Oh, gosh, I wrote somewhere that a sure sign of unwillingness to write is an untended blog. I really ought to have qualified this. I’m just about to almost fast approaching coming to the top of another book deal – more about that anon – which will indeed involve a lot of writing, but first it requires a great deal of reading. Being the kind of person (that is, a trained scientist) who when making a statement about anything without a reference will feel as if venturing out of doors in a state of deshabille, I will always go back to the sauce tzores source, take notes, and follow up further references, which accumulate faster than I can read them. This has generated a large pile of light reading amid which I currently find myself.
Some light reading, recently. This box contains almost 200 references on a subject people know almost nothing about. Exhausting but not exhaustive.
This means that I don’t have much time to write this blog, in particular to update my list of books read in the preceding month, which is becoming every two months. So here is what I read (or, mostly, listened to) during the past couple of months. Apologies for the brevity.
John Elledge: A History of the World in 47 Borders – The human habit of drawing lines on maps seems no more strange than when one is flying above the ground in an airliner, or even in a spacecraft, revealing that these borders don’t really exist. For all that they are so insubstantial, they do cause a great deal of trouble. This entertaining read reveals the secret plans of Britain and France to carve up the Ottoman Empire (and we all know how well that went) to revealing why Bolivia has a navy, even though it’s landlocked. And other stuff.
John Le Carre: Smiley’s People – the conclusion of the trilogy that began with Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and continued with The Honourable Schoolboy in which self-effacing spook George Smiley finally gets … well, that would spoil it. The writing is gorgeous, stately, measured. The character studies precise and detailed. You can practically smell the raincoats and cigarette ends and see the haloes of smog round the lamp posts.
Stella Rimington: At Risk When I discovered that my longtime friend Professor A. L. of London shares my new-found love of spy thrillers he recommended the works of former real-life spy chief Stella Rimington as easy reads that go down without touching the sides. Or, in my case, easy listens while walking the dogs. At Risk is the first of several novels featuring MI5 agent Liz Carlyle. Lots of twists and high drama, well plotted and straightforwardly delivered. I objected to one thing – the author’s habit of dividing sentences to show that the character is doing two things at once. As Dr Gee took another swig of his coffee, he noticed a spelling mi$take. But that’s really just a matter of taste.
qntm: There Is No Antimemetics Division This was a recommendation from Natasha Pulley, one of my favourite authors of modern fantasy, so was not to be missed. And it’s a doozy. Weird, sui generis, inventive to a degree, I’ve come across nothing remotely like it, the closest (and for weirdness rather than setting) is The Vorrh by Brian Catling (which made my Book Of The Year some years back). The premise is simple – we all know about memes – that is, ideas that propagate themselves, perhaps to a greater degree than their inherent worth deserves. But what if there are antimemes? Ideas, concepts or even objects that hide their own existence, and even compromise the memories of those who come across them? Compelling, thought-provoking, terrifying – this will be a contender for my best book of 2026. Thanks, Ms Pulley, for that recommendation.
Stella Rimington: Secret Asset Here our heroine Liz Carlyle is worried about her agent working to foil an Islamist plot, but is taken off the case to expose a mole in MI5.
Adrian Tchaikovsky Children of Strife This is the fourth in the increasingly inaccurately named Children trilogy (Children of Time, Children of Ruin, Children of Memory). Tchaikovsky bows to no-one in his ability to get inside the minds of aliens, and Children of Earth deservedly won awards. But the problem with sequelae of books with long, complex plots and vast casts of characters is that it’s increasingly hard to move the plot along without losing people, unless you can constantly revisit past lives and past contexts. Children of Strife suffers rather badly from this. The story is great, but moves with the speed of an arthritic sloth. And it’s not helped by the fact that many of the characters are really, really unsympathetic.
Stella Rimington: Illegal Action Liz Carlyle goes undercover to protect Russian emigre, art connoisseur and Putin critic Nikita Brunovsky, who MI5 think is at risk of assassination by a Russian secret agent. But is he?
