I’ve never been able to get in to Pullman’s fantasy books – next time I get sick or have a long plane journey I’m gonna try ‘em out again – but I really like his list of essential books to read, partly because I haven’t heard of most of them. What’s the point of recommending Anna Karenina or Catch-22 to people?
I’ve just finished the horror/sci-fi novel Hyperion by Dan Simmons: its not bad, if you like that sort of thing which I sort of do. Like most sci-fi its filled with techno-gibberish and pretentious cultural name-dropping (’the consul played Rachmaninov on his Steinway piano before farcasting through the worldweb’) but it manages to avoid many of the other crimes common to science-fiction (astonishingly, none of the female characters are prostitutes or lesbians).
Hyperion ends on a cliff-hanger and there are three more books in the series but they can go in the ‘ol sick day/plane trip pile. I’m about to get started on Legacy of Ashes, Tim Weiner’s history of the CIA.
