Book The Twenty-Third

The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole aged 13 3/4 by Sue Townsend

I’d never read this one before, but now that I have bought Every Book Ever, I’ve decided to use those discount vouchers Borders keeps sending me to purchase all of those books I should have read…

This was a fun read. I spent a while thinking that Townsend was underestimating fourteen year olds, but that having been said, while my students are generally more clued-up than Adrian Mole, I distinctly remember that I wasn’t at that age. Hell, it’s probably safer that I read the book in my thirties – when I was the age of the protagonist, I might have thought this was a real diary, and taken it entirely seriously…

Book The Twenty-Second

The Simping Detective by Si Spurrier

Jack Point is a Simp, someone who dresses like a clown and acts like an idiot. He is also a detective, who was kicked out of the justice department for insubordination. Or was he?

This story contains hands-down the best noir dialogue I have ever read. It’s such an over the top noir-detective story that it almost circles around to become a loving homage rather than an unsubtle parody.

If I had any problem it would be the pedantic issue of having read this so close to Spurrier’s novel Contract, which shares many of the tropes used in The Simping Detective. (They’re wholly different stories, but both about hard-nosed characters to who kill people and feel sorry for themselves, and there’s an almost-identical digression in both stories about disposing of bodies down ones plughole. Hell, the main characters of both have the last name ‘Point’. But I’m just kvetching now – it really was great.)

Very good, and well worth reading. Probably more for fans of 2000AD than for normal people, as it is set in the milieu of Judge Dredd, which can be a little confusing if you’re not familiar with it to begin with, but still highly entertaining and a great read.

Book The Twenty-First

The Secret Man by Bob Woodward

The inside story of Bob Woodward’s relationship with FBI Deputy Director W Mark Felt, the man who was known for thirty years only as Deep Throat.

What got me about this story was how, for lack of a better word, banal it all was. I had a picture in my mind (based on nothing but pop culture, to be fair) of Woodward and Bernstein as angry and righteous crusaders and Deep Throat as the shadowy, all-knowing, possibly even Machiavellian figure. But, as this book reveals, Woodward was an inexperienced reporter who made many stupid mistakes, and Felt was a profoundly paranoid man who had hit the glass ceiling of advancement at the FBI, and seemed to be informing as much out of frustration at what he saw as poor decision-making on behalf of his resented superiors as much as any desire to see justice done.

A nice coda to the Watergate story, but it fills in blanks rather than tells the whole story, so only really for those with a pre-existing interest in the case.

Books The Sixteenth Through Twentieth

Scalped vols 1-5 by Jason Aaron

Dashell Bad Horse is a member of the Tribal Police on the Prairie Rose Reservation; it is his job to make sure that things run smoothly in a place with one of the highest rates of unemployment and lowest life-expectancies in the country.

Dashell Bad Horse is also an enforcer for Chief Red Crow, the crime lord of Prairie Rose; making sure that Red Crow’s meth labs and prostitution-rings don’t have any competition.

Dashell Bad Horse is also an FBI agent, forced to go undercover in the tribal home he fled fifteen years earlier to bring down Red Crow’s criminal empire.

This is gritty stuff – a proper crime story. There is no such thing as black and white in Scalped; shades of grey typify every character and situation. Bad Horse is meant to be the hero, but as the story goes on, it becomes harder to sympathise with him, and easier to see the point-of-view of the corrupt Lincoln Red Crow.

If you’re looking for a good, hard noir story, this is your best bet.

Book The Fifteenth

Contract by Simon Spurrier

Michael Point is a hitman. He has been caught and is being interrogated; whereupon he tells his tale. A tale about how the people he kills just won’t stay dead; how he finds himself drawn into something he doesn’t understand, and how his life starts spiralling out of control.

This book is great. I’ve been enjoying Si Spurrier’s column Short n’ Curlies for a while now, and have been liking his comic work that I’ve picked up, and I was very impressed with his debut novel. The narrator is a painfully flawed, but horribly relatable character, and it is impossible not to like him; nor feel sympathy as his well-ordered life crashes down around him.

