Bad Pharma: How Drug Companies Mislead Doctors and Harm Patients by Ben Goldacre (3 stars)

I knew from the first few pages of this book that Goldacre had done his homework and would back his arguments with facts and plenty of references. In fact, he tells us right up front:

So, to be clear, this whole book is about meticulously defending every assertion in the paragraph that follows.

Which is great, I wanted the facts, I wanted references, I wanted solid arguments, and this book definitely delivers. But it isn't particularly entertaining, and finishing it took quite a lot of determination. Honestly I'm not sure what Goldacre could have done to improve this: it's an incredibly important message that needs to be heard by, well, preferably everyone, but especially all members of the medical and pharmaceutical industry. Judging by the contents of the afterword and the success of the alltrials campaign this has happened to some extent, which is great. But my 3 star ranking here reflects the view that just not that many lay people will be willing to trudge through this book.

Having said that, I'm incredibly glad that Ben Goldacre has written the book and launched the campaign, since it's a tragedy that (among many other problems) data from trials conducted in humans can be cherry-picked by companies to publish only favourable results. Everyone reading this should go sign the alltrials petition to help fix that.

In places I found the tone a little shrill and the recommendations, such as this one, somewhat impractical. What would patients think when confronted with such information stuck to the wall of a clinic without a 450-page accompanying novel to explain it?

All doctors should declare all payments, gifts, hospitality, free teaching and so on, to their patients, to colleagues, and to a central register. The conventional cut-off is for everything within the past three years, but we could consider making it longer. We should display the contents in our clinics, to our patients, and let them decide if such activities are acceptable.

More sensible than displaying it in clinics would be making that central register data available online. And I'm sure Goldacre is betting that sunlight shone on it like this will basically kill the entire practice of semi-bribes. Many people already shop for doctors on recommendation sites like yelp, having this data available to the patient as part of that interface when choosing a physician would be valuable.

For the most part though, the recommendations are sensible and practical. Since Goldacre basically wrote an abstract for the entire book in the first few pages I thought I'd just include it here, rather than summarising the problems and arguments further:

Drugs are tested by the people who manufacture them, in poorly designed trials, on hopelessly small numbers of weird, unrepresentative patients, and analysed using techniques which are flawed by design, in such a way that they exaggerate the benefits of treatments. Unsurprisingly, these trials tend to produce results that favour the manufacturer. When trials throw up results that companies don’t like, they are perfectly entitled to hide them from doctors and patients, so we only ever see a distorted picture of any drug’s true effects. Regulators see most of the trial data, but only from early on in a drug’s life, and even then they don’t give this data to doctors or patients, or even to other parts of government. This distorted evidence is then communicated and applied in a distorted fashion. In their forty years of practice after leaving medical school, doctors hear about what works through ad hoc oral traditions, from sales reps, colleagues or journals. But those colleagues can be in the pay of drug companies – often undisclosed – and the journals are too. And so are the patient groups. And finally, academic papers, which everyone thinks of as objective, are often covertly planned and written by people who work directly for the companies, without disclosure. Sometimes whole academic journals are even owned outright by one drug company. Aside from all this, for several of the most important and enduring problems in medicine, we have no idea what the best treatment is, because it’s not in anyone’s financial interest to conduct any trials at all. These are ongoing problems, and although people have claimed to fix many of them, for the most part they have failed; so all these problems persist, but worse than ever, because now people can pretend that everything is fine after all.

3 stars.

Jupiter - Illusions of Faith by Kynan Waterford (3.5 stars)

Fans of Matthew Reilly will find a lot to like in this book. It's packed with intricate action scenes featuring "the most dangerous man in the solar system" Garen Maertikye deploying a dizzying array of body enhancement technology to move stealthily, outsmart, and when forced to, destroy his enemies. In fact, the body enhancement tech was one of my favourite aspects of the novel, with the highlight being the "type-seven augmented plantim" (i.e. plant matter) body. The description of the surgical implantation of a new occupant into this body and subsequent adaptation to the user was fantastic, as was seeing its capabilities tested through a number of violent encounters.

For me the piece that was missing here was a back-story on how Maertikye came by all of his amazing tech, especially since it is far more advanced than that available to the well-funded Coalition soldier elite. Presumably there's a thriving and dangerous black market for body enhancements, an exploration of which would make a great novel on its own. But we're given little insight into how Garen has survived all of these years - how is he funded? Being an emotionless badass might be a tactical advantage, but it doesn't fuel and repair a spacecraft, or make a stormsuit.

The body tech and fight scenes sit more towards the science end of the science-fantasy spectrum, but there are also elements of the story that are much more solidly at the fantasy end: energy transfer between heavangels and humans, direct manipulation of human emotions by heavangels, and a spontaneous complete body transformation. I found these aspects hard to reconcile with the preturnatural body tech and fight scenes that were full of much more realistic physics - I've never read the term "angular momentum" so many times in fight scenes before!

I'm not against science-fantasy, but my personal preference would have been for these aspects to have a pseudo-science grounding: like the heavangels are nano particles that move through the atmosphere in clouds but can inhabit humans as brain parasites. There's a great potential twist here if the humans try to stop killing them, only to be overtaken as hosts for an alien parasite. Garen's stormsuit could have been specially designed to harvest energy from a cooperative cloud of nano particles.

While I'm on my high-horse writing my wishlist, I also wished there was more ship slang, which is bound to develop on a closed ecosystem like the Golgotha, and less use of the word terrorist, which is cringe-worthy in a couple of cases. Like when a soldier is supposed to be verbally abusing a captured Maertikye, and the best he can muster is "You're in more trouble than you know, terrorist".

While the action has a Matthew Reilly flavour, it is far from being mindlessly dumb like those novels. A lot of thought has gone into the Coalition's economic stranglehold on the population and life on board the Golgotha. Character development isn't spectacularly deep, and having a main character with deliberately suppressed emotions doesn't help in this regard, but it isn't completely absent. To its credit, things don't get tied up in a neat bow at the end, it's suitably complicated, and suitably open for plenty of sequels.

Looking forward to the next one.

3.5 stars

The Sunne in Splendour by Sharon Kay Penman (2 stars)

Have you always been upset about Shakespear's portrayal and longed for a different perspective on Richard III? Are you ready to pick up minor inaccuracies about 15th century Catholic law, know your Plantagenet and Lancastrian family trees off by heart, sell white boar embroidery on etsy, and have your own extensive opinions on the various scenarios re the demise of the "princes in the tower"? Well, this is the book for you. There's apparently a lot of you, judging by the overwhelmingly positive reviews this book has had on amazon.

