Mixed Pickles - the Book log 2012

Don't take for Granted

The second book in the Peter Grant series, and it builds nicely on the first ("Rivers of London").  Our hero is a rookie policeman, and rookie wizard.  Hold on to your Hogwarts induced heavings, he's no Harry P.    Son of a West Indian jazz man, barely able to conjure a single fireball without blowing the place up, Peter G has to rely on his wits and his ability to sense the presence of magic to solve this one, a nasty tale of jazz men being murdered by... but that would be telling.

New readers start here

The story moves at a hectic pace, and there are colourful characters aplenty mixed in with some great invention (Larry the Lark, the living fortune-telling machine is one to remember).  More widely read people than me might be able to detect influences, but to me Aaronovitch is an original - light-hearted and black-hearted at one and the same time, full og plot and full of wit.  Looking forward to the next one.

Unputdownability : I think I'll go to bed early and do some reading...

That sinking feeling...

Six complete issues of this classic 1950s horror comic, so twentyfour tales of revenge from beyond the grave, premature burial, revenge from beyond the grave, voodoo, faithless wives and philandering husbands... oh, and revenge from beyond the grave.

TftC lacks the variety of, say ShockSupenStories - and although its stories tend to have a moral (albeit most of them are along the lines of "Do this, and someone will take revenge on you from beyond the grave") there is nothing which comes close to the social commentary stories , and none of the adaptations of other writers' works (like the Ray Bradbury's seen elsewhere).

You can forgive the lack of variety - Bill Gaines provided most of the plots for Al Fedstein to write the stories, for most of the EC line of seven bi-monthly titles.  Do the maths - that fourteen short stories a month, every month.  No wonder the plots could be a little samey (or even "inspired" by other media - note the number of times a Wax Museum provides the setting). 

Still - you can imagine the chill these stories gave the unsophisticated juvenile reader, and some of the artwork is pretty ghastly (in the best possible sense).  And you can equally imagine how parents siezed up the EC horror line as the cause of all their problems (in much the same way that, say "Civil War" bubblegum cards outrgaed British parents in the 1960s, and punk rock in the late 70s).  Every generation needs something other than their own failings to take the blame for the inevitable youth disaffection.  Poor old Bill Gaines - it was him and the Communists, and his comics were easier to spot.

Volume 1 now sells for around the £200 mark - not sure that I am completist enough to go that far.  But I shall continue to pick up odd volumes of the EC archive whenever I see them at a decent price.

Unputdownability:  Like a big box of chocolates, one or two taste great, but the the whole lot in one sitting 'll make you a little bit icky.

I really shouldn't - but Philip Reeve is such a great story teller.  Within moments of opening one of his books, you are absorbed into his reality, which he fully furnishes and makes wholly believable.  In "Larklight" we are in a Victorian world as seen through the eyes of a "Boys Own paper" hero with an annoyiong older sister, a deceased mother, and a semi-detached scientific father.  Only difference is, they live in a Jules Verne/H.G. Wells outer space domicile, in a breathable aether that fills a universe full of planets easily reached by alchemical engines.  But in this comfortable, British Space Empire of Kieller Dundee marmalade and Victorian engineering ingenuity lurks a great danger in the form of ten-legged spiders from Saturn.  Oh.  And pirates. 

Thank goodness for the British Secret Service, and backbone, and stiff upper lips.

Even when writing for a younger audience than those that the "Mortal Engines" books are aimed at, Reeve never patronises.  He never insults, and he never stoops to slipping in "adult" jokes, though there are nudging references for the more savvy of his junior readers.

Beautifully, and amusing, illustrated throughout by David Wyatt.

Unputdownability:  like a Saturday morning serial, you can't wait for the next episode.

It'll turn out all Wight in the end

The difficulty with coming across a "serial" character so late in the day is that it is difficult to feel particular empathy with their problem (and all serial detectives seem to have a "problem" these days).  In the case of DI Andy Horton, it is the fate of his disappeared mother, something which takes up an awful lot of his internal processes during the course of this book without making any significant progress towards a solution - very frustrating for the new reader.

While this is all going on, a somewhat overcomplicated case involving a transvestite corpse found bobbing in the sea off the Isle of Wight is being solved and an important lesson is learned - that I don't really enjoy police procedurals as much when they are not written by Ed McBain.

Unputdownability :  Every time I did, I had to backtrack when I picked it up again, just to clarify who was who.

The yellow, black and purple of the Gollancz covers were the first things I learned to loook for when I moved up to the adult library. That, and the PG Wodehouse "Signature" edition jackets from Jenkins.
So I was delighted when I saw a bunch of them in a bookshop, all wrapped aropund ten classic SF novels, and I decided to reintroduce myself to an old favourite; "Dune". I last read this in 1974, just after I started work - it got me through quite a few Tube journeys, books weren't usually that thick in those days.   It bears re-reading nowadays, for the grand scale and the dashing (and sometimes slapdash) plotting.  The writing is surprisingly old-fashioned - the omniscient narrator who can tell you wahat every character in the room is thinking has long fallen out of fashion, but once re-accustomed to it, it becomes bearable if not over-used.  I am left, as I was many years ago, with the impression that Herbert started out with a swashbuckling story of interplanetary fueding, and ten found his story taking over - it becomes more psychedelic the further you get into it, and more portentous and (occasionally) more pretentious. 

Oh well, if you are going to delve into SF's back catalogue, you might as well go for The Master.

Actiually, by this stage of his writing, RAH was far too interested in showing how clever he was, and how well constructed his philosophical arguments were.  So the story itself is episodic, disjointed, and less than satisfying by modern standards (but in its day won, I think, a Hugo for Best SF Novel of the year).

It is astonishing the extent to which Heinlein's world of 5000 years in the future has changed so little from the world of 1960, but RAH isn't there to construct a future technology, merely a future quasi-stratocracy (not actually a military rule per se, but a democracy where only ex-military can vote) and a vehicle for his less than right-on views.  Sometimes I think the only liberal view RAH had was concerning intra-familial love;  Time Enough For Love and Farnham's Freehold both have characters and situations which espouse (*ahem*) "close and loving family relationships".

Never mind.

Don't read this expecting all the excitement of the Vehoeven movie, or the CGI cartoon "Roughnecks" that graced breakfast TV about 15 years ago - don't even expect all the characters to have the same gender.  And take it all with a pinch of generous salt.  Thems was different days, after all.

Unputdownability:  Another day, another chapter.