I was searching for something to say about the imposing length of this book, but it seems every other review has already said it, and indeed, the author makes reference to it a few times as well. Long it may be, but extremely readable, with its smooth, polished, conversational prose and unhurried but regular pacing. In time, it covers just over a year, in people it covers four families and assorted people in their orbits, in theme it goes from comedy to tragedy to romance to domestic drama, to campus politics to national politics to urban industry to rural agriculture to religious ferment to obsessive love to social class to music, art and poetry to corruption, reform, idealism and revolt and madness and misogyny and bigotry and catastrophe and riot and two weddings and a funeral and so on and so forth.

Despite its sprawl, it never seems to sprawl, and though there's a lot to keep track of, the leisurely pace and the distinctive characters - who are mostly lovable to one degree or another despite very identifiable foibles and failings - moving through their lives never seem rushed or muddled or melodramatic. There's no zany plot twisting soap operatics here, and all the twists and the turns of their lives, big and small seem natural and unforced. Indeed, perhaps a more ruthless author might have visited more in the way of loss and grief on the central families -at times they seem quite blessed, despite the upheavals personal and political and social going on around them. But life can be like that sometimes too, and the experience is so immersive and vivid and the world so rich and the families so alive it seems like a small complaint that they're not quite unhappy enough.

Odd to add a book quite so popular - 217, 737th person to rate the book! I'm adding the 4, 183rd review! This was the second Stephen King book I read, it came from the library as part of an omnibus edition with Carrie. I think it was borrowed by my sister, and I snuck in and read it in secret over some long hot summer days. This was also how I got into Famous Five. I never reread Carrie or 'Salem's Lot or The Shining, even though I spent most of my teenage years reading and rereading King, because I never owned copies. This is a very banal review so far, you'd think the momentous occasion of the 4,183rd review would merit something momentous. Sorry.

I stopped reading King around the time of Wizard And Glass or Insomnia, can't remember which, don't much care. I think I've read the odd story here and there but this is the first time I've picked up a King novel in jaysus, what, twenty years? Now I feel like a character in an Irish King novel reminiscing about time gone by and lost childhood enthusiasms. If you don't hear from me I've been eaten by a Leprechaun.

'Salem's Lot is really very good, isn't it? It actually has quite a literary style, otherwise a lot of the folksiness and philosophising and shifts in tone and voice wouldn't work anywhere near as well as they do. However, his eye for character, his sense of detail and evocation of small-town life would outstay its welcome if he didn't throw vampires at it.

A small band of heroes and one token girl must deal with an outbreak of vamipirism that only they notice. The main hero's a writer, by the way. He started early with that schtick, didn't he? There's a teacher who has Knowledge and a Professional who's Likeable But Doomed and a boy who is Preternaturally Calm and Knows His Genre. The girl Knows Her Own Mind and her mind wants the writer but she Can't Be Saved. Honestly, I can't remember if these are King Types, but they do ring bells.

Talk about readable, though, boy howdy whoopsy-doodle, as a King character's interior monologue would say with slightly annoying regularity. Nailed to the page with vampire teeth through my palms, which is the sort of blurb they really, really loved for King books of that era and all through the eighties. 'Triple H for Horror.' Thank you, The Sun. But no, it's a fantastic, top quality, high-brow, low down pot-boiler of blood and angst and death and undeath and creepiness. I shall be keeping an eye out for The Shining and Carrie next, you betcha oh shut up.

An unashamedly large and intricate tale that starts with thirteen characters relating their commingled stories to a thirteenth but which goes on to draw in more characters and their various mysteries. A conspiracy and a counter-conspiracy as a group of men try to make sense of strange and inexplicable goings-on which seem to implicate them in shady activity. Where has the young prospector vanished to? Why did the whore try to kill herself? Where did the gold in the dead hermit's cabin come from? In the frontier New Zealand gold-rush town of Hokitika there is little certainty and less clarity but there is certainly skullduggery afoot.

Catton's tale is long and full of character and incident, a mystery story and a love story and story of injustice and oppression. Big, bold, immersive and intriguing.

Jame comes to Tai Tastigon. Jame is a woman on the run with gaps in her memory and Tai tastigon is a large city full of gods. So full, that on the particular night of her arrival, there are dead gods wandering the streets, which makes for a disorienting entry for Jame and the reader. After some misadventures that are a bit hard to follow, or at least comprehend, Jame is taken in by the inhabitants of an inn. She becomes an apprentice with the Thief's Guild more or less to pass the winter so she can cross the mountains and join her people who are, by the way, refugees from another world pursued by a Dark Lord eating his way through dimensional realities and opposed by the tripartite god of James' tripartite people with whom they have a strained relationship. Keeping up? Good. Then there's the politics of the Thieves Guild and the upcoming council elections that look set to tear the city apart, the rival inn looking to start a fight, the stalking of a god by a monotheist a bit worried about the profusion of deities that are not hers, a cat with whom she has an empathic connection and probably some other stuff I'm forgetting.

A lot goes on in this crowded, teeming book, and structurally it's all over the place, more like a crime saga about boiling tensions on the mean streets only with, y'know, gods and demons and empathic cats. If you can get past the first chapter without wandering off in dizzy bewilderment, it's a captivating novel bursting with ideas despite its relatively short length. It also turns out to be the first in a long saga of novels not yet completed, but not too far off completion, either. Unique and original, which you can't say about many.

Not the best Tim Powers book I've read - whenever he sets a book in modern LA it always tends to come across as such a bland and empty backdrop compared to any of his historical novels, or even Las Vegas in Last Call. Still, it's an engaging thriller with the customary Powers clever-clever, linking spider images that transport you through time and allow you to take possession of other bodies with tarentellas but it feels slight as far as his usual stuff goes. Still, readable and enjoyable, just not mindbending.

