Published by: Oni-Lion Forge Publishing, 2025

Invisible Differences is a graphic novel which tells the story of Marguerite, a twenty-something office worker who struggles with all aspects of her everyday life until she reaches a crisis point that leads to her being diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). The book was recommended to me by my pal Dom, whom I met at Real World earlier this year and who has a child with ASD. Dr Julie Dachez is an author, public speaker, and Autism activist and the book is based on her experiences before and after her own diagnosis. I recognised so much of the story she tells here.

The book was originally published in French. Judging by the comments, resources, and additional information that are provided at the end of the book, the French government's record in supporting children and adults with ASD is evidently even worse than it is here in the UK. They have been condemned by the Council of Europe for discrimination against children: according to Julie, only 20% of French children who have been diagnosed with ASD attend school regularly. The reactions of many of Marguerite's friends and coworkers are painfully uninformed, and a page that simply collects many of the misguided things which allistic people tend to blurt out when you tell them about being Autistic show that normies are reliably clueless about it, regardless of their national culture:

"Deep down, aren't we all a little Autistic?"
"Oh right, yeah, Autistic like MONK?"
"But you look so normal!" and
"But... You can talk!"

And yeah, I've experienced those reactions, too.

The film Rain Man is (rightly, in my opinion) criticised more than once for the damage it did to public and professional awareness of Autism. Marguerite struggles to find anyone who understands. The first psychologist that Marguerite consults tells her that she does not look Autistic in any way and dismisses her self-identification with a single sentence, "Don't believe everything you read on the Internet." One character later in the book empties a box of matches on to a table, expecting Marguerite to tell him how many there are (like a normie would even bother to take the trouble to check that she was correct, right?) But somehow, gloriously, Marguerite eventually prevails.

The illustrations by Mademoiselle Caroline are a perfect match for the text and the use of colour in particular is wonderful. The story is life-affirming and positive and reading it brought a smile to my face this morning.

Published by: Kingmaker Publishing, 2024

I first saw Jakko playing guitar on stage when I was still a teenager. His band 64 Spoons supported the Christian rock band After The Fire at Imperial College Students' Union when I was there studying physics and they made more of an impression on me than the headliners. The Spoons never hit the big time, but Jakko went on to perform and record with a bewildering variety of artists before Robert Fripp asked him to be the vocalist and "old standard tuning" guitarist for the final (to date) iterations of the legendary prog rock band King Crimson. And if you know me, you know exactly how obsessed I am about that particular band.

This isn't your average rock star autobiography, though. Jakko is open and honest about his struggles with low self-esteem and deep feelings of rejection resulting from being an adopted child, and his difficulties in maintaining relationships stemming from both a resulting fear of being abandoned and from spending months of his life at a time on the road. It's an intensely personal account from start to finish as Jakko relates his decades-long quest to find his birth parents as well as recounting the ups and downs of what has been a quite extraordinary professional career. There are many moments in the narrative that are, quite frankly, heartbreaking. But there are also tales of incidents that genuinely made me laugh out loud: not just the one in which Motörhead frontman Lemmy encounters King Crimson drummer Ian Wallace at the Rainbow Bar and Grill in Los Angeles in his typically gruff fashion (I won't spoil it, you'll have to read it for yourself) but also several which involve King Crimson's founder Robert Fripp, particularly one where, after he had read an interview Jakko gave to a music magazine, a disgruntled Mr Fripp took Jakko aside and very politely asked him to stop going around telling people interviewing him how nice Robert was being to him, because it was ruining his reputation...

Because I'm a prog rock nerd, I've met people mentioned in this book, and not just Lemmy. Jakko's account of each of them rings true. It was lovely to read about several musicians who are heroes of mine who Jakko ended up getting to know such as Jakko's bandmate, the legendary bass and Chapman Stick player Tony Levin, and the utterly unique guitarist Allan Holdsworth. But what totally freaked me out was discovering that I might have played keys for a battle of the bands gig at the Dacorum Pavilion in Hemel Hempstead back in the 80s (we didn't win) where one of the other bands was Steven Wilson's first band, prior to his formation of Porcupine Tree. And Jakko was in the audience that day. My life has been totally weird enough for that to have happened. I wonder if I'll ever be able to confirm that it was the same contest?

As you'd expect from someone with a career like Jakko's, the supporting cast of characters is peppered with musicians, comedians, and other media personalities that you'll know well (the unexpected appearance of Uri Geller at one point was fun) but Jakko mentions them all in a way that drives the narrative forward, never as simple name-dropping. There are good guys like Tony and Allan and there are some bad guys as well, but even the bad guys occasionally do something that results in a positive outcome; as Jakko observes, you never know what effect your choices might have, further down the line.

As I've been a committed and totally obsessed prog rock nerd since I was a teenager, it will probably come as no surprise to you to hear that I absolutely loved this book. I think you will, too.

Published by: Monoray, 2022

Helen's daughter Ellie recommended this book as being the most helpful one about being Autistic that she'd read, and after finishing it I think that's a solid assessment of it. The author's bio describes him as a "proudly Autistic professor and social psychologist" and he relates his own journey of self-discovery at the same time as explaining what Autism is and how it affects people, and he provides a set of very useful tools and techniques which an Autistic person can use for negotiating the challenges of modern life. And there are lots of those; as Dr Price makes very clear, society would much rather sweep the whole idea of Autism under the rug and some of the responses that neurotypical ("allistic") people have devised in order to make themselves feel less threatened or upset by Autistic people are horrific. Forget trying to help the people who are suffering; that's usually the last thing on everybody else's mind.

The book is very much written for people who are Autistic themselves, rather than being aimed at their family and friends. And that makes a surprisingly powerful, positive difference to the text. His choice to capitalise the word Autism as I have done here was, as he explained in an essay in Medium back in 2022, because he sees it as "an identifier I am proud of, a mark of community membership rather than a condition I have been saddled with" and again, that hit home strongly. Although he describes Autism as a disability, and makes an argument for that being the case which is impossible to argue with, I'm still having difficulty coming to terms with accepting that as being true in my own case. I don't feel disabled. But then again, I'm only just beginning to realise how much my own life has been affected by the way my brain works (or sometimes doesn't).

And in reading the accounts of Devon's own experiences and those of other Autistic people he has met as a result of his activism and advocacy (and the book has sold more than a quarter of a million copies, so there are plenty of those) I'm left in no doubt that I am autistic. There were many points in the book where I found myself reading about someone doing a thing that I do, or someones account of something that has also happened to me, and exclaiming in surprise, "Wait, that's an Autism thing?" His advice that I shouldn't expect a formal assessment to be much help was unexpected, but I've taken that on board, too.

This is a very helpful and important book, and I'm pretty sure that I will be reading it again before too long. Recommended.

Published by: Oxford University Press, 2008

I was well into my thirties when I read Oliver Sacks's classic work on autism, An Anthropologist on Mars. I started reading more about the condition because I recognised that several aspects of my father's behaviour cropped up in Sacks's humane and sensitive descriptions of his patients—although I'm sorry to say that neither of those adjectives could have been applied to my dad. And although I'd realised that my own mind didn't work the same way that other people's did when I was a small child, it never occurred to me that I might have the same condition, too. If this seems odd (and it should, because it was already known that the condition has a genetic origin, and is heritable) I can only explain that up to that point, I'd based my self-assessment on a series of clinical texts, the most significant of which was a collection of academic essays edited by Dame Uta Frith that was published in 1991 called Autism and Asperger Syndrome. And yes, the irony of that choice of reading material is not lost on me.

Temple Grandin, who is described in Sacks's book, is nothing like most of the cases described in Professor Frith's earlier book, the majority of whom were mentally and physically impaired and who were often entirely unable to communicate with others (i.e. they were "nonverbal" and that's very definitely not me at all). I therefore (and now, it seems, very foolishly) discounted the possibility that I might be autistic. And I continued to do so until earlier this year, when—thanks to my friend Robin Ince, the penny finally dropped. So it felt like I needed to catch up with some slightly more up-to-date literature. And where better to start than with Professor Frith's Very Short Introduction?

After reading the book, I'm still sure of my self-diagnosis that I'm somewhere on the spectrum. I'm less sure that I would get a formal diagnosis. I'm worried that the comorbidity of PTSD and ADHD (and again, I've not been formally diagnosed with either condition but it's pretty bloody obvious to me that I've got both of them) would make an assessment challenging—as would the fact that I've been masking for the whole of my adult life. I'm evidently what's known as "high functioning" autistic (and a friend of mine told me recently, while laughing, that I should be the poster boy for such people). The book delivered several "Aha!" moments, though. My struggle to ever find a hat or crash helmet large enough to fit me seems to be the result of a significant trait in autistic people that they have larger brains. That was a surprise, but it tracks. When I was young, hypersensitivity made my life an absolute hell (whether it was thanks to the scratchy, home-made t-shirts my mother used to make me wear, the hideous dental brace I had to wear to correct the alignment of my front teeth, or the continuous rashes I would suffer from that didn't appear to have any cause, or just the strong aversion to physical contact which didn't disappear until I was in my twenties—at which point my girlfriend discovered my hypersensitivity and it suddenly became fun). I struggled with food textures I didn't like (I could only eat peas by swallowing them whole); I could read before I started school; I would get intensely, obsessively interested in particular subjects and my habit of reading the dictionary as if it was a novel had given me a prodigious vocabulary by the time I was seven; and even today, I could easily be the poster boy for weak central coherence, to the point that I actually have a SQUIRREL! caption on my StreamDeck for those moments where I get totally distracted by a minor detail and veer off into the weeds. I learned that absolute pitch, a.k.a. perfect pitch, is also present in about 30% of all cases. And when it comes to sensory processing and sound, the reason why I've ended up as a recording engineer and producer suddenly becomes obvious...

Sadly, the book's central message is that more research is required (at least, that was the situation back in 2008 when the book was published). And while Professor Frith dives deeply into examining the theories as to what the root causes of autism might be (completely demolishing most, if not all of the popular media scares in the process), the book is not going to help anyone deal with being autistic to any great degree, particularly if, like me, you only became aware of your autistic status late in life. Even so, I took some comfort in acquiring more data about my condition and I feel more confident in ascribing specific aspects of who I am to it, rather then just my general, nonspecific weirdness (which, incidentally, is likely to be the title of a forthcoming album).

Published by: Granta, 2009

When I was eleven years old, my family and I went to visit my cousins in Chipperfield for a few days. While we were there, we played with their old clockwork record player, listening to a bunch of old 78 rpm discs (our favourite being a recording of Sibelius's Finlandia) which we played over and over into a Decca cassette recorder while we howled like wolves, horror movie style. Hearing the results of our work over the opening notes of Jean's tone poem was an extraordinary moment for me and I immediately became utterly hooked on the idea of recording sounds for myself. I pestered and pestered my parents so much that they eventually gave in and bought me a recorder of my own (the exact same model, of course). By the time I hit my teens, I was recording anything and everything I possibly could. Sound recording has been an obsession of mine ever since and I'm still doing so today, more than fifty years later.

How did technology come about that could let a nerdy kid like me listen to the sound of waves that I'd watched breaking on a beach in East Anglia playing back in my bedroom a couple of weeks later when I'd returned home from my holidays? Who were the heroes and villains of the story? Who got rich in the process, and who should have, but didn't? Was every new technology that appeared successful? Where were the fortunes made; where were they lost, and why?

Thomas Edison starts the story, of course. And while I knew the names of a lot of the characters who were subsequently involved (including such luminaries as Hugh Padgham, They Might Be Giants, Peter Gabriel, Steve Albini, Bob Katz, and Bob Clearmountain to name just a few) a lot of the stories that Greg Milner relates involve people I'd never heard of. And I'm me, remember.

The history of the industry standard DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) Pro Tools is worth the price of admission all on its own. The discussion of the rise of MP3, lossy compression, and what it did to the music industry is a sobering read. And there are hints of a future that has yet to come to fruition; while surround sound had been around for a while when this book was first published, things like immersive audio were still on the drawing board and some technologies have yet to make it out into the world of high-end commercial audio. The discussion of wave field synthesis in the book's closing chapter hints at a technology that is only really starting to come into its own nearly fifteen years later. From wax cylinders to hard drives, it's fascinating to read about all of the ways in which we capture sound.

What a glorious book.

Published by: Worldbuilders press, 2017

Well, that didn't take long; I finished book 3 on the same day as book 2 (by this point I'm afraid that my principal motivation was to get the wretched things out of the way so I could get back to reading other more entertaining stuff).

My criticisms of the first two books apply here as well; the Bobs still can't INFOSEC their way out of a paper bag, the requirements of the plot continue to dictate whether or not a technology is available instead of the other way around, and the cast of characters continues to be about as diverse as an episode of Friends.

But what really bugged me this time was the chronology of the chapters. I started to notice that one chapter would take place twenty years earlier than the chapter which preceded it and the next would skip forwards an arbitrary number of years again. Was this supposed to emphasise the time dilation effects of space travel at relativistic speeds? If so, it doesn't work. It's completely unnecessary, because the Bobs have faster-than-light communication. Was it an homage to Quentin Tarantino's storytelling style (think Pulp Fiction)? I would not be at all surprised to learn that this was the case.

I'm sorry to say that when everything wrapped up neatly at the end I heaved a sigh of relief because it meant I wouldn't have to read any more books in the series. Not a fan.

Published by: Worldbuilders press, 2017

Yes, I went straight in to the second book in the Bobiverse series. As I read this book I realised that the author's use of extremely short chapters (some only lasting a couple of pages) was proving to be very effective in keeping me reading even if the writing continues to be mediocre at best. I knew I was being manipulated, even as I kept turning the pages. At least this time around, some of the issues I had with the plot and the general setup of things are—well, they're still not addressed satisfactorily, but at least they're lampshaded (an authorial practice which effectively says to the reader, "Yes, I know this is stretching things a bit too far, but just roll with it, okay?") I may have kept reading, but I was still painfully aware that this series of books is still a middle-aged white male nerd writing about the adventures of a whole bunch of middle-aged, white male nerds. Many years ago someone completely ruined Peter Hamilton's space operas for me by describing their settings as "Essex in outer space" and the criticism—brutal though it undoubtedly is—holds true here as well.

