iansales going for 75 in 2010

While I regularly document what I read (and watch) on my blog, doing it here on a book by book basis helps me in putting together those round-up blog posts. So I'm going to do it again this year.

I'll start on January 1st, or with the first book I read in 2010. At the moment, Fire Sale by Sara Paretsky is looking like it might be the last book of 2009. So it'll be the one I pick up from the TBR pile after that...

Glad to see you back with us again for 2010, Ian.

Ta. It's good to be back :-)

Incidentally, I got some good books over Christmas and I'm looking forward to reading them...

Spook Country, William Gibson
Sandman Slim, Richard Kadrey
Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy
The Fahrenheit Twins, Michel Faber
Darkmans, Nicola Barker
The Lemur, Benjamin Black (AKA John Banville)
Black Swan Green, David Mitchell
The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro

That is, of course, in addition to all the good books I already have waiting to be read...

Welcome back! Nice list...

First book of 2010, not yet finished is Night of the Mir'aj by Zoë Ferraris, a murder-mystery set in Saudi Arabia. While the author apparently lived in Jeddah, some details don't ring quite true. There is mention of a "rear hump" on a camel - Dromedary camels only have one hump; two-humped camels, Bactrian camels, are only found in Asia. The author also refers to a man's robe as a thobe, when Gulf Arabs actually call them dishdasha. The transliteration of Arabic also doesn't follow standard spellings as used in that part of the world. I'd guess Ferraris lived in a compound in Jeddah for a couple of years, but most of her knowledge of Saudi comes from books.

Just picked up Jonathan Littell's The Kindly Ones in a local charity shop for £3.99. Cool.

Caught your name in another group I just joined (I think Writers/Readers group), so I thought I'd star you here and follow your reading.

Good Luck with Blood Meridian. Are you a McCarthy fan? That is probably his toughest read. But I found it enjoyable.

I've only read The Road and All the Pretty Horses. I liked the first, but not the second so much. I'm told Blood Meridian is his best.

Best is in the eye of the beholder. It's not my favorite of his. For me, the border triology, which begins with All the Pretty Horses, is what I think of as his best, followed closely by No Country for Old Men.

BM is sorta a tome which speaks to all of his themes he develops in one place. It is very violent, even for him, and very dark, even for him. But it was worth the read and I still enjoyed it.

I had trouble with All the Pretty Horses - it took me a while to figure out the book was set in the late 1940s. And the two main characters felt much older than their age. I wasn't convinced by their arrest either.

Still, I do plan to read more by him.

Book 1: The Night of the Mir'aj, Zoë Ferraris. Not bad - not entirely convinced by the author's knowledge of Saudi. The Islam seemed well-researched, but some of the other details didn't seem right. It was less of a murder-mystery than a character study of its two lead characters - desert guide Niyar, who's of Palestinian extraction; and modern Jeddah woman, Katya Hijazi, who works in the women's lab at the coroner's office. But if you want to read a book set in Saudi, then Hanan al-Shaykh's Women of Sand and Myrrh is greatly superior.

Next up: Dinosaur Junction, Ann Halam - it's taken me years to track down a copy of this. And Lord Byron's Novel: The Evening Land, John Crowley - which I've been meaning to read for a couple of years...

Book 2: Dinosaur Junction, Ann Halam. One of her weaker ones this. Ben collects fossils but his Machiavellian sister, Rowan, gets him involved in a plot to grow a dinosaur from a DNA sample. Rowan is an interesting character, but the story doesn't quite hang together plausibly.

Book 3: Boeing B-47 Stratojet by Lindsay Peacock. I went through a phase last year of buying books on aircraft - although only certain aircraft, most especially military aircraft from the Cold War. (Yes, one of my favourite films is "Strategic Air Command", starring Jimmy Stewart.) I've been working my way through these books, although I didn't bother listing them in my 75 books thread last year.

But I thought I'd list this one here because it's more extensive than other books I have on the B-47. (If you don't know, or can't remember, what the B-47 is, see the wikipedia page here.) It's also better written. The book describes the early days of SAC, the thinking that led to the B-47, both on Boeing's part and the US military's. It details the service history of the aircraft, the many variants, and gives an indication of what it was like to fly.

Book 4: Lord Byron's Novel: The Evening Land, John Crowley. Crowley's a writer I admire a great deal - his Ægypt Quartet is a modern classic. After the somewhat disappointing The Translator, I was a little unsure what to make of this one - it's not as if it's premise is one which especially appeals to me. The title refers to a novel, apparently written by Lord Byron, but encrypted in order to save it from destruction by his daughter Ada.

Crowley's novel is structured in three parts - Byron's novel itself, Ada's notes on Byron's novel, and email exchanges amongst the two women, one of whom discovers the novel, and her estranged father (who, like Roman Polanski, cannot return to the US). As far as I can tell, and I'm no expert (although I did read Robert Nye's The Memoirs of Lord Byron about fifteen years ago), Crowley has Byron's voice down pat. Admittedly, I did feel the story went a bit Edgar Allen Poe-ish towards the end. Ada's notes are cleverly done, and the story told in the email exchanges is affecting and adds an extra dimension to Byron's novel.

Lord Byron's Novel: The Evening Land is an extremely well-done novel, and unsurprisingly beautifully written. I expect fans of Byron and his poetry will get more out of it than I did, but I recommend it anyway.

#15: That one looks good. I will see if I can find a copy. Thanks for the recommendation, Ian.

Anything by Crowley is worth reading.

My local library has his Aegypt. Is that a good place to start with him?

Yes. It's excellent, although it's only the first of four books - and I'm not sure the other three were ever published in the UK. The 4th one certainly wasn't - it's only available from Small Beer Press. Mind you, the books do stand alone.

Otherwise, Little, Big is definitely worth trying.

#19: Thanks for the input on the Crowley books. I will start with Aegypt and see what I think. My local library has Aegypt, The Deep and Little Big.

I read it late last year, but I finally got around to posting my review of Stranger in a Strange Land on my blog. See here.

Book 5: Pawn of Prophecy, David Eddings, the first book of the Belgariad. This year for my reading challenge I plan to read the first book in a fantasy series, and then decide whether or not the book is good enough to make me want to read the rest of the series. In Pawn of Prophecy's case, the answer is no. It reads like the fantasy equivalent of a Hollywood "knights of the round table" historical drama. The prose also reads as though it were dictated, not written. In fact, the whole book feels manufactured, as if Eddings were working to a checklist. Not to mention that Garion is too much a bratty teenager to carry the book as the prospective hero.

#22: Pawn of Prophecy was the book that actually started my reading fantasy as a teen. It is definitely the weakest book in the series though.

The books are now sold as YA, which is probably about right. I don't think even if I have read the book back when it came out I'd have been that impressed.

Don't give up on all fantasy. You can get some great suggestions from TadAd and ronincats. For me, my favorite, outside of Stephen King's Dark Tower series, is the urban fantasy of Charles De Lint.

I haven't given up on the entire genre. It's just that this year I'm going to read twelve I've not read before to see whether or not they're any good. I have quite a few already on my book-shelves.

I hope the next one is a better read for you ;-)

I agree that series is a bit juvenile.

My favorite fantasy series is Tad Williams' Memory, Sorrow and Thorn starting with The Dragonbone Chair. Hope you find something you like better!

The Dragonbone Chair is one of the twelve I chose to read for my challenge. In fact, the full list is:

Pawn of Prophecy, David Eddings
Magician, Raymond E Feist
The Dragonbone Chair, Tad Williams
Assassin’s Apprentice, Robin Hobb
King’s Dragon, Kate Elliott
Colours in the Steel, KJ Parker
The Sum of All Men, David Farland
The One Kingdom, Sean Russell
The Darkness That Comes Before, R Scott Bakker
The Wizard Hunters, Martha Wells
The Blade Itself, Joe Abercrombie
Winterbirth, Brian Ruckley

These are all fantasy series I've not read before - I've read Wheel of Time, Malazan, A Song of Ice and Fire, etc.

Wow, that's a nice list. I've read 7 of the 12, and they're all pretty good (with some variation, of course). Of tyhe batch, I'd say Eddings is the least good, but as has been mentioned, the series does improve as one goes along.

Some of them may change, depending on availability. The Wells and Russell were, I think, never published in the UK, so finding copies may prove difficult. Some I already have. I entered a twitter competition by HarperVoyager for a "mystery book" back in December and won - and the book proved to be Magician. Which was useful. I also picked up a copy of The Blade Itself over Christmas for 99p.

Book 6: The Rim of Space, A Bertram Chandler. This is the first book in the UK version of Chandler's Rim Worlds series - the original US series has two additional books, different ordering, and one book has a different title. It's a thin work, which is why I knocked it off in a single night. Chandler used to be a merchant seaman, and it shows in his writing - they are mostly set in and around itinerant space freighters. Unfortunately, he didn't seem to have much imagination - his spaceships are the pointy rockets of yore, they operate pretty much like ships of the first half of the twentieth century, there are no computers, and everyone is pretty much an Anglophone Westerner. In this one, Carver joins the crew of Lorn Lady, a Rim Runners freighter, and is involved in various adventures of several "alien" worlds (they're humanoid to about 100 decimal places). Unfortunately, he's a bit of a prat.

I have posted my review of Pawn of Prophecy on my blog - see here.

Book 7: Machine Sex and Other Stories, Candas Jane Dorsey. Collection of short sf stories, and it's the sort of sf of which I'm not that fond. Little seems to happen, and it's never directly stated, only alluded to. There are one or two good stories in this book - such as 'The Prairie Warriors', and its follow-on, 'War and Rumours of War'. But I can't say I enjoyed the others very much.

Book 8: When the Dream Dies, A Bertram Chandler - book two of the Rim World series. And this is even less imaginative than The Rim of Space. The crew of a Rimrunner ship buy an old gaussjammer ship - which travels between stars using some sort of magnetic drive, which doesn't for one moment remotely convince - but on their maiden voyage they find themselves thrown into an uncharted area. There they discover a world run by an AI built to serve humans, but without a population to serve. So it imprisons the four crew so it can serve them. But they manage to escape with the help of the four robot women the AI has created as companions for them - and which were run by the AI's "Auxiliary Control" - which, in the height of silliness, Chandler tries to portray as the female aspect of the AI's "Central Control" male aspect.

I vaguely recall reading a number of A Bertram Chandler's novels back in my early teens - perhaps When the Dream Dies was one of them: the title sounds familiar, although the plot wasn't. It was because of that vague recollection that I picked up the Rim World books cheap on eBay. But they really are quite poor. Once I've read them, I'll probably get rid of them...

Boy, Ian, you are having a rough start to your reading year. I certainly hope things improve for you.

