Mo Said She Was Quirky by James Kelman

24 hours inside the mind of Helen, pretty much stream of consciousness.  Helen is a croupier working nights at a London West End casino.  She has a 6 year old daughter Sophie, is divorced from Sophie's father and lives with her boyfriend Mo in a tiny flat in south London.

On this day Helen is on her way home from her shift in a taxi when she is startled by the sight of a pair of homeless men walking in front of them.  He seems to be Helen's brother Brian, lost to her years earlier when he walked out of their Glasgow home after a fight with their father.  Unable to rest as she so desperately needs to do she is sat in the kitchen as Mo and Sophie wake, startling her from her reverie on old family photographs.  As they begin their day Helen retreats to bed waking as Sophie's school day ends and Mo prepares to go to work as a waiter.

Kelman brilliantly evokes the fractured sense of a life of drugery, Helen is never rested enough or present enough to be a parent to Sophie and the shadow of her own past, unloved by her mother, abandoned by her beloved brother, negatively affects her judgement of Sophie's actions and innocence.

It is so noisy in Helen's head, things unspoken, sentences half spoken making the reader wonder and speculate.  Helen worries incessantly and conversely talks herself into not acting on the things her instinct warns her are not right.

This was a book that returned to my mind over and over, the sad bleakness of Helen's life living the twilight world of a nightshift worker fighting to make ends meet, not a comfortable book but a brilliantly written one.

Four Children and It written and read by Jacqueline Wilson

Rosalind has been sent to live with her dad and stepmother for the summer while her mother goes to sumer school and is not best pleased.  Rosalind is a bookish girl, her brother Robbie is similar, lost in a world of playing with his toy animals.  But at their dad's house they have to cope with their new stepsister Samantha, always appropriately known as Smash, and life with a dad who always seems to be disappointed in them.  However, there is compensation in the form of Maudy, their new half sister, an adorable toddler.  On a day out having a picnic in the local woods they find a strange creature in the sand and Rosalind recognises it, it's the sand fairy or passamead from one of her books, a creature that can grant wishes.

In a wonderful tribute to E Nesbit's Five Children and It Wilson shows just what can happen when your wishes do come true, and continues the tradition of the children learning a series of hard and entertaining lessons when things go wrong.  Wilson brings Nesbit's classic right up to date, rather than five children from one family we have a fractured family with all the conflicting loyalties and difficult feelings that Wilson writes so deftly about.  But there is the same feeling of 'what if' that still enchants.

Wilson reading her own book brings an extra wonderful touch, she is as entertaining a reader as a writer and her love for her character and story is so evident.

Time Warped: Unlocking the Mysteries of Perception by Claudia Hammond

Claudia Hammond presents solid evidence culled from scientific papers and in this wonderfully accessible book presents an overview of how we perceive time and our minds can betray us.  She looks at how our brains perceive the passage of time and the illusions that reveal our weaknesses, how people with synaesthesia perceive time and how we can work with the feeling of never having enough time in our days.  Hammon writes in a clear good humoured style, describing the extremes psychologists have gone to in the cause of discovering how our brains perceive time, from shutting themselves away in ice caves to recording then trying to recall every day of their lives.  She speaks elegantly of the pysiological structures in our brains and bodies that perceive the passage of time without the presence of an actual internal clock. A really enjoyable education.

Freddie & Me: A Coming of Age (Bohemian) Rhapsody by Mike Dawson (gn)

An interesting chronicle of life lived with an obsession with Queen.  Mike Dawson is born Scottish but grows up in the Midlands before moving with his family to America, where Queen are virtually unknown.  Like many of us of the same generation he describes the first time he saw the groundbreaking band on television with their strange videos and Mercury's awesome voice.  I liked the nice touches of Mike's parents giving him his first Queen album on tape.  Relations with family and the tensions of growing up with an older brother and younger sister are well narrated.

