Ragtag Giggagon

So Dr. John Yeoman offers some wonderful creative writing tips, courses, classes and bukes via his web presence at the Writers' Village . He allayed my insecurities over a certain story a few years back, and did a pretty powerful edit on it to boot. He's written a collection featuring the hero of his novel, Hippocrates Yeoman. The character is a witty Elizabethan apothecary, something of a Colombo / Holmes mystery-solving type. The collection is called The Cunning Man . A nice size for a collection, at about ninety pages. Alongside the text is commentary from the author, where he shows the reader how he writes. He indicates where he has used the "rule of three", for example, or where he echoes a previous piece of text to bring home a point or to mine for humour. The protagonist-narrator is a funny guy, and there are more than a couple of chuckles. One big criticism is that I wouldn't have opened with the first story, a tale about the theft of a goblet. The second ...

The end of days was a bit of a let down. If only light didn't bend quite so much it'd be darker and more exciting and...Einstein would be wrong...the spoilsport.

This is a review for people who read VERY slowly. Updike's Terrorist (from 2006) was a published book what I had on the go for about eight months. I could've read it in a few sittings, but the thing is - and here's the thing, folks - the novel is populated with a handful of interesting, wonderfully-drawn characters so it's very easy to abandon for weeks at a stretch and return to without needing reminders. Brilliantly-researched, featuring a gynandromorphic imam with a chip on his shoulder, teaching the eponymous (anti)hero - a young man fresh out of a New Joyzee high school - how to read the Quran. Rewarding stuff for any reader curious about Islam. The conversations between student and teacher at the mosque are so eruditely honed that I can say with complete certainty that Updike has forgotten all the stuff he must've learned in the course of his research. (Mainly because he died in 2009. RIP.) The boy's mother - a single woman whose male-gaze descriptions viv...

Hilariously funny stuff, with wonderfully descriptive writing, from the pen of William Frederick Available on Amazon here ! And at Goodreads here ! Scanning much of this novel (and there's a lot in it, well worth its price), I can say that it's brought a smile to my face on every second or third page. The two central characters Bertram and Gertrude are reconciled and reunited in middle age after years apart. The result - alongside a plot involving a Chinese troublemaker and the Dutch secret service - is lewd filth of the highest order! (That's a good thing.) There are gags about infirmity, with Bertram frequently struggling for breath or requiring assistance (both chemical and physical for numerous reasons and in a variety of ways), doooobul untundras all over the place, and a very vivid prose style.  There is some wonderful characterisation too. Intelligent stuff beneath all the buffoonery. Bertram seems such a reluctant, cowardly and unreliable hero that he earns the read...