Read and Return

Bollocks, the cocking Read and Return bookshop has closed! And I had £11 of credit with them... Arses!

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

Many years ago, after reading Order of the Phoenix, I swore that I was not going to give J. K. Rowling any more of my money until she learned to read over her work and delete the duff bits. Now with my brain fried by hormones and lack of sleep I was so desperate for an easy read that I went back to the Harry Potter* series.

Maybe motherhood has eroded my critical faculties, but the Half-Blood Prince feels like a return to Rowling's earlier form. For a start it is much shorter and tighter than than the previous 2 installments. And I enjoyed a new comic character, Professor Slughorn who is a bit of a slimey networker. And the whole thing is easy enough to read at 3am while feeding a baby.

The ministry of magic has finally got the message that Lord Voldemort is back and prominent wizards who opposed him are being found murdered. Meanwhile, Harry has been given a second hand potions text book full of annotations by the mysterious "half-blood Prince" which make his potions the best in the class...

Unfortunately, I now feel the need to read Deathly Hallows and I have a bad feeling about that one. The fact that it had to be made into 2 films rather than 1 makes me think it might be another unedited abortion. Ah, well. I'll have to read it and find out... 

*At the height of Harry Potter mania my sister made a game of inventing new Harry Potter titles. She was best at the game coming up with gems like "Harry Potter and the Chamber of Commerce" and "Harry Potter and the Centre of Gravity".

Mumming down

Well, my pregnancy ended on the 16th Feb and I am now the slightly shell-shocked co-owner of a tiny daughter.

I read the following books whilst pregnant but didn't manage to finish blog entries for them:

Fight Club by Chuck Palahunik

Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell

Robin Ince's Bad Book Club

The Princess Bride by William Goldman

Havoc in its Third Year by Ronan Bennet

Day Watch by Sergei Lukyaneko

Perhaps I will get round to finishing some of these. Maybe when daughter is 18.

Anyway, what with the horrific lack of sleep it was 4 weeks after the birth before I could concentrate enough to read anything at all and I can only manage very easy books. That's right, I'm back on the Trudi Canavan, or Trudgy Caravan as my friend Jules calls her.

I've just finished "The Novice", the sequel to Magicians' Guild. In this book Sonea (the street urchin with magical powers) starts her training in magic. Unfortunately, the other novices don't want to share lessons with a guttersnipe and Sonea becomes the victim of endless magical bullying. When it becomes clear how strong a magician Sonea is, her training is taken over by the sinister High Lord which causes as many problems as it solves.

My main criticism is that Sonea's cheif tormentor amoung the novices, Regin, is not a fully realised character and just seems to be malice on legs. Despite this I can't wait to read the final book and find out what the High Lord of the magicians' guild is up to! 

RIP DWJ

This week has seen the demise of one of my favourite children's authors, Diana Wynne Jones and the world is a slightly crappier place as a result.

The People's Manifesto by Mark Thomas

In 2009, Mark Thomas toured Britain with a stand up show where he asked the audience to suggest some policies they would like to see put into practise. At the end of the show each audience voted for their favourite policiy and all the favourites have been collected together to form this book: the demands of the people of Great Britain (or at least those of them who agree enough with Mark's left wing politics to make them feel it was worth going to see him). Anyway, it's considerably more democratic than anything offered by any major political party.

The lovely thing about these policies is how they range from the serious (renationalising the railways, requiring a referendum to go to war and introducing a "none of the above" box on ballot papers), to the trivial (everyone should be allowed the day off work on their birthday, Windsor to be renamed "Lower Slough" and overtaking lanes for pedestrians). Many of the the policies reflect a desire for fairness, or sometimes just a love of poetic justice, for example, people who support ID cards would not be allowed any curtains, those guilty of homophobic hate crime would have to serve their sentence in drag and and anyone who lets their dog shit in the street would have to wear it as a moustache.

Overall my favourite policy is that politicians should have to wear overalls like formula 1 drivers, covered with the logos of all the companies who pay them.

Magicians' Guild by Trudi Canavan

Just look at that correctly placed apostrophe! Surely we are in the hands of a master here? At least compared to reading "Shadowmancer"...

I've now graduated from children's books to blandly generic fantasy for young adults. Magicians' Guild takes place in a standard-issue Fantasyland city complete with guilds for magicians, theives and probably assassins. In this irony-free Ankh-Morpork lives Sonea, a streetwise teen from the slums who discovers she has magical powers. The titular (f'nar, f'nar! Titular!) guild of magicians must then track her down and persuade her to join them before she accidentally destroys the whole city.

The charm of Magicians' Guild is that despite being a long way from either imaginative or literature, it is never so badly-written that is gives you "the bump" and startles you awake wondering why you've been spending your time on such rubbish. Like all the best "dragon crack" it is very easy to start and very hard to stop. It also follows fantasy conventions exactly by being part of a trilogy. Bugger. Now I need two more books in order to find out whether the snooty magicians will ever really accept a commoner. And what about the Lord High Chief Magician bloke who is a thoroughly Bad Egg? I can see a trip to the Read and Return* bookshop in my future!

Let's hope I hurry up and have this baby before I end up regressing all the way back to Eddings and Gemmel.

*To my alarm, Exeter's read and return has a prodigious collection of erotica. While I am happy to purchase pre-loved books along the lines of "The House Plants of Gor" and "The Stainless Steel Rat Picks his Nose", I'm a bit chairy of second-hand porn!

Shadowmancer by G. P. Taylor

Pregnancy has bought with it a reduction in brain power* and I have been reaching for the easy books. What could be easier than a kids' book? Plus it will be great practice for reading The Little Mole Who Knew it Was None of His Business over and over again. Alas, once you are an adult, reading all but the most well-written of children's books is actually quite a chore.

Shadowmancer is a fantasy novel of the epic-battle-between-good-and-evil school. In the style of The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe it even has a guest appearance from Jesus. Set in North East England in some sort of generic "olden days" (I think it is round about the 18th century as we have smugglers and long-haired men) the local vicar is a sorcerer set on taking over the world using the power of the Keruvim (a sort of golden angel statue thingy. A mcguffin, it's basically a mcguffin.). Only two local kids, Kate and Thomas, and the incredibly holy African boy Raphah stand in his way. Will they be horribly killed, or will Jesus help them out at the last minute? This is fiction, so Jesus comes through, just like he doesn't in real life. I think I read somewhere that the author of this book is a vicar, but I can't altogether trust my own brain at present, so perhaps that isn't true.

I can't say that I really enjoyed reading Shadowmancer all that much. The good characters are good through and through whilst the bad characters are utterly bad. I feel this gives the book an overly simple and unrealistic feel - but I suppose that's what you get if you insist on reading children's fiction when you're in your mid 30s. The only real character in the whole thing is the smuggler Jacob Crane who is ruthless in his pursuit of wealth but fundamentally unwilling to see a satanic priest rule the Earth. Sadly, by the end of the book, he has seen the error of his ways and become comepletely nice. Pass the sickbag!

*If you are of the female persuasion and plan to one day bear children, feel free to imagine that this will not happen to you. I know I did.