2017 Reading Challenge - One Hundred Years of Solitude

Welcome to the jungle...

Book 1 (January, Magic Realism)

One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (translated by Gregory Rabasso and read by John Lee.)

Reason for Reading: South American literature and magic realism are strongly intertwined, at least as far as the canon of translated works exported to the English speaking world goes, and neither is something that I know much about. One Hundred Years of Solitude has a strong reputation both in Spanish and in translation, so that seemed a fair place to start from.

One Hundred Years of Solitude tells the story of the Buendias, a family of variously antisocial loners whose patriarch is one of the founders of the village of Macondo, along with his wife and first cousin Ursula. His name is Jose Arcadio Buendia, and his children are Jose Arcadio and Aureliano. Most of their descendants are also called Jose Arcadio or Aureliano (Aureliano in fact has seventeen children all bearing his name) with the only blips being Arcadio and Aureliano Jose, so it's a book that demands close attention. The daughters of the family have more varied names, but are fewer in number, as befits a line wallowing in machismo. The Buendia men are either towering geniuses or physical titans, blessed with an extraordinary blend of total commitment and capacity for vacillation. The women are determined and focused, but prey to violent passions.

Aureliano, who later becomes a revolutionary Colonel fighting thirty-two doomed wars against the forces of conservatism, has some gift of prophecy, and the family inherits from an ancient Gypsy named Melquiades a set of parchments which contain, deeply coded, the entire history of the line and of Macondo from Jose Arcadio Buendia's dream of a town of glass to the destruction of the doomed settlement in a great wind storm. The history of the family and their town is cyclical, not just in the names of the boys, but in repeating patterns of behaviour, the constant return of the more introspective sons to the study of Melquiades parchments, and a tendency for members of the family to fall in love with their own aunts (and an accompanying fear of one day producing a child with the tail of a pig,) to embark on doomed causes, and to remain forever solitary however many people surround them.

It's a somewhat bleak story, using elements of the fabulous as part of its commentary on the repeating nature of history and the political stagnation of a world where the conservative regime is eternal in its corruption because its liberal opponents either compromise too much or become monstrous warmongers; where hard work is always defeated by time and dissipation; and where the best that true virtue can hope for is to escape the miserable confines of reality after leaving a trail of destructive insanity in its wake. It is also, however, a deeply beautiful book, full of black humour and splendid prose. The translation is the only one ever published. It first appeared three years after the original, because Marquez insisted on waiting for the translator Gregory Rabasso to be available, and the author declared the prose to be superior to the original(1).

All in all, while I have a limited taste for doomed family sagas I think if I as going to read one then this is a good one to go for. I am definitely minded to look into the author's other work once the challenge is over, and perhaps see what else Latin America has to offer.

(1) New York Times, 2004 

My 2017 Reading Challenge

Okay, so I asked around about classics to read in 2017 a while back, but I think rather than specifically classics per se I think that my reading challenge to myself this year is going to be to broaden my horizons (as much as I could read Jane Austen until the cows come home.) I want to read different stuff to what I usually do (SF, fantasy, thrillers, primarily by British or American authors.)

So, my challenge to myself is this:

Each month, read or listen to (audiobook, not adaptation) and review two books which fall outside my usual genres of preference, and/or are written by authors who are non-white, non-English, non-straight, non-male or otherwise fall outside the usual range of voices in my reading. For extra credit, add in some poetry, because I basically never read poetry.

I plan to loosely theme each month, because that's how I roll. I've got the following penciled in, but there are obviously some pretty big gaps. What would you recommend to me to fill them?

January - Magic Realism

1. 100 Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
2. Nights at the Circus, Angela Carter

February - Gothic

1. White is for Witching - Helen Oyeyemi
2. We Have Always Lived in the Castle - Shirley Jackson

March - Mad People

1. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
2. Trainspotting - Irvine Welsh

April - China

1. Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress - Dai Sijie
2. Wild Swans - Jung Chang

May - Australia

1. Carpentaria - Alexis Wright
2. That Deadman Dance - Kim Scott

June - Emancipation

1. Beloved - Toni Morrison
2. The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood

July - India

1. A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
2.  The God of Small Things - Arundhati Roy

August - The Luke Cage Syllabus

1. Little Green - Walter Mosley
2. Crime Partners - Donald Goines

September - Africa

1.  Dust - Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor
2.  We Should All Be Feminists - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

October - 

1.  Travel Light - Naomi Mitchison
2.  

November - Muslim Authors
With this one, I might want to swap out one of the memoirs for something purely fictional.

