Sunday Summary: May in Review

Wow, it feels like ages since I've written anything on here! Everything's fine, I just haven't felt much like writing reviews lately; I've read plenty of books but not had all that much to say about them. But I might ramble a little about a few of them in this post, we'll see.

Some of the things I've done

My work shifts have been all over the place the last few months, although fingers crossed they'll be getting back to something like normality from now on. We've got a new girl just starting at work, doing Sundays and a couple of afternoons in the week, and my manager told me she reminded her of a younger version of me. Having met her, briefly, I sort of agree. In about a two-minute conversation we compared our to-read piles, favourite books, and I already promised to lend her one of my four copies of Anne of Green Gables. I think reading that book is a quick way to get to know me! Must find out what her equivalent book is. I'm sure she'll have one.

When I haven't been at work I've been writing; I've picked up the children's story I began for NaNoWriMo last year and am giving serious thought to submitting it to Mslexia magazine's First Children's Book competition in the autumn. I've nearly finished the first draft, but have discovered I'm already over the suggested word count for a children's book!

I had a week off a couple of weeks ago and spent a couple of days up in London, staying with my sister Jenny. While she was at work I did some exploring, and some book shopping - although only on the first day. I also went up to Camden Market, which is awesome, and as it was a lovely sunny day, I walked up the road to Primrose Hill, where I spent the afternoon sitting on the grass and reading. The Primrose Hill bookshop is one of my new favourites; it's small and cosy. While I was in there, the bookseller, Chrissie, was whizzing around the shop finding recommendations for one of her regulars who wanted some holiday reading.

By some fortuitous chance, an old friend, Anna, happened to be in London the same week, and had got in touch with Jenny suggesting meeting up for drinks. So we found a nice little pub next to the British Library, called the Rocket, and spent a lovely evening between there and Pizza Express reminiscing about our schooldays, making little confessions about being horrid teenagers (only a little horrid, as teenagers go, but I think we were all a little relieved to find the others had no memory of the wrongs we'd felt terrible for years for doing to each other.)

And the following day, as a belated birthday treat for Jenny, we went to Shoreditch to Lady Dinah's Cat Emporium for tea: a cafe where cats roam free and say hello to and play with all the visitors. The cats are very well looked after - the entry fee pays for their welfare, they get days off and all have their own members of staff, and there are all sorts of toys and climbing apparatus to keep them amused (although one of the kittens liked nothing better than a scruffy piece of string. Because cat.)

I'm back on the Island now, for the time being, and am enjoying the summer sunshine. It's a bank holiday weekend, and tomorrow I'm heading for the beach. We're nearly into June and it's been quite warm; let's see if I'm brave enough to go in  the sea yet. I've sorted through my to-read shelf and pulled my science fiction books to the front, because for some reason I've come to think of that genre as good beach reading. I've got sci-fi classics (Iain M. Banks, Bradbury, Asimov, H. G. Wells) shiny new or newish books (The Book of Strange New Things, The Peripheral, Speak) and some weird and probably dreadful old books I've found in second-hand bookshops, which I will not name and shame in case I slander unrecognised gems.


Some of the Books I've read:

Beside Myself by Ann Morgan, and When I Was Invisible by Dorothy Koomson

These were publishers' proof copies that my sister got from work, and it was interesting to read them one after the other, because they shared several themes. In Beside Myself, a set of twins swap places as a prank one day - but then one of them refuses to switch back. Towards the end, one of the characters asked something along the lines of "What does it matter? You're twins, you live the same life, what does it matter which name you are called?" But even from a very early age, different expectations are put on Ellie and Helen. One is a leader, one is a follower. One is perceived as a good girl, the other as a troublemaker. People respond to the twins' actions in different ways according to who is perceived to be doing them. It was a dark, troubling read.

Meanwhile, When I Was Invisible follows the lives of best friends Roni and Nika (Both Veronica/ka Harper) whose lives take very different directions after a shared ordeal leads to one betraying the other. Roni returns home after spending several years as a nun, while Nika is trying to rebuild her life after witnessing a terrible crime. Also a rather heavy read, but I found it much more satisfying than Beside Myself.

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Sparks

What I expected: A gender-flipped, feminist Dead Poet's Society. Progressive teacher shakes up the establishment but earns undying loyalty from her best students.
What I got: Miss Brodie shakes up the establishment, all right, but she is a manipulative, capricious and sharp-tongued woman who has affairs with other members of staff and sends some of her pupils down destructive paths. The narrative is curious, flitting between past and future and casually revealing what the girls' futures hold while they are still schoolgirls. Miss Brodie is rather more interesting and unsettling than the usual inspiring, unconventional schoolteacher figure, a deconstruction of the trope - except for the fact that she pre-dates many of the iconic examples!

