Book Review Catch-up!

One of the reasons I keep this blog is that I have a record of what I thought about something in the immediate period after experiencing it. I find it useful and interesting to flick back because I can think of a lot of Books, Films, or other media that I've grown to dislike through memory or social influence, and others where they've lived with me for a long time, making me appreciate them more. It's also just a useful channel for my urge to "talk about stuff" lets me get it out of my head and move on a little bit. I guess that's the diarists main driver, even if this is (mostly) limited to cultural consumption. Anyway, on the reading front I've been heavily distracted by Stephen King's The Dark Tower series (now on Book 5!) but here's a quick run down of what I've been reading as refreshers in between.

Holiday Reading: On Stranger Tides and The Lions of al-Rassan

I feel that I let myself down slightly this year on holiday, as I only managed to get through two books in the week we were away. In my defense we did fill the time with a lot of activity, including (but not limited to) Laser Tag, Quad Biking, a lot of boardgaming and ice cream. All good stuff. But in between all of that I did manage to get in two books, one of which I've been meaning to read for years, and don't have any real excuse for avoiding, and the other I'd not got around thanks to the terrible pirate movie of the same name. But I've read them now, and really enjoyed both, so lets talk a bit about them. 

Book Review: The Tiger and the Wolf

I feel like I've been lazy in catching up with reviewing books here. It's not that I'm not reading much (I'm up to 12 so far this year, which isn't bad) but more that with a focus on study going on I've been reading more "comfort food" books, literary popcorn, if you like, and often can't think of much to say about it other than "yep, that was a book that I read". I'm looking at you, The Dresden Files series. I have, however, been saving Adrian Tchaikovsky's The Tiger and the Wolf until after my most recent exam, so I give some proper attention. Long-time readers (or listeners of Dissecting Worlds) will know I was a big fan The Shadows of the Apt series, and after a couple of stand alone novels that promise of another long-running series was something I was really looking forward to. Oh, and can we acknowledge that the cover  (left) is really impressive and striking too? 

Book Review: SPQR

After some dailliances with "mere fiction" recently, I seem to be solidly back on a History kick at the moment. This is partly due to some of the books I got for Xmas, which included some cheery looking tomes on the Ardennes Offensive of 1944 and the Stalinist Purges  of 1937, happy reminders of what a great time the 20th Century was. But that is something to look forward to, as whats really kicked off this run is Mary Beards' excellent SPQR, which covers the Roman Empire from what I found to be a novel and interesting perspective. 

Book Review: Welcome to Night Vale: A Novel

As some of your may recall, I pretty much flipped out for the Welcome to Night Vale podcast last year, as I got sucked into its compelling vortex of deeply strange storytelling in 25 minute bursts. The news that there was to be a Night Vale novel, however, was both exciting and slightly troubling; exciting because, hey, more Night Vale, but troubling because it feels so natural in a Radio Station format, and I wasn't really sure how it would translate onto the page with Cecils' voice to work some magic. Regardless, it was at the top of my Xmas list, and then the top of my read pile for the New Year. And only a week in, I've finished it - and here's what I think.

Best of 2015: Books and Comics

So to finish off our trilogy of 2015 reviews, we come to the written word. This year I've managed to read 30 books, which I think is a record for recent years, and I'm quietly pleased about it. It's been skewed in some strange ways (more on that for a minute) but its also broadly diverse in others. I've rolled comics into this post as there has been a more "steady as she goes" feel to my comics reading, but even there I think I've done alright. Lets get to it.

Book Review: Career of Evil

There was a bit of excitement yesterday when J K Rowling mentioned on a Radio 2 interview that she has "written some of a childrens book", which more than anything else seems to demonstrate the hold that Harry Potter maintains over our collective imaginations. It also helps to vindicate her decision to publish her crime series under the pseudonym "Robert Galbraith", helping to to differentiate it from the Potter brand and avoid some of the snobbery about a "childrens author" writing "grown up" books that affected reviews of The Casual Vacancy. To be honest though, as much as I enjoyed the Potter series, I am quite happy with Rowling/Galbraith the crime writer, and she can keep writing books like Career of Evil for as long as she likes.

