Baby Gods

Cash in on the Da Vinci Code you say? Surely not. People have written templar consipracy novels for years prior to the Da Vinci Code. And this one proved fun to read.

[amazon.com][amazon.co.uk]

Publishers do seem to enjoy novels about action based antiquarian book dealers though, I don’t know if I approve of that, but it seems to work out fine in this novel. Ignore the plot, focus on the action, and you’ll have a fun ride.

A tad too many ‘puzzles’ inserted to make it all ‘occult’ and ‘mysterious’ but when you strip those out and skim over them you get a good action chase novel.

Now the observant reader will have asked themselves "but if you skim those bits then it can’t work well as a novel!". And I say you better get better at skimming books, sometimes you have to.

I passed this on to my Dad – a far more diligent reader of words than I (I suspect he reads all of the words in the book) – and he enjoyed it, probably more than I did so those words must count for something then.

Visit www.netdisaster.com and much hilarity doth ensue.

You type in the url of a web site, pick a disaster and then some totally splendid flash animation ‘Disasterises’ (my word, not theirs, can I ‘tm’ that?) the site for you.

I thought about making a video, but no need.

Has everyone used MyHeritage.com ? You get to upload a photo can then they compare your details with a bunch of ‘celebrities’ and come back with list designed to insult you. At least that happened to me!

You go to the site, click on Face Recognition, and then Celebrity Collage upload a photo – marvel as the software finds your face, watch it do a search and gape in amazement at the results. What! No Johnny Depp? No Russell Brand? No Ian McShane!

I don’t recognise most of these people.  Some I know, and never considered myself looking like, but really… Danny Devito? And does Danny Devito look like Ronan Keating?

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I had high hopes for all these books. But sadly none of them worked out for me – lucky old charity shop.

Dead Beat by Jim Butcher forms part of the "Dresden Files" cannon – a splendid TV show if you ignore the Pilot episode. For the longest time reading the novel I thought I might even finish it. I kind of enjoyed it, but kind of not, and then after one too many deus ex machina I dropped out. It  held my interest well enough while I lasted with it, but ultimately I didn’t care enough for it to retain that hold.

The Somnambulist sounded great – Victorian conjuror detective, magic, murder. But pretty early on it became a Yawn that never really engaged with me.

The End of Mr Y, received some pretty high praise from the literati recently and nominated for the Orange Broadband 2008 prize. Again I thought this would work for me – who doesn’t love finding old books mispriced in a 2nd hand bookshop – "Yes I’ll have that first edition of Burroughs’ Junkie for 50p please". And yet as soon as I started reading the book in the book I disengaged entirely.

All of these novels have at least one thing in common – the first person narrative. Which never used to present a problem for me. I used to read first person narrative books, but they seem so hard to get right and I guess you either bond with the narrator or want to kick them down the stairs. Only Dresden didn’t get kicked down the stairs but eventually I wandered off and left Dresden to fight his battles on his own.

They might well work for you, I simply offer you my warning.

I read the first 3 Ripley books in a compendium form. And at the time I assumed that Patricia Highsmith had written only 3 Ripley books – since the blurb on the back said "collecting the Ripley novels under one cover". And then I stumbled across "Ripley Under Water" and then in the ‘also by Patricia Highsmith’ section I see "The boy who followed Ripley", which unfortunately came out before "Ripley Under Water" so I still have more Ripley to read later, as a ‘missing episode’.

[amazon.com][amazon.co.uk]

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I love pulp novels. Particularly the hero pulps – The Shadow, Doc Savage and The Spider.

So when I saw “The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril” on the bookshop shelf with its distressed cover and the sadly slightly camp depiction of Lester Dent (on the UK cover). I had to buy it. [amazon.com][amazon.co.uk]

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