Miscellany – July 2008

This has been a month for many cloak-and-daggerish pursuits, much entertainment, joy, and a conference at which many deceptions were practised to my great amusement. All of this is nothing new: you will find many such things in the books below.

1. I think the highlight of my reading experience this time is Austin Grossman's Soon I Will Be Invincible. It is a beautiful and poignant send-up of the superhero genre, as fine a novel as Alan Moore's Watchmen and as intriguing as James Maxey's Nobody Gets The Girl. It is certainly far better than the Wild Cards series by George R R Martin; it evokes nostalgia, heroism, villainy, and answers with perfect poise and erudition the ancient question of why brilliant supervillains don't rule the world. A five-star read.

2. Yes, I have been reading more Boris Akunin. In this session, I have fallen victim to the red-haired, freckled, and utterly charming eponymous sleuth of Pelagia and the White Bulldog and Pelagia and the Black Monk. While being period pieces, Akunin has played his usual tricks with great skill and come up with a wonderful heroine in the person of Sister Pelagia and two zingers of plots which would not be out of place in the best of Chesterton's Father Brown stories. You will certainly be wondering about who would kill white bulldogs and why; you will be utterly (and creepily) stunned by the denouément of the Black Monk case.

3. I've never been a William Gibson fan, and his Spook Country is not going to change my mind, even though the gimmicks are lovely and the mystery of the missing container is cleverly done. It reads like a slow Mission Impossible movie, perhaps #2 and certainly not #1, which was slow but had a great plot. I think Gibson does a lot, but it's been done before by Jon Courtenay Grimwood, Iain Banks and others to greater effect and with greater coherence and style.

4. Terry Pratchett is always worth a read; his latest in paperback, Making Money is as clever as ever, with its interwoven strands of labour, economics, politics and my all-time favourite character, Lord Vetinari. There are many deep secrets in this book, and they are all hilarious; they also flatten the efforts of conspiracy theorists in other, more 'realistic' novels. Highly recommended.

5. Matthew Reilly's Six Sacred Stones is the immediate sequel to Seven Ancient Wonders. It is the usual cartoon blend of action sequences, shock, awe, and revelations of secrets man was not meant to know. However, it is all done at the usual madcap Reilly pace, which makes it good fun and the sort of thing you read if you want to go to bed feeling pleasantly tired.

6. Blind Faith by Ben Elton should have been a success, but it is in my opinion one of his duds. It's really a 1984-type novel with a dash of J G Ballard, Aldous Huxley and Robert Silverberg (in his dystopian mode). He extrapolates a future where an odd blend of sex and religion controls everyone through a Big Brother 'you must procreate and have fun' kind of environment, but nothing is really new in this novel, and the ending is as unsatisfactory as anything in this already pretty unhappy genre. I know I wrote something on it in the last post, but after finishing the book, I had to go back and see why I felt it was really so bad.

7. Oh yes, if you were unfortunate enough to see the Wanted movie based on the Wanted graphic novel (comic book sequence) by Mark Millar, then you really should read the book, which is a whole lot better and a lot more interesting.

That's it for this month! I've got a whole lot of books on globalization open on my desk right now, and I suspect you don't want a bonus post on 'books about globalization', so I'll leave it at that.