My Weekly Book

What I’m hoping to read in July.

This is at least my fourth encounter with the Journey to the West story – and the chances are that you’ve encountered it too, although not necessarily going by that title.

We seem to have been reading Julian May for ever. This is partly because her Saga of the Exiles and Galactic Milieu series run to quite a number of books and partly because each of those books is long in its own right. Also, the world she has created in their pages is on an operatic scale and mightily absorbing.

What is this book? A business textbook? A self-help guide? A social manifesto? In fact it is all three, in that order, and arguably decreasing in effectiveness as it moves for one to the other.

The premise of this book is both simple and seductive. What would be the fate of the planet if humanity simply ceased to exist?

It’s the halfway point in the year and time to pick up the reins. The plan: half of 52 books in the second half of 2010. A book a week for the second half of the year.

A year or so ago, I read and greatly enjoyed The Saga of the Exiles, on the recommendation of someone who had first come across them in childhood. Much more recently I became interested in Jungian psychology as one of the very few areas where science meets mysticism on terms that are not complete and utter nonsense. And there are striking parallels between the two.

In the spirit of looking forwards not backwards, and in ensuring this blog is ready and raring to go for 2009′s weekly book challenge, here are six-word reviews of the entire 2008 reading list.

Here are a couple of excellent articles from the New York Times books section for anyone who fancies a bit of feminist inspiration. The first reviews a book by Lisa Appignanesi about the historical collision between women and the mental health establishment. Plus, Germaine Greer on Shakespeare’s wife and The Telegraph on cult books.

We’ve started this series (once again being read out loud) in an attempt to fill the hole in our reading lives opened up by the completion in March of the entire sweep of Modesty Blaise novels. Feeling daunted by the sheer scale of Patrick O’Brien’s Aubrey/Maturin saga, and yet wanting something with a bit of staying power, this eight (or sometimes nine) volume science fiction epic seemed like an excellent choice – and so it has proved.

This is the most recent volume in the Titan reprint series to fall into my hot little hands and, in common with its predecessors, it contains three full stories – The Puppet-Master of the title, With Love from Rufus and The Bluebeard Affair. It’s fair to say that this is one of the lighter-hearted collections.

I’d been looking forward to this as something of a treat. Having finally filled in the holes in my Austen reading by completing Sense and Sensibility, Emma and the fragments Sanditon and The Watsons over the course of the last few months I had been promising myself a crack at this very well-received biography, published in 1997, next.

More kudos for whoever stocks the graphic novel shelf in my local library – I hereby send you another “ook” of cyber-approval. Knowing about the Alan Moore connection, and having read The Sandman: Preludes and Nocturnes, I just had to give this one a try and ended up thoroughly satisfied that I had.

Here’s an opinion piece from The Telegraph on the JK Rowling vs Steve Vander Ark copyright case that I found reasonably sane and intelligent. It neatly sums up how easily the most worrying thing for me and a lot of other people are the implications that a judgement in Rowling’s favour would have for the wider world of publishing and the intellectual arena.

A bittersweet moment, this. After an intense spell of working through the entire series of Modesty Blaise novels that started at the end of last year, with the help of a devoted fan who was kind enough to read the whole lot out loud,this signifies the end.

Spotted in The Telegraph today – another attempt to come up with a definitive list of the 100 (plus ten this time, couldn’t they bring it in at a round figure?) books you should be displaying smugly to visitors, or shouldn’t reach retirement age without reading, or whatever it is this time around.

Often the introductions to these Titan reprints of complete stories from the long-running Modesty Blaise cartoon strip are among the most interesting bits of the book. That is because the author, Peter O’Donnell generally writes a bit about how he came to dream up the story, about his relationship with artists or publishers or a little about the craft of creating a comic strip.

This is an important volume in Titan’s Modesty Blaise series, and for a sad reason. Almost exactly half-way through artist Jim Holdaway, who had been responsible for originally creating the visuals for Modesty and Willie as we know them, died suddenly. The introduction to this volume contains a tribute to him from Peter O’Donnell and an explanation of how his replacement, the Catalan artist Enrique Badia Romero, came to take over.

As a fan of thrillers, I like a John Grisham novel as much as the next thrill-seeking escapist. Thus I was interested to see the review of the latest on in the New York Times.

This, the penultimate book in the Modesty Blaise series, is most notable for the really striking change of tone that sets it apart from the other volumes – and, purists may say, not always to the good.