The Fifty Book Challenge 2006 List

Below is a list of the books I read whilst undertaking the 2006 Fifty Book Challenge. I've included a short review of each.

1. Strange and Secret People: Fairies and Victorian Consciousness by Carole G Silver; and The Light Princess, and other Stories by George MacDonald. I'm counting these as one item because I read about half of each before 2006 began. The latter is a children's book which I was drawn to having fallen in love with its title story as a child; I can now better appreciate its dry adult wit, though some of the shorter stories are painfully twee. It was a much more interesting read in light of the matters addressed by the former book, itself a thorough and absorbing study of a subject whose ramifications are still felt in society today. Both books, however, suffered from poor proofreading, which resulted in unwanted distractions.
2.Ghostly Tales: Volume 5 by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu. I had to read this as an ebook, because it's damnably hard to get hold of; but, being an anthology, it's easily enough read in short bits. Whilst it's effectively creepy in places and may thus please the general ghost story fan, it's much more interesting to the scholar, making as it does very effective use of ideas and motifs from old folk tales. The more primitive tales are the stronger, with the highlight being the simple but affecting Laura Silver Bell.
3.The Chrysalids by John Wynham. I can't count how many times I've read this book, and I was right in the middle of three others, but I'd just lent it to Stuart and there it was sitting on the couch, so it accidentally happened again. In my defence, I'll note that it is one of the best books there are, and that its morally complex story of outsiders trying to make their way in an intensely religious (apparently post-apocalyptic) society grows ever more relevant.
4.Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft by Ronald Hutton. I'd meant to get round to this one for quite some time, as it's the definitive work on the subject. Whilst I'm not Pagan myself, I have several friends who are, and Pagan traditions have a significant impact in the circles which I inhabit. Hutton does a good job of debunking certain myths in what is, by and large, an exceedingly thorough, well researched book. Unfortunately, given that it is written almost entirely in complex sentences, the poor proofreading was quite a distraction, and meant that it was sometimes a slog to get through when it ought to have been fun.
5.Saturday by Ian McEwan. Which half my friends are also reading this year. It's poetic, it's elegant, it has some affecting things to say, but the trouble is that it says most of them in the first few pages, after which the bulk of the story is superfluous. What ought to be slow-building tension and menace comes across as parodic in the context of McEwan's earlier work, and it's difficult to find much to hang onto in his curiously sheltered hero. Only the scene with the senile mother approaches the genius of which he is capable. Could try harder.
6.The Crystal World by JG Ballard. A re-read, because it was lying around in Stuart's house when I didn't have much else to do. I still think it's one of Ballard's finest pieces of work - character-wise, it has all the same flaws, and all the familiar obsessions are here, but its imagery is something out of this world. A really daring piece of imaginative science fiction merged with surrealism, developing complex ideas without ever losing its readability.
7.Perfume by Patrick Süskind. An exquisitely rich, very thoroughly researched piece of fiction, the first truly successful twenty first century gothic novel, this charts the life story of a man born in Paris in the 1740s with no personal odour and a remarkably refined sense of smell. It is incisive, imaginitive, wickedly amusing, and I highly recommend it.
8.Madness and Civilisation by Michel Foucault. This was one which I'd intended to get round to for a long time, and I'm glad I did so; I still intend, when I have more time, to read it in the original French. Effortlessly engaging yet thorough and absorbing, it draws upon its history of the treatment of insanity in the Age of Reason to raise questions about the way such things are handled today and, more potently, about the madness which is civilisation, the inherent peculiarity of the human condition.
9.Asylum by Patrick McGrath. A fine piece of work by one of my favourite living authors, this is the story of a complex of obsessions which develop within a mental hospital; in soaring prose, it tells a story much darker than is at first apparent. I reviewed the film adaptation of this a year ago, and was pleased to find the book just as satisfying. McGrath is one of few modern authors who can write convincingly about mental illness, and it's refreshing to see those suffering from it portrayed as fully rounded human beings.
