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Take equal parts Ulysses, Against The Day and The Adventures of Baron Münchhausen and mix them together using whatever you find in a pre-1989 Romanian apartment. And the fact that one of those books hadn't been written yet, and that another is often considered untranslatable, is part of the point.

3.5/5. Weakest Nabokov I've read so far, which still makes it a damn fine novel, but I would probably have liked it even more if I hadn't read Stoner last year. One of those novels where all the subtext - living a life in translation, not realising how much you don't understand of the language, whether linguistically or semiotically - is more interesting than the superficial plot. Pnin is a pitiable character, and his eventual rebellion against the narrator Vladimir Vladimirovitch is perfectly understandable, but I wind up loving bits and pieces of it more than the whole.

There is something inherently heretical about bicycles. A mode of transport that's powered by man alone, which looks impossible but that anyone can master, whose adherents buzz back and forth through cities with little care for rules since the big cities of Europe are built either for cars or mass transportation. The illusion of freedom and free will (free wheel?) that can end under the wheels of a bus at any second.

Anno Domini 1347, Monsignor Robert de Prevois, the Inquisitor of Paris, received news from the mouths of honorable citizens that master Enguerrand de Auxbris-Malvoisin, obsessed by the Unclean One, had left the saving grace of the Christian faith, turned to incantations and magic, and built a demonic device that he rode through the streets terrifying people.

The Cyclist Conspiracy is, in a lot of ways, a complete (or rather incomplete) mess; presented as fragments of writings about the sect The Evangelical Bicyclists of the Rose Cross, who supposedly have been lurking in the shadows of European thought (worldly or religious? Is there a difference when it comes to power?) since mediaeval times. They assign all sorts of symbolic meanings to the bicycles; the two wheels, the triangle in the middle, the crossbar that only men's bikes have, the fact that it looks like a cross from the POV of God... The Bicyclists pop up in Freud, they pop up in Sherlock Holmes, their members (including both Stalin, Milosevic, Bohumil Hrabal and Homer Simpson) have been seen in post-revolution St Petersburg and in monasteries. Their mission is to overtake time itself, to overthrow rationality, to build something, a new and final Tower of Babel, in the realm of dreams (which, again, is the traditional domain of both church and state - hence the need to get Freud on board). At least I think that's what Basara (the narrator) thinks he's found out in this novel.

...your muscles don't turn the pedals, your spirit does. And it would be better to see things like this: it is not you that is moving, but the road and the Earth are turning, and you are standing in place and keeping your balance.

By the 21st century, there are a lot of churches to commit heresy against, a lot of empires piled in palimpsests on top of each other, all "latently present the whole time" in the psychogeography of central Europe; Stalin and Kohl sitting next to Freud and Aquinas. (See also: Codrescu's Tzara and Lenin Play Chess.) Every act can be condoned by any and sometimes all of them, so every act is already done long before it happens. Any organisation against it - against order itself - will contain both dictators and artists, murderers and clowns, and at times it feels a bit like Basara is trying to have his cake and eat it too, especially during the more heavy-duty philosophical parts that make up the latter half of the novel (or "novel"). When one of the characters remarks "...he talked to me for a long time about Byzantium, bicycles, real and false eternity, and I remember that I was horribly bored..." I underline it. But the first half, and much of the second half as well, is just such an exhiliratingly insane and fun ride that I have to remind myself to keep my hands on the handlebars. Because, well, we're balancing on millennia of idea(l)s that can look pretty horriffic up close, and once you remember that it's easy to fall and hurt yourself.

But idols have a powerful weapon at hand - flattery. And as the Romans said, vulgus vult decipi. It is almost ridiculous, this human affinity for self-deception. And so the world is becoming an ever more beautified corpse; however, it is no longer enough for the streets to be clean; from the facades of buildings, enormous billboards authoritatively claim that everyone is happy, that everything is in order, and that it will stay that way forever. Ultimately, practicality has proven itself to be childish idealism; whoever longs for reality is becoming unreal, whoever longs for the surreal is becoming real.

