Review of My Reading Year.

Just a few notes on my best reads of the year from all the books I've read, regardless of when published. I've read 111 books, just 3 short of last year, but slightly more pages at just over 32,000, and near enough 50/50 male to female authors. I had two themed reading periods, tackling books for older children and young adults over the Easter holidays, and then my Season of the Living Dead in October.

Best re-read of the year - The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster. Let's face it, this was my only re-read of the year, but it is one of my desert island books. Click here to read my review and thoughts about my literary hero.

I intend to re-read more books that I haven't read for years in 2010, joining in with the LOTR re-read over at Shelflove, and revisiting one of my other desert island books The Shipping News by E. Annie Proulx having asked for and got a luxury hardback edition for Christmas.

Best undead - I read half a dozen vampire novels in my 'Season of the Living Dead' back in October, plus several books featuring zombies, ghosts and assorted other living dead monsters during the year. The Swedish vampire novel Let the Right One In by John Ajvide Lindqvist was possibly the highlight of these - both gruesome and tender. It should be noted that I was pleasantly surprised by the whole Twilight phenomenon and Sookie Stackhouse too!

Best contemporary novel - The Juggler by Sebastian Beaumont. Beaumont's first novel was one of my favourites from last year, and his second is even better. His books really mess with your mind, the Juggler is a psychological drama about a man's mid-life crisis. Read my review from back in March here.

Best young adult novel - See the last two items in my books of the noughties post below. Both are wonderful novels that adults will love too.

Best memoir - A Taste of My Life by Raymond Blanc. Although he had help writing it, this memoir is the authentic voice of the wonderful self-trained chef - and he was as nice in person as he appears on the box (whatever you think about this year's series of 'The Restaurant') - signing for four hours at my local bookshop.

Best author I discovered this year that I should have read years ago - Elizabeth Taylor. I read In a Summer Season earlier this year and was amazed by this dissection of middle-class mores written in the early 1960s. I have plans to read much more by her. Click here for my review from last June.

Best debut novel - The Girl With Glass Feet by Ali Shaw. Astounding modern fairy tale and even better, he's coming to Mostly Books in January to talk about it. This also wins the prize for the most beautiful book too with its lovely cover and silvered page edges. Click here for my review.

It's been a great year's reading, and I'm looking forward to 2010 immensely. What has been great is that many of the titles I've read this year have come from recommendations made by other bloggers. My list of other blogs that I visit regularly has expanded hugely too, and it's been truely lovely making more new blog friends. A huge thank you to everyone who has ever visited my blog, and thank you especially to those who've left comments - they are such confidence builders and make you feel part of a real community.

THANK YOU & BEST WISHES FOR 2010

My Books of the Noughties

I hope you all had a wonderful Christmas with your family and friends, and got everything you wished for. I’m still mid-way through the round of family visits, so here’s a post I prepared earlier.

Yes it is a list - I'm going to inflict my Books of the Decade on you – all five star books, published in the noughties, that I’ve particularly enjoyed reading during the last few years. So here they are in chronological order ...

2000: Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader by Anne Fadiman.
I’m starting off with the possibly the best bookish book about books ever written. What bibliomane could resist this book! A delightful collection of essays about books and life with books. Topics are wide-ranging - from the marrying of libraries to compulsive proof-reading, and from plagiarism to the joys of reading aloud. Totally fabulous.


2000: Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem.
Lionel is a young orphan with Tourettes. Yet his boss Frank sees something in him worth cultivating unlike many others in Brooklyn who don't take him seriously. When Frank is murdered, Lionel vows to find out whodunnit. This is Lionel's story of how he found Frank, (or Frank found him) and his work to solve the crime - all seen through the body of someone with Tourettes, constantly ticcing and having other compulsive behaviours When Frank is killed, Lionel loses his surrogate father and as he progresses in his quest to solve the murder he has to finish his growing up fast. This is an immensely readable and extremely enjoyable New York novel with a loveable and quirky main character.

