Reading Roundup - December 2018

Okay; it's the end of the year (technically, the beginning of the next,) so let's round up the last few books of the year.

Kind of following on from last month's read of the novelisation of Assassin's Creed: Odyssey, this year I tackled The True History of the Strange Brigade, a prequel tie-in to the computer game Strange Brigade, taking the form of an anthology of origin stories for the characters in the game (including, I believe, a number of DLC characters.) Given that the game itself is a somewhat whimsical parody of 1930s, colonial-nostalgic adventure serials, the book hits a pretty left-field note from the get-go with a tale of a working class Northern lass who finds that her well-paid seamstressing position involves stitching the flayed skin of the bourgeoisie into people-suits for demons.

The True History of the Strange Brigade is honestly a pretty surprising work/collection of works, and part of that is down to the choice of authors, including women and people of colour, and the decision to jettison the pro-colonial trappings of the source material in favour of infernally-inflamed class conflict, strong women, anti-establishment themes and overt criticism of two-fisted patriotism. Now, this gives the book an immediate leg-up because I didn't expect much of it, and the writing significantly exceeds the null standard I set for it. I think it's actually pretty good - although it can be hard to tell in such circumstances, I'd certainly rate the quality of writing above that of Odyssey - and it certainly isn't the super-questionable mess of outmoded tropes I was fearing.

This one actually wasn't an audiobook; I read it on my Kindle app instead.

While it took me a month to get to it, November is the traditional time for Ben Aaronovich to release a new Rivers of London novel, and as he hasn't yet reached them point where side projects and fandom commitments have started throwing out his schedule, boom! here's Lies Sleeping. In a break from the usual pattern of these novels, in which the case of the year interacts with the ongoing hunt for arc antagonists the Faceless Man and Leslie May, by focusing entirely on the ongoing hunt for arc antagonists the Faceless Man and Leslie May (and, admittedly, on a case of the year in which said arc antagonists try to pull down some heavy-duty magical shenanigans.)

The Met's unified taskforce dedicated to tracking down the Faceless Man is making slow, but steady progress, including but not limited to an in depth bit of forensic accounting, muscling over-privileged wannabe sorcerers, and staring at bells. Notably, the existence of this unified taskforce means that now-Detective Constable Peter Grant is no longer the only sub-Nightingale asset in the Falcon arsenal, although he is the only other working magician, with his cousin Abigail still underage and leaning into the urban-shamanic thing, and now-DS Guleed on her way to becoming a legendary swordswoman. On the other hand, it's Peter who has the relationship or relationships with the Rivers, and thus with London itself, and the personal involvement with Leslie, so this is still his story (at least to hear him tell it.) He is also the one who gets captured.

Lies Sleeping is another strong entry in the series, and - I think - wisely brings what can be considered the first arc to a halt. Will this be the only arc? Probably not. I hope not (and, you know, The October Man: A Rivers of London Novella is already slated for next June, so that's promising,) but I'm looking forward to a change of focus in the next few.

Thanks to Christmas, I followed up Lies Sleeping with Black Mould and Detective Stories, another two of the Rivers of London graphic novels.

Black Mould finds the Folly and its friends tracking infestations of apparently sentient, magic-eating black mould linked to a cut-throat property developer. Sahra Guleed has a sigificant role here, which makes me happy, in part because PoC representation is not merely admirable, but kind of necessary in a realistic depiction of London, but also because Leslie May's heel turn is potentially problematic if she's the only major female character... which she isn't. Yay!

Detective Stories breaks it down even further than usual, with four single-issue stories strung together by the framing narrative of the interview portion of Peter's examination to make the grade of Detective Constable. Aside from anything else, Detective Stories makes explicit the increasing exposure of the Folly, with magical cases included in performance reviews instead of simply being written off as the 'weird bollocks'. As a result, it's an entertaining curiosity, rather than a major entry in the canon, although it does provide an example of Peter and Leslie's pre-magic careers.

And finally, you may recall that the first book book - by which I mean audiobook, rather than comic - that I reviewed this year was Stephen Fry's Mythos, a retelling of the Greek Theogony. Perhaps it is apt then that I finish 2018 with Heroes, in which my fellow Queens' alumnus moves on to the heroic age and the culture heroes of ancient Greece - Perseus and Heracles, Jason and Atalanta, Theseus and Bellerophon - who forged the great states of antiquity and paved the way between the age of gods and the abject clusterfuck of the Trojan War (to be the subject of a third and final book, presumably aiming for next Christmas.)

Once again, Fry mixes heroic narrative with modern vernacular, the thematic resonances of the sitcom and the teen drama, and in audio format with his own cosily reassuring delivery. The result of this strange alchemy is another accessible set of tales which almost seem to invite discussion with the author/storyteller and make me yearn for the time when technology allows each listener to have their own virtual Fry to talk to.

