Be Excellent To Each Other

9.Disaster, Inc by Caimh McDonnell

A private detective uncovers a massive investment scam.

It's been a while since a novel's made me laugh out loud in a public space but this tale of crime and conspiracy had me doing so several times. Great fun, and now I'm keen to read more of this series.

10.) Decoy - Dudley Pope
Mostly a fun WWII naval adventure, scattered with bits of annoying exposition and technical details that suggest Mr Pope had no confidence in his audience's ability to understand 1940s cryptography. Pope apparently spent 2 weeks in a lifeboat after being torpedoed in WWII, and you get the impression that some of this story was a bit close to home for him. He does not like the Board of Trade, and has very strong feelings regarding life jacket design and safety inspections.

11.) Paths of Glory: The French Army, 1914-18 - Anthony Clayton
A short book that covers all of World War I, so it's pretty high level. Your poor old poilus had a rougher time of it in the trenches than his Tommy counterpart, with more politics and worse supplies and support, as well as having to wear red trousers and use a crummy rifle. It's made me want to read more about the French mutinies, as it seems the whole army wasn't that far from just falling apart - not altogether surprising, seeing how much shit the entire French army had been through.

10. A History of the World in 47 Borders by John Elledge
Short blog style chapters on various accidents of history. One of those to dip into when you're bored on the bus or toilet.

Segued neatly, however, to ...

11. The Book of Trespass by Nick Hayes

Part travelogue about the author's adventures ignoring "private property"/"no trespassing" signs, part history of restrictions on land access in England, and part cry for a saner system.
He skilfully intertwines these elements and gets quite poetic when describing the landscapes he's visiting. For anyone with even a passing interest in the great outdoors this is well worth a read, even if it'll frequently make you angry about aristocrats.

I've read a book! It's called Triceratops and Bottoms. It's a niche genre of science fiction I hadn't yet explored: dinosaur erotica.

Basically, a lady travels through time using a newly invented time machine. Brilliantly, and this is the best way of stopping the "Let's kill Hitler" issue, she can only travel to the Jurassic era.

There she bangs dinosaurs. And they bang her. At the climax (ho ho -ed) she brings a rich friend along for the ride (ho ho - ed).

Had it not been for the time travel rule it would have been a waste of £2.96. Also, I don't think all of the dinosaurs she bangs were in the Jurassic era.

Well that sounds disturbing.

1. Tom Holt - The Portable Door

I’ve been looking for some authors that I haven’t read before and I’d seen some recommendations for Tom Holt. Looking through the list of over 70 items he’s written, I went for The Portable Door as it’s the first in a series and the reviews I’d seen were mostly positive e.g. SFX one line review, “The best similes since Douglas Adams.’”

From page 1 I wasn’t keen on his style. On page 3 I found the first of the supposedly 'best' similes.

“But he stayed where he was, while the thin girl excavated the talons of her left hand, like Carter and Caernarvon questing for dead Pharaohs.”

“Oh, it’s obvious what you’re thinking,” she said, “from that soupy expression on your face, and the way your shoulders are sagging. Like someone sat down in front of a radiator and you’re beginning to melt.”

He couldn’t think of anything to say to that, so he said, ‘Oh,’ instead. She pulled the grin back into a little frown, like someone reigning in an unruly terrier, and scratched under her right armpit.

I’d have to say ridiculous rather than anything comparable to Adams.

And there were many of sections with lots of words but nothing actually being said, particularly in the early chapters.

I found the characterisation shallow, with too many characters introduced in quick succession.

The conversations were often inane and it felt like he was trying to hit a word count rather than engage the reader.

The Portable Door in question didn’t appear until around half way through the book, by which time I was struggling to keep going.

I was considering giving up on it, but pushed on to see if it got any better and if there was a satisfactory ending, but I found it a let down.

I thought the plot was a mess and didn’t achieve its potential.

My overall feeling is that it was like a novel for adults written by Enid Blyton.

But he’s obviously popular, so maybe he was over hyped and the basic problem for me is his style. But I have no plan to read any more from him.

I think I read The Portable Door a while back, but I have absolutely no memory of it, and have never read another Tom Holt book. I guess that kinda sums up my feelings on that.



12.) Red Harvest - Dashiell Hammett
Proper old-school, hard boiled PI shenanigans. A nameless Dick rocks up at a crime-ridden town to help a rich man find his son's murderer and then gets sucked into a brutal turf war. He plays each side off against the other, fixing boxing matches, solving various other murders and everyone ends up dead. I liked it, it's not sophisitcated or clever but rattles along and there's non-stop action.

3. Brutal - Iwain Thomas
4. Trails and Tribulations. The Running adventures - Susie Chan
5. Boy in a China Shop - Keith Brymer Jones

A bit of holiday reading, a few autobiographies. Did not quite finish my 4th.

13.) The Last Crusade - The Palestine Campaign in the First World War - Anthony Bruce
A history of a lesser-known bit of WWI. Interesting to compare it to my other WWI book a few weeks back which was almost entirely focused on the Western Front. Palestine was interesting because so much of what happened was constrained by supply issues, especially the water supply. The British also managed what they had always hoped for but never managed in France - a break-through and then using the cavalry to exploit their initial victory. A somewhat dry and fact-y book, hindered slightly by the fact that a lot of places that featured in the campaign had similar sounding names, and the maps in the book weren't quite up to snuff.

6. Relentless: Secrets of the sporting elite - Alistair Brownlee
7. The Raven Episode 1-3 - Tobey Alexander




The chapters are really shoer and John is a sarcastic, kinda why I like him

12. Brazil by Michael Palin

The book of his 2012 travelogue, not the Terry Gilliam film.

Picked this up from the library a few days after a pub conversation with a Brazilian friend in which I demonstrated a complete lack of knowledge about the geography of this continent-sized country.
Palin darts from place to place, goes on various junkets, meets local celebrities, and just so happens to get involved with every festival and ritual.
For getting an overview of the diversity of the country's landscape and people, it's easy and acceptable enough but I think I would be better off watching the show. I also found some of Palin's comments about women a little patronising and awkward at times, showing I think his age and background. There's also a little too much of "look how happy the poor people are compared to us wealthy types".

Loosely related but the Lost City of Z by David Grann is an astonishing retelling of the expeditions to explore the Amazon and ongoing abuses around the rubber industry.