Freelance Flaneur: Alrightreads: authors S

Some books I've read; my incredible insights thereon; updated when I can be arsed.

Marilyn Sadler and Roger Bollen, Alistair's Time Machine

Read 1991

***

How I've grown. I was so inspired by this short tale when I read it in school that I set about plagiarising my own version, identical word for word but naturally with the character's name changed to 'David' (despite me having no aptitude for science), but lost interest after a couple of pages. The golden canopy aesthetic showed up in 'Doctor Disguise's Time Machine' shortly after.

Carl Sagan, The Cosmic Connection: An Extraterrestrial Perspective

Read 2019

****

Sagan's pop science debut lacks some of the poetic oration of his later cosmic sermons, but it's still an inspiring and humbling collection of bite-sized astronomy, informed speculations, over-optimistic predictions and justified grievances.

Carl Sagan, produced by Jerome Agel, Other Worlds

Read 2020

***

The usual Sagan summary, padded out with blurry black-and-white space pics, Diane Ackerman's space poems, vaguely relevant classical quotes and New Yorker funnies. A fun retro curio, but get one of his proper books.

Carl Sagan, The Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence

Read 2015

****

Nearly 40 years on, you wouldn't read this for its analysis of dated research, speculations that have presumably been long since proved or disproved, or its comparisons of brain power to obsolete computers. You'd read it because you're correctly infatuated by Carl Sagan. Since he's stepping outside of his comfort zone this time, this lacks the authority of his space stuff, but it doesn't lack any of the euphoric enthusiasm. It's the least essential of his books after the space stuff and Broca's Brain, but I'd rather have Carl Sagan romantically theorising about brain evolution than getting the cold facts from someone who's actually qualified.

Carl Sagan, F. D. Drake, Jon Lomberg and Linda Salzman Sagan, Ann Druyan and Timothy Ferris, Murmurs of Earth: The Voyager Interstellar Record

Read 2019

****

Inspiring and mostly interesting accounts from the astrophysicists, artists and historians who put a great deal of thought into creating the ultimate time capsule of Planet Earth. Alien interception may be astronomically improbable, but the grand display of optimism and unity didn't hurt a bit, with a hilarious bureaucratic sub-plot where aliens aren't allowed to hear The Beatles or see full frontal nudity but will at least be helpfully informed about the full complement of the US Senate circa 1977. I hope they find that funny too. Pity us.

Carl Sagan, Broca's Brain: Reflections on the Romance of Science

Read 2011

****

No one does philosophical science better than Sagan. It may be a relic, but this brain-expanding collection of inspiring essays is more about the methods than the findings.

Carl Sagan, Cosmos

Read 2015, re-read 2023

*****

A certain stocking filler if I'd been born about 15 years earlier, the dated bits make a nice record of how things were looking more-or-less around the time I popped out. It's basically The Cosmos Companion, but unlike those other TV companions that were a treasure trove of behind-the-scenes trivia before the internet, telling you about the hilarious in-jokes printed on background props before they became embarrassingly visible 25 years later when the series got a HD remaster, it just sticks to the expanded synopsis.

Carl Sagan, Contact

Read 2011

****

I appreciate the film more these days than I did as a restless twelve-year-old, but the novel gives the doggedly methodical story the breadth and pace it requires. As a reward for your patience, it goes all SyFy miniseries at the end.

Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan, Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors: A Search for Who We Are

Read 2020

***

The last of Carl Sagan's books I got around to, as suspected this doesn't have his usual romantic zeal, which might mean he didn't actually write very much of it, or that he should have left the biology to people who get as excited by it as he did about the cosmos.

Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space

Read 2011, re-read 2023

*****

The eponymous quote is one of the all-time classic soundbites, and the rest will make you tear up too. In awe at the celestial majesty, in concern when we're invited to contemplate mankind's self-destruction, and in sadness when the audiobook narration switches from Carl to some other guy because Carl wasn't doing too good.

Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

Read 2009

****

A sceptical classic from the heart, Carl's criticisms of credulity and fraudsters are milder than a Dawkins and less sarcastic than a Randi, so there's more chance of his message getting through. I prefer him when he's waxing lyrical about the cosmos, but you need to take your head out of the clouds occasionally.

Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan, Comet

Read 2020

****

As eloquent as everything in the most consistently rewarding bibliography out there, this has always seemed like an outlier for its narrow focus on just some rocks. This would've been remedied if Carl had ever got around to writing Nebula, Pulsar and the rest. Why couldn't he live forever?

Carl Sagan, Billions & Billions: Thoughts on Life and Death at the Brink of the Millennium

Read 2015

*****

I don't know what the rule is that determines which favourite things I'll devour in as short a time as possible and which ones I'll spread over the years for fear of running out, but Carl Sagan's works fall under the latter category. There are a fair few people I'm reliably awed by, but I haven't come across anyone else whose words can inspire me like his. Once you get past the more elementary and dated chapters, there are a few more pale blue dot type moments in this posthumous book, which definitely didn't just make some tears come out at the end because I am a man. Grrr, man!

Carl Sagan, The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God

Read 2019

****

We can't watch these lectures, but since Carl talks like he writes, there's not much difference between these transcripts and his other books, until you get to the Q&A at the end where he patiently responds to people who think they know better. This veers towards the Demon-Haunted World side of things, but still takes time out to contemplate the cosmos which is what I'm here for.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

***

The inquitive sod got on my nerves and the parables were tedious, but I superficially enjoyed the star trek.

Saki, Reginald

***

Bertie Wooster's impertinent cousin dispenses drawing-room epigrams like Python's Wilde sketch extended to purgatorial eternity. An unintentional time capsule of an incredibly thin slice of society.

Saki, Reginald in Russia and Other Sketches

More substantial and loosely themed to allow some dark comedy and fantasy in, but got wearying as it went on, brief as they are.

Faves: 'The Lost Sanjak,' 'Gabriel-Ernst.'

Saki, The Chronicles of Clovis

A bit more refined, though a best-of would strengthen the themes and unflinching morbidity without all the irksome interruptions.

Faves: 'Filboid Studge, the Story of a Mouse That Helped,' 'The Peace of Mowsle Barton,' 'The Secret Sin of Septimus Brope.'

James Sallis, Drive

Read 2020

****

Aspirational lifestyle drama in the throbbing vein of American Psycho. High-octane neon noir thrills all the way, until it slows down at the end and reality catches up to spoil the fun.

James Sallis, Driven

Read 2020

***

Drive leaves you wanting more by design, so I carried on to the customarily unnecessary sequel. Older, slower and paranoid, I enjoyed the change of pace. More reckless thrills would have been boring.

Anne-Sylvie Salzman, Darkscapes

Read 2020

**

Thirteen journeys through twisted nature, usually arriving at rape (supernatural or traditional). Good to see the French romantic tradition isn't dead.

Fave: The Story of Margaret

Martha C. Sammons, A Guide Through Narnia with complete Index of Names & Places, plus Map & Chronology

Read 2020

***

Recapping events and highlighting themes across the series, the cross-referencing with the author's life and explanations gives it value, but the Chronicle chronicler's unquestioning devotion to Aslan means she doesn't dwell on any of the less wholesome implications.

Jim Samson, Chopin: The Four Ballades

Read 2020

***

You can enjoy these pretty piano poems without the analysis, but as a fan of the pompous prog rock epic and closed-circuit stand-up set, it was satisfying to find the same preoccupation with structure and callbacks playing out over the course of a decade almost two centuries back.

Sam Samson and Richard Watson, Dog Day

She was adamant that it should've been called Dogs' Day. Look at it, there's clearly more than one from the cover alone.

Mark Samuels, The White Hands and Other Weird Tales

****

A very impressive debut collection of pulp tributes and more visionary horrors. It could have been longer, but he looks fairly productive, so there's plenty to look forward to.

Faves: 'The White Hands,' 'Mannequins in Aspects of Terror,' 'The Impasse'

Mark Samuels, The Man Who Collected Machen and Other Weird Tales

****

Possibly a more refined blend of influences, from cosmic doom to poetic gore and fear and loathing for its own art form, but it lacked the stand-out tales of the first collection for me.

Faves: 'Thyxxolqu,' 'A Question of Obeying Orders,' 'The Tower'

Mark Samuels, Written in Darkness

****

Apocalyptic nightmare visions of decay and disillusionment. Still, you've got to laugh, haven't you?

Faves: 'The Ruins of Reality,' 'Alistair,' 'My World Has No Memories'

Mark Samuels, Glyphotech and Other Macabre Processes

****

An intriguing if unpleasant collection of linked stories with recurring themes of suffocating paranoia, body horror and the futility of our sham existence. Lovely.

Faves: 'Ghorla,' '"Destination Nihil"' by Edmund Bertrand,' 'A Gentleman from Mexico'

Mark Samuels, The Prozess Manifestations

****

Characteristically unsettling tales with more explicit if still confounding links across time and genre, from haunted wanderers to cyberpunk detectives and jungle commandos.

Faves: 'An End to Perpetual Motion,' 'The Crimson Fog,' 'In the Complex'

Mark Samuels, Witch-Cult Abbey

***

Sink back into an ornate Gothic bath of blood and bones.

Luis Sanchez, The Beach Boys' Smile

Read 2020

**

For want of an actual album to talk about (though it basically exists), this recounts the public domain history of the 'Boys and their contemporaries instead and figures you'll be okay with that.

Mª Isabel Sánchez Vegara and Matt Hunt, Little People, Big Dreams: Stephen Hawking

***

She's probably too young yet for these to inspire as intended, but the motor neurone disease was still quite the hook.

Mª Isabel Sánchez Vegara, Mariadiamantes, Popy Matigot and Olivia Holden, Little People, Big Dreams: I Can Be a Brave Adventurer

***

A free Happy Meal® book to feed your mind in an effort to counteract the junk food.

Steven Sanders, Miami Vice

Read 2020

***

A readable academic analysis of the substance underpinning the considerable style, with useful historicopsychogeographical context of how art and life imitated each other. I'd almost given up on the show, but this encouraged me to hop back in the speedboat.

Fabi Santiago, I Really Want That Unicorn

Only a unicorn statue in this one, so it wasn't a hit. A crocodile in a tutu can't cut it.

José Saramago, Death with Interruptions

Read 2015

**

The story of people suddenly not dying any more has presumably been done before, but since I can't give any examples apart from a disappointing season of Torchwood that came later, I'll give the author credit for examining the issue from various angles. For half a book anyway, after which it becomes a love story about the female Portuguese death. She isn't the most memorable incarnation of the personification, and the idea that political borders actually matter on a higher level is just depressing.

Sarban, Ringstones

Read 2018

***

A latecomer to the Machen/Blackwood tradition of folk horror before the '70s brought its infatuation with techno-henges, this slow-burning novella is filled with pleasant Northumberland scenery, encyclopaedic digressions and ominous foreboding.

It's quite rare for these nerdy folkloric tales to be female-led, but with its oblivious and inept protagonist and bridled women pulling chariots, it's not exactly a step forward.

Sarban, The Sacrifice and Other Stories

***

Terrifying tales of freaks and foreigners!

Faves: 'Number Fourteen,' 'The Sacrifice'

Gianni A. Sarcone and Marie-Jo Waeber, Ultimate Eye Twisters: A Mesmerizing Mass of Optical Illusions

***

Worrying about that literal possibility, my daughter's eye-twisting sessions were strictly limited.

Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood

Read 2015

***

Another autobiography in comic form, I'm pretty sure I was supposed to like this more than the flippant North Korea one. Sorry about that, I just didn't dig the childish art. It was educational though – of all the countries I could have done with knowing more about, Iran was high on the list. I knew nothing. It even made me reconsider the potential of Communism after reading its actual manifesto put me off, but then, anything's going to look pretty great when it's set against the Islamic Republic.

Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return

Read 2015

***

The author-artist had a more eventful youth than most (mine was mainly spent playing Diablo II), but after the bombs and oppression of the first book, the more personal troubles of an immigrant teenager trying to find her place can't really measure up. Yes, I am saying she should have had more consistently harrowing life experiences, what about it?

Robert J. Sawyer, Starplex

Read 2015

***

It's '90s sci-fi, so of course it's about wormholes. I like a good yarn about celestial superstructures and patronising advanced ETs as much as the next outdated nerd, but bogged down by trite space age soap opera and unimaginative concepts for humanoid friends and enemies that would be easy to render in rubber, it isn't so much a high-concept Contact or Rama as the optimistic feature-length pilot for a Babylon 5.

Robert J. Sawyer, Flashforward

Read 2015

****

I enjoyed the brief TV adaptation while it lasted – the first entirely cynical, failed attempt to make The New Lost – so even though I don't normally like to read things I've watched or watch things I've read, I could do with some closure. The book reads like a great 90s miniseries, complete with bland characters whose lives and relationships become artificially fascinating when put in tumult and a sci-fi plot that's extremely well though-out in some ways but still riddled with logical holes that you can have fun spotting. It turns out that answers aren't the most important thing after all, as seeing how the world reacts to future knowledge on the small and large scale is much more interesting. Especially since the 'why' involves the Large Hadron Collider, which has since been proven to not do this. You funny pre-millennials and your techology anxieties!

Paul Scanlon, Michael Gross and artists, The Book of Alien

Read 2018

****

Alien is one of several films from this era – along with Blade Runner, Star Trek I and Conan the Barbarian – that I really like, but mainly as worlds to get immersed in that occasionally get annoyingly interrupted by a plot. In devoting itself almost entirely to production design, this vintage making-of classic is right up my disconcertingly organic alley.

H. R. Giger's biomechanical designs are the obvious stand-out, but they've been widely reproduced elsewhere. I was more pleased to see Chris Foss' prelimary tramp steamers and "frustrated engineer" Ron Cobb's pragmatic interiors, both of which would be satisfyingly ripped off in Red Dwarf.

Caleb Scharf, Gravity's Engines: How Bubble-Blowing Black Holes Rule Galaxies, Stars, and Life in the Cosmos

Read 2015

***

The black holes were the best thing about A Brief History of Time, so a whole book on the colossal enigmas seemed like a good idea. If you've only ever been vaguely concerned about these invisible, mythological singularities, this will help to turn that into mortal dread as soon as you reach the line about some of them being billions of times the size of the sun. If there ever was a God, he was devoured long ago.

Caleb Scharf, The Copernicus Complex: Our Cosmic Significance in a Universe of Planets and Probabilities

Read 2015

****

After a good book on parallel universes and an alright one on future possibilities for life on Earth, I just needed some recent stats on extrasolar planets to provide comforting celestial succour and make the vast, cosmic emptiness that little less biting. This book is geared directly towards those feelings, taking a multi-pronged approach to help the non-religious feel at ease with the aid of research and probability rather than over-optimistic guesswork.

Andrew Schartmann, Koji Kondo's Super Mario Bros. Soundtrack

***

With only 90 seconds' worth of original music to cover, historical context makes up much of the necessary padding before bending our ears down for a closer listen than any other book in the series.

Kate Schatz, PJ Harvey's Rid of Me: A Story

Read 2020

***

This apocalyptic goth-chick-lit was the best of the fictional entries, even if the bar was set very low. I'd get more out of this personal reimagining if I was familiar with the album, rather than just enjoying having a bespoke reading soundtrack and trying to spot connections on the fly. Or maybe that'd just annoy me.

Axel Scheffler, Rhyming Stories: Pip the Dog / Freddy the Frog

Misleadingly flapless.

Axel Scheffler, Pip and Posy: The New Friend

Mostly predictable, but the seagull stealing the dog's ice cream was some unforeseen excitement.

Axel Scheffler, Axel Scheffler's Flip Flap Frozen

***

An old idea, even to her. Mixing up names and descriptions advances the idea, but overcomplicates the fun. Crafty of the author or publisher to theme it by climate zone, this may already be one of many sequels.

Axel Scheffler, Gobbly Goat: A Sound Button Story

It's an old formula, but nice to get some representation for the neglected capricans. The sound button smacks of an afterthought, since it's not cued into the story whatsoever, but that's the entire reason why she picked the book up, so they know what they're doing.

Axel Scheffler, Katie the Kitten: A Push, Pull, Slide Book

These interactive elements rarely add anything when applied retroactively, but I did enjoy the washing machine.

Uwe Scheid and Michael Koetzle, 1000 Nudes: Uwe Scheid Collection

Read 2015

***

This compendium of 'artistic'/'medical'/let's-just-admit-what-we're-doing snaps from the first century of photography provoked a range of reactions in me. To start with, there's the existential fascination that comes with looking at any vintage images in which the subjects are all but guaranteed to be dead now. Then there's the archaic amusement of favoured props and poses that reveal either what people were into back then (an awful lot of archery) or just that these pioneering photographers were brainstorming all over the place. Then, shamefully late, there's the melancholy you'll get when viewing lewd images generally (unless you're too desensitised) when you remember that these were real women, most of them probably down on their luck and not expecting their long exposures to have this longevity.

Alyssa Schermel and Marina Saumell, The Unicorn Princess

Own-brand 1980s My Little Pony. She found the witches a bit scary.

David Schiff, Gershwin: Rhapsody in Blue

Read 2020

***

It's nice to obsess over a single track, but that does mean he runs out of things to write about before the end, so starts banging on about race. Get your important social history out of my lightweight high-art pocket books and talk about Tom and Jerry.

David J. Schow, The Outer Limits Companion

****

More obsessively comprehensive than I strictly needed for casual viewing, but it's good to set standards.

Matthias Schultheiss, Bell's Theorem: Lifer

Read 2020

*

This seemed to be nominated as the classic German graphic novel series. I guess they've been too preoccupied with electronic music and board games to bother developing that particular art form. A load of edgy shit.

Arlen Schumer and contributors, Visions from the Twilight Zone

****

Submitted for your consideration: an exhibition of juxtaposed period telesnaps and poetic observations that authentically capture the eerie essence and surreal stylings... of The Twilight Zone.

Alvin Schwartz and Stephen Gammell, Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark: Collected from American Folklore

****

"How long do we have to put up with this dead corpse?"

I expected crap scares, but there were also ghoulish doodles, Halloween party tips and a scholarly study of persistent folklore that the author wants you to know was much more diligently researched than it needed to be.

Faves: The Big Toe, The Haunted House, The Dead Man's Brains

Alvin Schwartz and Dirk Zimmer, In a Dark, Dark Room and Other Scary Stories

Read 1993, re-read 2023

****

Alright, so this isn't substantial (especially not the ghosts), and as a picture book with as many words per page as Spot Goes to the Farm, it was below my reading level. That was part of the reason I found it so funny. Especially good for tormenting younger siblings.

Jon Scieszka, The Great Time Warp Adventure

Read 1996, re-read 2021

I was delighted to spot this budget sampler of the unread first instalment in the Time Warp Trio series among Penguin's 60p budget range at the time, but even as a fan, I was sceptical whether they really belonged alongside the proper classics. Of course, 25 years later it's a household name and on the national curriculum.

Jon Scieszka and Lane Smith, The Time Warp Trio: The Not-So-Jolly Roger

Read 1996

***

'90s kids didn't have Lemony Snicket, so we had to make do with measly serials where we could. I read further pseudohistorical adventures of the evidently unmemorable gang, when doing so seemed to be of the utmost importance for a very brief time, but I remember the Picasso pirate cover most clearly. Presumably, I identified with the glasses one.

David Scroggy, Syd Mead, Mentor Huebner, Ridley Scott, Charles Knode and Michael Kaplan, Blade Runner Sketchbook

Read 2015

***

You know when something goes wrong with a speaker cable or audio track and you can barely hear the dialogue over the amplified soundtrack and atmospheric effects? That's how I like to watch Blade Runner. I don't much care for the story, but I can watch those incredible pre-CGI visuals drenched in Vangelis' gloomy synthesiser all night. This vintage tie-in paperback takes you half-way there with concept art filling in every mundane detail of the 2019 dystopia, just BYOV.

Ashley Selby and Joel Selby, Sing and Play: Animal Rhymes

Inevitably few due to the page count, but a couple of surprising obscurities in there.

Will Self, Tough, Tough Toys for Tough, Tough Boys

Read 2015

***

Faves: 'Flytopia'

Worsties: The drug dealing ones, tut tut.

Will Self, How the Dead Live

Read 2007

****

This hybrid of cynical social satire, gritty soap opera and urban fantasy is a demanding and disturbing read that takes more than it gives, but I still quite liked it. The specific mechanics of post-mortem life will stay with you. I hope he didn't get it right.

Will Self, The Book of Dave

Read 2009

****

We're all fucked, so we might as well laugh about it. Grumpy Will Self unexpectedly leads the charge to lighten up post-apocalyptic dystopias, with plenty of scathing religious satire for good measure. Stick with Dave, he gets better.

W. C. Sellar and R. J. Yeatman, 1066 and All That: A Memorable History of England, comprising all the parts you can remember, including 103 Good Things, 5 Bad Kings and 2 Genuine Dates

Read 2019

***

The premise is that the history you were ineffectually taught at school must be the only history worth half-remembering, so they're not going to fill in what your teachers failed to. Good point, but I probably should have worked on remedying that ignorance rather than basking in it. Doubtless influential on the more refined historical pisstakes to come, and cathartic for history scholars, the hit rate of puns and comical errors and conflations isn't very high, but enough has accumulated by the end to make it worthwhile. The nonsensical exam questions are funnier than the main ramble.

Maurice Sendak, Where the Wild Things Are

Read 2020, re-read 2022

****

Not being American, this wasn't part of my compulsory childhood reading, but I understand the lasting appeal. I probably get even more out of it as a lit graduate parent than I would have back then, though it would've been fun to be scared.

Suzy Senior and Claire Powell, Octopants

If there's an age when underwear is inherently hilarious, she hasn't reached it yet.

Suzy Senior and Leire Martin, Unicorn Club

The kid has a cool name.

Suzy Senior and Claire Powell, Octopants: The Missing Pirate Pants

Not the most eagerly anticipated sequel, but the underwater washing line was quite funny.

Luigi Serafini, Codex Seraphinianus

Read 2015

****

I only did the minimal background reading before plunging into this, leaving me free to draw my own conclusions. If this only included the illustrations, it would be a funny and creative curiosity. But when half the pages are filled with lengthy hand-written paragraphs, charts and diagrams seemingly explaining this alien flora, fauna, architecture and technology in a made-up cipher language, it transcends fantasy art to become either an inspired pet project or a journal of genuine insanity (I'd argue that the third option – prophetic visions beamed from another world – is undermined by all the joke entries such as scissor plants and corkscrew fish). It's a mesmerising trip either way, but I'm not going to spend my life trying to decipher it.

Termisa Seraphini and Sophie Robin, The Secret Lives of Unicorns

***

Illustrations rather than photos clued her in to it possibly not being authentic zoology, but there were still good tips for wildlife spotting generally. Who knows?

Dr. Seuss, The Cat in the Hat

I don't know what he was a Dr. of, but I'm sure these conflicting stock personalities are ripe for psychoanalysis so you're spared from having to write your English essay on hard novels. I missed out on the chaotic fun in my childhood, but I was never big on rhyme anyway. I don't know why it always pleases me when these magical kids' stories are open to the boring dream interpretation.

Dr. Seuss, How the Grinch Stole Christmas!

***

My Green Eggs and Ham-loving toddler decided she didn't have the cultural foundations to fully appreciate it yet. She said something along those lines, anyway. Its anti-corporate message could prove useful propaganda in the long term.

Dr. Seuss, The Cat in the Hat Comes Back

A wry allegory for corporate delegation getting out of hand, I expect! Even the kids weren't pleased to see the Twat come back. How encouraging is that?

Dr. Seuss, One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish

***

Fox in Socks Lite, the parade goes on and on, but it kept her attention. I made do with Stoppit and Tidy-up.

Dr. Seuss, Green Eggs and Ham

****

This face-off between stubbornness and persistence was funnier than the selfish anarchy of the Cat in the Hat, even if the repetition got similarly tedious and was scandalously abridged when reading aloud to a toddler.

Dr. Seuss, Dr. Seuss's ABC

Imposing order on the chaos makes this a lesser work, but still more worthwhile than your standard cash-in alphabet book.

Dr. Seuss, Hop on Pop: The Simplest Seuss for Youngest Use

***

Fox on Socks is the current favourite in her own collection, but this more age-appropriate and educational take didn't amuse. Probably because it didn't obviously vex me in the same way, or because it was educational.

Dr. Seuss, Fox in Socks

***

I would've practised the tongue twister and failed to impress my peers if I'd had this as a precocious brat. As it is, I sided with the spoilsport as usual. Shut the fox up.

Dr. Seuss, There's a Wocket in My Pocket!

***

The usual poetic nonsense, at a reasonable length for a change.

Dr. Seuss and Quentin Blake, Great Day for Up

***

I don't know why the good doctor didn't feel up to illustrating his own automatic writing, but Quentin Blake does an admirable interpretation.

Dr. Seuss, Oh, the Places You'll Go!

Read 2020

**

Too patronising for graduates but irrelevant for children, I'm not sure who this aspirational independence primer is for, though obviously the last person it's for is someone who's done his travelling and settled down. It gets a point for nice drawings; you can improvise a more interesting story around them to entertain your preschooler.

Anna Sewell, Black Beauty: His Grooms and Companions, the Autobiography of a Horse

There are two ways to read this fictional account of contented servitude, similarly bleak. Unless she's especially crazy for horses, we'll stick with less depressing anthropomorphs.

Carole Sexton, Tales of Old Cheshire

We're not the most famous county down/up here (you don't even know where it is, do you?), so these local histories and fables aren't the most original or compelling. It's all about the novelty of seeing those familiar place names legitimised in (cheap) print. Reusing the same cover art across counties is especially cheap. They probably assumed that local loyalty meant it wouldn't ever come up, but I saw it.

Peter S. Seymour and Chuck Murphy, Silly Circus

Read 1988

**

I can't remember a time when the wheels still worked and this wasn't permanently stuck on the giraffe with duck feet. This is why my daughter's on the chewable cloth books.

William Shakespeare, The Two Gentlemen of Verona

Read 2005, re-read 2021

**

Having picked up a very cheap complete Shakespeare, that it turns out I'd never actually need thanks to early-bird course selection, I thought I'd best read at least one, so chose a random one I'd never heard of. A dull courtly love pentangle, brightened by some really laboured jokes that could be mistaken for an exaggerated pisstake. There were some nice rhymes, which is the sort of enthusiastic note I make when forced to listen to rap.

William Shakespeare, The Comedy of Errors

****

Actually recognisable as a comedy and actually funny as contrived confusions and identity crises pass the absurd threshold. Better than Beckett, though I may have been swayed by the phantom laugh track of Elizabethans wetting their breeches.

William Shakespeare, Love's Labour's Lost

Self-parodying sonnets and deliberately bad plays that you actually have to sit through.

William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream

Read 1999, re-read 2021

A promising supernatural layer amounts only to temporary tomfoolery and the story accidentally ends a couple of acts too early.

William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice

I quite enjoy these, until I'm reminded that he didn't come up with any of the plots, just fleshed out the characters and made racist caricatures sympathetic. Jim Davidson claims the same about his creations though.

William Shakespeare, Sir John Falstaff and the Merry Wives of Windsor

Blackadder's putdown to Baldrick that he'd laugh at a Shakespeare comedy frequently came to mind as I endured this mirth-free pantomime of a horny rascal getting his comeuppance, with bonus funny foreign accents. Even the fans don't like this one.

William Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing

It took several aborted attempts and most of the year to make it through this tedious loveteam tangle, which doesn't even bother to rhyme most of the time. I'm not even halfway through the comedies yet.

William Shakespeare, As You Like It

Tangled and sappy pastoral symphony, but it's nice to get out.

William Shakespeare, The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark

Read 2001

****

Ruined by repetitive GCSE-level over-analysis, but it's not like I would have sat down and read/watched it if I didn't have to. Lots of nice quotes and philosophising and stuff, but it's mainly valuable as the background context for Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead.

William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, or What You Will

Read 2000

**

Maybe I'll have a Shakespeare revelation later in life, but this introduction didn't win me over. If you caught a contemporary performance, you could at least appreciate the meta angle of an effeminate man playing a woman playing a man, but that's lost nowadays thanks to bloody equality. Its greatest legacy is inspiring a classic Blackadder episode – now that's how you do Elizabethan comedy.

William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure

This early-17th-century #MeToo drama is less problematic than expected, but it still takes about four acts longer than necessary to make its straightforward point.

William Shakespeare, The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice

Read 2004

****

Would I get on better with Shakey today, now that I'm not pressured to understand it, or does it lose something if you don't spend ages going over and over the same lines and bestial imagery? I preferred this to Hamlet, for the more cunning villain and more exotic setting.

William Shakespeare, The Tempest

***

Touted as The Bard's grand, fantastical, malleabllegorical finale, I still don't get what all the fuss is about. Forbidden Planet did it better.

Leslie Shapiro, Understanding OCD: Skills to Control the Conscience and Outsmart Obsessive Compulsive Disorder

Read 2015

**

After reading a single article online, I was fairly confident I'd diagnosed someone with OCD. This book made me less certain, while concerns that I might have it myself faded in and out (despite my ace performance on a totally reliable questionnaire). Maybe we're all a little bit OCD. But we're not all religious, so it's a bit annoying that this neuroscientist makes that presumption.

Shitij Sharma, Mudmen – The Quest for Humanity

Read 2017

**

You can't accuse Shitij Sharma of jumping on the latest trendy bandwagon, unless I’m out of touch and there's been a surge of stories about bitter dwarfs warping the world to their own hubristic ends.

If you're in the right frame of mind or reading under the influence, Mudmen could be considered a visionary work comparable to the uncompromising films of Jodorowsky or Blake's prophecies. But that would be a little generous. With his obvious drive, the teenage author's got a long career ahead of him, and this trilogy is destined to be a curiosity of the early years before he found his voice and created his masterpieces.

Nick Sharratt, Ketchup On Your Cornflakes?

****

The surprise 90s date gives this the innovative edge over all the modern equivalents, most of which are admittedly by the same author-illustrator. It made such an impression in her school book group that she talked about it all the way home.

Nick Sharratt, Shark in the Park! / Shark in the Dark! / Shark in the Park on a Windy Day! / Oh No! Shark in the Snow!

***

Fun the first time, but they should really be longer. I suppose that's what all the seasonal and colour-inverted variations are for.

Nick Sharratt, Don't Put Your Finger in the Jelly, Nelly!

More unmusical Nick Sharratt rhymes.

Nick Sharratt, Elephant Wellyphant / Octopus Socktopus / Moo-Cow Kung-Fu-Cow

***

Simple rhymes, flaps and toilet humour worked a treat.

Nick Sharratt, What's in the Witch's Kitchen?

****

A welcome innovation in flap books, she appreciated the pot luck peril, but not as much as the inescapable pop-up witch.

Nick Sharratt, Supermarket Zoopermarket

Dear Zoo was the first book she wanted to read over and over again. We were both bored of this culinary fusion long before the end. They're not even proper puns.

Nick Sharratt and Phoebe Tinkler, Unicorn Moonicorn

I wonder how many of the 20 or so words he needed a co-writer's help with.

Christopher Sharrett, The Rifleman

Read 2020

***

Clarifies why the TV western was so huge in its time and argues why this was the best of them, blending social honesty and progressive attitudes with conservative gun solutions. It's basically Deep Space Nine with horses.

William Shatner with Judith & Garfield Reeves-Stevens and Steve Erwin, Star Trek: The Ashes of Eden

Read 2020

**

I buy that The Shat suggested the characteristically vain Kirk action plot, making "his" first 'Trek novel less deceptive than the later ones, filled out with repetitive set pieces and gratuitous back references by his dependable "co-"writers. As an alt-universe Star Trek VII, it would have been even lamer than the real one, as demonstrated when they basically recycled it for Star Trek IX.

William Shatner with Garfield and Judith Reeves-Stevens, Star Trek: The Return

Read 1997

***

Even at eleven, I was sceptical about whether the famously flippant actor really wrote this lore-heavy Generations sequel (he obviously didn't). I remember being gobsmacked at the time by its logical leap of connecting V'ger and the Borg, later learning that that was entry-level fanon. I didn't bother reading the rest of "Shatner's" books.

Mark Shaw, Copywriting: Successful Writing for Design, Advertising, and Marketing (Second Edition)

Read 2015

**

"If you're explaining the benefits of a back-to-work scheme for 16-year-olds who've left school with no qualifications, you're not expected to use hip-hop street language."

This is by far the least useful and dreariest writing guide I've read this year, disregarding the advice of those other experts as well as its own. It's not entirely relevant to me, to be fair – he only gets around to online writing in the final chapter, but isn't that a bit of an oversight in the 2010s anyway? The focus is more on style and audience than presentation, which probably explains why it's so annoying to read, with densely clumped paragraphs and key points scattered all over the place at various angles. There are plenty of full-page examples from successful brands, but whereas Redish and Capala's books stated that they weren't paid to include their favourite examples, there's no such disclaimer here. Not a bad strategy – get people to take a really good look at your ads under the pretence that it's good for them. I'm off to buy a Land Rover.

