The City of Shifting Waters

With my 20-book project complete a couple of weeks before the year's end and some free time before tackling next year's goal, I decided to get a couple of quick ones in while I could. And it turned out I enjoyed writing about books so much that I'm going to keep doing it, so here's my first stand-alone book review.

Every Christmas, I like to give the gift of cinema to my family members. This year I took a gamble on getting my dad a film I hadn't seen: Luc Besson's Valérian and the City of a Thousand Planets. A gamble in that reviews and public reception had been mixed last summer and it was based on source material that none of us were familiar with. We ultimately all found Valérian to be a highly imaginative and enjoyable adventure through the space of the distant future, and while I felt the plot ran out of steam somewhat, the visuals more than made up for it.

It inspired me to seek out the original series of bandes dessinées written by Pierre Christin and illustrated by Jean-Claude Mézières, spanning a huge 21 albums across five decades. Personally I had never heard of the series, although feature adaptation aside the works have had significant influence on science fiction and the comic book medium, and are among the most successful in their genre. I was pleasantly surprised to find the first volume, 1970's The City of Shifting Waters, available for free on Kindle, and so dived in despite not having tried out any kind of book with images on that device before.

I found it to be something of a paradox. It is at once hugely inventive and also reliant on a range of sci-fi stereotypes - although on reflection, I suppose that its relatively early publication date means that it could well have served as the origination of some of those. The concept of "closing the loop" in its time-travelling story arc is certainly one that has been done many times since, but perhaps not before; and along with being given equal footing in the series' title, agent Laureline is certainly a progressive female character at a time when the likes of Robert Heinlein were dominating the genre.

However, it does also fall into the classic Dr. Who style trap of providing characters with access to unlimited travel across space and time and then sending them to 20th-century Earth with it. Albeit this is a post-nuclear disaster 1986 in which New York has turned into a tropical mangrove swamp and what little population remains is locked in a constant war of organised crime. Likewise, the villain Xombul, with his underground lair and plot to rule the world, is lifted straight from the pages of earlier superhero comics. Yet he is balanced by the charismatic blaxploitation gangster-musician Sun Rae and the endearingly nerdy scientist Dr. Schroeder, both of whom develop nicely as they help Valerian and Laureline in their mission.

So while the book is nowhere near as spectacular in its scope as the film, that can probably be put down to its age and the fact that this is where the series began. My experience of bande dessinée is effectively limited to Tintin and Astérix, both of which took a couple of books to truly hit their stride, and I wouldn't be surprised if Valérian didn't follow the same trend both in terms of writing and art as the years went on. I would certainly like to read more of it, and expand my knowledge of the medium in general.

3.5/5

Dane DeHaan was nowhere near as macho as the book version of Valérian, and Cara Delevigne not as ladylike as Laureline. But again, that could be the direction the characters take further down the line. In contrast, the film was a lot more bombastic than the book, which would be sound-tracked nicely by Air's sublime Moon Safari - French futurism at its best.

20 - The Devil's Ark

It was between the ages of 16 and 18 that I read a sizeable number of the books that anyone wishing to claim an interest in literature has to read. And it was during that same period that I managed to get back into reading in a way that I had been neglecting since my childhood. I came to realise that there was a world of literature out there that was essential to my intellectual development - and while I still have a long way to go in that respect, I am glad to have had the time and inclination to make the attempt.

My motivation can be attributed in large part to one man - Stephen Bywater. Taking charge of the literature side of my AS level in English Literature and Language, he taught the subject in the best possible way, opening my mind to entire new schools of thought and ideas that perpetuated my cultural curiosity through university and beyond. So it was only fair that, when he wrote a book, I should give it a read.

The Devil's Ark is an enjoyable piece of pulp-noir horror set in 1930s Iraq as a team of archaeologists attempt to excavate the ancient city of Nineveh. They are joined by photographer Harry Ward, who has been drifting around the world since his release from a mental institution that had been treating his WWI-induced PTSD, and now finds himself in the same region where he experienced that trauma. However his nightmares soon become the least of his worries as the team finds itself plagued by attacks of an apparently supernatural nature, and begin to clash among themselves as well.

The book is as good as you would expect from a writer who has devoted their career to the study of literature and language. Of course it's well-written, the characters are all well-defined and interact in a convincing manner, and the plot develops in a perfectly metered fashion as the tension builds (although contrary to the classic English teacher epithet, we are given a beginning, a middle and something that doesn't quite serve as an end). But what elevates it above being simply a technical exercise in fiction is the way the imagery interplays with the interior monologue, the exploration of mankind's darkest recesses (not surprising to anyone who has experienced one of his lessons on Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber) and a couple of genuinely hair-raising moments of pure horror. On reflection, it surpassed my expectations.

5/5

When it comes to 30s-inspired noir cool, this song serves as as good a soundtrack as any.

So that was 20 books for 2017. I think I was rash to say in my introductory post that I had ever fallen out of love with reading, because the love of it never went away. But I have certainly found that rearranging my life to make more room for it has been beneficial in a number of ways. With that in mind, my target for 2018 is to read just one book - David Foster Wallace's 1200-page juggernaut The Infinite Jest. I may review that here too if I haven't forgotten about all this by then.

Final ranking of all the books read this year, because I like to do that sort of thing:

1. Catch-22 - still yet to come across anything on its level.

2. Micromegas

3. Station Eleven

4. Hard To Be A God

5. The Devil's Ark

6. Anthem

7. Les Steine de la Castafiore

8. Ubik

9. The KLF: Chaos, Magic and the Band Who Burned a Million Pounds

10. Stories of Your Life and Others

11. Bricking It 

12. Morning Crafts

13. Wake

14. The Road to Little Dribbling

15. Distraction Pieces

16. The Devil Rides Out

17. A Brief History of Time

18. Rushing to Paradise

19. Make Something Up

20. Meditations

19 - Morning Crafts

When it comes to the arts (specifically music, film and literature), I've often been accused of having a slightly weird taste. As such, I've given some thought over the years to what can actually be classified as "weird" and whether the concept can even be defined in an objective sense. By dictionary definition, the word refers specifically to the supernatural, or in a more archaic manner to ideas of fate and destiny. Yet that doesn't seem to be quite in line with its modern usage, which relates more generally to anything outside of the usual, mainstream or everyday. But again there's another layer - hard to pin down - to the word that lends its usage to situations or ideas that instil a sense in those experiencing them that all is not quite right; so I suppose in that way the original definition has been retained.

With all that in mind, Tito Perdue's Morning Crafts is a truly, objectively weird book. Just as a start, for the purposes of this post I realised I would have to look up the publication date, as I was unable to place it at all, and consequently couldn't really put it in a wider context. The answer turned out to be 2012, much more recent than I would have guessed, and I believe not consistent with the period in which the book is set - although to work that out would be almost impossible, dealing as it does with ideas of a post-consumerist, post-service-industry-driven society that have only emerged since the turn of the millennium, but at the same time appearing to be set in the rural Alabama of a hundred years earlier. And that is far from the only contradiction of its kind. The struggle between old and new seeps into the very prose of the work, Perdue's writing at times lyrical and flowery, at others colloquial and comic, at still others all of the above at once.

The protagonist, Lee, appears in nearly all of Perdue's novels, and is apparently based on the author himself. Kidnapped one day from his farm in the Deep South, he finds himself inducted into a mysterious cult that forces the values of the study of the fine arts and aestheticism on the company of boys it brings in each year. Lee himself is a contradiction, seemingly hating every aspect of his education yet remaining committed to it all the same, attempting to escape on a regular basis yet returning just as soon as he has left the commune's limits without any coercion. It turns out that, despite his humble upbringing, he has something of a talent for classical literature and language, and before long finds himself protected among the cult's elite as his classmates begin to be consigned to working the fields. As a coming-of-age tale it doesn't really work, as Lee's rebellious attitude remains firm, and his successes seem to come as a result of nothing at all. I suspect Perdue's aim was rather to show that if you've got it, you've got it, although as Lee comes to the end of his journey uncertain of where to turn next, Perdue does say that he is too far removed from his origins to return.

The plot's conclusion is just as dichotomous - on the one hand, Perdue seems to be condemning the cult, placing as much emphasis as they do on pure theory rather than perhaps using their intellect to solve the abject poverty of the towns and communities that surround them, as well as highlighting the dangers of wilful isolation. But there is more than a hint of regret at the fact that there may soon no longer be any place for such ideals.

Otherwise, despite all the confusion brought about by the general weirdness of the book, Perdue's writing still made for very entertaining reading. It brought me right into the centre of a part of the world I know very little about and will probably never see, provided the occasional laugh-out-loud moment and left me considering the possibility of reading more of his works to see what happens next in Lee's life.