Book Review: The Martian

In conversation last week I realised that I've already sailed past my target of reading 20 books a year. In some ways thats not a challenging target, because I've always been a voracious and eclectic reader, but its hard to find the time these days - or rather reading time has to fight with everything else and often ends up losing. But it's only early September, and I've read 22 books so far this, even managing to plunge back to the Science Fiction genre; my first and greatest literary love that I've been neglecting as I've been distracted by "other genres". I hope it'll forgive me. At the far end of the Space Operatics I've been reading over the summer, there is the "Engineering in Space" genre, set tomorrow, with tomorrow's tech, and here I find The Martian, Andy Weir's self-published, and soon to be a major motion picture-ed, tale of isolation and survival on the edge of manned exploration. 

Book Review: Round Up!

So, we are still in "round up" mode and this time it's all the reading I've been doing. Somehow, I feel I'm making more time for reading this year (writing being a whole different story, sadly) and I'm making an effort to try new stuff that I've missed. I also want to make a bit of a return to the Science Fiction genre, which I've not been deep into for many years now, hence the prescene on this list of a couple of "classic" series that have been mentioned us as we've put out new episodes of Dissecting Worlds. So, with apologies for the brevity, lets get on with catching up.

Book Review: Children of Time

As a famous archologist almost said, "Spiders! Why did it have to be Spiders?!". Yes, I am mildly arachnophobic, and yes, I am mildly embarrased aboout it. After all, spiders are cool - they're diverse and biologically interesting, ecologically useful, mostly harmless to humans at least in the UK, and oh my god look at all those legs and eyes and argh, argh, get it away!!. Yes, I know it's not rational, but thats why it's called a phobia! Adrian Tchaikovsky however loves Spiders, so much so that he called his latest book, his first foray into full-length Science Fiction, Spiders are Better Than People.  Sorry, I mean Children of Time.

Book Review: Perfidia

There are a lot of fictional worlds out there that are engrossing, engaging and yet places you really wouldn't want to actually live. Anything after any sort of apocalypse, for instance. Or Westeros. But if you're in a world with Zombie, or Dragons, or even Zombie Dragons, there is the comfort of distance, a comfort that this isn't, and can't be this world. I think that in many ways that is one of the big selling points of SF/F fiction, the distance that lets you explore the potential horror of alternative lives knowing that it can't happen to you. The thrill of crime fiction is different, of course, because it's set in this world, where terrible things can, and do happen all the time, with hardly a Zombie Dragon in sight. And right at the dark, terrible end of Crime fiction is Noir, and my favorite Noir writer has to be James Ellroy. 

Holiday History Reading Roundup

One of the nice things about being on holiday is that I usually get chance to catch up on some big reading of big books, the sort of thing I often put off because I don't get that much reading time normally and I fear losing the flow of a longer work. So far this year I've been caught up in history again, filling in some gaps especially around the late 18th and early 19th Century. Whilst not a period I'm ignorant of, it is a period where my knowledge ebbs and flows a little, and the joined up linkage between events is a little sketchy, so getting a couple of good, solid books that ranged about a bit was really what I after. In the end, I got two books - the first on the French Revolution, and the second on the momentous year, 1848. 

Book Review: Hide and Seek / Tooth and Claw / Strip Jack

A few years back I ran through a year of reading crime and detective fiction, to see how I enjoyed the genre. I started way back with Wilkie Collins The Moonstone, and through the Golden Age of murders in country houses, all the way up to the modern, serial killer dominated, modern era. I really enjoyed it, as an exercise, and ended up with a bunch of authors I wanted to go back to. But there's always another series to read, I guess, and I only read about 20-25 books a year at the moment, so squeezing them in is a problem. However, when casting around on social media for inspiration for something to read next, I was reminded of Ian Rankin, whose Knots and Crosses I'd really enjoyed, and so picked up the second Rebus novel - Hide and Seek - for the kindle as my next read. I've since read two more, one after the other. 

Book Review: So You've Been Publicly Shamed

Having watched (and reviewed) Frank recently, I've been on a bit of a roll with Jon Ronson. He's one of those writers that always seems to be sitting on my "oh, I must read that" list, someone who documents the stranger corners of the world in an open and deceptively free-roaming style. I first came across him with The Men Who Stare at Goats, which even got turned into a film you can file under "OK, Mostly" but never managed to quite capture the essence of the book. Then the really interesting and unexpected The Psychopath Test, another book of wandering around and meeting strange, interesting and occasionally terrifying people. This time, Ronson is drawn to look at the idea of Public Shaming, especially around the Brave New World of Social Media. 

