Valkyrdeath's 2016 reading record

Time for my third year here! As usual, I hope to carry on with a diverse selection of books. I think I’d still like to increase the amount of non-fiction I read. Last year I hit a new record of 134 books read, beating my 104 of the previous year, so I’m going to stick with not setting targets since I seem to read more that way!

Books read:
1. Ella Minnow Pea by Mark Dunn
2. Filmish by Edward Ross
3. Time to Depart by Lindsey Davis
4. The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick
5. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
6. Prison Island by Colleen Frakes
7. The War That Killed Achilles: The True Story of Homer's Iliad and the Trojan War by Caroline Alexander
8. Maps and Legends: Reading and Writing Along the Borderlands by Michael Chabon

9. The Price of Salt (aka Carol) by Patricia Highsmith
10. The Wee Free Men by Terry Pratchett
11. Saga, Volume 4 by Brian K. Vaughan, art by Fiona Staples
12. Saga, Volume 5 by Brian K. Vaughan, art by Fiona Staples
13. Daughter of the Forest by Juliet Marillier
14. When Books Went to War: The Stories that Helped Us Win World War II by Molly Guptill Manning
15. A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle
16. Candide by Voltaire

17. The Summer Book by Tove Jansson
18. Steed & Mrs Peel: The Golden Game by Grant Morrison and Anne Caulfield, art by Ian Gibson
19. Best of Apex Magazine: Volume 1 edited by Jason Sizemore and Lesley Conner
20. The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende, translated by Magda Bogin
21. Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks
22. The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick

23. Tomb Raider: The Beginning by Rhianna Pratchett, art by Nicolas Daniel Selma and Andrea Mutti
24. The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle
25. Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin
26. The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists by Gideon Defoe
27. Lumberjanes Volume 3 by Noelle Stevenon and Shannon Watters, art by Carolyn Nowak and others
28. Revenge by Yoko Ogawa
29. Lucky Starr and the Oceans of Venus by Isaac Asimov
30. ODY-C Volume 1 by Matt Fraction, art by Christian Ward
31. A Hat Full of Sky by Terry Pratchett
32. My Lady Ludlow by Elizabeth Gaskell
33. Welcome to Night Vale by Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor
34. The Ballad of Halo Jones by Alan Moore, art by Ian Gibson
35. Ozma of Oz by L. Frank Baum
36. The Hours by Michael Cunningham

37. The Boy Who Would Be Shakespeare: A Tale of Forgery and Folly by Doug Stewart
38. The Trouble With Women by Jacky Fleming
39. Narbonic Vol. 3 by Shaenon K. Garrity
40. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
41. Narbonic Vol. 4 by Shaenon K. Garrity
42. Funny Science Fiction edited by Alex Shvartsman
43. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
44. Mister Monday by Garth Nix
45. Narbonic Vol. 5 by Shaenon K. Garrity
46. Narbonic Vol. 6 by Shaenon K. Garrity
47. Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain by David Eagleman
48. Travel Light by Naomi Mitchison

49. Grim Tuesday by Garth Nix
50. A Dying Light in Corduba by Lindsey Davis
51. The Book of Sand by Jorge Luis Borges
52. Nimona by Noelle Stevenson
53. Funny Fantasy edited by Alex Shvartsman
54. Double Cross: The True Story of the D-Day Spies by Ben Macintyre
55. The Mammoth Book of Perfect Crimes & Impossible Mysteries edited by Mike Ashley
56. Drowned Wednesday by Garth Nix
57. The Marvelous Land of Oz by L. Frank Baum
58. Bitch Planet Book 1 by Kelly Sue DeConnick, art by Valentine De Landro

59. Human Voices by Penelope Fitzgerald
60. Sir Thursday by Garth Nix
61. Rat Queens Volume 1: Sass and Sorcery by Kurtis J. Wiebe, art by Roc Upchurch
62. Under an English Heaven by Donald E. Westlake
63. The Embassy of Cambodia by Zadie Smith
64. The Princess Bride by William Goldman
65. Feeling Sorry for Celia by Jaclyn Moriarty
66. The Facts in the Case of the Departure of Miss Finch by Neil Gaiman, art by Michael Zulli
67. Lady Friday by Garth Nix
68. Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs
69. The Heart of Thomas by Moto Hagio
70. Agnes Grey by Anne Bronte
71. Hinges Book One: Clockwork City by Meredith McClaren
72. Hinges Book Two: Paper Tigers by Meredith McClaren
73. Superior Saturday by Garth Nix

74. The Red Virgin and the Vision of Utopia by Mary M. Talbot and Bryan Talbot
75. Enough Rope by Dorothy Parker
76. Sunset Gun by Dorothy Parker
77. Barefoot in the Park by Neil Simon
78. Public Library and Other Stories by Ali Smith
79. Female Tommies: The Frontline Women of the First World War by Elisabeth Shipton
80. Universally Challenged: Quiz Contestants Say the Funniest Things by Wendy Roby
81. Free Food for Millionaires by Min Jin Lee
82. Lumberjanes Vol. 4 by Noelle Stevenson and Shannon Watters, art by Brooke Allen
83. The Man Who Was Thursday by G. K. Chesterton
84. Lord Sunday by Garth Nix
85. William Shakespeare’s Star Wars: Verily, A New Hope by Ian Doescher
86. Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in Space by Mary Roach
87. No Mercy Vol. 1 by Alex de Campi, art by Carla Speed McNeil
88. The Martian Way and Other Stories by Isaac Asimov
89. Not Quite What I Was Planning: Six-Word Memoirs by Writers Famous and Obscure edited by Rachel Fershleiser and Larry Smith
90. Wet Moon Vol. 1 by Sophie Campbell
91. Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang by Kate Wilhelm

92. Dear Committee Members by Julie Schumacher
93. Wintersmith by Terry Pratchett
94. The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov, translated by Hugh Aplin
95. The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories by Susanna Clarke
96. Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson
97. Miss Lonelyhearts by Nathanael West
98. Three Hands in the Fountain by Lindsey Davis
99. El Deafo by Cece Bell
100. Through the Woods by Emily Carroll

101. All the Birds, Singing by Evie Wyld
102. Murder in the Generative Kitchen by Meg Pontecorvo
103. Spectacles by Sue Perkins
104. The Thing Around Your Neck by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
105. Steed and Mrs Peel Vol. 1: A Very Civil Armageddon by Mark Waid, art by Steve Bryant and Will Sliney
106. Dark Night: A True Batman Story by Paul Dini, art by Eduardo Risso
107. Six-Gun Snow White by Catherynne M. Valente
108. The Awakening and Selected Short Stories by Kate Chopin
109. Steed and Mrs Peel Vol. 2: The Secret History of Space by Caleb Monroe, art by Yasmin Liang
110. Everything is Teeth by Evie Wyld, art by Joe Sumner
111. Hero of the Empire: The Boer War, a Daring Escape, and the Making of Winston Churchill by Candice Millard
112. Steed and Mrs Peel Vol. 3: The Return of the Monster by Caleb Monroe, art by Yasmin Liang
113. The Gastronomical Me by M. F. K. Fisher
114. How to Be a Victorian by Ruth Goodman

115. After the Fire, A Still Small Voice by Evie Wyld
116. The Best American Comics 2015 edited by Jonathan Lethem
117. Red Land, Black Land: Daily Life in Ancient Egypt by Barbara Mertz
118. A Woman in Berlin Anonymous
119. Life After Life by Kate Atkinson
120. Anya's Ghost by Vera Brosgol
121. Arcadia by Tom Stoppard
122. The Manhattan Projects Deluxe Edition Vol. 1 by Jonathan Hickman art by Nick Pitarra
123. A Young Doctor's Notebook by Mikhail Bulgakov
124. The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut
125. The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole by Sue Townsend

126. I Shall Wear Midnight by Terry Pratchett
127. Descender Vol. 1 by Jeff Lemire, art by Dustin Nguyen
128. Art by Yasmina Reza translated by Christopher Hampton
129. Lost in Yonkers by Neil Simon
130. Blackout by Connie Willis
131. Phonogram: Rue Britannia by Kieron Gillen, art by Jamie KcKelvie
132. Phonogram: The Singles Club by Kieron Gillen, art by Jamie KcKelvie
133. Not Funny Ha-Ha by Leah Hayes
134. The Siege by Ismail Kadare
135. Unnatural Death by Dorothy L. Sayers
136. Photograph 51 by Anna Ziegler
137. The Pirates! In an Adventure with Ahab by Gideon Defoe
138. Lumberjanes Vol. 5 by various writers and artists

Book stats for 2015:
134 books read, made up of:
61 novels
35 graphic novels
23 non-fiction books
11 short story collections
3 poetry collections
1 play

One of my goals for the year was to try to balance the number of books by each gender more, and without monitoring it as I went along, I managed a perfect 50% split between male and female authors. I was very surprised but pleased.

Favourite fiction of 2015 (in no particular order):
The Golem and the Djinni
Mother Night
The Song of Achilles
Cold Comfort Farm
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
Station Eleven
Various books in the Falco series and the Dortmunder series

Favourite non-fiction of 2015:
The Elements of Eloquence
Agent Zigzag
The River of Doubt
Nothing to Envy
A Girl Named Zippy

Favourite graphical works of 2015:
Marbles
The Saga series
Lumberjanes 1 & 2
The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck
Narbonic 1 & 2

1. Ella Minnow Pea by Mark Dunn
Well, I think this was a great way to start the year off. I love wordplay, so this was perfect for me. It’s set on a fictional island with a culture built on language, which effectively worships Nevin Nollop, the assumed creator of the line “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog”, containing every letter of the alphabet. As the letters of this sentence on his statue start to fall off, the government decides this means those letters must be banned from use. The book is told in the form of letters between inhabitants, meaning the writing becomes more and more constrained as more and more letters are lost. But people keep writing, twisting language in new ways in order to desperately try to keep communicating. It’s clever and often funny. It’s also definitely dystopian fiction too, and feels very oppressive at the same time. The first letter (Z) lost automatically causes a ban on all books, and things only get worse from there.

I find it interesting, looking at the later pages of the book, that they should be practically unreadable, and yet with the gradual erosion of the language through the course of the book I found I was reading it perfectly easily when reading through the novel. It strikes me as smart writing that must have taken a lot of work. Anyway, I really enjoyed it.

Appropriate song to go with the book: LMNO by They Might Be Giants. From the moment I read the title of the book I had that song in my head.

Welcome back! And I've been meaning to read Ella Minnow Pea for years. You're review has prodded me to move it up the TBR pile.

>5 jfetting: Thanks! I hope you enjoy Ella Minnow Pea if you get round to it. I'd never heard about it until a few days ago and after reading the description I just decided I wanted to read it right away.

2. Filmish by Edward Ross
Subtitled “A Graphic Journey through Film”, Filmish is a non-fiction work told in a black and white comic book format. But it’s not just a straight forward history of film, and rather than simply going through films chronologically, the book is split into several chapters each exploring a different topic. Ross manages to go into a reasonable amount of depth for the short amount of space he has for each subject, and he’s clearly passionate about film. The book doesn’t just talk about film genres and styles but goes into more serious film theory territory, talking about the viewers’ relationship with films, how they can manipulate the way we see things, the relationship between film and technology (and technophobia) and many other topics. He regularly quotes other sources, often scholarly works, and everything is fully sourced. The art work is very well done, and it’s fun just spotting all the different films referenced in the images, though as with the quotes, everything is sourced in the extensive notes at the back. There’s nothing especially new for people who are already familiar with the topics covered, but it’s an excellent and wide ranging overview for anyone with an interest in film.

I loved several of these too-- particularly The Golem and the Djinni, Kavalier and Clay, and Station Eleven. Looking forward to following your posts this year; happy reading!

>8 SouthernBluestocking: Thanks, those were all great books! I'm hoping Helene Wecker writes another book soon and I'm looking forward to trying more of Michael Chabon's work.

3. Time to Depart by Lindsey Davis
Lindsey Davis continues to have fun trying out every type of crime story she can think of within the historical Ancient Roman setting. This time it’s effectively a police procedural transposed to Rome. As usual, it’s based around genuine historical concepts, chiefly that criminals condemned to death were given time to leave the empire if they chose before the sentence was carried out. An organised crime boss it sent away, but then the people who helped convict him start to be killed. I’d also never realised the Vigiles were set up as firefighters originally, which is used in the story. It’s a lot of fun, and as usual, Falco’s family life is as prominent as the mystery, and is where a lot of the humour comes in. The series just keeps getting better and I loved the book.

4. The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick
I’ve been meaning to read this book for a long time, and I’m glad I finally got to it. It’s set in an alternate reality where the Axis won World War 2 and the US is split between Nazi German and Japanese control. There’s not a huge amount of plot, though what is there is interesting. The book is largely character driven, following a wide assortment of different people, with their own views and opinions about the world they’re in. They span different nationalities and perspectives. It’s a book that doesn’t present a clear good and evil, a world full of moral ambiguity.

Within the book, there’s also a book called “The Grasshopper Lies Heavy”, which is a popular (though banned in Nazi controlled areas) alternate history book where the Allies won the war. It’s not quite our world, so there are two alternate histories for the price of one. It’s in the characters’ discussions of this book that I came to think The Man in the High Castle is basically using the alternate world to mirror our world, hence the moral ambiguity. A moment where a Japanese character expects white Americans to automatically give up their seats for him has clear parallels to the issues of the time it was written in the 60s.

I know Philip K Dick was trying to appeal to the mainstream at the time this was written, knowing how science fiction tends to get dismissed and anything that’s actually good just proclaimed not to be science fiction. So it amused me that there’s a brief conversation in the book where two people argue over whether The Grasshopper Lies Heavy is science fiction or not.

Anyway, that’s enough random rambling about the book. It was one that got me thinking and had far more going on than I first realised. It was a long way from the pulp alternate history about rebels fighting back against the evil Nazis that I was expecting.

5. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
This is a hard one to write anything about for me. It was well enough written and a fairly quick read, but most of the book I found fairly bland and uninteresting and I’ve already forgotten most of it already. The parts about the shell shocked former WW1 soldier Septimus and his experiences with two different doctors stood out to me though, and I liked those enough that I might try something else by Woolf at some point. I didn’t dislike this book, but it’s not really for me.

6. Prison Island by Colleen Frakes
This is a graphic memoir about the author’s childhood growing up on a small island containing a prison and houses for the families of the staff there. It’s framed around a visit with her family to the island shortly after everyone has left due to it being closed down. Most of the differences in lifestyle are basically the same as they would be growing up on any isolated island rather than specifically a prison one, such as having to catch a boat at 6am to travel to the mainland for school. You only get little snatches of events and it’s a short book, so you don’t really get immersed in life on the island, and a lot of it doesn’t seem hugely different to growing up anywhere else anyway. It doesn’t really make any great use of the graphical format either, though the art is nice enough. It’s readable, but nothing special.

7. The War that Killed Achilles: The True Story of Homer's Iliad and the Trojan War by Caroline Alexander
The War that Killed Achilles is a fairly in depth look at The Iliad, with lots of excerpts, and looking at it as an example of an ancient anti-war work. It’s an interesting way of looking at something that was usually seen as a heroic epic, and one I found fairly convincing. It also provides a lot of information along the way about the time it was written, giving an idea of what would be common knowledge then that we wouldn’t see in the same way. I enjoyed it a lot, though I don’t think I’ll be sitting down to read The Iliad itself any time soon.

Thanks for the reviews.

8. Maps and Legends by Michael Chabon
This is a collection of various non-fiction essays collected from various sources, so it’s a varied assortment. In general though, the first half has articles about genre fiction and some about specific authors, comic artists or books and the second half has more autobiographical pieces about his life and how he came to write some of his books. A lot of the first half puts up a defence of genre fiction, which is worthwhile, though he sometimes doesn’t seem to stick to his convictions. Despite defending genre fiction as being just as worthy as anything else, in his essay about Cormac McCarthy’s The Road he goes on the say that it’s not science fiction even though he states it does have all the science fiction elements that make up other post-apocalyptic fiction. I think it’s easy to lapse into that sort of defence though, even as you want genre fiction to be taken seriously it can be easier to lapse into trying to claim something isn’t part of the genre when trying to champion something. It sort of undermines the argument though. (I don’t understand “genre fiction” as a derogatory term anyway. All fiction is genre fiction. However much it might be labelled with the meaningless “literary fiction” tag, surely it must fit into at least one or more genres.)

Anyway, the second half is where the best material is, and it’s really interesting to read about how he came to start writing. My favourite was where he talked about discovering a book on how to speak Yiddish that was phrased like a travel guide language book led to his writing of The Yiddish Policemen’s Union. And it culminates in an entertaining mixture of fiction and autobiography about golems.

Overall, the book is a bit of a mixed bag, and I preferred the second half to the first, especially as in the first half he was often talking about books that I hadn’t read. It’s fairly short and an enjoyable enough quick read, but not really something to go rushing out to buy. I’m definitely looking forward to trying some more of his novels though.

9. The Price of Salt (aka Carol) by Patricia Highsmith
Originally written under the pseudonym Claire Morgan, The Price of Salt is basically a love story between two women who meet at the doll counter of a department store, apparently inspired by an event in the author’s life while she was actually working in that position. I’d never heard of the book until it was recently filmed under the title Carol, and love stories are not really my thing, but I gave it a go since it came up for an online book club. And I’m glad I did. While it’s a fairly slow moving story and not a lot happens, it’s extremely well written. The quality of the writing really carried everything and made it really easy to read, and the characters felt so real that it didn’t really feel like fiction at all. I’m still not going to become a fan of romance fiction, but I liked this one and can’t find much to fault it with. And it stood out at the time of its publication for avoiding the sorts of ending other books about homosexual relationships tended to have back then.

Appropriate song for the book: Oh! Carol by Neil Sedaka.

10. The Wee Free Men by Terry Pratchett
I’m skipping forward in my reread of the Discworld series. The last three of the Tiffany Aching books are the only Discworld novels I haven’t read, so I’m going to go through those now so I can finally get to the last one. So it starts with a reread of The Wee Free Men, which I’ve actually only read once back when it first came out. For some reason back then I didn’t like it as much as usual, which is a shame, since on rereading I realise it’s got a good story and is full of great moments and funny lines. I think it may be because I found the parts about the death of Tiffany’s grandmother hard at the time I was reading. Anyway, the Nac Mac Feegle are great as ever. It’s still not one of my absolute favourite Discworld books, but it’s still a fun read, and Tiffany is a good character. I seem to remember liking the second book better than this first one, mostly because Granny Weatherwax is in it. I’ll have to see how it goes this time round.
Appropriate song: The Wee Free Men by Steeleye Span (except why do the Nac Mac Feegle sound English in this song? That’s just not right!)

11. Saga, Volume 4 by Brian K. Vaughan, art by Fiona Staples
12. Saga, Volume 5 by Brian K. Vaughan, art by Fiona Staples
Continuing the story, and I’m still really enjoying it. I usually wait for these ongoing series to finish before reading them though, and I’m starting to wish I’d done that with Saga. It’s a bit annoying reading a chunk of the story and then waiting months before another one is out. I don’t know how people cope with getting the very short individual issues and waiting a month between them. None of these stand alone. But it’s very good and the art work is excellent, it’s just hard to keep hold of all the different storylines across the months.

13. Daughter of the Forest by Juliet Marillier
Daughter of the Forest is an historical fantasy novel based on the Six Swans fairy tale but with a medieval Ireland setting where various aspects of their folklore are true. The fantasy elements are actually fairly low key in the story, but the setting is very well realised, but most importantly the characters were excellent. I loved the book. Marillier doesn’t make it easy for her heroine though, and she goes through some really awful situations throughout the book. It was often hard to stop reading since I just wanted to see her finally get to safety. Sorcha is a great lead character, showing great strength and determination but not being perfect and making mistakes. I found the romance element to be well done too, and not off-putting at all. This is the first book I’ve read by Marillier and I certainly intend to read more, starting with the other two volumes of the original Sevenwaters Trilogy, of which this was the first.

14. When Books Went to War: The Stories that Helped Us Win World War II by Molly Guptill Manning
This was a really nice non-fiction read about the role books played in WW2. It starts with the Nazi book burnings and then voluntary public book donation schemes, but it mostly focuses on the Armed Services Editions that were specially printed for distribution to men in the US Army and Navy. These seem to have been highly valued by the troops who became big readers and helped the success of books like A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and made a classic out of The Great Gatsby. (Though I’m not sure I’ll ever understand the popularity of Gatsby, the only book I’ve ever literally fallen asleep while reading, but different tastes and all that.) It was really good to read about something like this, and especially good to see the cooperation between publishers to accomplish the project, and their determination in selecting the right books and fighting any attempts to censor anything. It was a quick read and perfect for a book lover, and I’d never actually heard anything about any of this before.

15. A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle
Surprisingly, I’d never heard of this book until fairly recently. Not sure how I’d avoided hearing about it, other than possibly the fact that I generally avoided children’s books when I was a kid. This one seemed to be exactly the sort of thing I would have loved though, and I enjoyed reading it. It includes some complex ideas in it without talking down to the reader too, which is something I appreciate in books aimed at younger readers. I liked the dimension jumping plot and the disturbing planet they end up on, and I liked that the story covered Meg’s realisation that her father isn’t perfect and can’t just fix everything. The ending I found to be a bit disappointing with the whole love defeats evil thing but otherwise I enjoyed the book and wish I could have read it as a kid.

A Wrinkle in Time was one of my favorites growing up and likely contributed pretty significantly to my career choice (I'm a scientist, like Mrs. Murray, only less gorgeous).

>23 jfetting: It's exactly the sort of book I'd have liked as a kid, with the science themes. From what I've read it seems to have inspired quite a lot of scientists, which can only be a good thing I think.

The second book in the trilogy, A Wind in the Door, features mitochondria pretty significantly. I remember being blown away when I learned about mitochondria for real in a biology class (not just characters in a novel? WOW). I may be due for a re-read...

You've read some good books so far this year! The Price of Salt/Carol and Mrs Dalloway are on my list, too.

>25 jfetting: I think I'll have to check that one out.

>26 KLmesoftly: I think it has been a good reading year so far! Hope you enjoy them both when you read them, they're certainly interesting books.

16. Candide by Voltaire
Well, this really wasn’t what I was expecting. Not that I really know what I was expecting, but it certainly wasn’t this. It’s a brief book full of one terrible thing happening after another, with war, murder, rape and torture all appearing repeatedly. Naturally, it’s a comedy.

It seems to be mostly a satirical attack of Leibniz’s “best of all possible worlds” philosophy, which is mentioned many times from the philosopher Pangloss within the book. Candide stumbles from one disaster to another as his mentor still insists that everything is for the best (“I hold firmly to my original views. After all I am a philosopher. ”) It also criticises prejudice and slavery in various forms. The style felt surprisingly modern to me, with a real snarky sarcastic tone to the whole thing, and it was often funny. The repeated dismissal of terrible actions as being within the rules of warfare, and the recurring mantra of “all is for the best”, even reminded me of Kurt Vonnegut at times. (So it goes.) Some bits were better than others, but mostly I enjoyed this and was impressed by the satire.

(I was less impressed by the edition I was reading though. It included a Candide Part Two straight afterwards as if it was part of the same book, but it felt off when I was reading it and the attitude felt different, and the ending of the first part seemed to be the natural end anyway. So then I looked online and discovered the second part was not only written later than Candide, but actually wasn’t even written by Voltaire. The ebook I had did not mention this information anywhere at all, and I think it’s pretty important, since it could give the wrong impression of the book. I was glad to find out the second part wasn’t actually a part of the proper work since it is much better without it. That’s not even considering the fact that the book is called “Candide and Other Works” but doesn’t contain anything else in it.)

17. The Summer Book by Tove Jansson
This was the first adult novel from the author better known for writing the Moomin books. It follows a six year old girl, Sophia, and her grandmother and the time they spend together on an island. The girl’s father is there too, but he never speaks or takes much part in the action, he’s just a background presence. It’s a nice book, with some entertaining conversations between the main characters, often funny, but there’s a melancholy side to things too as the recent death of the mother is understood but never directly spoken of. It was a very brief book, well written and I enjoyed it while it lasted, though it didn’t have any huge impact on me.

18. Steed & Mrs Peel: The Golden Game by Grant Morrison and Anne Caulfield, art by Ian Gibson
Originally published in the 90s as a six issue series, this is based on the old 60s British TV show The Avengers, but couldn’t be published under that name for obvious reasons. I loved the show so when I saw the recent reissue of this I had to give it a go. It actually contains two stories, the first four chapters being The Golden Game by Grant Morrison and the other two being Deadly Rainbow by Anne Caulfield. The first story captures the feel of the TV show really well, though it does it by being a bit too close to the plot of one of the actual episodes. The dialogue feels right for the characters though, and it brings Emma Peel back in after Tara King goes missing. The second story doesn’t work anywhere near as well though and felt a bit muddled. I didn’t care much for that one. I quite enjoyed the first part though, except for the artwork. Aside from the fact that I didn’t think it was especially good in general, the character art really didn’t work. Steed looked sort of like the same person, but Mrs. Peel could only conceivably be the same person after a plastic surgery disaster and Mother is clearly not even remotely the same person. If they’re based on a TV show, surely the characters should look like they did there. Anyway, half of it was quite fun but unexceptional, and the art ruins it a bit.

19. Best of Apex Magazine: Volume 1 edited by Jason Sizemore and Lesley Conner
I’ve read a couple of the Apex collections of World SF and have enjoyed them, so I was pleased to get this book collecting some of the best stories that have been published by Apex. It turns out I liked this one even more than the other two books and found it to be the most consistent anthology I’ve read in a long time. In fact, there wasn’t a single story I disliked, which is quite unusual for such a varied collection with a wide range of authors. The stories span science fiction, fantasy and horror, and they’re nearly always very imaginative and unusual rather than falling back on the standard themes and tropes. Obviously there were some I liked more than others, but there was nothing I found boring or regretted reading.

Some of the stories were like a masterclass in world building, creating an entirely different reality in just a few pages without having to spell things out with lengthy exposition, something that I always appreciate. A Matter of Shapespace by Brian Trent created such a fascinatingly different world that it almost seems a shame that it’s limited to the one short story (though for certain reasons I don’t expect to see it again). I also particularly liked the folklore styled Jackalope Wives by Ursula Vernon (which opened the book), Pocosin, which I’ve only just realised now while checking is also by Ursula Vernon, and The Performance Artist by Lettie Prell, about a woman gradually transferring her consciousness to ever more abstract computers and robots as an art exhibition. Other stories feature robots used as walking adverts (Advertising at the End of the World by Keffy R. M. Kehrli), a world where war veterans have their memory of the awful events they went through removed for all but one day of the year (Remembery Day by Sarah Pinsker) and a vampire on trial (Blood on Beacon Hill by Russell Nichols). All the stories have at least something interesting about them. It’s an enjoyable and well-chosen collection of stories.

20. The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende
A book following various members of a family over several decades against a backdrop of events in Chile (I think, since I don’t believe it ever actually mentions where it’s set in the book.) It’s quite a long book and I got through it, so I didn’t hate it, but it didn’t really do anything for me. Something about the writing felt quite distancing and I found I just couldn’t care what was happening to the characters for much of it. I found I liked it a bit more later on and for the last hundred pages or so when the political situation in the country came to the forefront of the plot I quite enjoyed it, but I found it a bit of a slog to get there. I think probably it’s just not the style for me. It probably didn’t help that I didn’t know what it was aiming for at first. It seemed to introduce supernatural fantasy elements early on in the book, so I assumed that’s what I was reading, but then those elements just drifted in and out of the book seemingly at random and I never understood why they were there in the first place. But it was well enough written and had bits where I did start to get into it, just every time I did I’d then hit another stretch that I found dull. And now I’ll bring another disjointed review to a close.

21. Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks
I’ve been meaning to read this for quite some time now, ever since I saw a stage version and loved it. I’m glad I finally got around to it, because I loved the book too. The depiction of WW1 is vivid and the scenes portraying the scale of the death and destruction it caused are powerful and some of the best I’ve read. It’s also nice to see a large focus on the tunnellers too, since they don’t generally seem to get a lot of mention in WW1 novels. Alternating with the wartime (and initial prewar) chapters are shorter sections set in the 1970s with the granddaughter of the main character trying to learn about what happened. I don’t really think these chapters added much to the story. They weren’t badly written and didn’t ruin the book, but I also don’t think the book would be any worse at all if they were just removed. Which they were in the stage version. It’s a great book either way, and one I’d happily recommend to almost anyone.

I’d avoid the TV version though.

22. The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick
This is a novel told in an unusual way that I’m not sure I’ve seen before. It’s not really an illustrated novel, but rather a novel half told in text and half in pictures. Sometimes there’ll be a few pages entirely of text, but then you’ll get a few pages where the pictures take over the story with no text at all. The story follows Hugo, a boy living alone in a train station in Paris in the 1930s following the disappearance of his Uncle. The plot brings in automatons and the history of early cinema, specifically Georges Méliès. Appropriately, the sections told in pictures seem to adapt cinematic techniques to the page to tell the story. It’s well done and was an enjoyable read. I also loved Scorsese’s film version, Hugo, which in my memory seemed to be quite faithful to the book overall.

23. Tomb Raider: The Beginning by Rhianna Pratchett, art by Nicolas Daniel Selma and Andrea Mutti
I got this in a bundle with some other graphic novels a while back which I mainly bought for other things, but I thought I’d give it a go since it’s a very quick read. It’s about what I expected. It’s effectively a prologue to the 2013 Tomb Raider game. I played that back at the time, and this comic doesn’t really add all that much to it, and it doesn’t have any real purpose to being read separately from the game since it doesn’t have its own ending. At least it doesn’t have the problems with the story not matching the gameplay that the game itself did. The artwork wasn’t all that good in this either. Not really worthwhile.

24. The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle
The second collection of Sherlock Holmes stories, and the one Doyle originally intended to be his last, ending as it does with Holmes’s death. I think I liked it as much as the first collection. I think these early short stories were when Holmes was at his best, and this collection contains some of the best and most famous stories, with cases like the Musgrave Ritual and the Naval Treaty, and of course the Final Problem where Holmes dies until a few years later when he suddenly didn’t because Doyle had caved in to the pressure of people wanting him to write more. Anyway, I loved it, but I always enjoy the Sherlock Holmes stories.

25. Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin
A man tells of how he fell in love with a bartender called Giovanni, and how this leads to Giovanni being executed (which isn’t a spoiler since it tells you this right from the start.) It seems to be fairly highly regarded for its portrayal of homosexuality written in the 1950s, so I could well just be missing something. The problem for me was that none of the characters was sympathetic. Around the mid-point, Giovanni said something violently misogynistic and the main character laughed as if it was nothing, and from that point I could no longer care about them at all anymore and the rest of the book fell flat. I know books don’t have to have likable characters to be good, but for something that’s entirely character based rather than plot based, it needs to at least make me care about what’s happening to them. It’s probably just not my sort of book mainly though, since I’ve never been much of one for love stories.

26. The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists by Gideon Defoe
“It was time for action. The Pirate Captain slammed down his After Eight mint with a mighty crash.”

This book was a lot of fun. It follows the adventures of Pirate Captain and his crew as they meet Charles Darwin after sinking the Beagle due to believing it to be carrying gold, and learning of his controversial scientific theory (that a monkey dressed up in a suit can be passed off as a gentleman.) It’s extremely silly and I loved the style of humour in the book. None of the crew are named and instead are referred to as “the pirate with a scarf” or “the pirate with an accordion”. There’s lots of great lines and crazy things happening and the pirates are as often likely to be found arguing about the best way to cook ham as running people through with their cutlasses. The footnotes are brilliant too, starting as factual information about real pirating linked with the things mentioned in the story, but growing increasingly more tenuous as the book goes on. The whole thing sort of reads like the literary equivalent of a Monty Python film. And unlike the film it’s not aimed at children, though I enjoyed the film too when I saw it a few years ago. I loved this one and found it to be one of the funniest things I’ve read in ages, and it made me laugh out loud several times, which is quite rare. I look forward to continuing with the series.

27. Lumberjanes Volume 3 by Noelle Stevenson and Shannon Watters, art by Carolyn Nowak and others
Lumberjanes Volume 3 contains the first four issues following the end of the initial eight part story arc. The first issue is a Halloween special, involving the girls sat around a campfire telling spooky stories to each other, each drawn by a different artist. The stories send up various tropes of ghost stories and urban legends and it’s a fun issue. The other three issues form a three part story. The writing is still very good, but sadly the artist is different to the first two volumes and it didn’t feel right, with a completely different style and the characters looking different. I don’t understand why they do things like that, especially since the art style looked great and added a lot of character to the series. Surely they could have at least got an artist who could make it look the same. Thankfully, the original artist is back for the next volume. This one was not quite as great as the first two, but still an enjoyable read, despite the artwork.

28. Revenge by Yoko Ogawa, translation by Stephen Snyder
This book took me by surprise slightly. I started it knowing it was a collection of short stories, but it wasn’t until part way through the second one that I started to realise the stories linked in with each other. Sometimes the links are subtle, sometimes they’re direct, but every one related in some way to the previous stories, and it makes the whole thing work better than I think it would have done otherwise. The book is strongly character driven, each story being narrated in the first person, interestingly with none of them ever being named. The subtitle of the book is “Eleven Dark Tales” and it’s a fitting description, the stories in it ranging from sad to disturbing and macabre. It’s very different from The Housekeeper and the Professor which I read last year. Where that was a pleasant enjoyable read but one which didn’t really stick with me, this book had moments which I’m pretty sure are going to stay with me. It also got me thinking of just how many lives intertwine and impact on each other, even when the people involved don’t realise it or necessarily even know each other. I wasn’t sure what to expect when I started the book, but I really liked it. The translation as great and I loved the writing style. Hoping to read more by Ogawa in the future.

29. Lucky Starr and the Oceans of Venus by Isaac Asimov
The third book in the Lucky Starr series of books aimed at children. It’s minor Asimov, but these books are quite fun anyway. This time Starr heads off to Venus after hearing his friend is accused of being a traitor to the Council of Science intent on clearing his name and finding out just what is going on. Again, Asimov starts this 70s edition with an introduction explaining how later astronomical information makes the science in the book out of date. In this instance, we have a Venus entirely covered by a planet-wide ocean. The fact that it’s scientifically inaccurate doesn’t change the fact that it’s an interesting environment that he’s created with its underwater cities and unusual lifeforms. The story is fast paced and entertaining enough, but most fun of all was the fact that the plot turned out to revolve around a form of Venusian frog that had powers to influence people’s minds. I just couldn’t help but think of this.

ALL GLORY.

Anyway, it’s fun, and something I’d have really enjoyed when I was in the target age range as well. It’s probably only going to be of interest to Asimov completists, but I think this is the best of the Lucky Starr books so far.

30. ODY-C Volume 1 by Matt Fraction, art by Christian Ward
A retelling of The Odyssey in a science fiction setting with the genders of the characters swapped. It’s an idea that sounded like it could be interesting. Unfortunately, the writing is weird, presumably trying to sound like The Odyssey itself but coming out as virtually incomprehensible. The artwork is colourful but looks like someone has just painted their psychedelic hallucinations. Good luck trying to work out what’s going on in any of this. As you can probably gather, I won’t be reading the second volume.

31. A Hat Full of Sky by Terry Pratchett
This is the second Tiffany Aching book in the Discworld series. I enjoyed the first one much more on rereading it, but this one is a much better book and can stand alongside Pratchett’s best works quite easily. It’s got all the hallmarks of what made his books so good, being both funny and intelligent, and with a great story. It’s one of his books aimed at younger readers but doesn’t suffer at all from that and doesn’t talk down to the reader so can be enjoyed by anyone. The Nac Mac Feegle are great as always, Tiffany is a brilliant character and is even better here than in the first book. Later on Granny Weatherwax enters the story as a major character, which is always great, and I think she’s possibly the best character he ever wrote. I loved every bit of it. Now I’m looking forward to going onto the remaining three Tiffany books, which I’ve never read before.

32. My Lady Ludlow by Elizabeth Gaskell
As the title suggests, this follows the character of Lady Ludlow, told from the perspective of an old woman remembering her time as a young woman and being sent to stay with her. There are various characters involved, but Lady Ludlow is the focus, and how her interactions with these characters eventually cause her to change. She’s stuck in the past, insisting on the superiority of the upper classes and opposing any education to the working class and refusing to employ any servants who can read and write. Over the course of the book, she comes around and ends up helping everyone to do all the things she initially objected to. It’s well written and I enjoyed the book overall. There was a lengthy section where Lady Ludlow tells a story about the French Revolution, which she blames on the education of the lower classes, and her personal connection to the events, and while this is important to the characterisation it did go on a bit too long for me and I didn’t find it very interesting. The rest of it I liked a lot though. Not my favourite of the Gaskell books I’ve read, but still good and I look forward to reading her longer novels soon.

33. Welcome to Night Vale by Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor
This is a gripping book. From the moment I started it to the end of the very last page I just couldn’t put it down. I mean, I tried, but no matter what I did with it, a few seconds later it would be back in my hand again.

Welcome to Night Vale does a good job of adapting the sort of strange surreal humour of the podcast into novel form, while expanding on it to suit the format. It’s a proper novel with good characters, even if those characters do live in a town where normal isn’t normal. It’s often very funny, often creepy, often both at the same time, and yet also manages to be quite philosophical too and has a great use of language. I enjoyed it just as much as I enjoy the podcast.

The best way to get a copy of the book is to wait until it appears in your hand one day unbidden. In that respect, it’s like any other book. If you decide to get it from the library instead, remember to take all necessary equipment, and for your safety and that of others, do not approach the librarians.

Great review !

>46 bryanoz: Thanks! It was a great book.

34. The Ballad of Halo Jones by Alan Moore, art by Ian Gibson
This is one of Alan Moore’s mid-80s works for 2000AD. It was quite a departure from the sort of things that comic usually printed. Halo Jones is an ordinary young woman living in The Hoop, a ghetto where the poor and unemployed are consigned, who decides to escape her life there. She’s not a galaxy saving hero, she’s simple someone getting constantly trying to improve her life, and carrying on despite the constant hardships and tragedies she endures. It’s also unusual in that all the major characters are women, with little to no talk about romance. Nice to see a comic from this era that so easily passes the Bechdel test.

The work is split into three books, each made up of five page chapters due to the instalments it was originally printed in within 2000AD. At the start of the book, it is a bit overloaded with Moore’s invented futuristic slang, but that soon settles down within a few chapters, and the story just keeps getting better. The third book is the peak where she joins the army and ends up in a war involving interesting time dilation features, but ultimately it’s a satirical anti-war story and it works particularly well. The story overall has humour but also some powerful emotional moments too, and can get quite dark at times. The artwork by Ian Gibson is quite detailed black and white artwork, a little cluttered at times, though mostly good. Apparently this is partly because it has been shrunk slightly though to fit the books format compared to the original comics. It’s a shame that there are only three books, as it was originally supposed to go on for nine but was stopped due to some rights dispute between the authors and publishers. It’s unlikely that Moore is going to go back to writing this now after all this time, and considering Gibson’s way of furthering the character recently seems to be in drawing and selling topless art of the character, perhaps it’s better left as it is. It’s a good read, and by the end approaching the quality of Alan Moore’s best works.

35. Ozma of Oz by L. Frank Baum
The third Oz book, and I think I found it even more enjoyable than the first one. I can’t say whether that’s because it’s better or because the story wasn’t as familiar. Lots of fun characters including a talking hen and a clockwork man, and an entertaining plot involving the Nome King. At some point I’ll go back and fill in the gap by reading the second book, but it wasn’t necessary to enjoy this one anyway. A fun read and I look forward to more.

36. The Hours by Michael Cunningham
I thought I’d read this now while at least some of Mrs Dalloway is still in my mind. The Hours is a short novel that alternates between three stories about three different women. One is Virginia Woolf in the process of writing Mrs Dalloway, another is a woman reading that book shortly after the Second World War, and the third is a woman in 2001 who’s been nicknamed Mrs Dalloway and basically having a corresponding story. It took a while to get going for me but after the first couple of chapters I found it starting to get quite readable. The writing is good, but I don’t really have much to say about it. It was enjoyable enough, though not something that’s likely to stick with me much. As with the book this is based on, ultimately nothing really happens, and the one event that does happen is the same one event that happened in Mrs Dalloway. I guess stream of consciousness just isn’t something that works for me.

37. The Boy Who Would Be Shakespeare: A Tale of Forgery and Folly by Doug Stewart
An interesting non-fiction book about William Henry Ireland, a 19 year old who started forging Shakespearian documents in the late 18th Century. It’s a story of escalating deceptions, with an initial forgery of a deed signed by Shakespeare intended to please his antiquarian father turning into huge numbers of forged documents of all types including initial drafts of his plays, and culminating in a brand new play called Vortigern and Rowena presented as Shakespeare’s lost masterpiece and staged at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane in London.

It’s an entertaining and amusing account, and Doug Stewart writes it well. As well as covering the story of the forged documents, he also talks about the culture that was starting to worship Shakespeare at the end of the 18th Century which allowed the forgeries to be accepted by huge numbers of people, many quite famous, despite them being full of errors. He forged documents that said exactly what people hoped they would, and they were so excited at having found them that they didn’t want to question them, even as every time something questionable was pointed out, another document would miraculously appear within days to explain it away. The account of the performance of the play, which was the final nail in the coffin for the forgeries, is often funny. I enjoyed reading the book and it was an interesting piece of history that I didn’t know about before.

