[books 2016] Witchraft and Magic in the Nordic Middle Ages

I am so far behind on this, I can't even remember much about most of the books from the last six weeks.

28 Witchcraft and Magic in the Nordic Middle Ages by Stephen A Mitchell

After a really unpromising introduction that led me to order a bunch of other non-fiction titles from the library, eventually I came back to this book to give it a chance.

Glad I did - the rest was actually quite good. It's got two basic parts - what we (might) know about the role of magic & the supernatural in Norse paganism, and in the Christian period, what practices made up what was perceived as witchcraft or devil worship. Good analysis of what we can know and not; lots of interesting factoids which I now can't remember.

You have to be my kind of nerd, but for what it is, it's pretty well written and interesting. (This is a book that Amazon pimped at me when I bought one of the Viking histories, so it came to me without any recommendations from a trusted source; it could have been complete bollocks).

[books 2016] The Vagrant

29. The Vagrant by Peter Newman

I really wanted to like this book - I've met Pete at a few cons and he seems like a great guy. However, this book just wasn't for me. It's set in a post-apocalyptic world where the earth split open eight years previously and released all kinds of demonic creatures which either killed or tainted most of the human population.

It's the kind of fantasy which involves a lot of traveling, which I always find tedious. The main character, the Vagrant, is traveling with a baby, and a goat (for milk for the baby). The Vagrant does not speak, which is an interesting challenge for a writer. The best character in the book is the goat (it's not just me).

I'm not sure whether it's because I was particularly brain fogged when I was reading it, but I couldn't keep straight the different types of monsters, demons, knights, etc.

I'm not saying it's a bad book - certainly there were scenes that I really enjoyed, but it just wasn't my kind of fantasy.

[books 2016] Who Killed Sherlock Holmes?

And I appear to have exceeded the allowed number of tags on LJ, so from now on I can only use ones I've used before.

30. Who Killed Sherlock Holmes by Paul Cornell

Regular readers will know that I have been eagerly awaiting this one. Paul Cornell's Shadow Police novels are my very favourite supernatural detective series, mainly because they are straight up horror in a police setting, and an exercise in what smart people do when presented with the supernatural.

In Cornell's London, whatever London remembers is real, so Sherlock Holmes is one of the ghosts of London. One of the detectives, Sefton, has a dream that Sherlock Holmes has been killed, rushes to the Holmes museum at 221B, and finds a body that only those who have the Sight can see.

This coincides (or not) with three separate Sherlock Holmes films/TV shows being shot in London, and grisly deaths of people who have ever played Sherlock Holmes, in ways that make increasingly less sense.

Meanwhile, the data analyst Ross is on a quest to recover her lifetime's happiness (which she had to sacrifice in the last book to buy a crucial clue - one of the singular darkest things I've ever read), and Lofthouse, the senior office who doesn't know why she knows about the Shadow Police, finds out more about her past and how she came to be involved in all this. These are easily the best parts of the book.

I loved every second of it. Still not as much as London Falling, but it will be extremely difficult to beat that.

[books 2016] The Secret Place

31. The Secret Place by Tana French

Tana French writes straight up crime fiction set in and around Dublin. Her first book, Into the Woods, is a real page-turner, and the second, The Likeness, is one of the most painfully suspenseful things I've ever read. Everything since, while still good, has been a disappointment in comparison.

In this (newish) one, a detective in the cold cases unit is given some new information about a murder that took place on the grounds of an expensive girls' school the previous year. He's desperate to get onto the murder squad and so volunteers to go to the school to conduct some interviews with the lead detective from the original investigation (who is now an outcast). They have one day to get the kids to talk & work out what happened.

It's still not as good as the first two books but was definitely better than average with well observed characters and perfectly paced.

[books 2016] Fellside

32. Fellside by MR Carey

A ghost story set in a women's prison. I'm a big fan of Carey's work and attended an interview with him at Waterstones where he talked about this book & the research he did before I read it, so I know that he has become a passionate advocate for prison reform and against the privatisation the prison services and the cutbacks that make life worse for inmates and staff alike.

