Book Review: When The Earth Died

I have just finished reading “When The Earth Died” by Karl Mannheim.

When The Earth Died – Karl Mannheim

I bought this book in a second hand bookshop last summer while on holiday in Devon, and it attracted me because it is a science fiction title covering the possibility of the Earth dying while humans are still around.

The blurb reads:

“His breath was tearing his throat as he ran, a tall, massive figure of a man, like a shadow along the smooth side of he great green building. There were no sounds of pursuit – the Empire Police were too discreet for sirens or whistles. But they were there behind him, and not only behind him but all around him. This looked like being the last hole into which this quarry would be driven.“

The book focuses mainly on a man called Barry, who has escaped the clutches of the Empire Police and their brainwashing ways, and suddenly finds himself a vital part of a secret mission to escape Earth and the increasingly dangerous war happening between two great empires. He and the girl he seems to love end up part of a mixed crew of scientists and other hand-picked normal people, ready to form a new colony on the Moon and beyond.

There is a great deal of tension built up within the novel, with certain characters seeming to lose the plot and go a bit crazy, the suspect characters who turn out to be traitors, and those who seem to struggle with what’s right and wrong. There are a few minor characters, like the would-be colonists in the crew who we find out very little about, even though they are part of this special mission.

The main tension is that of the journey in the spaceship, which takes them to the Mood and other places, which is a very dangerous journey into the unknown, and the death of the Earth which seems to happen surprisingly quickly! Maybe a little bit unbelievable! The fact that it is the humans who destroy the planet is pretty scary!

The ending is as happy as it can be, given the circumstances of the novel!

I give it 7/10 because it seems original, if a little bit too short of get into great detail about everything. Worth a read if you fancy a different apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic type story!

Note: This book doesn’t seem to be in print any more, but is available online through Amazon and other online stores, and secondhand shops. My copy was published in 1972 and is a Five Star Paperback.

Book Review: The Etymologicon

I have just finished reading “The Etymologicon: A Circular Stroll Through The Hidden Connections Of The English Language” by Mark Forsyth.

“What is the actual connection between disgruntled and gruntled? What links organs to organised crime, California to the Caliphate, or brackets to codpieces? The Etymologicon springs from Mark Forsyth’s Inky Fool blog on the strange connections between words. It’s an occasionally ribald, frequently witty and unerringly erudite guided tour of the secret labyrinth that lurks beneath the English language, taking in monks and monkeys, film buffs and buffaloes, and explaining precisely what the Rolling Stones have to do with gardening.” (Blurb from the back of the book)

I love learning about the English Language, having studied it at university, and this book is an excellent source of information about where words come from! I love how everything links together and leads on to another word and yet another story about how that word came to exist.

It’s a fresh and easy to read book, unlike other language books which can sometimes be a bit laborious to read. This book starts at a random point in the circle of meaning, and follows the links until it returns back to the beginning of the book, which i think is very clever and shows, quite rightly, how interconnected the words of the English Language really are.

It goes from words of which i already know the origins, such as England coming from the Angles moving to Britain, to more obscure meanings, such as gormless. Gormless which came from gorm, a Scandinavian word for “sense”, and gome, a dialect word from Yorkshire, and which Emily Brontë used in “Wuthering Heights”, meaning “senseless”. Really fascinating stuff, if you like this sort of thing!

I liked this book so much that i went and bought the next book “The Horologicon: A day’s Jaunt Through The Lost Words Of The English Language” as well! But more about that book later!

I give it 9/10 because it is fascinating and really informative. It might not be useful or interesting to all people, but for me it is a great source of word origins and i learnt a lot of things i didn’t know!

Book Review: Five Children and It

I have just finished reading “Five Children and It” by E. Nesbit. 

I haven’t read this since i was a child but as i read it, the story came back to me and i remembered how silly it is! Not in a bad way, of course!

It’s really random how the children discover the Psammead in a gravel pit and ask it for wishes everyday. The Psammead is a bit of grumpy creature and warns them about the wishes bringing trouble but they still manage to make trouble for themselves!

