THE TOY CAR: A SHORT STORY (kindle) by Rose Tremain

Published in 2025 by Amazon Original Stories.

The Toy Car is a coming-of-age story of Petros, an attractive 17 year old boy who lives on a sunny Greek tourist island. His life is mapped out for him - his father owns a popular taxi service and eventually he will inherit the business. 

It's a good life by most standards. 

But, his English mother is worried that Petros hasn't seen enough of the world so she convinces his father to send him off to live with her sister and her husband in London for a year abroad.

Petros brings along a toy version of his father's taxi, which is where we get the name of the story.

Up to this point, the story is pretty good.

When Petros arrives in London, his aunt and uncle seem very surprised about everything about him. They have not prepared for his arrival. Everything about the very existence of Petros confounds them.

I have no idea why they are acting this way, but it makes for a very poor experience for Petros. He spirals out of control with homesickness and bad experiences with girls and, eventually, he runs home.

What are the lessons learned in this coming-of-age story? 

Don't try new things?

London's weather is bad compared to the weather of a Greek island?

Better to be a taxi driver than to meet a girl in England?

Who knows what the point was supposed to be - all I know is that this book failed to deliver one except for the four I mentioned above.

I rate this story 2 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: The Toy Car: A Short Story by Rose Tremain.

THE RISE: A SHORT STORY (kindle) by Ian Rankin

Published by Amazon Original Stories in 2023.

Synopsis:

There has been a murder in one of the newest and most exclusive high rise apartments in London. The night security guard in the lobby was found dead by his girlfriend (she used to sneak in for a little romancing in the middle of the night.)

His head was smashed into the corner of the counter and a fancy electronic door key is missing from the collection of spare keys in the office.

When detectives start asking around it looks like just about everyone in the apartment building could have killed the guard, including the girlfriend.

My review:

The first half of this story was pretty tedious. The way the crime was finally solved was kind of obvious - and I missed it!

I rate this short story 3 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: The Rise: A Short Story by Ian Rankin.

V for VENDETTA (graphic novel) by Alan Moore and David Lloyd

 

Originally published in 1982.

Originally published in completed form in 1988 by DC Vertigo.

This iconic graphic novel has been on my to-be-read list for a long while. I tried watching the movie, but it had been a long week and I soon fell asleep. I assumed that the movie missed some of the pizazz of the graphic novel. I decided to go ahead and read the book when I noticed it was on the list of some 850 books that a Republican Texas state legislator wanted to ban from all Texas schools. 

V for VENDETTA is the story of a masked vigilante who decides to stand up against the fascist government of an alternative history version of the United Kingdom. The masked character has become the single most recognizable feature of the book and the face of the "anonymous" movement that swept over social media a few years ago.

Many people assume that it was put on the censorship list because it features a character that fights back against a repressive government. They assume that Texas is afraid of people that fight back, but they forget that this is a state that loves its own history of fighting back. The story of the Alamo and the Texas Revolution is revered in Texas. Texas was also a member of the Confederacy in the Civil War and some people in the Texas Republican Party have openly discussed another attempt at secession.

Based on the other books on this list, I think that the book was added to the list because there are 4 or 5 little panels in the comic that show a naked woman. They are not particularly lurid drawings, but most of the books are on this list for some sort of sexual reason. What appears in this book is certainly not worth the fuss of banning the book, but if you are making a list of 850 books you don't care about not making a fuss.

On to my review:

I was very much looking forward to this book. I like dystopian novels and I am very sympathetic to the themes of this book. However, I must admit that my reaction to the movie pretty much matched my reaction to the graphic novel. It is stylish but very slow and boring. I had a hard time finishing it and probably wouldn't have if not for occasional bursts of interesting plot showing up from time to time. 

I rate this graphic novel 2 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: V for VENDETTA by Alan Moore and David Lloyd.

