Category: Longform
You are viewing all posts from this category, beginning with the most recent.
Hijacked
Can anyone explain to me why this is resignation-worthy?
Simon Danczuk, Labour MP for Rochdale, ... told the Mail Online it was “like the Labour party has been hijacked by the north London liberal elite, and it’s comments like that which reinforce that view”.
The comment was, “Image from #Rochdale.” It was a picture of a white van outside a house covered in English flags. And that can drive a shadow cabinet member to resign. What?!?
Dotter of her Father's Eyes by Mary M Talbot and Bryan Talbot (Books 2014, 12)
Excellent graphic novel; part Mary’s autobiography, part the biography of Lucia Joyce, who was James Joyce’s daughter. Mary’s father, who was distant and borderline abusive, was a noted Joyce scholar.
Well worth a look if you enjoy comics. The “graphic biography,” if you will, is a little-used form.
EU 'benefit tourism' court ruling is common sense, says Cameron
I’m assuming the UK government won’t be bound by this European court ruling. After all, UKIP don’t like European court rulings, and government policy these days is all about keeping the Kippers sweet, isn’t it?
EU ‘benefit tourism’ court ruling is common sense, says Cameron
On Writing by AL Kennedy (Books 2014, 11)
Unlike Stephen King’s book of the same title, this isn’t exactly “a manual of the craft.” You won’t find much about the writing side of writing here; nothing about crafting sentences, forming paragraphs, developing characters or plots.
It’s less about the craft of writing than about the life of a writer; and it shares with King’s eponym the part-memoir approach. Kennedy spends a lot of time describing how writing has been bad for her health in various ways, and how in turn her pathological fear of flying has made the writing life more difficult, (travelling to North America by ship for a signing tour) for example.
The largest and most entertaining part of it was originally published as blog entries on The Guardian’s site.
It’s very good. And not from the book, but with Doctor Who back (and nearly finished) you should read her meditation on it and on the state of Britain.
The Silkworm by Robert Galbraith (books, 2014, 10)
Always good to get a new JK Rowling, of course, whatever name she's using. I sometimes wonder if she's got loads of other things out there, under other as-yet-undisclosed pseudonyms; probably not, though.
Anyway, in the second Cormoran Strike book, we have more of the same sort of thing we had in the first. This time it’s set in the world of publishing, with all sorts of rivalries between more and less successful authors, agents, editors and publishers. “Write what you know”, Jo.
But can such rivalries drive someone to murder? It seems so.
My main, and very minor, complaint about this was that there wasn’t enough of sidekick Robin in it, I felt.
I don’t know how many of these she’s planning to write, but sooner or later Cormoran has to meet – and presumably solve a crime for, or concerning – his estranged rock-star father. who is a recurring offstage character.
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime by Mark Haddon (Books 2014, 9)
In the interest of trying to catch up, I’m not going to say much about this. You probably know all about this already.
Also, it’s been quite a while since I read it, and although I enjoyed it, it hasn’t really stuck around in my head in a way that leaves me much to say. It’s clever in giving us some idea of what it might be like to live with autism. That might be its greatest strength.
Suzi Q, where are you?
I got a card in the post the other day, from my friends Di and Johnny. Regular readers will know Di as one of the most frequent commenters here (ie, she has commented). We disagreed over The Great Gatsby.
Anyway, the card had a post-it stuck inside, with some writing on it that I couldn’t quite make out. Di wrote, “Been trying to get this for you for ages… can you guess who it is?”
I was slow to realise that the “who” referred to the writing on the post-it. But she also said there was a clue on the back of the card.
On the back she’d written “devilgate.org”.
The post-it looks like this:
And I read it to say, “To Martin. Suzi Quatro.”
I mean, if it says that it makes sense considering my origin story; otherwise, not so much.
Thanks Di and Johnny. It’s a lovely thought.
BBC Music Greatest Covers
This BBC Music "Greatest Covers" poll has some quite good -- and interesting -- choices. It has the right answer, of course, but also Hüsker Dü and The Fall (and not even The Fall's best cover -- that would be "Xanadu").
The Severed Streets by Paul Cornell (Books 2014, 8)
I'm now so far behind in posting these that I'm just going to put very brief notes up for most of them.
As a sequel to the excellent London Falling this suffers slightly from what feels a bit like middle-book-of-trilogy syndrome; though I believe Cornell intends this to be an ongoing series, rather than a trilogy.
That said, there is an overarching mystery, which we must hope will be resolved over the course of several books. And at that point, maybe he’ll stop. But the actual story here is perhaps slight compared to the origin stories of the first one, and the horror that Quill and his wife, in particular, experienced.
A mysterious ghostly figure – invisible to all who don’t have The Sight, of course – is killing people in London. There appears to be little to connect them at first, but graffiti at some of the scenes suggests there might be a link to Jack the Ripper. Has his ghost come back and this time gone after rich white men? Or is it something else entirely?
It’s a fun read, despite my reservations above, with some amusing reference to fandom, and the terrible, terrible abuse of a giant of the fantasy genre.