Mark Charan Newton

Some thoughts on a book I read late last year. The Alexandria Quartet comprises of four novels, Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive and Clea. The first two are the most tightly linked, for everything you know in Justine is looked at from another angle, although still from the same narrator. Mountolive is more distant, and Clea certainly [...]

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Last post I take from my old blog, I promise. Just that there’s more people reading this one, so hey, I want certain things to be noticed. Like this one, of what I suspect is my favourite book. Or one of them.

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So this weekend I finished reading Underworld by Don DeLillo. A monster of a [...]

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Taken from my old blog…
This is an interesting one. The Fortress of Solitude is a book that’s difficult to catagorise. With brief genre moments, and certainly many nods towards SF / comic book fandom, it describes the lives of two boys, Dylan Ebdus and Mingus Rude. One white, one black, both growing up in Brooklyn. [...]

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Taken from my old blog, because I was reminded about it recently.
A performance artist hangs in statuesque pose. Knee bent. Upside down. The pose of the famously pictured man on 9/11. And this artist is effectively frozen in time. Which is the metaphor at the heart of Don Delillo’s latest novel, Falling Man. That of [...]

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Here online for all to see is a rather positive review of The Reef with a nice little bit here:
Newton treads new ground in his attempt to bring literary concerns to the fantasy genre.
Well that’s bloody well going on the cover of something. And a hurrah for that. Yes, that’s certainly what I was [...]

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Mythago Wood, by Robert Holdstock, is quite simply a beautiful book. It is a fantasy novel about the very nature of fantasy itself, about what it means to imagine.
Set after the Second World War, Stephen Huxley returns to his family home, Oak Lodge, on the outskirts of Ryhope Wood. It may appear like an ordinary [...]

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Fancied a bit of crime reading this festive period, so I went to the old faithful writer, someone who has never yet disappointed me, Henning Mankell. The Kurt Wallander mysteries are superb novels, set in the bleak countryside of Sweden. Miserablist fiction here, a particular favourite of mine, and done superbly. Wallander is a superbly [...]

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Last night I went to see Bruce Springsteen play at the O2 Arena, in London. And what a mighty concert it was too. There’s been so much talk of various bands reuniting in recent times, and with all the hype you forget sometimes who the truly great musicians are. Then you get talk of the [...]

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This isn’t going to be a coherent review, because, for me, it wouldn’t suit the book. The Alexandria Quartet comprises of four novels, Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive and Clea. The first two are the most tightly linked, for everything you know in Justine is looked at from another angle, although still from the same narrator. Mountolive [...]

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I’m currently working through one of the most pleasurable reading experiences of recent times. (This year has been a good year of reading for me.) Durrell is a phenomenal talent. He makes you pine for an age you never knew, as much for the quality of writing if nothing else. His ability to bring character [...]

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