Author: Jackie

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The Book Seat

I’ve just stumbled across The Book Seat. It is, essentially a bean bag for a book, which allows you to read without having to hold anything.

I was immediately drawn to this, and was very tempted to add it to my wishlist, but I now can’t decide whether it is a great solution to a very old problem, or just a marketing ploy, which won’t work in practice. How easy will it be to turn the pages? Will it just fall over all the time? I’d love to give it a try, as I’m always moaning about how heavy some books are!

Does it sound like a good idea to you? Or is it just silly? All thoughts appreciated!

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2008 Crime

The Ghost – Robert Harris

This is the second book I have read by Robert Harris. The first, Fatherland, was a great idea for a story, and was cleverly written, but lacked the special spark of a great book. Unfortunately The Ghost  wasn’t an improvement.

The narrator of Robert Harris’s latest book, Adam, is assigned the task of becoming a ghostwriter for an ex-Prime Minister’s autobiography. The person he replaces in this job has recently died in suspicious circumstances. Adam travels to America to interview the former Prime Minister and begins to uncover some dangerous secrets.

The Ghost comes across as an attack on various political polices rather than as a thriller. The plot is slow, and lacks the intelligence of Fatherland. If you are interested in British politics then it might be worth reading, as I’m sure there are many politicians parodied in this book, but I’m just after a decent plot, and failed to find one. 

The characters were flat, and the plot was highly improbable. By the end of the book I was so bored that I didn’t really care about the twist, I was just glad to have finished it.

Very disappointing.

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2009 Recommended books YA

The Hunger Games – Suzanne Collins

I bought this book about ten seconds after I finished reading Semicolon’s review for it, and I’m really glad I did, as I think this is my favourite book of the year so far.

The Hunger Games is an annual televised event in which twenty-four children fight-to-the-death. Two children from each of the twelve regions of Panem, a new land created from the ruins of post-apocalyptic North America, are randomly selected to take part.

This sounds like a scary, violent book, and if I’d have thought about it too much I may not have bought it. I admit that when I was reading the first chapter I was worried about the kind of book I’d started, and wondered how on earth it could be suitable for eleven-year-olds (the age suggested on the back cover). I didn’t have to worry, although the children do fight to the death, it isn’t graphic, and in a strange way you are hoping that each of them die, so that the narrator, Katniss, can survive.

Many important issues are raised in the book, including poverty, war, the misuse of power and the evolution of reality television – for this reason I think it would be great for reading groups.

The book is perfectly paced; the plot drives the book on so well that I didn’t want to put it down, but at no point was it going so fast that I was skimming sections. The characters are well thought out, and although survival is a large part of the book, I think the main theme is love. Katniss’s confusion over who she truly loves is very touching. I enjoyed this book so much that I have already pre-ordered the second book in the trilogy, which is released in September.

I can’t fault it. Highly recommended.

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Other

My first book giveaway!

I’ve decided to host my first ever book giveaway! I’m going to give away a copy of one of my favourite reads of last year: Random Acts of Heroic Love, by Danny Scheinmann. It is an emotional story about love and loss, which I think is unmissable. See my full review here.

 

 

As I’ve discovered with my two little boys bribery works! I’d like to encourage more comments on my blog, so if you’d like to win a copy of this amazing book, please leave a comment on this post AND somewhere else on my blog before the end of February.

This is an INTERNATIONAL giveaway, and as this book has not yet been released in paperback in the US, it is well worth winning!

GOOD LUCK!!

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1910s Books in Translation

The Lost Estate (Le Grand Meaulnes) – Alain Fournier

Translated from the French by Robin Buss

Le Grand Meaulnes was first published in 1913 and is one of the most well known, and most loved classics in France today. It is, essentially, a fairy tale; the main character, Meaulnes, finds a mysterious house, with a beautiful girl hidden within it, but when he tries to return to the house, he cannot find it. For the rest of the book Meaulnes tries to discover what happened to him during his visit to the ‘Lost Estate’.

I read this book for Cornflower’s book group and I’m afraid I wasn’t very impressed by it.

My Penguin classic copy of the book has a note on the translation which I think sums up some of my frustration:

“…the typical Fournier sentence, with its subordinate clauses separated by commas, giving a nervous feel to the writing..”

I’m not sure “nervous” is the right word, I found it annoying! The writing just didn’t flow very well. I don’t know enough about the French language to know if this is a more natural way of writing things in French, but I found it very off putting.

It has been described by many as a book which is “untranslatable” and for many reasons I feel this is probably the case. Translation from French to English loses the subtle double meanings for many of the words. The most obvious being the ‘grand’ of the title which can mean, big, tall, great, daring, noble….etc.

I thought the quality of the writing was also very patchy. Some scenes were quite good, but others seemed to have been thrown in randomly and didn’t seem very well thought out.

Overall, I got little pleasure from reading this book. I think it is probably best read in French, preferably at a young age. Some of the other members of the book group really enjoyed this book. If you have a vast knowledge of French culture, and enjoy reading individual dream like sequences then this may be a book for you, but I didn’t enjoy it.

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Other

I’ve completed Blog Post Bingo!

In the third week of the Blog Improvement Project. We were challenged to add ten different types of post to our blog. I’m really happy, because I managed to do it. I have created a poll here, so that you can let me know which of my post types you liked the best. It would be really helpful to know which are the most popular, so I can concentrate on them in the future. Thank you!

I’ve completed Blog Post Bingo!

  •  A Link Post – share a series of links your readers might find interesting

Links to book related news this week.

  • A Short Post – less than 200 words

I just included a picture of me and my little boy in the snow.

  • A List Post – simple as it sounds, a list of some sort

A list of 10 blogs with great layouts.

  • An Opinion Post – take an event, news, or another blog post and share your opinion on it

For Friday 13th I wrote a short post about my superstitions.

  • A Poll or Question Post – post a poll or ask your readers a specific question for feedback

As well as my ususal weekly ‘Can you judge a book by it’s cover?‘ quiz. I have also added a poll, so you can let me know which of these post types you prefer.

  • A How-To Post – You’re an expert in something; big or small, share how to do it

I wrote a guide on how to search for books on the Internet.

  • A Long Post – more than 700 words

My Weekly Geek look at different book covers is more than 700 words long. You can read it here.

  • A Review Post – self-explanatory, I think :)

With all the other posting I didn’t have much time for book reviews, but I did manage to squeeze a review of David Ebershoff’s 19th Wife in here.

I’d never heard of a BLOOK before. Have you?

  • FREE SPACE – a type of post of your choice (that is not the same as one of the previous posts)

I interviewed Sandy from You’ve Gotta Read This.

This has been a real challenge for me. I have enjoyed researching all the different posting types, and will make sure that I include more in future, but it has been very time consuming, and I haven’t been able to read as much as I’d like, so I’m off to read a good book!