No no, hold your tears – you’ll make it sound rehearsed…

As a last act of vanity, a sentence or three about the books I’m currently spreading myself across:

Book The Sixty-Seventh

What Am I Doing Here by Bruce Chatwin, a collection of Chatwin’s essays and short pieces written at various times throughout his life. Readable, and he certainly got up to a bit in his lifetime, but so far it has left me cold.

Book The Sixty-Eighth

The Complete Short Stories of Saki, the definitive collection of HH Munro, an author the students put me onto years ago and who by rights should occupy the same place in the cultural landscape as PG Wodehouse if it wasn’t for the premature patriotism-related death he suffered.

Book The Sixty-Ninth

The David Icke Guide To The Global Conspiracy And How To Stop It. Icke is crazier than a shithouse rat, but this – basically the Rosetta Stone of conspiracy theories where he ties together every left-of-centre idea into one overarching plot to kill us all – is sort of like comfort reading for me. I can read chapter after chapter without getting bored. Although admittedly it does start to drag slightly when he starts using entire chapters to list members of the American military-industrial complex and the numerous secret societies they’ve belonged to…

Book The Seventieth

The Eerie Silence by Paul Davies. A look at the history of SETI with a digression into the theory of alien life. So far, a lot of fun.

Book The Seventy-First

I Am Not Esther, by Fleur Beale. Studying this one with the Year 9s again. I like the stuff I get to teach religious children with this text, but my thoughts on it are summed up entirely here.

Book The Seventy-Second

The Carbon Diaries by Saci Lloyd, a future history, in diary form, about a sudden global-warming-related weather shift causing the UK to cut its carbon emissions overnight by eighty percent. Readable; I might teach it if we get a set of them – I can get all preachy and hippy, and expand the woeful ignorance my students have about this subject (I’m reading this basically because the other week I had a conversation with some of my fifteen-year-olds where it transpired that they didn’t know what global warming was. At all.) and I’ll probably read the sequel that’s sitting around the library, but nothing to get too excited over.

Book The Seventy-Third

Impulse by Ellen Hopkins, the story of three disparate individuals who find each other after attempting suicide. I like this story better than Hopkins’ other stories I’ve read recently – it’s been almost twenty-years since I read Go Ask Alice, and while such stories can be fun, I’m sort of bored with sordid tales of teenage drug abuse. Teenagers cutting themselves or taking too many pills on the other hand never gets boring. I guess it’s because I just like the idea of teenagers getting hurt… That having been said, both Crank and Glass had more poetic tricks in their narratives which made them interesting reading experiences. Impulse is more straightforward in its narrative, which isn’t bad, but is somewhat of a letdown given the potential inherent in the subject matter for the sort of double meanings which with Hopkins laced her first two books.

Right, that’s me for the time being. Cheers to the three or four people who read this, because it’s always nice to pretend there’s a purpose to doing all of this nonsense.

End transmission.

Two weeks ago, Clay’s first love, Hannah, committed suicide, leaving him with many questions. The answers come in an anonymously delivered package containing tapes recorded by Hannah, detailing the events leading up to her death, and placing the blame on thirteen people. Including Clay.

This isn’t a bad book, but Asher has tried a narrative experiment that hasn’t worked. Alternating quickly between Clay’s first-person narrative and Hannah’s narration of the tapes (in italics) isn’t on the face of it a bad idea, but Asher’s decision to only slowly reveal the depth of the two characters’ connection to each other falls down. At the beginning of the book – simply because it isn’t mentioned – we have no idea that they were more than casual acquaintances, and when new elements are revealed it isn’t a big shocking revelation, it feels more like Asher simply forgot to mention it before.

I can think of worse ways to kill a day or so, but I can also think of much better. Speaking of which, back to that massive David Icke tome that I’m plodding my way through…

Kristina is a good girl who never causes her mother or stepfather worry. Other than the minor trauma of her older sister de-closeting a few years earlier, the family has never had any bumps in their middle-of-the-road existence.

Then, on a rare visit to her biological father, Kristina meets a boy. He introduces her to a whole new world, of parties, physical intimacy and, most damningly, methamphetamines.

These two books are my favourite find recently, and I’m keeping an eye out for Hopkins’ other work. Her trick of telling the story though poetry is not, as I first assumed it would be, grating, rather, to quote the student I just gave to book to, it cuts all of the extraneous bullshit out and just leaves the interesting parts.

