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Best Science Fiction of the Year #15
Terry Carr (editor) 1986 (Torr 1986)



Another good anthology in this series. A few of the stories I didn't care for but they weren't badly written, just not to my taste. If I had to highlight the best I would go for the Robert Silverberg, Lucius Shepard and John Crowley stories. Silverberg's "Sailing to Byzantium" is a great story which had a slightly disappointing ending. It was the only one of the twelve which won a Nebula or Hugo Award although many of the others were nominated.
Karen Joy Fowler's "Praxis" was the first story she sold, thirty years before her novels started being nominated for the Booker Prize.

Game, Set and Math
Ian Stewart 1989 (Penguin 1991)



After Martin Gardner retired in the 1980s his Mathemetical Games column in Scientific American stopped but the French edition rebooted it with Ian Stewart as the author and this book is a compilation of twelve of those columns.
The format is very similar to the Gardner columns. Stewart as an academic mathematician possibly delves a bit deeper than his predecessor which meant I nearly always got stuck at some point in most of the chapters. He also fancies himself as a chilled out entertainer but the incessant puns and other attempts at humour are a bit tiresome. An interesting read none the less and I get just enough insight into the maths to feel the sense of wonder.

1001 books You Must Read Before You Die
Peter Boxall (editor) 2006 (Cassell 2006)



There's a great rant on goodreads by someone who points out how egregiously wrongheaded this list is and I agree with a lot of the complaints. The reason there's no Shakespeare, Chaucer, Milton etc is because the editor claims that "books" mean "novels" but then includes biographies, poems like Eugene Onegin, short stories like The Pit and the Pendulum and Aesop's Fables which whatever else it is it's definitely not a novel. This, the first edition, was also criticised for being too anglocentric (ten novels by J. M. Coetzee!) and the subsequent editions addressed this. Personally I would like to see a seperate list for books in other languages because of the thorny issue of translation.
The five editions now have a total of 1,318 titles of which I've only read 44. I'm not going to try and work my way through them but I'll pick out the odd one at random to have a pop at.
Next up: 1001 novels to read when you're dead (Barbara Cartland, Melvyn Bragg, Clive barker)

Sampson's Circus
Howard Spring 1936 (Faber & Faber 1946)



Two young lads on a caravan holiday follow a travelling circus and get involved as one of the acts whilst a sinister "Mr Nobody" is tracking them for some unknown nefarious purpose.
This is one of the three books mentioned in the first Carnegie awards for children's books along with: "Pigeon Post" and "Ballet Shoes" which I've already read. It has some memorable characters such as Charlie Chaffinch the 'oxton flyweight and an interesting mystery element which doesn't totally dominate the story.
New editions of the Ransome and Streitfeild books are still being printed but this book was last reissued over fifty years ago and is unlikely to be seen again in the near future as the two boys black up for their circus act and the word "nigger" is used on numerous occasions. A pity as it's just as good as the other two.
I'm going to jump forward to 1970 (picked at random) to have a look at some of the books nominated for that year's Carnegie Medal.

Aesop's Fables
V. S. Vernon Jones (translator) 1912 (Barnes & Noble 2003)



The first entry in "1001 Books ...". It's not what you would call a "good read" but interesting from a historical viewpoint. This version is aimed at adults and has 284 entries although there are several hundred more by some accounts. The most interesting part is the introduction by D.L. Ashiman who points out that Aesop might not even have existed and even if he did then he was not the author of all or even most of the fables which were first gathered in written form several hundred years after he supposedly lived.
Some of the aphorisms, proverbs and sayings from the fables are "wolf in sheeps clothing", "familiarity breeds contempt", "the goose that lays the golden eggs" and "every man for himself". There's a local pub called "The Fox and Grapes" and I didn't realise that this also comes from Aesop.

Horror: 100 Best Books
Stephen Jones & Kim Newman (editors) 1988 (Xanadu 1988)



This has a different format to the other "100 Best Books" series in that each one is chosen by a different author or critic who also write the little essays on their choice. Quite a few of the contributors are minor writers who I'd never heard of and several of the chosen books are now pretty much forgotten thirty years on. The first third of the books are from 1590 to 1920 and the final third are from the 1970s and 80s which gives an idea of how the selections were skewed to the modern (possibly even books written by the contributors chums).
Terry Pratchett writes a funny entry on "The House on the Borderland" and Clive Barkers discussion of "Doctor Faustus" is also quite amusing in the way he tries to present himself as a distinguished man of letters who just happens to write splatter fiction.

