First quarter reading

 When I was a student (a very long time ago) it was the done thing to study other people's bookshelves.  "Oooh", we would exclaim, "you've got this book, what did you think of it?"

I suspect that some people would stock a bookshelf just for publicity purposes, while actually reading a quite different set of books.  If you read Mills & Boon / Manga trash / true detective tales, then you buy a few volumes of Umberto Eco, Salman Rushdie, JK Rowling (but not Harry Potter) to impress your friends.

I think the current equivalent for the fully connected generation is to have a public profile at Goodreads or something of the sort.  Meanwhile in the steam-and-clockwork section of the Internet, some people post on a blog about what they have been reading.  So here's what I read in the first quarter of this year, some of it recommended, some of it disappointing, all of it genuine.  I finished every one from cover to cover.

Mick Herron - Spook Street

The next of the Slow Horses series, now a very good TV series.  This one is just as entertaining as all the rest so far, and I didn't notice so many instances of cheating the reader.  Herron has a habit of finishing a chapter with a sentence like "with a deafening bang, the gun went off" and then writing the next chapter about some of the other characters, so you are kept waiting to find whether anyone was actually shot and how bad it was.  The worst offence would have to be the "two shots" incident in Dead Lions.

Aaron Williams - Nodwick

I found a link to the complete collection and read them all from start to finish.  Williams has produced some inventive and entertaining comics; I used to follow Full Frontal Nerdity before Nodwick.  Reading this has encouraged me to look out some of his other series, maybe PS238 next.

Janice Hallett - The Appeal

Speaking (as we were earlier) of unreliable narrators, this is an intriguing whodunnit told entirely in a collection of emails and text messages between the people who were involved.  To be pretentious, we could describe it as an epistolary novel, like Jane Austen's Lady Susan.  For a change I took this one seriously, by trying to solve the mystery before the book reveals the answers.  I took notes of anything that seemed odd at the time, listed all the characters and their relationships, and actually did spot most of what had been going on. 

M.C. Beaton - Devil's Delight (Agatha Raisin)

The latest Agatha Raisin, light entertainment and nothing wrong with that.  I made no effort to guess who was behind this one, but still realised before Ms Raisin worked it out.

William Wallace Cook - Plotto The Master Book of All Plots

This is a fascinating book.  It attempts to analyse all existing storylines into a series of numbered structures, and then provide a method to string them together and write your own bestseller.  Apparently that's what Erle Stanley Gardner did to create the best-selling Perry Mason stories.  I've tried to follow the method myself, and have something that feels tantalisingly close to a decent plot.  Now all it needs is some stylish writing and interesting characters.  Maybe this one deserves a post of its own in future.

Richard Osman - The last devil to die

The latest Thursday Murder Club story, and not as bonkers as the previous one.  If you've not read any of these, I recommend them.  Like the Agatha Raisin series they are mostly light-weight silliness, but now and then hit the reader with a left hook of serious emotion.

Robert Thorogood - Death Comes to Marlow

The second book in the Marlow Murder Club series.  Entertaining but sadly for me not baffling.  It may be that the trick of this particular locked-room mystery has been used elsewhere and I'd seen it before, or maybe the author was too fair to the reader and gave enough information to reveal the solution.  Once it's clear how the thing was done, only one person could have done it, so the rest of the book is an entertaining wait for that suspect to be confirmed.

Ian Livingstone - Dice Men - Games Workshop 1975 to 1985

I read this one out of curiosity, since I'm old enough to remember the "new" GW store opening in Manchester and later the change of direction from covering any kind of game by any publisher to a single in-house brand of GW games in GW stores with GW models, and you can pay to have them advertised to you by buying the GW magazine.  No need for a recommendation, if you're old enough to remember then you'll already have picked this up for nostalgia.

One thing I never knew about was GW's failed game "Towerblocks", something about stacking wooden blocks into a tower, then carefully pulling them out again.  That'll never catch on!

Rev Richard Coles - Murder before Evensong

Given the other books on this list, you would expect Murder before Evensong to be just my thing, but it didn't really grip me.  Perhaps the supporting cast weren't interesting enough or didn't behave suspiciously enough to set me wondering whether they could have committed the murder.  Only one false trail looked plausible enough to set me wondering and I didn't spot the actual solution either.  The second novel is already sitting on my shelf and I'm hoping to enjoy it more than this one.  I suspect that any author's first novel is a place to use all the funny stories from real life, vent some long-felt frustrations or in this case perhaps to make a number of in-jokes to amuse other vicars.  Certainly one of the many faults with my own attempt to write a book was that it was too full of the stuff I wanted to get off my chest, even though nobody would care.

Clearly a theme runs through the books this quarter.  They are mostly lightweight crime stories.  Second quarter is going to change that in a big way, since I'm half-way through Neal Stephenson's Anathem, but I'll talk about that one when I've finished it.

Until next time, health & happiness to you all.