A Week in December by Sebastian Faulks
I picked this up on the way through Terminal 5 on Monday, to at least kill some time on the 9 hours to Seattle. Little did I know that by the time I landed, I’d be 3/4 of the way through.
Telling the story of 7 main characters over the week before Christmas in 2007, Sebastian Faulks weaves a marvellous tale that exposes the massive differences between people that live close together in West London.
Faulks writes with unerring precision (inspirational), and develops characters into completely plausible and believable people that your can really engage with. The whole thing rattles along very nicely until the inevitable, but still surprising climax.
A great read – why not add it to your next Amazon order – click here.
By: mattr
Category: books
I’ve invested some time in reading some highly recommended business/excellence books recently, and whilst I don’t suggest that you go away and read all of these, just one of the following 3 in your next Amazon order will reap maximum benefits.
Why not add some of these to your Sunday morning reading list?
I picked this up in my favourite second hand bookshop before Christmas to fuel my addiction to travel related literature, especially about inhospitable places.
True North documents the writers travels around the countries of Arctic Europe, including Iceland, Greenland, Lapland and Svalbard – and throws some interesting light on these cold and unforgiving countries.
Weaving historical information from Viking sagas and early literature into his travel diaries brings an extra dimension to the standard travel writing and allows the reader some insight into how the history of these countries is closely linked with the history of our own.
Fascinating read – well documented with maps and a few photographs. Available from Amazon here : True North: Travels in Arctic Europe
By: mattr
Category: books
I read this during my recent trip to Seattle, an impulse buy as I was waiting in Terminal 4. As always, a tough book to read, with hardcore subject matter.
Welsh creates some good characters as he develops the story of a Scottish cop, holidaying in Florida with his fiancée as he tries to recover from a particularly unpleasant child murder case.
Our ‘hero’ Ray ends up embroiled in a protection case of his own, escorting a young vulnerable girl to safety after she finds herself in danger from paedophiles.
Whilst Welsh creates a good story, it isn’t a taut thriller that keeps the pages turning. You care about the characters, and so you keep going – but I did find it a little bit dry, no great twist, no great revelation.
I’ll keep hoping for Welsh, I like his style – but I think he needs to get back to his roots a little bit.
Get yourself over to ‘Blog a Holiday Read’ courtesy of Penguin and register yourself smartish. You can receive a free book, on the provision that you blog a review of it.
I got ‘The Great Gatsby’ – and I’m looking forward to reading it this summer!
By: mattr
Category: books
One of my favourite books of recent years has made it to the big screen – with the impending release of Choke by Chuck Palahniuk.
The (NSFW) trailer is good enough to keep me going, but I can’t wait to see this.
I’m not a big reader of crime fiction – especially those murder mystery type affairs where an enigmatic cop find his way through a labyrinth of information to arrest the psychopath – that’s too much like my day job.
However – someone bought my a hardback of Broken Skin for my birthday last year, and I finally got round to reading it.
Broken Skin tells the story of Logan McRae, a detective sergeant in Aberdeen as he investigates a number of seemingly unlinked incidents. A murder in the local BDSM community, a rapist football star and an 8 year old murderer are all on the loose in the Scottish city.
As it happens – the story is quite taut with a twist or two along the way. The dialogue funny and hard hitting. The crimes are fairly gruesome but the book doesn’t spill over into a gore-fest, and concentrates largely on the characters round the CID in Aberdeen as the hunt down the criminals.
If you are into crime thrillers – then this one can be recommended. You might as well get in a read it, because I fully expect that this (and the character – Logan ‘Lazarus’ McRae) will be turned into a TV cop (a la Rebus or Taggart).
By: mattr
Category: books
Whilst I was looking at information about the new James Bond film, I noticed that Daniel Craig is due to play the devil (alongside Ewan McGregor as the main character – Declan Gunn) in a movie based on one of my favourite books of recent years.
I, Lucifer by Glen Duncan tells the story of satan sent back to earth in a test to see whether he can behave himself enough to return back to heaven.
It is a brilliant story (like all of Glen Duncan’s writing) with savage dialogue and just enough religious influence to make it super interesting. I’m really looking forward to the film.
Interesting article in the Guardian by Mark Lawson this morning about publicists trying to release movies, books and TV shows without critics even seeing them – to save potential bad reviews.
It seems that increasingly the press are only getting to see movies at the very first public screenings (Friday afternoon on the day of release), because the film distributors and publicists are stopping newspaper reviewers seeing the film before the public.
The whole thing got me thinking a bit – does anyone really need the press reviews to judge whether to see a film or buy a book or not? Certainly – if I see a trailer for a film and it looks OK, I’ll go and see it regardless of what the newspaper reviewers say. More than often, I’ll find out about a film release from a buzz on the ‘net and I might even do a quick search for comments made across the hundreds of blogs and websites that specialise in movies.
In fact – that’s the whole point, the web has democratised the process so much that press reviews have become negligible in their influence, sites like Metacritic have sprung up to aggregate the average reviews and tell us what a much wider base of people think about a film or book or whatever.
That just leaves the press reviewers like Anton Ego from Ratatouille – found out for the snobbish, elitist club members that they are.
After finishing Devil May Care, I decided that I needed to read more of Sebastian Faulks work, so I plumped for ‘Engleby’ first. After finishing it late last night, I’m glad I did – it is an absolute corker of a book.
Engleby is the story of a man who wins scholarships to first a public school, and then a top university but never really ‘fits in’ at either place. Eventually taking a career in journalism, he finally seems to settle down – until his only, distant relationship at university, comes back to haunt him.
The main character is the narrator of the story, and Faulks skillfully blends his unreliable story (maybe influenced by drugs, drink and psychosis) with the diary entries from the object of his obsession.
Faulks writes with a great style, Mike Engleby is a dark, obsessive man with a great sense of humour and razor sharp intellect. By the end of the story, you wonder who really is the damaged character in the story – and until the last page, you are never quite sure of what really happened.
Excellent book – from an brilliant writer, I’m going to buy Birdsong next and I’ll update when I’ve given that a read.
By: mattr
Category: books
- 52 great ways to think like a top MBA student, bite size and easily digestible – but full of great thought leadership.
- An oldie but a classic, you can read this in 60 minutes – and it will last a lifetime.
- So much of our time is spent in presentations, why not try and make yourself excellent at them. Helps you break the PowerPoint shackles.
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