Book(s) of the Week

Today's post brings some recommendations for lockdown reading from 4C: enjoy!

Lockwood and Co. Book 4 : The Creeping Shadow by Jonathan Stroud

Recommended by Timothee Brian

This book is about a group of four young people going on many adventures of ghost-hunting in a ghost infested England. It is an action and adventure book. I liked it as you can really lose yourself in the book. It is very exhilarating, especially the end.  It is well written, although the teenagers seem to be talking in quite a posh fashion, and it could maybe have been improved by cutting to the chase a bit quicker as we have to wait until after the middle of the book to actually start what the book is about. I would recommend this book but only to people who like fantasy books like Harry Potter as this is a very similar genre.

Book of the Week

Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell

Recommended by Mr Hager

It is relatively well known that Shakespeare had a son, called Hamnet, who died just a couple of years before he wrote his most famous work, Hamlet. 

It is a staple of literary biographies, and has inspired speculation from critics and authors, notably James Joyce in both Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses as to what the relationship is between Shakespeare’s art and his life. O’Farrell’s sense is that, for the most part, Hamnet the boy is little more than an interesting footnote to history, and that his identity and significance has been 'lost in the genius of his father'. This novel sets about trying to correct how underwritten Hamnet has become in biographies and studies of Shakespeare by putting him at the novel’s centre.

Book of the Week

The Ministry of Truth by Dorian Lynskey
Recommended by Miss McLaren

Our first book of the week this year is Dorian Lynskey's fascinating study of Orwell's dystopian classic, Nineteen Eighty-Four. 

This feels peculiarly timely. In January 2017, when reports of low attendance at Trump's inaugural address were dismissed as 'alternative facts', and it became clear that fake news was now definitely a thing, Orwell's novel shot to the top of the book charts.

Now, as the Trump presidency implodes so spectacularly, and Twitter and Facebook finally pull the plug, Nineteen Eighty-Four has again become a touchstone - this time for Trump's defenders, not his detractors:

Irony clearly passed the Trump dynasty by.