schopflin's reviews
718 reviews

Pretty much what you would expect if you have read the first book and mostly as compelling. I only felt I was reading anecdote filler right at the end. A good book for when you aren't feeling well. 

Another well-plotted Maeve and Josh thriller. The tension between them continues. A good pageturner. 

What a wonderful book. I love Laura Cummings' writing and her intelligent exploration of memory and knowledge. This book had a ln extra appeal because I have a long-term love of 17th century Dutch art. Twenty-something me would have been very excited to read this, but would have struggled with the actual reading. With a more flexible fifty-something reading muscle, I found myself going back over paragraphs because the writing was so insightful and beautiful, and I didn't want to miss anything. 

Solnit is neither a psychogeographer nor a historian. While there is some history here, much of it fascinating, this is a ponderous book of essays on topics more or less related to walking. There were many insights but I did find she took a long time to say everything. It may be that some of the things that seem obvious, for example about women walking and suburbanisation, only seem so because of this book's influence over the last 20 years. Not an unalloyed pleasure but glad I have finally read it. 

I loved this book. It's clever, funny, informative and highly relatable despite its distance in time and location from me. The book is in the historic present throughout and in the earlier chapters has a 'child's eye' view, neither of which I like very much, but I enjoyed it here. Some may find the growing up story interweaved with politics a bit jarring but I feel it was appropriate. And Trapido never tries to pretend that she's writing from anything but a position of privilege. I much preferred it to Damon Algut's The Promise and that won the Booker... 

This was well written and translated, with complex well-drawn characters, but it was very hard to care about any of the characters. I loved the Stockholm setting. 

An entertaining enough and well-written mystery. It passed the time on a train journey but was curiously uninvolving. 
EDIT just upped my score because as 24 hours have passed I realise the characters were very well drawn and it was funny!

Absolutely excellent follow-up to the same author's Chernobyl. I am actually breathtaken to realise the risks taken in the post-war era, mostly for the sake of technological peacocking. Plokhiy tells the stories of the better-known disasters with the same fingertip-tension that he brought to his Chernobyl. His afterword is interesting. He is even-handed on the need for nuclear to take us away from fossil fuels and reduce carbon emissions. But I think he makes clear that the world is too politically unstable for something as dangerous as nuclear tractors to exist at all. But that's my take. 

I loved this book. Beautifully written, a gorgeous print and binding and full of information told with humour and elan. 

I was disappointed by this book. She had a good story to tell but I found her writing style clunky and full of clichés. It may have been a choice to reflect her awkward teenage self. I would still recommend it as I learned a lot from it about the Chinese experience in Britain.