Anne of Avonlea by L. M. Montgomery

Being the second book in my Anne of Green Gables omnibus, I used to read the two books back-to-back as a child, and Avonlea was just as much a favourite as its predecessor. Nowadays, though, I read it less often than Green Gables and Anne of the Island. It's a very episodic book, although the romance between Miss Lavendar Lewis and Stephen Irving towards the end foreshadows Anne and Gilbert's relationship (which for many readers - not this cynical old maid, though - is the main story of Anne.) It was lovely to reread after a few years, to meet Mr Harrison, to spend time seeing the Avonlea Village Improvement Society, to just spend the time with some old friends.

But the character of Paul Irving has come to irritate me no end, although with a feeling of guilt because he is in many ways a lot like Anne. Do different expectations for boys and girls influence what traits one can allow? But then Walter Blythe, in the later books, takes after his mother too, and he is one of my favourite characters. Walter has more depth of character, though, a melancholic temperament, inner turmoil, while Paul's ongoing struggle is with eating all his porridge. He's just so sickeningly good, and the "poetic" temperament Anne sees in him reminds me of nothing so much as Madeleine Bassett from Jeeves and Wooster as an eight-year-old boy.

Currently reading: The Time Machine by H. G. Wells

The original time-travel adventure. I'm only a few chapters in so far, but it reads surprisingly fresh and contemporary, with its succinct explanation of the Fourth Dimension, and the Time Traveller's theories of the future evolution of mankind into a gentle, physically frail and unambitious race living in a paradise - or so it seems at first! This is a book that shaped science fiction as we know it: without it there would be no Doctor Who, no Back to the Future, and everything else would be quite different too!

I'm not sure when I'll get back to blogging regularly; probably not until I've finished my first draft of my work in progress, but watch this space. I will be back!

Book Bloggers Do London, and other adventures.

Last week I finally had some holiday from work. It had been three months since I last got off the Isle of Wight, even for a day trip, and I usually like to at least go shopping in Southampton or Portsmouth once a month. But I made up for it on my recent London trip. I went to stay with my sister, and on Thursday was very excited to meet up with Bex and Laura for the first time for an epic book-shopping spree.

I got into London quite early, taking the train with my sister Jenny, who works in Victoria. After wandering down Oxford Street, desperately looking for a pair of jeans that were affordable and not skinny (I failed. Skinny jeans are sadly the default style these days.) I got to our meeting place in Waterstone's Piccadilly with a few minutes to spare. I was worried we wouldn't recognise each other, but - after apparently offending a passing man by accidentally catching his eye and causing him to swear under his breath at me - Bex found me, recognising me by my bag. Laura was not far behind, and we started from the top of the massive, five-storey bookshop and worked our way down. Bex had never been to this Waterstone's before, and I had only once. We didn't spend as long as we could have in there - you'd probably need a full day to do it justice - but we explored the children's section, the Shakespeare area, the Russian bookshop (oddly), and of course large sections of Fiction. I bought Robin Stevens' two schoolgirl murder mysteries, which have caused a bit of a buzz online this year: Murder Most Unladylike and Arsenic for Tea. 

We left Waterstone's and went on a search for some lunch, but apparently Piccadilly doesn't have restaurants. We walked and walked before giving up and taking the next tube to Leicester Square, where we basically came out of the station and into the first cafe we saw, a cheap-and-cheerful noodle place with pink seats.

We took a detour from our planned bookshop route to go into Forbidden Planet - which does sell books, after all, as well as comics and all the geek memorabilia you could wish for. In the Doctor Who section I saw cuddly Adipose toys - squishy fat monsters - and commented that "they ought to make Adipose stress toys... they DO have Adipose stress toys!" After that, of course, Laura would not let me not buy one, as I had just somehow willed it into being. And it is so funny adorable that I don't think it would be possible to remain stressed while squishing it around. Look!

Oh, there was so much geek merchandise in Forbidden Planet that I could have spent my month's pay on before I even ventured down to the book department. Buffy and Firefly Pop figures! A giant Serenity ship (at £340!) All the Doctor Who and Star Trek things you could dream of. T-shirts! ALL THE THINGS, PEOPLE! Then, downstairs, we all managed to talk each other into buying at least one comic book or graphic novel: Bex got Hyperbole and a Half, Laura bought Watchmen, and I picked up Seconds, which I knew I'd read about somewhere but forgotten it was Bex's review that made me interested in the first place. It's awesome that people can know each other's reading tastes so well, especially when they're people who haven't met before. (I know Bex and Laura have met up plenty of times before but this was my first time on a bloggers' book-shopping spree and it was as awesome as I'd hoped.)

