Learning to Paint and Draw by Hazel Harrison

As a newbie kind of lost in the world of materials and techniques but desperate to express myself this is a brilliant book, covering briefly many aspects of drawing and painting, using watercolours, pastels, graphite and coloured pencils, oils and acrylics, and pastels.  A really good starting point.

Seriously Good!  Gluten-Free Baking by Phil Vickery

I have just had two massive slices of Vickery's Apple Pudding Cake with Cider Topping from page 86 of this wonderful book.  Being gluten intolerant can be a chore but finally I have recipes for much missed beloved goodies such as flatbread, yorkshire pudding and the five recipes I've tried so far really do work and are wonderful.

I only have two issues.  Firstly, Vickery uses a food processor a lot, which is fine for those who can afford it but for those with only at most an electric mixer had mixing alternatives would help.

Secondly I had real problems making the wonderful tasting Bonfire Parkin with Ginger Icing because I, like many that I know of, am intolerant to the gluten in oats, for me it is my most pernicious ingredient.  I tried using quinoa to replace the oatmeal but it didn't really work, I may try polenta next time.  The book is called 'gluten free' so it should contain only gluten free ingredients.

But in general, this book is great, a little effort and you don't need to rely on the supermarket and health food shop gluten free aisles. 

The Passage by Justin Cronin

6 year old Amy is abandoned by her desperate mother with a group of nuns after killing a trick who was taking her to a fraternity house.  Deep in the mountains of Colorado army scientists are trialling use of a virus found in the jungles of Columbia to create supersoldiers of immense strength, bloodthirstiness and longevity, vampires in all but name.  After 12 subjects the scientists want a new subject, they want Amy, and after treatment she becomes something new.  Inevitably the worst happens, the 12 get loose and turn everyone they bite into one of them, 'smokes', 'virals' or 'dracs'.  The United States turns apocalyptic.

Move forward a century, Peter lives in a fortified community, he has never seen the stars because at night floodlights are switched on all round the perimiter to keep the smokes at bay.  He is one of the Watch and is waiting for the return of his brother, taken up by the smokes on a visit to the generators.  For some reason, the smokes always come home.

This could have been a brilliant dystopia, it has elements of Shymalan's 'The Village' and good post apocalyptic novels but the characters aren't well deliniated, apart from Amy and ex-nun Lacey they all blended together for me.  There are too many cliches, vampires rule the world and humans become just meat, mad scientists ruin the world, etc etc.  Disappointing ultimately

The Girl at the Lion D'Or by Sebastian Faulks

A beautifully understated book, one reviewer described it as being like a Vermeer and it is very painterly with carefully deliniated characters.  The scene is the small French village of Janvilliers, the time between the First and Second World Wars, and a young girl Anne come to take up the post of waitress at the hotel Lion D'Or traumatised by a loss unidentified until later on in the narrative but inextricably linked to the horrors of World War I and the slaughter of Verdun.  She becomes drawn to Hartmann, recently married veteran living in his father's old manor house outside the town, and a gentle drama is drawn out backlit by the drama of France's road to Vichy and World War II, the quiet suffering of the millions of men that did make it back from the front and the memory of those who did not.

Clive Barker - The Dark Fantastic by Douglas E Winter

It took me I think three goes to read this weighty book but it was very much worth it.  This is not the usual lightweight biography of an author focusing on his or her life and the expression of themes from it in their work, this is academic in style and prose, a deep introspection into the life and literary and artistic work of an extremely complex individual, Clive Barker, perhaps most famously the creator of Hellraiser, the Books of Blood and Candyman.  Barker's work defies categorisation, straying at times into science fiction, other times fantasy and horror but always moving forwards and onwards, a mysticism grounded firmly in the material and earthly, sensual and sexual and often disturbing.  Winter uses both an erudite critique of each of Barker's major film, book and art works to date and his own correspondence with Barker to create something that does what a good biography should, sends you straight back to the books.

The Dream Merchant by Isabel Hoving

Joshua Cope is a very ordinary 11 year old boy, not particulary talented, unlike his best friend Baz who is an amazing drummer.  He has a dysfunctional but not particularly so family, he lives with his mother Mo and her partner and visits his father at the weekends.  His older sister is mildly annoying, as is her boyfriend who is always asking to see Joshua's collection.  Which is where what Joshua considers his own talent comes in, he's a good thief.  Late at night the phone rings, but none of the others in the house wakes and eventually he answers.  A strange man on the phone, he hangs up, but the calls keep coming and so begins an amazing tale of dream worlds, lost twins, broken families and high adventure rooted in the emotional landscape of four young children.  Absolutely brilliant.

