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John Sutherland, Stephen Fender - Love, Sex, Death, and Words: Surprising...
Quite possibly this was nothing more than a potboiler. But since we’re talking about John Sutherland here, even a potboiler by him can prove perfectly enjoyable. The idea behind this book is to create...
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Marek Kazmierski - Damn the Source
Reading and reviewing this book is a delicate matter for two reasons. First of all, it was written by a friend of mine and reading books by friends is a dangerous pursuit because you’re often faced...
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You WILL Remember My Name
I've recently experienced three seconds of Internet fame. I made a comment under HONY's photo of a teenager whose name is Beyonce and that comment got 5,458 likes. And today I made another comment...
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E.M. Forster - A Passage to India
“A Passage to India” is most of all a story of a fragile friendship which carefully treads the cultural differences. It’s a story of tiny misunderstandings and silly errors and their dramatic...
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Inga Iwasiów - Na Krótko
I wonder sometimes if I like the idea of Inga Iwasiów more than Iwasiów herself. An intellectual, essayist, thinker, feminist. Maybe she is a little like Sontag – too much of a literary critic to be a...
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Denis Johnson - The Laughing Monsters
‘The Laughing Monsters’ is a twist on the spy thriller – the twist being that it’s not very thrilling. This book just really doesn’t know what it wants to be when it grows up. It's a story of...
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Peter Godwin - Mukiwa: A White Boy in Africa
“In those days we called African men ‘boys’. We had cook boys and garden boys, however old they might be. African nannies we called girls.”I think I quite purposely avoided memoirs written by white...
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Granta 119: Britain
It was fitting that this was the very first Granta issue to arrive at my door after I subscribed. Britain, it said. What, no longer Great, I thought. When I first moved to the UK, I didn’t think I...
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John Briffa - Escape The Diet Trap
I read this book based on my GP's recommendation and I would probably recommend it to people, even though I’m not going to follow it to the letter myself. I think I’ve now reached the point in my life...
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Look at what they try and teach, give them what they want to read
Have you heard the news? Genius.com (previously Rap Genius), the site we used to go to to get the meaning of rap lyrics, is expanding. It won’t concern itself with just hip hop anymore; it will now try...
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Nick Harkaway - Angelmaker
On paper it looks perfect. Steam punk, romance, spy novel, comedy, action. All the reviews promised something I would love. But I struggled through this ‘fun, thrilling yarn’ like I struggle through...
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Ignacy Karpowicz - Sońka
To decide whether this book was good or not you have to decide where the kitsch ends and the parody of kitsch begins. Is it a regular melodrama or a self-aware melodrama?It’s a story of a young(ish),...
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Patrick Hamilton - Hangover Square
This is a book about the endless cycles of drinking binges and hangovers. It also is a book about an unhinged man convinced by some very convoluted logic that he needs to murder a woman - in that it...
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Andy Weir - The Martian
Just because I couldn’t put it down doesn’t mean I have to give it 5 stars. It was a great science-fiction book which got all (or almost) the science right but seriously lacked in the fiction...
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2015 in books
2015 was really not a good year. 2014 was pretty horrific and I was told things ‘could only get better’ then, which is of course a cretinous thing to say because things could get better, or they could...
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Tomás González - In The Beginning Was the Sea (translated by Frank Wynne)
I wanted to love this book because the original Pushkin edition is so pretty that I wanted to keep it. And I’m only allowed to keep books that I loved. For this reason I probably was more forgiving...
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Manuel Rivas - The Carpenter's Pencil
This book was written in Galician but I read its Spanish translation. Now, Spanish is my third language, so God knows how much was lost in this game of Chinese whispers but I will try to tell you what...
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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie - Americanah
Adichie and I seem to share sensibilities and I often mention her as one of my favourite authors, even if I often think she lets herself off too easily. Which is another thing we seem to have in...
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Ali Smith - How to Be Both
"Past or present? George says. Male or female? It can’t be both. It must be one or the other. Who says? Why must it? her mother says.This was easily my favourite book read in 2015. There was something...
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Margaret Atwood - Stone Mattress: Nine Tales
I haven’t seen snow for at least three years now and I don’t know when I’m going to see it next. Before I moved to London, I would see snow in regular intervals, as a part four of the comforting...
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Sarah Perry - After Me Comes The Flood
I read this book a long time ago, so this will be a difficult review to write. I suppose I was waiting for a heatwave to hit London so I can be in the right mood to write this and a heatwave is...
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Natsume Soseki - Kokoro (tr. Edwin McClellan)
My book club buddy made us all read it because he was dating a Japanese girl and wanted to learn more about her culture (I hope one day someone reads Prus for me, that would be real love). Anyway,...
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Graham Swift - Last Orders
This was easily the least exciting Booker Prize winner I’ve ever read. You know that other London all us new hipster Londoners never get to know? Even though we all live together, on the same streets,...
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Andrea Busfield - Born Under A Million Shadows
What happened here was that Andrea Busfield took a crap book (The Kite Runner) and wrote a cheap knock-off of it. It was such a blatant example 'if you liked that, read this' than I don't think anyone...
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Alan Moore, Dave Gibbons - Watchmen
The problem with ground-breaking works is that, a decade or two later, once the ground is well-broken, they no longer seem that ground-breaking after all.We forget that once upon a time the idea of a...
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