10.Outlaws and Highwaymen: The Cult of the Robber in England from the Middle Ages to the Nineteenth Century by Gillian Spraggs. A thorough and interesting study, very easy to read, but one which repeats itself too often. Apparently designed for an utter beginner, it overexplains things to the point of tedium, and its persistent interruptions to translate rather obvious snippets of Middle English really disrupt the flow of the text. I found it odd that it talked at length about Robin Hood and about the concept of a 'good fellow' without once mentioning Robin Goodfellow and the contribution of faerie lore to perceptions of the Greenwood and its inhabitants. Still, a pleasant way to spend a few hours.
11.Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality by Anne Fausto-Sterling. This is considered a classic in its field, and I had meant to get round to reading it for some time. In the end, I found it rather peculiar. It is certainly erudite and very thoroughly researched, but it requires intensively critical, cautious reading. The author is prone to rhetorical tricks which obscure certain possible interpretations of referenced data, tipping the apparent balance in favour of her own arguments, which are sometimes dubious. She's a little too keen on throwing out the baby with the bathwater, saying that because sex exists on a curve rather than a straight line we might consider certain aspects of differentiation entirely inappropriate, despite the fact that it's a bell curve. Also slightly disturbing are the occasional mistakes which she has clearly made by accident (in some cases she goes on to contradict them directly) but which haven't been fixed by a proof reader, implying that no-one else familiar with the science involved gave her feedback on her manuscript before publication. That said, this is an excellent record of case studies and the history of research and is inarguably a vital work.
12.The People's Act of Love by James Meek. This tale of village life, revolutionaries, warlords and religious cults in early twentieth century Siberia has a few points of merit - one or two nicely drawn characters and some effective descriptive prose - whose attractiveness is smothered under its studied pretense as under a blanket of snow. It's trying so hard to be a Great Russian Novel, doing everything by numbers, that it misses the spirit of the thing entirely. It has the tedious fickle heroine down pat, and the grand sense of inevitability, but in the end there's little to keep one reading that far. Its horrors, even if they are there principally as metaphors, pale beside the real horrors of the period, and as such lack the weight to inspire passion or philosophy. Passages which should build tension merely feel as if they're wasting time. Beautiful though Meek's exploration of his setting may be, there's something missing about it - a vital spark of romance, a feeling of involvement. Like Siberia, it looks stunning from a distance, but up close it's just big, empty and cold.
13.Serendipities: Language and Lunacy by Umberto Eco. For decades now, Umberto Eco has been exploring historical and linguistic academia and bringing back the good bits for we poor mortals who lack the time to do it all directly. It doesn't always work in his fiction, which many of my friends find to dry to read at all, but in this collection of essays it is an undoubted delight. Here, he explores the great things which have been discovered whilst people were looking for something else, usually something quite unreasonable from a modern perspective. This is a book full of humour and a treasure trove of curiosities.
14.13 Great Stories of Science Fiction edited by Groff Conklin. I borrowed this from Erith because it contains a John Wyndham story which I didn't think I'd read before. In actuality, I think I had read it, and possibly the whole book, just twenty five years or so ago, long enough to have forgotten most of the details. It's not a great Wyndham, and most of the stories here are quite forgettable, but there's a passable piece by Arthur C Clarke, a curious vignette by Pohl Anderson, and a Theodore Sturgeon short which, as so often, eclipses everything else present with its grace, its humanity, and its elegant literary style.
15.Ramsey Campbell, Probably, being a collection of non-fiction by Ramsey Campbell. I find Mr. Campbell's fiction a bit hit and miss - always readable, but not always satisfying in story terms - but I do like him as a writer, and I enjoyed this collection of assorted reviews and essays a great deal. Totalling well over four hundred pages and at times repeating itself, it remains surprisingly engaging throughout. Recommended.
