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100 books, part 5

100 books that “shaped your world”… Sounds easy enough. Until you start thinking about titles. I could have just banged out a list, and not worry about whether some of the books actually deserved to be on it. But no, I had to put together an annotated list – which meant I had to give a reason why each book made my 100. You can find the earlier parts of my list at: part 1, part 2, part 3 and part 4. But I’ve also included a full list of the 100 Books That Shaped My World at the end of this post. Because this is the last post on the topic, and it covers…

The 2010s

I spent all but the last ten months of the decade living in South Yorkshire, buying far too many books online and from local charity shops. It all got a bit out of hand. When I put everything in storage and moved, I filled 85 boxes, mostly with books. I also sold about 15 boxes of books, and gave away close on 100 paperbacks. The good thing about this was it actually financed my move north. Even so, I was still a little surprised at how much I’d amassed.

I did, however, read plenty of books this decade. Just shy of 1500, in fact. My reading tastes also changed. As the 1990s and 2000s had progressed, I’d found myself reading more and more “literary” fiction, although science fiction still formed the bulk of my reading. During the 2010s, I started reading more British postwar fiction, and treasuring the prose of a number of such writers.

But I wasn’t just drifting toward fiction that wasn’t genre, I was also starting to be put off by current genre writing. Twenty-first century science fiction, especially US sf, began to privilege sentiment over rigour. And then there was the somewhat florid prose, and the over-use of metaphors in an attempt to add invention to over-familiar sf tropes. Changes in the publishing industry also meant editors chased debuts – because at least debuts weren’t “categorically killers”… yet – and the decline of marketing budgets pushed most of the promotion online and onto the authors themselves, and reviewers, bloggers, fans and readers. Which made it all tribal as fuck. The growing dominance of fantasy also limited the science fiction considered commercially viable, and in recent years several popular works have melded the two genres.

Of course, writers whose works I liked and admired were still published, and I discovered new writers whose books I liked and admired, and, even though I’ve been reading science fiction for close on 45 years, there’s still plenty of old science fiction for me to explore (even if its appeal is often somewhat limited).

This is, of course, a purely personal perspective. The science fiction genre has changed – this is hardly surprising – not only artistically but also in the way the publishing industry treats it. Some of those changes have worked for me, some haven’t. But it’s probably telling that only three category sf books from the 2010s appear in the list below, and one of those is in a negative capacity.

Lady Chatterley’s Lover, DH Lawrence (1928). My father had been a big fan of Lawrence’s fiction for much of his life, even going so far as to drag my mother to Taos to visit Lawrence’s shrine during a visit to the US. I think perhaps because of my father’s reverence for Lawrence, and what I imagined 1920s prose to be like, I sort of avoided reading him. But for some reason I decided to give Lady Chatterley’s Lover a go, and immediately fell in love with the book and Lawrence’s prose. So much so, in fact, that I tracked down Lawrence’s other books. But even that wasn’t enough, and I spent a long time hunting down copies published in the 1970s by Penguin, with white covers and Lawrence’s name in orange, as shown to the left. I now have twenty-eight of them. I’m still working my way through Lawrence’s oeuvre.

Seven Miles Down, Jacques Piccard & Robert S Dietz (1961). I can’t remember what prompted it – possibly watching the terrible BBC TV series The Deep – but deep sea submersibles, particularly historical bathyscaphes, became another “enthusiasm”. It took me a while, and it wasn’t cheap, but I tracked down a copy of Seven Miles Down, the only book written about the record-breaking descent to Challenger Deep, some 11,000 metres deep, by the Trieste in January 1960. Two people have since equalled that dive – James Cameron in 2012 and Victor Vescovo in 2019. The enthusiasm fed into my fiction, and the Trieste appeared in a couple of short stories and the third novella of the Apollo Quartet. I also collected several books on submersible and undersea habitats.

Synthajoy, DG Compton (1968). I consider Compton one of the best prose stylists UK science fiction has produced. He was not one of UK science fiction’s best plotters (which, as I suggested in a recent Reading diary post, may be why he switched from writing crime to science fiction). But it’s not just Compton’s prose I find so impressive, he was also superb at writing characters and he liked to experiment with narrative structure. All of which are on display in abundance in Synthajoy. The book is told entirely from the POV of its protagonist, but her story drifts back and forth seamlessly in time, building up the story from both present and past. Compton’s best books all exhibit a very 1970s aesthetic, which I admit I also find appealing. Compton’s books led me to the works of other British sf authors of the 1970s, some of whom I had read in previous decades, but now I found myself appreciating them, especially those whose novels were explicitly British.

China Mountain Zhang, Maureen F McHugh (1992). This book makes my list not because it’s a good book – which it is – or because I’m a fan of the writer – I haven’t actually read all that much by her – no, it makes my list because it was the first book reviewed on SF Mistressworks. Back in 2010, there’d been a conversation online about the fact so few British women genre writers were in contract with publishers in the UK. So I put together a list of 100 science fiction novels by women writers that had been published prior to 2000, a sort of response to the SF Masterwork series published by Gollancz. And after the list, it seemed like a good idea to build a website which reviewed science fiction books by women writers published before 2000. So I did. And it certainly changed my reading. Not only did I seek out sf novels by women to review for SF Mistressworks, but I also made an effort to balance my reading between male and female writers, and not just in genre fiction.

Correspondence, Sue Thomas (1991). When I was at university in Coventry, I remember visiting a bookshop/cafe called The Wedge. They had a carousel filled with books published by The Women’s Press, most of which, I seem to recall, were the sf titles in their distinctive grey design. I didn’t buy any, I wasn’t into that sort of science fiction at that time. But after kicking off the SF Mistressworks website, it occurred to me The Women’s Press sf titles would be good books to review. I had a read a few in the years since graduating from university, but now I decided to collect them. And I built up quite a collection: 45 out of 52 titles (including the two YA titles), both the grey cover design (A and B format) and the ones with the black-and-white striped spines. Correspondence was the first title published by The Women’s Press I read specifically because it had been published by them. I went on to read many more – again, because they had been published in The Women’s Press sf series.

