Valkyrdeath's 2015 reading

Time to set up for my second year here. I’m going to carry on trying to read a wide variety of books, but I’m not setting myself any targets for how many. I didn’t set a target last year and consequently it was the first year I actually went over 100 books. I think I’d like to try and read a bit more non-fiction this year though.

Books Read:
1. What We See When We Read by Peter Mendelsund
2. The Elements of Eloquence by Mark Forsyth
3. The Invisible Man by H. G. Wells
4. Dotter of Her Father's Eyes by Mary M. Talbot art by Bryan Talbot
5. Agent Zigzag by Ben Macintyre
6. Holy Sh*t: A Brief History of Swearing by Melissa Mohr
7. Ghosted: Haunted Heist by Joshua Williamson art by Goran Sudzuka
8. The Unwritten: Tommy Taylor and the Bogus Identity by Mike Carey art by Peter Gross
9. Pyramids by Terry Pratchett
10. Why Me? by Donald E. Westlake
11. Cemetery Girl: The Pretenders by Charlaine Harris and Christopher Golden art by Don Kramer

12. Nebula Awards Showcase 2008 edited by Ben Bova
13. Locke and Key: Welcome to Lovecraft by Joe Hill art by Gabriel Rodriguez
14. The Invincible by Stanislaw Lem translated by Bill Johnston
15. Saga, Volume 1 by Brian K. Vaughan art by Fiona Staples
16. Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn
17. Fresh Air and Fun: The Story of a Blackpool Holiday Camp by Bertha Wood
18. The Currents of Space by Isaac Asimov
19. Alan Mendelsohn, The Boy from Mars by Daniel Pinkwater

20. The Golem and the Djinni by Helene Wecker
21. Mary Poppins by P. L. Travers
22. Inside Job by Connie Willis
23. WRONG! Retro Games, You Messed Up Our Comic Book Heroes! by Chris Baker
24. A History of the World in 10½ Chapters by Julian Barnes
25. Good Behavior by Donald E. Westlake
26. The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt’s Darkest Journey by Candice Millard
27. Blankets by Craig Thompson
28. Freddy and the Ignormus by Walter R. Brooks
29. Shadows in Bronze by Lindsey Davis

30. Rasputin: A Short Life by Frances Welch
31. Dragons at Crumbling Castle by Terry Pratchett
32. Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach
33. Sandman: The Dream Hunters by Neil Gaiman art by Yoshitaka Amano
34. The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot
35. Cautionary Tales for Grown-Ups by Chris Addison
36. Brightness Falls from the Air by James Tiptree Jr.
37. Chicago Days/Hoboken Nights by Daniel Pinkwater
38. The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes
39. The Fifth Head of Cerberus by Gene Wolfe
40. Pratchett’s Women: Unauthorised Essays on the Female Characters of Discworld by Tansy Rayner Roberts
41. Saga, Volume 2 by Brian K. Vaughan art by Fiona Staples
42. Amityville Horrible by Kelley Armstrong
43. The Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennett

44. Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut
45. Oh What a Lovely War by Theatre Workshop
46. Venus in Copper by Lindsey Davis
47. Lucky Starr and the Pirates of the Asteroids by Isaac Asimov
48. Let Me Go by Helga Schneider
49. Lois the Witch by Elizabeth Gaskell
50. Clouds of Witness by Dorothy L Sayers
51. The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller
52. Welcome to the Monkey House by Kurt Vonnegut
53. Killing is Harmless: A Critical Reading of Spec Ops: The Line by Brendan Keogh
54. Math on Trial: How Numbers Get Used and Abused in the Courtroom by Leila Schneps and Coralie Colmez

55. Guards! Guards! by Terry Pratchett
56. Saga, Volume 3 by Brian K. Vaughan art by Fiona Staples
57. Drowned Hopes by Donald E. Westlake
58. We Can Fix It!: A Time Travel Memoir by Jess Fink
59. To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis
60. Uncle Boris in the Yukon and Other Shaggy Dog Stories by Daniel Pinkwater
61. The Caves of Steel by Isaac Asimov
62. The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories by Angela Carter
63. Marbles: Mania, Depression, Michelangelo and Me by Ellen Forney
64. The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making by Catherynne M. Valente

Stats for 2014

104 books made up of:
56 Novels
26 Graphic novels
16 Non-fiction
6 Short story collections

78 by male authors, 24 by female authors. (2 multiple author anthologies not included)

Favourite novels of 2014:
The Martian by Andy Weir
Doomsday Book by Connie Willis
Cannery Row by John Steinbeck
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
The Dortmunder books by Donald E Westlake (I don’t want to pick one particular one out)

Favourite graphic novels of 2014:
Fun Home by Alison Bechdel
Asterios Polyp by David Mazzucchelli
The Adventures of Unemployed Man by Gan Golan & Erich Origen

Favourite non-fiction of 2014:
Destiny of the Republic by Candice Millard
It’s Not Rocket Science by Ben Miller

1. What We See When We Read by Peter Mendelsund
A thought provoking look at the reading experience, what people visualise when they read, and how incomplete those images are. The book is full of pictures that emphasize the points the author is making, and I loved the design of the book. I think it’s definitely a book I’m going to want to reread, which is unusual for me. Thinking about the process of reading is something most of us don’t usually do, and I found it really interesting.

>3 valkyrdeath:: How intriguing! Added to my list :)

I'm coming from TonyH's thread where we are becoming Shakespeare when we read him and now you are posting about thinking about the process of reading...

>3 valkyrdeath: I snapped up that book at the bookstore, but have yet to read it.

>3 valkyrdeath: What We See When We Read sounds like a wonderful read.

Hi there! I read The Martian and Cannery Row last year as well and really enjoyed them both, too!

The question of what people actually see as they read sounds like an interesting topic. I'd be curious to get inside my daughter's head - I feel like she visualizes much more completely than I do.

>3 valkyrdeath: I somewhere heard of What We See When We Read but didn't know of its illustrated aspect. Onto the wishlist! I'm especially interested to follow your graphic novel and short story reading.

What We See When We Read certainly seems to be of interest to people! I hope anyone that reads it finds it as thought provoking as I did.

>8 ursula: Hi! I think The Martian was the best modern science fiction book I've read in quite a while, and I always love Steinbeck. I'll be following your thread with interest!

>9 detailmuse: It's very heavily illustrated on almost every page, and the text is often displayed in different ways too. It's a very quick read despite the length of the book. The writer is apparently a book cover designer. I'm rapidly exhausting my local libraries supply of graphic novels sadly, but I need to find ways to read them somehow! I definitely intend to read more short story collections over the year.

It's only January 4 and my wish list is toppling! But I think I'm going to have to add What We See When We Read! Thanks for your comments, I think! ;-)

Started reading Eats, Shoots and Leaves by Lynne Truss but abandoned it pretty quickly. The author basically told me to stop reading on the first page for not being furious every time I see a misused apostrophe. And then she compares seeing grammar misused to a bereavement, which is just unpleasant, and the attitude doesn't seem to get any better over the next few pages. There's a difference between taking a light hearted look at grammar mistakes and being an obsessive grammar bully. Lynne Truss comes across as that sort of person who responds to a long and well thought out article by ignoring the content and going on a rant about an insignificant grammar mistake they made. It just seemed petty and unpleasant and I don't see any point in going on.

>11 Poquette: These groups are really increasing my wishlist at an alarming rate. I hope you enjoy What We See When We Read, I really liked it.

<12 right on

>12 valkyrdeath: Then by all means stay away from her book about politeness. She seems to be an angry, entitled woman.

>15 ursula: That sounds horrendous. I'll definitely give that a wide berth. It's strange she'd be writing about politeness, considering her attitude comes across as quite rude.

I gave Eats, Shoots and Leaves a go back when it was so popular, but gave it up early on because the author's self-righteous smugness was not enjoyable. I notice every misplaced apostrophe -- I was a proofreader for years, and a good one, but I also understand that it's more important to communicate than it is to nit-pick. That attitude results in people becoming self-conscious of their own writing (and Word Court did this to me -- the issues addressed were arcane, and it made me too careful to be fluent) which is not a good thing. First write, and as you write more and read more, your grammar and spelling will improve as a side effect of all that reading and writing. But first write all you want, without worrying about the details. If can understand you, you've done a good job./end rant.

>17 RidgewayGirl: I agree completely. Obviously it's best to try and get things right, but the attitude that comes across in that book is horrible.

2. The Elements of Eloquence: How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase by Mark Forsyth
This book describes the various rhetorical figures of speech and takes a look at how they’ve been used over the centuries to create memorable lines. There’s a huge range of examples, anything from Shakespeare to Wordsworth to Beatles song lyrics. It’s really interesting and informative, and I learnt a few things I didn’t know about. My favourite piece of information regarded the order everyone puts adjectives in, automatically without realising it. It was strange to see the order written down and realising it was true, yet somehow we follow it without being taught or even knowing we’re doing it. Best of all though, the book is hilarious and made me laugh out loud on multiple occasions. I enjoyed the author’s earlier book, The Etymologicon, but I think I liked this one even more. I’d recommend it to anyone who has a love of language, since I find it hard to imagine anyone not enjoying it.

The Elements of Eloquence: How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase by Mark Forsyth sounds interesting. Onto the wish list . . .

The Elements of Eloquence sounds terrific. i'm wondering if you read in response to, or as a cleansing from Eats, shoots and leaves.

>21 dchaikin: I did in a way. Eats, Shoots and Leaves was this month's pick for a bookclub. The general theme for the month is language and since I'm not going on with that book I decided to read something I already had on my "to read" list with the same theme. I might read one or two other language books this month too, now that I've started.

Enjoyed your review of The elements of Eloquence. I might be tempted.

I have The Elements of Eloquence on my Kindle - it hasn't appealed so far when I've been 'browsing' but I think it will now!

Ooooh, The Elements of Eloquence sounds good.

A couple of books I've enjoyed and have used as references over the years are The Transitive Vampire and The New Well-Tempered Sentence, both by Karen Elizabeth Gordon. Both are intelligent and fun approaches to grammar.

>19 valkyrdeath: interesting: the language and the history.

>10 valkyrdeath: I'm rapidly exhausting my local libraries supply of graphic novels
I looked through the books we have in common and then through your "graphic novel" tag and have a few more to recommend if you have access through inter-library loan etc:

especially Stitches by David Small (my favorite) and the Barefoot Gen series on Hiroshima by Keiji Nakazawa

also Blankets by Craig Thompson

I'll second the recommendation of Blankets.

