The miscellany

Sometimes I blog as I read, sometimes not so much...

Martin Millar is a genius (why do all his main characters have to have an X in their names?) and Lux the Poet (a new re-release from Soft Skull) is utterly delightful. Millar is one of only a handful of writers I can think of who combines the style gene with the light reading gene - it is an unusual pleasure to relish sentences so much at the same time as compulsively following developments in the lives of characters...

I happily whiled away an hour or two with Christopher Fowler's Full Dark House: A Peculiar Crimes Unit Mystery, only it set me off on wondering about the history of occult detectives in literature (results of inquiry yet to be determined); I also recently read the first book in Jim Butcher's Harry Dresden series, and though I like this sort of book very much, it occurs to me (belatedly!) that perhaps it is not the freshest idea going round...

Richard Stark's The Hunter (thanks, Levi!) was too short to last the whole plane trip, but I am willing to forgive it almost anything for introducing me to the past-tense verb vagged (arrested for vagrancy - transitive and intransitive, as far as I can tell)...

Terry Pratchett's Nation is a lovely book - I think I like his young-adult fiction even more than the best of the Discworld novels. It is made out of the same cloth as the seafaring adventures of Joan Aiken's Dido Twite and Eva Ibbotson's Edwardian little girls, with stiff infusions of Victorian adventuring fare, but very distinctively Pratchettian also - highly recommended.

Last but not least, I raced through my friend Farai Chideya's Kiss the Sky in two sittings. It is addictively readable, and there is a description of the protagonist, as a child home alone after school, breaking her mother's rules and eating things secretly out of the fridge that is so vivid and beautifully written that it is going to stay with me for a long time...