>15 iansales: Crowley is the 'cover' interview in Locus this month. Interestingly, he says he may return to writing SF & F. He has been disappointed, apparently, that his literary fiction has not seemed to gain him that many new readers. My favorite of his is The Translator, although I've not read the Aegypt cycle. (he also mentioned that he wants to find someone or a grant to help him write a 5th book in the cycle which will be a sort of "learned commentary" on the other four books. He said no critic or fan could get it right—he would like to explain all the 'cool' things that readers have difficulty noticing.

And interesting to read your take on an early Halam. I have read 2 of her YA books and enjoyed them but I wouldn't want a steady diet of such stuff - even if it is Gwyneth Jones. Dukedom_enough did a review of her latest collection in Belletrista here, if you're interested.

#35 - I wouldn't say that - it's about average. A couple of good books, a few more bad ones.

#36 - if that 5th book were ever published, I'd certainly buy a copy.

I've read most of Halam's books, and some are certainly better than others - The N.I.M.R.O.D. Conspiracy is especially good, as is the Inland trilogy - The Daymaker, Transformations (no touchstone) and The Skybreaker. I have a copy of Grazing the Long Acre, although I've not read it yet. I suspect I've read most of the stories in it already, anyway.

book 9: Bring Back Yesterday, A Bertram Chandler - the third book of the Rim world series, and better than the second. The narrator misses his ship - spent the night with a woman and overslept - and is recruited by a detective agency trying to break into a reclusive scientist's laboratory. The scientist has apparently invented some form of time travel. It turns out the narrator is a little more involved than anyone initially thought. There are problems with the logic of this story, and Chandler isn't exactly subtle about what's going on. He still has an unfortunate tendency for "as you know" dialogue too.

Book 10: Beyond the Galactic Rim, A Bertram Chandler, the fourth and final book in the Rim World series. This is actually a collection of four short stories, and they're about equal to quality to preceding three novels. In 'Forbidden Planet', a ship bought by a lottery-winning syndicate proves too big to earn a living on the Rim... until it's chartered by a survey mission to Eblis, the most inhospitable planet in the region. No reason is given for the planetary survey. In 'Wet Paint', the discovery of a recent cave-painting on a deserted world leads to some of the most implausible bollocks science as a rationalisation it has been my misfortune to read. In 'The Man Who Could Not Stop', an habitual criminal is in and out of jail too many times... and finds himself press-ganged into a mission into intergalactic space. And in 'The Key', a down-on-his-luck spacer is hired as captain for a millionaire's yacht. The millionaire is searching for the key to human existence, which Chandler has tied in with some rubbish about hydrogen atoms being introduced from some other dimension. This is probably the weakest of the four, and that's not saying much.

I polished off a bunch of graphic novels, which I won't count here. For the record, they were: Tintin's The Red Sea Sharks (last read when I was kid; not one of Hergé's stronger ones - some of the story seems to be missing), The Chimpanzee Complex 2: The Sons of Ares (a really cool central premise - lost Soviet mission to Mars in the 1970s, led by Gagarin; but it doesn't do enough with it), The Francis Blake Affair (one of Blake & Mortimer's more coherent stories, possibly because it was written after creator Jacobs' death), and Guardians of the Galaxy: War of Kings 2 (Abnett & Lanning continue to write a smart and witty end to the universe, and managed to pull in all the earlier incarnations of the Guardians).

Then it was:

Book 11: Prince Caspian, CS Lewis. I'm reading these just to say I've read them. Because I'm way too old to really enjoy them. They have a certain small charm, but the often patronising tone frequently annoys. And, to be honest, not a lot actually happens. The film makes a meatier story of it.

Book 12: Animal Farm, George Orwell. Which I'd never actually read before. At least, I don't think so. It's hard to tell since it's one of those stories which has entered Western culture. I thought it was good, although the stupidity of the lower animals was a little implausible. Like the ending, though.

Book 13: T-Minus: The Race to the Moon, Jim Ottaviani, Zander Cannon & Kevin Cannon, is a comic-book telling of the Space Race, from Sputnik to Apollo 11, and aimed at younger readers. My review of it is here.

Book 14: The Poison Throne, Celine Keirnan. A fantasy novel I had to review for Interzone. It was originally published as a YA novel in Ireland a couple of years ago. Didn't think it was very good.

Read Animal Farm for the first time last year and was a little underwhelmed. But I enjoyed 1984 so, and maybe the idea that the story has penetrated culture threw me off from really enjoying the book on its own merit.

I had the same response to The Picture of Dorian Gray. Because I knew the story - who doesn't? - I ended up focusing on the writing. Which was uniformly bad.

Book 15: Moon Lander, Thomas J Kelly. Kelly was the project manager at Grumman for the Apollo Lunar Module. He's an engineer, so the prose is serviceable at best and clumsy at worst. But he knows his material, and that shines through. Perhaps because I've read so much about the Space Race, but almost nothing about the LM and its development, but I found this book fascinating. Kelly doesn't whitewash his role, or Grumman's, in the Apollo programme - this is a warts and all account. Worth reading if you're interested in the subject.

Book 16: A Better Mantrap, Bob Shaw. A collection of short stories by Northern Ireland sf writer Shaw. They're polished, if lightweight, and the jokes are a little old these days. It'll kill an afternoon, but it's not Shaw's best work by a long shot. Bizarrely, none of the stories in the book has the title 'A Better Mantrap', and I never did figure out why they called the collection that.

I hope you stumble on a good read soon, Ian. Looks like the past several have not been good ones for you at all.

I pretty much know what I'm going to get when I pick up a book. But ones that surprise me by being a great deal better than I'd expected are rare. I did enjoy Moon Lander more than I'd expected, although the Shaw collection was a disappointment.

alcottacre, I think you might have jinxed my reading :-)

After A Better Mantrap, I started Bright of the Sky by Kay Kenyon, but gave up on it after 75 pages. If I'd wanted to read Cherryh, I'd read Cherryh. And none of the characters were likeable. It also felt... too calculated.

So now I'm reading Chris Beckett's award-winning collection, The Turing Test instead. And it's much, much better.

Oops!

Book 17: The Turing Test, Chris Beckett. A collection of short stories, most of which appeared in Interzone. Quality is generally high, although some were better than others. There's a slightly old-fashioned feel to Beckett's sf, something I remarked on when reading his novel, The Holy Machine, and some of the stories in this collection have a similar feel.

Book 18: A Very British Coup, Chris Mullin. What an annoying book. I sort of enjoyed it, but it did get more irritating as it progressed. Written in the early 1980s, it posits a left-wing Labour victory in the general election in the late 1980s. The establishment - not to mention the US - are not happy. And they set about destroying Prime Minister Harry Perkins and his Cabinet. I actually agreed with most of Perkins' policies, and it was clever how Mullin showed the establishment responding (the Americans were painted with very broad strokes), but poor oldf Perkins never stood a chance... Mullin gives him no opportunity to respond - he's the legally elected leader of the country, and Mullin has him powerless before the vested interests of the establishment. I find it hard to believe that, no matter how much they disagreed with his policies, the civil service would actively work against the prime minister. Nor is the British press as uniformly pro-establishment as Mullin posited - not even back in Thatcher's day.

Book 19: Project Constellation Pocket Space Guide, Tim McElyea. My timing never was any good. Project Constellation was cancelled only a week or two ago, so this book is now completely irrelevant. While NASA's Ares X test was a big of a con, I quite liked the Constellation architecture and would have welcomed a new series of missions to the Moon. They're unlikely to happen now. In fact, I'll be very much surprised if we move out of LEO - other than robotically, of course - within my lifetime. A more in-depth review of this book will be going up in the next day or so on my Space Books blog here.

Forgot to mention: I've posted one of my semi-irregular roundups of my reading and watching to my blog here.

About The Picture of Dorian Grey: I almost threw that book into a fountain with frustration. To this day the word "witty" makes me cringe.

I agree that it's greatly over-rated.

Book 20: Moonraker, Ian Fleming.
The first third is about a game of bridge, and I don't know how to play the game. But it's not actually a bad read. The middle third is about a nuclear missile, and I do know about about that, and what Fleming's written is mostly nonsense. The final third is Buchan-ish thriller, and includes an entire chapter in which the villain explains his background and nefarious plan. This is not the Bond of the films. It's not a very good book, either.

Book 20: Tupolev Bombers, David Donald
I don't normally bother mentioning the aviation books I read, but I think will do for this one. It covers five of Tupolev's best known bomber aircraft from the Cold War - Tu-95 Bear, Tu-16 Badger, Tu-22 Blinder, Tu-22M Backfire, and Tu-160 Blackjack. The text focuses a little too much on the weaponry carried by the aircraft, but there's plenty of detail nonetheless. And lots of photographs.

Book 21: Nova War, Gary Gibson
This is the second book in the Dakota Merrick trilogy begun with Stealing Light. Plenty certainly happens in this, although it's definitely the second boko of a trilogy. I couldn't remember some of the details of the first book's story, but Nova War isn't that difficult to follow. There are perhaps a few too many flashbacks, but there are lots of eyeball kicks and sensawunda stuff - an Orion nuclear-powered rocket landing on a world, for example. I'd prefer more description - he throws in stuff, such as alien races, but they're little more than words. It's pacy edge-of-the-seat space opera, and sort of mashup of Banks, Asher and Reynolds although not without its own flavour.

Book 22: Apollo Advanced Lunar Exploration Planning, edited by Robert Godwin
A compilation of NASA and Grumman documentation from the 1960s giving details on future Apollo plans for extended - 14-day - stays on the Moon. I read it for review on my Space Books blog - see here.

Book 23: The Science Fiction Poetry Handbook, Suzette Haden Elgin
Since I try writing poetry myself - see here - I decided to give this book a go... and was surprised to find it covered the process of writing sf poetry with a great deal of detail and analysis. Elgin is by training a linguist, and she uses the tools of her trade to analyse several of her own poems. An interesting and useful book.

Book 24: Mission to Mars, Michael Collins
Published in 1990, this pretty much out of date now. Which means many of the hurdles Collins describes no longer exist. And the areas required study have been studied. But still no mission to Mars. The book is at its most interesting when it describes a fictional mission to the red planet with an international crew. I'll be putting a more substantial review of Mission to Mars on my Space Books blog.

Books 25: The Desert King, David Howarth
This book, the life of ibn Saud, read like Dune without the sandworms. It was published in 1965, so Dune (the serial) predates it by a couple of years, otherwise I'd have suspected Frank Herbert of plagiarism... But, of course, ibn Saud was a real person, and his life has been well-documented by a number of Arabists. I was surprised to discover that TE Lawrence had not fought alongside ibn Saud during WWI. In fact, ibn Saud mostly sat out the Great War. The British backed the Sherif of Mecca against the Turks, and its his forces Lawrence led in battle. Later, the British put one of the Sherif's sons on the throne of Jordan - his descendant still rules today; and one on the throne of Iraq - and we all know what happened there... Much as I enjoyed this book, I suspect it covers a subject you'd need to read several books on in order to get the true story...

