Themself by James Kemp

Book review: I've read some short story and other writing collections before, and there is an element of stop/start as you move from one piece to the next. In this collection the author has created a flow by linking his writings to an OU creative writing course.

What we have here is a collection of short stories and poems, a military theme being evident in a lot of them, interspersed with little tips on writing that the author has found useful to himself and for his course. Therefore you can imagine that this book would be useful to OU students undertaking the same course, but also novice writers. 

From page 1 you can see that there are weblinks so if you have the paperback version you may want to have an internet connected device nearby. This will certainly help with giving some context of bits where there is assumed knowledge. Through the writing you can see that the author can hold a story but one of the problems with some of the writing is that he was restricted by word count (as he mentions in his reflection pieces where he analyses his writing and where he looks at things such as character, setting, conflict, show and tell...). For example a whole story on a complicated world is built up around a "creation myth I wrote for the primary god in a theocracy" with many twists and turns but is covered in just 5-6 pages. There is definitely scope for fleshing out that story and others. Also some of his analysis may be too detailed for a book like this, e.g. the author talking about word count: "taking the mid-point of words per minute, it's within a single standard deviation of the median, mode and mean...".

With most of the content in the book coming from the author's blog there were elements that could have been changed a little to reflect that they are now in a book, e.g. "tell me in the comments ...", plus some other pieces from his blog not written specifically for the course felt shoehorned into the relevant sections just because the author was proud of them. Having said that though they were good in their own right. I enjoyed reading about self-drive cars for example.

Also you could tell this was self-published as there are little edits that the book would have benefited from. For example after chapter 1 we go onto chapter 3.

But overall I liked it.

Amazon UK Link: THEMSELF

Publication date: 21 Jan 2016

Quantum Drop by Saci Lloyd

This is “kind of a story” that follows Anthony Griffin, a fake name so as to protect his identity, who is the boy next door.

Anthony lives in a world where you might “punch something into your deck,” or people might be “plugged into the Drop” via a visor, or you might push “a hologram chip across the table” instead of a business card.

He lives in the Debtbelt where “once your credit’s gone there’s no way back. You’re toast.” This is because of the Betta. “Short-selling, junking, gold farming, black boxing, risk-rolling – the Betta got a finger in every pie.” Basically “you’ve got to keep sweet with the Betta because they are the power.”

Except Anthony’s girlfriend didn’t keep sweet with them and has ended up dead because of them, and it is eating up at Anthony as he tries to discover what happened, all at the expense of his own future, like his exams which he walks out on. And all he’s got to go on is a voice.

So that is the story right there. And the book is Anthony’s narrative of the story. It took me a while to get into it because of his voice with all it's chattiness – “I mean, why do you think, not for even one second, do I ever, ever shut up?” – leading to diversions about brains evolving from animals etc. But the story is none-the-less gripping once it gets going. 

Older teens should enjoy.

(I got this book through Amazon Vine. It is listed HERE.)

Catastrophically Consequential by Stephen C. Bird

I won this book in a Goodreads First Reads contest.

This is not a book with a plot. Rather each chapter is a little story. And the experimental nature of them totally ruined them for me.

The first chapter was fine, a story about a guy having flashbacks, although it could have been fleshed out a bit.

Then the second chapter is where things start to go wrong as it contains wacky character names, and over-the-top place names, that they take over the story ruining it in my opinion, but that is nothing compared to the next two chapters which are written in an accent that I couldn’t work out decisively, and that made these chapters near unreadable.

The fifth chapter reverses the trend and gives a little story with inspired character names, Mannequin Streetwalker, inspired presumably from a similarly named Star Wars character, but whose nature very much matches her name. But again the story could have been fleshed out.

And then the remaining nine chapters descend into stream-of-consciousness nonsense with wacky place and character names remaining. It was a bore to follow, and even then I didn't.

Not even the cover is good.

(This book is available on Amazon here.)

Grimm Tales: For Young and Old by Philip Pullman

Who'd have thought I'd be reading fairy tales as an adult.

Here Philip Pullman has re-written 50 Grimm Tales. He has written an interesting introduction detailing how the traditional fairy tale differs from novel telling. Also after he has told each tale he writes a little bit of analysis to accompany it. Some tales will be familiar (at least in part), e.g. Rapunzel and Cinderella, whilst others will be less so. There are recurring themes, e.g. evil women, whether they be stepmothers or witches; the main character being an ex-soldier, or a miller, or a poor person, or a guy called Hans; princesses and kings wanting to marry pretty young things, and so on.

Some of the tales are quite gruesome with gallows, deaths, incest all being present. Therefore I don't know if every tale in here is suitable for young as suggested in the "young and old" bit in the title.

Also I can't really judge how this compares to other collections of the Brothers Grimm stories, or fairy tales in general, but as a standalone it is perfectly good and I enjoyed reading it.

(I got this book through Amazon Vine. It is listed here.)