Creator: Tony Robinson
Publication date: 2004-10-08
RRP: £14.99
Price: £8.03
Review The Light Fantastic / Corgi Audio:
Creator: Alan Bennett
Edition: Abridged Ed
Publication date: 2002-08-05
RRP: £15.99
Price: £10.11
Review Winnie-the-Pooh: The Collection (BBC Radio Collection) / BBC Audiobooks Ltd:
Creator: Ronald Pickup
Edition: New Ed
Publication date: 2003-03-27
Dewey code: 813
RRP: £13.00
Price: £7.75
Review Bleak House (Penguin Audio Classics) / Penguin Audiobooks:
Creator: Tony Robinson
Publication date: 2007-04-05
RRP: £12.99
Price: £7.34
Review Diggers (Nomes Trilogy) / Random House Children's Books:
Creator: Marcella Riordan
Edition: Abridged
Publication date: 2004-10-31
Dewey code: 813
RRP: £16.99
Price: £8.51
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.
Authors
- Alphonse Daudet
- Jerome K. Jerome
Publication date: 2006-05-15
RRP: £12.99
Price: £8.87
Review Fry and Laurie Read Daudet and Jerome / CSA WORD:
Creator: Juliet Stevenson
Edition: New Ed
Publication date: 2003-01-30
Dewey code: 813
RRP: £13.00
Price: £5.83
Review Wuthering Heights (Penguin Classics) / Penguin Audiobooks:
Creator: Jenny Agutter
Edition: Abridged
Publication date: 1996-10-31
Dewey code: 813
RRP: £13.99
Price: £4.99
Review Pride and Prejudice (Classic Fiction) / Naxos AudioBooks:Elizabeth Bennet is the perfect Austen heroine: intelligent, generous, sensible, incapable of jealousy or any other major sin. That makes her sound like an insufferable goody-goody, but the truth is she's a completely hip character who ,if provoked, is not above skewering her antagonist with a piece of her exceptionally sharp, yet always polite, 18th-century wit. The real point of the book though, the critical question which will keep you fixated throughout, is: will Elizabeth and Mr Darcy hook up? Read this genuine all-time classic and discover the answer while enjoying a story that has charmed generation after generation.
Creator: Tony Robinson
Publication date: 2005-08-02
Dewey code: 813
RRP: £14.99
Price: £9.43
Review Witches Abroad / Corgi Audio:
Creator: Tony Robinson
Publication date: 2006-10-23
Dewey code: 813
RRP: £14.99
Price: £8.55
Review Eric (Discworld) / Corgi Audio:
Creator: Tony Robinson
Publication date: 2005-08-02
RRP: £14.99
Price: £9.45
Review Men at Arms / Corgi Audio:Another wild romp through Discworld! Corporal Carrot, a young dwarf, is newly in charge of the recruits guarding Ankh-Morpork. Edward, the 37th Lord d'Eath, has just discovered that Ankh-Morpork, kingless for generations, has a sovereign ruler, who must be convinced that he is, in fact, the King. The fate of Ankh-Morpork rides on a young man's courage, an ancient sword's magic and a three-legged poodle's bladder.
Creator: Simon Callow
Publication date: 2007-09-06
RRP: £9.99
Price: £4.83
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.
Publication date: 2008-10-09
RRP: £14.99
Price: £10.49
Review The Fifth Elephant (Discworld Novel) / Corgi Audio:Terry Pratchett has a seemingly endless capacity for generating inventively comic novels about the Discworld and its inhabitants but there is in the hearts of most of his admirers a particular place for those novels which feature the hard-bitten captain of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch Samuel Vimes. Sent as ambassador to the Northern principality of Uberwald where they mine gold, and iron and fat, but never silver, he is caught up in an uneasy truce between dwarfs, werewolves and vampires, in the theft of the Scone of Stone (a particularly important piece of dwarf bread) and in the old werewolf custom of giving humans a short start in the hunt and then cheating. Pratchett is always at his best when the comedy is mixed with a real sense of jeopardy that even favourite characters might be hurt if there was a good joke in it. As always the most unlikely things crop up as the subjects of gags-Chekhov, grand opera, the Caine Mutiny-and as always there are remorselessly funny gags about the inevitability of story: "They say that the fifth elephant came screaming and trumpeting through the atmosphere of the young world all those years ago and landed hard enough to split continents and raise mountains. No one actually saw it land, which raised the interesting philosophical question: when millions of tons of angry elephant come spinning through the sky, and there is no one to hear it, does it-philosophically speaking-make a noise? As for the dwarfs, whose legend it is, and who mine a lot deeper than other people, they say that there is a grain of truth in it". All this, the usual guest appearances and Gaspode the Wonder Dog. [+]- Roz Kaveney.
