Books read in the last couple of weeks:
The Psychopath Test – Jon Ronson
Alpha – Greg Rucka
Feel: Robbie Williams – Chris Heath
Fables: Peter & Max – Bill Willingham (re-reading, for last week’s Fairy Tales piece for Time Entertainment)
Star Trek: New Frontier #6 The Quiet Place – Peter David
Star Trek: Titan #1: Taking Wing – Andy Mangels and Michael A. Martin
Admit it: You thought I was joking about the Star Trek books, right…? Definitely not; I can make it through one of those (one of the regular ones, at least) in a couple of nights, post-work/pre-sleep, and they definitely work in the enjoyable-enough-to-keep-reading-dumb-enough-to-decompress-the-brain scheme of things. And, thanks to the local library, I can speed through as many as I want without it costing me anything. Success!
The Ronson one was enjoyable, but ultimately disappointing; it felt like a series of shaggy dog stories as opposed to something more coherent, but I loved the Rucka book – Really, really good thrilling writing. A bit looser than his Kodiak and Queen and Country novels, but not necessarily worse for that. The Chris Heath book was… I don’t know. I feel really ambivalent about it, to be honest; it was very readable, sure, but I felt like I was being conned the entire time. For a book so lauded by British journalists and profile-writers, it felt very much like something that wanted me to buy more Robbie Williams records than anything else. In that respect, it pretty much worked; I didn’t buy any Williams, but I did get his In and Out of Consciousness: Greatest Hits 1990-2010 from the library, and have been surprised by how much of it I enjoyed, even the songs I’d never heard before (Pretty much everything after I left the UK).