O is for Outlaw – Sue Grafton

Back to form in this next “letter of the alphabet” tale from Sue Grafton concerning Californian private investigator, Kinsey Millhone. Grafton manages subtly to introduce us to Kinsey’s first husband, and by so doing allows her heroine to tells us more about her earlier life, and its police force context. Very subtly done, in contrast to earlier attempts to provide such insights via the long lost relatives route.

The only bit of the book I didn’t like was Sue Grafton’s note at the start, telling us when the various episodes detailed in the alphabet books take place – essentially placing all of the books to date in the 1980s – and thereby justifying the absence of mobile phones and the internet. Surely Sue Grafton could have provided us with plot-based pointers on this front, rather than this school-ma’am-ish elucidation.

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Which Lie Did I Tell?: More Adventures in the Screen Trade – William Goldman

Another gem from Phil’s bookshelf. After bemoaning the books on my “To read” shelf, and failing to get to the Barbican Library to stock up on fresh page-turning fodder, Phil came to the rescue:

Phil: “What do you fancy reading?”
Mary:”I don’t know, something like this [pointing to William Goldman’s Adventures in the screen trade].”
Phil: “You mean like this [holding out Which Lie Did I Tell?: More Adventures in the Screen Trade], his follow-up.”

Thus I found myself back in the world of making movies, US-style, but this time with William Goldman deconstructing scripts, and explaining what works and why, and what doesn’t and why not – not just in his opinion but bringing in comments and analysis from other screen-writers he knows. It’s a small, small world!

And, yes, there are occasional asides, offering Heat-type gossip about stars of the silver screen. Thank heavens for a weekend for reading!

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Burning Chrome – William Gibson

Having enjoyed the science fiction elements of Cloud Atlas, and not finding anything appealing on the “Books to read” shelf, I turned my attentions to Phil’s collection of William Gibson novels, and picked out Burning Chrome as one I’d not read before.

I’d not realised that it is a collection short stories, written by William Gibson (occasionally in collaboration with others) in the early years of his career. I’d also not realised – until I opened the book to start reading – that the first story is Johnny Mnemonic, the basis for the film of the same name starrring Keanu Reeves in a warm-up to his role in The Matrix.

An enjoyable collection, where you see William Gibson articulating concepts, scenarios and locations that are developed in his later novels. It strikes me that the stories are always told from the perpective of the underdog or the outsider – I can’t think of an occasion where we see Gibson’s vision of the future from the point of view of someone with power, or simply getting along with a “normal” humdrum life.

Hmmm. What next?

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Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell

Phil bought this for Christmas 2004…. and it has sat on the “Books to read” bookshelf ever since…. It’s not that I didn’t want to read Cloud Atlas, just that as a hefty hardback I knew that it would be awkward to read in bed, which is where I do most of my reading.

However, it turned out to be a classic “I’ve started so I’ll finish”, in the sense that I just kept having to turn the pages, to read “just one more chapter”. I loved the way the book’s structure and story set mirror a book’s physical make up of each of the signatures (I’ve just had to look that up on Wikipedia), where you only get a continuous selection of text printed on the middle pair of pages.

I also really liked the way David Mitchell gradually revealed the connections between the stories and their narrators, and carried forward a narrative stretching from the 19th century to an unspeficied number of centuries in the future.

If you enjoy fiction in flavours raning from historical, to modern, to science, then read this novel!

Buy it: Amazon link