16.The Witchfinder and the Devil's Darlings by Simon Peters. A book about a witchfinder and some wiches in which the witchfinder finds some witches and then we learn that some witches have been found by a witchfinder. That's about the level of the prose. It really is a long time since I've encountered anything quite this badly written in a print publication. In places, whole paragraphs are repeated from earlier in the book, as if the reader is expected to have forgotten them. This is, however, quite handy as collection of snippets written and spoken by other people, with the peasants of 1645 coming across as rather more eloquent than the author.
17.Quatermass by Nigel Kneale. I have always been a fan of the Quatermass films and had intended for some time to get around to sampling Kneale's work. I'm glad I did. Though it's certainly flawed - its pervasively negative attitude to women and certain comments on race make for difficult reading in a book written less than thirty years ago - it is very well written for a story of that type, and it excels in its portrait of an aged hero. Far too many writers present such characters simply as slightly more fragile young people with more experience of the world and less inclination to urgency. Kneale gives us a hero who is suffering from the early stages of senility, a sense of displacement in time, a tendency to lose track of what he's doing and to forget things, and who is also continuously aware of the very real dangers which seemingly ordinary activities can present to his vulnerable body. All this without ever ceasing to grip the attention of the reader. I was duly impressed.
18.The Evolution of Co-operation by Robert Axelrod. This one was lying around on Stuart's bed for months so I read it when I was there, when he was busy. It's one of the fundamental works on altruism and evolutionary theory, solidly reasoned and well supported by research, which has provided inspiration to many important scientific writers since. Much of what it has to say will already be familiar to the educated modern reader, but it's well worth a look all the same.
19.Cousine Bette by Honoré de Balzac. Erudite chick-lit with added violence and misery, Balzac's comedy of manners is at once devastatingly witty and hysterically exhausting. He manages very well to combine astute social and political observation with high drama and a rollercoaster pace, and I certainly enjoyed it, but I expect it will be quite a while before I have the energy for more.
20.In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development by Carol Gilligan. This book claimed that it could help me to understand and like women better, something which I've been trying to do all my life. In actuality, it only made me more frustrated with them - it did perhaps inspire a degree of pity, but that hardly seems respectful. Not that I'm sure it was telling any universal truth about women in the first place. It was very culture-specific, it depended on studies most of which seemed deeply flawed, and I certainly couldn't apply most of what it said to my friends, though perhaps that's because most of my friends have functional brains. However, it's always useful to read something alien, something which improves one's awareness of others' perspectives - namely, psychologists' perspectives. Ultimately, my main problem with this book was that it reminded me of first year undergraduate lectures - it started out by making a very simple proposition, went on to repeat that proposition in a wordier but scarcely more meaningful way, then concluded by restating it. It might have put across as much useful information in ten percent of the space.
21.Needle by Hal Clement. A bit of light reading on the surface, full of adventure and fun, Clement's work is, as so often, exquisitely crafted. The scientific ideas contained herein are truly imaginative and superbly realised, so the story retains the power to convince even decades after it was written. As always, Clement's greatest triumph is his ability to get inside the heads of his characters, offering truly alien perspectives as absorbing and believable as his portrait of a fifteen year old boy. I enjoyed this a great deal.
22.Same Sex Unions in Pre-Modern Europe by John Boswell. This is a book which the author took twelve years to research, and it shows in all the best ways. Although he firmly states his case that same sex unions of a type similar to marriage occurred in several of the relevant societies, Boswell is no propagandist, and he makes no sweeping claims as to the nature of these bonds, noting that the reasons for opposite sex unions have also varied quite a bit over the course of history. Supporting his argument are several manuscripts with full sets of accompanying citations. This is altogether a beautifully well referenced book, but it puts the notes on the same page as the main text, which can interrupt the flow of Boswell's otherwise elegant prose and can make the volume rather hard going. Although translations are usually supplied, it helps to have some knowledge of French, German, Italian, Russian, Greek, Latin, Arabic and Hebrew. I'm sorry to say that my grasp of the latter, after some years without practice, has declined horribly, and I shall have to approach this again at some point when I've had time to re-learn it.
