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I don't remember details about the first time I read Good Omens. I remember laughing quite a bit. I remember being transfixed and unable to put it down. I remember deciding to read a lot more Gaiman and Pratchett.

And so, because the powers that be have decided to finally film this and I want to be able to say with some authority that the book is better, I re-read it lo these many years later, after having a read a lot more Gaiman and Pratchett.

And, y'know, it's pretty recognizable. Like putting on a well-worn old sweater. By now I know both Pratchett's wordplay, Gaiman's mythology, Pratchett's mindful optimism, Gaiman's love for outsiders, nevermind that I have no idea who wrote what here because they really hit a sweet spot where all those ideas work together. Sure, so they both had some growing to do as writers, and the book has dated a little bit, and some of the running jokes are overused, but... Hey, it's a book about the divinity of human imperfection. And I still can't put it down.

An interesting idea wasted on a fairly standard whodunnit. The idea of a country between Denmark and Britain, with equal parts Scandinavian, Dutch and British heritage (though none of it apparently going back further than the 19th century or so), promises more worldbuilding than Adolfsson is interested in - it could just as well have been set in any coastal town in Scandinavia or Scotland, with a few small details changed - and the case itself isn't up to much. I like some of the character work, but... that's about it.

Petrol-drinking tuaregs, hidden oases in the Nubian desert, Persian armies whose descendants ("They're white men!") still hang on to that one oasis 2,500 years after losing contact with the outside world... You'd be hard pressed to call this the most realistic of the Biggles books. On the upside, there's not nearly as much racism as you might expect (which is to say there's a certain amount, more than 12-year-old me would have picked up on), and damnit, Johns' habit of breaking tension to lecture on how flying works is still unmatched for its sheer seriousness. I haven't read Biggles since before I discovered Monty Python, and only now do I realise just how little they had to exaggerate. Ridiculous, but with a stiff upper lip you can't help but admire.

China is poor, too, but when the country becomes properly rich we can buy an American president.

2.5, probably. As a satirical chronicle of China's change from maoist farming nation to super-city capitalist superpower, it has both some good points and some good laughs, and Yan's targets are no less relevant outside China. Men get to make money for others, women get to sell themselves to others, repeat as the skyscrapers grow.

But 380 pages of that needs characters and plot to carry it. The narration is too dry even as it occasionally veers into sub-Márquezian magical realism, and the characters mostly consist of dramatic exclamations of what they want to do next, all driven by fate and plot necessity.

Brilliant translation, though.

Listen: Private Dietz has come unstuck in time.

It's the big final war between the rebels on Mars and the ordered, free societies of Earth. (So what if the Martians were earthlings once; it's not like we, as a species, have a good historical record of remembering who our friends and enemies are.) Sao Paolo, one of the greatest cities on Earth after most of North America was wiped out in an earlier war, is destroyed and Dietz, having lost both family and city, signs up to avenge them. Becoming one of the dreaded space marines who can teleport to any place in the Solar System and arrive ready to kick ass.

I teleported home one night, With Ron and Sid and Meg. Ron stole Meggie's heart away, and I got Sidney's leg.

The Light Brigade is a novel of entropy, of breakdown; of society as late-stage capitalism moves to the only end point it knows, of self as part of basic training, of molecules as people are beamed as photons across space, and of the genre; what at first looks like a straight update of Starship Troopers (or Tropers), Verhoeven's more than Heinlein's, quickly starts falling apart under reality, and gets mixed up in body parts from other corpses; Orwell, Vonnegut, Adams, probably a dozen I'm not familiar with, stuck together with Hurley's trademark love of goo and gore and fueled by a healthy dollop of Trump-era anger.

The Light Brigade certainly isn't a subtle novel. It is just as certainly a thrilling, fun, horrifying and clever novel that twists itself around itself so many times (possibly one too many, but it's no big complaint) that by the time it comes out with a big fist in the air at the end I'm almost blinded.

Had to spend a while googling to make sure this wasn't an elaborate 21st century literary hoax. Apart from having aged surprisingly well (yes, he thinks depression is caused by demonic possession or unbalanced bodily fluids, but the way he both describes it, sympathises with it and discusses its treatment is remarkably modern) Burton's all-out rant on mental health, with enough asides to make Sterne's head spin, is just so much fun to read.

Wow.

