Jamie

Acaster is one of my favourite comedians. Unlike his first book, which is just a collection of very funny anecdotes, this is more focused and autobiographical, centered on a year in his life (2017) where he was going through a lot and used music as a way to escape, specifically by obsessively researching and then buying 366 different albums, all from 2016. The book takes the form of an autobiographical account of 2017, where Acaster goes, quite intimately, into how he was feeling at the time and what was going through his mind, including the suicidal thoughts that he was grappling with. This is interspersed with passionate and largely insightful reviews of the various albums he listened to, many of which are extremely obscure and were only unearthed from the hours Acaster spent digging through the internet to find them.

I enjoyed it, but not as much as his first book and I liked the autobiographical stuff more than the music reviews, which got a bit tiring after a while. Still, I'd recommend it if you enjoy the author and/or the music of 2016.

An engaging, if convoluted, old school spy novel

I was inspired to read this after watching the fantastic film version from 2011. It's only taken me 8 years! I enjoyed the intrigue and the double-crossing, but I have to say that I felt the need to re-watch the film after reading the first few chapters so that I could figure out what was actually going on. There is a lot which is deliberately left unsaid that could be missed, as well as a lot of jargon that I had to look up. The book is also very much part of the George Smiley series of Le Carré's novels and makes reference to previous events from the earlier books.

Still, a good read. Some of the ruminations on the mind and motivations of a spy are especially engaging. Recommended!

This was very enjoyable - a fun page-turner from start to finish that keeps its pace and energy all the way through. I thought the juxtaposition between the virtual paradise that the protagonist escapes into and the dytstopian real world he actually exists in was especially well done. The nerd in me enjoyed spotting the different pop culture and gaming references, too (although, being a child of the 90s, quite a few of them were lost on me).

I will say that the third act seems a bit rushed and arbitrary in places, lacking the nuance and tension of the rest of the novel, but overall I'd definitely recommend this to anyone with a passing interest in light sci-fi, videogames and/or the 80s.

The first Connelly I've read, I thought this was a satisfying page-turner with a couple of good twists that I didn't see coming. Reading it for the first time in 2019, however, 27 years after it was originally published, some of the characters and ideas felt a little hackneyed, but I enjoyed the Chandler-esque charm of it all the same.

I'm not the biggest fan of Limmy. I don't mean that I don't like his stuff, it's just that, barring the odd clip from Youtube or the occasional highlight reel from one of his streams, I've never really engaged with what he's done, so I'm not entirely sure why I bought this, to be honest. Thankfully, however, I enjoyed it a lot. It's probably the most...intimate autobiography I've ever read and includes chapters with titles like ‘My first wank' and ‘Becoming an alky'. Like his TV shows, it's funny, but never funny in a way that makes you actually laugh aloud, and a lot of it is truly, desperately sad. The chapter where he talks about his mother's death was heart-wrenching, though not necessarily for the reasons you'd expect, and the ending is somewhat ambiguous. I hope he's doing ok...

Highly recommended, even for people who, like me, aren't diehard fans.