JOSEPH ANTON: A MEMOIR (audiobook) by Salman Rushdie

Published in 2012 by Random House Audio
Duration: 26 hours, 59 minutes
Read by Sam Dastor
Unabridged

For most people, Salman Rushdie is, and will always be, that author that the Iranians tried to have killed all of those years ago. I freely admit that this is an accurate description of me. Although I am an avid reader, this is the first Salman Rushdie book that I have even contemplated reading. 

Rushdie narrates this autobiography in the third person, which is a little weird and gave me the impression that he is trying to distance himself a bit from his own story.

The biggest chunk of Joseph Anton: A Memoir tells about how Rushdie dealt with the fatwa, or ruling against him and his book The Satanic Verses by the leader of the Iranian Revolution himself, the Ayatollah Khomeini. Khomeini ruled that the author, the publishers and the editors of the book should die for blasphemy and that anyone who died in an attempt to kill them would be considered a martyr. This caused Rushdie to go into hiding and be officially under police protection provided by the British government. Joseph Anton became his code name.

Rushdie the "icon" - the man who came to symbolize the intolerance of government-sponsored religion and offered a real-life preview to the dangers of radical Islam - and Rushdie the actual man are quite different people. I admire iconic Rushdie, but everyday life Rushdie is hard to like sometimes. Rushdie is often brutally honest about his friends and colleagues and their shortcomings - as he saw them. I can only imagine that many of his friends read this book and were horrified at how they were portrayed.

The book ends with a moving account of the 9/11 attacks on New York City, his adopted hometown. It makes a elegant bookend to a book that basically is about Islamic terror aimed at one person that morphs into terror aimed at an entire city.

The reader, Sam Dastor, was excellent. Interestingly, he is also the reader of the audiobook version of The Satanic Verses.

I rate this audiobook 3 stars out of 5. Way too long and too many uncomfortable comments about the author's supposed friends.

This audiobook can be found on Amazon.com here: Joseph Anton: A Memoir by Salman Rushdie. 

NOT JUST ANOTHER WAR STORY (audiobook) by Wayne G. MacDowell

Originally published in October of 2014.

Audiobook published in February of 2016
Read by Tom Lennon
Duration: 18 hours, 24 minutes
Unabridged

I have read or listened to a few books about the experiences of fighter and bomber pilots in World War II and those books drew me to this one.

The main character of Not Just Another War Story is Steve Carmichael. Steve grew up on a ranch near Orlando, Florida and was a baseball player at the University of Florida.  The Detroit Tigers are interested in him but, as a kid he learned how to fly a rattletrap biplane that his father purchased for a song and refurbished and Steve decides to join the Army Air Corps as a pilot.

He becomes a B-17 Flying Fortress pilot and is shipped off to England in 1943. The story follows his original crew that all trained together as they try to work their way through their required 30 missions. The descriptions of everything to do with the airplanes and the combat missions in this book are absolutely excellent. I felt like I was riding along with the crew and I was invested in those characters.

But, this book is bogged down by so much pointless detail when they are not in the airplanes that it became a chore to listen to. In a print book you can easily skim over excessive description of breakfast after breakfast after breakfast (the level of detail gets down to the jelly that everyone had on their toast at the table) but you can't skim in an audiobook.

 Uneventful trips are described in detail. Rather than saying something like "and they made it back to the hotel, had a nightcap and went to bed" you get 5 minutes of description of the car, the hotel lobby, the alcohol and a discussion of why everyone is tired. The reader knows why they are tired - we just read about it (or heard about it, in my case).

Rick Steves

It is clear that MacDowell did an extraordinary amount of research for this book and that is nothing but commedable. However, the non-combat scenes tried my patience because it felt like MacDowell was trying to incorporate EVERYTHING he learned about the various locales into the book. Every time a character encounters a new town, a new building or, sometimes, even a new room the reader gets an extensive history lesson (this church/town/castle was built in....burned down in...and re-built in...). It was like Rick Steves from the PBS travel show was trying to tell me a war story and give me a tour of London at the same time.