Unfortunately Laura then had to go back to uni for a Macbeth lecture, and we had to go on a big diversion to find the tube station thanks to all the work at Tottenham Court Road. Then, when we got through the station barriers Bex and I weren't sure we actually wanted the train from there after all, though we figured out a way to get to the Persephone bookshop. Most people hate the London Underground but I quite like it, if it's not too crowded and I don't need to worry about losing too many people. Neither of us had been to Persephone before; it is the shop of a small publishing company which reprints forgotten books, mostly by women, from the early part of the 20th century. It's an unusual way of shopping, in that all the books have plain grey covers (with pretty endpapers and matching bookmarks which are prints from fabrics made in the same year that the books were published.) All you have to go on is the title and the blurb. I bought Saplings, by Noel Streatfeild who wrote the classic Ballet Shoes. 

Of course, no trip to London would be complete without visiting Foyle's in Charing Cross Road. The shop has moved down the road to an even bigger store, shiny and new and exciting - although, if I'm honest, I miss the old Foyle's and its layout. I was very tempted by the 80p mini-books that Penguin have published on every subject to celebrate its 80th anniversary, and Bex persuaded me that they would be too small to count towards my book-buying limit, but in the end I didn't get one of those. I did, however, find the last copy of Ms Marvel, and Deborah Johnson's The Secret of Magic, which I could have bought from work, but where's the fun in that? Finally, I picked up a writing prompt book - which doesn't count, because it was from the stationery section - of 642 Things To Write About. 

Weighed down by bags of books, we headed back to Victoria for 6 o'clock, with just enough time to get a cup of tea or coffee and a piece of cake from Cafe Nero, where we found agitated text messages from Ellie demanding photos and details of our shopping trip. Well, Ellie, this may be a belated post, but I hope it will do.

Jenny met me at Nero's, and we took the train back to her house, where we watched the incredibly cheesy original film entitled Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It was quite ridiculous, farcical, a long way from the vision Joss Whedon thankfully got a second chance of realising. The vampires hammed it up no end, took a long time to die, Buffy was far more fluffy-headed than Sarah Michelle Gellar, at least at the start (but that's fair; the series Buffy was implied to be an airhead before she got "called.") There were different elements to the mythology than we were familiar with, and though I could from time to time see elements of the character we know as Buffy Summers, the story just isn't the same without the strength of the supporting cast. Also, for some reason (wine?) the leading man's horrible patch of chin hair made me laugh hysterically for about five minutes straight.

Friday

Jenny took the Friday off work and we decided to celebrate her birthday a week early, with presents, cake and a meal out in the evening. It was a gorgeous sunny day - winter was definitely on its way out - so we drove out in her exciting new purple car to Richmond Park, spending a lovely afternoon taking pictures of trees, parakeets and deer.

The park closed at half past five but our dinner reservation wasn't until seven o'clock, so we popped into Wetherspoon's to pass the time. Jenny took out her phone to reply to a friend who had been messaging her through about three different apps (I do not quite understand the necessity of having three different ways of sending text from one mobile phone to another, but there you go.) I heard a sad "oh!" and Jenny told me that Leonard Nimoy, one of science fiction's most beloved legends, had died. It wasn't really a surprise. I knew about his lung disease, and that he had been taken into hospital earlier in the week. I followed him on Twitter, and each time he updated, I would think, "Oh, good, he's still alive then," but the last tweet, a few days before his death, made me feel uneasy at the time. Even then, I must have recognised the poignant finality to his words. The news may not have been unexpected, but I was still very sad. I am very sad. Though I am a new Trekkie, and it was Zachary Quinto who first made me interested in Spock, it was Leonard Nimoy who made me fall in love with the character, bringing a subtle humanity to this all-logical, apparently-emotionless alien. And - though (of course) I never knew Mr Nimoy personally , or even very well as a fan presumes to "know" someone they admire, but I liked him nonetheless, as a person as well as an actor. He came across as a real gentleman, wise, intelligent and compassionate. He'll be sorely missed, and of course my thoughts go out to his family and friends at this time.

