imyril steps up to 2014

I read a colossal number of books in 2013 (nearly half as many again as a typical year for me), and I'm not expecting to be quite so prolific in 2014. I might just about be able to read all the physical fiction on the shelf, but there's no way I can read everything - and I don't just want to read difficult fiction :)

So I think I'm going to design my 2014 challenge around variation. I expect to read 4 books in an average month, so I'd like to aim to include one non-fiction and/or one personal development tome each month (noting that PD counts as non-fiction, so one book may meet both goals some months). The last decade has seen me be exhausted by what I do and using reading for escapism - I've got a bit of balance back and am enjoying myself at work again, so I'd like to see if I can add a bit of professional polish.

I'll also aim to take 1 unread book off my physical and Kindle shelves each month, of whatever topic/genre/what have you.

Last but not least, I'm going to indulge in my completist streak - so over the course of the year, I'll choose some random targets to 'finish' on my shelf, starting with Donna Tartt novels. I've never finished The Little Friend, so I'll go back to this and give it another go; I am excited to read The Goldfinch; and completism means I get to indulge myself with a reread of The Secret History :)

Given the amount of cross-over in my challenge, it's entirely possible I'd only take 24 books off the shelf, so in the spirit of the group, I'm going to target 36 books - or 75% of whatever number I end up actually reading!

No idea how I'll keep track of all this, but it does mean I'll be trying to track all my reading in this thread rather than just a slightly arbitrary subset of physical fiction (as I did in the second half of 2013).

---

Total read: 80
Total off the shelf (phys / Kindle): 24 / 34
Total acquired: 80 (excluding Kindle duplicates)
Mount TBR score: -22

Jan (8 - 2/3/3)
Lev Grossman - The Magicians (physical off the shelf, fiction)
Tom Rath - Strengthsfinder 2.0 (non-fiction, personal development)
Iain M. Banks - Consider Phlebas (reread, Culture completism)
Robin Sloan - Mr Penumbra's 24 Hour Bookstore (Kindle off the shelf, fiction)
Jane Harris - The Observations (fiction)
Mark T. Barnes - The Garden of Stones (Kindle off the shelf, fiction)
Ray Bradbury - Fahrenheit 451 (physical off the shelf, fiction, SantaThing 2013, classic SFF)
Phil Rickman - The Wine of Angels (Kindle off the shelf , fiction)

Feb (7 - 1/5/1)
Donna Tartt - The Goldfinch (kindle off the shelf, fiction, Tartt completism)
Alfred Bester - The Stars My Destination (physical off the shelf, fiction, classic SFF)
Iain M. Banks - The Player of Games (fiction, Culture completeism)
Charles Palliser - Rustication (Kindle off the shelf, fiction)
Lloyd Alexander - The Foundling (Kindle off the shelf, fiction)
Catherynne Valente - Palimpsest (Kindle off the shelf, fiction)
Paul Antony Jones - Extinction Point (Kindle off the shelf, fiction)

March (8 - 1/6/1)
Iain M. Banks - Use of Weapons (fiction, Culture completeism)
Dana Stabenow - Second Star (Kindle off the shelf, fiction, women can too write SFF)
Sally Gardner - Tinder (physical off the shelf, fiction)
Kurt Vonnegut - Slaughterhouse-five (Kindle off the shelf, fiction, classic scifi)
Jim Kelly - The Water Clock (Kindle off the shelf, fiction)
S. G. Redling - Damocles (Kindle off the shelf, fiction, women can too write SFF)
Diane Setterfield - The Thirteenth Tale (Kindle off the shelf, fiction)
Dana Stabenow - A Handful of Stars (Kindle off the shelf, fiction, women can too write SFF)

April (7 - 4/2/1) (and 1 partial)
Margaret Atwood - Oryx and Crake (physical off the shelf, fiction, SantaThing 2013)
Jose da Fonseca - English as she is spoke (physical off the shelf, non-fiction)
Michael Marshall - We Are Here (fiction, physical off the shelf)
Jeff Vandermeer - Annihilation (fiction, physical off the shelf)
Pasi Ilmari Jääskeläinen - The Rabbit Back Literature Society (fiction, Kindle off the shelf)
(Iain M Banks - The State of the Art) (partial; Culture completeism)
Phil Rickman - Midwinter of the Spirit (fiction, Kindle off the shelf)
Janny Wurts - Curse of the Mistwraith (fiction, women can too write SFF)

May (6 - 1/2/3)
Andre Norton - Plague Ship (fiction, women can too write SFF, classic scifi)
Anne Rice - The Witching Hour (fiction)
Robert O'Brien - Mrs Frisby and the Rats of Nimh (fiction, group read)
Sarah Moss - Names for the Sea (non-fiction, Kindle off the shelf)
Kate Danley - The Woodcutter (fiction, Kindle off the shelf)
Jeff Vandermeer - Authority (physical off the shelf, fiction)

June (4 - 2/1/1)
Louise Penny - Still Life (physical off the shelf, fiction)
Melissa Scott - Burning Bright (Kindle off the shelf, fiction, women can too write SFF, group read)
Katharine Kerr - Polar City Blues - (fiction, women can too write SFF)
Peter Collyer - Rain Later, Good (physical off the shelf, non-fiction)

July (4 - /2/2)
Guy Gavriel Kay - The Summer Tree (fiction)
John Sweeney - Elephant Moon (Kindle off the shelf, fiction)
N. K. Jemisin - Killing Moon (Kindle off the shelf, fiction, women can too write SFF, group read)
Iain. M. Banks - Excession (fiction, Culture completeism)
Louise Lawrence - The Warriors of Taan (fiction, women can too write SFF)

August (5 - 1/2/2)
Lauren Beukes - The Shining Girls (fiction, Kindle off the shelf, women can too write SFF)
N. K. Jemisin - The Shadowed Sun (Kindle off the shelf, fiction, women can too write SFF, group read)
Jared Diamond - Collapse (non-fiction, group read)
Tamora Pierce - Alanna (fiction, women can too write SFF)
Nick Harkaway - Tigerman (physical off the shelf, fiction)
Elyne Mitchell - The Silver Brumby
Weis & Hickman - Dragons of Autumn Twilight

September (7 - 3/1/3)
Robert Westall - The Cats of Seroster
Jeff Vandermeer - Acceptance (Southern Reach) (physical off the shelf)
Christopher Priest - The Prestige (physical off the shelf, group read)
Rajaa Alsanea - Girls of Riyadh (physical off the shelf, Diversiverse)
Octavia Butler - Wild Seed (women can too write SFF, Diversiverse)
Iain M Banks - Inversions (Culture completeism)
Matt Hill - The Folded Man (Kindle off the shelf)

October (3 - 2/1/0)
Ben Aaronovitch - Broken Homes (physical off the shelf)
Matthew Inman - The Terrible and Wonderful Reasons Why I Run Long Distances (physical off the shelf, non-fiction)
Daniel O'Malley - The Rook (Checquy Files) (Kindle off the shelf)
Mary Robinette Kowal - The Lady Astronaut of Mars (Kindle off the shelf, Women can too write SFF)
Iain M Banks - Look to Windward (Culture group read)
Ann Leckie - Ancillary Justice (Kindle off the shelf, women can too write SFF)

November (7 - 3/3/1)
Susan Hill - The Woman in Black
Katharine Grant - Sedition (physical off the shelf)
Halliday Sutherland - Hebridean Journey (physical off the shelf, non-fiction)
Rose George - Deep sea and Foreign Going (non-fiction, kindle off the shelf)
Helen S. Wright - A Matter of Oaths (kindle off the shelf, women can too write SFF)
Lauren Owen - The Quick (physical off the shelf)
Suzanne Collins - The Hunger Games (kindle off the shelf)

December(2 - 2/0/0)
(G Willow Wilson - Alif the Unseen)(abandoned 58%)
Susan Hill - Printer's Devil Court (physical off the shelf)
(Leigh Driver - The Lost Villages of England) (partial - abandoned 30% but will continue to dip in/out - this really is a coffee table book not a straight read through)
Susan Hill - The Soul of Discretion (physical off the shelf)
Martha Wells - The Cloud Roads (physical off the shelf)
Sarah Moss - Bodies of Light (kindle off the shelf)
Lauren Beukes - Zoo City (kindle off the shelf, women can too write SFF)
Suzanne Collins - Catching Fire (kindle off the shelf, women can too write sff)
Marc Burrows - I Think I Can See Where You're Going Wrong (physical off the shelf, non-fiction)
Seanan McGuire - Discount Armageddon (kindle off the shelf, women can too write SFF)

Male / female authors: 40 / 39 (+ 1 co-authored)
Culture completeism: 7 / 10
Tartt completeism: 1 / 3
Classic scifi: 5 / 12
Women can too write SFF: 21
SantaThing 2013: 2 / 3
Non-fiction and/or personal development: 9 / 12
Diversiverse (full year): 4

Interesting challenge -- good luck with it! I will also try to read more non-fiction next year -- got a bit of a headstart with 1913.

Good luck and enjoy your challenge!

Here's to getting started with 2 physical books to get off the shelf - Tom Rath's Strengthsfinder (non-fiction/professional development) and Lev Grossman's The Magicians (fiction).

The Magicians kicks off my challenge to read all my Christmas and SantaThing books, which seems like an honest completism challenge to start the year ;) (The Goldfinch and the Donna Tartt challenge is awaiting me going back to my commute next week, as it's a Kindle copy).

1) The Magicians - Lev Grossman

I can see why this gets labelled as Harry Potter for grown-ups - an unhappy teen with a towering intellect and an interest in sleight of hand stumbles into the magical college of Brakebills after finding his Princeton interviewer dead in his study, and much of the book is given over to his escapades as he learns magic at the only school for magic in the US. Quentin is self-absorbed, sorry for himself, pathologically unhappy, lacking in confidence, but magically competent - so he fits right in. Brakebills students are the elite, but Quentin is soon catapulted forward a year, reinforcing his outsider status and pushing him ever closer to his gifted classmate Alice. As they are pushed into an exclusive group that appears more dedicated to drinking than cantrips, the cloying atmosphere becomes ever more similar to that of Hampden in The Secret History - but here the students will lead themselves astray without any help from their professors. The latter part of the book deals with Quentin's attempts to deal with the real world after graduating, and drifts ever further from Potter even as the author suggests that Quentin's childhood Narnia-analog may in fact be both real and within reach. The novel is far more about the brutal realities of life (even as a magician), Quentin's alienation and his self-regard (or lack of it) rather than any heroic arc (sorry Potter fans), and on this level works reasonably well.

Nonetheless, this is an odd mess of a book to me - I'm not convinced the various parts hang together, and while the characters are convincing (or at least familiar) they're not very appealing. I wasn't enamoured of the occasional random pot shots at geek and goth culture, which didn't ring true at all coming from Quentin, and Fillory - a blatant Narnia clone, complete with religious affectations, but with added surreality - felt like a cop out. I'm not sure why Grossman didn't come up with something a bit more original - because if he meant to attack Narnia, that didn't really work either; it just felt like a bad caricature rather than a meaningful criticism (and Fillory made a lot less sense than Narnia).

It's a curiosity, but the jury is out on whether I'd be willing to make space on the shelf for the sequels. It might grow on me as I digest, but for now the final quarter has left a slightly bad taste in my mouth.

I appear to have acquired 7 books in the past 24 hours. I blame the Kindle January sale. And my lack of self-control around books!

Ruth Ozeki - A Tale for the Time Being (had my eye on this for a while)
Eleanor Catton - The Luminaries (because I bought it for everyone else at Christmas)
Donna Tartt - The Little Friend (because the hardback I own is just WAY too heavy to read ;)
Dave Eggers - The Circle (I missing One LT, One Book, but hey, 99p!)
Charles Palliser - Rustication (sounds intriguing, and I remember The Quincunx)
Neil Gaiman - The Ocean at the End of the Lane (duplicating my physical copy for ease of access. Also, 99p! I always said I'd happily pay 99p extra to get a book in both formats - see, it's true :)
Sara Maitland - Gossip from the Forest (sounds intriguing, I love fairytale lore and I'm still too chicken to read A Book of Silence)

Nice! That reminds me I also have the physical copy of The Ocean at the End of the Lane to read. So many books etc.

Ah nuts. Those days when you realise the book you're reading isn't the book you thought you were reading.

I am reading Strengthsfinder 2.0, which I thought I was reading - but it's not the book I thought it was (Strengths-based Leadership). I somehow missed that my physical book and my Kindle book ... aren't the same book. Oops?

Luckily both are worth a read!

The Magicians sounds like an odd combination of Harry Potter and The Catcher in the Rye.

I'd definitely put Magicians closer to The Secret History than Harry Potter. Sure, it's a school for magic, and they end up in fairly tribal cliques (but the tribal clique thing is true of universities, not a purely Hogwarts concept) - and I think the age difference makes a huge difference, as does the lack of focus on the primary character. He isn't important, he's just another student, who is searching for the thing that will make him happy. Yes, there's a sport/game introduced eventually (and even the characters make jokes about quidditch), but it's more like magical chess than magical rugby. Ultimately, the only Potter link is that it's about magic users :)

Equally though, I think the author was collecting analogues and making references throughout - so HP is a good reference point, although anyone seeking the hopeful / heroic aspects of HP will be rather disappointed!

Catcher in the Rye is a good call though, from what I read about it (I've never read it) - the themes of depression, alienation and self-discovery are all there.

2) Strengthsfinder 2.0 - Tom Rath

I've been meaning to read this and take the Strengthsfinder test for years - I'm glad I've finally done so (and I rather wish I'd done it years ago!). It's actually a really slim volume, so I might not give myself any points for now reading Strengths-based Leadership, as I think both books give over a fair amount of their size to the definitions of the strengths (which are the same in both books).

Essentially, the idea is that Gallup - with decades of research up their sleeves - identified 34 core strengths (or natural talents if you like) that you can build on. The argument is that we are mostly encouraged to focus on our weaknesses, and to aim to build on them so they become strengths - and that this is bad for us, because

- it's not the most motivational thing in the world
- it can lead to you not paying attention to or building on your strengths, which is daft
- you'll never be as good at these things - however much time, effort and education you invest - as someone with a natural strength in that area
- it will always take you more effort to do things in your weak areas, so you'll be less productive and probably less happy

They're fairly convincing and I do appreciate the philosophy (although I think most of us work in environments where you can't get away with saying 'oh I'm crap at that, why doesn't so-and-so do it, so we do have to do some work around key weaknesses).

After being taken through the background and the theory, you take the test (this is really what you pay for when you buy the book), which is A LOT of questions - for each you simply and rapidly (i.e. instinctively, not consciously) choose on a sliding scale whether you are more aligned with statement A or statement B (and the 2 statements are often not in opposition - they can even be unrelated). After half an hour or so of this, the numbers get crunched, and you are presented with the 5 areas that you show strongest alignments to, complete with more detailed commentary that bears out some of the finer points from your answers (i.e. even if you had the same 5 strengths as me, your report probably wouldn't read quite the same way, as secondary influences are played in).

It's the first time I've taken any sort of personality / skills test that I actually agreed with / couldn't argue with the results - and for 3 out of 5 of my strengths, simply had to laugh and say "well of course, I can't argue with that". The other 2? 1 I considered a strength, but there are other traits that might have come up stronger (i.e. I can't say which of certain traits would be primary for me), and 1 that I'd considered to be something I aspire to, but which apparently my instincts are all aligned with. It's worth pointing out that results for Strengthsfinder can change over time - although they rarely change dramatically, and over time means over years.

So - I'm intrigued, and it was really useful to validate what I do best (vs what I think I do best) and I did get a kick out of confirming that what I'm doing right now (running my own business, essentially providing strategic/operational trouble-shooting) appears to play directly to my strengths, which is why I'm enjoying it.

I did find myself then wanting to know what my weakest areas were, as I see this as a way of knowing what I'm likely to cock up in (and so where I should seek help) - but of course they won't tell you that, as they don't believe in focusing on weakness. Apparently I'm too stuck in the old paradigm, but I do have to disagree with them here - I know I've got secondary strengths that I use on a daily basis, and I can guess at where my weak points are - but it would be quite useful to have this validated. I think my self-awareness is pretty good, but given my strengths are in information collection and analysis, it's entirely predictable that I'd like some scientific rigour around my self-assessment ;)

...but there are other profiling tools that look at this, which I will visit later in the year.

In the meantime, I plan to read Strengths-based Leadership (which I hadn't realised was a separate book), which moves from talking about how to play to your strengths for personal success into how your strengths (however introspective they may seem) can be applied in a leadership context. I led project teams for over a decade and was in senior management for 5 years before opting out to do my own thing - although my current job requires me to convince, inspire and lead groups of people who don't even know me into changing their ways. So I'm interested to read the case studies of the leaders profiled by Gallup, and how they lead teams, and to absorb a few thoughts on any ways I can tailor my style for success (especially now that I have to rely less on established relationships / trust and more on charisma / rapidly creating trusted relationships).

I'd recommend the test if you're interested in an impartial but totally positive way of looking at what you do best. The strengths are abstract (e.g. mine include Individualization - the tendency to look at everyone as an individual and be interested in them, not just what they do or what group they belong to, and make them feel individually worthwhile - and Input - which many here may find cropping up, as it's about the voracious desire to collect information about lots of topics because it's interesting; a very bookwormy trait!) - the really useful element being the thoughts on how to apply this in the real world - i.e. how to make it a strength / how to get the most out it.

4) Mr Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore - Robin Sloan

After rereading Consider Phlebas (which I thoroughly enjoyed, as always), I have been chortling through Mr Penumbra. When a desperate young designer takes over the night shift at an obscure San Fran book shop it's even quieter and weirder than he expects. From the tech delights of Google to the dusty restrictions of an aging book cult, the story bounces along with charm and humour, which I found irresistible. Light weight and lovely.

5) The Observations - Jane Harris

A very good friend loaned me this last summer, and I've only just got around to reading it (so off my shelf, but not off my shelf, all in one. Confusing!)

I class this alongside Sarah Waters - it features a convincing Victorian setting (in this case a village in lowland Scotland), a colourful heroine (Bessy Buckley, a brash young Irish girl with a string of lies to tell), and an increasingly silly/melodramatic set of less-than-shocking denouements in lieu of meaningful character progression or plot (I loved Tipping the Velvet, but I did have some credibility issues with some of the emotional arc it encompassed; and the last third of Fingersmith actively annoyed me).

Bessy is taken into service by Arabella Reid purely because she happened to show up at Castle Haivers (a country house rather than a true castle) within minutes of the previous girl being dismissed. Lying about her name, her age, and her background, she eventually realises that Arabella hasn't been taken in by any of her stories and has reasons of her own for taking the girl in: she is conducting a private study of the traits of the servant class to try and identify what makes a perfect servant. When Bessy realises she is being manipulated by her odd but adored mistress, she decides to wreak havoc and taken revenge - with unexpected consequences.

This starts as almost stream of consciousness from Bessy - erratic punctuation and sentences written as they would be spoken - and slowly develops into a more coherent narrative (intentional control of style, mirroring narrator Bessy's growing confidence and practice with writing); it is scattered throughout with colourful dialect for you to either know or guess from context. Some of this style bothered me initially (including the adoption of flip for f*ck, which I didn't entirely believe in BUT reminded myself that this is 1869 - I'm not familar enough with just how coarse lower Glasgow language was then as opposed to now), but I soon found myself racing through. It's really the narrative style that sets it apart.

This is easy enough reading - colourful, entertaining, and not in the least bit challenging. However, this is ultimately my criticism of it too - it's too simple. There are very few real secrets or plot turns (although I had trouble believing in Arabella's insanity - she was eccentric but sane, and then suddenly foaming-at-the-mouth hallucinating insane; this seemed very Victorian but not very realistic); the secrets are rather less horrifying than Bessy or Arabella believe (although it's fair to say they would have entirely outraged Victorian society, we're left with the challenge that this is a modern book read by a modern audience); and as there's absolutely no need for Bessy to reveal most of her own secrets in order to further the story we must also believe that our colourful liar actually has a confessional streak (she's Catholic by birth, but not a churchgoer, so this isn't an obvious trait).

I'd class it as fun but not particularly satisfying.

>4 imyril: I've just finished The Night Circus and Mr Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore was one that kept popping up as a recommendation on lists and such, so it's good to see someone else has recently delved into it and tempts me further to give it a try (maybe once I've got a few more off my TBR pile!)

14> I loved The Night Circus - I wouldn't say it has much in common with Mr Penumbra at all, but I did enjoy both for what it's worth :)

6) The Garden of Stones - Mark Barnes

I picked this up on a whim from Amazon recommendations. On the surface, it's a straightforward fantasy epic: an ancient Empire is riven by civil discord when an ambitious high lord sets his sights on recovering lost technologies to save his own life and gain the imperial throne. There's a bit more to it than that, however, and quite a lot to like.

The setting is somewhere across the galaxy, in some future time (humanity has gained the stars, but this tale doesn't focus on them). The Shrian Federation is the remains of the once-mighty Awakened Empire, itself a descendant of greater things. The Avan, an aggressive humanoid race engineered by ancient race the Seethe (humanoid/avian), rule a sort of feudal republic - the nobility dominate a caste system that kills a lesser being for insulting a greater, but elect an Asrahn on a 5 year cycle to lead the Federation. Gender inequality is surprisingly absent - in spite of the overtly Arabic-inspired trappings of the culture - with female warriors, magi (or Scholars as they're known in Shrian) and leaders going unremarked.

The world is largely shown not told - Barnes drops Unnecessarily Capitalised references (meh) in without much explanation, letting context generally qualify anything not immediately obvious with fairly (if not consistently) light touch exposition (there are some rough sections early on, but these aside I liked the casual approach). Characters likewise largely reveal themselves, although I found it difficult that everyone was a Mary Sue - smart, athletic, gifted - and had to remind myself that perhaps this is permissible from an engineered race - why engineer flaws?

The tale itself is fast moving and diverting, mixing warcraft, magic, and politics whilst playing with themes of racial integration, honour, loyalty and responsibility. It's colorful and fresh enough to pass muster, not least because of the many engineered races that inhabit the world (and the clarity that Shrian is one threatened nation amidst many others that aren't Avan-dominated). There's a clear sense that this tale is a small part of a much larger world stage.