Ancillary Justice, Ann Leckie (2013)
God’s War, Kameron Hurley (2011). I’m not sure it’s fair to say these two books “shaped” my world, but I bought and read them because of the social media buzz attending them. I thought them both good, but one better than the other, and I did read both trilogies through to the end. Of course, there have always been books published that generate excitement within fandom, but the ones I remember from the early 1990s were by authors with proven track records. Both Ancillary Justice and God’s War were debuts, and the buzz promised they were something different. They’re both space operas, of course, but very different in their approach to the subgenre. And, it had to be said, to me they felt like they were indeed doing something new with space opera, something interesting. There was nothing unique about that – Colin Greenland had done the same more than twenty years ago with Take Back Plenty, but his re-imagining of space opera seems to have ended with him. The success of Leckie’s and Hurley’s books – especially Leckie’s, which seemed to win every English-language sf award on the planet – promised real change in the subgenre. It could be argued Becky Chambers’s The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet also fit the same pattern, but its online buzz felt manufactured, and I hated the book and thought it badly-written, derivative and mostly cheap sentimentality. But the Hurley and Leckie showed the power of social media in genre fandom, and that still influences my reading to some (albeit diminishing) degree.

Evening’s Empire, David Herter (2002). Herter is an author I picked up on after reading his debut, Ceres Storm, published in 2000. He makes this list for two reasons. First, even though I bought Evening’s Empire when it was first published, it sat on my bookshelves for nine years before I eventually got around to reading it – and then I picked it as the best book I read that year. It’s not the book I’ve owned the longest without actually reading, but it’s a good example of one. The second reason is that Herter was quite open about his writing plans. He wrote an East European fantasy set in Czechoslovakia post-WW1, and a dark fantasy based on Something Wicked This Way Comes… but, sadly, the ambitious space operas he blogged about have yet to appear. It is, perhaps, one of the downsides of social media.

Spomeniks, Jan Kempenaers (2010). As I remember it, I stumbled across a website with photographs of Yugoslavian monuments to those who died in World War 2. Further research led me to an ad for Kempenaers’s exhibition of photographs of many of those monuments, not all of which had survived intact. The exhibition published a book of the photographs, which I bought. And that sort of sparked off another “enthusiasm”, this time for architecture, specifically East European and Soviet Modernism, and Oscar Niemeyer. To be honest, it was all pretty much eye candy to me. While the engineering of exploring space and underwater I find fascinating in a technical way, buildings and architecture not so much. But I do enjoy looking at pictures of the sort of buildings that seem to embody the enthusiasm for, a celebration of, the future that at some point around the middle of last century seemed humanity’s reward for its discoveries. Er, despite the Cold War and the threat of Mutually Assured Destruction.

The Member of the Wedding, Carson McCullers (1946). Among the things my father left behind when he died was a collection of about one hundred Penguin paperbacks he’d bought in the late 1960s and early 1970s, most of them directly from the publisher (there was a receipt in one). I’d read one or two of the books over the years, but few of the authors in the collection had appealed to me. But I took my pick of them, intending to give the authors I’d not read before a go. The Member of the Wedding was the first book I read of the ones I took. It wasn’t… to my taste. But it did not alter my plan to work my way through the collection. And that proved an excellent decision – as can be seen below. Twice.

Leviathan Wakes, James A Corey (2011). Like the Leckie and Hurley mentioned above, this book received a lot of online attention. And even more so when it was turned into a television series. Many people recommended it to me because, they felt, it was the sort of science fiction I liked: near-future hard sf. I fucking hated it. I thought the book was terrible, with deeply embedded, and unquestioned, right-wing sensibilities. The attempt at diversity struck me as little more than a thin glaze. And the plot hinged on an act so heinous it should have been unthinkable to any civilisation that claimed to be, well, civilised. It was also American as fuck. I tried watching the TV adaptation, but gave up after one too many mentions of torture. Leviathan Wakes made me realise I was no longer willing to put up with the right-wing bullshit endemic in space opera which science fiction fandom, and the general sf-reading public, seems happy to accept.

Hear Us O Lord from Heaven Thy Dwelling Place, Malcolm Lowry (1961). Among my father’s Penguin paperbacks were three by Malcolm Lowry – this collection, Under the Volcano and his debut, Ultramarine. I was aware of Under the Volcano, although I’d never read it; but I knew little about Lowry, his life or his other works. Hear Us O Lord from Heaven Thy Dwelling Place was… interesting. Until I got to the novella, ‘Through the Panama’. It blew me away. I read more Lowry, learnt of the semi-autobiographical nature of his fiction. I loved that. I loved his discursive prose style, his use of meta-narratives. He became a favourite author, and I began to collect his books – in first edition. I have now read all of his fiction, except his last unfinished novel, La Mordida.

Girl Reading, Katie Ward (2011). One of the things I dislike about the online culture surrounding books and fandom is that everything seems to be given five stars in reviews. It’s bad enough that many online reviews are indistinguishable from marketing hyperbole, but the tendency to give everything top marks has meant retailers’ ranking algorithms now count only the number of reviews, and don’t weight them by the number of stars given. Potentially, giving a book five stars is only setting up a future reader for disappointment. Which does not mean every now and again a book comes along that rightly deserves five stars. Girl Reading was one of those books. And, astonishingly, it was a debut. Sadly, Ward has yet to follow up on Girl Reading. I’ve been eagerly awaiting a second novel from her for eight years.

