Bargain Books and Medicine Chests

To me, Bernard Cornwell is best known for writing the Sharpe novels and The Last Kingdom novels, with both sagas being made into successful TV series over the years.  So I was curious when I came across a stand-alone Bernard Cornwell on the Bargain Book Table last year, especially one with the intriguing premise that Fools and Mortals promised on the back cover. Fools and Mortals is lifted from a line in A Midsummer Night’s Dream when Puck says “Lord, what fools these mortals be!”  It’s a nice choice of title because one of the main plot lines of the book is William Shakespeare and his company planning and rehearsing the inaugural performance of the play to celebrate the wedding of the Lord Chamberlain’s granddaughter. Having said that, one of the great conceits of the book is the story isn’t really about William Shakespeare at all, even though he’s one of the chief protagonists. It’s about Richard Shakespeare, one of his brothers. Cornwell has taken the fact that Richard ac...

  You can come to a new book in so many ways – a review, a recommendation from a friend, desperation at the airport or station where you will sometimes buy just about anything so you have something to while away a few hours when you can’t go anywhere. I’ve bought books on the basis of all three of these and I think most people would agree that the first two methods are usually, but not always the most reliable because it’s really embarrassing when a friend loves something you really hate! I came to Giovanni’s Room after reading an interesting interview with Sharmaine Lovegrove who has worked as a bookseller for over twenty years, but couldn’t get a job in publishing. She argues that there is a real disconnect between the publishing industry and readers. The interview is worth reading in its own right, but it also lead me to another article written two years earlier in which she takes about the lack of diversity in UK publishing, her own history as a book seller including openin...

I don't have any particularly deep thoughts to share about How to Stop Time (and some might say I haven't had any deep thoughts about any of the books I've read and reviewed so far for this blog, but that is another thing altogether…), but the one thing I do have to say is that I really enjoyed it and would definitely recommend it to anyone who wanted a light, quick, easy, well written and engaging read. Our hero is Tom Hazard, a 41-year-old Englishman who is just about to start a new job as a history teacher at a London secondary school. The only trouble is that Tom Hazard isn’t his real name – well, not his full name, anyway –   he’s not 41 and he’s not really English. Because Tom is over 400 years old, comes from French aristocratic stock and suffers from a rare disease called anageria, which radically slows down the aging process. The idea of the disease is a lovely conceit because it allows Matt Haig to have Tom participate in the momentous events as well as the smal...

 One of the attractions of the Bargain Book Table is that it sometimes entices me to read authors I’ve never got around to reading, but who I feel I should have read. Edna O’Brien is one of those authors. When I saw one of her later novels, The Little Red Chairs on the bargain table sometime last year  I automatically picked it up, and after reading the blurb on the back, I was intrigued enough to decide it might be time to rectify my omission. Having finally got around to reading it, I’ve been struggling to get to the bottom of what I felt about this book until I remembered a conversation I had with my older brother many, many years ago (as in the 1980s years ago). We had rented One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest on VHS from the local video store (ah remember VHS!). I’d seen the film before and read the book, but my brother hadn’t. At the end (oh god, that ending…) I remember asking my brother what he thought of it. After a pause he said that he thought it was a brilliant film, ...

Reading A Christmas Carol put me in the mood for reading other short stories. Since we’re still in the festive period I wanted something light and easy – sort of the literary equivalent of an appy. I was chuffed to remember that around the same as the Munro’s bargain book table yielded some Dickens, it also offered another quintessential English (and I say English advisedly) author – P. G. Wodehouse and My Man Jeeves. As with A Christmas Carol, my impressions of P.G. Wodehouse are coloured by adaptations, most notably by Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry in Jeeves and Wooster, but also by the BBC’s Wodehouse Playhouse and not least by the Croft Original Sherry ads starring a stately Michael Denison as Jeeves. To that end I was concerned that as with Dickens it would be difficult to put my previous experience aside to enjoy the ‘source material’ without preconceptions. However, the thing about P.G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves and Wooster is that they are archetypes. Bertie really is a scatterbrained t...

I was cruising my bookshelves last week looking for a book to read in the run up to Christmas. Sometimes looking at a bookshelf is a bit like ‘shopping your closet’ where you have to look at what you’ve got with a fresh eye in the hope that something jumps out at you when you don't know what you're really in the mood for. In this case the fresh eye was noticing that I had a copy of A Christmas Carol bought on impulse from Munro’s bargain book table about 18 months ago and promptly forgotten about. Really, it might as well have been doing a dance on the bookshelf shouting ‘read me’, because if there is ever a time to read A Christmas Carol it’s in the week before Christmas. I should say at this point that I am not a Dickens fan. I remember having to read Hard Times as part of a curriculum on industrial history when I was at college and there’s nothing like forcing someone to read an author they’re already not predisposed towards, to put you off that author without ever giving th...

