Happy by Lonely Planet

A lovely little book perfect for giving and receiving about the different ways you can find personal fulfilment around the world. This being a lonely planet it celebrates the effect that visiting different cultures can have in broadening our own understandings, but also the effect that travel has in defamiliarising our own homes when we do return. Each double page spread is a glossy photograph accompanied by a Secret, Tradition, Date and the place that it is Celbrated, followed by text expanding on the titles. It is divided into three sections, Mind, Body and Spirit and is great to dip into when your spirit needs a little lift

Distinguished Leaves: Poems for Tea Lovers by Elizabeth Darcy Jones

A sweet little book of meditations on the gentle art of tea drinking. The book is in sections dividing the teas into white, green, blue, black, red and yellow with a brief description of what the colours mean. A poem is dedicated to each variety of tea treating them as an individual and speaking about their personality as if they were a person. Some of the poems are a bit slight but there a plenty that speak elegantly of this most ancient tradition of making tea with loose leaves and a meditative spirit

The Careful Use of Compliments by Alexander McCall Smith (Isabel Dalhousie #4)

When Isabel Dalhousie receives an auction catalogue she spots a painting by an author that she has another painting by, and who has been dead for 10 years. Whilst dealing with the emotional fallout from learning she has been ousted as editor of the Journal of Applied Ethics, and getting used to life with a new baby, she bids for the painting. She is outbid, but then approached by the winning bidder and begins to wonder about the painting and its artist. On the one hand, this is the best plot of an Isabel Dalhousie story so far, I love the gentle mystery about a painting, that a possible forgery can be a window into something far sadder and more humane. However, Isabel's new baby son Charlie is unnaturally good, I don't remember new motherhood ever being as benign, but then maybe she is just lucky!

The Four Encounters: Buddha 2 by Osamu Tezuka

The young Prince Siddhartha, the boy who will one day become the Buddha, is growing up, baffled by the stark contrast between the privileges of his life as heir to the throne and those of people around him in a society viciously controlled by caste. He becomes aware of the realities of suffering and death that he has been so assiduously sheltered from, and begins to question the assumed order of his world. Falling in love with a pariah tragedy strikes and Siddhartha increasingly battles with the gulf between his role and his feelings, eventually casting off his life as a priceand all his finery, and hair and becoming a wandering monk.

Tezuka brings together the familiar Buddhist myth with a cast of ordinary people, tragic, hilarious, stupid, drawn with such skill and bringing the story of Siddhartha's inner and outer journeys vividly to life within a landscape and society that are both historic and timeless, with some wonderful anachronisms.

Devadatta: Buddha Book 3 by Osamu Tezuka

Prince Siddhartha, the boy who will one day become the Buddha, has cast off his life as a prince and becomes a monk. Volume 3 of Tezuka's epic chronicles his ordeals, opening with the beautiful boy monk asleep under a tree wakening in full awareness to a new day. We follow him as he meets with the monk Dhepa whose backstory was introduced to us in Volume 1. He takes Siddhartha to meet his master Naradatta introducing him along the way to the ascetic tradition of undertaking ordeals in order to cleanse the self of desire and become purer, entertainingly ridiculed to show how the Buddha began to question this polar opposite to his former regal life and at the end of this volume attains enlightenment.

Tezuka brings together the familiar Buddhist myth with a cast of ordinary people, tragic, hilarious, stupid, drawn with such skill and bringing the story of Siddhartha's inner and outer journeys vividly to life within a landscape and society that are both historic and timeless, with some wonderful anachronisms.

Charley's War 2 June - 1 August 1916 by Pat Mills

Charley's War is always brilliant, the collection of Battle comic strips of young Private Charley Bourne, fighting in the worst hells of the Western Front. In this collection we at the Front in August - October 1916, as the first 'landships', better known to us as tanks, are unleashed on the Germans. If the powers that be had used the full capacity of these new weapons the war would have been over, but as ever Mills and Colquhoun express the incompetence of the generals with brilliant black and white illustrations and show rather than tell us the horrific consequences of their stupidity on the lives of the soldiers fighting at the Front.

A History of the World in 100 Objects by Neil MacGregor

I listened to the programmes and was desperate to see the objects talked about, and I learned so very much about world history from this truly global history of human kind in 100 objects stretching right back to the very first human use of stone tools right up to the present day. I enjoyed its non euro centric focus and I liked the pictures, they are of lovely quality and if you wanted to see more you could make the pilgrimage to the British Museum. Although by definition idiosyncratic MacGregor's selections opened my eyes.

Charley's War: The Great Mutiny by Pat Mills

Charley's War is always brilliant, the collection of Battle comic strips of young Private Charley Bourne, fighting in the worst hells of the Western Front. In this collection we are Etaples training camp in August 1917 where the brutal treatment of trainees by officers explodes into mutiny. Then, filled with remorse for having to shoot one of his comrades for desertion he joins the stretcher bearer's, unarmed soldiers charged with going out of the trenches unarmed to collect the wounded with only armbands with the words SB on them to protect them. As ever Mills and Colquhoun express the unfairness and slaughter of the Western Front with brilliant black and white illustrations and show rather than tell us the horrors of shell shock, malnutrition, gas attacks, class hierarchies and black humour.

