{"id":782,"date":"2004-08-01T12:21:04","date_gmt":"2004-08-01T12:21:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/2004\/08\/starter_for_ten\/"},"modified":"2004-08-01T12:21:04","modified_gmt":"2004-08-01T12:21:04","slug":"starter_for_ten","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/2004\/08\/starter_for_ten\/","title":{"rendered":"Starter For Ten"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>First of all, don&#8217;t be put off my by the fact that <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.co.uk\/exec\/obidos\/ASIN\/0340734876\">Starter For Ten<\/a> features in the Richard and Judy summer book club. Now I might be a bit of a snob about these things, but featuring on a not-particularly intellectually demanding afternoon talk programme does not put a book high on my agenda.<br \/>\nBut this is quite a funny read &#8211; and takes me back to the early novels of David Lodge. Brian Jackson is spending his first year at his unnamed new university where he&#8217;s studying &#8220;Eng-Lit&#8221;. First task is to get into the University Challenge team, where he can try to woo the beautiful Alice.<br \/>\nThis is a pretty amusing tale of university, that&#8217;s helpfully set about three years before I did the same, thus making it all the more accurate for me. Sometimes the naiivity does seem a little over-egged, but there are laugh-out-loud moments, and it&#8217;s a thoroughly good read. It also really doesn&#8217;t end up how you expect it to end, but I&#8217;ll say no more.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>0340734876<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"cybocfi_hide_featured_image":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-782","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/782","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=782"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/782\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=782"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=782"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=782"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}