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Revision as of 13:56, 27 September 2015
The Bookbag
Hello from The Bookbag, a book review site, featuring books from all the many walks of literary life - fiction, biography, crime, cookery and anything else that takes our fancy. At Bookbag Towers the bookbag sits at the side of the desk. It's the bag we take to the library and the bookshop. Sometimes it holds the latest releases, but at other times there'll be old favourites, books for the children, books for the home. They're sometimes our own books or books from the local library. They're often books sent to us by publishers and we promise to tell you exactly what we think about them. You might not want to read through a full review, so we'll give you a quick review which summarises what we felt about the book and tells you whether or not we think you should buy or borrow it. There are also lots of author interviews, and all sorts of top tens - all of which you can find on our features page. If you're stuck for something to read, check out the recommendations page.
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The Spirit of London by Rob Keeley
Ellie, Charlie and Mum have left Inchwood Manor and are headed home to London, where Mum's latest Journeyback project is renovating an old 18th century house, 47 Foster Square. But it's not quite home to London. They're not returning to their old house but to another tiny, cramped flat. When asked why, all Mum will say is, "Ask your father." Full review...
A Death in the Dales by Frances Brody
Kate Shackleton's niece, Harriet, was recovering from diphtheria and Kate decided to take her away to the country for a fortnight to help her recuperate. Her's friend - and would-be suitor - Dr Lucian Simonson had inherited a house in Langcliffe from his aunt Freda and Kate was pleased to accept the offer of the property for a couple of weeks. There was a hidden message that she might also see if she'd like to make her residence there more permanent, but Kate was in no hurry to make her mind up about remarriage. Her private investigations suited her well and it wasn't long before she was approached to look into a crime which had troubled Lucian's Aunt Freda. The old lady had witnessed a murder, but her evidence was dismissed and she went to her grave believing that the wrong man had gone to the gallows. Full review...
1916: A Global History by Keith Jeffery
1916 was a pivotal year in modern history. It witnessed the Easter Rising in Dublin, the battles of Verdun and the Somme, and the election of Woodrow Wilson as American President. These, and several other events described in this book in detail, were later seen as crucial staging points in the course of the First World War. Full review...
Wheels of Terror: The Graphic Novel by Sven Hassel and Jordy Diago
War books and anti-war books, in my mind, have a lot in common and only a couple of easy things need be changed to turn one to the other. This is dressed as an anti-war book, but here is the lead character surviving against all odds – the platoon whittled down several times while he and his few friends go strong; here he is overcoming all kinds of difficulty and adversity and still coming out the other end; here he is doing proper heroic deeds – or his colleagues saving the day at the last minute – and the war carries onwards towards its inevitable end. The difference perhaps is in the minutiae of what those difficulties and deeds need be, with the anti-war book having a simple honesty about them and their overall worth that the gung-ho, militaristic piece would patently lack. And when you face the guts and gore of the kind of warfare on these pages, you don't really expect jingoism and 'hoo-rah!' attitudes. No, even if the DNA is pretty much the same, the result here is definitely, grimly and firmly anti-war. Full review...
The World of Norm: 9: May Still Be Charged by Jonathan Meres
If you ever wondered what Harry Enfield's Kevin going UUH, that's SO unFAIR!! but stretched to the length of a book sounds like then wonder no longer. Norm is only twelve but he already knows life is completely unfair. He has a horrid girl next door who annoyingly wants to spend time talking with him, he has two awful younger brothers, he has school, and he has a world of parents and adults around him all wittering on in the most weird, antique phrasing. They don't help him understand the world at all, just lay all the world's problems on his shoulders and move on. This morning in concern, for instance, Norm has hardly moved at all – he's still in bed when he's been grounded. His parents have looked up his phone bill online, and it's rather long. As long as Norm's entire list of woes, perhaps – and therefore is just one more thing that's a burden. And as life is so unfair, the only way out is to wait for his parents to decide between him paying them back or grounding him for a month – until something even worse, more unwelcome and more unfair gets mentioned… Full review...
The Rabbit Who Wants To Fall Asleep by Carl-Johan Forssen Ehrlin
Roger the Rabbit wanted to fall asleep, but somehow he couldn't, no matter how hard he tried. It wasn't that he didn't do much during the day, because he did but sometimes he was so tired that he could fall asleep on the swings. One night Mummy Rabbit took Roger to see Uncle Yawn, who had a notice outside his house saying I can make anyone fall asleep and once Roger went home (it was actually quite difficult for him to get there as his eyes kept closing) he went straight to bed and fell asleep. Full review...
Draw It! Colour It! Creatures by Axel Scheffler, Emily Gravett et al
Colouring books for adults are all the rage at the moment and it's too easy to forget that adults are not the only ones who benefit from the calming, soothing therapy of colouring or the improvement in hand-eye co-ordination which comes with practice. Children's picture books have tended to be flimsier and not put together with quite such panache or by such well-known names, but we now have a children's colouring book to bridge the gap. Draw It! Colour It! Creatures has projects from 43 artists, well known in the field of children's book illustration, all packed together in a stylish book with flaps so that you're not going to lose your place. Full review...
