Readathon – DaneCobain.com

Isaac Asimov – Earth is Room Enough | Review

Title: Earth is Room Enough

Author: Isaac Asimov

Type: Fiction

Page Count/Review Word Count: 176

Rating: 4/5

Isaac Asimov – Earth is Room Enough

I meant to pick this up a while ago for a readathon, but the small print put me off. It was a pretty good read though, and I especially liked the final story. Dreaming is a Private Thing. That’s because it’s the story that inspired Bill Holt and his album, Dreamies.

But honestly, all of the stories in here are pretty good, and it’s got me excited about reading more Asimov on the weeks and months to come. I have a few of them sitting around on my TBR shelves just waiting for me to get to them, and now I have my Asimov vibe back. It’s been too long since I read any of his work.

Oh, and for the record, my favourite stories were The Dead Past, An Immortal Bard and Dreaming is a Powerful Thing. But you could pick out any of these stories at random and still enjoy it.

Isaac Asimov

Click here to buy Earth is Room Enough.

Irvine Welsh – The Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs | Review

Title: The Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs

Author: Irvine Welsh

Type: Fiction

Page Count/Review Word Count: 439

Rating: 8/10

Irvine Welsh – The Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs

Welsh is back on fine form here, and while he has written better (Marabou Stork Nightmares might well be an undiscovered modern classic), this still makes for a fantastic read. And, like most of Welsh’s work, it’s difficult to stop reading it, once the story has absorbed you – in fact, I read this as part of my 24-Hour Dyslexia Action charity readathon, and reading it from cover to cover in one sitting wasn’t a problem. It’s just the kind of story that does that to you.

Loosely speaking, it follows the story of a typical Irvine Welsh character called Danny Skinner, a “hard-drinking, womanising officer” at Edinburgh’s Department of Environmental Health. When the department is joined by a calm, mild-mannered model railway enthusiast called Brian Kibby, Skinner finds himself getting agitated, treating Kibby as a nemesis even though he hasn’t really done anything except for being a living representation of everything that Skinner hates.

Then, and with a sprinkling of style, something strange begins to happen – the two seem to share a strange link, and Kibby starts to suffer from bad hangovers and comedowns despite never touching a drop of the stuff, while Skinner can hit the town with no ill effects the morning after. It’s almost like black slapstick, like black humour – humour about dark subjects like death and mental illness, as opposed to humour by, for and about black people. I’m not a racist, I promise.

Irvine Welsh

And, as usual, Welsh writes in his traditional style, which includes plenty of Scots dialect, plenty of drinking, drug use and debauchery, and his use of profanities and an indented hyphen to signify dialogue. – Kinda like this ya radge c**t.

This can occasionally make it difficult to follow the story, and your brain can start processing narrative as dialogue and vice versa – that said, Welsh’s writing tends to flow from one paragraph to another, and so the odds are that if you have to concentrate to understand something, it’s probably intentional.

And that’s one of the things with Welsh’s writing – it grows on you, and you can re-read his stories and see subtle undertones that weren’t there on your first read. I’ve only read this novel once, and so I’m probably not the fairest of judges, but I have a feeling that that’s the case here, too. Perhaps I’ll re-read it myself at some point, but I need to finish the rest of Welsh’s books first. So the real question is, fancy a race?