wtb_michael's reviews
2165 reviews

Collected Stories Gillian Mears by Gillian Mears

challenging dark sad medium-paced

4.0

Mears' writing is so evocative and interesting, especially in the later, longer stories - she wrote the beautiful and disgusting intimacy of bodies so well 

Hyacinth by Will Cox

challenging dark funny fast-paced

5.0

 Incredibly strange, gothic horror novella featuring Hyacinth Bucket and the cast of Keeping Up Appearances - surreal and utterly enjoyable 

The Rest of the Robots by Isaac Asimov

adventurous fast-paced

3.0

 Fun to read and ground-breaking at the time, but Asimov lacks the wildness/paranoia of PKD and his enthusiasm for straight up ideas ahead of characters or prose mean he's probably not really for me 

Warlight by Michael Ondaatje

adventurous dark emotional medium-paced

4.5

 What an extraordinarily assured writer Ondaatje is - this is part spy novel, part exploration of history and memory and filled with his brilliant prose and fated moments. Sad that this is the last of his prose for me to read until he publishes something new 

The Wedding Party by Liu Xinwu

funny informative lighthearted medium-paced

4.0

A little too sprawling for my brain to manage, but a great look at 1980s Beijing via the cast of characters circling around a wedding in a working class apartment block. Funny and gentle and entertaining

Little Plum by Laura McPhee-Browne

dark emotional hopeful fast-paced

4.0

McPhee-Brown always writes so beautifully about the body, about physical feelings, and this book about pregnancy and motherhood gives her plenty of room to stretch her muscles. The plot is a bit loose, until the tension ratchets up in the last third, but it's readable and moving and easy to zip through

Moral Hazard by Kate Jennings

dark emotional funny fast-paced

4.25

Scathing and sad novel about alzheimers, wall street and patching together a life - the same kind of episodic structure as Snake, but a very different book

Phase Six by Jim Shepard

challenging dark tense fast-paced

4.0

Do you really need to be reading a book about a deadly and mysterious pandemic sweeping the world? I can deeply sympathise with the idea that now isn't the time for this, but it's an incredibly well constructed, gripping and surprisingly moving portrait of the next, worse pandemic

The Last Children of Tokyo by Yōko Tawada

dark slow-paced

3.75

I felt like this kind of fizzled at the end, but the world building and writing up to then were ace 

H(A)PPY by Nicola Barker

adventurous challenging medium-paced

3.25

Wild, weird, entertaining - takes a fairly cliched dystopian setup to some very odd places