Miscellany – September 2007

Here are some autumnal readings for those of you not consumed by the preparation, execution, duration or marking of examinations. So far in September, in between bouts of rage and incoherent sanity, I've managed to do these:

1. Michael LeGault's Th!nk is a valid response to Malcolm Gladwell's Blink. The latter of course is famous for espousing the cause of intuitive 'snap' judgements ad absurdum. Th!nk, on the other hand, while raising many good points about the importance of formal reasoning (or at the very least, considered reasoning), is badly written and couold have done with a dose of critical judgement to reduce the over-inflated page count.

2. Sergei Lukyanenko's Nightwatch and Daywatch are the first two of a trilogy. After having read scores of vampire, werewolf and assorted peculiar-mythical-denizens-in-cities novels, I hadn't much hope for Lukyanenko. It got worse when they proclaimed him a sort of J K Rowling from Russia. But I persevered and I'm glad, because Lukyanenko's managed to make supernatural thrillers that have interesting characters, coherent reason and cunning plots in them. The Twilight Watch ends the trilogy, but I'm waiting for it to be shrunk to manageable paperback size.

3. Christopher Moore's A Dirty Job does a fairly good job of the oops-I-have-become-Death-what-do-I-do-now genre. The plot is a little more cunning than that, of course, but with competitors like Gaiman and Pratchett, you need a lot more than Moore. Good for a lazy read. Really funny in spots. But not more.

4. Paul Park's A Princess of Roumania turned out to be a haunting novel which isn't quite about parallel universes, gypsy magic, adolescent rites of passage, or gratuitous violence both natural and unnatural. It's just a well-written novel with a... novel premise. If you like (pseudo)historical fiction, and you don't mind it written well but a little obliquely (a bit like Jane Austen mixed with K J Parker), this one's for you.

5. Spider Robinson's Very Bad Deaths is an interesting one-shot thriller. The hero is a classic self-reliant non-judgemental libertarian (like most of Spider's heroes) who teams up with a telepath and a hard-bitten female cop to hunt down the most cruel killer of all time. It's a bit slow, with the modern trend of page-count inflation. But the plot unwinds fairly well.

6. S M Stirling's A Meeting at Corvallis fares a lot better. This last book of a trilogy is good at weaving the strands to a close as we see a sort of post-apocalyptic American Pacific Coast work its angst out. Bloody battles with cavalry and siege machines, classic self-reliant semi-judgemental libertarians, the usual. I think I'm getting jaded by American libertarianism, the best way of life for all who believe etc etc.

7. David Lynn Golemon's Event is very funny. It's meant to be taken like a serious cross between Whitley Streiber and Matthew Reilly, and it does very seriously attempt to tie up a whole bunch of X-Files/Indiana Jones-type conspiracies. But it's hard to take macho confabulations of Alien vs Predator, Close Encounters, Mission Impossible and other such stuff and not snort a few times. Read it for fun. Really. If you took it seriously, I'd have to kill you.