Based very firmly on a true story, the Surgeon of Crowthorne concerns the inestimable assistance one Dr W.C. Minor gave in assembling the first concise Oxford English Dictionary.
He was deeply interested in language as well as being a keen painter and a man of science.
Oh, and he was a paranoid, delusional, sex-obsessed, xenophobic murderer as well.
Set in the infamous Salem, The Lace Reader concerns an admittedly insane protagonist and her return to her childhood home.
Amidst a tale of death, magic, lies and, for some reason, lace, she tells the reader about her past and why she’s been damaged so badly. continue reading…
Unless you count the Anita Blake Series (and I wouldn’t), this is only the third detective fiction novel that I can remember reading. ‘Murder on the Orient Express’ and ‘The hound of the Baskervilles’ are certainly more famous than this novel and often held up as exemplars of the genre. Perhaps this led me to expect a little more from this book than was delivered.
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I’ve always wanted to read Ernest Hemingway’s books. I have a copy of ‘For whom the bell tolls’ glaring at me from my bookshelf. Must get round to reading that. Still, although this is a short book, it’s considered one of his best so a good start.
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The first of two books this month, Erich Maria Remarque’s ‘All quiet on the western front is generally held as one of the greatest war novels of all time. Not having read any other war novels, I can’t really comment on that, but I can tell you that this is a very good book.
The story centres on a group of German soldier in World War I and on one named Paul Bäumer in particular. It covers their training and convalescence as well as fighting in the trenches and details with a very neutral tone what they were put through during the course of the story.
