books
📚Books 2026, 12: Just One Damned Thing After Another, by Jodi Taylor
I’m not sure where I heard of this. It’s on a list of possible books to read I’ve had knocking around for a few years. I thought it originally came from one of those lists in The Guardian, ‘Books to Read This Summer’, or similar. But I can’t find any reference to it on the site now.
And it would be kind of strange to read about this in The Guardian, because it’s not very professional.
The problem is, it feels like it needs a major editing pass. It’s kind of disjointed. There are inconsistencies of tone, and confusion (in the reader) about how much time has passed. After what feels like quite a short time in the main character’s experiences, we learn five years have passed, for example.
The idea is good, and it does succeed in being a page turner. It wound the tension very high, especially at one point. It’s about time-travelling historians. An academic institute where they do historical research by time travel.
Which is a fine idea, but surely the first question anyone asks when they discover time travel is possible is, ‘To the future?’ So if you’re not going to travel forward you need some mechanism or rule as to why that’s not possible. Our characters here don’t even think about the future. Except (spoiler ahead) when one character reveals he’s from the future.
Later on there’s a mission to Mars planned, but that has nothing to do with our characters, except when one threatens to leave and join the space programme. Other than that we hear nothing of the world outside St Mary’s, the research institute that gives this series (because of course) its title.
It turns out it began as a self-published novel, and was successful enough that the series was picked up by a mainstream publishing house, which is the dream. From reviews and comments on GoodReads and elsewhere I hear the writing gets better in the later books. I suspect that is at least partly because of professional editors. Still, we learn our craft and hopefully improve oner time, whatever we do.
Overall I enjoyed this book, though I’m not sure I would recommend it, and I don’t think I’ll bother with the sequels. Interesting, though.
📚 Books 2026, 11: Bright LIghts Big City, by Jay McInerney
I feel that title should have a comma.
I heard Jay McInerney interview on The Booking Club podcast , and it intrigued me enough to make me want to read this. Then, as I suggested a couple of days ago, I wondered why I hadn’t read it years ago..
The second-person, present-tense viewpoint quickly becomes transparent, and is never annoying.
It’s a cocaine-fuelled fever dream. Over a few days and 150 or so pages our unnamed (I think) protagonist loses his job through general fucked-up-ness, tells us the story of how his wife left his wife left him, and of the death of his mother. Which seems to be main trigger for his fall. This is a telling quote:
You kept waiting for the onset of grief.You are beginning to suspect it arrive nine months later, disguised as your response to Amanda’s departure.
All of which makes it sound dark and tragic. But it’s not. It’s really funny most of the time, and a compelling narrative beautifully written all the time. Overall I enjoyed being in the narrator’s head — or him being in mine, or however you’d put it.
📚 You are reading Bright Lights, Big City by Jay McInerney. You are finding it hilarious. This book was published when you were 20: why have you not read it till now?
📚 Books 2026, 10: The Lost World, by Arthur Conan Doyle
I had read a lot of Sherlock Holmes, but none of Doyle’s other work; including none of the Professor Challenger stories. There aren’t nearly as many as there are Holmes stories, so it’s less of a challenge (ha) to do so. I was in a second-hand bookshop a few weeks back, in an unfamiliar town — let’s not be coy, it was Taunton — and I was there so long, going, ‘So many books, so little time,’ that I felt I had to buy something: it would be impolite not to.
And just as I was preparing to leave, I saw a collected Professor Challenger volume, and here we are. I’m treating the individual novels in it as separate novels, since they are, and will write about them here individually.
So to The Lost World . A tale of adventurers finding a fabled land where dinosaurs still live, even in the 20th century. In this case it’s on an inaccessible plateau in South America, not underground, for example.
In fact, this is the motherlode for all those kind of stories, predating Edgar Rice Burroughs and everyone else.
It’s presented as a work by a journalist, Edward Malone, a young man seeking both to please his editors, and (seemingly more importantly at first) to charm his beloved, one Gladys, who says she’s attracted to the adventurous type of man.
Challenger claims to have seen evidence of the prehistoric creatures' existence; his brother scientists don’t believe him; the Zoological Institute commissions an expedition to confirm or deny. Young Malone volunteers/is volunteered to go along and report back.