4/5

This song isn't particularly weird as they go - although the video certainly is - but for some reason this book reminded me of it a lot.

18 - Ubik

One of my principal motivations for setting myself this challenge was assaulting the ever-growing pile of books - physical and electronic - accumulating in my limited living space. This was particularly true in terms of my collection of science fiction: the combination of very reasonable pricing on the Kindle store for the SF Masterworks collection and my desire to get through more of the fundamental works of my favourite genre had led to me amassing quite a collection, most of which was embarrassingly unread.

Philip K. Dick is one author who features prominently. Partly because he seems to have written ten times as many books as pretty much anyone else, and partly because the majority of said books are considered classics in their own right and essential reading for any sci fi fan. But personally I had yet to even graze the surface of his back catalogue, having only got through Time Out of Joint (excellent, a lesson in how to drip-feed the reader with information at the same rate as the characters understand it) and a collection of his short stories (quite hit and miss, but Beyond Lies the Wub is a masterpiece of the genre).

And so to Ubik. This novel is from Dick's golden era spanning the 60s and 70s, and is generally considered one of his very best, lying right in the middle of the likes of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, A Scanner Darkly and Valis. Published in 1969 and set in the distant future of 1992, it is one of a number of Dick's works to deal with themes of psychic powers, potential future divisions in humanity, and wider philosophical and religious themes. I chose it because of its relatively short length and the fact that it predates his mental breakdown and the truly bizarre work that followed - after all, I am getting to the tail end here.

Dick's speciality is to drop the reader right into the world of his novel and then have them catch up with its rules as they go along, and this is no exception. Having established that mind-reading is commonplace in this future, and introducing the characters in a flurry of encounters, the plot then hinges on a group of agents who specialise in negating the powers of psychics being dispatched to investigate a rival organisation, but instead being ambushed by a terrorist bomb. The action proceeds to unfold in an unravelling manner similar to that of Time Out of Joint, as the protagonist Joe Chip tries to make sense of what has actually happened to his team, who begin to find themselves seemingly drifting back in time.

His conclusion - saved until the final pages of the book and then turned on its head again even after that - is a tragic one, and it allows Dick to delve into the concepts of our perception of life, death and the afterlife. I'm not sure I understood all of what he was trying to say, and nor did I expect to on the first read through - this is high concept science fiction, using its action to reflect on human thought and experience in a way that only the very best works of the genre can do.

What I also found interesting, and which ultimately left me appreciating the universal application of Dick's philosophy all the more, was the author's vision of the future. Ubik's world is one where business trips to the moon, personal rocket ships and the ability to preserve the dead at the moment of death and then communicate with their minds are routine. Yet the characters still complete their various transactions with small change - indeed Joe Chip is prevented from leaving his apartment because he can't find a nickel to put in a slot in his door - and their daily news is provided by a mechanical device that reads newspaper articles out loud. Chip's boss tracks his employees by getting their location from a psychic and then sticking pins in a paper map. It's a strange effect that dates the book hugely, and made me realise just how much the planet has changed in less than fifty years.

4.5/5

Dick's influence on other forms of culture has been substantial. I was initially going to claim that no other author I have read this year has had their work turned into an opera, but it actually turns out that Micromegas and one of the Tintin books both were. Anyway, here's some weird avant-garde futurist-minimalist electro-opera about a Philip K. Dick book that isn't this one. I quite like it.

17 - Micromegas

I'm not sure whether it's really possible to feel an affinity with a time before you were alive. People often lament not having been around in the swinging sixties or roaring twenties, but ultimately it's not as if they could truly know what it was like to be alive at that time because, simply put, they weren't.

That being said, I would have to say I feel less affinity with the 18th century than pretty much any other period in history since the Dark Ages. With not much of note occurring in British history compared to the centuries before and after, my basic knowledge of the time is somewhat lacking. And while I am aware that the Age of Enlightenment laid the foundation for the vast majority of Western culture, I've always seen as just that - the foundation. The art and music created at the time, in my humble opinion, just isn't as developed or refined as what came later.

This is also the case for the literature of the time: I have very little knowledge of it, have studied it even less, and the works I have come across didn't make much of an impression. I maintain that Goethe's Faust is the most impenetrable thing I will ever read in any language, and Sterne's The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman is the most impenetrable thing I won't ever read (beyond the agonisingly dense first page).

But as with every rule there is an exception, and it comes in the form of the enfant terrible of the Enlightenment - François-Marie Arouet, better known by his prison nickname (yes, really) Voltaire. In a moment of madness during French A-Level I decided to take on his Candide, ou l'optimisme, and not only managed it but thoroughly enjoyed it. It blew me away how modern the prose was, and the ideas behind it. This coming-of-age tale of disillusionment with the failings of society, of learning that the further one travels, the less one knows, and of the overblown silliness of the romance and adventure novels of the time felt like something from the counter culture movement of the 1960s. It's literally 200 years ahead of its time, and I honestly can't think of any other work in any medium that can make that claim.

And so to Micromegas. I had always thought it was the general belief that science fiction was brought to the mainstream by the likes of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells in the 19th century, but with this wonderfully bizarre little novella Voltaire undercuts the trend by over a century again. And sure, the likes of Gulliver's Travels and Kepler's Somnium may have come even earlier, but as far as I'm concerned this story of giant aliens trekking across the galaxy is the first work to be in line with what we would think of as sci-fi today.

It starts off lightheartedly enough as Voltaire describes the adventures of an alien from Sirius who, by virtue of being hundreds of thousands of feet tall, is able to travel from star to star with ease, gaining all the knowledge the galaxy has to offer as he does so. He eventually reaches our solar system, and alights on Saturn where he meets a scientist who, standing at only 6,000 feet tall, is a dwarf by his standards. After a brief cultural exchange on the differences between their planets, in which the author again lays on the comic hyperbole in spades, the Saturnian's wife (a "pretty, petite brunette" - Voltaire coming across like 1752's Kurt Vonnegut) gets fed up and tells them to go elsewhere.

They arrive at Earth, and this is where the book goes from silly to profound in no time at all. After initially believing the planet to be uninhabited because they can find no forms of life big enough to make an impact on it, they soon come across a ship full of philosophers that has run aground in the Baltic. It is here that Voltaire delivers a stream of brutal social satire that again feels more like it belongs in something by some 60s beat poet. The pointlessness of the distinctions the philosophers draw between their different schools of thought, the futility of wars over lands of no real value in the name of rulers who will never see the lands by soldiers who will never meet their rulers, the belief that Earth is the centre of the universe and the universe was created for it - 250 years on and it seems we still have a lot to learn. And he makes the solution to it all seem so obvious.

Voltaire ends on what is essentially a punchline, and that felt right too. The shortest book I've read this year, and it has produced what I believe is my longest post. I can't recommend it enough.

5/5

And this is what music will sound like 250 years from now.

16 - Wake

I mentioned in a previous post that I once spent a large portion of my free time reading a collection of amateur horror stories gathered together in a mobile app. I imagine that few people who did the same would have avoided being inspired to write a story of their own in that vein, given the general come-and-have-a-go-if-you-think-you're-scary-enough attitude of the internet horror community. And I was no exception as early on in my endeavour the makings of a novel (or possibly a film script) began to come to me.

The setting was minimalist in scope - following a vaguely defined apocalyptic event, a group of survivors gathers in a remote corner of the English countryside and does their best to survive. They soon find themselves being stalked by a mysterious entity but then realise that that is the least of their problems as, in Sartre-esque fashion, their incompatibility as people begins to tear the group apart as they try to escape their predicament. I'm not sure how it would have finished, or indeed how the plot would have progressed, because I have always been better at writing about other people's writing than composing any of my own, and the work remained nothing more than a collection of thoughts. And now it turns out, somewhat creepily, that Elizabeth Knox beat me to it anyway. Having stumbled on Wake by chance in an article where literary critics recommended books they thought no one else would have read, I knew that I had to see how a proper writer would tackle the idea.

There are a few key differences: Knox sets her action in a small town in New Zealand, the supernatural element is given much more significance and, perhaps most importantly, she actually managed to write her story. But otherwise, Wake manages to very effectively put onto paper the concept that I thought would make such a great story.

The novel's opening makes for some of the most hair-raising reading I have ever come across, as a police officer on routine patrol finds herself in the middle of the unfolding action. Knox's writing is absolutely breathless as the town's citizens turn on each other, and the officer, Theresa, does her best to defend herself.

