valkyrdeath's 2014 reading

I’m new here and thought I’d give this a go. I haven’t had the chance to do as much reading as I’d like recently, but I’m hoping keeping track of my books here will help motivate me to actually find the time somehow. I’m aiming to try and get as much variety as I can amongst the books as the year goes on but whether I’ll achieve that remains to be seen. I'll try and do a mini review of each book and hopefully that'll help with my ever worsening memory.

Here are the books I’ve read so far:

1. Raising Steam by Terry Pratchett
2. The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde

3. Lost in a Good Book by Jasper Fforde
4. Fooling Houdini by Alex Stone
5. Screen Burn by Charlie Brooker
6. Fashion Beast by Alan Moore
7. Notes from the Underground by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

8. F in Exams by Richard Benson
9. The Well of Lost Plots by Jasper Fforde
10. Hercule Poirot's Christmas by Agatha Christie
11. The Night Bookmobile by Audrey Niffenegger
12. The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13 3/4 by Sue Townsend
13. Nemo: Heart of Ice by Alan Moore
14. The Martian by Andy Weir
15. It’s Not Rocket Science by Ben Miller
16. Cannery Row by John Steinbeck
17. Little Fuzzy by H. Beam Piper
18. Wild Worlds by Alan Moore

19. We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson
20. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark
21. The Laying on of Hands by Alan Bennett
22. Raffles: The Amateur Cracksman by E. W. Hornung
23. Something Rotten by Jasper Fforde
24. The Pearl by John Steinbeck
25. Spike Milligan: Man of Letters by Spike Milligan, edited by Norma Farnes
26. Neonomicon by Alan Moore
27. Destiny of the Republic by Candice Millard
28. The Driver’s Seat by Muriel Spark

29. The Hot Rock by Donald E Westlake
30. The Red Pony by John Steinbeck
31. Babel-17 by Samuel R. Delany
32. Fun Home by Alison Bechdel
33. The Adventures of Unemployed Man by Gan Golan and Erich Origen
34. The Snarkout Boys and the Avocado of Death by Daniel Pinkwater
35. Slaves of Spiegel by Daniel Pinkwater
36. Exit Wounds by Rutu Modan
37. First Among Sequels by Jasper Fforde

38. Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction by Nick Montfort
39. Alex through the Looking Glass by Alex Bellos
40. The Snarkout Boys and the Baconburg Horror by Daniel Pinkwater

41. One of Our Thursdays is Missing by Jasper Fforde
42. Yossel by Joe Kubert
43. Dark Entries by Ian Rankin
44. Slow Storm by Danica Novgorodoff
45. You are Not So Smart by David McRaney
46. Nintendon’t: 25 of the Worst Video Games Ever by J. Andre Bardin
47. The Art of Pho by Julian Hanshaw
48. The Kite Runner: Graphic Novel by Khaled Hosseini

49. The Silver Pigs by Lindsey Davis
50. Saint Germaine: Shadows Fall by Gary Reed and Vince Locke
51. Asterios Polyp by David Mazzucchelli
52. The Callahan Touch by Spider Robinson
53. The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
54. Animal Farm by George Orwell
55. Borgel by Daniel Pinkwater
56. Adolf Hitler: My Part in his Downfall by Spike Milligan

57. Lord of the Flies by William Golding
58. The Apex Book of World SF 3 edited by Lavie Tidhar
59. The Education of Robert Nifkin by Daniel Pinkwater
60. Doomsday Book by Connie Willis
61. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
62. Sandman: Endless Nights by Neil Gaiman
63. Flim-Flam! Psychics, ESP, Unicorns and Other Delusions by James Randi
64. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum
65. The King by Rich Koslowski
66. Ice Haven by Daniel Clowes
67. Nebula Awards Showcase 2014 edited by Kij Johnson
68. How to Suppress Women’s Writing by Joanna Russ

69. Bank Shot by Donald E Westlake
70. Skizz by Alan Moore
71. The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists by Robert Tressell
72. The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman
73. Batman: The Long Halloween by Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale
74. Snow Falling on Cedars by David Guterson
75. The Mysterious Affair at Styles by Agatha Christie
76. Batman: Dark Victory by Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale
77. Dracula by Bram Stoker
78. Catwoman: When in Rome by Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale
79. The Woman Who Died a Lot by Jasper Fforde
80. The Stars, Like Dust by Isaac Asimov
81. Monstrous Beauty by Marie Brennan

82. Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell
83. Batman: Noel by Lee Bermejo
84. Freddy the Detective by Walter R Brooks
85. Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke
86. Scenes from an Impending Marriage by Adrian Tomine
87. The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood
88. Death by Chocolate by Alan Nolan
89. David Starr: Space Ranger by Isaac Asimov
90. Jimmy the Kid by Donald E Westlake

91. D-Day June 6 1944: The Battle for the Normandy Beaches by Stephen E Ambrose
92. The Great Brain by John D Fitzgerald
93. Speculative Journeys by Irene Radford
94. The Etymologicon by Mark Forsyth
95. The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin
96. Regeneration by Pat Barker
97. Batman: R.I.P. by Grant Morrison
98. The Eye in the Door by Pat Barker
99. The Ghost Road by Pat Barker
100. Wyrd Sisters by Terry Pratchett
101. Mr Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan
102. Nobody’s Perfect by Donald E Westlake
103. Fish Whistle by Daniel Pinkwater
104. Futures Near and Far by Dave Smeds

Glad you're starting here!

1. Raising Steam by Terry Pratchett

I’m a huge Terry Pratchett fan and have read almost all of his books, so I’m quite sad to say that this one was a bit of a disappointment. It’s the first Discworld book that I’ve actually found hard going at times. Something just felt slightly off about it. Perhaps it’s partly the fact that the arrival of steam trains was handled in a fairly straight forward manner without the same level of wit Pratchett usually brings to things. I think it’s also because the writing just doesn’t feel quite right, which could be a sad consequence of the author’s illness. It’s a bit too action focused and I felt it tried to cram a few too many characters into it, and sometimes the characterisation seemed a bit odd too. It’s not actually a bad book, but it just doesn’t have the same appeal as the rest of the series for me. I hope that’s only a one off and the next book will bounce back to the normal standard.

2. The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde
3. Lost in a Good Book by Jasper Fforde
The first two books in the Thursday next series. The Eyre Affair creates an imaginative alternate history version of 1985 where the Crimean War is still going on and extinct animals have been recreated as pets by genetic engineering. It involves the invention of a method to let people enter inside books and a criminal using it to kidnap Jane Eyre. It’s got lots of great ideas and is a fun read, even if the writing is a bit basic. The sequel improves things, setting up an entire world within books and an inter-fiction police service, bringing in lots of classic characters. They’re both full of jokes and word play, which I love, and the second book is better, though suffers from lacking any real ending, just finishing suddenly to be continued in the next book. Both recommended though.

4. Fooling Houdini by Alex Stone
This follows the author as he aims to improve his magic after entering the "Magic Olympics" and failing spectacularly. He uses it to look at various topics related to magic, such as psychology and mathematics. Or at least he does later in the book, as for much of the first half he's just talking about himself and his experiences with the magic community. The second half is better when he simply uses his experiences to launch into studies on the mathematics of shuffling or the psychology of misdirection, though it's never especially in-depth. It's also inaccurate at times, not least because there isn't an event called the "Magic Olympics", it's the FISM World Championships of Magic he was talking about. Anyway, it was a reasonably entertaining book despite the fact that it seemed to descend into boasting occasionally, and it definitely improved as it went along. I’m just not sure how much of it can be trusted.

5. Screen Burn by Charlie Brooker
The first collection of Brooker’s columns from The Guardian. Unlike his later collections, this one only contains his Screen Burn articles, which makes sense since they’re the only ones he was writing at the time. It means there’s less variety since every column is about TV, spanning the years 2000 – 2004. Fortunately, they’re still often extremely funny. There was plenty of awful TV for him to rant about then, though there are a few too many articles focused on the then-current crop of housemates in the Big Brother house. His way with a comic phrase carries it through even those though. Probably a bit much to read in one go, but a perfect book for dipping in and out of. I prefer the newer books with his more general columns included though.

I discovered the Thursday Next series through LT. I stopped reading them at some point, not sure why, but I remember feeling so impressed by how creative Jasper Fforde was in this series. I love the factions of violent literary groupies that are mentioned throughout the series.

There really is a huge amount of creativity in those books. I love the idea of a society obsessed with literature in general. I'm fairly bad at starting series of books and then getting distracted part way through and not finishing them though.

Welcome to Club Read. I'm entertained by your variety so far - Pratchett to Dostoyevsky.

Thanks! I've been adding more and more variety to my reading over the last few years and I find I enjoy things a lot more like that, and also that I enjoy things I might not have previously considered.

6. Fashion Beast by Alan Moore
This is a little odd, as you might expect from Malcolm McLaren's involvement. It's also a new adaptation by Antony Johnston of an 80s film script that Moore wrote but which was never filmed, so it's not a true Alan Moore graphic novel, but out of the adaptations of his work by others that I've read, this is one of the better ones. It's loosely based on Beauty and the Beast and set in the fashion industry of an 80s dystopian vision of the future. It's got plenty of those Moore touches that elevate the work above the average graphic novel, even when it's an adaptation, and the film script itself came from the period when his writing was at its peak. It’s quite disturbing at times and there’s not really any purely good characters, just a lot of people getting by in a ruined world. It's not amongst his absolute greatest masterpieces, but it's far from his worst work.

7. Notes from the Underground by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
This is the first Dostoyevsky I’ve read, but it probably won’t be the last. It’s in two halves, the first presenting the narrator’s philosophy and the second presenting some events from his life demonstrating it. The first part can be a bit hard going at times but it’s worth it, and the second half is far easier to get through. He has a masochistic enjoyment of his own suffering and a sadistic love of causing suffering in others, but aside from those aspects, the most disturbing thing about it is how much of myself I could recognise in the character’s obsession over minor events. He’s probably the ultimate unreliable narrator too, where even in his philosophising section he concludes that he may actually be lying about it all. Anyway, I’m not going to try to analyse it all in a few lines here, but I absolutely loved the book.

I must get to Notes from the Underground

8. F in Exams by Richard Benson
This purports to be a book of funny answers that kids have given on exam papers. Some of them are quite funny but I have a problem with books that are misleading, and I'm extremely skeptical that these are real. For one thing, there's no indication of where they've come from, and I doubt examination boards send student's exam papers off to publishers. The answers are shown in different handwriting as if they're taken straight from the papers, and yet in one, they've accidentally duplicated put the same word twice in a row and it's completely identical both times, no variation at all. And the questions themselves often don't sound like real exam questions. If there's a maths exam that genuinely asks people to give the formula for how to win the lottery, then I'm worried more about the mentality of the examiners than the students. Basically, this is a joke book pretending to be something different.

9. The Well of Lost Plots by Jasper Fforde
The third book of the Thursday Next series. This time, it's almost entirely set within the book world, and the writing feels better than before. It's absolutely crammed full of literary references and word play, with jokes about things such as the theft of punctuation from the final chapter of Ulysses. One particular section regarding the use of the phrases "had had" and "that that" manages to culinate in a sensible sentence containing the same word repeated 11 times in a row, one of my all time favourite pieces of word play. And this time, while there are still wider events to be resolved, it still brings some things to a conclusion at the end, meaning it's more satisfying than the previous book. I think this is the best book out of the first three.

I have Notes from the Underground (which Nabokov says the title was translated terribly, btw :P) and debated on that or Devils (aka Demons aka The Possessed) for this year, but settled on Devils. Notes is up for next year, lol.

