Review

2026-01-28

Spoiler warning: I spoil the plot of this 1950s pulp fiction novel early, often, and remorselessly.

I picked The Silver Eggheads off a shelf of battered paperback pulp fiction in the Glasgow branch of Oxfam Books. Like all good pulp fiction, the illustration on its cover is absurd and confusing. A flesh-coloured humanoid with simple socket holes for eyes and a mouth, two-pronged grabbers for hands, ball-joints for knees and elbows, and hemispherical breasts covered with the solitary piece of clothing: a white bra. Just next to that creature, a seemingly human man in a mid-century sort of lounge outfit and a sailors’s hat reaches across a metallic console of dials and gauges as if to grab the flesh bot. In the extreme foreground of the image, looming in from the left hand side of the frame, a glass balloon with suggestions of facial features that are once again socket holes skitters across the floor with thin metallic appendages that end in unheimlich four-fingered hands.

The Finest Hotel in Kabul by Lyse Doucet

2025-12-17

Although LyseDoucet’s [sic] habit of introducing herself as a background character with a huge wink to the stalls grated a bit after a while, I ended up very endeared to this book in the end. I remember live coverage of the war in Afghanistan on the BBC growing up, and the image of Lyse Doucet on some balcony with explosions in the background is strong in my mind. She’s a badass, and this feels like a relatively well executed diversion for her. The debt this owes to The Grand Budapest Hotel, or maybe that that movie owes to hotels like this, is clear.

The Good Apprentice by Iris Murdoch

2025-11-15

This went straight onto the Bad Smart People book list. I did find Midge in particular kind of absurd, like an even more extreme Thérèse Raquin, but I suppose we’re meant to find her ridiculous.