Alrightreads: Brexit

Alan Moore and Alan Davis, Captain Britain

1982-84 (collected 2002) / Ecomics / 208 pages / UK

***

Fresh from reimagining Marvelman, Alan Moore had his wicked way with another obscure and rather ridiculous hero, with less gusto. It's got the epic classical aspiration, sci-fi/magic dichotomy, madness and satire of his masterpieces, but turns out more a spattered mess. Its saving grace is a relentless killing machine that's properly chilling and makes the Terminator look like C-3PO.

Bill Bryson, Notes from a Small Island

1995 / Audiobook / 282 pages / USA

****

I still don't get why he's king of the travelogue, but this was an entertaining false-nostalgic primer for returning to Blighty, updating his '70s experiences to a '90s experience I was too young to be concerned about at the time. Presumably there have been some further changes since. Not giving the non-British audiobook narrator pronunciation notes was a major oversight.

Various, Icons of England

2008 (updated 2010) / Ebook / 368 pages / Various

****

Various naturalists, writers and other public figures write very short odes to bits of the English countryside and tangentially related topics. It does the trick, but fewer voices saying more would have been more satisfying. Though also more of an ask, since it's for charity.

Shashi Tharoor, An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India (a.k.a. Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India)

2016 / Audiobook / 360 pages / India

***

He's right; I studied history as far as AS-level and the atrocities of Empire were never touched on. I only pieced it together over time from extracurricular sources like Monty Python. "We" were unequivocally the baddies. How to atone for that?

Robert Macfarlane, The Lost Words

2017 / Audiobook / 112 pages / UK

**

I didn't realise how lucky I was to grow up in a village, surrounded by the stench of cow pats. This book is for urban kids who only know the British countryside from books... so doesn't really help there. The audiobook presentation has a nice birdsong backing that's better than the poetry.

Alrightreads: A

Iain M. Banks, Against a Dark Background

1993 / Audiobook / 487 pages / UK

***

It's been a few years since I dropped Banks sci-fi, but I'd hoped this unCultured standalone might make a fresh start. With an atheist god and a weapon with a sense of humour, there's a vein of sci-fi comedy running through this cyberpunk grail quest that I wish he'd embraced more fully, but it comes across more like an action cartoon for adults.

Richard K. Morgan, Altered Carbon

2002 / Audiobook / 416 pages / UK

**

I keep persevering with cyberpunk, since I enjoy the synthwave background mixes. With thought-provoking transhuman concepts demonstrated through a rote hardboiled plot, this is like an updated Philip K. Dick novel, but longer and less knowingly funny.

Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation

2014 / Audiobook / 208 pages / USA

*****

The first original work I've read from the well-read subgenre curator, this has the atmosphere, pacing and unreliability of classic cosmic horror combined with the attention to characterisation today's picky readers demand. It gets the length just right, skipping the setup and filling in the background we need to know along the way as we join one of many doomed X-peditions incrementally scratching away at what's allowed to remain a mystery, before getting X-panded or ruined with sequels.

Jeff VanderMeer, Authority

2014 / Audiobook / 352 pages / USA

***

The Cube Zero of the trilogy shows the behind-the-scenes workings that might have been better left to our imaginations and takes a long time to rekindle what was good about the first one. This different approach was no doubt better than a rehash, if there had to be a sequel at all, but its X-Files-esque tone is a lot less fun.

Jeff VanderMeer, Acceptance

2014 / Audiobook / 341 pages / USA

****

With time jumps filling in notable backstories and solving dangling mysteries, we're doing late-period Lost this time around. That's okay, I miss Lost.

One doesn't like to blow one's own trumpet, but apparently

Alrightreads: Counting

I can count!

Top 10 Mr. Show sketches

The pedigree of stars and initial sole writers Bob Odenkirk and David Cross is enough to recommend this '90s sketch show, which resembles a more savage Flying Circus or grown-up Fist of Fun. As with Python, it's the effort (even when minimal) to link sketches and theme episodes that means it's always satisfying to watch, even when the ratio of actual LOLs isn't that high.

In spite of what I just said, here are some of those LOLs in isolation. If you haven't watched the Show, do that rather than let me spoil the jokes.

Best of 1988–1999, Not from 1988–1999

If 13,000 words of anachronistic 21st-century highlights wasn't going far enough already, here's the nostalgic prequel to fill in the rest of my autobiography in entertainment, as far as I remember it:

The Best Things I Watched, Read and Played Each Year from 1988–99 (Aged 2–14).

Probably. Cross-referencing across school years and houses I lived in was satisfying detective work. You know, for me.

Update: Replaced by expanded, ongoing, more historically accurate edition.