But once this is over with and all but thirteen of the town's residents have killed each other or themselves, Knox really steps up in terms of portraying the tedium of routine that becomes the survivors' reality. And it is here that the characters start to clash - from the brash American William, to the alcoholic Warren and former military man Bub by way of single-minded conservationist Belle and world-weary filmmaker Curtis. While it was initially confusing trying to keep track of such a large central cast, all of the characters are allowed time to settle into their roles, and as we learn more about their backgrounds Knox does not hesitate to dive into the darkest reaches of human nature.

The result is a read that is often uncomfortable and difficult, and that isn't helped by the aforementioned supernatural element which is frustratingly vaguely defined, but not vague enough that it doesn't encroach on the novel's realism. The passage in which Knox reveals the true nature of the apparent dual personality of the Maori girl Sam was certainly the most confusing plot building I have read all year.

But putting these flaws aside, Wake is a compelling and surprisingly emotional book. It is also a very Kiwi one, delving into the nation's past and present issues. And on reading the afterword I learned that the whole thing was inspired by Knox's mother's battle with Motor Neurone Disease, which added another dimension to it all that I hadn't even considered.

4/5

New Zealand is very much on my list of countries to visit, but until I do I shall be forced to assume it's just like this all the time.

15 - Rushing to Paradise

With all of the books I have read this year, I haven't found it particularly hard to find something to say about them. Each time I enter the final third, be it of a novel or a non-fiction work, the direction my following blog post will take is already becoming clear.

J. G. Ballard's Rushing to Paradise has been the first exception - a book so truly bizarre and confusing that I realised the only way I would be able to write about it would be to discuss how I couldn't work out how to write about it.

The premise is simple enough. While attempting a sabotage mission on a French nuclear testing island in the Pacific with environmentalist acquaintance Dr. Barbara Rafferty, a young British chap named Neil is shot in the foot by soldiers. The incident is caught on camera and subsequently becomes a global news story, meaning that the pair are able to return to the island with a team in an attempt to claim it fully from the French. In doing so one of their team is killed - again on camera - and this immortalises their campaign. They decide to turn the island into a wildlife reserve for any and all endangered species on the planet, and donations from around the world start flooding in.

So far, so satirical critique of the flawed idealism of the environmentalist movement and the callousness of national governments in trying to suppress it in favour of profits. But it is after this that the book descends into chaos. Having initially been portrayed as someone who just really cares about the environment, man, Dr. Rafferty quickly develops into a sinister cult leader, transforming her team into a fanatical army willing to die to defend their newly-created sanctuary. Except that they don't need to - the world loses interest in their plight fairly quickly. Nor do they seem to want to, becoming instead more devoted to the menial tasks they first took up upon arrival: repairing the island's radio tower, documenting its many plant species, destroying the endless supply of gifts that have been sent from around the world. And in the end it's not even a sanctuary, as the animals are killed for food and the inhabitants end up at war with each other.

My main issue with all of this was that the book struggles to settle on making any particular point. It starts out well enough as a commentary on environmentalism, but that thread is dropped well before the halfway point. It could be seen as an insight into the formation of cults and the motivations of people who join them, except it doesn't really explain this beyond saying "they just... do". Perhaps Ballard was aiming for a Lord of the Flies style microcosm of society and human nature, but his characters are so bizarre and exaggerated that it's hardly a realistic one. And speaking of characters, we are left questioning the motives of pretty much everyone at the end, meaning it doesn't work as an examination of madness, cultism or anything much else.

But as dissatisfying as the plot was, Ballard still manages to create a wonderfully dark, brooding atmosphere for its many twists and turns. His prose lurches between the whimsical and the grotesque, often within the same sentence, and he ramps up the weirdness and tension to an almost unbearable level as the truth about what is happening on the island is gradually revealed.

Certainly, it has left me wanting to read more of his work. But Rushing to Paradise feels like something of a missed opportunity, somehow both overdeveloped and underdeveloped all at once.

3/5

I've never seen or experienced the Pacific Ocean, and I think I may have been missing out on some commentary on how it can change people. But musically it sounds significantly more relaxing than in this book.

14 - The KLF: Chaos, Magic and the Band Who Burned a Million Pounds

A tenet often espoused - usually on "humorous" fridge magnets - is that if you open your mind too much your brain will fall out.

On the other end of the spectrum, the internet is full of people who claim to have conclusive proof that the world is being controlled by a sinister cabal of the global elite who have already brainwashed the masses - the Illuminati.

In 1994, Bill Drummond and Jim Cauty, at the time the two halves of electronic music duo The KLF, took one million pounds in cash to a Scottish island and proceeded to burn it on camera. As they departed, they suddenly realised that neither could quite remember or understand why they had just done what they did. In The KLF: Chaos, Magic and the Band Who Burned a Million Pounds, biographer John Higgs examines events before and after and suggests that the two viewpoints above may in fact be equally valid.

As far as the Illuminati are concerned, they were very much a real group. However, they existed in Germany in the 18th Century and were in fact opposed to the machinations of the establishment - principally organised religion and governments - that sought to oppress the expansion of human thought. The more modern image of the Illuminati as shady global overlords stems mainly from a group who sent letters to Playboy magazine in the 1970s claiming a wide range of conspiracy theories in their name, and the Illuminatus! series of novels by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson, a bizarre work of post-modernist rambling that nonetheless laid the foundation for most of the myths propagated today.

Drummond and Cauty were part of that first group of pranksters, and were acquaintances of Wilson, and so sceptics would be quick to suggest that their actions were simply a result of overactive imaginations; their increasingly outlandish fabrications becoming an obsession and eventually manifesting as real beliefs. Yet there is also evidence that things go further than that: from an extra who appeared in one of their films insisting that he had been stalked by an agent of some unknown organisation to a wide range of admittedly surprising coincidences without which none of the events in the book could have come about.

But while Higgs devotes some space to the questions surrounding the pair's crowning performance, the book serves more as an account of the weirder side of British punk culture from the 1970s to 1990s. This incorporates some amusing anecdotes, such as how Bill Nighy, of all people, upon reading Illuminatus!, suddenly starting seeing Illuminati imagery everywhere when watching TV. Unnerved, he decided to go to the pub, taking the book with him, only to run into director Ken Campbell, who was putting together a stage production of the work at the time. Nighy joined the cast and appeared in the play in London, where the sets were designed by none other than Bill Drummond. It is also interesting to note that The KLF were successful in their ultimate aim of erasing themselves from music history. I consider myself reasonably knowledgeable in the area and was vaguely familiar with a few of their other projects, most notably The Timelords and The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu, but had never heard of The KLF and found their music comparatively hard to track down online. Not a bad achievement for a band who were going multi-platinum at the time.

The book also serves as a neat summary of some of the more left-field schools of philosophy through the ages, from Daoism to Dadaism to Discordianism. It also deals with much older ideas, such as magic, paganism and collective consciousness. Higgs allows all of these equal merit, suggesting that they too may have influenced Drummond and Cauty to burn their remaining cash. He also introduces an interesting concept of his own, which suggests that the period 1991-1995 is something of a wasteland in time - after the major geopolitical events of the 20th century but before Windows 95 and widespread internet, after the old norms of empire and the Cold War had died but before the new ones of worldwide communication and commerce had begun. It was a time that produced a huge amount of music that was both hugely successful and popular, and yet never seen as part of mainstream culture, and The KLF's art film is portrayed as the culmination of this. Any earlier and it would have been accepted as surrealist or anti-establishment art. Any later and it would be a protest against capitalism and the reckless practices of the investment banks that were about to bring about global economic collapse. Instead, the duo were left with uncertainty about why they had done it, despite being so sure that it was what they had to do.

It helps immensely that Higgs is a good writer, approaching the topic with a healthy dose of scepticism and no shortage of humour. "They had been asked to appear the previous year, but negotiations had broken down following their plans to fill a stage with angels and Zulus and arrive on the back of elephants. The deal breaker, with hindsight, was probably their plan to chainsaw the legs off one of the elephants" could well be the best passage I will read all year. And ultimately I had to agree with Higgs' conclusion that the burning of a million pounds was the result of a pair of artists too caught up in their own hype and desperate to outdo their peers.

But the book is wide-reaching and engaging enough to make me think, and question my world view, and it isn't often that that can be said of a biography.

4.5/5

Drummond and Cauty recorded under a wide variety of aliases, and nearly all of their music is disappointingly mediocre: a classic case of the idea behind the music being more interesting than the music itself. However, nothing will convince me that this song is anything other than an absolute masterpiece:

13 - The Road to Little Dribbling

When it comes to patriotism, I've always had mixed feelings. On the one hand, I find it somewhat pointless to take pride in something so arbitrary as the patch of land on which you happened to be birthed. And yet I also think it is very much justified to praise the achievements of your forefathers and the culture and environment that have helped shape you as a person. Convert that to the form of sporting success - something that is becoming increasingly common for the UK, in fact - and I feel ready to tattoo a bulldog onto my chest while singing Rule Britannia and saluting a picture of the Queen.