A Big Little Life by Dean Koontz

Koontz's biography of Trixie, the golden retriever who changed his and his wife Gerda's lives from a work dedicated childless (but happily so) couple and turned them on to an awareness of the joyfulness with which an extraordinary dog such as Trixie meets and experiences every day.  There is no doubt that Trixie is extraordinary but it is also true that the revelations she brings to Koontz are those that experiencing life through the lives of any pet, or indeed, of a life lived in the moment, can and do bring.  Yes, it is overly sentimental and bucolic but sometimes that isn't a bad thing

The Vision by Dean Koontz

This was better than the previous version, The Face of Fear.  Here the clarivoyant is Mary Bergen, who works with police to help them solve cases.  She is accompanied by her brother and her husband, who come increasingly into conflict as to how to help her handle the emotional fallout of her work.  But now she is pursuing a serial killer and her visions have a new intensity, she is experiencing the pain of the victims and something seems to be pursuing her, something to do with the trauma buried in her past when she was sexually assaulted by the family gardener.  Gripping and much better in terms of focus and pacing, but for me the red herring was too obvious.

The Hungry Ghosts by Anne Berry

The extraordinary story of two girls, Alice, youngest daughter of a member of the colonial Hong Kong British government and the wife who only wanted to provide her husband with her son, and the girl who haunts her, the ghost of Lin Shui, a young virgin raped and murdered by a Japanese occupying solider during World War II 20 years earlier.  Alice is a ghost to her own family, unwanted by her mother, adored by her father, largely absent and unable to protect her from the increasing hostilities of her sisters and mother, and held accountable for the action of Lin who is drawn to Alice's life force and loneliness and moves and destroys objects around her as a misplaced act of affection.  As colonial rule in Hong Kong is rent asunder by civil unrest and Alice and her family are exiled to England, a country that has never been home to them, Alice's entourage is swollen by further restless spirits.  Berry handles the entire narrative beautifully, even Alice's monstrous mother is comprehendable in her own pain and reasons for the mental and physical torture she deals out to Alice, an amazing book of aching sadness.

The Face of Fear by Dean R Koontz

Graham Harris, psychic and one time climber, witnesses in absentium the brutal murder of exotic dancer Edna Mowry by the Butcher, a serial killer rapidly reducing the citizens of New York City to a state of terror, but in doing so he sets the Butcher on his own tail.  A good pursuit story that ends a little improbably but entertaingly in Harris and his girlfriend abseiling down the outside of an office building from the fortieth floor.

Trapped by Dean R Koontz and Ed Gorman

Based on one of Koontz's short stories this Gorman graphic novel has good ideas, lab rats that have been bred to enhance their intelligence and as a result are lethal, a threatened child and mother isolated on a farm, but without Koontz's extended prose there is no character development and it's not very good.

The Eyes of Darkness by Dean R Koontz

Tina Evans is an ex Vegas showgirl opening her first major show on the Strip and slowly coming to terms with the death a year earlier of her 12 year old son in a terrible crash with his scout troop in the high Sierra mountains, a crash that left his body so mangled she and her husband were advised to have a closed coffin ceremony.  Tina is now living alone, Danny's room remains unchanged and one night she hears a heavy thump from his room.  She finds Danny's blackboard overturned, on it are written two words: Not Dead.  Initially Tina believes it's a sick joke perpetrated by her ex-husband, but as the incidents increase in intensity and complexity, always saying that Danny is not dead, is in pain and needs her, she finally becomes convinced Danny is indeed not dead.  With attorney she heads for the mountains and, as often with Koontz, the answer lies underground in a secret lab where decisions are made by evil men for the 'good of the nation'.   Although this is an early Koontz novel familiar themes of a hostile government, the propensity of evil to thrive in secrecy and the benevolence of mysterious forces are already here.

