Mark Charan Newton

Now here’s an interesting one. Essays In Love, by the talented young philosopher Alain de Botton. Ever the one to expand my emotional and intellectual range (being only in my twenties, I feel perhaps there’s much to experience in life, so here’s a quick short cut to understanding), and it being some years since I [...]

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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 a moment in time so frozen, so embedded in characters minds, [...]

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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. Not a simple friendship.
The [...]

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Two books—one fiction, one poetry collection.
The first is David Peace’s Nineteen Seventy Four, the first book in the Red Riding Quartet. Set in 1974, young crime correspondent, Edward Dunford, The Yorkshire Post, is on the story of the murder of a young girl. The murder is particularly brutal, with, amongst other things being done to [...]

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So this weekend I finished reading Underworld by Don DeLillo. A monster of a book. Eight hundred plus pages. There’s nothing I can really say that every major world newspaper or author has said already, I suppose. (This is the third DeLillo novel I’ve read in a row after Americana and White Noise.)
But I’ve never [...]

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Another one taken from the Solaris blog, but I loved this book so much I had to put it up here too.
The Girl In The Glass, by Jeffrey Ford.
Being in publishing, you read all day, and so reading for pleasure becomes a little difficult—you always feel you’re reading to learn more about the industry, or [...]

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I’ll admit, at times, I can become quite dissatisfied with mass-market offerings. Don’t get me wrong: there’s a lot of wonderful stuff out there, but I was in one of those diva like moods where I couldn’t find a book I wanted to read, truly. Something different, that stands out.
So I took the plunge into [...]

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Taken from my work blog. I thought I’d fill the page with some book reviews until I think of how to use it properly.
The real world can be filled with as much wonder as any fantasy creation—you just have to know where to look. In Tim Butcher’s Blood River, we are taken to somewhere you [...]

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