The Wall Around Eden, Joan Slonczewski (1989). I started collecting copies of the Women’s Press sf titles partly because some of the books interested me, but also partly because they were ideal material for the SF Mistressworks website. Slonczewski was not an author I had read before, although her name was known to me, chiefly from her novel A Door into Ocean (also in the Women’s Press sf series). I had not expected much of The Wall Around Eden, but I was delighted to find the novel was put together like a precision-built watch. Many of the books I read, I read critically; but this was the first time I found the actual craft present in a novel to be the most impressive thing about it.

Women of Wonder, Pamela Sargent, ed. (1974). Another read prompted by SF Mistressworks. Once I looked into it, I discovered there had been several female-only science fiction anthologies published over the years. Women of Wonder was not the first, but it was a prominent pioneer. And yet there are people who insist that women writing science fiction is a twenty-first century phenomenon. It’s a bullshit position. Women have been writing science fiction – very successfully – since it was invented. And there were many women who wrote novels and stories in early centuries which fed into what became science fiction. But, somehow, women sf authors were written out of the genre’s history, probably by the cyberpunks of the early 1980s. That rewriting of genre history was one of the inspirations behind SF Mistressworks. I went on to read – and review – several female-only sf anthologies, and found a number of authors whose longer works I then sought out.

HHhH, Laurent Binet (2012). This was a book that generated some small buzz among my circle of acquaintances on social media, despite not being genre – and most of my circle are genre writers and fans. It is, in fact, WWII history. And yet it’s also about the author and about the process of writing the history book. Its ostensible subject is Reinhard Heydrich, a Nazi bigwig and war criminal, one of the men responsible for the Holocaust, and, during the period covered by HHhH, Reich-Protector of Bohemia and Moravia. But it’s not Heydrich, or Operation Anthropoid, the attempt to assassinate him (which succeeded more by accident than design), that puts HHhH on this list. The Nazis have never been an “enthusiasm” of mine. But I have always been a fan of experimental narratives – not so much experimental prose, like stream-of-consciousness, but narrative structures other than straightforward linear. HHhH helped crystallise my interest in such narratives – and helped explain why some books I had read in previous years had appealed to me so much. It’s something I’ve continued to explore, both in my reading and my own writing.

The End of Days, Jenny Erpenbeck (2012). I think this was also a recommendation. Or perhaps I saw a review of it in a newspaper. There was another book with the same premise – a person who lives through several alternate variations of their life – which proved much more popular, particularly in genre circles, and that was Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life. But I fell in love with Erpenbeck’s dry reportage-like prose. If I had become disillusioned with genre’s turn to over-written and sentimental prose, then the clarity and emotional distance of Erpenbeck’s novel – albeit translated – was exactly the sort of fiction I wanted to read. And I went looking for it.

Party Going, Henry Green (1939). And speaking of clear prose, Henry Green is surely a master of it. I found this omnibus of three of his novels in a charity shop, but it was around six years before I got around to reading one of the novels. And then I was sorry I’d not read it much sooner. Green’s prose is among the best I’ve read. And, astonishingly, he makes no concessions towards his readers. Everything – the plot, the characterisation – is conveyed through dialogue. Coming from a science fiction background, a genre which feels a need to explain everything, a genre which has developed a number of techniques for lecturing the reader, not just in invented worlds and “facts”, but also in information the reader could easily find out for themselves, this was something to definitely striking. It might seem that mainstream fiction, or even crime fiction, or thrillers, do not use exposition, but of course they do, it just occupies a different place in the narrative. Green’s novels showed me that stripping back exposition to the bare minimum did not have to handicap a narrative.

Nocilla Dream, Agustín Fernández Mallo (2006). Nocilla Dream came to my attention via a review on a friend’s blog, and it sounded intriguing enough for me to give it a read. Like the Binet above, Nocilla Dream uses a non-standard narrative structure – in this case, short unrelated sections, only some of which are narrative. It is also pretty much the antithesis of Green’s fiction, in that some of the sections are pure exposition, pure dry reportage, not always related to the fictional narratives. There’s more, of course, to Mallo’s book, which is the first of a trilogy, and which spawned a literary movement, the Nocilla Generation, in Spain. I plan to explore the other Nocilla Generation writers, and have so far read only a novel by Álvaro Colomer, titled, coincidentally, Uppsala Woods, but few of the books have been translated into English, and Spanish is not a language I speak or read. Perhaps I should try learning it.

The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner (1931). This was another book from my father’s Penguin collection. I knew of Faulkner, but knew nothing about the man or his fiction. An early twentieth-century US author – and while I had read one or two of them many years before, I couldn’t say any had really appealed to me. But The Sound and the Fury did something those other US novels had not done: it used an experimental narrative structure. It told its story through three limited POVs, none of which were actually central to the plot. I was hugely impressed. Books with complex narrative structures interest me, and it’s something I’m keen to explore in my reading. Faulkner’s prose is also wonderfully sharp. I have already read more Faulkner.

Here is the full list, for those of you like lists in, er, list form:

