tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-102121682012-01-26T02:17:41.106ZTamaranthhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16404232531650393068noreply@blogger.comBlogger6521100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10212168.post-68312048066054187282012-01-21T13:02:00.000Z2012-01-21T13:02:08.197Z

The channel through which these images had reached them was extremely confusing (decryption key pulled out of a dead man's wallet by a Hungarian in the Philippines communicating with an American in Canada, the conversation taking place on an imaginary planet .. (796)Neal Stephenson's latest novel is a vast, sprawling contemporary techno-thriller. It's very readable: I devoured it, on my Kindle (

Tamaranthhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16404232531650393068noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10212168.post-80773720643986343772011-12-10T21:01:00.000Z2011-12-10T21:01:13.658Z

Darling Mother, I have fallen in love. I now know something about myself which I have been suspecting for years, if I had had the honesty to admit it. I ought to be frightened and ashamed, but I am not. Since I can see no earthly hope for the attachment, I ought to be wretched, but I am not. I know now why I was born, why everything has happened to me ever; I know why I am lame, because it has

Tamaranthhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16404232531650393068noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10212168.post-74879292843363202702011-10-16T16:00:00.000+01:002011-10-16T16:00:42.682+01:00

Why would he sit there? To experience, and so that afterwards he could curse his maker for creating the incident. he believed in God now, but it was a malevolent thing and he would speak of it with a small, vehement 'g'. He believed in god. He believed in the cruelty and the inevitability of suffering. And he believed that he was doomed. As if to reassure him, thunderclouds gathered above the

Tamaranthhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16404232531650393068noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10212168.post-15308912135140313912011-10-16T14:55:00.000+01:002011-10-16T14:55:17.511+01:00

"Groundsense. It's a sense of everything around us. What's alive, where it is, how it's doing ..." "Magic?" "Not the way farmers use the term. It's not like getting something for nothing. It's just the way the world is, deep down." (Beguilement, p. 68) Again, books I've owned for a while but only just got round to reading. I'm a fan of Bujold's Vorkosigan saga, and I like the first two of her

Tamaranthhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16404232531650393068noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10212168.post-33220851891921400142011-10-13T18:48:00.000+01:002011-10-13T18:48:40.916+01:00

Sometimes what happens in my life echoes what happens in the stone, sometimes it's the other way round. But my stone also shows me people and places I've never seen before -- the fortress of Tintagel, King Uther, Ygerna, the hooded man. (The Seeing Stone, p. 301) I've owned these books for many years, and only read them recently (enforced inactivity plus Indian summer). The first volume was

Tamaranthhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16404232531650393068noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10212168.post-42874639401338434442011-10-01T14:24:00.000+01:002011-10-01T14:24:00.626+01:00

Mag never told Faey that she knew she was other than made. Human being what it was -- raging, messy, cruel, drunken and stupid -- she decided to remain wax. If, she reasoned, she did not say the word, no one would ever know. Saying 'human' would make her so. (p.20) Ombria is a bright city sparkling with the decadent seeds of its own downfall. Its Prince is dying and Domina Pearl, the malevolent

Tamaranthhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16404232531650393068noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10212168.post-32802080657539248402011-09-27T19:36:00.000+01:002011-09-27T19:36:06.230+01:00

I then perceived that what I had discovered myself about the sea amounted to no more than fragments of an unsuspected whole. For MacDuff the seagoing was not merely a way of life, it was the very basis of how he looked at reality. It meant learning to live with perpetual change, never taking anything for granted, being trained continually in humility and respect for what you have not mastered,

Tamaranthhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16404232531650393068noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10212168.post-47121843457305108822011-09-27T17:01:00.000+01:002011-09-27T17:01:46.266+01:00

The play is so great a success that the company immediately commissions Master Shakespeare to write a second part and even a third. Master Lazarus gets down with quill and candle to compose them each day and night while the drunkard from Warwickshire plays bowls at Newington Butts, drinks at the Mermaid and is now and again entertained by my Lord Essex. (p.139) Rose Hassan is a mixed-race

Tamaranthhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16404232531650393068noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10212168.post-45477413064358224362011-09-26T16:56:00.001+01:002011-09-27T17:07:54.547+01:00

The rooks are coming home late, hurtling on their rag wings toward the Lady Oak, racing the night, caw-caw-caw. Maybe they’re afraid of being transformed into something else if they don’t get back to the tree in time, before the sun dips below the horizon that saucers blackly beyond the tree. Perhaps they’re frightened of shifting into human shape. What's it like to be a caw-cawing crepuscular

Tamaranthhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16404232531650393068noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10212168.post-31176655128320809422011-09-26T15:36:00.000+01:002011-09-26T15:36:15.678+01:00

I once heard someone say morality was method. Do you hold with that? I suppose you wouldn't. You would say that morality was vested in the aim, I expect. Difficult to know what one's aims are, that's the trouble, specially if you're British. I'm fairly sure I read this as a teenager, but on rereading in advance of new movie version I remembered nothing: so perhaps it was a first read after all.

Tamaranthhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16404232531650393068noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10212168.post-50338041094589497302011-09-22T18:11:00.000+01:002011-09-22T18:11:53.312+01:00

...one night just before my father disappeared, I heard him tell my mother, "I remembere how the moon shines into the ocean and the pattern it makes on the sea floor." [...] He meant that we were from the ocean. "You're a mermaid," he told me at the breakfast table. "Don't forget it." A corner of toast scraped the roof of my mouth when he said it. The cut it made helped me to remember. So I don't

Tamaranthhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16404232531650393068noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10212168.post-47694745720492818212011-09-08T19:18:00.000+01:002011-09-08T19:18:25.684+01:00

"There has been a meeting of the Epicureans every month for over a hundred and fifty years [...] there is nothing left that we, or our predecessors in the club, have not eaten." "I wish I had been here in the Twenties," said Virginia Boote, "when they legally had Man on the menu." "Only after it had been electrocuted," said Zebediah. "Half-fried already it was [...]" "Oh, Crusty, why must you

Tamaranthhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16404232531650393068noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10212168.post-15832134368877452172011-09-08T19:15:00.000+01:002011-09-08T19:15:20.041+01:00

