JOSH’S BOOK SYNOPSIS 5 golden tickets grant access to 5 lucky children the trip of a lifetime... but not is all that meets the eye. A psychotic chocolate factory owner, armed with a hoard of subservient little orange men, conjure up a ‘le jeu de le mort’ to decide who is worthy of not only his approval... but also his entire business empire. The bloodthirsty tycoon, known as Willy, hatches a plan to coax 5 kids to his factory so he can pick them off one by one in a novel full of vengeance and punishment to decide whom he can groom to become his successor. Set in wintery Victorian Britain, Wonk ..read more

BOOK SYNOPSIS The book begins in the Louvre, with the murder of the gallery's fictional curator Jacques Saunière, who is shot one night by an albino monk named Silas under the instruction of the mysterious Teacher. With his last dying efforts, Saunière drags himself into the pose of The Vitruvian Man, Leonardo da Vinci's iconic painting, and spells out a code next to his body in his own blood, which ends with the words 'P.S. find Robert Langdon'. Langdon, it turns out, is a Harvard Professor of Symbology who just happens to be in Paris on business. Langdon doesn't know what to make of the ..read more

BOOK SYNOPSIS As with all the Sherlock Holmes stories, this novel revolves around a case for Dr. John Watson and Mr Sherlock Holmes, two celebrity detectives in Victorian England. It begins with Dr. James Mortimer, a mate of Sherlock, asking for advice about his friend Charles Baskerville who died of a mysterious 'heart attack' on the Dartmoor moors.  Holmes sends poor old Watson to the moors to investigate, and down in Dartmoor, Watson soon realises the Baskerville manor and surrounding moors are as creepy and bleak as promised: there's an escaped convict running loose on the moors, a ma ..read more

'It's hard to revisit something you loved so much as a kid, and just beat the shit out of it.' And yet here we are, looking back on a book that inspired 15-year-old Oli to believe in both travelling and literature. Does Jack Kerouac's great American novel still hold up over a decade later? Well yes, and no. The boys get stuck into whether the intoxicating Beat lifestyle still has the same appeal in your late 20s. And indeed, in the 21st Century. Was Kerouac an early Twitch-er? How spontaneously was this written? And what price do we pay for being for being original and not conforming? These ar ..read more

BOOK SYNOPSIS Wartime Britain. Four precocious and posh children have just been evacuated old manor in the countryside. While exploring the house, the youngest child, Lucy, goes into a wardrobe in one of the house’s many bedrooms, and walks right through the back into a new world beyond. The world of Narnia. In the mystical snowy kingdom, she and her siblings encounter anthropomorphised goats, beavers, birds, Santa Claus and the White Witch, the evil overlord of Narnia who's on the hunt for the children. As the children struggle to evade the her clutches, they're rescued by King Asla ..read more

BOOK SYNOPSIS To explain this book in any useful way, you have to start with the central concept. And it's basically about brains. Brains, memories and data. Set some time in the future, we're introduced to a world where certain gifted people can essentially encrypt data using the two different halves of their brain. These people are called Calcutecs, and their abilities are prized by the dystopian state known as The System under whose reign the world resides. On the other side, we have Semiotics, vigilantes working against the state to steal this encrypted data. One of these Calcutecs is our ..read more

BOOK SYNOPSIS Published in 1989, this is the 8th novel in the Pratchett's Discworld series, and the first to focus on The Night Watch, who are, as the name would suggest, the night watchman of Ankh-Morpork, the primary city in Discworld. Led by world-weary alcoholic Captain Vimes, this band of miscreants is largely made up of semi-reformed criminals serving prison sentences and the earnest Carrot, a human adopted by dwarves, who willingly signs up to the Watch at the beginning of Guards! Guards! and looks to apply every law in the book to this pretty lawless city. Revitalised by Carrot's enthu ..read more

BOOK SYNOPSIS: A loveable woodland romp, with many of the best scenes featuring a roly-poly toad.   POD SYNOPSIS: Bad subplots, colonialism and the animal class system: it's the last episode in this season of ANA, which means the last chapter of Wormworld — possibly ever. After all this time, Josh finally gets to reading his dream novel ('it's got animals in it. That works for me'), but the book gets a mixed reception, as do JRoy's late Xmas presents, which he kindly brought along unexpectedly (thanks again, mate). Skip to 56 mins for the final chapter of Wormworld: 'I've got a Six-pack ..read more

BOOK SYNOPSIS: A group of people lose their minds in the mind-numbingly tedious Yorkshire countryside.   POD SYNOPSIS: A lack of ghosts and too many olden day-sy words: it's our second crack at Emily Bronte's gothic ghost tale, and Josh still doesn't like it. Stay tuned for the boys' favourite ghosts, chapter 5 of Wormworld and a fair bit of Kate Bush ..read more

BOOK SYNOPSIS: Patrick Bateman works on Wall Street in an unspecified, important but seemingly pointless job, spending his days in restaurants and bars with other men in similarly vague and successful jobs — half of whom don't seem to know who he is. It's a life he seems to resent, but he makes no attempt to escape it. By night he is the psycho from the book's title: a man who obsessively humiliates, rapes and dismembers women and anyone he takes a dislike to. The violence is described in horrific detail, but in the same bored tones with which Bateman describes his expensive meals in downtown ..read more