1 The Golden Bird, Jan Pieńkowski & Edith Brill (1970, UK)
2 The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, Alan Garner (1960, UK)
3 Destination Moon, Hergé (1950, Belgium)
4 Edgar Rice Burrough’s Tarzan of the Apes, Burne Hogarth (1972, USA)
5 Dan Dare: The Red Moon Mystery, Frank Hampson (1951, UK)
6 Doctor Who and the Zarbi, Bill Strutton (1965, UK)
7 Starman Jones, Robert A Heinlein (1953, USA)
8 Gray Lensman, EE Doc Smith (1951, USA)
9 The Trigan Empire, Don Lawrence & Mike Butterworth (1965, UK)
10 Jack of Eagles, James Blish (1952, USA)
10 Tactics of Mistake, Gordon R Dickson (1971, USA)
10 Time and Again, Clifford D Simak (1951, USA)
13 Final Stage, Edward L Ferman & Barry N Malzberg, eds. (1974, USA)
14 Dune, Frank Herbert (1966, USA)
15 Traveller: Characters & Combat, Marc Miller (1977, USA)
16 The Undercover Aliens, AE Van Vogt (1950, USA)
16 The Winds of Gath, EC Tubb (1967, UK)
18 The Book of Alien, Paul Scanlon & Michael Gross (1979, UK)
19 The Dune Encyclopedia, Willis E McNelly, ed. (1984, USA)
20 The Future Makers, Peter Haining, ed. (1968, UK)
21 Dhalgren, Samuel R Delany (1975, USA)
22 The Right Stuff, Tom Wolff (1979, USA)
23 The Far Pavilions, MM Kaye (1978, UK)
24 Iceberg, Clive Cussler (1975, USA)
25 The Complete Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy Lists, Malcolm Edwards & Maxim Jakubowski (1983, UK)
26 Radix, AA Attanasio (1981, USA)
27 The Barbie Murders, John Varley (1980, USA)
28 Serpent’s Reach, CJ Cherryh (1980, USA)
29 The Science Fiction Sourcebook, David Wingrove (1984, UK)
30 The War for Eternity, Christopher Rowley (1983, USA)
30 Under a Calculating Star, John Morressy (1975, USA)
30 Where Time Winds Blow, Robert Holdstock (1981, UK)
33 Knight Moves, Walter Jon Williams (1985, USA)
34 Kairos, Gwyneth Jones (1988, UK)
35 The Space Mavericks, Michael Kring (1980, USA)
36 The Female Man, Joanna Russ (1975, USA)
36 The Fith Head of Cerberus, Gene Wolfe (1972, USA)
36 The Five Gold Bands, Jack Vance (1950, USA)
36 The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K Le Guin (1969, USA)
40 The Innocent, Ian McEwan (1990, UK)
41 Use of Weapons, Iain M Banks (1990, UK)
42 Take Back Plenty, Colin Greenland (1990, UK)
43 Raft, Stephen Baxter (1991, UK)
44 Semiotext(e) SF, Rudy Rucker, Peter L Wilson & Robert A Wilson, eds. (1989, USA)
44 The Brains of Rats, Michael Blumlein (1989, USA)
46 Metrophage, Richard Kadrey (1988, USA)
47 Dreamside, Graham Joyce (1991, UK)
48 Iris, Wiliam Barton & Michael Capobianco (1990, USA)
49 A Vision of Battlements, Anthony Burgess (1965, UK)
49 How Far Can You Go?, David Lodge (1980, UK)
51 Angel at Apogee, SN Lewitt (1987, USA)
52 C is for Corpse, Sue Grafton (1986, USA)
52 Guardian Angel, Sara Paretsky (1992, USA)
54 The Alexandria Quartet, Lawrence Durrell (1957, UK)
55 An Exchange of Hostages, Susan R Matthews (1997, USA)
55 Bending the Landscape: Fantasy, Nicola Griffith & Stephen Pagel, eds. (1997, USA)
57 Coelestis, Paul Park (1993, USA)
58 Holy Fire, Bruce Sterling (1996, USA)
59 Cotillion, Georgette Heyer (1953, UK)
60 The Master Mariner, Nicholas Monsarrat (1978, UK)
61 The Second Angel, Philip Kerr (1998, UK)
62 The Children of Anthi, Jay D Blakeney (1985, USA)
63 The Forever War, Joe Haldeman (1974, USA)
64 The Mechanics of Wonder, Gary Westfahl (1998, USA)
65 The Eye of the World, Robert Jordan (1990, USA)
66 Watchmen, Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons (1987, UK)
67 The Incal, Alejandro Jodorowski & Moebius (1980, France)
67 Valérian and Laureline 4: Wlecome to Alflolol, Pierre Christin & Jean-Claude Mézières (1972, France)
69 The Levant Trilogy, Olivia Manning (1977 – 1980, UK)
70 Penguin Anthology of Classical Arabic Literature, Robert Irwin (1999, UK)
71 Ascent, Jed Mercurio (2007, UK)
72 Moondust, Andrew Smith (2005, UK)
73 Alanya to Alanya, L Timmel Duchamp (2005, USA)
74 Poems, John Jarmain (1945, UK)
75 Postwar Military 4: Avro Vulcan, Andrew Brookes (1985, UK)
76 The Raj Quartet, Paul Scott (1966 – 1975, UK)
77 The Stainless Steel Rat, Harry Harrison (1961, USA)
78 First Man: The Life of Neil A Armstrong, James R Hansen (2005, USA)
78 Carrying the Fire, Michael Collins (1974, USA)
78 Return to Earth, Buzz Aldrin (1973, USA)
81 Lady Chatterley’s Lover, DH Lawrence (1928, UK)
82 Seven Miles Down, Jacques Piccard & Robert S Dietz (1961, USA)
83 Synthajoy, DG Compton (1968, UK)
84 China Mountain Zhang, Maureen F McHugh (1992, USA)
85 Correspondence, Sue Thomas (1991, UK)
86 Ancillary Justice, Ann Leckie (2013, USA)
86 God’s War, Kameron Hurley (2011, USA)
88 Evening’s Empire, David Herter (2002, USA)
89 Spomeniks, Jan Kempenaers (2010, Belgium)
90 The Member of the Wedding, Carson McCullers (1946, USA)
91 Leviathan Wakes, James A Corey (2011, USA)
92 Hear Us O Lord from Heaven Thy Dwelling Place, Malcolm Lowry (1961, Canada)
93 Girl Reading, Katie Ward (2011, UK)
94 The Wall Around Eden, Joan Slonczewski (1989, USA)
95 Women of Wonder, Pamela Sargent, ed. (1974, USA)
96 HHhH, Laurent Binet (2012, France)
97 The End of Days, Jenny Erpenbeck (2012, Germany)
98 Nocilla Dream, Agustín Fernández Mallo (2006, Spain)
99 Party Going, Henry Green (1939, UK)
100 The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner (1931, USA)


