Review: Sampled at Sadler’s Wells

This wonderful show provides a taster of some of the goodies that will be available in this north London venue’s 2016 dance programme

---

I can’t claim to be a dance expert. I’ve been Sadler’s Wells a total of five times, I’ve seen Billy Elliot and I watch Strictly. That’s the sum of my dance experience (unless you count the many lost hours in various clubs, which it’s probably best not to). But I do love it, so I’m trying to get to know it better.

It was with this in mind that I went to Sampled at Sadler’s Wells on 30 January. This two-hour show provides a small taster of the venue’s upcoming season, hence the name. I didn’t really know what to expect as I’ve never been before. The show started with a short film of interviews with some of the performers of the first piece, Outlier by Wayne McGregor. Then the auditorium went completely dark, the lights on the stage went up and the performance began.

Sampled at Sadler's Wells. I was a lot higher up than usual. Bit scary.

Outlier is a contemporary ballet piece. To me it looked like ballet but exaggerated. There was an air of threat, of violence, to the performance. It was awe inspiring and powerful, but didn’t have the grace and beauty that I associate with ballet. It was stunning.

The act that really stole the show for me, though, were the duets by Julia Hiriart Urruty and Claudio Gonzalez. They danced two tangos in the first act. The first was heart-breakingly beautiful – the story of a man remembering his dead wife and bringing her back to life through dance. It moved me to tears. They also danced a more contemporary version to the song Wicked Game and then an impressively athletic tango in the second act. They were frankly amazing and I want to see them again – which is surely the point of the show. I will certainly be going to Immortal Tango at The Peacock next month.

Equally impressive, and also on the ‘must see again’ list, was Connor Scott performing his piece Get Up. This contemporary dance won him the BBC Young Dancer 2015 award, and it’s easy to see why. The piece was powerful, athletic and yet graceful; this 17-year-old is certainly one to watch.

The first was heart-breakingly beautiful – the story of a man remembering his dead wife and bringing her back to life through dance

Special mention must go to The Ruggeds, a world champion b-boy crew from The Netherlands. They performed Adrenaline, possibly the most appropriately named piece of the evening. This isn’t a dance form that I would usually watch, but I thoroughly enjoyed it and anyone with an interest should really book tickets to Breakin’ Convention ‘16, Sadler’s Wells’ festival of hip-hop dance.

Much more traditional was Zenaida Yanowsky’s rendition of the Dying Swan from Swan Lake. Making up the rest of the programme were BBC Young Dancer finalist Vidya Patel, performing a traditional Kathak dance Khoj - The Search, and 7 Fingers with Nocturnes, a dreamlike contemporary dance and circus crossover.

They were all excellent. All incredibly different and a wonderful example of the breadth of dance styles. I had a thoroughly enjoyable evening and will definitely be sampling (haha! Sorry …) this show again next year.

Art: Empty Lot by Abraham Cruzvillagas

The latest installation to grace Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall provides interesting comment on the urban and natural environments

---

I really love the Turbine Hall installations at Tate Modern. I love how they’ve used that space, turned it into part of the art itself. It would have been so easy to simply convert it into more gallery rooms, but instead they’ve made that cavernous area into both a challenge and an opportunity for artists – how are you going to fill this, how are you going create art here?

The latest artwork is an interesting one. It’s called Empty Lot and is by Abraham Cruzvillegas. It features two sets of massive triangular seed trays. These are suspended above the floor of the Turbine Hall on scaffolding. All the materials are found or recycled.

Nothing has started growing in this series of trays yet. 

Each of the trays has been filled with soil from parks and gardens across London. The soil is being watered and lamps provide light and heat. And that’s it. The artist – and his audience – is simply waiting to see what will appear. It’s very likely that the soil will contain all kinds of seeds; mostly grass seeds, but there could be all kinds of wildflowers and maybe even some insect lavae. The question is whether any of these will develop.

When I visited one set of trays was just soil still, but the other side had a variety of what appeared to be grasses growing. My plan is to go back several times throughout the exhibition – it runs till 3 April 2016 – and see what’s changed. Will the plants that started growing survive? Will more grow? What sort? Will swarms of insects emerge from the dirt?

There are plenty of examples of species thriving in an urban environment, Red Foxes being one of the most ubiquitous, but Collared Dove and Carrion Crow are also survivors

To me this piece represents the interaction between the urban and natural environments: in these times of increasing urbanisation how will nature react and survive? There are plenty of examples of species thriving in an urban environment, Red Foxes being one of the most ubiquitous, but Collared Dove and Carrion Crow are also survivors. Sadly there are many more that are suffering. My knowledge doesn’t run to plant species, but it seems likely that these will be mirroring animals: the most adaptable species will increase while the more specialised will decline and eventually become extinct.