38. The Trouble with Women by Jacky Fleming
“In the Older Days there were no women which is why you don’t come across them in history lessons at school. There were men and quite a few of them were Geniuses.”

A short satirical illustrated book about women in history and how they’re treated in history books. Both the text and the drawings are funny and I got a few laughs from it. Enjoyable and written with a sharp wit but with a real message too, one which should be obvious these days but that I fear is still needed anyway.

40. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
This is one of those books I’ve been meaning to read for a long time. I saw an excellent stage version last year, so that pushed it up the list, and I’m glad I finally got to it. It has similarities to other dystopian fiction, but it feels quite different to most of them overall. It was very readable and still felt quite fresh and relevant. It’s also different in having the “savage reservations” where people have been left alone and isolated because it would be too difficult to “civilize” them. The savage society is a sort of opposite to the main society, but that’s far from perfect either. There’s lots of stuff in this book that I’ve noticed being used in other fiction later, such as drugs being used to keep the population happy and a population being grown in labs and conditioned from childhood to behave in certain ways. I’m glad I finally read it, and I found it to be a really good, thought provoking read.

42. Funny Science Fiction edited by Alex Shvartsman
Well, that title doesn’t try to hide what the book is about. This is an anthology of humorous science fiction stories by different authors. The majority of them are fun, and while they vary in how comical they are, they’re all readable. The opening story, Observation Post by Mike Resnick, was a favourite, where an alien race analysing broadcasts from Earth to see whether they should invade mistakes films and TV dramas for factual documentaries and come to the conclusion that we’d be unbeatable. It was told in the form of reports about what had been seen, and I enjoy that format. I also really liked the closing story, Troublesolving by Tim Pratt, which involved time travel in a fun and unusual way, and Flying on My Hatred of My Neighbour’s Dog by Shaenon K. Garrity, where they’ve discovered a way to generate electricity via people with a talent for hating things. (Garrity also wrote the Narbonic comic, which I’m also reading right now and is brilliant.) There’s nothing especially deep or any complex stories or characters involved, but there doesn’t always need to be in this sort of thing. Sometimes it’s nice to just read something that’s funny and entertaining, and this fit that requirement.

#54 Thanks for the review valkyrdeath, sounds good, shame mylocal library doesn't have it...

>55 bryanoz: I got it from the Kindle Lending Library. It makes a change to actually find a book on there that I was interested in reading for once!

43. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
The classic semi-autobiographical novel about a young woman’s descent into depression. I thought that it would be a tough read and full of angst, but it’s actually a really easy book to read. I really liked the writing style and it just raced along, and there was a lot of humour despite the bleak subject matter. Esther, the narrator of the book, is a believable character, not always completely likeable and with some annoying opinions at times, but then so are most of us at that age I expect. Her gradually worsening depression is convincing, as would be expected since Plath based it on her own experiences. There are some brilliantly written phrases and bits I could really identify with. I mostly enjoyed the book and I’m glad I did read it in the end.

44. Mister Monday by Garth Nix
The first book in the Keys to the Kingdom series, about an asthmatic schoolboy who gets caught up in strange events as a plague hits the people around him. It’s fast paced and gets going right from the start and never lets up, and it’s got a really imaginative world that’s revealed efficiently through the writing without needs for lots of exposition slowing things down. It also has lots of fun characters and a good plot. If it had been around when I was a kid I’m pretty sure it would have been amongst my favourite books, but it’s a great read as an adult too and I look forward to going through the rest of the series. I’ve already started on the second one.

39. Narbonic Vol. 3 by Shaenon K. Garrity
41. Narbonic Vol. 4 by Shaenon K. Garrity
45. Narbonic Vol. 5 by Shaenon K. Garrity
46. Narbonic Vol. 6 by Shaenon K. Garrity
These four volumes cover up to the end of the six and a half year run of the Narbonic webcomic. It follows mad scientist Helen Narbon, her evil intern Mell, technician Dave and a gerbil called Artie whose intelligence was boosted to genius level. The first two volumes were great but the series just keeps getting better as it goes along. It’s impressive how, when all the daily strips are put together like this, it reads just like a graphic novel with a proper storyline, yet due to its origin they also work as individual strips and you get a punchline at least once every four panels. It’s also impressive just how forward Garrity had the whole storyline planned out, and you can look back and see foreshadowing throughout the run, (the ending was foreshadowed over four years before she got there!) yet there’s a lot of surprises along the way. The final year is amazing, still often very funny but also with some really powerful moments too and some really great strips. The whole thing is a great read and I now miss not having any more of it to go through.

47. Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain by David Eagleman
An interesting, well written and easy to read book about neuroscience, looking at how small a part consciousness plays in the workings of the brain and how much is going on below the surface without our awareness. It’s fascinating stuff and raises questions about how much control we have over what we do. He addresses that side of things in the last couple of chapters, which were interesting but felt a bit out of keeping with the more factual earlier chapters as he starts expounding at length his theories about how a future version of the justice system could work taking the workings of the individual criminal’s brain into consideration in the sentencing. It could get a bit repetitive in this section. Overall it was a really good and well worth reading for anyone with an interest in how the brain works.

48. Travel Light by Naomi Mitchison
This was quite a fun short historic fantasy read. It’s mostly based around Norse mythology, but pulls in other mythological and fantasy elements too. It’s also a surprisingly varied book for its short length, and goes through many changes of direction. It follows a character called Halla, starting from her childhood as she’s abandoned as a baby by her stepmother by saved by her nurse who takes on the form of a bear. She’s then raised first by the bears and then by dragons, before setting off on various travels with humans. As a dragon, she’s brought up to hate all heroes, so I guess she’s literally an anti-hero. There are some satirical elements and some subtle feminist moments in it, and it all feels like a fun modern fable.

I got this book in a bundle and had never heard of Naomi Mitchison before. She sounds a fascinating person, living to the age of 101 and having written over 70 books spanning multiple genres of fiction and non-fiction, and at various times in her life helped socialist refugees escape Austria in the 1930s, was a political activist, feminist and campaigner for birth control, was friends with Tolkien and proofread Lord of the Rings, received a CBE and became advisor and honorary mother to the Bakgatla tribe in Botswana. I find it amazing that someone like this is practically forgotten these days and that I’d never heard anything about her before.

49. Grim Tuesday by Garth Nix
This is the second book of the Keys to the Kingdom series, picking up right where Mister Monday left off. No sooner as Arthur got back to his home then he’s pulled back to the House again to defeat Tuesday, who is trying to use a legal loophole to take control. Again, the world building is great and the plot is fast moving and entertaining. The characters are good too, and Arthur is a reluctant hero, getting dragged into these things and just wanting to get back home rather than acting like all the danger is fun. I’m enjoying this series a lot so far.

50. A Dying Light in Corduba by Lindsey Davis
The next book in the Falco series, and this time he leaves ancient Rome again and is off travelling to Spain, this time investigating a potential price fixing scheme for olive oil that seems to be linked into a murder and attempted murder back in Rome. Helena is soon to give birth and goes along with him to escape all the relatives trying to tell her what to do. It’s another entertaining story in the historical mystery series and gives a glimpse of another area of the Roman Empire. I didn’t think the actual mystery aspect was quite as good as in the last few books, though it introduces a new spy character that I feel will be turning up again. It’s still a really fun and enjoyable read thanks to the characters and their interactions and is well worth reading as with the rest of the series.

51. The Book of Sand by Jorge Luis Borges
A collection of thirteen short stories, some of Borges’ last works. I didn’t think much of it in general. Most of the stories didn’t really seem to go anywhere. This was true of some of the stories in the previous collection I read, but in that case, each one at least had a fascinating idea behind it that made me enjoy reading them anyway, and some of them had proper plots. In this one, I just didn’t see the point of most of them. The title story, the last in the book, features a book with an infinite number of pages, and was the only one I really found memorable at all. Apparently Borges thought this was his best book though. I certainly preferred Fictions.

52. Nimona by Noelle Stevenson
Originally published online as a webcomic and now collected into book form, Nimona tells the story of a shape shifting girl who becomes sidekick to the mad scientist supervillain Lord Ballister Blackheart. It’s set in an interesting fantasy world that’s a combination of traditional medieval style fantasy mixed in with modern and futuristic elements. The book is often very funny, but it’s a great story too, and while at the start it just seems like a light hearted fantasy spoof, it ends up having quite a few emotional moments. Things in the world aren’t what they first seem, and ultimately there may be reasons you might actually end up wanting the villain to win anyway. As with Stevenson’s later Lumberjanes comics, this ends up being a tale of friendship. This one doesn’t feel like it written to be aimed specifically at kids, though it’s certainly suitable for them. (The book itself seems to be marketed to kids, but that’s a different matter.) Anyway, I loved this book and found it much more impressive than I was expecting. One of the best one off graphic novels I’ve read recently.

53. Funny Fantasy edited by Alex Shvartsman
A follow on volume from Funny Science Fiction, but this time featuring comic fantasy stories, which I’m sure no-one could guess from the title. Again, they’re all readable and mostly fun, though I didn’t like it overall as much as the science fiction one. Despite that, there are some good stories here. Librarians in the Branch Library of Babel is another story from Shaenon K. Garrity (who seems to be turning up on my thread a lot recently) and is based on Borges’ famous The Library of Babel and I feel it managed to be every bit as clever as that story while having the bonus of being funny too. That one was my favourite this time, but another highlight was The Best Little Cleaning Robot in All of Faerie by Susan Jane Bigelow, which brought fairies into a science fiction settings (and then science fiction characters into the fantasy setting) in an entertaining way. The other stories are enjoyable enough reading, not especially memorable but a nice amusing way to pass some time anyway.

54. Double Cross: The True Story of the D-Day Spies by Ben Macintyre
Ben Macintyre’s Agent Zigzag was one of my favourite non-fiction books, so I was looking forward to reading this. While not quite as enjoyable as that one, this was still a great read. This book tells the story of some of the other double agents working for the British during WWII and the deceptions they carried out to mislead the Germans, ultimately all coming together to mislead them regarding the D-Day invasion. It’s another story full of adventure and many eccentric characters ranging from a Spanish chicken farmer to a German anglophile who was friends with P.G. Wodehouse to a French journalist who almost derailed the whole spy network due to her obsession with her pet dog. There’s a lot of humour in the book, though there’s some darker events too. It can get a bit confusing with the huge number of people involved, especially as many of which have their real names, an agent codename given to them by the Germans and then yet another codename given to them by the British for their double agent work. The author handles this well though and I generally knew who he was talking about, and while it was overwhelming at times, given the material it’s not really something that can be changed, and all of these people have stories that are worth being told. Another good book that I’d certainly recommend, though if you were only going to read one of Ben Macintyre’s books about WWII spies then I’d go for Agent Zigzag first, which is one of the most entertaining spy stories I’ve ever read, real or fictional.

55. The Mammoth Book of Perfect Crimes & Impossible Mysteries edited by Mike Ashley
This is a big collection of locked room mysteries and other crimes that initially seem to have been committed in impossible circumstances. It’s got a pleasing range of dates for the material, with the oldest story being from 1910 while the newest ones were from 2006, the year the book was released. According to the introductions, Mike Ashley appears to have gone to a lot of work to dig out a lot of more obscure stories amongst these, a few of them never having been published since their original appearance in old magazines. They also span a lot of crimes, locations and time periods, from historical mysteries to ones set in the present day. It’s a well-chosen collection. There are some clever concepts here, especially in Duel of Shadows by Vincent Cornier, an ingenious where a bullet fired from a gun in 1710 and hits a man over 200 years later. It’s a book I’ve been reading gradually over a long period, since I think it’s the best way for this sort of story. Most of the stories were enjoyable enough, though they’re not all brilliant, and the odd one had a completely absurd solution, but I think there’s enough here to be worthwhile to anyone who enjoys these sorts of mysteries.

56. Drowned Wednesday by Garth Nix
The third book in the Keys to the Kingdom series, again following right on from the previous one, and this time it’s a maritime adventure, complete with pirates. This one was a lot of fun, again set in the same wonderful and imaginative fantasy world but with a different feel to it yet again. The new characters that are introduced are great, and Arthur seems to have resigned himself to having to carry on with the adventures, though he still really just wants to go home. Loving this series, and so it’s on to Thursday.

57. The Marvelous Land of Oz by L. Frank Baum
Going slightly out of sequence, this is the second Oz book, as I read the third one earlier this year and have gone back to fill in the gap. Dorothy doesn’t appear in this one at all, and instead we follow a boy called Tip on his journey through Oz. It has a bunch of new strange characters along with the Tin Woodman and the Scarecrow from the original book. It’s a fun book again, though not quite as good as Ozma of Oz was. The plot involves a revolt where Scarecrow is overthrown by an army of women who think men have been running things for too long. The gender clichés here are a bit cringeworthy which is the main annoying feature for the book. The women want to take over so they can wear all the jewels and use the money to buy dresses, and the heroes escape by releasing mice near them which cause them all to run away. It’s strange though, since in general it’s noticeable that most of the strongest characters in Oz are the women. Anyway, it was a fun book overall.

58. Bitch Planet Book 1 by Kelly Sue DeConnick, art by Valentine De Landro
I wasn’t sure quite what to expect from this but thought I’d give it a go. This volume collects the first five issues of the Bitch Planet ongoing series. Framed as a spoof of 70s prison exploitation films, it’s set in a future where all women guilty of crimes, mainly that of being “non-compliant”, get sent off to a prison planet, unofficially known by the book’s title. It took a couple of issues to get going, but it became quite good, and there’s some great moments in it, with a diverse group of women at the heart of the story. I enjoyed it, and would read the next volume if I had easy access to it, though I wouldn’t go out of my way trying to get hold of it.

