Wasteland is great - from memory I think Wizard & Glass is even better.

The whole Attack Helicopter saga is saddening/fascinating.

Where'd you source the Isabel Fall story?

The Omen

Still a great slice of horror

I'm currently reading a book in which IM FEATURED IN!! WOOOHOO!!

"Martial Arts and Your Life: The Story Of Us, What We Do and Why" by Kris Wilder and Lawrence Kane.

My profile is only 4 pages but still... It's a start!

Just wait for my autobiography "does this smell infected?"

davyK wrote:

MattyJ wrote:

Wasteland is great - from memory I think Wizard & Glass is even better.

I think Wizard and Glass is my favourite. Absolutely fantasic book.

That's the peak. I remember saying to myself that if this series gets any better my head will explode. Sadly it didn't and tailed off if anything but it was still very good even at that point.

The end

Spoiler:

gets very meta and throws in fan service

- so it should be better than I found it to be. At some point I will go back for a re-read.

I’m really looking forward to Wizard and Glass. I’m following a recommended expanded reading list so I have a few to read before I get to it (Insomnia, Rose Madder etc)

By Jimminy, I'd love HBO to give The Dark Tower the full fat works.

In Retrospect : The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam is Robert McNamara's account of the mad descent into further madness under the JFK and LBJ administrations while he was Defense Secretary (sic).

An intelligent man(chair of Ford motors before and president of the World Bank after he left because of differences with LBJ),  he is clearly troubled by his and others' failures in the early 60s. He sets out everything he and his colleagues did wrong in some detail and summarises them and attempts to formulate lessons from them - which seemingly haven't been learned as I look around today. An easy read despite the subject matter and McNamara comes across as a an empathetic and thoughtful man despite the shortcomings of his service. He has been labelled with many things and while he doesn't address them all here, it's probably fair to say he was blamed for a lot of things that went wrong - perhaps incorrectly.

I have a physical copy of this I got from an Amazon trader a few years ago and the bonus feature of this is that it has been signed by him. Nice. Makes it a keeper.

You can tell I've been on holiday, I've got some reading done...

Utopia Avenue - David Mitchell
I'm a fan of much of Mitchell's work - to the point of standing around in the hight street handing out free copies of Cloud Atlas on World Book Day, back when that was a thing. None the less, even as a fan, it's kind of hard to recommend his latest.  Which is a shame, because it has moments of greatness, but buckles under the weight of its self indulgence.

To rewind - Utopia Avenue is his ninth novel, and tells the story of the eponymous fictional 60s psychedelic rock band, from their humble beginnings, their gradual rise and inevitable end. If that sounds familiar, then, yes, it is for the most part. The band is made up of 4 members with the story told chiefly from the perspective of 3 of them - working class bassist Dean, middle class folk pianist Elf and descended from Dutch aristocracy lead guitarist Jasper.  Gross, the drummer - is relegated to a single chapter of his own - it's not clear whether this is a knowing nod towards the popular perception of drummers, or simply that Mitchell doesn't really know what to do with him.

If you're a follower of Mitchell's work you may have raised an eyebrow at the "dutch aristocracy" bit and the knowledge that Jasper's surname is De Zoet probably nails it. His novels have always included references to the others (and his first book - Ghostwritten - is essentially a series of short stories that reference each other).  Here he turns that dial up to 11 however.  Every other character is either someone we've heard of before in one of his other books, or a descendant of them.  This becomes particularly the case in the latter third of the book, when the narrative suddenly takes a left turn, and for De Zoet's sections especially, it resembles a direct sequel to The Bone Clocks and Slade House.  As someone who's read those books this twist was long overdue (the hints are there from the outset), for those who haven't I can only imagine it would be utterly perplexing.

Third act detour aside, I suspect the references to other characters would be fine for new readers.  What's likely to prove universally distracting though is his insistence on dropping in every possible reference to the period. Mitchell fell into a similar trap in his 80's set "Black Swan Green", but again its exaggerated here - with barely a page being turned without some famous ghost from the past wondering in. Here's David Bowie!  Look, it's Marc Bolan, being a dick! Now we're hanging with Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell.  Jerry Garcia's turned up!  etc etc.  Whilst such cameos would be fun in small doses, they become tedious, and slightly ridiculous - each is less a person than a caricature of the celebrity.