If, like me, you forgot there was a Shakespeare play about Richard III, had never heard of the princes in the tower, thought plantagenet was something related to blood clotting, and thought The Tudors TV series would have been drastically improved without fighting the same stupid war with France and Spain every other episode, you should probably give this 1000 page tome a miss. How did I, terrible history student, get here? I blame goodreads recommendations.

This book is a very extensively researched and, as I now know, unusual perspective on Richard III (i.e. he's an insufferably good guy). By which I mean that it's perhaps the most entertaining history textbook ever written. It is however, a pretty ordinary novel.

It begins with lots of incredibly dry exposition, that's screaming "Look! Look at all the research I did!" Honestly I could not care less about why Edmund is a little bit sad at Christmas, it doesn't matter. I don't care how long it took to figure all this out, it's just boring.

After the July battle that had delivered the Kind into Warwick's power, Marguerite had retreated into Wales and then Yorkshire, long an enclave of Lancastrian loyalties. There she'd been reunited with the Duke of Somerset and Andrew Trollope, who'd spent several frustrating months trying to dislodge Warwick and Edward from Calais. These Lancastrian lords...Marguerite herself had ventured up into Scotland...And so Edmund found himself spending the Christmas season in a region he little liked...

The imagery and raw emotion of Marguerite d'Anjou sinking to her knees in the snow was a welcome break from all the wooden third-person exposition, and things get a little better from there, but it's still a tough slog.

In trying to paint Richard in such a positive light Penman goes too far and makes him unbelievable. He's such a beacon of principles, loving father, faithful husband and all round honour-bound we-could-never-accept-French-wine-when-we-could-die-in-battle caricature that I found myself wishing for his downfall, anticipating a spectacular fall from grace. Sadly Penman only allows a little incompetence and poor character judgement.

To combat the dryness, exactly halfway through Penman decides it is time for sex. All of a sudden it's all kirtles, and body parts "gleaming soft and wet", and "feeling desire start to quicken again". This made things a bit more interesting at the expense of making the history nerds angry. Why are you ruining a perfectly good textbook?

But it takes until about page 715 before I get the first "huh, THAT's interesting" moment when Dr. Stillington drops his bombshell. At this point things start to unravel and the long, long, long anticipated climax made for good reading. A nice payoff, but it wasn't worth all the pain.

The subject material certainly has all the ingredients for a fantastic story, but history is a terrible editor. It could be a far better novel if the author was willing to give up on some of her research and make the history nerds angry by taking more liberty with the facts.

2 stars.

The Girl With All The Gifts by M. R. Carey (4 stars)

This book has an interesting early reveal that if you come to the book in just the right way, i.e. without reading anything at all about it, is probably worth preserving. So I'm putting the spoiler warning right up front, since it's impossible to talk about otherwise. Consider yourself warned.

Having said that, I knew it was a zombie book before I started reading. I think it's actually very obvious before the reveal, but it's hard to judge that objectively. The start of the book is very strong. The idea of high-functioning zombie children being studied for clues to help a mostly-annihilated human population survive in the post-apocalyptic world is very novel. It feels more like a government-gone-crazy dystopia novel to begin with, especially as Melanie notices lots of little cracks appearing in the facade that the teachers and Sergeant Parks present.

After the Junkers storm the base in a brilliantly conceived attack, everything changes. The novel switches to Walking Dead mode, where survival means defending against attacks from both humans and zombies. This is definitely entertaining, and Melanie's encounter with a partially conscious zombie sitting on a bed, singing and leafing through photos is one of the creepier things I've ever read.

"The raven... croaked... as she sat... at her meal..."

It's so apposite to her thoughts, Caldwell is thrown for a moment. But he's not answering her, he's only singing the last line of the quatrain. She knows the song, vaguely. It's "The Woman Who Rode Double", an old folk ballad as depressing and interminable as most of its type - exactly the sort of song she'd expect a hungry to sing.

Except that they don't. Ever.

But the story seems to start losing its way, especially after entering London. Dr Caldwell goes somewhat nuts, and the madcap adventure with the armored vehicle bordered on slapstick with the car careening around through buildings with zombies attached. I get that this was supposed to be the last desperate actions of a species on the brink of extinction, but by this stage I felt like the book had lost almost all of its early promise.

The ending was fitting I think, and I liked the use of an actual zombie fungus as the basis for the infection. Overall there are great ideas here, the execution just wasn't that strong.

4 stars.

Swan Song by Robert R. McCammon (3.5 stars)

My first goodreads recommendation, it was certainly on-target with the post-apocalyptic genre, one of my favourites. The obvious comparison for Swan Song is with Stephen King's The Stand. On the face of it there are a number of similarities: there's an apocalypse and the survivors are caught up in a good versus evil struggle with a fantasy component, i.e. the devil has a real physical form and people are drawn to each other through dreams. Good and evil population centres form and come into conflict.

But there's lots of differences too. Swan Song is much more of an action/horror book, with modest effort spent on building characters, paling in comparison to the masterful character construction in The Stand.  It is also almost purely post-apocalyptic, not much time is spent before the apocalypse, and because it's nuclear the apocalypse itself plays out very quickly, in stark contrast to The Stand where both of those phases are very long.

Swan Song draws inspiration from TS Eliot's The Waste Land and quotes from it are used extensively throughout the book, including as the password prompts for the nuclear launch.  (Incidentally, using a well-known poem verbatim as challenge-response is a terrible choice of authentication strategy).

Minor spoilers ahead.

McCammon's devil is fairly supernaturally creepy in the early stages of the book as he sits in an untouched theatre in NYC amidst the nuclear wasteland, and during his first encounter with Sister Creep.  Later in the novel though he seems impotent when confronting Swan, for seemingly little reason.  Her ability to wield "forgiveness" had a deus ex machina smell to it.

On at least a couple of occasions this book crossed my gore and horror threshold.  This is when I stop enjoying the other-worldness and thought experiment of survival after an apocalypse, and start wondering why I'm reading about babies getting clubbed to death to assert a warlord's evil-ness.

Sans these sections I thought the evil side was fairly well imagined.  I liked the image of the people living in holes surrounding the camps with lights and guns, picking off survivors as they are attracted to the lights of the settlement.  Lord Alvin of the K-Mart was pretty well-done too, very Mad Max.

