The Bone Season saga is a bewitchingly idiosyncratic steampunk-sci-fi-fantasy hybrid – after binging all three books currently out in the world, my imagination is reeling. The brain really does feel warm after finishing, like the body after a sumptuous roast… gravy-drenched Yorkshire puddings, turkey slices dipped in cranberry sauce, steaming brussels sprouts, peas and potatoes, …
Because I am a gargantuan dork willing to arise at the crack of dawn to stand in line for 2 hours with other gargantuan dorks, I managed to score a literal £5 ticket to have my eyeballs blessed for more than 3 hours by the symphonic nuances of Sir Ian Mckellen, Mithrandir himself, as the …
This is a deliciously dark book. Like steaming fillet steak soaked in peppercorn sauce with roast potatoes, buttered runner beans, and a glass of Merlot delicious. You know you’re reading Schwab by the second sentence, when the slender figure of Victor Vale sweeps through a cemetery at night, his billowing trench coat brushing the tops …
‘Stas reskon’ means ‘chasing danger’ in Arnesian, the language of Red London. It occurs in Book 2 of VE Schwab’s incandescent Shades of Magic series, A Gathering of Shadows, when the badass seamster and quirkily maternal Calla applies it to our relentlessly independent protagonist Lila Bard. It’s my favourite Arnesian phrase and captures in totality …
So, I had to re-read this for my last mammoth university essay – it was also around the same time the new BBC mini-series came out. I only made it through a couple of episodes, partly because I was so swamped, partly because Walter is a little… bland? A little vanilla… But Marian was great …
This is a strange book – strange, disturbing, violent, and thoroughly Victorian in every way. With extremely limited rights around ownership of their finances and even more limitations around opportunities to generate income, the burden of monetary concerns was a crippling one for women in Victorian society. In terms of actual law, women were little …
“This is Captain Kathryn Janeway of the Federation starship Voyager,” were words that quite literally defined my childhood. The most stable period of said hood occurred towards the end of primary school when established morning ritual was an episode of Voyager before school at the breakfast table, the opening credits serving as the theme tune of …
I started out really liking this book. The Hélène Cixous quote at the beginning hooked me in like a fish and I was immediately immersed in the intensity of the story, simultaneously surreal like a mystic dream vision and scalding as a sunburn slap. But about two thirds of the way in, I started to …
“These sit in the wilderness, pent like lousy rodents all the day long; appointed scape-beasts come to the waste-lands, to grope; to stumble at the margin of familiar things – at the place of separation.” Reading this slim novel-poem-memoir hybrid is like reading a book-length Waste Land without any of the lofty ambiguity. In Parenthesis …
“I guess it’s like an airplane: they’re the drag and we’re the thrust, together we make the thing fly. Too much of us and we’re nose-heavy, too much of them and we’re tail-heavy – it’s a matter of balance.” Thus conscience does make cowards of us all. This is Scout’s final realisation in Go Set …
“I have only to glance over my shoulder for all those years to drop away and I see it behind me again, the ravine, rising all green and black through the saplings, a picture that will never leave me. I suppose at one time in my life I might have had any number of stories, …
“There was no mystery in the heart of a Buendia that was impenetrable for her because a century of cards and experience had taught her that the history of the family was a machine with unavoidable repetitions, a turning wheel that would have gone on spilling into eternity were it not for the progressive and …
“Ladies and gentleman of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns.” Vladimir Nabokov, a Russian writer born at the close of the 19th century, undoubtedly penned one of the most beautifully written and equally horrific English language novels of all time. …
Believe it or not, an old teacher of mine asked me to read this slight book in my final year of high school, assuring me it would be life-changing. I mean, I wouldn’t go as far as that, but it’s certainly interesting. It may be just a short children’s story about a lonely wolf, but …
On an iron-grey Tuesday night earlier this week, the first floor of Waterstones Piccadilly was filled with the murmur of voices from a truly staggering array of cultures. It was an evening in celebration of Arabic literature and the launch of the fifty-fifth issue of the Banipal magazine. The magazine itself is significantly named for …
Deep in the heart of Mossflower country, nestled between the emerald woods and the sprawling meadowland, stands an ancient abbey. It was built from red standstone by the first mice centuries ago, and even now, with the fiery red cloak of ivy draped over its south face, it burns as brightly as it did back …
“There is nothing like looking, if you want to find something,” said a pensive Thorin Oakenshield in The Hobbit. Walking into the Sir John Ritblat Gallery at the magnificent British Library in the heart of London evokes just this feeling. You may not know what you’re looking for, or that you’re even looking for anything …
In the introduction to A Farewell to Arms, Hemingway’s grandson records that he wrote “on the principle of the iceberg. For the part that shows there are seven-eighths more underwater”. The story follows Frederic Henry, an American lieutenant serving as an ambulance driver on the Italian front in WWI. He is wounded while eating cheese …
So, The Republic… A thought-train. My favourite aspects of Plato’s writings in this book are his concepts of “philosopher kings” ruling society in an autocracy, and of the tripartite soul. The Platonic Academy in Athens was the first of its kind, and it was just one of Plato’s legacies between 428BC and 347BC. It was …