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Reading diary, #27

Although I’ve been appending a count of books read from the 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die list to these reading diary posts, I’ve not been making much of an effort to work my way through that list – certainly not to the extent I’ve been doing with the 1001 Films You See Before You Die list. Of course, reading a book requires more of an investment in time than watching a film, and I suspect there are fewer books on the book list of the sort I’d enjoy than there are films on the film list. Anyway, there are no books from the list in this post, although I do have about a dozen somewhere on the TBR. Just thought I should mention that.

bleeding_kansasBleeding Kansas, Sara Paretsky (2008). I am a big fan of Paretsky’s Warshaski novels – my mother took me to see Paretsky being interviewed by Val McDermid at the Harrogate Crime Festival last year – although it’s taken me a while to get round to reading her non-Warshawski novels. I read Ghost Country while at Bloodstock, a metal festival, last year, and thought it very good. Bleeding Kansas is… less good. It’s apparently based in part on Paretsky’s own teen years in Kansas, before she moved to Chicago; and, I suspect, although I rather hope not, based on the people she knew from that time. Because they are pretty much all mean-minded and prejudiced Bible bashers (is there any other sort?). Especially one family, who use their faith to justify all manner of bigotry and nastiness. The story focuses on Lara Grellier, the teenage daughter of one of the farming families in the Kaw River Valley. Her mother Susan is fascinated by a Grellier ancestor, who helped slaves during the Civil War, and survived several attacks by Quantrill and other pro-slavery “Border Ruffians” (the title of the novel refers to that period), but has a mental breakdown after the death of her son in Iraq. A lesbian Wiccan from Chicago has just taken over the dilapidated mansion of the local, deceased, gentry; and the Schapen family, mean-spirited relious types to a person, have accidentally bred a pure-red heifer which an apocalyptic Jewish sect from Chicago want in order to to rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem. Meanwhile, everyone else tries to get by, without being too hateful – at which they don’t always succeed – or too liberal, which would of course see them tarred and feathered and driven out of the county. I really don’t have any sympathy for people who think their religion excuses their appalling behaviour (I’m looking at you, North Carolina), and I’m really not interested in reading about such people. It’s to Paretsky’s credit that she’s even-handed in her treatment of her caste of bigots and idiots, but that does make you wonder why she wrote the book in the first place. Yes, Warshawski is a champion and plays a champion’s role, and that’s part of the character’s appeal – so it seems self-evident that to go against type would result in characters most of Paretsky’s readers are going find unlikeable, and so create a novel most would find a less-than-enjoyable read. The Amazon reviews, interestingly, seem evenly split among the stars ratings, on both UK and US sites.

heart_hunterThe Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Carson McCullers (1940). This is one of a pile of Penguin paperbacks from the 1960s I inherited from my father. Some of his collection I wasn’t interested in, but I kept many – including four by Carson MCullers: The Member of the Wedding I read a while ago but wasn’t that impressed; The Heart is a Lonely Hunter is her first full-length novel and probably her best-known work, and I liked it a great deal more; still to come are Clock Without Hands and a collection, The Mortgaged Heart. A pair of deaf and dumb men (referred to throughout as “mutes”; actually, one is only deaf, but speaks so infrequently everyone assumes he is unable to do so), live in a small town somewhere in Georgia in the 1930s. One of the two men becomes mentally ill and is sent away to an asylum. The other, Singer, moves into a boarding-house and becomes a sort of listening post for a variety of characters, who come to talk at him and relax in his company. There’s something obviously Christ-like about Singer, although McCullers never quite makes it explicit. The novel actually focuses on four of Singer’s “friends”: a teenage girl who loves music, a drunken labour activist, the widowed owner of a local café, and a black doctor who is a communist and preaches Marxism to his family at Christmas. I enjoyed this a great deal more, and thought it much better, than the earlier MCullers novel I’d read. There was apparently a film made of it, which changed the setting to the 1960s. Not sure how that would work…

bsg_final_fiveBattlestar Galactica: The Final Five, Seamus Kevin, Fahey, David Reed & Nigel Raynor (2009) I bought this to read while rewatching Battlestar Galactia from the beginning, because it professed to tell the back-story of its titular characters (the five of the Twelve Cylon “skin jobs” whose identities were not revealed until very late in the series). As is the case with most such tie-in graphic novels, the art is pretty awful. Unfortunately, the story doesn’t make much sense either. Perhaps I should have waited until I’d finished my rewatch before reading it, maybe then it would have made more sense. I can’t remember from my previous viewing of Battlestar Galactica if Earth was supposed to have an ancient technological society which then disappeared (leaving no evidence of its existence; strange, that…), or not. From what I do remember, the Galactica arrived at Earth in its prehistory – although there was another Earth-like world in there somewhere, although that planet destroyed itself in a nuclear war. Anyway, I was put off a bit by the generally bad art, and since my comics reading these days seems to be limited to translated bandes dessinée (I’m no longer interested in reading about fascists in tights), so I’ve probably lost the knack of reading US graphic novels. But maybe if I give The Final Five a go after I’ve watched all of Battlestar Galactica again… (I bought the Blu-ray ultimate collection, £100 off, in a recent Amazon Prime Day – it includes everything… the pilot mini-series, the webisodes, Caprica, the whole lot. Totally worth what I paid for it – and yes, I still consider Battlestar Galactica the best television sf series ever made, and among the best television series ever made of any genre.)