Even Money by Dick & Felix Francis

Ned Talbot is a bookmaker, one of the last independents working his pitch at Royal Ascot. As his day draws to a close he is pestered by a man, who claims to be his father, and then is attacked and stabbed in front of him in the car park. But Ned's father is dead, both his parents died in a car crash when he was a baby and he was raised by his grandparents. Ned is plunged into a brilliant plotted but unfortunately not so well written story about the secrets hidden in his past, the mental fragility of his beloved wife, murder, money and fraud.

Castle Waiting by Linda Medley

Castle Waiting begins as the fairy tale castle Sleeping Beauty slept in for 100 years before being woken by a prince, but Linda Medley asks what happened after she woke and went off with her price. Medley answers with a wonderfully bizarre story steeped in cultural mythology and fairy tales, homage paid to the talking animals of Aesop, to Grimm and Andersen but also, becuase this is a (beautifully drawn) graphic novel, to Rackham and Beardsley. The hardback itself is beautiful, a lovely size on buff coloured paper bound with elegant endpapers.

What the Night Knows by Dean Koontz

Detective John Calvino has a wonderful life, three sparky intelligent children - artistic 13 year old Zach, dreamer Naomi 11, and 8 year old latent psychic Minnie - home schooled by his artist wift Nicky and tutors. But he is haunted by the horrors of a childhood, orphaned and robbed of his two sisters by a man of unspeakable depravity and violence. Now a 14 year old boy Billy has turned on his family in an eerily copycat violent spree and evil appears to be awakening. Vintage Koontz, where he pits good and innocence against mailign and less over forms of evil, without ever seeming trite or patronising and combining the earthly and grounded with the supernatural and demonic.

Crossfire by Dick & Felix Francis

Thomas Forsyth's life as a career soldier is brought to an abrupt end by and IED in Afghanistan. He returns to his racehorse trainer mother's stable in Lambourn struggling to come to terms with his maimed body and the loss of his future with the Army. In his childhood bome he is drawn into a roller coaster ride of hedge funds, fraud, blackmail and murder and finds a place for his military training in planning and executing a war against an unseen enemy. Discusses heavily relevant issues within a thrilling story.

The Right Attitude to Rain by Alexander McCall Smith - Isabel Dalhousie #3

In Alexander McCall Smith's third Isabel Dalhousie book human nature and love are gently reflected on. Our eponymous heroine is the editor of a journal of ethics and lives alone, visited by her spiritualist housekeeper Grace, close to her neice Cat and her ex boyfriend Jamie. As Isabel entertains house guests, her American cousin and husband, she comes into contact with an American couple, millionaire Tom and his young fiancee Angie. Is she simply a gold digger? And what of her own feelings for a younger man, feelings that help her heal from the loss of her beloved but unfaithful husband years before.

Johannes Cabal The Fear Institute by Jonathan L Howard

Johannes Cabal is a necromancer, raiser of and communicater with the dead. To his gate (not into the garden, due to the tendency of the fairies in his garden to eat the unwary) come three visitors. Messers Shadrach, Bose and Corde, an art dealer, a solicitor and a funeral director, who belong to a society known as The Fear Institute. They want to hire Cabal to guide them through the Dreamlands, the place people go when they dream, in search of the Phobic Animus, fear itself. What ensues is an adventure in the vein of Terry Pratchett's Discworld and Jasper Fforde's Bookworld, and indeed in the tradition of Lewis Carrol. Howard draws on literature and mythology in a book that is laugh out loud funny, gently and not so gently poking fun at mystics and believers in dream reading everywhere. A book I didn't want to end.

Fun Home by Alison Bechdel

Alison's father is a funeral director in a town so small he teaches part time to supplement his income. Both he and Alison's mother Helen are distant and emotionally unavailable leading to Alison's siblings and parents existing in the home behind the funeral home, the 'fun home' of the title in separate bubbles, like an artist's enclave. It is Alison's relationship with her father she focuses on in this brutally honest but gently wry and revelatory autobiography. He is a repressed homosexual obsessed with asthetisism, consumed with restoring their home to it's historical glory at the expense of his wife and children's own tastes and personal space. As Alison goes to college and discovers her own emerging homosexuality the truth about her father's affairs with boys comes out and she struggles with her deep love for a man unable to express affection for her. Compelling and well drawn.

Johannes Cabal The Necromancer by Jonathan L Howard

In a universe very much like our own, with the addition of magic and Hell being real, Johannes Cabal is a necromancer, a speaker with and controller of the dead. In return for his powers he made a Faustian pact with the Devil for his soul, and now he wants it back. He strolls into hell and makes a deal with Lucifer, 100 souls for his own. The Devil provides him with an infernal carnival and the rest is up to him. This could have been a grim horror story, but Howard's use of gentle humour and literary allusion combined with some excellent characters, especially Johannes' undead brother Horst who has the usual infernal powers combined with a strong moral compass, that make this a joy to read.

