If my review title makes you want to howl and scream with the unparalleled, uncompromising rage of a true English-language pedant, then you are going to love this book. Hard. The full title is Spell It Out: The Curious, Enthralling, and Extraordinary Story of English Spelling, but reading it is a breeze. It is a book for the layperson, so even if you haven’t quite nailed that dissertation defense, you’ll be fine… Full review
Reading with the Lights Off
First of all, this is a sequel. If you haven’t read the preceding novel A Wizard of Earthsea, then go do that right now. It’s not long. I’ll wait… It’s wonderful, right? I remember how the prose grabbed me when I first read it, and it still grabs me that same way. It’s like The Gunslinger in that way; it feels truly, effortlessly ethereal. The text exists outside of time, as do all great fairy tales. And that’s the one problem with the sequel. Much […]
Slick As Sh*t
There is a very deliberate sort of chaos in Perdido Street Station. Everything about it is designed to force square pegs into the rounder, well-worn holes of our expectations for fantasy and horror. Its pages are occupied by fantastical races, but their separation from humanity is stark and marked. There are no beautiful elves or noble dwarves found in New Crobuzon, but there are frog-like vodyanoi and beetle-headed khepri and culturally alien bird-folk and inconveniently spiny cactus people and…and…and… There is a very deliberate […]