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I Am Not Sidney Poitier (2009) is a real blast. I’m loving it. Very amusing and satirical. This is look like my favourite book by Percival Everett so far

The tension has most certainly ratcheted up 😱

She danced wildly, feeling that here, in this classless, uncritical society, she had found some sort of escape. She was so excited that she laughed all the time and her partner, excited by her excitement. flung himself about in a physical fury, at times taking leaps into the air as though the dance itself were not enough to consume his energy.

Laura nodded but now their moods had been exchanged. She was apathetic while Vicky, a-shimmer with anticipation, was eager for Laura to share her eagerness. ‘You'll see, we'll have a fabulous time. It'll be mad. I'll make Clarrie introduce you to everyone. If you don't dance, I won't dance either’

A sobering, if not downright depressing, read that manages to hold power to account without losing sight of why the game matters to people in the first place. Highly recommended for football fans who like their sports writing steeped in cultural context and modern history

Laura, discouraged, dropped down on the rug and shutting her eyes, saw herself walking in night-time Soho through a street a-dazzle with lights, where nobody slept. There were discotheques and dance clubs and cafés and coffee bars and young men by the dozen: young men beyond dreams, with lean pliable bodies and hair curling on their shoulders, as beautiful as archangels, in clothes all colours.

The holiday was almost over. They had known for a short time the simplicity of independence. Tomorrow they must face again the emotional confusion of home.

A very readable, sharp, sociologically grounded commentary that treats football as a lens for broader political and cultural shifts. Excellent so far

So good

Would you believe it?

The Rouse is the second book in a short period to mention Ironfoot Jack.

He also appears in I Hear a New World.

Woah. A big twist as Luke works out what happened to Pretty Baby

Eddie is constantly walking a tightrope with no safety net. Every single relationship is so transactional. There’s no honour among thieves here, just people constantly calculating the trade-off value of everyone around them

Come and see me when the ink dries

The Luke v Curtis non-fight is visceral

Charming Peter versus Button Dainty showdown 😱

Enjoying EL’s meticulous detailing of middle-class cultural gatekeeping and his single minded obsession with status

The post-party discussion between Sarah and Wilfred is fascinating. Talk about cards on the table! And very uncomplimentary if it’s also about AS Byatt

I’m around halfway through this book now and finding it a bit of a slog. Perhaps it will make more sense when I reach the conclusion and reflect upon it? Perhaps I’m just not that interested in the history of California?

The murder section is a bit more interesting and revealing

Some jaw dropping stuff in this book. No surprise Meta are not keen on this information being in the public domain. I probably wouldn’t be reading it if they hadn’t tried to suppress it

The men and women of the West scraped clear the glass of their own lives whenever they wanted to make a new image there, and San Francisco was a hothouse made out of these lives, incubating fantasies, erasures, and new beginnings. (Like the glass used for early photographic negatives and later repurposed for green houses)

That exotic new world of images speeding by would become the true home of those who spent their Saturdays watching images beamed across the darkness of the movie the-ater, then their evenings watching images beamed through the atmosphere and brought home into a box like a camera obscura or a crystal ball, then their waking hours surfing the Internet wired like the old telegraph system.

Through the new technologies-the train to the landscape, the camera to the spectacle-the Victorians were trying to find their way back, but where they had lost the old familiar things they recovered exotic new ones. What they had lost was solid; what they gained was made out of air.

I loved the James Ellroy-esque "A Violent Masterpiece" and this seems to be just as good. Another dark, razor-sharp modern noir that moves at breakneck speed and pulls no punches. I'm a confirmed Jordan Harper fan!

This captures that narrow historical corridor between the austerity of the 1950s and the full explosion of Swinging London in the mid/late 60s. Despite elements of modernity the infrastructure for a truly modern female life hasn't quite been built yet. These characters are caught between eras. It's fab and has a wonderful duality: part classic novel of manners, part early herald of 1960s liberation

Every time I pick this up I love it. I've just got to the party section which is brilliantly done. All that's good and all that's awful about house parties. This is such a vivid evocation of early 60s London complete with Beehives, bohemianism, and the shadow of Victorian values clearly present but starting to recede.

Very assured for a debut