>25 ljbwell: I'll have to look into those two, thanks!

>26 detailmuse: >27 RidgewayGirl: I've been wanting to read Blankets for quite some time, but was not able to find it last time I was looking. I'm going to try again. I'll also check out the other two, which I hadn't heard of. Thanks for the recommendations!

I'll second Barefoot Gen, which i got a little obsessed with a couple years back. I liked Stitches too.

The Elements of Eloquence is going on my wishlist. The Etymologicon is already on there.

When it comes to graphic novels and comics, I don't generally bother with digital versions. However, I couldn't resist the current Humble Comics Bundle, considering I could get the first three volumes of Saga and the first eight volumes of The Walking Dead. I bought it just for those, but it also comes with a lot of other stuff that I've never heard of. At least I'm not short of graphic novels to read now. Anyone know if any of these are any good?

Alex + Ada
Deadly Class
C.O.W.L.
Elephantmen 2260 (what a bizarre title)
Minimum Wage
God Hates Astronauts
Satellite Sam
The Manhatten Projects
The Wicked + The Divine
The Fuse
Velvet
Sex Criminals

3. The Invisible Man by H. G. Wells
I found this to be an enjoyable story and very well paced, though I don’t think it ranks up alongside his best work. It had some interesting ideas, but I thought the main character’s nastiness was a bit over the top. It would have been nice to have something to show how he ended up descending to that level, or something to show that he was always that unstable, but the madness just seemed to escalate too quickly. Despite that, it’s a good story and the character is memorable, and it builds up to a genuinely tense conclusion. A fun quick read.

>31 valkyrdeath:

I like the Manhattan Projects generally; some of the others are waiting for me to get around to them. That's a pretty diverse list though - I rarely see some of those grouped together. Sounds like you have a lot of fun reading ahead of you :)

>33 AnnieMod: I've just looked up Manhattan Projects and that sounds like something I'd enjoy, so I might give that a go soon, thanks! I think the intention of that pack was to be diverse so that there was something there to appeal to all tastes. It should be interesting trying them all out.

>34 valkyrdeath: keep us updated then - I will be interested to see what you think of those.

4. Dotter of Her Father’s Eyes by Mary M. Talbot art by Bryan Talbot
Time for my first graphic novel of the year. This one combines a biography of Lucia Joyce with a memoir of the author, focusing on their respective relationships with their fathers, James Joyce and Joyce scholar James S. Atherton. Lucia’s story is a fairly tragic one culminating in her spending the majority of her life in mental institutions. The author’s story is rather happier as she escapes her initially unpleasant situation. The main linking threads between the two, aside from the James Joyce connection, are that they both had fathers who were writers and who apparently grew more and more distant over time as they became too focussed on their work, and that they both affected in a substantial way by the attitudes of their times towards women.

The artwork is by Bryan Talbot, Mary’s husband. It’s very good, and manages to use colour to make it immediately obvious when switching between the two stories to avoid it becoming confusing. It’s a more consistent style than the book I’ve previously read by Bryan Talbot, Alice in Sunderland, and it fits very well for the book.

The book wasn’t a bad read, though it’s not going to become a favourite. It just feels a bit insubstantial, possibly because of trying to cover two lives in the extremely short length (less than 100 pages) of the book. It’s enjoyable to read, but as graphic memoirs go, it’s not up there with the likes of Fun Home or Persepolis. The writing and art were very good though and I’d certainly be interested in reading any projects they might go on to do together.

Oh, and I love the title. That’s what drew me to get the book in the first place.

5. Agent Zigzag by Ben Macintyre
A really fascinating account of Eddie Chapman, criminal turned double agent during World War 2. It’s a gripping story from beginning to end, following how his life of crime led him to be imprisoned on Jersey when it was occupied, how he convinced the Germans to train him as a spy, only to turn himself in to become a double agent the instant he landed in England. It’s easily the match of any fictional story, and in fact would probably be deemed unrealistic if someone had presented it as a novel. It’s also a very funny story, full of eccentric characters. Macintyre’s writing keeps the story moving at a good pace while providing plenty of details about the background details about the events and other people involved. Chapman is a really interesting person, incredibly brave and risking his life to help Britain win the war on one hand, an unrepentant criminal who returned to a life of crime afterwards on the other. Yet he seems to have charmed nearly everyone he met and there’s something likable about him that comes across in the book despite everything.

This is one of my favourite stories from the war, and one that I’m very happy to have learnt more about. I also have Macintyre’s book about Philby, which I’m quite looking forward to reading after how much I enjoyed this. And that’s my disjointed thoughts on another book. I loved it.

>37 valkyrdeath: I loved Agent ZigZag , when I read it last year. It was one of those stories that seemed so unbelievable, and it was told with a lot of humor.

>36 valkyrdeath:: Thanks for the review of, and reminder about, Dotter of her father's eyes. I remember reading about it when it first came out and being interested. I've read most of Bryan Talbot's Grandville series of graphic novels, and was curious how his style of artwork would fit with a very different type of book.

>38 NanaCC: I missed your review of that last year. It really was like reading a good novel.

>39 ljbwell: I only found out about Grandville the other day, and it looks fun. If you've read most of it, then I take it you'd recommend it? The only Bryan Talbot I've read is Alice in Sunderland, and the artwork there was very impressive, and the book itself was unusual.

>40 valkyrdeath:

Grandville is a great series which needs to be a lot more popular than it is.

>12 valkyrdeath: I HATED Eats, Shoots and Leaves! She was so smug and snarky. And I'm an editor! On the other hand, >37 valkyrdeath: I LOVED Agent Zigzag. It was the first book by Macintyre I read and it remains my favorite.

>19 valkyrdeath: The Elements of Eloquence sounds intriguing.

>41 AnnieMod: Good enough for me, I'm going to get hold of the first one.

>42 rebeccanyc: It's the first book by Ben Macintyre I've read too, and I certainly hope to read more. I bought the Philby one at the same time as Agent Zigzag, so it'll probably be that next. Also glad to find there's quite a few people who have similar views on the Lynne Truss book.

>40 valkyrdeath:: There are four (I think), and I've got three of them. I actually took issue with a few things in the first one, but I'd argue that the stories have gotten stronger along the way. From the graphics end of things, though - gorgeous. Rich colours, fun visual references, strong sense of the characters and society.

>44 ljbwell: Yup - 4 with the Noel from last year.

>45 AnnieMod:: Ah, good, so it *is* only the Noel one I'm missing.

6. Holy Sh*t: A Brief History of Swearing by Melissa Mohr
As stated in the title, this book charts the history of swearing over the centuries. The “Holy” part of the title actually has meaning aside from its use in that particular phrase, since there’s a lot of information about the religious swearing of oaths, and how swearing oaths in vain became offensive language and how that has gradually changed over to the form of swearing we have now. It’s split into six chapters, starting with the roots of swearing in ancient Rome, then onto the Bible, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Victorian era and finally onto the 20th Century. I found a lot of the information in the book to be interesting, though there were times when it could get a bit repetitive, especially in the Middle Ages section when she sometimes seemed to repeat the same fact several times throughout the chapter. It’s also quite an academic book, though there is humour in there too. I quite enjoyed it, though I think it’s one for someone with a real interest in linguistics rather than the casual reader though. And as expected, it’s clearly not a book for someone who’s easily offended.

Hmm. All that about the history of swearing sounds interesting and even important, but not sure i want to read an academic book on it.

Thank you for your review - The Elements of Eloquence is going on my reading list, too.

>48 dchaikin: I sometimes wonder if when addressing subjects of this nature, there's a feeling that the author has to try and make it more scholarly sounding in order to deflect the sort of critics who will accuse them of writing about a frivolous topic. It wasn't too dry and had a few jokes in there, but it could have been a more entertaining read than it was.

>49 reva8: I hope you enjoy it!

7. Ghosted: Haunted Heist by Joshua Williamson art by Goran Sudzuka
Time for another selection of random graphic novels and comic collections from my library. In this one, a criminal is broken out of jail by a rich man who wants him to perform an unusual heist: to steal a ghost from a haunted mansion. It takes elements of the heist stories with the team of various experts being assembled, and blends them in with a haunted house story. It was an entertaining enough story, and built up to a good ending, though it wasn’t exceptionally original in the end. It was fun though, and I’d read more if I saw it, though I wouldn’t really specifically look out for it. I was pleased that despite being volume 1, it told a complete story in its own right too.

8. The Unwritten: Tommy Taylor and the Bogus Identity by Mike Carey art by Peter Gross
The Unwritten tells the story of Tommy Taylor, who shares his name with a Harry Potter style character in the books written by his father, and becomes famous because of this. Then, to his own surprise, rumours surface that he might not be the author’s real son. Later, it seems that things from the novels might not be as fictional as they seemed. The story plays a lot on the nature of Z-list celebrities and the obsessiveness of fans, but has some interesting ideas going on, though it doesn’t feel especially original. It’s the start of a lengthy ongoing series, collecting the first five issues, with only four of them following the main story and ending it on a cliffhanger, which always slightly annoys me, but I suppose can be expected when it’s a collection of comics from a long series. The final issue is an odd story about Rudyard Kipling which ties into the world of the story and looks like it will play a part in future. I enjoyed it and it has potential and I might read the next volume sometime. It felt like this one was basically just setting things up.

>52 valkyrdeath: I liked the later volumes more - the first collections is really setup (the second one as well quite honestly). I need to get back to that series... :)

>53 AnnieMod: Thanks for telling me, I was hoping that was the case! I did like it so I'll definitely try and get hold of the next book sometime soon.

9. Pyramids by Terry Pratchett
Continuing my reread through the Discworld series. This is one of the books that doesn’t star one of the regular characters, and I often think these are unfairly ignored in favour of the popular characters. Which is a shame, since while this isn’t one of my absolute favourites of the series, it’s still a fun book. This one parodies ancient Egypt in particular, but is also a satire on pointless traditions and on religion, starting some of the ideas that he explored more fully in Small Gods (which is one of my favourites). Anyway, it’s a Discworld book, it’s hard to go wrong with any of them.

Thanks for posting a review of this book. I've felt for a while that I'd like to learn more about how to read, a process that I haven't thought about much since 1st grade.

>55 valkyrdeath: Small Gods is my favorite from diskwolrd. I think it was the first Pratchett i read.

