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The Malt Whisky Murders - Natalie Jayne Clarke
This book coincided nicely with my renewed interest in whisky. It's rare that I pick up a novel so directly related to my current special interest, and I do wonder if that made me like this more than I otherwise would have done. That's not to say that I didn't enjoy it, but my impression of The Malt Whisky Murders is largely that it's just fine, and I wonder if I'd feel a little less positively about it if it wasn't directly leaning on my current obsession.
The protagonist of this novel - a woman who buys a distillery and finds two dead bodies hidden inside the casks - is a bisexual woman with ADHD. I have a weird relationship with the idea of "representation" in fiction, largely because I've never really seen myself in a book or on screen. And the rare times where I do, I find it uncomfortable rather than comforting. The depiction of ADHD here is a pretty good one, and tracks quite closely to my own experience, but the more real it felt the more unsettled I felt. Rather than feeling "represented" or "seen" I felt exposed, and I didn't like that at all. Luckily it didn't make me angry, like the almost offensive depiction of autism in All The Little Bird-Hearts, largely because it is a good depiction of the condition and the struggles that it causes, and so it didn't stop me finishing the book.
I did enjoy this overall, though I perhaps would have liked it to have a little more substance - some more twists and turns in the narrative and the investigation into the killings, a couple of red herrings here and there. It's a very straightforward narrative, and that's not really what I'm personally looking for in a crime novel. This is very much a "cozy" book in the modern sense of being soft, fluffy, and comforting, rather than in the more traditional meaning of cozy crime (though it's that, too). The result of that is that there's very little conflict, and we also don't get much of a payoff once we reach the denouement.
My favourite part of The Malt Whisky Murders is the fact that it's so clearly in conversation with the work of Iain Banks, albeit subtly. He's quoted in the epigraph - a line from a non-fiction book about whisky that I didn't know he'd written - and one of the characters references The Wasp Factory. The fact that large parts of the novel are told in the second person from the point of view of the killer seems to me to be a very clear nod to Complicity, which also happens to be my favourite Banks novel.
All in all I enjoyed this, though didn't love it. I'm possibly swayed by the fact that I'm currently obsessed with whisky, and also pleased to have finally read a novel at a normal speed for me rather than labouring over it for weeks as has been the trend recently. Hopefully this is a sign that my reading slump is over, and I can finally get back to working through the other CWA Dagger shortlists.
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Deception Point - Dan Brown
I read Dan Brown's latest Robert Langdon book The Secret Of Secrets last year (or was it the year before? I lose track) and my overall impression was that it wasn't meant to be a Langdon book. I thought that it read like Brown's pre-Langdon techno-thrillers Deception Point and Digital Fortress, with Langdon shoehorned in because that's where the money is. My takeaway - other than it being shit - was that Brown was clearly tired of the character and the formula and wanted to go back to his earlier style of books, which (in my opinion) were always better than the Langdon books.
I've been in a reading slump and when I need to get out of a slump I turn to simple thrillers. John Grisham is my go-to author, but this time I decided to revisit Deception Point because I remember loving it.
Spoiler alert: it's dogshit, and it is in no way better than the Robert Langdon books - even the really, really bad ones. I wish I could go back in time and peek inside my brain to figure out what I liked about this when I first read it 20-something years ago.
I still really enjoy the conceit of it, and the first half - right up to the discovery of the conspiracy - is fun even if it's poorly written. But then it completely loses its way. I don't even want to spend the time and effort it would take to talk about why this is bad. It's just bad. I remember the reveal coming at the end of the book rather than halfway through, and I think that's probably some sort of defence mechanism my brain has enacted to help me forget how utterly dismal the back end of this novel is.
The worst part is that this took me a week to get through, so it didn't even fix my reading slump.
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Whisky Review #3: Kilchoman Loch Gorm 2022 Edition
I just got home from a busy weekend working at the UK Games Expo (post about that coming soon, probably) and I really wanted to relax before I head back to the day job tomorrow, and I decided to reach for a bottle that I don't spend much time with - the Kilchoman Loch Gorm 2022 edition.
Bottled: 2022
Cask Type: Matured in oloroso sherry butts previously used by Bodega Jose y Miguel Martin for a minimum of eight years.
Stated Age: NAS
Strength: 46%
Price Paid: Somewhere around £60 for the bottle
Served: Neat in a Glencairn
Nose: Salt, smokey peat (though not as much as I expected), and something medicinal and sour lurking underneath, almost like burned rubber
Palette: Sweet and spicy, sherry run through with peppercorn and chili flakes. I don't get much of the peat on the palette, which is again surprising.
