Book list from January to April

The Buried Age by Christopher L Bennett. A Star Trek book, set just before TNG. Picard has just lost his first ship in an encounter with the Ferengi, and has a few years to fill before stepping onto the Enterprise. Bennett fills that gap with a plausible storyline and interesting SF ideas. The characters are true to themselves, with lots of insights into how they became the people we're familiar with from the TV series. There are fun cameos from every major TNG character. All of it is true to canon. It must have taken Bennett ages to work out how to fit it all together so neatly. I was glad to have read this particular Star Trek book but, having glanced at the blurbs for a few others, I don't think I'll be bothering with any more. This one is apparently quite unusual. Good, though, if you like this kind of thing (which I do). Except that I noticed halfway through that he kept making characters smirk at each other. It's a noticeable word. The first smirk stood out. The second smirk leapt out. The third smirk made me laugh out loud. I stopped counting after that.

Angela Carter's Book of Fairy Tales. A collection of fairy tales taken from all over the world, focussing on female protagonists. So many of these tales are about stepmothers being cruel to stepdaughters, it made me realise what life must have been like for women when childbirth was so dangerous. You'd be lucky to have the same mother for the whole of your childhood and adolescence. You'd be lucky to survive labour. If you were a man then finding another woman to rear your children would be of prime importance, no matter how unappealing she might be. Horrible situations. Thank goodness for progress. Thank goodness for proper standards of hygiene during childbirth.

Dombey and Son by Charles Dickens. I started reading this in December, after hearing a couple of episodes of the Radio 4 serialisation. I normally get very impatient with Dickens, and in fact I did nearly throw this book across the room a couple of times: his female characters are sometimes unbelievably saintly. However, it also made me cry on no less than three separate occasions, and I loved the ending. Loved it to bits. I spent most of the book thinking "there's only one way this can end, and it's going to be messy and unpleasant", but he took it in another direction entirely and I was left completely satisfied.

Resistance by J M Dillard. A rubbish, bad, not good at all Star Trek novel, set after the last (also rubbish, bad, not good at all) film. The writer lost me early on when he had Captain Picard happily overseeing the dismantling of B4 (a Data-like android), so that it could be sent to Starfleet HQ for further analysis. After all those episodes where the Trek writers were at pains to show that Data had equal rights with humans, and that it was Picard who championed those rights -- to have him now acting as if those rights had never been established... So the writer lost me. And they further lost me with the naff prose and unmemorable plot.

How Much For Just The Planet? by John M Ford. What a mad book. I might have understood it better if I knew more Gilbert & Sullivan operettas. Occasionally the characters burst into song (but, this being only a paperback novel, there was no tune printed, just the words, and you had to work out what the tune was from the metre of the lyrics -- I hardly ever managed to do this). Funny to have Kirk and Spock and McCoy and the rest getting caught up in a farce and a costume drama and a fairytale all at the same time. With extra Klingons!

The Ode Less Travelled by Stephen Fry. Another re-read, to give me some ideas for structure with the poem I wrote for this year's Braaid Eisteddfod.

Odd and the Frost Giants by Neil Gaiman. He wrote this for free, for World Book Day. It's only short, but the story doesn't feel curtailed or rushed or thin. I don't know how he managed to do that. It's packed full of suggestion, and growing, and revelations about people and growing up and expectations, with Norse mythology underpinning everything. And the pictures are good, too.