Thankfully the wishes only last until sunset, which helps them out of a few sticky situations but still has repercussions, some good and some bad.

My favourite is when they wish for wings and end up stuck on top of a church tower at sunset when their wings disappear. Thankfully they manage to convince people to help them and the happy outcome of this is that the children’s family servant, Martha, ends up meeting her future husband.

I like how this book covers the idea of being able to wish for anything you want and the problems with having this freedom. It’s no surprise that the children wish to be beautiful and to have lots of money, but they soon find that these traits has unfortunate consequences. The moral of the story is that having everything you want isn’t as simple or as desirable as you would think!

I give it 8/10 because it is a classic children’s story which is a fun read!

February Reading Challenge: Literary Classics – The End

Today marks the end of my latest reading challenge, in which i planned to read as many literary classics a si could manage during February!

My list which i compiled for February is as follows:

• “Northanger Abbey” by Jane Austen (new read)
• “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” by Lewis Carroll (re-read)
• “The Secret Garden” by Frances Hodgson Burnett (new read, but seen the film)
• “A Tale of Two Cities” by Charles Dickens (new read)
• “Five Children and It” by E.Nesbit (re-read)
• “Anna Karenina” by Leo Tolstoy (new read)
• “Les Misérables” by Victor Hugo (new read)
• “Wuthering Heights” by Emily Brontë (re-read)

Out of these, i managed to -read “The Secret Garden” (See my Book Review for it) and “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” (see the Book Review), two stories which i am already familiar with!

I started reading “A Tale of Two Cities” but haven’t got very far with it, so i will carry on reading it!

As for the others, i didn’t get around to them, but February wasn’t a long month and i was reading LOTR for most of the month, but i intend to read them at some point in the near future!

At least i can tick off two of the books on the list though!

Book Review: The Secret Garden

I have just finished reading “The Secret Garden” by Frances Hodgson Burnett. I have read this book before, i think, but have always been familiar with the story due to loving the film version when i was little.

It was nice to read the book and i felt compelled to carry on reading as i was so eager to re-live the story again! I really enjoyed reading it and still think the story is as delightful as i used to find it when i was younger.

I love the characters develop and change through the book, with Mary being such a spoiled and disagreeable child at the start of the book and then becoming less self-centred and a nicer girl by the end. Colin is also the same but probably worse as he spent so much of his life as a pampered invalid.

I love how one garden with all its emerging beauty can change two children so much, and also, in turn, it has a profound effect on Mr Craven himself, although we only discover this towards the end of the book.

The character of Dickon plays a large part in helping Mary and Colin in becoming better people, with his charming ways and down-to-earth demeanour.  He charms creatures and is followed around by them, and he knows so much about plants and animals and is such a generally nice person that it is no surprise that the two spoiled children react so well to his way of thinking and living.

It is such a lovely story of childhood, loneliness, friendship and growing up, and it is clear to see why it is such a classic children’s story. I give it 8/10 because it entices you to keep on reading and makes you appreciate little things like flowers and so on.

Book Review: Alice’s Adventure’s In Wonderland

I have just finished re-reading “Alice’s Adventure’s in Wonderland” by Lewis Carrol. 

I read it a few times when i was a child, and thought i would see if i gained anything different on this read.

I am finally understanding why adult readers have said that they wondered if Carroll was a fan of opium: when i was a child i just thought the book was full of delightful random stuff, and now i just feel it’s full of total nonsense! It really reads as if the narrator is on something! It’s just full of totally bizarre characters and ideas!

Unfortunately, on this reading i feel that Alice is just plain irritating and stupid, and that every other creature in the book is right to get annoyed with her when she constantly interrupts whoever is speaking! It’s good that she has a mind of her own and keeps herself in control, but she maybe talks a little bit too much to herself all the way through the book! So maybe she actually is more insane than the Mad Hatter!

I can’t say i have always loved this book: despite loving fantastical stories, this book was always too confusing and weird for my liking, and my opinion hasn’t changed much now. I definitely dislike Alice more now!

