schopflin's reviews
717 reviews

I'm not a fan of short stories as a genre but I am a huge fan of Jane Gardham's. Her writing is so clever, somewhere between human observation and uncanny weirdness, that I couldn't not enjoy this. 

I've read a lot of books on the topic of how we organise our knowledge to make it manageable and this is without doubt the most entertaining book I have read on the subject. Part of me felt a pang as it's a version of a book I would like to have written myself. But better - full of reflective insights that go beyond the book history (and the humour). My one complaint is that he skates slightly over subject headings - how they are chosen, how people decide to divide up the world (in technical terms, he doesn't touch on thesauri and taxonomies). But that is probably another book. 

This isn't a beautifully-written book, but it's an honest testimony to the author's experience. She captures both the lives of the Polar inhabitants and also her own reactions, wishing they conformed to her childhood memories and her fears for their future. I learned a lot, including about a 1957 nuclear accident, and it's worth remembering that these people noticed ice thinning decades before climate change was accepted as real. 

I found this book strangely uncompelling. I left it for a bit and really struggled to get back into it. I found it so hard to care about the characters or what they did. However it is well-written and by the end I was drawn in. What happens towards the end of the book is powerfully told. I appreciate that as a heterosexual woman I may be missing something specific to gay literature. 

I read a lot of family holocaust memoirs - these days usually written by descendents of the victims. This is a really excellent example - well-researched and written, full of interesting history but also reflective about memory and how we tell our family stories. Highly recommended.

This book does not quite deliver on the promise of the opening chapter, which suggests a deeper exploration into the societal ethics behind our decisions to re-use, recycle and chuck objects once we can't or won't use them anymore. However, it is instead, a history of the industrial and other processes by which we recycled and repurposed. The book takes a reverse chronological approach, sometimes focusing in on certain moments: 20th century agricultural developments that led to the BSE crisis, the two world wars, the dissolution of the monasteries, sometimes pure industrial history. It is well-written and funny and highly recommended for anyone interested in the history of daily life 

Enjoyable but not riveting. There's a lot of vocational awe in librarianship and a lot of burned out professionals who reject it. I don't want to dislike the book just because Orlean loves public libraries so much. The 'was it arson' story was more intriguing and the history also interesting. 

This is a dark book that's not easy to love. The reader knows the secrets but other people don't which makes it tense rather than suspenseful. The narrator is brought to life and many other characters were believable and/ or amusing but the female love interest was not. 

This book relates to my PhD thesis and I had to put it aside when brain fog meant I couldn't give it the attention it deserved. So glad that I picked up momentum again. Nearly all the chapters are entertaining, some humerous, and all showing a great love of books as objects. The chapter on footnotes was really a literary history, rather than a paratextual one, as if footnotes were too obvious to write about as a concept. Conversely, the endleaves chapter was at the dry end of book production history. This book is possibly a niche pleasure but a joy nonetheless and a beautiful object in itself. 

This is a good one, clever, funny, sometimes moving, with a great sense of place. It took time to build suspense but ended up a pageturner.