Yearly Archives: 2018

First Lines: Funny Fantasy/Science Fiction/Horror

Where Alex Shvartsman’s Unidentified Funny Objects collections (mostly) contain all new funny fiction, his series of Funny Fantasy / Science Fiction / Horror anthologies contain reprints of humorous genre fiction. Now, of course, the boundaries between these genres is vague at best. And with the recurrence of several authors across all three volumes, read in… Read more »

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First Lines: Ibid, A Life

The reason I put Mark Dunn’s Ibid: A Life on my list of 40 books to read before my 40th birthday, was its novelty value. As explained in the introduction, the author wrote an biography of Jonathan Blashette (a circus performer born with three legs who goes on to make a fortune in the deodorant… Read more »

First Lines: The Great John Green Re-Read Project 2018, Part 1

My current night-time reading project is revisiting all of John Green’s novels in publication order. Since encountering them nine years ago I haven’t gone back, and I wanted to see how they’ve held up. In part one of this probably two-part series, I’ll start with the first three, Looking for Alaska, An Abundance of Katherines… Read more »

Seen Live: Daniël Lohues, “Vlier”

On account of me and The Missus taking my mother-in-law along, this year we journeyed West, to The Hague, to see Daniël Lohues perform a show in support of his latest album Vlier. Compared to shows I saw in the more eastern parts of The Netherlands, two things are worth mentioning: first, most of the… Read more »