Elizabeth is Missing

I am honestly in a good mood this Sunday morning. In about half an hour I am off out with my brother and his kids to walk up and down some nearby hill.   So I thought i would settle down for an hour before and try and get into this book before he arrived.  Well, I have ended up cancelling my hour of reading pleasure and have decided to ditch the book and moan on my blog.   I have to stop reading this tripe. It was So boring and depressing I feel I am losing the will to live. Even the writing style got on my wick. Yes, I love descriptive books but descriptive for a reason.  ' She picked up her spoon and stirred her tea' or 'she watched the  rain drop go down the wall'. These are just dull as ditch water sentences.
If there was an ITV 7 channel this book would be on it as the midday drama for the terminally soul destroyed. How the hell did it get such good reviews?  This is bullshit. I blame Penguin publishers. If I remember rightly  'A Short History of Tractors in Ukranian' was similarly over hyped by them and accordingly I read this I almost died of boredom.  More wonderful  fodder for an  ITV 7 drama script.

Reviewers houldnt  mis-sell books with the blurb:  'Momento' meets 'Gone Girl' when it so obviously isn't. At least now I have stopped reading it. This is the second book in a row I have ditched.  This is unheard of for me, but hey, it feels good. 

Maybe the topic was just too grim for me. Writing about Alzhimers is bloody depressing.  I just didn't want to be inside the head of someone with this disease.   

Right time for something good! 

The Potter's Hand

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As I was visiting my friend Jo in Stoke over New Year I decided to find out more about this city.  I realised I didn't have a clue about the life of WEdgewood and the potters of Staffordshire.  I got this book because I thought I would get a good story about this interesting time in the 18th century when people like Wedgewood were taking England into the industrial revolution. 

Unfortunately I was disappointed. The story was like wading through treacle.  All the characters were really flat and dull and when I read a novel I want a good story first.  Unfortunately A N Wilson didn't agree with this idea so this book was just a ploy to bang your head against the history wall. It really didn't work. It was just too much. Stories from Burslem in Stoke, mixed with tales of Catherine  the Great in Russia, who wanted Wedgewood to make her a massive tea service, all running alongside Wedgewood's nephew in the United States trying to get white clay from the Cherokee Indians and unfortunately getting caught up in the War of Independence and falling in love with an Indian woman.  It was just too much and didn't work because the characters were just too weak.    Honestly, Wilson should have just written a pure history book like all of his other ones, it would have been more successful.  Infact I got so annoyed by this ' book' I sped read the last half on the train to Reading and then wished I could have left it behind, but unfortunately it's a library book and I have to take it back.