Given how much I liked this book, I feel like I’m doing it a disservice by not raving on and on about it for untold pages, but really, the only salient point is: find yourself a copy and read it – you’ll like it.

Book The Fourteenth

The Satanic Bible by Anton LaVey

Let me explain why I was somewhat wary of this from the outset: What I knew about LaVey Satanism lead me to the conclusion that it was basically Libertarianism. I’m fine with that. (I mean, actually worshipping Satan makes slightly more sense than reading Ayn Rand; if only because spending an eternity in hell would probably be faster than plodding ones way through Atlas Shrugged – less painful, too…) So I read the intro, written by the current High Priest. He said that the Church of Satan was only for special people. Nothing unusual: libertarians are famously elitist. He lists those for whom Satanism is intended:

“a select few who are epicurean” Yep, reference to ancient Greeks. That’s in-keeping with Libertarianism. “pragmatic, worldly, atheistic, fiercely individualistic, materialistic, rational” So far so good. I can deal with Libertarians no problem. What’s this next bit…? “and darkly poetic” Oh shit! Fat Goths who can’t grow beards, and wear vampire capes! Abort! Abort! Step away from the book!

I guess it was naïveté on my part to expect to read The Satanic Bible and not come across blotchy fatsos who write pornographic Ann Rice fanfiction. I mean, I can deal with Rationalists, but Live Action Role Players engaged in a life-long game of Vampire: The Sucking, that’s where I draw the line.

That having been said, the book was alright. All a bit dramatic and overblown, but given my proclivity for poems written by depressed teenagers and heavy-metal lyrics, that just made it more fun to read.

It was pretty much just a humanist manifesto (but slightly more aware than the frothy rantings of Ayn Rand insofar as LaVey admits the existence of love – which Rand’s autistic robots could never do – and says that, while he never touches the stuff himself, altruism is a fine enough idea if that’s your bag) that slowly transfigures itself into the rule-book for a live-action role-playing game. Nothing necessarily wrong with that. (I did like how unapologetic LaVey was when outlining the appropriate dress for a satanic ritual: long black robes for the men; tight, slutty clothing for the women. There’s something almost refreshing about being that blatant.)

Overall, I think the most telling part of the book is LaVey’s digression into other people considered Satanists where he says, to paraphrase, “How come people can’t figure out that Aleister Crowley was taking the piss? I can’t believe that it’s not clearly self-evident that he wasn’t serious. Now back to what I was saying about how to perform a Black Mass…”

Book The Thirteenth

School’s Out by Christophe Dufosse

A friend of mine once recommended Michael Marshall Smith’s brilliant Only Forward by saying that Stark, the narrator, was such a relatable character that every time he acted the dick, my friend felt the need to call his mother. I think Pierre Hoffman may be my Stark. And let me tell you, I winced a lot of times when reading about the character of a hypochondriac thirty-two-year-old teacher who neurotically obsesses over so much small crap that he lets life pass him by while he lives in squalor as an anti-social hermit.

And then of course, there’s the scene where he tries to make out with his sister…

Hoffman, I’m pleased to say, is not a cipher that I see myself in, but it is hard not to get caught up in his apathy and low-level despair.

This is a peculiar book in a way – and I don’t just mean the scene where the main character tries it on with his sister. (Well, I don’t JUST mean that scene…) It is almost a case of false advertising: the blurb tells of a teacher taking a class in the wake of a colleague’s suspicious suicide, who becomes increasingly paranoid about the slightly-too-well-behaved students. Sure, that happens; it’s the frame the whole story hangs on, but in terms of page-count it’s actually only a small part of the book. The book as a whole skips from this to Hoffman’s relationship with his fellow teachers, with his sister and brother-in-law, random people he meets as he deals with the death of his predecessor, and the general malaise he finds himself in from day to day.

