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Tag Archives: anthony burgess


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A mountain of words

It’s been a while since my last book haul post – two months, in fact – which goes some way to explaining the number of books which appear in this one. Someone needs to put more hours in the day so I can actually get around to reading some of them…

This year, of course, is the Durrell Centenary. So I’ll be rereading The Alexandria Quartet at some point, and I thought I’d buy myself the new paperback edition so I could do so. The CD is a collection of poetry readings, interviews and, er, Durrell singing.

Ballard is not a young man’s writer – not enough shit gets blown up, for a start; and then there’s that cynicism – so while I’ve read many of his stories and books over the years it’s only in the past few I’ve come to really appreciate his fiction. As a result, I’ve been building up a small paperback collection of his books – and they are attractively packaged paperbacks, these 4th Estate ones.

I am not, it has to be said, a particularly big fan of all the titles that have appeared in the SF Masterworks series, and most people don’t spend money on books they know they don’t especially like… but… they make a set. They’re packaged to look the same – or they were until they revamped the entire series. And some of them really are genre classics: Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion, certainly; and much as I loathe Harlan Ellison and his works, I have to admit Dangerous Visions was an important anthology.

From my trawls through various charity shops some books from the would-like-to-read list. I’ve been working my way through Litt’s alphabetical oeuvre, though none have especially impressed me so far. McCarthy should only be read when you’re feeling unaccountably cheerful and would like to torpedo your good mood. The Satanic Verses is infamous, but I’ve never read it. The Mailer was a swap from readitswapit.co.uk, and I’m  not sure why I bought The Apple.

So Long A Letter is May’s book for this year’s reading challenge (see here). Cyclonopedia has been repeatedly recommended by Jonathan McAlmont, and Berit Ellingsen is one of the contributors to Rocket Science (plus, the cover art of The Empty City is the National Congress building in Brasilia – see later).

A pair of 2012 hardbacks: I pre-ordered Ison of the Isles as I was so impressed with its preceding volume, Isles of the Forsaken (see here). And Stonemouth is Banks. Enough said.

The Steerswoman’s Road is an omnibus of The Steerswoman and The Outskirter’s Secret. I’ve read the first, but not the second. The other three books are ones I want to read. Palimpsest was a charity shop find, The Godless Boys was from Richard Palmer in payment for a copy of Adrift on the Sea of Rains, and The Dervish House was from an unmentionable and unmentionably large online book retailer.

Three genre titles for the collection – both Remaking History and Moon Dogs are signed (and those two authors pretty much describe the two endpoints of the type of sf I like best). The Ice Monkey is really hard to find in hardback but I lucked out.

I collect first editions by Anthony Burgess, and I’m interested in the works of DH Lawrence, so Flame into Being neatly covers two of my literary interests. The Nylon Pirates is one of Nicholas Monsarrat’s potboilers – he managed to write potboilers and literary fiction with equal facility if somewhat variable results. A Division of the Spoils is the third book of the Raj Quartet, and Disguise for a Dead Gentleman is DG Compton in his initial guise as a crime writer. I expect good condition first editions of those early “Guy Compton” books are extremely difficult to find, so this tatty one will have to do.

I spotted mention of these chapbooks by Michael Swanwick from Dragonstairs Press somewhere and decided to take a punt on them.

If I ever visit Brazil, it won’t be for the carnival, the beaches, the cocktails, the culture… it’ll be to see the buildings in Brasilia. I love the fact that even unfinished, or badly weathered, they still embody the optimistic future past decades imagined we’d all share. The man chiefly responsible, of course, was Oscar Niemeyer. Eastmodern is more Warsaw Pact architecture, a collection of photographs of modernist buildings in Slovakia, and some of them really are quite skiffy.

The giant book on ekranoplans was research for a story, honest. Or it will be when I’ve thought of an idea for story which has ekranoplans in it. Well, I managed it for flying boats (see here), so anything’s possible. Besides, if Sebastian Faulks can include one in his 007 novel Devil May Care, why shouldn’t I? Marswalk One is one of several Mars book I now own and which I will use as research while writing the second book of the Apollo Quartet (I got it very cheap on eBay). Dark Moon is one of those fake Moon landing nutjob books, and I thought it might prove entertaining. The Fallacy of Fine-Tuning is also research for Apollo Quartet book 2.


