reading – 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.

Continue reading →

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.

Continue reading →

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!

Continue reading →

Book reviews: pre-flight five

June 2, 2024June 2, 2024 CaptainFezLeave a comment

We’re about to go overseas for a month, and so I’m hoping that the next post here will be a recap of all the things I get through during fifty-odd hours of flights and however many hours of sitting in gardens.

HOWEVER that means that I need to clear my backlog of books read before I place myself at the tender mercies of security at the international terminal.

Same, except it’s a paperback.

So let’s get to it, because fuck knows I’ve got a lot of pre-trip packing and organisation to get through.

Continue reading →

Book reviews: sharks, serendipity, ‘splosions, snapshots and spooks

March 3, 2024March 3, 2024 CaptainFezLeave a comment

Well, another five books have come and gone, so it’s time for my thoughts on the same. They run the gamut from experimental fiction to weird memoir and scientific history to gothic fantasy, so you can’t accuse me of being particularly genre-monogamous in the last little while, if that’s even a thing.

Anyway, let’s see what I read. Or heard. Or both.

Continue reading →

Book reviews: three down, ? to go

January 28, 2022December 31, 2022 CaptainFez3 Comments

Well, we’re nearing the end of the first month of 2022, and I figured it’s as fine a time as any to check in and let you know what I’ve been reading. I’m assuming you’re interested because you are reading this but then I could also be overestimating whether anybody reads this.

Regardless, onwards.

Continue reading →

Planning the pages: 2020 edition

January 12, 2020January 14, 2020 CaptainFez3 Comments

OK, let’s do this thing before the month gets away from me.

Here’s a list of books. This will be the third year I’ve tried to plan out what I’d like to read in the coming months. Naturally, I never really get through the whole list – or even half of it. That’s kind of the point, though: this is a selection of works that I use to spur me onwards: to remind me that there’s great things out there that I want to read. Continue reading “Planning the pages: 2020 edition” →

Planning the pages

January 2, 2018January 2, 2018 CaptainFez8 Comments

So there’s this.

Words. — Buncha words. Also, I should really mop this floor.

As I wrote just a couple of days ago, 2018 is the year I’m going to take the whole reading challenge thing a bit more easily.

I usually try to shoehorn 52 books into each year in some kind of book-a-week plan. Some years I’ve done more than 100 book per year. But mostly, I feel kind of hampered by there being a goal at all: I know I want to read more, and I know that how many books I read, I feel I should have read more. Continue reading “Planning the pages” →

The Priest of the Invisible

August 11, 2016August 11, 2016 CaptainFez3 Comments

As part of an attempt to become more organised (and to eke more out of my hours) I’ve recently begun scheduling things I’d like to do. It’s not quite as cold as it sounds, and it affords me the ability to ensure I do things I like, but which often suffer in the throes of a Wikipedia hole or a TV Tropes vortex.

One of the things on my list is to read a poem a day. Every day. One poem. This is to counter the fact that though I like poetry, and though I spent four years at university reading books – some of which were made up of poems! – I still feel myself to be a low-watt bulb when it comes to poetry. It’s something I like, and have liked for a long time, but something I feel kind of stupid around, like I’ve turned up to a fancy restaurant in tracksuit pants. Continue reading “The Priest of the Invisible” →

The power of Poe

October 14, 2015October 21, 2020 CaptainFezLeave a comment

I have always liked Edgar Allan Poe, though I will freely admit that I have never really understood him as well as I would like.

Oh, I get the stories well enough. I know where they’re going. I can see the shadows they cast, the histories they reference, and even – on my better days – the jokes and knowing winks that he peppers throughout for observant readers to pick up. But I think, more than his now slightly wordy and archaic writing style, there’s a distance between Ed and I that can’t be crossed.

And I’m kind of OK with that. He’s been a sort of uneasy hero of mine for many years, now, and though I have always tempered my thumbs-ups with an acknowledgement of the problems of having him as a role-model (less for the cousin-marrying alcoholic part and more for the proud hack with ghosts to get out part) I feel it’s the fact that there’s something about him and his work that doesn’t click fully with me, that feels off, that aids his stature for me. The fact that something doesn’t fit, that something is weird: it’s a boon rather than a cause for pause. Continue reading “The power of Poe” →