Moon Over Soho and Whispers Under Ground

Author:  Ben Aaronovitch

Year published: 2011 and 2012
Series: Rivers of London 2 and 3

Pages: 384 and 400

Time It Took To Read: I read them both over two days, to the cost of all else

I think I have a new love. These books combine everything I loved about the Frost series, back in the old days, with everything I love about the Dresden Files, and even Harry Potter. I am holding off buying the next one, because if I pass my exams, I'm getting a Kindle and these are the sort of books I want on Kindle. 

In Moon Over Soho, something is killing off musicians after gigs. And Peter's dad is a musician. Also, a woman with vagina dentata (look it up, it's grim, and also not real...) is on the loose. I read this with a growing sense of irritation at how OBVIOUS everything seemed, and then it wasn't remotely obvious at the end. 
In Whispers Under Ground, a rich American kid dies on an underground platform. This leads to a trail of art, pottery, Covent Garden and festive London disruption. 

If you like detective novels or magic these are a must-read. To be honest, even if you're not mad keen, go find them. They're warm, realistic and funny, and they're sometime sickening. 

Book count: 24/50

Rivers of London

Author:  Ben Aaronovitch

Year published: 2011
Series: Rivers of London 1

Pages: 432

Time It Took To Read: A few days, could've been quicker if I hadn't taken my time

Imagine if Harry Potter didn't go to Hogwarts, and 12 years later, he was working for the police when someone said 'yer a wizard, Harry'. That's how I described the pretext of this book to my sister. I don't think I can improve it.

Peter Grant is a fairly rubbish Met copper, who just before he finishes his preliminary training, has a chat to a ghost at a crime scene. From there, his career path wildly deviates from the path he wasn't really looking forward to. Not only is something possessing people to commit awful crimes, there's gang warfare breaking out between the rivers. No spoilers.

I loved it. I don't even want to write a proper review because I want to go and start the second one right now. I SAVOURED this book. I read it slowly (not one for reading things slowly, me), I thought about it, re-read bits if I didn't 'get' them the first time. London is lovingly, perfectly described, and the people are believable and solid. Except when they're ghosts, and then they're just malevolent. 

It's perfect for those who like their supernatural fiction to be actually believable, and not too romantic. 

I'm also reading The Odyssey at the moment. Which is quite the different tack. 

Book count: 22/50

After Dead

Author: Charlaine Harris
Series: Southern Vampire Mysteries
Year: 2013

Pages: 200

Time It Took To Read: Fifteen minutes. I'm not lying.

This is the most disappointing book I've ever read. Ever.

I thought it'd be akin to The Sookie Stackhouse Companion, which is a meaty fan-friendly book of trivia, extra and ACTUAL CONTENT. Alas, I was wrong. 200 pages which could easily be condensed to 45, with a few lines to sum up the characters' ending. Quinn, for example, gets a WHOLE PAGE to describe his ending, but only five words (He had many more adventures). It's an affront to trees, this waste of paper. I don't know why Charlaine Harris even bothered writing it, except as a money spinning exercise. Nobody has a satisfactory ending: it's all misery, death and mundanity. The combination of this and the last proper book has taken away all the joy I had in this series. If I'd paid for this, I'd be LIVID, it's going for NINE POUNDS on Amazon and I doubt there's more than 3000 words in the whole thing.

I am taking this deeply personally, I know.

Book count: 11/50

Dead Ever After

Author: Charlaine Harris
Series: Southern Vampire Mysteries 13
Year: 2013

Pages: 352

Time It Took To Read: Three hours

I have been waiting for this to come out in paperback since last year. I cannot be doing with cluttering my house up with hardbacks. The covers fall off, they take up immense amounts of space, they hurt to hold too long because I've got a faulty wrist. But this is one of the few book series that I have read AS a book series, rather than started with book ended in ebook. I needed an ending.

In preparation, I read all twelve preceding books in order over a few days. 

I was a bit worried in case the ending was shit. A series you've invested in has the potential to disappoint in a way non-series books do not. And lots and lots of fans DID think the ending was shit, and loudly declaimed this only. I avoided spoilers, and this is a non-spoiler review.

I liked it. I don't see how it could have ended any other way, while still being true to the central character. But there were lots of things left unsaid and undone that I would have liked a better ending on. As a postscript, she's written a book about What Happens Next, which I plan to read as soon as my beloved brings home my charger cable for my ereader... 

It does suffer slightly from a change in narrative style. Sookie has upset a lot of people over the years and they want revenge, and this point of view doesn't fit with the narrative of any of the other books, so it jars. Then it lapses back into the usual style. There's only one sex scene, and it's appallingly written. The sex itself is believable, but the way it's written made me cringe. It's not a particularly well thought out plot: the final villain isn't really believable in motive, and I was disappointed. The series deserved to go out on a bigger bang than this.

I'm a bit sad it's ended. I do love vampire mystery soft core, and I don't watch True Blood because bleeding wrists make me faint. But perhaps it's better this way than Charlaine Harris just churning out books to make money.

