When I was young I totally fell in love with the books by Arthur Ransome. They were gentle fictional novels which really caught my fancy. They are the reason I enjoy rowing, I’m not particularly good at rowing…I’m more in the camp of go-hard-or-go-home and that’s not terribly good when ...

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This is a book I found on my phone while I was on a plane last year. I had just watched the movie made from the book starring Hilary Swank. We’d spent so much time on planes I’d run out movies or TV shows I wanted to watch. I turned ...

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The Full Monty One of those books I have no idea where I got it from, they seem to just find themselves on my shelves without me doing anything. That’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it. So much I want to say about this book. I want to talk about ...

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I read this book when I was young, it was an amazing book back then but I totally missed the point of it. The fact that I think there are many possible points to it is rather irrelevant as I missed them all back then. I just knew it was an amazing ...

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The Sound of Music. You probably all know it as the movie with Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer and you may even know it was a book before that but it all started in the 1920s in Austria when Maria Augusta Kutschera was sent to Captain Georg von Trapp’s house to look ...

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I was very pleased to see The Great Gatsby on the weekend, it’s rare that I’m up-to-date so I enjoyed it for its rarity and also for the movie. I’d made certain to reread the book earlier this month as it’s been far too many years since my first reading. ...

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If you saw the movie Beaches with Bette Midler and Barbara Hershey and you think this book might possibly the same story then you’re partly right. There are enough similarities to ensure you can see where they got the ideas for the movie from but there are also major departures. ...

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I looked in my diary and noticed how busy June is for birthdays and anniversaries of writerly and filmy type stuff. I’ve briefly written about Lester del Rey before (June 2, 1915–May 10, 1993), he’s a man who really deserves a whole article and not just brief mentions in other ...

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The Grapes of Wrath in every form is very hard to take. It shows how the poor and dispossessed lived and loved during the Great Depression in America. Its real message is how the big corporations had stopped treating people as humans and started treating them as numbers. In case ...

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Definitely, poor Yorick, it’s a fairly well known line from Hamlet and often misquoted.  This doesn’t mean I’m reviewing Hamlet, far from it.  I am going to make quick mention of the storyline and then talk a little about the numerous essays and creative responses that I’ve had to read ...

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It’s been an interesting weekend with a juxtaposition of events.  On Saturday we went to see the latest Harry Potter movie and on Sunday we went to a funeral.  Why am I mentioning the funeral?  You’ll have to get through a few words about Harry Potter before I get to ...

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I was given A Christmas Carol DVD to view and review. As I’ve never read the book I took the time to read it first so as to be more familiar with the story. When I came to watch the movie I found it reasonably faithful to the book. In ...

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This is the typical story of two teens meeting and falling in love. One of them is famous, Christopher Wilde played by Sterling Knight, and the other isn’t, Jessica Olson played by Danielle Campbell. Jessica’s older sister, Sara played by Maggie Castle, is mad keen on Christopher and is desperate ...

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I was sent this movie to review and asked a friend to come over with her young son as my kids are in the wrong demographic and I wanted to get a young person’s take on it. This movie was loosely based on The Frog Prince originally written by the ...

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Now, I’m sure some of you already knew that work has begun on transforming John Marsden’s book Tomorrow When the War Began into a movie, but I’ve just found out. I read on IMDB that they announced the casting of Caitlin Stasey as Ellie Linton, the central character of the ...

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