>57 dchaikin: That was my first Pratchett too. We had Small Gods and Guards! Guards! from the library, my dad and I read one each and then swapped and both became instant fans.

>56 poingu: I think most of us don't really think about the process of reading and what goes on in our heads when we read, and it can be an interesting subject.

10. Why Me? by Donald E. Westlake
The fifth Dortmunder book, and I think the best one yet. The others have all been good, but the humour seems even tighter here with the laughs coming even more regularly. Again, it manages to have a plot that’s entirely different to the others, this time with Dortmunder stealing the most valuable jewel of his career entirely by accident and then spending the book trying to get out of the mess it’s got him into. It’s full of great characters and funny lines.

11. Cemetery Girl: The Pretenders by Charlaine Harris and Christopher Golden art by Don Kramer
The first volume of a series of graphic novels. It starts with a girl being dumped and left for dead in a cemetery, only to wake up with no memory of who she is or how she got there. (No clichés there then…) And so, to avoid running into the people who were after her, she decides to just stay there and live in the cemetery, as you would. This one was readable but didn’t really work. I know people don’t always act rationally, but there are just too many moments, practically every three or four pages, where I felt like shouting at a character as they ponder over what to do when the answer is clear. The overall mystery of who the girl is remains at the end of the book for future volumes, but I don’t think I’ll be bothering.

>55 valkyrdeath: Pyramids is actually one of my favourite Discworld novels, although, as you said, it is hard to go wrong with any of them. I have a bit of a soft spot for the Assassin's Guild, so I really enjoyed it. I do see it, though, more as a take on debunking popular 'scientific' claims, and less on religion - or atleast, less than Small Gods.

>61 reva8: I do especially love the Assassin's Guild section at the start of the book. It's so long since I'd read Pyramids that I'd forgotten most of it, but that particular section I still remembered quite clearly.

12. Nebula Awards Showcase 2008 edited by Ben Bova
I decided to go back and fill in some of the gaps in my reading of the Nebula Awards collections, and while I’d read the 2007 and 2009 volumes, I’d missed this one. Sadly, this is one of the years where the collection was lighter on content, with only five complete stories included. Naturally, there’s the winner in each of the short story, novelette and novella categories, alongside one runner up short story and a story by James Gunn, who won that year’s Grand Master award.

The book opens disappointingly with the winning short story, Echo by Elizabeth Hand. It seemed a rather pointless story, where the narrator talks about how her long distance lover never talked to her much, and now there’s been a disaster and communications are cut off most of the time, she hears from him even less. And that’s about it. The runner up story later in the book, The Woman in Schrodinger’s Wave Equations by Eugene Mirabelli, wasn’t a bad story, and was superior to the winner, though wasn’t outstanding. It’s about a man studying physics and his relationships with two women, and other than his area of interest, I’m not sure what qualifies it as science fiction. I try not to worry too much about genre boundaries, but I’m almost certain these can’t have been the best two stories they could have found out of an entire years output.

The novella dominates the book, and in fact was originally published as a book on its own. At over 120 pages, Burn by James Patrick Kelly takes almost a third of the space on its own. It’s based around the fighting of forest fires and the author’s apparent hatred of Henry David Thoreau, being set on a planet called Walden where everyone has to live a simple life and remain generally isolated. It’s not destined to become a favourite, but it was at least an enjoyable and well written story.

As was Two Hearts by Peter S. Beagle, the winning novelette. It’s a classic fairy tale fantasy story and perhaps my favourite of the book, despite the fact that I’m generally more interested in science fiction. It’s apparently a sequel to The Last Unicorn, which I’ve never read, so I don’t know how it links in with the original, but it worked perfectly well as a story in its own right.

There’s also the Rhysling Award winners for science fiction poetry included, which is a nice touch, especially as they don’t take a great deal of space. After that though, it’s onto the filler, of which there’s way too much in this volume. It’s nice to have a story from the year’s Grand Master winner, but James Gunn’s The Listeners is not only a fairly famous story already, it was already included in an earlier Nebula Awards volume back when it was a nominee itself, and I feel it would be better to include more of this year’s nominees. The novel excerpt is another completely pointless way of taking thirty pages away that could have been used for other stories in order to give you a random chunk of story with no beginning or end. The essays aren’t bad, but aren’t especially thrilling and don’t seem to have a great deal to say, and I could do without Orson Scott Card’s baffling talk about science fiction being a literary movement rather than just a genre.

That could sum up the problem I have with this volume. Some years the collection is amazing and some years disappointing, and this is one of the worst, but I don’t think it necessarily reflects on the quality of the fiction that year, just on the judging criteria. I understand that everyone is going to have different tastes, but the short story winner this year was so feeble, and half the stories barely fit into the genre anyway. I get the impression that the judges for that year were just going for anything that seemed “literary”, to use a term I particularly dislike, with references to Thoreau in Burn, mythology in Echo and untranslated foreign language quotes in The Listeners. Whether or not that is the case, this had the least content of any Nebula Award volume I’ve read, and none of what was there stood out enough to really make the book worthwhile.

13. Locke and Key: Welcome to Lovecraft by Joe Hill art by Gabriel Rodriguez
After the murder of the father in the Locke family, they relocate to a town called Lovecraft. There’s the level of subtlety we’re talking about with this story. Nothing could go wrong in a town called Lovecraft, surely. The house they’ve moved into has mysterious doors with different magical properties, and the killer has escaped and is coming back for the rest of them. It’s quite well written and the artwork is good. It’s not the most amazing story, but it was entertaining enough and I’d probably read another. I could see it having some potential to get more interesting over the series.

14. The Invincible by Stanislaw Lem translated by Bill Johnston
I’d never read any Stanislaw Lem before, so thought it was about time to give him a go now. This one is about a spaceship crew investigating the disappearance of their sister ship. The first part of the book is about the discovery of what happened, and then the rest of the book is dealing with that. The writing was very dry though, and I almost gave up early on, but before I did the story started to get more interesting and kept me going. It’s full of technical details, but lacks character, and indeed characters. I already can’t remember any of the characters in the book, and none of them were really distinct from each other. I never got any feel for the personalities.

I’d also never realised before how much easier to read things were with paragraphs. There’s lots of huge blocks of text in this book, and in the last chapter there’s sections where it goes for 3 – 4 pages for a single paragraph.

The story was decent enough for me to want to finish the book but nothing too spectacular. It generally fell flat because of the issues I mentioned. Though it’s hard to say with a book like this how much of it was the fault of the author and how much was the translator. The translation was perfectly good English though and I didn’t see any problems in that regard.

I might try one more Lem book sometime to see if I have better luck, since he’s highly regarded and this isn’t his best known work. Probably not for a while though.

Interesting review of The Invincible. I have not read any Stanislaw Lem and so I won't start with this one.

>65 valkyrdeath: I’d also never realised before how much easier to read things were with paragraphs. There’s lots of huge blocks of text in this book, and in the last chapter there’s sections where it goes for 3 – 4 pages for a single paragraph.

The only time I haven't hated page upon page of unparagraphed text is in Paul Auster's memoir, Winter Journal, where they took me down a rabbit hole and the writing sped up fast. I loved seeing them coming.

>66 baswood: I think Solaris is generally considered his best work, so I'm thinking maybe that would be a better starting point. It's the one I'll try next if I decide to read another.

>67 detailmuse: I've never read that book, but I can imagine it working when used well. I have read books before that use tricks like that to control the pacing of the book, so a really good author can get away with pretty much anything. This one sadly just felt like they'd regularly forgot to insert the new line break.

15. Saga, Volume 1 by Brian K. Vaughan art by Fiona Staples
After those average comics from the library, this one feels like a big improvement. Lots of fun characters, good dialogue, imaginative settings and the start of an interesting plot. The writing is very good, as is the art. This one definitely is just the start of a longer story though, so there’s no conclusion to anything at all here. I’m looking forward to going onto the second volume very soon.

16. Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn
Not a bad as I feared it might be, though I’m not quite sure why this was such a big success. It seems a fairly average modern thriller, though the thriller components didn’t really kick in until the last third of the book when the pace started to pick up. The moment that was supposed to be a major twist half way through was predictable, and while I didn’t predict all the specifics of it, I saw it coming from very early on, and it’s quite unusual for me to guess a plot and I usually don’t even try.

It was reasonably well written, though had some annoyances, but it just didn’t do anything much to make it stand out to me. I enjoyed the final portion of the book, up until the ending, which was completely awful, not even slightly convincing and left the story feeling unsatisfying. It’s quite grim reading too, since it’s one of those stories without a single likeable character. Not an awful read, but nothing special. I probably would never have read it if it wasn’t the pick for a book club this month.

17. Fresh Air and Fun: The Story of a Blackpool Holiday Camp by Bertha Wood
A bit of local history, and also a world record holder for oldest author to have their first book published, being released on her 100th birthday. It’s a memoir mostly focusing on her time setting up and running a holiday camp with her husband. It’s a fairly short book and it’s not hugely detailed, but it’s interesting enough for what it is. Holiday camps were a big part of post-war 20th century Britain when holidays abroad were unlikely for the majority of the working class population. These aren’t always the things people write about, but I think it’s important that we have first-hand accounts like this. There are a few amusing moments and if the author had gone into more detail and talked about more of the things that people got up to in their camp then this could have been a really entertaining book. As it is, it’s still a piece of small scale history that’s now preserved.

18. The Currents of Space by Isaac Asimov
Published in 1952, this is the third and final novel in Asimov’s early Empire series, though chronologically it takes place between the other two. This is a huge improvement over The Stars, Like Dust, the previous book, though it’s still far from the heights of Asimov’s later novels. Perhaps it’s because he was only just getting started as a novelist, though he was already a master of the short story.

The book opens with a brief scene where a Spatio-analyst arrives to warn the government of the world of Florina of an impending disaster that will destroy the planet, only for the person he’s informing to wipe his mind. The book then moves forward in time and follows the gradual recovery of his memories and the mystery of just what the disaster was, who wiped his mind and why. It’s a complex plot with a large number of characters and several threads running simultaneously, but Asimov’s clear writing means that everything remains easy to follow.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the book is the nature of the world set up, with the Florinians producing a cotton-like substance called kyrt but being controlled by the world of Sark, who treat them as slaves. The whole plot revolves around this situation, and it’s a pretty clear reference to cotton slavery. Whether it’s because he didn’t usually do it, or because I didn’t notice it at the young age when I first read most of his books, it’s not something I’m used to seeing in Asimov’s work.

