Miscellany — May 2010

Yes, it has been a long time; so long in fact that I will not be able to catch up by reviewing all the books I have read since the last time I really posted.

So what I'll do here is talk briefly (as usual) about the few books I have read in the last few weeks that would be of any interest to my few readers. Is that OK? Anybody?

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1. Guy Adams's The World House is the first part of an epic. It is like Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman slammed together in the death throes of a maniac. There's a mysterious box. People who look for it end up in a house which is also a universe. And it seems to have been designed to keep someone in. At this point, I went all retro and started thinking of Sapphire and Steel and Doctor Who. But this book is perhaps more horrifying in some ways. It is an excellent read, and some parts are genuine comedy. That makes it worse.

2. Ender in Exile is Orson Scott Card's official sequel to Ender's Game, and in some ways, it fills a lacuna that has always existed between that book and Speaker for the Dead. It is a good read, especially if you have already read the other Enderverse books and can thus make sense by fragment recognition. I am not so sure it stands well as a novel on its own.

3. Garry Kasparov's On Modern Chess: Part Three — Kasparov vs Karpov 1986-87 is a really good chess book. It covers the huge double-match after the inconclusive war of attrition fought between the two earlier. With glimpses of chess politics and excellent analysis, especially in places where Kasparov mourns his own poor analysis (which is probably still a lot better than 99.5% of most chess players), it is worth working through. I think Anand (who recently defended his own title as World Chess Champion) might have benefited from Kasparov's analysis of the Gruenfeld as a championship match opening.

4. I reviewed the late Stieg Larsson's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo in October 2008 or thereabouts. Since then, I have consumed The Girl Who Played with Fire and the final volume, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest. They're excellent Scandinavian versions of John Grisham novels, but with greater emotional intensity. Elisabeth Salander is not only a quirky heroine, but she is something darker and a lot more powerful. While the trilogy makes a great 'individual vs establishment' story, it isn't that. It's more than that; it's about the costs and rewards of liberal democracy, while not descending to polemic.

5. Pride of place must go to Reif Larsen's The Selected Works of T. S. Spivet: A Novel. This is my singular best novel of 2010. It's about a boy growing up in a ranch in the Midwest. But his mother is an entomologist searching for the elusive (illusive?) Tiger Monk. And his father is a laconic cowboy who doesn't seem to value the scientific approach. Our hero, Tecumseh Sparrow Spivet, is a cartographer by nature; he maps everything, and he is mystified by many things. Then one day, the Smithsonian contacts him, and his life will never be the same. Except that it was already not going to be the same when his elder brother got killed by a shot to the head...

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That's it for now! I won't inflict the rest of the reading on you. I will only just quickly plug one more book for the very few of you (and even fewer now, perhaps) who might be interested in diasporic communities.

Leo Suryadinata has edited and collected a bunch of essays on Peranakan Chinese in Globalizing Southeast Asia. There's a chapter in it by me. Enjoy!

The Healthy Dead

I have not posted here since the end of 2008; very remiss of me, I know. Since then, I have consumed (so my records tell me) more than 500 books, journals, and other publications, but fewer than a thousand such.

I break my wretched silence for this most excellent passage from Steven Erikson's The Healthy Dead, which I first read in 2005, and which when read five years later, has not lost any of its wry humour. The reason I'm reading this again is that it's part of Erikson's collected Bauchelain and Korbal Broach series, with the first three novellas concerning these worthies (and their manservant, Emancipor Reese) all in one eponymous volume.

The quotation is here. Bauchelain the sorcerer is speaking to Reese. Enjoy!

"I have been thinking, Mister Reese."

Oh no. "About deposing this kindly king?"

"Kindly? Do you not realise, Mister Reese, how perfectly diabolical is this king's genius? Every tyranny imaginable is possible when prefaced by the notion that it is for the well-being of the populace. Patronising? Of course, but when delivered with wide-eyed innocence and earnestness, what is a citizen to do? Complain about the benefits? ... we are witness to genius, plain and simple. And now, we are to match wits with this clever king. I admit, the blood rushes about my being at the challenge."

"I am happy for you, Master."

"Ah, Mister Reese, I gather you still do not understand the threat this king poses to such creatures as you and I."

"Well, frankly, no, I don't, Master. As you say."

"I must perforce make the linkage plain, of sufficient simplicity to permit your uneducated mind to grasp all manner of significance. Desire for goodness, Mister Reese, leads to earnestness. Earnestness in turn leads to sanctimonious self-righteousness, which breed intolerance, upon which harsh judgement quickly follows, yielding dire punishment, inflicting general terror and paranoia, eventually culminating in revolt, leading to chaos, then dissolution, and thus, the end of civilisation." He slowly turned, looking down upon Emancipor. "And we are creatures dependent on civilisation. It is the only environment in which we can thrive."

Emancipor frowned. "The desire for goodness leads to the end of civilisation?"

"Precisely, Mister Reese."

"But if the principal aim is to achieve good living and health among the populace, what is the harm in that?"

Bauchelain sighed. "Very well, I shall try again. Good living and health, as you say, yielding well-being. But well-being is a contextual notion, a relative notion. Perceived benefits are measured by way of contrast. In any case, the result is smugness, and from that an overwhelming desire to deliver conformity among those perceived as less pure, less fortunate — the unenlightened, if you will. But conformity leads to ennui, and then indifference. From indifference, Mister Reese, dissolution follows as a natural course, and with it, once again, the end of civilisation."

"All right, all right, Master, we are faced with the noble task of confounding the end of civilisation."

"Well said, Mister Reese. I admit I find the ethical aspects of our mission surprisingly... refreshing."

This is one of the most interesting declarations of political ideology I've found so far. I am sure that many Atlanteans would agree that it is amusing.

Miscellany – December 2008 Bonus Issue

And so it came to pass that I found myself with rather a lot more time than I once thought I had, and hence was able to read a lot more books than I thought I had. Here, then, is an account of the December bonus reading.

