Be Excellent To Each Other

A few of the later ones are in order, too, specifically 61 Hours, Worth Dying For, A Wanted Man, and Never Go Back. Make Me has a cliffhanger into Midnight Line, and Running Blind (aka The Visitor, book 4) needs to be read after Tripwire (book 3) as there's a spoiler in Running Blind.

13) Babylon’s Ashes (Expanse 6) by James SA Corey - still excellent sci-fi
14) Eject, Eject by John Nichol - a history of ejection seats in aviation. Very interesting stuff
15) Missile Commander by Tony Temple. Story of the creation of Missile Command and his world record scores. A fascinating look at the early years of the industry that would be interesting for anyone whether you are a gamer or not.

I’ve just bought Julia which tells the same story from her point of view. I’m intrigued to see what it adds.

https://www.waterstones.com/book/julia/ ... 1783789160

I don't read but since I've been on holiday.... I've finished a book!

'How not to be a boy' by Robert Webb.

It was great. Loved it!

14.) Drunkard's Walk - Frederick Pohl
A profoundly strange book that, frankly, goes all over the place. An otherwise sensible mathematics professor has sudden, intense, suicidal impulses. Is there a baffling reason for this? Yes, there really is!

The Red Scholar's Wake by Aliette de Bodard

Lady gets kidnapped by pirates and married the leader of a faction in this romantic space pirate thriller.

It was OK

I snagged a book from a charity shop purely because it was called "Vampirates" and there's no possible way that could be bad.

But it was.

I just read the first one in the Smiley series. Was nice enough.

The first one is pretty weak, they get much better.

Philip Pullman - The Secret Commonwealth, Book of Dust 2. I was looking forward to finishing the further adventures of Lyra Silvertongue/Belacqua. Somewhere around page 600 I realised I wasn't going to. Apparently the next is imminentish.

Antti Tuomainen - The Rabbit Factor. Translated from Finnish, pretty successfully. A thriller with its tongue firmly in cheek.

M.R. Carey - The Book of Koli. Book one of a trilogy, and I have the last two, hooray! Post-apocalyptic life in a village and beyond, inhabitants trying to understand and use remaining bits of technology, and living like with bits of lore.

Cheryl Strayed - Wild. Also a film. Had this for ages - she walks the Pacific Crest trail, underprepared and doing so to escape life and herself. She reads as she goes and burns the pages to lighten the load. Great travelogue.

Blaine Harden - Escape from Camp 14. Produced after interviews with Shin Donghyuk, who was born and raised in the camp and knew nothing else for years. It's a huge work camp, spread over miles and miles, in an inhospitable part of North Korea (but then, that's most of the place, for various different reasons). The way they treat people, and lack of food, means many North Koreans are physically and/or mentally underdeveloped, which may contribute to the bitty nature of the book. But reality resists a neat story. It's a great, short, enlightening read.

15.) Trigger Warnings - Neil Gaiman
Despite having read a few of his books, its taken me his long to realise I don't particularly care for Neil Gaiman. This is a collection of short stories I didn't particularly care for.

16.) The Big Sleep - Raymond Chandler
PI Phillip Marlowe accepts a seemingly simple job to deal with a blackmailer, and get sucked into a much more complicated ( and, frankly, somewhat holey ) plot. Scotch is drunk. Dames be dames. Cars are tailed, guns are waved about, people are slugged on the jaw and complicated things happen with gamblers, bootleggers, pornographers and grifters. It's all very fab.

Isn't he a baddie now, anyway?

His take on Norse Mythology was a great read

He’s not what you’d call one of the good ones if the allegations against him are true, and he seem to be hoping they just go away if he doesn’t engage.

It’s really good. It feels very faithful to the tone of the original, covers things that are going on away from Winston Smith, and continues the story past the end of what we know. Well worth a read.

Ben Judah - This is London. A series of essays, loosely interconnected, looking at London from a variety of perspectives, meeting immigrants and the rich. Absolutely fascinating, and eye-opening.

John le Carré - Silverview. A man sets up a bookshop and is befriended by an older local. The latter is a bit mysterious, and eventually revealed to be a man of many parts. This is Le Carré's last book, only 200 pages or so, and maybe finished in a bit of a rush - it feels less fleshed out, and less satisfying than others.

John le Carré - The Mission House. First person retelling from a multi-national, multi-lingual protagonist who finds himself with more information than he knows what to do with. Hard to pull off first person, but this pretty much succeeds.

Ann Patchett - Tom Lake. A mother tells her daughters about her early love life, while her husband floats in and out of the story until becoming more important. The way she writes makes it look so simple that I believed I could do it, though the fact that one of the early sentences made me tear up because it was so beautiful suggests she actually writes and overwrites until it's perfect. Brilliant, along with everything else she's ever written.

Bernard Cornwell - Sharpe's Command. From the 2020s, a little bit on auto-pilot - like Rowlling in the later Potter books, he's probably too big to be edited now, but that leads to some very obvious repetition. The artillery man who has been peripheral finally gets the chance to blow things up towards the end, and invokes Barbara (Patron Saint of artilley) every sentence. And then again in the next sentence (Barbara's the Patron Saint of artillery, you know). But still, rollicking and all that.

