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“Death is always on the way”
Photo by Karl Bissinger, Morocco, 1949 I have a special fondness for the stories of wayward—particularly British—ex-pats getting into trouble in foreign places that they fail to completely understand....
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Harry’s Top-10 Reads of 2010
cross stitch c/o BoingBoing.net As my final post of 2010 I am once again presenting my (now 14-year-old) son’s top-10 list of reads for the past year—with only minimal editing and no comment. The only...
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“… phony Beatlemania has bitten the dust”
I was going to let it pass without comment, but the knowledge has been nagging me, insistently, with a need to share. Yesterday marked the anniversary of the release, in December of 1979, of the...
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My top-10 reads of 2010
Time, once again, for an entirely subjective and somewhat erratic list of favourite reads—this one for the year 2010. This time, I’m trying a little experiment. I’m often uncomfortable with hawking...
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“I’ve been as bad an influence on American literature as anyone I can think of”
Since it made my top-10 of the decade, Richard K Morgan’s outrageous noir-fantasy The Steel Remains has continued to occupy a small, dark corner of the back of my brain—largely because I learned,...
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Reality vs. The Fantastic
Damien G. Walter, in a recent Guardian blog post, attacks what he sees as a failure on the part of literary fiction—with its apparent obsession with realism (or its complete disconnection through...
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“…to the last I grapple with thee…”
Moby Dick by Rockwell Kent Over this past summer, I set myself the task of finally reading Herman Melville‘s popular doorstop Moby Dick. I’m pleased to say I completed it, but not until the end of the...
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“…simply messing about in boats”
Alberto Manguel‘s excellent article on The Wind in the Willows encouraged me to finally read a classic that had somehow eluded me in childhood; despite being one of my sister’s favourites. This is odd...
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“Imagination is like a muscle…”
As part of my ongoing attempt to become more literate in classic science fiction I recently finished a couple of books by quirky legend Philip José Farmer: the seminal To Your Scattered Bodies Go and...
View Article“We like lists because we don’t want to die”
I love lists and I’m clearly not the only one. A man who has earned a significant reputation for his understanding of intra- and intercultural intertextuality, Professor Umberto Eco, has even written a...
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