Keith Maguire

Informative and charming - very enjoyable in audiobook form.

This is an astonishingly rich and evocative book. It seems to contain so much more that the words could possibly hold.

It's a heart-breaking account of the experiences and the aftermath of being a prisoner of war for an Australian soldier on the Burma railway. The accounts of the conditions for the prisoners of war are extremely harrowing. The experiences are recounted in the context of a lifetime, with the time in captivity as well as characters' lives before and after plaited into a constantly shifting narrative perspective. Try to read as little as possible about it before starting - any plot summaries I've read vastly over-simplify what is happening.

Enjoyable light-hearted science fiction with an interesting plot. Quite a breezy/snarky narrator that could be grating depending on your preferences (like Joss Whedon character speech), it was at my personal limit for that style but the storytelling was good enough to overcome that.

Pretty tough going, lots of miniscule detail of characters experiences of tedious events. Worth it for the transcendent passages towards the end.

A very enjoyable book set during the compiling/writing of the Oxford English Dictionary. It's a combination of very enjoyable page-turning read with a critique of the textual-evidence-based nature of the OED and the way that such an approach necessarily misses out on significant parts of the language.