The Buddhist Handbook by John Snelling

Good, comprehensive and easy to understand

Life: An Exploded Diagram by Mal Peet

Clem's story begins as the chimney of his mother Ruth's house shatters into pieces as a Spitfire goes through it in pursuit of a German bomber and she goes into labour. He emerges into a loveless house, his grandmother Win despises her daughter for falling pregnant to a soldier just as she did, and at the age of three has to adjust to the arrival of the large strict stranger who is his father. Growing up in a council house under the great skies of Norfork in a house marked by puritanical sexlessness he endures grammar schoool before falling for the daughter of the manor, the beautiful Frankie as in the wider world the Cuban missile crisis and the specter of Mutually Assured Destruction unfolds. Her father employs his and their furtive assignations culminate in a literally explosive tragedy that brutally sunders the pair. Peet weaves his story with great skill and uses Norfolk dialect to create a real sense of life in a Norfolk village between the wars, and the devastating closing pages of the book are shocking and yet, on reflection, give a sense of completion to a book about a man who's life has been defined by life shaking explosions.

Doctor Who Serpent Crest 1: Tsar Wars by Paul Magrs (AUDIO)

Tom Baker stars in this adventure, he and Mrs Wibbsey are kidnapped and taken across the universe to a distant kingdom where the Tsar and Tsarina rule over the Robotov Empire.  The mystery of why they have been brought there unfolds with questions about the rights and humanity of artificial intelligence and the life of a child who may hold the key to resolving the conflict between robot and human kind.  A case of mistaken identity leads the Doctor to the shadowy forces lying behind the conflict that are playing a far more long term and sinister game.  A good audio play, good fun but a little archaic at times with regard to some of the attitudes.

Cake Angels by Julia Thomas

This is a review I will probably update once I've had a go at the few of the recipes, but on looks alone Thomas' book is a winner. It's a nice size at about nine inches high and stays open easily, a small thing but essential for a cookbook!

Most of the recipes are well illustrated in full colour divided into cakes, traybakes and cupcakes / muffins. There are sections on equipment, ingredients, decoration and stockists which give really helpful pointers as to what to use as alternatives to gluten and dairy and where to find them. The recipes themselves are well laid out and the text is friendly and easy to use. A delightful addition for a person who still stands longingly near bakeries to torture myself with the smell of what I cannot have.

Wonder Struck by Brian Selznick

It would be enough for this to be a wonderful narrative, but Selznick has done it again, creating something even more wonderful than his The Invention of Hugo Cabret.

In 1977 Ben, a young boy dreams of wolves and grieves for his recently dead mother. Unable to sleep he wanders from his aunt and uncle's lodge in the woods on the edge of Gunflint Lake, Minnesota, the short distance to his former home and finds a mysterious book about the first kinds of museums known as Cabinets of Wonders and telephone number. Lightning strikes as he tries to dial the number and he is deafened.

In 1927 Rose, a deaf girl of a similar age to Ben, gazes across the river at Manhattan and runs away to find the beautiful silent movie star Lillian Mayhew and seeks shelter in the company of her brother Walter, creator of an entire room of Wonders.

This story would be in and of itself delicately and achingly rendered, but Selznick's combination of text with stunning pencil drawings is unique, not a comic but not simply illustrations either, the drawings having a narrative value of their own like a comic without the speech bubbles. Just as Ben and Rose's stories speak to each other across 5 decades the pictures and words are in a dialogue creating something truly spellbinding.

Touch by Alexi Zentner

In less deft hands Zentner's plot is historical romantic fiction, a man sits by the bedside of his dying mother recalling his memories of the small northern logging town founded by his grandfather.  There is drama and pathos, hard winters, terrible choices and losses set against the backdrop of goldrushes and lost dreams.  But this book is far more than that, invoking the spirits of the forests and the mythology of a family where the fantastical and the everyday live side by side.  Zentner speaks  the snow and ice of the frozen winters and the terrible dangers of logging and living on the edge of human existence into being in a book I didn't want to end.

The Capture of Cerberus and The Incident of the Dog's Ball by Agatha Christie (AUDIO)

Two Poirot stories found by Agatha Christie's family in 2004 among her private notebooks, they are intriguing and well plotted as her other works, similarly evoking an era that is past whilst also unearthing the universal reasons for murder and hiding.

To me, The Capture of Cerberus is the least successful.  The father of a son torn apart by a mob for the killing of a Nazi dictator is convinced of his son's innocence and comes to Poirot looking for his help.  I felt this one was a little hampered by the slightly heavy handed references to the oncoming Second World War and the allegories with Hitler.

The Incident of the Dog's Ball is classic Christie, a letter posted long after being written leads Poirot to the death of a rich old lady in a Kent village, a change of will seems to imply some skullduggery but as usual all is not as it seems.  A really great story.

Both are read evocatively by David Suchet, the actor best known to us in the present day for playing Poirot himself, which adds real richness to the audio book.

The book to accompany Billy Connolly's 2008 tour of the Northwest Passage is beautifully illustrated with stunning pictures of the landscape and people he encountered along the way in the Canadian far north. As everything is written by Connolly from his point of view it is very much his reflections on what he sees around him, about his value judgements and reactions, but there is probably not a better person to do this with his charming self deprecating wit and his ability to connect with strangers on a profound level.

