One More Chapter

I'm not entirely convinced I should admit to this, but I conciously and willfully spent a big chunk of Saturday scrunched up in bed finishing this book. I got properly stuck into it Wednesday morning, and it took quite an effort to get myself to the office on time. After that there was little hope for my weekend really.

I find that there's always somthing a little sad about finishing a trilogy, especially as these days I'll rarely read all three back to back. Now that my blog has been about I bit I know that I read the first installment way back in April 2006 (see - method to my madness!), so the incomplete story had spent over two years hanging around the back of my mind. Finally getting to the end is a bit like losing touch with an old friend; something warmly remembered, but passed beyond my reach. Yes - I really am that much of a soppy old thing.

Anyway - as my ramblings may have indicated, I've loved the Bartimaeus Trilogy. It's got a perfectly executed plot and, as with all the best childrens literature, the adult in me reads the unwritten bits that build on the story. It's that ability to engage the both the critical adult and the willing to believe child that puts this trilogy firmly into the outstanding category.

Read it, and I promise you won't regret it.

Another one of my charity shop 'I've got ten minutes till my bus comes' purchases. It's not bad, and if The Da Vinci Code did it for you then you'll probably enjoy this too. There's not great deal else to say about it really....

Read It

I was chatting to a friend in the pub not long ago, and I described this book as being equal parts historical politics, bodice-ripping and bloody warfare. On the face of it I think that's a fair description, but 525 pages of novel would get pretty boring if there weren't a bit more to it than that.

Men of Men explores in painful detail the relationships of late 19th century British empire building. Fiction it might be, but this book took me through lofty ideals and outright greed, and after reading it I can see how things might have been very different in Africa if it were not for the blessing and the curse of mineral wealth.

This is the rare work of a writer who has both a passion for his homeland and it's people, and an informed, balanced view of it's history. Here the two are merged seamlessly, making for a rollicking advendture novel with a depth that i find more gripping that most stories of it's type (if you've read Clive Cussler you'll know what I'm talking about).

Read it