59. Human Voices by Penelope Fitzgerald
A short novel set at the BBC during the blitz in WWII. It’s an interesting book, and as Penelope Fitzgerald worked at the BBC at that time, I’m not sure how much fact is mixed in with the fiction there. I’m also not really sure what to think of it. I neither loved it nor hated it. I think it picked up for me about half way through and by the end of it I was left feeling there was more to the book than I’d first realised, but it mostly didn’t pull me in too much. It didn’t have much in the way of an overarching plot, mostly it was a series of events, and there are some funny moments in there. It was hard to really get to know the characters though, especially given the one strange irritation of the book. It constantly uses acronyms throughout the book as if she expects the readers to all have worked at the BBC and know what it all means. Often when talking about a character they’ll be referred to by the acronym of their job role rather than their name, so that many times I wasn’t actually sure which of the characters was actually being referred to, which I feel is a pretty significant problem. It was mostly well written and had some nice touches and was perfectly readable despite the flaws, but it’s not something I think will really stick with me.

60. Sir Thursday by Garth Nix
Book four of the Keys to the Kingdom series. I love the fact that every one of these books has a completely different feel while still being a continuation of the ongoing story. This time Arthur is drafted into Sir Thursday’s denizen army while Leaf tries to deal with things going on in their normal world. I like that the normal world isn’t quite our world too. Still a great series.

61. Rat Queens Volume 1: Sass and Sorcery by Kurtis J. Wiebe, art by Roc Upchurch
The first volume of an ongoing series of comics, collecting the first five issues. It’s set in a fantasy world and is clearly inspired by Dungeons and Dragons with the adventuring parties, and the characters have modern attitudes and talk in modern style language (with plenty of swearing). It’s funny and an enjoyable read, though it does feel like the story is only just getting going in this volume.

62. Under an English Heaven by Donald E. Westlake
A rare non-fiction book from Westlake, this book relates the events leading up to and following the British invasion of Anguilla in the 60s. It was a perfect subject matter for him, since it has all the hallmarks of a farce. Anguilla wanted to be free from St Kitts rule but still to be a British territory, but the British, though a series of blunders and a general lack of interest, continuously misread the situation, culminating in a large scale armed invasion of the island only to find it populated by baffled unarmed civilians. Scenes were the British come in the quell a rebellion only to find the rebels are flying the Union Jack and singing God Save the Queen are like something from an old Ealing comedy. Westlake writes with all the humour you’d expect from him, and it’s full of his wonderful way of phrasing things. It’s also really interesting, and a subject that isn’t really talked about, to the point that I wasn’t even aware it had happened previously. (Westlake does talk in an introduction about a British journalist who helped him who had also written a book about the incident, which had suddenly at the last minute been cancelled from going to print. The British don’t like to advertise what a bunch of bumbling idiots most of us are, though clearly we can’t hide it very well right now given current events.) The book also has one of my favourite dedications ever: To anybody anywhere who has ever believed anything that any Government ever said about anything…

63. The Embassy of Cambodia by Zadie Smith
This is a very short book, only 69 pages in fairly large type. It’s not really focused on plot, but concerns Fatou, an immigrant from the Ivory Coast working as a servant for a family, but with her supposed pay being withheld for accommodation and food that is provided. She passes The Embassy of Cambodia regularly on her way to go swimming with forgotten guest passes she’s found in the house of the family she works for, the only place she can go to do anything without money of her own. It’s a well written story, though it felt a bit too short and didn’t have a huge amount of impact. I’m happy to have read it, but it wasn’t especially memorable.

64. The Princess Bride by William Goldman
William Goldman’s abridged version of the Florinese classic by S. Morgenstern. That’s how it’s presented anyway. I loved this book. The main swashbuckling storyline is full of adventure and is very funny. It’s full of brilliant scenes, including probably the best sword fighting scene I’ve ever read in a book and a very funny battle of wits. The framing around it with the introduction by the author about his childhood and how he became attached to the book and ended up abridging it, and his regular interruptions of the story to comment on things and point out what he’s cut out, all added another level to the story. I really like things that blend fact and fiction in that way, and he holds up the concept of this being an abridgement of another author’s work even into the new additions for the 25th anniversary edition where he talks about his attempts to abridge the sequel being thwarted because Morgenstern’s estate decided they wanted Stephen King to do it instead. And when he talks about having cut out long dull irrelevant sections from the book, I get the impression Morgenstern may have been based on Victor Hugo from my experience with Les Miserables.

Now I really need to see the film again, since I’ve only seen it once many years ago and I feel I’d like it much more now.

65. Feeling Sorry for Celia by Jaclyn Moriarty
This is an extremely funny book written in the form of letters between friends and notes left on fridge doors and the like. It follows Elizabeth Clarry as she reluctantly starts writing to a girl from another school thanks to her English teacher, and charts their growing friendship as she deals with problems with her other friend Celia and with her family. The letters are all extremely funny and the notes between her and her mother are hilarious. All the characters are entertaining. The book deals with some serious issues too and handles them really well, but it was never too long before something else to make me laugh. A really enjoyable read and I definitely want to try and get hold of her next book now.

66. The Facts in the Case of the Departure of Miss Finch by Neil Gaiman, art by Michael Zulli
I thought this title sounded familiar but I knew I hadn’t read the book. It didn’t take me long into reading it to realise that it’s an adaptation of one of Gaiman’s short stories into comic form, adapted by letterer Todd Klein. Fortunately, it was a good story, featuring a rather odd circus that starts off as rather disappointing but culminates in strange events. It’s framed around Gaiman and two of his friends going there with a woman who wasn’t called Miss Finch (and I never realised from reading the short story, despite the hints, that the friends were Jonathan Ross and Jane Goldman) and now telling the story of what happened to her. It’s an atmospheric story, but sadly I don’t think the adaptation to a comic was either necessary or particularly successful. The art work isn’t bad, but I feel it’s the sort of story where it was a lot better to leave things to the imagination than to show pictures. It wasn’t bad, but the original story was much better. I rarely see the point of adapting prose stories into graphic novel form though, other than to cash in with a popular author’s name on a new book.

67. Lady Friday by Garth Nix
The fifth book in the series and it continues to be good. Arthur seems to be getting used to his situation but is still making mistakes. Nix manages to keep things fresh and introduces new elements even five books in. Just two more to go.

68. Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs
The concept as I see it: A creepy woman has convinced a bunch of children that just because they are different they should be kept isolated away from everyone else and live forever in one location, claiming it’s for their own good. She also then keeps them in a time loop so they keep looking like children even though by this point they’re adults in their 80s, a fact that she ignores and continues to treat them like children. An 88 year old woman promptly starts to seduce the 16 year old grandson of her former lover the first time she meets him. A man with the power to bring things to life explains that it’s fine for him to torture those things, because they wouldn’t be alive without him so he can do what he wants to them, an explanation which is apparently deemed perfectly acceptable.

Yeah, I didn’t really like anyone in this book.

I thought this was an ok read but nothing spectacular. I can cope without much plot if the characters are really good, and I can cope without strong characters if there’s a really interesting plot, but this didn’t seem to have either. It was readable though but it doesn’t inspire me to read any more. Apparently the author had originally planned to do a book showing his collection of interesting old photos, and I think I’d probably have preferred that. I don’t think the photos added anything to the plot in this book, but I really liked some of them as intriguing pictures.

69. The Heart of Thomas by Moto Hagio
This is a manga from the 70s that was apparently only recently translated into English. I thought I’d give it a go since I’d enjoyed the author’s collection of shorter works in A Drunken Dream when I read it last year. This one is a fairly lengthy book set in a boys boarding school in Germany. It starts with a boy named Thomas committing suicide and leaving a note behind for another boy named Juli, who he’d loved but had been rejected by. Shortly after, another boy who looks a lot like Thomas joins the school, and the book follows the relationship between him and Juli and various other students. The characters are fairly complex and you learn about their pasts over the course of the book, often only really understanding their behaviour towards the end. I found it got better as it went along, but found the plot could feel a bit muddled and sometimes inconsistent, especially earlier on. I’m not sure if that’s from the original or if it’s a translation issue. The art was ok, but I found that some of the characters looked too similar and I would get them mixed up, which didn’t help with the confusion. Apparently it was a very influential in manga terms, though I’ve barely ever read any so don’t really know the specifics of that. It wasn’t a bad read and there were some good moments in the latter part of the book, but I didn’t love it. Though I guess love stories aren’t really my thing in general anyway.

70. Agnes Grey by Anne Bronte
The first of the two novels written by Anne Bronte, this tells the story of Agnes as she decides to become a governess due to her family struggling financially. It’s semi-autobiographical, since apparently Agnes’s experiences of working for the two families in this book are taken almost directly from her own experience as a governess. The first family in particular is truly awful, but there’s some humour in the narration which I liked. The book was very well written and I enjoyed it overall. I’m hoping to go ahead and read The Tenant of Wildfell Hall at some point soon.

71. Hinges Book One: Clockwork City by Meredith McClaren
72. Hinges Book Two: Paper Tigers by Meredith McClaren
This is the first two volumes of the Hinges webcomic. I absolutely love the artwork in this. The pictures are really well drawn and detailed without being cluttered. It’s important, because they tell most of the story, as there’s very little dialogue, especially in the first book. It’s mysterious and unusual, and doesn’t explain anything to you, leaving you to pick up the details of the world and what is happening as it goes on. I enjoyed them both and am looking forward to the next one.

73. Superior Saturday by Garth Nix
Book six out of seven, so approaching the end of the Keys to the Kingdom series now. Another good book, less of a standalone story this time, it ends in a real cliffhanger, so I’m glad all the books are already out and I can go straight onto the last one.

74. The Red Virgin and the Vision of Utopia by Mary M. Talbot and Bryan Talbot
The third collaborative work between Mary and Bryan Talbot, and again it’s a work of graphical non-fiction. This one tells the story of the life of French anarchist Louise Michel, focusing mostly on her time in the Paris Commune and her subsequent deportation to New Caledonia where she befriended the local population and then supported them in their rebellion against the French colonial authorities. It’s framed with a conversation being held with Charlotte Perkins Gilman, who remembers talking to Michel about their shared love of utopian fiction. It’s an interesting book, especially since I hadn’t even heard of Louise Michel before, and the artwork from Bryan Talbot is up to his normal standard. As usual with these Mary Talbot books, it’s been well researched and there are fairly extensive notes at the back giving further historical information and references. It’s a good follow up to their previous book about suffragettes, and I possibly enjoyed it even more through not being familiar with the subject matter already.

75. Enough Rope by Dorothy Parker
76. Sunset Gun by Dorothy Parker
I actually finished Enough Rope a couple of months ago but completely forgot to list it, so I’ll list it here alongside the one I’ve just finished. I enjoyed quite a few poems from these books, sometimes funny, sometimes sad, sometimes both. I’m no good at reviewing poetry and I don’t understand a lot of it so I’m not going to try to write about them any more than that.

77. Barefoot in the Park by Neil Simon
I’ve been familiar with the title of this for a long time but knew nothing about it, but I was happy to find that it’s a very funny play. I listened to an audio full cast recording which was fairly well done. I wasn’t sure about one or two of the performances but it certainly didn’t take anything away from the play itself. I need to try out some more of Neil Simon’s plays since I think I’ve enjoyed everything I have seen by him in the past.

78. Public Library and Other Stories by Ali Smith
I hadn’t heard of this book but I was drawn to it, appropriately enough, at my local library last weekend. I’m glad I was, since I loved it. It collects about a dozen stories, none of them actually called Public Library, though the author has spoken to various people about public libraries and printed their feelings about them between the stories. (It only occurs to me now, after writing that line, that the lack of a story called Public Library could be representative of the library closures that are a recurring theme in these sections.) Smith’s writing is wonderful, and she has a clear love of words and language as well as literature, and it shows through constantly in the stories. They’re not stories you read for any sort of plot. They tend to ramble, go off at tangents, and often are a blend of fact and fiction. But I found every one of them to be a joy to read, and with a lot of wordplay and humour that I really wasn’t expecting, while still being meaningful. I also thought it just kept getting better as it went along. I particularly liked the story After Life, about a man who is mistakenly reported dead by the local newspaper twice, ten years apart, with the differing reactions to the event showing the difference in culture over that decade. The closing story, And So On, that starts with the early death of a friend, was a powerful way to end the book too. This was the first Ali Smith book I’ve read and now I’m really looking forward to reading more of them.

79. Female Tommies: The Frontline Women of the First World War by Elisabeth Shipton
The title is a bit misleading. Many of the women talked about in this book aren’t British and a lot of them aren’t frontline either. That doesn’t make the book any better or worse, but I think titles for non-fiction books should be related to the contents.

Anyway, this is a wide ranging book about the roles women took on during WW1, from nurses and ambulance drivers to women who joined up to fight posing as men, to the Russian Women’s Battalion of Death. It’s often a bit of a dry read but I can’t fault the information and there are some interesting people and organisations I wasn’t aware of included. It’s clearly been well researched and everything is thoroughly referenced and noted. It possibly tried to cover a bit too much territory though. I never felt like I got to know much about any of the particular people involved because there were just so many and before I could learn about one it was onto another. Also, each chapter seemed to be written as if they were separate, as when people who had been talked about in earlier chapters got mentioned in someone else’s story later on they were introduced as if we’d never heard about them before. Each chapter also ends with a few paragraphs telling you everything you’ve just read all over again, and the final chapter simply recaps the entire book in brief. It just doesn’t really flow.

That’s not to say the book is bad. As I said, the information is good, and it gives a good overview of events and could possibly be a good starting point for other more in depth reading about the individuals. I’m not sure if there’s any other books covering the same material, but I’d only really recommend this one if you’re extremely interested in the subject.

80. Universally Challenged: Quiz Contestants Say the Funniest Things by Wendy Roby
Pretty much as expected from the title, this is a collection of funny answers given on TV quiz shows. I wasn’t expecting anything too amazing, though really most of these aren’t really all that funny, mostly just being people not knowing things rather than giving answers that are actually comical, though there’s the odd laugh every few pages. I think a lot of the humour with some of the answers is with the reactions from the host and things like that which won’t come through in print too. But basically, it’s exactly the book you expect for this sort of thing.

