Orhan Pamuk depicts his characters as exquisitely and minutely as the miniaturists of Istanbul depict their horses, leaves, women and warriors, and tells his tale as meticulously as the masters of old. A murder mystery that opens with the corpse describing his death and immediate afterlife, the quest for the killer involves an exploration of the clash between the old styles of illustration and illumination of the East and the new, Venetian style of the West which threatens to corrupt and supplant the other. The philosophies and spirtuality and politics of style and imitation are debated and explored and illuminated through parables and tales.
Slightly heavy - wrong word - slightly slow and absorbing going for a January full of other stresses and distractions and obligations, but well worth working through, triumphant and gorgeous and ultimately sad; a potentially immortal work of art to immortalise the passing of a style of art that was supposed to be immortal.

I actually read this in an omnibus edition, but what the hell.

The most amazing thing about this book upon reading it for the first time is the way it echoes down through some of my favourite films. Hammett was well served with adaptations, with The Thin Man and The Maltese Falcon being amongst the best of their era, Falcon in particular being one of the definitive private eye films. Red Harvest, less well known, inspired Kurosawa's brilliant samurai film Yojimbo, Sergio Leone's For A Fistful of Dollars and, er, Walter Hill's Last Man Standing, which i have a soft spot for. None of them directly adapted the book, but the influence is clear, and even more marked in the Coen brother's Miller's Crossing, which captured the language, the personality, the down-at-heels stylishness, the alcoholic haze and brought it to glorious life. Read this book with Gabriel Byrne's voice in your head. It's lovely.

So the nameless, overweight and frequently drunk Continental Op turns up in Personville, colloquially known as Poisonville, at the behest of the local newspaper editor. The newspaper editor turns up dead and it turns out Personville is choking on corruption and gangsterism and bootlegging and everything bad under the sun. Included in the line up of scoundrels is his client's father. Having solved the murder by page 50, the Op has also bullied the father into paying him to essentially clean up Personville, which he then proceeds to do.

There follows a scheming, twisting, tale of many, many murders as the Op pits faction against faction, finding any available spanners and tossing them into the works until the whole damn town explodes around, nearly taking him with it. the Op is the original hard-boiled, smart-talking, fast-punching quick-shooting gumshoe who's so good at outsmarting everyone around him, he even manages to outsmart himself. This is a fantastic novel, told with spare, witty language. It's a touchstone in popular culture, a classic of its kind and an all-round awesome read.

A long, dense, sometimes difficult book about a long, dense, difficult man. Har har. Christopher Tiejens is a gentleman and a gentleman is beholden to a myriad unspoken and unwritten laws, many of which appear to be made up by the gentleman to justify rather silly behaviour. Or perhaps that's unfair. Christopher aspires to a kind of Protestant sainthood and will cleave to his ideals even as England decays around him, leaving him the last decent Englishmen, susceptible to all manner of beastliness as he bulls through with an almost pathological stubbornness and an apparent addiction to manly noble suffering.

Wife Sylvia ensnared him after she thought she ha been made pregnant by another man. Sylvia turns out to be a monster, for all that she might at first eke a certain sneaking admiration for her convention defying ways. It soon becomes apparent that she isn't defying anything, just making them work to her own demented ends. Thus begins poor old Christopher's travails. Cuckolded, bitched, and now the subject of her bottomless malice, he stoically endures the whips and chains of bad fortune. Then he meets Valentine Wannop and falls in love. Then the war comes along to hasten the destruction of all he holds dear. It's pretty much downhill all the way.

Poor Christopher becomes the whipping boy for all his class, as Christ-like in his fundamental goodness as in his ability to endure the scourge. One prays for a happy ending, if only to relieve one's own suffering, but damned if I know whether any chink of happiness was allowed in at the last. Maybe? Book 4 has some amazing writing in it, but it's a bit elliptical in terms of the plot. It's a bit of a let-down after the splendid war-torn scenes of the previous two books. Perhaps that was the point, a comment on the post-war treatment of the soldiers? No, it just feels... unresolved, After Infinite Jest last year, I probably shouldn't complain about wading through 900 pages and not finding resolution, but the ambiguity of the ending felt mean-spirited rather than aesthetic. Maybe it'll grow on me. I can see why the tv series largely left it out.

With a birfurcated narrative that spends time in two separate realities, one almost-real with odd science fiction overtones and the other a dreamy but slightly sinister fantasy that might be a utopia or might be some sort of entropic hell, this reminded me of Iain Banks' Walking On Glass. What starts off as mysterious forays into slightly alien worlds filled with oddness and danger and conspiracy, turns, magically, in the the end to a meditation on mortality and eternity, and though the ending is unknowable, the imponderable and inevitable human confrontation with the certainty of one and the seeming impossiblity of the other is a powerful and moving modern evocation of the human condition.