Stuff happens. Dinosaurs are found. Ape-men fought. An impossible fecundity of life exists on a twenty-by-thirty mile plateau, isolated from the rainforest and Amazon below it. (A question comes to mind: why wouldn’t the pterodactyls fly down from the plateau to the jungle? At least sometimes?)
It’s lots of fun, if very full of the idea that the white European (or really, British) man is the most highly evolved entity on the planet. It is, of course, of its time.
📚 Books 2026, 9: Disappear Doppelgänger Disappear, by Matthew Salesses
I first heard of Matthew Salesses when I was doing my MA. One of the tutors said his forthcoming book on the craft of creative writing was eagerly awaited by everyone in the business of teaching it. This was in early 2021. I got hold of an ebook copy of Craft in the Real World at some point, and haven’t got very far with it. The main thesis, as I recall, was about the typical method of critiquing creative works didn’t work well for all people.
Which is fair enough, if perhaps a bit slight to hang a whole book on (I’m sure there’s more). But when I was looking into it, I read the announcement of this novel (which came out earlier, in 2020), and thought it sounded amazing.
What’s actually amazing to me, having read it, is that it’s the second novel in a row I’ve read that makes almost no sense at all.
I expect it’s me. I suppose it must be, because again, the cover and inner pages here are festooned with glowing platitudes, while I was left cold by much of the action, and confused by what Salesses was trying to say.
A young Korean-American writer1feels he’s disappearing. A near-duplicate of his girlfriend turns up. She used to have a boyfriend who looked just like the narrator, and who disappeared.
She has never heard of Boston, where the novel is set. Until it switches to the alternative universe where the doppelgänger woman came from, and a city whose name is given as XXXXXX. Why not make up an actual, believable, name, I wondered.
All of which is fine, and could explore some interesting ideas about identity, and indeed tries to. But the narrator is such an annoying character who keeps doing stupid things for no very good reason, that it’s hard to get with him. That in itself could be seen as good characterisation, of course.
But whatever is going on between the two alternatives doesn’t make much sense to me, and things don’t get resolved in any meaningful way, and I just didn’t enjoy it much. Cultural differences, maybe? That is, I believe, part of what Salesses’s Craft book was about: different cultures have different ways of telling stories. Maybe my understanding and expectations are just too western to appreciate this.
Which is my loss, I guess.
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Just because they say ‘Write what you know’ doesn’t mean you have to write about writers, by the way. ↩︎
📚 Books 2026, 8: The Spirit of Science Fiction, by Roberto Bolaño, Translated by Natasha Wimmer
On the cover of this there is a quote from The New York Times describing it as ‘A gem-choked puzzle of a book.’ Which is a very fair point. I ended this book and said, ‘I didn’t understand that.’ Which has nothing to do with its being in Spanish, as I was reading a very good translation.
I didn’t really get what it was trying to say, what the point of its existing was. Which sounds horribly dismissive, and I don’t mean it that way. I enjoyed it while I was reading, which didn’t take long, as it’s only 196 pages. But the ending…
Well, let’s start at the beginning. It’s a novel by a Chilean author who is very well thought of, at least posthumously. It’s about two twenty-something would-be poets from Chile, recently arrived in Mexico City. It has three strands. One is a fairly straightforward telling of their life, from the point of view of one of them, Remo. Trying to find writing workshops, learning about the literary magazines of their adopted city, partying.
In another strand, someone is interviewing someone else. The interviewee appears to be Jan, the less active of the two poets. In that first strand, it’s clear he hardly leaves their room. But in this one he has just won a major award. The interviewer may be Remo, but it’s never stated, and there are suggestions it’s someone else.
And in the third strand, Jan writes letters to real-life science fiction authors. Alice Sheldon, Ursula LeGuin, Philip Jose Farmer, and others. They are partly fan letters, partly weird philosophical discussions.
And that’s more or less it. They both get girlfriends, Remo gets a motorcycle. The book ends with a section entitled ‘Mexican Manifesto’, which describes Remo and Laura’s experiences in the bathhouses of the city. And then it just… stops.
Honestly, I feel as if there’s a whole chunk missing at the end. Especially since there are no pages after the last one, either with information or even blank, which is quite unusual.