Reading Roundup - January and February 2018

New Horizons Challenge: TheHandmaid's Tale

In January, I treated myself to the 4^th and 5^th volumes of Giant Days, John Allison's comic following the adventures of Scary-Go-Round alumna Esther de Groot and her friends at the University of Sheffield (as I'm sure I've explained before.) 

Volumes 4 and 5 follow the trio of Esther, Susan Ptolemy and Daisy Wooton through the final term of their freshman year, the summer vacation and the beginning of their second year. Independent film-making provides a distraction from the horrors of money troubles and house-hunting, and a new shadow falls over the group as shady entrepreneur Dean Thompson appears on the scene. The summer brings the excitement of the Wye Valley music festival, and then the new year the group's first shared housing. As ever, Giant Days combines its lively sense of the absurd with a touch of the mundane to produce a fast-paced, madcap bundle of fun. Well worth the reading. 

These volumes also feature a return to the nexus of weird that is Tackleford, and are notable for their treatment of supporting character Ed Gemmell. Previously Esther's nice-guy semi-stalker, Allison takes the unusual and refreshing step of having the character recognise that pining over a girl won't make something happen, and then move on before the whole thing becomes a festering toxic pit of entitlement.

Also courtesy of Comixology was The Witchfinder General, a six-part limited series, following the misadventures of Drew Jackson, a Pentagon intern who finds himself assigned as apprentice to the US Witchfinder General and then rapidly promoted to become head of the department after his boss spontaneously combusts. The Department of Witchfinding has a fine tradition of ruthlessly suppressing the supernatural, but Drew has a very different approach, trying to make friends out of enemies. It's a philosophy that looks set to cut little ice with the Nine, an ancient cadre of nigh-immortal witches set for their ninth and final assault on the pillars of reality, but it is the one thing he has going for him that generations of more powerful and experienced Witchfinders General didn't have. 

I really enjoyed The Witchfinder General. It follows the fairly well-trodden path of young rookie stumbles into contact with ancient mysteries, winds up out of his or her depth, tries to do something new, but it does it well and it's definitely better than holding up the witchfinders of the past as shining paragons of virtue. Also, it features Benjamin Franklin in the role of armoured, time-travelling badass the Clockwork Minuteman. That's the kind of secret history it's hard not to like.

Next up, I hit Stephen Fry's new collection of Greek mythological retellings: Mythos. This is an odd beast, with Fry - as both author and narrator, the latter continuing a recent trend in my listening, from Harry Potter and the Audible complete Sherlock Holmes collection, as well as the free sampler of their equally Frylicious reading of Holmes-adjacent detective series, Max Carados - recounting his material somewhat in the style of a media journo recapping the soaps. From the teenage emo crushes of the Titans to the sleazy leching of Zeus and the almost mature and considered love affairs of other gods and mortals, Fry focuses his gaze heavily on the early cosmic myths of creation and espeically the Theogony of Hesiod, rather than the more conventional greatest hits entries of the Age of Heroes: Heracles, the Argonauts, the Trojan War, and all of that jazz. This combination of voice and material results in something markedly different to your typical myth collection; a cosily accessible anthology of child-eating, spouse-eating, abuse cycles, metamorphoses and domestic douchebaggery. It's a lot of fun, but won't float your boat if you like your mythology done with proper epic reverence.

What the Hell Did I Just Read? is the third volume in the David and John cosmic horror series by David Wong. As with the previous volumes in the series - John Dies at the End and This Book is Full of Spiders Serious Dude,Don't Touch It - What the Hell Did I Just Read? is a fast-moving fusion of cosmic horror, supernatural action and scatological humour, as David and John bring their barely understood and virtually unearned abilities to bear on a case of monstrous child kidnapping. Now, if you know me at all - either in person, or through the blog - you'll know that this was always going to be a tough one for me. Whether because of this, or because the joke is wearing a little thin, I definitely found this tougher going than either of the previous novels. On the other hand, I was impressed that the book addressed a crucial and often overlooked point regarding its own protagonist: That it is entirely possible that someone faced with constant struggles with the supernatural, cursed with unique insight beyond the ken of ordinary mortals, and stalked by malignant extradimensional entities, could also suffer from serious, but treatable mental illness. Props for that.

