Bargain Books and Medicine Chests

  A couple of weeks ago when I wrote about Rivers of London , I said that it was a very British book. Extending that thought, The Bertie Project by Alexander McCall Smith is a very Scottish book, and even more than that, it is a specific subset – it is a very Edinburgh book. I don’t mean that you can’t enjoy the story if you’re not familiar with Edinburgh – you would enjoy it in the same way as you’d enjoy Rivers of London even if you weren’t familiar with London, because in both cases the authors are skilled enough to give you enough information even if you’re not intimate with the environment. Having said that, I’m very familiar with Edinburgh. Okay, it was in the 1980’s when I spend four years there as a student, but in a city as old as Edinburgh, while some of the infrastructure is different now, the one thing that doesn’t change is the basic city centre layout – the castle, the Old Town and university, the New Town, the established schools, the museums, galleries and other...

Mark Haddon is well known as the author of the acclaimed novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. For some reason I've never quite got around to it, so my introduction to this author is through his second novel, A Spot of Bother. A Spot of Bother is the tragi-comic tale of George Hall – 61, recently retired, contemplating a life of comfortable dullness when he discovers a weird looking lesion on his hip and immediately jumps to the conclusion that he is going to imminently die of skin cancer. Add into the mix that he finds it almost impossible to talk to his wife Jean about personal matters, his extremely opinionated daughter Katie is set on marrying Ray, a match her parents think is totally unsuitable, and the wedding means they’ll have to extend an invitation to his son Jamie’s boyfriend Tony. All in all, George begins to find retirement just a tad stressful and as the family situation escalates, George’s mental state gradually morphs from stress into anxiety ...