Alrightreads: D

Robert Aickman, Dark Entries: Curious and Macabre Ghost Stories

1964 / Ebook / 173 pages / UK

***

A mixed bag of vague strangeness in varied settings.

Faves: 'Choice of Weapons,' 'The Waiting Room.'

Worsties: 'The School Friend,' 'The View.'

Paul Huson, The Devil's Picturebook: The Compleat Guide to Tarot Cards: Their Origins and Their Usage

1971 / Ebook / 256 pages / UK

***

Comprehensive context for the pretty playing cards, but not much in the way of divination tips, if that's your thing. The rules seem flexible to the point of being meaningless.

Gene Wolfe, The Devil in a Forest

1976 / Ebook / 224 pages / USA

***

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.

R.J. Wheaton, Portishead's Dummy

2011 / Ebook / 235 pages / UK

****

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.

Rob Palmer, Dad Hacks: 101 Easy Tips to Save Families Time and Money

2019 / Ebook / 224 pages / Australia

***

Useful and less useful tips, some more patronising than others, some such as the reverse hoodie food trough presumably jokes, though it's not clear whether the credited "researcher" realised this when sourcing tips from reddit via Buzzfeed.

Alrightreads: Kidz Klassix

Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There

1865-71 (collected 1888) / Audiobook / 208 pages / UK

****

I didn't see Disney's take until I was too old and sober to appreciate it. Going back to the sources was more rewarding, but it's probably a bit too tongue-twisting to make it onto the bedtime story list. We'll stick with Lovecraft.

Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden

1910-11 (collected 1911) / Audiobook / 375 pages / USA

***

More ambiguously magical than I was expecting, I wouldn't have got much out of this as a boy, but I found it relaxing as a grown-up. For a vintage book, the attitudes aren't bad either.

Norton Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth

1961 / Audiobook / 255 pages / USA

**

Starting out like a similarly quirky Alice in Wonderland for boys, this quickly grew tiresome without comparable iconic imagery (I didn't see the illustrations, admittedly). This is coming from someone who normally considers puns the highest form of wit.

Alfred Bestall, Rupert: The Daily Express Annual (1964)

1964 / Ebook / 114 pages / UK

***

I had one or two Rupert annuals as a child, but don't remember ever feeling like reading them once I was able to, so I don't know if this one's typical of the form with its odd parallel prose and poetry streams for the same stories, origami tips and racist magic paintings. Apart from that part, it was quite nice.

Faves: 'Rupert and the Compass,' 'Rupert and the Dog-Roses.'

Worsties: 'Rupert and the Distant Music,' 'Rupert's Pleasure Island.'

Roald Dahl, Matilda

1988 / Audiobook / 240 pages / UK

***

I might have read some or even all of this one as a child, it's one of the less memorable ones for being less ghoulish and comparatively humdrum until the second half, when the precocious prankster's "brain power" gets a sci-fi literalisation. It stands up well as an adult, even without nostalgia.

Alrightreads: Shadows

Roger Zelazny, Jack of Shadows

1971 / Audiobook / 207 pages / USA

**

A nice science-fantasy scenario thrown away on a slapdash story.

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

1993 / Audiobook / 528 pages / USA

***

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.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind (La sombra del viento)

2001 / Audiobook / 575 pages / Spain

**

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.

Eliot Wilder, DJ Shadow's Endtroducing...

2005 / Ebook / 100 pages / USA

**

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.

Tim Lebbon, Alien: Out of the Shadows

2014 / Audiobook / 352 pages / UK

***

I knew better, but curiosity got the better of me, and there was a chance these interquels would explore new possibilities rather than just doing Alien again again again. Not this time.

Alrightreads: C

Arthur C. Clarke, Childhood's End

1953 / Audiobook / 214 pages / UK

****

'Guardian Angel' was a nice slice of heavy-handed colonial allegory and this is a very worthwhile expansion. Clarke hadn't yet learned to stretch out the revelations across a lucrative tetralogy, and while I normally prefer to leave some mysteries to mull over, getting full disclosure was satisfying, capped off with an emotionally confounding climax.

Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan, Comet

1985 (updated 1997) / Ebook / 432 pages / USA

****

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?