#61: Is there a bibliography section to give you ideas of further books to read in The Desert King?

Yes,there's a two page bibliography at the end of the book. Most of the titles listed are from the 1920s - 1940s, and probably difficult to find these days. I had a look on eBay for some by Harry St John Philby, and they were about £30 each.

Thanks for the info, Ian.

Also worth looking for are books by John Bagot Glubb and HPR Dickson. Both spent a lot of time in the Gulf in the 1930s and 1940s.

One of these days I'll have to get a copy of The Seven Pillars of Wisdom as well...

Yes, me too.

The region has always interested me. Mind you, I have a personal connection to it... I grew up there - Qatar, Oman and the UAE.

Have just started The Assassin's Apprentice*, Robin Hobb. Each month this year, I plan to read the first novel of a well-known fantasy series I've not read before, and then I'll blog about it. January's book was David Eddings' Pawn of Prophecy, which I wrote about here.

So far, the book doesn't bode well... The map has to have the most boring names I've ever come across in a Fantasyland, and it opens with the infamous "blank page"... Not good.

* gah - more nonsense from the stupid touchstones - there is no article in the book's title, but it can't find the touchstone unless you include it. Stupid.

Book 26: Assassin's Apprentice, Robin Hobb.
I actually enjoyed this more than I'd expected to. As a secondard world fantasy, I think it faisl the immersion test - the background is too thinly sketched-in, too reliant on mediaeval clichés, and not especially interesting. The plot doesn't actually start until more than halfway through the book, and is wrapped up a bit too quickly. But Hobb has an engaging voice, and the prose is very readable. I'll be writing more about this on my blog.

Book 27: From Saturn to Glasgow - Fifty Favourite Poems, Edwin Morgan
As I mentioned earlier, I write the occasional sf poem (see here), although I don't actually read much sf poetry. I prefer poetry of the 1930s/1940s - the Auden School, Lawrence Durrell, John Jarmain, Bernard Spencer, Terence Tiller, etc. But a friend kept on recommending Edwin Morgan to me as a sf poet worth reading, so I picked up this collection on eBay. And... his style is not one I particularly care for, although I do like one or two of the poems in the book. I suspect I will need to read more Morgan...

Book 28: The Night Cache, Andy Duncan
This chapbook cam free with a year's subscription to Postscripts magazine. PS Publishing have done it every Christmas for for the last half a dozen years. It's a good story, although it seemed familiar. I'm almost sure I've read it before, although the chapbook says copyright 2009 and makes no mention of any prior publication. Perhaps I'm confusing it with something else.

Book 29: Buck Rogers - A Life in the Future, Martin Caidin
This is a "re-imagining" of the character, published by the same company who published a role-playing game based on the character and set in a universe closer to that of the television series. Words can't describe how bad Caidin's novel is. His take on Rogers is charmless, everyone is a superhuman paragon, it's all very sexist, the science and technology is risible, the writing is awful, and it's so slapdash he contradicts himself from chapter to chapter. I've now read two sf novels by Caidin, and they were both shit. I won't be reading any by him again. Ever.

Have posted my review of Assassin's Apprentice on my blog - see here.

Nice review, Ian. I need to find my copy so I can give it a read.

Book 30: Exhibitionism, Toby Litt
A collection of short stories, some of which are a little too consciously clever. The best stories in this book are the ones which are more traditional in structure and narrative - 'The New Puritans', 'My Own Cold War', etc. Still, there's nothing embarrassing in Exhibitionism. Nothing especially memorable, either.

I think I can safely skip that one!

Book 31: Pashazade, Jon Courtenay Grimwood
I had to check when this was written while I was reading it, because it read like a recent novel but included some ideas that felt a decade or so old. It was published in 2001. So it's held up well. The alternate world - dominated by the Ottoman Empire, and the Germans under a Kaiser - is interesting, and handled well. I hadn't expected so many cyberpunk tropes and, it has to be said, a nine-year-old hacker is a little implausible. But that's minor. I enjoyed this, and I might see if I can get hold of copies of the other two books in the trilogy, Effendi and Felaheen.

#75: That one intrigues me. I will see if I can find a copy. Thanks for the recommendation, Ian.

I agree with you completely about the names Hobb gave to her characters and locations - they were so incredibly uninspired that they contributed to my feelings of meh-ness as I read. Nevertheless, I did read the whole series and found it, as a whole, a bit more satisfying than many fantasy series. I even continued to the series concerning sentient ships (can't think of what it's called right now). I am curious - what are the other fantasies you are planning on reading? Hope Lynn Flewelling and George R.R. Martin are among the authors in the group.

The full list is:

Pawn of Prophecy, David Eddings (1982) - review here
Magician, Raymond E Feist (1982)
The Dragonbone Chair, Tad Williams (1988)
Assassin’s Apprentice, Robin Hobb (1995)
King’s Dragon, Kate Elliott (1997)
Colours in the Steel, KJ Parker (1998)
The Sum of All Men, David Farland (1998)
The One Kingdom, Sean Russell (2001)
The Darkness That Comes Before, R Scott Bakker (2003)
The Wizard Hunters, Martha Wells (2003)
The Blade Itself, Joe Abercrombie (2006)
Winterbirth, Brian Ruckley (2006)

I've already read George RR Martin, Steven Erikson, Robert Jordan and Stephen Donaldson, so they didn't qualify. I have a copy of the first of Lynn Flewelling's trilogy, so I might substitute that for one of the above.

Book 32: Solaris, Stanislaw Lem
I think Andrei Tarkovsky's film of this book is an excellent film - although apparently Lem hated it - although I do like Tarkovsky's "Mirror" and "Sacrifice" more - and possibly "Stalker" too. The Soderbergh remake is just dull. And, unfortunately, so is the book. The early chapters are also clumsily written, although that might be the fault of Lem's translator. There's also a lot of bogus science in the novel - which is one of my pet hates. Lem spends several chapters trying to explain what Solaris and what it does, by referencing previous expeditions' studies and results... and it's all nonsense. Which is a shame, because parts of Solaris aren't too bad. And the central premise is quite strong.

Book 33: One Giant Leap: Apollo 40 Years On, Piers Bizony
I took a break from Paul Auster's The New York Trilogy to read this coffee-table book for review on my Space Books blog. It's very good. Bizony says he specifically hunted out photographs that of Apollo 11 that had not been used before, and he's selected some very good ones. He also makes some interesting points about the Apollo programme, and makes clear that it would never have succeeded if it had not been for James Webb.

There have been a number of books published to celebrate the 40th anniversary of Apollo 11 - I listed many of them here - and having read some of them and some of the books written at the time of the Moon Landing... These later books are, happily, not merely uncritical appreciations of the project, but provide real commentary. True, they've had the benefit of 40 years of history, but... Bizony makes an interesting point in One Giant Leap: one of the reasons for the public's disenchantment with space is that it has not substantially progressed. Forty years after the Wright brothers' flight, airliners were flying around the world. Forty years after the transistor was invented, computers are embedded in everything from games to cars. Forty years after Apollo, astronauts and cosmonauts are still be strapped to the top of a giant candle... The benefits of Apollo are scattered across a host of disciplines, and not immediately obvious. In other words... why is there no moon base? where are our holidays in space?

#80: where are our holidays in space?

I wish I knew! I sure would like to celebrate a holiday in space.

I am adding One Giant Leap to the BlackHole. Thanks for the recommendation, Ian.

Review of One Giant Leap now up on my Space Books blog here.

Book 34: The New York Trilogy, Paul Auster
This was my first Auster. As the title suggests, it's a collection three linked novellas set in New York - "City of Glass", "Ghosts" and "The Locked Room".

In the first, a man is mistaken for a detective (called Paul Auster) and accepts a case to watch a recently-released felon, whose daughter-in-law is afraid will harm her husband. The ersatz detective, Quinn - actually a writer of mysteries - finds himself so wrapped up in the puzzle of his case that his identity begins to unravel. On the whole, this story works really well. Although when Quinn meets the man he is impersonating, Auster, the two discuss Don Quixote and meta-fiction, and it feels like an unsubtle intrusion of the story's theme.

"Ghosts" is less successful. All the characters have colours as names. Blue has been tasked by White with watching Black. And all that's all he does. Until his own life falls apart because of his focus on Black. When - against White's wishes - he engineers a meeting with Black, he discovers that the case is less straightforward than he had imagined.

"The Locked Room" is the best of the three. The narrator is contacted by the wife of Fanshawe, a childhood friend - his best friend during those years, in fact. Fanshawe disappeared six months previously, and it was his wish that his wife contact the narrator in order to manage the many unpublished poems and novels he had left behind. Fanshawe's work proves to be excellent, and is subsequently published. The narrator also falls in love with Fanshawe's wife, Sophie. She divorces the missing man, and they marry. Then the narrator is commissioned to write a biography of Fanshawe, and begins to investigate what happened to him. Along the way, he tries to determine the identity, and eventual fate, of the man he is writing about.

A good book - although not one which convinced me to add all of Auster's novels to my wants list. But if I stumble across any of his books going cheap in a charity shop, I'll probably pick them up.

Book 35: Empire of the Atom, AE van Vogt
The thing with van Vogt is that his sf is so bonkers, so ill-thought-out, that it often passes straight through bad and out into entertaining. Not all of his books are like this, however. The Undercover Aliens may be a favourite, and The Universe Maker has so nonsensically convoluted a plot it's great fun, but I hated Slan and The Secret Galactics was dire. Empire of the Atom falls somewhere in the middle. It is, at first glance, an oddly straightforward novel for van Vogt. In 12,000 AD, a semi-barbaric civilisation, the Empire of Linn, exists on Earth. They have spaceships, colonies on Mars and Venus, but fight with swords and bows and arrows. They worship the "atom gods" in temples of science, and yet seem to have access to advanced technology which they don't understand. The novel charts the life of Clane, a mutation and the grandson of the Lord Leader. It's a fairly ordinary story, except for the odd bit of completely bollocks science. But then in the last chapter it takes a completely bizarre turn into the metaphysical. And then ends.

I'm currently reading the sequel, THe Wizard of Linn.

I read The universe maker earlier this year, and hated it -- although I agree its plot is nonsensically convoluted, its other flaws kept it from passing straight through into entertaining for me.

But I read some others when I was younger, and the irrational thrill-ride buzz you describe is what I remember fondly about them. (I did like Slan, but haven't read it in some 30 years.) I haven't read The undercover aliens, so maybe I should dig that up.

I admit van Vogt is definitely an acquired taste and impossible to take seriously. It's the complete disregard for sense, logic or plausibility that attracts me to his books, so it's the ones that are most nonsensical, illogical and implausible that appeal most. Although The Undercover Aliens does manage a good noir feel in parts. Other ones I like include the two Weapon Shop books, Pawns of Null A, and Mission to the Stars. Ones to be avoided include The Secret Galactics and Renaissance (no touchstone).