Finish: On the short end of medium length. This Is where the smoke lives, bursting in as the other flavours all aside. It's ashy like burned paper. There's some vague fruitiness here that I can't identify, just lingering under the smoke.
I love aggressively smokey peat and I picked this up hoping that would be what I got. It isn't quite there - the sherry sweetness mitigates a lot of the impact of the smoke, despite being peated to 50ppm - but that doesn't mean it isn't lovely.
This is aged exclusively in oloroso sherry casks, a combination of 20 fresh and 2 refill butts of varying ages. No age statement here, but the youngest are at least 8 years old and I remember reading (though can't find the source now) that some of them are around 15 years old. I'd expect to detect more of the oak in here, but I'm not getting much of it at all and there's barely any tannin happening.
All in all this is a very surprising dram. It's not the sherry bomb you might expect given the way it's matured, and it's not massively smokey either despite a decent level of peat on paper. Initially I was a little disappointed, but as I spent time with it it really grew on me. It's subtle and surprising and, ultimately, very enjoyable - an easy sipper but with some pleasant complexity if you pay attention to it.
This is the only Kilchoman I've tried and I'm definitely keen to explore their range a little more.
Verdict? Yum.
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Whisky Review #2: The GlenAllachie 12 Year
It's a beautiful sunny day here in the UK and for once I've got it off, and what better way to spend the afternoon than sipping on a whisky in the garden with some music playing?
I'm traditionally an Islay drinker and when I decided earlier this year that I wanted to start learning more about whisky and expanding my tastes my first stop was Speyside, a decision largely driven by the fact that my fiancée has shown an interest in Scotch recently and her favourite band have a song called Speyside. After some googling I came to the decision that this would be a good entry-level example of the Speyside style.
Bottled: 2025? I'm still figuring out how to read bottles. The code etched on this is
L 09 10 25Cask Type: Nothing stated on the bottle, but Whisky Base lists Pedro Ximènez and Oloroso
Stated Age: 12 years
Strength: 46% ABV
Price Paid: £43.95
Served: Neat in a Glencairn, rested for 15 minutes in the sun (mainly because I forgot it was there)
Nose: Cocoa and toffee apples,
Palette: Warm chocolate, caramel
Finish: Bitter and tannic
It took me a while to get anything other than "generic whisky smell" from the nose but I did pick out some chocolate notes and a little sweet fruit that reminded me of toffee apples. I certainly don't get any of the treacle, espresso, cinnamon, or sticky raisins that the notes on the bottle tell me to expect. Compared to the Hibiki 12 I reviewed over the weekend it's a much more simple, straightforward whisky.
This has a really lovely, treacley mouth feel. It's rich and warm, though not particularly complex - a burst of chocolate and sweet caramel, but not a lot else. It's hot but not overpowering, and the flavours are immediate and reach up into your nose.
A long finish on this, lingering long after you're done. There's not much flavour in the finish, mainly a sense of bitterness, maybe a touch of saline, and really grippy tannins that grabbed onto my bottom gums and wouldn't let go.
Overall I'd say I enjoyed it but didn't love it. It's an easy, daily drinker, but nothing to write home about and not something that inspires me to want to explore GlenAllachie further. Is that just the whisky, or is it that I don't have strong feelings about the Speyside style in general? I don't know - I guess I'll have to try some more offerings from the region to find out.
I'm still not comfortable giving scores so I'm going to use my Yum/Meh/Yuck scale and give this a Yum-. It's fine.
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Hibiki 12
I've been reacquainting myself with my whisky shelf recently after a few years of hyper focusing on wine and not really touching the amber stuff. I've been a whisky drinker for a long time and was briefly the whisky buyer for a bar in south Manchester a lifetime ago, but I don't actually know all that much about the stuff beyond knowing what I tend to like. When I was getting into wine I found that writing reviews for myself was a very good way of learning more about it and enjoying what I was drinking a little bit more intentionally, so I'm hoping to get something similar out of writing about whisky. We'll see how it goes.
Hibiki 12 was one of the first whiskies I really fell in love with, and this specific bottle was bought for my by my mum for my 30th birthday. Shortly afterwards I quit drinking for a few years and so didn't touch it, and then it was discontinued and became incredibly expensive. The result is that I've been rationing it for a long time, because I know that once it's gone I'll never have it again. It's probably five years since I last tasted this. But now that I'm staring down the barrel of 40 in a few weeks, I'm realising that I should just let myself enjoy things rather than holding on to them.