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New Year, new books

It would have been nice if I could have made a New Year’s resolution to buy no books in 2012. But that was clearly impossible as there were a number of 2012 releases I wanted. I’ll just have to try and limit my purchases instead. Sadly, I’ve not been entirely successful in that regard – only one month into the year and look what’s been added to the bookshelves all ready…

Three new releases: Blue Remembered Earth, Alastair Reynolds, In the Mouth of the Whale, Paul McAuley, and Dark Eden, Chris Beckett.

Three for the collections: Homage to QWERTYUIOP, Anthony Burgess, which is signed; The Steel Albatross, an underwater thriller by Mercury astronaut Scott Carpenter, which is also signed; and Selected Poems, Lawrence Durrell, from 1956, which is not signed.

Another of Jacques Tardi’s bande desinée: Like A Sniper Lining Up His Shot is an adaptation of a French thriller novel and pretty good. Mission to Mars is for the Spacebooks collection, and also for research for a short story.

A bunch of paperbacks from my father’s Penguin collection… Twilight in Italy is travel-writing, ‘À Propose of Lady Chatterley’s Lover’ and Other Essays is, er, non-fiction, and The Woman Who Rode Away is a short-story collection. I think I have quite a lot of Lawrence on the TBR now. JP Donleavy, on the other hand, I have never read before and know very little about – so I’ll give A Singular Man, The Destinies of Darcy Dancer, Gentleman, and The Onion Eaters a go. He doesn’t appear to be in print in this country anymore.

And more paperbacks from my father’s Penguin collection: another McCullers, The Mortgaged Heart, a collection, though I wasn’t that much taken with her The Member of the Wedding; a pair of Camuses (Cami? Camopodes?) Exile and the Kingdom and The Fall; and a collection of essays by Orwell, Decline of the English Murder. To the left is Sally Miller Gearhart’s The Wanderground, a Women’s Press sf paperback kindly donated to the SF Mistressworks collection by Una McCormack, for which much thanks.

And three non-fiction works from my father’s collection: The Fatal Englishman by Sebastian Faulks is biography, of a sort; Leavis’s The Great Tradition and The Common Pursuit are both literary criticism.

Two books for this year’s reading challenge – world fiction (see here): The Fat Years, Chan Koonchung, from China, and which you can see from the bookmark that I’m currently reading; and The Door, Magda Szabó, from Hungary. High-Rise joins the other nice 4th Estate paperback editions Ballards on my bookshelves.

Some science fiction… A pair of SF Masterworks: RUR & War with the Newts, Karel Capek, and Sirius, Olaf Stapledon. Colin Greenland’s Spiritfeather, one of the volumes from the four-book Dreamtime YA series published in 2000. There was a bit of a fad for Brit sf authors contributing to YA series at that time – not just Dreamtime, but also The Web, which boasted books by Stephen Baxter, Ken MacLeod, Peter F Hamilton, Eric Brown and Pat Cadigan. And, finally, Mission Child, Maureen McHugh, a charity shop find I plan to review for SF Mistressworks.

And here is The Monster Book for Girls, an anthology of dark fantasy and horror from theExaggeratedpress, which looks very nice indeed, but also…

… contains my story ‘Dancing the Skies’, which is the ATA/Spitfire story, which required much research on the Air Transport Auxiliary and WWII fighters and bombers.


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Too many words, too little time

I promised yesterday I’d put up a post showing the books I bought at Novacon, and so here it is. Also included are those books purchased since the last book haul post. Embarrassingly, it’s more than I thought it was. Oh well. Time to learn to speed-read…


Three Women’s Press sf titles from Novacon – as mentioned in my previous post: Memoirs of a Spacewoman, Naomi Mitchison; The Book of the Night, Rhoda Lerman; and The Two of Them, Joanna Russ. Expect reviews to appear at some point on SF Mistressworks.