Oddly, I felt that the villains got more page time devoted to their doings and motivations than the heroes - although it wasn't possible to confuse the two, and there's possibly a more interesting version in which the villains were presented as the hero protagonists they perceive themselves to be. But this is fairly straightforward right and wrong, with dark magic, racism and murder thrown in to underline that point.

One beef I was left with was that for all the society ( appears to) consider gender equal, the author doesn't treat them equally in terms of outcomes. Only one female character (Shar) is unequivocally positively presented, and she's defined by her unquestioning friendship with the male hero. Mari is an intriguing character (warrior poet, protector of the current Asrahn, wayward daughter of the villain), caught between loyalties and with her own arc - but I felt her moral choices were undermined by her romantic involvement with her House enemy, Indris, hero of the piece (and I found it unbelievable that she didn't recognize him, when she had been intended to seek him out and kill him in battle). The supporting cast of women of rank lack the drive and agency of their male counterparts. Overall, the context felt gender neutral, but the story remained male dominated, although this may shift in future novels.

Lastly, I had a slight nag that for all there were nominally many races, they might as well have been different human tribes. They didn't feel Other, with the marginal exception of the Scholar Femensetri, whose magically extended lifespan gives her a distance and perspective others lack and makes her feel slightly alien, and possibly Far-ad-din, who comes across a bit Tolkien Elvish as he disengages from a society that struggles to accept a former racial overlord as a co-citizen. But fundamentally, the odd reference to having two hearts (the Avan) or quills/feathers instead of hair (the Seethe) or animal body parts (hybrids abound), everyone felt human.

Generally though, I was diverted and entertained. I'm not rushing out to buy the sequel, but I may explore this world further when there are fewer exciting options on Mount TBR.

7) Fahrenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury
I haven't read this since it was on a school reading list over 20 years ago. I recall it as my lesson that just because a book was on the list didn't mean we would actually study it - so the crafty students didn't buy books until we got to them. Me, I bought everything up front and mostly secondhand, and this one was dog-earred and torn, and I raced through it before school even started.

Fast forward 20 (25?) years, and I'd mostly forgotten it, and long since lost that poor dying copy. So when SantaThing brought me a copy I was delighted. Reading it as an adult in the reality-TV explosion of the conformist inane, the vision is all the more terrifying for being 60 years old.

Montag is a rubbish hero, a perfect product of his world. Even when he is moved to save books rather than burn them, he hasn't the courage to read them. The saving is an almost unconscious action, but one that continues even as his guilt grows. When he is pushed into engaging with what he has done by three terrible events in rapid succession, he doesn't know how. When he seeks guidance, he can't resist his socially-trained urges to simply react, lash out, live in the now rather than think and plan for the future. The outcome is inevitable, although the ending wasn't what I expected (or remembered - I seem to have mixed up another robot dog story with my vague memories; possibly Snow Crash or something by Jeff Noon).

The details of media, even technology (unlike so many, Bradbury assumed wireless communication), social pressure, tv society, lack of consideration of consequences, media scapegoating and pressure to conform are all horribly relevant. It's not easy reading, although the very recognition makes the ending seem less neat, less likely, more the rapid close-out of a short story that has made its point (and itself prefers not to focus on consequences).

As ever with classic scifi, women are woefully under served: the fragile muse, the distant wife, the shrieking harridan, and ultimately the entirely invisible - the educated hobos with their memorized literature are all men.

It's still a great read and a beautifully written novella. I can't imagine it on screen, so I hope it's still on the reading lists - and perhaps actually studied, not just one of the also-ran inclusions.

It's really interesting to read your comments as I have this on a list to borrow from the library in the fairly near future (it's one they have in their not huge audio book collection and I've been going through the list to see what actually tempts in what they've got). I had it recommended to me a few years ago, but had never seen a copy in shops so never got around to reading it. I didn't know the person well who made the recommendation (and he'd written me quite a list of books that I ought to read asap - there are still plenty of others that I need to track down!) so was never sure whether it would be one I'd like or not, your comments tell me enough to make me curious.

I'm glad it sparks your interest! I'm curious now - what else was it on the list? Was there a theme?

I don't know about theme. I met him on holiday and, along with a couple of other people, we got chatting about books and reading and before we moved on he gave me a list of books I should read. These were the books - Edgar Huntly, Memoirs of a sleepwalker by Charles Brockden Brown , The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon, Whit by Iain Banks, In Country by Bobbie Anne Mason, The History Man by Malcolm Bradbury, Red Harvest and The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett, Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut, Absolute Beginners by Colin MacInnes and Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis.

I've never actually gotten around to reading any of them although a couple like Fahrenheit 451, the titles always stuck with me, but I actually found the list in the back of a notebook the other day (strange how these things happen, no?) I have read Transition by Iain Banks (or rather listened to - we had it on audio) I didn't enjoy that one, but I'm not sure whether that was because of the book itself or because, as I later found out, it was an abridged version (something I do my utmost to avoid - 'if the author put it in, it was supposed to be there' tends to be my feeling on the matter) and so it had perhaps been hacked to incomprehensibility.

Any idea whether there was a theme?

Wow that's quite a list! I haven't read any of the others, but Slaughterhouse Five is on my list for this year so I'll post notes on that at some point :) The others aren't though - it looks very eclectic to me - American Gothic, dystopia, noir - very interesting! All classics of their type though, so a great list.

I read Transition a couple of years back and it did nothing for me. I don't really recall the detail of the novel now, just the disappointment. I've read plenty other Iain M Banks and loved them (I'm doing the Culture group read this year to revisit), but Transition fell very flat.

That makes me feel a little more positive about giving others by him a go - I was quite put off by Transition. It's a very luck of the draw thing sometimes with authors on whether you like them or not depending on which of their books you try first. With so many good books still waiting to be read, it's easy to say 'Well I tried X and didn't like it, so I won't read anything more by that person'.

I shall look out for Slaughterhouse Five to see what you think - unless it turns up in the library's audio section, I'm unlikely to get to it this year - more than enough titles already on my TBR piles.

8) The Wine of Angels - Phil Rickman
I found Merrily Watkins when buying a gift for a relative who likes crime novels a lot more than I do, then picked it up for me on a Daily Deal as she always seems faintly annoyed when I haven't read books I give as gifts.

I pegged it as fluff - single mum parish priest solves religiously-related crime! - Midsomer Murders with a priest - etc - and I wasn't wrong, but given my disdain for Midsomer this thankfully turned out to be a lot more fun.

Merrily and her daughter Jane move to a historic Herefordshire village for Merrily to be installed as priest. Tragedy strikes with an unexpected death at a controversial wassailing organized by towny newcomers the Cassidys, but Merrily is otherwise enchanted by her new home. Old forces are stirring though; Merrily is haunted by the enormous old vicarage and nightmares of her dead husband; Jane is drawn to the ancient orchard beyond the church walls. When the Cassidys wayward daughter disappears, things come to a head and Merrily must find a way to reconcile the village with its deep-buried past.

Expect some recognizable British village character tropes along the way (and the inevitable tension between natives and incomers), but Merrily herself and her daughter Jane are delightful: bright , stubborn, independent, and human. Merrily's slightly mystical faith, unpopular in the modern Church, make perfect sense in the knowledge that the sequel sees her become an exorcist.

The plot is frequently by the numbers, but there was the occasional twist and turn I didn't see coming, and it never flagged or grew dull. It's lightly written stuff, easy to fly through.

Great literature it ain't, but it was a lot of fun. I think I've acquired a new guilty pleasure for the dark winter nights when I'm not looking for a challenge.

Glad you've found something to enjoy - it's nice to read something just to relax and not worry about the 'great literature' for a while, change of pace. I've not come across the author before.

I'll admit I'm struggling with The Goldfinch - it's easy enough to read, but so far it hasn't grabbed me. I'm almost bored. Theo is too young to be interesting, and while I'm sure this period of his life was very formative and all that, it feels like a few well-chosen paragraphs would have got the idea across effectively rather than endless introspective review of the emotional sock drawer. I'm hoping the pace picks up!

I agree! I did read it but found myself waiting for it to become as good as everyone said...

9) The Goldfinch - Donna Tartt

My, this was a bit of a slog. My real problem with it - having done the slog, metaphorical legs aching and body tired from the headwind - I can neither say I loved nor hated this book. I admire it as a piece of work, and am left untouched (and slightly frustrated at just how much time I had to devote to it). It is interminably slow, every scene - every facet of every scene - built up stroke by careful stroke, layer upon layer of observation, repressed emotion, nuance until the overall effect is stifling.

It is, without a doubt, great writing - proper literature if you will, fascinated by the way in which our pasts colour our present and define our future, and the way in which we perceive, respond to, interact with beauty. In The Secret History, Tartt said beauty is terror... a fire that defines - in The Goldfinch, pure beauty is a trap... that must be wedded to something more meaningful. To my mind, that meaning is never found - Theo's epiphany in Amsterdam and his nihilistic reflection at the end left me cold, just as many of the books other motifs are drawn from the bag of things I just don't enjoy (I've got a particular dislike of alcoholism and drug abuse in fiction; I've never got over a forced reading of A Million Little Pieces).

Theo Decker spends his wayward life hoarding beauty - The Goldfinch itself, stashed in a pillowcase or a storage locker for half his life; his memories of Pippa; Hobie's masterpieces - and destroying it, whiting it out in a haze of drugs and alcohol that leave him reeling; the only response he has left to the self-destructive urges and survivor's guilt that hound him following his mother's death. No blame ever attaches to The Goldfinch - arguably the true cause of her death as it is the reason they are in the museum the day of the bombing - because it is his own misdemeanour at school that has resulted in them being free to go see it on that day in particular. Like Boris, the mercurial Russian who repeatedly leads him astray and further astray, Theo loves The Goldfinch without reservation, without reflection; he defines himself through his possession of the stolen painting.

So - I appreciated the artistry on display in The Goldfinch. I loved the prose - every bit as enveloping and satisfying as The Secret History. But while the characters were brilliantly depicted, inhabiting the imagination beyond the page, leaving you with no doubt of their reality, there wasn't much to like about most of them (although the cameo by Francis Abernathy made me smile) or the story itself, so the pace dragged at me. Ultimately, I respect the author and the novel, but I'll happily leave it on the shelf from now on.

10) The Stars My Destination - Alfred Bester

My problem with classic scifi is the awful attitudes of the time it was written in, that many authors struggled to escape. This bothered me less with Fahrenheit 451 (which is more or less of an age with The Stars My Destination), although the way women were treated still got demerits, but was inescapably awful here.

Gully is trapped in a dying spacecraft, with limited resources and no way out - although humanity has learnt to teleport (although hello holes in logic, and hello a poor excuse to treat women badly), nobody can teleport across space. When another vessel sails past for the first time in months, he fires off distress signals, but the other craft sails on. His rage at their abandonment sparks what his futile survival has failed to - the drive to patch his ship up and get back to inhabited space - in order to take revenge on those who refused to rescue him.

So my problems start early: I struggle to accept that the drive for vengeance is stronger than the drive to survive. Gully has been willing to drift for months. Only when he is snubbed does he suddenly work out how to fire up the engines. Really?

It goes down hill from here for me. Gully is casual about potentially committing if not genocide then certainly mass-murder (turns out he hasn't, but he's prepared to); equally casually rapes a woman just because he can; and later tortures people he holds accountable for his abandonment. Along the way, he becomes educated (in stages); but it is only when he discovers that someone he insta-loves (GRR) is responsible for his abandonment that he begins to show anything remotely resembling remorse (and then it looks more like remorse that he is unwilling to complete his vengeance, and guilt about what he has done only because he is not able to complete his self-imposed mission, rather than genuine recognition that he's a monster).

Tacked onto this is a coda in which Gully liberates mankind by giving them an uberbomb, taking the decision of whether to go to war out of the hands of the security forces / megacorps / government and putting it in the hands of the people - which is a lovely sentiment for the 50s, but does feel randomly added at the end. Gully has had the bomb throughout; it is collateral to him; when he finally recognises what it is capable of he has coincidentally grown to a point where he can understand the implications - although it takes a faulty robot (no implications of AI here!) to tell him what the right thing to do is. Some personal growth.

There's a way of looking at this as an early take on the Everyman vs the MegaCorps, and the rights of the many as individuals (to education, to choice, to a meaningful life) vs the way in which government and corporations reduce the individual to a statistic who can't be trusted to make decisions for themselves and must be kept in their place. I think the intent is probably there, but I can't get past the packaging - and it certainly doesn't drive the narrative for the bulk of the book.

Coupled with the appalling handling of female characters throughout (even the supposedly capable criminal doesn't get a scene without either tears or hysterics), I found all this hard to swallow. I recognise that it was doing something new and different for its time, so I guess we have to award it classic status - it is a building block that great things have been built upon - but, urgh.

12) Rustication - Charles Palliser

I remember a friend making me read Quincunx when it came out, because she thought it was the best thing since sliced bread. I found it slow, overwrought, and unrewarding (but I don't enjoy Dickens either). Nonetheless, I thought I'd give the much-slimmer Rustication a go, with its take on the Gothic novel of social manners.

Presented (unconvincingly, although I've not done any research to invalidate the claim) as a true story - or rather, an actual historical document and unsolved murder - the novel is a 'copy' of the torrid diary of Richard Shenstone, written over a few weeks in December/January.

Rusticated (sent down / thrown out) from Cambridge, Richard joins his recently-widowed mother and domineering sister in a lonely house on the marshy southern coast. Unaware of the circumstances of his father's death, unwilling to divulge his own secrets (the Rustication and the reasons for it), confused by the family's sudden lack of means and fall from social grace, he records his teenage sexual fantasies (Victorian vanilla, but all-encompassing in terms of the women he meets - he 'falls' for everyone of suitable age / station, however briefly), his failing battle to ditch a university-acquired opium habit, and his vivid imaginings of what is actually going on around him.

Richard is a wildly unreliable narrator - all illogical leaps and sex-driven conclusions (she looked at me = she loves me; she scorned me = she's writing the poison pen letters circulating in the neighbourhood) - so it's hard to know how much to take at face value as the plot twists and turns (or his understanding of it does, at least). The small community is ripping itself apart with envy as various marriageable girls ( including Richard's sister) try to ensnare the earl's nephew, and hideous letters start circulating, accusing everyone of torrid behavior. When death threats and animal mutilations are added to the mix, the stage is set for social carnage.

We're told from the outset that a murder will occur - the questions are who will die, and who was responsible - but I found it hard to care about the characters even as I raced through the pages to get through the plot. The overwrought circumstances lacked credibility to me (not so much the small-minded backbiting community, which rang true, but the animal mutilations as escalation), and there's nobody other than the most peripheral characters (Betsy, Miss Biddlestone, Mrs Guilfoyle) who is remotely sympathetic.

This is car crash fiction in period dress; entertaining enough in places and atmospheric to be sure, but Richard's hot and sticky imaginings and the explicitly awful poison pen letters (reproduced in quantity) are pretty off putting - the sheer level of misogyny was hard for me to deal with, however period-appropriate it probably is. The relentless hatred of women (by Richard, and by the women themselves) made it fail for me.

Do you think that science fiction, out of all of the genres, tends to become dated the quickest? Fantasy is different. Most fantasy is based off of mythical elements and therefore has a timeless quality. But when I read science fiction or dystopian novels that mention A, B, C, and D, I can give you the general time period in which it was written.

I'm not sure I do. Any fiction dates itself - crime novels, romance, etcetera etc - if it's set in the 'now' and references current affairs or technology. Scifi can sometimes mask that if it's concerned with other things - would you guess Brave New World is getting on towards 100 years old?

That said - I think we're seeing technology diverging at such a rate now that scifi is dating faster because nobody can foresee everything, and it's the small ubiquitous stuff that sticks out when it's missing (eg mobile phones). Even things written 30 years ago has gaps - those will only become more obvious as time goes on. So when scifi is concerned predominantly with technology, I think you're absolutely right.

No, I think it has very little to do with technology because in a lot of cases science fiction writers have been remarkable prophets in terms of were the science at the time was going. It has more to do with the world building.

It's been a while since I've read it, but what makes Brave New World dated is A) the people worshiping Henry Ford, B) the Pavlovian conditioning of humans, and C) the communist references and ideology. It's still an absolutely amazing and thought-provoking book, but with those three things combined Brave New World is so 1932.

After WWII, there was The Illustrated Man. In it there are stories that feature A) places being destroyed by an atom bomb, B) black people being segregated to Mars, C) a Roswell style alien invasion, and D) a robot that falls in love. During those stories there was a part of me that chuckled and said, "Oh, Grandpa." The stories were still great, but that's so 1951! However, my two favorites were the one about the evil sentient city from another planet that hates Earth and the one about the father who sacrificed himself to the playground in order to save his son. In other words, the ones more based off of fantasy. Those genuinely frightened me.

Could Aldous Huxley have ever written a book in which most of the world was destroyed by climate change? Or one in which the world was dominated by fundamentalist Islamic ideals? Those are the types of things that I'm talking about when I say that science fiction is very much of it's time period. Most of them are built off of where it looked like the world was heading at the time it was written. To your point, other genres get dated too but the results are never as hokey to me.

Sorry that I got on my soap box, but I just think it's a very interesting way to look at the genre and your review of The Stars My Destination triggered the thought.

I don't think you can escape being of your time. I studied archaeology, and the history of archaeological thought mirrors the cultural history of the archaeologist: invasions, empires, cultural spread by colonial channels, no by osmosis, no by trade, and definitely no invasions (how old school), it's all about economics... Etc. Fiction is the same, except authors sometimes try harder to shed their own context :)

In the same way, you can't shed your readers' context - you pick out Pavlovian & communist threads in Huxley as dating mechanisms, whereas I see those as elements a modern writer might equally have woven in (Ford not so much, you're absolutely right - I'm too used to simply ignoring ritual beyond tagging it as ritual and totally forgot the angle ;) and I'd argue that all these things date all fiction; they're not dating Huxley because he was writing scifi.

I guess it just doesn't jar for me the way it does for you.

It does make me think about rereading Brave New World as part of my classic scifi foray this year tho - it's been years and I may come back and agree I'd simply forgotten all the nuances as it's been so long ;)

I don't much care for Brave New World, but for classic sci-fi it doesn't seem particularly dated to me, just hamfisted.

As far as themes go I think Huxley actually did a good job predicting the trajectory of civilization what with it's encouragement of consant pleasure seeking through consumerism and other diversions. Though I'd be less inclined to attribute this to a malevelent conspiracy to propogate passive citizenry than an insatiable capitalistic hunger for impulsive and uncritical consumers. Frankly I don't think one can rightly consider the state of global economics and productivity without pointing a long and accusing finger at Ford. It was his model for unskilled factory assembly line production that has driven manufacturing so far down the labor totem pole that no "sane" person thinks it possible to pay someone first world wages to do the job. Gee thanks Ford.

I'm actually kind of sorry now that I hijacked poor imyril's thread. I didn't say that these books did a bad job at predicting things, or that fiction can completely escape it's time. I'm just saying that I can see the time period that science fiction books are written in more easily than other genres. A writer most certainly could weave in communist and Pavlovian themes in a modern science fiction but I find it unlikely that anyone would because those concerns are not in vogue anymore. Now let's say that I read The Great Gatsby without knowing anything about the book's history. How would I know that that's not historical fiction? Oh, never mind. I'm letting this go now.

35> oh, please don't apologise, I love exploring an interesting idea (and I've been chewing this over off an on all afternoon - in a good way!)

If it's bothering you though, I'm happy to agree that we disagree (which is fine and good - that's the joy of LT and comparing perspectives) and leave it at that - but it's been lovely stimulating food for thought and I am sure I will continue to think about this over the next few days. I often read without thinking too hard about what I'm reading (which is one of the reasons I'm trying to get into the habit / gain the discipline of writing reviews), so a meaty discussion is nectar to my mind.

13) The Foundling - Lloyd Alexander

I first read Lloyd Alexander as a school book club purchase 30 years ago. It was one of several series that I jumped into the middle of (I think I started with The Castle of Llyr and then The Black Cauldron, but it may have been the other way round), and then spent time and effort to eventually acquire the rest.

I had no idea that there was a collection of Prydain short stories, all set before the Chronicles begin, until I was given it as a perfect birthday gift. Perfect comfort food reading, and I have delightedly devoured the slender volume today.

This is pure joy for any fan of Prydain - a chance to revisit some of the stories mentioned in passing in the Chronicles but never explored (how Fflewddur gained his harp; how Coll rescued Hen Wen from Annuvin; how Orddu, Orwen and Orgoch raised Dallben; how Dyrnwyn came to lie in the bowels of Spiral Castle) and some weaving of Celtic tales into the familiar setting. My favourite by a mile tells how Eilonwy's mother Angharad chose her husband, which essentially reaffirms that storytelling is enchantment and is just delightful.

These are fairy tales, with traditional structures and relatively simple outcomes. It's a very slim book, and if you're not a fan there's arguably nothing new here - you'd be far better off picking up The Book of Three. But it was exactly what I was after, and I'm a much happier person for reading it.

I'm also declaring a couple of additional challenges for the year: to further explore classic scifi (however much it may annoy me) and to explore more female SFF writers (partly in solidarity given some of the current toxic atmosphere in the genre, and partly because it just occurs to me looking at my reading over the last 3 years, female authors are underrepresented by about 3:1 - and frankly, that's bollocks. So I'm going to deliberately read more). Again, these will cross over with off the shelf, and - hurray! - with each other. But Iain M Banks doesn't count towards classic scifi for this challenge. So my Culture completeism remains separate.

14) Palimpsest - Catherynne Valente

This sensuous, richly-detailed, quietly horrific fairytale explores the parallel world of the city of Palimpsest, and the difficulties faced by those of our world who wish to get there. It's easily dismissed as a fantasy novel in which shagging the right person will grant you a passport to another world, but there's more to it than that.

It touches on some obvious themes - immigration (legal and illegal); multiculturalism and blending in; obsession and faithfulness; sacrifice and selfishness - and slips in others by the by, from the politics of education to the role of literature.

Valente has a tendency to tell as well as show, but in an offhand manner that barely underlines the point, leaving you with more to think about (Nerezza; Hester; Clara). At the same time, she seasons her tale with so many additional images and concepts that it became impossible for me to get hold of it all.