From Venice to Cathay, from Seville to the Gold Coast of Africa, men anchored their ships and opened their ledgers and weighed one thing against another as if nothing would ever change. Or as if there existed no sort of fool, of either sex, who might one day treat trade (trade!) as an amusement. [Niccolo Rising, opening] I first read Niccolo Rising while I was home for my mother's funeral, in

Tamaranthhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16404232531650393068noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10212168.post-73392749554510305422011-09-08T17:52:00.001+01:002011-09-08T17:52:49.463+01:00

"... how can it be that when we come alive we are not just the legend, but we know what we are as well? Is that unusual?" "No. Not unusual at all. I live in a Roman villa, surrounded by caves, fortresses, other places, and the mythagoes that inhabit them believe they're in the real world." (p. 62)Avilion, Robert Holdstock's last published novel, returns to characters introduced in 1984's Mythago

Tamaranthhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16404232531650393068noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10212168.post-62669211510445032222011-09-06T15:58:00.000+01:002011-09-06T15:58:02.495+01:00

All my signposts had gone up in one blinding, dizzying explosion: my second chances, my revenge, my nice thick anti-family Maginot line. Rosie Daly dumping my sorry ass had been my landmark, huge and solid as a mountain. Now it was flickering like a mirage and the landscape kept shifting around it, turning itself inside out and backwards: none of the scenery looked familiar any more. (p.121) The

Tamaranthhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16404232531650393068noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10212168.post-53520988495005218692011-09-06T15:37:00.000+01:002011-09-06T15:37:07.279+01:00

Of course, they're all over, gods are. Theurgic vermin, those once worshipped or still worshipped in secret, those half worshipped, those feared and resented, petty divinities: they infect everybloodywhere. The ecosystems of godhead are fecund, because there're nothing and nowhere that can't generate the awe on which they graze... The streets of London are stone synapses hardwired for worship.

Tamaranthhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16404232531650393068noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10212168.post-23712021175075549182011-09-06T15:06:00.000+01:002011-09-06T15:06:18.805+01:00

"Where did you learn to elude pursuit like that? You're very good." "John Buchan, The Thirty-Nine Steps," said the girl, with spirit. "Who taught you to burgle houses?" "A burglar," said Phryne, as though surprised at the question. (p. 206-7) Another Phryne Fisher mystery, set in 1920s Melbourne. Phryne (who frequently features in the local scandal rag as 'High Class Girl Dick', to her delight)

Tamaranthhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16404232531650393068noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10212168.post-20763348239215720742011-08-05T13:20:00.000+01:002011-08-05T13:20:51.335+01:00

Sally Gilmartin was as solid as this gatepost, I thought, realising at the same time how little we actually, really know of our parents' biographies, how vague and undefined they are, like saints' lives almost -- all legend and anecdote -- unless we take the trouble to dig deeper. (p. 33) Oxford, 1976: Ruth Gilmartin is a single mother with a five-year-old son, studying for a PhD and supporting

Tamaranthhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16404232531650393068noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10212168.post-53267713838520121332011-08-04T15:48:00.000+01:002011-08-04T15:48:42.491+01:00

This was the backlash of loneliness. The mortal version had at least a certain terminus: you could only be lonely for a lifetime. In an immortal body, it could last forever. A boy could be stranded like this, in the prow of something strong and unstoppable, eternally alone, eternally aware ... He could be pathetic and self-pitying, and aware of that too, and equally unable to change it. (p. 266)

Tamaranthhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16404232531650393068noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10212168.post-25801698678830722402011-07-28T14:20:00.002+01:002011-07-28T14:20:41.337+01:00

I looked forward to being neither a wage slave nor a tycoon. But that was before British culture slumped to an infantile consensus obsessed with cash and fashion. New Labour and wall-to-wall football have left only exile, the stoic's way out. If one is not allowed to be serious one might as well emigrate. Even mockery is an art form requiring discipline and sacrifice. (p.56)The first Gerald

Tamaranthhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16404232531650393068noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10212168.post-44955754037016915112011-07-28T11:24:00.000+01:002011-07-28T11:24:02.669+01:00

... we rode into a ghost town, the roofs long since fallen in and the walls crumbling away, the tall armies of nettles where the merchants had spread their wares and the Auxiliaries had taken their pleasure in off-duty hours, where the married quarters had been, and children and dogs had tumbled in the sunshine under the very feet of the marching cohorts, and the drink shops had spilled beery

Tamaranthhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16404232531650393068noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10212168.post-6545948687716503592011-07-22T19:49:00.001+01:002011-07-22T19:49:41.820+01:00

... if you've seen a dead body, you know how they change the air: that huge silence, the absence strong as a black hole, time stopped and molecules frozen around the still thing that's learned the final secret, the one he can never tell. Most dead people are the only thing in the room. Murder victims are different; they don't come alone. The silence rises up to a deafening shout and the air is

Tamaranthhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16404232531650393068noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10212168.post-92167241556171739872011-07-21T14:53:00.000+01:002011-07-21T14:53:40.737+01:00

Most people have no reason to know how memory can turn rogue and feral, becoming a force of its own and one to be reckoned with. Losing a chunk of your memory is a tricky thing, a deep-sea quake triggering shifts and upheavals too far from the epicentre to be easily predictable. From that day on, any nagging little half-remembered thing shimmers with a bright aura of hypnotic, terrifying

Tamaranthhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16404232531650393068noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10212168.post-43014066857750778952011-07-21T14:46:00.000+01:002011-07-21T14:46:27.172+01:00

"Do you know why my books are so successful? ... It is because they have a beginning, a middle and an end. In the right order. ... I shall have to tell you the end of my story before I tell you the beginning." "The end of your story? How can that be, if it happened before you started writing?" "Quite simply because my story -- my own personal story -- ended before my writing began. Storytelling

Tamaranthhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16404232531650393068noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10212168.post-74197911791039036722011-07-06T16:34:00.000+01:002011-07-06T16:34:19.913+01:00

...Veals believed it was important for him to be aware of other people, natives and visitors alike, however partial and bizarre their take on life. Since his own reality derived from numbers on a computer terminal, he thought it wise to keep an eye on flesh and blood; there might still be something he could profitably learn from them. (p. 39) Set in London in December 2007, A Week in December

Tamaranthhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16404232531650393068noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10212168.post-14881326316039420432011-07-04T17:32:00.000+01:002011-07-04T17:32:27.321+01:00

Many miles away on the far side of an immense gulf of air the Mediterranean is visibly frittering its time away, lying glazed and inert in its bed at two o'clock in the afternoon like a teenager who has been out clubbing all night.(p.4)The louche and misanthropic Gerald Samper, iconoclastic gourmet cook and ghost-writer to illiterate stars of sport and stage, is living in dread of his imminent

Tamaranthhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16404232531650393068noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10212168.post-69605691990920155592011-07-04T17:29:00.000+01:002011-07-04T17:29:28.065+01:00

One day a storm came and swept away everything that Emma had, and everything that Emma knew. When it had done all that, it swept away Emma too. It might have been a storm with black winds, with thunder and lightning and rising waves. It might have been a storm with terrible anger and policemen coming to the door, and strangers, hospitals, courtrooms, and nightmares. It might have been a storm

Tamaranthhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16404232531650393068noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10212168.post-72480421575406801272011-06-22T11:57:00.000+01:002011-06-22T11:57:39.329+01:00

What has happened to us? How is it that we, the inventors of devices that fly across oceans, hurtle to other planets, burrow underground, and kill from a distance; we, the atom-splitters, the antibiotic-discoverers, the computer-modellers, the artificial-heart-implanters, the creators of GM crops and ski-slopes in Dubai, have failed to see five minutes beyond our own lifetimes? (p. 302) Summer,

Tamaranthhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16404232531650393068noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10212168.post-54887292853964842992011-06-21T20:01:00.000+01:002011-06-21T20:01:17.118+01:00

"Are you asking me if I am a lonely man? Or are you asking me to tell you some more about my writing?" I realised that the two, which I had always held in my mind distinct and apart, were now no longer separate. Paul Michel and the hidden drama lived in his texts were utterly and terribly fused. And this process was not of his making, but mine. He was the end of my quest, my goal, my grail. He

Tamaranthhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16404232531650393068noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10212168.post-66086401397805553902011-06-20T14:08:00.000+01:002011-06-20T14:08:59.681+01:00

Even the police had brought a clairvoyant in, but they hadn't briefed him properly and he had thought they were looking for a body when, of course, they already had one. The clairvoyant said the girl's body was 'in a garden, within walking distance of a river', which pretty much narrowed it down to half of Cambridge ... How many girls were out there, unturned by the plough, unseen by the passerby

Tamaranthhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16404232531650393068noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10212168.post-4793882315027247222011-06-20T14:05:00.000+01:002011-06-20T14:05:53.378+01:00

Jackson Brodie had cared about missing girls, he wanted them all found. Louise didn't want them to get lost in the first place. There were a lot of ways of getting lost, not all of them involved being missing. Not all of them involved hiding, sometimes women got lost right there in plain sight. Alison Needler, making accommodations, disappearing inside her own marriage, a little more every day.

Tamaranthhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16404232531650393068noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10212168.post-13522200317056286382011-05-24T10:47:00.000+01:002011-05-24T10:47:05.909+01:00

"...it all began with this woman in Ereğli who started to see into souls and tell fortunes: the peri were whispering it to her, apparently. Then there's this businessman in Nevbahar: he's very interesting, very up to day; it's not fairies or djinn; it's robots. Those swarm-robots that build up into all kinds of different robots. But at some level it's the same; he finds lost things and gives

Tamaranthhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16404232531650393068noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10212168.post-32250365626214303242011-05-22T11:38:00.000+01:002011-05-22T11:38:03.471+01:00

"... I've learned to trust myself. I've learned that people --". Well, that wasn't quite right. She corrected herself: "Adults. Are just loosely connected. They're just a bunch of compulsions and stuff. Rationalisations. Seriously. Even before the Fall. Small things could break them. They're not like kids." (p. 128) Shine was introduced as a revolutionary new medium for neurological directives: '

Tamaranthhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16404232531650393068noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10212168.post-35956541096985481522011-04-20T20:56:00.000+01:002011-04-20T20:56:47.679+01:00

That's the secret of this planet, Todd. Communication, real and open, so we can finally understand each other for once. I clear my throat. "Women don't got Noise," I say. "What'll happen to them?" He stops. I'd forgotten ... if there's a way for men to stop having Noise, there must be a way for women to start. (Monsters of Men, p.453)I'm discussing both novels in a single post because I read them

Tamaranthhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16404232531650393068noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10212168.post-63905153301682155252011-04-20T20:51:00.000+01:002011-04-20T20:51:38.373+01:00

... the SIS Beirut station picked up a heavy traffic on the service bandwidth: it was en clair, but they thought it must be code because it was all nursery rhymes -- 'the man in the moon came down too soon', 'how many miles to Babylon' -- that kind of thing. The SIS triangulated the signal and found that it seemed to originate in the Bashura cemetary, but they could never find a transmitter, and

Tamaranthhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16404232531650393068noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10212168.post-10676105086572270232011-04-18T19:45:00.000+01:002011-04-18T19:45:49.755+01:00

Generosity -- Richard Powers "We cured smallpox. We eradicated polio. We can hunt down and wipe out misery. There's no reason why every one of us can't be equals to our ideal ... I don't believe in God, but I do believe that it's humanity's job to bring God about." (p.190) Russell Stone teaches a 'creative nonfiction' class: one of his students is Thassa-dit Amzwar, a young Berber Algerian woman

Tamaranthhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16404232531650393068noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10212168.post-25498208555114230922011-04-18T19:31:00.000+01:002011-04-18T19:31:48.663+01:00

It's a junkie look. That desperately pretending that everything is hunky-dory, you're not stressed at all about anything in the world, when inside your jeans pockets, your hands are clamped into sweaty fists, fingernails leaving grooves in your palms. If Huron's grooves were an LP, they would be playing the Johnny Cash cover of Nine Inch Nails' 'Hurt'. And the tentacles would be waving along in

Tamaranthhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16404232531650393068noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10212168.post-20587246324692789612011-03-31T11:53:00.000+01:002011-03-31T11:53:09.522+01:00