Barchester Towers is the second volume of the Barchester Chronicles of Anthony Trollope. It continues to follow the doings of the clergy of the cathedral city of Barchester, as the Chapter faces the upset of a new bishop. Dr Proudie is a henpecked man, given the seat in preference over the Archdeacon, son of the previous Bishop and presumed successor until an eleventh hour fall of the friendly ministry. Along with his overbearing, self-righteous wife, Dr Proudie brings into the cathedral close the scheming and obsequious Mr Slope, one of literature's finest and most mundane villains. Once more, other men take up arms over Mr Harding's position at Hiram's Hospital, and the struggle between Mr Slope, Mrs Proudie and Archdeacon Grantly for control of the cathedral and the diocese threatens to overthrow all peace in the hallowed halls of Barchester. As with The Warden, the delight of Barchester Towers lies mostly in Trollope's wry, satirical style, and in particular his great pains to relieve the reader of any concern that his heroine, the widow Mrs Bold, might end up with the ghastlier of her suitors. I suspect that at the time it was pretty scathing satire, but with time it has become a rather cosy read for when you don't want to be doing with violence and inhumanity.

I also decided that I was going to go back to a YA series I never finished when I first read it, and so began from the start with the eponymous first volume of the Skulduggery Pleasant series. Stephanie is drawn into a weird secret world of secrets and sorcery when her uncle dies, leaving her a house, a fortune, and an occult secret or two. Attacked by magical henchmen, she is rescued by Skulduggery Pleasant, a skeletal magician with more than a few secrets of his own, who becomes her teacher as well as her guardian, as the two seek to prevent a sorcerer named Nefarian Serpine gaining ultimate power and returning his dark gods to the world. 

Skuldugery Pleasant is witty and fast paced, with a fairly rugged magic system and an effective, show-not-tell approach to most of its world-building. Bursting with one-liners, action scenes and more entertaining, misguidedly self-assumed nomes de guerre than you can shake a stick at, this is a solid opening chapter, and I think I'll make an effort to get through the whole series this time.

My final read for this period was a bit of a struggle. The Masked City is the second book of the Invisible Library series, following Irene Winters, a relatively junior agent of an extradimensional library devoted to maintaining the balance between order - represented by the dragons - and chaos - embodied in the fae. When a pair of power-hungry fae known as Lord and Lady Guantess abduct her dragon apprentice, Kai, Irene is willing to go to any lengths to prevent the long-standing cold war between dragons and fae erupting into open conflict, and to rescue her friend. There's a lot to like in the Invisible Library series, not least the fact that the masked city of the title is a high chaos world that is basically nothing but Venice in carnival, but also a lot that gives me significant pause.

There's a tentative romance between Irene and Kai that is literally the least interesting thing about either character, and tritagonist Peregrine Vale brings all the least appealing features of the Holmsian detective into play with his arrogance and effortless competence, not only assuming that a lady must need protection but somehow being able to offer that protection to Irene soundly within her sphere of competence. The book isn't terrible, but I wanted to like it much more than, in the end, I was able to.

Reading Roundup - April 2017

2017 Reading Challenge

I dropped a book this time round. April was a very slow month for some reason (mostly Easter, I think,) and I only got through one of my challenge books (which is why I've swapped out 'Big French Novels' for 'The Luke Cage Syllabus' in August.) That book was Irvine Welsh's unrelenting Trainspotting, a brutal and unromantic slice of life from the drug-addled youth of Leith. On the other hand, I have made a decent stab at The Rose That Grew From Concrete, and the next month's books include the very short Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress.

I kicked off this month with Ancillary Sword, the sequel to Ancillary Justice and the second book of the Imperial Radch trilogy. Having precipitated the militarisation of the schism in the manifold clones of Anaander Mianaai(1), the Lord of the Radch, the rogue ancillary Breq is assigned as captain of a Mercy - smallest of the Imperial Fleet's ship classes - and to command the defence of a world that helps to fuel the Radch's inexhaustible thirst for tea.

Without her overwhelming thirst for revenge, Breq has more time to muse on the psychological impact of her losses in this novel, leading to a slower narrative with less focus on action and more on character. In addition to herself, Breq struggles to integrate Seivarden into the modern fleet, and to help a copy of Anaander Mianaai to become her own person after having her ancillary implants removed. As she bonds with the common folk of the Radch and butts heads with the great and the good, Breq's character emerges as, to paraphrase another work, a great sympathiser for cripples, bastards and broken things.

Adjoa Andoh once more provides a strong reading, and if not much happens in comparison to Ancillary Justice, the novel is never slow. I've got a bit of a backlog to work through, but Ancillary Mercy is definitely on my list for reading in the near future.

Next up is the second book in Rick Riordan's Magnus Chase and the Gods of Asgard series, as dead boy walking Magnus and Muslim Valkyrie Sam attempt to track down the missing Mjollnir on behalf of it dim-witted owner. Their best option appears to be to try to follow a dangerous ploy set out by Sam's father Loki halfway, then pull a fast one at the last minute, but can you truly pull a fast one on the God of Mischief? And can their new ally be trusted?