The Funhouse by Dean R Koontz

This early Koontz story was written under one of his pseudonym Owen West and is a novelisation of a screenplay, which explains much of its lack of development.  The characters are very two dimensional and sympathy is difficult to find for them.  Amy Harper is a confused teenager, the daugther of a fanatical catholic alcoholic, Amy is torn between feeling that she is wicked and that her mother is the one that is not normal.  Her brother Joey is terrified by her mother's night time visits to his bedside when she belives him asleep and whispers that she is afraid that he is truly evil beneath the skin.  Their father is largely absent and ineffectual.  But Ellen hides a secret.  She is also the daughter of a fanatical catholic mother and when she was a teenager ran away to the fair to live a carny life.  She bore her handsome husband a child but he hid a terrible past of child neglect, self blame for the death of his mother and siblings in a fire, and turn to Satanism.  The child is a terrifying freak and Ellen kills the child, is beaten and left with the promise that her husband will find her and kill her children.  Obviously the fair finally comes to town and Amy and Joey end up in the Funhouse where their mother's secret almost kills them, but they escape.  Very black and white, even down to Amy's best friend who is heavily promiscous and she, her randy date and Amy's equally frisky partner, who have just agreed to a threesome, die in true Scream style.  This did, however, lay the groundwork for Twilight Eyes which is a much better version, although women still idealised in that too

Night Chills by Dean R Koontz

Koontz opens his book with two strange dangerous looking men emptying some kind of chemical into a reservoir in the isolated logging town of Black River, they return to their motel, one drives off, one stays in the motel, both receive odd phone calls about locks and keys.  One drives himself into a wall at 100 mph, the other opens his femoral and ulnar arteries with a razor and bleeds out in the motel bath.  All over Black River people experience night terrors, and then to the town comes the sinister Ogden Salsbury, a pathological misogynist genius with a terrible hold over the people of the town.  Widowed Paul Annendale comes to the town to camp with his two children Rya and Mark and is connected, too coincidentally, with the only two people not to suffer night terrors, his girlfriend Jenny and her father Sam, the only person who can decipher the events unfolding in Black River.  A cracking start to a good story by Koontz, but it does creak a bit in places and the bad guys are too simply drawn.

Demon Seed by Dean Koontz

Interesting book about the dangers of AI, about a computer that is so intelligent it develops consciousness and desire.  Most of all it wants embodiement and invades the automated systems of beautiful self isolated Susan Harris.  Chilling, but not his best.

500 Essential Graphic Novels by Gene Kannenberg

A definitive book that I will buy for myself and keep and dip into whenever I want inspiration for what graphic novels and comics to order from the library and buy for myself, a brilliant selection divided into easy to use categories with a simple scoring and age suitability system.

Twelfth Night Manga Shakespeare by Nana Li

Well illustrated and using the conventions of Manga expression to bring out the nuances in Shakespeare's text this is a great introduction to Twelfth Night for anyone who finds reading a play text difficult.  Li brings to life the comedy of the play, graphically showing the anarchic sense of fun that was current in Shakespeare's time.   The drawing is achingly beautiful, I'm not sure who I'm more in love with!

Great British Comics by Paul Gravett & Peter Stanbury

A lovely coffee table book celebrating British comics from their inception to the present day.

Have You Any Wool: The Creative Use of Yarn by Jan Messent

Good and inspirational but quite dated, although some great ideas about using crochet, knitting, needleweaving and wool wrapping to create.

Forbidden by Tabitha Suzuma

Lochan is an unwanted child, his mother married her father after she fell pregnant and had four more children to please his father before he abandoned them and left for America to have a new family.  As she didn't want her family Lochan's mother takes no responsiblity for them, acting as if they don't exist, spending her time money on clothes to impress her latest boyfriend rather than on food and clothes for her children.  17 year old Lochan is highly intelligent and deeply introverted, opening up only to his beautiful sister Maya, 13 months younger than him, his brothers Kit, an angry mosher rapidly getting in with the wrong crowd, 8 year old Tiffin, a complete tyke with genius for football and the baby, 5 year old Willa, an angelic faced cherub with a talent for art and a quiet goodness.  Out of this horror of neglect and emotional abuse comes love as Lochan and Maya quietly and desperately parent their younger siblings.  Suzuma deliniates each character perfectly and this is one of the few books lately I have actively cried while reading, so very very sad.

The Best of Battle by Titan Books

A great selection from the Battle war comic, including a wide range of different types of comic, World War I, II and Vietnam along with some from the German and Russian viewpoints.

