[books 2014] Living Next-Door to the God of Love

5. Living Next-Door to the God of Love by Justina Robson

Wow, this was *hard*. It did not help that I painted myself into a corner whereby the only way I could finish it was to read it at lunch and on the bus in order to finish it before book club.

I'm still not sure I understood it. I adored bits of it and found other parts not very interesting on top of being very difficult.

My final take-away thought is that it's bog-standard traditional-to-urban fantasy, but with n-dimensional physics, thus making it (according to the blurb on the cover) hard sci-fi.

Loads of interesting points to think about.

I'm keeping it, because I'd like to try it again some time and maybe I'll pick up on more of what's going on. Not that I'm likely to ever have the requisite time + brain power combination going, but it could happen.

Will definitely be checking out her other stuff.

[books 2014] Marc Almond's autobiography

6. Tainted Life by Marc Almond

Marc's autobiography, published way back in 1999!

It's very much a recently-out-of-rehab mea culpa.

It gets really repetitive.

Having said that, the parts about his childhood are pretty harrowing (domestic violence), and the art college/ university parts are interesting.

Marc studied at Leeds Polytechnic and a lot of myths about Soft Cell were still current when I was at Leeds University. I always thought I'd bought my copy of the 12-inch of Bedsitter in the cluster of streets (the Brudenells) where it was written, but it turns out the crappy accommodation that inspired that particular song was in Chapeltown. (Only Marc Almond could "accidentally" end up living in Chapeltown - it's nowhere near the unis, not in the student ghetto, and I suspect was known throughout the North of England for being a notorious red light district).

Also he was not as young as I thought when Soft Cell made it big - for some reason I thought he had never finished his degree due to being derailed by fame, but Soft Cell didn't even start going till after he graduated.

There are some well thought out passages about homophobia in the music industry and society in general, even coming from people who are ostensibly gay allies.

One for the fan-boys-and-girls only - it's certainly not *bad*, but there's far too much "I made a bad record because I was on drugs and couldn't say no to people. I should have learned", which fails to be followed up by learning.

Oh, and thanks very very much to girfan for tracking down a copy of it for me!

[books 2014] Inherit the Dead by various authors

7. Inherit the Dead by various authors

This is a hard-boiled crime number written in twenty chapters by twenty different authors. I only became aware of it because John Connolly contributed a chapter.

A wealthy woman hires an ex-cop PI to track down her missing (but estranged) daughter, who nobody seems to be too worried about.

It's not good, per se, but it's interesting watching the writers trying to write the next guy (or gal) into a corner and to out-noir each other. It's successful in that if you look hard you can pick up the voices of the individual writers (mainly in my case Connolly because he's the one I know best, but there's also contributions from Mark Billingham and Charlaine Harris), but it hangs together as a novel surprisingly well.

Continuing to learn Germanic languages through the medium of crime drama

I'm definitely slipping. All through the first series of The Bridge I could tell when they were speaking Swedish and when they were speaking Danish. Not what they were saying, but I could definitely tell the sound of one language from the other.

This time round, I couldn't, except when they were talking about work, in which Danish uses the German verb "arbeit" and Swedish uses "jobbe" as a verb.

I suspect I need a big dose of Swedish Wallander (Krister Henriksen version please). Allegedly BBC4 has more coming this year.

Also allegedly the makers of The Bridge are working on a third series, and can't wait to see how they write themselves out of the ending of the second series. There are many plausible scenarios in which Martin doesn't go to jail, but not a lot in which he emerges with his career intact.

BBC4's latest Saturday night Euro-crime is Salamander, a Belgian number. It is neither as good as the best Scandinavian efforts nor as bad as the Radio Times made out (so far). I was hoping more of it would be in French so I'd be less tied to the TV and the subtitles[1], but it's 99.9% in Flemish. Which I thought I didn't speak At All, but it turns out is more generically Germanic than I thought. If anything, it sounds more like the Scandinavian languages than German. I'm also left wondering how it is that I've been exposed to so little spoken Dutch/Flemish.

[1] Having said that, my French vocabulary expanded markedly from watching Spiral. Previously, touristy general getting-by language aside, my vocabulary tended heavily towards history, archaeology and literary criticism