Karl's Reading List

Published by Michael O'Mara Books Limited: London, 2009 (2008). You find the randomest books when you have a book-swap library outside your house! I probably wouldn't have picked this book up from a library or a cafe, but finding it downstairs on the pile of books mum 'curates' from her book-swap library was easy enough to become appealing (yes, we are still living at my parents' house while we house-hunt). Roger Moore was most famous for playing James Bond in seven films - still the most that any actor has played in the official series (Sean Connery played Bond in seven films as well, but the last one was the unofficial Never Say Never Again ). He tells his life story, starting with growing up in England, being one of the children sent away during the Second World War for safety, and moving gradually into his life as an actor. Usually the biographies I read are of Christians; I am a Christian and enjoy reading the stories of how people came to faith, and what they ...

Published as an audiobook by Librivox, read via Fabuly. Narrated by Brenda Dayne. First published 1920. Whoa. This book is intense! And not in the usual way you might think of. The Age of Innocence is the third Pulitzer Prize -winning novel I have read, and is the most unexpected so far. I wasn't expecting a novel written in 1920 and set in the 1870s to be so heavily about the main character considering an affair... but there you go! It is very emotionally charged, with our main character, Newland Archer, growing obsessed with the married-but-separated Madame Ellen Olenska even as he pursues an engagement with the more traditional and (in Newland's eyes) almost ignorantly 'innocence' May Welland. It is apparent from the start that it is not only that Newland finds Ellen 'fascinating', but that he is thrilled and tempted by the very fact that Ellen is unconventional, perhaps a little bit dangerous, and therefore - to him - more 'exciting' than his convent...