10. Hercule Poirot’s Christmas by Agatha Christie
This is about as typical an Agatha Christie book as you can get. A big house, lots of suspects, a violent murder, everyone hiding something and red herrings everywhere. The exposition can be a bit clunky and the characters aren’t exactly deep, but that’s not what you read her books for anyway. The actual mystery here itself is well thought out and everything falls into place neatly and logically and by the end you see all the clues were there all along. Not one of her best or worst works, but falling somewhere in the middle I’d say.

>16 .Monkey.: I'll be interested to see your opinion on Devils. I'm certainly intending to try more of his works myself at some point.

11. The Night Bookmobile by Audrey Niffenegger
My previous experiences with Audrey Niffenegger’s graphic novels hasn’t been great. I read both Three Incestuous Sisters and The Adventuress together a few years back and remember virtually nothing about the former while the latter did nothing for me. I picked this up anyway since I found the concept of stumbling across a mobile library at night and finding it contains all the books that you’ve read during your life. I did enjoy the story too. It had an intriguing idea and a sudden turn of events towards the end that was genuinely unexpected. Wasn’t too keen on the artwork, but I’m glad I read the story.

12. The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13 3/4 by Sue Townsend
Books about teenagers generally aren’t my preferred choice of reading material, but I make an exception for Adrian Mole. This book is a modern classic. While I enjoyed it when I first read it as a kid with plenty of funny situations to laugh at, I possibly enjoyed it even more now. Much of the humour comes from the character’s naïve opinions and reactions to things. He decides that he’s an intellectual though constantly misses the point of everything he reads. The reader can see things that Adrian can’t, even as he’s writing about them in his diary. He’s a typically self-obsessed teenager, but thanks to the warmth of the writing it’s hard not to like him. The ending is a bit abrupt though, but I don’t think it’s too big a deal in a book like this. There are consistent laughs throughout the book and what more can you ask for from something like this?

13. Nemo: Heart of Ice by Alan Moore
A spin-off from the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen series, this book sadly features Captain Nemo’s daughter from the disappointing Century books rather than the original Verne character used in the earlier League series. It’s sad that Alan Moore’s recent works just don’t live up to the classic stuff he did in the past. As with the other LOEG volumes, this is full of characters from Victorian fiction, both well known and obscure, but the trouble this time is there’s barely any distinct personalities displayed in this story. The plot is H.P. Lovecraft’s At The Mountains of Madness transplanted into the League universe and it doesn’t really do anything new or particularly interesting with it. It’s not bad, but it’s fairly bland and has nothing to really recommend it.

14. The Martian by Andy Weir
I’m surprised at how much I enjoyed this. It’s the story of an astronaut stranded on Mars after the rest of his crew have left thinking he was dead, and how he then manages to survive there. The story is often exciting as he copes with disaster after disaster, and the science is all very well thought out. It’s very much a hard sci-fi book, with lots of scientific details throughout the whole story, yet it manages to maintain a great sense of humour throughout. The bulk of the story is told through journal entries from the main character, aside from the occasional detour to show what is happening back on Earth. He’s constantly joking and making funny comments which makes the book very entertaining and prevents everything getting too bogged down in the science, as can often happen with hard sci-fi.

One curious thing though, is that having compared reading experiences with Meredith, we’ve discovered that there are two versions of this book. There’s the original ebook version, which was also used for the audiobook version, and then a modified version which has been used for the new printed version of the book and also the latest ebook. There’s a fun epilogue bit in the original which for some reason has been removed in the latest edition. It makes me wonder what else has changed. I feel a bit short changed if things have actually been removed from my version!

Anyway, whichever the version, I loved the book.

>22 valkyrdeath: My vanpool mates probably want to clobber me over the head and steal this book because I can't help but giggle and snort over some of Watney's journal entries...all while most of them are trying to nap on the way in to work.

You've reminded me to go add a note on my thread! You can do a spoiler thing on her, just the usual "spoiler" but in the arrows. I'm going to add the epilogue text to my thread under a spoiler.

Useful to know about the spoiler tags. I'll remember that for future reviews! I still don't understand why they removed that epilogue, it seems ridiculous. The end feels quite abrupt without it too.

15. It’s Not Rocket Science by Ben Miller
Ben Miller is best known for his sketch show with Alexander Armstrong and as the detective in the first two series of Death in Paradise, but he was in the middle of a PhD in physics before he abandoned it for his comedy career. He returns to his love of science for this book, which takes a look at what he refers to a science’s “best bits”. There’s not much here that’s going to be new to anyone who’s already read up on the subjects covered, but as an overview and launch point for people new to the subjects it’s very good. Miller’s sense of humour comes through in the text and never feels forced, making it an entertaining read even when I already knew what he was discussing. It’s easy to understand, and while it doesn’t go into depth, it provides enough to give a basic understanding and to inspire interest in the reader. I didn’t learn anything from the general physics chapters, but to my surprise, I found the chapter on the science behind cookery really interesting and despite the title, the final section does indeed feature rocket science. I’d definitely recommend this book to anyone who’s interested in starting reading up on science topics. I couldn’t think of a much more enjoyable starting point.

16. Cannery Row by John Steinbeck
There’s not much I can say about this one. It’s a classic, and deservedly so. A beautifully written portrait of the various odd characters that inhabit the area, full of vignettes interspersing the simple plot about the throwing of a party. At times it’s funny, other times sad but always well written and with characters that feel believable. And it’s full of moments where Steinbeck sums things up so perfectly that I end up wanting to quote sections of it all over the place. So basically, I love it.

I'm giving up on A Clockwork Orange, for now at least. I'm just not getting into it. The nadsat slang just makes it too difficult to read. I've no problem with using invented words, but when there's dozens of them in the space of four or five lines it ends up feeling like I'm having to spend more time trying to decode what's actually happening than being able to appreciate the story. It may well be a good book, but it's not for me right now.

17. Little Fuzzy by H. Beam Piper
I found this to be loads of fun, from the classic era of sci-fi. The story isn’t too deep, with a miner discovered a new race on a planet and trying to prove that they’re a sapient life form while the corporation running the planet tries to prove they’re not even though they know they are. It’s a straight forward good vs evil thing. The Fuzzies are ridiculously cute, but the book does manage to fit in some interesting discussion about what it means to be sapient. It all ends up as an entertaining courtroom drama, which I love. I thoroughly enjoyed the whole thing.

18. Wild Worlds by Alan Moore
This is a collection of comics Alan Moore wrote for WildStorm comics. It’s not really his best work, especially in the opening Wildcats story which really was just an average superhero comic story that didn’t have any indications of Moore’s genius in it at all. The second short story is more interesting and the longer Voodoo story isn’t bad, though nothing spectacular. The other two stories in the book are quite forgettable and feel like they would have meant more if I had any idea who the characters were. I wouldn’t really recommend it for anyone other than Alan Moore completists.

19. We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson
I think I’m in a minority here, but this book just did nothing for me. I was all set to love it, especially considering how much I liked The Haunting of Hill House, but it just seemed to be lacking. It was well written and the narrative voice of Merricat was distinctive and the whole thing felt very creepy, but it didn’t go anywhere. The revelation towards the end I assume was supposed to be a twist but was obvious from early on in the book and relates to events that occurred before the start of the story, and for most of the rest of it nothing really happens. The main events happen in the middle section of the book, and it feels like the story reaches its conclusion about three quarters of the way through and then just peters out. Even though it was a short novel, it still felt like it had been padded out longer than it needed to be, and I think I’d perhaps have enjoyed it more as a short story. I’m sure I’ll try other Shirley Jackson books, but this one really wasn’t for me.

>31 valkyrdeath:, Oh, I'm so sorry you didn't like We Have Always Lived in the Castle, it's one of my favorite books. The creepiness, the claustrophobia...

>32 fannyprice: It was certainly well written and it was very atmospheric. I just personally prefer more of a plot. Other than the fire nothing really happened in the story, and the fact that Merricat killed her family seemed clear from very early on, so I never really got any suspense from the book. Not saying it's bad though, just didn't work for me personally. :)

20. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark
I enjoyed this book more than I expected to. Despite the very different themes, in some ways the writing style reminded me a bit of Catch-22. It jumps around different time periods but never feels disjointed. If there’s one thing I didn’t think really came through in the book, it’s why the fascist teacher Miss Brodie did inspire such love from her students, something which was very clear in the film adaptation where it was easy to find yourself liking her at times despite everything. Still, the book itself is wonderfully written and I did enjoy it.

21. The Laying on of Hands by Alan Bennett
This book takes a look at a memorial service where a surprising number of well-known people from different walks of life turn up, none of them aware that the deceased knew the others. Starting from the perspective of a complete outsider, people get up to speak and the character of the dead man and the mysterious cause of his death is gradually revealed. As usual for Bennett, it covers some of the sadder aspects of life while still managing to have a sharp wit. There are a few laughs and some really clever lines along the way, as he satirises celebrity culture, the church and modern life in general. Not his best work, but it’s an enjoyable read.

22. Raffles: The Amateur Cracksman by E. W. Hornung
Quite a fun collection of the first eight Raffles stories. They’re typically Victorian and read very much like an inversion of Sherlock Holmes. It’s quite clear what the dedication of “To A.C.D. this form of flattery.” The stories start off basic but do improve as they go on. I thought they were an enjoyable read, though not to the point where I want to urgently seek out the rest of the stories.

I will mention that the stories weren’t really what I was expecting. I’d always heard about Raffles as if he was supposed to be a master thief, but he’s really not, and quite often his plans go wrong. Usually it’s because of bumbling sidekick and narrator Bunny, but mostly the reason he spoils the plans is because Raffles refuses to tell him what’s going on so Bunny has no idea that he’s doing something wrong. He is a gentleman thief, but not an exceptionally clever one.

23. Something Rotten by Jasper Fforde
The fourth book in the Thursday Next series, basically completing the story began a couple of books earlier. I think this is my favourite book in the series. It’s entertaining, funny and manages to wrap up all sorts of plot threads from the various books in clever ways.

24. The Pearl by John Steinbeck
A fable like story about greed and how it affects people. It’s very well written as ever by Steinbeck. I liked it.

25. Spike Milligan: Man of Letters by Spike Milligan, edited by Norma Farnes
Spike Milligan was a prolific writer of letters throughout his life, and his former manager Norma Farnes collects some of them into a book here. Many of them are as funny as you’d expect from Milligan, but there’s a lot that show the other sides to his personality. He was known as a difficult man to work with at times and he suffered from severe depression throughout his who life, and this all surfaces amongst the letters in this book. He helped out with lots of charities and wrote in support of many causes, but could also at other times get angry about things and often seems to have been good at putting the blame for his mistakes on other people. It’s an interesting way of getting a glimpse into his life in general.

If there’s a problem with the book though, I’d say it’s with the editing. The material just doesn’t seem very well organised. It is split into lots of chapters each with a different topic, which works quite well, but the letters aren’t always arranged well within these. Letters jump backwards and forwards through the years from one page to the next, and at one point Spike’s reply to a letter is printed on the page before we see the letter he was replying to. Farnes occasionally puts notes in, but not very often, and there’s many times when a letter will refer to things without us having a clue as to what they are with nothing to explain this.

It’s Milligan’s sense of humour that makes this a book still worth reading though. Some of my favourite moments include his writing to a tea company asking what they did with the corners when they switched from square to round teabags and apologising for not being able to attend an event due to having been dead for 24 years. The fact that he consistently referred to his publisher, Dick Douglas, as Doug Dickless also amused me far more than it should have done. Overall, it’s an interesting insight into Milligan’s personality, but it’s a shame it wasn’t better organised.

You should post that review on the book page, as it seems like a really helpful one! I'll have to consider getting this one for my dad.