The overall nature of the disaster is based on science that’s no longer plausible by modern knowledge, but then I’ve never felt that is too much of an issue. As long as things work in an internally consistent way then I don’t mind if they don’t match up with reality.

This isn’t one of Asimov’s best, but it’s a well plotted mystery and an entertaining read. Not a place to start with the author, but one that I enjoyed reading. Thankfully, he was only a couple of books away from writing The Caves of Steel and that’s where he really hit his stride with the novel form. I think there’s a reread coming up there.

>72 valkyrdeath: Thanks for this review: I haven't yet made my way through the Asimov canon (apart from Foundation). I agree with you that internal consistency can override the outdated science, that's a good point. So, Caves of Steel next, I think,before I attempt this one?

>73 reva8: I'd definitely say Caves of Steel was a good starting place with his novels. I, Robot is a great starting point for his short stories, or pretty much any of his collections from the 50s and 60s such as Nine Tomorrows and Earth is Room Enough.

Enjoyed your review of The currents of Space and its nice to have some perspective on the book from someone that knows their Asimov

>75 baswood: Thanks, it's always nice to know someone enjoys them!

19. Alan Mendelsohn, The Boy from Mars by Daniel Pinkwater
I finished this one ages ago and then completely forgot to update with it. Another fun book from Pinkwater. Some bits seemed familiar, and then I realised it was because I’d read about the real versions of some of the events used in the book in Fish Whistle last year. I loved the satire around the school system and the child psychiatrist was hilarious. Again, I wish I’d had these books as a kid.

20. The Golem and the Djinni by Helene Wecker
This was a great book. Set in New York in 1899, the story mixes elements of Jewish and Islamic mythology into the historical setting. It’s about half way through the book before the two title characters actually meet, but it ultimately ends up being a story of an unusual friendship between two people with very different views of the worlds. It’s well paced and entertaining throughout and I loved every bit of it. I can’t really find anything to fault. Hard to believe it’s a debut novel.

21. Mary Poppins by P. L. Travers
As a child, Mary Poppins was one of my favourite films, but I’d never read the book until now. Back then, I didn’t even know it was based on a book. Even reading as an adult, I really liked it. I think the abrupt and unpleasant Mary Poppins character of the book who “never wasted time in being nice” is a more entertaining character than if she was the sentimental creation of the film. There’s a real feeling of magic in the book and Mary comes across as extremely otherworldly.

At least Saving Mr Banks inspired me to finally read this, even if it did try to pretend that Travers liked the film in the end. I really enjoyed this, and will be getting round to reading the sequels at some point.

22. Inside Job by Connie Willis
A very short book about a professional debunker and his former film star assistant. They’re investigating a fake medium who seems to have suddenly started genuinely channelling an unexpected spirit. The central concept, that famous sceptic H. L. Mencken has returned to the grave and is speaking through fraudulent psychics with the paradoxical purpose of pointing out that they’re fakes, I found quite funny and the plot had a few twists along the way. This is the first Connie Willis book I’ve read that isn’t one of the Oxford Time Travel stories and it was still well written and very entertaining. It’s not a deep complex book, but it’s a fun tribute to H. L. Mencken and to scepticism in general.

>73 reva8: Definitely in order - even if they are not related as much as the Foundation novels, reading them in order makes a lot of the smaller details shine.

>78 valkyrdeath: I've had that one on the kindle since a week after it was published... I probably should push it up the list... I like the fact that the writers finally decided to look outside of the Arthur and/or European medieval based worlds for their first novels

>81 AnnieMod: I'm glad of the different settings too. I get bored of fantasy when it's all set in that same sort of world all the time. I'd definitely recommend The Golem and the Djinni/Jinni (not sure why there's two variant spellings on different books covers.

23. WRONG! Retro Games, You Messed Up Our Comic Book Heroes! by Chris Baker
A combination of wanting something light to read and browsing the practically worthless choice of books in the Kindle Lending Library led me to this. Unfortunately, it was a bit too light. Running quickly through around eighty superhero games from 1978 through to 1992, the author mentions one point, minor or major, where they’d got a character wrong in the game compared to the original comics, and then basically moves on to the next game. The concept might have been a fun read if it had gone into more depth about each game in general and maybe pointing out more mistakes rather than just one per game. As it is, it doesn’t really have enough time to be particularly funny and I’m left knowing nothing about the games other than Batman wore purple in this one, Batman shoots people in that one, Batman murders Catwoman in another one, and bloody hell there’s a lot of Batman games. Might have been alright as a website article, but it’s not really much to support a book with.

>82 valkyrdeath:
US vs UK I bet - because you know, English speaking readers cannot deal with the spelling of the other country...

For the different settings - I remember reading The Lions of Al-Rassan back in my teens. It was so different from all the fantasy I had read before that it made me realize that fantasy is a lot bigger genre than I really believed it to be (highly recommended if you never read it). It may be set in Europe-like world but it does not forget the non-Christian parts of the world.
And from the newer books - had you read Throne of the Crescent Moon?

I know I know - you are not trying to get recommendations but... :)

>84 AnnieMod: I've never read either of those, but I'll make a note of them! I'm more of a science fiction reader in general and haven't read huge amounts of fantasy, but I'm always happy to find ones with less conventional worlds. Throne of the Crescent Moon sounds very interesting. I'm always happy for recommendations really. I don't mind having plenty on my to read list, it makes sure I've always got plenty to choose from!

24. A History of the World in 10½ Chapters by Julian Barnes
Somewhere between a novel and a collection of short stories. Each chapter tells a different fictional or non-fictional story, covering a wide variety of styles, but always with recurring themes. The main recurring subject is a naval one, with shipwrecks featuring in many of the stories, but I think the idea linking them all together is that of history itself. There’s a lot that seems to suggest that what we know about history is only ever going to be a representation and never a complete picture, whether it’s skewed by the people recording it, incomplete or misinterpreted. It’s written in a generally light style with a lot of humour, though the subjects it covers range from the comic to the dark.

I particularly enjoyed the comical alternate take on Noah’s ark in the opening chapter, told from the perspective of a stowaway woodworm. (Woodworms in a later chapter are put on an absurd trial for causing damage to a church.) A chapter based on a ship hijacking perhaps had the biggest impact on me in its own right, with a powerful ending. Elsewhere there’s a surprisingly interesting look at the painting The Raft of the Medusa, looking at why Gericault painted what he did and omitted other details. It’s a diverse book and I liked some chapters more than others, but overall I found it to be well written, both entertaining and thought provoking and it’s one of those books that I find myself still thinking about afterwards. It’s the first Julian Barnes book I’ve read, and I might try some more in the future.

This was my suggestion for the book club I’m in and it got picked for this month, so here’s hoping I’m not the only one to like it!

>85 valkyrdeath:
Same here - my genre is SF. But I had found in the last years that I enjoy some types of well written fantasies.

I was just contemplating starting reading Dragons at Crumbling Castle this weekend when it comes on the news that Terry Pratchett has died. If I'd never read a Discworld book years ago, I would barely know any of the people I know now. My life would be very different, and considerably worse for not having read his books. Inevitable as it was, it's still hard to take in. In my opinion it's a loss of one of the all time truly great writers.

>86 valkyrdeath: I too really enjoyed A History of the World in 10½ Chapters. That and Flaubert's Parrot are my favorite books by Julian Barnes.

>88 valkyrdeath: I have not yet read anything by Terry Pratchett although I have been tempted from time to time, knowing how highly his Discworld creations have been praised. It is unthinkable that such a creative writer would succumb to, of all things, Alzheimer's! What a loss to his many fans.

>88 valkyrdeath: A few days ago I mentioned that Al-Rassan made me realize how broad the fantasy genre can be - but exploring it was a wholly different thing. It took a few years and a newly found friend to give me Guards!Guards! - I still laugh at my silly head for almost saying that no, I am not interested. Best decision I ever took to actually read the book. Caught up on all books published by then (the year at the time was 2000) and since then any book is read as soon as I can get my hands on it. A couple of years later I actually read them all again one more time - in English this time (and since 2005 or thereabouts I had been reading the new ones only in English). I'll miss the yearly book from him. But then DEATH obviously decided that it is about time he stop him from spilling more of HIS secrets :)

>89 Poquette:
Start with either Guards!Guards! or Equal Rites ( or Mort eventually I guess) - and then continue in the subseries for a few books. I am all for reading in order and all that but if you never read him, I would vote for either of those and not for the very first ones. Once you are hooked, go back and read in order

>89 Poquette: Does Flaubert's Parrot require any prior knowledge of Flaubert to enjoy? I definitely want to read some more Julian Barnes.

>90 AnnieMod: It was actually my teacher at school who recommended I read Pratchett, and I've been grateful to him for that ever since! I'd agree with Guards! Guards! as a perfect starting point. It was my second Discworld book, though my dad's first, and it's still one of my favourites. The first few books are enjoyable but certainly not the best starting point to get hooked on the series. One of the great things about them is that every one works on its own without needing prior knowledge.

>90 AnnieMod: and >91 valkyrdeath: Thanks for recommending Guards! Guards and/or Equal Rites. I am adding them to my wish list so I won't forget.

>91 valkyrdeath: Does Flaubert's Parrot require any prior knowledge of Flaubert to enjoy?   Not really, unless you become curious as you read. A lot of information is provided in Flaubert's Parrot itself. You can always go to Wikipedia if you want a brief background.

>92 Poquette: Thanks, I've wishlisted that one now.

25. Good Behavior by Donald E. Westlake
The sixth Dortmunder book, and as funny as ever. This time, after being saved by nuns after a failed heist, he gets himself caught up in the rescue of a kidnapped nun. He finds a way to turn it into a profitable venture and gets some of the old faces together again to pull it off, but of course, nothing ever goes smoothly. There’s funny dialogue and situations throughout and Westlake still has that way of cleverly phrasing everything that makes even simple lines funny. Another really entertaining book.

26. The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt’s Darkest Journey by Candice Millard
An account of Roosevelt’s dangerous journey to chart a tributary of the Amazon. It’s one of those pieces of non-fiction that reads like an adventure story and it becomes really quite thrilling by the end. I don’t think I’ll ever understand why anyone would go on journeys like this though, knowing the incredible risks, and the fact that they arrived at the river having lost most of their provisions and leaving their boats behind and deciding to go on anyway in makeshift canoes made from tree trunks seems completely insane. It does make for a good read though. While Roosevelt might be headlining the book, I found Rondon, his Brazilian co-commander, to be the more fascinating character.

