I had a rather foolish experience to this one - when recommended by someone that I read it, I said I’d read enough lately of the development of various number systems. I’d been thumbing through Meta Math (another take on Gödel’s incompleteness theorem), and I just really didn’t feel up to reading another popular […]
In-between more “serious” novels, I’m on a bit of a graphic novel trip - I just finished The Arrival, I’m waiting on a delivery of Bone, Watchmen, and From Hell, and the almost full set of Akira’s sitting on my shelf waiting to be read. Which, ironically, was why The Invention of Hugo Cabret surprised me so […]
Stephen King’s an old dog, and I doubt he’d disagree. The thing with old dog though, apart from being inable to learn new tricks, is that they’re persistant. They’re set in their ways. And, if they’re well trained, they still know a thing or two that’ll impress you.
Bag of Bones is classic King. I was […]
The Arrival isn’t quite what you’d expect. It’s a graphic novel with no words, yet it has at least four distinct languages. It tells a tale that’s almost clichéd, yet it does so in a way that’s breathtakingly unique. And, most importantly, it’s profoundly moving.
The Arrival describes the experiences of a family looking for a better life. […]
Business books are a dime a dozen, and to be frank, most of them of are crap. Methodologies, processes, best-practice - most of it’s frequently stating the obvious at best, condescending at worst. Of course, the irony is that it’s impossible to get an education in practical business outside of actually working in the field […]
Chuck Palahniuk is a somewhat confrontational writer. Not in the somewhat grotesque, if occasionally insightful sense of Irvine Welsh, but in the truly jaw-dropped, sphincter clenching, stomach-turning sense of a deadly car wreck involving a vehicle of clowns. You don’t want to look, but somewhere in between the tragedy and humour, you find you can’t pull away.
Haunted is a […]
Babies are secretive little things - they fool you into thinking they’re mindless eaters / poopers, and then you notice them watching you out of the corner of your eye, absorbing everything you do. They’re manipulative, too! When you least expect it, they smile and captivate you!
They’re master torturers, too - their ability […]
Every now and then, you come across a novel that’s just so frighteningly real, so frightening possible, that it takes your breath away. We Need to Talk About Kevin, for me, was that novel - I finished all five hundred odd pages in three sessions. One on the night I bought it, one […]
Idoru, a corruption of the Japanese pronunciation of “Idol”, is pretty much what you’d expect from William Gibson - there’s a secret online city, divorced from the network, there’s an aging rock star interested in bridging the gap between the real and the unreal, there’s a man-cum-borderline-machine with the ability to pull patterns out of […]
If you’ve been living under a rock lately, you’ve probably missed the whole Wicked phenomenon. Basically, Wicked is an alternative take on the Wizard of Oz, following Elphaba (L. F. B. - Baum’s initials? Geddit?), also later known as the Wicked Witch of the West, through her childhood, university education, and eventual demise. It’s worth […]