Wednesday 2 September 2009

kilburn social club reviews and other housekeeping

I've said in another post that there's no graceful way for me to comment on reviews, so I won't. All I will say that it is easy to find thelondonpaper's one, which was negative (and where is thelondonpaper now? Coincidence?) but it is almost impossible to find some of the best ones, because they were on the radio. When I have sorted out a proper, more coherent web presence (soon, people, soon) I'll have a page of links and so on and so forth, but for now, here are some radio quotes which are nice if you are me, and which make me seem boastful if you are not.

Alex Heminsley said, on Radio 6:
It's the kind of book I can imagine people would get quite obsessed by ... he's taking liberties with reality, but it still creates a real world which you feel like you're in when you're reading it ... if you read it, you'll really want someone else you know to read it, or to meet someone else who's read it. It's the kind of thing if you saw someone at a party and they'd read it too, you'd want to spend half an hour dissecting it.
I did the Simon Mayo Books Podcast (with Richard Bacon, because Simon Mayo was away, which was a pity for me, though RB was good, because I think Simon Mayo is brilliant, but all is not lost, because they want me to review on the panel later this month). Tim Bowler said:
ambitious in the most quirky sense ... a very, very complex, multilayered book, very playful book, it's got a marvellous sense of the ridiculous ... I thought it was tremendous. And the talking football - it's worth buying the book just to find out about the talking football.
Helen Dunning said:
The ambition and the scope of the book, I thought, were tremendous ... I think your talent for developing different elements of the story is quite extraordinary - the sisters, Esther I thought was amazing, she was like a cross between Sue Ellen and Joan Collins. I also liked that the footballers [have] their own philosophies and ideas about what football means to them.
and Tony Bradman said:
I think the football scenes are great, actually. It's very, very hard to write about football well, there's a whole vocabulary, there's a whole way of writing about it that most people fail at, so I really enjoyed those. It's a 500 page book and you do seem to put absolutely everything in it all at once ... I'm kind of worried about what you're going to do next.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Congratualations on the praise! In my experience, a good, long, thorough bitch session with another author helps clear out any residual vitriol left by bad reviews, whereas good ones can remain a pleasant part of your mental furniture for a long time.