Hi, I'm Tim. Read my blog. It's about books. I track my movie viewing and occasionally write short reviews at Letterboxd. You can also find me on Blues...
If you pay any attention to the book world, you probably encountered The Guardian's recent 100 Best Novels . I won't add to the extensive commentary it produced except to say that the method behind the list (compiling the votes of 170+ writers, editors, broadcasters, etc) is significantly more interesting than just having one guy (Robert McCrum) do it then for some reason having him do it again a…
2025 wasn't my most enthusiastic year of reading but I finished 83 books, and a lot of them were pretty good! Highlights: Gwendolyn Brooks's Maud Martha , a poet's novel (complimentary) that tells a whole complicated life in under 200 pages. Finally managed to read the whole of The Lord of the Rings trilogy, and the first Earthsea trilogy, too. Turns out there's a bunch of stuff at the end of LOTR…
I read 87 books in 2024. There are reviews of sixteen of them on this blog, including four books about books and eleven popular classics of wildly varying quality . Of the latter, my favourite new-to-me books were Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton; Hotel du Lac by Anita Brookner; The Quiet American by Graham Greene; The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath; and My Ántonia by Willa Cather. (My least favourite was…
Ray Newman’s 2022 collection of weird tales, Municipal Gothic , was one of the best things I read last year ; his new collection, Intervals of Darkness , is perhaps even better. I tore through it in a couple of evenings, eager to see what horrors and/or delights the next story would bring. Newman peppers his work with playful nods to classic weird writers and cultural artefacts. “The Horns in the…
This post is part of Commonplace Classics , wherein I read the books we all know and sometimes love. H. Rider Haggard's 1887 novel She is the tenth best-selling individual book of all time, outstripping modern blockbusters like The Da Vinci Code , The Bridges of Madison County , and all but one of the Harry Potter books. Popularity isn't the only domain in which She remains competitive: Haggard's…
This post is part of Commonplace Classics , wherein I read the books we all know and sometimes love. I studied Heart of Darkness in high school and it was extremely hard going. It was without question the most sophisticated book I had encountered to that point, the narrative essentially a monologue with very little dialogue and infrequent paragraph breaks, the language ambiguous and difficult to…
This post is part of Commonplace Classics , wherein I read the books we all know and sometimes love. The word "prairie" evokes powerful mental images, even for those whose relationship with the United States is entirely pop cultural. One pictures vast expanses of fertile grassland, teeming with elk and bison and the giant squirrels known as prairie dogs. Pioneers work the land: rugged, salt of the…
This post is part of Commonplace Classics , wherein I read the books we all know and sometimes love. I've got the brains You've got the limbs Let's make some weird monkeys - Pet Shop Boys H.G. Wells was many things: biologist, socialist, novelist, political thinker and activist, eugenicist, futurist, the list goes on. His true calling, though, was to screw as many women as would have him, which…
This post is part of Commonplace Classics , wherein I read the books we all know and sometimes love. Sylvia Plath was an American poet whose only novel, The Bell Jar , was published pseudonymously in January 1963. Plath killed herself a few weeks later, aged 30, leaving behind two children and one husband, the English poet Ted Hughes 1 . Plath's star continued to rise after her death, particularly…
This post is part of Commonplace Classics , wherein I read the books we all know and sometimes love. I don't remember which Graham Greene novel I read first as a teenager in the mid-90s, but I have a feeling it was Stamboul Train , Our Man In Havana , or The Ministry of Fear . I liked spy fiction, and those books sounded enough like spy fiction to attract me. They were in the Penguin Classics…