I'm not honestly sure what I make of it; I found it quite overwhelming, and I think I'll need to reread it at some point when I'm properly well. Intriguing and unusual; arguably subversive (if you have very strict ideas about sex and love); and often unpleasant. Only poor mad Oleg and woeful Hester acknowledge that Palimpsest is madness. I remain slightly upset at the willful self-deception of the would-be immigrants, determined that Palimpsest is paradise, refusing to acknowledge the ways in which it is needlessly cruel, and that so many of its pleasures are taken at the expense of others. But then, I think this is another point Valente is making - we choose what we perceive.

15) Extinction Point - Paul Antony Jones

Hands up who loves a good apocalypse novel? Yeah, me too. I grew up reading Wyndham, and I've sought it out ever since. Sadly, Extinction Point isn't a good apocalypse novel. The writing style is laboured - regularly veering into 'what I did today' levels of tedious detail - and sadly some of those details are just so wrongheaded that I found myself repeatedly yelling at the book, much to my bloke's amusement (bless him, he joined in towards the end when the wrongheadedness strayed into a territory close to his heart - cycling).

The core concept is familiar: an unexpected thing happens (blood-red rain from a clear sky), and 8 or so hours later, everyone dies. The rain travels the world from east to west, so New York City knows what's coming thanks to news reports out of Europe - people in the US have time to go home, or try to flee - and worse, time to consider their fate. Chilling.

Finding herself the lone survivor, heroine Emily must come to terms with the trauma of seeing her beloved city die around her and makes plans to travel across the country in search of safety. And this is where it all unravels. Emily doesn't leave New York until about three quarters of the way through the novel; it largely focuses on her unnecessarily prolonging her stay in an increasingly dangerous environment on the basis of fairly weak logic.

Add in the overwhelming details (her shopping list; how to make coffee; what order she packs her backpack in), the random details that don't ring true (she cycles to work across Manhattan and gets no other regular exercise, but expects to cycle across the US - and cover 150 miles in 2 days. My friends are keen cyclists; they train to be comfortable over 50++ mile distances - a short daily hop won't do it. Or when - although my bloke tells me I'm being unreasonable on this one - she casually pops a pint bottle of water in her jeans pockets. I can't remember ever owning jeans that would let me get away with that) and her appalling survival instincts (attacking an alien with a knife with her mouth open?! Cycling through a forest that she can't see the extent of rather than skirting the lakeside edge or finding a route around it?) and it begins to feel very very forced.

2 side-notes - apparently this was self-published, which explains some of the stylistic issues. Also, I think I'd have forgiven more of the style and decision making if Emily had been younger. However, Emily is a working adult in her 20s (although a throwaway comment about grandchildren make her sound like she's in her 30s) - so unforgiven it shall remain ;)

Needless to say, I won't be reading the sequel (or: the second half of the novel, which would be more accurate - the first ends abruptly having really not got very far). The core concept and the imaginative details that grow from it are intriguing, but the execution is unbearable.

Ha. Good review. It's so much easier with bad books isn't it?

41> way easier :) Although I'm very comfortable getting into detail and writing a positive movie revew without feeling like I'm gushing - with books it's always easier to see the details that bother me; when it all works I'm so swept up I struggle to say why it worked.

I know! You know you've got a good when it leaves you a gibbering idiot come review time.

17) Second Star - Dana Stabenow

This was a recent Green Dragon book bullet - sort of - as it came from following a link during a discussion of female authors in SFF, where I gleaned a whole host of new titles for Mount TBR (and a new challenge for the year: for every classic scifi, there must be SFF written by a woman. These may be one and the same, or I might just say to hell with my original Challenge list for 2014 and read a helluva lot of fantasy and scifi. I'm totally cool with that).

I read A Cold Day for Murder last year (Stabenow also writes Alaskan-set crime thrillers), and pegged it as lightweight fluff (although I'm not keen to read more of the Kate Shugak novels - it was fine, not good, and I'm a tough sell on crime thrillers), so I knew more or less what to expect and wasn't disappointed.

Esther (Star) Svensdotter is in charge of getting Ellfive habitat commissioned - Earth's last great hope for managing population explosion is to move up into orbit. She's a tough Alaskan (of course; she's a Stabenow protagonist) who isn't afraid of tough decisions, doesn't much like politics, and leads from the front (but has a big soft heart). With just weeks left before the big day, she must keep her motley crew of brilliant but wayward senior staff pointed in the right direction, break in her new security chief (fnarr fnarr), deal with the Luddite faction who'd like to see Ellfive literally fall out of the sky, avoid a military takeover by her ex-lover, and figure out whether there really are any aliens out there. Thankfully, her crew are right behind her and several of them know how to cook up a good dinner.

Stabenow likes her female protagonists independent and ornery (so do I), so my only beef with this otherwise entirely entertaining diversion is that she also likes to saddle them with unnecessary romance. It isn't the main story, it doesn't ultimately get in the way, but it didn't add anything to have Star go "kneak weed" (in her sister's words!) over a bloke who was behaving utterly inappropriately. It doesn't matter if he's hot as fresh toast, if he's flirting - let alone making physical overtures - you don't let him get away with it on the job. You put him in his place fast and take it off-duty. It was macho bullshit, and Star didn't put up with it anywhere else. To be fair, I'm objecting to one scene and it's mild stuff - but it really bothered me, even though I ended up liking the guy.

It's not brilliant literature by a long stretch, it's almost old-school in feel, and it's too neat in places, but I enjoyed it (once Star got her head out of her pants and her mind back on the job - she figured it out in a couple of chapters, so this really didn't take long). I did like that space is egalitarian. Ellfive is full of capable women heading up functions and just getting the job done; even Space Patrol casually includes female officers without a deal being made out of it. Star reflects at one point that space has attracted women rather than men because men have it easier 'downstairs' - women aren't giving up any opportunities to head up into the sky.

Overall, good not great, but good enough that I'll probably seek out the sequel at some point when I want some popcorn reading.

18) Tinder - Sally Gardner

This was a gift from a good friend, who thought it sounded intriguing and up my street. It's a gorgeous book, painstakingly illustrated - barely a page that doesn't have some ornamentation - that benefits from being read in one sitting with a roaring fire. Gardner's afterword mentions that she was horrified growing up to realise that books for adults didn't have pictures; but as this is a retelling of a Hans Christian Andersen story (The Tinderbox), it's probably best thought of as YA rather than all grown up.

Reset in Germany during the Thirty Years War, eighteen-year-old Otto is on the losing side in a battle. Fleeing into the forest as his comrades die, he meets a mysterious man-beast who tends his wounds and gifts him with some dice. The dice take young Otto on a dark adventure with werewolves, witches, and the ghosts of his own past.

This is beautifully written and enchanting in presentation - the illustrations are striking and far from comforting - and if Gardner has added detail to soften the fairly unpleasant source material, she hasn't strayed too far. Her hero is younger and more naive, but still a soldier; her villains are more clearly evil; her heroine needs a good rescuing but is fierce in her own right (and unlike Andersen's tale as I understand it, she is complicit in her love affair). This is fairytale as nightmare rather than dream, and in considerably more detail than the original. Gardner has woven in themes of PTSD and how soldiers cope with a return from the front, which are relevant here but give young Otto a lot more depth and despair than Andersen's soldier. But this is still fairytale, so the usual tropes are in evidence: most notably female characters are almost all stupid or evil (although to be absolutely fair - so are most of the men). Crucially, none of the characters rise above fairy tale, remaining very simple and flat.

However - if you embrace the format (and I do like a good fairytale, for all their faults) - this is very well executed, and I liked Gardner's take on the ending. This merits a place on my shelf for the haunting artwork.

Interesting. The Tinderbox is one of my favorite Anderson story (I read a version where the witch states boldly that, "I know you are a soldier by your sword and your sack" and ever since I've chosen to believe this is true to Anderson's original) and the execution sounds fascinating. I'll have to keep an eye out for it.

19) Slaughterhouse-five - Kurt Vonnegut

I picked this up as my March classic scifi novel, knowing it is also hailed as one of the great anti-war novels, but I didn't really know what to expect. It certainly wasn't what I got ;)

Billy Pilgrim is hapless. A trainee optometrist, he's drafted as a chaplain's assistant, and the novel opens with him behind enemy lines. Gangling, inept and sick, it's a marvel he doesn't get his 3 companions killed or captured sooner; but soon enough he is in enemy hands (where he remains for the rest of the war). His experiences as a prisoner of war in transit, in a camp, and finally in Dresden during the Allied raids are scattered throughout the novel.

20 years later, Billy Pilgrim is a successful optometrist with an unexpectedly successful soldier son and a domineering daughter (I'm not going to whinge about the portrayal of women in this one; I'd be here all night. This is very much of its time, so they barely feature and when they do it's not to their credit, but at least - unlike Bester - they don't get casually raped). After surviving a plane crash, he takes it into his head to finally start telling the world that he was abducted by aliens from Tralfamadore and trying to relay their perspective on time.

The Tralfamadorian perspective on time is the framing device for the entire novel: they experience it all at once. Whatever happened, has always happened. Whatever is happening, always happens. Whatever will happen, will always happen. Existence is structured around these events, and there's no point getting upset about it; it's just the way it is, was and will be. Everyone is absolved of all responsibility (you can't change anything), and as long as you focus on the good bits it's absolutely fine. Sure, there's the bits where you're not alive, but... well, you're just not alive. That doesn't hurt.

So although Billy is described as time-travelling, slipping from war-torn Germany to Tralfamadore to his own comfortable future, technically he's just learnt to view his life in almost as non-linear way as his abductors, zoning out from one time to another. Chronology and structure go out the window from the start; the novel is at best a series of excerpts from Billy's life. True to the Tralfamadorian philosophy, he is one of the most passive protagonists you could care to read about, witnessing rather than partaking in his own life (with the possible exception of his single infidelity).

There's many ways to write an anti-war story. Time-travelling and alien abduction don't normally feature, but even Vonnegut's handling of Billy's wartime experiences aren't entirely typical. The novel is written with a light detachment that I mostly found surreal rather than laugh-out-loud funny; but there's no denying that the message that comes through loud and clear is of the powerlessness of the common soldier. Billy and his comrades are preoccupied with staying warm; finding a place to sleep; getting enough to eat. They have no control over their destiny (which is reinforced by the Tralfamadorian view), and have what is objectively a fairly miserable time - although Vonnegut's portrayal is far less unpleasant than many other anti-war novelists'. Still, the casual powerlessness and meaningless sinks in. There's no glamour here, no good guys or bad guys; just people getting by until the bombs come down.

There's two ways to read Slaughterhouse-five. Either it's a scifi story - with alien abduction and time-slipping - or it's a psychological novel about PTSD and the way in which we cope with extreme trauma. Poor Billy was bullied, abused, and exposed to horror - he can be forgiven for seeking to escape the real world and dreaming up a philosophy in which this is somehow less painful, because it's simply how things are. The narrative is seeded with plenty of suggestions that the Tralfamadorians are a hallucination. If anything, this increased my sympathy for him - as a time-slipping abductee, he eludes responsibility and is a non-character in the grip of greater forces (which is how Vonnegut initially describes him); as a traumatised veteran, his hallucinations are a response to his experiences - and it's at least possible to give him credit for being a decent person in spite of his awful circumstances, running a successful business, and raising two ultimately fairly decent kids. Having the odd daydream about a pornstar on another planet seems forgivable.

Of course, I may be overly influenced by having just read Tinder, which also deals with PTSD themes - I do seem to have a knack for randomly reading books close together that I don't realise share key themes (I also do it intentionally from time to time - but, like cannibalism, PTSD isn't a theme I'd normally choose to dwell on across several reads!)

20) The Water Clock - Jim Kelly

I picked this up as a random Kindle cheapy, probably attracted by the setting (the Fens in winter). I struggled to get into it initially, but I think that was me rather than it - it's a perfectly serviceable crime thriller, the writing is okay, and the setting is indeed interesting (although it may just be a combination of my long affection for The Nine Tailors and this winter's severe flooding that makes it work for me).

Philip Dryden is a former Fleet Street reporter, back home in the Fens following a car accident 2 years ago that left his wife comatose. Cynical, detached and unconvincingly cowardly (and I'll come back to this, because it bugged me), Dryden is a good investigative journalist and seems to relish his job on the local rag. When a body is found in the boot of a crashed car, he's got the biggest story in years on his hands - and it soon becomes apparent that the killer is far more concerned about Dryden's investigation than the inept police efforts.

What Kelly does well is evocation of place. He's got a nice turn of phrase from time to time, and he gives you a clear image of the wintry (and flooding) Fens. I was less impressed by his cast of characters - I don't mind not having a clue who the killer is, but I really object when literally nobody in a crime novel is unconnected to either the crime or the protagonist. Whilst the characters felt credible, they were fairly thinly drawn (I've seen other reviewers who felt they were rich and deep; mileage clearly varies). And notably, for all that he brought the landscape alive, it felt unpeopled - the background of life at large was a very very thin veneer (compare and contrast, say, Merrily Watkins' parish, with its bustling pubs, unpleasant youths, and local busybodies - none of whom are anything but window dressing, but they made the village feel lived in).

Still, the thing that bugged me most was the author's insistent reiteration that Dryden was a coward. He's apparently scared of everything - the dark, dogs, water, heights - but he repeatedly does things that put him in the way of his fears. So I'm sorry, he's not a coward. He's afraid of those things, but he doesn't let that stop him - technically, that's courage, not cowardice. When fear does eventually get the better of him, it's the least convincing passage in the entire book.

But that bugbear aside, this was fine. Not great, and I'm not rushing out to read the sequel (there are several), but fine.

21) Damocles - S. G. Redling

This was an Amazon impulse buy. I wasn't familiar with the author, and I had a moment's fear when I realised it was published by the same Amazon imprint responsible for Extinction Point, but thankfully this is much better stuff.

S. G. (apparently people struggle to spell Sheila. Really? Or is it easier to be a gender-neutral genre author?) has done a fine job turning out a reverse first contact. Mankind has reached the stars, settling the solar system and beyond. Stasis and chelyan crystal technology have made interstellar travel a possibility; when an ancient message is decoded that suggests man kind from the stars, it's the impetus to send a 6-person crew into deep space aboard the Damocles in search of our ancestors.

The novel is very simple: it begins with the crew awakening in orbit around the planet of Didet, and it focuses on their first contact with the locals and the intricacies of trying to establish communication when you have no common frame of reference. It's charming and I found myself sucked in, for all that the characters are very thinly drawn. Much of the charm is derived from the Dideto perspective - specifically Loul Pell, a geeky young man in a back-end job, who bungles his way into becoming the primary interpreter. He is vulnerable, enthusiastic, self-aware, lacking in confidence and utterly entranced by the alien visitors, and it's hard not to like him.

Unlike old favourites of mine like The Sparrow, you never get under the skin of the human characters - or even much coverage of the back story. There are never more than hints of how history has shaped Earth, or even of the alien message that prompts the journey. Much like Loul and Meg's conversations, this novel only scratches the surface - but it's set for sequels, and I'd happily read them if they appear.

Redling gets bonus points for portraying gender-neutral societies on both Earth and Didet (although there's not many female Dideto in the cast): the crew is 50/50, and if the captain is male, the pilot and the engineer are both female (as is the primary character, the linguist Meg). That said, there's not a whole lot of female:female conversation or friendship, and one of the women barely appears as she stays in orbit on the Damocles, so it's not a perfect future. Still, it's refreshing and it took me half the novel to notice - but I liked it more when I did.

>27 imyril:: Thanks for the lukewarm review of The Goldfinch -- I have heard people rave but was skeptical it would be my cup of tea.:)

22) The Thirteenth Tale - Diane Setterfield

I had no idea that this was a novel about twins, any more than I knew that twins would feature in Damocles, but this little coincidence made me smile - I do have a knack for reading books with shared themes in unexpectedly close proximity. Needless to say, other than twins, these two have nothing in common!

The Thirteenth Tale may have just catapulted to the top of my list of reads so far - an instant favourite, the sort of utterly satisfying read that brings tears to my eyes at the close because it just works. This is a modern gothic novel, in which Margaret Lea - surviving twin, bookseller, reader - is invited to become the biographer of England's 'best-loved novelist' Vida Winter, an eccentric octagenarian (who also turns out to be a surviving twin) famous for lying about her history in every interview she's ever given.

As Miss Winter's tale unfolds, I couldn't help but reflect that she is one of the least reliable narrators going. She weaves in eccentric landed gentry, a leaning towards violence, a suggestion of congenital insanity, a hint of incest, twins, ghosts, an ancient housekeeper, a reliable gardener, the well-meaning doctor, and an efficient and entirely scientific governess. It is wild enough that poor Margaret must surely doubt everything - but in demanding three facts that are public record, she finds evidence that the bare bones of the story check out. But being wise in the ways of the gothic novel, she's wise enough to realise things may not be what they appear...

This is brilliantly immersive, the sort of book that benefits from torches under the duvet, sucking you in and demanding one more chapter before sleep. It is a ghost story without being a ghost story; no horrors or terrors here beyond the loneliness of those who survive. And it is a book about writers, readers and lovers of books - beyond the recurring theme of Jane Eyre, there is the constant call and response of a passion for reading.

I do love a book about loving books. Apparently the BBC televised this recently and I missed it; I'm very glad I did, as I think it would suffer from a shorter form. But I might have to seek that out now to see how it bears up.

Sounds cool!

That does sound really good ... will have to add it to the pile, I'm afraid.;)

I loved it. I've looked into the recent televisation and sadly it's not available online, but I'll keep an eye out for it - it had an absolutely cracking cast!

Ok, I've just spent my last swap site credit on a copy, so should get it soon.:)

23) A Handful of Stars - Dana Stabenow

After the unexpected entertainment of Second Star, sequel A Handful of Stars is a bit of a mess. Picking up a couple of years later, the focus is on the Ellfive/Terranovan mission to the asteroid belt to find raw materials. The setting (and some of the characters) is closely modeled on the Alaskan gold rush, which starts out rough, ready and fairly amusing.

However, it lacks pace and focus, as it's all very episodic. If the first 2/3 of the book meanders slowly nowhere, the last turns and kinks all over with no sense of direction, commitment or interest in exploring consequences. And then it just stops.

All in all, this is diverting but dissatisfying after the promising first installment. I'll probably still read the third and final book for completeism (and in hope of the resolution missing from book 2).

24) Oryx and Crake - Margaret Atwood

I remain ever so grateful to my Santa this year, as she selected a fabulous trio of apocalypse novels in spite of not considering herself a scifi reader. This is the second of the three, and my first foray into Atwood since The Blind Assassin came out: somehow I'd forgotten how easy it is to fall under the spell of her prose.

Snowman lives in an indeterminate near-future, a bedraggled and half-naked wild man with no civilisation and little sanity left. Self-appointed guru to the Crakers - genetically altered proto-humans, simplistic and charming - he sleeps in a tree to avoid predators and relies on his adopted tribe to bring him a fish a week as protein. Dreaming or waking, he is haunted by his past, and the novel evolves a split storyline that alternates his decision to go on a mission in search of supplies with his memories of growing up and - ultimately - the apocalypse that has brought down mankind.

I devoured the first half in a dreamy day at a spa, where I was as hazy as Snowman and could drift through the meandering first third without thinking too hard about what was going on (or seeking any form, rhyme or reason to it) - I think I might have found it harder going if I'd been reading it on a commute, but by that first day's end I'd stumbled into Oryx's backstory and from there on in the narrative gains direction and purpose.

Snowman is a necessarily unreliable narrator - he is under-fed, hydrated, sleep-deprived, and probably suffering from PTSD (not even 'post' - the trauma is ongoing) - and there's a suggestion that he has always drifted along the spectrum from wilfully naive to deliberately (self-)deceptive: his childhood habits of making up wild stories to be the centre of his classmates' attention; his indulgence of Crake's fascination with games that focus on megadeath and civilisation collapse, and his lack of consideration about what his signifies for Crake's choice in career; Oryx's insistence that she is not the girl Snowman/Jimmy this she is, and his willingness to believe the stories he suspects she's only making up to keep him happy; his fiction-fuelled relationships and break-ups with his various lovers. Snowman/Jimmy has always created his own reality, and now he creates that of the Crakers, who rely on his wisdom to explain the world to them. Lonely and self-absorbed his whole life, he isn't particularly likeable, although it's easy to feel sorry for him.

Still, the story works taken at face value - although I'm curious to see how (if) the sequels suggest his version of the past may be less than accurate. Ultimately, this is apocalyptic satire, and satisfying on both levels: the hellish corporate vision of the (uncomfortably believable) near-future, with its treasonous crime of hampering the dissemination of commercial products, and the apparently unlimited freedom with which the CorpSeCorps could gun people down. The unsubtle suggestion that all genetic modification is bad, m'kay (the velociraptor-like pigoons, shrewd and aggressive; snats and wolvogs), although I do tend to agree that corporations aren't the best judges of consequences - profits don't dovetail well with sensible, ethical decision-making. Crake's late assertion that art is the start of human downfall (and like war, is the product of repressed sexuality and frustrated testosterone - his views on female artists are less than positive). It's dark, it's well executed, and if it's unpleasant (and it is, sometimes very) it's also fascinating.

That said, this isn't a book that's kind to humanity (or gender), and it's sufficiently harsh in its satire that I'm going to make sure I'm in a positive frame of mind before I tackle Year of the Flood.

Great review! I think I feel a reread coming on ...

PS: Copy of The Thirteenth Tale has arrived.:)

>58 littlegreycloud: thanks :)

I hope you enjoy The Thirteenth Tale!

25) English as she is spoke - Jose da Fonseca

This charming reprint is a jest at the expense of a 19th century instructional, originally written with the intention of helping Portuguese students learn English. The English editor (James Millington) presents excerpts from the phrase book, selected for their comic value - as it seems the original authors didn't actually speak English but French, and prepared their guide on the basis of their knowledge of French and a French:English dictionary.

Millington isn't afraid to make it clear that he finds it all hilarious and slightly hypocritical - as the authors in their own introduction make no mention of their methods, and claim their book is 'clean of gallicisms' (rather than being predominantly French phrases badly translated into English). The authors also claim 'scrupulous exactness' rather than 'a literal translation; translation what only will be for to accustom the portuguese pupils, or-foreign, to speak very bad any of the mentioned idiotisms'. The stage is set for a good old laugh at how badly we speak each other languages, at early Babelfish levels of fidelity.

