The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons by Sam Kean

The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons is a slightly misleading title: there is not a single incident of dueling neurosurgeons in the book.

As a non-fiction, popular science primer on neuroscience, however, the books is splendid. I've heard quite a few of the anecdotes / case studies before, but this book pulls together all the incidents and anecdotes that have shaped neuroscience, and presents them in an engaging, fun way. It's like a "Horrible Histories" book for adults.

The book is not too bothered about chronological order; instead, it presents the knowledge obtained thus far by brain region and by type of brain functionality. This works very well - but it does give a somewhat more logical and structured impression than the history of neuroscience and its theories probably warrants. And there's always the sense that bigger, clearer discoveries might be just around the corner...

Many of the scenarios do resonate with me as a reader & movie watcher: clearly, the likes of Hitchcock and Philip K Dick were inspired very much by real conditions - and the effectiveness of uncanny stories is directly linked to how closely they resemble everyday (or not-so-everyday) brain misfirings...

I'd highly recommend this book to anyone - it is a compelling, entertaining and educational read: pop science as it should be done.

Rating: 5/5

Random Acts of Senseless Violence by Jack Womack

Random Acts of Senseless Violence is a novel in the form of a diary of a teenage girl living in New York. She receives it as a birthday present, and chronicles the next six months of her life. They are eventful six months, both for her, personally, and for the wider US: caught in a long-term recession and decline, stability is crumbling and pockets of violence and societal collapse are forming at the edges. Her own family is just about to descend from lofty upper middle class to struggling working class, as her parents' exuberant and careless spending habits and debts catch up with them.

It's a bit strange to read Random Acts of Senseless Violence. It was written in the mid-1990s, before the internet and mobile phones became truly universal, yet set slightly in the future, without any real technological advances. In some ways, this enhances the novel: it does not get caught up in the blips and fads and things that are quickly replaced in our lives. No Twitter and Bebo and Ello to be found. This makes it more universal. On the other hand, it makes it feel slightly old-fashioned, as characters rely on landline phones in ways that now feel entirely alien to most readers.

The universal feel makes the authenticity of the story - and its prescience - all the more unsettling. Our protagonist's family tumbles from debt-bubble-financed luxuries down to a fragile, easily exploited situation, and as reader, you realise just how precarious their situation was just before the tumble began - and just how rapidly things are sliding out of control. The downward spiral is mirrored - or perhaps caused - by the terminal decline of the entire US economy, but of course, our teenage narrator only perceives tiny glimpses of the wider world in her diary, snippets from the news and overheard conversations and adults' anxieties. We're presented with adults who are over-medicated, stressed to near-breaking point, and a sense of widespread, near-universal mental ill-health. Adults are cracking up, and the children are not sure what to make of it. At one point, our narrator notices that adults seem to be all crazy, and comments that she can't afford to get any more crazy herself.

(The widespread mental ill health rings worryingly true in these times of London riots, Islamic State, post-Arab Spring civil wars, and rise of UKIP, Britain First, Tea Party, and other extremist movements throughout the wealthier world...)

Meanwhile, there's the matter of puberty (the diary carefully notes each instance of her period, as a teenage girl perhaps might), and sexual awakening, and peer pressure, bullying, domestic abuse, isolation...

Random Acts of Senseless Violence is a masterpiece of writing craft: its characters and story developments are absolutely believable and authentic, echoed worryingly in things that have come to pass in recent years: the debt bubble, recession, collapse of the Rust Belt / Detroit and New Orleans, the riots in London and the Occupy Movement, the political leaders who seem impotent to turn things around and who look increasingly haunted by their own impotence, holding on to power despite widespread disillusion and protests... but a much more compelling feat of writery craftsmanship than its prescience is the gradual, subtle and entirely radical shift in the narrative voice. This teenager is meeting new people, and her vocabulary, her sentences, her speech patterns, her entire language changes. At first, she simply reports the dialogue, but slowly, one tiny step at a time, her own lines of dialogue, and then her entire writing voice, shift, until by the end, you are reading something which is unrecognisable when compared with the start. The later diary entries are the writings of a different person who somehow emerged by coming of age in that time and that place and through those events...