At least the characters do notice some of the more blindingly obvious solutions to their problems this time around. It eventually occurs to the colonists on "Vulcan" (yes, I know) that if the local fauna is biocompatible enough to enjoy eating them, they should be able to eat it. (Which is, quite frankly, wildly implausible. I'd long since given up on expecting Taylor's settlers to encounter any insurmountable problems in surviving in a completely different biosphere; compare and contrast how smoothly the Bobs deal with hostile alien lifeforms with the hellish scenario that the colonists encounter in Kim Stanley Robinson's entertaining but incredibly bleak Aurora, for example.) I don't see how the pinch point of not being able to build enough ships to evacuate Earth before its resources run out makes any sort of sense. Why don't the Bobs just build them using resources in all the planetary systems that they're establishing colonies on instead? If you first prioritise making more printers with your printers, exponential growth kicks in and creating a ridiculous number of them should be a no-brainer, frankly. Doing so rapidly turns humanity into a post-scarcity civilization and the only issue that still counts is how you transport resources as quickly as possible to those systems that haven't caught up yet. Quite a lot of the related technology being employed doesn't make sense, either. The Bobs can scan things seemingly down to the atomic level if not the quantum level (because otherwise Bob couldn't have been resurrected in the first place) and once they have the data from those scans, their magic printers should be able to make any object they can think of, just like the Star Trek replicators they're so obviously inspired by—including food. In VR, the Bobs drink coffee and cognac and remark on how authentic it tastes to them. So why is having enough food to go around an issue? And the other tech feels implausibly patchy: on the one hand the Bobs have faster-than-light VR conference calls and something akin to artificial gravity but on the other they still suck at information security and they can't cure cancer.

Look, I'm me, remember? I like thinking this stuff through and it bugs me when an author only follows their train of thought far enough for things to spark drama, not realising that going a little further would tip the environment (and plot) in a far more interesting direction.

This time around, Bob has gone from espousing Gene Roddenberry's ideals to behaving as if the Starfleet Prime Directive (which he was so keen on when he was a human being) was an optional, nice-to-have thing only when it's convenient. Before we're half way through the book, he's totally cool with exterminating any alien lifeforms that inconvenience his colonisation plans or threaten his nerdy pals. And the characters barely notice that this is what they're doing.

Book 2 ends on enough of a cliffhanger to make me want to read the third volume and as I've already bought it, I'll be doing that forthwith, but the standard of writing hasn't really improved much beyond the first volume and I'm not really feeling any inclination to track down further titles in the series.

Published by: Worldbuilders press, 2017

I've been meaning to check out the Bobiverse for some time. It gets rave reviews from Audible listeners and has been successful enough that there are currently five books in the series. This week a parcel containing the first three books landed on my doormat and yesterday I retired to my favourite armchair to start reading them. At first, the plot felt very familiar: like Neal Stephenson's Fall; or, Dodge In Hell (which was published a couple of years later) the protagonist is a white, male, engineer whizz-kid who makes a vast fortune, spends some of it signing up with an Extropian cryonics company, and then suddenly dies.

In this case, he wakes up at some point in the 22nd Century in a thinly disguised version of a post-Trump United States run by white nationalist Christian fundamentalists (which is looking depressingly prescient these days) to find out that he's been indentured as part of a project that is constructing a Von Neumann Probe, and he'll be its pilot. He has no say in the matter, because he's no longer human; he has no rights. He's just property. He's a digital simulacrum of his original personality, created from a scan of his thawed-out brain (which was destroyed in the process) and running in a fancy computer (unlike Stephenson, Taylor resists the temptation to catalogue the nuts and bolts of the system that "Bob" is running on).

So far, so dystopian. Unfortunately that's about where the inventiveness grinds to a halt and the plot disappears under an avalanche of tiringly self-indulgent fan service. This is a book that ought never be filmed, because the appropriation of other people's intellectual property, particularly that of Gene Roddenberry and George Lucas, would entail truly astronomical payments for rights clearances. There's no easy way to say this: the writing is poor. The book reminded me strongly of the only book I've ever thrown in the bin before I finished it: Ernest Cline's Ready Player One—but in some respects, this book is worse because it lacks even the slightest nod to diversity (and yes, I know Cline's book was filmed, but who's going to argue with Steven Spielberg?)

This is a nerd's power fantasy, pure and simple. Even when Bob meets an intelligent alien species, the character that he picks to make First Contact with isn't a planetary leader, oh no; he picks another nerdy kid (and then helps him get laid, because of course he does). The protagonist never develops much of a relationship with any other character but instead just makes fresh copies of himself, one after another. I was particularly irked by the fact that the name which Bob's second iteration chooses for himself as "number two" is Riker. As any fule kno, Riker was always referred to in Star Trek: The Next Generation as "Number One". This isn't just a lightweight book, it's downright sloppy.

And the evidence of Bob's nerd credentials is rather thin on the ground. While he is supposed to have made his initial fortune by being supremely competent as a computer engineer, he takes decades to realise a lot of the things which ought to have been immediately obvious to him (like information security, or the risks inherent in making multi-generational copies of data in a high radiation environment. He makes no attempt to take adventage of his digital nature. Bob can clearly edit his own code (it's mentioned explicitly as a plot point early on) but he never feels the need to enhance or augment his existing cognition in the same way that he refines the design of his spaceship, for example—and let's face it, that's the sort of thing any engineer worth their salt would automatically tackle first! Any additional capabilities which the plot demands are more or less handed to him on a plate. There's none of Star Trek's competence porn in evidence here; and forget logic or inventive, unusual solutions to the problems faced by the protagonist—most of the conflicts in the book are resolved either by Bob throwing a hissy fit or the exchange of tactical nuclear weapons.

I did make it to the end of the book, though. The final line is pure cringe, because while the Bobs espouse the virtues of Gene Roddenberry's Starfleet (particularly the Prime Directive) their actions continually miss Roddenberry's point completely. Gene would most emphatically not be proud.

Okay, I admit it: I'm going to treat reading the next two books as an object lesson in identifying bad writing habits. I literally just cracked my knuckles. I'm not holding out much hope that things are going to improve.

Published by: Hachette Books, 1998

If you're going to read a book in order to learn about songwriting, it's a good idea to pick one by somebody who has written a popular song or two. Mr Webb is certainly one of those people, as (amongst other titles) he wrote Platinum-selling hits like Galveston, By The Time I Get To Phoenix, Up, Up, and Away, and MacArthur Park. Not only can he walk the walk as effectively as he can talk the talk, he also adds wider perspective gathered from an awe-inspiring roster of his industry contacts throughout the book. This is a treasure trove of good advice written from first- and second-hand personal experience.

Webb's book is much more technically oriented than the Pat Pattison book I read recently. There's a lot more about the musical nuts and bolts of constructing a melody and the pros and cons of settling on a particular chord progression, for a start. There are diagrams of the Circle of Fifths and mentions of Mozart and Schubert. But what struck me most about this work is simply how much more interesting it is to read. Webb has a wealth of relevant stories to tell, and he does so with a sense of humour that helps him to tell them well. He's as talented a writer of prose as he is of songs.

But this book might kill your aspirations of making it as a songwriter, all the same. In the final chapter of the book Webb is brutally frank about the cut-throat nature of the business. There are stories of lost fortunes and lawsuits, of bad choices made and careers which imploded. And just to hammer the point home, the book ends with a list of some (but by no means all) of the famous songwriters who passed away while he was writing the book. It's not a short list, and not all of the people whose names are in it died from natural causes. It's a bleak epilogue and to pile on the misery, a quarter of a century later the promise of the Internet has turned out to be rather different to the brave new world of artist websites it looked like becoming back then. But Webb's secret is that he doesn't care. The name of the game is to write songs and if that's what your chosen career is going to be, you have to knuckle down and do the work. And then keep doing it.

Sometimes—if you're incredibly lucky and you're in the right place with the right people at the right time (and most importantly of all, if you've got the right chops)—you might make it.

Published by: Tor, 2018

I don't know what was going on with me yesterday, but I was clearly in need of some calming and soothing reading material because I ended up burning my way through three of the Murderbot books in one sitting, one after another. Rather like Douglas Adams's books were when I was in my twenties, the Murderbot Diaries are my go-to choice for comfort reading.

Exit Strategy sees Murderbot returning from its travels to save the Preservation Aux team once again. After two fairly brief adventures in books 2 and 3, book 4 feels like it's a more substantial affair and a prime candidate for adaptation as season 3 of the TV show, I reckon. I did notice reading this book again after watching the first season of the TV show (multiple times, I might add) that the show had kinda-sorta co-opted the way in which Murderbot's love of The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon was used as a restorative device at the end of this book for the final episode of season one, but it made sense to do so.

As I commented the first time I read it, this book brings the tale of Murderbot's dealings with the evil corporation GrayCris to a very satisfying conclusion and justice is done. Not only has Murderbot developed as a personality but its actions are beginning to have wider repercussions across the fictional galaxy which it inhabits.

Murderbot, I am sure, would be mortified to hear about that.

Published by: Tor, 2018

The fact that I finished re-reading the third book in the Murderbot series on the same day that I read the second one illustrates just how brief each one is; if I were adapting these books for television, I'd be strongly tempted to make the second season of the show a retelling of both, although even cutting them down to five episodes each feels like I would be stretching out the story quite a lot.

Like book #2, Rogue Protocol is dedicated to the exploits of Murderbot acting on its own. The supporting cast don't crop up again (other than in Murderbot's recollections of the emoji-using robot Miki, that is). Once again, Murderbot finds itself pretending to be human (or at least, something more than it actually is) for a fair bit of the story, but then has to employ all its rogue sec-unit skills to save the day—all while grumbling about how it really hadn't bargained for having to do any of this, as it would much rather be tucked away in a storage locker somewhere watching all the new shows it had downloaded from the entertainment channels (which presumably it's been doing all this time without having to pay for a subscription or anything). It's not going to surprise anyone when I say that I found myself identifying far more strongly with Murderbot this time round as I follow my own path of neurodivergent discovery. Oh boy, I can empathise.

This is the book in which the wider arc of Murderbot's story begins to appear. It's satisfying to spot all the little clues and pointers which Martha Wells drops into the narrative which will pay off down the line. Reading the books again turns out to be even more fun the second time around. So, straight on to book #4!

Published by: Tor, 2018

My re-read of the Murderbot Diaries continues with the second volume in the series. It's an entertaining follow-up to the first story, but as I burned though the whole thing in a couple of hours today, I suspect that when this version is adapted for television, its events will be over and done with long before the season concludes and they'll have to move on rapidly to book number 3.

One obvious logistical problem in moving this book from page to screen will be that the only character who we already know is Murderbot itself. The Preservation Aux team from All Systems Red are mentioned a lot, but they don't take part in what's going on at all.

And maybe it's the state of the world at the moment, but the Universe that Murderbot inhabits feels even more dystopian this time around. It's all the more satisfying, then, when Murderbot fully lives up to its name at the climax of the action and the nasty corporate goons all get their just desserts.

Published by: Writer's Digest, 2009

After February Album Writing Month finished this year, I found myself wishing that I was better at writing lyrics for songs. Mine always felt like something was a bit off, somehow. I just assumed that I could fix things by learning more about the craft, so I set about gathering a few more books on the subject. This book, written by a professor who teaches songwriting at Berklee, would have been an obvious choice even before several of my musician friends had recommended it as a must-read.

But this was before I discovered that I'm autistic. Now, the reason why my lyrics feel so off is clearer to me, and it has nothing to do with my relative lack of understanding of process, structure, or meter. It's the way my mind works that makes me write the way that I do.

And perhaps that's why I bounced off this particular text so hard. I just couldn't relate to it. It's taken me more than six months to read, which is an inordinately long time for me to get through a book. The last hundred-plus pages of the book are dedicated to teaching a handful of basic principles which are summed up perfectly adequately in a single paragraph at the bottom of page 240: lyrics can be "balanced" or "unbalanced" and this enables the songwriter to achieve four important things:

1. Spotlighting important ideas
2. "pushing" one section forward into the next
3. contrasting one section with another
4. setting up a need for resolution in a following section or line

Or perhaps it was because the lyrical examples used for the interminable exercises which Professor Pattison puts the reader through felt way too American to be relevant to someone like me, who is from the North of England. Why does Tulsa play such a prominent role in popular music, eh? I've never been there; I don't think I know anybody who has. The Professor's approach also involves teaching how to recognise things like iambic pentameter without using any of the standard technical terms I already knew which identify the nuts and bolts of meter or scansion like rhythmic feet; everything has been ba-DUMbed down (sorry—I couldn't resist). I already understood the need to make a connection with one's listeners through one's lyrics, but ironically there were precious few moments in this book where I felt like it was addressing me directly as a writer. Mostly, I just felt bored (and annoyed by the typos).

Sorry, Professor.

Published by: John Murray, 2023

Randall, who is best known as the creator of the wonderful xkcd webcomic, returns with a second collection of answers to some truly very weird (and occasionally disturbing) questions sent in to his website. If you want to know how long it would take to fill an olympic-size swimming pool with your saliva, how long you could stand on the surface of the sun without being harmed, or exactly how tall a billion-storey building would be, then this is the book for you.

In working through the answers, Randall uses real world physics but he pushes things in unexpected and hugely entertaining directions. Did you know that—just assuming that you could somehow get past all of the problems with hydraulics and materials science involved—if you piped all of Niagara Falls through a (very strong) drinking straw, the flow would have to travel at 2% of the speed of light to cope with the volume of water? As the author points out, this would turn out to be spectacularly bad for the planet, so it should not be attempted experimentally.

In fact it's comforting to note that Randall adds timely warnings of "NEVER DO THIS" when discussing the advisability of attempting many of the feats in the book such as firing a bullet up a cliff so that someone standing at the top could catch it, or covering yourself in a ten-meter ball of sunblock and jumping into the Sun. He compiles a list of such things; by the end of the book the impression one gets of how the minds of a cross-section of his readers work is somewhat alarming.

As you've probably already figured out, this is very much my sort of book. Great fun.

Published by: Wellcome Collection, 2017

Bella Bathurst's account of how she lost her hearing as an adult and was profoundly deaf for the next twelve years was recommended by Tchad Blake during one of this year's Masterclass sessions at Real World Studios. I'm glad he did. It's more than just an account of deafness; it's a celebration of hearing and listening and paying attention and it's one of the most moving books I've read in a long time.

The thought of going deaf horrifies me. Far more than the prospect of going blind, in fact. Much of my life has only been bearable because I could lose myself in listening to music. Getting a cassette recorder when I was in my teens also meant that I could record the nice parts of the world and then listen to them on headphones once I was back in my room. Field recordings, particularly those I've made myself, still hold as much power for me as a listening experience as Beethoven's Ninth or Led Zeppelin II. For me, the world is sound.

Bella started to lose her hearing at the age of 28. There's no self pity in her account; she is frank and honest about what happened and how she attributed her deafness to a head injury sustained while skiing but which was ultimately precipitated by a car accident (or so she thought). In Sound, she goes beyond the physical causes of hearing loss and examines the role that deafness plays in society: where it's most prevalent; how the hearing world responds to it; if it's accepted or, more likely, ignored; and how its effects can sometimes be mitigated to some degree.

I was shocked by how casually some professions—particularly those in the military—seem to view hearing loss as just a side-effect of the job. The attitude is largely one of "Yes it sucks, but what can you do?" I hadn't realised how stark the choice can be for people in combat situations: keep situational awareness and go deaf but stay alive, or keep your hearing but end up dead. A 2008 study in the USA, Bella tells us, suggests that 51.8% of serving military personnel had moderate to severe hearing loss. This isn't just a problem that will crop up later in their lives, either: another study conducted the same year with tank crews discovered that among those personnel who were unable to hear a command to engage a target, 59% had hit the wrong object. Or person. Or people.