I saw Patti Smith play live for the umpteenth time this summer. I don't think she could give a bad concert if she tried, but this was one I was a bit wary about: Like all aging rock stars, she was going to play her most popular album (Horses) live in its entirety. It's a setup that, for most artists, becomes a dull exercise in nostalgia and note-perfect reproduction. As Jim Reid of the Jesus And Mary Chain pointed out in an interview when they set out to play Psychocandy live a few years ago, their concerts back then were never faithful reproductions of the studio material, yet if they were to sound NOW like they did back then, fans who only knew the album would complain about it not being authentic.

I shouldn't have worried, though, because if there's anyone who can pull this sort of thing off, it's Patti Smith. Not only because she's kept working with (as far as life and death allows) the same musicians ever since, but also because her entire career and Horses in particular have always been about subsuming yourself in what Lethem called the ecstasy of influence. Horses was always basically a sermon using rock'n'roll and poetry as holy writ; 40 years on, she just has to acknowledge that Horses itself has become part of that gospel. The 2015 version doesn't sound dated or nostalgic, nor is it a radical rearrangement as Dylan or Reed might have done, it's just ... lived in, a bit grey and wrinkled, not as limber as it once was but still refusing to back down.

Come on, man! I am PURE! I am ready to change the fucking world! Come on, motherfuckers! Come on! Come and get me!

Which leads us to M Train, her second memoir after the brilliant Just Kids, but this time starting in the Now: Patti Smith, grey, creaky-jointed, widowed and literal Grandmother of Punk, sits in her favourite cafe in the Village, sipping coffee and reading and taking notes. Not for anything in particular, but she just woke up from a dream where she was told that "It's not so easy to write about nothing." "I could do it, if only I had nothing to say," she responds. And sets about doing that, which of course in a way means trying to say everything.

Where Just Kids had a central story set squarely in the past - her dream of becoming an Artist (irrelevant which kind), her relationship/friendship with Robert Mapplethorpe, their respective rise to fame and self-awareness, with a coda set after his death - M Train is far less focused. That's not necessarily a bad thing; I'd gladly listen to Patti Smith ramble on about the phone book. Much like Dylan's Chronicles, it's not a tell-all memoir for those who want to know juicy personal details; you get to know a lot about Patti Smith, but little that concerns her actual career (the few times she even acknowledges that she's a musician can be counted on the fingers of one hand), and much more about how she sees the world and how it shapes her. She talks about books she's read and loved from Rimbaud to Murakami, people she's admired, TV shows she's following, the house she bought just a week before hurricane Sandy hit it, her various private travels all over the world (or just across the street) to visit other drifters alive and dead and collect memories with her notepad and her camera... And the still lingering grief from her husband's death 20 years earlier, that's mellowed but never goes away. She sleeps in Frieda Kahlo's bed, she visits Ozu's grave, she gets mugged, she drinks copious amounts of coffee, and she never stops thinking about it, filtering it through all that holy writ of how others have experienced the same things.

I saw a quote the other day to the effect that books are how humans update their software. M Train, using that metaphor, is one long personal debug, going over alternately hilarious and deeply moving, and sure, once or twice it goes overboard and becomes exactly as hippyish as you'd expect of an aging cat lady poet. But that's part of what Patti Smith is, and it wouldn't be her without it. At least twice, she seems to read my mind and responds (very specifically) from the written page to something I'd been thinking aboout IRL just hours earlier. In most books, I'd write that off as coincidence; but this is that rare memoir that feels not like a monologue but a dialogue, and I feel honoured to have gotten a chance to talk to her.

OK, I'm not the squeamiest person, but I honestly had trouble sleeping after finishing this one.

I hate that the publisher makes sure I know the circumstances this book was written under; if I dislike a book written by a dying author, that makes me feel like an asshole. If I like it, I'm forever (or at least for a while) going to wonder how much of that is me projecting what I know of the author onto the text.