The book is a chronological diary of his journey, beginning with Nova Scotia, Cape Breton and Newfoundland. Here he is immersed in the world and traditions of the descendants of the Scottish and French settlers, their music and particular brand of nostalgia for countries that no longer exist and celebration of the Viking connections with the area.

Then he gets on a Harley and moves North to Nunvut, territory of the Inuit granted to them by the Canadian goverment in repayment for years of brutal colonial rule which saw the children of the natives shipped away from their homes to be 'educated' and the Inuit and their towns renamed. He reflects on the Inuit responses to climate change and going from an intinerant to a settled lifestyle and experiences the juxtaposition between the modern world of high speed broadband and the traditional one of hunting and throat singing.

Moving north over the Arctic circle to Baffin Island he boards a cruise ship, a much hated experience but one that does take him through the Northwest Passage and the history of the Europeans who died trying to find it.

He then boards his bike again to travel south through the Northwest Territores meeting the Inuit of the west cost before heading south with a fruit seller in his massive truck through abandoned gold rush ghost towns and experiencing modern day gold panning.

He ends up in the Yukon, staking a mineral claim and British Columbia, spending time with ranchers, cowboys and totem pole carvers, experiencing the rigours of a sweat lodge, becoming inducted into the Killer Whale tribe as 'Prince of Laughter' and watching grizzly bears and golden eagles catch the salmon running upriver , ending his journey logging on the coast.

A stunning book that taught me much about one of the wildest land places in the world, narrated by a charismatic and entertaining author.

It's All About the Beads by Barbara Case

As a complete beginner I found Case's writing style and use of diagrams excellent she made me feel confident that I could take on the patterns myself.

The introduction comprises a primer on types of beads, materials, tools and basic techniques, all of which are clear, easy to understand and well illustrated

These are followed by 80 'recipes' for necklaces, earrings, brooches and even golf counters.  The recipes are really clear, at the top of each is a rating of how easy the project it is, how long it should take to make and the length of the finished piece.  There is a clear picture of the project as made by the author, and then the 'ingredients': everything you will need to make the project, and then step by step instructions.  A multitude of different styles are included and many many different kind of beads, a delicious invitation to take the recipes and use your own ingredients to make the designs your own.

A gift to the reader

The Beader's Handbook by Juju Vail

This is a good comprehensive book but as a complete beginner with regard to beading I found it a little difficult to follow, there aren't enough diagrams to make me feel comfortable following the instructions.

This is unfortunate because the structure of the book is very good, starting with a section on tools and equipment before introducing the reader to the basics of beadings.  The it goes on to working with wire, stitching and weaving (including knitting and loom and non loom weaving) and ending with a section on different types of beads.  Lastly there are a selection of bead weaving graph papers to be used for designing using the different types of stitch.  It has the potential to be a much better book.

Torchwood: Consequences by James Moran, Joseph Lidster, Andrew Cartmel, Sarah Pinborough and David Llewellyn


Five interlinked Torchwood stories on the theme of consequences of actions, my favourite Torchwood book / play to date

In the first book: 'The Baby Farm' we are in Victorian England.  A desperate mother is driven to give up her baby to the deliciously spooky Ms Blight and one of Torchwood's founding memebers: Emily Holyroyd places a mysterious book in Cardiff University Library.  The Torchwood team follow the fate of the babies to a Ragged School.  These were real historical institutions set up by philanthrophists to give boys training in skills such as shoe making, ironwork and tailoring and offer them a real chance of escaping the poverty they are born into.  But in this case something Rift borne is involved and those taking the babies have to pay a terrible price for exploiting an alien species.

In 'Kaleidoscope' we have moved forward to the time when Jack had disappeared leaving Gwen, Toshiko, Ianto and Owen rudderless.  Danny is a young boy terrorised by his physically abusive father.  When a piece of alien technology comes into his hands he looks through it at his father believing it to be an ordinary kaleidoscope, but this is a Rehabilitator.  They were used in prisons and when the viewed was seen through it they became the ideal according the person doing the viewing.  Danny's father becomes loving, gentle and a real father.  But the Rehabiliator is very addictive, and when Gwen removes it from Danny she causes terrible damage which Jack would have foreseen.

Jack is back in 'The Wrong Hands' and Torchwood's attention is drawn to the strange deaths of a number of drug dealers, one cut in half by a weapon that is clearly not terrestrial.  On a sink estate in Cardiff an alien child has taken over control of a young impoverished girl to take care of him.  As the alien child tries to take over Gwen Ianto and Jack struggle to get her back, and the local supermarket is destroyed in a ball of fire as the child's surrogate mother fights back.

James Moran's 'Virus' takes up the story, as the child's remaining parent fights their way through the Rift to find their child and mate dead.  They blame Torchwood and inject Gwen and Jack with a virus that leaves them in a catatonic state of living death, the worst possible fate for an immortal.  It is up to the remaining member of Torchwood, Ianto, to rescue them, drawing on the depth of his love for Jack to become the least likely action hero.

The final book 'Consequences' brings the story arc full circle.  It is narrated by Nina, an ordinary hard drinking student who is losing chunks of her memory but seems to be driven to follow a handsome man dressed like a World War 2 soldier.  The Torchwood team are drawn back to Cardiff University Library to solve this last finely written story.

