Tag: books

Journal

As I drink my celebratory snifter of port…

It’s a cool winter evening and I’ve turned off most of the lights in the flat, shuffling around the study by dim glow of the desk lamp, swaying in a slightly dreamy manner to Bauhaus songs while I poke bits of Flotsam with a stick.  In theory I should be writing right now, but I figure if I don’t sneak off and blog now, I’ll get all caught up in drowning Keith Murphy in the demonic equivalent of a baptismal font and it’ll be another week before I post here again. I’m going to mention, first off, that Angela Slatter is in the process of delivering a very special series of Friday Drive-By interviews focusing on the contributors to the forthcoming Stephen Jones anthology A Book of Horrors. The first link takes you straight to the page she’s set up for it on her website, which means you miss out on the very charming otters that appeared on the post

Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

5 Books

If you were to ask me for book recomendations right now – and yes, I know you aren’t, but lets just say you were – you’d probably get a list that runs something like this: The Thin Man, Dashiel Hammett: Screw The Maltese Falcon – if you’re only going to read one hardboiled detective story by Hammett then you really should start with this one. I picked it up on the back of watching Nick and Nora’s Infinite Playlist when it was mentioned that the title characters in the film were based on the relationship between Hammett’s Nick and Nora Charles in the film version of this book, and it’s not hard to see why they were taken with the couple. Nick and Nora Charles are fricken’ awesome – their banter, their affection for one another, their goddamn chemistry as a literary couple – and it’s refreshing to see a hardboiled investigator who is actually happy much of the time.

Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

Awesome Things about 2009 Fiction Edition

2009 is totally going down as the year that I rediscovered how much I enjoy reading for pleasure. It’s one of those habits that eluded me a while back, which was kind of unfortunate given that my book-buying habit didn’t exactly die off at the same rate. And it’s not that I stopped reading, exactly; I just fell into the trap of rereading old favourites with the occasional new work creeping in. By the end of June I’d made the decision that this should be rectified and promptly started ploughing my way through the seemingly endless array of novels and non-fiction that fill my too-read bookcase. Since then I’ve managed a fairly steady pace of two books a week. I’ve barely made a dent on the unread book read pile of doom, but it’s still exposed me to a lot of kick-ass fiction. To whit, I give you the fourth and fifth instalment of Awesome Things about 2009:  The City