The Gates to Hell and all that

I should have known you can’t have just one book about dead bishops. Here is another one, although the bishop isn’t the main character, or anything. This is a Halloween book, so go get a copy to get you into a nice demonish mood for the day.

It can be very dangerous for the TBR pile development to go and poke around on other people’s blogs, but when Declan on Crime Always Pays put the first chapter of John Connolly’s The Gates up, I couldn’t resist. And John was extremely charming about being begged for a copy.

The Gates is a very funny book, and very exciting, too. (And what’s more, it’s short, in this age of four-inch thick books.) Samuel Johnson and his dachshund Boswell are out trick-or-treating, slightly prematurely, when they come across something at the neighbours’ house that doesn’t look very good.

It’s not good. Earth is about to be invaded by really bad demons. (But as the more alert readers can work out, Halloween is not a good time for demons to invade anywhere.) 11-year-old Samuel and his friends and his dog have to try and save the world from this new threat. They get some assistance from a friendly demon called Nurd, and information – if not useful help – from the scientists involved with the Large Hadron Collider. Because it just happens to accidentally help the demons find a way in.

John believes in footnotes. Lots of them. They are very amusing footnotes, which is lucky, because I really don’t like the flow of my reading interrupted all the time. But I forgive him, because they are funny. And necessary.

As with far too many authors, I don’t know John’s books at all. In the case of The Gates, think Douglas Adams meets Eoin Colfer. That should do it.

Henry gets his comeuppance

Hmm, Perfect Peter may have been emptying the dishwasher unasked, which is rather wet, but perhaps there is more to him than that. Horrid Henry is as ‘horrid’ as ever, and uses ‘poor’ Perfect Peter for his own needs, in this almost Halloweeny Horrid Henry Wakes the Dead.

You have to give it to Henry, he does have some good and original ideas, when all his peers are somewhat useless, not to mention untalented. ‘Waking the dead’ as entertainment is not your average school show material. And not every school invites TV presenters like Sneering Simone. Wonder where Francesca got the inspiration for him?

Four more stories about our HH, with friends and family. When will Fantastic Francesca run out of alliteration on the names front?

Hope you people aren’t getting tired of this Halloween review week, btw? More excellent spooky books here before the week is safely over. I’ll be done when Plucky Palmer’s pumpkin explodes on Saturday evening.

(Photo © CBS)

And Another Thing

Seamless, said someone in the audience last week, when talking to Eoin Colfer about his new Hitchhiker novel. And she’s right. After a year of Eoin saying he wasn’t going to try and be Douglas Adams, he has got much closer than you’d imagine possible. And that’s good. Seamless means that we don’t really notice the change from one writer to another. I’ve read other sequels where the style is very different, and with good reason. You can’t be someone else.

I feel that Eoin could be some kind of honorary little brother of Douglas’s. Like most others, I found And Another Thing to be more Hitchhikery than I’d thought possible. It’s very enjoyable. Someone said he’d not laughed reading this one, unlike with the other five Hitchhiker books. I agree to some extent, but wonder if that’s because we are not only older now, but the concept is less new and we have come to expect certain things, so don’t laugh out loud. But I could be wrong.

It’s good that Eoin didn’t seek to write this book. I think you do a better job when a little reluctant. So I was surprised at the Guardian reviewer’s comment that Douglas’s family allowed Eoin to write this sequel. They asked him to! There is a big difference.

To be perfectly honest, I couldn’t totally remember how we left Arthur and Co in book five. It’s been a while. But it was easy to get back into the flow, and it’s good that Eoin came up with his own plot, rather than use the notes Douglas left. I daresay we wouldn’t have had an Irish character without an Irish author, so Hillman Hunter is a fun invention.

The use of Norse Gods is also good. Would quite like people to settle on the spelling of Leif, however. I like it correct, and I don’t want both spellings competing with each other. And is it just my background, or is there some deeper meaning in Thor’s appearance and the fact that Arthur has some dislike for Thursdays?

Random Dent is quite lovely, really, particularly given the weird adults she’s surrounded by. Zaphod is better with the one head, but still stupid. Nice to see Trillian finding love. And I suspected Fenchurch would turn up, somehow.

Eoin hasn’t written a definitive ending, just really carried the story on a little. He’s left it so that we can stop here, or his idea of other relay authors taking over would be a feasible project. I would like to see poor Arthur sorted. He’s really a most unfortunate man. At least he’s getting used to his bad luck.

