Phil James

Audio book. Horrible voice of the narrator put me off it.

Unfortunately the packaging doesn't convey the interesting and lively quality of the writing inside. Joan Baxter has a rhythm in her writing that goes from personal anecdote to investigative reporting to broad sweep history that never lost my interest.
Recommended to all fans of Naomi Klein and Ronald Wright, and anyone who wants to know Africa.

I was given this to review.
I'd already read a book by Ruth Ozeki that I really liked http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/917346.All_Over_Creation
and so I had high hopes for this one. It didn't start too well though, two different voices, and neither seemed to speak to me. One a teenage girl sitting in cafe in Tokyo writing a diary and the other a japanese-american woman reading the diary she's found on the beach, on an island in British Colombia.
Her writing is simple, uncomplicated but this is deceptive and as the strands of the story weave together and the layers are built up the characters deepened and I became hooked.
She made me think of Barbara Kingsolver in her realism and Haruki Murakami in her dreamy mystical resonances.
Recommended.

A book unlike any modern genre but also deeply rooted in the tradition of travellers that use their travel in the exterior world as a way to talk about the interior life.
To be taken at a slow walking pace. When you have plenty of time for contemplation. The audio version is read in an agreeable, deep richly rolling voice. Good before bedtime, I suppose.

I loved every moment of reading this book. While I was away from it I needed to get back to it, which for me, is my definition of a supremely successful novel.

Received as Goodreads Giveaway.
“A literary descendent of Roberto Bolaño...“
I didn't really like the Robert Bolano I read; I felt it was pretentious and deliberately obscure. I just finished “Infinite Jest” by David foster Wallace, and that could be similarly accused, but with the key difference, I was drawn in by the characters.
This book is an intricate puzzle, a glittering jewel of compact post-modern techniques that is admirable but ultimately empty because I wasn't attached to any character.
There is no time to develope the characters in 90 pages, but anyway the main theme is the mutability of identity,so maybe character wasn't the point and in the end I was glad it was as short as it was.
Not bad but not really for me.

The author passed away while I was reading this. A fascinating, science based overview of the site, not without poetry in the descriptions.
I'll re-post the obituary from the Quietus
https://thequietus.com/articles/28150-aubrey-burl-obituary

I was given a copy of this book. It intimidated me with a heavy subject but was a lot lighter to read than expected. Think Jon Ronson's Psychopath Test written from someone with a track record of serious journalism. It didn't exactly make me laugh but as the author gets deeper and deeper into the bizarre beliefs of ISIS recruiters and their teachers, the experience becomes intensely surreal.

He also is stubborn enough to ask awkward questions to Islamic scholars and listens carefully to the answers.

This is a book that many people would benefit from reading. He shows the ways our misperceptions are playing into exactly what these apocalyptic cultists want and how they are on a spectrum of religious beliefs that have already shaped our history.

Without doubt the best version of the I Ching I've come across. The author clearly explains where the images originated in the the ritual and political history of ancient china and still makes them relevant to the modern reader. I especially liked the drawings showing the evolution of the chinese characters.

This was an excellently entertaining read, but I suppose even then it's one for the fans. The stylistic choices work really well and should be repeated in other band biographies. A mixture of discography, timelines, album breakdowns, interviews and the all important essays putting the band in context(s).

Hawkwind are seen in relation to Science-Fiction, hard-rock, end of/or continuation of the counterculture, post-punk, krautrock/electronica and as an alternative to mainstream music business.

Now something on Gong and family?

I must firstly state that Cloud Atlas is one of my all time favourite books so there was going to be the risk of comparison from the beginning. But having read and been impressed by Doerr's “All the Light We Cannot See” I knew to trust a master storyteller and try to put comparisons to one side.
For maybe until half way through the book the storylines and characters weren't compelling and the comparison was deadly. How to compete with David Mitchell's satire, mystery and gothic horror/Science-fiction, but I should have trusted Anthony Doerr.
IT IS WORTH IT!
Characters deepen, storylines connect up and it is not at all predictable. By the end he took me somewhere else from the experience of Cloud Atlas, more optimistic even with the horrible realities, and fully winning it's place on my shelves not far from David Mitchell's works.

As another reviewer already said this “ticks all the boxes” but is ultimately disappointing. After Nick Harkaway's brilliant debut novel “The Goneaway World” that was edgy, creepy and seriously mind-blowing scienc-fiction I was expecting more. After reading Neil Gaiman and China Mieville's takes on the secret London conspiracy plot I did feel as if I'd read it all before, and was just looking for the climax and the end.

