Category: Book Reviews

  • a sinecure for people who are not even wrong

    Ask not for who the zinger zings — for it zings for thee.

  • Skeleton crew: Zone One by Colson Whitehead

    Skeleton crew: Zone One by Colson Whitehead

    I was never much of an enthusiast, to be honest, but I swore off zombie novels for good after being obliged to read the execrable World War Z during my Masters. But last year I read and greatly enjoyed Harlem Shuffle, and figured that it would be worth seeing what Colson Whitehead could do with…

  • Coming to terms with learning to listen: Adam Soto’s This Weightless World

    Coming to terms with learning to listen: Adam Soto’s This Weightless World

    On New Year’s Day 2012, the SETI people finally receive an incontrovertibly extraterrestrial signal, which they announce in a hastily convened web-broadcast which, true to the time, much of the world does its best to watch despite the bandwidth issues. As one might expect, the enormity of this interjection into the rolling drama of human…

  • Books read 2021

    This is the first year I’ve actually kept a proper tally of the books I’ve read; as such, I’m not sure how representative (or not) it is of my usual reading habits. (In fact, I’m pretty sure it’s not that representative, given I started keeping track when my mishap at the end of January ensured…

  • an eminent domain

    An old bit of advice from the days when I was still working seriously on trying to get short fiction published went along the lines of: submit your work to the venues you read most regularly. (I got some fairly prestigious rejections, obvs.) I’ve broadly kept to that dictum with my writings, fictional or otherwise,…