Please Don't Leave Me Here by Tania Chandler
If you like unreliable narrators then this is the book for you. In Brigitte, the protagonist of Please Don't Leave Me Here, Tania Chandler has created an unforgettable troubled character whose fractured mental state leads to erratic thought processes, vivid and none too pleasant dreams and an inability, or unwillingness, to recover her memory of her former life. None of which is helped by her drink problem and, as the story progresses, an addiction to prescription medication. Full review...
Diary of a Time Traveller by David Long and Nicholas Stevenson
With the usual complaint that 'History is Boring!', Augustus slumps over his school desk – until his teacher, a certain Professor Tempo, comes to his aid. She gives him a notebook and yellow pencil and says he should imagine himself in a place in the past to see how interesting it actually could be. And lo and behold he's there, seeing the world of the past's effect on the world of the present for his very own eyes. He ends up doing this more than a couple dozen times, filling the notebook with amazing sights he's seen and people he's stood alongside, from Mozart to Einstein, from Chaucer to Lincoln, and what we read is what he comes up with in this brisk and colourful volume. Full review...
Rising Strong by Brene Brown
This is Brené Brown's fourth book. Like Elizabeth Gilbert, she is well known for her TED talk. As a professor at the University of Houston, she has spent the last 13 years working with people's stories. Such a qualitative approach, based on anecdote and experience, is relatively rare in the social sciences but certainly makes her work more accessible to laymen. Her books fall into the 'self-help' arena, but without any of the negative connotations of that term. Here she makes her research relevant to everyday life by weaving in pop culture references and telling stories from her family and professional life. Full review...
I Used To Know That: General Science by Marianne Taylor
This book got off to the right start in my mind because it comes in 3 key sections, each for one of 'my' sciences without a nod to any of the other '-ologies' (or pseudo sciences as they were often called at school). Marketed as stuff you forgot from school, this is a book from the same series that has already spawned I Used to Know That: History by Emma Marriott , I Used to Know That: Maths by Chris Waring and I Should Know That - Great Britain by Emma Marriott among others. Full review...
Silence is Goldfish by Annabel Pitcher
In which Tessie-T discovers she's a Pluto and her parents wanted a Mercury or Venus, at least.
When Tess is in her father's study, she discovers a blog post he has written which gives away a devastating family secret. Suddenly, for Tess, everything has changed. She decides to run away but chickens out at the last minute. As her life falls apart, Tess retreats into selective mutism and her only conversations are with an imaginary friend: a talking goldfish torch. Full review...
Very British Problems Abroad by Rob Temple
Meet, if you haven't already, the phenomenon of the Very British Problem. In this format they're in pithy little comments (of, ooh, about 140 characters in length, for some reason…) and detail the minor things in life that we like nothing more than to inflate to a major factor of life. They can involve manners, staring at things until they mend themselves, hitting things ditto, or the fact that nobody apart from you and I know how to queue properly. And if the idea hits the world outside our shores, then – well, you certainly have a book full of content regarding our attitude and ineptitude abroad. Full review...
Memoirs of a Neurotic Zombie by Jeff Norton
Adam is twelve. He has a crush on Corina who's in his class at school, he likes collecting things, and he has early onset Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, which means he would rather wear purple spandex and dance the Macarena right down Main Street than go within five miles of a germ. He frets about a lot of things, actually: if worrying was an Olympic event, he'd get the gold, every time. Other than that, things are pretty okay. He has normal, loving parents (apart from the fact they still insist on going to SMOOCH concerts), a small group of friends who share his interest in comics and video games, and a standard-issue irritating sister. Nothing weird there, then. Nothing but the fact that he's been dead for three months. Full review...
Meet at the Ark at Eight! by Ulrich Hub, Jorg Muhle and Helena Ragg-Kirkby (translator)
An educated penguin, an agnostic penguin and a violent, smaller, young penguin walk into a snowdrift… You might not be able to make a full joke out of that opening line, but this book practically does continue on from there. Three penguins – each a little different from the other, even if they generally look and definitely smell the same, and God, a subject of their conversation when a butterfly comes along, of all things. The young, hot-headed one (well, in the pictures he wears a woolly hat, he's bound to be hot-headed) leaves in umbrage, leaving just two – which is perfectly timed if you're a dove, and come along telling all the animals to get into Noah's Ark in pairs, as an almighty flood is about to happen… Full review...
Deep Thought: 42 Fantastic Quotes that Define Philosophy by Gary Cox
Who really knows what Cogito ergo sum means? Yes, you may know that Descartes said it, and that it translates as 'I think, therefore I am', but what was it the French philosopher was trying to say about human existence when he said this most quotable and definitive phrase? And, for that matter, where did he say it? Was it in the seventeenth century or the eighteenth? If these are the sort of question that keep you awake at night, then Gary Cox's Deep Thought: 42 Fantastic Quotes that Define Philosophy will be a welcome addition to your library. Full review...
