I’m not very good at reading non-fiction – without a story I get bored, and indeed I did start this book over a year ago, and then got bored and left it for a long time before taking it up again to finish it.
I did enjoy listening to it (in two halves!) and was constantly annoying my husband with wee titbits of information from the book. Having studied biochemistry and molecular genetics there was a lot of stuff that I knew once and had forgotten, and some stuff which I’d never really thought about. A lot of interesting history of science stuff and factoids about health and diet etc in different parts of the world. Fun.
This novel is based on the true story of Monsignor Hugh O’ Flaherty, an Irish priest working in Vatican City who helped many escaped prisoners to flee the city under the noses of the Nazis.
I loved the narration – I have been watching the tv adaptation of Mr Mercedes (by Stephen King) and I was reminded of Brendan Gleeson’s fabulous betrayal of Bill Hodges – the irascible grumpy Irishman with the heart of gold and courage of a lion, in the character of Hugh. (As I re-read the previous sentence, I’m struck by my use of the hackneyed idiom: ‘courage of a lion’. Not only was it lazy on my part, but it seems to me that it is the small creatures who need more courage – it’s easy to appear brave if you’re bigger and fiercer than your peers, Like saying the Nazis were brave but actually they just had power. Surely it is the tiny creatures who face so many dangers and struggles who should be lauded as being brave – so the idiom should be brave as a dormouse, or brave as a wren. Just sayin.)
So, back to the book which was exciting and portrayed the whole gamut of human personalities from the very bad to the very good and shades in-between. I enjoyed the read.
It was interesting to me to read this book so soon after I read Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, as both books are set in the same era (early twentieth century, in the lead up to the war) and cover similar fields (medicine – although while The Magic Mountain had doctors floundering in the field of tuberculosis, without the benefit of modern understanding and equipment, in this book the field of study is disorders of the mind).
The two main characters came to ‘mad doctoring’ from very different backgrounds – Jacques was the son of a poor French farmer whose brother was kept chained up in the stables because he suffered from what we would now call severe schizophrenia. Jacques intelligence was nurtured by a local priest who enabled him to study and follow his dream to help his brother and others like him.
Thomas was from an upper-class English family, and as the younger son was expected to train for some respectable profession. His interest lay in literature, especially Shakespeare which led him to wondering how our minds evolved to create art which led him to studying the brain and it’s disorders.
There was a lot of interesting information about the history of this field of medicine, and vivid portraits of the horrors of the early asylums which I found fascinating. As a story though, I felt the characters were somewhat lost behind the weight of the historic setting and although I found the book interesting (if a little over long), I wasn’t that invested in the people at the heart of the story (the ending did move me though).
I have read and enjoyed other Keith Pearson books, and I generally like books about time travel, and yet… this book (or at least the first half of it) really dragged for me. I’m not sure if it was the slow plotting or the plodding narrator (or both) although when I increased the audible listening speed it did help reduce the boredom a bit.
There is a lot of setting up of the plot – Craig is 46 and in a loveless marriage and a dead end job and overweight and miserable. Then (finally) about half way through the book, when tidying his childhood bedroom he finds a computer game he’d written in his youth about time travel, which whooshes him back into his teenage self.
I preferred the second half, because who hasn’t wished to go back and relive events armed with adult knowledge and maturity and do them differently. There are some quite poignant scenes, although the sex scenes were uncomfortable.
The ending surprised me with a big cliff-hanger, so much so that I bought the second book (this time as a kindle book not an audiobook, both because it was cheaper and also because the narrator was so boring in the first book). Time will tell if things resolve nicely in the sequel.
I bought this in the Audible sale – it looked like the sort of thing I like so I gave it a go. The audiobook is narrated by the author, who has a lovely Geordie accent, like Sarah Millican!
The main character, Tanz discovers that she has strong psychic ability and, aided by her ghostly spirit guides, and new psychic friends she tries to help restless spirits and uncover crimes.
