Category Archives: book reviews

book reviews, running

Running book review: The Art of Running Faster by Julian Goater and Don Melvin

I have mixed feelings about this book, first published in 2012. Most runners want to run faster. But how? Julian Goater, 1981 National Cross Country champion, shares his insights in this title. 

With a mixture of anecdote and specific training advice, he expands on six components of fitness: speed, suppleness, strength, stamina, skill and psychology. Some of his advice is uncontentious: do core strength training, for example, and do different types of training sessions including fartleks (short bursts of speed within a run), intervals, long runs and recovery runs. He is a enthusiast for cross country because “it gives you all-over, full-body fitness and resilience that will help you enormously when you run on quicker surfaces.”

All the above makes sense to me, but I am less sure about his advocacy of training twice a day. “To fit in the variety of training sessions you need, run twice a day most days,” he writes. This is not to get in more mileage overall, but more variety of short sessions.

Goater’s overall philosophy seems to me well summarised in a quote he references from Olympic gold medalist Sebastian Coe: “I’ve always felt that long, slow distance produces long, slow runners.” Goater feels that runners all too often get in plenty of miles but get too comfortable running at a steady pace and do not do enough speed work; and speed work, he says, must be above race pace otherwise it is useless. In fact it must be well above race pace. “To be effective, even your slowest speedwork should be done faster than your best pace for the distance below the one you are aiming for. If you are training for 10K, run your long sustained-speed repetitions at a faster pace than you can sustain for 5K,” he writes.

The author also states that “ideally, at least 80 percent of your running should be done at a comfortable cruising pace – but not just jogging.”  So he is not recommending speedwork above all else.

I did enjoy the book and especially Goater’s recollections of Coe, David Bedford, Steve Cram and other runners of his day. I think it could help me to run faster, if only thanks to his insistence on purposeful training and encouragement to put in more effort.

That said, I note the lack of references to scientific studies of the impact of different types of training. Rather, Goater relies on his own experience as a runner and a coach. 

A good book, but best read alongside other more rigorous training guides.

The Art of Running Faster by Julian Goater an Don Melvin (ISBN 978-0-7360-9550-1)

book reviews, running

Running book review: Run your best Marathon by Sam Murphy

I like this book and recommend it, perhaps even for those not intending to run a marathon, or not yet.

Murphy is a runner and journalist, and takes the trouble to explain the science and to back up her statements with references to credible research. This is important because there are a surprising (to me) number of unresolved questions for those who want to optimize their running. Stretching, for example, before or after a run. “I’ve yet to find any evidence that stretching – of any kind – actually makes you run faster,” says Murphy. Does it reduce injury? “No clear effect,” she writes; but adds that there is evidence that if you think it helps, it does.

I would still call this matter of stretching unresolved. Julian Goater and Don Melvin, in their 2012 book The Art of Running Faster, have an entire chapter on the subject and say that “You do need to stretch – regularly … in my experience regular stretching is the key to avoiding injury.”

Murphy also has a down-to-earth section on how to choose trainers. “Many of the claims made about how shoes can protect or correct your feet are exaggerated or just plain wrong,” Murphy writes, with reference to research. She does confirm though that those super expensive carbon-fibre plate shoes are faster, but also notes some downsides. Comfort is the most important thing, she feels. I also like this great tip: when buying shoes, take out the insoles and stand on them. “Your whole foot should be within the boundary of the insole,” she says, otherwise you will have cramping which can be a disaster (it was for me).

The book takes the reader through the art and science of training, and then offers a set of training plans. She categorizes the plans as full throttle (training five days a week), steady state (mostly four days a week) and minimalist (mostly three days a week). In each category there are plans for experienced, and first timer. Runs are described as easy, tempo, marathon pace and so on; but you have to work out the exact pacing yourself, for which there is extensive guidance, as this depends on your capabilities and targets. 