Chase by Dean Koontz

Great vintage Koontz, tightly plotted, full of twists and well written. Ben Chase is a Vietnam vet, feted as a war hero but fighting traumatic memories with drink and social withdrawal.  When he stops at the local lovers' lane he cannot but intervene when he hears screaming, and disturbs a vicious attack on two teenagers, the boy dead from multiple stab wounds, the girl curled with fear in the other seat.  But the killer has carefully selected the couple, does not appreciate Chase's intervention and starts making threatening phone calls naming himself only as 'Judge'.  The killer makes it clear that he knows a lots about Chase's past and is prepared to hurt him and those he cares about to punish him.  The police don't believe Chase, believing him delusional after consulting with his psychiatrist, and when Chase meets the beautiful Glenda and suddenly has a lot more to lose he turns the tables and the hunted becomes the hunter.  Really good, satisfying and makes you think about judgement and the lack of right we have to judge others.

Twilight Eyes by Dean Koontz

This is not one of Koontz's best books, there are jarring cliches and technical failings throughout but that doesn't matter.  Twilight Eyes is a nostalgic book, set in 1964, the year of Kennedy's death, and has a haunting melancholy for a lost time of certainties, a world beginning to fracture with the Bay of Pigs.  Carl Stanfeuss is a 17 year old boy on the run, going by the name of Slim MacKenzie because he killed his Uncle Denton with an axe, believing he could see through his Uncle's skin and see inside another evil creature, that he calls goblins.  He breaks into the Sombra Brothers Carnival at night looking for work, and encounters another goblin sabotaging the dodgems, he kills this creature but when he comes to dispose of it the creature is gone.  He joins the carnival as a caller and falls in love with his boss, and finds he is not alone in seeing the creatures that pass for human.  As the Carnival travels to the mountain town of Yontsdown Slim finds himself in a nightmare world where the figures of authority, police, judges, clergy, are goblins and that something terrible is being created.
I love this book because of its place in my own personal history, I read it as a teenager and it soothed the sorrow inside of me.  I may not have been aware of goblins as such, but they can be read as a metaphor for the evil within humanity and its potential for horror, balanced against the courage of people who cannot just stand by and let even unkindness be the dominant force in the world, let alone terror and pain and fear.  It set me on a hard but worthwhile path, that standing by is not an option, however tempting that may be.

Re-gifters by Mike Carey, Sonny Lieu and Marc Hempel (Minx)

Korean American teenager Dik Seong Jen, Jen to her family, Dixie to her friends, lives in LA and has a talent for Korean martial art hapkido, until she is distracted by a crush on her school and hapkido classmate surfer boy Adam.  A great story of how Dixie comes to terms with her feelings, her sense of identity and has a great feel good happy ending.

Seeing Things by Oliver Postgate

Postgate was the wonderful man who made my childhood a place of magic and safety with Bagpuss and this autobiography is just wonderful.  Postgate was an extraordinary man, born to socialist parents whom he called by their first names and who worked from first principles without any engineering expertise to solve any mechanical problem, ending up in animation via a wide range of jobs from stage, farm and charity work in post war Germany.  He speaks of his worlds as something that came through him rather than from his imagination, as having a life outwith him, and his philosophies had a lot to teach me.

The Spider Moon by Kate Brown, Book 1

Fascinating and beautifully drawn fantasy but much too short!  Bekka is a young girl, a diver with webbed hands who collects oil-bearing sea urchins which her community trade with the bird folk, the ruling elite.  When her mother, a village elder, is arrested for failing to trade with the oil company Bekka and her mentor Kaye go after them. 

Gemma Bovery by Posy Simmonds

Narrated by Raymond Joubert, baker in the little Normandy village of Bailleville, this is the story of Gemma Bovery, her affairs, Joubert's obsession with her and the parallels between her life and that of Flaubert's eponymous Madame Bouvery.  An acute observation of the gulf between what we think we want and what actually makes us happy and brilliantly illustrated.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Steig Larsson (AUDIO)

AZ: "Forty years ago, Harriet Vanger disappeared from a family gathering on the island owned and inhabited by the powerful Vanger clan. Her body was never found, yet her uncle is convinced it was murder - and that the killer is a member of his own tightly knit but dysfunctional family. He employs disgraced financial journalist Mikael Blomkvist and the tattooed, truculent computer hacker Lisbeth Salander to investigate. When the pair link Harriet's disappearance to a number of grotesque murders from forty years ago, they begin to unravel a dark and appalling family history. But the Vangers are a secretive clan, and Blomkvist and Salander are about to find out just how far they are prepared to go to protect themselves".  Really well written and atmospheric, evocative of the island nature of Sweden

The Wild Things by Dave Eggers

 

Eggers imagines a full length story based around the wonderful childhood companion that was Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are.  Like many young boys, Max is imaginative, energetic and misunderstood by his teen sister and hard working mother, and after a confrontation with his mother's boyfriend runs away into the woods.  There he finds a boat on the lake shore and sails away 'in and out of days and nights' until he reaches the fantastic island where the Wild Things live, massive savage beasts that change their mind about eating him and instead crown him as their king.  But kingship and responsibility for these great sad creatures with their complicated relationships to each other becomes increasingly fraught.  Full of longing and a plea to remember what children are, and to let them be lost in their wild world.