I was going to open by saying that Magnus Chase and the Hammer of Thor has little in common with Ancillary Sword, but that's actually not true. The Imperial Radch trilogy's calling card is its almost universal use of feminine pronouns to represent a virtually genderless society, while The Hammer of Thor introduces Alex Fierro, transgender and gender fluid child of Loki, whose greatest fear on arriving in Asgard is that the eternal form of an Einherji would mean sticking in one gender. Embracing the power of Loki in order to own it, Alex is not only an unusual example of a heroic non-binary character... well, anywhere, but especially in mainstream children's adventure fiction(2), but possibly - if it goes the way it's looking - perhaps the first children's adventure transgender love interest.

Kieran Culkin provides a far superior voice for the reading of this volume, as compared to The Sword of Summer's Christopher Guetig, whose performance made Magnus's disaffected narrative voice so unsymapthetic that it put my partner - as great a fan of Riordan's work and listener of audiobooks as I am - off the story altogether until she was able to get a paper copy.

Square cover art = audio only!

Tipped of by my industry contacts(3), I was quick to snap up the free, audio-exclusive short story A Rare Book of Cunning Device, by Ben Aaronovich. It's only thirty minutes long, which is barely a short-story in real terms, but thirty minutes in the world of Peter Grant and the Folly is worth thirty hours of willfully nonprogressive neo-Roman space nazi Scientologists(4). Also, free! And read, as always, by Kobna Holbrook-Smith.

At some point in the Rivers of London chronology, Peter Grant is called in to investigate what seems to be a haunting among the stacks and automated collection systems of the new British Library, the only problem being that it is much too new for ghosts. On the other hand, some of the books are old... Could be a job for Britain's only apprentice magician (assuming an increasingly narrow interpretation of 'apprentice magician',) assuming he can do the business without melting the tech in the book collecting system. The short story also introduces us to a no-nonsense lady librarian who knew Peter's mother, so I can't believe she's going to prove to have been a one-shot.

I don't usually go through the books that I read with my daughter, but then again there are a lot of them. At some point I ought to do a post devoted to some of them, like the alternative princess stories in Don't Kiss the Frog, Princess Daisy and the Dragon and the Nincompoop(5) Knights and The Princess Who Saved Herself, or the bucolic life lessons of Mathias Feldhaus' Frog books. 

For now, however, we're just going to look briefly at Cinnamon, a short story by Neil Gaiman released in a new edition, illustrated by American artist and author Divya Srinivasan. I picked this up on impulse at my FLBS and for two days Arya refused to let me read it, because it was new and uncertain. Then she agreed, if she could have 'The Clumsy Princess' and The Very Hungry Caterpillar as well, and since then she's asked that the story of a blind princess and the man-eating tiger who sets out to teach her to speak be read to her every night. I call that a success.

(1) Advantages of audiobooks: I would never have pegged the pronunciation of this as An-ah-ander Mee-ah'nee-eye.

(2) Up to younger teen target audience, I mean. Obviously in YA pretty much anything goes, most likely because at that point you're selling purely to the reader and not their parents.

(3) I follow Ben Aaronovich's blog, okay.

(4) More on this when and if I finish the book.

(5) "Does that mean that they poop?" - Arya-Rose, age 4.

Reading Roundup - April-June 2016

It's time for another reading roundup, as I quickly review the books I've read or listened to lately.

Part 2 of Tad Williams' epic 'Sorrow, Memory and Thorn' trilogy, Stone of Farewell, was kind of jarring for me as a kid, shifting book 1's child-principals - especially Simon and Miriamele - into young adult mode with what seems almost indecent suddenness, and there's a fair degree of the sex given that my impression of Book 1 was that they were about thirteen. In retrospect, they're older, it's just that they're both kind of spoiled and childish teenagers in their own way in The Dragonbone Chair, while here they are forced to grow up fast. There's a lot in here that is pretty stock quest fantasy, but it did a lot to at least reshape the mould at the time. I remember the third book - To Green Angel Tower - receiving one of the first favourable newspaper reviews I'd ever seen of a work of fantasy. The greatest strength of the book is also one I think I failed to appreciate as a young reader, to whit the depiction of a mundane and reasonable feudal empire being overtaken by magic, myth and insanity. It's interesting from a more mature perspective to see the degree of genre-blindness in characters who belong in a respectable mediaeval chronicle when not being forced to deal with bloody elves.

Like The Dragonbone Chair, this was read by Audible regular Andrew Wincott with characteristic gravitas.

