Bookworm Book Review

Netherwood By Jane Sanderson

I did not finish the book as i could not engage with the characters and found it predictable and boring - Elaine B.

Same for me - Mary

A very pleasant read but don’t feel as though I will want to rush to read the following novel. Margaret W.

A very easy quick predictable read along the lines of Downton Abbey or Upstairs Downstairs. - Sue

A fictionalised Black Diamonds. I kept thinking that I had read the book before.  Didn’t really enjoy it -  Angela

Easy reading.  - Margaret D.

I really enjoyed reading this book and I liked the fact that it mentions places I know.  A lightweight book but the characters were well described and I loved the recipes at the back -  Lybby

Yvonne and Sylvia enjoyed the book too.

DAVID COPPERFIELD BY CHARLES DICKENS

There are certain books of Dickens that I love and I have read this book several times before. I think it is my favourite Dickens novel. I find most of the characters very well drawn and believable. I think that Dickens was a comedian and this is brought out in his characters.  I love to hate Uriah Heap - Lybby

Loved it. Enjoyed every word. Always have, always will. - Mary

I enjoyed reading Oliver Twist as a child - my favourite book. I had high hopes of this being equally enjoyable and I was not disappointed. Dickens paints a vivid picture of London in his day with lots of humorous touches - Elaine

I have read this book before, am over familiar with the plot and didn’t want to read it again. - Yvonne

I have read this book before and will read it again and again. So very many things that leaped off the page at me. The wise words of Miss Mowcher ‘try not to associate bodily defects with mental my good friend except for a solid reason’. Dora Spenlow has always set my teeth on edge and I am pleased to say that she still does - Angela

I wasn’t looking forward to reading this. I thought ‘ugh, Dickens’ but I was surprised and have enjoyed it. - Sue

Margaret D and Rosemary also had their Dickens L plates on and have been pleasantly surprised.

Watch this space though as we all have our free copy of Oliver Twist and are joining in with the City Read for May. Will this lead to an overdose of Dickens?

THE GUERNSEY LITERARY AND POTATO PEEL PIE SOCIETY

Yvonne and Libby gave their opinions, having read the book a month after the rest of the group. Both had spent time in the Channel isles,  Yvonne with Scout Camps and holidays and Lybby had flat shared with a Channel Isles girl. They both thoroughly enjoyed the book and both want to return to the Isles for another visit. Yvonne had been upset to find that the author died soon after writing the book. Lybby enjoyed it so much she has now got it on her Kindle.

LOVE IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA

GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ

Oh dear.  On a positive note, Helen enjoyed it finding it very funny and well written. Angela also found lots to laugh at but not enough to console her for reading the whole book. For the rest of the group it was just a matter of discussing how many pages they read before giving up.
  It ranks along with Catcher in the Rye as another famous book that wouldn’t have got published left to Bookworm.

THE GUERNSEY LITERARY AND POTATO PEEL PIE SOCIETY

We all enjoyed this one. How little we knew of the German occupation of the Channel Islands. Those who had visited knew some things. The book revealed so much more but leavened with humour It did move several of us to tears but also laughing out loud.

This was my favourite book so far of the ones we have
read. Equal with Harry Patch. – Sylvia

Well written and original, funny and informative. Enjoyed all the characters - endearing and amusing. I knew nothing of the slave workers and how badly they were treated.- Elaine

The Channel Islanders felt abandoned by England and that feeling still persists today. I have really enjoyed this book and would like to receive letters myself that are so full of humour. – Sue

An unusual format - ie letters throughout - but enjoyable. A book I couldn’t put down – Margaret

Enjoyed it, a very different read. The format made some very difficult facts more palatable. Cleverly structured, very funny and pithy. – Angela

I enjoyed the book so much I that I have recommended it to friends and am going to buy a copy – Mary

SWIMSUIT

BY JAMES PATTERSON
A book that deals with snuff movies and includes graphic descriptions of the murder of young women. Most of us found it unecessarily graphic, prurient and didn’t finish it.  Margaret said it was a book  that she would never have chosen but  thoroughly enjoyed although she was not sure she should have, given the content.  Lybby found it a tense read and had to read it until the end even though she didn’t like the book. Sue will read other James Patterson books as this was not your usual murder mystery.

We have read a James Patterson book before—The Murder of King Tut—and don’t like his use of short chapters and blank space. You either like him or you don’t and on the whole—we don’t.

THE ANGELS GAME

By CARLOS RUIZ ZAFON

A beautifully written book. We were all in awe of his descriptive abilities. This may be one of the best writers we have ever read and more than one of us was inspired to read more of his work.

Yvonne is familiar with Barcelona and could visualize the  streets and  buildings he described. Sue liked his description of a tram—’like a large wrought iron rat trap’

This was another book that Margaret would never have chosen but she could not put it down and  found that the end of each chapter drew  her into the next.

However, the plot is dark, convoluted and difficult to grasp. Angela ended up being very disappointed as she set off really liking it, thinking  she was going to enjoy it and then ‘lost the plot’ and could not get a grip on it.

Carlos Ruiz Zafon is a new author to us and one we are very glad to have found.

CRANFORD BY MRS GASKELL
Including The Cage At Cranford
Mr Harrison’s Confessions
My Lady Ludlow
‘Such simple innocent lives yet each has an interesting tale to tell’
or
‘A load of silly women with nothing to do.’
Yes, once  again we were divided in our opinions. Mary thought it was great to find women so central and men so much on the periphery and has also had her vocabulary increased. She will now be bringing ‘sesquipedalian’ into conversations wherever possible. Helen enjoyed the book and found it much easier to read than many of Mrs Gaskell’s contemporaries. Cranford was the most popular of the stories with My Lady Ludlow getting a definite thumbs down from all of us. We now appreciate what a good job the BBC did in weaving all the stories together.

