I read a lot, and try to keep things varied and am always interested in broadening my outlook through something new. Currently writing a memoir about walking, mental health, and grief. Can be found elsewhere on the fediverse talking about things other than books at nickbwalking@zirk.us and nickbwalking@me.dm
This link opens in a pop-up window
A stark recounting of Sissay's childhood and the way the care system and systemic racism failed him. Even though it was a story of a pretty dark account, I wanted it o be longer to recount how he dealt with those issues after he left the care system at 18, but perhaps that's coming in a future volume.
It's very easy to be fearless about your writing practice when, faced with writers' block, your husband can surprise you with a week's holiday in a luxury resort in Costa Rica.
The winner of two Lambda Literary Awards (fiction and science fiction) The Gilda Stories is …
This has one of my personal bugbears - constantly shifting perspective within scenes. Sometimes this can work, especially if it's making a wider point in the structure of the story, but here it's unfocused and jumping, making it hard to follow who is thinking what and who knows what at any particular point in a scene. A shame, because the central idea here of looking at two hundred or more years of history with a black lesbian vampire at the heart of the story is very good and throws up lots of interesting angles and ideas. The idea of powerful billionaires hunting vampires in order to secure their own immortality rings a lot differently now, when powerful men are literally injecting the blood of the young, than it might have done when originally published in the 90s.
What would happen if women suddenly possessed a fierce new power?
In THE POWER, the …
Yes, yes, I should read the original before watching the adaptation, but sometimes you can't help it. What's interesting here is the way the TV series tells the story in a much more conventional way than the novel, especially omitting the framing device that allows the novel to speed through many parts. There are times when I wished it would slow down a little and explore ideas a bit more, but it's a good read and raises a lot of interesting questions - and what if our whole existence is just part of a fable to explain the lost history of a distant future?
A really interesting story of how Lily's father left her family when she was just six so he could join the Bhagwan's movement and focus on himself. An exploration of the effects this abandonment and her father's later behaviour had on her as his life fell apart in different parts of the world.
An absolute doorstopper of a book, packed with information, covering every aspect of the dissolution in quite forensic detail, illustrating a lot of the stories around the dissolution and showing what a massive social upheaval England went through during the later years of Henry VIII's reign. Maybe too detailed if you want just a brief overview of the period, but Clark has obviously done a lot of research to draw out all these facts and stories and brought them together in one volume.
I found the middle sections of this the most interesting where Crow talks about the rise and fall of Imperial Spain and the art and literature that came from that era. The rest of it has some interesting moments but all filtered through a very dated perspective of assuming "the Spanish people" are homogenous s a group of peasants without agency who just wander around in the background of history. Particularly annoying when he reaches the twentieth century, where the section on the Civil War is just anti-communist axe-grinding, then the section on post-Franco Spain has a "how dare these people want to live modern lives" attitude to it.
I'd read some issues of Concrete back in the 90s and then thought about it again recently. Luckily, this volume was in my local library and was an interesting rediscovery of a very different age, both in the world Concrete exists in and the perception of comics and portrayal of superheroics. It's a very gently kind of story-telling, focused much more on the character than his exploits and adventures and trying to grapple with the idea of what it would be like to be transformed in that way.
This account of the development of the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine combines science and recent history, showing how the team came together to put out a Covid vaccine in such a short time. There's a lot of science in this and it's interesting to see just how casually they describe things that would have seemed miraculous just a couple of decades ago, like the way they manipulate DNA. The book could have been two or three times longer explaining a lot of the intricacies of this, but as it is, it's a fascinating tight read, the pace of it echoing the pace of the creation process.
This is an interesting and engaging introduction to Spanish history, beginning in prehistory and continuing right up until the 2010s and the abdication of Juan Carlos. It's about themes and interesting moments and incidents rather than trying to tell the whole sweep of everything that went on in Iberia across those thousands of years but helps to give an idea of what Spain is, where it came from and where it might be going. Some of his arguments for Spanish exceptionalism are a bit weak, though. While the idea of different regimes defining what makes Spain and Spanishness in contrast to an "anti-Spain" is interesting, nationalism defining itself by what it is not is a feature in many countries (see Linda Colley's Britons, for instance). An ongoing metaphor about the three faces of Santiago doesn't work because two of those faces are too similar to work as separate analytic prisms. …
This is an interesting and engaging introduction to Spanish history, beginning in prehistory and continuing right up until the 2010s and the abdication of Juan Carlos. It's about themes and interesting moments and incidents rather than trying to tell the whole sweep of everything that went on in Iberia across those thousands of years but helps to give an idea of what Spain is, where it came from and where it might be going. Some of his arguments for Spanish exceptionalism are a bit weak, though. While the idea of different regimes defining what makes Spain and Spanishness in contrast to an "anti-Spain" is interesting, nationalism defining itself by what it is not is a feature in many countries (see Linda Colley's Britons, for instance). An ongoing metaphor about the three faces of Santiago doesn't work because two of those faces are too similar to work as separate analytic prisms. However, overall, this is interesting, and a good starting point on Spanish history before jumping into more detail on other areas.
There's lots of really good information in this book, and Saini makes a very good case for how we've missed a lot of the stories about how society came to be in an attempt to fix a gendered narrative on it. The problem I have with it is, like her earlier Inferior, it reads more as a series of pieces sharing similar topics rather than a single boo with a cohesive argument and narrative. Feels like there's a lot more that could be said about how the different parts of this link together but then it ends with a very brief conclusion.
I love Vonnegut's style in both the way he evokes huge images and events with sparse words and in his ideas, like this most banal and final of apocalypses with the world ending in ice-nine. The problem is that as we get further from the period it was written in, the assumptions it was written under, especially about the role of women and non-white (and non-American) people in the narrative and society, jar even more with the inventiveness going on around them.
Well, it has The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas in it, so that's worth the admission price alone, but the rest of this collection is very good too. Caught my attention much more than the first volume (other people's take may vary, of course) with her use of science fiction tropes and ideas to tell stories from alternative perspectives, raising questions for the reader about our world and our priorities.
This is more a vague summary of bits of British and Chinese history over the last couple of hundred years than a look at the relations between the two countries. There's no focus to it, no thesis being examined, no argument being made, just "this happened, then this happened" for a couple of hundred pages. I spotted one glaring error - Chris Patten wasn't appointed Governor of Hong Kong by Thatcher in 1992, because she'd been out of power since 1990 - and some of the statistics he quotes about China's growth are suspect and appear to contradict each other. There are interesting books to be written - or have already been written - about a lot of the subjects here, this fails to be interesting about any of them.
Including for completeness!
