reading a leaf from wanderlight's book over her shoulder
i. At the moment, I am finding things a little difficult. Nothing in particular has happened; I just seem to be struggling a little.
End of angst.
ii. I have discovered that caffeine in the morning has absolutely no affect on me. This is bad.
ii.a. Especially when I woke up at six o'clock this morning. Approximately.
ii.b. I only know this approximately because my alarm clock seems to have died. Hopefully it only needs more batteries.
ii.c. Note to self: buy more batteries.
iii. I walked home from school on Monday carrying a really large bag of marbles. I just thought that you should know.
iv. When I am unconsciously very close to a state of mind (like this one now), I tend to end up staying up when I should be asleep and writing poetry. These often tend to be very different poems than poems that I've written before: one was The genus homo necrotechnophile; or Why One Should Peruse The World Wide Web With Care; or O! the shamb’ling 7331 5p34k hordes!; or just ‘Their brains can’t think’ (or even, simply, braaaaaains), and another of them is the poem that is saved on my hard-drive as V, and is totally Robbie's fault, except for the part where I wrote it, and is impossible to read completely out-loud, and is metafictiony in a clumsy, broken kind of way and has only two sentences outside of the brackets. This one just feels like it tries to hard to be clever, is written in quite possibly the worst iambic pentameter known to man, and is saved on my hard-drive as Y. I will probably post it at some point, although not today.
v. On Monday night, I spent a little time online talking to some people who know about these things and did some polishing, which is a nice euphemism for me bombarding friends of mine who have much better things to do with my time with not-quite-finished bits of poetry (i.e. things that I've written and am almost satisfied, but don't quite feel right yet) and babbling at them. As a result, two poems are now finally finished to my satisfaction, which makes me very pleased.
v.a. Also, in the process of said polishing, Mike said some things to me that made me inordinately happy and a little proud, which was really very nice of him.
vi. The original plan for this post was to type up some lists. So I will.
vi.a. The List of Books
#18 - Use of Weapons by Iain M. Banks
This book is, really, far too clever to be allowed. This, however, is okay, because it is beautifully written and very wonderful and intelligent and beautiful and stylish and funny. The concept is fantastically, and it is executed to perfection - not only does it have one of the cleverest structures I have ever seen (a linear story that happens 'now', so to speak, interspersed with short stories that revolve around the central character but go backwards through time, so that the first is the closest chronologically to the main story and the last the earliest, and yet are still incredibly relevant to the plot, book ended by two poems and capped with a perfect epilogue) but it also has a reveal that makes you re-evaluate the entire book and just what it was trying to say. Not only that, but it also has its full Banksian contingent of Things That Are Just Insanely Cool, which in this case can be epitomised with the whole thing that culminates in the hat he talks about at parties. (In The Crow Road there was the Möbius scarf, for example; but this one has a spoiler attached, so I've tried to make the reference as cryptic as I can. I have faith in
tefkas 's deductory skills, especially given his recent reading material, and hope that anyone else who's read it will likewise be able to work out what on earth I'm blathering on about.)
Can you tell I liked it?
(This book has actually already been listed. Er, oops?)
#19 - 2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke
Okay. I will admit it.
I have not seen the film.
Now, I know that I should, but I haven't. I do want to.
And part of my reason for wanting to do so is that I can imagine how wonderful this book would be as a film. It's not heavy on complicated introspection, for the most part, or abstract philosophising; it's about the sheer vastness of space, the magnitude of it, the immensity of things. For me now it's an odd book, because I'm used to reading science fiction that is either cyber-punk or trash or space-opera or Iain M. Banks; this is sci-fi from the days in which it was the science that mattered, or rather the concepts behind them. (I suppose in some ways Hard Contact is a bit like that - it's pretty much an exploration of what being a clone bred to fight and kill and die as a team does to people, after all - although it's got the psycho-analysis and character-based stuff as its meat rather than just the effects of the science.) It's clean and uncomplicated, at least from that perspective, and in some ways this makes it very simple and naive; but on the other hand, being complicated isn't what the book’s about...