Maybe it's because of my newly discovered autism, but Bella's writing about the human sensorium (not just our hearing) and how we process our perceptions of the outside world hit home on a visceral level. The following passage in particular leapt off the page as an accurate description of how I have always viewed the world as a visual artist, even now with my elderly, blurry eyesight:

"Real seeing is a raptorish faculty, a sharp, hungry tool, strip-mining information from the visual world. (Lucien) Freud had it. The deaf have it. Children have it until they are taught to turn it off. We all have it, but that open seeing is such an intimate gift that it seems too personal for daily use. Don't stare. Why not? There's so much to be curious about, such sensory pleasure to be had. Freud looked like the deaf because only the deaf choose to see."

Then, in the closing chapters of the book, Bella explains how everything changed for her. After a complex surgical procedure, her hearing was restored, an event that is nothing short of miraculous. Her description of the operation sounds like science fiction but how she relates its results (with the help of Sir Simon Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic) is the book's emotional heart. This is an extraordinary, truly uplifting book.

Published by: Angry Robot, 2024

The sequel to last year's Gogmagog picks up seamlessly from where the action left off, with Captain Cady Meade and her intrepid crew arrived in the city of Ludwich and trying to figure out how to stop the impending rise of the aforementioned Gogmagog, and which of her acquaintances can be trusted to help her.

As in the first volume, the setting is often hallucinatory or just plain weird, although as the stakes become clearer things take on a slightly more grounded feel than in the previous tale. This feels like it was necessary in order to make the threat to our trusty protagonists more significant. There's still plenty of strangeness involved, however. The references to Forteana and British folklore continue to come thick and fast, whether it be to wodewoses or to Queen Elizabeth the First's scientific adviser (and astrologer), Dr. John Dee as well as more esoteric stuff such as the method of loci that all serve to give the story a densely populated richness and heft. There are what in other works might be called fairies, and elves, and zombies; there's a living underground railway network, a crashed alien spaceship that just gets mentioned in passing, and a nod to Arthurian legend in the finest tradition of Tolkein. Messrs. Noon and Beard have encyclopedic knowledge of such things, and they plunder their reference libraries to great effect.

It's all deliciously good fun. And the book's epilogue, which reminded me strongly of the gag with the ring at the ending of Mike Hodges's 1980 movie Flash Gordon, leaves plenty of room for a sequel.

Published by: Rutgers University Press, 1972

I have sat in many science show audiences over the years while Professor Andrea Sella entertained me by making things explode (and I have been hit—but never hurt—by the shrapnel from more than one of his plastic buckets in the process). I was enthusing about things going bang with him recently (as you do) on Mastodon and he immediately recommended a history of rocket propellants, written by one John Drury Clark, as being right up my street as well as one of the most entertaining and outrageous works of science that he had ever read. Even better, he sent me a link to a .pdf of the book which is available at archive.org.

Of course I had to read it.

Understandably, it's extremely heavy on the chemistry. It's nearly fifty years since I took my "A"-level in the subject, so a lot of it went completely over my head, but that didn't really matter. Clark had been running a side-hustle as a writer of science fiction tales since the 1930s, and it shows. He was a natural at spinning a cracking yarn, and the subject matter (which was often dangerously and occasionally lethally explosive) drives a tale which frequently had me howling out loud in outright disbelief. And that's before you add in Clark's links to such exotic characters as L. Ron Hubbard (for whom he occasionally polished science fiction stories) and JPL founder Jack Whiteside Parsons (who was a crony of Aleister Crowley and a fellow member of the Ordo Templi Orientis).

They were all clearly quite mad and their exploits are related with a perfectly judged, droll humour. The incident with several thousand bats is worth the price of admission all on its own. It's a wild ride, and very much worth your time.

Published by: William Collins, 2018

I worked in the training industry for almost all of my professional career; in the public sector, then the private, and even a stretch in academia. And throughout that time if there was one thing that could be relied upon to make my heart sink and cause me to hastily downgrade my opinion of the professionalism of an organisation, it would be any time when they asked me to complete a personality test going by the name of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, or MBTI. This "test" asks you a series of simple questions and then uses your answers to classify you as one of 16 personality types based on four binary choices: you are either an Extravert (E) or an Introvert (I), you rely on Sensing (S) or on iNtuition (N), you make decisions based upon either Thinking (T) or Feeling (F), and you approach life by either Judging (J) or Perceiving (P). I've taken the test many times, and I've seldom got the same result twice; when it comes to using personality testing for the purposes of recruiting or managing people, that's a pretty serious shortcoming. In my experience (and it's also my professional opinion) the results you get from completing the MBTI are about as helpful and scientifically robust as the horoscope you read in the morning paper.

This book chronicles the MBTI's development into the billion-dollar behemoth it now is from its folksy, kitchen table origins. Katherine Briggs and her daughter Isabel Briggs Myers based their work upon a naive and distinctly amateurish interpretation of Jung's classic work of mysticism (and, frankly, pseudoscience) Psychological Types. Jung had nothing to say about judging or perceiving; that was entirely the invention of Katherine and Isabel, but he presented the first three of the dimensions listed above as a continuum shading from each to its opposite—not as stark binary choices. Such nuance played no part in Katharine or Isabel's world. As Emre relates it, the vibe was more one of casual racism, a fondness for eugenics, a relaxed attitude to ethics, and a sense of self-belief which is likely to strike the modern reader as misguided, if not downright monomaniacal. Indeed, it's very difficult not to view the author's description of her interaction with representatives of the organisation that owns the MBTI these days as indistinguishable from those with members of a cult. The book has done nothing whatsoever to change my opinions about the MBTI's utter lack of validity or scientific rigour.

As Professor Emre observes in this book, people find their MBTI results helpful in negotiating modern life. That's undoubtedly true. But I can say exactly the same thing about people who take their daily horoscope seriously.

Published by: Macmillan, 2025

As a whole, my family are an odd bunch. I don't think anyone in it would even think of arguing with the assertion that we have strong tendencies for neurodivergent behaviour. I have no doubt at all that my father had Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, or OCD. I draw this conclusion from behaviours such as his insistence—if any of us ever loaded the dishwasher and put things on the "wrong" shelves—on taking everything back out of it so that he could put everything back "properly" or the discovery, back when I still lived with my parents, that the "line of soap scum" that he would rage at us for leaving in the bath instead of rinsing it out was actually the result of him using scouring powder so heavily that he'd worn through the bath's enamel coating. His behaviour became more and more extreme as he got older, and the OCD behaviours persisted long after Alzheimer's had erased other aspects of his personality.

I've wondered whether or not I was neurodivergent for decades. The first time my suspicions were raised was in the late 80s when I read Oliver Sacks's classic book The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat in which he describes his encounters with several patients with autism. My suspicions grew much stronger when I read his biographical sketch of Temple Grandin in his book An Anthropologist on Mars and stronger still when I read her autobiography, Thinking In Pictures in the 90s. Her fondness for the character Lt. Commander Data in Star Trek struck a powerful chord, because that's who many of my friends back then compared me to, and not always kindly. I decided that I needed to know more and after reading Uta Frith's work on Asperger's and Prof. Simon Baron-Cohen's books about autism a few years later (way before the two conditions became reclassified as Autism Spectrum Disorder or ASD back in 2013), I asked a handful of my friends, who knew me well and whose judgment I trusted, if they thought I was on the autistic spectrum. Not one of them did. At the time I just assumed that my feelings of being different were therefore caused by the clinical depression I suffered from (I'd just received a diagnosis) and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (and believe me, I didn't need a formal diagnosis to know I had PTSD). I can't say I was reassured by this; far from it. I told myself I must be normal and was just good at finding other ways to be miserable and broken.

But there's a moment in this book where Robin makes the observation that most of his friends are neurodivergent. I think that was the point where I started thinking, "Oh..." because I count myself as one of them. And then there's the chapter where Robin discusses his own recent diagnosis of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and every single diagnostic indicator he describes is something I do or have done regularly at one point or another. "Oh..." again.

All the way through the book I found myself thinking, "That's me. I do that." There are entire chapters where this happened on every page. It was quite a shock. And yes, I know that people with a tendency to hypochondria might read a book about a condition like this and end up convinced that they had it too; I wasn't sure whether that was going on with me, so I reached out to a dear friend who has known me for a very long time and who knows about this sort of stuff (she has a daughter with ASD) and asked her if she thought I might be neurodivergent. I got a reply back that simply read "Really? I've always known!" with a smiley face emoji at the end. "Oh..." once again.

The book is full of the compassion and empathy that is at the core of Robin's soul. It's a beautiful, challenging, revelatory work of self-discovery. His message is wonderfully simple: the fact that you are neurodivergent does NOT mean that you are broken. The ways in which he sums up how we negotiate our lives (with varying degrees of success) are powerful and wise, and none more so than this:

"You want to be in charge, but there are things that are out of your hands. You cannot argue yourself out of an upset stomach or truly fake a smile or stop yourself blushing. You cannot control who you fall in love with, and you can't always persuade them to love you back. "

Ain't that the truth.

It's not just the ADHD. Discovering that there's such as thing as Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria explains much of the continual state of inner turmoil I find myself in. I can't think of any other book I've read in the last thirty years or so where I can genuinely say that it's changed my life, but I can with this one. I'm not sure that it will bring any form of lasting relief, but all the same I feel like an immense weight has suddenly been lifted from my shoulders.

If only it had happened fifty years ago...

Published by: Self-published, 2017

Looking at listings of this book online, it's difficult not to get the impression that this self-published book is desperately trying to pass itself off as an official product of the UK MOD, but it's so ineptly put together that you'll be disabused of that idea as soon as you pick it up. You won't even have to open its pages to realise you've been sold a dud; the evidence is right there on the front cover, which proclaims that the book contains "FIELD OFFICE AERIAL INVESTIGATION AND ADMINISTRAIVE (sic) FILES" and the blurb on the back, which was also written with the Caps Lock key firmly engaged, could have done with a proof reader to point out that "AN EXACTLY WHAT THE UK GOVERNMENT, MILITARY THOUGHT OF IT ALL THIS IS THE PLACE TO START." is not in any way a coherent sentence.

The author (and I use the term about as loosely as possible, because he hasn't bothered to write anything that provides context, commentary, or anything else of any use) has simply collected all the MOD documents he could find and dumped them into a text document which then got banged off to his publisher. No attempt has been made to organize anything, although I suppose the fact that an index has been provided should at least be acknowledged, even if the names of people and places in it are all in lower case, the selection of keywords is completely arbitrary, and the entries for E, F, and G have been lost because they've dropped off the left-hand edge of the table the author thought he was using to format the page. This is an astonishingly lazy and sloppy piece of work.

But the author's biggest failing is a complete lack of awareness that while an image that's been scanned in at 72 dots per inch (dpi) for viewing on the World Wide Web might look okay on his computer monitor (if it's a Mac, that is; Windows machines default to 96 dpi), the same document is going to look completely illegible when it's committed to print. Any laser printer worth its salt prints at 600 dpi at the very least, and most can handle 2,400 dpi. The bare minimum for acceptable image quality in print is 300 dpi, and very little of this book's contents meet that requirement. As a result, almost every review of the book on Amazon complains about how blurry everything is. This isn't the first book I've read recently that suffers from this entirely avoidable rookie mistake, and I'm sure it won't be the last. The fact that many of the reports are handwritten compounds the problem still further here, though.

And the reports themselves? If I had to guess, I'd say that more than 99% of them were the result of misperceptions of stars, meteors, and satellites, or other more terrestrial phenomena such as aircraft anti-collision lights (on page 45, one sighting report even concludes with the comment "Southend ATC contacted by Police and stated that an aircraft departed in the direction of the sighting at 182249A May 87") and whoever filled out the report of another sighting—of a bright light seen out at sea—on page 161 adds a note that, after they contacted the RAF's Distress and Diversion (D & D) cell at RAF West Drayton, "They informed me that there are rigs at approx position 5330N–00140E and can release flares or burn chemicals without warning."

So not only is this book incredibly slipshod, it's also boring. Don't waste your money.

Published by: Picador, 1994

I first encountered Professor John Taylor (1930–2012) way back in 1973 when I saw him on a television talk show chaired by the British journalist David Dimbleby. Together with the writer Lyall Watson (who had recently published his classic book on the paranormal, Supernature) Professor Taylor and the rest of the country looked on in amazement as Uri Geller bent spoons and restarted watches in front of the television cameras. Although initially taken in by this encounter (the result was a book called Superminds which came out in 1975 in which he attempted to elicit the physical processes that might account for paranormal powers—but he was unsuccessful in this as he didn't apply Occam's Razor adequately, taking the bold step of suggesting that there was a fifth fundamental force of nature in play without first considering the far more likely possibility that what was going on was the result of deception and deliberate fraud) he later changed his mind. By the time he wrote his follow-up work Science and the Supernatural in 1980 he had become highly sceptical of all claims of paranormal abilities.

Professor Taylor was a polymath; starting as a mathematician, he also worked in the fields of theoretical physics, neural networks, and artificial intelligence. As such, he was better qualified than most to attempt to answer some of science's biggest questions: how did the Universe begin, why is there something rather than nothing, why should there be a particular theory of everything, and how can we explain consciousness? That was the ambitious aim of this little book, and he makes a decent stab at coming up with some answers given the state of knowledge about cosmology and consciousness more than thirty years ago (and the thalamic reticular nucleus or TRN is still the focus of much research on consciousness today).

However, the book has its problems. With the range of subject matter being addressed you'd think that it would be a fascinating read, but large swathes of the book are, quite frankly, really dull. It reads like it's a transcript of a talk given by the most tedious of university lecturers to a half-empty theatre on a wet Thursday morning. Paragraphs begin with phrases like "Let us investigate..." and "We have now shown that..." The ideas being presented aren't structured particularly clearly and there is precious little insight to be gained from the author's own work apart from a very brief chapter near the end of the book on the nature of consciousness. Here, Professor Taylor's fascination with and enthusiasm for the subject he's writing about is finally let out to play and the book finally comes alive. It's a pity that this energy isn't sustained for very long. Soon we're back to slabs of text that begin with "Consider the following events..." once again.

It's an interesting book, but it could have been so much better than the one we've ended up with.

Published by: Angry Robot, 2024

I didn't know anything about this book before I started reading it, but I've enjoyed reading several of Jeff Noon's earlier novels (starting with the Arthur C Clarke award-winning Vurt) so I suspected I was going to be in for a wild ride through unfamiliar, increasingly weird territory and that very much turned out to be the case.

This is one of the finest modern works of science fiction I've read in a long time. Gogmagog has a timeless, hallucinogenic quality to it that strongly reminded me of the work of Mervyn Peake (the "File under:" tags that the publisher has added on the back cover confirm I'm not the only one that's occurred to) and that is a Very Good Thing. I'm not going to describe the plot. Try to read it spoiler-free, like I did, because the experience of each "Wait, what?" moment (and there are plenty of them) is all the more delicious when you have no idea where things are going.