Book count: 10/50

Beyond Black

Author: Hilary Mantel

Year: 2005

Pages: 451

Time It Took To Read: A day of pretty much solid reading

You wait all month to finish a book, and then do two in two days.

Oh, Hilary Mantel! I read the Cromwell books last summer and LIVED in them. I'm generally not a fiction fan, but Mantel writes obliquely enough for me to know exactly what she means without feeling it. It sounds like bollocks when you say you 'feel' what the characters feel when you read a book, but that's what I do. I don't visualise it, I feel it. In fact, I live it. It means books like The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo make me feel awful for days after reading them. It's why I prefer non-fiction or fiction from a male perspective. 

Beyond Black is a book about women, and the men that have hurt them and made them miserable. It is also about mediums, and sceptics. I am a massive sceptic about mediums. I think they exploit the grieving with their utter bollocks, but this book makes you think well...what if they WERE real? What demons would they face every day, listening to the lost dead witter on? What if the dead held a grudge? Why do some people who hear voices get locked up or medicated, and others get TV shows? 

Alison, the medium, has a history of utter misery and secrets so dark, she is literally haunted by them. Colette, her manager, is a woman who has had a bitter, beige sort of existence. And Morris...Morris is grim.

There is a deep, sensual realism in Mantel's writing, that lets you breathe the world she describes. Places you know you've been: the new build estate, the flashy chain restaurant, the dodgy village hall, the relentless toll of the motorway - all drawn perfectly. 

I can't wait to read more of her stuff. 

Book count: 2/50

The Dresden Files

After reading Storm Front, I downloaded the entire Dresden Series and read them back to back, on my shitty 2-hour-battery-life e-reader. I have now finished them.

Titles: Fool Moon, Grave Peril, Summer Knight, Death Masks, Blood Rites, Dead Beat, Proven Guilty, White Night, Small Favour, Turn Coat, Changes, Ghost Story, Cold Days

Author: Jim Butcher

Series: The Dresden Files, books 2-14

Year published: 2001-2013

Pages: Varies, up to about 700

Time It Took To Read: A day each, if I could have read them solidly without needing to charge the bloody e-reader

I love this series. It encompasses huge amounts of mythic lore, from God and angels to faries (sidhe), trolls, pixies, ghost and spirits, Norse mythology, shapeshifters, vampires, demons, and incubi. At the centre is a wizard, who remains fundamentally human (at least...mostly), with a sense of righteous, and indignant, fury. He wants things to be right. He senses that there's a much bigger wrongness with the world than merely what is happening with Chicago. He doesn't know who he really is, and keeps being fed snippets of personal history. 

I am eager to read more. Butcher's plan is to write 20 regular files books, and then an apocalyptic trilogy to finish things off. That means I only have to wait about TEN MORE YEARS to finish it. 

And it brings my final tally of the year to 63 new books. I've also re-read a lot of old ones, so it's probably closer to 100 books this year. I've got about 12 new ones to read waiting on the shelf, and my boyfriend's moved in with his huge stock of sci-fi and fantasy. MOAR READINGS!

Happy New Year!

Storm Front

Author: Jim Butcher

Series: The Dresden Files, book 1

Year published: 2000

Pages: 336

Time It Took To Read: A day

 

I bloody love supernatural horror. Not the ghosty-bump-in-the-night type, because that's freaky. But wizards, vampires, demons. The Southern Vampire Mysteries (True Blood) are my favourites, but as that's now finished, I needed a new series to get into. BEHOLD, this came up on a trip to Forbidden Planet and is amazing. So much so that I've got hold of the WHOLE series already. 

Harry Dresden is a real wizard, who earns a meagre living by consulting for the police and offering a private eye service to the public. He is the only wizard in the phone book. When a horrible double murder occurs, the police (who are largely sceptical about his powers) call him in to have a look. This leads to an unfortunate series of events, in which Dresden's life is threatened repeatedly, by demons and wizards and storms. 

It's a bloody good read. Kinda trashy, but with good characters and just the sort of fantastical horror I love. Escapism at its finest.

 

And there we go. FIFTY new books read this year, with about 7 weeks to go.  I will continue blogging reviews of all the new books I read. I think my favourite was Wolf Hall.

Shadow of Night

No photo. Go look it up on Amazon, it's BLUE.

Title: Shadow of Night

Author: Deborah Harkness

Series: All Souls Trilogy Book 2

Year published: 2012

Pages: 630

Time It Took To Read: Two afternoons

After reading the first of this series, I compulsively bought the second. Then I remembered how horrendously behind on uni work I was and made myself forsake it until my last TMA was in. My last TMA was submitted on Sunday and I picked this book up yesterday. AND DEVOURED IT. 

Now, I don't want to give away any major plot twists, but the story thus far is that a witch has fallen in love with a vampire (as you do) and now they're hiding in time from the Congregation - a scary collection of witches, vampires and daemons who keep order. The witch, Diana, has a very shaky grasp of her power, and is trying to find a teacher. The vampire, Matthew, has his finger in every possible historical pie.He is omnipresent, friends with every luminary of the 1590s, and exceptionally politically powerful. Diana has to cover up her 21st century origins, and Matthew has to try and cover up several hundred years of changing ethics and politics. And then they have to try and get what they came for, and then get home again.

