#40 Here Lies Arthur by Philip Reeve ( Read more... )

#71 The Knife Of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness

Read for review for Strange Horizons.

#72 Mortal Engines by Philip Reeve

Read to my girlfriend as a bedtime story. This is my second or third re-read and there are a couple minor flaws but it is stil bloody good. My original review is here.

#73 Shadows Linger by Glen Cook ( Read more... )

It was a dark, blustery afternoon in spring, and the city of London was chasing a small mining town across the dried-out bed of the old North Sea.
So begins the most exhilarating adventure I have read in a long time. Mortal Engines is set in a post-apocalyptic future, a thousand years after the Sixty Minute War wiped out civilisation as we know it. ( Read more... )

A Darkling Plain has won the Guardian's Children Book Prize. Good. Haters, get bent.

Unless, of course, you are hating on benpeek. He deserves it.

PS Poll haters: polls are for polling, foo'.

My review of A Darkling Plain by Philip Reeve is up now at Strange Horizons.

If another issue of Vector is ever published you will see me banging on in there about how much I was looking forward to A Darkling Plain and it repaid my hope. I know some people - fjm, for example - thought the series tailed off but I really think this is one of the best ( Read more... )

I started reading The Stories Of Tobias Wolff the other week. They are very good, reminiscent of Richard Yates' masterful short stories, but I really wasn't in the mood. I needed something lighter. So I took a walk to the children's section of Waterstone's and risked accusations of paedophilia to return with:


( Read more... )

Thanks to talvalin I am not only a member of the BSFA but have read Infernal Devices by Philip Reeve. I find this series utterly addictive. This, the third novel, takes place 16 years after the last volume and so the then unborn Wren becomes the teenage protagonist. Or at least nominally so since it is still really about Tom and Hester. Reeve's character ( Read more... )

Diary by Chuck Palahniuk: enjoyable enough but ironically scuppered by it's viewpoint character. This is ironic because it is integral to the plot that the book is told as a diary but the presentation of the story in diary form is exactly what causes it to fail. It makes the story seem comic rather than horrific. As I was reading it I was struck by ( Read more... )

I have been strangely prolific on the review front recently. Here's the round-up:

The Year Of Our War by Steph Swainston
Faces Of Mist And Flame by Jon George
Mortal Engines by Philip Reeve

Succumbed to Waterstone's again today: went in for Oryx And Crake, saw it was on 3 for 2, saw Perfume by Patrick Suskind was also in the offer and then it was ( Read more... )