Sad Cypress by Agatha Christie

Poirot murder mystery listened to on BBC iPlayer.  Elinor Carlisle stands in the dock accused of the deaths of her aunt and the lodge man's daughter Mary Gerrard, the only one with clear motive and opportunity, but Poirot reveals the unseen

Lowboy by John Wray. 

William Heller, aka Lowboy, is on the run after breaking his conditions of release from Bellevue psychiatric hospital.  He travels the subways and subterranean tunnels, off his medication and becoming increasingly psychotic as his paranoid schizophrenia takes over tipping the human need to find patterns in the chaotic into madness.  Wray writes the novel from two points of view, Lowboy's increasingly disturbed perspective and that of Detective Ali Lateef, searching for Lowboy with his mother Yda, aka Violet, their tale too becoming unspooled as Lateef reflects on his altered identity, name changed when his father converted to Islam, and that of Yda.  Very good, but I prefer Tabitha Suzuma

Alice in Sunderland: An Entertainment by Bryan Talbot

A lengthy comic version history of Sunderland framed through the experience of a single slob like audience man making up the entire audience of a surreal production at the Sunderland Empire.  Interesting but I did feel like I was just being lectured to, and found the repeating mentions of Lewis Carrol / Dogson's links to Sunderland and the life of Alice Liddel a little repetitive.  Learned lots though

Grandville by Bryan Talbot

One of my favourite graphic novels of all time is Talbot's harrowing tale of homelessness, child abuse and Beatrix Potter, One Bad Rat. Grandville doesn't disappoint, an amazing tale of a future with reference ton the works of French charicaturist JJ Gerard, science fiction illustrator Robida, Conan Doyle, Rupert the Bear, Tarantino and Herge.  In this dystopia Napoleon won, the French rule Britain as a backwater annex and the 'people' have mostly animal heads, with the exception of a few humans, an underclass known as 'dough faces'.  The badger faced Detective Inspector Lebrock of Scotland Yard stars with his Watson type Detective Ratzi, a return to Talbot to his love of the intelligence and talent of rats as seen in One Bad Rat.  I loved the use of animals to denote character or the surface appearance of, and his use of Snowy Milou is genius, particularly his opium addled dreams in the Blue Lotus house of Tintin's trip to the Moon.

The Hell of it All by Charlie Brooker

Wonderful to find someone so misanthropic he makes me look permanently cheerful.  This is a collection of Brooker's columns for The Guardian including my favourite, a piece so bleak (on the subject of why everyone doesn't just go and commit suicide) that the paper wouldn't print it on a Monday morning and he wrote on on arachnophobia instead. 

Crimespotting: An Edinburgh Crime Collection by One City Trust

Great little collection of crime stories based in Edinburgh written by a variety of writers, some such as Lin Anderson and Ian Rankin known for their crime fiction, others such as Margaret Atwood and James Robertson less so.  For me, the best definately saved til last with AL Kennedy's contribution although the quality of Rankin's piece was superb.

Breathless by Dean Koontz

Grady Adams and his Irish wolfhound Merlin have an encounter with two large white creatures which bear no resemblance to any creature seen before on earth.  Vet Cammy Rivers witnesseses a room of traumatised puppy farm retrievers spontaneously become still and then release all their suffering and become like normal happy dogs, and a field full of horses and assorted ducks, goats and other animals stand fixed in one direction for 15 minutes and then revert to normal.  Henry Rouvray brings death to the house of his twin Jim and his wife Nora but it is soon him that is being stalked.  Good but ends far too quickly, feels like the issues contained within with regard to the subject of evolution are not properly worked through.

HG Wells The Science Fiction Volume 1

Absolutely fascinating, collection of four of HG Wells' novels, great to read and see how someone from over 100 years ago saw the future.

