2011: review of my completed reading

I’ve fallen behind the number of books I read last year. With only a couple of weeks of 2011 I doubt I’ll match the 63 from 2010.
I intended to mention my favourite books of the year, but looking back at my reading list I find so few that REALLY excited me. So instead of a top 10 or a top three books of the year that I intended to write – all I can do is mention the books that kept my interest and made me reluctant to put them down.


• The year started with Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall. Despite its length I was caught up in the story and enjoyed it enough to be interested in the promised sequel.
• I always find Mike Gayle very easy to read. With all of his books I’ve been reluctant to put them aside when I’ve started them. I’ve now read them all.
• Jasper Ffforde, one of last year’s favourites had only one book on this year’s list. I really love his writing but I think I needed a break. I have several unread Fforde’s on my shelves waiting for next year.
• Richard Harland’s Liberator also needs a mention. A great sequel to Worldshaker from last year’s reading list. I really wanted to revisit the world he created in the first book and I would certainly be interested in a third instalment should he write one.
• Neverwhere was the first Neil Gaiman book I’ve read. Very inventive but at times verged on being overly grotesque for my liking. Fantasy with some very dark aspects.
• The Power of Six was another sequel, related to a book from last year’s list. This one is the follow up to I Am Number Four, while it kept me reading I found it less rounded than the first book. It was clearly part of a series rather than a stand-alone book, like pulling a collection of chapters out of a longer piece of fiction.
• Duma Key was the first Stephen King book I’ve read in over ten years. I enjoyed most of it. I’ve written about some of my concerns about the book in an earlier post. I recently came in for some questioning on a Christian forum – why would I want to read such things? I can understand the concern. King’s reputation perhaps gets in the way. People have preconceptions about the type of thing her writes, and I may write something about that issue at another time.
• Divergent by Veronica Roth, another first episode of a series. I am very interested in the next instalment due sometime next year.

All of the above are works of fiction. What about non-fiction?

• David Hick’s Guantanamo: My Journey will only reinforce whatever people already believe about his imprisonment at Guantanamo Bay and what led him there. While the book answers a lot of questions, at times he seems to avoid telling us what really happened. I feel he was not as innocent as he tries to make out – but neither was he as guilty as the political powers insisted. I think he was an idealist but foolish young man in the wrong place at the wrong time who continually fell into the hands of the wrong people.
• Unzipped, Suzi Quatro and Haunted Heart by Lisa Rogak. I’d like to write a separate article incorporating these two books. One clearly about Suzi Quatro, the other about Stephen King – famous people I’ve had some kind of attachment to in the past. Very interesting to find out what went on behind the scenes.
• Several food books – the stand out perhaps being In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan. His views of food are essential reading for anyone who has real concern about what they are eating.

After this listing and commentary of “readable” and “interesting” books – there is one book from 2011 that I have to single out as my book of the year. If I can only recommend one book out of all of those I’ve read this year it would be The Book Thief by Markus Zusak.
Why the recommendation? I suggest you read it for yourself and find out.

I loved it.

The Gratuitous Excess of Stephen King.

I've probably read more about Stephen King and more about his books than I've read of his fiction. And I’ve probably read more biographies about Stephen King than I’ve read about any other individual.

He is one of the most successful authors ever, so it’s not surprising that I was interested in the man and his work. I saw I could learn something, or at least be inspired by his example.

My interest in King started around the same time I started a creative writing course at University in the early 1990s. One of my first stories written for the course had horror elements and immediately someone made a Stephen King comparison. I don’t know whether that comment influenced me in any way, but it seemed that most of my story writing from that point took on elements of “dark fantasy”.

For one Uni assignment I wrote a review of one of King’s books – Cycle of the Werewolf, a short novel illustrated by comic book artist Bernie Wrightson. The one thing I recall about my review is that I saw Wrighton’s artwork as a metaphor for King’s work in general. Wrightson had provided both coloured, graphically bloody illustrations and more subtle black and white sketches. I found the subtler drawings much more effective. Likewise with King’s writing, there was a mixture of “gross-out” and more nuanced incidents –again I found the subtler approach more interesting, more imaginative and overall much more effective in capturing my attention.

It had been over decade since I last read anything by King, but reading Lisa Rogak's Haunted Heart, a recent biography, made me curious enough to read another of King’s books. I chose Duma Key because its main character takes up art near the beginning of the book – as I have done this year.
I’m now approaching page 90 out of almost 700 pages. It is still a long way to go, but enough to give me an idea of what I like and don’t like about King’s writing. At this stage there is one major issue that in my opinion mars what he writes, and that is his occasional habit of resorting to extreme crudity. In the context of Duma Key it has seemed entirely gratuitous.

I admit that my opinion on this is strongly influenced by my Christian commitment, but that is not the whole of the matter. I understand that the use of expletives can effectively create realistic dialogue and give colour to character. Used in the appropriate context it doesn’t bother me so much.

In Duma Key so far, there have been two instances of excessive crudity. Both were unnecessary and neither added to the story, or the characters. Were they used to serve the story (in my opinion no) or to serve the reputation of King’s ability to shock?

I get the sense that it is the author himself rather than his characters that are the focus of the extreme use of language. As if King is trying to show that he’s still able to shock his reader rather than adding a realistic edge.

My Fictional Autobiography (part 3): The Alien Years.

