Graham Stull (Author of The Hydra)

Graham Stull rated a book did not like it Blood Ties (Kingdom, #2) by Jo Nesbø (Goodreads Author)	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
In these days of AI generated content, there is much talk about the 'uncanny valley' - where visual effects are neither a clearly cartoonish, figurative representation of reality; nor are they close enough to perceived reality to qualify as actual vi ...more
May 26, 2026 07:01AM · like · see review · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of Blood Ties by Jo Nesbø. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — Blood Ties by Jo Nesbø <iframe sandbox id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">
Graham Stull liked Denisse's status update Denisse is 86% done with La princesa de hielo audiolibro: WTF?!?!?!
May 26, 2026 06:59AM
Graham Stull and 44 other people liked Suz's review of A Far-flung Life: "I adored The Light Between Oceans over a decade ago, so naturally I was exceedingly envious without ever saying so, watching all the fancy accounts with the big numbers receiving the gifted bundle… though it appears I have said it now haha. And yes, " Read more of this review »
May 26, 2026 06:59AM · see review · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of A Far-flung Life by M.L. Stedman. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — A Far-flung Life by M.L. Stedman <iframe sandbox id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">
Graham Stull rated a book it was amazing Hamlet by William Shakespeare	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
To read or to watch on stage? That is the question when it comes to Shakespearean plays. And there is a clear consensus among middle class parents of teenagers condemned by the school curriculum to the former: it is better to take seats amidst a sea ...more
Apr 29, 2026 12:24AM · 1 like · like · see review · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of Hamlet by William Shakespeare. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — Hamlet by William Shakespeare <iframe sandbox id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">
Graham Stull rated a book it was ok Something of his Art: Walking to Lubeck with J. S. Bach (Field Notes) by Horatio Clare	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
There is a style of book that exists in this world, and populates the shelves of middle class homes, mostly in England. A gentle piece of quirky non-fiction into which you can dip on a lazy Sunday afternoon. It feels indulgently erudite, warming the ...more
Jan 02, 2026 05:48AM · like · see review · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of Something of his Art by Horatio Clare. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — Something of his Art by Horatio Clare <iframe sandbox id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">
Graham Stull rated a book it was amazing The Glass-Blowers by Daphne du Maurier	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
This was not the first Daphne du Maurier you are likely to read. After all, she is much better known for her pacy, plot-driven psychological stories like Rebecca, The Scapegoat or Jamaica Inn. The Glass-Blowers has little of that. In fact, at the begi ...more
Nov 01, 2025 03:19AM · 1 like · like · see review
Graham Stull rated a book it was amazing The Summer Book by Tove Jansson	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
This is a little gem of a book - easily the best I have read so far this year. It's impossible to even write a book review about it, because the book itself refuses to adhere to conventions. In fact, it is only by having read and reflecting on this bo ...more
Sep 24, 2025 07:06AM · like · see review · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of The Summer Book by Tove Jansson. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — The Summer Book by Tove Jansson <iframe sandbox id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">
Graham Stull rated a book liked it Berlin Game (Penguin Modern Classics) by Len Deighton	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
I first arrived in Berlin in 1991, having hitchhiked through East Germany in a series of old Trabants and the odd Mercedes. It was the day the telephone company was ripping out all the old GDR public phones and replacing them with Wessie ones, and as ...more
Aug 26, 2025 03:44AM · like · see review
Graham Stull rated a book it was amazing The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
It's not easy to define exactly what is good writing. Sure, there are some rules that, if followed, tend to improve the reader's experience and make the text seem more professional. Here, four examples that are often given to would-be writers in crea ...more
Jul 25, 2025 03:31AM · like · see review
Graham Stull rated a book really liked it Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne by Katherine Rundell	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
I first met poet John Donne There where in the century just gone Every Irish not yet -man and -woman Was made to memorise his sonnets: On the bescribbled pages of Soundings, That schoolbook greatest English hits With tea stains on it. I’ll confess he had on ...more
Jul 05, 2025 07:52AM · like · see review

Graham Stull rated a book did not like it

Blood Ties (Kingdom, #2)
by Jo Nesbø (Goodreads Author)