I also think the work says something about the tenacity of nature. The grasses are growing – and hopefully more will do so – despite being transplanted and a lack of natural sunlight. We tend to think that our imprint on this world will be permanent, but it won’t. Humans have had a devastating effect on the natural environment, but this won’t last. The world will long outlive us.

Above and below: grasses are beginning to develop

Review: King Rat by China Mieville

VERDICT: A beautifully written modern-day urban fairytale

I put off reading this for years because the blurb mentions drum n bass and jungle – two types of music I’m really not interested in. However, Mieville is one of my favourite authors and I plan to read everything he’s published, and that includes this book. And boy was I pleased I did.

I’d describe this as a modern-day urban fairytale. It follows Saul, a young Londoner whose life is turned upside down when he comes home to find his father murdered. All the evidence seems to point to him as the murderer, so when a mysterious stranger, the titular King Rat, comes to bust him out of jail Saul has little choice but to go with him.

What follows is a music-fuelled adventure through a fantastical London underground, complete with characters from myth, such as Anansi the spider. As Saul spends more time with King Rat he learns more about his own true character, and becomes embroiled in a centuries-long and deadly battle between King Rat and the Ratcatcher.

The book is beautifully written. It reads as if written by someone totally in love with language, and I was surprised to find out it was Mieville’s first book – it seems like a much more accomplished novel. Although he was writing essays and articles long before he published his novels.

I wonder if maybe at some point Gaiman and Mieville sat down and riffed on alternative Londons

There are definite shades of Mieville’s own Un Lun Dun and The Kraken, as well as Gaiman’s Neverwhere. This book, however, predates the first two by more than a decade and was published just two years after the Neverwhere TV show aired, so couldn’t have been influenced by any of these titles. I wonder if maybe at some point Gaiman and Mieville sat down and riffed on alternative Londons.

This is one of Mieville’s most accessible books and would work as a great introduction to his work. I read it in just five days. It’s full of action but also quintessentially Mieville’s New Weird.

Review: Nymphomation by Jeff Noon

VERDICT: This alt-Manchester-set thriller and urban fantasy is exceptionally well written

This is an exceptionally hard book to review. Not because it's bad – it isn't, it's excellent – but because it's almost impossible to define what it's about.

Gambling? Definitely. It nicely sums up our seeming obsession with the National Lottery and Euromillions, the faith of the poor and the desperate that a game of chance will turn their lives around.

But it's about much more than that. Love, friendship, mystery, murder, maths and the idea that information creates more information – it reproduces, hence nymphomation.

It’s 1999 and Manchester is in the grip of a new gambling game based on dominoes – match your domino with the randomly chosen one to win. One side means a smaller win, getting both means winning big. Every Friday night the populace of Manchester hold onto their ‘bones’ and hope to match the winning numbers. A double six garners the best prize, while a double blank (the ‘joker bone’) is the booby prize – no one knows what it is, but everyone knows it’s bad.

A double six garners the best prize, while a double blank (the ‘joker bone’) is the booby prize

But of course there’s much more to it than that, and a small group of Mancunians are brought together to look at what really might be going on. What does the joker bone really represent? Who is the mysterious Mr Millions? What does all this have to do with groundbreaking yet dangerous maths research from the 70s? And what it the true nature of luck?

It’s hard to go into further detail without giving the game – pun intended – away. Suffice to say this is an exceptionally well written thriller crossed with urban fantasy. It’s part of Noon’s Vurt series, but doesn’t require the others to have been read.

Review: Survivor by K R Griffiths

This novel take on the serial killer plot didn’t quite hit the spot

---

THIS is an interesting take on the serial killer story – told from the point of view of the killer. This gives us the opportunity to see how a person comes to be a serial killer.

We first meet Clive Barrett at work. Barrett is the perfect employee for his City bosses: quiet, successful, unassuming, he keeps to himself and doesn’t cause trouble. If anything the only problem is that he doesn’t join in enough, and in fact in these opening passages he is making his excuses and leaving his colleagues to their Friday night drinks. Barrett has other plans for his evening.

Barrett wants to be the most notorious serial killer the UK has ever seen. But there’s set to be a spanner in the works; one of his previous kills didn’t stay dead, and she wants revenge. Thus begins a deadly game of cat and mouse.

Barrett is a fledgling killer; he makes mistakes – the biggest of these leaving his new adversary alive. He tries to learn from these slip-ups. He has big plans. This is a completely different approach to the serial killer plot as I know it. The Dexter series of books is the only other story I know of that takes the serial killer as the main character. I haven’t read these but as far as I’m aware Dexter is already established as a very competent and deadly killer.