So it was with these mixed emotions that I read Bill Bryson's latest collection of writing, The Road to Little Dribbling. Essentially a sequel to his original analysis of the UK, Notes from a Small Island, the author travels the country from bottom to top, revealing the history of the places he sees as compared to the present day; and all with his trademark accessible writing style and wit.

There is a lot in this book that paints my country in a less than positive light. Whether revisiting places from Notes from a Small Island or exploring (in a lot of cases relatively unknown) new locations, there is a clear common theme. As an American who has lived for a large portion of his life in England, Bryson is able to offer a different perspective, one that is unhindered by any misguided loyalty an English writer might have when trying to be objective about the state of their own country.

In short, Bryson is not happy with what he sees. The book portrays a country in neglect and disrepair, of slowing dying towns and unloved rural areas. It must be said that nearly all of this can be traced back to some truly awful decision-making at the level of public administration, and Bryson is merciless in tearing down the officials and bureaucrats who have allowed this to happen. Thanks to profit-first governments huge portions of our nation's heritage have been lost or wasted, and living conditions in a lot of places have become a lot worse than you might expect.

This makes for a surprisingly powerful book, because this is clearly a country that Bryson is very fond of. He sees the state of affairs as a true shame, and to his credit appears to be very active in campaigning for the stopping or reversal of the problems he describes. So while he does lament the mistakes that have been made, his outlook is ultimately optimistic.

And it's not all bad, either. In some cases - the occasional museum or park, mostly - things have been done very well, and the writer's enjoyment is clear to see. His conclusion, too, on how despite all its faults the UK still has a lot going for it - arguably the best education system in the world, more heritage than it would ever be possible to see in a lifetime and a unique culture - is enough stir up the kind of feelings I described above.

I absolutely devoured this book: we're talking a single-figure number of sittings. Bryson's sense of humour has become slightly gentler with age, but his writing is as light as ever and there are more than a few passages that are very, very funny. It's not quite up there with his "classic" works, but this still serves as a solid analysis of modern Britain and all of its quirks, problems and triumphs.

4/5

It could only really be this:

12 - Hard To Be A God

In the wake of Trump's election at the end of last year, it was reported that the sale of dystopian fiction increased dramatically in America. Most notably, George Orwell's 1984 jumped roughly 80 places up the fiction chart to become the best-selling book on Amazon, 70 years after its publication. My criticisms of that work are numerous, and I won't go into them here, but I was more struck by the fact that it doesn't actually relate particularly closely to the situation in America.

As I write this in a nation under CCTV, yes, I can admit that Orwell did get some things right. But American readers looking for literature offering some foresight into the direction their country is headed would be better off tracking down Arkady and Boris Strugatsky's Hard To Be A God.

I was first introduced to the Strugatskys' work by the excellent 1979 sci-fi film Stalker, an adaptation of their novel Roadside Picnic, which I read last year. While the film's primary merit is as a masterpiece of cinematography, the book goes several layers deeper. The premise remains the same, but the setting is developed far further, resulting in a bitter critique of the empty promises of the USSR's ruling party and the endless mazes of bureaucracy that meant the working classes had no chance of benefiting from them anyway.

I was amazed that a book so critical of the Soviet Union had been allowed to be published at the time, until I read the afterword and found that, in fact, it hadn't been. Instead, the authors had engaged in a relentless process of drafting and censorship by the state before finally conceding a heavily edited version in the 1980s. As per policy, the book's highly cynical tone was blunted, and the result must have been substantially different to the version that I read, approved by the brothers as being the intended original in the 1990s.

Somehow, it seems that Hard To Be A God suffered no such obstacles, despite, in my opinion, being a far more open critique of the direction of Soviet society at the time. This is perhaps due to its plot whereby, in a distant future, envoys are sent from Earth to a planet very similar to our own but which has yet to emerge from the Dark Ages. The result is a fantasy-style adventure story with plenty of sword fighting, castles and wizards.

Despite this, though, the novel's true purpose is clear. Our hero Anton, undercover as nobleman Don Rumata, is tasked with ensuring the planet's societal development into the Renaissance and Enlightenment; preserving art and literature and aiding the advancement of technology without intervening to too great an extent. Instead, he finds himself fighting a relentless tide of wilful ignorance, as gangs of uneducated, untrained mercenary soldiers roam the cities wiping out anything perceived as intellectual. All this under the command of prime minister Don Reba, a man intelligent enough to play the game of politics, but not intelligent enough to do anything worthwhile with his success. Reba was based on Lavrentiy Beria, state security chief under Stalin, but the parallels with Trump are plain to see - surrounded by yes-men and faceless mobs of unflinchingly loyal supporters, he builds insurmountable power over his kingdom as Anton/Rumata battles his conscience over whether to intervene.

The book's conclusion - which I can only assume was allowed to be published thanks to the reversal of Stalinist policies over the 1960s and 70s - is that intervention is essential if society is to develop, whatever the consequences. Don Reba's government is nowhere on the political spectrum, as his society has not yet reached that point, but comparisons are made, both concretely and by allusion, to both Hitler and Stalin. And while comparing Trump to that pair is definitely oversimplifying, there are general lessons to be learned about avoiding the mistakes of the past.

Ultimately, Anton appears to have done the right thing by using his powers for revolution, and that is where this book is more useful than 1984 ever would be - Winston Smith would have had a much better chance had he chosen the sword over the pen.

On a side note, my forays into Russian literature have been limited: Roadside Picnic, Dmitry Glukhovsky's Metro 2033, Mikhail Bulgakov's Heart of a Dog and a handful of (largely failed) attempts at Tolstoy, Solzhenitsyn and Dostoevsky are about it. This is partly because I found in all cases that the translations were very similar - the writers' own styles were masked by the attempts to liven up Russian's grim syntactical efficiency into English with resulting empty prose styles and characters that seemed underdeveloped. Yet Hard To Be A God suffers none of those issues and the fast-paced plot created a complex world that Tolkein and George R. R. Martin would be jealous of in less than 300 pages. So, full marks to Olena Bormashenko on the translation.

5/5

Before the Strugatsky brothers were sticking it to the man with their writing, Dmitri Shostakovich was doing something similar with music. Without going too deep into music theory, his Fugue in A Major for piano appears to be perfectly in line with tradition, but subverts those rules into an increasingly bizarre sequence (under the conventions of classical composition), creating discord where there should be none and sarcastically calling out Stalin's oppressive control of his music.

11 - Station Eleven

What seems like a lifetime ago, in 2012, I found myself living in small-town Germany. It was a year that involved a certain amount of travelling around on the country's surprisingly poor rail network - windswept hours spent huddling on platforms in the Ruhrgebiet's least interesting backwaters, endless empty stations on the route from Düsseldorf airport which were nevertheless deemed essential stops, flashbacks to fighting sleep on a painfully slow S-Bahn trip from Essen to Düsseldorf as the sun rose on a freezing December morning.

It was early on in my time there that I decided I should find some form of entertainment for said journeys. It was a different time, long before my Kindle, and when network operators charged extortionate per-kilobyte data use rates, a far cry from today's brave new world of no roaming charges whatsoever.

With this in mind, I happened upon a mobile app which was basically a database of plain text format copies of the internet's most popular horror stories. Over the course of the year I ended up reading them all - some very good, some which had potential but were under-developed, the vast majority forgettable or unoriginal, some just plain bad, and a few raising serious concerns over the author's mental state.

A lot of these stories imagined a post-apocalyptic world - post-society, post-humanity. It is a genre that has already been fairly well covered, and I don't think I once saw it done well. Partly due to the fact that there was no requirement for these writers to have any writing talent, but mostly because they tended to fall back on the tired tropes and stereotypes.

Emily St. John Mandel's Station Eleven is a book that does post-apocalyptic well. In fact, it does it brilliantly. More than just a step up from what has been done before, it combines detail in its setting, development for its characters, and a complex, interwoven plot that seems to swell and flow almost organically as the pieces fall into place around each other. It reminded me more than a little of Tarantino's Pulp Fiction, jumping around in a manner that at first seems random, but makes more and more sense as the book goes on, and ultimately works from an aesthetic point of view as well.