And there is something almost loveable about Vogons.

He’s too short, and too prompt

I suppose the tiny pixie-like creature with the green, painted face, curling up in a basket on the floor near Eoin Colfer at his book signing, should have made it obvious it was only a dream. The same goes for Eoin’s pixie green shirt and long, wild hair; not to mention that his face was wrong. After all, we were clearly in the wrong book. And Another Thing is Hitchhiker-land, not Artemis country.

I forgot to bring my book to the signing, so I decided to take pictures instead. That’s when I realised I had no camera with me either. So, very lucky indeed that it was only a dream. The staff at John Lewis were very friendly, even giving me a cream bun to eat, but I felt the shop’s hologram fire doors were not quite right. Still just a dream. But it was a nice touch to video-film every fan sitting next to Eoin, except for his slightly off-putting grin.

So, the real signing was in Waterstones, Deansgate, where the witch snuck in, to case the joint shortly before Eoin turned up. They had a cleverly hidden queue behind some shelves, but it didn’t extend into the street. I took up shooting position to catch Eoin to start with, except he discovered me and waved. Then I joined the fans behind the shelves for my five minutes of fan behaviour for the day. He almost remembered that I’m the one without an e. Might be the school teacher in him.

At the Contact Theatre last night we learnt that Douglas Adams’s brother quite liked Eoin, except he’s too short and too prompt. Meaning that Eoin doesn’t engage in the kind of procrastination Douglas used to. And Eoin’s short. Shorter than Douglas, at least. He wrote And Another Thing in six months, partly because he writes fast and partly because the publishers were in a hurry to get the book out for the 30th anniversary of the original Hitchhiker. Eoin described his first impression of Douglas Adams’s book as ‘Monty Python meets Pink Floyd, in space’.

We were treated to another stand-up performance from Eoin, who claims he can only be funny because he doesn’t have to do it all the time. He explained how he wrote this sixth book about someone who has spent the first five wanting a cup of tea, which as Eoin rightly pointed out, is a fairly thin plot. It was relatively easy building a story around characters he already knew well, but he totally ignored Douglas’s notes, not wanting to ‘mess up Douglas’s plot’.

He won’t want to write any more Hitchhiker books, since he feels he’s an interloper in this world, although thinks the job could be passed round a few other writers. We learned that he has already arranged with Morris Gleitzman that they will finish each other’s books ‘if the plane goes down’. Right now Eoin is happy to be back writing Artemis Fowl, and he’s supposed to be done by Christmas, though there has been a slight set-back over a fairy brain disease called the Atlantis Complex, which is too complex to explain here.

The man is obsessed with Kate Bush. He does have other obsessions, but keeps coming back to her. He likes Apple computers, Zaphod is his favourite in Hitchhiker, he joined a group on Facebook to protest against himself writing the sixth Hitchhiker book – which made him feel a lot better – and he became an author simply because he had no friends when he was young. Oh, and he thinks the number 43 is far funnier.

This was a nicely mixed family entertainment kind of event, with many ‘old’ Hitchhiker fans turning up with their questions, and Eoin came face-to-face with Charlie, his interviewer in Cheltenham a year ago. As Daughter and the witch sat sipping very reasonably priced cokes afterwards, Eoin came up and inquired whether we had managed to get any decent photographs. That will be as opposed to the photographer he told us about, I should think.

Well, did we?

(All good photos by H Giles)

And eventually there was one

Serves me right?

I could have reviewed And Another Thing here. Being very keen to read it, and also unsure who’d be looking after the publicity for Eoin Colfer’s new book, seeing as it’s an adult book, I asked Eoin himself. That was five months ago, because you can never begin too early. OK, so Eoin said ‘no proofs’. Have to wait for publication day. (That was three days ago.) He also told me who to contact at the publishers. So I did. Was promised a copy, for publication day. (That was three days ago.)

First working day (for the postman) was two days ago, so I stayed patient until then. Plus one more day, just in case. No book. But there was a very good review by Mary Hoffman on her blog on Monday. So clearly there were early review copies out there. I asked Mary where she got hers. I mean, she could have gone out and bought it on Sunday and read very fast. She hadn’t. The publisher sent her a copy when she asked.