The Time Machine. 
As with most of Wells' stories, this is in Victorian fashion a story within a narrative.  The story is narrated in first person by a unnamed narrator who relates the adventures related to him by the Time Traveller who builds a device that takes him into the far future to witness the destiny of humanity, who have devolved into two separate species, the white skinned fearsome Morlocks who live underground, are photosensitive and who feed on the feckless beautiful Eloi, who lead a blithe daylight existence on the surface.  An imaginative reflection on the future of our species based on the contemporary split of society into the indolent elite and the work burdened proletariat.

The Island of Doctor Moreau
The narrative of Charles Prendick, gentleman and scholar, is prefaced by an introduction stating that Prendick's written account follows but that the said gentleman subsequently lost his memory and did not remember the events given in his written account, and that the narrative has been released after his death by his nephew, again giving it the unreliability of a second hand account whilst also allowing it to be presented as a document of curiosity, something present writers don't often do and which adds a fascinating layer.
Prendick is shipwrecked and picked up by the Ipecacuanha where he meets Montogomery, a strange man accompanying a menagerie including a puma, several large fierce dogs and rabbits on their journey to an unidentified island.  Prendick is thrown off the ship by the captain at the island and is allowed ashore to meet Dr Moreau.  The horror of the island is slowly unfolded via Prendick's first person narrative, that Moreau cuts up animals and makes them into human-like beasts which haunt the island and in the end kill Moreau and revert to the beastial natures of themselves.  Truly chilling

The War of the Worlds
Just as thrilling as when it was written, but also really interesting to reflect on Wells' narrative of how the coming of the Martians would have affected people at the turn of the century and how things had to change for Steven Spielberg's 2005 film.  In Wells' book the news of the coming of the aliens travels slowly and the rise of the tripods comes as a shock to a society unused to horror and human slaughter, in the film the news and panic travels instantaneously via the mass media and the horror is communicated via the destruction of the innocence of Dakota Fanning's slow withdrawl from screaming hysteria into catatonic silence.

The First Men in the Moon
I hadn't heard of this one before and I think it's overlooked, very brilliant thinking and again a reflection on the nature of society.  Mr Bedford, a gentleman with debts who has fled to the south coast to escape bankruptcy and to write a play which he hopes will restore his finances, meets Mr Cavor, a brilliant scientist who is working on a substance that will block all forces, including gravity.  The difference between the purity of Cavor's scientific mind and Bedford's avoricious nature are revealed by Bedford's quick realisation of the potential of a substance that can block even gravity but after Cavor succeeds in his creation and almost destroys the entire atmosphere of planet earth he instead creates a spaceship which via anti gravity takes Cavor and Bedford to the moon.  Here Wells' imagination creates a fascinating world where the answer to the Moon's low night temperatures and airlessness is a society that lives beneath the surface in caverns stretching down to a core lunar sea.  These Selentites shepherd the wonderful Mooncalfs on the surface during the lunar day and return at night, and each Selenites is individually physically and mentally tuned to their individual purpose, books replaced by Selenites with enormous brains that are repositories for knowledge, workers with great arms designed for their individual job, presided over by the Grand Lunar.  Wells is pretty damning about human nature, Bedford's bloody humanity comes to the surface and he kills a number of the Selenites and escapes back to earth, but Cavor is recaptured and manages to communicate his experiences of Selenite society to earth by radio before making his own fatal mistake. 

Leviathan by Paul Auster

Auster's book is written from the point of view of Peter Aaron, writer, and is his biography of his friend, political writer turned activist, Benjamin Sachs.  Aaron uncovers Sachs' life, their shared history in New York, lovers, friends, and what drove his friend to become so alienated from and opposed to corporate America.

Flying Finish by Dick Francis

 Lord Henry Gray is a reluctant aristocrat, holiding down a desk job at a the Anglia Bloodstock Agency, much to his family's disapproval, and dodging his mother's efforts at marrying him off for money escaping to his true passions as an amateur jockey and pilot.  When he tires of the desk job and takes on a job as head groom for Yardman's equine transport business he becomes involved with a shady world of smuggling, and meets the beautiful Gabriella in Milan

