Virtual Methodist

OK... so, for the entertainment of all three of you sad people who are reading blogs or are trawling through facebook during the Christmas break, here are the VM Awards for things out there in the real world... Starting with some of the stuff that appears in the sidebar of the blog... Best Read of the Year: This may have changed since Christmas, depending on whether I get any of the books on my wishlist from Santa, but I've vowed not to go near the computer for a week (a sort of pre-New Year resolution), so I've written this before the big day... Whilst it wasn't written or published this year, I was a bit slow in reading Stieg Larsson's " Girl with a Dragon Tattoo " but until recently it would have been my favourite read of the year, despite it's unremitting grimness... However, it was toppled at the last minute by C.J. Sansom's " Heartstone ", which was published this year, the latest in his Shardlake series which I reviewed a couple of da...

I've noticed recently that my book reviews in the sidebar have got longer and longer... So as a result I've decided to post the longer ones here in the main body of the blog and just offer a pithy line or two in the sidebar... And this is as good a time as any to start, throwing out my suggestions as to what you should, or should not spend any Christmas booktokens on... beginning with C.J. Sansom's "Heartstone." Actually I have run out of superlatives for this series of books, with this one being the fifth to feature hunch-backed Tudor lawyer and sleuth Matthew Shardlake. This one took longer to pick up the pace and tension, but the power of these books is not in the plot, which is, at times derivative, based on a stock theme eg. the Apocalyptic themes in "Revelation", or the key narrative twist here, which is taken strait from Shakespeare) but rather the meticulous period detail and depth of characterisation. You can smell the ordure and feel the bites ...