Frank Herbert: Dune Messiah

As I was halfway expecting, I actually liked this rather more than Dune. Which, I hasten to add, does not mean that I think Dune Messiah is the better novel – for starters, it is very clearly not standalone but a sequel and would most likely not make any sense whatsoever if you haven’t read the first novel in the series. It is also lacking the impressive width of scope that for me was the main appeal of Dune and painted on a much smaller canvas. Thus, Dune Messiah is rather like a dwarf standing on the shoulders of the giant – it does not amount to much without its predecessor, but together with it views farther and without obstructions.

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Frank Herbert: Dune

This would probably be a better (and certainly a considerably shorter) novel if someone went and removed all the parts printed in italics. They are rather like the voiceovers in the original cinematic version of Blade Runner, which keep on belabouring points that the viewer would have been very capable of working out for themselves, thank you very much. I may be a bit harsh on Herbert here, but I am developing a really low tolerance level against authors who indulge in overexplaining and apparently think their readers to illiterate to get hint, so beat them over the head with a sledgehammer instead. Usually repeatedly.

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Anne Holt: Death in Oslo

I liked, and with later volumes loved, Anne Holt’s Hanne Willemsen novels; so it was natural that I ended up trying out one of her other series. Death in Oslo is the third volume in her Modus series which centers around psychologist Johanne Vik and police officer Adam Stubo, and it is sort of a cross-over, as Hanne Willemsen actually also plays an important part in this volume, though we only get an outside perspective on her.

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Edgar Rice Burroughs: The Gods of Mars

So, here we are at the second of Burroughs’ Barsoom novels, and while it picks up more or less where the last one left off (and was published only a year after A Princess of Mars) there are quite a few changes. The most obvious, or at least the most important one, is that Burroughs got rid of all the Western trappings – this novel is pure Planetary Romance, in fact may be the work which really constitutes the genre.

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Elizabeth Sandifer: TARDIS Eruditorum – An Unofficial Critical History of Doctor Who Volume 7: Sylvester McCoy

This is somewhat different from previous books in the series in that only roughly a quarter of the volume deals with Doctor Who on TV; the remaining three quarters concern themselves with the Virgin line of New Adventures books which Sandifer treats as regular continuation of the show. Which means that she does her usual spiel of first embedding the novel she i writing about in its context of pup cultural and material history before proceeding to analyse the book itself and to place it in the context of Doctor Who.

Seeing how the TV show got cancelled in 1989 it makes sense to move from TV episodes to novels, all the more so since those were published at regular intervals and did carry the torch of Doctor Who through what has come to be known as the wilderness years. Sandifer makes a smooth transition from visual to literary medium as the subject of her essays, and throughout the whole book makes a convincing case that the Virgin series of novels laid a lot of the groundwork for the shape the show was to take at its eventual resuscitation on TV in 2005.

This book keeps up the high standard of writing as well as the high densitiy of insights offered that one is accustomed to from Sandifer’s writing. Since I have not ever read any Doctor Who novel at all (and am unlikely to, considering the extraorbitant prices they charge for the ebooks), for most essays in this volume of TARDIS Eruditorium I lack knowledge of the source they relate to, which makes for a somewhat disconnected and sort of flat reading experience. I hasten to add, and really want to emphasise, that this is through no fault of the author and that the volume is a quite enjoyable read that does an excellent job of giving a reasoned overview of the pre-TV movie wilderness years. In short, TARDIS Eruditorium continues to be an excellent series (and by the time I am writing this, I am already quite far advanced in volume 8 and poised to start on the new series, both the TV shows and Sandifer’s essays).

Edgar Rice Burroughs: A Princess of Mars

Originally, I was planning on making another attempt to get through at least some of the Gor novels (having read my way through the whole of The Wheel of Time apparently has not appeased my literary masochism yet), but then I remembered that I had the Collected Works of Edgar Rice Burroughs on my Kindle, and it occurred to me that I might as well read the original first, since that might actually by fun. More than John Norman in any case, which is admittedly as low as a bar can get.

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Lizzie Huxley-Jones: Under the Mistletoe with You

As its title pretty much gives away, this novel is a Christmas Romance – I was craving something cosy and comforting and this fitted the bill very nicely. It took some time to really warm up – the intitial transactions between Christopher and Nash, the two protagonists, are as irritating for the reader as the characters are to each other, and I was just not feeling the chemistry between them and they both remained strangely fuzzy in outline.

Also, this is sort of a doubly queer novel – not only is it about a MM couple, but one of the main protagonists is a trans man. Weirdly, however, Under the Mistletoe with You makes barely anything of this; it is fairly late in the novel before it is even mentioned, and then only in passing and is only foregrounded very briefly even later on. One might view that as the author attempting to normalise transitioning (and this is more or less the reason Huxley-Jones gives in a brief afterword), but if it was, she failed at it and it only comes across as an inexplicably blurry spot in the narrative.

Thankfully, things improved once the novel widened its scope beyond the main protagonists to include the village community, and the main couple gained contour when set against the background of a variety of quaint villagers – of particular note is an abolutely wonderful and heartwarming episode involving newborn puppies and the reconciliation of quarreling lovers which alone is worth the price of admission. Clearly, this is what Huxley-Jones intended conceptually: Christopher and Nash discover the respective other’s true character and their love for them not so much vis-a-vis each other but in the other’s interaction with others, as part of a community. It is both sweet and clever; and I just wish the author had not waited for half of the novel to get to this point.

This is then followed by a third part which is somewhat of a mirror of the first one and shows how the deeper knowdledge Christopher and Nash have gained of each other transforms their intimacy from constantly annoying each other to a deeply felt love. One might even go so far as to see a dialectical structure at work here, with the novel posing intimacy as the thesis, moving to community as its antitheses and finally achieving true love as synthesis. Admittedly, that may be stretching things a bit, however.

In any case, after a rather bumpy start, Under the Mistletoe with You ends up as a sweet heartwarming Romance, just right to make its reader glow with Christmas spirit. And somehow I’m also feeling the urge to bake some Christmas biscuits now.

John Sandford: Shadow Prey

While I do love crime novels, and police procedurals in particular, a policeman who drives a Porsche at work as main character usually would raise a big red flag for me; add to that that said main character also is a successful womanizer, I’d have shelved the series under “James Bond as policeman” and kept well away from it.

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The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick, Volume One

This collection of stories presents very early works from Philip K. Dick, so my expectations were not very high to start with, but this volume still managed to disappoint them and if I were to sum it up in one word, that word would be “underwhelming.” There is arguably not a single really good story in here, and even the barely readable ones can be counted on one, definitely no more than two hands.

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