So Many Books, So Little Time

Every day, the list of books one would like to read grows longer. The latest addition to my own such list is Megan Shephard's The Madman's Daughter  (just published by Harper Voyager), the madman in question being H.G. Wells's Doctor Moreau. The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896) is Wells's masterpiece, and stands alongside Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) and Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897). If you haven't read any of them, do – ditto Moreau's Other Island (1980), Frankenstein Unbound (1973) and Dracula Unbound (1991), all by Brian Aldiss. Then read The Madman's Daughter and report back, because at the rate my list is growing I won't live long enough to read it myself.

No Helping Some People

Some people swallow just about any conspiracy theory, monster myth or ridiculous bit of pseudoscience they come across. Back in the 90s I worked with an otherwise very nice chap who had caught the Erich von Däniken bug and believed every word he wrote. I failed to convince him von Däniken was an insult to serious academics, so I pressed this nice little debunking volume on him (first published in 1976) and urged him to read it:

A week or so later he handed it back unopened. (Another nice little debunker, incidentally, is this one, first published in 1984:

And no, I don't suppose it's on sale at the Loch Ness visitor centre.)

'Finding Myself Up My Own Arse'

One of my pet hates is non-fiction that, whatever the purported subject matter, is actually all about the author's 'journey of discovery': in other words, all about the author. All authors are vain, but writing about oneself in the guise of something else is pure conceit. Judging from the number of such books published, though, they obviously sell, so what the hell do I know? (I can see the blurb now... 'In Finding the Weretiger, Patrick Newman tells the self-indulgent true story of how he bummed around Asia with his head up his arse looking for an elusive mancat – and instead found himself.' Something along those lines, anyway.)

A Glimpse of Old England

When I go fishing I have to make do with tea from a flask, hastily made while in my usual groggy early morning state. Things were obviously different for those who could afford servants in the old days...

The lady angler on the right in this photograph from 1900 is a study in concentration as she waits for a bite on the Darenth River – a chalk stream, and then a prime trout fishery for the well-heeled – near Dartford in Kent. But I wonder what the maid bringing a tray of refreshments on the left was thinking?

Nice of You to Tell Me

Charity shops are pretty depressing places, and trying to scan their grotty bookshelves over someone's shoulder – there's always someone in your way – can be pretty soul destroying, but every now and then you find a diamond among the dross and suddenly it all seems worthwhile. So it was that I recently found this little gem, first published in 1954:

It's the diary an Australian nurse secretly and very bravely kept while interned by the Japanese in Sumatra from 1942 until the end of the war. By the time her camp was liberated she weighed less than six stone. But, she survived. So many others didn't. A mile away was the men's camp. With the war lost, the Japanese announced that internees with husbands and fathers there could visit them. Excitedly they all got ready, women and children alike. Then the Japanese called out the names of all those who needn't bother... 

An Englishman's Home...

Some men with a big yellow digger turned up the other day to demolish the 1930s house across the road. From my desk I had a grandstand view, and I was just thinking 'I must get myself one of those' while wondering idly how long the job would take when the operator no more than nudged one corner of the building, just below the roof, and the whole edifice collapsed in a sorry heap like a brick soufflé. What's worrying is that my own house is virtually the condemned one's twin. I'll have to go gently with the hammer next time I hang a picture.

Pretty Much Irreplaceable

The house is on fire, I've rescued my cats and fishing tackle, and there's just enough time to grab one book off the shelves before my entire library goes up in flames. But which one? (No, not my own...) Here it is:

Doesn't look much, does it? Indeed, it's a pretty grotty 1980 Charter, New York paperback. But since I first found it in a second-hand book shop in the mid-1980s, A Rude Awakening has remained my favourite book, and Aldiss my favourite author. First published in 1978, it is the third in the semi-autobiographical 'Horatio Stubbs' trilogy – after The Hand-Reared Boy (1970) and A Soldier Erect (1971) – and sees Aldiss at the very peak of his powers. The setting is Sumatra in 1946. Stubbs is a squaddie, a veteran of the Burma campaign with only days to go before he returns to Blighty. He determines to marry his Chinese girlfriend and take her with him, but events conspire against him. In a particularly memorable passage, he finds himself powerless to save a Dutch friend from summary execution by Indonesian freedom fighters. The game is up for Stubbs, and for the British out East.