In which I rant a bit about recent reading

My Cathy was chucking out some books for the charity shop, so I thought I'd give one of them - an action/adventure type story set during the Trojan war - a go. Didn't last a chapter. How can you make the Trojan War boring? This book did. And maybe I've been spoiled by Mary Renault's wonderful prose, having just read "The Mask of Achilles" and re-read "The Persian Boy", but this other book looked like an eleven year old had written it. In contrast, Elin Gregory's excellent "On a Lee Shore" reads like my beloved P O'B might have written bits of it.

It makes no sense to me how the poorer book can be the one with the major publisher.