Central Station

Lavie Tidhar, 2016

(June 2017)

  

Central Station is a mid-future cyberpunkesque novel comprised of a dozen or so chapters, many of which were originally published as stand-alone short stories. They’ve obviously been reworked fairly carefully (or, more generously, were originally written with a very clear eye on the big picture), and for all that there is something of a central plot running through the book, its focus is very much on these interlinked vignettes exploring migration and belonging, faith and memory.

Random Acts of Senseless Violence

Jack Womack, 1993

(June 2015)

  

Holy fuck. I mean seriously: holy fuck. You know the cliché about stuff ‘making the hair on the back of your neck stand up’? Actually happened. Genuine shivers down the spine. Two-hundred-and-twenty pages of agonizingly honed build-up driven into the base of your skull through the knife-point of the final three paragraphs, with all the brutal precision of a neurosurgeon wielding a prison shank.

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.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

An Inquiry into Values

Robert M. Pirsig, 1974

(September 2013)

One of things I find myself doing, as a result of blogging about every book I read, is picking out quotations I think I could use here. It’s not obsessive, but every so often something will jump out at me as illustrative, or just interesting, and I’ll put it in the final post. After about five pages of Zen… I noticed one. Then after a few more pages another presented itself, then after a few more pages another, and another, and another.

Quite a quotable book then, and definitely relevant to our (by which I mean my) areas of interest. But there are just too many of the damn things. It’s packed too tight to unwrap in a single blogpost and the connections to other stuff I think and have thought shoot out like a web spun by a spider on speed. So I’m not going to quote anything from the book at all. No. I’m going to quote Donald Rumsfeld instead.

The Testament of Jessie Lamb

Jane Rogers, 2011

(March 2012)

So after harping on about the misogyny in the last book I read, this one opens with a teenage girl being kept prisoner in a spare room, with bicycle locks around her ankles and only a bucket to piss in. Plus ça change.

  

First

All the others were just practice.

7 Deadly Virtues – Interlude

A Scandal in Suburbia

Doraemon has a magic pocket. That’s a pretty useful power to have. Anpanman has an edible face, which is possibly less so. Still, it’s better than your resident gaijin’s superpower which is, what exactly? Being really tall? Having a small face (which somehow still manages to contain big eyes and a tall nose)? Just being different?

It’s the last one, I think, and as powers go it’s pretty crappy. It’s like the power of a lie-detector test or a placebo, in that it only works if people believe it works.

I do have a wicked cool secret identity though