Cuties

Last.fm looks good. The Comet Gain biography cleared up something I've wondered about. Phil Sutton was the drummer in the original lineup, but the sleeve notes to their first album "Casino Classics" credit "Hoffner Burns" with percussion. It turns out that they're the same person. There's also an Anorak group.

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There's an article in The Listener this week about New Zealand historian WH Oliver and narrative history. It mentions his role in creating the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, and that the five volumes of the Dictionary are now completely available online. I haven't used this before, either online or the paper copy. It looks like a really useful source of information.

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Book Reviews

The Listener, The Guardian, The London Review of Books and The New York Review of Books all have interesting book reviews. You can search them here. Some of the reviews in the last two are subscriber only, but once you know the issue you want you can use the Opac to find a paper copy. So it's also a way of searching those serials more specifically.

Kazuo Ishiguro

One of the tags on LibraryThing for Kazuo Ishiguro's "When We Were Orphans" is "memory", which is pretty good as a one word part description of what the book might be about. I borrowed it for my library. And there are some interesting comments in the reviews about the unreliability of the narrator, and why he seems convinced his parents are being held captive in the same house as they were 30 years before.

Casino Classics

There weren't actually tickets for this show, it was just pay on the door. The Betsey Trotwood is a short walk from the Farringdon tube. It still has top class indiepop.

Things I am reading now

The Maori Magna Carta.