Toast by Nigel Slater

Apocalypse Nerd by Peter Bagge
Before Scotland by Alistair Moffat
Charley's War 2 June - 1 August 1916 by Pat Mills & Joe Colquhoun
The Island Beneath the Sea by Isabel Allende
Kraken by China Mieville
On Green Dolphin Street by Sebastian Faulks
Picture Perfect by Jodie Picoult
Scapa by James Miller
- Having visited Orkney in the summer of 2010 I naturally wanted to know more about the modern archaeology of these ancient islands that was all around me, abandoned gun placements, wrecks sticking out of the water, the Italian Chapel, a homage to the Sisitine Chapel made out of two Nissen huts by Italian prisoners of war, and their creation, the awe inspiring Churchill Barriers, causways that link the lower islands and close off the great natural harbour of Scapa Flow.  This is a great book, authoratitive in style, full of pictures and covering the Navy's use of Scapa Flow as a major anchorage in the First and Second World wars.
Sum by David Eagleman

DYSTOPIA #9
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

A sad dystopia of utiliarianism taken to its logical conclusion, to the creation of clones to provide the raw materials for medical experiments and operations, and their fate if they are raised not in a factory but in a boarding school setting.  Explores with delicacy and deep feeling the relations between children raised together and the nature of friendship backed by a morally horrendous premise.

DYSTOPIA #8
Island by Aldous Huxley

Journalist and life long cynic Will Farnaby wakes up to the insistent call 'Attention' after being shipwrecked on the forbidden island of Pala, located geographically somewhere around Bali.  Sent by the head of his paper, oil tycoon Aldehyde, to find out whether Pala will be easy to take over and exploit, Will finds himself in a world where the inner life is cherished and valued and even the birds in the trees have a part to play in reminding the inhabitants of this utopia how best to live and be.   Wonderful and sad.

What If? Mirror Mirror edited by Jennifer Grunwald

A great collection from Marvel that is kind of an answer to DCs Elseworlds collections. 

Hector Espejo, online name The Watcher, is the child of millionaire computer geeks, and first hacked into the Pentagon before he was 10.  Using the net he has discovered a parallel world and each of the six comics in this collection are based on his findings: what if the Fantastic Four were Russian;  what if Prince Namor, Aquman grew up on land, what if Captain America had emerged during the American Civil War, what if Matt Murdock hadn't been Daredevil but instead had had a Japanese ancestor with Daredevil's blindness and fighting skills; what if Wolverine had been a fur trapper forced to cross with Scarface in Chicago during the Prohibition era, and what if Thor had become the herald of Galactacus.  All really well written and fascinating.

Batman: Hong Kong by Doug Moench & Tony Wong

Batman is called to help when a computer hacker comes across a private broadcast of a snuff film of a man being murdered by snake bite and becomes the next vicitim himself.  When a similar murder occurs in Hong Kong he crosses the Pacific to engage with a world of Triads, honour and police at war, and a new ally Night Dragon.

The Authority: Prime by Christos Grace & Darick Robertson

The Authority and StormWatch Prime go head to head in a battle over their former leader Henry Bendix's secret bunker, great mayhem and fight scenes, good story too.

Smokescreen by Dick Francis

Edward Lincoln is a action movie film star, but his family life is quiet, a lovely wife (Charlie) and three children, two sons and a daughter with retarded development due to brain injury.  Nerissa is his substitiute mother, she asks Edward to go to South Africa to find out why her horses are no longer winning and he swiftly becomes embroiled in a thriller to more than equal his films, including three attempts on his life (electrocution, burial in explosion at gold mine and abadonment in car in Kruger National Park), a brilliant calculating killer, entrapment attempts by a beautiful girl and the highest stakes: a gold mine, prizewinning horses and Edward's own life.

Dead Cert by Dick Francis

Life is as normal when amateur jockey Alan York watches his friend Bill Davidson go over the jump in front of him to win the race on Admiral, but then the horse falls crushing his friend beneath him killing him and widowing his wife Scilla, leaving her with three children.  Alan goes back to the course and sees wire strung across the top of the fence and reporting it to the police engages with a dangerous underworld which revolves around love interest Kate Ellery-Penn, orphaned and raised by her upper class aunt and uncle and the said uncle's secret life.  Ends with a fantastic manhunt in the forests and woods around the racecourse with Alan on Admiral pitted against a gang of taxi drivers come tough guys with orders to kill.

Bonecrack by Dick Francis

Neil Griffon takes over the training of horses at his father's stable after his father is hospitalised with a broken leg.  He is visited by vicious sociopathic crime boss Enso Riviera who has only one aim, to make Neil put his son Alessandro the jockey on Archangel the favourite for the Derby, by any means necessary.  Griffon's head lad is Etty Craig, great female character.  Neil takes on Alessandro and a dangerous game begins, Neil trying to keep his life and his father's stables alive under paternal pressure that he does not know what he's doing.  Set in Newmarket.  Ends with attempted shooting of stable lead jockey Tommy Hoylake on Newmarket Heath.

