I Am Scrooge: A Zombie Story for Christmas by Adam Roberts Given that Yellow Blue Tibia by Roberts was both the maddest and best SF book I read this year, I had high hopes of this zombie take on Dickens’ A Christmas Carol as a bit of fun this festive season. Would it live up to the fun I had Read More
My Books of the Year 2010
Now I’ve read 100 books and it is nearly Christmas, I thought I’d look back on my year of reading and pick out my favourites from a very varied bunch. To celebrate that depth, I’ve chosen a bunch of categories to separate them into, so without further ado, here are my top eleven (couldn’t manage Read More
The World of Ephemera #9
The Cockney Alphabet & Railway Porter’s Prayer I rediscovered these whilst sorting out a pile of cuttings and other assorted papers I’d built up the other day. They come from articles in old editions of the Folio Society magazine. The Cockney Alphabet I love this, yet apparently there are millions of variations on it – so Read More
Where ‘they beat him up until the teardrops start’ …
Following the Detectives: Real Locations in Crime Fiction edited by Maxim Jakubowski Taking twenty key locations in crime novels and investigating what the areas mean to the authors and their detectives, this book contains a mine of useful information. From Inspector Morse’s Oxford to Wallander’s southern Sweden, from Brunetti’s Venice to Marlowe’s LA – each of Read More
What could have possessed Dr Jekyll?
The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by R L Stevenson When I received an email from the publicist for this new series of classic novels in quality pocket hardback format from Whites books, Jekyll and Hyde was the one that leapt out of the list as I’d never read it before. The Read More
An evening with Toby Mundy
My local indie bookshop Mostly Books had an extra member of staff yesterday. Courtesy of an initiative by the Independent Alliance – a (now defunct) collective of ten independent UK publishers founded by Faber, Toby Mundy the CEO of Atlantic Books worked in the shop during the afternoon, and stayed on to give a talk about independent publishing in the evening. Read More
The World of Ephemera #8
Wool This week’s ephemera post is about a piece of paper that has hidden secrets! Who would have thought that an unpreposessing leaflet like this on the right which appears to be the equivalent of a paint chart for wool would open out into something as glorious as this below … In fact it opens Read More
An author I’ll always look out for …
Daniel Woodrell …is barely known in this country, but has started to increase his profile a little with the release of a highly acclaimed film (it won at Sundance) made of his 2006 novel Winter’s Bone. He’s actually written eight novels, all of them set in the area he knows best – the Missouri Ozarks – Read More
Peirene #3 – Train of thought …
Portrait of the Mother as a Young Woman by Friedrich Christian Delius translated by Jamie Bulloch This is the third title from Peirene Press who launched this year publishing thought-provoking short novels of contemporary European literature in luxury paperback editions. Read my thoughts about their first two books here. Portrait of the Mother as a Young Woman, appears rather Read More
New Stories from the Mabinogion #4
The Meat Tree by Gwyneth Lewis. The Meat Tree is the fourth in the series of contemporary retellings of stories from the medieval Welsh story cycle The Mabinogion commissioned and published by Seren Books. See my reviews of the other titles in the series here and here. Gwyneth Lewis is an interesting author: firstly a poet, she has written a book-length poem about Read More
Fforde does YA and it’s Ffabulous Ffun!
The Last Dragonslayer by Jasper Fforde Jasper Fforde has written a new book, and if it wasn’t for heroine being two weeks short of sixteen, no swearing, and no overt classic literary references, you’d be hard pushed to know that it was for young adults. I expect that many grown-ups will read it anyway and some Read More
The world of Ephemera #7
The word is ‘dirndl’ A dirndl, just in case you’ve never heard the word before, is the name for a traditional peasant dress worn in Bavaria, the Tyrol and the surrounding areas. It consists of a fitted bodice, blouse, full skirt and apron. I’m talking dirndls today because I have one – read on … Read More
New Stories from the Mabinogion #3
The Dreams of Max and Ronnie by Niall Griffiths See my previous post here for some background on this series of comtemporary retellings of the medieval Welsh story cycle the Mabinogion, and the first two titles in the sequence. The third book, The Dreams of Max and Ronnie to give its full title comprises two novellas based upon separate Read More
Don’t call me Vicky! Meet V.I. Warshawski …
Indemnity Only by Sara Paretsky. Meet V.I. Warshawski – friends get to call her Vic, never Vicky. Indemnity only is the first in a series of 13 novels featuring the sassy Chicagoan PI. One evening she meets a new client, a banker, who wants her to find his son’s missing girlfriend. Vic goes to the boy’s pad to Read More
The World of Ephemera #6
Family Photos I love looking at old family photos. Amongst all my Mum’s was a small album she inherited from my late Great-Aunt Muriel. This one shows Muriel and friends strolling down the street in Llandudno in 1929. Muriel is the third from the left, she was twenty-three when this was taken. I’ve no idea Read More
