1993 / Ebook / 72 pages / UK
***
Whether it succeeds in reclaiming the "impossibly dated," frightfully English, institutionally sexist picture for modern audiences is down to the individual, but it revealed depths that I wouldn't have thought to notice through my own prejudices.
Rhys H. Hughes, Romance with Capsicum (and Other Piquant Assignations)
1989-94 (collected 1995) / Ebook / 80 pages / UK***
This promising demo would be stronger if he'd left out the early filler, but it's interesting to see his style develop from uncharacteristically predictable twists through zany personifications to finally end up in familiar musty attics and the delicious punning of the title track. There's an occasional theme of over-optimistic yearning for distant or absent women, but maybe that's just how guys start out writing generally.
Fave: 'Romance with Capsicum'
2006 / Ebook / 157 pages / USA
**
Half inane lyrics glossary, half song-by-song thoughts and interpretations by the band, author Peter Straub and others. Maybe works as a nice companion piece if you're the sort of person who digs ukulele ballad triple albums in the first place.
2012 / Ebook / 249 pages / UK
****
Not primarily concerned with optimising for students, this takes a sweeping overview of works I appreciate more in the academic context than when they're cut loose to work out on my own. Though reading analysis of descriptions of nature does rub in that I should get out more.
Mark Valentine, Haunted by Books
1997-2015 (collected 2015) / Ebook / 296 pages / UK***
I appreciate the boundless freedom of digital books, but Tartarus Press is the lone siren that threatens to lure me back to the financially ruinous rocks of sensory reading. It's probably because my phone's ebook reader background matches the delicious creamy hue of their covers that I imagine I can smell them. This one has interesting introductions to the sort of obscure writers the publisher likes to exhume, but I'd have preferred a feature-length account of the book-collecting adventures.
