By Nic Lindh on Saturday, 27 December 2014
As you’d expect from an autobiography by John Cleese, So, Anyway… is smart, funny, and conversational. Fair warning, though, that it stops just as Monty Python are formed, so apart from allusions to Cleese and Terry Gilliam not being on the best of terms, to put it mildly, there’s little about that part of his life in here.
There’s plenty about his early life, strained relationship with his mom, and the escapades of his father, who clearly had an interesting time what with getting hurt in WWI then traveling around the waning Empire leading the life of a British gentleman before settling down in rural England to sell insurance.
One feeling I kept having when Cleese wrote about his college years and his start in comedy was how incredibly implausible it sounded. Not casting any aspersions on his truthfulness, but wow, the coincidences and lucky breaks are astonishing.
If you’re interested in Cleese himself or you’re a bit of an anglophile, So, Anyway… will do you solid.
A funny and smart mix of stories about Poehler’s life, advice, and general oddity. It’s a fast, easy read, though the name dropping gets a bit heavy at times.
Yes Please made me binge-watch Parks and Recreation, which was enjoyable.
One of the best new fantasy novels I’ve read in ages, The Mirror Empire does very interesting things with the tropes of the genre and is completely engrossing.
Be prepared to concentrate, though—the plot is intense and dense. You’ll be rewarded.
There’s a whole sub genre of urban fantasy that takes place in London and London Falling is the darkest take on the genre I’ve seen. It’s a bit hard to discuss the plot without spoiling it, but basically four hard-case police officers working on a case accidentally acquire what they call the Sight, enabling them to see the supernatural elements and beings that crowd around London, including and centrally to the story a very terrible witch.
London Falling admirably sticks to being a noir police procedural with the supernatural elements added on top, providing another level of menace and straight-up creepiness.
This is one of the most British books I’ve read when it comes to vocabulary, to the point where I had to concentrate to understand some passages, which added to the atmo.
It’s also the first in the Shadow Police series and frustratingly the only one. If you happen across this review, Mr. Cornell, please write as fast you can—can’t wait for the next installment!
Broken Homes is the fourth installment in the great Rivers of London series and you should absolutely not start here but at the beginning—the series is written with each novel having a stand-alone plot but there’s also an arch that gets more and more interesting as it goes on.
So Rivers of London is written like a TV series and rewards binge-reading. Which is great until you reach the end of the published novels and have to sit in a corner and wait for the next one to get your fix.
Rivers of London is part of the London urban fantasy genre, like London Falling, but takes a much lighter tone. Our protagonist, Peter Grant, is a police officer with the ability to see the supernatural elements of London and is apprenticed to a wizard police officer who runs a tiny department in the police force that deals with the “special” sorts of cases.
Broken Homes gets deeper into the mythology and has Grant figuring out what is going on with a London slum skyscraper. Hint: Bad things.
It moves the series along and there’s a huge twist at the end, but it’s not the best installment. Still, if you’ve gotten this far in the series, you’ll enjoy it and get excited for the next installment, which is January 6, 2015 according to Amazon.
Ellroy is back in LA in this first novel in a new series that takes place around the time of Pearl Harbor, before the events in the LA Quartet.
As you’d expect from Ellroy it’s super densely plotted and written and the most hard core of hard core noir. Soooo dark and depressing. And incredibly impressive both for its own sprawling plot and for all the recurring characters from the LA Quartet. (You don’t have to have read it to enjoy Perfidia, but if you have you’ll gasp in places as you get the back story of characters in those novels.)
If you’re an Ellroy fan, Perfidia is a given.
The Peripheral may very well be Gibson’s best work ever, which is high praise indeed. It gives us not one but two dystopian near-futures and is lathered with his polished, smooth prose. It’s impossible to talk about the plot without spoiling, so I’ll leave it alone except to say that it’s completely normal to start reading this novel and enjoying it while being utterly confused. Until that glorious moment when the plot clicks into focus.
Glorious.
After reading The Peripheral I decided to revisit Burning Chrome, Gibson’s classic short story collection. And even though some of the specifics of how cyberspace works and the prevalence of Japanese cyberdecks and conglomerates dates it pretty badly, they’re still beautiful vignettes, and since the technology was never really the thing, it’s still a great collection.
