The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories

Ken Liu, 2016
(May 2016)

Reviewed over at Strange Horizons. It's very good.

The Race

Nina Allan, 2014

(March 2015)

I came into this book almost completely blind, buying it simply on the back of its appearance on this year’s shortlists for both The Kitschies and the BSFA Awards and the reasonable cost of the ebook edition (price-point matters, kids!). I think I lucked out massively in this regard, because the less you know about this going in the better. However, it’s almost impossible to talk about without spoilers, so why don’t you track yourself down a copy and come back once you’ve had a chance to read? There are dogs in it, if that helps.

She Weeps Each Time You’re Born

Quan Barry, 2015

(March 2015)

  

This is very good. The obvious point of comparison is Midnight’s Children, in that it’s also a magical realist novel in which a mystical child offers a prism through which to view the inevitably traumatic business of colonial separation and the ensuing intranational turmoil of independence, but in Vietnam and not India and, well… Better.

After Me Comes the Flood

Sarah Perry, 2014

(February 2015)

  

Starts strong but fades a little, though is all the while executed in the most beautifully, transparently opaque prose, which is a ridiculous oxymoron but I can’t think of anything more apt. I know what I mean.

Bending Adversity

Japan and the Art of Survival

David Pilling, 2014

(October 2014)

  

Some fifteen years after John Dower’s near-mandatory Embracing Defeat, David Pilling brings us Bending Adversity, the next installment of the Manipulating Negativity series on The State of Japan. I’m happy to announce that I’m slated to write the final volume of the trilogy some time in 2029, to be titled Pity-Fucking Decrepitude.

1Q84

Haruki Murakami, 2009, 2011 [Jay Rubin and Philip Gabriel 2012]

(June 2013)

Well now. That was a hell of a ride, wasn’t it?

1Q84 Book Two

              “Who switched the tracks?”

              “Who switched the tracks? That is another difficult question. The logic of cause and effect has little power here.”

Just in case you were in any doubt.

Hawthorn and Child

Keith Ridgway, 2012

(February 2013)

Well, this is very odd. It’s very good, but very odd. I think.

Jagannath

Karin Tidbeck, 2012 [Karin Tidbeck, 2012]

(January 2013)

“People who hurt others are the ones with the best imagination,” Rebecka said.

Osama

Lavie Tidhar, 2011

(January 2013)

Can a something be both tender and hardboiled concurrently? Melancholy Noir? Wistful Pulp? Clearly I think it can, else I wouldn’t be asking the question. Osama is both, all of these and more; but ultimately it’s just singularly brilliant.

The Best of All Possible Worlds

I recant. I repent. I confess. Forgive me father for I have sinned. Nevermore shall I blaspheme and take the name of AKB48 in vain. I am converted. The scales have been lifted and on the road to Akihabara mine eyes have beheld the glory, the fury, the majesty and the triumph that is the blistering satire of AKB. I was blind but now I see. The Lord is Light and She has illuminated my ere wretched path with the wisdom and the knowledge that, in a land justly unheralded for its political lampoonery, AKB48 are perhaps the most ambitiously conceived, expertly executed, and insidiously subversive commentary on the body politic ever unleashed on an unexpecting world.

Work with me on this.

Brasyl

Ian McDonald, 2007
(June 2012)

A real curate’s egg, this one. I read River of Gods a while back and it was exceptional. Exotic, exciting, excessive (in a good way) and other words beginning with ‘ex’. This was less captivating. Not bad, but I ended up reading it in parallel with another book which is something I very rarely do; I usually prefer focusing on one thing at a time.

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

and, Through the Looking Glass And What Alice Found There

Lewis Carroll, 1865, 1872

(May 2012)

Despite Jabberwocky being one of only two poems I can recite from memory, I only read (and saw) the Disneyfied version of Alice when I was younger, but bought the ‘real’ thing in uni. I was toying with an idea for my thesis – trying to extend the Red Queen hypothesis on dynamic equilibrium beyond biological evolution to cover social systems as well. My tutor, with depressing ease, convinced me that my ideas were a little too vague to base a research project on, and the book’s been on the shelf ever since.