2002: War Crimes for the Home by Liz Jensen.
The things normal people got up to in the war. Good girl Gloria falls for a GI and learns to be bad with disastrous consequences. Told in flashback, Gloria is now an old lady and installed in an old nursing home due to, her son Hank, thinks dementia or even mad cow disease. Gloria however is not senile at all, just supressing all the bad stuff and is preparing to die and join her friend Doris. Hank, who has grown up without a father is desperate to find out where he comes from. Jensen serves this sad story up with large helpings of really black humour, some sick jokes, and loads of sex! Gloria, once relieved of her virginity was a bit of a one-woman shagging machine. It won't be a surprise to you to find out she gets pregnant and abandoned by her man, but I won't say any more.

This is an intelligent novel that shows, to use the words of the Rolling Stones, "You can't always get what you want, you get what you need." With the young men all away fighting, rationing, bombs and death all around, wartime brought different values to the fore as you might die tomorrow. Contrasting against that with the contemporary strand of the story is a bit of a dig about how we treat our elderly folk. You're taken with Gloria all the way through all the ups and downs of life's rollercoaster - quirky, funny, sad - a fantastic read. Liz Jensen has written several other books on my TBR pile - must read more soon. (More of my write-up back here.)


2003: The Scheme for Full Employment by Magnus Mills
A superb satire on crackpot government schemes, trade unions and workplace practices. The Scheme is a self-perpetuating plan to keep people in work - people drive vans and make deliveries - however they only collect and deliver parts for the vans they drive, thus keeping a huge number of drivers, warehousemen, engineers, supervisors etc etc in work. The workers are mostly proud to belong to The Scheme, but gradually complacency starts to set in, and niggles between colleagues lead to factions in the workplace and before you know it there's a strike! Could this spell the end of The Scheme?

Mills' short novel is peopled with characters we'll all recognise ... from the jobsworths to the shikers, from the whatever gets me through the day bods to the advantage-takers - all of human life is there in this microcosm of best intentions gone awry. Gentle, yet biting, and with tongue stuck firmly in cheek - I loved this book and have more to read on the TBR pile.

2005: The People’s Act of Love by James Meek
The mixture of love story, prison break, religious cult, and war story combine potently to make something that appears 100% Russian (not that I'd know what that is, but that's the feeling I got). Atmospheric, exciting, mad and very, very cold.


2006: Winter’s bone by Daniel Woodrell
When Jessup goes missing after putting up the Dolly family house for his bail bond, his daughter Ree has to find him or be made homeless. What's more, her ma is crazy and she's having to bring up her younger brothers on her own. This is life on the edge and making a living is hard. Just about everyone is related, but these mountain folks still don't trust each other, as Ree discovers when she goes looking for her pa on the other side of the valley.

In a mere 193 pages, you get an icy clear picture of this hard life in the brutal winter of the Ozark mountains. Although there's little cheer, Ree has a true pioneer spirit and you root for her from page one. I'll now have to track down all his previous books - highly recommended.


2006: The Road by Cormac McCarthy
This is the book of the decade in most of the lists I’ve seen, and I find I can’t disagree. My full post is here.

Nuclear winter is setting in. The American landscape is grey - almost everything is burnt or buried in ash. There is no wildlife, it's either died or been eaten, human bodies are everywhere - dessicated and mummified by ash, others rotten, some obviously cannibalised. We follow the progress of a father and son - not named, just trying to follow the road south. They're exhausted, starving and ill, their whole world contained within a shopping trolley. His overwhelming love for and instinct to protect his son is the only thing keeping the father alive. The son remains full of hope that when they get to the coast, everything will be alright - the father does his best to keep that belief alive.

The book is written in short bursts, each giving a glimpse of what living in this awful new world is like. We don't find out much at all about what happened - it's nearly all about the 'now' for father and son - what point is there dwelling on a past that can never be recovered.