Jenny and I went to Jamie's Italian restaurant in Kingston, a place I'd been meaning to go to since it opened. Being a Friday night it was very busy, quite loud, but the customer service was amazing. We were in the restaurant for two hours, but did not feel that we were either kept waiting or hurried. We enjoyed a delicious three-course meal (I had mushroom bruschetta, a sausage pasta dish and something very much like a posh Bakewell tart) and a lot of good conversation. The price was reasonable, the staff were charming, and we left feeling full but not uncomfortable. An excellent meal.

Saturday

Friday's sunny weather gave way to a rainy, grey Saturday. I met up with Clare and Hannah, two of my best friends from university, who sadly I don't get to see very often any more, due to me working weekends and them working weekdays. We took the tram from Wimbledon to Ikea in Croydon, and spend the morning wandering around, looking for potential furniture for "when we can afford it" and stopping halfway round for meatballs (probably horse-free) in the cafeteria. None of us have cars, so the only shopping we actually did was for little things like tablecloths and cushions. I may or may not have spent a lot of time in the store humming Jonathan Coulton's "Ikea" song.

Afterwards, Clare left us and I went back to Hannah's flat. I hadn't planned to spend very long there, but we kept on talking, and then Hannah's husband Paul told me that they had a Wii with Mario Kart, so we had to have a game or two. And then Hannah and I spent nearly an hour talking out in the hallway when I was getting my coat on. In the end, I got back to Jenny's flat about four hours after I initially intended to. Oops.

Sunday Summary: Weather, Werewolves and Manic Pixie Dream Girls.

London: 

If 2013 will be forever remembered as the year we had no spring, then the winter of 2014 will be chiefly remembered for its storms and floods (at least here in the UK. I understand the USA has been experiencing freak snow.) Last weekend I had made plans to stay with my sister just outside London, but the weather forecast was not good. I'd booked myself a late evening train, and all the reports pointed towards having to cancel. However, when I left work on the Saturday night to find it dry and a bit windy, I decided to risk travelling, and aside from a bit of rollercoaster-tummy on the ferry, I had no trouble getting to my destination (though my train time had been altered, causing a bit of confusion, in order to accommodate a couple of extra stations.) I got to her flat just after 10PM, where she was at the ready with copious amounts of curry and her Buffy the Vampire Slayer DVD. She has befriended the staff at her local Indian restaurant/take-away, and ended up with a whole load of freebies "so there's enough for everyone." How many of us did they think would be eating?

In actual fact, the weather stayed fine the whole time I was in London: a bit cold, a bit drizzly, but OK, though the Thames was horribly flooded between Kingston and Richmond. I met up with friends on the Sunday and they pointed out where the cycle path usually was, and the road. All were underwater, with a car parked in the river with a council notice stuck to its back windscreen (probably saying: "your car is getting wet, please move it.")

And now... the weather:

I thought we'd got off quite lightly on the Isle of Wight, but yesterday, various friends posted photographs on Facebook of some of the coastal towns' flooding, particularly in West Cowes, where the high street was underwater all the way up to Sainsbury's (which is a bit of a walk from the seafront and the ferry terminal.) Apparently the military were helicoptered in to help out. Checking the local news site, I've also just found out that Ventnor Undercliff is being evacuated due to landslides. I've been unaffected by it all, as I live in the centre of the Island and uphill.

Shopping!

One of my Christmas presents was a gift card for Foyle's, so I travelled into London with my sister on the Monday morning, before heading back home via a shopping trip to Southampton later that day. I'd planned to spend it on The Girl With All The Gifts by M. R. Carey and Attachments by Rainbow Rowell, but astonishingly, I couldn't find either of these titles in the famous five-storey bookshop. Not that it was too hard to find something else to spend my voucher on: eventually I settled on The Explorer by James Smythe, which I remembered seeing reviewed on Ellie's book blog, and Dream London by Tony Ballantyne, which was an impulse buy. It is brand-new to me, but looks bizarre, unsettling and fascinating. I bought The Girl With All The Gifts in Waterstone's on Oxford Street (the little one in the Plaza, which I like better than the one with the funny Twitter account; it has a friendlier atmosphere, I think) but could not find Attachments in any of the big stores in either London or Southampton. Not to worry, though, as there was a copy back on the Isle of Wight.

Since I've lost both my local HMV and Blockbuster, I have to do my DVD-buying whenever I get the chance. I'm especially disappointed in the loss of Blockbuster for boxsets - there are so many series I want to watch, but don't want to shell out £20 or so if I don't know if I'll like them. I found the first series of Battlestar Galactica in HMV for £6.99, and a second-hand season one of Heroes in Southampton's CEX. (Now, why don't we have a CEX on the Island? It is needed.) Both of these are things I've been curious about for a while, and did not mind spending just a little more than it would have cost to rent them. In the meantime, I've been continuing watching Buffy and Star Trek: The Next Generation.

