Sheila's Guests and Reviews

When I was offered the loan of a copy of Philip Dick's A Scanner Darkly I couldn't resist. I love the movies based on Dick's stories. And I've loved every one of his stories I've had the chance to read. It kind of annoyed me that I'd not read this one yet. But what I didn't expect was to find myself in doctor's and dentist's waiting rooms, glued to my phone, frantically reading the next chapter. One my phone! I suppose it's appropriate. After all, Dick was writing of a future world with future technology (and modern-day problems), so my not read on a phone. But my phone...! I'm going to load it up with more books now. I think I'm hooked. It's the one item I'm guaranteed to always have with me, so now I'll always have a book to read. Meanwhile, in paperback, on my tablet, kindle and y computer, and in every spare moment, I read other books. They're all kind of dark. They all scan kind of strange places. And here are my re...

With the world growing darker (politically and in season), fires burning, waters flooding... I ought to look for something light to read, but I end up haunted by dark matter and enjoying the sense that perhaps we can learn, if not directly from the past then possibly from its fictional recreation. So here I am enjoying Alice in Sinland, Killing the Devil, following Stainer through a collegetown summer of drugs, watching Ruined Wings try to fly, Missing Presumed and Accountable to None. Dark matter indeed, but some of it's hauntingly evocative, literarily beautiful, and gripping to read. And some of it's just dark. Here are some book reviews anyway. Enjoy complex four-star coffee with the more complex reads, and dark five-stars for the darkest ones. Alice in Sinland by Antara Mann is an oddly surprising dark read. An up-and-coming lawyer is asked, "What do you want?" and realizes she always wanted to be a star. Down the rabbit-hole of modern-day stardom she goes, wh...

The news is of danger. The world's not as safe as we'd choose. Though, to be fair, we never thought London was safe. Not when I was growing up and gangsters were a strange phenomenon. Not when the IRA held sway. Not when friends asked if we really wanted to risk taking our children there before we left the country. And surely not now, because nowhere is safe. Because safety is an illusion. So I read for escape... maybe. But which books help you escape? Self help books perhaps? They'll tell me how to protect myself against everything I've thought of that might go wrong. Except my protection goes wrong and I never thought the basement would flood that way. Children's books? I've read lots of those. They gather me back into innocent certainties with beautifully illustrated calm. But then I grow up when I close the book. Fantasies? They help, I guess, though I always end up ascribing fantastical beasthood to modern day fears. Action and adventure? At least f...

The future had its bleak turns during my childhood. I wrote stories about the end of the world, where an anonymous someone in Russia, China or the USA pushed a button and blew us all up. I wanted to stand on a tall tower watching the bombs, because I was sure the tower would fall and I wouldn't need to survive the aftermath, and also because I wanted my eyes wide open. But it didn't happen. One of my sons suffers from similarly bleak views today. Meanwhile my mum, who lived through the Second World War in England, has a much more honest view of the past. Her world was threatened dailly. Her disasters appeared on her doorstep and drove her to hide in underground shelters. My disasters and my sons are just in our heads, at least for now. And then there are books. Fiction offers an escape, a place to explore different ways, a chance to see through different eyes, and maybe even an opportunity to realize the end's not today, and the future really hasn't happened yet, so...