Philip Shaw, Patti Smith's Horses

Read 2020

***

The first two thirds of this stuffy "critical biography" left me increasingly bored and annoyed until he finally started talking about the album in question at the end, with the brief but insightful track-by-track analyses I'm here for. He didn't convince me that it's the greatest rock album of all time, but it was nice to know what's going on.

Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson, The Illuminatus! Trilogy, Part I: The Eye in the Pyramid

Read 2009, re-read 2012

***

The first time I failed to make it through the first book of a trilogy that sounded right up my street, I was convinced the problem must be with me. The second time, I conceded that maybe it just wasn't all it's made out to be.

Robert Shearman, Remember Why You Fear Me: The Best Dark Fiction of Robert Shearman

Read 2015

*****

I knew Shearman could write smart, suspenseful and hilarious because of the handful of Doctor Who audio dramas he wrote in the early 2000s, which rank among the best of that entire canon. But until now, I didn't know he could be so brilliantly twisted too. In most of these terror tales he can't help himself from softening the blow with black humour, but a few of them go without. Those are the ones that are going to lurk in the memory. All the leading phobias are accounted for – theoretically, some of these stories could kill.

Faves: 'Damned If You Don’t,' 'Featherweight,' 'Granny’s Grinning.'

Worsties: 'So Proud,' 'One More Bloody Miracle After Another,' 'The Bathtub.'

Robert Sheckley, Untouched by Human Hands

Read 2020

***

The best stories adopt an alien perspective. The worst are about demons.

Faves: 'The Monsters,' 'Keep Your Shape,' 'Seventh Victim.'

Worsties: 'The King's Wishes,' 'Warm,' 'The Demons.'

Robert Sheckley, Immortality, Inc.

****

This is why we can't have nice things. More cynically satirical than Philip K. Dick, this tale of reluctant and unhinged undead is still comfortingly straight compared to his other novels.

Robert Sheckley, Journey Beyond Tomorrow (a.k.a. Journey of Joenes)

Read 2020

***

A brilliant framework, piecing together a twisted account of preapocalyptic times through a variety of unreliable sources. A shame the stream-of-consciousness satirical odyssey itself doesn't really live up to it, though I'm sure it's caused much agreeable thigh-slapping down the decades.

Robert Sheckley, The Game of X

Read 2015

**

Either I've been making progressively unlucky random selections, or Sheckley isn't the overlooked genius that first book made him out to be. This one foregoes the sci-fi to poke fun at the spy genre instead, and it's exactly as funny as every single other Bond parody you've sat through. (Or was Austin Powers any good? I don't trust my teen nostalgia).

Robert Sheckley, Mindswap

Read 2015

***

It's entirely possible that I would have bloody loved this if I'd been in the right mood for zany freestyling, or if I hadn't read the similar (later) Dimension of Miracles first. There are more ingeniously daft sci-fi concepts that struck me as more Red Dwarf than Hitchhiker's this time, and it's still satisfyingly downbeat in general. I just wasn't so won over by the parade of successive genre parodies for the sake of it, which takes up about half the book.

Robert Sheckley, Dimension of Miracles

Read 2015, re-read 2022

*****

Unless you're trying to look clever, it's not really possible to discuss this comedy sci-fi classic without pointing out its many technical and spiritual similarities to Hitchhiker's Guide. This isn't fair on Sheckley's less famous book, since it was written more than a decade before the first radio series, but if you found Adams' later sequels in the trilogy a bit excruciating, this is the perfect substitute. There are some overly daft bits, but on the whole this space-time odyssey hits that elusive sweet spot between inspired SF and great LOL. The whole thing's powered by brilliant, mad logic and the conclusion is both depressing and inspiring.

Robert Sheckley, Can You Feel Anything When I Do This?

Read 2015

**

Sheckley's brief, episodic novels point to a short attention span, so I had high hopes for the pick of two decades' worth of short stories. I was largely disappointed. There's some neatly twisted philosophising, but little in the way of mad pseudoscience. Occasionally funny, rarely interesting.

Faves: 'The Cruel Equations,' 'Pas de Trois of the Chef and the Waiter and the Customer.'

Worsties: 'Down the Digestive Tract and into the Cosmos with Mantra, Tantra and Specklebang,' 'Aspects of Langranak.'

Robert Sheckley, Options

Read 2018

***

There comes a time in an experimental artist's career when they have to decide whether to stop messing around and be sensible now or to keep pushing boundaries and audiences away.

Robert Sheckley's first novel after an extended leave admirably takes the latter option, though it's not clear whether all the jarring false starts leading to frustrating dead ends are trolling tomfoolery or a genuine breakdown and failure hidden in a postmodern cloak. I like to think it's both.

Robert Sheckley, Minotaur Maze

***

Postmodern classical wank, not that there's anything wrong with that. Some funny concepts, but more a warm-up exercise than a novel.

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus

Read 2016

*****

The "first science fiction novel" (one of them, anyway) comes down heavily against the science part. For God's sake, don't seek knowledge. Take a holiday in the mountains and come back calmer and contented with your privileged life. While the electrifying Boris Karloff incarnation is always going to be the most iconic, going back to the source confirms that Frankenstein is the monster after all; his surprisingly eloquent creation, not so much. That major point tends to get missed out when every bloody TV series does its Frankingstein episode. You can also take delight in paragraphs overflowing with nature symbolism and groan at a significant woman author making all of her female characters depressingly pathetic.

Mimi Sheraton, 1,000 Foods To Eat Before You Die: A Food Lover's Life List

Read 2015

***

More affluent-American-centric than would have been ideal (North America and Europe takes up more than half the book; the Philippines doesn't get a single entry, which is correct), the apparently famous food writer does make the occasional concession to commoners, usually in the form of patronising entries on the dubious joys of bread and dripping, jellied eels and other kitsch poverty staples.

I kept count and I've tried something like 193/1000, though most of those were doubtless in disgraceful proletarian versions and so hardly count. I probably even dine with a single set of cutlery for god's sake.

Faves: The India section was literally mouthwatering. I didn't know that could actually happen.

Worsties: I haven't tried head, so call me judgemental, but I'm going to go with head. And mushy peas.

Jill Sherwin, Quotable Star Trek

Read 1999

*

Star Trek can be pretty profound sometimes. If you're the sort of person who likes to dispense quotes on cue, and you're not ashamed to be quoting a character who doesn't really exist, you'll get more out of it than I did.

M. P. Shiel, Xélucha and The Primate of the Rose

Read 2020

***

I don't know why Tartarus' reprint of the old Arkham House collection only got as far as the second story. Maybe they had trouble tracking down some of the others like I did. The first one's more interesting for its sci-fi ponderings and faux-antiquated language on the right side of the centennial to be acceptable.

Yujin Shin, My First Body Book

***

Friendly anatomical primer, if a little misleading in the proportions and all those faces.

Yujin Shin, My Magical Rainbow / Forest

Read 2022-24

She doesn't always feel like reading. These are basically the adverts before library rhyme time.

Nadia Shireen, Barbara Throws a Wobbler

***

She's choosing her own behavioural conditioning now. An extra point for the expanded universe twist ending.

Hank Shteamer, Ween's Chocolate and Cheese

Read 2020

***

Prosaic defence of a former novelty band starting to take themselves seriously, distinguishing the edgy and existential from the inexcusably daft.

Neil Shubin, Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body

Read 2009

****

I was never very good at science academically, but pop science that invites me to view the world and my own body in fresh ways is always interesting, and Jurassic Park gave me lifelong goodwill to paleontologists. If you're not willing to see the tiktaalik in you, that's your choice. I find it comforting that we're all one big family.

Robert Silverberg, The Man in the Maze

Read 2007

****

The prolific Silver Age author updates a Greek myth to outer space with more restraint than the producers of Ulysses 31. It's a heady psychological story of isolation, free will and responsibility, but the maze is also literal, don't worry.

Clifford D. Simak, City

Read 2019

****

It takes a few tales before this chronicle of humanity's downfall and the rise of the mutant animals starts to come together, but it all adds up to a more compelling whole than most fix-up novels achieve. Simak's less convinced of the indomitable human spirit than many sci-fi writers, and while his fantastical transhuman solution might not seem particularly helpful, you can stretch some real-life analogies out of it, if that's your bag.

Posy Simmonds, Baker Cat

This may have been her introduction to institutionally grim British children's literature. It got me down, anyway.

Anthea Simmons and Georgie Birkett, I'm Big Now

She enjoys alternating roleplay between baby and caregiver, but she's less interested in reading about it.

Dan Simmons, Song of Kali

Read 2018

***

Dan Simmons' longer novels have alternately fascinated or bored me, but this is your bogstandard horror debut, controversially warping real Hindu deities into Lovecraftian nightmares.

What makes it stand out is the exotic setting of Calcutta, described in such detail and with such seething resentment for the culture and customs that I can only assume he had a bad experience. Daydreaming a nuclear solution out loud on the opening page of his literary career probably wasn't the wisest decision in hindsight. Should have vented in a blog.

Dan Simmons, Hyperion

Read 2013, re-read 2022

*****

A loose Canterbury Tales pastiche gives this twisted genre mash-up all the variety of a themed anthology. Reaffirming its place among my favourite novels, this is the only literary sci-fi saga I've really taken to, not that I ever felt like reading the sequels. Time to rectify that.

Faves: The Priest's Tale, The Scholar's Tale, The Consul's Tale

Dan Simmons, The Fall of Hyperion

****

The more straightforward but mandatory second half (of the first half), it falls far short of its predecessor's classic status, but makes up for the loss of the variety show with satisfying closure.

Dan Simmons, Worlds Enough & Time: Five Tales of Speculative Fiction

Read 2015

***

This is the third of Simmons' books I've read, and the only one that hasn't been great. Since his 'epic' Hyperion was basically six or seven completely different stories flimsily tied together like an Amicus horror film, I expected more from this collection of miscellany that doesn't even bother with the tenuous links.

Faves: 'Looking for Kelly Dahl'

Worsties: 'The End of Gravity'

Dan Simmons, Ilium

Read 2015

***

My fourth outing with Dan, embarking on another bold new saga I won't be continuing, his hit rate's fallen to 50% now. This was no Hyperion. Some good ideas, but I've overloaded on time travel recently (recently?), and while these Homerian reenactments don't actually involve time travel, their no-frills, uninspiring presentation of the no-longer-epic Iliad is like sitting through an especially dull SyFy channel miniseries. For 752 pages. And it's only part one.

Dan Simmons, The Terror

Read 2015

****

"Chilling!" – Various smart-arse reviews, I expect.

Quitting A-level history half-way through because it was too much hard work, I've never felt special affinity for any particular historical era or personages, but the 19th century polar voyages are as close as things get to 'my period.' I wanted to write my own novel digging up the graves of these doomed explorers, but never bothered for reasons explained in the previous sentence. Dan Simmons put in the effort though, and having led me on similarly overlong journeys through Victorian sewers and electrical forests, this was the most enthrallingly uncomfortable. If the cold, hunger and (real-life) cannibalism aren't already enough, he throws in a supernatural beastie to really finish you off. (Hyperion > Terror > Drood > Ilium)

Dan Simmons, Drood

Read 2011

****

I've never been much of a Dickens fan. Too long. But that didn't hinder my appreciation of this similarly long and very atmospheric tribute to the bloke from off of the tenner and the "true" story behind his incomplete final novel, even if I did sometimes get Dickens and Wilkie confused with Holmes and Watson like the illiterate pleb I am.

Dan Simmons, The Guiding Nose of Ulfant Banderoz

Read 2020

***

Written for a tribute volume to the Dying Earth series, this is appropriately indulgent tomfoolery as Simmons digs out Vance's genre-troubling toys and decides his pirate ship will be an impractical sky galleon, because when else are you going to get to write that?

Dana Simpson, Phoebe and Her Unicorn series

***

She's found her Garfield, and probably this year's collectable series unless we slow down to real-time dailies.

Dana Simpson, Phoebe and Her Unicorn in The Magic Storm

****

A break from the perpetual soap for a full-on self-contained graphic novel adventure. This change-up was a hit, as we got through it in a day.

Dana Simpson, Phoebe and Her Unicorn in Unicorn Theater

****

The second (final?) full-length graphic novel in the series makes a sustained examination of the characters' feelings in a way that isn't really possible in syndicated newspaper funnies. Back to those now.

Paul Simpson and David Hughes, Farscape: The Illustrated Companion

***

A whole book on the lengthy genesis of Space Chase with more of that intriguing concept art would have been more interesting, but this suffices as your bogstandard episode guide.

Paul Simpson and Ruth Thomas, Farscape: The Illustrated Season 3 Companion

Read 2004

***

In the olden days, the series companion would cover more than a single run of episodes, but Farscape merch was always a bit on the exploitative side. The third season was the best season, so I paid my respects by buying the book. Aside from full-colour photos of various disgusting Muppets that were appreciated, the interviews with cast and crew weren't especially insightful – more TNG than DS9, companion aficionados! I've wasted my life.

Paul Simpson, Farscape: The Illustrated Season 4 Companion

***

Not the funnest year to recap, even before the cancellation gloom.

Robert Simpson, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine – Mission Gamma #4 – Lesser Evil

Read 2016

***

Absent friends are returning one by one, which is gradually improving the atmosphere. They even kill off an established secondary character – admittedly one who hasn't been seen in a few years, but compared to the spin-off media's former policy of strict non-interference, this is revolutionary! But then they go and spoil it all by drafting in some irrelevant Next Generation foes to account for all the political turmoil, rather than allowing it to be organically home-grown. And bringing in the Borg as well was an unwelcome reminder that I'm reading a kid's book.

Lesley Sims and Sara Gianassi, Usborne Listen and Read: Sleeping Beauty

Literal talking book.

Iain Sinclair, Crash

Read 2020

****

I haven't read Ballard's novel to rate it against Cronenberg's damaged film (curiously unarousing even at thirteen), but when the academic write-up has more artistry than the selected quotes, Sinclair's Crash wins. I hope the BFI made a habit of hiring proper writers to bang on about films they like, they're on to a winner.

May Sinclair, Karmic Tribunal

Read 2017

**

May Sinclair certainly knows her way around the Tibetan Book of the Dead. She could have inserted any recently deceased character into this crash course, which guides us step-by-step from one life to the next. But because she was writing Karmic Tribunal in 2016, it inevitably skews towards politics.

If your knowledge of karmic balancing could do with some touching up, this is an educational read when it's not bogged down by depressing reality.

Sean Singer, Discography

Read 2015

**

I feel obligated to throw in some poetry every 500 books or so. I think this is supposed to be word jazz? I don't get it.

Faves: 'Inside the Keith Jarrett Trio,' 'Goat Moving Through a Boa Constrictor.'

Worsties: 'Photo of John Coltrane, 1963,' 'Who Can Stay the Bottles of Heaven?', 'Self.'

Thomas Sipe, Beethoven: Eroica Symphony

There's no chance of conjuring your own connotations after you've been bombarded with the composer's politics and the corresponding history of interpretations. The last chapter finally gets around to the music and attempts some vaguer themes, but it's already been ruined.

Dawn Sirett, Sarah Davis and Dave King, Pop-Up Peekaboo!: Playtime

***

The daytime counterpart to her Bedtime book, there's some more interesting overlapping going on and entire characters haven't been edited out by a roughhousing toddler this time, which is always a bonus.

Dawn Sirett, Sarah Davis and Dave King, Pop-Up Peekaboo!: Bedtime

***

A bedtime book with a bedtime theme, that ought to be manipulative enough. You'd have to be some kind of cheapskate parent to buy your child a pop-up book second-hand, but it saved her the trouble of ripping those bits herself.

Dawn Sirett and Charlotte Milner, Follow the Trail: Minibeasts

She always passed on this in the library, but as a prescribed World Book Day freebie, it's infesting her bookshelf regardless. She somehow finds finger trails less appealing when they're left by creepy-crawlies, weird kid.

Dawn Sirett, Helen Senior and Rachael Prokic, Pop-Up Peekaboo: Diggers

Passed some seconds in the library.

Ben Sisario, Pixies' Doolittle

Read 2020

***

Uneventful road trips with the grown-up band members unfold the unsurprising oral history of the alt-rock touchstone. Reads more like an extended advert for their reunion tour until we get to the customary album commentary at the end.

Elaine R. Sisman, Mozart: The 'Jupiter' Symphony

Read 2020

**

Tables of formulae illustrated by notation demonstrate how the composer captured the essence of the mathematical sublime. It's not one of the more accessible of these books. Much better is the appendix reprinting an enthused antique review, since it actually uses words.

Zecharia Sitchin, The 12th Planet

Read 2015

*

I was once briefly persuaded by ancient astronaut theories for all of a couple of hours. Since then, the appeal has been in their entertainment value as extremely detailed science fiction, amusement at their desperate dot connecting and admiration for the researchers' dedication, since they do usually believe this stuff (there are easier and less publicly humiliating ways to earn a living). This is notable as an early example of the genre – pre-Icke, post-von Däniken and 2001 – but this time I was more annoyed than amused, since the argument is mainly based on some old tablets that only the author can translate (fine) and his refusal to believe that a bunch of evolved primates could come up with civilisation and technology all by themselves. Give your ancestors some credit, for Enki's sake.

Julia Skinner, Cheshire: A Miscellany

***

A brief data burst of local knowledge for visitors, newcomers or people who grew up in the county but spent most of that time playing on the Amiga. They might be making some of it up for a laugh, I can't tell, me yed's all of a missock.

Angela Slatter, The Girl with No Hands and Other Tales

***

Covering the same timespan as Sourdough, this has the feel of a rough demo ahead of the more inspired and refined themed collection. She wastes no time raising and slaying the Angela Carter anxiety beast, so that comparison will never be made again.

Faves: 'Red Skein,' 'The Juniper Tree,' 'The Girl with No Hands'

Angela Slatter, Sourdough and Other Stories

*****

Variably dark, consistently enchanting fairy tales from the de facto bard laureate. It may be a while before I can share these bedtime stories.

Faves: 'The Shadow Tree,' 'A Porcelain Soul,' 'Lavender and Lychgates'

Angela Slatter, The Bitterwood Bible and Other Recountings

****

Dark fantasy becomes outright horror in the Sourdough prequel scrapbook, occasionally overly infatuated with its own lore.

Faves: 'The Coffin-Maker's Daughter,' 'The Night Stair,' 'The Bitterwood Bible'

Angela Slatter, Home and Hearth

***

A jolting return to the modern world after immersion in the mythos, this put me in mind of a creepy Inside No. 9. Not exactly substantial enough for the solo release, but she was probably a long way from another miscellaneous collection.

Angela Slatter, Of Sorrow and Such

****

The Sourdough movie wasn't a stretch after the long story cycle in the last collection, but I was more engaged.

Angela Slatter, Finnegan's Field

****

The clash of suburban realism and monstrous fantasy is conventionally a bit awkward, but this has the makings of a modern folk horror classic.

Angela Slatter, Red New Day & Other Microfictions

An inadequate smattering of insubstantial stories, mainly playing with mythological figures. They were originally written for a daily web project rather than intended for publication, but might as well.

Faves: 'Binoorie,' 'Foundation,' 'The Impatient Dead'

Anthony Slide and Edward Wagenknecht, Fifty Great American Silent Films, 1912–1920: A Pictorial Survey

Read 2020

***

"The telephone pole is something of an anachronism for a scene set in 900 A.D."

A whistle stop tour of the first and least interesting decade of feature-length film production from one of the less interesting countries making them. The brief reviews are usually unsentimental, except when they're worshipping D. W. Griffith and prickling at accusations of racism like someone banging on about 'SJWs.'

Jan Smaczny, Dvořák: Cello Concerto

Read 2020

***

Humanises the usual technical analysis by inviting us intrusively inside the composer's mind to speculate on his motivations, inspirations and barely legal muses.

Steve Smallman and Caroline Pedler, There's No Such Thing as Monsters!

She wasn't worried about these things before, hopefully it doesn't start now.

Steve Smallman and Bruno Robert, Eat Your Veggies, Goldilocks

Subverting her expectations to preach healthy eating in an unhelpful and unsatisfying way. I don't get it. She always related more to Baby Bear anyway.

Steve Smallman and Neil Price, Fairytales Gone Wrong: Stinky Jack and the Beanstalk – A Story About Keeping Clean

As expected, it's another lazy retelling of a well-told public domain classic almost verbatim with a few "amusing" changes, except not.

David Smay, Tom Waits' Swordfishtrombones

Read 2015

**

I'd tried a few times before to get what the deal was with Tom Waits, but never succeeded. This was my chance to find out what I've been missing and to force myself to appreciate an arbitrary modern classic. It wasn't particularly successful – not a failing of the music, more an issue with the wiseguy critic who opts to get into the surreal spirit of things rather than give his actual opinions or the clinical analysis I would have preferred. Should have just read a smart-arse review.

Art Smith, Building Today's Green Home: Practical, Cost-Effective and Eco-Responsible Homebuilding

Read 2015

**

More professional than the previous one, but a lot less useful unless you happen to be an American baby boomer who's planning to build your retirement home, but first need to overcome your scepticism of this new fangled "green" tree-hugging commie crap. The title didn't make clear just how specific its target audience is.

Clark Ashton Smith, The Star-Treader and Other Poems

Read 2015

***

Generally considered to be the bronze medallist of Weird Tales after Lovecraft and Howard, I was looking forward to another unchallenging collection of sinister stories from C. A. Smith, but then the only complete audiobook I could find was this poetry collection published when he was 19. Eugh, right? I'll still have to check out his proper stuff some time, but this turned out to be a surprisingly enjoyable experience outside of my comfort zone. It's juvenile and completely infatuated with Keats, but he finds his own way occasionally by mixing some celestial phenomena and infinity angst in with the mythology and nature reverence. I ended up switching to the e-book anyway, when I remembered dramatic amateur poetry readers are the worst of all.

Faves: 'Ode to the Abyss,' 'The Song of a Comet.'

Worsties: 'The Price,' 'Saturn.'

Clark Ashton Smith, The Return of the Sorcerer: The Best of Clark Ashton Smith

Read 2015

****

The connoisseur's Weird Tales weirdo, C.A.S. typically gets relegated to "similar authors" lists when people are craving more Lovecraft, but his own flair for the foreboding is just as good. Compared to that other heavyweight Robert E. Howard... to use an analogy that will help no one, if you used to play those isometric RPGs like Diablo and tended to favour the dependable barbarian, you're better off with Howard. If you doggedly stuck with the necromancer, because the perverse pleasure of getting to raise creatures you'd just killed to fight against their own kin outweighed the unfairness of your character just objectively not being that good, Smith's your man. Since this is a best-of compiled for modern readers it may not be a fair representation, but for once it was refreshingly free from the ol' institutional racism.

Faves: 'The Return of the Sorcerer,' 'The Double Shadow,' 'The Isle of the Torturers.'

Worsties: 'A Night in Malnéant,' 'The Devotee of Evil,' 'The Enchantress of Sylaire.'

Sandy Schofield (Dean Wesley Smith and Kristine Kathryn Rusch), Star Trek: Deep Space Nine – The Big Game

***

A decent effort for so early in the series (though inevitably lacking as a result), the authors' relentless emphasis on bad smells made the crisis unpleasantly immersive, so thanks for that.

Guy N. Smith, The Slime Beast

Read 2016

***

Superbly dreadful, I could not in good conscience award a higher than average rating to this hack B-movie of a book, but at the same time, it's one of the most entertaining page-turners I've read all year. I don't normally have the patience to ironically appreciate the awful, but this is as close to real-life Garth Marenghi as it's possible to get without knowingly taking the piss.

It's also a lot like a desperately adult '70s Doctor Who or Children's BBC serial (there's even an Uncle Jack), only with less plot logic and more deflowering and entrails. While writers often use alien invasions as allegories for various contemporary fears, Guy N. Smith doesn't burden us with subtext. He just marks this out as a product of its time with an abundance of authentic period perviness.

Guy N. Smith, Killer Crabs

Read 2020

'You stupid over sexed wench!' he hissed. 'You never seen anything like what's going on out there, and all you can think of doing is tossing yourself off!'

This didn't tickle me as much as the other Guy N. Smith horror porn I've read. Maybe it was the fetishised rape scene that rubbed me the wrong way, or the exotic sunny setting that made it too easy to visualise as a legitimate off-Hollywood B-movie. He sets up the foreboding menace well, I'll give him that.

Jeff Smith, Bone: Out from Boneville

***

Pleasant if generic cartoon wanderings. Nice to visit if it pops up in your anthology comic, but not the most gripping saga.

Oli Smith, Doctor Who: The Runaway Train

Wild West tropes crowd aboard this creaky locomotive that's mainly noteworthy for being driven by Matt Smith himself, complete with an awkward co-star impersonation and one American accent.

Oli Smith, Doctor Who: Nuclear Time

***

Backwards shenanigans spice up otherwise forgettable peril. Rory shows up, though more sarcastic than I remember.

Tim Smolko, Jethro Tull's Thick as a Brick and A Passion Play: Inside Two Long Songs

Read 2015

****

Life's too short to even get around to listening to Jethro Tull's one-song albums, but Mr. Smolko here has gone even further by scrutinising their meaningless lyrics and newspaper/playbill inlays and generally treating these self-parodying prog excesses with the reverence usually reserved for symphonies. Good man.

Ian Anderson and his merry men aren't my favourite medieval revivalist prog rockers, which is good because I learned something new on every page. Much more worthwhile than reading about a band I really like and already know everything about. I don't understand TaaB any better, but at least I know I'm not supposed to now. This also helped me to finally appreciate A Passion Play, which I used to consider too obtuse even for me. Imagine that.

Matthew Snee, The Year I Slept

Read 2017

***

When a book introduces itself as an erotic romance featuring the ghost of a dead lover, you might naturally expect a more explicit take on a popular 1990 film, but Matthew Snee's short novel, The Year I Slept, doesn’t go down that route.

These encounters are strictly of the flesh and blood variety (among other fluids). In a generous budget-saving concession to any filmmakers who are thinking about adapting it, the supernatural elements only show up in the talky bits in-between.

Lemony Snickett, A Series of Unfortunate Events

Read 2014

***

I don't remember why I started listening to these audiobooks, but I made it through a few (4? 5? 6?) before the audacious joke of them all being variations on exactly the same thing stopped being funny. Maybe you have to push on and it eventually gets funny again, like a Stewart Lee routine.

Lemony Snicket and Jon Klassen, The Dark

***

Sub-Gaiman elemental anthropomorphism, but presumably helpful for some people. No need to risk inducing phobias my child doesn't have though.

Lemony Snicket and Rilla Alexander, Swarm of Bees

Unsatisfyingly random, anticlimactic mess.

Alexey Sokolsky, Your First Move: Chess for Beginners

Read 2015

***

I've never been very good at chess. I accepted this at around age 16 when I was regularly annihilated by my six-years-younger brother, and I was reminded again when I recently started to play and lose against amateur-level computer opponents while listening to audiobooks. I thought this guide might help, and it did fill me in on a few basics I didn't know about – en passant pawn capturing, the specifics of stalemate, the importance of controlling the centre – but after these introductions it rapidly falls into shorthand notation and demands more work than I'm prepared to put in to improve my game. Until we get those Matrix-style skill set downloads that Michio Kaku promised, I'll have to be content with just being mint at Scrabble.

Matthew Solomon, The Gold Rush

Some insights on the improvised production process, but mainly a tedious catalogue of alternate versions and lawsuits.

Vera Southgate and Robert Lumley, The Gingerbread Boy

Read 1989

****

Most of our Ladybird books were dreary Disney novelisations, but we had a few non-corporate classics in there. This tale of youthful mischief, manipulation and comeuppance was my favourite, from the farcical chase sequence to the grisly ending where our hero provides a running score of his own devouring. It didn't affect me, he's a biscuit. I was more disturbed when the Little Old Lady starred in one of my most memorable nightmares.

Josephine Southon and Paul Moran, Where's the Baby Unicorn?: An Enchanting Search Book

***

She prefers OG Wally to the unicorn rip-offs, but it's some novelty.

Jessica Spanyol, Rosa's Big Shadow Puppet Experiment

***

She was too preoccupied with getting the characters' unimportant names right to be fascinated by the science. I liked the thick paper.

Donna Spencer, How to Write Great Copy for the Web

Read 2020

**

A glorified blog post or sign-up-to-download-our-free ebook that thinks it's a coffee table book, this is a lot more elementary than its title promises, so there's a bonus marketing lesson for you.

Mark Sperring and Sam Lloyd, I Love You, Dino-Daddy

Another Father's Day type book, mostly relatable for humans, apart from the specific part where he's an amateur magician. Who am I kidding, I'll be desperate to impress.

Mark Sperring and Maddie Frost, The Littlest Things Give the Loveliest Hugs

I normally pick out the library books and only have myself to blame, but this was a rare request when it caught her eye. I got sick of the sickly rhymes and switched to widlife identification as it went along.

Mark Sperring and Sophie Corrigan, Mince Spies

She didn't have context for vigilante crime-fighting teams or Christmas tropes, so this wasn't the most engaging read at her storytime session for either of us. An empty supermarket is the most festive of settings.

Mark Sperring and Tim Budgen, 20 Unicorns / Bunnies / Dinosaurs at Bedtime

***

An inevitable hit, just as inevitably spun off to cover all the cryptozoological bases.

Art Spiegelman, The Complete Maus: A Survivor's Tale

Read 2008

****

Much has been said about this anthropomorphic holocaust survivor's guilt classic since the first instalment was published almost 40 years ago, and it's been too long since I read it myself to offer any original observations. It's very long, so you get good value?

Mickey Spillane, I, the Jury

Read 2015

That's that decided – I definitely prefer the largely asexual Holmes/Poirot/Creek mould to Mike Hammer and his sleazy ilk. He's not even a very good detective, getting distracted from obvious clues by a seemingly endless conveyor belt of beautiful femme fatales he can sleep with (he does have lots of naps) before finally putting a bullet into their naked, heaving breasts. There's definitely an audience for that, but it's not me. I like John Zorn's musical take, but even a flimsy pulp paperback is too much.

Kathy Wolff and Richard Byrne, What George Forgot

****

She spotted it, after coincidentally forgetting her own shoes in the library.

Frank Spotnitz, Marv Wolfman, Doug Moench and Brian Denham, The X-Files

***

Before the usurped IDW comic continuation and zombie TV relaunch, this brief Wildstorm run aimed more squarely for nostalgia. Impressive likenesses in familiar plots bring nothing new to the table, just how you want it.

Maureen Spurgeon and Jimmy Hibbert, Count Duckula: Restoration Comedy

Read 1990

**

I associate this with B&Q, so it's either where I persuaded my dad to buy it or I took it along one time to alleviate boredom outside of the good bit with the fake bathrooms. I don't remember ever seeing the episode, it seemed incredibly average. I finally got the pun during the second year of my university English literature course.

Maureen Spurgeon, Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles Bumper Storybook

Read 1990

****

This was a good value adaptation compendium that handily scaled up the text along with the pages, which I appreciated as a beginner reader just starting school. Spell 'Technodrome.'

Tom Stacy, Peter Bull and Sebastian Quigley, Sun, Stars & Planets

Read 1993-94

***

My First Space Book, this schooled me up on the planets and other basics. Packed with scientific knowledge, it had to include a ridiculous section on astrology too for balance. I think we got this free or discounted with Weetabix tokens. We had Earth, Sea & Sky as well, but that wasn't as interesting, obviously.

Tom Stacy and Chris Forsey, Earth, Sea and Sky

Read 1994

**

The more practical, down-to-earth sibling to Sun, Stars and Planets probably answered a lot of frequently asked questions, but was naturally a lot less interesting and too much like school.

Fiona Stafford, Reading Romantic Poetry

Read 2020

****

Not primarily concerned with optimising for students, this takes a sweeping overview of works I appreciate more in the academic context than when they're cut loose to work out on my own. Though reading analysis of descriptions of nature does rub in that I should get out more.

Nikki Stafford, Finding Lost: The Unofficial Guide

Read 2020

***

A little more restrained than the follow-ups, since it needs to get introductions and cast profiles out of the way, but this was the classic era for freeform speculation (seasons one and two) and it's nice to get back into that headspace. She was always overzealous with the numbers-spotting, but it gave her something to do between seasons.

Nikki Stafford, Finding Lost: Season Three – The Unofficial Guide

Read 2020

****

Probably the most annoying stretch to watch in real time, but this highly engaged contemporaneous commentary fills in the production background and strange supplements you'd be oblivious to on a binge. Some of the trivia categories are pointless and relentless, and the literary essays are more showing off than insightful, but padding was better than the alternative of only doing this every two years. She should do all the shows. If anyone else still reads these things.