A decent editor could knock 3 or 4 hours from this story and made it nothing but better. As philosopher Blaise Pascal stated in a 1657 letter, "I have made this longer than usual because I have not had time to make it shorter." 

Tom Lennon read this audiobook. There were a wide variety of accents to be mastered for this book and his Belgian, French, German, southern and Maine accents were excellent. Any complaints I have about the audiobook are not the fault of the reader.

I rate this audiobook 3 stars out of 5.

This audiobook can be found on Amazon.com here: Not Just Another War Story.

Note: I was provided a copy of this audiobook in exchange for an honest review.

SLEEPYHEAD (Tom Thorne #1) (audiobook) by Mark Billingham

Originally published in 2001.

Published HighBridge Audio in 2013.

Read by Simon Prebble.

Duration: 10 hours, 32 minutes

Mark Billingham's Sleepyhead is set in London and features a serial killer with a twist. Rather than actually trying to kill his victims, the attacker is trying to paralyze them by pinching a spot in their neck for nearly two minutes in an attempt to cause a stroke in the victim's brain stem. The result, if done right, is a person who cannot do anything more than blink even though their brain is entirely functional. This is difficult and the result has been a slew of dead young women and one "successful" victim who is forced to breathe on a ventilator in a hospital.

Thanks to the inspired work of a coroner, the local police know what the attacker is trying to do - but they have no idea how to stop him. The star of the investigation is Detective Inspector Tom Thorne, a troubled middle-aged cop with his own demons. Due to a past failure, Thorne is driven to the point where he risks everything to find this attacker.

Sleepyhead was Billingham's first novel (this series now has a dozen novels) and as such it is has some room for improvement. Typically, new authors tend to skip details in an attempt to keep the plot moving. Billingham did the opposite here - some scenes included a stifling amount of detail that make the story drag. Billingham set out to set a somber mood and he successfully maintains it throughout, even to the detriment of the story.

The audiobook was read by Simon Prebble. I think the style of the book hurt Prebble's presentation. There were multiple characters that told the story from the first person perspective and there were no clues that the narrator had changed when the changes occurred. Sadly, Prebble chose not to change the voices of these characters very much so that they could be told apart instantly. I think that may have been on purpose - the book gives the reader no idea that the story is being told by another person, either. It just switches and the listener is left to try to figure out who is telling the story.

On top of that, there is a gigantic amount of British slang used throughout the book that gives it an authentic feel but sometimes lost this American listener. Combine that with the multiple, but often indistinguishable narrators and the slow spots and you can see why this can be a frustrating audiobook.

Note: I received a copy of this audiobook for free from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

I rate this audiobook 3 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: Sleepyhead (Tom Thorne #1) by Mark Billingham.

Great Tales from English History, Volume III: Cheddar Man to DNA (audiobook) by Robert Lacey

An Entertaining Take on English History

Published in 2007 by W.F. Howes Ltd.
Read by the author, Robert Lacey
Duration: 6 hours, 15 minutes

Abridged.

Robert Lacey's quirky 3 volume collection Great Tales from English History was truly a joy to listen to. Volume III ran from the late 17th century to the 1990s and covered such topics as John Locke, The Boston Tea Party (a remarkably even-handed presentation of the American Revolution in general), King George III, the beginnings of the Methodist movement, the Industrial Revolution, Bonnie Prince Charlie, the Charge of the Light Brigade, Darwin, Queen Victoria and World Wars I and II.

If you are listening to this audiobook to get a complete history of England, you will be sorely disappointed. This series cherry picks the interesting and fun stories (the type I love to tell  in the classroom) and strings them together for a most entertaining listen.

Lacey reads the book himself and does a very good job. Sometimes it can be a problem when the author reads his or her own work in an audiobook format but as a reader Lacey was everything a listener could ask for.

