According to Goodreads, I’ve read 33 of Stephen King’s books – since getting bitten by the bug through some of his best a few years back, I’ve been slowly working my way through the rest of them. Rose Madder isn’t one of his best, nor is it one of his worst. Instead it’s a decent book, albeit with a harrowing subject matter, that would have been a lot better had it been missing its supernatural elements. Rosie Daniels has spent fourteen years in an abusive […]
Being David Mitchell (the one that didn’t write Cloud Atlas)
First coming across him as Peep Show‘s Mark, and since then on That Mitchell and Webb Look and the ten thousand comedy panel shows that litter the Dave channel, I find David Mitchell very, very funny. Which is why, when finding myself feeling rather down, I chose to read his autobiography. And while Back Story didn’t raise many belly laughs, it was still an amusing and pleasant way to pass some time. David Mitchell would be the first to admit that he’s not had the […]
“He ate little but drank much and vomited proportionally.”
A Dead man in Deptford is one hell of a book. Imagining the fascinating life and early death of Christopher ‘Kit’ Marlowe – Elizabethan playwright, poet and alleged spy – on opening I was a little worried that the language might be too dense (’tis written in the parlance of the time) but before long I was putting off sleep to read more while gleefully noting all of my new favourite olde words and pretty much wanting to roll around in the wonderful writing. While […]
The town, not the planet
In Dispatches from Pluto, British-born travel writer Richard Grant takes a trip to meet a friend in the Mississippi Delta, and ends up buying her father’s old plantation house. Moving his girlfriend and dog from a tiny Manhattan apartment, they throw themselves into Delta life – battling the snakes, armadillos and sometimes alligators that inhabit their garden, wrangling weeds that grow faster than they can yank them, hunting food for the table, discovering how hard it can be to heat a creaky old house […]