I've been doing rather well with my Mt. TBR challenge this month, but I still hadn't touched any of the lovely Persephone books on my shelf. 

This lunchtime I picked up Tell It to a Stranger, a collection of short stories, and found it very hard to put the book down once my lunch break was over. 

 

I can already tell that I like Berridge's writing. It is even-handed and consistent, and although the stories I have read can hardly be described as cheerful, there is some quiet optimism in them.

What I have enjoyed most so far, however, have been Berridges observations. 

 

"The old lady shook her head. That's the way it goes, from generation to generation, she was thinking. The young one setting up new values which are as old as the sun, kicking away from the parents as a child kicks from the womb." (The Bare Tree)

"NIGHT FIGHTER" is J.R.D. "Bob" Braham's story, which lives up to its billing as "fast-paced, hard-hitting and personal."

After leaving school in 1936 and having worked as a clerk in a police station, Braham joined the Royal Air Force (RAF) on a short service commission in late 1937. Despite some struggles during the elementary stages of flight training, he persevered and won his wings in late August 1938. During this time, Braham had his first exposure to night-flying, a skill at which he would become highly proficient during the Second World War.

But before that, Braham was to gain considerable experience flying some of the RAF's standard and recently obsolescent fighters of the 1938-40 period, inclusive of the Hawker Fury, Hawker Demon and Gloster Gladiator biplane fighters, the Hawker Hurricane (one of the modern monoplane fighters then swelling the ranks of RAF Fighter Command, along with the Spitfire), and the twin-engined monoplane - the Bristol Blenheim. Eventually, a short time after the outbreak of war in September 1939, the decision was made to make Braham's squadron into a night-fighter unit. A year would pass before he scored his first kill, flying the Bristol Blenheim.

Braham has a way of bringing home to the reader the stresses, strains, and thrills of combat flying. I gained a deep appreciation for the dynamic, fluid nature of the air war by night as waged between the RAF and the Luftwaffe. Sometimes one side would move a little ahead of its opponent as the technology of radar detection and concealment grew and evolved under wartime pressures --- and changes in tactics and aircraft would tilt the scales, as well.

By 1943, Braham had become one of the RAF's highest-scoring night-fighter aces flying the formidable Bristol Beaufighter and commanding his own squadron. He would go on to help develop "intruder tactics" by which RAF night-fighters could engage in fast, low-level daylight missions against Luftwaffe airbases and German military installations in Occupied Europe, as well as Germany itself. A year later, Braham himself would be shot down by enemy fighters on an intruder mission over Denmark, flying the superlative DeHavilland Mosquito twin-engined fighter. (The way Braham describes this combat in great detail was like seeing a dramatic series of heart-stopping scenes being played out in my imagination.) Braham would return from POW camp in May 1945 and resume serving in the RAF before accepting an opportunity to emigrate with his family to Canada and join the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF), where he would serve with distinction for 16 years (1952-68).

All of these are priced from 99 cents to 1.99. Or at this moment at least. No idea of the quality of some of these - they're here because I once read something somewhere that made them sound good. I'm still narrowing down which I'll pick myself. If something in here you've read is exceptionally great or absolutely awful, do chime in!

 

I figured I'd stuff as many of these into one entry and maybe some of you folk would be interested. Because as usual my I'm Interested In This list is always a mishmash of subjects - lots are things that caught my eye eons ago and are only now on sale. Also there were more books than this - this is just the amount I decided to share before I got tired - narrowed down from 58ish books. Some I dropped since they were more than 1.99, which I always feel is a great price for "oh I'll give it a try." Which is why I currently have so many unread ebooks. ...Which is my way of saying, fair warning, perhaps pay no attention to all this.

 

While I haven't made my mind up on everything I can tell you what I did buy immediately - the one on Madame Tussaud. Because it's one of two books on her I've wanted and the woman has always fascinated me.