Nikki Stafford, Finding Lost: Season Four – The Unofficial Guide

Read 2020

****

Journeying down a specific nostalgic avenue, this comprehensive guide to my favourite year of the irresistibly annoying TV series considerately avoids spoilers for those reading along episode by episode (you wouldn't get that with a fan wiki), while still being adorably time-bound in its more delirious fan theories and excitement for the future. A knowitall retrospective would be boring, it was all about the journey.

Nikki Stafford, Finding Lost: Season Five – The Unofficial Guide

Read 2020

****

As exhaustive a guide as the show's most self-absorbed year requires, also going satisfyingly extracurricular to cover the promotional games, fan theories of the time and the significance of books and other works name-dropped. Bursting with enthusiasm, but not to the point of overlooking distracting continuity errors and bad wigs.

Nikki Stafford, Finding Lost: Season Six – The Unofficial Guide

Read 2020

****

Reliably in-depth recaps, observations and faux real-time postulations for any newcomers reading along as they watch, until everyone's up to speed and the rest of the book can be a compulsory defence of the polarising finale, which apparently disappointed some people who required hard science fiction explanations for everything that happened in their supernatural show. I was never so engaged with the final year generally, so this wasn't the nostalgic trip the other guides were.

Nikki Stafford, Investigating Sherlock: The Unofficial Guide

***

Not quite complete, but maybe all the adventures worth recounting, this opinionated companion strikes a delicate balance of source snobbery and Tumblr fangirling, but mainly felt like I was reading Den of Geek or something.

Ryan Starbloak, Swiftopia

Read 2017

**

The actual story may be a flimsy hook to hang a grievance on, but it's the world-building interludes that are more impressive. The author-singer-songwriter gets so caught up in his alternate future history, he actually writes the lyrics for the imagined Taylor Swift songs that caused this whole apocalyptic mess. He plans out the tracklist and album concept and everything.

Getting more into that side of things would have been great. Not every book has to be young adult dystopian fiction, any more than all music should be Taylor Swift.

Jim Starlin and Berni Wrightson, Batman: The Cult

Read 2019

***

I normally read comics for the writer, not the artist, but Berni Wrightson doing a dark Batman appealed. His ghoulish art brings out the horror of nightmares, hallucinations and sewer catacombs, but it'd be better in black and white than with garish paint splashed over it. As a sideline miniseries, it's desperate to be as edgy as The Dark Knight, but ends up more as a flaccid PSA. Cults are bad, kids.

Jim Starlin and Jim Aparo, Batman: A Death in the Family

Read 2019

**

Only notable for the phone-in gimmick that saw bloodthirsty 80s comic fans vote to kill off a short-serving Robin, the bigger shock for me was the mediocrity of the writing and art after being spoiled by timeless prestige titles. Explicitly a sequel to The Killing Joke, it looks like it belongs decades earlier. And after being taken on a world tour of terrorism, famine and mass-murder, the death of one angsty teen I was barely acquainted with just didn't feel like a big deal.

Ringo Starr and Ben Cort, Octopus's Garden

Thanks to the guest reader, I just had to turn the pages on time.

Greg Steddy, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Movie Storybook

Read 1990

***

80% movie stills, 10% concise small-print summary, 10% large-print quotes or other random cool-dude exclamations. I wasn't so into the film, but the cinematography's good and there are plenty of iconic shots here.

Greg Steddy, Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles, Books 1–4: Enter the Turtles / Turtle Power! / The Return of the Shredder / The Curse of the Evil Eye

Read 1992–93

****

The most worthwhile of the episode adaptations, not only for featuring screencaps throughout, rather than off-model paintings where Michelangelo's weapon is censoriously wrong and Shredder's mask invariably coloured blue, but also for adapting those elusive first episodes we didn't get to see on the BBC outside of edited highlights (though the books still omit a couple of less relevant adventures for good measure).

After receiving the first volume for Christmas '92, my quest to collect this series a year after Turtlemania had died down was comparable to the Turtles hunting down the Eye of Sarnoth. In the end, I only managed to find book three on holiday before requesting the other two for Christmas '93.

Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons

Read 2019

*

This reads like a deranged mistranslation of a homewares catalogue. It's literally not poetry. It could be art, but shit art. Shame she wasn't a painter.

Bruce Sterling, The Parthenopean Scalpel

A crap terrorist's manifesto.

Roger Stern and Mike Mignola, Doctor Strange and Doctor Doom: Triumph and Torment

Read 2016

***

Taking a holiday from substance, I couldn't resist this double Doc whammy. I can't say I was familiar with either of the good doctors before, but I always enjoy a good hell quest. Mignola's doodles are as reliable as ever, but they would have benefited from a more sardonic script. Stern's story takes the mystical woo-woo way too seriously.

Wallace Stevens, Harmonium

Read 2019

**

Maybe it's because he's always left to the end, when my not sizeable patience for poetry has worn thin, but I found Stevens a stuffy bore at university too. This is a generous-sized collection by these poets' standards, but it was a chore to get through.

Jack Stevenson, Witchcraft Through the Ages: The Story of Häxan, the World's Strangest Film, and the Man Who Made It

Read 2020

**

The obscene blasphemy's all in good fun, but learning about the harsh and egotistical production has taken the shine off the oddball classic. Most of the book covers the director's other, less interesting films, seemingly out of obligatory fairness.

Robert Louis Stevenson, Edinburgh: Picturesque Notes

Read 2018

***

I would have liked to have gone to school in Edinburgh. There wasn't much to learn about the South Cheshire village I grew up in, beyond the one 16th-century pub, whose Dick Turpin connection is optimistic at best, so it was nice to learn some of the history of my favourite city beyond the ghoulish side I already knew. Though Stevenson inevitably digs that stuff up too, it's Edinburgh after all.

This brief but intimate tour is dated in a very satisfying way, capturing a time when the New Town was actually new, Dean Village was still a village and Calton Hill was already a national embarrassment.

Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island

Read 2020

***

Nicely paced until they get to the island and it shifts from wide-eyed adventure to depressing action and the tedious fallout. It wasn't as fun as I'd always assumed, the Muppet version's better.

Robert Louis Stevenson, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

Read 2005, re-read 2019

*****

The last decade or so of the 19th century was an abnormally influential period for timeless sci-fi and horror classics, and most of them are a comfortable length as well. Stevenson's gas-lit psychological mad scientist tale with shades of the Ripper is the type of era-defining time capsule you'd normally have to unconvincingly contrive decades later. It does the found footage approach before Dracula too.

Robert Louis Stevenson, Kidnapped

Read 2015

****

It's bad to have a bad uncle. David Balfour goes through an amusing amount of ordeals around the Highlands and islands and only has a cry sometimes. I liked David, but my enjoyment was hindered a little by the American LibriVox narrator's distractingly bad attempts at Scottish accents, phrases and place names.

I'm not racist, but some things just shouldn't be permitted.

Jeffrey D. Stilwell and John A. Long, Frozen in Time: Prehistoric Life in Antarctica

Read 2015

****

I knew even less about Antarctica than I knew about Iran, but at least I'm not alone on that. This is mainly about fossils, but that also means it's an excuse to spend time with dinosaurs after making it through the tedious invertebrates, and the journal extracts and photos from pioneering expeditions inject much-needed excitement every now and again. It's helpfully patronising too, if you need a refresher on fossils and plate tectonics.

R. L. Stine, Say Cheese and Die!

Read 1996

***

My brother sensibly spent his monthly comic allowance on childish books rather than childish comics, collecting as many of these as they put out across however many series they did until he'd had enough. This was the only one I read, it was passable.

Russell Stinson, J. S. Bach's Great Eighteen Organ Chorales

Read 2019

***

Another attempt to appreciate the Shakespeare of music (I didn't make it through Music in the Castle of Heaven), these derivative ditties for church organ are a friendly length, with enough variation to make a satisfying album. I can't say that Stinson's technical track-by-track analysis eludicated anything for me, but I appreciated the fanatical enthusiasm.

Faves: 'Fantasia super Komm, Heiliger Geist,' 'An Wasserflüssen Babylon,' 'Nun komm' der Heiden Heiland,' 'Komm, Gott, Schöpfer, Heiliger Geist.'

Bram Stoker, The Complete Short Stories of Bram Stoker

Read 2017

***

Ranking Bram Stoker's short stories

Bram Stoker, Dracula

Read 2014, re-read 2019

*****

The first four chapters covering Jonathan Harker's Transylvanian troubles make for one of the best openings and one of my favourite things in literature. The rest of the book rarely reaches those heights again, mainly for being extremely drawn-out, but there's still plenty of quaint Victorian values and symbolism to enjoy amid all the nattering.

Bram Stoker, The Jewel of Seven Stars

Read 2015

I finally read Mr. Stoker's classic rip-off vampire tale last year and loved it. Did he write something similarly definitive for the mummy genre? If he had, it probably wouldn't have taken lazy public domain horror browsing for me to learn about it. There are suggestions that it's going in interesting directions – a mummified queen rather than a king prompting discussions of early feminism, anxiety about the waning British Empire – but then it doesn't really go there. They don't even go to Egypt! They barely make it out of the bedroom.

Dacre Stoker and J. D. Barker, Dracul

Read 2019

***

Another somewhat cynical cash-in on Dacre Stoker's ancestry, this sounded more worthwhile than the Dracula sequel J. D. Barker wrote for him a decade ago, and crafting a metafictional backstory where the Stokers and their contemporaries experience Dracula-like events would have been an inventive conceit if this was still the 1980s. It gets points for authentically pastiching Dracula's found-footage style, but they didn't have to respectfully imitate that book's tiring length quite so slavishly.

Jon Stone and Michael J. Smollin, The Monster at the End of this Book

Read 2019, re-read 2022

****

I wonder if there's a stranger Sesame Street tie-in than this metafictional antibook that makes the reader culpable for lovable, furry old Grover's escalating distress, passionately evoked in the nightmarish art. It definitely shouldn't exist, but I'm glad I got around to it eventually, though only after mistaking Clive Barker's Mister B. Gone for being original.

Jon Stone and Michael Smollin, Another Monster at the End of This Book

She loves the original, but was correctly unimpressed by this pointless by-the-numbers sequel.

Marie Carmichael Stopes, Married Love, or Love in Marriage

Read 2016

**

With all this smut on the street, impressionable young wives and their awful husbands are liable to get the wrong idea about the role mating plays in a successful partnership, so Dr. Stopes stepped up to the challenge with coy Christian practicality. Being a flawless modern man, I didn't need to be lectured on how to treat my bird, but it turned out we are doing a few things wrong, like sharing a bedroom and having conversations. They came back from the war to this.

Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

Read 2005

****

One of my favourite things we studied in my first year of uni, and thus one of the few to get my full attention and lodge in the memory almost 15 years later, I still have the feeling that my fresher mind didn't fully appreciate just how good it was. If only there was some way I could read this short book again or watch a performance to find out. Oh well, never mind.

Jo Storm, Approaching the Possible: The World of Stargate SG-1

Read 2020

***

A middle ground (tonally, chronologically and geographically) between the serious '90s Star Treks and the rainbow zaniness of Farscape and Doctor Who, this isn't a show I've ever felt compelled to revisit or even to finish, but this look back at the early years was still nostalgic. The first 100 or so pages could stand alone as a slim overview of the series and fandom, then it gets into the meatier episode guide, albeit overly concerned with shipping. Only getting as far as season eight, for eternal want of an update, that's still further than I made it.

Jo Storm, Frak You!: The Ultimate Unauthorized Guide to Battlestar Galactica

Read 2020

***

More like 'penultimate,' as the unofficial chronicler of 80% of Stargate SG-1 moves on to cover 75% of a superior sci-fi drama, also never updated once the journey was over and Ti(gh)-ins less in demand. Not as in-depth as it could have been, even then, but still a nice reminder of why the series is a candidate for the best.

Theodor Storm, The Rider on the White Horse

Read 2020

**

I was swept away by the stormy, spooky opening that resurges in full force at the end. It's just a shame about nearly all of it.

Will Storr, Will Storr vs. The Supernatural: One Man's Search for the Truth About Ghosts

Read 2008

***

This was passed around my sceptical ghostbusting group. While we're on the same cocky page, and I had a chuckle at familiar character types, the self-important title and cover put me off ("Not THE Will Storr?! Wow!!!"). Seems he's calmed down in his later books.

Robin Stowell, Beethoven: Violin Concerto

Read 2020

**

One day, a Beethoven scholar's going to chill out and wax lyrical about what they enjoy in the music, rather than playing detective with sources in the ongoing war of authority. There's probably stuff you can plagiarise for your essays, at least.

J. Michael Straczynski, Mark Moretti, Michael Netzer and Carlos Garzon, Babylon 5

When a TV series is plotted out years in advance, it's not a huge surprise that tie-in media would be able to scoop up some of the leftovers they didn't get around to doing properly, rather than commissioning some hacks to riff impotently on established themes. Coming straight from Straczynski (via some hacks), this four-parter feels authentically like a missing episode. Not a great one, but one we sort of needed, though may end up being summarised in a quick line of dialogue for the benefit of less extracurricular nerds anyway.

J. Michael Straczynski, Tim DeHaas and John Ridgway, Babylon 5: Shadows Past and Present

***

The short-lived comic hits its stride with better writing and drawing of another arc-sowing story by the boss. The plot and character voices are authentic, it only loses credibility as a real episode of the budget series through its la-de-da location shooting. As someone who's reading these in the proper sequence, it kept up the hype nicely. Race through shows and miss the immersion to your detriment.

J. Michael Straczynski, Peter David and Michael Collins, Babylon 5: In Valen's Name

The series gets a lot of praise for its plotting, but budget and other necessities mean that a lot of that happens out of sight and mind. Fortunately, there's authorised supplemental canon to patch some of those holes. Unfortunately, Minbari stories are pretty dull.

J. Michael Straczynski, J. Gregory Keyes and Fiona Avery, Babylon 5: The Short Stories

***

I might get around to at least some of the canonical novels, but these short trips were an easier digestif for now. Not further stories I needed, but neither was the majority of the final season.

Faves: J. Michael Straczynski's 'The Shadow of His Thoughts' & 'Genius Loci.'

Kristofer Straub, Starslip Crisis, Volume 1

***

A distinctive sci-fi comedy rather than the trite parody expected, the universe and arcs build nicely, but the humour's stuck in the orbit of the daily "funnies."

Kris Straub, Broodhollow Book 1: Curious Little Thing

****

A light-hearted American gothic pastiche that gets deeper and creepier as it goes along. I'll sign up for more, but still haven't warmed to the goofy art.

Radio/podcast drama might have served it better.

Kris Straub, Broodhollow Book 2: Angleworm

****

Psychological and physical dangers ramp up as the cartoon horror mystery sitcom becomes increasingly Twin Peaks, right up to the perpetually-paused cliffhanger.

Kris Straub and Sarah Pharris, Candle Cove and Other Stories

Read 2020

****

Rightly dominated by the eponymous creepypasta hit, this is a solid assortment of flash horror and epic several-pagers. The best are expertly unsettling; the worst don't deserve posterity, but then it'd be even shorter than it is already. I'd be more critical of the length if he wasn't being prolific with web comics, web series and other things.

Faves: 'Lemon Blossom Girl,' 'Curious Little Thing,' 'Candle Cove.'

Thomas Strømsholt, O Altitudo

***

Psychotopography or just psycho? You decide.

Fave: 'In Search of the Hidden City'

Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, Roadside Picnic

Read 2015

***

The main reason this is considered interesting is that it's a rare slice of Soviet-side sci-fi, but trying to analyse it as such easily slips into wishful thinking. Is its not bothering to distinguish itself from Western pulp fiction a political statement? Or is it actually just not bothering? Yes, it focuses on the tribulations of unremarkable low-lifes rather than elites, the cosmos is indifferent to the suffering of man, and one of the characters is called 'Red,' but on those terms you could make a similar case for Red Dwarf being subversively anti-communist.

Dana Suskind, Thirty Million Words: Building a Child's Brain

Read 2019

***

Don't ignore your kids, don't give a toddler a tablet and other earth-shaking revelations. The author advocates tireless babble to build those brains, so it's not surprising that she'd find it hard to adjust when talking to adults. Take out the autobiography, repetition and hyperbole and it would make a worthwhile article.

Patrick Süskind, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer

Read 2014

*****

I've never paid much attention to my sense of smell, as you'll know if you've ever been around me, so this was a fascinating olfactory exploration of revolutionary France. Feat. death.

I'm not the biggest fan of glorifying psycho killers, fictional or otherwise, but this novel has serious style.

Anna Süßbauer, Spin and Spot: Moon and Stars

She likes the moon, but the novelisation didn't do much for her. 'Spin' suggests a less stubborn wheel that the target audience might have a chance of turning without assistance.

W. Dean Sutcliffe, Haydn: String Quartets, Op. 50

Read 2020

**

Dull correspondence, contemporary reviews and modern-day autograph hunting take up most of the book before the music is touched on, and that doesn't prove to be especially insightful beyond the connections between the pieces.

Peter Swaab, Bringing Up Baby

An uncritical appreciation of a fun film that nevertheless feels the need to ceaselessly cross-reference the screwball canon.

Michael Swanwick, Bones of the Earth

Read 2019

***

This self-consciously post-JP prehistoric sci-fi takes the time-honoured time travel approach, overcomplicated with mysterious aliens and relationship angst at the expense of thrills or wonder.

Charlie Sweatpants, Zombie Simpsons: How the Best Show Ever Became the Broadcasting Undead

Read 2020

**

I'd figured that the series' millennial decline was a combination of exhausting the concept, losing the best writers and the end of my own nostalgia. Fortunately, this short book was here to educate me in the writer's objective opinions. Even if he's right, he's the sort of tirelessly, tiresomely negative fan you'd leave a forum to get away from and detox your online activity, but since his forum was specifically founded on beating a dead Simpsons, I should have known what I was getting into. Move on. At least it's not a twelve-part "video essay."

Sheila Sweeny Higginson, Mickey Mouse Clubhouse: Up, Up, and Away!

Lessons on shapes and shadows are subtly weaved into a typically exciting plot. She found out about this show because a play cafe was showing it, thanks a bunch.

Sheila Sweeny Higginson, Susan Ring and artists, Disney Mickey Mouse Clubhouse Storybook Collection

Just about the worst thing she watches, but any excuse for a longish bedtime book. She currently wants the whole thing every day, which is good, in a way. The sacrifices I make.

Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels, or Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World. In Four Parts. By Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and then a Captain of Several Ships

***

The prototypical satirical phantasmagoria was entertaining for its first couple of adventures, but I didn't lament the publisher's edits.

Robert Swindells, Room 13

Read 1995

****

Much more compelling than Hydra, I really enjoyed this kids' horror story, and followed in its footsteps when we visited Whitby and the Dracula Experience shortly after on a family holiday. I still read things like this all the time, but grown-up versions. There's nothing more grown-up than ghost stories.

Robert Swindells, Hydra

Read 1995

**

This junior sci-fi thriller was somehow more of a struggle than Jurassic Park. My main motivation to persevere was seeing the developing organism become increasingly monstrous with each new chapter heading.

Anoosha Syed, That's Not My Name!

***

Her own grief will be more in the spelling department. Sorry, it made sense at the time.

Bryan Talbot, The Tale of One Bad Rat

Read 2015

****

I'd been meaning to read this for ages, but it's easier to slag off shitty vintage TV tie-in comics than risk not liking something many people hold dear. This is as mainstream as the graphic novel gets, challenging many readers to get over their preconceptions of speech bubbles and nice art. For me, the challenge went in the other direction – do I want to read a cathartic incest survivor's tale? Wouldn't that just be overly depressing and sentimental? Yes, but it's only towards the end that it gets a bit cloying and turns into a pamphlet you might find at your local clinic. Fortunately, there's also some arty-farty intertextuality to see me through, even if this time it's Beatrix Potter rather than obscure scriptures or forgotten recesses of the DC Silver Age. Made me miss the Lake District too.

Bryan Talbot, Grandville

Read 2015

****

If The Tale of One Bad Rat was too heavy-hitting, take a trip by dirigible or cross-channel locomotive for some absurdist escapist espionage in Talbot's lavishly detailed steamaltopia. Sure, there are heavy-handed allusions to 9/11, Vietnam, nationalism and other things that matter, but when has a story starring anthropomorphic animals ever had to mean something?

Bryan Talbot, Grandville Mon Amour

Read 2019

***

Another decent tale of corruption and betrayal set in a steampunk alternative history where most folk happen to have the head of an animal. It's been so long since I read the first one that I can't really remember how it compared. I think that one was funnier.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

Read 2019

**

A thought-provoking essay padded out to book proportions because that sells better, the takeaways are to expect the unexpected and not trust experts. Apart from this expert who can't get over how maverick he's being.

Shaun Tan, The Lost Thing

Read 2020

****

This junior Kafka is better than any Kafka. It didn't dazzle me like Tan's The Arrival did, but I would have been well into it as a boy. What are? Why are? That's a keeper.

Shaun Tan, The Red Tree

Read 2020

***

One for the darker side of the picture book shelf. Too risky to gift, but the right kind of child should get something out of it (i.e. a weird one). I got more of a nihilistic than depressive vibe, which shows how reliable armchair psychology can be.

Shaun Tan, The Arrival

Read 2014

*****

This silent graphic novel is one of the most affecting books I've ever "read." I can relate to the alienating experience of arriving in a strange land, and it helped me to imagine what the experience might be like for people who are struggling with that out of necessity rather than entitled leisure. Actually, this shouldn't even be on this list, because I could ~~re-read it~~ look at the pictures endlessly.

Shaun Tan, Tales from Outer Suburbia

Read 2020

***

Memorable imagery supplemented by forgettable text, pre-literate kids making up their own stories will get the most out of it and be rewarded with benevolent nightmares.

Fave: 'Distant Rain'

Shaun Tan, Rules of Summer

Read 2020

***

A richly illustrated contents list for stories we have to imagine for ourselves, this dependably taps into childhood fear and wonder, but I wasn't feeling it as much as some of his others. Maybe because I was an indoors kid.

Shaun Tan, Cicada

Read 2020

***

Comfortably ensconced in the hall of fame by this point, this felt like a more predictable and less inspired fable than earlier hits like The Arrival and The Lost Thing, even if the ending pulls off the same simple surprise as The Very Hungry Catterpillar's.

Grafton Tanner, Babbling Corpse: Vaporwave and the Commodification of Ghosts

Read 2020

****

"Absurd, hilarious, unnerving, and sometimes boring."

A thoughtful exploration of the philosophy (presumably) underpinning vaporwave and YouTube Poop that makes the case for the intentionally shoddy, stolen, almost unlistenable music's artistry. Those satisfied consumers in YouTube comments enjoying it on the surface level are happy in their ignorance, don't take it away from them.

Sam Taplin and Federica Iossa, Usborne Sound Books: Night Sounds / Zoo Sounds / Bird Sounds / Dinosaur Sounds / Seashore Sounds / Wild Animals Sound Book / Arctic Animals Sound Book

***

Library copies are selectively broken, so we provide our own soundtracks. Shame we didn't get to hear the authentic prehistoric field recordings though.

Sam Taplin and Stephen Cartwright, Usborne Farmyard Tales: Poppy and Sam's Animal Sounds

***

It's what you would expect (and regret, if you're foolish enough to invite noisy books into your own home). As ever, finding the duck is a low-key bonus.

Sam Taplin and Essi Kimpimaki, Usborne Little Peek-Through Books: Are You There, Little Tiger?

***

She was too impatient to appreciate the red herrings stalling her determined hunt, so I won't hold out hope for her Usborne Puzzle Adventures waiting in the cupboard.

Sam Taplin and Sarah Allen, Usborne Little Peep-Through Books: Are You There Little Unicorn?

***

She treasured this semi-knackered 25p ex-rental.

Sam Taplin and Ag Jatkowska, Usborne Musical Books: The Animal Orchestra Plays Beethoven / Bach

Read 2022-23

Toddlers will delight to hear the composer's biography read aloud accompanied by random snippets of his music with no attempt at engagement.

Sam Taplin and Ana Martin Larranaga, Usborne Sound Books: Dance with the Dinosaurs

The noisy books seem to be getting louder and more annoying, or maybe I'm approaching a meltdown. It does attempt to encourage physical activity, but pressing the buttons was enough interactivity for her. Just give her a Game Boy and be done with it.

Sam Taplin and Ana Martin Larranaga, Usborne Touchy-feely Sounds: Don't Tickle the Reindeer! / Unicorn!

Read 2022-23

Noisy fluff? It's so crazy, it just might work.

Yvonne Tasker, The Silence of the Lambs

Read 2020

****

An academic goth explains convincingly why this is a justly celebrated '90s classic, whether you enjoy its feminist spin on the procedural or stroking your beard to bird symbolism. The class segregation of horror films never occurred to me before, but makes uncomfortable sense.

Geraldine Taylor, Talkabout Baby

Read 1988

**

Presumably an appropriate guide to help me deal with a new brother, this became more notable as a source of comedy when it hung around past its useful window, with its genuine enquiries about whether various lethal weapons are safe for baby.

Mike Taylor, The Eleventh Doctor: A Critical Ramble Through Matt Smith's Tenure in Doctor Who

Read 2019

****

I'll resist the urge to ramble less astutely about the only era of this children's programme that meant something to me, since I've already done that (more than once), and talk about the actual book. As reprinted and supplemented blogs, rather than a hindsight-spoiled retrospective, it's a nice time capsule of what it was like to ride the four-year rollercoaster, complete with the type of nostalgic fan theories we all indulged in, but didn't all commit to print.

Sean Taylor and Neal Layton, Where the Bugaboo Lives

****

I'd been on the lookout for this for a while. It could inevitably do with being longer and more varied, but it's another good beginner's gamebook. She's probably ready for Fighting Fantasy now.

Shawn Taylor, A Tribe Called Quest's People's Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm

Read 2020

****

A meaningful case for your music being better than what the kids have today, incorporating the author's juvenile reviews that are better than I write now (even if he does go off on tangents about that honey Gloria Domingo from class).

Britta Teckentrup, Oskar Can...

So? Those aren't impressive feats, mate. Though I suppose you are a bird, fair enough.

Britta Teckentrup, Mole's Star

An atmospheric fable she was bored by. Moles are only good for making juicy hills.

Raina Telgemeier and Ann M. Martin, The Baby-Sitters Club: The Truth About Stacey

***

The library didn't have any other Baby-Sitters Little Sister (sic), so she jumped the age gap for a story about diabetes and home-based start-up rivalry. She prefers hanging out with older kids anyway.

Nicholas Temperley, Haydn: The Creation

Read 2020

***

Spends too long on the awkward Bible adaptation of the libretto and its translations before being redeemed by an interesting breakdown of instrumental symbolism. That's mainly what I'm here for.

Scott Tennent, Slint's Spiderland

Read 2020

**

This isn't the only book in the series that fails the brief to obsess over a single album and instead provides the complete band history, but at least it's honest about it. Apparently a story that hadn't been told before, possibly because it wasn't very interesting.

Michael Tennesen, The Next Species: The Future of Evolution in the Aftermath of Man

Read 2015

***

That's either a misleading title or I was being too optimistic in hoping for an assortment of sci-fi speculations that could give the post-human historians a good chuckle in a few million years' time. Really, this is predominantly scene-setting, reminding us about things like how evolution works and what a mess we've made of the place before it finally puts forward some candidates for the next dominant species in the latter chapters. No need to be too depressed about the prospect of oceans swarming with jellyfish and exponentially growing squids, it's not like you'll be around to see it.

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

Read 2019

***

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?

Louis Theroux, The Call of the Weird: Travels in American Subcultures

Read 2019

****

Louis writes like he speaks, only more introspective, opinionated and sarcastic now he has to narrate as well. With no camera for his subjects to play up to, he digs deeper into what makes his kooky cast of harmless and less harmless characters tick, sometimes just having to accept defeat.

Louis Theroux, Gotta Get Theroux This: My Life and Strange Times in Television

Read 2020

****

Of all the strange souls Louis has encountered on his travels, the biggest weirdo turns out to be: hims... actually, probably the Reverend who thought he was channeling 'Korton.' He was a freak.

Valerie Thomas and Korky Paul, Winnie's Flying Carpet

Meg and Mog with more expressive art.

Craig Thompson, Blankets

Read 2010

****

A less harrowing counterpart to Maus and Persepolis in the canon of graphic auto/biographies, there isn't as much to glean from Craig Thompson's teenage romantic awakening, but then I did read it on the wrong side of that hormonal apocalypse. Hm? Oh yeah, nice drawings as well.

Dave Thompson, The Making of the Cure's Disintegration

Read 2019

**

I didn't expect a lot from this kitsch CD-sized book covering one of my favourite albums for want of a more definitive companion, but it was still a letdown. After the composition and recording anecdotes promised by the title, the songs themselves are only given a couple of sentences each that don't bother describing them musically or lyrically, the focus instead being on listing all the obscure single and bootleg releases that would be of interest to the type of obsessive collector who bought this. We end on a rambling interview that would have been more insightful if it wasn't about the next album but one.

Kelly Thompson and Brianne Drouhard, Mega Princess

****

Her first superhero comic, I suppose, but still comfortably in the childhood fantasy realm. She doesn't even mind too much that Jerk Pony isn't Jerk Unicorn.

Tony Thorne, Countess Dracula: The Life and Times of Elisabeth Báthory, the Blood Countess

Read 2015

***

First Santa, now Bathory. It wasn't a major shock to learn that the Countess' iconic, literal blood baths are almost definitely sensationalist myth, but it was a surprise to consider for the first time that she might not have killed those 600-odd village maidens at all, considering this was the height of the Inquisition and witch trial hysteria. Now Hammer and Cradle of Filth are slightly ruined, but I'll always take disappointing reality over wishful horror.

Scott and David Tipton and Fabio Mantovani, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine – Fool's Gold

Read 2018

***

It failed to launch a modern DS9 comic run, but this miniseries set on the cusp of season four gets the nostalgia right and feels like a fond return, even to someone who's just read all the DS9 comics there have ever been over a couple of weeks. I'm especially pleased that the Tipton brothers went with a light-hearted story after (technically before) all the conflict. The only thing I didn't like so much is the digital art that puts in textured displays and stuff. What happened to drawing?

Scott and David Tipton, Tony Lee and J.K. Woodward, Star Trek: The Next Generation/Doctor Who: Assimilation²

Read 2013

*

It was the anniversary year, alright? If I'd have known that frivolous reading was going to come back to haunt me, I would have spared myself the inevitable disappointment. Not that I was expecting quality, but the awkward franchise mash-up was impossible to resist. Next time, maybe hook up baddies that aren't exactly the same things in different packaging, only with slightly different catchphrases.

Scott Tipton, David Tipton and Greg Scott, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine – Too Long a Sacrifice

***

Taking its cues and themes from a specific microgenre of episodes, this would have been a worthwhile addition and is one of the better DS9 comics, though it's mainly notable for its isolation as the only one of those in bloody ages.

R. Larry Todd, Mendelssohn: The Hebrides and Other Overtures

Read 2020

**

A few passes over Junior Beethoven's precocious trilogy picked out some nice features of the landscape, but didn't inspire me to visit again.

Patricia Toht and Jarvis, Pick a Pine Tree

Overlong slog through the motions of an outdated and environmentally inappropriate Christmas activity. Nice pictures, but we got nothing out of it.

J. R. R. Tolkien (and Christopher Tolkien), The Silmarillion

Read 2015

**

I knew before I plunged in that this is the worst place to start with Tolkien, but I only made it a few pages into The Hobbit the last time I tried, when I was about 10, and it's not like I'm going to bother with the other one. Besides, I like Blind Guardian's musical version and I like a good compendium of myths – this is clearly influenced by the likes of the Kalevala – though it does help when those writings have some real cultural/historical appeal rather than being knowingly made up. As ever, my ratings reflect my enjoyment rather than judge the quality and value this doubtless has to fans, but between the intermittent tales it's just a parade of names and titles. Doesn't even rhyme.

Barrie Tomlinson, Richard Elson and Sandy James, Sonic the Hedgehog (a.k.a. Sonic Sunday Strips)

Read 2016-20

*

Like pretty much all Sonic the Comic fans, it seems, I didn't know Richard Elson was seeing the News of the World Sunday supplement on the side, illustrating a customarily lame serial that gives the worst of licensed hedgehog media a run for its money. If I had known, my childhood would have been 0% richer.

Jill Tomlinson and Paul Howard, The Owl Who Was Afraid of the Dark (Abridged)

***

This junior edition of a supposed classic was still a bit too drawn-out for a two-year-old, but her owl fetish saw her through.

Tony Tost, Johnny Cash's American Recordings

Read 2020

***

This exegesis of Cash folklore explores the deep meanings of an old man playing cover songs in the corner semi-convincingly. It seems more substantial than most of these books, but that could just be the abundance of chapters leaving a lot of white space.