He had wanted to write about drug addiction so it almost inevitably became a story about prison. A woman who has committed arson whilst under the influence of heroin, which resulted in the death of a child living in the same block of flats, is committed to Fellside, an enormous and corrupt prison for women in the middle of nowhere in the north. She is haunted by the ghost of her victim.

But mostly it's about prison life and survival in prison (for staff and inmates alike). It's not much like his previous work at all. I hate to use the terms literary and serious, but it is, and is more character than plot driven.

I liked it very much, but still not nearly as much as The Girl With All The Gifts. And although I saw the ending coming, I still didn't like it.

[books 2016] Rebooted Sherlock Holmes

33. Sherlock Holmes: The Patchwork Devil by Cavan Scott

I am fascinated by Sherlock Holmes as a cultural phenomenon, so have been vaguely intending to read one of the current run being put out by Titan for a while. Cavan Scott is a local writer and had a signing event for this at the local Forbidden Planet, so I decided this was as as good a time as any.

Despite the story having a good hook right from the start, it took me a while to get into it. It's set in 1919 so Holmes and Watson are older. The narrative is more self-aware and knowing than Conan Doyle, but not mean-spirited or sarcastic. It didn't quite work for me until about 1/3 of the way in, when it clicked.

It is based around an engaging mystery and throws in another enduring mythos in popular culture, the Frankenstein's monster. My main criticism is that it throws in too many elements from the original Holmes Canon so that it becomes a bit messy in places.

Nothing profound but it was an entertaining public transit read. My 12 year old self, however, would have loved this to death.

[books 2016] Dead Shift

34. Dead Shift by John Llewellyn Probert

I'm not sure how I came to be aware of the launch event for this book, but it was held at a book shop in Clevedon called Books on the Hill that I'd been meaning to visit for some time, so I dragged Jason out to the seaside early on a Saturday morning to pick up a copy (and other things).

It's a Lovecraftian horror novella. A dying man performs a ritual to open the gates to another dimension in hospital (rather than at the place of great evil he originally intended) and three doctors, stuck on the night shift, have to save the world as the hospital is cut off from the rest of reality.

Not complicated, not even particularly original, but a terrifically fun read nonetheless. Some of it is genuinely creepy, balanced by some laugh-out-loud funny moments. Even if I hadn't read the author's note at the end it would have been obvious to me that his day job is in the NHS, because he captures that so perfectly.

Even though Probert lives locally and has written loads of stuff, I'd never heard of him before. I will definitely be seeking out more of his work.

[books 2016] Guns of the Dawn

35. Guns of the Dawn by Adrian Tchaikovsky

I've encountered Adrian on many a panel at cons, and people I trust rate his work. However, he writes doorstops that are mostly part of a very long multi-part series so I've been wary. One of the latest, though, while still a doorstop, is a stand-alone and appealed to me more than the series, so I picked it up while I was at Books on the Hill.

In an alternate world whose level of development is somewhere between the Napoleonic and First World Wars (the weaponry is the former, but they have trains), two neighbouring nations are at war. One country is so screwed (but telling the citizens that victory is just around the corner, and people believe it) that they have a draft of women, one from each household. The thing that tells you this is a fantasy novel is that there are Warlocks, but they're not very effective in war.

Most noble families send a servant; however Emily Marshwic believes in honour and duty so she goes herself. By virtue of her elevated station in life she is immediately made a junior officer. Because of her belief in honour and duty, and because her brother was killed there, she volunteers to go to the less desirable of the two fronts.

Naturally, everything she thinks she knows and believes is tested to breaking point. She is fighting in a swamp, using outdated methods because their country has honour, against a country who just do what needs to be done to win. Her only outlet is that she is able to write freely to the corrupt mayor of her home town, without being subject to the censorship that the army writing home contends with.

The war ends and follows her home in an awful (but predictable) way.

I have no words to express how much I loved this book: the characters, the pacing, the plot. I usually get very bored with long battle scenes, but even these were fascinating to read. The end was absolutely perfect, which I very rarely say at the end of a good long book.