#TDiRS22 – The Dark is Rising Sequence Book 5: Silver on the Tree

And so we come to the final book in Susan Cooper’s fantasy adventure series for older children (and adults!), Silver on the Tree, published in 1977. Thank you to all those who have read along with me over the past five months, your company has been much appreciated. You can also catch up with the Read More

Book 100 of the Year: Charles Yu’s strange science fictional universe

How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe by Charles Yu Inspired by Susan’s review of Yu’s latest novel, Interior Chinatown (which I’ve had to order!), I returned to Yu’s previous novel, his first published in 2010, which has a winning cover full of ray-guns, and if you look carefully enough, a dog. Both Read More

Review catch-up!

This spring into summer period is shaping up to be a huge publishing push, as publishers catch-up with COVID-19 delays. It’s nice to see new books spread out over several months too, which I hope means that more will get the attention they deserve. Will they revert to form in September and October though? Woe Read More

A dose of totally bonkers Russian SF from the Strugatsky brothers

Last year, a language missing from my reading in translation was Russian, and Karen picked me up on it 😀 when I published my annual stats. So, this year I’m making sure that doesn’t happen again by getting an early first read–it won’t be my last–of one of the Strugatsky brothers’ SF novels. I can Read More

Guest post from Shiny reviewer Anna Hollingsworth

Today, I’m delighted to welcome Anna Hollingsworth from our Shiny New Books reviewing team to my blog. Anna, who works in journalism, has been reviewing a wide range of fiction for us for several years (click here to be taken to some of her reviews). At Shiny, we only really like to include books that Read More

In Brief:

Catching up on books read with short reviews… Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi Translated by Geoffrey Trousselot A short Japanese novel about time travel set in a café was always going to have to be read by me! It ticks all the boxes on the face of it, and I was hoping Read More

20 Books of Summer #3 & #4 – Kurkov and Pinol

I’m already behind on reading and reviewing the pile of 20 books I selected (here), but I’m not a challenge completist! Anything that spurs me to reduce my TBR by a book or two is good. Today, I have two in translation for you. The Gardener from Ochakov by Andrey Kurkov Translated from the Russian Read More

The Bookish Time Travel Tag!

I was tagged in this meme which is on it’s travels around the bookblogs by Kaggsy, but it was started by The Library Lizard. I couldn’t not give it a go… 1. What is your favourite historical setting for a book? If you did the stats on books I’ve read, it would probably come up Read More

The lost post archive: The Dark Tower

Stephen King’s Magnum Opus – The Dark Tower I read the seven volumes, comprising over 4000 pages, of King’s Dark Tower epic fantasy over a period of four years. All the posts were ‘lost’ in my domain transfer. I’ve restored them into their original places in the time-line, linked below. It’s been a couple of Read More

Pitch: The Time Bandits in Hawaii?

The Girl from Everywhere by Heidi Heilig Nix Song lives on a tall ship with her father and small band of fiercely loyal crew, refugees from time. Captain Slate is able to ‘navigate’ the ship through time to any where, but only if he has a true and dated map – and each map only Read More

What did I read pre-blog?

I’ve been doing some maintenance on my master spreadsheet. It contains a record of every book I’ve read since 2007 and some from earlier. I used to write capsule reviews on it – I was able to refer back to my one on Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle just the other day Read More

A near-future techno thriller…

Deja Vu by Ian Hocking This novel is one of the first publications from a new indie publisher called Unsung Stories, specialising in ‘genre fiction that defies categorisation’. Déjà Vu is essentially near-future science fiction with a techno-thriller slant to it. It is 2023. Saskia Brandt is a Berlin-based detective in the European FIB. Returning from Read More

Mix Douglas Adams with Jewish Mysticism, Marco Polo, a dash of the X-Men and time travel for weird fun!

A Highly Unlikely Scenario : Or, a Neetsa Pizza Employee’s Guide to Saving the World by Rachel Cantor If I said that a wacky speculative fiction novel about a 21st century world governed by the philosophies adopted by fast food chains was actually great fun to read, you might begin to doubt my sanity.  I Read More

Stephen King’s Dark Tower #7

The Dark Tower Book 7: The Dark Tower by Stephen King I reached the Dark Tower! It’s been a long time a-coming, but I have finally reached the end of Stephen King’s epic fantasy series The Dark Tower. I began reading the books back in May 2011 in a readalong with Teresa and Jenny at ShelfLove. It was to Read More

‘A Duty-Dance with Death’ – ‘So it goes’

Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut This was our book group’s choice for discussion in November. Whilst it’s fair to say that whilst nobody loved it, and some didn’t get on with it at all, it did provoke some good discussion. I quite enjoyed it, and would certainly read more by Vonnegut. My only previous experience with Read More

Stephen King’s Dark Tower #5

The Dark Tower Book 5: Wolves of the Calla by Stephen King Last year I took part in Teresa & Jenny’s Dark Tower readalong at Shelf Love, but I dropped out after book four in the series. I didn’t have the time to get through the increasing page-count then, but was definitely hooked by the Read More

Stephen King’s Dark Tower #3

The Dark Tower Book 3: The Waste Lands by Stephen King It’s the third month of the Dark Tower readalong hosted by Shelf Love.  The Waste Lands (1991) is the thickest book so far, and things are certainly starting to hot up. If you’d like to see how I got on with the previous volumes, click here for Read More

Stephen King’s Dark Tower #2

The Dark Tower Book 2: The Drawing of the Three by Stephen King It’s month 2 of the Dark Tower Readalong hosted by Teresa and Jenny at Shelf Love.  If you want to catch up with the first book, click to my review here, as I won’t re-explain what happened before. Book 2 starts exactly where we left Roland, the Read More

3 reviews from Jan 2011: Hornby, Jensen & Gaiman

Juliet Naked by Nick Hornby I don’t know how he does it, but there’s something about a Nick Hornby book that so hooks me, that I feel part of the story – I can always identify with some of the characters. Juliet Naked is the story of a lost rock star, a completist fan and his Read More

If you could turn back time …

Alice in Time by Penelope Bush This was our book group’s choice for our June meeting, chosen partly as Bush is the cousin of one of our members, but also as we haven’t read a young adult book for twelve months – we usually pick one per year. Alice is 14. She’s been best friends with Read More

This novel snaps, crackles and pops with electricity

The Invention of Everything Else by Samantha Hunt This Orange prize short-listed novel has had some mixed reviews. To be honest, it’s a bit of a mixture itself, refusing to be easily genrified being: part fictionalised biography of mad physicist Nikola Tesla, part love story, part time-travel SF/fantasy, and part mainstream novel set in New Read More

Tempus Fugit – Time flies when you’re having fun!

Tanglewreck by Jeanette Winterson There is much to like in Winterson’s novel for older children (upwards). I thoroughly enjoyed it and hope it might have a sequel some time. This fast-moving Fantasy/SF novel, (it’s a bit of both), about the power to control time, owes a lot to Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy. It Read More