What I read:

Last week I read through two decent but underwhelming teen novels: Ketchup Clouds by Annabel Pitcher, and Severed Heads, Broken Hearts by Robyn Schneider. I'd read Pitcher's My Sister Lives on the Mantlepiece (or, more accurately, let David Tennant read it to me when I had a migraine) and was very impressed, but unfortunately Ketchup Clouds didn't live up to expectations. I couldn't figure out how old the narrator was supposed to be: her voice came across as much younger than the events she was reporting. I suppose this is fair enough: she must be between fourteen and sixteen, an age where childhood and adulthood sit very uncomfortably together. The cover story alluded to a girl haunted by a terrible secret, but the plot focused more on the run-up to the tragedy than its aftermath, and though beautifully written, it was a storyline that didn't really interest me.

Severed Heads, Broken Hearts is a very John Green-esque coming of age story, funny and affectionate, but unfortunately spoiled for me by the awareness of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope. Last year, the Internet got quite indignant about Manic Pixies, declaring them to be a sexist portrayal of women, that they appear only in relation to men and don't get to tell their own story. I don't necessarily agree with this argument: characters look different from the outside than from the inside. If Cassidy, or Alaska Young, or Margo Roth Spiegelman were the protagonists, rather than the love interests, would that in itself stop them from wearing the "Manic Pixie" label? Can you think of any characters who could be "Manic Pixies" if they were shown from another perspective? I wonder if even my beloved Anne Shirley would come across that way, if her story was told from the perspective of Gilbert Blythe. Jeane from Sarra Manning's Adorkable is an interesting version of the character, as the narrative switches between her point of view and the boy's. Also, are there Manic Pixie Dream Boys? Augustus Waters springs to mind. And let's not forget all the supernatural creatures in the form of a teenage male, who are seen only in relation to a teenage girl. An Interchangeable Magical Boyfriend Creature is very different to a vampire, werewolf or faerie narrator who happens to have a girlfriend. Does this mean there is no place for the trope? Nine out of ten times, when I think analytically about tropes, it enhances my reading experience, but occasionally it ruins it. Cassidy Thorpe is a textbook Manic Pixie Dream Girl, and though I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing, the controversy of the trope made me enjoy Severed Heads, Broken Hearts a lot less than I might have done a year ago.

Glen Duncan's The Last Werewolf has been sitting on my to-read pile for a couple of years, so I decided that if I was going to read it, I should hurry up about it. It is very dark - perhaps not surprisingly for a book about a man who turns into a ruthless killer once a month! My preferred version of the werewolf legend is when the person and the wolf are pretty much separate - and that the wolf looks like a wolf, not a weird hybrid. The Last Werewolf uses the hybrid version, which extends into narrator Jake's human life as well. He cannot compartmentalise his human and wolf selves, so he's developed a very nihilistic worldview to cope with his changed nature. So he kills people every month: he has come to terms with this in order to survive. The Last Werewolf is bleakly philosophical, darkly poetic; not always a pleasant read, but it's good to have another version of the werewolf legend to compare with the Lupins, Ozzes and Elenas.

Though I wouldn't call myself a Tom Hiddleston fangirl, I do like him a lot as an actor and a person. He's been acting in Shakespeare's Coriolanus recently, which I haven't been lucky enough to see, but the Twitter-talk about it prompted me to read the play. As is often the case with Shakespeare, I was blown away by how applicable this story of ancient Rome still is today: the tragedy of a powerful man whose fatal flaw is his underestimation and disdain for the ordinary folk. This isn't one of Shakespeare's plays where every other line is a famous quotation, but it does include the words "to fob off" (exactly as one would use it today) "thwack" and "sprightly."

Bout of Books 8.0: Saturday

9PM

After a lovely - but too quick - day off with plenty of reading, I was back at work today, where I spent much of the time manning the front till. This is not one of my favourite jobs as I'm not allowed to wander off and get anything productive done, but just have to stand there and serve customers. Most are friendly or neutral - I haven't had any really unpleasant people for a while - but smiling at everyone is tiring. Still, the coming week has plenty of other work to do, and I spent the last part of the afternoon making lists with bullet-points, trying to organise every small detail of what I have to do on each day. (I am a fervent believer in lists. They make the jobs feel less overwhelming, and it is a nice feeling to cross items off.)