23.The Jewel in the Skull by Michael Moorcock. Donald handed me all seven books in the Hawkmoon series when I asked for something light to help me relax whilst my workload is heavy. It's gleefully gruesome stuff, another ripping yarn from Moorcock's pen, set in what might possibly be our own future but what is, essentially, a fantasy landscape. Though his tale is a slight one and patterned throughout with his own familiar motifs, this is a gripping and enjoyable read. Like Peake at his best, Moorcock uses his bizarre landscape to explore aspects of the human spirit easily recognisable in any age. This gives his work a richness and substance which belie the limitations most people expect of the genre.
24.The Mad God's Amulet by Michael Moorcock. The second book in the Hawkmoon chronicles; more light reading, though dear me, the hero does whine a lot. Moorcock's colourful backgrounds and enthusiastic approach to the grotesque redeem what is a still more formulaic tale than the first, and his indulgent divergences into late 1960s fashion provide plenty of subsidiary amusement.
25.Families in Former Times: Kinship, Household and Sexuality by Jean-Louis Flandrin. A thoroughly researched and often fascinating study of seventeenth to nineteenth century French family life which does drag a little in places and repeat itself a bit too often, but is overall well worth reading. It doesn't do much by way of drawing conclusions, yet offers a wealth of insight, simply in its correlation of data, regarding changing concepts and perceptions of the family. Work like this is sorely needed as we work on adjusting modern family law to better take account of lived realities.
26.The Venus Hunters by JG Ballard. My friend Hojheg gave me this anthology. It turned out to include three stories which I've definitely read before - it's possible I've read and forgotten others, or that they've blurred into the generic landscape of the author's work. This is vintage Ballard, containing some fine pieces which demonstrate both his brilliance with abstract narrative and his skill at extrapolating from initially sane situations to discover madness. There's some shite included too, mind, with one story (Passport to Eternity) which I found almost unreadable. Others are interesting mostly as historical curiosities, snapshots of a bygone age which Ballard preserved in fascinating detail. I think my favourite, all in all, was The Killing Ground, which has, if anything, benefited from the passage of time.
27.Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals by John Gray. I'd had high hopes for this book, which had been recommended to me by several people I respect; perhaps if I hadn't done, I might have come away more satisfied. Gray is a Michael Moore amongst philosophers of science - self educated, reassured by the attention of critics, and therefore, despite his obvious intelligence, prone to falling prey to the follies of dogmatism, his theories constructed like a house of cards upon information which is often insufficient, misunderstood, or just plain wrong. In comparing him to Richard Dawkins, I can only assume that JG Ballard (who was bound to love the book, since he's quoted in it) was referring to his snappy sentence structure and occasional tendency to be snide - there's nothing of Dawkins' thoroughness or analytical rigour here. The very readable prose is amusing given that Gray begins his arguments by asserting that it is rhetoric, not natural superiority, which has made science dominant over religion in the modern world. His rhetoric, flowery though it is, cannot altogether disguise the weakness of certain of his arguments, nor his habit of repeating material to stretch the thing to the sort of length which publishers like. In places, it is laugh out loud funny. One particularly cute paragraph reads "Caring about your self as it will be in the future is no more reaonable than caring about the self you are now. Less so, if your future self is less worth caring about." This can be a frustrating read, but it does provide a fascinating psychological profile of the author, and it's one of those handy guides which can help any writer to consider the mistakes worth avoiding in hir own work. Gray's heart is in the right place, but for the most part, Morrissey said it better.
28.L'Immoraliste by André Gide. After torturing myself with earnest pseudo-philosophy, what a delight it was to lose myself in the sensuous yet infinitely more insightful prose of Gide! His exploration of the conflict between Nietszchean perspectives on morality and lived experience is all the more powerful for being swallowed up in an intimate tale filled with the very beauty which is to be its narrator's undoing. It is enriched by its erudite references without ever letting them distract from the story, and the story itself would doubtless be just as satisfying to one who missed them completely. As with all the best literature, it communicates almost by stealth and yet has far more to say than many far longer non-fiction works on ethics, art or history. Let the blossom wither on the tree; here is the fruit.
