‘Burning Bright’ by Tracey Chevalier

Lambert, 1792 is the backdrop for the story of kids growing up in the street of London. Nothing sensational, no innovations in form – just a simple, good story with down-to-earth characters who could  easily be your neighbours today. It is in this simplicity that resides its strength. I confess that sometimes I get a bit [...]

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‘Revelation’ by C.J. Sansom

Thrilling, fascinating, bloody…
Of course, if you don’t like the genre, this can easily be discarded as ‘low brow’ literature because, at the end of the day,  it is nothing more than a whodunnit. But what an entertaining one! And if you like English history, as I do, then you can be sure you will not [...]

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‘The Uncommon Reader’ by Alan Bennett

If there is any pleasure in being a frequent customer of the British Rail is the number of hours you can devote to reading. I’ve been coming and going between Plymouth and Leicester and it has given me the opportunity to catch up with some reading. The Uncommon Reader is a very short book that [...]

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‘Lord of the Flies’ by William Golding

Northop Frye in The Educated Imagination uses the metaphor of a person cast away in a desert island to explain the three levels in which the mind operates,  how it interacts with the world and how these levels are expressed in different ‘languages’.
I’ve been studying understanding of human imagination for my MEd dissertation and Frye’s [...]

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‘Never Let Me Go’ by Kazuo Ishiguro

This is just my second Ishiguro’s novel. After a memorable books, such as Remains of the Day, it is hard for any writer to live up to the expectations to their readers. Never Let Me Go is a novel that puzzles from the title to the the last page. It starts in a way that [...]

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‘The Book Thief’ by Markus Zusak

My good intentions of leaving novels for the period of the dissertation have not lasted long.  Having to travel to London twice in the last two months, I simply needed a book. I was attracted by the title and the good reviews it received but I’m sincerely disappointed.
The idea is simply brilliant – it’s quite [...]

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‘Ghost Stories’ by M.R. James

I don’t have much time to read fiction nowadays because of professional reading but I cannot go without it so I’m trying to get to a compromise. I reached out for the shelf and grabbed Ghost Stories. I have always loved this sort of tales because my grandpa used to tell us ghost stories when [...]

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‘The White Tiger’ by Aravind Adiga

Eduardo got this book as a present from Sara, a couple of months ago, and devoured it in three days. Since I decided to take a couple of days free between the last assignment and the next I decided that thsi could perhaps be a perfect choice. If it had engaged Eduardo that much, it [...]

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‘The Kite Runner’ by Khaled Housseini

I cannot remember the last time I had wept reading a novel. I think it was about 25 years ago reading Wuthering Heights! Now, this tale of loss, friendship, human frailty and redemption has made me drop some tears again. Super story that granted me some hours of non-stop reading and also make me look [...]

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‘The Children of Húrin’ by J.R.R. Tolkien

Christmas break means Christmas reading
I had already met Húrin and the tales of Turin Turambar in the Silmarillion, but this time it is told in further details. If it all sounded harrowing and poignant in the previous book now it just sounds tragic. Somehow knowing the details of what happened to Turin and [...]

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