Tag: month in review

Book of the Month

December saw the launch of the Huffington Post‘s UK Culture section, to which I’ve been contributing; and the best book I read this month was the first I reviewed for them – Sarah Winman’s debut, When God Was a Rabbit.

Reviews

• When God Was a Rabbit by Sarah Winman [****]
• Ill at Ease by Stephen Bacon, Mark West and Neil Williams [***½]
• ‘A Marvellous Party’ by Kat Brown [***½]
• ‘Augury’ by Jess Hyslop [***½]
• Where the Devil Can’t Go by Anya Lipska [***½]
• Alison Wonderland by Helen Smith [***½]
• King Death by Paul Finch [***]
• Embassytown by China Miéville [***]

Features

• A meme with book titles.
• My favourite reads of 2011.

And that is the end of 2011 on Follow the Thread. Thank you for reading, and my best wishes to you for the new year. See you in 2012!

Book of the Month

November turned out (by accident rather than design) to be a month where all the books I blogged originated from this year. And the best of the lot was Christopher Priest’s first novel in nine years, The Islanders — an exquisitely crafted piece of work which provides a set of narrative pieces in the form of gazetteer entries, and leaves readers to construct the story (or stories).

Reviews

• The Islanders by Christopher Priest [****]
• The Silver Wind by Nina Allan [****]
• ‘Sullom Hill’ by Christopher Kenworthy [***½]
• Landfall by Helen Gordon [***]
• The Company Man by Robert Jackson Bennett [***]
• ‘Remains’ by G.A. Pickin [***]
• Three pieces from Granta 117, by Will Self, Rajesh Parameswaram, and Julie Otsuka
• …and I completed my story-by-story review of A Book of Horrors.

Features

• I get analytical about reading analytically.
• Sampling Weidenfeld & Nicolson’s forthcoming debuts.

Book of the Month

This month, I read the winners of both the Man Booker Prize and the Guardian‘s Not the Booker Prize. The latter won out for me, so my pick of October’s reads is King Crow, Michael Stewart’s intriguing study of a teenage boy obsessed with birds, who gets led astray by a new friend.

Now here’s what else was on the blog this month…

Reviews

• King Crow by Michael Stewart [****]
• The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes [***½]
• What I Did by Christopher Wakling [***½]
• Comes the Night by Hollis Hampton-Jones [***]
• Abolisher of Roses by Gary Fry [**½]
• … and I began a story-by-story review of Stephen Jones’s anthology A Book of Horrors.

Features

• Scott Pack selects his literary dodos.
• Thoughts on the announcement of the Literature Prize.
• Assessing how the Clarke Award winners have been judged by posterity.
• A snapshot of my reading life at the end of October.