Whoops. Bit late with this one. Also, I’m still only managing four books a month. Could do better. Anyway, here we go.
City of Spades by Colin MacInnes. I bought this mainly because of the episode of the excellent Backlisted podcast on MacInnes’s Absolute Beginners, and because that book is nominally part of a trilogy, I thought I’d read them in order, because that’s the way my mind works. So City of Spades is the very first in the trilogy and I’m sort of assuming it’s basically MacInnes clearing his throat, preparing for his masterpiece. It’s certainly an interesting read, giving a fascinating insight into the black subculture of 50s London. However, it’s one of those novels that consists of a series of episodes that doesn’t really lead anywhere satisfactory. It hasn’t put me off reading Absolute Beginners, however, and I’ll probably be diving into that in December.
Lost for Words by Edward St Aubyn. Ah. Well, this was another of my Hestercombe Gardens secondhand bookshop acquisitions. I’ve read a couple of St Aubyn’s Patrick Melrose novels – enjoyed Bad News, not quite sure about Never Mind – but this was a different kind of beast altogether. It’s a self-consciously comic novel based around a farcical literary award and, my God, it tries so very hard to be funny.
However, this isn’t always successful, basically owing to misunderstandings of the form. For example, the book contains extracts of the various terrible books that are under consideration, and one is quite a neat parody of an Irvine Welsh novel. However, a couple of chapters later a character refers to the novel as being like a poor imitation of Irvine Welsh, at which point the joke vanishes. There was no need to do this. There’s also a weird subplot potentially leading to a very dark grand guignol ending, which I could totally imagine the St Aubyn of Patrick Melrose really going for, but for some reason he bottles it.
This book won the 2014 P.G.Wodehouse Prize. Go figure.
“You Are Not Expected to Understand This” – How 26 lines of Code Changed the World edited by Tori Bosch. The Facebook algorithm threw this one at me and I couldn’t resist: twenty-six essays on seminal examples of computer code that changed the world. In the end it was a bit of a mixed bag of some really interesting stuff that was new to me, some stuff that I’d come across elsewhere, some stuff that wasn’t actually that interesting at all and some stuff which shouldn’t have shown the light of day at all, such as the admiring piece on the blockchain algorithm. I mean, really.
An Uncommon Atlas: 50 New Views of Our Physical, Cultural and Political World by Alastair Bonnett. This looks like it was bought for me a Christmas or two ago, but I honestly can’t remember. I’ve been a fan of Bonnett’s work since I read Off the Map: Lost Spaces, Invisible Cities, Forgotten Islands, Feral Places and What They Tell Us About the World and I found this a fascinating read as well, even though it was more of a coffee table book than Off the Map. I’m always drawn to unusual maps and unusual ways of visualising data and the combination presented by this book was irresistible.