Sue Townsend, The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13¾

Read 1996

***

This did the rounds at school when we were a couple of years younger than the diarist, and was mostly notable for being mildly, confusingly dirty. I had to quiz my Dad about what legovers and wet dreams are. "Is that when you wet the bed?" "...Yes."

Lou Treleaven and Maddie Frost, The Snowflake Mistake

I bet she doesn't choose any of these when it's actually winter.

Simon Trezise, Debussy: La Mer

Read 2020

***

The philandering genius' Impressionist masterpiece is just the right length to obsess over at one side of an LP, though I'm not convinced by the intimate psychoanalytic take. It's balanced out by presenting a variety of grasping interpretations from down the years, just like the composer explicitly discouraged.

Namrata Tripathi and Carlo Loraso, My Little Pony: Eight Little Ponies

Really contrived rhymes.

Rob Trucks, Fleetwood Mac's Tusk

Read 2020

**

One of the more annoying books in the series, from its teenage fixation on one band member and preoccupation with sales figures to the worthless autobiography strand, maybe this was a simulation of the album's divisiveness or something clever like that.

Thomas Tryon, Harvest Home

Read 2018

**

More Twin Peaks than an American Wicker Man, this pastoral soap opera takes its sweet time getting to the horror and a point. If you're daydreaming of a rustic escape, you might not mind that as much as I did.

Chrysostomos Tsaprailis, A Plot of Earth and Other Tales

***

These morbid folk tales and mythology experiments work out what they'r doing by the end.

Fave: 'Gula'

Dylan Tuccillo, Jared Zeizel and Thomas Peisel, A Field Guide to Lucid Dreaming: Mastering the Art of Oneironautics

Read 2015

****

It's a rarity to come across a pseudoacademic book whose philosophy and attitude I'm totally on board with. This brings together all the usual tips 'n' tricks to achieving unconscious awareness and manages to be inspiring and motivating without taking things to supernatural conclusions or advocating scary drugs. Let's see if I can get back into regular lucid dreaming without wasting the opportunity pathetically.

Mike Tucker, Doctor Who: The Silurian Gift

***

At the Mountains of Madness meets Jurassic Park from the bloke who built Red Dwarf.

Stephen Tucker and Nick Sharratt, The Three Little Pigs: A Lift-the-Flap Fairy Tale

***

A nice idea that I can't believe took until 2016 to execute.

Peter Turner, The Blair Witch Project

Read 2020

***

There's nothing fans won't know already about the inhumane production that's more interesting than the film itself, much of it repeated again across the chapters when he runs out of trivia, but it was a nostalgic trip back into the woods.

Mark Twain, Tom Sawyer's Pirate Adventure

***

Skipping introductions for five chapters from the adventurous middle (about an hour's worth of public domain audiobook), I probably got slightly more out of its presentation of pipe-smoking fictional feral toerags than if I'd been force-fed it in school.

Benjamin Tweddell, The Salix Arcanum

***

Beautifully adorned Machen imitation.

Gus Twintig and Scott Teplin, The Clock Without a Face: A Gus Twintig Mystery

****

An upbeat alternative to Manson's Maze, the gimmicky extracurricular treasure hunt is a load of tedious bollocks (even if it hadn't been dug up within months of publication), but the more conventional domestic puzzles and quirky voyeuristic vistas earn it a place on the future rainy-day / pretending-the-internet's-broken list

Jenny Tyler and artists, Usborne Bedtime Stories for Little Children

****

The other one's a mainstay of the bedroom bedtime library. This one has fewer classic cuts, but similarly friendly panoramas.

Neil Degrasse Tyson and Donald Goldsmith, Origins: Fourteen Billion Years of Cosmic Evolution

Read 2015

***

I try to keep up with the space documentaries, but I'd be lying if I said I take most of the information in while enjoying the CGI nebulae and dizzying numbers. I don't primarily listen to spacey prog rock for the lyrics either.

So far, it's only Carl Sagan who's succeeded in putting across that same sense of wonder in the written/spoken word, and as his remake of Cosmos demonstrated, Neil is not Carl. It might seem rich coming from me, but I could have done without the sarcasm when I'm trying to learn about antimatter, dark gravity and the accelerating universe, and I was annoyed by their continual need to belittle creationists and alien abductees even though I agree with them. Can't we just ignore the whackos? Must there always be war?

Unknown, 123 Train Jigsaw Book

****

Animals and a choo-choo in a jigsaw seemed like a winning combination, but she couldn't care less. I thought it was clever, anyway. Maybe she'd have preferred the ABC train, since she's always singing that. I'm out of touch already.

Unknown, ABC Train Jigsaw Book

****

She was going to get some kind of alphabet jigsaw now she can precociously do both, and this combines it with animals and a choo-choo, triple win. They presumably came up with this one first before stretching the numbers 1-10 across 26 puzzle pieces in the 123 Train, she prefers this one.

Unknown, Aliens

Read 1998

****

One of those books you see for a quid or two in The Works repeatedly before caving in and buying it, this was impressively in-depth, glossy and full-colour for the budget price (that drawing of Antonio Villas Boas' naked alien lady was especially glossy by the time I finished with it). Digging into the psychology of racism, repressed sexuality and abduction experiences as birth trauma, the authors put in more effort than they were contractually required to, whoever they were, and this was a formative text for my scepticism generally.

Unknown, Animal Peep-Through: My Jungle Friends

Overlapping layers are a better tease of what's next than those rubbish tab books, and the roleplaying mirror is employed for more than vanity, but the text may as well have been lorem ipsum for all its use.

Unknown, Baby Touch: Peekaboo / Pets

Read 2021-23

She was happy improvising narratives for the tactile chaos while I scoured the trays for more appropriate/boring things.

Unknown, Baby Touch and Feel: Llama

I normally try to give her something a bit more advanced or entertaining, but this was one of the few that was accessible when we crashed a scheduled activity session. It revised her counting and added a more obscure character to the bestiary that she'll probably forget.

Unknown, Beavis and Butthead Annual

Read 1996

**

I've never seen Beavis and Butt-head, but as rude cartoon characters who said rude words and had a rude word in their name, they were rebelliously appealing to me growing up, regardless of the quality of the content. They perved on their neighbour and lost their pants on a water slide, that's about as much as I remember. And yams.

Unknown, Berlitz Korean Phrase Book & Dictionary

Read 2011

**

Right from the start, the fundamentals contradicted more convenient online guides and what I was actually hearing in real life. Maybe this was business speak or something.

Unknown, The Book of Genesis

Read 2007

***

I read the first part when studying Paradise Lost, and it's pleasantly pastoral and symbolic. But after that, it really goes downhill, the misanthropic protagonist getting downright psychotic at times, even if you can look past the historical prejudices. I don't mean to sound like an overreacting parent panicking about video games, but I'm worried that these messages might rub off on more easily-influenced readers.

Unknown, The Book of Job

Read 2015

Well, I wasn't going to read the whole goddamned book. And this self-contained tale of piety, puppetry and infanticide is one of the most approachable portions if you're looking for Bible-as-literature and you're not in the mood for the psychedelia of Revelation, though there are still a couple of fancy monsters at the end. Apparently some people read it for moral guidance, but that doesn't seem very appropriate. Long-suffering Job might get a reset button "happy ending" to clean up all the unjustified horror (his kids are still dead, but he makes some more and that's apparently the same thing), but you don't get that with typhoons or cancer.

Unknown, Book of Revelation

Read 2008

***

John trips balls on Patmos and countless generations of faithful scholars take it seriously. The template for many a psychedelic apocalypse, though I prefer Aphrodite's Child's rock opera version.

Unknown, Bounce! Bounce! Bunny

I wouldn't have been annoyed by this routine story of discovering your self-worth if it didn't look misleadingly the same as their older books that featured more entertaining flaps or pop-ups. It's basically AI automation at this point.

Unknown, Bunny's Big Craft, Story and Activity Pack

***

High-quantity seasonal tat.

Unknown, The Christmas Story: With 4 magical sounds!

That came around again bloody quickly.

Unknown based on the scripts by Brian Trueman, Danger Mouse: Planet of the Cats

Read 1996

***

This had stuck in my memory as the most epic of Danger Mouse serials from earlier childhood, but after excitedly picking up the book and tape at a school book fair a few years later, I realised I was a little past caring. It's anthropomorphic hedgehog heroes these days, granddad!

Unknown, Disney Frozen 5-Minute Treasury

She always wants to roleplay Frozen, so when I found this sourcebook of readymade scenarios, I bought with enthusiasm on her behalf that didn't turn out to be shared. She knows it's below par. I'll try to raise our standards.

Unknown, Disney Frozen: The Mysterious Treasure

A Frozen story for boys, the drawings were quite nice, which kept me going.

Unknown, Disney Pixar Finding Dory: Ocean Adventure / My Underwater Story

Variably severe abridgements of the film with different activities to extend the experience, one going to the effort of a full jigsaw package.

Unknown, Disney Pixar Finding Nemo: The Graphic Novel

When it's bedtime and your parents don't let you just watch things. It doesn't count as her first proper comic. I think my equivalent was Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze.

Unknown, Disney Princess Storybook Collection

Replacing her crap Disney compendium with a slightly less crap, if similarly outdated one, this one at least has linear stories.

Unknown, Disney Wonderful World of Reading: The Princess and the Frog

A lot more detailed than the Step into Reading version; still not as good as watching the movie.

Unknown, Dora the Explorer: The Official Annual

Interactive adventures abridged to the point of passivity, maybe to give you a break from the taxing puzzles.At least they remembered to include Swiper's catchphrase this time, but you still have to provide the jingles yourselves.

Unknown, Edd the Duck Annual

Read 1992

*

One of the stranger franchise tie-ins to have existed, until you see all the other merchandise based on the Broom Cupboard's inarticulate mascot that points to a craze, but might only have been wishful thinking. Edd was no Pinky Punky, where's his annual?

Unknown, The Elf on the Shelf: Search and Find

At least this cash-in rip-off is on theme.

Unknown, Final Fantasy VIII: The Official Strategy Guide

Read 2015

***

I wondered what kind of person sits through a 'Let's Play' YouTube playlist, and here I am working through the paperback. I basically fancied a nostalgia trip, revisiting the action, landscapes and beasties of a game that probably occupied a month or two (more?) of my adolescence, but which I remembered surprisingly little about. It turns out that's because it's all so bland and unmemorable. Even the menus are grey. I always much preferred this game's colourful, quirky, better predecessor, but I don't need a refresher for that one as I replayed it to optimised tedium. I could write the guide! But I doubt many people would read that, since it's not 1997.

Unknown, Find Spot at Nursery: A lift-the-flap book

If it debuted in 2021, it's not Eric Hill, is it? Unless he thoughtfully churned out a load of these in advance for his publisher to milk at a steady trickle after his death. Then again, it's hard to believe that anyone else could come up with such imaginative places for Spot and his friends to hide after 40 years. Toddler liked it.

Unknown, Gabby's Dollhouse: The Sparkliest Day of the Year

A new one. No dumber than the things I used to watch, I have some perspective.

Unknown, Gerry Anderson's Thunderbirds Are Go!

Read 2020

***

A decent budget tie-in, especially for the time, interrupting the compulsory plot summary as it goes along with relevant and much more interesting behind-the-scenes insights. I would have appreciated some of the latter in my childhood Thunderbirds comics that kept things tediously in-universe, getting to know the talent involved and F.A.B. trivia like the meta decadence of Lady Penelope's real mink coat.

Unknown, Goldie Goldfish

Read 1986

***

A peaceful rhyme about a fish swimming about, notable for being waterproof so you could read it in the bath. They should make adult books like that.

Unknown, Harold's Worst Nightmare

Not the lad with the purple crayon, but a normal cat who promptly learns his friendship lesson so we don't have to waste too much time on fun conflict. Mog for oversensitive kids.

Unknown, Illustrated Guide to Isle of Wight Wax Museum, Brading

Read 1995

***

The laid-back, creaky attractions of the Isle of Wight made it my favourite holiday destination as a child, and the wax museum's Chamber of Horrors was the best I'd seen (I was a connoisseur). This souvenir guide presented them in all their gory glory. Good for scaring a younger sibling, again.

Unknown, Jurassic Park: The Official Annual

Read 1993

**

This was guaranteed to sell, however little effort they put in, and true to lazy tie-in form it just summarises what we already knew about the story, the dinos and the less interesting people, justified by a lot of nice photos. I'm sure I had another book that went more into the making-of and wasn't the grown-upvMaking Of, but that doesn't seem to exist.

Unknown, Ladybird

A sort of insectoid version of the Tom Fun sketches from Reeves and Mortimer. There's not much going on behind the googly eyes, but she likes to carry this one around.

Unknown, Little Miss Pocket Library

I was disappointed at the slightness of her mini Mr. Men, but knew what we were in for this time: another of those boxsets she loves to tip out, read aloud herself through memorisation, then assemble into the tableau naming all the familiar and non-appearing characters. I am looking forward to becoming more intimately familiar with them than any of my own favourite things.

Unknown, Mei and the Kittenbus

***

The biggest little tease in cinema, it's impressive that the museum-incarcerated Totoro sequel has managed to evade piracy all this time, with the exception of a borderline-unwatchable stealth phone recording and this Japanese souvenir artbook. Lovely pictures, anyway.

Unknown, Mr. Men Super Library

I hadn't paid attention to the page count. The original stories weren't that substantial in the first place, but these board pamphlets ditch the plot for reworked summary introductions. Making the back of the books into a jigsaw just about redeems it.

Unknown and Roger Hargreaves, Mr. Men: My Daddy

Repurposing a dead author's illustrations to check off laudable attributes that can't possibly all apply to all dads and seem a bit judgemental for a modern publication. Bad luck if you're short.

Unknown, Mr Men: Hide-and-Seek in the Garden – A Lift-and-Find Book

***

Incorporates detection and counting to make use of the space, which was more than I expected.

Unknown, My Busy Books: Disney Frozen Fever / Moana / My Little Pony

Read 2022-23

Bought for cheap toys.

Unknown, My First Learning Book: 123 / abc / Shapes / Colours

Read 2020

****

I was planning to get her a Ladybird boxset at some point (I only had their Colours book back in the '80s, so I'm still not sure what a square is), but these rip-offs were better for an early start, since they're made from chewable, washable cloth. Considering the general originality on display here, I'll assume LakaRose didn't invent the medium, but I don't need to get too cynical, since they do the job and I appreciated the angloform spelling. If this is too innocent and wholesome for you, you can speculate about the stupid reasons why the pig from earlier editions was replaced with a pink cat.

Unknown, My Little Pony: 123

Not the whole loosely rethemed Learning Library this time, just dipping our hooves in to marvel at how barely relevant things could get. On the plus side, it goes up to 12.

Unknown, My Little Pony: 5-Minute Stories

***

A nice gimmick and double length excuses adapting some of the same episodes again.

Unknown, My Little Pony Adventures: The Animated Series Show Bible

****

More vibrantly illustrated than the proposals for grown-up television tend to be, but just as curious in its mildly altered concepts. Who could be bothered drawing all those bridles, after all.

Unknown, My Little Pony Annuals 2005–07 / 2013–22

***

Timeless gift sets of stories, puzzles and stickers, zeitgeist be damned.

Unknown, My Little Pony: Applejack's Busy Day / Rainbow Festival / Pinkie Pie's Secret

The cartoon's a bit hard for her to follow sometimes, but these board books strip the plots to the bone with variably worthless results.

Unknown, My Little Pony: The Big Book of Equestria / Magical Story Collection / The Big Book of Friendship Stories / Magical Friendship Stories

Read 2022-23

***

Approachable illustrated summaries of alternately dramatic and mind-numbingly tedious adventures. A step up from her Peppa and Dora ones, the equivalent of my Turtles ones, only gayer.

Unknown, My Little Pony Colouring Adventures

The stories are a nice touch, and sometimes relevant to the activity, even if the careless clipart doesn't always match the plot. If that didn't escape a three-year-old's notice, what does that say about your team?

Unknown, My Little Pony: Crystalling Chaos

A simple story about a cute baby unicorn was too much to expect, it had to be bogged down by lore. They throw in random questions along the way, perhaps sensing boredom.

Unknown, My Little Pony Early Readers: Twilight Sparkle's Princess Spell / Pinkie Pie's Perfect Party / Rainbow Dash's Big Race / Applejack's Sister Surprise / Fluttershy's Secret Song / Rarity's Friendship Lesson

Read 2022-23

***

Simple, collectible bedtime novelisations at this point, but they'll be there as a possibly more appealing alternative to Ginn Reading 360 when she starts going solo.

Unknown, My Little Pony Essential Handbook: A Magical Guide for Everypony

***

Lots of pictures to look at and draw.

Unknown, My Little Pony: First Look and Find

"First" was the word to avoid there. When she wasn't being patronised by the familiar characters just standing there like a normal picture she just wasn't interested in finding their apple pies and shit.

Unknown, My Little Pony: The Movie Early Reader – The Movie Storybook

A poor alternative to the big picture book, at least for storytime purposes.

Unknown, My Little Pony: The Movie Storybook

***

Decent junior abridgement. It's kind of the old Sonic & Knuckles story for the 2010s, but with more magic of friendship™.

Unknown, My Little Pony: Ponies Unite

Easy-reading reference to the new toys, I mean characters.

Unknown, My Special Christmas: A Personalized Story about You and Santa

Read 1989

****

I saw through the crudity of incongruous typewriting over template art of stockings and street signs before I saw through the Santa myth, but this was actually pretty special, taking Me on a world tour that introduced me to the Northern Lights and a vision of Russia I still naively conjure when reading Gorky and listening to Rimsky-Korsakov and the like. My brother had the birthday one, I didn't care for it because it wasn't about Me.

Unknown, Noddy and His New Friend

She wanted context for the lullaby theme tune and sat through this real-time episode adaptation. They used to credit preschoolers with longer attention spans.

Unknown, The Official Thunderbirds Annual

Read 1992

**

Thunderbirds was so late 1991 to early '92 (when it wasn't being popular decades before my birth), so I wasn't especially enthused by this festive latecomer. I mainly remember the inappropriately disturbing comic about a one-eyed alien snake thing and being stressed out by Jeff Tracy's biography stating he was born in 1979, taking longer than I should have to realise that the show's probably set in the future.

Unknown, The Offspring – Star Profile: If You Can't Join 'Em, Beat 'Em

Read 2001

**

There's some great rock journalism and literature out there, but if you're a fan of childish punk bands, you have to lower your standards a bit. The accompanying interview CD was more insightful than the book, but it had lots of pretty pictures, and I was glad that it caught them around the time of Ixnay before they went all sell-out.

Unknown, Our New Baby: Help Your Child Through a New Experience

There's no announcement, I just tried to find her a cute book about babies, but didn't really succeed.

Unknown, Paw Patrol: Pups Save Ryder's Robot

She didn't even ask for it, I made the honourable sacrifice myself. The thinnest pages of any book she owns, tight bastards. The title reads like a bad translation.

Unknown, Peppa Pig: Peppa's Treasury of Tales / Peppa's Story

Collection / Peppa Goes Boating and Other Stories / Storytime Fun

Read 2020-22

Her first TV tie-ins, topped up every six months or so with a new bumper treasury to keep bedtime high-brow. The total lack of consistency in the shape and size of these collections can only be a deliberate measure to help prevent compulsive tendencies in later life.

Unknown, Peppa Pig: Lost Glasses / Where's Peppa's Magical Unicorn? / Where's Peppa? / Where's George's Dinosaur?

It's Spot, not Wally, but the elements of misdirection and deduction justify the otherwise uninspired rip-off. Eric Hill's estate should get royalties for all of these.

Unknown, Peppa Pig: The Story of Peppa Pig / Peppa's Play Date / Easter Egg Hunt / Peppa's Magical Unicorn / Etc.

A breed of novelisations that vary unrecognisably from the episodes and are worse, for inexplicable reasons.

Unknown, Peppa Pig: Peppa Loves the Park / Peppa's Zoo Adventure / Peppa to the Rescue

Read 2021-22

Barely any thought went into these flaps and levers, which generally just widen the picture or make something move a bit and start repeating themselves by the end. If you're going to nick a gimmick, at least be interesting.

Unknown, Peppa Pig: My Peppa Adventure

***

A very nice idea for an early, minimally-interactive book (presumably nicked, based on their track record). Lots of decisions amounting to nothing of consequence, she'll be on the Lone Wolfs in no time.

Unknown, Peppa Pig: The Official Annual 2017/2023

Read 2022-23

***

Random episode adaptations, sticker book activities without the stickers and craft ideas, some of which may even be worth trying.

Unknown, Peter Rabbit: Lily's Party Time

She's never been bothered about her comprehensive Beatrix Potter compendium, but this CGI bunny she's never watched was apparently appealing. It's fine.

Unknown, Peter Rabbit Loves...

With all the substance of a greeting card, this pointless Potter paraphernalia is proud of its eco-friendly manufacture, but it would've been more admirable to decide not to produce it in the first place.

Unknown, A Peter Rabbit Tale: Starting School / Trick or Treat

What's the obsession with appropriating this guy and draining his personality while you're at it? It's like the generic Bart Simpson stories I wrote at six.

Unknown, Pokémon Classic Collector's Handbook

****

Reprinting the original '90s guide (that my brothers had) may be an admission that things have got out of hand since. You don't need more than these. Not until you can name them all in order, anyway.

Unknown, Pokémon Crystal Version: The Official Nintendo Player's Guide

Read 2015

***

What was I saying about mature Manga? I considered myself too grown-up for Pokemon back when my brothers were into it, but when I realised my belated first smartphone makes a cracking Game Boy emulator, I finally found a worthy successor to Dizzy for mildly challenging audiobook visiontracks. It was fun for a while, but when trying to catch 'em all got boring and annoying, and lacking convenient school playground access to share tips, I got an instruction manual to turn time-wasting entertainment into unpaid labour. It turns out I can't even catch 'em all anyway, because that requires social interaction. Seems like a misunderstanding of the point of Game Boys if you ask me.

Unknown, Pokemon: Where's Pikachu? – A Search and Find Book

Read 2022/24

***

Licensed Where's Wally knock-offs haven't moved on in the quarter century since Where's Sonic. Pretty spreads, but why do they all take the simplified route? Give the kids some credit and their parents more peace.

Unknown, The World of Peter Rabbit: The Bedtime Bunny Hunt

Setting necro cash-in cynicism aside, it's been a while since we had a good old flap book.

Unknown, Severance: The Lexington Letter

***

A short and typically tangential tie-in, mainly notable for giving a hint about one of the series' formerly opaque mysteries, unless I'm missing things.

Unknown, The Simpsons Rainy Day Fun Book

Read 1997

**

This looked fun in the shop, but then we didn't have much use for it. It also relies on the out-of-character premise of Bart Simpson being really into crafts.

Unknown, Sooty's Fireside Tales

Read 1988

***

Another book I had to be content with looking at for a few years before I was finally able to read it, not that it made much more sense that way. Who were those random human kids hanging out with the now-anthropomorphic puppets? Where was Soo? The part where they got caught up in a machine and were converted into confectionery was pretty creepy.

Unknown, Space Flight: The First 30 Years

Read 2020

**

With the USSR dissolving around them, you'd think that even a NASA publication would give more acknowledgement to the other side of the story than a fleeting namecheck of Sputnik, but I guess they wanted to keep stoking the national pride to help them fulfil the prediction of the next 30 years of space missions being just as exciting as the first. Better get a move on.

Unknown, Spot's Slide and Seek Funfair

Not the old-school Funfair one with flaps that was actually by Eric Hill, but a new generation of more annoying and ridiculously obscured push/pull tabs, most of which just extend the scene unremarkably.

Unknown based on the episode written by Peter Sauder and Richard Beban, Star Wars: Droids: The Adventures of R2-D2 and C-3PO – The Trigon Unleashed

Read 1990

**

It was nice of my mum to buy me a Droids book, but I can't have been paying too much attention to the show, since I didn't have a clue who any of these people were and couldn't really follow what was going on when jumping in at book three, so I just relaxed and enjoyed the dilapidated sci-fi imagery. VHS screencaps beat UK publishers' in-house illustrators any day.

Unknown, Step Into Reading: Frozen Story Collection

She has a Frozen week every now and then, and it's some variety from unicorns, even if we're both perplexed about "Anna is in FRONT, Elsa is in BACK."

Unknown, Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles First Dictionary

Read 1992

***

To judge it by its cover (Donatello loves rollerskating!), this looks to be just about the nadir of tie-in merchandise, but it was potentially useful (not that I remember ever using it) and their persistence in including the Turtles & friends as tenuous examples is admirable and amusing.

Unknown, Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles: Spelling & Reasoning

Read 1993

**

You know how publishers license trendy children's franchises to garnish generic educational books aimed at parents who want to trick their kids into doing homework? I was such a Turtles freak that I chose these for myself. The pink Reasoning book was aimed at my demographic (7–8) and proved a decent precocious challenge, but I was disappointed in myself when the blue Spelling book turned out to be suited to its target 5–6 age rating after all.

Unknown, Teletubbies: Pocket Library

There's plenty of time to bury the classics in crap merchandise (I think we had an entire shelf of TV annuals growing up), but like the wobbly toys, I hoped these could make substitutes for the episodes since she started requesting "teh, teh, teh" a bit too often. I don't blame her, I was a bit obsessed with them when they came out, and I was in double figures. The back covers cobble together into a jigsaw like her Mr. Men set, so I'll retroactively dock those a star for redundancy.

Unknown, Terry Nation's Blakes 7 Annual 1980

Read 2020

**

I like to play 1970s childhood sometimes, and it's been long enough since I binged the show that the real nostalgia blended with the imaginary one. These prose stories with variable art aren't great, but they're on brand for the series, more than the series was a lot of the time. Which is more than can be said for the features in-between, which aren't the expected in-universe profiles or makings-of, but instead cover general astronomy facts and demand an unreasonable level of space trivia for readers of any age.

Unknown, Thomas & Friends: My First Thomas Railway Stories

Three insubstantial character profiles in verse, at least that's some effort. I would have been more touched by her choosing something I specifically would have wanted in my own childhood if it wasn't such a terrible series in retrospect.

Unknown, Thomas & Friends Super Library

We didn't really need another of these, and there was even a missing book / jigsaw piece, but we're not pursuing minimalist efficiency. I never cared for Toby anyway.

Unknown, Thomas & Friends: Thomas' Jigsaw Book

***

She likes doing jigsaws before bed, she likes Thomas at the moment, and this was £1 in a charity shop, so there's nothing to complain about, really. Apart from the lack of visual variety, but I suppose that's a realistic simulacrum of train life.

Unknown, Thomas & Friends: Noisy Thomas Sound Book

No effort to incorporate the single sound into the plot. The library copy's dying battery added an eerie v a p o r w a v e atmosphere.

Unknown, Unicorn Academy: Under the Fairy Moon

***

She has no interest in the original books, but adapt an episode she's already seen and slap familiar imagery on, and she snaps it up. I was exactly the same. We skipped the frequent exposition digressions that are only there to expand a 45-minute episode to 160 pages.

Unknown, V Annual 1986

Read 2020

*

There was presumably enough (several-years-belated) V-mania among British kids to justify this pathetic cash-in, evidently brought to you by the same unsung heroes responsible for the Blake's 7 annuals based on the identical, misguided structure, astronomy questions when they run out of ideas and art that would be more appropriate for Postman Pat. For want of any kind of behind-the-scenes information there are also vaguely relevant lizard facts, drab puzzles, a board game no one's ever played and a jokes page. Here's one: "What kind of money do Visitors use? A: Weirdo (weird dough)."

I could have finally got around to reading Thomas Pynchon's V., I suppose, but I'm an idiot.

Unknown, The Very Friendly Unicorn

Charm-free DIY.

Unknown, The Very Hungry Caterpillar: Little Learning Library

***

There's no shortage of sets like these out there, and this isn't the only one leeching off a well-loved brand, but I thought it might make a nice supplement to the classic original and get some vocabulary down her, which turned out to work a treat.

Unknown, When Santa Got Stuck Up the Chimney

The only noisy book we found that day that worked. She wasn't impressed. To be fair, my own rendition was stifled by the public setting, but cartoony Santas never really did it for me either.

Unknown, Where's Sonic?

Read 1996

**

Where do they get their crazy, borderline-copyright-infringing ideas from? This incredibly cheeky release doesn't match up to Wally, obviously, but I was impressed by the pleasant artistic renderings of familiar zones when my brother bought it, so at least someone put in the effort.

Unknown, Where's Sonic Now?

Read 2020

**

They got away with it, so the second barefaced rip-off is even cheekier in appropriating the Wally sequel's title without any of the skill. Sonic consumers will be happy enough just seeing those familiar zones from a couple of games ago being rendered by an anonymous artist. Say what you will about the Ladybird Sonic canon; they stuck to those comfort zones more than any of the other cash-in crap.

Unknown, Winnie-the-Pooh: Hide-and-Seek – A lift-and-find book

Offensive flaps that don't obscure much in the first place and need to be held closed to avoid revealing the remaining limbs. It adds some counting in a pitiful attempt to secure another star, but I won't have it.

Unknown, Words I Say

****

A generous selection of variably wordy words to learn.

Naoki Urasawa, Naoki Urasawa's Monster, Volume 1: Herr Doktor Tenma

Read 2015

The English-speaking internet doesn't know any Japanese authors besides Murakami who I've done already, and I don't fancy that geisha book, so it'll have to be Western-friendly manga again. This one's even set in Caucasialand to make things easier, ありがとうございました! In fact, it goes so far to make sure you're not confused – making every character a one-dimensional type and frequently flashing back to melodramatic encounters that happened a few pages previously in case you're not keeping up with the extremely basic ethical dilemma – that it comes off as insulting. Why is the author's name in the title? Is he supposed to be impressive?

Sam Usher, Snow

The delayed gratification wasn't worth it. It wasn't much different from Rain, the author-illustrator taking the popular thematic approach of getting away with writing the same book multiple times.

Sam Usher, Rain

***

The lovely rain and puddle effects make it worthwhile, but we didn't dwell on those for nearly long enough as I worried about her attention span in public for a deliberately tedious book.

Mark Valentine, Herald of the Hidden and Other Stories

***

Enthusiastic, largely indistinguishable tributes to old-school occult detecting and other supernatural miscellany free from postmodern cynicism, save my own.

Faves: 'Herald of the Hidden,' 'Go to the West'

Mark Valentine, Haunted by Books

Read 2020

***

I appreciate the boundless freedom of digital books, but Tartarus Press is the lone siren that threatens to lure me back to the financially ruinous rocks of sensory reading. It's probably because my phone's ebook reader background matches the delicious creamy hue of their covers that I imagine I can smell them. This one has interesting introductions to the sort of obscure writers the publisher likes to exhume, but I'd have preferred a feature-length account of the book-collecting adventures.

Chris Van Allsburg, Jumanji

Read 2020, re-read 2024

***

I'd assumed the film was based on a kids' book of some kind, but a picture book was a surprise and slight disappointment. Nice drawings, but no time for tension as we work methodically through the urban bestiary.

Chris Van Allsburg, Zathura

Read 2020

**

The Jumanji sequel lazily follows the same template page for page, only with less interesting artwork and no girl one this time, because space is for boys.

Mara van der Meer, Natalie Munday, Tom Moore and Will Deer, Pull-tab Surprise: Little Cuties

Every anthopomorphised object is overcomplicated with a distracting first name and half of the tabs are decorated with random clipart for lack of better use. Like one of those baby sensory videos, but without the appeal.

James Van Hise, Kay Doty and Alex Burleson, Trek: Deep Space Nine – The Unauthorized Story

You wouldn't turn to this hasty half-season primer for authoritative insights, but as a combination of overly repetitive magazine and opinionated barely-retrospective, it makes a nice time capsule commemorating the first 'Trek spin-off. I especially enjoyed the candid dismay at the series seeming to abandon its promising premise for generic crap almost immediately. Just wait.

James Van Hise and Hal Schuster, Trek: The Unauthorized Story of the Movies – From The Motion Picture to Generations

****

Basically a self-aggrandising 90s fan blog, but with more typos.

Jan Van Houten and artists, Adventures on a Single Page, Season 1

***

Kid-friendly adventures economised at a cost to clarity, but I should be able to plunder an idea or twelve for pony-based roleplaying.

Leopold van Sacher-Masoch, Venus in Furs

Read 2016

Things take a disappointing turn to the coy in what I presume is a landmark bondage classic from the other godfather of violent love (he's the M). The cover's more explicit than the content, which doesn't even feature a fleeting flash of nipple (it crossed my mind that I might be reading some kind of early public domain censored version), the excitement being entirely in the psychology of control, submission and humiliation. Not exactly a step forward after De Sade, but the pathetic protagonist helped to balance out all those victimised females just a little.

