In amongst writing about books other people have written, I really should mention the book that was launched at the girls' school at the end of October - Engibear's Bridge. Ben illustrated it, with the author, Andrew King, being an engineer from Brisbane. They worked so well together on the first book, Engibear's Dream, that the second book was a ( Read more... )

I get to read so much!

Last week I finished another nephew present - Alex, the Dog and the Unopenable Door, the first book by Ross Montgomery. Alex Jennings lives in a town on the outskirts of which is The Forbidden Land. If anyone tries to travel across the border dividing the town and The Forbidden Land, they are physically forced back and ( Read more... )

Soon after the last lot of books, I read the final book in Hugh Howey's Wool Series, Dust. Jules is back home, in Silo 18, organising the rescue of Solo and the children she met in Silo 17. Donald is in Silo 1, trying with his sister's help to get a drone up, while at the same time posing as Thurman. When his deception and his communication with ( Read more... )

Yesterday I finished Joe Haldeman's The Accidental Time Machine. Matthew Fuller, a physics PhD student at MIT, builds a calibrator to measure the relationships between gravity and light. He finds that when he resets the machine, by pushing a button, the machine travels forward in time, with each journey about 12 times further into the future than ( Read more... )

At the beginning of the month I read a Peter Temple book, An Iron Rose. Mac Faraday, the narrator, is a blacksmith (hence the title) working in the country outside of Melbourne. His good friend Ned Lowey is found hanged and it is ruled a suicide. Neither Ned's grandson, who was living with Ned and whom Mac takes in, nor Mac can believe that Ned ( Read more... )

I didn't borrow more from the library for a while so I could finally read The Book Thief, by Markus Zusak. Ben's parents gave it to me for Christmas in 2011. The year before they'd also given me a book, which I started to read but got so confused I gave up. When I got The Book Thief I sort of assumed it would be the same sort of worthy, but ( Read more... )

Before the books mentioned in the previous entry (which I finished about a week ago, in time to give to my niece 2 Sundays ago and return to school last Thursday) I read the 11th book in the Edge Chronicles series by Paul Stewart and Chris Riddell. The Nameless One: The First Book of Cade" is set in the Third Age of Flight, when people have settled ( Read more... )

I finished "The Extraordinary Education of Nicholas Benedict" in time to return it to the library on Monday. Since then I've started If I Stay, by Gayle Forman. I chose it as a birthday present for my niece who turns 12 this month, based on the fact that she's read the Divergent trilogy as well as The Fault in Our Stars, and liked them all. ( Read more... )

The Blind Goddess (Blind gudinne) is a Norwegian crime novel, the first in a series about Detective Inspector Hanne Wilhelmsen by Anne Holt. Strangely, I felt the main character was actually a solicitor, Karen Borg, or perhaps Håkon Sand, a police lawyer. Karen discovers a body while walking her dog one morning in Oslo. When a suspect is found ( Read more... )

I'm reading Trenton Lee Stewart's The Extraordinary Education of Nicholas Benedict right now, as I've read one of his earlier books The Mysterious Benedict Society and the Perilous Journey. I've realised I never posted about it, so I'm doing it now ( Read more... )