There is an awful lot of violence against women in the book. But it’s well handled. It can be easy for such stories to descend into misogynistic torture porn but Griffiths manages to avoid this.

So why only two stars? I don’t think we get enough into Barrett’s head – we don’t really understand why he’s a serial killer (unlike with, say, Dexter). Also the man is clearly a psychopath and it’s hard to have any kind of emotional connection to a character who himself is lacking emotions, even if it's just to dislike him. This is also my issue with Dexter and why I haven’t read it.

My main problem, though, is the ending. I found it deeply unsatisfying and unconvincing. I feel that Griffiths has sacrificed a realistic ending for the sake of a twist. And unfortunately I didn’t think the twist was that good. I won’t say what it is – you’ll just have to decide if you want to read the book!

For sake of clarity, I’m not comparing this book to the Dexter series, just using the latter as a reference.

I received this book as part of the GoodReads FirstReads scheme.

Review: Sirdar Snuggly Baby Speckle

It's being used for a boy’s baby jacket, but how will this super-soft baby yarn measure up?

---

First impressions
This is an incredibly light-feeling, soft yarn, with an almost velvety handle. I really like the colour – I don’t usually go for green but this works well. I bought the yarn online which always makes colour choice difficult, and as this is for a boy's baby jacket, I wanted to avoid the old ‘blue for a boy’ cliche. The speckle effect is also nice. The twist appears tight. This yarn should knit up well.

In use
This is a really nice yarn to knit with. The addition of acrylic gives a tiny bit of stretch and it’s tight enough that there’s no splitting. I’ve had to undo a few rows and found this easy – the yarn doesn’t ‘stick’ the way some do.

The speckle effect on a child’s jacket is fun and a nice way of introducing a bit of colour

Knitted up, the speckle effect is lovely. It’s really quite random, creating a result that resembles sploshes of paint flicked over a cream fabric. I can imagine that this might be too much on an adult garment, but on a child’s jacket it’s fun and a nice way of introducing a bit of colour.

Conclusion
Beautifully soft and fun to knit with, it’s a great baby yarn and machine washable, too. It would probably work well for blankets, but I’m not sure it would be suitable for grown up clothes.

Yarn spec
Double knit • 50g • 135m • 60% cotton/40% acrylic • 28 rows x 22 sts in 10cm square  • 4mm needle, 4mm crochet hook • Colourway: Moss • RRP: £4

Review: Aeon’s Gate trilogy by Sam Sykes

I’m impressed with this debut trilogy from a new fantasy author

---

I’m always on the look out for good new fantasy – new to me, anyway. Twitter has turned out to be an excellent source for this. I believe I found Sam Sykes having followed Joe Abercrombie. Sykes is very entertaining on Twitter and I felt it was only fair to buy one of his books. So I did.

The first book in the trilogy, Tome of the Undergates, starts with a 200+ page sea battle with pirates. That’s either awful or awesome depending on your point of view, and I thought it was awesome. Being thrown right into the action like that isn’t something I’ve experienced before. Usually battles come after the characters have been introduced, when we know who to cheer for. Managing to make the reader care about characters we’ve only just met is hard, and here you do kinda care. Even more difficult is keeping the reader invested even after those characters have been revealed to be a bunch of scumbags and villains.

This opening is intriguing. We don’t know why the characters are fighting pirates, why they’re at sea, or even who our main cast is. All this information is revealed slowly, keeping interest high. Our intrepid gang comprises Lenk, the leader, Kataria, Dreadalion, Gariath, Asper and Denaos. In many ways they are the ideal AD&D group – leader, warrior, mage, barbarian, cleric and thief.

Tome, as the name implies is about a book. The kind that if it falls into the wrong hands Very Bad Things will happen. It’s our group of adventurers’ job to ensure that doesn’t happen. Not because it’s the right thing to do, but rather because they’re being paid very good money. Our gang is not heroic or noble, with the possible exception of Lenk, who at least tries. And yet you still root for them. This may be because they’re real. They’re flawed, they’re vulnerable, they’re petty, they have secrets, they’ve made mistakes and they want to atone for them, some of them have done terrible things, some of them are going to do terrible things. In short, they’re human. Even the ones that aren’t.

My dad’s comment pretty much summed the books up: “They’re good, really good, but they’re so weird”

The other two books in the trilogy are Black Halo and The Skybound Sea. I’m not going to attempt to a precis of each of them – read them, they’re great. Each book comes to a proper conclusion, but the story continues throughout.

The books are incredibly inventive. Sykes has created whole new races, complete with history, culture, beliefs and so on. The writing is stunning; by turns funny, exciting, gross, beautiful, moving, violent, disgusting and more. The final book ends with a great twist, presumably setting up Sykes’s next book, A City Stained Red, which he is working on right now. When he’s not on Twitter.

