Category: Book of the Week

After mentioning Philip Larkin a few weeks ago, I figured I may as well showcase another collection of poetry that I have an interest in (and haven’t yet read). Night Sky with Exit Wounds is not only a rather mellow and pained sounding title, but the name of Ocean Vuong’s 2016 collection of poetry that…

Hard to believe I’ve been running this Friday series for half a year already, but the calendar doesn’t lie. So, to celebrate this small milestone for this series I started mainly due to a random impulse, I want to cover something by an author that has really grown on me across the last months: Sally…

Throughout the final days of 2021, as well as the first days of 2022, I quite enjoyed Ben ‘Yahtzee’ Croshaw’s comedic and creative portrayal of an apocalyptic situation in his novel Jam. However, Mogworld, to my knowledge, is his very first literary work. The whole story takes place within the setting of a massively multiplayer…

Like last week, let me break some new ground on Book of the Week by covering a book I read a few dozen pages into before chucking it into the local charity shop some months later, having left it long untouched. George R. R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones should not really even be on…

This week, I want to feature something different by touching on what is probably my favourite collection of poetry from everybody’s most marmite of poets, Philip Larkin. I am also breaking new ground for Book of the Week by covering something I have read, but have yet to review. The Whitsun Weddings is one of…

I must confess that this book lured me in with this particularly pretty cover, but the content of Night Train to the Stars is rather fantastical. Although the compilation bears the name of Miyazawa’s best-known Night Train to the Stars, this whole book is full of the author’s Japanese fairy tales. In particular, these fairy…

Modern novels with slightly meta titles can be rather hit or miss (especially debut works), but I think Really Good, Actually is a solid hit from what information I can source online about it. This humorous novel follows twenty-nine-year-old Maggie, a woman whose marriage ended after 608 days, or roughly 1.6 years. Now facing an…

Anonymous authors are always alluring because it often makes you wonder why someone refused to put their name to whatever they had written. I think it’s doubly surprising in the case of Diary of an Oxygen Thief, because it appears to be rather well-known. A Dutch novel at around 140-pages, it is not a long…

Big Sur is one of those books that I judged by the cover, mainly because I like this particular version’s fat and rounded wide font in tandem with the calming blue and abstract artwork. However, that was a very surface-level interest, because my interest in it grew more upon learning that it is really memories…

Everyone, especially Brits, like a good bit of dry humour and cynicism. Nothing seems to universally inspire a sense of cynicism quite like thinking about the state of the climate and how damned as a species we are. This makes McEwan’s satiric Solar—a novel about a jaded Nobel Prize physicist who pursues a solar-based solution…