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It's a tragedy: Stella Petersen, a young woman, an English teacher at a high school in northern Germany, has died. The school holds a memorial service, and one by one they step up to give their eulogies: the principal, other teachers, a representative of the students.

In the audience sits Christian, one of the students. He was asked to say a few words, but while the others speak for all but one minute, he's quiet. He sits there remembering the summer, their summer, in the small seaside town with beach parties (this is the late 50s, after all), regattas, and clandestine meetings. It's a short service, so it's a short novel; in just over 100 pages, and in quick flashbacks, we get to follow Christian's and Stella's hesitant, very inappropriate, and ultimately (as we know) doomed relationship.

So, yet another novel by an aging writer reminiscing about first discovering the physical act of love, eh? Well sure, if you want to get technical, but it's a lot more than that. Though on the one hand, this is really that simple: a story about falling in love for the first time, back when everything is still life and death, everything or nothing, when you still think love is all that matters and your feelings are automatically returned. Lenz's style is wonderfully and deceptively light, letting Christian the narrator set the whole thing in such simple tones (teenagers love hard, but they're not always noted for their empathy) that we almost, but only almost, don't notice the obvious: that Stella is an adult, with a couple more years on him, and a complicated life full of issues and relationships that Christian has no part of. Christian certainly doesn't notice; he's too busy making plans of a little lighthousekeeper's house for two.

That difference in storylines, that confusion of subject and object run throughout the novel. Christian, in love with (the idea of being in love with) a person who's supposed to be an authority figure, dreaming of being her Man, struggles to be consistent in how he addresses and thinks of her; shifting between du and Sie when talking to her and between you and she when describing her to himself. It's as if he's trying to deliver a eulogy to her, yet ends up telling himself their story instead, fixing it in his memory as he wants to remember it, encasing her in amber. And throughout the novel, rock by rock, a breakwater is built outside the little town to keep the big waves from ruining the nostalgic calm.

There's a tone in A Minute's Silence that reminds me of the paintings of the Skagen painters; the wide open sky, the false nostalgia of easy life in a place where most people have to work hard for everything, the hazy North Sea light. At other times it reminds me of Isherwood's A Single Man; not just the way it's set in a single day but dealing in memories and their role in how we see (or fail to see) ourselves and relate to others, or coping with the death of a loved one, or even the way the discussion of a different book (Orwell's Animal Farm; Christian misses the point of it entirely) plays an important part in the narrative. But also the way the author manages to charge every word of his simple story and featherlight prose with meaning. If you wanted to, you could pick every paragraph apart hunting for symbolism and find it - yet that's never necessary. That's just all the little shades of blue that make up the whole picture, give it depth. Mostly, though, A Minute's Silence is just itself: a simple but haunting story about a young man, a slightly older woman, and how we become... well, slightly older. A eulogy for getting it both right and wrong.

There's not a lot we know about one of the greatest writers of all time. So little, in fact, that people for the last 200 years have been speculating that maybe he didn't even write the works he's credited with.

Bryson dismisses all such claims in one of the funniest chapters of the book - noting that three of the leading "anti-Stratfordians" are named Looney, Silliman, and Battey - and instead focuses on presenting what we do know about Shakespeare, what we can reasonably assume about him, and how we know it. And as always with Bryson, it's all presented in a very light, entertaining but informative tone.

There's a lot of interesting information in here, both about Shakespeare the person (the little we know of him), his career and how his works survived, and the society that formed him. What I would have liked to hear more about is the society that he formed; his literature, and the influence it had on the coming 400 years. That's not the book Bryson set out to write, and I guess I'll have to keep looking for one of those. For now, Shakespeare is definitely recommended for those who want to know who ol' Billy Stratford was.

When I was a kid, I read about cowboys and indians. Yeah, I know, I was born a few generations after the big wave of that stuff, but there was still Lucky Luke and Tintin In America and my dad's old 50s adventure books and plastic bows and arrows and toy guns.

Then, just as I was starting to discover newer stories where the white man was the evil colonist and the Native Americans were the innocent, nature-loving philosophers who cried every time someone dropped a gum wrapper, I saw Little Big Man. The movie version starring Dustin Hoffman, that is. And a lot of things changed there.

Little Big Man, both the movie and the novel it was based on (which I've now read for the first time) is about Jack Crabb. Jack is 111 at the beginning of the story in the mid-1950s, one of the oldest living Americans, and the last survivor (or so he claims) of the battle of Little Bighorn, where the combined forces of Sioux and Cheyenne soundly defeated the US cavalry for the first and last time. Except he's not just Jack Crabb, he's also Little Big Man; that's the name the Cheyenne gave him after they adopted him as a 10-year-old boy after killing most of the people in the wagon train he was travelling on. For the next 25 years, he spends his life drifting back and forth between his two lives; a Cheyenne brave watching his world disappear, or a white man trying to make a living in the new society that's growing out of the so-called Wild West - as gold digger, poker player, rich dandy, poor drinker, muleskinner, con man, anything. He has one family each by a Mexican woman, a white woman, and a Cheyenne woman. Does Jack Crabb run into every single famous person from Wyatt Earp to General Custer? You bet he does. Does Little Big Man witness racism, marginalisation and massacres of his people? Of course he does. It's almost too much. It's almost so you'd agree with the (fictional) post scriptum: either he's telling the complete truth, or he's lying about all of it.

So far I'd been a great admirer of civilization, but I figured that was because I hadn't come in touch with the process of its creation.

