So I just re-read my review of The Shining Girls and realised that although I rated it Good I spent almost the whole review saying what I didn't like about it! Let me remedy that... What I did like - Kirby was a great protagonist and her interactions with Dan were great. I loved what Beukes did with the idea of trophies. The structure of the book was genius, the pacing was very good and the writing is very very good.

Really enjoying the 1000 words so far, looking forward to seeing which 3 get Editor's choice.

I have tickets to see Adam Johnson at the fantastic Mr B's but looks like someone else will benefit from mine as I have to go to Finland with work :-( That's the second event I'm missing because of last minute travel! First Joe Hill, gutted I missed that event, now Adam Johnson. Not going to let anything stop me going to the Neil Gaiman event in Bath though!

Missed a couple of Friday Flash so will attempt to remedy that today if the workload allows...

http://www.waterstones.com/waterstonesweb/displayDetailEvent.do?searchType=1&author=Mark%7CBillingham

Waterstones in Bristol are running a series of intriguing events and the latest Crime Night coming up at 7pm on June 18^th with Mark Billingham and Martyn Waites (half of husband-and-wife team Tania Carver) looks really good. The guys at Waterstones tell me that Mark is a stand-up comedian in his spare time, and he and Martyn are an excellent double act. It should make for a really entertaining evening. Tickets £5, £3 to Waterstones cardholders.

 

The next day (Wednesday June 19th) they have two events off-site. The first is with children's author Melvin Burgess in the morning. This is a school event, so no public availability, but if anyone wants a signed copy of any of his books Waterstones can take requests and dedications.

 

That evening Charlie Higson will be at Bristol Grammar School. This is a public event. Tickets are only available through the school, not through Waterstones although they will be there on the night selling books, and are once again able to take dedications and requests if you can't make it. Detials of the event can be found here:

http://www.bristolgrammarschool.co.uk/Events/Literary-Event--Charlie-Higson.aspx

The shining girls By Lauren Beukes

 

Harper is down on his luck in Depression era Chicago when he finds a method of travelling through time. He then uses this to become a serial killer. The list of his victims is on the back of the book. One of them is fighting back. This is a great premise which the book mostly lives up to. I really enjoyed it but wasn’t totally satisfied at the end hence the 4 stars instead of 5. Many books are like icebergs where you understand that there is a ton of research and character & background development behind what’s on the page. This book, I feel, fails a little on making the iceberg work for the story. The characters, especially of the shining girls themselves, are not explored satisfactorily. We never really get the serial killer’s motivation, except you know he’s a serial killer, he kills people, that’s all you need to know. The time travelling macguffin isn’t really explained either, which in itself is OK and I quite liked that Beukes didn’t get drawn in to over-explaining things but since you, the reader, don’t know the rules, then there’s a sneaking suspicion that possibly anything could happen, although there is enough for you to see the shape of it. There is an off-hand reference to free will in the context of what the heroine is studying and there is a call back later in the book on that but this is an underdeveloped theme. The first half of the book had me turning the pages and fully immersed, the second not so much. Beukes has grown as a writer since Zoo City I believe and this is a much tighter book and better written however I feel like I enjoyed Zoo City more, guess I’m just not that into serial killers.

 

Overall - It never lost my interest and left me wanting more, would definitely recommend it

Short Interview with Lauren Beukes about the book here: http://terribleminds.com/ramble/2013/06/06/ten-questions-about-the-shining-girls-by-lauren-beukes/

 

The orphan master’s son Adam Johnson

Brilliant
 

What everybody gets wrong about ghosts is the notion that they're dead. In my experience, ghosts are made up only of the living, people you know are out there but are forever out of range

 

This is a book that takes a fictional look at life in North Korea. The fictional in that sentence is the important word. At heart this is a book about the dangers of when story becomes all consuming.