I genuinely loved these books. I even insisted my dad read them, and I never do that. His comment pretty much summed them up: “They’re good, really good, but they’re so weird.” I’d take that as a compliment.

Review: Eeny Meeny

A thriller with an intriguing set-up and plenty of twists and turns

---

I really enjoyed this book. The premise is intriguing: two victims, one bullet; one dies, the other lives. The first two victims are a young couple who are snatched while hitching home from a festival. When the girl bursts from the forest, emaciated and starving, at first no one believes her story that her boyfriend begged her to kill him. They assume it’s a relationship gone wrong - maybe he turned on her and she shot him in self-defence. But then two more people go missing and the authorities start to realise they’ve got a serial killer on their hands.

The police investigation is led by DI Helen Grace. Grace is possibly the best female lead I’ve ever encountered in a crime thriller. In fact she might be the only one I’ve encountered – women tend to be victims, seconds-in-command, family members or support in some way to the main male characters, the DI or private eye and the killer.

Grace is ambitious, driven, strong willed and yet dedicated and loyal to her team. She isn’t a particularly sympathetic character, which is quite refreshing. It’s nice to read a female character when the author has resisted the urge to make her likeable. She is impressive, though. If someone you loved had been murdered you’d want someone like Grace heading the investigation.

Helen Grace is possibly the best female lead I’ve ever encountered in a crime thriller – in fact she might be the only one I’ve encountered

The author has previously written screenplays, and this discipline seems to have served him well. The short chapters are episodic and told from the point of view of various characters, often Grace, but also members of her team and the victims. Each chapter manages to reveal information – and often misinformation – while keeping the reader in the dark.

The book is full of twists, and I usually pride myself on being able to work out what’s coming, but with this novel I was really kept guessing.

Overall this was a well-written, pacy thriller that provided a very enjoyable read.

Disclaimer: I received this book through the Goodreads First Reads scheme.

Review: Thor: The Dark World

The second Thor film has come in for a bit of criticism, but I loved it

---

I’ve seen quite a lot of criticism of Thor: The Dark World: it’s humourless, takes itself too seriously and is somewhat ridiculous. But I think it’s fantastic, and here’s why.

First off, it looks gorgeous. The SFX are excellent. But it’s not just that – the overall ‘look’ of the film is beautiful. It reminds me Guillermo del Toro’s Hellboy II and Blade II films.

I don’t agree with the charges that it’s humourless and takes itself too seriously, either. Some scenes are hilarious: Darcy and Ian the Intern, Thor on a tube train. And while Chris Hemsworth is rather po-faced throughout, Tom Hiddleston seems to be having great fun. In fact his Loki is worth the price of admission alone.

There isn’t much of a plot – but who cares when you’ve got Tom Hiddleston in a leather coat and chains?

I admit there isn’t much of a plot. Just some stuff about invading dark elves, Earth at risk of total destruction, blah, blah. But really who cares when you’ve got Tom H in a leather coat and chains? Mostly it just seems to be preamble to the next Avengers film – a long-winded way of getting Loki where he needs to be for that film. But when the preamble is this pretty, what does that matter?

I only have two criticisms. First, Anthony Hopkins as Odin. It just doesn’t work for me. Ron Perlman would have been far more badass. Second, Greenwich is NOT three stops from Charing Cross! In fact the bit of Greenwich they go to isn’t even on the sodding Underground. This might not seem important, but it wouldn’t have taken much to get that bit right, and as London is the best city in the world they should have got it right.

I found the film highly entertaining and that’s all I ask for from a comic book film. It’s also left me thirsting for next Avengers installment.

Book review: Larkswood

A mystery with intrigue – but ultimately did it satisfy?

---

The synopsis of this book was really intriguing: dark secrets, families torn apart, a historical reach spanning generations. What’s not to like? The introductory chapter didn’t disappoint, either, setting up the mystery nicely.

The story begins with Louisa Hamilton and her coming out, along with her older sister. Louisa is then set for a season in London, which she really isn’t looking forward to. However, she becomes ill and is sent to Larkswood House, the family home to which her grandfather, whom she has never met, has only just recently returned.

As she recovers, Louisa begins to love Larkswood, her grandfather Edward and, more unfortunately, the hot gardener. She also discovers what appears to be a family secret and endeavours to investigate. Some 40 years ago, when Edward was a teenager living with his two beloved sisters and with absentee parents, disaster strikes the family, tearing it apart.

The two stories are told in parallel to each other; we don’t learn what the terrible secret is until near the end, but I found it easy to guess. That said, there were plenty of other twists along the way that I didn’t see coming. As a thriller this all works very well and I read the book in just a couple of days – the mystery is such that you really want to find out what happened.