The character development was fairly weak, and we don't get a deep feeling of being inside the head of any character, but I have to give McCammon some credit.  He certainly picked interesting character trajectories.  A homeless lady turns into a strong township leader, and a teenager, Roland, gradually reveals a mad and utterly ruthless appetite for survival at all costs.

There's a few cringe-worthy moments, e.g. when Sister Creep is saved from a pack of wolves, not once, but twice, under increasingly improbable circumstances.  And Macklin's whole shadow-soldier business.  It should have been really creepy, but instead it just felt going through the motions to apply the obvious stereotype for a post-apocalyptic warlord: psychologically unstable war vet.

He blinked.  The Shadow Soldier was smiling thinly, his face streaked with camouflage paint under the brow of his helmet.

The other similarity this book shares with The Stand, is that the ending is pretty poor.  All of the supernatural struggle is cast aside for a very real, very improbable, and fairly Matthew Reilly action sequence (it even involves a bunker).  After which everything is pretty much fine and things are looking great for the human race.  *sigh*.

Definitely a page-turner, post-apocalyptic fans who were bored with the pace of The Stand with a high tolerance for gore would find lots to like.

3.5 stars.

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (5 stars)

In one of the best starts to a book that I can remember, this classic Pulitzer Prize winner begins with a quote:

Lawyers, I suppose, were children once
--Charles Lamb

Writing this review feels a little too much like a high school English assignment so I'm going to keep it (somewhat) brief.  It's an incredible book, and every bit deserves its Pulitzer and place on many Top 100 lists.

Once you've suspended your disbelief that your 8-yr old tom-boy narrator, Scout, is a natural wordsmith with an uncanny talent for deconstructing the messy, complex adult world into powerful and moving observations you'll love it.

Scout's father Atticus is a beacon of progressive thought and moral standing in deeply racist 1930s Alabama.  This from Miss Maudie:

"What I meant was, if Atticus Finch drank until he was drunk he wouldn't be as hard as some men are at their best. Thre are just some kind of men who - who're so busy worrying about the next world they've never learned to live in this one, and you can look down the street and see the results."

And I completely agree with his philosophy on answering kids' questions, here he reproaches his brother after he evades Scout's question about the meaning of "whore-lady":

"Jack! When a child asks you something, answer him, for goodness' sake. But don't make a production of it. Children are children, but they can spot an evasion quicker than adults, and evasion simply muddles 'em."

This quote also shows his intense desire to be the best he can, when faced with a moral crisis right at the end of the book:

Sometimes I think I'm a total failure as a parent, but I'm all they've got.  Before Jem looks at anyone else he looks at me, and I've tried to live so I can look squarely back at him...if I connived at something like this, frankly, I couldn't meet his eye, and the day I can't do that I know I've lost him.  I don't want to lose him and Scout, because they're all I've got.

Some spoilers coming.  If you didn't read it in high school, you should go read it now.

There are some incredibly powerful scenes in the book, particularly Atticus camping outside the jail to protect his client.  Scout defuses an angry mob with a big dose of childish naivete that humanises and personalises Atticus, changing him from the man defending the subject of the mob's hatred, to a father and neighbour.

After the dramatic events of the trial, the denouement seems a little weird.  Basically you know there's something bad still coming, and we just have to sort of wait around for it to show up.  Once it does show up it's shocking, and Scout's simple "Hey, Boo", after the dramatic events is incredibly raw and emotional.

Boo was our neighbor.  He gave us two soap dolls, a broken watch and chain, a pair of good-luck pennies, and our lives.

 5 stars.

The Bloodletter's Daughter by Linda Lafferty (2.5 stars)

This was my backup book, purchased for $1 through some promotion and left on my kindle in case I found myself without a book or internet. That happened recently and it served its purpose, but was fairly unremarkable.

I appreciated the historical fiction aspect and the research that went into it: the descriptions of the Cesky Krumlov bathhouse, bloodletting and application of leeches were all fairly interesting.  Kepler was thrown into the story in a clumsy fashion, I guess his sidebar was supposed to be background on the conflict between religion and science, but it felt very disconnected.

The writing is amateurish, but not in a terribly distracting way.  Marketa and Don Julius are the only characters we get to know in any sort of detail.  Marketa's pure white virginity and passion for medicine and academic study seemed fairly implausible for a poor bathmaid in the 1600s, but I was willing to put that aside.  Don Julius is actually pretty good.  Where the story really falls apart is shortly before the climax.

Spoilers ahead.

Marketa's friend and protector drugs and date-rapes her true-love sweetheart, which is completely forgiven by all parties, because Annabella wants a child and the guy was being too precious about his virginity.  Right then.

I shall have the child I long for, and you - you no longer have your priestly virtue to confuse your heart and deny love.  I have set you free.

Marketa blindly accepts that Annabella's plan is the right course, even though she has no idea what it is.  Everyone else also appears to be on board, including Jakub and Marketa's dying aunt.  When the completely implausible plan comes to fruition I could see why it needed to be kept secret from Marketa and the reader - it's so incredibly complicated and unlikely that it would never work.

It's not like there were no other options. Putting aside the bizarre notion that Don Julius would call on the barber he has imprisoned and whose daughter he is promising to kill to cut his hair and shave him with a straight razor, having Pichler kill him at that point would have been far more plausible.

In the early part of the novel I thought Don Julius was going to turn out to be some sort of autistic savant and solve the puzzles of the Coded Book of Wonder, leading us on an Indiana-Jones meets Dan Brown quest for treasure.  I'm glad this book didn't turn out that way, but I still wasn't very impressed.

2.5 stars

World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War by Max Brooks (4 stars)

I'm a zombie fan, so it was about time I got around to reading this.  I have to admit being largely put-off by the fairly average movie inspired by the book, but I was assured that the book was much better.  It definitely is.  In fact, they could have stuck closer to the book and made a much more interesting movie.

Brooks has put a considerable amount of thought into many aspects of the world's military and political reaction to a zombie apocalypse.  I was fascinated by the catastrophic failure of traditional military weapons and tactics in the face of an enemy completely without fear at the battle of Yonkers.

But what if the enemy can't be shocked and awed? Not just won't, but biologically can't?

Troops with high-tech "Land Warrior" network centric communications and satellite imagery, a key strategic advantage in normal warfare, were quickly demoralized and running in fear after getting detailed images of the horde and seeing their friends eaten on live video uplinks.  Tanks, artillery, air-craft, navy, the jewels of a modern military were all very expensive and very inefficient ways to kill Zombies.  Eventually all of this is supplanted by far more efficient simple rifles and simple hand-to-hand weapons.

