Saturday 7 January 2012

A book review or two

What to do on a cold, miserable, windy January day? Why read a book of course. And luckily I was given 3 review copies of new books in my goodie bag from Cathy the Bookseller (who's job I unutterably envy I have to say) at our pre-Xmas get together. I couldn't think of a better way to spend today than to spend it reading a book that isn't yet on the shelves.

It's called 'The Good Father' by Noah Hawley. The story is a good one. A son kills a senator billed to be the next President of the USA and the novel is about how the father deals with this news. Sadly, the author has the rather annoying habit of employing similes on a lot of pages and I found it very irritating. And then he killed the story for me by introducing an outrageous scenario that I just couldn't believe in near the end. I'm not going to spoil it for you just in case you buy the book for yourself. Suffice it to say the book dropped a star because of this and it gets a 3 out of 5.

This is a whole lot better than the biography of Peggy Guggenheim by Anton Gill I've just finished. 528 pages of facts which left me cold. It was a slog, but I refuse to be beaten by a book unless it's absolute crap, which would get nul points (French accent) in my rating system. This one got one star. I don't recommend you read it unless you're suffering from insomnia.






2 comments:

  1. Funnily enough, I do suffer from insomnia. Perhaps I should give the biography a try?

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  2. Well Karen, it makes me yawn just thinking about it!

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