Archive for the 'Book Reviews' category
Reviewing this particular graphic novel is tough. It’s so famous and acclaimed that a lot of reviews, essays and poorly spelled praises have already been written about it. There are also the rules that surround it.
1. When reading Watchmen, restrict to one chapter a night.
2. When telling someone who hasn’t read Watchmen about it, you […]
Posted on July 6th, 2008 in Book Reviews with no comments
It’s Sunday the 29th of June and I’m only a quarter of the way through this book, but I’ve got to start this review now. Palahniuk is a writer who’s just too good to be legal. He’s very much a scrapbook writer, taking bits of stories from annecdotes and events across his […]
Posted on July 6th, 2008 in Book Reviews with no comments
I got hooked onto Wilkinson through his first book of short stories, Memoirs of the Messed Up Minds, so when I found that his next book was to deviate from his dark sense of humour and somewhat taboo subject matter, I was a touch worried. This was, however, to be […]
Posted on June 29th, 2008 in Book Reviews with no comments
This is from the author of Atomised, which is apparently slap yourself stupid fantastic. Where I can, I try to read the book after the one that made an author famous as I am interested in new writers but I have an allergy to hype. I refused Firefly and Battlestar Galactica for months/years because of […]
Posted on June 26th, 2008 in Book Reviews with no comments
I’ve never had a ‘favorite’ writer before, at least not in the sense of if for some reason I was being stuck there and I could only have one author’s set of books with me I could produce the name instantly. I was introduced to Burroughs by my very good friend, and soon-to-be-published poet, Ian […]
Posted on June 8th, 2008 in Book Reviews with no comments
A young Irishman sits in a Paris jail. He has confessed to a murder his lawyer is convinced he did not commit. There is a witness of the run in the city of Paris, and she, a young street kid, may have the answer. But his neurotic Paris Lawyer, haunted by his own rural upbringing […]
Posted on May 28th, 2008 in Book Reviews with no comments
I can sum up my feelings about this book in one sentence: wave upon wave of disappointment.
This isn’t a criticism, however.
Firstly, it’s not immediately obvious that this book is not a novel but a collection of short stories. I saw the title and thought ‘ah, it’s about ‘that Wow signal, which is a pretty spiffy […]
Posted on May 14th, 2008 in Book Reviews with no comments
First, a confession: I’ve never read Trainspotting. I’ve seen the film (as if that’s any compensation) and thought it was excellent, and have meant to read the book, but found the dialect in the writing too damn dense. I had Filth recommended
to me by Brandon Wilkinson some time ago and I decided that, since he’d […]
Posted on May 9th, 2008 in Book Reviews with no comments
I’ve been interested in this book for a few years and was very keen to find out where the title had stemmed from when I started reading it. Turns out that testicles look like eyeballs when both are popped out of their respective cubby holes, and our dear sweet Simone, fuck-buddy of the protagonist, likes […]
Posted on May 5th, 2008 in Book Reviews with no comments
This is Logan’s first collection of ‘industrial fiction’, consisting of eight stories that take place in a world of electrical monsters, steel webs and sad televisions. It’s a bold movement into a ‘new’ genre, and I can tell that his heart’s really in the right place, but it just doesn’t come off.
The pacing within the […]
Posted on May 5th, 2008 in Book Reviews with no comments