It's only half the story; while the crew and passengers of the steam launch Juniper might have reached their destination at the end of this book, their adventures very definitely have not concluded, and I'm clearly going to have to read this year's sequel Ludluda as soon as I can get my hands on a copy.

Published by: Torva, 2024

Chris is an astrophysicist by trade. As well as presenting the BBC's The Sky At Night programme he's the thirty-ninth Gresham Professor of Astronomy at Oxford University, and an accomplished science communicator. Full disclosure: he's also a friend of a friend. On page 174 there's a typo, as Chris asserts in one of many footnotes that the Voyager space probe carries a map showing Earth's location relative to the positions of fifteen pulsars, each identified by their frequencies. The map actually shows fourteen pulsars; Chris very kindly corrected my copy by hand. I'm sure he'll get round to yours eventually.

This book gives the scientific background on several fascinating discoveries in the fields of astronomy and cosmology over the past century or so, from the development of radio astronomy and the discovery of the cosmic microwave background by Penzias and Wilson (which earned them a Nobel Prize) and that of pulsars by Chris's Oxford colleague Dame Jocelyn Bell-Burnell (which should have earned her a Nobel Prize as well, but—scandalously, in my opinion—the Nobel committee awarded it to her boss instead, because he was a man and she wasn't) to the recent discovery of the biomarker phosphine (as Chris points out, the main source of phosphine here on Earth is penguin guano) in the atmosphere of Venus by a team led by Jane Greaves from Cardiff University. There are tales of weird visitors to our solar system from the Universe beyond, musings on the potential for life to exist deep beneath the ice of one of Saturn's moons, the history of the Hubble Space Telescope and its successors, and the science of asteroids and gravitational waves. There are many footnotes and humorous asides (Chris makes a strong case for getting rid of the Moon because of how much of an inconvenience it is for astronomers. All that shining, and getting in the way. Who needs it?) and Chris's enthusiasm for his subject matter is infectious. The book is a delight from start to finish.

Published by: Penguin, 2019

I've been reading every book by Lee Smolin that I could lay my hands on over the past couple of years, and this is his most recent. It's an examination of the schism in physics between the predominant school of thought (initiated by Nils Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger et al. back in the 1920s) known as anti-realism, which posits that physics (and the rest of the Universe) can only make sense when someone observes it and even when they do, they can at best only ever know half of what there is to know about a given system and the fundamental particles that it is made of at any moment; and realism, the school of thought which was adhered to by Albert Einstein, Louis de Broglie, and others which asserts that there is a physical world which objectively exists independently of attempts by people to measure or quantify it (in effect, they believe that reality is something that doesn't go away when you stop looking at it). And if that summary of what physicists disagree about has broken your brain, wait until you read the rest of the book.

Welcome to the world of quantum mechanics. This is a book that unpacks the implications of collapsing wave functions, non-locality (where the effects of a measurement can propagate faster than the speed of light, which breaks relativity and which Einstein famously described scornfully as "spooky action at a distance") and the idea that reality somehow has limitations baked in to it about the amount of information it is possible for an omniscient being like Pierre-Simon Laplace's hypothetical Demon to know, making it impossible to ever predict the future down to the smallest, perfect detail. And then it describes how the attempts of such luminaries as dear old Albert to come up with an alternative way of thinking were—shockingly—ignored and then abandoned for the best part of half a century.

It's an extremely chewy, complicated read. By the end of it you may be wondering what sort of a universe you are actually living in and whether any of it actually makes any sense at all. I know that feeling, believe me; I'd much prefer the realists to be right.

Professor Smolin concludes the book with a discussion of his own ideas about ways in which physics could be unified in a way which would make realists happy. I was shocked to realise that quite a lot of what is being suggested about how "events" need to "learn" how they are likely to turn out on average resonates (aha!) strongly with Rupert Sheldrake's observations made in presenting his theory of morphic fields that I found so annoying last year.

I didn't see that one coming. This is a dense, fascinating book.

Published by: Tor, 2022

I was sad to hear of the demise of the writing challenge NaNoWriMo back in April because I've enjoyed more than one book which owed its existence to the challenge and to the wildly enthusiastic writing community that its website had accumulated over the years. Travis Baldree's Legends and Lattés is the latest of those works.

It's a fantasy novel in which the protagonist (an orc called Viv) steps away from her years of adventuring and decides instead to open a coffee shop. Now, that's a life goal worth pursuing. As the cover points out, the stakes are low (the chances of violent death are rather lower in the retail beverage sector) but Baldree spins a nicely inventive yarn that deftly incorporates my caffeinated beverage of choice into a setting populated by characters that are normally found in a Dungeonmaster's handbook. There are some nice gags where the real world practice of the barista's art is subtly skewed but instantly recognisable. Everything progresses neatly (perhaps a shade too neatly for some tastes) and even though it's not in the same genre, the overall vibe reminded me above all else of the lovely Wayfarers series of books by Becky Chambers, and if you're looking for comparisons to make, that's one of the better ones. You might even pick up some ideas for improving your own coffee-making skills; I did!

It's a pleasant, low stress, comfort read that kept me happily turning the pages until I'd got to the end (where there are a number of extras, including a recipe for the "Thimblets" biscotti that the heroine's customers find so irresistible). Very entertaining.

Published by: Panther, 1977

It's impossible to avoid getting nostalgic reading these books. Not just because my copies are from a time when a paperback could provide hours of daring adventure and thought-provoking wonder for an outlay of just 50p; the covers, adorned by Chris Foss's magnificent triptych of spaceships, were enough to kick my imagination into overdrive before I'd even read a single word of the text. Once I discovered that the three covers all fitted together I got a little bit obsessed with them, poring over the finer details and I soon found the trademark "F" in a shield which Mr Foss used instead of a signature. Although the covers which he had produced for E. E. "Doc" Smith's classic Lensman series of space operas will always have a special place in my heart as the first pieces of his work that I ever encountered (and that back when paperbacks cost just thirty-five pence!) I never felt the need to draw my own version of any of those images with coloured pencils so I could stick the picture on my wall—as a teenager I couldn't afford an airbrush like my hero used—but that's just what I did with the covers of the Foundation trilogy.

But that nostalgia is coupled with embarrassment at how much simpler and far less nuanced my understanding of the world was back then. I already mentioned the chauvinistic mindset that pervades the other two books; at the time I first read them, that was pretty much how men thought and I can still remember my teenage self being extremely disappointed to find out that the principal protagonist of the final book in the trilogy was a fourteen-year-old girl. Reading the novel again now, I'm struck by how much Asimov's writing improves when he writes from her perspective. It's not perfect, and he can't resist milking things for comedic effect to begin with, but he soon makes clear that this is the character with whom his sympathies align most strongly. This is particularly surprising given that his own daughter wasn't even born when the novel was published. Yes, the tone of the book is still deeply rooted in 1950s culture (characters really did call each other "old man" in their conversations back then) but young Arkady clearly is having none of it.

Good for her!

As with the previous book, it's been assembled from two of Asimov's existing novellas. When the book opens, the character of the Mule is still with us, but the "cliffhanger" from Foundation and Empire is dealt with (to the Mule's satisfaction, if not ours) and he plays no further part in the plot. The second novella concerns the First Foundation's rather more scientific investigations into what the mysterious Second Foundation might actually be up to. This is where the trilogy finally lands on its feet. The plot is soon off and running with twists, double- and triple-agents, and misdirections aplenty. There's even a space battle and wonder of wonders, we're there when it happens rather than have someone tell us about it afterwards! It's all great fun.

So I feel no need to go and spoil things by picking up Foundation's Edge. It's time for something else.

Published by: Panther, 1977

After reading the first volume of Asimov's Foundation series once again I decided this week that I might as well carry on and read the other two parts of the original trilogy (while the series started out as a trilogy, Asimov caught financially incentivised sequelitis in the 1980s and ended up writing another four novels which actually explain most of the diversions that the television series is making from the original text). As I mentioned below, the other works after the trilogy are noticeably inferior (contemporary reviews tended to use words like "turgid") and at the moment I have no plans to read any of them again.

Foundation and Empire is split into two parts. In the first, the Foundation encounters the remnants of the Empire some three hundred years after the events of the first novel. The galaxy has yet to descend into the complete barbarism that was predicted by the psycho-historian Hari Seldon but the Empire seems to have somehow entirely forgotten about the Foundation or why it was created. Suspicious, eh? The threat the Foundation faces is that of a competent strategist, General Bel Riose. In response, Ducem Barr and Lathan Devers attempt to divert Riose's attentions away from the Foundation but fail; the Foundation prevails anyway because (the agents are subsequently told by their superiors) the power relationship between a strong general like Riose and a weak emperor always ends like this. This understandably leaves the reader wondering why the Foundation, knowing this, bothered wasting any resources on the "threat" at all (and, indeed, why the author felt he needed to bother the reader with it, either).

In the second part of the book, we are introduced to the character with the silliest name Asimov ever came up with (and believe me, Asimov came up with some grimace-inducing names over the years), one Magnifico Giganticus. When we first meet him, we are told he is jester and bard in the court of a more significant threat to the Foundation, a character known as The Mule. The Mule is a threat because he's a wild card that the Foundation was unable to predict. This, various characters muse, is because of his genetic makeup; they don't consider The Mule to be a human being at all but a "mutant" even though Asimov points out (using one of the Foundation's scientists for his authorial voice) that mutations are commonplace events; that many humans are mutants; and that mutations are more likely to kill their recipient than give them an evolutionary or sociological advantage—which kinda undermines most of the dramatic foundations (aha!) of the story.

But the Mule has been born with a superpower, and as the book continues we gradually figure out what it is, what's going on, and why the First Foundation—including its headquarters on Terminus—falls under his control just as easily as what's left of the Empire does. How all this comes about is left as an exercise for the reader's imagination rather than the author's. Both civilizations succumb entirely off camera.

Once again, the book's values and social mores are as deeply rooted in the early 1950s as its technology. Characters react to the behaviour of the book's female protagonist Bayta Darell with shock because she carries herself "as the equal of a man." Their guns and waste-paper baskets might be atomic-powered but the book's dramatis personae get their news from newspapers and reels of film. A lack of any decent information technology becomes an excuse for bad writing; Asimov is much too fond of using it as a quick way to get the reader back up to speed without bothering to figure out the details ("Oh hey, while you were jumping through hyperspace all this cool stuff happened") and oh boy, the telling, not showing really grates after the first dozen times it happens.

The book ends on a cliffhanger, of a sort; Asimov significantly builds up the importance of the Second Foundation in seeing Seldon's plan to its successful completion throughout the book but we're left none the wiser as to how they'll manage to do so, or even where they are (even if one character has figured most of it out by the end of the final chapter). That'll be why the final volume of the original trilogy is called Second Foundation, then...

Published by: Tor, 2017

Given that the first episode of Apple TV's adaptation of the first Murderbot novella arrives in a couple of weeks, I couldn't resist going back and reading it again. The casting for the show looks to be ridiculously good and as I read the book yesterday I found I was already imagining Ratthi's dialogue being spoken by Akshay Khanna, Gurathin's by David Dastmalchian, and Doctor Mensah's by Noma Dumezweni. I was absolutely imagining Alexander Skarsgård speaking the narration, too.

In times that are as grindingly stressful as these I derive a lot of comfort from reading stories which I know will turn out fine in the end. Perhaps this is why I have been relating so strongly to the way that the eponymous SecUnit gets their happiness from watching episodes of The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon, particularly now that I know the show-within-a-show stars John Cho and the always-reliable Clark Gregg. Returning to familiar characters for a few hours yesterday and being able to track Murderbot as they identify the traits and quirks of each character's personality as they grow to know them was a delight.

The way that Murderbot goes offline for the story's dramatic conclusion still bugs me. But the way that it's placed in a situation where it's smarter and faster and generally more competent than anyone else but still finds it impossible to stop them all doing really stupid things kinda resonates strongly these days, and resonates hard.

Published by: Panther, 1977

I've been enjoying Apple TV's adaptation of Isaac Asimov's classic work but after watching yet another set of very dramatic explosions in one episode, I knew I had to go back and read the original novel to see if my memory was playing tricks on me, because all sorts of things like that happen that I didn't remember being in the book at all. And I'm not complaining about the gender-swapping of several key characters here; that didn't bother me at all. In fact I see it as a distinct improvement on Asimov's writing, which often reads as if everyone concerned was a member of some stuffy old Galactic gentleman's club (and another thing that will slap you in the face almost immediately when you start reading the book is just how popular cigars and cigarettes will still evidently be, some forty thousand years into the future).

The good news was that it wasn't my memory at fault. The TV show plays the long game, incorporating plot elements, characters, and retcons from the somewhat inferior sequels and prequels Asimov subsequently wrote in the 1980s (and the show's screenwriters added a few inventions of their own, of course). It bears little resemblance to the 1951 text. In the novel (my copy has the classic cover by Chris Foss) you won't find the Galactic Empire's rulers being a triumvirate of clones of the original Emperor Cleon; you won't find Gaal Dornick and Salvor Hardin teaming up as contemporaries; Gaal doesn't have clairvoyant superpowers; Trantor doesn't have a space elevator, so it doesn't get destroyed in a 9/11-style terrorist attack (the whole Anacreon/Smyrnian conflict is remarkably civilised); and Hari Seldon quietly shuffles off his mortal coil off camera, without the need for any other character to stab him in the chest.

I was surprised how much of the dialogue has survived, though sadly this isn't a good thing. Asimov was a prolific writer, and as a polymath of the first order he could write convincingly about all sorts of sciences and technologies (or at least he'd be able to crib something together from someone else's work, even if he was extremely lax about attributions). But good lord, characters make speeches that creak and groan with pomposity and they read exactly as you'd expect for something that was written at the beginning of the 1950s by a white college professor. Women (or as the author describes them rather more frequently, "girls") appear from time to time mostly so that they can gasp in appreciation at the fancy atomic-powered jewellery bestowed upon them by their menfolk, and that's about it for people who aren't male (and although it's never specified, the men are almost certainly all WASPs and resolutely straight) so if the writers of the show want to change things up, by all means let them; the attitudes expressed here are frequently in dire need of modernisation.

But like Heinlein, Asimov could always be relied upon to crank out an entertainingly hokey aphorism that can catch the reader's attention. Hardin's axiom still rings true: violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.

Published by: Bloomsbury, 2015

"I suffered for my music. Now it's your turn."
Neil Innes

I'm going to put my hand up straight away and say I've never been one for reading books that frame their content as some variation upon the theme of "How to unlock your hidden creative talent." You may have read my review of Rick Rubin's book on the same subject last year and if you did, you probably remember just how much I struggled with the twee spiritualism and his pompous appropriation of Chinese, Indian, and Japanese philosophy. But several of my fellow FAWM adventurers name-checked Ms Gilbert in our Slack conversations during February this year in glowing terms, and they made me curious. So I watched her TED talk about creativity (and let's face it, any video with a cracking ancedote about Tom Waits is going to be worth your time watching) and liked her approach to the subject enough to want to find out more, so I ordered a copy of Big Magic.

