“When the doorbell rings at three in the morning, it’s never good news,” begins Stormbreaker, the first in Anthony Horowitz’s bestselling Alex Rider series. I would definitely concur. The last time someone buzzed me at three in the morning it was my twenty-one-year-old sister-in-law asking to borrow a MacBook cable for someone’s...

  I have a friend who’s a former chef. The only thing he loathes more than poor-quality coffee is the current trend of amateur food photography. “Wouldn’t you rather enjoy the food that someone’s prepared for you, and spend some time hanging out with your friends rather than fiddling around with the filters on Instagram?” he...

Yesterday I asked the readers of the RIASS Facebook page whether they make themselves finish reading a book that’s really not to their tastes, or whether they put such a book down. And if the latter, at what point would they do so? There’s a reason that this review is appearing about a week later than originally scheduled. And that’s because...

One of the topics that I find endlessly interesting in fiction is the lengths that many authors will go to in order to avoid dealing with modern technology in their work. A functioning mobile phone, for example, can easily put an end to a disaster or adventure story, so it’s little wonder that characters either lose them, forget to charge them, or break...

My husband Jono and I have pretty divergent reading tastes: his section of the bookshelf is largely business books and non-fiction, whereas mine’s largely fiction with the odd piece of narrative non-fiction thrown in. But there is some overlap in our reading habits, and zingy fiction that treads the line between MG and YA definitely comprises a large part...

Whew, here I am, having emerged from air after slogging my way through Elizabeth Hoyt’s Lord of Darkness, the latest in her Maiden Lane series. Though not a long novel, Lord of Darkness certainly feels it: I suspect that there might be some sort of time dilation powers hidden within its pages. There’s a reason that category romance novels tend to...

Anyone who’s been reading this site for a while knows that I regularly pass on zingy series fiction to my husband. Though his reading interests are polar opposites of mine, he’s possibly an even tougher critic. He’s basically a thirty-year-old teenage boy, and a mere paragraph of extraneous exposition results in him skim-reading–or...

  My father is a small man. He is small in stature. He is small in emotions. And he is also small in achievement. My father’s greatest achievement is the PhD he obtained just after I was born. When I turned eighteen, he gave me a copy of his PhD. When I turned twenty-one, he asked when I would be obtaining a PhD of my own. My father is a scientist....