Jack Vance, The Dying Earth

Read 2019

***

Vance wasn't the first writer to take us to the waning Earth, but since he was apparently the first to import generic fantasy themes in that setting, he gets the respect of a pioneer. Since I don't read much fantasy, I found it good pulpy fun for the most part, but it was only the very rare occasions when they came across some dilapidated futuristic technology or mentioned the red sun that I remembered to be impressed. I felt similar about The Book of the New Sun, which might as well be a shared universe.

Jack Vance, The Eyes of the Overworld (a.k.a. Cugel the Clever)

Read 2019

***

After setting the scene of his Dying Earth, Vance focuses on one of its denizens this time, who's pottering about having quests foisted upon him, having erotic exercise and taking pointless time trips to keep him from dwelling on the inevitable eternal night. Quite funny in places.

Steve Vance, Cindy Vance and Bill Morrison, Simpsons Comics Extravaganza

Read 1997-2021

****

I had one of these issues back in the day (with several years' transatlantic delay, which was the style at the time) and was impressed by its authenticity, especially compared to what I was used to from cash-in tie-ins. It's not particularly funny, but if, like me, you starve yourself of Simpsons for a decade at a time so you can look forward to enjoying the classics all over again, it makes a nice midway treat.

Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation

Read 2020

*****

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

Read 2020

***

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

Read 2020

****

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.

Jeff VanderMeer, Dead Astronauts

Read 2020

****

This psychedelic post-sense future congeals into clarity as it goes along. Apparently the second book in a series, but I recommend diving in here for optimal disorientation, as well as averting your eyes from blurbs or reviews. Including this one, fuck off.

Various, 30-Second Maths: The 50 Most Mind-Expanding Theories in Mathematics, Each Explained in Half a Minute

Read 2015

***

This seemed like a nice, handy and arrogantly titled set of pocket guides (again wasted in e-book form). I contemplated reading their philosophy guide and stressed myself out over their psychology one before making the logical calculation to supplement my GCSE maths and maybe actually learn something useful. The useful bits were boring though, I enjoyed the abstract concepts and weird universal rules a lot more. I'm glad I finally know what words like 'calculus' and 'logarithm' actually mean too, though as expected, in the time since I jotted that note down it's gone again. I don't have to understand it to enjoy it, and it's easier to enjoy it when there's not a stressful exam coming up.

Faves: Infinity (again again et al), game theory, exotic shapes, Pascal's Triangle (making up for his flawed wager).

Worsties: Trigonometry, long division (it's not really in here, but I have bad memories).

Various, 30-Second Philosophies: The 50 Most Thought-Provoking Philosophies, Each Explained in Half a Minute

Read 2015

**

Like an impractical phone keyboard, this guide is just a little too small to offer more than the briefest introduction to complex ideas. I know that's the entire point of it, I just think you'd be better off elsewhere, whether you're being introduced to these concepts for the first time or freshening up. Julian Baggini's solo works get it about right.

Faves: The liar paradox, the brain in a vat, the trolley problem, Plato's cave.

Worsties: Most of the religious arguments are flawed.

Various, The 33⅓ B-sides: New Essays by 33 1/3 Authors on Beloved and Underrated Albums

Read 2019

****

Most of the appeal of these books is the length – just long enough to get pretty in-depth about an album, on whichever aspects the writer thinks are important, but still thin enough to not get boring. This release does away with that, going for quantity over quality with 55 shorter write-ups of albums that don't require that level of analysis. A diverse pick-n-mix of obscurities and oddities chosen for you by other people, you won't enjoy them all, but there's bound to be plenty of pleasant surprises.

Faves: The Smashing Pumpkins' Adore, Stars of the Lid's And Their Refinement of the Decline, Nine Inch Nails' The Fragile.

Worsties: Christina Aguilera's Mi Reflejo, Daniel Lopatin's Chuck Person's Eccojams Vol. 1, Wesley Willis' Rock 'n' Roll Will Never Die.

Various, 150 Best Minimalist House Ideas

Read 2015

**

I've been a loyal advocate of the minimalist lifestyle since 2007, when I sold my extensive DVD and CD collections to pay for rent and lentils, and you can rest assured I won't be cluttering any valuable space in our new house beyond a pants/T-shirt drawer. So, since I'm already on board with the ideology, these barren domestic voids didn't have the striking impact they were probably supposed to. I was mainly disappointed at the lack of variety. Does minimalism always have to mean blinding white? You're already painting the wall and choosing furniture, why not express your personality just a little? Or is that where the slippery slope begins?

Various, 150 Best Sustainable House Ideas

Read 2015

**

My wife's drawing up the floor plans for our place as I type, so when I read that this book included plans and diagrams among all the glossy photos, I hoped there might be a couple of last-minute ideas to borrow, or just plans we could plagiarise verbatim to make sure our house doesn't fall down. Unfortunately, it's all far too lavish and poncy to be of much practical use to regular people, apart from reminding me about skylights.

Various, 2000 A.D. Annual 1978

Read 2015

***

More false nostalgia, this might have been in my Christmas stocking if I'd been born about 15 years earlier. I've come across this classic British institution a number of times over the years when exploring the obscure early works of writers and artists who went on to bigger things, so I thought I'd check it out on its own terms. It's not as tongue-in-cheek as I expected, with plain moralising rather than satire. I suppose it got better. There's also a strong educational angle with articles on contemporary science topics kids are interested in like the space shuttle, oil and commemorative stamps. These were presumably dropped after a while when they realised readers were more interested in the bits where Judge Dredd blast a guy's face off.

Faves: Cheery nuclear holocaust inevitability in 'End of Voyage' and juvenile polar bear vengeance in 'White Fury.'

Worsties: Future Nazis and 1970s black people play ball in 'Harlem Heroes.'

Various, 10,000 Years of Art

Read 2014

****

I like Phaidon's bite-sized art tasters. This one's hindered by its fair focus on times before art was any good, but it gets better as it goes along. If the pictures are too small or the squashed desciptions aren't enough for you – you're on the internet, you twat. Get a wallpaper.

Various, A1, Book One

****

Precisely as pretentious as you'd hope a 1989 British art-comic anthology would be.

Faves: John Bolton's 'Bad Bread,' Dave Gibbons & Ted McKeever's 'Survivor,' Alan Moore & Steve Parkhouse's 'Festus: Dawn of the Dead'

Various, AA Mini Guides: Britain

***

More virgin travel guides that might take a while to get stuck into, what with them primarily targeting more adventurous grown-ups with their own sets of wheels, but they're bound to be pretty good, right? If I was driving, I wouldn't be able to read the guide, would I? Think it through.

Various, Album Cover Album 3

****

I wonder if Roger Dean & co suspected they would be meticulously cataloguing the decline of the art form. Thematic juxtapositions increasingly feel like exposés of unoriginality. Still a nice collection.

Various, American Gothic: An Anthology 1787–1916

****

More questionable and wilfully obscure selections than necessary, but at least someone made the effort.

Faves: Edgar Allan Poe, Edith Wharton.

Various, The Art Book

Read 2005, re-read 2015

*****

If I knew much about art beyond works bastardised by Monty Python animations and compulsory trips to the Tate Modern every time I'm in London to be entertainingly annoyed by cheeky masterpieces, I'd probably denounce this book as over-simplistic. But it isn't patronising, and the decision made to present 500 artists in strict alphabetical order, each summed up by a single work, makes for an eclectic experience that blends centuries and styles and avoids the tedious problem of categorisation. Being almost entirely Western-centric, all those Madonnas, Jesuses and bearded saints do get repetitive though.

Faves: Bosch, other imaginative and detailed paintings.

Worsties: Slashed canvases and those ones that are just a colour. Yeah, well done. Clap, clap. Look how much effort the others have put in, you should be ashamed of yourselves.

Various, Art of Atari Poster Collection

A tellingly brief exhibition that unconvincingly attempts to bridge the chasm from sports to D&D.

Faves: Haunted House, Video Pinball, Tempest 2600

Various, The Art of Morrowind

***

I forgot I'd had this, because of its lightweight and modest nature as added value to a special edition game bundle, but like the accompanying soundtrack CD, it's a nice supplement to a game I was once immersed in, though never sufficiently obsessed by.

Various, The Art of Nick Cave: New Critical Essays

Read 2015

***

A hip professor's community college course meets songmeanings.net in this collection of essays that vary from insightful to bloody tedious. I admire its dedication to covering the full range of Nick Cave's oeuvre – including his novels, obscure screenplays and obscurer ballet soundtracks – but for philistines like me and almost everyone else, those are the annoying bits in-between the chapters dealing with the music. This book did help me to gain a new appreciation for overlooked songs and to notice some of the weird shit the instruments are doing, but I guess I would have preferred it to be a strict song-by-song companion in chronological order, preferably timed to match each song's length as well as my reading speed. That's not too much to ask, is it? Yeah, well maybe I will write it.

Various, The Art of Science Fiction, Vol. 1–5

Read 2020

***

These mysterious, context-free galleries let the weird landscapes, apocalyptic megacities, retro spaceships and Nazi boobs speak for themselves. They're not saying anything very original, but at least it's not CGI.

Faves: Yuji Fujii, Takashi Asada

Worsties: Emiko Hoshi, Junichi Murayama

Various, Arthur C. Clarke's July 20, 2019: Life in the 21st Century

Read 2020

***

Scoff at its speculations of a modest moonbase and continuing dominance of the VHS format by 2019 if that gives you pleasure, but as Clarke makes clear in his introduction, this is more aspirations than expectations (which is the case for utopian sci-fi generally, when its not being satirical, idiots). He brings together a bunch of specialists in various fields, few of them writers, to wax prestalgically to varying degrees of accuracy and interest. Reality sometimes kept up. Excellent synthwave cover.

Various, The Best of /r/LetsNotMeet, Vol. 1: The First Four Years

***

"Creepy" reddit has long been my read-only trashy magazine fix, but it doesn't adapt well to print, especially when the volume is as slight as the content. A few classics though.

Various, Best Russian Short Stories

Read 2015

****

I'm not sufficiently experienced to argue with the American editor's selections, but he admits that some of these got in for the sake of diversity. The philosophical debates and futile struggles of the disenfranchised might have got a bit heavy without the rom-coms to break things up, but I wouldn't have minded, that's what I was here for. I feel inexplicable affinity with pre-Soviet Russia, even though I hardly know anything about it. I suppose that means I was a frozen peasant in a past life then? We can't all be Cleopatra.

Faves: Gogol's 'The Cloak,' Chekhov's 'The Bet.'

Worsties: Pushkin's 'The Queen of Spades,' Turgenev's 'The District Doctor.'

Various, Blackadder: The Whole Damn Dynasty

Read 1999-2000

*****

Blackadder translates exceptionally to print, especially when it's so lovingly presented with period-specific formatting and illustrations. You lose the enunciations and facial expressions, but only if you haven't watched the episodes enough times to drill them into your memory. The original supplementary material doesn't add much, and the gaping omission of the Christmas and Comic Relief specials is as irritating as when they weren't included on the DVD set either, but this was still a handy asset for 90s teenage comedy nerds to have ready for subversive school performances (we did 'Private Plane,' I was Balders) and silent reading sessions with stifled chuckles.

Various, Blimey! It's Slimer!

Read 1990

*

Cor! It's the throwaway out-of-character "funnies" from Ghostbusters comic collected for posterity they don't deserve because Slimermania. Slimer was never my favourite thing about the series, but I was still jealous when my mum bought this for some other kid's birthday and I insisted on reading it myself first. The jealousy diminished as it went on.

Various, The Blue Book & The Yellow Book of Stories, Songs, Poems and Games

****

With default definitive interpretations of the Pied Piper, the Three Little Kittens, the blackbird pie and many more, this incomplete book and tape set was one of the big nostalgic mysteries for me, finally identified as reprints of Little Story Teller magazine for Early Learning Centre (which turns out to be where nearly all the obscure childhood curios came from). Their contents may be scattered on YouTube.

Various, The Book of Music and Nature: An Anthology of Sounds, Words, Thoughts

Read 2016

**

"Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny."

I was hoping for an insightful, permissably slightly zany exploration of whale song and bird poo-tee-weets, but this is mainly spiritual faff about universal harmony and archaic public domain articles about that new-fangled musique concrète they have now.

On the plus side, there is a free virtual CD online that saves you the trouble of scouring YouTube and Freesound.org or going to your nearest jungle to listen live.

Various, The Broadview Anthology of Seventeenth Century Verse and Prose

Read 2005-06

**

I don't think I ever went into a bookshop and bought any of these study books full price. Most of them were eBayed second-hand; a couple were Amazoned when I earned enough dooyooMILES; some I read online; this one I loaned from the library the month before term began and kept renewing all year long. As for the contents, it's useful for studying the period, but nothing I'd sit down and read today, especially as it deliberately omits the famous works that are widely available elsewhere. Why would I want to buy that?

Various, Buster Book 1992

Read 2015

*

- "I'll have to think of something quick."
- "Instant coffee?"

Somewhere between my loyal following of Turtles and Sonic comics (and probably parallel with Dinosaurs! magazine – who's the spoiled brat now?), Buster was my inexplicable comic of choice. Yeah, not your successful, mainstream Beano – a second-rate rip-off with less memorable characters, many of them based entirely on weak pun names that I didn't even get because I didn't grow up in the 60s. I don't remember any of these stories from the comics I had around this time, but they surely can't be the best of the year. And where the hell's Odd Ball? He was the only good one.

Faves: I always appreciated Chalky because he draws.

Worsties: Most of 'em.

Various, Busy Safari / Puppies / Ambulance / Sports Day / Jungle / Storytime / Christmas / Elves

Read 2022-23

Suspense-free animal observation, festive churn, etc. Presumably libraries get bulk discounts on these things.

Various, Capturing the Stars: Astrophotography by the Masters

Read 2015

*****

It's wasted as a PDF, this really belongs on a coffee table or ripped up and stuck on your walls. The history and practicalities of backyard space photography are briefly introduced, each astrartist explains their approach and setup, and there are captions explaining what each of these awe-inspiring, colourful swirls is (along with their less inspiring names), but it's not bogged down in technicalities if you're just here for the pictures. And to spot some of the desktop wallpapers you've had in circulation for years and have been falsely crediting to Hubble.

Faves: Per-Magnus Heden, Russell Croman, R. Jay Gabany, Robert Gendler.

Worsties: Astrophotography pioneers Edward Emerson Barnard and William C. Miller. Just because it was ages ago and your equipment was a bit basic, it's nothing personal.

Various, Catholic Anthology 1914-1915

Read 2019

****

Pound isn't pushing a manifesto this time, just curating the cream of contemporary poetry as he sees it. Some of these selections would become immortal academic fixtures (Eliot's famous early ones are in there), others are misfires (WCW goes off on a weird one), most are obscure delights.

The War's still in its adolescence, but it gets the odd look-in and sets the tone, firmly stomping out the poesy.

Various, Christmas Carols

Your standard assortment, sparing expense with decorative borders for want of more inspiring art. It had a tape, but I preferred Away in a Manger's nativity musical.

Various, Classic Ghost Stories

****

A brilliant Dickens tale joined by incrementally lesser oldies, though I don't really see how any of them would appeal to kids.

Fave: Charles Dickens, 'The Signal-Man'

Various, Classic Nonsense Verse

Silly R@nD0M poetry would have been the most palatable kind to young me, but this poor showing would have put me off again. A public domain bill of Lear, Carroll and Anon without the likes of Milligan, though some more modern poets got their own mini anthologies.

Fave: 'One Fine Day in the Middle of the Night'

Various, Collins Big Cat Phonics for Letters and Sounds: My Day, Our World / Incy Wincy Spider

Not as captivating a wordless book as The Arrival, and she can already read up to five-letter words anyway, but they presumably know what they're doing. We have to "read" these three times a week and answer questions she already memorised in class before we're allowed to enjoy some proper reading.

Various, Collins Big Cat Phonics for Letters and Sounds: Pat It / Sit Sip Nap / Sit Sit

Jumping from wordless books to up to three words a page that she could read by spelling them out, this is more like it. You wouldn't really want to binge them though.

Various, Creepypasta Collection

***

Some kid's poorly-organised compilation of favourited short "creepy" stories, veering from tame children's ghost stories and urban legends to depraved necro incest gore, seemingly with a few hilariously inept originals mixed in too. Rarely any good, but always entertaining.

Faves: 'Gateway of the Mind,' 'Dead Bart,' 'Autopilot'

Various, The Creepypasta Collection: Modern Urban Legends You Can't Unread

***

Variable works by passionate weirdos, collected in a book with credited authors, like horror stories would be, but we mustn't call them that.

Faves: Max Lobdell's 'Teeny Tiny' & 'Licks from a Bear,' Matt Dymerski's 'Psychosis'

Various, The Creepypasta Collection, Volume 2: 20 Stories. No Sleep.

Distinctly cheesier and less accomplished than the first helping, which is more in the spirit, really.

Faves: Ashley Franz Holzmann's 'Slumber Party,' Vincent V. Cava's 'Neptune's Fancy'

Various, Criterion Designs

Read 2015

The attitude behind these bespoke LaserDisc/DVD/Blu-ray covers is the exact opposite of Trash, and interestingly there is some overlap of subject matter. I guess you can polish a turd. I didn't connect with Trash's glorification of smut, but I'm equally ill at ease with the Criterion Collection's deluxe fawning and steel cases. I like watching films and sometimes the posters are nice too, but that isn't enough for these people. They have to put their own stamp on the classics by playing around with various art movements and fun fonts. If you have more artistic sensibilities than me, you might appreciate their efforts.

Various, Cthulhu Cymraeg: Lovecraftian Tales from Wales

***

Variably serious and intense travelogues.

Faves: Rhys Hughes' 'The Bicycle-Centaur,' Mark Howard Jones' 'Pilgrimage,' Brian Willis' 'Song of Summoning'

Various, Dark World: Ghost Stories

***

Mostly forgettable tales for a worthy cause. Class clown Rhys Hughes' pisstake shows up the more earnest efforts.

Faves: Christopher Fowler's 'Mistake at the Monsoon Palace,' Rhys Hughes' 'The Swinger,' John Gaskin's 'Wolvershiel'

Various, DC Science Fiction Graphic Novels

Read 2015

****

It doesn't look like DC ever reprinted these fairly obscure paperbacks in a bumper collection, so I'll just pretend that collection exists, as the series only ran to seven 50-page volumes anyway. Adapting selected short stories from star authors (Bloch, Bradbury, Ellison, Martin, Niven, Pohl and Silverberg) combined with mostly great art would seem to be a winning combination, but in banking on hard SF&F readers picking up a flimsy comic, and comic fans stomaching ponderous narratives without a cape in sight, it may have been a few years ahead of its time. But delaying it would have meant missing out on that classic 80s comic art, before computers and insane anatomy ruined things.

Faves: Frost and Fire, Sandkings.

Worsties: Merchants of Venus, The Magic Goes Away.

Various, Dead Funny: Horror Stories by Comedians

Read 2016

****

Destined to be not especially great, this was a fun and worthwhile exercise all the same. From various interviews and podcasts I've listened to over the years, being the slightly sinister, horror-obsessed kid at school is almost a prerequisite for becoming a stand-up comedian when you grow up (at least the sort of comedians I like), and this is their chance to revisit and pay homage to that old favourite genre. Or, if you're Reece Shearsmith and that Garth Marenghi guy, another day at the office.

The rules are lax for this anthology, which ranges from the excessively gory to the tongue-in-cheek. Not all contributors go down the implied route of tempering the frights with chuckles, but the most blackly humorous ones are usually the best.

Faves: 'Dog,' 'A View from a Hill,' 'For Roger.'

Worsties: 'The Patient,' 'In Loving Memory of Nerys Bag,' 'All Warm Inside.'

Various, Dead Funny Encore: More Horror Stories by Comedians

Read 2018

****

This feels like a more consistent collection than the first one, mainly because all the contributors understood what it was this time, and again it's mostly entertaining. The comedians don't all feel pressured to be funny, but it's better when they do.

Faves: Stewart Lee's 'Test Pressing,' Rufus Hound's 'Date Night,' Alan Moore's 'Cold Reading.'

Worsties: Alice Lowe's 'Carnival,' James Acaster's 'To Do,' Natalie Haynes' 'The Basement Conversion.'

Various, Dennis Annual 1991

Read 1990

**

I liked American Dennis first, before switching loyalties, though tracing it back to the comic source didn't prove all that rewarding, just educational for teaching me some Americanisms.

Various, Dimension X

Read 2020

**

Five novellas, seemingly chosen for length rather than theme or quality, from what history judges to be a mixed bag of prominent and obscure writers. Some consistency or some kind of point would have been nice.

Fave: Robert A. Heinlein's 'The Man Who Sold the Moon'

Various, Disney Ultimate Family Treasury

She'd started to be bothered about Tigger not looking "right" in the original illustrations, so it was time to concede principles to taste with mini reverse adaptation novelisations of favourite films for storytime, plus suggestions for ones to try next. I was always a sucker for the franchise tie-in, but it was a bad habit I don't want to encourage too much, as it makes it harder to keep up the pretense that reading isn't a second-rate substitute for watching telly.

Various, Doctor Who: The Brilliant Book 2011

***

A bit of an odd choice to package the de facto Official Series Five Companion as a 'family' annual, but if it wasn't for those disposable stories and fluff features between the episode guides, interviews and behind-the-scenes insights, they'd struggle to pass this off as more than a souvenir magazine.

Various, Doctor Who: The Brilliant Book 2012

***

Cutting down on the stories to make it a more respectable counterpart to the child-oriented Annual, but keeping the other superfluous padding between the episode write-ups, now with more of an educational angle about real and pretend history. I don't know whether they continued making series companions in some other unsatisfying hybrid form, it took me long enough to work out what these were.

Various, Doctor Who: The Eleventh Hour – A Critical Celebration of the Matt Smith and Steven Moffat Era

Opinionated episode guides are more my level than academic essays, but it was a worthy effort all the same, even if avoidable anniversary publishing haste left it forever incomplete.

Various, Doctor Who: 12 Doctors, 12 Stories

Read 2015

***

So I'm shamefully falling back on a TV tie-in, but at least I didn't count these 12 collected 'e-shorts' (sounds fashionable) as 12 separate entries. It's not December yet.

I wouldn't normally expect much from Doctor Who books, but these were comparatively high profile ones, having been monthly 'event' releases through the anniversary year and attracting a few fairly big writers among the majority I've never heard of. So it was a bit disappointing that most of the tales were distinctly mediocre. Hopefully the last time this year that I'll spot the Puffin logo and feel embarrassed.

Faves: It's Neil Gaiman's one, obviously.

Worsties: Paul McGann's Doctor may only have that one lacklustre episode to his name, but it seems Alex Scarrow didn't even watch that.

Various, Dora the Explorer: Dora's Storytime Collection

More age-appropriate novelisations than the Pony and Pokemon ones, and more tediously repetitive as a result. The Spanish guide is genuinely useful though.

Various, Dorling Kindersley dinosaur books

Read 1992-95

***

Various, The EC Archives: Tales from the Crypt, Vol. 2

Read 2015

****

I skipped over the supposedly shaky first collection of reprints of this classic, influential and infamous 50s horror comic to get straight to the juicy stuff, and I wasn't disappointed. Reading these originals after having already watched all the HBO adaptations like a philistine, it's interesting to see how these simplistic tales for kids (sinister kids admittedly) were warped for a mature audience. They basically just added boobs and cussing. All the relentless puns and ruthless gore were there already, with most stories building up to the money shot of some rotting corpse or other with his flesh and eyeballs all hanging off. It's the sort of thing I never tired of doodling in margins all the way through school, I just wish I'd read these 20 years earlier.

Faves: 'Last Respects!', 'Bargain in Death!,' 'The Ventriloquist's Dummy!'

Worsties: The ones about rape potions are tasteless in a less good way.

Various, First Stories: Cinderella / Little Red Riding Hood / Hansel and Gretel / The Little Mermaid / Puss in Boots / Three Billy Goats Gruff / Mulan

Read 2022-23

Slider-jazzed plot summaries. I really hope these aren't any poor sods' main versions.

Various, First Time Learning: Reading / First Writing / Early Maths / Numbers

***

"Teach me, Daddy," she chorused as I cautiously turned to each new vowel sound. She was noticeably more engaged with the reading and writing ones, chip off the old block.

Various, Five Favourite Bedtime Tales

Read 2021-22

***

An inferior, wordier supplement to her Usborne equivalents contributing a few more fairy tales with no overlap, since it's good to have your own default definitive versions of these things.

Various, The Flamingo Anthology of Fantastic Literature: Black Water

Read 2013–14

*****

Thick anthologies of strange stories were good travelling companions on long bus journeys, but this was the best one I read, bought in a second-hand bookshop in Sydney. It hung around when I stopped travelling, until it became a practical casualty of emigration.

Various, Follow Me: Finger Mazes / Around the World / Santa / Follow My Heart / Follow the Bunny / Farm

****

Her introduction to mazes, she's less interested in the sub-Where's Wally sub-game.

Various, Four Color Fear: Forgotten Horror Comics of the 1950s

Read 2016

***

As entertaining as the schlockiest vintage horror comics are, wading through boxes of cheap Tales from the Crypt knock-offs would be an arduous task that Greg Sadowski has graciously done for us in this extensive anthology of the "best" of non-EC PD (bloody hell, how bad was the stuff that didn't make it?)

Most of these tales are the same old thing about myriad monsters infiltrating everyday '50s life, but the most entertaining ones veer into more bizarre areas where the mainstream publications were too afraid to venture (because they wanted readers).

Faves: 'The Corpse That Came to Dinner,' 'Death Deals a Hand,' 'The Wall of Flesh.'

Worsties: 'Servants of the Tomb,' 'Mother Mongoose's Nursery Crimes,' 'Vision of the Gods.'

Various, Ganymede & Titan Presents The Garbage Pod: A Collection of Red Dwarf Fan Writing 2003-2011

Read 2019

****

This anthology of assorted articles on the classic sci-fi sitcom proves that's it's a bit deeper than you probably think it is, made more persuasive through swearing. This was the vanity project that inspired me to publish my own pointless ebooks of blogs years ago, except this one's actually worth reading. If you like Red Dwarf and that.

Faves: Seb Patrick on dreams, John Hoare and Ian Symes on series VI-VIII, Top Ten Episodes.

Worsties: The Smeg List, The Insult List.

Various, The Ghouls

Read 2011

**

I haven't seen all the de facto "classic" films that were adapted from these de facto "classic" tales, sometimes ad nauseam. But when it comes to iconic monsters, it's usually the striking visuals that made them that way. Why else is this being presented that way around?

Various, Hell Season

It hadn't clicked what guro meant when I checked out what I imagined to be a more standard horror manga, but once I realised what was going on, I had to see how far these freaks would push it. Pretty far, it turns out. I hope they're on some kind of government list.

Various, Hellblazer #1-100ish

Read 2007–08

****

The longest comic series I've stuck with, this infernal serial was good company until ennui set in during the lacklustre Paul Jenkins era. Time and gin (I was drinking relevantly along) mean I'd struggle to rate all the nuanced paperback collections against each other until I do a re-read, but Jamie Delano was good and Garth Ennis was great.

Various, Hubble: A Journey Through Space and Time

****

A greatest hits of desktop backgrounds that's nice to have, even if some like the Ultra Deep Field are best served by a screen (preferably IMAX). Also a nice pictorial supplement when I get around to reading Carl Sagan again.

Various, The Hutchinson Treasury of Children's Literature

Read 2021-

*****

Even if most of it goes unread, there's enough decent stuff in this bumper sampler of nursery rhymes, picture books and bedtime tasters of classics, handily organised by age appropriateness. It should hopefully have a very long bedside-table-life.

Various, The Hutchinson Treasury of Stories to Read Aloud

Read 2022-

*****

This unfairly generous and unabridged anthology came along at the right time and certainly saved on classic picture book purchases, even if her nostalgia will be a little cramped.

Various, Icons of England

Read 2019-20

****

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.

Various, Des Imagistes: An Anthology

Read 2019

***

Having only committed to memory those two Imagist poems every English graduate knows (not included), I was looking forward to a compilation of relentlessly laser-focused haikus describing a bit of wainscoting or something, but instead mainly got romantic Grecian odes spread across several pages at a time. Either I've misunderstood Imagism or half of the writers did.

Various, Indiana Jones Omnibus: The Further Adventures, Volume 1

***

A tasty lasagne of retro cheese covering vintage cheese. It was impossible to discern sincerity from sarcasm, even as Indy genocides and pillages ancient cultures to their face, but it was enjoyable nonsense regardless, particularly the enthusiastic and unnecessary narration. ("A foot now achieves what a hand could not...") ("A journey that is both grueling, invigorating, tedious and beautiful.")

Various, Inkshot 01

Read 2015

It seems Brazil doesn't have a thriving comics industry, but it isn't lacking passionate, variably talented writers and artists. Well, some of the artists are good, at least. This is the maddest and least coherent collection I've ever seen of anything, basically a demo tape showcasing the best of local indie talent to potential American employers, or as the curator himself puts it: "some kind of refugee boat or van full of illegal immigrants." That's thinking positive. You could have at least had a native English speaker give it a read-through first.

Faves: 'Vancini's Chronic Surrealism,' 'That Night in Pisa,' 'Caligari 3000.'

Worsties: 'The World Dies Screaming,' 'Rockets by Two,' 'Blessed Days of Indifference,' 'The Brief Story of Faraday Silva,' 'The 3 Mosquiteers,' '10 Reais,' 'Revenge Is a Dish Served Raw.'

Various, It Came from the North: An Anthology of Finnish Speculative Fiction

Read 2015

***

From the Kalevala to the Moomins, Finland has a rich vein in creepy weirdness that her modern writers don't seem to be tapping to its full potential, if this is the best they've got. Multi-author variety packs usually entropy towards averageness anyway, but this falls a little short. There are still a couple of great ones in here, but too many bad B-movies.

Faves: Leena Likitalo's 'Watcher,' Jyrki Vainonen's 'The Garden.'

Worsties: Anne Leinonen's 'White Threads,' Maarit Verronen's 'Delina.'

Various, Latin American Art of the 20th Century

Read 2015

***

I hadn't questioned the worth of Latin American art, but this book is determined to prove it anyway, taking a defensive stance by default. Unfortunately, by forever referring to influences from across the pond and desperately clinging to the part-Peruvian heredity of more famous Europeans, it doesn't really convince. I ended up in the same position I've been trying to avoid with Third World literature, perusing okay artists who haven't found their way into the canon but are at least "good for Latin America."

Faves: Goitia, Matta, Coronel.

Worsties: Madí is just shapes, and I still don't get Cubism.

Various, Life: 100 Photographs That Changed the World

Read 2015

****

This one's been hanging around for a long time, but every time I opened it out on the virtual coffee table, the general bleakness put me off. These aren't necessarily the '100 Best' or 'Most Famous' photos – the criteria is more vaguely specific than that – but they're mostly worthy and mainly debilitating. Something to check out if you feel like taking a long, hard look at your species, as long as you have the stomach for the horrors of war, executions, massacres, disease, famine and sport.

Various, The Mammoth Book of Classic Chillers

****

Enough obvious hits to justify the shelf space, but the curator is no magpie.

Faves: William Hope Hodgson's 'The Derelict,' Edgar Allan Poe's 'The Fall of the House of Usher,' W. W. Jacobs' 'The Monkey's Paw,' Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu's Carmilla, Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

Various, Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology

Read 2020

***

A vintage exhibition from inside the wave, this is more diverse and interesting than a modern retrospective would likely be, making time for Renaissance time travel and Gothic fantasies rather than being preoccupied with repetitive iconography. Bruce Sterling's commitment to showcasing more obscure works not widely anthologised elsewhere was considerate to ravenous readers of the time, but makes for a weaker legacy.

Faves: William Gibson's 'The Gernsback Continuum,' Greg Bear's 'Petra,' Paul Di Filippo's 'Stone Lives.'

Worsties: Tom Maddox's 'Snake-Eyes,' Rudy Rucker's 'Tales of Houdini,' John Shirley's 'Freezone.'

Various, Mr Blobby's Joke Book: Radio Times Readers' Favourite Blobby Jokes

Read 1996

*

I remembered it being unreadable, but hadn't paid attention to the background that rather than bother to come up with their own puns substituting pretty much any word with "blob," they let the British public do it for them, then sold it back to them for £2.99. Our family had the Blobbymania, from the pink lemonade to the crap Amiga game and doomed theme park, but this might have been the lowest point of the laughable franchise.