1. Persepolis - Marjane Satrapi
2. Reading Lolita in Tehran - Azar Nafisi

December - Mother Russia

1.  Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
2. The Secret History of Moscow - Ekaterina Sedia

Poetry and Music Bonuses

1. Tupac - The Rose that Grew From Concrete
2. Guante - A Love Song, A Death Rattle, A Battle Cry
3. Edgar Allen Poe - Collected Verse
4. Te Vaka - Havili
5. Freida Hughes - Wooroloo

Reading Roundup - December

An unfortunate title, as all Google
searches go first to the song from The
Hunger Games.

There's been a death among the bright young things of London. The daughter of the Goddess of the River Tyburn is involved, and to repay a debt Peter Grant - the Met's only apprentice magician - is to make sure that no-one knows that. It is a debt that he utterly fails to repay, but that soon becomes the least of his problems as a lost work by Sir Isaac Newton appears and is pursued by at least two other groups considering themselves the heirs to the great man's legacy, and a series of unnecessarily horrible deaths surrounding the original murder hint that someone has inadvertently angered the Folly's nemesis, the Faceless Man. On the upside, if the old Faceless is going after Lady Tyburn's daughter, Grant might just have another chance to pay back his debt.

The Hanging Tree is the sixth novel in the Rivers of London series, but don't let that fool you into thinking it's the sixth story or you'll be baffled by references to Russian sorcerers and self-driving cars. The comics are full on canon and don't you forget it(1). We return to London after the dreamy rural idyll of Foxglove Summer, and both Grant and Aaronovich are on firmer ground for a case which brings us round one of the long awaited throwdown between the Folly and the Faceless Man, as well as introducing two new factions in the form of an American paranormal PMC and a matriarchal counterpoint to the traditional Newtonian sausage fest.

This was the first of the series I'd come to as an audiobook, and Kobna Holbrook-Smith more than justified his continued employment as the series narrator, bringing Grant's distinctive voice to life.

Soon to add 'soon to be a major motion
picture' to its cover.

The Screaming Staircase is the first in a series of YA paranormal mystery novels featuring Lockwood & Co, one of a large number of agencies who deal with the UK's major ghost problem. With seeing, tracking and thus containing ghosts largely the purview of the young, most agencies use adult supervisors, but Lockwood & Co is owned and run by teenagers, specifically the titular Lockwood. A charming, reckless, slightly Peter Pannish youth, Lockwood recruits narrator Lucy Carlyle to join his agency alongside the book smart George. When they stumble on a long-cold murder case the exposure attracts a millionaire industrialist, who asks them to cleanse one of the most haunted mansions in the country; a job which could be the making of the agency... or the death of them all.

The book does a good deal of world-building and character introduction, but also has a fine plot of its own and a wonderfully villainous villain. Oddly, I kept thinking it was set around the Victorian era, rather than in an alternate modern day, possibly because of the swords, or the widespread use of child labour (for reasons of spiritual sensitivity.) I've been a fan of Stroud since the Bartimaeus trilogy, albeit I've not followed him closely and there are now about half a dozen Lockwood & Co books for me to catch up on, but them's the breaks.

Miranda Raison's reading was excellent.

Like Goldfinger, but more so.

And speaking of YA authors I touch base with occasionally, Goldenhand is the latest in the occasional Old Kingdom series. Following directly from the short story 'Nicholas Sayre and the Creature in the Case', it follows Nicholas and Abhorsen-in-Waiting Lirael as they faff around the Clayr glacier arguing snittily about librarians and obviously fancying the ever-loving pants off each other, while to the north of the Old Kingdom (because it turns out there is a north of the Old Kingdom) a young woman is struggling to bring a years-old message to warn Lirael of the danger still posed by 'the Witch Without a Face.'

As my summary may suggest, I found Goldenhand to be an awkwardly balanced book. Ferin's mission is all urgency and good people falling under the plot bus while waiting for the badasses to arrive, but the Lirael and Nick bits are basically a comedy of manners, intercut with the life or death stuff. For my money, it would have worked better to focus on Lirael until she hears news of the message, then cut back to what Ferin has been up to (chases, violence, death and sacrifice.)

