More easy reads for the middle of the night

High Lord by Trudi Canavan

I have reached the end of the Black Magician trilogy! Finally I have closure and Trudgy Caravan and I can go our separate ways! In this final instalment it turns out (rather disappointingly) that the High Lord is not in fact evil. He has been practising black magic but only because it was necessary to protect the kingdom from a bunch of evil, foreign magicians. Sonea choses to help him, but they are caught practising black magic and drummed out of the guild leaving the country undefended with evil magicians marching towards it...

Tithe by Holly Black

Now this was good fun! 16 year old Kaye Fierch was able to see fairies as a little girl. When her mother's latest relationship breaks down they move back to the town she grew up in. The fairies are still there but now they seem to be involved in very adult machinations...

Escardy Gap - Peter Crowther and James Lovegrove

Basically this book is Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury rewritten in the style of Stephen King with added postmodern wankery of an author trying to write a horor novel as the wraparound story. The sad thing is that I read it from cover to cover, more fool me! Going to try to ebay it to buy stuff for Tiny Daughter...

The Eclipse of the Century by Jan Mark

When 20 year old student Keith Chapman is involved in a car crash he has a near death experience, but rather than seeing a vision of heaven and speaking to his dead relatives he sees a town square and hears a woman's voice telling him that they will meet again in Qantoum, under a black sun at the end of a thousand years. Keith does some research and discovers that Qantoum is a real place; a town which sprang up round an oasis on the silk road it has been conquered by Alexander the Great,the mongols and Russia but with the collapse of the Soviet Union it is now in a disputed territory on the boader of Tajikistan. He determins to visit to see whether it is anything like his vision. Years of fighting have left Qantoum a wreck without power and miles from any kind of authority. It has two distinct populations: the Sturyat, descendants of a tribe of nomads who settled there a thousand years ago and a motley collection of westerners living in and around the town museum. Feeling very pleased with his own political correctness, Keith moves in with the natives, but are they Sturyat as peaceful as they first appear? Why is everyone who crosses them "taken by the sand" and is there any truth to their bizzare assertion that their race comes from space and will be heading back there soon?

I really enjoyed this book; once again there was an upside to being hauled out of my lovely bed! My favourite character was the phlegmatic Russian Lt Kije. I can still see the image of him that built up in my head, sardonic, unshaven and with a filthy Russian cigarette on the go (the text never really describes him, this is just how I think he ought to look).

Holes by Louis Sacher

By now you will probably be wondering just how many children's books I have on my shelves that I haven't got round to reading. The answer is a truly shameful amount. After all, it's one thing to keep putting off “Ulyses” or “Gravity's Rainbow” and quite another thing to put off reading Shadowmancer or Lyrial. I haven't even finished the Harry Potter books; I got in huff after the fifth one was so long and so very rubbish... Anyway...

Stanley Yelnats is the fat kid at school who nobody likes, then his life gets a lot worse when he is falsely convicted of stealing and gets sent to Camp Green Lake. The camp is in a dried up lake bed in the desert, which saves the warden the bother of having guards and fences; any boy who runs away will be dead in 3 days. It is also plagued by yellow spotted lizards with a deadly bite. In ths setting the junior convicts must each dig a hole five feet deep and five feet across every day, on the grounds that this will build character. However, anything found in the holes must be shown to the warden – what is she looking for?

The back cover of my book describes it as a detective story, but I think it's more like a fairy story. And the warden ( a five-star psycho-bitch who paints her nails with rattlesnake venom) makes a brilliant wicked queen.

Holes is well-writen and easy going, but if even tht is too much bother, there's a film with Sigorney Weaver in the role of the warden.

Conrad's Fate - Diana Wynne Jones

As my house moving steps up a gear, I am back on the children's books!

“Conrad's Fate” is one of a subset of Diana Wynne Jones's books which feature the character Chrestomanci, an immaculately-attired, nine-lived enchanter and one of the many fictional characters I quite fancy. These books take place in a universe with magic and generally follow the form: a bunch of kids get into worse and worse trouble, until finally Chrestomanci turns up in his tophat and tails, looking humpable and saves the day. Alas, in this book, he is only 12, so you can't lust after him or you'll be hauled away by the police*.

Anyway, back to the plot. Conrad lives is a small resort town in the English Alps with his mother (a renowned feminist author) and his uncle (a bad lot). His uncle runs a bookshop and Conrad has to work in the shop and do all the housework because his mum can't allow herself to be exploited. Looming over their town is the huge castle where the count and countess live. The magic practised there is rumoured to be responsible for all the bad luck in Conrad's family, and the reason his end of the village can never get TV reception. Conrad's evil uncle convinces him that he has terrible Karma due to failing to kill someone he should have killed in a previous life. Conrad is then dispatched with appropriately dire magics to the castle to get a job as a footman and redeem himself when the opportunity comes. On the way he meets a mysterious boy called Christopher who can use magic and claims to be searching for his missing friend.

I enjoyed this book up to the end where, sadly, the denuement really didn't work for me. I am decades older than the intended audience and very fussy, but this was rather a disappointment. It turns out that the Count and Countess are actors and the real Count is the person we all thought was the butler. We are supposed to believe that the Count wanted to see his residence restored to its former glory by the use of magical equipment to play the stock market stored in the castle's wine cellar and the only way he could do this was to disguise himself as his own butler. Bollocks! Come on DWJ, you can do better than that!

