Books
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I’m working my way through Michael Moorcock’s The Eternal Champion series and recently I read Corum. Elric is one of my favourite characters in literature and I enjoy the self-conscious/aware nature of the multiple worlds cycle that is the Eternal Champion. Although one might argue that Moorcock is simply telling the same story over and…
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Royal Flash by George MacDonald Fraser is the second in a series of books following Flashman, the bully from Tom Brown’s Schooldays (which I never read). Naturally, I haven’t read the first in the series. Well, this is a pretty entertaining romp that doesn’t take itself seriously at any point. Actual history is tweaked to…
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Slights is the debut novel of Kaaron Warren, published by Angry Robot, that came as part of my welcome pack from joining the British Fantasy Society. The protagonist is a serial killer and the blurb implies that the story will be a gruesome serial killer horror. Instead it’s somewhat of a hybrid. It’s part psychological horror, part…
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I’m a bit behind on my book posts. I have a tallish pile of books sitting on the desk waiting for me to say something interesting about them. We can only hope… Several of the books are non-fiction so I thought I’d bundle them all together. Bad Samaritans: The guilty secrets of rich nations and…
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This came to my attention at alt.fiction 2010. During a panel it was held up as an example of a perfectly good novel that couldn’t sell due to the market. With the upswing of the horror market, it found a publisher after having been with an agent for something like four years. I was keen…
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Before Charlaine Harris and Stephanie Meyer there was Kim Harrison and the Hallows series. The premise is that a virus wiped out about three-quarters of the human race, thus revealing the supernatural population. For a Few Demons More is the fifth (and so far final) in the series. All the books in the series have…
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Lords of the North by Bernard Cornwell has Vikings in it, so it is automatically brilliant. Also, Cornwell is one of my favourite authors. One thing that characterizes Cornwell’s writing is a tendency to end a scene or chapter with a snappy short sentence. For example ‘The gods were not happy.’ Sometimes it’s a cliffhanger,…
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I do like lists. From the Huffington Post, here’s a list of books that apparently people claim to have read but haven’t. The Canterbury Tales by Chaucer – I read the Knight’s Tale at school, and it’s on book mountain, but I haven’t read any more tales. Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville –…
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Oh goddess, it’s so embarrassing. I hate reading these things. But, following a workshop on the challenges of writing for Mills & Boon, there are several of them on book mountain. I’m perfectly prepared to believe that writing formulaic romance requires considerable skill and discipline. The second Mills & Boon I’ve read since the workshop…
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Last year, there was a television adaptation of The Turn of the Screw by Henry James and thus there followed much discussion of its horror and psychological twists. Well, what more reason do you need to read a book? I struggled with the language. This was a surprise. I read the odd classic and although…
Boudica Marginalia 