[He] could just drift into murder and fascism, but I refused that entirely, for myself and for the future. It was the way I'd thought before, about living in a tiny flower garden in the midst of fields of manure. I couldn't close my eyes to the fact that keeping the flower garden meant pushing other people off into the manure. (p.306) 1949, but not as we know it: 'the border of the Third Reich

Tamaranthhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16404232531650393068noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10212168.post-73695600709260416822011-03-30T17:41:00.000+01:002011-03-30T17:41:12.333+01:00

"I am now 86 and in poor health, and the memory of a particular event in 1940 has haunted me all my life ... A great wrong was done many years ago ... and unless we tell the truth to the generations that follow, the evil will lie waiting beneath the earth." (p.116) The archaeology featured in The House at Sea's End is more recent -- Second World War -- than in Griffiths' previous novels: I

Tamaranthhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16404232531650393068noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10212168.post-2383303916445244642011-03-30T17:37:00.000+01:002011-03-30T17:37:43.718+01:00

"You must face the fact that many members of staff are beginning to lose their patience. Perhaps you feel that they don't understand you?" "I think the problem is that they do understand me, sir." "Yes. You see that is exactly the kind of remark that is guaranteed to put certain masters' backs up, isn't it? Sophistication is not an admired quality. Not only at school. Nobody likes it anywhere. In

Tamaranthhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16404232531650393068noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10212168.post-7219305331999190302011-03-30T17:36:00.000+01:002011-03-30T17:36:20.434+01:00

It's a terrible thing to be married to the wrong man... It's like being trapped at a bad party that never ends. The voices are always too loud and the jokes are dumb and you end up standing against a wall, hoping nobody notices you because it's so much easier that way. It's like you're trying to avoid somebody who's the only other person at the party. (p. 329) Recently-divorced Nell Dysart is

Tamaranthhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16404232531650393068noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10212168.post-10472669111702861422011-03-12T15:56:00.000Z2011-03-12T15:56:02.029Z

Star temples and ley-lines, UFOs and landscape giants, couldn't they see that what was really, permanently astonishing was the human ability to keep finding these things? ... That's the interesting thing, that's the subject: not why there are ley-lines, but why people find them; not what plan the aliens had for us but why we think there must, somehow, always have been a plan. (p.286) Set in the

Tamaranthhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16404232531650393068noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10212168.post-48222637955811371122011-03-12T15:54:00.000Z2011-03-12T15:54:08.354Z

In the fifteen years of her life Wynter had come to understand and accept that most human beings were unpredictable and untrustworthy, faithful only for as long as the wind fared well. But ... ghosts and cats had always just gone their own way, and although you could never trust a cat to serve anyone's purpose but its own, you always knew where you stood with them. (p.14) Set in the early

Tamaranthhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16404232531650393068noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10212168.post-40209469283391761932011-03-07T13:51:00.000Z2011-03-07T13:51:21.666Z

"I am not overly encumbered by principle, as you know," Zelikman continued. "I am a gentleman of the road, an apostate from the faith of my fathers, a renegade, a hired blade, a brigand, a thief ..." (p. 119-20)The working title of this short novel, according to the author, was Jews with Swords: it's a pretty accurate description, though it fails to mention Chabon's baroque joy in language, or

Tamaranthhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16404232531650393068noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10212168.post-29938226330803811452011-02-12T20:55:00.000Z2011-02-12T20:55:27.054Z

11 June: Day Sacred to Fortuna Virgo ... When I read Pliny or Catullus the gods are not just names to me, they are real. Their power and might overshadows all that comes after -- the puny love-feast of Christianity, the ridiculous modern gods of horoscopes and hypnotism and moving pictures. The Roman gods are logical and that is why I like them. If you kill, you must make amends in blood ... (p.

Tamaranthhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16404232531650393068noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10212168.post-37505177063560366102011-02-12T20:50:00.000Z2011-02-12T20:50:38.465Z

"You only wiped off the 'I'?" said Lord Maccon, looking thoughtfully at the puddle of homunculus simulacrum residue ... "So you turned VIXI -- to be alive -- into VIX -- with difficulty. Thus the automaton could still move, but only barely. In order to destroy it entirely, you needed to remove the word and the activation particulate completely, breaking the aetheromagnetic connection." "Well,"

Tamaranthhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16404232531650393068noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10212168.post-60991413153212805262011-02-11T14:32:00.000Z2011-02-11T14:32:31.195Z

"And how about events in the wider world?" Stuart asked. "How do you think they might affect us? ... The Germans ..." "Germans?" said Phillips in surprise. "I don't recall a ship-burial ever being discovered in Germany." "No, no. I meant the possibility -- likelihood, even -- of war." "Oh," said Phillips. "That." (p.128)A fictionalised account of the Sutton Hoo excavations in the summer of 1939,

Tamaranthhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16404232531650393068noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10212168.post-28337364502782096632011-02-11T14:29:00.000Z2011-02-11T14:29:44.120Z

If there had been more of a man's soul in either Sweets or Painter they would have seen the partnership they had entered on as astonishing, the adventures they had as tales at once thrilling and poignant... They remembered none of this; or if they did, it was in a way that men would never be able to perceive. (p.113) Set a century in the future -- though it was published in 1976, and that

Tamaranthhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16404232531650393068noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10212168.post-46605858542663613412011-01-22T17:56:00.000Z2011-01-22T17:56:32.107Z

... the parameters of my world had become fluid and unstable. I had always been solitary, self-contained and independent. But I had been held in place by Isobel. We were like mercury in the porch thermometer; one rose and fell in balance with the other. (p. 150) Toby Hawke is eighteen, friendless, completely alienated from teachers and classmates: he's been raised by his unmarried mother Isobel -

Tamaranthhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16404232531650393068noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10212168.post-40901463137262987292011-01-13T19:51:00.000Z2011-01-13T19:51:42.164Z

How dare they do this to me? I had never been violent! Never! Had I? Of course, obviously, yes, ha, I had been extremely violent in my earlier life as a famously inventive ultra-assassin, but that was a long time and far far away and in another set of bodies entirely. (p.309) I've got halfway through this novel several times, so finishing it felt like an accomplishment. I honestly don't know what

Tamaranthhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16404232531650393068noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10212168.post-89370664807232073692011-01-06T17:43:00.002Z2011-01-06T17:43:59.123Z

The evenings were too short to abolish the McGregors' atmosphere in the house; even when she rolled into bed, dog-tired, she still felt it all about her. It was as if they were gradually taking over psychic occupation, and had left their elemental presences behind them to keep guard, watching and despising. (p.43)Jane Drummond has just moved with her husband Graham and her two small children (

Tamaranthhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16404232531650393068noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10212168.post-50918316315842675562011-01-03T17:09:00.000Z2011-01-03T17:09:30.420Z

The barge-dwellers, creatures of neither firm land nor water, would have liked to be more respectable than they were. They aspired towards the Chelsea shore, where, in the early 1960s, many thousands lived with sensible aspirations and adequate amounts of money. But a certain failure, distressing to themselves, to be like other people, caused them to sink back, with so much else that drifted or

Tamaranthhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16404232531650393068noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10212168.post-39543398456877255342010-12-31T14:54:00.000Z2010-12-31T14:54:25.435Z

"I shall tell you what Amethyst children are like ... and you tell me if this matches up. First of all, they feel out of place. They see the world in a different way to ordinary people and they are so acutely aware of the problems we face they want to be part of changing it. They are creative people who have difficulty fitting in with anyone else and they have different aspirations. They don't

Tamaranthhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16404232531650393068noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10212168.post-10656180859949669532010-12-31T14:14:00.000Z2010-12-31T14:14:05.885Z

"Marshland is very important in prehistory ... It's a kind of symbolic landscape. We think that it was important because it's a link between the land and the sea, or between life and death." Nelson snorts. "Come again?" (p.24) First in the Ruth Galloway series of archaeological whodunnits. I discovered this quite by chance: Anne and I went to the Bodies in the Bookstore event at Waterstones,

Tamaranthhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16404232531650393068noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10212168.post-13197105777105613852010-12-31T11:35:00.000Z2010-12-31T11:35:47.663Z

We sat in a globe of light, the smell of burning everywhere, and no one considered how a fire blazing right there beside the water might affect a woman for whom fire and water meant nothing but tragedy and death, a woman who could not look seawater in the face, who'd boarded up her fireplace. We were blinded by nostalgia for the woman she'd been before all of that. It makes me weep now to think

Tamaranthhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16404232531650393068noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10212168.post-42705147473838022232010-11-23T12:27:00.000Z2010-11-23T12:27:13.123Z

I certainly wasn't happy. Happiness has to do with reason, and only reason earns it. What I was given was the thing you can't earn, and can't keep, and often don't even recognise at the time; I mean joy. (p. 241) Reread for bookclub: I first read this novel as a teenager, and have reread it a couple of times since, though not for a while. I was surprised by just how much I'd forgotten, and by

Tamaranthhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16404232531650393068noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10212168.post-49487002050039250122010-11-22T15:42:00.000Z2010-11-22T15:42:07.857Z

Seven o'clock on a Monday morning, five hundred years after the End of the World, and goblins had been at the cellar again. (p.3)... which gets my award for the best opening line I've read all year. Maddy Smith, fourteen and restless, lives in the small village of Malbry, just a couple of miles from goblin-infested Red Horse Hill. She's a misfit, accused of witchcraft (though that same

Tamaranthhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16404232531650393068noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10212168.post-39722050062100705102010-11-11T12:02:00.000Z2010-11-11T12:02:30.967Z

... no neuroparticipant will ever undertake to treat a full-blown psychotic. The few pioneers in that area are all themselves in therapy today. It would be like driving into a maelstrom. If the therapist loses the upper hand in an intense session he becomes the Shaper rather than the Shaped. (p.33) Reread after seeing Inception: I can't remember exactly when I first read this, or whether I read

Tamaranthhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16404232531650393068noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10212168.post-77692337346566441822010-11-01T15:55:00.000Z2010-11-01T15:55:33.277Z

"He's a very special boy." Ma shrugs. "He's just spent his first five years in a strange place, that's all." "You don't think he's been shaped -- damaged -- by his ordeal?" "It wasn't an ordeal to Jack, it was just how things were." (p. 236) Room, based on the Josef Fritzl case, is Emma Donoghue's seventh novel: it was shortlisted for the Man Booker prize, and is being described as her

Tamaranthhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16404232531650393068noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10212168.post-59993017379704192072010-10-18T15:53:00.000+01:002010-10-18T15:53:44.899+01:00

Schrödinger, whoever he was, and his cat, and anyone else that felt like it, had all climbed inside Pandora's box and were dining on a can of worms. Jackson felt the beginnings of a headache, another one, on top of the one he already had. (p.144) Another twisty, witty, knotted plot from Kate Atkinson (whose work I've read and enjoyed before). I don't want to dive into details of the plot, not

Tamaranthhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16404232531650393068noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10212168.post-69439491873715182072010-10-18T15:29:00.000+01:002010-10-18T15:29:46.383+01:00

There ain't nothing but Noise in this world, nothing but the constant thoughts of men and things coming at you and at you and at you, ever since the spacks released the Noise germ during the war, the germ that killed half the men and every single woman, my ma not excepted, the germ that drove the rest of the men mad, the germ that spelled the end for all Spackle once men's madness picked up a gun

Tamaranthhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16404232531650393068noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10212168.post-8166531127842133652010-10-17T13:22:00.000+01:002010-10-17T13:22:14.364+01:00

The woods, the Downs, the lawn, the hearth, the stables were a real reality, kept in being by continuous inventive willpower. In weak moments [Olive] thought of her garden as the fairytale palace the prince or princess must not leave on pain of bleak disaster ... She could not, and did not, imagine any of the inhabitants of this walled garden wanting to leave it or change it, though her stories

Tamaranthhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16404232531650393068noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10212168.post-17270963821905285092010-10-15T11:57:00.002+01:002010-10-15T11:58:59.653+01:00

I'd finally given her what she wanted, the elixir of eternal youth, effected by the removal of her internal fire (the catalyst of change) through the agency of death. She'd have been so pleased, if only she'd been there to see it. Still, you can't have everything ... (p. 70)Saloninus, philosopher and alchemist and the 'greatest living authority on ethical theory', is on the run. His wife is dead

Tamaranthhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16404232531650393068noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10212168.post-6861339834432470312010-10-14T16:29:00.000+01:002010-10-14T16:29:21.337+01:00

"I think that if someone tried to rob you in the street, you'd pick his pocket, sell him a better knife and probably offer him a job as a tax collector." Basso raised an eyebrow. "I choose to take that as a compliment." (p. 353) Bassianus Arcadius Severus -- Basso to his friends, of whom he has few -- is notorious for his luck: not that it's all good, but that it all works, eventually, in his

Tamaranthhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16404232531650393068noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10212168.post-7774188061615153642010-09-09T11:15:00.000+01:002010-09-09T11:15:20.930+01:00

"Which is worse -- the fact that [he] raped her out in the cabin, or that you're going to do it in print? You have a fine dilemma. Maybe the ethics committee of the Journalists Association can give you some guidance." (p. 461) An ageing Swedish industrialist engages a disgraced journalist, Mikael Blomqvist, to investigate the 1966 disappearance of his great-niece Harriet. He'd also like to know

Tamaranthhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16404232531650393068noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10212168.post-91843290432983665702010-09-07T16:17:00.000+01:002010-09-07T16:17:39.944+01:00

She was born Margaret. As a girl, she was May; as a teenager, Mia; as an adult, Marge. When she dies, dhe was Margaret once again. There were other iterations along the way: Old Margaret with the grey hair, the sexy and impossible Maggie whom I adored, the manic depressive Greta, and others, so many others. There were so many Margaret Townes. Sometimes I ask myself, how could Margaret have been

Tamaranthhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16404232531650393068noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10212168.post-9129074672682913632010-09-07T16:12:00.000+01:002010-09-07T16:12:16.751+01:00

The specification is that you, Aaron Spenser, did wilfully and unlawfully violate the Cultural Contamination Act in regards to your relationship with an inhabitant or inhabitants of the newly opened planet Henderson's IV in such a way that you have influenced -- to the good or to the bad -- all culture within their closed system forever. How say you to the specification, guilty or not guilty? I

Tamaranthhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16404232531650393068noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10212168.post-37882023986627902942010-09-02T14:44:00.000+01:002010-09-02T14:44:10.780+01:00

Imagine coming to a city like Nanjing when you have never seen a television or a car... Her heart is like a blank sheet of paper, ready to absorb whatever lands there. (p. 183)Miss Chopsticks, which tells the stories of three country sisters who go to Nanjing to find work, is based on the true stories of three young women -- not actually sisters, but Xinran (a successful journalist in China and

Tamaranthhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16404232531650393068noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10212168.post-66273471743358379592010-08-31T12:27:00.000+01:002010-08-31T12:27:57.589+01:00

I can find no observations on the effect of running a steam locomotive in the vicinity of a ley line. The stationary steam engines used in mines have, to date, not been located near enough to ley lines for any difficulties to become apparent. I found, however, any number of papers regarding the tapping of ley energies. Most of them warn of inadvisable methods of attempting it, or deal with the

Tamaranthhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16404232531650393068noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10212168.post-57544783507400303812010-08-26T17:52:00.000+01:002010-08-26T17:52:17.156+01:00

She stopped and gestured at the pub they were passing, very ordinary-looking apart from its bright blue paintwork, with a flat, tiled frontage. “Look at this notice beside the door. It says it’s been here since 1462. Shakespeare probably drank here. See what I mean? Even the bars turn out to be historic.” “I never noticed that. But why shouldn’t it still be here?” objected Dil. “Getting thirsty’s

Tamaranthhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16404232531650393068noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10212168.post-15575529745234420602010-08-25T21:18:00.000+01:002010-08-25T21:18:58.955+01:00

A muse ... doesn’t simply entertain. She inspires, she influences the great man’s work. ... He, the great man, would be sitting frozen in front of a blank sheet of paper, empty canvas, silent piano, and I would walk in. Five feet five, flat-chested and skinny, but with a great fire in my eyes, or a strange remarkable gait or carriage, or speaking in an especially melodic voice, and he -- the

Tamaranthhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16404232531650393068noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10212168.post-55765351846185905292010-08-25T11:51:00.000+01:002010-08-25T11:51:04.132+01:00

People like me are supposed to have next to no attention span. But in fact, in my case, quite the opposite is true: my attention span is limitless; it's just a matter of where my focus settles: a buried hotel, a butter press, the salt shaker, the County atlas, the genealogy and then, and then him, him, him. (p. 134) Jerome, a young artist, discovers the body of a dead man in the ice of Lake

Tamaranthhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16404232531650393068noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10212168.post-44395841588639882472010-08-25T11:47:00.000+01:002010-08-25T11:47:13.591+01:00

I only wanted books -- nothing more -- only books, only words, it was never anything but words -- give them to me, I don’t have any! ... What do you mean there’s nothing? Then how can you talk and cry, what words are you frightened with, which ones do you call out in your sleep? Don’t nighttime cries roam inside you, a thudding twilight murmur, a fresh morning shriek? There they are, words -- don

Tamaranthhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16404232531650393068noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10212168.post-49911552530439161622010-08-16T18:45:00.000+01:002010-08-16T18:45:17.053+01:00

”Maybe you noticed something different. When you returned to St Hauda’s Land. A taste on the air. A mannerism the birds have. A peculiar snowfall, making almost mathematical patterns. A white animal that’s not an albino... for the most part, people are either born here and are used to these things, or they move away. There aren’t many people who come here.” (p. 108)Midas Crook lives on the remote

Tamaranthhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16404232531650393068noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10212168.post-31970162839598044842010-08-11T11:35:00.000+01:002010-08-11T11:35:19.622+01:00

I hated the mountains and the hills, the rivers and the rain. I hated the sunsets of whatever colour, I hated its beauty and its magic and the secret I would never know. I hated its indifference and the cruelty which was part of its loveliness. Above all I hated her. For she belonged to the magic and the loveliness. She had left me thirsty and all my life would be thirst and longing for what I

Tamaranthhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16404232531650393068noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10212168.post-58349658431058513082010-08-04T10:20:00.000+01:002010-08-04T10:20:46.575+01:00

