Books To Recommend ?

David (and Stella) Gemmell's Troy trilogy is well worth a read - it's very good. It's a completely different twist on the Trojan legend but it works very well.
 
I did enjoy One Day immensly as well, and have just been reading Kate Atkinson again. Her "behind the scenes of the museum" is a real classic, not to be missed in any case, and enjoy he so-called crime novels as well, starting with Case Histories.
 
I've just bought and started A Room Swept White, a 'psychological thriller' by Sophie Hannah, a writer I haven't tried before. She's won some lit prizes and been nominated plenty of times, and the blurbs say she is the mistress of 'psychological Gothic'. The theme is three women all convicted of causing the deaths of babies in their care, who have their sentences overturned, the wrongdoing by the attending expert doctor, and we've kicked off with one of the women being 'found dead at home'.

The first few pages already present an interesting viewpoint, so we'll see how we go, but it could be quite involving.
 
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Dusted off a few old Michael Dibdin Aurelio Zen crime thrillers, after watching the TV adaptions, which were quite fun, but didn't really do justice (cf Rebus)

Dibdin is (was) a very fine writer, with a knowledge and love of Italy that is hugely impressive. Well paced, great dialogue, labyrinthine plots; just great.
 
Shadow Leader said:
David Nicholls' One Day is superb; read it in just over twenty four hours even with work getting in the way and concluding with a 3am-6.30am stint. A colleague recommended it to me on several occasions and I can see why he was so insistent I read it!
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Echo this like others have, absolutely superb and one of the best books I've ever read I think. Also finished it in no time at all, started in Kolkata departure lounge and was finished before the descent into Heathrow!

The film is out in July I believe.
 
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I loved the tv adaptations of some of the Zen books, mostly due to the fabulous scenery and Rufus Sewell, who is also fabulous scenery.
 
For a good, laugh-out-loud, stress-busting read, Gervaise Phinn's books about his work as a school inspector in Yorkshire are great entertainment. He is a gifted storyteller but is also a very sensitive man and writes with great empathy about the less privileged children that he encounters.

Just finished Up and Down in the Dales. (Perhaps I should put this on the Stress threat for Bar The Bull?) There is a memorable chapter where he describes an English class in a senior school, where the pupils extemporise Hamlet - in broad Yorkshire accents and dialect. Brilliant. Starts off:

"Hey up, 'Amlet."

"Hey up, 'Oratio, what's tha doin' 'ere?"

"Nowt much. 'Ow abaat thee then, 'Amlet? I 'ant seen thee for a bit."

"Nay. I'm not that champion, 'Oratio, if t'truth be towld."

"Whay, 'Amlet, what's oop?"

"Mi dad's deead, mi mam's married mi uncle and mi girl friend does nowt but nag, nag, nag. I tell thee 'Oratio, I'm weary wi' it."

"Aye, tha's not far wrong theer, 'Amlet. She's gor a reight gob on her, that Hophilia ..."

... and so it goes on. I'm not knocking the Yorkshire accent either, it's just that my ex was very Yorkshire when he first came to Cheltenham and I can just hear him and his mate chatting. It's also the way the two lads put the whole story into such a down-to-earth way, right down to encountering the ghost of Hamlet's father on the battlements.

Another of Gervaise Phinn's books A Wayne in a Manger about the various nativity plays and children's take on Christmas did the rounds in January and had us all laughing. Anyone who has kids or just enjoys their company will recognise some of the situations he describes (like the little boy dressed as a sheep desperately trying to get the attention of the little girl playing the Angel Gabriel and being rebuffed with "Shut yer gob!" out of the side of her mouth as she delivers her lines, finally blurting out "Chardonnay! I can see yer pink knickers!!!" because her robe is tucked into the back of her knickers).