1. The Gervase Fen novels by Edmund Crispin that I mentioned in the previous post are every bit as entertaining as I thought. They partake of the same old-school charm as Margery Allingham, Dorothy Sayers, and M R James possess. They are also considerably more mischievous, as I can testify to after having read Holy Disorders (about shenanigans in a small cathedral town and undead priests, sort of), and Love Lies Bleeding (about the perils of school romances and hiding out in the school laboratory at night, among other things). Recommended for those who like old-fashioned slow-paced thinking detective novels with a minimum of procedure and a fair amount of literary farce.

2. Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book is a haunting, sweet, inventive tale of a boy named Nobody and his unusual upbringing and destiny. It reminds me a little of Peter Beagle's A Fine and Private Place, which has much the same quality of writing. It also reminds me of Roger Zelazny's A Night in the Lonesome October. These two similarities do not give away any of the unusual and heart-breaking plot. It is a fine read, a wonderful adventure, and one that you would encourage your friends to read, simply because they are your friends.

3. The Ghost by Robert Harris is what I call a 'light' thriller. It is serious stuff, and it is a conspiracy novel involving the highest levels of government and a secret that people have to die for. But it is tightly plotted, shortish, easily-written. It can be devoured on a day at the beach, and is probably designed for that purpose. You can enjoy it without thinking too much.

4. Meanwhile, Harry Turtledove has been at it again. Opening Atlantis is his first salvo in yet another barrage of alternative history. This time, geology run amuck has split part of the eastern seaboard of what we would call North America and left it in the mid-Atlantic. This alternative world thus has a ready-made Atlantis, and it is duly colonised by Europeans. Contention, strife, and piracy ensue, to everyone's entertainment. Classic Turtledove, but as usual a bit heavy.

5. Oscar Wilde sees a return at the hands of Giles Brandreth, whose Oscar Wilde and the Candlelight Murders must surely rank as one of the best literary murder mysteries of all time. The mixture contains a stiff dose of Arthur Conan Doyle, who was actually a friend of Wilde, and Robert Sherard, Wilde's confidant and friend. All the sordid bits of the Victorian Age are on display, as well as the glorious elegance and eccentricity. Highly recommended for those who like such things.

6. Greg Rucka's Patriot Acts is the sixth Atticus Kodiak novel. Atticus is a former bodyguard who was good but not great. Like Child's Jack Reacher, he is a man with a code of conduct and the nerve to follow it most of the time. But he is not as much a superman as Reacher is, and when his friend and sometime lover (whom we've followed for five books) is killed in this book, we feel for him. The reason for the killing and the form of revenge are what hold this book together; it isn't a bad read, but not as tightly woven as other Rucka offerings.

7. Actually, Diana Wynne Jones's House of Many Ways, the latest of the infamous Howl novels, has a much more interesting plot. Like most of her other work, it tends to be over-inventive, leaving the reader gasping at times. But it is a well-told tale, with many delightful touches and a lot of great fantasy writing.

8. Jonathan Barnes's The Domino Men is typical Brit humour. I suppose it could be conspiracy horror science fiction like some of the stuff by Robert Rankin, but it is a lot more subtle in its more shocking aspects, and the plotting owes more to Tom Holt than to Terry Pratchett. Well, at last you will know the secret of the Windsors and why Londoners behave the way they do.

9. Finally, I just finished Scott Adams's Positive Attitude, the 29th Dilbert collection. As usual, it reminds me of the workplaces many of us have known, and some of the delightful (yes, all in full colour now!) cartoons capture exactly the spirit of working in an anti-intellectual hellhole while kept alive only by wit and creativity. Amazing.

And that's it for the month just gone! My 'unread' stack still has about 30 books in it, maybe more. But I shall not be discouraged.

Miscellany – December 2008

Well, I suddenly found the time to eat through a stack of books. Besides the incredibly left-wing polemic-disguised-as-research with the title of Globalizing Education: Policies, Pedagogies & Politics (eds. Apple, Kenway, Singh), I have read a lot of stuff that is much more worthy.

1. Yes, I have finally read all the Lee Child paperbacks! Yay, me. The eighth installment was The Enemy, a flashback episode which lends our hero Reacher a lot more depth and tells us something truly frightening about the end of the Cold War in 1990. The plot is worthy of an Anthony Price novel, with some very smart people doing incredibly stupid things. Number 9 was One Shot, about a sniper who couldn't have been and a sniper who unfortunately was; the plot is almost one from Chesterton's Father Brown detective stories, and is a real hard-core police procedural. After that comes The Hard Way, in which a kidnap attempt turns into a murder case while not being the same instance; violent men come to odd ends (or odds and ends) and a lot of ordnance is supposedly deployed somewhere in rural England. The most recent one is the eleventh Jack Reacher novel, Bad Luck and Trouble, in which a lot of his old friends (some of who we met in The Enemy) are disposed of and a truly monstrous plot comes to light. I must say I have enjoyed every single one of them so far.

2. Matt Rees was totally unknown to me, until I read The Bethlehem Murders and The Saladin Murders, about a Palestinian history teacher whose outrage leads him to become an amateur detective and get into all kinds of trouble for which is integrity has not prepared him. The books give a very good feel for the occupied territories, and it is a sad and moving one.

3. Edmund Crispin was the pseudonym of one of the somewhat forgotten British detective novel geniuses of all time. With people like Margery Allingham being reprinted, it's about time that the late Bruce Montgomery has his nine Gervase Fen novels reissued. All about an odd Oxford don with a predilection for arcana and peculiar knowledge (and a suicidal attitude to motor vehicles), these books are marvels of compact humour and unusual plotting. I have just read The Moving Toyshop, in which the scene of a crime disappears and all the suspects are equally suspicious and anonymous (and, oh yes, identified by lines in Edward Lear limericks).

That's all for now! I am off to a holiday resort for a few days and when I come back things should be interesting again.

Miscellany – November 2008

November was a very busy month. Too much reading, too little output; a bit like having a terrible sort of constipation aggravated and not alleviated by fibre.

1. Two more Lee Child thrillers hit the deck this month. Without Fail is all about the attempted assassination of the Vice-President elect of the USA. The usual skullduggery, but it's not very inspiring — except for the major biographical insights into Jack Reacher's life. Persuader is a much better thriller, with a lot more bloodshed and creepy Bond-style villains. The twists are more fun too; the introductory kidnap scene is entertaining and the fate of the participants makes for good reading.