My 2c on zombie eradication.  At the point where they were rounding up zombies to send them towards highly efficient sniper emplacements I thought they should have been using a mobile slaughterhouse corral and pneumatic bolts to destroy the brain.  A lot more automated, cheap, and less prone to mistakes than snipers.  Similarly for the underwater zombies problem, nets and a floating slaughterhouse would work the same way.

I liked that the interviews spanned a large time period, so we got a birds eye view of the whole history of the war.  Particularly interesting was the period after the humans carve out some viable territory and need to re-organise all of society for war and reconstruction.

The first labor survey stated clearly that over 65 percent of the present civilian workforce were classified F-6, possessing no valued vocation.

This is totally me, useless after the zombie apocalypse.  Well, perhaps not completely useless if computer communications are still a thing, but certainly no civil engineer or carpenter.  You can imagine this doesn't exactly sit well with everyone:

The more work you do, the more money you make, the more peons you hire to free you up to make more money. That's the way the world works. But one day it doesn't. No one needs a contract reviewed or a deal brokered. What it does need is toilets fixed. And suddenly that peon is your teacher, maybe even your boss. For some, this was scarier than the living dead.

The idea of Quislings, living people who act like zombies out of some Stockholm-Syndrome-like impulse, was fantastically imagined.

This novel is really quite a strange format.  It's basically a series of short stories, so you don't spend much time with any of the characters.  It's part academic paper, part military after action report, and part touching personal news reporting, all about a very fictional subject.  At times it is powerful and almost inspirational:

There's a word for that kind of lie. Hope. 

This novel probably appeals most to people who have spent considerable amounts of time pondering what the best zombie survival strategies are, what weapons are most effective and durable, and generally how you would survive this invented apocalypse.

4 stars.

The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories by H. P. Lovecraft (3.5 stars)

Cthulhu has been calling me for some time, and I finally succumbed to the lure of the octopus-headed dragon thingy from the deep. For me the call came from numerous pop culture and game references, but Lovecraft's short stories have generally been hugely influential in the world of sci-fi/horror/fastasy, and a source of inspiration for many creative works. Just take a look at the lengthy Cthulhu Mythos page.

After reading this collection I had a great respect for Lovecraft's imagination, and his ability to build a chilling and creepy atmosphere. The chronological order of stories allows the reader to experience Lovecraft's growth in abilities as an author. During the first story Dagon, I wondered why I was reading this at all. The story seemed to be a prop to drop as many names as possible to show off the literary education of the author:

...would have excited the envy of a Doré...beyond the imagination of a Poe or Bulwer...Vast, Polyphemus-like...

But things get better. The Picture in the House managed to build a lot of creeping fear for a very short story and The Outsider was a really nice idea that I think could have been built into an entire novel as the main character explores the foreign world up above and we learn about his world below.

Herbert West - Reanimator drove me nuts with the constant re-caps. I guess this was originally published as a serial, requiring some level of introduction for new readers, but it was maddening to read a number of background-filling sentences like "It was in those college days that he had begun his terrible experiments..." every few pages. I did like the talking head though, that was cute.

The Hound brought us back to name-dropping, *sigh* although overall the story was pretty clever.

While Lovecraft's imagination is fantastic, and his ability to chill the room is impressive, these talents vastly exceed his actual writing ability. He uses a couple of very lazy tropes, namely "and then I woke up" and "too horrible to describe".

In He, a miraculous escape is made. How convenient the protagonist just woke up outside safe and sound with no explanation required?

The man who found me said I must have crawled a long way despite my broken bones, for a trail of blood stretched off as far as he dared look...report could state no more than that I had appeared from a place unknown...

For "too horrible to describe" we have, in Cool Air:

What was, or had been, on the couch I cannot and dare not say here.

and in The Hound:

I cannot reveal the details of our shocking expeditions, or catalogue even partly the worst of the trophies adorning the nameless museum we prepared in the great stone house...

and in Herbert West - Reanimator:

The scene I cannot describe - I should faint if I tried it...

If there is a word that Lovecraft enjoys above no other it is "Cyclopean". Look it up, you'll read it in every story.

The last few stories are brilliant (by the way The Rats in the Walls was my favourite of the earlier ones). Still plenty of weaknesses in the writing, but the powerful imagination and creepiness makes up for everything. I loved The Colour Out of Space, The Whisperer in Darkness, and The Shadow Over Innsmouth.

Particularly in The Whisperer in Darkness I had to suspend my disbelief that Akeley would have shootouts with aliens every night and his only response was to write a few letters to a stranger and buy new police dogs every other day from some local inexhaustible pool that didn't ask any questions. And that Wilmarth was gullible enough to fall into a comically obvious trap. Still, I equate the latter with the urge to yell "look behind you" in a horror movie.

Overall my favourite moment from all the stories was the narrator's flight from Innsmouth in The Shadow Over Innsmouth while being pursued by a legion of underwater horrors. Brilliant, creepy stuff.

It's hard to rate a collection of short stories, some of which are weak, others amazing. The collection is definitely worth a read, even just so you understand all the random Cthulhu pop culture references.

3.5 stars.

Zoo City by Lauren Beukes (4 stars)

This is a really entertaining read. The world building is excellent, and Zinzi December is a great character. The dash of magic into the gritty Johannesburg setting works really well. The idea of being 'animalled' for crimes is very creative and well executed. I totally bought the burden and social stigma of being an "Apo" (Aposymbiot), the Zoo City ghetto, and Zinzi's dark side scamming innocents out of their life savings with 419 emails.

I found the transition from "I don't do missing persons" to being a private eye a little under-explained. I think the author intended to show Zinzi getting sucked into the investigation reluctantly, but it didn't read like that, I never really got an insight into her motivations. But generally I liked that many aspects of the world weren't explained, it kept a real air of mystery to the story, i.e what crimes warrant an animal? What is the Undertow? What are the properties of the connection to the animal?

Beukes takes an interesting approach to filling in details, she does it with a number of factual interstitials: IMDB entries, newspaper articles etc. I liked this idea: some of them were really well written and revealed detail in clever ways, others (like the IMDB entry and comments) were fairly annoying to read but still very believable.

The writing is really good, full of ironic humour and witticisms:

All it takes is one Afgan warlord to show up with a Penguin in a bulletproof vest, and everything science and religion thought they knew goes right out the window.