I confess, I was also a little disappointed that this is the end of Chlorr of the Mask, who from her introduction in Clariel frankly deserved to be more than a sinister presence, but then Nix has never been good at... No, scratch that; has never really been one to give screen time to his villains. I don't think it's that he can't write them; he chooses not to. Even the human antagonists barely get a mention, and the northern tribes in particular end up as a literal faceless horde.

The performance by Heather Wilds was not one of the best I've heard. It's not the worst, but it doesn't bring the book to life and makes the slow sections drag.

(1) Note to self, acquire comics.

Reading Roundup - October-November 2016

"Revenge is a dish best served unexpectedly and from a distance - like a thrown trifle."
- Francis Hardinge, Twilight Robbery

Eventually they're going to try to film
this(1), and it's going to be... interesting.

I've already reviewed the dead tree edition of Anciliary Justice, the critically acclaimed, multi-award(2) winning and - most importantly - really rather good first installment of the Imperial Radch trilogy, but given that I'm planning to swing by the rest of the series at last, I figured I'd refresh my memory of the starting point and revisit the lonely quest of Breq, last ancillary 'corpse soldier' of the long-destroyed warship Justice of Toren, to bring justice to the manifold Emperor of the Radch, a vast, interplanetary empire with its noble houses arrayed in a complex system of patronage and no concept of gender (represented by the nearly-universal use of feminine pronouns, save where Breq is talking to extra-Radch barbarians in their own language.)

I'm glad I did. It is, as I say, a very good book, and interesting for more reasons than the pronoun quirk. The Radch is a fascinating mix of science fiction feudalism and corporate hegemony (the houses are clearly aristocratic, but their power base and interests largely commercial,) and the narrative transcends a simple revenge tale with its complex and existential political dimension. There are, I note on my second visit, a lot of odd coincidences, although I do wonder if that isn't a deliberate hint of something bigger. The reading, by Adjoa Andoh, is excellent.

Promises, promises...

Twelve Kings, also known as Twelve Kings in Sharakai(3), is another tale of long-deferred revenge. Ceda (pronounced Chay-dah) is secretly the pit fighter known as the White Wolf, double-secretly a courier of dubious goods, and triple-secretly working a long - oh, so long - game to bring down the twelve immortal Kings who rule the city of Sharakai with an even dozen iron fists, not because they are deathless tyrants whose daughters form a cadre of bloody protectors called the Blade Maidens, nor because their once-human servants take a tithe of the population every once in a while, but because they killed her mother and called her rude names. Meanwhile a group of freedom fighters/terrorists are also gunning for the Kings, although notably they have even less plan than Ceda for dealing with the fact that they are unkillable.

There's a lot of good stuff in Twelve Kings, but as a novel it falters on the fact that Ceda is neither a particularly likable protagonist, nor especially competent. She's clearly supposed to be a tough, non-nonsense gal who goes for what she wants and gets things done, except that it takes her most of the book to achieve anything. Also, if you want to sell your heroine as sexually liberated, I personally would avoid mentioning that her twenty-plus years older sex partner first met her as a child anywhere near the actual sex scene (if you absolutely have to have her shagging someone who met her when she was a child and they were in their thirties.) Her machinations are often clumsy, and her 'complicated' relationship with her not-brother Emre gets tedious every time it shades towards romance.  It's also highly notable that absolutely no-one seems remotely interested in the fact that a group of immortals place any importance on succession.

It's the literary equivalent of a beautifully shot film with an exotic location and decent cast - in this case the reading by Sarah Combes - but only a so-so script. On the other hand, props for a setting that is markedly different from stock, and an ambitious scope.

In America, Fly Trap. I have no idea
why.

I was what they call these days an early adopter when it comes to Frances Hardinge, reviewing her first three novels and moderating an online Q&A with this up-and-coming Oxford-based author with her wry turn of phrase and strong hat game in my previous life as a teacher and semi-pro reviewer of children's books. Alas, when that life ended, I sort of fell out of touch with the children's and young adult book game, and I've got fearfully behind, which is doubly embarrassing as about half of my friends game - or used to game - with her and I once met her while she was dressed as a duck.