Bits of the book are indeed twee; I can understand how tempting it must be to link creativity with spirituality even though I don't hold that point of view and never have done. For personal reasons which I'm not prepared to go into here, I had a viscerally negative reaction to her discussion of suicide and in particular the repeated use of the word "commit" in that context. I found it to be deeply abhorrent. Some of the science is wonky, and I'm not sure that the examination of the mental state that the psychologist Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi called "flow" (and you can find out all about that in one of my all time favourite TED Talks) gets anywhere near to the reality of what's going on. And after a while the writing style, which splits everything up into small, easily digestible chunks with chapters that seldom last beyond four pages, made me realise that this is a book that was primarily written for people who don't read a lot of books.

But the author's central thesis, that habitually framing the creative soul as tortured artist is wrong; that great art does not solely arise from great suffering, is a significant one. I've thought for many years that making art is the most important way that is open to us in which we can interact with the universe and I also strongly believe that this is a two-way process; when we engage our creative faculties in whatever way we have discovered works for us, the universe notices. If we're really lucky, it might even give us an occasional nod of encouragement. Forget fame or fortune; those are trivial things in comparison to having the whole of creation somehow pay attention to your efforts.

Ms Gilbert promotes the way of the Trickster rather than that of the martyr, of doing the work while acknowledging that you're playing a game with the rest of eternity—and as someone who I'm pretty sure has read more about the Trickster legend than most, I heartily and totally endorse this approach. It's a freeing and inspiring mindset. This book suggests that the best way to approach creativity is with curiosity and a sense of play. If you work in this way, Ms Gilbert writes, it may result in the universe reacting with, "Oh, you liked that, did you? Well, how about this, then?"

Believe me, it happens. I've experienced it myself. More than once.

Published by: Borzoi, 1999

This is another collection of Hammett's short stories, and it's a far more discerning selection than the Must Have Books one I reviewed earlier. For a start, the title story is a doozy, reading like a try-out of many of the plot elements that Hammett later used in Red Harvest. Oh man, this guy could do bleak better than anyone.

There are tales featuring Red Harvest's Continental Op, some where the protagonist is Sam Spade of The Maltese Falcon fame, and even a couple of stories featuring a Thin Man (although Nick Charles is absent, as is Nora). Although the fare is mostly that of the hard-boiled detective variety, there's also a cowboy tale and My Brother's Keeper (which I'd argue is the weakest story in the book, just as it was in the Must Have Books anthology) is the account of a regretful, none-too-bright boxer looking back on the events that led up to his brother's death.

By the time The Thin Man movies became a roaring success, Hammett no longer believed in the private detective as a means of doing good in the world. In Hammett's screenplays, Nick Charles maintains that he has retired from the detective game, even as he's dragged back to solve one more case—and then another, and another; Hollywood loved milking a franchise as much as it could, even back then. Hammett makes no attempt at all to hide the metatextual commentary on his own career which was drawing to a close, much too soon.

Hammett was at his best when he was writing about protagonists who are trying to stem a rising tide of corruption and grift during the time of the Great Depression, but that's getting a bit too on the nose to make it comfortable reading material right now. I think I've satisfied my need for detective fiction for the time being, so it's time to look for something a bit more optimistic, positive, and inspiring.

Published by: Everyman's Library, 2000

Hard-boiled, nihilistic private detectives don't come any more brutal than Hammett's nameless "Continental Op" (so called because he's an operative of the Continental Detective Agency, based in San Francisco). On an alignment chart, I'd place him as chaotic evil; he has no reluctance whatsoever to lie, finagle and cheat everyone that he encounters in order to achieve his objectives. That's exactly what he does here.

When it comes to the authorial adage that you should write what you know, Hammett's grab bag of life experiences was scarier than most. In Red Harvest he uses the very worst of them.

The novel is based on something which happened to Hammett while he was working as a strikebreaker for the Pinkerton Detective Agency in the mining town of Butte, Montana. According to the writer, he had been offered five thousand dollars to assassinate a political activist called Frank Little and had refused, but Little was subsequently lynched by a gang of unknown assailants who were never caught. The unrest which followed culminated three years later in the Anaconda Road massacre. The experience radically changed Hammett's opinion of society, and not for the better.

It takes almost no time at all for the Continental Op to discover that the mining town of Personville—which every character throughout the book refers to as "Poisonville"—is a reeking cesspit of corruption, grift, and double-dealing. The writing is angry and utterly cynical; there aren't any good guys in Red Harvest. Hammett sets the scene with cynicism, disgust, and contempt and then puts a match to it. It doesn't take much imagination to find yourself thinking that this is how he would have liked to resolve the real-life situation he found himself in. The Op's fundamental methodology in sorting out the mess is to act as a literal agent of chaos and he methodically sets out to make things even worse. The mayhem starts fairly small but as it escalates and the bodies pile up (and at one point when the Op stops to count the death toll, well before the start of the final act, he gets well into double figures) you begin to realise that Hammett is not going to ease up. He has a point to make, and he's not messing about.

By the end of the tale, even the Op has had enough. But catharsis has been achieved, and (and you can't really class this as a spoiler, because it's the standard outcome for the genre) seeing the bad guys get their just desserts with their enterprises left in smoking ruins is always satisfying. What a pity real life isn't so neat and tidy.

Published by: The Mysterious Press, 2012

This book was the first time that Hammett's original outlines (it would be unfair to call them screenplays) for After The Thin Man and Another Thin Man—the second and third of MGM's Thin Man films starring William Powell and Myrna Loy—had ever been published in print. But the writing doesn't read like Hammett, and neither outline is counted in his bibliography as one of his original works. That's because (as was the norm for Hollywood then as now) Hammett's initial drafts were further developed by two of the studio's professional screenwriters: the married couple of Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich. They toned things down to meet the draconian whims of Joseph L. Breen, who was the head of the Production Code Administration as well as (it would appear) an uptight, humourless prude. The amount of fun that Nick and Nora were allowed to have was duly rationed out in miserly doses.

There's not much fun for the reader either, because the text here lacks Hammett's authorial tone. It contains lots of stage directions, lumpen, plodding descriptions of each new character as they are introduced, and even attempts to choreograph individual shots for the director. But what really sours the mood for me is that everything is written in the present tense. For example:

Phil tumbles backwards into the arms of Nick, who, with Nora, is coming up the stairs. Nick says: "Mmmm! Big confetti they throw here."

Ugh. The thing about writing like this is that it comes across as if it was written for children learning to read and that makes me think that the writing was quite deliberately being dumbed down in order to make it more accessible to its audience (which in this case was the producer Hunt Stromberg and various studio executives at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) who clearly didn't appreciate or even understand why other people considered Hammett's talent to be as extraordinary as it was.

Both films are clearly recognisable here, because these are the pages they sprang from. But a lot of the sparkle that Powell and Loy put back into the movies must have come from them because I can't see it on the page. And while the films make a decent job of the denouement in each case, it looks like the writers left much of that sort of stuff to the director, because things are surprisingly hand-wavy when it comes to explaining whodunnit.

This is one for Hammett completists only, I think.

Published by: Must Have Books, 2021

This collection of seven of Hammett's short stories, three of which feature the private detective Sam Spade, comes in a lightweight, poorly formatted print-on-demand edition that didn't cost me anything (it was part of another buy three, get the fourth free deals from World of Books) but I still feel like I got a bum deal.

The Spade stories (Too Many Have Lived, They Can Only Hang You Once, and A Man Called Spade) are middling affairs, and no more. "And other stories" can hide a multitude of sins and that's just what it does here. The remaining four stories fall disappointingly and resoundingly flat. Put the worst short story Raymond Chandler ever wrote up against any of them and it would blow Hammett's out of the water leaving nothing but a cloud of smoke and steam and a bunch of very surprised fish.

Very disappointing.

Published by: Everyman's Library, 2000

It's impossible not to think of Humphrey Bogart when you read dialogue written for Samuel Spade, the private investigator. Even more so than when you read dialogue that was written for Philip Marlowe, I suspect. Likewise, Joel Cairo will always sound like Peter Lorre in my head, and nobody but Sydney Greenstreet will ever be the scheming Mr Gutman. The film and novel of The Maltese Falcon are inextricably linked for me and I'm not alone, there: this is the case which made Sam Spade a household name. I've lost count of how many times I've watched the film but I've probably listened to Jon and Vangelis's 1981 tribute album The Friends of Mr Cairo more than twice as many times.

Again, there's a layer of ick going on under the surface, particularly in a scene after Spade has encountered Gutman's seventeen-year-old daughter who has been left, drugged up, terrified, and alone, in her father's hotel suite. Spade berates Gutman for putting the child in a situation where she's forced to stab herself with a pin in order to stay awake long enough to give Spade the message which tells him what he needs to know. He does so as lewdly as possible: "That daughter of yours has a nice belly," Spade leers at him. "Too nice to be scratched up with pins." It's a bizarre moment and as the girl only has dialogue in the one scene, it feels to me like Hammett started to write her out of the book completely but got sidetracked and forgot. She doesn't appear in the movie at all. However, there is also a theory kicking around online that for most of the book she's cross-dressing as the surly young thug, Wilmer Cook.

The Maltese Falcon is a remarkably plain story, when you set out the events from start to finish. What makes the book so special is the way that Hammett tells it. He knew before he started that he wanted to try something different, telling his publisher that he was working on an "experiment" a couple of years before its results saw the light of day. The book isn't told in the first-person format that had been the staple of detective fiction up to that point. Spade spends the first half of the book giving no outward sign that he has any idea about what's going on at all and Hammett never gives us a glimpse of what he might be thinking. Spade never shares any of his theories or insights with anyone else, and with no internal dialogue to go on we are left to make our own inferences from the clues Hammett drops such as when a turn of events prompts one of Spade's sardonic or savage grins (he does that a lot). We follow Spade around, metaphorically sitting on his shoulder as things happen to him and around him. When Spade talks on the phone, we don't even hear what the person at the other end of the line is telling him and if things happen elsewhere, we don't know about them until someone thinks to bring Spade up to speed. We're made to feel every bit as confused as he is; we're all constantly playing catch-up. And that is as thrilling a ride as you could wish for.

Published by: Everyman's Library, 2000

I only discovered the William Powell and Myrna Loy series of Thin Man movies a couple of years ago, but instantly became a huge fan and quite frankly nobody else will ever be able to replicate the magic that they created together as Nick and Nora Charles. As I appear to be on a detective fiction binge at the moment I decided it was about time I read the source material (Hammett is probably more famous for having written The Maltese Falcon and creating its protagonist, Sam Spade, and I have that book lined up next). But I was hearing Powell and Loy's voices speaking when I read any of Nick and Nora's dialogue in this book. I was imagining their apartment as I'd seen it in the movies and I was smiling as I visualised the antics of the movie version of their dog Asta when she appears on the page even though she's always a boy on the silver screen (ahh, the magic of moving pictures).

Nick and Nora's dialogue here doesn't quite have all the martini-driven zing of Powell and Loy's (a cop still sets up the film's most memorable gag after finding a concealed gun by asking them if they've heard of the Sullivan Act, but sadly Nora's punchline of "It's okay, we're married" is missing). Their banter isn't a million miles away, though. The way they regard each other with obvious affection means that much of the sparkle is already there and they are clearly Hammett's creations, fully formed. The same can be said of the plot; every beat of the first film is there on the page, and scene after scene plays out as it would a year later when Hollywood got in on the act.

Having read so much Chandler over the last few weeks, it's impossible not to see Hammett as a big influence on him. Both men wrote for the Black Mask magazine but Hammett had firmly established himself as a leading writer of detective fiction before Chandler got his first short story published (The Thin Man came out six years before The Big Sleep). The cloth that the dramatis personae are cut from in both men's work is immediately recognisable. This isn't true-life adventure in any shape or form. Everything in The Thin Man (particularly the consumption of truly heroic quantities of alcohol) is dialled up to eleven for dramatic and comedic effect much as Chandler does, and I have no doubt it was intended to shock the reader, too.

Because even if the work of Sigmund Freud and Carl Gustav Jung had seeped in to the public consciousness back when the novel was first published (the action takes place in New York over the Christmas holiday in 1932), Dorothy and Gilbert, the two children of missing scientist Clyde Wynant, both demonstrate eccentricities that must have raised eyebrows. For example, Gilbert tells Nick that he's been feeding his sister narcotics in order to find out if she will become addicted; she appears to have recognised what he was doing and evidently decided to play along with him. Later on, Gilbert mentions to Nick that he's thinking of moving to California to start a new life, and asks him if there's much incest out that way. But the way sensibilities have changed since then is probably best illustrated by the scene when Nick and Nora decide to put a distraught and very drunk Dorothy to bed in their apartment rather than sending her home to her mother (who is a murder suspect, and who we are told has just given her own daughter a savage beating). While Nick helps out I did not expect to read his careful appraisal of the "beautiful little body" of the unconscious twenty-year-old girl he has just helped his wife to undress. There's none of Philip Marlowe's Galahad-like wholesomeness on display here; instead it's more than a little icky. Somehow I can't see the Powell and Loy versions of the characters getting in to that sort of territory.

Hammett doesn't establish his settings anywhere near as vividly or flamboyantly as Chandler does. Nick Charles approaches the mystery in a much more straightforward, meat-and-potatoes sort of way. Like Marlowe, he's usually the smartest guy in the room, just as good at solving the cases he's presented with. But Nick is far more affluent, clearly operating with one foot on a much higher rung of society's ladder than Marlowe ever managed to reach. He has none of Marlowe's vulnerability, either physical or financial. He might not get sapped by a blackjack as often but he does get shot, and moves on with little more than a shrug. While he's not completely invulnerable, there's more than a whiff of privilege about him, particularly when it comes to the lifestyle he shares with his wealthy wife. Remember, the events in this book take place in the middle of the Great Depression. As a result the Charleses are often in danger of appearing more than a little bit smug and Nick is about as good at evading that particular problem as he is at dodging the occasional bullet. And Hammett knew it, later writing: "Maybe there are better writers in the world but nobody ever invented a more insufferably smug pair of characters." I don't care. They're still great fun, more than ninety years after they first appeared in print.

Published by: Penguin, 2000

Playback was Raymond Chandler's final novel, first published in 1958. He had suffered through a decade of declining health and died the following year. Throughout his career he had struggled with depression and this led to at least one attempt at suicide, in 1955. Knowing this, it's difficult not to see a growing sense of darkness in the book.

This is the seventh of the Philip Marlowe novels and it's noticeably shorter than its predecessors. There's far less of Marlowe's trademark wit and, frankly, the writing's not as good. There are only occasional flashes of the old gleeful cynicism, such as the moment at the beginning of chapter 2, when he first sets eyes on the woman he's been employed to follow as she gets off a train at the railway station:

There was nothing to it. The Super Chief was on time, as it almost always is, and the subject was as easy to spot as a kangaroo in a dinner jacket.