Creator: Harry Secombe
Publication date: 1996-03-04
Dewey code: 817
RRP: £12.99
Price: £8.39
Review The Goon Show: I'm Walking Backwards for Christmas, Vol. 3 / BBC Audiobooks Ltd:
Creator: Alan Bennett
Edition: Abridged Ed
Publication date: 2002-08-05
RRP: £15.99
Price: £10.31
Review Wind in the Willows (BBC Radio Collection) / BBC Audiobooks Ltd:
Publication date: 2006-11-06
RRP: £12.99
Price: £4.69
Review "Goon Show 24", the Case of the Missing Heir (BBC Audio) / BBC Audiobooks Ltd:
Edition: New Ed
Publication date: 2006-09-04
RRP: £25.00
Price: £6.98
Review The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid (BBC Audio) / BBC Audiobooks Ltd:
Publication date: 2008-10-20
RRP: £350.00
Price: £227.50
Review Harry Potter - The Complete Story: Collected Audio Edition (Harry Potter) / Bloomsbury Publishing PLC:
Publication date: 2008-10-09
RRP: £14.99
Price: £10.49
Review Carpe Jugulum (Discworld Novel) / Corgi Audio:Carpe Jugulum is the 23rd Discworld novel, and with it this durable series continues its juggernaut procession onwards. Pratchett is an author who inspires such devotions that his fans will fall on the novel with cries of joy. Non-fans, perhaps, will want to know what all the fuss is about; and that's something difficult to put into a few words. The best thing to do for those completely new to Pratchett is to sample him for themselves, and this novel is as good a place to start as any. But fans have a more precise question. They know that Discworld novels come in one of two varieties: the quite good, and the brilliant. So, for instance, where Hogfather and Maskerade were quite good, Feet of Clay and Jingo were brilliant. While true fans wouldn't want to do without the former, they absolutely live for the latter. And with Carpe Jugulum Pratchett has hit jackpot again. This novel is one of the brilliant ones. [+]The plot is a version of an earlier Discworld novel, Lords and Ladies, with the predatory elves of that novel being replaced here by suave and deadly vampires, and the tiny kingdom of Lancre being defended by its witches. But plot is the least of Pratchett's appeal, and Carpe Jugulum is loaded with marvellous characters (not least the witches themselves, about whom we learn a deal more here), comic touches and scenes of genius, and even some of the renowned down-to-earth Pratchett wisdom (here about the inner ethical conflicts we all face, and the wrongness of treating people as things). Pratchett's vampires are elegant Bela Lugosi types, and they come up against an unlikely but engaging alliance of witches, blue-skinned pixies like Rob Roy Smurfs, a doubting priest with a boil on his face and a magical house-sized Phoenix in a seamless, completely absorbing and feel-good-about-the-universe mixture. Highly recommended. -Adam Roberts.
Creator: Tony Robinson
Publication date: 2005-08-02
RRP: £14.99
Price: £8.55
Review Lords and Ladies / Corgi Audio:
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Models & Brands:
The Light Fantastic, Winnie-the-Pooh: The Collection (BBC Radio Collection), Bleak House (Penguin Audio Classics), Diggers (Nomes Trilogy), Ulysses (Modern Fiction), Fry and Laurie Read Daudet and Jerome, Wuthering Heights (Penguin Classics), Pride and Prejudice (Classic Fiction), Witches Abroad, Eric (Discworld), Men at Arms, The Twits, The Fifth Elephant (Discworld Novel), The Goon Show: I'm Walking Backwards for Christmas, Vol. 3, Wind in the Willows (BBC Radio Collection), "Goon Show 24", the Case of the Missing Heir (BBC Audio), The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid (BBC Audio), Harry Potter - The Complete Story: Collected Audio Edition (Harry Potter), Carpe Jugulum (Discworld Novel), Lords and Ladies |
