Hello St Marks

Bill Bryson's books line up in two rows. The romping travel yarns (I've read all of those) and the smart, tricky books (I've read none). I see a pattern appearing. 'Shakespeare', offered to me by a chap at work, was a lovely surprise. Did you know Shakespeare introduced the words critical, horrid, lonely, eventful and zany into the English language, and about 2030 others? Insultment, bepray and exsufflicate failed to take hold, but it was a very good effort in any case. One fell swoop, the milk of human kindness, cold comfort, foregone conclusion ... all Shakespeare. Or Shakspeare, or Shakspere - the one spelling WS never used himself is the one we now assume is correct. Bill Bryson seems to have a real fondness for the dedicated and often madly obsessed scholars who daily add to the vast weight of reflection about WS, but the theme of Bill's slim volume is how little there is truly known in the details of WS's life. I keep going back to one line: "O...

Three books of fluff, inhaled at speed this month: 'Visible Panty Line' by Gretel Killeen. Thumbs up to Gretel, she wrote a whole book from beginning to end and some of it is very funny. 'Endymion Spring' by Matthew Skelton. Conventional YA fantasy set in 21st and 15th century Oxford; books infused with timeless power, accessible only to children pure of heart, etc. The Oxford setting suggests Philip Pulman but it's nowhere near as dense, beautiful and black. The book-theme is very like Cornelia Funke's 'Inkheart' but the adult characters are flimsy. It's typical of the many fat fantasies populating the bookshelves of childrens's bookstores; perfectly good and entirely predictable, but then, I'm not 12. Stephanie Meyer's 'The Host' was a surprise. I'd read 'Twilight' and set it behind me with some embarassment not intending to read more, then I heard Nancy Pearl's podcast interview with Stephanie Meyer and I was se...

Amanda Lohrey taught writing at UTS; she might even have taught me. The careful construction and extended metaphors I remember from university writing courses are there in 'The Philosophers Doll', beautifully rendered, of course, but even so. I rushed the first quarter of this novel to see if it would relax, and it did. The book is about an unplanned pregnancy, in a marriage between a social worker and a philosopher. There's a painful, slow progression of misunderstandings and foolish decisions and stupid silences with my mental commentary running: 'just tell him now ', 'just explain it properly for heaven's sake'. Then there's a structural flipflop, the narrative voice changes, the time frame shifts, and the last third of the book is teriffic.

It's bloody hard to keep up with this. 'Orbital Resonance' (John Barnes) is a neatly shaped, engaging, tidy sci fi: post Collapse, a generation of spaceborn kids grows super-fast to maturity, socially engineered for coherance and high achievement. It's a closed society, manufactured but rational, calm and appealing. The input of a Earth-born teenager dirties up the social pool, plots are uncovered and untidily resolved. It's a great read, and modestly scaled (scoring high on my current number 1 measure). John Barnes wrote 'Mother of Storms', a personal fave from a decade or so ago, about extreme weather and global catastrophe, which has moved from whimsical to topical in the recent decade.

Lynne Reid Banks has the aura of high school library to me and I loosely link her with the politically correct, earnest novels I didn't want to read when I was at high school. (The power of Google: she wrote 'One More River', which I did read in school, about a friendship across the religious divide in Israel.) 'The L Shaped Room' is slim, modest and beautifully shaped adult novel, but with the economy of scale and ambition which you used to see in young adult novels (but not anymore; today's YA novels are morbidly obese, but that's another story). 'The L Shaped Room' is about a pregnancy out of wedlock when that mattered a great deal; Jane is thrown out of home, finds a bedsit in a hovel and tries to carry on, filled with desperate selfloathing and denial. She reluctantly allows herself to be befriended by her neighbours, carries on working, builds a nest and grows up. It's beautiful to read because there's no high drama to the story, Jane i...