At The Guardian Tom Gauld lays out in graphic form the algorithm which AI will need to follow to give us more Jane Austen novels. © Tom Gauld, The Guardian

I made a post at the beginning of October about my plans for this month, and since we're halfway through, I thought it'd be good to check in and see how I'm doing. Books and Short Stories My plans: Read Parasite Eve Read Frankenstein Read 13 ghost stories As you can see by the strike-throughs, I've finished both Parasite Eve and Frankenstein. I liked them both, although Frankenstein was definitely the better read of the two. I found Parasite Eve to be over-descriptive and too vile for my horror…

Sebastian Sparrevohn Under Review:Suzanne R. Black. Between Novel and Network: Technology and Literary Form in Fiction and Fanfiction. LSU Press, May 2026. Networks are with us all the time now. We are entangled and embedded in them. The internet has long ago ceased being a place we go and is instead something that envelops us. This notion once suggested a utopian imaginary; the internet was imagined as a medium that enabled radical possibilities and creativity. However, that utopian imaginary…

I see that today is Oscar Wilde's birthday (born 1854). Here is something I wrote some years ago about him – or rather about an altogether extraordinary Max Beerbohm essay, 'A Peep into the Past'...'Browsing my overcrowded bookshelves with a view to some thinning out, I came across a collection of previously uncollected pieces by Max Beerbohm, A Peep into the Past (Rupert Hart-Davis, 1972) – definitely a keeper. The title essay is a quite extraordinary piece, written in 1893/4, when Max was a…

Conservative commentator Ross Douthat has apparently written a young-adult fantasy novel, replete with the inevitable map, and Albert Burneko is here to tell us that it’s terrible. “For one thing, it is disgracefully unoriginal,” he… More

A massive car bomb goes off in front of a hotel in Baghdad, vaporizing the security guard at the front gate. The guard finds himself a soul without a body. An old lady named Elishva has been waiting for her son to return from the war for years and years already. Nobody else thinks he’ll ever return, but Elishva refuses to give up hope. Some even believe that she, or the image of a saint on her wall, has magical powers. Simultaneously, an old, alcoholic junk dealer, Hadi, a neighbor to Elishva,…

📷 272/365 - Beautiful morning.

After six years, I’m finally free of changing diapers!

It's hard to craft a book with so much righteous indignation - let alone make it funny, accessible, and informative. Nevertheless, Dipo Faloyin has succeeded in writing a spectacular takedown of the myths which are often perpetrated about Africa. It starts in the best way possible: [Insert generic African proverb here. Ideally an allegory about a wise monkey and his interaction with a tree, or the relationship between the donkey and the ant that surprisingly speaks to grand gestures of valour.…

Robin Wigglesworth is the editor of FT Alphaville (one of the rare bullshit-free zones in the financial press) and his posts are always worth reading. He also just came out with a big, sweeping modern history of the bond market, which is fortuitous given current events.

Welcome to this week's Link Dump, where our host will be Little Tim!Although I don't think he approves of us one bit.Watch out for the Skunk River Monster!The Los Angeles novelist who is forgotten at home, but loved in Italy.From "miracle vine" to invasive species: yes, yet another instance of government and unexpected consequences.A ramming disaster at sea.Europe's "hunger stones."Japan's Roswell.How King John blew it.The hidden history of paper.A mother's death kicks off a weird saga.The real…

The Ladder of Knowledge, by Alexander V Gheorghiu, Aeon What We Can Save In A Time Of Endings, by Kat Hill, Noema On Growing Up Cantonese American in Southern California, by Melissa King, Literary Hub (Excerpt from The Girl Who Became King) 'An Object of Lust': How the Ancient Greek Goddess Aphrodite Became a Controversial Symbol of Love and Sex, by Matthew Wilson, BBC

It’s Friday, so it’s time for the Book Blogger Hop again, hosted by Billy @ Coffee Addicted Writer. I’ve made my own image from a stock photo (credit: Anna Shvets) to avoid adding images created via generative AI to my blog. Feel free to use it too if you would like! This week’s prompt is about designing a bookish escape room: If you designed a book-themed escape room, what puzzles would be part of it? I have no idea about anything specific, but I’d steer away from using details of specific…

Hello, dear readers! Here are Siri and Selma reporting from Gladstone’s Library in the little Welsh village of Hawarden, where we are spending a few glorious days with Dina and Klausbernd. We are rather proud of ourselves for discovering this extraordinary place: Britain’s only residential library, home to thousands upon thousands of books, housed in ...