I couldn't get to sleep for ages last night, for no one's fault but my own. I tell myself that the computer must go OFF at 10PM on a work night, and that I must wind down with a book for half an hour to an hour before switching off the light, but that time crept to 10.20... 10.30... 10.45... I was in bed by about 11, but my mind was still whirring. So I made a start on my next read: Necropolis by Catharine Arnold. It is a beautifully macabre history of London, the people who died there and the burial rites throughout the centuries. I continued with this book at lunch time, and have got up to the various plague epidemics before the Great Fire of London. Having lived in London for a few years, I do love to find out about the stranger things in its history. It is a very strange city.

I had intended to read more when I got into work, but instead, inspired by the video I watched and shared yesterday, of Neil Gaiman's advice for budding writers, I brushed the cobwebs off an old project: a screenplay adaptation of L. M. Montgomery's Rilla of Ingleside. My recent "work" on this project has been a scene-by-scene outline, but though I hadn't finished the planning, I felt it was time to jump in and actually do some writing. First drafts can be edited, but blank pages can't.

Dodger - Terry Pratchett

It has long been suspected that although his books are universally classified as “comic fantasy,” Sir Terry Pratchett doesn’t really write fantasy at all. Sure, the majority of his literary output takes place on a flat world, carried through space on the backs of four humongous elephants, who in turn are supported by the gigantic turtle named the Great A’Tuin. And certainly this world is populated with witches and wizards, vampires, werewolves and zombies, trolls and dwarves and blue-skinned six-inch-high warriors. But all that is merely set-dressing. Over the years, the Discworld books have evolved from parodies of fantasy, to fantasy as parody of everything else, to satirical fiction that uses fantastical elements as a lens to view our own society.

When I watched the TV adaptations of Hogfather and Going Postal, I was reminded of nothing so much as the BBC series of Charles Dickens’ Bleak House and Little Dorrit. Perhaps this was in part because Ankh-Morpork had been designed to resemble Victorian London, all ricketty and grimy, and perhaps some shared actors helped (Claire Foy and Charles Dance, for example.) But I came to realise that it was not just the TV adaptations that had a similar style, but the works upon which they were based. Pratchett and Dickens make use of humour and caricature to challenge their readers to think about the ridiculousness of life, silliness to make a serious point.

So when Terry Pratchett brought out a novel set far away from the Discworld, in Charles Dickens’ London, the two worlds joined together seamlessly. Pratchett’s Dodger is not, as I first thought, Oliver Twist from the point of view of the more interesting semi-antagonist, nor a prequel. Instead, despite the shared nickname and outfit, Dodger charts the changing fortunes of another young urchin, a kind-hearted but streetwise lad who earns a living as a “tosher,” scavenging in London’s intensive sewer system. This Dodger has a strict personal morality, even if it doesn’t always necessarily match up with the law, and when he rescues a young woman from a savage beating, his destiny takes a detour and he finds himself mixing with some quite surprising characters from London’s myth and history. “Mister Charlie” Dickens himself plays a significant role in the story, and we see that Dodger influenced some of Dickens’ own writing. I repeat, this Dodger is not Dickens’ Jack Dawkins, but we can infer that he influenced some elements of Mister Charlie’s Artful - a subtlety that perhaps only a master writer like Pratchett could convey.

There are never any doubts over the authorship of this book - you can see that Ankh-Morpork owes a lot to Victorian London, especially now that it is well-established in the Discworld’s industrial revolution. And you really don’t miss the fantasy elements - as I said before, these are mere setting details for Pratchett’s explorations of humanity (even when this humanity refers to trolls, dwarfs and goblins.) London is a fascinating city, both above ground and beneath it, as stuffed with strangeness as anything you could make up. My curiosity, first piqued by Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere, was tantalised and has been inspired to read more non-fiction about the secrets of the city.

I was strongly reminded of Pratchett and Gaiman’s friendship and collaboration on Good Omens, more than anything else either author has written in the twenty-odd years since. As well as the appearance of the surname Device in a bonus scene,* I noted a paraphrase of one of the few lines in Good Omens whose author I was sure I could identify. (I would have said it was absolutely a Neil line.) And Pratchett made reference to a curious brass bedstead found in the sewers. I last met this bed in the preface to Neverwhere. Truth really is stranger than fiction.

*bonus scene exclusive to Dodgers bought in WHSmith.

Olympic Readathon mini-reviews: Ray Bradbury and Sarah Waters

Something Wicked This Way Comes – Ray Bradbury

One strange wild dark long year, Halloween came early. One year Halloween came on October 24, three hours after midnight.

