I seem to be spending more time of late documenting the books I purchase rather than the books I actually read. And though I do – mostly – read more books each month than I purchase, and I often want to write about them… I don’t seem to be doing so as often as I once did. It’s also that time of year when I belatedly realise that my choice of reading material hasn’t prepared me at all well for awards season. While I’ve read over a dozen books published during 2013, less than half were genre novels. Admittedly, one was Ancillary Justice, the book everyone has been talking about (see here)… But I’ve also been reading fiction from the second decade of the twentieth-century right up to 2012 during the year. Plus a lot of research – on Mars for The Eye with Which The Universe Beholds Itself, and on the Mercury 13 for Then Will The Great Ocean Wash Deep Above. And I really haven’t read as much 2013 short fiction as I promised myself I would do…

Anyway, not including the books I’ve read and reviewed for SF Mistressworks, and the books I intend to review for Daughters of Prometheus, here is the second lot of my most recentest reading…

Killer in the Rain, Raymond Chandler (1964) A collection of previously-unpublished short stories, this made for a weird reading experience as Chandler adapted many of the stories for his novels. So the precursor to Philip Marlowe and his adventures appears several times – which means the stories sort of hover on the edge of familiarity, without actually being familiar. At least two stories contain elements of The Big Sleep, but are different enough to make you doubt your memory of that novel. Otherwise, this is solid Chandler fare – iconic, and perhaps a little too over-exposed to wear its seminal status all that well.

Lanzarote, Michel Houellebecq (2000) This is more of a novella than a novel and is pretty much a distillation of what Houellebecq does. Bored bureaucrat goes on holiday to the titular island, reflects on the strange volcanic landscape while engaging in graphic and detailed sex with a pair of German tourists, while Houellebecq himself reflects on modern society. Some of the ideas in Lanzarote were clearly later expanded to become the novels Platform and The Possibility of an Island. Incidentally, I read Lanzarote on the train while travelling to the World Fantasy Con, and it probably isn’t the best sort of book to read while riding public transport…

The Sweetheart Season, Karen Joy Fowler (1996) This was the novel I immediately started after finishing Lanzarote, and it’s a much better rail-journey read. The title refers to an all-female baseball team formed during the late 1940s in order to promote a brand of cereal. The women all work at the mill where the cereal is made – it’s the only industry in the town – and the novel is about them, their lives, the history of the town, and the events leading up to the team’s single season, and its after-effects. Not, you would have thought,  my usual reading fare – but this is Karen Joy Fowler, a writer whose works I have long admired (since I started subscribing to Interzone back in the late 1980s, in fact). The Sweetheart Season is really funny, contains some lovely writing, and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

The Boosted Man, Tully Zetford (1974) The second in Zetford’s Hook quartet. This is pure 1970s sf hackery, and Zetford – a pen-name of Kenneth Bulmer – probably banged out all four books in a weekend. It shows. Once again, Hook is forced to land on a planet not his chosen destination. Everything initially looks grim and dirty and horrible, but then he realises the world is really a paradise. Everyone has wonderful jobs, wears the finest of clothing, eats the most delicious food, and has access to the best leisure facilities in the galaxy. Except, of course, they don’t. It’s all a mirage, induced somehow by a drug or some electronic thing – it wasn’t really clear. In reality, they’re no more than slaves, clad in rags, eating slops and being worked until they fall over and die. But HOOK SMASH. And dig those crazy eyebrows too, man. Two more books in this series and I can send them back to the charity shop. Not keepers.

