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Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage
Haruki Murakami 2013 (Vintage 2014)



"Tsukuru Tazaki had four best friends at school. By chance, all of their names contained a color. The two boys were called Akamatsu, meaning ‘red pine’, and Oumi, ‘blue sea’, while the girls’ names were Shirane, ‘white root’, and Kurono, ‘black field’. Tazaki was the only last name with no color in it.
One day Tsukuru Tazaki's friends announced that they didn't want to see him, or talk to him ever again.
Since that day Tsukuru has been floating through life, unable to form intimate connections with anyone. But then he meets Sara, who tells him that the time has come to find out what happened all those years ago." (blurb)

You might expect a book about a boring character to be a bit dull itself but not in this case. I thoroghly enjoyed my first Murakami, first Japanese, or come to think of it, first asian novel. One thing that surprised me was how westernised Japanese urban society is - like Sunderland without Greggs - and even the Pet Shop Boys get a shout out.
Murakami is one of the world's best selling authors. His books get the Harry Potter treatment with people queueing up at midnight for his book releases. I won't go that far but I'll be looking out for his back catalogue in the charity shops.

The Best Science Fiction Stories: 1949
Everett F. Bleiler and T. E. Dikty (editors) 1949 (Frederick Fell 1949)



This was the first ever "Year's Best" SF anthology. It's not bad, most of the stories are readable although a couple are too dated to be anything other than curiosities of their era.
There are decent stories by stalwarts of the pulp magazines such as Murray Leinster, Fredric Brown and Henry Kuttner. There's two Ray Bradbury stories which became part of "The Martian Chronicles". I didn't think much of them when I first read them as a teenager but I enjoyed them more this time as my range has widened to include the folksy sentimental "wishy-washy" SF as I would have labelled them back then.

Classic Tales of Horror Volume 2
Jonathan Wooding (editor) 2007 (Bloody Books 2007)



"Classic" is a euphemism for old enough to be out of copyright but it's also a fairly accurate description for the literary merits of this anthology. I enjoyed reading some old favourites by M. R. James, Bram Stoker and E. Nesbit. The stories by literary giants George Eliot and Edith Wharton were the first I've read by those authors which was good because I'm unlikely to read any of their novels.
I bought it because I wanted to read "The Judges House" by Bram Stoker which put the frighteners on me when I was a lad. It's still a good read but this time I didn't have to sleep with the light on afterwards.

In the Ocean of Night
Gregory Benford 1977 (Orbit 1978)



Benford's novel "Sailing Bright Eternity" is one of the "SF ... 101 Best Novels 1985-2010" and is the sixth and last in a series so I thought I should get cracking on the earlier ones first, this being number one.
It's not a great read unfortunately. We have first contact with an alien artefact which attracts the scout of a machine civilisation which is attempting to cleanse the galaxy of organic lifeforms. An exciting premise but it seems to take a back seat to the protagonist's relationships and office politics.
One problem that can't really be avoided in near furure SF is that the novel is set between 1999 and 2019 and we can see that Benford's future is nothing like the real one. Later editions have dealt with this by pushing it further into the future. One quite amusing prediction is that in the 2010s female tv news reporters would be broadcasting topless.
Walmsley, the protagonist, is an unlikeable character and Benford isn't able to make him sympathetic enough for us to care about him. There's also a bizarre sublot involving Bigfoot. It turns out he's not some student jokers messing about in monkey suits but a stage in human evolution which has been propelled by previous alien visitors.
Disappointing then, but not bad enough for me to give up on the series just yet.

Wings Over Witchend
Malcolm Saville 1956 (Girls Gone By 2010)



Number nine in the Lone Pine series and the third set on the Long Mynd in Shropshire.
Since the last visit the Mynd has acquired a large forestry plantation and a Gliding club which is good because without them there wouldn't have been a plot.
This time we have a ruthless gang of professional criminals engaged in .... christmas tree rustling!, and the glider soaring overhead at night is a gang member in radio contact with the thieves allowing them to dodge the boys in blue. Then the flying saucer that the British boffins invented in the last book shoots down the glider with a Lewis Gun in the rear cockpit. I made that last bit up - old Malcolm missed a trick there.

SPQR
Mary Beard 2015 (Profile Books 2016)



"Ancient Rome matters.
Its history of empire, conquest, cruelty and excess is something against which we still judge ourselves. Its myths and stories - from Romulus and Remus to the Rape of Lucretia - still strike a chord with us. And its debates about citizenship, security and the rights of the individual still influence our own debates on civil liberty today.
SPQR is a new look at Roman history from one of the world's foremost classicists. It explores not only how Rome grew from an insignificant village in central Italy to a power that controlled territory from Spain to Syria, but also how the Romans thought about themselves and their achievements, and why they are still important to us."

