Love this, actually. Lots of people don't, and it suffers for all sorts of reasons that aren't its' fault, poor widdle bookie wookie, but, though manifestly incomplete and dealing with the aftermath of the exhausting Storm, foregrounding minor characters, touring various parts of the world, dealing with political machinations in hitherto marginal settings, Feast is a perfectly satisfying read, and may find kinder judgement when its companion volume is finally available. And I'd better find out what happens to Brienne, or there'll be words.

Why, yes, this was the very copy of the Wasp Factory I purchased with the same book token I used to buy that copy of One Hundred Years Of Solitude. Well spotted.

By all accounts this caused a bit of a storm when it first came out, as witnessed by the infamous Irish Times review, now used as a blurb of pride, though not on my edition. It can't be the murders or the paganism or the dysfunctional family or the gruesome bit or the cruelty to animals, because there was nothing there that you couldn't have found in horror fiction in one form or another over the years. I imagine what rankled was the language and the realism and the psychological acuity, not to mention the literary packaging. Nowadays, from that point of view, it seems relatively tame. Still packs a bit of a wallop, though.

Frank lives with his father on a small island in Scotland. He mounts animal skulls on poles, embeds wasps in candle wax, hunts rabbits with a flame thrower and keeps the skull of his enemy, Old Saul, in a bunker. The island is his domain and he rules it like a god. Now his brother, Eric, who sets dogs on fire, has escaped from his asylum and is on his way home.

Frank's a monster, a fledgling serial killer who capriciously decided on a different career track after his first three victims. His rituals and his ceremonies and his totemic objects make sense of the world and make sense of his own mind. His voice is sane, articulate, witty and intelligent. He uses it to describe his odd activities, makes them seem strange, unhealthy, perhaps, but essentially harmless. Then he seamlessly uses that same voice to describe catapulting small animals into river mud, the murder of his brother and two cousins or his attitude to women. One clings to the voice as a sign of potential redemption, but redemption is something you do, not something you are, and Frank is utterly aware of what he is and of what he has done. Or so he thinks.

A familiar pattern of secrets, ideas, family circles, social lives and horrible accidents and bizarre occurrences marks this as the proto-Banks novel, but for a debut it springs fully formed with voice, attitude and gleeful cunning intact and ready to rip it up through the twin worlds of literary and science fiction.

One noticeable negative effect of using an online cataloguing social media service like this here Goodreads is a tendency to attach more value to numbers than to books themselves. Thus, I am mildly obsessed by the numbers of books read per year, by the number of pages read per year, by the 'most-read authors' and by the various sub-categories of the books I read. This isn't all bad of course. Being aware of how many books I read helps keep me focused on reading more books and spending less time foostering online. It encourages me to read more non-fiction and helped me notice the overwhelming maleness of the authors I read and helps me push myself outside my comfort zone and challenge myself a little

Unfortunately, there's a tendency to look at books and decide they're too damn long, too damn dense, too damn hard, I'll be a month or more reading that, it'll bring down my total, better to read something short and fast and easy. This is particularly bad when it comes to collected or omnibus editions, like the Gormenghast trilogy which I've tried a few times to start but give up because it's just going to take too damn long and after all that time it'll only count as one book! Or this very Quartet, which I put off for weeks before diving in. The numbers shouldn't matter more than the books, of course, but sometimes they do, and that's something to be overcome.

The Alexandria Quartet consists of, yes, four novels, all set in the titular North African city in the late thirties early forties. In fact, the first three cover the same time period, more or less, and provide seperate glosses on the same events - even if the events themselves are not depicted in the book, they are altered by new information. Then in the third novel, 'the time dimension is unleashed,' and yes Durrell can get away with saying stuff like that and, indeed, with doing stuff like that.

A group of remarkably self-involved, pretentious, priveleged, post-colonial avatars fall in and out of love with each other, have affairs, enact betrayals and deceptions, analyse themselves and their histories and their relationships with with rare articulacy and poetic prolixity. They discuss art and poetry and literature and all around them the city and its environs are described with astonishing vigour and extraordinary language. They break up, commit suicide or die or go into exile, and that's the first book, Justine, a concentrated non-linear burst of almost impressionistic intensity. Balthazar interleaves new accounts, new insights structured as threads which intertwine with Justine, altering our perceptions, deepening our understanding, but quietly mocking our presumption that there can be full and complete and singular understandings.

Mountolive steps back and above the previous two, almost conventional in plot and structure, creating a political backdrop which further contextualises, confuses and contradicts the first two volumes. Finally Clea lurches like its narrator back to the city and on through the war - and, in a series not short of passages of dazzling literary dexterity, contains the highlight of a description of a bombing raid seen from offshore. Stories continue and develop, the nature of love is further explored, the dead from Justine continue to intrude with galling insights, comic hilarity and esoteric explorations. It ends with notes that point to future volumes never to be written but which exist as part of the vast thrumming life-energy of the Quartet that seems to sprawl across unwritten histories.