Since the last time more than 20 years ago I last read it, I’d forgotten how sad the stories are—regret is a constant theme.
Well worth a re-read or a first read if you’ve been living under a rock.
I was impressed enough with The Mirror Empire to pick up this omnibus of Hurley’s entire Bel Dame Apocrypha series, God’s War, Infidel, and Rapture.
Far-future sci-fi, the series takes place on a planet colonized mostly by Muslim nations. The terraforming didn’t go super well, and the nations have descended into a horrific never-ending war.
Our protagonist is a former Bel Dame, what government enforcers-slash-sheriffs are called and she is most emphatically not a nice human being. And neither is anybody else. The series is grim and grimy with a strong sense of noir.
With the general unpleasantness of everybody involved, it can be a bit of a slog, but Hurley’s world building is first-rate and full of interesting details like the use of insects as technology-analogs (a result of the terraforming not going well) and plenty of misandry (women run the planet and are just as bad at is as men).
The Bel Dame series is well worth checking out if you want a different flavor of sci-fi.
Includes Doppelgänger, Be Useful, Rose/House, System Collapse, and Empire of the Wolf.
Includes Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing, Extremely Online, Number Go Up, Mercury Rising, The End of the Myth, and The Big Break.
Includes Hello World, A Frozen Hell, Powers and Thrones, Dead Country, Blitz, The Hope that Kills, and Worth Killing For.
We pour one out for The Expanse and Sandman Slim, and we raise our glasses for a sequel to Malazan. Also, an extra-bleak Holocaust tour and a discussion of how cults control their members through language. Includes Cultish, Nein, Nein, Nein, Driven, Happy-go-Lucky, The Nineties, Fargo Rock City, The Scholast in the Low Water Kingdom, King Bullet, The God is Not Willing, and Leviathan Falls.
Why your body hurts, lots of politics, and some truly demented grimdark fantasy in this installment. Includes Reign of Terror, Evolution Gone Wrong, The Cruelty is the Point, How to be a Liberal, The Splendid and the Vile, Deep Work, A Desolation Called Peace, Black Stone Heart, and She Dreams in Blood.
Includes Everybody Has a Podcast (Except You), Pappyland, Backstory, and Medallion Status.
Some very good history, some very strange novels and some slick space opera. Includes Enemy of all Mankind, A Very Punchable Face, Confederates in the Attic,Ballistic Kiss, Harrow the Ninth, The Library at Mount Char, Children of Time, The Last Emperox, and Cage of Souls.
Back once again with the sci-fi and general calamity. Includes The End is Always Near, Eat the Apple, A Memory Called Empire,Gideon the Ninth, Infinite Detail, Permafrost, Fallen, and The October Man.
A sci-fi and fantasy heavy installment that includes The Valedictorian of Being Dead, The Mastermind, Broadsword Calling Danny Boy,Tiamat’s Wrath, The Raven Tower, The Liberation, The Light Brigade and Cryptonomicon.
Includes The Incomplete Book of Running, Aching God, The Murderbot Diaries, Lies Sleeping, The Consuming Fire, and Rendezvous with Rama.
Includes Hollywood Dead, Tales from the Loop, Things from the Flood, The Court of Broken Knives, and Port of Shadows.
Includes The Storm Before the Storm, White Trash, Calypso, Tell the Machine Goodnight, Prince of Fools, and Provenance.
Mostly excellent non-fiction in this installment. Includes Fantasyland, The Miracle of Dunkirk, Das Reich, The Undoing Project, Waiting for the Punch, Vacationland and Points of Impact.
Lots of sci-fi in this installment. Includes Retribution, Boomerang, The Collapsing Empire, All Systems Red, and Ninefox Gambit.
Includes a mea culpa, Hillbilly Elegy, Gulp, The Stars are Legion, and The Kill Society.
Lots of fiction series in this one. Includes Grunt, 1177 B.C., Louder Than Hell, Smarter Faster Better, The Hanging Tree, Death’s End, Chains of Command, and Who Killed Sherlock Holmes?.
