Books and Words

Midnight for Jack Nightingale

Tuesday, 22 March 2011

It isn’t every day that you read a book that works on every level, one that has an unusual plot and a satisfying twist, plus a style that makes you savour every page. Midnight is such a book. It is the second in a trilogy (at least) billed as A Jack Nightingale Supernatural Thriller, which [...]

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Afterlight and The Payback

Sunday, 13 March 2011

I haven’t reviewed any books for a while and then along come two at once — Afterlight by Alex Scarrow and The Payback by Simon Kernick — both of them thrillers that tidy up loose ends for the author and which don’t quite work for that very reason.

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Apostrophe

Tuesday, 8 March 2011

One of the things that impressed me in South Africa was the generally correct use of the apostrophe. They were added where they shouldn’t be, as in DVD’s and potato’s, and were where they should be, today’s special, let’s party etc. So it was a double shame that we should find the worst example on [...]

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Don’t Try This At Home

Tuesday, 4 January 2011

We’re well into January and I’m still ploughing my way through The Second Book of General Ignorance, or why everything you think you know is still wrong. I’m a sucker for obscure and quirky facts and one of my favourites from this edition is the slowest recorded time for and Olympic marathon — 54 years, [...]

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Poe Must Die

Monday, 6 December 2010

I mentioned Poe Must Die last month when I wrote about boxing and I wondered whether this 1978 novel by Marc Olden was quite as good as I remembered it, so I tracked it down to one of our more obscure bookshelves, blew the dust off the dust-jacket and read it again.

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i-Wisdom

Sunday, 5 December 2010

Don’t you just love it when you stumble on a site that informs and inspires and yet you didn’t know existed. So it was with iWise.com which has set itself the modest ambition: To organize the world’s wisdom and make it universally accessible and useful. It is attractively presented with thought maps, similar to the [...]

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In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni

Friday, 3 December 2010

The title of this post is one of my favourite palindromes, certainly my favourite in Latin and known as The Devil’s Verse. It means “we wander in the night, and are consumed by fire” or “we enter the circle after dark and are consumed by fire”,  both said to describe the movement of moths or [...]

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Boxer Rebellion

Monday, 15 November 2010

My dad used to box when he was younger and still bears the scars — a cauliflower ear and a perforated eardrum. He tried to teach me the noble art when I was younger, him on his knees showing me how to guard my chin with my fists and my body with my elbows. He [...]

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The Book of Secrets

Saturday, 30 October 2010

Life has been rather hectic lately and I haven’t many opportunities to go online, other than to work on a website I’m putting together for an acquaintance. There has been some downtime, however, with my latest read The Book of Secrets by Tom Harper. I bought it on the strength of  The Lazarus Vault which [...]

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