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I couldn’t help thinking Lincoln in the Bardo was a mash-up of an adult version of Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book (the relationships between the ghosts), blended with Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Paramo (ghosts not understanding why they’re there, or where there is!), with a traditional historical account of the death of Willie Lincoln (and how…

An odd quirk of fiction centred around a historical researcher where the prose bounces about in time, is that it doesn’t feel like you’re reading fiction. The modern day aspect feels like a plot device, and with the historical, is it fiction or non-fiction – you end unsure of what you’re reading. The writing is…

Rudeness seems to be everywhere these days – from aggressive driving on our streets, to reality TV where producers intentionally generate antagonism to garner a response (and viewing figures), all the way to the White House. Obama led with thoughtfulness and inclusiveness, Trump took a different route, he’s given presidential support to rudeness. He’s taken…

“If Cats Disappeared from the World” has sold millions of copies in Kawamura’s native Japan, and I can see why. It’s a charming story of a dying man who becomes embroiled in a wager between God and the Devil – what would the man sacrifice from this world for extra days of life? The Devil…

Annie Lowrey fully supports UBIs (Universal Basic Income) – amongst other ideas, she poses convincing arguments on how it would end poverty, fight racism and gender inequality, make our society able to tackle the pending robotic workforce upheaval, and how it could prevent Trumps and other populist political disasters from reoccurring. This book comes across…

‘Tribe of Mentors’ is an odd book – I’m not sure who it was aimed at. The book contains the verbatim transcripts of interviews from his podcast – if you’re a frequent listener, as I am, then you get nothing new. If you weren’t, and you hadn’t heard of Tim Ferriss, picking up this book…

On paper, “An Ocean of Minutes” should have been right up my street. I like a bit of time travel, love a bit of romance, and dystopian fiction is generally worth a nose. However, Thea Lim’s first novel seems a bit lost and searching for an audience. The general premise (woman travels forward in time,…

I’ve had interesting chats with strangers on trains, plains, busses, etc., and learnt some neat origami skills as a result. Luckily, there wasn’t a psychopath who wanted to kill my ex… This was a good book, but it did seem dated – the concept has been copied and improved many times, and the prose clumsy…

This is a fresh approach to self-help books – swear a lot, accept your problems (but choose them wisely), and tell people to stop aiming for the clouds and instead tackle those values that keep them in the gutter. There are definitely some interesting bits, particularly around values and simplifying your dreams, but I don’t…

I did struggle with Crow Road. It’s one of Iain Banks’s earlier novels, and it shows. I did enjoy The Bridge, which came out before, but that was focussed on story – Crow Road is heavily character based, where the action is minimal, and the whodunnit doesn’t really start until three-quarters of the way through,…