This installment features grimdark fantasy, peppy astronauts and the Roman Empire. Includes SPQR, And On That Bombshell, The Code Book, Schiit Happened, Beyond Redemption, The Severed Streets, The Martian and Veiled.
Includes The Antidote, One Nation, Under Gods, Losing the Signal, The Todd Glass Situation, The Last Policeman, The Three-Body Problem, The Dark Forest, Beacon 23, Killing Pretty and Queen of Fire.
Lots of fantasy and sci-fi in this installment plus a book about sports! Includes Boy on Ice, Difficult Men, Restaurant Man, The Red Line, Cunning Plans, Seveneves, Nemesis Games, Bitter Seeds, The Mechanical, Angles of Attack, and City of Stairs.
Nic is sad about Terry Pratchett's passing. Includes No Land’s Man, Idiot America, Something Coming Through, The Burning Room, Foxglove Summer, and The Dark Defiles.
Lots of good reads in this installment. Includes All Hell Let Loose, Metallica: This Monster Lives, 10% Happier, Onward, Echopraxia, Cibola Burn, The Getaway God, Lock In, The Red: First Light, Terms of Enlistment, and Lines of Departure.
Solid reads abound in this installment of the roundup. Includes Console Wars, Your Inner Fish, Flash Boys, Digital Wars, The Perfect Storm, Tower Lord, By Blood We Live, I am Pilgrim and Lexicon.
Some great reads and a huge disappointment in this installment. Includes The Loudest Voice in the Room, Hatching Twitter, Dogfight, Ancillary Justice, KOP Killer, The Circle, Working God’s Mischief and Where Eagles Dare.
Some solid reading awaits you in this installment. Includes The Outpost, Masters of Doom, How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big, The Everything Store, Bomber Command, Gods of Guilt, and Low Town.
A slimmer-than-usual book roundup is heavy on the non-fiction, including several must-read titles.
Another book roundup, including some stellar athletes and soldiers, what might be the most jaded, soul-weary protagonist ever, and some grimdark fantasy.
Nic reads a book about the processed food industry and is incensed.
The Core Dump is back! Books were read during the hiatus. Includes The Coldest Winter, Oh, Myyy!, Tough Sh*t, The Revolution Was Televised, The Rook, Mr. Penumbra’s 24 Hour Bookstore, Gun Machine, Fortress Frontier, Standing in Another Man’s Grave, and The Memory of Light.
From a true patriot to a world-weary detective, a dead god, and a civilization about to sublime from the galaxy, this book roundup spans the gamut. Includes Where Men Win Glory, Wild, Inside the Box, The Black Box, Three Parts Dead, Red Country, and The Hydrogen Sonata.
From the heights of athletic excellence to the depths of depravity, this roundup includes The First 20 Minutes, Double Cross, The Heroin Diaries, Tattoos and Tequila, Dodger, Farthing, and Devil Said Bang.
Includes Wabi-Sabi, Making Things Happen, D-Day, Tallula Rising, Blood Song, The Americans and Amped. All in all, a happy romp through the meadows of literature.
Includes Search Inside Yourself, The Information Diet, Redshirts, The Gone-Away World, Wool, Leviathan Wakes, and Prince of Thorns. One of these may very well change your life.
Includes Shadow Ops: Control Point, The Night Circus, The Hunger Games, Quiet, The Science of Yoga, and Kitchen Confidential. Lots of good stuff in this one.
Includes Angelmaker, The Magicians, Magician King, Iron Council, Thinking, Fast and Slow, Distrust That Particular Flavor, and Talking to Girls About Duran Duran. One of these is the most important book of 2011.
Includes The Drop, Ready Player One, Moon Called, Among Others, Excession, Inferno, The Paleo Solution and I am Ozzy.
Includes Sandman Slim, Snuff, The Cold Commands, Reamde, Goodbye Darkness, Steve Jobs and The Psychopath Test.
Some books you might enjoy reading.
Matt Taibbi’s Griftopia is an important book, and it will make you angry enough to froth at the mouth.
The Heroes is an intense, wild ride into a maelstrom of violence, brutality and flawed human beings. You should read it.