#20 - How the Dead Live by Will Self
I first picked this book up about a year ago, in an airport bookshop, when I had some time to kill and nothing to do; I read the blurb and thought that it looked interesting, and then I had to go catch my flight, so I left it there.
I then saw it in the Scope shop just before half term, and bought it.
It was interesting. The concept was a very cool one, even if I'd seen it before in Etgar Keret's The Bus Driver Who Wanted To Be God, and the style grabbed you and pulled you in and it had some very interesting ideas, like the lithopedion and the Fats and the taxi drivers - but the book seems to be Lily, the narrator, monologuing on and on like a stuck record about her two daughters (one of whom she thinks of as fat and boring and middle-class and rich, the other of whom is a complete junkie) and sex and how banal the world is and sex and her daughters and addictions and sex and her daughters and how banal the world is and her daughters and sex. The so-called plot-twist at the end didn't really do anything or have any real impact.
It was a very odd book; not one that was desperately enjoyable to read or even good, but somehow (morbidly?) fascinating.
The place where we spent our holiday has a bookshelf complete with a varied menagerie of books - Tony Parsons, John le Carre, Karen Slaughter, some chick-lit of varying levels of sophistication, a family saga, a medical thriller, a Patrick O'Brien novel and another couple in a similar vein, some Tom Sharpe and a book on the Charge of the Light Brigade. Will Self seems somehow out of place, but not glaringly so. I hope someone else enjoys it.
#21 - Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
This book annoyed me immensely. It did so for the simple reason that it took four days of my holiday time to read it.
Admittedly it is twelve hundred pages long and a hundred and fifty years old, but even so, four days is really a very long time.
(For the record, Jonathon Strange & Mr Norrel took me about two, although that is both two hundred pages shorter and more recent, even if it pretends not to be, and was also read during a holiday in which I was not skiing, but even so.)
Apart from that singular irritation, I absolutely loved it. The writing was wonderful - 'lyrical' was a word used in the introduction, and I agree completely - and the depth of the novel was fantastic. Javert is also a far more sympathetic character than he is portrayed as in the musical, and Thernadier is a great deal less scrupulous, and Marius actually has a character and does things that aren't mooning over Cosette (who I was greatly relieved to discover isn't actually called Cosette, because her name upsets me) and almost getting killed, and the students are wonderful (as is Marius's grandfather and the bookist) and there's a whole host of wonderful minor characters who are really cool and it's a wonderful, wonderful book.
And also, the Bishop of Digne is the best example of a Situation Ethicist ever.
#22 - Small Gods by Terry Pratchett
I have, of course, read this book before. Lots. I had not, however, owned a copy; and as it is (a.) Terry Pratchett and (b.) Small Gods and (c.) wonderful and (d.) on the RS department's list of recommended fiction and was (e.) heinously cheap in the charity shop I felt that I was obliged to buy it, and did so. I also bought a copy of Pyramids for the same reasons except for (d.), although I'm pretty sure it does have philosophers in it at some point.
It was even better than I remembered. In fact, I would go so far as to rate it as one of the best books the Terry Pratchett has ever written. Also, possibly, one of the angriest books, and also one that has become incredibly topical in recent times. It is, I suppose, almost the funny man's The Amber Spyglass, except saying that demeans it; but it certainly has some of the same themes, and could cause religious people of a certain disposition to explode in a pillar of burny and righteous anger at its irreverence, and cause other, more moderate religious people to find it very funny and very true and very wise on the dangers of over-organised religion. It is a wonderful, wonderful book. Everyone should read it. And not only because Brutha is a woobie Simony obviously needs to get laid/have a hug Didactylos and Urn are so damn cool Vorbis is so incredibly scary of all the things that I just said about it.
It is Terry Pratchett. And it is righteously hilarious.
(It also seems to have been influenced by its own plot, or at least my copy has, because despite being in an inside pocket of a supposedly waterproof jacket, it ended up getting really very very wet indeed.)
