A Season in Hell

The Gold Coast, in my younger days, was not a city that welcomed serious readers. It’s a long, skinny strip of a city pressed up against the South East Queensland coastline, a city predicated on beachfront tourism and theme parks and being a nice place to retire. I often introduce it to American friends as […]

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 […]

In Which I Wax Enthusiastic About Some Recent Reading

So Gail Carriger’s Soulless is pretty fricken’ awesome, assuming a given value of awesome that roughly equals me rabidly devouring the book like the unholy mixture of crack and mind-candy it is. I’d fallen for this book so hard after the first chapter that it could have spent the remaining pages kicking puppies and forcing kittens […]

Stacking Books in Piles

It seemed like a slightly manic goal when I set it back in July of last year, but my question to read 104 books in the space of a year may actually work out. I finished Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own this morning, which brought my reading total up to 74 books, then […]

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; […]