Light by M. John Harrison
It’s hard to avoid wordplay in talking about this: it’s a dazzling, brilliant novel. It’s the most successful fiction I’ve ever seen at embedding quantum physics, on every level – it’s dee[…]

Sideways
I went to my first movie preview tonight. My pal Andrew got me in on a screening of Alexander Payne’s new movie – we’d both loved the last two he made, so were looking forward to this. I’d read an ILE thread about it,[…]

Thomas Gravesen at Real Madrid
Obviously all we amateur pundits instantly agreed that Gravesen was just the kind of player that Real needed, someone to work and win ball and stop the other team in the middle of the park, someone to do the kind of job[…]

The Big U by Neal Stephenson
This was Stephenson’s first novel, before the PoMo blockbusters. Unsurprisingly therefore, it’s a campus novel, but it’s not like any other campus novel I’ve read. There are comically useless profe[…]

We don’t often talk about covermount CDs here, and I suppose most of them aren’t worth a lot of attention, but I have one here that made me go out and buy a few albums by the people on it, so I think it’s worth highlighting here.
Th[…]

Boxing Gorilla!
Not much needs saying about this. It’s from 1951-53. It was brought to my attention by Dom Passantino, but originally rediscovered by RealInMemphis.co.uk. Note the second match on the bill…[…]

A Long Hot Summer by Masta Ace
Most of my albums of the year are ones where I’ve seen plenty of discussion about them on I Love Music – Streets, Big And Rich, Smile, Tom Waits, Dizzee and so on. I just did a search on this album title, an[…]

The Scavenger’s Tale by Rachel Anderson
This is an interesting and impressive novel. It’s slim and simply written: she also writes children’s novels, and brings that clarity and precision here, but this would surely be too harrowing[…]

This is one of Taschen’s wonderful art books – I think they are sometimes disdained because of their mass market production and remainder shop appearances, but they are superb books, always with very high quality text and imagery – […]

Happy Now by Charles Higson
Is Higson our leading renaissance man? Modest success as a pop star, writing for Reeves & Mortimer, a leading performer in The Fast Show, and also a fine novelist – I suppose Jonathan Miller ranks higher in such[…]