Reynolds is rapidly turning into one of my favourite authors. This is the third book I've read of his and I totally loved it. He has a glorious wordy Victorian style I love. This was a lovely supernatural tale about a man who had sold his soul to the devil and needed to offer up virgin sacrifices in order to escape his bargain. Reynolds did a ( Read more... )

First of all I must admit that modern literary criticism (unless they are books about historical Chinese literature) are my least favourite kind of academic books. I find their style awkward, their vocabulary annoying and that they often entirely miss the point. So I am not the intended audience of this book. Alan Moore is probably my favourite ( Read more... )

This was fascinating. I bought it because I really like Thompson's books and think he's a really good historian and I really like Blake. However, it ended up being much less about Blake and much more about obscure 18th century Christian sects. I found that interesting though as I was raised in a very evangelical church where we were told their ( Read more... )

On Tuesday night I went to see the Lightening Child at the Globe. A re-telling of the Euripedes Bacchae with music by Arthur Darvil. I really like the Bacchae play and was interested to see how they would do a "modern" version. It was for the most part very entertaining. It struck with the original story much closer than I was imagining. The events ( Read more... )

I'm very behind on cross-posting my book reviews for the past couple weeks! They are all on goodreads, but will attempt to transfer them here as well ( Read more... )

These are really excellent reading practice but the plots always leave a bit to be desired! This was the last one of the level 2 books I'd not read. It was a rather dull story about a village that hunted geese, then had two as pets. But still nice very good practice.

I did quite enjoy this. It was an interesting tale of life in Pompeii mixed with Egyptian magic and witches and a love story. It was a proper 19th century "romance" in the tradition of Walter Scott but then would have lovely diversions where it would talk about the archaeological evidence for what it was writing about and mention which museums to ( Read more... )

** spoiler alert ** I'm still in two minds about this series. I don't think I'd keep reading it if I wasn't able to borrow them for free from the library. This issue had the worst violence I've ever seen in a comic book as the woman who'd been raped and tortured last issue took her revenge. It was horrible violence. It wasn't like death and the ( Read more... )

This was lovely. I hadn't heard of it but found it on the sale shelf of forbidden planet for 99p. It was beautifully written and the illustrations were great for the story, dark and grim and realistic. The story was set during the Blitz in London but didn't have any of the "blitz spirit" rather it was just people living in fear and trying to get on ( Read more... )

I bought this from the Tibetan Buddhist museum in Gruyeres. They had a lot of statues of Tara there and I realised that I knew nothing about this goddess and should probably fix that. This book was written by a lama in exile. As such it is not an academic book but a book by a believer trying to explain his faith to a European/American audience. ( ( Read more... )