“…it’s about time that a different – non-sexist, non-passive, progressive female – perspective on sexuality broke though into the mainstream, so the more of us doing it, the better…”
Suhayl Saadi: Psychoraag
“…I see little point in attempting to mimic what’s already been done very well by others. But I mean, I didn’t write Psychoraag thinking, “Halleluia! Now I’m going to write the first Asian Scottish novel!”…”
David Nobakht: Suicide: No Compromise
Chris Mitchell Suicide: No Compromise – David Nobakht See all music by Suicide at Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com Just finished the top notch hardback edition of David Nobakht’s biography of synth-rock pioneers Suicide. I would have loved to have written this book. Very much a band biography rather than a personal history of Suicide’s two members, […]
Trainspotting The Play: Harry Gibson: 10 Years On
“…Trainspotting keeps bringing new people into theatres; theatre managers cry out happily, ‘We’ve never sold so much lager’…”
Joshua Davis: The Underdog: How I Survived The World’s Most Outlandish Competitions
Chris Mitchell The Underdog: How I Survived The World’s Most Outlandish Competitions – Joshua Davis See all books by Joshua Davis at Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com Joshua Davis set out to win. At anything. Living in a crappy apartment with a crappy job and a loving but long suffering wife, Davis set out to prove himself. […]
Nic Dunlop: The Lost Executioner
Chris Mitchell The Lost Executioner is my Book of the Year. Like my pick for last year, Emma Larkin’s Secret Histories: Finding George Orwell in A Burmese Teashop, The Lost Executioner is a personal travelogue into a country that tries to understand its recent, disastrous politics. Where Secret Histories documents Burma’s slide into a real-life […]
Carly Milne – Naked Ambition: Women Who Are Changing Porn
Chris Mitchell A collection of essays from women working in the US porn industry and women consuming porn outside it, Naked Ambition is an intelligent and provocative survey of pro-porn female opinions. There’s little in the way of gushing praise about the industry itself – most of the writers agree that newcomers get eaten alive […]
Magnus : Sleepwalker
Chris Mitchell These days I’m reduced to randomly choosing new music at the bootleg CD stalls on Bangkok’s streets. I don’t bother with the music press anymore so I have no idea who’s up and coming, who to find out about, who to watch – these days I just pick albums on whether I like […]
John Battelle – The Search: How Google And Its Rivals Rewrote The Rules Of Business And Transformed Our Culture
Chris Mitchell John Battelle’s The Search is more than just a potted history of Google, although that company looms large throughout his book; rather, it’s a book which takes stock of Google’s giddy rise, the search engine wars between Google, Yahoo! and MSN, and the arrival of online contextual advertising which has irrevocably changed the […]
Christopher G. Moore: Gambling On Magic
“…I was at a bit of a disadvantage during our caffienated conversation as I have yet to read any of Moore’s books. He kindly gave me copies of the aforementioned Zero Hour, along with the Burma-set…”
Atomic Swindlers : Coming Out Electric
Chris Mitchell Music is the best mood-alterer we have. Put on a record and you can find yourself grinning involuntarily a few moments later; conversely, stand in an elevator for more than a few seconds involuntarily listening to crackly saxophone-driven muzak that manages to hit that precise treble frequency which is the sonic equivalent of […]
Hunter S. Thompson : An Appreciation : A Real American Patriot
Chris Mitchell on why Hunter S. Thompson was one of the most important figures in American letters I love my friends. Away from email for a few days, log in this morning to 5 different people telling me Hunter S. Thompson is dead. Distraught isn’t the word. Thompson was forever sidelined as a caricature in […]
The Incredibles Are Satan’s FuckBeast
Chris Mitchell on the abomination that is Pixar’s latest The Incredibles. No no no. Sick and wrong. Until now, digital animation had been synonymous not so much with great computer generated cartoons as great scripts – Toy Story, Finding Nemo, Monsters Inc, A Shark’s Tale and, leading them all, Shrek – which not only broke […]
Emma Larkin: Secret Histories: Finding George Orwell In A Burmese Tea Shop
Chris Mitchell This could well be my book of the year. Ostensibly an attempt to retrace the physical origins of George Orwell’s novel Burmese Days, Secret Histories is actually a superbly concise and deeply scary history lesson in the fate of pre and post-colonial Myanmar. (It’s been published in the USA under the less lyrical […]
Robert Carver – The Accursed Mountains: Journeys In Albania
Chris Mitchell This is truly an armchair traveller’s book: Robert Carver delivers a fascinating account of his time in a country that you’d never want to visit. Managing to make several journeys through Albania in the early 1990s directly after the collapse of communism and shortly before the onset of all-out anarchy, Carver reveals a […]
Anthony Swofford – Jarhead
Chris Mitchell Jarhead documents Swofford’s time in the US Marine Corps in the run up to Gulf War One – as a personal insight into the American war machine and the daily life of a scout/sniper both in preparation for and within the actual theatre of war, Jarhead is a compelling ground level description. Far […]
Colin Feltham – Problems Are Us…Or Is It Just Me?