2007: The Dig by John Preston
A lovely gentle novel about gentlemen archaeologists and country life and the story of the Sutton Hoo discovery just before WWII. In a sleepy town in Suffolk, Mrs Pretty, a widow, finally decides to have some tumuli on her land excavated. She gets in a local self-taught archaeologist, Basil Brown, who painstakingly digs away and reveals the sandy remains of a wooden ship - only the nails remain. But in step the men from the British Museum to take over the dig ... but all rivalries eventually get put aside when they discover gold!

We all know the results from the amazing gold on display to this day in the British Museum, but the human story behind those involved in the dig is less well known, and for all the lack of big drama is compelling none the less. What made this novel for me is that I went to visit the site maybe 15 yrs ago, and was treated to a fantastic talk by a volunteer and the dig itself was still live - the ship may have been discovered, but in the neighbouring field, they were trying to find out more about the way of life of the Anglo-Saxons who lived there. For a fuller review click here


2007: Blood Red, Snow White by Marcus Sedgwick
Marcus Sedgwick's wonderful novel tell the time of Arthur Ransome's time in Russia. Sedgwick is one of those teen authors whose books are crossover adult reads too, and I can't recommend this one highly enough - it has revolution and politics, spies and intrigue, romance and family drama, all steeped in Russian fairy tales.

Sedgwick's novelisation is no dry biography. He starts by using the Ransomes collection of Russian fairy tales to tell the problems of the people, embodied by a great Russian bear spurred into action against the Tsar by two friends arguing in the forest - they are Lenin and Trotsky - superb scene-setting. Into this the character of Ransome, who had run away from an unhappy marriage to Russia in 1913, wanders in and instantly falls in love with a woman stirring a pot on a stove in an office – Evgenia. She was Trotsky's personal secretary; they married eventually. Combined with all the derring do of the amateur spy, the author delivers a totally fabulous novel. Click here


2007: by Philip Reeve
I love novels based on Arthurian myths and legends and this one, which won the 2008 Carnegie medal, is a great read. Reeve's book for teens presents a totally different take on the stories that is highly original. The land it portrays is one of warring tribes; Arthur could be the one to pull the tribes of the west together to face the Saxons, and Myrddin (Merlin) is doing his best to make it so. However, Myrddin's chief weapon is not Earth magic - it's spin! Yes, you heard me right, 'twas ever thus. Myrddin comes from the bardic tradition and is a master story-teller, embellishing and embroidering Arthur's exploits to the masses to put his man forward as the natural leader. He's also good at creating illusions and using any opportunity to promote his master.

The story is mainly told almost entirely from a young girl’s point of view, Gwynna, who becomes Merlin’s assistant (dressed as a boy for safety). It takes us from the episode of the Lady of the Lake through to the deaths of Merlin and Arthur. All is seen from the slightly removed perspective which reveals the politics and spin underneath and the legacy it creates. (Full review here)

*****

I warn you - next post will be my books of the year 2009. In my noughties books, there were a couple of obvious choices, some more quirky, and others which I loved, but know the authors have written better books - I just haven't read them all yet.

• What were your books of the decade?
• Do we agree at all?
• What should I have read?

I'd love to hear from you.

MERRY CHRISTMAS!

I'm signing off for a few days, so it just remains for me to wish all of you a

M E R R Y

C H R I S T M A S !!!

Back soon with my books of the year and Reading Resolutions for 2010...

Cheers!

Lots of love

Annabel

x

The Truman Show meets Dickensian melodrama

Welcome to Pastworld. Imagine that London has been reinvented as a theme park; that Dickensian London has been recreated in every detail. Rich tourists undergo immersion training, get costumed and are then brought in by airship to become 'gawkers' in this new, old world. Caleb, son of Lucius Brown, one of the park's original imagineers, is due to arrive for his first visit with his father.