Twilight Robbery is a first for Hardinge; her first sequel, specifically a follow-up to her debut novel Fly By Night. It follows Mosca Mye, her homicidal goose companion Saracen and n'er do well for hire Eponymous Clent as they seek to prevent a kidnapping and, in the process, escape from a potential warzone through the city of Toll, which is actually two cities; not in the manner of Ankh-Morpork or Budapest, nor yet of Besel and Ul Quoma in The City and the City, but by dividing up the city between day and night. Toll by Day is a good town of good people, charging massive tolls to enter the city and equally massive tolls to leave, while Toll by Night is a squalid den of thieves. Every Twilight, the city transforms from one to the other, and it's a poor lookout for those whose name indicates that they were born under the protection of a night-time patron Beloved (and one of the things I love about this book - spoilers, this is a positive review - is that it's so hard to explain one thing without the others, so organically do the elements of world-building fit together.)

Full of twists and turns, reversals of fortune and exquisite turns of phrase, Twilight Robbery confirms that, while one-offs may be her preferred mode, Hardinge can go back to the well(4) and not find it brackish. Mosca remains a superb mix of spiky and kind-hearted, and if Saracen spends most of the novel being little more than quietly disgruntled, an excellent double-conspiracy plot more than makes up for a lack of goose maulings.

I dead tree'd this one, courtesy of the local library, less because I didn't want to own it than because I like to seize on whatever I can find to show support for the local library since, you know, it's a local library.

I want to know, what in this book could
you not have written alone?

Kindle First is a mixed bag, and I mean really mixed. Not like a bag of mixed nuts, because maybe you don't like almonds but you do like walnuts, but they're all nuts (and probably not peanuts due to allergies.) No, it's a mixed bag like Bertie Bots' Every Flavour Beans; sure, there's all your favourites in there, but by definition there's earwax and the bile taste when you throw up in your mouth as well. Ocean of Storms is not the bile taste; it's more the bland, cardboardy tang of bad crsipbread.

EMP from the moon, aliens, desperate mission, sabotage, exploding love interest, manly-yet-intelligent-and-sensitive hero, sacrifice, cover up, corporate shenanigans, conspiracy, revelation, time travel! That is a lot of things for a book to include while yet and at the same time being incredibly predictable. It also has a posh British character written by someone with even less experience with what posh British people sound like than me, lapsing often into US vernacular, and the rest of the time talking like Archie Leach in Leverage despite being only about forty.

Being a Kindle First option I read this one on Kindle, and I'm happy not to have shelled out the three quid for the Audible upgrade.

Jinni in the US original.

Finally for this month, The Golem and the Djinni is a historical urban fantasy. A golem, created to be an ideal wife, is widowed en route to America and taken in by a New York rabbi. At the same time, a djinni is released form centuries of captivity and becomes an apprentice tinsmith in the city's Little Syria district. Dubbed Chava, the golem seeks to live a modest and blameless life, while the djinni, given the name Ahmad, embraces impulse and spontaneity and believes himself removed from any consequence. When they meet they find commonality in their non-human condition and bound nature - she is driven to fulfill the needs she senses around her, while he is held in human form by an iron cuff - but are pushed apart by violence before being reunited to face a common enemy.

The really striking thing about The Golem and the Djinni is that it is a beautifully written book, powerfully evoking 19th century New York, but that the magical nature of the protagonists has so little bearing until very late in the slow-paced narrative, and that in the end neither effects a great deal of agency over the outcome of the story. I don't know what I was expecting from the novel, but while I have no regrets of the twenty hours listening to George Guidall's evocative reading it certainly wasn't this. If you like your urban fantasy leisurely and contemplative, this is one for you.

(1) It has in fact been optioned for television. Leckie announced on her blog that the producers were positive on approaching a series full of dark-skinned, ungendered, polytheists, but that was two years ago and I cynically doubt it will make it past pre-production without introducing a simmering love-hate sexual tension between a busty, blonde Breq ('she redefined the role with her audition') and a ruggedly handsome Seivarden.
(2) Hugo, Nebula, BSFA, Arthur C. Clarke and Locus.
(3) In case you confused it with Twelve Kings in Sheboygan.
(4) The metaphorical well; I'm unconvinced that a sequel to Verdigris Deep would work at all.

My Dark Life

Today I went into town and got a book signed by Mr Ben 'Remembrance of the Daleks' Aaronovich.

