Iain Rob Wright - The Final Winter: An Apocalyptic Horror Novel

Iain Rob Wright - The Final Winter: An Apocalyptic Horror Novel: A pub somewhere in Great Britains nowhere... A few days ago it startet snowing worldwide, and now the snow is responsible for a more or less total breakdown of all infrastructure. Some of the local alcoholics and the waitress are locked-in and try to make the best of it. A stranger enters the pub, says a few friendly words, and then... power breakdown - not only in the pub, but in the whole town, probably in the whole world. When the electrical panel is checked, it is clear, that not simply the RCD is down, but the panel is burned completely.
And things start to get weird: when people of the surrounding shops try to get to the pub one gets murdered by strange hooded figures; another is thrown through the pub window and by that badly injured; freshly drawn beer is suddenly stale...
After a while in the completely frozen pub, where everybody is wrapped in warm clothing and everything flamable is burned, the persons trapped start to get to know and trust each other, which turns out to be a bad mistake! Something bad is still outside, but evil is not banned from the pub - and the hooded strangers outside are on a mission: They want the SINNER. But everyone of the pubpeople has a skeleton in the closet... so who is meant, who can they sent out to stop all this? And will all this be stopped by sending out a single person?

I really liked the book - only thing I did not like as much is the revelation of who the hooded figures are, and who the stranger in the pub is, apart from that it was a nice story, and even better, after finishing the story there are some short-stories from the final winter at the end of the book, stories of what happened in other parts of the world and how people reacted to the situation.

All in all I think I award 8 out of 10.

I am yet undecided as what to read next - I thought about "Watership down" - but the book I have is really old and has a really bad smell... I don't know yet, but will inform you :-)

 --> it turned out to be the first part of the Bartimäus books by Jonathan Stroud.

Michael Collins - The Last Book

"The Last Book", hmmm, I was hoping for an end time story... well serves me right, buying a book just because of its title, not even having a glance at the summary...

Well, ok, what is it about... The world is going to the dogs, nearly everyone is getting aggressive for no reason at all, bombs are exploding everywhere and no terroristic group takes the responsibility for them.
A ghostwriter is asked to write the 3rd (and last) book of a bestselling series (and here you have the explanation for the title :-)). Everything is depending on her to finish what the author of the two first books ist not able to. She - and several others - are drawn deep into a story which started years and years ago, and which will - if everything goes wrong - turn earth into hell.

All in all the book was an OK book, nothing I would read twice, but OK... what buggers me, is when there are words missing in the text, and I am quite sure that that had nothing to do with the ebook conversion, it just seems as if no one really read the text, and me, not being a native speaker in english... well I can't stand it, when I have to think minutes over a sentence, just because I cannot find out its meaning. Only afterwards I find out there was a word missing.

I will award 5 out of 10 for an ok story and a bad editorial office.

So far I have not decided what I will read next - "Bartimäus" or "the final winter" (this should really be an apocalyptic story) or a horro shortstory collection... hmmmmm. Cannot decide.

Michael Bond - A Bear Called Paddington

Michael Bond tells the heartwarming story of a little bear who sits at the beginning of the story at Paddington station with a label round his neck saying "please look after this bear". Family Brown happens to find the little chap, and decides to first feed him and get him something to drink, and after christening him "Paddington" - as no one is able to pronounce his real name - they take him home.

What begins as a nice little story soon turns out to be a mingle-mangle of little disasters - which are always funny for the reader - as I already mentioned, people where turning their heads at me, cause I continuously roared out of laughter. Paddington always does the wrong thing, but always means best, so no one can be mad at him for a long time.

The book is told in chapters which are not really linked, so it is a good book for bedtime reading. Paddington covers a lot of situations - going by tube/elevator/lift for the first time, entertaining a whole department store, painting like one of the old artists, setting the whole house under water - and it is a really enjoyable book. I award 10 out of 10, not only for the story itself but also for the very nice illustrations, which are enjoyable even on their own.

I now turn back to the Zombie Survival Guide (having seen World War Z in the movies, I think I might need to hurry...) - I haven't yet finished the Festival Guide as well, but I have no tickets for any of the upcoming festivals, so I take my time!