Pastworld is peopled by the 'residents', most of whom officially live and work there as Victorians, giving the punters an authentic experience. But there are also some unofficials - pickpockets, fences and entertainers, plus 'The Fantom', who has taken on the unofficial role of Jack the Ripper and is working with a band of 'ragged men' to strike terror throughout the city. The park's owners are very, very worried indeed, and they send in a detective to hunt him down.

The last piece of the puzzle is seventeen year old Eve who lives with her father Jack; she has no memories of anything before the age of fifteen. In Truman Show style, she doesn't know she is living in a theme park. However she is never allowed to go out on her own and is beginning to wonder why. Jack returns from an excursion out and starts to explain a little to her:

'I have to tell you something, Eve' he said, in an unsteady voice. 'You may often have wondered why I look after you so carefully. The truth is that someone is after us. They have been for a long while now. I have deliberately kept this from you, Eve, just for your own protection. I have always been so very, very careful for you. But anyhow this bad, bad person has got a sniff of you, and as soon as it can be arranged we will have to move somewhere else. Somewhere far from here.'
He stood and paced up and down in a twitching panic. I could make no sense of it at all. Here was my mystery.
'How would such a dangerous person know anything about us?' I said.
'He knows,' Jack said nodding. 'As I said, he's got a sniff of you.'
Something alerted me in those repeated words: 'A sniff of you'. That surely meant it is not 'us' at all but just me alone, myself - someone is especially after me. It was suddenly clear to me.
I am a deep secret.
I am a hidden person.
I am to be kept safe for ever. I was a fairy-tale princess, like Rapunzel, locked away from the world in her high tower.

This is the first novel for young adults from children's author Ian Beck, which has plenty for grown-ups to admire too. I thoroughly enjoyed its cultural touchstones, murderous action and twisty plot. I particularly liked the interleaving of the futuristic and Victorian milieux which resulted in much more than a straight-forward melodrama. Without spoiling anything, there is plenty of room for a sequel (please?).

If you've read The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters by G W Dahlquist and enjoy teen fiction, you'd certainly like this book. (9/10)

My Secret Santa arrived - yippee!

My Secret Santa gift from the Book Blogger Holiday Swap arrived and I couldn't wait to rip the paper off and see what was inside... Complete joy! two wonderful, and completely different books from my wishlist and super hand-crocheted bookmarks to go with them.

The books were Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont by Elizabeth Taylor, a wonderful author I only discovered this year, and First Among Sequels by Jasper Fforde from his supremely inventive Thursday Next litcom detective series. They both go onto the reading pile for after Christmas. As for the bookmarks - I have never learned to crochet, and they are so neatly done and lovely bright Christmassy colours.

A huge thank you goes to Meghan at Medieval Bookworm for her brilliant choices and great crochet skills. Thank you again and very best wishes for a MERRY CHRISTMAS!

My Reading Resolutions for 2009 - how did I do #4 (the final one!)

By now you might have cottoned on, by the series of bookish but not books-read posts, that I'm suffering a severe case of end-of-term-can't-read-itis and have thus resorted to fillers; (all this pondering the stats is helping me formulate my books of the year though). Aside from that, I am reading The Moonstone but mostly the same pages over and over before falling asleep. I may have to resort to something fun and trashy again to get me through it... However, this is the last post about my 2009 Reading Resolutions in which I resolved to 'read more non-fiction'.

This year about 15% of my reading was non-fiction (around 10% in 2008). I've read a wider range of subjects too. One of those that has stuck with me was the first book I read this year The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell which looked for those key moments that made a good idea a great one. I always enjoy biographies and memoirs, and this year have read enjoyable ones by Raymond Blanc, Susan Hill and the quirky Stewart Copeland. So a vintage non-fiction year for me.

RESOLUTION #4 - PASSED!!!

My Reading Resolutions for 2009 - How did I do #3

My third reading resolution for 2009 was to 'read more world and translated fiction'. Last year I read a dozen which were all Nordic or French except for Blindness by Saramago. This year I did a bit better...