There are a few fiery passages on the theme of social injustice, mostly delivered by supporting characters. Most of the action takes place in a highly affluent town where the majority of the people who work there can't afford to live there. But Marlowe barely notices all this. He's tired and run-down and his world is painted in shades of grey that will be painfully familiar to anyone with experience of depression. The joy has gone out of the way he describes his progress through the plot and its inhabitants. He's done with getting angry, whether it's when a minor character ends up dead or when he meets someone for dinner and gets stuck with the bill.

Marlowe remains a sucker for lost causes, of course. He still gets bonked on the back of the head, because he's Marlowe. But this time he ends up in the town of Esmerelda (a fictionalised version of La Jolla, a town on the California coast just north of San Diego where Chandler lived for most of his last decade). This time the cops are unfailingly polite, firmly on the right side of the law, and barely involved in the proceedings at all. Even the house detectives at the hotels Marlowe visits are sources of support and exposition rather than conflict. I got the strong impression that Chandler didn't want to piss off the locals by showing the sort of corruption he was so fond of portraying in the "Bay City" of Marlowe's earlier adventures. So Esmerelda comes across as too nice and too up-market a place for someone like Marlowe. This weakens the stakes, too: more than one supporting character who would have come to a grisly end in earlier novels actually manages to survive—just—to the end of the book. But it's not just the setting that doesn't fit. This is a different Marlowe to the one we're used to. This one gets laid rather than just managing to steal the occasional kiss. The ludicrous ending, which features the return of a character from a completely different novel, feels bolted-on and just plain weird; it's like Chandler knew that he was done with Marlowe, and wanted to give the guy a final, lucky break.

And I say this even though I know Chandler had started work on an eighth Philip Marlowe novel. He died before he could finish writing it. It was eventually completed (as the result of a request by the Chandler estate) by Robert B. Parker and published as Poodle Springs in 1989 but at the moment I don't have the heart to track down a copy and read it. Instead, I'm going to try my luck reading some Dashiell Hammett...

Published by: Penguin, 2010

Raymond Chandler was an only child. The way that sibling relationships feature in his novels (it's the central pillar of the plot in The Big Sleep, for example) wasn't written from experience and they're never weirder than they get in The Little Sister. As a result the plot here (such as it is) is the wobbliest of any of the stories of his that I've read, and at this point I'm close to having read all of them; Chandler was not a prolific writer. Marlowe muses deeply on all sorts of psychological aspects of behaviour, not all of it convincing, and it felt like he was papering over the cracks of the construction. Even when he manages to pull together all of the narrative threads for the conclusion, the way he does it doesn't deliver the same satisfaction that his earlier novels do.

And that surprised me, because The Little Sister is what you might call "late" Chandler, first published in 1949. By this time Chandler had progressed from being Raymond Chandler the author of detective fiction into Raymond Chandler the very successful Hollywood screenwriter. Write what you know, the saying goes—so here Marlowe ends up on set in Hollywood, hanging out with faded leading actors and rising starlets. He knows to call the place where the magic happens a sound stage; he meets eccentric studio bosses and high-powered lawyers. It's not convincing; Marlowe feels profoundly out of place in such an environment. He's making twenty dollars a day when he's lucky (and he never is) so what the hell is he doing there?

He's still getting beaten up, of course. This time around it all feels somewhat gratuitous, particularly when the Bay City cop (yes, we end up back there again) punches him in the face during an interrogation even though we later find out that he knows full well that what Marlowe has just told him about the case he's working on was the truth. There are psychotic murderers, dodgy doctors, vamps and dames, and sad sack supporting characters who don't survive for more than a couple of chapters after they've been introduced. Chandler gives some of the antagonists names which seem improbable, if not just plain silly.

LA can still take Marlowe's breath away. But it feels like he's getting a bit tired of turning out memorable descriptions of his milieu and its inhabitants. The only bit of writing that really burns into the page is a speech late on in the book by a disgruntled cop complaining how hated the police have become, even as they try to fight the rising tide of corruption that is flooding the city. What would Chandler have made of the place today, I wonder?

Published by: Penguin, 2011

I am quite clearly hooked on Mr Chandler's work. And once I'd started reading this one, I didn't put it down until I'd finished it—even though I only read the short story of the same name last week so I knew (or at least, I thought I knew) how things would eventually pan out.

It's interesting to see where Chandler tweaked the original plot. In the short story, there's a whole subplot involving Nazis and counterfeit dollar bills which has been excised. This isn't much of a surprise, as by the time Chandler got around to rewriting the tale, America was at war and everybody knew the Nazis were the baddies. The cast of characters in the novel is smaller, which lets the story unfold faster. People's motivations are (eventually) clearer. The sense of place is always strong with Chandler's writing, but here it's been amped up even more than usual. And the author knows the way things need to go to bring us to the story's conclusion so he straightens out a few kinks in the tracks (but also adds a couple of new, unexpected curves).

Someone tells Marlowe in this one that he's a "soiled Galahad" and that's a perfect description of him. He's never going to end up with the girl, or live happily ever after; he'll never have even the remotest degree of financial security. He'll continue to operate in a permanent state of concussion from all the times he's knocked out with guns and blackjacks. He'll just about be able to hang on to his rented apartment and an increasingly decrepit two-room office in LA to work out of, and he'll keep drinking inordinate amounts of booze until his liver finally gives up the ghost (if he survives that long). He's never going to be anything other than a warrior poet and instrument of justice. He's a knight in armour that is probably well past its sell-by date. And he remains one of literature's most fascinating characters.

Published by: Penguin, 2011

This is the third full-length Philip Marlowe novel and once again it's been assembled from scenes Chandler had written for earlier short stories. By this point in his career he was really hitting his stride as a writer and the themes of corruption and of the ability of the ultra-rich to get away with just about anything they want are very much foregrounded.

Why am I such a fan of Chandler's work? Once again, let me give you an illustration. Two murders in to the plot, Marlowe receives a mysterious phone call which summons him to a gangster's nightclub. As he arrives, the bartender is being bawled out by an irate guest for mixing a drink incorrectly. Our hero watches what's going on with quiet amusement and when it's all over and the customer has stormed off, he approaches the bar...

"Your name?"
"Marlowe."
"Marlowe. Drink while waiting?"
"A dry martini will do."
"A martini. Dry, Veddy, veddy dry."
"Okay."
"Will you eat it with a spoon or a knife and fork?"
"Cut it in strips," I said. "I'll just nibble it."
"On your way to school," he said. "Should I put the olive in a bag for you?"
"Sock me on the nose with it," I said. "If it will make you feel any better."

There's an introduction to the novel by Mark Billingham in which he quotes an awestruck Billy Wilder (the film director, who was no slouch as a storyteller himself) reacting to Chandler's work:

"By God, a kind of lightning struck on every page."

He wasn't exaggerating.

Published by: Everyman's Library, 2002

This is a doorstop of a book that runs to a hefty 1,300 pages but I've breezed through it without any real effort because the writing is so good. It collects together every short story that Chandler wrote, and a lot of the early detective tales written for Black Mask magazine gathered here were stripped down, souped up, and then retooled to provide the plot for Chandler's classic novels featuring the private detective Philip Marlowe. As a result, I found myself getting a strong sense of dejá vu every hundred pages or so.

Marlowe makes more than one appearance here, of course. But he's also present in the form of his not-very-alter egos Mallory, Carmady, and John (or Johnny) Dalmas as well as the rather more effete Walter Gage. They're all interchangeable, of course; their job is to tell the story, meet dames, get beaten up, come out on top again because they're always the smartest guy in the room—but they never seem to make money in the process. They take such relish in telling us of their adventures that it really doesn't matter.

There are a couple of oddities which stand out; Chandler was scathing about science fiction (and only someone of Chandler's calibre could end up inventing an Internet search engine in the process of mocking the genre) but he wasn't averse to casting his net wider than the detective fiction that made his reputation. The Bronze Door and Professor Bingo's Snuff (which crop up late in the collection) are both tales with an uncanny twist to them and they're memorable ones. Just like every other story in the book.

Published by: Boxtree and Faber & Faber, 2013

I recently found this hardback, 30th anniversary copy in a local charity shop and despite the fact that I already have original paperback copies of both The Meaning Of Liff and the later, much expanded The Deeper Meaning Of Liff which I'd bought when they were first published, it's one of my favourite books and I couldn't resist grabbing it. This edition is a reprint of the "Deeper" version of the book, complete with a red sticker on the cover that proudly tells me that it is "New and unimproved."

It's always a delight to just dip in to and giggle as the authors take an obscure place name and press it into service as a descriptor for something "that there ought to be a word for." And so we get such gems as:

Nottage, n.

The collective name for things which you find a use for immediately after you've thrown them away.

For instance, your greenhouse has been cluttered up for years with a huge piece of cardboard and great fronds of gardening string. You at last decide to clear all this stuff out, and you burn it. Within twenty-four hours you will urgently need to wrap a large parcel, and suddenly remember that luckily in your greenhouse there is some cardb...

I think the closest town which was conscripted for use in the book is this one:

Yate, n.

Dishearteningly white piece of bread which sits lumpily in a pop-up toaster during a protracted throcking (q.v.) session.

Although the book can always be relied upon to cheer me up, John Lloyd's preface to the 2013 edition did bring a tear to my eye:

Douglas, I've made a few small changes to acknowledge the passing of the years. Hope you're alive and well in some parallel universe—you're sadly missed in this one.

I couldn't agree more.

Published by: Bramley Books, 1998

This is unquestionably the shoddiest, most hastily thrown-together heap of festering ineptitude I have come across in the six decades I've been reading about UFOs, and I've read a lot of stinkers in my time.

I could tell this was going to be a mess as soon as I spotted the tired old cliché of the "TOP SECRET" stamp on the front cover which had the "R" in "secret" backwards—hey, it's because it's supposed to be using the Cyrillic alphabet, geddit? Let's quietly ignore the fact that any genuine Russian speaker (which the author, who was born in Ukraine, undoubtedly is) knows that the letter "Я" is actually pronounced "ya" and just get on with it, shall we?

Even though I knew I was going to be wading through some truly execrable dross, the quality of the text was so bad it took my breath away. If this book was a Wikipedia page, there would be at least one <Citation Needed> flag in every paragraph. Each case is presented third-hand with the barest of details, only very occasional references to the sources used, and absolutely no useful context. Any reflection on a sighting's significance by the author reads as meaningless word salad:

"Officially, KGB researchers reported such objects as unknown space radiation with oscillatory mass, but unofficially they were thought to be something far more imposing."

Leaving aside the technobabble garbage (and it is garbage) for a moment, let's examine just what's being asserted here. "Thought?" By whom? Without citing a source, "unofficially" could refer to anyone from the Soviet Politburo to the author's cat. And just what were "they" thought to be? Why were "they" regarded as being "imposing?" What does "imposing?" even mean in this context? It's hard to believe that someone was actually paid real money to write this junk, but it would seem the budget didn't stretch to doing much by the way of research beyond reading magazines. We get a heavily embroidered, two-page spread describing the Dyatlov Pass Incident which includes a spurious claim that all of the bodies found had "an unnatural, orange colour" which I've never seen mentioned anywhere else. There's a discussion of the Petrazavodsk event that does at least mention the Kosmoss-955 rocket launch that is thought by aviation experts such as James Oberg to have been responsible, but then we veer off into weirder discursions about zones which immediately made me think of the Strugatskys' novel Roadside Picnic and Tarkovsky's classic film of it, Stalker rather than anything even remotely plausible.

Somewhat predictably, Stonehill starts leaning into the pseudoscience aspect of the phenomenon, and he leans hard; that's when the wheels really come off the rationality car and we end up reading about invaders from Mars. Nikola Tesla and Lev Termen (who was better known in the West as Leon Theremin) get cameos during discussions of captured alien technology, because of course they do; if the Americans were reverse-engineering weird stuff from recovered saucer wreckage, the Russians must have been doing it as well. Rational explanations aren't just thin on the ground, they're nowhere to be seen; Stonehill can't believe a clever human being could come up with new technology on their own and would much rather tell us a wingnut theory involving crashed flying saucers and technobabble that he's picked up from somewhere or other (don't expect sources), beginning each one with "some researchers think that..." Really? Who thought that? Why did they think it? What evidence led them to do so? Can it be corroborated? What does science say about it? If you've ever read the discussion pages on Wikipedia you know that the phrase "Some people think..." is shorthand for "This is what I personally believe based on no evidence whatsoever."

<Citation Needed>!

The majority of reports cited in the book are urban legends, hoaxes, or stories of events that happened to a Friend Of A Friend (which is why Fortean researchers refer to them as FOAF tales, and treat them with justifiable scepticism). As Dr David Clarke likes to point out, closer examination of most UFO evidence presented reveals that it's hearsay, on the same level—and about as plausible—as folklore, and that is the case throughout this book. So we are told that some soldiers were turned to stone after firing at a flying saucer; small boys disappear when a monster in a park points a magic wand at them (then reappear when the monster leaves); and space probes sent to Mars vanish mysteriously after getting zapped by UFOs (spoiler alert: the loss of the probes was actually caused by shoddy engineering and the Russians weren't the only ones at fault when it comes to messing up space programs hoping to investigate the Red (aha!) Planet).

Most of the "UFO" photos used here are of rocket launch plumes, lens flares caused by reflections of bright lights in the internal glass of the camera lens, or lenticular clouds. We're seldom told who took the photo, or where, or even what it's supposed to show (it doesn't help matters that the publishers are very keen on pictures of amorphous, fuzzy blobs). The lenticular cloud photo is not captioned at all when it first appears on the contents page, then it's described as a picture which was "sent anonymously" (of course it was) to a "leading researcher" (who?) that allegedly shows an "ominous looking craft" on page 53. No. Just... No.

Many of the other photographs in the book show lights in the sky that are clearly the aurora borealis, overexposed photos of street lights or the Moon, or just blurred snaps of fireworks going off. And if the picture researcher couldn't find a photo of the thing that was referred to in the text, no problem! Just caption any old flying saucer image with some guff like "the object in this picture looked very similar to..." You might get away with this once, but after the third time it happens it gets tiresome, particularly when you know the picture is a dodgy one. For example: on page 35, the photo used wasn't taken by a Russian at all, but by the American Daniel Fry following his notorious alleged close encounter in 1949 with the alien entity "A-Lan" (yes, really) at the White Sands Proving Ground in New Mexico—which is not in Russia. One photograph appears to show a hat that someone has just thrown in the air at a demonstration.

The designer wasn't averse to using photos from other hoaxes, either. Evidently resorting to fakery is no big deal in UFOlogy; just add a comment of "Although this was proved to be a fake, the existence of alien craft remains a very real threat" and Bob's your uncle! That particular gem can be found on page 65. Then check page 95 for a photo that was clearly taken in the tacky tourist trap we know and love as the International UFO Museum and Research Center in Roswell, New Mexico (still not in Russia, by the way) but which is captioned as a genuine photo from the aftermath of the alleged 1947 saucer crash itself—even though you can see the reflection of other museum exhibits reflected in the glass that the photo was taken through. Several images are used more than once, making me think that the graphic designer must have reached the point where they'd given up completely. I don't blame them.