A wonderful set of stories that include both great science fiction storytelling writing but also great heart and a real sense of the difficult dilemmas the dwindling Torchwood team face.

Daredevil: The Man Without Fear TPB by Frank Miller and John Romita Jr

This is a beautiful rendition of the Daredevil genesis story arc  from the masterful pens / pencils of Frank Miller, John Romita, Al Willamson, Christie Scheele and Joe Rosen.

The artwork stunningly accompanies the devastating tale of Matt Munro, the motherless son of a boxer and reluctant mob enforcer raised in Hell's Kitchen.  An accident in which he is blinded by a chemical spill saving another man's life seems the end of his ambitions to educate himself out of the ghetto.  But a strange man known only as Stick comes into his life and teaches him how to use his other senses.  After his father is murdered for refusing to throw a fight Matt turns vigilante and metes out a terrible revenge, but loses his mentor as Stick abandons him as a lost cause.  Things don't look good as Matt is becomes passionately involved with fellow vigilante Elektra but he is redeemed by his fight to save a young girl.  From this he emerges as the fully fledged Daredevil.  Awesome.

Torchwood: The Lost Files AUDIO

Three Radio 4 full cast dramas set before the Children of Earth series

The Devil and Miss Carew is the simplest of the three adventures.  Rhys' great uncle dies drawing him and Gwen to the nursing home to pick up his belongings, but they encounter a resident speaking of other residents that have left with their life force restored to them.  As increasing power cuts disable the country and the world Gwen tracks down Miss Carew, previously dying from terminal heart failure, now back at the helm of her computing company, and Torchwood homes in on an alien force communicating via the Shipping Forecast.

In Submission the team receive a distress signal heard throughout the world through the water.  It's source is the Mariana Trench, the deepest part of the sea.  Ianto is reunited with an old friend from Torchwood One and the team journey to the bottom of the sea.

In The House of the Dead it's closing night at the pub of the same name known as the most haunted pub in Wales.  As last orders are called a psychic calls on the dead to contact their loved ones, and Jack bursts in trying to stop the seance.  The ghosts start arriving, Jack's behaviour becomes erratic and Ianto and Gwen are torn between their trust in him and worry for him.  At first a good story, but then with a twist at the end that is a real punch to the gut, elegantly and devastatingly plotted.

All three plays carry each in their own way speak of what death is, how it defines life and The Lost Files is a precursor of and paen to the events to come in the Children of Earth story arc.  A great chilling collection.

Doctor Who: Blackout by Oli Smith, AUDIO

The Doctor has travelled back to 1965 with Amy and Rory, they've taken a train from Philadelphia to New York City and walked into a world of alien abductions and clinical trials run on a city wide scale.  There is something in the water, a hidden ship is 100ft above the city and the Doctor, Rory and Amy are all dying from a disease that makes you ultimately explode with heat.

An excellent straightforward Doctor Who adventure, fighting aliens to save mankind, but with a twist of reflection on our right to experiment on animals.

The Left Hand of God by Paul Hoffman

The brutal religious zealots the Redeemers have raised a monstrous boy who carries the name of Thomas Cale.  It isn't the birth name that was ripped from his as a child but that of a martyr.  The Redeemers take young children and indoctrinate them to become soldiers in their holy war against the Antagonists in the trenches on the Eastern front.  The boys are routinely brutally physically punished to the point of near death, fed rancid and disgusting food, indoctrinated by an endless round of sermons and rules, isolated from the outside world including any members of the opposite sex and exposed to terrifying lessons such as the burning alive of transgressors.

Cale is utterly brutalised but something of a human spirit lies under the trained killer, and it comes to the fore when he comes across a Redeemer dissecting a girl, kills him and saves Riba, another girl in the room with him.   So begins a wild escape across the desolate Scablands to the fortified city Memphis, home of the Materazzi people, with the archer Vague Henri and sniper Kleist.  Hoffman introduces a fascinating cast of peoples, costumes and places whilst never losing hold of character and the driving force of a great plot of intrigue, warfare, fundamentalism, coming of age and first love that leaves you wanting more.

I love the very first sentence of The Left Hand of God.  It is a single word: Listen.  It is a word that recalls fireside stories, being read to as a child, a word that can be a brutal order or a gentle call to hear.

Choke Chain by Jason Donald

12 year old Alex and his younger brother Kevin Thorne are a pair of brothers growing up in 1980s South Africa.  They are poor but white and although the book is set pre the breakdown of apartheid their world is changing.  Their brutal, devious and selfish but charming father Bruce teaches them how to con and bully their way through a world where his brand of violent chauvanism is beginning to be replaced by values of social justice and mutual respect.  As their parents' marriage splinters under the force of Bruce's (a play on brutal?) savage narcissism the brothers and their mother Grace struggle to cope and the climax of the story is a tragedy that warns against answering violence with violence.

As first person narrator it is Alex's voice we hear most clearly, and follow his coming of age as he moves from trying to emulate his father to finding another way.  The evocation of pre-apartheid South Africa, the institutional racism and bigotry, the patchwork of languages and the heat of Pretoria, cool of the Drakensburg and humidity of Durban is extremely powerful.  Alex's narrative is couched as a series of anecdotes, much in the way Bruce would tell stories, but these are not witty and entertaining, they are painful recollections of brutality and humiliation, and of Alex's sense of his failure to protect his little brother.

