Imagination is a necessary ingredient in every work of fiction you read. Whether it’s brilliantly or prosaically exercised, the ability of a writer to take an idea and run with it such that you, as the reader, have no choice but to run right alongside them, is one of the Continue Reading
Books
Book review: Record of a Spaceborn Few by Becky Chambers (Wayfarers #3)
Every last one of us needs some kind of purpose. Without it, no matter what we tell ourselves or how fiercely we push down the discontent, we always feel adrift, lost, as if we are heading nowhere even as we doggedly place one weary foot in front of the next. Continue Reading
Lost in a sea of beautiful words: My 20 favourite books of 2019
Books have always been my happy place. From when I was a kid at school, battling bullies and the loneliness of having no friends – who wants to be friends with the object of the bullying? NO ONE – through to this year when I nursed my mother through the Continue Reading
Merry pop culture Christmas to all … and to all a goodnight!
Merry Christmas from the 25th Century … and also from me! Thanks for a wonderful year of pop culture goodness and here’s to an even better year of books, movies, TV, graphic novels and songs in 2020! But wait … this is the most wonderful time of the year so Continue Reading
Santa’s in trouble? He needs some of Russell’s Christmas Magic by Rob Scotton
You’d think, given the miles he has clocked up over the many centuries that Santa has been delivering presents all around the world that he’d have the whole sleigh maintenance thing down pat. And yet, time after narratively convenient time, the big red guy’s sleigh inevitably comes a cropper, dragging Continue Reading
On 11th day of Christmas … I read An Island Christmas by Jenny Colgan #BookReview
Christmas is a pretty powerful time of the year. Or, at least, that’s the way it often seems with popular culture and some sort of giddy group consensus joining together to ordain it as the time of the year, the most wonderful time of the year in fact, when just Continue Reading
Book review: The Electric Hotel by Dominic Smith
History is all too often the art of looking back at facts and not personalities. When we examine the big epoch-defining events of our time and those that preceded it, we are often apt to look at what took place rather than who made it take place. That is largely Continue Reading
Christmas Comes to Moominvalley (adapted from the Tove Jansson classic) by Alex Haridi & Cecilia Davidsson / illustrated by Filippa Widlund
The chances are that if you haven’t heard of Christmas, then you have been living under the proverbial rock, without deliveries of junk mail or without access to a streaming platform or no nearby mall or singing angels in the sky announcing the saviour’s birth (you know, it happens ALL Continue Reading
On 8th day of Christmas … I read Across the Void by S. K. Vaughn #BookReview
Nothing captures the imagination like trying to rescue someone in impossible circumstances and it doesn’t get much more impossible than the cold and unforgiving surrounds of outer space. An environment noted for its hostility to life as much as its startling beauty, journeying into space is not for the fainthearted Continue Reading
On 7th day of Christmas … I added 10 more new pop culture ornaments to my tree incl. Ziggy, Scruffy, Star Trek: Discovery and Bing Bong
It would readily apparent by now that I really love Christmas, and by extension that I really love decorating my Christmas tree which takes pride of pop culture ornament-accented place in my lounge room every year. Granted, it’s almost 20 years old and is looking a little old and creaky Continue Reading