Monday morning means Emerald City, which is Oz for grownups. It's based on not just the first book, but subsequent books, and I'm less familiar with those. I think there's some new stuff thrown in, and certainly I can think of at least one character where they've amalgamated two and I'm pretty certain they were separate in the book. But it's ( Read more... )

I've mostly been forgetting to read a lot lately. Colin an I watched Interstellar, which I found emotionally difficult but, apart from an unfortunate resemblance of one of the minor characters, not for any good reason. We all went to see Sing for Andreas' birthday, which was rather lovely. But books not so much. I put my short story collection down ( Read more... )

Not so much exactly what I've been reading as what kind of thing I've been reading ( Read more... )

Today I am mostly excited about Dark Minds which is a horror/noir short story collection including a story by a girl I know - she was in Benedict's primary school class, and she's the daughter of Andreas' godmother. Today was a day I had planned for finishing my Christmas shopping and sitting in a cafe with a book, so if all goes to plan, I'm going ( Read more... )

Over on Facebook there's a meme going around. This is the original ( Read more... )

I've been asked a few times for a review of this so i thought I'd better read it :)

On the whole I like it. It's a family of choice space fiction with a cast of believable characters. It did seem a bit tick boxy at the start, there's a manic pixie dream girl mechanic (I wonder why fivemack was reminded of Firefly), a nurturer, a wild eyed newbie, an ( Read more... )

There's a competition being run by a book shop in London, Win a book a month for the rest of your life. It's a book of their choice, based on what you tell them about your preferences - and presumably they hone their recommendations over time, although it doesn't say that. A nice prize ( Read more... )

You've probably seen the boxes of things that have been going around for a while - there's a theme, and you don't really know what you're getting until it turns up. Judith and I had Quarterly ones for a while before deciding that actually, we weren't sufficiently enamoured of all the things, and I switched to just choosing something for the ( Read more... )

Yesterday I made a dinner so nice Jack wrote it down. So I figured that I'd give you a 'here was my day' post even though I haven't written up Spain ( Read more... )

It's very rare that I do that, but this was a nonfiction whose tone was annoying *and* when I fact checked the bits I could was obviously wrong, or at least, right in such a narrow set of circumstances as to be useless to me. (Yiddish Civilisation by Paul Kriwaczek ( Read more... )