It seems travel (sort of) books were next. First up, Road to Rouen by Ben Hatch, an amusing book about taking his family around France. Amusing, yes but one of those books I won’t read again. Sorry, Ben. Maybe it’s because I don’t have kids? The stories are mildly funny but I think you have to have kids to really get them.

It was well written and, as I say, amusing but not really “great”. It can’t, for example, compare with The Goldfinch, nor anything by Margaret Atwood. Maybe it should have been the first book that I read?

And then I started an ebook. To be fair, although this IS available on Amazon, it’s a book written by the brother of a friend and ex-colleague and also the son of another ex-colleague, sadly no longer with us. As I don’t have a Kindle, he sent it to me in PDF format.

It’s called: New Zealand Calling by Alex Richards.

He’s not a professional author but he tries to be descriptive. However, it reads much as I assume my blog reads; interesting enough if you know the people involved; a collection of experiences and stories that don’t really hang together with a “plot”. There’s no “conclusion”.

However, some of the stories were interesting and some, amusing.
But I found that just reading an ebook was neither comfortable nor enough and so, at the same time, I started God’s Traitors by Jessie Childs.

I finished it today, so it’s taken about 3 days. This is a history book, about the Roman Catholic persecutions during Elisabeth I’s reign and afterwards, told through the experiences and lives of several generations of one (noble) family.

But it’s history and so full of dates and factual things. Not really a novel, as such but still a bloody good read.

And, for my next book (which I will start in a moment) I’ve chosen A Girl Is A Half-formed Thing by Eimear McBride. I think this won the Women’s Prize for Fiction but I’ll need to check.

In any event, I’ve read it’s difficult to read, so I have another, just in case.