Various, illustrated by Gaby Hanson, My Favourite Nursery Rhymes

Read 2020, re-read 2020, 2021

***

The cheapest one on the shopping app with the nicest art, finding out it was a sturdy board book when it arrived was a bonus. Though a bit annoying that they rounded the page corners but didn't do the same to the sharp covers. And including deep cuts like 'Little Betty Blue' and 'I Love Little Pussy' stretches the definition of 'favourite' like a premature greatest hits album, it's not as if they'd run out.

Various, illustrated by Gaby Hanson, More Favourite Nursery Rhymes

Read 2020, re-read 2020, 2021

***

A noticeably darker sequel, with child abuse and ambiguous infanticide from the onset, this is the sort of thing most people would select at random in the pound shop, but I'd been after it for a while to help maintain the symmetry of my daughter's bookshelf and give her a headstart on the OCD.

Various, My Little Pony: Adventures in Friendship, Volume 1

***

Nice character-based compilations of some of the more obscure 'Pony comic ranges, even if the mean cloud in the Rainbow Dash story might have contributed to the young reader's night terror. Bad weather.

Various, My Little Pony: Passport to Reading – Ponyville Reading Adventures / Best Fillies Forever

Good-value omnibus of tedious reads, notable as her first independent reading without coercion, when she decided to tackle the welcoming word "No." Give it a few years and she'll have all the two-letter Scrabble words memorised.

Various, My Little Pony Storybook Collection

She likes how the 'Minty ponies' look more like her knock-off toys, and their simple escapades make for more suitable bedtime stories than the brony stuff.

Various, My Little Pony, Vol. 1: Big Horseshoes to Fill

The first time I've seen her get properly excited by fan service lore, outside of her own fanfic.

Various, My Little Pony, Vol. 3: Cookies, Conundrums and Crafts

***

The four-year-old reader identified the artist of one issue (another Amy) based on recognising her style. She insisted we read the Bloody Mare-y one despite my accurate protests that it would creep her out at bedtime.

Various, Mysteries

Read 2011

****

Compilations are a mixed bag by nature, but this generous assortment of lesser-known old-timey ghost stories and other weird tales tended towards the delightful. I can't actually remember what any of them were, so I'd get to enjoy them all over again if this mysteriously appeared in a drawer.

Various, No Sleep: The Creepiest Tales, Real Life Encounters, and Paranormal Experiences Contributed by the Reddit Community

***

Not a bad collection, and the less worthwhile posts are short and skimmable, but if you're going to copy and paste a bunch of favorite posts, why not share your whole archive? I should have kept my own.

Various, The Norton Anthology of Poetry: Fourth Edition

Read 2004-05

****

A bit of a boring and uselessly general thing to bring up retrospectively, obviously not everything in this heavy book is excellent, nor even most of it, but for its scope and quantity it would be a nice thing to have on the shelf. That is, if I hadn't reBayed my second-hand copy as soon as it had served its practical purpose, trading poncy poetry for food and basic needs.

Various, NoSleep Classics – 2011

***

One overachieving literary show-off before we get to more expected fare with Bloody Marys and shit.

Fave: 1000Vultures' 'Penpal,' marisunday's 'Jesus Camp'

Various, The Official Sonic the Hedgehog Yearbooks

More excitable guff for the nostalgic British Sonicmania time capsule, along with the early comic, the newspaper strips and the Ladybird books and similarly high quality. The unnecessary closed-caption translations of cool dude expressions was the best part.

Various, The Official Star Trek Fact Files

Read 1997-2000

****

I know it's not a book, but collecting this seemingly endless weekly series for some 200-odd issues (thanks, Mum), it has to be the most extensive work I've read. Shame I didn't find practical information about the real world as interesting as pretend stuff, but you never know when knowledge about self-sealing stem bolts and reverse-ratcheting routers will come in handy.

Various, The Owl and the Pussy-cat and Other Poems

Starts well with a few nonsense poems, then bulks out the majority of the thin volume with miscellaneous dullness.

Various, The Pied Piper of Hamelin and Other Classic Stories in Verse

****

Mini anthology of obvious but worthy rhymes, just missing 'The Raven.'

Fave: Robert Browning, 'The Pied Piper of Hamelin'

Various, Piracy, Vol. 1

Read 2015

***

One of EC's less enduring comic lines, even at four issues (of a total seven) there's not a lot of variety in these tales of violence and cruelty on the waves. You'd probably get a kick out of it if you enjoy fairly historically accurate nautical adventures, but you'd be disappointed if you were expecting swashbuckling cheese and supernatural shenanigans. I was really hoping for something along the lines of Tales of the Black Freighter, the comic-within-the-comic that's one of my favourite parts of Watchmen, but that's more a grim-80s extrapolation.

Faves: 'Sea Food,' 'The Sheba.'

Worsties: 'Pirate Master,' 'Inheritance.'

Various, The Pitchfork 500: Our Guide to the Greatest Songs from Punk to the Present

Read 2015

****

This wasn't released as an interactive, play-along book, but you can easily turn it into one if you possess an impressively eclectic music collection (not that Pitchfork has the broadest scope) or just download the illegal torrent someone made collecting all 500 songs, which taught me a thing or two back in my data entry days. If you're not listening along, or don't have the requisite background knowledge, I don't imagine you'll get much out of the reviewers' imaginative interpretations of what various kids with guitars sound like. It's an insightful history of the evolution of specific genres over an arbitrary time period, but you'll still be annoyed at what they left out.

Faves: Gloomy 80s, but there's not enough of it.

Worsties: I don't want to say in case it sounds racist. But it's not music, is it? It's just aggressive talking.

Various, Planet of the Apes: The Original Topps Trading Card Series

***

Sparse trivia accompanying repetitive imagery, especially when it gets to the TV series, but I love that these paltry exhibitions exist for those who really care.

Various, Point Horror: 13 More Tales of Horror

Read 1996-97

****

A strong anthology of atmospheric creepers. I got the other two books in the series a few months later, which statistically must surely have been around the same level of quality, but I couldn't get into them. All my attention suddenly being diverted to a particular science fiction franchise won't have helped.

Various, The Puffin Baby and Toddler Treasury

****

I could have saved time and shelf space if I'd found this quality assortment before buying nursery rhymes, fairy tales and picture books separately, but she's already so attached to her versions that most of this is redundant now. Interspersing short rhymes between classic tales, licensed characters and even the blooming Snowman, it's like a great Pre-CBeebies line-up.

Various, The Puffin Book of Horror Stories

Read 2015

**

Following the same thought process that brought us Crime Traveller, Horowitz noticed that his name sounds a bit like "horror" and that qualified him to curate this rather shoddy collection. The classics are okay – there's an extract from Dracula – but the more contemporary young adult entries are a bit pathetic. I can't deny I still enjoyed it though, and as it's only my second Puffin book of the year, I think I'm excused. Right, because Night Force was so heavy-going.

Faves: Roald Dahl, 'Man From The South' and Bram Stoker, 'Jonathan Harker's Journal.'

Worsties: Stephen King, 'Battleground' and Kenneth Ireland, 'The Werewolf Mask.'

Various, Quantum Leap

Read 2020

****

Wholesome sci-fi that doesn't shy away from heavy themes like bigotry and child abuse, this also might be the most authentic TV to comic adaptation I've seen. Most of these would have made decent episodes, even if they're really rushed at 24 pages or less. Apart from that crazy last one, anyway. Oh, boy!

Various, Read with Oxford: Stage 1 – Biff, Chip and Kipper – Dad's Birthday / Silly Races and Other Stories

***

She often chooses these reading and phonics activities over proper bedtime stories. What's wrong with this kid?

Various, Read with Oxford: Stage 1 – Non-fiction – Animals and Us

***

Borrowed from the library for her own good, despite her protests. She came around when she saw the squirming baby rats.

Various, Read with Oxford: Stage 1 – Phonics – Sam's Backpack and Other Stories

So it looks like she can read now. Good job.

Various, Read with Oxford: Stage 1 – Phonics – The Town Mouse and Country Mouse and Other Tales

She only bothers when there are ponies involved.

Various, Read with Oxford: Stage 2 – Non-fiction – Our Wonderful World

***

These reliably teach me a thing or two. Aren't goats' eyes weird?

Various, The Real Ghostbusters Annual 1990

Read 1989

****

Better than the anglicised Turtles stories tended to be, though they would be if they're just ripping off Doctor Who. It was a while before I could read this myself, but I mainly got the gist from the pictures, even if some of those were "unfinished" and needed colouring in (neon-pink felt tip being the natural choice for caucasian skin tones).

Various, Red Dwarf Smegazine

Read 2000, re-read 2017

***

Ranking the Red Dwarf Smegazine strips

Various, Red Dwarf: The Roleplaying Game

Read 2015

I never joined in with the roleplaying or table-top wargaming at high school. It all seemed much too social. But I've always enjoyed taking a look at the reference materials, with their fine-tuned worlds, exquisite artwork and incomprehensible charts. This one has the charts, but it's otherwise not the sort of thing you'd read for pleasure unless you're a recovering Red Dwarf obsessive who hasn't done so yet and who has the emotional resilience to withstand the worst type of fan fiction. You wouldn't actually want to play it, though it's not bad as a creative project. Apart from some bizarre racism.

Various, Red Dwarf: The Roleplaying Game – Series Sourcebook

****

One of the quirkiest episode guides out there, this is really an ambitious (sometimes overly so) mission in opening up every episode of the series thus made into a practically playable module. It has some useful pointers for the rapidly-approaching day when I run out of ideas and start awkwardly forcing Red Dwarf into my five-year-old's junior RPG. She may recognise some of them from bedtime stories.

Various, Ripley's Believe It or Not!: Strange Coincidences

Read 1996

****

When you're browsing a gift shop under time pressure, you only have a moment to choose the sole, affordable souvenir that will stay on your bookshelf for the rest of your childhood. I was impressed that my brother chose something unconventional and interesting that I enjoyed dipping in and out of, rather than a book about the world's stickiest bogies or something. I've only just considered that some of these might have been made up.

Various, Ripley's Believe It or Not!: Odd Places

Read 2020

***

Most of these aren't particularly odd nor difficult to believe, especially in the age of 'mysterious' YouTube spam channels, and even the ones that are interesting are liable to be dubious and outdated. But don't let that stop you from sharing. Just make sure you begin each amazing anecdote about a realistically tall lighthouse with the phrase "Believe it or not..."

Various, The Science Fictional Dinosaur

Read 2019

***

Obscure picks from some big-name authors, most of these scientific dragon tales take a more serious and speculative approach than your Edgar Rice Burroughses, but some of them are still pretty dumb.

Faves: Frederick D. Gottfried's 'Hermes to the Ages,' Robert Silverberg's 'Our Lady of the Sauropods.'

Worsties: Robert F. Young's 'When Time Was New,' Isaac Asimov's 'Day of the Hunters.'

Various, Seasons of War: Tales from a Time War

Read 2015

***

This unofficial charity anthology of Doctor Who stories takes the interesting approach/gimmick of focussing entirely on the little-seen John Hurt incarnation of the Doctor and his almost-entirely-unseen, metaphorically-alluded-to machinations in the unfilmable Time War. When it comes to extracurricular Who excursions, it's these obscure recesses of the canon that have the most appeal for me, rather than sub-par adventures with familiar characters who annoyingly don't sound like they do on TV, and I commend the gaggle of 30-ish amateur and established writers for having a crack at it. There are a few good 'uns, and as it's for a good cause, there's no point being too harsh on the rest.

Faves: 'The Holdover,' 'The Thief of All Ways.'

Worsties: 'Everything in Its Right Place,' 'Climbing the Mountain.'

Various, Sonic the Comic

Read 1994–2000, re-read 2011, 2016

****

While I was supposed to be enjoying a tropical island, I discovered a nostalgic forum devoted to this childhood favourite and lost a couple of days reading colourful adaptations of ancient Sega games instead of taking day trips. Don't tell me how to live my life.

Various, Star Trek and Sacred Ground: Explorations of Star Trek, Religion, and American Culture

Read 2006

****

Star Trek's political, racial and sexual allegories are all ripe for frivolous academic scrutiny, but I found this collection of essays a lot more interesting, putting Roddenberry's didactic atheism in context and exploring how the spin-offs have lightened up on that front since he shuffled off his mortal coil and went to no afterlife. This theme ended up forming about a fifth of my whistlestop essay, but it probably should have been the whole thing.

Various, Star Trek Annual 1983: "The Wrath of Khan"

Read 2020

British 'Trek Annuals reprinting shitty Gold Key comics were a staple of speccy seventies Christmas stockings, culminating in a more timely reprint of Marvel's adaptation of the first film at the end of the decade. I don't know whether the publisher knew there wasn't going to be a similar adaptation this time around when they reserved the slot, but it's unlikely they cared about the Genesis-style wave of disappointment rippling across the British Isles on Christmas Day when Wrath of Khan content proved to be no more than a couple of publicity shots in favour of more shitty Gold Key comics and worse home-grown puzzle pages. Those speech marks were telling in hindsight.

Various, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine comics

Read 2018

***

Ranking the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine comics

Various, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine – Prophecy and Change

****

It's slightly bizarre that I didn't get around to this 10th anniversary anthology celebrating one of my favourite series until the other side of the 30th, but I was always lazy with the expanded universe. It satisfied the spec, filling some gaps interestingly if not necessarily.

Faves: Michael A. Martin and Andy Mangels' 'The Orb of Opportunity' (Nog story), Heather Jarman's 'The Devil You Know' (Dax story), Andrew J. Robinson's 'The Calling' (Garak story)

Various, Star Trek: The Further Adventures of the Starship Enterprise!

Read 2020

****

A race evolves beyond linear time, the Loch Ness monster attacks the Enterprise and Rand marries a pyramid of pure thought-energy. I don't know whether this trio of trippy tales represents the best of Marvel Star Trek, but they were more interesting than the average DC. Though that's partly the novelty of discovering a fairly obscure recess of the expanded universe I hadn't even known existed.

Fave: 'Tomorrow or Yesterday'

Various, Star Trek Graphic Novel Collection: Dreamworld

***

Further alternate universe voyages aboard Kirk's Excelsior and Spock's Surak, with more conventional eras mixed in along the way.

Various, Star Trek Graphic Novel Collection: The Secret of the Lost Orb

Read 2018

***

Novel ideas are getting thin on the ground as Malibu Deep Space Nine approaches the frankly deserved end. The only one of this batch that doesn't rely on recurring characters and repetitive themes, from Ro Laren to not-Tribbles, is a generic Roddenberryesque fable that feels like it's in the wrong iteration of his franchise.

Various, Star Trek Graphic Novel Collection: Sole Asylum

Read 2018

**

The first Deep Space Nine comic ends on a bunch of unnecessary sequels to better stories from the telly, though the final issue's similarity to an episode that only broadcast the previous month is to its credit. It then squanders that goodwill by boiling down to another evil madman being thwarted in his nefarious scheme, much like a TNG film.

Various, Star Trek: The Next Generation Annual 1992

Read 2020

***

Thunderbirds was my scene at the time this scrapbook of American things was compiled for nerdy British kids (though I was mysteriously gifted a 1701-D bubble bath at some point; my destiny was predictable). The comic feature is a random but decent pick from the DC run, the rest being in-universe and behind-the-scenes features mercifully provided by Starlog's TNG magazine rather than letting home-grown writers pad it out with the usual generic puzzles and an unappealing board game in seeming contempt for their audience.

Various, Star Trek: The Next Generation – Enemy Unseen

The old DC comics were rarely much good, but at least they captured the spirit of the times. I read a couple of these retrospective Wildstorm comics at the time before giving up due to lack of interest, only to pick them up again a couple of decades on for the sake of pointless closure or something. They got worse.

Various, The Star Trek Script Books, Book One: The Q Chronicles – The Q Scripts

Read 1999

**

Q bagged more than his fair share of the best episodes, but I don't know why you'd want to read them in unembellished screenplay form rather than watching them. Are you staging an amateur production of Tapestry or something?

Various, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, Vol. 1-10

Read 2017

***

Ranking (the "best" of) the Star Trek: Strange New Worlds stories

Various, The Star Wars Album

Read 2020

****

I'll always take a flimsy time capsule over a definitive retrospective, and this stocking fodder captures a brief moment in time when the 'Droids were considered the breakout stars and Star Wars was primarily celebrated as a successful amalgamation of cinematic styles, rather than sweeping those out of memory to become the new default. This slim guide satisfyingly spends longer than is really sensible exploring those influences, from Flash and Buck to Laurel and Hardy, so there's only time for a skimming overview of the production after the mandatory film synopsis, interesting itself for the alternate dialogue. It doesn't get into Joseph Campbell or Freudian symbolism, but they needed some space for photos.

Various, Stories from Rainbow

Read 1988

****

I'd grown out of the TV series that this was only tangentially connected to by the time I was able to read these stories myself, but it was a nice selection. I liked the one with the cow, the pig and the tunnel and the one with the cross-section of the block of flats best, even if I hadn't grasped perspective yet, so was confused by the sudden, unexplained appearance of a giant mouse at the end.

Various, Strange Tales

***

Experience tonal whiplash as extreme autocannibalism leads into dull romance. Something for everyone, but not a lot for the individual.

Faves: Anne-Sylvie Salzman's 'Meannanaich,' Adam Dafy's 'The Self-Eater,' Nina Allan's 'Terminus'

Various, Strange Tales V

***

Nicely varied interpretations of the broad brief, from creaky horror to sci-fi and even a wholesome fairy tale.

Faves: Elise Forier Edie's 'You-Go-Back,' David Rix's 'Henge,' Yarrow Paisley's 'Mary Alice in the Mirror'

Various, Tick-Tock Clock Book / My First Clock Book

Learning the clock was a particularly troubled home learning memory, so I'm just easing her in with the o'clocks for now.

Various, The Time Traveller's Almanac

Read 2015

****

Not all of the 65 stories contained herein are classics of the sub-genre. It's weird that they left so many out. The categorisation of stories into four types is sometimes awkward and meaningless. But it's still the indulgent bumper book of time travel stories it promises to be, and I can't not love that.

Faves: 'The Most Important Thing in the World,' The Time Machine (excerpt), 'A Sound of Thunder,' 'Alexia and Graham Bell,' 'Is There Anybody There?,' 'The Weed of Time,' 'The Waitabits,' 'Red Letter Day,' 'In the Tube.'

Worsties: The original essays are a bit of a waste of time.

Various, Twilight Zone: 19 Original Stories on the 50th Anniversary

Read 2019

****

This good-value anthology of authentic homages and smart-arse subversions was a fitting anniversary tribute to the classic series and better than some of the TV revivals... of The Twilight Zone.

Faves: Deborah Chester's 'The Street That Forgot Time,' R. L. Stine's 'The Wrong Room,' John Miller's 'Your Last Breath, Inc.'

Worsties: Lucia St. Clair Robson's 'A Chance of a Ghost,' Robert J. Serling's 'Ghost Writer,' Jim DeFelice's 'The Soldier He Needed to Be.'

Various, Unexplainable Happenings: Chilling True Stories, Volumes 1–5

****

Mostly explainable, most probably made up, but it's nice to get a set that isn't just recycled Reddit content, though each individual volume's stingily slim.

Various, Usborne Illustrated Stories for Children

****

I couldn't resist the budget quantity. We've found at least a few worth reading.

Various, Usborne Stories for Little Children

Read 2021-22

****

A compilation of their pointlessly segregated Little Boys & Girls books (I don't want to break it to her that she's not supposed to find the Gingerbread Man fun), this proved to be the follow-up to their Fairy Tales book we'd been waiting for. It doesn't have flaps, but she makes it an interactive experience anyway, mainly pretending to eat and share around all the food while a narrative drones on in the background.

Various, The Walker Book of Bear Stories

Read 2020-21

***

You can imagine how self-satisfied I felt when I spotted that this collection included We're Going on a Bear Hunt and loads of other stuff for the same price you'd pay for that picture book alone. Suckers! Sure, your child might actually enjoy having the story read to them when it isn't squashed into unappealing panels that I initially mistook for a continuation of the contents page, but you can't argue with the value. Now shut up and eat your supermarket own-brand multipack crisps.

Various, The Weetabix Wonderword Illustrated Oxford Dictionary & The Weetabix Oxford Illustrated Book of Facts

Read 1991-95

****

The main general reference materials I had in my pre-internet childhood, if these really came free with Weetabix tokens (probably with some extra contribution) they were good value. My primary school didn't give homework, so I only needed to rely on them academically when made to write an essay on 'why we should look after animals' after I got caught scaring a cat.

Various, Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?: The Bumper Quiz Book

****

A decent adaptation (provide your own friend and dramatic stings) that gives you a more realistic idea of your capabilities than nodding along with the telly.

Various, The World Treasury of Science Fiction

****

Many dubious selections, but enough hits to make it a weighty keeper unless a better one comes along.

Faves: J. G. Ballard's 'Chronopolis,' Arthur C. Clarke's 'A Meeting with Medusa,' Gene Wolfe's 'The Fifth Head of Cerberus,' Alfred Bester's 'The Men Who Murdered Mohammed,' Damon Knight's 'Stranger Station.'

Various, The X-Files: Trust No One

Read 2020

***

These retrospective fanfics from professional writers meet the bare minimum requirement of being credible cases, but only a few are as entertaining as the average episode. Small-town sheriff's departments, missing teens and ambiguous monsters feature appropriately heavily and there are even a couple of Skinner stories when the fictional Mulder and Scully are busy, but I wouldn't say this project was really worth the effort of putting together. But enough about the TV revival!!!!!1

Fave: Kevin J. Anderson's 'Statues'

Various, The X-Files: The Truth Is Out There

Read 2020

***

They used up the better-known authors on the first batch, though I'm not sure whether the average quality was really lower here or I'd just reached my fanfic limit. A couple stood out for being traditional X-Files done nicely, another for being desperately meta in a way I reliably enjoy regardless, and another would have gone down in infamy if they'd actually made it. Most would have been instantly forgotten. It's only mildly distressing that the generic titles of these anthologies are in the reverse order of the '90s companion books.

Fave: Kendare Blake's 'Heart'

Various, The X-Files: Secret Agendas

Read 2020

***

Probably the best or at least most consistent of these anthologies, alternating light and dark entries, tastefully incorporating more mythology elements and with better characterisation, especially for Scully. Titles like 'Perithecia,' 'Stryzga' and 'Kanashibari' are as authentically X-Files as the time stamps.

Fave: Jade Shames' 'Give Up the Ghost'

Brian K. Vaughan, Pia Guerra, Goran Sudžuka and Paul Chadwick, Y: The Last Man

Read 2008

***

An interesting exploration of gender genocide, though it would've been better as a miniseries. Or maybe I should've quit when the characters started to get on my nerves, but then I wouldn't have known how it ended... I can't remember now.

Mark Cotta Vaz, Tales of the Dark Knight: Batman's First Fifty Years

Read 2019

***

An insightful illustrated history of the Caped Crusader (as he's less coolly known), this equipped me with all the context I needed on the brand's influences and evolution as far as I'm interested in that. Since it's fandom writing, our historian can't help letting his own real-ale prejudices shine through regarding proper Batman, because some eras are just too silly to be objective about.

Elizabeth Verdick and Marieka Heinlen, Teeth Are Not for Biting

She only did it once, but now never will again, such is the power of book.

Mark Verheiden, Mark A. Nelson, Den Beauvais, Sam Kieth, John Arcudi and Tony Akins, Aliens Omnibus, Vol. 1

Read 2015

**

While I wouldn't go near a trashy comic based on the Aliens franchise published today, stepping back in time to when the films were still fresh and putting myself in the saliva-spattered shoes of hungry fans was somehow appealing. My disappointment wasn't so much with the predictably unremarkable stories as with the integrity of the reprinting, which, in a pathetic attempt to stay plausibly canon after Alien 3 coldly killed off a couple of characters they'd been using, retroactively renamed these characters to pretend they weren't the characters they clearly were, just a couple of new characters who'd been through remarkably similar events to another couple of characters in that universe. I may be 30 years old and reading Aliens comics from 25 years ago, but don't treat me like an idiot.

Faves: Nightmare Asylum (nice art).

Worsties: 'Theory of Alien Propagation,' 'The Alien.'

Jules Verne, Five Weeks in a Balloon, or, Journeys and Discoveries in Africa by Three Englishmen

Read 2015

**

There are two major reasons why this early scientific romance isn't so frequently adapted for film, cheap miniseries, Willy Fogg animated escapades and Star Trek alumni audio dramatisations as Verne's more famous works. Firstly, a balloon flight over Africa doesn't spark the imagination in quite the same way as a trip around the entire world or a subterranean dinosaur odyssey. Secondly, I know it was a different time and culture, but zut alors monsieur Verne! You even make my Nana look cosmopolitan.

Jules Verne, A Journey to the Centre of the Earth (a.k.a. A Journey to the Interior of the Earth)

Read 2019

****

I'd listened to a radio drama and seen the Willy Fogg adaptation, but glad I finally got around to this certified adventure classic. Verne's enthusiasm for elementary science and travel is infectious, before they head underground and things get enjoyably silly.

Jules Verne, Around the World in Eighty Days

Read 2014

***

I enjoyed listening to many of Verne's Extraordinary Voyages on my own slightly less adventurous travels, but most of them were through the medium of Leonard Nimoy and John de Lancie's Alien Voices dramatisations. This was the first one I read (listened to) in the original (translated) form, and it was nicely episodic, even if I couldn't get Holmes and Watson out of my head, as ever. At least I wasn't thinking of anthropomorphic animals.

Jules Verne, The Mysterious Island

Read 2015

****

Another exhilarating voyage extraordinaire, I hadn't seen/heard any adaptations of this one before (unless you count Lost, in which all the exact same things happen but with added magic and angst). The page count would be no obstacle to fitting it all into a film, since most of it's just the author's survival tips and detailed explanations of balloon mechanics, geology, taxonomy, chemistry and all the other education he's decided you need to appreciate the plot. It's not professional or polite to posthumously diagnose psychological disorders in writers, but I call Asperger's.

Jules Verne, Master of the World

Read 2015

****

A rip-roaring, flawless adventure until the second half when our noble hero is taken prisoner and it becomes depressing for a while, this was one of the last books J. V. wrote and feels like a tried-and-tested best-of. There's an expedition up a volcano, a madman terrorising the world with advanced technology, planes, submarines and superfast automobiles, shootouts, spies, a little subtle American baiting and frequent encyclopaedic digressions interrupting the action to give us too much information about geography.

Elisabeth Vincentelli, Abba Gold: Greatest Hits

Read 2020

**

- "What's your favourite Abba album, then?"
- "Tough one. I think I'd have to say 'The Best of Abba.'"

Even when trying to put aside the superlative Partridging, this doesn't convince in its case for the greatest hits package as artistic statement when she has to rearrange the tracks to make a meaningful narrative and talks more about the reactions than the music.

Rizwan Virk, The Simulation Hypothesis: An MIT Computer Scientist Shows Why AI, Quantum Physics and Eastern Mystics Agree We Are in a Video Game

Read 2019

***

All things you've probably heard before, recapped and juxtaposed to make a case that's as flimsy as it is statistically almost certain. The first half blinds with science before he brings in ancient and new age mysticism that coincidentally shares similar ideas. He's not the most charismatic science writer, but I've read all the Brian Greenes already and Carl Sagan's dead. Or reincarnated/respawned, whatever.

Viz, Viz Comic: The Big Hard One – Best of Issues 1 to 12

Read 2019

***

I've been hearing that Viz used to be better and how I was missing out ever since school, so let's put that to the fucking test, shall we? These early issues are as hit and miss as I'm used to, and are mainly interesting as historical artefacts of Chris Donald's DIY record label tie-in outgrowing its niche local audience and breaking into the mainstream. Early adventures with Ted Dempster, Pathetic Sharks and the satirical social saga of Skinheed are a bit of a slog, but Biffa, Billy, Johnny, Roger and Sid are all there by the end, doing their joke.

Viz, Viz Comic: The Big Hard Number Two – A Compilation of Issues 13 to 18

Read 2019

***

This is proper Viz now, but I still wasn't feeling it. Some of the pisstake features and letters are funny, but those same couple of jokes start to grate after a while. There was a point early on when a triple whammy of scatalogical, silly and downright weird strips made me lose it, but other times I felt I'd be more entertained by an actual kid's comic.

Viz, Viz Comic: The Big Pink Stiff One

Read 2020

****

"Matured" would be a completely inappropriate choice of phrase, but the DIY 'zine has established a professional pisstake production line as it enters the second half of the '80s, though still with plenty of typos keeping it real. Newcomers Buster Gonad, Terry Fuckwitt, Finbarr Saunders and Mrs Brady would provide handy repeatable formulae, supplemented by an endless parade of less enduring characters with names like Davy McGraw and His Unbelievable Magic Door and Raymond Porter and His Bucket of Water. Like all the inane features, a lot of this is funnier in theory than execution, but they still have to fill the page after they've got the laugh.

Viz, Viz: The Dog's Bollocks – The Best of Issues 26 to 31

Read 2020

***

Now I remember why I stopped reading these. The perpetual repetition is part of the joke, but it's a slog when you're reading a year's worth of strips back to back. By this point, it was only the (seeming) one-off strips that kept me going, the more pointless the better – Hugh Phamism, Jelly Head, Rubber Johnny, Norman's Knob, Careless McKenzie, Suicidal Syd, Luke O'Like, Dai O'Rea, Captain Magnetic ('He Doesn't Attract Ferrous Metals At All!'), Clarence Coxes ('He Puts Used Matches Back in the Boxes'), etc etc.

Fave: Hooray Henry

Viz, Viz: The Spunky Parts – Yet Another Compilation Annual of Issues 32 to 37

****

The romantic photo stories are getting better and the increasingly over-the-top violence and gore would have been hilarious when I was 12. Most of the old timers are boring by now, and the relentless royal features completely tedious, but The Fat Slags inject some fresh, high-cholesterol blood and the Billy the Fish saga becomes almost unironically gripping.

Faves: Billy the Fish, The Fat Slags

Viz, Viz: The Sausage Sandwich – Stuffed with the meat of issues 38 to 42

***

There must be a golden age somewhere, they can't just put out the same old faintly amusing shit forever. Surely?

Faves: Zip O' Lightning, Holey Joe, Clumsy Claude.

Viz, The Viz Bumper Book of Shite for Older Boys and Girls

Read 2018

**

Viz has probably made me laugh more than anything else in print, but I always optimistically forget how low the hit rate is. It's worse than ever in this Ripping Yarns-style special, which lacks the curated quality and quantity of the regular comic annuals by presenting bespoke weird content.

Most of the stories are longer, duller and more outlandish than the norm, sending characters to space or flashing back to their teens, and the mock educational articles in-between are a complete waste of time. The sole story that tickled me was Jack Black and His Dog Silver foiling a wallpaper counterfeiting ring, that earned a star.

Viz, The Viz Book of Crap Jokes / More Viz Crap Jokes

Read 1999

****

Between us, my friend Simon and I had the crap canon covered. He probably didn't buy the book for himself though.

Viz, The Council Gritter

Read 2015

****

My experience of pre-2000s Viz is limited to intentionally Crap Jokes and an absolutely appalling Amiga game, so I have the advantage over long-term readers of not remembering how it used to be better. These collected comics are from 2006-8ish, and there does seem to be a bit of a decline even from the few years since I was reading them at high school... though of course that could just be because I was in high school. It's mainly the topical satire and celebrity stuff that's dated badly, the regular characters are still thankfully trapped in their violent 1960s Geordie Beano parody world where they belong.

Faves: Biffa Bacon, Terry Fuckwitt, Letterbocks.

Worsties: Raffles the Gentleman Thug, Billy the Fish, anything with Bin Laden.

Michael Vogel and Amy Mebberson, My Little Pony: Goodnight, Baby Flurry Heart

***

An original 'Pony book, this works much better than condensed TV episodes, and it's been a big hit. It'd work as a bedtime story even if you weren't familiar with the toys characters, but know what you're getting into.

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Player Piano

Read 2018

***

Vonnegut's early short stories didn't stand out to me, and since I've never come across any impromptu praise for his isolated debut novel, it's stayed on the virtual shelf for a decade or so.

It's not completely featureless, but it's more Philip K. Dick than the fully-formed Vonnegut of The Sirens of Titan. Its requiem for honest labour in the face of automation remains current; the sexual politics and retro technology less so.

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., The Sirens of Titan

Read 2013

****

Not his most accomplished work, but I enjoyed its freeform, scatterbrained pulp feel. A full Vonnegut re-read would be an enlightening experience to connect the dots, but it's been over a decade and I haven't even finished the first round yet.

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Mother Night

Read 2013

****

One for the pile of books I admired but wouldn't want to put myself through again, Wikipedia's categorisation of "dark humour, metafiction" makes it sound a lot more whimsical than I remember the experience being. Even if it's pretend, we can learn a lot from it, and the narrator helpfully flags up the various lessons as they occur to him.