Some mistranslation highlights:

• Kindred: the gossip mistress, the quater-grandmother
  
• Woman objects: the paint or disguise
  
• Servants: the coochmann (obviously a typo, but I watched Carnivale recently, with its cooch tent - something very different!)
  
• Parties of a Town: the sink, the low eating house, the obelisks (some town!)
  
• For the table: some groceries, some crumb (um, yes, well, I guess this is technically accurate)
  
• For eatings: some wigs(!), a little mine(?), hog fat (yum)
  
• Quadruped's beasts: a dragon (wow!)
  
• Fishes and shell-fishes: a sorte of fish (well, yes), a hedge hog (err, no), a torpedo (wait, what?)
  
• Chivalry orders: Black eagle, Elephant, Very-merit (ah yes, the Very-merit Order of the Elephant!)
  
• Degrees: a harbinger, a parapet (vs say, a great admiral or an army general - the mind boggles)
  

Once you get into the phrases, the comedy gets exponential. I grew up abroad, so have spent a lot of time around those who have learnt English as a second language, and have some familiarity with the grammatical contortions that result. I also speak a little French - which vastly helps in making sense of how some of the English translations were arrived at.

• Clear but curious: This ink is white and Dry this wine (I assume the second is meant as a descriptor not an instruction!) - not to mention Take attention to cut you self (I don't think you need the 'not' in Portuguese or French; missing it in English changes the meaning substantially)
  
• Fine in Portuguese: Where are their stockings, their shoes, her shirt and her petlicot? (the author has applied Portuguese rules onto the pronouns - making them match the nouns - and has unintentionally described a torrid disrobing ;)
  
• Garbled but clear: These apricots and these peaches make me and to come water in mouth and He does me some kicks (that would be fine... in French) and the rather unfortunate I have mind to vomit
  
• Wait, what? That are the dishes whose you must be and to abstain

...and then you reach the 'familiar' dialogues. These are often hilarious to the modern reader because of content as well as Babelfishing: the master complaining to his servant that his shirt is too cold; the diner eating bread as he is unsure if the meat is good; two gents complaining about the quality of servants these days; and - tellingly - the section on whether or not you speak French. Quite a specific target market in terms of social status ;)

The English (mis)translations of familiar letters and anecdotes also betray the French origins as they're largely between and about French people. These are almost but not quite impenetrable - the meaning you can (easily) divine is often not the one that was originally meant - but left me impressed that there weren't more European wars on the basis of diplomatic misunderstandings!

All in all, this was a fabulous little birthday present - an oddity and an entertainment. And certainly, do not might one's understand to speak...

That sounds like a real treat!

It's a very slim volume - an easy morning read, but delightful. The same friend also bought me a copy of William Shakespeare's Star Wars - he has a good sense of humour :)

26) We Are Here - Michael Marshall

I really enjoy Michael Marshall Smith. I was bemused when he became Michael Marshall, and the more MM I read the less clear-cut the distinction seems to be. He is prone to a number of gender tropes that are going to annoy many readers (male-dominated cast; women tend towards feminine mystique, especially intuition, and provide emotional rescues in return for physical ones; they are unlikely to save the day), but he has a narrative voice, a sense of humour and a love of cats that I can't resist.

That said, some of his recent books fall flat. The Intruders was the first, and Bad Things compounded it. I didn't bother buying Killer Move for years, as I'd had my faith shaken. When I eventually did - and loved it in spite of its flaws - it put me back on track to read We Are Here as soon as a paperback appeared. I didn't realise it was a sequel of sorts to Bad Things, or I might have hesitated.

Thankfully, We Are Here stands alone. It adheres to the MM template of a recognisably real, modern-day world (in fact, I suspect all his novels take place in a single mirror world, and the point is that our world is more mysterious than we like to think) and solid, everyday characters who come into contact with a mystery they cannot explain and are compelled to solve (and although two of those characters are survivors of Bad Things, there doesn't seem to be any other link).

Intuitive, independent Kris(tina) is drawn to mysterious Lizzy, who is caught between her need to stalk Kris' posh bookclub pal Cathy and her desire to move on. Lonely author David is unnerved and confused by the reappearance of his childhood friend Maj, but Maj has his own problems - and his enemies are quick to take advantage of this unexpected link to Maj's past. Fierce, impetuous John is far too down-to-earth to see things that aren't there, which is making it difficult to keep tabs on any of it - or handle the unseen's invasion into his life with Kris. Ruthless criminal Reinhart and driven visionary Golzen have their own plans, although it's unclear whether they have world domination or paradise in mind, but aren't going to let Maj, John or Kristina get in their way. It can't possibly end well.

The twist here is more MMS than MM - half the cast may or may not be real. Do they have the talent to fade into a crowd or do they actually become invisible? Are they the lonely dead or the lonely ghosts of forgotten ideas? Can a figment of your imagination hurt you? (clue: yes of course it can)

This starts and builds well - paranoid, suggestive, the sort of thriller that has you yelling 'DON'T SPLIT UP' and 'IT'S BEHIND YOU'. The tension ratchets well (the sequences in which David is stalked by Golzen's siblings are particularly chilling) although the stakes remain unclear. And then - for me at least - it all comes apart at the end. The novel trips over its own pace; Kris/Lizzy reaches a satisfying conclusion, but the Reinhart/Golzen/Maj/John climax left me cold and felt unresolved - Reinhart had been a threatening shadow, and his motivations were perhaps too unclear for the showdown to make a lot of sense.

There's a whole intriguing shadow world that I'd happily revisit though, so if the friends are explored further in a future novel, I'll probably pick it up.

27) Annihilation - Jeff Vandermeer

The first in the Southern Reach trilogy, Annihilation wasn't what I expected, and I was about halfway through when I realised I needed to adjust my filters to really get engaged. Southern Reach is a shadowy (government?) organisation that is investigating the mysterious, abandoned wilderness Area X. The novel follows the twelfth expedition sent in to probe its secrets, an all-female team of a psychologist, surveyor, biologist and anthropologist. Narrated by the biologist, a very cold fish who keeps the world at arm's length and then some, the novel drops clues from the start that things are not what they seem, and rapidly transforms from a mystery/thriller seeking answers and instead focuses on ideas of identity, perception and understanding. I think a reread will make it a very different book for me, and I'm looking forward to that. However, this isn't quite a 4* read for me on first encounter, because the prose isn't quite accomplished enough. I can see why it's compared to Atwood by one reviewer, but I can't help but think she (or Michel Faber, actually) would have elevated it with the stark beauty and control of their writing.

The team are inserted into Area X under hypnosis, the first clue that everything we know may be false. Later we learn that Southern Reach 'took their names' during training (and in extremis, this finally bothers the surveyor, who seeks to prove her companion's humanity by begging for her name); eventually, we find out that all previous explorers have died in the Area or on their return. The team themselves seem unconcerned by this last point - or perhaps only the biologist is. She, we come to realise, had no attachments to keep her in the world and lost her husband with the 11th expedition.

Emotionally aloof, more interested in ecosystems than people, her narration keeps the reader at a distance. She is a harsh judge of her fellow explorers, but we slowly realise through her inclusion of episodes about her childhood and her marriage that her internalisation of her emotions doesn't make them less strongly felt. Equally, that her apparently objective account is about as unreliable as they get - not only because she herself soon realises that she can no longer trust her perceptions.

Annihilation is about transitions - geographical, physical, emotional - explored through Area X, the lies of Southern Reach, and the tranformative alien presence living within it. It's weird and includes elements of Cthulhu-esque horror, but the biologist's cool narration shields you from the impact of almost everything - her account of her experiences is numb, possibly an attempt at scientific objectivity even though she knows she cannot possibly explain most of what she has seen. But it's mostly (for me) about the biologist's emotional journey. It's going to make a stunning, haunting and hopefully far from mainstream movie (I found it cinematic before I read it has already been optioned).

As an aside, the choice to make the entire cast female is interesting. In the absence of names or personalities (they're not there to study each other, and as an introverted outsider the biologist has little interest in the humanity of her colleagues) they could just as easily be male. Or alien. They are deliberately two-dimensional, with hints of depths that the narrator simply skims over. All this being true, it was just nice that the (male) author had chosen to make them all female - because why not.

28) The Rabbit Back Literature Society - Pasi Ilmari Jääskeläinen

This was a recent discovery and bargain buy, and I'm really glad I picked it up. It had a few aspects that I found questionable / unnecessary, but overall it was lightly told, entertaining and a lot of fun. Ella Milana is a literature teacher, on a temporary placement in her home town when she comes across a copy of Dostoevsky that doesn't end the way she expects - she's fairly sure Sonja shouldn't shoot Raskolnikov. I'm not going to go into plot from there - one thing trips neatly into another as the book takes unexpected turns and rambles its way through the forest of local mythology, literary society and aspiring (and disappearing) writers - and when it manages to stay away from Ella's lips and nipples (seriously, why are they a repeated theme?) - it's delightful. Like Oskar's notebook, the novel ends up a little treasure trove of concepts that could each stand alone at the heart of a novel, strung together by Ella as she explores the mysteries of the Society and founder Laura White.

For all this gets tagged as magical realism, the town of Rabbit Back never feels real (it's a bit too contrived) and I felt the magical elements were strictly supporting cast - and arguably only a matter of perspective. For me, this was a novel about perception, conscience and inspiration - regular themes in my reading. I loved the differences in the various authors memories and interpretations of their shared past, and the strong implication that reality is what you choose to believe in. That's always an idea I can get behind :)

I powered through in an afternoon, although it was Do Nothing But Read Day!

...and, with ReadaThing over, my reading may drop off a bit again now ;)

29) Midwinter of the Spirit - Phil Rickman

As I took a mental nosedive at the end of the week and had reached a good hold point in Mistwraith (things have gone horribly wrong in Etarra; time to change focus from wraiths to warfare I suspect), I popped it down for a couple of days until I get my concentration back. In the meantime, it was back to Merrily Watkins for some easy reading.

Midwinter is set perhaps a year after The Wine of Angels - Merrily has lived down the more colourful aspects of her first months and settled into her rambling vicarage in Ledwardine. Daughter Jane is now 16, and still interested in a non-Christian spirituality (behind her vicar mum's back). Merrily herself has pursued her awakened interest in the less mundane aspects of her belief, and trained as an exorcist, supported by the radical new Bishop of Hereford.

If Angels was about village life, local politics and the prejudices against female priests within their congregations, Midwinter picks up with the three main characters (Merrily, Jane and damaged former singer Lol Robinson) and moves the story onto the bigger stage of Church politics, prejudices against female priests within the clergy, and the sharp pointy end of dealing with the occult. The supernatural elements are dialled up to 11 here, and the story is about as cheerfully over the top as you might expect - hauntings, blood sacrifices, possession, sex magic, and terror in holy precincts. Yes, it gets very silly, although I liked that evil here is the work of the living, not nebulous terror from beyond the grave (although I'd have liked a more even-handed portrayal of non-Christian spirituality, which I think got rough treatment here vs in book 1; one to keep an eye on in future novels).

I raced through this and enjoyed it as a guilty pleasure, but after this second outing I'm flagging my emerging issues with Rickman's Herefordshire (now they've cropped up in 2 books):

- the focus on Merrily's physical attributes. I get that he's trying to make the point that it's tough being a female priest, and being a young and pretty one makes it even harder, but the focus on her looks sometimes feels prurient. Thankfully this is dialled back after the initial couple of chapters, but I'm not kidding - some characters passes comment on her looks at least every 50 pages.

- Merrily's lack of confidence, specifically her tendency to turn to a male authority figure to validate what she's doing (and I don't mean God). Merrily seeks guidance from her male tutor and her uncle in book one; from her male spiritual adviser and the Bishop in book two. Given how terrible their guidance tends to be, it bothers me that it always takes her so long to dig out her own spine and do what she wanted to do all along. Because she's not credibly political so this isn't about ensuring consensus; she just lacks conviction. On the flip side, part of the arc of these books is her realising that it's all on her; her getting over her crises of faith; and having her come good regardless of what's at stake - rising above her insecurity.

- the recurring archetype of the dangerous female temptress (how many good Christian men get led astray by sex with evil women in book 2?!) and the muddied horror movie trope that sex = death. I'd like to not see a subtext of subversive female sexuality in future instalments.

I also felt Merrily got let off the hook a bit here, when she supports Dobbs in the Cathedral, but his appearance means she doesn't need to take full responsibility herself, and Huw later strongly implies it was all unnecessary anyway thanks to the (male saint's) holy relics.

What I'm looking for in the next instalment (as there's enough entertainment here that I've not been put off; just putting the series on notice): more focus on people and relationships than occult plot (I missed the village life of Ledwardine here); more conviction from our heroine; no sexy teenage girls; and if I were really lucky, an emerging friendship between the inimitable Annie Howe and Merrily. Merrily struggles with DCI Annie Howe, but I think she's awesome - she doesn't put up with any of the patronising nonsense Merrily accepts, she's hardnosed, competent and no-nonsense: just the sort of friend a female exorcist needs.

On the plus side, happily still no running around with guns, which is a total off-putter for me. Crucifixes and flower pots, absolutely fine.

30) Curse of the Mistwraith - Janny Wurts

Woohoo, I finished! :) I don't feel I did this justice on this read, and I'm glad I ended up reading in stages - the fact I enjoyed certain parts of the journey so much more than others may well reflect on the state I was in rather than on the twists and turn of the story itself.

Janny's epic demands and deserves much more brain than I could apply to it - it's beautifully written, in lush prose that makes the most of the riches the English language has to offer. When I was in a good place, I really enjoyed the precision and depth of the language; when I wasn't, I didn't, which is utterly unlike me and became a sure indicator that I should put the novel down and come back when I was feeling better. In terms of the story itself, there's an epic scale to the tragedy that I needed to be in the right health and mental state to enjoy rather than just appreciate the execution of (sadly, I wasn't).

My main problem, though, was that I basically disliked everybody in it.

I had hopes for Lysaer when he was outraged by Arithon's treatment and stood up to his father, but all that went by the wayside in favour of irrational prejudice when he was banished through the Gate. Once on Athera, he sometimes seemed petty, often prejudiced, and embraced the sort of Lawful Good version of justice that makes me bare my teeth (spot the barbarian northerner over here). As an aside, I don't understand how Lysaer's father appears to have escaped his hereditary trait. He was tyrannically unjust - specifically, the threat to kill the healer if he failed to heal Arithon (and frankly, his need to torture Arithon to death rather than just let him die) seemed to me at odds with his supposed s'Ilessid heritage.

Arithon, on the other hand, was generally right up my street (magician, musician, swordsman, wit) - but gosh, so sulky! While I generally approved of his actions in the end, his begrudging embrace of necessity and his efforts to avoid it wore a bit thin. I also felt the narrative was weighted in his favour, and I'd have felt better about that if he didn't repeatedly do things that annoyed me (especially with reference to the clansmen and his musical angst). It's not that he doesn't feel real - it is all utterly credible - it just made me like him less.

So there they are, hamstrung by hereditary traits that set my teeth on edge, and then they get cursed to behave badly at each other to boot, and Lysaer is utterly unapologetically awful. I'll admit I smacked my own nose for thinking that if I were Sethvir and Asandir I wouldn't have bothered trying to save his life in Etarra (given what they knew would result); he'd banished the Mistwraith, so I'd have been sorely tempted to just let him die and give Arithon a war he could win. Clearly I've read too much GRRM.

...which brings us to the Fellowship. The almost but not quite omnipotent Fellowship, whose moral choices are far beyond the judgement of mortal man. The Fellowship clearly feel they are the moral arbiters of Athera, but they're not objective at all (although still, apparently, more ethical than me ;) and are willing to let the world burn if it will fix their precious Fellowship - the loss of the Paravians was unacceptable, but it was the restoration of the Seven that seemed to justify the risks they would countenance.. However, in CotM they have the moral high ground and the upper hand in the narrative - their actions only criticised by antagonists who are portrayed in a negative light (the Koriathain; the townsmen) - so I hope they are undermined in subsequent volumes.

I didn't like the Koriathain either, which is unfortunate as they're the principal female characters (unlikeable Talith and fabulous but far-too-briefly-seen Maenalle and Dania are peripheral at best). I understand there is more even representation for women (hooray!) later in the cycle, which is promising - for all the negative way in which they were portrayed in CotM, I felt I could grow to at least understand and sympathise with Morriel and Lirenda; but didn't get a chance in this first outing. Elaira likewise has promise of being the spunky provocateur, although I've got an enormous issue with insta-love.

At the end of the novel, I'm left torn. There was much to appreciate here, but I didn't enjoy it very much - although as noted above, I do feel that this is partly because of my illness. I will continue exploring the War of Light and Shadow once I am in better health, although seeing that Dakar is a major character is almost enough to put me off - I liked him least of all, which is quite an achievement given some of the nastiness other characters get up to!

31) Plague Ship - Andre Norton

I picked this up on Gutenberg as I realised I've not read any Norton in years. It's a slim slice of 50s scifi - traders in space, negotiating the intricacies of alien cultures, dodging the traps of human corporate politics, and trying to stay alive as the stakes escalate and the rookies are left in charge. I liked the casual multiculturalism of the Solar Queen (no women, naturally - it's the 50s), although I assume the opening scene wasn't meant to be quite as Brokeback as it was in my head (but: gruff blokes rubbing perfumed oils into each other? I don't care what the excuse was ;)

This was a fairly low-key affair - while it was nominally high stakes stuff, I didn't feel the tension and I wasn't sucked in, I just rolled along with it. The focus was more on the nuts and bolts competence of getting the job done; it was remarkably under-sensationalised, which made for an interesting, but workmanlike execution. Still, there's something quite appealing about it; the crew feel real precisely because they get on with what feel like real jobs, and worry about day to day concerns. But it's not very exciting, so it's really easy not to go looking for the various sequels. It's a bit like reading a bunch of books about reasonably interesting car mechanics with silly names (Dane Thorsson - obviously looks like Chris Hemsworth in my head - but Captain Jellico. Really? Really??)

32) The Witching Hour - Anne Rice

A visit up memory lane. The Mayfair Witches were my preferred flavor of Rice as a teenager, and I thought I'd go see if the suck fairy had paid them a call in the intervening years.

Michael Curry is pulled from the sea by a mysterious woman on a boat, gaining a mission that he can't remember and a power in his hands that he'd prefer to dismiss. When he eventually finds his rescuer - brilliant, beautiful neurosurgeon Rowan Mayfair - he finds his soulmate. But she is heir to an occult legacy that can only come between them.

It's every bit as silly as it sounds, and it's well-stocked with problematic tropes that I'd find utterly unforgivable if I were reading it for the first time now: Curry is old enough to be Rowan's father; it's instalove - and she's crying to have his babies within about a week; they're married within months; there's a little too much perfection and far too much money sloshing around; and then there's an awkward set of references to rape and abortion that are dubious at best. Very dubious.

It may be the ultimate antidote to show don't tell though, with - I'm not kidding - several hundred pages of exposition in the middle. And this is technically the good bit: the 400 year history of the witches and their intangible familiar Lasher, source of their wealth (if not their paranormal powers). At least the historical exposition is less repetitive than the modern day prose and dialogue.

Bizarrely, although the tale revolves around strong women who wield all the power, it still feels like it's dominated by strong male characters thanks to the POV time given to Curry and the all pervading presence of Lasher himself. I'm not convinced it would pass the Bechdel test.

But. Guilty pleasure. I can see the problems with it, but some of the writing is atmospheric and I do admire the intricacy of the history section. I probably will read the sequel later this year (which I recall also centres on a good slice of historical exposition ;) but no rush.

Ultimately, the suck fairy has certainly called in, but she hasn't quite ruined it for me. But it's pretty terrible.

Ha. I'm going to have to use the suck fairy.

Heh. All credit to the lovely folks in the Green Dragon :)

33) Mrs Frisby and the Rats of Nimh - Robert O'Brien

The May Morphy Group read, which I couldn't resist joining in. I can still see why I loved this as a child (and why I hated the film, actually), with its plucky, well-mannered heroine. There are echoes of its time in the narrative (we never learn Mrs Frisby's given name - she's arguably an adjunct to Jonathan, but I think it's more about social politeness of the era) but otherwise this is pretty timeless stuff with good lessons about refusing to accept the status quo and striving to make the world a better place, however small and normal you may be.

As a child, I completely missed that it was rigged for a sequel. I may need to find out what happened next, although there's an inevitable sadness in its future: only Mrs Frisby lacks an enhanced lifespan.

34) Names for the Sea: Strangers in Iceland - Sarah Moss

I've been saving this, so our impromptu trip north was the perfect time to finally read it (I'll read sagas next time).

Moss is an English academic (English Lit) and novelist, whose first 2 novels (Cold Earth and Night Waking) have been in my top 5 the past 2 years. Entranced by the far north as a teenager, she couldn't resist a job at the University of Iceland and arrived just as the country neared bankruptcy after the economic collapse.

Her narrative is engaging as usual, although it becomes clear how much Nina and Anna (her fictional heroines) borrow from their creator (although I had slightly less urge to shake Sarah herself) as she tries to find her feet in a foreign country with a culture of doing not telling, and where almost everything she took for granted in the UK is unavailable or shipped in at great cost and unaffordable on her academic wage.

Her attempts to grapple with the Icelandic psyche (and learn to love Icelandic food) are entertaining, and made a an interesting counterpoint to the 'truths' peddled by our guidebook and local tourism. She is quick to remind that her own truths may be equally misguided; her experience of being foreign is isolating and peripheral, ignorant of custom and shielded from many realities by her very English lack of confidence in learning a new language (this was familiar to me from my childhood - my mother would send me to ask for things, as I had no self conscious filters about my mangling of my newly-acquired second language).

Moss's own cultural and social (class) prejudices are also on candid display - a couple of offhand comments are painfully middle class and blinded by that - although this leads to an investigation of the Icelanders almost willful ignorance of their poorer citizens.

Interestingly, her husband Anthony is marginalised in the narrative, almost invisible, although her sons get plenty of page time. Given Moss's clear enchantment with her surroundings, it almost feels like a reversal of the spousal relationship in Night Waking, and I (perhaps unnecessarily) felt quite sorry for him.

Fascinating stuff, and the perfect time to dust it off.