I didn’t buy Edward’s acceptance – and tacit approval and encouragement – of Louisa’s relationship with the gardener

One of the things that often seems to suffer with thrillers, though, is characterisation, and this is the case here. The characters are all rather cliched and one dimensional. Edward is never more than the gruff, bluff grandpa. Louisa’s sister is the beautiful, shallow one interested only parties and securing a good marriage. Louisa herself is plain and bookish, intended no doubt to appeal to a rather bookish audience, or at least one that sees itself as such. Parallels between the two sets of sisters are clear but never examined.

I didn’t buy Edward’s acceptance – and tacit approval and encouragement – of Louisa’s relationship with the gardener. Their differences in station would have been enough for him to put his foot down and his own past would mean he would want to keep them apart. I can’t say much more without giving away the secret, but I found the ending unsatisfying. It was wrapped too easily for my liking.

Book review: Shades of Milk and Honey

This Austen/magic mash-up didn’t prove spellbinding for me

---

The problem with following authors on Twitter is that when you don’t like their books you feel bad. I do, anyway, especially when said author seems to be so nice.

I really didn’t get on with Mary Robinette Kowal’s Shades of Milk and Honey. Jane Austen-esque, it was essentially Sense and Sensibility with magic, or glamour as it’s called in the book. I didn’t warm to the main character, Jane, at all. Mostly I just thought she needed to get over herself and grow a backbone. Her younger sister Melody was just plain annoying.

While the passages on glamour were often beautiful, the story itself was completely predictable. In some ways it was both too similar to Jane Austen and yet not similar enough. It was so alike that I couldn’t help but compare it, unfavourably, to the original. Had it simply followed the story of Sense and Sensibility, more like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (the story of P&P with added zombie fun), I might have been able to let the story wash over me and just enjoyed the addition of magic.

Modern-day menace
I found some of the language jarring. Depression instead of melancholia, for example. The former was in use in the 19th century, but the latter was far more common, especially among laypeople. And using gift as a verb is just plain wrong (as in a synonym for given, rather than talented).

I understand that Kowal did a lot of research to ensure the historical accuracy of the series so it’s likely that she had good reason for using the language she did; unfortunately I don’t know what those reasons might be so I can only judge as I find.

Melody was just plain annoying

It was also really very obvious what was going to happen – who would turn out to be the rotter, who the good guy behind the taciturn exterior. And it was about as subtle as a punch to the face. I got it from the very first page that Jane was plain and Melody beautiful. It didn’t need to be repeated every couple of paragraphs.

It’s a shame, because I really wanted to like this book, but I just didn’t warm to it. I won’t be reading any of the others in the series.

Review: My Mad Fat Teenage Diary

This teenage diary wasn’t what I expected, but that doesn’t make it a bad thing

---

I bought this having watched the excellent TV show on Channel 4, but then I had a look at the comments on Goodreads and was a bit apprehensive. The main criticism was that the book was nothing like the series, and it’s true: the book is different.

Much of what made the series so good is missing: Rae’s social worker; her friends back at the hospital; her burgeoning relationship with Fin. She’s also younger in the series and it’s set in the early 90s rather than 1989. In the diary she’s on a scholarship to a private school, creating all kinds of wealth issues, which aren’t in the series. Several other elements are present and correct: the bitchy best friend; the weight issues; the sex-mad teenager-iness; the visit to a rave.

Rae’s mental illness was much more visible in the series. In the diary it’s hardly mentioned at all. In fact she explains that she doesn’t want to talk about it because she doesn’t really know how to deal with it.

I challenge anyone who’s ever been a teenage girl to not identify with Rae on some level

But once you accept these differences, the diary is actually a very good read. In the series Rae was always the ‘good guy’, but in the diary she can be selfish, thoughtless, mean, even cruel at times. Often she doesn’t realise. But it makes her more real. In fact for all her mental health problems, Rae is a normal teenage girl, with body issues, love life issues, arguments with her friends and her mum. She’s just trying to find her identity in this world, and I challenge anyone who’s ever been a teenage girl to not identify with her on some level.

Book review: Parade’s End by Ford Maddox Ford

Hard work, but worth it – mostly.

---

I downloaded this having watched the BBC adaptation starring the wonderful Benedict Cumberbatch. This is the first of Maddox Ford’s books I’ve read and I’m not sure it’s the best introduction to his work. For a start it’s huge – 906 pages, according to my Kindle. It’s also quite hard going.

Set in the early 20th century, it tells the story of Christopher Teijens, the youngest son of an old, respected Yorkshire family. Unhappily married to Sylvia and bringing up a son who might not be his, Christopher finds his head turned by the young Valentine Wannop.

