Book Reviews
Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk: a modest bestiary by David Sedaris
Originally published at Verbicide Following in the footsteps of Me Talk Pretty One Day and Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, the latest addition to the David Sedaris library has hallmarks of his classics: the dysfunctional family values, the well-observed minutiae of human behaviour. Unlike in his classic tomes, however, the characters of this [...]
After Dark by Haruki Murakami
Originally published at The Skinny Haruki Murakami’s style is deliberate, economical and has a unique ‘sufficiency’ which lends itself startlingly well to magical realism. His style somehow succeeds in making everyday non-adventures – say, cooking spaghetti – into engaging portraits of human activity and when he finally pulls you into wonderland nothing could seem more [...]
Hollywood by Charles Bukowski
Originally published at The Skinny Unwarranted Re-release can occasionally be the sweetest phrase in the English language. While everyone else this summer is pretending to enjoy Mark Haddon’s dreary A Spot of Bother or Toby Litt’s adolescent Hospital, the Emperor’s New Clothes effect can be swiftly bypassed by reading this republished Bukowski classic instead. In [...]
Tamara Drewe by Posy Simmonds
Originally published at The Skinny With the obvious exceptions of Matt Groening’s Life in Hell series and the brilliantly inexplicable Perry Bible Fellowship creations, newspaper ‘funnies’ are pretty shameful. But along came Posy Simmonds in 2005 with something different for the back of the Guardian’s newly reformatted literature supplement. Astonishingly, her strips, while often witty, [...]
Salmon Fishing in the Yemen by Paul Torday
Originally published at The Skinny Dr Alfred Jones is a fish out of water. Extracted from a humdrum home life and a comfortable career at the National Centre for Fisheries Excellence, he is cast into a foolhardy government-backed project designed to introduce salmon fishing to the parched Yemen. It’s East-meets-West time, kids. Rather than being [...]
The Successor by Ismail Kadare
Originally published at The Skinny Fragmentary, confusing, dissident and frightening, The Successor is not an easy book to read. Most journalists have opted for the descriptive shorthand of likening Kadare to Kafka but while both writers dabble with the state between dreams and reality, Kafka’s ideas seem almost childish when compared to the winter-cold vision [...]
The Very Best of Monty Python by Monty Python
All the material in this book is guaranteed to be old, writes Terry Gilliam in one of the book’s many prefaces, “not a single new joke or idea has been sacrificed for this tome.” This is doubly true when you discover that The Very Best of Monty Python is in fact a repackaged omnibus edition [...]
Scots Who Made America by Rick Wilson
Originally published at The Skinny The first man on the moon was the son of a Scotsman and Uncle Sam himself came from Greenock We’ve all seen them: the portly, T-Shirted American tourists hunched over the Mitchell Library’s microfilm readers, desperately seeking evidence of their “Scotch” ancestry. Rick Wilson sheds some light on America’s curious [...]
