Publication date: 2008-10-02
RRP: £16.99
Price: £9.74
Review Seven Troop / Random House Audiobooks:
Creator: Rob Inglis
Publication date: 2002-10-21
Dewey code: 813
RRP: £60.00
Price: £25.00
Review The Fellowship of the Ring - Audio CD / HarperCollins Audio:
Creator: Richard E. Grant
Publication date: 2007-10-04
RRP: £24.99
Price: £4.79
Review World Without End / Macmillan Digital Audio:
Creator: Martin Jarvis
Publication date: 2007-09-06
RRP: £9.99
Price: £4.80
Review Fantastic Mr Fox / Puffin Books:In the tradition of The Adventures of Peter Rabbit, this is a "garden tale" of farmer versus vermin, or vice versa. The farmers in this case are a vaguely criminal team of three stooges: "Boggis and Bunce and Bean / One fat, one short, one lean. / These horrible crooks / So different in looks / Were nonetheless equally mean. " Whatever their prowess as poultry farmers, within these pages their sole objective is the extermination of our hero-the noble, the clever, the Fantastic Mr. Fox. Our loyalties are defined from the start; after all, how could you cheer for a man named Bunce who eats his doughnuts stuffed with mashed goose livers? As one might expect, the farmers in this story come out smelling like. well, what farmers occasionally do smell like. This early Roald Dahl adventure is great for reading aloud to three- to seven-year-olds, who will be delighted to hear that Mr. [+]Fox keeps his family one step ahead of the obsessed farmers. When they try to dig him out, he digs faster; when they lay siege to his den, he tunnels to where the farmers least expect him-their own larders! In the end, Mr. Fox not only survives, but also helps the whole community of burrowing creatures live happily ever after. With his usual flourish, Dahl evokes a magical animal world that, as children, we always knew existed, had we only known where or how to look for it. (Great read aloud for any age; written at a 9- to 12-year-old reading level) -Amazon. com.
Creator: Joanna David
Edition: New edition
Publication date: 2003-01-30
Dewey code: 813
RRP: £13.00
Price: £7.34
Review Pride and Prejudice (Penguin Classics) / Penguin Audiobooks:
Creator: Harry Secombe
Publication date: 1996-02-05
Dewey code: 817
RRP: £12.99
Price: £7.41
Review "Goon Show" Classics: Moriarty Where Are You? / BBC Audiobooks Ltd:
Creator: Simon Callow
Publication date: 2007-09-06
RRP: £9.99
Price: £4.76
Review The Twits / Puffin Books:Roald Dahl has such an unusual first name due to fact that his parents spelt his name wrong on the Register of Births. From this non-literary background came one of the masters of children's literature. The Twits is one of his many successful and highly entertaining books. The Twits are a couple that nobody would like to know. They are hairy, dirty, smelly and generally unpleasant. Roald Dahl's characters are possibly the most horrid people you will ever read about. Mr and Mrs Twit spend their days inventing new ways to be be nasty to each other. Each time Mrs Twit does something bad to Mr Twit, he just invents something worse to do to her. The Twits are not only unpleasant towards each other but they also hate animals. It is because of the Twits' attitude towards animals that we see their really awful side: Mr Twit keeps a family of monkeys that have to spend their days upside down and Mrs Twit likes to make pies with freshly caught birds. [+]Dahl's story, as is characteristic with all his books, has a happy ending. Only how will the animals beat the Twits? -Jon Smith.
