This little book is the story of Buck, a house dog that gets abducted and put to work as a sled dog in the harsh North.
It's a great story. I really like Jack London's books. They are really good adventure stories but he also makes you actually care about the dog/wolves.
It gets a bit philosophical at points but otherwise it's great if you want a fast paced break from writing your dissertation (or whatever else you might be doing).
This is one of my friend's favourite books so I thought I would check it out. Unfortunately because it's her favourite I have seen the most recent film version with her so I knew the plot going in.
For those who haven't seen the film, this is the story of orphan Jane Eyre who was raised by her unfeeling aunt. She goes to a very strict religious boarding school and finally becomes a governess at the house of Mr Rochester. Here she inevitably falls in love with her master but the course of true love doesn't run smooth and she ends up on a few adventures of her own.
Even though I knew how it ended I was still gripped by this book. Jane tells you the story in a way that means you can't help with sympathise with her. Her experiences and emotions are so vivid that you get dragged into the story and I often found myself egging her on or shouting at the other characters. At parts this seems like a traditional love story but all the twists and turns throw you off and keep you in suspense as to whether they will ever get it together.
I think knowing the plot actually helped me focus on the characters and I ended up getting way too into this book. So give it a go and see if you can stay out of it.
Decided I fancied a nice big classic to get my teeth into and at over 400 pages this fit the bill. This is the tale of a mysterious and apparently cursed diamond, the Moonstone, which is given to Rachel Verinder for her birthday. But the diamond disappears as quickly as it appears and the rest of the book is spent trying to discover what happened to it.
The book is compiled of different characters' points of view as they each pick up the story and add what they know. This means that you get a variety of voices while also getting to follow the story of the diamond as it travels around the country. It's a really clever technique and keeps the intrigue going as well as breaking up quite a long story.
With each voice comes a different view on the world from Betteredge, the butler who believes in the gospel of Robinson Crusoe, to Miss Clack, the busy body who hides behind the Bible, to Ezra Jennings, the disgraced doctor's assistant. Collins uses each of the characters not only to move the story on but also as a caricature of certain types of people. The use of Miss Clack as a satire of single-minded and occasionally hypocritical Christianity is funny while also being really clever. I really loved this element of the novel and at points was more interested in the satire than the diamond.
But eventually you do find out what happened to the diamond and the novel closes with a level of satisfaction and closure that I find many lack. I did manage to guess the culprit earlier on but it didn't hamper my enjoyment at all because I had all the little subplots and the satire to keep me busy. Good read if you have the time for it.
I thought I'd give myself a break after The Shining and read a nice simple kids' book.
Treasure Island tells the story of Jim Hawkins, a simple inn-keeper's son, whose meeting with "The Captain" leads him into a life of adventure and danger as he sails in search of treasure with a crew full of pirates.
It's really good fun this book. It is just a great adventure book for boys. I don't mean that in a sexist way just that this story has adventure, fighting, pirates and mystery and I can really picture kids reading it and then playing pirates for the next few months, each fighting to be Jim the hero. The characters are simple without being boring and 2D and the story keeps moving at a pace so you never get bored.
One thing that maybe wasn't so great was the amount of boaty jargon used. Obviously at the time these terms would be more commonplace but reading it now I was often confused by where people were and what they were talking about. But it didn't matter that much because the basic message of "there be scary pirates coming to get you" was never really lost.
This book is great if you just want to forget all responsibilities and feel like a kid again for a few hours, and seeing as I read it while stuck on the M40 for 5 hours that seems pretty good to me.
We all know The Shining in some form, unfortunately for me my first encounter with it was the Simpsons spoof The Shinning. I then went and watched the film and was thoroughly confused, and thinking about the Simpsons. So finally I decided to give Stephen King a go and actually read The Shining.
It is very different from the film and in some ways makes more sense but in other ways makes no sense at all.
The story is of Jack Torrance who gets a job as a winter caretaker at a big mountain hotel called the Overlook. He moves to the hotel with his wife Wendy and his psychic son Danny. Already weird. Once there the hotel starts to get into everyone's head and convinces Jack to kill his family. Their only hope of survival in the completely snowed in hotel is one of the hotel's cooks, Dick, who is also luckily psychic.
So yeah that's the basic story. Bit weird. But it's all the other things around the story that get even weirder. From aggressive hedge animals to bitchy ghosts this book has a whole host of bizarre features that are sort of explained in the book by "magic psychic hotel" but that sometimes isn't enough of an explanation.
All the crazy aside, this is a good book. I've always been sceptical of scary books, I mean it's a book how scary can it be. Very is the answer. I was so tense at points reading this and I can tell you it is not a good idea to read this before bed because you will just find yourself lying there tense and expecting scary dead people.
So yeah it's bizarre and at times hard to make sense of but if you just accept that it's a really good read. There's real tension as you read about the characters in danger and the odd features just add to the madness and confusion that keeps you guessing. Go out and read it, but not at bedtime.
Of Mice and Men is a little book that tells the story of George and his simple-minded friend Lenny as they start work at a new ranch.
For only a few pages it's a really moving book. George obviously regrets getting lumbered with Lenny who means well but with his limited intellect and extraordinary strength tends to get them run out of their jobs pretty quickly. But despite the trouble he causes, George sticks with Lenny and protects him against others who don't understand him. It's really sweet the mix of frustration and love that George expresses.
Unfortunately this isn't enough for a happy ending, which I already knew going into the book. Despite having been told the story in some detail by my mum I was still gripped by this book.
So this is a really good book and I thoroughly recommend it, although I would suggest getting a copy that doesn't have a schoolkid's notes, and in some cases little drawings, in it.
This book follows the story of Stephen Wraysford through his youth spent in France and then through the first World War with sections written from the point of view of his granddaughter in the 1970s.
It wasn't the most cheerful book to read over Christmas but it's a classic. It's also not for the faint hearted as the scenes during the war are often fittingly horrific and very visual. These scenes are really powerful and really express some of the horror of the situation to the point of being hard to read.
Another thing to look out for are the quite graphic sex scenes which I found on the day I decided to read on the bus. I know nobody else knew what I was reading but it made me a little uncomfortable on the number 8 at midday.
But overall this is a great book. It is truly moving both in the depictions of war but also the personal relationships that survived it. The only thing I would say about the book is that while the sections from before the war really stressed how much life had changed, the sections from the 70s, I felt, were a bit unnecessary and didn't add much to the book (although I know someone who only read those sections and would disagree).
But yeah, it's a really god book although not the most cheerful of stories. And as a little bonus I got my copy for £2 just because it had the TV series cover - score.
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