Hortus Vitae: Essays On The Gardening Of Life by Vernon Lee
(Read as part of the 2018 Read Harder challenge. Category: A book of essays.)
Vernon Lee, pseudonym of Violet Paget, was an essayist, story writer, and aesthete active in the late 19th and e[…]

Six to Sixteen: A Story for Girls by Juliana Horatia Ewing
Read as part of the Book Riot Read Harder 2018 Challenge (Category: “A children’s classic published before 1980”)
She’s no relation, but I’ve always had a curios[…]

I’m not doing a comics poll this year – the slack is being admirably taken up with Pete’s new TV poll – but I still read a LOT of comics last year. Here, in no special order, were some of the best ones, new to me if not always[…]

La Belle Sauvage by Philip Pullman
Philip Pullman has an enviable knack of getting critics to dwell on the high-flown literary allusions in his books – Paradise Lost in the His Dark Materials trilogy; The Faerie Queene here. But he’s also[…]

Repurposed and edited Goodreads reviews of the Love And Rockets Library (by Los Bros Hernandez; published by Fantagraphics).
Heartbreak Soup (Gilbert Hernandez)
This is my third or fourth time reading these stories, but the first for a decade or so. […]

“Hi, we’re Jay, Mike, Cheryl and Bobby, better known as Bucks Fizz, stars of LOOK-IN magazine – oh the mischief we got up to! Nothing risque, you understand, it’s a children’s paper. Of course we’re also famous as […]

“Hi Readers! It’s WHACKY here from COR!!, the weekly mag that thrashes the others. You’ve not seen much of me in comics lately, which is a bit of a sore point. I used to have to beat the offers away, but frankly, now Corporal Punish[…]

“Greetings people of Earth. It is I, Servitor Vek of the Doomlords of Nox. My all too convincing alien visage has come among you to pass final judgement on your species. I expect to reach a guilty verdict. Perhaps the comics you have selected i[…]

“OINK! GNURF! SLURP!! SLOO!! GNAROOSH! GRUNT! SNAFFLE!! CHOMP! SNORRT!”
Translation: “Good morning, everyone. I’m Rasher, the porcine companion of that young shaver Dennis, and I’m delighted to introduce the 2015 Freaky […]

Back by popular demand! (Kat asked)
As last year, we are running a COMICS POLL. This was an intimate occasion in 2014 with a small but magnificent body of voters, so if you want to vote in a poll where your opinion really will count* then face front,[…]