China Mieville's Perdido Street Station is a gritty, thaumpunk scientific romance and a sprawling, Gormenghastly epic of intertwining plot threads and prose that occasionally forays into sweeping and ornate forms worthy of a star or two from Stella Gibbons. In narrative scope it is somewhat akin to Stone of Farewell, although set in a more confined geography and far, far more aggressively opposed to any sense of conventional fantasy. Mieville creates a dense and layered world of ancient mysteries, steampunk technology and rigorously analysed magic, of part-animal humanoids akin to the images of Egyptian gods and half-machine 'remades', of corrupt civil servants and exotically-armed murder-hobos hell-bent on 'gold and experience'. Into a city on the brink of either revolution or eternal tyranny comes a horrifying apex predator, capable of overwhelming the most powerful of opponents, and petty graft, scientific curiosity and dodgy associations combine to turn a city on its head and the life of one particular scientist and his friends inside out.

This audiobook is excellently read by prolific narrator Jonathan Oliver. Increasingly I find the Audible stable of readers to be a boon; not that I choose by reader, but with a few notable exceptions that I don't get on with, it does tend to mean they'll have someone good to do it.

Un Lun Dun is probably a less technically excellent example of Mieville's craft than Perdido Street Station, and having been written with a much younger readership in mind notably lacks much of the sex, violence and sheer unpleasantness of the earlier book. It begins as a (relatively) straightforward tale of two girls, one special and the other not so special. Zanna is the Shawzy, the prophecied hero of UnLondun who will save the abcity from the depredations of the Smog. Deeba is her sidekick; possibly the clever one, or the funny one, no-one is that bothered, at least until the Shwazy spectacularly fails to save the day. Faced with corrupt officials, nefarious schemes and the single-minded faith of most UnLonduners in obvious heroes, Deeba sets out to convince a city that they are wrong before her own life forgets her.

In its way, Un Lun Dun is as ground-breaking as Perdido Street Station, challenging the hell out of the preconceptions of young adult quest fiction with its offbeat, technofantastical secondary world, failed prophecy and 'wrong' hero. The reading by Karen Cass is overall good, although there is just something in the performance that can't seem to close a chapter.

Childhood's End was pretty groundbreaking at the time, although it's been long enough that it no longer feels it.

I read Arthur C. Clarke's classic tale of quiet invasion and parapsychological evolution in the wake of the recent TV adaptation, which sought to focus on fewer characters for clarity, and succeeded mostly in making the whole thing vastly more sensational by compressing the expansive timeline of the novel to about twenty years. I had previously only read the short story 'Guardian Angel', on which the first part of the novel is based.

It's hard to come at the novel these days without noticing how old-fashioned, even reactionary the future it envisions is. One of the characters is essentially polyamorous, but with no indication that his wife - whose life even in the Golden Age of mankind is as a mother and housewife - wishes for anything more than a stable marriage. The absence of mobile phones is always telling (see also Doomsday Book below) and the horror of the anti-Overlord characters that in the 'Golden Age' there are dozens of channels and people watch up to three hours of television per day makes me blush.

Greg Wagland's reading is good, but ultimately there is no getting away from the fact that this is a novel of its era. In many ways, the most fascinating part in this day and age is the foreword, featuring the ageing Clarke's reflections on his early work and assumptions.

Demigods and Magicians collects the three short stories which cross over between Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson/Heroes of Olympus and Kane Chronicles settings (which also take place in the same world as the Gods of Asgard series, because Riordan is not a man afraid to ask for the plural of pantheon.)

I've already read (and reviewed) 'The Son of Sobek' and 'The Staff of Serapis'. 'The Crown of Ptolemy' wraps up the crossover with the insane, less-dead-than-he-ought-to-be magician Setne attempting to consume the power of all gods and become himself a singular, all-powerful deity. With his mix of Egyptian and Greek magic granting him the ability to consume any power thrown at him from either pantheon, it is up to our heroes - Percy and Annabeth, and Sadie and Carter Kane - to find a way to cross the streams of their respective powers and thwart him.

I read this one the old fashioned way, and from the library no less. Kicking it old school.

'The Crown of Ptolemy' feeds naturally into the beginning of Riordan's new series, 'The Trials of Apollo'. In The Hidden Oracle the Sun God falls, powerless and mortal, into the heart of New York and becomes the slave of feral demigod Meg. As he struggles to reach the relative safety of Camp Half-Blood and to understand why his father has opted to take away not only his divine powers, but his strength, looks, clear-skin and washboard abs, he becomes caught up the attempt of another group of mortals to gain divinity, this time by controlling all of the world's Oracles and thus fate itself. While seemingly less threatening than Titans or Giants, these new enemies have a power and menace all their own, and may in fact have manipulated all of the preceding events in order to facilitate their own selfish designs.

Robbie Daymond is another good reader, and as with previous Riordan novels helps me to get into the correct American milieu for the writing.