I rate this audiobook 5 stars out of 5 and it can be found on Amazon.com here: Great Tales from English History Volume III: Cheddar Man to DNA by Robert Lacey.

Reviewed on February 18, 2012.

Note: The links provided here are to an abridged re-working of the audiobook I listened to. I could not find the exact version I listened to. This would also be a great listen, but not of all of the same stories in the same volume. It looks like the has publisher rearranged the same stories into different volumes.

London Bridges (Alex Cross #10) (audiobook) by James Patterson

Published by Hatchette Audio in 2004
Read by Peter J. Fernandez and Denis O'Hare
Duration: 8 hours, 19 minutes

Unabridged

The real problem with James Patterson's works right now is that he has become a corporate thing - James Patterson, Inc. James Patterson, Inc. produces a large amount of books, movies, and even TV shows, but like nationwide fast food chains that produce large amounts of food in a short amount of time, Patterson's prodigious output suffers from a serious lack of quality.

The last 3 Patterson books I've reviewed have all had gaping holes in the plot. Does he even have his work edited any longer, or do they just print them up as soon as the rough draft comes in?

London Bridges features Alex Cross, Patterson's most enduring character and the star of much better books like Kiss the Girls. In this one, Alex is confronted by two of his arch-villain foes at the same time - the Weasel and the Wolf.

Unfortunately, Alex is cheapened by being in this book. The bad guys are so extreme as to make James Bond bad guys look reasonable. People are blown up and shot in the foreheads left and right and no one ever catches these people on a video camera?

Patterson stretches the book with lots of filler such as detailing Alex's musical choices, adding product placemements (Virgin records, etc.) and an extended sexual foreplay scene that did nothing to advance the plot but lots to titilate.

Most annoying are details that should have been included, such as why does the Wolf want the Weasel working on his conspiracy? Why do their choices of weapons of mass-destruction change? Why do their target cities change? Why were Arabs and Mafia-types and Russian ex-KGB guys brought in and tossed back out of the story? Why can't Alex find out about exposure to radiation when he is exposed to a nuclear weapon? You'd think they'd debrief a fellow about that.

Alex confronts a bad guy and kills him - a climactic scene in the middle of the book. No mention is made of the injuries Alex sustained and he is never de-briefed about the situation. It is never mentioned again. Why not? Maybe there was not enough space since I got to hear more about Alex's musical choices, angst about being separated from family (they are in and out of the story at odd moments, especially since they are apparently evacuated since Washington,D.C. is threatened by the super-villains). Alex's grandmother's health issues are hinted in yet another book and the reader is constantly threatened with her impending doom, a cheap stunt to gather interest in an underdeveloped story. Oh, what a story this could have been if Patterson had really developed it and turned it into a two or three volume series!

The audio version is narrated by Peter Fernandez and Dennis O'Hare. One of them reads the chapters that are 1st person in the form of Alex Cross. The other reads the sections that are 3rd person and feature the Wolf and the Weasel. Both are strong readers and cover it quite well  - the material is just not equal to their ability.

I rate this book 2 stars out of 5 and it can be found on Amazon.com here: London Bridges by James Patterson.

Reviewed on December 8, 2007.

Portrait of a Spy (Gabriel Allon #11)(audiobook) by Daniel Silva

A smart spy thriller

Published in 2011 by HarperAudio.

Read by Simon Vance
Duration: 12 hours, 15 minutes

Unabridged.

Daniel Silva's Portrait of a Spy features Israeli master spy Gabriel Allon, now semi-retired and living and working in rural England as a restorer of paintings. Europe is suffering a wave a suicide bombings. While in London on business he spots a suicide bomber on his way to blow himself up in a London open-air area of markets and restaurants. He steps in with his weapon but is stopped by UK agents that think that he is the threat and the bomber detonates himself.

