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)

  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 english naval machine which ultimately built the empire. this book, part of a series of three, is devoted to his battle against his political enemies (he was imprisoned in the tower on suspicion of treason) until final rehabilitation. very tory.

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  ― Posted on Dec 22, 2009 | Add your feedback

• 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.

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  ― Posted on Dec 12, 2009 | Add your feedback

• 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.

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  ― Posted on Dec 14, 2009 | Add your feedback

• “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)

  “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 manage english but writes XXX in text; and his mission is introducing his fellow countrymen to “lovely britsh food” (!).

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  ― Posted on Dec 3, 2009 | Add your feedback

• 1 person find this helpful

  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.

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  ― Posted on Dec 6, 2009 | Add your feedback

• 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.

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  ― Posted on Dec 1, 2009 | Add your feedback

• 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)

  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 teaches creative writing at uni, so.

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  ― Posted on Nov 29, 2009 | Add your feedback

• 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)

  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 flow. i admit my aversion to all things american, though.

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  ― Posted on Nov 27, 2009 | Add your feedback

• 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)

  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 face a kidney transplant - donated by her son - and serious illness) but very effective in portraying the worst of the blairite era. hum, was there a best?

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  ― Posted on Nov 24, 2009 | Add your feedback

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

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  ― Posted on Nov 5, 2009 | Add your feedback

• 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)

  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 natural rhythms are quite different).

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  ― Posted on Nov 7, 2009 | Add your feedback

• 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.

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  ― Posted on Oct 12, 2009 | Add your feedback

• the devil exists, and he can type - or does he? the comforters in the title are the useless friends who assist job - to no avail - in the bible. the book marks the author's conversion from critic and poet to novelist, and her coincident conversion to catholicism. balanced between supernatural mister ... (continue)

  the devil exists, and he can type - or does he? the comforters in the title are the useless friends who assist job - to no avail - in the bible. the book marks the author's conversion from critic and poet to novelist, and her coincident conversion to catholicism. balanced between supernatural mistery and subtlety, very witty and amusing at times, this is a mischievous challenge to post war realism.

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  ― Posted on Oct 9, 2009 | Add your feedback

• can a ghost story be boring? oh yes, this one was.

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  ― Posted on Sep 20, 2009 | Add your feedback

• dark fairy tales set in a distopic, possibly pagan multiverse. the first story is quite chilling, unforgettable, the others you can live without.

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  ― Posted on Sep 16, 2009 | Add your feedback

• 1 person find this helpful

  not funny, not funny at all. weird and amazing in its apparent clarity, but deep, and with a very convincing cochlear shape. quite an experience. unfortunately, the book is known to the world because of a tv series called "lost": it sold in 3 weeks, after being quoted by some character, as many copi ... (continue)

  not funny, not funny at all. weird and amazing in its apparent clarity, but deep, and with a very convincing cochlear shape. quite an experience. unfortunately, the book is known to the world because of a tv series called "lost": it sold in 3 weeks, after being quoted by some character, as many copies as in the former 30 years.

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  ― Posted on Sep 11, 2009 | Add your feedback

• shelby belittling picard, borg dobermans (!), kirk defeating the dominion with his bare hands - oh, and he came back from the dead, too. fun and intriguing, though the tng crew looks a bunch of idiots.

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  ― Posted on Sep 12, 2009 | Add your feedback

• this book is widely praised as a very fine portrait of feelings in a woman facing sudden bereavement. it is, well, exactly that. but i am not sure it is suitable for the contemporary, hasty, superficial reader.

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  ― Posted on Sep 12, 2009 | Add your feedback

• it should not be taken literally, as a catalogue of mental cases (though such is the case, at first astonished glance). more than that, a monument to the english motto "i am my own master".

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  ― Posted on Sep 4, 2009 | Add your feedback

• I love her being razor-sharp and reticent, apocalyptic and blase'.

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  ― Posted on Sep 3, 2009 | Add your feedback

• a family as toxic as they come, a pastiche of trite situations and developments.

