What I read
Re-read of Gail Godwin, Grief Cottage (2017), not one of the top ones, but still good.
Re-read of Cold Comfort Farm. Realise my ambition is to say 'I AM the something nasty in the woodshed' cackling madly. (In fact is not Aunt Ada Doom, before Flora Poste sets about her, pretty much that herself???)
Elizabeth Hand, Hard Light: a novel ( ( Read more... )

We remind our readers that Mr Mybug in Cold Comfort Form delivered himself of the comment that [B]y God, D.H. Lawrence was right when had said that there must be a dumb, dark, dull, bitter belly-tension between a man and a woman, and how else could this be achieved save in the long monotony of marriage?
(Rennet, who obviously does not actually ( Read more... )

On the one hand, there was some bloke saying that if you're not into the book after 20 pages, you should hurl it at the wall -
- and on the other hand, there was someone, and it was on Twitter and one cannot always be sure what the user name signifies and I'm not even sure if I saw the initial tweet that kicked the debate off, but this sort of ( Read more... )

I’ve just judged two literary prizes and reading for both numbed my brain with bleakness. Like the misconception that comedic acting is somehow easier than Ibsen, so has “happy” literature somehow become equated with lightweight.
I didn't particularly agree with JoJo Moyes' suggestions for 'something that’s not a romcom in book form. Are there any ( Read more... )

Interview in today's Guardian G2: The irrepressible actor loves to give people ‘a jolt’. She talks about her weight, the joy of being a lesbian - and why she sits on people on the tube. I wasn’t really interested in men and I’m still not - I’m not interested in their souls, because very few men have souls. When you find one that has, it’s worth it ( Read more... )

Inspired by this post by
( Read more... )

I clicked on a link because it offered a link of 6 of fiction's most dysfunctional families (though the piece itself seems to go for phosphorescent allure), and it included Brideshead Revisited, and 5 crime novels I have never even heard of. OK, the column does start off by at least name-checking VC Andrews, of whom I have heard, though never read ( Read more... )

Well, okay, Will Self sez, yet again, that Novel B Ded, or at least, on its way out, though this does not seem to stop him writing and publishing the things -
But I do wonder to what extent when people say X or Y is DEAD they are actually talking about some particular niche manifestation or subgenre - and I very much doubt that there is a ( Read more... )

I daresay I have perorated before about people - especially blokes - who become parents and It Transforms Their Life, not in the sense of before then they had never thought about changing nappies or hallucinating from sleep deprivation, no, it is a Deep Existential Thing of feeling a connection in a previously rootless existence.
Which is just one ( Read more... )

Bronte 200 Symposium: Branwell Bronte: 'Perfect Wreck'.
Though I daresay no-one will have the effrontery (or will they? cf the guy who was all about Shelley wrote Frankenstein, not some girly) to posit that he wrote the works of his sisters?
In fact there are some interesting things about the wider culture of the time that you can probably get at ( Read more... )