On Basilisk Station, David Weber

"HONOR HARRINGTON

Having made him look a fool, she's been exiled to Basilisk Station in disgrace and set up for ruin by a superior who hates her.

Her demoralized crew blames her for their ship's humiliating posting to an out-of-the-way picket station.

The aborigines of the system's only habitable planet are smoking homicide-inducing hallucinogens.

Parliament isn't sure it wants to keep the place; the major local industry is smuggling; the merchant cartels want her head; the star-conquering, so-called "Republic" of Haven is Up To Something; and Honor Harrington has a single, over-age light cruiser with an armament that doesn't work to police the entire star system.

But the people out to get her have made one mistake. They've made her mad."

I've long wanted to read David Weber's 'Honor Series'; it's ubiquity in some form or another in charity shops points to a wide fanbase, but until recently I never found a copy of the first in the series, 'On Basilik Station'. It was well worth the wait, and I'm very keen to read the next book.

The Baen business model is fascinating, and their commitment to freeshare books is one that's exceptional in its fairness and earned scruples. The first half dozen books in the series are currently available online to read for free, or to download to Kindle for a pittance. It allows new readers to get into the series easily, and the accessibility encourages hooked readers to continue reading by picking up a full price book.

This is an excellent idea, and for a series that is currently pushing 15 books, an easy way to entice readers into commiting to a series without breaking their bank account. It also allows for Bain to see the interest levels in their stories.

It helps that the books are fantastic, a roaring alternative to Sharpe or Hornblower set in the far future, but with a tactical and military side that does a far better job of recognizing the range and scale of space conflict than almost any other book I've read, aside from maybe Iain M Banks' Culture novels.

Honor herself is a wonderful character, a strong female protagonist with a novel back story and charisma, charm and chutzpah in spades. The villains are unsubtley written, as is the case for almost all books of this style, but that's part of the fun - and fun it is, to an almost ridiculous degree.

Also Try:
David Weber, On Basilisk Station - http://www.baenebooks.com/p-304-on-basilisk-station.aspx
Iain M. Banks, Player of Games
Orson Scott Card, Ender's Game

America Alone; The End Of The World As We Know It, Mark Steyn

"It's the end of the world as we know it...Someday soon, you might wake up to the call to prayer from a muezzin. Europeans already are. And liberals will still tell you that "diversity is our strength"--while Talibanic enforcers cruise Greenwich Village burning books and barber shops, the Supreme Court decides sharia law doesn't violate the "separation of church and state," and the Hollywood Left decides to give up on gay rights in favor of the much safer charms of polygamy. If you think this can't happen, you haven't been paying attention, as the hilarious, provocative, and brilliant Mark Steyn shows to devastating effect. The future, as Steyn shows, belongs to the fecund and the confident. And the Islamists are both, while the West is looking ever more like the ruins of a civilization. But America can survive, prosper, and defend its freedom only if it continues to believe in itself, in the sturdier virtues of self-reliance (not government), in the centrality of family, and in the conviction that our country really is the world's last best hope."

Mark Steyn's America Alone is the kind of book that I pick up every now and then and read in the same way Southern schools approach creationism and evolution; it's reading the controversy, Frankly, if the above quote doesn't represent it enough, American Alone is a brilliantly though out, well argued and utterly incorrect assertion that Islam is on an unstoppable path to taking over Europe and the world.

There's so much wrong about this that even the stuff that's genuinely interesting and important can be ignored; the work on demographics, and attempt to get beyond the stale arguments between conservative and liberals about Islam to talk about what Islam itself believes is good, but too often if becomes bogged down in reactionary dogma and xenophobic spite.

If you've seen Affleck vs Maher recently, you'll know the thrust of the argument; Islam is a threat not just to conervative ideology but liberal too, there's more of them every year and less of us, and sooner of later their ideas win democratically because they can muster the only voices. It all relies on an us-them attitude, and ignores pretty much anything on progressive or liberal voices within Islam, but it's an argument that seems to be growing in popularity and prominence.