Some people have complained that the good guys don't win cleanly. I hate those sorts of endings, and while there is some raggedness to this ending I felt like the opposite, that most things got wrapped up a little too neatly. The climax also feels rather rushed and broke with the dark mysterious feel of the rest of the book for a Van-Damme-style finish. Contrast the brilliantly written off-balance dirty fight in the sewers with the final scenes: I wish the climax had been more in the style of the former.

Some more choice quotes:

Nzambe aza na zamba te. God is not in the forest. Maybe He is too busy looking after sports teams or worrying about teenagers having sex before marriage. I think they take up a lot of His time.

They burned this neighbourhood down in the early 1900s to prevent the spread of bubonic plague, and it occurs to me that they should consider doing it again, to purge the blight of well-meaning hipsters desperately trying to paint it rainbow.

4 stars.

Born On A Blue Day: Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant by Daniel Tammet (4 stars)

This insight into a savant's brain is fascinating. Daniel is unique in that he has the talents of a savant (e.g. memorising 22,514 digits of pi in a few days), but is capable of leading a relatively normal life, being in a relationship, and even writing about all of it in an autobiography.

The high point of the book for me was seeing a graphical representation of a string of numbers from pi as visualized by Daniel. He has synesthesia, a neurological 'union of the senses', which in Daniel's case means he perceives numbers and words as having particular colours and shapes. He shows a painting of his visualisation of the same sequence of numbers in this TED talk. The idea that someone's brain is so different that they can see the number "1" as a bright light, when I just see a 1, is really pretty amazing.

Daniel's Asperger's means he struggles with many of the things, particularly interactions with other people, that most people can accomplish without any conscious thought. It was fascinating watching the David Letterman interview after reading Daniel's behind-the-scenes account. He seems completely calm and collected on stage, but it was actually a very challenging thing for him to do.

Daniel also meets Kim Peek (the real "rain man") as part of the "Brainman" documentary, and while they share some savant talents there is a stark contrast between Daniel's high functioning autism and Peek's need for full time care.

I found some parts of the novel less interesting: such as lots of details of who he talked to in Lithuania, and the occasional side track into neurological research. But overall I enjoyed it, and this book left me intensely hoping that Daniel can move beyond simple demonstrations of his impressive talents and use his abilities to change the world. I wish him all the best.

4 stars

The Fault in Our Stars by John Green (4.5 stars)

After reading Ruth Graham's literary snobbitribe on slate, and infuriated counter arugments, I immediately went out and bought The Fault In Our Stars to see what all the fuss was about.

My first observation while reading this novel was that the line for Young Adult seems to be extremely fuzzy. Is just having a teenager's POV enough to make it YA? What if said teenagers have a better vocabulary than most literary critics and razor-sharp acidic wit?

Kaitlyn, you're the only person I've ever known to have toe-specific dysmorphia

But of course there is always a hamartia and yours is that oh, my God, even though you HAD FREAKING CANCER you give money to a company in exchange for the chance to acquire YET MORE CANCER

...but he didn't die and now here he is, a full-grown adult in a church basement in the 137th nicest city in America, divorced, addicted to video games, mostly friendless, eking out a meager living by exploiting his cancertastic past, slowly working his way towards a master's degree that will not improve his career prospects, waiting, as we all do, for the sword of Damocles, to give him the relief that he escaped lo those many years ago when cancer took both his nuts but spared what only the most generous would call his life.

These words are unlike any I have heard come out of the mouth of a 16 year old, but I'm willing to suspend my disbelief on that account and swallow the line that two teenage literary, sarcastic geniuses were thrown together by fate, because the result is fascinating. According to Graham, the thing that makes YA is presenting:

...the teenage perspective in a fundamentally uncritical way. It’s not simply that YA readers are asked to immerse themselves in a character’s emotional life—that’s the trick of so much great fiction—but that they are asked to abandon the mature insights into that perspective that they (supposedly) have acquired as adults.

While that makes complete sense when talking about something empty-headed like Vampire Academy, it seems much less obvious here. In any case, defining YA is going to remain complicated, especially when some presumably respectable pundits consider LOTR to be YA.

In any case, meta-discussions aside, this is a fantastic book and I'd recommend it to all adults and teenagers alike. The dialogue is brilliantly written, savagely sarcastic and ironic, and a joy to read. The cancer isn't central to the book, but requires the characters to drop all of the normal teenage concerns and pursue a really interesting journey together, including a realisation that ultimately they may make little to no mark on the world.

A minor point but something I found annoying was Van Houten's strange appearance in the final act of the novel. It was completely out of character for Van Houten and implausible. Perhaps Green felt the need to show that Hazel had moved past her obsession with the novel, trivialised in the face of the recent events?

I have no idea what having a terminal illness is like, but the experiences of the "cancer kids" and their families rang true to me. I really liked Gus and Hazel, even if they sounded a little like male and female versions of the same person.

4.5 stars

Vampire Academy by Richelle Mead (1 star)

There's few books on the Dymocks top 100 I haven't read, and this was one of them. I put it on my list with some trepidation, knowing I was likely to hate it, but also knowing that writing a scathing review is kinda fun too. There's a movie coming out so I decided it was time. Worst case it's another Twilight, best case it's a Sunshine.

It's been so long since I read Twilight I can't say for sure that this is worse, but it's definitely just as bad. Being inside the decidedly empty head of a shallow image-obsessed teenager during the height of teenage he-said-she-said-you-stole-my-boyfriend-lets-spread-rumours is nauseating. This is basically an insipid high-school drama about looking hot, getting boyfriends and backstabbing, with a very light dusting of what could have been an interesting vampire world.

Rose at least has more backbone than Twilight's Bella, but she's a boring follower. Despite her supposedly rebellious outlook she never questions the obvious oppression and servant class status of Dhampirs, and whether the Moroi she loves so much are actually the good guys.

I know I'm not the target audience, but there is far better YA fiction to be had.

1 star

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot (3.5 stars)

The first half of this book is great. Reading about the birth of cell culture was really interesting, and Henrietta's personal struggle was moving and very sad. I'd heard a few radio interviews about this book, and read some articles, so I didn't really learn much about the HeLa cells themselves. However I was shocked by the history of unethical human experimentation mentioned, including the Tuskegee syphilis experiment and Southam's intentional injection of HeLa cancer cells into unsuspecting patients and prison volunteers.

If the book ended with the medical non-fiction history being caught up to roughly the current day I would have been very happy. But the author then inserts herself into the story and turns it into a extended familial biography. The whole second half of the book feels like it is about her personal difficulties in dealing with the modern-day Lacks family members.

