en-US Sun, 15 Jun 2025 23:04:45 -0700 60 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg Review7447313174 Sun, 15 Jun 2025 23:04:45 -0700 /review/show/7447313174 Robert gave 3 stars to You Are Here: Personal Geographies and Other Maps of the Imagination (Paperback) by Katharine Harmon
Looks wonderful, great to dip into, but you start to realise that the bar for inclusion (is it a map? no, okay, but is it eclectic, eccentric, but still a bit diagrammy? yes? then, it’s in!) is set quite low. Plus, for many, the pages are too small for the level of detail on the map (maybe this is a smaller version of a coffee table edition? or maybe a FTSE100 boardroom table edition?). A three star collection of four star infographics. ]]> Review7621972515 Sat, 14 Jun 2025 06:06:14 -0700 /review/show/7621972515 Robert gave 3 stars to Tooth and Nail (Inspector Rebus, #3) by Ian Rankin
You know how it is, you're halfway through and already starting to compose your Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ review - mine was going to be how this is a burger of a book, not gastropub burger, but not one from those takeaways you only go to late at night when you're drunk neither, decently put together, satisfying for as long as it lasts then forgettable, aspirations of Five Guys, but nearer Burger King than McDonalds, say - and then something happens...

For me, it was finding out Rebus is ex-SAS. What? There's absolutely nothing in the slightly disorganised and shambolic Rebus, who is team-allergic, that says SAS or even ex-military. Keeps a neat suitcase, I suppose. But he doesn't even deploy much in the way of hand-to-hand combat skills, so it's not even that Rankin makes much use of it in the narrative. Odd, incongruous, and completely threw me out of the story.

Message for the line editor: you can't make a sauce out of scallops. A sauce to go with scallops, yes, but not a sauce out of them.

Oh, and copy editor or proofreader: it's 'poky', not 'pokey'. ]]> 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. ]]>