While I've been on my current Riordan kick, I also looked to the library for Percy Jackson and the Greek Gods and Percy Jackson and the Greek Heroes. These are secondary works in which Percy narrates the stories of classical mythology in all their gruesome glory and his characteristic irreverent manner. More than just a money-making spinoff, they form a useful pair of companion volumes for a series which gets pretty damned into it sometimes on its mythology, and a decent primer on the canon for anyone old enough to recognise Percy's anachronistic insertions for what they are. Importantly, they don't romanticise the material in the way that a lot of authors do when recounting these much loved tales of bloodshed, parricide, infanticide, patriarchal attitudes, questionably consensual relations and gruesome mutilation.

A modern time travel classic, Connie Willis' Doomsday Book is set in a near-future Oxford where the Faculty of History operates an extensive time travel programme, sending historians to periods considered 'safe' in order to conduct field research. Taking advantage of the absence of the Head of History, Mediaeval plan to send a researcher to the middle ages for the first time, a period previously rated unsafe. Unfortunately, the question of whether or not she is safe in the fourteenth century soon pales as a terrible influenza epidemic sweeps the city, starting with the technician who operated the 'drop'.

Doomsday Book is notable for featuring a female time traveler, and is widely hailed as a classic of the genre. This historical sections are extremely well done, and the theory of time travel is well-developed enough for in-universe discussion, without being precise enough for strict debunking. On the other hand, the near-futurism is damned strange. Despite time travel and the near-elimination of disease, it's very much the 1990s still, with most if not all of the problems in the modern parts of the plot down to the absence of mobile phones, email and virtual networking. It is also quite noticeably an outsider's - specifically an American's - Oxford, with colleges operating their own academic facilities and staff, and archaeological research conflated with history (rather than operating in a separate academic division.) 

While dramatically apt, Jenny Sterlin's narration is perhaps a little too dry for the book's humour, mostly coming into its own in the more somber late sections of the novel.

Finally for this roundup, The Ables is a novel about preteen disabled superheroes learning to overcome their disabilities through cooperation and taking on a messianic cult. It is also, and this has not hurt the sales figures at all, written by Jeremy Scott, the voice of the popular Cinema Sins YouTube videos. The audiobook is also read by Scott, and that was a fascinating experience, as you can almost hear him learning to narrate as the book goes on. It's subdivided into - I think from memory - four books, and continuity references make me suspect it was written with some intent to be released serially as four separate parts. Throughout part one the reading is in the same quickfire delivery as Cinema Sins; so much so that I expected a ding at the end of every sentence. Further on, however, Scott's storytelling style became more relaxed and naturalistic, bending more to the dramatic needs of the story.

The Ables is a great idea, and a good novel. It's not perfect, in part because Scott is not able to get entirely into the perspective of a blind boy (I think; hell if I know what a blind boy's actual perspective is.) It also fails the Bechdel test hard, and I'm in two minds about that. On the one hand, d'uh; on the other, it's a book about a twelve year old boy, and twelve is often a very gender divided time. On the gripping hand, it's a book about a twelve year old boy with superpowers, and if we can get behind supergeniuses and telekinetics, we can surely manage to imagine a world in which one or more girls can be part of the gang without fear of an uncontrollable cootie epidemic.

Still, all in all it's not a bad book, and an impressive first effort for someone whose comfort zone is pure snark.

Heroes of Olympus - The Mark of Athena and The House of Hades

I've been getting caught up on Percy Jackson lately, inspired by my partner's run at the original heptalogy. The Mark of Athena was for a long time a sticking point for me, since my commute got bigger and more crowded and the hardback is fricking huge. So I bought the kindle edition as well and read that on the train.

Annabeth, Jason, Piper and Leo have flown to Camp Jupiter in the magical trireme Argo II, in the company of Coach Gleeson Hedge, action satyr. Percy and his friends Hazel and Frank are more than happy to sign on to the Quest of the Prophecy of Seven, but when Leo unaccountably opens fire on the camp, they are forced to set out straight off and pursued by Roman forces, heading for the forbidden Ancient Lands and a Greek treasure stolen long ago by the Romans. Banishing ghosts and battling monsters, they make their way across the Atlantic to the Mediterranean and Rome, where Annabeth has to go it alone in pursuit of the Mark of Athena, while Jason and Percy overcome their alpha-hero antagonism to take on a pair of giant twins.

Although technically victorious, our heroes begin the next book in the series, The House of Hades, separated, and indeed with Annabeth and Percy literally in Hell, or at least Tartarus.

With time running out, and at different speeds for those in and out of Tartarus, the heroes must make their way to the two sides of the Doors of Death in order to close them. En route, Annabeth and Percy must befriend those whom they might have thought implacable foes and learn the meaning of sacrifice. In the mortal world, Frank embraces his inner war god and Hazel is chosen by Hecate to learn to control the Mists. Meanwhile Leo, the perpetual seventh wheel of the quest, finds his destiny and proves that in some ways he is better than Percy Jackson, and Nico di Angelo comes out (which for a popular children's series is pretty huge.)

