What was the last book you read?

I've just finished "Famous Five On A Summer Picnic". Absolutely fantastic. The summer hols have just started and The Famous Five are looking for adventure. Dick and Julian infiltrate a gang of Colombian drug smugglers and suffer horrendous abuse inside a Bogota prison when they are caught. Big Burly Julian becomes a real favourite in the showers with the inmates and Dick isn't left out of the fun either. I won't give away the ending in case you haven't read it yet but it is only the quick thinking of Timmy The Dog that saves the day when the drug barons decide that Dick and Julian need to pay for their intrusion and no amount of ginger beer or heaps of tomatoes look as if they can help. It's a real cliffhanger.

 

I've just finished The Beano Christmas Album 1987. Biffo The Bear is a right jack-the-lad but Desperate Dan is my favourite. Would you believe he ate a whole Cow Pie by himself.

 

Black Beauty by Anna Sewell.

 

I've just finished reading Thomas The Tank Engine & Friends. It is about a collection of railway locomotives that can talk. I found it all rather difficult to believe.

 

Undefeated - The 1974 British and Irish Lions in South Africa.

A brilliant account of the greatest ever British & Irish squads and the unbeaten tour of South Africa.

Swami

 

The Jersey by Peter Bills

The Secrets Behind The World's Most Successful Team (The All Blacks).

Swami

 

The Saint Goes On by Leslie Charteris

Three novellas including "The Case of the Frightened Innkeeper" which I clearly remember being adapted as a television episode starring Roger Moore.

Many of the Saint stories feature the character of Patricia Holm, Simon Templar's "partner in crime" to whom he is monogamously devoted. She is the Saint's equal and a liberated woman long before the term was coined but has been left out of most of the screen incarnations, presumably because the producers wanted to keep the Saint footloose and fancy-free.

I'd love to see a "Simon and Patricia" TV series based on this relationship. I think it would work either in the modern day or as a period piece set in the 1930s when the stories were written.

 

The Perfect Car - The Biography Of John Barnard.

A profile of one of F1's greatest designers.

Swami

 

Into the Black by Rowland White (ironically)

The behind the scenes story of the first flight of the Space Shuttle. A sequel of sorts to Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff.

 

The Loudest Voice in the Room by Gabriel Sherman

 

The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick

I heard about the TV series but decided I'd rather buy the book than the DVDs.

 

The Saint in New York by Leslie Charteris

This one was adapted as the first Saint film, starring Louis Hayward in 1938.

 

The Children of the New Forest by Captain Marryat

I've actually had this book on my shelf for years without getting around to it. It's quite different to what I was expecting. I thought it would be an Enid Blyton or E. Nesbit style children's adventure but it turned out to be rather serious historical novel set during the English Civil War about a family of orphans who seem very mature for their age.

 

Have A Good Week...Till Next Week (British Wrestlers Of The TV Era) by John Lister.

Swami

 

The Lost Battles by Jonathan Jones

About the rivalry between Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo Buonarroti.

 

I've just finished reading "The Memoirs Of Mo Mouse". It's the lifestory of this really irritating bloke who lives in London who nobody likes. He goes round trying to be funny all the time but nobody is laughing. He really thinks he's the dog's bollocks but he isn't. Far from it. He posts on this entertainment forum trying to get everyone to be his friend but he hasn't got any. One by one, all the other posters stopped posting and he was on there on his own.

 

No Borders - players' accounts of Irish rugby through the years.

Swami

 

Shall We Tell the President? by Jeffrey Archer

Thriller about an assassination plot against President Edward Kennedy.

From the perspective of 2018 this reads like an alternate history novel but it was actually published in 1977, six years before the fictitious events take place, which strikes me as either extremely brave or in extremely bad taste given that there were genuine fears at the time that if Ted ran for president he could be targeted by some crackpot with no motive other than to be the killer of the last Kennedy brother.

 

I've just finished reading a couple of books by Ian Fleming about this secret agent called James Bond. He is a sexist, racist, homophobic, alcoholic but everybody still seems to love him. In one of them, there is a character called kitty Galore and he rapes her in a barn.

 

'Moments of Clarity: Voices From the Front Lines of Addiction and Recovery' by Christopher Kennedy Lawford.

Honestly, it's such a brilliant read. The book was created from an ensemble of interviews with those who have battled addiction, so each chapter provides a new voice.