Adrian Tchaikovsky - City of Last Chances. Dumps you right into the action, jumps from perspective to perspective with brief introductions to each one, but succeeds in building a word of an oppressed population, some magic, mysterious woods, post-apocalypic feel and more. First of a trilogy.

Ben Macintyre - SAS Rogue Heroes. The book that launched the TV series. Just as good as that, a good way to revisit the characters. And then more, because the TV series so far has only covered the early years. It all seemed much more bitty as they get out of the desert - once it's established that the SAS aren't going to be disbanded, which we all know, then they attempt to fight all over the place, sometimes more successfully than others. Great account of an awful lot of material, turning it into something readable and consistent.

16. Emperor of Rome: Ruling the Ancient Roman World by Mary Beard
The prof tries to create a job description for running the western world. You can't but hear her voice as you read, but ultimately I feel her attempt to understand the "Emperor" as a job falls back too much on the anecdotes she said she was trying to avoid.

17. Mort by Terry Pratchett
I'm sure I read this as a teenager but had no recollection of it. Other than a rushed finish, this tale of Death's apprentice remains a classic.

18. Christopher and His Kind by Christopher Isherwood
The author has lots of rough sex.

19. Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein

Naomi Klein is not Naomi Wolf. Klein uses the confusion to look at why certain people previously on the left have gone hardcore alt-right.
It's an interesting story, especially when Klein reflects on the impact of her previous works, but a bit disjointed as she leaps from topic to topic.

17.) Billion Dollar Brain - Len Deighton
Snappy little spy novel that, somehow, took me 6 weeks to read. Spies spy on our spies while they're spying on their spies. Cynical back-room deals and shady border crossings and a wealthly lunatic trying to take down communism. Very spy-y, quite funny in places, the sort of book you'd be happy to have if you were stuck in an airport.

I've just read all 5 of the light bringer books back to back. Really enjoyed them, nothing super out there, but the characters were varied enough to be interesting and it's one of those that just jumps between the characters to tell the story, so you don't have time to get bored with any of them. A good fantasy romp.

Although, I've no idea what number that is for the year!

The Light Bringer?!

I confess to that being at least a partial reason for looking at them initially

20. Heaven and Hell: A History of the Afterlife by Bart D Ehrman

An overview of the development of ideas about death from early Hebrew thought, through the Greeks and Romans, to early Christianity.
It's very high-level and each chapter left me feeling that a lot was being left out, and I found the author's smugness about his answers to theological disputes irritating. I finished it unsure who it was aimed at as it felt a bit dry for the general reader but a bit simplistic for those with some existing knowledge or interest in the history of beliefs.

21. The Great Indoors: At Home in the Modern British House by Ben Highmore

Room-by-room look at how domestic life changed over the 20th century. Short enough to maintain interest but I think Bill Bryson did it better.
I never realised how recently the duvet became popular over here, nor how it was distrusted as a "continental quilt" by some.

22. Ghosts of the British Museum: A True Story of Colonial Loot and Restless Objects by Noah Angell

Ostensibly a tour of the British Museum with accounts of hauntings in various locations, it's more a reflective essay on the legacies of colonialism, the dubious way most of the collection was gathered, and whether the museum is itself a relic of the past.

Reading on a dark November night, one or two of the encounters described gave me the chills, especially the one in the King's Library late at night. I was less impressed with some of the mediums the author shows round the museum, thinking that I probably could have cobbled together a story about a spirit based on general awareness of a particular period provided I was convincing enough.

23. Failed State by Sam Freedman

Another of these "the UK is governed terribly" books I keep on picking up in the library or when the price of the Ebook drops to under a quid. Nothing wrong with his arguments and I'm always grateful for new case studies to add to my file, but you could probably save yourself some money by asking me the right question after I've had a couple of pints.

I did like his observation that journalists and others heavily into politics fall back on the same lazy comparisons (eg Thatcher; "Winter of Discontent"; "donkey jacket") which not only comes across to the less-engaged as a series of in-jokes and akin to hearing fans discussing their favourite B-sides, but stifles our understanding of the present.

18.) Falling Free - Lois McMaster Bujold
Lois McMaster Bujold has written about 100 books and won a whole bunch of Hugo and Nebula awards, yet I had never heard of her. Somewhat bonkers scifi where a bunch of experimental humans, genetically engineered to function better in zero-g, break free of the megacorp that owns them. Starts off slow, got properly good towards the end, in a laser-beams-and-hyperdrives sort of way.

/perks up

It has been a long time since I've updated, and I'd hate for you to think I'm not going to make it. Or for my silence to artificially create tension. So after a week off where I read a book a day, here are a few:

Christian Wolmar - British Rail: A New History. Fascinating history of British Rail which successfully makes the case that it didn't deserve its reputation (particularly not the sandwiches - he makes this point several times, and BR pioneered the cling-film wrapped sandwich) and was accelerating towards a bright future when privatised. Ironically the progress made towards that acceleration, and the strength of the best of the management, made privatisation easier (though still not successful, right?). Timely and excellent.