I give this book a 7/10, because it is a classic children’s tale after all, and it is pretty unique, but i just don’t consider this to be one of the best books i’ve read, either as a child or as an adult!

Book Review: The Lord of the Rings

I have finally finished reading “The Lord of the Rings“! 

I was given the film tie-in set of Tolkien’s epic tale back in the early Noughties, and i tried to read it but gave up partway through the second book. It’s taken me 10 years to get around to reading it again, but after being prompted to read “The Hobbit” by a friend who raved about the book and the film, i decided to give LOTR another go when i finished “The Hobbit”.

I am so glad i persevered with the set because it really is an excellent read! It’s good to read more about what happened to Bilbo, and how his heir, Frodo, came to inherit the Ring.

I love how the Fellowship comes together to take the Ring to Mordor to be destroyed and all the adventures they go through which tears them apart and throws them back together again.

I was fascinated by Gollum and how, despite being evil and desperate for the Ring, he still leads Frodo and Sam through Mordor. Their pity for the miserable creature helps them achieve their task, but at the same time makes their lives more dangerous because of his conflicted personalities.

I love the Elves and all the descriptions of these fascinating and beautiful beings who seem so wise and generous. It feels like the best place in Middle Earth is Rivendell, with the beauty of its trees and lands, and the happy elves who sing all the time.

The languages and songs through the tale are beautifully written and add further mystery and intrigue to the plot. My favourite part of the book is when Sam tells Frodo that he hopes that maybe one day people will sing a song about Frodo the nine-fingered hobbit, and then he later gets his wish, causing him to cry with joy.

It is a story of stories, with so many different characters all experiencing things at the same time, and although it takes a while to read the whole tale, it gives you the story from different points of view, and all the experiences mix together to give you a very detailed account of how the friends help destroy evil within Middle Earth and restore peace to the troubled land and bring a new king to power.

I give LOTR a big 10/10 because it is worth reading despite the length of it, and it is one of those books you have to read at least once in your life!

Book Review: The Hobbit

I have just finished reading “The Hobbit” by J.R.R. Tolkien, having read almost all of “The Lord of the Rings” and being curious about the beginnings which lead to Bilbo Baggins having the One ring, and also seeing the publicity for the film version of “The Hobbit” everywhere for the last few months.

The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien

At first, i found it a little bit boring waiting for the excitement to start. Then Bilbo, Gandalf the wizard and the troupe of Dwarves set off on their journey and it started to get more interesting as they found themselves in various trying situations.

I was glad when they finally got to the Lonely Mountain and started trying to find their way inside and killing the dragon guarding the treasure. I did feel that the description of the battle at the end was hurried a bit and so it felt like the interesting bits were very short and the more boring bits were quite long-winded.

However, the bit where Bilbo meets Gollum and finds that all important ring is good, what with all the riddles they challenge each other with. Gollum is described very well and sounds rather horrible!

The descriptions of everything are fairly good, which is important in a fantasy novel like this one, with different histories for each species, and detailed descriptions of the landscape and the characters themselves.

The characters are good, with Bilbo Baggins seeming like the most unlikely participant in such a quest after the inital descriptions of him being well-fed and happy living a comfortable life in his little sheltered hole. However, the hints of his  ancestors, the Tooks, become more substantial as he grows into his role as a burglar and becomes very good at making up plans and having useful ideas and becoming generally more accustomed to the life of an adventurer.

I found it weird how Gandalf kept disappearing off during the quest, leaving Bilbo and the dwarves to fend for themselves, and then suddenly coming back at vital moments: it felt like he was cheating!

I can’t say i loved this book, even though it improved towards the end, but i will give it 7/10 because it is full of fascinating elements and the later half of the book is more interesting than the first half.  I also managed to keep reading it without giving up (although i did skip through the songs in the book), and i now want to re-read (and properly finish) “The Lord of the Rings” while i’m still in the Middle-Earth mindset! If you haven’t read these books, then you should!