Well, having started strong with 4 proper-length novels in January, February has been a little busy, so I’ve read rather less.
In my defence, I finished a book on Sunday, so if February was a proper-length month I’d have squeezed in another. Ah well, at least I’ve got a headstart on March!
Project Hail Mary - Andy Weir
Project Hail Mary was a Christmas present from one of my most reliable book-choosing friends. She usually skews more towards fantasy (at least in her presents to me), so I was mildly surprised to find myself unwrapping what was patently going to be reasonably hard sci-fi. And set in space. I often don’t get on well with books set in space. But, like I said, she’s very reliable.
“I have four rough circles, each a couple of inches across. Yes, inches. When I’m stressed out, I revert to imperial units. It’s hard to be an American, okay?”
And everyone liked The Martian, right?
It was, of course, fine. The books cracks along at a tremendous pace, manages not to have vast tracts of turgid prose about the insides of spaceships, and is broadly speaking very silly.
Dr Grace - our unlikely space hero, suffering from amnesia and inexplicably solo on a large spaceship - has a very lightweight, chatty narration style that is incredibly easy to read.
We do, over the course of his adventures, get moderately vast tracts of space logistics, some of which I found a little difficult to follow - but I think that’s on me. I usually can’t keep up if anyone describes a layout more complicated than a small potting shed.
The story does use the same device over and over again: Dr Grace has a problem! Dr Grace can jury-rig himself a solution using a thing that is already on the ship, some alien tech and a lot of maths! He is basically a one-man A-Team In Space.
But… while I wouldn’t like to stand bail for all the solutions being completely plausible, they are plausible enough. They feel like a bunch of little puzzles with very satisfying conclusions. Anyway, the cover-blurb says Tim Peake liked the book, which seems good enough to me.
Despite my space-based misgivings, this book was massive fun.
Once Upon A Tome - Oliver Darkshire
This book - also a Christmas present - is subtitled “The Misadventures of a Rare Bookseller”. I suppose technically it is non-fiction, but it is another very quick, easy and entertaining read.
“Unlike other disciplines, book cataloguing is less an art, not really a science, and more of a completely unstandardized, decentralized carnival fire.”
In a series of very short chapters (which are the absolute devil for making readers think “ok, just one more, then I’ll…”) the author recounts the deeply peculiar - and probably mostly true - life of an apprentice at a shop which claims to be the oldest bookshop in the world. (At least he says it did at the time, its website now claims, slightly more circumspectly, that it is “the longest-established rare book dealer in Europe”.)
If you are the sort of person who likes hanging around in second-hand bookshops, and sincerely wish to believe that all booksellers are mad as hatters, shuffling about in a sort of genteel chaos of incunabula and stuffed owls, trying to avoid both demanding customers and cursed volumes, then you should read this book.
If you know that sort of person, and never quite know what to give them as a present, give them this book.
I assume that lawyers have been involved and none of the stories are actively libellous, but there is a pleasing vibe of scurrilous gossip throughout. Grab a drink, find a comfy chair, and prepare to be entertained.
You Don’t Have To Have a Dream - Tim Minchin
“Which is your job (just by the way):
To put into the world valuable ideas.”
This is yet another very quick read - as a book it’s on the slim side, but more relevantly it’s big print, and big illustrations. The content is the transcripts of three speeches Minchin has given, each one on the occasion of receiving an honorary degree. One of which is a long-form poem.
Some of it is advice on being an artist. Some of it is suggestions of how to live better. Some of it is a bit angry, and some of it is funny, and all of it is very easy to understand and expressed with a lot of heart.
It feels like it would be pretty decent life advice for a child, though it depends how comfortable you are with your child reading the word fuck occasionally.