These schedules are not as demanding as those in the classic book Advanced Marathoning by Pete Pfitzinger and Scott Douglas, nor is Murphy’s book as technical. Experienced runners would likely benefit more from the Pfitzinger and Douglas book; yet having read both, I still found Run your best Marathon useful.

Where this title wins though is in its approachability, down to earth style, and coverage of those small details which experienced runners seem just to know, but rarely explain. This is especially true in the second half of the book, about practicalities, body maintenance, how to choose a race, and nutrition/hydration. There is advice on exactly what to eat and drink, and how much, even down to tips like how to drink while running, without choking or coughing. There is also a complete checklist of what you might need for race day, though I am not sure about the bin liner she suggests for keeping dry before the race!

The book is very approachable and especially suitable for those contemplating their first marathon (as I am). Much of it applies to other distances as well, certainly longer runs of 10 miles or more, and there is so much general running advice that it may be worth a read even for those who have no intention of subjecting their bodies to a gruelling 26.2 mile race.

Run your best Marathon by Sam Murphy (Bloomsbury, ISBN 978-1-4729-8952-9)

book reviews, running

Running book review: The Race against Time by Richard Askwith

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I picked up this book, sub-titled “Adventures in late-life running”, because it seemed a good fit for my own situation, having taken up running as I approach retirement age.

It is not quite what I expected. Askwith’s first love is fell running, which he used to do intensively when younger. He recounts in the first chapter how he returned for a reunion fell run, now in his early sixties, and his reflections on the toll of age on his performance and that of his friends. 12 of them came for the reunion but only 4 actually ran, the others declaring themselves unfit for more than walks and socialising.

What we get in the subsequent chapters is a series of portraits of older runners, most much older than their sixties, backed up with interviews: why do they run in old age, how do they train, what is their story?

There are also interviews with experts on the subject of old age and fitness, and the whole book is punctuated with Askwith’s reflections on aging, mortality, and a few of his own recent experiences of running.

Curiously this is a book which I enjoyed less as it went on. Askwith’s constant self-deprecation becomes tiresome, and he seems almost unaware of the frustrating contradictions which he presents. How much should you train? Not too much and focus on HIIT (high intensity interval training) according to an interview with Peter Herbert. – you can read more about his approach here. Yet we also hear from the amazing Tommy Hughes a world record (for age) marathon runner and how he runs 20 miles a day in training. Or by contrast Angela Copson, who according to the book hardly trained at all for the 2007 London Marathon, other than running alongside her husband riding a bike, but achieved under four hours as a sixty year old woman.

It is all fairly confusing if you come to the book looking for advice on how to run well as an older person; and in fact you should look elsewhere for that kind of advice.

On the other hand, Askwith does put in the hard work of going out and interviewing numerous interesting older runners and for that, the book is well worth a read.

https://amzn.to/3LGn44d

book reviews, books, reviews, tech, Uncategorized

Reimagining Collaboration by Phil Simon

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This is a book about collaboration in the new era of Zoom, Teams, Slack and other such tools – not that they are completely new, but the pandemic and enforced remote working caused a huge boom in usage and some permanent changes in the way people work together. Author Phil Simon is a US specialist in business communications, and associated with the Agile methodology of software development – quite appropriate for this book, since collaboration is at the heart of Agile.

There are a few themes here. Simon believes that organisations need strong collaboration in order to thrive, and personally I think that is spot on. He spends some time distinguishing between collaboration and other related but different things like communication (a pre-requisite but insufficient on its own), or co-operation which can be a passive relationship; people can co-operate without actually collaborating.

Despite all the this, the main topic of the part 1 of this book, I am not sure that Simon ever nails what collaboration really is, at least not in this book. He has a go at it and there are many examples given of what it is not, but it remains, in my mind, a bit elusive. I did like his metric of organizational health: “The ability to rally around a common vision, execute effectively, and create a culture of innovation.”

Simon does show a good understanding of the human factor in productivity. He talks about managers versus makers, and how managers feel the need to communicate often with many people, while makers need to reduce distraction and focus on a task; I am not sure if he had software development in mind but this is a good description of what developers need.