Eighteen in translation, plus a sprinkling from parts other than the UK or USA. I spread my reading around the EU a lot more too including novels written in German, Dutch, French, Italian and Spanish. Missing this year are novels from Canada, Japan and Eastern Europe - maybe more Margaret Atwood, Murakami and Stefan Zweig for next year to redress the balance.

RESOLUTION #3 - PASSED!!!

My Reading Resolutions for 2009 - How did I do #2

On Sunday I told you about the results of my first Reading Resolution that I made for 2009 - here's the second. I said 'I will read the Canongate Myths series of books'. Here they are sitting together on the shelf; at the start of the year I already owned the first eight, since added the ninth, and the latest additions are on order as we speak (Hurricane Party by Klas Ostergren, and Baba Yaga laid an Egg by Dubravka Ugresic). But did I get round to reading any of them? ...

The answer is in the visible shrinkwrap still on the signed boxed set of the first three that my other half gave me two or three Christmases ago. Sadly no.

But why? I love re-tellings of myths and legends and fairy tales ... often, nothing excites me more reading wise. The real problem is that they were essentially hidden in the TBR mountain by then, and as you'll see from my previous post, I read so many brand new books in 2009 , I didn't have time for much else.

Once I got invited to join Amazon Vine which gets you free new books to review, plus Librarything Early Reviewers one and occasional publisher freebies, there's little time to delve into the TBR mountains. So you can see I'm continuing totry to talk myself into seriously reducing the number of books I acquire... more of that in my Reading Resolutions for 2010 I think.

RESOLUTION #2 - FAILED!

My Reading Resolutions for 2009 - how did I do #1

Back in the New Year of 2009, I made a set of 'Reading Resolutions'. One of them was 'I shall read more books published before I was born.' So including all books read up to the beginning of December, how did I do?

Not very well actually! I managed to read a huge 90 books from the noughties with 37 of them being published this year. Those published before I was born comprise just the five at the top of the doughnut - a mere 4.5%, and of those only two were from the TBR mountain - Oh Dear! However the five were gooduns ...

• Old Peter's Russian Tales by Arthur Ransome (1916)
• The Mask of Dimitrios by Eric Ambler (1939)
• Miss Hargreaves by Frank Baker (1940)
• The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey (1951)
• The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway (1952)

In mitigation, I am now reading Wilkie Collins' The Moonstone (1868). The real question is though - did I read more pre-1960 books in 2009 than in 2008? Well, no - actually I read five less! Hence your suggestions for reading more classic fiction in 2010 would be very welcome.

RESOLUTION #1 - FAILED!

Q&A with science writer Marcus Chown

It's my great pleasure today to introduce you to Marcus Chown, author of We Need To Talk About Kelvin who is on a blog tour to promote the book (which I reviewed a couple of posts down the page). Apart from writing great popular science books, Marcus is cosmology consultant of magazine New Scientist, having formerly been a radio astronomer at Caltech in Pasadena. Marcus's own website is here where you can see the whole blog tour and find out more about his books.

As to my questions, I trained as a scientist originally and now work in a school as a lab technician, so I was particularly interested in asking about his views on teaching and popularising science at all levels ...

Annabel: Everyone likes a bit of Sci-Fi, witness the popularity (still) of Star Trek, but how can you transform that into an enjoyment of proper science and convince readers (and the wider public) that ideas and theories from the cutting edge of science are not fiction and are worthy of serious consideration?

Marcus: Oddly enough it was science fiction that kept me interested in science when the teaching of science at school was dull and boring! Most of my fellow pupils were turned off. I think it was because the science I read about in science fiction, particularly the novels of Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov was fun and exciting and mind-expanding, and the stuff I learnt at school wasn’t.

So, I think the answer is clear: Teach all the mind-blowing stuff at school! (I address how you do this in another of your questions below).

