City of the Beasts

Isabel Allende, 2002 [Margaret Sayers Peden, 2002]

(May 2016)

Back when I was a teenager and still took rugby, or indeed anything other than childcare and the concomitant challenge of trying to fashion some sort of ‘me time’, seriously, the two best clubs in England were Bath and Leicester. Growing up near the latter, they were, and still are, my team of choice (indeed, I was briefly a member of their protozoan academy, in the brave new world of those immediately post-amateurism days). While the Underwood brothers were clearly the star attractions, the members of the ABC club (the world being neither brave nor as yet new enough to convince the Tigers to adopt numbers instead of letters on their shirts) were the kind of club stalwarts who inevitably rose to fan favourite status, and of whom none were more stalwarty than Darren ‘The Baron’ Garforth.

The Sandman: Overture

Neil Gaiman, J.H. Williams, and Dave Stewart, 2015

(January 2016)

  

A surprisingly simple story told outstandingly well. Your sensawunda here in full effect, and more importantly it doesn’t feel spurious or unnecessary in the way a lot of the other outgrowths of the Sandman mythos have done. Beautiful stuff, even if I am unfortunately too far removed from the original series to pinpoint many, if not most, of the loose ends being tied up. Still, I suppose that’s the secret to good fan service, isn’t it? Throw it in in a way that doesn’t distract from the rest of the story or alienate the your less fanatical readers. Still disappointed by the relative absence of Death though, but then I always am.

Fables

Volumes 1-15

Bill Willingham, Mark Buckingham, et al, 2002-2011

(January 2015)

I recently came into a couple of hundredweight of comics.

Oh Christ. Not like that.

Cat Country

Lao She, 1932 [William A. Lyell, 1970]

(January 2015)

One of the main strengths of science-fiction as a genre, one of its main attractions for writers and reader alike, is how use of the speculative allows for a more honest examination of the real. The observer paradox is an ever-present concern in the social sciences, exacerbated by the fact that it is an essentially reciprocal process: the act of observing changes that which is observed, but as a component member of the observed the observer is themselves also changed. The trappings of SF allow for a certain distance, a cleaving of subject and object.

Nova Swing

M. John Harrison, 2006

(July 2013)

  

       Three women and one man were picked up two miles from the Café Surf, in the back lot of another bar, where they were apparently trying to have sex with one another. There was some sense they didn’t know how to progress with this but were willing to learn.

1Q84

Haruki Murakami, 2009, 2011 [Jay Rubin and Philip Gabriel 2012]

(June 2013)

Well now. That was a hell of a ride, wasn’t it?

The Island of Doctor Moreau

H.G. Wells, 1896

(January 2013)

I could probably compose this post almost entirely from fragments of stuff I’ve already written about other books. Let’s see, what exactly do we have here?

The Bloody Chamber

Angela Carter, 1979

(June 2012)

I should have read this years ago. Literally. I did English electives at uni and this was required reading for one of them. Didn’t read it back then though. Was too busy indulging other pursuits and just winged it in the tutorial. In retrospect if I had actually read the damn thing, it might have saved me a fair bit of grief.