Riordan continues to combine rollicking adventure, snarky humour and mild horror to good effect. Especially effective is some of the soul-searching in The House of Hades, where Percy is faced with the consequences of his past heroism, not just in the resentment of monsters he has killed, but of those he has left behind and never thought of again (a not uncommon failing in ancient heroes.)

American Gods

And there it is again. Do American publishers worry a lot
that readers will mistake a novel for, say, a boa
constrictor?

Shadow is looking forward to getting out of prison, seeing his wife, getting his life back. The news that Laura is dead hits him hard; the news that she died in flagrante along with the friend who was going to give him a job is devastating. There seems little to do except take up the offer of employment given him by the mysterious Mr Wednesday. This job leads him on a journey that falls somewhere between a spirit quest and a road movie, to rally the old gods brought to America by generations of immigrants for a final battle with the new gods of technology. America is a bad country for gods, and there isn't enough to go around.

"Wednesday grinned. His smiles were strange things, Shadow decided. They contained no shred of humor, no happiness, no mirth. Wednesday looked like he had learned to smile from a manual."
Aptly enough, Neil Gaiman's biography of the American soul dances among the great American genres: Part beat novel, part noir, part war story, part sting, it defies even the many layered label of magic realism. It is what it is and that's probably all you can say without an essay. It's a big ass, slow moving read, but none the worse for it, and it is absolutely full of beautiful prose moments that thumb their noses at any snide presumptions as to the quality of fantasy writing. The story is rambling, its turns deducible, but not predictable. At its heart, it is a series of vignettes in which Shadow meets gods who tell tales of how it used to be, and of tales of the many migrations that made up modern America.

In the audiobook, Neil Gaiman reads the 'Coming to America' interludes - plus a foreword and an afterword - while George Guidall, an Audible favourite, reads the main narration, but the character voices are read by separate actors, which is something that I always like in an audiobook. The performances are all good, although there is always something a little odd in the juxtaposition of Audible's preferred dry, measured style and scenes of sex and violence, the narrator describing the crunch of bone or a post-coital ecstasy with the same impassive tones he used to describe the dented paintwork of a car or the window of a diner.

Helen of Sparta

Once upon a time there was a girl named Helen, a princess who married a great king, ran away with a prince and so started a war the like of which the world has never seen. This is the bit of the story that a lot of people gloss over.

Amalia Carosella, in her desire to give Helen her own voice (although seriously, she's been given at least two others that I found just image searching the cover - The Memoirs of Helen of Troy and the apparently less sympathetic Memoirs of a Bitch) presents the story of her abduction by Theseus of Athens as a grand and tragic romance, in which Helen flees her abusive and resentful mother and a planned alliance-marriage to childhood friend-turned-abusive rapist dick Menelaus, but basically finds her life being continually fucked up by the anger of the gods.

Helen of Sparta is an okay book with a couple of specific flaws. Firstly, it's just... really quite rapey. As decent as Theseus is in the novel, it's hard to see how Helen can be intimate with anyone given that she's basically been dreaming about being raped in the ashes of Troy by just about every other man she knows and isn't related to since puberty. I know Greek myth is brutal, but damn. Also, turning the abduction of the prepubescent Helen into the elopement of a young woman, there is sex, and then a child, and because she has no place in the later narrative the daughter is exposed on the hillside at the will of the gods*.

Again, it's not a poor representation of the heroic age of Greek myth, but I'm not okay with little girls being sacrificed**.

Overall, however, the book manages to balance adherence to the broad structure of the mythological tale and the romantic narrative it wants to convey. It ends on a downer which hints at a part two, and in all honesty, I'd read part two if and when.

Which is a lot better than the last couple of Kindle First offerings.

* My own theory is that Athena pulled some switcheroony which will be revealed in a later book, possibly in Egypt, but it still made for upsetting reading.
** Which is not to say I am okay with little boys being sacrificed, but I can work with it as an earnestly horrible part of a narrative in a way I can't with girls, simply because I have a daughter and not a son.

Good Omens

About six months ago I posted a list of ten books that had affected me, one of which was Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman's Good Omens. With the recent passing of Sir Terry from this mortal coil to the etheric whisper of internet headers, I decided that I wanted to hit the canon again, and to start with one of my favourites.

At some basic level, Good Omens is a pastiche of The Omen (the original one,) complete with a Satanic conspiracy replacing the son of a US ambassador with the antichrist, filtered through a comedy of errors that is forever hovering one legs akimbo sight gag from a Carry On movie. An angel and a demon, both of whom have gone rather native, strive to save the world, while a moment of distraction leaves the antichrist to grow up as a perfectly normal boy. As the preordained moment approaches, the forces of Heaven and Hell, of England's once-proud Witchfinder Army, and of the well-informed descendants of Cromwellian prophetess Agnes Nutter, descend on the Oxfordshire village of Tadfield to do battle (because anyone who considers themselves to be a force is inevitably looking for a fight.)

