Priestdaddy by Patricia Lockwood

Oh what a joy to read! I loved, loved, loved this book. This is the true so-far life story of the writer and poet Patricia Lockwood, whose father is a married Roman Catholic priest. She and her husband Jason move back home while they are regrouping both financially and emotionally and she uses that time to write a book about her family and upbringing. The book is wicked and hilarious, deeply moving, poetic, philosophical, angry, thoughtful and satirical. And did I already say it? HILARIOUS. Lockwood lays herself bare, with all her vulnerabilities and self doubt mingling with a wonderfully observant wit and irreverence for the culture in which she finds herself. Her characters, with all their flawed eccentricities, are both recognizable and memorable. And her language and metaphor is that of a poet. This is one of the best books I’ve read in years, beautifully balanced, filled with moments of extreme hilarity mixed with reflection and at times pain.

Noughts & Crosses by Malorie Blackman

Such a disappointment. This was one of the Guardian’s best 100 books or something, but it was just rubbish. The plot itself is obvious and heavy handed. The noughts are the white people and the crosses are the black people. And they have reversed roles so that the noughts are victimized by the racist crosses. There’s nothing more to it than that, all tied up in a first person teenage love story that reads like a thirteen year old’s dear diary. Ordinary writing, no characterization to speak of, no nuance, no surprises: really, really disappointing. Blah. I want my money and my time back!

Light by M John Harrison

This is one of the trickiest books I’ve read in a long time and I struggled to understand it. However I was utterly compelled to keep going with it. It’s a science fiction novel in three strands. In the twentieth century we have Michael Kearney, a physicist who is investigating singularity (which I have no idea about) and his ex wife Anna. Hundreds of years in the future we have two people who are living on planets that are part of the Kefahuchi Tract, which is a singularity. I looked this up and found this: ‘In the center of a black hole is a gravitational singularity, a one-dimensional point which contains a huge mass in an infinitely small space, where density and gravity become infinite and space-time curves infinitely, and where the laws of physics as we know them cease to operate.’ First we have Ed Chianese, a ‘twink’ ie someone who lives their lives in a virtual reality tank, who was once an ace space ‘surfer’ and then there is Seria Mau who is a female who allowed her body to be fused with her spaceship and has become a freelance assassin. Kearney is on the run from a creature called the Shrander which he believes he can only keep at bay if he murders women. Ed is deeply in debt and on the run from his creditors until he is recruited to join a circus as a soothsayer. Seria is trying to find the meaning of a box that she has obtained. So the story moves from one strand to the other. Surprisingly, although I spent a lot of time frustrated because I couldn’t understand the science behind what was happening, it was the detail – the mathematics (an entity which runs the ship) and shadow operators, and cultivars and the ‘new men’ with their gangly limbs and red hair and the genetically engineered rickshaw girls and the ‘tailor’ who is a genetic engineer and all the other wonderful invented creatures, and the development of the characters - that make this such compelling reading. I think the more you read this book the more you get out of it. There are threads of imagery that run through it, and once you are confident enough to forget to worry about the science, then you can immerse yourself in this fabulous detail and also in the wonderful imagery on Harrison’s writing. And in the end, all is explained – and though I wasn’t sure what that explanation entirely meant, a book as rich as this has left me thinking about all its other aspects instead