35) The Woodcutter - Kate Danley

I picked this up as another interesting / respected example of a modern retelling of fairytales. As with Tinder, I recognised that this means problematic fairytale tropes would be in evidence, but I had hoped that - like Sally Gardner - Danley would have woven in original elements that would help her novel rise above its roots. I like fairytales, especially when told aloud by a performance storyteller (or storyteller, as they used to be called), but they are by nature short and simple. Longform, I think you need to add something to make it all work. Tinder had spectacular artwork, beautiful prose, and an interesting thread of PTSD. The Woodcutter has, um, well, I'm going to struggle here.

The eponymous Woodcutter is responsible for keeping the peace between the mighty fae and the 12 human kingdoms about the Wood. The fragile peace relies on 'wuv, twoo wuv' between a king and queen (one of whom must be of faerie descent) in each human kingdom, with the Woodcutter as a sort of referee who steps in when either race behaves badly or wild magic comes out to play. The all-conquering force of love counters human greed, and stops the fae massacring humankind.

So much for original background setting - it's fine, and although I'm unfond of instalove as ever (and this really is love at first sight and the power of love's first kiss to boot) it does at least underline that this is fairytale. And I'm always a fan of the fae as Wild Hunt who mankind should walk softly around.

But everything else is borrowed. The tale opens with a princess (Cinderella) fleeing a monster in the Wood. Distressed by her untimely death, the Woodcutter goes in search of the Beast that killed her, giving him a framing quest to journey the Wood and the Kingdoms to ensure at least half of them remain loyal to the pact and secure the other princesses - Rapunzel, Snow White, Red Riding Hood and so on - from the wicked Queen and her consort who are at the root of the bother.

This is where the whole thing failed for me - he simply meets fairytales and they play out more or less as you would expect (with a couple of gender switches, but don't expect (human) women to rise above traditional Grimm roles - princesses need protecting and accept pain as a measure of their worth; mothers are greedy, malicious, or evil; and crones are magic).

Jack, Rumpelstiltskin, Iron Shoes, Baba Yaga, the Twelve Dancing Princesses and even the Billy Goats Gruff(!) all make appearances and play out their tales, the fae are ruled by Oberon and Titania and the Wild Hunt is led by Odin. It's a hodgepodge at best, and while I think the reader is meant to glory in all these traditional tales coming together, I found myself wincing. There can be no surprises here if you grew up reading the stories, but there's no added depth either - the characters are their one-dimensional fairytale selves, simplistically woven into a single narrative.

I might have enjoyed all this as a young teen (or even younger), but as an adult read it is flat and disappointing - especially when there are a number of more interesting fairytale remixes out there. Should probably be repackaged and marketed as children's fiction (I think even YA is misleading - at 14 I'd have been as dismissive of this as I am now).

I think I'll follow this up with Authority (Southern Reach) by way of something completely different!

36) Authority - Jeff Vandermeer

The sequel to Annihilation picks up the action outside Area X and inside the agency responsible for monitoring and investigating it, as Central (?Intelligence?) send fixer John Rodriguez into Southern Reach to take control after the presumed death of its director. An outsider, Central are relying on his fresh eyes to help them bring order - but he faces fierce, accomplished resistance from his second-in-command, and soon realises that the chaos and the crazy go a lot deeper than just the former director. It is soon an open question whether it will be possible to bring order to the Southern Reach - or ever understand Area X.

I had far less trouble engaging with Authority than Annihilation, and it increased my respect for Vandermeer's abilities. Where I previously criticised Vandermeer for clunky prose, I now realise to what extent this was a deliberate reflection of the biologist's taciturn, opaque nature - the prose here is more fluid, because Rodriguez is an insecure, introspective manipulator who deals in words. It's great stuff, and I was absorbed from start to finish.

I would still have been happy with Annihilation as a stand-alone novel left open to interpretation, but I really enjoyed the progression here and am thoroughly looking forward to the final installment later this year.

37) Still Life - Louise Penny

The first instalment in the Gamache crime series, set in the sleepy Quebec town of Three Pines. The community is rocked when one of their number is found dead in the woods, shot by an arrow. Inspector Gamache and his team are called in from Montreal to investigate, and must unpick the personalities, histories and relationships of the innocuous inhabitants to find murderer and motive.

This series came highly recommended, but the first instalment fell flat for me. I'm not a huge fan of crime - especially cosy crime - so this was always going to be a hard sell for me, however tempting the review of a later novel in the series had been. My focus was largely on the characters, and sadly I struggled to find anything to like in any of them other than Armand Gamache himself - and not enough in him to get attached to. Combined with slightly awkward prose style (it is a debut novel, and I imagine the style improves over subsequent volumes), this is enough for me to leave the series here as pleasant enough if you like that sort of thing, but not my cup of tea.

I liked that Penny placed a gay couple at the heart of her community, and that Myrna engaged in some rather pagan rituals in the woods, and nobody bats an eyelid at either - but I didn't like the way Clara was constantly undermined, or just how awful Yolande and Agent Yvette Nichol were. I got the impression I was supposed to like Ruth Zardo for being brash, outspoken and eccentric, but she too fared poorly with me as just downright rude.

I suspect I'd like this better on screen, although given I watch crime even more rarely than I read it, the chances of me finding out (there is a dramatisation) is low.

Oops, I got a bit behind. Three for one!

38) Burning Bright - Melissa Scott

I merrily joined the group read because I liked sandstone78 's conceit of the trilogy of book names (Tiger Tiger/The Stars My Destination, Burning Bright, In the Forests of the Night ... although from subsequent comments, that last one might get a miss - sparkly vampires have less appeal than they once did) as much as because the plot description sounded right up my street: scifi! heroine! role-play! political intrigue!

...and it didn't disappoint. I won't go so far as to say it made up for my grievances against Bester, but I didn't ask it to; it has still instantly become a firm favourite and in my top three reads of the year so far.

The planet Burning Bright is an independent trading station caught between two superpowers: the human Republic and the hsai Empire; it is also the home of the Game, a networked roleplay game that provides infinite scenarios (if deliberately little closure) in an alternate universe of equal political intrigue and psi powers. For Quinn Lioe, Republican pilot, a forced stop-over on Burning Bright while her ship is repaired is an excuse to test out a new scenario she has written on the Game's home planet and cement her growing reputation in the Game; but winning the attention of Game notables unexpectedly draws her into the political wrangles of the real world.

I used to be a gamer, and the joy of a great session was also the pain of a poor one: the magic of collaborative creativity blossoms based on equal ability and commitment from all involved. Weak links (or self-involved ones) can bring down a session and derail a scenario, no matter how determined or creative the person/people in charge (although the Game appears more tolerant of railroading than gamers I have met). I recognised Lioe's frustration with her players, and Ransome's decision to embrace an art form that gave him total control of his stories - I went from playing to writing scenarios back to writing fiction for the same reasons. Give me one thing that rings so totally true, and I'll swallow everything else more or less wholesale ;)

However, it's worth noting that the Game is really a peripheral element here - it hooked me in, but it's not what the book is really about, and you don't have to give a damn about gaming to enjoy this as fine political scifi. Clashing civilisations, smuggling, smouldering grudges, carnivals and monsoons make for a heady mix in a colourful city where old and new technology merge seamlessly. I didn't find myself questioning gondolas, helicopters or bicycles as means of getting around the canal-based city - I did find myself making assumptions about energy generation, food sources and so on that the text often validated in passing (Burning Bright is an ocean world; the city is on a rare and limited land-mass). I couldn't begin to guess how far in the future this was meant to be; if it's our future at all. It doesn't really matter - it doesn't get in the way of the story.

I also liked that sexuality just wasn't a thing here. Liberal is the name of the game, and non-possessive is the only way to play it.

I'd love to revisit this universe. It's a great creation, with strong characters (of both genders). I spent a good deal of the book trying to decide whether Damian Chrestil was actually a villain or whether my perceptions were being coloured by Ransome's perspective on the Chrestil family in general; I love that sort of ambiguity, and I liked how Scott handled it through to the end.

Great stuff. Thank you sandstone78!

39) Polar City Blues - Katharine Kerr

An old favourite, and I'm happy to say I still love it. Kerr's first scifi outing, this is a fast-paced thriller set on a desert planet that is part of the tiny human Republic poised between two much larger, more powerful galactic neighbours. When a Confederation diplomat shows up dead in Polar City, police chief Al Bates must race against the clock to solve the crime if he is to avoid all 3 governments landing troops to 'keep the peace'. And there are other problems unsettling the city slums: an alien artifact, a mysterious disease, and a rumour of the Devil. Only Bobbie Lacey, ex-spacer, comp jockey and trader in information has access to all the sources to start putting the pieces together. But will a ghetto girl work with the cops?

There's a lot to like here - Lacey is a good female lead, smart, cool-tempered and competent; the world-building reminds me strongly of that in Burning Bright (clever in its supporting detail; light on exposition; very credible; more than the sum of its parts); and the plot bounds along without really pausing for breath. We get 5 alien races, psychics, space-faring and AIs - although AIs aside (and they are getting a bit creaky by modern computing standards - Buddy has to think a bit hard sometimes for a modern Googler ;) the planet Hagar is deliberately called out as being low-tech and most of the action takes place in the slums, which has limited how badly the novel has aged over the past 20 years.

That said, this is one for which mileage may vary. It's told in present tense, for a start, which I know can be a red flag for some, and the characters speak in a future faux SoCal dialect that's easy enough to understand, but can be grating. There's a May-to-December romance of sorts (but given rejuvenation drugs, they look about the same age), although for once the woman is the older.

My main discomfort does centre on the romance, partly with the age, but mostly with Lacey's justification of her choice to her friend Carol at the end. Lacey has decided she wants a man who will look up to her, and is happy to keep her toy-boy (he has no job, and nowhere to live - he really is a kept man). It's made clear elsewhere that she does love him, so it's unclear how big a grain of truth this justification is (as Lacey is quite strong enough a person to tell Carol that she loves Mulligan, end of, however much Carol disapproves). That said, I think Kerr intends for this to be uncomfortable, playing with what is a fairly unpleasant romance trope in much the same way she inverts social status to put Los Blancos bottom of the pile on Polar City to play with racial prejudice (with mixed results, for my money).

So - Burning Bright reminded me of Polar City Blues, and I've loved both. sandstone78 drew a parallel between Burning Bright and Foreigner, which I picked up earlier this year and haven't read yet, so time to rectify that I think.

40) Rain Later, Good - Peter Collyer

I've had this little gem on the go as a coffee table book for weeks, reading a few pages here and there (often with coffee).

An inexplicable attachment to the shipping forecast - the four daily reports on weather at sea that go out on Radio 4 - is quintessentially British. It doesn’t matter that most of us live inland and some never venture onto a boat in our lives (now that cheap flights are so much easier than ferries); we like to know what’s going on out there. Apparently just changing the time of broadcast resulted in a deluge of complaints - there is no discussion of cancelling it, although most ships have access to up-to-the-minute information on-board from other sources.

This coffee table book is delightful, channelling the national attachment and matching it with evocative watercolour paintings and affectionate travel notes that give you itchy feet to see places for yourself or offer insights into the author/artist. I had no idea that there was an Open Air Rain Museum (tongue-in-cheek much?) in Bergen (or that it rains 290 days of the year there) and there are similarly entertaining notes for most ports of call. I rather regret that the author didn’t follow through on his whim to add food notes for breakfast and fish and chips forecasts for each area.

However, there is a stunning painting of the sea or coast (complete with shipping forecast for the day he was there) and a secondary painting or line drawing representing an aspect of local life for every current (and two past) shipping forecast regions and coastal weather stations. Given the Shipping Forecast covers the broader seas around Britain, this is a tiny view into the coastal life of Norway, Iceland, the Faeroes, the UK, Ireland, France, Holland, Spain and France - as well as our offshore islands - and amply illustrates the incredible variety and beauty of our coasts.

I could wish that the images were bigger or that the book was landscape to match their format (rather than square, reducing their size). But the hazy views of light rippling on waves and suggestions on the horizon are enchanting. Don’t expect anything iconic to separate the sea areas - one patch of sea looks much like another - but for lovers of wind and wave, this is a treat. For the coastal paintings, this book reminded me that I do love watercolours after all (although I wouldn't choose to put them on my wall), and that there's a lot of variety in the type of painting you can produce with them. There's some beautiful work in here, and as it's often of my favourite subjects (cliffs, mountains, sea, clouds), I'm not biased at all.

More catch up reviews...

41) The Summer Tree - Guy Gavriel Kay

A reread for me, as I was on holiday in the south of France and it felt appropriate to revisit some GGK (although I ended up with Fionavar rather than Arbonne or Ysabel as it's been a long while since I revisited GGK's first world). His first long-form effort is an epic cross-over fantasy in which five Canadian students are taken to the first of all worlds (Fionavar) for the frivolous reason of attending the High King of Brennin's golden jubilee. All is far from what it seems, with political intrigue rife in the kingdom and darker shadows gathering under the noses of the in-fighting factions. As forces beyond time begin to exert their influence on events, the visitors are drawn into a conflict that will ultimately affect all the worlds - including their own.

Weaving together Celtic and Scandinavian mythology with high fantasy tropes (he apparently intended to show you could do more than knock off Tolkien when tackling the genre), Kay manages to largely dodge Basil Exposition and still convey epic swathes of setting and back story in amongst the swift plot progression and witty repartee. If you're after pure originality then this isn't going to be for you, but I have a deep love of this sort of thing when done well, and this is pretty good.

That said, it doesn't work as well for me as it did on first reading 15 years ago. Kay's prose style goes a long way to papering over the cracks and can send shivers down my spine when he hits the right mythic note, but the Tolkien tropes stick out and bother me. Given that Tolkien was also working from Celtic and Scandinavian sources, this is wildly unfair - but just a bit more tinsel would have gone a long way to making it feel less derivative (and it doesn't feel derivative for the most part, which is why those small things stick out so badly for me).

I'm far more forgiving of the more obviously Celtic and Scandinavian borrowings that never appear in Tolkien (the Cauldron of Khath Meigol; the Summer Tree itself; Owein's Hunt; the Cave of Sleepers; the pantheon; and so on), except for the one borrowing that gets no tinsel. Technically, in spite of heavy foreshadowing it doesn't actually appear in this first book, so I won't rant (Arthur, Lancelot and Guinevere. Seriously. Seriously?? No, I still can't get past that), but it has always reduced my regard for the sequels.

What did bother me on this reading is how one note our Canadian heroes and heroines are: they get to be bright, funny, brave, heroic - they're given tragedies (or rather, the menfolk are), but not flaws. I notice it more now than I used to (I think I used to just enjoy them for being so shiny) and they feel less real to me, although consequently I have come to like Dave Martyniuk best after all (with the chip on his shoulder to sand down). This has also got to be Kay's weakest showing for women: whilst well-represented in numbers, they lack depth or nuance and they're far from well-served in roles or agency, although they do get to throw cold water over over-sexed idiots.

On the flipside, the Fionavari are more nuanced: still largely bright and brave, but pride, ambition and arrogance are flaunted to the extent that most of them (not least Prince Diarmuid) are interesting but practically unlikeable until you meet the forthright Dalrei. Complex motivations and slow reveals on back story bring much needed colour and tone - although once again the women are rather flat.

All of which makes it sound like I didn't enjoy it, which simply isn't true. I still given it 4* - because it's well-written (if not quite as adept as his later works, it's still more lyrical than some authors ever achieve), does create a coherent world and narrative from its many sources (and plays to my preferences in using Celtic myth as its mainstay), is deftly plotted, and generally a good read if not a perfect one - and because 15 years on it still holds a huge sentimental pull for me and still moved me to tears. I'm not going to make a point of completing the trilogy in one sitting, but I may run through it by the end of the year.

42) Elephant Moon - John Sweeney

I was really quite angry by the time I finished this slim novel about the war in Burma. I'd bought it because I'd read that it was based on a little-known true story of the Second World War when a herd of 53 elephants was used by a young English schoolteacher to rescue a band of orphans in Burma and transport them to the safety of India.

What's not to get excited about?

Well, the fact that it's simply not quite true.

The Author's Note (crucially at the end of the book) is careful to point out that the novel is inspired by the true stories of the elephant men of Burma. That's as far as it goes. No schoolteachers, no orphans, although the Bombay Burma Trading Corporation did indeed evacuate women and children over the mountains with their elephants (much to the disgust of the authorities). The misleading lines above, I've subsequently discovered, were penned by the Daily bloody Mail, famous for their pinpoint accuracy. Mea culpa. If only I'd done my research better. I have now, and it turns out that the school of mixed-race orphans did exist in Rangoon - although they didn't escape by elephant, and only 4 appear to have survived the march on foot to India. This is one reason I tend to avoid modern historical novels - it's too easy to spot where the fiction creeps in.

The tale invents the character of Grace Collins, a young schoolmarm posted to Burma by her Whitehall papa to keep her safe from the war. When the Japanese invade Singapore, neither her headmistress Miss Furroughs nor the British authorities seem to take the threat seriously - and as the Japanese get ever closer, not even her beau Bertie Peach is interested in the fate of the orphaned by-blows she teaches. With the last ship sailing, she manages to get the children (and Miss Furroughs) onto an antediluvian bus and flee north.

When Miss Furroughs dies in the firestorm of Mandalay, Grace finds herself an unexpected ally in resourceful Jemadar Ahmed Rehman. But their journey is beset by bureaucratic idiots, the engineering wobbles of the ancient bus and its exhausted (and sozzled) driver, the challenging terrain of northern Burma, and the shameless racism of the fleeing British (not to mention the guns of the Japanese). When they are rescued from despair by a grumpy officer attempting to rescue the last of his elephants from the Japanese by taking them over the mountains - considerably madder than anything attempted by Hannibal in the Alps - she allows herself to hope that she and the children may yet see India.

All of which sounds great even if it has been a little liberal with its history, but it isn't particularly well executed. The writing is adequate, but wobbly. The characters rely heavily on Empire stereotypes, and while there's a certain joy to reading dialogue with voices straight off It Ain't 'Alf 'Ot Mum, it doesn't make them more credible. There's a splash of insta-love and a streak of misogyny (partly period accuracy, but Grace's looks also become her most important attribute) and the absurd Eddie Gregory subplot adds violence against women plus rape and murder fantasies, introducing an unpleasant and unnecessary subplot that doesn't sit with the rest of the novel - because there wasn't enough going on already?!. I also couldn't help but think that for a book with a theme of racism there's no escaping the problem that it gives the white men names, but the Indians ranks (we learn their names, but they are never used). Indeed, very few of the lower caste Burmans get anything at all - although their elephants are named, so make what you will of the pecking order there.

This may well reflect the attitudes of the time and Miss Collins' relations with the men in question, but in the Jemadar's case stops ringing true as their relationship evolves (and in any case her inner monologue might unbend as far as names?) and doesn't entirely chime with either Grace's or the third person narrative's willingness to adopt the British officers' (first) names rather than remain on formal terms. The narrative isn't exclusively from Grace's perspective, either - so there was opportunity to give us the perspective of the Indian officers and the Burmans to level the playing field, which Sweeney doesn't take up.

If I turned my brain off and refused to let any of my triggers twitch, there's a rapid plot with orphans and schoolmarms and elephants and gallantry and elephants and so on as promised, which does seem guaranteed to appeal to the Daily Mail (or possibly my grandma, although she's quite picky too), but sadly it's mired in so much tripe that I spent the entire novel annoyed that there was a really good story half-obscured by the sensationalised mush. Sadly, it turned out to be two entirely separate stories historically, but I can at least go find the autobiography of Elephant Bill to learn about the true elephant men of Burma (there appear to be very few records of the unpleasant fate of the unwanted orphans of Rangoon; British racism and prudery casts a very long shadow).

Oh well. At least it's short. And it'd probably make a good film, as most of its flaws could either be fixed in the screenplay or are the sort of thing Hollywood embraces shamelessly on screen anyway :P Non-speaking parts don't need names, after all.

44) Excession - Iain M Banks

Ah, Excession, our love/hate affair continues. This was the third time I'd read it, and after hating it the first time and loving it the second, this time I'm just split down the middle: I hate the humans and love the Minds.

Reading the Culture novels in close succession this year, I've thoroughly enjoyed seeing the progression from Consider Phlebas as I've worked my way into Special Circumstances book by book to Excession (and I'll admit that from this point onwards I'm into books I've only ever read once and don't really remember, which is quite exciting) - but it has left me utterly despairing at the vision for humanity.

The problem with a post-scarcity future of complete excess and hedonism is the vapidity that goes with it. This was less obvious in the younger Culture (we met a single SC agent in the Idiran war in Phlebas, and as an agent infiltrating a hostile vessel she wasn't going to be vapid at all and was surrounded by mercenary hardcases, so we weren't seeing the Culture; Jernau Morat Gurgeh in Player of Games was a wildly clever bloke who was despairing of exactly the same traits in his society that are annoying me; and we got only a brief glimpse of Sma's hedonistic excesses in Use of Weapons). In Excession, it's clear the Minds are pulling all the strings - implicit in every book to this point, but now underlined - because the humans couldn't find their way out of their navels with a map and a ball of string. Unfortunately for me, they get a lot of page time.

I'd cheerfully skip the lot of them and just read the Minds. Here we get politics, acerbity, convoluted ethics, self-reflection, poetry, horror and glimpses into the intellectual hierarchies at play within the Culture. Lucky humanity, allowed to play in a future they long since abrogated all responsibility for, because - thankfully - their ancient creations have souls and consciences (of sorts; here we see that even the Minds are far from incorruptible, and that one Mind's necessary outcome is another's black-souled conspiracy). The distinctions between one Mind's conscience and another's (most notably the Attitude Adjuster, the Killing Time, the Grey Area and the Sleeper Service) are fascinating, as are the carefully drawn lines of their monumental egos. The Sleeper Service keeps Dajeil aboard in a sense because it is playing God - however much it shies away from direct interference (which it can afford to do, without any real time constraints). The Grey Area plays God even more directly, sampling the minds of entire planets to pass judgement on uncontacted wrongdoers.

I'll admit to struggling to keep track of which Mind was part of what conspiracy, but... I'm only basic human.