I wasn’t sure at first if the style of the book was fun or annoying – a bit chic-lit/rom-com, although it did grow on me and by the end of the book I was quite excited to read the next instalment.
I first read this book in 2020 and have been eagerly awaiting the promised sequel since then. Now the next book is coming out in February (Woo!) so I gave this book another listen to refresh my memory and prepare for the exciting next instalment.
The book is like a post apocalyptic Jeeves and Wooster (I said that to me 26 year old son and he said ‘What’s a Jeeves and Wooster?’ !!) so, for those of you who don’t know, Jeeves and Wooster was about very posh English people in the Early twentieth Century and mostly features young men getting into scrapes and young people generally trying to find socially acceptable marriage partners. Imagine that kind of thing going on, but in a future where social standing is determined by how much people are able to see of specific colour spectrums (in this imagined future, vision and sight seem to be generally much diminished).
The young hero (Eddie) shows a promising amount of red vision but falls for a social outcast ‘grey’ who opens his eyes to some of the secrets and conspiracies that exist in the society around him.
It’s a book that works on so many levels – it is often very funny, but also clever and intriguing and quite dark. I am very excited to read the sequel!!
I have a physical copy of this book, which I read a long time ago, so only remembered vaguely. This is the newly released extended version of the already long book, and it was a biggie.
A virus is accidentally released from a government lab in the USA somewhere and very quickly the world falls apart. Ninety something percent of people are dead within two or three days of being infected.
The book follows various strands of different characters who survive the virus and who start having mysterious dreams/visions, some of a benevolent old lady, who tells them to come and find her and some from a malevolent man who scares them.
People make their ways to the different camps and have adventures on the way. Those who make it try to build a new world order with the threat of a showdown between good and evil hanging over them.
I’m a big fan of Stephen King, and I did enjoy the book, although I was quite glad when it finally ended!
The annual Christmas short story by Jodi Taylor was fun as always. The team go on what should be a simple time jump to find the authentic recipe for mince pies (originally called Christmas Pies) and of course all kinds of shenanigans ensue.
It was narrated this time by Markham, which was a refreshing change from Max.
One Foot in the Fade: Fetch Phillips Book 3 – Luke Arnold – 20.12.23
After slogging through Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain, I wanted something fun to read, and I remembered how much I enjoyed the first part of this series by Luke Arnold. Set in a world that used to have magic users and all kinds of magical creatures, until some event happened which removed all the magic from the world. The magical creatures are weakening or dying off and the world has to learn how to create science and technology to take over the day to day tasks that used to be performed by magic.
The hero is a human who lives with shame because of his past when he fought against magic users in the war. He is now a private investigator trying his best to atone by exclusively working for (ex)magical creatures. It has a darky comic noir feel and I found the series to be very well written with intelligent characterisation and plotting and I felt gripped and moved by it.
Wow – this is a BIG book. It took me a whole month to read, and I usually read at least two books a week! It’s not just that it had 700 plus pages (I’ve read other doorstops with similarly many pages) but that each page is so densely packed. It’s amazing actually that a book can be so dense and long and yet not very much happens. There are a lot of big words, which I often had to pause to look up the meaning of, not to mention the phrases, paragraphs and on one occasion whole chapter written in languages other than English and not translated.
It’s a coming of age tale of sorts, with a main protagonist, Hans Castorp, who is a newly qualified engineer. He goes to visit his cousin, a patient at a sanitorium in the Swiss alps, supposedly for three weeks but ends up staying for seven years.
The patients spend their time eating and sleeping and talking about philosophy and politics and religion and deep stuff like that. I don’t know if I was bored, as such, but it was definitely a slog to get through – I did really enjoy bits of it, and found some of the passages both very thought provoking and sometimes very moving. It’s a book that I have heard referred to so many times that I thought I really ought to read it, and I’m glad I have but I’ll not hurry to read it again!
Sarah Wray Writer 