Kevin Courrier, Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band's Trout Mask Replica

2007 / Ebook / 148 pages / Canada

**

Rather than getting into the spirit and writing an avant-garde treatise, this is a disappointingly earnest appreciation and background to a boring album. The sincere comparison with the moon landing made me chuckle.

Kris Straub and Sarah Pharris, Candle Cove and Other Stories

2008-14 (collected 2015) / Ebook / 84 pages / USA

****

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.'


Lukas Resheske, The Copywriting Business Formula: How to Build a $250,000/year Freelance Copywriting Business from Scratch, Volume One

2018 / Ebook / 38 pages / USA

**

In a freelance business, time you don't spend earning is time you're spending. Don't I know it. There are lots of valid points here about taking control, focusing on your strengths and going niche that I've worked out over my decade as a freelance writer, but I prefer my laid-back, low-budget approach over aggressively pursuing the big bucks. It's a shame this guy's so dedicated to efficiency that he didn't bother to turn these transcribed chapter summaries into a proper book.

Alrightreads: Five Senses

Robert Sheckley, Untouched by Human Hands

1952-53 (collected 1954) / Audiobook / 169 pages / USA

***

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.'

Ellis Peters, A Morbid Taste for Bones

1977 / Audiobook / 192 pages / UK

***

The monastic double-act prefigures The Name of the Rose, but this mystery is less compelling. Like all good historical fiction, you laugh at the characters' zany obsessions, then realise it's just a variation on more familiar nonsense. It was mainly worth sitting through for Stephen Thorne's narration, the comforting voice of childhood audiobooks.

Rhys Hughes, The Smell of Telescopes

1996-2000 (collected 2000) / Ebook / 280 pages / UK

*****

Setting myself moronic reading themes pays off every now and then, I probably never would have come across this obscure oddity from a new favourite writer without it. These twenty-six tales of Weird Wales share the occasional irrepressible character, but they're mainly linked by recurring preoccupations and a consistent tone that can't help itself from regularly deflating the unnerving atmosphere with exquisite puns and convoluted twists. Too many faves to bother listing.

China Miéville, Emma Bircham and Max Schaefer, Looking for Jake and Other Stories

1998-2005 (collected 2005) / Audiobook / 303 pages / UK

****

Not as many stand-outs as his next collection, but still an engaging mix of moderately weird tales and successful and failed experiments.

Faves: 'Entry Taken from a Medical Encyclopaedia,' 'Different Skies,' The Tain.

Worsties: 'An End to Hunger,' ''Tis the Season,' 'On The Way to the Front.'

James Acaster, Perfect Sound Whatever

2019 / Audiobook / 304 pages / UK

***

A strange mix of a comedian's 2017 diary and eclectic album reviews. I didn't feel like bursting my synthwave bubble and checking out as many  of the recommendations as I normally would, apart from the irresistibly bizarre ones like gospel black metal and the Flanders band. It never stopped being distracting that he pronounces "record" like an American.

Top 10 childhood TV theme tunes

Becoming a parent has been a more valid excuse to indulge in childhood nostalgia. She can have her own roaring '20s nostalgia, but I'd be neglectful if I didn't sprinkle some glorious '80s in there.

Here are my favourite TV themes enjoyed in childhood that have also stood the test of time, with no regard for the accompanying visuals (however skill) or the actual quality of the show (when I even watched it). They're not all from kids' shows.

Featuring embedded video links that I'll allow to deteriorate over time like our memories.

Alrightreads: B

Iain Banks, The Business

1999 / Audiobook / 390 pages / UK

*

If you read the blurb hoping for a conspiracy thriller, or had forgotten that Banks' "mainstream" novels had any traces of the fanciful stripped out of them by the '90s, you'd probably be disappointed by this tediously humdrum romcom take on Chris Carter's Millennium.

Steve Matteo, The Beatles' Let It Be

2004 / Audiobook / 141 pages / USA

**

I've never got the Beatles obsession, but I like their later albums well enough and could do with knowing them better. This wasn't very illuminating, focusing more on the artists' personal lives and the context than digging into the music like I like. Maybe there's not that much to it.