My evidence is my book, Quantum Theory Cannot Hurt You. Now who would have though that a book with a title like that would sell like hotcakes? But it has. Far faster than any of my other books. And the feedback I’ve been getting from readers – many of whom have no science background at all – is: Why the hell didn’t they teach this kind of stuff at school? If they had, I would have stayed interested. Why didn’t I discover that matter is so empty that, if you squeezed all the space out of atoms, you could fit the human race in the volume of a sugar cube? Why didn’t I learn that, according to Einstein, you grow old more slowly on the ground floor of a building than on the top floor? Why didn’t I learn that atoms – the building blocks of you and me – can be in two places at once, influence each other instantaneously even when on opposite sides of the Universe, and do things for absolutely no reason at all? We live in a Universe that is far stranger than science fiction, far more weird than anything we could possibly have invented. If kids realised this, I believe they would be interested in science.

Annabel: How do you strike a balance between making scientific theories accessible and 'dumbing down' the often complex physics and maths that underpin theories? There wasn't a single equation in WNTTAK, although many were effectively expressed in word descriptions in the text - is that your secret?

Marcus: I don’t think about striking a balance between making things accessible and ‘dumbing down’, and for a simple reason: I write for me! I’m constantly trying to understand things better, get things straight in my own mind. And explaining things in words and images is how I understand things (that’s why I have no equations). By good fortune, the way I explain things to myself happens to be pretty much the same thing as explaining stuff to you or my wife or someone waiting for a number 22 bus. So, when you read my books, often it’s me wrestling to get to grips with some concept!

I was incredibly lucky to be taught by the American physicist, Richard Feynman. I’m obviously in no way comparable to him, but I do remember his criterion of whether he really understood something was whether he could explain it to someone, anyone. That’s the way I feel.

Annabel: Do you have any opinion of science education in schools? Science these days is seen as a 'difficult' subject, and many are discouraged from taking it further after GCSE as there are easier options to get grades. This is leading to understaffed and under-resourced science departments and ultimately a lack of future scientists ...

Marcus: Recently, I’ve had some correspondence with science teachers who have said they have used Quantum Theory Cannot Hurt You with their teenage pupils and have said it’s just the kind of thing they should be teaching. It kind of confirms something I think about science teaching. School science – at least when I was at school – was taught chronologically. So first you do Newton and gas laws and lots of pretty dull stuff. By the time you get anywhere near the present day and all the fun, amazing stuff like quantum theory and relativity, it’s all over and it’s time to leave school. So what I think should be done is that a lot of the fun stuff should be taught first - don’t worry that it’s mind-blowing; younger kids have no fear – then, later, when the children are hooked, fill in all the background.

It’s exactly the same as getting kids hooked on reading by giving them Harry Potter. Later, you can give them the classics. When I was at school, it was the opposite way around. I had to read Nicholas Nickelby when I was nine. And it put me off Dickens for 20 years! And that’s what I think we’re doing at school with science. We’re not telling kids about this incredibly amazing world we find ourselves in, where, for instance, a single atom can be in tow places at once – the equivalent of you being in London and New York at the same time. We’re not telling kids that the Universe is stranger than anything we could possible have invented, stranger than any sf movie they have ever seen. If we did, we might grab their interest.

But, of course, I understand, that with so few good science teachers, you need to get more kids interested enough to do science and be science teachers, to get more kids interested… It’s a chicken-and-egg problem.

Annabel: Do you think more effort needs to be made to popularise complex scientific ideas? How much does physics, maths and cosmology suffer from spin, both media and political?

Marcus: Yes, I do think that more needs to be done to popularise science, for the simple reason that we live in a world where we need to be informed on scientific and technological matters such as the anthropogenic greenhouse effect, nuclear power, genetic modification, and so on. But, you’re right, there are obstacles in the way of popularising. Many of the gatekeepers in the media have arts backgrounds and are ignorant or nervous of science. It is very hard for science journalists to get stories past their editors on, for instance, radio and TV. That’s why we normally only get only alarmist stories such as “the LHC’s going to destroy the world” or the briefest, over-simplified, trite soundbites such as “the LHC is going to recreate the Big Bang”. And, in addition to over-simplification and sensationalism, there is the problem of a non-science-literate media giving a platform to people with an agenda such as those saying “My drug will cure cancer/Parkinson’s/ME/or whatever.”

