Too Like the Lightning

Ada Palmer, 2016

(January 2017)

I enjoyed this book. In places I enjoyed it very much indeed. Please bear that in mind, as I’m going to spend most of what follows talking about its many faults. Though to be honest, they’re all really manifestations of one fault. It is all, appropriately enough, just a little too… a little too.

The Just City

Jo Walton, 2015

(March 2016)

  

A raging worldbuilding nerdgasm in all its eruptive glory.

  

Strange Weather in Tokyo

Hiromi Kawakami, 2001 [Allison Markin Powell, 2013]

(November 2015)

Look, I’m as hacked off as the next man by the tendency for every Japanese author translated into English to get compared to Haruki Murakami, as if he’s the only author from the 10^th most populous country in the world. Here, however, I think it might actually be justified.

Out, Damned Spot

Or, Believing Your Own Bullshit

So this is going to be about the Comfort Women (again). And as an added topical extra I’m also going to be talking about #gamergate. If you find either of those two terms meaningful and want to back out now I wouldn’t blame you in the slightest.

Consider Phlebas

Iain M. Banks, 1987

(January 2014)

  

And so the Culture re-read begins. It’s got to have been at least a decade since I read the earlier ones and in going through this I was pleasantly surprised at how much of it I’d forgotten. Obviously certain key facts about the ending remain, which made it a slightly difference experience from the first time, but the actual details were happily and surprisingly fresh.

S.

J.J. Abrams and Doug Dorst, 2013

(November 2013)

I know I’ve riffed on the whole ‘experimental books that are really just kids’ books with bigger words’ angle only recently, but I’m afraid it’s something I must revisit here. For all the comparisons being made between S., House of Leaves, and Pale Fire, I’m afraid it’s most obvious literary antecedent is The Jolly Postman. I fucking loved that book.

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?

Privates on Parade

My new base school has relatively modern buildings. Because of this, the men’s toilets don’t have manual flushes, but are all on motion sensors. Nothing so great there, you might think; this is Japan. In many Japanese homes and hotels it’s not uncommon to find toilets with controls so complex they would make even Data or Sulu give up hope and just use their shirt-tails instead.

Nailing Screws

Or screwing nails, one of the two. How we nail the screw which screws the… Fuck it, you know the drill by now.

Know the drill. God I’m a funny bastard.

The Horror, The Horror

I’ve never really been a huge fan of Horror. I saw one of the Child’s Play movies when I was obviously too young, and I can’t really remember much of it, except Dad stopping it halfway through and taking it back to the video rental shop. I think I’d convinced him that it was a cartoon, based on the picture of Chucky on the box, and in his mind cartoons were inherently childish. An animatronic doll possessed by the soul of a dead serial-killer probably wasn’t what he was expecting for his Sunday evening family viewing. Narnia it was not.

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!

What are you doing?

Departures

We went back to the UK this summer. Despite my wife and I being together for over eight years now, we’d never actually flown together before; a result of spending much of that time on different continents, so one of us was always flying to meet the other. We’ve had many tearful goodbyes and many joyous reunions, but we’ve never actually done the full day’s trek together - from our regional city in Japan to my hometown in rural England, or vice-versa. Door-to-door it takes pretty much 24 hours.

Given that the real point of this trip was for our son to meet my side of the family, we had to bring him along as well. This complicated matters, but not all that much, to be honest. I won’t go into all the details, except to say that Vantaa airport in Helsinki is lovely; clean, decent enough food, and compact. This last is an important consideration when you’ve got a tight transfer (‘You should see a doctor about that,’ etc). Charles De Gaulle, by comparison, is awful.

Manchester airport though, Manchester airport…