It's worth reading then, if only to be able to refute it, and to quote it in disbelief to incredulous friends.

Also Try:
This American Life: A Not So Simple Majority; http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/534/a-not-so-simple-majority

Blankets, Craig Thompson

"At 592 pages, Blankets may well be the single largest graphic novel ever published without being serialized first. Wrapped in the landscape of a blustery Wisconsin winter, Blankets explores the sibling rivalry of two brothers growing up in the isolated country, and the budding romance of two coming-of-age lovers. A tale of security and discovery, of playfulness and tragedy, of a fall from grace and the origins of faith. A profound and utterly beautiful work from Craig Thompson."







Blankets is the exact kind of book that libraries were made for; a sweepingly original, beautiful and heartfelt novel of teenage love, loss and identity that I would never ever pick up but which is utterly wonderful.

Blankets is tonally atypical of almost anything else out there, working as much as a late teen reimagining of Calvin and Hobbes or a less magical-realism Scott Pilgrim. Both of these featured protagonists stuck in their own heads, and Thompson's autobiographical tale is sweetly familiar for this. The constantly present snow covers up as much as he reveals with Blankets, but it's not just art school drawing and introspection, as there's a throughline of humour that he mines to great effect, with one passage in particular, of Thompson and his brother pretending to pee on one another leaving me in stitches.

It's maybe more funny in context.

This is a medium-pushing work, a book with heft and weight beyond just its size. This is a far more important, refreshing and thoughtful work about being a teenager than Catcher in the Rye could ever hope to be,

Also Try;
Daniel Clowes, Ghostworld
Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes
Bryan Lee O'Malley, Scott Pilgrim

How Not To Be American: Misadventures in the Land of the Free, Tood McEwen

"'This new American uniform - the baseball cap, t-shirt, shorts and trainers (why not a scooter?) is not about looking good. It's about disappearing into a new, unofficial, global army of cultural babies. It says: I eat hamburgers and watch TV and chew gum all day, I want everyone to play my game, You have to be nice to me and if you're not I'm gonna shoot you, I can't understand a word you say… and what is that but American foreign policy?' Todd McEwen left the United States in 1980, but it's still driving him crazy. He worries about cheeseburgers, Cary Grant, Henry David Thoreau, democracy, the Elks Club and Daffy Duck. Join him on his acid-reflux examination of what America has come to be."




I approached this anticipating an American version of the anthropology, or at least quasi-anthropology, of something like Kate Fox or Bill Bryson. It's really, really not, Instead, it's McEwen's own take on an autobiography, closer to a series of essays and thoughts on subjects from Cary Grant's suit to california politics.

At one point there's a surrealist dream sequence piece.

It's hella weird, and the schtick gets old well before it ends, with the roughly 60% that's really good being heavily outweighed by the stuff that really isn't.

And it definitively doesn't explain how not be American.

Also Try:
Bill Bryson, A Walk in the Woods
Kate Fox, Watching the English
Barack Obama, Audacity of Hope

The Catcher in the Rye, J. D. Salinger

"Anyone who has read J. D. Salinger's New Yorker stories - particularly A Perfect Day for Bananafish, Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut, The Laughing Man, and For Esme - With Love and Squalor, will not be surprised by the fact that his first novel is full of children. The hero-narrator of The Catcher in the Rye is an ancient child of sixteen, a native New Yorker named Holden Caulfield. Through circumstances that tend to preclude adult, secondhand description, he leaves his prep school in Pennsylvania and goes underground in New York City for three days. The boy himself is at once too simple and too complex for us to make any final comment about him or his story. Perhaps the safest thing we can say about Holden is that he was born in the world not just strongly attracted to beauty but, almost, hopelessly impaled on it. There are many voices in this novel: children's voices, adult voices, underground voices-but Holden's voice is the most eloquent of all. Transcending his own vernacular, yet remaining marvelously faithful to it, he issues a perfectly articulated cry of mixed pain and pleasure. However, like most lovers and clowns and poets of the higher orders, he keeps most of the pain to, and for, himself. The pleasure he gives away, or sets aside, with all his heart. It is there for the reader who can handle it to keep."


