More "Tales from The Book Club"

As I mentioned previously, I'll be using this blog once ever couple of months to update the list of those books I've featured on The Book Club (and, those which I haven't been able to squeeze in but which are still highly recommended).

Show 5:- 3rd April
Raymond Khoury - The Last Templar (Orion)
Will Hodgkinson - Guitar Man: A Six-String Odyssey (Bloomsbury)
J Shaun Lyon - Doctor Who: Back to the Vortex (Telos Publishing)
Douglas Greenwood - Who's Buried Where in England? (Constable & Robinson)
Ken Emerson - Always Magic in the Air (Fourth Estate)
Simon Hughes - Morning Everyone (MacMillan)
Andrew Smith - Moondust* (Bloomsbury)

[* not Moonshot as both I and Jon Harle insisted on calling it on the show itself - many, many apologies to Andrew and to his publisher for getting the name of the book wrong ... But it's a wonderfully well-written book whatever it's called!]

Also received during March and April:
Robert Dimery - 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die (Cassell Illustrated)
Ray Banks - Saturday's Child (Polygon Publishing)
Gary Rimmer - Number Freaking: The Surreal Sums Behind Everyday Life (Icon Books)
Ian Mortimer - The Perfect King: The Life of Edward III (Jonathan Cape)
Paul Du Noyer - We All Shine On: The Stories Behind Every John Lennon Song (Carlton)
John Kennedy O'Connor - The Eurovision Song Contest: The Official History (Carlton)
Steve Watkins and Clare Jones - Unforgettable Journeys to Take Before You Die (BBC Books)
Gavin Pretor-Pinney - The Cloudspotter's Guide (Sceptre Books)
Matthew Parker - Monte Cassino (Headline Book Publishing)
Thomas Myler - Boxing's Hall of Shame (Mainstream Publishing)
Fred Eyre - Kicked Into Touch (Mainstream Publishing)
Robert and Isabella Tombs - That Sweetest Enemy: The French and the British from the Sun King to the Present (William Heinemann Publishing)
Karen Armstrong - The Great Transformation (Atlantic Publishing)
Harry Thompson - Penguins Stopped Play (John Murray Books)
Mandy Ambert - Geordie and the Spaceman (Author House)
David Nicholson-Lord - Planet Earth (BBC Books)
Nick Hornby - A Long Way Back (Penguin Books)

Several of these will feature in the next programme which is on 8th May (due to next Monday being a Bank Holiday). I'm still in the process of sorting out the script for this month as a couple of books that I wanted to feature haven't turned up yet(!)

I'd also like to pay a moment's tribute to one of my all-time literary heroines, Muriel Spark, who died last weekend. Most people will know her best as the author of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie - quite possibly the greatest novel written in the English language in the last century. However, her work was always challenging and remarkably multi-layered, witty and humane. Check out The Ballad of Peckham Rye, The Girls of Slender Means, Momento Mori, Reality and Dreams and the remarkable The Abbess of Crewe for other outstanding examples of her work. There's a fine website run by the National Library of Scotland at http://www.nls.uk/murielspark/index.html for further details on this quite remarkable writer and her, equally remarkable, life.