Books

Shannen Doherty has denied claims that she is a 'bad girl'.

The former Charmed star told OK! that people mistake her intelligence for nastiness.

"It's funny," she said. "I think that in America, a woman with a brain is called a woman with edge, and I think in Europe a woman with a brain is called a woman with a brain.

"I think it's a very different stigma. I don't think it's an edge at all. I'm smart and I'm quick, and I like playing smart characters."

It could only happen in a Douglas Adams story - the man whose original Hitcher's Guide to the Galaxy trilogy ran to five books follows up with a sixth: from beyond the grave.

That's right, Artemis Fowl author Eoin Colfer has released And Another Thing... an official Part 6 of 3 in the Hitchhiker's Guide series - reprising all our favourite characters: Arthur Dent, Ford Prefect, Zaphod Beeblebrox and Trillian.

Now, a funny thing happened on the way to this unlikely sequel - over the summer, I re-read all the previous five books. And though I remembered loving the absurd humour of the series as a teenager, by the time I'd completed Mostly Harmless, I was totally burned out on the Guide. My abiding feeling about the end of the series was that it was thin on plot, think on inane babbling and I closed the book feeling that the franchise had been flogged to death.

Colfer, to his credit, does a great job at picking up from where Adams left off. And he earns his fanboy credentials by resurrecting Adams' bizarre universe from the Vogon destructor fleets to Wowbagger The Infinitely Prolonged (who gets a romantic storyline in this book). I have very little complaint with Colfer's narrative - he does a good job of channeling his inner Adams.

I love it when guerilla bloggers cross over into traditional media and become successful in the mainstream. That's what fashion blogger Mademoiselle Robot - aka Laëtitia Wajnapel - has done. She's published a book celebrating two years of blogging, featuring interviews and photos of actors, musicians and othercreative types she's encountered along the way.

It looks like a quirky and interesting book, and here's a bit more of what Laëtitia has to say about it -

To celebrate the second anniversary of my blog (www.mademoisellerobot.com), I has been working on a book compiling interviews I have done since november 2007.

In the past two years, I have been lucky enough to meet wonderful people who have been a constant inspiration to me. I have interviewed artists, actors, musicians, fashion designers, celebrities, muses, always aiming to get the most accurate and most intimate portrait of them.

The blurb hooks us with a tantalising premise: aged ex-copywriter Frances sits on her stairs waiting for the bailiffs to give up and leave her in peace. By way of killing some time she pretends to reflect on the exciting array of world history she has beheld over the past five decades, including such delights as the rise and fall of Communism, Feminism, and Capitalism (which was promptly followed by the Shock, Crunch, Squeeze, Recovery, Fall, Crisis and finally, Bite).

Audrey Niffenegger's Her Fearful Symmetry sees two twins move into their dead aunt's London flat as part of the strange terms of her will. However, the ghost of their aunt Elspeth - to everyone's surprise, even her own - continues to haunt the flat where she once lived.

For the first time on Unreality Shout, I wanted to introduce some questions for people who've read the book and want to discuss it a bit further. There will naturally be spoilers throughout the following post and in the comments section of the page - if you haven't read Her Fearful Symmetry yet, be warned!

Finally, I got my hands on Audrey Niffenegger's follow-up to The Time Traveler's Wife. But where her first novel tackled involuntary time travel, Her Fearful Symmetry is steeped in the aftermath of a death when some sticky family secrets begin to unravel.

Niffenegger takes her narrative London this time, when one of the central characters, Elspeth, dies at the age of 44. This is where the fun and games begin - Elspeth had left her flat and belongings to her two American nieces, Julia and Valentina, mirror twins of her sister Edie and her husband Jack.

As a long-standing fan of Kate Mosse's novels, I was delighted to spy The Winter Ghosts in a bookshop. If you're at all familiar with Mosse's previous work - Labyrinth and Sepulchre, you'll recognise the setting and themes almost instantly.

The Winter Ghosts follows Frederick Watson, a young man burdened by grief at the death of his brother during the Great War. After a breakdown, he takes some time to explore the Languedoc region of France. But while travelling, he crashes his car and is forced to stay the night in a remote village.

It's been a few years since Dan Brown dropped a new book on us, so I was initially shocked when I walked past Waterstones and discovered The Lost Symbol. Of course, in the intervening years, Brown's "Indiana Jones of Symbology" - Robert Langdon - has become a major movie franchise, so naturally Langdon is the hero of this novel too.

Having just re-read Angels And Demons (my favourite of the Dan Brown novels), I was ready for another fix of Langdon and the unraveling of ancient history and secret sects.

Surprisingly, the story takes place on American soil, in the nation's capital, Washington DC. Langdon is invited to give a talk by old friend and mentor Peter Solomon, a high ranking Mason, wealthy heir and all round nice guy. Of course, when Langdon arrives in DC, he discovers the whole thing was an elaborate trick and that some maniac has hacked Solomon's hand off and left it as a symbol which Langdon must decode.

I've been following the launch of Kathy Lette's new book - All Steamed Up - with interest. As you know, a central theme of this launch (in partnership with Radox) is that women need to take the time out for themselves. It's an interesting concept, isn't it? I really do think that women feel guilty taking time to themselves. It's probably part of our conditioning to be always 'on' - whether at work, taking care of the housework, doing homework with the kids. If my day is so busy, why should I feel guilty for slipping upstairs for five minutes to read a book?

Perhaps that's the real idea behind the Kathy Lette/Radox partnership – Selfishness – to make people realise that when you've spent your days giving yourself to everybody else, it's OK to take some time for yourself. And if anybody's got a problem with that [glares at husband...]

This theme is central to ‘All Steamed Up’ – for an exclusive insight into the inspiration for the book, here’s a video:

I wasn't aware of it, but Ms Marisha Pessl has been a controversial commodity in bookworm circles. She divides opinion as much on the basis of her (very) good looks as much as she does with her writing style. Yes, a little research on the author reveals two tribes: one which believes Pessl to be a literary wunderkind, the other insisting she's an overhyped author.

Better still, she's only released one book to date, Special Topics in Calamity Physics.

The Story

Special Topics in Calamity Physics follows a gifted student, Blue van Meer, who travels from town to town with her father, an itinerant academic who raised her since her mother died.

Blue and her father move to a new town and she starts an exclusive school. She’s taken under the wing of a teacher at the school, Hannah Schneider, and is grudgingly accepted by Schneider’s select group of pupils known as The Bluebloods.