#23 - Walking on Glass by Iain Banks
(Not that, you know, I like the guy or anything.)
Walking on Glass is, even for Iain Banks, very, very bizarre. It's almost gratuitously bizarre; whilst it doesn't go so far as to have characters spontaneously growing horns, or professing their undying love for light bulbs half-way through the novel or saying things like 'Good day to thee, squire, can I wuggly wuggly oompah oompah chi?' it does have some bits of random that don't seem entirely necessary. (I should point out here that I don't think things need to be necessary in a novel - in fact, it's usually the unnecessary bits that I adore the most. It's just that there were bits that didn't seem to really add to the novel very much as a whole apart from making the reader go 'bwa?' a little bit.) Again, it's a very complicated structure involving multiple narratives that somehow all manage to intersect, and again it has some very cool concepts. Actually, it has shed-loads of them. What it doesn't seem to have is a reason; after reading it, whilst you do feel that you've read a very good book, you're left with a lingering sensation that you've either somehow missed the point or that there wasn't supposed to be one in the first place.
As well as being fascinating in itself, it's very interesting reading it in relation of Banks' other stuff; there are certainly sections that hark back to The Wasp Factory, and I definitely think that some of the ideas in Quiss' segment of the narrative were re-used in a rather more refined way in Player of Games. It is, somewhat appropriately, a gateway, of sorts.
My verdict is that it's definitely a good book, but not up to Banks' usual standard. But still very good.
#24 - The Absolute Sandman, Vol. 1 by Neil Gaiman (art by Sam Kieth, Mike Dringenberg, Charles Vess, Michael Zulli, Kelley Jones, Chris Bachalo, Malcolm Jones, Danny Vozzo, Colleen Doran and, of course, Dave McKean)
This was the first book I read after turning seventeen.
My parents are wonderful.
It is gorgeous.
It's the only word for it. Not only is it Neil Gaiman, not only is it SANDMAN, and not only is it bound in black leather-like stuff and large enough to brain a mid-sized hippogriff, but the first nineteen issues have been completely recoloured. The effect is utterly magnificent; where before the art was good and cool and a wonderful aid to following the plot, it is now incredible in its own right, especially in A Midsummer Night's Dream. The book is a feast for the eyes. Absolutely and utterly gorgeous.
It is also a work of pure genius, obviously.
It is gorgeous.
#25 - Perdido Street Station by China Miéville
This is a book that needs a little explaining.
In October 2006, I did a week of work experience in the children's department of Macmillan's as an editorial assistant, which was not only incredibly lucky but also incredibly incredible. As anyone who I have ever met in real life will know, I loved it. Amongst other things, I got to sit in on the a departmental meeting and a status meeting at which, amongst other things, the rebranding of The Princess Diaries was discussed at length; read
ana_beachcombe 's novel The Land of Bad Fantasy and a manuscript whose title wasn't Lost in a Good Book but was something not dissimilar, both of which immediately restored my faith in the merits of children's fiction (because incredible snarky commentary on fantasy cliché's and stereotyping and crazy crazy metafiction where not only is the author a character but in which there is another character refuses to believe in the existence of an 'Author' and the existence of plots holes forms part of the plot); helped prepare some cover briefs for a reissued Eva Ibbotson book and the comic book of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and just generally had an incredibly amazing time. On the last day, however, I did something entirely different: I checked the copy-editing on a book called Un Lun Dun, or rather checked that all of the corrections and changes had been made. This involved reading two 250 sheet high stacks of A3 paper pretty much simultaneously a sheet at a time and checking for discrepancies (and also having a very quick crash-course in copy-edit notation), which in turn meant that I got to read a 500 page novel whilst working.
This would have been cool if it had just been any old young adult novel. It wasn't. It was an absolutely fantastic 500 page novel with carnivorous giraffes, busses with feet, elite martial-artist rubbish-bin guards known as binja and an animated milk carton called Curdle, and that's not even the start of it. There's a review of it here, but don't just believe them. Read the book. Buy it for yourselves. Buy it for your friends. Buy it for your children. Buy it for other people's children.
