Seven books this month, mainly fiction:
Intrusion — Ken MacLeod
What if the power to make the wrong decisions is taken from you, what if you want to make your own decisions without justifying yourself to others, not want to take up the shield of a religion to justify refusing what’s for your own good?
Something Wicked this Way Comes — Ray Bradbury
Sandra gave me this as a present some years ago, because we had been talking about Bradbury for some reason; I read it after his death. A great American fantasy/horror classic, full of his peculiar brand of nostalgia without his sometimes cloying sentimentality
Testament of Youth — Vera Brittain
A book drenched in grief and sorrow from the first page, though still with somewhat of a happy ending. Vera Brittain’s autobiography centers on the Great War and the men she lost through them: her lover, her brother, her friends as well as her struggle to live with these losses. Its matter of factness is what gives it its power.
Tsing-Boum — Nicolas Freeling
The French wife of a Dutch military man is murdered in her flat, shot six times with a machine pistol, as a gangster serial is playing on the tv, drowning the noise. A professional killing, but why this woman?
Cop Killer — Sjowall & Wahloo
Gloomy seventies Scandinavian police procedural, the ur-well of all those Hennings and Bridges and other fashionable Nordic thrillers.
Criminal Conversation — Nicolas Freeling
A highly placed banker accusses an equally highly placed doctor of murder and inspector van der Valk has to play a psychological game to find out the truth.
We Who Are About to… — Joanna Russ
When a starship crashlands on an alien world far from home, all but one woman see it as their duty to restart civilisation there. This is the story of that one woman.
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