Yes, I remember loving Weapon shops of Isher and the Null-A books.

Book 36: The Wizard of Linn, AE van Vogt
The sequel to Empire of the Atom - see above. After the alien Riss turned up out of nowhere at the end of the previous book, Clane the mutation has captured one of their spaceships and is now taking the fight to them. En route he discovers a pair of planets, "like two giant moons", whose human inhabitants can teleport and read minds. Then he travels onto a Riss planet, and discovers an underground civilisation of humans. So he travels back to Earth, persuades the Riss to leave through a demonstration of some magical technology he's picked up somewhere, and that's it. Definitely one of those books where this happened and then that happened and then something else happened... and you know full well the author had no idea what was going on from one moment to the next...

Book 37: The Worlds of Frank Herbert by, er, Frank Herbert
This is the harback Gregg Press edition, so there's a nice introduction by William Schuyler which wasn't in the original. The stories date from 1958 to 1967, and appeared first in either Galaxy or Analog. They're very much of their time, and most of them havwen't held up that well. The opening story, 'The Tactful Saboteur', featuring Jorj X McKie of BuSab, has, however.

Book 38: Apollo - the Epic Journey to the Moon, David West Reynolds
Big glossy coffee table book about the Apollo programme. Lots of photos and diagrams. Not especially detailed, although the chapters on Apollo 11 and Apollo 15 aren't bad. It'd be a good introduction to someone who's interested in the subject, though. There'll be a more detailed review going up on my Space Books blog soon.

I've noticed you're reads on the space program. May I suggest Into the Final Frontier by Bernard McNamara.

From the Amazon Description:

"One of the greatest accomplishments of the 20th century was man's advance into space. This book traces the development of manned space flight from the late 1800's to the present time and offers speculation about man's future objectives in space. The book discusses the scientific results of manned space flight while also examining the cultural, military, and political factors that influenced these achievements. INTO THE FINAL FRONTIER is designed to work as a supplement to a main astronomy course or in a course specifically targeting the space program. "

Doesn't look like an easy book to find. I can't find any reviews of it online anywhere, either.

Yes, it's not a well-known one, but it's well-researched and in interesting sort of macro level look at the program.

I'll keep an eye open for it, then. Thanks.

As promised, I've posted a review of Apollo - The Epic Journey to the Moon on my Space Books blog - see here.

Book 39: Space Stations - Base Camps to the Stars, Roger D Launius
A solidly-researched introduction to space stations, covering early NASA designs in great depth, also Freedom, Salyut and Mir, and the ISS. A review will be going up on my Space Books blog shortly.

Book 40: The Age of Zeus, James Lovegrove
I read to review for Interzone. Enjoyed it, but it's not great literature - which is a bit of a shame as Lovegrove is capable of - and has in the past written - much better.

Book 41: Agent of Chaos, Norman Spinrad
Poor old Norman's been getting a bit of hate round the blogosphere after an ill-judged piece in the April/May issue of Asimov's. But never mind. I'd always considered Spinrad one of the New Wave authors - not a Brit but definitely in tune with the movement's sensibilities. So I was somewhat surprised to discover that Agent of Chaos is dated, badly-written tosh. It's the sort of crap churned out a decade or two earlier than its publication date. An autocratic state governs the Solar system - everyone not on Earth lives in domed cities - and there is a "Democratic League" trying to overthrow it, as well as a "Brotherhood of Assassins" which tries to scupper both groups' plans. The head of the Democratic League is a bumbling oaf called Boris Johnson, which amused me. But there's nothing in this book to recommend it.

Book 42: Gilbert and Edgar on Mars, Eric Brown
A novella from the excellent PS Publishing. GK Chesterton is kidnapped by an inhabitant of Mars, and magically transported there - where he meets Edgar Rice Burroughs. Something strange is going on in this exotically-populated version of Mars, and it's up to GK and Edgar to figure out what it is. Brown tries to keep a few revelations up his sleeve, but anyone who's read any ERB can figure out pretty much from the start what's going on. Brown manages a respectable pastiche of Chesterton's style, however, and this is all excellent fun.

#96: Adding several of those books to the BlackHole. The Eric Brown book looks very fun. Thanks for the recommendations, Ian.

Book 43: The Proteus Sails Again, Thomas M Disch
His last work, I think. It's a novella from Subterranean, and continues on from The Voyage of the Proteus. It's more meta-fictional than that one, with more references to popular culture and only a minor framing narrative which uses Greek mythlogy. It's... okay.

Book 44: Tupolev Tu-22 Blinder, Sergey Burdin
This book is... comprehensive. It'll only appeal to those who are fascinated by the aircraft, but it certainly covers its topic in great detail. If I could come up with an idea for a story which uses the Tu-22, then it'd be a perfect reference work...

Book 45: Dreams of the Sea, Élisabeth Vonarburg
This is one of those sf novels set on an alien world which makes no concessions to to the reader. The story is so embedded in the world that there is almost no exposition. It's done really well - Vonarburg is an excellent writer. And the world of the book is certainly strange. But it's neither an easy read nor a fast one, and sometimes very little seems to happen. It's a book, I think, that will need rereading.

Book 46: The Road to Corlay, Richard Cowper
This is the first novel in the White Bird of Kinship trilogy. It's set in the year 2999, after a flood has split the British Isles into seven island kingdoms. Technology has fallen back to roughly mediaeval level, and a militant church runs much of the UK. Peter, a travelling story-teller, takes Tom, a young piper, to York to enroll him in the Minster school, but Tom is not all he seems. If he's not the prophesied White Bird, then he is its prophet... This book didn't feel at all dated, and read as well now as it no doubt did 30 years ago.

Book 47: A Dream of Kinship, Richard Cowper
The second book of the White Bird of Kinship trilogy. The Kinship religion is morphing into Christianity - accreting the creed and ceremony of the church it is replacing. But this is not what it is about - as Tom, son of the Bride of Time, learns as he grows up and studies at the religion's centre, Corlay on the Isle of Brittany. The actual Christian Church has plans to safeguard its stranglehold on the Seven Kingdoms by seizing control, but Tom manages to prevent this happening in the first kingdom. A Dream of Kinship is the middle obook of a trilogy and less structurally ambitious than The Road to Corlay. It moves the story forwards and that's about it. The parallels between Kinship's history and Christianity's history also become more marked.

Book 48: A Tapestry of Time, Richard Cowper
The final book in the trilogy. Tom travels about Europe with his girlfriend Witchet as an itinerant musician. There's nasty incident in the French Alps, and Tom gives up on Kinship. But events lead him back to it - but in opposition to Brother Francis, who is Kinship's St Paul. The final section of the book is set 800 years later, as two Oxford dons in a faux-Victorian/Edwardian English society, are "helped" to uncover the original Kinship, and not the church that has grown up around it. Again, Cowper's clearly riffing off Pauline Christianity.

They're good books these three - well-written and interesting. Perhaps it's a little implausible that British society would culturally repeat history after the Drowning when the icecaps melted - mediaeval in 3000 AD, Vistorian 800 years later. But that's a minor quibble - Cowper makes it work.

Book 49: The Blade Itself, Joe Abercrombie
This is actually March's book for my fantasy challenge, read a bit late. I'd been looking forward to it, seeing as I've never seen a bad review of it. So I was bit disappointed to find that it wasn't as good as I'd been led to believe. The writing is amateurish, and the cast are entirely unlikeable. I'll be posting a full review to my blog in the next day or so.

Currently reading The Lemur by Benjamin Black (AKA John Banville). Not sure what to read after that... I sort of fancy Lady Chatterly's Lover, or perhaps The Magus, or American Adulterer. Not sf, though. I think I'll stick to literary fiction for a bit.

>100 iansales: I'm look forward to reading your review. I started to read The Blade Itself, but just could not get into it. I put it aside after just a few chapters and might get back to it later.

Edit to fix Touchstone.

Book 50: The Lemur, Benjamin Black
John Glass is an ex-reporter who married into a rich family. His father-in-law asks him to write a biography, so he hires a researcher. A couple of days later, the researcher tries to blackmail Glass, and is subsequently murdered. Glass is worried that the murderer was his father-in-law, and ex-CIA telecoms billionaire, whose riches he resents (even while being kept by them). This isn't a murder-mystery, it's more of a character portrait of Glass. A quick read, but not a bad one.

I picked up The Magus next.

Dreams of the Sea sounds interesting. I don't think I've ever even heard of Vonarburg before. Googling her, I see that she's "one of Canada's most revered science fiction writers" so I'm intrigued.

She writes in French, but Edge (see here) has English translations (partly by herself) of much of her work. Definitely worth trying.

Have posted my review of The Blade Itself by Joe Abercrombie on my blog - see here.

Nice review, Ian.

I'm expecting some hate from my review, given that a lot of people think the book is brilliant :-)

I really do not like it when people attack reviewers for what, after all, is their opinion. That is one of the reasons I will not read the reviews on Amazon any longer - they are too vituperative.

You should have seen some of the comments directed at me when I wrote on my blog that I thought Asimov's Foundation was one of the worst sf series.

Some people take their own opinions far too seriously!

Some people mistake their own opinions for fact, and refuse to accept any other view.

True (but then, that is just my opinion.)

Book 51: The Magus, John Fowles
I wasn't expecting to finish this one so quickly - it's a fat book, 656 pages in my Vintage paperback edition. I started it on Wednesday evening and finished it on Saturday evening. But Fowles is an amazingly readable writer, which is one reason why I like his books so much. In The Magus, Nicholas Urfe accepts a position as teacher at a boarding school on the invented Greek island of Phraxos. There, he meets Maurice Conchis, a millionaire who owns a villa on the island. Conchis involves Urfe in a series of psychological games - few of which appear to make much sense. And that's part of the appeal of The Magus: the promise that Conchis's "experiments" on Urfe, the situations he devises, will be explained. And yet what little explanation does come stretches credulity. Urfe is also an unsympathetic narrator: he's crass and arrogant. Conchis is little better, full of aphorisms that don't submit to scrutiny. If Fowles Mantissa was a dirty old man's book, then The Magus is definitely a young man's book. Fowels himself in an introduction describes it as a "retarded adolescent" novel. That's a bit strong. It's not as good as The French Lieutenant's Woman, or A Maggot, and it's probably a book best read young; but neither is it something written by, say, James Patterson. The Magus is a not a disappointing read, but neither is it quite as good as its reputation claims.

#113: The only book by Fowles that I have read is The French Lieutenant's Woman but it looks like The Magus is worth investigating even though I am neither young nor a man.

Yes, it's definitely worth reading.

I have that one and The Collector to read. I am thinking of including one of them in the Halloween list of books we do each year here on the 75'ers. I am leaning toward The Collector but am going to take another look at this one.

