Book posts
These are my book notes. Nothing fancy. They’re not really reviews, more like thoughts a day or two later, and I try and write them before I pick up another book. Writing something quickly gives me a snapshot to look back on, and it seals the experience more firmly in my brain.
July 25 2025, 13:49
Picnic at Hanging Rock (novel)
My daughter bought this for me for my birthday in March, and I wanted to watch the Peter Weir film for #ArthouseSummer2025, so it seemed right to read it before the film images infected my imagination. [more...]
July 23 2025, 14:23
The Fog
This is one of those formative books for me. I mean, look at the cover! The one I have now is on the left, but the hastily Photoshopped one on the right is the edition I owned in my teens. [more...]
June 17 2025, 21:49
Satin Island
I bought this in Barter Books, Alnick, because of the beautiful cover, unusual size, and the blurb proclaiming it was shortlisted for the Booker in 2015. The cover has a colour wheel of some kind with a coating of oil on one side. [more...]
June 07 2025, 11:58
Gabriel’s Moon
I was looking for something literary and genre, and I remember loving Any Human Heart many years ago. I know Boyd has written several spy novels, but I didn’t finish the last of his I tried (a whodunnit about Freud and Vienna), Waiting for Sunrise. [more...]
May 21 2025, 19:35
Good Morning, Midnight
Reading the afterword by A.L. Kennedy, this is the fourth novel in a row where Rhys was working with a similar character, as if trying to find the ideal version of her: intelligent, lonely, processing personal tragedy, and struggling with alcohol. [more...]
May 14 2025, 09:00
Ghost Wall
This was a tough read. The prose is lyrical, often beautiful, but the physical abuse Sylvie suffers was hard to stomach . It opens with the sacrifice of a young woman at some time in the past by the community she grew up in. [more...]
May 11 2025, 12:26
Businessmen as Lovers
Mimi and Caroline, second cousins and close friends, travel by train from England to Italy for a summer holiday at the house of Mimi’s Aunt Evie. Mimi is grieving her mother’s death, but she’s also newly in love with a Reuters journalist she affectionately calls Beetle. [more...]
May 03 2025, 20:34
Audition
The nameless narrator is an actress married to Tomas, a writer, and they don’t have children, but in the opening she meets at a restaurant a young man, Xaviar, who is convinced she is his mother. [more...]
April 30 2025, 14:59
Did not finish
Instead of posting negative reviews on books I don’t like, I’ve decided to take a few notes about what didn’t work for me, put the book down and move on to the next one. [more...]
April 05 2025, 21:52
A Visit From the Goon Squad
I wanted a novel, and this pushes the boundaries of what a novel can be, interweaving short stories over multiple decades with connected characters. It’s a work of genius, and occasionally maddening for that, because she represents some of these characters in irritating ways... [more...]
March 29 2025, 13:55
Success
Sex-obsessed half-brothers Terry Service and Gregory Riding share Gregory’s London flat, where Gregory is living an abundant life of money and sex, and Terry is miserable and impotent. When sister Ursula becomes old enough to join them in their adult lives, their fortunes start to change. [more...]
March 22 2025, 14:58
Lost in the Garden
Heather, Antonia and Rachel are adults, but they live a child-like existence in a rural England that is in a forever summer, and the dead wander lost in the streets. Heather’s boyfriend Steven sets off for Almanby, a place everyone knows to never go to, vowing to return, but he doesn’t, becoming another of their friends who has disappeared. [more...]
March 16 2025, 11:25
Super-Cannes
Written by J.G. Ballard, first published in 2000, it’s a book I’ve told myself I love for years, but I couldn’t say why, and I remember it was also frustrating, and again, I couldn’t say why. I thought I'd read it afresh and work it out once and for all. [more...]
August 05 2024, 18:34
Early summer books
All Fours, by Miranda July. I haven’t laughed out loud so much at a book since Bridget Jones’s Diary. The unnamed artist makes terrible, hilarious decisions over and over, but she’s also just trying to have the horny creative life she wants. [more...]
May 11 2024, 10:45
Cornish horrors
I took my time with Cornish Horrors: Tales from the Land’s End, a collection of short stories I bought in Swansea Waterstones on one of my visits to see my father. Research can quickly become procrastination. [more...]
April 13 2024, 10:29
Ligeia
Ligeia, by Edgar Allan Poe, is a six-thousand-word hallucinatory tale about an intense marriage that survives beyond death. The narrator is looking back, remembering his wife, Ligeia, who he idolised. [more...]
January 07 2024, 14:28
Fidelity
I’ve deleted my Patreon creator’s account, which was beginning to feel like I was cheating on my website (or the other way around, I’m not sure). Two places for almost the same words. [more...]
December 30 2023, 21:06
Best film discoveries and fiction of 2023
My favourite ten film discoveries (ranked) and ten favourite fiction books (not ranked). (Letterboxd is a hella sexy website. I wish GoodReads made more of an effort.) [more...]
August 12 2023, 10:21
Eastmouth and other stories
Beautifully crafted, easy to read stories by Alison Moore that are intricate studies in helplessness and despair. The characters find themselves enmeshed in situations that keep getting worse until often they are crushed. The environment shackles them. Language holds them. Revenge arrives, soporifics are deployed, the decay is in all things. They are drawn to that which will damage and destroy them. [more...]
December 17 2022, 14:36
Chaotic reading
This morning there was a thin crust of snow on the ground. The car park was empty, and the lines were hidden, so I chose a spot near the meter and hoped. [more...]
April 23 2021, 19:23
Stop What You’re Doing and Read This!
It’s been a tough year, and in the tumult of it, I stopped enjoying reading (again). Instead, I watched films, which are just as wonderful, but do a fundamentally different job. [more...]
April 01 2021, 13:10
Something Wicked This Way Comes
I bought it three years ago in a bookshop sale, in spite of the cover, which honestly put me off reading it for a long time. [more...]