Pratchett and Gaiman occasionally talked about a sequel - the title 668: The Neighbour of the Beast was touted sometimes - but in the end it never happened; partly because Gaiman moved full-time to the states, and partly because they never settled on the story. I'm rather glad of that, because Good Omens is something of a perfect storm, uniting two authors who were really just getting started in such as way that I believe it tempered both of their styles and signaled a sea-change in their individual writing, while at the same time producing something priceless.

Seriously; about 70% of all images resulting from a search for
'Good Omens' returns fan art of Aziraphael and Crowley, and
perhaps a quarter of that is explicitly shippy. I'm sure you
wouldn't have to look far to find one of those intertwining wing
and no clothes poses so popular with people who ship winged
humanoids and have any ounce of artistic ability.

Good Omens is a very character-driven apocalyptic narrative, and the characters are rather wonderful, from Adam's small and disorganised 'pack of ringleaders' to the bikers of the Apocalypse, and of course the fandom's favourite ship, Crowley and Aziraphael*. The authors also manage to slip in some social commentary - much of it a little dated now** - and even to get in a dig at people who wear sunglasses when it's dark, which in 1990 was only just starting to be a thing.

It is also unashamedly funny and, and this is important, doesn't pretend not to be or to have been during the big, dramatic denouement. It doesn't go all grimdark, and yet manages to have a sense of peril for characters the reader has grown to like. It may also count as one of the first truly transatlantic novels, its wry footnotes peppered with explanatory notes for the American reader which poke fun at the American and British people in more or less equal part.

In case I'm being too oblique, I love this book: always have done, still do. The only disappointment for me on this reading was the audiobook version I switched too while I was walking. It wasn't bad, but they did a Radio 4 adaptation just before Christmas*** and so I was disappointed to only get the one voice. All in all, I think I'm more of an audio play kind of guy.

* Because nothing gets shippers hot for a couple more than adversity, and what greater adversity can there be than explicitly stating that they are sexless beings? For myself I can see the sense behind the pairing, but they are more of an old married couple, rather than a white hot sexy pairing.
** Similarly, any technical references are pretty antiquated, from the wonder of a car with a phone in to printed manuals, and British fast food has come a long way since 1990.
*** Which is well worth checking out.

Runelight

The Old Gods have settled into life in the quiet village of Malbry, but the world is not done with them yet. Prophecy will out, wolves will rise and riders will ride; Carnage, Treachery and Lunacy astride steeds of fire, sea and air. Ragnarok is coming, again; even with the aid of a newly discovered twin, this time Maddy may not be able to cheat the immortal malevolence of the Whisperer, and the aid of her sister Maggie is not something to be counted on.

Joanne Harris's sequel to Runemarks ramps up the emotional hurt while maintaining a strong blend of modern irreverence and mythic resonance. At the core of the story is the idea of the language that makes the world, and in particular of the emergence of the new script to replace that which was crippled at Ragnarok.

Unfortunately, the increased focus on the shenanigans of the travelling gods - an unwieldy party consisting of seven Vanir, six Aesir, three wolves, a dodgy witch, a surly dwarf and Loki - detracts from the role of Maddy, the protagonist of Runemarks, leaving her to wander kind of lost through most of the book and failing to be either an effective soldier or a committed rebel. Maggie, meanwhile, is a poor substitute, a mystical powerhouse but the pawn of manipulative men pretty much throughout the story.

Runelight is not a bad book and has a lot to recommend it, but it isn't as strong and Runemarks by some way.

Runemarks

The village of Malbry is a dull village, occupied by dull folk who never dream, or if they do aren't gauche enough to talk about it. And then there's the exception; Maddy Smith, who talks to the Outlander One-Eye and has a blatant runemark on her palm. Many people predict that she will come to a bad end, but only one knows that the world could stand or fall - again - on her actions.

When I first read Runemarks a few years ago, it was honestly not what I'd expected from the author of Chocolat. It's a post-apocalyptic adventurer, in which the apocalypse was the Norse Ragnarok and the new world is built on the ruins of the Middle world of Midgard and the fallen Sky Citadel of Asgard.

It's a good story too, full of twists and turns and betrayals, and with a wonderfully grim and impersonal adversary in the Order, a sort of church-cum-civil service. Maddy is a likable protagonist, and the characterisations of the Norse Gods are fun and irreverent, neither throwing aside traditional descriptions nor feeling that the Aesir and Vanir need to be portrayed necessarily as perfect beings, or even good people.

Runemarks is well worth a read, and I'll be taking a look at the sequel after I finish Foxglove Summer.