(Yes, I would rather like to have a job with Pan Macmillan when I'm older, how did you tell, but no, they're not reading my blog. Sssh.)
So, anyway, I checked the copy-editing on this rather fantastic book (and correctly spotted that China Miéville had read Neverwhere, because it says so in the Acknowledgements) and had a wonderful time. And was told that China Miéville usually writes adult fantasy/sci-fi stuff, and had a look at the blurb of an example that they had hanging around the office (because the entire building was stuffed with books that they'd published, or were thinking of publishing that had been published in other countries, or that the author had published before, or just looked cool) whilst I waited for the Photocopier of Doom and thought, 'Oooh, this looks shiny' and decided I wanted to read it.
Between then and now a lot happened. This included me being sent a very nice and shiny printout of the final dust-jacket of Un Lun Dun upon which had been written a very nice note of thanks that was signed by a bloke called China, which made my week.
Having read it, I can tell you that it is fantastic. It is sprawling. It is epic. It is steampunk at its most vivid and imaginative. It is a mutant mix of Ankh Morpork and Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscurra and of Gormangahst and of Neverwhere and Michael Creighton and Wicked and a whole host of things that I have read. It is simply so crammed full of wonderful inventions that it would take far too many words than I have at my disposal to describe it.
If you like your fantasy dark and gritty and uncompromising and real, if you like your prose vivid and eloquent and inventive, if you like to see an author pick up a ball and then not only run with it but dance backwards juggling it along with three satsumas, a melon, a live chainsaw, a poisonous scorpion and a vat of napalm, then this is the book for you.
vii. I was going to include a list of loot in this post as well, but I think I should stop now. Seven is a good number for a list, anyway.
ETA: For some reason it seems to want to tell me that my LJ post is finished twice at the end of it which is probably fair enough given its length. Maybe this'll fix it...
ETA2: I can't count. Fixed.
End of angst.
ii. I have discovered that caffeine in the morning has absolutely no affect on me. This is bad.
ii.a. Especially when I woke up at six o'clock this morning. Approximately.
ii.b. I only know this approximately because my alarm clock seems to have died. Hopefully it only needs more batteries.
ii.c. Note to self: buy more batteries.
iii. I walked home from school on Monday carrying a really large bag of marbles. I just thought that you should know.
iv. When I am unconsciously very close to a state of mind (like this one now), I tend to end up staying up when I should be asleep and writing poetry. These often tend to be very different poems than poems that I've written before: one was The genus homo necrotechnophile; or Why One Should Peruse The World Wide Web With Care; or O! the shamb’ling 7331 5p34k hordes!; or just ‘Their brains can’t think’ (or even, simply, braaaaaains), and another of them is the poem that is saved on my hard-drive as V, and is totally Robbie's fault, except for the part where I wrote it, and is impossible to read completely out-loud, and is metafictiony in a clumsy, broken kind of way and has only two sentences outside of the brackets. This one just feels like it tries to hard to be clever, is written in quite possibly the worst iambic pentameter known to man, and is saved on my hard-drive as Y. I will probably post it at some point, although not today.
v. On Monday night, I spent a little time online talking to some people who know about these things and did some polishing, which is a nice euphemism for me bombarding friends of mine who have much better things to do with my time with not-quite-finished bits of poetry (i.e. things that I've written and am almost satisfied, but don't quite feel right yet) and babbling at them. As a result, two poems are now finally finished to my satisfaction, which makes me very pleased.
v.a. Also, in the process of said polishing, Mike said some things to me that made me inordinately happy and a little proud, which was really very nice of him.
vi. The original plan for this post was to type up some lists. So I will.
