Petey & Pussy is a terribly original novel about a cat and a dog who live life as it can only be lived in the Twitter-era American family. Petey is the balding dog who likes his feline friend Pussy, and they are both united by their loathing of the feathered bane of their life, Bernie. [...]

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The Terrible Axe-Man of New Orleans is a very good historical novel, in the graphical genre. Shining a spotlight on one of the darker times in New Orleans’ history, Rick Geary gives us a little tour of New Orleans, its variegated history and chequered past. What is Dixie? What is jazz? What role does New [...]

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Temperance is a great graphic novel by Cathy Malkasian that can be many things to many people, in the manner of all good works of art. We have a paranoid premise, where the father convinces his children that killing others is okay, if it’s done for the cause. But what is the cause exactly? And [...]

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Fifth Business is Robertson Davies‘ first part of his Deptford trilogy, a series of books that examines the long-lasting effects of small incidents on people’s lives, sometimes living past them to affect their descendants’. Dunstan Ramsay is a boy in small-town Canada, the type of town that Davies excels in describing. He is a polite [...]

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I’ve only ever taken the one course on law, so I’m no legal eagle, but I’ve recently run afoul of some rental condition which I thought I’d been exempted from. I have a portable dishwasher which I’ve been using without any issues in the last few places I’ve rented. This place, in the heart of [...]

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This one’s light reading and constitutes a break from the classics. Clive Cussler presents a collection of vignettes about crime. Serial killers and murder abound in here. The Weapon is about a man who undergoes extraordinary rendition to prove that the policy is hugely flawed and often tortures people based on incorrect evidence. The Circle [...]

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Here’s another delightful collection of short stories by Ray Bradbury. These ones have a touch of the horrible and stray a little from his usual sci-fi oeuvre. The Dwarf is about being different and how those dreams can crush you, until you find a secret way out. It’s your little secret and keeps you warm [...]

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What an absolutely smashing monster of a book. Cervantes writes Don Quixote in a literary trance from which we wish he would never awaken. Don Quixote has read too many chivalric stories and is besotted with the ideals of old. He decides to go wayfaring to recapture ancient glory, along with his hastily deputized squire, [...]

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E. M. Forster is good at writing about the peccadilloes of the British classes. In A Room with a View, we see romantic interest clash with respectability in the upper classes as they vacation in the south of Europe. Lucy is being courted by Cecil, who is just the kind of toff mothers approve of [...]

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E. M. Forster dissects social attitudes prevalent in the Raj during the glory days of Empire. Not the liberal attitudes of London, but the social attitudes present in far-flung colonial outposts where the iron fist must prevail. Adela Quested journeys to India to marry the magistrate of a small Indian town, a certain Ronny Heaslop. [...]

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