Highly entertaining, in places quite touching and in others very, very funny.
 
krizon said:
Mmm, with Crazyhorse about THE BOOK THIEF - did a quick flip through the intro pages, then read the back third of the book. Unnecessarily dense and elliptical writing, I thought, peppered with surprisingly bad analogies at times. Yes, a bit original in that Death is the narrator and therefore tells the story of the characters, but the essence of the book is Holocaust survival, and I suspect there are a lot of nonfiction books on the subject which draw us more authentically and directly into the subject. At times, I irritatedly felt that the book was more about the author's penchant for a curiously-phrased sentence than its content.
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I knew I'd seen The Book Thief mentioned on here - just finished it, thought it was superb. Cried my eyes out.

On flicking through the thread I see I posted at one point that I was enjoying Mo Hayder's Pig Island. I must only have been three pages into it at that point. Don't read it, it's trash - unlike her other books which are very good.
 
Whipping through the carefully-phrased The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid, Penguin. Set in Lahore, if features a bearded, English-speaking Pakistani addressing a rather uneasy American man in a cafe. The discussion ranges round the Pakistani's reminiscences about his time in the America, and then that country's relationship with India and Pakistan, as those two countries eyeball each other aggressively. The Daily Telegraph says it's "sharp, relevant, impressively intelligent... entertains at the same time as it makes you think", the Grauniad declares it to be a cleverly-constructed fable "of infatuation and disenchantment... Intelligent and highly engaging, genuinely provocative".

I'm enjoying it, not least Hamid's attractive descriptions of places and his past life - he conveys the whole book (209 pp) in the form of a monologue. That isn't as heavy going without a dialogue as it might seem, and probably adds to the progress of the novel without the thoughts of the other, the American, intruding.
 
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Been fascinated with him ever since seeing the tv series with Alfred Lynch when I was a child. And one of the places I most want to go to is Ely Cathedral..if it was the other side of Europe I would have probably made the effort to see it by now.
 
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moehat said:
Been fasciated with him ever since seeing the tv series with Alfred Lynch when I was a child. And one of the places I most want to go to is Ely Cathedral..if it was the other side of Europe I would have probably made the effort to see it by now.
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Have to admit that I had never heard of him, but Ely also on the list of places to visit, and as guilty as you on the count of making the effort.
 
A kid's book, Marianne Dreams by Catherine Storr. Very imaginative. Dialogue a little dated (written late 40's early 50's) but doesn't lose much for that. Basically about a young girl confined to bed who finds that she enters in dreams a house that she has drawn in her sketchbook during the day. Some of us may have seen the TV adaptation during the late 70's/early 80's.
 
Filling in the holes in my memory with The Iran-Iraq War 1980-1988 by Efraim Karsh, Osprey Publishing, and also starting The Anglo-Irish War, The Troubles of 1913-1922 by Peter Cottrell.

These are two of loads of titles of potted histories in Osprey's Essential Histories catalogue. You can view what's available on http://www.ospreypublishing.com - these cost £10.99 each in the UK. Great for reminding yourself of dates, leading figures, and the 'reasons for'. For example, Iraq's invasion of Kuwait sprang from its financial disaster in funding its battles against Iran: after Kuwait refused to keep to agreed oil quotas and adversely affected Iraq's ability to produce oil at the agreed rate (at which it could enable its recovery). And the attack on Kuwait mightn't have gone ahead if Saddam had been met by a more robust rebuttal to his comments by the then US Ambassador to Baghdad.
 
krizon said:
Wasn't that called Paperhouse? If it was, I think I saw it and thought it was darn spooky!
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Yes Kri, that was the film version. The BBC made a series called Escape Into Night which, not having seen the film, I am told is better than the film, which had to leave some things out. The series is a bit dated now, but still holds the attention. The fact that it is in black and white also adds to the atmosphere of the dream house.

It's a brilliant idea and well-written as it draws the reader in and actually almost makes one experience the blurring of the lines between "real" and "imagination".

Personally, I find the films and books that can capture an atmosphere without buckets of blood and gruesome make-up much more menacing and fear-evoking.

Probably why I like books written for children so much -their imaginations have not yet been reined in by "rational" or "logical" thought, so the writer is able to blur the lines between "real" and "fantasy" and create another world, or something magical, or make the ordinary downright scary - and kids do love a good scare!
 
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