Also selfie <==

The weird thing is that both Ben and a couple who were there for the signing asked if we'd met before at other signings or cons. Apparently I have a more socially-outgoing, but still nerdy doppelganger.

I was also told that I totally ought to go to a con, so maybe that can be my New Year's Resolution: To visit a localish convention, social anxiety be damned.

Reading Roundup - September 2016

Ink and Bone by Rachel Caine is a steampunky alchemical fantasy, set in a world in which the dominant global power is the Great Library of Alexandria. Popular technology is largely Victorian, while the great institutions of the world - most notably the Library itself - have access to high speed trains and sophisticated automata, much of it based on the Library's monopoly on the practice of Alchemy. The Library also seeks to assert ownership over all original works, allowing access to books through blanks, alchemical Kindles able to download any book from the Library through their pages.

Jess Brightwell is a London lad, born into a family of book smugglers who deal in rare original manuscripts. Lacking the mercenary zeal for the business, his father buys him a place on the Library's apprentice course, hoping to place a family member in a position of advantage. Along with his cohort and under the firm hand of Scholar Wolfe, he undergoes the harsh and competitive process of training and selection, but before graduation, the pupils and their teacher are all plunged into a life and death struggle, not just against those who would destroy the Library's power, but against the Library itself.

Subject of many rave reviews, Ink and Bone has a slow start, and suffers somewhat from placing its narrative focus on Jess, whose vacillation makes him perhaps understandable, but also one of the less compelling and likable of the students. In addition, one of the major twists at the end of the book is not only cruel, but predictable, and as much as I hoped it might be averted, cast something of a pall over the pacier second half of the story. I'm also not sure how I felt about the seeming assertion that burning books is better than letting the Library monopolise them. Still, I might go for the next in the sequence, and Ben Allen provides a lively narration.

Book Two of Charlie Fletcher's Oversight series, The Paradox, returns us to a London in the care of the Free Company of the London Oversight, the group who police the boundary between the mundane and the magical like Pilgrim's heavily-armed younger brothers and sisters. Despite the recent recruitment of Charlie Piefinch and Lucy Harker, the Oversight is still in a parlous state, especially with Jack Sharpe and Sara Falk still lost in the mirrors. As the two young recruits enter training, Sharpe and Falk seek for each other, avoid the sinister John Dee and the hungry wights of the mirror realms, and eventually come upon the secret behind the near-destruction of the Oversight. Meanwhile, other forces are moving, other Free Companies and freelancers are hunting. The Sluagh are looking for a way to be free of the ancient bane of iron, the Citizen schemes, and the House of Templebane is seeking its revenge.

The Paradox suffer a bit from middle volume sag, and a lot of its time is spent moving from beginning to end, rather than doing its own thing. Lucy Harker also comes off badly, her understandable reluctance to trust or be tied down unfortunately mutating into an unlikable selfish streak. The other characters are more balanced between strengths and flaws, and perhaps the most interesting theme of the book is raised by the Sluagh chieftain who tells the Smith that the Oversight is supposed to protect the border, but only ever do so in one direction, allowing the mundane to bind the old world in iron. This is never really followed up, but hopefully will be returned to in book 3.

Charlie Fletcher is not as good a reader as Simon Prebble, but neither is he as bad as many Audible reviews make out.

My final September book - I've been getting back into audio plays in a big way - is The Three Body Problem by Cixin Liu, one of the leading works of the modern Chinese SF scene. Set through the Cultural Revolution, it is an alien invasion story in which no aliens actually invade, instead somehow manipulating the universe in such a way as to convince scientists that physics does not work, driving several to suicide and aiming to paralyse human progress in preparation for the actual invasion in about four hundred years time.

Translator Ken Liu and narrator Luke Daniels convert the text into one redolent with familiar idiom, and while the details of the Cultural Revolution may be surprising to western readers/listeners, as they were to me, the production as a whole eschews the lure of oriental exoticism and lets the speculative fiction speak for itself. As with The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet there is a section which takes the narrative viewpoint away to the alien world of Trisolaris which, for my money, is the weakest part of the book. I would have liked to have seen more of that background explored through the Three Body game, but I kind of understand the choice. It's definitely worth a read, and quite different to anything else I've read.