Book Review: The Cuckoo's Calling

Crime is a genre I don't read enough. I few years back I read a "Year of Crime", 20 books from different writers across the genre, and found a lot to like there, but never really found too much time to go back. Its got it's own beats and conceits, cliches that have broken into the wider culture, and ones that haven't, and the "detective" figure has had an impact in both SF and Fantasy over the years, although often a very specific model of it. So naturally I'd never heard of Robert Galbraith, who'd written a moderately well read, but well reviewed first novel, The Cuckoo's Calling, until it was revealed that he was, in fact, the pseudonym of much better known author J K Rowling. I can see why she did it too, after The Casual Vacancy - not perfect, by any means, but certainly interesting and at time very ambitious - got more than it's fair share of snippy reviews that seemed to drip some contempt for a "childrens author" writing "adult books". 

Book Review: The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

Anyone who even casually glances at this blog, or my twitter feed, or facebook page, or, to be honest, probably just meets me, will quickly reach the conclusion that I'm a total geek. They're not wrong. I've been swimming in that ocean a long time, and not always been totally comfortable with it, but one of the benefits of age can be you stop giving a toss about who you think you should be and just concentrate on being who I actually am, geeky bit and all. And now I sound like that song from Frozen. Anyway, despite spending a lot of my free entertainment hours on watching, reading, and talking about all manner of geeky stuff, I do occasionally feel the urge to come up for air, and consume something outside the Great Geek Ocean, because I also like content diversity and shiny new things. 

A Year in Review: 2014

So Farewell, then, 2014, and don't let the door hit you on the way out. There seems to be a general consensus that its been a bad year in many, many ways, especially if you spend any sort of time in online communities, which have felt like a magnifying glass for all the horrors of the world at times, albeit one that occasionally shows you cute baby animals too. Its also been a year when this negativity seems to have spilled out into everything - there is hardly anything that has been popular that has not been subjected to careful scrutiny for negative messages, secretive agendas or bias of any kind, from all corners of the political spectrum. Not that this sort of thing is an invalid process - I'd argue its a necessary process, in fact - but at times, to quote one of my favorite films this year, it just wanted to suck the fun out of everything. 

Personally, I just want to like stuff, to applaud what is done right. So here, in no particular order, are my "top three" entertainments of the year by largely arbitrary categories. Other Opinions are available! 

Book Review: Foxglove Summer

Ben Aaronovitch's Peter Grant series was one my big literary discoveries of last year, something that had slipped under my radar until I was lent the first three, which I devoured in quick succession. I guess they're best described as "Modern Urban Fantasy", mixing contemporary London with a hidden world of magic and assorted supernatural entities, and a healthy dash of Police Procedural. There's a lot of fun world-building, some interesting new twists, and above all a great sense of character right in the front and centre, making them books that are a pleasure to read and spent time in. Foxglove Summer is the fifth in the series, and it's largest departure to date. 

Book Review Roundup: History!

I realised with some pleasure recently that I've hit my target of reading 20 books this year, which may not seem that many to some of you, but feels like an achievement to fit around everything else. It's been an eclectic year and mixed in is a bunch of factual books I've not mentioned here, yet. I'm not quite sure why - many reviews I read of history books tend to double as critiques of the history, as much as the book itself, especially for periods that feel contemporarily relevant, something you'll see a lot this year with all the World War One stuff. Personally I feel that if you're interested in a period you should read around from multiple sources anyway. So with that in mind, here is a round-up, along with a quick summary of why you should read them! 

Book Review: Declare

Over on the Dissecting Worlds channel, we're currently doing a series on Spies and all things Espionage related. We've just recorded the third episode, on the intersection between horror and the spy genre, and when we mentioned this planned episode a couple of months back, one book kept coming up, and it was one that I've never actually heard of. I guess thats kind of appropriate, right? The book was Declare, by Tim Powers, and when at least four people recommend is a "set text" for the subject, then you really have to read it. I'm really, really glad I did.