Bottled: I believe 2013, based on the bottle code (Z4HK3)
Cask Type: A blend of 30 malts from Yamazaki and Hakushu whiskies aged in American, Spanish, and Mizunara Oak, including plum brandy barrels.
Stated Age: 12 Years, with the oldest malts in the blend being aged for more than 30 years.
Strength: 43%
Price Paid: N/A - a birthday gift from my mum in 2016
Served: Neat in a Glencairn. No resting before drinking but enjoyed over about 20 minutes.
Nose: Sweet and fruity, like rich marmalade and plums. It smells full, warm, and round.
Palette: Spiced fruits, cloves, sweet honey, a ribbon of vanilla that I guess comes from the oak. A gentle, slow-motion eruption of flavour.
Finish: Long and lingering, candied apple and tannins gripping your gums (can you tell most of my tasting experience is in wine?)
I remember loving the flavours but feeling that this was quite a "sharp" dram. It seems that a decade of oxidisation and maceration in the bottle has worked some magic here and mellowed it out significantly. This is a beautifully rounded whisky now. It has absolutely no edge to it, just a gentle warming hug in the mouth. You almost wouldn't know it's got a percentage. There's a ton of sweetness in here, and the texture reminds me of an Old Fashioned that's been made with syrup rather than brown sugar. It's silky smooth in the mouth.
This is entirely unlike the sorts of whiskies I usually drink these days - I'm a peat fiend, generally - but it's one of the first whiskies I properly enjoyed when I was first getting into the stuff, and I'm delighted to say that it's still a very tasty dram. I'm really going to enjoy finishing off the bottle now that I've allowed myself to reopen it.
At this stage I have so little knowledge about what I'm drinking that I don't really know how different woods impact a whisky, but the presence of Mizunara here - which I understand is a fairly uncommon wood to use and is mostly found in Japanese whiskies, being a Japanese wood - makes me want to learn more about that specifically.
Would I pay upwards of £500 for a bottle of this now when I know it was around £70 back when I was gifted it? Absolutely not. But at the time of writing this I've just read the news that Hibiki 12 is finally coming back to travel retail this year, and if the new version is anywhere near as good as this then I'll be ecstatic to see it return. Hopefully the 17 will also make a return, since I never got a chance to try it back in the day.
Which brings me to a score. I have a real hatred of rating scales that don't actually use the full scale, especially when anything under 50 basically means the same thing. At that point, why do you have 50 points there to play with?
So I guess if I'm going to review things I need to figure out how to score them, and I haven't done that yet. For the time being I'm just going to go with Yum, Yuck, or Meh, and this is very much a Yum. Maybe a Yum+.
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Wolf Hall - Hilary Mantel [DNF]
I've been in a massive reading slump for the past few months. It's not just been reading, I've been in a slump in general for most of this year. I think a combination of changing jobs and wedding planned has overwhelmed me and I've been unable to focus on anything.
That slump seemed to come to an end last week. I read a couple of books that I really enjoyed (though I haven't reviewed them), and decided to pick up a book I've been meaning to read for years - Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall.
Unfortunately this is a DNF for me, at somewhere around the 30% mark. I pushed on beyond the point where I first started to think that maybe I wasn't enjoying it, because at times I was really loving it. That's mostly down to the quality of Mantel's prose, which is exquisite and a joy to read.
If good prose were enough to sustain a book then I'd love this, but it isn't. Most of my time spent reading this I spent adrift, with no idea what was happening, who these people were, or what the significance of anything was. It quickly became clear to me that I don't know enough about Tudor history to make any sense of this.
I pressed on, but I eventually realised that was well as not knowing what was happening I didn't really know who it was happening to. Thomas Cromwell, obviously, but who actually is he? We spend all of our time in his head, but I had no sense of who he is, what he wants, what drives him. He moves through the world and things happen around him, and he comments on them. Once I realised that I didn't know anything about the narrator and didn't seem to be learning anything about him, either, I decided to give it up and move on to other things.
I've intended to read all of the Booker Prize winners at some point (as well as all of the International Booker winners). After DNFing this I suppose I now know that I also won't be reading the sequel, which won the prize in 2012. So that's one challenge that just got a little more attainable.
