Elsastella Female, 58, Married. Italy

samuel pepys, who gave us the dramatic first-hand account of the great fire of london, kept a diary between 1660 and 1669. forgotten for 120 years, before the diaries were rediscovered, he was known to a few specialists as the father of the admiralty administration: for arthur bryant, he created the ... (continue)

not their best book, maybe they went off their usual path with the story of a motley crew of youngish people (mis)behaving as if they were still at uni. unputdownable nonetheless.

psychopat teen unwilling father, powerful and cruel too willing grandfther, want back the child a lovely couple adopted 9 months ago. one-dimensional characters oh so very american, written for cinema audiences.

“the grapes of wrath” it isn’t. an east european immigrant lands in london, meets solidarity, friendship and even love (well, sex at least), makes good money working hard and goes back home to a future of relative affluence. enjoyable but banal, a feel-good book very distant from reality. lev can’t ... (continue)

douglas adams on a very bad acid trip. but he wrote the script for "the city on the edge of forever" - though roddenberry marred it - so i bow to his legendary abrasive character.

when i first read this book, around, say fifteen, i thought it was a masterpiece, now it looks incoherent, and even a bit silly. that's old age for you.

mostly "matrix" veering into "alice in wonderland", with a hint of "thornbirds", darrida, the birth of homoeopathy, rough sex, the history of time, what else?, neil gaiman, with the benign rats and the london underworld, oh, and genesis 2:16. too much on one's plate to handle, honestly: but she teac ... (continue)

pruned of the oh so very central gay issue, hark hark!, the story is the usual one of a disfunctional family. the young enthusiast lesbian is quite irritating, when she is eager to morph into a boy and blasts her father for being a closet gay - and a manque' interior decorator, as if it was a fatal ... (continue)

poor aidy: "for some reason i always feel comforted when i am in woolworths. when i was a child, i spent my first pocket money there. it is good to know that whatever travails we may suffer in life, woolworths will always be there"... not so caustic as the other adrian mole books (townsend had to fa ... (continue)

part "da vinci code", part "futurama" (the heads in the bell jars), mostly "the fugitive".

you can wrap yourself up in this just for the sheer beauty of verse and the evocative poetic images. but reading english poetry aloud is the most effective way to experience the internal rhythms of the language, so different from romance languages (which may sound a little flat in english, since the ... (continue)

it's hard to be a woman - and more so when you are very plain AND a poet. a biography devoted mostly to her poetical work (which dr. leavis blasted), with heartbreaking glimpses on her personal life.