Starting on the eve of a global health crisis that will go on to wipe out 99% of the world's population, the narrative introduces the novel's main characters as fate brings them together at a performance of King Lear in Toronto. Then, just as it seems things are getting going, we are taken twenty years into the future. What has happened cannot be reversed, the world has changed beyond recognition and what is left of humanity now do their best to survive with what is left. Mandel then proceeds to recap the character's story arcs in non-linear fashion, showing how their lives had always been connected and influenced each other. It helps that she does seem to care about her characters, and this means that by the end of the book so does the reader.

A mantra that keeps appearing in this new world is "survival is insufficient" - and it is here where Station Eleven is light years ahead of any post-apocalyptic fiction I have read in the past. From the Travelling Symphony that crosses the Great Lakes region performing orchestral music and Shakespeare plays to anyone who will watch, to the Museum of Civilisation that houses remnants of the old world in an airport, Mandel adds touches that show that the end of the world need not mean the end of optimism, or of culture, or of humanity. If I had to live in a fictional post-apocalypse, I would choose this one without hesitation.

5/5

Something, something, post-apocalyptic sci-fi rap. Seriously just watch all of this, it's basically the pinnacle of music.

10 - The Devil Rides Out

For as long as I can remember, I have had an interest in the paranormal. Inspired by a book of my parents' on unsolved mysteries of the world - itself a mystery, completely incongruous with the rest of their collection - I loved being frightened and fascinated in equal measure by tales of strange creatures, alien abduction and the planet's least explored corners.

At the same time, however, I have always remained fairly sceptical in the face of such claims. Much as I would love all UFO reports to be real so we can start living in The Fifth Element already, I don't believe aliens have ever visited Earth. Sightings of ghosts, Bigfoot and the likes of the Jersey Devil are probably testament to the power of imagination. The Loch Ness Monster might just be explained by the 9ft long wels catfish that inhabit the lake. And the two theories dominating the internet in recent years, Flat Earth and the Mandela Effect, are in my opinion nothing less than proof of the collective stupidity of mankind.

As such, I have never had much interest in the occult or black magic. While some of the above phenomena are perhaps vaguely plausible, or at least have their origin in real-world happenings, hinting that there may be more to discover, black magic always seemed too far-fetched to merit serious consideration. This is probably not helped by its image as the preserve of goth teenagers in small town America with nothing better to do and the super-rich elite with, well, nothing better to do.

Dennis Wheatley's The Devil Rides Out, however, contends that not only is black magic real, it is being used at this very moment under our noses to help people with less than honourable intentions to wield immeasurable power over the world and the people in it. Or at least it was in the 1930s. Sparked by the writings of the likes of Aleister Crowley, the medium saw something of a resurgence at the time, with Hitler being probably the most notable proponent.

It was against this background that Wheatley set his hugely successful series featuring the Duc de Richleau, a set of adventures spanning the globe that deal with the occult, other worlds and mysterious forces. The second book in the series, The Devil Rides Out has all the ingredients to be a thrilling caper but ultimately falls just short.

This mainly stems from the fact that Wheatley is very, very serious about the book's basis in the occult. The result is a narrative that is less Indiana Jones and more BBC crime drama procedural. The peak of this occurs just as the novel's story is about to switch up a gear. Faced with his friend Simon Aron being used as the centrepiece of a satanic ritual, the Duc and his American sidekick Rex prepare to mount a daring rescue, driving right into the heart of the gathering and hauling Simon into his car by the passenger door. But first, Wheatley takes great care to explain every one of seemingly dozens of steps taken by the Duc to ensure protection against any dark forces. Once the escape is attempted, in the last couple of pages of the chapter, it almost feels like an afterthought. Add in theories such as Rasputin having started World War I by summoning the Horsemen of the Apocalypse and the relic of an Egyptian god holding the key to world power and we're firmly in tin foil hat territory.

And so it goes for most of the book. But the plot, equal parts burdensome and ridiculous, is at least alleviated by some entertaining writing from Wheatley. Of particular note is a chapter where the action is documented by the minute as three different plot lines unfold simultaneously, but credit is also due for the way in which he sets up a P.G. Wodehouse-style domestic scene at the book's main location at one point, only to tear it all apart moments later. The result is the book's most satisfying sequence, the tension ramping up relentlessly as the characters repel a series of increasingly bizarre attacks from the antagonist Mocata - who seems to have been inspired, at least in his physical description, by Crowley himself. And while the double-twist ending seems like something of a cop-out at first, it does serve to keep the work grounded while still hinting at something more.

Despite Wheatley's earnest assurance in the preface that all of this has been extensively researched and is representative of genuine goings on in England at the time, I have to conclude that the truth is somewhere between the two. The Duc ends the novel stating that we are far from knowing what is really out there, which I agree is true. But it's probably not quite as exciting as he, or this book, would suggest.

3.5/5

2spooky4me.

Halfway there!

9 - Make Something Up

I would think the vast majority of people are only familiar with the works of the Seattle writer Chuck Palahniuk through the film adaptation of his first novel, Fight Club. And still more who do count themselves as fans will have been introduced to him by that film.

My path was slightly different - when reading an article about the most famous bodies of water in literature (must have been a slow news day), I learned of Palahniuk's short story Guts, a tale supposedly so shocking it caused people to faint at live readings. I was intrigued, but ultimately forgot about it. And then I saw Fight Club.

In fairness, the film's success is well deserved, and it is thanks in no small part to Palahniuk's writing which transposes perfectly to the interior monologue of Edward Norton's narrator, itself broken down into convenient soundbites to spawn a million anti-consumerist tweets sent from a million iPhones. Not long after I decided to hunt down Guts and read it as part of the short story anthology mashed together into a meandering novel titled Haunted. I didn't pass out, but Guts certainly hit home, a shocking tale of the depravity and subversion simmering literally just below the surface of American suburbia. The other stories were somewhat inconsistent but there were still a few gems - most notably Obsolete and Foot Work, both of which deserve big-screen adaptations of their own.

Make Something Up is Palahniuk's second collection of short stories, and ultimately the same appraisal can be made. While it drops the overall plot that weaved in and out of Haunted, there are still a few subtle connections between the 24 pieces that form the whole. This is most obvious in a triptych of stories featuring anthropomorphised animals loosely resembling Aesop's fables but with moral conclusions so brutally mean-spirited they leave a sour aftertaste. Similar in nature are the likes of Cannibal, Zombies and Tunnel of Love, three tales in keeping with the general theme of the grim reality of American society. These are hardly enjoyable reading and ultimately I failed to see the point, unless there was no point other than to show that, a lot of the time, life is arbitrary and unfair.

Equally hard to get on with were the more experimental stories. The dense word-fog of Smoke and the endless malapropisms shoved into Eleanor result in prose that is borderline unreadable, and while they undoubtedly took a lot skill to write, there is not much enjoyment to be gleaned. It's akin to listening to a world-class musician practicing scales for hours on end. Slightly more successful was Liturgy, an exercise in the art of the euphemism of upper-middle class society.

But as with Haunted, there are more than a few stories here that just work. Essentially a shaggy dog story told in stream of consciousness style, The Facts of Life is perhaps the most shocking of the bunch, but also the funniest in my opinion. Torcher cleverly doubles up as a murder mystery caper and a savage satire of the trust fund hippie culture; Expedition mixes Kafka and de Sade into a foreshadowing of a possible Fight Club sequel. And call me soft, but while Fetch and Mister Elegant may seem incongruous with their happy endings, they stand out as the two most enjoyable stories here.

Objectively the best, however, would have to be Inclinations. Being the longest story in the book, it has room to develop its characters, lurch from ironic to funny to terrifying to foul and back again, and deliver plenty of twists along the way. Again, while I am perhaps not quite tuned into its portrayal of the unique pressures and intricacies of American life, it does deliver a sensitive look at the teenage experience that is not often seen in literature.

Overall, I found the quality of these stories to vary immensely. While all were shocking in their own way, it is what Palahniuk actually does with that shock value that means at least a few of them go above and beyond that basic level. One thing is for sure - the collection's subtitle, Stories You Can't Unread is more than suitable.

2.5/5

Undoubtedly, this is a pretty punk form of writing, but that's another area I'm not particularly attuned to. In the end, while I'm sure there are plenty more out there, the best act I could think of to blend punk aesthetic with a certain level of technical ability is Pixies. Oh, and their song Where is my Mind plays over the closing credits of Fight Club, so that'll do.

8 - Les Stiene de la Castafiore

I must have been around 8 when I first became a fan of Tintin. Within a couple of years, I had managed to read every one of Hergé's albums featuring the character - or rather, the 21 of the original 24 that are freely available in English - thanks to a local library. The adventures of the young reporter provided an ideal combination of fun and excitement, not to mention the brilliant scope of Hergé's artwork. Although how Tintin managed to keep his job while doing so little actual reporting will remain a mystery.

