Currently reading this:






The blurb:



Interesting to read about traditions, their origins, etc. (And the possible origins of the word “sirloin”). As for anyone who says the commercialisation of Christmas is a modern phenomena, well judging by the facts here, the commercialisation of Christmas goes back centuries.

Shakespeare For Squirrels by Christopher Moore

Pocket, the Fool, is back along with Drool and Jeff (though not for much of the book).  And this time he's invading A Midsummer Night's Dream.  Set adrift by the pirate crew he was with at the end of Serpent of Venice, Pocket and his side-kicks wash ashore in Greece and in to the various machinations of Theseus, Titania, Oberon, The Puck and into the bed of Cobweb.  

Moore's Shakespeare books tend to be a bit raunchier and manic than his Pine Cove books and this is no exception.  Pocket is just as adept at a dirty insult as he is in higher forms of wordplay.  Moore does a nice job of shining the spotlight on some of the lesser characters of the Bard's masterpiece of comedy, particularly the fairies.  

Fun stuff as usual from Moore and a nice rebound from Noir, which was more than a bit disappointing. 

After the Revolution
Robert Evans, 2021


Thematically quite similar to the book I wrote about in the preceding post. It's set in the 2040s, after a cataclysmic revolution that tore the US apart into a number of independent(-ish) countries; a sort of rump US still exists in the northeast, while the South, Texas, California, etc. are now independent. All of the action here takes place in Texas, where a militant Christian movement called the Heavenly Kingdom has taken over big swaths of the state and is advancing toward Austin. The story is told from the point of view of three characters: Manny, a fixer/production assistant who helps out-of-state media crews; Sasha, a high-school senior who runs away from home to join the Heavenly Kingdom after being converted online; and Roland, a former military special ops soldier who is basically an unkillable cyborg.
For a debut novel, this fantastically well-written. Evans incorporates a lot of socio-political themes here, but first and foremost it's just a really gripping story. I should not that I wrote in a little greater detail about this and the preceding book elsewhere (a little shameless self-promotion on my part, here's the link). If you're interested in After the Revolution in particular, follow the links I included in that article - as it's available online as a free e-book.

The Sixth Directorate
Joseph Hone, 1975

The cover blurb describing this one as “Fast, sophisticated, splendidly authentic” gives me pause. I suppose it is sophisticated and probably somewhat authentic, but fast it is not – in fact, the pace throughout most of the book is downright plodding.
The main character is a poor sap named Peter Marlow (the main character in several of Hone’s spy novels) who is in prison when we first meet him, having served four years of a 20-year sentence for treason – for which he was set up. He’s visited by a high official in British intelligence who offers him the opportunity to get out and secure a pardon. All he has to do is pretend to be a deep-cover mole in the British civil service working for a faction within the KGB who had just received a posting at the UN in New York (the actual double-agent had just been apprehended and apparently spilled everything he knew). That, by the way, only happens about a quarter of the way through the book. Before that, there is a metric ton of set-up, in which we learn, among other things, that there’s a super-secret faction inside the KGB itself that’s trying to subvert the Soviet system from within and apparently make the regime less authoritarian and more true to its Marxist idealist roots. This is the mysterious ‘sixth directorate’ of the title. Hone incorporates a number of real life figures as characters, such as then KGB chief Yuri Andropov and his number two man Alexander Sakharovsky, and high-profile British defector Kim Philby even makes a brief appearance.
If I could use one word to describe this book, it would be overwritten. The basic set-up as described is intriguing, and some equally intriguing themes are explored – mainly the psychological toll that engaging in so much deception and subterfuge might have on people, to the point that you don’t know who to trust and what’s real (themes that Philip Dick approached from different angles in his SF novels). However, Hone spends way too much time on lengthy descriptions and exposition, often in sections with Marlow’s first-person narration – I get the impression he was trying to mimic Graham Greene’s style, but really missed the mark. I lost interest in the story about halfway through and really had to force myself to get to the end. There are, however, some occasionally amusing turns of phrase, like this description of the book’s female lead by another character: “(a) jet-set girl in a suede overcoat and dark glasses with that butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-my-mouth American face.”

I agree that the series dropped somewhere in the middle but I thought it picked up again after a while, though I'm not 100% sure when now, it's been so lomg since I read those books. Looking at the goodreads descriptions, it might have been Choice of Evil that I felt was a return to form. I don't know if the series ever quite made it back to the level of the early years, but I definitely felt there was an improvement. And for myself, even the weakest instalments were still emininently readable.

I've read only two non-Burke books and thought they were both first rate: Two Trains Running, set in the 1950s, and Shella. The latter in particular can stand with the best of the Burke series, IMO.

Heads to the Storm
Edited by David Drake and Sandra Miesel

This was a library book sale pick up I didn't look at too closely... it had a host of great authors, and that cover was really intriguing. What isn't prominent is the 'Tribute to Rudyard Kipling' part.

It is a true tribute each story includes a couple pages from the author about what they thought about Kipling, or the influence he had, etc. Interesting stuff, as I've not really ever read anything by him.

The only problem is the stories are just not good. Boring, mostly. A few try to be sad, but don't invest you enough to really make it mean anything, while a couple others sacrifice what I expect is meant to imitate Kipling's style without providing any substance. It also includes to Kipling short stories, both of which were similarly boring.

The best entry by far was 'Lucifer' by Roger Zelazny.. which would make a great Twilight Zone episode.

It definitely made me realize I have no need to read anything by Kipling, though, so that's good

I'm exactly the opposite with both Dickens and Kipling: I enjoy them as much for their prose style as for the content. I'm a big fan of 19th century writing in general.

Speaking of the Jungle Books, I reccommend to anyone interested to try to find an edition that contains a story titled In the Rukh. It wasn't actually part of the Jungle Books but it was in fact the first Mowgli story ever published and as such is sometimes included as an appendix. The Oxford paperback edition has it, for example. What's interesting is that it features Mowgli as an adult, after he has left the jungle and is trying to live amongst his fellow human beings. Mowgli is a supporting character, the story isn't told from his POV, and thus Kipling is able to convey the sense of uncanniness such an individual might elicit if he existed in the real world.