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40 Films Before 40
I turn 40 in about 6 weeks. Last night, on a whim, I decided that I'd like to watch 40 films I've never seen before in advance of that happening. For some reason I thought it would be a good idea to ask Bluesky to recommend some of these films to me.
I asked people to recommend their favourite "I've never met anybody else who's seen this" film. As always when you ask for recommendations online, some people are shit at understanding the task. But sometimes you strike gold.
I discarded responses where:
- I've already seen the film. Obviously nobody recommending things blindly can know what I have or haven't seen, but I know what's new to me.
- They recommended more than one film in the same post. I asked for a recommendation, not every film you've ever seen.
- The person indicated that they haven't actually seen the film they're recommending. You'd be amazed how often this happens.
- Horror comedy / comedy horror.
- The person responding to me had an American flag in their profile picture.
I've also removed any films recommended by people I don't know where I've looked at it and thought, "this sounds terrible".
I of course got more than 40 recommendations, so I've had to do some pruning. Here's the list I ended up with:
- Coherence (2013)
- The Plague Dogs (1982)
- La Jetee (1962)
- Suspiria (1977) - a film I should have seen but somehow haven't
- Help, I'm A Fish (2000)
- Yakuza Apocalypse (2015)
- Trenque Lanquen (2022)
- Kin Dza Dza (1986)
- From Beyond (1986)
- The Falls (1980)
- Aniara (2018)
- Gandahar (1987)
- Orlando (1992)
- Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die (2025)
- Welcome to Woop Woop (1997)
- Upstream Color (2013)
- Hundreds Of Beavers (2022)
- The Man From Earth (2007)
- Tulpan (2008)
- Koyaanisqatsi (1982)
- Miracle Mile (1988)
- Asphalt Watches (2013)
- Accumulator 1 (1994)
- The Chess Of The Wind (1976)
- The Nines (2007)
- The Shout (1978)
- How To Get Ahead In Advertising (1989)
- Mad Dog Time (1986)
- Bigfoot: The Lost Coast Tapes (2012)
- The Standoff At Sparrow Creek (2018)
- They Don't Cut The Grass Anymore (1985)
- What A Carve Up! (1961)
- Avalon (1990)
- 96 Souls (2016)
- Casa De Mi Padre (2012)
- Hysteria (2011)
- Kontroll (2003)
- Kirikou and the Sorceress (1998)
- Anarchy TV (1998)
- Zinda Laash (1967)
Will I watch all of these? Probably not, purely because I already had a couple of films in mind that I want to prioritise watching soon - Miloš Forman's The Fireman's Ball is at the top of that list, for example - but these will be good to dip into if I'm stuck for something.
I'm not going to blog my way through them all because that would be ludicrous but I'll revisit this in a month and change to see how I got on. If you're interested in real-time thoughts then my Letterboxd is here.
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Blue Remembered Earth - Alastair Reynolds
I realised recently that Alastair Reynolds has quietly become one of my favourite authors. Blue Remembered Earth is probably my least favourite of his books that I've read so far, but that's like saying it's my least favourite Comeback Kid album. There are no bad Comeback Kid albums, and one of them has to be bottom of the list. (It's Turn It Around, for those interested. I know that's tantamount to blasphemy.)
This has all the hallmarks of a Reynolds classic. Weird alien artifacts left behind by a race that's probably long dead? Yes. A race across the solar system in an improbable craft? Yes. A ton of science that feels real and probably but that's explained in a way that's easy to follow for people who don't understand science (me)? Yes. Complex characters making decisions with very limited information? Also yes.
I haven't read enough of Reynolds' back catalogue to know if he always wrote thrillers of if he slowly slipped towards that form over time. I don't remember Pushing Ice being a thriller really, and so I suspect it's the latter. Blue Remembered Earth feels like an early step towards writing SF thrillers, and it's maybe a little bit of a stumbling step. This is very deliberately plotted, but it's a plot that shows its seams. A common criticism of Reynolds' prose is that he's very workmanlike, and this book is a good example of that.
That's particularly true in the middle of the book, in the sequences that take place on Mars and in the underwater nations. Both of those sequences feel very "built", very deliberately designed to move the plot forwards without offering us much yet. It's the closest I've come to feeling like a part of a Reynolds book was "filler", and it's the first time I've found myself wishing that he'd just get on with it.
But then he does get on with it and we're back to classic Al, and we end on a really warm, hopeful note that also sets us up brilliantly to take a step into the rest of this series. This is ultimately a book about remembering where home is, and about the desire to always have a place to come back to, and it's really nice.
