reading

6 Posts Back Home

currently reading

Clowns at Midnight by Terry Dowling. Very Australian. Very intriguing. Here’s a bit of blurb from the publisher’s website:Clowns at Midnight is a powerful and spellbinding tale of fear and wonder, of unexpected transformations and genuine redemption. David’s discoveries in this almost overlooked corner of rural Australia lead him full-square into both the universal mystery at the forgotten heart of Western civilisation and the deepest, darkest secrets of the human condition.one of those books you think about even when you’re NOT reading it.

review

I’m not one for complicated reviews but of Connie Willis’s Blackout, I have this to offer: Now and then a novel comes along that is so damn engaging and exciting, it reduces reality to a niggling irritation serving no purpose other than to obstruct quality reading time. I clearly recall feeling the same way when reading Passage nine years ago. The terrible feelings of disappointment upon reaching the end of the book. Not because it sucked, but because I would no longer be spending my time with those characters, each of whom had become as real as the people populating my own life. Even more so, some of them.

review

Just finished reading The Limits of Enchantment by Graham Joyce, a book I grabbed off the shelf last Monday as I headed out the door to spend a couple of hours on public transport. I needed a book guaranteed to be engaging and Joyce is one of those rare creatures — an author who never disappoints. Not ever. Not once. No matter how uninterested I may be in his subject matter, he always manages to charm and win me over. This one even made me tear up in a couple of places.

Glitter rose

If you’re into books as artifacts, you really can’t go past this one. Small and pink, it’s like a treasure washed up by the ocean, tangled amidst shells, seaweed and driftwood, carried onto land by a moonlit tide. The size of the book was what encouraged me to select it for last week’s train travel reading. I go to the gym before work so am always lugging a bag of clothing with me, meaning I tend to choose physically smaller books if I can help it. I’d read two of the stories before — I published one of them in Agog! Terrific Tales. All but one of Marianne’s Glitter Rose stories are set on the fantastical Carmine Island, a place infected by mysterious spores which alter people in sinister ways.My one criticism of the book is that I’d have liked it to be a novel. I wanted to spend more…

random stuff

As I may have mentioned in earlier posts, I really dug Steig Larsson’s Millennium trilogy. If you haven’t yet read The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, here’s a tip: the first 50 pages or so are boring as batshit. After that, it’s all sex, violence and wacky Swedish intrigue, complete with Ikea sequences and the most uneventful prison scenes in literary history.I thought I’d follow up with a David Baldacci thriller The Whole Truth, seeing as two people recommended him to me. This book is truly and totally gobsmackingly awful. It reads like a parody of a watered down version of a novelisation of a movie. I simply can’t believe a word of it, from the ‘super-rich arms dealer’ Nicholas Creel’s ability to manipulate world politics via a few viral you tube clips and thus start a war, to the action hero Shaw himself, tough as nails, eats bullets for…

SF Signal: Mind Meld

Q: What were the best genre-related books, movies and/or shows I consumed in 2009? My answers and those from a bunch of other fine folk here. Also some classy-looking book covers. The novel editions I read had far crappier covers!

Navigate