vi.a. The List of Books
#18 - Use of Weapons by Iain M. Banks
This book is, really, far too clever to be allowed. This, however, is okay, because it is beautifully written and very wonderful and intelligent and beautiful and stylish and funny. The concept is fantastically, and it is executed to perfection - not only does it have one of the cleverest structures I have ever seen (a linear story that happens 'now', so to speak, interspersed with short stories that revolve around the central character but go backwards through time, so that the first is the closest chronologically to the main story and the last the earliest, and yet are still incredibly relevant to the plot, book ended by two poems and capped with a perfect epilogue) but it also has a reveal that makes you re-evaluate the entire book and just what it was trying to say. Not only that, but it also has its full Banksian contingent of Things That Are Just Insanely Cool, which in this case can be epitomised with the whole thing that culminates in the hat he talks about at parties. (In The Crow Road there was the Möbius scarf, for example; but this one has a spoiler attached, so I've tried to make the reference as cryptic as I can. I have faith in
tefkas 's deductory skills, especially given his recent reading material, and hope that anyone else who's read it will likewise be able to work out what on earth I'm blathering on about.)
Can you tell I liked it?
(This book has actually already been listed. Er, oops?)
#19 - 2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke
Okay. I will admit it.
I have not seen the film.
Now, I know that I should, but I haven't. I do want to.
And part of my reason for wanting to do so is that I can imagine how wonderful this book would be as a film. It's not heavy on complicated introspection, for the most part, or abstract philosophising; it's about the sheer vastness of space, the magnitude of it, the immensity of things. For me now it's an odd book, because I'm used to reading science fiction that is either cyber-punk or trash or space-opera or Iain M. Banks; this is sci-fi from the days in which it was the science that mattered, or rather the concepts behind them. (I suppose in some ways Hard Contact is a bit like that - it's pretty much an exploration of what being a clone bred to fight and kill and die as a team does to people, after all - although it's got the psycho-analysis and character-based stuff as its meat rather than just the effects of the science.) It's clean and uncomplicated, at least from that perspective, and in some ways this makes it very simple and naive; but on the other hand, being complicated isn't what the book’s about...
#20 - How the Dead Live by Will Self
I first picked this book up about a year ago, in an airport bookshop, when I had some time to kill and nothing to do; I read the blurb and thought that it looked interesting, and then I had to go catch my flight, so I left it there.
I then saw it in the Scope shop just before half term, and bought it.
It was interesting. The concept was a very cool one, even if I'd seen it before in Etgar Keret's The Bus Driver Who Wanted To Be God, and the style grabbed you and pulled you in and it had some very interesting ideas, like the lithopedion and the Fats and the taxi drivers - but the book seems to be Lily, the narrator, monologuing on and on like a stuck record about her two daughters (one of whom she thinks of as fat and boring and middle-class and rich, the other of whom is a complete junkie) and sex and how banal the world is and sex and her daughters and addictions and sex and her daughters and how banal the world is and her daughters and sex. The so-called plot-twist at the end didn't really do anything or have any real impact.
It was a very odd book; not one that was desperately enjoyable to read or even good, but somehow (morbidly?) fascinating.
The place where we spent our holiday has a bookshelf complete with a varied menagerie of books - Tony Parsons, John le Carre, Karen Slaughter, some chick-lit of varying levels of sophistication, a family saga, a medical thriller, a Patrick O'Brien novel and another couple in a similar vein, some Tom Sharpe and a book on the Charge of the Light Brigade. Will Self seems somehow out of place, but not glaringly so. I hope someone else enjoys it.
#21 - Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
This book annoyed me immensely. It did so for the simple reason that it took four days of my holiday time to read it.
Admittedly it is twelve hundred pages long and a hundred and fifty years old, but even so, four days is really a very long time.
(For the record, Jonathon Strange & Mr Norrel took me about two, although that is both two hundred pages shorter and more recent, even if it pretends not to be, and was also read during a holiday in which I was not skiing, but even so.)
