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Comet Weather is a joy
I thoroughly enjoyed reading Comet Weather, by Liz Williams,
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Borne Review
Tonight I reviewed Borne, the latest novel by Jeff VanderMeer, for the RTÉ Radio 1 Arts show, Arena.
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Reviewing Cell
Writer Mark West began a intriguing project in 2015, a blog called King For A Year, in which a reviewer discusses one of Stephen King‘s works each week. 52 Reviewers, 52 novels, 12 months. Mark asked me to participate, and today you can read my exploration of King’s 2006 novel Cell. There are extensive spoilers in the piece, just so you know…
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NaNoWriMo 2010
NaNoWriMo is approaching. For those not in the know, this stands for National Novel Writing Month. Although, as Martin pointed out, it would probably be more accurate to call it International Novel Writing Month, since people participate from all over the globe. The idea is simple: it’s a collective push by writers to commit 50,000 words to paper/hard drive during the 30 days of November. That’s about 3/4 of the words necessary for a standard novel – well, depending on the genre. NaNoWriMo is about writing a fast first draft without over-analysing the quality. This is a system that works well since a lot of the fine work occurs in the…
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the road
I’d been hearing a lot about Cormac McCarthy‘s novel, The Road, before it won this year’s Pulitzer Prize for best novel. I purchased it recently, and during a long train journey read the book in one sitting. I would describe this novel as literary horror, with an emphasis on horror. The post-apocalyptic world that McCarthy describes, in which a man and his son scrabble to live in a burned, used-up world, is bleak, desolate, hopeless. It is a story about the fact that humans endure despite the odds, even though there is no good reason why they should strive to do so. The biological mechanism, even in the worst of…
