Books To Recommend ?

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Just finished The Time Travellers Wife - brilliant book - more for slushy romantics like me though - Troods take note!
 
Being signed off work for 2 weeks I'm finding the time to get through the books that have been piling up waiting to be read. One of those those I've read so far is Dead Until Dark which the TV series True Blood is based on. One for the girls, it's a readable, enjoyable book, with a bit of sex, some blood and gore and a bit of crime. And, of course, lots of vampires. I've also read Graham Greene's The Third Man and Fallen Idol which are both in the same book. The Third Man isn't among his best although he all but admits that in the foreword as it was written for the film. The Fallen Idol is a rather sad short story.

I'm currently reading Lev Grossman's The Magicians and loving every word. I can't really describe what it's about, to say it's about a boy who goes to magic school would be doing it a disservice, and it's certainly not Harry Potter.

The Time Traveller's Wife is next on the pile, glad to see it's had a good review on here as I wasn't very sure about it.
 
This sounds fascinating: Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human by Richard Wrangham, Profile, 309 pp, £15. Some reviews:

"This is a daringly unorthodox book, and one that might just transform the way we understand ourselves," said James McConnachie in The Sunday Times. Richard Wrangham believes that the crucial step of human evolution from ape to man too place not, as is usually thought, when our ancestors mastered hunting or using tools - but when they learnt how to cook. Around 1.9 million years ago, when Homo habilis became Home erectus, we first stood up straight; our guts and mouths shrank and our brains swelled. Wrangham, a Harvard professor of biological anthropology, argues that the best explanation for this remarkable transformation is the discovery of cooking. Cooking gelatinises starch, denatures protein and softens everything. It widens the range of what is edible and improves the calorific value of food. This spared out bodies a lot of hard work - in the form of chewing and digesting raw food - and freed up time and calories, allowing early humans to hunt and to think, another very energy-intensive activity. We became evolutionarily wedded to fire.

"Good, big ideas about evolution are rare," said Simon Ings in The Sunday Telegraph. Often they're no better than 'just so' stories - specious skeins of cause and effect. And here, of course, there isn't much in the way of direct proof. But the big news is that Wrangham succeeds in making a case. He presents a great deal of biological evidence - our tiny mouths and teeth are clearly made for bolting down food softened by fire (chimps, by contrast, spend 6 hours a day chewing). His review of the anthropological literature shows that no one, ancient or modern, settled or nomadic, has ever survived for more than a couple of seasons on an exclusively raw diet; studies of those who live on raw food show that it supplies insufficient energy (half of female 'raw foodies' are so thin they stop menstruating). Humans, says Wrangham, are as adapted to cooked food as cows are to grass.

This is an exhilarating book, says Bee Wilson in The Times, and its central thesis soon seems so obvious that you have to remind yourself how groundbreaking it is: even Darwin didn't recognise the importance of cooking. Catching Fire is a rare things, said The New York Times: a slim book that contains serious science related in direct, no-nonsense prose. It is toothsome, skilfully prepared brain food.

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For history buffs: A Gambling Man: Charles II and The Restoration by Jenny Uglow, Faber & Faber, 580pp, £25

Jenny Uglow's enthralling book opens with Charles II's restoration. In May 1660 he landed at Dover and was greeted in London by cheering crowds, maypoles and bonfires, after the dour years of Cromwell's rule. The book is sensitively observed and richly describes the period without making it too familiar: it is still hard to imagine a scaffold in Whitehall dripping with royal blood, carts laden with corpses of London's poor, or the sails of a Dutch fleet in the Medway - that is, to accept them as reality, and not costume drama. In the past, Uglow has written lives of writers and artists such as George Eliot and the engraver Thomas Bewick. In this case, she writes deftly about a man whose art happened to be his life: being king, playing off his enemies against one another. Like many a good card game, A Gambling Man is intense, involved, absorbing - and a tad too long.
 
no to recommend, but to wait for:

The Autobiography: The Story of the Irish Champion Jockey (Hardcover)

by Ruby Walsh (Author)

on the recommendation front I am just reading

" The Monsters of Templeton" by Laureen Groff

"Willie Cooper arrives on the doorstep of her ancestral home in Templeton, New York in the wake of a disastrous affair with her much older, married archaeology professor. That same day, the discovery of a prehistoric monster in the lake brings a media frenzy to the quiet, picture-perfect town her ancestors founded. Smarting from a broken heart, Willie then learns that the story her mother had always told her about her father has all been a lie. He wasn't the one - night stand Vi had led her to imagine, but someone else entirely. As Willie puts her archaeological skills to work digging for the truth about her lineage, a chorus of voices from the town's past rise up around her to tell their sides of the story. Dark secrets come to light, past and present blur, old mysteries are finally put to rest, and the surprising truth about more than one monster is revealed. " (from amazon)

brillilant read, flying through it. funny, witty, never dull.
 
Currently reading Wilbur Smith's four book "Ballantyne" saga.

I think I've slabbered on at length about Wilbur Smith before, but he really does have a tremendous ability to bring the subject to life. The feeling of excitement as you "set off" on another trek into the undiscovered African wilderness is palpable.

:<3:
 
Totally. I read some (I think he's gone back in time with them) of the Courtney books starting with When the Lion Feeds about twenty years back. Good author.
 