Not a perfect book, then, but there's no such thing as a bad Alastair Reynolds book (at least not yet, in my experience), and I still really enjoyed this.
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Talking It Over - Julian Barnes
I first read Talking It Over when I was about 19 years old, after I read A History Of The World In 10 1/2 Chapters and decided I really needed to read more Julian Barnes. I liked it at the time, but I realise now that I wasn't old enough or possessed of enough life experience to fully appreciate it.
When I was 25 I went through a bad break-up and my partner got together with my best friend of close to a decade. The three of us had spent years doing everything as a trio, and I felt hugely betrayed. I haven't spoken to them for close to 15 years - longer than we were ever actually friends to begin with, I've just realised - but I think about them regularly. They left a void in my life that has never really been filled.
Unsurprisingly, re-reading this book brought up a lot of feelings about that time in my life. It's impossible for me not to place myself in the shoes of Stuart here, and I had a very strong reaction to the way he's portrayed. I feel like he's owed a little more grace and understanding as he deals with everything that's happening to him.
None of the characters here is drawn particularly sympathetically, but that's always been a strength of Barnes' writing. He's very good at showing people as they really are, warts and all, and he nails all three of our main characters to the wall here. This situation feels utterly mundane and real, and it hits harder as a result of that.
I re-read this mainly because I've only just learned about the existence of a sequel, and I wanted to refresh myself on this novel before I move on to the follow-up. I'm very curious to see what that book holds.
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Taiwan Travelogue - Yáng Shuāng-zǐ
On the surface, Taiwan Travelogue looks like exactly what it professes to be - a cosy, quiet novel about food, travel, and unrequited love between two women. A Japanese novelist travels around pre-war, Japanese-occupied Taiwan alongside a brilliant local translator, a woman with deep knowledge of the island's layered culture and history. The novelist has been officially invited to deliver a lecture series, and plans to spend a year writing travelogue articles for Japanese publications. It's a familiar setup: writer moves to foreign land, lives like a local, befriends a native who can help dissolve the exoticism of the place into digestible prose to send home.
But Yáng Shuāng-zǐ does something subversive with these tropes. The translator's notes describe this as an onion of a novel, and that's exactly right. Beneath the quiet cosiness, tension is constantly bubbling. There's the tension of colonisation, of what an enforced language does to a people's culture and society. We're reminded from the outset that the narrator - the writer, our sole point-of-view character - is a coloniser, and we're never allowed to forget it. Footnotes interrupt the narrative throughout, correcting her language, challenging her history, and pointing out that many of the things she's describing no longer exist, casualties of colonialism, of travel and tourism. She is entirely unaware of the power she wields. This is, at its core, a book about quiet, polite power dynamics.
Large sections are devoted entirely to food: lists of local dishes, descriptions of flavours, comparisons with mainland cooking, ruminations on names and preparation. I found myself initially charmed by these passages, then gradually bored, and eventually skimming them. I initially felt guilty about that, but by the end of the novel, I think that response is entirely intentional. We're meant to grow tired of the narrator's self-indulgence, the sound of her own voice. This is presented as a love story, but I don't think it's a love story between two women. I think it's a love story between the narrator and the sound of her own voice.
The novel is also a remarkable nesting doll of translations. Fictional translators conduct conversations in the footnotes alongside Lin King, the real translator, who in her closing note reflects on the experience. She discusses being tempted to invent an extra meta-layer for the English translation, and laments that footnotes are so rarely used in literary translation. She tells us that they gave her space to explain context, historical detail, and her own translation choices in the moment, rather than saving everything for an end note.
I find myself agreeing with her desire for more footnotes in translations. The footnotes here reminded me of Jennifer Croft's work in The Extinction of Irena Rey, another novel deeply preoccupied with language and the politics of translation. And they also brought to mind Paige Morris's translator's note in Han Kang's We Do Not Part, where she describes defaulting to Yorkshire English to render a working-class local dialect on the page, a decision I would have loved to encounter as a footnote while reading, rather than discover afterward. More footnotes in translated fiction, please. Publishers, if you're reading this.
Taiwan Travelogue is intricate, layered, and quietly furious. I suspect I'll begin to see reviews calling it cosy fairly soon. It is not cosy. It's a book about tension, about violence, about colonialism and empire, about national identity and personal identity. I'm very glad I picked it up, and I'm excited to see what the rest of the International Booker longlist holds.