Another review comment, from the Paris Review, says this book ‘functions as a kind of key to the jewelled box of Bolaño’s fictions’. So maybe I need to read more of his books, and I’ll understand them collectively?
A couple of reviews linked from the Wikipedia entry suggest strongly that this — an early draft, not published in Bolaño’s lifetime — was indeed the wrong place to start.
📚 Books 2026, 7: Raven Black, by Ann Cleeves
I heard Ann Cleeves on the Radio — probably Radio 3’s Private Passions — a couple of years ago. I must have seen her books in shops before that, but hadn’t really paid attention. And I vaguely was aware there was a BBC detective show called Shetland.
Turns out that show is based on this novel and its sequels.
Anyway, she sounded interesting on the radio and I seem to read almost as much crime fiction as SF these days, so when I was exploring a bookshop on our recent trip to Devon, and saw this, I thought I’d give it a try. I devoured it in a couple of days. Really good page-turner, engaging characters, unexpected ending, Just what you want.
📚 Books 2026, 6: The Twenty Days of Turin, by Giorgio De Maria, Translated by Ramon Glazov
I don’t recall where I first heard about this . It was probably Warren Ellis, but I seem to recall there being a second source. Anyway, I lived in Turin, or between Turin and my then-home in Walthamstow, for the best part of a year, 1989–90. My employers had a big contract with an Italian bank, and most of the work was done on site. Which seems amazingly old-fashioned for software development today, when we mostly don’t even visit our employers' premises very often.
All of which has nothing to do with the novel. It was written in the 70s and is set then. The unnamed first-person narrator is researching the titular event, which happened ten years earlier. It’s not entirely clear to what extent he experienced the ‘Twenty Days’ himself, but many people still living in the city did, and they don’t talk about it. It started with mass insomnia. Sleepless people took to the streets, some in their nightclothes. Then the violence started. Mysterious, brutal murders of the insomniacs.
But before all that, there was the Library. It seemed to be a project by well-meaning young people, possibly religious, who set up a kind of pre-computer social network. People were encouraged to share diaries or other writing — original manuscripts only, no published work. For a small fee, anyone could visit the archive thus formed, and read any of the pieces. For slightly higher fee, they could find the name and address of a chosen contributor.
The idea being ostensibly to help lonely people find like-minded folks. With a strange inevitability, that isn’t necessarily how it was used.
The implication is the Library somehow led to the sleeplessness, if not the violence. Perhaps not the violence, as our narrator’s explorations appear to find a more supernatural, if not downright bizarre, explanation for that.
And it all seems to be starting up again. The Library didn’t go away, it just went underground. And the narrator and at least one of his interviewees may be in danger.
It’s an odd one this. Reviews of the recent English-language publication speak of its prescience, comparing the combination of the Library and the insomnia with people up all night doomscrolling on their phones. Which is interesting, but takes no account of the violent attacks, and the supernatural element.
I think this will bear repeated readings.
📚 Books 2026, 5: Red Menace, by Joe Thomas
Red Menace is the sequel to White Riot. As the first book starts with the 1978 anti-Nazi festival in Victoria Park, this one starts at Live Aid. We have similar backstage access, with Suzi Scialfa, photographer and writer, and her partner Keith, sound man to The Style Council.
Thomas does a very clever thing in this book: he makes us be sympathetic to, on the side of, one of the main characters, Parker, who is a spycop, with all that implies. He’s in a relationship with a woman who doesn’t know he’s an undercover police officer. He’s gathering information on left-wing and community protest movements.
He seems to be doing it for good reasons — one of the main crimes he’s trying to father information on is police corruption. This is a time when Stoke Newington Police station was the source of much of the illegal drug traffic in Hackney, a hotbed of police corruption. Parker and his handler are working agains that. At least partly.
In the last one Parker was infiltrating the National Front, which makes me wonder why nobody in the left-wing organisations he’s involved with in this one are aware of that. I suppose you didn’t really do background checks if you were a community organisation on the Broadwater Farm estate, or union organisers in the Wapping dispute. Those being two of the real-world political struggles the novel covers.