Too new to be included in the book, but I think it’ll be a long time before anything matches this comic misunderstanding: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VvRwRuHwyTU

81. Free Food for Millionaires by Min Jin Lee
I wasn’t sure what to expect here, but to my surprise, I really enjoyed it. The book mostly follows Casey Han, a daughter of Korean immigrants, through several years of her life. It doesn’t focus exclusively on her though, and spends time on the lives of some of her friends and family along the way too. All the characters felt believable, without heroes and villains, simply people with their individual flaws and good points. One of the things I found most impressive about the book was the way it regularly switched perspective between different characters and showed things from their viewpoint, and didn’t feel judgemental towards any of them. You’d see the characters from their own viewpoint and that of the other characters but there was no overall narrator passing judgement on who was right or wrong. Changing viewpoint isn’t unique of course, but I thought it was particularly well done here. It’s very impressive considering that it’s a debut novel too. It’s a pretty long book but I was interested from beginning to end.

82. Lumberjanes Vol. 4 by Noelle Stevenson and Shannon Watters, art by Brooke Allen
Back on top form, the fourth Lumberjanes volume contains one four-part story that reveals more of the history behind the camp and some of the characters. The plot is more involved than the previous volume, the writing is as great as ever, and Brooke Allen is thankfully back as the artist for these issues. Still a lot of fun.

83. The Man Who Was Thursday by G. K. Chesterton
For a classic philosophical/theological novel, this has above the average number of high speed elephant and hot air balloon chases. I found this to be quite a fun read for the most part. There were some great funny moments in it, though the escalating nature of the story became quite easy to predict after a while. I can also see that it most likely had an influence on at least on particular Discworld novel too. I thought it sadly fell apart a bit towards the end when it started on the religious themes and I wasn’t quite sure what was going on at the conclusion. Perhaps nothing really was aside from the book’s subtitle, “A Nightmare”. It was quite enjoyable to read but I would have liked more of a conclusion.

84. Lord Sunday by Garth Nix
The final book in the Keys to the Kingdom series, and it’s a great conclusion. It’s been an original series throughout, and Nix never chooses the clichéd way to do things. Everything is wrapped up well and the ending has plenty of surprises but it completely appropriate. Definitely one of the more fun fantasy series I’ve read, and I’m looking forward to reading some more of Garth Nix’s books.

85. William Shakespeare’s Star Wars: Verily, A New Hope by Ian Doescher
This is a fun little book that retells the first Star Wars film in the form of a Shakespeare play. More than just trying to make the language old fashioned, it’s been written in full iambic pentameter, and a lot of work has clearly been put into it. It references famous lines from Shakespeare’s plays at various points of the story, as well as changing famous Star Wars lines into suitably Shakespearian dialogue. They even give inner monologues to the characters, although really I don’t think R2D2 should have any English language speeches, even as inner monologues. It was quite a funny read, and it’s even better on the full cast audiobook, where they do a good job of sounding like the original actors. I’d love to see this on stage.

86. Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in Space by Mary Roach
I found this to be a really fascinating read. Mary Roach looks at the details of space travel that don’t generally get discussed, the normal day to day tasks that suddenly become complicated when they’re performed in space. It has chapters ranging from the effects of being in zero gravity and the problems of motion sickness it causes to details of food arrangements and ultimately right down to the problems of toilet facilities in an environment with no gravity. As usual with Roach, it’s not only interesting and unusual but also very funny too. She makes everything entertaining and the book is also full of details of conversations she had with people involved in space exploration. I loved the book. I need to try to get to her other books fairly soon.

87. No Mercy Vol. 1 by Alex de Campi, art by Carla Speed McNeil
Another random dive into the graphic novels I’ve obtained from bundles. It follows a group of US teenagers who visit Central America, where their bus goes over a cliff and they find themselves having to try to survive alone in the desert. The characters are all one dimensional stereotypes, at this point at least, and they’re virtually all unlikeable, though I think that’s intentional. Possibly because they’re horrible and constantly do unbelievably stupid things then it’s supposed to make it less upsetting when awful things start happening to them. It got a bit more interesting as it went on, but there was nothing that really grabbed me in it. At the start especially it also seemed to be trying too hard to feel current, full of technology references and people thinking in emojis. I always think this is a sign that a book is going to date badly very quickly. Mentioning mobiles phones and computers in general is one thing, but having characters mentioning Instagram filters and talking in Twitter hashtags seems a good way to ensure it’ll be virtually unreadable in a few years time when everything has changed. Anyway, the book was readable but didn’t grab me and I doubt I’ll move on to the next issue.

And after writing that I’ve found an article where the author is talking about this book and saying that the key to writing teenagers is that very few people are stereotypes. I’m not sure why they can feel like such blatant attempts to represent a particular type of person without that being intentional, but I guess it isn’t.

88. The Martian Way and Other Stories by Isaac Asimov
Finally continuing my chronological Asimov reading. The Martian Way collects four stories, two short stories in between two longer ones. It opens with the title story, which has a well realised setting. Mars has been colonised but they still rely on Earth to get supplies for many things, especially water. It deals with the political situation as an Earth politician starts to gain support for his campaign against sending things to Mars. (The politician was an attack on Joseph McCarthy and apparently Asimov was quite disappointed not to get any reaction over that.) The solution to the problem in the end is entertaining as they beat the manipulative politician through ingenuity. I found it a bit uncomfortable that part of the story revolves around obtaining water by taking away the ice from the rings of Saturn though. It’s probably believable that humanity would just decide to start destroying the rest of the solar system for resources, but it would have been nice for it to be addressed at least.

Youth is a minor short story involving visitors of a much smaller alien race getting trapped by children who just think they’re unusual animals. It’s got a twist that I saw coming right from the start, though unlike many twist stories, it actually doesn’t impact the rest of the story. It’s not bad but nothing special. Likewise, The Deep was a readable short story but not one that was particularly memorable.

Sucker Bait closes the book, and that’s the highlight for me. An expedition is sent to investigate a planet that was previously colonised about 100 years earlier but where all the inhabitants had died of a mysterious illness without any known cause. It has an interesting group of characters in the scientists sent to investigate. It also has an interesting concept of a group of people having been trained up to memorise everything precisely whose role it is simply to learn about any random things they come across, with the idea being that they can make connections between completely different subjects where specialists in a particular subject would only know half the information and computers wouldn’t have the intuition to connect them. The central character is from this group, and the book deals with how different he is and how difficult it makes it for him to deal with other people. The ultimate solution of the mystery is fairly straight forward but believable. I don’t think Asimov put this story in any of his other collections either.

So there’s just one really good story in this book, and three ok ones. But the best one is also the longest and takes up almost half the book on its own, so it’s was a worthwhile read. I think this book was just slightly before he reached his peak in his non-robot short stories.

89. Not Quite What I Was Planning: Six-Word Memoirs by Writers Famous and Obscure edited by Rachel Fershleiser and Larry Smith
The subtitle pretty much tells you what you’re getting with this book. Inspired by the famous six word story supposedly written by Hemingway (For Sale: Baby shoes, never worn), Smith magazine got people to send in six words to sum up their life. They collected some of them into this book. Most of them aren’t anything special and they can be a bit samey, where a few people have said essentially the same thing. Occasionally, at their best, they show the power of words and how much can be said in such a short sentence, implying an entire story in that one line. Sometimes they’re sad, often they’re funny. It’s nothing too spectacular but it was fun enough for a quick read.

90. Wet Moon Vol. 1: Feeble Wanderings by Sophie Campbell
Another delve into a random graphic novel. This is the first volume in an ongoing series of books, though a very irregularly spaced one it seems, since there’s only been six so far with this one being released in 2004, the sixth in 2012 and a seventh not out yet. I struggle with the few months wait between volumes of Saga! This one didn’t do anything for me anyway. It’s a story about a group of teenage goth girls and is focused on the characters with only the vaguest hint of a plot starting up right at the end of the book. I don’t think it’s bad, and the actual art was very good, but it’s not for me. I can’t really understand the sorts of relationships in this book. I don’t understand friendships where the friends are constantly having yelling arguments with each other and insulting each other, since it just doesn’t seem like friendship to me and I don’t know why people like that would carry on hanging around with each other. I just don’t think I want to spend more time reading about that sort of lifestyle.

91. Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang by Kate Wilhelm
I found this one as part of the SF Masterworks series, one of the few in that collection that I hadn’t already heard of. Written in the 1970s, Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang is a post-apocalyptic novel where the disaster is brought about by pollution, though the specifics of exactly how aren’t covered. The main problem caused is that everyone left is infertile, and so a small community of scientists set themselves up in the Appalachian Mountains investigating cloning as the only means to continue the human race. But the clones aren’t quite the same as other humans, and all clones created at the same time have some sort of empathic connection. The book then follows on from there for a while, before jumping forward a little to the early dystopian society created by these clones.

I thought this book had some good ideas at times, but found it a bit slow at the start. A romance in the first part felt really tacked on and didn’t seem relevant to anything, and I found it hard to get into, but I decided to keep going since it’s not a particularly long book. It was only at about the mid-point where the plot really started getting going and things started getting more interesting, and it picked up from there and ultimately had a pretty good ending. The characters and their relationships to each other become more important. Because of this, in the end, I’m happy to have read it, but it takes too long getting started to really recommend.

92. Dear Committee Members by Julie Schumacher
This is a book told as a series of letters, which is something I always find hard to resist. In this case, they’re all written by Jason Fitger, English professor at a small university, and are nearly all letters of recommendation for his various students or for other members of staff who are applying for different jobs and courses. The letters are grumpy, sarcastic and sometimes very funny. Over the course of the book, it does tell a story, as his frustration with writing these letters leads to him rambling about other things that are going on. As it progresses it becomes clear that there’s a lot more to the character than just the misanthropic grouch that he first appears on the surface. It’s mostly a comical read, though it does cover darker territory later on and has more depth than the series of funny rants the book initially seems to be. It’s not likely to be something that sticks with me for a long time, but it was a fun quick read.

93. Wintersmith by Terry Pratchett
The third book in the Tiffany Aching series, and one of the few Discworld books I hadn’t read before, leaving me only two more. Pratchett was still in great form when writing this one, and it’s got a good story and very funny writing. Tiffany is a really good character and the Feegles are as entertaining as ever. There was a brief section in an underworld featuring bogles that eat people’s memories, which makes one of the characters very angry about them and comment that taking away someone’s memories is taking away the person. It was quite sad to read knowing that it was around the time this book was being written that Pratchett would have received his Alzheimer’s diagnosis and it feels like he was writing his feelings on it into the book, before he publicly revealed anything. Anyway, it’s another brilliant Discworld book, as expected.

94. The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov translated by Hugh Aplin
This was a very odd fantasy book, but one that was a lot less tough than I was expecting. I can’t compare it to other translations, but this one at least was very easy to read. I quite enjoyed the book, and at times it did make me laugh, particularly when the cat Behemoth was around. It did feel a little disjointed at times, and only really seemed to come together into any sort of storyline about half way through. Interestingly, this copy of the book mentions that the author didn’t have time to properly edit and revise the last half of the book before his death, yet it’s the part that felt like it flowed the smoothest, despite a couple of inconsistencies. It’s not a favourite but I enjoyed it well enough.

95. The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories by Susanna Clarke
A collection of short stories framed as being by different authors from the same world as Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell. It carries on the mock 19th century writing style of the novel. The stories are fun and mostly feel like alternative fairy tales, told with a fun sense of humour behind them. Jonathan Strange appears in one of the stories, and one of them features referencing footnotes in the same way as the novel, but they’re all individual stories. I enjoyed them, though they don’t have the same depth as the novel and it’s best to take them as a separate thing without trying to compare them. Fun for anyone who is a fan of the huge novel and still wants more, but not essential reading.

96. Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson
This was really good. It’s a memoir written in free verse, split into individual poems, and perfectly readable. Woodson tells of her childhood from her birth and growing up in the middle of the Civil Rights movement. The poems are good and her story is really well told. Well worth reading.

97. Miss Lonelyhearts by Nathanael West
Well, this was a bleak read. Before I’d got to it I’d seen it referred to as a black comedy, but I’m not sure where the comedy comes in. It’s about a man who has been hired to write a newspaper advice column under the name Miss Lonelyhearts, which is also the only name he’s ever referred to by during the book. Initially not taking it seriously, he sinks into depression as he realises the genuine misery and horrible situations in the letters he’s getting. There’s pretty much every type of prejudice involved somewhere in this very short book and all the characters are horrible including Miss Lonelyhearts himself, who at one point, along with his friend, starts throwing homophobic abuse at a random old man in a bar. I didn’t really like this, or get the point of it other than to say that people are all awful. I think it’s probably aged badly too.

98. Three Hands in the Fountain by Lindsay Davis
It’s always fun to get back to another Falco mystery. The series continues to alternate between stories set in ancient Rome and ones where he goes off to another part of the world, this book being one of the former. Lindsey Davis also continues to use the series to try and write every type of crime story around, so this time we get a serial killer. The book is still often very funny, but it’s tempered with a story that’s darker than usual. Body parts, initially just hands, start to turn up in the water supply, leading to the discovery that for years someone has been killing women undetected. With a story like that, the humour eventually has to take a back seat for a while and the ending becomes quite tense. It’s well written and entertaining as usual. Not my favourite of the series, but still a good read.

99. El Deafo by Cece Bell
A graphic memoir aimed at children, but perfectly enjoyable for an adult too, or at least it was in my case. It portrays the authors childhood after going deaf at the age of 4 following an illness. She has hearing aids at home that let her hear, but she still needs to use lip reading and context to help her understand things, something she has trouble getting other people to understand. For school she has a more powerful type of hearing aid with a microphone that the teacher wears, which she discovers means she can hear the teacher wherever they go in the school. The El Deafo of the title is her own superhero alter ego she creates from this, able to hear things going on elsewhere. I really liked the art style of the book. It does a good job of portraying what the deafness was like for her as a child, and also has a good afterword that explains how every deaf person’s experience is different in how it affects them and how they treat it. I liked this book quite a lot.

