Looking for Alaska

Looking for Alaska

Review coming soon

Chalked Up

Chalked Up

Review coming soon

Born On A Blue Day

Born On A Blue Day
Ok this was probably the quickest book i’ve ever read. For a couple of reasons, firstly its a true story. Not autobiographical, but more like a travel write for a recent journey, ever since Daniel Tammet recalled publically Pi to about 22,000 digits. I do like faction, so that helped. Also the formating is good and with it being a hardback you know theres going to be plenty of margin & line spacing. Basically the subject matter meant I couldn’t stop reading this. I’m researching aspergers for a book I’m writing so this was spot on. Oh also I recently watched the accompanying TV programme featured about Daniel. This is definitely a niché audience read, but I’m still giving it 4 stars… it gripped me all the way through.  Click through to amazon to learn what its about.

Life on the Refridgerator Door

Life on the Refridgerator Door
This is probably my first true ‘girly’ book, which I’m regretfully proud of. Regretfully, because I guess I should have found one a lot earlier. But anyways… not very many pages, and short well formatted chunks of text. Basically this is what it says it is, notes left on the fridge door about the relationship between a mother and daughter (if I remember correctly). Whilst I didn’t read much of this book in the shop, it did make a large enough impact on me to ‘phone-it’ … hate reading? you’ll love reading this.

The End Of Mr Y

The End Of Mr Y
This was a surprise find. Its big bold red spine grabbed my attention and was stunned to see the pages were all black (not the faces, but just the edges). I knew this would be a good one, cause anyone going to that length for presentation alone, deserves to be purchased. The cover is quirky, the back cover is equally as mysterious…. and even tho its states itself as being ‘a thrilling adventure of love, sex, death (ed: yawn) … and time-travel’ <– Ooo ello, this raises an eyebrow. Sooo… all this manages to get me to to open the pages and have a flick through… lovely big line-spacing, and a decent font, but other than that its pretty standard format, normal margins, lots of pages of unthrilling text and paragraphs that don’t really look much like paragraphs at all, cause the indents and gaps aren’t big enough. But either way, I sat for a bit and read the first few pages. Thankfully, its a contemporary tale, set in the ‘now’ which makes it much more palettable in my (pun) book, I’m gunna give this one a go anyway… I’ve bought it so I might as well.

I’ll probably add more this once I’m done, or mid way at least. Worth checking out I think. 4 stars for the black edged paper alone, how often do you see that??

The Raw Shark Texts

The Raw Shark Texts
This book took a bloody long time to get on here. Why I’m not sure, because I’ve been stalking it in Waterstones for aaages… waiting for it to come up in a ‘3 for 2′ offer no doubt (like it did in Leeds, when I ’should’ have bought it) Grrr. anyways….

this is like a picture book with text… formatted wonderfully… loads of effort gone into making it diverse and interesting. With each turn of the page you’ve no-idea whats coming next… and that’s without reading a word of the story. This is a grand book. A real non-readers book. I will buy this in its hardback version, cause I’m not 100% certain that they’ll continue the formating in a paperback version (I hope they do cause its kinda key to the storyline) … click the cover above and read about it. The story has got flavours of the Matrix and Memento.  

Shorty Loves Wing Wong

Shorty Loves Wing Wong
Bit of a late find this one, I was almost out of the shop. 90 pages, half of them pictures of odd looking cat figures in modern poses and humanal(?) situations. Read the back cover and it sounded really good, contemporary and relavant to todays world. Easy on the eye. didn’t notice any thing about the paper (so it was probably average) … a little hardback tho if I recall. The only bad point imo was the standard formating of the text (small font, tight kerning, standard linespacing etc) and a complete absence of paragraphs. One could argue that the ‘chapters’ are only paragraphed sized, but c’mon, a little sentence break in the odd place would have helped people (ie: me) a little. That minor detail prevented it getting a full 5stars from me. However, I’m more than happy to give it a generous 4. Turns out it was written by michael smith who also wrote The Giro Playboy which looks equally as readable.

Streetwise

Streetwise: Stories from an Irish Prison
An easy to read bunch of contemporary short stories. Not many pages. I’ve read one ’story’ from it… and hate the fact they are fiction, cause they are so good I want to believe! However…. tis probably just faction. The paper smells and the font isn’t very good.