Book Club

My latest pick up from eBay is Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone’s Dungeoneer.  I blogged before about picking up Out Of The Pit, a monster compendium from my childhood that I absolutely adored.  If Out Of The Pit contained all the creatures that we fought with dice on lazy Sunday afternoons as kids, Dungeoneer was the rulebook that held it ...

“When I think of my wife, I always think of her head.” On their fifth wedding anniversary, Nick Dunne’s wife Amy disappears and their home shows signs of a violent struggle.  There are traces of blood but no body is discovered.  What happened?  Who killed Amy?  Is she even dead?  Just what is going on here? Gone Girl is the ...

“Barry Fairbrother did not want to go out to dinner.” The Casual Vacancy, JK Rowling’s first work of adult fiction, is set in the sleepy English town of Pagford and begins with the death of local parish councillor Barry Fairbrother.  Fairbrother is a popular figure in the community and was involved in everything from being a father to a family ...

“In a hole in the ground, there lived a hobbit.” With Peter Jackson’s film adaptation of The Hobbit just a few short months away, I thought it would be a good time to revisit the novel to get a refresher course on Bilbo Baggins and his adventures with the Company to retrieve a mountain of gold from the dragon Smaug. ...

“The man in black fled across the dessert, and the gunslinger followed.” When it comes to books, I’m always cautious of the fantasy genre.  I don’t necessarily object to them in principle and I enjoy plenty of fantasy genre films and video games.  It’s just that the fantasy genre for books almost always favours sprawling epics that take the author ...

Life of Pi is a highly decorated and successful novel by Yann Martel which won the Man Booker Prize in 2003, sold millions of copies worldwide and has admirers including Barack Obama.  But since I’m a poorly read shlub who doesn’t keep up with these sort of things, the first time this story caught my attention was when Ang Lee’s ...

What makes a genius? What makes a genius stand out from the pack in a professional sports team, in classical music, in pop music, in Silicon Valley, in literature, in science, in anything?  It’s a surprisingly simple formula according to Malcolm Gladwell in his book Outliers.  It’s ten thousand hours of practise. Outliers is a much more focused and thematically ...

Although he’s been a pretty well established author for some time, I only discovered Malcolm Gladwell for myself about a year ago, when I read What The Dog Saw, an eclectic collection of his articles from the New Yorker. Blink was an earlier book of his, published in 2005 and carries the full title Blink: The Power of Thinking Without ...

11/22/63 is the latest novel from Stephen King in which a divorced high school teacher Jake Epping meets an aging cancer-afflicted fry cook who reveals he has a time portal in his diner that transports you to 1958.  The fry cook explains that it is possible to make changes in the past, then travel back to the present to witness ...

Room is a prize winning novel from Canadian author Emma Donoghue.  Its a story told from the perspective of a five year old boy Jack who has lived in a single room all his life with his mother.  They are the hostages of ‘Old Nick’, who abducted Jack’s mother when she was a teenager and impregnated her. Donoghue was inspired ...