Some people may see Bruce as a sterotypical bad guy but he isn't, Donald has written an elegant and devastating account of what it is like to grow up choked in the shadow of such a powerful personality.  This is one of the hardest and best books I've read in some time.

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Century: 1969 by Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill

Moore does it again with the League fighting occult foes in swinging 1960s London.  We open as dissolute rock god Baz is murdered by black hooded figures.  The Nautilus breaches off the white cliffs of Dover and Captain Nemo's daughter helps Mina Harker, Orlando and Allan to land where they catch a bus to London.  They are in pursuit of old enemy Haddo, who is indeed dead, but a sinister plot for a wicked spirit to find a new body is afoot.  Great psychdelic drawings and use of contemporary fashions and drugs with Moore's usual twisting of reality, not the best League adventure but still interesting.

iBoy by Kevin Brooks

Tom Harvey is walking to meet Lucy, to him the prettiest girl at his school. She was the girl next door but still lives close by in her flat in their home in the sky: Compton House tower block on the impoverished Crow Town high rise estate. A stolen iPhone is thrown from the window of Lucy's flat and shatters Tom's skull, finding a weak spot in his skull and plunging him into a coma. However, rather than the impact killing him something amazing happens, the chip of the iPhone embeds itself into the neural pathways of his brain. He wakes wired into the global networks of mobile phone, internet and television superhighways that invisibly cross the land and he has control of electrical fields. But something terrible has happened to Lucy and he begins to exact a terrible revenge on those who have hurt her.

On one level therefore this is a good adventure story about an ordinary boy who becomes a superhero by freak accident, the stuff of comic book legend. However, Brooks also subtly interweaves into his text concepts of social injustice, the impact of single parenthood on the lives of young boys, gang warfare and violence as power into the fabric of this book, so you come away having learned much about the moral ambiguities of revenge, justice and hate.

Ascent by Jed Murcurio and Wesley Robins

Yefgenii Yeremin is orphaned by the Second World War, one of the few children to survive Stalingrad. He grows up with a world of kicks and punches in the casual brutality of an orphanage. There is a way out, but it is slight, only one child from all the orphanages in the area will get the opportunity of going to the academy to learn to fly. He makes it and becomes an ace flying MIGs against the Americans in Korea, but his achievements can never be recognised as officially the Soviets are not there. Exiled to Antarctica he and his wife live a lonely and harsh life, then as the Space Race takes off Russia are in need of an expert expendable pilot to try and land on the moon before the Americans do.

Robin's stark blocky drawings with their muted colours illustrate this bleak sad tale beautifully, echoing the blunt brutality of the life of a brilliant man whose achievements can never be recognised. Not quite as brilliant as Nick Abadzis' Laika but another timely example of recovery of hidden and lost histories, a work that makes you think about our perception of the recent past. The names of great Americans such as Aldrin burn in our consciousness but there must have been equally brilliant Soviets who, apart from Gagarian, remain unnamed and lost so our histories must be incomplete.

The True Tale of the Monster Billy Dean by David Almond

Billy Dean is born in the town of Blinkbonny, just outside Alnwick, the day the bombs explode razing his town and plunging his country into war. He grows up knowing only the walls of the tiny flat where he and his mother live, and the face of his father who is an occasional visitor, preaching hellfire and teaching his son Bible stories. At the age of 13 his mother takes him out into the post apocalyptic landscape of rubble for the first time and he becomes a phenomenon, can speak to the dead and heal the living. As his father returns and the truth of his birth and the reasons he was shut away come to light the narrative comes to a climax involving redemption and the holy island of Lindisfarne.

Almond has written almost the entire book in Dean's own demotic, a sentence structure that is coherent and complex but often childlike, and words written phoenetically much as a 7 year old child would write. This makes it perhaps a little harder to read but also compelling and with a sense of authenticity as a boy who was shut away from the world for 13 years, knowing nothing of rivers, bombs, hills, wind or rain struggles to narrate his own history

Annexed by Sharon Dogar

Dogar imagines life within the hidden flat that housed Anne Frank and her family from the point of view from the boy she fell in love with, Peter van Pels. Dogan works with the fact that a diary is a subjective piece of writing, and that Anne Frank was a young teenager, and constructs a narrative that is very interesting but without the compelling power of Frank's own diary Kitty. When we read Frank's diary we read the actual words of a very ordinary young girl destined to die in the Bergen-Belsen death camp, to be survived only by her father and her words which would ring out as an appeal against race hatred and mass killings throughout the years since. I think Dogar's book is best when she is imagining Peter's experiences in Auschwitz and the final death march to Mauthausen, and the title is clever too as the Nazi's systematically annexed Europe 'cleansing' it of 'undesirables' as they went.

The Blue Book by AL Kennedy

After reading Oatley's book Such Stuff as Dreams on the psychology of fiction I understand that for a piece of fiction to be taken into the mind of a reader and become a simulation within their own mind they have to touch their reader. There are a few writers who do this for me to the extent of shaking my understanding and opening me up to new understandings, the poetry of TS Eliot, Blake and McCaig, and the writings of David Almond, Phlip Pulman and AL Kennedy are among them.