More from Novacon – and, er, a Moore from Novacon: Judgment Night by CL Moore. Also for SF Mistressworks. Critical Threshold and The City of the Sun are the second and fourth books of Brian Stableford’s Daedalus Mission sextet. Now I need to find copies of the other four…


More recent books from Novacon. And you can’t get more recenter than the brand new Solaris Rising collection. The Matthew Farrell of Thunder Rift is actually sf author Stephen Leigh, and the Adam Roberts of The Snow is actually top parodist A.R.R.R Roberts.


Some charity shop finds. Marilynne Robinson’s Home I’ve been keen to read after being impressed by her Gilead. Not sure why I picked up Touching The Void – possibly because it’s on the World Book Night list. Adam Thorpe is an excellent writer and his Hodd is a retelling of the Robin Hood legend. John Banville I’m not especially keen on, but I thought I’d give his Eclipse a go.


Some sf (-ish) novels from Harewood House’s second-hand book shop. Jayge Carr’s Leviathan’s Deep I’ve been after ever since I read her story in Women of Wonder: the Contemporary Years (see here). It will be reviewed for SF Mistressworks. The Raw Shark Texts was a Clarke Award finalist in 2008, but lost out to Richard Morgan’s Black Man. The Manual of Detection by Jebediah Berry I’ve been on the look-out for ever since seeing an approving review of it by Michael Moorcock.


A pair of paperbacks from my father’s Penguin collection. Never read any Faulkner, so Intruder In The Dust should be interesting. And the only Orwells I’ve read are Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-four, so Down and Out in Paris and London should also be interesting.


Some new books. Songs of the Dying Earth I have to review for Interzone. I’m about a third of the way through it. The Ascendant Stars is the third and final part of Mike Cobley’s jam-packed space opera trilogy. Prague Fatale is the eight novel featuring German detective Bernie Gunther. I’m guessing it’s set in the Czech Republic…


The Electric Crocodile first edition is for the collection. Anthony Burgess: A Bibliography is to assist with the collection.


Some sf graphic novels. I finally got round to buying a copy of Dead Girls, the first part of the graphic novel adaptation of the novel of the same title. It’s very good. Dejah Thoris: Colossus of Mars is an original story set in Edgar Rice Burrough’s Barsoom, featuring John Carter’s improbably bosomed wife and set long before he appeared stark naked on the Red Planet. It’s actually quite good – keeps to the spirit of the books, gives Dejah Thoris very much a starring role with agency, and has some lovely artwork. Warlord of Mars, an adaptation of ERB’s A Princess of Mars, is less successful. The art is a little variable, and ERB’s prose was never very good. But then the idea of ERB’s Barsoom novels was always better than their implementations.


Finally, a book about Ridley Scott’s Alien. It’s full of lots of fanboi goodies, like behind-the-scenes photographs, production design sketches, fold-out plans of the Nostromo, and all that sort of stuff. Cool.


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The shelf that groaned

It’s been over a month since my last book haul post, but if I leave it any longer, it’ll take me an entire weekend to photograph my purchases. So herewith approximately five to six weeks worth of slippery “bid”, “buy it now” and “place order” buttons, and the results thereof.

Some time this month, we say goodbye to Waterstone’s 3-for-2 offer, so I felt obliged to go out and have one last go on it. C I’m told is very, very good; I haven’t quite found the right way to read Adam Roberts yet, but I’m reliably informed New Model Army is very good; and The Testament of Jessie Lamb is a literary-but-it’s-really-sf novel and was on this year’s Booker long list.

A trio for the SF Mistressworks collection: The Planet Dweller, We Who Are About To…, and How To Suppress Women’s Writing.

Some charity shop finds. I went off McEwan after Saturday, but I might as well give Solar a go. Engleby is the only Faulks I’ve not got, but I really need to get cracking on reading them. Out of Sheer Rage is about DH Lawrence – sort of – and I’ve heard it’s good. The HE Bates boxed set was a surprise find. It contains: Fair Stood the Wind for France, Dulcima, Seven by Five, The Four Beauties, The Wild Cherry Tree and The Triple Echo.

