Eats, Shoots & Leaves - Lynne Truss

Lynne Truss aims her fantastic wit and years of experience on sloppy punctuation.  A great read and very amusing.  

The Steep Approach to Garbadale - Iain Banks

I've been a fan of Iain Banks since a friend loaned me a copy of the Wasp Factory about fifteen years ago. Since then I have read everything he has written. I generally prefer his science fiction; to me that is where his skills are at their peak.

In Garbadale Banks is revisiting modern corporate culture, a subject he mulled over in his previous novel The Business.  This time he mixes in some of the secrets, scandals, and quirks of an old Scottish family, cheapening the storytelling somewhat with the use of a gimmicky twisted plot-line and suspense.

Unfortunately this is a weak novel for Banks. His last, The Algebraist, was among his best and one of my favourites so I'm pretty sure he hasn't run out of good ideas.  There was nothing challenging here and most of the characters felt two dimensional.  It's hard to empathise with a protagonist that never shows you how he feels.  The story itself has very little substance and is hinged on a secret that you know is only going to be revealed in the final pages. 

The Englishman's Boy - Guy Vanderhaghe

I read The Last Crossing last year on someone's recommendation and ended up passing it on to just about anyone I could convince to read it. The Englishman's Boy I enjoyed just as much, if not more.

Harsh Cry of the Heron - Lian Hearn

The fourth and final book (except for the fifth - a prequel!) in the Tales of the Otori epic saga. While this is yet another amazing installment in what has been one of the most satisfying series I have ever read, one thing became clear as I finished the book: Hearn is an incredibly skilled writer and her prose is totally consistent in style, pace, and timbre. From the first pages of Across the Nightingale Floor to the conclusion of Harsh Cry, the series reads as one long story that never dissapoints.

Reading the series feels like a literature of the highest quality disguised as a guilty pleasure. Really, I can't recommend these books enough. A delight to read and very good storytelling throughout.

Pirate's Passage - William Gilkerson

A couple of years ago my brother passed me a copy Gilkerson's first novel, Ultimate Voyage, which you could accuse of being a young adult novel intended for an adult audience. How's that? Well, the story wasn't especially challenging to read, but it was peppered with some interesting metaphors and themes that many younger readers likely would not have perceived or payed much attention to. Or to put it another way, the story had a depth more akin to The Hobbit than Harry Potter.

Pirate's passage is essentially a coming of age story. Jim is a young lad who lives with his mother in a quiet sea-side village where they struggle to keep the family inn afloat. Sound familiar? Being a pirate story there are quite a few nods to Stevenson's classic Treasure Island. A mysterious and weather-beaten sea captain is blown ashore one afternoon and takes up residence in the inn. The old sailor soon makes himself useful by turning the Inn's fortunes around and taking young Jim under his wing. Jim embarks on a detailed course in pirate history, which ultimately culminates in a practical application of Jim's, as well as his teacher's, accumulated knowledge.

Gilkerson, who has had a long career in non-fiction writing, has spun a good yarn here, and has injected it with a wealth of fascinating maritime lore. I would say there is slightly less meat here for not-so-young adults to mull over than Ultimate Voyage although it will definitely keep fans of pirate stories happy.

Shutterbug Follies - Jason Little

I've been reading the amusing and quirky Motel Art Improvement Service weekly comic on Jason Little's site for a few months now. Digging through his other work a while ago I found a teaser for his book Shutterbug Follies. Luckily I found this book in my local library the other day and scooped it up. It's a short story about a young woman who while working at a photo-lab uncovers a mystery that she can't resist investigating. Little has a great drawing style (and loves to use dramatic punchy colours) that reminds me of the Tintin books I read as a kid. While I really enjoyed the book and highly recommend it to anyone, Shutterbug Follies suffers the curse of the graphic novel - a very high price to reading time ratio.

The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini

I just finished listening to the unabridged audio-book version of Khaled Hosseini's first novel. It tells the story of Amir, a privelidged Afghan boy growing up in the years before the Russian invasion. As the country dissolves into chaos, Amir and his father emmigrate to the United States, finding a new life among other Afghan refugees. As an adult Amir must make a return trip to his homeland to honour the memory of his childhood friend and earn himself redemption from a boyhood act of cowardice.

Eastern Standard Tribe - Cory Doctorow

I've enjoyed several of Doctorow's pod-casted short stories (especially Anda's Game) but this is the first full length novel of his that I have read. It's a great fast-paced story that plunges you into the near-future world of a network consultant forwarding the interests of his time-zone 'tribe' by sabotaging the code of their European rivals. Doctorow is at his best when he's fleshing out the 'what-ifs' of our digital culture; he fabricates train wrecks between social structures and electronic ones and writes stories based on the results. A quick read, but an enjoyable one.

jPod - Douglas Coupland

Definitely not Coupland at the top of his form, but a slightly amusing take on achingly contemporary post-modern culture. He switched the extra fine brush he used for his bullseye characterizations of geek culture in Microserfs for a paint roller this time; the morality play is all that remains having any meaning.

Across the Nightingale Floor - Lian Hearn

An elegant and beautiful tale of an orphan boy taken in by a lord to be his trained assasin.

This is the first book in the Tales of the Otori series.