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Cat's Cradle

Read 2008, re-read 2014

****

For some reason, I remembered this being noticeably on the short side. Maybe it just flies past. A classic of apocalyptic anthropology with plenty to untangle, I could give it another spin.

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, or Pearls Before Swine

Read 2020

***

Vonnegut's feel-good novel, despite the customary tragedy and pervading cynicism, it was quite a pleasant, knowingly naive fable, but I preferred the summaries of bad Kilgore Trout books along the way.

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death

Read 2008

*****

There aren't too many certified Great Novels that I really get, but this is one of the stand-outs. Simultaneously fun and harrowing, and generally disorienting, it directly inspired the best episodes of Lost and Star Trek: TNG, which isn't a bad legacy.

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Breakfast of Champions, or Goodbye Blue Monday

Read 2014

***

Not as enjoyable as his less grounded works, but its world-weary and delirious protagonists were pleasant company. I missed out on Vonnegut's doodles in the audiobook version, but the narrator was fittingly old and cranky, at least.

Kurt Vonnegut, Slapstick, or Lonesome No More!

Read 2011

****

An awkward melting pot of sincere family values and ridiculous satire, this seems to be one of his least liked novels, but it's one of my favourites of the half I've read. I'm a sucker for a vast Gothic setting.

Kurt Vonnegut, Jailbird

Read 2020

**

Tied with Bluebeard as his blandest and least idiosyncratic novels, this would get a boost if I was more interested in socialism or 1970s American politics. Alas.

Kurt Vonnegut, Deadeye Dick

Read 2020

****

I'm glad I didn't read a blurb, so I could enjoy the perspective shift when the nature of this self-described notorious murderer's crimes is revealed and it turns out this isn't edgy nihilism after all, but resigned despair. With recipes.

Kurt Vonnegut, Galápogos

Read 2014

***

He's written about the real-life horrors of Dresden and Hiroshima, but I found this satirical speculative evolution to be Vonnegut's most disturbing book, partly because he presents our devolution back into marine life as a good thing and partly because he might be right.

Kurt Vonnegut, Bluebeard, the Autobiography of Rabo Karabekian (1916–1988)

Read 2020

**

Reading about a real artist would have been more interesting and probably more entertaining, but these bibliographies won't complete themselves. More mature (i.e. boring) than the typical Vonnegut, I didn't get this one or care enough to try.

Kurt Vonnegut, Hocus Pocus, or What's the Hurry, Son?

Read 2020

***

Another fictional biography of a 20th century American that's too long to really hold my interest, coming at the end of my Vonnegut voyage didn't do it any favours, but I got on better with its teller than most.

Kurt Vonnegut, Timequake

Read 2018

***

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.

Kurt Vonnegut, Bagombo Snuff Box: Uncollected Short Fiction

Read 2010

***

Raised on episodic TV, I'm a great admirer of short stories, but Vonnegut's didn't stand out as anything special compared to his novels. Then again, this is the leftovers that didn't make it to the curated collections, so to be expected.

John Vornholt, Laurie S. Sutton and Leonard Kirk, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine – Shanghaied

Read 2018

***

The comics continue to predict future elements from the TV series, albeit in a more basic way and while getting Odo and Trills wrong. The first story is maybe the only light-hearted tale in the Malibu run that balances humour and peril well and doesn't come off as annoyingly childish, even if it's probably a bit too daft to have made a real episode.

John Vornholt based on the story by Ronald D. Moore and Brannon Braga, Star Trek: First Contact – A Special Young Adult Novelization

Read 1997

***

Seeing First Contact in the cinema is probably the closest thing I've had to a religious epiphany, and boy, did it radicalise me. This "young adult" (precocious child's) novelisation was probably the first Trek book I bought. While I mainly gazed at the photos in the long wait for the film to come out on video, the book captured the brisk pace of the film well, even if it amusingly sanitised the bullshits and hells ("I believe I speak for everyone here, sir, when I say... forget our orders.")

Michele Pariza Wacek, Love-Based Copywriting System: A Step-by-Step Process to Master Writing Copy That Attracts, Inspires and Invites

Read 2016

**

Clearly I wasn't too enamoured with this fluffy approach to evil content marketing.

The only note I took away was the second-hand wisdom that you can thwart procrastination by forcing an activity for 12 minutes, after which time you're already in the groove so might as well carry on.

Larry and Andy Wachowski and Geof Darrow, The Art of The Matrix

Read 2014

****

Shoving in the entire screenplay after the graphic novel storyboards and lush paintings we're here for adds minimal value for maximum price, but if you don't mind the cost, or just pirate these things anyway, it doesn't detract from one of the best film art tie-ins going.

Martin Waddell and Patrick Benson, Owl Babies

***

Abandoned babies learn to be self-reliant.

Martin Waddell and Sarah Fox-Davies, Snow Bears

Owl Babies if you prefer grizzlies.

Arthur Edward Waite, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot, Being Fragments of a Secret Tradition under the Veil of Divination

Read 2015

***

I don't feel compelled to give disclaimers when I read up on Jewish mysticism, demon lore or alien abduction encounters for entertainment and human interest, but I feel I have to do it here: I don't believe in this. But that doesn't mean I'm not allowed to appreciate some classic symbolic art and have the parts that don't conflict with Christian ideas explained to me in archaic-even-for-the-time vocabulary by a blustering authorial voice that I had to keep reminding myself wasn't a parody. This edition cheats a bit by including full colour prints like they wouldn't have been able to do back then. It doesn't smell authentically like a 105-year-old book either, unless your e-reader device happens to smell like that anyway.

Faves: The Hermit, naturally, and Death, predictably. Just keep telling yourself it means "change." That's what the woman said when she saw the look on your face. You only went in there for a laugh, it's not like you believe in this rubbish. I mean, it's the 21st century, right? Ha ha. Come on! Gulp.

Libby Walden and Jacqui Lee, This Is Owl

***

Ups the interactive ante without annoying sounds.

Rose Walker and Dawn Machell, Christmas Peek-a-Boo!

Not the most magical secular introduction, but she happily followed the actions. She already liked snowmen and reindeer, the rest didn't make much of an impression.

Adam Wallace and Alice Pescarin, If Your Best Friend Is a Unicorn

Laziest unicorn art ever.

Danny Wallace, Join Me: The True Story of a Man Who Started a Cult by Accident

Read 2019

*****

I found Dave Gorman's further japes disappointing after his endearingly stupid namesake odyssey, co-authored with Danny Wallace in its definitive book form. It turns out I'd been following the wrong branch. Starting out similarly juvenile and egocentric before randomly becoming meaningful and heartwarming eight chapters in, this is the worthy sequel I was waiting for. Danny's admirably frank about how much of a twat he is, but this never would have happened if he wasn't.

Danny Wallace, Yes Man

Read 2019

****

Picking up where Join Me left off, Danny's next monetisable stupid boy project is more calculated, cynical and self-absorbed than the kindness cult, but it gets funnier as it goes along and he gets ever deeper into completely unnecessary trouble. There's a smidgen of self-help in this comedy memoir, and I suppose I might have benefited if I'd read it at the time and took its gist to heart. Nah.

Danny Wallace, Friends Like These: My Worldwide Quest to Find My Best Childhood Friends, Knock on Their Doors, and Ask Them to Come Out and Play

Read 2019

***

The contrived scrapes were going to get stale sooner or later. This crisis of maturity is more relatable and less wacky, thus less entertaining.

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

Read 2019

***

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.

Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story

****

Like Poe doing Shakespeare. I couldn't pin down precisely how far this pioneering pastiche's tongue is meant to be jutting out to the side, but even if it's all sincere cheese, it's still a riveting classic that doesn't outstay its welcome.

David Walser and Jan Pieńkowski, Meg's Christmas

Not noticeably worse than the originals, apart from forgetting how to draw Owl's beak on occasion.

Stephen Walsh, Stravinsky: Oedipus Rex

Read 2020

*

I wasn't going to enjoy the opera anyway, and it's not the commentator's fault that it's apparently difficult to comprehend even if you do speak Latin, but his approach to explaining the work to non-opera listeners by comparing it to a Verdi opera wasn't very illuminating.

Marion Walter, The Magic Mirror Book (a.k.a. Make a Bigger Puddle, Make a Smaller Worm)

***

I knew I'd had some mirror book or other in early childhood, and there was no doubt it was this one when I saw some very familiar, cryptic and always slightly creepy half-illustrations towards the end. A bit odd that I don't remember the cover or any of the earlier pages, but I think we can work out what happened there.

Dave Warburton, Freelance Flaneur: Year One

My first pointless ebook, covering September 2010 to September 2011 in Italy, Greece, Israel, Egypt, Taiwan, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia and Singapore again (plus 20 minutes in Cambodia). It's almost entirely the same stuff you can already read here, but more annoying to navigate.

Dave Warburton, Freelance Flaneur: Year Two

My second pointless ebook, covering September 2011 to September 2012 in the Philippines, Borneo, Thailand, Cambodia, South Korea, Japan, Sri Lanka, China and Laos. Excitingly included exclusive unseen blogs for a couple of weeks before they went online anyway.

Dave Warburton, 1001 Books That I've Read

Read 2019

***

Piffling "reviews" (some as many as four words in length) of a seemingly totally random selection of books organised by author, all copy-pasted from a blog without the original context (if any) or cover images to look at, and only some finickity tweaking to make the pages square up. I don't know why I bothered. At least it's free.

Dave Warburton, 2001 Books That I've Read

****

The updated edition everyone's been waiting for, expanded with another year's worth of lightweight reading with lighter summaries and scraping the barrel to count more childhood books and other retro submissions not considered worth mentioning last time. Same time next year!

David Warburton, 1001 Books That My Preschooler Has Read: The Complete Babyliography 2020–24

*****

A parent's bored, compulsive catalogue of things he largely has no interest in, bizarrely reviewed from his own perspective rather than the child's, even though that's of no use to anyone.

Zoe Waring, Peek-a-Boo Baby: Miaow

It gets a point for the spelling, and it's nice to see some representation for hamsters, but it's a bit bizarre that a book featuring only five animals could only come up with identifiable sounds for three of them. She seemed to find the interactivity beneath her, but enjoyed the mechanical process of lifting flaps, as ever.

Penny Warner, Baby Play and Learn: 160 Games and Learning Activities for the First Three Years

Read 2020

***

Mostly obvious, infrequently dangerous and sometimes not technically games, but it's good to have lists. Sorted by approximate age with quick-reference illustrations when you're panicking to stave off boredom.

Penny Warner, Preschool Play and Learn: 150 Fun Games and Learning Activities for Preschoolers from Three to Six Years

I might check back each year, but it's all pretty arbitrary and obvious anyway, I'm sure it repeats some from the toddler book. They could have updated the ebook to not mention cassettes and things.

Ben Warren and artists, My Little Pony: Tails of Equestria – Judge Not by the Cover

****

A more idiosyncratic entry in the series, it's a good thing it was included in the bundle with Ogres & Oubliettes, since all those origami creature standees couldn't be easily reused elsewhere. It's a fun old-school ~~dungeon~~ library crawl with plenty of hidden chambers for their own sake and our first scuffles and actual peril thus far (not that you can die in this game), which were necessary reminders to put our special talents and quirks to use for once. Maybe we shouldn't have skipped that practice session after all.

Bryan Waterman, Television's Marquee Moon

Read 2020

****

Detailed build-up and breakdown of a classic album and interesting deconstruction of punk origin myths, even if he does makes the 'tell a vision' pun twice.

Jane Werner Watson, Mickey Mouse's Picnic

Boring story with bizarre vintage attitudes.

Robert N. Watson, Throne of Blood

Read 2020

***

A Shakespeare scholar explains why this is the best of the adaptations, and now that I understand the nature symbolism and meaningful framing that I still don't pick up on unassisted, he's probably right. All Kurosawa films should be issued with these things. Films generally.

D. P. Watt, The Ten Dictates of Alfred Tesseller

****

I have a feeling this morbid tour through Earth's inevitable ruins is probably more profound when the end is nigh, so I'll try to remember and hopefully there'll be time.

Fiona Watt and Stella Baggott, Baby's Very First Touchy-feely Colours Play Book

A couple of years late to be the first, having the set back then would have been nice. At this stage, it's just pretty pages to flick through and compulsively open flaps. She fell asleep in the buggy 10 minutes later, so wasn't up for anything demanding.

Fiona Watt and Stella Baggott, Baby's Very First Fingertrail Play Book Garden

***

Pretty and educational. Following snail trails is easier than mazes.

Fiona Watt and Stella Baggott, Baby's Very First Slide and See: Night Time / Things That Go / Unicorns

Read 2022-24

Barely any words, so I let her take care of it while I looked for proper books.

Fiona Watt and Stella Baggott, Baby's Very First Truck Book

There's not much to it. Get them a toy with wheels.

Fiona Watt and Rachel Wells, Usborne Touchy-Feely Books: That's Not My Bus / Duck / Hedgehog / Etc.

Read 2021-23

Some dynamic braille.

Fiona Watt and Katie Melrose, Usborne Musical Books: Carnival of the Animals

They weren't the first to do it, but this one adds in morbid supernatural dino bone dance to potentially creep toddlers out.

Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes

***

I don't feel I missed out too much, but swap a childhood Garfield annual or two and it could have been a favourite, while still requiring translations from my mum.

Peter Watts, Blindsight

Read 2019

****

Science fiction and horror are the more marketable genres Watts blends to explore his challenging philosophical ideas, and these dogged digressions and the supporting world-building are what make this so impressive, more than the rote Borg plot. No character gets off lightly as the author crams in concepts from AI and augmentation to virtual afterlife and credible vampires. I appreciated the value.

Peter Watts, Echopraxia

Read 2019

**

Blindsight is one of the best modern sci-fi books I've read, so I had reasonable hopes for the sequel that didn't take long to get dashed. The author continues his philosophical discourse through transhumans and unconvincing technology and pushes the space gothic vibes further, but he neglects to make the story entertaining this time around.

Anthony G. Wedgeworth, Fate of Thorik

Read 2016

**

I was dishonestly polite when I reviewed this inept Tolkien fanwank for a friend's book review website. I was probably worried the author would see the two-star rating (which is generous) and be devastated, considering all the blurbs he's written online declaring how much creating his derivative RPG world has helped him to deal with his life's struggles, so I scraped some desperate positives out of the barrel to soften the blow.

But this is my blog now, and I don't give a shit if you're dyslexic.

Marc Weidenbaum, Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works Volume II

Read 2015

***

The 33⅓ series has given a few of my favourite albums the indulgent commentary treatment, but since I already know about those, I was more interested in finally getting to grips with a willfully elusive one. These unhelpfully untitled pieces have been in rotation as non-distracting background music for years – so non-distracting, I couldn't recall a single note, only a hazy sense of sine waves. This overview is as dry and analytical as I needed, skipping around tracks and time indexes to highlight themes and prove there is some variety after all, along with a dollop of historical context. I still don't love it, but I get it now.

Christopher R. Weingarten, Public Enemy's It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back

Read 2020

**

Treating the album more as a social statement than some music, which might have been the case, this aggressive origin story spends so much time drawing lines from the influences that it neglects to talk much about its subject.

Jaime Weinman, Anvils, Mallets & Dynamite: The Unauthorized Biography of Looney Tunes

****

I preferred Tom and Jerry, but this was an interesting history and analysis of those other violent schedule fillers.

Howard Weinstein, Rod Whigham and Gordon Purcell, Star Trek: Tests of Courage

Read 1999

***

Star Trek comics were normally only good when they were bad, but this was the most satisfying story arc I read. I imagined at the time (13 or so) that it would have made a servicable Star Trek VII – doubtless because it had the superficial trappings of Star Trek VI – and I even read the dialogue out loud and timed it to see if that would work. I don't know why I admitted that. Did I do the voices and sound effects as well? Almost certainly.

Howard Weinstein, Rod Whigham and Gordon Purcell, Star Trek: Revisitations

Read 2014

***

Nostalgic solace is the only reason to read Star Trek comics. If you're hoping for them to actually be any good, you're just going to be disappointed. These were absolutely fine.

William L. Weir, BBC Radiophonic Workshop: A Retrospective

****

A convincing case for the underappreciated genius tinkerers, even if the associated compilation is largely unlistenable even for me.

Eric Weisbard, Guns N' Roses' Use Your Illusion I and II

Read 2019

**

I'm not a fan of sleazy cock rock generally, but I always liked the over-the-top pomp of 'November Rain,' so if I was going to give anything a look, it'd be the indulgent double album. For all its bloat, there's apparently not much substance worth writing about though, our chronicler choosing the role of character assassin over critic.

Bobbi JG Weiss and Colleen Doran, Disney's Beauty and the Beast: The Official Movie Adaptation

She requested the theme when we were idly pirating ebooks and this was the best I could do at short notice. At least it's authentic period tat.

Manly Wade Wellman, What Dreams May Come

Read 2018

***

I haven't read any of Wellman's other John Thunstone stories, and the fairly generic occult investigator hasn't charmed me into seeking out more.

A distinctly retro tale by this point, I preferred to imagine it was the novelisation to the non-existent '70s BBC serial I'd rather be watching, shot on low quality film stock with a Dudley Simpson soundtrack.

H. G. Wells, The Time Machine: An Invention

Read 2006

*****

There were a couple of isolated female precursors who shouldn't be overlooked, but this is where science fiction really kicks off, and it's an absolute belter all the way to the giant crabs. Alright, so Back to the Future's better, but that's better than everything.

H. G. Wells, The Island of Doctor Moreau

Read 2015

***

The Time Machine was previously the only thing by H. G. I'd actually, properly read, but films, radio plays and prog operas have filled me in on much of the rest. This one was the main exception, which I was only familiar with via a lazy Simpsons Halloween parody, but it turned out that was enough. You basically already know it. Wells' second 'scientific romance,' this cheery tale of an amoral genius' tropical Build-a-Beastie workshop is a little less romantic than its already pretty grim, time-travelling predecessor. As far as the science goes, I can't say if it's any less plausible, but at least this time it's the biologists' chances to get stroppy.

H. G. Wells, The Invisible Man

***

Not the answer to Jekyll & Hyde I was hoping for from the science fiction patriarch, but at least he thought through the consequences.

H. G. Wells, The War of the Worlds

***

George Pal's film version scared me as a child and Jeff Wayne's rock opera excuses that entire medium, but going back to the source was a bit disappointing. Where The Time Machine was awe-inspiring, even in its dystopian pessimism, this is just depressing, but still historically interesting to get an authentic steampunk take on the now-cliched alien invasion in the alien culture of pre-war, pre-radio Britain.

H. G. Wells, Tales of Space and Time

Read 2015

****

The science in these five fictions is reliably good and adorably antiquated. Coming right in the middle of H. G.'s golden age, the best ones are worthy of spots in his top tier, with their pleasing riffs on The Time Machine and direct crossovers with War of the Worlds if you enjoy that sort of thing. The ones that try something different aren't as good, obviously. Three of them don't even have Martians in, for god's sake.

Faves: 'The Star,' 'A Story of the Days To Come.'

Worsties: 'A Story of the Stone Age,' 'The Man Who Could Work Miracles.'

H. G. Wells, The First Men in the Moon

****

Adorably quaint odd-couple gravpunk adventure. Jules Verne with characterisation.

H. G. Wells, The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth

Read 2015

***

Not the most inspired of Mr. Wells' scientific romances, but probably just as influential as any other – even if it's mainly on B-movies this time. A pair of meddling scientists (when will these damned men stop trying to understand things?) make a potion that makes things go giant, essentially. They convince themselves of its noble, humanitarian benefits until as far as chapter two, by which time it's accidentally worked through the food chain and one of the scientists has added it to his infant son's bottle in the name of reckless curiosity. They deserve everything they get.

Clare Helen Welsh and Nicola O'Byrne, Wee? It Wasn't Me!

Mingin', but admittedly educational.

Irvine Welsh, Trainspotting

Read 2005

*****

I got through this in about two sittings, finding it captivating in a way the film (watched a couple of years later) wasn't. It somehow didn't put me off moving to Edinburgh, where I eventually got so complacent that I forgot I was in the Trainspotting place and got mugged by some of the characters.

Irvine Welsh, The Acid House

Read 2007–08

****

I picked up this collection shortly after arriving in Edinburgh to remind myself what I was getting into. A strong collection ranging from the grim to the fantastical, reading it on public transport seemed to have the miraculous effect of bringing the characters to life around me.

Irvine Welsh, Maribou Stork Nightmares

Read 2011

***

Welsh and Iain Banks are basically the only Scots-deploying writers I know, so I couldn't help seeing this as a slightly more comprehensible take on The Bridge. The coma gimmick may be hack, but it's an excuse to mix up genres and contrast a charming colonialist caper with some seriously dark shit.

Irvine Welsh, Ecstasy: Three Tales of Chemical Romance

Read 2011

**

A classy move in the wake of Leah Betts. After the comparatively wholesome Acid House, these overlong shorts wade deeper into the filth with less comic buoyancy.

Irvine Welsh, Porno

Read 2009

***

I really liked Transpotting (book), but this sequel wallowed in the grime with less humour or hope of reprieve. They're older and stuck in their ways, so there's no light at the end of the tunnel. I remember walking home down dark Edinburgh streets while listening to the audiobook describe a rape taking place more or less where I was and wondering why I was doing this to myself.

Wan-go Weng (and, you know, the artists), Chinese Painting and Calligraphy: A Pictorial Survey – 69 Fine Examples from the John M. Crawford, Jr. Collection

Read 2015

***

I could have struggled through an antiquated classic, or tried to distinguish fact from myth about modern China while worrying whether the scholar was leaning too far towards undeserved reverence or twitchy xenophobia, but instead I chose to relax in serene, scratchy nature. It's a shame the book's so annoyingly organised, it makes it difficult if you want to find out what's going on but can't read Chinese for some weird reason.

Faves: Epic multi-pager landscape scrolls. More is more.

Worsties: Cursive calligraphy is just scribble, come on.

Cindy West, Happy Sailing, Mickey Mouse

How have these bozos thrived for so long with no personalities?

Colin West, Monty Bites Back

Read 1993

**

I was always one for judging books by their covers, especially when those covers were drawn in the appealing cartoony style that I got bollocked for at school. The Jets range employed this tactic successfully to make completely mediocre and forgettable books seem worth reading and keep me stuck in the junior readers section of the library until my mum snapped me out of it. I can't even remember if there was a least worst one, this was just my first one.

Robert Westall, The Machine-Gunners

Read 1999

***

Embodying the transition from kid books to proper books in Year 8 English, this was an impressively unsentimental wartime adventure and the swearing was a novelty.

Dennis Wheatley, The Haunting of Toby Jugg

Read 2016

***

My original plan for December was to read Dennis Wheatley's 12 retroactively serialised 'Black Magic' books, until a couple of those proved difficult to track down so I widened the scope. A good thing too, since this is considered one of his best, but for the most part it's interminable.

An injured WW2 pilot writes a therapeutic journal to aid his recovery and calm his supernatural anxieties about multi-limbed shadows outside the window. Ghost or mental? Be patient, first let him guide you through his distastefully privileged upbringing in tedious, unnecessary detail. It wishes it were Dracula.

R.J. Wheaton, Portishead's Dummy

Read 2020

****

The album didn't do much for me, but this exhaustively in-depth write-up – a song-by-song listen-along that works in all the context of its creation, composition and legacy – is the standard all 33⅓ writers should aspire to. It'd be a much briefer series if they had to bother.

Wil Wheaton, Memories of the Future, Volume 1

Read 2006-07, re-read 2024

****

Infinitely more valuable than some random nerd's musings on the show, but as commendably frank. I eagerly awaited the original blog posts at the time and was disappointed that he didn't continue, even if the pop-culture Tourette's and Crackedspeak are a little grating now.

Michael Whelan, Michael Whelan's Works of Wonder

****

Gorgeous paperback escapism.

Faves: 'The Robots of Dawn,' 'Moreta: Dragonlady of Pern,' 'H.P. Lovecraft Series,' 'Foundation's Edge'

Chuck Whelon and Helen Brown, Where's the Bunny?: An Egg-cellent Search-and-Find Book

****

One of the easier ones in this range, presumably continuing until the whole animal kingdom and fictional bestiary is accounted for, she was very pleased with herself when he was already in her line of sight on turning the page.

John Whenham, Monteverdi: Vespers (1610)

Read 2020

*

It was stirring to hear something so ancient (at least in approximated form), but breaking it down extinguished rather than illuminated. The reconstructed history and arguments over authenticity were similarly unenlightening to the point of pointlessness, then he wastes a lot of paper reprinting all the lyrics in case you fancy some karaoke.

E. B. White, Charlotte's Web

Read 1994

****

I don't remember Mrs Clarke or my classmates crying when she read us this touching tale, but it still affected me. Not enough to make me a vegetarian, but I've always been kind to spiders at least.

We read The Sheep-Pig as well, but the jeopardy of whether or not Babe would perform his trick adequately felt somewhat less urgent than Wilbur's plight.

Patricia White, Rebecca

****

Irresistible gothic glamour.

Paul Whitehouse and Charlie Higson, The Fast Show Book

Read 1998

***

Not one of the classic comedy books, but if the endless repetition of The Fast Show somehow left you wanting more, here is some more.

Steve White-Thomson, Sparklers: Summer

Selective seasonal summary, more for reading practice than tips.

Patrick Wiegand, Oxford First Atlas

***

Stuck in the cupboard with other books bought stupidly far in advance when stuck for ideas to pad out a discounted order (and before I thought of screening books on the Internet Archive first), who knows how outdated it may end up being if we ever get around to looking at it.

Elie Wiesel, Night

Read 2015

***

I'm back for more misery, give me your best shot! Ow, not that hard. This Auschwitz survivor's (presumably) unembellished memoir of horrors was penned to keep the memories alive, lest they be allowed to fade away. That was evidently necessary, considering I somehow, shamefully wasn't aware of the full extent of it. I've seen the photos, I knew about the showers, but I did not know about the infants and the fires. I tried to convince myself I wasn't being a terrible human being as I typed keywords into Google, just to double check. If only the holocaust deniers were right, we'd live in a slightly less devastating reality.

Austin L. Wiggins, Bonds That Bind

Read 2017

***

Austin L. Wiggins' first short story collection is a light volume, containing just six stories of less than ten pages each. He could have bulked it out, but favouring quality over quantity is probably a good idea for a new writer. Nothing kills the buzz of a great story like a weak follow-up.

These six variations on a (loose) theme of unbreakable bonds and moral dilemmas aren't all equally impressive, but there's no dead weight dragging it down. With recurring tropes of gang violence, bored office workers and suicide across several stories, it's the inconsistencies that keep things interesting.

Hugo Wilcken, David Bowie's Low

Read 2020

****

With context and influences in the first half and the story of every song in turn in the second, this is as much as I wanted to know about peak Bowie, though the writer could do with reading up on what 'autism' is.

Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

Read 2006

****

I skipped over the Romantics and Victorian realists to arrive at the good shit. Imagine being cocky enough to only write one novel in your life which then becomes the core text of a literary movement that has its own course at universities over a century later. I shan't read any of his plays, just to spite him.

Eliot Wilder, DJ Shadow's Endtroducing...

Read 2020

**

Actually writing a book proved too much for this music journo, so he turned on a dictaphone and let the artist tell his life story, which finally gets around to the album in question towards the end. No doubt this was a more inspiring route for other creators than a comprehensive catalogue of elusive samples, but it didn't really help me to see the art in plunderphonics.

Chris Wilkins and Roger M. Kean, The Story of the Oliver Twins

Read 2020

****

A fittingly colourful and DIY biography of the precocious 8-bit clones, albeit skewed towards their retro creations and skimming over their personal lives and creative work after the early '90s that didn't involve aborted Dizzy revivals. That's what we're here for.

Mike Wilks, The Ultimate Alphabet

Read 2020, re-read 2021

***

Maybe expecting another impenetrable Masquerade, I was disappointed that there didn't seem to be to much to these themed surrealist dreamscapes, beyond the thousands of things, but I'm not exactly catching them at their best on a laptop PDF. The numbers and enthusiasm dwindle as he approaches the end of his alphabetical odyssey, I know the feeling.

Mike Wilks, The Ultimate Noah's Ark

Read 2020

***

Hieronymus Bosch meets Where's Wally in the lazier but more engaging sequel. Learning from the ultimate pointlessness of the last one, the artist makes things more interesting by promising a prize if you can spot the lone creature travelling solo. If it's going to be his customary self-portrait in the middle, that would be an insult to those who diligently scanned each grid reference. So let's hope that's it. Update: It's not.

Mo Willems, Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus! / Sleigh! / Stay Up Late! / The Pigeon Finds a Hot Dog! / Loves Things That Go! / Has Feelings, Too! / Wants a Puppy! / Needs a Bath / The Duckling Gets a Cookie!?

Read 2022-23

***

She likes books that shout at her, but it would've been better with optional routes for little delinquents who want to defy authority. The cookie and school ones are her faves.

Mo Willems, Knuffle Bunny: A Cautionary Tale

***

You can tell she enjoys and relates to a book when she wants to read it five times through and then roleplay it so many times you lose count. Fortunately, the props were on hand.

Mo Willems, Knuffle Bunny Too: A Case of Mistaken Identity

***

As tirelessly playable as the original, good job!

Mo Willems, Who Is That, Cat the Cat?

She spotted the uncomplicated pattern and played along while it briefly lasted. There's no need for it to be quite that short.

Mo Willems, Elephant & Piggie series

****

Early-reading flip book fun.

Kit Williams, Masquerade

Read 2019

***

I can't even do cryptic crosswords, so I didn't plan to spend too long trying to crack this legendarily fiendish picture puzzle. Solved a couple of borders to feel suitably cocky, then headed to the walkthrough.

Kit Williams, Untitled

Impenetrable even when you know the answer already. The art isn't even especially captivating.

Peter Williams, Bach: The Goldberg Variations

Read 2020

***

Joe's easygoing harpsichord epic gets a skimming overview, searching for meaningful connections and briefly considering the merits of wacky astrological interpretations. Not paced for listening along, but a good primer for obsessing on your own time.

Rob Williams, Steve Scott and Bart Sears, Indiana Jones and the Tomb of the Gods

Read 2020

***

Like the standalone novel that came out at the time, this failed to kick off a resurgence of Indy comics, maybe because the weak 2008 film didn't muster the enthusiasm expected or because the premise of tracking down three pieces of a mysterious artifact is so generic even within Indiana Jones comics. The actor likenesses are a lot better than they used to be, at least.

William Carlos Williams, Spring and All

Read 2019

**

I was expecting scenic minimalism, not an apocalyptic essay on art with occasional, merciful interruptions of vivid poetry begging to be salvaged for a best-of. If you don't have enough poems to fill a book, just release an E.P. next time.

John Williamson, Strauss: Also Sprach Zarathustra

Read 2020

**

Musical analysis takes a backseat to trying to pin down what the composer was getting at and whether he eventually got there. If you only know the famous intro, you're not going to come out of the other end much the wiser, though it was nice to learn that the piece is more thematically relevant to 2001 than I'd figured.

Connie Willis, To Say Nothing of the Dog: or, How We Found the Bishop's Bird Stump at Last

Read 2015

*****

The comfort zone can be a dull place sometimes, but I decided to trust the common sense that a book combining a few favourite themes – time travel, mystery and the ever-risky 'comedy' – ought not to be completely unenjoyable. Turns out it's a new favourite, so why have I been wasting time trying to broaden my mind with poetry, high fantasy and boring medieval sagas that don't even have the word "paradox" on every other page? It's also a case for positive discrimination, as part of the reason I gave this priority over the other comic time travel mysteries was its female author. If I'm going to do graphs at the end of this (and why the heck wouldn't I?), I don't want to find out I'm an awful dick. Not long left now, I'd better get skewing.

Connie Willis, The Best of Connie Willis: Award-Winning Stories

Read 2016

****

Like greatest hits albums, I usually avoid best-of anthologies and prefer to seek out the original collections – filler, obscure album tracks and all – which arbitrarily punctuate a writer's career every time their folder of uncollected odds and sods breaks 200 pages. These are mostly very good stories, but when every one was the proud recipient of a prestigious industry award, where's the jeopardy? At least there's some variety, including a compulsory Women's Issues story that's probably the best of the bunch, though it would have been better if I hadn't read some of her full-length novels before the succinct stories they were developed from.

Faves: 'Inside Job,' 'Even the Queen.'

Worsties: 'A Letter from the Clearys,' 'At the Rialto.'

Jeanne Willis and Tony Ross, Dr Xargle's Book of Earthlets

Read 1992, re-read 1996, 2021

***

Getting the alien perspective was three-eye-opening, but I didn't need to see the gimmick stretched over a whole series. When I read this again a few years later, the pitch black and sunflower yellow babies representing the different varieties of babies you get seemed a bit dodgy, but the willy was still funny.

