Hello St Marks

Here's the joy of second hand bookstores, well proven. I would never have bought Dan Simmon's 'The Terror' in a bookstore - it's a block of a thing, 935 pages, horror title, gory splat of blood on the cover, and I've never heard of him. But in the low-risk world of a second-hand bookstore, I was seduced by two things: it's about the Franklin expedition to find the North-West Passage in the mid 1800s, and Stephen King declares on the cover: "I am in awe of Dan Simmons", which, perhaps oddly, I find persuasive. This is a teriffic book. I was thoroughly engrossed and felt bereft when it was finished. The Franklin expedition was a well-equipped pair of boats, 130 British naval men and marines, the height of seafaring technology of its time. The expedition was lost. Rescue expeditions eventually found traces of the Franklin effort, and it is generally thought that the crew was icebound for 3 winters, savaged by starvation, scurvy, lead poisoning and bot...

Just filling in time with this one, a perfectly amiable and engaging fantasy about a newly trained wizard caught up in royal shenanigans, 'The Accidental Sorcerer' by K E Mills. The conceit is that wizarding is a straightforward profession aquired via correspondence course. Gerald Dunwoody (Wizard, Third Class) is unhappily employed as a probationary compliance offer, Department of Thaumaturgy, with wizarding yet to meet his expectations. He stumbles on a nasty incident in a Staff factory, sorts it out, blows everything up and so discovers greater powers within himself that anyone suspected, etc. The blurb calls it "Harry Potter for grown ups", which is about right. NEXUS declared it "unputdownable", which was very kind.

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...

K J Parker wrote 'The Fencer Trilogy' containing, at the end of the second volume, one of the most startlingly unexpected and horribly upsetting plot developments I've read (I won't tell), so it's hard to explain why I read the third volume, let alone this new book. K J writes fantasy, sort of, but with no magic, no elves and dwarves and talking trees, no quests or golden orbs, and almost no women. I picked up The Company' because it said on the blurb that it was 'a stand-alone book' and I can't bring myself to embark on another bulky series. I've just given up on Kevin Anderson's mega series (Saga of the Gods/War of the Endless Saga, something like that) at half way through book 5 because I happened to see book 7 arrive in the bookstore. Book 7, each with the heft of a housebrick, and it's not done yet. Barely forgivable if it was worth it, but Anderson doesn't appear to have an editor and these wretched books are pockmarked with rep...

I've been caught in a bog with this book, stuck fast and exhausted by it. 'The Daughters of Moab' by Kim Westwood, has excellent credentials: Australian science fiction, post-apocalyptic near-future, set in the outback, female protagonists... you'd think it had been written for me. Starts well. Nine years after Tribulation with the climate in turmoil, toxins rising from fissures in the earth and a murderous sun, the nutty Followers of Nathaniel have imprisoned the suspiciously healthy Daughers of Moab to drain them of their remarkable blood. They're not mad, just daft and isolated to distraction in an island of desert. The Daughters are all genetically modified transfects, part human, part dingo, eel, kangaroo, at the beginning of a bizarre evolution. A bold Daughter escapes, a rogue Nathaniel with farmer's blood aids her, and from there on in the story was all but incomprehensible. The language was beautiful, fluid and obscure: "Oliver, endowed with roach-...

Kate Jennings is an Australian living in New York, making a living by writing. I read her second novel, 'Moral Hazard', back in 2003 and loved it. It's about business writing and slow grief, transparently fictionalised from her experience of losing her husband to Alzheimers and sinking into the moral vacuum of business writing for a big NY bank to fund his medical care. It was a slim book, and reminded me of Helen Garner, which is high praise. So this new book, 'Stanley and Sophie', was an unexpected treat, a memoir about recovery and dogs. Kate finds herself the owner of a border terrier, which is a very particular kind of dog, and she falls in love with this sparky pup and sinks into dogworld. Life in NY post 9/11 is filtered through her love for Stanley and the domestic details of a writer's life, with dog. Her story of Stanley is adorable and I loved reading it; then she gets another terrier, Sophie, and life gets doggier and complicated. Kate's life dis...