Book Reviews From The Bookbag
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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Asterix and the Picts by Jean-Yves Ferri, Rene Goscinny, Albert Uderzo and Didier Conrad
I've never been entirely certain if Asterix was written for children or adults. I am quite certain children were the original target audience, but it is equally apparent that many of the jokes are thrown in for adults as well. It does seem as if more adults are buying Asterix than children now, and comics in general have been taken over by the adult consumer, but Asterix still has plenty to offer the younger reader as well. If it is perhaps a bit more sophisticated than the average children's book today, all the better. I'm all for children's books that are light and easy to read, but I think we are doing our children a disservice by filtering out any book with a more complex vocabulary or a fair number of unfamiliar words. My children did find a few words like solidarity, fraternise and diaphanous challenging, but if we don't challenge them at all - how will they learn? Full review...
Winter by Adam Gopnik
In this collection of five essays, each one offering a unique and fascinating perspective on the season of winter, Adam Gopnik takes the reader on a captivating journey, exploring history, art and society, through Romantic Winter, Radical Winter, Recuperative Winter, Recreational Winter and Remembering Winter. In each essay, Gopnik focuses on one or two central themes, whilst also touching on surrounding ideas. For example, in Romantic Winter his central topics are art and poetry, however, issues such as changing society, technology, sex and culture are also explored, in relation to these pivotal notions. He also includes two sections featuring collections of artwork to illustrate his viewpoints, which add a charming, individual touch to this book. Full review...
Who Invented The Stepover? (And Other Crucial Football Conundrums) by Paul Simpson and Uli Hesse
In 1982, second division Charlton Athletic staged an unlikely transfer coup by signing former European Footballer of the Year Allan Simonsen. If the thought of the Danish superstar forsaking the glamour of Barcelona for south east London seemed unlikely then consider that Simonsen had previously faked his own death during a World Cup qualifier. Full review...
Cloudland by Joseph Olshan
Catherine Winslow, a retired investigative journalist, writes household columns for various newspapers while she sits holed up in her house in Vermont. One day, when the winter snow started melting, she discovered a body near her property. The discovery unearthed a series of killings which Catherine and her neighbour a forensic psychiatrist set out to solve. Full review...
Lionheart by Stewart Binns
Richard the First. Richard the Lionheart.
Even those of us who didn't pay attention much in history lessons, those of us who are pretty dodgy on which King came when, will be familiar with some of them and be able to put them more or less in their time context. We know William the Conqueror, we know Henry the Eighth…
… and, up to a point, we know about the Lionheart. Full review...
The Snow Queen by Hans Christian Andersen and P J Lynch (Illustrator)
Determined heroine Gerda has a series of adventures on her journey to find her friend Kay after he has been spirited away by the Snow Queen to live in her palace of ice. 'The Snow Queen' is one of Hans Christian Andersen’s less disturbing fables with a message about the power of love and true friendship. No heart wrenching deaths like 'The Little Match Girl', no tortured longing like 'The Little Mermaid', it has the benefit of a happy ending. And, in contrast to so many traditional tales where the hero is usually male, its star is a lively girl who rescues her friend against all the odds. Full review...
Stinkbomb and Ketchup-Face and the Badness of Badgers by John Dougherty
It's a good day, unless you're a young girl called Ketchup-Face, who doesn't like being rudely woken up by happy birds singing outside her window. It's a good day, unless you're a young boy called Stinkbomb who's just been woken up by his sister jumping on him. It's a good day until they find a piggy bank raided, and can only assume the thieves were badgers – the clue is in the 'bad' bit. So they go off to meet the king, and a song gets sung, and a major crime-busting task-force is formed, and someone eats an elephant. Yes, it's a good day. Full review...
Outraged of Tunbridge Wells: Original Complaints from Middle England by Nigel Cawthorne
It was ever thus… cyclists go too fast, without using a hooter or lights; there are hoodlums everywhere one looks, and no public conveniences; people pretend to have qualifications and degrees they haven't rightfully earned; buses are too busy with shopping women who should be indoors already, cooking for their working menfolk… It's a very clever idea to show exactly what is behind the 'disgusted of Tunbridge Wells' tag, and as a book to be shelved alongside those with the wackier letters sent to the Daily Telegraph, these selections from the Royal town's press itself make a great eye-opener to the complaints and complainants of Kent. Full review...