I really enjoyed this book. Like Destiny of the Republic it was really well written and informative. I just wish Candice Millard would write some more books now!

27. Blankets by Craig Thompson
An autobiographical graphic novel following the author growing up in an extremely religious family through to his eventual loss of faith, focusing partly on his childhood relationship with his brother but mostly on his relationship with his first love as a teenager. It’s very well written and drawn, if a little angsty. He captured the emotions in the events very well and I can understand why it had such a big impact.

28. Freddy and the Ignormus by Walter R. Brooks
This is the second of these books that I’ve read, and I really enjoyed it again. The characters are really entertaining and funny. Brooks also seems to be able to put good messages for children into the books without ever coming across as preachy, and it’s nice to see a set of talking animal characters that come across as being convincing people, with all the strengths and flaws you’d expect. A fun book from what seems to be a really fun series.

29. Shadows in Bronze by Lindsey Davis
The second in the Falco series of historical mysteries. The plot involves dealing with the aftermath of the conspiracy from The Silver Pigs. I found it to be a thoroughly enjoyable read, though not so much for the mystery as for the characters and setting. The plot is actually fairly light in this one, with events only really getting going properly around the last quarter. Instead, it focuses mainly on the developing relationship between Falco and Helena. The characters are great and I still love the idea of a film noir style detective in the ancient Roman setting. There’s a lot of historical detail in the books without it ever feeling like you’re just being given a history lesson, and the writing is often amusing. There were some very funny events towards the end too. I’m looking forward to the next book to see how things develop.

30. Rasputin: A Short Life by Frances Welch
My knowledge about Rasputin was pretty much limited to that ridiculous Boney M. song, so I thought it was probably time I learnt a bit more. This book seems like a good introductory volume. It’s quite short at around 200 pages and just gives an overview of his life and eventually assassination, along with the other people involved. It’s basically the story of how a man claiming to be a faith healer conned his way into the confidence of the royal family and ended up wielding power over Russian politics, all while sleeping with practically every young woman he could find. The main problem with the book is that so many of the facts are unclear, with first-hand accounts from different people contradicting each other, and even the same person contradicting themselves at different times, probably through trying to sensationalise the story in later years. It means it’s hard to tell exactly which parts of the story are true, but the story is generally interesting enough to be worth reading about anyway, and the major points are clear enough. This book was decent, though it really is only for someone who knows very little about Rasputin, since it’s so short there isn’t really space to go into any real depth. It achieves its purpose though.

31. Dragons at Crumbling Castle by Terry Pratchett
One of the last Pratchett books published but actually containing his earliest work, this collects a set of children’s stories he wrote while a teenager, for printing in the local newspaper. They’re simple fantasy stories but with the Pratchett sense of humour clearly developing already. These are clearly aimed at young children, and it seems like this book would be a great introduction to Terry Pratchett. There’s enough there that I found enjoyable even now though, with quite a few funny jokes throughout. It’s obviously not got the depth of his later books and he was still developing as a writer, but it’s still fun in its own simple way, and I feel it would be good for the target audience. For the Pratchett fan, there’s a lot of interest to, with two stories about Carpet People that went on to inspire his first novel and some lines occasionally that you can see he later developed within the Discworld series.

32. Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach
This is another great non-fiction book and one of my favourites I’ve read recently. It looks at the various ways cadavers have been used, such as organ donation, surgery practice, investigating rates of decomposition to help in murder investigations and nutty attempts to prove the Turin Shroud is real by crucifying corpses. It’s fascinating, but Mary Roach’s writing style also makes it surprisingly funny. I also didn’t find it morbid at all, since it’s simply looking at the uses of bodies after death, and not generally at death itself. I’ll almost certainly be checking out some other books by Mary Roach. This one is definitely recommended.

Enjoying your reviews. I didn't know about that Pratchett.

>102 dchaikin: Thanks. The Pratchett didn't seem to get advertised much and before it came out it basically appeared on Amazon with no information about what it actually was.

33. Sandman: The Dream Hunters by Neil Gaiman art by Yoshitaka Amano
A retelling of a Japanese folk tale that never actually existed, The Dream Hunters is unusual for a Sandman story in that it isn’t a graphic novel but simply an illustrated one. Gaiman is good at writing fable-like stories and this really does feel like a Japanese legend, especially early on. The Sandman characters appear later though usually not identified outright, leaving the reader to spot where it ties in to the rest of the series. It works as a story in its own right but has extra depth when familiar with the graphic novels. It’s fairly short and not very long, but it’s enjoyable and well written, and Amano’s watercolour artwork adds a lot to the feel of the book. Probably best for people who are already fans of the Sandman series in general though. As a comic it would have fitted in perfectly well amongst the occasional single issue stories.

>104 valkyrdeath: At the end of 2014 when I was reviewing all my reading for the year I discovered that the word "dream" appeared in the title of five different books I had read. So now every time I see the word I stop and take a second look. I may have to add Sandman: The Dream Hunters to my wish list!

>105 Poquette: I often enjoy stories involving dreams in some way so I'm surprised it hasn't turned up in the titles of more books I've read recently. That may change at some point.

34. The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot
I wasn’t really expecting to like this book, but I really enjoyed it. It was surprisingly easy to read and the characters were well written. It also didn’t seem to follow a predictable path, though the ending itself did seem a bit like she didn’t know quite how to end things and was just finding a way to get out of it. I wasn’t expecting the humour either, but there were quite a few funny scenes. I have a tendency to think books from this era are just going to be stuffy and dull, but I guess it’s just finding the right books. I liked that it showed what society was like for women at the time too, which was probably pretty important at the time. Anyway, it seems I don’t have much coherent to say, but I liked the book and will be reading some more Eliot at some point.

>104 valkyrdeath: Wasn't this gorgeous? Probably my favourite in the Sandman books, right after 'The Sound of Her Wings'

I've enjoyed any of Neil Gaiman's books that I've listened to, but I've never read any of the Sandman books. I might need to check.

>108 reva8: I loved the whole Sandman series so I find it hard to decide which parts were my favourite. I did really enjoy this one though.

>109 NanaCC: I think if you like Gaiman in generally, you'd almost certainly like Sandman. Other than Dream Hunters, they're all graphic novels, and they're the books that made me realise what could be done in that medium.

>104 valkyrdeath: and >108 reva8: You really piqued my interest re Gaiman's Sandman series, and I happened to be in Barnes & Noble yesterday and took a look. My experience with graphic novels is almost nonexistent, so I was quite taken with the art work in The Dream Hunters. I ended up buying it and volume one Preludes & Nocturnes, which I started reading immediately. Maybe I am not as interested in my current reading as I thought! hmm

>111 Poquette: I hope you like them! The Sandman series is a real epic and so multi-layered that I can usually find something new whenever rereading. With Preludes & Nocturnes he was still finding his style and it's a bit less even than the later books I think, but it was enough to get me hooked.

35. Cautionary Tales for Grown-Ups by Chris Addison
A fun, silly read with comedian Chris Addison coming up with a modern version of Belloc’s classic children’s book. The poems are actually very well done and it’s one of the rare places where you’ll find rhymes referring to bronchopneumonia. It’s not really laugh out loud funny but it’s amusing and entertaining. The characters mostly haven’t done anything too much wrong, but then it’s not meant to be taken seriously anyway. There are tales of the dangers of not voting or fly tipping, but there’s also stories of neighbours trying to outdo each other in gaudy Christmas lights on their houses (“With six-foot Santa, snowmen, deer – the standard ‘Xmas’ crew- / And sundry other flashing tat they’d bought at B&Q”). Nearly everyone comes to a ludicrous far-fetched end due to their activities, such as the Christmas lights being mistaken for a runway by a jumbo jet. It feels sort of Milligan-like. Not the deepest book, but a fun light read with well written comic verse.

36. Brightness Falls from the Air by James Tiptree Jr.
James Tiptree Jr. was primarily a short story writer and only wrote two novels towards the end of her career. This is the second of those, published just a couple of years before her death. A group of people gather on the planet of Damiem to watch the final stages of a star going nova, though two appear to be there by accident. The planet is a protected world, home to a race of winged humanoid aliens who had previously been tortured and killed to harvest a fluid they secrete that was used as a very expensive drug. The book acts as a sort of mystery story, with you never being quite sure which characters are genuinely who they say they are. It’s quite tense throughout most of the book and the pacing is good. The characters were quite interesting too, particularly Zannez, making a likable character from someone with a profession that would usually be instantly vilified.

If there’s a problem, it’s that it seems clear that Tiptree isn’t really comfortable with the novel format. It’s not badly written and I did enjoy the book, but there’s so many ideas crammed into the book that it can be overly busy at times. On the other hand, it meant it was anything but predictable, and I felt I had to just keep reading to see where it was going. The ending possibly wrapped things up too neatly, but in general I found the book to be an entertaining read.

>36 valkyrdeath: That one might have to go on my wishlist. I've never read Tiptree's novels, but if they're even a fraction as good as some of her short stories, they are surely still worthwhile.

>115 bragan: Well, it certainly wasn't boring! I've only read Tiptree's short stories in anthologies so I've not really registered which particular stories are hers. I have the best of collection Her Smoke Rose Up Forever on my planned reading in the near future though. I'm looking forward to it.

>116 valkyrdeath: Her Smoke Rose Up Forever is really fantastic. I think I gave it five stars.

>117 bragan: That's good to hear! I'll try and get to it soon. Just found your review of it and it sounds excellent.

37. Chicago Days/Hoboken Nights by Daniel Pinkwater
Continuing on from Fish Whistle, this is another non-fiction collection, mostly of things written for broadcast for his third and fourth years on All Things Considered. As stated in the preface, put together they form a sort of fragmentary memoir of his earlier life. As before, I kept finding things familiar and then realising I was reading about the events that had inspired something from one of his books. There’s a lot of humour, though it’s not quite as diverse as the previous volume. I enjoyed it. It’s probably best for someone who’s already a fan of his books though.

>111 Poquette: Oh, I'm glad. People tend to be wary (they're comics, we're adults, why bother?) but really, these are some of the most complex, thoughtful and philosophical stories there are. I think Sandman is probably Gaiman's best work.

>114 valkyrdeath: This sounds really interesting, I'll have to check this out. I too, have only been familiar with Tiptree's short stories.