This is the least enjoyable history book I've read for a long time. Beard's account focuses on her own interests in sociology and civil administration which I found quite dull. Incredibly there's more about dice games than the battle of Cannae. She ends the history in the early third century AD for some obscure reason which I can't remember. I did learn quite a lot because I started from a position of high ignorance but I got more than I wanted on a lot of dull stuff; page after page on Cicero for example, who seems to be an obsession of the author. On the plus side it has a decent set of maps with nearly every place mentioned in the text shown on one of them.
I think "Dynasty: The Rise and Fall of the House of Caesar" by Tom Holland might be more to my taste. The Guardian sniffily described it as "lurid" and a bad review from them virtually guarantees a good read.

Rabaul 1943-44
Mark Lardas 2018 (Osprey 2018)



"In 1942, the massive Japanese naval base and airfield at Rabaul was a fortress standing in the Allies' path to Tokyo. It was impossible to seize Rabaul, or starve the 100,000-strong garrison out. Instead the US began an innovative, hard-fought two-year air campaign to draw its teeth, and allow them to bypass the island completely.

The struggle decided more than the fate of Rabaul. If successful, the Allies would demonstrate a new form of warfare, where air power, with a judicious use of naval and land forces, would eliminate the need to occupy a ground objective in order to control it. As it turned out, the Siege of Rabaul proved to be more just than a successful demonstration of air power – it provided the roadmap for the rest of World War II in the Pacific." (Osprey)

Another good Osprey title with this the second in the Air Campaign series. I didn't know anything about this operation which was led by the US with Australian and New Zealand playing a significant role and no British forces involved at all although Beaufort and Beaufighter aircraft were operated by the RAAF.
I've now read over twenty of these Osprey Campaign books and there's not been a dud yet. Only another four or five hundred to go.

On the Past, Present & Future
Isaac Asimov 1987 (Barnes and Noble 1992)



This is one of the ragbag books where Asimov collects various pieces published in a vast array of periodicals from "Penthouse" to "Personal Administrator". It covers a lot of the same ground as earlier books with propaganda on How the only hope for humanity is a socialist world government, colonisation of the solar system etc. More enjoyable are the autobiographical and sometimes humorous pieces where he explains his approach to writing and his enthusiasms for Sherlock Holmes and Gilbert and Sullivan. One of these is about his heart disease and bypass surgery. His doctor recommends a heart surgeon called Colvin who he had operate on his own mother. "Do you love your mother, Peter" says Asimov. "Very much" he replied. "Then I'll take Colvin" says Asimov. The surgery was a success but he wasn't to know that the blood he received contained HIV and it was that which killed him a few years later.

Fatima
Fatima Whitbread & Adrianne Blue 1988 (Sphere 1989)



The second half of the book is an account of Fatima's athletics career. The rivalries with Tessa Sanderson and Petra Felke, the two olympic medals and the World Championships gold which make her Britain's greatest ever thrower. Very interesting particularly if you're an athletics fan.
Unlike most sporting biographies where the subject's childhood is skimmed over in a brief opening chapter or two Fatima devotes the whole of the first half of the book to her harrowing childhood. Abandoned by her mother to die as a three month old baby she was brought up in a succession of children's homes. In a sensible well run country her mother would have been in jail for ever but in a country where the perpetrators are seen as victims, particularly if there's an ethnic dimension, the useless social services send the child back to the mother who treats her as a slave and allows her boyfriend to rape her and then tries to pimp her out.
After all that trauma it's heartwarming to read about the love she has for her adoptive family, the Whitbreads and you finish it feeling that sporting success was never more deserved.

Henry I
Edmund King 2018 (Penguin 2022)



"The youngest of William the Conqueror's sons, Henry I came to unchallenged power only after two of his brothers died in strange hunting accidents and he had imprisoned the other. He was destined to become one of the greatest of all medieval monarchs, both through his own ruthlessness, and through his dynastic legacy. Edmund King's engrossing portrait shows a strikingly charismatic, intelligent and fortunate man, whose rule was looked back on as the real post-conquest founding of England as a new realm: wealthy, stable, bureaucratised and self-confident."

This series gives a good summary in less than a hundred pages for people like me who are starting from scratch.
Hnery's reign was a period of stability but his only legitimate son died young and the 12th century establishment blob blackballed his daughter Matilda and put Henry's nephew Stephen on the throne which led to the civil war known as "The Anarchy". It sounds like there should be plenty of scope for blindings, castrations and disembowelments in the next instalment.
It's a pity they didn't have a book on either of the King Edmunds as this fellow would have been the perfect choice to write it.