2. Christopher Fowler has been at it again, with White Corridor, his fifth Bryant & May novel about two rather peculiar investigators. Again, the sense of the arcane and obscure permeates the whole tale. Fowler writes very uneasy stuff, and while this one is not one of his best, it is a very good novel at the human level. The two parallel plotlines teach us a lot about humanity, and each one has a twist that speaks of how scarred and damaged that humanity can become. I recommend all his novels if you are the sort that likes psychological thrillers with subtle points.

2. Somewhere along the line, a man named David Stuart Davies decided to launch a line of cheap reprint books. Along the way, he contributed at least two which are entertaining on their own. Davies's additions to the Holmesian canon, Sherlock Holmes and the Hentzau Affair and The Tangled Skein, are adept at capturing the gaslight mood of the original tales. They are also, I think, a send-up of the whole genre. The former links Holmes with the Rassendylls from Anthony Hope's The Prisoner of Zenda and Rupert of Hentzau; the latter links Holmes with Dracula. To my mind, this one isn't as good as Fred Saberhagen's The Holmes-Dracula File, though.

3. Sir Andrew Caldecott was a well-respected administrator in colonial Malaya. He found time, in his busy life, to write a bunch of gently spine-chilling tales collected under the title Not Exactly Ghosts. That's really the secret of his writing: he is able to convince you that quite ordinary things have supernatural and terrifying implications, while not actually telling you explicitly what they are. People with too much imagination will be thoroughly spooked.

4. The Venetian Betrayal is Steve Berry writing yet another historically suspect conspiracy thriller. He does it well enough, and this one involves a Central Asian Federation, the body of Alexander the Great (and the body of St Mark), lots of gratuitous and technically-interesting violence, and secret agencies of all kinds. It's a good read if you like the running-around-digging-up-old-secrets genre.

5. In The Book of Fate Brad Meltzer combines Lee Child and Steve Berry as he attempts to write a conspiracy thriller about the US Presidency, an attempted assassination, mad but very skilled gunmen, and secret plots involving Freemasons that don't quite take off. Meltzer is better at writing graphic novels than text novels. Actually, his books might make good movies if cut down by about 60% (which is what most movies do anyway). Somehow, his writing lacks punch.

6. Globalization And Defence In The Asia-Pacific: Arms Across Asia is an interesting book edited by Professor Geoffrey Till, Emrys Chew and naval officer Joshua Ho. What I think I like best of this collection of essays about the new face of Asian tensions is that 'arms across asia' sounds like a charity of some sort. It's hard to get a copy, and like most academic books, it costs way too much.

I'm moving on to read Edmund Crispin's Gervase Fen series of mysteries about an Oxford don and his unusual associates. That will be followed by a bunch of pseudo-historical thrillers, I suppose.

Miscellany – All Hallows' Eve 2008

Well, I managed to get a whole lot more reading done since the last post. Here's the Hallowe'en special!

1. I think that Lee Child is better than John Grisham in at least one way. Like Grisham, you learn about the technicalities of the legal (or extra-legal) life. Like Grisham, the plot eats at your mind, ratchets up the tension, and tempts you to finish each book at a single sitting. Unlike Grisham, Child actually varies his plots and comes up with very different and unlikely takes on life, coincidence, evil and violence. The fourth Reacher novel is called The Visitor, and no, it is not about an asteroid, a ghost, a psychopathic man with an axe, or anything like that. Rather, it's about ex-Army women dying in bathtubs full of army-green paint. Really. And very well done too. The fifth in the series is called Echo Burning, and it has even more devastation, a totally different plot, and lots of distressingly discriminating violence involving a femme fatale and a traditional Southern family.

2. Paul McAuley is indeed a finer thriller-writer (when it comes to biothrillers) than anyone except Michael Crichton. With respect to Crichton, the only reason McAuley is behind is that a) he is more exact about life, and b) he has written fewer books. The latest McAuley I've read is White Devils, an unusual riff on the not-quite-post-not-quite-Apocalypse genre, mixed with Heart of Darkness and savage lacings of philosophical terror in the form of post-human pre-humans. Yes. You heard me. Go read.

3. It's a pity that Stieg Larsson is no longer with us. I've just read the first of his three books, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and it's a beautiful read. As with many modern Scandinavian authors, the writing is sparse but detailed; accounts are exact, the plot is convoluted and horrific, the characters are wonderful psychological case-studies. The book centres around Mikael Blomkvist, an investigative journalist who normally deals with the financial and industrial world. His eventual co-star is Lisbeth Salander, a Goth prodigy and private investigator with rather odd behaviours. The two of them deal with a serial killer, a financial empire, and lots of truly very nasty people. Along the way, they find love and hate and powerful passions. Not bad at all.

I've got a huge reading list for now. Back soon though.

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.

Miscellany – September 2008

September has been a terrible month. Too many things to do, too little space in which to do them, and what seems like a thousand people to appease. Nevertheless, I've managed to appease the library shelves.

1. Steve Augarde's Celandine is a worthy sequel to The Various, reviewed two posts ago. The mythical and eponymous Celandine, who brought a higher form of civilisation to some of the Various and seriously perturbed the rest, is revealed as another human girl, plunged during wartime into the odd world of the little people. The book isn't quite a sequel; it's perhaps more of a prequel, and yet a centrepiece. This is a trilogy, and for once it doesn't seem as if the second book is just filler.

2. John Scalzi's The Last Colony has a lot in common with Heinlein and Niven, with Joe Haldeman thrown in. It's the third member of a series begin in Old Man's War, and reads a little bit like Haldeman's The Forever War crossed with All My Dreams Remembered, interpreted by Niven and humanised by Heinlein. John Perry and his family are tapped to start up a new colony for all kinds of dastardly political reasons, are on the brink of destruction, pull their fat out of the fire just in time by conning the alien commander into a very bad situation, and are home in time for dinner.

3. All that was pretty engaging, but the material covers roughly as much as Larry Niven's Fleet of Worlds, co-written with Edward Lerner. This one is a worthy addition to Niven's Known Space universe; as a tale told on its own it is also pretty good. The story is one about humans working in tandem with a wiser, more powerful space-faring race of kindly mentors, only to find out that they are servitors to a bunch of ruthless pathological cowards... what's even more fun is when you're a long-time fan of Niven and can spot the references to earlier tales of Known Space.

