Cramlington Book Club

Looking back over the books we have reviewed this year there seems to have been a lot of low scores. We usually have a plethora of 7's but so many books seems to have fallen below this 'average' score. Our chosen books have certainly been wide ranging, from golden oldies such as Agnes Grey and The Thirty Nine Steps to our first ever hard back, Eleanor Oliphant. We've had the true story of a doctor tragically dying from cancer to the filming of a (fake) true story in 1940's England. We've been bang on trend with Thirteen Reasons Why and Big Little Lies airing at the same time as we were reading them yet nothing really hit the spot. That was until Eleanor. It's time once again for the Big Review and this time its of 2017!!!!!!! January started with Agnes Grey by Anne Bronte. A slim read to lead us into 2017 which scored a 6.8 by the group. The blog also features the book that wasn't actually reviewed - Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte. February was...

I thought this was going to be the first inbetweeny of 2018 however The Kingmaker's Daughter was one of those books where you find yourself 'just reading one more chapter' and before you know it another hour has gone by. I don’t know why this book had hung round on my bookshelf for so long as I had really enjoyed the previous books in the Cousins' War series ( The Lady of the Rivers , The White Queen and The Red Queen). I didn’t suffer for the break in reading though and can easily recommend it as a standalone to anyone who hasn’t read the other books previously (do read The White Queen though it is rather good). I remember really disliking the Nevilles in the previous books yet I easily found myself liking Anne the central character this time round. Similarly Gregory never dipped beneath the surface of Elizabeth's icy exterior in this book (as Anne never really got to know her) whereas in The White Queen Elizabeth was central and her inner turmoil was c...

I'm finishing off this year with quite possibly the worst book I have read in a long time. Bought last Christmas as a present (sorry Jacqui!) I didn't squeeze it in before January and it felt wrong to read a book based around Christmas at any other time of the year. The premise of Mystery in White  was perfect, a snowed in train, a 1930s house where tea is laid on the table yet no one is at home, a handful of strangers forced together on Christmas Eve, classic Christie combination if you ask me. Yet about a quarter of the way through (still grasping to recall characters names) I realised Agatha Christie J Jefferson Farjeon was not. I found Maltby's character (the would be detective) most annoying. He knew everything before it had happened "You're going to tell us there was a body in the carriage next to you" "how did you know that" "you said you were escaping the train, you left in the snow and you are breathless" I'm paraph...

I suggested this book last year as our #OneRuleOfBookClub whereby we must read a Christmas book in December. I was outvoted that time for The Santa Klaus Murder but suggested it again this year and was thrilled when it met with little resistance. It intrigued me having heard about Matt Haig via his book about depression and then his very commercially successful How to Stop Time (not that Reasons to Stay Alive wasn't successful) why then would an author at the beginning of his career (or at least at the beginning of his career in the public eye) dip into children's books and not just any old children's books but Christmas children's books. Very risky. The book is very much a children's book, I actually read it straight through in no time at all. Yet where children's books have sometimes floundered when put in front of the group in the past this one didn't. Was this because it was a Christmas children's book as opposed to just a children's book...

I first heard about this when someone suggested it as a Book of the Month for book club. It didn't make the cut for the group however hearing a faint sniff of zombie I went and bought it from the Internet.  I have to confess reading this straight after the excellent World War Z was probably not the best thing to do. However whilst the two were both about zombies they were extremely different. ' The Girl ' was more of your typical 'it's the end of the world and we need to get to a safe haven' kind of book. In this respect it was more similar to the recently reviewed The End of The World Running Club than World War Z.  Like with 'Running Club' humankind had gone to sh!t with people turning on each other left right and centre despite the main characters trying to put differences aside to reach a common goal. Like with Running Club there was the inevitable betrayal with a few characters lost along the way and also a surprise repeat occurrence of Jaf...

My husband I have this thing about zombie films, we love them and so in an attempt to get my husband to read more I bought him World War Z a couple of birthdays ago. On the bookshelf it went, unread. I didn't feel like I could just pick it up and read it given that I had bought it for him but I hated the fact it was just sat there, unread. And I quite like zombies, and it was unread, and my husband was unlikely to read it............... so I picked it up and read it, in 3 days. It wasn't that I was trying to be all stealth like (read and replace before he notices) it was just really easy to read. The book was a series of peoples recollections of their experiences during the 'zombie war' that had taken place 10 years ago and had devastated the world and I loved how Brooks never slipped from this premise - from the forward to the dedication at the end of the book the reader was totally submersed in the fact that the war had taken place. Even the blurb at the back of th...

This hardback was given to me by my mum one Christmas as it featured the 8th Army of which my grandad was a part. I'm not sure to what extent he was involved with El Alamein but he was definitely in Africa and served under Monty. Band of Brothers is one of my favourite box sets, I love reading about history, particularly World War II and so this for many reasons was a book with my name stamped all over it It's obviously factual and is quite lengthy and so I wasn't expecting it to be sunlounger reading. I wasn't however expecting to need a dictionary to decode some of the pages. I have a degree, I am a solicitor, I read anything and everything constantly and consider myself to have reasonable intelligence yet even I had never come across words like sybaritic or grangiliquence. It alienated me as I'm sure it would do a lot of people and I really found myself frustrated by Dimbleby for writing in such a way as to make it so inaccessible. The soldiers he wrote abou...