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In these days of AI generated content, there is much talk about the 'uncanny valley' - where visual effects are neither a clearly cartoonish, figurative representation of reality; nor are they close enough to perceived reality to qualify as actual vi In these days of AI generated content, there is much talk about the 'uncanny valley' - where visual effects are neither a clearly cartoonish, figurative representation of reality; nor are they close enough to perceived reality to qualify as actual visual perception. They are in between, and create an uncanny sense of something that is 'almost' real.
Jo Nesbo's 'Blood Ties' occupies the uncanny valley of literature, uncannily poised in between genre scandi police fiction and actual literature. What makes the effect so unpleasant is that the book has some features of real writing to it. Nesbo wants to be a serious writer, and achieves that in places. At the same time, he is cursed with enough muscle memory from years of cranking out many, many scandi murder stories, that he cannot quite escape the ridiculous and cartoonish.
What results is simply awful. A truly unlikable protagonist named Roy who plods through the uni-dimensional, clumsy plot at a slow and pedestrian pace, yet still finds time to embroil himself in action scenes that are as unrealistic as they are unnecessary.
Worst of all is the warped moral lens through which the reader is forced to view Roy and his uninspiring mission to build a roller coaster in rural Norway. Nesbo tries hard to make the reader sympathise with this guy by backsplaining his childhood abuse into our heads with a blunt instrument, yet even that is so uncannily fake as to leave us emotionally cold. Roy's brute-boy morality and sordid affair with a young woman are the side plot to his attempts to escape justice for the many murders we know he and his brother Carl committed in the past. Is Roy remorseful? It's actually hard to say, because the character is so poorly written.
Beyond that, Nesbo's warped moral lens does little more than give the reader a headache. Whatever Roy's childhood, I still wanted him to get caught and go to jail. But I didn't want it badly enough to keep reading. I made it about halfway through, before committing my own sort of crime: I left the paperback at an Airbnb for some other unsuspecting reader to suffer the same fate as me. ...more

Graham Stull liked Denisse's status update

Denisse is 86% done with La princesa de hielo audiolibro: WTF?!?!?!

Graham Stull and 44 other people liked Suz's review of A Far-flung Life:

"I adored The Light Between Oceans over a decade ago, so naturally I was exceedingly envious without ever saying so, watching all the fancy accounts with the big numbers receiving the gifted bundle… though it appears I have said it now haha. And yes, " Read more of this review »

Graham Stull rated a book it was amazing

Hamlet
by William Shakespeare

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To read or to watch on stage? That is the question when it comes to Shakespearean plays. And there is a clear consensus among middle class parents of teenagers condemned by the school curriculum to the former: it is better to take seats amidst a sea To read or to watch on stage? That is the question when it comes to Shakespearean plays. And there is a clear consensus among middle class parents of teenagers condemned by the school curriculum to the former: it is better to take seats amidst a sea of theatregoers, than to suffer pages full of the slings and arrows of outrageous Elizabethan iambic pentameter.
I will make so bold as to disagree. I think you need to do both. First read and study, then go and watch a great performance. And while reading the first few plays might feel toilsome, it is the only way to truly steep yourself in a language that - let's face it - has grown archaic even to the most literate among us.
So as I picked up Hamlet to read it for the very first time, I thanked my English teachers who, 35 years ago, I once cursed for forcing me to chore through Merchant of Venice, Romeo and Juliet, King Lear...And I'm glad I saved Hamlet for so late.
For one thing, it is replete with quotable quotes I knew but did not know came from Hamlet; phrases woven deep into our cultural fabric - everything from the Rotten State of Denmark, to 'Never a Borrower nor a Lender be', to 'the lady doth protest too much, methinks', to the latest Taylor Swift song, and many more I'll leave for the reader to discover himself.
Beyond that, Hamlet is a cracking good story. It is the mother of all whodunnits - for though Hamlet's father the king is dead, was he murdered? And if so, by whom? It is also the progenitor of the 'unreliable narrator' device. Can we believe that what the ghost tells Hamlet is true, when we know Hamlet is losing his mind?
And it is the prototype for the psychological thriller: the internal struggle the young prince endures when faced with the decision of whether to avenge his father's death or to accept it not only gives rise to the most memorable quotable in Shakespeare's oeuvre, but it is also a delicate and meaningful treatise on the nature of courage and cowardice. The poignancy with which Hamlet's prevarications contrast with the bold decisiveness of the similarly wronged Laertes is so sharp it almost causes the reader to wince.
Most of all, though, we readers of this great play must never forget that Hamlet is what the middle class parents of high school scholars proclaim it to be: a set of instructions to actors, so that they can put on a show. Now that I have suffered my slings and arrows, I can't wait to book a ticket and see this masterpiece come to life. ...more

Graham Stull rated a book it was ok

Something of his Art: Walking to Lubeck with J. S. Bach (Field Notes)
by Horatio Clare