The only interesting aspect of the human storylines (which I'm serious; I'll just skip in any future read - especially Alicia Silverstone Ulver Seich) was the denouement of the Dajeil Gelian / Byr Genar-Hofoen plot. After 40 years of pregnant sulking, Dajeil finally has the opportunity to see her former lover and is unexpectedly reluctant to do so. The slow reveal of the Dajeil/Byr storyline makes it clear that he didn't just abandon her; nor did he just cheat on her - she assaulted him when he was in female form, and sort-of pregnant, nearly killing him and resulting in the death of Byr's baby. Byr leaves, and Dajeil then puts her own pregnancy and life on hold for the next 40 years - sulking, as some observers suggest, or possibly wallowing in remorse, or traumatised and hoping for Byr's return to achieve some sort of closure. Either way, I find 2 things intriguing and whispered rather than shouted through the narrative: Dajeil would have killed Byr permanently, as it becomes clear at the end of the book that Byr has never been backed up and lives on the principle of only getting one shot at life (and Dajeil was aware of this when she stabbed him) and they lost their second baby. In facing a second death, Byr does in fact come to terms with that assault, and in facing her own death (and losing control of her pregnancy), Dajeil comes to terms with giving birth at last; both are able to move on. These very human notes are quieter refrains of pathos that cut across the huge operatic chaos going on ship-to-ship around the Excession, and are almost at odds with the portrayal of humanity in general whilst offering something almost more recognisable in its tragedy. I sort of hate myself a bit for even thinking that, but there you go.

All of which makes the Sleeper Service's actions make a huge amount of sense - it feels responsible; it's not just playing God, it's trying to make amends (and not necessarily to Dajeil) - and it can't take its sensors off the human action even while it tries to figure out what to do with the Excession.

So I can respect the outcome, but oh, I didn't enjoy the journey (on the human side). So it's 3 and 1/2* from me, and somewhat begrudgingly - because flipping back and forth between a slog and a romp is frustrating.

45) The Warriors of Taan - Louise Lawrence


The first reread from the Boxes of Basement Books - an old childhood favourite (I'm also looking forward to revisiting Moonwind). YA scifi, this is really thinly-veiled feminist ecomentalist propaganda (and I say that as a cheerful ecomentalist with a big feminist streak - looking at things like this and Mrs Frisby I'm starting to wonder how influential my childhood reading was :)

Taan has been occupied by the rapacious Outworlders, who are plundering its natural resources and using superior weapons / technology to pen the natives into reservations. Internal tensions are rising as the warrior caste agitate for a hopeless war in the face of insuperable odds, while the priestesses seek a peaceful resolution. A rebellious young prince is the fulcrum on which native hopes turn: will he lead his father's troops to war or make peace with the sisterhood?

I'm delighted to find the suck fairy has passed this by (although I think I've given it an extra half star for sentimental reasons; it doesn't quite stack up to adult reading). The novel focuses on the build-up to world-changing events rather than their resolution, staying tight on its youthful characters (novice priestess Elana; Prince Khian) who spend a good portion of the novel in out of the way places (farflung outposts; locked up; underground) having character-building experiences and trying to figure out what they should do. It's not perfect, but it's still quite sweet.

Things to like: positive female relationships, character growth, a plot that rockets along at a fine pace, and interesting aliens (the stonewraiths).

Things that are so-so: there's a lot of men being aggressive eejits and women having special instincts and being peaceful, which I'm not a big believer in or a massive fan of. Also, I think it would have been awesome if Khian/Leith had explicitly got it on, given a) how much of a bromance they had going and b) given how gender-segregated the society is (warriors vs sisterhood; all women retreating to Moonhalls twice a month) it feels like same-sex relationships wouldn't/shouldn't be taboo. Given the time of writing (80s) and the audience (YA), it's not really surprising that this wasn't included (and there are some hefty hints - Khian pines for Leith, and there are lots of meaningful glances), but... it would have been a brilliant inclusive gesture. But perhaps too shocking at the time? I don't really remember.

It also closes with what feels like a set-up for a sequel, although I don't believe one was ever written. This feels like a good thing - having chosen not to detail the resolution (we skip from the set-up for the resolution to the epilogue!) it would feel very odd to jump to a sequel.

46) The Shining Girls - Lauren Beukes


It's taken me a while to get round to reading Beukes in spite of hearing many good things, but I'll be back for more. Scifi meets crime as a time-travelling serial killer hunts his victims across the 20th century, and the girl that gets away tries to unravel the mystery of her attacker. It's like reading Michael Marshall Smith with a female lead; it had me at hello, in spite of the squicky POV of psychopath Harper Curtis and always divisive first person narrative.

The success for me here is many-fold, from great prose (in spite of that first person!) and a carefully woven plot through to colourful characters, starting with its villain, who gets fully half the page-time POV: at no point does Beukes try to explain, rationalise, normalise or apologise for Harper. He's just a monster. In spite of this, his POV chapters are compelling. Disturbing, absolutely, and horrific - but never titillating. It's very carefully controlled.

At the same time, she gives us brief windows into the victim's lives. In these glimpses, the women come vibrantly to life, full-formed and three-dimensional - each one becomes a tragedy in her own right and a tiny window into her own time, not just a statistic (with the exception of poor Julia, whose murder happens off the page).

And then there's spiky, indomitable Kirby herself, who survives her murder and refuses to be deterred from trying to hunt down her impossible attacker. Kirby rejects her physical and emotional damage; it's the rest of the world that can't leave her baggage at the door. She's bright, feisty and she shines - it's not hard to see why she makes Harper's list.

My only real question is how many stars to give it - I think I'll sleep on it, but 4+.

I've already picked up a copy of Zoo City for future reading.

You are ahead of schedule - congrats! You should plan something special for the big 50.

>84 Yells: you know, I'd completely lost sight of that :) I'm even on target with my challenge of 75% of those being off the shelf rather than rereads - the only thing I've been rubbish at is reading non-fiction (which is no surprise - this year and every other year ;)

Now I feel I've picked up Tigerman too early - I should have saved that for the big 50 as I'm loving it already! I'll have to peruse Mount TBR and see what else is going to warm the cockles of my bookwormy heart...

Ooh, Tigerman! I have that one in transit from the library. Glad to hear you're enjoying it.

47) The Shadowed Sun - N. K. Jemisin


The second half of the duology for the Jemisin group read, and a palate cleaner mid-way through Jared Diamond as his handling of his Greenland case study half-way through Collapse annoyed me and I decided to come up for air :) (also, Collapse is quite long and I needed some fiction in my reading life! ;)

I found this a great improvement on the first instalment (The Killing Moon), although it would be a tricky stand-alone read as it assumes the world-building and recent history of that tale and moves right along.

This second volume addresses some of the weakness of the first - most notably giving space to character development over plot development, with the first quarter setting the scene, but the next half developing characters and relationships as much as (if not more than) plot. The final quarter brings the resolution of the various major plots without feeling rushed (and with only one element feeling a little deus ex machina although because we already know from the first novel that Gatherers are insane ninja-demons, it's not entirely unbelievable that the palace coup is easy once they are released).

I also found the characters more interesting and engaging than the first volume - even Wanahomen (who is childish, cruel and unlikeable to start with) develops into an interesting character (if still arrogant and overbearing) - and Hanani, who carries the weight of the novel - worked well for me from start to finish. I particularly liked that by the end of the novel she was explicitly rejecting the patronising sexism of the Hetawa priesthood, which made me feel a good deal better about it (i.e. that we are meant to both recognise and dislike it). I also liked the 'barbaric' Banbarra, who felt like a much-adjusted Bedouin tribe - warlike, unapologetically brutal, passionate, but gender-equal, with women very much in control of sexual relations, tribal wealth and inheritance; in many respects they made more sense than the 'civilised' Gujaareen society (which still feels a little muddled to me after 2 books, especially in terms of gender roles, in part I think because we see it through the eyes of the male priesthood, who are largely set apart from it).

I hover between 3.5 and 4 stars - I would have given it a whole-hearted 4 stars if the novel had been romance-free, as this was the element I was least comfortable with and that I think the novel could happily have done without. However, 3.5 feels a little mean. So a begrudging 4 for now and I reserve the right to be meaner later. It does make me feel better about having given The Warriors of Taan 4 stars though (as there are numerous parallels between the 2, which amused me throughout).

>81 imyril:: Now you've peaked my interest. I have yet to read any Banks -- I bought The Player of Games last year but haven't touched it yet ...

>88 littlegreycloud: there has been some discussion (in the Green Dragon and through the Culture group reread) about where the best place to start is with the Culture novels, given they're technically chronological but none of them rely on any of the others and do genuinely stand alone. I'm rereading all of them this year in order (although I didn't post comments on the first 3, as I've reread them so many times) and discovering a new admiration for them.

I think you can jump in with Player of Games without a worry; my only caveat is not to expect to like the protagonist (err, although I'd argue that's true of most of the Culture novels! But Gurgeh is difficult because he's so arrogant and has no sense of humour) and the book is a bit of a slow starter.

Rereading them close together has been fascinating. I've noticed all sorts of things that have eluded me in the past, and gained a new appreciation for Banks' universe building. After Excession though, I'm into books I've only ever read once - and barely recall - so I suspect I'll be reading less closely as I get distracted by plot!

48) Collapse - Jared Diamond


An examination of ancient and modern societies that have undergone sudden collapse, and an evaluation of the environmental context in terms of population size, impact and sustainability. Diamond argues from the start that he doesn't believe in environmental determinism - it's not geography or climate change that he believes knocked any of these societies over - it's our responses (or lack of them) when things start to go wrong.

I've been wanting to read this for several years, and Morphidae's Mighty group read means I've finally done so. And I'm terribly glad I had a group to keep me going, because in spite of this being accessible and interesting (and a subject close to my heart), I found it quite a struggle.

It's probably the most depressing book I've read this year, and I say that as an idealist and an optimist. I'm less optimistic about the broader adoption of the Greater Good over the Greater Profit, and reading this many case studies that reinforce the sneaking suspicion that humanity can be horribly short-termist and selfish doesn't do me any good - especially when so many of the positive role models are dictators! Successful (i.e. sustainable) environmental management seems to depend on tiny, localised societies (Tikopia; Papua) or totalitarian control (shogunate Japan; Dominican Republic under Balaguer). The fact that the First World is swinging around to recognising and beginning to reduce its environmental impact is dwarfed (for me) by the rapid industrialisation of China, India, Indonesia and so on - who have very few qualms about the environmental impact of their rush to the top of the economic ladder.

I'll leave most of my comments over on the group read thread, but in a nutshell - my main issue with the book is that it's just too long. I think ot would have benefited from fewer case studies and less repetition. Ultimately, there wasn't enough differentiation between the issues within case studies, so this felt like retreading the same ground. Add in repetition within chapters - while this isn't a consistent problem, it's sporadically a big problem (I'm going to tell you about X; now I'll tell you about X in detail; having told you about X...) - and you have a recipe for intermittent boredom, which was almost enough for me to give up completely.

Which is a shame, because in between are chapters that are fascinating, horrifying, thought-provoking and interesting. I think a damn good edit could have improved the whole thing, packaged it up a bit better, and actually made the message stronger rather than weaker. I can't recommend it as it stands unless you're interested with a strong stomach; an abridged version should probably be required reading for everyone.

49) Alanna - Tamora Pierce


I fell in love with Alanna when I was perhaps 7 years old (maybe 6), a lonely only child in a small rural town whose friends all lived in outlying villages and farms that couldn't be reached on foot. It was the early 80s, so I was free to roam on my own cognisance, and I spent as many hours in the local library as the local park with the ducks. The librarians soon realised I was no worry (quite the opposite, as I'd help them tidy up and put mis-shelved books back where they belonged), and mostly ignored me almost as completely as the ducks. I remember finding the heavy hardback with its beautiful cover of the Ysandir looming over Persopolis (even if Alanna and Jon's horses were the wrong colour ;) and reading it in the library (repeatedly), as well as carrying it carefully home to curl on the sofa. Alanna was my favourite book for years, and will always have a very special place on my bookshelf (less so the sequels, which I didn't get hold of for years; I was mid-teens before I even knew books 3 and 4 existed).

So there's no way I can revisit her adventures without bias, and I haven't even tried. A few shaky bits of prose aside, it's fast-paced and gloriously single-minded in letting its heroine overcome her challenges on her own. She may need to learn to ask for help, but she doesn't need rescuing. For an adult reader, it's definitely simplistic (it's a children's book - it's allowed to be) - and while the Sweating Fever sequence retains its power, Alanna's adventures in Olau and Persopolis feel a little too easy, without any real question of her survival. The real joy for me though is in Alanna's steadfast refusal to give in to the more mundane challenges of bullying, mathematics and swordcraft, repeatedly knuckling down and finding ways to achieve her goals.

Perhaps the boys don't really feel like teenage boys - they're all very sensitive and mature; perhaps it would be nice if there were other female characters; perhaps the world feels a bit clean and tidy; and of course there's the unfortunate aspect that the climax involves two great white saviours coming to the desert to liberate the Bazhir from their semi-divine oppressors. I'm prepared to ignore all of it and enjoy the ride. I certainly wasn't conscious of any of this when I was 7 (although on that last point, that is the point - representation is important, and this isn't helpful).

I'll admit to finding both The Warriors of Taan and Mrs Frisby more satisfying as an adult reader, although whatever comments I made about their potential influence on me growing up they can't hold a candle to Alanna, who got to me first. I loved her because she resonated, but she was probably also the first female fictional character who reinforced the message that I could be anything I wanted, and I shouldn't let anyone tell me otherwise.

>90 imyril: Guns Germs and Steel has probably been on my shelf for more than a decade at this point and I'm still not ready to face it, so I get the difficulty of Collapse. It's staggering just how happily and indifferently humanity digs it's own grave.

>92 fundevogel: Quite. Thankfully Alanna and - my 50th book! - Tigerman are hi-jinks entertainment, so I'm adopting the ostrich response to Collapse until I recover my resilient optimism. The sand is lovely and warm against my eyes, and it doesn't scratch if I don't open them.

50) Tigerman - Nick Harkaway


Curled up on the sofa with coffee and toast didn't feel quite appropriate for the climax of Tigerman (which is indeed awesome and made of win), but it's far too early in the morning for whisky and I just don't like strong builder's tea with a mountain of sugar in it.

This is probably Harkaway's least genre outing, in the sense that it doesn't feature global apocalypse, bombs that destroy reality, ninja, cake, steampunk monks or mechanical bees. I remain a bit bewildered by the lady in the bookshop who told me it featured a psychic volcano. I suppose that's one way of interpreting it, but it's far from explicit - although it's clearly her head-canon, and far be it from me to argue if it works for her. It's a bit of a stretch for me. Maybe I misheard her.

In that sense, I hope it furthers his road to a broader audience, because I think it's brilliant. This is Nick Harkaway writing a John Le Carre story. On the Le Carre side, Tigerman is a cynical commentary on politics (dirty) and culpability (deniable), and a touching exploration of the affections of an emotionally-battered sergeant with PTSD, unexpectedly making new connections during the final days of an island every government pretends doesn't exist (and soon won't, because they're going to blow it up). Lester Ferris channels many stereotypes (not least British discomfort with talking about feelings) and still feels real, thanks not least to Harkaway's deft touch in aside (The man had no calluses, and his eyes were perfectly empty may now be my favourite ever condemnation of the modern politician).

By contrast, the boy Lester hopes to adopt is pure Harkaway and draws the narrative firmly back into his preferred domain. A streetwise cipher who speaks Internet, his English is a loose string of enthusiastic gaming, scifi, and comic references that had me in stitches. Anyone who tries to make a film of this will need the perfect casting to pull this off without it becoming twee and cringeworthy, but given free rein in my head it worked just fine. The boy's total attachment to genre entertainment turns the Le Carre set-up into a reluctant superhero story that feels almost credible - far-fetched as spy fiction, but firmly set in a recognisable world.

The rollicking adventure races with a sense of inevitability, twisting and turning through plot development that is almost mythic in its familiarity, but at no point could I assume I was sure where Harkaway would take it (I didn't spot Gonzo Lubitsch, after all). While I'd have been mildly disappointed to find out I was wrong about Bad Jack, I still trusted that the truth would be equally spot on. I did briefly think it was going to break my heart, but it didn't in the end (because I am less emotionally engaged by father/son bonding, being an only daughter who never had a father) - although it was immensely satisfying.

In summary: wheeeeeeeeeeeee and also wooooo. Made of win.

I've been remiss in updating with my reading, so here comes an avalanche...

I finished August and started September with a re-ReadaThing, exploring some of those childhood books that my Mum recently brought over. I'll limit my comments here as this is my Books off the Shelf (which these certainly weren't) - full comments are over in the Green Dragon.

51) The Silver Brumby - Elyne Mitchell
This stood the test of time reasonably well: the simple tale of the coming of age of a wild 'cream' colt as he overcomes the threats of weather, rival stallions and man. Largely a case of tell over show, there is little dialogue and less inner monologue; instead you get evocative descriptions (and beautiful line drawings) of the Australian landscape and its animal inhabitants. Very definitely a children's book for kids that love horses, which it largely refuses to anthropomorphise.

52) Dragons of Autumn Twilight - Weis & Hickman
This hurt. Ultimately, if I want to be kind to my childhood attachment to it, I had much lower standards (because it was so hard for me to get hold of books in English I read anything) and this is a decent description of a roleplaying game. If I remove all my grown-up filters for what makes a good book, there's a nostalgic glow to the glaring character archetypes, plot tropes, gamesmaster amusement ('You do what? Are you sure?') and railroading, and to spotting the responses of players under pressure (the attack on the lifts at Xak Tsaroth was the highlight of the novel for me purely because it is the sort of daft thing roleplayers do when they've run out of sensible ideas, rather than something an author would make his/her characters do) - all deliberately taking place in a familiar setting to create a common frame of reference.

As a book, on the other hand, it's dreadful, if still less annoying than The Left Hand of God (which is the only book I've given a 1 star rating to in the past year, I think).

53) The Cats of Seroster - Robert Westall
Where most childhood fantasy is about farmboy heroes, brave knights or individuals stepping up to a glorious destiny, Cam of Cambridge is a penniless student who spends three-quarters of the book looking for ways to sidestep his. He has no desire to be a warrior, nor a leader, and is terrified of giving himself over to the ferocity of the immortal Seroster. Cats, however, turn out to be much better at herding than being herded, and the enormous golden Miw are a ruthless delight. This is unapologetically dirty, vicious and mediaeval in a way that almost presages grimdark - n least for its handling of its very few women - and I'm mildly surprised that I loved it as a child. But it's great, and it has fabulous cats.

54) Acceptance (Southern Reach 3) - Jeff Vandermeer

So I have finished Acceptance and quite honestly I haven't a clue what I make of it and won't be assigning a star rating. It goes on the list of things I'll need to read again sometime to make up my mind. I found it quite hard going, densely wordy and vague at best in its intentions and conclusions. The prose has a certain magnetic pull, and I enjoyed spending time with the Lighthouse Keeper, the Psychologist, and the Biologist/Ghost Bird.

The Lighthouse Keeper gives us the past: snippets of the mysterious goings-on along the forgotten coast before its transformation and its first blossoming into Area X. I liked Saul Evans - he has a tired but loving bulk to him that is tangible and grabbed my affection even as his world starts to transform around him, from the bizarre encounters with the Seance and Science Brigade to his first brush with the otherworldly invasion.

The Psychologist gives us her version of the first two books, in an out-of-time flashback that I think represents her memories as she lies dying on the beach, although this is slightly ambiguous. I liked that her frustration and experiences mirrored Control's far more than he would have believed - far from being the woman with the answers and the authority, she too was wrestling to make sense of something in which she was far more invested than he was.

Ghost Bird gives us the present, as the survivors try to find answers in Area X and forge a future in which they don't turn into weird leviathans.

Back in Area X, Control has less control than ever. Reduced to following Ghost Bird in the hope that her previous experiences or very nature will give her advantages that match her confidence, he gets little POV time and spends most of the book in a state of half-off-the-page panic. This was a bit of a letdown for me, as I appear to be one of the few people who enjoyed Authority and would have liked to see more agency and meaning for him.

More intriguing, Grace survived Authority and is waiting for them in Area X. Whilst we never get her point of view, she is less antagonistic and a lot more interesting through Ghost Bird's eyes and in the Director's flashbacks. She is the closest we get to a relatable observer who can help make sense of the weirdness, although it rapidly becomes obvious that she's falling apart.

Ultimately, there are some answers half-given and open to interpretation, and a wide-open ending that allows you to either adopt Grace's bristling hostility to the unknown or Ghost Bird's easy acceptance of her environment. I'm left somewhere in the middle, but the problem for me is less the mild frustration and more the fact that ultimately, I don't think I care either way.

55) The Prestige - Christopher Priest


Hurray for Morphy's Mighty Reads! This was a perfect palate cleanser, and joins Tigerman, The Shining Girls and The Thirteenth Tale at the top of my new reads of the year so far.

It really doesn't matter if you've seen the film - the book adds to the dark tale of 2 feuding Victorian illusionists with a modern-day wrapper revealing how the feud has trickled down into subsequent generations. In fact, there was enough additional depth and variation in the Victorian sections that I actually felt that I could be 'spoilt' - the end of the book and the fates of pretty much all the key characters is different here.

Told largely through the diaries of the two magicians, this is a study of obsession and animosity. All is fair in magic and war - they disrupt one another's performances, interfere (if not always intentionally) with love lives and ultimately threaten each other's lives. With asides on the cost of living a life of lies, what is considered acceptable to sacrifice for your art, and magic as both illusion and as science we haven't discovered yet, this is heady stuff, told with Gothic glee. I'm not particularly interested in stage magic; it really didn't matter - I was hooked from the start.

My only discomfort is the same one I had with the film - the awful position it puts its female characters in, especially Sarah Borden (although she is practically invisible in the book - her sad storyline was expanded in the film, presumably as an attempt to explore consequences that are implicit in the book, although there's a suggestion here that she and Olivia are unaware of what Borden is up to, unbelievable as that seems). In the book, Angier is not a widower and he visibly behaves badly with his string of affairs and long-suffering wife (although given the film kills her off in the opening sequence, it's open to debate whether she's getting shorter shrift here).

Either way, we're strictly in a world in which peripheral, poorly-treated women must always play third fiddle to the true focus of the magicians' lives: their career and each other. Obsession - it's never pretty.

I've docked it half a star for the abrupt ending - it's not that I necessarily wanted more answers (unlike Acceptance I didn't mind being left with a host of implications and questions), but it did feel like it just stopped.

