My Weekly Book

Total books read: 53, as listed in full in this post. Now all I need to do is to blog about half of them…

OK, looking at the blog I discover that the last book review was posted in September – number 29 of 52 in fact. With about six weeks of 2011 left, how is the challenge looking?

Now, this ought to have been right up my street. London, railways and Victoriana, by Jove. Must have a touch of the old Steampunk about it, you would have thought. In fact, jolly close to the kind of stuff I find myself writing in my spare time. (And churning out at great length come November and December, but that’s another story. Literally.) But not a bit of it.

This was an entirely practical read – and one I wish was mandatory for anyone who has ever said: “What are the odds of that happening?” before expounding at great length on how 9/11, the moon landings, aircraft contrails and flouride in the water supply are all massive government conspiracies.

Recently I undertook the reckless act of making a trip to a different library branch to the one I normally frequent – and there, quietly perusing the crime shelves, I had quite a serious shock, I can tell you. Time was when the publication of the latest in Alexander McCall Smith’s gentle series about Botswana’s only lady detective used to send me fleeing into Waterstones in quest of its brightly-coloured jacket. Now, I was a bit chastened to discover, no less than four had been published that I had neglected to read.

When you hear the term ‘science fiction’, what do you think about? Is it Golden Age stuff from the 50s set in a shiny spaceport somewhere in an imaginary solar system? Do you see the shadow of huge, city-sized spacecraft crossing the sky?

My guilty pleasure this summer seems to be reading obese historical thrillers and crime novels – a genre pairing that seems to get me every time. CJ Sansom, of course, falls into this category, regularly coming in at more than 400 pages in huge editions, and I’ve recently discovered that Phil Rickman, sometime purveyor of supernatural horror, has been at it as well with books such as Bones of Avalon.

I keep reading how the book is dead, and the ebook now reigning triumphant, which amuses me somewhat. According to this school of thought, I am no longer reading newspapers either (even though I do quite often – and do the crossword, which is a major motivator for buying them). Obviously I am typing this on a smartphone with my thumbs, because the desktop PC is dead, and therefore mine has already gone in the bin.

You really would have thought, wouldn’t you, that after having been tricked so neatly by Archbishop Cranmer into risking life and limb in the service of a king who despises him, Matthew Shardlake would have had the good sense to stick to his resolution made at the end of Sovereign never to get involved with court politics again.

So, the unthinkable has happened. After 13 years of Labour government the British public found its recollection of exactly how dreadful it was to actually live in a Conservative-run country sufficiently muted to vote the buggers back in – sort of, anyway.

It’s sometimes easy to forget just how long the Springwatch phenomenon has been going – and how many different incarnations (and presenters, for that matter) it has been through. To celebrate the launch of the latest series, always essential viewing in this household, I thought I’d take a look at this book published after the 2006 series had been broadcast.

I came relatively late to the Wallander phenomenon, but can date my engagement with it to the day. It was Saturday April 3, 2010, as the second episode of the second series of the Swedish TV series was being broadcast on BBC 4.

I’ve paid fulsome tribute in this blog before to the graphic novel purchasing policy of my local library – and here it is justified once again.

This book is one of the definitive accounts of a troubled period in English history – a closely-interconnected series of northern rebellions starting in 1536 with the potential to topple the throne of Henry VIII. This event, coming as it did so soon after the Wars of the Roses, and at a period when some of the most significant shifts in English history were taking place, would doubtless have changed the destiny of the country significantly.

It can be odd to read a work like this one, that defines a set of literary conventions which are now so commonplace as to be completely unremarkable. It’s necessary to work quite hard to get yourself in a mindset where you can properly appreciate its originality.

Daphne du Maurier is one of my favourite writers. Rather than the narrowly-defined purveyor of romantic fiction that she was once perceived as, she is now recognised as an incredibly versatile and imaginative author who could tackle any genre she turned her hand to – from historical novels and psychological thrillers to science fiction and, yes, even the occasional romance.

The Men Who Stare At Goats is a book that starts out exactly as you would expect any work by Jon Ronson to do. It is filled with seemingly random coincidences and awkward encounters with individuals that we shall politely call ‘complex personalities’. Conversations spiral off in unexpected and frankly surreal directions and Ronson finds himself encountering the unexpected at every turn.

Ah, PG Wodehouse. It’s all about the ear, you understand.

This is speculative fiction of the very finest sort – an extremely well-informed ‘what if’ written by one of the most respected astronomers and scientific communicators of his generation, a man that can also be credited with making the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence (SETI) a credible possiblity, as well as inspiring almost single-handed the current movement towards scepticism and critical thinking.

Volume three in CJ Sansom’s Matthew Shardlake series is a huge, dense, labyrinthine doorstop of a mystery that meticulously traces its hero’s hesitant path through the social, political and emotional mire posed by mid-sixteenth century York and its rebellious, angry and impoverished citizenry.