It’s Snakewood launch day :)

James C. Scott’s fascinating book argues that we have enslaved ourselves to grain production and the ‘civilisation’ that followed. The inevitable outcome of grain cultivation and sedentism’s propensity to increase birth rates has led to both a patriarchal system that reduces women to breeders and promotes warfare to enslave yet more people to sustain the…

Here, by Richard McGuire, is no less than the zenith of the graphic novel as an art form. It is one of the most profound things I’ve read.

As saddened by the whole Hugo ‘puppy’ bullshit as any right-thinking person would be, it did introduce me to The Fifth Season, so thank you for that guys. Incidentally, Deji Bryce Olukotun’s Nigerians In Space bubbled up to the top of my ‘to read’ pile too. I loved both these books.

I needed to step away from sff reading at least briefly, mix it up. I got a blast of something beautiful. William Maxwell’s So Long, See You Tomorrow is a marvellous novella. I was reminded of Ian McEwan’s prose, still my favourite, for its transparency and depth of perception. Maxwell’s book presents the act of…

I’ve written here about my miserable realisation I wouldn’t read more than a couple of thousand books in my lifetime, if I really went for it.  I thus struggle to read more than one or two books by any author because there are so many more authors to read.  How could I read another Philip…

The Old Ways by Robert MacFarlane is a book about walking country paths. I know, that’s what I thought, and I only bought it because writers of the stature of John Banville named it as one of the books of the year on its release last year. But then I started reading it, and I was…