The so called 'teen bible', Catcher in the Rye is often branded as the most important and true-to-youth book ever written, which makes coming to it as an adult potentially the wrong way to do it. It's easy to see why teens love it, it is utterly a teen novel, in the sense that it's meandering, boring and more impressed with itself than it should be.

It is a relentlessly teen read; a book that so thoroughly nails the self-important conceit of being young and certain that you're better than everyone else. Everything from his distaste of the phony's that surround him, to the disinterest in his education and future make Holden's voice uniquely and authentically spot-on.

Unfortunately, you would be better off skipping it, as that same authenticity makes it virtually impossible to like him. He's an unrepentent little dick; the kind of kid whose self-satisfied selfishness is the attitude you hope people will leave behind when they become adults but which, judging by his popularity with killers, some people sadly don't. Like The Great Gatsby, it's a wonderfully constructed portrait of someone you probably want to spend as little time as possible actually in the company of.

To put it into contest; Lord of the Flies is a great book, but would you want to hang out with or emulate the kids from that?

Also Try:
Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games
Charlie Higson, The Enemy
William Golding, Lord of the Flies

Prime Minister Portillo and other things that never happened, various

"What if Lenin's train had crashed on the way to the Finland Station? Lee Harvey Oswald had missed? Lord Halifax had become Prime Minister in 1940 instead of Churchill? In this diverting and thought-provoking book of counter-factuals a collection of distinguished commentators consider how things might have been."









I find these non-fiction 'What if?' books slightly sad, as they work as neither a truly good history book, or as a work of historical fiction. This is compounded by a mixed bag of authors, who range from those catalogueing slight alterations to full blown changes in the timeline, in a variety of styles, with varying degrees of success.

One of the big issues is that very few of these imagine a world changed all that much by the alterations they describe; most are obscure, or at least historically distant, enough that it's hard to see how a revitalised party or individual could have impacted more. Even greater changes, like JFK surviving or Churchill being passed over for Halifax engender only slight fluctuations - legislation passes slower, or the pace of the war moves differently, with the same fixed outcome.

It's a very Fukuyama-esque book, where the outcome we currently have is seemingly all that's possible. Compare and contrast to real works of speculative history, such as Harry Turtledove, and the difference is huge.

Often dry, sometimes interesting, but only fitfully worth dipping into, this is a book more for the writers than the readers, and is best passed over in favour of better offerings.

Also Try;

Robert Harris, Fatherland

Eric Flint; 1631

Harry Turtledove, Guns of the South

Code Monkey Save World, Greg Pak and Jonathan Coulton

"A put-upon coding monkey teams up with a seething, lovelorn super-villain to fight robots, office worker zombies, and maybe even each other as they struggle to impress the amazing women for whom they fruitlessly long. Based on the songs of internet superstar musician Jonathan Coulton."

I picked this up from Kickstarter on the strength of being a fan of both Jonathan Coulton, on whose songs the book is based, and Greg Pak, the writer of the story. Growing out of a Twitter conversation between the two about how cool it would be to use the former's songs to create a interconnected Universe, the four issue comic series was hugely succesful and includes a number of extra's, including illustrated song lyrics, mini-comics and throwaway joke panels, as well as sample art from Takeshi Miyazawa.

The story is perfunctory, and serves more as a way of introducing the concepts and themes of Coulton's songs. This can take it in some weird directions, but it doesn't have the scope to do anything more than reference and move along, leaving it a little lost when it tries for epic scale (which, considering it features space war, robot invasions, zombie uprisings and multiple supervillains, is a frequent occurrence).

It's not bad, but it isn't the home run I had hoped for. The art though is lovely, and Code Monkey in particular is wonderfully drawn, with Miyazawa pencilling an expressiveness to every character that's a real treat.

Also Try:
Greg Pak, Incredible Hercules
Bryan Lee O'Malley, Scott Pilgrim