Kennedy crafts her prose with the heart catching precision of a poet, never a word wasted and many challenging. The Blue Book is packed with phrases such as 'kind hotel' is a fresh pairing that sparks memories of good times had in hotels, a posh hotel in Salzburg where room service was exemplary, we watched an epic thunderstorm and decided to have a child, of pools and understanding staff.

Elizabeth Barber, also know as Beth, is boarding a ship for a cross Atlantic cruise to New York with her completely adequate boyfriend Derek. Her friend paid for the trip but couldn't make it. Whilst waiting interminably to check in for boarding Elizabeth is asked to take part in a simple numbers trick with a street magician, and later he corners them on board, takes his meal with them and verbally assaults Elizabeth. But all is not as it seems and the book and the story are masterful sleights of hand.

The Blue Book is a puzzle box, extremely clever, revealing and deeply moving, it speaks both overtly and in its form of the nature of reading, of charlatan trickery and the probabilities that fake mediums use, whilst never losing contact with the painful history Elizabeth is trying so hard to run from and the difficulties of loving for real. The close reading the puzzle asks of the reader is rewarding and enlightening, teaching as it entertains. It is full of gut level punches and revelation.

The Walking Dead by Robert Kirkman


I'm not a fan of horror films, this was selected for me by one of my current comic pushers at my library and I'm glad he did.

Rick Grimes wakes up in hospital having been in a coma, only to find himself the survivor of a horrific plague that has turned people into cannabilistic zombies.  Grimes makes his way to Atlanta in search of his wife and son and just escapes being eaten alive.

Rather than being splatter gore zombie fare Kirkman looks at what it means to be a survivor, how it feels to be left alive and what survival does to people's character.  Excellent execution (excuse the pun) and writing.

Autonomy by Daniel Blythe

Set in the near future, Hyperville is the mother and father of all shopping malls, an experience so vast with restaurants, bars, casinos, cinemas and theme parks that its hotels hold the shoppers who come to stay for a week or more to get the entire experience.  But something terrible is lurking under the very lowest level of the complex and the Doctor once again fights the Nestene Consciousness, a contest we have seen many times before as the consciouness takes over plastic and taps into our fear of shop dummies.  Good fun and thought provoking about the seeming human love for shopping malls, which are my personal idea of hell.

Lost Souls by Joseph Lidster (BBC RADIO 4 FULL CAST DRAMA)

To celebrate the switching on of the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Switzerland Lidster comes up with an aching Torchwood paen that honours the recent deaths of Toshiko and Owen whilst imagining the worst that could happen when the LHC comes online.  Martha, now working for UNIT, has been called in by a friend to investigate disappearances among the workforce at CERN in Geneva, then her friend disappears and unwilling to bring the entirety of UNIT into a delicate scenario she calls Jack.  There are voices in the air, saying that they are the dead, that they want to come back.

The recording isn't particularly long but it is very good, it's a dramatisation rather than a reading of an audiobook so it's packed with sound effects and hearing Ianto, Jack and Gwen speak of their grief and connecting it with the madness that the irrecoverable loss of a loved one can drive you to is seamless.

Forever Autumn by Mark Morris, read by Will Thorp (AUDIO)

In the New England small town of Blackwood Falls the Doctor and Martha emerge out of an eerie mist, a strange book has been dug up from among the roots of an creepy black skeletal tree and a slumbering menace has awakened.  Think Sleepy Hollow with aliens:  the Hervokan.  They are an ancient race whose science of gestures, psychic connection, ability to bring to life inanimate objects and take over minds looks to human eyes like black magic.  With their giantlike spindly figures and jack o lantern style heads these monsters have been the inspiration of much of the celebrated horrors of Hallowe'en.  The Doctor and Martha must fight to save themselves and the townspeople of Blackwood Falls.  A nice length story, two cds read by Will Thorp, who Dr Who addicts will recognise as Tony Zed from The Impossible Planet and The Satan Pit story arc.

Glow by Amy Kathleen Ryan

Waverley is sixteen, the eldest of the daughters born in space to the crew of the starship Empyrean, a mission of last hope travelling from the poisoned Earth in search of a new world to colonise. Kieran, the eldest boy, has just asked her to marry him and she is considering his fumbling proposal and the presence within the fog of the nebula through which they are passing of their sister ship, the New Horizon.  The ship launched a year before the Empyrean, she should be much further ahead and and their captains are in closeted heated discussion.  There seems no cause for disagreement, both ships contain vast domes of crops and livestock providing them with all the food, oxygen and water they need.  But the Empyrean does have something the New Horizon does not, the children.  As Waverley finds herself prisoner on the sister ship and Kieran one of the boys left without any adults on the Empyrean both struggle for survival and their characters emerge along the way.  This is a good read, but I felt the plotting was a little heavy handed at times, the theme of religious and xenophobic intolerance could have been handled with more subtlety.