Well written in a unique way, and powerful without being preachy, these ones are keepers. (Of course, I do need to give them back to the school library…)

A recounting of the emperors of Rome from Augustus through to Romulus, focussing on their deaths.

This was great. Each emperor got a couple of pages, and exactly enough background information as is necessary to give context to their death. Well researched, pithy and entertaining.

Chas has just made a terrible mistake. To pay off some gambling debts, he’s agreed to drive a man to a place. Sadly, the man is a hitman, gunning for the brother of the London’s most vicious crime lord. The hit fails, the assassin is dead, and Chas doesn’t know where to turn. The he remembers that his best friend, John Constantine, is a magician. Sadly, Constantine has a history with this crime lord – a history that paralyses him with fear – and also, as he says, whenever you really, really need magic to work; it won’t.

This is, to my mind, the definitive Hellraiser story. At turns terrifying and funny, crisp dialogue, great characterisation, and as entertaining as all hell. It also helps that it stands alone far better than most of the other collections. You could read this with no idea of who the characters were and still make perfect sense of it.

A well-to-do family in the days leading up to World War I are enjoying a few drinks when a mysterious police inspector interrupts them to question them all about the suicide of a working-class woman who intersected with their lives in ways none of them could imagine.

This is not at all subtle in its message. The (admittedly quite inoffensive) message of don’t-be-a-dick-at-people is rammed down the reader’s throat unapologetically, but the whole thing takes less than an hour to read, so it doesn’t stick around long enough to get on ones nerves.

Jack Randell is on the run with a group of Spares – human clones created so that the rich can have replacement parts for when they hedonism themselves into serious accidents.

I first heard about this story years ago, when rigorously critiquing the move The Island with a friend of mine. The core concept is similar enough that the book’s author and the movie’s producers racked up a small amount of court time discussing a few issues. Which is sort of odd, as the Spares, except for providing the story with a title, are pretty much just a McGuffin to kick Randell into a bunch of weird situations, almost none of which actually involve the clones.

This book may not have as many bizarre ideas as Smith’s Only Forward, but it comes close. It creates a twisted world that only borders on being comprehensible, and once again the main character is horribly relatable.

This isn’t exactly what is advertised by the title, but is probably the most fun you’ll have reading this month, so you should acquire a copy.

The continuation of the story of the children of a cabal of villains, running from their parents and trying to find their way in the world.

A worthy story that is no worse than either of the first volumes. A quick but pleasing read.

The first in-depth biography of New Zealand’s most beloved comedian.

Honestly, I didn’t love this. I’m as big a fan of Billy T James as anyone of my generation (or the generation immediately preceding mine, who liked him a lot more than many of my contemporaries) so it was nice to read about his life in more detail than has previously been covered. That having been said, the book was simply not written well. Elliot falls into the trap that I hate so much of meaningless digressions. It is hard to argue that giving paragraphs of information about the lives of the people who consented to be interviewed provides necessary context for the story of James. (As an aside regarding the interviewees, I was a bit leery from the outset when the introduction was used not only to thank those who had provided support, but also to passive – and not so passive – aggressively insult people – by name – who didn’t want to be involved in the writing of the book.) And Elliot may have a past as a historian of comedy, but that is no reason to dedicate paragraph after paragraph to detailing the lives and acts of comedians who were stylistically a little bit like Billy T James but in all other ways unconnected. It’s simply not relevant. Of course, worse than that is when the academic in him takes over, and he minutely deconstructs why James’ jokes were funny. Given that he also openly admits that Billy T’s jokes were often corny and out-of-date, funny more due to the delivery than anything else, this sort of point-by-point sociological breakdown is as irrelevant as it is annoying.

Stories of famous literary hoaxes and the perpetrators thereof, from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion to Mark Twin’s overtly fictional newspaper columns to James Frey and JT Leroy.

If you like stories, you’ll like this. Pithy but interesting chronicles of fakers and how and why they did what they did. The most interesting thing was how forgiving the author was of these hoaxers. Many of them were clearly raised wrong and had deep-seated psychological reasons for doing what they did, but Katsoulis goes out of her way to find reasons that most of them might have just needed a hug. Which is sweet, really, and certainly less tiresome than if she had spent page after page pillorying them.