Son of heaven by David Wingrove
9781848875258 #1 in the Chung Kuoseries A thin layer of mist wreathed the meadows all the way to reeds that traced the meandering path of the river. It is the year...
10 April 2011
Rainbow Pie by Joe Bageant
a memoir of Redneck America ISBN: 9781846272578 Before picking this book up I’d never heard of Bageant, and in the middle of reading it I learned from Metafilter that he had...
8 April 2011
Pretties by Scott Westerfeld
In the world of Uglies once you turn sixteen you also get to turn “pretty”. That is you undergo surgery that’ll get rid of all your old imperfections and instead make you beautiful according to the conventions of evolution and society. In book one Tally was the last of her friends to turn sixteen, and so was left alone when they all turned Pretty and moved to Pretty-town.
Spoiler warning for book one in effect.
7 April 2011
Spartacus : Gods of the arena dir. by Steven S. DeKnight
First things first, this is an awesome show. Awesome! Anyone who says different is just plain wrong!
When I first started watching Spartacus : Blood and Sand I have to say that I wasn’t overly impressed. Obviously influenced by the style and look of 300 it seemed to be a show that existed only to show glossy violence and sex. And boy did it ever show that. But after the first few episodes it developed into a very enjoyable, almost addictive, show. But then its star was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma and so film making was delayed as he underwent treatment. And so instead of a second season we got a prequel. Spartacus : gods of the arena. Don’t be fooled by that name in the title, this has no Spartacus as all, instead it tells the story of how John Hannah’s Lentulus Batiatus comes to run the family ludus, and how Crixus becomes a gladiator.
23 March 2011
Shadow of Kilimanjaro by Sue Lange
Baraba is sent to accompany a German family of missionaries to Africa. He poses as their student, but in reality he has been sent by Lady Ada Lovelace in order to investigate the possibility of the dis-souled near the famed mountain of Kilimanjaro. Accompanying Mr and Mrs Rebmann, and their cousin Clare, he is there when a strange Englishman shows up, in his range rover. Bernard Bourne has been living in Africa for some time, and so can provide them with some much needed supplies. He brings Clare to his home in order to pick up some of these supplies, along with the servant Baraba. But Bourne is not as altruistic as he may seem.
21 March 2011
The Fighter dir. by David O. Russell
IMDb ; Metacritic Micky Ward is the youngest of a large family. All his life he has looked up to his older brother, Dicky, who once knocked down Sugar Ray Leonard...
20 March 2011
Black Dogs by Ursula Vernon
ISBNs: 9781936689026 & 9781936689033 Book One: The House of Diamond – Book Two: The Mountain of Iron The world was green and grey, balanced on a serrated knife of pine and...
17 March 2011
Mad Bad Richard Dadd by Amy Sterling Casil
Mad Bad Richard Dadd has been commissioned by Sir Thomas to paint a record of their journey through Europe. But travelling from Greece he is visited one night by a strange figure calling himself Osiris. But that is just a name this figure has taken, he is insistent that he is no supernatural character.
Dadd is a real-life character, a famous Victorian painter, and infamously a murderer. This is a possible telling of how he became this murderer.
10 March 2011
2011 #5
Sligo Rugby Football Club won the Connacht Junior League division 1 with a 42 – 3 win over Castlebar.
6 March 2011
Tongues of Serpents by Naomi Novik
ISBN: 9780007256778 book 6 in the Temeraire series There were few streets in the main port of Sydney which deserved the name, besides the one main thoroughfare, and even that bare...
6 March 2011
Brutal women by Kameron Hurley
Author Kameron Hurley has been getting a bit of coverage in the sff-world lately on account of her debut novel God’s War and to tie in with this publicity a collection...
3 March 2011
Tor’s Best SFF novels of the decade
And how scary is it to hear that we’re a decade into the 2000s? Scary Scary, that’s how Scary Old Man’s War by John Scalzi[1] – 295 votes American Gods by...
3 March 2011