Creator: Alan Bennett
Publication date: 2002-08-05
RRP: £5.99
Price: £2.43
Review The House at Pooh Corner (BBC Radio Collection) / BBC Audiobooks Ltd:
Creator: Marcella Riordan
Edition: Abridged
Publication date: 2004-10-31
Dewey code: 813
RRP: £16.99
Price: £9.08
Review Ulysses (Modern Fiction) / Naxos AudioBooks:Ulysses has been labelled dirty, blasphemous and unreadable. In a famous 1933 court decision, Judge John M. Woolsey declared it an emetic book-although he found it not quite obscene enough to disallow its importation into the United States-and Virginia Woolf was moved to decry James Joyce's "cloacal obsession". None of these descriptions, however, do the slightest justice to the novel. To this day it remains the modernist masterpiece, in which the author takes both Celtic lyricism and vulgarity to splendid extremes. It is funny, sorrowful, and even (in its own way) suspenseful. And despite the exegetical industry that has sprung up in the last 75 years, Ulysses is also a compulsively readable book. Even the verbal vaudeville of the final chapters can be navigated with relative ease, as long as you're willing to be buffeted, tickled, challenged and (occasionally) vexed by Joyce's astonishing command of the English language. Among other things, a novel is simply a long story, and the first question about any story is "What happens?" In the case of Ulysses, the answer could be "Everything". William Blake, one of literature's sublime myopics, saw the universe in a grain of sand. [+]Joyce saw it in Dublin, Ireland, on June 16, 1904, a day distinguished by its utter normality. Two characters, Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom, go about their separate business, crossing paths with a gallery of inforgettable Dubliners. We watch them teach, eat, loiter, argue and (in Bloom's case) masturbate. And thanks to the book's stream- of-consciousness technique-which suggests no mere stream but an impossibly deep, swift-running river- we're privy to their thoughts, emotions and memories. The result? Almost every variety of human experience is crammed into the accordion-folds of a single day, which makes Ulysses not just an experimental work but the very last word in realism. Both characters add their glorious intonations to the music of Joyce's prose. Dedalus's accent-that of a freelance aesthetician, who dabbles here and there in what we might call "Early Yeats Lite"- will be familiar to readers of Portrait of an Artist As a Young Man. But Bloom's wistful sensualism (and naïve curiosity) is something else entirely. Seen through his eyes, a rundown corner of a Dublin graveyard is a figure for hope and hopelessness, mortality and dogged survival: "Mr Bloom walked unheeded along his grove by saddened angels, crosses, broken pillars, family vaults, stone hopes praying with upcast eyes, old Ireland's hearts and hands. More sensible to spend the money on some charity for the living. Pray for the repose of the soul of. Does anybody really?" -James Marcus.
Publication date: 2005-10-10
RRP: £12.99
Price: £2.48
Review Untold Stories: Diaries Pt. 2 / BBC Audiobooks Ltd:
RRP: £65.99
Price: £37.99
Review Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (Book 6 - Unabridged 17 Audio CD Set - Childrens Edition) / J.K. Rowling:Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, the sixth book in J. K. Rowling's bestselling series, picks up shortly after we left Harry at the end of The Order of the Phoenix. Lord Voldemort is acting out in the open, continuing his reign of terror which was temporarily stopped almost 15 years beforehand. Harry is again at the Dursleys, where the events of the previous month continue to weigh on his mind, although not as much as the impending visit from his Headmaster, Albus Dumbledore. Given their last meeting, Harry is understandably confused as to why the old wizard would want to visit him at home. Rowling opens with a chapter she had wanted to use for the first book, of The Philosopher's Stone-Lord Voldemort has been creating chaos in the Wizard and Muggle communities alike, the war is in full swing and the Wizarding community now lives in fear. The press have been questioning the events at the Ministry which led to the admission of Voldemort's return, and of course Harry's name is mentioned a number of times. Harry's got his problems, but his anxiety is nothing compared to Hermione's when the OWL results are delivered. There's a new Defence Against The Dark Arts teacher, an assortment of new characters and creatures, and startling revelations about past characters and events. [+]Gone is the rage-filled Harry of The Order of the Phoenix-he's not being kept in the dark any more, his unjustified Quidditch ban has been lifted and he has matured considerably in his short time out of school. Half-Blood Prince follows Harry into the world of late-teens, and his realisation that nobody is infallible has made his growth that much easier. Accepting his destiny, Harry continues to behave as teenagers do, enjoying his time with his friends, developing his relationships outside of his usual circle, and learning more about how he must, eventually, do what he is destined to do. J. K. Rowling delivers another fantastic tale which will have the readers gasping for more, capturing the characters perfectly and continuing a tale which readers will enjoy over and over again. -Ziggy Morbi.
