schopflin's reviews
725 reviews

The Foundling by Georgette Heyer

fast-paced

3.5

Not my favourite Heyer. I liked the hero very much but the strong female character was kept very much in the background. Enjoyable enough though. 

The Travelling Hornplayer by Barbara Trapido

3.5

Clever and absorbing. The time it's written and set is very real to me although I'm not sure what modern readers would make of it. The characters were never completely real to me and the self-absorption was often hard to love, but the observations on self-deception were biting and it made a pleasing pattern. 

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Bullying

How to Be a Bad Botanist by Simon Barnes

4.0

I love the way Simon Barnes writes and I love reading about plants so this was always going to be a winner for me. It doesn't quite match the wistful quality of 'On The Marsh' or 'The Year of Sitting Dangerously' but then it's more in his 'helpful information' stream of books. I miss the more personal aspect. 

I Seek a Kind Person: My Father, Seven Children and the Adverts that Helped Them Escape the Holocaust by Julian Borger

4.5

The family holocaust memoir is one that's quite familiar to me. This excellent book deftly combines a moving personal story with exceptionally well-researched wider history. Told in a clear way that expresses grief and sorrow without ever being sentimental. 

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Genocide, Hate crime, Torture

Moderate: Suicide

Summer in Baden-Baden by Leonid Tsypkin

3.0

I don't really like Stream of Consciousness even well it's extremely well done, as it is here by Tsypkin and his translator. And there were many, many scenes of gambling, which I found stressful. But there's much to admire here, particularly around the author squaring his love of Dostoyevsky and the latter's antisemitism. I especially loved the little details of Soviet life. But the main part - Dostoyevsky's travels early in his second marriage - really wasn't for me. 

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Antisemitism

Strange Labyrinth: Outlaws, Poets, Mystics, Murderers and a Coward in London's Great Forest by Will Ashon

4.0

I'm not sure if I understood (or possibly believed) the unifying theme here, but it was a good read, full of excellent stories and sense of place. And Epping Forest is impossible not to get lost in unless you go there all the time.  

Butter by Asako Yuzuki

3.5

This was a useful novelistuc companion to Small Fires, touching at much greater length on issues of domesticity, the reasons we cook and body image. The story itself isn't amazing but the feminist message was well-explored and the insight into Japanese cultural mores was fascinating.

Small Fires: An Epic in the Kitchen by Rebecca May Johnson

slow-paced

4.25

This is clever and inspiring writing. It's not a genre I usually like very much but Johnson makes such subtle points about food I really enjoyed it. If it had a single unified theory behind it, I missed it. But it was worth it anyway. 

Book Madness: A Story of Book Collectors in America by Denise Gigante
Did not finish book. Stopped at 26%.

I'm so disappointed by this book because there's a fascinating story inside - one about how Charles Lamb and his associates owned and personalised their books, and how this enhanced their value to various transatlantic book collectors and sellers. This is supposedly a popular book, not an academic one, but Gigante seems so in thrall to her primary sources that she runs from quotation to quotation without ever telling a coherent story. I also wonder if she is actually not a book historian but a literary one, hence constantly quoting from texts rather than writing about the volumes they appeared in. I kept waiting for the book to start and eventually had to acknowledge this scattergun mess was the whole book. I'm the perfect audience for a version of this book, just not this one. 

Angels by Marian Keyes

fast-paced

3.5

Clever and funny like all Marian Keyes. It has the usual generic caveats - and I can never quite believe in her Throughoughly Decent Men. The main problem with this one, having read 'Rachel's Holiday' recently, is that the Walsh sisters are supposed to be so different, but the inside of Maggie's mind isn't so different from Rachel's. Since she created at least eight distinctly believable characters in 'Grown ups' maybe that's something that's come with time.