CricketGeek Book Review: The Albion 2013 Ashes eBook - by The Armchair Selector

The team at The Armchair Selector have put together a handy guide for anyone who is wanting to watch the Ashes in 2013.

A screen shot of the eBook's

eye-pleasing layout.

It includes information about the players, the ground, some recent history and some personal accounts of ashes experiences.

The layout and design of the eBook is outstanding, it's visually captivating while still being very readable.

The team have done well to find a balance between being informative about the cricket, and humorous and easy to read. For me the highlight was Peter Miller's section giving tips for keeping awake through the night for the matches.

The one omission was Ashton Agar from the profiles, but to be fair, he was very much a surprise selection.

Overall I really enjoyed it. I would recommend it to any cricket tragic who's likely to be spending a lot of time on the couch (or to anyone who isn't a massive fan, but wants to sound knowledgeable). I'm not sure if they are planning on producing one of these for the return series, but if they are, I'll be buying one.

The eBook costs US$3.99, and can be bought here.

CricketGeek Book Review: Chinaman: The Legend of Pradeep Mathew - Shehan Karunatilaka

As a former mystery wrist-spinner, I was eager to read the story about a Sri Lankan mystery spinner, even if he did bowl with his left arm. I was expecting a good cricket book, but instead got a very good book, that happened to feature cricket.

The book came highly recommended, and it did not disappoint. I believe that the best novels are ones that take the reader into a different time/place. I loved Crime and Punishment because when I read it I became Raskolnikov. When I read Live Bodies, I became Josef Mandl. Jane Eyre and The Bronze Horseman had a similar effect. While reading Chinaman, I was so transfixed that I could almost smell the Sri Lankan streets.

The characters have a richness that is hard to find in other novels. The three main characters all have twists and reveal new sides to themselves regularly. The lead character, WG Karunasena, undertakes a moral journey that would feel at home in a Dostoyevsky novel.

Often books with exceptionally deep characters sacrifice the plot. While there was moments where the book dragged, it generally moved quite quickly, and some of the twists in the plot were both unexpected and interesting.

Overall this is one of the best books I've ever read. The three books that it feels the most like are three of my favourites, A Painted House by John Grisham, Mr Pip by Lloyd Jones and Live Bodies by Maurice Gee. I cannot recommend it highly enough.

Book review: Guile and Spin by Stuart Larner

Guile and Spin by Stuard Larner is a novel based around a tennis coach taking up cricket in order to earn a grant for his recreation centre. It is set in a small town in England, and follows the interaction between a handful of characters through a cricket season.

When I first started reading Guile and Spin, I was quite disappointed. The book starts off going into excruciating detail about everything in a way that is quite distracting. The writing at first seemed quite clumsy and the characters quite plastic. However, the book is written as a fun read and not as a piece of high brow literature and it succeeds in that. Eventually I quite enjoyed it.

Once you look past the overly stereotyped characters, and the annoying detail, the story is a good fun read, that has a couple of plot layers, some of which are fairly predictable, but others that throw up some surprises.

It is ideally suited to the e-book format, and would be a good read while sitting on public transport. It's also probably a great read for a teenager who is a fan of cricket. I could imagine a number of the boys that I coach really enjoying reading this.

In summary, it's not going to win any prizes for literature, but it is a fun read, that may be a very good Christmas present for a cricket obsessed teenager.

You can purchase the book on Amazon here