Book 52: Lady Chatterley's Lover, DH Lawrence
I was surprised by how much I enjoyed this. I've never read any Lawrence before (I much prefer another Lawrence - Lawrence Durrell), and it didn't initially bode well. It's very much a novel of its time, with that artificial "telling" sort of narrative - the opposite of immersion, in other words. And Lawrence's dialogue left a lot to be desired. so many exclamation marks! But when it comes to describing the English countryside, he writes some lovely prose. And the characters of Mellors and Lady Chatterley proved so completely unlike the impressions of them I'd gained from various film adaptations that I found myself enjoying reading about them. Mellors is definitely a far more complex and well-drawn character than the film versions suggest. I was going to put this book up on readitswapit.co.uk once I'd read, but I'm going to hang on to it instead. Definitely worth a reread at some point.

I haven't gotten to that Lawrence yet, though I read Women in Love last year and did not like it much. The earlier Sons and Lovers was a better read for me.

Book 53: Majestrum, Matthew Hughes
This is another of Hughes' Archonate novels, Vancean Dying Earth science fiction, although the lead character is the "discriminator" Henghis Hapthorn. Who is hired by Lord Arfe to investigate the background of the man wooing the aristocrat's daughter... and subsequently proves to be a member of a conspiracy. Clues also suggest another conspiracy aimed at the Archon himself is afoot, and it is up to Hapthorn to solve both. Hughes does his Vancean sf very well, and there are some lovely touches in Majestrum - such as the aristocracy being unable to perceive people unless they're wearing badges of rank or performing certain gestures. I didn't enjoy this book as much as other Hughes ones I've read because it mixes magic and sf, and I'm not convinced the two are miscible.

Book 54: Necromancer, Gordon R Dickson
This is one of Dickson's Childe Cycle, a sequence of novels which includes the Dorsai trilogy. Necromancer is set in the early 21st Century and is intended to set the scene for the break up of humanity into the Splinter Cultures. I still have a soft spot for the Dorsai books, even if the chief thing they display is that Dickson's reach for exceeded his grasp. But Necromancer is poor stuff. It's one of those sf novels of the early 1960s where the author is more in love with their philosophy - or what passes for one - than they are their story, world or characters. (James Blish's The Quincunx of Time is another.) And it's complete tosh. Paul Formain is a mining engineer who loses an arm in an accident. He joins the Chantry Guild, a cult dedicated to the destruction of humanity's reliance on machines, because they promise to teach him to use psychic powers to regrow his missing arm. But Formaine proves to have other talents. Or something. This is one of those novels where the writer puts stuff down on the page, and then later dismisses it without thinking through the ramifications. One to avoid.

Book 55: Collected Poems*, Keith Douglas
Douglas is perhaps the best known of the WWII poets. He died at Normandy in 1944, but some of his poems from the North Africa campaign are among the best war poetry ever written. I picked up this book in local library sale, and it's definitely worth the small amount I paid. I much prefer poetry of the 1930s and 1940s to present-day poetry - poets such as Durrell, Spencer, Tiller, Auden, etc.

* with such a common title the touchstone was never going to work...

Book 56: The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro
I like Ishiguro's writing. Prior to this I'd read only his Never Let Me Go, and while I thought it was weak as a sf novel, I did enjoy the writing. And it strikes me that The Remains of the Day suffers from a similar problem. It's beautifully written, and Ishiguro's presentation of Stevens, the narrator, stays amazingly in voice throughout. But, let's face it, Stevens is a bit of a plonker. I seem to remember Anthony Hopkins making the character much more sympathetic in the film adaptation. There's also some confusion over the actual plot. It's about Darlington and Nazi appeasement, but on the surface it seems to be about Stevens visiting Miss Kenton in order to ask to come back to work for him. Except that goes nowhere. They meet, the subject is never raised, they part. The Remains of the Day is an excellent character-study, but I suspect Stevens is not "human" enough a character to sustain a study at such length. All the same, definitely worth reading.

Book 57: Illyria, Elizabeth Hand
This novella was given free to subscribers of Postscripts magazine, but I see that it has been recently published in the US by Viking. As a YA fantasy. Maddy and Rogan are cousins, whose fathers are identical twins. They're not like their siblings, being perhaps closer in temperament to their dead great-grandmother, who was a famous actress in her day. They're also very much in love with each other, although they keep this secret as their families are against it. When their school puts on a production of Shakespeare's The Tempest, with Maddy as Viola and Rogan as Feste, it forces their respective families to split them apart. There's not much that's actually fantastical in this - a cardboard theatre the pair find in an attic, which I think represents their yearnings. Illyria reminds me of something, but I can't remember what. The writing is very good, and as a teenage rite of passage novella it works extremely well.

#122: That one looks like a book I would enjoy. Thanks for the mention, Ian. I will look for it.

Book 58: Colours in the Steel, KJ Parker
This was April's book for this year's reading challenge, and I thought it was actually pretty good. My full review is on my blog here.

Book 59: Superstructures in space, Michael H Gorn
It's not about superstructures, and the only real structure it actually covers is the ISS, but this is still a good book with some lovely photographs. I reviewed it on my Space Books blog here.

Book 60: Blaming, Elizabeth Taylor
No, not that Elizabeth Taylor, the other one. I must admit I'd never known there was a writer with that name - she has slipped out of fashion in the last few decades, although she's been "rediscovered" in the last couple of years. But after watching François Ozon's adaptation of her novel Angel* (I reviewed the film here), I fancied reading one of her books... and found a copy of Blaming in a local charity shop. It was good, but I'll not be rushing out to buy her novels. (Although I'd still like to read Angel.) Blaming is a thin book, only 190 pages. It was also Taylor's last - she was dying of cancer when she wrote it, and didn't live to see it published. Amy and Nick are on holiday in Turkey when Nick suddenly dies. An American woman, Martha, attaches herself to Amy and helps her out, accompanying her back to the UK (where Martha lives). But once back in London, Amy doesn't feel Martha is the right sort of person to be her friend, although she is reluctantly drawn into friendship with her... which ends badly. Despite its 1976 publication, this is quite a dated novel. Its upper middle class attitudes hark back to an earlier decade. Taylor was an excellent writer, although her prose seems more like a pencil sketch than a fully-realised portrait. She's certainly worth trying.

Book 61: The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Alan Moore & Kevin O'Neill
For some reason, I had volume 2 of this but had never read volume 1. So I finally got round to buying it and reading it. It's easy to see why it's proven so popular. This is good stuff, a melding of a dozen or more literary characters from late Victorian / early Edwardian UK. Some of the art is a bit fanciful - Moriarty's Cavorite-powered air battleship, for example, looks a bit over the top. On the other hand, the city of London and the Dover docks, look fantastic. It's a shame they made such a bad film adaptation of it. And why did they put Quartermain in charge in the film, when it's Mina Harker in the graphic novel? Can't Hollywood handle women in charge?

* no stupid touchstone, of course

Re book 61: My husband, daughter, and I recently watched the abomination that was The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. I've never read the book, but may try to locate it based on your note above and to get the bad taste of the movie out of my mouth.

It's definitely worth getting. There's also The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen 2, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Century 1910, with more to come. All by Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill.

And if you like that sort of thing Ian Edginton & d'Israeli's Scarlet Traces* and Scarlet Traces: The Great Game are also excellent.

* stupid touchstone only points to the second book

Thanks! I'll take your advice. I just did a bit of research on Scarlet Traces and it sounds very odd and interesting!

It's set after the Martian invaders all died, and the British Empire has reverse-engineered their tripods and heat rays. Edginton & d'Israeli also produced a graphic novel of The War of the Worlds, which is also very good.

Book 62: The Hunt for Zero Point, Nick Cook
According to Cook, the Nazis were experimenting with anti-gravity in the years leading up to WWII, and even managed to build some prototype flying saucers. These were snapped up by the US and have been "super-black" projects ever since. The B-2 bomber apparently uses some of this technology. I don't believe a word of it. Cook ties in the Philadelphia Experiment, which has been comprehensively debunked. Everything else is anecdotal, and some of the basic laws of physics are discarded. If the B-2 bomber really used secret anti-gravity technology, there's no way it would still be secret. Its workings might be, but not the fact of its existence. It's like people who think the Moon landings were faked - it would have cost more to fake them and keept it secret for 40 years than it would have done to send astronauts to the Moon...

#131: I certainly feel safe in skipping that one!

I'm admit to finding the subject a little fascinating. I mean, I read sf a lot, anyway :-) But I read The Hunt for Zero Point chiefly for research for a sttory I'm writing.

That's cool!

Book 63: The Damned Utd, David Peace
I am not a football fan. In fact, I hate the game. Well, I actually hate pretty much all sports. But I'd watched and enjoyed the television adaptation of Peace's Red Riding quartet, so I wanted to read one of his books. I saw The Damned Utd going cheap in a charity shop, and decided to buy it - partly because I knew my dad would want to read it as well as he admired Clough (and I'd bought him the DVD of the book for his birthday last year). So, despite hating football, I enjoyed this fictionalisation of Brian Clough's 44-day stint as manager of Leeds United. The story is told from Clough's viewpoint, with italicised sections covering Clough's career at Derby County. Peace has very muscular repetitive prose style, and it works well for this story. Apparently, one of the Leeds footballers sued the publishers over his characterisation in the novel, and won; and the book wasn't well-received by Clough's surviving family, or many others who are named in it.

Book 64: The Steel Crocodile, DG Compton
I've now read three or four of Compton's novels, and if they seem to have one thing in common it's that they're a bit thin on plot. They're essentially well-drawn studies of the viewpoint characters. The Steel Crocodile is a case in point. It's set in a 1970s-style über-nanny state run by sociologists, with a lack of privacy not unlike that we have today in the UK. Matthew Oliver is a psychologist, married to Abigail. He is offered a position at the Colindale, a secret establishment, although no one knows what goes on there. Oliver is contacted by the Civil Liberties Committee through an old university friend, and asked to report on the Colindale to them. He agrees.

He reports for work, and learns that the Colindale is simply a giant computer, which sifts through huge amounts of data in order to predict scientific or technological discoveries. The committee running the Colindale then decide whether or not to prevent those discoveries in the interests of world harmony. There's also a secret project: the director of the Colindale is using the computer to find a new messiah for the age. Meanwhile a militant arm of the CLC want to destroy. And they do.

Oddly, each section of the book is written from the viewpoints of either Oliver or Abigail, but the sections overlap - giving two, often different, views on the same scene. Having said all that, Compton's writing excellent, and I could imagine this book being made into a film with some great 1970s visuals - all Brutalist architecture and huge antiseptic data-centres...