Part 2 then gets to the heart of the book: better collaboration through technology. The key concept Simon uses is what he calls a “collaboration hub,” meaning any of a number of tools which form a central internet-connected space where users can interact with one another. This includes what the author calls the big three, Slack, Teams and Zoom, as well as other applications such as Expensify or Canva.  

The author is a user of Slack and of Google Docs and while he shows a commendable neutrality in the sense that he considers other tools such as Teams equally effective, adding that “It’s fair to call the similarities around today’s internal collaboration hubs remarkable,” his greater depth of knowledge of the tools he mainly uses does show. There is really much more about Slack than about Teams, and that is something to be aware of. Teams users can still benefit from the book but less so than Slack users.

There is a big theme here though which is that the author considers email, especially internal email, a blocker to collaboration. He gives reasons, including that inboxes tend to die when an individual leaves the company; that email is gaffe-prone since a careless email, or a careless reply-all, cannot be unsent; and that emailing attachments like spreadsheets leads to multiple forks of the same data. In fact, toward the end of the book Simon remarks that “Effective, long-term collaboration cannot take place via email. Period.” He also recommends ditching internal email completely.

While I have some sympathy with this view, I think it is overdone. I reminded myself that one of the most successful collaborative projects of all time, the Linux kernel, is based on email lists. 

Still, Simon is quite correct, a collaboration tool with channels for team members has lots of advantages over email, gathering all the communications in one spam-free place and making search much easier.

Part three of the book is called “moving from theory to practice” and contains lots of discussion about how organizations can move towards using collaboration hubs and what can go wrong. Then part four peeks into the future and envisages smarter collaboration hubs which use AI to book meetings for us, automatically transcribes meetings and sends automatic alerts to Slack channels.

There is plenty of wisdom though I could have done with more on practical questions about how to get the most from Slack or Teams. How many channels or Teams should you have? When should you have a video conference versus a message chat? Should we have our collaboration hubs always open or sign out sometimes? Who should be able to create a channel, or should anyone? And what more advanced or intricate features of the products are worthwhile?

I enjoyed Simon’s willingness to be blunt at times, as well as some amusing reflections like “In my consulting days, I often saw project managers call meetings essentially because they were bored.”

Towards the end of the book we also get this: “Just because the discussion or task takes place in a hub doesn’t mean that it’s truly collaborative.” I agree. What then is the magic that enables an organization to be collaborative? In the end it is corporate culture rather than tools that matter most. I think the author recognizes that, but after reading the book, I am still not clear about the best way to get to the collaborative culture to which we should aspire.

Thanks to Netgalley for an electronic review copy of this title

apple, book reviews, books, professional, tech

Book review: After Steve by Tripp Mickle

This is billed as a book about a company, but is more accurately described as about two people, Tim Cook and Jony Ive, respectively CEO and former Chief Design Officer at Apple, one of the world’s biggest and most profitable companies. The author Tripp Mickle is a reporter at the Wall Street Journal where he covered Apple for four years.

Mickle has a thesis: that under Cook Apple’s profitability has flourished but its design-led innovation has faltered, damaged in 2011 when co-founder Steve Jobs died at the age of 56. “It’s unclear if design will ever regain its position as the dominant voice over product direction,” he writes. In his epilogue, Mickle says that “Cook’s aloofness and unknowability made him an imperfect partner for an artist who wanted to bring empathy to every product.” The author mentions several times that Cook “seldom went to the design studio to see Ive’s team work.”

The book has amazing detail and represents the outcome of interviews with “more than two hundred current and former Apple employees” supplemented by further interviews with their family members, friends, suppliers of Apple, competitors, and government officials. There is lots of dialogue in the accounts of key incidents, drawn either from recordings or “reconstructed based on the recollections of people familiar with the events described.” As you read, you feel immersed in the company. It is a great achievement, particularly (as the author also notes) considering that “at Apple, current and former employees adhere to a strict code of silence.” There is a thick section of notes and references.

