Kurt Vonnegut, Timequake
***
Burning through an author's most popular books first means the remainder of your relationship is probably going to be a drawn-out disappointment. So it goes, ting-a-ling.
This isn't a bad book, but it is a self-confessed failed novel that compensates by semi-fictionally deconstructing the abandoned earlier version of the novel while giving a weary old man the opportunity to muse and vent about things worth listening to.
Russell T. Davies and Benjamin Cook, Doctor Who: The Writer's Tale – The Final Chapter (Book Two)
****
I'd figured this was the sequel to the entertaining archive of email and text correspondence between the former-minus-one Doctor Who showrunner and some other guy that I read a few years ago. Turns out it's a generous second edition of that same book, bulked out to double the length with another year of chat. So I didn't read the first half again, even if doing so would be more entertaining than rewatching most of the episodes it excites over in glorious anatomical detail. Revealing and insightful, I eagerly await Steven Moffat's tell-all.
Iain Banks, The Quarry2013 / Audiobook / 336 pages / UK
***
I didn't read all of the remaining intervening mainstream novels like I meant to this year, so I don't know if this one's uneventful minimalism is unusual. Banks says he wrote it before knowing that life was imitating art, but context is everything in this peaceful epilogue.