While He Was Sleeping by Ayano Imai
Who needs friends when you have a fine smart hat? Not Mr Brown, a bear with a strong sense of style but a lack of companions. He can please himself. So he does, until a determined woodpecker decides that Mr Brown’s hat is prime real estate to house him and a flock of his feathered friends. Mr Brown quickly grows to like his new tenants. His hat attracts imitators however, the birds choose only him. When winter comes, the birds depart and Mr Brown goes in to hibernation. Will he hear their singing again? Full review...
Tales from Schwartzgarten: The Woebegone Twins by Christopher William Hill
Not many people could possibly live in the town of Schwartzgarten by choice. The mortality rate is indecently high (rather like in those English country villages inhabited by amateur detectives), and the whole town exudes an atmosphere of menace and gloom. Let's face it, even the most confident estate agent would struggle to sell a property in Poisoner's Row, never mind in the vicinity of the Glue Factory or the Cinema of Blood. Full review...
What if Money Grew on Trees?: Asking the big questions about economics by David Boyle
In a climate of increasing economic uncertainty, we may often find ourselves exploring the big questions about money, finance and the global market. For example, during the recent downturn, experts were faced with such questions as What if we just kept printing more banknotes? and What would happen if the banks crashed again? These, and other thought-provoking speculative questions have been put to a team of experts and their answers have been recorded in a fascinating and absorbing little book called What if Money Grew on Trees? Full review...
Song of the Golden Hare by Jackie Morris
If you buy one picture book this year, make it this one. Not because it’s a good story, or because you know a child who would love it (both sound reasons), but because it is also a stunning work of art. The pictures are full of carefully observed wildlife and glorious colours. Every inch adds to the telling of the tale. Full review...
Posthumous Stories by David Rose (writer of short stories)
These sixteen short stories have one thing in common: lives, and plenty of them. We jump from the earthy banter of a road crew building speed humps to an interview pre-broadcast of a classical piece where the interviewer isn't getting the kind of answers for which he hopes. On the way we meet the least-mentioned Beatle, visit a world where people are paid to read for the many that don't and the man trying to remember his father through art to name but a few. For good measure there are a couple of Kafka-esque experiments that also work as ripping good yarns. Full review...
The School Inspector Calls! by Gervase Phinn
If you've read any of Gervase Phinn's fictionalized autobiographies (the Dales series), or either of the previous two volumes in this Little Village School set, you'll know what to expect here: cosy English fun set mostly around a primary school, full of Yorkshire dialect, quirky characters prone to malapropisms and many 'kids say the darndest things' moments. Full review...
Empire Antarctica: Ice, Silence and Emperor Penguins by Gavin Francis
I know two books don't make a genre, but twice in recent years I have read autobiographical travelogues of men who felt too much was going on in their lives and their surroundings, and took themselves off to remote, isolated, extremely cold and inhospitable places. One went to the shores of Lake Baikal, and shared his days hunting, fishing, drinking and reading with only a few very distant neighbours. Gavin Francis took himself south, to the edge of the Antarctic ice, to spend a year as a scientific doctor. He wasn't able to be completely as alone as some have been in the past – even if he hid himself away in isolation before the week-long annual changeover of staff was through. Francis ends up with a baker's dozen of companions, in a place where – apart from the ice, sealing things up – only two lockable doors exist. You might think this was a large group of people for someone wanting to be alone, but the very tenuous and isolated feel of the place in the huge emptiness of the landscape is the main point of this book – that, and communing with emperor penguins… Full review...
Leaving Haven by Kathleen McCleary
After years of trying for a second child, Georgia is over the moon to conceive using an egg donated by her best friend Alice. The pregnancy progresses well and everything is looking rosy for Georgia and husband John until, with mere weeks to go, she uncovers a devastating secret that changes everything, including her ability to love her new baby, Haven. Full review...
As Serious As Death (Primavera Blackstone Mystery) by Quintin Jardine
Primavera Blackstone is determined to live a quiet life. She's happy in her role as a single parent to the late Oz Blackstone's three children (one of hers, two of someone else's - don't ask, it's complicated...) and living in a village on the Spanish coast suits her perfectly. She's OK with Liam Matthews too. He's not the love of her life but they rub along well together until Liam mentions the M word. Primavera doesn't want to get married and before long Liam is on his way. Problems never seem to come on their own - and the next one is the arrival of a retired policeman from her Scottish past. Ricky Ross is now a private detective and he's working for Jack Weighley, owner of a budget airline and a man whose PR makes him seem nicer than the reality would prove. Full review...