High Stakes by Dick Francis

Trainer Jody Leeds, father Quintin Leeds, Jockey Club member, is fleecing owner Steven Scott, when his horse Energise wins unexpectedly Steven is sure of his trainer's guilt and complicity with Ganser Mays, bookmaker in ringing (subsitituting identical horses, 'dead ringers', for the horses supposed to be running).  Steven has made a fortune making beautiful toys. Friend is Charlie Canterfield, merchant banker.  Steven has workshop in house and assistant come butler is Owen Idris.  Love interest beautiful intelligent American Alexandra Ward (Allie).  Steven realises Engerise has been swopped and decides to get him back, gets badly beaten but gets Energise back with a ringer scam of his own.

DYSTOPIA #7
The Glass Bead Game (Magister Ludi) by Herman Hesse

Like nothing I've ever read before.  The presumably fictional but utterly convincing biography of Joseph Knecht, the man who in the 23rd Century becomes Magister Ludi (Master of the Game) in the Kingdom of Castalia, an elite community who preserved the integrity of humanity when it dissolved into anarchy and dangerous superficiality centuries earlier.  Castalian's are the intellectual elite of their society but they no longer create, rather they study earlier cultural achievement and play the Glass Bead Game, a game that is never completely defined but appears to be an intellectual exercise in pure brilliance of the mind.  The Glass Bead Game taught me a lot both about the need for me to become more centred and the value of meditation, and also the implicit dangers of intellectualism and seperatism.

DYSTOPIA #6
Divided Kingdom by Rupert Thomson (AUDIO)

A really good listen and really thought provoking although a bit too much in the spirit of a boy's own adventure, the protagonist Thomas Parry never seems to really get hurt through all the danger and troubles he comes across in this dystopia come picaresque.

Parry is taken from his home in the dead of night at the age of 8 and taken to a school where he is indoctrinated into the new world order.  The UK has been redesignated as four separate kingdoms according to the humour of the individual.

The Red Quarter is for sanguine people, optimistic, outgoing and easily distracted, the Yellow for cholerics, quick to anger, passionate, the Green for melancholics, the thoughful depressives, and the Blue for phlegmatics, flexible easy going natured. 

Parry becomes a true servant of the regime, entering the civil service and being sent to a diplomatic in the blue quarter, but then he goes to a strange nightclub which brings back memories of his past and goes on the run, travelling through the various Quarters and even becoming a White person, a person who fits in no Quarter but travels between them, before finally returning to the Red Quarter a very changed man. 

Thomson shows through Parry's experiences that dividing humours negates the countering effects one humour can have on another, and does not allow for the ultimate aim of the theory of humours, that is, that we should recognise which humour is most dominant in ourselves, that is true, but that a truly balanced or humoured individual is one in which the humours are balanced, and therefore tearing apart the fabric of society cannot be right.

The City & The City by China Mieville

Two cities,  Beszel, a decaying soviet style society and Ul Qoma, near Eastern in style.  The body of a murdered young girl found in the vandalised playground of a sink estate by Inspector Tyador Borlu of the Extreme Crime Squad [for some reason, annoyingly, Blogger doesn't seem to support accents, but there are acute accents over the first e in Mieville, the second in Beszel and the u in Borlu, which give an indication of the slavic slant of the language of the latter two].  But all is not as it seems, and Mieville's detective story is, Borlu says of his case on page 9, 'considerably more Byzantine than it had initially appeared'.  I won't give anything away, but the reference to Byzantium, also known as Istanbul and Constantinople over its history, as well as the meaning of 'byzantine' itself give clues to just how much of a ride Mieville takes you on.  Brilliantly conceived and written

POST APOCALYTIC #1
The Postman by David Brin

A fascinating page turner of a book with lots of great ideas but not terribly well written to my mind.  The population of the United States has been decimated by climate shift, disease and bands of insane survivalists.  Gordon Krantz, a lone survivor living a subsistence level existence in the hills of Oregon, is set upon and robbed of all his possessions by a band of men.  He finds the ruined remains of a jeep with a postman inside and takes the clothes, and the role of postman, and becomes an unwilling extraordinary symbol of hope in a particularly dark age.