When Cooger and Dark’s Pandemonium Shadow Show comes to town in the middle of the night, best friends Will and Jim sneak out of their homes to investigate – but once in, the boys are ensnared in the carnival’s dark secrets, and it doesn’t want them to leave.

Though only 260 pages, I found Something Wicked… quite a slow read, because Ray Bradbury works his words hard: telling a story, making poetry and music, capturing snapshots and philosophy, evoking terror and joy and exploring just what it means to be human. Stunning and extraordinary, Something Wicked… is full of memorable characters and rides: Cooger and Dark, the Illustrated Man, the Dust Witch and the Seller of Lightning rods, the mirror-maze and the carousel that ages its riders up or down with every turn. There is something terrifying in the manipulation of time on the body: I was reminded of the creepiest parts of Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator, Harry Potter’s Department of Mysteries, and the Master’s torture of the Doctor in Doctor Who. Bradbury has created a circus that will trouble the mind long after the pages have closed, and I suspect I’ll never feel quite comfortable visiting a fairground after dark again.

Tipping the Velvet - Sarah Waters

 When oyster-girl Nancy Astley falls in love with a male impersonator on the stage of the music-hall, her greatest dream comes true when Kitty asks her to come with her to London. After spending time employed as Kitty's dresser, Nancy is asked to join in her act, and it soon becomes inconceivable to think of one without the other, whether on or off the stage. But after the dream comes the waking, and when Kitty abandons Nan for a man, Nan finds herself a single woman having to make her own way in the harsh world of Victorian London.

Though nearly 500 pages, Tipping the Velvet is a quick read, a page-turner. Sarah Waters keeps the story fresh by changing Nan's situation regularly and introducing a cast of memorable characters, both lovable and awful. The story is told in stunningly authentic period language, and enlightening about the underground gay and lesbian cultures of 1880s and '90s London. Tipping the Velvet is hilarious and heartbreaking, more than a little saucy, but I felt that there was a sad, sordid feel to it in the middle sections - a sense that Nancy doesn't value herself and lets others take advantage of her - before she finds a place for herself among the socialists, feminists and "toms" of the East End.

Tipping the Velvet is a brilliant exploration of sexual and gender identity, but more, it is a gripping story. Ms Waters writes with confidence and poetry, and this book is all the more remarkable for being her first novel. It is a masterpiece from one of Britain's greatest contemporary writers.

Neverwhere - Neil Gaiman

Dear Diary.

On Friday I had a job, a fiancee, and a life that made sense. (Well, as much as any life makes sense.) Then I found an injured girl bleeding on the pavement, and I tried to be a Good Samaritan. Now I've got no fiancee, no home, no job, and I'm walking around a couple of hundred feet under the streets of London with the projected life expectancy of a suicidal fruitfly.

After stopping to help a young girl in trouble, Richard Mayhew finds to his horror that he seems to have dropped out of the world. Not only do his friends and colleagues not recognise him, but no one else seems to even see him. Cashpoints don't recognise his bank card, automatic doors can't sense him and his flat has been let out to someone else! Desperate to get his life back, Richard finds himself in another London located beneath the streets of the city we know by that name, in the sewers and disused tube stations, where all those London landmarks with strange names have a literal counterpart. An Earl has his Court on an underground train, the Night's Bridge is a deadly place, the Black Friars guard a key to release an Angel - named Islington - from his prison. London Below is where the people go who "fall through the cracks" of society, a place where rats are venerated but a human life is fragile. Richard no longer exists in London Above, but can he hope to survive long in London Below?

In Gaiman's introduction to Neverwhere, he writes that his intention was, "to write a book that would do for adults what the books I had loved when younger, books like Alice in Wonderland, or the Narnia books, or the Wizard of Oz did for me as a kid." If that is so, he certainly succeeded. After just one reading, Neverwhere felt like a classic to me, like something I knew inside out because it wasn't just a book that had been written, but something organic, something that had grown naturally and that somehow, I had always known this story. It was more like a mythology than a novel. London is an old city, with so much forgotten history and so many romantic, imaginative landmarks and names that Gaiman's explanation makes sense of them all. Of course the Earl has a Court. Of course the Angel Islington is a real figure. Of course the Black Friars are a real order of monks with a mysterious purpose. In an unsettling way, Gaiman's Neverwhere comes to feel more real than the real city of London.