 

I'm assuming all the book images above will give you links to Amazon (again US Amazon, check to see if there's price matching in your location) - here are the ones that wouldn't fit:

 

Showgirls, Teen Wolves, and Astro Zombies: A Film Critic's Year-Long Quest to Find the Worst Movie Ever Made by Michael Adams

 

Talking to the Dead by Barbara Weisberg

 

The Man Time Forgot by Isaiah Wilner

 

Love and Madness by Martin Levy

 

Anne Frank by Francine Prose

 

Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution by Sara Marcus

 

The Lives of the Muses by Francine Prose

 

The Best American Crime Writing 2006 (Best American Crime Reporting)

 

Periodic Tales: A Cultural History of the Elements, from Arsenic to Zinc by Hugh Aldersey-Williams

 

Reality Matters: 19 Writers Come Clean About the Shows We Can't Stop Watching by Anna David

 

The Fellowship by Roger Friedland (Author), Harold Zellman (Author)

[I'd forgotten this was on Frank Lloyd Wright and had to look it up because I thought it was about LOTR]

 

The Greedy Bastard Diary: Around the States in 80 Days by Eric Idle

 

The Map That Changed the World by Simon Winchester

 

Note, if you're going to make an impulse buy on Amazon sales, go for the ones marked 99 cents more quickly. Those sometimes go away in a matter of hours. The higher the price the longer you can dither while making up your mind.

Berridge is a generous-spirited radical, inhabiting every perspective with insight and commitment. Her aristocrats have virtues which she values and which redeem them personally, but do not justify their overprivileged status.

The critical even-handedness Berridge so masterfully deploys is, I feel, particularly effective in 'Snowstorm' which explores the fraught emotional territories of motherhood and medicine to reveal the debasing potential of certain ethics of care and self-sacrifice. In the delicately nuanced comparison of a worldly young pregnant woman and a female gynaecologist in charge of a maternity hospital under the chronic additional tension of evacuation, Berridge allows the latter bitter envy, and a measure of consolation.

Review: It’s (relatively) not often that you see vampire girls. It’s often the boys, and then the girl gets turned if she’s lucky. It’s quite nice seeing the girl born a vampire for once. Elena knows that she will become a vampire some day, but she doesn’t know everything else about herself. Which is quite a lot, and quite major to how she’ll turn out. She’s living with a family of Protectors-kind of like slayers, but magical versions. Then she meets William Granville, a vampire, and a lot of things happen. She gets pulled into a Vanator hunt (a Vanator is essentially a werewolf that drinks blood. And the a’s should have hats on them. Whatever they’re called in punctuation terms.), she learns the truth about her parentage, she learns she’s even further than normal than she thought she was, and she finds herself falling in love with a 400+ year old vampire. Yay!So, it starts really quickly with Will out hunting Vanators. We soon get to the main bit-Elena’s life. To be honest, the first bit wasn’t amazing. The first third (about that much, well, until she meets Will) is nice to read, but lacking on the paranormal side, and edging towards teen girl-y problems-sneaking out for parties and such. Not really what I was expecting, and really not my thing. I suppose it was useful for character building, especially around Elena’s family.Then we met Will and it all picked up. Hunts are fairly frequent in this, and there’s quite a bit of blood and guts at various points in the story.Elena, once we’d got over the first part, is really really cool. Her parentage is just one of the many things that gives her an edge-her general attitude and her development are two others. I love the way she speaks-always speaking her mind and consistently sassy and strong. She definitely develops-how could she not after learning all of THAT about herself? Will, I quite liked. Even if it was creepy how he always turned up.There’s some very realistic seeming dialogue, especially in the family scenes. I can guess that everything that happened between Elena and her “mother” would have happened anyway, even if they weren’t a vampire and a magical protector. And the bits with Lucas, the brother. Aww. Lucas is a very sweet, if sometimes annoyingly, protective brother that makes having siblings not seem so bad.The best thing about this book is the description in the action scenes. Well, the description throughout. But in the action scenes especially. Paranormal Australia is easily imagined, and I felt like I was right there in all of it.Overall: Strength 4 tea to a great start to a paranormal series that I definitely want to carry on with.