A J Lattimer & Co. - Michael Reidy

  Academics and critics love to talk about novels in epoch-defining terms. “So-and-so destroyed the traditional novel”; This writer “breathes new life into an old form”; or, that “genius reinvented the novel.” It’s all hogwash, of course. The great 18 th century novelists set the theme and subsequent writers have been riffing on it ever since. Scott uses the versatility of digital print production to cast certain words and phrases in different typefaces and colours as well as to include photographs and digital artworks, not common today, but often a feature of early novels. At first glance, Kerry Scott’s Schism appears to be yet another variation on 1984 and Brave New World – and it does draw on those dystopias – but it’s more than that, and more disturbing for it. As with traditional dystopias, there is a dominant way of thought and a sophisticated way of developing and enforcing it. Humanity has been selected and categorized with “disposables” bred for service and targe...

Expandthetable.net is a great website for book-lovers who also love good food. (Or, I suppose, for food-lovers who love good books. Whatever.) I was contacted two weeks ago by Susan Weintraub who writes the blog (and also operates Editing Unlimited offering editorial services) who wanted to review Lost Lady . In the review that resulted from our email conversations, we found some fascinating coincidences and shared interests, some of which are related in the review. I am grateful for her review (on her blog and on Amazon  and Goodreads ) and I look forward to trying her tempting recipes!

  This book was offered as a Kindle special which is a great way to discover new writers, especially with the second-hand bookshops closed. Set in Detroit and Ann Arbor – which is a refreshing change from New York, San Francisco and Chicago – Who She Was captures the attention from the start and continues its pace through the book. While plot-driven, the characters develop well and are interesting and individual. While set in the contrasting worlds of comfortable affluence and grinding poverty, drug addiction and dysfunctional families, Parkinson does not fall into stereotypes or become preachy. The hero (Sylvia Wilcox) is a former cop now private investigator. She is haunted by events of her past, but doesn’t use them as an excuse or crutch. The plotting is tight and the ending has the requisite, “I should have seen that coming!” quality about it. It is a detective story that does not deceive – it’s all there, the real clues, the false trails, the dead-ends. At no time is t...

 I have to ask, "Why would someone think I'd be interested in a TV series with a title that 9th-graders would find childish?" Still waiting for the answer.

Started watching Rebecca on Netflix last night. New Year’s Eve treat. Didn’t make it through the credits. When she talks about how overgrown and jungle-like the drive and house had become, she’s walking through landscape without a vine out of place. Goodbye.

This was a question in "The Writer's Nook" section of Quora. As usual, my answer slides off the point, but it sets down a number of things about writing that I believe. * Writers’ courses and groups focus too much on creativity. That got your attention, but it wasn’t creative. Forced creativity is like a foreign accent: you can’t hide it. If you are a writer, you will find both a voice and something to say. Brilliant writers with nothing to say become historians - and there is always a need and market for readable history. The alternative is to be like E M Forster who dried up in 1927 but was hailed as the century’s greatest novelist when he died fifty years later. Reading widely is the cure for many faults in writing. Study the masters, just like aspiring artists and learn the craft of writing . Many can learn the craft; few can learn the art - arguably, it can’t be learned. Aim to be readable. Read the masters out loud. Read your own work out loud. Previous generations...

  Watching The Billion Dollar Art Hunt (BBC iPlayer) is a hugely frustrating way to spend an hour. At the end of an IKEA assembly puzzle of equal length, you have a piece of furniture. At the end of this documentary, all you have are the same questions that were posed at the beginning: Where are the bloody paintings, and who took them? The show, led by veteran art journalist, John Wilson, examines the case of the most spectacular art heist in history: the theft of fourteen pictures from the Isabella Steward Gardner Museum, in Boston, in 1990. Estimates are that the paintings are now worth nearly a billion dollars. Of course, these are sensationalised prices. The major paintings were cut from their frames, and probably rolled, possibly even folded. The prints and watercolours may have fared better, but the major paintings are damaged goods and have probably not been looked after in the intervening thirty years. The circumstances of the robbery are well-documented, so I am not ...