What Sophie Said

Are you a Kindle or a physical book person? I absolutely love my Kindle for the tube, but I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to let go of physical books entirely… Maybe it’s the ex-English Literature student in me! Here’s my latest round-up of mini-reviews:- Pompeii, Robert Harris This novel starts a few days before the eruption of Vesuvius and tells the story from four different perspectives: an engineer, a young girl, a corrupt millionaire and an elderly scientist. I absolutely loved this book. It reminded the geeky side of me of studying for my Latin GCSE, and I found it interesting reading more about such a fascinating and heart-breaking event in history. I really liked the way it brought in the scientific, the geographic and the personal, and entwined in a beautiful narrative. This one is well worth a read. The Shining Girls, Lauren Beukes Starting in the 1930s, Harper Curtis selects and kills his ‘shining girls’, believing he is unstoppable. In 1992 Ki...

Wow, my reading list posts have been a little neglected of late! Not to worry though, I’ve been keeping a list of everything I’ve read and I’m planning to write a few posts today to have them lined up and ready. The posts may have slowed, but the reading definitely hasn’t, and I have so many to talk about over the next few weeks. So here it is, the next four books on my reading list: Five Quarters of the Orange, Joanne Harris Widow Framboise works at a creperie, working on and refining old family recipes. Her nephew tries to exploit her success and claim the family secrets. Throughout the novel, details of Framboise’s wartime childhood tumble out, and it becomes clear that a lot of her memories are more constructed than they originally appeared. The story had potential, and was intriguing. I loved the childlike perspective of Framboise’s memories, but at times the narrative was a bit too disjointed. I didn’t feel like I particularly warmed to any of the charact...