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book Read Every Day reading reviews

RED Book 23: Wool – Hugh Howey

I don’t want to bore you with apologies about how long it’s been since the last RED update (or blog post of any kind), however I will say, to be fair to Wool, that the long delay has been to do with events in my personal life making me not feel like reading very much. I stalled in the middle of this book but not because of the book itself.

Wool is set in a post-apocalyptic world where what’s left of humanity lives in an underground silo and the worst crimes are punishable by being sent outside for ‘cleaning’ which involves spending your last few minutes, while the poisonous atmosphere eats through your suit, wiping down the cameras so that the silo-dwellers can temporarily get a clear view of the outside. But, as ever, all is not what it seems. Is the silo really all there is?, is the outside really a poisonous uninhabitable wasteland?

First thing to say about Wool is that it was originally published in 5 parts and it shows. The first part – the original short story – is complete in itself. However it gives away some information as part of its climax that I think you’d want to keep back if writing the novel from scratch. Parts 2-5 are more connected but suffer from having being written individually and so characters and plot elements that seem central in part 3 may not be by the end of 5. Particularly with the characters it was harder to care when you realised they may not be around that much longer.

That said it was an intriguing world. (I was going to say “well-built” but you could pick holes in it all day long if you’d a mind to. I don’t usually.) And he certainly knows how to create tension. I can see exactly why Ridley Scott bought the film rights. The best bits read like set pieces from a good SciFi thriller movie. That said there were bits that felt like padding.

He’s written a prequel which I hear good things about and which was at least written as a complete novel from the word go. I will probably check it out eventually but it’s not next on my list.

6/10 – good plot, interesting world, characters and coherence needs work.




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How to Waste The Rest of Your Life (not) Reading

or

Are ebook Samples really Useful?

Why Did I Do This?

One of the biggest problems with books these days – and I guess I really mean ebooks – is there’s just too much freaking choice. The rise of self-publishing is undoubtedly a good thing, it means that anyone and everyone can get their words online and into a form you can conveniently download onto your phone, tablet or ereader device. But not everyone and anyone can write, or has something interesting to say, or can use a spell-checker apparently. And that’s before we get into issues of taste and preference.

One of the tools that sites like Amazon use to counter this problem – along with ratings and reviews – is the availability of free samples. Basically every ebook available from Amazon also has a sample – usually the first chapter or so – that you can download for free. A try-before-you-buy option with no commitment. Good idea huh?

Yes. Well, I mean I think so in principle but I seem to almost never use them in practice. This post will be partly about why that is. Maybe.

However the thing that really inspired this post was when samples are used in the recurring arguments over the relative quality of indies versus trad-published books. This is a sub-section of an argument about quality and it basically says that even if there is a lot of unreadable junk out there it’s possible to find the “gems” by using, amongst other things, samples.

Let’s just say I’m sceptical about this – surely it simply takes too much time to read samples to use them as anything other than a final filter? But that’s a gut reaction. So I thought I’d test it. Sort of.

What did I do?

I decided to throw a few numbers together and see what came out.

On the 16th August 2012 I went to amazon.co.uk and I looked at the available fiction ebooks (I almost never read non-fiction). I read mostly from the following genres (Amazon’s categories) SciFi, Fantasy, Crime & Thrillers and Action & Adventure. I looked for a “comedy” category but although I found “humour” as a category for paper books I didn’t for the Kindle store. Also that included non-fiction humour – books of essays and memoirs and so on – which I’m less inclined to read.

Anyway here’s a list of how many titles there were:

Genre Total
Action & Adventure 38,375
Crime & Thrillers 74,605
Fantasy 38,790
SciFi 33,904
All four 185,674
SciFi/Fantasy 72,694
All Fiction 561,178

Clearly, even without further analysis that’s too many books. Fortunately Amazon gives me lots of ways to filter these. I can look at just the ones with a 4star or higher review average (I want to read the good ones right?), or the ones which came out in the last 30days (let’s assume I check regularly) or I could look at what’s about to come out. Or combine two or more of these.

Genre Total 4star 30days Coming Soon 4star+30
Action & Adventure 38,375 4,508 1,435 70 70
Crime & Thrillers 74,605 12,987 3,035 509 250
Fantasy 38,790 6,383 1,813 178 136
SciFi 33,904 4,102 1,427 102 10
All four 185,674 27,980 7,710 859 466
SciFi/Fantasy 72,694 10,485 3,240 280 146
All Fiction 561,178 67,690 22,813 3,253 1,409

Now some of those numbers look less scary but what do they mean in terms of reading samples?