Some science fiction, which I do of course still read every now and again. Three SF Masterworks: Greybeard and The Body Snatchers I’ve never read; Hellstrom’s Hive I’m looking forward to rereading. Debris I have to review for Interzone. A Fighting Man of Mars… well, I’m looking forward to the film due out later this year – I may even go to see it at the cinema. The books I’m less keen on, but never mind.

First editions: Final Days and Leviathan Wakes are both science fiction (much thanks to Gary for the former, and Sharon for the latter). Isles of the Forsaken is fantasy – and yes, that’s the signed, numbered edition. Dark Tangos is, well, it’s by Lewis Shiner. And it’s also the signed edition.

First editions for the collection. Yes, that really is Demons by John Shirley and, er, Demons by John Shirley. The one with the red cover is a novella from Cemetery Dance, and the other is a novel, of which the novella forms the first half. Both are signed. As is Brain Thief, which I reviewed for Interzone last year (but was only sent an ARC). The Player of Games is hard to find for a reasonable price in first edition, but I managed it.

A Smile in the Mind’s Eye is signed and goes on the shelves dedicated to Lawrence Durrell and his works. The Wanting Seed and Tremor of Intent are difficult to find in first edition.

Graphic novels: the latest in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, the fab and groovy Century 1969. I have fond memories of Marvel’s John Carter of Mars comic from the 1970s, and a few years ago tracked down all 28 issues and three “king size” annuals. But a trade paperback is so much more convenient – except the artwork in it is black and white, and not colour as in the original comics. The Extraordinary Adventures of Adéle Blank-Sec 1 I bought after enjoying Tardi’s The Arctic Marauder.

Finally, Ravages, the last, I think, of the Orbital graphic novels, and a book about, er spacesuits titled Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo. I don’t know what the cover of the latter is made from but it has a similar texture to rubber matting and is quite strange.


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Ten Greatest Authors

I can’t even remotely pretend the ten authors in this list are the “greatest” in any commonly-accepted sense. They’re not all favourites, but they’re certainly the authors whose writing I admire the most. Still, it’s a list. Everyone likes lists.

In no particular order…

  1. Lawrence Durrell – I love the way he uses the English language. At a sentence level, I think he writes the best prose of any writer I’ve ever read. The Alexandria Quartet is required reading.
  2. Anthony Burgess – because fiction should be clever – although, to be honest, Burgess was occasionally too clever for his own good. Once described as a great writer who never wrote a great novel… except Earthly Powers is a great novel.
  3. John Fowles – the sheer readability of his prose disguises the depth and insight of his fiction. The French Lieutenant’s Woman is one of the great works of post-war British literature.
  4. DH Lawrence – I came late to Lawrence, but I immediately fell in love with his prose – the level of detail, the insight, the poetry…
  5. John Crowley – the Ægypt Sequence remains one of the best works of American literature from the second half of the twentieth century. Often it seems the height of hubris to claim Crowley as a genre writer.
  6. M John Harrison – the finest British prose stylist who self-identifies as a genre fiction writer. Light is a touchstone work of science fiction.
  7. Paul Park – the finest American prose stylist who self-identifies as a genre fiction writer. His books are less challenging than M John Harrison’s, but they also make more original use of genre tropes.
  8. Gwyneth Jones – her prose is an order of magnitude better than is typical for science fiction; and her science fiction is an order of magnitude more sophisticated than is typical for the genre.
  9. WG Sebald – because he’s such a resolutely interesting writer in the way he frames and presents narratives.
  10. Kim Stanley Robinson – the most thoughtful science fiction writer of his generation, and extremely readable with it. The Mars trilogy is a touchstone work of science fiction.

Honourable mentions: Mary Gentle, Paul Scott, Joseph Conrad, Frank Herbert, Margaret Atwood, Kazuo Ishiguro.

Also: my Ten Greatest Film Directors post.