Little Big Man isn't a flawless literary masterpiece in terms of prose - it's not supposed to be, as it's allegedly just a typed interview with an old decrepit man, and probably could have used a ghostwriter (at least try and get him to stick to one tense in each sentense). As a pure adventure novel about the death of one civilisation and the rise of another it's excellent, thrilling, horrifying, hilarious and moving in equal parts, but there are a lot of those around too. Its greatest strength, what struck me so hard about the movie and works just as well here, is the fantastic detail in the description of life both on the prairie and in the frontier towns, and the fairness. (Allegedly, the native American actors in the movie refused to believe that the book was written by a white man.) Here, neither Cheyenne nor Americans are presented as exclusively good or bad - if anything, they're all a bit foolish, including Jack himself and possibly the reader, if we believe everything he tells us. They're all just human beings, prone to violence and irrationality, with a ton of history on their shoulders, hung up on honour and pride, blind to their own prejudices and all too willing to see the other side's. (This goes for our narrator too - even after all he's gone through, Jack Crabb remains a bit of a racist, a product of his time.) Berger, born three generations after all of this happened, brings both people and time to proud, foolish life. And, as a final reminder of the times, the novel ends by somewhat clumsily pointing at something that was just starting to happen in East Asia. Oh well, you can't have everything.

Now, all the above should be read with a caveat. See, I read this in translation, which normally isn't a problem, but the new Swedish translation is so atrociously bad you'd think the translator thought this was just one of my dad's 50s boy's adventures about whitehats and redskins - so bad that I find it difficult to say just how good this novel would be in English.

One morning as Eric Sanderson awoke from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed into himself. Except he doesn't remember the uneasy dreams. He doesn't remember himself. He's got more or less complete amnesia (think Eco's The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana - he's forgotten everything about himself, but every piece of historical and pop-cultural trivia, every turn of phrase, every cultural meme is still there). He's a blank slate. Except for the letters his old self keeps sending him, warning him of a conceptual shark - the idea of a predator, lurking in the stream of information surrounding all human interaction, and feeding on memories. The ultimate representation of self-destructive thoughts.

You'd think the best thing that could have happened to Eric - the new Eric, Eric II - would have been if Eric I had never told him about this, because once he knows, the shark is after him too. And so he has to set out on a quest to find himself - literally and figuratively, in both the subterranean and subtextual world under the consensus of what life in 21st century Britain is like. (Possibly, he's mad and it's all in his head. Possibly, the shark is very real. Possibly, both; after all, if you have an idea in your head, then that idea is real - the only reality there is, perhaps?)

It's difficult to explain, but it's really a quite clever idea, weaving in themes about language, subjective construction of reality, memetic mutation and evolution, dealing with grief, and a bunch of stuff that might have fit well in a Paul Auster or Haruki Murakami story (unsurprisingly, Hall namedrops both, along with Borges and other metafictional superstars). He's not quite the writer it takes to say anything truly profound about it, and rather than a new Kafka On The Shore it ends up more as a mixture of Snow Crash and Neverwhere with some unfortunate overtones of the Big Purple Dan Brown Book Which Shall Not Be Named. But hey, I really like two of those, and as metaphysical thrillers go it's entertaining. I'll put up with some clunky prose if it serves an original idea, and for a long while it does.

So I'm coasting along merrily on the streams of consciousness - not stream-of-consciousness - in Eric's wake until I hit the last 120 pages. Which, without giving away any details, are anything but original. In fact, I've both read and seen them. As in literally scene by scene, word for word. I get the point of it, but there's using pop culture references to make a point and there's outright plagiarism, and the fact that the characters acknowledge the original in the text while playing it out only makes it all the more stupid, and the book sinks like a stone.

Beach closed.

Someone I usually trust told me "You like Buffy, so read this" and thrust this book into my hands. And I'm glad.

In a not-too-distant future, the US government is finally sick of illegal immigrants, bird flu, and terrorist attacks from south of the border and do something drastic but effective: they cordon off a strip of west Texas, declare it no longer part of the US but a military buffer zone, and give everyone a few hours to get out. Those who choose to remain - and, 20 years later, their children - find themselves living on occupied territory, with only as many rights as it's currently convenient for the military to allow them, and no possibility to leave in either direction. Except one: every month or so, there's a boxing gala where locals are invited to challenge the current military champion. If they win, they get a ticket back to the States. Of course nobody has (yet), and isn't likely to since everyone knows it'd be a PR disaster if people back home found out how things are...

This is where Loup (pronounced "Lou") Garrón grows up. Loup is... different. Her father, a deserter whom she never met, was part of some sort of military experiment (described with a great deal of exaggeration in the tabloids as "werewolf soldiers", hence her name), and as a result, it's clear early on that Loup has inherited something from him. She's stronger and faster than a normal person, and she has no capacity to feel fear. Which isn't a good thing when you're living under martial law, and doesn't get easier when she and her half-brother get orphaned early on. He grows up to be the best boxer the town of Santa Olivia has seen, she grows up in an orphanage trying to hide who or what she is; falling in love with another girl doesn't make things easier for her. But the town has a legend of its own, that of Santa Olivia, the blue-clad little girl who stopped a war, and as people get sick of their situation they start praying for her to appear.

It's tempting to describe the plot of Santa Olivia as Dark Angel meets Rocky; mutant girl becoming working-class hero. That doesn't mean it's not an intriguing novel. Sure, you'll see the plot twists coming, but Carey wisely doesn't rush into things, taking time to set up her world and giving all sides motivations for acting the way they do without painting anyone as a grade-A villain. The SF/fantasy elements and the big political questions are played very low and used mostly as a background for the story of the town, how people survive in it, the stories and dreams they rely on to keep going from day to day, and of course Loup herself. She's an intriguing character, enough so that even when the tempo flags in the middle rounds (the entire third act of the novel is essentially one long training montage) it stays on track, a slow but rich build-up to a finale that makes me want to read more. It's not quite a masterpiece, but hey, if you like the idea of a fairly realistic dystopia with a female protagonist who kicks ass, you won't be disappointed.