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Life's a Pudding
Guy Nickalls 1939 (Faber and Faber 1939)



Guy Nickalls was 41 years old when he won a rowing gold medal alongside Frederick Kelly in the eight at the 1908 Olympics. Nickalls describes Kelly as the most talented sculler he ever saw but a very difficult man to train and it would be hard to find two men more different in temperament. Kelly was an aesthete, a talented musician and composer who never mentioned rowing in his war diaries. Nickalls was a bluff outdoorsman who devotes much of his book to just about every race he ever rowed in as well as every animal he killed and every fish he caught.
He was too old for military service in WWI but blagged and bribed his way in and eventually reached the Western front in 1918 in his fifties where he had a few close shaves.
Nickalls hardly mentions his wife and children nor his working life in the city. His son fills in some of the details in a closing chapter and describes him as a man completely lacking in tact who couldn't be prevented from telling people exactly what he thought. He also says that "Boy scouts and flint implements were two of his pre-war hobbies". Each to their own I suppose.

Balaclava 1854
John Sweetman 1990 (Osprey 1990)



"The Charge of the Light Brigade, famously immortalized by Tennyson, lasted only 20 minutes from beginning to end and was but one of the three dramatic phases of the Battle of Balaclava. John Sweetman describes this dashing series of actions, including "The Thin Red Line" and the Charge of the Heavy Brigade, as the Anglo-French army besieging the Crimean port of Sebastopol defended its supply base from Russian attack." (Osprey)

Another good entry in the Osprey Campaign series written by one of the Sandhurst historians.
Most people have heard of the Charge of the Light Brigade but the Crimean War as a whole is largely forgotten. The names of the other battles live on precariously in various ways. There are still a smattering of pubs called The Alma. The balaclava is the headwear of choice for Irish terrorists and Inkerman Street was where Stan Ogden's lady friend lived.
The last veteran of the war, who was present at the naval bombardment of Sevastopol, was Timothy the gender fluid tortoise who died at Powderham Castle in 2004.

Supergeordie - Scott Dobson's Christmas Book
Scott Dobson 1971 (Frank Graham 1971)



Geordie Beuk No.10. More stories, jokes, folklore and, as it's Christmas, a quiz, a crossword and a set of recipes which use the magic ingredient known as "broon". All written in the local pidgin with the author's distinctive illustrations.

Puzzles from Other Worlds
Martin Gardner 1984 (OUP 1986)



"Why did Lieutenant Flarp refuse to spin the coin? Can a polybug have seven edges? What convinced Ada that she was in another universe? Brimming with conundrums like the above, and peopled by such bizarre characters as Dr Moreau, the purple-pebble eaters, and the not-so-intelligent race of three-eyed humanoids who inhabit the planet Chromo, Martin Gardner's latest collections of science-fiction puzzles will keep the reader amused and engrossed for many hours.
Each of the tales contains a challenging puzzle involving logic, wordplay, palindromes, geometry, probability, or magic numbers. Every puzzle leads to a second and related puzzle, which in turn leads to a third, and sometimes a fourth, and the answers on all four levels are listed at the back of the book. Written by a master puzzle-maker, this is an irresistible book for both science-fiction and puzzle fans." (blurb)

As well as his monthly column in Scientific American, Martin Gardner, for a number of years, wrote these puzzle colums for Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine. They are short articles, given a humourous SF setting, where the emphasis is focused on the puzzles and less on the maths. Each article starts with a realatively easy problem followed by supplementary puzzles which are a bit harder. They're good fun and even if you get stuck on the puzzles it's still interesting to see the neat ways in which they can be solved.

Sideshow
Sheri S. Tepper 1992 (Bantam 1993)



"Barbaric customs and bizarre human cults are prserved on the planet Elsewhere. The rest of the universe has been taken over by the Hobbs Land Gods, which means that everyone alive, with the exception of the people on Elsewhere, lives in perfect harmony with nature and with each other. But Elsewhere is ruled by computer-encrypted professors who have been dead for a thousand years. The professors were dedicated to maintaining human diversity. Their ancient analogs are dedicated to something far more sinister. The time has come to consider whether enslavement by the Hobbs Land Gods is not preferable to the depravity being cultivated on Elsewhere. The time has come to ask the Big Question: what is the Destiny of Man? And answer it . . ." (from Goodreads)

The final book in the arbai trilogy and the weakest in my opinion. Tepper's books tend to be quite hard to get into because of their glacially slow beginnings and this one especially so. There are some intersting ideas and interesting characters and the story became quite compelling towards the end but overall it just didn't "click" with me.