Persian Fire
Tom Holland 2005 (Abacus 2005)



"In 480 BC, Xerxes, the King of Persia, led an invasion of mainland Greece. Its success should have been a formality. For seventy years, victory - rapid, spectacular victory - had seemed the birthright of the Persian Empire. In the space of a single generation, they had swept across the Near East, shattering ancient kingdoms, storming famous cities, putting together an empire which stretched from India to the shores of the Aegean. As a result of those conquests, Xerxes ruled as the most powerful man on the planet. Yet somehow, astonishingly, against the largest expeditionary force ever assembled, the Greeks of the mainland managed to hold out. The Persians were turned back. Greece remained free. Had the Greeks been defeated at Salamis, not only would the West have lost its first struggle for independence and survival, but it is unlikely that there would ever have been such and entity as the West at all.
Tom Holland's brilliant new book describes the very first 'clash of Empires' between East and West. Once again he has found extraordinary parallels between the ancient world and our own. There is no competing popular book describing these events." (from Waterstones)

I knew very little about the Persian Wars and next to nothing about classical history and I found this book to be a great read. I had to take it slowly because it's dense with information and analysis but it's well worth the effort. Some reviewers wrote that the author takes a few liberties by filling in the gaps in the story but he explains his reasoning in the introduction and the endnotes. Oh and the maps are good as well.
Holland's first books were vampire novels but he now just writes popular history. His Penguin Monarch's book on Athelstan, the first King of England was also very good.

A Perfect Spy
John Le Carre 1986 (Book Club Associates 1986)



"Magnus Pym - ranking diplomat, consummate Englishman, loving husband, secret agent - has vanished. Has he defected? Gone to ground? As the hunt for Pym intensifies, the secrets of his life are revealed: the people he has loved and betrayed, the unreliable con-man father who made him, the two mentors who moulded and shaped him, and now wish to claim this perfect spy as their own.
Described by le Carre as his most autobiographical novel, A Perfect Spy is a devastating portrayal of a man who has played different roles for so long, he no longer knows who he is." (from Waterstones)

My first Le Carre and found it a bit boring. I kept thinking why is it taking me so long to read a 460 page book and then found out that the paperback is 690 pages; I'm just not used to reading hardback novels. There's too much of the Pym character looking back on his life and not enough espionage. I didn't find the character and his motivations convincing which is odd as he is closely based on the author whose own father was a notorious con-man. Le Carre had become a critically acclaimed and best-selling author so he could probably publish whatever he wanted without the editor telling him to cut a couple of hundred pages.

William - The Fourth
Richmal Crompton 1924 (Macmillan 1995)



Nobody knows how Richmal Crompton invented "William". She had a genteel Edwardian upbringing, was educated at a girl's school and taught classics at the same school. She was a spinster who, according to her biographer, probably died a virgin. In this book she preempts Bill & Ted in William's pronounciation of "Socrates". She preempts Mrs Slocombe with the line: "You admiring my pussy, little boy" and, most impressive of all, she has William's prim and proper Aunt take a ride at a funfair. You wonder why the Merry-go-round has chickens instead of horses until you read: "She paid for William and Douglas, and Henry and Ginger, and herself, and mounted a giant cock...there came a gleam into her eyes, a smile of rapture to her lips...It's-it's quite a pleasant motion, isn't it? It seems a pity to get off."
A saucy minx and no mistake. Get her on the phones!

Two in the Bush
Gerald Durrell 1966 (Fontana 1968)



"Two in the Bush is a record of the six-month journey which took Gerald Durrell, his wife Jacquie, and two cameramen through New Zealand, Australia and Malaya. The object was, first, to see what was being done about the conservation of wild life in these countries, and, secondly, to make a series of television films for the BBC. They were introduced to many rare and remarkable animals - Royal Albatrosses, Tuataras, Duck-Billed Platypuses, Flying Lizards and Long-Nosed Bandicoots, as well as to some equally unusual humans." (Waterstones)

Not as interesting as Durrell's animal collecting travelogues because half the fun was in the catching of the beasts. The spirit of adventure of the trips to exotic locales in Africa and South America was missing to a certain extent as Durrell and his tv crew were chaperoned around by various conservationists and billeted in hotels a lot of the time. He also is beginning to get a bit preachy in the style of St. David of Attenborough. Fortunately the animals are still interesting and Durrell has a talent for describing them.