Posted in Book Reviews, Other Book Reviews on April 30, 2008 | No Comments »
I read a vast quantity of books during April, most of which have been reviewed here. There are a handful, however, that I haven’t reviewed properly. There are varying reasons for this.
The Road - Cormac McCarthy - there are about a thousand reviews of this already, so I didn’t feel the need to add another. [...]
Posted in Book Reviews, Fremantle Press, Simon Haynes, tagged Fremantle Press, Hal Spacejock, Simon Haynes on April 24, 2008 | No Comments »
“Hal Spacejock: Just Desserts” is the third in Simon Haynes’ humorous SF series, and it’s the best yet. Before I get into discussing this book explicitly, I want to give potential readers an idea of what makes this series different to most of the other SF on the market today. The “Hal Spacejock” books are [...]
Posted in Book Reviews, Other Book Reviews, T.A.G. Hungerford Award winners, tagged TAG Hungerford Award, simone lazaroo, the world waiting to be made, TAG Hungerford Award Winner on April 23, 2008 | 2 Comments »
“The World Waiting to be Made” is Simone Lazaroo’s TAG Hungerford Award winning first novel. Of the four Hungerford winners I’ve now read, I contend this to be the best. The book appears to be a bildungsroman tale of Lazaroo’s own life, although there is a note in the front saying that some things have [...]
Posted in Book Reviews, Other Book Reviews, tagged Book Reviews on April 23, 2008 | No Comments »
I can’t remember ever reading so many books so rapidly. I’m going at the rate of around a novel a day at the moment, which is due to the fact that I am on school holidays until next Monday. (I’m a teacher in case you’re wondering). I’ve read about 5 books in the past 5 [...]
Posted in Book Reviews, Other Book Reviews, tagged Ma Jian, Beijing Coma, stick out your tongue on April 23, 2008 | No Comments »
Ma Jian is my favourite Chinese writer, due to his outstanding travel narrative, “Red Dust.” Ma is a realist; he has said that it is his intention to depict the lives of the people he sees around him as accurately as possible. But realism is very much out of fashion in Communist China, dangerously so. [...]
Posted in Book Reviews, Bruce L. Russell, T.A.G. Hungerford Award winners, tagged Bruce L. Russell, TAG Hungerford Award, TAG Hungerford Award Winner on April 21, 2008 | No Comments »
I liked Russell’s “Channelling Henry” so much that I made a point of hunting down his earlier novels, the TAG Hungerford Award-winning “Jacob’s Air, and his second novel, “The Chelsea Manifesto.” “Jacob’s Air” was the 1995 winner of the Hungerford Award (which is for a writer who hasn’t yet published a novel length work and [...]
Posted in Book Reviews, Fremantle Press, Other Book Reviews, T.A.G. Hungerford Award winners, tagged TAG Hungerford Award, brenda walker, TAG Hungerford Award Winner on April 20, 2008 | No Comments »
Brenda Walker’s first novel, published in 1991, has the distinction of being the inaugural T.A.G. Hungerford Award winner. Set in Perth in the late eighties, it is a strange and slender novel of two people: a barrister named Tom O’Brien, and a writer called Anna Penn. The story is told in a distinctively dispassionate style [...]
Posted in Book Reviews, Fremantle Press, Simon Haynes, tagged Hal Spacejock, Simon Haynes on April 19, 2008 | No Comments »
This is the first novel in the “Hal Spacejock” series, and I’m reading it second, after “Hal Spacejock: Second Course.” Confused yet? Luckily, I wasn’t. Simon Haynes has constructed his series in such a way that each book is a stand-alone novel; it’s not at all like a fantasy epic where you have to remember [...]
Posted in The Kingdom of Four Rivers on April 18, 2008 | No Comments »
Today is a happy day for me, as I finally sent my novel, “The Kingdom of Four Rivers,” off to the TAG Hungerford Award. The deadline isn’t until the end of June but I thought it prudent to get it finished now, so that I might turn my attention back to my actual day job, [...]
Posted in Book Reviews, Fremantle Press, tagged TAG Hungerford Award on April 18, 2008 | No Comments »
Boy, have I read a lot of books so far in 2008! I worked out today that I’ve read no fewer than 20 novels so far this year, and I’ve written reviews on about half of them. It’s strange-last year I read very little, perhaps as few as 10 books for the whole year, but [...]
