Where do I begin? Perhaps with a blog post I wrote a few years ago, about how a book I loved went out on sub and got many nibbles but no offers and how it broke my heart a little bit? Yeah, we’ll start there. Reader, Coil was that book. Is the message here ‘never […]
Read more "Basically the best news ever! The little book that could."This is the follow up to the wonderful Oryx and Crake. We see the events before, during and after the catastrophe from the point of view of two characters: Ren and Toby. When we first meet them, both are trapped; Toby in a health/beauty spa and Ren in the medical isolation unit of the exotic […]
Read more "2015 Reading Challenge, Book 22: The Yesr of the Flood by Margaret Atwood"Wodehouse is brilliant, end of. His books are, naturally, set in bubble world fantasies stocked with dapper gents in spats, terrifying matriarchs and wily servants, but they are truly things of wonder. Nothing can make me so instantly cheerful as a Wodehouse novel. This is his usual fare, a comedy of wonderfully disastrous errors which, unlike the […]
Read more "2015 Reading Challenge, Book 19: Leave It To Psmith by P.G. Wodehouse"This is a very interesting book of post-apocalyptic fiction in the Wodehousian tradition of a salty lark told in florid and often exhaustively descriptive terms. I described it on twitter as fight club on LSD meets the Expendables and sort of explodes in slow motion. It’s a little more complicated than that, after all it […]
Read more "2015 Reading Challenge, Book 15: The Gone-Away World by Nick Harkaway"Time for book 8 in my challenge (imagine challenge in Megamind’s voice, cos that’s how I generally say it), and it’s the book that’s been adapted into a tv show. I chose Wolf Hall. I like a bit of La Mantel in general, and this book was one that sat on my to-read list and […]
Read more "2015 Reading Challenge, Book 8: Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel"Now I’m probably being a touch controversial here, as I have problems with this one, the same problems I’ve had with every book I’ve read by Lauren Beukes. Something always feels like it’s missing. A piece out of place. I am always left dissatisfied. This does not mean to say I dislike her writing. I love […]
Read more "2015 Reading Challenge, Book 4: Moxyland by Lauren Beukes"Here it is, book two. The book set in the future. I waffled on for an AGE about this, and had to cut a tonne of my wafflings. Mainly stuff about Lowbeer, one of my fave characters, as that all got a bit spoilerific, but ugh I loved her, that ambiguous, wheeler-dealering, complex woman whose […]
Read more "2015 Reading Challenge: Book Two: The Peripheral by William Gibson"This is the first of my reading challenge vlogs. Sorry it’s a bit of a patchwork, I had extreme cat interference. Been crazy for cats this months, some kind of January madness has infected them. Either way, the drama llamas are out in force. I keep meaning to film their various battles in slow-mo and […]
Read more "2015 Reading Challenge, book one: Dust by Arthur Slade"So here we are again, on Sunday, doin’ the checking in dance. How have I fared this week? I hit my 1k a day target, *loud crazy cheers* but a lot of those were rewriting words *less loud crazy cheers*. My count of entirely new words, as in words on brand new scenes, is 4k. […]
Read more "Clarion West Write-a-Thon: Sunday Check Numero Deux"
Word Bullets 