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About half way through this dual time story. I’m enjoying the emerging magical and mystery aspects and the linked themes emerging that I won’t divulge because I don’t want to spoil them.

All I can think about is how much I would like a piece of marble cake.

Hard work.

Reading this for the second time. I had forgotten how exciting it is. Terrific story, very difficult to put down.

It's been a bit like trudging up a steep hill in a barren landscape in the blaring sun and finally coming to the top and seeing a shady copse and a cool, bubbling brook ahead. Well worth the effort.

"But that was then and this is now and I'm still getting nowhere fast". Not a promising start.

Now it's creepy. Which is good.

So far so good, shades of Raymond Chandler.

I am listening to the audiobook and reading the e-book on Kindle. I was slightly surprised when I started the ebook after listening to the audio version because they were completely different. Fortunately I realised after reading a review of the book that half of the editions started with one story and the remaining half the other.

Underwhelmed so far. Some beautiful imagery but the characters seem to be devices to drive the plot. Pushing some buttons and pulling levers to get the reader's sympathy-a blind girl and an orphan boy, each with remarkable gifts.

I didn't realise how widespread the Peasant's Revolt was in 1381 and how many records were destroyed. I had always thought Richard II very brave to confront the rebels at Mile End and Smithfield when he was 14 years old, but really he made stupid promises he had no power to make, worsening a fraught situation. What a bad, bad king he was.

Enjoyable read so far, but inexplicably people don't have mobile phones in 2054 Oxford.

Typical dysfunctional, angst-ridden American middle class family that authors seem to believe are so very original but are really so very alike. American authors and playwrights have managed to turn Tolstoy's epigram on it's head. This one has a ghost angle. Enjoyable read overall, except the characters have deplorable manners and no on seems to notice.

Just started this 1951 novel about a bedridden detective who investigates the murder of the princes in the Tower to amuse himself. So far it's wizard.

Ok, we're finally getting somewhere. It took 400 pages of hard slog, but I am now beginning to see what the fuss is about. Still, 400 + pages to get into a novel?

Underwhelmed so far. Much more like Wilkie Collins than Dickens. Tells, rather than shows. Characters do implausible things. Hoping it will come together eventually.

Chapter on Dickens' Bleak House.

On a Book Club deadline, so spent the day in bed with the cats and this diverting coming-of-age story set in Adelaide in the late seventies. Feel very at home with this book and know the characters well. The narrator, Jake Taylor is a likeable kid and his mother, hard-drinking and smoking Harry, is a scream.

The novel is unsettling and frightening. The house on Ash Tree Lane is scary but the layout of the book itself is much more frightening. The first 117 pages is conventional, with footnotes at the bottom of the page. Then footnotes appear as text boxes and columns alongside the main text and their content reflects the obsessive, unravelling mind of the characters.

Riveting at times, meandering at others.

Fascinating, disturbing and funny.

Completed absorbing. Loving it.

So far, so good. Have laughed out loud a couple of times already, which I wasn't expecting and the characters are well drawn, the baddies just ghastly and the goodies flawed.