The Foggy Dew in Coquitlam is one of my favourite watering holes. The staff are friendly, the people usually college-going alcoholics and there’s a live band that won’t do Slayer covers. It was on one cold October night that we decided to re-visit the Dew. Some of us were dressed as priests, others as Heidi, [...]

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From Dubai, we see a novel about a woman who grows up in a desolate mountainous region and is a bit untamed, a bit wild. Not sexually or anything like that, just not fully fettered and locked down as you’d expect the stereotypical woman from the Middle East to be. Maha Gargash‘s The Sand Fish [...]

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Herman Hesse‘s quite the writer. In Siddhartha, Hesse takes us on an exploration of what he perceives the Buddha to have been like. Siddhartha was the first name of the Gautama Buddha, the founder of Buddhism. Be warned, Hesse’s interpretation of what the Buddha must have been like takes extreme liberties with the “historic” version [...]

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Martin Cruz Smith’s Gorky Park is a book that ties in a lot of disparate elements. Three murders in Gorky Park in Moscow that leave investigators baffled, the Russian sable-fur monopoly, American businessmen in Russia who are not in the great game of espionage, hardboiled Russian detectives running afoul of the KGB, NYPD detectives built [...]

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That’s right, kiddies, it’s another Uncle Rebus novel. Except this one isn’t about Brer Rabbit (apologies for the pun). Rankin tackles the growing asylum-seekers problem in Scotland and Western Europe in general, here. An immigrant is murdered in Scotland and the usual suspects are well, suspected. But of course, all is not what it seems [...]

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Ian Rankin is the master of recounting tales of Scottish hard men. Take a fully-grown specimen of Scottish manhood, turn him loose on alcohol and ciggies, bake him with years of distrust, baste him with a failed marriage or two and top him off with a generous icing of cynicism to get someone like John [...]

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When Papa writes, the world reads. Hemingway’s classic about the Spanish Civil War needs no introduction, being one of the preeminent novels of its era to deal with a war that was a harbinger of the much larger European theatre of war. The writing is solid, covering Robert Jordan’s mission in an absorbing fashion. Remember, [...]

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We saw Alice in Chains at GM Place tonight. It was the first time I’d ever seen them and they were very good. Mastodon bored me to death and I slept through the Deftones, so I don’t know anything about their performance or setlist. Back to Alice. The new singer, William DuVall was alright. He [...]

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I must admit, at first I wasn’t overly enthused by Tim Parks‘ Europa, a novel about foreign lectors who travel to the European Parliament to plead their case for their jobs. The protagonists are exciting enough, but the lengthy run-on sentences really put a crimp in my enjoyment. Sentences over a page long? I guess [...]

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