Enjoyed your excellent review of Spike Milligan: Man of letters. Shame about the poor editing.

26. Neonomicon by Alan Moore
The first part of this graphic novel turned out to be The Courtyard, which I’d previously read as a separate volume, though it was in black and white then and now it’s in colour. It’s a decent little Lovecraft themed story. The new longer second part of the book takes things further, coming to a rather disturbing conclusion. It’s crammed full of references to Lovecraft, but those references are actually brought in as part of the plot. Having read all of Moore’s masterpieces, I’m left picking at the lesser works that remain. Again, this isn’t up there with his best books, but it’s still a pretty good read, especially for anyone with an interest in H. P. Lovecraft.

27. Destiny of the Republic by Candice Millard
I knew nothing at all about President Garfield before I read this book, and I found it fascinating. It focuses not just on Garfield himself, but the arrogant doctor who treated him after the shooting, the assassin, and Alexander Graham Bell who invented a metal detector to try to locate the bullet. It’s non-fiction writing at its best, telling an interesting story in an engaging way, and providing all the background necessary to understand what’s going on. I found the descriptions of the political situation that led to Garfield’s surprise nomination as leader as entertaining as anything else in the book. I think I’d recommend this to pretty much everyone, with or without an interest in American history.

28. The Driver’s Seat by Muriel Spark
This is a tough one to write about, mostly because I’m not quite sure how I felt about it. I really like Spark’s writing still, and definitely plan to read more, but I didn’t like the plot so much this time round and don’t quite know what to make of it. I enjoyed it, but it really took until the end to really appreciate what it was doing, even though in defiance to convention, she bluntly states that the main character will be dead by the end of the book. Rather than a whodunit, it becomes a who’s-going-to-do-it. But she never allows us into the thought processes of the characters , and the actions of Lise, the main character, are so crazy that it’s hard to get a handle on things. No-one is particularly likable either. It’s well written, but I think I wasn’t quite prepared for it when I started.

I did love this quote from one of the characters: “I'm a strict believer, in fact, a Witness, but I never trust the airlines from those countries where the pilots believe in the afterlife. You are safer when they don't.”

29. The Hot Rock by Donald E Westlake
This was a really entertaining heist novel with lots of humour. The dialogue was sharp, the constantly escalating series of events was hilarious but well plotted and thought out. Some scenes from the book I know will be amusing me for a long time to come. One of the most fun novels I’ve read in ages. I’ll definitely be checking out the rest of the Dortmunder books.

30. The Red Pony by John Steinbeck
Another Steinbeck as I work my way through the stock in the library. This was well written but didn’t appeal to me as much as the other Steinbeck books. There were still some great lines and the story was reasonably, though extremely grim for the most part. The red pony of the title is only in the first chapter, since this is actually a collection of four sequential short stories put together as a novel, but horses are a theme throughout most of it. I’ve never been particularly fond of horses so that could be why it never grabbed me as much, but the writing still pulled me in at times.

31. Babel-17 by Samuel R. Delany
This is a book with a really interesting premise, but it sadly didn’t work for me. It seems to be loved by a lot of people, but it was just too unfocused for me. The central idea involves the deciphering of a strange language during an interstellar war, and the plot looks at the way language changes perception and thought processes. There are some good moments where the lead character solves problems by thinking in other languages, but then for huge chunks of the book it just goes into rather uninteresting space opera territory. At times it seems like Delany felt the need to cram every idea he had into one short novel and it will just suddenly change tracks and start talking about something completely irrelevant. The pacing is all over the place. Just not for me I guess.

32. Fun Home by Alison Bechdel
I picked this up from the library on a whim without knowing anything about it and was surprised by how much I enjoyed it. It’s a memoir in graphic novel form. (Is there an official term for that? Graphic memoir doesn’t sound precise enough, since it sounds like it could just be a memoir with explicit content.) It focuses on the author’s childhood and early adulthood, her relationship with her father and her realisation that she was a lesbian. I loved the way it was told nonsequentially, cycling through the same events several times, showing how she saw them at various times as she learnt new information. Along with Persepolis, I’m starting to think this graphical format works really well for some types of memoir. I hope I can get hold of the follow-up book at some point.

33. The Adventures of Unemployed Man by Gan Golan and Erich Origen
Another graphic novel I picked up without knowing anything about it because the title sounded fun. It’s actually a satire on the recent financial crisis, focusing on America, but done in the style of golden and silver age superhero comics. It’s full of parodies of famous characters but it’s entirely about the credit crunch, and it’s pretty much spot on. It was also very funny at times, and I enjoyed it a lot.

34. The Snarkout Boys and the Avocado of Death by Daniel Pinkwater
35. Slaves of Spiegel by Daniel Pinkwater
I’d never even heard of Daniel Pinkwater before these books, but I wish I’d known about them as a kid, since I would have loved them. Instead, I got to enjoy them now anyway. They’re crazy, funny, and of course the foods mentioned in them sound delicious. I listened to the audio versions and he seems the perfect reader for his own books. I look forward to reading or listening to more of his madness.

36. Exit Wounds by Rutu Modan
A graphic novel about a taxi driver in Tel Aviv who is informed by a female soldier that his father might have been killed in a terrorist attack. The book follows their investigation to try to find out whether it was him or not, learning about the estranged father in the process. I really liked the art style, and I enjoyed the book. It was good, but didn’t quite reach greatness in any way for me.

Getting behind on updating this so I'd better try and catch up. I actually read this one back at the end of May...

37. First Among Sequels by Jasper Fforde
The fifth book in the Thursday Next series is set 14 years after the previous book and starts a new story arc. It’s still a lot of fun and still full of great word play and references to other books. It’s not quite as good as the previous two books which are where I think Fforde really hit his peak, but it’s still an enjoyable read. I can only imagine what it must be like for anyone to try and read one of these books without having read the rest of the series though, especially when he introduces two separate fictional versions of Thursday Next alongside the real one. The idea that time travellers have been using the technology under the assumption that it would later be invented is great though.

38. Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction by Nick Montfort
Twisty Little Passages, named after the infamous maze from the classic original Adventure game, takes a look at the history of interactive fiction (IF) as a genre and considers its literary merits. It’s a worthy goal, and the sort of thing that could be used more in gaming, and IF is a good place to start.

If you don’t know what IF is, it’s what used to more commonly be known as a text adventure; a game where you’re presented with written descriptions of where you are and what is happening, and interact with the game by typing instructions in as close to real language as the programmers can manage. In the early days of computing it was one of the big genres, selling massive amounts of games and supporting entire companies, but these days it’s almost entirely profitless and being made by amateurs, who have nevertheless managed to create amazing works.

While the book has worthy goals, I do have some issues with it, mainly in the early chapters. It’s a rather scholarly work and Mortfort seems so worried about getting IF accepted academically that he avoids gaming terminology as much as possible. For example, he never refers to players, but instead uses the rather awkward “interactors”. He also spends a lot of time defining various terms at the start, and it makes the early chapters quite hard going and far more detailed than they need to be, even for someone unfamiliar with the genre. He also spends an entire chapter trying to present IF as a modern form of the traditional literary riddle, which failed to convince me no matter how much time he spent on it and then was barely relevant again for much of the rest of the book.

Once we get this out of the way though, the book settles down and presents an excellent history of the IF form, charting the creation of the genre with Adventure, moving onto Zork, looking through the various games made by Infocom, some of the more notable examples from other companies, and finally onto the experimental works being created by the IF community, which is still going strong to this day. It looks at some of the games in detail and presents a more literary analysis of them than is usual. I did think it might have gone into some more depth with some of the later games, but it still covers them well.

It’s just a shame that the author feels the need to stress the separation from other forms of gaming, since that’s further distancing games in general from getting recognition in favour of just trying to elevate one genre. Despite this, it’s an enjoyable book, though a bit dry in the early parts, and it’s a good start to looking at interactive narratives more seriously.

39. Alex through the Looking Glass by Alex Bellos
A sequel to Bellos’s earlier book, Alex’s Adventures in Numberland. Again, each chapter looks at a different mathematical concept and goes into the history of the people who discovered it along with a discussion of how it works. It was quite interesting and generally written in a way that should be fairly understandable to most people, though I don’t think it was as straight forward as the first book in its explanations. Anyone with reasonable maths skills should find it easy enough to follow though might not learn too much new in terms of the actual concepts.

I did have some issues with it. One in particular, where at one point he mentions that a certain set of numbers are so widely spaced that the probability of choosing one randomly is exactly zero. Really? He’s actually suggesting that it’s absolutely impossible to pick those numbers randomly? It might be extremely close to zero as to be virtually impossible, but the probability certainly isn’t exactly zero. Extending that logic, it would be impossible to pick any number at all randomly. I could have done without all the numerology stuff in the first chapter too. Otherwise it’s not a bad book, though I wouldn’t really go out of my way to recommend it too much. I’d certainly recommend the previous one though.

Time to catch up as I've got way behind again, though I haven't read too much recently.

40. The Snarkout Boys and the Baconburg Horror by Daniel Pinkwater
Another fun book. I think I even preferred this one to the first Snarkout Boys book. I’ve left it too long to write it up to be able to put much information about it, but it was funny and entertaining and had great comic characters.

41. One of Our Thursdays is Missing by Jasper Fforde
Book six in the Thursday Next series varies things up a bit. It starts with a redesign of the entire Bookworld and the first person protagonist is now one of the fictional Thursdays that appeared in the previous book. It’s set almost entirely in the new Bookworld. It’s still a very enjoyable book and has lots of good moments in it, though it’s not quite up to the standard of the best of the earlier books. Still a decent entry in the series though. I hadn’t read this one before since the first time I read the series this hadn’t even come out, so I’ll be interested to see where the next book takes things.

42. Yossel by Joe Kubert
The author’s parents apparently left Poland for America when he was a child, after a failed initial attempt to be admitted. This graphic novel is a sort of what if story, looking at what might have happened if they’d given up at the first try. It portrays the Warsaw Ghetto and the eventual uprising there, with a detour in the second half as a concentration camp escapee tells his story. It’s a fairly well told tale, though I think it gets better later on, but there’s some quibbles I have. At one point people are transported from there to Auschwitz, but I’m pretty sure Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto were taken to one of the other camps in reality. Even for a fictional story, I’d have thought that would be something to check before writing. The art is made of sketchy charcoal drawings which sometimes look good and other times are so rough and scribbly that I could barely tell what they were supposed to be. In general it works reasonably well though. It’s not a dreadful book, but it’s not quite up to the standards of Maus.

43. Dark Entries by Ian Rankin
I’ve heard of Ian Rankin and know he did the Rebus series but haven’t actually read any of his books. I was a bit surprised to see his name on a Constantine graphic novel. Dark Entries takes the traditional haunted house story and places it into the context of reality TV, a sort of blending of Most Haunted and Big Brother. Constantine is called in when something starts scaring the contestants other than what was planned, and he’s hired to go undercover. Of course, things aren’t quite what they seem and there’s a major twist half way through, though it’s nothing too surprising considering the series it’s part of. This is a standalone book rather than part of the ongoing series though, and it’s reasonably well written and entertaining, though the ending felt a bit convenient. Nothing too special, but a fun light read.

Great reviews; popping in to say so and mark your thread.

I see we share a love of graphic novels and interactive fiction. I tanked on the Thursday Next series after Something Rotten, but The Eyre Affair is one of my favorite books to reread. I expect I shall die young, as half of Next's assigned ten most boring books are favorites of mine. On the other hand, I've no plans to read Ulysses, so maybe I can stave it off that way.

Thanks! I do love graphic novels, and I've got a bit burnt out with novels recently so I'm going through a few of them alongside some non-fiction. Interesting to find another interactive fiction fan. It's a niche format but I think it has so much potential.