New Stories from the Mabinogion: vols 1 & 2
The Mabinogion is a collection of medieval Welsh stories of Celtic origin – they are written very much in the bardic tradition of oral storytelling. The eleven tales as normally collected have the four ‘branches’ of the Mabinogion proper, a set of Native Tales and three Romances; the Native Tales also include early references to Read More
The Death of King Arthur vs. Le Morte D’Arthur
The Death of King Arthur by Peter Ackroyd I am a huge fan of all things Arthurian – having always enjoyed books about myths and legends by Roger Lancelyn Green et al as a child, it was seeing the 1981 film Excalibur that turned this interest into a bit of an obsession. I read most of the old Read More
A Miscellany of Gaskella’s 2010 Midweek Miscellany posts
In 2010, I used to do a regular(ish) Midweek Miscellany post – full of bits and pieces. As I’ve been adding back all the reviews lost in the transfer process from old blog to new, what to do with posts like these has become a bit of a quandary, as some of these snippets are Read More
Cold War espionage feels so real in this book
The Spy Who Came in from the Coldby John Le Carré This was the October choice for our book group and I must say it proved to be a popular one given that several of the group had moaned ‘not a Le Carré’ when I suggested it; however this one’s relative brevity, tautness and utter plausibility Read More
Let’s talk about pop music
Pop Charts by Paul Copperwaite This was one of those impulse purchases in the charity shop. It’s the sort of book I’d never buy for myself, although I might have given it to my brother for Christmas as a silly present if I’d spotted it in a shop. For a pound however, it was a bargain Read More
The World of Ephemera #5
Medical Matters It’s time for another post in my series on paper finds – and I have three things to share that are all linked by being of a medical nature. First is my Mum’s discharge certificate from the evocatively named Purdysburn Fever Hospital after suffering a bout of scarlet fever back in 1939. Scarlet fever Read More
A Gothic spine-chiller for kids, adults too!
The Dead of Winter by Chris Priestley Priestley is an accomplished author and illustrator of children’s books, fiction and non-fiction. The past couple of years, he has specialised in horror stories for children. He’s written a series called Tales of Terror which have been well-received, (I know Scott Pack is a fan). The cover of his latest novel is brilliant Read More
A classic western – Yee-Haw!
Riders of the Purple Sage (Oxford World’s Classics) by Zane Grey A while ago I received a copy of the Oxford World’s Classics catalogue inviting me to ask for any books I’d like to review on my blog. Where to start! I could have chosen hundreds, but one in particular leapt out at me from a Read More
The World of Ephemera #4: Childhood drawing
Sorting through mountains of papers, one happy discovery has been a folder containing many of my childhood drawings and doodles that my Mum had kept. It has been absolutely wonderful to be reunited with them, and indeed a real trip down memory lane as I can remember many of them. My daughter has been especially Read More
Sisters are doing it …
The Story Sisters by Alice Hoffman Elv, Claire and Meg Story are sisters. They’re extremely close, inventing a language all of their own – Arnish – even their mother is excluded from their fantasy world, and the younger two are always rapt with Elv’s storytelling about the fairy land of Arnelle. Theirs is a world full Read More
Sookie Stackhouse #2
Living Dead In Dallas by Charlaine Harris Living Dead in Dallas is the second in the hugely successful Sookie Stackhouse series of vampire novels by Charlaine Harris. If by any chance you’ve not encountered them before, either as books or in their TV incarnation True Blood, I suggest you start here with the first. In this second novel, Sookie is Read More
The Yeomen of the Guard off duty …
Balthazar Jones and the Tower of London Zoo by Julia Stuart (republished into its original place in the time-line from my lost post archive) I’d picked this book up in a bookshop, and put it down again, thinking it might be a bit twee. Then I was offered a copy by the publisher and after Read More
Twins & Ghosts – a complex combination
Her Fearful Symmetry by Audrey Niffenegger There was an awful lot written about this book around the time of its publication last year. I generally prefer to miss all the hullaballoo, to let things settle down for a bit and read books at the time of my choosing. This autumn, I decided to include it in Read More
Everybody here has a secret…
Peyton Place by Grace Metalious This was our book group choice for October, and what a good one it was, for everyone who finished reading the book loved it. This is the book that set the benchmark for every soap opera and drama of small town America that followed, and it’s almost shocking to find Read More
Susan Hill’s ghostly story for autumnal nights
The Small Hand by Susan Hill Susan Hill is justly renowned for her ghost stories – her best-known is The Woman in Black which is both chilling and a darned good read. The Small Hand is her latest, and I thoroughly enjoyed it too. It starts off simply. Adam Snow, an antiquarian bookseller is on his way home from meeting a Read More