Allon is told to walk away but he is haunted by his failure. When he is approached with the chance to infiltrate the financial network of the same terror network he leaps at the chance. This is a joint CIA/Israeli operation and the muddled politics of our current administration (make grand overtures, continue the rendition program, bomb some dictators, not others) are mirrored in this fictional administration. Silva has brought the "Arab spring" in as well so the book has a real current events feel to it.

The plan they develop is just simple enough and just crazy enough to have some sort of chance. Silva does a great job of giving the "feel" of the cities and countrysides that the book travels through - London, Paris, rural France D.C., Dubai, the Empty Quarter. He takes the time to flesh out plenty of supporting characters. But, sometimes the story drags as a result.

Reader Simon Vance does a great job with every character except for Gabriel Allon, who sounds more like a sleepy Alec Guinness than a confident, professional spymaster. I kept imagining him in Jedi robes, rather than carrying a pistol and tracking terrorists.

I rate this audiobook 4 stars out of 5.

This audiobook can be found on Amazon.com here: Portrait of a Spy by Daniel Silva.

Reviewed on September 16, 2011.

Nest of Vipers by Linda Davies

Not so hot.

Originally published in 1995.

Nest of Vipers features Sarah Jensen, a young, gorgeous, exceedingly bright (When are we going to have a book about an ugly, old not-so-bright heroine?) currency trader who is asked by the British version of the Federal Reserve President to go undercover at a trading house and see if they are using inside information to make millions of pounds. Much trouble ensues.

The female lead is a little too well-connected (she always knows just the right person to help her when she needs something) and I was kind of bugged that the characters used dollars and pounds interchangeably in their financial wheelings and dealings. Maybe that's the reality of international currency exchange and the power of the United States. If so, "Go USA!"

Back to the book - It's better than reading nothing, but you might want to read an old National Geographic instead.
 
I rate this book 2 stars out of 5.

This book can be found on Amazon here:  Nest of Vipers 

Reviewed in February of 2005.

Five Cities That Ruled the World: How Jerusalem, Athens, Rome, London and New York Shaped Global History by Douglas Wilson

Wow! What a Stinker!

Published in 2009 by Thomas Nelson

When I saw this title I was thrilled to pick this book up. I am a high school history teacher that loves classical history. I was eager to see what someone had to say about these 5 world class cities.

What I got was a poorly written mishmash of ideas that sort of worked themselves into some kind of theme that sort of held together to make a vague point from time to time. In other words, it read like one of my high school student's research papers.

I am a fan of Thomas Nelson publishing - they are a religious publisher that generally holds themselves to high standards. This book, however, makes me doubt my previous impression. Five Cities has a clever premise, an interesting cover but has no real substance and is full of too much supposition and theory rather than solid history.

What do I mean?

To be specific, on pages 8-9 he asserts that the Phoenicians, as part of a trade alliance with King Solomon, set across the Indian and Pacific Oceans (colonizing Polynesia along the way - and ignoring the fact that the Phoenicians preferred to hug the coastline when they sailed) to trade with and establish mines in Central and South America. They also created the Incan and Olmec civilizations. Also, they colonized Massachusetts. Really? Sure - just completely ignore DNA testing, decades of research and just go back to the old long-discredited theory that the Mayans must have really been a lost tribe of Israel because there's no way an Indian could have conceived of a city or a pyramid. He is asserting that only Middle Easterners could've imagined pyramids, despite the fact that every inhabited continent but Australia had pyramids structures of some sort.

I should have stopped right there, but I didn't. I finished the whole thing, mostly for the same reasons that people gawk at car accidents - I had to see how bad it really was.

The Jerusalem chapter is extraordinarily weak because it does not focus on Jerusalem's role as a cradle for 3 of the world's 5 largest religions. Rather, it focuses on the New Jerusalem mentioned in the Book of Revelations. Using an end of the world version of Jerusalem to explain why Jerusalem WAS important is poor logic at best and disingenuous at worst.

The exception to the rule that the Jerusalem chapter is very poor is the section on the Crusades (pp. 28-32). It was quite good.