29.Intelligent Thought: Science versus the Intelligent Design Movement ed. John Brockman. A surprisingly diverse collection of essays centered around the response of science to the proposals of the Intelligent Design movement, this book is sometimes repetitive but is by and large an informative, entertaining and engaging read. Beginners to the subject will find most of it easily accessible; those who already have a solid scientific education may find themselves tempted to skip bits, but there's plenty of interesting stuff here for all, including Leonard Susskind's perceptive analysis of the debate itself and Frank J Sulloway's fascinating history lesson debunking popular myths about Darwin. My personal favourite was Lee Smolin's essay on the extension of principles of natural selection to physics, since I had developed my own theories in this area some years previously and it was a delight to see them substantiated (in some cases with material I had never considered). I also learned that it is easier to eat oatcakes and lime pickle whilst reading Steven Pinker than it is to eat chocolate cake whilst reading Richard Dawkins; by way of testament, there is a small brown stain at the top of page 93. Whilst I am not certain of the scientific significance of this, it does at least serve as an illustration of the dangers of paying too much attention to other people's words and too little to the material world.
30.In Cold Blood by Truman Capote. This was something which I'd been meaning to get around to for years, and I'm glad to say that I found it every bit as good as everybody said. It's one of those books which one rather feels people ought to read in order to become fully developed human beings, though, in turn, it challenges out notions of what that might mean. Rather than falling down on the side of any particular political agenda, this evocative account of the killing of a Kansas farming family, and its aftermath, has at its centre a profound sense of the value of ordinary human life and of the fragility of human interaction. It has given its subjects a kind of immortality, yet its humble message seems to be that this can never be enough.
31.A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe. This book is fiction, being written several decades after the great plague which swept through London in 1665, but it's meticulously researched, representing the culmination of Defoe's lifelong interest in the subject and his passion for making history accessible to the public. It also has a typically erudite introduction by Anthony Burgess which helps to provide context for readers unfamiliar with the period. One man's account of his experiences and observations in London during the plague year, it is surprisingly modern in style and makes for gripping reading. Many of the anecdotes our hero tells are based on stories which were widely reported and apparently true, giving an edge to a story which is utterly plausible but also so horrific that it takes a while to come to terms with - as, indeed, it did for people there at the time. Perhaps most affecting, though, are the little details of ordinary life which become apparent through the text, reminding us that three hundred and fifty years don't separate us all that far from these people. There are detailed accounts of business practices and some fascinating speculations of bacteriology, about which a lot more was known than most people realise now. As a study of human behaviour in extremis, this is fascinating, and I can't think of a better guide for those developing emergency plans for outbreaks of disease in our own time.
32.Mutants: On the Form, Variety and Errors of the Human Body by Armand Marie Leroi. A wonderful book, refreshingly intensive in its analysis of the underlying science yet still picaresque and full of fascinating asides which should make it accessible and pleasing to any reasonably inteeligent reader. Although, in areas which I know well, I found myself in disagreement with the author about some minor matters, on the whole it appears to be very thorough and well-researched, impressive considering its scope. It introduced me to a number of new concepts in human physiology. The author worries that his attempt to adopt a healthily distanced style will render the text too dry to be appealing, but his sense of humour shines throughout and his elegant prose is always entertaining. The breadth of erudition on display in a volume which took five years to research is delightful, adding the opportunity to test out various of Leroi's theories at home. I heartily recommend this.
33.Sexual Ambivalence: Androgyny and Hermaphroditism in Graeco-Roman Antiquity by Luc Brisson. A few useful bits of information and some great quotes from writers like Aristotle and Pliny the Elder mixed in with a whole lot of pseudo-existential bollocks, the sort of over-analysis which teaches high school kids to loathe literature of all kinds. When it's not taking the form of tables and diagrams which would embarrass a business studies tutor this book is written in beautiful flowing prose - an unfortunate thing, since it flows by so easily that, in the absence of real content, one can quite forget to pay attention to it. Brisson does have a few good points to make but they would have been better made in a short essay.