Very interesting idea! It could have been a little less… verbose, maybe? But it’s a very good thriller indeed! Rating: 👍Hey, thanks for reading my blog via the RSS feed! Feel welcome to get in touch!

This is my third and final book for this week’s 1949 Club, hosted by Simon of Stuck in a Book and Karen of Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings. Whichever year is chosen for the club, you can almost guarantee Georgette Heyer will have had a book published in that particular year – and 1949 is no exception. The novel begins with Arabella Tallant, the eldest daughter of a Yorkshire vicar, being invited to London to stay with her godmother, Mrs Bridlington, for the season. On the way, her carriage breaks…

"The First Men" is a 1960 science fiction novelette by Howard Fast. It is about a group of gifted children, raised in a controlled environment, who evolve into super humans. Non-Spoiler Summary In A Nutshell: "The First Men" is a story in two parts. The first part is an exchange of letters between Harry Felton, a man living abroad, and his sister Jean, a child psychologist living in the United States. Through their exchanges we learn that Jean and her husband have received a grant for a project…

One of my aims with our reading clubs is always to try to get in as many different kinds of writing as I can; in some of our years, it would be so easy to just read e.g. Golden Age Crime all week, but I do like to stretch myself if I can! Mention on another blog (I can’t recall which) of the author James Baldwin reminded me that as well as fiction, he had also written essays (I read some of these as part of my Penguin Moderns reading project). And another blogger nudged my memory with respect…

The sword in the stone: Here's a 12th century relic from the Abbey of San Galgano. In 1180 Galgano Guidotti decided to renouce violence and warfare and thrust his sword into the rock as sign of his conversion to a life of peace and piety. "According to legend, while on the road near Siena, Galgano's horse threw him into the dust. An invisible angel, the archangel Saint Michael, lifted him to his feet and led him to Monte Siepi, a rugged hill close to his home town of Chiusdino.""In a vision, he…

The back page of Dandy Comic Library #53 (published around early 1985) advertised the next two issues that would be on sale the following month, one of which was scheduled to be Violent Elizabeth in "Very Cross Country Runner".If you remember my look at Plug, you'll probably recall Violent Elizabeth was one of the stars of that comic; the Dandy Comic Libraries often featured interlopers from other titles, even ones that had been defunct for quite some time. However, when Comic Library #56 was…

In Miss Silver’s 15th outing, she just happens to be staying with a school friend when a murder takes place. Does she have precognition? I couldn’t help wondering what her fave, Alfred, Lord Tennyson would say about this. In Locksley Hall, his narrator says:“For I dipt into the future, far as human eye could see,Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be . . .”Read more »

“I know, for both of us, the dead world’s much too crowded.” Live long enough and all, reluctantly, must agree. Most of our relatives and oldest friends are dead – the unhappy price paid for longevity. As Dr. Johnson describes grief in The Idler (January 27, 1759): “The loss of a friend upon whom the heart was fixed, to whom every wish and endeavour was tended, is a state of dreary desolation, in which the mind looks abroad impatient of itself, and finds nothing but emptiness and horror. The…

Ok. I want to start out by saying this is not the movie I thought it was. I wanted a movie that was about psychic powers. This is about a cursed Aztec idol home to a demon.So. A win? Yeah, it was still fun. At least I can log this as a first-time view. I am sure this movie has nothing to do with SNAP! nor being the lyrical Jessie James.The Power (1984)A college professor has an old idol containing an evil demon named Destacatyl. Before long, it is in the possession of some Los Angeles…

Yes, I am posting these backwards and forwards now as I work to catch up. Based on a photo I took on September 12.

Barry & CaitlinWe had quite a build up to last weekend's Colchester Comic Mart and it all seemed to be over in a flash. There were the usual worries — would I have the right stock and the right number of books — and some unusual worries — would the new book arrive on time for me to launch it. Thankfully, I'd put those worries aside by Thursday, when I swapped them for a madcap afternoon — and

I did editing for the intro adventure of a project that's now live on Backerkit! It's a post-modern fantasy city setting inspired by Prague, full of cats, and the adventure is a complex story of a ship and its sailors/passengers across 4 different moments in its history. I spoke with Sparkle, the lead writer on the project, about Prague's influence on her work, the importance of diversity, and the experience of translation, both across languages and systems.The team is based in Czechia, so they…

And there was there an herd of many swine feeding on the mountain: and they besought him that he would suffer them to enter into them. And he suffered them. Then went the devils out of the man, and entered into the swine: and the herd ran violently down a steep place into the lake, and were choked. When they that fed them saw what was done, they fled, and went and told it in the city and in the country. Then they went out to see what was done; and came to Jesus, and found the man, out of whom…