I'm reading Insomniac City, the Bill Hayes memoir about life in New York with his partner, the neurologist Oliver Sacks. After I reread Awakenings a while ago,
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Friends, I am so tired, jet-lag is the worst. (I do not always like William Gibson, but he is spot-on about jet-lag: ".... her mortal soul is leagues behind her, being reeled in on some ghostly umbilical down the vanished wake of the plane that brought her here, hundreds of thousands of feet above the Atlantic. Souls can't move that quickly, and ( Read more... )

I am rereading Awakenings, the Oliver Sacks book about encephalitis lethargica and L-DOPA. I first came across the story as a teenager and predictably found it completely fascinating. But I bounced off the book a bit the first time, probably because I was too young for it and also it has a lot of quite boring prefaces. But this time I found it ( Read more... )

So a few of you asked me to write up my thoughts on Kushiel's Dart, once I'd finished it! (It took a while. It had somehow escaped me that the print edition is NINE HUNDRED PAGES, wow.) My thoughts are - complicated. I liked it! I really did. But I probably won't read any more in the series ( Read more... )

I am weepy and tired and verklempt. I spent yesterday afternoon "reading" The Arrival, by Shaun Tan; troyswann recommended it to me when we were up in Scotland and I saw it in Housman's bookshop at King's Cross and bought it on impulse. (And had a weird encounter at the counter, where the clearly-very-new person behind the counter asked me if I were a ( Read more... )

A week post-move and we still don't have internet at home. I'm reading a lot! It's rather nice. But apologies to all the people to whom I'm being a terrible correspondent, which at this point is just about everyone. Apparently we have internet from Friday, I live in (moderate) hope ( Read more... )

Oh, friends, I am discouraged and mostly broken. Writing is terrible. I'm stuck right in the middle of a slough of despond about the stupid novel - it's a terrible book, even if it's not a terrible book it's a book about things literally only I care about, no actually it's a terrible book, it will never be finished and I will be writing it forever ( Read more... )

I just finished The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison. (Who is - to save y'all my strained thought processes - the same person as Sarah Monette! She's the same person who wrote Mélusine, the tortured terrifying idfic of my inner teenager's heart!) But The Goblin Emperor is not like that at all. Well, it's a secondary world fantasy of elves and - ( Read more... )

I read this novel on
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I wrote a long post here about my job and then deleted it because - well, horrible indiscretion. Here, have some ( gallows humour )