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I’ve been reading Pratchett for a long time. By my reckoning, I could have been no older than 10 when I read my first Discworld book. I know this because I remember the re-release of one of his non-Discworld books – The Carpet People – being advertised in 1992, which inspired me to check out some of his books from the library. I think the first ones I read were Pyramids, Small Gods and The Colour of Magic.

That was seventeen years ago, which is kind of frightening, but that’s how it is. I grew up reading Discworld and I’m still a fan. This Summer, I’m going to be re-reading the whole series, from The Colour of Magic through Making Money. Or possibly Unseen Academicals, which is due out in October. Pratchett’s one of the few authors whose books I automatically pick up as soon as they’re released. He’s the only author whose books I’ll buy in hardcover. So don’t expect the utmost objectivity with these reviews.

Then again, I can see the flaws in The Colour of Magic. This first book of the series follows the adventures of Rincewind, a hapless wizard, as he tries to keep Twoflower, the Disc’s first tourist, alive against some serious odds. The wafer-thin plot is besides the point, though, and the real meat is in the gentle parody of classic fantasy, which touches on Fritz Leiber, Anne McCaffrey and even H.P. Lovecraft. It’s all rather light and unchallenging, but there’s some genuinely funny bits among the Douglas-Adams-esque absurdity of it all. This one-liner is as funny, if not more so, than anything in Adams:

Let’s just say that if complete and utter chaos was lightning, then he’d be the sort to stand on a hilltop in a thunderstorm wearing wet copper armour and shouting ‘All gods are bastards’.

The Colour of Magic is far from Pratchett’s best, but it’s a perfectly good example of the Adams-esque funny-fantasy subgenre. There’s hints of how the series would develop. I was actually surprised by how good it was – it’s been a long time since I read it and I’d assumed it would be a chore in comparison to the more recent novels. It’s far from them in both style and skill, but it’s still a pleasant way to spend a few hours.

I read this before Amsterdam and what with going on holiday, I didn’t have time to write a review. The book’s now back at the library so I don’t have a copy to hand. It was very good though.

I got back from my trip to Amsterdam a couple of days ago. I had a great time there. I took lots of photos, many of them of ducks.

This is caffeine:

I was pretty excited to find recently that you can now purchase pure caffeine from sports supplements retailers. Caffeine’s cheap – it’s the by-product of decaffeination – and I like the idea of caffeinating my own drinks (rather than just drinking coke or whatever). So I bought some. The picture above shows 200mg of the stuff, or about 2 cups-of-coffee worth. It was nice added to some orange juice and lemonade.

When a writer can’t come to the damn point after 125 pages, I start to lose interest. The thing that amazes Kluger is that sometimes things that appear simple are actually pretty complicated. This doesn’t seem quite so astonishing for me, and Kluger’s sense of amazement wears rather thin with chapter-after-chapter of meandering semi-coherence. Maybe he draws it all together in a staggering conclusion; I wouldn’t know because I didn’t get that far. I suspect not, though.

Subtitled The Power of the New Digital Disorder, Weinberger examines the ways that the internet is changing the way humans deal with organising knowledge. Easy reading, but Weinberger’s observations never go beyond the obvious. His examination of the history of organisation was interesting. I particularly enjoyed the sections on Melvil Dewey (of the Dewey decimal system) and Linnaeus and the taxonomical system he developed that forms the basis of modern biological classification. But the rest seemed kind of weak.

Back when I was in school our physics teacher disappeared. Literally – one day he just stopped coming into school. So we ended up with a replacement for a couple of months while waiting for someone new to take the job permanently. Mr Green was an interesting guy, but he found it impossible to stick to the subject he was meant to be teaching. A random question would set him off on a rambling discussion of something entirely perpendicular to the curriculum. It wasn’t long before people started doing that on purpose, because Mr Green’s rambling observations were a hell of a lot more interesting than how a spring works.

The Velocity of Honey is like that. There’s no overarching theme here, no point that Ingram’s trying to make except maybe that science is full of interesting stuff and, well, here’s some of it in handy book form. It’s not serious science trying to do serious things, and it’s fascinating. The focus is a little narrow, but Ingram addresses this in his prologue: “I chose the topics based on the appeal of their science, which really meant their appeal for me. (For some unknown reason, there seems to be a lot of psychology and physics, with not much in between.)”