4. Sometimes, a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do. Especially if the dead man you just met is your long lost brother. And that's more or less what Lee Child's Killing Floor is all about. That and a town that reminds me of a certain Stepford. Between him and G M Ford, I now know what to do when I am bored and need a quick change of pace. Oh yes, I ought to put Clive Cussler here too. Although they are all very different, and Ford's probably the best.

September was a terrible month. Sigh.

Miscellany – August 2008 Bonus Issue

Yes, I have finished four of my ten globalization books. I've also managed to read quite a few others!

1. Alexander McCall Smith's The Careful Use of Compliments is the fourth installment in the ongoing and philosophically problematic story of Isabel Dalhousie, professional philosopher, doting aunt, and now single mother. It is all a tangle, but not complicated except for the social implications and the philosophical musings. It gets more entertaining when perfect but previously unseen paintings by a long-dead artist begin to surface...

2. Kage Baker's The Sons of Heaven somehow manages to tie up all the major threads and loose strands in her sequence about the Company, that fabled time-travelling corporation which seems to know everything and be everything. How do immortals fight eternals? And what kind of God is running the whole show? Some people might consider such questions blasphemous, but I'm sure Isabel Dalhousie (and Kage Baker) would not.

3. I read through Charles Stross's Halting State without coming to a halt. Like Gibson's Spook Country and others, it is about the near future and the consequences of having an omnipresent Internet. Unlike the Gibson however, Halting State is a deftly-woven tale about money, gaming, technology, people, espionage, and the fate of the world. Well, it superficially resembles the Gibson in themes and tropes, but trust me when I say it's a lot better. And it will make you think of MMORPGs in a very different way.

4. Locke Lamora is back! Scott Lynch's second novel, Red Seas Under Red Skies, might have a pretty unwieldy title, but the nearly 800 pages went by altogether too quickly as Locke and his friend Jean work their way backwards and forwards through people as corrupt and clever as they, for the ultimate prize. But hang on, everyone has a different idea of what that is, and how it might be attained. Lynch is a lot like Matthew Hughes and Jack Vance, but he remains his own person, and I think he is much better at evoking humanity and true humour than the other two.

5. Matthew Hughes's Majestrum is a gem of its own. Somewhere between Zelazny and Vance in the fantasy spectrum, Hughes has managed to create Henghist Hapthorn, world-travelling discriminator of a distant future millennium. Hapthorn is very much the Vancean hero, sometimes at a loss but mostly sharp, clever and sarcastic. He is also a Zelaznian hero in the sense of possessing a unique take on a change that will soon overtake the world, as well as being divided within himself, almost literally. For Henghist Hapthorn is actually two people in one body, a man of science and a man of magic – and the two distinct persons are not very happy.

6. David Lynn Golemon is back again! The master of the cheapish sensational thriller ripoff has written Legend, more or less a sequel to Event, which I reviewed here. I went back to look at Event for comparison's sake. I think that St Martin's Press should shoot their text editor; the new potboiler has a lot of grammatical errors of the 'agreement' kind, which a good text editor would have corrected as a matter of course. Story has cryptozoology, lost treasure, ancient history – all the stuff which Matthew Reilly and James Rollins do so well, and which the team of Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child excels at. So why read this at all? Simple: spotting errors of fact and grammar has never been so entertaining!

Note: I've wondered for a while if 'Golemon' is itself a typo for 'Goldman'. Or perhaps it is a command word for a humanoid construct: 'Golem, on!' Then again, maybe it's an adequate descriptor: 'Go lemon.'

7. Robert Sawyer's Rollback is yet another fine balance of SF and human-interest from the Canadian excellence-mill. Sawyer is prolific and yet he is able to turn out a range of very different characters whose pains are easily empathised with. This time round, he gives us the story of Sarah and Don Halifax. She's the one who first makes contact with an alien race. He's the one who gets a successful rejuvenation while hers (offered by a wealthy magnate) fails. She's in her eighties, he's now physically 25. The whole sad story becomes a happy one. The aliens? Well, something interesting happens there too.

8. While delving in the depths of a second-hand bookshop, I was able to retrieve three books by Anthony Price. For those of you who don't know who Price is, here's a summary. He is certainly one of the five or six finest espionage/thriller writers I've read, a specialist in how the nasty dark corners of history can ambush us in the present. I got The Alamut Ambush, in which the Israelis and Egyptians play a bluff/double-bluff game forced upon them possibly by the British in the worst of ways; The '44 Vintage, in which a very valuable... unknown item is about to be sneaked out of Nazi-occupied France as the Germans retreat towards Berlin; and A Prospect of Vengeance, in which a trap involving a long-dead intelligence officer wakes up and bites a lot of people. At the centre of each mess is Dr David Audley, rugby-playing Cambridge historian and reluctant intelligence man. He isn't the protagonist all the time, but he can always be relied upon to act the antagonist to whichever poor sod is in focus.

Well, it was a great August! Back to my books on globalization then...

Miscellany – August 2008

It has been a long haul and a worthy one. In the time since the last post in July, I have read more Akunin and had the joy of reading even more wonderful books.

1. Boris Akunin's 'Erast Fandorin' series is not only intriguing, but full of literary humour and cold-blooded plotting. Beginning with The Winter Queen and going on to The Turkish Gambit, Murder on the Leviathan, The Death of Achilles and Special Assignments, I took no breaks while devouring the first five of a truly engaging sequence. The eponymous Fandorin begins as a naîve and idealistic Russian policeman who becomes a complete character, personal tragedy and all, by the end of the first book. Each of the subsequent books then employs a different approach to the crime/mystery/thriller/conspiracy constellation, each time hitting the mark with as much punch as its literary antecedents, and often with more style. Thoroughly recommended, and I will be looking out for the next few.

2. Jasper Fforde's First Among Sequels is the fifth in Thursday Next's peculiar literary adventures. This one, compared to its predecessors, is less involved with the literary world and more of a time-travel puzzle with the usual bookish humour sprinkled wildly throughout. I can't say I get very involved with Fforde's characters, which are a bit thin compared to, say, Terry Pratchett's. But that's part of the nature of this sort of comedy – a sort of polite Robert Rankin, Brit humour, kind of thing.

