The widget on the right will play you a whole free audio chapter of Neil Gaiman's new book - The Graveyard Book. What do you mean you've never heard of him?? Go on, click on it, you know you want to...It's free!
Sergei Lukyanenko - "The Night Watch". The first in a series of supernatural thrillers with a Russian twist - a sophisticated read interspersed with references to Russian literature and pop culture...With a cynical look at modern-day Russia, where even vampires have more morality than the country's corrupt leaders. The only drawback is the sometimes sloppy translation - the publisher seemed to have been in a hurry to get this out, probably due to the release of the film of the same name.
Just a very quick post to say that I'm still alive (just incredibly busy). Remember to breathe, as Ampersand Duck always says. In the meantime, you can check out the incredibly cool Bookcrossing Catch/Release Map, giving a real-time view of world locations where books in the wild are released or caught. What do you mean, you haven't heard of Bookcrossing before? Just go their site by clicking here, and follow the catch/release map link on the top left hand side of the site. It's wild, I tell ya.
Ever since Bill Bryson wrote the words "I came from Des Moines. Somebody had to." in his first travel book (The Lost Continent), his loyal readers had been waiting for him to expound on that. And now he has satisfied them, with a whole book devoted to Des Moines, Iowa...Albeit the Des Moines of Bryson's youth, in the 1950's.
The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid (published here in Aus before the US/Canada, so there!), is part memoir and part nostalgia, but also gives insight into the cultural era that gave us the baby boomers. The book is funny, sad, poignant and bitter all at the same time. While Bill entertains the reader with his outrageous tales about a kid's life in America in the fifties, he also laments for the passing of that seemingly gentler (more naive?) time. His tale about the atomic-powered self-cleaning toilet seats in a small Des Moines diner is flabbergasting, but he also goes on to write about the many, unsafe nuclear bomb tests that were conducted around the American Midwest during that time, and how people were kept in the dark about the consequences.
In between stories about his dad's baseball reporting for the local paper, and his desperate search for a way into his first strip show, he laments the loss of the locally owned and operated department stores, restaurants and movie houses, overtaken by the McD's and the Walmarts of today. Oh yes, and we finally get to hear the backstory about his old friend Katz, who also starred in "A walk in the woods" (although Hannelie still maintains that he's wholly fictitious). A very funny look at American culture.
I managed to get my hands on Christopher Moore's "Stupidest Angel, ver 2.0". Moore's books are extremely funny, and always a little bit irreverent (witness Lamb, the gospel according to Biff, Christ's childhood friend). This little red book brings together a lot of characters from his previous books (Practical Demon Keeping, The Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove, etc.). Lonely losers all, they are gathered in the picturesque California village of Pine Cove for a Lonesome Christmas Party....Then Santa gets killed, a (very) stupid Angel tries to grant a child's Christmas wish, corpses rise from the grave looking for human brains to eat, there's a warrior babe on the loose with a samurai sword...And as usual, it all goes horribly, and hilariously wrong. This short read isn't up to par with his previous books, however, it does provide for some light hearted and irreverent entertainment, more so if you're fed up with Christmas jingles and fake santas.
Just finished reading Alexander McCall Smith's "Friends, lovers, chocolate". It's part of the Sunday Philosophy Club series, and is set in Edinburgh (unlike his No 1 Ladies Detective series, which is set in Botswana). This is the second book in the series, and I found it better than the first one.
Thirty-something, unmarried, and independently wealthy Isabel Dalhousie is the Editor of the academic journal "Review of Applied Ethics". She's curious aout everything, and, being a philosopher, she thinks a lot about the mundane things which other people would easily dismiss, and this usually lands her in interesting and often peculiar situations. There's some interesting philosophical discourse about receiving somebody else's cellular memory, as a result of a heart transplant, and a mystery to be solved.
The portrayal of Edinburgh's sometimes stuffy, village-like atmosphere is spot-on. Having visited Edinburgh only once before, even I recognized some of the references to place names and coffee shops scattered throughout the book. Don't know if lovers of the Ladies Detective series will enjoy this book, though.
"Thud!" by Terry Pratchett. This is the latest in his Discworld-series, and as usual it contains scathing satire and social commentary barely coated with a thin layer of fantasy story: The recently urbanized communities of dwarves and trolls of Discworld (a round, flat world, carried on the back of four elephants, which in turn are standing on the shell of a giant turtle...) are fighting in the streets of Ankh-Morpork, as a result of ages-old feuds, bigotry, and yes, racism. Pratchett shows how easy it is to start a war based on hatred, ignorance, malicious gossip and the fear of ordinary people (Ok,ok, dwarves & trolls). As usual, only Commander Vimes of the City Watch seems to be able to see through the lies and deceit, as only an old street-smart copper like him can.
If you haven't yet read anything by this master storyteller, do it now!
