I read this recently after putting it off for years. I expected it to be full of wisdom, I expected to learn something new, but instead I found it as dull as dishwater. It was once an important book, but I don't think the Communist Manifesto is relevant anymore, and is really only worth something as a historical document. There is nothing new here, surprisingly, perhaps because everything about the downtrodden working class has already done the rounds. George Orwell does a better job of speaking for the proletariat. We all know we're slaves to money, but does anybody have a Utopia up their sleeve? You won't find Utopia here either.

This is basically two essays published in the Ladies' Home Journal in 1890, and the same thing as "How I Write My Novels" by the same lady, with tons of Gutenberg spam.

Don't expect a "cookery" book on writing a novel. These are two essays that have more in common with the kind of essays you were made to write about yourself in primary school. Not very informative and too personal to be of any value.

Basically, a space opera. Reminded me of some of the sci-fi B movies I used to enjoy as a kid. It's a little flat in the telling in places, a bit pulpy (although it's meant to be I suppose because it is space opera after all), and the aliens reminded me of the crew of Space Quest (the game), but you can't fault the passion behind the story. Despite the basic premise, there's an undercurrent of humanity that's quite moving. Made me think how finite our world really is. Still, a great little book. I enjoyed it enough to look up the author and seek out some of his other work.

A good introduction to Edith Wharton's work. This collection contains Mrs Mainstey's View, which is surely one of Wharton's best short stories and as good as any of Elizabeth Bowen's stories. It's a simply written but deeply moving story, with an ending that is inevitable yet none the less shocking for it. There is great empathy here in the characterisation. Wonderful stuff. Worth checking out just for that one alone. But this collection also has her better known stories The Bolted Door, Kerfol, and Dilettante. If you like these you should check out Ethan Frome, too.

This book is awful. I came to this book with high hopes after reading all the praise that preceded the contents and was sorely disappointed. Never has a collection produced such a strong dislike in me and wonderment at how or why writers/editors give such unjustified praise to a book that is mediocre or in this case downright awful. The book is a collection of short stories where supposedly strange things happen, as in the title. The first story is about a man who seems to be dead and what does he do with his time? Well, he wanders about on a beach and masturbates in a hotel room. That’s all. The story is a wash out, nothing happens in the end. Actually all of the stories just fizzle out to nothing, end up meaningless. After about the third story you start to wonder why you are bothering to read this stuff. I found myself confused most of the time, as to who was talking, who the writer was talking about, what was going on or supposed to be going on, and nothing seemed to make sense or add up. The writing jumps about all over the place, present tense one minute, past tense the next, jumps viewpoints left and right until you don’t know or care what is going on. I’m not against breaking convention, if it is done well it is great –and great writers have done it, Joyce etc- but it doesn’t come off in this collection, probably through inexperience, lack of skill, as it was the writer’s first collection. So I read the second story, hoping it would be better. The second story is about a boy and a girl and her weird parents (the father has fake noses and the mother a prosthetic leg, whoopee) but it ends up fizzling out and leaves you wondering what it was supposed to mean, if anything at all. The characters were badly drawn, the prose erratic and seemed to be a deliberate attempt to be modern but just ends up being confusing. The specialist hat is probably the most conventional of the stories (babysitter, something in the house etc.) but even here it fizzles out and is too vague to produce the frisson that it should. After this, I didn’t want to read on and when I did (only because I realised I wanted to let others know how bad this books was) the stories were so confusing that I found myself wondering where I was and where the characters were and what in the hell was going on and seriously wondering if there had been some really bad typos here somewhere. The characters all seem the same, the settings are unclear, the dialogue is stilted, the stories seem pointedly strange to the point of silliness. I’m still wondering if the awards that this collection received were all part of the fiction. Surely somebody’s idea of a joke! I really wonder.
An instantly forgettable collection of experimental stories. Too vague and confusing to be worth attempting to read through the swamp of nonsense. You’ll probably give up after the third one, like I did.