3. The Accidental Time Machine is another of Joe Haldeman's fine novels, but somehow not quite as complete as his more visceral early excursions. In contrast with other time-travel stories of the last fifty years, it adds very little that's new. But all major SF authors are supposed to have done time-travel, and this amusement should help Haldeman on his way to a clear status in the majors.

4. The Various, by Steve Augarde, is an unusually potent version of the 'children meet fairies living nearby' story. This doesn't quite do it justice, but apart from saying that Diana Wynne Jones's fans would probably appreciate it, I am going to wait till I've read the sequel, Celandine (already out in the stores), before I say more.

5. The fourth in the Sugawara Akitada novels by I J Parker, Island of Exiles takes the 11th century Japanese official and sleuth through his most harrowing adventure yet. The problem is that after reading Akunin's Pelagia and the Black Monk, claustrophobic islands with deadly goings-on tend to wear on one slightly. It is nevertheless a solid tale, but the hero's character development undergoes quite a bit of strain.

6. I finally got down to Susanna Clarke's The Ladies of Grace Adieu. It's an excellent collection of faerie tales, very reminiscent (as other reviewers have said) of Angela Carter's writing. But Clarke is of course an excellent proponent of the comedy of manners, and this juxtaposition leads to what I can safely call light-hearted delight. It might be called a handbook on how, and how not, to deal with the people under the hill.

So far, so good. I have a lot more lined up. But it will probably have to wait until I've written at least another 10,000 words of my dissertation. Haha.

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.

Miscellany – June 2008

June has been the busiest of months so far. It was a long March, and a cruel April, but May flowered and here we are...

1. Tom Holt's Barking is yet another successful send-up of London's corporate culture. Holt's oeuvre is broadly comedic, ranging from wry looks at genuine history (Meadowland, Olympiad) to perverse looks at mythological sagas (Expecting Someone Taller, Who's Afraid of Beowulf?) and many others. Barking is about werewolves, unicorns (well, at least one), vampires, and how mythology distorts our views of both good and evil, because near-eternal life makes fools of us all. Highly recommended entertainment!

2. Bernard Cornwell's Sword Song has an embarrassingly bad title, but makes up for it by being an excellent fourth installment in the life of Uhtred, a pagan Saxon nobleman who was brought up as a Dane and now serves Alfred, King of Wessex (and some day, England). The highlight of this part of the series is the attack on London, which plays out very much like a modern Special Forces infiltration but with a lot more blood spatter. Excellent read, but you might want to get hold of the first three parts before you begin: The Last Kingdom, The Pale Horseman, and Lords of the North.

3. Ian Sansom's The Case of the Missing Books starts with typical British farce as the half-Irish Jewish Londoner, librarian Israel Armstrong, finds himself in Northern Ireland running a library that doesn't seem to exist. He has to put up on a farm, in a refurbished chicken coop, and deal with locals who aren't particularly enamoured of him. The poor man suffers much, eventually finds the missing books, and never gets to see Gloria, his girlfriend whom we never see either (not even by the end of the third volume in the Mobile Library series). The next two I devoured immediately after; Mr Dixon Disappears and The Delegates' Choice are just as funny.

4. Simon Green's The Man with the Golden Torc is a typical Simon Green adventure. Strong hard-boiled wise-cracking hero (in this case, the man named 'Shaman Bond' or 'Edwin Drood') takes on mighty forces with outrageous companions, wild magic, and huge amounts of destruction. Outré manifestations, perversities and monsters all appear and disappear. Since this is a Simon Green ride, just enjoy it the way you enjoyed the Deathstalker epic, the Hawk & Fisher stories, or the Darkside series. You did enjoy them, right?

5. Ben Elton's savage wit has now been turned upon the dystopia that media trends seem to be driving us towards. His latest novel, Blind Faith, is all about a future of the Internet, religion and sex gone amok. Somewhat reminiscent of Orwell's 1984, it is set in a world in which everyone is Big Brother, and the rule of law is perhaps too democratically maintained.

I've actually read a lot more than this, but I haven't actually finished any of the six or seven books I'm reading at once while plotting my next research digression. That should be in time for the July issue. In the meantime, remember that the Kinokuniya and Borders discount cards are your very good friends...

Miscellany – May 2008 Bonus Issue

In the last 20 days or so, I've been able to read quite a bit more. Sadly for some of you, a lot of it is really serious (haha) stuff on education in Southeast Asia and that kind of thing. Without further ado, here we go: a dirty dozen to end the month of May.

1. George Alec Effinger's Dirty Tricks is an odd mixture of his short stories. Essentially, Effinger's oeuvre is the peculiar short story that leaves you wondering a) what you just read, b) what world you're living in, and c) whether buying the book was worth it. The fact that it is hard to resolve any of these questions testifies to his skill; then again, one is never sure what kind of skill it is.

2. John Scalzi's The Android's Dream is a sideways tribute to Philip K Dick's novella which eventually became Blade Runner (yes, starring Harrison Ford too). What's interesting is that it's about blue and sheep and genetic engineering and alien powers who have been using humans for various reasons. Not really about androids, but certainly fun; one of those 'Earthman wins against superior and arrogant aliens' stories.

3. Charles Stross's Toast is a much better collection than Effinger's. It isn't all beautiful, but the stories glitter with a touch of the future that could be just round the corner. Alternate worlds, alternate times, and the pains of growing up as individuals and as a species. He does have his fixations though – computing and computers, Cthulhu, stuff like that.

4. Singapore Inc.: Public Policy Options In The Third Millennium, edited by Linda Low and Douglas Johnston, is a useful book but not a beautiful one. It covers a lot of ground, but can be boiled down to perhaps a single main point: globalisation and the knowledge-based economy are the excuses/forces which are persuading Singapore to tread the fine margin between ethical behaviour and profitable behaviour. Yes, quite.

5. Examinations In Singapore: Change And Continuity (1891-2007), by Tan Yap Kwang et al, is a quick look at 116 years of examination history in this small island. It offers many curious and entertaining facts but desperately tries not to be controversial, which makes it a little toothless. It almost (but not quite) completely fails to critically analyse the system and its evolution. Nevertheless, it offers a good starting point for further digging.