metabaronsThe Metabarons: 40th Anniversary Edition, Alejandro Jodorowsky & Juan Giménez (2015). The Metabaron bandes dessinée originally appeared between 1992 and 2003, and while the original Metabaron character appeared in The Incal in 1981, I’m still not sure how that works out to a “40th anniversary edition” in 2015. Anyway, it’s a nice hardback omnibus of all the Metabaron stories, so who cares? The story is framed as a story told by the robot Tonto to the robot Lothar, both of whom look after the Metabunker, the home of the last Metabaron, No-Name. The Metabunker is located in a deserted city-shaft on a deserted world, and No-Name is absent for much of the length of The Metabarons. There’s a reason for this framing narrative, but explaining it would constitute a spoiler, so… Tonto explains how the first Metabaron, owner of a marble planet, was forced to reveal the existence of the epiphyte, a substance which counteracted gravity, to the Emperor and Empress, and so became fabulously wealthy, and was given the title Metabaron. He was also a superlative warrior, and with his new-found enormous wealth set out to improve his skills and his killing technology. And also institute the various traditions which were carried down through five generations to No-Name: that there can only be one Metabaron, so the son (or daughter) must kill the father, and that part of the training involves some form of mutilation and replacement prostheses. Jodorowsky wrote The Incal after the failure of his Dune project, and some of his work on Herbert’s novel ended up in that bande dessinée. But there’s also a lot of Dune in The Metabarons – there’s a Bene Gesserit analogue, a pain test that copies the one undergone by Paul Atreides (but involves real physical damage), and even mentat-like advisors to the Emperor and Empress. There’s also stuff that’s pure Jodorowsky – such as the Emperor and Empress being succeeded by a pair of conjoined twins of different genders, the Emperoress. Some of it is a bit silly. The third Metabaron, for example, is Steelhead, so called because his father shoots off his head as a baby, but his mother manages to fashion a robotic one in time to save his life. Um, right. The artwork throughout is gorgeous, and the story is pretty much pure-strain space opera. Totally worth buying.

murphys_gambitMurphy’s Gambit, Syne Mitchell (2000). I read for review on SF Mistressworks. I forget where I stumbled across mention of this novel, and with a publication year of 2000 it only just sneaks into SF Mistressworks’s remit, but it looked intriguing enough for me to buy a cheap copy on eBay… which proved to be a bit tattier than expected. Ah well. Not a keeper anyway. As should be clear from my review here.

murder_lochMurder at the Loch, Eric Brown (2016). Eric is a friend of many years, although I wouldn’t read these books – Murder at the Loch is the third in the series – if I didn’t enjoy them. True, they won’t set the crime genre alight, and they might even be described as a bit “cosy”, but they’re fun undemanding reads, and it’s clear the author’s heart is in the right place. The stars are Donald Langham, a crime novelist, and his fiancée, Maria Dupré, a French immigrant, who works for his literary agent. The stories are set in the 1950s, which means the author doesn’t have to worry about mobile phones and the like generating so many plot contortions the story falls apart (in fact, part of the plot of Murder at the Loch involves the cast being cut off for several days at a Scottish castle, with no way to telephone for help). While the back-story makes mention of WWII – in fact, it triggers the plot in in this book – and there are number of small details which anchor the novel to its time and place, it does sometimes read a little like it takes place in a political and historical vacuum. But that’s a minor quibble. Langham and ex-army pal and now PI, Ryland, are called up to Scotland by their old CO, Major Gordon, who now runs a posh hotel in a renovated castle. Someone took potshots at him and a guest a couple of days previously, and he’s understandably worried. What follows is a fairly typical country house mystery plot, with a few twists. Sunk in the loch is a Dornier Do 217 from early 1945, and its presence is a mystery as the Germans had stopped bombing the UK by then. It was while attempting to salvage this that Gordon and his Dutch engineer were shot at. Also resident in the hotel, or turn up shortly after Langham and Ryland arrive, are Gordon’s Byroneseque layabout son, an aloof Hungarian countess, a German aircraft enthusiast, a retired academic investigating the castle’s ghosts, and the three staff, including a young woman who is more of a family friend. A snow storm cuts off the castle, the Dutch engineer is brutally murdered, and you can’t really get a more faithful implementation of the country house murder template than that. But if the identity of the killer isn’t all that hard to figure out, and the clues dropped along the way make the motive as plain as day, it’s all handled with a nice light touch and very readable prose. I pretty much read Murder at the Loch in an afternoon, and sometimes that’s the sort of book you want to read.

1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die count: 122


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30 words on 30 books

I shamelessly stole this idea from Pornokitsch, who did the same yesterday. Since I’m not doing my readings & watching posts this year, I thought thirty words on the last thirty novels I’ve read might be a good way of mentioning my recent reading. But 30 words is actually harder to do than it looks…

Final Days, Gary Gibson (2011)
Discovery on planet orbiting distant star reached by wormhole suggests future is fixed and immutable. World starts to fall apart. Nice Apollo re-enactment but otherwise not that much stands out.

The Member of the Wedding, Carson McCullers (1946)
Tom Sawyer-ish Frankie daydreams of brother’s wedding. A GI mistakes her age, wants to get frisky. Lovely writing, though it’s hard not to suspect Frankie is wrong in the head.

Like A Sniper Lining Up His Shot, Jacques Tardi (2010)
Graphic novel adaption of French thriller set in the UK. Assassin like father like son. With guns. And gore. Not much more to be said. Tardi is definitely worth reading.

Bodies, Jed Mercurio (2002)
Incompetent doctors get away with murder on the NHS. New houseman is horrified. He learns to work with the system. A favourite writer but it will scare you off hospitals.

City of Pearl, Karen Traviss (2004)
First human colony disappears, rescue mission discovers aliens protecting them. Mix of hard sf and space opera. Nice heroine, not so interesting aliens. Oozes competence without suggesting more. Review here.

The Bender, Paul Scott (1963)
Should have been a film with Dirk Bogarde. 1960s wastrel goes begging for cash and sparks family crisis. Great wit, great writing, and an astonishing postmodern interlude. Recommended. Review here.

Leviathan’s Deep, Jayge Carr (1979)
Freak alien resembles humans. They want to conquer her planet and fall in love with her. She scuppers their plans. Somewhat old-fashioned sf, though protagonist well-drawn. Review on SF Mistressworks.