Ocean of Life: How Our Seas Are Changing by Calum Roberts

This is a clarion call to action by a Professor of Marine Conservation at the University of York.  Much of his prose is a slow read because he writes as a scientist, there are few quick soundbites, just a mountain of evidence with regard to how the seas have changed since humans evolved.  He takes us through all the science of oceanography and marine biology, winds and currents, tides, deoxygenation, dead zones, disease and marine farming, history, acidity and warming with remarkably little repetition.

Roberts begins at the beginning, with our impact as hunter gatherers, and moves through industrialisation and mechanisation showing how our methods of using the seas, both as a source for food and as a sink for our waste, have grown exponentially over the past 200 years.  The seas are not as visible to the lay person as land and the effects of global warming upon them have been less obvious, but they are now becoming more so as the sea warms, the ice caps melt, the water becomes more acidic, areas of deoxygenated water grow and the stresses the seas are placed under are exacerbated by human needs for food.

The science Roberts lays out from multiple sources demonstrates the untenability of claims of climate change, but remarkably this book is not a gloomy one.  Roberts is a scientist and as such he gives the fully balanced view.  He demonstrates there are many unknowns, that life within the seas is evolving  and the ways in which the marine environment ultimately evolves is unknown and may be of benefit, but that the problem may well be that humans will not survive the changes they have wrought.  Roberts works with many marine conservation agencies and believes that conscientious stewardship of the sea is both possible and beginning to take place.

A worthwhile task to read, thoroughly educating and well balanced, and you will never look at the seas in the same way again.

Judge Dredd The Art of Kenny Who: The Cam Kennedy Collection by John Wagner, Alan Grant, Gordon Rennie and Cam Kennedy

I simply have not laughed this much at a comic in ages.  Judge Dredd is Mega-City One's infamous police officer, the 2000AD parody of American policing culture, a man who is judge, jury and executioner (frequently) in a futuristic police state city, the man who's famous tagline is 'I am the Law!'.   Kenny Who comes to Mega-City One from the Caledonian Hab Zone to make his fortune as an artist for Big 1 Comics.  An innocent abroad in the predatory city he quickly brings himself to the attention of Dredd, getting himself bitten by a rouge human and ending up in jail after threatening the Senior Editor of Big 1 Comics and smashing the robots who it turns out are actually drawing the comics.  It's a merciless parody of the big American comics publishers, of stereotypes of Scots and just brilliantly illustrated by Kennedy.  And that's just one of the stories in this collection, pages of artwork that are so far from the standard grid plan.

John Carter: A Princess of Mars by Roger Langridge and Filipe Andrade

This is a graphic novel adaptation of Edgar Rice Burroughs' first Barsoom novel and I have to admit I haven't read the original, but the adapatation is well drawn and full of life.

John Carter is a prospector in the Arizona desert in the early days of America.   He wakes up from being overcome by fumes while escaping men on horseback to find himself stranded on Mars, the prisoner of green many armed lizard like creatures who call themselves Tharks.  He can understand them but they cannot understand him.  When they capture a human princess Dejah Thoris Carter's affections are engaged and he fights to free her.

Andrade's drawings of the humans has an epic feel, all muscle definition, flowing hair and a Grecian feel.  The martians with their green flesh and multiple arms are scary but are bipedal and easy to perceive as sentient intelligent beings and the battle scenes are beautifully drawn.

The Fourth Crow by Pat McIntosh

Maister Gil Cunningham is Blacader's quaestor, the man in medieval Glasgow charged with investigating suspicious deaths and bringing the perpetrators to justice, in effect a detective.  A woman has been tied to St Mungo's Cross to cure her melancholic madness, not unusual in itself, but now she is dead.  Gil's investigation rapidly becomes more convoluted, McIntosh weaves together medieval Scots with early Glasweigian life where the church ordered the hours of the day and the law of the land into an engrossing mystery with plenty of twists and turns.