The Secret Staircase (Brambly Hedge) by Jill Barklem
Primrose and Wilfred have a poem to rehearse as part of the mouse community's midwinter celebrations, but nowhere to practice, until they are shunted up to an attic. But once there chance discoveries lead them to find a new world that they could hardly have imagined – luxurious rooms carved into the upper reaches of the oak tree, where nobody has gone for years… Full review...
Doctor Who: 11 Doctors, 11 Stories by Eoin Colfer, Michael Scott and others
It's basic knowledge that Doctor Who has changed a lot since first being seen fifty years ago – and I don't mean the title character, but the nature of the programme. It has gone from black and white, and cheaply produced, and declared disposable, to being an essential part of the BBC, full-gloss digital, and accessed in all manner of ways. So with the celebratory programme still ringing in our ears, and leaving people pressing a red button to see a programme about three Doctors, er, pressing a red button, we turn to other aspects of the birthday bonanza. Such as this book, which has also mutated in its much shorter lifespan, from being a loose collection of eleven short e-book novellas written by the blazing lights of YA writing, to a huge and brilliant paperback collecting everything within one set of covers. Full review...
How to Read a Novelist: Conversations with Writers by John Freeman
As a book reviewer there are certain people whom I hold in high regard and one of these is John Freeman. Not yet forty he has an enviable record as an editor to some of the big names in literature and it seems that every book of note for a decade and a half has been greeted by his review. Don't be misled by the title How to Read a Novelist - this isn't a guide to literary criticism, but a collection of Freeman's interviews with eminent authors. There are fifty six in total, ranging from literary giants such as Toni Morrison, Ian McEwan, Gunter Grass and Kazuo Ishiguro through to popular crime fiction writers such as Donna Leon. Full review...
A Mammoth in the Fridge by Michael Escoffier and Matthieu Maudet
One day, Noah opens the fridge and finds that there is a mammoth inside! His dad tells him not to be silly, but when he and mum open the fridge to check there, indeed, is a very large mammoth, squashed up inside! Whatever will they do to get him out? Full review...
The Currency of Paper by Alex Kovacs
Maximilian Sacheverell Hollingsworth was - as the name might suggest - of aristocratic birth, but had broken off all contact with his family and in consequence found himself labouring for forty hours a week in a printing works in Dagenham. He came upon the idea of planning out his entire life and this he did in the course of a single afternoon whilst enjoying a little illicit sick leave in a pub in Bloomsbury. He would first become a counterfeiter - on a massive scale - and then a sculptor, filmmaker, collector of artefacts, sound artist and mystic. Circumstances would also turn him into a recluse, except on certain well-ordered occasions, most of which would occur - somewhat to his initial surprise - later in his life. Full review...
Winter Cocktails: Mulled Ciders, Hot Toddies, Punches, Pitchers, and Cocktail Party Snacks by Maria Del Mar Sacasa and Tara Striano
I nearly didn't read this book - cocktails are not something which appear in our house - but fortunately I had a look at the subtitle and realised that mulled ciders, hot toddies, punches and pitchers appealed a great deal more. I'm never averse to something warm and reviving after being out in the winter cold. Even better is the fact that it all comes in a well-presented, hardback book which will stand a lot of duty in the kitchen. Full review...
Emily of New Moon: A Virago Modern Classic (Emily Trilogy) by L M Montgomery
I think I should confess, before I write this review, that I am a true Lucy Maud Montgomery geek! I have loved her books since I was a little girl, and I have read them so many times that the covers are worn and faded and her stories live inside of me, at least in part making me who I am. I wrote my masters dissertation on her books. I went to Prince Edward Island, Canada, for a conference about her works. I came back with a bottle of red sand and a heart full of memories. If anyone ever mentions Anne of Green Gables in my presence my eyes get very large and I get very excited (and my husband rolls his eyes...) So it is with trepidation that I sit down to review one of her books. Bear with me, I will try not to geek out too much, and I will do my best to be fair! Full review...
What If Einstein Was Wrong?: Asking the Big Questions About Physics by Brian Clegg
What if Einstein Was Wrong? is a beautifully presented book written by a team of scientific experts attempting to answer some of the most intriguing What If? questions about physics, cosmology, technology and relativity. The result is an accessible storehouse of information, written in user-friendly format, which can be dipped into from time to time whether it be to impress friends at dinner parties, or simply to find out the answers to long-burning questions like: What if You Could Journey Into the Past? Full review...