Beautiful and vital, complex and ambitious, funny and horrible, this is an astonishing, dazzling, deeply enriching work of literature.

Such a pity it only counts as one book.

I think this fantasy trilogy may well be my favourite. It's one I still reread with pleasure, probably because it is so clearly written for adults, though when I first read it as a teenager the violent indignities inflicted on Christian missionaries and the fate of poor Suldrun scared me off after the cosy safety of Middle Earth and Narnia. Luckily I went back to it. The dangers and cruelties of the Elder Isles anticipate the modern hard-boiled fantasy epics of Martin, Abercombie et al, yet the language is that of high chivalry, arch wit and sharp irony. Even the most horrible monster is highly articulate and argues with logic and reason. For every danger and cruelty, however, there is wonder and kindness and joy. The books, also, are unashamedly drenched with magic and crowded with fey personages, possibly the best fictional representation of fairies I have ever read, wonderful creatures utterly without conscience.

The story is long and strange and always unexpected. Our protagonists suffer sudden changes or reversals of fortune at every turn, and it's only about halfway through before a narrative begins to take proper shape. Vance's evocation of a fantasy landscape is unparalleled. For the first time, I noticed that there was something missing from the detailed descriptions of meals and feasts and scavenged scraps and quick repasts: no potatoes. Because, of course, they haven't been brought back from the Americas yet. I don't know why, but that little detail made me unaccountably happy.

Kafka Tamura runs away from his home in Tokyo, travelling almost randomly to a far-away city. There he spends most of his time in a special library, absorbed in his reading. After a little more than a week he wakes up in a park next to a shrine covered in blood that is not his own. Nakata is an old man who tracks down lost cats. His current job takes him to an abandoned building site where he sits and waits until a dog arrives and tells him to follow it. Such are the two disparate narratives in Kafka On The Shore, a strange, eerie, disturbing novel filled with the magical and the surreal, with diversions into the realms of art, music, and philosophy and an intricate, opaque metaphysical plot propelling the actions of the protagonists, while they try to makes some sense out of the odd, dangerous turns their lives have taken

It's certainly a superb novel. Murakami occupies a sort of calm, literary kingdom that starts at the point where Neil Gaiman, Flann O'Brien and Jonathan Carroll intersect. Very little of the underlying plot is explained, but, thematically, it all makes a dramaturgical logic, making sense as a narrative, with only sly hints at any underlying explanation. His characters, though, are alive, and richly developed and emotionally real, even in the most bizarre and shocking of circumstances. Mr Nakata, who can neither read nor write but can talk to cats, is a particularly engaging character in his simplicity and his innocence, both of which mask a tragedy of a lost life.

There's some very strange sex (the sex itself isn't strange, it's either who's having it or what's said during it), an aesthetic and spiritual awakening, a savage murder and weird things fall from the sky. And it all makes sense. It just doesn't get explained. How did he DO that?

You've got to admire Christopher Tolkien. His stewardship of his father's work has clearly been a labour of love, a deeply serious, scholarly task requiring commitment and devotion that stands in stark contrast to the crass commercialisation that, by default, accompanies the films. So when he produces a new posthumous book as by JRR Tolkien, you have to treat accusations of cashing in with skepticism.

The Children Of Hurin is definitely not new. Versions of the story appear in The Silmarillon and Unfinished Tales. It is one of the core myths of Tolkien's Elder Days, so the story will be familiar to many. However, what we have here is a carefully collated, edited, coherent, self-contained continuous narrative, and it is something of a revelation. It's a marvelous read and a great story and a thrilling journey through Beleriand. The archaic style, deliberately employed by Tolkien to give a sense of distance and deep time, may be off-putting to some readers, but it very quickly grows on you, creating a vivid, powerful sense of momentum and an epic sense of scale, with every emotion, even the pettier, meaner ones, painted in strong primary colours and the titanic forces at war and the overwhelming sense of impending doom and inescapable tragedy imbuing the whole thing with that aching sense of sadness and lovely things passing that is unique to Tolkien.

The illustrations by Alan Lee are wonderful and atmospheric. There is a useful fold-out map at the back to keep the reader oriented. Christopher Tolkien restricts his notes and comments to the introduction and the appendices, and they can be safely skipped if one is so inclined. A handsome little book well worth getting, and far from leaving me cyincal about the exploitation of Tolkien's work, it leaves me wishing for further volumes giving, for example, stories such as The Tale Of Beren And Luthien and The Fall Of Gondolin similar treatment.