Miscellany — July 2010

June has not been a good month for reading; it has been full of alarums and excursions. Yet somehow I have managed to clear a lot of backlog and steer my way to a less cluttered set of 'local' shelves — that is, the shelves I stock around my desk and bedside.

1. Haruki Murakami's Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman is one of his few collections of short stories. He's always written weird, skewed, very personal stories about human events and human lives. This one is good without exception.

2. The Yiddish Policemen's Union is Michael Chabon at his inventive best. With the same sad, angry and utterly melancholic tone as The Final Solution, this one is all about an alternate universe in which the Jews never got their homeland in Palestine, but were moved to Alaska instead. It begins with the death of a man calling himself Emanuel Lasker, after the late world chess champion. And it ends with global disaster. Excellent. The best of my June books.

3. Tom Holt, on the other hand, is adept at serious comedy. His May Contain Traces of Magic is another of his more recent novels about commercial and professional life in London. It answers a lot of questions about where magical items come from and why things work out the way they do. If you like a more mundane sort of fantastic comedy, this is good for an evening's entertainment.

4. Giles Milton recently decided to take up fiction. His According to Arnold is as obsessed with mushrooms as his previous Edward Trencom's Nose is obsessed with cheese. Mushrooms become the centre of a huge conspiracy, which later requires drastic resolution. It's comedy too. Sort of.

5. Joel Spring's Globalization of Education: An Introduction is a good summary of recent research on this topic. However, it is rather too facile a read — not all of it is solid, and it contains several obvious and several not-so-obvious untruths. It's a pity because what is valuable is very good indeed.

6. From Jonathan Lethem, Karl Rusnak and Farel Dalrymple came a remake of Omega the Unknown, Marvel's 1970s peculiar hero who didn't seem quite human and later found out he wasn't. It is an excellent remake, a sort of post-modern take on the theme that includes all the old icons and gives them new meaning.

7. Brantley L Bryant exposes his complicity in Geoffrey Chaucer Hath A Blog: Medieval Studies And New Media. Very few suspected him of being the modern voice of the mediaeval story-teller. Now the truth can be told. Re-reading the blog posts and the commentary on them is an uneven experience, but fun if you like that sort of thing.

8. Lavie Tidhar's The Bookman is another odd novel from Angry Robot Publishers. It is about steampunk and truth and lies and adventure and the secret underpinnings of the world. Is it about reality at all? Is this an adult novel or one for the young? I don't know. I would hesitate to call it good. But it is certainly a wonderful adventure.

9. James Rollins's The Doomsday Key follows the old Rollins formula of ancient conspiracies with modern consequences. I read these the way I watch action movies — for the pace and adrenaline. It's OK otherwise. Not particularly convincing.

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I have to add that if you're wondering how come most of what I read is rated well, it's because I get to choose what I read. When I pick a lemon, it's not so frequently because I normally can detect lemons early. :)