The Bookman, Lavie Tidhar (2010)
Literary and pulp potage which stripmines steampunk tropes. Orphan adventures, starts cleverly in Victorian Lizard London but loses steam about halfway through before Bond-esque Vernian finish. The first of three.

Omega, Christopher Evans (2008)
Man recovering from terrorist bomb explosion dreams himself into alternate self in a world where WWII never ended. Very cleverly done, alternate world very real, great writing. Recommended. Review here.

Angel At Apogee, SN Lewitt (1987)
Princess pilot, a hot-shot of course, proves to be catalyst which rejoins three sundered races on three separate planets. Interesting debut, though perhaps a little over-egged. Review on SF Mistressworks.

The Fat Years, Chan Koonchung (2009)
China prospers while rest of world in financial crisis. Interesting window on Chinese society, though unsatisfactory as a novel – the plot is explained in a final chapter info-dump. Review here.

The Fall, Albert Camus (1957)
Pompous ex-lawyer monologues at stranger in Amsterdam bar and over several days tells him of his somewhat boring fall from grace. Mercifully short, though there’s some insightful writing in it.

Selected Poems, Lawrence Durrell (1956)
It’s a book of poems. And they were selected. By Lawrence Durrell. He did this several times. Except when he wasn’t collecting his poems for his Collected Poems. More here.

Betrayals, Charles Palliser (1994)
A story told through several stories – including a superb pisstake of Taggart, and a righteous skewering of Jeffrey Archer. Superbly done, though perhaps needed the stories tying together more. Recommended.

Leviathan Wakes, James SA Corey (2011)
Solar system shenanigans as alien virus wreaks havoc for corporate profit. Who needs New Space Opera? Regressive: no diversity, old school sexism, implausible villainy. Mostly right physics. Avoid. Review here.

Native Tongue, Suzette Haden Elgin (1984)
Men repeal rights of women, so they secretly develop women’s language. Interesting linguistics, good female characters, though characterisation of men not so convincing and world-building weak. Review on SF Mistressworks.

This Island Earth, Raymond F Jones (1952)
Manly engineer saves the galaxy by demonstrating good old US engineering know-how. Womanly PhD does his ironing and cooking. Happily they don’t write them like this any more. More here.

The Lady in the Lake, Raymond Chandler (1944)
Mixed-up femme fatales don’t fool Marlowe in hunt for rich man’s missing wife. Not the cunningest murder-mystery plot and Marlowe often gets away with murder. Strong on place and time.

The Door, Magda Szabó (1987)
In Hungary, writer hires housekeeper, who proves to be old school peasant and a right character. Fascinating portrait of housekeeper, thoroughly enjoyed it. Soon to be major film. Review here.

The Unorthodox Engineers, Colin Kapp (1979)
Collection of sf shorts in which lateral thinking engineers solve seemingly intractable problems. Dated, problems not especially unsolvable, nor especially original. Entirely forgettable, in fact. Hard book to find, though.

Journey to the Centre of the Earth, Jules Verne (1864)
Story not as good as Nemo’s though text is more pleasingly detailed. Science horribly dated, of course, and often wrong. Characters bizarrely emphatic – except for phlegmatic Icelandic guide. Historical document.

Arkfall, Carolyn Ives Gilman (2008)
Novella set on human-colonised Europa-like planet with interesting socialist society. Woman and male tourist find themselves on unintended journey after seaquake. Promises more than it delivers but still worth reading.

Kamikaze l’Amour, Richard Kadrey (1995)
Kadrey channels Ballard and Shepard in rock star epiphany in California overrun by Amazonian jungle. Not sure how original was 17 years ago but is not now. After Metrophage, disappointing.

Smart-Aleck Kill, Raymond Chandler (1958)
Collection of four shorts. Simple direct prose, strong on place and time, though plotting something of a direct line and characterisation sketchy. More for noir fans than normal readers, possibly.

Embassytown, China Miéville (2011)
Truthful aliens get hooked on impossible Ambassador’s speech. World falls apart. Narrator teaches aliens to lie and saves planet. Interesting ideas but old-fashioned science fiction. Likely award-winner. Sigh. Review here.

Dr No, Ian Fleming (1958)
Bond in Jamica. Again. Racial stereotype has evil plan to do evil. Bond foils, with help of trusty local. He nearly dies in the process, but he gets girl. Again.

The Incal, Alejandro Jodorowsky & Moebius (1981)
Seminal bande dessinée allegedly cobbled together from failed Dune film project. Light and dark Incal combine to save galaxy from evil Darkness. Completely bonkers. Lovely art. Everyone should own copy.

Alias Grace, Margaret Atwood (1997)
Character study of true life murderess from 1840s. Clevery done – never quite determines innocence or guilt, though very detailed on life and crime. Lovely writing. Possibly Atwood’s best novel. Recommended.

The Planet Dweller, Jane Palmer (1985)
Hot flushes and giant aliens that live inside planets. Cartoon aliens that want to conquer galaxy. Hit and miss comedy, but too fantastical for sf. Review soon on SF Mistressworks.

The Ginger Star, Leigh Brackett (1974)
By-the-numbers swords and planets. Manly hero brought up by animals battles way across barbarian planet to save mentor. Been there, done that. Yawn. Review soon on SF Mistressworks.


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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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Festive activities

Christmas is over for another year, and life can now return to what passes for normal. Once again, I was in Denmark for the festivities, but this year it was wet and windy rather than the usual deep snow. There was a lot of eating involved, and a lot of walking. The day after Boxing Day, we went to see David Fincher’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo at the cinema (English with Danish subtitles, fortunately). Though I’ve not read the book, I have seen the Swedish version of the film. To be honest, I’m not sure which of the two versions is the better.

