“You want to play the rest of this life?” Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow tells the story of Sam and Sadie, two childhood friends and video game prodigies from LA whose fates are irrevocably entwined one day in a children’s hospital game room, and how they’re reunited years later in 90s Boston where, together with …
“Sky above, Luca wanted to do right by that laugh.” I read most of this book on sun-drenched beaches and benches in and around Venice, crowded on all sides by jaw-dropping Gothic architecture pushing ten centuries in age largely built with Croatian limestone and suffused with Byzantine and Islamic influences on account of the vast …
“The miracles in fact are a retelling in small letters of the very same story which is written across the whole world in letters too large for some of us to see”, said C. S. Lewis in a sermon preached at St. Jude on the Hill Church in London on 26th November 1942 in the …
“History has failed us, but no matter.” This is one of the most extraordinary books I have ever read. It’s been my constant companion these past few weeks, housebound in a very storm-torn Scotland with a broken knee, a tempestuous saga following the story of four generations of a Korean family from their origins in …
“When I look at the majesty of the night sky, with the Milky Way stretching out overhead in a huge arc of stars, I don’t feel anxious. I feel limitless. Like there are infinite possibilities out there and I could be part of any one of them.” This was absolutely superlative from one of my …
“Reading this at the age of 13, I understood that fantasy, the place I was looking for, is not to be found in dragons, ghosts, or magic wands. It resides in language. Fantasy is death by owls. It’s mourning through gesture. It’s music, incantation in half-light. An inverted heart.” — An excerpt from one of my …
“Who can say if the thoughts you have in your mind as you read these words are the same thoughts I had in my mind as I typed them? We are different, you and I, and the qualia of our consciousnesses are as divergent as two stars at the ends of the universe. And yet, …
“Hope is part of the human condition and trans people’s hope is our proof that we are fully human. We are not an ’issue’ to be debated and derided. We are symbols of hope for many non-trans people, too, who see in our lives the possibility of living more fully and freely. That is why …
“Eventually remembering turned into imagining. How slight the difference was between the two.” So, this is undoubtedly one of the most critically acclaimed books of the last two years, and also generally one of the most hyped, hence my trepidation in deciding to finally embark on the journey (and still only when some of the …
I picked these books up quite simply due to the overwhelming love for them that thrums across the interwebs like cosmic background radiation. Constant. Immutable. Just perennially reliably there. And perennially reliably wonderful they are. They cut you to the quick. Sunshine dancing across the blade. Precision storytelling and genre mastery at its finest. My …
“We have become accustomed to an impoverished planet.” This… is a *sobering* read. Attenborough’s thesis is that the planet’s stability and sustainability rely solely on its biodiversity, which we as a species have utterly decimated in the last century alone with ramifications that become more and more urgent with every passing second. One need only …
“Give her a week to herself and she began to isolate, cultivating an ash pile of loneliness that built on itself exponentially, until she was daydreaming about selling everything and drifting away on a boat toward nowhere.” Detransition, Baby is one of those exquisitely crafted, sumptuous, slowburn character studies that makes you both ache for and …
“Saying the words made me feel like I’d been released from the dark pit of my imagination, allowed for a moment to stretch and scream.” “Did I choose for my heart to beat or my lungs to demand air?” I utterly inhaled this exquisitely-crafted memoir over the course of several long walks by the loch …
“Mr Pickwick, having said grace, pauses for an instant, and looks round him. As he does so, the tears roll down his cheeks, in the fulness of his joy. Let us leave our old friend in one of those moments of unmixed happiness, of which, if we seek them, there are ever some, to cheer …
“This book is an experiment. It is an attempt to see what new stories and approaches emerge if black British history is envisaged as a global history and – perhaps more controversially – as a history of more than just the black experience itself.” Black and British is, I think, the most informative book I have …
I look at Ma. “Do you love her?” Ma’s eyes get that sparkle I’ve seen before. I’ve developed a nervous tic ever since I started working in publishing of constantly checking my progress through a book – whether it’s the number of pages left in a hardback or paperback or the ebook %. There are …
And so turns the final page, again. My third time reading this book, and it remains as affecting as the first. I don’t know if I’ve ever read anything with as much heart. Despite its premise being centred around a brutal and horrifically familiar injustice, it’s a story suffused with such overwhelmingly soul-soothing warmth. To …
“Her pen had a heart inside, and the nib was a wound in a vein. She stained the page with herself.” I don’t think I’ve ever encountered a book, at least not since Redwall and The Cry of the Icemark and Sabriel in childhood, Wuthering Heights and The Lord of the Rings and The Secret …
“Fired up! Ready to go!” “Either grab a drink and sit down with us or get the fuck out of here.” “Rarely does a week go by when I don’t run into somebody—a friend, a supporter, an acquaintance, or a total stranger—who insists that from the first time they met me or heard me speak …
“Maybe I don’t know what fills it in yet, but I can look at the space around where I sit in the world, what creates that shape, and I can care about what it’s made of, if it’s good, if it hurts anyone, if it makes people happy, if it makes me happy.” So this …