When he moves on to Athens, he quotes Homer as though he were a trusted historian, not a storyteller (p. 46). He also mis-tells the story of Athena's birth (p.49). Hephaestus did not "attack" Zeus - he split his head open at the request of Zeus (he had a horrible headache and felt like something was trying to push out of his head). Literally, a splitting headache!

The Parthenon - the most famous ancient temple
in Athens, Greece

If Lord Elgin were alive today he could easily sue for libel (p.77). Lord Elgin rescued the art of the Parthenon in the 19th century by buying as much as he could - it was for sale on the open market - and sending it to London to be preserved. He "stole" them to save them, not because he was a thief but because the 19th century Greeks did not value their own heritage. If, on the other hand, he wanted to discuss why the British Museum does not return them to Athens, he would've had a better argument.

For reasons unknown he mostly skips over the Persian destruction of Athens and how the city re-built itself and instead gives a half-hearted history of the Peloponnesian War (Sparta vs. Athens).

The section on Rome struck me as neither great nor poor, which is a victory of sorts.

The London chapter assumes that the reader knows a lot about the struggle for religious liberty in Britain and Scotland and that one understands their Civil War - mighty big assumptions to make. As a result, it made for confusing reading for me (fairly well versed in the issues) and would be a mish-mash for most readers.

He also mis-attributes the George Bernard Shaw quote "England and America are two countries separated by a common language" to Winston Churchill. (p. 151)

The New York chapter is actually sort of bland, an anti-climax when compared to cities that had actual physical empires. He has a nice turn of phrase when he notes that when Dutch New Amsterdam became New York in 1664 "the first course of the American melting pot was served." (p. 158) However, we also have an inexplicable section on baseball (pages 168-171) that goes with nothing else in particular. There is not an over-arching sports theme in the book, just an orphan section on baseball...

Victor Davis Hanson (A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War) and Bernard Lewis (Islam: The Religion and the People), both fine authors and historians, are quoted extensively throughout the book, a fact that must be a source of professional embarrassment for both of them. Do yourself a favor, read Hanson and Lewis and skip this one entirely.

I rate this book 1 star out of 5.

This book can be found on Amazon.com here: Five Cities that Ruled the World.

Reviewed on December 22, 2009.

***EDIT August 9, 2020***
Please note: Today I came across information about other writings of Douglas Wilson that I am not comfortable with. He espouses a seriously warped view of American slavery and of women's rights. I do not endorse those views.

More Blood, More Sweat and Another Cup of Tea by Tom Reynolds

An interesting look at the experiences of a London paramedic

Published in 2009.

Tom Reynolds (a pseudonym) is the writer of a blog about his experiences as a paramedic in London. There are 212 entries that read like they were lifted from his blog, perhaps given a little editing and some re-arranging and then printed. If you like the television show Cops than this format may be of particular interest to you.

There are things to be gleaned from the book:

You learn that a blanket is the most important tool in an ambulance.

You learn that, like on the show COPS, alcohol creates a lot of trouble.

You learn that Britain's NHS is seriously overburdened. Reynolds discusses hospitals filled to capacity, ambulance services that make people wait for over an hour (not always but it does happen), hospitals without basic supplies like pillows and blankets, a boy with a history of collapsing waiting for weeks for an MRI scan (I have had two on an emergency basis in the last 3 years for one I had to wait 15 minutes and for the other I had to wait 45 minutes).

You also learn that some people are just nasty. Here's a quote from Reynolds. He is calling his dispatcher: 

"'Control, I need to return to station to clean out the back of our motor - we've just transported one of our 'local legends'. Is there any infection control policy for patients who are infested with insects?'

'Erm...'"

Gritty, disconnected, worth the read.

I rate this book 4 stars out of 5.

This book can be found on Amazon.com here: More Blood, More Sweat and Another Cup of Tea by Tom Reynolds.

Reviewed on March 22, 2010.