The Farseer Trilogy, The Liveship Trilogy, and The Tawny Man Trilogy by Robin Hobb. Comfort re-reads during my busy practice/rehearsal/festival month. There are so many things to love about these books (if you're predisposed to like fantasy). The plots are pleasingly convoluted, yet grounded in the characters. The characters themselves are fully-rounded, all full of flaws and bright spots, all with their own agendas, all acting as though they're the hero of the tale. In fact, the Liveship books seem to be an exercise in how to write a fantasy trilogy with no bad guys. Or at least, with no Evil Overlord. There are bad people there, but they all have their reasons for being bad, and actually they're all trying to be as good as they can be. It's interesting. The only weak points in the Liveship books are the bits involving the Chalcedeans, who seem to be entirely bad in every way -- a civilisation founded on slavery and abduction, and shockingly sexist too. There's no explanation for the Chalcedeans' evil ways, which makes them appear two-dimensional compared to everyone else in the cast. Anyway, yes, plot and character = excellent. And the world-building is great too. Everything fits together very well, and I love seeing how the different cultures view themselves and each other. It's believable, which is surprising for a sequence that features, among other things, dragons, telepathy, and ships that are alive but also dead at the same time. The thing that annoys me -- and it annoys me every time I read Hobb's books -- is the needless repetition of facts. Sometimes it's small facts, like the colour of someone's eyes; I don't need to know that they're pale blue every time they blink. Sometimes it's large facts, like how women in Bingtown are expected just to look pretty and produce children. The books are long, so perhaps there's some concern from either the author or the publisher that people will forget the important facts from one long section to another. But the books would be significantly shorter without the repetition! Oh well. They're good, anyway. It just saddens me that they could've been really incredibly amazingly good, with a little less padding.

Slam by Nick Hornby. Very enjoyable, as all this books seem to be. It's the same male character that you find in any Nick Hornby book, though. Likeable, but selfish. In touch with his own feelings, but not in touch with the feelings of the women around him. This one has an interesting conceit of occasional time travel (short jumps into a potential future). I liked how it managed to be both entertaining and cautionary about teenage pregnancy.

The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin. Another re-read. I can tell that I'm going to keep coming back to this book regularly for the rest of my life. It makes me look with clearer eyes at all the social transactions I normally take for granted.

Magic For Beginners by Kelly Link. A collection of short, spooky, quirky, magical, zombie-filled, uncanny stories. It took me a while to finish this because each story was so unsettling that I had to read something light and trivial immediately afterwards (see all the Trek and children's books in this list for said light and trivial reading matter). The stone rabbits were creepy. The coin-filled cat-skins made me too afraid to turn the light out and go to sleep. The sad, sad zombies. The difficulties that crop up when the dead marry the living. Normally I dislike short stories, because it's often too easy to spot where they're heading, but I couldn't foresee the conclusion to any of these.

I Am Legend by Richard Matheson. I saw the film. I nearly threw up because of the hand-held camera bits (which is why I didn't go to see Cloverfield), but even with that I was still mesmerised by the first half. All the scenes that involved just Will Smith's character and his dog were so heart-breaking. Then they spoilt it all by having really bad CGI monsters, and an ending that felt like it was for a different film altogether (the other ending is closer to the spirit of the book, but still marred by the awful CGI. They should've used actors for the vampires). I suspected that the "one man and his dog" bits were probably the truest to the original story, so I borrowed the book off a friend. It's not much like the film at all. The vampires are not unintelligent, incommunicative monsters. The dog is not his constant, loyal companion from the pre-plague days. But he does have lots of loneliness/madness-related issues. And the ending makes a lot more sense, especially in light of the story's title.

Charlie Bone and the Blue Boa, ...and the Castle of Mirrors, ...and the Hidden King, and ...and the Wilderness Wolf by Jenny Nimmo. Another apparently unending children's series. She just solves one mystery (the main one being how Charlie could be so obtuse as to not realise who his father was in the very first book) and you think it's all about to be wrapped up, when another mystery is plonked in the middle of the story. With extra jeopardy for all the good guys. I'm reading these because my little brother likes them.

Me Talk Pretty Some Day by David Sedaris. I've read this a few times before. It's just a collection of funny stories from Sedaris's life. The best chapters are the ones about learning to speak French. And the best one of those chapters is the one where everyone tries to explain (badly, in pidgin French) what Easter is.

The Pinhoe Egg, The Nine Lives of Christopher Chant, and The Game by Diana Wynne Jones. All re-reads, and all, being by DWJ, perfect as far as I am concerned. Everyone should read all of DWJ's books. It'd make the world a better place.