After Steve then is essential reading for Apple watchers. That said, I have a couple of reservations. At 512pp this is a lengthy work and for me, too long. It is occasionally repetitive, the writing is professional but at times pedestrian. Further, if your interest is in Apple the company rather than Cook and Ive, it is overly focused on those two people.

This last point is perhaps why Mickle misses the impact of Apple Silicon, the series of ARM-based processors which began with the A series and took over from Intel as the technology in Mac computers from November 2020 with the launch of the M1. Recently Apple has announced the M2 with claimed performance improvements of up to 18% for the CPU and 35% for the GPU, compared to the M1.

Apple Silicon matters because it dramatically improves over x86 in its power/performance ratio, making the company’s laptops and iPads a delight compared to their competition. It may not be design-based, and it builds on ARM and the work of others, but it is a huge advance and gives the company’s hardware an edge over its Windows and Android competition that is hard to counter. Johny Srouji, in charge of Apple Silicon? Not mentioned by Mickle.

I would have preferred the book to be shorter (though researchers may be glad of its detail). What of its central thesis? Mickle makes the point that Apple Watch has a disappointing lack of focus, which I agree with, and that projects like the Apple electric car appear to have faltered. The Beats acquisition had a mixed outcome, and this was a puzzle to me too. Apple did not need Beats, its culture was alien, and my sense is that Apple Music would have flourished equally well without it.

I do think though that since Jobs Apple has developed something with iPhone-level impact and that is Apple Silicon and the M series in particular. I also think that Mickle misses something of the big picture. Buying a smartphone or computer? There is the Android jungle, or the Windows jungle, or Apple. For many it is hardly a choice; and the fact that this is more than ever true more than a decade after the passing of Jobs is huge credit to those involved and makes the accusation “how Apple became a trillion-dollar company and lost its soul” ring just a bit hollow.

Bob Dylan, book reviews, books

The World of Bob Dylan edited by Sean Latham

This book describes itself as the “first published project to emerge from the Institute for Bob Dylan Studies at the University of Tulsa”. This institute is linked to the Bob Dylan archive which assembles over 100,000 items including audio and video recordings, essays, poems, photographs, correspondence and more. The archive has Dylan’s support and he described it as “a great honour.” The purpose of the archive is both public display and academic research. Sean Latham, editor of this title, is director of the institute as well as a professor of English at the adjacent University.

Latham says the purpose of the book is to get different perspectives on “understanding the depth, complexity and legacy of Dylan’s music, while at the same time setting out an entirely new agenda for writing, research and invention.” That second goal sounds ambitious and I am not sure exactly what Latham means, except insofar as academic writing about pop music still seems something of a novelty. There is always that question: are we taking all this too seriously? Those of who have grown up with Dylan’s work are too close to it to know; we may in fact be at some kind of “peak Dylan” as the adolescents of the sixties and seventies are now the professors and writers – and yes, there are plenty of professors here, seventeen if I counted them right, along with a journalist or two, and Dylan fan and author Andrew Muir. The Dylan of Ballad of a Thin Man didn’t have much time for professors, but hey, the times they are a changin’.

There are 27 essays here, with five sections: biography, the musical genres Dylan drew on, Dylan’s work and its place in culture, political contexts, and finally Dylan’s legacy. The title, by no coincidence, is the same as that of a 4-day symposium that took place at the end of May 2019, and some of the material, such as the chapter by Griel Marcus, is drawn directly from that event.

We kick off with a rather selective chronology, then Andrew Muir takes us through the biographies: Scaduto, Shelton, Spitz, Heylin (“it so far outclasses its predecessors that it might as well be the first”), Sounes, and mention of some others. Enjoyed this. Then we get Latham on Dylan’s songwriting, a challenging topic, and a piece that to me does not quite capture its subject. Then comes a chapter on Dylan’s singles, or ten of them: I couldn’t make sense of this one, why include Tangled up in Blue, which is hardly single material even though it was a (rather unsuccessful) one, but not Lay Lady Lay or Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door which work well as singles? And that is it for Part 1.