Apart from that singular irritation, I absolutely loved it. The writing was wonderful - 'lyrical' was a word used in the introduction, and I agree completely - and the depth of the novel was fantastic. Javert is also a far more sympathetic character than he is portrayed as in the musical, and Thernadier is a great deal less scrupulous, and Marius actually has a character and does things that aren't mooning over Cosette (who I was greatly relieved to discover isn't actually called Cosette, because her name upsets me) and almost getting killed, and the students are wonderful (as is Marius's grandfather and the bookist) and there's a whole host of wonderful minor characters who are really cool and it's a wonderful, wonderful book.
And also, the Bishop of Digne is the best example of a Situation Ethicist ever.
#22 - Small Gods by Terry Pratchett
I have, of course, read this book before. Lots. I had not, however, owned a copy; and as it is (a.) Terry Pratchett and (b.) Small Gods and (c.) wonderful and (d.) on the RS department's list of recommended fiction and was (e.) heinously cheap in the charity shop I felt that I was obliged to buy it, and did so. I also bought a copy of Pyramids for the same reasons except for (d.), although I'm pretty sure it does have philosophers in it at some point.
It was even better than I remembered. In fact, I would go so far as to rate it as one of the best books the Terry Pratchett has ever written. Also, possibly, one of the angriest books, and also one that has become incredibly topical in recent times. It is, I suppose, almost the funny man's The Amber Spyglass, except saying that demeans it; but it certainly has some of the same themes, and could cause religious people of a certain disposition to explode in a pillar of burny and righteous anger at its irreverence, and cause other, more moderate religious people to find it very funny and very true and very wise on the dangers of over-organised religion. It is a wonderful, wonderful book. Everyone should read it. And not only because Brutha is a woobie Simony obviously needs to get laid/have a hug Didactylos and Urn are so damn cool Vorbis is so incredibly scary of all the things that I just said about it.
It is Terry Pratchett. And it is righteously hilarious.
(It also seems to have been influenced by its own plot, or at least my copy has, because despite being in an inside pocket of a supposedly waterproof jacket, it ended up getting really very very wet indeed.)
#23 - Walking on Glass by Iain Banks
(Not that, you know, I like the guy or anything.)
Walking on Glass is, even for Iain Banks, very, very bizarre. It's almost gratuitously bizarre; whilst it doesn't go so far as to have characters spontaneously growing horns, or professing their undying love for light bulbs half-way through the novel or saying things like 'Good day to thee, squire, can I wuggly wuggly oompah oompah chi?' it does have some bits of random that don't seem entirely necessary. (I should point out here that I don't think things need to be necessary in a novel - in fact, it's usually the unnecessary bits that I adore the most. It's just that there were bits that didn't seem to really add to the novel very much as a whole apart from making the reader go 'bwa?' a little bit.) Again, it's a very complicated structure involving multiple narratives that somehow all manage to intersect, and again it has some very cool concepts. Actually, it has shed-loads of them. What it doesn't seem to have is a reason; after reading it, whilst you do feel that you've read a very good book, you're left with a lingering sensation that you've either somehow missed the point or that there wasn't supposed to be one in the first place.
As well as being fascinating in itself, it's very interesting reading it in relation of Banks' other stuff; there are certainly sections that hark back to The Wasp Factory, and I definitely think that some of the ideas in Quiss' segment of the narrative were re-used in a rather more refined way in Player of Games. It is, somewhat appropriately, a gateway, of sorts.
My verdict is that it's definitely a good book, but not up to Banks' usual standard. But still very good.
#24 - The Absolute Sandman, Vol. 1 by Neil Gaiman (art by Sam Kieth, Mike Dringenberg, Charles Vess, Michael Zulli, Kelley Jones, Chris Bachalo, Malcolm Jones, Danny Vozzo, Colleen Doran and, of course, Dave McKean)
This was the first book I read after turning seventeen.
My parents are wonderful.
It is gorgeous.
