Archive for the ‘Books’ Category

Wyrd Sisters is the sixth novel in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series. For me, it was the first novel where the witches really came into their own – Equal Rites was good, but the development in Wyrd Sisters really brings them along.

As good as Granny Weatherwax is, I have to say that my favourite character is Nanny Ogg. I wasn’t overly in love with the Macbeth theme, but who needs to be when you have such awesome characters.

Waiting to Be Heard: A Memoir is a book by Amanda Knox, the girl who was convicted of murdering University of Leeds student Meredith Kercher in Perugia, Italy. Four years later the conviction was overturned on appeal, though is since going back to trial.

I’m not sure how useful it is as case notes – it’s clear from the book that Knox is innocent, but then as she wrote the book, you would expect it to be. If everything she says in the book is true, then the entire trial is a joke, but it certainly can’t have been written without bias.

BBC News published an interesting article about how what she writes in the book differs from what she said at the time. Things have almost certainly changed in the edit. But that said, even when you strip away the bias, it seems very generous to describe the evidence they do have as beyond reasonable doubt.

In any case, the book itself makes for an interesting read. Presumably there is little left to hide after the trial went through every detail of her personal life, so it is laid out without reservation. It’s structured well, in a small chunks that made it easy to read and I struggled to put it down every time.

I was quite excited to get onto Sourcery, the fifth book in the Discworld series, as I’m a big fan of the wizards. Plus, who doesn’t love Rincewind? I’m seriously considering it as a middle name for Chris Junior. While I was an enjoyable read, I didn’t find it quite as good as Equal Rites or Mort – but then anything with that amount of Death in it is always going to be hard to beat.

In the forth book of the Discworld series, a young man named Mort becomes Death’s apprentice. This had a lot of resonance with me as I considered a similar career path back when I was younger, before deciding to go on and become the lion tamer you all now know and love.

I found the book far more witty and engaging than the previous books in the series. Not that I didn’t enjoy them, because I did, but I thought this level was on a level above them – it was simply better. Though of course, it’s easier to write a great novel when you have an inherently funny topic, such as Death.

In the third book of the Discworld series, a dying wizard passes his staff onto a baby without first checking the gender. As it turns out, Eskarina is a girl. But there are no female wizards. What a to do.

I was a little disappointed in the content of the book I think, I was hoping for a in depth examination of gender roles and the struggle of a female wizard in an otherwise all male university. But most of the novel was about the journey to Unseen University rather than what happens when she gets there.

Never the less, it was an enjoyable read and featured plenty of Granny Weatherwax, which is always going to be a good thing.

I’ve just finished reading the second Discworld book, The Light Fantastic. I can’t work out whether I enjoyed it more or less than the first one.

I found it a bit slow to get doing – Rincewind and Twoflower’s adventures weren’t that interesting to me, but as the book went on, I found the tales of the wizards, and particularly the goings on of Ankh-Morpork drew me in to a to an incredibly imaginative world. I’m hoping this bodes well for the third book, which focuses on the wizards and the witches.

I also liked the increasing use of language tricks employed by Pratchett that made it an even cleverer text than the first.

I had only read one Terry Pratchett book since becoming an adult, which is now quite a long time ago, and I’ve never read any Discworld – so clearly that was something that needed fixing. While some people suggested the first in the series was far from the best, after careful consideration, I decided my OCD was too great not to start at the beginning, so The Colour of Magic it was.

The book starts by unloading a large amount of information at once, and I struggled to put everything together immediately, but as it went on, everything slotted into place and I found myself amerced in a wonderful world, packed with fantasy, magic and ever flowing adverbs.

In fact, I enjoyed it so much, I’ve already made a start on the second book in the series, The Light Fantastic.

Having recently read the first two books in the His Dark Materials trilogy, Northern Lights and The Subtle Knife, I moved onto the final part (as is traditional with trilogies – unless you’re Douglas Adams!), The Amber Spyglass.

While I found the previous book a bit hard going in terms of maintaining my interest levels, I had no such problem with this one. Pullman’s description of their voyage to the Land of the Dead kept me riveted, at least as much as I can be to a book. I also found the end heartbreaking and am very glad that Elina is from the same parallel universe that I am (as far as I can tell anyway).

I would say it’s well worth a read, though you do need to read the whole trilogy for it to make any sense. But if you’re a Harry Potter fan, this is worth a read as well.

I’ve been continuing through Philip Pullman’s triology, His Dark Materials, and recently finished the second book, The Subtle Knife.

I found it slow to get started – I was just bored at first, as the story saw the protagonists running round ordinary Oxford with no fantasy to add some spice to the story. But eventually the stumbled back into the other worlds and the story picked up, it eventually became entertaining and ultimately worth baring through the early chapters.

It’s also clear that this isn’t really a trilogy of books, it’s one book split into three parts – reading one and not the others wouldn’t make much sense, or provide any conclusion to the stories.

I’ve been reading Philip Pullman’s trilogy, His Dark Materials, starting with book one for obvious reasons – Northern Lights.

I enjoyed it, but it felt very much like a children’s book. Obviously that is because it is, but if you take the example of a series like Harry Potter, that has caught the imagination of many adults too, and I don’t feel Northern Lights has the same power.