Excellent review of Brightness falls from the air I have not read any of Tiptree's books ; a pleasure to come, but I will read the short stories.

>120 reva8: Hope you enjoy it if you do read it!

>121 baswood: Thanks! I've limited experience with Tiptree myself but I'm looking forward to investigating further.

38. The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes
I didn’t know much about this book when I got it from the library, but found it to be a quick and interesting read. It’s a fairly low key story centring on the narrator’s memories, mainly of a friend from his teenage years who committed suicide and of a former relationship. The book is generally based on the idea of the unreliability of memory. As new information is discovered, past events are seen in a new light, making the last half of the book like the unravelling of a mystery, which kept me reading. It’s very short and I raced through it in two days and enjoyed it.

>123 valkyrdeath: Interesting . . . I read The Sense of an Ending a couple of years ago and it oddly left very little lasting impression. The other Barnes books I have read left a vivid mark — Flaubert's Parrot and A History of the World in 10½ Chapters. I wonder why the difference.

>124 Poquette: I'm not sure if it'll leave any last impression on me. Very few books do. It's been quite helpful keeping these little reviews since I often can't remember much about a book a couple of months later. It's just a book I enjoyed reading though. I saw that it won the Booker Prize and I'm not sure I thought it was quite that good, but then I'm often baffled by prize winning books and at least this one was readable.

The only Barnes I read was England, England. It left me feeling flat after expecting it to be so good based upon the premise. I don't seem to be in a hurry to get back to him.

I felt a bit flat after A Sense of an Ending, but that's books for you - what floats one person's boat doesn't work for another :)

It crossed my mind that Barnes was in it for the money. I know, That's a mean thing to say, but it's almost as though it was written by someone else.

>126 NanaCC: I was considering reading that since I found the premise interesting, but I've heard nothing but bad things about it wherever I've looked.

>127 AlisonY: Exactly, no book is going to appeal to everyone. That's why it's great that there's such a wide variety of books available. Sense of an Ending wasn't a particular favourite or anything, but I found it a nice easy read. (Which is something I really appreciate after finishing The Fifth Head of Cerberus).

39. The Fifth Head of Cerberus by Gene Wolfe
Well, this was disappointing. I’d heard this was a sci-fi classic so maybe my expectations were set too high, but I didn’t like it much at all. It’s a set of three related novellas with connecting themes. The first one was easy to read and I quite liked the writing style, but it becomes clear what’s going on early in the story and it doesn’t really do much with it, and the revelation near the end just falls flat since it was already obvious. The second story was a surreal mess that I hated. The third story was the most interesting. Based around an investigator reviewing documents for a case, it’s told through various notebooks, diary entries and prisoner interview recordings allowing you to piece together just what the case is about and what’s going on. Again, it’s well written and I didn’t hate the story, but it didn’t really go anywhere, and as before it was fairly clear what was going on early on, especially since it had been stated as a theory in the first story anyway. Unless I’m completely wrong about what was happening. Maybe I’m missing something considering how highly regarded this is, but I can’t see how. Just different tastes I guess. Two readable but bland stories and one I hated don’t do much for me. I might still give The Book of the New Sun a go sometime though, since I don’t like to judge an author entirely on a single book.

Also, not a comment on the book itself, but my edition has one of those introductions that’s nothing but a description of what’s going to happen in the book. I skipped it and went straight into reading the book thankfully since I’ve had books ruined like this before, but really, what’s the point of introductions like that? Who wants their book to start with a complete spoiler? This should come at the end surely.

40. Pratchett’s Women: Unauthorised Essays on the Female Characters of Discworld by Tansy Rayner Roberts
There are not many books actually about the Discworld novels out there so when I saw this I thought I’d give it a go. It’s a short book looking at the various portrayals of female characters throughout the Discworld series. I’m not really an analytical reader, I prefer to just enjoy the story in a book, but it’s interesting to look at these things occasionally, especially when there’s important issues involved. This doesn’t really go into a great deal of depth in the space given, but it does make a few interesting points at times. It also makes some baffling assertions, such as that Hogfather makes no sense except on rereads (it was an instant favourite of mine from first read) or that Felicity Beedle in Snuff is a thinly veiled version of J. K. Rowling, which I just don’t think is true. I’m not disappointed that I read it, though I think it could have been made clear that the book was a compilation of articles that had previously been posted online before I bought it though. I don’t think I’d particularly recommend it unless you’re extremely interested in the subject and don’t mind the odd strange comment.

41. Saga, Volume 2 by Brian K. Vaughan art by Fiona Staples
A great continuation of the first volume. It’s still sharply written with great dialogue and characters. The art style is excellent too and really adds to the story, and the designs of the various odd creatures is really imaginative. Onto volume 3!

42. Amityville Horrible by Kelley Armstrong
I didn’t know anything about this book, since I got it as part of a Humble Bundle that had a couple of books that I wanted so this came along with it and I thought I might as well give it a go since it was so short. It seems to be part of a longer series of books called Women of the Otherworld. This one is about fake TV spiritualist who actually happens to be a necromancer and genuinely have the power to speak to the dead, but still fakes it for her performances due to how the real thing works. She’s pressured into appearing on a haunted house reality show in Amityville where things start to go wrong. It wasn’t terrible but not especially exciting either. Then there’s a twist at the end which feels like a complete cop-out.

43. The Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennett
A fun little book where Queen Elizabeth II stumbles across a mobile library and becomes addicted to reading. It’s as much a paean to reading in general though as the Queen’s whole outlook changes as she reads more and more. It’s got plenty of Alan Bennett’s usual wit and it builds up to a great speech and an amusing ending.

I particularly liked the conclusion she draws after holding a party for her favourite author’s so she can meet them. “Authors, she soon decided, were probably best met within the pages of their novels.”

44. Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut
This is a novel posing as a memoir being written by a man called Howard W Campbell Jr as he sits in an Israeli prison awaiting trial for war crimes during World War 2. He spent the war broadcasting anti-Jewish propaganda for the Nazis, but also passing secretly passing messages to America within those broadcasts, a fact which the US government refuses to either confirm or deny. It’s a story of many forms of moral ambiguity, not only the fact that however much he was helping the Allies, his propaganda was also highly effective. It’s full of characters that fall into a moral grey area in a conflict that is often portrayed as purely black and white, and looks at what people can be driven to in desperate situations.

"We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be."

I think this is my favourite Vonnegut book that I’ve read so far, yet it’s not one I’d ever heard about. It’s probably also his most accessible, told in a fairly straightforward manner and without the more crazy elements of books like Slaughterhouse-Five. It’s still full of great lines and Vonnegut’s brand of dark humour, and he has that way of phrasing tough details in such a simple, casual way that somehow gives them more impact. So it goes. I’ve found the Vonnegut books I’ve read to be mixed, but this one I loved.

I recently read Slaughterhouse Five and was impressed. I'll have to hunt down a copy of Mother Night. Good review!

>135 valkyrdeath: sounds good - adding it to my wish list. I've always been curious about Slaughterhouse Five but avoided it as it as I'm not sure it's my kind of book. This sounds a little whacky, so it maybe a better place to start with Vonnegut.

>134 valkyrdeath: This sounds like a light, fun read. Somerset Maugham did something similar (a fictional dinner party with all the authors he discusses) in Ten Novels and their Authors.
>135 valkyrdeath: I liked your review. This is a Vonnegut novel I haven't read yet, somehow.

>134 valkyrdeath: I too enjoyed The Uncommon Reader very much when I read it a few years ago. I had almost forgotten about it. Also enjoyed your comments.

>136 RidgewayGirl: If you enjoyed that one, there's a strong chance you'd like this as well. Vonnegut's style is very much there, although the story is far more structured.

>137 AlisonY: I'd say Mother Night would be a great starting place for Vonnegut.

>138 reva8: The name of Somerset Maugham is very familiar, yet I know absolutely nothing about him or his books at all. That dinner party thing sounds fun, but I haven't read any of the books in Ten Novels and their Authors so I'm not sure I'd get anything out of reading it.
I'd barely heard of Mother Night before I read it, but I don't know why it doesn't get talked about as much as some of his other books. If you've liked any Vonnegut you'd probably like that.

>139 Poquette: It was a fun book but a surprisingly thoughtful one too. I don't think I've read or seen anything particularly bad by Bennett.

>134 valkyrdeath: Fabulous book. And time for a re-read (again). >:-)

45. Oh What a Lovely War by Theatre Workshop
I haven’t read a play script since I was at school, but I saw this in the library and thought I’d give it a go, since no-one seems to be staging it around my area these days. Created by Joan Littlewood and her Theatre Workshop, based around Charles Chilton’s radio musical The Long Long Trail, it’s very much a collaborative work, and the book doesn’t credit it to any one person. It’s a classic anti-war musical highlighting the absurdities and horrors of World War 1, using the soldiers spoof versions of lyrics of period songs throughout. A lot is missed by reading it rather than seeing it produced though, since some sections seem quite visual and you only get the lyrics without the music. Thankfully, since they’re existing old songs and I’ve seen the film version before, I could imagine them anyway. Not an ideal book for reading, but I think it’s the closest I’m likely to get to the stage show.

>141 Helenliz: Do you re-read it often? It's certainly short enough not to take too much time!

46. Venus in Copper by Lindsey Davis
The third Falco book, and everything feels a lot tighter and more focused this time round. The plot is much more to the forefront, though the character development is still there. While I enjoyed the first two books, this is the first one I found to work as an effective mystery, leaving me guessing who had done what. It purposefully follows some detective fiction tropes (while subverting others) and relocates them effectively into the ancient Roman setting utilising things intrinsically linked to the period. It’s often funny and the whole thing feels sharper this time around. The series seems to keep improving.

>143 valkyrdeath: I've read it a few times. It was out book club selection a year or so back. I read it at the beginning of the month, saw a copy at the library book sale towards the end of the month and read it again! I do re-read books and old favourites get revisited multiple times. Even so, twice in a month is pretty unusual for me.

47. Lucky Starr and the Pirates of the Asteroids by Isaac Asimov
This is the second of Asimov’s books aimed at children and starring David Starr, now known mostly by his nickname Lucky. It’s basically more of the same, a fun and fast paced story with more action than the typical Asimov but still with a level of scientific accuracy above that of most books of this style. The science also hasn’t dated so much in this book with the facts still generally being correct, even if our knowledge has expanded since. It also treats the pirate community of the title in a more thoughtful way than might be expected, rather than just making them Long John Silver in space. It’s nothing particularly deep, but it’s a fun kid’s story that I could still enjoy reading as an adult. I do wish I’d owned it when I was in the target age group though.

