The Reading Roundup

It's been a while since I posted anything about what I've been reading so here is a slew of books I've finished in the last six months.

First up is Kraken by China Mieville. This one holds a special place in my heart for it was after attending a talk by the author that Salsa Girl and I commenced our grand experiment together.
The book itself is almost up to his usual standard although it does seem to be fascinated with the "weird in the modern world" idea which makes it interesting but not quite compelling.


My next read was Terry Pratchet's Reaper man. This crossed the returns desk at work and happened to be the one I was up to in his Discworld series so I snapped it up and put it on my to-read pile.
I enjoyed it heartily - my first Pratchet for years (which means I am falling further and further behind his output).


Following the fantasy hijinks I moved on to the first of the recommendations for my reading that I deigned to allow Salsa Girl to make - Illusions by Richard Bach. Much like his seagull book it is about the power of believing in oneself and one's ability to shape reality with one's own belief. This one, however takes it a bit further and a bit more literally with it's real-world, human based setting. All in all some nice ideas but hard to take the implication that they are real.


This next one show the danger of giving one's romantic interest carte blanche to select one's reading material, especially when combined with ones own compulsion to do things in the proper order. So because the strong recommendation was for the second in the Children of Earth series I had to start with the first volume - The Clan of the Cave Bear (AKA Ayla invents everything) by Jean M Auel. It is the tale of a young Cro-Magnon girl adopted by a tribe of Neanderthals and the troubles she has fitting with her different look, new ideas, and not knowing her place in The Clan
Anyway, I'll begrudgingly admit that it was a reasonable read although there was an annoying tendency to mix scientific narrator information with point of view type narration, a fictitious example: Ayla was wary as she entered the mountains because tectonic plate shifting caused regular earthquakes.


Which brings us to Prophet Margin by Simon Spurrier. I read this one thanks to Fantomas and his generous birthday voucher.
It is a novel based on characters from 2000AD - the same comic in which Judge Dredd features.
Reading this was akin to watching a car crash as the author appeared to be too embarrassed writing the story to take the characters seriously. I had no sense of the author even liking the characters as I read numerous blokey/schoolboy allusions to the sexual relationship of the two male main characters. Mix in a lot of juvenile "world comprised totally of space whale excrement" type settings, many clumsy attempts to write like Douglas Adams, and a seeming misunderstanding of the main characters motivations and you have a book that's a struggle for the first half and then begins to settle down and flow by the time it gets to it's final 50 pages or so. All the while never really feeling like the same setting as the original comics.
Thanks a lot Fantomas!!!
Not worth a read for anyone other than a big fan of the characters looking to be outraged - i.e. me.


After reading that last one I was glad to be diving into the second Clan of the Cave Bear novel next.
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