This short little children’s book concerns a Norse boy, Odd, the three talking animals he encounters when he runs away from home and his adventures thereafter. A fun book that’s got a little bit of depth to it.
BooksOfTheMoon
Odd and the Frost Giants
By Neil Gaiman
Rating: 4 stars
Book details
ISBN: 9780747595380
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Year of publication: 2008
World’s End (The Sandman, #8)
By Neil Gaiman
Rating: 4 stars
A reality storm draws many travellers together in an inn between worlds, and they spend the time telling stories. This is an odd collection. Dream and the Endless make only cameo appearances (when they appear at all), and the first time I read it, it filled me with foreboding which somewhat diminished my enjoyment of it — something that came to fruition in the following two books. But the stories told are enjoyable, and some of them are multi-layered stories within stories within stories which makes for fun reading.
Book details
ISBN: 9781563891700
Publisher: Vertigo
Year of publication: 1995
Round the Moon (Extraordinary Voyages, #7)
By Jules Verne
Rating: 2 stars
The sequel to From the Earth to the Moon focuses on the projectile carrying our three brave Selenauts and resolves the cliffhanger left at the end of its predecessor. This one, unfortunately, fell somewhat flat. It didn’t have the humour nor even the action of FtEttM. It felt quite flat, and lecture-like at times, and although a lunaphile may be delighted with its descriptions, I found myself skipping over them in an attempt to get to a good bit that never materialised. It’s worth reading to complete the story and since it’s quite short, but it didn’t grab me at all.
Book details
ISBN: 9781598183047
Publisher: Aegypan
Year of publication: 1870
From the Earth to the Moon (Extraordinary Voyages, #4)
By Jules Verne
Rating: 4 stars
This short little novel concerns the construction of a giant cannon to send a group of three brave men to the Moon. It’s humorous, has some surprisingly accurate science and its Victorian heroes are the Men’s Men that you would expect from that era. Verne writes tongue in cheek about the glorious Americans and takes some sly digs at the British while he’s at it. A fun book.
Book details
ISBN: 9781598184549
Publisher: Aegypan
Year of publication: 1865
Nausea
By Jean-Paul Sartre
Rating: 2 stars
This is a novel about alienation. The protagonist, Antoine Roquentin, is trying to write a book about an 18th century nobleman, but keep getting distracted by The Pointlessness Of It All. Although the book itself was easy enough to read, I don’t feel that I got much out of it. Despite the long soliloquies, I don’t feel that I really got under Roquentin’s skin or at the source of his ‘Nausea’ as it put it, or really sympathised with him at all. I just wanted to shake him and tell him to snap out of it.
I found the bits of the book where Roquentin is being active or talking to people or doing something much easier to read than the bits where he’s agonising over nothing at all. It possibly deserves a reread though — now that I know what to expect, I may get something more out of it.
Book details
ISBN: 9780140022766
Publisher: Penguin Books
Year of publication: 1938
Dave Gorman’s Googlewhack! Adventure
By Dave Gorman
Rating: 4 stars
Dave Gorman is pretty mental, and possibly in a literal sense. This time be becomes obsessed by finding googlewhacks, with his usual arbitrary and obscure rules. Except there’s a problem: he’s supposed to be writing a novel. Instead, he uses the advance fee from his publisher to travel the world meeting owners of googlewhack websites and asking them to find more for him, while ignoring his ‘real’ life.
It’s a fascinating, and very funny read, but you really do have to question the sanity of the man, especially when he appears to have a nervous breakdown in Texas, when it looks like his quest has failed. Definitely worth reading.
Book details
ISBN: 9780091897420
Publisher: Ebury Press
Year of publication: 2004
Mr Jones’ Rules For The Modern Man
By Dylan Jones
Rating: 1 star
I hated this book. Absolutely hated it. Written by the editor of GQ magazine, it provides rules (not guidelines, rules) for how men should live. The author is the kind of self-satisfied git you want to “rag-doll up and down the road like an empty shell suit”. I also realised very early on in the book that the kind of men that this book is aimed at is the kind of men that I despise and who just really aren’t nice.
The reasons that I finished it are: 1) it was a present; 2) I’m not going to let a man like that defeat me; and 3) it’s sort of a car-crash book, you can’t stop reading because it’s so awful.
Avoid. Really, it’s not worth the precious hours of your life.
Book details
ISBN: 9780340920855
Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton Ltd
Year of publication: 2006
To Here and the Easel
By Theodore Sturgeon
Rating: 5 stars
This is an amazing collection. It consists of one longer piece (the title piece) and five shorter stories. Sturgeon’s writing is simply fabulous, ranging from swashbuckling to almost prose poetry with incredibly vivid imagery. Sturgeon was one of the first people to bring literature to SF in an unashamed way, and this collection just shows how good a writer he was.
Some of his recurring themes turn up again in this collection — post-humanism and co-operation as cornerstones of survival — and it’s interesting to see how they’ve developed through his work. It’s never more than subtle though, and never gets in the way of the story. Highly, highly recommended.
Book details
ISBN: 9780586041277
Publisher: Panther Science Fiction
Year of publication: 1973
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