Book 65: Galaxies Like Grains of Sand, Brian Aldiss
This is a collection of related stories giving a history of the galaxy over several million years. Each story is introduced by a "non-fiction" section, sort of like Stapledon's Last and First Men. The stories read a little dated, although they're better than most of the stuff produced around that time (i.e., 1959). This is an early collection by someone who went on to write some very good stuff indeed, so it's not really much more than a historical curiosity.

Only 10 books to go. Last year, I hit 75 books on October 9. I think I'm going to smash that this year. Which seems odd, because I don't think I've been reading any more books that I was doing last year...

I would say you are going to smash it and then some, Ian. Congratulations!

I think I must have not bothered counting a lot of the books I read last year - probably graphic novels, and books on aircraft.

Book 66: City of Dreams and Nightmare, Ian Whates
I'll be putting a full review of this book up on SFF Chronicles - I'll link to it when it's done. For now, City of Dreams and Nightmare is a mélange of tropes, wit ha plot that seems to expand as the story progresses. The writing is occasionally clumsy, the characters are a little stereotypical - and why must male writers put nubile teenage girls in their stories? - but there's some neat invention and the whole thing romps along like a great lollopping dog. It's also the first of a series.

#141: I think I will just skip that one!

Book 67: Diamonds are Forever, Ian Fleming
Forget the film, this novel shares only its title, the characters, and the setting of Las Vegas. In the novel, Bond takes the place of a mob courier, carrying diamonds smuggled out of Sierra Leone to New York. He is accompanied by Tiffany Case, who works for the gangsters, the Spangled Mob (after the brothers who run it, Jack and Seraffima Spang). In New York, Bond is meant to be paid off by betting on a fixed race at Saratoga. His old pal Felix Leiter, now a Pinkerton detective and missing an arm and a leg (from Live and Let Die), is investigating the race-fixing, so they join forces. Felix bribes the bent jockey to throw the race, Bond doesn't get paid, so is sent by the mobsters to Las Vegas to meet Serrafima Spang. Even for books written in the 1950s, the Bond novels are pretty sexist and racist. Bond may have a little more depth as a character, but his typical response to any solution is violence. Often deadly. Fleming's details never quite ring true - he labels all the clothes worn and food consumed during the story, but the workings of the US mob feels like it bears no resemblance to an actual criminal mob. I'll continue to pick up the Bond novels if I see them in charity shops, but they're pretty much dated trash.

Book 68: Promethea Book 2, Alan Moore
Promethea is sort of a superhero, although her chief weapons are story, myth and legend. She manifests through Sophie Bangs, a New york student, and the most recent of a series of Prometheas. These are extremely clevlery done, unfortunately much of this book is taken up with a lecture on the Tarot and its motifs. When the story moves forward, it does so very entertainingly. But when Moore lectures on the series central conceit, it gets a bit boring. I seem to remember Promethea Book 1 being a more engaging read than this one. But we'll see how the story progresses...

Book 69: Inflight Entertainment, Helen Simpson
Every five years, a new Helen Simpson collection appears. I've enjoyed her short stories since stumbling across her 1995 collection Dear George and Other Stories in 1997, despite the fact her fiction is not I would have thought would appeal to me. For one thing, her stories are usually published in literary and women's magazines. They're also very domestic, and very relationship-centred. However, she writes lovely prose and has an excellent eye for the foibles of human nature. Inflight Entertainment* is a thinner collection that that of other years, and many of the stories in it are about global warming. In the title story, for example, a man travelling first class for the first time discusses his scepticism about global warming with a fellow passenger who is a scientist. An old man dies during the flight, and the scientist confesses that old people have start flying more because the generation who will inherit a dead earth don't seem to care about global warming so why should his generation? Another story, 'Ahead of the Pack', pitches personal plans to combat global warming in the same manner as dieting plans, and the story is framed as a marketing pitch. Other stories are simple slices of domestic life. Good stuff.

* more touchstone fun: the title has a hyphen "In-flight", but include it and you get the touchstone for some book called Spam. Without it you get the right book... which displays with a hyphen. They really need to sort the touchstone system out...

Book 70: Halcyon Drift, Brian Stableford
This is the first book in the Star-Pilot Grainger, or Hooded Swan, series, and was written in 1972. It shows a little. The prose is better than its contemporaries, but the universe as described has very little rigour or plausibility. It's sort of space opera-ish - but much closer to the Dumarest Saga, or A Bertram Chandler. The space travel descriptions are quite lyrical, but don't make much sense. The hero, Grainger, is refreshingly self-centred, and the story isn't mired down with dollops of bogus philosophy or science, as many books of this type of the time were. Not bad.

Book 71: The Saturn Game / Iceborn, Poul Anderson / Gregory Benford & Paul A Carter
The first novella, 'The Saturn Game', is terrible. An exploratory mission to Iapetus from a huge research vessel in the Saturninan system comes a cropper. The crew of four are not trained scientists - or they certainly don't behave like them. In their free time, they play a fantasy role-playing game and have done for so many years it's threatening to spill over into real-life. And when their trip to Iapetus' surface turns into a disaster, it partly helps them escape. Anderson obviously had this neat idea of juxtaposing the twee fantasy RPG world with the hard sf story of visiting Iapetus. He gets the details of the moon wrong, the prose tries far too hard and often falls flat on its face, and I find it highly implausible such incompetent people would be let near a spacecraft in the first place. A stupid story.

I have never read anything by Helen Simpson. I will have to look for some of hers. Thanks for the recommendation, Ian.

She was one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists in 1993. Her previous collections are: Four Bare Legs in a Bed, Dear George and Other Stories, Hey Yeah Right Get A Life and Constitutional. There's also a novella of hers, 'Flesh and Grass', which was published with a Ruth Rendell novella, 'The Strawberry Tree', in a single book under the title Unguarded Hours.

#147: Thanks for the list of her books.

I forgot to describe the second novella in The Saturn Game / Iceborn. It was written by Gregory Benford and Paul A Carter. A mission to Pluto discovers life on the dwarf planet. Meanwhile, everyone on Earth thinks the whole thing is a scam by the sole astronaut - the only survivor of the crew of four - and the Project Pluto team on the Moon. Clearly much of the thought in this story went into the creation of the Plutonian ecology, because the story's not up to much, the politics is simplistic, and the characterisation is poor. It's better than 'The Saturn Game', but that's not saying much.

Book 72: No Truce with Kings / Ship of Shadows, Poul Anderson / Fritz Leiber
And speaking of simplistic politics... 'No Truce with Kings' takes place a couple of centuries after a nuclear war. A feudalistic state now exists on the Pacific coast of the US, but there has been a coup by a faction wanting to impose a more democratic society. They are helped by a pan-continental Order of Espers. Except the Espers aren't really psionic - they just have fancy advanced technology given to them by undercover aliens... who have secretly engineered the coup because they want the Earth to have supra-national democratic world state before it can be invited into some sort of galactic federation. Anderson makes out that feudalism is a better and more successful form of government than democracy. Rubbish.

'Ship of Shadows' is Leiber trying to pull off a Cordwainer Smith story. The viewpoint character is amnesiac and has poor eyesight - so everything he sees is blurred and hard to understand. The Big Reveal is that they are all aboard a spaceship orbiting a dead Earth - although using the word "ship" in the title is a bit of a giveaway. Confusingly-written, thin on plot, and mostly pointless. Not good.

Book 73: British Experimental Turbojet Aircraft, Barry Jones
I don't normally count these sort of books towards my 75, but this was such a good one I thought I should. The title pretty much describes the contents. It contains a chapter each on a variety of prototype jet aircraft built during the 1940s to 1965 - although Sandy Deny's infamous White Paper of 1957 killed most military aircraft projects in the UK. The author covers each aircraft in detail, there are colour line drawings of each, and a number of photographs. The final chapter covers aircraft that were cancelled, such as the Avro 720, Hawker P.1121, and, of course, TSR.2. An informative and very readable book on its subject.

Book 74: Real-Time World*, Christopher Priest
This is Priest's first short story collection, originally published in 1974. It includes his first published work, the short story 'The Run' from 1966. Real-Time World starts strong - the first four stories are very good. In fact, I picked one of them for a guest review on NextRead for the blog's Short Story Month (see here). The second half of the collection is less good - including the aforementioned 'The Run', which is pretty bad. But then it ends on a strong note with the title story, which may be a bit too consciously Ballardian but still works well.

* surprise, surprise - touchstone is broken. I honestly can't see the point in the touchstones - they don't work properly, so they're next to useless.

Currently in the middle of The One Kingdom by Sean Russell, which is May's book for this year's reading challenge. I'll be posting a full review on my blog once I've finished the book. At the moment, I'm not sure what to make of it - in places it seems a bit too consciously WOT-ish, the writing often tries too hard, and it's a fantasy novel driven by lack of information rather than too much... which is weird.

You're the only other person that I've ever heard consider Never Let Me Go weak. Bless you!

Is that good or bad?

Book 75: The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Century 1910, Alan Moore & Kevin O'Neill
I think perhaps I should have read The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: The Black Dossier first as that introduces the new league featured in Century 1910. Not doing so just meant the difference in line-up came as a bit of a surprise. But never mind. Century 1910 is apparently the first of three books to be set during the 20th Century. It's not as easy a read as the original volumes - for one, it's apparently based partly on Brecht's "Threepenny Opera", about which I know nothing. It's also a bit thin on plot - Nemo dies, his daughter runs away to London, is raped, and she has her revenge on the East End when the Nautilus turns up to find her. I'm assuming the three books, once completed, will add up to something a little greater. As it now stands, it's a little underwhelming compared to the two original volumes.

And that's it: 75 books. But since the last was actually a graphic novel, I'll celebrate after this:

Book 76: The One Kingdom, Sean Russell
This is the first book of the Swan Wars' trilogy, and is my book for May for my reading challenge this year. A full review will be going up on my blog shortly. In short, however, there were some neat ideas in it, the prose was mostly readable, but the pace was so slow I thought the damn thing would never end. I'd actually like to find out what happens in the rest of the trilogy, but I'm not prepared to slog through 1500+ pages of sluggish prose to do so.

And now I can celebrate...

\o/

Not even halfway through the year - well, 23 days short of the halfway mark - and I've done my 75. I might well break my previous record of 220 books read in a year this year...

Congratulations on reaching 75!!

Thanks.

I've posted my review of The One Kingdom on my blog here.

Good! I felt all alone!

Congrats!

If you haven't already, don't forget to post on the bragging thread!

I like Helen Simpson too, and I succumbed to a secondhand copy of Inflight Entertainment for £7 - I assume it was a review copy given it had only just been published. I read Constitutional earlier in the year.

Book 77: Yukikaze, Chohei Kambayashi
I reviewed for Vector, the BSFA's critical journal. It was first published in 1984, but the edition I read is its first English translation, published hits year by Haikasoru. I wasn't that impressed.