OK, I can't make myself love it unreservedly, but that's more by design than by accident. James may semi-ironically refer to this as "an African Game of Thrones", and he may have plot elements about the Rightful Heir and Magic vs Science and Revenge vs Justice, but please don't go in expecting a generic fantasy plot with slightly darker characters. Black Leopard, Red Wolf is a complete submersion into a messy, multi-layered mashup of African and Afro-caribbean mythology and beastiary, messed-up politics and personal hangups that our only, not completely reliable viewpoint character has no intention of seeing from different POVs or jamming into a regular three-act structure.

It's not an easy read; I'm more tempted to call it an African Gravity's Rainbow or a souped-up Palm-Wine Drinkard than anything GRRM could cook up. And then there's the language; where James spent A Brief History of Seven Killings playing with various Englishes, he's now chosen to present his story through an English that has to emulate a half-dozen different languages and pidgins, expressing ideas and myths that he knows most of his readers will be totally at sea with (and into which he drops us with no preparation or parachute or Cliff's Notes whatsoever), and he has way too much fun with it. You're constantly having to keep track of where you are, when you are, what's dream and what's reality, who's mortal and immortal, just what the plot is and why our Tracker can't just let go of his official and personal quests. What gradually emerges is a society of very varied cultures and technologies that's starting to gradually feel the panic of impending doom both from without and within, while testing and failing all the various tools they've developed over so long that they can't see them anymore, snaking its way from one setpiece to the next by ways that never feel given.

I feel like I've been run over by a truck blasting African Scream Contest while waving a Pride flag tied to a sorcerer's wand. Which is a dumb simile. But Black Leopard, Red Wolf is so very dense, yet so full of little hooks and snippets and holes leading in different directions; so labyrinthine, yet never quite forgetting the heart - or hearts - of the story. I don't know what else to say.

A staggering literary kaleidoscope - the same story three times, except shaken up between every telling to extend the timeframe (war, post-war, post-wall) and change all the details. Heartbreaking, yet a complete joy to read, a language that remains crystal clear and enthralling even as we're led deeper into a labyrinth of unspeakable (and therefore changed) details.

"I stället för att läsa historia klev jag in i historien och påverkade den."

Tyvärr känns det någon gång som om Khavari är en bättre berättare än Hellquist är en tolk. Men utöver det, jodå. 2000-talisterna kan mycket väl rädda världen om de får en chans.

You can love me in a pagan way.

Two young people, Arvid and Lydia, meet and fall in love. There are no immediate hurdles to their love. That should be it, right, just coast to the happy ending? Except things don't just "happen". (I have a feeling Söderberg would have agreed with John Lennon about life being what happens to you while you're busy making plans.) A few hesitations, a few clumsy words, and they're on different paths, reconnecting and rekindling and resplitting several times over the next 15-odd years, while the world continues around them. They both want to be free, they both want to be together, but as fate would have it, those two things are never possible at the same time.

They talk about mountain landscapes - it should be called valley landscapes. You live and work in the valley, not on the peaks.

I haven't read this since high school, and I'm struck again by how thoroughly modern Söderberg feels in almost all respects. It's a novel from 1912 (the free ebook version is pre- grammar and spelling reform, at that) in which people have casual (and not-so-casual) sex, swear and generally act in their own best interest, set to a clear-eyed, mildly ironic prose where Söderberg doesn't so much gladly dismantle the old society that's about to become something different as pass it by with cold disdain; while it's set during a time when both revolution and war was in the air, Söderberg remains coolly above such things as politics and just focuses on his two fuckups as they dance around each other, trying to figure out what's keeping them apart or together.

It's weird how it even feels more timeless than both adaptations I've taken in - Sundström's 1960s-set rewrite For Lydia and Pernilla August's 2016 film. Those feel like period pieces (an unsuccessful one in August's case) while the original, details and a few plot elements (the casual dismissal of children, for instance) aside, feels far more relatable. not because Söderberg doesn't allude to then-current events - he most definitely does, that's part of the point of having a novel take place over 15 years - or because things haven't changed (especially for women) in 107 years, but because the things he does dwell on remain mostly the same. (OK, apart from the obsession with what Carl Snoilsky would have thought.) (Though it also probably helps that 1910 is more safely in The Past than a story set when my own parents were dating.)

Where August rushes through the plot, Söderberg lets them evolve (or not) seperately, until it's already too late. Where Sundström rightfully calls both Arvid, Söderberg and society on their insidious rather than overt sexist bullshit, and probably writes a more likable story, Söderberg lets his two characters be both part of the world and isolated from it, creating tension from their inability (or well, chiefly Arvid's) to find and accept each other at the same level. Cool and collected on the outside, messed up as hell on the inside.

You don't choose your destiny. And you no more choose your wife or your mistress or your children. You get them, and you have them, and occasionally you lose them. But you do not choose!