Such Stuff As Dreams: The Psychology of Fiction by Keith Oatley

I don't think my brain has worked this hard for over a decade since I left university, but like riding a bike it's amazing how much comes back to you. Oatley has written a tantalising book about the relationship of readers to all kinds of fictions, not just books but also movies and television.  Moving beyond reader-response theory Oatley theorises that when we read we create a simulation in our minds of the fictional world, a dream which we enter into and interact with, and draws on science to show that reading about an action such as kicking activates the same area in our brain as doing that action for ourselves.  He speaks of the social aspect of writing, in particular function, both in terms of speaking to others about what we are reading and with regard to how fiction can help us negotiate the social world for ourselves by presenting us with a myriad of scenarios the total of which could not be contained in a single lifetime.  As a voracious reader I loved this book but was left wanting more, what are the regions of the brain that have been implicated in reading, what can neuroscience tell us?

Akira Volume 2, by Katsuhiro Otomo

Tetsuo's powers and his instability are on the rise.  He becomes obsessed with Akira, the mightu force that destroyed Tokyo 38 years earlier.  Trying to stop him are the clandestine government forces that hold him, headed by the Colonel, and the underground resistance, and Kaneda and the street gangs of Neo-Tokyo.  As the novel Akira rises, a young boy, seemingly innocuous.

Akira Volume 1 by Katsuhiro Otomo

Kaneda is a disaffected rebellious teenage boy growing up in dystopian 2030 Neo-Tokyo, a city built around a crater of destruction from the massive detonation that exploded in the heart of Tokyo at 2.17pm on December the 6th 1992.  He leads his gang of anarchic motorcyling teenage delinquents breaking into the zone of destruction and his friend Tetsuo is badly wounded as they crash trying to avoid a mysterious wrinkled faced child who disappears.  Tetsuo is taken away by mysterious forces and return to their school for out of control teens strangely changed.  A wild adventure of gang warfare, underground resistance, a beautiful girl and awesome psychic powers begins, a 360 page long but absorbing fabulous ride.

Y: The Last Man : One Small Step (Book 3) by Brian Vaughan and Pia Guerra

After a plague which wipes out every creature carrying an X chromosome except for one man, Yorick Brown (alas) and his monkey Ampersand, the pair are travelling across post apocalyptic America with mysterious government agent 355 and bioengineer Dr Mann in search of the doctor's experimental files and a possible cure for the plague.  Israeli soldiers, a Russian agent and the return to earth of three astronauts, two male, from the International Space Station make for a great dystopia, can't wait to read the next.  Brilliantly written by Vaughan and drawn by Guerra.

The Brain Book by Rita Carter

Visually this is a stunning book, coffee table size with beautiful glossy double page spreads of diagrams, photographs and scans. The text on each page is learned and accessible and this would be a good book for kids, the information bites are fairly small.  But despite its beauty I feel there is something lacking.  Many of the photographs of people are of the kind you find on clipart sites illustrating an emotion and don't really serve any purpose, they feel very pat.  The structure of the book is such that you can dip in and out of any spread, so there is no linear narrative, even the history of knowlege on the first pages jumps around and is difficult to follow.  A little too slick.

Blankets by Craig Thompson


This is Thompson's autobiography and at over 580 pages it is a doorstep of a graphic novel, but utterly compelling, expressively drawn in lovely monochrome.
Craig and his younger brother Phil sleep together in a single bed, suffering the everyday traumas of growing up as an outsider, strict Christian fundamentalist parenting and sexual abuse at the hands of a babysitter.  As he negotiates high school with its social hierarchies and casual brutalites he falls in love at Christian summer camp with fellow outsider Raina.  She has her own burdens, a brother with Downs, a sister who is mentally retarded and an utterly selfish older sister who leaves the care of her own baby to her sister and mother.  Thompson chronicles the tender wonder that was his experience of first love, wonder battling with his fundamentalist inspired terror of the sins of lust, of his vision of Raina as a beautiful angel set in contrast to his own self loathing.  Blankets took me achingly back to my own adolescent years, it is stunning in its honesty and expression.

The title refers to a number of evocative concrete images, of a quilt created as a message of love, I know as a quilter the act of creation for a person means that there is an alchemy of thoughts about the person the quilt is destined for in every stitch.  Blankets also refers to the thin inadequate blanket Thompson and his brother shivered under together as boys, that could in their wild lovely imaginations become a pirate ship but could also lead them to fight, to Phil being punished by being traumatically shut in the house's tiny dark spider infested cubby hole and to Thompson carrying a burden of guilt at being unable to protect his brother. Blankets refers to the snows that cover the land during his time with Raina, to memories of creating snow angels, of watching snow fall in the dark and of the coming of the end of love with the thaw.

Cannot recommend enough

The Quitter by Harvey Pekar, art by Dean Haspel

Pekar is one of the giants of American comic writing and in this book expressively drawn in monochrome by Dean Haspel you can see why.  This is Pekar's autobiography of his younger years and he is relentlessly brutal and honest about his own shortcomings, in particular his inability to keep going with any task when faced with being less than perfect and not receiving adultation.  It is a tendency all of us have and dealing with failure is an essential part of character growth and Pekar is mercilessly candid about the ways this shortcoming has crippled his emotional and professional life.  One of those rare comics which is not action driven, not much happens but you come away feeling that you have encountered a mind of rare clarity and a story that you can truly learn from.  I only wish he'd completed the story.