“You don’t know what it really means to crawl into someone else’s life and stay there. You can’t see all the ways you’re going to get tangled, how you’re going to bond skin to skin. How the idea of separating will feel in five years, in ten–in fifteen. When Georgie thought about divorce now, she imagined lying side by side with Neal on two operating tables while a team of doctors tried to unthread their vascular systems.” (201) Georgie McCool is in her mid-thirties, married […]
Harry the Wizard is back, with a bad migraine and Winter in his soul
Dresden is not only back from the dead—having spent an entire novel as a ghost!—but he is back with more guilty angst over endangering his friends and loved ones than ever before. The Winter faerie queen Mab still has her claws in Harry, and forces him to work with his worst enemy Nicodemus to pay off her debt to the scary dude. The job entails ripping off a certain Greek god of the underworld, no small task even for Harry. And, of course, that means […]
The Bestiary: A Smoothly Entertaining Read
Reading anything by Nicholas Christopher is like a smooth gliding ride. His stories flow, the prose is smooth, the tale unwinds, you don’t want to put it down and then it’s over… So pleasant, like a purring powerful car on a smooth road up the coast on a nice warm evening. Not a lot may happen on the ride, but it was very pleasant while it lasted. Nicholas Christopher’s first book was “A Trip to the Stars” – amazing and I need to re-read and […]
The dark underbelly of Victorian London, a strange and secretive club, a dab of the supernatural – an enthralling blend of Sarah Waters and Anne Rice.
James Norbury leaves his sister in the Yorkshire mansion that was his childhood home to make out for London, in search of a readership for his gloomy and laboured poetry. Before long, he is rapidly running out of money, and so accepts the offer of a room from an old university acquaintance and finds his life much improved. Moving in different social circles and inspired by love and an Oscar Wilde play, he decides to become a playwright and spends a good few months living […]
Like Cloud Atlas and Ghostwritten before it, The Bone Clocks sees Mitchell weaving a dense and kaleidoscopic novel out of disparate stories, tones and genres.
Holly Sykes fills this book. Bookmarking the beginning and end with first-person narration, we experience her life as a fifteen year-old runaway and as a grandmother trying to protect her children in a world falling apart at the seams. But in the intervening years we catch glimpses of her from the perspectives of a cast of acquaintances, lovers and friends such as the Bret Easton Ellis-esque sociopathic monster that is Hugo Lamb, a twenty-something egotistical conman intent on scoring against his rich Cambridge cohorts; the […]
The Hunger Games: Now with Scary Metal Knife-wielding Bulls (No, Really)
So. I’ve heard all kinds of things about The Maze Runner, but until I realized there was a movie coming out, I didn’t feel an urge to read it necessarily. And then I saw the trailer, which left me a bit intrigued. And then I read the book very quickly. I have no idea how or where to start, because I have a lot of complex feelings about the book. I guess a synopsis should come first, eh? Thomas wakes up in an elevator-like lift […]