A meagre homage

JG Ballard died in 2009 on April 19 (I am a tad late to say ‘OTD’). I read his “The Voices of Time” in a paperback collection edited by Damien Knight, 100 Years of Science Fiction. (I was very happy to buy those two volumes, by the way, in the mid-70s, with part of the […]

William Gibson reminds us to read Jack Womack

Stealing from the Guardian as I do from time to time, I see that in their regular “The Books that Made Me”, William Gibson, under the heading “The book I think is most underrated” nominates, “Jack Womack’s Random Acts of Senseless Violence. A near future that chillingly predicted the foulest possible outcome of our past […]

Reading Pandemica

(Be patient, I do get around to recommending stuff to read somewhere in here eventually …) Candice Carty-Williams is spot on, at least for me, when she warns re self-isolation: 1) Don’t go out and buy a thousand books. Much like holiday reading, you almost certainly won’t get through them all. Your to-be-read pile will […]

Wha’s a man t’ doo?

I am far from home. My many, many books are in cartons, denied to me, being placed in storage. I have been surviving upon Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle, and I am in love with Duchess Eliza, not to mention Daniel Waterhouse, the Shaftoe Brothers, Enoch Root, the crew of the Minerva, and not to forget […]