As the Wellcome Book Prize, which celebrates literature with health, illness and medicine themes, is on hiatus this year, Rebecca, who has chaired the shadow panel got permission to run a ‘NOT’ The Wellcome Prize event. Today it’s my turn to spotlight two books, published last year that might have been selected for this year’s Read More
Month: April 2020
Great Idea but, again I wanted more science…
Body Tourists by Jane Rogers I should be reviewing the pile of books sitting beside me, but having finished this one yesterday, I just had to get my thoughts down straight away. The last book I read by Jane Rogers was her 2011 Booker longisted The Testament of Jessie Lamb (reviewed here). Although I loved Read More
Review Catch-up – Moor – Edwards – Moss
Thank you to everyone for their kind words about my Shiny cock-up! Much appreciated. About one year’s worth of reviews are now back up for your delectation – five to go – but I’m really enjoying revisiting them and getting links up to date and so on. Meanwhile I have been reading, and here are Read More
And with the click of a button…
…I inadvertently deleted the whole of Shiny New Books! It’s a long story – but involves finding ourselves as admins locked out of the website. Why?: Because we were using more than our allotted space, I discovered when I ‘chatted’ to our webhosting company. Solution: moving from ‘managed WordPress’ (controlled by web hosting co) to Read More
Review Catch-Up
I’ve built up rather a pile of books to catch up on reviewing – it’s all the lovely fault of getting stuck into my Shiny archiving project. So here are some shorter takes to reduce the pile somewhat. Dan Leno & the Limehouse Golem by Peter Ackroyd This was our book group choice this month, Read More
Easter Bunnies
Watership Down Cover Art Richard Adams’ first novel Watership Down was published in 1972 by the publisher Rex Collings in a rather sweet, but monochrome cover (above). The novel had been rejected by several publishers, but after publication went on to win the Carnegie Medal amongst many other awards. Thinking about Easter bunnies, I made Read More
The Shiny New Books Archive: A furlough project!
It’s hard to believe perhaps, but the labour of love that is my other booky place, Shiny New Books, had its sixth birthday this week. Shiny launched on April 7th, 2014 as a quarterly book recommendations site, with four sections: Fiction, Non-fiction, Reprints and BookBuzz, edited by me, Harriet, Simon and Victoria respectively. We recruited Read More
A female revenge story – the first novel from an esteemed film director…
Are Snakes Necessary? by Brian De Palma and Susan Lehman Titan Books ‘Hard Case Crime’ imprint offers an interesting blend of old and new crime fiction, reprinting classics from the 1950s and 60s by authors such as Mickey Spillane, Donald Westlake and Ed McBain (I reviewed McBain’s Cut Me In for Shiny here) alongside new Read More
Blog Tour: Richard Russell – Liberation Through Hearing
Richard Russell is the producer and owner of XL Recordings, home of some artists I know well such as Radiohead, Adele, The Gotan Project and the White Stripes, but also a lot of fare that isn’t my normal listening such as The Prodigy, MIA, Dizzee Rascal and more. I may not listen to that second Read More
Six Degrees of Separation: Stasiland
My favourite monthly tag, hosted by Kate at Booksaremyfavouriteandbest, Six Degrees of Separation picks a starting book for participants to go wherever it takes them in six more steps. Links in the titles will take you to my reviews where they exist. This month – the starting book is: Stasiland by Anna Funder A modern classic book Read More
Book Spine Poems for Strange Days
The other week Rebecca got this started again with her post here, and I responded with a Paul Auster book spine poem here. Then yesterday, Cathy came up with some splendid ones here, and, copycat that I am, I had to have another go. I so enjoy doing this… another way of playing with my Read More
Making plants fun! Review & Q&A
I Ate Sunshine for Breakfast by Michael Holland Illustrated by Philip Giordano I don’t feature many new children’s books on this blog, but I couldn’t say no when offered this one which is published today by Flying Eye Books. I mean, just look at that lovely cover. And then I opened the book up, and Read More
