Booksale!

I know many authors think that selling books second-hand is selling them (the authors) cheap, but it may also have a beneficial effect; introducing readers to new authors (who then go out and buy more by the same person).

Authors aside, we are readers. We (I speak for myself for those people who read this who like reading books, if you don't, please ignore this post. In fact if you don't, you probably aren't reading!) like to read books!

In clearing my house ready for a move, I had two bagfulls of books (having already taken several loads to the local charity shop) and thought I would sell them at work. Then a thought occurred to me - to sell them for charity.

I put a note round at my employers and not only did I advertise the sale, but I had more contributions of books! So at lunchtime today I spent an hour and a half in a meeting room surrounded by books: including the true story of a call girl and XML programming (in Chinese). So plenty of variety!

I am delighted to say that my kind colleagues helped me raise over £100 for Alzheimer's Research UK. Oh, and I picked up a few books for myself.

But the most important part of the exercise was the personal stories I heard, and of how Alzheimer's has touched so many people's lives. The stories were, of course, not happy ones. Suffering is part of the human condition. But wouldn't it be nice if we could, in time, actually remove this one from the list?

I know there are many good causes out there, and I have indeed shown my support for conservation well beyond my employment in that area. However, if you have five minutes and even just five pounds, your support could make a tremendous difference to the long term solution for curing dementia.

The most amazing blog party on earth!

It's over - a whole month of blog party on Nadine's site, - and it was amazing!

It had visitors from 56 countries! Authors gave away 31 books... and there were not only many participants in each daily 'party' (with some days running to nearly 100 comments) but hundreds of 'lurkers' who just hung around and watched the fun.

Nadine is not only a good writer, she's an amazing friend to writers all over the world. She shares her experience and wisdom (I keep telling her she should charge for this!) and her blog party was incredible - giving other authors exposure, new site visits and more sales.

When it comes to writing, people think it's a lonely world (visions of dusty attics, clattering typewriters and smoke-ridden, dusty dens), but the internet has changed that. Writing is usually a solo experience, but with forums like http://www.mywriterscircle.com/ and authors like Nadine out there, it isn't like that any more.

Visit her blog, take a look through the posts, find out about some amazing books, and visit her website too. Spread the word, spread the love, and help independent (and mainstream too) writers:

http://www.nadinelaman.blogspot.com/

http://www.nadinelamanbooks.com/

Blog Party!

It's a blog party! Sounds a bit like 'block party', doesn't it? And has some similarities - Nadine's Blog Party is bringing together bloggers from all over the world to have a knees up!

So much going on - I can't begin to cover it all here. The thing to do is visit Nadine's blog (First Draft) next week and join in the fun!

www.nadinelaman.blogspot.com

You can win one of my books (The Ghost Sniffer) on one of the days - check out Nadine's blog every day to see what you could win (and how!)

The Kathryn’s Beach Trilogy

Book review of the trilogy by Nadine Laman

I’m an avid reader and I read all genres, from sci-fi to biography, novels to history. I love to read and the key to me is a great story and ‘engagement’. Even if you don’t like the characters, you have to engage with them.

That’s what I loved about Nadine’s trilogy – I read Kathryn’s Beach and I felt that the active, first person style was very engaging. You are right there, in the moment, seeing the world through her eyes. The upsets, the challenges and the drama all feel very real when you are reading from the first person point of view, even though it is not that common a form. The story in Kathryn’s Beach is also one that engages – you understand the distress she feels and why she had to ‘run’, the curiosity as strange events unfold, and grief and joy as different action takes place in Kathryn’s life.

Nadine has a blog where she talks about her writing at www.nadinelaman.blogspot.com and you can buy her books off her website www.nadinelaman.com.

Once I’d read Kathryn’s Beach, I just had to read the others. High Tide, the second book, still used the ‘drag you along’ style and the shocking events that happened, and how Kathryn handled them, still felt personal. Though maybe you don’t agree, as a reader, with everything she says or does, you are taken along by the story and follow her life changing encounters with a family that you kind of wish you had, and are very glad you don’t have.