It’s told from multiple viewpoints again, most of them characters from the previous novel, and mostly in third person. There are a couple of the younger characters who get first-person sections. And one mysterious gang-boss character whose italicised chapters are in the second person. We’re told ‘you’ are behind various criminal activities around corrupting land deals in the London Docklands redevelopment, corruption involving ‘Right to Buy’, and so on.
I’m not sure why exactly Thomas chooses to do things in this way — particularly the different grammatical persons. Perhaps to help with keeping the different voices distinct; perhaps just as an exercise for himself (or to show off, you might say). It could be confusing, but it never is.
As before, the story is not finished, with a third volume planned. But most things that concern us in this book are wound up, for better or worse, and stories in the real world don’t really have endings, do they?
The striking thing about these books is how he weaves his fictional characters into real-world events that he — and most of his readers, I’d imagine — lived through. Or at least lived through the time in which they happened. And how he has real people interacting with his fictional ones. He gets away with it, I imagine, because he doesn’t have real people say anything they didn’t actually say, and he cites his sources. Political pamphlets, interviews with The Style Council, and so on.
It’s tense at times, and I recommend it.
📚 Books 2026, 4: Caledonian Road, by Andrew O'Hagan
I really enjoyed this. It’s set in London (mostly), in a later year of the pandemic (2022, probably), and across just over a whole year. The characters are people from the upper-middle to upper classes, and some of the lowest classes in society, including criminals and illegally-trafficked people who have to work for them.
Some of the blurbiness on the cover describes it as a ‘state of the nation’ novel. It doesn’t quite seem like that for me (though I don’t know if I could give you an example of one that is), not least because the main characters exist at a fairly rarified level of society. They are things like academics, authors, journalists, MPs and lords. Or else they’re would-be drill rappers in street gangs. There’s nobody who’s just normal; whatever that means.
There are so many characters that O’Hagan provides a list of them, a dramatis personae, which I approve of.
Anyway, it’s very good, and I read it much faster than I expected to, which is usually a good sign.
📚 Books 2026, 3: How to Seal Your Own Fate, by Kristen Perrin
As I said a couple of days ago, the second Castle Knoll Files book isn’t quite as good as the first. It’s a fun enough read, but it feels slight as a work of detective fiction, compared to, say, Christie or Rowling, the main crime writers I’ve read recently.
And there are some incongruities. The writer is American, though she has lived in the UK for years, and it shows. Especially in the parts that are written as being a diary from 1967 (the main narrative is present day). Modern terms are used in ways that they wouldn’t have been back then. No examples come to mind right now, but I might update this if they do.
And there are occasions of dialogue that reads more like exposition. People just don’t talk like that.
Apart from those relatively minor points, I enjoyed it a lot, and will doubtless get the third book, which is due out in April. I wonder both for how long Perrin will be able to keep coming up with titles that match the style; and for how long our intrepid investigator, Annie Adams, will be able to find cold cases in great-aunt’s notes.
📚 Emily Tesh wrote the best SF book of the last couple of years (not just my opinion, it won the Hugo). Now The Incandescent is an incredible fantasy book, a magic-school story for adults.
She’s so good she almost scares me. Yet she just seemed to appear out of nowhere.
📚 Books 2026, 1: The Cold Six Thousand, by James Ellroy
The first book of this year, or the last of last? I started reading James Ellroy’s The Cold Six Thousand a couple of weeks before Christmas, set it aside for some Christmas books, and then went back to it.
I started reading it once before, years ago, and didn’t get far. And I think that’s because of its very strange style. Ellroy uses a chopped-up style of extremely short sentences, much repetition of names, and almost no use of pronouns. For example:
The witnesses were antsy. The witnesses wore name tags. The witnesses perched on one bench.
Or:
Wayne ducked by. Wayne passed a break room. Wayne heard a TV blare.
And that kind of thing is repeated across 600+ pages. It can be hard work at times. The only relief comes in some chapters that purport to be transcripts of phone conversations recorded by the FBI.
We are in the real world here, in the sixties. Right at the start, JFK is assassinated. The three viewpoint characters are all dodgy members of various law-enforcement agencies (Las Vegas police, FBI, CIA) and are all connected to the conspiracy behind that event (spoiler, it was the mob, but certain others, like J Edgar Hoover, weren’t too bothered and/or were sort of involved).