Turned to Facebook for some nice relaxation, only to find more reports of books received in the post. Facebook is also where Mary and I happened to notice that some people (better ones, clearly) had received an early ‘half proof’. I was forward enough to ask the publisher at the time (August) if there were any more of those to be had. No.

I know I don’t have an absolute right to a free book. But it seems to me that an early request by me, followed by an early promise from them, would somehow result in a book. Times are bad, and they may be economising, but in that case a ‘no’ would have been more helpful.

Times are bad here, too. It’s not as if we never spend money on unnecessary things. We do. But we think about them first. I feel more guilty about getting a free copy of a book written by someone who can’t live off their writing, than I do requesting one written by Eoin. I think both he and his publishers will do OK out of this one.

If I’d known I’d need to buy the book, I’d have been out shopping on Sunday, to give me time to read. But I was so secure in feeling that come Monday – or maybe Tuesday – the book would too. It would have been nice to have read it by tomorrow, when Eoin comes to town. But I can live without nice.

In the end the Resident IT Consultant agreed it might be best to buy a copy, so off he went. Tesco had had cheap Stieg Larsson books, so he tried a few Tescos with no success. Then he looked in Borders, where they had the book, but at £15.99 it was rather pricey. On to Waterstones, where he saw none. He asked. They had forgotten to order them, so had put an order in on Saturday, but had yet to receive it. (Bad distribution service, if you ask me.) WH Smith had a large poster prominently displayed and copies of the first five books in the trilogy. For a man who doesn’t like asking, the Resident IT Consultant did well. He asked. ‘Oh, we think the book is embargoed,’ they said. ‘Yes, until about two days ago,’ said he. They investigated and found he was right, so a pile of And Another Thing was unearthed and he was able to buy a copy at long last.

Ah well, I might be back to being less horrible tomorrow. I expect it’s only my mid-October crisis.

Hitchhiker history

Who needs it? The history. The background to one of the funniest ideas in – well, in what? – literature? Broadcasting? Television? Film?

I started at the wrong end, if there is one. I read the books first. Though, come to think of it, since the radio series of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is a lot better than the books, it would have been more disappointing to go the other way. OK, maybe I did it the right way. In fact, I have a feeling I may even have watched the television series before getting to the radio. It was on just as I met the Resident IT Consultant, and I recall us watching it in the early days.

I looked on in fascination as the trilogy grew to five books. That’s British humour for you. It’s why I like my adoptive country so much. It has stuff like H2G2.

Fast forward to the unfashionable end of the last century, when I came across the radio series on audio cassette in the mobile library, and borrowed it for Son. I thought he might like it. He did. It wasn’t exactly news at the time. Nobody much – other than nerds – talked about it, so Son was educated in something vaguely historical and dated. Who cared, as long as he laughed and learnt a few new good quotes. It turned out useful, too. How his leaders at Pilots at the local church could even begin to think that children his age would be able to answer any questions on this subject in their fun quiz, is beyond me. Old-fashioned Son could, but his friends had never heard of it. Very handy, too, when it came to dressing up for World Book Day at school. We just needed to send Son to school in his dressing gown, holding a ‘book’ which said Don’t Panic.

From then on I’d say that H2G2 woke up again. More stuff on the radio, a film, and now the sixth book, written by Eoin Colfer. He is not Douglas Adams, but since we can’t have him, Eoin is a good second. I hope.

Anyway, that history. Who needs to know? I mean, who doesn’t already know about it? There was a long description/history thing in the Guardian a week ago, and I just wondered what the point was. As a fan, I do like reading about what I like, but there was something not quite right about this article. And I don’t just mean the fact that facts were wrong. Ford and Arthur did not hitch a ride with Zaphod when Earth was demolished.

The point of the new book is surely to educate a new generation of readers, and anybody old who happened to miss it the first time?

How to buy books

I really should learn not to say these things! A week after my latest, but by no means last, moan about having too many books to read, I had to kick myself. Hard.

When discussing reading with Meg Rosoff on Wednesday, we both agreed that we prefer not to pay for our books. (That’s not us you see sidling out of the shop with books in our poacher’s pockets.) What was I thinking?

So, having to – no, wanting to – read Mal Peet’s Exposure before the prize event on Thursday evening, I decided that two return trips to London was more than ample time to read it in. It was. I should have heeded the ‘more than ample’ thought, however. Minutes after arriving at Euston on the second day, I finished the book.