6. Glen Cook's Cruel Zinc Melodies is the 12th of his series of novels about Garrett, a private investigator in a fantasy world who has a dead demigod as his partner and a host of curiously entertaining acquaintances as his supporting cast. This one is almost like Marvel Comics' Runaways in which the children of some seriously bad people do interesting things, get the adults involved, and wake up things not meant to be woken. As entertaining as the other eleven.

7. T A Pratt's Poison Sleep is the second of a series that began with Blood Engines (see earlier post). It's an exciting read which delves into the seamy underside (overside?) of Felport, a city full of sorcerers. Marla Mason is the hard-boiled heroine who is also the guardian of the city and default arbitrator between its many contending powers. The story rolls on crisply as psychotic magicians, dreams, and chaos-makers contend; the heroine and her sidekick(s) get into all kinds of chilling situations; and the ending unfolds just untidily enough to lead to the next book. Marla has her own website. Great stuff.

8. David Gibbins is obviously out to make a lot of fast bucks. His previous two books were Atlantis and Crusader Gold. His latest is The Last Gospel, a rather unusual thriller about Jesus' own story, with enough Dan Brown-style material to outrage conservatives. It also completes the Lost Civilisation plus Secret Order plus Heretical Christ-Account trifecta which seems so beloved of thriller writers these days. That said, they're not bad stories even if they're bad books.

9. The Singapore Miracle: Myth And Reality by Rodney King, an Australian writer who worked in Singapore for 15 years , is a hard-hitting attempt to apply serious analysis (for once) to the question of how much about Singapore is myth and how much is reality. He does a good job, slightly undermined by the Australian determination to demostrate a personal bias for the sake of showing character. The undermining is negligible though, because King is ruthless, generally fair and reasonably accurate. It's not deathless prose, but it's the critique of Singapore you won't find in the other books mentioned in this post.

10. The Onion Presents: Our Dumb World – Atlas Of The Planet Earth is the most beautifully evil piece of humour I've read this whole year. Playing off the myriad prejudices and stereotypes of their predominantly American readership, the Onion staff have come up with a true Atlas filled with stuff man was not meant to share around at parties. If you have the cash, this is a must-read.

11. Lincoln Child and Douglas Preston have co-written many hair-raising thrillers together. The Wheel Of Darkness, starring Aloysius Pendergast, an FBI agent quite unlike any other, is all about a secret order, a hidden treasure with evil powers, the science behind demonic manifestations, and a luxury liner about to kill a lot of people in a dramatic way. Good plot twists and madly killer (haha) pseudoscience make for yet another Child/Preston success.

12. Paul Magrs has joined the ranks of Kim Newman, Neil Gaiman, Alan Moore, Christopher Fowler and the many other chroniclers of what I call 'secret England'. In Something Borrowed, the second of his books about an unusual lady named Brenda who lives in Whitby, he pulls together threads left over from his previous Never The Bride to make a mind-blogging pastiche involving mad Chinamen under Limehouse, a dastardly vampire, and a bunch of oddly familiar writers.

Well, that's it for now. I have a huge pile lined up, and as you can see, free time to consume the whole lot and do useful work too!

Miscellany – May 2008

My last update had me starting on a roll. Little was I to know it would soon be curtailed by serious work. But here is the reading list for May so far:

1. G M Ford's Blown Away is not related to movies with similar titles. However, it is a rip-roaring tightly-paced book that is a good successor to his (previously reviewed) Fury. The plot begins with a chain of people being blown up in bank robberies. Then comes the idea that Frank Corso is the cause. The ending is as precipitous a cliffhanger as I've ever seen. Very good!

2. Gordon Dickson's (posthumous) 10th volume in his Childe Cycle was completed by David Wixon. It's called Antagonist, and we are reunited with Bleys Ahrens in his monomanic plot against the Hal Mayne and the Final Encyclopaedia. It is about as good as it gets for this rather pedagogic part of the Cycle. I much preferred The Tactics of Mistake and the first few other books in the series.

3. David Gemmell's Fall of Kings was also completed posthumously, in collaboration with his wife, Stella. It is the final part of his Troy trilogy, and is as powerful as the first two, though less good-humoured. We finally see Troy fall, meet old friends, watch them die, and see what happens to Helikaon and the beginnings of a new legend. The writing is clear, forceful and expressive; the plot is full of action and character. What more could you wish for?

4. Meanwhile, Eric Shanower's Age of Bronze graphic novel series about the Trojan War continues with Part 3a, Betrayal. In this book, we find the feud between Agamemnon and Achilles come to the fore. Everyone does unhappy things to everyone else. It is a low, brutal look at an age of heroes, and it is wonderful to read it in conjunction with Gemmell's Trojan epic.

5. China Miéville's Un Lun Dun is another 'hidden London' novel. This one is good, but somehow less creepily inventive than the ones shown to us by Kim Newman, Christopher Fowler, and even Neil Gaiman (as in Neverwhere). I cannot recommend it to you except for its playful creativity; unfortunately, this palls after a while. And it doesn't compare so well to the next book on my list.

6. Stephen Hunt's The Court of the Air is a tour-de-force. It is at least at the same level as Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, minus the footnotes and obvious real-world parallels. It is possibly superior, dealing as it does with a post-apocalyptic world that is somehow stuck in a steampunk frame of mind which is rather 19th century in tone and appearance. It is too inventive to describe; mutants, magic, mayhem and marvels are but the least of it. And it is pacy and beautifully developed all the way to the end; five stars, at least. And two thumbs up. And I also think it is far better than Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy. Far better.

7. James Rollins's The Judas Strain is a bit far-fetched to me. Yet another biological plague novel, this. It is full of the usual Rollins action and deadly confusion, arcane factoids and cool gadgets – but it fails to grip in the face of the ever-strengthening competition from people like Paul McAuley these days. Fun, but not a whole lot more than usual.

8. Mr Wong Goes West is the latest installment in Nury Vittachi's very funny series about a Singaporean feng shui detective and his adventures. This one has the odd murder of a Greek is a semi-sealed-room mystery, the Queen of England, a huge aeroplane with nightclubs in it and a bunch of eco-terrorists on the loose. Madness.