Chris Mitchell Colin Feltham’s book is a concerted attack on the self-help industry and an uncompromising questioning of the effectiveness of counselling and therapy as a whole. Feltham’s conclusions do not provide a cheerful prognosis – in essence, he maintains that professionals and clients alike muddle through with a mish mash of different methods and […]
Ben Myers – The Book Of Fuck
Chris Mitchell With a title like that, you’ve got to write a good book or have the word “wanker” silently appended to your name forever after. Just to make things more difficult, the press release trumpets the fact that The Book Of Fuck was written in seven days. I don’t know about your criteria for […]
Clive Cussler – Raise The Titanic!
Chris Mitchell You can’t argue with that exclamation mark. Another milestone on my quest to rediscover classic thrillers, Raise The Titanic! is so full of plot twists the cover might as well be made up of multi coloured dots and put out at parties. It is a breath-taking, preposterous plot in which the raising of […]
Anna Funder – Stasiland
Chris Mitchell Recently I re-read George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four, fifteen years after first reading it. Orwell’s future vision is an inherent part of our culture now, commoditised and trivialised, denied shock value or reconsideration due to its very familiarity. Re-reading the book and returning to Winston Smith’s world, however, is to feel a distinct […]
Mark Andresen – Field Of Vision: The Broadcast Life Of Kenneth Allsop
Chris Mitchell Biography is often the most satisfying of all literary genres; other people’s lives frequently prove more fascinating than most fiction and the palpable, if inevitable, sense of beginning, middle and end provides a natural plotline and structure. Where most fiction is reality badly rendered, biography has the opposite problem of having to deal […]
Nicholson Baker – Double Fold
Chris Mitchell For bibliophiles, this is something of a horror story. Double Fold is a journalistic tour de force of the wholesale destruction wreaked upon countless unique books and periodicals within American libraries during the 1980s and early 1990s. This wasn’t the work of some crypto-fascist bookburning organisation, but the work of the libraries themselves. […]
Donald Rawley – Slow Dance On The Fault Line
Chris Mitchell LA may be the City Of Angels, but in Donald Rawley’s debut collection of short stories, it’s also a city of ghosts. Slow Dance On The Fault Line describes those lives normally lost within the noise of the night, finding the memories, dreams and moments in people’s lives which are built, like the […]
Mike Daisey – 21 Dog Years: Doing Time At Amazon.com
Chris Mitchell I hesitate to call Mike Daisey’s book profound but it’s certainly got a lot more depth than most corporate bitching books. 21 Dog Years is actually a love story of sorts – of how self-confessed slacker Daisey fell for the shiny dream of new start-up Amazon and the charisma of Jeff Bezos which […]
8mm : Opener EP
Chris Mitchell The efforts of unsigned bands are something I usually prefer to pass over in silence. There’s a simple reason why many bands remain unsigned: because they’re bloody awful. Or, perhaps more accurately, so hopelessly mediocre as to provoke nothing but indifference. I subscribe to the theory of sonic Darwinism – those who are […]