Annabel: And lastly, just in case no-one has asked you this yet - How did you come up with the title of WNTTAK - it's inspired? (Ironically my other half has never heard of the 'other' book - but did say 'I'll read that after you'...)

Marcus: Good titles are very hard to find, and I drive my wife up the wall, wasting whole holidays, trying to get them! Poetry is good, and songs lyrics… The Universe Next Door came from line of an e. e. cummings’ poem: “Listen, there's a hell of a good universe next door: let's go!” The Never-Ending Days of Being Dead was a line from Jim Crace’s brilliant novel, Being Dead. Quantum Theory Cannot Hurt You was from Adrian Mitchell’s “Mashed potatoes cannot hurt you, darling”. I fought like mad but I wasn’t able to get my publisher to let me have the “darling” on the end. I still hope I’ll get it on a future edition!

We Need to Talk About Kelvin just came to me when I was coming down the stairs of our house. I’d read Lionel Shriver’s bestselling novel, We Need to Talk About Kevin, which is about a boy who kills his schoolmates and most of his family with a crossbow (!), so it must have been in my mind. The title immediately struck me as a good one. If you know the allusion, great. If you don’t, maybe you’ll think – Who’s Kelvin? Why do we need to talk about him? – which might just intrigue you enough to pick up the book in a bookshop (In fact, the reaction of your partner suggests this may be true!).

Actually, I went to a talk Lionel Shriver did at the Cheltenham Literature Festival. But I was too shy to go up to her and ask whether she would write a Foreword to my book!

Thought-provoking questions! I hope my answers live up to them. Thanks for hosting me on your blog site!

Annabel: Marcus, thank you very much for your considered and insightful answers, and for actually being the first author to be a guest on my blog. Good luck with the book and the rest of the blog tour.

To visit the next leg of Marcus's Blogtour, click here.

An truly original modern fairy tale

The Girl With Glass Feet by Ali Shaw is that rare thing - a thoroughly grown-up modern fairy tale that works. It's also a beautifully designed book with an evocative cover and silver page edging.

It is set in a remote cluster of islands around an archipelago called St Hauda's land which feels as if it's somewhere like the Faroes, or Newfoundland - definitely northern and slightly Nordic. A land where "strange winged creatures flit around icy bogland; albino animals hide themselves in the snow-glazed woods; jellyfish glow in the ocean's depths."

Midas is a local, estranged from his mother and still reeling from the death of his father. He's in not in a hurry to start anything new, instead he diverts his emotions into his photography. Ida, meanwhile, visited St Hauda's Land six months ago on holiday, but since then something strange is happening to her - her feet are starting to turn to glass. She's returned to see if she can find a cure, for the glass which started at her toes is creeping further, she is already hobbling on her crystallising feet.

Midas bumps into Ida out on the hills and they strike up a rather awkward friendship. For both of them, it is really love at first sight, but neither realises this yet. Ida has to take the initiative:

"The simplest thing you could do to help ...Like I said before ... I am frightened. I can't feel my toes, for God's sake. I don't know where I end and my socks and boots begin. You could, if it's not too much trouble, just hang around."
He stood up. He supposed in a movie this would be the moment where he put his arm around her waist and said something manly. At the very least he'd place a firm hand on her shoulder. But his arms were dead.
'Okay,' he said, 'that shouldn't be a problem.'

Sometimes you just want to knock their heads together! Midas has buried his emotions so deeply, and they're both too quick to take umbrage with each other - love is hard work for this pair. You just have to hope that they work it out - their romance, and what's happening to Ida. There are no easy answers for them in their journey.