"An interesting bargain, is it not? A pact of honesty between a woman said to have murdered her husband in cold blood and a gentleman who conceals the truth about himself from the world." "I am satisfied with it." (p. 86) Madeline Deveridge is the eponymous Widow, and now she is apparently being haunted by the ghost of the husband she's alleged to have murdered. She applies to Artemas Hunt,

Tamaranthhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16404232531650393068noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10212168.post-44114490909079990852010-08-04T10:18:00.000+01:002010-08-04T10:18:21.008+01:00

Meanwhile, Jennifer Brown has been arrested for taking drugs at a rock and roll club and is in the Tower waiting for the police to do her over. Ronald Brown, the son, has been beaten again, I'm not sure what for, but the class suspect an older boy has been corrupting him into the English vice, as they call it. Mrs Brown is still concerned about conditions at the local factory ... It's such a

Tamaranthhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16404232531650393068noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10212168.post-26048382522839139272010-08-02T16:07:00.000+01:002010-08-02T16:07:01.279+01:00

"Two hungry people should never make friends. If they do, they eat each other up. It is the same with one person who is hungry and another who is full: they cannot be real, real friends because the hungry one will eat the full one. You understand?" "Yes, grandfather." She was scared, now, because she knew he wasn't talking about food-hungry... "Only two people who are full up can be friends. They

Tamaranthhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16404232531650393068noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10212168.post-57666100946166238442010-08-02T16:01:00.000+01:002010-08-02T16:01:14.898+01:00

Holmes was dead: to begin with. And had been dead for well onto two years. And who was I without Holmes? He had been my dearest friend. He had served as that fixed point around which my life as a storyteller revolved. (p. 3) The story begins in 1922, when an elderly Watson (widowed again, living in the Baker Street apartment, lonely and beginning to lose his grip on his memories) decides to write

Tamaranthhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16404232531650393068noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10212168.post-19669180716151331582010-08-02T15:09:00.000+01:002010-08-02T15:09:00.484+01:00

"I don't see people as male or female. I just see people ... Don't you think the world has expended enough energy keeping men and women separate, trying to convince us we're from Mars or Venus? For what? We're from Earth. Why does it have to matter so much?" I have no answer, only a deep, almost physical aversion to the idea. (p. 116) Jill McTeague is a perfectly normal seventeen-year-old

Tamaranthhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16404232531650393068noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10212168.post-44075814837751959002010-08-01T18:11:00.000+01:002010-08-01T18:11:02.692+01:00

When Stella contemplated her own progress through time and space, she saw lines -- black lines that zig-zagged this way and that, netting the map of England, netting the globe ... and sometimes these lines crossed one another. The intersections must surely be points of significance -- these places to which she had been twice, three times, many times, but as different incarnations of herself,

Tamaranthhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16404232531650393068noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10212168.post-81035235526161238562010-07-30T12:33:00.000+01:002010-07-30T12:33:28.103+01:00

He thought of the glow on Eve Moskelute's face as she said, "Someone had seen the butcher ... someone had followed the soldier." "There's always someone," she'd said. The butcher killed the soldier, and someone broke a chamois's neck and placed it on the butcher's doorstep, as though in payment. Bad wondered, Who was 'someone'? (p. 110) Two men are visiting Monaco independently, both in search of

Tamaranthhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16404232531650393068noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10212168.post-2493403010775591892010-07-28T15:03:00.000+01:002010-07-28T15:03:37.615+01:00

I volunteered at the right time, just when Havemercy was fresh off the table, and she was being real picky and real precise about not having anyone fly her no matter how they coaxed, until she took one look at me and it was love at first sight, only we both knew the other one didn't have any heart for loving to speak of. She was beautiful then and she's still beautiful now, though there's a clip

Tamaranthhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16404232531650393068noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10212168.post-53989706561124277722010-06-24T11:43:00.000+01:002010-06-24T11:43:30.962+01:00

"But London," said Lucian, "is a sad, irreligious place, where there is no longer any true respect for the Infernal Majesty. And that is an important power to conciliate in invoking shades of the dead, since the only shades one would ever desire in company must necessarily come from below. You should visit Paris, cousin -- with your understanding of history you would find it entertaining, as many

Tamaranthhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16404232531650393068noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10212168.post-13216175388300312372010-06-24T10:55:00.000+01:002010-06-24T10:55:02.834+01:00

Ryan pulled out one of the sweetcorn cans and hefted it to shoulder height, but the muscles in his arms seemed to have gone slack. What was he hoping to do, scare them away like stray dogs? The trolleys juddered their plastic child seats with a wet paddling sound and jangled their chains. Ryan was reminded of a snake's rattle. Feeling sick, he decided to come quietly. Ryan's mother and father

Tamaranthhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16404232531650393068noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10212168.post-24731151863995043352010-06-21T15:41:00.000+01:002010-06-21T15:41:32.490+01:00

You have to forget everything you ever saw on Silence of the Lambs and read in Patricia Cornwell. Serial killers aren't masterminds. They're nasty little mean-minded bastards with dreams of blood. They act out of obsession, not out of deep planning ... they're as boring as people who describe the tuppeny Norwegian unfranked blue stamp, except that they're talking about corpses. (p.125) Having

Tamaranthhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16404232531650393068noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10212168.post-86864226323936581462010-06-13T16:32:00.000+01:002010-06-13T16:32:45.641+01:00

... there he was again -- right smack back in the same place, slogging through black river water to his knees under the jaundice-yellow sky. Skulls to the left of him, flowers to the right, the very air itself an obsidian storm through which knives swirled by, drawing blood 'til it felt like all he had left for skin was a single walking wound.(p.14) Read for review for Strange Horizons: this is

Tamaranthhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16404232531650393068noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10212168.post-21789339722711620102010-06-09T19:08:00.000+01:002010-06-09T19:08:05.031+01:00

"I am Mrs Geddes. My late husband was the lightkeeper." Every word she spoke made it seem the more extraordinary that she was here. She was a lady. She spoke the King's English. Her skin was as brown as a hazelnut. She wore gold studs in her ears, and a sacking apron stained with soil. He saw that her hands were dirty, covered with earth in fact. (p. 97)Lighthouse surveyor Archie Buchanan has

Tamaranthhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16404232531650393068noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10212168.post-4877174727991849552010-06-08T15:00:00.001+01:002010-06-08T18:13:14.084+01:00

Pebble-hard fenugreek lies tight and closed in the centre of your palm, colour of sand at the bottom of an old creek. But put it in water and it will bloom free. Bite the swollen kernels between your teeth and taste its bitter sweetness. Taste of waterweeds in a wild place, the cry of grey geese. Fenugreek Tuesday's spice, when the air is green like mosses after rain. Spice for days when I want

Tamaranthhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16404232531650393068noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10212168.post-40681646024387249062010-06-07T19:40:00.000+01:002010-06-07T19:40:31.594+01:00

In Berlin, her photograph was displayed everywhere in the newsagents' windows next to that of the Kaiser. In Vienna, she deformed the dreams of that entire generation who would immediately commit themselves whole-heartedly to psychoanalysis. Everywhere she went, rivers parted for her, wars were threatened, suns eclipsed, showers of frogs and footwear were reported in the press and the King of

Tamaranthhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16404232531650393068noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10212168.post-72414806789873936192010-06-01T11:23:00.001+01:002012-01-15T11:24:18.406Z

This review originally appeared in Vector, the critical journal of the British Science Fiction Association, in Summer 2010. Fathom, something of a departure from Cherie Priest's earlier works (though not from her Southern Gothic roots) has something of the flavour of Tim Powers' On Stranger Tides. It melds furious tropical storms, the earth-quaking dreams of ancient gods, the stifling lushness of

Tamaranthhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16404232531650393068noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10212168.post-1258085493061991612010-05-30T17:10:00.001+01:002010-05-30T17:12:39.464+01:00

It would never be exactly as Reinhardt dreamt. nothing could. How lucky mortals are, thought Lewis, that they never live long enough to learn it. (p.23)California, 1934: Max Reinhardt is staging a spectacular production of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, and Literature Specialist Lewis (an immortal cyborg, for those unfamiliar with the Company) has been charged to retrieve Reinhardt's

Tamaranthhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16404232531650393068noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10212168.post-17116052014046484672010-05-30T16:56:00.000+01:002010-05-30T16:56:27.560+01:00

Until that moment Diego had not been conscious of his dual personality: one part Diego de la Vega, elegant, affected, hypochondriac, and the other part El Zorro, audacious, daring, playful. He supposed his true character lay somewhere in between, but he didn't know who he was: neither of the two nor the sum of both. (p.232) Isabel Allende was approached by the owners of the rights to Zorro, in

Tamaranthhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16404232531650393068noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10212168.post-74721018896117201632010-05-26T15:33:00.002+01:002010-05-26T15:33:48.060+01:00

We have your bloody hatchets and your Hiroshimas. We march in spite of Hell, we do -- Atrophy, Entropy and Proteus vulgaris, telling bawdy jokes about a far, girl name of Eve and a travelling salesman called Lucifer. We bury your dead and their reputations. We bury you. We are the centuries ... Generation, regeneration, again, again, as in a ritual, with bloodstained vestments and nailtorn hands,

Tamaranthhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16404232531650393068noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10212168.post-49610399761039353532010-05-24T16:58:00.000+01:002010-05-24T16:58:39.119+01:00

‘My brother permits few people inside his guard. Four people in his first sixty-three years, I should say: myself, Dr Watson, Irene Adler, and you. For those inside his affections, Sherlock’s loyalty is absolute. In another man, one might call it blind. Any one of us four could commit cold-blooded murder, in Trafalgar Square, in broad daylight, and he would devote every iota of his energy and wit

Tamaranthhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16404232531650393068noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10212168.post-30044824774584516342010-05-10T15:34:00.002+01:002010-05-10T15:34:56.521+01:00

Like an object so familiar to the eyes it goes unseen, I had habitually walked past my own history ... my entire childhood had become a self-inflicted blind spot -- I had complacently passed by the locked rooms of my past for so long, fingering the key in my pocket, that I no longer knew where to find the door. (p. 279)After leaving India, Holmes and Russell set sail for San Francisco, where Mary

Tamaranthhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16404232531650393068noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10212168.post-79454063374078591352010-05-10T15:31:00.000+01:002010-05-10T15:31:53.073+01:00

Amber, when warm, gives out a faint aroma, the odour of slow time. I put the spilling double-handful up to my face and inhaled its trace of musk, laced with the tang of betrayal. Sunny Goodheart gave me the necklace because it looked pretty on me; I accepted the gift because it would remind me of consequences. (p. 203) Holmes and Russell journey to India at Mycroft's behest, to investigate the

Tamaranthhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16404232531650393068noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10212168.post-33307842137961043802010-05-09T15:43:00.002+01:002010-05-09T15:43:50.424+01:00

Seldom have I enjoyed myself more with another person than on that long day's hike across the hills with the lesbian wife of the Seventh Duke of Beauville ... (p.109)Hours after returning from The Moor, a bloodstained and battered stranger arrives at Holmes' and Russell's door. On closer inspection, he's not a stranger after all: he's the scion of an old and distinguished family, seeking help in

Tamaranthhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16404232531650393068noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10212168.post-27375698754711168802010-05-09T15:39:00.000+01:002010-05-09T15:39:13.637+01:00

Five weeks earlier I had been a maturing apprentice who was moving away into another field, but the events of the last month, both at home and here in Palestine, had shaken that comfortable relationship to its core. (p. 203)O Jerusalem is set two-thirds of the way through The Beekeeper's Apprentice, when Russell and Holmes flee England and their mysterious opponent, and end up in disguise in

Tamaranthhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16404232531650393068noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10212168.post-84605181050967176442010-05-05T20:28:00.000+01:002010-05-05T20:28:42.740+01:00

She stared across the wood. It had swallowed Harry, then breathed out Scathach. It had filled her head with legend, then sucked her in, a fish sucking in a fly. (p.317)Reread for book club: this is a book which I adore, which I used to read often, and I still retain some sentences word for word. ("There is old memory in snow.") Odd what I remembered and what I didn't: I remembered the time loop,

Tamaranthhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16404232531650393068noreply@blogger.com0