100. Through the Woods by Emily Carroll
A collection of short fairy tale-like horror stories in comic format. Some are more intriguing than others, but they all have open ambiguous endings that leave things open to your own interpretation, which I like in stories of this sort. It was a quick read, and I enjoyed most of it, and some of the stories leave you thinking afterwards. The stylised art suited the stories too. Not a favourite, but a good read for anyone who likes this sort of thing, and better than a lot of the dark fairy story type books I’ve read.

101. All the Birds, Singing by Evie Wyld
The book opens with a young woman called Jake, a sheep farmer, whose sheep have been getting killed by someone or something. This story is told chronologically, but it alternates with chapters that go back through various earlier events in her life in reverse chronological order. It’s a really interesting structure and one that works very well. We get to see the consequences of events before we see what caused them, and it’s interesting the ideas that can form about what’s happened that often aren’t the case once the past is revealed. The writing is extremely good and it has a feeling of menace that runs through the whole thing, both in the ongoing storyline and in the revelations of the past. It’s not always an easy read, since it deals with some tough themes, especially abusive relationships, and the story has a few surprises near the end where it went somewhere I really wasn’t expecting. It is a compulsive read though, and I got through it very quickly as I just had to keep going. I feel this is a book I’m going to be thinking about for a while afterwards. This was Evie Wyld’s second novel, and now I need to try and get hold of her first.

102. Murder in the Generative Kitchen by Meg Pontecorvo
McConnery Ellis is on trial for murdering her husband. He’s been poisoned by a high-tech AI generative kitchen, and the trial hinges on whether she purposefully poisoned her husband or whether the kitchen AI somehow made the decision itself. This trial is quite intriguing and has a few interesting ideas. The first half of the book alternates between the trial and the experience of one of the jurors, Julio Gonzalez, and his attempts to seduce a fellow juror despite severe penalties for communicating during the trial. In this future, the jury in the courtroom is represented by robots and the jurors themselves watch via a virtual reality headset while on a luxury holiday paid for by the courts. This side of the story I found less successful. It makes no sense at all for a court to pay for people to go on holiday and watch the trial from a luxury resort as opposed to them just watching the trial, and it’s never explained why they would go to this expense. It’s also not very interesting to watch a man for some reason being obsessed with someone he’s only seen in passing and doesn’t even know.

The second half of the short book becomes a sort of science fiction Twelve Angry Men, following the deliberations of the jury. Here the science fiction elements make a bit more sense. Having the jury meet in virtual reality with generic robot representations to prevent any bias does have some logic to it, and the discussions are well done. For me, it fell apart a bit at the ending though. Potential spoiler here, but I think it’s more of a warning than a spoiler to say there’s no resolution to the trial. The jury reach no verdict and we never find out what happened or what verdict is reached on the retrial.

I was enjoying the book generally, but whether you’re likely to enjoy it hinges a lot of whether you can put up with not having a resolution to the trial. If you can, then this is a decent story, but I personally don’t see the point of a court room drama story that doesn’t get resolved. It’s like reading a Poirot novel and having him say “I haven’t got a clue” at the end and abandoning the case unsolved. If you feel like that then I can’t recommend it, but if you don’t mind an open ending, then by all means give it a go.

103. Spectacles by Sue Perkins
This is a memoir by the comedian Sue Perkins. I loved it. As expected, it was almost always very funny, though she does touch on sad events and regrets at times, but it’s never far from another hilarious line or comical event from her past. I generally prefer reading in print to audiobooks, but this is one of the occasions where I think the audiobook is better since she reads it herself, which enhances everything a lot, especially at times when she can’t keep from laughing herself. I already liked her but this book made me like her even more. Definitely recommended.

104. The Thing Around Your Neck by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
This is an excellent short story collection. I enjoyed every one of the twelve stories in the book. Adichie writes in a way that manages to put you into the lives of her characters almost immediately. The stories are all about Nigerian characters, though not all set in Nigeria, and they vary in tone, but are consistent in quality. Some highlights for me were On Monday of Last Week, an often humorous story of a Nigerian woman working as a babysitter for an eccentric American family, and The American Embassy, where the story of a woman queuing to request asylum at the embassy is told in flashbacks as to how she ended up there. I especially loved Jumping Monkey Hill, about an African writer’s conference run by a patronising British man. That had one of my favourite closing lines to a story. Those are some highlights, but I could list almost any story from the book there. The characters are all well developed despite having only a short space to tell the story. One of the best single author story collections I’ve read.

106. Dark Night: A True Batman Story by Paul Dini, art by Eduardo Risso
This was a very unusual graphic novel. This isn’t actually a Batman comic, and the word “true” in the subtitle is the key. Paul Dini was one of the main writers on Batman: The Animated Series (still the best Batman adaptation ever in my opinion) and this is his memoir of a brief period of time during the making of that show when he got mugged and badly beaten up and left in hospital having to have part of his skull reconstructed. The event itself is brutally captured and I can understand why in an interview I saw recently Dini said that when he first got the completed artwork for the scene he just couldn’t look at it. Most of the book is about the aftermath of the attack, his recovery both physically and mentally as he comes to terms with what happened and tries to deal with the fear. He also has to overcome a block from his ability to write Batman when all he can think of was how there wasn’t anyone there to save him. The most interesting aspect comes from how this is all represented. Dini sees the various Batman characters as the voices in his head, the villains telling him to give up and that he got what he deserved, while Batman complains about how badly he handled the situation. It’s a short book, and it can be a tough read at times, though there’s some humour in there too. It feels like a really honest account of his own thoughts during a difficult time, and it was very well done.

107. Six-Gun Snow White by Catherynne M. Valente
As the title suggests, this is a retelling of Snow White in a western setting. It turned out to be a lot less silly than it sounded. It’s beautifully written and the story is well adapted. This version is quite a dark tale with themes of racism and misogyny in the old west running through it. Snow White here is half-Crow, and there’s no prince and no dwarfs but seven tough independent outlaw women with their own town. Even considering it aside from being a fairy tale retelling, this is a really good, very well written story.

108. The Awakening and Selected Short Stories by Kate Chopin
Published at the very end of the 19th Century, The Awakening is an interesting novel about a woman struggling between her own desires and the attitudes of the time of how women were supposed to behave. The writing was very good, and the story was apparently quite controversial at the time. It feels quite modern for the time it was written. The short stories at the end were good too.

110. Everything is Teeth by Evie Wyld, art by Joe Sumner
A brief graphic memoir showing a period in Evie Wyld’s childhood where she becomes fascinated by sharks, particularly shark attacks, and imagines them lurking everywhere. The art was done as black and white cartoonish drawings except for occasional things, particularly all the sharks, which are drawn in a more realistic style. The contrast is quite effective, and the sharks looked great, though I wasn’t sure the style of the drawings was the perfect fit. It was a decent read, though nothing that really stood out. It’s interesting reading this not long after reading All the Birds, Singing though, as shark imagery turned up a few times in her writing there too.

111. Hero of the Empire: The Boer War, a Daring Escape, and the Making of Winston Churchill by Candice Millard
I loved the other two Candice Millard history books I read so I went for this one as soon as I saw it. It follows Winston Churchill’s experiences during the second Boer War, which is something I’d never really read about before. It works as a great adventure story, the main focus being his time as a prisoner of war and his subsequent escape. The writing is as good as usual for Millard. She also does a good job of showing what was going on in the war in general to frame the story without ever losing its focus. It’s also a reminder of the fact of the tens of thousands of people, mostly women and children, starved to death in British concentration camps. What a great country we were, involved in a war between two sides fighting over the rights to land that didn’t belong to either of them.

I was wary about the book before I started, even though I’d already decided to read it. Despite the way he always seems to be portrayed these days, Churchill was pretty horrendous (he believed in eugenics, thought “mental defectives” should be sterilised and sent to enforced labour camps, sent the army in against striking unions, objected to women getting the vote, etc). But he’s still a fascinating man too, and the book wasn’t really affected by any of that. It was another great book from Millard, though Destiny of the Republic is still my favourite.

105. Steed and Mrs Peel Vol. 1: A Very Civil Armageddon by Mark Waid, art by Steve Bryant and Will Sliney
109. Steed and Mrs Peel Vol. 2: The Secret History of Space by Caleb Monroe, art by Yasmin Liang
112. Steed and Mrs Peel Vol. 3: The Return of the Monster by Caleb Monroe, art by Yasmin Liang
I read the 90s comic miniseries based on 60s TV show The Avengers earlier this year, and since I had them I thought I’d go ahead and read these three volumes that made up the brief 12 issue run from 2013-2014. It contains a few separate stories across the issues, though they all link together to form an overall arc via the same villains. That’s something that never really happened in the series, where every episode was an individual story and villains would only return very occasionally, usually in a later series. The feel of it was mostly right, though the dialogue was a mixed bag, sometimes not seeming too bad and other times feeling completely out of character. It’s a shame since the characters are the most important part of the series. I think it mostly got better as it went along. The art was a mixed bag. In the first volume it often seemed a bit rushed and the characters didn’t look quite right and even seemed to vary from one page to the next. The artist for the other two volumes was much more consistent, and while I didn’t love the simplistic style I didn’t really find it too distracting and I thought it was preferable to the first one, which is probably another reason I found the later volumes better. Anyway, it wasn’t a terrible read but also wasn’t anything all that good either. Big fans of the show might want to take a look but it’s not something I’d really recommend.

113. The Gastronomical Me by M. F. K. Fisher
A memoir of the authors experiences with food throughout her life up to the point of writing in 1943. The writing was fairly good but the book didn’t really grab me. For me, it focused too much on the food. Talking about meals she’s eaten would have been fine in the context of her life, but mostly she doesn’t seem interested in talking about much else. Occasionally she does, and there are the occasional interesting moments, but mostly for me it felt like it had just dissolved into basically a big list of “and then I ate this and drank some wine, and then I ate this and drank some wine”. Especially as the book went on, the ignoring of the rest of her life became confusing, since she was talking about her husband and how much she loved him, and all of a sudden she was with some random other guy who she never explained who he was, then a few chapters later she had one line mentioning she divorced her husband, but I never really found out who that other guy was, even after he died. Sometimes a chapter would end and I would wonder what it was all about. It might not be a bad book, but it wasn’t really for me.

114. How to Be a Victorian by Ruth Goodman
A look at what daily life was like in Victorian era Britain. This was a good read and was told in an entertaining way. Historian Ruth Goodman has actually tried out most of the things she talks about in the book too so she knows what she’s talking about. The book follows the structure of an average day, with each chapter advancing, starting from getting up in the morning and ending with going to bed at night. I particularly liked that it didn’t focus just on upper class life and that she instead talked about how life was for different types of people, and also how things changed throughout the fairly length period. It covers a wide range of subjects in reasonable detail while always being an enjoyable read.

115. After the Fire, A Still Small Voice by Evie Wyld
I started October with Evie Wyld’s second novel, so now I’m stepping backwards and starting November with her first one. Thankfully I think I enjoyed this one just as much. The chapters alternate between two stories. The first tells the story of Frank as he moves to an out of the way shack and meets his new neighbours in a community where a young girl has recently gone missing. The second it set many years earlier and is about Leon growing up at his father’s cake shop and then his experiences in the Vietnam War after being conscripted. The relationship between the two stories only becomes completely clear as you read. The writing is wonderful and the author has a knack at making her characters seem like real people. Both of her novels are excellent and I’m really looking forward to seeing what she writes next.

116. The Best American Comics 2015 edited by Jonathan Lethem
A collection of the editors picks of some of the best comics of the year. I’m glad I read it as it’s good to see a selection of comics that I might not have seen otherwise, and I did add a few things to my list to look out for from it. The only thing I’d read from it already was one of the better stories from How to Be Happy by Eleanor Davis. There were some interesting excerpts from graphical biographies and memoirs and some interesting story pieces. There was also a lot of stuff that was so far into the abstract and surreal that I found it incomprehensible. There were a few works that looked great but I haven’t a clue what they were about. Pretty Smart by Andy Burkholder was two dozen panels of incoherent dense text. (“OUTSIDE TO SMOKE I WENT OUTSIDE TO SMOKE OUTSIDE WITH THE SMOKERS TO LEAN WITH THE SMOKERS TO LEAN ON A WALL AND NOT BORROW A CIGARETTE TO SMOKE TO LEAN ON A WALL AND SMOKE WITH OTHER SMOKERS SMOKING TO NOT TALK…” is about half the text from one of the shorter panels. Impossible to read to read it annoying was to impossible to read I found it.) But there was enough that I enjoyed to make the book worth reading with selections from Roz Chast, Cole Closser and Anya Ulinich being some of the highlights for me. I’ll probably read some other volumes of this if I get the chance.

117. Red Land, Black Land: Daily Life in Ancient Egypt by Barbara Mertz
This was a really good non-fiction read looking at what we know about life in ancient Egypt. It’s full of interesting information, and it makes it clear about how much of it is speculation and the evidence it’s based on. It also points out the many misconceptions that get thrown around about the era. Just as importantly, it’s also extremely funny. Mertz writes in a very conversational style and often made me laugh. I listened to an audiobook version since it was the only one I could get hold of, but it was very well done and I liked the reader. Loved the book and I look forward to trying out some of her fiction soon.

118. A Woman in Berlin by Anonymous
A really important first-hand diary account covering a two month period at the end of the Second World War starting just before the Russians reach Berlin. The anonymous account is extremely well written. It’s not the easiest read, since she goes through some really terrible things, with her and virtually every woman in the area being repeatedly raped by the invading soldiers, all while struggling to get enough food to eat. She manages to keep going through it all and somehow even keeps a sense of humour that shows through at times in the writing. It’s not something that’s going to be fun to read, but books like this are very important. Nothing can show what something was like better than something written by someone who was there.