An astonishing book. Essentially an urban epic about losing your cat and your wife and your grip on reality, the plot moves dreamily through the mundane world of a man living an aimless, blameless life as he experiences erotic phone-calls, the philosophical musings of a teenage neighbour, horrifying stories from Japan's military campaign in China, a fascination with an abandoned well, two sisters named after islands and their strange vocation, and, frankly, a whole lot of other stuff. The writing is plain but addictive, and though the plot is full of ambiguities, complexities and perplexing enigmas, many of which are left for the reader to resolve, it is nonetheless a supremely satisfying read.

Genuinely masterful and romantic modern fantasy, as creepy strange things happen on the odd little Scottish outcrop that is Appleton, where everything is in decline and all the apple trees are gone. But a golden apple has appeared out of season in a walled off orchard and a new chance has come around to make everything right or to lose everything for good. But who will eat the golden apple, and will it be in time? Appleton is cut off from the outside world and the mists are rolling in. Ghosts are stirring and old things are coming back to prey on the living. Well, that might make it sound like more of a horror than it really is. The book is a slow burn, until two thirds of the way through when the weirdness really takes off. It's more creepy and strange and atmospheric as three women search for love or lust and trace the story of the island the people who lived on it, all leading to the peculiar situation our heroines find themselves in.

So, in a radical departure, I read this baby exclusively on my phone. The author has been considerate enough to put the entire trilogy online for free and my phone has a thingy that lets me download books and the book was there so I said, that's me, all cutting edge and cyberpunky and whatnot.

Peter Watts. Not the most cheerful writer. Not your cuddly romantic heroic hard-edge but soft-hearted type of author, and this is not the most cheerful of books, and the whole trilogy's been a downer so far, but what a ride! The whole thing fizzes and pops with ideas and action and great writing, one can almost forget that the whole thing is about the world dying horribly, except Watts NEVER LETS YOU FORGET.

In Starfish, Leni Clarke is a Rifter, working at a new power generating station on top of a geothermal vent at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. She has been physically altered to survive underwater at insanely high pressures, but it soon becomes apparent that the physical adaptations were easy. psychological adaptation, on the other hand, is a whole different kettle of fish. Rifters come pre-adapted to high-stress environments. They're the survivors of abuse or trauma. They're also the people who commit abuse and inflict trauma, all mixed together at the bottom of the ocean. It's a volatile mix.

What nobody expects is that the Rifters start to like it down there. The Rifters don't want to leave.

Damaged personalities who may not be human anymore in a high-pressure setting. The most hostile place on Earth, spitting lava and boiling water, teeming with hungry monsters with huge teeth. This is insanely atmospheric, claustrophobic, and scary as heck. I was utterly riveted the whole way through, and I don't actually LIKE reading on my flipping phone. I just had to keep going.

A guy hanging on the beach is approached by another guy who wants the first guy to kill him. The first guy agrees, but the first guy isn't the wasted junkie the second guy thinks he is. The first guy is an asshole. A complete and utter asshole. He's also a journalist named Fletch investigating drugs on the beach and plagued by editors and lawyers and ex-wives, but the puzzle of the guy hiring his own murderer is a puzzle he can't resist and he sets out to discover what the hell is going on.

It's funny and it's clever and it's even angry and serious at the heart of it. I'm not sure I've anything else to say about this. Nope. That's it.

This big, meaty historical thriller about dodgy dealings that threaten a widespread financial crisis was a bit of a revelation. Liss manages to evoke an eighteenth-century voice and mind-set while rendering both utterly readable. Dextrous plotting, devious characters, witty lessons in philosophy and finance, and controlled bursts of violence and action power this novel along to its conclusion.

Benjamin Weaver, ex-boxer turned thief-taker, is the proto-Marlowe on these mean London streets, drawn into the new-fledged world of the proto-stock market when hired to look into an apparent suicide. What compels Weaver to reluctantly take the case is the suicide's connection to his father, run down by a carriage at around the same time. Not only is he drawn into the web of dealing and double-dealing at the Exchange, he also finds himself making contact with his family, members of London's close-knit Jewish community, and the web of corruption and conspiracy is wide enough to cover both.

Yes, well, entirely apart from the resonances the book will have for the modern reader, set as it is on the cusp of the South Sea Bubble, this brilliantly imagined and vividly rendered is thoroughly interesting and entertaining from start to finish.