It’s December, so that means it’s time to fill up column inches with “best of” articles. I did it last year, and if nothing else, it was a welcome opportunity for me to look back on the year. 2013 was a bad year made better by some good books, while 2014 has been a much… Read More
reading
Up to my neck in books
We’ve just moved into a new flat, after nearly twenty years in our previous home. It turns out that you can acquire an awful lot of books in twenty years, so for the past month I’ve been trying to thin out the herd – I’ve taken loads of books into the office to let people… Read More
Everything is amazing
The comedian Louis CK has a routine about how everything is amazing, and no-one is happy. It’s a rant about how quickly we become used to the technological marvels that permeate our society, and how quickly we take them for granted. When the high-speed internet on our long-distance flight goes wrong, our sense of entitlement… Read More
Priorities
The last couple of weeks have been very busy. After twenty years of living in rented accommodation, we’ve put down a deposit on a new flat and are currently going through all the admin and paperwork required to apply for a mortgage. Most people of my generation went through this decades ago, but for a… Read More
For the third and final part of the Chimney Rabbit Best of 2013, I’m covering children’s books. This was the most difficult category for me to come up with a top five, as I’ve read so many utterly fantastic children’s books this year. In the end I’ve had to cheat and include two books in… Read More
For the second part of the Chimney Rabbit Best of 2013, I’m covering adult books – which is to say, any fiction I read this year that wasn’t a comic and wasn’t a children’s book. A note on eligibility – I’m including only those books I read this year for the first time. Any re-reads… Read More
For a variety of personal reasons that I won’t go into here, 2013 has been a horrible year that I’ll be glad to put behind me. Even the things that, objectively, have been positive, have been tainted to a greater or lesser extent by the negatives, so this is not a year I’m going to… Read More
A trip to Hay-on-Wye
Last week, I took a day off work for a trip to Hay-on-Wye – the small town just over the border into Wales that boasts more bookshops per square mile than probably anywhere else on the planet. It’s a bit of a trek – it takes over two and a half hours to drive from… Read More
Different languages
I was watching The Eagle on DVD the other evening. It’s the 2011 film adaptation of Rosemary Sutcliff’s classic 1954 children’s novel, The Eagle of the Ninth, the story of Marcus Flavius Aquila, a young Roman officer, driven by duty and honour, both of Rome and his family, to travel to the north of Britain,… Read More
A gift from the Culture
Earlier today, the writer Iain Banks announced that he was dying of cancer and had less than a year to live. I found this news quite upsetting, to say the least. It’s never pleasant to hear about cancer, and I’m sure most people have had cancer touch their lives at some point – it’s a… Read More