...all of which does not mean the book is actually fun to read. It is enormously talented, clever, a masterpiece of craftsmanship - but the sort of work you appreciate, rather than enjoy. I cannot praise the genius of the book highly enough, but I can't claim that it made me feel good while I read it. And, to me, the entire point of reading is about enjoyment (even if a story is dark or harrowing). This book is simply a bit too relentlessly troubling for me.

Rating: 4/5

Dream London by Tony Ballantyne

Dream London is a book unlike any I have read before. It's as if the author had thrown together Dark City, Brazil (the Terry Gilliam Movie), a dash of Yellow Submarine, and a dose of Neil Gaiman style urban fantasy into a concoction that is dream-like, unpredictable, surreal, and yet strangely hypnotic and quite readable. Female readers be warned: the dream-world presented here is quite misogynistic and definitely extremely sexist in its aesthetic / tone / fundamental architecture. But it's also aware of the fact, and this is being highlighted many times in the book (just as all the 'ethnics' are being condensed into stereotypes).

The basic plot is that Captain James Wedderburn, former soldier and current pimp, suddenly attracts the interests of various entities - a Cartel, a crime overlord (the Daddio), spies, and Angel Tower - the building where Dream London is being made. The city has somehow been sold, and is shifting, geographically, but also in time and flavour, and people are changing. Everyone is becoming a stereotype. The women become whores and cleaners and other archetypes. The men become football hooligans or pimps or men in suits. Everyone finds their humanity shrinking as existing traits become honed into archetype-level one-dimensionality, and Dream London has a certain, sleazy, seedy, almost steampunky aesthetic it is growing towards. And in that strangely drifting London, some people want to reverse the drift, return to modernity, while others want to capitalise on the changes, and everyone suddenly has an interest in getting Captain James Wedderburn to act as their catalyst / agent / hero.

But, as any dream, the story ebbs and flows and shifts and changes. It circles around, but when it revisits a location or a character, they are different from the way they were before, and like any nightmare, there is no way to escape, just a slowly building sense that something ominous is about to happen.

Dream London became harder to stick with the longer the story continued, because the dream-like nature is not just authentic but also frustrating. Just as movies like The Fall and Brazil and perhaps even Casino Royale slowly drift into surrealism and with it, narrative discomfort, so Dream London flows steadily away from a clean premise and into an atmosphere that isn't quite right. The grand finale is perfectly dream-like, too.

I thought the book was very well-written, imaginative, and authentically dream-like - in some ways, a masterpiece. But, just like a semi-nightmarish dream of running and frustration, it has an aftertaste. There is much to enjoy here, and much cause to cringe and fret, too.

Rating: 4/5

Three Graves Full by Jamie Mason

Three Graves Full is a novel that really wants to be a comedy movie. Jason, our protagonist, is a meek man who, in a rare fit of rage, has murdered someone and buried him in his back yard. A year later, someone discovers a skeleton - in his front yard.

The book continues the tale of hapless Jason, and adds various other characters (the ex-girlfriend of one of the victims, two police officers, a dog...), and creates a web of unlikely events that have the general feel of a Guy Ritchie movie (or perhaps an indie movie) - except it's all set in America.

It's a pleasantly diverting, vaguely entertaining yarn, marred by being somewhat overwritten. The writer seems to be a beginner - the prose itself is frequently clunky and over-reaching, but there's also a tendency to give detailed back stories of each character and event, often filling in details that weren't really needed. It's also a book that yearned to be laugh-out-loud funny, but wasn't.

A promising premise, not quite lived up to.

Rating: 3/5

Eight Men and a Duck by Nick Thorpe

In the non-fiction book Eight Men and a Duck, a journalist has a chance encounter with a confident, gung-ho adventurous American, and decides to join the American's quest to cross from Chile to Easter Island in a reed boat, inspired by Thor Heyerdahl's Kon-Tiki adventure (which never actually landed on Easter Island).