Septimus and the Stone of Offering
Stephen Chance 1976 (Bodley Head 1979)



"A mysterious fire on a Welsh hillside on a clear April morning; the remains of a white bird lying in ash on a tombstone with a dagger in its breast; no wonder the Reverend Septimus Treloar, ex-CID Chief Inspector, thinks there's something worth investigating in the small village of Hafod Maenen. With only a handful of clues at his disposal but a great deal of canny instinct, Septimus is drawn into a revolving plot concerning political conspiracy, ancient rites and dark magic powers at work in the depths of the Welsh valleys. In this, the third of his wonderful Septimus series for young adults, Stephen Chance once more depicts his eccentric hero as he wittingly plays his hand against the forces of evil." (publisher's blurb)

Stephen Chance was the pen-name Philip Turner used for his four Septimus books. The books are well writen with good characterisation and unlike today's YA novels have few if any children involved. Turner won the Carnegie medal for one of his other books in the mid sixties and his output was well regarded but very few of his novels have been reissued in the last fifty years. Faber now publish the Septimus books as print on demand but the seventies hardbacks are still available for a similar price in the second hand market.

Modern Fantasy: The Hundred Best Novels
David Pringle 1988 (Grafton 1988)



"...The selection is a wide one, embracing stories of supernatural horror, heroic fantasy or 'fabulation' (tales set in a real but subtly distorted world) - all of them dealing with the marvellous, the magical or the otherworldly. The titles are arranged in chronological order of publication and range from "Titus Groan" by Mervyn Peake, "Seven days in New Crete" by Robert Graves, "Conan the Conqueror" by Robert E.Howard, "The Lord of the Rings" by J.R.R.Tolkien, "Dandelion Wine" by Ray Bradbury, "The Once and Future King" by T.H.White, "Cold Heaven", Brian Moore, "Nights at the Circus" by Angela Carter, "The Witches of Eastwick" by John Updike and "The Day of Creation" by J.G.Ballard." (blurb)

Pringle confines himself to the post war period 1946-1987 which prompts the query as to whether there were three fantasy books published each year which were worthy of inclusion. I've only read eleven and there are quite a few I've not heard of. So far I've only read the entries for the ones I've read and the he does a nice job of summarising the book and it's author in a couple of pages. It'll be interesting to read some of the more obscure books and pass my own judgement on them before reading Pringle's views.

The 1987 Annual World's Best SF
Donald A. Wollheim (editor) 1987 (DAW 1987)



I've read a few of Wollheim's Year's Best anthologies and they often include some real stinkers. Of the ten stories there are a couple that wouldn't have seemed out of place in a thirties pulp mag and one annoyingly twee feminist fable but the rest range from not bad to very good. I thought the best was Lucius Shepard's "R&R", a novella set in an American war in Guatemala with fantasy/magic realism elements but not actually SF. What stops it and a lot of other short fiction from being top class is the lack of pay-off at the end. This one seems to end too early, others just sort of peter out.
The Shepard story and Roger Zelazny's "Permafrost" won the Nebula awards for Novella and Novelette respectively.

Ravensgill
William Mayne 1970 (Red Fox 1990)



"Ravensgill describes how teenage cousins Bob and Judith reconcile a family quarrel that was prompted by an apparent murder committed by a member of one family against another. Ever since the murder took place forty-six years before, the respective families of the protagonists have been at odds. The cousins set out to solve the crime and end the bitterness that exists between their families. Unexpectedly, Bob finds a secret tunnel, an underground watercourse that provides a clue to the solution, and both he and Judith research the situation extensively. At the end of the novel, the teens clear the name of the main suspect in the crime, the late husband of Bob's grandmother, and bring about reconciliation." (from encyclopedia.com)

This is one of the three runners up for the 1970 Carnegie medal. Mayne has been described as a children's writer who was admired by librarians and literary critics but not much read by children and I don't remember seeing any of his books in our library. With it's lyrical desriptions of the Yorkshire Dales and a complex set up in which the protagonists, and therefore the reader, have less than clear understanding, it would be a challenging read for a child. I'm still not absolutely clear about who's who and what happened to them which caused the family rift.
Mayne later spent a couple of years in prison for sexual assaults on underage girls.

Big Bang
Simon Singh 2004 (Fourth Estate 2004)



"Everybody has heard of the Big Bang Theory. But how many of us can actually claim to understand it? With characteristic clarity and a narrative peppered with anecdotes and personal histories of those who have struggled to understand creation, Simon Singh has written the story of the most important theory ever.
As well as explaining what the Big Bang theory actually is and why cosmologists believe it is an accurate description of the origins of the universe, this book is also the fascinating story of the scientists who fought against the established idea of an eternal and unchanging universe. Simon Singh, renowned for making difficult ideas much less daunting than they first seem, is the perfect guide for this journey." (from Blackwells)

I'd previously read John Gribbin's "In Search of the Big Bang" and the great Steven Weinberg's "The First Three Minutes" on this subject but that was decades ago and it's a subject so fascinating that it's worth revisiting anyway even without the updates to the story.
I thought Singh did a fantastic job explaining cosmology for us laymen. The science is interesting enough but he makes the book less dry with bigraphies of the people who worked it all out.
A mint condition hardback picked up for £2 in a charity shop.