Jeanne Willis and Briony May Smith, Stardust

My First Cosmos.

Jeanne Willis and Ross Collins, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

***

One of several films in her current rotation, I didn't expect I'd be reading her the Lewis Carroll original any time soon, but I was still impressed that she sat through this modern rhyming adaptation one and a half times. Glad she didn't want any more though, or I'd be stuck in jaunty meter all day.

Jeanne Willis and Ross Collins, Alice Through the Looking-Glass

***

Their first rhyming retelling was one of the first longer books she sat through when barely two, so the sequel was a long time coming in toddler years.

John Wilmot (probs), Sodom, or the Quintessence of Debauchery

Read 2016

*

It's my own fault for conflating the erotic with the bawdy. Rochester's dirtiest Earl may or may not have written this smutty comedy, but it's nothing to be proud of either way. It's all orifice-obsessed talk rather than action, for the braying delight of a degenerate Restoration rabble whose lineage you could probably trace directly to "Chubby" Brown's contemporary audience. Next to zero thought has been paid to giving every character a "hilarious" dirty name, and its only value is in helping to demonstrate the vintage of those terms. It's all in rhyme too, which is usually enough to superficially impress me, but not after rubbing me up the wrong passage.

Carl Wilson, Celine Dion's Let's Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste

Read 2020

****

For a series that prided itself on being open-minded and outside the box – occasionally featuring straight-up fiction between the in-depth reviews of canonical classics – the prospect of looking dorky was evidently too much and required a unique subtitle to explain what was going on, perfectly illustrating the treatise within. He's totally right, I've had it with tribal snobbery and people's 'objective' taste and don't read websites like those any more, including this one.

Gary Wilson, Your Brain On Porn: Internet Pornography and the Emerging Science of Addiction

Read 2015

***

I hadn't ever come across this guy's viral TED talk, as my rubbish, limited mobile Wi-Fi doesn't have the bandwidth for those kind of multimedia adventures. On the bright side, that physical barrier has certainly helped me to cut back on other viewing too. There's some real neuroscience in here, but it's largely anecdotal and quoted from cold turkey pioneers on Reddit and forums rather than the writer's own experiences, which are implicitly the picture of health and decency. He can't get over how ambitious and maverick he's being, treating this debilitating addiction as a specific brainwrong that his colleagues are too square and boxed-in to accept. At least he doesn't brings Jesus into it.

Robert Anton Wilson, Prometheus Rising: Second Revised Edition

Read 2019

*****

My previous experience with RAW was several attempts to get through a supposedly classic novel trilogy I turned out to be too square for, but this owner's manual for the brain is one of the most balanced and thought-provoking things I've read, even if his forecasts for the 21st century turned out to be a bit optimistic. Writing from outside all the various boxes, everyone's beliefs get insulted fair and square, with practical and impractical exercises encouraging us to temporarily abandon our own (obviously correct) philosophies and explore various opposing mindsets to realise how brainwashed we all are – and what we can do about it. Funny too.

Robert Anton Wilson, Quantum Psychology: How Brain Software Programs You & Your World

Read 2019

***

More learned behaviour 'is' challenged as RAW tells us to stop being so assertive all the time. A less compelling follow-up to Prometheus Rising that goes over some of the same points, this was the one that broke my brain, when unwise bedtime reading led to a restless night trapped in an endless labyrinth of Robert Anton Wilson books. Or maybe I just had a fever or something, let's not go making assumptions.

Ethel Wingfield, Harry Wingfield and John Scott, Colours

Read 1988

***

With that dodgy cover and the rainbow song, it's a wonder I learned the correct order at all. Frequently returned to because I found its monochrome assortments soothing. Now my daughter has a cloth version.

Robert Winston, The Human Mind and How to Make the Most of It

Read 2009

****

I enjoyed watching Robert Winston's documentaries growing up, but I don't remember much about them apart from all the naked people and that time he got pissed. This explains why, and I took notes while reading about how the brain makes connections to retain memories to make sure I retained that memory in the future. What do you know, it worked! Shame I didn't do that for all the other knowledge across my life that went straight out of the other ear.

Margaret Wise Brown and Clement Hurd, Goodnight Moon

****

My belated impression of this bedtime classic was admiration of its dreamy twilight atmosphere and slight sinister edge (who is "nobody?"). She didn't really take to it though, which is probably a relief in the long run.

Richard Wiseman, Quirkology: How We Discover the Big Truths in Small Things

Read 2009, re-read 2015

****

I've either read this book before or just read most of its contents in other forms when I used to follow Prof Wiseman's blog back in another life, but like films and albums, you are allowed to read a book again if you like it (apparently). This celebrates odd and terrifying brain quirks for the fun and interest of it all, before Wiseman switched to the self-help genre that was presumably more profitable and where he could administer some valuable damage control with his actual credentials.

Richard Wiseman, Paranormality: Why We See What Isn't There

Read 2020

*****

I followed the Prof's blog while he was promoting this, but didn't feel I needed to read it, since I'd read and lived enough sceptical debunking already. Enough time's passed that it managed to be nostalgic as well as entertaining, when it wasn't depressing. My scepticism hasn't waned, but the need to belittle people's ~~wrong~~ beliefs has, unless they're actively causing harm. The tone is cheekily educational rather than condescending, but as one of that lot, I would say that.

Richard Wiseman, Night School: Wake Up to the Power of Sleep

Read 2015

****

I read most of the Prof's books when I lived in Edinburgh and he turned up as a guest speaker everywhere I went, but I didn't bother with this one until now – I assumed it was targeted at insomniacs, and I haven't really suffered with that since I forced myself to stop drinking nothing but Coke at age 20 and miraculously calmed down. It is largely a self-help guide, and Wiseman has that patter down pat by now, but it's also got plenty of fascinating, real science in it about sleep and dreaming, as well as less firm parapsychology and flim-flam to be taken with a cellar of salt. He can't help himself.

Joel-Peter Witkin, Joel-Peter Witkin: Forty Photographs

Read 2020

**

Fucked-up industrial nightmares, classical perversions and indecent imagery I'd rather not have made myself endure, with a brief biography revealing why he's like this.

P. G. Wodehouse, Something Fresh (a.k.a. Something New)

Read 2018

***

I've never found Wodehouse to be the comedy god others do. He doesn't have the inherently funny way with words of a Douglas Adams or Terry Pratchett, and his winding together of disparate, blatantly-telegraphed plot points isn't as satisfying as a David Renwick or Larry David. Plus, I know we're laughing at the idle, incompetent, undeserving rich, but spending so much time around these asses is still annoying.

It gets points for having a surprisingly strong female character and a character named Threepwood.

P. G. Wodehouse, The Inimitable Jeeves

Read 2009, re-read 2010, 2020

****

As is bound to happen when you dip into a series a couple of times at random, the first one you pick up is the one you've read/seen before (I think on that train ride down the Nile, quite irrelevantly). Its unrelatable upper-crust crises didn't have me slapping my thigh, but the extended joke of all events being filtered through our utter twat of a narrator kept it entertaining even through the repetition. And 'Steggles' is still an inherently hilarious name to me.

P. G. Wodehouse, Carry On, Jeeves

Read 2009, re-read 2021

****

After the desired origin story it's back to more of the same as the previous book (all of the books?). Character growth would kill the serial, Jeeves' increasingly supernatural air is presumably the author exhausting the thesaurus. Eminently readable, but funnier on infrequent visits than when you're into the swing, what? Even without the cash-in cover, there's no unseeing Fry and Laurie, and it's all the better for it.

P. G. Wodehouse, Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves

***

A significantly later permutation on the same old thing, on a more sustained scale. Time has not dimmed nor developed the purgatorial saga, though the back references are tellingly excessive and calling a character 'Stiffy' is surely taking the piss by this point.

Gene Wolfe, The Fifth Head of Cerberus

Read 2019

****

A fantastic space-gothic novella supplemented by related expanded-universe tales that are inevitably nowhere near as good. Still, that was a better option than padding out the original story to book length and ruining it.

Faves: 'The Fifth Head of Cerberus.'

Worsties: '"A Story," by John V. Marsch,' 'V.R.T.'

Gene Wolfe, The Devil in a Forest

Read 2020

***

A surprisingly straightforward historical detour for the master of dark science fantasy, unless I'm missing something. The casually evil baddie is pretty chilling, but my enjoyment waned as it went along and the chance of it suddenly getting a lot more interesting got ever slimmer.

Gene Wolfe, The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories and Other Stories

Read 2016

****

I enjoyed Wolfe's quadfurcated magnum opus The Book of the New Sun last year, so I was interested to see how his earlier short stories fared. And it's not like I could resist that title once I got wind of it. It's not all glorious stylistic wank, though saying that, he's never better than when he's inverting titles, themes and perspectives with OCD precision.

Faves: 'The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories,' 'The Death of Dr. Island,' 'Seven American Nights.'

Worsties: 'Three Fingers,' 'Feather Tigers,' '"Cues' (less substantial shorties).

Gene Wolfe, The Shadow of the Torturer

Read 2015

****

There's no particular reason it's not a five-star book. It's a well-written story in a well-defined dystopian world, it's won plenty of awards and adulation that I'm sure it deserves, the ingredients are to my taste (dingy atmosphere, spooky necropolis, people wearing robes) and it's easily the best inexperienced-apprentice-goes-out-into-the-unusual-world-and-we-see-it-through-his-eyes story I've read, but by the end I didn't feel any urge to see how those adventures continued in the inevitable sequels. I wonder what it takes to impress me?

Gene Wolfe, The Claw of the Conciliator

Read 2015

****

I didn't expect I'd read more of this saga, interesting as the first book was, but then in typical foolishness I committed to a month of repeat authors and Wolfe's more divergent books weren't available in audio form in the sort of places I look for them. (I don't have it in me to visually read through more than a couple of novels a month. How would I find the time and patience to scour the dark recesses of the Amiga emulation library without my soundtracks?) There's quite a lot I like about this series quite a lot, but I can't help feeling like an impostor for not being so into it as the majority of people who bothered to read this far (book two of four). Do I have to keep going? That's another annoying obligation, it would be quite good.

Gene Wolfe, The Sword of the Lictor

Read 2015

***

Unlike some sagas whose chaotic meanderings are powered by the changing whims of authors, The Book of the New Sun really is just the one book staggered over four volumes to increase its prospects of scooping up Nebula awards. This coherence is comforting, but annoying when you're trying to rate comparatively or find new things to talk about. I think I liked this quarter mildly less? Fingers crossed for a really amazing or really rubbish ending.

Gene Wolfe, The Castle of the Otter: A Book About the Book of the New Sun

Read 2018

**

Before The Book of the New Sun was even complete, its author unapologetically wrote his own fanzine/fansite in book form. Featuring self-interviews, answers to mainly imagined FAQs, glossaries of obscure words and names, a jokes page and, best of all, obsolete insights into the early-1980s US SF publishing industry.

Originally a very limited edition before it was collected with other odds and sods, I don't think Wolfe intended this vanity project to still be knocking about decades later. I enjoyed the New Sun books, though it wasn't totally my thing, and this had made me appreciate it more on a technical level at least. There's a chance I'm the least fanatical Gene Wolfe reader to ever bother reading this curio, and since even I got something out of it, I'm glad it exists.

Gene Wolfe, The Citadel of the Autarch

Read 2015

***

The grand finale to the four-book saga takes its sweet time getting going. I can only assume Wolfe overestimated the number of pages the denouement required, as the first third has our protagonist listening to pointless fables while he recuperates. After that, we tread the obligatory Hero's Journey to its reasonably satisfying, slightly crazy conclusion. It should have all been the one fat book, but then I wouldn't have read it.

Gene Wolfe, The Urth of the New Sun

Read 2015, re-read 2018

****

Part 5 of 4, this bulky coda catches up with our chronicler a century after his hero's journey and is a nice self-contained adventure in time and space. Though I was still confused about what was going on some of the time, and I've been reading along, so good luck climbing aboard here. One of the things I liked about the earlier books was that humanity's space-faring past was only alluded to, and then only with as much credibility as any dusty legend, but it's nice to finally head out there and see the myriad creatures of the cosmos in an impossibly impractical wooden ship.

Gene Wolfe, Storeys from the Old Hotel

Read 2018

****

I prefer my Gene Wolfe brief, concentrated and to the point, even if that point is often elusive and more about atmosphere and justifying a pun title. Most of these tales, specifically chosen for their obscurity, are less than 10 pages in length, making this the perfect no-overlap companion to the longer shorts of The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories and Other Stories. There's even a fourth doctor/death/island permutation as the author continues to stubbornly mine that seam and still finds gold.

Faves: 'Slaves of Silver,' 'Westwind,' 'To the Dark Tower Came,' 'A Solar Labyrinth,' 'On the Train.'

Worsties: 'Continuing Westward,' 'The Packerhaus Method,' 'A Criminal Proceeding,' 'The Choice of the Black Goddess.'

Gene Wolfe, On Blue's Waters

Read 2018

I'm sure it has its devotees, but this wasn't my sort of thing at all, so I'm glad I didn't commit to the entire Book of the Short Sun as planned.

As a sci-fi fan, I appreciated the strange new worlds, new life and new civilisations, but downgrading from a spaceship modelled on a boat to an actual boat, and bringing in actual mythological creatures (or the Clarkeian next best thing) was too much standard fantasy for me, dismembered cyborgs excepted. The chronicler's a lot less likeable than Severian too, which is some achievement considering the other guy tortured people for a living.

Gene Wolfe, A Borrowed Man

Read 2018

**

I'm all for a good convoluted excuse to blend genres, but this future noir is only appealing in style rather than substance, and not very appealing at that. The premise of cloned authors being loaned out in a post-book society is too bizarre to be credible, and since only literate nerds are going to be reading this in the first place, it doesn't need the patronising explanations to excuse the corny in-character narration, in case we thought Gene can't write.

Marv Wolfman and Gene Colan, Night Force

Read 2015

***

The morbid team that brought us Marvel's Tomb of Dracula defects to DC to present a new, less commercially successful but more satisfying series with darker plots, gruesomer art and the most '80s title possible. It's basically an occult Mission: Impossible, but this time they actually do shuffle around the characters based on the situation and sometimes... they die! I wouldn't call it an overlooked classic, but I admire it for taking risks in the short life it had before its inevitable cancellation after these 14 issues.

Faves: Beast!

Worsties: The Summoning, Mark of the Beast!!

David Wong, John Dies at the End

Read 2020

***

Supernatural detectives get the stoner–slacker treatment, with gore galore and pop culture tourettes. It's the sort of thing I'd be persuaded I loved at fifteen. Good title, anyway.

Dick Wood (seriously), Nevio Zaccara and Alberto Giolitti, Star Trek: Gold Key Archives Volume 1

Read 2015

**

More a vintage curio than something you'd actually read expecting it to be any good, these original Star Trek comics – released when the series was still on the air – are a load of shit (one of them's okay), but I find them so much more entertaining than the drab lines that came later, written and drawn by people who'd actually bothered to watch the show. You can keep your consistent ethics and characters that look and behave anything like their on-screen counterparts – I'll take a remorselessly genocidal Kirk, overly emotional Spock, white Uhura and a different actor playing Scotty every issue, exploring the galaxies in their hilariously undersized star space-ship complete with rocket engines, a periscope and seat belts (that last one's not a bad idea).

Colin Woodard, The Republic of Pirates: Being the True and Surprising Story of the Caribbean Pirates and the Man Who Brought Them Down

Read 2015

***

By now, I've come to expect that the more suspiciously entertaining parts of history weren't all they're cracked up to be, so it wasn't a great disappointment to find out that some of the most notorious "pirates" were actually progressive goodies fighting the power. Don't worry, there were still plenty of real pirates knocking about who were irredeemable dickheads, they're not completely ruined.

Patrick Woodroffe, Mythopœikon: Fantasies Monsters Nightmares Daydreams – The paintings, book-jacket illustrations and record-sleeve designs of Patrick Woodroffe

Read 2018

***

The psychedelic LP and sci-fi paperback cover are two of my favourite artistic mediums, so it's always nice to see those overlooked artists represented. I've come across this guy a few times, but can't say his work has ever stood out, apart from a daft Budgie album cover I found quite funny but it turns out was supposed to be serious.

A budget career overview rather than a lavish coffee table book you can pore over, you can still rip it up to decorate your walls.

Faves: 'Triptych: The Thousand-Year Roundabout,' Michael Moorcock covers.

Úna Woods, Have You Heard Of?: Dolly Parton

This stood out to her, for whatever reason, so we both got educated.

Marc Woodworth, Guided by Voices' Bee Thousand

Read 2020

***

This careless collage of band memoirs, fan outpourings and academic forgeries is a fitting reflection of the ramshackle album and made for one of the more readable entries in the series, though I was relieved when it was over.

Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out

Read 2016

**

"She shifted her eyes and became less desirable as her brain began to work."

As expected, Woolf's feet-finding first novel is closer to the 19th-century husband-seeking female novels than the more confident, progressive and experimental stuff she's better known for, but the groundwork is there, and the political diatribes were supposedly a lot fiercer in the early drafts before she was advised to temper things somewhat, there's a dear.

My biggest issue is the size of the thing, encompassing too many characters over a surplus of pages covering an inordinate length of time. Hopefully it won't be too long before that's sorted out and I can look forward to being trapped inside one woman's head as she goes about her morning ablutions in real time.

Virginia Woolf, Night and Day

Read 2016

**

Back to the real (privileged) world of drawing rooms and recreational duck slaughter, Woolf's more concise character palette covers the full spectrum of contemporary women's attitudes as she sees them... though only among a class of women for whom work is an optional political statement rather than a necessity. Maybe it's asking too much for a book to cover the entirety of English society, this is even longer than the last book already.

For all its cushy progressiveness, we're still firmly entrenched in the Victorian novel, with hot topics like suffrage and the crumbling caste system being secondary to the more pressing dilemma of which suitor our heroine should choose. The lawyer or the poet? Isn't there a war on?

Virginia Woolf, Jacob's Room

Read 2016

****

Disorienting alienation at last! Woolf's decision to self-publish meant she could be as strange as she damned well liked, but this isn't quite as revolutionary and inverted as the fans like to claim. The protagonist is unusually backgrounded, but he's still there. The dialogue is vacuous and events meaningless, but the poetic descriptions keep us grounded.

If Ulysses hadn't come out the same year and ruined things for experimental novelists, maybe this would enjoy the same level of appreciation as its successors, rather than being (arguably unfairly) overlooked and treated more like a promising demo.

Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway

Read 2007, re-read 2016

***

I appreciate what you're doing, but while making us intimately privy to the scatter-brained stream-of-consciousness of a middle-aged, middle-class, post-war housewife is intriguing, that does mean we're stuck with actually reading about the dull minutia that occupies said middle-aged, middle-class, post-war housewife's day. And it's all a bit of a rip-off of Joyce anyway.

The side trip inside the bipolar head of a male character was more compelling, probably because a) the comparisons to the author's own tragic mental issues add superficial real-life pathos, and b) I'm obviously a white male chauvinist. Why else would I prefer Jacob's Room to Mrs Dalloway? I'm probably a homophobe too.

Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

Read 2007, re-read 2016

*****

"Unfilmable" is one of the highest compliments you can give to a book. Just as very few of the films I like are adaptations, the best novels and short stories are those take full advantage of the medium. Imagine trying to film this. It'd just be a meaningless sequence of people doing mundane things while looking contemplative. Film it at a high frame rate and play the audiobook over the top and you might be getting somewhere, but I wouldn't want to watch that.

There's probably more to me adoring this while being indifferent to Mrs Dalloway than just the more pleasant coastal scenery, but don't underestimate the power of that.

Virginia Woolf, Orlando: A Biography

Read 2016

***

Already regarded as a classic feminist novel, Woolf's book-length lesbian love letter wasn't considered essential reading when I studied the modernists, maybe because it's disappointingly accessible after all that showing off.

But it's presumably secured its spot on the syllabus now that transgender is a thing. Or maybe just to help people who've read The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen but didn't know who the ageless, androgynous one was supposed to be. Ticking off those references is the only reason I bother with classic literature, after all.

Virginia Woolf, The Waves

Read 2016

*****

Back on form and capsizing the boat, this is her most arduous one yet and thus the most satisfying. You wouldn't want to read this sort of book every day – even the author has to take a sanity break and write magical love stories between her heavy-duty efforts – but it's got to be good for the soul, or at least makes you feel clever when you don't have trouble following what's going on even without a Wikipedia summary holding your hand.

In this schizophrenic soliloquy sequence blending novel, play and vivid poetry, Woolf escapes Joyce's shadow and puts forward a worthy rival to Ulysses. So I suppose there's nothing left to prove and the laurel bed is earned. I don't mean to be a pessimist, but surely things can only realistically go downhill from here?

Virginia Woolf, Flush: A Biography

Read 2016

***

A necessary light palate cleanser after The Waves, this is really a smart-arse literary joke needlessly extended to book length, but at least it is a bit of a short one.

This atypical biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning sidelines the poet and centres instead on her spaniel. Partly for the fun of subverting your expectations, but also presumably so Woolf can make some scathing observations on unnaturally stratified and polluted London from a dog's primal perspective. It's borderline Disney already, but I don't think she went far enough. I wanted an authentic canine simulator – less time dwelling on his pedigree, more time sniffing other dogs' arses and licking his own balls.

Virginia Woolf, The Years

Read 2016

***

The bubble was bound to burst eventually. Flush was a fun, inconsequential E.P., but her next "proper" book after Lighthouse and Waves feels retrogressive in several undesired ways, length being just one of them.

From the onset, this had the same disappointing air as an increasingly pretentious prog band stripping back to the core instruments and a basic stage set when you were looking forward to more delightful pomp. In its favour, there's nothing half-arsed about it, and it does manage to be moderately superior to her early works, but if she was going to look back to the "classics," I would have preferred anything over a slightly better 'Night and Day.'

Virginia Woolf, Between the Acts

Read 2016

****

Pulling back from the languid scope and length of The Years, Woolf's prematurely posthumous final novel is more concise, necessarily less polished and a much more satisfying one to go out on. I don't just rate these on length; I'd rather read this twice in one session than go through that last one again.

Swapping the city for the symbolic countryside, Woolf explores her justified fears of a Britain and Europe poised for war while some posh people watch an amateur pageant, almost as oblivious to its ironic symbolism as I was, and I was looking. We're treated one last time to the scatter-brained anxieties of a cast of familiar characters as we possess patriarchs, wives and gardeners in turn.

Virginia Woolf, A Haunted House and Other Stories

Read 2016

****

I expected to like this posthumous collection of sketches a lot more than I actually did, but considering what Woolf did for the novel, it would be asking a bit much for her less substantial works to be similarly groundbreaking.

Spanning most of her writing career, you can see the playful and ambitious seeds that would germinate more fully in her best books, while others seem primarily oriented to sell to Harper's.

Faves: 'Kew Gardens,' 'Lappin and Lapinova,' 'Solid Objects.'

Worsties: 'The New Dress,' 'Together and Apart,' 'A Summing Up.'

Benjamin Woolley, The Queen's Conjurer: The Science and Magic of Dr. John Dee, Advisor to Queen Elizabeth I

Read 2016

****

Here's another man who takes the woo-woo seriously. There's no shortage of potentially inspiring biographies out there of physicians doing their utmost in challenging circumstances, but no, I choose a magic quack. It's healthy to get some non-fiction in every now and then, even if said non-fiction is about stuff that doesn't exist (but is still unaccountably accurate from time to time). It was nice to spend some time in Blackadder II ambiance too, and if Miranda Richardson's definitive take on the virgin queen is proving to be a barrier, I say just roll with it, it makes history more fun.

Bernie Wrightson, Bruce Jones and a couple of others, Creepy Presents: Bernie Wrightson

Read 2015

****

The evidence keeps mounting that I was born a generation late. I know, I can still find all these things today – with much greater ease than a kid in pre-internet rural Cheshire would have had to track down obscure imports like Creepy! and Eerie! – but it's not the same. These ghoulish black and white nightmares should have been part of my life when they could really have affected me. Like the philistine I'm on an unending mission not to be, I hadn't heard this writer/artist's name before, but even if I hadn't seen his actual work I'd certainly seen plenty of imitations. This isn't charmingly archaic Tales from the Crypt horror – it's intense, exquisite and a pleasure to linger in Bernie's dingy manors and spooky woods.

Faves: 'Jenifer,' 'Cool Air.'

Worsties: 'Clarice,' 'Reuben Youngblood: Private Eye!'

Jason A. Wyckoff, Black Horse and Other Strange Stories

Read 2020

***

Diversifying from the publisher's usual Edwardian affectations, these contemporary American supernatural tales instead draw from the murky well of home-grown traditions, from Lovecraft to The X-Files. An 'average' rating by me in rough comparison to the entirety of literature, but for a first collection, the author should be pleased with himself.

Fave: 'The Night of His Sister's Engagement'

Rebecca Yaker and Patricia Hoskins, 101 Great Ways to Sew a Metre

I let the wife fill out the dad and daughter used book discount bonanza with a few generic craft and recipe books from the limited selection, because that's the kind of amazing husband I am. A full-time mum isn't going to have the chance to indulge in hobbies any time soon, but this has turned out to be one of the toddler's favourite books to flick through tirelessly looking for the elusive photos of girls, pets and teddies amid all the diagrams. Kids are weird.

Emma Yarlett, Nibbles: Numbers / The Monster Hunt

Eating the book is a fun gimmick, if 50+ years old.

Neal A. Yeager, non-Hollywood: a novel of actors, indie film & music

Read 2016

***

You'd hope that the myths of Hollywood would be well and truly busted by now. But as the entertainment machine becomes more finely tuned every decade, and generations of aspiring young stars continue to have their dreams dashed when they find they don't fit into increasingly narrow parameters, cautionary tales are called for.

Neal A. Yeager's non-Hollywood isn't a non-fiction tell-all, but its intertwining narratives following a cast of struggling actors and actresses, filmmakers and musicians over a number of years feels like it's grounded firmly in true experiences, whether first-hand or anecdotal. The grievances are just too specific.

W. B. Yeats, The Tower

Read 2019

***

I don't know why the Irish nationalist occultist didn't get much of a look-in at university, outside of some swan rape. Maybe the lyrical throwback and – would you believe it – rhyme! – make it harder to conveniently slot him in chronologically. The longer ones are trying, but if I'm not going to bother studying the context and rhyme schemes, I don't deserve to get it.

Helen Yoon, I'm a Unicorn

***

A different take, and a nice message, with a proper unicorn cameo to avoid complaints.

Yoshitoshi and Tamara Tjardes, One Hundred Aspects of the Moon: Japanese Woodblock Prints by Yoshitoshi

Read 2020

***

This completed Panini sticker album commemorates a couple's successful 26-year quest to catch 'em all. Nice nature scenes, but I could do without all the people and metamorphosing foxes getting in the way.

Faves: 'The Moon's Four Strings,' 'Mount Ji Ming Moon,' 'The Moon and the Abandoned Old Woman.'

Susan Youens, Schubert: Die Schöne Müllerin

****

This deep analysis would be appreciated for any good concept album. It ends up more lit crit than music study, so is more on my level than most of these.

Annemarie Young and Nick Schon, Read with Biff, Chip & Kipper: Kipper's Rhymes and Other Stories

The appeal of recreational phonics is wearing thin, but there are also mazes. It's ironic that these easy-0readers have the most complex titles and credits, making sure the original creators are recognised for bringing forth these deep and innovative characters.

Mike Young, Super Safe with SuperTed

Read 1991

**

I saw the educational cartoon at school before I was cautiously gifted the book adaptation, so I was learning while critiquing the minor dialogue discrepancies. The main thing that bugged me was the illustration showing Blotch's shoes clearly protruding over the edge of the curb, right above text expressly warning us to stay behind the line. My mum tried to justify it, but she was probably annoyed that the artist hadn't easily avoided that nitpick too.

Charles Yu, How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

Read 2020

***

I figured this was riding on Ready Player One's indulgent retro wave and was surprised that this one came first, though you can never be sure when time travel's involved. All the genre references try to obscure that it's just The Man Who Folded Himself.

Anne H. Zachry, Retro Baby: Cut Back on All the Gear and Boost Your Baby's Development with More Than 100 Time-Tested Activities

Read 2020

***

This common-sense advocation of traditional parenting over unnecessary gadgets wasn't especially eye-opening, but there were some good reminders and I took some notes. You'll save money, help your child's development and avoid cluttering your house with shit they don't need. The catch is that you have to actually give them your time and attention, what a bummer.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

Read 2020

**

I'm always down for a book about books, it's just a shame it's the type of books I'm not interested in.

Yevgeny Zamyatin, We

Read 2003

***

Not well-versed in early-20th-century Soviet technocracy, there's a lot more subversive satire going on in Zamyatin's superficially simplistic far-future fable than I bothered getting into for the purposes of my A-level essay, when I plonked it at the far end of the timeline respective to a 1984 or BNW and concentrated on the sci-fi technicalities.

Warren Zanes, Dusty Springfield's Dusty in Memphis

Read 2020

**

It seemed a strange choice to kick off these tributes to classic hipster albums with an easy listening staple where someone sings other people's songs with the house band. But in prioritising the personal over the analytical, it's a good demonstration of this series' free-for-all mission statement, for better and worse.

Roger Zelazny, This Immortal (a.k.a. ...And Call Me Conrad)

Read 2019

**

The young writer starts as he means to go on with a dark future fable steeped in mythology. Competent, but pompous heroic fantasy has never really appealed to me.

Roger Zelazny, Lord of Light

Read 2019

****

I've long been meaning to read some proper Hindu and Buddhist mythology, but this postmodern sci-fantasy tribute probably takes care of it. The premise is like one of those Star Trek episodes where advanced aliens impersonate primitive Earth deities, but Zelazny's cosplayers are more method and he's more respectful of the wisdom behind the trappings. It's the most 1967 thing I've ever read.

Roger Zelazny, Isle of the Dead

Read 2018

***

Zelazny's anachronistic future has some unique touches that make it stand apart from your standard Silver Age sci-fi setting. So it's a shame he cheapens it by making it the story of an unenlightened 20th century businessman who made his way to the future the long way round and ends up doing preposterously well for himself in this brave new world. What's the male equivalent of a Mary Sue?

It might just be that I've watched a lot of Red Dwarf recently, but from prolonged suspended animation to psychic terraforming, I have a feeling this slim volume had a place on Grant Naylor's collective bookshelf.

Roger Zelazny, Jack of Shadows

Read 2020

**

A nice science-fantasy scenario thrown away on a slapdash story.

Roger Zelazny, A Night in the Lonesome October

Read 2019

***

Zelazny's last completed work was this more coy precursor to the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, told from the unfamiliar perspective of the familiars of familiar characters. Nice for Victorian lit and horror fans, but one of those pet projets that was probably more fun to write than to read.

Count Zhoaren von Bvcegi, Making Sense of UFO: The Bvcegi Report

Read 2019

*

I haven't really kept up with the UFO world since I was about 12, so I trusted the Count to fill me in on what's been going on. There are a couple of contemporary photos of "pyramid"-shaped Mars rocks and Giza UFOs presented without comment, but he's more interested in giving his brief thoughts on the pages of website, forum and Yahoo! image search screenshots he includes without permission, covering old-hat topics primarily based on research from 100 years ago. Sometimes he copies the same text more than once to fill up more pages, sometimes they're too small and blurry to actually read, sometimes the page didn't actually load, but at least that's a respite from his own writing, which is made as difficult to read as possible in italicised, multicolour-highlighted, abnormally punctuated, randomly capitalised Comic Sans to weed out all but the troo loons.

Herman Zimmerman, Doug Drexler and Rick Sternbach, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Technical Manual

Read 1999

**

Adding colour and glossy paper should technically make this an improvement over the TNG one, but it comes off more like an in-character Dorling-Kindersley guide than real blueprints. DS9 was my favourite Trek, but that wasn't down to the Treknology.

William Zinsser, On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Non-Fiction (25th Anniversary Edition)

Read 2019

****

Occasional rules, but mainly sensible advice and informed preferences for writing clearly and simply about anything, with examples aplenty. You won't learn how to rank in search engines or how to stand out in social media feeds, but you'll learn how to write for people who like to read.

Zitkala-Ša, Old Indian Legends

Read 2015

**

That's "Indian" as in not-Indian, from a time before this silly PC nonsense when we were free to propagate stupid and insulting mistakes for centuries. This Sioux writer relieves her smallpox-surviving native countryfolk of the burden of their centuries-old oral legacy by recording these stories in print, which presumably captured their souls or something. Trickster spider fairy Iktomi is like the Indian Anansi, who I obviously know about from studying African heritage and not just because of Neil Gaiman.

Faves: 'Iktomi and the Fawn,' 'The Tree-bound.'

Worsties: 'Shooting of the Red Eagle,' 'Dance in a Buffalo Skull.'