SNAPSHOT For years, Aziz Ansari has been aiming his comic insight at modern romance, but forModern Romance, the book, he decided he needed to take things to another level. He teamed up with NYU sociologist Eric Klinenberg and designed a massive research project, including hundreds of interviews and focus Continue Reading
Books
Book review: Rosewater and Soda Bread by Marsha Mehran
New beginnings, truly new beginnings, are a rare thing in life. Either they are not looked for at all by people caught in the slothful yet iron grip of the devil-they-know, or if time and circumstances do demand their provision, not granted by whatever mysterious powers in the universe Continue Reading
Book review: Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
For a place and time that humanity is yet to reach, the future dystopian era certainly bears all the hallmarks of a road well travelled. In fact, so well depicted have been its tropes of ruin and decay, its harbingers of humanity’s demise and whirlwind-reaping that you could be Continue Reading
Book review: The Abyss Beyond Dreams by Peter F. Hamilton
(image via Tor Books UK; I was going to photograph my own cover but all my enthusiastic reading left some of the letter a little less than glossy)[/caption] It is a conundrum almost as old as time itself – do the ends always justify the means? It’s one of the Continue Reading
Book review: The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern
“The circus arrives without warning. No announcements precede it, no paper notices on downtown posts and billboards, no mentions or advertisements in local newspapers. It is simply there, when yesterday it was not.” So begins the only novel that has ever made me to want to run off and join the Continue Reading
Re-stacking the shelves: The 10 books I loved most in 2014
I have always loved to read. But somehow in the last few years I lost the habit, partly because I was frantically busy at work and barely had time to watch the TV shows I love and movies I wanted to see, but also because somehow, and I have Continue Reading
On the 6th day of Christmas … I read the holiday romance collection Let It Snow
It has oft been said, most notably by songwriters Edward Pola and George Wylie in 1963, that Christmas is “the most wonderful time of the year.” In its most romantic sense that’s probably true – how can you not be beguiled and cheered by chestnuts roasting on an open fire, Continue Reading
Want a book from the fabulous Amy Poehler? YES PLEASE!
I am fairly certain … no wait, I know beyond a shadow of a doubt in fact … that Amy Poehler is the funkiest, coolest, funniest, female entertainer on the planet at the moment. * It stands to reason then that if you have achieved that exalted status, and Continue Reading
Book review: Tiger’s Wife by Téa Obreht
The two most charming things about Téa Obreht’s assured debut novel The Tiger’s Wife, a captivating mix of real life and the delightfully fantastical set in what was once Yugoslavia, are revealed almost immediately by the evocative, descriptively-rich opening paragraph: “In my earliest memory, my grandfather is bald as a stone Continue Reading
Book review: The Girl With All the Gifts by M. R. Carey
Melanie, according to the invitingly brief dust jacket blurb of The Girl With All the Gifts (based on the Edgar Award-nominated short story Iphigenia in Aulis), “is a very special girl”. And the novel of which she is the moral and emotional core, is extraordinary too, a highly original take on Continue Reading