Big juicy epic grimdark fantasy about a bandit who conquered an empire, became queen, faked her own death and retired to become mayor of a small village for twenty years. And then our story begins. One quick murder and massacre later and Zosia is back on the warpath, heading off to round up her five old Villains and scrounge up and army and start a war to take down an empire all over again, as you do. Things go as well as you might expect with lies and betrayal and a diverting side-quest to rescue a missing princess, and yet by the time we're halfway through the book, war is pretty much a certainty

Despite its arresting opening, this doesn't quite grab traction as much as it should, not for a while anyway. There's plenty to keep you interested, with the worldbuilding and the characters, but it feels loose and sprawly until the multiple narrative strands start to come together in the last two hundred pages or so. Nonetheless it's well-written and not as grindingly, relentlessly grimdark as you might expect. The volume ends just as the world is going definitively to some kind of hell, so one might hope for a tighter, faster, even nastier bit of pandemonium in volume two.

Another of Rucka's damaged, driven heroines, Dex is a bit more laid-back and cool, but she's still got a gambling problem and a mentally handicapped brother to support. A down-at-heel PI with slightly tarnished heart of gold, she walks down the mean streets of Portland Oregon. Inveigled, rather than hired, to search for a missing grandaughter, she quickly finds herself roughed up by an unsavoury pair and invited for words with a terrifying local gangster. So it's not a straightforward missing-person case, is it? Stumptown is like an updating of The Rockford Files with its sensible, likeable, honourable, protagonist plagued by the worst luck, and the utterly gorgeous artwork by Matthew Southworth gives it an amazing atmosphere.

I've been saving this for a special occasion, and had rather a nice read of it today over cornflakes and Irish coffees and ended up putting on the turkey twenty minutes later than I'd planned. One story for each of the Endless, showcasing the talents of some fairly major comics artists. It's the pure stuff Sandman was made of, so if that was the stuff for you then this is certainly the book for you also. Favourite has to be Delirium: Going Inside, but they're all pretty damn good.

Ah, the difficulty of reviewing God. God the book, God the wicked old millionaire, God the author, God the reader. All the gods looking down on poor old Nicholas Urfe, holy fool and everyman, just intelligent enough to sense the game, not intelligent enough to know what to do about it. Like the rest of us. Because he wants in. He wants to know the purpose, the answer. He wants to be a player. Oh God, don't we all. And everybody, even Nicholas himself, knows that he is being played and, worse still, that there is no game and no God, though it seems crass, even vulgar to say so.

Nicholas Urfe goes to Greece to teach at a remote, secluded island. He leaves behind an unsatisfactory life and love affair, and brings with him all his faults and failings. On the island he encounters a rich old man, and over weekends at the old man's house hears his life story. Right from the start, games are being played. Visions appear, unseen guests move about, suggestions of ghosts and madness and theatrical tableaux, and all the time lie after lie after lie. Nicholas accepts the challenge, which at its heart and stripped of deception is to simply be a part of the old man's games, to be a fox that knows it's being hunted. Naturally, he does not know what he is in for, but at each stage, half deceived, half aware of the deception, he plunges deeper into the labyrinthine layers of the game, until there is no turning back and no guessing the harm and humiliation awaiting him.

No reader can possibly find the broad elements of this unfamiliar. It has utterly permeated our culture, the idea of the manipulative game played on an unsuspecting person who must succumb to the game's hidden but inevitable outcome, or who must overcome the traps and deceptions and defeat the minotaur at the heart of the maze. It pops up in books, films, television. The cheap attraction of the authorial stand-in able to make things happen in a certain order and a certain way with contrived complexity and conceptual craziness; the cathartic choice of the victim falling at the final trap or breaking the walls and gaming the gamers. And yet none of them are quite like The Magus.

The lessons of the game in The Magus are brutal and unpleasant. The arrogance with which they're dispensed are horrifying. Nicholas is chosen as likely to be at least semi-complicit in the proceedings, and as this is an elaborate con and the gifted con-man will exploit the victim's weaknesses to his profit, sympathy for con victims tends to be limited. If it weren't for their own greed and foolishness they wouldn't have been caught out, we say, sitting in judgment. The repulsive heart of any con is the co-man's apportioning of blame with the victim, and so it is also the repulsive heart of this superb novel.

This book made me depressed and angry as Nicholas inveigled himself into the lies and illusions, setting himself up not just for betrayal, but for the flaying of his own personality for the entertainment of all. And the lesson is good. The lesson is right. Illusions, freedom and the simple necessity of not hurting other people. Be skeptical about things, but not cynical. Be open to the signs and portents and experiences of life without being infantile. Know the measure of your freedom and use it. But even so.

Nicholas' heroism is that he resists as many lies as he falls for, and he sees through the game as it happens. His tragedy is that he's supposed to, and then he's supposed to be grateful for it. At the end he is poised with the girl from the affair previous to his trip to Greece, both dripping from mutual wounds, and one is, perhaps, meant to root for them to somehow bridge the canyon between them. Why, I wonder, are they meant to be together? They won't have a relationship, they'll have an ongoing trauma. The suspense of the ambiguous ending, to me at any rate, isn't whether they will get together, but whether they'll find the strength to walk away. Find Jojo, Nicholas, and get your shit together.

Like the rest of us.

A short, sharp, bitter and somewhat backhanded treatment of a collection of western legends. McMurtry's pungent, punchy, no-nonsense style of storytelling works to remarkable effect in these brief chapters recounting episodes from the lives of Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday, Charlie Goodnight and a few others as they wander across the western plains, blundering and blustering their way doggedly into the stories that would make them legends.