All posts filed under: Little Reviews

Little reviews // October 2016

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I’ve got three little reviews this month – one a new release that I’ve been waiting for for a year, and two audiobooks that were spur of the moment downloads and were both fantastic. ALL OF THESE WERE FIVE STAR READS!! Can you believe that?? The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories from My Life Author: John le Carré Genre: Non-fiction (autobiography/memoir) Release Date: September 8th, 2016 Rating: ★★★★★ [Goodreads] I wanted to dedicate a whole post to this book, because it’s so special to me and it deserves it. But the reality is that a post of any great length would have just been a gush fest with very little substance to it. So a short post it is – being succinct is sometimes best with books we love. Although this book falls best into the memoir category it isn’t really a memoir; as the title suggest it’s more like a collection of stories. Any fan of le Carré is guaranteed to enjoy this book. Not only are we given an insight into his writing process, but along …

Little reviews // July 2016

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I’ve got three little reviews for this month and all of them are about books I borrowed from the library. The Man Who Was Thursday Author: G.K. Chesterton Genre: Fiction (classic/mystery) Release Date: First published in 1908; this edition published July 24th, 2013 Rating: ★★★ [Goodreads] I picked this up from the library so that I could mark off a bingo square (I had to read a book with a day of the week in the title), and having never read Chesterton before, I was pretty excited. The opening pages and chapters hooked me right away and I thought, “this is going to be an amazing reading experience”. It was so ridiculous and had me laughing out loud too much on the train, and I swear it has the most beautiful sunset I’ve ever read: “All the heaven seemed covered with quite a vivid and palpable plumage; you could only say that the sky was full of feathers, and of feathers that almost brushed the face”. There’s a whole paragraph of this sunset but, you get it …

Little reviews // May 2016

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I’ve got three little reviews for this month – one is an ARC I enjoyed a lot less than I thought I would, one is a ghost story set in the Arctic, and the last is a modern retelling of a Shakespeare play. The Butchers of Berlin Author: Chris Petit Genre: Fiction (historical/thriller) Release Date: May 1st 2016. Rating: ★★★ I was 100% convinced that I’d enjoy this, basically because of this line from the blurb: “Corpses, dressed with fake money, bodies flayed beyond recognition: are these routine murders committed out of rage or is someone trying to tell them something…” [Simon & Schuster]. Ok, so maybe ‘enjoy’ isn’t an appropriate word to use in the context of this book, but you get what I mean. Unfortunately I was left pretty disappointed. The biggest problem I had, was trillions of plot threads and characters to keep track of. I spent the vast majority of the book trying to understand what was happening, which resulted in me not enjoying it and I would have abandoned it had I …

Little reviews // March 2016

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I’ve only got two books for this month’s Little Reviews. One of these books I loved, the other one is the most messed up thing I’ve ever read and I don’t know if I like it or want to burn it. I’m very conflicted about it. Crash Author: J.G. Ballard Genre: Fiction (literary) Release Date: My edition – September 1st 2008, first published in 1978. Rating: ★★★☆ The only way I can possibly describe this book is, “what the actual fuck?” (Sorry to people who don’t like swearing.) I don’t think I’ve ever read a book more messed up than this one. I picked this book to read as part of the Weirdathon (hosted over at Outlandish Lit) and I have honestly never read anything weirder in my life. For the week or so it took me to read this I slept poorly every night, so take that on board if you’re thinking of reading it (I don’t know if there’s an actual connection between the book and my bad sleep, but I’m going to say there is). It’s not …

Little reviews // February 2016

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This is the first of what might become a recurring monthly post (we’ll see how bothered I am). Basically this is going to be a round up of any books I read in a particular month that I couldn’t manage to write a big long post for, but that I feel like I need to say something about. The Interrogation of Ashala Wolf Author: Ambelin Kwaymullina Genre: Young adult (sci-fi/dystopian) Release Date: July 2012 Rating: ★★ To begin with, I should say that I’m not the ideal reader for this book; dystopian young adult isn’t what I usually gravitate towards (unless there’s a film adaptation on the way), so I may have been negatively geared towards it without meaning to. Having said that, I had some issues with this one that I haven’t had with the other YA books I’ve read. I liked the general idea of the book – a dystopian future in which people with supernatural abilities are persecuted, these people forming The Tribe and fighting against their oppressors; the world of this future …