British Books - Page 6

Out of the Silent Planet (Hudson River Editions)

C. S. Lewis

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 162 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

A Must Read 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 1 people found this review helpful.

This is a must read for any Lewis fan and really for anybody. It is excellent and very though provoking.

Certainly worth reading, although could have been more in depth... 4 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

I had no clue that Lewis had written a sci fi trilogy when I stumbled upon this one completely by random. I was in between books and it is certainly a quick read, so why not?

I am glad that I did. Lewis does a great job in telling a story and making sure that he finishes it up and ties up the loose ends. He created a world that was altogether plausible. The Oyarsa and the Hnau add a lot, and also tell a story about our own world.

As with anything Lewis writes, I can't help but look for a parable or some other deeper meaning as it relates to mankind. Dare I say that the Oyarsa are angels in Christian myth, that Hnau are the many different religions that exist? That accepted, then the story behind the story would show the predominance of a God, any God, and that all of the Hnau (Jewish, Christian, Muslim...) all should get a long as they are all ruled by the same god, or in this case Meldilorn?

I ramble, but either way Lewis created a story worth reading. I do want to read the next in the series to see where it goes, to see if the parable mentioned above does in fact play out even more. I would recommend, even though Lewis could have made it a bit more involved and in depth than it already was.

3.5 stars.

Editorial Review:

In the first novel of C.S. Lewis' classic science fiction trilogy, Dr. Ransom, a Cambridge academic, is abducted and taken on a spaceship to the red planet of Malacandra, which he knows as Mars. His captors are plotting to plunder the planet's treasures and plan to offer Ransom as a sacrifice to the creatures who live there. Ransom discovers he has come from the 'silent planet' - Earth - whose tragic story is known throughout the universe...

The Tenderness of Wolves: A Novel

Stef Penney

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Total reviews: 50 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

A brilliant and breathtaking debut that captivated readers and garnered critical acclaim in the United Kingdom, The Tenderness of Wolves was long-listed for the Orange Prize in fiction and won the Costa Award (formerly the Whitbread) Book of the Year.

The year is 1867. Winter has just tightened its grip on Dove River, a tiny isolated settlement in the Northern Territory, when a man is brutally murdered. Laurent Jammett had been a voyageur for the Hudson Bay Company before an accident lamed him four years earlier. The same accident afforded him the little parcel of land in Dove River, land that the locals called unlucky due to the untimely death of the previous owner.

A local woman, Mrs. Ross, stumbles upon the crime scene and sees the tracks leading from the dead man's cabin north toward the forest and the tundra beyond. It is Mrs. Ross's knock on the door of the largest house in Caulfield that launches the investigation. Within hours she will regret that knock with a mother's love -- for soon she makes another discovery: her seventeen-year-old son Francis has disappeared and is now considered a prime suspect.

In the wake of such violence, people are drawn to the crime and to the township -- Andrew Knox, Dove River's elder statesman; Thomas Sturrock, a wily American itinerant trader; Donald Moody, the clumsy young Company representative; William Parker, a half-breed Native American and trapper who was briefly detained for Jammett's murder before becoming Mrs. Ross's guide. But the question remains: do these men want to solve the crime or exploit it?

One by one, the searchers set out from Dove River following the tracks across a desolate landscape -- home to only wild animals, madmen, and fugitives -- variously seeking a murderer, a son, two sisters missing for seventeen years, and a forgotten Native American culture before the snows settle and cover the tracks of the past for good.

In an astonishingly assured debut, Stef Penney deftly weaves adventure, suspense, revelation, and humor into an exhilarating thriller; a panoramic historical romance; a gripping murder mystery; and, ultimately, with the sheer scope and quality of her storytelling, an epic for the ages.

Ulysses (World's Classics)

James Joyce

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 396 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Ten Reasons to Re-read Ulysses 5 out of 5 stars.
3 of 3 people found this review helpful.

1. When you tried it in college, it was a task, a challenge, an intellectual mountain to climb, a test of your literary mettle. Perhaps if you read it apart from any course, as I did, you felt you failed.

2. In the intervening time you've read perhaps hundreds of Modernist and post-modernist novels by Joyce's acknowledged progeny, those whose numbers are legion: from William Faulkner to Beckett to Barth to Perec to Eggers to Coover to Calvino to Kundera, from "Wittgenstein's Mistress" to "Wittgenstein's Nephew," from Jeanette Winterson to Louis Paul Boon and Gilbert Sorrentino to Peter Handke. These you have relished and enjoyed tremendously. Why, then, not tackle their progenitor, the master himself, again?

