P.G. Wodehouse - Uncle Fred in the Springtime

A particularly rich Blandings novel, complete with multiple impostors, detectives, broken engagements, money troubles, attempted pig thefts and everything you could want, all written as beautifully and wittily as ever. One of his finest.

I saw my GP this morning and went through a whole list of issues that weren't blatantly to do with the chemo ( Read more... )

John Barth - The Book of Ten Nights and a Night

He's one of my half-dozen favourite writers ever, but I found this collection a bit disappointing. He does go to some effort: ten uncollected stories, plus a framing device and one new story, but the frame is another female muse metafiction, which he has done a few times before, and the stories tend to ( Read more... )

That was one of the physically worst nights I've ever experienced ( Read more... )

Carlos Ruiz Zafon - The Shadow of the Wind

This has a lot wrong with it: some cliched writing (possibly down to the translator), but mainly it cheats in unconvincing ways. It's a gradually revealed gothic mystery set from the end of WWI into Franco's fascist Spain of the '50s. We get lengthy revelations in implausible circumstances, often featuring ( Read more... )

Black Jack 14 by Osamu Tezuka

Nothing new to say about this series: maybe the best short stories ever in comics, all based around a rogue surgeon, by arguably the greatest cartoonist ever. A constant, total delight, with real knowledge of his subject (Tezuka qualified as a doctor while his manga career got going) and incomparable humanity behind it ( Read more... )

Nicola Barker - Clear

An extraordinary novel, based around characters who observe David Blaine's 44 days in a transparent box. As ever, her characters are unlike anyone else's, making a complex web of entirely original interactions. The jacket calls her "perhaps the most gifted young English female writer at work today" - I think I'd take out 'young ( Read more... )

Blazing Combat by Archie Goodwin and lots of artists

This 1965 Warren series was short-lived because of its anti-war tone, but it can be put beside Kurtzman's EC war comics without looking embarrassed. Apart from the odd bit of clumsiness, Goodwin's writing is tense and strong and varied, and the art is mostly great. Three Toth stories are the ( Read more... )

Philip K. Dick - The Variable Man

One of my favourite collections of stories ever. They are longish, 5 in 220 pages, and three are magnificent. The title story is about an odd-job man from 1913 being accidentally pulled into the midst of a 22nd Century interstellar war - and suddenly the computed stats and odds go wild. The next two have something ( Read more... )

The Outfit by Darwyn Cooke

I can't better Richard Baez's excellent FA review of this, so I won't try, but I enjoyed it enormously.