This past few weeks in Australia have given me an opportunity to catch up on life admin – I renewed my photo ID and got a new Medicare card, things of that nature. But the very first thing that I did – literally on day one at my parents’ place...
I was just taking a look at Goodreads and I’ve discovered that I didn’t read a single book in October, and I’m on track to not read any in November as well. Does this ever happen to you? I was on a roll. Not that reading books is a trackable...
I have to admit, I picked The Castle of Otranto from the library because it was a very slim volume. At 140 pages, it suited me nicely. And then I couldn’t resist this blurb: Manfred, wicked lord of Otranto Castle, is horrified when his son is crushed to death on...
Soul Tourists by Bernardine Evaristo is not at all what I was expecting from the cover or the blurb. It is a fairly linear story, but told partly in prose, partly in verse and partly in a sort of condensed dialogue format which swings from internal to external. It doesn’t...
It’s not easy being a book lover on the road. My parents (bless them) have several hundred of my books in storage in their garage, and yet I still shipped over two boxes of printed matter! One box of those were my diaries and notebooks and various works in progress....
We live in a society that is obsessed with celebrity and success. We like to think this is somehow new, but it was as true in 1999 – when Home Truths was first published – as it is now. Adrian and his wife Eleanor live in a nice home in...
Review: Hothouse by Brian Aldiss Look, I persevered. It is no doubt an interesting book concept. And I came away from it with a clear and unsettling feeling that I had just spent a week in overgrown and hostile jungles, amongst the sticky, sharp, cloying, impenetrable vegetation of Aldiss’s future...
I put off reading The English Patient for a long time. It seemed long or tedious or too romantic or something. I don’t know why, but reading the book never appealed to me. Which is absurd, because I loved the movie. I can’t remember when exactly I saw the film,...
The Jungle by Upton Sinclair is an unrelentingly awful tramp through the worst parts of early American capitalism. Normally I would hate something this despairing, but actually I found myself drawn in and – unusually for me – unable to look away. Upton Sinclair’s expose of the Chicago meat packing...
Adding a book to the ‘did not finish’ pile always feels like a failure. On whose part, I don’t know – the reader and the writer are sometimes equally to blame. There are plenty of (probably) truly excellent books that I just haven’t been able to finish, and loads of...
