Chris Bissette

The shortlist for this year's Ursula K Le Guin Award has been announced, and I'm once again planning to try and read them all before the prize is awarded in October. (I previously read all of the 2024 prize, and you can find those posts here. I didn't get a chance to read last year's shortlist.) I say this every time I write about a shortlist, but one of the things I love about reading awards is that it exposes me to books I hadn't previously heard of and encourages me to read things that…

This book coincided nicely with my renewed interest in whisky. It's rare that I pick up a novel so directly related to my current special interest, and I do wonder if that made me like this more than I otherwise would have done. That's not to say that I didn't enjoy it, but my impression of The Malt Whisky Murders is largely that it's just fine, and I wonder if I'd feel a little less positively about it if it wasn't directly leaning on my current obsession. The protagonist of this novel - a…

I read Dan Brown's latest Robert Langdon book The Secret Of Secrets last year (or was it the year before? I lose track) and my overall impression was that it wasn't meant to be a Langdon book. I thought that it read like Brown's pre-Langdon techno-thrillers Deception Point and Digital Fortress, with Langdon shoehorned in because that's where the money is. My takeaway - other than it being shit - was that Brown was clearly tired of the character and the formula and wanted to go back to his…

I just got home from a busy weekend working at the UK Games Expo (post about that coming soon, probably) and I really wanted to relax before I head back to the day job tomorrow, and I decided to reach for a bottle that I don't spend much time with - the Kilchoman Loch Gorm 2022 edition. Bottled: 2022 Cask Type: Matured in oloroso sherry butts previously used by Bodega Jose y Miguel Martin for a minimum of eight years. Stated Age: NAS Strength: 46% Price Paid: Somewhere around £60 for the bottle…

It's a beautiful sunny day here in the UK and for once I've got it off, and what better way to spend the afternoon than sipping on a whisky in the garden with some music playing? I'm traditionally an Islay drinker and when I decided earlier this year that I wanted to start learning more about whisky and expanding my tastes my first stop was Speyside, a decision largely driven by the fact that my fiancée has shown an interest in Scotch recently and her favourite band have a song called Speyside.…

I've been reacquainting myself with my whisky shelf recently after a few years of hyper focusing on wine and not really touching the amber stuff. I've been a whisky drinker for a long time and was briefly the whisky buyer for a bar in south Manchester a lifetime ago, but I don't actually know all that much about the stuff beyond knowing what I tend to like. When I was getting into wine I found that writing reviews for myself was a very good way of learning more about it and enjoying what I was…

I've been in a massive reading slump for the past few months. It's not just been reading, I've been in a slump in general for most of this year. I think a combination of changing jobs and wedding planned has overwhelmed me and I've been unable to focus on anything. That slump seemed to come to an end last week. I read a couple of books that I really enjoyed (though I haven't reviewed them), and decided to pick up a book I've been meaning to read for years - Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall.…

I turn 40 in about 6 weeks. Last night, on a whim, I decided that I'd like to watch 40 films I've never seen before in advance of that happening. For some reason I thought it would be a good idea to ask Bluesky to recommend some of these films to me. I asked people to recommend their favourite "I've never met anybody else who's seen this" film. As always when you ask for recommendations online, some people are shit at understanding the task. But sometimes you strike gold. I discarded responses…

I realised recently that Alastair Reynolds has qui[...]