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Your Kindle bargains for September

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Here’s my highly personal selection of what’s on on at 99p or thereabouts during September:

Literary Fiction A Manual for Cleaning Women – Lucia Berlin – cult short story writer recently rediscovered, in the Carver/Ford/Munro/Oates vein Empire Falls – Richard Russo – not sure I am up for 800 pages but it won the Pulitzer…doesn’t help I confuse him with SF writer Richard Paul Russo. What a Carve Up! Jonathan Coe – justly celebrated dissection of Thatcherite England, which Coe keeps returning to with diminishing returns Milkman – Anna Burns – breaking my 99p rule for this, recent Booker winner is £2.49 and one of the best novels written over the last 20 years. For the first 30 pages you wonder what is going on and how you can read on, for the next 200 it has you by the short and curlies.

Classics Very slim pickings. The Master and Margarita – Bulgakov – lots of his at 99p. I find this one quite hard going, but really enjoyed Heart of a Dog.

Non Fiction The Pigeon Tunnel – Le Carre – his autobiography A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush – Eric Newby – classic travel writing Wishful Drinking » Continue Reading.

Ten Thousand Light Years from Home

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Author:James Tiptree Jnr.

James Tiptree Junior – real name Alice Sheldon, had such an extraordinary life, working for Army Intelligence and the CIA; careers in both painting and writing; that who she was and how she wrote is in danger of overshadowing what she wrote. This collection is a great reminder of her unique tone, and her pivotal place in sci-fi history, linking the fifties magazine style with the new wave of the sixties. Which is a way of saying that the stories here are quite diverse, and while some still pack an almighty punch others have dated.

The ones that work least successfully are a group of stories in which hard-bitten but whip-smart professionals deal with alien invasions, fixes on the galaxy’s gambling world, and the travails of trans galactic parcel deliveries. ‘Birth of A Salesman’ and ‘Faithful to Thee…’ projects a fifties world of club cars, trilbys, FedEx and PanAm into the far future. These aim for satire but too often descend into whimsy.

Then there’s a group of stories where she much more successfully flips the conventions: Beam Us Home takes the stranger in a strange land story and – as Michael Faber’s Under the Skin would » Continue Reading.

Kindle monthly deals for August

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A little later than usual due to a family holiday, here’s my personal selection from this month’s kindle offers, with the emphasis on Fiction, Scifi, Classics and a bit of nonfiction. All 99p or thereabouts.

FICTION Decent month for lit fic. My Secret History – Paul Theroux I may have read this 20 years ago, have forgotten everything about it Oreo – Fran Ross – I loved The Sellout by Paul Beatty and this is referenced in several reviews, though written in 1974. Brazzaville Beach – William Boyd Girl – Edna O’Brien May be too dark for me as it’s O’Brien’s take on the Boko Harum schoolgirl abductions.

SCIFI Again, strong lineup Dark Eden – Chrs Beckett – first of a trilogy, very well reviewed. Autonomous – Annalee Newitz Read this a few weeks ago. Excellent on AI and genetic engineering. Aurora – Kim Stanley Robinson – KSR’s take on the generation starship novel. Always worth reading him. The Dark Forest – Cixin Liu OK you should but#y this but not read it. It’s part two of a trilogy and I have just read part one – The Three Body Problem and it is fantastic. The Cultural Revolution, » Continue Reading.

Acts whose catalogue rewards listening in reverse

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Niche post here, one for the cataloguers and tic merchants. I’m midway (R-S at the moment) through an alphabetical listen through of the CDs. While most artists I listen to in release order, there are some who beg to be listened to in reverse order, as the quality steadily climbs until the sunlit uplands of the debut is released. Two cases:

Oasis. The exemplar. Start with the desperate Dig out…, then onto the Will This Do of Don’t Believe and Heathen Chemistry…the flashes of the old in the rubble of Standing On…the overlong badly produced but at the core there’s a half-decent album of Be Here Now, then What’s the Story and Definitely Maybe. From the swamps to the summit, ever upwards.

Sisters of Mercy: Vision Thing (has Tony James), Floodland (some great tracks) First And Last (awesome) and Some Girls Wander… ok I slightly cheatred as SGWBM is a compilation, but the arrow-like ascent holds true.

There. I’ve shared. Minimum 4 albums, arbitrarily. Or if you want to start at the top, artists whose catalogue showed a straightline descent from glory to gruesome.