I actually do hope to read Ulysses eventually, but whether I'll ever get to it I don't know.

Enjoyed following along here. I haven't read a graphic novel in a while, but I like them especially when I get in reading slumps.

You're right about the Warsaw Ghetto. They were sent to Treblinka. See Wikipedia (1st paragraph).

>59 dchaikin: Thanks, I couldn't remember the camp but I was sure it wasn't Auschwitz. I think there's a tendency to just use Auschwitz as it's the best known one and people will recognise the name, but then I think it would be better to actually show that it wasn't the only one.

Two books finished on the same day this time! Doesn't happen very often with me, even if one is a graphic novel.

44. Slow Storm by Danica Novgorodoff
This one left me a bit cold. The artwork was good at times, but the story itself just didn’t go anywhere. It’s about a firewoman and a Mexican illegal immigrant she befriends after she finds he’s been living in the barn that just burnt down. Nothing really happens though and it just ended leaving me thinking “so what?”

45. You are Not So Smart by David McRaney
This was a fun psychology book looking at various ways in which we go around deceiving ourselves. It was all done in short easy to read chapters each looking at a different topic, which was exactly the sort of book I needed right now. The subjects are interesting, as are the examples used, and it’s written in a straightforward style. If there’s a flaw, it’s that he keeps stating that some study shows that you, the reader, behave in a certain way, but when he goes into the details of the experiment it turns out only 75% of people behave that way. By those odds, one in four of the people reading the book presumably don’t behave like that then! It annoyed me slightly, but then I don’t think it’s a big issue since I think it’s more just an amusing premise for the book than anything. Occasionally, a chapter will repeat information that was covered in earlier chapters, perhaps a result of its origin as a blog. Probably sounds like I’m criticising it more than praising it now, but the flaws are minor and the book was very entertaining and I’d recommend it to anyone with an interest in the subject matter.

>60 valkyrdeath: Do you read his blog? I like to read it on occasion; but his long format kills me. He's made the point that if you really want to read to be informed, you will read no matter the length. Still, I hate scrolling for what feels like two hours while reading what he has to say.

>61 lesmel: I've never read the blog. I was half way through the book before I even knew about it. I'm not very good at reading long things online though. I have an annoying tendency to just skim through things when they're on my computer monitor.

Two books finished in one day for the second day in a row! Don't think that's going to happen again for a while.

46. Nintendon’t: 25 of the Worst Video Games Ever by J. Andre Bardin
I got this because I was after a nice easy read that wouldn’t take too long. The subtitle is a bit misleading though. It would be more appropriate to say “25 games that annoyed the author when he played them”, but then even that isn’t fully accurate. I expected just an amusing look at some of the truly awful games that have been released, but most of the games were merely mediocre. Of course, opinions on things vary, but the author himself even keeps saying this. Regularly throughout the book he makes comments along the lines of “This isn’t the worst game ever, but it’s not the best either, it’s just mediocre.” Well, in that case, why exactly are you putting it in a worst games ever list? He puts games on because they were overhyped, or because it’s a sequel that changed the gameplay style compared to the previous game, but none of this makes them the worst games ever. Another game he actually says was very good, but he thought it featured too many new characters which later went on to ruin the series, but that doesn’t change the fact that he’s just said the game was good. The number two entry wasn’t even a game at all but an ET-themed personal organiser application. It can be amusing at times, but I’m not sure the author really knew what he wanted to write. Quite disappointing.

47. The Art of Pho by Julian Hanshaw
I kept seeing this book in the library and thought it was a collection of artwork by an artist known as Pho. I had no idea pho was a Vietnamese noodle dish. Anyway, this is a very strange and surreal book. It’s follows a character called Little Blue as he travels around Vietnam making pho. At times, it becomes a graphical recipe book for a few pages at a time showing how to make various Vietnamese meals. The story starts off promising but it does seem to lose its way later on and the ending is a big disappointing, and I think at times it’s a little too surreal. It’s saved by the fact that it’s a joy to look at though. I loved the style of the art and would happily have kept reading just for that, so even if the story didn’t quite work, I’m still glad I read it. There’s definitely talent behind it and I’ll be interested to see other books by the author.

I’ve just discovered that there’s a motion comic version of this book that can be watched online for free at http://artofpho.submarinechannel.com/ so I’m noting that here since I think I’d like to check that out at some point.

Not sure I want to read a book on it, but I do love pho. Did the book inspire you to try it?

>64 dchaikin: I'd definitely try it if I ever saw it, but I never have, and I'm far too lazy to try cooking things myself.

48. The Kite Runner: Graphic Novel by Khaled Hosseini
I’d heard of The Kite Runner but knew nothing about it, so I didn’t realise this was an adaptation of a novel. I don’t generally read graphic novels adapted from prose but since I already had it from the library I thought I’d give it a go. It wasn’t an easy read, mainly because the protagonist was completely unlikable for the majority of the book, and it’s hard to see the motives for the unpleasant actions in the early part of the book. The fact that he didn’t help his friend when he was being attacked I can understand and don’t hate him for. The fact that after this he doesn’t help his friend, and in fact starts treating him badly to the point of framing him for theft and driving him away on the other hand, that’s just behaving terribly for no apparent reason. Of course, maybe this is explained in the actual novel in some way. Anyway, it was well written generally otherwise, and I don’t think books necessarily have to have heroic leads. The attempted redemption at the end does feel a bit too convenient though. It’s not the sort of thing I’d generally read, though I don’t regret doing so. I don’t think it’s the sort of thing I could see myself reading in prose though.

49. The Silver Pigs by Lindsey Davis
I really enjoyed this one. It’s the first book of the Falco mystery series. It did take me a little while to get used to the mixing of a noir style detective narration with the Ancient Rome setting but after a few chapters I got used to it and it didn’t feel incongruent. I couldn’t always keep the plot twists straight in my head, though that’s more my problem than anything. It was mostly because I have trouble remembering the names of all the characters involved in this sort of story at the best of times, never mind when they have Roman names. It was easy to pick up what was going on from the context though, and it didn’t matter too much anyway since the writing was good and the book was funny. I can’t comment on the accuracy of the setting since my history is awful, but to my surprise I found the background details as interesting as the crime itself. I’ll be reading the next book in the series at some point.

50. Saint Germaine: Shadows Fall by Gary Reed and Vince Locke
Saint Germaine is a graphic novel about an immortal who invites a writer into his house to explain the story of his life. I’ve always found immortality a pretty horrific idea. I’m 31 and already often feel like I’ve had enough so I can’t imagine going on forever. Still, it’s a way of allowing the writer to include glimpses of lots of historical periods, and it covers such things as Auschwitz and the Salem Witchcraft accusations. It wasn’t a bad book, but I don’t think it really did much with its premise. I guess it’s because it was more of an introduction, collecting the first five issues of an ongoing comic series, which I didn’t realise when I borrowed it. It seems to be trying to be like the Sandman series, but it’s doesn’t quite have the skill of Gaiman’s work behind it. Readable, but nothing I’d go out of my way for.

51. Asterios Polyp by David Mazzucchelli
I knew nothing about this when I picked it up from the library, so it was a nice surprise. A lot of the best graphic novels use the form to their advantage to do things that aren’t possible in other media, and this probably does that more than any book I’ve read. Everything from the style of the art, the colours, the fonts and shapes of the speech bubbles, even the layout of the panels from one page to the next, it all seems to have been carefully thought out to contribute as much to the story and themes of the book as the text itself. Early in the book it makes a point about how everyone sees the world in their own way, and this is illustrated by different characters being illustrated in different ways with different colours. When two characters start a relationship, the art styles and colours merge together, and when they later argue they fracture and separate again. But it’s never overdone, and it all contributes to ideas behind the book.

There’s a lot of depth to it, but the book is also a joy to read. It’s often funny and is written in a way that made me want to just keep reading. The plot itself starts as the apartment of the titular architect is struck by lightning and burns down, and follows him as he starts a new life for himself, but spends as much time going back over his life prior to this too. As you read, things are revealed which then show events from earlier in the book in a different light. It’s a book that I feel I have to reread, so I’m annoyed it’s due back at the library. I may have to buy it.

Anyway, I’ll stop there I think before I go on about it too much. I’m not the best at writing about this sort of thing, but the more I think back over the book, the more impressed I am by it. And the artwork is gorgeous in its own right too. Probably my last graphic novel for a little while, so I’m glad I saved this one for last!

52. The Callahan Touch by Spider Robinson
I’d given up on the Callahan series for a while after reading Lady Slings the Booze about a year ago and absolutely hating it, but I thought I’d give the next book a try. In that book, Spider Robinson went overboard with his tendency to put his own views into the mouth of a characters and then have every single other character in the group agree completely, on every topic. Then he started talking about how pacifists are all cowardly terrorists who are so obsessed with making peace that they don’t care how many people they kill with their bombs in the process, and went on about it for ages. Apparently, he doesn’t understand what the word “pacifist” means, but it didn’t stop him making it the focus of about half the book. Awful

Anyway, I’m talking about the wrong book. This sixth book is a bit better, but it’s not as good as the original three volumes of short stories. This time, Jake has opened a bar called Mary’s Place in an attempt to recreate the now destroyed bar from the original stories. All the regulars are there, and new people show up to tell their stories as before, but it’s more drawn out being set in a novel. There are good bits, and the puns are back in full force, and the doctors have yet to cure me of my love of puns. The author is still too self-indulgent though. There’s an entire section describing a massive jam session in the bar, which seems pointless, but then at the end in the Afterword he tells you he was using it to promote various artists that he likes. And at one point he has a character completely shock everyone with an anecdote pointing out a plot hole in Citizen Kane that no-one else has ever spotted but him, which comes across as if the author is claiming to having spotted something else no-one else ever has. Of course, he only proves he hasn’t paid attention to the film, since he’s completely wrong, so perhaps that’s why no-one else has commented on it.

So, it was funny at times and had the odd good idea, but there’s just too much annoying stuff along with it.

It's always frustrating when a series goes like that or an author is too intent on promoting their own views with every character. Throwing in the bands sounds like a terrible idea. I really disliked those mentions in books anyway, as it tends to date them so quickly.

Those things do often date things, and there's quite a few references in the book that seemed quite obscure. The musicians were mostly non-famous musicians who he then put the contact details for in the afterword, but however much he might want to promote them, I don't want to read a list of their names in the middle of a novel.

>68 valkyrdeath: I think immortality is one of the hardest stories to write, especially because authors sometimes end up exploiting painful histories. I recently read The Incrementalists and enjoyed it. But it was beyond pompous of the authors to write the Khmer Rouge's genocide as what happens when the immortal characters in the book fail in their duties! It felt artificial to have the main character be upset about this, probably because the novel itself was fluffy. It sounds as if Saint Germaine handles the exploration of history with more sensitivity.

I recently had a conversation with a microbiologist who was touting a breakthrough in anti-aging: some sort of cellular regeneration he feels will be possible in the next 25 years. He was a bit huffy when I asked him what the point of living to Methuselah's age would be if humans aren't also going to fix the messes we've made.

>73 LibraryPerilous: I think you're right in that those stories often do exploit the bad parts of history. I think it's ok if they're just observers in it, but it can get a bit distasteful if it's done like the example you mentioned.

I think this world would become a complete nightmare if lives were extended too much. No-one would fix any of the problems, they'd simply make more new ones to go along with them.

