The 100 Book Year

Ghosts don’t exist. There’s lots of evidence we can use to support that position – where are the black and Indian ghosts in Britain? Poor people have always died in greater numbers and more tragic circumstances, why are ghosts usually of richer people? Why should the internal emotional state of someone as they die be able to externally determine whether or not they stay on and spook about? If they’re not bound by gravity, (seeing as they float about like intangible jellyfish), why do they appear on the spot on the Earth where they carked it, rather than somewhere in space, several million miles away, which is the actual geographical location that they died and from which the Earth has since tootled away? Ghosts are clearly a load of old ectoplasm. But that said, I do really like a good ghost story, and so does pretty much everyone else. Despite their non-existence, the universality of ghost stories tells us that they’re still meaningful to people even if they’re not real, like the e...

I don't generally read other reviews before I write my own, partly so that I don't bias my own, and partly so that I don't realise I've completely misinterpreted something and feel like Colonel Dummkopf, Grand Leader of the Shit-For-Brains. But a few negative reviews on Goodreads caught my eye, which I found surprising. I think The Three may have suffered for being classified as horror, when in fact it isn't - and if you opened it up expecting horror, I can understand your disappointment. To be clear, there are definitely creepy and horrific moments in here. It's not a light-hearted whimsical romp for children, like Winnie The Pooh or The Shining . But this is more about a grimly-winding tension that gets more unsettling as it goes on, precisely because it refuses to give you the answers you want. More than that, though, it's an exploration of the destructive power of belief. A freak event occurs - four planes go down on the same day, three of ...

Margaret Atwood has got dystopian speculative fiction down . She probably gets up in the morning and chomps on a huge bowl of Dystopios, washed down with a hot cup of speculation. In fact, she's got it so down that in The Heart Goes Last , one of her more recent offerings, the premise feels almost throwaway. It's not that it's not fully-considered, or incomplete - Atwood's world-building is as jam-hot as it ever was. It's more that it feels like she can slot it together with such ease that shocking elements don't even shock her anymore. There's real darkness in this story, but the tone across the book is much lighter than on some of her other works, and that can serve to jar a little. The premise is that society has crumbled (natch) and an authoritarian new semi-socialist system has arisen to combat the cultural rot ( mais oui ). In this, people spend half their lives voluntarily in prison (A.K.A. Positron), and the other half out of it (in Consi...

Across the course of this challenge, I’ve tended to pick authors whom I know are well-respected, or books that have sat on my ‘to read’ list endlessly, gathering dust and weeping like abandoned children. So when I saw Karen Russell’s Vampires in the Lemon Grove winking at me, a book I’ve never heard of by an author I’ve never heard of, but with a frankly excellent title, I thought Are you Abba? Because I’m gonna take a chance on you. I’m delighted that I did. VITLG is a book of short stories, each of which follows a similar form: there’s a weird idea that forms the crux of the plot, and then Russell sets about making it feel fleshed out with believable characters. It would be wrong to call this surrealism, because there’s generally only a single oddity in each story. But it’s also not quite magic realism. It’s somewhere in-between. Or if it is magic realism, it’s 90% realism and 10% magic. It’s on the Murakami road. Let’s be exemplokleptomaniacs and take an example: in on...

It occurs to me that I don’t think I’ve ever read a book set in Yorkshire before. Is there a dearth of Yorkshire authors? Is it cultural – do they get kicked in the ear if they try to publish a story? Or technological – if they sit down at a keyboard does it send electric shocks up their fingers until they submit? Or is it that there are loads of Yorkie writers and books set there, and I am a human dumpling who simply hasn’t read them? Oh god, it’s the last one, isn’t it? As a means of rectifying this minor patheticism, I picked up Elmet by Fiona Mozley. It’s set in West Riding of Yorkshire, where the kingdom of Elmet used to be in ye olde times(e). It’s very much in the present day, but the significance of Elmet as a sort of ‘badlands’ tees up the theme of the book well. Elmet follows a man called John and his children, Cathy and Daniel, through Daniel’s eyes. John is a professional fighter, revered and feared throughout the country for his strength and ability. He's...

I’ve read a few books dealing with black slavery as part of this challenge. It’s interesting how each one looks at it through a slightly different lens, adding slightly different perspectives to the whole picture. In The Long Song , the thing that rings as much through the book as the horror and inhumanity of slavery is the sense of humour between the slaves themselves. It felt odd to laugh out loud while reading this, but there are plenty of times I did. I guess that this in itself is important – humour is an essential and universal human trait, so if we deny the slaves’ humour in recounting their stories, maybe it’s another way of denying their humanity all over again. I tried rewriting this about five times to make me sound less like a pseudo-intellectual jerksack, but this is the best I could do, I’m afraid. Anyway, TLS is set in a Jamaican sugar plantation in the early 19th century, and spans the periods just before and after slavery was abolished in the British Empir...

Okay, so it’s basically my own fault for not properly researching what I was reading. I knew of Anaïs Nin as a writer of fiction and essays, so when I picked up this slim volume of short stories, I thought little of it. But as it turns out, she also wrote erotic literature. I’ve reviewed quite a few graphic novels during this 100 Book Year, but this is my first set of graphic short stories. And by graphic , I don’t mean it has pictures. I took this to read this on the train, and as my misconception became clearer, found myself regularly glancing anxiously at the woman next to me in case she could read the content of the page I was on and now considered me a Public Transport Pervert. It’s important to consider these stories in their proper context. Nin, a complex and controversial character, wrote mostly in the 1940s within a circle of mostly-male literary elite, and sought to find her place at the lead of it. She’s widely considered ground-breaking in the West as a woman writ...