Alrightreads: Brexit

Alan Moore and Alan Davis, Captain Britain

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

***

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

Bill Bryson, Notes from a Small Island

1995 / Audiobook / 282 pages / USA

****

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

Various, Icons of England

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

****

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

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

2016 / Audiobook / 360 pages / India

***

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

Robert Macfarlane, The Lost Words

2017 / Audiobook / 112 pages / UK

**

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

Alrightreads: A

Iain M. Banks, Against a Dark Background

1993 / Audiobook / 487 pages / UK

***

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

Richard K. Morgan, Altered Carbon

2002 / Audiobook / 416 pages / UK

**

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

Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation

2014 / Audiobook / 208 pages / USA

*****

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

Jeff VanderMeer, Authority

2014 / Audiobook / 352 pages / USA

***

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

Jeff VanderMeer, Acceptance

2014 / Audiobook / 341 pages / USA

****

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

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

Alrightreads: Counting

I can count!

Top 10 Mr. Show sketches

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

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

Best of 1988–1999, Not from 1988–1999

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

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

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

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

Best of 2000–2019, Not from 2000–2019

Happy New Vicennial! Rather than a boring round-up of things I've enjoyed in the past year, or even the last decade, here's a thoroughly tedious chronology of My Best TV, Films, Books, Music and Other Stuff That I Happened to Experience During Each of the Last 20 Years.

These are the cultural highlights that were most important to me At the Time (Aged 14–34), plus retrospective overall favourites by category and the Overall Best Thing of the 21st Century.

Importantly, many best things of the year Weren't Actually Released in That Year, because there are loads of other years to catch up on and I'm not some zeitgeisty freak. No, I'm clearly normal.

Based on Memory, Research, Guesswork and Existential Anguish. Selections from my old 2014–18 round-ups revised when I somehow remembered things more clearly years later.

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

Ranking Father Ted

Revered by other comedy snobs, and obviously funny, I've never got on all that well with the ecclesiastical classic, finding it a bit cynically contrived and considering Big Train to be peak Linehan/Mathews.

I enjoyed its flights of fancy, but it's not something I've made an effort to seek out since I was a teenager who'd watch any comedy that came on, whether it was on my bedroom portable or a bus full of schoolkids on their way to Germany, hearing that theme tune over and over.

Still, it's something to watch and tediously compare. Here are a non-fan's Top Twenty-five Teds.

Alrightreads: Dinosaurs

Jurassic Park's still the best.


Jules Verne, A Journey to the Centre of the Earth (Voyage au centre de la Terre, a.k.a. A Journey to the Interior of the Earth)

1864 / Audiobook / 183 pages / France

****

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.

Various, The Science Fictional Dinosaur

1950-82 (collected 1982) / Audiobook / pages / USA/UK

***

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.'


Michael Swanwick, Bones of the Earth

2002 / Audiobook / 335 pages / USA

***

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.

Ricardo Delgado, Age of Reptiles Omnibus, Vol. 1

1993-2011 (collected 2011) / Ecomics / 398 pages / USA

***

I would've got more out of Delgado's silent film storyboards if I'd read looked at them at the time, at the height of Jurassic Park-fuelled Dinomania. I liked his scenic vistas the best, ominously pitting the pitiable reptiles against the indifferent forces of nature. The anthropomorphised action sequences were less enthralling.

Nick Attfield, Dinosaur Jr.'s You're Living All Over Me

2011 / Ebook / 160 pages / UK

***

I wasn't aware of these proto-grunge kids before, so this was an insightful and entertaining textual documentary to catch. Our chronicler takes an appropriately dismissive tone for the self-described "lazy" band, until he slips up and admits that it's a "great album" towards the end. I think that's going a bit far.

Alrightreads: Aminals

Watership Down's still the best.

Jack London, The Call of the Wild

1903 / Audiobook / 232 pages / USA

****

I didn't dwell on what brutal messages the author might have been imparting; just enjoyed the fusion between harsh realism and sentimental myth-making and a pragmatic brevity that more novels should embrace.

Clifford D. Simak, City

1944-51 (collected 1952) / Audiobook / 224 pages / USA

****

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.

Colin Dann, The Animals of Farthing Wood

1979 / Ebook / 302 pages / UK

****

It was unlikely that reading the original children's novel as an adult was going to be as affecting as the classic cartoon was back in the '90s, but the adaptation turned out to be largely faithful. One improvement was gender-swapping some of the relentlessly male characters for a bit of balance, I don't know what Colin had against girls.

Jim Fusilli, The Beach Boys' Pet Sounds

2005 / Audiobook / 121 pages / USA

****

An album so universally revered that even I like it, this song-by-song analysis from a veteran music journalist is passionate, astute and interesting. Many lesser writers in this series tend to fall down at that third part.

Bryan Talbot, Grandville Mon Amour

2006 / Ecomics / 104 pages / UK

***

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.