This isn’t an easy book to get into, but it is worth the effort. It is incredibly well written. Christopher goes off to fight in the First World War and the sections on his experiences of trench warfare are some of the best I’ve ever read. At times moving and comic, it conveys both the horror and the stultifying boredom perfectly. Christopher’s frustrations with his commanders and the politicians back home will surely be recognisable to any captain in the field.

There are some great moments of humour, with Sylvia’s arrival at her husband’s barracks almost farcical in its mistaken identities and misunderstandings. None of the characters are particularly likeable, but this didn’t matter. In fact it made more sense than the BBC adaptation, in which Christopher was essentially sympathetic and I couldn’t understand Sylvia’s antipathy towards him. In the book her behaviour is much more understandable.

Sylvia herself is an interesting character. It would have been easy to cast her as The Bitch or The Whore, but she isn’t. She takes lovers throughout her marriage and there is a suggestion that Christopher isn’t the father of her son, yet she isn’t judged by the book. In fact all the women are ‘real’ characters, with their own motivations. A very unusual and refreshing situation.

So why only three stars? The book is seriously let down by the ending. The BBC series finished with the end of the war and the troops coming home. The book, however, carries on with some rather long-winded and to my mind pointless chapters told from the point of view of Christopher’s brother Mark and his French mistress, as well as Valentine and Sylvia. For me this final section put something of a dampener on what was otherwise an excellent book.

Review: Apartment 16 by Adam Nevill

This was an intriguing book rather than an engaging one. It’s not the most original story – all the elements of a haunted house story are there. An old, exclusive apartment block in Kensington. A mysterious apartment that remains locked but from which strange sounds emanate. An evil presence that tortures the residents in both life and death. The ageing residents themselves, who guard a terrible secret that binds them together as it tears them apart.

It’s the treatment of these tropes that lifts the book. Art becomes both catalyst and reason for the ghostly (or even ghastly) goings-on in apartment 16. And there are enough twists and turns to keep you reading on. One character in particular seems to be innocuous but turns out to have a dark secret of their own.

Into this charged situation come Apryl, an American who has just inherited an apartment in the Barrington House and everything inside from her great aunt Lillian, whom she never knew, and Seth, an artist who has moved to London to pursue his dream of painting but ended up working the graveyard shift as night watchman at the block.

Apryl discovers the mystery of apartment 16 when reading her aunt’s increasingly confused journals and is determined to find out what happened. Seth is drawn to the rooms on his nightly rounds of the building and finds himself in deep over his head.

But it was these two characters that didn’t work for me. I found neither at all sympathetic. Apryl comes across as rather self-obsessed, while Seth is pathetic and self-pitying. I found myself not caring what happened to them, not caring whether they lived or died. What I did care about, though, was the mystery. I wanted to know what happened in apartment 16 and what still happening. I was intrigued about the real identity of the evil presence.

So, not a perfect book, but certainly a readable one.

The Time Machine by HG Wells

I’ve been finding it difficult to review this book. Maybe because it’s so well known, or maybe because I wasn’t that impressed with it.

It’s the story of the Time Traveller – we don’t learn his name – told by a friend of his. The Time Traveller invents a time machine and travels forward many millennia into Earth’s future.

This is a surprisingly short book and one rather thin on, well, everything – plot, exposition, characters...

It started well, with an interesting discussion on the meaning of time that reminded me of Bergson’s Creative Evolution. The dinner party setting was good fun and later on the Traveller’s own explanation of time travel was well done. However, his relationship with the Eloi girl Weena left me feeling decidedly uncomfortable and his blythely leading her to her death was irresponsible and possibly immoral.

The devolution of the human race was never properly explained. Why would humanity split in two in such a way? Why are the underground-dwelling Morlocks immediately assumed to be evil? Why would they hide his time machine? There’s also a very disturbing implication that the worker-humans (who eventually become the Morlocks) of the Time Traveller’s imagined future are inferior to the rich, refined humans how end up as Eloi.

In short, too many questions were left unanswered for me to really enjoy this book. The title was downloaded for free from Amazon via @FreebooksUK.

Book review - Neverwhere

I’ve thought about doing (non-knitting) book reviews on this blog before and always decided against it. Most recently my book reviews have been going on Goodreads, that’s what it’s for after all. But the demands of three blog posts a week, plus socialising, a relationship, holding down a job, knitting and all the little things that make up a life, have meant that reviewing books has fallen by the wayside. So I’ve decided that it’s time to start putting reviews here.

