A curmudgeon writes.
The Lottery and Other Stories by Shirley Jackson.
My rating: five stars
A short review for a short book: read it.
Look, I should probably do a bit more than that.
This is the first collection of short stories by Shirley Jackson that I’d read, and from what I gather it’s the only one I really need to. (That’s not to say that I won’t, just that this seems to be the prevailing sentiment.)
Continue reading “Book review: The Lottery and Other Stories”
Gibbons, or One Bloody Thing After Another by James Morrison.
My rating: four stars
There’s a bit of trepidation I feel in reviewing this one, as its author, a noted issuer of lamentations about terrible publishing design choices, is someone I know. (Inasmuch as sending him the occasional book and interacting on the sewer/binfire that is Twitter (amongst other places in the search for a replacement for said sewer/binfire) can be adequately called “knowing”.)
James was kind enough to send me a copy of the work (available now through Orbis Tertius Press!) as part of a by-mail book swap.
Continue reading “Book review: Gibbons and Dubliners”WHOOMP! HERE I AM.
In an attempt to not spend months between posts, here’s some reviews of books I finished in the past couple of days. They’re both a bit … well, me-ish … but perhaps you’ll get a buzz out of them also?
The Adventures of Christian Rosy Cross by David Foster.
My rating: three stars
The first David Foster I’ve read turns out to be right in my wheelhouse but also a bit of a ’70s let it all hang out holdover. This last part isn’t a particularly bad thing, but it does mean that when things get a bit hectic, the author has the ejector-seat trip of “hey man, it is what it is or was or whatever” that he can cling to.
Ahem.
Continue reading “Book review: The Adventures of Christian Rosy Cross and Yellowface”As is eternally the case, I’m behind on my book reviews. Way more behind than I’ve been in quite a while. This post is three times as long as the last one.
(TWENTY-FOUR BOOKS WHAT THE HELL MAN.)
I mean, I did get made permanent at my new job. I did go to Dark Mofo (aka Goth Schoolies), though this – depressingly – turned out to be much more lame than expected. And I did catch COVID after three years of avoiding the bloody thing, giving me further evidence that I should really stay the fuck home as much as possible.
(Which, to be fair, probably counts as my House Words.)
Point is, there’s been a bit on. And so with a meagre clutch of excuses, let’s get to the books I’ve been reading since I last graced your eyeballs.
(Mercifully, I’ve been doing a bit more reading which, if nothing else, makes me feel a bit better. YMMV, mind.)
Continue reading “Book review: a few months’ worth, why not?”
The Anomaly by Hervé le Tellier
My rating: four stars
Doubles have always freaked me out. Perfect example? The Black Lodge sequence from the end the second season of Twin Peaks: you know, Cooper is running around trying to avoid a maniacal version of himself, identical except for clouded eyes. The perfect image of something so mundane, something an individual sees every day – themselves! – except multiplied, with presumably ill intent.
There’s a long history of doppelgängers being evil, or at the very least a sign that everything is very fuckin’ far from okay – and their appearance is, understandably, a cause for concern.
(A special shoutout here to the Irish for using the term fetch to describe the same thing, which brings new depths to the demand that people stop trying to make fetch happen.)
Le Tellier’s The Anomaly takes the idea of the sudden appearance of a doppelgänger but adds a bit of a twist: what if there was a planeload of doubles?
Waypoints by Adam Ouston
My rating: four stars
So you know Harry Houdini, right? The straitjacket-and-locks guy? Big hater of spiritualist fraudsters? Escapologist, man with a dynamic gaze? Eventually bought low by a sucker punch? You know, this guy:
Well, it turns out that prestidigitation and being a momma’s boy weren’t the only things he was interested in: he also had a brief flirtation with aviation. Including Australian aviation: on a trip out here (organised at great expense), Harry was keen to be the first to attain powered flight on the continent.
(He ended up being third, though that didn’t really stop people blowing his trumpet, so to speak.)
This quest for aviation supremacy – and one man’s quest to reenact it as a sort of psychic salve – form the basis of Waypoints, Adam Ouston’s novel of uncommon energy and beauty.
Continue reading “Book review: Waypoints”This year, I had intended to write reviews of everything I read.
Obviously, with this year being this year I haven’t been able to do that for a lot of the books I ploughed through. I really wanted to record some thoughts on them, because it’s an important part of the reading process, for me: it helps bed down each book in my mind, so that I’m not taken by surprise halfway through an unintended reread by a plot development that suddenly reminds me that oh yeah, I’ve read this before.
Part of my process this year has involved the taking of notes to serve as a sort of memory aid for my reading. Generally, they require a Rosetta Stone to be sifted through, even by me, so they’re not particularly enlightening on their own, but they do allow me to crack out a couple of brief thoughts about what I’ve read this year.
So that’s what I’m doing here.
Continue reading “A reading recap (2021)”
The Wanderer by Timothy J. Jarvis
My rating: 4 of 5 stars.
It took me a while to read The Wanderer and I’m not entirely sure why. It might’ve been this cursed year – hell, let’s blame that. But I certainly found that as much as I was entranced whenever I perused the book, I wasn’t quick to come back to it.
Curiously, this isn’t the bad thing that I had expected. It meant that each time I returned, I was surprised anew at how bizarre the thing is.
Continue reading “Book review: The Wanderer”
Imperium: A Fiction of the South Seas by Christian Kracht
My rating: 4 of 5 stars.
First things first: this book is great and you should read it. I found it deeply enjoyable and odd in a a manner reminiscent of Fitzcarraldo: a story of absolutely genius/idiotic zeal.
Second things second: if you don’t read this review, at least read the Wikipedia description of the book because if it doesn’t make you want to read it, I just don’t know what to say to you.
Imperium is a 2012 satiric novel by the Swiss writer Christian Kracht. It recounts the story of August Engelhardt, a German who in the early 20th century founded a religious order in German New Guinea based on nudism and a diet consisting solely of coconuts. The fictionalized narrative is an ironic pastiche.
See?
Continue reading “Book review: Imperium”
I Am God by Giacomo Sartori
My rating: 4 of 5 stars.
When I was a kid, I remember a lot was made of what-ifs. What if you could be invisible? What would you do? Where would you go? Where would you sneak to, in order to see things you weren’t supposed to.
Honestly, I don’t like to watch some things human beings do. But as you can imagine there’s no roof nor wall nor duck blind nor sheet nor wile that stands in the way of a god; unfortunately I must put up with all of it.
Take that idea, add an alpha and omega and you’ve got I Am God, a novel which features a God who, when He’s not reminding the reader of how powerful he is, spends his time observing a pigtailed atheist microbiologist who somehow has attracted His notice, despite Himself.
Continue reading “Book review: I Am God”
Yeah nah. 