As my interest in languages grew, I began to collect Tintin albums in French and German as easy reading for practice, which allowed me to cross Tintin in the Congo off my list - a book widely restricted in the English-speaking world due to its broadly racist portrayal of Africans. And since I was on a beginner's Dutch course for the last six months, my parents thought it would be a good idea to add to my collection with a new title in Dutch. There was just one problem - the book I received was actually in Bruxellois.

Bruxellois, as you might expect, is the language spoken by the residents of Brussels; however, as stated in the explanatory notes at the back of the book, the term actually covers five distinct slang dialects. Principal among these are French, Flemish and mixed Bruxellois - the latter providing the basis for this Tintin translation. The Brabantian-based Marollien dialect and Bargoentsh are much more obscure, and barely spoken today.

Unfortunately for my Dutch development, Bruxellois is grounded mainly in French, with the occasional interjection of Dutch, plus some Spanish and a few words with no obvious background. Still, I would probably have struggled with French alone - words such as 'astableeft' ('alstubleeft') meaning 'please' and 'band' in the context of 'tyre' are, to my knowledge exclusive to Dutch. Mainly, though, Bruxellois is used for the character's exclamatory interjections - Tintin's English catchphrase 'great snakes!' becomes 'potverdèkke!' while the creative cursing of Captain Haddock is rendered as an impenetrable lists of nouns and adjectives with no obvious basis in anything.

Ultimately I found myself skimming over the dialect words because the intended meaning was nearly always clear. The translator's note clarifies that Bruxellois is nowhere near a complete language, being limited to only a couple of hundred words used to embellish conversation with irony and self-deprecation, and as such I thought it was actually a very good fit for the dynamic dialogue of the characters and in particular the captain. While a glossary is provided I referred to it increasingly little as the book went on, preferring to follow the plot at its intended pace.

As for the book itself - well, it falls firmly in the middle of the late-era Tintin albums. Not as grand in its scope as Tintin in Tibet or The Calculus Affair, but mercifully lacking the half-baked weirdness of Flight 714 to Sydney and Tintin and the Picaros, it is the opinion of the majority of Tintin academics (yes, that's a real thing) that this would have been a suitable end to the series. I have to agree: the majority of the recurring characters play a role and still more are referred to in passing, a sort of final reunion. The opera singer Castafiore and her entourage seem finally to be moving on to bigger things, and the Thompson twins leave as they first arrived, in a state of chaos. As the work concludes, Tintin, Snowy, Haddock and Calculus seem ready to retire in the peaceful surroundings of Marlinspike Hall, their adventures at an end.

The plot is a meandering detective story, revolving around the disappearance of Castafiore's jewels and Tintin's attempts to solve the mystery. It unravels in a farcical manner as time and again Tintin follows a clue to a dead end, before finally coming good in working out the twist ending. The only work to be set entirely at the characters' "base camp" of Marlinspike Hall, it showcases Hergé's talent for humour in dialogue, and ability to tell a story without relying on adventure to exotic settings. No coincidence that it was written at the time in his life immediately following a period of depression due to his divorce.

5/5

Reading this was undoubtedly a rather hipster undertaking. So here's some Belgian hipster music which is also actually good:

7 - A Brief History of Time

Around two and a half years ago, I went to the cinema to watch The Theory of Everything, James Marsh's biopic detailing the life and career of Stephen Hawking. It left me inspired to learn more about the scientist's research into physics and cosmology, and I decided the place to start would be to read his hugely popular and successful book for the layman, A Brief History of Time. Fortunately my parents already had a copy, so I borrowed it and then proceeded not to read it. But now I felt it might be a good time to break up all the science fiction on my list with some science fact.

A Brief History of Time was published in 1988 and collates all of the existing theories surrounding the relationship between time and space and the connection of forces within the universe that had been developed up to that point. Hawking then discusses the possible directions this research could take, with the overarching theme of whether mankind will ever be able to comprehend the nature of the universe.

I suspect that, if such an answer is ever found, I will not be the one to do it. Hawking states in his introduction that he had been advised to include as few equations as possible; that for each one that appeared in print, the readership of his book would halve. The problem that results from this is that he must then describe a number of highly abstract concepts by way of roundabout explanation - and often I found that words were probably not the best way of going about it. The use of diagrams helps in some cases, but I actually found myself wishing that he had simply used an equation and then elaborated upon it to aid visualisation.

Too often, Hawking describes a concept using an analogy only to refer to it in passing later on under the assumption that the reader has absorbed and understood all that it entails. While this might be possible with more serious study of each idea, that wasn't the book's intended purpose and the result is that, towards the end, nearly every sentence becomes a dense fog of technical terminology that does more to create confusion than to clarify.

But I suspect a lot of this will relate more to me as an arts student than anyone with a more in-depth knowledge of maths and physics. While the ideas he describes can be dense and abstract at times, Hawking's writing style as a whole is largely the opposite - as you would expect from a scientist he is methodical and precise in his work. I found the chapter on elementary particles to be quite engaging, and in fairness he does stress that a lot of the theories discussed are, by definition, theoretical. I am not sure what advances have been made in cosmology since 1988 but at the time there seemed to be a general lack of concrete evidence for pretty much everything. Otherwise he does manage to slip the occasional joke in, the anecdotes about the lives of scientists of the past are fun, and the underlying philosophical discussion of the nature of our existence, the possibility of God as creator and which direction the human race will take next is one that any reader should ponder.

Almost 30 years on from this book's publication, I am not sure we are any closer to finding the Grand Unified Theory that Hawking suggests could provide all the answers - but if we do, it will be in no small part due to his work. Just not necessarily this book.

3/5

Remember this?

6 - Stories of Your Life and Others

It will become clear over the course of this year that I am a fan of science fiction. So it was with some regret that I did not make it as far as seeing Denis Villeneuve's much-praised Arrival when it was in cinemas at the end of last year. I could, however, read the story on which it was based.

Stories of Your Life and Others brings together the short(ish) stories that make up the first half of the career of American author Ted Chiang. While there are elements of science fiction in the stories, they could perhaps best be described as speculative science fact. In short, Chiang asks the question "what would happen if..." and then sets up a world in which that is reality. At the same time, he manages to establish a cast of characters and begin, develop and conclude their story arcs. This is an achievement in itself given that most of the stories are under 50 pages. But it's really only half of the whole.

Chiang is clearly a very intelligent man. While Wikipedia states that his academic endeavours concluded with a bachelor's degree in computer science, I find it hard to believe that he is anything short of PhD level in pretty much every discipline. In fact, the story Understand follows the path of a man who is endowed with a superhuman intelligence that allows him to collate and then transcend all existing human thought, and I imagine Chiang's mind to be on the same plane.

The collection starts in a relatively straightforward manner with Tower of Babylon, an account of the biblical tale of a tower constructed with the aim of reaching God. Once you can get past the physical differences to our world, the story builds nicely to a surprising conclusion and you find yourself immersed in the setting. But that's about as easy as it gets.

It's probably no coincidence that I found Story of Your Life, the inspiration for Arrival, to be the next-most accessible story. During my MA course I was forced to attend a module on research methodologies in applied linguistics. Perhaps it was due to the fact that the lectures were held at 9am on Monday mornings, but I found it hard to see any significant application beyond that study of the vocabulary sizes of various rappers and the recent article breaking down Donald Trump's speech patterns. But Story of Your Life provides another possible use - when aliens first make contact with Earth, a linguistics researcher is sent in with the seemingly impossible task of deciphering what the aliens are saying, and then replying to them. The zen-like approach to language that Chiang invents for the aliens is truly inventive, as is the way in which the story develops and then concludes once the main character begins to understand how to speak and read it herself. It's an abstract story in a lot of ways, but I felt that my knowledge of the area helped keep me grounded.

Consequently, I think there was probably a lot I didn't catch in the other stories. GCSEs in maths and biology only got me so far with Division by Zero and Seventy-Two Letters, while my knowledge of theology (Hell is the Absence of God), sociology (Liking What You See: A Documentary) and genetics (The Evolution of Human Science) is even less developed. And as stated above, to fully understand Understand would require multiple lifetimes of study in a multitude of subject areas. Which is actually the point of the story.

But none of this matters too much, because Chiang can write. While in less capable hands these stories might be frustrating, falling into either textbook-like descriptions of the worlds they describe or focusing too much on the characters and leaving the setting underdeveloped, Chiang balances the two perfectly, meaning that while the concepts require a lot of additional thought, the stories themselves are surprisingly easy reading.

