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March-May Reading
Doctorow is both an entertaining author and very much on the right (by which I mean left/anarchist) side of politics. His futuristic utopia is set in a world where people are kept artificially poor in the midst of post scarcity merely to keep the capit …
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January/February 2017 Reading
Bruce Sterling is that other cyberpunk author. He is back to writing counterfactual alternative histories examining what may have been had things just happened to turn out slightly differently (cf. steampunk bible and Victorian romp The Differen …
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December 2016 reading
This is a pretty comprehensive 'brief' history of the Anglo-Saxons - from the decline of the Romano-British culture in (what we now call) England up until the arrival of the Normans and indeed beyond. Hindley investigates …
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November 2016 Reading
This novel was one of a trove I inherited from my parents, a gift for my mother on her 20th birthday. It tells the story of a weaver, formerly a religious nonconformist and now miser, who discovers a meaning in life other than gold when an orphan c …
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October 2016 Reading
Blood Meridian (or The Evening Redness in the West) is a sort of literary slasher set in a mythical version of the Old West. If you can get past the grisly ultraviolence and cast of socio/psychopathic characters, there is a powerful story and …
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September 2016 reading
I can’t resist a bargain. Paying 60p for a book with a 1 pound sticker on the front does, I believe, constitute a bargain. The text, dating from 1990 is actually a pretty solid PL introduction and fairly compre …
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August 2016 Reading
I have wanted to read some of DFW’s stuff ever since sending one of my blog posts through I Write Like and discovering that our styles were statistically similar. Having read this collection of essays, I am rather chuffed at the …
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July 2016 Reading
An Oxfam treat, this. S?awomir Mro?ek’s 1957 collection of ultra-short stories are bizarre and compelling. From elephants made from rubber to save money, to a world of tiny people that live in a drawer, Mro?ek is satirical and surreal in e …
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June 2016 reading
Eco is brilliant, and I think this is one of his most enthralling novels since Foucault's Pendulum. As in that book, conspiracies abound — freemasons, jesuits, that sort of thing — though this time in nineteenth century Europe. How …
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May 2016 reading
This novel was leant to me by Nor who was recommended it by another friend. In a sort of rambling travelogue, Sebald ruminates on thoughts and stories that were triggered by wandering round on the Suffolk coastline — Lowestoft, Southwol …
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