What did I assume?

I needed to make an mathematical model (i.e. a spreadsheet) and for that I need some generalisations or assumptions.

First let’s assume that it takes me on average 5mins to read a sample. Sample sizes vary but I am a slow reader so I think this is on the low end but that will favour the proposition that samples are a good way to filter.

So let’s plug that into our model and here’s the time taken to read all those samples:

Genre Total 4star 30days Coming Soon 4star+30
Action & Adventure 133d 5h55m 16d 15h40m 5d 23h35m 5h50m 5h50m
Crime & Thrillers 259d 1h05m 45d 2h15m 11d 12h55m 2d 18h25m 1d 20h50m
Fantasy 135d 16h20m 22d 3h55m 6d 7h05m 1d 14h15m 11h20m
SciFi 118d 17h20m 14d 5h50m 5d 5h22m 8h30m 50m
All four 645d 16h50m 97d 3h40m 27d 18h30m 3d 23h35m 2d 14h50m
SciFi/Fantasy 252d 9h50m 36d 9h45m 11d 6h00m 1d 23h20m 1d 12h10m
All Fiction 1949d 12h50m 235d 0h50m 79d 5h05m 11d 7h05m 5d 21h25m

Whoops! The power of multiplication has turned what had seemed reasonable book numbers into to unreasonable lengths of time. I’m clearly not going to spend days (or months, years!) reading samples to decide my next “full” book read. About the only thing that seems reasonable is 4star SciFi from the last 30 days.

How did I refine the model? (assumptions #2)

OK so I’ve got some numbers now but are they at all useful? Would any sane person really trying to read all the samples from a particular category? Probably not. We can refine the model with a couple of additional assumptions. Let’s say I go to Amazon and look at the list of my particular category – it shows me them in pages of 12 where I get the book covers, titles and authors. Probably what I would do is page through this list and click on a few likely looking ones and read the blurb and if that didn’t immediately disqualify itself I’d then download the sample.

So let’s assume it takes 5seconds to scan each page of 12 book titles and covers.

Let’s assume that for any list 10% are worth reading the blurb and that it takes 15seconds to skim-read the blurb.

Remember this is based on testing the idea that samples are actually the way to go so the blurb-reading is really to confirm that the cover/title has given the correct impression as regards genre and probable content.

Finally let’s assume that we commit to read the samples of half the ones where we read the blurb i.e. 5% of the list overall.

Plugging those numbers in to our new model the overall time take per list is:

Genre Total 4star 30days Coming Soon 4star+30
Action & Adventure 8d 12h19m 1d 21h11m 6h44m 19m 19m
Crime & Thrillers 15d 14h34m 3d 13h01m 1d 14h15m 2h23m 1d10m
Fantasy 8d 14h16m 1d 5h59m 8h31m 50m 38m
SciFi 7d 15h19m 1d 19h16m 6h42m 28m 2m
All four 36d 8h29m 5d 11h28m 2d 12h13m 4h02m 2h11m
SciFi/Fantasy 14d 5h35m 2d 1h16m 1d 15h13m 1h18m 41m
All Fiction 110d 21h01m 13d 6h04m 4d 11h12m 1d 15h17m 6h37m

Still a lot of large numbers there. I’m automatically rejecting anything over a day. However an hour and a half to check out upcoming SciFi/Fantasy seems doable, as does a couple of hours to review the 4star+ books in my favourite genres from the past 30 days.

So, whilst the numbers overall confirm my gut instinct, limit the scope a little and it may actually be a viable method.

Hold on a second your model is wrong because…

I can think of two main reasons someone may object to the way I’ve set this up:

  1. The numbers in your assumptions are wrong. Obviously it’s true that if we vary these numbers we can come out with different answers. All I can say is I think the assumptions are roughly true for me and I’ve tried to err on the side that would lessen time taken so that I’m giving sampling as a method a fair chance.
  2. In reality, no-one would do it that way. Clearly when you have a nice simple equation you can plug whatever numbers you like in and get the answer. A human being however would react differently given 10 books to sample rather than 10,000. In other words the assumptions don’t scale. I think this is true. I think that the larger the number of books you have the more you would want to use other filters first OR the more likely you are to simply bail out early i.e. read the first 25 samples say, and pick the best of those. However I think the numbers are still useful because they show the difficulty of getting your book read, based on sampling alone, if it’s lower down that list. Which I think just confirms what indie authors already know which is the importance of getting as may good reviews, ratings and getting as high up those popularity lists as possible.

