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One of the funniest books I read last year was The Diary of a Bookseller, which in diary form, relates the trials and tribulations of running a second hand bookshop in the small Galloway town of Wigtown. Bythell has a caustic wit – sometimes directly shared with customers who behave in stupid manners, and sometimes…

I’ve recently begun a rewatch of perhaps the best TV adaptation of Elmore Leonard – Justitifed with Timothy Olyphant. I’m halfway through the second season. But I happened to be in Heffers in Cambridge recently where they have famously good Crime Fiction section. Richard Reynolds is their crime fiction expert, and earlier this year he…

It’s always good to keep up with the Clarke Award, Britain’s premier SF award which this year was awarded to Tade Thompson for Rosewater. The book is set in a future Nigeria, where Kaaro is earning a living using his special skills to find things. He is a “sensitive” and he’s been recruited by a…

Having previously read and very much enjoyed (if that’s the right phrase) Cathy O’Neill’s Weapons of Math Destruction I wasn’t sure if Hello World was going to tell the same story. These are both books about the dangers of artificial intelligence – or more specifically machine learning – that is behind so much of what…

Earlier this year, I was cycling through Fen Drayton, the Cambridgeshire nature reserve, with a friend, and he mentioned reading Waterland some years earlier. I’d always known of the book but had never read it. But now I was beginning to become interested in this strange landscape, that is as man-made as any other landscape.…

Note: I’m a little behind on some of my book reviews, so there here follows a big batch all at once! I do this mostly to have a comprehensive record of my reading. Crudo is a slight novel; in terms of length as well as subject. Our narrator is Kathy, and she’s relates her life…

A lot of Japanese novels that seem to get English translations can be quite similar, addressing universal themes of love or loneliness through outsider characters. I’m not sure if that’s a reflection on a society where the need to conform to norms is stronger. This book is similar, but very much different. Tokyo Ueno Station…

I think I picked up Fen in Blackwell’s in Oxford, drawn to it by one of those bookseller reader cards. Fen is a short story collection set in and around the fens, telling dark gothic tales. It reminded me a little of Angela Carter’s short stories, although in a much more contemporary setting. The tales…

Swan Song is a remarkable novel that explores the life of Truman Capote and his “swans” the society women he hung around with – you could say, the set that he inveigled his way into. I confess that I knew relatively little about Capote, having not seen any of the biographical films about him, nor…