0210 | The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
Context: Read this as we walked the South West Coast Path for four days for our 15th wedding anniversary. REVIEW Collins practically invented the whodunnit and this is his first…
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0199 | Cakes and Ale – W. Somerset Maugham
Context: Was reading this by the side of the pool at our host’s place when we couchsurfed Cairns. REVIEW What name beginning with W could possibly be so bad that…
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0198 | The Picture of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde
Context: Finished this off the day we went into Perth taking our friends’ bikes to cycle around King’s Park and the Swan River. REVIEW Never read any Oscar Wilde but,…
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0196 | Stargazing – Peter Hill
Context: Borrowed from my mate Gareth, and finished this off just as we were packing for a six week trip to Malaysia, Singapore, Australia, PNG and UAE. REVIEW My mate…
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0194 | Silas Marner – George Eliot
Context: Listened to this walking around Cambridge trying to find a decent pair of sandals for our trip to Papua New Guinea. REVIEW Only read Middlemarch before by Eliot although…
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0193 | The Radiant Way – Margaret Drabble
Context: Finished this off in a brand new armchair at my mate’s house. Gorgeous chair from Marks & Spencers. Perfect for reading in. REVIEW Fifty pages into this, I was…
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0190 | Smiley’s People – John le Carré
Context: Got my first cold in a year and a half just as I finished this off. I should have been reading The Spy Who Came in from the Cold!…
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0186 | Amsterdam – Ian McEwan
Context: A reclining chair, a lamp and a cushion on a cloudy Saturday morning. REVIEW I’ve read a couple of other McEwan’s which always captivated me until about halfway through….
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0185 | Thank You, Jeeves – P.G.Wodehouse
Context: On the bookshelf along with this were several other first edition Wodehouse hardbacks, some with very good dustjackets from the 1930s. Lovely. REVIEW I couldn’t help thinking of Huxley’s…
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0181 | Under Milk Wood – Dylan Thomas
Context: One of the books on the bookshelf in our bedroom at our new place in Bar Hill. REVIEW This only takes about thirty minutes to read from cover to…
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0180 | The Information | Martin Amis
Context: Finished this off just after a shopping trip to Tesco’s where I got two free blocks of cheese (always complain politely!) REVIEW Recently, I read The Old Devils by…
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0174 | Cryptonomicon – Neal Stephenson
Context: Started to learn to play the piano at some point in the months I spent reading this. REVIEW Many of you know that I’m pretty fixated with the 1001…
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0167 | Attitudes and Language – Colin Baker
REVIEW If you’re into Welsh, this is the book for you. I’m not and I’m reading this in preparation for language survey work in PNG. So, was it relevant? Juuuuuust…
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0165 | An Interesting Narrative – Olaudah Equiano
Context: while I was reading this, our clothes dryer died in the garden and we had to string up an emergency washing line REVIEW A friend bought me this for…
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0161 | A Modest Proposal – Jonathan Swift
Context: Very brief listen to this courtesy of librivox.org while working in the Wycliffe kitchens. REVIEW I was expecting something of a banal treatise on something mundane or other but,…
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0159 | Decline & Fall – Evelyn Waugh
Context: Listened to this in a day while chopping copious amounts of veg in the Wycliffe kitchens. REVIEW Having read Vile Bodies, I was expecting something a bit more banal…
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0155 | The Old Devils – Kingsley Amis
REVIEW Who names their child Kingsley? I mean, honestly, who does? It sounds like the name you’d give a Basset Hound. Anyway, name apart, this was a terrible novel. It…
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0148 | Hard Times – Charles Dickens
Context: Read this mostly on my way to and from work along this farmer’s track. REVIEW This is a shorter novel than most Dickens I’ve read but it still contained…