This is garbage. It's laughably, embarrassingly bad. It's also a perfect example of why the field of UFOlogy is commonly regarded as junk science these days.

Published by: Penguin, 2000

Chandler wrote The Long Goodbye in 1953 and in a letter to a friend he described it as his best book. Once again, it features the private investigator Philip Marlowe who once again is drawn into a complicated plot involving several seemingly unconnected narrative threads which will, of course, turn out to be much more than they first appear. Marlowe is now in his forties, is still in love with Los Angeles and its architecture, but is still as unimpressed with the human condition as he ever was.

The novel has more autobiographical detail in it than any of Chandler's other work that I've read. There are frequent allusions to British mores and culture (Chandler grew up in London, gained British citizenship, and worked in the Admiralty for a year) to wartime trauma (he served in the Canadian Expeditionary Force in France during World War One) and there are several extended meditations on what it means to be both a writer and an alcoholic; The Long Goodbye is not a novel to treat as a drinking game. There's a profound darkness hanging over many of the book's principal characters—even the ones who somehow manage to survive to the end of the book (not all of them do; this is a Raymond Chandler novel, remember). And yet Chandler obviously had a lot of fun writing it. There's an air of relish in the way he presents Marlowe's thoroughly jaundiced view of the world and there are frequent moments which are laugh-out-loud funny.

In one scene, Marlowe is standing in the street talking to a shady contact by the name of Chick Agostino when

The door of a car banged open and a man about seven feet high and four feet wide jumped out of it, took one look at Agostino, then one long stride, and grabbed him by the throat with one hand.
"How many times I gotta tell you cheap hoods not to hang around where I eat?" he roared.
He shook Agostino against the wall. Chick crumpled up, coughing.

So far, it's all meat-and-potatoes gangsterism. But as Chandler is writing Marlowe here, we get this unexpected little exchange as dessert:

I watched Chick straighten himself out and regain some of his composure. "Who's your buddy?" I asked him.
"Big Willie Magoon," he said thickly. "A vice squad bimbo. He thinks he's tough."
"You mean he isn't sure?" I asked him politely.

If you're not at the point where you're telling yourself that you need to read some of this stuff for yourself by now, you have my sympathies.

Published by: Penguin, 2000

And so I head straight on to the second of Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe novels, Farewell, My Lovely. It was written in 1940 but the most famous film adaptation, which starred a much-too-old Robert Mitchum as Marlowe (Mitchum was 57 at the time; Marlowe is supposed to be 30-something) was a remake filmed in 1975. It's a long time since I watched it. I should really dig out my DVD copy and give it another spin.

At first glance, the plot appears to be going in multiple directions at once. That's because it is—Chandler assembled Farewell, My Lovely from three short stories he'd already written about a gangster looking for a former squeeze, a jewel theft mixed up with a blackmailer, and the hunt for a missing girl and her dog that ends up on a gambling boat anchored off the California coast (but not before the detective has been sapped with a blackjack and pumped full of narcotics that he spends almost a whole chapter shaking off). But the three threads are woven together with a slow and gentle inevitability that is so subtle you don't realise it's happening until our narrator remarks on things that happened dozens of chapters earlier and you realise that they weren't just Marlowe indulging his talent for vivid description but also him noticing a vital clue.

Chandler was an impeccable stylist and for Marlowe's return he turned things up to eleven. The opening paragraphs, which introduce us to a gigantic hoodlum by the name of Moose Malloy, have a better cold open than any drama series I've seen on television in the last twenty years. Marlowe's fatalistic, what-can-you-do approach to life is as evident as ever and Chandler's regular themes of corruption and social decay are all present and correct. The action takes place around a version of Los Angeles (and a thinly disguised Santa Monica) that Marlowe describes with such a keen eye for detail it's obvious that while he professes deep contempt for its inhabitants, he clearly loves the physical place and its architecture, both good and bad. His turn of phrase when he introduces each new member of the cast and sets the scene for us as they interact with Marlowe is a delight and you can't help but tag along for the ride. I could fill this review with one memorable line after another, but that would be unfair. You really need to read the book and encounter them for yourself in their natural habitat.

Published by: Penguin, 2000

After savouring the work of John Kennedy Toole, my appetite for more Michelin-star-quality writing kicked in strongly so I went back to an old favourite of mine: Raymond Chandler (1888–1959). And what else was I going to start with but The Big Sleep? It's probably the one book of his that pretty much everyone knows. He wrote it in 1939 but like most other people these days it was the 1946 movie starring Humphrey Bogart that was my first encounter with the tale. And what an encounter that is; if you've not seen the film, you need to do something about that, sharpish.

The hero (who became Bogart's most famous role) is Philip Marlowe, a private investigator based in Los Angeles. He's perceptive, smart, and clearly much too honourable for his own good to make a decent living at what he does. The book opens with him being called in by the elderly General Sternwood to investigate a blackmail plot involving the younger of the General's daughters, Carmen. But that's just the start of the proceedings. The cast of characters (all of them described in vivid, memorable, and perceptive detail by Chandler) expands rapidly; things take increasingly darker turns, the stakes get higher, and through it all Marlowe takes nobody's word for anything. He gets beaten up, shot at, threatened, choked into unconsciousness, shot at and threatened again, and then shot at even more and yet he maintains his sense of honour and chivalry to the last. We could do with a lot more people like Marlowe around these days.

Chandler's style is still influential today; there are whole passages in The Big Sleep that trigger memories of later books and more recent films and you realise how extensively other writers and film directors have borrowed from his work. Going right back to the unadulterated, unfiltered source material is an intoxicating experience. There's no doubt that I'm going to have to follow on by rereading the other Chandler books in my collection. They're addictive.

Published by: Penguin, 2016

Before I sat down to read A Confederacy of Dunces the only thing I knew about it was its title, which is taken from an epigram by Jonathan Swift. I didn't know its author had taken his own life after suffering from mental illness which was exacerbated by failing to find a willing publisher for the book. I didn't know that it was the author's mother who first recognised the value of the work or that it was she who was responsible for getting it published posthumously. I didn't know that it went on to win a Pulitzer Prize or that it was held in quite such high regard as it is. I didn't know that the central character of the book was based on a fellow Professor at the University of Southwestern Louisiana where the author worked for a year.

But now I do. And I keep asking myself how it has taken me so long to get round to reading one of the most monstrously funny classics of modern literature that I have ever encountered.

Ignatius J. Reilly is one of the most memorable fictional creations you are ever likely to encounter. All the way through the book, the reader follows his actions and inner dialogue with a sense of mounting horror and revulsion punctuated by repeated thoughts of "Oh no, he's not going to..." followed soon after by guffaws of laughter when of course that's exactly what he does do. The plot consists of a chain of events precipitated by Mr Reilly that start as merely improbable but which escalate with the addition of a menswear factory, an undercover cop, a hot dog stand, a cockatoo, and some wild parties. Somehow Toole brings the whole confection to its inevitable and satisfying conclusion with no apparent effort at all.

So much fun.

Published by: Yale University Press, 2006

I set about reading this, Thoreau's most famous work, because it is referred to several times in Anthony Storr's wonderful book, Solitude (Thoreau wrote an entire chapter on the subject in Walden). How disappointed I was to discover then that Thoreau only played with the notion; isolation for him was only tolerable provided that the comforts of modern living remained in comfortable striking distance (but preferably without having to put oneself out and interact with the people who were so kindly providing them for him). He was far too much of a snob to actually try leading a life in the genuine wilderness. The mythology, the fantasy of the idea was far more important to him than the practice.

His first chapter, Economy, shows him at his most fantastical, claiming to eschew the trappings of modern life because he finds them to be a distraction from his journey of self discovery and the construction of his personal myth. In doing so, he reveals a streak of narcissistic elitism that's a mile wide.

He rejects the idea of having a job as being beneath him, yet the way he maintained his existence relied on mooching off other people—he was effectively living for free on Ralph Waldo Emerson's land. Emerson even lent him the tools to clear an area of woodland there and build a shack for himself (and Thoreau makes a point of telling us that when he returned the axe he'd borrowed to cut down the trees that were his building materials, it was sharper than it was when he'd acquired it, because to him that's a more important point to focus on than who lent it to him—presumably Emerson—or their trust and generosity in doing so.) Despite bold claims of a life of ascetic solitude, it's been suggested that he would also walk to his mother's house several times a week where he would wait while she did his laundry and baked him cookies and this really upsets his hagiographers.

The fact that Thoreau was blind to his own privilege is difficult to deny, however. If he can live in so pleasant a manner, he reasons, then if anyone ends up unable to do so by virtue of being poor, it must have been their own fault for being part of the vast civilisation from which he believes he has distanced himself. He looks down his nose at such people with misanthropic, smug contempt.

He was puritanical to a fanatical degree. In the first chapter, we find him boldly asserting that all he would really need in life to get by is a roughly coffin-shaped box he could steal from the local rail yard and sleep in every night. After drilling breathing holes in it first, he assures us; although where the drill comes from is left as an exercise for the reader. He tells us that he never had the means to feed guests at the occasional gatherings which took place at Walden, because he had never bothered to prepare himself for entertaining company. He only had three chairs, so if more than a couple of people visited him they all had to be content with standing around outside. Thoreau even refused to equip his shack with anything so humbly self-indulgent as a doormat: "preferring to wipe my feet on the sod before my door. It is best to avoid the beginnings of evil." He regarded any day that was started with a cup of tea—or, worse, coffee— as "dashing the hopes of a morning" and quite frankly any man who thinks like that is clearly not to be trusted. Parties at Thoreau's place must have been an absolute riot.

While he denigrates modern society, technology, and regular employment he is quite happy to avail himself of their benefits. One moment we find him rejecting outright the utility of university education and fine literature; the next, he's extolling their virtues. He loves complaining about his alma mater but makes very sure we know where he was educated and he clearly took great delight in demonstrating what he thought of as erudition. But contributing to the production and maintenance of civilization, though? Ugh. That's beneath him. Let the plebs sort out the details, the financing, and the tedious requirements of keeping everything running. At one point in Walden, Thoreau even mentions how he had recently been jailed for refusing to pay taxes.

Even though he bitches about it, that Harvard education meant that he was unusually well-educated; Walden contains flashes of decent writing (there's an evocative chapter on sound, in particular). But too much of the book reads like the puerile efforts of an overindulged and grotesquely arrogant teenager suffering from a bit of schooling and a hefty dose of Dunning-Kruger syndrome. I've met people like this. The personality type is instantly recognisable and painfully familiar to me. How such a grandly self-obsessed, narcissistic asshole could become such a cornerstone of American culture speaks volumes about American culture. And nearly two centuries later, nothing has really changed in that regard, has it?

Published by: Prion, 2000

When I said William Zinsser had sent me scurrying back to my bookshelves to read White and Perelman again, this was the first book I alighted on. Sidney Joseph Perelman (1904–1979) was an American humorist and screenwriter (he won the Oscar in 1956 for Around the World in 80 Days and was also a writer on the Marx Brothers comedies Horse Feathers and Monkey Business) who was probably best known for the many articles he wrote for The New Yorker over the years.

This is a "greatest hits" collection of such pieces and even though some of the tales are now getting on for a hundred years old, they can still raise the occasional wry smile—but the multiple riffs on adverts he'd seen in other magazines, groan-inducing puns (particularly in his choice of names for the dramatis personae with which he populates his stories) and the general aura of misanthropy which pervades the book meant that it's taken me quite a while to get through it. It's a book of shaggy dog stories, told in as sour-faced a manner as it's possible to get and still be considered funny. At the time, at least—the laughs come much more slowly today. The choice of subject matter is, quite frankly, frequently lazy and more than once I was given the distinct impression that S. J. was just phoning it in.

Perelman hated the Marx Brothers and loathed Groucho in particular (they are not shown in a particularly flattering light in the one tale about Perelman's encounters with them that made its way into this collection). But they shouldn't be left feeling singled out; I get the impression that Perelman despised everybody in his world.

Published by: Harper Collins, 2006

More than one of my writer friends has recommended Zinsser's On Writing Well to me at some point, usually once they've seen the collection of similar works I've built up over the years: Williams's Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace; Hart's Rules; Strunk and White's classic The Elements of Style; and my favourite, Eric Partridge's English Usage and Abusage.

Zinsser's book has been in print for more than thirty years and has sold more than a million copies. The advice he offers is intended for the writer of non-fiction but while Zinsser taught the subject at Yale it's not pitched here at an academic level. Instead, this 30th anniversary edition has a new chapter on how to write family memoirs and another advising would-be authors not to write with specific publishing markets in mind. This suggests that the book is intended more for the amateur who tells himself or herself "I should get around to writing that book I've been thinking about..." more than once or twice a year.

It's also more American than the other books I mentioned above. Not a little bit American; it's emphatically American—even if the world-view presented is that of the folksy intellectual who has actually done some travelling abroad. The many references to baseball get tiring when you're neither a native or an aficionado. And when Zinsser gives a list of politicians who were talented speechwriters, only one of them—Churchill—was not a President of the United States.

But Zinsser knows good writing when he sees it. Quotations from works by E. B. White and S. J. Perelman had me scurrying back to my bookshelves so that I could enjoy more of their writing first-hand. This is a book that makes you aware of the craft involved in writing and perhaps in the process of doing so, it will encourage you to improve your own work. It had that effect on me, at least. All the same, Zinsser's own writing style left me feeling surprisingly flat. Perhaps I'm being unfair in trying to compare like for like, but he has none of the fizz or flair that Natalie Haynes demonstrates in such abundance (see below).

Published by: Self-published, 2018

This compact little book (my second-hand copy is a typically wonky Amazon print-on-demand job with inner margins that stray considerably away from the vertical) covers much of the same ground as Paul White's basic Mixing Techniques which I read last year, but with an important difference in that Mr Clarke actually knows what he's writing about.

Despite the very informal writing style, this isn't a book for beginners and a lot of items of studio equipment are mentioned without explanation of how they do what they do (so, for example, we're advised that the 21st reason that our mix might suck, "Excessive Vocal Sibilance" is usually fixed by using a de-esser plugin to tame the esses. This is the correct thing to do, but perhaps it would have been helpful for the author to explain that the basic approach of a de-esser is to apply compression to sounds just at the specific frequencies created when a singer says or sings something beginning with the letter S so that, if they're louder than the threshold which the plug-in deems acceptable, they will be made quieter, thus reducing the nasty hissing noise which would otherwise be heard in the mix without otherwise distorting the recorded sound.)

Some of the reasons and their proposed solutions feel like they're going to be rather out of the mix engineer's control. Not every engineer is a songwriter, but even if they were it seems unlikely that most bands would take particularly kindly to being told the mix sucks because of reason 37, "There's no hook!" by the guy they're (hopefully) paying to ride the faders...