53. The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
I’ve seen a few of the films versions many years ago, but this is the first time I’ve actually read this, or anything by Dumas. I really enjoyed it. It’s a good adventure story and is generally well paced, though Dumas can go on a bit at times. I think he could have used a good editor. I found it a bit surprising in general, since I was expecting the usual sort of heroic stuff and not the often unlikable characters the Musketeers actually are. Probably makes the story more interesting. I wasn’t expecting it to be as funny as it was either, so that was a nice surprise. I hope to read The Count of Monte Cristo at some point, but I think it’ll be a while before I want to embark on a book of that sort of size.

I read the translation by Richard Pevear, which seemed to be well done. I can’t compare it to others or anything, except that I initially started reading the public domain version from Project Gutenberg and barely got through a page, since I found it virtually unreadable.

I haven't read The Three Musketeers (yet), but I adored The Count of Monte Cristo when I read it at the end of last year. I read the Oxford World Classics edition which had helpful notes.

>76 rebeccanyc: I've heard good things about Count of Monte Cristo from everyone I know who's read it. I think I will get round to it eventually.

54. Animal Farm by George Orwell
It’s taken me long enough to finally get around to reading this, but I’m glad I finally did. As ever with Orwell, it’s both well written and easy to read, and I raced through it in a couple of days. The allegory of the Russian Revolution and Stalin’s subsequent rule also works well more generally as a story about the corruption of ideals by those who gain power. I’m sure I don’t need to say much else about this one. I definitely need to read more Orwell.

55. Borgel by Daniel Pinkwater
More surreal sci-fi themed craziness. This is my favourite of the Daniel Pinkwater books that I’ve read so far, mostly because of the character of Borgel himself. A lot of the stories he told made me laugh and the book in general is a lot of fun.


56. Adolf Hitler: My Part in his Downfall by Spike Milligan
The first of Milligan’s war memoirs. It’s very funny at times, as expected, though there are also darker moments too that often come suddenly and abruptly. But I guess that’s what war, and life in general, is like. It was nice to hear him reading it himself in the audiobook version.

57. Lord of the Flies by William Golding
I quite enjoyed this book, but I think I was expecting more from it after how often I’ve heard about it over the years. It was well written and I read it quite quickly and didn’t get bored, but it didn’t seem to be anything too spectacular in content really. It was a disturbing survival adventure but I didn’t find it especially meaningful other than to further illustrate that people are generally awful. A decent read, but I’m not sure why it’s considered a classic really.

58. The Apex Book of World SF 3 edited by Lavie Tidhar
The concept of a book of science fiction stories from around the world appealed to me immediately. I’ve read a huge number of sci-fi anthologies over the years but the content tends to mostly be limited to English speaking countries so it’s nice to see what other cultures can bring to the genre. As with almost any collection of stories, they’re a mixed bag, but there was enough that I enjoyed here that I’m glad I read it.

Some of the stories are very good. “Act of Faith” by Fadzilshah Johanabos is a story about a man who teaches his robot to become a Muslim. The look at whether a robot could become religious would fit happily alongside the classic Asimov stories but brings a different cultural perspective to things. “The City of Silence” by Chinese author Ma Boyong, perhaps the highlight of the book, is a lengthy dystopian story that echoes 1984 from a more modern perspective. It focuses around internet censorship and from there to the suppression of free speech, and coming from a culture where this sort of thing has already started gives it a worryingly convincing feel.

Many of the stories lean more towards fantasy than science fiction, such as “To Follow the Waves” by Amar El-Mohtar. Set in a world where dreams can be crafted, it uses the concept to tell a tale of love and obsession, and builds to a wonderful ending. “Waiting with Mortals” was set in a version of the modern world where ghosts remain behind if they have something keeping them there, and have the ability to take over the bodies of mortals. It uses the ghosts to tell a surprisingly human story, and it’s a setting I could see even supporting other longer stories.

Other favourites in the book are the disturbing twist on fairy tales in “Three Little Children” by Ange, and the time travel story “Regressions” by Swapna Kishore. The latter is based around Indian culture and gender roles within it and does a good job of presenting a thoughtful story while also teaching a bit about another culture for those of us who haven’t previously been exposed to it.

Those were the standouts for me, but most of the stories were at least worth reading, with the occasional exception. It’s a shame that the worst of these is the opening story of the book, “Courtship in the Country of Machine-Gods” by Benjanun Sriduangkaew. It’s a confused mess of a story and I can’t really understand why it was chosen as the opener for the book, since I feel it could easily put people off. There’s a story in there, but it’s buried under flowery language that seems more concerned with trying to sound clever than actually being readable.

Opening story aside, this is an interesting collection and a good way to see some different perspectives on the sci-fi genre. I’ll probably check out the other books in the series at some point.

59. The Education of Robert Nifkin by Daniel Pinkwater
This one felt a bit different to the other Pinkwater books I’ve read recently. It didn’t have the sci-fi elements and felt more adult with some of the language and themes. It’s still very funny though, and the line “My father is a son-of-a-bitch from Eastern Europe” is perhaps one of my favourite book openings ever. The last few chapters do a good job of portraying the joy of learning when allowed to discover things on your own.

Enjoyed you review of The Apex Book of World SF 3

I think The Education of Robert Nifkin is either the only or one of the only that doesn't have a fantasy or sci-fi element!

60. Doomsday Book by Connie Willis
Doomsday Book is the first novel to be set in her future version of Oxford where historians travel back in time to observe events. I’d previously only read her initial short story in the series, Fire Watch. This follows the first sojourn into the Middle Ages. Things don’t go quite as planned with the trip, and meanwhile a mystery virus has started infecting people in the future too.

It wasn’t perfect, but really liked this book. I liked it from the start, and while it was slow paced early on, I actually liked that. It had the right amount of humour and the characters were entertaining. There is a tendency for some facts and details to be repeated several times throughout the book though, which can start to grate and times. I don’t know if she didn’t trust the readers to remember what they’d already read, or if it just needed more editing, but it was a bit annoying. It didn’t detract too much from the book though, and by the end I just had to keep going to find out what happened. The conclusion itself was very powerful. I’ll definitely be checking out the rest of Willis’s books.

I enjoyed Doomsday Book too (although parts of it irritated me), but I liked her To Say Nothing of the Dog more even though I find medieval times more interesting in general than the Victorian era.

>86 rebeccanyc: To Say Nothing of the Dog is definitely on my future reading list now, as are Blackout and All Clear. There were definitely irritating parts in Doomsday Book but they didn't spoil the book overall for me.

61. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
I originally saw a stage play version of this a few years ago, and then later the film, but now I’ve finally got round to reading it. Because of this, I already knew the story was good, but I didn’t realise I was going to love the book this much. I can really understand why this book is considered a classic. I loved everything about it, the way it was written, the characters, the various stories and themes. There’s so much to think about in it. And while the racism themes and the trial are what generally get the attention, I think it’s the Boo Radley plot that’s my favourite part. This is joining the ranks of my favourite books.

62. Sandman: Endless Nights by Neil Gaiman
This is a set of seven short stories, one for each of the Endless from the Sandman stories, written after the main series was over. They’re set at different times and it’s a mixed bag in both style and quality. Most interesting is Fifteen Portraits of Despair, which is a collection of written vignettes o varying length framed by the illustrations. Not a cheery read, but a surprisingly powerful one. My favourite of them is, in full: "She decides to make a list of things that make her happy. She writes 'plum-blossom' at the top of a piece of paper. Then she stares at the paper, unable to think of anything else. Eventually it begins to get dark."

The other stories are mostly decent, but not amongst Gaiman’s best work. Most of it isn’t going to be of much worth to anyone who hasn’t already read the Sandman series either. Worth a read for fans, but by no means essential.

63. Flim-Flam! Psychics, ESP, Unicorns and Other Delusions by James Randi
James Randi has spent a huge amount of time debunking various fraudulent psychics and other people making claims of paranormal powers, and in this book he goes into detail with the evidence against all of this. Some of it is dated, particularly since the first chapter goes into detail about the Cottingley Fairies photos, which unbelievably some people still believed when this was first written in 1980. He uses that case to show the many techniques that can be used in dealing with these cases though, and those are still relevant to all the nonsense that’s around these days. And a surprising amount of it is still relevant even now. I don’t hear much about biorhythms these days, but I still often see documentaries about the Bermuda Triangle showing up on TV, and there’s constant advertising for a series on Ancient Astronauts, both things which are thoroughly debunked here. There’s a generally light tone taken through much of the book, though at times it turns to anger when dealing with the likes of the Jonestown Massacre, or the psychic surgeons who convince people they’ve removed their tumours through magical means, leading to them dying through refusing the real treatment that could genuinely save them. And to people who accuse him of overreacting and that it’s all just harmless fun, he points to the Jonestown Massacre.

It’s sad that books like this are necessary, and even sadder that most of the people they’d be of most use to will just dismiss them and stick to their delusions. Dated as some of it is though, this is a very good book that covers a variety of topics.

64. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum
This was a fun quick read. I enjoyed it well enough and will probably read some more of the series, but I think I’d have to have read it as a kid to truly love it. As children’s stories go though, it’s certainly an imaginative one.

65. The King by Rich Koslowski
A rather strange graphic novel about a reporter investigating an Elvis impersonator who claims to be the real Elvis returned as a god of music. While it starts out as just an odd premise, it actually becomes quite an intriguing mystery as the reporter tries to uncover just who the man really is. There seems to be an underlying message that blind faith and belief is more important than truth and facts, regardless of what it is that you believe in, which is something I strongly disagree with. The story itself though was one I mostly enjoyed, more than I was expecting, but that message which infiltrates the ending of the book does spoil it a bit.

66. Ice Haven by Daniel Clowes
This is another graphic novel, or as the cover states, “a comic-strip novel”. It’s easy to see why by flicking through the book, since at first it appears to be a collection of short newspaper style comic strips. It is an ongoing story though, but it’s told from the perspectives of various characters, each shown in the style of various comic strips. It’s a more complex book than it first appears to be too. It basically revolves around the kidnapping of a child and the effect it has on various characters around the town. It could be considered a sort of mystery too, though the culprit becomes obvious fairly quickly. It’s quite Lynchian in a way, showing the dark side lurking beneath a normal town. I liked it, and I think it’s one that would take a few reads to fully appreciate.

67. Nebula Awards Showcase 2014 edited by Kij Johnson
The 2014 volume collects stories from the 2012 Nebula Awards. The title years are always confusing. This one seems a bit of a slimmer volume than usual with the whole thing coming in at less than 300 pages. They’ve stripped away almost all of the essays that cluttered up some of the recent years books, which is good since most of them weren’t very good, but there are less stories included too. We get the winning entries in the short story, novelette and novella categories plus two of the short story runners up, and a Gene Wolfe story to represent his winning the Grand Master Award. That’s all you get for complete stories. Aside from those, there are sizable excerpts from both the winner of the novel category and the winner of the best YA novel category. I don’t understand the point of reading a chunk of a novel if you’re not going to find out what happens and I would rather have some more of the shorter stories, especially as in previous years I’ve often found some of the runners up to be far superior to the winners.

Anyway, in terms of the stories, the book is dominated by the huge novella After the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall by Nancy Kress. It’s over 100 pages on its own and was originally published as a separate book. It’s a good job it’s also one of the strongest stories in the book. There are two plotlines running alongside each other, one in a post-apocalyptic future and one in the present day where children are going missing with reports of them being taken by people who then disappear. It’s not really a spoiler to say time travel is involved. Eventually the present day storyline reaches the events that cause the situation in the future plot line. The story is very character driven and it’s well written and keeps you wanting to read.

Aside from that, the only story that especially stood out to me was the runner up short story The Bookmaking Habits of Select Species by Ken Liu. It’s a story presented almost like non-fiction, an examination of the ways different alien species record written language and make their own very different versions of books. It was a really entertaining story.