Have I learnt anything?

I think so. I had assumed that if I wanted to find something new to read I should follow the usual routes – reviews from trusted sources and recommendations from family/friends – methods which haven’t changed since I started reading (well before the advent of ebooks). I hadn’t expected sampling would help because I hadn’t expected that the numbers would ever dip to low enough levels to be reasonable. Turns out that may not be true and scanning the latest 4star books in my chosen genres once a month for samples might be a worthwhile investment.

Or not. Because intellectually I can see the merit. Psychologically an hour reading samples when I could be reading my next book seems like an hour wasted.

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book Read Every Day reading reviews

RED Book 22: Tigana – Guy Gavriel Kay

Oh dear. Been a long time hasn’t it? Still the increasingly inaccurately named Read-Every-Day project continues.

Tigana was the Sword and Laser Book Club book for June. And I did actually read it in June but given the current date it’s a poor show that I haven’t written it up until now. Anyway…

Tigana is a fantasy novel set in the world of the Nine Provinces of the Peninsula of the Palm. The Peninsula is split with half the provinces controlled by one foreign tyrant and the other half by the other with a single province remaining neutral. The story follows the journey of a young musician who becomes involved in a quest to unite and free the peoples of the Palm.

With a couple of strong caveats I really enjoyed this book. Caveat number 1 is that it takes a while to get going. If you’re tempted to give up try to keep going until chapter 5 or the scene in the hunting lodge. If you’re not gripped after that fair enough. Same logic applies if you feel confused. There’s a lot of geo-politics early on that does eventually become clear.

Second caveat is that the language takes its time. On S&L it was described as ‘flowery’. I think I’d call it ‘literary’ in any event it can be very descriptive at just the times when you want the story to move forward more quickly. But if that doesn’t bother you or you actively enjoy it then it will be a good read.

Although it’s a fantasy book and there is some mention of magic, mystical creatures and other realms this is really a story about people. It’s about war and the consequences of living with an invading power. There’s some interesting questions about morality in the book and you may find you come to be more sympathetic to more than one character who at first seems irredeemable.

It is quite a long book – 678 pages – and I had to “power through” to make sure I finished it on time. This had consequences for subsequent reading in that I didn’t feel like reading for long stretches after that. But I don’t really hold that against it.

7/10 – could have been more concise but a powerful read nonetheless.




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book Read Every Day reading reviews

RED Book 21: The Fifth Elephant – Terry Pratchett

So we’re up to Discworld #24 – only 15 books behind now!

Fifth Elephant is a City Watch novel. Or actually it’s a Vimes book with some appearances by other Watch characters, notably Carrot and Angua.

Vimes is sent as Ankh-Morpork’s ambassador to Uberwald for the coronation of the Dwarves new Low King. However when he gets there he becomes involved in solving a crime, the theft of a precious cultural artefact. This in turns leads to him being embroiled in political machinations and a power struggle between the Dwarves, Vampires and Werewolves who are the various ruling factions of Uberwald. As the plot unfolds Vimes finds himself fighting just to stay alive.

The early part of the story, is centred on this theft which functions both as a pleasing “locked door” mystery, and a gentle fun-poking at the idea of “locked door” mysteries. I enjoyed both elements.

I also liked the character interactions especially between Vimes and Lady Sybil, but also between Carrot and Angua – whose family is from Uberwald (remember she’s a werewolf). As ever Vimes is a character I enjoy, though he is a little too competent at times. However there were at least a couple of how’s-he-going-to-get-out-of-this? situations where it was luck or someone else that effected his escape/rescue rather him just being super-cop.

It’s an interesting problem, perhaps unique to a series like the Discworld books, because if I read this book as a stand-alone I wouldn’t have an issue with Vimes coming out on top – he’s the hero. So despite not having the raw strength of a werewolf, the powers of a vampire, the fighting skills of an assassin or sheer numbers of the dwarves, he wins through, mostly on his wits. As I say this shouldn’t be a problem, and it wouldn’t be…

…except there’s this niggling thing because I know there are other Discworld books where the protagonist is a Wizard or a vampire or an assassin and the story is from their point of view and it seems like magic or the dexterity and skills of a trained killer, or supernatural ability or whatever becomes the final word in competency. And maybe that’s all ok. Maybe it can be any of those things in different stories and really it is just about pov, but somehow I feel like I back in my days of Buffy fan discussion arguing who’s stronger than who, or what[1]. Anyway that’s all probably just me.