As I say, there are moments of greatness in here. A genuinely touching section crystallising one characters grief feels like it belongs in another novel altogether.  Equally, the sections referencing elements established in Bone Clocks are a fun extension of that narrative - but you have to get through two novels worth of stuff to get there.

So, yeah, if you're a fan, it's probably worth it for the good bits, but beware. It's frequently self indulgent, and it's long even by Mitchell's standards.


People From My Neighbourhood - Hiromi Kawakami


Almost the exact opposite of Utopia Avenue.  This is a tiny volume, containing many short stories each only a few pages long. Each tale stands alone, but also links together with the others to create its own unique world. Some stories seem simple and unremarkable memories from a childhood, others are utterly surreal and magical. They linger after you've finished, and I found that I had started to add elements that were never actually there in the book at all, as if I had dreamt them.

The characterisations are superficially simple, but again build over multiple tellings, enhanced by the odd chronology of the tellings, so that you often know a character's future before they've even be properly introduced. Similarly the oddness of the neighbourhood, whilst established in the first tale, gradually reveals itself over time, such that when we get to the utterly bizarre, you're quite happy to accept them.

Absolutely recommended. It's short, so even if you hate it, you will have lost very little of your life to it.  If you have any love for folk or fairy tales then I would absolutely suggest you pick this one up, as it's a fine new addition to that tradition.

15. Little Eyes by Samanta Schweblin, translated by Megan McDowell

This is one of the stranger books I’ve read recently, if for no other reason than it’s structure. There isn’t really an actual narrative here, but rather a collection of smaller stories told in fragments across the book. Their only connection is a new high end consumer toy called a kentuki. They are essentially small, mobile soft toys with cameras in their eyes that come in a variety of animal flavours and colours. Once you switch your new toy on it spends the first couple of hours establishing a connection with someone else in the world, who has paid just as much for a one time use code that allows them to control the kentuki as the person paid for the toy. Those who control these toys are called dwellers, and those that buy the kentukis are called keepers, and if this little gadget even once fails to make it back to its charging pad before the battery runs down it can never be revived. The stories explore the strange bonds people can form when they have a limited means of expression, and many of them feel very cautionary. I’ve already read Schweblin’s Fever Dream, and while I greatly prefer that, and I enjoyed this as just something completely different in both its ideas and structure.

16. The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham

This feels like a fairly close cousin of Wells’ The War of the Worlds, especially in those moments when the protagonist is wandering the streets of a forlorn London. Really enjoyed it, but it doesn’t come close to The Midwich Cuckoo’s for me.

17. Remains by Andrew Cull

Lucy, freshly discharged from a psychiatric hospital where she spent several months after the murder of her young son, buys the house where he was murdered and moves herself in. She has convinced herself that she can somehow contact the ghost of her little boy if she remains close to the place her was murdered. The sum total of much of the dialogue in this book ends up being: “Alex, are you there?” “Speak to me, Alex, please!” “Is that you, Alex?” etc, ad nauseam. What could have been a meditation on grief is very quickly revealed to be a skin deep horror story. Lucy isn’t simply defined by her grief, she is the very personification of it. You take the grief away and there isn’t a character there at all. I couldn’t empathise with her because there wasn’t a character there to empathise with. A book that started out with great promise but one I was ultimately just glad to be over and done with.

18. Ghost Summer: Stories by Tananarive Due

I’m loath to call this a collection of horror stories, but if they had to be pigeonholed somewhere, I suppose horror would be the place to put them. They contain ghosts, zombies, werewolves, monsters and a small variety of apocalypses. But these stories are never on the nose. The werewolf story, for instance, is about a young lycanthrope woman going to see a dermatologist about hair growth in inconvenient places at a certain time of the month. She always puts her characters first, and with good reason. Due does more to breathe life into her characters in twenty or thirty pages than some authors manage in eight hundred. My favourite, Patient Zero, is delivered through the diary entries of a ten year old boy confined to an isolation room in a lab while a pandemic might or might not be decimating the world outside. There are many great stories here, and Tananarive Due is a very fine writer.

3. Annihilation
Remembered I'd never read the others in the series so I went back to the first. It really is pretty much a perfect book. Such an eerie and evocatively told story.

ShabbyMcCrabby wrote:

3. Annihilation
Remembered I'd never read the others in the series so I went back to the first. It really is pretty much a perfect book. Such an eerie and evocatively told story.

Loved this. Wish it had been standalone. The follow ups were enjoyable but the first is, for me, a classic.