Life is, in many ways, a bittersweet mix of opportunities seized and chances lost. This all too flawed and earthbound state of affairs is not necessarily the result of poor decision-making or impetuous planning; it’s often simply the consequence of sliding doors rising up to meet us, necessitating that a Continue Reading
Books
Horse Museum – There’s a new Dr Seuss on the loose!
SNAPSHOTThe story follows a horse as it guides a group through a museum looking at the real-life examples of how artists have imagined the humble horse. It includes reproductions of more than 30 artworks about horses, from artists like Pablo Picasso to Susan Rothenberg and Jackson Pollock. And there are Continue Reading
Book review: The Lemoncholy Life of Annie Aster by Scott Wilbanks
Belonging, truly belonging, to a group of people, family or otherwise, is one of the great defining attributes of being human. While it’s healthy to define ourselves in our terms as anyone who has ever been part of a dysfunctionally intrusive group will tell you, there is so much to Continue Reading
Book review: Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky
If there is a creed for science fiction, and no doubt someone somewhere has attempted one since people, most people anyway, tend to love immutable rules, it must surely be to (a) to be expansively imaginative and (b) weave in penetratingly substantial examination of the contrarily complex nature of humanity. Continue Reading
Book review: The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix E. Harrow
Ask anyone who has ever fallen in love with the written word, and by fallen I mean with that desperate sense of urgency that says words and stories are life itself and their absence is a slow and lingering death, and they will testify with unbridled passion about the power Continue Reading
Book review: If You’re Reading This I’m Already Dead by Andrew Nicoll
At first gloriously silly glance, If You’re Reading This I’m Already Dead by Andrew Nicoll seems like a very silly novel. A riotously funny, over the top tale of a bunch of circus performers, then based in Germany, who decide to pull the grandest con of all by having one Continue Reading
Life is full of ups … and downers: This Boy by Lauren Myracle
SNAPSHOTLauren Myracle brings her signature frank, funny, and insightful writing to this novel of a teenage boy’s coming-of-age. Paul Walden is not an alpha lobster, the king lobster who intimidates the other male lobsters, gets all the lady lobsters, and wins at life. At least not according to anyone in Continue Reading
Book review: The Stationery Shop of Tehran by Marjan Kamali
There is a quiet joy in being surprised by a book. What you suppose it will be like when you pick it up in a bookstore and are intrigued enough by the back cover blurb to add it to your TBR pile – in my case, a towering mountain that Continue Reading
Book review: What If It’s Us by Adam Silvera and Becky Albertalli
Falling in love is a glorious thing. All that newness! All that possibility! All the promise of a bright and shiny future hand-in-hand with someone more special than anyone else alive. It’s heavy exclamation use territory and 16-year-old Arthur, one of the lovestruck protagonists in What If It’s Us? by Continue Reading
Happy 60th anniversary Asterix! Here’s a celebratory book to mark the occasion
When I first began reading Asterix way back in the ’70s when I was but a young boy, had hair (my six-year-old niece begs to differ) and dinosaurs ruled the Earth (also my niece’s firm belief and she shall be dissuaded), I was blissfully unaware of the fact that it Continue Reading