I think Skloot's intention here was to show how Henrietta's famous cells had changed their lives, and how they struggled to come to terms with the media attention and lack of any financial compensation. But it doesn't read that way. It feels like Skloot is pointing out just how hard her job was: aren't I just the best journalist ever? Look at all the stuff I put up with!

The Afterword gets back to the core ethical questions posed and gives a good overview of recent legal battles, and the applicable laws, regulations, and codes of conduct. None of which would require informed consent to make a HeLa-like collection of body tissue and sell it today. This is a strong finish to a book that lost its way in the middle.

3.5 stars.

Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout (2.5 stars)

This novel reads like Strout was given a university assignment "develop a character through a series of short stories".  The writing is undoubtedly masterful, but I wasn't impressed with the novel.  It feels more like an exercise, a talent demonstration, a resume filler, than a novel that will be loved and recommended by readers.  In this regard it was obviously successful, winning the Pulitzer Prize.

There are 13 vignettes, which give us some insight into the central character Olive.  In some stories we learn quite a bit, while in others Olive seems to be merely a passing reference, barely noticeable at all.  I found myself forging bonds with many of the incidental characters, only to have them broken at the end of the vignette, never to re-appear again.  But such is the nature of the homework assignment.

For me the most memorable story was the one where Olive displayed a purely vindictive and petty streak, by performing a series of mean-spirited pranks on her son's new wife, who she disliked.

It does not help much, but it does help some, to know there will be moments now when Suzanne will doubt herself.  Calling out, "Christoper, are you sure you haven't seen my shoe?"

Overall I found it to be a completely forgettable story about an abrupt, unsympathetic old lady, told from 13 disconnected and depressing viewpoints.  But the words are very pretty.

2.5 stars.

Burial Rites by Hannah Kent (3.5 stars)

This feels like the True History of the Kelly Gang for Iceland. It is historical fiction based on the fate of Agnes Magnúsdóttir who was charged with murder and was the last person to be executed in Iceland in 1829. As a debut it is very impressive. The writing is outstanding, at times lyrical, and it provides a powerful portrait of the hardship of rural Iceland. Agnes grabs your attention from the very first sentence, this is the opening:

They said I must die. They said that I stole the breath from men, and now they must steal mine. I imagine then, that we are all candle flames, greasy-bright, fluttering in the darkness and the howl of the wind, and in the stillness of the room I hear footsteps, awful coming footsteps, coming to blow me out and send my life up away from me in a gray wreath of smoke.

The research undertaken by Kent for the novel must have been enormous: not only into the details of the murder case, trial, and execution, but also covering the lifestyle of rural Iceland in the 19th century. I enjoyed reading interesting and detailed accounts of wheat harvesting, sheep butchering, sausage making, etc. It was made abundantly clear that life was hard for pretty much everyone, and female servants not only worked hard in terrible conditions, but were the subject of much abuse with very little prospect for improvement. Winter was a physical and mental prison for many months of the year.

Despite all that praise I didn't find myself particularly invested in this novel. As best I can tell, this comes down to the character development because the writing was great, the setting was interesting, and the plot moved along nicely. Agnes-the-character wasn't nearly as interesting as Agnes-the-story, which was largely portrayed as a wrong-place wrong-time kind of affair. Natan seemed interesting as a character - conflicted, manipulative, and intelligent, but he is barely present in the story, just flitting in and out of Agnes' POV. I liked this quote:

Natan did not believe in sin. He said that it is the flaw in the character that makes a person.

An interesting read, and well-written.

3.5 stars

Divergent, Allegiant, Insurgent by Veronica Roth (3 stars)

One of many, many attempts to write another Hunger Games, the Divergent series is very entertaining but horribly flawed. First take the hunger games, remove the world-building, get the Hogwarts sorting hat to carve the world up into houses, and add a splash of Ender's game training montage.

This young adult fiction got me through a few bad days of being stuck at home while sick, and I'm grateful for the entertainment, but I'm just going to review these quickly and do all three together because they are nothing amazing.



The good:

• It's a dystopia (I'm a sucker)
• No love triangle! One starts to appear at one point but it gets killed off (pun intended) quickly and fairly dramatically.
• Female and male protagonists aren't breathtakingly beautiful, perfectly proportioned goddesses and gods (I'm looking at you Twilight). Roth goes out of her way to point out imperfections and emphasize that Tris and Four are not at the top of the prettiness pecking-order on a number of occasions.

The bad:

• The world building is almost completely absent, and where it exists it doesn't make sense. Why do Abnegation perpetuate this horrible caste system that keeps the Factionless opressed when their main goal is to look after the Factionless? What does everyone do exactly - i.e. the Dauntless. What are they guarding the fence for? Why don't people try to escape the fence? Who is forcing everyone to obey the Faction system? The Salvation Army-like Abnegation running the government may be the least plausible governmental system I have ever imagined.
• The serums are a crutch. Roth comes up with some imaginative virtual reality scenarios in the Dauntless training, but it becomes clear that all the Dauntless training to overcome fears is actually pointless. If you wanted them to do something scary you could just use the mind control serum.
• There's a fairly disturbing anti-intellectual thread running through the series.
• Tris is actually a really boring POV. She is hopelessly caught up in trying to get accepted into her faction, and doesn't care to question the status quo. Her outlook gets a little more interesting in later books.
• The Tobias POV is horrible. It reads with an identical cadence to Tris, like they were the same person inside, and provides absolutely no significant insights or differences in perspective. I found myself often having to flick back to see which POV I was reading.
• The Bureau and genetic purity backstory is really weak and just not that interesting.

3 stars.

The Men Who Stare At Goats by Jon Ronson (2 stars)

This book tries to create ironic comedy from almost-plausible non-fiction journalism. I didn't find it all that funny, but it did prompt an occasional smile about the ridiculousness of the interviews and the mental image of someone trying to stare a hamster to death.

The 'journalism' is basically a sham, so don't expect a hard-hitting exposé. The source material is mostly interviews with people who are either insane or just doing some great trolling. I get that it's supposed to be dry humour, but I think it errs a little bit too much on the side of non-fiction for this approach to actually work properly. If Ronson took himself a lot less seriously then I think it would have been a lot more funny.

The strangest and most surprising part of the book is when it crosses the line from silly shenanigans to much darker conspiracy theories about links to real-world events like the rock music blared at Manuel Noriega in Panama, 9/11, and torture techniques used at Abu Ghraib prison. Not particularly funny subjects.

Maybe I'll get around to watching the movie one day.

2 stars.