The flight back from Denmark was… interesting. On the approach to Manchester Airport, the plane was thrown around by turbulence and we almost touched down… before the captain decided to abort and up we went for another go around. Fortunately, the second attempt was much smoother and we landed in one piece. I first flew in 1968 and I’ve flown at least once a year since, and that was the first time I’ve ever been in an aircraft that took more than one attempt to land. Having said that, I’ve never been a big fan of air travel – and less so these days than I used to be. All that “security theatre” is just unnecessary palaver – how many terrorists has it actually caught? We certainly know it failed to catch two bombers… And while airlines seem to want us to believe that air travel has become easier and more convenient, the reverse is actually true. Also, budget airlines appear to hold their customers in complete contempt. They ask you to queue at the boarding-gate for an hour but don’t provide anywhere to sit. Aircraft are not buses – and given all the hoops passengers are forced to jump through before boarding at present, they never will be. The entire industry needs over-hauling.

Santa brought me some books and some DVDs: William Tenn’s Of Men and Monsters and Tariq Ali’s Shadows Of The Pomegranate Tree, the first book of the Islam Quintet; and Twin Peaks: Definitive Gold Box Edition, Fringe Season 3 and Caprica Season 1 Volume 2. I read the two books before returning to the UK. Of Men and Monsters was better than I expected, though I’m in two minds whether it belongs in the SF Masterwork series. Shadows Of The Pomegranate Tree is set in Moorish Spain in 1500 CE, and chronicles the Spanish Catholics’ campaign to wipe out Islam and its practitioners on the peninsula. It’s strong stuff, though Ali’s frequently inelegant prose didn’t do the book any favours. I’ll probably read the rest of the Quintet at some point, but I’m not going to dash out and buy them immediately.

I’ll also read a number of books during the holiday – in fact, I was averaging one a day. The books were Engleby, Sebastian Faulks (2007), which was a definite improvement on the longeur-packed On Green Dolphin Street. A working-class scholar at Oxford University fancies a female student from afar, but one day she disappears and is never found. It’s not difficult to work out what happened to her, though it’s hard to tell if Faulks thought the reveal was an actual plot twist. The final third of the book is a character-study of the narrator, which not only means Engleby is not a murder-mystery novel but also means it’s unsatisfactory as either murder-mystery or literary fiction.

The Manual of Detection, Jedediah Berry (2009), I remember seeing an approving review of in the Guardian by Michael Moorcock when the book was published. As a result, I’ve kept an eye open for a copy in charity shops ever since. It is… an odd beast. The story seems better-suited to a comic or graphic novel and, as a result, doesn’t work all that well as prose. A clerk for the Agency, a huge detective agency which seems to be the most important company in a 1950s-style city, is promoted to detective when the detective whose reports he files disappears. He soon ends up out of his depth in some weird conspiracy between the Agency and a villain based in a carnival, and it’s all to do with the way the Agency actually operates. The missing detective is called Travis S Sivart, but nothing is actually made of the fact that the name is a palindrome. It makes you wonder why the author bothered.

Black Swan Green, David Mitchell (2006), is Mitchell’s fourth novel, and is told entirely in the voice of a thirteen-year-old boy living in the eponymous Worcestershire village in 1982. He’s being bullied at school, his parents’ marriage is on the rocks, and an act of petty revenge leads to a tragedy. Everything in the book struck me as a little clichéd, but perhaps that’s because I remember the early eighties quite well. Mitchell handles his narrator’s voice with skill and it’s a very readable story, but it all felt a bit soap-opera-ish in places. It’s not as successful as Cloud Atlas, though it is better than his first two novels, Ghostwritten and number9dream.

Of course, in the weeks leading up to Christmas the postie was also busy. Since my last book haul post, the following books have landed on the mat:

These are the aforementioned Christmas goodies.

Some first editions: White Eagle Over Serbia is for the Lawrence Durrell collection. The Dragons of Springplace and Impact Parameter I bought in the recent Golden Gryphon 50% off sale.

A few sf paperbacks. I used to correspond with Mike Shupp, and I’ve always wanted to read his Destiny Makers quintet, but it’s taken me a while to find decent copies. Now that I have the first book in the series, With Fate Conspire, I can make a start, although I still need to find a copy of the third book, Soldier of Another Fortune. Eye of Terror is Barrington Bayley’s only Warhammer 40K novel, and by all accounts is especially mad – even for him. The Chessmen of Mars almost completes my set of 1970s NEL editions of the John Carter books – because, of course, I have to have a set that all looks the same, and the ones I already had were NEL paperbacks from the 1970s. City of Pearl is November’s belated read for the reading challenge. I doubt I’ll read it before the end of the year, but never mind.

My father owned quite a large collection of Penguin paperbacks. I found an invoice in one, and discovered that he’d actually ordered them direct from the publisher. This was back in the mid-1960s. Though he read and admired all the Penguin books he bought, for the past few decades his reading had mostly been thrillers. Some of his books I want to read myself so I’ve started bringing them home a few at a time, and so… Le Grand Meaulnes, Alain-Fournier; Hear Us O Lord from Heaven Thy Dwelling Place, a short story collection by Malcolm Lowry; Clock Without Hands, The Member of the Wedding and The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, all by Carson McCullers; Albert Camus’ The Plague; Raymond Chandler’s The Little Sister; and The Sound And The Fury by William Faulkner.

The Revenge for Love and Radon Daughters I found in charity shops. Journey to the Centre of the Earth was a swap from readitswapit.co.uk. With Luck Lasting is Bernard Spencer’s second poetry collection, and while it’s an ex-library book it’s in excellent condition and doesn’t appear to have ever been booked out.

Finally, two books for the space books collection. Falling to Earth is the autobiography of Apollo 15 astronaut Al Worden. It’s signed. The Story of Manned Space Stations was ridiculously cheap on eBay – about £3.50 compared to £18.99 on Amazon.