There are, as mentioned before, lots of parallels with the godawful Twilight series. The biggest differences are that Diana is a fully rounded character, not a melancholy teenage idiot, and the author really knows her historical stuff. The book falls down slightly in some of the dialogue, but more than makes up for it in invoking the atmosphere of 16th century Britain. It did slightly rankle at how quickly Diana dropped her modern behaviour, though this is explained away by her learned background. 

Also, my useless vasovagal response kicked in when there was biting of chest arteries, and I nearly passed out. It is no good being triggered by venepuncture, when enamored of vampire fiction.

There will be a third in this series, but Deborah Harkness hasn't BLOODY WRITTEN IT YET. I feel slightly like going a bit Misery to force her to write it faster, but that way madness lies ;-). It really is quite a compulsive read. I am not a patient person, but will certainly be reading it when it finally emerges.In the mean time, if you are a fan of vampire books, or supernatural books, or alternative history books, or just historical fiction, I really recommend this particular book. But read the first one first, or it won't make all that much sense.

Book count: 26/50

Sepulchre

Title: Sepulchre

Author: Kate Mosse
Series: Languedoc Trilogy, Book 2

Year published: 2007

Pages: 784

Time It Took To Read: A particularly ungodly morning

This is the first Kate Mosse book I've finished. I started Labyrinth, but then dropped it in a puddle, ruining it completely. I suspect this book may well have say, desolate and unread, upon my shelf for some time except that I decided to take it to France this weekend - something fairly undemanding to read on the ferry.

As it happened, I read it while under the worst attack of diarrhoea I've ever suffered, yesterday morning in Verdun. I don't think I like Verdun anymore. 

It's set in the same place (in the South of France), in two separate times - 1891 and 2007. In 1891, a girl and her brother have gone to stay with their aunt, and the girl discovers a dark mystery in the grounds of the house. In 2007, an American woman believes her family history is linked to the same house. The two stories unfold, each lending explanation to the other. It's a similar technique to Labyrinth.

The twists of the story are predictable as hell, though the narrative is good. I find it slightly irritating that occasional French phrases are slipped into the dialogue, between two French people, speaking French, moreso when the language occasionally shifts to Occitan. I get that it's supposed to be evocative of the region, but it grates. There is a vague subplot about Debussy that fades out completely after the first third, until the epilogue. The historic villain is an absolute nutjob - charming, intelligent, vicious and insane - which is always good. However, the modern villain is an idiot caricature of the Richard Hillman type. 

All in all, I enjoyed the book. It was, as I thought it would be, a holiday book - undemanding, unsubstantial,  and addictive and it made a very nasty tummy bug eminently more bearable.

Book count: 22/50

A Discovery of Witches

Title: A Discovery of Witches

Author: Deborah Harkness

Series: All Souls Trilogy Book 1

Year published: 2011

Pages: 589

Time It Took To Read: Two days, in which I did little else

Ah, Vampire mythology. I've read a lot, seen a lot; and everyone's got their own interpretation. My first vampire book was Interview With A Vampire, which intrigued me, but also slightly revolted me. Then came the GODAWFUL Twilight series. Now, I like the Southern Vampire Mysteries (True Blood) as a bit of light reading. 

I got this book for my birthday LAST year (my birthday was on Wednesday) and asked for it because of the witch element rather than the vampirism. I really enjoy supernatural fiction in general, possibly because my mother wouldn't let me read any when I was young, making it rather irresistible.

I took an hour or so to get into it. The plot is that a witch - Diana - finds something that everyone wants, and falls for a vampire - Matthew - along the way. So far, so Twilight. And in many ways it DOES take a lot from the Twilight series - the vampires can daywalk, they generally avoid eating from humans, the old fashioned manners of the vamp contrast with the modern independence of the woman, and OBVIOUSLY their love is FORBIDDEN by all and sundry.

But there are many ways in which it is definitely NOT Twilighty. Diana, for a start, is a witch, not a puny human. She has no desire to be changed into a vampire, at least not to begin with. She's a historian in her early 30s, researching the genesis of modern science via alchemy. The author is a science historian, and the whole book is full of fascinating historical and scientific facts. This makes it a meaty read. There's also not too much blood. I am a bit squeamish; fine in the flesh, rubbish reading about it. It will make my history of medicine module next year FUN.

I read the book AVIDLY - literally, I did nothing else yesterday, much to the chagrin of my bored children - but found the pace frustrating. As I reached the end of the book and realised there was no tidy conclusion, I started to get a bit angry. How could the author NOT conclude an almost-600-page book? BEAST! Then I looked on Amazon and found out it's part of a trilogy (not advertised on the book), ordered the next one and relaxed.

Awesome book, in short. If you like the mythology, but hate the flimsy, formulaic trashiness of most supernatural books, give this a try.

Book Count: 21/50