 

Where we are from, he said, stories are factual. If a farmer is declared a music virtuoso by the state, everyone had better start calling him maestro. And secretly, he'd be wise to start practicing the piano. For us, the story is more important than the person. If a man and his story are in conflict, it is the man who must change

 

We follow the Orphan Master’s son, Pak Jun Do, from his life in the orphanage to a succession of roles working for the regime. Along the way Johnson’s deft weaving in of horrific background facts, the orphans gaffing bodies from the water of famine victims, disappearances, the intimately dystopian feeling of the relationships Jun Do has with people, the ubiquitous presence of the Dear Leader and the “Eternal President” the Great Leader (making North Korea a necrocrasy) is drawn so well at the beginning that when you see outsiders from the point of view of the Koreans they seem bizarre and unreal. This is most definitely a story and not reportage which is something that some reviewers seem to have missed? What it does supremely well is to get you inside the head of someone living in a dystopian present in such a way that the story is utterly believable, whilst at the same time you understand it shouldn’t be, that in North Korea stories are lies.

 

Overall – It blew me away, a definite 5 star read

 

Exhibitionism Toby Litt

 

Good

 

This is a collection of Litt’s short fiction, about half of which are on the theme of sex. As with all short collections, there is an unevenness with some stories falling flat. However there are some real gems here. The man who’s dream girls start coming to life in Dreamgirls, the alphabed of sex which explores sex from A to Z, My cold war ( a non-sex story) that explores post-communist Berlin and a mysterious set of photographs. I bought this in London when there for work and inadvertently left my book at home and it kept me entertained on the train journey homw.

 

Overall – Fans of Litt will enjoy this, for people who haven’t tried him yet this may be a nice introduction

The songlines by Bruce Chatwin

 

Chatwin is writing a book about Nomads but has reached a point where it’s just not flowing properly but he travels to Australia to find out more about the Aborigine Songlines and the book he was writing changes. Part travelogue, part meditation on nomadism, part philosophy this is a hard book to categorise. Chatwin has a really engaging writing style and he meets a collection of interesting characters.

 

Overall - It didn’t blow me away as much as his [in Patagonia] but still a really good read.

 

Unbuilt city by Eugene Byrne
 

 

 

Brilliant

 

Eugene Byrne is a local author whose fiction books are well worth checking out (Thigmoo & Things unborn and the book he co-wrote with Kim Newman Back in the USSA) he’s also a journalist and a historian who has written a few GN about Darwin and Bristol. In this, his latest book, he has excelled by creating one of the best guides to the “may have been” there is out there. The built environment in Bristol has a long history and Byrne explores the period between 1750-2050 to find the buildings, monuments and other structures that have been proposed for Bristol that didn’t get built. From the amazing bridge on the cover – imagine if that had been built! To statues that failed to be placed on the fountains outside the council offices to a Victorian plan to place the main railway station in the heart of Bristol (instead we have two on the outskirts). Some of these stories are surprising, some are quirky, others are just plain odd and the book is both informative and entertaining. I highly recommend this book regardless of whether you’re familiar with Bristol or not as it shows that the built environment is shaped just as much by what isn’t built as it is by what is and includes some really interesting history.

 

Overall – Great resource and very entertaining history

Very happy that my short White noise/Black silence has been chosen by 1000 words in their flash fiction competition here http://1000words.org.uk/ there will be a story printed every day (Monday-Friday) throught June, mine will be on the 27th

Sad to have missed Joe Hill at Waterstones because of a work trip to Paris. Especially since work stuffed up my hotel booking and I spent all night sorting out an alternative hotel. I did eat at a nice Vietnamese restaurant though, so not all bad.

Excited that this month I have tickets to see both Neil Gaiman and Adam Johnson (author of The Orphan Master's son)

Wednesday is Word of Mouth and this month is poetry related https://www.facebook.com/#!/events/492094730863634/

Over on LT on the 2013 challenge we decided after seeing that women are poorly served by reviewers, especially in SF&F, that we would dedicate a month to reading women writers. That's June.

It's sad that sexism is still so rife. I've previously written that it's a bit strange that when things from the 60's & 70's are rebooted (Dr Who, Star Trek immediately spring to mind) that the inherent sexism is also brought wholesale. Chuck Wendig in his own inimitable way discusses it the Dr Who thing here: http://terribleminds.com/ramble/2013/06/03/why-its-time-to-genderflip-doctor-who/