I have 3 daughters we tried this with — two are indie/alt rock fans (but on the eclectic side and more toward pop — not hardcore or real weird stuff) but one has already seen One Direction and Taylor Swift this year. Youngest saw Jake Bugg when she was 8 and now at 10 has started playing electric guitar…

I think he'll be great and this shot looks the part. (I don't particularly care what colour hair they give him.)

Thank you, the world needs more of this hard-hitting journalism.

I liked Cruel Shoes a lot, I read it as a kid. Also, didn't he have some kind of TV special? I remember at the start it looked like a drunk driving ad, he was leaving a party wasted and then driving his steamroller home…

Just one on constant loop I bet.

Yet another Ramones song that I didn't know was a cover.

Isn't that more like ancient culture rather than pop-culture? Like how I say "Veni, vidi, vici" whenever I take over a new country.

I find that is too much Fallian marsh gas, I stick to just 3.5 litres and it's usually fine — you should bubble it a little slower if you're doing that though.

Was he in the audience in character?

I had recently read the John Cleese book and I think some of that may have bled over into my enjoyment. I do think his voice didn't seem to fit the historical setting as well as it does more modern books.

Are clams not shellfish?

That doesn't even rhyme.

You worked for a country that was owned by an Indian? Which country?

I think I did read a few of those as a teen (or maybe it was some other similar guy), they were actually pretty fun.

I'm reading Elizabeth Kolbert's The Sixth Extinction from last year — good but a little depressing (as you might think). In a lighter mode, Victor Milan's The Dinosaur Lords (which GRRM blurbed as "Jurassic Park meets Game of Thrones") is fun so far, big medieval dino battles and an amnesiac protagonist.

That last sentence is a good summary. I did have a little less fun with the middle book (warning: contains pirates) but the third one might be the best of the three.

Stephenson is literally my favourite author still writing today but I didn't enjoy the Baroque cycle books as much as a lot of his future-set SF (Snow Crash is on the short list of 'might be my favourite book'). Certainly if you are liking Quicksilver, I'd say finish the rest of the cycle.

It is pretty fun, didn't really suck me in to reading more Jerome K. Jerome but I'm glad I read it.

Yeah, I think The Water Knife is my next book, I've enjoyed other Bacigalupi stuff too.

I agree about The Sculptor — I mean looking at it later I can acknowledge that the flaws might put some people off, but the characters just felt so 'real' and a lot of the art was amazing. It just pulled me right in.