4.5/5 for making me feel stupid.

If The Life & Death of Scenery was the 2nd-best sci-fi hip hop album of 2016, then clipping.'s Splendour and Misery was the best. Producers Jonathan Snipes and William Hutson work on a high level of theory - the latter may have completed a PhD in experimental music, but the concise and entertaining flow of rapper Daveed Diggs means you don't need one yourself to enjoy it.

5 - Anthem

As I was passing through my edgy modernist phase during the course of my A-levels, for some reason Ayn Rand was never an author that was particularly on my radar. I'm not sure why this was - the English course itself provided me with a pretty extensive reading list in terms of dystopian fiction, from the obvious (1984, Brave New World, A Clockwork Orange) to the slightly less so (Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, Margaret Atwood's visceral The Handmaid's Tale). Nor was my personal reading limited - I ran the gauntlet from Knut Hamsun's Hunger to Don DeLillo's White Noise, both unsettling books in their own right from opposite ends of the 20th Century. Yet the works of Rand, despite being considered parallel to all of these, remained unread.

But I was not unaware of her existence, so decided now was the time to give one of her books a try. The two generally cited as her best, Atlas Shrugged  and The Fountainhead, are not particularly conducive to a year of reading more than one book, so instead I opted for the lesser-known 1938 novella Anthem.

Anthem portrays a future society under supreme control - citizens devoid of all individualism to the point where the narrator refers to himself exclusively in the third person, and each character is assigned a number rather than a name. Technology and cultural activities are also strictly limited, and it is alluded that both of these played a part in the destruction of the society that preceded the current one. The whole is presided over by a council of elites; the similarities with the Soviet Union are clear, although the extent to which that is true borders on prescient considering the date of writing.

Our hero, the snappily named Equality-2521, stands alone as an individual seeking to escape from this system. Having been identified as a potential troublemaker at an early age, he is consigned to a life of sweeping the streets of his city. But this cannot crush his spirit, as he studies science in secret and dreams of escaping from the city with a peasant girl he has seen working in the fields.

Political connotations aside, Anthem is a brilliantly written book. While 1984 portrays a truly viable vision of a future police state but is hampered by Orwell's appallingly ham-fisted prose style, and Brave New World is well written but has dated somewhat, Anthem suffers from neither of those issues, and it must be borne in mind that it is from broadly the same period as both. Rand's writing is perfectly concise, revealing just enough about the world of her novella for the reader to understand the context, but still building up to the reveal of the mystery at the end.

The ending is certainly the main source of contention. While the "forbidden word" that has been hinted at up to this point is somewhat predictable, it still serves as a relevant reminder of the dangers of a society where individualism is suppressed to too great an extent. However, the new direction followed by Equality-2521 and the girl, Liberty 5-3000 - living at one with nature outside society - seems somewhat trite, and really isn't a million miles from the Völkisch ideology that the Nazis were pushing in Germany at the time. It's easy to see why Rand's works are so beloved by the libertarian right, but in the case of Anthem I think they've actually missed the point. As the novella concludes, there are hints that the new, rather isolationist, commune built by Equality-2521 will eventually head down the same route that led to the self-destruction of the society of the "Unmentionable Times". A cycle in which there is no real winner, perpetuated by the tendency of human nature to scramble to extremes in both directions. Sobering stuff.

5/5

Pretty much everything is banned in Anthem; L'Orange and Mr. Lif's The Life and Death of Scenery imagines a world in which that extends merely to all forms of culture. It was probably the second best sci-fi rap album of 2016.

4 - Catch-22

"They're not going to send a crazy man out to be killed are they?"

"Who else will go?"

The above quote is perhaps the most succinct representation of the titular, much misused, catch that permeates Joseph Heller's Catch-22. Barely a paragraph goes by in which the characters are not confronted with another form of the famous logical paradox. The perfect contradiction of it comes to define practically every character's story arc, their interactions, their conversations and their very existence. All of this and more is why I have come to consider it my favourite book.

However, the novel's first line - "It was love at first sight" - doesn't quite reflect my relationship with it. On the first reading, the plot is so brutally complex and non-linear that it isn't until beyond the halfway point that the reader can begin to piece together what actually happens, and when. Indeed, to attempt to explain it here would require more words than the book itself, so here's a drawing by Heller himself:

Much better.

In fact, this was my fourth time taking this particular ride, and I was surprised at how much of the plot was just second nature to me. This allowed me to appreciate the little allusions and connections throughout the book that link the episodic chapters to one another, ensuring it is so much more than just a collection of short stories.

And yet the chapters, especially the longer among them, serve perfectly well as stories on their own. The story of Milo Minderbinder and his preemptive forays into the post-war globalist world of trading, in particular, would work brilliantly as a film, as would perhaps the earliest moments in the work's timeline in which Yossarian is subjected to the absurdity of basic training, the ever present threat of actual combat hanging over him and concluding in the incident that drives his perspective for most of the book.

Countless words have already been written about the catch-22 concept and its logical and philosophical connotations; about Heller's (decidedly negative) portrayal of war and his use thereof as an analogy for the wider world; about the criticisms that are levelled at the contemporary society of the 1960s under this guise. Still more have been written about the use of language in the book, how it reflects the catch scenario in itself, and how the threads of narrative weave together to form a cohesive whole. I doubt that I will be able to add much to any of this, other than that these are all parts of what make it such a masterpiece in my opinion.

Instead, what struck me most this time around was the work's sensitivity. Hiding among all the absurdity of the dialogue are some outstanding soliloquies on the intransigence of life and the inevitability of death. The scene where Yossarian is made to pose as an airman already killed in battle in order to provide closure to his family who have come to visit him on his deathbed stood out as particularly poignant, but there are several similar moments where the action slows down a touch to provide similar hubris. A number of characters become, even with all the madness that surrounds them and which they seem to willingly perpetuate, tragic figures at the mercy of forces beyond their control.

The final quarter of the narrative in particular becomes almost relentlessly pessimistic, until the final scene which brings together all the hints and allusions at a possible solution that have been building up to that point. It wraps up the book as a whole in a way that is - and I don't use this word lightly - nothing short of genius.

This a book that everyone should read, and then read again. I for one anticipate getting through it many more times in my life, and I genuinely expect to take away something new each time.

5/5, obviously.

It seems fitting that my favourite book should go hand in hand with my (current) favourite song - Outkast's Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik. The album by the same name actually has a few things in common with Catch-22, namely the way in which threads of themes mesh together throughout to form a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts, but at the same time those parts somehow work better on their own. In itself that's a catch-22 scenario...

3 - Bricking It

I mentioned in my introductory post that I used a commute into London for a previous job to get some serious reading done. One, slightly less serious, book that I got through during that period was another Kindle recommendation - Nick Spalding's Fat Chance. I picked it up as something lighter, having been assured by reviewers that it was genuinely funny, and found that in spite of myself I had to agree. But there was also a lot more to it than that - I found it a brilliantly frank portrayal of married life, the rapid onset of middle age and all the shortcomings of the diet "industry". There were some great set pieces, each chapter acting almost as a self-contained story, some moving moments, and, as I have already said, I'd be lying if I tried to claim it didn't make me laugh.

Since I hadn't set any intellectual requirements for this year's endeavour, I decided Spalding's newest work might be worth a look. The similarities between the two are obvious - both are told from two, alternating, points of view, both concern the trials of the main characters in their attempts to reach a goal, and both are ultimately quite British in their scope. While Fat Chance chronicled the attempts of a married couple in losing weight for a competition, Bricking It is the story of a brother and sister attempting to rebuild and then sell a house left to them by their grandmother.

There are also similarities between the flaws of both books. Spalding does not have a particular talent for dialogue, and the result is conversations between characters that come across as stilted or just plain unnatural. And the interior monologues are only slightly better. Conversely, while in Fat Chance the main couple were well developed in spite of a rather vaguely portrayed set of minor characters, the opposite is true in Bricking It - the story arc of the siblings is rather predictable, but the supporting cast is full of memorable figures that add colour to the work.

Where Spalding salvages all of this, to the extent that all of these criticisms become secondary, is in his fantastic ability to construct a set piece. With each chapter serving as an episode within the greater context of the plot, he manages to cram an entire story, from start to finish, twenty times over into the novel. It is in this context that the comedy works best - scenes involving a box in the attic and a bonfire with unexpected consequences stood out as particular highlights. But it also ensures that, while the overall plot of the book may be quite simple and linear, the pace of the book remains consistently fast throughout. I doubt there will be many other books this year that I finish quite so quickly.

And, once again, I have to admit that I laughed out loud at times.