The final book, which we had to wait a bit for (keeping us in suspense! Everyone I know who read the other two books was dying to find out what happened in Storm Surge) kept the character strong – you knew it was Kathryn (like recognising an old friend) and wanted to find out how she coped with a complete life style change and some quite tragic, and heart-warming events.

From start to finish, I wanted to know what happens, I wanted to follow Kathryn on her journey and I enjoyed meeting the people she interacted with along the way. The reader gets comfy with people like Mr Goldstein, the elderly and kindly neighbour, Karen, the ex-boss who is a bit of a fixer, the demure Mother Elizabeth (I never met any nuns, but I believe this one) and the close companion Maggie, who is lost so early on.

All I can say is buy Kathryn’s Beach – and you will want to read the whole trilogy.

Nadine has an excellent blog where she talks about her writing: www.nadinelaman.blogspot.com and you can buy her books off her website at www.nadinelamanbooks.com

The Ghost by Robert Harris

As well as being a writer and musician, I am also a prolific reader - so I thought I'd offer a couple of my own thoughts on 'good reads' I have had recently.

So - I'm starting with a book that I picked up without any recommendation, called The Ghost. It's not what you think - it isn't horror or even supernatural, it's about an individual engaged in the fascinating occupation of ghost writing.

The novel was about a ghost writer called in at the last minute to write the autobiography of a former UK Prime Minister. His predecessor came to a sticky end and this is just the start of a far more complicated story that slowly unfolds. I won't give away the plot, but I will tell you how much I enjoyed the book!

It was racy, politically smart, well written, engaging and the main character was very easy to identify with (because I like writing? Maybe!). The PM was excellent too - shades of Blair, but it could have been any contemporary British PM (I had a very pleasant mental image of Hugh Grant as he played the PM in the film 'Love Actually').

The story carries you on at a good pace, has a great ending and is written in a style that I personally found easy to read. It was a book I wanted to read all at once but my reading habits don't usually allow that. I won't trot out 'couldn't put it down' or the other usual corny comments that tend to grace the world of book reviewing, but I will say it was an excellent book, a terrific story and I wouldn't hesitate in recommending it.

Genre? Well, it's a cracking good adventure story - but not in the traditional sense (no racing through deserts, but plenty of other action).

Here's the Amazon link to the book: The Ghost, Robert Harris

Enjoy!

If you like my book reviews - this is the first I've done (be gentle!), please pass this blog link on to others.

Against the odds

Having sworn never to blog - my friend Nadine has now started a blog! She's gone back on years of saying she'd never blog.

Here it is!

http://nadinelaman.blogspot.com/

She's a writer in North America (Arizona) and has written a series of three books about a lady called Kathryn. I've read the first two - waiting eagerly for the third due out later this year.

How well read are you?

The US list of the top 100 books - those I've read are in bold, those I want to read italics, and those I love in square brackets.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 [To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee]
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch-22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (I read lots of 'em, but not all!)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald - does audio book count?
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 [The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams]
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice's Adventures in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 [The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini]
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie-the-Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 MISSING - missing? Is that a book??
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 [The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon]
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby-Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - A. S. Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte's Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 [Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle]
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Want to join in a game of 'tag'?

You are supposed to:
Look at the list and:
1) Bold those you have read.
2) Italicise those you intend to read.
3) [Bracket] the books you LOVE.
4) Reprint this list on your own blog.

I'll 'tag' Nick because he introduced me to it. You can see his top 100 read, not read etc (he's read more than me).

Published at last!

"The ghost sniffer took its time..."

Back in March I did the recording for my first ever properly published work, "The Ghost Sniffer and other stories" - a collection of short ghost stories. The publisher is a small independent with fingers in many other pies, but the books arrived at last!

So now I have to market them - set up my website properly, add a shopping cart, send out promo copies and really push it. It's the start, I hope, of me getting writing properly.

Want to buy a copy?!!