I won't spoil the story, but you'll need a hanky before the end of this wonderful other-worldly tale. I loved it. (10/10)

Marking Quantum Physics Accessible

On Wednesday, I am delighted that Marcus Chown, author of We Need to Talk About Kelvin: What Everyday Things Tell Us About the Universe" will be visiting my blog to do a Q&A as part of his blogtour to promote the book. Marcus is a best-selling science author and cosmology consultant for New Scientist magazine.

Today, I shall talk about the book, which I'm going to call WNTTAK from now on, in which he seeks to explain some very complex quantum physics by looking at its effects in objects around us. Gosh, it all came flooding back to me! I did several terms of this at university with all the equations, and although it was interesting, it was difficult to how it applied to my subject (materials science), let alone normal life.

This is where WNTTAK is onto a winner - there are no equations. Let me repeat that - there are no equations! Instead, Chown uses illustrations of quantum physics at work in the real world to explain "why the reflection of your face in a window tells you that the universe is orchestrated by chance" and how static buzz picked up by your TV set emanates from the beginning of the universe amongst other stories. Interspersed with this are tales of the key scientists involved which help to lighten and put some personality into what could otherwise be a rather dry subject. It is split into three sections: What the everyday world is telling you about atoms, stars and then the universe, starting small and ending up very big indeed.

I found it an insightful overview of a difficult subject, written in a clear and accessible way that will satisfy science enthusiasts. I would also heartily recommend it to sixth-form physics and chemistry students.

Do come back on Wednesday and see Marcus's answers to the questions I posed to him about WNTTAK, and the state of science in education and the media ...

QI Book of the Dead

Not enough time to read ...

I'm very aware that I haven't posted since last Thursday which is a long time for me. But there has been so much going on - we're in December and suddenly Christmas rears its head and I'm behind with everything because November was even busier for me. So I shall fill the gap by telling you about some of my incoming books to read. From the top:

- Quartet in Autumn by Barbara Pym. I've yet to read any of hers, and got this one through ReaditSwapit. I'm sure I'll love it.

- Nation by Terry Pratchett. I'll be the first to admit that I'm not a Discworld fan, but many say this is different and I shall try it.

- The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins. This is our book group read for Christmas - amazingly I didn't have it on the shelves. I plumped for the Oxford Classics edition as I like the picture on the front. I enjoyed The Suspicions of Mr Whicher last year, whose star case influenced Collins, so am really looking forward to reading it.

- An Education by Lynn Barber. The clips and trailers I've seen for the film have been wonderful, but I prefer to read the books first if I can, so DVD to follow for this one.

- Evermore by Alyson Noel. No vampires, but another dark teen novel that's getting a lot of notice. One of my Amazon Vine picks.

- Rupture by Simon Lelic. A crime novel in which a young police detective gets obsessed by trying to find out why a teacher walked into a school and shot three pupils. Sounds disturbing! Another Amazon Vine pick.

- Selective Memory by veteran columnist Katherine Whitehorn. Found this in a charity shop and I think it'll read wonderfully as an older counterpoint to the Barber above.

- The Battle of the Sun by Jeanette Winterson. I enjoyed her novel Tanglewreck, written for older children earlier this year, and this is a sort of standalone sequel, in that it shares some characters. Hope it's as quirky as the other one.

- The Girl with Glass Feet by Ali Shaw. This is a beautiful book with a gorgeous cover and silvered page edges. A modern fairy tale about a girl who is turning to glass. Can't wait - Everyone I know who's already read it loved it.

- and finally, Pretty Monsters by Kelly Link. Kimbofo reviewed this book of magical short stories here and I couldn't resist - it sounds wonderful.

I hope that I'll get around to reading at least some of these books this month, and having time to write about them... and there are also those posts we all do featuring our books of the year to start thinking about... and seeing how I did against my New Year's Reading Resolutions to check out too... so even if I don't have time to write up books read, I've got plenty to talk about. See you soon!