Adrian Tchaikovsky - House of Open Wounds. Book 2 follows on from City of Last Chances, above. Excellent but nearly not - at some point about a third of the way through, I mean, I noticed that Tchaikovsky had, I mean, noticed that people now often, I mean, say they mean something. It's a great lesson in how written conversation should seem realistic, but not too much so - this ends up being just like people talk, and it's (I mean) incredibly intrusive when (I mean) almost every character uses the phrase as they talk. Fortunately it either stops or I gritted my teeth and got through it, and the actual plot and action winds up in a very satisfying way. First book - rebellion. Second book - misfits with special powers are formed into a mobile hospital.

Mark Greaney - Dead Eye. Of the two series, Hurwitz's Orphan X, and these Gray Man books, these are the weaker. Greaney is great at action, but so badly wants to write for screen (successfully, given there's a film) that his desire to write the action takes over. Far too much "A thing happened. THIS was..." "He spun and caught it. THIS...". Lazy, poor writing. But the action is compelling.

Christopher Brookmyre - The Cliff House. I used to love Brookmyre's Scottish thrillers - Die Hard, but Scottish, that sort of thing. I'd forgotten his character-scene-setting is a bit over the top and unconvincing, but it's probably necessary for a labyrinthine plot in which I guessed a few things but not most. A group of women are brought together, all with axes to grind, for a hen do. And they're on a remote island, so once communication is cut and there's a death, they can surely be controlled by whoever is trying to get someone to confess their secrets. First 5th, meh. Last 4/5, excellent thriller with compelling twists and turns.

Rich Hall - Nailing It. Sat in the front row of one of his shows and got rinsed, so had to buy his book. It's an excellent, well-written account of his career in comedy, but not blow-by-blow, a series of well chosen anecdotes that give a great view of the man. And if this prompts you to think, hey, Rich Hall! then there's loads of stuff on YouTube (much of which I looked up to have an idea of his different performances).

Linwood Barclay - I Will Ruin You. Another great thriller. Barclay specialises in ordinary people dumped into situations, such that there's no semi-superpower "oh, they'll be able to handle that" feeling. A teacher does good stuff at school, gets noticed and that leads to more trouble. Great.

24. Under the Eagle by Simon Scarrow
A new recruit to the Roman Army gets ready to invade Britain.

I found the characters mostly flat and drawn from stock, the twists unsurprising, and a smell of testostorne-fueled early-noughties "lads! lads! lads!" pervading, with the additional touch of the author enjoying describing spurty deaths maybe a little too much, but it was easy, addictive, and I'll probably read more.

5. The last Devil to Die - Richard Osman.

Book four in the Thursday murder club series. We return to our fav OAP A team, where they solve romance fraud and heroin smuggling and of course a few murders.

I really enjoy these books, not your usual crime dramas.

19.) Three Bedrooms in Manhatten - Georges Simenon
A lonely pair meet, walk, drink, smoke cigarettes, make love and talk a lot. There is ennui and staring out of windows.

6. The Crypt: Shakedown - Scott Sigler.

Yeah, not long at all, it turns out.

25. Ringmaster: Vince McMahon and the Unmaking of America by Abraham Josephine Riesman
Biography of the wrestling supremo. The book is a mixture of disgust at his behaviour and tacit admiration, with more sudden tonal shifts than the average episode of the One Show. Despite these flaws, it's an addictive and compelling read, especially for someone not into that world.

Let's close this year.

46. Agatha Christie - Autumn Chills. Short stories including some Poirot and some Miss Marple. Lovely.

47. Satoshi Yagisawa - More Days at the Morisaki Bookshop. A follow-up, with more gentle wandering through the life of a young lady and her uncle who owns a bookshop. A serious ending that made me cry a bit, but it's a hug of a book.

48. Clare Chambers - Small Pleasures. Set in the 50s, but not tiresomely 'period', follows a reporter investigating a more-credible-than-expected virgin birth. Some mild peril, but mostly about the rhythm of life and how small things and straightforward kindness can mean a lot.

49. Stuart Macbride - The Dead of Winter. He writes solid, gritty thrillers with a sense of humour, and this is no exception.

50. Nancy Mitford - Christmas Pudding. Posh people from a byegone age have some ructions around Christmas.

51. Antti Tuomainen - The Moose Paradox. Comedy thriller, the second in a series, following an actuary who is somewhere on the spectrum and sees things very logically. He inherited his brother's amusement park in the first, and had just about sorted out its finances and then this book happens. The author is praised for being funny, which I found a bit hit and miss - miss in the first book, but hit in this one.

52. Antti Tuomainen - The Beaver Theory. I sometimes get a bit lost in a series, so I went straight to the end. Not as funny as the previous, but more shenanigans, presented in straightlaced fashion by the actuary, and ties things up nicely.

Good work JBR for making 52! And well done everyone else for not quite making 52!