The Keanu Reeves movie, The 47 Ronin, opened this week to pretty mediocre business but it reminded me of this little blog post from 3 years ago about a visit I took to Japan. On arriving in Tokyo the first thing I did was get up early and take a trip out to the tombs of the 47 Ronin. I became aware of the Ronin initially through the Borges story "The Uncivil Teacher of Etiquette, Kotsuke no Suke," and then through the ukiyo-e, a remarkable series of woodblock prints on the subject of the Ronin. The shrine to the 47 Ronin is a surprisingly...
Thursday, 26 December 2013
Tuesday, 24 December 2013
Sunday, 22 December 2013
I'll probably do a separate list for crime fiction, but in the meantime here are my favourite books of 2013, not all of which were actually published in 2013. If there's a theme here I think it might be walking or possibly the literary ascent of the extended Morrissey clan...1. Autobiography - Morrissey. The Moz gets his revenge on anyone who's ever crossed him in this poisonously brilliant billet mal.2. Red or Dead - David Peace. One of England's...
Thursday, 19 December 2013
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probably helped that I was wearingmy lucky Dr Who t shirtI took part in the ABC Radio National end of the year quiz here in Melbourne this morning. There were four of us there representing four of the arts: cinema, performing arts, visual arts and books. I, of course, was waving the flag for books. It was a fun quiz being broadcast across all of Australia and although my knowledge of Australian culture isn't perhaps up to the standard of the other...
Tuesday, 17 December 2013
What is George McFly Day? Well if you're a follower of this blog you'll already know and if you don't know it's that bit at the end of Back To The Future where's George's box of books arrives from his publisher and the family gathers around and George achieves a sort of redemption and a fulfillment of his childhood dreams of becoming a writer....We got a George McFly day in the McKinty household today as my box of books arrived from my publisher,...
Saturday, 14 December 2013
My review of Patrick Leigh Fermor's The Broken Road from yesterday's Sydney Morning Herald and Melbourne Age....In 1933 Patrick Leigh Fermor was 18 years old and washed up: he'd been expelled from school, couldn't get into university and had no idea what to do with his life. So, inspired by the likes of Peter Fleming, Robert Byron, and Alexander Kinglake, Fermor decided to walk from London to Constantinople with the vague idea of making a book out...
Thursday, 12 December 2013
...the real Supremes, the big diva is the 2nd from the left in the front row...In my last post I talked a little about being a maths teacher. When I used to teach mathematics I always tried to incorporate some context into the subject, explaining what the stuff we were learning could actually be used for, where it came from and what problems it solved in the society where it was invented. (I stole this idea from Carl Sagan's Cosmos where in one memorable...
Saturday, 7 December 2013
The first newspaper review of In The Morning I'll Be Gone came out this week in Dublin's Hot Press. The review is by Anne Sexton and is wonderfully spoiler free. For me this book was more of a traditional mystery than a thriller (most of it is taken up with an old school locked room problem) but Anne seems to have enjoyed the noir elements too. Anyway here's what she says in Hot Press: ...In The Morning I'll Be Goneby Adrian McKintySerpents...
Wednesday, 4 December 2013
In a throwaway scene from an episode of the final season of Breaking Bad, Badger and Skinny Peter (Jesse's two drug-dealing pals) are talking about the transporter on Star Trek; you know what the transporter is even if you've never seen Star Trek, the "beam me up Mr Scott" machine: a teleportation device for transporting people instantly from one place to another. It supposedly works like this: the ship's computer breaks down the person being transported into a digital scan of their atoms and sends this digital information to the surface of...
Sunday, 1 December 2013
a blogpost from March of this year that got a lot of comments......My older daughter was at a sleep over party last week where they watched a horror movie. It was a whole bunch of girls together and none of them seemed to be particularly affected by the film, except for my daughter who was pretty disturbed by the experience. We don't watch horror movies in our house and I think this was the first one she had ever seen. She's had bad dreams for a...
Thursday, 28 November 2013
In the 50th anniversary special of Dr Who, The Day of the Doctor, there was a very intriguing philosophical moment that I thought might be interesting to unpack here. It occurred during a negotiation between shape shifting aliens and humans: the aliens had assumed human form and the negotiations between the two parties were going nowhere. The Doctor arrived and wiped their memories with his magic wand (er, sonic screwdriver) so neither party knew...
Tuesday, 26 November 2013
with the Coen brothers' new film Inside Llewyn Davies finally being released next week I'd thought I'd reblog this post about what possibly could be their next film...(or possibly the one after that)...The Yiddish Policemen's Union by Michael ChabonIn Michael Chabon’s universe Alaska isn’t a frontier bastion for singsongy dimwitted governors and moose-killing survivalists but rather is the transplanted home for two million cosmopolitan Jewish refugees...
Saturday, 23 November 2013
The first review of In The Morning I'll Be Gone came in last week. It's from Jon Page of Bite The Book and here it is (below). Remember Jon only reviewed the galley so the actual book is bound to be funnier, crisper and all together even more brilliant. The heart of In The Morning is pretty much an old school locked room mystery, a subgenre of mystery writing that I've always loved and always wanted to try. Anyway here's what Mr Page had to say:......Every...
Wednesday, 20 November 2013
If you are a literature groupie you might enjoy this list. It's my top places - obviously highly subjective - where you can soak up the atmosphere of a particular writer or a certain milieu. It was going to be a top 10 list but there was too much I wanted to cram in. I'm giving you my list in reverse order but really its not in any order if that makes any sense...14. The Eagle and Child Pub, Oxford, England. The bar where JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis...
Monday, 18 November 2013
Looking forward to the big Dr Who event next weekend - the 50th Anniversary Special - so I thought I'd repost this little essay on why Dr Who matters from back in August......When Matt Smith announced that he was quitting the role of Dr. Who after this year’s Christmas Special the papers and social media in the UK and Australia and the geeky parts of America went into their now habitual frenzy about who would or should be the next doctor. Dismissed...
Friday, 15 November 2013
Morrissey trying to conquer the world of literature and attempting to bring back the cream denim jacket look; only one of these goals is hubristic...I was half way through writing my review of Morrissey's Autobiography (which as you can see from a couple of posts ago (below) is already one of my favourite books of the year) when I read Terry Eagleton's review, here, in the Guardian and decided not to finish mine because his was so much better....
Wednesday, 13 November 2013
Ok, so it also helps that the Prime Minister, er, appeals to men of a certain age...Season 2 of Borgen started on Wednesday night here in Australia on the "minority needs" channel SBS. I was really worried that Borgen wasn't ever going to be shown again here in Oz because last season Borgen only got about 40,000 viewers each week in Melbourne which represented less than 1% of the population of the Greater Melbourne Area. Borgen got even lower viewing...
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