165: This Is A Lot Of Plot

YEAH, YEAH, YEAH by Bob Stanley has been my slow-read for several months as I wandered through the fog. Despite the fact it took so long, I never stopped loving it. It’s a huge one-volume over-view of popular music, as defined by as the starting at the UK charts and ending at the debut of Itunes. It was brought to my attention when a reader asked me for a recommendation for such a book, and I had nothing. As in his other life in Saint Etienne Stanley is part of one of my favourite bands, I’m surprised I hadn’t read it already – except it came out in 2013/2014, which basically explains everything. It is, broadly speaking, a history which comes from my aesthetic corner – as in, it assumes that Pop is Good and Rockist attitudes are Bad. As such, the stuff I loved is the stuff I knew less about – the earlier, pre-60s sections, and the side of the sixties I didn’t care about. There’s a playlist of all the tracks in it here, which was a great accompaniment. I’m sure that one reason why I spent so long to get through it that every second paragraph I was stopping to go and look up a record. It opened a lot of doors for me, and reminded me of doors I loved and hadn’t been through for a while. Not the actual Doors. You won’t trick me that easily. Basically, whoever recommended it to me on twitter was right – if I was to lob a single book at someone to tell them about what Pop was all about, it’d be this – not least that it is entirely upfront about the implicit Argue With Me. History is a conversation.

Then I hit the prose, with a couple of excellent novels, both enchanting the modern world with different tactics. Seanan McGuire’s Middlegame was on the Hugo shortlist this year, and she managed to create another fantasy mythology. Her prose remains dazzling, simple ink transmuting into gold like the alchemists the story circles around, and some of the most compelling monsters (as in, ethical monsters) I’ve read recently. Just released last week, Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Doors of Eden takes the long-view sci-fi evolutionary ideas which provided the intellectual punch of Children Of Time (or as I like to call it It Made Me Cry Over Spiders) and drops it into a present day multidimensional story, which moves like a thriller and thinks like that gif of the guy with the board covered in string, waving his hands. And while I read it much earlier, to provide a blurb, XX by Rian Hughes came out recently too, where Rian brings his powers as a designer to create a novel which only he could have done. That it manages to be so clearly experimental while also having a big, rock solid story engine is a hell of a thing to see.

I’m now back onto Non-fiction, with John Keay’s China: A History, where I will try my hardest to finally memorise the order of the main Chinese dynasties.

There’s also smaller things I approach. I also finished Board Games In 100 Moves by Ian Livingstone and James Wallis, which is a brief but characterful look at the entire history of boardgames. Clearly, this is all great stuff for DIE – lots of anecdote, detail, wit. I’m trying to read a short story from Yoshi Yoshitani’s Beneath The Moon. She’s one of my favourite fantasy illustrators, and she’s done 78 illustrations for 78 of her own short retellings of stories from all around the world. I love this approach – a short, determined injection of ideas, efficiently opening up worlds. It’s just come out, and there’s a sister-tarot deck along side it. Coo.