3. A book is no longer in any way a notch in your belt; you read for enjoyment, enlightenment, enrichment, a sense of connectedness, all the right reasons and some that aren't.

3. You can start with your old paperback, and if Ulysses again proves too difficult, you can toss it aside, no harm done.

4. If the old paperback falls apart and you find you're still reading, you can buy a new copy.

5. You're not in such an all-fired hurry any more. You have the sense to adapt to Joyce's demands and slow down your reading speed, recognizing that this is like a prose poem. Take five minutes on one given page, what's the rush? The writing is finely tooled enough to deserve it.

5. Your maturity allows you to see beyond the Masterpiece Syndrome and the Scholar's Paradise that Ulysses became to enjoy what a romp it is. This is fun! for God's sake. Joyce is forty different kinds of comedian, veering from irony to black comedy to sly humor to sheer buffoonery.

6. Each section being in a different style is itself royally entertaining, and Joyce is masterly in all of them. This is a buffet prepared by a virtuoso chef, and if you hang onto your hat, it's exhilarating as all get out.

7. The unexpected effect of all this variety is that the three main characters, Stephen Dedalus, Leopold and Molly Bloom are more vivid and real than they could possibly be otherwise. Various sections familiarize us with their intimate habits, personal effects, private thoughts, and the way others see them; and by regarding them through different stylistic lenses, Joyce effects unusual familiarity and allows these fictional entities to assume the palpability of real people.

8. We feel great affection for these characters, and Joyce achieves this while depicting them not as highly exceptional, heroic souls but rather average, idiosyncratic and unremarkable people. Even the highly intelligent, poetic Stephen is a typically self-dramatizing, youthful romantic. And yes, though the novel is rife with comic turns, there is poignancy, great and generous humanity.

9. The novel is a sensuous feast, the words chosen always with an ear for sound in the reciprocal service of memorable, ultravivid images. You can dog-ear a dictionary (to many disappointments, considering Joyce's flamboyant taste for arcana and neologisms) or not; your workable vocabulary will suffice for much, if not most, of the glorious language. In this regard Joyce is a wizard, a magician unsurpassed by any poet in memory.

10. As another reviewer here noted, you will have the urge, once you've come to the last line, to immediately begin again. Keep your new copy handy. This is such a kaleidoscope, a ride of a book, that you'll want to read it a third time, soon enough.

Editorial Review:

Ulysses has been the subject of controversy since copies of the first English edition were burned by the New York Post Office Authorities. Today critical interest centers on the authority of the text. This edition republishes, for the first time, without interference, the original 1922 text. Jeri Johnson's critical Introduction demystifies the complexities of the book, and a full textual publication history, helpful appendices, and explanatory notes guide the reader through this highly allusive text.

The Gun Seller

Hugh Laurie

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 112 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

funny 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

I'm reading it on tour and enjoying it immensely. I grew up in the U.K. digging his stuff in Black Adder, Fry and Laurie etc. Got to meet him briefly once and he was a gentleman. I'm looking forward to the next one. Good job Hugh.
Jon Cleary.

WONDERFUL READ 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

The Gun Seller is a fun, quick read that keeps you interested and entertained. It feels like typical HOUSE; wit and intelligence, with a bit of cynicism. I loved it.

The Gun Seller - Enjoyable Tongue-in-Cheek Funny Read 4 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

The Gun Seller is an enjoyable book and a parody of most spy thrillers. Hugh Laurie writes in the first person about a reluctant hero, with dry humor that will have you laughing out loud. The characters come to life throughout the story and there are some unexpected twists. This is a good read for any mystery fan. Here's hoping Hugh Laurie writes a sequel.

on second thought ... 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

i bought & read this book years ago, shortly after it was published. thought it a thumping good read. re-read it earlier this fall & was taken aback at how horrific it had become once reality had caught up & surpassed it. corrupt american government? check. people being manipulated & murdered for the greater good of arms manufacturers? check. hmmm ... did mr laurie have access to a time machine? still, it's a breezily written piece & (spoiler alert) given the good guy wins, a slight improvement over the past decade since it was written.

Editorial Review:

A spoof of the spy genre set in Britain features a drifter who orchestrates a magnificent caper involving the CIA, international terrorists, arms dealers, a high-speed chase on skis, and buxom, blonde beauties."

Fallen Skies: A Novel

Philippa Gregory

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 3 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Can a family's mannered traditions and cool emotions erase the horrors of war from a young couple's past?

Now back in print from New York Times bestselling author Philippa Gregory, Fallen Skies takes readers to post-World War I England in a suspenseful story about the marriage of a wealthy war hero and an aspiring singer he barely knows.