56) Girls of Riyadh - Rajaa Alsanea


Rajaa Alsanea is unusual: she's a dentist with a bestseller to her name that's banned in her home country (Saudi Arabia). She states in her introduction to the English edition that she never expected it to be translated, and her intention was never to talk to women outside the kingdom. Reading it, I had to battle from the start to keep my Western attitudes and prejudices leashed, not to mention my feminist leanings and my issues with male authority.

Sadeem, Gamrah, Lamees and Mashael are 'velvet' class girls in their first year of university: rich, privileged, and constantly brushing up against the strictures of Saudi society. They accept the teachings of Islam without question, but they long for love and hope to find men of their own choosing who will accept them as the free-spirited thinkers that they try to be.

Told through a series of emails (it is unclear whether this is merely a framing device or the voice of Alsanea herself, although I assume the former) whose author is castigated from the start - in much the way Alsanea was attacked following publication - by those who considered this candid portrayal of young women subversive and unIslamic.

Reading as an Englishwoman - even one with some (very limited) knowledge of Islamic culture - it's difficult not to judge. Some of the things the girls take for granted are horrifying: the terrifying stalking that is substituted for meaningful contact by the gender-segregated youth (the scene of young men in cars trying to push their phone numbers on girls in other cars gave me the shudders); the control and judgement of the older women that reinforces the status quo; the ease with which Saudi men can dispose of unwanted wives, and the status of these women thereafter; the rigid control of the society (and the religious police); and the supreme arrogance of the 'only true Islamic nation in the world'.

The things that outrage the email readership within the novel (and presumably the Saudi establishment in reality) seem almost trivial to a Western audience, just as the fictional email author's rebuttals preach (however unintentionally) to a Western choir. The girls drink (once or twice), smuggle Western movies into school, smoke a shisha (once), and carry on clandestine relationships that amount to deep-of-night phone calls and text messages as any personal contact is almost impossible in the kingdom. There are rare meetings at a chaperone's house, and a lot of talk about breaking taboos that none of them ever achieve.

Because, inevitably, the sheltered girls are so helplessly naive. Every broken heart is a car crash you see coming from the start: traditional Gamrah, desperate to please but hopelessly underprepared for her wedding night; sweet Sadeem, who is divorced by her fiance (legally but not publicly her husband) because of her willingness to accede to his advances (it's worth noting that the book only hints at what she may have allowed, which may well be much less than I read into the suggestion); half-American Michelle, tainted goods because of her mother, not fit for a true velvet class groom. Only bold Lamees, the Internet adventurer, is smart enough to keep her heart under wraps; although only she is arrested by the religious police for being found in a public place with a man she is not related to.

On the surface of it, this is exactly the sort of book I hate: chick lit, in which smart, independent girls define themselves almost entirely through their (much-imagined) love lives. The book is entirely given over to their dreams, heartbreak and compromises. But I didn't hate it. I swept through it rapidly, intrigued by the conflict between the girls' aspirations and their situation, and fascinated by this rare glimpse into a society I know little of. I lived on the outskirts of a Bedouin village in Jordan for a summer (whilst on a dig) and was invited to the wedding of a terrified teenage girl to a much older general (one of the more heartbreaking experiences of my life). This was another peek into a world that I can never fully understand.

Ultimately, it is a paean to the right to make your own choices; to abandon social prejudices (or at least some of them; the section dealing with a Sunni/Shiite friendship remains awkwardly underdeveloped - crossing this religious boundary seems to remain beyond the pale); and a rallying cry to recognise the value of a smart, independent woman rather than abandon her for an uneducated, sheltered girl who can be dominated. A searing moment - a critic writing in to question why a man wouldn't marry another man if he was looking for that sort of relationship. Ouch.

But it is worth noting that it focuses strictly on a class showered with money and privilege; girls who you see shopping in Knightsbridge and New York. Compared with less well-off girls, the friends are bemoaning the cultural equivalent of #firstworldproblems - I was reminded of A Thousand Splendid Suns precisely because there are no similarities here. Regardless, this was a good read and I'm glad I finally got to it.

57) Wild Seed - Octavia Butler


I've been meaning to read this for a while, and I'm glad I finally got round to it. I found it a little hard to engage with initially as the prose struck me as slightly stilted, but as I soon got sucked in it stopped mattering. In some senses, this felt like backstory / history - a recounting rather than a storytelling. I'll be intrigued to try other books by Butler and see if the style differs.

Doro is immortal, a cruel, controlling spirit moving ever further from his erstwhile humanity as he hops from one mortal body to the next (destroying the original inhabitant). Drawn to people with special abilities, he is determined to breed a super race who he hopes will one day be immortal as he is.

Anyanwu is as immortal as Doro, an entirely human shapeshifter with total control over her body and bodily processes. Doro recognises her potential and fears her resistance; the book explores their fiery relationship over the subsequent 200 years as she rebels against his assumed authority.

This is fascinating stuff, not least because Anyanwu forms a moral core to the tale without having inflexible prejudices (except about drinking milk). Butler also throws gender, race and sexual orientation in the air, because her 2 leads can both be anything they choose. There's lots to like: people of colour, fluid gender and a strong central female character.

But the central theme is control. Doro's attitude to his people is proprietary; he engages in eugenics and he doesn't hesitate to kill those who he no longer considers useful to his gene pool. Anyanwu correctly accuses him of being no better than a slaver; he doesn't value human life or recognise that his people have any rights. His own desires are the only thing that matter.

Moreover, Anyanwu identifies as female (although she can and does take male shape and even fathers children) and Doro generally appears male in the narrative. This makes much of the tale a study of a strong, stubborn woman fighting to retain her identity and principles in the face of an oppressive man who holds all the cards - he can kill instantly without even a touch, and has no qualms about threatening her children to force her to his will.

Technically, then, this is a book about abuse (and reads equally as a portrayal of slavery/emancipation or domestic abuse). Anyanwu's ferocity and independence obscures it to a degree: she refuses to be a victim, and her submission to Doro feels like a temporary accommodation, but I found it difficult to overlook, and it frequently made for an uncomfortable read as well as making me quite ambivalent about the ending.

There are other issues, not least the treatment of the disabled (arguably period appropriate in the broader strokes, but the conflation of mental powers / mental instability / (attempted) rape also bothered me), but overall this was a good challenging read and I do want to explore the Patternist books further.

58) Inversions - Iain M Banks


Another reread for my year-long Culture group read, I enjoyed this more than I did on first meeting it some years ago. It is both the most and the least Culture novel out there, in the sense that we get the view of Contact or Special Circumstances from the perspective of ignorant locals being gently affected by the Culture's hidden interference. This is what the Culture does, and what it looks like from the ground.

I still think this lacks some of the finesse of other Banks' scifi (the worldbuilding is cursory, and the primary narrative was less absorbing than others), but I admire the layers within layers that are at work and I enjoyed reading between the lines, being better informed than the narrators. There are some great characters here and it was refreshing to read a Culture novel in which I didn't end up despising the humans. Generally very satisfying.

59) The Folded Man - Matt Hill


One of these days I'll read a book set in Manchester that isn't bleak, and I'll be so shocked I have to sit down for a minute. Or drink tea. This industrial capital of the northwest has featured in numerous books as a brooding background for the unhappy and abandoned. Perhaps it was the urban decay of the later 20th century, the proud warehouses and mills crumbling, tagged by gags to mark knifings, racial tensions rising as incomes dropped. Perhaps it really is that grim Up North (full disclaimer: I'm from Sunderland. It's grim. And further north).

The Folded Man is set in the far-too-near future, a 2018 in which the internet has been turned off; mobile comms are for the very few; motorways for even fewer. Manchester is standing in for New York, the Beetham Tower blown up in a terrorist attack and replaced by a beam of light that shines nightly as a memory of what was lost. Distrust and media hype regularly turn the population into murderous rioting mobs, fuelled by racism but lashing out at whatever (and whoever) ends up in their path. Local governments rule with an iron hand, racist legislation limiting the movements of people of colour and heavy ordinance available for riot control with little care for who may get caught in the line of fire.

Our protagonist, Brian, is poorly-adapted for dystopian living. His legs fused together from birth, he's stuck in a wheelchair and terrified he's turning into a fish. His obsessive coping strategies include exfoliating salt baths to rid himself of the scales he's sure he's growing, eating his own hair and wallowing in self-loathing. He sits in his flat and watches reality tv streamed live from the helmets of soldiers in the Middle East. Once a week he verbally abuses his carer who delivers food and tries to make him take care of himself. Very rarely he puts himself through the humiliating agony of a visit to a local brothel.

Brian is dragged into a plot involving rightwing nutjobs and ends up in possession of a mysterious box that must never be opened - just as racial tensions boil over into a full-scale local uprising. Told in a terse, disjointed present tense, this doesn't always make a lot of sense, but Brian is as confused as you are, and often drug-addled to boot (a common Mancunian trope). At the mercy of anyone who can grab his wheelchair, he has little control over events - at a key point he's simply taken off to hospital for a regular check-up by a well-meaning carer. He's not in any position to be a hero, but it's also not in his nature. Even when he attempts to claim some agency, he is at the mercy of his obsessions - stopping to take a salt bath in a looted bath store during a riot. Key scenes - such as an attack by pigeons - underline his helpless rage at the world.

It's a bit like a mash up of Jeff Noon, The Wasp Factory and the worst of the evening news: disjointed, unpleasant and walking a fine line of you simply abandoning it as a bad job. I can't say I enjoyed it, but I can't help but think that Hill is one to watch.

60) Broken Homes - Ben Aaronovitch


I know some people have issues with PC Grant, but I can't help but enjoy this series (although I thought Whispers Underground was sub par). Broken Homes is a return to form romp, with Peter Grant and Lesley May trying to figure out whether their old enemy the Faceless Man has taken an unlikely interest in brutalist architecture, and if so, why (as a sideline to solving 2 unpleasant murders). The combination of magical education and police non-procedural continues to entertain.

I have a real soft spot for fiction that know their location as well as I do, allowing me to visualise exactly where the action is taking place. Aaronovitch does good London, so the only thing that made me blink here was the sudden insertion of the Skygarden Tower for the Heygate Estate (mostly famous to non-Londoners as a key location in Attack the Block). I quickly forgave him; the Skygarden Tower is an interesting concept, although I may not forgive him for Sky.

This instalment takes a couple of unexpected turns, one of which I have to assume leads to the Thing That Really Annoys People regarding Lesley in book 5 (note: I don't know the details of this thing; I just know that there is one. I intend to keep reading, with the forewarning that I may get very angry when I find out). In general, I found Lesley a little bewildering in book 4, partly because I couldn't remember whether she'd always been quite so blunt and direct in asking about Peter's sex life and partly because of the sudden emphasis on her somewhat Life on Mars attitudes to policing. I'd always thought she was a model WPC; here she develops much harder edges. And the twist at the end caught me sideways - I didn't see that coming at all.

None of this reduced my entertainment, combined as it was with colourful Zach and the resplendent Lieutenant Varvara Tamonina, who deserves far more page time than I suspect she'll get given Nightingale's plans for her.

Now the only real question is whether I move swiftly along into London Falling or The Rook and just declare October my London fantasy policing month :) ...I think so.

61) The terrible and wonderful reasons why I run long distances - Matthew Inman (The Oatmeal)


This was a random gift from Mr B, because he thought (correctly) that it would make me laugh. This is not a serious book about running for people who are terribly serious about running. This is from the Oatmeal, so it's a daft illustration of the crazy reasons we have for doing some really stupid things, like running up a mountain in 40C heat chased by giant hornets.

I took up running because I was rubbish at making time to go to the gym and I was losing the battle with weight creep. I like food. I like alcohol. I like clothes that fit. These things don't always make perfect partners, so I let a friend bully me into run club ('I don't run', 'They don't make sports bras good enough for me to run' and 'I got hit in the throat by a seesaw as a child and I've had all sorts of psychosomatic responses to breathing hard ever since' don't wash in the face of a determined Canadian) and she was absolutely right - all my excuses were rubbish, and I'd just been doing it wrong.

Matthew Inman appears to have had similar (but not identical) motivations and reactions, so his technicolour illustrations of the Blerch, a racing T-rex and the really grumpy woman at the gym who doesn't want men to talk to her (seriously, what IS that? We're there to sweat, not flirt!) kept me giggling from start to finish.

Lots of fun.

62) The Rook - Daniel O'Malley


I bought this on a whim ages ago, and have heard lots of good buzz about it here in the Green Dragon.

Supernatural London is getting to be a crowded place, so it's no small endeavour to launch another ship to sail those waters. Thankfully O'Malley has come up with a resourceful heroine, loveable allies, a suitably iconic supernatural agency to keep tabs on all the unmentionables, and a big sense of humour. Having grown up in Holland, I may have found the fact the villains were Belgian a smidgeon funnier even than intended.

The things that bothered me were almost entirely down to the fact that O'Malley isn't British, and he's trying to write convincing Brits. He does pretty well - he's got dry snark down just fine - but he inevitably makes a couple of basic cock-ups that stand out (such as Myfanwy having a 6-digit pin for her credit card, or wondering if she could remember how to drive a manual. No, she's British. She may be wondering whether she can remember how to drive at all, but it would never occur to her to wonder about her gear stick). These things are entirely incidental to the plot, and there aren't many of them, but they shook me out of the world each time.

However, this is nitpicking. By and large, this was a rollicking joyride of daft proportions, with colourful characters and a pleasant absence of paranormal romance (although there were heavy hints that this will almost certainly be in store for Myfanwy in future instalments). It doesn't take itself too seriously, which largely helps the suspension of disbelief (the episode with the prophetic duck was a joy), and it is randomly peppered with what appear to be offhand allusions to other supernatural fictions that it has cheerfully adopted as part of the universe (I spotted Midwich and Narnia; I'm fairly sure I was meant to pick up a couple more). And I loved that it is almost entirely gender-neutral.

I do think it showed itself as a first novel in a few places, so I can only expect to enjoy future instalments more as O'Malley gets comfortable. But this was certainly entertaining.

>103 imyril: - hey, those are MY excuses... get your own okay? (sounds like a cool book!)

>105 Yells: it's a delight. I totally recommend picking it up :) (although I suspect most of it is available online at The Oatmeal in the archives too)

63) The Lady Astronaut of Mars - Mary Robinette Kowal


This is a Tor short, and it's a delightful and moving little gem. Elma is the eponymous Lady Astronaut - now in her 60s, but still dreaming of space flight. Once the poster girl of the colonisation programme, she may have one last shot at flying through the dark as mankind reaches beyond our solar system in search of new planets to inhabit. But the cost is high, and the story focuses on her inner conflict, alternating her current situation with memories of that first mission to Mars.

I found this careful, simple and moving - a pleasure to read, with only the Wizard of Oz cross-over elements leaving me a little confused (apparently this was originally written for an anthology called Rip Off, that took well-known characters and placed them in other contexts) although thankfully they didn't distract from or undermine the main story.

Lovely, although it did feel like it could have been the beginning of a book rather than a short story - although it is complete in itself, and packs a solid emotional punch.

64) Look to Windward - Iain M Banks


Here's a funny thing: I really want to like Look to Windward more than I actually do. Even trying to sort out my star rating I could feel myself wanting to bump this up to 4 stars, but I can't really justify it, because I simply didn't enjoy the reading experience that much.

To be clear: it's not a bad book. Indeed, by the general standards of scifi, I'm being wilfully unkind in saying it's not that great - it tackles big ideas on a big bold canvas with some intriguing characters and beautiful writing (I've subsequently started Ancillary Justice, and I can't help but note how much simpler the language is). But by the Banksian standards against which I measure his Culture novels (set for me by the first 3 novels, all of which get 5 stars), I didn't feel it measured up.

And I can't deny it's an 'important' Culture novel. For me, these central books are all about the ethics of Contact, and here we get the consequences of Contact getting it wrong. A miscalculation has resulted in the deaths of 5 billion Chelgrians, when the response to a Culture-puppeteered political shift is bloody civil war. In the aftermath, Contact try to encourage a Chelgrian exile (Ziller) on a famous Orbital (Masaq) to meet with the new Chelgrian ambassador (Quilan) to assuage the Culture's guilt; but Quilan's true mission - hidden even from himself - is vengeance.

All of which sounds great, and provides us with the opportunity to look at life in the Culture up close for once. We continue the theme of Contact ethics, returning to Inversions's question of whether the Culture are right to interfere and questioning the depths of their conscience (as the gigadeath makes them feel bad, but doesn't affect policy in any way). We also revisit the theme of whether hedonistic, backed-up life in the Culture can have meaning (touched on in Player of Games) and introduce the concepts of controlled afterlives that will be revisited in Surface Detail. But this isn't a bridging novel - it's the natural consequence of finally looking at the Culture full-face.

The problem for me is pacing and focus. Look to Windward wanders, getting sucked into its own fascination with the crazy stupid lives (although to be fair, I loved the Culture cocktail party chitchat, unburdened with details of who is speaking, and recognisable gibberish to anyone who has ever been sober in conversation with drunk people) and the habitats of Masaq. This is probably the most detail we have had on a Culture habitat, and part of me wanted to love it on that account (ooh, place-making! Mad ideas! So this is what they get up to at home! Etc), but in fact I found it didn't engage me - unlike Consider Phlebas, which similarly explores imaginative worlds whilst advancing the plot. Add in Chel and the airsphere, and we get a lot of description and exposition.

Exploration of the characters is likewise leisurely, with relatively little in the way of character development. The (largely alien) POVs are there to show us the Culture, not to evolve in response to it. I doubt anyone is surprised when Ziller's ego will not permit him to miss the symphony debut, or when Quilan begins to have doubts about his mission; his desire is always for oblivion, not vengeance).

I was left entirely cold by the side-story on the airsphere, not least because it seemed to be utterly irrelevant, making me wonder if I'd missed something (I realise there's the overlap with where Quilan trains, and that Eweirl is responsible for Sansemin's death - but Uagen Zlepe just seems surplus to requirements, not least given his untimely death). This segment seemed to exist largely to underline that we are not meant to sympathise with the Chelgrian cause (but there was little chance of this), to revisit Consider Phlebas's theme that not every story influences larger events, and to give us the Yoleusenive's perspective from the far future in the coda. Which also serves only to emphasise how meaningless all this is in the long run.

If you approach this as the last Culture novel (which it seemed to be for a very long time), you could argue it comes full circle and makes a whole of what has gone before. But it ultimately isn't the last novel - and regardless, I clearly prefer the urgency of the more plot-driven adventures of the first trilogy over the more reflective explorations of the second.

65) Ancillary Justice - Ann Leckie


I doubt I can say anything that hasn't been said already this year about Ancillary Justice, so I'm going to try to be brief for once ;)

Some interesting ideas here, which I enjoyed without ever finding my sympathies on the side of the Radch - they are, after all, a ruthless hegemony in the spirit of the Roman Empire, which requires rather specific thoughts on civilisation and worth to get behind without reservation.

I found the novel accomplished and was comfortable with the central conceit - the misgendering didn't get in the way of my reading, and I didn't really struggle to work out the true genders of the key characters. I appreciated the more detailed commentary on the complexities of Radch gender (and culture in general) when Breq and Seivarden arrived on the station towards the end.

I never quite got over my unintended meta in which the Culture could be keeping a benevolent eye on all of this from a safe distance (which puts an entirely new twist on Anaander Mianaai), but it too didn't get in the way of enjoying the novel as it was written.

In spite of my appreciation, I didn't get sucked into the novel and although I'll read the sequel in due course, I'm in no rush. That said, I suspect this is one of the novels that improves with rereading - I think there are subtleties to be missed when you have little appreciation of Radch culture and history.

Right, I've been slipping so I'm afraid you get a barrage of commentary in one go!

66) The Woman in Black - Susan Hill


I first read The Woman in Black in my early teens, a set text for English that we never actually studied (but being me, I read everything on the list). I read it alone at home on an autumn afternoon as the light died, tucked up on the sofa in the grip of the dark, haunted atmosphere within its pages. My ears strained to hear and not-hear any sounds in the empty house (3 storeys and not much given to creaking, being largely made of poured concrete) and I hunched down on the book so as not to catch a sight of my reflection - or anything else - in the windows as dark fell. When it was done, I found the courage to go close the curtains and turn on every light in the house, then put on the television and remind myself that it was just a story.

I couldn't remember the details when I saw the recent film; I was just certain they had made many changes, Hammering it up. Rereading it now, I appreciated both the glorious faux-Victorian complexity of the language and the sheer simplicity of the haunting tale. No need for a plethora of deaths or a demonic monkey toy, let alone the egregious gore of modern horror. I love The Woman in Black for its effective use of suggestion (so well-adopted in the stage play, where the entire tale is largely conveyed by 2 versatile actors, good use of lighting and a bare minimum in props).

And yes, it still made my overactive imagination go haywire to the extent I couldn't read it in bed.

67) Sedition - Katharine Grant


Billed as 'the bastard child of Les Liaisons Dangereuses and Sarah Waters', this more or less lives up to that promise in terms of plot: some City businessmen made good wish to purchase titled husbands for their daughters, and come up with a hare-brained scheme involving piano lessons to show off the girls' wealth and accomplishments. However, the music master appointed to teach them has been incentivised by the bitter piano maker to seduce each girl before they master Herr Bach.

Monsieur is not to know there is nothing he can teach young Alathea musically or sexually, or how much more persuasive and inventive she is than he. Add in Annie, the disfigured daughter of the embittered piano maker, and you have far too many adjectives and a few too many conspirators plotting against each other ;) Expect everyone to be out to sleep with and harm almost everyone else, and you won't be far off the mark.

Many of the characters felt cartoonish - the aspiring parents and the Drigg daughters are well-trodden stereotypes even the Brothers Grimm would recognise, but I appreciated the understated friendship that bound Harriet to Georgiana and the unexpected bond and character reversals of Annie and Alathea.

This is colourful but surprisingly modest for a bawdy novel of seduction and liberation; unlike Waters, Grant prefers metaphors and implication over full-bodied romping. Her focus is on the girls' emotional and attitudinal shifts, transfigured by their various lessons in unexpected ways - some gaining grace even as they lose their reputations, others settling further into their thin stereotypes.

I found it entertaining, but it lost me at the climax, which strayed into farce with shades of Regency morality tale in terms of just desserts dished out.

