Ah the Eighties, what a decade. There’s no ironic nostalgia here, I was lucky to be born in 1978 and spent my childhood blissfully enjoying the wealth of cultural phenomena, actual queues at the cinema for great films (Star Wars, E.T. Ghostbusters, The Goonies, Back to the Future, Labyrinth, Big), a top 40 which wasn’t…
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I read this book during the early part of last summer. According to the blurb ‘From “one of the most significant figures of the last generation of fantasy”, comes Francesco Dimitri’s debut novel in English, an enthralling and seductive fantasy following four old friends and the secrets they keep’ (just to clarify, the quotation marks…
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Hero Born was a book I selected on the strength of the cover (more on which below), it’s the first instalment in The Seeds of Destiny series by Andy Livingstone. The series follows Brann, the son of a miller from a small village in the back of beyond. Anyone with a passing interest in fantasy…
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It’s been a little while now since I finished reading the Broken Empire trilogy, frequently the passage of time and the reading of subsequent books can diminish the esteem felt for a book or series immediately after finishing, not in the case of The Broken Empire trilogy. Over the course of this series we follow…
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Tomeopathy is shallow, many is the time I’ve bought a book purely on the back of a nice cover, as a method of choosing reading material it’s not fool proof. Sometimes though, things turn out ok and you don’t spend too much time beating yourself up for wasting money. The day I bought Dreamwalker was…
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After perusing through my newly created book pile, it became clear that I has been sitting on a few books for quite a while, worse still there were some complete collections in there in serious need of my attention. At a glance, it was clear that the highest concentrations of unread books resided under the…
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Terry Pratchett’s Discworld Novels, pretty good eh? I started reading them when I picked up Pyramids as a 12 or 13 year old (circa 1991/92). I loved the wry sense of humour and imagination of that book, after reading it I decided it would be sensible to go back to the beginning of the series…
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Following a brief moment of respite in children’s literature, I’ve thrown myself back into the Malazan Book of the Fallen. I thought that having waded through the first three quarters of book one, ‘Gardens of the Moon’, wondering who everyone was, what the hell was happening, and whether or not to bother struggling to the…
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Apologies to all, I’m wa-aaay behind on writing reviews of books I read weeks ago, actually I’m behind on reading books too. My timelines for new recommended reading lists and thoughts about previously read books that I put up shortly after the turn of the year are completely shot as well. Turns out that I’m…
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Some books follow a plot with a trajectory as predictable as an arrow, see ‘Kings of the Wyld’ (this comment isn’t meant to be dismissive, there’s a lot of fun to be had in knowing what’s going to happen but enjoying getting there, They made 1026* episodes of Columbo for exactly this reason). Some books…
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