required reading

Susan Hill's crime novel. I read I'm the King of the Castle at school. I remember we took turns to read aloud, and people would get very excited by the question of who was going to be picked when the swear word came up, on page 67, or wherever it was. If you take a look at other books bought by people who have purchased I'm the King of the Castle on Amazon, you can clearly see that it's still a set text for schools.

A familiar crime novel; it feels very genre, but an unfamiliar kind of ending, I think.

A 19th century German novella.

I hope Hodder don't mind that I was a little cheeky, and e-mailed them to ask for a proof copy. I didn't claim that I was a bookseller, just gave them my address...

This was passable. Normally I adore books with twists, when they take the bottom out of your stomach, but in this case I was pretty indifferent to the heroine. Her former mentor could be trying to have her assassinated, but I'm not sure I'd care. There was also a hint of spiritualism about it, which annoyed me. People are entitled to write about what they want to, but I hated the way this book skimmed lightly over and around this subject: Maisie feels the presence of her mother. Maisie is saved by hearing voices of dead people. Maisie has helped to convict mediums and spiritualists who are tricking people. Maisie can recognise true gifts of second sight or communicating with the dead as she has been told she is herself gifted in this way.

An Amazon reviewer said "With Maisie Dobbs, Jacqueline Winspear has possible created an enduring character like Poirot or Morse and certainly more three dimensional than the lauded Rebus of Ian Rankin's creation." This makes me laugh. Maisie Dobbs is a textbook creation, a paint-by-numbers heroine. Winspear's characterisation goes no further than, and I paraphrase unfairly, not having the book in front of me 'The tears sprang to Maisie's eyes as she remembered being a nurse in the First World War. Oh, so many people had died, and her beloved Simon's mind had gone. But she had dealt with all that, soldiering on in her work; she had slain her dragons.' Rebus may not be the original character that it is sometimes suggested that he is; being essentially Byronic, but Rankin's writing is genius: gritty, eloquent, insightful, dark. Let's see what the Guardian say about Rankin:

Rankin, who has also written as Jack Harvey, claims he didn't mean to write crime fiction and didn't think that was what he was doing. He excels at politically charged, morally and literally bloody crime novels with polished plots and an elegant turn of phrase, and is the kind of writer who will point ou that his title Dead Souls is "a book by Gogol, but more pertinently a song by Joy Division."