68) Hebridean Journey - Halliday Sutherland


I didn't quite know what to make of this book - I inherited it from a close friend's grandma, and I couldn't find out anything about it or its author, so I didn't even know if it was fiction or non-fiction. I eventually decided that it's the 1930s equivalent of a blog. As I was travelling in the Hebrides, I decided it was time to read it.

It is an account of a few weeks Sutherland spent travelling across the Hebrides, and he eventually clarifies that this is not intended as a travel guide. While he takes in most of the Hebridean islands (Rum was still privately owned) he doesn't necessarily take in all the sights. He visits acquaintances and friends of friends; he knocks on croft (and castle) doors to ask for accommodation and buttermilk; he recounts religious history and local mythology; and includes any other diversions and conversations that entertained him.

His views can be colourful and it's sometimes difficult to tell whether he is deadly serious or seriously tongue in cheek as it's tricky to judge past attitudes and knowledge (for example, when he weighs in on something I know full well to be untrue - but I don't know if this was common knowledge in the 30s). In other places, he's either having a good laugh or was an eccentric gentleman - he devotes some pages to recommending rising early when staying with friends even if it is not your usual habit, in part so they will think you industrious and in part because you will find they adjust their habits to match your supposed habit and make you a cup of tea (...but if you rose at 8 as usual rather than at 6, you wouldn't put them out and they'd still make you a cup of tea!)

Overall, this was occasionally diverting, sometimes dull - like many blogs ;) I peg this as a curiosity, and I'm glad I read it while travelling the islands it describes, but I won't be rushing to unearth any of his other books (there is a Lapland Journey as well).

69) Deep Sea and Foreign Going - Rose George


I found myself completely absorbed by much of this book, which is a journalist's account of a trip on a Maersk container ship and her insight into the workings of the shipping industry. Your mileage may vary, but I was fascinated (and at times disgusted) by the commercial realities and the human stories - from the impact of flagging out to the economics of piracy and the intimate loneliness of modern seafaring life.

I suspect I will reread this; I certainly found plenty of food for thought (not least in the closing chapters on environmental impact) and was touched by the chapter on the church's involvement to try and reassure seafarers that somebody out there cares in the face of elaborate corporate structures that remove any accountability for ship owners or flag states and leave the sailors literally at sea with little protection and less oversight.

Well written and unexpectedly engaging.

70) A Matter of Oaths - Helen S. Wright


I think I enjoyed this more than it deserves in some respects, but I'm not going to worry about that too much. This is a debut novel and it shows in some occasional awkwardness in language and characterisation and a touch of unmerited smugness in the closing chapter. I'm also not entirely sure that the chapter-opening comms snippets that gave the reader knowledge of enemy activities were a good idea - I felt this reduced tension rather than raising it (as I think the knowledge that there were bad guys was intended to, but in knowing their identities it removed ambiguities that would have otherwise increased tension at crucial points). On the flip side, these were the only info dumps in the early stages, and did provide much-needed context.

However, I liked it for how little we are told outside them - everything else emerges through the plot, which happily bounds along with few distractions. It's a happy space opera stew of familiar tropes with immortal warring Emperors, cyberpunk in place of science, amnesia, a strong dose of 'I'm getting too old for this shit' and a dash of romance.

I liked the offhand way in which it was made clear that few characters were white and several characters were gay or bisexual. I could have wished for more women in the foreground (while there are several female crew, they are basically wallpaper, leaving us with Rallya and eventually Emperor Julur's security lead Braniya, who is far from sympathetic), but Rallya - strong-minded, sharp-tongued, irascible and supremely self-confident - is a joy. We don't often get female Commanders let alone ones nearing retirement, although there were sections early on in the novel where some fairly nasty behaviour initially went unexplained and threatened to make her out a complete bitch (thankfully it becomes clear she's misbehaving purely for the badness of it - most of the time, anyway).

I would be delighted if there were a sequel, but as it's been 15 years since this first came out, it seems unlikely there ever will be. It remains an entertaining diversion I can see myself revisiting in the future.

Available for free download (or donate in thanks - I have done) on the author's website.

71) The Quick - Lauren Owen


I have a soft spot for vampire novels, as long as they're not paranormal romance. That said, I didn't realise The Quick was a vampire story when I picked it up - it is described as modern take on gothic horror, and for some reason I thought it was going to be about magicians.

As a vampire novel, it has plenty of traditional elements: secrecy, the upper echelons of high society, troubled priests, forbidden romance (James Norbury falls for the man he rooms with, which is unacceptable in Victorian London) and dogged heroism (Charlotte Norbury's determination to save her brother from the vampiric Aegolius Club). I liked that while Victorian vampire novels tended to involve women only as victims, Owen has 3 strong women in Charlotte, 'professional' vampire-hunter Adeline and streetwise Liza, vampire child of the Alia. I liked the details here - this is a Victorian London that feels fairly real; bustling streets, dirt and noise, the baying of the mob and the disinterest of strangers all ring true (as does the geography, my bugbear from Sedition). I also liked that Owen has vampires of all classes; her East End Alia are a viciously delightful answer to the Aegolius Club's snobby gentlemen and you could choose to read much into Mrs Price's rejection of Edward's desire to use his vampirism to 'improve the lot of unfortunates' and his intention to stop gaining consent to the Exchange.

But I wasn't entirely satisfied with the book overall. Like Sedition, the pacing felt off (especially in the second half) and I found the narrative structure awkward. The novel is split into 5 or 6 parts; the first lengthy section focuses on James Norbury, his slow-blooming romance and the first hints that some of the cast may not be what they seem. The second is a disjointed collection of notes and diary entries from an array of characters we haven't previously met, that confirm suspicions that this is a vampire novel and give us their perspective (sort of - the notes are actually written by a human associate). The next section re-introduces Charlotte in her search for her disappeared brother - well into half the book, it still all feels like slow build-up. Arguably this is in the classic tradition, but I'd prefer a bit more of an arc.

My problem in the end is that the climax doesn't quite pay off all this world-building and scene-setting - and that there's a further (lengthy) part of 'and what happened after', where once again I felt the pay-off failed to deliver. It just sort of meanders and ties up loose ends - unnecessarily, I think.

It's well-written and engaging, and I enjoyed it (and in spite of my carping, would recommend it) - but it didn't feel balanced, so I've docked it half a star for sort of just meandering along and along and along and rushing a bit and then meandering again until it finally reaches the sea. I can see Hollywood picking it up and making a better film of it with good use of the cutting room floor.

72) The Hunger Games - Suzanne Collins


I don't read much YA (unless it was something I originally read at that age), so I didn't join in the rush to read The Hunger Games a few years back. I did see the film though, and walked out frustrated that I felt there had been a good story that had been stifled in Hollywood casting and art direction. People who knew the books disagreed, which didn't encourage me to immediately pick up the books.

So it's taken me a while to get to them, and I'm glad I finally did. I can only respect Collins for her rapid character sketch and world-building (although I'd like to see some detail teased out in future books to convince me this 'works', there was enough here given the novel's single-minded focus on the Games).

I liked Katniss Everdeen too - spiky, tough, reserved, capable and unemotional - her matter of fact narration sucked me right in and I enjoyed her journey. The eventual romance (one of my sticking points in the film) made more sense with Katniss' interior monologue intact, and I liked that we had no sight of the machinations outside the Games.

Possibly a 4.5 - I really did think this was absolutely cracking through the first two-thirds. It suffered slightly from the fact I'd seen the film - this reduced the tension (and my enjoyment) of the final third, although it picked up again once Katniss was out of the arena and ultimately leaves me curious to read the next instalment at some point.

I can see now why fans of the book admired the film - in retrospect, it's one of the most faithful movie adaptations you could wish for. I suspect I would enjoy the film a lot more if I re-watch it now (I'd probably still object to Gale, Peeta and the other supposedly underfed tributes being so Hollywood shiny ;)

112: I'm probably the only person I know of that's avoiding the movies. I enjoyed the first book as well, but I'm just so sick of Hollywood shoving muscular, heart-throbby adult versions of teenage characters in my face. It's probably a weird attitude to have, because I love Jennifer Lawrence in other things. But I'm just so apathetic about the movie versions. Is that wrong?

>113 missrabbitmoon: not at all. The book is better, because it lets you pretend the stupid garish fantasy fashion of the Capitol is bearable and - more importantly ;) - because it keeps you firmly inside Katniss's head.

But I decided young that I didn't trust Hollywood (after Disney butchered Mrs Frisby) so I'm always sympathetic to ignoring film versions of books!

>114 imyril: Psst. That wasn't a Disney movie.

>115 fundevogel: gosh, so it wasn't! Oops. Thank you.

It was still a travesty :D (my 6 year old self was VERY unforgiving of films messing with favourite books... and I've never grown really grown out of that ;)

:)

Okay, I'm abandoning Alif the Unseen at somewhere between half way and two-thirds done. I've been gritting my teeth since the very beginning, and it's not getting better. The fundamental problem is that I just don't like Alif and I don't like what the author is doing with the characters around him.

Alif may be a fair depiction of a young man in the Gulf (he rings true with the world painted in Girls of Riyadh), but that doesn't make him a pleasant travelling companion. He is selfish and self-pitying, and his views on women are unchallenged (and guaranteed to annoy me).

The author upholds his view of women as existing to serve men's needs with the treacherous true-blood love interest, the pious sister-neighbour (competent, but clearly fated to be a quest reward as far as I can tell), and the hysterical American convert (there's probably an essay to be written on this character as an unusual case of authorial insertion; she may be the ultimate anti-Mary-Sue).

Vikram the Vampire is entertaining (offensive, but entertaining), but I struggle to believe in his motivation. It's terribly old-school, which is apt for a djinn, but I think I'd have preferred him to be as bad-ass and tricksy as his reputation. As it is, he's just a bit deus ex machina, appearing periodically to move Alif along to the next plot point.

It seems wholly unlikely at this point that there will be a turnaround big enough to make up for what has gone before, and the fluffy fantasy-hacking is really putting my teeth on edge. So I'm giving myself permission to abandon it.

73) Printer's Devil Court - Susan Hill


I've read it so you don't have to. I like Hill's ghost stories - simple as they are ;) - but this one fails to create atmosphere and is chock-full of egregious errors in continuity (one character - who only appears in a single paragraph - changes names between the start and end of that paragraph; later, a portentous comment about a ginger cat is meaningless as the scene involving said cat appears to have been cut from the story, so we have no idea why it is relevant) and syntax (missing commas a-go-go, plus the occasional erroneous or extra word - even in the About the Author). My teeth were grinding from start to finish.

Sadly the whole thing feels like a rough draft from an author more interested in other projects passed by a junior editor with a publishing deadline and no care for detail; it reflects badly on both Hill and on Profile Books.

It's a shame, as I've enjoyed the others in this series (Dolly and The Small Hand, along with reprints of older stories). But I'll think twice about picking up any more, and I'm desperately glad I got this from the charity shop!

74) The Soul of Discretion - Susan Hill


Marvellous, I've reassured myself that Susan Hill can write good prose, good characters, and keep me hooked.

I've frequently noted that I enjoy the Serrailler novels because they are about people, not crime. I think of them first and foremost as the unfolding drama of the Serrailler family - and after 8 instalments, you would think we knew all we needed to about them. Not so. I was genuinely shocked at the twists in their tale delivered here, which came as a bit of a double sucker punch (although whether Simon's experiences here will stop him behaving atrociously towards Rachel remains to be seen, I don't have high hopes for Richard's future - I was knocked for six by his behaviour here).

I want to say I struggled to put this down, but I found the criminal subject matter (child abuse and rape) a struggle, so in fact I was alternately reading voraciously and walking away to come up for air. Hill doesn't linger, but the carefully-sketched rape (and the brutal exploration of the aftermath) and the mere hints of the other were quite sufficient to make it a hard read. I think it's only fair to add a Caution notice on this one.

Cat's concerns for her teenage son's reading materials and her growing conviction that we need to embrace death as part of life make for much-needed relief, unlikely as that may sound.

Overall, a successful addition to the saga, although I'm mildly annoyed that it sort of feels like a cliffhanger as it leaves so much unresolved, but technically it wrapped up all the major plot points. It just did it in a way that leaves massive fallout for Book 9! (I note the obvious 'twist' relating to Rupert Barr/Rachel got spelled out, but I wonder how that the oh-so-casual reference to Gerald Hanbury will rebound on Cat and Imogen House?

And he might be a bit young, but odds on for Cat/Kieron? Or is that just me?

Oooh book 75 coming up! I'm not sure what to make it :)

75) The Cloud Roads - Martha Wells


I belatedly caught up on the Green Dragon Group Read :) I picked up The Cloud Roads after everyone else had moved on to The Serpent Sea, and with one thing and another it has taken until now to actually read it.

I found it a slow starter, in the sense that I didn't engage with it through the early chapters; but once the plot kicked in in earnest this improved and I found myself happily chunking through it. This is my first Martha Wells, and while I'm not bowled over, I liked it enough that I'll seek out further instalments of the Raksura at some point as I'm curious to see how the world-building continues to evolve - I'm hoping it develops more nuance, especially as it delves into the links between the Aeriat and the Fell (which I'm assuming it will).

I think my main problem was that I didn't really like Moon very much, and he is our sole point of view. Thankfully there were some great secondary (and tertiary) characters (Frost was an instant favourite, but I really liked Selis and Chime too), and once the broader cast came fully into play I was happier. My other issue was that it felt rather black and white - there are good guys and villains, and where there is any hint that a good guy may have been compromised, they turn out to have excuses - Pearl is in fact acting in the colony's best interests (although this was a good thing in my books); Branch betrayed them to Pearl but not to the Fell; Balm couldn't be held accountable for her treachery. I like a bit more complexity or ambiguity at play - even Ilane was acting in the best interests of her own people.

There's lots I could say, but as most of it has been said by others on the Group Read thread, I shall contain myself :) Suffice to say that I found this straightforward, but entertaining.

76) Bodies of Light - Sarah Moss


I am an unabashed fan of Sarah Moss's work, and her latest novel is no exception. Her first foray in historical fiction, she has chosen to tell the story of Alethea Moberley - the elder sister of May, whose history on Colsay inspires Anna to return to work in Night Waking. Alethea's parents are the oddly matched Alfred Moberley, a Manchester artist and designer in the mould of William Morris, and Elizabeth Sanderson, an evangelical feminist campaigner and lifelong do-gooder (except at home).

Raised to do her duty - that is to say, to do whatever her mother tells her - and to repress her emotions as self-indulgent hysteria and madness, Alethea makes for a quiet, nervous heroine who applies herself to her studies, her housework and eventually her calling as a doctor more to avoid disappointing others than to fulfil a lifelong dream. Yet she is fierce beneath the duty and embraces both duty and calling to make them her own in this fascinating portrait of the struggles of Victorian women to be taken seriously.

I was enthralled by this moving tale and - as with other books by Moss - rapidly found myself fully emotionally engaged, furious with Alethea's parents and sister for their behaviour and at times frustrated with Alethea for martyring herself to their opinions. In between, the glimpses of the impossible position Victorian women found themselves in (not least being subjected to brutal examinations by policemen to prove they weren't ladies of ill-repute when found out after dark) cast the hard-won freedoms of the 20th century into sharp relief. We may sometimes reflect that there's still a long way to go - even in modern Britain - but it is good to be reminded how far we have come.

This won't be for everyone, not least because it's written in the present tense which can be a turn-off, but it is firmly one of my favourites for the year and no doubt one I will revisit in future.

And a quick-fire round of reviews to the end of the year...

77) Zoo City - Lauren Beukes


The problem with finishing a book before Christmas and writing it up afterwards is obvious :) But - braced with some strong coffee and a deadline (as we need to jump in the car and head off for family shenanigans) - I'll give it a shot.

Zinzi December is an aposymbiont or zoo: following her brother's death, she has acquired an animal familiar and an appointment with the Undertow. Relegated to the violent slums of Zoo City when she is released from jail, she and her Sloth (by far the most likeable character in the book) survive on her talent for sensing the invisible threads that bind us to things we've lost - retrieving them for a fee. She keeps what's left of her life uncomplicated: no lost persons cases, no emotional ties. But when a client dies unexpectedly, she gets sucked into a case to find one of South Africa's biggest pop stars, and everything gets very complicated quickly.

This is a vividly realised world, horrifyingly believable in the way of the best spec fiction - as long as you accept that some bizarre kink in the recent past has made guilt tangible as a spirit animal (and, if you're lucky, a useful magical talent). I particularly the interspersed background chapters, which helped with world-building and flavour, and admired the atmosphere evoked throughout.

Zinzi is resourceful and intelligent, which makes her a strong (anti)heroine, but she's also a cold fish - she has cut herself off from feelings so thoroughly that I found it difficult to judge whether she cared about anything. By the end of it I didn't really feel I'd got to know her - she was all hard edges and we'd had little to latch onto through all the broken glass. Her sideline in 419 emails was wry, but I appreciated that Benoit eventually called her on it; while she was an unwilling participant at best, it was also clear she didn't particularly care who she hurt.

The ratcheting plot - lost items to lost persons to conspiracy nightmare - bounded along at a pace I'd expect from Beukes, but lost me in the final act when it started to feel first a bit silly (oh look! Everything gets worse! No, much worse! No, MUCH... you get the idea) and then resolved itself in a way that seemed out of kilter with the mood of the rest of novel (I wasn't clear why Zinzi wasn't in jail given the carnage at Huron's house; easier to believe she was a co-conspirator than a victim / do-gooder - especially given she'd been working for him). I think we were meant to take her final choices as a sign of her beginning to heal some of her emotional wounds, but I found it hard to believe in.

Overall, this felt good to a point, but if it had been my first experience of Beukes, I might think twice about reading more. Interesting rather than excellent for me.

78) Catching Fire - Suzanne Collins


I zoomed through the second Hunger Games novel as I wanted to watch the film. Back at home in the Victor's Village, Katniss realises she is still in danger from the Capitol when President Snow drops by to tell her it's all her fault that the Districts are acting up and that he'll kill everyone she cares about if she doesn't fix it.

...which probably sums up my biggest problem with the novel. I needed to accept that and move on, whereas I struggled to suspend my disbelief over the lovestruck teens being the spark for what is essentially multiple disconnected rebellions (as the Districts have no way of communicating with each other).

Once I popped that problem on the shelf and got on with it, the book works well in much the way of the first. Katniss' first person narrative keeps us confined to her skull for understanding what's going on and keeps us close to her as a person (because let's face it - Katniss is a cold fish from the outside; one of my issues with the films is that we lose sight of Katniss' inner turmoil, guilt, grief and anger as there's only so much even Jennifer Lawrence can do with her eyebrows). The bigger focus on romance angst was expected and, as expected, mildly irritating. I like Katniss much more when she's cold, focused and trying to survive than when she's flailing about over her boys and I really have no investment in who she eventually ends up with (I'd quite like to see the answer be neither).

Yes, in many ways this is retreading familiar ground (the train; the training; the arena), but Katniss' situation and slow realisation that she has no control over how the Districts react to her (i.e. her family are buggered whatever she does) lends a different flavour to the dish, the paranoia and feeling of persecution much more personal than the generic horror of the first book.

So - more solid entertainment, but it felt a little thinner than the first book. There's less originality and more rote here, so while it's a solid second instalment I don't rate it quite as highly.

79) I Think I Can See Where You're Going Wrong - Marc Burrows


Brilliant loo book received as a stocking filler - a collection of comments left by Guardian readers under articles on the Guardian website. Carefully curated, some of these (such as the person who sent an email to some corporate VIPs, signing off 'Regards' - only to realise after hitting send that G and T are terribly close together on a keyboard. Oops) will leave you in stitches regardless of whether you have any cultural context on the news stories, Britishisms and 'Guardian reader' persona. Other comments really do benefit from knowledge of the Guardian and exposure to British views on what people who read the Guardian are like (full disclaimer: sometimes, I read the Guardian or the Observer. Mostly, I read the Independent).

...but all of them work best if you've ever seen Dave Gorman's Modern Life is Good-ish and are familiar with his Found Poem. At which point this little book is a devastating gem.

It also goes to show just how hard the British will work to keep a good run of puns going :)

80) Discount Armageddon - Seanan McGuire


Sneaking in under the wire to finish my 80th of the year - a new high for me! I'm not typically an urban fantasy fan, but the Green Dragoneers sold me on the InCryptid books and I'm delighted to say it was a good buy.

McGuire isn't afraid to tick the basic UF boxes: trashy cover, smoking hot heroine, snark galore and the odd bit of inappropriate sex. Thankfully, she's not above a wink to the audience (the quotes opening each chapter kept me amused, although the location notes were a bit superfluous), a bestiary to make London Zoo weep and serves it all up with lashings of fun.

Extra points for having a spunky heroine who has female friends; more female characters than male (and not being afraid to let many of these be far from sympathetic but still fascinating); and a tribe of religious talking mice with unexpected festivals.

It's OTT, it's pulp at best, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I'll absolutely be seeking out further installments to see what becomes of Verity's ballroom dancing career. And I'm still considering giving it an extra half star for calling her telepathic 'cuckoo' Miss Zellaby.

Looking back, I blasted past my overall reading / shelf targets and missed everything else :)

But I had a fine time doing so and some unexpected health challenges along the way that messed with my concentration, so I'm very happy with the outcome.

Mid-year I started worrying about bias, and tracking author gender and diversity to see where I ended up. Conscious choices almost got me to 50/50 on gender for the end of the year!

Male / female authors: 50% vs 48.75% (+ 1 co-authored)
Women can too write SFF: 21 - 45.65% of SFF read
Diversiverse (full year): 5%

Non-fiction and/or personal development: 9 (target 12)
Culture completeism: 7 (target 10)
Tartt completeism: 1 (target 3)
Classic scifi: 5 (target 12)
SantaThing 2013: 2 (target 3)

Top 3 of the year - The Thirteenth Tale, Bodies of Light and Burning Bright by Melissa Scott (with hot competition from The Prestige, Tigerman and The Shining Girls)

Worst of the year goes to Printer's Devil Court.

I hope you've all had as much fun reading this year as I have!

I ended up with 2 parallel reading threads last year, but this year I'm only going to maintain my thread over in the Green Dragon. It would be lovely to see you if you fancy dropping in - you'll find it over here.

I will still be lurking in the Books Off The Shelf group and following you all here too though!