Nick Hornby on why eBook readers don’t (and won’t) sell.
Be careful not to read too far into the comments page, though. It’s full of that special breed of Internet solipsist who hasn’t figured out that their borderline obsessiveness isn’t exactly representative.
But – and this is the most depressing reason – the truth is that people [...]
WANT!
“The flat occupies part of the shared top floor of an existing Victorian mansion block. Our proposal extended the flat into the unused loft space above, creating a new bedroom level and increasing the floor area of the flat by approximately one third. We created a ’secret’ staircase, hidden from the main reception room, to [...]
Since I don’t have a blog category for “OCD”, I’ll mark this under “Books” and hope for the best.
Since there are so many library cataloguing sites around these days, and I can’t actually figure out which one is better than any other, I’ve sort of arbitrarily started using LibraryThing (because I clearly need to be [...]
I’ve been reading a fair amount over the last few months, but I’ve finally had to admit to myself that I’ll never have the time or motivation any time soon to write about it in any depth. For completeness’ sake, then, here’s a list of what I’ve been reading and roughly what I thought about [...]
It’s been a slow few months of reading for me, but here’s what I’ve managed to get through.
Learning the World - Ken MacLeod
I’ve enjoyed all of Ken Macleod’s books, and this is one of his most immediately accessible. It’s a slightly odd setup, in that it’s a first contact novel in which almost no contact [...]
Ghostwritten - David Mitchell
Mitchell’s first novel feels a lot like a warm up to him writing Cloud Atlas. It’s got approximately the same format of a series of globe-spanning short stories, each linked through some connection of the characters involved, but it doesn’t have quite the same impossibly-intricate, Russian-dolls structure of the subsequent book.
It’s [...]
The Christmas period meant lots and lots of books.
Spin - Robert Charles Wilson
Spin manages an interesting balancing act. It’s a hard Sci-Fi novel that works in some genuinely interesting - although not always entirely believable - character development, and some musing on human crisis response at family- and global-scales.
The “Spin” in question is a planet-engulfing [...]
World War Z - Max Brooks
My thinking goes like this: If you can, while browsing around a book shop, come across a book entitled “World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War” and somehow not buy it, then you probably shouldn’t ever try to talk to me. We just fundamentally wouldn’t be able [...]
The final part for a while, fashionably late. All of these were strangely hard to write about, partly due to a three day long headache which feels like an angry badger trying to burrow through my right eye, but mostly cuz im dum.
Glasshouse - Charles Stross
(Sorry for the U.S. link. The book isn’t out in [...]
Pushing Ice - Alastair Reynolds
I’m never really sure what I’m going to get with an Alastair Reynolds story. He wrote the fantastic Revelation Space space opera series, and interspersed it with the ho-hum Chasm City and Century Rain. He also published a volume collecting the dull-as-ditchwater Turquoise Days alongside one of my favourite short stories [...]
More book reviews, ignored until I realised that the pile was getting worryingly huge again. More to follow!
The Dispossessed - Ursula K. Le Guin
For some reason I managed to miss this during my utopia/distopia reading binge as I started University, and it’s often cited as one of the great utopian novels, despite never actually seeming [...]
No time to read but want to sound knowledgeable and self-important at dinner parties? You need John Crace’s bluffer’s guide to this year’s Booker Prize nominees.
Having access to the Internet means never having to enjoy anything yourself when there are other people around to enjoy it for you.
Song of Kali - Dan Simmons
A writer takes his wife and baby on a trip to India to attempt to acquire a newly written poem by the supposedly long dead M. Das. They do not have a good time of it.
This is obviously a first novel; it’s fairly straightforward, a lot of the supporting characters [...]
I remember - back in the mists of time - when I had the idea of writing small reviews of the books I’d read every couple of months, as a reminder to myself more than anything else since I like looking back at what I’ve read every so often and yet have no memory. Well, [...]
Since it’s too freakin’ hot to do anything involving movement, I’ve been looking for more books to read. I came across this link to an Authors on the Web where they’re collecting recommended reading lists from various authors, which sounded promising. But!, I slowly realised that I don’t recognise any of the authors on the [...]