Book 78: When We Were Orphans, Kazuo Ishiguro
I didn't mean to read two novels by Japanese novelists in succession - although Ishiguro is a British citizen - but that's the way it seems to have worked out. Much as I like Ishiguro's writing, it's difficult to feel the same about his characters. In this one, Banks, a famous detective in the 1930s (in the style of Sherlock Holmes), is a pompous self-deluded idiot. He grew up in Shanghai but returned to the UK at age ten after his parents disappeared. More the a decade later, he visits Shanghai and imagines a) that he can rescue his parents from their kidnappers, b) resolve the war between the Chinese and the Japanese, and c) that the kidnap of his parents and the war are linked and so the solution to it will bring about the second. Ishiguro's consistency of voice is impressive, but I'm still waiting for him to write a novel with a sympathetic protagonist.

Book 79: The City and the City, China Miéville
Was unsure what to make of this, given what I'd heard about it, but I ended up enjoying it. A full review will be going up on SFF Chronicle this weekend. I'll post a link here when it does.

My review of The City and the City is here.

Nice review.

Book 80: Child of the River, Paul J McAuley
This is the first book of the Confluence trilogy. Yama is a young man on the world of Confluence, which is plainly not a world per se but some sort of artificial construct comprising a river and a strip of land on one bank. This is set some time in the distant future, after the Preservers (descendants of humanity) created Confluence, populated it with races genetically-engineered from animals, and then disappeared into a black hole. Yama is possibly a human, and almost certainly unique on Confluence. He travels to the capital of Ys, having adventures en route, in order to determine his origin and his future. This trilogy is McAuley doing Wolfe's Book of the New Sun - it's the same sort of thing, far-future setting but ancient vocabulary, and a protagonist with a mysterious origin but a pivotal role to play in the future. It's good solid sf, certainly inventive, although it does feel a bit lightweight in places.

Book 81: Ancients of Days, Paul J McAuley
The second book of the Confluence trilogy, and McAuley moves seamlessly from Wolfe territory into Baxter. Yama is no longer the wide-eyed innocent and, as in all books of this type, has been tempered by the preventable death of a loved one. Not so sure about Angel's story, which explains the background of Confluence - they're big blobs of Baxter, and feel a bit like chunks of beef in a bowl of onion soup. Despite that, this is still a solidly written, entertaining sf trilogy.

Book 82: Shrine of Stars, Paul J McAuley
The final book of the Confluence Trilogy, which loops back on itself both in story terms and in being more like Wolfe than Baxter as the first book was. There's a lot of explanations in this book and not all of it convinces. I was starting to get a bit of BDO-fatigue about halfway through so perhaps reading the three books in succession might have been a mistake. It's a good solid sf trilogy, although perhaps a little consciously Wolfean in places.

Book 83: Starfield, edited by Duncan Lunan
A small press anthology of Scottish sf, its contents mostly winners of the Glasgow Herald sf short story competition. Some well-known names and some that have vanished into obscurity. A mixed bag.

Book 84: Troy, Simon Brown
Good luck finding the touchstone for this one. It's a collection from Ticonderoga Publications of sf and fantasy stories based around characters from the Trojan War. I thought these were very good indeed - well-written, and a clever use of each story's inspiration. Recommended.

Book 85: Starlight 2, edited by Patrick Nielsen Hayden
The second of three anthologies edited by Nielsen Hayden. The contents were bit too much like Clarion-style sf stories for me, and I couldn't get all that excited about them. They're well-written, but not the sort of genre fiction I like all that much.

Book 86: The Captain's Doll, DH Lawrence
I think I like this novella best of the three I've read. Lawrence does another one of his eternal triangles, but this time his characters are little less ordinary - an emotionally-distant English army captain, his wife, and a impoverished German countess.

Book 87: Books of Blood VI, Clive Barker
I used to like Barker's fiction, even if he was the master of padding and could turn a 40,000 word novel into a 200,000 bloated monster. his short stories are much the same - 10,000 words where half that would have done. The ones in this volume are mostly forgettable.

Book 88: Found Wanting, Robert Goddard
And indeed it was. There's an interesting mystery at the heart of this book, but having the main character run around while people explain it to him bit by bit doesn't make for a gripping story.

King's Dragon, Kate Elliott
I was reading this as June's book in my fantasy reading challenge, but I got about 120 pages in and ground to a halt. So I've abandoned it, and moved onto some thing else instead. Ah well.

Book 89: The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe, DG Compton
I've read four of Compton's novels now, and liked every one. They're very grim, very British, and very 1970s. In this one, the title character is told she has contracted "Gordon's Syndrome" and has four weeks left to live. She is promptly approached by a TV network, who produce a programme called "Human Destiny", a fly-on-the-wall reality show each series of which is about the last weeks of a terminally ill person. The reporter assigned to Mortenhoe has had his eyes replaced with cameras - not that anyone except he and his bosses know. But Mortenhoe doesn't want to be on telly, and so goes on the run. The reporter meets up with her and pretends to be her friend, all the while secretly filming her...

Book 90: Conflicts, edited by Ian Whates
It's not difficult to enter data correctly, so it continues to astonish me that people fail to do so. This anthology is not by Neal Asher, as LT claims. Asher contributed one of the stories in it. The anthology was edited by Ian Whates. He also published it. Anyway, I have to review the book for Interzone. I know about half of the contributors, and I'm wondering how many of them will still be friends after they see my review...

Book 91: Hello Summer, Goodbye, Michael G Coney
This is Eric Brown's favourite novel, so whenever I see him he tells me I should read it. And now I finally have. It's good - the world-building is excellent, it's well-plotted, and the characters are drawn well. It's set on a world with extreme seasons and human-like people. Drove, a young teenager, and his parents have moved to Pallahaxi, a seaside town, because of the war with a neighbouring nation. The previous year Drove had fallen in love with a town resident, Browneyes, and he's keen to renew his friendship with her, Which he does. And also learns more about the war, and about his world. Drove is admittedly a bit of a prat, and he matures surprisingly quickly about halfway through the book. But the ending is cleverly done. There's a sequel to Hello Summer, Goodbye, titled I Remember Pallahaxi, which I wouldn't mind reading.

#171: Too bad my local library does not have that one. I will have to look further afield.

That's not all that surprising - it was published as a paperback in the mid 1970s, and the most recent edition is by small press PS Publishing. But it's worth tracking down a copy.

OK, I will see what I can do.

It's not a book, but never mind. My review of "Cargo," a Swiss sf film and probably the best sf film of the year, is now up at The Zone here.

Review of DG Compton's The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe up on my blog here.

#176: I am going to look for that one!

Book 92: The Possibility of an Island, Michel Houellebecq
This is the second Houellebecq book I've read and, while the story is very different, it's very much like his Atomised. The same concerns - immortality and sex - are there, the same misanthropic, nihilistic tone is also there. In this one, Daniel is a French comedian, feted for his edginess. As he grows older, he finds his libido waning and his ennui waxing. By accident, he gets involved with the Elohimites, your typical nutjob alien-saviours/creators cult/religion. Except the Elohimits are serious about genetically-engineering humanity to be immortal, and have the scientific chops to make a good job of it. Daniel takes on the role of documenting the Elohimites quest for immortiality, an important aspect of the stopgap measure they introduce - as indicated by short interspersed chapters by Daniel26 (ie, the 26th incranation of Daniel). There's something about Houellebecq's writing which carries you through his novels - despite their miserableness, their unhealthy focus on sex, and the weak sfnal ideas around which he builds his plot and the unconvincing way he often deploys them.

Book 93: Anna Mercury Volume 1: The Cutter, Warren Ellis & Facundo Percio
I don't normally bother listing graphic novels here, but this one - and the one following - are good enough to be worth doing. The title character in this is an agent for a secret agency which handles relations with the nine Earths in parallel universes which are linked to our universe. The Philadelphia Experiment apparently created a route to one of these, inspired its inhabitants - like a cargo cult - to fast-track their progress, and they're nbow at war with their neighbouring state. Anna Mercury is there to make sure the war does not happen, and because of the tech she uses to travel there she has something approaching superpowers. Sort of. I like the central conceit, although the story is a bit humdrum.

Book 94: Ignition City Volume 1, Warren Ellis & Gianluca Pagliarani
This one is much better. Imagine a universe where Flash Gordon beat Emperor Ming, but in the process Mars invaded Earth. Somehow Earth won, but is no longer interested in space or space travel. The only spaceport left open is Ignition City. And it's a bit of a slum. Flash Gordon is Lightning Bowman, and he's not heroic anymore. Mary Raven, daughter of another such space hero, has come to Ignition City to learn how her father died. He was murdered in his sleep, probably by Lightning Bowman. But why? There's a brilliant exchange in this: when Mary meets the Prof Zarkov character and is invited into his house, she says, "... your house smells weird." He replies, "It smells of SCIENCE." I hope they do another series of this one.

Book 95: The Alteration, Kingsley Amis
Ten-year-old Hubert Anvil is a chorister, with perhaps the best voice in Christendom, and so the Abbot of his school decides he should have a glittering career as a singer. There's only one thing that needs to be done first: castrate him. In the world of The Alteration, there was no Protestantism, and so the Roman Catholic Church rules all of Europe. Technology has reached about mid-Victorian levels, although the book is set in 1976. Anvil's impending "alteration" sets off a chain of events, which sees him meet the Pope, and run away to North America. Amis' alternate world is clever, there's some excellent sf in-jokes in the story, and the plot gallops along at a comfortable pace. The writing's a bit clumsy in one or two places, and the fact it's a "satire" plainly is meant to justify the disappointing ending. But all together, this isn't a bad read.

Book 96: The Chimpanzee Complex Vol 3: Civilisation, Richard Marazano & Jean-Michel Ponzio
This graphic novel trilogy started so well... In the first book, The Chimpanzee Complex Vol 1: Paradox, the story opened with the Apollo 11 capsule returning from the Moon and landing on Earth... more than 50 years after it left. And it had already arrived once, back in 1969. This second time, however, the CM only contained Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin. This strange events prompts a mission to the Moon. Clues there then lead them onto Mars in The Chimpanzee Complex Vol 2: Sons of Ares. Where they find a Soviet colony led by Yuri Gagarin. These are pretty neat ideas. But the writer is going to have to do some serious legerdemain to pull out an explanation. Sadly, in this third and final book, he doesn't manage it. The crew of the Mars mission awake from cryosleep aboard their spaceship - only two have survived. And it's 70 years later. Their ship is docked to a huge alien vessel... There's no real explanation for anything that happens. And it's a little weird reading a graphic novel that doesn't use decompression after become so used to it. I think I probably need to read all three of these again, one after the other. Perhaps then they'll make more sense.

