fiction – Page 2 – Yeah nah.

Book review: cinq?

November 25, 2024November 25, 2024 CaptainFez2 Comments

Not as quick as I’d hoped, but here’s another five book reviews.

Inside you are two wolves, and they’re these guys. (Also, you know who’ll like this gif? MY WIFE.)

I say ‘book’, but in this lot there’s just one physical book. The rest were audiobooks because the physical books I’ve been powering through are phonebook-sized volumes, and I’ve needed something shorter to break them up a bit.

(It’s an indicator of Books of Some Length when Paradise Lost is considered a quick read.)

Anyway, there’s nice range of stuff in here, and I’m quite pleased to have powered through them while driving, whether that be a) to Sydney and back or b) around the block on the mower.

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Book review: recommendations, rereleases and revision

October 6, 2024October 6, 2024 CaptainFez1 Comment

Time for the first in a number of catch-up posts. Since I last wrote the reading has continued apace even as the reviewing has fallen off the cliff.

Time to get back on the keyboard.

Fear not, though: I’m not going to subject you to dozens of recaps in one go. I figure five will be more than enough to be going on with (at least until I write up the next five, right?)

Right.

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Book reviews: holiday reads

July 12, 2024July 12, 2024 CaptainFez1 Comment

I’m back. Not from outer space, but from the other side of the world where a nice holiday was had, and I purchased some eau de toilette that smells like a David Lynch movie or a murder weekend:

A calm yet confrontational scent that traces your neck like a sharp cold blade with buchu sulfur, metallic bloody notes and cold aldehydes. There is a feeling that something is going to happen with burnt rubber, cold cedar notes creating a concrete effect, combined with birch tar, leather and bay oil. Dying out on a cold, damp cellar smell with cedar atlas, dark musk and moss.

I also bought two dozen-odd books from across the UK, lest you think I would be caught slacking on the purchasing front. In particular, I must laud Halcyon Books in Lewisham (£2 per book! Any book!) and Criminally Good Books in York (a murderer’s delight).

In addition I can recommend staying in the Bram Stoker-themed room at La Rosa in Whitby, close to the spot where old mate came up with Dracula. (It’s suitably atmospheric, and the proprietors are lovely.)

On with the reviews!

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Book review: The Lottery and Other Stories

October 11, 2023 CaptainFez1 Comment

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.)

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Book review: Gibbons and Dubliners

September 24, 2023September 24, 2023 CaptainFezLeave a comment

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.

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Book review: The Adventures of Christian Rosy Cross and Yellowface

August 26, 2023September 1, 2023 CaptainFezLeave a comment

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.

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Book review: a few months’ worth, why not?

August 22, 2023August 22, 2023 CaptainFez1 Comment

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.)

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Book review: The Anomaly

February 4, 2023 CaptainFezLeave a comment

The cover of Hervé le Tellier's THE ANOMALY, winner of the 2020 Prix Goncourt.

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?

Of course there are two of this guy. Of course.

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Book review: Waypoints

January 28, 2023 CaptainFezLeave a comment

The cover of Adam Ouston's WAYPOINTS: a shot of an orange sky with an airliner proceeding from behind clouds, contrails behind.

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.

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A reading recap (2021)

December 30, 2021 CaptainFez1 Comment

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.

Yes, there is a certain type of pen I like to use while writing these. No, they’re probably not very profound. But hey, there’s two notebooks full of them this year, so I guess that’s meaningful.

So that’s what I’m doing here.

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