I don't think I will get to 100 this year - it will be the first time in several years. Too much time trying to distract myself from various problems by scrolling social media. That needs to change.
Eine I laughed at your review of Fleischmann Is In Trouble. That was more or less my view. Such tedious people with tedious problems.
83 Names for the Sea by Sarah Moss
I think I have read this before but couldn’t remember most of it. Family relocates to Iceland for a year just after the 2007 crash and attempt to navigate its oddities (lack of a second-hand market for furniture, food is expensive and not great, terrible driving conditions, awful weather – think that sums it up). I don’t want to be mean. I love Moss’s novels and this was very well done. I got a bit bored by the forays into history or her encounters with quirky locals but on the whole would recommend this.
84 The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson
I believe this is from the genre now known as “cli-fi”. Essentially, using science to make sense of what a future affected by climate change would look like. Only about 50% of this was a novel – the rest was a series of musings or short essays on a really wide range of topics from blockchain as a tool for delivering carbon reduction and social equality to wildlife corridors and glaciation, although they were all placed in ways that made sense of the narrative and built upon each other. There was a lot going on and it wasn’t entirely successful in holding my attention as a novel but as a somewhat hopeful vision of the future it was gripping. In fact, there’s at least one idea in there that we’ve often kicked around at work as a possible solution to one dimension of the climate crisis so it’s not particularly farfetched in many places. And it is a brilliant exploration of systems and contributing factors to climate change – from the role of the financial markets to environmental tipping points. I think this will probably go down as one of my books of the year. I’d absolutely recommend for anyone who wants to learn more about climate change in a digestible non-academic way and who wants to believe there is a scrap of hope for our future as humans (which I have to say, most of the time I find hard to locate).
85 The Silent Corner by Dean Koontz
I thought Dean Koontz wrote Stephen King-style horror. For the first 75% of this book, I thought I must be wrong and he was actually a slightly more creative Lee Child type writer (don’t get me wrong, I love a Jack Reacher novel but they are on the formulaic end of the spectrum). Then by the final stretch, I realised there was more of a Stephen King element then I had appreciated at the start and that the plot wasn’t all going to wrapped up neatly in this book and I’d have to read at least the next one in the series if not a few more. So that was a lot of readjustment needed in the course of a relatively short book.
It is hard not to compare the protagonist (Jane Hawk, FBI agent on leave from the Bureau following her husband’s suicide) with Jack Reacher because they are both smart, focused on taking down baddies, stunningly attractive to the opposite sex and able to flit across the US without leaving much of a trace. Hawk has a slightly more developed emotional hinterland than Reacher though I felt that only came forward when the plot demanded it – it didn’t seem to affect her day to day decisions much.
Hawk is on the trail of a bunch of VERY BAD people who are doing VERY BAD things to VERY GOOD people. She makes extraordinary leaps of deduction and is lucky enough to come into contact with some VERY HELPFUL people who are the difference between success and failure on her quest, plus a lock picking device which is mentioned so many times I assume Koontz gets commission from the manufacturers. This is all a bit odd and I have lots of unanswered questions but it was sufficiently diverting from my general angst and woes that I will certainly read the next one, if not the ones after that.