48. Let Me Go by Helga Schneider
A true account of the author’s meeting with her 90 year old mother for only the second time in her life since early childhood. Her mother had abandoned her family when Helga was a child to join the SS and ultimately to work in the concentration camps. It’s a deeply disturbing read, as she shows no remorse over the past. In their earlier meeting she had tried to give her daughter jewellery taken from the Jews in the camps she worked in and even in this second meeting while seemingly suffering from dementia, she’s still manipulative and still seems to believe that what she did was right. It’s not a pleasant read, but it’s a compelling one, and it’s a perspective to the holocaust story we don’t often see.

49. Lois the Witch by Elizabeth Gaskell
This is a short book about an English girl who becomes an orphan and moves to Salem to stay with her Uncle. Unfortunately, it’s right at the start of the Salem witch trials. This is a bleak story, but then that’s to be expected given the setting. The witch trial period is one of the many depressing moments in the history of quite a few countries, and the book could only really end one way. It’s very well written and seems to have been well researched too, with the events following the general facts although most of the characters are fictional. Good but dark. I think I need something cheerier now after the last two reads!

Thanks for the reviews! Lois the witch and Let me go seem quite interesting.

another reader of Let Me Go and another enticing review.

Mother Night is a new title to me. Thanks for bringing it to our attention.

>149 chlorine: I found them both interesting, especially Let Me Go, which was all the more disturbing for being true and so recent.

>150 dchaikin: Let Me Go is well worth reading, though not exactly enjoyable. It's hard to stop reading once you start though.

Looking back over my last few books, I've had a great run. I've surely got to come across something dreadful soon to balance it out.

50. Clouds of Witness by Dorothy L. Sayers
My first Lord Peter Wimsey book, and it seems like they’re quite fun. I’ll probably read some more at some point. I don’t have much more to say about it, mostly because I’m not good at writing about this sort of book but also because I tried an audiobook for this one read by Ian Carmichael. His reading was excellent. On the other hand, I’m hopeless with audiobooks because my mind wanders too much, and that’s not good for books with complex plots. My concentration is terrible these days. I think the rest of this series will be read in print.

So apparently your run of good books is not other yet! :)

>153 chlorine: Not yet, thankfully! I'll see how long I can keep it going.

51. The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller
This was a fun retelling of the story of Achilles and the Trojan war. It is told from the perspective of Patroclus, which I thought was an excellent choice and it what made the book so interesting. Much of the focus is on their relationship with events being seen through the lens of how it affects them. It’s more a love story than it is a war story. I know pretty much nothing about The Iliad and my knowledge about Achilles basically ends at the heel, which isn’t included in this book at all, so I can’t say how closely it matches the original story. As a novel though, it was entertaining and well-paced and I really enjoyed it.

>155 valkyrdeath: I read that last year and it's a great telling of a story. I thought the way she used the soothsayer to foretell the ending was a very clever way of getting round the way we all know how the story ends already.
I went out & bought The Illiad on the back of reading this - just not quite got around to it yet...

I'm rooting for your reading streak to continue well into next year. It's not like there aren't enough excellent books.

I loved A Song of Achilles when I read it earlier this year.

>156 Helenliz: I actually didn't really know precisely how it ended, so I was experiencing it more as a new-to-me story in general, though one where I've heard of some of the characters. The only thing I know about the Trojan war is the wooden horse. I never really had much interest in Greek mythology and it was the battle aspects of the story that made me wary of it, so I was glad to find they were downplayed. A really well written book that appealed to me despite my initial lack of interest in the subject!

>157 RidgewayGirl: Thanks! There's plenty of books I've got to read that I'm almost certain I'll enjoy, so it should keep going for a while hopefully.
I knew I'd seen someone write about A Song of Achilles on here not too long ago, but couldn't remember who it was. I knew it was positive though.

52. Welcome to the Monkey House by Kurt Vonnegut
A collection of early short stories by Kurt Vonnegut. Or to quote his own preface, “samples of work I sold in order to finance the writing of the novels.” A few are science fiction but the majority are snapshots of people’s lives. Despite my love of sci-fi, I think it’s the other stories that generally have the best moments. The writing is still distinctly Vonnegut and there are some great stories in here. There seems to be a real understanding of humanity behind most of them. Nothing is straight forward even in the simplest story. The quality is mixed as usual with short story collections. I enjoyed it mostly, but I do prefer Vonnegut’s novels.

I never read anything else than Slaughterhouse five by Vonnegut. I wasn't aware he had written non science fiction.

>160 chlorine: There's quite a few of his books that aren't science fiction in any way. Mother Night and God Bless You, Mr Rosewater for example. I'm glad some of his books were science fiction though, since if it wasn't for Slaughterhouse-Five I probably never would have started reading them.

Thanks for the information, that motivates me to read more from him!

53. Killing is Harmless: A Critical Reading of Spec Ops: The Line by Brendan Keogh
Spec Ops: The Line was one of the more interesting thoughtful computer games of the last few years. While on the surface it looked like just another Call of Duty style military shooter, over the course of the game it became a deconstruction of the genre, forcing the player to confront the consequences of the atrocities committed so casually in these games, and in consequence to examine the nature of the games themselves.

All of which makes it an ideal game to get a full book of critical analysis written about it. The whole idea of analysing games in this way is fairly recent, and this is the sort of book I’ve wanted to find and haven’t been able to until now. This follows a full playthrough of the game from the title screen right through to the end, looking in depth at everything that happens and the authors interpretation of just what is going on and what it means within the context of the story and of the gaming genre in general.

It’s clear the author has put a lot of thought into the book, with it showing through continuously throughout. I didn’t agree with everything he had to say, but it’s a story open to interpretation and that’s not necessarily a negative thing. There were a couple of things I was surprised that he’d missed and a few moments where I thought he was reading too much into minor incidental details, but overall I found it interesting and it pointed out a lot of things I hadn’t actually noticed. There was a significant error around the game’s ending, but at least in this edition it had been footnoted to point out the mistake and linked to an online article to update it (though I’m not sure why that couldn’t have been added to the book itself.)

It’s not perfect. I’m not sure following the game from beginning to end was the best way to do it, since it means at times it can end up repeating things, and not every single moment is equally noteworthy, and I don’t think anyone who hasn’t played the game is likely to be reading it and needing every detail filled in. But this is a new type of writing and it’s hard to say just how best to approach these things. Despite the problems, I found it to ultimately be a worthwhile and thought provoking read. I hope to see more serious books about gaming in the future (and more games worthy of them.)

Fascinated to see your review of Killing is Harmless A whole new genre opens up where writers provide a critique of themes, ideas and players interactions with the games. Very interesting.

>155 valkyrdeath:/>156 Helenliz: - I'm hoping to read the Illiad and Odyssey next year and then read around them as a year plan. Hopefully that will include this book.

>164 baswood: It's certainly a genre I'd like to see more of, and the potential of games as a storytelling medium is finally starting to be explored properly. It's the sort of thing I've often thought about trying to write myself but have never managed to find the time or patience to actually do it.

>165 dchaikin: I'll be interested to see what you think of it. I can only think of it as a story in its own right rather than how it relates to The Iliad. At one point I was considering reading the Odyssey but I gave that up.

54. Math on Trial: How Numbers Get Used and Abused in the Courtroom by Leila Schneps and Coralie Colmez
This book looks at various cases where maths has been misused during court trials leading to incorrect verdicts. It doesn’t just look at the mathematical side of things though, giving a full overview of each case and going into the story of anything relevant to the trial. So we get anything from the background of some of the people involved to information about DNA analysis to the events of the Dreyfus affair. It’s well written and I found it very interesting to read. It’s one of those books that ends up making me want to read up on some of these things in more detail.

Each of the ten cases had a mathematical point to the court case though (with the exception of the chapter on Charles Ponzi, which was mathematical but it wasn’t used to mislead in a trial so felt strangely out of place). The problem is that probability and statistics can be confusing and counterintuitive and that it’s unlikely anyone on a jury is going to understand them well enough to analyse everything themselves and so will trust whatever a supposed expert tells them in court. When the expert has, accidentally or intentionally, miscalculated or misinterpreted figures, lives can be ruined. It can be a slightly depressing read. Dr. Roy Meadow’s nonsense figures put many women in prison for murdering their children by using his nonsense figures to show it was almost impossible to be a natural death while other evidence was ignored. Perhaps scariest of all, nurse Lucia de Berk famously spent 6 years for murdering patients despite every one of the deaths having been deemed natural and there not being a single scrap of evidence against her simply because of a made of figure.

The book doesn’t have a solution to the problem. The authors express confidence that the public can become more educated in these matters, but I’m not so sure most people would ever bother looking into it. But this is still an interesting book, and one that doesn’t require a great deal of prior mathematical knowledge to appreciate. And while it focuses on court cases, this is the same sort of inaccurate information that the media is constantly trying to push onto us every day, hoping we won’t think things through, making it useful too.

For the question of educating the wider public, in particular concerning the media, I highly recommend A short course in intellectual self-defense by Normand Baillargeon.

It studies several aspects of communication and argumentation, including some maths and statistics, and gives some hints on how to detect whether an argument is flawed or not.

One example that stuck with me was to oppose the position that you are defending to something extreme that people won't adhere to, in order to convince them that your position is the only choice. One example was sentences such as : "America, love it or leave it".

Something similar happened to me yesterday : a woman in the street was collecting money or signatures for Amnesty International to fight against torture. As I refused to give anything she exclaimed : "You can't be a torture supporter!"

>167 valkyrdeath: Sounds interesting. Statistics can be so counterintuitive, as you point out. And so easy to manipulate. There used to be a book called How to Lie with Statistics.

>168 chlorine: Ah, the idea that you must have completely extreme opposing views if you don't support something 100%, I see that everywhere and there's people who genuinely seem to believe it and don't see how interesting it is. That book sounds interesting, though I think a lot of the people likely to benefit most from these sorts of things are the ones who probably won't read them.

>169 rebeccanyc: It really is counterintuitive. Even after studying it to degree level I find probabilities can be a real pain to know just how to handle them since they depend on so many external factors. I think a big part of the problem is that one of the first things people learn about probability is multiplying them together. Most people don't take it much beyond that, so if an expert gets up and states they've multiplied all the probabilities together, they're likely to take it on trust that that's the right thing to do. Very much a case of a little knowledge being a dangerous thing.

