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Tag: book

  • The Sympathizer

    Today I finished The Sympathizer, another of the books I discovered via the bookshop in Suvarbharmi Airport. It was really strong, even if the last chapters seemed to fade in strength – or perhaps that was my own fatigue.  The Sympathizer is about a double agent in the South Vietnamese secret police, eventually escaping to […]

  • Pete The Cat And His Four Groovy Buttons

    This was a book I chose for La Serpiente at the library a couple of weeks ago. It stars Pete, a real hep cat with a coat with four groovy buttons. As the story goes on, the groovy buttons pop off his coat one by one and roll away. But does Pete get upset? Goodness […]

  • Underground Airlines

    As well as Sarong Party Girls, I bought Underground Airlines last week, and what better place to read it than on a plane, while growing peevish that the in-flight entertainment system was crashing every ten minutes? Underground Airlines is a pun on the Underground Railway, which is something I’d never heard of until a few […]

  • Unwise reading material?

    Last night we had friends over to play board games and drink booze, but unfortunately La Serpiente wasn’t on board with this, and flopped and shouted and clambered out of bed until almost nine p.m. This was probably our fault for letting her sleep until 3:30 yesterday afternoon, but who wakes a sleeping baby? The […]

  • The Breakaway

    It seems I must not go spinning in the evening. The previous time I did so, I was wrecked for a week. This time round, I couldn’t sleep until two in the morning. I tried getting up, sitting down, thinking calming thoughts, listening to the world’s most boring podcasts, but it wasn’t until I ate […]

  • The Luminaries

    In the long dark evenings of insomnia, when my brain is spinning idly with unhelpful thoughts and I thrash about alone on the spare bed, I take up a book and try to read my way to the morning. Unfortunately, my current read is The Luminaries, the 2013 Booker winner.

  • Sweet Potato Cakes

    Last night my wife cooked the sweet potato cakes from Thomas & Lim’s The Feed Zone Cookbook; the cookbook I received as a belated Christmas present last week. The recipe is very easy, the only thing to be aware of is how sticky the patties get; make sure when forming them that your hands are […]

  • Declare

    This week I read Tim Powers’ Declare, a book Charles Stross avoided reading lest it warp The Atrocity Archives when he wrote it. It’s my favourite book of 2014 so far (even though that’s less than 2 weeks in) and here are some reasons why:

  • Kraken

    For my birthday, my wife gave me two books: a sci-fi novel, and Kraken, by Wendy Williams. (Not Wendy O Williams, but rock singers don’t always produce great works of literature.) Kraken is a 200 page primer on the wonders of cephalopods.

  • Drowned Hopes

    I’ve just finished Drowned Hopes, the seventh of the Dortmunder series. After what had felt like diminishing quality in some of the later novels, this was a welcome return to form. The location shifts again, from the New York City settings of the previous few stories, to a quiet town in upstate New York – […]