Thankyou Santa
This kind of thing is why Grant Morrison is my favourite comics writer:
“The Fortress appears in issue #2, stuffed with a ton of new toys and gets haunted by the bandaged ghost of the Unknown Superman of 4500 AD. The Kandorians f[…]

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[…]

WARNING BAD SEX
“Hoyt began moving his lips as if he were trying to suck the ice cream off the top of a cone without using his teeth … Slither slither slither slither went the tongue, but the hand that was what she tried to concentrate on[…]

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[…]

Japanese Inro by Julia Hutt
Inro were small sectioned lacquerware boxes, generally a little smaller than a cigarette packet, which wealthy Japanese wore dangling from their sash-belts from the 17th Century until around a hundred years ago, when Weste[…]

Tove Jannson wrote two picture-books-for-moominloving-tots: Vem ska trosta knyttet? (1960) and Hur gick det sen? Boken om Mymlan, Mumintrollet och lilla My (1952). When I discovered they’d been republished (as Who Will Comfort Toffle? and The B[…]

The Man Who Ate The 747 is a cute little book. It is a romance which is neither Danielle Steele doorstep thick, or branded via Mills & Boon. Romance fiction has a bad name, and yet historically the romance was a more than respectable genre. Ben […]

Bus stop top fun
From Hoxton to Clerkenwell (haven’t checked out the return route yet), on the route of the 55 and 243, next to the Foundry, Old Street station, Turnmills, Yo! Sushi, Clerkenwell Screws and the Yorkshire Grey. Variously, 8 brea[…]

Hard-working words
I saw in Smiths last night that Stephen Donaldson had written one last Thomas Covenant book. Imagine my delight! Not at the existence of the book, you understand – more tedious leprosy shenanigans I expect – but at Dona[…]