I'd heard how good Alice Munro is and how she's the best living short story writer but as a guy, the domestic detail themes were putting me off, a little.
If you are male and think this writer isn't for you, you'd be wrong. If you are a feeling human being you'll get something from them. She has a way of letting the stories resonate with each other, so that they move deeper feelings like really good poetry, yet on the surface there is nothing flashy, just “ordinary” lives, being lived out.
Some of the stories are connected with the same characters and some are separate, but I come away with the feeling of a unified force.

I wish there were more stars I could give. It blew me away.

This gave me everything I could have asked for from a new Ian McEwan, a topical subject,[ global-warming:] and a totally human, messy character making a mess of his life as we make a mess of the planet.
My criticisms, if any, are very small ones.
If one thinks of a random number to put in a story the usual choice will be 23, and this happens several times.

I was lucky enough to win a copy of this book, which I would have been interested enough to seek out anyway.

It suffers slightly by comparison to another steampunk sci-fi favourite of mine, Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/827.The_Diamond_Age_Or_a_Young_Lady_s_Illustrated_Primer
but it is well worth the tour of this debut writer's dark imagination.

Even though I felt it was, at first, a gothic horror version of Charlie and the Chocolate factory crossed with Angela Carter's “Nights at the circus” [leaving aside the obvious “The Tempest” and “The Wizard of Oz”:] the plot soon grows into it's own unique creature.

Populated with mechanical men, monsters and wizards this is a fantasy world that is strangely like our own in it's noise and loss of faith in “the age of miracles”

This is the second book by Gabor Maté I've read. The first was about stress and the immune system. He has a way of using himself as a very human example of his subject so that the people he tries to help are human too, before they are seen as “cases”
This is not a self-help book for anyone in the depths of addiction but a plea to all of us to realise we're probably all on a spectrum of addiction. A plea for compassion in our lives and in government policy.
Recommended.

Stunning. I was really excited to get this book and it kept me that way right to the end. After reading her “Oryx and Crake” I was already anticipating a dystopian masterpiece but this parallel story brings the two of them into the league of modern classics.
I think anyone would benefit from reading “Oryx and Crake” first, although it's not strictly necessary, but then they wouldn't get all the resonances I did.

Beautiful colour and design for a comic, but the story lacks in originality.

I'm going to give up on this one. Life's too short to listen to all this foul-mouthed egotistical babble.
I get the point, the author inhabits the caricature of himself to play with your mind and undermine the foundations of “literature” and the publishing industry, but I just got bored.

I've read Sherman Alexie before, but this is going back in his writing history. It shows; the stories are more raw, which can be a good thing but also leaves plenty undone.
The pain of poverty and oppression of life on a reservation is more evident and his dry humour less so. Still, it's not one to miss.

I probably would have enjoyed this more if I had never seen the wonderful British TV comedy “Upstart Crow”. I only managed to get the families voices and faces out of my imagination half way through, but Shakespeare remained to the end with the grinning face of David Mitchell.

Obviously this long, complicated book is immensely worthy, for the way it pushed the boundaries of post-modern writing. It used all the taboo breaking energy of the seventies to include as many fetishes and sexual inclinations as it could, and it is also occasionally brilliantly poetic and heart-breakingly beautiful...BUT...
the way it felt for me was mostly a slog, through a turgid marsh, where I was frequently lost. There's too many characters in too many plot-lines that jump about seemingly at random, leaving me not really caring. I made the mistake of continuing beyond the point where I could easily give up.

A great work of immense subtlety and elegant ironic humour but unfortunately mostly boring.At the age of 14 I read Herman Hesse's [b:Narcissus and Goldmund 5954 Narcissus and Goldmund Hermann Hesse https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1374680750s/5954.jpg 955995] at 18 I read [b:The Illuminatus! Trilogy: The Eye in the Pyramid/The Golden Apple/Leviathan 57913 The Illuminatus! Trilogy The Eye in the Pyramid/The Golden Apple/Leviathan Robert Shea https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1386923913s/57913.jpg 813] I see now that both were perhaps inspired by this book or at least the same interplay of opposing ideas, currents of philosophy influencing major world events, but both were a lot more exciting to read.I think I could appreciate the beautiful writing and start to appreciate the dialectics, but I need to be drawn back everyday to read as a pleasure not as a chore.In other words I won't be recommending this one.

I thought before reading this it would be involved with an obscure corner of history but out of this dark corner a light of illumination shines. It helped me understand the context for the occultist revival of last century and the apocalyptic obsession of modern culture and politics.
Recommended.