I always enjoyed Wilbur Smith's earlier works, the Courtney and Ballantyne sagas amongst them, but he went through a phase during the 90's where he seemed to be just following a formula (while nursing his wife, I believe), with some gratuitous torture descriptions that were just too much. The River God series saw him return to form. A gifted storyteller.

Of his stand-alone books, The Sunbird is a favourite of mine, very unusual with its theme of reincarnation.
 
The River God series was good but I didn't think The Warlock was up to much and the latest in the series, The Quest was plain ridiculous I'm afraid. Christ only knows what Smith was thinking or what he was on when he wrote it but it let him down badly with a major storyline in the book being pretty much akin to paedophilia. It was insane!
 
When The Lion Feeds is definitely his finest effort (and first). Agree with the comments about Sunbird and The Quest - but do think that there was a bit of repitition of the theme (and subsequently stolen by the film, The Mummy) in the first of the Egyptian books - River God?

The Dark Of The Sun and Elephant Song also stand out for me from his stand alone books.

Assegai was a return to form for me after 2 books (The Quest and Triumph Of The Sun) where I thought he was falling into the "churning 'em out" trap that so many writers fall into in later years.
 
simmo said:
When The Lion Feeds is definitely his finest effort (and first). Agree with the comments about Sunbird and The Quest - but do think that there was a bit of repitition of the theme (and subsequently stolen by the film, The Mummy) in the first of the Egyptian books - River God?
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Hmm, not quite so sure - although bear in mind it's been a good ten years since I last read River God. Surely in River God Taita was at least a young man and he loved Lostris more in the guise of her as his mistress; as he was a eunuch at the time he couldn't really do much more anyway - even if he wanted to - I guess!

The 'reincarnation' of Lostris in The Quest was just plain wrong!
 
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Karen Maitland's Company of Liars. It's just superb. Basically the book tells the tale of a group of misfits that find themselves landed with each other on the road, trying to ply their trade and escape the plague in 1348. It's very, very good.
 
I read "One Day" by David Nicholls (no connection) and can wholeheartly recommend it. if you are about 40 and had a life back then ;) this is your book! best book I read last year by a long margin.
 
Bad I would imagine!

Read another book by the author who wrote The Kite Runner, A Thousand Splendid Suns. Very worthwhile reading if you enjoyed the first as I did. Afghanistan from the womans viewpoint. Another moving and well-written story.
 
Sir William Garrow; His Life,Times and Fight For Justice by John Hostettler and Richard Braby. Honestly would recommend only the first third or so as a lot of the book concerns his extended family history, but a fascinating insight to a man and his times, and how he instigated a fundamental change in the way trials were conducted.
 
Barbara Livingstone's photographic books. Fantastic and empathetic books. Top photographer who clearly respects her subject. Have a Google. She's a big fan of 'Old Friends'.
 
A Life In Secrets by Sarah Helm - the biography of Vera Atkins, PA to Maurice Buckmaster of SOE during WWII. She went with the British authorities to the Nuremburg trials and spent a lot of her time there trying to trace the agents who went missing, particularly the women.

A very interesting woman who was reluctant to yield any information about herself to the author. The background of her biography gives some fascinating information about the French Underground movement and the British agents involved in it. It was quite shocking to read how much more sophisticated the German organisations were compared to the British. Our agents were quite amateurish by comparison.

Ms Atkins spent years travelling abroad after the war, spending her time and money on interviewing people who may have seen "her girls" and tracking down documentary evidence of their demises. Harrowing reading, in some cases.

Very interesting book for those who are interested in the period, moving and sometimes a bit distressing.
 
Redhead: what's particularly distressing to read is the rushed, Girls' Own Annual-type of prep our female SOE operatives were given. They were dreadfully tortured in many cases of capture - the Nazis not having a soft spot for gellent young gels, however blue their blood or noble their suffering. One of 'ours' was an Indian princess, if I recall correctly - was she not called Princess Noor ("Light")? Highly educated, beautiful and elegant. Very quickly captured, brutalized, and then murdered, after failing to crack under the savagery meted out.

I haven't read Ms Helm's book, which sounds very worthy of its type, especially since not a lot of attention was paid to these efforts. There are so many stories behind the two world wars - for example, Jilly Cooper's utterly sensible book, "Animals in War" (or similar - I no longer have it, so it may be slightly different), pays homage to the homing pigeons who, by flying messages between the lines, in spite of often returning to base winged and bleeding, saved, it is believed, around half-a-million lives. Then there are the tragic mules and horses, where, in their case, half-a-million equine lives were lost, many blown to pieces, many just stuck in the mud trying to haul half-ton gun casings around. I wonder what stories of trained army dogs accompanying the troops today might be told in later years?
 
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You're right, Krizon. Those poor girls went into a highly dangerous situation with what would now be a laughable lack of training and their ends, particularly Princess Noor's, were truly horrendous.

As you say, so many animals have endured terrible suffering during our wars. My great grandfather, in peacetime, was a well-known "horse doctor" in his area and loved horses dearly. When he joined up for the Great War, he became a dispatch rider and was very relieved when his horse was soon replaced by a motorbike, because he didn't break his heart every time one got killed or wounded.

Have you read War Horse by Michael Morpurgo? It's told from the horse's point of view (like Black Beauty) and is the basis for the new West End Show of the same name.

I believe that our modern-day forces are producing a book or film about the roles that their dogs are undertaking, but can't remember what it's called or when it is being released.
 
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