Of the others, Close Encounters by Andy Duncan was a likable UFO story but a bit predictable and the rest were readable but nothing that particularly stood out. Then the book closes with the Rhysling sci-fi poetry awards. The winner of the best short poem category wasn’t a poem, it was a short story. The woman who wrote it said it wasn’t a poem herself, but it seems the fact that a poetry magazine published the story was enough to make it eligible for the award. The people who wrote actual poems must be annoyed about that. It was good, but shouldn’t have won that award.

68. How to Suppress Women’s Writing by Joanna Russ
A brief but well written examination of the many ways in which books (and art in general) created by women have been suppressed over the years. The title gives a good indication of the content, as Russ summarises the techniques with lines such a “she didn’t write it” and “she wrote it but she had help”. It progressed from things used to try to prevent women from writing in the first place, through denying they wrote it, denying that what they wrote has any value or if all else fails suggesting that the work is anomalous amongst women’s writing.

Appropriately, within a couple of days of reading the “she didn’t write it” section I came across articles suggesting Truman Capote wrote To Kill a Mockingbird and then came across a book dedicated to trying to prove Mary Shelley didn’t write Frankenstein.

I find it hard to say much about a book like this, other than to say it’s awful that it’s necessary, and even worse is that, while things are better now, there’s still examples of the concepts shown in this book going on all the time. It’s a book I’m glad I’ve read.

Incidentally, I found the book hard to get hold of. And as far as the Kindle is concerned, there’s only one Joanna Russ novel available. I guess that’s “she wrote it, but she wrote only one of it” covered.

>95 valkyrdeath: "But you're a girl" does, indeed, have endless variations. Russ' book sounds fascinating. I'll see if I can track down a copy to pair it with a reading of Rebecca Solnit's latest, Men Explain Things to Me.

I recently read a graphic novel you might like, Moto Hagio's A Drunken Dream and Other Stories. They're painfully beautiful, and many have a sci-fi setting. All of the stories were excellent, but "Iguana Girl" was the standout for me. The book also contains an essay on shōjo manga and an interview with Hagio.

Edited: clarity

Enjoyed your review of Nebula Awards Showcase 2014

>96 LibraryPerilous: Thanks for the recommendation, I hadn't heard of that one. It looks interesting. I'll try and check it out! The Joanna Russ book certainly made me think. It was written over 30 years ago now and some bits are dated, but far too much of it is still relevant.

>97 baswood: Thankyou! I thought I would write a more detailed review since there weren't any others on the books page. Thought I see that's no longer the case.

69. Bank Shot by Donald E Westlake
The second book in the Dortmunder series, and it’s just as funny as the first one. This time round they plan a bank heist where they steal the bank itself. It’s full of entertaining characters and hilarious dialogue and situations. I’m loving this series so far and am looking forward to the next book.

70. Skizz by Alan Moore
Continuing to fill in the gaps in my Alan Moore reading, and of the lesser known works I’ve been reading, this has been one of the better ones. Originally serialised in four page segments in 2000AD, it’s been put together as a graphic novel here. It’s a sort of satirical British take on ET, where an alien crash lands in Birmingham. It’s very funny at times, but also as sentimental as the Spielberg film in its own way. Instead of the nice suburban American family of ET, here the alien is thrust into a world of punks in Thatcherite Britain. The best characters are the hilarious Loz and Cornelius, two unemployed workers hunting for jobs who end up helping to rescue Skizz from the government who are holding him prisoner. They have a lot of the funniest dialogue and are the best thing about the story. (Also, the group hunting down the alien are being commanded by a South African who sees anything different as a threat; an unsubtle dig at the Apartheid of the time.) It’s not as deep as Moore’s very best work, but it’s an entertaining sci-fi story with a lot of social satire but with an ultimately positive outcome, even if it is a little too convenient.

>100 valkyrdeath: I don't like Alan Moore, but this one sounds fun.

>101 LibraryPerilous: It's quite different to most of his other work, even the other 2000AD things I've read of his. It was fun!

71. The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists by Robert Tressell
I’ve been meaning to read this for years but since it’s quite a long book I’ve always put it off. I’m glad I finally got round to it. I can understand why it’s considered a classic and such an important book. It follows a group of house painters, chiefly Frank Owen, a socialist who is constantly lecturing the rest of the workers and being ridiculed in return. Even though this was written decades before my dad started work, painting was his trade and he has told me enough stories to know that in his early days a lot of the stuff in this book was accurate even then. A lot of the points made are also relevant. It does repeat itself sometimes and it lags a bit in the middle but in general it’s a very good read, written by someone who had actually witnessed most of it. And for all the grimness of the setting, there’s quite a bit of humour in there too.

I've had The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists on the TBR since another LTer recommended it last year. Glad to know you enjoyed it too.

I am encouraged to get to The Ragged Trousered Philanthropist this year

72. The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman
I found this to be one of Gaiman’s better books, certainly the one I’ve enjoyed most out of his recent works and possibly his best since American Gods. It’s told from the perspective of an adult looking back on his childhood as normal events suddenly take a strange turn. It fits into that adult fairy tale style that Gaiman is so good at, though there’s not really anything here that would make it unsuitable for children either. It is quite tense and makes you want to keep reading, and there’s a real sense of threat. Stories with sections where a character is trapped and unable to communicate what’s happening and to be believed are ones I always find quite disturbing. I’ve seen reviews since reading the book where people talk about themes of the differences between adulthood and childhood and symbolism and things like that, and I’m sure it’s probably all there but it’s not the sort of thing I take from a book like this. What I’ll say about it is that it was a great story that was beautifully written and held my interest for the full length.

73. Batman: The Long Halloween by Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale
This one was a reread, though the first time I read it was a few years back now so I’d forgotten the details. I remembered it being my favourite Batman book, and I think it still is. It lets Batman do some actual investigation work, has a good central mystery with a few twists to it and a good noir style. It also has the origin story of how Harvey Dent became Two-Face. The inclusion of so many different Batman villains is pretty obviously fan service and they’re not all necessary, but it doesn’t really harm the story. I think it’s one of the best Batman stories around. (And that includes The Dark Knight Returns. I find Frank Miller’s stuff ridiculously overrated, all style and no substance.)

All this is despite an extremely ridiculous moment, where Batman traces who made a nail bomb because “Every nail has a serial number. Like a gun.” No, I don’t think so. And even if they traced it to the store it was sold from, who takes down someone’s name before selling them a pack of nails? One of the most stupid plot devices ever. Still, loved the story.

>107 valkyrdeath: I'll definitely have to check this one out. I appreciate DC now that I'm older, especially their New 52 reboots. Marvel's always been angstier, but now most of their stuff is written in millennial speak and has lost quite a bit of the unabashed liberalism I loved so much growing up.

An exception is the Marvel Noir series, which I think is quite good, but it certainly borrows heavily from DC's current output, both in tone and style. DC has always been edgier—witness their Vertigo imprint.

I agree with you about Frank Miller, who is all shock and schlock.

Have you read Batman: Noel? I thought it was very well done.

>108 LibraryPerilous: I hadn't even heard of Batman: Noel, so thanks for the recommendation! I'll definitely be checking that one out.

I've not really read much of the modern Marvel stuff. I think the most recent one I read was Neil Gaiman's 1602. I like some Marvel things but I think I've read more DC, mainly either Batman or works under the Vertigo banner. I don't know Marvel Noir though, so I might look into that.

Frank Miller certainly does like to go for the shock factor. People say he lost it when he did the awful All Star Batman and Robin comics, but I can't say I've ever read anything by him that's been especially memorable or had any depth to the plot.

74. Snow Falling on Cedars by David Guterson
This sounded promising before I started it, with the court room drama and the look at the treatment of Japanese Americans during WW2. Sadly, it just did nothing for me when I read it. It seems Guterson doesn’t believe in using one word when he can use twenty others. He constantly goes off on long rambling descriptions of the life stories of the various characters, only occasionally relevant to anything else, and hardly ever interesting. I just didn’t care about any of the characters in the book and I only kept reading to see the resolution of the trial. It did improve about a third of the way through, but then it still had sections where it got very dull and irrelevant. I didn’t need a couple of pages explaining that the defence attorney was impotent, and I certainly didn’t need the eleventy-gazillion pages describing how bad the stormy weather was outside. I think there’s a decent novella here, but it’s buried behind a lot of waffling to pad it out to novel length.

>110 valkyrdeath: Not to mention the main character's narcissism, or his misogyny, or the racism in a book that is supposed to be about racism—plus the stilted prose. I admire your dedication.

>111 LibraryPerilous: I almost gave up, but in the end I managed to stick with it since it was for a book club and I sort of wanted to see what happened in the trial. Later on I did start skimming over paragraphs that were clearly irrelevant though. I do think it was quite badly written and I'm not sure why it's so highly regarded.

75. The Mysterious Affair at Styles by Agatha Christie
This is the first Poirot book, and I think Agatha Christie’s first book entirely. Basically all the hallmarks that would characterize the majority of her works are there right from the start. There’s the big house setting, multiple family members, all suspects and nearly all with something to hide. The book is full of clues and red herrings and the solution is ingenious as always. Everything used to solve the crime is presented to the reader though I doubt many people actually work these things out. I certainly don’t even try and just enjoy the story. Anyway, it’s a good easy read as always with Christie, and especially with Poirot, who is always an entertaining character.

76. Batman: Dark Victory by Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale
This is a direct sequel to The Long Halloween, and unlike that one, I hadn’t read this before. Again, it focuses on the gangster families of Gotham and again many of Batman’s most famous villains appear, this time in a more important role than in the previous story. It’s another good story and is well written, and again has a central mystery for Batman to solve. It’s not quite as good as The Long Halloween, partly because it’s not as fresh and it does have a lot of similarities to that story and again features a killer who murders his victims on holidays, this time leaving partially completed Hangman games as messages and killing policemen and ex-policemen. It also introduces Robin. I generally prefer a solo Batman, but Robin fits in nicely with this book and only really comes into the plot towards the end. It’s a good book, though not quite as essential as the previous classic.

77. Dracula by Bram Stoker
I’m not a huge fan of vampires, generally finding them quite dull, and I basically knew the story to this, so I didn’t really expect to enjoy it much. To my surprise, I really liked it. I loved the way it was written in the form of diary entries and letters, so we get the story from different perspectives. I think this helped a lot. It’s well written and just a really good adventure story. It wasn’t perfect; some of the characters give speeches that go on a bit and the last part of it isn’t quite as good as the earlier sections, but I still enjoyed it all the way through. The sexism does annoy a bit though. I know you have to make allowances for the time it was written in, but having the women saying things like “why are men so noble when we women are so little worthy of them?” is quite galling. Anyway, this is one I can actually understand the reason for it being considered a classic.

78. Catwoman: When in Rome by Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale
I don’t think I’d generally read Catwoman comics, but I recently discovered this one, which is linked in with Dark Victory and by the same author and artist, so thought I’d give it a go. At one point in Dark Victory Catwoman vanishes off to Italy, and this tells the story of what happened there. She’s seeking out evidence to find the identity of her parents but finds herself under attack. There’s a central mystery, but the story is much shorter and simpler than either of the two Batman volumes they wrote. It’s not a terrible read, but it’s fairly forgettable and inessential.

79. The Woman Who Died a Lot by Jasper Fforde
I finally got round to the latest of the Thursday Next books so I’m done until he writes another one. This was a big improvement over One of Our Thursdays is Missing and is probably the best of the second story arc so far, but it’s not up to the standards of Well of Lost Plots or Something Rotten. It’s still imaginative and a fun read and I’ll definitely be reading the next one when it arrives, but the series isn’t as brilliant as it once was.

>79 valkyrdeath: I quit on the series and didn't read this one, but I really do like the first three books.

