Read: My Father’s House by Joseph O’Connor 📚 Less than keen on his others, but this is manages to be richly told without losing suspense. #bookstodon #booksky #amreading
Abandoned: Red Queen by Juan Gómez-Jurado 📚
No feeling for pace, language or humans, for people who would secretly prefer a comic but a book makes them feel more intellectual, made worse in the audiobook by Scott Brick’s overwrought self-infatuated narrating style. #bookstodon #booksky #iamreading
Driving my grandfather’s car
Thursday, July 10, 2025
Driving my grandfather’s car - When I was 12, my grandfather presumed I’d know what I was doing with his car. I didn’t think I did. But it would’ve been worse to let him down, so I figured it out.
Read: An Honest Man by Michael Koryta 📚 Straight ahead innocent man vs corruption, gripping and unpretentious. Fast, easy read. #Bookstodon #booksky #iamreading
Read: Heartwood by Amity Gaige 📚
Great American wilderness novel on the Appalachian Trail. Three women intersect after one of them gets lost. It’s character more than breakneck action (in a good way) and human warmth rather than darkness.
Read: This Is Not a Game by Kelly Mullen 📚
Self consciously smart arse and genre-aware. People say things like ‘but how could the maid be leaving the kitchen at 9pm? Letitia said the dog hair wasn’t on the vicar’s collar till 10pm!’. Not my thing. #BookSky #amreading #bookstodon
What's going on at Byline Times?
Wednesday, June 25, 2025
Why is Byline Times serving up generic US political slop? Is it turning into Reach PLC?
Read: The Mysterious Case of Rudolf Diesel by Doublas Brunt
Tuesday, June 24, 2025
Safe to skim everything before Chapter 24 (which covers Diesel inventing his engine and getting rich in a boringly methodical way) because all the interesting stuff about his disappearance is in the last third. #BookSky #bookstodon
On the lake
Got some CDs
As a recidivist 80s nerd who spent high school in what we were pleased to call ‘the computer room’, I’m loving Halt And Catch Fire on ITV. It’s a fictionalised version of microcomputers in the 80s where people invent the internet on Commodre 64s.
Breaking news: the new head of MI6 (C) got started with spying when she was given the Usborne KnowHow Book Of Spycraft. I too have this book and memorised it as a kid. When is it my turn to be C?
Read: Never Flinch by Stephen King 📚
King is always compulsive, without me being able to figure out why. He’s sneaking some suspense in there without me realising how. #Booksky #amreading #bookstodon
Short story - King of the Mountain
Tuesday, June 17, 2025
He’d felt watched, but there was nobody there to watch him. He lifted a single eyelid and checked his cycle was still leaning against the bench. The French village square was scorching in the afternoon sun, and empty, apart from a scatter of long-parked cars and the small village shop in one of the corners. The shop, he had discovered, sold rich cold ice cream which had scorched his tongue as he bit into it.
Trump’s been outplayed by Putin, Netanyahu and every other world leader because he’s all ego and bluster and not very bright. All he has left is lying to his base
Read: Mood Machine by Liz Pelly 📚 Audiobook recorded by the author, Liz Pelly, in an intensely irritating? slackjawwwd valleh girrl drawl? that almost made me? stop listening? Not helped by? Adolescent horror that? the music business? is a business? #BookSky #amreading #bookstodon
Read: Who Could Ever Love You by Mary L. Trump, PhD 📚
As fellow family-of-a-narc, I found a few moments in this resonated, but if you’ve come across The Donald ever before, there’s not a lot new here. #BookSky #amreading #bookstodon
I bought a stack of very cheap CDs yesterday at a stall at a Thing. They sound marginally better than Tidal High Quality but mostly, I can’t curate what’s on them. I can’t think about which playlist to add tracks to. I just have to listen to them. #MusicSky #Music
Read: Come Closer by Sara Gran 📚
New York architect is either possessed or has a psychotic breakdown in a tightly written novella. Psychological thriller or horror? You choose.
So that’s the plotting done. Now it’s just… typing. Which is great and also daunting.
#writingcommunity #iamwriting