Part 2 on genres opens with an essay on folk music by Ronald D Cohen, then Griel Marcus on the Blues, based on his lecture. The Marcus piece is a bit odd in print, not least because it says “Bob Dylan’s Lovesick Bournemouth October 1 1997 plays.” There is always YouTube.

The third section is the best. Here we get Raphael Falco on Dylan’s visual arts; interesting because Falco is a professor of English writing a book on Dylan and Imitation: Originality on trial, and he picks up on the fact that many of Dylan’s paintings are based not on what he saw on his travels, as he claims, but on photographs or pictures by other people. “Dylan’s paintings of photographs that are themselves paintings provoke new (and largely overlooked) questions about imitation as an aesthetic practice,” writes Falco. This is followed by a chapter specifically about borrowing, by Professor of English Kevin Dettmar, author of the Cambridge Companion to Bob Dylan. Dettmar is perhaps needlessly verbose, but I did enjoy it when he wrote “Although the release of Love and Theft perhaps represents the apex of Dylan’s intertextual creative process, it also coincided with the burgeoning corpus of searchable online digital texts and the growing sophistication of the Google search engine, under whose scrutiny the songwriter’s entire catalog has been revealed to be full of patches and duct tape.”

There are two chapters on Dylan and religion, one on Judaism by Elliot R Wolfson, and one Christianity by Andrew McCarron, author of a book on Dylan’s “religious identities.” I enjoyed them both; and liked that McCarron by no means focuses only on Dylan’s most overtly evangelistic phase but writes about “a man whose connection to God has changed as he has aged,” calling his chapter “An Exegesis of Modern Times”, a 2006 album. McCarron also, correctly I believe, observes how Dylan combines sexuality with spirituality and infuses women with holy powers; though it seems this did not always ensure good behaviour towards women which might have been an intriguing thread to follow.

The sections on politics and on legacy did not work so well for me; but I was interested in the final chapter, by Mark A Davidson who is Archives Director of the American Song Archives in Tulsa including the Bob Dylan Archive. Tulsa, he notes, has become the “center of the Bob Dylan universe,” quoting an article in Rolling Stone, and in one sense it is hard to disagree.

Oddly, this is also my biggest disappointment with The World of Bob Dylan, that there is relatively little here in terms of examination of the archive. There are occasional intriguing remarks like “in the case of a song like Jokerman, from his 1983 album Infidels, Dylan wrote and revised the song over the course of nineteen pages; “ I would love to know more about this, and will look forward to future books that explore some of these newly uncovered artistic treasures.

The World of Bob Dylan, like most collections of essays, is good in parts, and an effective taster for further work from some of the authors included.

book reviews, books

Karachi Vice by Samira Shackle

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Karachi is the largest city in Pakistan (though not its capital) and among the largest cities in the world. It is also a troubled city; and Karachi Vice tells a bit of its story through accounts of the lives of five people. Safdar is an ambulance driver for a charity called Edhi; Parveen a resident and activist from Lyari, a densely populated area fought over by rival gangs ; Siraj a map researcher whose research into water resources make him vulnerable to attack by those with, um, business interest in controlling water supplies; Jannat a woman from a village near Karachi who tells of its near-destruction because of illegal land possession by a private developer; and Zille a crime reporter who lives for the thrill of real-time reporting on notable incidents. Some names have been changed.