Then a thought struck me; what do I read now? As the slice of Jamaica cake would testify, I had eight more books in my bag. But of course, I’d read all of them. They had just come along for the ride, so to speak.

I would simply have to actually buy a book. But which one? Luckily, I had just been thinking that Son in his exile needed more Terry Pratchetts to read. So to kill two books with one purchase, I phoned him to check which books he’d not already got or even read. Thus we decided on Moving Pictures, which had somehow escaped him, and I had something to read on the way home. Home where hundreds of new books waited for me.

A Cautionary Tale

It’s confession time again. I do know Hilaire Belloc, but only as a name. I had very little idea of what he was famous for, though a quick trawl on Wikipedia has remedied this situation a little. He’s got a new book out. Well, new and new, it’s obviously old, but has nice new clothes.

Mini Grey has done new illustrations to Jim, who ran away from his nurse and was eaten by a lion. Despite this early warning, along with the warning on the cover of the book, I was still unprepared for Jim being eaten by the lion. No happy ending there.

I’m not terribly familiar with Mini Grey, either, but this book is enough to make me a fan. I’d forgotten the fun you have with pop-ups. The lion is a little scary, but more surprising. (Though I could see it having the same effect on young readers as the pop-up crocodile we used to have. Sort of, aarghh..!) Mini has thought up a lovely map of the fateful zoo, but I’m not sure I like the snake house all that much. I may stay away from this zoo. The staff are a little remiss,

even if little boys shouldn’t run away from their nurses, or mums, or anybody, really.

There is a lot here to make reading this book over and over again a lot of fun. The poem is fun to read, and the pictures will last a long time. And if it can prevent any more boys being eaten by lions, then it will have done a good job.

I’m no howler,

nor am I a blunder or a mistake. I think. Nevertheless I get a mention on the first page of Philip Ardagh’s new ‘list’ book, Philip Ardagh’s Book of Howlers, Blunders and Random Mistakery. Philip, or someone else, seemed to think that my praise for his last list book would be good to put in this new book as proof that you need to buy it. Glad someone has realised how important I am. Even the Resident IT Consultant looked almost proud of me.

I digress. Philip has, as the compulsive fact collector he is, produced a book with plenty of mistakes and other bad things, and things going wrong. Luckily that was his intention, so anyone who likes reading about stuff that went less well than it might have done, could try this list of blunders.

The book has some very old mistakes, and some rather fresh ones too, so you can look on it as a cross between a history book and a newspaper. I bet Philip enjoyed himself collecting all these facts!

The Carpet People

Must remember it’s not called Carpet World. But it’s awfully hard, when it is a carpet world.

I had never read Terry Pratchett’s Carpet People before, although it’s been around a good few years. Now his first novel is back again, with original illustrations by Terry himself. It’s a funny thing, this reading a story written by a 17-year-old and ‘improved’ on by a 43-year-old, and now published when he’s a sort of 60+. That’s recycling for you!

It will not come as a surprise if I say that it’s a very funny book. I was suspicious to begin with, but could not find anything bad to base further suspicions on. Shame. So, it’s really very funny.

I did have some problems to sort out. I could visualise the carpet on which the people live. But for the life of me I couldn’t work out how the colours of the carpet kept changing. The minimalist carpet-hater in me saw only a monochrome carpet. The penny dropped when I suddenly imagined a patterned carpet. That’s how the colours changed! Sorry for being an idiot through half the book.

Terry says the size of the city of Ware is like . this. That is smaller than I had imagined, but it might work. And I’m still unsure what the Fray is. Footsteps?

Anyway, great story about various groups of people who don’t get on or like each other or trust anyone who’s different from them. Normal in other words. Some of them are quite big, and others are very small. But they all fit into a city the size of . which is amazing, and my mind struggles to get a grasp on size. But let’s not be size-ist.

The adventure isn’t what matters most, although the walk to find peace and the wars with other people is interesting enough. ‘ Brocando looked tired. “Well, we haven’t got many dungeons,” he said. “So perhaps if you can avoid capturing any alive that would help.” “You mustn’t kill an enemy who has thrown down his weapons,” said Bane. “Can’t you? We live and learn. I always thought that was the best time,” said Brocando.’

There are many truths like that, and it’s a wonder that not more people have discovered them before Terry Pratchett did. He’s a man to my liking.

Neither Snibril nor Brocando looked the same in Terry’s drawings as they did in my mind. Could he possibly have been mistaken? Or is it me?