The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt (4.5 stars)

Some books are read and easily forgotten.  This one will stick with me for a long time.  The characters are powerful, the writing is impressive, and Theo's fall through life is heart-wrenching.  It all starts with a single, random, destructive event that will shape Theo's entire life.

It happened in New York, April 10th, fourteen years ago.  (Even my hand balks at the date; I had to push to write it down, just to keep the pen moving on the paper.  It used to be a perfectly ordinary day but now it sticks up on the calendar like a rusty nail.)

The explosion and Theo's escape is brilliantly written.  Tartt captures Theo's confusion, disorientation and desperation with great realism.  Theo's interaction with Welty, and witness of his death had me entranced.  Tartt managed to evoke deep empathy and connection with this man, essentially a stranger, by sharing the intensely personal final moments of his life.

And so begins Theo's fall.  It seems to be arrested fairly quickly as the Barbours step in, but soon takes a turn for the worse as his father appears on the scene.  The sequence of callous actions taken by Theo's father to sell his dead wife's possessions, Theo's failure to fight to keep his new and beautiful friendship with Hobie, and Mrs. Barbour's seeming failure to raise objections to Larry Decker's obvious unsuitability as a parent make for a chilling and depressing turn in the story.

Theo moves into Larry and Xandra's huge empty house in a failed Vegas housing development, befriends misfit Boris, and begins his drug habit.

It seemed like the kind of room where a call girl or a stewardess would be murdered on television.

I found this incredibly hard to read, there's something deeply disturbing about witnessing a promising young life slide inexorably towards disaster.  There reached a point when 14 year old Theo was having a thanksgiving dinner of stolen potato chips and vodka, getting drunk and watching the Macy's Thankgiving Parade with Boris, that I began to despair of there being any good news or a chance for Theo to turn his life around.  Theo and Boris' drug experimentation felt rather Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas on a number of occasions.

"Of course," said Boris, looking less and less like a person every moment, and more like some degraded piece of silver nitrate stock from the 1920s, light shining behind him from some hidden source.

Eventually there's another big change that at least gets him out of Vegas, but his life begins to be ruled by the stolen painting, particularly his fear of discovery and jail-time for the theft.  He's so afraid of Hobie discovering the painting that he only leaves the house in his company and spends most of his time indoors scarcely leaving his room.  Any hope I had that getting out of Vegas would set him back on the right track is soon crushed.

His trauma over the death of his mother, and years of mistreatment and neglect by his father have left him isolated and unable to relate to his peers, even when he does get back to something like normal schooling:

They lived at home with their parents; they worried about things like grade curves and Itailian Abroad and summer internships at the UN; the freaked out if you lit a cigarette in front of them; they were earnest, well-meaning, undamaged, clueless.

For a large part of the novel I found myself floundering around, desperately hoping for the hint of a happy resolution: that Theo and Pippa will be able to make a relationship out of two broken pieces, that Theo could make it as a legitimate antiques dealer.  While this deep emotional connection is the sign of a great novel, it was also intensely depressing and made for some difficult reading.

When Theo takes his ill-conceived trip to Amsterdam with Boris I felt like the person watching the horror movie yelling out "Don't go in there! Turn around!", it was so obviously a terrible idea.  Having said that, I thought the ending was decent, there's some resolution, but not too happy as to be out of character with the rest of the novel.

My main regret is that the details of art forgery and the international art-crime underground weren't explored more, perhaps through Boris' point of view.  The glimpses we got from Theo were fascinating:

Short of black light or lab analysis, much of Hobie's fudging wasn't visible to the naked eye; and though he had a lot of serious collectors coming in, he also had plenty of people who would never know, for instance, that no such thing as a Queen Anne cheval glass was ever made.

A very impressive novel.

4.5 stars.

Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn (4.5 stars)

Let me start by saying that you should just go read this, it's a great novel. Don't read any reviews, don't read the blurb on the back, don't read about the author's other work, just read it with no preconceptions as I did. Now, I'm going to assume you've read it so here come the SPOILERS.

Firstly, I hear a few people are complaining that the major plot twist was too obvious. Honestly, I think this shows poor appreciation for the art that Flynn put into the tone and style of Amy's diary entries. The Amy of the diary was so in love, so puppy-like, so obviously the victim. It never occurred to me, until the reveal, that she was a diabolical sociopath who took great joy in carefully planning the destruction of other people's lives for the slightest perceived infraction. How could it? I think those who picked this twist were spoiled in some way ("there's a huuuuuge twist"), or perhaps familiar with Flynn's writing style from other books. All cues for an unreliable narrator point to Nick, he openly admits lying on a number of occasions, but not what the lies are, making the reader distrust him. In comparison, Amy of the diary seems all the more trustworthy.

The reveal of Andie was masterfully played, and she instantly became my prime suspect. So needy, so incredibly into Nick, that making his pesky wife disappear would be completely plausible. But, I was wrong, and I was relishing the fact that I had completely no idea where this crazy story was going to go next. When I reached Part Two: Boy meets girl and the scope and cunning of Amy's intricate plan is revealed I found it extremely difficult to put the book down.

Once Amy is done telling us how amazingly clever she was, I found myself enjoying the novel less. We watch Amy make some very risky decisions with two down-and-out randoms she finds staying in the mountain cabins. Flynn tells us she's putting on another one of her personas, presumably to fit in, but even if this new persona is a risk-taker the behaviour still seems implausible. She watches news coverage about her own death with strangers, showing little regard for what being recognized will mean for her multi-year husband-destruction project. Inevitably this behaviour leads to crisis, which is good because it would have been pretty boring if she just won the game.

Unfortunately the next sequence with Desi, while interesting, had a number of holes:

• She chooses the worst possible meeting place for someone on the run: a casino, where she is probably captured on dozens of cameras. While Amy isn't carrying an identifiable mobile phone, Desi almost certainly is, and so his movements could be investigated after his murder by looking at cell-phone-tower logs.
• It is very likely that Desi had an alibi for the supposed kidnapping timeframe, but the police seem to never investigate this.
• Pulling off a second perfect murder frame-job without the benefit of a year of pre-planning is exceedingly unlikely, especially when you are a prisoner, and also the number one suspect in the eyes of the police.
• Desi's palatial lake house didn't clean and launder itself. It's likely there were some staff present, or involved peripherally, whose testimony could have weakened Amy's claimed timeline of events.