And that's it for now!

Miscellany – April 2008

Hmm, it's been a very eventful month. Somewhere in all the fireworks, I found plenty of time to read.

1. Lincoln Child's Deep Storm is another one of his odd stand-alone thrillers. The last two, Utopia and Death Match were about an amusement park and a matchmaking service, respectively. This one is about... well, it begins on an oil rig. The plot quickly escalates, with a lot of tension as you try to figure out what genre this is and what the conclusion might possibly be. Excellent read.

2. I also gorged on G M Ford. The Seattle-based author is pretty prolific, but I'd not read his stuff prior to Event One. And then, I read Fury and got hooked. Ford's protagonist is journalist Frank Corso, who is really the epitome of curiosity of the cat-killing type. He writes about killers and other people, and often mixes the two. Black River followed, and then the chilling A Blind Eye. Red Tide smacked a bit of post-9/11 mass-destruction hysteria, but it was effective stuff. I finished with the fifth book in the Corso series, No Man's Land. That last one wasn't as good as its predecessors.

3. Jeff Lindsay's Dexter In The Dark is the third in the series featuring the police blood-spatter expert who is secretly a psychopath (and good at not being one). It begins to move into metaphysics of the F Paul Wilson type, which is not necessarily a good thing. But Lindsay's Dexter is a creepily likeable psychopath whose main aim in life is killing non-socialised psychopaths, so that's all good. I think.

4. I finally got hold of Harry Turtledove's In At The Death, the fourth and final book of his Settling Accounts sequence and the tenth (!!) book in the overall alternate-history series in which the US Civil War was never fully resolved. It is a good way to tie up loose ends. But his long long long narratives are painful to the mind.

5. Liz Williams's second installment in the story of humanity's bioengineered interstellar offspring is out. Bloodmind is a worthy sequel to Darkland. I realise that the overall tone here reminds me of that in Tepper's The True Game — there's an isolated bunch of post-human superhumans with deadly urges and a convoluted past.

6. Andrea Camilleri's The Paper Moon is a typically wry take on Sicilian police work and good food (although, I must say that the food takes an unusually low profile in this episode). It is the ninth book in the series, with every one a complete winner. Translator Stephen Sartarelli and his footnotes are clever and erudite, without taking anything away from the humour and humanity. Everyone should read Camilleri. He is that good.

That's it for now! I calculate my average reading input these days at about 350-400 pages a day, work and light reading combined. So I should be updating more.

Miscellany – March 2008

It's been a long February, and it will be a long March. Somewhere in between, some reading got done.

1. Michael White's The Fruits of War has interesting content. It's a sort of compendium of technologies that humans have picked up in the heat of the crucible of war. But he overdoes things, gets boring, and has a terrible ear for a phrase.

2. I went on to John Zakour's and Lawrence Ganem's The Radioactive Redhead and Zakour's first solo effort, The Frost-Haired Vixen. They made me decide that an over-reliance on supercomputing and pyschic powers as plot drivers is unhealthy. Zakour's latest is The Blue-Haired Bombshell. I'm not sure if it will be worth reading.

3. John Scalzi's Old Man's War however was an excellent read. Analogies have been drawn between it and Heinlein's Starship Troopers, as well as Haldeman's The Forever War. But Scalzi's Earthmen-at-war-against-inscrutable-aliens effort builds unashamedly on such classic antecedents and does reasonably well. It is not as deep as Alastair Reynolds or Iain Banks, in terms of space opera, but it's good, and so is the sequel, The Ghost Brigades. Actually, I think the latter is better. There's one more to go in this trilogy.

4. I liked Dean Koontz's Odd Thomas enough to splurge on Forever Odd and Brother Odd. They were worthy sequels about the unreliable ghost-seeing narrator. However, the nature of evil receives a different treatment each time: Forever Odd explores the nature of Thomas's gift and its limits; Brother Odd handles the grey area between the unnatural and supernatural. I must admit Koontz's narrative pacing is superb, and I would buy another in the series.

5. The Highwaymen is a trade collection of the DC Wildstorm series by Bernardin, Freeman & Garbett. I seldom add graphic novels to this list, but it's an excellent example of retro action-adventure storytelling; the two protagonists, 'Mr McQueen' and 'Able Monroe' remind one slightly of Ian Fleming's 'James Bond' and 'Felix Leiter' respectively. They are ageing heroes in a future world who find themselves executing one last mission for their late boss, a certain President William Jefferson Clinton. Superpowers do appear, as they tend to in such excursions, but our unpowered heroes win through.

6. Kim Newman's Bad Dreams is an old book; it was his first novel, I think. Yet another London noir horror effort, it is about as creative as early Christopher Fowler or Neil Gaiman, but a lot nastier in spots. He's improved a lot, so this one's not a good starting point if you want to read Newman. I would recommend Anno Dracula, personally.

Well, that's it for now. I'll be too busy to write for a while, or even read, more's the pity.

Miscellany – February 2008

February, unexpectedly, allowed for some reading even as things began to fall in chaotic showers from the sky.

1. John Zakour and Lawrence Ganem's The Plutonium Blonde and The Doomsday Brunette are the first two in (so far) five novels starring the last private eye on Earth, Zachary Nixon Johnson. Hardboiled homages to Chandler and the like, with a whiff of Larry Niven, these are excellent semi-comic reads with good puzzle plots. The hero isn't very hardboiled, but the cheesecake is an amusing send-up. Two thumbs up!

2. Kim Newman's The Secret Files of the Diogenes Club reprises the oddball virtuosity of his previous The Man from the Diogenes Club. The eponymous club is, of course, the place where Mycroft Holmes was occasionally the British Government. Weird tales and zany, horrific ones and amusing ones can all be found here. Newman makes use of many of his own characters and characters you might find in Alan Moore's Albion and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Sort of. This book is hard to find, and good to keep.

3. Dean Koontz's Odd Thomas boasts a superbly unreliable narrator who is mostly reliable. His is a supernatural existence, made odd by the fact of his own existence and his own terrifying sanity. He sees things. He can guess at the future. And he can see the horror about to descend – but not all of it. Excellent reading if you want Stephen King style horror with a bit more brain and a lot fewer pages.