Reading Roundup - August 2016

The Scar is the second of China Mieville's Bas-Lag novels, named on my copy as the New Crobuzon series, and although the action of The Scar leaves the outskirts of the city itself in the prologue and never goes back, it does loom large in the thoughts of our protagonist throughout. Belis Coldwyn is an author and linguist, and as an ex-lover of Perdido Street Station's Isaac, unreasonably high on the government's to do list. She jumps on a ship to the colonies, but when that ship is intercepted by the forces of the floating city of Armada she is caught up in something vaster than she could have imagined. Some in the floating city have an audacious plan to tether an extradimensional leviathan and so make their way to the ruins of an ancient Empire and plunder their unimaginable power.

As with Perdido Street Station, the scope of The Scar is colossal. Geographically it far exceeds its predecessor, although the bulk of the action is restricted to Armada itself. The rough and gritty thaumpunk dystopia of Bas-Lag opens out from the claustrophobic glory of New Crobuzon through the eyes of Belis and a handful of other viewpoint characters, all of whom play key roles in the plot without any of them being major players, even when they think that they might be, as it rambles towards what is more of an end than a conclusion. The Scar is very much about the journey, rather than the destination.

Damian Lynch provides a radically different voice to Jonathon Oliver, and at first I did find this a bit distracting. Ultimately, however, he brings his own energy to the reading.

Sleeping Giants is the debut novel from author Sylvain Neuvel, and takes the form of a series of statements and interviews with the personnel of a highly secret project, recorded by the programme's enigmatic and ludicrously well-connected backer. The statements reveal the discovery of the pieces of a giant, alien mech functioning on an utterly unknown level of science, the underhanded and even illegal steps taken to secure it in US control and the intricate web of contingency plans and conspiracy used to bring it into the open.

While only touched on briefly, the mech's origins hint at future conflict with an ancient empire long-since withdrawn from Earth along with the planet's eleven other protectors, and the novel is pitched as Volume 1 of The Themis Files. I confess, I'm not rushing for the next one. While the multi-voice recording was excellent - I am hugely in favour of multi-voice recordings in general and this one had a talented cast on its side - I was not quite taken enough with the characters to truly get into the story, and given the archival approach I felt that it might have benefited from taking a broader view and including outside perspectives on the programme and the appearance of the robot on the world stage.

Not remotely a debut novel for prolific military scifi writer Jack Campbell, The Dragons of Dorcastle is the first in a series set in a world in which the ordinary people are caught between the mutually antagonistic influences of the two Great Guilds, the Mechanics and the Mages. The Mechanics create the devices on which society runs and insist on their exclusive right, indeed ability, to provide and maintain them, while the Mages manipulate reality by embracing a philosophy which insists that nothing is actually real. Neither have much time for the Commons.

When Mari and Alain, prodigies of the Mechanics and the Mages respectively, are thrown together by circumstances it at first seems to be nothing more than your average star-crossed love affair, but even as their feelings challenge their Guild teachings and their experiences reveal the internal corruption and contradictions of their masters, Alain becomes aware that Mari is a figure of prophecy fated to stand against a great Storm that threatens to tear the world apart. To defeat it, however, she needs to overthrow the established order of both Guilds and rally them in common cause with the ordinary people of Dematr, a level of change that neither Guild will allow, even if the alternative is destruction.

Also dragons.

MacLeod Andrews provides a good reading, although I did hear 'Alain' as 'Elaine' to start with. Overall, The Dragons of Dorcastle has an involving story and an interesting set-up, but personally I could have done with less romance. It doesn't feel like Campbell's strong suit, and narratively it primarily serves to provide a reason for the two leads not to discuss the vital prophecy in a timely and useful fashion.

Finally this month - this feels thin. I'm sure there must be something else I'm missing, although in my defence, The Scar is fucking immense - is Hamlet's Hit Points. One of my rare non-fiction reads, in this book rock star games designer Robin D. Laws uses a system of beat analysis to break down the fluctuation of hope and fear in the dramatic and procedural plots of three famous narratives, in order to provide exemplars for games masters to consider when pacing their own offerings. In addition to providing an interesting and innovative reading on three well-worn texts - Shakespeare's Hamlet, Dr No and Casablanca - and providing some interesting examples of technique for the storyteller or game writer, Laws discerns some under-discussed elements of the works involved, such as a eakness in Hamlet's supposed tragic flaws or the Freudian subtext of No. It's a genuinely fascinating approach and one I shall likely be applying to my future storytelling.