This was one of Pratchett’s “many endings” books, which I’ve mentioned before as being a weakness for me. I think I mind it less here but there are several plot strands that get set up and when what I think is the big climatic scene, which ties up say 2 or 3 of them, there are still a few left to wrap – which is does but in a relative sedate fashion. I think at a certain point[2] you have to accept that’s his style and at least live with it.

Overall it’s an enjoyable book. Not my favourite Discworld, not even my favourite Watch book[3] but definitely worth the read.

7/10 – Discworld delivers another solid fun read.

[1] Classic case would be the ‘cage’ in the Library which at various stages contained various monsters, at least one of which managed to escape by forcing his way out and was then bested by another who was never able to get out of that particular cage.
[2]book 24 perhaps?
[3]Guards Guards![4]
[4]at least so far. I’m told Night Watch is excellent.




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book Read Every Day reading reviews

RED Book 20: Charlotte Street – Danny Wallace

Charlotte Street is a book for which I again broke my TBR rule[1] Why? Well, I knew who Danny Wallace was from his association with Dave Gorman, from various bits of TV, from a non-fiction book Join Me, which I read about 2/3rds of[2] several years ago. And then I saw that he was releasing a novel and read the blurb and thought, “OK, this sounds like it could be my kind of thing”.

Is it? We’ll see.

Charlotte Street concerns a man, Jason Priestley[3], who’s lost his way a little. He doesn’t have a firm grasp on his career, his long term girlfriend dumped him and he’s living above (and sporadically in) a used video games shop in a slightly dingy flat.

One day he meets a girl – on Charlotte Street – with an amazing smile who’s struggling with various bags and packages, and trying to get into a taxi. After this brief meeting he discovers she’s left behind something, a disposable camera. Of course he gets the film developed and is intrigued by pictures. Not knowing who the girl is or anything about her, Jason decides to try to use the contents of the photos as clues to to try to find her.

The rest of the book follows loosely this structure, but it also interweaves the ongoing story of his life – his attempts to get his career on track, to get over, or possibly back with his ex- and so on. At times I think it would have been better if it were a little more rigid with the structure, perhaps having a chapter for each photo.

The book is basically a rom-com concept and as such it’s perhaps inevitable that there will be some question about whether he ends up with “the Girl” or not, and if not whether it’s one of the other possibilities. I won’t give away the ending but let’s just say that I thought it was going to end up with a particular pairing, then that became obviously not the case, then I briefly hoped that was a double-bluff and then – I was disappointed.[4]  I hate when that happens. Oh well.

Charlotte Street is another one of those books about men in their mid-twenties to early-thirties who are trying to figure out what life is all about and where they fit in and with whom. I seem to have read a few like this. This isn’t one of the better ones but it’s hard to find it offensive. It’s a light read and goes down ok but it’s forgettable and a little meandering.

If you like Nick Hornby or John O’Farrell or Tony Parsons then… maybe you should stick with them 😉 If you’ve run out of their stuff right now, then this is not bad.

6/10 -a rom-com that wasn’t quite up my street.

[1]Which is now, not so much broken as lying in shattered pieces on the floor.
[2]On the one hand I didn’t finish it, but on the other I read most of it in a day, which says that I was into – on that day at least.
[3] No – as the running gag goes – not that one.
[4]I think I’d wanted him to end up with a particular woman because I thought she was the female character I liked most. However thinking about it now, I didn’t like him quite as much so in that sense she’s better off without him.
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book Read Every Day reading reviews

RED Book 19: News From Gardenia – Robert Llewellyn

Now, you know how for the last few months, particularly in relation to TBR,  I’ve occasionally mentioned how “there’s a book coming” which I’d already “ordered”? Well this is that book.

What happened was that toward the end of last year I’d heard about Unbound and I was interested (it’s like “Kickstarter for Books” if that means anything). Mostly because I would like to see a model of publishing that is able to adapt to the new world of ebooks, but without being a free-for-all with no concept of gatekeepers. When I saw Robert’s Llewellyn’s pitch for this book, and that was not long after having read and enjoyed Punchbag, I knew I wanted to support both this book and the site.