Stonemouth, Iain Banks (2012) I’m going to miss a new Iain (M) Banks appearing every year, but at least he left a substantial body of work ripe for rereading behind him. And I really must reread the Culture novels. Perhaps that’d make a good reading project for a summer. Anyway, Stonemouth is Banks’s penultimate novel, and it’s very much in the same space as The Crow Road and The Steep Approach To Garbadale. The narrator, Stewart Gilmour, left the eponymous Scottish town under a cloud five years before, but now he’s back to attend the funeral of one of the town’s two gangland bosses. He’s met with grudging acceptance – no one is going to ignore the old man’s dying wish – but he is clearly not welcome and staying longer than necessary is out of the question. It’s a while before Banks reveals why Stewart was run out of town and, to be honest, I kept on expecting something a little more shocking to subsequently be revealed. But it never came. Instead, the story builds up to a shocking confrontation. Stonemouth is classic Banks – it’s all there: the voice, the wit, the place, the semi-adolescent manglings of philosophy… It doesn’t quite have the zap of earlier works, and in places it does feel like a book written by a man in his late fifties about a group of people in their twenties. But Stonemouth does possess buckets of charm, and that’s more than enough to carry the reader through to the – surprisingly – upbeat ending.

Captain Marvel: In Pursuit of Flight, Kelly Sue DeConnick, Dextor Soy & Emma Rios (2012) I went off superhero graphic novels a few years ago, and I wouldn’t normally have bothered with this one – I mean, Captain Marvel? She’s hardly a frontline superhero (although, interestingly, Marvel was originally male but the mantle was passed onto a woman). But the story of In Pursuit of Flight features the Mercury 13, so naturally my curiosity was piqued… Carol Danvers, Ms Marvel but now using the name Captain Marvel, is left an old aeroplane by Helen Cobb, a pioneering woman pilot who inspired Danvers’ own flying career. While Helen Cobb’s career is clearly based on that of Jerrie Cobb, her character isn’t – she’s a tough-talking bar-owner in the flashback sequences. The plane is a North American T-6 and the plane in which Cobb allegedly broke a world altitude record. The real Cobb did indeed fly T-6s – she ferried them down to South America for Fleetway after the Peruvian air force had purchased them from the US – but she achieved her altitude record in an Aero Commander. Danvers decides to try and prove that Cobb’s record was possible, but loses control of the plane. As it descends in a spin, the plane travels through time and Danvers finds herself on a Pacific island during World War II, helping a group of crashed WASP pilots defeat a Japanese force which has Skrull technology. The WASP pilots turn out to be the Mercury 13. Unfortunately, In Pursuit of Flight is all a bit of a mess. DeConnick has played fast and loose with her inspirations, the time travel plot doesn’t quite add up, and the artwork is not very good. I also hate it when mini-series swap artists halfway through, as this one does. Annoyingly, I see the blurb for the sequel, Captain Marvel: Down, includes the line “what threat is lurking below the ocean’s surface?”. It’s almost as if DeConnick has read Then Will The Great Ocean Wash Deep Above…

Strangers and Brothers, CP Snow (1940) This was the first book of the series written by Snow, and so the series is named for it – but the book is now better known by the alternative title of George Passant. And it is him the story is about. The narrator, Lewis Eliot, is one of a group of young adults in an unnamed East Midlands town during the late 1920s. The nearest city is Nottingham, but the town is certainly not Mansfield. Snow was from Leicester, so it’s more likely to be somewhere south of Nottingham – Loughborough, perhaps. Anyway, Passant is sort of a den mother to a group of twentysomethings. He works as an articled clerk at a local solicitors, but believes he should be made partner. When one of his friends, Jack, is let go by his employer, a printer, because the printer’s eighteen-year-old son has a crush on Jack, and the local technical college cancels Jack’s bursary, Passant argues that Jack should be allowed to complete his course. But Jack, it transpires, is a bit of a chancer, and when he persuades Passant to go into business with him… it all comes to a head a few years later when Passant, Jack and Olive are had up on charges of fraud, and Lewis is called back to town from his inn of court in London to defend them. Passant’s lifestyle – parties at a local farm, at which the men and women often partner off – is called into question. Though they win the case, Lewis doesn’t find out until afterwards that fraud had been committed – though, to be fair, the fraud of which they’re accused is no more than the typical sharp business practice you find happening now among fat cats and so-called captains of industry. Strangers and Brothers is a slow read, and while it paints an interesting picture of a past decade, it doesn’t appeal as much as Anthony Powell’s not-dissimilar A Dance to the Music of Time. But I think I shall continue to read them, anyway.