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There is a style of book that exists in this world, and populates the shelves of middle class homes, mostly in England. A gentle piece of quirky non-fiction into which you can dip on a lazy Sunday afternoon. It feels indulgently erudite, warming the There is a style of book that exists in this world, and populates the shelves of middle class homes, mostly in England. A gentle piece of quirky non-fiction into which you can dip on a lazy Sunday afternoon. It feels indulgently erudite, warming the insides of your university-educated ego as you delight in a particularly well-crafted metaphor, or the deployment of a somewhat archaic adjective you imagine other classes of reader would be forced to look up on their phones.
Such is the book Horatio Clare sat down to create when writing Something of his Art: Walking with Bach (Field Notes). A sheaf of said notes -most likely handwritten - lay next to a computer, perhaps held in place by a mug of good coffee, as Horatio set about recounting his 'adventures' while recording a BBC documentary that follows the historic walk of Johann Sebastian Bach's across the Germany of 1705.
The problem is, Clare largely fails. To be fair, there are exceptionally well-written passages lost in the long and wearisome trek that is this short tract. But its central purpose - to give the reader a sense of the young J.S. Bach and his walk from Central Germany to the coastal city of Luebeck, to meet the then-famous composer Buxtehude - is lost.
We do not get Something of Bach's Art. Instead we get a rather dry, tired account of three middle-aged men on a work assignment for the British state broadcaster. We learn much about Horatio Clare: he likes birds and wishes Europe had more of them, in that vague way of the comfortable urban naturalist shielded from the realities of nature. He dislikes right-wing populism, yet he very much likes virtue-signalling that fact. Most of all, he is rather indifferent to Bach's music and its German cultural context, instead treating it like the work subject we know it was. He does not even bother to hide the fact that the 'walk' he takes in Bach's footsteps is mostly a series of train and taxi short-cuts to the next hotel.
Perhaps not much is known of Bach or his walk to Lubeck, and so Clare had not much to tell without drifting fully into fiction-writing? Perhaps the very idea of walking in Bach's long-erased footsteps was a silly one? Or perhaps the BBC documentary (that I did not watch) is well-edited in a way these field notes are not, and therefore tells that story much better?
In all events, we do learn something of Horatio Clare's Art - specifically that he is prepared to put his name to a book that never ought been published, great tits, wood pigeons and all. ...more

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The Glass-Blowers
by Daphne du Maurier

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This was not the first Daphne du Maurier you are likely to read. After all, she is much better known for her pacy, plot-driven psychological stories like Rebecca, The Scapegoat or Jamaica Inn.

The Glass-Blowers has little of that. In fact, at the begi ...more

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The Summer Book
by Tove Jansson

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This is a little gem of a book - easily the best I have read so far this year.

It's impossible to even write a book review about it, because the book itself refuses to adhere to conventions. In fact, it is only by having read and reflecting on this bo ...more

Graham Stull rated a book liked it

Berlin Game (Penguin Modern Classics)
by Len Deighton

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I first arrived in Berlin in 1991, having hitchhiked through East Germany in a series of old Trabants and the odd Mercedes. It was the day the telephone company was ripping out all the old GDR public phones and replacing them with Wessie ones, and as I first arrived in Berlin in 1991, having hitchhiked through East Germany in a series of old Trabants and the odd Mercedes. It was the day the telephone company was ripping out all the old GDR public phones and replacing them with Wessie ones, and as I crossed from the lights and noise of West Berlin into East Berlin, I realised I was going to have a hard time making a phone call. In the following years, I would work (and even have one notable flirtation) with East Germans as they struggled to adjust to life in the West that had swallowed their country.

So when I picked up Len Deighton's Berlin Game, I hoped to revisit a little bit of that intangible sense of Cold War Germany - the clash of cultures and the deeper German culture that lay underneath; the fear and hatred of the Stasi; the casual bigotry of the Wessies against the Ossies; the dull tastelessness of Communism braced against the glitzy degeneracy of Capitalism.

To his credit, Deighton tries hard to fill the book with enough details to create that mood. But that is just the problem: he tries too hard. The details are too studied to feel credible. It contrasts well with the movie Goodbye Lenin, a beautiful and compelling sketch of East Germanness that draws from the artists' resevoir of details with the natural ease of true natives.

The other major problem is in the book's protagonist - whose name I have (tellingly) already forgotten two weeks after reading. Who is this man? Is he the pensive, understated and soft-spoken antihero the dialogue suggests? Or is he the quiet hard man, prone to outbursts of violence, whom the narrator goes to great pains to describe? After reading the book, I still cannot really say and I'm sure Deighton had no real idea.