80. The Stars, Like Dust by Isaac Asimov
Back to my attempt at working my way through as many of the Asimov books that I haven’t read as I can. This is the earliest of them, Asimov’s second novel, and one of his weakest. He didn’t like the book himself and there are quite a few problems, not entirely the author’s own fault. In terms of overall themes and plot it’s a fairly light “space opera” story. There are plenty of twists and turns along the way, as everyone plots against each other, but generally it’s a fairly standard story of a tyrannical empire and a small group of rebels. Asimov keeps things readable and managed to keep me wanting to find out what would happen, but it’s not very memorable or particularly interesting. There’s also a tacked on romance subplot that’s completely clichéd and the woman isn’t very well written.

The worst aspects though are in a subplot that ultimately ends the book. Throughout the book there’s mention of an ancient document that contains plans for a powerful weapon that would help them defeat the enemy. The document is revealed in the final lines of the book, and turns out to be the US Consitution. (Wasn’t that later a weak and tacky ending to an episode of original series Star Trek?) Anyway, Asimov didn’t even like this himself, the whole idea having been thought up by his editor and having to be written into it to get the book published. I think he was pretty much sick of the whole thing by the time he actually wrote the book. It’s not completely dreadful though, so I’m not sure Asimov was capable of writing anything that wasn’t readable, but it’s certainly not recommended for anyone other than completist fans.

Thanks for the review of The Stars, Like Dust sounds like one to avoid.

81. Monstrous Beauty by Marie Brennan
This is a book of seven stories, all very short. Each of them is based on a different fairy story, but given a macabre twist to the tale. It’s not a unique concept, with the likes of Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber and Neil Gaiman’s Snow, Glass, Apples amongst many others having been around for a long time, but these stories still manage to hold their own. Beginning with a version of Snow White where the Huntsman actually obeys his orders and kill Snow White in the opening line of the story, a disturbing atmosphere is maintained throughout the book despite the short length thanks to the quality of the writing. Disappointingly, there’s perhaps too many variations of the “she turned out to be a monster” ending though. Despite that, it’s such a brief book and well enough written, and with enough good moments that it doesn’t matter too much. And it does save the best until last with a retelling of Beauty and the Beast that avoids falling into the pattern of the previous stories. Not an essential read, but a quick and enjoyable one.

82. Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell
I’m always wary about starting books by a Victorian author that I haven’t read before, since so often the writing style is so ponderous and hard to read. I definitely didn’t have that problem here. I enjoyed the book from start to finish, and the writing style didn’t feel dated at all. Aside from the setting, it could have been written now. With no single running plot, the book is basically just a series of events in Cranford. It’s funny, and the characters are believable. Despite how much the world has changed since this was written, all these people are still around and recognisable. It was a quick and very enjoyable read, and I’ll be checking out some more of Gaskell’s books soon.

83. Batman: Noel by Lee Bermejo
A version of A Christmas Carol in the world of Batman sounds quite a tacky idea, but this book is extremely well done. It avoids the idea of simply retelling the exact story but with Batman characters inserted in place of the originals, and instead goes for something a bit more interesting. It’s narrated throughout as someone telling a story, but the story being told is simply A Christmas Carol, Scrooge and all. The art and speech bubbles show a story that runs parallel to the narration, echoing the same themes of the original. It’s an interesting technique and one I really enjoyed. And the artwork was absolutely amazing. I think it would have been worth it for that alone.

>108 LibraryPerilous: Thanks for the recommendation of this book!

>123 valkyrdeath: You're welcome. I'm glad you liked it. The artwork was beautiful. I also liked the way there are subtle jokes about the heavy turn the Batman comics have taken over the last decade or so.

>124 LibraryPerilous: I liked that too, the way they showed the old comical style Batman as the way he used to be. Which also echoes how Scrooge had changed too I guess. I was amused to see in the shops at the weekend a series of new comics called Batman '66 set in the world of the old Batman TV show.

PBS had a miniseries of Cranford years ago. It was wonderful. I also loved her book, North and South. I should read more of her books. I have her complete works on my kindle.

>126 NanaCC: It was the first thing I'd read by her and I hope to read more. I never saw any of the TV adaptations of her stuff either. I have a few complete works collections on my Kindle but it never occured to me to get Elizabeth Gaskell, so I may do that now.

84. Freddy the Detective by Walter R Brooks
I was never really a fan of talking animal books in general as a kid, so even if I’d been aware of these books, I’d probably have skipped over them. Which is a shame, since this book was a lot of fun. The characterisation is surprisingly good, it’s got detective work, a courtroom drama and it’s also often very funny. I enjoyed it even as an adult. I listened to an audiobook version, and the narrator was very good too. I’ll probably check out some more books in the series.

I love the Freddy books.

85. Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke
I absolutely loved this book. I’ve had it for quite some time and had always put off reading it with it being so long, but it was picked for me to read this month and I’m really glad it was. I also didn’t have a clue what it was about, having only been told how good it was but nothing else. The book portrays the two titular magicians and the return of magic in an alternate version of 19th century England. It’s styled as if it was written during the Victorian era, which worked really well. Clarke has created a really convincing world, full of detail, and the book is full of footnotes giving historical information and referencing fictional books. It almost felt like I was reading a real historical story and that somehow I’d missed the fact that magic used to exist.

The use of archaic spellings to try to make the book seem even more fitting for the period was something I didn’t like quite so much. At the start the continued use of “shew” instead of “show” confused me, and the occasional other spelling like that didn’t really do much to enhance the atmosphere of the book. It doesn’t help that most of the books from the 19th Century that I’ve read don’t use these sorts of spellings, whether from the original writing or later editing. It’s a minor flaw though.

Most importantly, the book was so entertaining that the 850 pages just flew by where other shorter books have dragged. It’s nice to read a book this long and supports its length. I didn’t find it dragged at any point and I just wanted to keep reading. It could have gone on for another thousand pages and I’d have been happy to go on. One of my favourite books that I’ve read this year.

86. Scenes from an Impending Marriage by Adrian Tomine
A very short graphic novel / comic about the author and his partner and what happened while they were planning their wedding. It’s amusing at times, though it’s not especially original and is nothing amazing. It was fun though, and a very quick read. It did nothing to help me understand why anyone would go through all this stress and complexity and insane expense to get married when afterwards they’re still two people living together, which they could have done anyway. I think understanding that is something beyond my ability.

87. The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood
A very short book that retells a part of The Odyssey from Penelope’s perspective. I quite enjoyed it. It wasn’t anything too remarkable, but it was a quick and entertaining read. I enjoyed the fact that Penelope was telling the story from Hades in the present day, and it’s told in colloquial language with modern references. It adds a lot of humour, as does the Greek chorus of maids that intercept the normal chapters. It was often quite funny, which saved the book because the story itself would otherwise be fairly dull. I think my favourite parts of Greek mythology are still the ones that are accompanied by Ray Harryhausen effects.

88. Death by Chocolate by nolanalan::Alan Nolan
This is a simple comic (in both the graphic novel sense and the comedy sense) murder mystery. It wasn’t bad but nothing special. It was in the adult library but I think the book is aimed more at kids and I’d probably have liked it more back then. It features a bumbling detective who seems to be modelled on Hercule Poirot, and his chimp sidekick who actually solves everything but doesn’t get any credit because she can’t speak. The culprit is fairly obvious from the beginning. It’s amusing but not hilarious. The art consists of black and white line drawings which aren’t bad but not outstanding. So yeah, it was OK, I guess.

89. David Starr: Space Ranger by Isaac Asimov
The first in a series of six Lucky Starr books that Asimov wrote in the 50s, aimed at children. They were originally published under the name Paul French, since he’d been asked to write the this book with the intention of it being turned into a TV series, and he didn’t have enough confidence in television to put his own name to it. Anyway, it features David Starr, the youngest member of the Council of Science. Cases of poisoning start occurring around the world after people have eaten food imported from the colonies on Mars. They’re covered up to prevent panic, since not enough food is produced on Earth alone to sustain the population. David Starr is sent off to investigate.

I’d never got round to these books before, and now that I’ve read the first one I’m surprised by just how fun it was. Asimov doesn’t really change his style here, since his straight to the point writing is perfectly suited to children anyway, and he doesn’t talk down to the reader. He also tried to incorporate accurate astronomical details into the story, although as the introduction for the later edition I read mentioned, some of them proved to be wrong after later probes got more accurate information on Mars. It doesn’t stop this working as an entertaining adventure story though, and the central mystery is well done and keeps you guessing as to who the culprit is. It’s faster paced and contains more action than the usual Asimov due to the target audience. I would have loved it as a kid if I’d had access to it. As it was, I still enjoyed it now, despite some of the sillier aspects to it.

>131 valkyrdeath: it's beyond my life understanding too, and I felt that way even as I went through it.

>115 valkyrdeath: "I’m not a huge fan of vampires, generally finding them quite dull," - What a great opening line! (I have no vampires among my acquaintance). Just catching up with your thread. I like the spread of your selections. I was interested in your review of Snow Falling On Cedars. I remember liking it when it came out, but can't remember much about it. I may now have to reread it to see if it's dated.

>136 Oandthegang: In my experience vampires don't seem to be very good conversationalists. They're too fixated on blood and you've no chance of a chat in the daytime.

I just couldn't get into Snow Falling on Cedars. It was mainly the writing style.

90. Jimmy the Kid by Donald E Westlake
The third Dortmunder book. This time the gang decide to copy the plot from a fictional Richard Stark novel (Richard Stark being the pen name that Westlake uses to write the Parker books). It’s another very funny book that I really enjoyed. It’s one I couldn’t help thinking could make a great film while I was reading it, though having then seen about the film that was made based on it, I don’t think that’s the one.

91. D-Day June 6 1944: The Battle for the Normandy Beaches by Stephen E Ambrose
The title makes it pretty obvious what this book is about. It’s at its best when it’s giving accounts of individuals throughout D-Day, including many direct quotes from first-hand accounts. Hearing from the people who were actually there is always worthwhile so it certainly wasn’t a wasted read. The problem is with the American bias. I’ve no problem with something focusing on the American perspective, but Ambrose seems to go further and feel the need to denigrate the other nationalities involved, particularly the British. If the early build up chapters are to be believed, the American army was ultra-disciplined and full of men who were practically superhuman, where the British army were undisciplined and their men would surrender at the slighter sign of trouble. Complete nonsense and it’s completely unnecessary to bring that sort of mindless patriotism into an event that was very much a joint operation. And when he talks about “the poison of pacifism” having eaten into the souls of the British I almost didn’t want to go on with the book. Yes, it’s such an awful poison, not wanting to murder people.

Anyway, as mentioned, the accounts of the men involved in D-Day are worth reading through. I didn’t particularly like the way he’d switch between his own writing and quotes from the veterans mid-sentence in a way that changed the tense though. Like this:
He turned a corner without slowing, “and we went crashbang into a barbed wire entanglement”…
It’s a minor niggle but still, it threw me off every time it happened, and he did it quite regularly.

It’s not a terrible book but I think there are probably better and less biased accounts of D-Day out there too. I might have been better tracking down a copy of The Longest Day by Cornelius Ryan, which I believe is supposed to be far more balanced and inclusive of the various nationalities involved. Or just settled for re-watching the film.

>139 valkyrdeath: I don't know much about WWII, but I see no problem with pointing out differences between armies' discipline and training tactics, nor in mentioning differing cultural attitudes toward surrender, if those things are true and a part of the history of an event. Would you be angry if Ambrose had made similar comments about, e.g., the differences between American and German armies? It does sound like Ambrose took his editorializing too far. That might explain his popularity with the jingoistic right-wingers here in the States.

