Imaginary Cities

Darran Anderson, 2015

(July 2016)

Magisterial, I believe is the word.

City of the Iron Fish

Simon Ings, 1994

(June 2016)

Gothic New Weird with a healthy dollop of bildungsroman and one of the most gratingly pretentious protagonists I’ve encountered since Catcher in the Rye. In fact, I’m not even sure it is a bildungsroman, but there’s such a strong connection in my mind between the annoyance I feel for both Holden Caulfield and Thomas Kemp, the narrator of this book, that maybe I’m just collapsing them both in to each other.

The Book of the City of Ladies

Christine de Pizan, 1405 [Rosalind Brown-Grant, 1999]

(May 2016)

  

There is a woman who occasionally crops up on my twitter feed who spends a large part of her time responding to men with anime avatars asking “BUT WHAT HAVE THE WOMENZ EVER DONE FOR US?” by sending them explicit lists of accomplished women in science, politics, the arts, and such like. A service that is both valuable and depressing in its necessity. This book is basically the mediaeval version of that, made even more depressing because apparently we’re still having these arguments more than half a millennium later. Plus ça change.

Triumph of the City

Edward Glaeser, 2011

(May 2016)

Hmmm. On the one hand, yes. On the other, very much no.

City of the Beasts

Isabel Allende, 2002 [Margaret Sayers Peden, 2002]

(May 2016)

Back when I was a teenager and still took rugby, or indeed anything other than childcare and the concomitant challenge of trying to fashion some sort of ‘me time’, seriously, the two best clubs in England were Bath and Leicester. Growing up near the latter, they were, and still are, my team of choice (indeed, I was briefly a member of their protozoan academy, in the brave new world of those immediately post-amateurism days). While the Underwood brothers were clearly the star attractions, the members of the ABC club (the world being neither brave nor as yet new enough to convince the Tigers to adopt numbers instead of letters on their shirts) were the kind of club stalwarts who inevitably rose to fan favourite status, and of whom none were more stalwarty than Darren ‘The Baron’ Garforth.

Love in a Fallen City

Eileen Chang, 1943-47 [Karen S. Kingsbury, 2007]

(April, 2016)

  

I read this straight after Occupied City, and to be honest I was expecting to get a bit more of a compare/contrast thing going. That I’m finding that harder to do than expected is, I guess, a function of the luxuries afforded by both time and distance, as well not living under an occupying military administration.

City of Stairs

Robert Jackson Bennett, 2014

(March 2016)

In which I finally get around to one of last-year-but-one’s must-read books and it is every bit as good as everyone says it is. In lieu of anything approaching a reasonable amount of time to compose my thoughts, I’ll instead remind you all of the impromptu dance contest Pep and I held a few months back, and merely state that I concur with pretty much everything my more erudite and better informed friend had to say.

Occupied City

David Peace, 2009

(April 2016)

The sequel to Tokyo Year Zero, and apparently the middle volume of a planned ‘Tokyo Trilogy’, though given the continued absence of a final volume it’s probably better if we don’t hold our collective breath on that score.

Open City

Teju Cole, 2011

(March 2016)

A deceptively quick read, for all that this is a book that could never be accused of wearing its pretensions lightly. Never mind the quality, feel the research.

A Different City

Tanith Lee, 2015

(March 2016)

This was my first encounter with the extensive works of Tanith Lee, and was a slightly contradictory experience. There was a lot to like about the three slices of gothic horror in this slim volume, but by many of the metrics I’d usually apply when deciding if a book’s ‘good’ or not it comes up short. Of course, this also begs the question as to how reliable those metrics are.