55. Guards! Guards! by Terry Pratchett
This was the second Discworld book I ever read back when I first discovered Pratchett, and it’s still one of my favourites. The last two books saw Pratchett getting into his stride, but absolutely everything came together so well with this book. All of the City Watch are great characters, as is Lady Sybil of course, the plot is great, the writing is sharp and the book is extremely funny. The whole of the Watch series contains some of Pratchett’s best writing and I always look forward to reading them again.

56. Saga, Volume 3 by Brian K. Vaughan art by Fiona Staples
I’m still enjoying this series. Good writing, good art, entertaining dialogue. Now I just need to get hold of the next volume to find out what happens next.

57. Drowned Hopes by Donald E. Westlake
These books are always fun. I think this is the seventh of the Dortmunder books, and it’s significantly longer than any of the ones that came before it. Here they’re having to find a way to dig up some previously buried stolen money, with the snag being that the place where it was buried has been flooded and turned into a reservoir. Dortmunder gets involved to try and figure out a way to get to it to keep Tom, his former cellmate, from blowing it up and flooding the nearby town and killing all the people there. It’s a darker concept than usual with Tom being a particularly nasty character, but the multiple failed attempts at getting to the money are still very funny, and the collecting of Tom’s various other smaller caches in between even more so. And I loved Wally, the computer geek character who is portrayed in a far more positive way than in a lot of things, even if the computer details given are alternately dated and unrealistically optimistic these days. One of the best so far.

58. We Can Fix It!: A Time Travel Memoir by Jess Fink
A graphic memoir told in the form of the author using a time machine to travel back in time to visit her earlier selves. It’s an interesting idea, but it seems about the first half of the book is taken up with her just going back and having sex with her younger selves and then spying on her previous sexual encounters. Fair enough to have those things in it, but it’s not particularly interesting to take so much of the book up. After that it improves slightly as she starts trying to fix her mistakes, but it’s never really satisfying. It hints at various disturbing events but we never really find out what happened and before any details are given she’s off to a different time again, so you just get a lot of disjointed moments and no real depth to anything. The humour is also quite puerile, leading to her, amongst her more serious final realisations, to come to the conclusion that “fart humour transcends age and time restraints”, something that I agree with only to the extent that it’s equally unfunny at any age to me. Nice concept, but it’s very short and just didn’t do enough with it.

I'm usually a sucker for time-travel stories but I think I'll give this one a pass. Thanks for the review!

>175 chlorine: I love time travel stories too. My next update tonight is a much better one, To Say Nothing of the Dog, which I see you've already read. Probably wise skipping We Can Fix It.

>176 valkyrdeath: I haven't read To Say Nothing of the Dog, but I loved Willis' Doomsday Book.

>177 NanaCC: I loved Doomsday Book too. To Say Nothing of the Dog is very different in tone, but I still loved that too!

59. To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis
A much more enjoyable time travel book than the one I’ve just read. It seems I can rely on Connie Willis to provide a good read. After being sent back in time to find the Bishop’s bird stump, a ludicrous MacGuffin to hang the plot around, Ned Henry soon ends up in the Victorian era with severe time lag, little preparation for the period and no idea what he’s supposed to be doing. The other Connie Willis books have often had plenty of humour in them, but this one is played out almost entirely as a comedy, and it’s a really fun read throughout. It plays on the conventions of time travel fiction as well as referencing all sorts of things from Victorian fiction to 1930s murder mystery novels. It also sets up plenty of comic set pieces along the way, from boat journeys to fraudulent seances. It’s a very different book from Willis’s earlier Doomsday Book, but I still really enjoyed it and am looking forward to reading more of her work in the near future.

Though I do wish at least one character would just stand up to the obnoxious and demanding Lady Shrapnell and simple say “no!”

I also liked this book a lot. The only problem with this is that Willis must have worked on the first chapter much more than the rest. I found it really funny, to the point of sometimes laughing out loud (the scene where the main character tries to convince the nurse he's not time lagged is a hoot). The rest of the book was good but kind of a let down in comparison.

Glad to hear Doomsday book is different, as I was reluctant to read something in the same vein. I must give it a try!

>180 chlorine: Doomsday Book is more serious in general and has some really bleak moments with the plague setting, though it has its funny moments at times. I hope you enjoy it if you read it! I haven't read Blackout and All Clear yet but I've been told they're excellent too and also nothing like To Say Nothing of the Dog.

60. Uncle Boris in the Yukon and Other Shaggy Dog Stories by Daniel Pinkwater
A memoir focusing mostly on the dogs Pinkwater has owned and encountered throughout his life. The content was entertaining enough, but the majority of it is stuff he’d already talked about in Fish Whistle and Chicago Days/Hoboken Nights so if you’ve read those volumes there’s not much new here. A bit disappointing , but mostly because I’ve already read about most of it fairly recently.

I enjoyed both Doomsday Book and To Say Nothing of the Dog.

>183 rebeccanyc: They're great books. I'm planning to read more by Connie Willis in the hopes it's all as good.

61. The Caves of Steel by Isaac Asimov
(What’s with these old Asimov book covers? I haven’t got a clue what that thing is supposed to be on there, but whatever it is, it’s definitely got nothing to do with the contents of the book, nor has the spaceship thing. It seems the covers were all like this back then.)

Anyway, this is a reread of one of my favourite Asimov books. At its core is one of Asimov’s best mystery stories, a murder mystery investigated by detective Elijah Baley and his robot partner R. Daneel Olivaw. Far from being just a detective story stuck into a science fiction setting, Asimov creates a plot that’s entirely dependent on the culture it’s set in, and it’s this that makes the book stand out. It’s one of Asimov’s best realised worlds and he manages to portray huge amounts of information about it through context and in a relatively few words within the first few pages (something I’d certainly be grateful if more authors could learn.)

The Caves of Steel of the title are the huge enclosed Cities which the inhabitants of Earth now almost exclusively live crowded within, never venturing out into open air. They live strictly regimented lives enforced thanks to the overpopulation of the planet causing everything to be in short supply. In contrast, the colonies on other planets have grown into self-contained worlds with low populations living in wide open spaces and strictly limit immigration and mostly avoid contact with people from Earth due to their lack of immunity to diseases, which they’ve had no exposure to. These “Spacers” have one isolated settlement on Earth, rigidly guarded, but one of them has been murdered. Throw into this a growing resentment from the population against robots taking work from people amongst many other factors and you’ve got a really interesting setting to work with.

There’s some places where it has dated a bit. It’s an old book and technology has obviously gone off in new directions to what was predicted in some ways, and amusingly, the unmanageable population that has caused the Earth culture to become like this is a mere 8 billion, which I believe we’re not far off now. Elijah’s wife is also basically a typical 50s housewife character, which is disappointing, though sadly a fairly standard feature of that era of sci-fi. These things aside though, it’s a great story and I still enjoyed it on rereading.

62. The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories by Angela Carter
I think I came across this one after enjoying “Snow, Glass, Apples” by Neil Gaiman many years ago and seeing it being compared to this, but I’ve only just got round to reading it. I didn’t particularly like it unfortunately. It’s a collection of adult retellings of fairy tales (though the author apparently denies this even though it’s clearly true), mostly with disturbing and sexual themes. The title story opens the book and is the longest story by far. It was a fairly straight retelling of the Bluebeard story, but incredibly drawn out, overly descriptive and I found it just generally very dull, and the same applies to most of the rest of the stories too. Carter also seemed far too fond of using obscure words all over the place which I always read as the author showing off. Puss-in-Boots was the best of the bunch for me, a more comical story that was a bit better than the rest. The two takes on Red Riding Hood and one of the Beauty and the Beast stories were probably my pick of the rest, though I wasn’t all that impressed by them. In general I just found this boring. Clearly not the book for me.

I had mixed feelings about The Bloody Chamber too.

I remember Caves of Steel} being an excellent science fiction novel, glad it still holds up for a re-read

>185 valkyrdeath: valkyrsdeath: is it in The Caves of Steel that there is this network of moving walkways (or moving sidewalks, or people movers, what on earth is the correct word for these in English?! In French we call them something like wheeled carpets) that go at different speeds, with the slowest ones on the outside and the faster ones inside?
I remember fantastic chase scenes on these but I'm not sure if it was in this book or not.

>189 chlorine: It most likely is the one. It does feature the moving sidewalks and there's chase scenes on them. I remember the same concept was used in the Heinlein story The Roads Must Roll but I can't remember the details of that it whether it had any chases.

>190 valkyrdeath: valkyrdeath: I'm sure it was an Asimov book so that's the one! :)

63. Marbles: Mania, Depression, Michelangelo and Me by Ellen Forney
Marbles is an excellent graphical memoir that follows the author’s struggles with manic depression and the lengthy process of finding the right combination of medications to help her. She also looks at the association between bipolar disorder and creativity and talks a lot about her fears that taking medication would destroy her creativity.

The writing is excellent and I really loved her art style. The artwork really captured the feel of both the extreme highs and lows of the manic and depressive phases in a way I’m not sure a plain textual description could quite match, and I found myself association with much of the story despite living a very different life. I also find it reassuring to read something like this with a generally positive outcome, and for all the emotional turmoil it’s ultimately quite uplifting. I found it to be a really powerful book and one I’d definitely recommend.

64. The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making by Catherynne M. Valente
I wasn’t sure about this book when I started reading it. I find this sort of “child travels to strange fantasy world” story can go either way, at best being fun and imaginative but at worst coming across as a bland attempt to copy books like Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Thankfully, I found this to be one of the former. It certainly evokes elements of classics like the Oz books, the Alice books and The Phantom Tollbooth, but the actual contents are full of imagination, and there’s more modern satirical elements to it and an almost Pratchett-like sense of humour at times. I really liked the writing style too. I particularly liked the moments when the narrator addressed the reader directly, at times even talking about the extra privileges the reader has to know things the characters don’t. I enjoyed the book and may well read the next one.

I’m a bit confused around who this book was aimed at though. I was sure when I added to my wishlist a long time ago it had said it was an adult book styled after traditional children’s stories, but now it seems to be marketed as a children’s book. Maybe I was mistaken. Either way, I’d say it’s suited to pretty much any age group, though there are some quite dark elements and the narrator does refer to the reader as being grown-up at one point. Not really important, but I’m just not sure whether I got mixed up or if the marketing was changed.

Time for a new thread I think!