The book is astonishing and has the feel of authenticity since it is based on the actual experiences of these people. It is also something of a dark book, as you would expect from the title. It is a somewhat disjointed read, particularly in the first half of the book, since the various stories are interspersed; you read a chapter on one, then on another, than back to the first, and so on. There is a common thread though, and it all begins to make sense when you go back to re-read the prologue, having finished the rest of the book. There we find a timeline of major events as well as the background. Karachi, Shackle explains, “has been home to a series of complex and ever-evolving conflicts, with sectarian and ethnic resentment mingling with politics and organized crime.” The author concludes that “this is the front line of global urbanization at its most unforgiving.” It is important for all sorts of reasons, demonstrating the human cost of corruption and sectarian conflict.

The tone is measured and matter of fact though you cannot read it without feeling angry at times. One incident that I found particularly stirred my emotion was the account of the 2012 Baldia Town fire, a fire in a textile factory where “all but one exit had been locked by bosses who did not want the workers to take breaks or steal the products … anyone who made it to the front gate of the compound found it locked too.” Many lives were lost.

Karachi Vice has been a long time coming. Author Samira Shackle is a freelance journalist and editor of the New Hamanist, a rationalist quarterly. Shackle is based in London but her mother is a Karachiite. Shackle lived there between 2012 and 2013, a tumultuous period ahead of the Karachi Operation, an effort to stem the violence and crime and one that had considerable success. Shackle was also in Karachi following police patrols in 2015 and 2016 and has first-hand knowledge of incidents like those she describes. In 2018 she won a book prize enabling her to get the book deal that has enabled publication. Parts of the book have been previewed in the Guardian as long ago as 2015.

While I highly recommend Karachi Vice for anyone with an interest in world affairs, I do not find the approach of the book entirely to my taste. I preferred the Guardian pieces where the main subjects are referred to by surname rather than forename; I could have done with a bit more background; the jumping around between subjects makes things hard to follow at times.

None of that matters. Shackles tells real stories from people who get too little attention; the book is gripping, sad but also in a way inspiring, thanks to those moments when courage, love and human decency shine despite dark times.

See more reviews on Amazon UK

book reviews, books, music

Carole King’s Tapestry by Loren Glass

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This title in Bloomsbury’s thoughtful 33 1/3 series is by Loren Glass, a professor of English at the University of Iowa in the USA. Writing about music is always a curious business – “dancing about architecture” –  and Glass takes a personal approach, dedicating the book to his mother and describing his memory of “the singer songwriters whose albums [she] played as I was growing up.” Tapestry was one of her favourites and Glass links it to the sexual revolution of the sixties and the feminism which followed. He observes that King favours the term “woman” over “girl” and how she sang as “the subject, not the object, of sexual experience and desire.” Tapestry, says Glass, “heralded a new, more equitable era for parents and their children.” He also writes that “the peak years of the women’s liberation movement coincide with the apogee of the long-playing album as an art form.”

There are five chapters in this short volume. One of the slightly odd things about the book is that each chapter feels almost complete in itself. The introduction is an essay in its own right. Next comes Maturity, giving the biographical background about King and her turbulent relationship with husband and lyricist Gerry Goffin. Then comes Trilogy, describing the three albums which King calls a trilogy in her autobiography: Now that everything’s been said, Writer, and Tapestry itself. Glass describes the recording of Tapestry and then gives a song by song commentary. Chapter 3 (or 4) is Celebrity, looking at King’s profile and career following Tapestry. The book closes with Legacy, looking at King’s later more retrospective career and reflecting on the significance of Tapestry today.

Glass goes over the top from time to time. ““No album before or since has been able to speak so intimately to so many for so long,” he says. And later that, “Only the Beatles have achieved this degree of cross-generational appeal … but most of us grow out of our Beatles phase while Tapestry endures.” I could do without the hyberbole; it is of course a fine album but one of the curious things is that it was James Taylor who better caught the magic of You’ve got a friend, in my opinion, and Aretha Franklin (for whom the song was written) who has the best performance of (You Make Me Feel) Like a Natural Woman.

I enjoyed the book and learned a lot about Carole King, Tapestry, and the other albums Glass covers in some detail. I also appreciated the personal approach. On the other hand, I am not convinced the book is structured in the best way; it seems repetitive at times and I would have liked a sharper focus and more detail on the album itself, perhaps gathering together some of the fragmented commentary into a longer song-by-song analysis. Still a good read for anyone who loves this classic album.

