Day 1 My First Effort


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Day 38

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          I have just read Robert Galbraith’s (aka J K Rowling) Troubled Blood . It is   very good but it is also very heavy. If you have a kindle, buy the electronic version. I didn’t because I was so incensed that the kindle copy was more expensive than the hard back. How can they justify that? Anyway, Troubled Blood is nine hundred and twenty-seven pages of superb detective story. The main characters are, as before, Cormoran Strike and Robin Ellacott, partners in a detective   agency based in Soho. The   agency is slightly more prosperous than before and they have a secretary and subcontractors to help with the increased work. However, it is not a happy time. Robin’s husband is making their divorce as gruelling and painful as possible and Strike’s Aunt Joan, who brought him up, is dying slowly and painfully from cancer. On a visit to Joan in Cornwall, Strike is approached by a couple of women, Kim and Anna. Anna is upset and anxious. T...
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Day 37 Small Pleasures and Little Treats

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        Small Pleasures and Little Treats   Small Pleasures There is an inevitability about the ending of Clare Chambers’ Small Pleasures. It is signalled with little ambiguity by the structure of the novel. The one thing that isn’t clear is who’s destiny we are foreseeing. The story is set in 1957 mostly in southeast London, in genteel suburbia, peopled by the sort of people the 50s always brings to mind, the conservative (with a small c) lower middle classes in their between-the-wars semis. It's a good, pitch perfect late 50s setting. Jean is a reporter on the local paper. She is fast approaching forty, single, looking after her difficult and sickly mother. Her sister has escaped to Kenya with her family. Jean feels abandoned. Life isn’t exactly a struggle, but it’s confined and small, getting by, making ends meet, not miserable but with no room for joy. It always amuses me how people want to recall the community spirit of the 40s and 50s. My memor...
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Day 6 New Worlds in Space and Time

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New Worlds in Space and Time The Book The UnTied Kingdom by Kate Johnson, 15 Jan 2014 This is one of those supremely satisfying books where the balance between adventure and romance is perfectly structured. Too often one element is thrown in either to soften or spice up the other, to supply some dramatic tension because the original story cannot provide it on its own. There is one leap of belief needed and that is to accept the possibility of parallel worlds. Otherwise, reality rules. Eve, an ex-pop star with money problems, forced to do humiliating sensation TV to earn some money, is accidentally   flung through a hole in the sky above Tower Bridge. She and the birdlike contraption she is riding on land in the Thames. She is rescued to find that England is in the throes of a devastating civil war. The world is dominated by the French Empire and the Coalitionists, who want to cede to France, have rebelled against the English government. Eve has been rescued by a major in the ...
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