There were a couple of minor annoyances with the Unbound experience. There was less in the way of updates than I’d hoped (the Unbound website has an “author’s shed” area which you gain access to by supporting the book.) Also the release date slipped a couple of times and at least once we only heard after failing to receive the book. But overall given this is a very new venture they can be forgiven these hiccups.

Anyway onto the book itself.

News From Gardenia is the story of a man from the 21st century who gets inexplicably transported into the world of a couple of centuries in the future. What he finds there is a world very unlike our own. A world where people don’t use energy like it’s an inexhaustible resource. Or any other resource for that matter. Gardenia is the future name for Britain where people have taken to supplying their food needs via gardening. However the hero of this book also visits a number of other societies of the future, some which have adapted very differently, and all different to our own.

OK so this is a Utopian novel and as the author himself acknowledges it’s actually very difficult to write such a book and make it interesting. You can’t fall back on alien invasion, zombie apocalypse or environmental catastrophe to create drama for you. (Though as you’ll recall at least one of those doesn’t automatically make for a gripping story.) And I knew this from the pitch. I guess I had some confidence based on the fact that Punchbag managed to be both an “issue” book and a “proper story”.

News From Gardenia doesn’t. Not quite. It’s reasonably interesting, especially when you know that there’s no technology in the book that fundamentally new. It’s a future that could happen if we collectively chose it. However the problem is that the story of our hero and his attempts to adapt to his new life are always subservient to descriptions of how things work. So it becomes a kind of travelogue of the future.

This is not helped by a rather abrupt and ambiguous ending. I had to double-check that there wasn’t a chapter missing in my ebook copy.

However it was a short, easy read and fairly interesting on its main topic.

6/10 – an intriguing look at energy conservation and use, not so much an actual story though.

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book Read Every Day reading reviews

RED Book 18: Equations of Life – Simon Morden

Another long gap. Naughty me. Oh well.

Equations of Life was the May book for the Ship of Fools book group. Its author is an SoF regular and I had actually gotten the book a while ago with the intent of reading it at some point, partly because it sounded interesting in its own right, but also because I was curious what he was like as an author[*].

This book is set in an expanded London (“the Metrozone”) of the future, about 20 years after a series of terrorist attacks where nuclear weapons were used.  It follows Samuil Petrovich, a young Russian physics genius with a somewhat dubious past who’s now living and studying in the Metrozone. One day he helps foil a kidnapping attempt and the fallout from this incident sets in chain the events of the rest of the book. And it’s a wild ride, there’s gun-toting nuns, rival urban gangs, virtual reality, AI-controlled giant machines, a zombie-like army of street people and just for good measure, the equations that may well be the basis of a Theory of Everything – and which do, of course, give the book its title.

I definitely enjoyed this book but as usual with me, it’s easier to articulate what I didn’t like. I kept feeling that Samuil was written older than he actually is. He’s also annoying as he’s pretty much universally competent, whether it’s squaring up to gang bosses or solving intractable physics problems. His only real flaw appears to be a physical one, a heart condition, which itself is always conveniently dangerous whilst never actually stopping him from doing anything the plot requires.

Another minor irritation – and this may just be me – was that he swears in Russian. Frequently and in many different ways. At least I think most of it was swearing. I wasn’t going to stop to look it up every time. I know it’s authentic, but it felt like the author constantly reminding me that this character was Russian.

I did like the fact that plot whizzes along and quite a lot of stuff happens, like a good thriller, and a lot of it is inventive and interesting (though be warned some of it is dark and icky). The pictures conjured up in my head of some of the scenes toward the end in particular were very effective.

I also like the romantic sub-plot, mostly because I’m a sucker for that kind of thing.

There’s another two books in the series, soon to be three I understand, and whilst I’m not raring to read them, maybe when my TBR is low enough, or I’m just in the mood for a rompy-scifi-thriller.

7/10 – an inventive, wild ride of book.

[*]Let’s face it – with the availability of so much fiction these days, there has to be something beyond simply “sounds interesting”. It has to be “sounds interesting” and “I like the author”, or “sounds interesting” and “comes recommended from trusted source”

 

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Read Every Day reading

The Second Reason

So what’s the second reason I’ve been a bad boy I hear you all ask?

TBR.

So at the beginning of April my TBR was 188. My current TBR? 196!

