Richard Branson – Losing my Virginity

A non-stop, fast-paced life of adventure as Richard Branson tries one new business after all. A school drop out whose headmaster said he would either go to jail for become a millionaire. He managed to achieve both, as the jail sentence was only a few days.
Fascinating reading about the ballon trips, speed boating across the [...]

Favourite books of 2008

Fiction
1. World According to Garp – John Irving
2. The Book Thief – Marcus Zusak
3. Solaris – Stanislaw Lem. Now that I have read the book I watched the film version made in the early 1970s by Andrei Tarkovsky, then the recent version with George Clooney. A good film with a fantastic soundtrack.

Non Fiction.
4. Kingdom of [...]

The Story of the Trapp Family Singers

The Story of the Trapp Family Singers
Maria Augusta Trapp
First published in 1949
Maria was a novitiate in the Nonnberg convent in Salzburg, Austria when asked by the Mother Superior to be a teacher for the youngest daughter of Baron von Trapp, retired Captain in the Austrian Navy. This assignment was for one year after which Maria [...]

Loop – Koji Suzuki (final book of the Ring trilogy)

This is the third book in the Ring trilogy. In the first book, Ring, the videotape was the vendetta of Sadako, a tragic girl who could not be sated with simple revenge. In the sequel Spiral, a mutating virus displaced the tape and came to threaten the entire diversity of life.
This third book is quite [...]

Spiral – by Koji Suzuki

Spiral by Koji Suzuki. Originally published in Japan as Rasen in 1995. English translation copyright 2004. Spiral is the second part of the Ring trilogy of novels by Koji Suzuki.
The story starts with Mitsuo Ando, a doctor who is performing an autopsy on the body of Professor Ryuji Takayama who had died of a sudden [...]

Ring – the novel

Ring by Koji Suzuki
Translated by Robert B. Rohmer and Glynne Wally
(Originally published in Japan as Ringu in 1991.)
My motivation for reading this book was seeing the film Ring (released in 1998) directed by Hideo Nakata.
Notes from the book dust-jacket: Kazuyaki Asakawa is a dedicated journalist who has worked his way up from local newsbeat reporter [...]

One Day in September – Book Review

After seeing the film of the same name, I wanted to learn more about the events of the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich. The film focused on the kidnapping and the Germans’ abortive attempts at freeing the hostages.
The book by Simon Reeve, journalist, writer and author of “The New Jackals: Ramzi Yousef, Osama bin Laden [...]