Reviews and Comments

A well researched account of the first year or so of Churchill's wartime premiership, made quite charming by focussing on the personal lives of a small "cast" - Churchill, his youngest daughter Mary and daughter-in-law Pamela, his secretary Colville and detective Thomson, and also including some vignettes of Harry Hopkins, William Averell Harriman, Rudolf Hess, and a few others. A little hagiographic, but very enjoyable.

2.5 (audiobook)

I didn't know whether to.mark this as 2 or 3*, and decided to be generous in case it was at partly the reader that was making the dialogue stodgy and unrealistically formal.
The story is well structured, although rather implausible and riddled with coincidences, although it was certainly a good enough yarn to keep me interested.
The detail on police procedure was plausibly realistic, although often a bit too didacticly laid out. Too much reliance on genre clichés - the hardboiled DI with coupled with a heart-of-gold DS to keep her from getting into trouble, the outsider who pulls off a miracle to get accepted, the old-fashioned decent crook who helps out.

A good adventure yarn using Napoleon's 1798 expedition to Egypt as a vehicle. The lead characters are engaging but there's no real depth to them. The mystery about the American protagonist's acquired medallion twists and turns, sometimes implausibly, but drives the plot entertainingly. There are terminological anachronisms that jar, but on the whole it's a well written piece of froth that is an enjoyable diversion.

2.5* (audiobook)
Light froth, but well enough written to get through. Predictable and clichéd, made worse by the irritating tone of the reader.

3.5*
Chapter I is brilliant - had me completely gaffed from the start. The rest of Part I is also very good. Part II was a slight deterioration, but still good. Part III I found found OK, but a bit predictable and mundane in comparison to the rest.

There was a lot of potential here to explore more of how the "binding" of memories into books created a society different from our own, but each time we were on the threshold of that, at the respective ends of Parts I & II, the author backed away, and shifted the direction of the story.

Hmmm. 2.5⭐. Very patchy.
It's not clear to who the audience is meant to be for this book. It's clearly popular science rather than a real textbook, times the writing is so opaque the only a proper physics will be able to understand it. I am far from being hard of thinking - I'm a former university lecturer in computer science - and I also so have a strong interest in cosmology and particle physics, having read many books on both subjects over the years, I really struggled with about half of this book. Where I could keep up it was fascinating and thought-provoking, but sadly for too much of it Hawking assumes too much background knowledge on the part of his audience.

3.5* - Still good, but not his usual standard
I usually like Sedaris a lot, but this one didn't hit the spot as well as others have. I don't know if it was my mood or his style this time. Although the humour was still there, it felt darker and bleaker than others. I'm also tempted to say it was more self-obsessed, but that's an odd thing to say of works that are all autobiographical anecdote.

Excellent story, almost the paragon of "hard boiled", but that cosiness of familiarity from knowing the film (I am surprised to find how closely the film followed the book).
I have not read any Hammer before, but based on this I will be seeking out more.

A later update. I'm downgrading this to 4.5 ⭐. Thinking back, there are too many passages that are clumsy or unfinished threads to be a true five ⭐. It's still been my best read of this year, though.
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Wow. What a ride. Absolutely the best book I have read this year.
I am fairly.new to to Stephenson, having read only "Snowcrash" from him before this, but I am certainly going to seek out more of him after this. The multi-threaded creative detail in this rivals AS Byatt's "Possession", but is more accessible and a lot funnier.

I used to like Ian McEwan. When I was travelling around Europe by train in the early 80s I would often have one of his books in my backpack - First Love Last Rites, The Cement Garden, In Between The Sheets.
The books of the 90s didn't do it for me. I decided to risk the slim On Chesil Beach to see if we have become reconciled, but we haven't. The writing is very skilled, but the content - both theme and characters - is not. It's an uninteresting story about two unappealing, tedious people.