This points to a wider weakness in Deighton's writing. His highly stylistic descriptions are used as a sticking plaster to cover over the shallowness of his characters. I paraphrase a sample here: "She flashed him the kind of smile that said she wanted to know more about his past, but was slightly afraid to ask the question." There are dozens of these kinds of 'smiles' peppered throughout the text, and I'm sure if Deighton sat down with a police sketch artist he would be unable to produce a physical rendering of any of them.

Of course, the book is ultimately a spy novel, and therefore should be judged by its compelling, racy plot. But here I have to give it only middling marks. In fact, very little happens, and although the ending is somewhat surprising, it achieves this twist only by sacrificing the credibility that kept the action slow the rest of the way through - (no spoilers, though).

Ultimately the most interesting thing about Berlin Game has nothing to do with spies and little to do with the Cold War. It is what the story tells us about Postwar England. Deighton, son of a working class man, struggled to find a place in a Britain that had faded from power. He wrote the book at the dawn of Thatcherism, at a time when his country had been humiliated by an IMF economic programme, shocked by race relations and bruised by the paramilitary consequences of Britain's occupation of Northern Ireland.

The result is a well-wrought tale of bureaucratic London, pervaded by wry cynicism and divisions of social class, all washed down by copious glasses of neat gin. The details are sparse, but authentic. Here Deighton is truly writing what he knew. ...more

Graham Stull rated a book it was amazing

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
by Mark Twain

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It's not easy to define exactly what is good writing. Sure, there are some rules that, if followed, tend to improve the reader's experience and make the text seem more professional. Here, four examples that are often given to would-be writers in crea It's not easy to define exactly what is good writing. Sure, there are some rules that, if followed, tend to improve the reader's experience and make the text seem more professional. Here, four examples that are often given to would-be writers in creative writing courses: (1) avoid adverbs, (2) avoid arbitrary changes to character point-of-view, (3) show-don't-tell, (4) keep the 'voice' consistent.
Mark Twain's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer isn't just good writing, it's great writing. And yet, it breaks all of these rules, liberally and willfully. Twain's literary dance is freestyle, the joyous rhythm of pure storytelling, which throws his narrator's lens across an expanse of adverbs, 'author-splaining' and character points-of-view as wide as the Mississippi River; all in a literary voice that changes - practically mid-sentence - from the Southern soprano of a Missouri boy to the often ironic tenor of a Yankee intellectual.
Never do you get the sense that Twain takes these literary liberties out of amateurish necessity, as cover for having been a bad student in dance class. He shows you just enough flashes of clever convention to assure you he could, if he wanted, write the whole thing in the elegant ballroom waltz of his (mostly English and much admired) literary predecessors: Dickens and Thackery.
But Twain's ambition is not just to tell great stories; it is to tell great American stories. This Americanness, fresh and unburdened by convention, makes The Adventures of Tom Sawyer such an interesting read. The style is raw, because it must be raw, if it is to tell of a country still in its adolescence.
So too the eponymous central character. Tom is a flawed hero, a shabby scholar, and an undisciplined and ofttimes ungrateful nephew to his long-suffering Aunt Polly. His boyish play at piracy or robbery makes no moral distinction between good and evil, and in that, he displays not badness, but the amorality of those who have not yet tasted forbidden fruit. Equally, though, he is bursting with vital energy, courage and shows us throughout the book's pages glimpses of the American Smooth of goodness, which his manly future self will one day master.
Most of all, Sawyer is free. Free to fight with other boys, to smoke, to break out of his house at midnight and explore distant river islands, unconventional ideas or "h'anted houses". He is the Lord of the Dance.
In all of these ways, Tom Sawyer is not a character at all. He is the personification of this juvenile America. His Adventures, set purposefully at the dawn of the civil war, are an allegory for the rise of the United States as it shuffles forward in an awkward and uncharted dance towards greatness.
No wonder this book has entranced generations of American readers. When they read Tom Sawyer's Adventures, they are not just being told a story, they are hearing their own nation's biography.
Tom's flaws are their flaws; Tom's accomplishments are theirs too. And while this Nation-State Tom has long since grown up, and the Republic of his manhood long since turned into an Empire frail with decay, still there remains something of that unconquerable American spirit that makes this book important.
For as the great rock band Rush sang of Tom Sawyer, a 105 years later:
"What you say about his company, is what you say about society." ...more

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Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne
by Katherine Rundell

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I first met poet John Donne
There where in the century just gone
Every Irish not yet -man and -woman
Was made to memorise his sonnets:
On the bescribbled pages of Soundings,
That schoolbook greatest English hits
With tea stains on it.

I’ll confess he had on ...more

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	The Hydra 4.16 avg rating — 45 ratings — published 2015 — 3 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
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