Alrightreads: 2019 Books

Checking out some recent releases, like a normal person might do.


Benjamin Dreyer, Dreyer's English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style

2019 / Ebook / 291 pages / USA

***

Reading about how to read and write right makes me feel productive. A veteran proofreader offers handy tips for those writing or proofing in American English, others can work it out. I got quite a few notes out of it. [AU: Are all the Trump digressions really necessary though?]

David Wallace-Wells, The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming

2019 / Audiobook / 310 pages / USA

***

Whether he's being selective or not, these relentless statistics are heavy. I hope some of the other civilisations out there fare better, we're done for.

Stewart Lee, March of the Lemmings: Brexit in Print and Performance 2016–2019

2016-19 (collected 2019) / Ebook / 400 pages / UK

***

As much as I'll always venerate Lee, I've never followed his journalism with much enthusiasm. I enjoy his antagonistically weird style, but preferred the previous, more varied assortment over this one's dogged theme. Padding it out with a stand-up transcript creates the problem that an intervening show has been skipped over in the chronicles now. When are you going to annotate Carpet Remnant World, mate?

Margaret Atwood, The Testaments

2019 / Audiobook / 432 pages / Canada

***

Sequels are rarely necessary, but if you found the first book excessively grim and hopeless, Children of The Handmaid's Tale will provide some much-needed, hard-earned relief. Eventually.

Philip Pullman, The Secret Commonwealth

2019 / Audiobook/ebook / 656 pages / UK

****

I re-read Pullman's classic trilogy in-between the prequel and this sequel, so got more out of the continuing story of the almost-grown-up Lyra and Pantalaimon, respectively, than I did its scene-setting predecessor. It's similarly slow and ponderous, and the unambiguously magical setting feels considerably more humdrum and non-escapist than it did in Lyra's dimension-hopping youth. This is, of course, Pullman's heavy-handed point, and although it makes for a much duller and disposable trilogy, I'm still on board and the finale's likely going to be my most eagerly-awaited book of the next few years, credulous fanboy that I am.

Top 10 Seinfeld episodes

I've watched lots of Seinfeld on shuffle in the past, but recently decided to take it from the top.

Rating and reviewing 180 episodes ostensibly about nothing wasn't a chore I felt like putting myself through, so I decided to just enjoy watching it like some kind of normal person, only stressing over choosing some interchangeable favourites as it went along.

Ranking Christopher Eccleston Doctor Who

If Doctors are the nerdy child's equivalent of football teams, Christopher Eccleston is geographically 'my' Doctor, born a few miles closer to where I was than fellow underdog Paul McGann (though still about an hour's drive on the M6).

I've never felt any special attachment to his incarnation, but his relative scarcity in the canon – just the one run of episodes, not even hanging around for Christmas – makes him an interesting curio and means I'm not sick of seeing his mugging face like some of his more popular successors. There's also the extra novelty of his series being the debut year – definitive firsts, growing pains and all.

Here's what I reckon are The Top 11 Ninth Doctor Stories, for no more pressing reason than it was going to happen sooner or later and I felt like some light reading.

Ranking the Philip K. Dick novels

Read over four years, I don't know whether the benefit of hindsight and fallible memory make this more or less reliable than the lists I recklessly improvise in real time while reading along. I can't trust that my memories are real anyway.

Here are my The Top 46 Philip K. Dick Novels.