If you had asked me a few months ago whether I had read this I’d have said yes. I thought that I had read most, if not all, of Wilson’s books that are in linked to the Illuminatus trilogy. But I’d have been wrong.
This one features James Joyce and Albert Einstein drinking in [...]
Above all, this took me a loooong time to finish. Even when I was reading it steadily and thought I would just carry straight on through, it was slow going.
It’s not that hated it; or even that I didn’t like it. Nor, indeed. was the prose hard or complex. It just didn’t [...]
This has been the third year in which I have read a volume of The Baroque Cycle over the summer. I loved the first, despite its dip after the first book. The second was slower – in fact suffering from classic middle-volume longeurs. I thoroughly enjoyed them both, though.
This third volume is [...]
Cayce Pollard has a strange kind of allergy: certain brands make her ill.
Or at least, their logos do; seeing the Michelin Man, for instance, sets her off in a particularly bad way. She has a corresponding – and possibly linked – talent, which is that she can reliably tell whether a new logo, for [...]
Ellis’s Spider Jerusalem is a journalist, based on Hunter S Thompson. At the start he is living in seclusion in a cabin in the mountains, but contractual difficulties drive him back to the city for the first time in five years. Shit happens, and he writes about it.
This volume comprises the first three [...]
Mr Handler operating under his own name, here, rather than his Snicket nom de plume. As such, this is a novel for adults, rather than children.
Though in fact, is it even a novel at all? It is in fact more of series of short stories, or even vignettes. They are linked, or [...]
I came upon these when I was digging out some old comics for my son. These are not for eleven-year-olds, but I realised I hadn’t read them in years, and I thought I’d see how they had aged (plus, I remembered next to nothing about the story).
The story is not bad, but not that [...]
Posted out of sequence, for reasons unknown even to me.
Writing about this novel is kind of embarassing for me, because I had the chance to make it better than it is, and I, er, blew it because I read too slowly.
See, I was on quite a large list of people who saw a draft version [...]
Hmmm, once again I try a Warren Ellis, and find that it’s not as good as I expected, or hoped. ‘Good’, that is, in the sense of ‘exciting, dramatic, interesting’. I didn’t dislike it, and the story was OK; but it never really caught fire, you know?
Still, it was his debut, so maybe [...]
I bought this in a second-hand bookshop, and tucked into the back there was a cutting from The Guardian of this review by Michael Moorcock. So go and look there if you want a plot summary: he does it much better then I could.
It’s an interesting, dark story, and I’m not totally sure how [...]