Published by: Picador, 2024

I really enjoyed Natalie's Pandora's Jar (2020) and I've been lucky enough to see her talks at several Cosmic Shambles events over the past few years. In fact, I picked up this signed copy of Divine Might at the Nine Lessons show at Kings Place last December, where she entertained us with the tale of Aphrodite's pursuit of the mortal Anchises (that particular story features in this book, and you ought to go into it spoiler-free, because Natalie's rendition of it is hilarious so I'm not going to go into details).

The book casts a critical and extremely well-informed eye over the legends of Aphrodite as well as other goddesses from Greek history (so we meet Hera and Athene as well as the Muses and the Furies) examining them from a modern perspective and placing them in a context that takes in witty nods to everything from Father Ted to the Internet Movie Database. Look, any author who includes a nod to Ray Harryhausen is going to be very much in my wheelhouse. I was in nerd heaven, and found myself chuckling from start to finish.

When I wasn't gasping in outrage, that is; if reading about the woeful behaviour of the male gods of the time back then doesn't instil in you a strong desire to smash the Patriarchy, then you and I probably aren't going to be friends. This book is a treasure.

Published by: Hodder and Stoughton, 1986

I first read Lyall Watson's classic work about parapsychology and fringe science Supernature: A Natural History of the Supernatural when I was a teenager (and I still have the Coronet paperback I bought back then). I've collected a fair few books of his over the years, and when I saw this one in a charity shop and didn't recognise the title, I grabbed it—even though the cover has a nauseatingly twee painting on it which features a unicorn, butterflies, and what appears to be a badly rendered Star Trek villain (I think it's supposed to be an example of Boskop Man but he has been portrayed as a Caucasian male, which seems improbable, to say the least). I should have checked the contents page; as soon as I started reading it, I realised that I already had a copy. The book was reissued several years later as Dreams of Dragons. And the copy I already have of that book has a much better cover, with a dragon on it. Ah well.

But the improbable artwork is a useful metaphor for what's in the book. I loved Supernature when I was a teenager because Watson could spin an engaging tale, but now that I'm older I recognise his strong tendency to embellish and distort his accounts in order to make them more lyrical and satisfying (and hey, it totally worked on teenage me). The most polite way of describing many of the things that Watson writes about in this book would be to say that they are ignored by mainstream academics (explicitly so in the case of the aquatic ape theory or Rupert Sheldrake's formative causation theory, both of which get their own chapters). Other chapters seem to be at odds with current knowledge (such as Watson's bucolic description of Papua's Asmat people, for example; Watson might extol cannibalism as being an environmentally sound strategy in isolated, resource-poor communities, but he omits any mention of major drawbacks to the practice such as kuru, the prion disease which afflicts members of the Fore tribe on Papua to this day).

Watson was at his best when he toned down the pseudoscience and focused more on plausibility. The chapter that was subsequently chosen for the book's new title, about his encounters with the giant monitor lizards known as Komodo dragons, is proper boy's-own-adventure stuff (if rather grisly). Then again, I'd pick the account of such things by Sir David Attenborough over Watson's on any day of the week.

Published by: Headline Publishing Group, 2014

This is a history of the Large Hadron Collider up to the announcement of the discovery of the Higgs Boson in 2012 (and its immediate aftermath) which is written by someone who was deeply involved in what was going on. Professor Jon Butterworth is based at University College London but—as he describes in this fascinating account—he commutes to Geneva every week to work on leading-edge research into particle physics. Not just atoms, but all the less-familiar things which exist inside them—and which fly out of them, if you smash things in to them fast enough. At 27 km in diameter, the LHC is the largest experiment ever built on Earth in order to do just this (although out there in the rest of the universe, there are things going on at much higher energies, and particles from such events slam into Earth's atmosphere every day. Jon explains that this is one reason why physicists weren't worried that their machine was going to cause the end of the world when it was first powered up back in 2008). In this book, he gives his account of taking part in the search for the "massive scalar boson" that Peter Higgs realised should exist if the Brout-Englert-Higgs mechanism (which was first proposed back in 1964) actually existed.

As you might have already gathered, this history is described in a very nuts-and-bolts fashion and there are plenty of clear explanations of the science involved. It's also entertainingly funny (full disclosure: I've met Jon at science events organized by Robin Ince, and can confirm that he is like that in real life, too). He's also a passionate campaigner against government science funding cuts, and presents plenty of economic benefits which result from such seemingly exotic research. There's even an explanation of the deeper significance of CERN's adoption of the comic sans typeface in communications with the media several times during the course of the project.

The book expertly conveys the thrill of the chase as hints that the elusive particle actually existed became stronger and stronger. Jon also managed to make me understand a little bit about why the Higgs's existence is such a big deal for physics. It's a great read, and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Published by: Icon Books, 2012

Lacking in etymological fun but crammed full of bad dad jokes and casual racism. It might be cool for the Daily Mail crowd, but I'm out. I'll be dropping off all three of the books by Mr Forsyth which I bought recently at the local charity shop, soonest.

Published by: Icon Books, 2011

This is an amiable romp through the origins of some of the more eclectic words which have become part of the English language. In deciding which words are worthy of note, the author focuses on whether a word has a good story behind it or not and this serves him well for the most part—although I found myself thinking, "Well, maybe, but..." more than once, and that's not really a reaction you want to get from readers of your non-fiction book, even if it did get into the Christmas bestseller lists. I was disappointed to discover that Mr Forsyth skipped an opportunity to include one of my favourite anecdotes from the history of computing when he discusses the modern usage of the word bug (but as Mr Forsyth points out, the word was being used in that context back in the 19th Century, long before computers were invented).

My inner pedant was rubbing his hands with glee to learn that one does not keep to the "straight and narrow" but to the "strait and narrow" but that's about the only thing that has stuck in my memory, despite only finishing the book half an hour ago. Despite its title, the book is actually pretty thin when it comes to discussing the actual etymology of the words being discussed, which I found intensely frustrating.

And the structure of the book, where the author's final comment on each tale leads him on to the next word he wishes to examine, often feels painfully contrived. As a result, much of the book reads like a collection of segues from a not particularly funny stand-up comedian. It's an okay effort, but that's all. It would have been better to skip the lame jokes and just let the ludicrous histories of the words themselves get all the laughs.

Published by: PH Learning Co., 2023

This (self published) book is subtitled "Think, learn, and problem solve like a Nobel Prize-winning polymath" which is a bit strong, I reckon. We get to read a few pithy quotes from the great man and there are one or two entertaining anecdotes about Feynman's cognitive approach but the book is best described as a self-help manual for people wanting to develop their critical thinking skills. And it only does so at a very basic level. It's unlikely to teach you how to think or innovate like Feynman could. It omits several of the principal explanations that Feynman himself gave about the way he approached science (for example he once famously asked a biology class why they still bothered memorising the names of all the things inside an animal when someone else long ago had already produced, as Feynman put it, a "map of a cat"—thus demonstrating that for Feynman it was more important to be able to find something out when you needed to than it was to fill your head with a lot of information which you may never need to use again for the rest of your life). The author also recounts the beginning of Feynman's tale about noticing the Cornell crest rotating on a spinning plate thrown by someone in the cafeteria there one lunchtime, but he doesn't explain what was going on or that Feynman misremembered the ratios of wobble to rotation and then omits the punchline entirely: the chain of thought which led to the work which earned Feynman his Nobel Prize (Feynman describes this in his autobiography, Surely You're Joking, Mr Feynman?):

"I went on to work out equations of wobbles. Then I thought about how electron orbits start to move in relativity. Then there's the Dirac Equation in electrodynamics. And then quantum electrodynamics. And before I knew it (it was a very short time) I was "playing"—working, really—with the same old problem that I loved so much, that I had stopped working on when I went to Los Alamos: my thesis-type problems."

It's that ability to chain apparently unrelated concepts together like this which was one of Feynman's greatest gifts. While it's an ability that might be acquired through diligent practice, Feynman evidently had an innate aptitude for it. Similarly, being able to clearly visualise a problem and intuitively see what is going on is frequently cited by renowned scientists as the principal reason for their insights (such a list of innovators includes not just Feynman, but also Archimedes, Galileo, Newton, Faraday, Edison, Tesla, Kekule, Einstein, and Steven Hawking). The book doesn't explain how we might learn to do this beyond recommending that we "remember the value of play." Instead there's a discussion of data representation as taught by the great Edward Tufte which is a different kettle of fish altogether. And while chapter four of Hollis's book relates Feynman's own account of being able to solve problems because he had ended up with a "different set of tools" to those used by his peers (such as less-frequently-taught approaches to calculus) it's rather sketchy on how you or I might go about building up our own cognitive skill sets in this way. Instead, the book pivots to a description of Feynman's four-step learning technique, but the author can't even settle on what the four steps are.

Hollins also regularly veers off into the weeds. While he accurately observes that Feynman loved to communicate things in the simplest language he could manage, here we're lectured about what is clearly one of the author's pet peeves and in criticising the use of impenetrable jargon he takes several pages to cover the basics of The Sokal Affair. Aside from the quoted slabs of text being meaningless (after all, that was the point of the paper) the point is largely irrelevant. One might have taken the opportunity to examine why it is that scientific papers are so frequently written in deliberately obtuse language (and yes, I'm looking right at you, Thomas Kuhn) but this is not done.

The book's a nice idea, but quite honestly you'd get much more out of reading Feynman's own books on the matter, Surely You're Joking, Mr Feynman? and The Pleasure of Finding Things Out.

Published by: Arkana, 1989

This is the first of a loose trilogy of books which Koestler wrote about the development of human thought. It was followed by The Ghost in the Machine and The Act of Creation but somehow I ended up reading them in reverse order. The Sleepwalkers was first published in 1959, and rather like me (I came along the following year), it's beginning to show its age.

Koestler's main thesis (which gives the book its title) is that the originators of some of science's grandest leaps forward came up with their ideas, not as the result of blinding flashes of inspiration, but through a long and muddled process during which they often failed to recognise the most important aspects of their discoveries and operated for the most part in a kind of somnambulant stupor. Indeed, after the death of Aristotle, the idea of evidence-based thinking was replaced by philosophising based on dogma and it took more than two thousand years before anyone took any interest in figuring out how the cosmos might actually work again.

Koestler covers the evolution of cosmology from Aristotle and Plato by way of Copernicus, Tycho, Kepler, Galileo, and Newton and his research goes into forensic levels of detail. As a result, he explodes many of the myths which are still prevalent in popular culture sixty-five years later (Galileo never spent a single day in a prison cell as a result of his arguments with the Church, nor did he remark "Eppur si muove" at any point in response to his interrogators from the Inquisition). Kepler's achievements are extraordinary because the errors which he made miraculously cancelled each other out and led him to the right answers by a largely spurious path. Galileo didn't get round to making the leaps of thought that changed physics for ever until he was in his seventies. The book also shows how the Catholic Church cracked down on challenges to the scriptures even though their own scientists knew that the theories which they proclaimed in public to be heretical were in fact correct. One is left marvelling that any scientific progress at all ever happened back then.

It all goes to pieces in the epilogue, though. Koestler downplays the importance of relativity or quantum theory to a surprising degree. The observed expansion of the Universe (now known to be a result of the Big Bang) is alluded to in a single, dismissive sentence. The concepts of forces and fields are just as important in modern thought as Kepler's and Newton's laws, but they are sidelined here because Koestler sees them as labels for things which we don't understand, but instead just nod wisely when they're discussed as if giving a concept a name equates to understanding what it is. Koestler is most definitely not okay with anyone trying that. As an example of such vague or indeed circular definitions he gives us "magnets work because they're magnetic" and I can see his point, even though that's how most school physics textbooks summarise the subject. "And what about ESP?" he then asks us (parapsychology was a lifelong interest for him and his will included an endowment for a research chair at Edinburgh University to ensure that exploration of the subject continues to this day. Koestler died in 1983). I offer no judgment on that particular point, but instead observe that this book may be one of the first ever places where the popular culture myth that we only use a few per cent of the brain's capacity (which is, as I hope you already know, utter bollocks) appeared in print. But the foundations of both The Ghost in the Machine and The Act of Creation are visible in his closing arguments here.

Published by: Quercus Editions, 2020

This is a rather lovely collection of essays on different things that Bill recommends as sources of happiness. And you can't argue with his choices, although some of them (such as climbing an active volcano) may involve a bit more effort than just doing a spot of birdwatching or popping down the road for a stroll in your local park.

Again, this is a book which was written during lockdown in the initial stages of the Covid pandemic. As a result, there's a certain wistfulness in the descriptions of his more wide-ranging adventures in Colombia and Indonesia, for example. Going out for a walk for an hour or so was one of the few nice things that we were encouraged to do back then, and it's a habit that a lot of people have stuck with. "Will we ever return to normal?" Bill muses. Nearly five years later, Covid is still out there; trying to stay mentally and physically fit is just as much of a challenge.

Published by: Titan Books, 2023

Straight on to book #2 of Gareth's Continuance series. This one is set some fifty years after the events of the first, and features a whole new cast of characters. The ensemble he introduces here really let him stretch out as a writer, as he has created a wildly disparate bunch of protagonists from many different species with many different world views. There's a fun framing device which explains how the diegetic nature of the tale has been brought about; this seems to be a theme of the series, as much the same thing is done in Stars and Bones. In each case, it's done smoothly and plausibly without ever throwing the reader out of the action. Kudos, too, for the layered meanings of the novel's title. Nice!

And without spoiling things, I should say that I have always been a big fan of science fiction novels which involve a Big Dumb Object (BDO). In Descendant Machine we don't just get one BDO, but several of them, and not only are they all splendidly inventive pieces of technology, each of them turns out to be a satisfyingly important plot element.

I was a little let down by the ending. The unavoidable existential threat that our heroes are facing gets subtly retconned into an ever so slightly less dangerous thing that one of them can figure out how to fix, because of course they can. This sort of thing has been done far too often in recent episodes of Doctor Who, and it bugs the hell out of me. And here, the idea that the "solution" would not have been discovered by a galaxy full of beings who are SPOILER REDACTED felt wildly implausible, to put it mildly. But I enjoyed the book all the same, and I read the whole thing in a couple of sittings; that's always a sign that a tale is worth reading as far as I'm concerned. More please, Gareth!

Published by: Titan Books, 2022

This is the first in a new series of books that are collectively known as the Continuance; saying more would constitute a spoiler, I reckon, so I'm not going to discuss the central premise of the novel at all. But the book was written during the pandemic, and it's very much a product of its times. The spectre of contagion is an inescapable, powerful presence which grounds the otherworldly aspects of the fiction in an uncomfortably familiar, real-life context. The growing horror as the body count rises (and it rises a lot, in a style that reminds me strongly of The Expanse) is expertly conveyed.

There are a couple of plot holes that you could drive a starship through but the book's central themes of family bonds and parenthood are deftly worked in to the story and the resolution is unexpected and satisfying.