Glass Palace, the - Amitav Ghosh

THE GLASS PALACE Spanning a century and three generations, across Burma, India and Malaya, The Glass Palace is a fair doorstop of a book. It took me ages to read it but this was more due to lack of interest than the number of pages. When you read, do you get caught up in the book, at the expense of everything else? Do you ever stop reading, realise its 4am, you’ve not been to bed yet and you have to be up for work in a couple of hours? Or do you climb out of the bath when the water’s gone cold and your skin is all shrivelled and wrinkly from soaking for so long? I frequently get caught up in a book at the expense of everything else ...  Read the complete review

homebase is the friendly green DIY store. but its not friendly if you work there with sam and ian as your managers. sam tries to be nice, then tells you to put bulbs out, which is in itself, an illegal move. she then tells you to move, which again is illegal. ian on the other hand, limps around the store all day pullin his trousers up. on one occasion, a member of staff was carrying some stock around the store. when ian confronted him and asked where he was going, the puzzled member of staff told him that there was no room on the shelf. with this, ian went bezerk, he started throwing hammers around, spanners, screwdrivers, piercing the ...  Read the complete review

I'm not a fast reader. It typically takes me about a week and a half to get through a novel. This is mainly because I only really read anything on my commute into London and back, which gives me only about an hour's reading time per day. If I'm enjoying a book, I'll sail through it, and devour up to a hundred pages in a day. If I'm not, the reading drags, and I won't get through so much each day, becoming distracted by discarded newspapers on the Underground. So, when I tell you that it took me over a month to get through 'The Glass Palace', you'll have a rough idea of how much I enjoyed it. I'd only ever encountered the ...  Read the complete review