Bedside Books

 Yes I have finished another one, and it's this. 

the sequel to Winterbirth which I wrote about here

What can I say? I've finished it, it moves the story along, I now feel obliged to get hold of Book 3 and find out what happens in the end. It's not as good as it should be, given the originality of the setting. There's something not quite right about the way Ruckley writes and I can't quite put my finger on it, but what should be a truly compelling story isn't. 

Anyway that leaves me with two books by the bedside. Upside, they're both short. Another upside, one will be a double dip with the the Books to read Poster. Downside, I suspect both will be heavy going. 

I have of course read/listened to quite  a lot of other things recently, although nothing really remarkable. The last two Saturday Slaughters efforts have been a near miss and a total fire in the air and the arrow goes nowhere near the target miss. The first was by Robert Goddard and was called The Fine Art of Invisible Detection. I had a friend who was a big fan of Robert Goddard and so I read one once. Literally decades ago. That will tell you how keen I was to read this. In the event it was a fairly quick but not very satisfying read. It was a thriller -well I didn't find it particularly thrilling  IYSWIM - but that was the genre. The problem with Goddard for me, and for the other hardy souls who braved a truly awful day weather wise to struggle to the library to discuss the book, was that it was plot driven not character driven. The plot was OK, bits of it were even original, but the characters were cardboard and the motivation for the one who set all the events in motion was totally lacking. It went from Japan to London to Devon to Iceland, and as far as the Iceland sector went we all felt it was a bit 'I'd like to go to Iceland, I wonder if there'a a way I can get the coast as a tax write off? Oh I know, I'll call it a research trip ...' 

The current one, which was in my house for rather less than three days, was truly awful. I can't even tell you what it was called because it had one title on the spine 'All the Girls here are Nice Girls' and a different one 'Are you a Nice Girl?' on the front cover.. It was one of those North American college set books. No-one in it was a nice girl, and the boys weren't nice either. I read the first 100 pages, and then the last 15. and then I took it back to the library. It was all about people being nasty to other people just  for the fun of seeing what would happen, and then getting their comeuppance decades later. I can;t help wondering, if American College life is as awful as it is portrayed in so many books, why people go?  And how so many survive the experience?