34.Martha Peake by Patrick McGrath. At first glance very different from the author's other work, this is a huge, rambling, heavily stylised gothic novel which spans the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, taking in a monstrous polluted London, a dark isolated mansion, a doomed poet whose destiny is dominated by his physical deformity, a doomed heroine whose love cannot hold back the madness around her, alcoholism, murder, betrayal, fire, and the American revolution. Upon a closer look, however, it reveals itself as entirely the work of McGrath, its symbolism not mere decoration but - as in the best gothic literature - a device whereby to explore the workings of the soul (for which one may read, in this case, the psyche). McGrath's astute understanding of mental illness here shows itself at its best in a powerful story whose apparent focus is elsewhere. It's also a fascinating study of storytelling itself: of the interplay between history and fiction; memory and actuality; imagination, reason, and heroically conceived lies. The unrelenting suffering of its characters may put off some readers, yet it is filled with a passion for life which makes it thrilling reading.
35.The 1975 Annual World's Best SF ed. Donald A Wollheim. The English-speaking world's best, at any rate; with that proviso, not a bad collection. There's a lyrical, literary, richly imagined novella by George RR Martin which soars above the rest, but also a pleasingly willful tale by Brian M Stableford and an Alfred Bester story which is as captivatingly written as all his work, even if I remain unsure what it's trying to say. Asimov's redoubtable Stranger in Paradise tops it off. The others are all quite readable, with a tendency to elegant worldbuilding undermined by a fundamental naivete about human nature; they are, at worst, passable fantasies.
36.The Pirates! in an Adventure with Whaling by Gideon Defoe. Not quite as sharp as its predecessor (The Pirates! in an Adventure with Scientists) this still has several laugh-out-loud moments and really gathers pace towards the end. We get to know the characters better and find out more about the world in which they operate, as well as meeting Captain Ahab and the bloodthirsty Cutlass Liz. Slightly odd grammatical conventions (perhaps related to dialect) make the text awkward to read in places, but for the most part it's a fluent, energetic story of wild adventure and inadvertent derring-do. There are also some first class educational sections in which readers can learn about Nantucket, debt, conservation, and how to make use of different parts of a whale.
37.The Pirates! in an Adventure with Communists by Gideon Defoe. In this volume Defoe wisely takes a different direction, presenting us with an adventure set mostly on land and with no sign of the Pirate Captain's familiar nemesis. We do get to meet Karl Marx and poor harrassed young Engels, plus a harried Wagner. More stuff actually happens than we've become used to, which makes for a more satisfying read.
38.Spaceland by Rudy Rucker. I'd rwead the start of this before but never got round to finishing it. As it turns out, the start is by far the strongest part, as the ending does tend to squander its social observations and mathematical delights in something not unlike hippy bullshit, with rather too much running round the (trans-branal) corridors for my liking. Still, when it's good, it's very very good, and I do recommend it. Like Abbot before him, Rucker, for whom advanced mathematics is the day job, does a great job of making dimensional theory accessible and of using visual imagery to help the viewer understand something we're too often told we 'cannot imagine'. His pacing is strong and his comedic story surprisingly lightweight, though sometimes its characters become just a little too cartoonish and dim to work. The psychosexual undercurrents are twee but by and large he gets away with them.
39.The Conquest of the Incas by John Hemming. Enormous and meticulously detailed, this is considered by experts in the field to be the definitive history of the fall of the Inca civilisation, yet it's easy to read and accessible even for those whose knowledge of the subject is initially slight. It effectively debunks a number of popular myths about the Spanish conquest and provides a remarkably balanced overview of events (particularly when one considers the shortage of Inca sources). It's also full of fascinating insights into military history, along with real life tales of adventure and a powerful portrait of colliding cultures. Probably a bit overwhelming for the average reader (I've certainly encountered university short courses which taught less than this), but recommended nonetheless.