  I am guessing like many others, my book ‘Wish List’ is often informed by some reviews which pique my interest. That was certainly the case with The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel. To that end, I was delighted when my other half bought it as part of a seriously excellent book haul for my birthday back in September.   However, then I started to see it on a lot of people’s ‘Top Picks of the Year for 2020’ or other similar types of list and I began to twitch a little because I have lost count of the number of times I have read something because it was one of these end of year roundups and then been wildly disappointed that the reality didn’t lead up to the hype on the list. I know that sounds like a bit of insane troll logic because I put it on my wish list because of reviews and surely an end of year list is just another type of review? Well, both yes and no, at least in my mind. So, before I get into my thoughts on The Glass Hotel, bear with me and I’ll attempt to explai...

  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 ...

It’s true to say that whether you enjoy a book or not, or even whether you finish it, can often be as much about the mood you were in at the time as it is about the literary, or otherwise, merits of the book in question. Rivers of London by Ben Aaronovitch has been sitting on my bookshelves since 2014 when we had a brief sojourn back to Blighty in an expensive experiment to prove that we’d rather be in Canada after all. Anyway, back to the book in question. It had been recommended by practically everyone I know back in the UK, and that was enough for me to seek it out, and at the time I think it was also a way of connecting back with the UK after years away because Rivers of London is by its nature a very British book. With that in mind and given that our attempt to fit back into British life was not altogether a success, in retrospect it’s perhaps no surprise that I didn’t get on with the book. I mean, I really didn’t get on with it. I started it, but while it was a perfectly ok...

It’s been about 10 days since I finished History of Wolves by Emily Fridlund and I’ve had to let it sit in my brain and fester a bit before I felt I had my thoughts in order. First up, a bit about the book. It’s a first novel and tells the story of Linda, a teenage girl growing up in very rural Minnesota who befriends a young mother and her four year old son who have moved in to a summer cabin on the other side of the lake while they wait for the arrival of the absent academic husband/father. The relationship between Linda, the mother and son is at the heart of the story. Additionally, we have a picture of rural and small-town Minnesota – a teacher who may or may not be guilty of child pornography. A fellow pupil who may or may not have had a relationship with the teacher. On top of that we have a time shift with adult Linda looking back at the events of her teenage years and we see how they affected her initial and continuing maturation into adulthood. That’s a lot of stuff ...

If I was trying to find a literary illustration for the term ‘curate’s egg’ for someone who’d never heard of the phrase, I could do a lot worse than point them at Mr Churchill’s Secretary by Susan Elia MacNeal. I’m torn between trying to decide if it is a good book with bad bits or a bad book with good bits. Before I get into the whys and wherefores of those feelings, a bit about the book. As the title suggests this is set during World War II. Our heroine is Maggie Hope, a Brit by birth and Bostonian by upbringing who is settled in London in 1940 after trying and failing to sell her grandmother’s rambling Victorian house in London. After one of Churchill’s secretaries is killed, Maggie is persuaded, against her better judgement, to take on the job and from her position in the corridors of Downing Street and the bunkers of the Cabinet War Rooms she is drawn into the intrigues of the different factions jockeying for power behind the scenes in Churchill’s first months in office....

The power of the Bargain Book table is that it entices you to buy books you wouldn’t otherwise have considered. I’m not particularly a fan of crime novels and thrillers. I’ve always felt I get enough of that watching the news in real life without making it recreational. So I’m always a bit surprised with myself when I see a book in these genres that entices me to buy. Apart from my antipathy towards crime novels, I nearly didn’t buy The Brutal Telling by Louise Penny because of its title. The word ‘brutal’ automatically made me think of the kind of excessive violence that really turns me off a book. However, there was something about the book, sitting on the bargain table at Munros that made me pick it up. I think it was the colours on the cover – rich deep browns and reds of autumn trees (or at least that’s what they look like to me) that made stop and consider it. Whoever wrote the blurb on the back cover also did their job well because in reading it, I was intrigued, so in the...

I’m not sure if you can actually start a comment with an aside, but I’m a rebel, so I’ll do it anyway… When I was in college in the dim and distant past of the mid 80’s, a girl in one of my classes commented that I reminded her of Elizabeth Bennett. I wasn’t sure if that was a compliment or not because at that time, I hadn’t read Pride and Prejudice. The comment prompted me to remedy the oversight, and by the time I’d finished I decided that I was pretty damn happy with the comparison. This came back into my mind when I was reading Longbourn by Jo Baker which is a ‘what if’ might have been happening ‘below stairs’ while the drama of Pride and Prejudice is playing out. What it does is make you see Austen’s characters through the other side of the telescope, and that’s an illuminating view for many of the characters we know so well. But firstly I’m here to talk about Longbourn. A good friend recommended it, and I’m glad she did because it is delightful. Our heroine is Sar...