Longform
📚 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.
Watched: ¡Nae Pasaran! 🎥
¡Nae Pasaran! is a great wee documentary about some workers at a Rolls Royce plant in East Kilbride (near Glasgow), who refused to repair the jet engines for Hawker Hunter aircraft belonging to the Chilean air force, because of Pinochet’s coup and atrocities.
The filmmaker, Felipe Bustos Sierra, is the son of Chilean exiles, and he manages to track down various people in Chile who were connected to the events. Former air force officers who refused to support the coup and who were arrested and tortured thereby. An air force general who did serve in Pinochet’s murderous regime, but wasn’t flying the day they bombed the parliament building, honest guv!
There were eight engines in East Kilbride for maintenance when one of the workers realised they were Chilean. As a union shop steward he ‘blacked’ them: marked them as disputed and not to be worked on.
Eventually they were moved outside. After six months in the Scottish weather, we learn, even crated up, they would be useless.
Well worth a watch if you can track it down (It was available to buy on Vimeo). A celebration of international workers’ solidarity, and reminder of a time when unions were strong in this country.
Little Lost Machine
A little while ago, which turns out to have been June 2024, I microposted saying I ought to write about my thoughts on the current state of what people like to call AI. LLM-based prediction machines, some might say. Then about a year later I briefly wrote again about my negative reaction to the whole idea.
But I didn’t go into detail. And I’m still not going to; at least not today. I have several thousand words of attempted essays, if that’s not a tautology1, wherein I try to understand my own thoughts and feelings.
And time passes. And the development of the things is lightning fast. It’s a moving target that annoys me.
Still, I do have thoughts. And feelings. And the best way to understand them is to write about them. And the best way to write about them is publicly. Maybe. So I’m going to try writing about them here. A series of short posts around that theme. This is the first.
Maybe I’ll give them their own category, though I have too many categories as it is. I discovered it’s hard to search my blog for ‘AI’. Micro.blog’s search is good, but that’s just such a common set of letters. Weirdly, it brought up all my Crucial Tracks entries, as if it was also finding the ‘IA’ in ‘crucial’.
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What with ’essay’ originally meaning ‘attempt’. ↩︎
📚 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 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!’ ↩︎
The American President 🎥
The American President is another Sorkin/Reiner collab, and another one we watched over the Christmas break.
it’s also Sorkin’s dry run for
it’s pretty good. Feels weird, having Martin Sheen in the Leo role, but you get used to it.
The Godfather 🎥
Can’t remember if we watched this on Christmas Day or Boxing Day, but it turns out to be a Christmas movie itself. At least in part, and as much as Die Hard is. Or maybe not quite. The point is it does have a scene — quite an important one — at Christmas.
Anyway. I thought I had seen this before. I mean I had, I watched it. But I couldn’t remember anything of the story after the famous horse’s head scene. Maybe that’s because I watched it on my own, so didn’t talk about it afterwards? I don’t know.
It is, of course, very good. There are some strange missed or dropped elements. Michael marries a woman while he’s in hiding in Sicily. She is assassinated by a car bomb, and never mentioned again. Not even as part of his motivation for revenge on the other Mafia families.
I don’t doubt, though, that if (when) I watch it again, I’ll find many parts I missed or have forgotten. That may be the mark of a great film, you can keep going back to it. Or, I don’t know, maybe the mark of a bad one, that you don’t remember it! (I don’t really think that.)
Bowie: The Final Act 🎥
Watched: Bowie: The Final Act 🎥
Very good documentary about Bowie, starting approximately with Young Americans and moving forward — though moving back and forward in time. A lot of focus on the years in which he (hushed tones) wasn’t cool!
Interviews with Reeves Gabrels of Tin Machine, Earl Slick, Tony Visconti and others. Well worth a watch.
📗 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, 29: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, by Simon Armitage
This is, of course, a classic of Old English literature, translated into a modern verse form by the poet Laureate, Simon Armitage.
It’s a deeply weird tale. Why, when an uncanny knight turns up at King Arthur’s court — not just dressed in green, but green-skinned and -haired — and issues a challenge that involves both striking the knight with an axe and agreeing to receive a similar blow from the knight in a year’s time; why would anyone agree to that?
Chivalry, I guess? Or arrogance, we might call it today. Either way, Gawain accepts, and beheads the knight. The knight picks up his head and rides off, saying, ‘See you in a year, you’ve got to find me or you’re a big fat coward,’ basically.
Gawain proceeds to do nothing about it until the year is almost out. This, at least, I can identify with.
Don’t get me wrong, I loved it. I might take issue with the modernness, the casualness of some of Armitage’s word choice. But who am I to do so?
2025 in Blogging and Reading
My personal tradition requires me to post a brief summary of last year’s posts, early in the new year. I also note how many books I read.
In 2025 I read — I’m going to call it 30 books, even though there are only 28 posts so tagged at the time of writing. I’ve finished two in the last week or so that I consider 2025 books, and I’ll be posting about them soon.
And 134 posts so dated, which is up on 2024. Here’s the monthly breakdown:
| Month | Posts |
|---|---|
| Jan | 6 |
| Feb | 13 |
| Mar | 14 |
| Apr | 27 |
| May | 15 |
| Jun | 15 |
| Jul | 8 |
| Aug | 8 |
| Sep | 5 |
| Oct | 11 |
| Nov | 7 |
| Dec | 5 |
And on we go into the new year.
📗 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.
Bringing Up Baby, 1938 - ★½
We tried to watch this several months ago and it was so annoying we gave up after a few minutes. But it turns up on so many lists of best comedies, we thought we'd give it another chance.
Which maybe wasn't a mistake, but wasn't a great use of our time.
It's not terrible, but it's pretty poor. Rich people being daft, and all the comedy relies on no one communicating even close to sensibly.
But it has a few moments, and there's a collapsing brontosaurus at the end. Sorry if that's a spoiler for you.
Crucial Track for 30 November 2025: Come Home
'Come Home' by James
Share a song that perfectly soundtracks your commute.
If I hadn't already listed 'Sit Down' as a Crucial Track, it would be perfect, because most days my 'commute' involves going into a room in my house and sitting down at my desk.
Still, we can stay with James: 'Come Home' is just as appropriate.
📗 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.
This Is Spinal Tap, 1984 - ★★½
This isn't as good as I remembered, nor, in all honesty, as good as its legend suggests. It's well done, certainly, and the iconic moments are all there, of course. But it's not really that funny.
Some moments, are humorous enough, to be sure.
I wonder if the forthcoming sequel will go up to 12.
📗 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.