Monthly Archives: February 2009

Masks of the Illuminati, by Robert Anton Wilson (Books 2008, 21)

If you had asked me a few months ago whether I had read this I’d have said yes. I thought that I had read most, if not all, of Wilson’s books that are in linked to the Illuminatus trilogy. But I’d have been wrong.

This one features James Joyce and Albert Einstein drinking in [...]

Snow by Orhan Pamuk (Books 2008, 20)

Above all, this took me a loooong time to finish. Even when I was reading it steadily and thought I would just carry straight on through, it was slow going.

It’s not that hated it; or even that I didn’t like it. Nor, indeed. was the prose hard or complex. It just didn’t [...]

The System of the World, by Neal Stephenson (books 2008, 19)

This has been the third year in which I have read a volume of The Baroque Cycle over the summer. I loved the first, despite its dip after the first book. The second was slower – in fact suffering from classic middle-volume longeurs. I thoroughly enjoyed them both, though.

This third volume is [...]

Pattern Recognition, by William Gibson (Books 2008, 18)

Cayce Pollard has a strange kind of allergy: certain brands make her ill.

Or at least, their logos do; seeing the Michelin Man, for instance, sets her off in a particularly bad way. She has a corresponding – and possibly linked – talent, which is that she can reliably tell whether a new logo, for [...]

Transmetropolitan: Back on the Street, by Warren Ellis and Darick Robertson (Books 2008, 17)

Ellis’s Spider Jerusalem is a journalist, based on Hunter S Thompson. At the start he is living in seclusion in a cabin in the mountains, but contractual difficulties drive him back to the city for the first time in five years. Shit happens, and he writes about it.

This volume comprises the first three [...]