Neverwhere is a wonderful fantasy quest with a humour reminiscent of Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, only it takes place beneath London rather than in space. Perhaps there is some inspiration from classic Doctor Who, but Neverwhere is what alerted me to the wonderful imagination of Neil Gaiman. True, sometimes I got so engrossed in the world of London Below that I would wonder, vaguely, what the actual plot was - what were the characters' goals. For the most part, though, I didn't wonder for long but just sat back and enjoyed the ride.

London Below has some wonderful characters: the Lady Door with a special talent for opening doors that no one else can - that no one else even knows are there. The Marquis de Carabas - named from a fairy tale - the arrogant, flamboyant rogue. And in Mr Croup and Mr Vandemar we have the creepiest villainous duo I have yet encountered, chillingly, inhumanly evil; "I suppose you could call them men, yes. Two legs, two arms, a head each." Yet alongside the shivers evoked by this terrifying duo is a lot of dark humour in their very matter-of-factness and the contrast between them. Mr Croup is smart-talking, sly and cruel. Vandemar is mentally slow and brutally honest. This combination of clever baddie and thuggish, stupid baddie is hardly an original one, but Croup and Vandemar stand out from the rest. But despite all the dangers encountered below the streets of London, the scariest moment was the "Ordeal" that Richard is tested with, a scene of psychological horror that leaves Richard - and maybe the reader too - questioning his own sanity. His hallucinations - if that's what he experiences - are terribly convincing.

I first had Neverwhere recommended to me in my first week at university, September 2004, but it took me until last spring to get around to reading it. When I did, I wondered how I could have waited so long, and why my friends had not insisted more strongly that I stop dawdling, put down everything else and read this book. Neverwhere is without doubt the best book I read in 2010, a must-read for Londoners and London-lovers with a love for a good imagination.

Artichoke Hearts, Sita Brahmachari

Mira Levenson has just turned twelve and her world is becoming a strange and unrecogniseable place. Her Nana Josie, always so artistic, passionate and full of life, is dying; she can't stop thinking about Jidé Jackson, whose confident, joky manner hides a tragic history and a sensitive soul. Mira is changing. Sometimes she catches her mouth saying what she didn't intend to say, speaking out when she's always been so shy, or alternatively keeping secrets to herself. Nothing particularly drastic, she just doesn't feel like sharing everything with everybody.

There are a lot of books for teenagers that deal with the aftermath of the death of a loved one. Artichoke Hearts actually seemed to be targetted at the younger end of the Young Adult range (11+) but is unusual in exploring a terminal illness, and the feelings of helplessness of those who can only watch as a relative approaches death, and Brahmachari writes this with simplicity but a great deal of maturity. Nana Josie is early on established as a vivacious, artistic woman, a former hippy and passionate protester. Early on, there is a moment of dark, uncomfortable humour, as she embarks on her big artistic project: to paint her own coffin. It is heartbreaking to watch such a lively person fade.

The artichoke of the title refer to a charm given to Mira by Nana Josie, a symbol of the human heart, and how with age and experience, a heart which may seem to break grows tough layers to protect it, like the layers of an artichoke. The novel is a sweet, beautiful coming-of-age story, showing a child starting to learn who she is. Mira is a quiet girl, artistic and thoughtful, but through the sadness of seeing her grandmother die, the strangeness of early adolescence and the sweetness of a first romance, she grows in confidence and self-awareness. The characters are all very-well rounded individuals, and I think that Jidé Jackson is one of the loveliest boyfriends I've encountered in a kids' or teen book for a long time - and he's only twelve.

Read for the Support Your Local
Library Challenge 2011

One way that Mira grows in her understanding is in her extracurricular creative writing class, which is led by writer Miss Pat Print, and consists of herself, her best friend Millie, Jidé and his friend Ben Gbemi.  In the classes, Miss Print (an unfortunate name for a writer!) helps the children to understand themselves and their world through writing. The novel is written as being Mira's diary, in the present tense which itself is highlighted early on as helping reader and writer feel the immediacy of the narrative. On occasion, after a short writing exercise, the children start to feel empathy for others in a way that they hadn't before. I found these writing sessions fascinating, and they summed up what is, to me, why literature is so important: Fiction (or poetry, theatre, film, TV) helps to make sense of the world and cultivates understanding of other people.

Artichoke Hearts is a pensive, sometimes sad read, but ultimately it left me feeling uplifted, a celebration of life, youth, a loving family and good friends. I would recommend it for Judy Blume fans and older readers of Jacqueline Wilson, who are maybe looking for something a bit more grown-up. So far, Artichoke Hearts has quietly slipped onto the bookshop shelves with little fanfare, but it deserves to be widely read and talked about.