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.

Ninefox Gambit

Yoon Ha Lee, 2016

(January 2017)

I think I’m becoming more nostalgic in my middle age, and especially so when it comes to my reading. More and more I find myself harking back to the things I read as young(er) adult, not so much conceptually but emotionally. Part of this is the natural passage of time and experience, I think, but the more comparators you have for something the harder it becomes for it to raise its head above the herd.

Ammonite

Nicola Griffiths, 1992

(January 2017)

Space opera of a sort, despite the fact very little of it takes place in space. Marge Taishan is an anthropologist charged with investigating the planet Jeep. Unknown generations ago it was settled by humans, whose society has long since reverted to pre-industrial modes. An attempt at recolonization failed once it was discovered that he planet harbours a virus which kills all men (and a good proportion of women), leaving the planet isolated and the survivors quarantined.

Near to the Wild Heart

Clarice Lispector, 1943 [Alison Entrekin, 2012]

(January 2017)

A stunning and mercifully short journey through the inner lives of a young woman in inter-war Brazil. Lispecter's works have had a bit of a renaissance in recent years (as far as I'm aware, at least), and I can see why. The prose switches seamlessly between mimesis and stream-of-consciousness, as the orphan Joanna creates her own worlds as she passes through being raised by intolerant relatives and a loveless marriage to the unfaithful Otávio. I say 'mercifully short' because the effect of this constant tumult is as exhausting as it is captivating, and in the perfect marriage of form and function the reader can occasionly become as exasperated with Joanna as the characters around her; god help me, but I genuinely laughed out loud at some of Otávio's more exasperated interjections. Excellent stuff.

  

Death Sentences

Kawamata Chiaki, 1984 [Thomas Lamarre & Kazuko Y. Behrens, 2012]

(January 2017)

Death Sentences is, at least as far as plot goes, about a poem that causes anyone to read it to die. The blurb suggests that this conceit is shared with The Ring, but for me the obvious comparator is Monty Python:

Kolymsky Heights

Lionel Davidson, 1994

(January 2017)

A surprisingly nostalgic reading experience, this. A ripsnorting thriller praised by a number of authors I like (Philip Pullman, Alastair Reynolds) and which, despite being set in the early 1990’s, has a distinctly Cold War feel that threw me right back into the Tom Clancy novels I ploughed through as a teenager. It’s also utterly ridiculous.

Sky Burial

Xinran, 2004 [Julia Lovell & Esther Tyldesley, 2004]

(January 2017)

This is one of those ‘non-fiction’ books, like, say, In Cold Blood or Tokyo Vice, wherein you’re not quite sure exactly how much trust you should place in the ‘non’.

Half-Resurrection Blues

Daniel José Older, 2015

(January 2017)

Everyone wants coffee except Dr. Tijou, who prefers tea.

I'm struggling to explain why I found this line is so funny, but it provided my first book driven LOL of 2017: a good three or four minutes of guffawing about tea. I am, however, going to give an explanation a bash, because if nothing else it's going to be a good way of working through exactly why I enjoyed this book so much.

Signal to Noise

Silvia Moreno-Garcia, 2015

(January 2017)

  

The first book of the year gets 2017 off to a mixed start. On the one hand, this garnered a fair amount of praise and I can see why: it's well written, thoughtfully plotted, and the characters are only too believable. But on the other, it also served to remind me that coming of age stories really aren't my cup of tea at all. If I were less of a middle-aged curmudgeon I'd be able to praise this for more that its technical execution, but as it stands I'll just say that if pig-headed and self-obsessed teenagers are what floats your boat then you could do a lot worse than this.

Count Zero

William Gibson, 1986

(December 2016)

So I finally acquired a replacement copy of this, and it was good. In the light of having read most of Gibson’s other stuff it was a little underwhelming, to be honest, in that it’s a very, very obvious bridge between Neuromancer (the plot’s essentially a carbon copy) and the Bigend ‘cool hunting’ books, and it doesn’t manage to execute either aspect quite as well as those it links together. Judged as a stand-alone work, however, it’s a very slickly executed piece of cyberpunk, which is only to be expected, I suppose.