27th July 2024

Frankie Boyle’s novel has been on my wish list since I first saw it listed, and so when I came across it in a charity shop it was an easy choice.

It’s the tale of a man for whom much has gone wrong, and yet he’s not really cognisant of that currently, living out a repetitive and chaotic life propped up by a range of pharmaceuticals that make constant and repeated appearances chapter after chapter after chapter.

As a work of humour, it has its moments. It’s filled with ideas. Almost to the point you think that Frankie Boyle’s head is such an idea machine that he wrote to novel just to get rid of as many of them as possible in one go.

The plot is convoluted, with a lot of characters coming and going. Weirdly it reminded me a lot of Douglas Adams, and his Dirk Gently character, in that in both the character’s approach to investigation is to just see where the universe takes him.

In reflection, I think it was probably too complex and too druggy for me to really recommend, but I’m glad I got the chance to read it at last.

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21st July 2024

Although technically a prequel, this novella totally stands alone and doesn’t need the reader to have any familiarity with the main series. Some knowledge of Tudor monarchy will help, but only as much as is standard primary school curriculum.

We arrive at the court of Henry VIII as he’s updating his marital status, following Grace, a relatively minor noble who has been chosen to serve as a lady-in-waiting to the Queen, and learns that her colleagues are more than they first seem.

It’s an interesting story of believable characters of the time, and shows a little bit of the history of this fictional universe in a way that’s very easy to empathise with.

Mostly though I loved how much research must have gone into creating such an authentic setting. There were loads of little references to historic people, places, and events with which I wasn’t familiar, and several times I found myself off reading down a rabbit hole of Wikipedia to learn about something mentioned in passing.

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21st July 2024

Chris Brookmyre subverts the genre with a bewildering opening to this complex novel, where we open in a Scottish village, following a cosy crime story about an elderly Marplesque detective. But after three chapters suddenly another novel starts - now we’re in LA, the present tense, and a gritty thriller about a reckless cop.

As the plots develop in parallel, the novel becomes more and more complex, gradually peeling back layers for the reader so we can learn more and more about this bizarre world, until finally…

It’s a totally original approach to storytelling while also feeling so very Brookmyre. I absolutely raced through it, totally hooked on the mystery within the mystery within the mystery.

Another really good adventure that I thoroughly enjoyed all the way through.

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21st July 2024

Clark’s first novel drops us into a parallel early-20th-century Egypt, several decades after the Djinn and other supernatural beings returned to the world. There we meet Fatma, an agent of the government ministry responsible for the supernatural, as she’s assigned to investigate some mysterious deaths.

It’s a really interesting world filled with new twists on which supernatural beings have what powers, what problems, and look out for which people. And a really solid set of nuanced and interesting characters surviving in a world that both is and isn’t our own.

I understand that while this is the first novel, there are already several shorter works that Clark has set in this universe and with these characters. The novel refers back to these a bit too frequently and relies on devices sourced from these to continue its plot. I found this a bit frustrating having not read those other works, as without all the context these elements felt a bit like cop outs. So I’d recommend making the effort to seek those out before reading this.

Overall though a really nice visit to a book set in a different place, culture, and time, with the added bonus of some fantasy worldbuilding.

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7th July 2024

I’ve seen this book and its sequels in shops so many times and eventually picked it up in a charity shop.

This is a tale of a bewildered Englishman who runs a B&B in the Loire Valley, who just wants a quiet life, but whose guests seem to be a wild mix of people causing too much excitement to enter his life.

I think my main frustration was that we’re aligned with the wrong character. This means that there’s so much going on that we don’t see, and even when action happens most of it is in the chapter breaks and we just get filled in afterward.

I found the narrative very easy for my eyes to just slide past and so found myself having to go back and find out what I’d missed, which is never a great experience.

There are a couple of moments where I did actually laugh, but eventually I realised I needed to just put the effort in to get the second half done in one sitting so I couldn’t move on to something hopefully more engaging.

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7th July 2024

I’ve waited many decades to read this, but a desire to avoid the films until I’ve done the book finally prompted me into it.

At its core this is the tragic tale of a young man forced by prophecy/destiny into a course of actions that he has almost no control over, serving as a vehicle for building a science fiction world seemingly decrying a capitalist future of oppression by a hereditary ruling class.

I struggled to find most, if any, of the characters engaging, and the worldbuilding limited in interest with the focus being more on the politics than anything else. I found the plot to be slow, and driven much more by what people were thinking rather than doing.

The narrative frustratingly flicked between characters, often seemingly mid-sentence, so just when I was starting to feel comfortable in an alignment I was thrown elsewhere. I’m not sure I would read something that’s so much in the heads of its characters and think “this’ll make a film”.

As much as I wanted to appreciate it, I don’t expect to be picking up any of the sequels.

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29th June 2024

After reading a hefty non-fiction tome and trying to read something which turned out to be very much not my thing, I turned to Andrew Cartmel, whose previous novels I’ve found very relaxing and enjoyable.

The Paperback Sleuth is the opening to a new series with a new main character, but very quickly becomes clear that it’s the same world as the Vinyl Detective series, and Cartmel makes great ongoing jokes out of cross-over between the two.

This though has a new tone. Cordelia, our main character, has a more chilled attitude to life, and that’s reflected in slightly more graphic sex and drugs references than those in the previous series.

It’s a really good book, and I absolutely stormed through it in two days, aided by the weather being perfectly attuned for sitting out in the garden in the evenings.

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