John Medina, Brain Rules for Baby: How to Raise a Smart and Happy Child from Zero to Five

2010 / Ebook / 300 pages / USA

****

Smarter than the average baby book, this is the usual 21st-century advice backed up by reliable studies and evolutionary biology. We'll see how things turn out.

David Garfinkel, Breakthrough Copywriting: How to Generate Quick Cash With the Written Word

2014 / Ebook / 113 pages / USA

**

Some timeless tips and old-school cheese packaged with the dubious USP of urgency. I didn't sign up to the course he kept pushing, so he can't be that good.

David Mitchell, The Bone Clocks

2014 / Audiobook / 609 pages / UK

***

I'd been disappointed that Mitchell's novels post Cloud Atlas weren't the lesser retreads of that style I'd been expecting, but he got there in the end. Omitting the pastiche aspect, and taking place over a less impressive timeline with more explicit connections, this ends up being the more coherent novel. Never mind.

Alrightreads: Islands

Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island

1881-82 (collected 1883) / Audiobook / 282 pages / UK

***

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.

John W. Campbell, Islands of Space

1931 (revised 1957) / Audiobook / 224 pages / USA

***

I don't know if these vintage sci-fi writers were following received wisdom that you had to focus on either plot or character at the expense of the other, or if that's just how it tended to come out. In its lengthy descriptions of future tech and exploration of slightly-differentiated new worlds and inferior civilisations, this is squarely in the former camp, with occasional moments of wonder. Sometimes travel's about the places, not the people.

Mo Hayder, Pig Island

2006 / Audiobook / 352 pages / UK

****

Starting out as your basic but morbidly fun marauding monster investigation/debunking, this becomes more interesting when the mystery's seemingly solved before the halfway point and the horror gives way to sympathetic drama. For long enough that you let your guard down.

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

2009 / Ebook / 279 pages / USA

****

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.

Bill Bryson, The Road to Little Dribbling: More Notes from a Small Island

2015 / Audiobook / 400 pages / USA

**

Twenty years on, the veteran travel writer tours Britain again, but mainly moans about the internet, the young people today and other random targets and gets into pointless arguments with proprietors and other locals. Maybe this is what reading my travel blog was like.

Alrightreads: Four Seasons

Geoffrey Himes, Bruce Springsteen's Born in the U.S.A.

2005 / Ebook / 144 pages / USA

***

I've never paid much attention to lyrics outside of Nick Cave, so it's gratifying when these books cover the laboured songwriting process and get inside the writer's head rather than just recounting humdrum studio anecdotes. If that's too deep for rock 'n' roll journalism, he ends with a ranked discography, good man.

Robert A. Heinlein, The Door into Summer

1956 (collected 1957) / Audiobook / 188 pages / USA

***

Less piss-takingly complex than my favourite Heinlein time travel stories, but still satisfyingly tidy and I was still left with that familiar unpleasant aftertaste by the end, the dirty get. Pete the cat was the best character.

David Mitchell, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

2010 / Audiobook / 480 pages / UK

**

David Mitchell (Not That One) has certainly done his research into Japan and the Dutch East India Company at the turn of the 19th century. Well done. I'll stick to his supernatural works over his grim realist horrors.

James Goss, Doctor Who: Dead of Winter

2011 / Ebook / 255 pages / UK

***

Goss can be relied on to shake things up, and this epistolary tale told in multiple unreliable voices mucks around in ways that wouldn't work on TV or audio, which is more than I expect. A minimalist historical horror, it fits well thematically with the parallel sixth series.

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

2009 / Ebook / 205 pages / USA

****

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.

I made this

Do you remember that short-lived Children's BBC 'Genie' ident from 1995, with the generic Aladdin bloke whose head was bigger than his body, as if he'd been drawn by a child who was still in single digits and had no knowledge of anatomy, but knew how to flatter competition judges by unsubtly implying that their channel was magic? I did that.

My unimaginative winning entry to the CBBC ident competition (I think the stop-motion bees one was the other winner) has never showed up in ident compilations on YouTube, when I've been feeling self-indulgent enough to check, and it's still classified as lost media by people who think that information is valuable enough to include on a wiki, but who clearly aren't obsessive enough to skim through random continuity uploads from early 1995 to see if it's there.

Found it! (4:06)



That was 25 years ago. I should probably get some new achievements.