First up is an old title: Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere. I’d been wanting to read this for some time. I watched the TV show when it was first shown many years ago and later read that Gaiman wasn’t entirely happy with the way the series turned out; he published the book to redress the balance. Having loved the series I wanted to find out what his vision for the story had been.

The book is the story of Richard Mayhew, who after a random act of kindness, finds himself no longer a part of the life he knows, of London Above, and instead one of London Below – where all those who fall through the cracks end up. Here he finds adventure, murders to be solved, keys to be found, beasts to be slain and assassins to be avoided at all costs.

Richard isn't an entirely sympathetic character. He's weak, bullied by his overbearing girlfriend, a bit whiny. His journey in London Below is as much emotional as physical, and the changes his adventures forge in him are wide ranging and long lasting.

The storytelling is fantastic – and fantastical – with London Below well realised as a forgotten, hidden realm that Londoners will find both strange and familiar. I love books about London and ones about an alternative to the city we all know and love have an especial appeal. China Mieville's wonderful Un Lun Dun comes to mind.

The characters are well drawn and believeable, particularly Hunter and the Marquis de Carabas, although my personal favourites have to be Mr Croupe and Mr Vandemar. The sense of menace whenever they are on the page is almost palpable – no small feat in a book.

This really is an excellent book. And how does it compare to the TV show? Well it's been so long since I saw the series that I really can't remember. I think I shall be making a DVD purchase very shortly.

Yarn review: Manos Silk Blend

Composition: 70% extra-fine merino and 30% kettle-dyed silk
Tension: 22sts x 30 rows
Length: 270 metres per 100g hank
Colourway: Candyfloss
Price: £15 (from SoSusie Yarns at Archway Market)

Now that my Ishbel is done, I’ve been able to concentrate on testing out a yarn I’ve had for a while. Manos Silk Blend is, as you might expect, a gorgeous mix of silk and merino from fair-trade organisation Manos del Uruguay.

In progress: the colour and stitch pattern are shown off nicely.

Manos del Uruguay is a non-profit social organisation which, since 1968, has provided jobs for craftswomen living in Uruguay rural areas. The yarns are hand made and dyed in small lots, and the collective also produces clothing and artisanal goods.

The yarns really are luscious and Silk Blend is truly gorgeous: soft to the touch, smooth and warm. It has a very high ‘squish factor’, as I like to call it - a yarn’s ability to produce that need in all knitters and crocheters to grab a yarn and squash it, stroke it and hold it against our skin.

A very simple k2tog/YO pattern was used to create the lattice effect. The merino blend combined with the open-work stitches should produce a very warm yet lightweight hat.

This is not a very tightly wrapped yarn and I was slightly concerned it would be splitty but it’s not all. It’s actually really nice to knit with, although I would suggest that metal needles would be better than wooden or bamboo. I used a metal circular and the yarn slid along it nicely, but I suspect it might stick on the rougher surface of wood or bamboo. It knits up nicely and the stitch definition is lovely.

The lacy cap I designed to test the yarn shows off the variegated colour well, I think, and the super-soft blend of silk and merino means it’s safe for even the most sensitive of heads. The pattern will be available shortly via Ravelry and as a kit from SoSusie Yarns - watch this space!

The finished hat. It would make a great gift for a baby or little girl.

The hook test

As we all know I've been crocheting a baby blanket of late (it's very nearly done!), and for this project I've been trying out some new hooks. These particular hooks were a freebie on a magazine. Typically I can't remember which magazine or who makes the hooks. But I think they're Knit Pro Symphonies.

They're certainly pretty enough to be Symphonies - multi-coloured, smooth-as-silk wood, and, usefully, they're double ended. So five hooks give me 10 different sizes. The yarn slides nicely along the polished wood and while the tip of the hook isn't especially pointed I've had no problems inserting it into the stitches, even the foundation chain was no more problematic than usual.

The 'barrel' of the hook is nice to hold, with a carved flat edge where my thumb sits nicely. This edge has also got the hook sizes printed on it. But, and here's the rub - literally - with the hook sizes printed just where my thumb rests the white writing is quickly getting rubbed off. The only way I'm going to be able to fix this is carve the sizes into the wood with a knife.

The double endedness is another problem. It's certainly useful, but the hook is just the wrong length for me. The 'other' end, the end not being used, sits right on the fleshy, sensitive part of my palm - it's called the Mars negative mount in palmistry, according to Wikipedia! This makes the hook really quite uncomfortable to use, though the way I hold my hooks might have something to do with it. I have my hand on top, rather like holding a knife, whereas anyone holding their hooks more like a pencil, with the hook on top, is likely to be fine.

The hooks are the same size as my 'normal' metal ones (I measured) and they could do with being a touch longer. I've got quite small hands so I think this is a problem that most hookers (hee hee) will have. Just an extra couple of centimetres would have made all the difference.