119. Life After Life by Kate Atkinson
The idea behind this book sounded intriguing and I’ve been meaning to read it for a while, and I’m glad I finally got around to it. This story about a woman who keeps repeating her life over and over, changing each time, is really well told. She gets feeling of déjà vu that cause her to avoid things that went badly before, but she usually doesn’t know why, and it doesn’t always turn out better. For most of the book we’re just seeing different versions of events. It covers a large span of time, but a lot of the book is taken by her multiple experiences during WW2, one interestingly where she ends up living in Berlin during the war, which coincided nicely with my previous read. It’s does have a lot of depressing themes throughout the book, and of course you get to see the main character dying in a lot of different ways, but I thought it was very good and I really enjoyed it. I plan on reading some more by Kate Atkinson.

120. Anya’s Ghost by Vera Brosgol
This was a fun graphic novel with a really good art style. It follows a school girl who doesn’t fit in at school who falls down an old well in the woods and discovers a ghost, which follows her out when she is rescued. The story avoided being predictable and took some unexpected turns at times, the writing was good and the art was great. An enjoyable read and I hope to see more books from Brosgol.

121. Arcadia by Tom Stoppard
This was an interesting play set in a large country house in two time periods, switching between 1809 and the present day, or what was the present day when it was written in the 90s. We see events unfold in the scenes in the past, involving a young girl who has mathematical and scientific ideas ahead of her time, her tutor and the other inhabitants of the house. In the present, various scholars are researching different things and trying to piece together the events from the past, with varying degrees of accuracy. I listened to it in audio format first, but then read the book afterwards as the audio didn’t have any stage directions and could be confusing at times, especially towards the end when it’s switching quickly between the two eras. For a play, it does read very well as a book though. I can’t really say much about the play. It’s quite complex and hard to say what it’s about, but I liked it. And being Tom Stoppard, it does have some great comic dialogue in it (“As her tutor you have a duty to keep her in ignorance.”)

122. The Manhattan Projects Deluxe Edition Vol. 1 by Jonathan Hickman art by Nick Pitarra
This collects the first 10 issues of The Manhattan Projects. It’s an alternate history comic where the atomic bomb was just a cover for stranger science fiction type developments. It’s quite fun in a very silly way, full of conspiracy theories and ridiculous technology. It’s also full of real scientists and other historical figures, though they’re not exactly faithful representations, leading to scenes such as Albert Einstein and Richard Feynman battling robots under the control of a resurrected AI version of Franklin D. Roosevelt. It’s nothing too special, but it was a fun read and I’d read more if I get the chance.

123. A Young Doctor’s Notebook by Mikhail Bulgakov translated by Hugh Aplin
A collection of short stories, originally published separately in 1920s but all basically sequential. They follow a newly qualified Russian doctor as he moves to start working in a small village hospital. The stories are sometimes funny, but also quite graphic in terms of the procedures. Bulgakov apparently was drawing on his own experiences in the medical profession for these stories. It was a good quick read, with what seemed to be a good translation from Hugh Aplin, who also translated the version of The Master and Margarita that I read earlier in the year. I really need to see the TV series they made of this now.

124. The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut
Another great novel from Vonnegut. This was his second book, and feels much more like his later style than Player Piano did. I really enjoyed it, though as is often the case with Vonnegut, it’s hard to really describe. It’s often funny, and I wasn’t too surprised when I looked up the book and found that Adams had cited it as an influence. It’s full of science fiction elements, interstellar travel, a very unusual invasion from Mars and “chrono-synclastic infundibula”, but it’s all used in the purposes of a social satire. The writing style is pure Vonnegut, it’s funny, a bit crazy, and feels like it shouldn’t make sense and yet he manages to hold everything together without losing the reader. It’s only just behind Slaughterhouse-Five and Mother Night for me.

I’ve just been distracted from actually posting this by an entertaining video of Kurt Vonnegut talking about the shape of stories on a graph: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oP3c1h8v2ZQ

125. The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole by Sue Townsend
I read the first Adrian Mole book over two years ago with the intention of starting reading through the series again, and then somehow completely forgot about it until I recently picked up this one off my shelf. This one is just as good as the first one, and this is when the books were at their best. Adrian’s diary here is consistently funny as he struggles through another year and a bit of his childhood leading up to his final schools exams while his family life becomes more chaotic than ever. It’s interesting to read this now as Sue Townsend incorporated current events into the diaries, so we also get to see Adrian’s views on the politics of the time and things such as the Falklands War. A lot of the humour comes from the contrast between his insistence that he’s an intellectual and his complete naivety and lack of understanding at what is really going on. (After talking to his father’s “ex”-lover and realising she used the present tense when talking about their relationship, his response is “It is absolutely disgraceful. A woman of thirty not knowing the fundamentals of grammar!”) These books are always a joy to read and hopefully this time I won’t forget to go on to the next one.

126. I Shall Wear Midnight by Terry Pratchett
Another great Discworld read, the fourth in the Tiffany Aching series. This time, something is stirring up hatred against witches, and it’s causing it to be a dangerous place for both them and for anyone else people decide to take against. As ever with Pratchett, it’s a really good read, Tiffany is still amongst his best characters, and the Feegles are always fun. It’s really nice to also see the return of Eskarina Smith, who was only seen in the one book before and it always felt strange that he’d never returned to her. Another excellent book. Pratchett really was on top form right up until just before his death. And now there’s only one Discworld book that I haven’t read.

127. Descender Vol. 1 by Jeff Lemire art by Dustin Nguyen
This was a pretty good first volume collecting the first six issues of the science fiction series. It starts briefly where giant robot-like machines appear over the Earth and start attacking, and then quickly jumps ahead 10 years where a robot boy is awakening on a mining colony. In the meantime, robots have been effectively wiped out following distrust caused by the incident, and people are after the boy as he may hold the answers to just what the machines were and why they were attacking. It was reasonably well written. The artwork was done in watercolours, giving it quite a unique style, and was very effective, managing to convey beautiful large scale outdoor environments and contrasting them with stark plain corridors and other interiors. I think the art was the best thing about it and really made the book work. I enjoyed it and will hopefully get hold of the next volumes when I get the chance.

128. Art by Yasmina Reza translated by Christopher Hampton
A three actor play centring around three friends and their different reactions to a painting. One of them buys a painting that is just a white canvas with some lines of white paint on it for an extremely large sum of money, his friend is openly hostile about hating it while his other friend is in the middle trying not to offend either side. The whole thing brings out grudges and hostilities and ends up tearing the friendship apart.

I recently went to an art gallery that had an exhibit of a particular artist, and every painting in that room was just a canvas painted plain black. Having seen that, the idea of this white painting amused me and didn’t seem as unlikely as it might have done otherwise, but I don’t think it’s really representative of modern art in general as the arguing in the play initially seems to revolve around. It doesn’t matter too much though, since it’s just a launching point for a play about a friendship between three people. It gets better as it goes on for a while, and reaches some very funny bits towards the middle, before it gets a bit too unpleasant to be comical. As a drama it works reasonably well, but I find it hard to imagine a painting causing problems in a friendship in this way, though it was hard to imagine these three people being friends anyway. I suspect a lot of how the play comes across will revolve around the portrayals of the particular cast. I enjoyed it, but it’s not something I’d likely feel the need to see or to read again.

129. Lost in Yonkers by Neil Simon
Now this play I loved. It was extremely funny at times, but also rather darker than the other Neil Simon works I’ve seen and read, featuring some quite serious conversations at times. It’s set in the 1940s, where two children are left by their father to stay with their grandmother, an hard woman to live with, and their Aunt who seems to have some sort of learning disability, though it’s never specifically specified. Later, their criminal Uncle also turns up. There’s lots of brilliant funny moments as always with a Neil Simon work, but the situation is generally quite tragic too, and there’s no easy resolution to a lot of it. I’d definitely love to see this on stage, and I could easily see it being one of my favourite plays. I only found out after listening to the audio version that it won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, but I can certainly understand why.

130. Blackout by Connie Willis
This book is the first half of Connie Willis’s time travel story where historians at Oxford University go back to WW2 to see what things were like. There are several characters at different places and times during the war and the chapters switch between them until they eventually start to come together. I loved it just as much as her other books in the series, if not more. She portrays the wartime setting well and the characters are interesting. Despite the length, it’s one of those stories that just fly by as it’s hard to stop reading. It gets very tense at times and it’s clearly not a happy time, but there’s plenty of humour mixed in there too as is usually the case with Willis. There are odd points where her research has missed something, even in the parts at the beginning in Oxford before they go back in time, such as when it’s mentioned with no further explanation that it would be illegal to have a relationship with a 17 year old, but I’m sure the research would be going into the wartime setting and not into things like that. And it’s an odd future anyway, since although it’s supposed to be 2060, apparently no-one has mobile phones and everyone has extreme difficulties finding other people. And the historians somehow seem to be completely clueless about anything that didn’t happen in the precise bit of the war they’re going to visit, often not even knowing about major things that happened outside of those few weeks. Somehow none of this bothered me though since it was so entertainingly written and I just wanted to find out what was going to happen. I’m hoping to get straight onto All Clear next month to find out how the story ends.

131. Phonogram: Rue Britannia by Kieron Gillen, art by Jamie McKelvie
132. Phonogram: The Singles Club by Kieron Gillen, art by Jamie McKelvie
These are the first two collected volumes of Phonogram, a music themed comic. It’s a strange concept where phonomancers can use music in magical ways. Each volume works as a standalone with no cliff-hanger endings, so that was a nice change. It was quite well written, but I think I’m a bit outside the main target market for this. It’s mostly focused around the Britpop era and my knowledge of that is fairly limited. I was at school during that era, and under the idea that music was all rubbish based on the stuff I heard on the radio, so I didn’t get into music until later in life and avoided the stuff that I’d hated when I was a kid, so this was full of references to bands I’d never even heard of and music I didn’t know. It was still readable though, so I read both volumes since I had them. I enjoyed the second volume better than the first. The first contains one storyline across the six issues, and the artwork was in black and white. The second was in colour, which suited this style of art much better I thought, and it contains seven individual issues focusing on different characters, all on the same night as a club. They’re all separate stories but they interlink and events in one might be viewed briefly from another perspective in another story, so you understand what is going on more as you go along. It’s a clever structure and I quite enjoyed reading it. So I feel like it’s probably something I’d like more if I knew more about the era of music it’s based in, and it certainly wasn’t bad, and even had a bit of an Alan Moore-ish feel to it.

133. Not Funny Ha-Ha by Leah Hayes
Like the previous two reads, this was a random pick out of the collection of comics and graphic novels I have from various bundles, and I’m reading them without reading up on them beforehand. I think probably I’m not in the main target audience for this book, since it’s a sort of guide to abortions, helping to show what the process is like and how it works and to help guide people through who have decided to undertake it, without going into any moral judgement on the issues. It follows two women undergoing two types of abortion, and seems to be good for what it is. I might not be the person it’s aimed at, but I’m glad a book like this exists.

134. The Siege by Ismail Kadare
This was a good book and I enjoyed reading it, though having read the afterword at the end, I feel like I was also missing a lot so can’t really say a lot about it. It’s set around a 15th Century siege by the Ottoman Empire against an Albanian fortress. It’s mostly about the life in the Ottoman camp and the people there, mainly focusing on a chronicler. I missed most of the references to the time it was written due to lack of familiarity and read it as a straightforward historical story, which the author says it isn’t, but I still enjoyed it anyway.

135. Unnatural Death by Dorothy L. Sayers
The third of the Lord Peter Wimsey books. I really enjoyed reading this one. It was a lot of fun, though the main plot twist I actually saw coming from very early on for once. That doesn’t affect anything for me though, and I loved the characters, and it wasn’t really an whodunit story, but rather an investigation to work out just how they did it. There’s some racist language at one point in the story which is uncomfortable but thankfully only brief and not from the main characters, and the character referred to is portrayed sympathetically, which made it slightly easier to bear. Overall though, it’s a good read and I’m looking forward to carrying on with the series, which I intend to do much quicker this time.

136. Photograph 51 by Anna Ziegler
This play is a fictionalised account of Rosalind Franklin and her role in the discovery of the structure of DNA. It was interesting and well written, though I think how well it worked as a play would depend very much on the production. It’s a fairly straight forward telling of events, though it’s hard to say how accurate a lot of it is, and at times the characters, reliving events from some sort of afterlife, dispute how things happened between themselves. Franklin is an interesting subject for a play and definitely worthy of more attention, though she sadly died so young that we don’t have much in the way of her side of the story to go on. The play portrays her fighting the sexism of her colleagues, but also being defensive to the point of pushing away anyone who tries to be friendly, though really that may have been necessary for her to even get to her position in the first place. But that’s just the version of her from the play anyway, which admits openly that it’s a work of fiction. I enjoyed it anyway but feel it would work much better actually seeing it. I’m hoping to read more about Rosalind Franklin fairly soon though.

137. The Pirates! In an Adventure with Ahab by Gideon Defoe
The second in the Pirates! Series of books, and it’s another fun read, though it’s not quite as consistently funny or surprising as the first book was. I loved the original, but I think possibly the style is never going to work as well when repeated. It still had plenty of funny moments though and it was never boring and kept me entertained throughout its short length and I’ll probably read more at some point, though probably I wouldn’t want to read them too close together.

138. Lumberjanes Vol. 5 by various writers and artists
This volume contains the previously missed one off issue 13 and the next three part story. The first is a really fun flashback issue showing the girls arrival at the camp, with the original writer and artist, and I really enjoyed it. The second story is the point where Noelle Stevenson left as writer, but it’s not lost too much thankfully. It wasn’t quite as good as the excellent fourth volume though, but it still has some good moments in it and I feel it improved as it went along. I change of artist is much more of an issue though. Brooke Allen has left completely now and the artist from the third volume has returned. Again, the characters look nothing like they did before, the art style is completely different and just doesn’t seem to fit the series. It has a big impact as the art in the original issues was excellent and the art here often just looks strange. I think the next issues have another new artist though, so hopefully they’ll capture the style of the comics a bit better, and the writer will have had a chance to settle in m