Lily Valance is determined to forget the horrors of the war by throwing herself into the decadent pleasures of the 1920s and pursuing her career as a music hall singer. When she meets Captain Stephen Winters, a decorated veteran, she's immediately drawn to his wealth and status. And Stephen, burdened by his guilt over surviving the Flanders battlefields where so many soldiers perished, sees the possibility of forgetting his anguish in Lily, but his family does not approve.

Lily marries Stephen, only to discover that his family's façade of respectability conceals a terrifying combination of repression, jealousy and violence. When Stephen's terrors merge dangerously close with reality, the truth of what took place in the mud and darkness brings him and all who love him to a terrible reckoning.

The Gunslinger Born (The Dark Tower Graphic Novels, Book 1)

Peter David, Stephen King, Robin Furth

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 73 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

book 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

never read a graphic novel before-- thought this was excellent read- art work suited story content

Excellent Adaptation of Wizard & Glass 5 out of 5 stars.
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This is a very good adaptation of the best part of "The Gunslinger" and the entire "Wizard & Glass." I read the single issue first, but unlike some of my fellow reviewers, I did not miss the extra background material that has been cut out. It is not as good as some classic graphic novels (like "The Watchmen"); however, it is still an excellent telling of a classic story. This is fine work by both King and Marvel. I would recommend it to any fan of King, Marvel, or graphic novels in general.

Editorial Review:

"The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed." With those words, millions of readers were introduced to Stephen King's Roland -- an implacable gunslinger in search of the enigmatic Dark Tower, powering his way through a dangerous land filled with ancient technology and deadly magic. Now, in a comic book personally overseen by King himself, Roland's past is revealed! Sumptuously drawn by Jae Lee and Richard Isanove, adapted by long-time Stephen King expert Robin Furth (author of Stephen King's The Dark Tower: A Concordance) and scripted by New York Times Best-seller Peter David, this series delves deep into Roland's origins -- the perfect introduction to this incredibly realized world, while long-time fans will thrill to adventures merely hinted at in the novels. Be there for the very beginning of a modern classic of fantasy literature!

The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Volumes D-F: The Romantic Period through the Twentieth Century and After, 8th Edition

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 3 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Great economical purchase 3 out of 5 stars.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful.

An excellent buy! I was forced to buy the 3000+ page book for my Brit Lit class, but I needed something smaller. Also, there is no way in the world I am going to lug that mammoth book around for four months. I decided to purchase the smaller 3 volume set and I am glad I did. Same information, but in a more compact size. Great for people studying English/British literature courses.

Editorial Review:

Read by millions of students over seven editions, The Norton Anthology of English Literature remains the most trusted undergraduate survey of English literature available and one of the most successful college texts ever published. Firmly grounded by the hallmark strengths of all Norton Anthologies—thorough and helpful introductory matter, judicious annotation, complete texts wherever possible—The Norton Anthology of English Literature has been revitalized in this Eighth Edition through the collaboration between six new editors and six seasoned ones. Under the direction of Stephen Greenblatt, General Editor, the editors have reconsidered all aspects of the anthology to make it an even better teaching tool.

My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer (Wesleyan Poetry)

Jack Spicer

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 2 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

The Murderer of Modernism 5 out of 5 stars.
4 of 4 people found this review helpful.

In the decades following WWII, a tremendous amount of complex, appealing, outward-facing, socially engaged and universally relevant poetry was written in the United States by poets who more or less all knew each other, wrote about each other, and went to the same parties. Ferlingetti published Allen Ginsberg, who staged a happening at the funeral of Frank O'Hara, who was a close friend of John Ashberry, who promoted the books of Kenneth Koch, and so on. Together, these poets' work influenced everything from political speeches to hip-hop, and perhaps more importantly, their eclectic, immediate, deeply personal, free-spirited outpourings drowned out the recondite, referential, fascist, formalist modernism exemplified by Eliot and Pound, and cured American poetry of the disease that continued to plague our architecture and our prose. (Notice there's no "postmodernism" in poetry--"Howl" made it irrelevant.)

Jack Spicer is the self-selected black sheep of the group. His poems are stubbornly self-reflexive: they are about poetry and poets, and the struggle to the death between them. He likes to quote Pound. He disses New York. He writes "A band of faggots. . .cannot be built into a log-cabin in which all Western Civilization can cower." (Take THAT Ginsberg and O'Hara.) He talks about being in hell. He sees ghosts.