*For anyone else who likes Chrestomanci, here's a breakdown (as far as I can remember) of which books he's grown up in, and which he's a child in.

• baby chrestomanci : Charmed Life, The Lives of Christopher Chant, Conrad's Fate

• grown up: Witch Week, The Magicians of Caprona

Larklight by Phillip Reeve

This was an enormously enjoyable children's book set in a kind of space-faring version of the Victorian era. This is what we SF fans would call "Steam punk". It works pretty well as the book has the positive aspects of the "Thrilling Stories For Boys" kind of books (space pirates fighting giant spiders, for example), while satirising the jingoism of the originals. There is also Victorian-era science: space is full of "Aether" rather than vacuum.

My edition has been illustrated by David Wyatt and inside the covers of the book are lots of mock-Victorian adverts which are full of little jokes for the SF fan-boy. For example, an ad for the "Crighton" model of auto-butler and the "Lensman" series of telescopes.

Art and Mytrle Mumby live in Larklight, a rambling mansion floating somewhere between the Earth and the moon. Art reads thrilling tales of adventure in the farthest reaches of the Empire while Myrtle attempts to master the accomplishments of a gentlewoman (these appear to be fainting and playing the piano-forte). The house is attacked by giant spiders and their scientist father is carried off wrapped in web, leaving Art charged with protecting his sister. Art tells Mrytle that they must get to the lifeboats as, "something most disagreeable has happened!" and they are lunched on a series of adventures which include nearly being eaten by caterpillars, rescued by pirates, being repeatedly attacked by the giant spiders and saving the British Empire - hurrah!

Regressing into Childhood...

Those people who know me in real life will be aware that I have had problems with nasty neighbours. These have culminated in my deciding to move house to be rid of them. This may strike people as quite an extreme solution but believe me, compared to weeping continually or murdering someone it becomes the only sensible option. Anyway, while I grapple with what wording to use to successfully sell my beloved home to someone else without actually lying, the last thing I want is to have to wrestle with difficult literature. No, what I want for the moment is to sit hunched in a corner and try to comfort myself by rocking backwards and forwards and reading nothing but children’s books.

A Hat Full of Sky by Terry Pratchet

This is the sequel to “The Wee Free Men” and is the second book about Tiffany Aching (an 11 year old witch from the chalk downs who once saw off the Queen of the fairies by hitting her with a skillet) and the Nac Mac Feegle (a clan of violent, drunken, woad-covered pictsies). Depending on who you believe the Nac Mac Feegle either left Fairyland of their own accord, rebelling against its Queen, or were thrown out for being “pished”.

In this novel, Tiffany leaves home to study witchcraft in the mountains. Whilst there her habit of casually stepping out of her body (which she taught herself to do because she didn’t have a mirror) has disastrous consequences when her empty body is taken over by an evil entity known as a hiver. The Nac Mac Feegle are soon on their way to rescue their favourite “hag”, but they are at their best with problems that can solved by nutting somebody…

One of the things I liked about the book was that since the majority of being a Discworld witch doesn’t involve magic, you can effectively Be Your Own Granny Weatherwax. Now that sounds like the crapest spin-off self-help since the Tao of Poo. Don’t look to me to create it; I’m already being my own lifecoach, feeling the fear and doing it anyway AND fighting the seven signs of aging. You’ll have to shift for yourself!

Across The Nightingale Floor

In some ways I have always wanted to be Japanese and enjoy practicing swordsmanship in the falling cherry blossom with killer cheekbones and epicanthic folds. I could really rock that ethnicity... So I expected to really enjoy “Across the Nightingale Floor”, a children's fantasy novel set somewhere a bit like medieval Japan.

A young man, Tomaso, sees his village destroyed and his mother and step-father murdered by the local warlord. He is then adopted by a rival aristocratic family (who rename him Takeo) and gradually finds out that his birth father was part of a tribe of magic ninjas. Takeo then has to practice his ninja-skills for an attempt on the life of the man who killed his family. Things don't quite go according to plan and although Takeo escapes with his life and the bad guy is dead by the end, so is Takeo's patron is killed, leaving him in the hands of “The Tribe” of magic ninjas.

I just didn't like this book as much as I expected to. Maybe it's because I have been dealing with some very stressful events recently, or maybe it's because I only seemed to have time to read it in 5 minute snatches. Also, am I the only person here who thinks that ninjas are exciting enough without having magic powers? There are two sequels to this novel, but I'm afraid I won't be bothering to read them. What with there being so many amazing books in the world there just isn't time to read the ones I think will only rate 50%.

King of Shadows by Susan Cooper

Nathan Field is part of a company of child actors putting on a production of A Midsummer Night's Dream in the reconstructed Globe theatre. One night he goes to bed with flu... and wakes up in 1599, about to perform the Dream with Shakespeare himself!

One of the things I like about this book it that Nat's crush on Shakespearereminds me of the way men lez up in Shakespeare plays. I have to confess that I find it very exciting when two good-looking actors put their arms round one another's shoulders and call each other “noble cuz”. Another reason to love this book is because it has my sister's favourite ending: He woke up and it was all a dream... or WAS it?