Monster by C J Skuse
More than anything else, sixteen year-old Nash wants to be Head Girl of Bathory School. Indeed she's willing to put up with almost anything to get the top job. But, just when she's poised to be awarded the role, everything starts to unravel. Nash and a group of school misfits have to stay at school over the Christmas holidays and, trapped by the worst weather in decades, suddenly find themselves fighting for their lives. Not everyone is going to survive. Full review...
Why We Do the Things We Do: Psychology in a Nutshell by Joel Levy
Chalk and cheese; your left hand and your right; philosophy and psychology. All pairs have something closely resembling yet very different from the other, whether through colour and crumbliness, or physical form, or from being studies of the mind. The only thing is, one pair is alone. Your two hands formed at the same time, whereas chalk is the older, and philosophy predates psychology. The two were the same thing until recently, and we can perhaps point at a William James as the father of the split. I make this point because when I reviewed this volume's sister book I found no timeline or history evident. Here, however, we do get one – travelling quickly from the ideas of idiocy-cum-possession in our early history, through phrenology and mesmerism to the birth of psychology. The fact that we then immediately look at free will in much the same terms as the philosophers does shows how common the disciplines still are – and how vital to our understanding of ourselves both topics remain. Full review...
Why We Think the Things we Think: Philosophy in a Nutshell by Alain Stephen
Way back when, when I started back on adult education having finished my university life (I know, it's hard to believe sometimes, but bear with me) I was asked if I was going to do a philosophy A-level. No, I said – there was no point in studying something nobody can agree about. The introduction to this book raises much the same point – the solution to philosophical questions and study is only ever going to be more questions. It says that Kant thought the study of thought, or, more precisely, how ideas are formed was the highest science, although that sounds like the psychology that I did indeed study. Still, study it many people do do – and probably a far greater number would wish to read around it and find out what it might be like to sound as if you have studied it – hence books like this. Full review...
Username: Evie by Joe Sugg
Meet Evie. She's surprisingly unwelcome and alienated at school – for a trendy and attractive girl, nobody at all seems to have any time for her, apart from the geeky card-collecting boy with the milk-bottle glasses on the bus. Perhaps it has something to do with her father's thatched house – after all, she must be a witch to live there. It's not that she would wish to live there, with nobody else around, and the memory of her deceased mother. But luckily someone is choosing a place for her –her father is able to put all his work into a cyber-world for her, the E-Scape, which is close to the perfect world. All that remains is to programme the humans to be her friends, and make the connection Evie has with them and them with her in return to be of mutual, confirming, happy benefit. But someone else has entered the E-Scape, and their influence seems all that much more powerful than Evie's tentative happiness… Full review...
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, Mark Burstein (editor) and Salvador Dali
If you don't know the story now, then where have you been for a hundred and fifty years? A young girl sees a hurrying white rabbit, follows it, falls down a hole, fails to recognise the 'stranger danger' in partaking of random foods and drinks just because of a label on them, nearly drowns a whole menagerie of animals in a lake of her own tears, takes advice from someone on drugs, plays cards, or croquet, or both or neither, and wakes up to find it all a dream. Someone else tried out such gibberish on a young girl, wrote it down in a flurry, made a hugely successful name for himself, and woke up to find even at this remove that most people (unlike me) adore the thing. But it's not just for now, its 150th birthday, that the work gets reprinted. In the 1960s, someone came up with the idea to put the esoteric, surreal and daft mind of Salvador Dali in cahoots with the esoteric, surreal and daft world of Carroll's Alice, and the result was a very rare and valuable edition – a box set of illustrated booklets, perfectly suited to the very surrealistic 105th birthday. Since getting sight of one is like seeing a flat clock in Dali's pictures, this decent hardback replication is the nearest you'll get to owning one of the most special of Alice editions. Full review...
Mad in the Back by Michael Rosen and Richard Watson
Mum is setting off on a long car journey with two kids in the back - did I hear you groan? Mum groaned too because she knew what was going to happen. She told the kids before she set off that they had to behave because she couldn't drive properly if the kids were going mad in the back. The kids told her not to worry - and off they went. Then the kids started The Moaning. Every parent will know exactly what this means: requests for drink, food, windows open... Then the squabbling starts: accusations that HE has got my book, ears are bitten by HER. Mum tries diversionary tactics: look out of the window - there's a lamp-post. (Yes MUm - we know desperation when we hear it.) And it gets worse. And worse. Then Mum snaps. Full review...
I'll Meet You In Heaven by Jill Thrussell
Rebecca and Gideon were made for each other. They've been married for 10 years and, apart from their unfulfilled desire for children, all is perfect, love remaining at the centre of their relationship. Well, all was perfect until their 10th anniversary dinner and that fatal a fatal car crash. The next thing they know, they arrive in a garden to be told that they'll be sent back to Earth for 3 months to live separately as a test. Why? More importantly, would they be able to find each other again afterwards? Full review...
