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This book had a rather strange construction. I suppose that is caused by being part two. Quite a large part of the first half of the book is about a criminal, 'Harry', but at a given moment he takes himself off to Australia, and we don't hear from him again.
There is only the thinnest connection with the rest of the book. That part is centred around a small village in Somerset. I had the feeling that I had landed in an extended version of The Archers, with one important exception. Although there is enough going on in the plot, I didn't really care what happened to them. The main protagonist, Daphne, is an unattractive and unsympathetic character and her husband Felix is rather two-dimensional. The main problem is that the text isn't so well written. I cannot judge if that was due to the translation (unfortunately I had a Dutch copy) or it is the same in the original. There were certainly some awkwardly literal translations of English phrases, and at least one mistake. 'Wedding breakfast' is a lunch, so 'bruidsontbijt' is not correct. The sexuality of the main characters plays a significant role in the book. It is difficult to say much without spoilers, but suffice to say that it is good to see diversity presented as normal, also in a book set in the 50s.

It is difficult to know what to make of this book. The main character, the mother, is a rather unsympathetic person. On the one hand, that can be a bit irritating, on the other hand, it can be amusing. I'm not sure what the author intended. The writer also had some strange stylistic tricks. Quite often he writes and sentence and then repeats it, but not quite the same. I am not quite sure what effect he was aiming for. What he also does, but in this case I think rather effectively, is analysing the actions and dialogue of the characters as he goes along. This made the dialogues much more interesting and added an extra dimension. Just a few plain words can then take on a whole new meaning. The book is easy to read and, seeing it is short, you are through it in no time. Actually very little happens when it comes down to it and that is also part of its charm, that it focusses on the drama of normal everyday (or at least normal) events.

This was the first book I have read by Paul McAuley, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I read a review somewhere that said he was the most imaginative sci-fi author in Britain today, and whilst there might be other contenders for that title (Peter Hamilton, perhaps?) it certainly sounded worth giving him a try. I was not disappointed. War of the maps is very imaginative and it also has a good plot and well-developed character to boot. I particularly enjoyed his use of ant biology in the plot. McAuley quotes Terry Pratchett at one point ("Or have things so degenerated in your sandy scourhole of a country that you think you live on a flat plate riding on the back of a turtle, or some such nonsense?"), which is certainly enough to put him in my good books as well as a passing reference to a famous evolutionary biologist ("but I soon learned that there are more kinds of beetles than there are people in the entire kingdom. The creator gods had a particular ,liking for them, it seems", which refers to J.B.S. Haldane's remarks about God having an "inordinate fondness for beetles"). This was the first book by Paul McAuley that I read; it will not be my last one.

If you are interested in plants, specifically trees, then this is a superb and fascinating book. It is not one to sit down and read on one go, but a reading a handful of chapters before going to sleep in the evening is great. It is packed full of intriguing facts. I was amazed to read that monkey puzzle leaves can live up to 30 years!
The book works well as an e-book, and the wonderful leaf silhouettes look good on an e-reader. The quote from Kahil Gibrahn ("Trees are poems that write upon the sky") fit well with that. The only thing is that there are quite a few cross-references, cited by page number. Of course, in an e-book that makes no sense, so that was rather lazy of the publisher.
The authors were not afraid to use technical terms, but those are clearly explained and there is also a glossary at the back. The glossary is a bit short, terms like 'lenticel' are not there, and I'm sure not everyone knows what that is. Lenticel is explained on first use ("sites of gas exchange - which are long and narrow") but a book like this is clearly designed to be dipped into, so the reader can come across it first in a later chapter.
I found one strange statement. They claim that the tulip tree is called that because of the shape of the flowers. Surely not? A) The flowers are not really tulip shaped, and B) The leaves are very tulip shaped. They mix metric and imperial units, which is a bit quaint and I can imagine bewildering for an international audience.
All in all, a wonderful book, I thoroughly recommend it to anyone with even a passing interest in trees or other plants.

I read this book as part of the excellent Brommer Op Zee series in which the author adds comments and questions to the book. When I started, I thought, 'not another book of a childhood made miserable by an extreme reformed Protestant upbringing'. There has been quite enough literary misery on that topic without yet another volume to add to the pile. Why on earth did they choose that? But I quickly discovered that this book is quite different. For a start, there is a lot of humour. The children are happy quite a lot of the time, they are not always good, and they don't experience their religion as oppressive. What is nice about this book is that it actually allows you to understand and appreciate that community rather than just confirming prejudices. The extra comments from the author were also interesting and added useful information about her writing process.

A complex and interesting book. So many characters and so many story lines! I've just read the (good) Dutch translation, but think I need to read it again to understand it better. This time in the English original...
So, a few days later, and now I've read the English version. Indeed, there are a lot of small but important details which I missed on the first reading and also the bewildering array of multiple interacting characters makes much more sense (to me at least) once I've already got a bit of an idea what is going on.
The eccentric (/original) punctuation was less of a problem than I expected. Mostly, conventional sentence breaks are replaced with a new line followed by a space. I was soon reading that without noticing. That did make it a bit pointless. What worked quite well was that sometimes sentences were broken up that way mid-sentence, which gave a sort of poetic effect. The same construction is used for (bulletless) lists and tables, and that also works well.
The book is centred around the experience and identity of black British people. The extraordinary diversity of richness of their history is very well brought over. One aspect that the English original does much better than the Dutch translation is the dialect and rhythm of the speech of some of the characters. Often written dialect is just irritating (imho), but in this case, I could just hear the African and Caribbean voices, and it definitely added an extra dimension.
A sentence which I thought summed up the book nicely was, "you must go back [to Oxford] and fight the battles that are your British birthright, as a true Nigerian".

One the face of it, a charming Victorian pocket flora. Its aim is to describe common plants in non technical terms for ramblers. In that, it fails. Terms like "involucral scales" are definitely not going to be understood by people with no botanical background, also not in 1895.
The age doesn't make it easier. A surprisingly large number of names have changed, making it sometimes hard to know what a plant is. I'm still not sure what Hypnum triquetum iis supposed to be.
The book repeats the myth that 'bluebell' means a different plant in England and Scotland. I remember being told by no less that a professor of botany at Glasgow University (Jim Dixon) that this is nonsense and is just passed on from book to book, with no basis in reality. At least now I know that this is an old story.
But I should not be so negative. The book is nicely written and full of interesting things. I knew that the potamo of Potamogeton was from the Greek for river, but not that 'geiton' means neighbourhood.