I think this book has only just been published in the UK in the last few days. I bought it in June at LAX waiting for a flight. I first entered Palahniuk’s twisted, warped, often-appealingly depraved and funny world by reading Survivor and Fight Club. Maybe I’ve been living in the UK too long, but [...]
With Woman’s World, I was the first person on 26 books to review a graphic novel. And now another first – we’ll see what the book purists say – my review of a completely wordless graphic novel by Andrzej Klimowski. Where Graham Rawle’s was a graphic novel formed by a painstaking collage of text and [...]
Mrs. Chppy’s Last Expedition: the Remarkable Journal of Shackleton’s Polar-bound Cat is just a cracking good read! Alexander is an accomplished writer and researcher on English naval history, including an account of the crew’s survival on the ill-fated Endurance expedition to the Antarctic.
In this book, rather than give us Sir Ernest Shackleton’s or [...]
I was really genuinely excited to read this book. I tend to like harrowing family sagas. If you’ve seen my earlier posts, you know how much I enjoyed reading Peyton Place. One of my all-time favourite books is Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible. I distinctly remember wanting to read that book as slowly as I [...]
Paddington Bear is 50 years old this year. I remember those great stop-motion animations from the 1970s that I used to see on television as a child. I miss that jerky, slightly homemade aesthetic. (Wow, now I sound as if I’m 50 – “these kids today with their slick computer animations and Surround Sound – [...]
Greetings! It’s been a shamefully long time since I’ve posted, but I have been reading, promise. Shane constantly teases me that if I finished as many books as I started, I’d give James a run for his money! It might be blasphemous to state on this site, but if a book doesn’t hold my interest, [...]
Not long ao, I finished the Diving Bell and the Butterfly in the language it was ‘written’ in. The text was actually conducted by its author through the blinking of his left eye, the only part of his body not afflicted by the rare vascular condition ‘Locked-in Syndrome.’ The sheer existence of this book is [...]
Gang Leader for a Day was Shane’s Valentine’s gift to me. Doesn’t induce quite as many romantic, doe-eyed ‘awwws’ as a bouquet, chocolates or a puppy, but it was exactly what I wanted.
The author was one of the contributors to Freakonomics and I’d come across his blog posts where he continues his sociological work [...]
Embarrassingly, I forgot I read this book for a number of weeks (my latest excuse for not posting with more regularity)! This is also surprising because it was an excellent read.
Shane mentioned to me that it was a good, fast read and I quickly dove into it as a means of procrastinating. I was [...]
Grace Metalious found infamy after publishing Peyton Place. Some libraries proudly posted signage that Peyton Place couldn’t be found on their shelves. Metalious seemed to have known what kind of reaction she might receive in certain quarters, and even worked it into the weave of her story. The hate-filled Page Girls, embittered spinsters, get the [...]
