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  • The Editors, by Stephen Harrison
    This managed to be both fun and thought-provoking. It's an interesting look into the world behind the editing of a fictional online encyclopedia that may or may not reflect the Wikipedia that Harrison has made a name for himself in reporting.

    I've read lots of thrillers by journalists that relate to their beat, and they can often fall into the trap of stuffing in lots of their hard-won research as dull exposition. None of that here. It's a light journalistic touch, and everything is left to the novelist's pen — making for an easy read you will whizz through and enjoy.
  • Winter, by Ali Smith
    The second in her seasonal quartet, and it's just as great as you'd expect from her.

    No gripes at all to learn anything from as a writer, and I can only takeaway her light touch with her characters and scenes. She manages to get out of the way as the author so deftly that everything feels very naturalistic.
  • The Director, by David Ignatius
    I love thrillers with a blend of politics, espionage, and international intrigue. This is the first I've read by Ignatius, and I found he writes really well in the genre.

    But. Oh and it's a but. The premise for this is so ridiculous it kind of derails the whole thing.

    The whole plot hinges on a secret that the CIA was originally created by Britain's MI6 after the second world war as part of a plot to keep the younger headstrong nation under Britain's imperial control. Since then it's been run by people who secretly subscribe to this loyalty to the old country, and that's the root of all the CIAs problems, and its illegal behaviour.

    Then, in an Ayn Rand-ian wet dream, a billionaire businessman is brought in to sort it out and he turns out to be a highly-principled action hero who sees down the threat and frees the agency. Along the way he takes anti-political-correctness stances, such as telling a black character not to play on their racial identity for advantage.

    And then, it's a thriller with a strong tech plot, in which hackers have a fiendish plan. The author, who is a journalist, has obviously done lots of research, and sprinkles this liberally — but doesn't quite understand it. At one point an ace hacker on the run buys "a new tablet with a new IP address." Anyone with any tech knowledge is then jarred out of the story even more.

    Maybe it's just this one story that's so ridiculous and the author has better plots they understand more in others? He writes well, so I may try some of his earlier works. But maybe the Randian views will keep getting worked in?
  • The Passenger, by Cormac McCarthy
    The writing is superb, the characters are great. But it just feels all too bitty. It was written in pieces over decades, and maybe it's a symptom of that. But maybe McCarthy is genuinely trying to resist the normal confines of plot. The result, though, can be a bit frustrating. Every time a plot starts to develop I want to know what happens, but it just evaporates. It needed a stronger editorial hand.
  • Stella Maris, by Cormac McCarthy
    This is apparently an attempt to fill out the interesting main female character in The Passenger who went painfully under-explored before. But it's written entirely in the form of transcripts of sessions with her therapist, which can get a bit wearing and means not a lot actually happens. But again, the writing is superb.
  • The Secret Hours, by Mick Herron
    A great pleasure for anyone immersed in Herron's Slow Horses universe. masterfully done.
  • The Morning Star, by Karl Ove Knausgaard
    Wonderful writing, great world-building, compelling characterisation — but just as with the McCarthy books I read above there's a 'literary' writer's resistance to plot. So many interesting ideas and events emerge but are just cast aside. Then Knausgaard instead has his trademark obsession with minutiae. The result is that there may be some kind of apocalypse going on outside the window, but we're going to spend the next three pages on describing coffee being spooned into a pot or something. It makes for a frustrating read. If you're a proudly literary writer and want to resist plot, then simply don't bother introducing one in the first place, rather than create it then ignore it. Am I being curmudgeonly?

Dec 2024 reads

I tried to end the year with a great, worthy, literary epic, but it turned out they were too frustrating — and the winners for me were genre fiction.