My Week In Books 9... A Week With a Sailor And a Spy......

Due to a bit of time off, and being on a couple of days training which involved a few hours sitting around waiting for results and other things to happen, I've had a HUGE amount of time to read this week! You just can't help good luck eh??

So, I've finished four books in a single week! Something of a record, though two of them were, in all honesty, very short...

As I mentioned earlier in the week, I finished Brighton Rock, which I've already reviewed here... and I also finished my latest instalment in the Hornblower series Lieutenant Hornblower, by C.S. Forester, which I've decided not to review in detail, not because I didn't like it...(I did, I loved it...) but because I've figured you have better things to do than read a review of every book I read... Suffice to say that if you're into historical fiction of the Naval 'derring-do' style, you will do no better than to continue joining young Horatio Hornblower on his adventures!

I've also, in just two days managed to rattle through two John Le Carre short novels: A Murder of Quality and Call For The Dead, two George Smiley stories, the character some of you may know from Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and Smiley's People...

These two were my first foray into Le Carre territory and I loved them. Short, direct, well written, gritty, atmospheric, they are truly greats of the sixties spy genre.

Again, I'm not going to write full-blown reviews here at this point, I'm not convinced that my readers are that interested in everything I read, but I would recommend you give them a go. They only came into my sphere of interest because of my recent urge to collect old Penguin paperbacks, and I'd be hard pressed to find a collecting fad that has given me so much pleasure so quickly.

I guess the moral of this post has to be: if you want to start collecting books, buy old ones, cheap ones, short ones and well known ones. You'll probably never get rich from them, but you'll get hours of entertainment, and before you know it, you'll have a substantial collection!

Happy reading.
Stevie at B.L.M.