Edition: Unabridged
Publication date: 2007-12-03
Dewey code: 823.8
RRP: £19.99
Price: £10.70
Review Treasure Island: Unabridged (Classic Fiction) / Naxos AudioBooks:
Edition: Abridged edition
Publication date: 2004-05-17
Dewey code: 910
RRP: £14.99
Price: £8.55
Review A Walk in the Woods: Abridged / Corgi Audio:Bill Bryson has made a living out of travelling and then writing about it. In The Lost Continent he re-created the road trips of his childhood; in Neither Here nor There he retraced the route he followed as a young backpacker traversing Europe. When this American transplant to Britain decided to return home, he made a farewell walking tour of the British countryside and produced Notes from a Small Island. Once back on American soil and safely settled in New Hampshire, Bryson once again hears the siren call of the open road-only this time it's a trail. The Appalachian Trail, to be exact. In A Walk in the Woods Bill Bryson tackles what is, for him, an entirely new subject: the American wilderness. Accompanied only by his old college friend Stephen Katz, Bryson starts out one March morning in north Georgia, intending to walk the entire 2,100 miles to the trail's end atop Maine's Mount Katahdin. If nothing else, A Walk in the Woods is proof positive that the journey is the destination. As Bryson and Katz haul their out-of-shape, middle-aged bodies over hill and dale, the reader is treated to both a very funny personal memoir and a delightful chronicle of the trail, the people who created it, and the places it passes through. Whether you plan to make a trip like this one yourself one day or only care to read about it, A Walk in the Woods is a great way to spend an afternoon. [+]-Alix Wilber.
Publication date: 2004-08-02
RRP: £5.99
Price: £2.08
Review Fantastic Mr. Fox: Complete and Unabridged / Collins Audio:In the tradition of The Adventures of Peter Rabbit, this is a "garden tale" of farmer versus vermin, or vice versa. The farmers in this case are a vaguely criminal team of three stooges: "Boggis and Bunce and Bean / One fat, one short, one lean. / These horrible crooks / So different in looks / Were nonetheless equally mean. " Whatever their prowess as poultry farmers, within these pages their sole objective is the extermination of our hero-the noble, the clever, the Fantastic Mr. Fox. Our loyalties are defined from the start; after all, how could you cheer for a man named Bunce who eats his doughnuts stuffed with mashed goose livers? As one might expect, the farmers in this story come out smelling like. well, what farmers occasionally do smell like. This early Roald Dahl adventure is great for reading aloud to three- to seven-year-olds, who will be delighted to hear that Mr. [+]Fox keeps his family one step ahead of the obsessed farmers. When they try to dig him out, he digs faster; when they lay siege to his den, he tunnels to where the farmers least expect him-their own larders! In the end, Mr. Fox not only survives, but also helps the whole community of burrowing creatures live happily ever after. With his usual flourish, Dahl evokes a magical animal world that, as children, we always knew existed, had we only known where or how to look for it. (Great read aloud for any age; written at a 9- to 12-year-old reading level) -Amazon. com.
Publication date: 2003-07-07
Dewey code: 817
RRP: £15.99
Price: £9.98
Review Blackadder Goes Forth (BBC Radio Collection) / BBC Audiobooks Ltd:
Creator: Christopher Lee
Edition: Unabridged
Publication date: 2007-11-05
Dewey code: 823.912
RRP: £29.99
Price: £14.99
Review The Children of Hurin / HarperCollins Publishers Ltd:
Publication date: 2003-10-02
RRP: £12.99
Price: £7.34
Review The Wee Free Men / Random House Children's Books:
Edition: Unabridged
Publication date: 2007-09-03
RRP: £15.99
Price: £8.35
Review Shakespeare: The World as a Stage / HarperPress:
Creator: Alan Bennett
Edition: Abridged Ed
Publication date: 2002-08-05
RRP: £15.99
Price: £10.32
Review Winnie-the-Pooh: The Collection (BBC Radio Collection) / BBC Audiobooks Ltd:
Publication date: 2004-10-08
RRP: £14.99
Price: £8.55
Review Wyrd Sisters / Corgi Audio:
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Models & Brands:
Seven Troop, The Fellowship of the Ring - Audio CD, World Without End, Fantastic Mr Fox, Pride and Prejudice (Penguin Classics), "Goon Show" Classics: Moriarty Where Are You?, The Twits, The House at Pooh Corner (BBC Radio Collection), Ulysses (Modern Fiction), Untold Stories: Diaries Pt. 2, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (Book 6 - Unabridged 17 Audio CD Set - Childrens Edition), Treasure Island: Unabridged (Classic Fiction), A Walk in the Woods: Abridged, Fantastic Mr. Fox: Complete and Unabridged, Blackadder Goes Forth (BBC Radio Collection), The Children of Hurin, The Wee Free Men, Shakespeare: The World as a Stage, Winnie-the-Pooh: The Collection (BBC Radio Collection), Wyrd Sisters |