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  ― Posted on Aug 30, 2009 | Add your feedback

• have mercy on me, o great goddess, for i have sinned. i wowed not to read gory thrillers anymore, especially those with mental stalkers in it, but i failed you. neglecting in the process the real good stuff i fastidiously chose and left dormant on my shelf.

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  ― Posted on Aug 27, 2009 | Add your feedback

• star trek for dummies.

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  ― Posted on Aug 21, 2009 | 1 feedback

• 1 person find this helpful

  a creeping, disturbing unease grips you when you read her stories. do it, by all means.

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  ― Posted on Aug 8, 2009 | Add your feedback

• cunningly convoluted and - yes, i have to admit, very entertaining. perfect for a day at the seaside.

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  ― Posted on Aug 5, 2009 | Add your feedback

• 2 people find this helpful

  obvious, trite, foreseeable. i could tell who the phantom was from the start, but had to endure until page 510 for the plot to untangle. will i ever learn? it's from richard and judy book club, home of the worst books of my life.

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  ― Posted on Jul 31, 2009 | 2 feedbacks

• nothing ballard hasn't already told us, and much more chillingly. these babes in the wood stranded on a greenland island unaware of the flu outburst that is consuming the world are not credible.

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  ― Posted on Jul 19, 2009 | Add your feedback

• 1 person find this helpful

  growing old - and getting deaf - is no laughing matter. enthralling precision of detail, though i could hardly spot the "many laugh-out-loud moments" the back cover promises.

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  ― Posted on Jul 9, 2009 | Add your feedback

• 1 person find this helpful

  oh, the inexhausted inventiveness of publishing executives. the book jacket, spotless new, is printed to look torn and creased, as if it was old. what for, pray?
  anyhow, nothing you couldn't find in "the turn of the screw".

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  ― Posted on Jun 20, 2009 | Add your feedback

• 1 person find this helpful

  you can have too much of a good thing, actually. it was like watching 12 poirot episodes in a row on dvd.

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  ― Posted on Jun 16, 2009 | Add your feedback

• 1 person find this helpful

  amateur sleuth searches oxford looking for a missing body - and the toyshop where he found it, who disappeared overnight. mischievous, with people always on the move and an unforeseen twist about the title at the end.

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  ― Posted on May 31, 2009 | Add your feedback

• 1 person find this helpful

  as intriguing as watching "in the night garden" on CBeebies. i resorted to reading it out of despair, not having anything viable and being trapped with an ill toddler in a hotel - where someone had left this book. definitely something you can do without.

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  ― Posted on May 25, 2009 | Add your feedback

• schmaltz and civil protest at their best, from the man who wrote the real story of the protocols of the elders of zion and oliver twist seen from fagin's side.

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  ― Posted on May 25, 2009 | Add your feedback

• the book first came out in 1992, the year of the chicago flood, when fish leapt in the basements of houses, and has just been published in uk. strongly anticipatory, plagued by one of the most fastidious characters ever, who begins saying "i told you so" at page one going on until the gloomy end. se ... (continue)

  the book first came out in 1992, the year of the chicago flood, when fish leapt in the basements of houses, and has just been published in uk. strongly anticipatory, plagued by one of the most fastidious characters ever, who begins saying "i told you so" at page one going on until the gloomy end. seventeen years ago, though, it was not obvious to foresee such a distopic future.

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  ― Posted on May 25, 2009 | Add your feedback

• more than a story, this is a series of reliefs like those you find in medieval churches, or maybe a number of sketches in succession, as in a morality play - with more than a hint of morals seeping through. uk as it is today - but with a bergmanian flavour (remember "the seventh seal"?). very clever ... (continue)

  more than a story, this is a series of reliefs like those you find in medieval churches, or maybe a number of sketches in succession, as in a morality play - with more than a hint of morals seeping through. uk as it is today - but with a bergmanian flavour (remember "the seventh seal"?). very clever.