See more reviews on Amazon.co.uk

book reviews, books

Her Last Holiday by C L Taylor

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C L Taylor takes us into a world of needy people in this tale of discovery and self-discovery, as a woman (Fran) sets out to discover what happened to her much younger sister who went on a holiday/extended therapy session two years earlier but never returned. The official verdict was suicide but with no body discovered and the fact that the organiser of the event, Tom Wade, was imprisoned for the manslaughter of two others at the same event, there is every reason to suspect that the full story has not been told. When Wade is released and organises a new retreat, Fran attends under an assumed name, determined to find out more.

The novel is billed as a psychological thriller, the tension builds as strange and scary things occur on the retreat and you cannot figure out who is really responsible. It reminded me of one of those Agatha Christie stories where a bunch of people are all in a lovely house together, with surface politeness but all sorts of friction and emotion underneath. The desire to know more kept me turning the pages. The story is told through the eyes of three women: Fran, her missing sister Jenna, and Tom’s wife Kate. We jump back in time for the Jenna sections, with helpful chapter sub-heads saying “two years ago”. Several people on the current retreat were also at the previous one, so we gradually learn more about them from these different perspectives.

Tom and Kate pitch their holiday retreats as “soul shrink”, events for hurt people to give them a new start. We join some of the counselling sessions, and in describing these the author shows deep knowledge of the subject; they are convincingly told and make the book though-provoking in terms of the ways people damage one another (and themselves) and the somewhat dysfunctional families they belong to. There is ambiguity in the telling: are Tom and Kate charlatans making promises to their vulnerable guests that cannot be fulfilled? Or are they doing good work (manslaughter and missing person incidents aside) that really does improve the lives of others? This is deliberate and even at the close of the book, when the facts of the matter are revealed, the reader is, I believe, meant still to have questions about what is sincere and what is fake.

I love books that challenge me to do some thinking, and this is one of them. Part of me though would have liked the loose ends to be more firmly tied up; there is also an incident described in the first chapter for which we never get full resolution.

Great read though, exciting, well-written, thought-provoking and insightful.

Her Last Holiday
is published by Avon Books on 29th April 2021, ISBN 978-0008379223

book reviews, books

Rhys Bowen: A love story for Venice

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I loved this book; if anything it is too short. It begins with Lettie, a young English girl, and her visit to Venice in 1928, accompanied by her prim and stuffy aunt, who is determined to protect her charge from anything modern or lively, and especially from interacting with strangers. Needless to say the delightfully named Aunt Hortensia’s does not altogether succeed in her endeavours and Lettie forms a brief but life-changing connection with a Venetian, leading us into a story that spans the decades, as we jump to the modern day and follow the story of Caroline, who is charged by her great aunt Lettie to visit Venice to uncover … something.

This is an easy and compelling read which I finished in one sitting. The bulk of the book concerns Lettie and her time in Venice as Europe was plunged into the tragedy of the second world war. The war is mostly at a distance but casts a shadow over everything, and author Rhys Bowen recounts some dark moments.

Reflecting on the book I am struck by how Bowen transports us to Venice, the city and its people, which in many ways is the heart of the story. She has obvious affection for this unique and wonderful place, its delicious food (if you know where to go), its beautiful works of art, its addiction to religion, and even its less savoury aspects, smells, frequent rain, and occasional “acqua alta” when the city is flooded.

The charm of the ancient and magical city more than makes up for what are perhaps slightly thin (though still likeable) characters. The only negative for me is that the ending was a little abrupt; I would have liked a little more detail about the aftermath.

No complaints though; I reviewed this book on a drab November day in lockdown and spending a few hours in Venice was a most welcome and enjoyable respite.

A Venice Sketchbook is published by Lake Union Publishing on 13th April 2021.