What’s in a Book?

What’s in a Book?

What’s in a book?
Between the covers
Let’s take a look
At the wonders inside

Whether fact or fiction
Novel or poetry
Written with perfect diction
Or slovenly prose

What about genre
Romance or mystery
Fantasy or horror
Thriller or erotica

Escape the mundane
Visit the fantastic
Magical worlds
Imagination elastic

So what’s in a book?
Now you know
Anything you like
Go on give it a go

For this, and other random poetry, check out ‘Who Want’s a Theme Anyway?’ here:

Amazon US

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Description

A collection of poetry celebrating the beauty of the random. There is no thematic link to these poems, they touch upon almost any subject that crossed the author’s mind in the moment. They were born from a series of journal notes made over the course of a number of months. This collection is an eclectic mix of poems and range from love poetry to landscapes, children, paranormal, science and technology, and animals, with a lot of other topics thrown in for good measure.

Times New Romanian by Nigel Shakespear

Description from Goodreads

Times New Romanian provides a picture of Romania today through the individual first-person narratives of people who chose to go and make a life in this country. Each chapter a voice, each story in Times New Romanian provides readers with a look into the Romanian world – the way things work, the vitality of the people, the living heritage of rural traditions, ordinary life – sometimes dark, sometimes sublime, always interesting. In a land full of character and contradiction, there is a strong attraction for those with the spirit to meet the challenges, where the one thing you can be sure of is the unpredictable. Life is not always easy. These stories will tell you why… If you want to know more about Romanians and their country, the voices in Times New Romanian make for an enjoyable and lively read. Inspired by Studs Terkel and Tony Parker, Nigel used their oral history style and his own experience in Romania to guide him in recording these interviews.

I gave this book four stars out of five

My thoughts:

I very much enjoyed reading this book. I tend to read a lot more fiction than non-fiction these days, so it made a pleasant change for me.

I liked the format of the book, which consisted of many, short, real life stories from people that had moved into Romania, or worked there, generally as foreigners. This made it easy to read in a bitwise fashion. I don’t think I quite realised the extent of the cultural diversity of the country before. It was a great insight into life as a foreigner in a fascinating and exciting country.

Each story had a different viewpoint based upon where the person had originated from, how they had first visited the country, their motivations for being there, and ultimately what kept them there. For some they now viewed Romania as their home, whilst for others it was home for now, but their real home was elsewhere. Some of those spoken to divided their time between living in Romania, and living in another country.

I found it fascinating to hear about the multitude of different ways that these people approached life in Romania. For some it was just somewhere that they worked, either for themselves, for large multinationals, or as volunteer workers, for others it was because they had a Romanian partner.

It was interesting to see how people’s lives had changed and developed during the course of their time there, and as a result of the people that they met and their experiences.

I would recommend this to anyone wanting to gain a greater insight into life in Romania as a foreigner, or indeed just interested in learning more about the country. This was a most interesting read.

This review is based on a complimentary copy provided by Netgalley and the publisher.