And the ending. It's almost universally hated, and I have to admit I was a hater at first. But it stuck in my mind, and after some reflection I've come around to respect. Nick makes what seems to be a bizarre choice, feeling trapped by his need to protect an unborn child from his psychotic wife, and a real fear of reprisal for leaving her. It seems unlikely that Amy could pull off another outlandish frame-job, but bad choices are completely consistent with Nick's character. As for Amy, she has finally found a way to manipulate a man into exactly what she wants. Thank god it isn't a hollywood ending where the baddies all get caught and go to jail.

I've focused mostly on plot here, but the writing is magnificent, I'll leave you with some of my favourite quotes:

Ironic people always dissolve when confronted with earnestness, it's their kryptonite.

...

There's something disturbing about recalling a warm memory and feeling utterly cold

...

But there's no app for a bourbon buzz on a warm day in a cool, dark bar. The world will always want a drink.

...

Sleep is like a cat: It only comes to you if you ignore it.

4.5 stars

People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks (4 stars)

This has been on my to-read list forever, I thoroughly enjoyed March, and Year of Wonders was also pretty good. Like Year Of Wonders the historical aspects of the novel are great: and we get to sample all sorts of different time periods following the history of the haggadah.

So why had an illuminator working in Spain, for a Jewish client, in the manner of a European Christian, have used an Iranian paintbrush?

Also, like Year Of Wonders, it suffered from over-dramatisation, in this case in Hannah's modern-day story. A fairly implausible love interest jumps into bed, a big family secret is revealed, and there is a serious car crash, all of which felt like flashy over-played distractions getting in the way of the great historical vignettes. Towards the end of the novel it descended into farce: Hannah is pressured into a completely implausible spy-style mission that involves smuggling items through an airport in a suitcase with a custom-built secret compartment, and then performing a Mission-Impossible-style museum heist. blech.

In comparison, the short stories of the haggadah are fantastic: moving, heart-breaking, and inspiring.

...I have spent many nights, lying awake here in this room, thinking that the haggadah came to Sarajevo for a reason. It was here to test us, to see if there were people who could see that what united us was more than what divided us. That to be a human being matters more than to be a Jew or a Muslim, Catholic or Orthodox.

4 stars.

Dad Is Fat by Jim Gaffigan (4 stars)

Raising my two kids isn't even in the same ballpark as Jim Gaffigan's herculean task of raising five in a two-bedroom apartment in NYC, but I definitely still related to this book in many ways. It made me laugh out loud plenty of times, and I've found myself quoting bits of it to my wife days after finishing the book. If you're a dad, or going to be a dad, this is a great book to read. If you're not, it's probably good birth control. Here's some of my favourite quotes:

As a dad, you are Vice President. You are part of the Executive Branch of the family, but you are the partner with the weaker authority. In your children's eyes, you mostly fulfill a ceremonial role of attending pageants and ordering pizza.

...it wasn't just Jeannie and me; there was a midwife there, which means we believe in witchcraft. Actually, a midwife is a certified medical practitioner. She is not your "extra wife" and will not make you breakfast. I learned this the hard way.

Babies are the worst roommates. They're unemployed. They don't pay rent. The keep insane hours. Their hygiene is horrible. If you had a roommate that did any of the things babies do, you'd ask them to move out.

Nothing in my life has ever been as important as pushing the elevator button is to my three-year-old.

If you're a Jim Gaffigan fan you'll definitely already know some of the material. I watched one youtube video of his standup and recognised quite a few of the jokes. But in-between the jokes, the book is partly a love letter to his wife, and partly thoughtful reflection on parenthood but still in an irreverent style.

Failing and laughing at your own shortcomings are the hallmarks of a sane parent.

4 stars.

The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury (3 stars)

Another sci-fi classic. Except this is less sci-fi, and more social commentary in a series of loosely-linked vignettes that happen to occur on Mars. Some of my favourite moments:

• The Earth Men must be the most unusual human-alien contact story I've ever read, where telepathic Martians frequently project hallucinations about being men from Earth, making it extraordinarily difficult for real men from Earth to be taken seriously.
• The anti-censorship message in Usher II where having read Edgar Allen Poe would have saved various overzealous sensors from death in a recreated House of Usher was a darkly humorous criticism that obviously later grew with Bradbury into Fahrenheit 451.
• In There Will Come Soft Rains I loved the idea of the automated house bravely plugging along after all of humanity has departed. It made me think of NEST Protect giving the smoke warnings, and brave little Roomba's trying to clean up ash even as the house burns down.

I found the idea that every single person on Mars would immediately pack up and depart for Earth after Earth had an entire continent and major cities obliterated by nuclear weapons just preposterous. Bradbury really wanted to show that greed, self-interest, and the worst parts of human nature eventually destroyed both planets, but he needed a better story for the Mars side.

"I was looking for Earthian logic, common sense, good government, peace and responsibility."
"All that up there?"
"No. I didn't find it. It's not there any more. Maybe it'll never be there again. Maybe we fooled ourselves that it was ever there."

Time and publishers have been unkind to this novel. I have two complaints about the kindle edition I read. First, the dates in the chapter headings have been advanced 30 years from the original. According to wikipedia this change occurred with publication of the 1997 edition, ostensibly so that the future was still in the future. I couldn't think of anything more pointless.

More sinister and worrying, the story "Way in the Middle of the Air" was replaced with another, according to Wikipedia because the original story was "less topical in 1997 than in 1950". The original story (which I found and read online) was about African-Americans freeing themselves from racism and servitude in 1950s USA by fleeing to Mars en masse to start again. Replacing it is whitewashing of the worst kind, and couldn't be more ironic in a novel with a strong anti-censorship message.

Definitely some nice ideas here, and an important piece of sci-fi history, but reading it today is more an exercise in understanding the origins of the genre than anything else.

3 stars.

Best of 2013 as read by G

A whole year of sci-fi! Last year China Miéville became one of my favourite authors, Hugh Howey finished the Wool saga strongly, and I dipped my toe into the world of Gene Wolfe, which I didn't exactly enjoy but the stories still seem to be haunting my brain almost a year later.

I read quite a few sci-fi classics last year, but many have aged very poorly and I didn't enjoy them, so I'm done with that and heading in an as-yet-undecided direction for 2014.

The best (5 stars):

• Altered Carbon: A Takeshi Kovacs Novel by Richard K. Morgan
• Embassytown by China Miéville

Special mentions (4.5 stars):

• Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption by Laura Hillenbrand
• Shift Omnibus and Dust by Hugh Howey
• Old Man's War by John Scalzi
• Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson
• The City & The City by China Miéville