Paperbacks – DaneCobain.com

Title: Alien

Author: Alan Dean Foster

Type: Fiction

Page Count/Review Word Count: 246

Rating: 4.25*/5

For some reason, I wasn’t expecting this book to be as good as it was. I’m not sure why, because I’ve seen and enjoyed the movie and I’ve read and enjoyed Alan Dean Foster. I think another part of the reason is the book itself, which is one of those old sci-fi paperbacks with tiny print and super yellowed pages. And then for the first ten pages or so, there was a lot of computer jargon that felt super dated and just kind of annoying, with people saying stuff like “patch the RDN drive through the CRX aux” for pages at a time.

But once I started to get absorbed into it, I found myself unironically enjoying it, and despite the fact that it’s a novelisation of the movie, I think I liked the book better. That’s a testament to Alan Dean Foster’s skills as a writer, and I was particularly impressed by how visceral it was. In the chest bursting scene, for example, Foster was writing about the stench of Kane’s perforated bowel, a detail that you wouldn’t pick up on if you just watched the movie and wrote what you saw.

All in all, this would be a great book to read if you’re into sci fi in general, as well as if you specifically like Alien. It definitely did the movie justice, hurray.

Alan Dean Foster

Click here to buy Alien.

Graham Greene – Travels With My Aunt | Review

Title:Travels With My Aunt

Author: Graham Greene

Type: Fiction

Page Count/Review Word Count: 262

Rating: 9/10

Graham Greene – Travels With My Aunt

Travels With My Aunt is one of my favourites of all of Graham Greene’s entertainments, the story of a retired bank manager who goes travelling with his Aunt Augusta, after meeting her at his mother’s funeral. And while she might be in her seventies, she sure knows how to have fun, dragging him from Brighton and Paris to Istanbul and Paraguay and mingling with everyone from hippies to secret agents and war criminals.

There’s a lot going on throughout the novel to keep you entertained, but really this is a triumph of characterisation rather than of plot, and much of the dialogue is simply sublime. The novel itself has an overall feeling of light-heartedness, making it a joy to read compared to some of Greene’s darker, more serious work – in fact, I think it stands up well to many of the modern mass-produced paperbacks that seem to be crowding the market, these days. I certainly know which one I’d prefer to read!

Whether you’ve read Greene’s work before or whether you’re new to him, I’d highly recommend giving this book some of your time – it might not quite change your life, but at the very least it’ll cheer you up and leave a smile on your face, and at the end of the day, a book that does that is fine by me. So what are you waiting for? Get reading it, and let me know what you think!