In his pity, privacy, and focus on writers and death, he reminds me of Roberto Bolano and David Markson. But there is also an energy, a wealth of invention, and a darn human likeability to his work that. . . well, maybe there was something in the air in mid-twentieth century America, which we can all breathe even now by reading these poems. "Love makes the discovery wisdom abandons." Ahh--joy. "Two loves I had, one rang a bell/connected on both sides with hell." Who of us hasn't been there? And as for modernism--"Love ate the red wheelbarrow." Yes again. Thank the ghosts. Read this and breathe.

Editorial Review:

In 1965, when the poet Jack Spicer died at the age of forty, he left behind a trunkful of papers and manuscripts and a few copies of the seven small books he had seen to press. A West Coast poet, his influence spanned the national literary scene of the 1950s and '60s, though in many ways Spicer's innovative writing ran counter to that of his contemporaries in the New York School and the West Coast Beat movement. Now, more than forty years later, Spicer's voice is more compelling, insistent, and timely than ever. During his short but prolific life, Spicer troubled the concepts of translation, voice, and the act of poetic composition itself. My Vocabulary Did This to Me is a landmark publication of this essential poet's life work, and includes poems that have become increasingly hard to find and many published here for the first time.

Frankenstein

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

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Total reviews: 318 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Choose the 1818 version 4 out of 5 stars.
7 of 8 people found this review helpful.

Most editions of Mary Shelley's landmark book available today follow the heavily revised 1831 version. The impulse behind this trend is an honorable one (to present what is seemingly an author's "final revision"),but the 1818 version is preferable for many reasons. Looking back on her creation in later life, Shelley felt obliged to alter the book's focus in significant ways, adding what critic Marilyn Butler accurately describes as "long passages in which her main narrator, [Victor] Frankenstein, expresses religious remorse for making a creature..." The author sought to make the 1831 edition less controversial and thereby more palatable to the tastes of the reading public. The 1818 version is closer to Mary Shelley's original intentions, though it too, unfortunately, was filtered through the sensibilities of her husband, the poet Percy Shelley, who took many of his wife's rather straightforward passages and rendered them into his own more ornate and Ciceronian style. Still, the 1818 version remains more vital, more original, and less constrained by what the author believed would be acceptable to readers in 1830s England.

Editorial Review:

This is one of the best known horror stories ever. Victor Frankenstein, a Swiss scientist, has a great ambition: to create intelligent life. But when his creature first stirs, he realizes he has made a monster. A monster which, abandoned by his master and shunned by everyone who sees it, follows Dr. Frankenstein with murder and horrors to the very ends of the earth.

Animal Farm (Everyman's Library (Cloth))

George Orwell

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Total reviews: 1155 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Animal Farm is instructive for our presidential election. 5 out of 5 stars.
4 of 4 people found this review helpful.

2008 is the ideal time to apply the principles that we have learned from Animal Farm and apply them to November's 2008 Presidential election. Just as Napolean, the pig, instigated a rebellion against the owner of the farm (Jones) by talking about how great things will be once the animals ruled the farm, today we are told by the Obama Democrats that once Bush and the Republicans are thrown off the farm (Washington), that all will be well, that things will look wonderful, and that none of us will ever be hungry again. In Animal Farm, though, the animals were far worse off after Mr. Jones was kicked off the farm. Like Obama, Napolean also did not have any experience in running a farm, but this did not stop him from stating that he would be more competent and able to handle the farm. Further, once Napolean took charge of the farm, the interests of the other animals started to decline more and more. He started to remove any sense of democratic principles by eliminating the need for public comment and strongly took action against any potential dissent. This is exactly where the Obama Democrats want to take our country--first, by stating that they (and he alone) can manage the country -- even though there is no experience to suggest that he ought to, and secondly, by eliminating any form of dissent by destroying talk radio and also by heavily regulating and taxing the internet in order to suppress the one free and open medium that is available to counter their message. The lesson of Animal Farm is clear: those who claim to provide us with utopia on earth often will create hell instead through dictatorship, centralization of authority, and a desire to obtain power for power's sake. If we learn the lessons of Animal Farm, our nation will be far better off.

Editorial Review:

(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)

Animal Farm is the most famous by far of all twentieth-century political allegories. Its account of a group of barnyard animals who revolt against their vicious human master, only to submit to a tyranny erected by their own kind, can fairly be said to have become a universal drama. Orwell is one of the very few modern satirists comparable to Jonathan Swift in power, artistry, and moral authority; in animal farm his spare prose and the logic of his dark comedy brilliantly highlight his stark message.

Taking as his starting point the betrayed promise of the Russian Revolution, Orwell lays out a vision that, in its bitter wisdom, gives us the clearest understanding we possess of the possible consequences of our social and political acts.