If you’re happy to let Ingram ramble at you on 24 different subjects this this’ll work well. I’ve read quite a lot of pop-sci and these kind of books have a tendency to cover the same ground – but I never noticed this in The Velocity of Honey. Ingram’s both original and interesting, which is quite an achievement. I had fun reading it.

I kind of liked Kalder’s debut effort, Lost Cosmonaut. But Strange Telescopes is a much more engaging and mature work by a writer who’s clearly grown up and found himself in between books. This is Kalder without much of the glibness and arrogance that characterised Cosmonaut. The dark edge is still there, but it’s all the sharper for the subtlety.

Strange Telescopes is an examination of four Russian eccentrics. Actually, eccentric may be the wrong word. Kalder’s first subject, Vadim Mikhailov, who explores subterranean Moscow is clearly an eccentric, as is the film-maker obsessed with exorcism. But it’s hard to call Vissarion, a cult leader who claims to be a reincarnation of Jesus, merely eccentric. Kalder’s final study, Nikolai Sutyagin, who built a teetering wooden tower, seems the most normal of the lot. The common thread that Kalder finds is that all these men are engaged in the creation of their own realities. By accepting their realities for a while, Kalder is able to examine how it works.

It’s fascinating. Pretty much all the criticisms I leveled at Cosmonaut are fixed in Strange Telescopes. It’s a very good book and Kalder’s style is dry, witty, refreshingly dark and cynical. The pacing is problematic – Kalder’s apt to ramble around his subject for a while. The excorcist chapters dragged a bit for me. For the most part though, your patience is rewarded.

Charlie Brooker is a very funny man and I read through these two collections of his Guardian columns in a matter of days. Brooker began writing his TV column in 2000 and together the two books cover all of them to 2007. Unlike most TV columnists, Brooker hates most TV, the way it insults viewers, aims at the lowest possible demographic, and the way it slides into needless cruelty.

In a way he reminds me of the comedian Bill Hicks, who also used savage invective to communicate a righteous anger and made it funny. Like Hicks, Brooker has a fine line in knob (and arse) gags. He’s at his best when he’s looking on at something in horror.

Not everyone will appreciate what Brooker does, but if you like this sort of thing, then what Brooker does is some of the best of that sort of thing you’re likely to find. And it does bring memories of awful TV shows flooding back.

You shouldn’t believe anything that Daniel Kalder, author of Lost Cosmonaut says. Under a list of rules for the anti-tourist at the start of the book he states “The anti-tourist loves truth, but he is also partial to lies. Especially his own.” At times he veers off into the outright fictional, but it’s never entirely clear which bits of his stories are actually true. This is important, because otherwise, Lost Cosmonaut would be, by a very wide margin, the most depressing travel book I’ve ever read.

Kalder goes in search of emptiness, alienation and nothingness in the Russian Federation’s semi-automonous republics. He visits Tartarstan, Kalmykia, Mari El and Udmurtia – places I’ve never heard of and, based on his descriptions, would never want go. It’s hard to believe that Kalder, as he presents himself in the book, is anything other than a characature. He’s arrogant, crude, nihilistic and lazy – someone who’d be a nightmare to actually travel with. But it’s obvious that he knows far more about the Russian republics than he’s letting on and beneath the layer of existentialist crap he piles on, he seems to have a genuine affection for his subject.

It’s a bit like P.J. O’Rourke’s 1989 travel book, Holidays in Hell. Kalder would reject the comparison – in his rules for anti-tourists, he says that the only reason to penetrate danger zones is “vanity and a desire to brag”. Kalder doesn’t search out the dangerous – he finds interest in the banal and mediocre. What he’s really after are people clinging to the tattered edge of their identities, being consumed by Russia. Ethnicities on the verge of extinction, where people live lives of poverty and desperation. Kalder manages to criticise himself as an anti-tourist looking in on people’s misery, while skewering the cultural tourism of his contemporaries. Kalder’s no better than any of them and he doesn’t really pretend to be. It’s all a bit too post-modern, but identity is one of the few things that post-modernism actually does well.

I have no idea how accurate the book is in its depiction of these people, their culture or their countries. Kalder’s often quite funny in a mordant, dark and juvenile kind of way, but the whole effect of the book is rather depressing. I prefer my travel books a little less existentialist and a lot more straight-forward, but Lost Cosmonaut is actually pretty good. Just don’t go into it expecting it to be cheerful.