I chose this book after recently completing Burning Chrome by Gibson. The premise of this intrigued me, and I wanted another sci-fi book for my other book club project. The titular difference engine is a reference to an early computing machine created by Charles Babbage. He subsequently merged the difference engine with the Jacquard machine... Continue Reading →
Burning Chrome, by William Gibson. Pub 1986
I first read this book in the early 90s, a gift from a friend. I enjoyed it very much, but never returned to it as sci-fi is not my favourite genre. However, I've read a few good sci-fi books lately and enjoyed them, so I returned to this one to see if it stood the... Continue Reading →
Trespassing, by Usma Aslam Khan. Pub 2003
I’ve had this book on my shelves for a long time. I bought it after reading Fallen by David Maine (and a few of his other books), and reading in the author notes that his wife was also an author. For whatever reason, I never got around to reading this one until now. Trespassing is... Continue Reading →
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, and Other Jazz Age Stories, by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Pub 2009
Last year, I listened to an episode of Backlisted (a favourite podcast) about American fiction, where one of the panelists recommended the story, “The Diamond as Big as The Ritz”. I was interested enough that I sought out a collection of 19 Fitzgerald stories that included this story, and was surprised to find that he’d... Continue Reading →
Fire Weather, by John Vaillant. Pub 2023
This was an impulse purchase when visiting a friend with whom I'm working on a nascent book review podcast project. In that "club" we have to read the same book, and then have a discussion about it over Zoom, with the recording (with some editing) becoming a podcast episode. So far, we've only made two,... Continue Reading →
Beneath the Surface of Things, by Wade Davis. Pub 2024
This was an impulse purchase at the local bookshop. By rights, I should have waited for a birthday or Christmas list (and for paperback), but impulses rarely give way to such sober second thinking. I was keen to read more of Wade Davis’ writing after enjoying The Wayfinders last year, as well as his public... Continue Reading →
Table for Two, by Amor Towles. Pub 2024
When I learned in April that Towles had a new book out, so soon (within a year) of his previous (The Lincoln Highway), I was just a little excited. And so, I invoked one of the exceptions to my book-buying prohibition (a new book by a favourite author) and bought it almost immediately. Then I... Continue Reading →
Pop’s Banjo
Annual #tellastory day and Pop’s birthday, and so another pop tale. I wrote a few years ago about the emergence of the banjo for Pop, and more recently I had a chance to look back at old photo albums so I was able to narrow down its arrival in my life. This photo is from Christmas 1970,... Continue Reading →
Lightning Strikes the Silence, by Iona Whishaw. Pub 2024
Book 11 in the Lane Winslow series continues the excellent and engaging stories we’ve come to enjoy, with its usual cast of delightful characters. It’s hard to believe that barely three years has passed since Lane first arrived in King’s Cove, as so much has happened to her and around her. It is June 1948,... Continue Reading →
Knife, by Salman Rushdie. Pub 2024
I have only ever read one Salman Rushdie before – East, West, published in 1994. I don’t recall much about it, other than where and when I bought it – in 1994, in London. My copy is autographed by the author, something I thought extraordinary since he was still very much in hiding at that... Continue Reading →
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