The story carries on through the sixties up to the other to big political assassinations, of Martin Luther King and RFK. And guess what? Our antiheroes — or some of them, at least — are involved in those too.
It’s a novel of the sixties, then, about conspiracies and secrets. Not unlike my beloved Illuminatus! trilogy. So why don’t I love it, then? Mainly, I think, it’s that stylistic choice. I don’t see the point of it, and I found it quite annoying, until eventually it became almost comical. And I did enjoy the book (otherwise I would have stopped reading, what with life being too short to read a book you’re not enjoying). Just not as much as might be expected from the setting.
There’s also this: I learned when I was around half way through that this is actually the middle volume of a trilogy. I’ve noted before, though perhaps only in footnote, that publishers seem to hate putting numbers on books1, or otherwise letting the reader know important details like that. And it doesn’t matter that much here. It works OK as a standalone novel. But I realise now, part of the strangeness at the start may have been a kind of sense that we were expected to know the characters to some degree. I wrote about something like this fifteen(!) years ago, and the sensation I had this time (I now realise) was similar.
Lastly, it’s a very brutal book. There are many acts of extreme violence, described in casual, if not loving, detail. And the casual racism of the language will probably upset some people even more than the violence.
So I’m glad I’ve finally read it, but I don’t see me searching out the other parts of the trilogy.
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‘The Cold Six Thousand? I haven’t read volumes one to 5999 yet!’ ↩︎
📗 Books 2025, 30: Slow Horses, by Mick Herron
It’s interesting to discover that this is a great read even though I’ve seen the TV series. An interesting parallel with early last year, or rather last thing in 2024, when I read Conclave, not long after seeing the film.
If you’re unfamiliar with Mick Herron’s ‘Slough House’ stories, the series is up to four seasons now — or is it five? — on Apple TV. And it’s really good. This is the book that started it all, and it’s excellent. A group of misfit MI5 spies, each of which has been shunted aside from the main track because of some mishap or fuckup.
📗 Books 2025, 28: The Book of Dust vol 3: The Rose Field, by Philip Pullman
I said I wouldn’t say much about the previous book till I’d read this one, since they’re really all of a piece, a single story spread across the two. And now here we are. Oh, and there are spoilers below.
Trouble is… it doesn’t feel like we’re quite finished.
To summarise: I mostly enjoyed the story very much. There were points where I was just wanting it to end, but in the sense of wanting to find out what happened, not of wanting it to be over. Lyra and Pantalaimon can separate, since their adventures in the original trilogy (something I had completely forgotten when I first read volume 2, which is part of the reason I reread the originals back then). And they’re not getting on with each other at the start of volume 2. In fact, Pantalaimon leaves Lyra, goes off on his own, to find, he says, her imagination.
Which sets up the main driver for the two books. Or one of the main drivers. Because there’s a lot going on beyond Lyra and Pan’s life. Specifically, the Magisterium is up to its old shenanigans and a whole lot of new ones, and there’s a war brewing. Or being brewed. But it’s not clear to the ordinary people of Brytain (as they spell it over in Lyra’s world) who or what the war is against.
Lyra and Pan travel east by different routes. Along the way they meet gryphons and witches and humans and, of course, daemons. Some of the humans seem to barely believe their daemons exist, which is odd.
And there are still windows between the worlds — presumably opened by some past bearer of the Subtle Knife — and the Magisterium is trying to destroy them with explosives and some success. Because, they believe (or their new pope-like leader claims to know) the windows let evil into the world.
Or something like that. The ravings of religious nutters doesn’t make much sense. This new pope-like guy is, by coincidence, Mrs Coulter’s brother. That is, he’s Lyra’s uncle. We assume, therefore, they’ll meet towards the end.
Reader, they do not meet. And that’s only the least of what feel like a great deal of loose ends. In fact there are so many points of interest that we might have expected to be resolved that are not, that this feels like the middle volume of a trilogy, not the final one. Which makes sense, considering the first volume of this trilogy was a prequel to the originals, while the second two comprise a sequel. It feels like Pullman wanted to, or should have, written a full sequel trilogy.