That having been said, the blurb on the back of my copy of the book is nowhere near as misleading as the cover to the copy shown in the above link, which features a woman’s naked back/lace-covered derriere. Let me be clear here: there is no sex in this book. Hoffman once attempts to grope his sister and is politely rebuffed and other than that sex is barely mentioned, except when Hoffman admits that he’s probably not going to have any with the character who might otherwise have been the love-interest in a more conventional narrative.

All that aside, I loved this book. It was bleak, poetic, funny and engaging. I know it sounds sort of horrible, and it is, but in the best way possible. Best book I’ve read in a while.

Book The Twelfth

Your Erroneous Zones by Dr Wayne W Dyer

Yes, I read a self-help book. It wasn’t for the reason you probably think, but you wouldn’t believe me if I told you, so…

Honestly, I don’t have a lot to say about this one. I think I might have actually been able to use this book, say, six or seven years ago when I was actually quite messed up; but now that my head is on relatively straight, most of Dyer’s advice was self-evident. All pretty much of the “you-decide-how-you-deal-with-stuff” variety. Of course, I suppose that people with good jobs, mostly-sorted-out lives and a pretty high level of self-awareness aren’t really the target market.

Book The Eleventh

An Education by Lynn Barber

The story of Barber’s life, which has apparently been made into a movie that people quite like. Whereas I understand the movie to be mainly about the affair she had as a teenager with an older man, that is one chapter of this book which otherwise deals with her entire life.

It’s probably due more to my appalling attention span than any particular literary taste, but I really do like it when people cut the boring bits out of their autobiographies. An Education has eight or so chapters, which are compartmentalised into the different phases of her life: childhood; teenaged affair; university/meeting future husband; different phases of career in journalism; husband’s death, then we’re done. While that may come across as being somewhat disjointed, Barber doesn’t miss out any of the important stuff, and tells her story with an air of fun that is sorely lacking in many other books.

Read it.

Books The Eighth Through Tenth

Justice League: a new beginning by Keith Giffen & JM DeMatteis; Justice League International by Keith Giffen & JM DeMatteis; Millennium by Steve Englehart

I’ve mentioned before JM DeMatteis and Keith Giffen’s take on the Justice League, where they concentrated more on the humourous aspects of a pack of disparate individuals coming together to save the world than the heroic ones. The first two collections of these issues are somewhat dated (in the space of thirteen issues, incursion into Soviet airspace is used as a plot-point something like half a dozen times) but it is a fun bunch of stories. By way of a digression: while it may be a point lost on normal humans, comic fans will probably know of the redefining nature of these comics. They were published in the wake of Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns when the comics industry was trying to be grim and deconstruct superheroes into post-modern pieces of psychosis. In the middle of this, Justice League went in entirely the opposite direction and had the philosophy that superheroes trying to co-exist would probably get on each others’ nerves and that would be kind of funny.

It is great stuff.

I also reread Millennium, the story of Earth’s superheroes coming together to help a pair of cosmic beings usher in a new evolutionary cycle, because it ties in with some of the Justice League stuff. This has aged far worse than Justice League. Its biggest problem is that it collects all eight issues of Millennium originally published in the eighties, but the story crossed over into dozens of other titles which haven’t been included in the collection, even though they often contained major plot points. The effect is very much like cutting out every second chapter of a book. You have the beginning, end, and several disjointed bits of middle, but it is, overall, a fairly unsatisfactory reading experience.

Actually, what really got me was the awful attempt at superheroes this series introduced as the “next step” in human evolution (the whole series basically being a gimmick to intro some new characters). One of them has the super-heroic name Random Access Memory. His power/place in the next step of human evolution was that he was Chinese and good with computers. Kudos go to DC Comics for the fact that one member was the first openly gay character in the company’s history but, because they weren’t allowed to state that due to the Comics Code at the time, they had to “imply” it by making him a swishing, effeminate caricature.

Still, the Justice League stuff was good…