GYPSY BOY BY MIKEY WALSH
Definitely not Cranford.  A brutal read full of prejudice and violence. Violence between father and child, husband and wife, gypsy against gypsy and gypsy against Irish Traveller.  Romanies came across as being prejudiced against anyone who  isn’t a Romany. Mikey Walsh paints a vivid, no holds barred picture of his childhood.  It is a book about a different culture, one that prefers to remain ‘closed’ but is lived in public view. There are references to persecution and hatred of gypsies but the book gives plenty of evidence as to why this is the case.
There is humour and Helen thought his chain smoking, kleptomaniac aunt could have come straight from The Simpsons.
Definitely a tough read  but it led to a very good discussion.

Yes Sister, No Sister by Jennifer Craig
This book tells of the training of nurses at Leeds General Infirmary in the 1950s. As often happens we were divided in our opinions. Mary thought it a poor book and badly written. Angela struggled to find anything to say other than yes, it is a book and I have read it. Elaine pointed out several anachronisms— were Mini  cars, The Beatles and contact lenses available in the 1950s? Sue enjoyed reading about the antics of the housemen. Yvonne and
Lybby really enjoyed it. Margaret (ex nurse) found it easy  reading but doubted than anyone from outside the NHS would get the same enjoyment. There was a general feeling that hospitals were better run in the 1950s than they  are now.

MADAME BOVARY Gustave Flaubert
What a contrast! To start with the negative—Mary really  didn’t enjoy it and would not  read another book of his. Yvonne has never liked it despite having read it in French and English.
The  rest of us did enjoy it and found it to be well written with good descriptive passages and characters.  We were united in our dislike of Emma Bovary—”self centered”,  “terrible mother, incapable of love”.  Angela thought her  a nightmare combination of Princess Di and Vicky Pollard. Flaubert did a good job of making her unlikeable.
Emma was in love with the idea of love and both Sue and Rosemary thought it quite  a modern story that was still relevant today. Helen thought that the views on religion held by M. Homais seem very modern and must have been very shocking at the time the book was written.

Next we are off to Cranford (what would the Cranford ladies have made of Emma Bovary) and we will also be reading Gypsy Boy by Mikey Walsh.

We stayed in the era of The Moonstone with these  books, The Devil’s  Acre by Michael Plampin and The Suspicions of Mr Whicher by Kate Summerscale.

The Devils Acre is a story  mixing fact with fiction and based in the gun factory opened in London by Samuel Colt in the slums of Devil’s Acre.  Real life characters such as Dickens, Palmerston and Prince Albert are combined with fictional ones. Mary  did not like the book at all, finding it a weak plotline with a highly unbelievable romance at the centre of it. The rest of us did find it a good read  but the descriptions of squalor and violence were hard to stomach. It was obviously a very well researched book as was The Suspicions of Mr Whicher.

This was a hard book to read, as it deals with the gruesome murder of a small child. It is packed solid with fact and we did wonder if all of them were needed. It seems to be two books in one—one dealing with the murder and the other with the rise and fall of the detective—both  real and fictional. It could be used as a reference book too.  There were many links and references to our last book,  The Moonstone, and also mentions of The Devil’s Acre which was a notorious criminal rookery.

The Suspicions of Mr Whicher  has it’s links to modern times in that the newspapers gave the murder saturation coverage,  shovelling guilt in all directions and also we were reminded of the death of Jamie Bulger.

This book sparked the best discussion we have had for a long time and none of us are absolutely sure that the right person was arrested.

NEXT—we stay in the mid 1800s but move to  France  to deal with Madame Bovary and then to  mid 1900s Yorkshire for Yes  Sister, No Sister a book about nursing.

THE MOONSTONE BY WILKIE COLLINS
This was a re-read for some of us and a new read for others. It is interesting to re-read a book as an adult that you first read at school. The Moonstone is a milestone book— the first detective novel and initially printed in a serialized form.
Sylvia took an instant dislike to Mr Betteredge and the style of writing of the book (too wordy) and read only a few chapters. The  rest of us persevered and thoroughly enjoyed it. It made us laugh and was worth pursuing as it is not an obvious ‘who dunnit’. Was it the mysterious woman in the villa or could it have been Miss Clack, inspired by the beloved words of Miss Jane Stamper. (Miss Clack was one of our favourite characters along with Gabriel Betteredge).
It was interesting to see the real life problems of Wilkie Collins coming through in the book which may be why the characters are still so bright and engaging.  We really need to read Robinson Crusoe now to see if we find it as inspiring as Gabriel Betteredge did.

THE CROW ROAD BY IAIN BANKS
Definitely a book that would benefit from being taken apart and fastened back together in chronological order. There were mixed opinions on this one—half of us loved it, half of us couldn’t be bothered finishing it but we all found the abrupt moving backwards and forwards in time irritating. It had a lot going for it—humour, murder, mystery, sex, love and poetical descriptive passages but still failed to register as one of our favourite books.

THE L SHAPED ROOM BY LYNNE REID BANKS
This one succeeded where The Crow Road failed. Everyone enjoyed it and it provoked a long and interesting discussion on how the attitude towards unmarried mothers has changed.  The book is well written and evoked many memories of the fifties. Definitely one of our favourite reads.