I mean, I don’t mind a few things not being resolved. Stories never end, really, they just stop. But there’s just so much here feeling like untold stories. Maybe he’ll release a series of standalone shorts, as he has before with things like ‘Lyra’s Oxford’. Maybe he really has another volume up his sleeve, but if it takes another six years to write it… well, he’s not getting any younger.
Where we’re left is not terrible. Lyra and Pan are back together and reconciled, and the immediate active dangers are stopped. But they’re in another world that doesn’t seem great, and if they go back to their own, they’re a wanted terrorist, thanks to their uncle’s work!
I express the previous paragraph in the way I did to make a point that occurred to me about Lyra’s world. All humans have daemons, which are part of themselves. An externalised part of their personality or psyche. The human and daemon talk to each other, and will talk about themselves doing things, saying, ‘When we sneaked into the catacombs…’ and so on. We. The thing Pullman missed, I think (and I’m sure his Exeter College predecessor, JRR Tolkien, would not have missed) is: language would be different. Ordinary, everyday language. There would hardly be a personal singular pronoun. Or it would still exist, but be used in a different way.
There would probably be different forms of the first-person plural, too. A ‘we’ that means one human and their daemon referring to themselves. And another form of ‘we’ that means a group of people (and their daemons) together.
Anyway. Just a thought about language. And I want more, Mr Pullman, but I don’t expect it. Still a great story, just not quite the ending I was hoping for.
📗 Books 2025, 27: The Book of Dust vol 2: The Secret Commonwealth, by Philip Pullman
I started to dip into the new one, but as I said I might, I decided it had been too long. I went back and reread this one. And I’m very glad I did. I had forgotten many of the details, remembering only a few high and low points.
I really enjoyed it, and won’t have much to say about it till I’ve finished the new one, which I’m already well into, you won’t be surprised to hear.
There is the suggestion that some gates between the worlds are still open. Are any of them to our (Will’s) world? And would we want Lyra and Will to be reunited, if that were possible? It would undermine the ending of the original trilogy, but if done right…
That said, I don’t think that’s where it’s going to go. Just the idle musings of a shipper.
📗 Books 2025, 26: Matrix, by Lauren Groff
A book about nuns in the 12th century? Why not? Austin Kleon rates it, which is how I came to it.
About one nun, more accurately, a real historical figure, who may or may not actually have been a nun at all: Marie de France. She was definitely a poet, though.
None of that really matters, though. The book isn’t a biography, it’s fiction. A novel based loosely on a historical figure about whom not much is known. She’s descended from a fairy, or said to be in the story. She has visions of (or from) the Virgin Mary. She saves an abbey full of nuns from starvation, and turns it into a power in the land.
It’s very good. In my ongoing, unstructured notes on how writers present speech, and such: there is no direct speech at all in this. Or there is at times, but it’s not punctuated as such. I would have expected to find that annoying, but actually I hardly noticed it.
Groff is an excellent writer, I would have to say. I’ll be keeping an eye out for more by her.
📗 Books2025, 25: Summerland, by Hannu Rajaniemi
I enjoyed this, but it hasn’t really stuck in my mind. By which I mean, I finished it a few weeks ago, and don’t really recall much of it now. I’ve read two of Hannu’s hard-SF trilogy, but never got to the third, despite what I predicted back then. They were hard work, as I recall, which is probably why I never got to the third.
This one, which was recommended by Warren Ellis is much more approachable. It’s 1938 and the afterlife has not only been discovered, living humans can communicate with the souls in it. And the intelligence services of the the Great Powers are making use of it to extend the reach of their empires.
It’s good, but thinking about it now, one idea that’s mentioned and doesn’t really get explored is this. People no longer fear death. When you know there’s an afterlife — and especially when your one of the privileged ones with a ‘Ticket’, that means your soul will persist in ‘Summerland’ and not dissipate — then there’s nothing really to fear.
But it’s a spy story, so the focus is on the plot, as it should be, and it’s a good one. Thought it maybe slightly runs out of steam at the end. Worth checking out, though.
‘[W]e might have to wait two years for the conclusion’ I wrote almost six years ago.
The conclusion of The Book of Dust arrived the other day. I haven’t started it yet, and now I’m thinking I might go back and reread the previous one first.