What if, with your dying breath, you sent your lover back in time in order to change the fate of a ruined Earth? What if he sent a message back to his younger self to help seduce you? What if the Government intercepted a mysterious orb full of treasures from another dimension? What if…? This is a curious mish-mash of a book. Part sci-fi and part romance. I don't read enough romance to tell if t…
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Malcolm Croft (under the pseudonym Catherine Nappington) has produced a compendium of cat illustrations from ancient manuscripts. It's then peppered with a variety of regurgitated facts and captions of a sub-Facebook levels of humour. There are a few hundred pages of illustrations for you to flick through - but they're all devoid of context. As sumptuous as the images are, they're surround by…
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My friend Manuel has sent me his latest book to review - and it is a corker. The best thing about this book is that it doesn't waste any time trying to convince you that Accessibility Is Good™. You're a professional web developer; you know that. Instead, it gets straight down to brass-tacks and gives you immediate and useful examples of what to do. You could read the book linearly - but it is m…
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A friend mentioned that they were going to a Proust book club where they'd be discussing Swann's Way, the first volume of the masterpiece. "Well," I thought, "That sounds like a fun challenge!" It was not. I picked up the Standard eBooks version translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff and started my journey. It starts with a young man having a wet dream and then, in excruciating detail, describing …
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The purpose of table manners is to stop us killing each other. That's the rather provocative assertion in Margaret Visser's excellent deconstruction of why we have such elaborate and infuriating rituals around eating. It starts, naturally enough, with a chapter on human sacrifice. It is grim, violent, and soaked in blood. A delightful amuse-bouche this isn't! But it makes the case that this is…
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I rather enjoyed HMRC (Her Majesty's Royal Coven) and The Shadow Cabinet by Juno Dawson. This is a sort-of prequel to the series. What if Anne Boleyn was a witch?!?! It's a fun enough book, but doesn't really go anywhere. Part of the problem is that the stories chapters flip back and forth in time. It is a tired literary trick and robs us of the gradual build-up of the characters. There's no…
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This is not a ‘resistance’ book. It is not a guide to activism. It is not a reflection on ‘how democracies die’ or how authoritarianism is on the horizon. It is an exploration of how, without questioning the very context in which resistance takes place, it is futile. This book is more about its subtitle than its title. It doesn't really provide new stories or new ways of thinking about the worl…
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About ⅔rds of the way through reading Janice Hallett's debut novel, The Appeal, I purchased her next book - The Twyford Code. The schtick is similar to the first. We, the reader, are taken through an epistolary series of audio files - voice notes from a recently released convict. There's intrigue, murder, regret, and redemption. The story isn't as tangled as The Twyford Code - here's it is one m…
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Romeo and Juliet is obviously about a young Pakistani girl whose overbearing father wants to marry her off to a cousin, despite her age and wishes. How could it be anything but? ‘Oh dear, please don’t ruin Romeo and Juliet by talking about race!’ said a member of the public when the Globe hosted an anti-racist webinar on the play. You may be thinking this too. But worry not, because the play can’…
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This is a fun bit of sci-fi. A bit tropey in places, but an excellent sense of world-building and a vicious cast of double-crossers. The protagonist is best described by one of the character's off-hand remarks about her being “The very best space fascist girl scout of them all.” Can you feel sympathy for someone who has been manipulated into being evil? What about if given every chance to cha…
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Funny from the preface up until the very last footnote. This is the updated version of the classic "What If" book - where Munroe goes into absurd details about ridiculous questions. Full of nerdy giggles and some utterly bizarre units. For example: The storage industry produces in the neighborhood of 650 million hard drives per year. If most of them are 3.5-inch drives, that’s 8 liters (2 g…
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After reading Karin Tidbeck's Amatka I knew I needed to read more by her. Jagannath is an exceptional collection of short stories. In turns beautifully silly and oddly romantic. What does it mean for a man to fall in love with an airship? If God walks the streets, how can He be summoned? Does the Devil rely on mechanised bureaucracy to connect to people via phone? Each story feels like a…
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