en-US Mon, 09 Jun 2025 21:55:20 -0700 60 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg Review7534903459 Mon, 09 Jun 2025 21:55:20 -0700 /review/show/7534903459 Robert gave 2 stars to The Sirens of Titan (Paperback) by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Like jazz, but not the good kind, the freeform sort that has no beginning, middle, or end, with some good ideas and the odd catchy riff but in the main drones on and on and on in a smug and self-satisfied way. Tiresome. ]]> ReadStatus9500425712 Mon, 02 Jun 2025 12:20:45 -0700 /review/show/7621972515 Robert is currently reading Tooth and Nail by Ian Rankin
]]> Review7501821144 Fri, 23 May 2025 23:27:59 -0700 /review/show/7501821144 Robert gave 2 stars to A Year of Living Simply: The joys of a life less complicated (Mass Market Paperback) by Kate Humble
The Germans probably have a word for my mixed feelings having finished this, but credit to Kate Humblebrag by helping me decide between two and three stars by finishing with a plea, as an author, to buy new books after very much pushing homemade, second-hand, and the 'reduce, reuse, recycle' agenda when it comes to virtually else.

And doesn't that sum it up? Because I can't help feeling that this book didn't need to be written had it not been for Kate's needs to write books to pay the mortgage. Compared to other light non-fictions I've read over the last couple of years - Helen Russell's 'Year of Living Danishly' or Geoff Nicholson's 'Lost Art of Walking' - I sensed no impetus from the subject matter itself demanding to be written about. This is very much 'I'll have a good hot bath and a glass of white until I think of an idea to pitch to my agent'. What's resulted isn't much more than Baz Luhrmann's 'Everyone's Free (to Wear Sunscreen)' as if told through a middle aged woman's ramblings on her mobile phone on a bus that you can’t avoid overhearing - occasionally illuminating and funny, but mainly inane - with the only thing to distract being wondering what a woman in Hunter wellies and a Barbour's doing on a bus. ]]> ReadStatus9432081744 Fri, 16 May 2025 10:37:53 -0700 /review/show/7574203194 Robert is currently reading Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don't Know by Adam M. Grant
]]> Review7501821144 Fri, 16 May 2025 06:27:27 -0700 /review/show/7501821144 Robert gave 2 stars to A Year of Living Simply: The joys of a life less complicated (Mass Market Paperback) by Kate Humble
The Germans probably have a word for my mixed feelings having finished this, but credit to Kate Humblebrag by helping me decide between two and three stars by finishing with a plea, as an author, to buy new books after very much pushing homemade, second-hand, and the 'reduce, reuse, recycle' agenda when it comes to virtually else.

And doesn't that sum it up? Because I can't help feeling that this book didn't need to be written had it not been for Kate's needs to write books to pay the mortgage. Compared to other light non-fictions I've read over the last couple of years - Helen Russell's 'Year of Living Danishly' or Geoff Nicholson's 'Lost Art of Walking' - I sensed no impetus from the subject matter itself demanding to be written about. This is very much 'I'll have a good hot bath and a glass of white until I think of an idea to pitch to my agent'. What's resulted isn't much more than Baz Luhrmann's 'Everyone's Free (to Wear Sunscreen)' as if told through a middle aged woman's ramblings on her mobile phone on a bus that you can’t avoid overhearing - occasionally illuminating and funny, but mainly inane - with the only thing to distract being wondering what a woman in Hunter wellies and a Barbour's doing on a bus. ]]> ReadStatus9425230816 Wed, 14 May 2025 14:13:27 -0700 /review/show/7569390989 Robert is currently reading The Russia House by John Le Carré
]]> ReadStatus9411844339 Sun, 11 May 2025 06:19:42 -0700 /review/show/7560064664 Robert is currently reading Feng Shui by Anonymous
]]> Review7507374009 Sat, 10 May 2025 08:08:20 -0700 /review/show/7507374009 Robert gave 3 stars to The English Civil Wars: 1640-1660 (Paperback) by Blair Worden
History, it is said, doesn’t repeat, but it does rhyme, and this decisive twenty years in English history puts me in mind of the post-Brexit clusterfuck we’re currently living through, given neither seemed to have a clear exit strategy, or even idea of next step, after whoever was in charge at the time said ‘sod it, let’s do it� and lit the red, white, and blue touchpaper.

I thought I knew quite a bit about this period, but I was wrong. Worden’s account surprised me with how few pages were devoted to Edgehill, Marston Moor, Naseby, and all that, which was the bulk of what we were taught in school about the Civil War (singular). And it’s also changed my view of Cromwell, from some Darth Vader-like religious-intolerant megalomaniac to someone a bit more nuanced, who could easily have become King Oliver I and started a dynasty in much the same way as Henry Tudor did, but preferred a (marginally) more democratic way of doing things.

So thought-provoking, but what, for me, holds it down to three stars is that it lacks exactly what the book jacket blurb praises it for: readability. Throughout is garbled prose, clauses that tie the reader in knots, and even one or two garden path sentences. I read quite a lot two or even three times just to make sense of what is, admittedly, an opaque period of history. But, given I’ve just read a slightly longer book covering a couple of millennia of the Middle East’s history, boiled down by Peter Mansfield into a concentrated but easily flowing narrative jus, three’s my limit. ]]> ReadStatus9375484263 Thu, 01 May 2025 14:17:44 -0700 /review/show/7534903459 Robert is currently reading The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
]]> Review7315136820 Thu, 01 May 2025 08:06:13 -0700 /review/show/7315136820 Robert gave 2 stars to A Perfect Spy (Paperback) by John Le Carré
There's something very, very wrong here. My initial diagnosis was literary schizophrenia: after a sober first chapter, the second changes character utterly into head-jumping, tense-skipping, untethered dream-logic nonsense. But having read more, I modified my assessment to dementia. Yes, there's a story somewhere in here - although I was halfway through when I glanced at the back cover without the slightest recognition of the 'two controllers race to get their double agent back first' tale I was allegedly reading - but it's utterly swamped by interminable biographic drivel. Every so often, like sunlight through winter clouds, clarity is momentarily achieved - there's something about the Czechos' blowing spies as a double-bluff to convince the Brits that they have Pym, which I would have liked more of - but it soon disappears in a haze of barely relevant backstory. A crying shame, as it is when any crystal clear mind is lost. ]]>