Well, I now feel ready to write the first Reading Roundup post for a long time! I was so worried that the stroke would stop my reading for good. After relying on audiobooks for two months, which don’t feel quite like real books to me, I have managed to read two ebooks. Hooray! I cannot yet read a really real book as, even with glasses, I cannot cope with the size of the text. At least ebooks enable me to adjust the font and its size. I do still find the print even of ebooks quite difficult to follow – web pages seem to have a lot more blank space between paragraphs – but my sight issues appear to be improving still. Phew!

I will tell you about each book I have read, giving you my star rating as log it on the Goodreads website, the blurb (as written on the same site), and my review as uploaded. For the time being, my reviews will probably be quite short until I can get back into the swing of writing again. Also, my book choices will depend on the ebooks that are available to me on Leicestershire Libraries’ ebook site. I find it far more difficult to select books online as I prefer to hold an actual print copy in my hands!

If you look on the right hand side of this “The Librain Retired” site and further down the column, you will see a “widget” that contains the feed from my Goodreads’ account. This shows you the most recent books that I have read, plus my review. If you were to look at this feed on the day I am writing this post, you would see that I had to abandon a fabulous print book – Pierce Brown’s Dark Age – halfway through when I had my stroke. I do hope that I am able to return to it very soon, although I expect that I will have to start again at the beginning as I will have forgotten too much of the complex plot!

The Blood Road by Stuart MacBride

So, my first ebook was Stuart MacBride’s The Blood Road, #11 in his Logan McRae series. Here is the blurb:

Some things just won’t stay buried…

Logan McRae’s personal history is hardly squeaky clean, but now that he works for Professional Standards it’s his job to police his fellow officers.

When Detective Inspector Bell turns up dead in the driver’s seat of a crashed car it’s a shock to everyone. Because Bell died two years ago, they buried him. Or they thought they did.

As an investigation is launched into Bell’s stabbing, Logan digs into his past. Where has he been all this time? Why did he disappear? And what’s so important he felt the need to come back from the dead?

But the deeper Logan digs, the more bones he uncovers—and there are people out there who’ll kill to keep those skeletons buried. If Logan can’t stop them, DI Bell won’t be the only one to die…

This is my review:

The Blood Road by Stuart MacBride
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I love this series. The main characters are brilliantly written to the extent that many of them feel like old friends, and the black humour often makes me laugh out loud. The plotting is clever and usually very, very dark. This book stands well with the rest of the series with some sad, scary moments leavened with amusing touches. Even though there have been a lot of books, the author continues to write at a very high standard. Highly recommended.

View all my reviews

As you can see, I am trying out a different way of linking my review! Let me know if you have any issues with this, please.

Gallows View by Peter Robinson

My second ebook of the week was Gallows View by Peter Robinson, #01 of his Inspector Banks series. This is the blurb:

A Peeping Tom is frightening the women of Eastvale; two glue-sniffing young thugs are breaking into homes and robbing people; an old woman may or may not have been murdered. Investigating these cases is Detective Chief Inspector Alan Banks, a perceptive, curious and compassionate policeman recently moved to the Yorkshire Dales from London to escape the stress of city life. In addition to all this, Banks has to deal with the local feminists and his attraction to a young psychologist, Jenny Fuller. As the tension mounts, both Jenny and Banks’s wife, Sandra, are drawn deeper into the events. The cases weave together as the story reaches a tense and surprising climax.

I only finished this yesterday, so I have just written this quick review:

Gallows View by Peter Robinson
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

There were some good points about the book: the actual storyline was interesting, with three strands woven together and the setting was well described. These are what kept me reading. It was so obvious that this book was written in the 1980s – in fact the general attitude to women felt like something fuelled by Benny Hill! The sexism was awful with female characters being stereotyped in such crude ways. Mind you, the males were not much better.

I may try to read one of the more recent books in the series, with the hope that the author has developed beyond the porcine Neanderthal that he shows himself to be in this book, but I am not sure if it is worth my time!

View all my reviews

Well, I hope that you have enjoyed my return to sharing my reading.

Love and best wishes,

Anne

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