I recall writing to Arthur Shuttlewood in the 1980s. He was a one time journalist who became a kind of UFO guru. He had written several books about his home town’s relationship with UFOs, starting with The Warminster Mystery. Over many years Shuttlewood claimed that Warminster in southern England was an important hot spot for UFO activity.
I had been fascinated by UFO stories since the mid 1960s when England became the focus of a UFO “flap”. As an 8 or 9 year old during the time of the space race, the idea of alien visitation inspired a lot of excitement. I read many books from that time onwards including a few of Shuttlewood’s. Since I came across this topic at such an early age I can’t blame myself for maintaining a degree of gullibility for many years after. I lapped up the wildest claims with barely a degree of scepticism and a lot of my reading leaned towards things unexplained.

There was a strange tension in my life from trying to live with contradictory beliefs. In the late 70s I became a Christian, and yet I still tried to hold onto the interest in visiting aliens. To some extent I was able to do this by redefining the UFO phenomenon, moving from aliens visiting earth to an understanding that the whole thing was a demonic delusion. This view was not merely an idea permeating fundamentalist circles; some of the most popular and respected UFO writers were saying the same thing. The most well known that come to mind were John Keel (Operation Trojan Horse) and Jacques Vallee (Passport to Magonia). While these writers did not necessarily hold to the Christian interpretation of “demonic”, they raised the possibility that entities that had once been viewed as “demons” in some cultures were now being interpreted in terms applicable to the space age. Vallee saw the possibility that they were “Inter-dimensional” rather than Extra-terrestrial.

The 1980s was a boom-time for UFO books, aided by some highly questionable TV specials claiming Government collusion with extra terrestrials. I recall one that featured interviews with alleged CIA agents who described interaction with a captive alien (or “gray” as they came to be known). One of the major revelations provided was the flavour of ice-cream the entity preferred.

Books that were part of this trend included Above Top Secret by Tim Good and Communion by horror writer Whitley Strieber. The latter describing Strieber’s claimed abduction by “the visitors” was followed by several sequels such as Transformation and Breakthrough: the next Step. Strieber was another UFO writer who noted the similarities between his “visitors” and the demons of various religious traditions but his later books became more and more esoteric in content, making him seem more like a mystical guru than a serious contributor to UFO literature.

It was in the 90s that I woke up to my gullibility thanks to books by Jim Schnabel. Round in Circles examined the crop circle craze and Dark White looked at alien abductions. Rather than follow the tried and (not so) true path of examining countless witness reports, Schnabel turned the spotlight on the investigators who were presenting their own interpretation of the reports to the public. In my view he well and truly blew these phenomena apart, showing how much the investigators projected THEIR desires and expectations onto the evidence they claimed to have.

While the books and authors mentioned above would be classified as non-fiction, the borders between fact and fiction were clearly blurred by a lot of wishful thinking (both on the writer’s part and more significantly mine).

Hollywood returned to the UFO/Alien visitor arena starting with Spielberg’s Close Encounter’s of the Third Kind (in the 1970s) and later with his more popular ET.
Joe Dante’s Explorers starred very young River Phoenix and Ethan Hawke, while Cocoon directed by Ron Howard made an Oscar winner out of one of its aging stars (Don Ameche).

Starman one of John Carpenter’s less gruesome films was (like ET) part of the “alien as benign but threatened visitor” genre that contrasted significantly with the hostile aliens portrayed in many 50s SF films, when Hollywood had previously exploited an interest in things alien.

Some of the most popular films were converted into “novelisations”, of which I only recall reading Close Encounters of the Third Kind. I also owned the book version of Explorers but I don’t remember reading it.

Away from Hollywood’s exploitative inspiration, John Wyndham’s novels were favourites for a while, some of which had tenuous links to UFOs and/or alien visitors. The most significant being The Midwich Cuckoos, a story about a village that was temporarily cut off from the world by a mysterious force field (an idea that Stephen King has also used in his recent novel Under the Dome). In Wyndham’s book the temporary isolation is lifted and the entire female population of childbearing age are found to be pregnant. The story has been twice filmed under the name Village of the Damned. (Did I say I had moved away from Hollywood’s exploitation of the genre? Clearly that is not possible!)

One of the earlier and most well-known novels about alien visitors cannot be ignored. War of the Worlds has inspired films, radio plays and a musical extravaganza, and it was the latter that most closely followed H G Wells book. I read Wells’ novel many years ago and it’s one that I intend to read again when time and discipline permit. It is one of those science fiction stories that has taken on iconic status. A popular SF writer also wrote a sequel. Christopher Priest’s The Space Machine takes elements of War of the Worlds and another Wells novel The Time Machine and creates a story from a mix of the two ideas.

Perhaps the most cerebral book dealing with UFOs that I’ve read was Ian Watson’s Miracle Visitors, which dealt with the psychological nature of UFO encounters and gave a very ambiguous view of them. The cerebral approach to alien intelligence was also taken in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 A Space Odyssey created with Arthur C Clarke. I later read Clarke’s novel to see whether it would help me make sense of the film (which it did). In this story an alien presence has been alongside mankind from the very beginning of man’s development, following his progress and leaving clues of their existence that mankind will find at various stages of his technological journey.

Clarke was one of the most well known and admired science fiction writers and created various differing scenarios in which mankind came into contact with alien civilisations. Apart from 2001, the most memorable to me were Childhood’s End – which from memory gave an interesting spin to the alien as demon concept; and Rendezvous With Rama, a story dealing with the exploration and examination of a massive alien craft passing through our solar system. Rama was followed by a series of sequels.

I have only touched the surface of the ways in which human-alien contact has been explored in both fiction and “non fiction”, and all of it refers to aliens visiting US. There is probably far more about man visiting alien worlds stretching from early stories of men visiting the moon, through to Star Trek TV shows and movies and their various spin offs and imitations. The possibilities for stories about alien contact of various types are potentially limitless.

And here, on that cliched note, ends the latest part of my "fictional autobiography".