4.5/5

If this book were to be adapted into a film, I feel it would be at least 43% montage scenes. At least one of them deserves to be set to this:

Simple and unassuming, yet amusing and clever.

2 - Meditations

In my ongoing quest to fill the void of sporting activity that graduate life tends to entail, I decided, almost a year ago, to devote some of my energy to the gym. Three evenings and one morning each week, I get to wander around in silence counting reps in my head and generally relieving the stresses of the contemporary working day. At the same time, I am exposed to terrestrial television's early-evening line up of quiz shows - Pointless, The Chase and Eggheads, which allows me to exercise both mind and body. Or something.

As part of this pursuit I have been known, occasionally, to browse the various fitness forums offered up by the internet. One day, in among all the insecurity, in-jokes and odd pieces of actual good advice, I came across a thread dedicated to so-called "mental gains" - specifically, recommended reading for the man or woman with the goal of physical perfection. Suggestions ranged from the Bible to the rather out-there teachings of "iceman" Wim Hof. But by far one of the most popular works, and one that caught my eye, was the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius.

Marcus Aurelius was emperor of Rome from 161-180 AD, although for the first eight years he shared power with Lucius Verus. Meditations was written in Greek over the last ten years of his reign, and commits to paper (papyrus? wax?) his stoic world view as applied to the full spectrum of the human experience.

I had been assured prior to reading that this book would change my life, along with my fundamental understanding of the world around me, my role within it and my duties towards it. So it would be safe to say that expectations were, ultimately, set impossibly high. Not to say that there aren't some brilliant words of wisdom to be found. Marcus Aurelius' attitude to the world of work resonated in particular:

"What art and profession soever thou hast learned, endeavour to affect it, and comfort thyself in it; and pass the remainder of thy life as one who from his whole heart commits himself and whatsoever belongs unto him, unto the gods."

Did the Romans even have jobs in the modern sense? Probably not, and yet these words would not be out of place at a careers talk in the present day. Equally, his advice on the natural world and mankind's responsibilities in that area still hold up.

But ultimately my main issue with the writing was that it was just too... earnest. Following this philosophy would entail assessing every single action of your life, determining whether it serves a higher purpose, and eliminating any aspects that do not. It's a mindset I absolutely apply to lifting weights, but I can't really see it taking root elsewhere. Combine that with an 18th century translation that hadn't bothered to explain any ancient Greek terms that are untranslatable and Meditations became something of a burden to read. Perhaps that was the point: the teaching of stoicism is, essentially, to suck it up and get on with life. But the world would be a much more boring place if that was all anyone did.

2/5

I've also decided that this blog should stay true to its roots, so each book will be paired with a musical counterpoint. I feel like Aurelius would have loved Gesaffelstein's Pursuit, for all its clinical efficiency. Good workout music too.

1 - Distraction Pieces

Like, I suspect, the majority of Brits who were teenagers in the mid '00s I was first introduced to the work of rapper Scroobius Pip through his seminal collaboration with Dan le Sac, Thou Shalt Always Kill. Though I now think it comes across as trying a bit too hard with its sanctimonious tone and early trash-rap mood, at the time it seemed to fit in perfectly with the world view of a generation of indie and emo kids who thought they had the arts all figured out. "Thou shalt not make repetitive generic music" seemed to us the most brilliantly witty indictment of the admittedly pretty awful pop music that permeated the airwaves of the time and kept what we considered real music out of the spotlight.

But music moved on, and so did I.

Then, about five years on, I rediscovered him and found that there was a vast back catalogue of great material that I had missed out on. While the that same world view that I never quite agreed with remained, it was applied to the gamut of the human experience, in particular as it pertained to modern British society. And I realised that the man had a brilliant talent for words.

So when I saw, thanks to the occasionally good Kindle recommendations emails that Amazon bombard me with, that Scroobius Pip had written a book, I was interested. When I saw that it was in fact a series of interviews with various creative types on such varying topics as politics, the arts and science, I thought it could be worth a look. And since, as one Amazon reviewer pointed out, it was currently on sale for less than the price of a pint, I decided it would be a good way to kick off the first year in which I attempted dry January.

As it transpired, Distraction Pieces is in fact a collection of transcripts from Pip's iTunes podcast of the same name. For those who have been regular listeners, there is not much new here. But as I said, I had never been a particularly close follower of his work and wasn't even aware that the podcast existed.

The ordering by theme, rather than interviewee, keeps the book flowing and introductions to each section by Pip himself help to give more of an insight into his own views, as the guests are allowed the lion's share of each conversation. Bringing together an interesting mix of personalities ranging from Frank Turner, Amanda Palmer and Killer Mike from the world of music, Romesh Ranganathan and Rufus Hound from comedy and writers Alan Moore and Jon Ronson, Pip provides merely the occasional nudge to steer his interviews into various directions. Police brutality, the creative process and the role of the arts in modern society are all covered, as are death, independent cinema and magic.

While it would perhaps have been more interesting to see a few guests with opinions that conflicted with those of the interviewer, Distraction Pieces remains a brilliant insight into the minds of some of the more highbrow creative types around today, their view of the world around them, and their view of themselves.

As a teenager, I thought I had the arts figured out; now I know that isn't the case at all. But it is reassuring to see that the artists themselves are still trying to figure things out.

4/5. Not sure if I'll do ratings, but that's what this gets.

Reading

Somewhere along the line, I fell out of love with reading.

As a child, I couldn't get enough. With a foundation, like the majority of British kids, in the works of Roald Dahl, I progressed to the classics between the ages of around seven and fourteen, encountered a brief dry spell, and then immersed myself in modernism over the course of my A Levels like any good pretentious aspiring arts student should.

But the next five years were about to drive me into the ground.

While I didn't dedicate every waking hour of my life to the library (hardly any in fact since I preferred to work from my room), a degree in French and German followed by an MA in Translation Studies ensured that there was little time available to read for pleasure. So I simply stopped.

In fairness, I did actually enjoy a lot of the books I studied. Subject to deep analysis, the short stories of Franz Kafka reveal themselves to be just about the most perfect use of any language ever. Thomas Mann proved with Mario und der Zauberer just how beautiful German can be in the right hands, while Peter Weiss's Die Ermittlung showcased its brutality in gut-wrenching detail and Ulrich Plenzdorf's Die neuen Leiden des jungen W. its potential for humour. The poetry of Baudelaire allowed me to feel every inch the stereotype of an arts student that I aspired to be, and an academic reading of Asterix revealed more dimensions than my ten-year-old self could ever have imagined.

Then again, a lot of what I read had less of an impact. I am reminded, by its presence on my bookshelf, that I once studied a book named Flugasche by Monika Maron, and yet I cannot recall a single detail of its content. Stripped of its post-colonial context, Maryse Condé's La coeur à rire et à pleurer reads like an airport paperback, while Die heilige Johanna der Schlachthof is Brecht a painfully long way from his best. Renan Demirkan's Schwarzer Tee mit drei Stück Zucker has not even been deemed consequential enough to warrant its own Wikipedia page, and for good reason.

And then there were the works I actively disliked. Nobel Prize aside, Elfriede Jelinek's writing in Women as Lovers is post-modern neo-realist rambling at its absolute worst. The second half of Goethe's Faust proved so impenetrable that I struggled for the majority to decipher even the superficial meaning of the smog of classical allusions and forced weirdness. While I never read Mein Kampf in its entirety, the passages I did encounter, for all their tedious egocentricity, left me wanting to punch a hole in the wall and Hitler in the face. And yet the worst of the worst would have to be Georges Bataille's Le bleu du ciel, the only book I have read so utterly depraved that I found myself genuinely offended by its content. Worse still was that it was dropped from our curriculum. After I had already read it.

Looming in the background to all this like a vast, oceanic undercurrent, was the endless, soulless, hard academic theory. Hours spent poring over regional breakdowns of French by-elections from the 80s in an attempt to work out exactly how many people jumped ship from the Communist Party to aid Mitterrand's drearily efficient rise to power. The inscrutability of political theory in general. The black hole for enjoyment that is film theory in general. The pretension of literary theory in general. The theory of translation, in which the same debate has been raging with little progress since the turn of the 20th century, and which has provided absolutely minimal influence on my emerging career as a translator.

Needless to say, reading came to be something of a chore, and one that I only picked up again when I found myself with a 75-minute daily commute to and from London. This allowed me to tick off a few works I'd had my eye on, but was never a long-term solution and before too long I found myself driving to work, living in a house with plenty of other forms of entertainment in a town with plenty of yet other forms of entertainment.

I did not read many books in 2016. In 2017, I aim to read 20. I will probably review most of them on this page at some point. Stay tuned!