A curmudgeon writes.
Night and the City by Gerald Kersh
My rating: 5 of 5 stars.
Gerald Kersh is someone I’d wanted to read for a while. Harlan Ellison and Michael Moorcock were and are both fans, and the author seems to be one of those, like Poe or Dickens, who managed a hack’s volume, but also kept a remarkable quality.
He also looked natty as fuck, let’s face it.
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The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton.
My rating: 5 of 5 stars.
You know, there’s not a great deal of point to reviewing something like The Outsiders. It’s the sort of work that’s become such a cultural touchstone – who hadn’t heard “stay gold” before reading this? – that it’s impossible to rank it. The score won’t change anyone’s mind, nor will it change the book’s reputation.
Still, in the spirit of trying to review everything I read in order to give some shape to my post-read feelings, I’ll give it a go.
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54 by Wu Ming.
My rating: 5 of 5 stars.
Last year I read Q, the medieval pastiche created by Luther Blissett, a guy who did exist but also – for authorial purposes – didn’t.
This year, I moved a bit forward in time and read 54, set in 1954. It’s another creation by parts of Q‘s creative steering committee, except this time around they’re known as Wu Ming. Basically they’re a bunch of anonymous Bologna-based scribes who create playful pieces, which is just as well because their nom-de-plume is the Chinese phrase for anonymous.
How handy is that?
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The Plague by Albert Camus.
My rating: 5 of 5 stars.
The Plague mightn’t have inspired a Cure song, but that doesn’t mean you should discount it. I mean, is it on the nose to be reading something with this title in 2020? It feels a little on the nose, but here I am, ploughing through Camus’s 1947 examination of the effects of bubonic plague on a city because frankly, there’s not much else to do in 2020 other than to try and avoid disease by any means necessary, as others seem hell-bent on playing chicken with it.
(Well. I suppose I could’ve come up with a radio adaptation and recorded it remotely but I guess I don’t have the funding or the spark of the BBC, so reading it was about all I can stretch to.)
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Nightmares: Three Great Suspense Novels by Ira Levin.
My rating: 5 of 5 stars.
Ira Levin. You know the guy: novelist, playwright and the man whose stories became adapted into a dozen or so films, from Sliver to The Boys From Brazil. A jobbing writer, whose tight planning is a thing of wonder.
Nightmares is a collection of three of Levin’s novels in one book club-style hardback. It’s something that I came across in an op shop in a small town in the middle of the country, which is probably fitting because each of the stories are about people fitting in – or trying to fit in – to a community.
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Islam: The Essentials by Tariq Ramadan.
My rating: 4 of 5 stars.
I’m not a Muslim – I’m not really religious in any meaningful way – but I’ve always had an interest in Islam. This interest is probably a mish-mash of things: the lingerings of Orientalist stories from my youth, and the fact that the belief seemed such a mystery to me.
I’ve lived in areas with plenty of Muslim neighbours, but I’ve not known much about what they believe. Certainly, there’s a lot of investment in the West in presenting the faith as the origin of Everything Wrong With The World, so it’s the sort of thing I’ve long had a niggling desire to get a better handle on. Because surely tabloids aren’t the best source of qualified comment on the religion, right?
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The Parsifal Mosaic by Robert Ludlum.
My rating: 4 of 5 stars.
Airport novels. They’re the ideal way to defrag your brain. It took me years to deprogram myself from the literature degree belief that everything I read had to be worthy, had to be a classic.
Sometimes, you just want some brain-popcorn rather than multi-clausal comedies of manners.
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The Cook by Harry Kressing.
My rating: 5 of 5 stars.
I imagine this novel to take place in some kind of weird Mad Men universe. It’s that drinks-before-dinner, hired-help-run-the-show kind of world where there’s precise demarcation between what’s meant to happen and those it’s meant to happen to. Think of it like Upstairs, Downstairs only with Betty Draper and you’re probably about right.
Naturally, this clockwork world goes to shit the moment the titular character shows up.
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Water Shall Refuse Them by Lucie McKnight Hardy.
My rating: 4 of 5 stars.
Heading to a drought-stricken Wales in 1976 seems like a shitty holiday idea. It’s even shittier when you’re a 16-year-old girl accompanied by your family – a needy toddler, a sculptor father and a grieving, wasting mother – and eaten up by a dedication to something called The Creed.
You can tell things aren’t going to go well, and that’s before the village turns out to be, uh, none too friendly to outsiders.
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Burnt Island by Alice Thompson.
My rating: 5 of 5 stars.
I’d read the blurb for this book – writer applies for a fellowship on a Scottish island and mysteries ensue – and noted the price (three bucks on Kindle!) and took the plunge. I mean, I’ve spent more on bad coffee, let alone good spookiness.
Imagination is a terrible thing, Max. It perverts reality. You can lose yourself in it. Not realise what’s really happening to you.
This is good spookiness. Continue reading “Book review: Burnt Island”
Yeah nah. 