Book 97: Starswarm, Brian W Aldiss
Like Aldiss' Galaxies Like Grains of Sand, this novel is a collection of linked short stories with explanatory text. It not only follows the same pattern as that earlier collection, but covers the same ground too. It's a future history of the galaxy, although this one is more... well, alien. The humans in each of the stories have moved further from us then they had in Galaxies Like Grains of Sand. Starswarm is strangely dated in some respects, but not at all dated in others. And while Aldiss was a much better writer qua writer than most of his contemporaries, there's some stuff in here that's a bit clumsy.

Book 98: Veteran, Gavin G Smith
I met Gavin at alt.fiction, and he offered to send me a copy of this, his debut novel. I said I'd review it for SFF Chronicles for him. But I don't think I'm the book's chief audience. Gollancz are pushing it as like Richard Morgan, but to me it feels like twenty-year-old cyberpunkish military sf. There are nods to current sensibilities towards the end, and the narrator is amiably inept and far from irony-free... but it still feels like it's well past its sell-by date. Which is not to say it's not put together well. The writing's not bad, and what it lacks in originality it more than makes up for in energy. I'll be putting a full review up, as promised, on SFF Chronicles, and I'll add a link here when it's done.

I finally finished my review of Gavin smith's Veteran and, as promised, the link to it is here.

#181: Nice review, Ian!

Book 99: The Inward Animal, Terence Tiller
This is a collection of poetry, published in 1943. I like Tiller's poems and now have four of his collections. The ones in The Inward Animal are denser than his others, but I like that.

Time for a moan: some eejit has entered The Inward Animal's author as "terencetiller", which means the book is not being recognised as one by "Terence Tiller", and I can find no way of fixing this. It's all very well crowd-sourcing data, but you have to have some way of editing it. Crowd-sourced data means a lot of it will be shit - inaccurate, mispelled, wrong - and you can't just leave it like that.

Book 100: Smiley's People, John Le Carré
I'm not a big Le Carré fan, although I've read a few of his books over the year. I forget why I picked up this one and read it - I think it was on some list or other; perhaps the Guardian's 1000 books to read, or something. And... Bits of this I liked. It couldn't make up its mind without it was a narrative or reportage, which was odd. And Le Carré seemed to revel in Smiley's enigmatic personality a bit too much. But it had a good sense of place, and the way the plot was slowly revealed was done well.

Book 101: Roads Not Taken, edited by Gardner Dozois and Stanley Schmidt
This is a reprint anthology, containing stories which fit theme from Asimov's. They're not very good. The usual suspects are in there - Harry Turtledove, Mike Resnick - and, strangely, Gene Wolfe. Not really impressed by any of the stories. Oh, and the theme is alternate history.

Congratulations on passing 100 books!

Book 102: The Restoration Game, Ken MacLeod
MacLeod is one of those authors whose novels I buy in hardback as soon as they are published. Some have been disappointing - but only in comparison to his other novels. I'm in two minds about The Restoration Game. It's a very readable book, with an engaging narrator. Lucy Stone is a Scot of American extraction, who grew up in the former Soviet republic of Krassnia, but now lives and works in Edinburgh. When her mother, who has links to the CIA, arranges with her for the small computer game company Lucy works for to create a game based on Krassnian mythology, it's really to help promote a "colour revolution" in Krassnia. Which is sort of all linked in with Krassnia's feudal past, when the Vrai ruled the country and supposedly guarded some secret which gave them great power. Lucy is uniquely qualified to both help the Krassnian revolution and unravel the secret of the Vrai. Like some of MacLeod's other novels, The Restoration Game presents as a thriller but has a very science-fictional idea at its heart. Worth reading.

#185: That book looks like one I would enjoy. Thanks for the recommendation, Ian.

Book 103: Empire of Light, Gary Gibson
This is the third and final book in Gibson's Shoal Sequence, or as I call it, Giant Space Fish trilogy. The first two books were Stealing Light and Nova War. Dakota Merrick finds the Maker, creator of the caches, and discovers what it is. She also learns of the Mos Hadroch, a weapon which could be used to defeat the Emissaries. She joins up with Lucas Corso, who's having trouble with his political rivals on the Freehold (ultra-libertarian) colony on Redstone. In a stolen frigate, they, and a handful of others, travel across the galaxy to Perseus Arm to strike a blow against the Emissaries with the Mos Hadroch. But someone onboard the frigate is not exactly what he appears to be... Empire of Light is a solid finish to what's been an inventive and fast-paced space opera trilogy. Gibson is good at throwing out the eyeball kicks, although I often find his prose a bit sparse - sometimes I'd like a bit more description. He does a good demolition job on Starship Troopers with the story-thread set on Redstone, and if the ending seems to come a bit fast it's probably because the journey there has been so busy. A quality new space opera trilogy.

Book 104: The Orphaned Worlds, Michael Cobley
This is the second book in Cobley's Humanity's Fire space opera trilogy, and while it's the middle book it never flags. Cobley keeps the action coming and throws in plenty of mini-revelations. On the other hand, he deserves a slap for using the word "youngling". In The Orphaned Worlds, the various forces ranged against the lost human colony on Darien begin their attack - and there are a lot of forces. The Hegemony strengthens its grip, while casting the Darien freedom fighters as terrorists. Also appearing on the scene are a huge bunch of heavily-armed religious fanatics, the Spiral Prophecy. And, of course, there's the Knight of the Legion of Avatars, who finally arrives on Darien and begins wreaking havoc... Cobley's characters are interesting and diverse, and he has an excellent eye for description - especially of landscape. If the trilogy has a fault, it's that its canvas is so huge, with so many made-up words in it, that it sometimes feels more like a role-playing game. And, on occasion, his villains do seem just a little bit too evil... But, like Gibson's Shoal trilogy, this is good British 21st century space opera.

A couple of good recommendations there. Thanks.

It seems like science fiction has soundly moved to the UK...so little seems to come out of American anymore. Everything here is either "let me write the 1,792,472th vampire book" or "let me write the 982,325,296th urban fantasy."

I've posted more extensive reviews of Empire of Light and The Orphaned Worlds on my blog here.

My review of Ken MacLeod's The Restoration Game is now up on SFF Chronicles. you can find it here.

Book 105: Terminal World, Alastair Reynolds
Reception to this book, when compared to the rest of Reynolds' oeuvre, has been mixed. Some say it's good to see a writer move out of his comfort zone, even if the result isn't quite as good as his usual stuff. Others simply say the book is disappointing. And some like it a great deal. Certainly it's not Reynolds' usual sf - being more steampunk than hard sf or space opera. And in itself, that's not a bad thing. But... I found Terminal World disappointing. It starts off as a mashup of half a dozen film styles before settling down to "Mad Max with airships". I didn't think the characters were especially well-drawn, and the pace sagged badly just pas the middle. Further, not much was actually explained. He built this world - which is actually Mars, not Earth; there are clues in the text - but failed to provide any sort of convincing explanation for how it came to be. It's as if the book will be getting a sequel, even though the story doesn't need one.

I'll probably put a more extensive review of this up on SFF Chronicles next week some time. I'll post a link here when it's done.

But now I can finally start on my Summer Reading Project. Well, after I finish off Corpsing by Toby Litt, which I decided to read to clean my palate after reading four recently-published sf novels...

Book 106: Corpsing, Toby Litt
This is Litt's third novel - each of his novels have been titled in alphabetical order; his next book will be King Death. Conrad Redman meets up with his ex-girlfriend, Lily Irish, a young actress famous for a series of ads, at a famous restaurant. During their meal, a hitman appears, kills Lily, and seriously wounds Conrad. After he comes out of a three-week coma, Conrad determines to discover who hired the hitman. Corpsing describes how he goes about this. The resolution is a little disappointing, but the journey to it is very good. Conrad is an engaging narrator, there's some perceptive writing in the book, and it's also funny in parts and clever in other. Worth reading.

I will have to check into the Toby Litt books. Thanks for the recommendation, Ian.

You can see all his books on the front page of his web site here. To date, I've read Corpsing, Exhibitionism and Journey into Space, and I have deadkidsongs on the TBR. The books don't have to be read in order, incidentally - they're all completely different stories (and two of the books are short story collections). The alphabetical order by title thing is just a gimmick.

#195: Ah, OK. I thought the books were a series. Thanks for the heads up, Ian.

Off to visit the website. . .

From your list of fantasy for the year I've only read 5 of the authors. I find this a bit disturbing as, despite the evidence on my thread, I do consider fantasy my main genre. Seems I've some work to do!

Hope I come across these two: Book 45: Dreams of the Sea, Élisabeth Vonarburg and the Cowper trilogy. Thx!

RE: Kate Elliott, have you read Jaran? The first in a SF series which reads more like fantasy (unlike the rest of the series) was my fav to the extent that I thought I didn't care for the rest at all (the direction they went after book 1). But here years later, I've found myself thinking about the last book several times this year. Hmmm...

May I echo Jim in that Williams' Dragonbone is really quite good? But, you might hate the names ;->

The Vonarburg is available from EDGE Publishing here. I don't think you're likely to find it in a shop - although two of her earlier novels were published in the UK back in the 1980s by The Women's Press.

I gave up on the fantasy challenge. It was proving too much like hard work. I still have couple left to read, which I might get round to some day.

Yes, I saw that Ian. Too bad. Of course I would have put Guy Gavriel Kay's Tigana at the top of your list to start with.

Thanks too for the tip on Vonarburg
Edited to fix typos

I read Tigana many years ago. I've read a few of Kay's books over the years, although I'm not really a fan.

Well then, I guess it's just as well it wasn't on the list LOL

If you don't like it you don't like it. Everyone seems to adore Atwood and Allende. I've read 'em (more than one to several) and I just don't get it. It's just not pleasant reading for me. Some I like more than others, but none of them were books I'd pass on to a friend (even though a friend passed them to me!).

I've never tried Allende, but I've enjoyed the Atwood novels I've read - and I have bunch more of them on the TBR. OTOH, I tried a Hemingway and gave up after 30 pages. Couldn't stand it.

Book 107: Thousandth Night and Minla's Flowers Alastair Reynolds
This is a back-to-back double of two of Reynolds' novelettes from Subterranean Press. I'd read 'Minla's Flowers' in The New Space Opera, but 'Thousandth Night was new to me as it was originally published in a SFBC anthology, One Million AD. (Although, I have read the novel, House of Suns, which follows on from 'Thousandth Night'.) Anyway, both are good examples of Reynolds' fiction. 'Thousandth Night' features better characterisation than House of Suns - possibly because in the novel having two clones as the main protagonists means they tend to blur together. I was amused by one line, in which something is described as difficult because it would be "like playing chequers on a chessboard". For a start, we Brits call it "draughts" and I believe the correct US spelling is "checkers". And, it is played on a chessboard. I couldn't work out if it was a joke or just a brainfart. Anyway, a pretty good story. 'Minla's Flowers' is a the stronger of the two, I think. While the first contains several impressive images, the latter's plot contains more sensawunda and better shows the scale and timescale of the universe. Worth reading.