Yes, it’s such an awful poison, not wanting to murder people.

How would you have gone about stopping Hitler's martial march across Europe—which also involved murdering lots of people who weren't on battlefields—since you view battle casualties themselves as murder?

>140 LibraryPerilous: The "if those things are true" part is what I dispute. I don't think the war would have lasted long enough to reach D-Day if the troops were in the habit of surrendering the instant they ran into any trouble. I found it interesting that while much of the book had constant references to the sources of the information, he didn't provide any references at all when he made those claims. (There were surrenders of course, but not everyone surrendering the instant they came under attack like he makes it sound in the book.)

I'm not disputing the necessity of the war or anything, or the necessity of the killing which was part of that. I do dispute the idea that being non-violent is some sort of freakish weird and negative thing as Ambrose seemed to make out.

92. The Great Brain by John D Fitzgerald
This was quite a fun old children’s book, mostly about the narrator’s manipulative brother and his many money making schemes. It was interesting to see a portrayal of childhood in another era, one in which it was an event to see someone getting an indoor toilet fitted. The book took some surprisingly dark turns along the way though, dealing with death and attempted suicide, which I really wasn’t expecting. It’s clear the book came from another era but the lighter moments are often funny and the darker moments are handled reasonably well. I mostly enjoyed it, aside from a couple of events that brought back some of my own bad memories.

93. Speculative Journeys by Irene Radford
A collection of science fiction and fantasy short stories, strangely credited as being co-written with P. R. Frost on the cover despite this just being Irene Radford’s pen name for some of her stories and books. The stories are mixed in terms of quality, but they’re all enjoyable enough to read. There’s nothing that’s especially memorable though. Some of the stories have a good idea behind them, but just not enough is done with it to make a truly great story. Some of the stories were set in worlds the author had used previously for different novel series, and these seemed to be generally more assured than some of the others which weren’t quite as sharply written. Overall, a decent enough read but nothing outstanding. I wouldn’t object to reading another book by the author, but I wouldn’t go out of my way to track them down either.

94. The Etymologicon by Mark Forsyth
This was a fun read that explains the origins of English words and phrases. It’s presented in short segments, but each one leads into the next, as if it’s just one long rambling talk. It’s also all told is an entertainingly comical style. The humour reminded me a lot of the classic 1066 and All That, although here you get actual facts alongside it too. I enjoyed it a lot more than Balderdash and Piffle, the last etymology book I read.

95. The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin
I never read this book as a kid, and in fact I hadn’t even heard of it until recently, though I wish I had. It was an entertaining and puzzling mystery story with fun characters and I raced through the book in a little over a day. I know if I’d read it when I was younger I would have had pages of notes to try and work out all the clues myself, as I loved anything to do with games and puzzles. I still enjoyed reading it even as an adult and the writing didn’t really seem to mark it as a children’s book to me anyway.

96. Regeneration by Pat Barker
This is an interesting novel that presents a fictionalised account based on real events during WW1. It centres around Siegfried Sassoon’s admittance into Craiglockhart Hospital after being deemed mentally ill for writing a letter criticising the war. It doesn’t focus entirely on that though, and spends a lot of time on various other characters, especially on the real life doctor Rivers and a fictional patient Prior. It fits a lot into a relatively short book, and as well as dealing with the war via the experiences of the patients, it also covers Sassoon’s poetry and his meeting with Wilfred Owen, and touches on the attitudes of the time towards homosexuality and towards the treatment of mental illness. It was Rivers himself that held the book together for me, and his internal conflict at helping cure people knowing that they’ll then be sent back to the front and likely killed. I found it to be a really good book and am going straight onto the second book of the trilogy.

I actually saw the new touring stage play version just a couple of weeks before reading the book, and that was also very good. The lighting and sound were fantastic, completely and suddenly changing the tone for brief and intense flashback scenes. It was very faithful to the book, although I can’t comment on the ending since I believe it used some scenes from the later books to round off the play.

I really enjoyed Pat Barker's trilogy. I look forward to your thoughts on the second book.

>147 NanaCC: I'm enjoying them so far! I finished the second one yesterday and I'm most of the way through the last now. I might post my thoughts properly later if I feel up to writing.

97. Batman: R.I.P. by Grant Morrison
There was nothing on the book to suggest this was anything but a standalone story, but it seems that the Batman comic has got into one of those stages where it’s so bogged down in long running storylines that trying to read any of it without having read the previous few years just leads to confusion. I could basically follow the storyline, especially later on when it got going properly, but it didn’t really stand out as anything special to me, and wasn’t anything that hadn’t been done before. And when you get Bat-Mite turning up, even in an hallucinatory state, I think it’s getting a bit too desperate. It was readable, but it felt like a bit of a mess, and I don’t think much of the story is going to stick with me. I’m not really sure why it seems to be so highly regarded. (I did like Grant Morrison’s 80s Arkham Asylum book though.)

98. The Eye in the Door by Pat Barker
99. The Ghost Road by Pat Barker
The second and third books of the Regeneration trilogy. I think I enjoyed them as much as the first for the most part. They concentrate a bit more on the fictional characters along with Dr Rivers, though Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen do feature again a little. The second book revolves around an alleged assassination attempt against Lloyd George and Pemberton Billing’s campaign against homosexuality (which he claimed was being spread by German spies). It covers more what was happening in Britain at the time away from the war. The third book I think is the weakest. Most of the book is as good as the others, and I thought the ending worked very well, but the lengthy digression into Rivers’ anthropological study of an island tribe dragged on for me, especially as it was just a telling in more details events which had already been mentioned in the earlier books. I think it was a bit heavy on Prior’s sexual encounters too; surely it didn’t need to go into those so often? Still, they’re great books overall and I really liked the whole series.

When I finished the Regeneration trilogy last year, I commented that I felt that the Booker Prize, which was awarded to The Ghost Road, was really meant for the trilogy as a whole. I really enjoyed the first book the most, but the trilogy was very well done. And I agree that Barker may have made a bit too much of Prior's bisexual encounters.

>151 NanaCC: You're probably right about the Booker Prize. It was an excellent trilogy, but if I was to give one of the books a prize on its own it would be the first, not the last. It makes sense if they were awarding it for the whole series.

100. Wyrd Sisters by Terry Pratchett
I’m resuming my long overdue reread of the Discworld series. I’ve read the books many times over, but the last time I read through them was over a decade ago, and since then I’ve only read the new ones that have come out. The first time I read this book was before I’d read Macbeth, so I actually spotted most of the references in reverse, reading the Shakespeare and remembering the relevant jokes from Wyrd Sisters, which was slightly strange. Reading the book this time through, I’m impressed by just how often Pratchett slips in minor references to the play though, just in the words he uses or a particular phrase here and there. It’s what I love the most about Discworld books. Every time I read them, no matter how many times I’ve read them before, I always seem to spot something new.

I also think this book is around the point where the Discworld series started to become great. Not that the previous books are bad, but everything just seems that bit sharper here. I think I appreciate the witch books more and more as the years go by for some reason too.

And this book means I’ve hit 100 books for the year, and since I’ve delayed updating this, I’ve already passed that too! I’ve never read that many in a year before, or even come particularly close.

Congrats on reaching a hundred! I haven't been able to read Pratchett for awhile, i seem to lose patience. Wyrd Sisters was the last one i tried - perhaps i should read Macbeth first, then try again.

>154 dchaikin: Thanks! This year I never set myself a target, and so managed to hit the target I usually aim at.

I hadn't read the Discworld books in so long that I'm enjoying them all over again. I didn't think much of Raising Steam at the start of the year though sadly. I enjoyed Wyrd Sisters without having read Macbeth originally but there's a lot to be gained reading it after I think.

101. Mr Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan
Well, for a while I was quite enjoying this book. It wasn’t the most amazing book ever, but it was a fun story with a central puzzle-based mystery, and I quite like that sort of thing. It had some flaws, such as an obsession with how amazing Google is, (did they sponsor the book or is the author just after a job there?) or the fact that the main female character is quite unpleasant but I got the impression I was supposed to like her and the lead character of the book thought she was amazing. The book also namechecks so much current generation technology that the book is going to seem very dated within a few years. But despite all that, it was a light easy read. And then the ending came along.

The ending really annoyed me. So I’ll have the spoiler mark this bit, since there’s no way to say why without spoilers. The central mystery revolves around an old book that was printed in code. Supposedly many intelligent people have been trying to decode it for centuries without success. Then Google puts a team of geniuses onto it with the combined power of all of their computers, and it still can’t decode it. In the final reveal, it turns out to be a simple substitution cipher. The hero discovers that there’s notches in the font the book was printed in which are the encoded information. But even if they were missed, it doesn’t matter, because it’s still a substitution cipher, and the fact that capitals are encoded differently to lower case letters and the double f is different to two single fs isn’t going to stop an average puzzle solver from decoding it with frequency analysis within a few hours. Even assuming all the people over the centuries have somehow not managed to solve it, the computers would have come up with the answer in seconds. I don’t generally have a problem with suspension of disbelief, but that’s just insulting. He really couldn’t come up with a more convincing code than that?

Anyway, I would have recommended it for anyone who wanted a fun puzzle mystery, but that ending means I can’t really recommend it at all. I’ve not been so disappointed in an ending since the final episode of Lost.

102. Nobody’s Perfect by Donald E Westlake
The fourth in the Dortmunder series of comic crime novels. This starts out with Dortmunder being hired to steal someone’s painting so he can claim the insurance money on it, and spirals out from there as more and more things go wrong. Again, it’s very funny, the plot is well thought out and I’m impressed by how different each book is so far.

103. Fish Whistle by Daniel Pinkwater
A collection of very short articles by the author, the majority of them written and read out for All Things Considered on NPR. Collected, they form a sort of memoir, though of various isolated events. As expected, it’s a funny book and it’s very interesting to see how a lot of the things he talks about were used in various ways in his novels. The series of articles on dog training perhaps went on a bit too long for me personally, but otherwise I really enjoyed the book.

OK, Fish Whistle is definitely going on my wishlist. I love Pinkwater!

>159 bragan: If you love Pinkwater, I don't think you can really go wrong with that book! I'd never even heard of him until this year, but I've really enjoyed everything I've read by him so far.

104. Futures Near and Far by Dave Smeds
I’m always wary about single author short story collections when it’s an author I don’t already know. I’ve read a lot of science fiction that’s either bland or terrible, especially in recent years. Thankfully, Futures Near and Far was a pleasant surprise. This is a very well written collection of stories spanning written at various times from the 80s onwards. The stories generally take a single technological concept and looks at what the consequences of this might be.

The highlights for me were the three stories based around nanotechnology, with a future where “nanodocs” keep everyone permanently young and heal any injuries. Anyone who dies will even be brought back by them. The opening story starts the book off strongly, presenting a time where some people class suicide as a hobby and murder has become a minor crime.

The worlds in all these stories are similarly interesting and have been well thought through, with intriguing premises behind them. Some are better than others, and sadly my least favourite were the last two stories in the book, which were also the longest. They weren’t bad, but didn’t quite match the standards of the rest for me.

If there’s one thing that makes this book a bit wearying to read in one go, it’s the fact that the stories do generally take a rather dark look at things. People can be guaranteed to find new ways to do unpleasant things, and most of this book is looking at that side of things. There’s a cast of fairly unpleasant characters: murderers, corrupt lawyers, rapists, mimes… The stories are good though, and it’s not entirely without humour. Although the only purely comic piece in the book was disappointingly just a retelling an old joke with the bear replaced by an alien creature.

Anyway, I enjoyed this collection quite a bit and I’ll be interested to read some more of the author’s work in the future. Hopefully that future won’t be like the stories in this book.