That said, I definitely wound up liking this a lot more than I expected. It looks really clichéd - two bored young teenage outsiders from Berlin, a rich dork and a dirt-poor immigrant, decide to just "borrow" an old car and take off on "holiday" for a few weeks. Because why the hell not, mostly. Turns out that the adult world is a strange and incomprehensible place, and it takes more than just knowing which pedals to push to make your way ... Along the way through the former GDR they bump into various strange people. Or at least they think they're strange, but what do they know?

Again, yeah, you've seen this plot before, and when it's all narrated by one of the 14-year-olds it makes me even more wary. But I ended up scoffing the whole book down in two long reads, because it's just that well done. There's a hunger, a force behind Herrndorf's writing, a sense of humour that refuses to turn into comedy. The situations the boys find themselves in aren't just wacky adventures, though they initially appear that way when filtered through a not-as-smart-as-he-thinks kid's view. There's a new Europe out there, one which consists of layers of lots of old ones, and it takes more than just a hotwired Lada to understand it. Freedom's just another word for nothing, etc.

Not quite perfect, but the kind of finale that retroactively pulls up the first two novels up a notch as well. The Ancillary novels, for all that they mirror the standard trilogy pattern of outsider->complicated->triumph, still fell like one long novel chopped into three volumes for marketing purposes, but I love how much it gets right in the end. Not just that it's fun - and the last volume really ups the "fun" factor - but underneath it there's a lot of interesting ideas. How seriously it takes the question of just what happens when you introduce things like AI and cloned personalities into a story, for instance; the driving force behind the whole thing is Breq killing the evil emperor, but how exactly do you physically kill an emperor who has thousands of backup bodies spread out over hundreds of star systems who all depend on her being, basically, God?

Let's be sure that includes ALL of our citizens, shall we, Governor?

Ann Leckie has come under fire from a lot of, shall we say, somewhat less than progressive parts of SF fandom for outrageous things like only using female pronouns for all characters, etc. This, as many have pointed out, is of course profoundly silly; what, we're fine with hive minds and AIs and transhumans and aliens and FTL spaceflight, but gender ambiguity is outrageous? Yes, there are times when the dialogue between her characters almost sounds like the comments section at The Mary Sue, but she uses that. Ideas matter in SF, always have, and what Leckie does is to introduce the classic space opera to the question: Just what do all these various words, "person", "citizen", "people", "human", "individual", etc actually mean when you look beneath them, at the unspoken (or spoken so long we've accepted them) assumptions? She's not nearly the first to do so, but literature is an ongoing discussion and she makes an argument well worth listening to, even if - or especially as - it leans toward the optimistic. Hell, the whole thing is basically kicked off by the fact that even the evil emperor has a conscience. And just look at the titles of the books, and how they're ordered.

Also, fun. How does an all-powerful alien ambassador eat oysters? However she damn pleases.

Of course, underneath all that discussion is another discussion lurking, just how much our current view of rights and justice plays against a very Western idea of self-realisation and individualism. But that's for another day. In the end, this is what clever SF does, it opens gates between systems and lets them clash for a bit, and does so in a way that you can't stop reading.

Bitch Planet wears its politics on its sleeve, and I love it for it.

I love that it's unashamedly in the exploitation film mold, while still delivering kick after kick to the balls of a patriarchy that looks only just exaggerated.

I love that it's clever and darkly funny about it even when it waves its banners, constantly shows different angles on how prejudice affects everyone in different ways.

I love the art, that checks all the old women-in-prison stereotypes, nudity and all, but never feels sexualized.

I love the not-exactly-subtle but still clever use of the words "father" and "mother", hijacking Family Values(TM) for fun and profit. Mostly profit.

I love the brutality of it; those in power share exactly as much power as suits them, step across that line and the grandfatherly we-know-what's-best-for-yous and are-you-sure-you-wouldn't-rathers look exactly like a fist. Everyone knows that, but doesn't want to believe it applies to them. "Trust me", says the person who won't hesitate to have you killed if you don't - because they know the same applies to those above them.

I love that it's a comic book, the sort of larger-than-life POW! SOCK! WHAM! medium where this actually works, where the characters get to be their colourful selves, trapped on a planet and in a medium of their own.

I think I will love watching some people get exactly what they deserve.