It's the only word for it. Not only is it Neil Gaiman, not only is it SANDMAN, and not only is it bound in black leather-like stuff and large enough to brain a mid-sized hippogriff, but the first nineteen issues have been completely recoloured. The effect is utterly magnificent; where before the art was good and cool and a wonderful aid to following the plot, it is now incredible in its own right, especially in A Midsummer Night's Dream. The book is a feast for the eyes. Absolutely and utterly gorgeous.
It is also a work of pure genius, obviously.
It is gorgeous.
#25 - Perdido Street Station by China Miéville
This is a book that needs a little explaining.
In October 2006, I did a week of work experience in the children's department of Macmillan's as an editorial assistant, which was not only incredibly lucky but also incredibly incredible. As anyone who I have ever met in real life will know, I loved it. Amongst other things, I got to sit in on the a departmental meeting and a status meeting at which, amongst other things, the rebranding of The Princess Diaries was discussed at length; read
ana_beachcombe 's novel The Land of Bad Fantasy and a manuscript whose title wasn't Lost in a Good Book but was something not dissimilar, both of which immediately restored my faith in the merits of children's fiction (because incredible snarky commentary on fantasy cliché's and stereotyping and crazy crazy metafiction where not only is the author a character but in which there is another character refuses to believe in the existence of an 'Author' and the existence of plots holes forms part of the plot); helped prepare some cover briefs for a reissued Eva Ibbotson book and the comic book of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and just generally had an incredibly amazing time. On the last day, however, I did something entirely different: I checked the copy-editing on a book called Un Lun Dun, or rather checked that all of the corrections and changes had been made. This involved reading two 250 sheet high stacks of A3 paper pretty much simultaneously a sheet at a time and checking for discrepancies (and also having a very quick crash-course in copy-edit notation), which in turn meant that I got to read a 500 page novel whilst working.
This would have been cool if it had just been any old young adult novel. It wasn't. It was an absolutely fantastic 500 page novel with carnivorous giraffes, busses with feet, elite martial-artist rubbish-bin guards known as binja and an animated milk carton called Curdle, and that's not even the start of it. There's a review of it here, but don't just believe them. Read the book. Buy it for yourselves. Buy it for your friends. Buy it for your children. Buy it for other people's children.
(Yes, I would rather like to have a job with Pan Macmillan when I'm older, how did you tell, but no, they're not reading my blog. Sssh.)
So, anyway, I checked the copy-editing on this rather fantastic book (and correctly spotted that China Miéville had read Neverwhere, because it says so in the Acknowledgements) and had a wonderful time. And was told that China Miéville usually writes adult fantasy/sci-fi stuff, and had a look at the blurb of an example that they had hanging around the office (because the entire building was stuffed with books that they'd published, or were thinking of publishing that had been published in other countries, or that the author had published before, or just looked cool) whilst I waited for the Photocopier of Doom and thought, 'Oooh, this looks shiny' and decided I wanted to read it.
Between then and now a lot happened. This included me being sent a very nice and shiny printout of the final dust-jacket of Un Lun Dun upon which had been written a very nice note of thanks that was signed by a bloke called China, which made my week.
Having read it, I can tell you that it is fantastic. It is sprawling. It is epic. It is steampunk at its most vivid and imaginative. It is a mutant mix of Ankh Morpork and Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscurra and of Gormangahst and of Neverwhere and Michael Creighton and Wicked and a whole host of things that I have read. It is simply so crammed full of wonderful inventions that it would take far too many words than I have at my disposal to describe it.
If you like your fantasy dark and gritty and uncompromising and real, if you like your prose vivid and eloquent and inventive, if you like to see an author pick up a ball and then not only run with it but dance backwards juggling it along with three satsumas, a melon, a live chainsaw, a poisonous scorpion and a vat of napalm, then this is the book for you.
vii. I was going to include a list of loot in this post as well, but I think I should stop now. Seven is a good number for a list, anyway.
ETA: For some reason it seems to want to tell me that my LJ post is finished twice at the end of it which is probably fair enough given its length. Maybe this'll fix it...
ETA2: I can't count. Fixed.