The book reads like someone telling a yarn to his mates. It's chummy, everyone's improvising, a bit inept, and hugely reliant on luck. The quest is about as wise, responsible and well-prepared as the adventures in the Hangover movie series, but there's less humour.

It's not really a scientific thing: it's people having an adventure for adventure's sake.

Once the only vaguely skilled person left the team (frustrated with his companions' habit of winging it and lack of preparation / forethought, and the resulting delays), the narrative lost a lot of interest for me. Basically, I didn't really like any of these guys all that much, as I could not respect them.

It's not a bad book, but it doesn't really have anything much to say: A bunch of bumbling young men seek adventure and succeed mostly through luck. The end.

Rating: 3/5

Seed to Harvest by Octavia E. Butler

Seed to Harvest is a series of four novels, collected together in one volume. The third book is essentially a standalone novel, while the fourth ties it and the first two books together.

The novels start with the meeting of two virtually immortal people, a long time ago (18th century, I think) in Africa. One is Doro, a man whose soul travels into other bodies (and whose previous host bodies die / are discarded). The other is Anyanwu, a woman who has near-infinite abilities to heal her own body, and read her own DNA, understand what each cell is doing, and how to heal / regenerate / rejuvenate herself. Doro is much older - thousands of years older - and has been breeding people with supernatural powers into little (quite incestuous) communities in order to cultivate their supernatural traits. He decides to conquer and control Anyanwu, and the first novel is essentially about the relationship between them.

The second novel, set in the 1970s or so, is about a young woman who is the most powerful result of Doro's breeding programme, and who becomes a power to contend with.

The third novel is about an invasion by an alien parasitical micro-organism which changes the physical properties of the humans it infects, and permanently alters their offspring.

The fourth novel is about people from the breeding programme, and their power struggles, while in a world-wide war with the people who are infected with the alien organism. Humans without superpowers have become nothing more than slaves.

Reading these novels, it becomes very clear what themes interest Octavia E. Butler: power, control over others, the mechanisms of slavery. Every single one of the books is about people imposing their own will and control on others, with motives that range from mean-spirited and petty to survival instinct, from lust for power to a desire to protect humanity or protect family. In essence, these are all novels about enslavers and the enslaved.

Unfortunately, the novels aren't nearly as gripping and powerful as Kindred (by the same author), which doesn't bother to metaphorise slavery into supernatural fantasy, but simply transposes a modern couple into the past through time travel. Kindred is a masterpiece. Seed to Harvest is comparatively weaker, because none of the characters are entirely human. Super-powered people using super-powers to enslave are less scary than men using mundane brutality. The fantasy elements create a distance between subject matter and impact on (this) reader's empathy.

I must also admit that I did not really find Anyanwu's character convincingly developed after the first book - I think her story in the second book was wasteful and disappointing.

I'd still recommend the author highly - but I'm really glad I read Kindred first: it's a much, much better novel than this series.

Rating: 3/5

Kindred by Octavia E. Butler

I don't usually read any books set in the world of US slavery - Uncle Tom's Cabin was just about the extent of my reading thus far. But then, Kindred isn't a typical slavey novel.

Dana is a 26-year-old woman living in 1976. She's recently married to a white man. And one day, she gets dizzy and finds herself elsewhere, watching a little boy almost-drown. She saves his life, realises she is visiting the slavery-era past and gets beamed back to 1976. Soon, the rules of her travels become transparent: whenever the boy is about to die, she is transported across space and time to save his bacon. Whenever she fears for her life in that world, she is returned to 1976.

The plot follows the logic of the story consistently, intelligently and entertainingly. The characters all seem believable. It's not challenging to read, but intelligently written with a lot of thought about what slavery is, how it works, how it changes people - both the slaves and the slave owners. It feels completely authentic and believable all the way through. It's a novel about power relationships and how power corrupts. The story is tense and gripping and smart.

In short, I'd highly recommend this book.

Rating: 5/5