4. David Baldacci's Simple Genius is a tightly-woven thriller about cryptography and secrets which lots of people with guns will work hard to obtain. There are some deaths. What's good is the psychological background and plot; what's bad is the horrendous overuse of jokey names.

That's it for mid-February!

Miscellany – January 2008

Yes, January, that two-faced month, has come to an end. And not a moment too soon. I am exhausted from my participation in the Red Queen's Race, and my reading has suffered a lot. Yet, there have been moments...

1. Hal Duncan's Ink is the second installment of his tour de force, The Book of All Hours. Overpowering the typical Tim Powers epic and certainly more ambitious than many who have gone down this path, its scope is nothing less than the whole of Creation – and that includes all realities that have ever existed. More mythology than you can (and would dare to) shake a stick at. Not recommended for the faint of heart.

2. Tim Powers, yes. His Three Days To Never reads like some physicist's amalgamation of Declare and his various Californian novels thrown together with the time-travel theme from The Anubis Gates. Although it is typical Tim Powers, it is a far cry from the innovative anarchy and raw terror of The Stress of Her Regard or On Stranger Tides. On the whole, I prefer the older books.

3. Neal Stephenson's The Big U was his first novel. Its contents would be oddly evocative of long-buried memories for people who have passed through peculiar institutions of an educational nature. But weirder. And more peculiar. And excessively so.

4. Clive Cussler's The Treasure of Khan is his usual action-packed world-class thriller, making use as usual of some obscure corner of pseudohistory. But this one has global terrorism and globalism in it! And even global warming! Fun.

5. John Ringo... urrrk. All right, I read three of his books. I am still puking.

And that's it for the month of January. Obviously, it wasn't a very good month.

Miscellany – December 2007 Bonus Issue

Yes, there were other books consumed in the dying days of December!

1. Diana Wynne Jones's The Pinhoe Egg is another Chrestomanci tale. This one combines elements of The Homeward Bounders and Hexwood as far as geometry is concerned. It's the interesting tale of the people who live around Chrestomanci Castle, and how they have been surviving their closeness with the arbiter of magic. Of course, Cat Chant is involved, as are the other castle denizens. I think it's better than Harry Potter any day.

2. Joe Haldeman's A Separate War & Other Stories is one more collection by this most excellent of SF writers. Haldeman has always scored big with me, with short and very powerful novels such as The Forever War, Mindbridge and All My Sins Remembered. The first one is officially a classic; his first novel and one which has won all the available awards. The third one speaks to me most of all; how one serves a faceless hierarchy until one is a useless and worn down tool, even though the best of its kind.

3. James Ward's Dragonfrigate Wizard Halcyon Blithe is what you get when you mix dragons, magic, Napoleonic-era naval warfare and C S Forester together, and let a game designer write it up. It's fun to read, and not as heavy on the political subtext as Naomi Norvik's Temeraire series.

4. Ng Pak Tee and Jason Tan have edited a compendium of views on Singapore's Education System from 1997 to 2007. It's called Thinking Schools, Learning Nation: Contemporary Issues & Challenges. It's pretty eye-opening as author after author dissects the system for inconsistencies and accuracies, failures and successes, hype and under-hype. It's published by Pearson and supposed to be available from 1 Jan 2008. I got an advance copy. Of particular interest are the chapters about new school and curriculum types, sex education, and the desperate lives of teachers.

And that's it for 2007! See you again sometime in mid-January.

Miscellany – December 2007

And we close the year with a bunch of delightful (and not-so-delightful) winter reads...

1. Steven Brust's Dzur is finally out in paperback. It explores the interesting psyche of the Dzur warriorlords, and how our protagonist Vlad learns that the Jhereg can also learn from people whose idea of fun is tremendous odds against and very slim chances of survival. Good, but somehow more meditative in its violence than some of the others in this series.

2. Sarah Monette's The Bone Key is a wonderful homage to M R James and other creepy Victorian ghost-story writers. This is a collection of linked tales about a museum curator and the terrifying phenomena he encounters. Monette's stories, however, serve to develop the character of the protagonist – unlike the two-dimensional agents we find in other such tales. It was also pretty chilling: I had two nights of twitchiness from this book.

3. Mike Carey, author of the Vertigo series Lucifer and (for quite some time) JC:H, has recently delivered three books in an ongoing series. The occult-detective trope comes to life this time in the form of Felix Castor, exorcist and reluctant investigator of other events. The Devil You Know, Vicious Circle, and Dead Men's Boots are excellent examples of noir detection, managing to strike that elusive balance point in which the magicking is essential but does not destroy the sanctity of the plot by copious use of dei ex machina. If you like JC:H as a character, you'll find him being channelled here...

4. Steve Berry is at the Dan Brown thriller counter again, this time with The Alexandria Link. Berry is productive with the religion-related 'secrets man was not meant to know' thrillers. This is another. There isn't much to say else, except that it isn't a bad book. Sad.

5. Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill's The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: The Black Dossier suffers from Moore's occasional need for scurrility. The plot is thin, the story ribald (and disjointed because of it), and the whole production is full of running gags and in-jokes. Where LoEG volumes 1 and 2 were excellent stories in their own right, TBD requires too much back-story and cross-referencing to make its point. It's a pity; I was looking forward to this one.

6. Charles Moore's The Jennifer Morgue is out in paperback. It's the sequel to The Atrocity Archives, a spy thriller with horrific but humorous twists. In this installment, the secret agents of the Laundry go out into a post-Britannic, post-modern world to battle the horrors of another plane. The interesting thing about this one is the nature of the meta-plot. At what point do you realise which plot this is? A good read, if you like crafty eccentric thrillers. Oh yes, compare Ramona in this one to Juliet in Carey's books.

7. Eric Flint's 1634: The Ram Rebellion is indigestible. The book is too hard to swallow, and for once, it is hard to summon up enough enthusiasm to read through the 700 pages of how a male sheep becomes the symbol of an unlikely un-rebellion. Sort of. The others in the series are better.

And that's it so far! My current 'unread' stack is 23 books high. Sigh. I shall attempt to plough through as much of it as possible in order to meet the deadline for January. Till then, enjoy your holidays!