This book stands out in the Sharpe series in that it is predominantly based in England and the only fighting occurs in the prologue and epilogue. That means that this book is entirely carried on storyline, without the frequent “kill some frogs” tactic that he uses to liven things up normally.
I mean, if the plot is getting dull, all I have to do is wheel on forty thousand frogs and mow them down - everyone’s happy again!
Such a good book!
I started it yesterday morning whilst Radio made a blog post. I tried maybe a chapter before succumbing to sleep yesterday evening, and then killed the rest of it during today.
The war is over, a vanquished Napoleon forced to abdicate and exiled to Elba.
One of Radio’s character quirks is to label things she’s never done as ’scary’.
I can agree that an awful lot of things that remain untried could be classed as ’scary’. For example, I’d be apprehensive about doing a tightrope walk over shark-infested water. I’m not sure that Radio’s fears really belong in this category, so, one by one, I’ve tried to encourage her to do ’scary’ things.
She’s now showered several times (a fear of running water causing her no end of misery when hotels don’t have baths and she has to stay there for a while), rowed a boat, driven a car a little bit, and has now been able to somewhat stymie her instinct to squeal if I raise her so much as an inch off the ground.
Yesterday was another occasion to demonstrate to her that she can do everyday things that she thinks are scary.
Heidi Dalibor, a 20-year-old resident of Grafton, Wisconsin, has the dubious distinction of having been arrested for not returning her library books.
Law enforcement gone too far? Opinions are divided.
I had a bit of a mission yesterday. I had to go out to someone who had a brain injury.
He’d been living with his parents, who helped him. His father recently turned 70 and was astute enough to acknowledge that, statistically, there aren’t a million years left for him, and he was now another year closer to leaving his son on his own.
By Bernard Cornwell
This was one of the books I recently took on holiday with me, and it was the first to be started during the journey.
I had been looking forward to it because, of the original series, it is the first appearance of Obadiah Hakeswill.
I wasn’t let down: He’s downright rotten here.
By Bernard Cornwell
This story was written at ITV’s request, since they wanted another programme to broadcast. Cornwell wasn’t able to finish the book in time to meet production deadlines, so the endings are very different.
By Dava Sobel
I was looking for a book on Galileo and found out that Dava Sobel had written one. Well, this had me expecting great things, because I read her brilliant book on longitude a couple of years ago.
This book is a little bit different to standard fare though. Galileo had two daughters. Both were born out of wedlock, so he sent them to a convent. One of them, the elder, Virginia, went by the convent name Suor Maria Celeste, and wrote frequent letters to her father throughout their lives, sometimes as many as two a week.
The author intersperses her narrative with letters from Maria Celeste throughout the book.
By Kenneth Katzner
Some sources cite 6809 languages in the world, a figure that I have quoted myself in presentations. This book, of course, only covers a fraction of them, going into any sort of detail in only about 200 cases.
I don’t particularly like social misfits who pontificate behind a keyboard because they have a bit more knowledge than you do about geek culture. You know the ones I mean: They’re better than you because they use Linux.
I had an issue with one of these types a few months back when we needed to talk about something, and I gave him a list of four instant-messenger programs that I use. He mailed back to say that we would have to talk via another programme that I didn’t have (Jabber), since he would only use ones that were open source. If you’re a business, however benevolent, you’re the enemy.