40.Rodent Mutation by Bron Fane. That is, by an alias of the inimitable RL Fanthorpe, which explains a lot. Toxic and radioactive waste (both kinds!) trigger the emergence of atavistic giant beavers with immense brains and the power of teleportation. They use these powers (honestly) to steal cups of tea and generally terrorise the neighbourhood. A sewage inspector, a cartoon scientist and a Real Man (tm) set out to stop them. In between the rather lame action sequences we get a whole chapter of Facts about beaver natural history and another about the barge trade. Some sentences break mysteriously only for their latter parts to appear further down the pages, in the middle of other paragraphs. And scattered throughout the text are advertisements for breast enlargement creams and skin ointments. A facinating curiosity which has to be seen to be believed.
41.The Age of Reason by Thomas Paine. One I'd meant to get around to for a while, and rather different from what I had expected. There's a lot of good work here which still stands, and more which is fascinating as a demonstration of the bizarre conclusions which sound reasoning can reach if based on unsound principles. Sadly, Paine's reasoning isn't always so sharp when it comes to his criticisms of the Bible, and one is left with the impression that he only got away with as much as he did because his critics weren't especially sharp either, but sides letting prejudice interfere with their powers of observation. For instance, Paine asserts that because the four New Testament gospels contradict one another, none of them can be trusted, which is not quite true - one of them might be trusted, we just don't know which one. It's a fine point but an important one when so much else is based on it. Still, this is worth reading for Paine's fascinating speculations on astronomy alone.
42.The Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins. Pretty much all stuff I was already familiar with, but it's always good to revise these things once in a while, to make sure one hasn't fallen into bad habits or made lazy assumotions. It's also refreshing to read Dawkins' clear, elegant prose, so rarely in need of editing. And any book from the 'eighties which discusses computers is always going to provide amusement.
43.A Brief History of the End of the World by Simon Pearson. A book which lives up to its name, often frustratingly, though it did teach me a few new things about Christian movements in America and I have respect for an author who doesn't neglect the existential significance of Morrisey's Every Day is like Sunday. ;) Just a shame that it's actually only about the Judaeo-Christian and Muslim world, when other cultures' notions of the end have often been much more interesting.
44.Vampires of Venus by Karl Mannheim. Classic pulp trash, though, disappointingly, not as sleazy as the title suggests. A boy who relies on luck and a girl who does nothing but simper are drawn into a conflict between their flying seal-like friends and Martians hungry for Venus' water; in the meantime, they must also battle giant red birds which drain their victims of blood. It's written in an awkward style which I believe I recovered from at about the age of twelve, though apparently Mr. Mannheim never did - the way a child might think literature ought to look, rather than, you know, the way words go. Cute.
45.The Eve of St Agnes by John Keats. A small but potent collection foccusing mostly on the poet's romantic works rather than his political ones. Sumptuous and bitter and laden with prophetic suggestions of doom. Particularly potent, in retrospect, is the ode to Chatterton.
46.Into the Slave Nebula by John Brunner. An entertaining, well-realised piece of pilp which I forgot completely due to brain damage, but which I have since skimmed through again and largely recovered. Hardly the author's greatest work, but good at what it does.

Unfortunately I didn't successfully complete the 2006 Fifty Book Challenge as I suffered partial kidney failure and lapsed into a coma shortly before the end of the year. I did have a few half-completed books but am refraining from listing them as, to be quite honest, I can't remember a thing about them; I suffered some memory loss due to a minor stroke. Still, I enjoyed the undertaking, which I guess is really the point, and I do intend to try it again if my now damaged eyesight improves sufficiently. If it never does, well, I'm glad I used my last few months of having adequate sight for something useful.

This way to go back to Jennie's page about the Fifty Book Challenge.

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Last updated 3rd February, 2007