Beauty and Chaos: Slices and Morsels of Tokyo Life by Michael Pronko.
My rating: 4 of 5 stars.
I’m a bit of a fan of Japan. I’ve learned some [terrible] Japanese, and have travelled there several times, for holidays and for music competitions. I like the contradictions of the place, and am always looking for an excuse to journey back. This, Michael Pronko’s first collection of essays on Tokyo, offers a pretty good trip.
Twisted Clay by Frank Walford.
My rating: 5 of 5 stars.
So here’s a book that was written by a future pillar of the Katoomba community who, aside from writing, spent time as a buffalo hunter, crocodile shooter, mule packer and prospector. He was a boxer and dab hand with a knife, and shared the same bucolic Blue Mountains literary salon as Eleanor Dark.
Naturally, it’s a book about a murderous teenage lesbian who receives communiques from her dead father – letting her know his brains are falling out from where she hit him with an axe in retribution for wanting to try and cure her with hormone therapy, so can she please come and dig him up – who ends up in Sydney committing further murders. Written in 1933, no less. And promptly banned for thirty years.
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Psycho by Robert Bloch.
My rating: 4 of 5 stars.
When I was a teenager, going through something of a Hitchcock stage, I found a copy of this book and I remember loving it. But that was thirty years ago, so I figured I’d better revisit Bloch’s best-known work and see if it still stands up.
Unsurprisingly, it does. I think it’s probably more affecting at this point than it was when I was younger: the book is a lot sharper than I remembered.
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The Walking Dead Compendium 4 by Robert Kirkman.
My rating: 5 of 5 stars.
So this is where it all ends. The final instalment in the saga of The Walking Dead, in which a bunch of favourites will die, and the world will go on.
Probably not, man.
Or will it?
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The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones by Stanley Booth.
My rating: 5 of 5 stars.
The Stones are now a band that it’s impossible to view independently. They’re like a Mount Rushmore in dick-sticking jeans, or a Statue of Liberty with a drug problem: something that defies description.
Fact: you can smell this photo.
And yet, Stanley Booth’s book made me feel like I was closer to understanding the blokes in [an iteration of] the band than any number of tell-all interviews or coy promotional bullshit. (more…)
Swedish Mysteries; Or, Hero of the Mines by Anna Maria MacKenzie.
My rating: 2 of 5 stars.
I’m a fan of gothic literature. Chuck me some Radcliffe, and I’m happy for hours. Dripping caves and fusty castles are my thing. Wicked religious orders and Machiavellian familial fuckery? I’m all ears.
You’d think, then, that I’d be all over MacKenzie’s based-in-fact-but-not-really novel about Gustav Eriksson, a man possessed of a shitload of derring-do and a will to power that saw him take on Christian II (of Denmark, Norway and Sweden, because one country’s obviously not enough) and win.
You can set your chronograph to that fringe.
You’d also be wrong. This one’s a bit of a stinker, and as much as I wanted to like it, I just couldn’t. (more…)
The Walking Dead Compendium 3 by Robert Kirkman.
My rating: 5 of 5 stars.
Another volume of blood, guts and inter-community negotiation.
Quite the statesman.
Yep, it’s time for another tranche of The Walking Dead.
This compendium gathers together issues 97 – 144 of the comic series, and for the first time the stakes seem a lot higher, at least to me. There’s a sense of community throughout this volume, a feeling that there’s a world beyond just surviving. It also takes place at a period long enough after the outbreak of whatever it was that caused the dead to walk, so you know that anyone who’s bad at this point is going to be really fucking bad. (more…)
The Ritual by Adam Nevill.
My rating: 5 of 5 stars.
I saw the film adaptation of this novel before I read it, so I was slightly wrongfooted coming into it. I wasn’t, for example, prepared for how metal as fuck the original is.
Yes, it’s still a story about middle-aged guys having a failed bromance in forests so offputting they should be marked HERE BE DRAGONS on the topo map they’re using to get around. But the film adaptation – which was just fine, and plenty creepy on its own – lacks a certain corpsepaint madness that makes the novel so appealing.
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The Aosawa Murders by Riku Onda (tr. Alison Watts).
My rating: 4 of 5 stars.
Parties are great. Parties celebrating the auspicious birthdays of elders are also great. What’s not great is when the party is spoiled by cyanide, resulting in the deaths of most people at the party, in vomit-tinged terror.
That’s one way to break up a celebration. (more…)
Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov.
My rating: 5 of 5 stars.
I’d reached my 40s and hadn’t read any Nabokov. None. This in itself is a fairly large stain against the whole literature-at-uni education trajectory, but it’s especially galling given that now I have read some, and it turns out that the work is ridiculously good.
Like, so much better than I could’ve hoped. To think that there’s people out there who suspect that Infinite Jest takes textual explanation and sidetracking to its ultimate end. (I was one of them until today, let’s face it, even though a Russian whipped Wallace at that game 34 years earlier.)
Get in, loser. We’re gonna fuck with narrative structure.
Yeah nah. 