If you're new here, why not subscribe to our email updates or follow us on Facebook? You can also add us to your Google Reader. Thanks for visiting! RIASS stuff: Review: Welcome to the Great Mysterious by Lorna Landvik Rating: Writing, place and Anthony Doerr’s Four Seasons in Rome Rating: Giveaway: Safe Haven by Nicholas Sparks (US only) My recent...

    About a fifth of the way through his travel memoir Four Seasons in Rome Anthony Doerr steps back from his rapturous scramble to describe everything around him to muse on Victor Shklovsky’s idea of habitualisation. “The easier an experience,” writes Doerr, “or the more entrenched, or the more familiar, the fainter our...

RIASS stuff: Today I’m over at Sue Bursztynski’s blog chatting about myself (because, you know, I don’t do enough of that here) and the book I’m currently working on. Lisa Stasse’s The Forsaken and my frustrations with dystopian YA Sorry guys, I get a bit ranty in this one. Giveaway: Safe Haven by Nicholas Sparks (US only) My husband...

RIASS stuff: Lisa Stasse’s The Forsaken and my frustrations with dystopian YA Sorry guys, I get a bit ranty in this one. Review: Portrait of an Artist, as an Old Man by Joseph Heller Rating:  A wry look at the problems of an author who has nothing left to contribute, but still wants to write. Possible truths and Helen Dunmore’s Talking to the...

  Like many readers probably are, I’m fascinated by recursion: by sentences that can carry on forever through the syntactic links of subordination, and by narratives that fold in and over themselves, a literary homunculus. In particular there’s something about books about books and authors writing about authors that I find utterly compelling....