You Better Not Cry

Japanese lawmaker Taro Yamamoto got himself into a bit of hot water not so long ago, following the most ill-advised letter since the Children’s Television Workshop’s dalliance with Cyrillic in 1983 as part of a well-intentioned but ultimately disastrous attempt to ease Cold War tensions between East and West (“One! One Mother Russia! AHA HA HA HA!”).

There Is No God

See? See? I fucking told you.

The Iron Jackal

Chris Wooding, 2011

(February 2012)

Apparently if you write a steampunk book with ‘Iron’ in the title, you must have a picture of a train on the cover.

That’s the trouble with genre writing; it’s too easy to mock the conventions and for bad writers to get away with guff by sticking to them. Of course, they also give good writers something to kick against, subverting expectations and all that.

Death – The Time of Your Life

Neil Gaiman, Chris Bachalo, Mark Buckingham,1996

(February 2012)

A fairly straightforward one, this. No real twists or turns, and it all comes good in the end. An enjoyable if unchallenging little coda to the rest of the Sandman books.

Breaking the Wa

Japanese people hate ambiguity. No, really they do. I know that many people, eminent people, have said otherwise, but they’re wrong. Get me, picking a fight with a Nobel Laureate. This can only end well.