A Lesson in Cruelty - Harriet Tyce

41%

14.06.26

This was as messy and illogical as Harriet's performance on Traitors. 

What You Did - Claire McGowan

45%

21.09.25

I read this because the author went to the same college as me, and a sort-of unnamed version of it did feature - but it was nothing like my experience. She seems to have hated it as much as she hated her protagonist, who has so few redeeming features that I hoped she sank under the increasingly heavy pile of increasingly ridiculous Bad Things that happened to her. It was hardly the gritty realism I suspect it was intended to be.

(I didn't realise this was by the same author - it was both similar and quite different.)

Guilty By Definition - Susie Dent

57%

03.02.25

A competent first novel. Dent seems pleasant and erudite in real life, and this comes across here - it's obviously more than a little autobiographical (apart from the murder bits, I assume). Oxford was the main star but the plot was unusual, if a little confused by the end, and the characters fairly well drawn. It might be Dent's speciality but most of the distracting and irrelevant etymology could have been edited out.

Babel - RF Kuang

 

Didn't finish

I really wanted to read this but it was too much of a workout - both in terms of the library hardback weighing about as much as a small dog, and also in terms of it being really boring. 

Magpie Lane - Lucy Atkins

 54%

04.04.22

I dreamed the correct ending to this halfway through, which makes it either a premonition or predictable. It's true that the (non-)plot depended on the character telling the story, and good unreliable narrators can make a book spark, but this one was so unlikable that I found myself siding with the employers she hated so much.

The Dictionary of Lost Words - Pip Williams

 48%

20.08.21

You'd think I'm the ideal audience for this novel - I've studied, lived and worked in Oxford and work with words now. But the story was so dull, the characters so two-dimensional, the dialogue so unlikely, and the author so keen to show off her conscientious research and ruminations on the nature of words that I just didn't care.

Note: I'm might also start keeping count of books where women become pregnant after having sex once. Spoiler: It's most books with unmarried female protagonists, especially when they're set in the past.

New label: pregnant first time

Tin Man - Sarah Winman

 

60%

29.07.21

I'm all for relationship-based novels and beautifully written character studies - and this excelled at that - but I also expect something to actually happen in a story. There was no narrative tension to this at all, beyond 'bereaved man finds friend's diary, feels better' (spoiler!).

Gaudy Night - Dorothy L Sayers

53%

01.08.20

The interest of this lay in my own experience of an Oxford college, albeit one that seems to have been struck from the record in this story. Otherwise, it was all rather dated, wordy and confusing, and riddled with typos. And, disappointingly for a 'golden age' detective story, there wasn't even a murder!

The Party - Elizabeth Day

60%
25.10.19

On the one hand, it's well written and engaging. On the other, there's something that doesn't quite work - though whether that's the hoary old stalker/friend trope, the slightly wooden characters or rather flat ending, I can't decide.

Crampton Hodnet - Barbara Pym

64%
19.05.19

Perhaps not one of Pym's best novels, but still arch and wry and perceptive and occasionally laugh-out-loud - and it's amazing how so many self-proclaimed humorous writers aren't any of those things.

La Belle Sauvage - Philip Pullman

73%
30.12.17

There's no better way to round off the year with master storyteller Pullman's new novel eclipsing all others, carrying readers away into his vivid world like the engulfing flood in the book. It's not really for children, I think - though kids would do well to absorb the obvious political and social commentary here. My only criticisms would be the surprising upholding of traditional gender roles (compared with Lyra's later heroism) and the open-ended, slightly unfocused nature of the story, setting it up for the two sequels.

The Chimes - Anna Smaill

49%
06.07.16

Reading a book about how music sounds is never going to quite work. Reading a retro-futuristic dystopian book about how types of music that don't exist sound is never going to work at all. Hampering characters with no memories is also going to make rounding them out a tad challenging. All in all, this reads more like an undeveloped first draft - or a heavily cut draft of a much longer book.

The Bone Season - Samantha Shannon

65%
25.10.15

So compelling yet so clunky - it's that Twilight dilemma. The awkward plotting, the self-important narrator and the general need for a thorough edit don't seem to matter quite as much when there's such an exciting and original story.

A Discovery of Witches - Deborah Harkness

Didn't finish

28.06.13

I don't usually review books I don't finish, but then I don't usually make a decision to stop reading a book. I'd got to page 362 of this one - less than halfway through but still representing a waste of time not to record it. It's so in need of a decent structural edit that I had to check it wasn't self-published. It's basic stuff. Changes from 1st to 3rd person narrative betray a lack of confidence in the chosen delivery. Characters - good or bad - that you can't relate to don't hold your interest. A love story and an imagined world that don't ring true - well, there are other books on my To Read book that are a better use of my sparse time.