Miscellany – October 2008

October has always been somewhat of a crisis month for me. However, no longer burdened by the marking of prodigious numbers of examination answer scripts and suchlike, I have been able to get more reading done in this October than for the last fifteen or twenty Octobers.

1. Matthew Hughes's The Commons is a fix-up novel about the adventures of one Guth Bandar, a noönaut (one who travels the collective mind). In his future time, personal transfer into the collective unconscious is a possibility. However, Bandar has a problem: the collective unconscious seems to have become self-aware. In other words, the unconscious is becoming conscious. It would certainly appear to herald a crisis in the history of humanity...

2. National Differences, Global Similarities – World Culture and the Future of Schooling is an interesting little volume by David P Baker and Gerald K LeTendre. Its eleven brief and enlightening chapters provide perspectives on various aspects of what the authors believe to be a steadily converging global education template. Even though it is somewhat America-centric, it tries desperately not to be, basing a lot of its conclusions on things like TIMSS (the Third International Maths & Science Study of 1994, 1999 and 2004). Mining it for nuggets of interesting truth helped pass the October blight.

3. Tim Harcourt's The Airport Economist, unfortunately, was not as worth it. Affecting a typically Australian folksy demeanour (typical as far as Australians attempting to write non-fiction is concerned) did not help his somewhat sparse and unenlightening commentary on the subject of how the rest of the world's economies impacted each other. This was mainly because he had a lot to say to Australians and little else to say to others.

4. I suspect I have accidentally resolved to read all of Lee Child's books, just as was the case with G M Ford and a number of others. The second installment was Die Trying, with very minor variation in hero and major variation in plot. Jack Reacher finds himself handcuffed to a crippled female FBI agent who has been kidnapped. Mayhem ensues. Entertainingly violent and with a quintessentially American plot (i.e. it could only happen in the USA). The third installment was Tripwire, a truly ghoulish action thriller about a terrible secret from the Vietnam war, in which Reacher ends up with the daughter of his former commander, a dead man who has left him an assignment of unknown provenance.

5. Joel Rosenberg is one for awfully bad titles. They are either trite or unpronounceable. But his Paladins II: Knight Moves is a good successor to his earlier Paladins. To recap a bit, this is his series about a post-Arthurian alternate fantasy world where warriors wield swords in which souls of either holy (White) or unholy (Red) magnitude have been bound. Characterisation is good, plot is slow but crafty; the whole thing moves quite well.

6. David Hewson's The Garden of Evil is the sixth in his series about the Italian police detective Nic Costa. It is as compelling a portrait of human evil as any of the others. The shocking beginning (how many other authors kill off a major character violently so early on?) is just the opening for Hewson to show us the depravity of the human soul. See how history leads to obsession, and thence to tragedy all round.

7. Bloodlines is F Paul Wilson's 11th installment in his Repairman Jack supersequence. Like Isaac Asimov and Larry Niven before him, he's an author who somehow developed a plan for making almost all the books he ever wrote (medical thrillers, supernatural horror, crime thrillers) into a single tapestry. Like Niven, he has a chronology. Unlike Niven, his chronology ends with the imminent end of the world, as the Adversary and his proxies take on the equally creepy and violent heroes of this doomed planet. This one covers the genetic plot, in which the Adversary's breeding programme comes to fruition. Literally.

8. Stephen Hunt's The Kingdom Beyond The Waves is a rip-roaring action fantasy thriller of exquisite style and immense inventiveness. It follows The Court Of The Air and is a worthy sequel, as magically-mutated combat archaeologist Professor Amelia Harsh searches out the ruins of lost Camlantis in the company of a peculiar submarine crew...

That's it so far for mid-October. I'll probably give it a second shot somewhere around All Hallow's Eve.