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 29

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            The Roundheads and Cavaliers quartet by Stella Riley   I am very fond of this series, which I read when they first came out in the early 90s. They are excellent historical novels set during the mid-17 th Century covering the Civil War and its immediate aftermath. Although they contain romance, it would be wrong to characterise them as mere romances, because the Civil War is shown accurately in all its brutality and pain. They are an excellent read that bear rereading from time to time. Last year Alex Wyndham recorded the first, the Black Madonna , for Audible. Previously he has recorded Ms Riley’s other books, The Marigold Chain and the Rockliffe books with elegance and panache. It is so satisfying when the reader’s voice matches the book perfectly. There are no jarring notes at all. He has just finished recording Garland of Straw , the second in the series. Of the four it is probably the easiest to read as a stand-alone book. ...
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