It’s doesn’t take long with a new book before you can relax with the knowledge that you’re in safe hands – the manner of narration, simple details expanded to instil curiosity, characters beyond the cliche and the tropes. With Once Upon a River, Diane Setterfield establishes her quality on the first page. The novel, based…

Pete Lindsay’s and Mark Bawden’s Pig Wrestling is an interesting book about how to analyse and resolve problems. You could blast through it in a single sitting (1-2 hours) but it still contains concepts worth taking away (cleaning the problem, for example). I’m not convinced by the Fable approach to self-help books. I first encountered…

An interesting aspects of the four books in the The Cemetery of Forgotten Books series is that they can be read in any order. This one, the last, is my first. It’s hard to say whether plot points were missed or nuances lost, but I did feel I was reading a standalone book. This is…

My rating: 5 out of 5 I used to watch tennis in the days of Becker and Conners and Agassi, so this semi-autobiography (actually penned by J.R. Moehringer) was a trip down memory lane. A real page turner, I don’t tend to read sports books generally, but this kept me going and reading fast. Well…

My first thought when reading Kate Mascarenhas’s The Psychology of Time Travel was I bet this is her first novel. Then, as this is a published work, why wasn’t the editor harsher? The amount of telling, not showing, became a real stinker for me. Likewise the jumps in PoV. Both mistakes are easily made, but…

A lot of self-help books go into great depth on a specific topic – Steven Pressfield’s War of Art, for example, going into great length about how to beat procrastination – Brian Tracy’s Eat That Frog takes a different approach. 21 topics are skimmed over (procrastination, task selection, planning, etc) in 4-5 page chapters (this…

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…