I know, I know. But the thing is I make up these arbitrary rules for things that are supposed to be fun. So yes, I would like to read my way through some of my backlog of unread books and TBR was a way to achieve that. But there’s a lot in there that I’m probably only going to read when I really inspired to (a lot of the classics from Project Gutenberg) or possibly never (the rest of the John Carter books?) and there were some good books coming out, books for book clubs or books for series I want to follow (I only own one Discworld book after Thief of Time and until last week didn’t own The Truth)

So what I’m saying is sometimes you’ve just  got to break the rules.

(for the uninitiated: TBR stands for To-Be-Read and its those books I have a copy of – electronic or paper – which I have not yet read. The idea was that at the start of each month I’d record my TBR and unless I was at least one lower at the start of the following month I wouldn’t allow myself to acquire any new books. That way, the theory goes, my TBR gradually goes down.
some theory huh?)
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book Read Every Day reading

RED Book 17: The Magicians – Lev Grossman

Ok, hang on, you’re probably thinking, haven’t we been here before?

And you’d be right.

So I’ve done re-reads before but this is the first re-read of a book I’ve read and blogged about before. The reason? Well a couple of things. I want to read the sequel and I always thought I’d re-read the first book beforehand to remind myself of key points. However the main reason was that the Sword and Laser YouTube show had it as their book club book for April.

So what shall I say about this book second time around? Well after the first time I recall being surprised at negative reactions to Quentin the lead character, and this was borne out by the reactions in the S&L Goodreads group discussions about this book. So I went in deliberately looking to see if I’d find him whiney, irritating or hateful. And I just didn’t. Maybe it says something about me I don’t know but whilst he lacks direction at times and he’s not an optimist really I still kind of liked him. I was never less than sympathetic to him.

Also whilst it felt like a little bit of a slog in the middle my favourite parts are towards the end so it left me with a good feeling. There’s so much in this book. It’s not that long – ~400pages – but it packs in scenes and episodes in a number of different settings and even worlds whether it’s Brakebills, Brakebills South, Fillory, New York after graduating, New York after returning and so on. I enjoyed that.

It drops a point for the slight slogginess but other than that:

7/10 – a good re-read.




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book Read Every Day reading reviews

RED Book 16: The Shining – Stephen King

So I’ve been a bad boy – in two ways, but I’ll just name the first here – that I read this book 3 weeks ago and haven’t written it up yet. Which is a problem because my memory is terrible and any details I recall have since merged into an overall impression. So I might approach this review slightly differently.

Normally at this point I’d do a little synopsis of the start of the plot so you’d know what kind of story it is and then make my comments on how I enjoyed it (or not). But do I really need to do that?

OK so a writer takes a job as a housekeeper-handyman for an isolated hotel that’s closed for the winter. As he and his family become more cut off by the weather strange things begin to happen.

But you probably knew that because of the film. Even if like me you’ve never really seen the film all the way through it’s one of those things that has so seeped into the culture that you’ll have seen a few clips, or even parodies of famous moments – “Here’s Johnny“? “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy“? (neither of those moments are in the book by the way)

The thing is – and I can’t stress this enough – the book is not the film. The film as powerful as it is – and since reading the book I have watched the film from start to finish – is a different story. It has the same elements but the film is really about the descent of a man into a kind of madness, a cabin fever brought on by boredom and isolation in which some spooky things happen but they may just be in his mind. The book is the story of a place, a place where powerful and malevolent forces have infiltrated the fabric of the hotel that’s built there and manifest themselves in increasingly disturbing ways.

I can see why fans of the book might dislike the film.

I wasn’t gripped straight away. It took maybe 50-100 pages. But during the early part of the book I identified – too much for comfort – with the character of Jack Torrance and that kept me interested. Once we get to the hotel, the tension ratchets up increasingly as the chapters go by and by the end it’s a really suspenseful page-turning thrill of a ride.

Funny anecdote – whilst I was still about halfway through for a little light relief I decided to break from reading and watch that episode of Friends where Joey’s reading the Shining and has to put it in the freezer. Of course what I’d forgotten about that episode, kinda the point of that strand of it, is that Joey spoils the book for Rachel. So even though I knew I knew the ending of the film, I also knew that the ending of the book was slightly different and didn’t know exactly what it was – until I spoilt myself by watching Friends.

Except not really. One way I can tell this is really a great book is that even though I knew a lot of the bare bones of the story (from the film) including the ending (from Friends) I still enjoyed this read.

8/10 – A master story-teller on his game.