At my mother's knee... and other low joints by Paul O'Grady

At my mother's knee... and other low joints As I have got older I have made some big decisions in my life (education, job, marriage, parenthood etc.) but one of the most important has been that if I don't like something (book, film, music) I just don't finish it. Unfortunately that conclusion has just been reached with this Paul O'Grady autobiography. Don't get me wrong - I love Paul O'Grady's sense of humour and would definitely describe him as seeming to be warm-hearted but this book is just plain boring. I really and truly expected to find myself laughing out loud and not wanting to put the book down but in actual fact I've hardly been able to bring myself to pick it up in the first place. Far too much information about his family and not enough stories about Mr O'Grady himself - I've had it for weeks and have now given up at page 136 - maybe it's fantastic from there on in but I'm never gonna find out...

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The Book Thief by Markus Zusak

I read The Book Thief by Markus Zusak a few years back now (and as such the details are slightly hazy) but as this is the first book club blog-type thing I have ever written and it is my favourite book I thought it was still the most appropriate place to begin. Review upon review upon review has been written on it (nearly 900 on Amazon alone when I last looked never mind all the 'professional' ones) so I'm going to keep this one short and personal.

I have to admit that there have been times in my life when I haven't read as much as I should but occasionally you take a punt on a book (I'd actually bought this for my wife) and once you start it is impossible to put it down. This book grabbed me emotionally in a way that I find difficult to describe. Suffice to say that if I had had a daughter I wanted to call her Liesel and that I found it difficult to read the last 40 pages as I was crying so much I could barely see them - I am very affected by acts of courage and loss!

Anyway - what do you think of The Book Thief and while you are thinking about that what other Modern Fiction books do you suggest we might want to discuss?

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The Other Queen by Philippa Gregory

As part of my duties to a book group that I'm helping out with but don't actually belong to I recently had to read The Other Queen by Philippa Gregory. I have to admit that the idea at first filled me with dread as everything about it "400+ pages of historical fiction set in Tudor times" screamed "this is not my cup of tea and I'm not going to like it and it's going to take forever to read and I'm not going to be able to talk about it without offending the group (6 elderly ladies that I'd never met before)!" However...

I actually thought it was great. Obviously if you know anything about Tudor England (I don't) you would expect this to be a novel that was full of politics, intrigue, plotting, sexual tension, love, murder, executions etc. It is full of all these things plus it cracks on at a great pace - it has very short chapters as the narrative keeps swapping between the 3 main characters - Mary, Queen of Scotts; Bess of Hardwick and her husband the George Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury and although even I knew how it was all going to end it still keeps you interested right up to the (bloody) end.

Of course I've no idea whether or not it's particularly historically accurate and I'm sure that probably matters to a lot of people (not me though) but it is fiction and from what the author says in the notes at the back it's pretty well researched and nobody is going to know exactly what happened so she is as likely to be right as anyone else from what I can tell.

All in all a big thumbs up for a book I really thought I'd hate. Just goes to show you shouldn't judge a book by it's cover! Boom Boom...

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