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  ― Posted on Feb 21, 2009 | Add your feedback

• very good, totally engrossing, though not her best. and the usual moralistic attitude is maybe too much, this time.

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  ― Posted on May 6, 2009 | Add your feedback

• quite a disappointing book. the author is a well known poet, and it shows: her elliptical style is more suitable for a poem, plot and characters are totally unplausible.

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  ― Posted on May 2, 2009 | Add your feedback

• i loved the first book, so into the wildean canon. this is more entertaining, but there's less oscar as we know him in it.

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  ― Posted on Mar 30, 2009 | 1 feedback

• 1 person find this helpful

  it must be read listening to mozart's requiem in d minor: death here is a welcome visitor, not the grim reaper. but after the killing things start to get a bit tedious and foreseeble, maybe you CAN have too much of a good thing. consider it is the book of someone who's 89 by now, and stoically read ... (continue)

  it must be read listening to mozart's requiem in d minor: death here is a welcome visitor, not the grim reaper. but after the killing things start to get a bit tedious and foreseeble, maybe you CAN have too much of a good thing. consider it is the book of someone who's 89 by now, and stoically ready to say farewell.

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  ― Posted on Apr 4, 2009 | Add your feedback

• alpha mommy meets psycho. i read it in two days: harlan coben it ain't, but maybe that's a good thing. a bit more humane, a bit more feminine, a bit milder than most murder misteries.

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  ― Posted on Mar 30, 2009 | 1 feedback

• 2 people find this helpful

  a most satisfactory read. the real story of the murder of a three year old boy that marked the birth of detective fiction. very good research, very well written.

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  ― Posted on Mar 17, 2009 | 1 feedback

• very easy reading. "behind the scenes..." was much more complex. this one has a definite anti-male hue, too.

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  ― Posted on Feb 21, 2009 | Add your feedback

• why bother to exhume sherlock holmes? very disappoining, there is no real holmes nor mistery in it, just a masturbatory exercise from a pulitzer winning author - and american, too.

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  ― Posted on Mar 12, 2009 | Add your feedback

• 1 person find this helpful

  a book by his son, who steers through the maelstrom of wilde's public and private life. a fascinating reconstruction of the naughty nineties, too. 146 illustrations, the best you could look for.

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  ― Posted on Mar 13, 2009 | Add your feedback

• i read it a few years ago, but came back to it after reading the splendid biography by ellman. this sounds a bit like a psychoanalitic session, but is soundly wildean nonetheless. and not reticent on sex, as ellman was.

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  ― Posted on Mar 3, 2009 | Add your feedback

Elsastella has this up for trade. Trade with Elsastella for this.

• 2 people find this helpful

  i love stephen - his cinema, his comedies, his q.i., his poetry, his software reviews... this book was moving and shocking, at times, very very good.

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  ― Posted on Mar 30, 2009 | Add your feedback

• someone has finished one's own planet (does a bell ring here?) and luckily found a brand new one to tarnish. i am so fond of dystopic universes... in the end, though, mostly a love story (or a history of love?). not what i expected, but clever.

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  ― Posted on Mar 7, 2009 | Add your feedback

• the best insight on the blairite years. i read it in 3 hours on a plane. lovely adrian, so naif.

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  ― Posted on Feb 23, 2009 | Add your feedback

• definitely better than the one with the sentient labrador, "the last family in england", but too narrow and a bit dumb. i've had enough of stories of illiterate people and chavs, of too much trash tv and karaoke and quiz nights at pubs... there must be more in literature, if not an exemple to follow ... (continue)

  definitely better than the one with the sentient labrador, "the last family in england", but too narrow and a bit dumb. i've had enough of stories of illiterate people and chavs, of too much trash tv and karaoke and quiz nights at pubs... there must be more in literature, if not an exemple to follow, at least something better than what you can get from a trip on the tube...

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  ― Posted on Feb 23, 2009 | Add your feedback