Happy apping

Recently I've been trying out knitting apps for my iPhone. For anyone with an iPhone, tap 'knitting' into the search box and an array of options appears. In fact, if any more proof that knitting is trendy were needed, then the number of knitter-friendly clever pieces of software for Apple's little block of cool is surely it.

Of course they all claim to help you keep track of your projects, plan your next, count all your stitches and rows and make endless cups of tea (OK, I made up that last one). Prices range from free to £3.49. But which is best? Well that partly depends on what you want the app to do. Jknit, the most expensive, claims to be a complete knitting assistant, allowing you input your pattern instructions to create a single counter telling you exactly what to do row by row – it seems to do everything but knit the rows for you. At the other end of the scale are the free apps that just work as a digital row counter.

The knit test
I've been trying out two of the simpler apps – KnitMinder and Knit Counter, both in free 'lite' versions. The full versions cost £1.79 and £2.39 respectively. Both of these store counters and project information about yarn and needles used.

KnitMinder allows you to record notes in a logbook, which Knit Counter has space for notes. So far so similar. So what are the differences? KnitMinder has the option of saving planned, finished and on hold projects; handy for shopping excursions or keeping track of what you've got outstanding.

The free Knit Counter only allows you record one project; the paid-for version allows unlimited. So while you can't file projects as 'planned' or 'on hold' you can still input such projects and make a note of their status.

Changing boons
Knit Counter's real strength, though, lies in the versatility of its counters. You can assign each project as many counters as you like; for example, a hat I'm making has got four counters. You can assign any name you want to each counter, unlike KnitMinder, which gives you a choice of several. I'm recording the number of rows I knit, the number of repeats in a row, the number of rows to repeat for the ribbing and the number of repeats for the lace section, each with its own name.

To count up, you simply tap on a plus sign next to the row name. You can even link rows so that after you've reached a certain number on one counter, another will count up. Very useful! You can also program in an increase or decrease reminder.

You might have guessed that I prefer Knit Counter. Its adaptability makes it incredibly useful, and the user interface is much prettier than KnitMinder's. It has made following my rather complicated hat pattern much easier. The only drawback is that the free version only lets me record one pattern – so I guess I'll be forking out for the paid-for counter then!

The place for lace

Review: Amazing Crochet Lace by Doris Chan

This isn’t a new book – in fact it’s about three years old, but it’s new to me. I got it as a birthday present just a couple of weeks ago.

The book starts with an introduction from Chan – why she crochets, her theory of ‘exploded’ lace and a bit of advice on how best to approach the patterns. Then it’s the usual abbreviations and stitch keys and then straight into the patterns. There are 19 of them in total, arranged into four chapters with names like Garden Party and Last Call, which seem to have more to do with the names of patterns rather than the look of any of the garments.

First things first, then, exploded lace means taking a pattern for some small decorative item – like a doily or table runner – and adapting it for bigger yarn, bigger hooks and a much, much bigger product, like a shawl, a t-shirt or a dress.

Chan also talks about every crocheter’s most hated stage – the foundation chain. She uses something she calls the BASE CH/SC. It involves making two chains and making both a chain and a single crochet into the first chain. Then doing the same into the chain of the stitch you just made, and repeating this till you’ve got the right number of stitches. It’s something I’ve never encountered before and the instructions and illustrations really are clear. With a bit of practice it was pretty simple. The resultant chain is an odd-looking bulky thing that is remarkably easy to crochet into. I’m not sure it’ll take over from a traditional chain in my crochet repertoire, but it’s certainly good to know.

The pattern I tested was Chrysanthemum Tea Shawl, a huge circular shawl adapted from three doily patterns. The instructions are easy to follow and the thick yarn and big hook mean the piece grows pleasingly fast. Each pattern comes complete with full written instructions and chart showing a sample of the lace pattern.

The garments, which include a skirt, a dress, t-shirts and shawls, are all lovely, with only a couple I wouldn’t wear. The layout and instructions are generally good, clear and simple to follow. But make no mistake, these pieces are not for the beginner. The patterns are complex, often involving hundreds of stitches. To do this you need the time and space to concentrate – don’t do what I did and sit down in front of Smallville and think it’ll turn out OK. It won’t. And make sure you check for errata before you start. I found a mistake in the special stitches box! But think how much worse it would be to have completed a few hundred stitches only to realise something’s wrong.

One problem is the photography. Each garment has a full-page plate and often another couple of photos. But these are all dark, making it difficult to see colours and detail. A little lightening in Photoshop would have helped. But this really is a minor niggle in an otherwise excellent collection.

A couple of not-very-good shots of the shawl.