Existential question: in Springsteen’s ‘Open All Night’, if it ’takes [him] two hours to get back to where [his] baby lives’, why does he later call her on the phone to say he’s ‘got three more hours but [he’s] covering ground’? Where has he been in the extra hours???
📚 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.
-
‘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.
-
‘The Cold Six Thousand? I haven’t read volumes one to 5999 yet!’ ↩︎
March in London romorrow in support of the protests in Iran. I’ll be there. Not much reporting of it in the mainstream news, from what I can see.
Watched: Towards Zero Season 1 🎥
Or season ‘only’, as it is. An adaptation of an Agatha Christie novel, and quite a fun one. Where ‘fun’ includes murder, as it tends to with the Queen of Crime, of course.
I note in passing on this early-morning start day, that The Monkees (or songwriter John Stewart) had to get up earlier than The Clash, pre-fame. ‘Ring, ring, it’s seven am’ vs ‘The six o’clock alarm would never ring.’
🎥 Forgot to mention we watched Holiday Inn over the Christmas period. A singer gives up show-business because it’s hard work, to become a farmer! After a year he realises the obvious, and turns his house into a supper club that’s only open on the fifteen holidays in the US year. Great songs.
Trying out mb-cli, a command-line Micro.blog client from @timapple.
I fail to understand anyone who considers themself to be even vaguely ‘progressive’ or ’liberal’ or ‘on the right side of history’ can not stand with the people of Iran. Sure, the US taking action might not be the best result, but as long as the Islamic Republic falls, the world will be better.
Five under par in today’s Minute Cryptic!
Minute Cryptic - 12 January, 2026 “7-Eleven uniform among ugliest uniforms” (5,4) 🟣🟣🟣🟣🟣🟣🟣🟣🟣🟣🟣🟣 🏆 0 hints – 5 under the community par (47,960 solvers so far). www.minutecryptic.com
Going to see The Book of Mormon tonight. I’ve no real idea what it’s about, which may be the best way to approach it, I don’t know.
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.
Very weird. I’m trying to sign in to YouTube on my Mac. The signin page gets intercepted by Microsoft’s SSO page, which wants me to log on with my City Lit account. I did a course there last term. They used Google Classroom, so that was the last way I signed in to anything Google. But I want to sign in with my Google account.
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.)
Watched: Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl 🎥
Another one we watched over Christmas. Rewatched, actually, as we saw it when it came out last year.
Tons of fun, of course. Four stars.
Watched: A Few Good Men 🎥
I’m trying the Micro.blog films feature, for more control than the Letterboxd RSS feed.
We introduced our daughter to The West Wing over the last few months, and needed more Sorkin. Also RIP Rob Reiner. It’s a great film. I’d give it four stars if this had them.
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.