Category Books

Writing Home

Read Alan Bennett’s Writing Home over my holiday – probably, in terms of pages, more than I have read for the entire year previously – and of course it is superb. It’s actually my second reading, the first not really…

Port Mungo by Patrick McGrath

Originally posted on Palimpsest: Well, I have now finished two books consecutively for the first time in ages, and at last my Palimplist is making some movement. I think I should thank Patrick McGrath for that. Port Mungo is every…

Reading

Am currently reading On Beulah Height, by Reginald Hill. Not very far into it, but the change of pace is startling after Destination: MORGUE!, I have to admit. There is a distinct paucity of Hill info on the web, just…

James Ellroy

Here, as promised earlier, is a slightly edited version of my Palimpsest post about James Ellroy: Frankly, James Ellroy is God. He is without doubt the world’s best living crime author, and I’d wager that he’d the best crime writer…

Destination: MORGUE!

I am currently reading the latest from my all-time favourite author, James Ellroy. It’s a collection of essays and autobiographical pieces, as well as three novellas. It is (obviously) brilliant. I am currently putting together a fairloy lengthy Palimpsest post…

Two new books

I had a look round the Kingo branch of ‘The Works’ (which the carrier bag claims has the website www.theworks.gb.com) today. They seem to stock mainly remaindered stuff, but I got an Ian Rankine three novel omnibus for £4.99 and…

Some not-very-recent reading

Read these yonks ago, but never got round to posting anything on them… A Brief History of the Future – John Naughton This is an excellent study of the origins of the internet, by academic and journalist John Naughton, whose…

More reading…

I have abandoned ‘Consider Phlebas’ with a third of the way to go. At the end of the day, I don’t like SF enough to read nearly 600 pages of the stuff. So, fiction-wise I am reading ‘Lolita’ now, which…

Consider Phlebas

This is still going well, and I am hooked into the action scenes. Banks does write well, especially in his early books. Mind you, this is going to have stiff competition as I am going to treat myself to a…

Current Reading

I am currently reading Consider Phlebas, by Iain ‘M’ Banks. It is the first Science Fiction novel I have read since I was a kid, and I have to say it took quite a long time to get into. The…