A curmudgeon writes.
In Search of Lost Time Volume V: The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust.
My rating: 3 of 5 stars.
This review’s going to be shorter than my other Proust ones, which is amusing because, even with everything else going on this year, this book was an enormous fucking slog. I mean you’d think there was more to write about it, but ensuring I maintained the will to live seems to have taken precedence.
Some Must Watch by Ethel Lina White.
My rating: 3 of 5 stars.
IT WAS A DARK AND STORMY NIGHT.
No, really, it was. That’s the set-up for White’s novel, famously made – with some alterations – into The Spiral Staircase in 1946. The film has, it seems, driven many to seek out the novel to sup at the story’s source, though I’m coming at it from the position of a heathen non-watcher, which means I’m likely not as irritated by the material changes which some argue made the film.
Continue reading “Book review: Some Must Watch”
In Search of Lost Time Volume IV: Sodom & Gomorrah by Marcel Proust.
My rating: 4 of 5 stars.
So, this is volume four of Proust’s epic, and it marks the point of no return, or at least where the presence of the sunk cost fallacy begins to make itself felt.
(I must admit that it was at this point I began to question whether I’d actually finish the text. But having cut through the first couple of volumes, I figured the only way out was through, so ONWARDS.)
Continue reading “Book review: In Search of Lost Time Volume IV: Sodom & Gomorrah”
Talking To My Country by Stan Grant.
My rating: 5 of 5 stars.
My book reviews are generally a bit tongue-in-cheek. You know, a bit of back and forth, a bit of piss-taking.
Not today. Because Talking To My Country is too serious for fucking about.
Continue reading “Book review: Talking To My Country”
Ultra-Gash Inferno by Suehiro Maruo.
My rating: 2 of 5 stars.
So, I’ve read a couple of Suehiro Maruo titles before. You know, extreme ero-guro (don’t google that, frankly) manga that pushes boundaries and buttons.
I’m not easily shocked, and I knew what to expect, so I figured this one should be more of the same: perhaps not great, but interesting nonetheless.
Continue reading “Book review: Ultra-Gash Inferno”
Islam: The Essentials by Tariq Ramadan.
My rating: 4 of 5 stars.
I’m not a Muslim – I’m not really religious in any meaningful way – but I’ve always had an interest in Islam. This interest is probably a mish-mash of things: the lingerings of Orientalist stories from my youth, and the fact that the belief seemed such a mystery to me.
I’ve lived in areas with plenty of Muslim neighbours, but I’ve not known much about what they believe. Certainly, there’s a lot of investment in the West in presenting the faith as the origin of Everything Wrong With The World, so it’s the sort of thing I’ve long had a niggling desire to get a better handle on. Because surely tabloids aren’t the best source of qualified comment on the religion, right?
Continue reading “Book review: Islam: The Essentials”
The Parsifal Mosaic by Robert Ludlum.
My rating: 4 of 5 stars.
Airport novels. They’re the ideal way to defrag your brain. It took me years to deprogram myself from the literature degree belief that everything I read had to be worthy, had to be a classic.
Sometimes, you just want some brain-popcorn rather than multi-clausal comedies of manners.
Continue reading “Book review: The Parsifal Mosaic”
Doomed to Fail by J.J. Anselmi.
My rating: 3 of 5 stars.
Doom? Doom. DOOOOOOOOOOOOM. It’s a good word. One of those multiple-vowel words that have a plasticity turned to enjoyable goop by repetition. It’s also a type of metal music, though it furcates into numerous equally heavy (though to outsiders, often similar-sounding) strands.
Doom music is an unmitigated bummer, a reminder that Life Is Hard So Why Bother sung from basements at brain-rattling volume through equipment that smells like spilled bong water and hot dust. It’s a release in only the way realising you’ve reached the bottom of the barrel can be. It’s about [dis]comfort with horror, and in its original form emerged as a reaction against post-war austerity, industrial isolation and the general Shittiness of Living. It’s something you’d expect to be extremely un-fun, which it is, but luxuriating in that precise bummedness is, well, if not fun, enjoyable.
Continue reading “Book review: Doomed to Fail”
In Search of Lost Time Volume III: The Guermantes Way by Marcel Proust.
My rating: 4 of 5 stars.
Do you like parties? I don’t mean goon-in-the-backyard, sausage sandwich kind of parties. I mean the sort of parties which involve military officers, pomp and pecking order. You know, society wankfests that lumber on intolerably despite the apparent desire of everyone else to be anywhere else?
Louder Than Hell: The Definitive Oral History of Metal by Jon Wiederhorn.
My rating: 5 of 5 stars.
METAL.
It’s a genre that’s only bound together by a spirited fuck you. Its denizens run the gamut, from church-burning nihilists to hairspray-supported hedonists; from kvlt blackness to tits-out stupidity. From funereal dirges to brain-freezing speed runs. The sublime to the ridiculous. Speed to heroin. True to poser.
It’s got it all. It just adds studs and unreadable logos.
Continue reading “Book review: Louder Than Hell”
Yeah nah. 