The Allotment Thread…how is your veg getting on

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The love that dare not speak it’s name, yes we have come to this. Motorbikes, loud music and up all night must in time be tempered with more tranquil pleasures. Along with Roger Eno it’s a thread dedicated to the joy of growing veg. And salad. And Fruit. With fellow allotmenteers @smudger and @hubert-rawlinson I give you the allotments thread. So tbis is not about flowers. Or lawns. Or gardens. It could be about pots, and beds, providing they’re veg beds. From blackfly to slugs it can feel like a never-ending war on nature, but it also gives. We have oodles of chard in the fridge, some end-of-season rhubarb and raspberry cookies waiting for attention. You’ve lost the plot I hear you say! Well the plot details are in the comments.

The Hair Carpet Weavers

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Author:Andreas Eschbach

The Hair Carpet Weavers starts with the story of just that: a hair-carpet weaver – a man spending his entire life, as his predecessors did, weaving one spectacular carpet from the hair of his wives, as an offering to the Emperor. In a series of short chapters, each from the perspective of a different character, we build up a collective picture of a planet-wide society bound together by the bizarre collective endeavour of the carpet makers . The carpets themselves are sent away on completion on spaceships to the Emperor’s Palace, and their purchasing is paid for by taxes collected by the Empire, in a form of circular economy. Worship of the Emperor, who though not seen as a God, does enjoy eternal life and unlimited power, is complete and heretics are dealt with severely. Society is governed by rigid castes and education is seen as a dangerous enterprise – though in a wicked aside an Imperial Tax Collector observes that cities who kill their teachers generally see taxable revenues fall over the long term.

The frame continually widens, as a spaceship bearing researchers from the Empire itself arrives. We learn that the Emperor himself, for whom weavers » Continue Reading.

Only connect…Dr Who, Rush, Colditz, the world’s longest word, Julian Clary, Friends of the Earth, Tina Turner

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The answer is the recently departed Rupert Hine. A life well lived as they say. I could go on but Adam Sweeting has written a brilliant obit. I’m sure he appears in the ‘departed’ thread but this is such a lovely piece of writing about a life filled to the brim with music.

Hine discovered the world’s longest word, in Maori, which he used at the start of Lone Ranger by Quantum Leap ‘sitting on the loo reading the Guinness Book of Records’

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2020/jun/11/rupert-hine-obituary

The Listening Project Nine: Filthy Belgians alert

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The latest in an occasional series mining the British Book of Hit Singles for obscure gold, crazy covers and brickbats. Not much text and lots of vintage Youtube clips. This week’s gold is from some Belgian producers producing a dance classic. Ah yes the 90s and 00s. No, the early 70s and here is frankly filthy Jungle Fever from the early 70s, years before Donna Summer and Lil Louis made moaning on the radio an art form. See how you get on, I think it’s fab. In the comments an earworm to ruin/make your day, two amazing vocal performances, a wikipedia dubious claim and of course the sound of a barrel being scraped (nothing as bad as supermodel week).

Kindle monthly deals for July

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The start of the month means there’s a new set of Monthly Deals for the Kindle. If you still hanker for some reading matter in between your marathon bouts of pub and restaurant visits, these are on at 99p for July. As ever, personal recommendations rather than authoritative list and mainly fiction. The Panzer Drivers memoirs (see other recent posts) are no doubt there but someone else will have to rate them. Also lots of books for more than 99p, but I have my rules (ok the Wandering Stars is 1.69 but he’s a very hot writer).

CLASSICS Uber-depressing and angry French working man classic Germinal by Zole. Read this a few years and really like it. Metamorphosis by Ovid. Never read. The Trial by Kafka. Nothing more to say – a book everyone should read at least once. Not long. All Penguin Classics so the translations and print will be good.

LITERATURE Cloud Street by Tim Winton – apparently the modern Australian classic novel. Our Antipodean correspondents please comment, looking forward to this. The Golden Notebook – Doris Lessing. Forbidding. The Colour Purple – Alice Walker. Very of the moment. Disobedient by Naomi Alderman. Liked The Power, v zeitgeisty » Continue Reading.

Paradise Rot

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Author:Jenny Hval

The list of novels written by musicians is not long, perhaps because writing one seems like quite hard work. Nick Cave, Louise Wener, Laughing Len on the credit side …and er Morrissey and even Bruce Dickinson on the definitely debit side. Jenny Hval, Norwegian avant-garde popist, has an entry in this short canon as strong as anyone. Paradise Rot was written in 2009 before her music career really got going and has recently been translated into English (Norwegian title Perlebryggeriet which translates literally as Pearl Brewery).

It clocks in at a slim 150 pages in large type and a couple of nights reading will see you through. The story is told by Norwegian student Jo who turns up at a British seaside university town (Aberystwyth? Southend?) to study biology. Struggling to get to grips with ‘Aybourne’ and her fellow students she finds lodgings and human contact in a barely-converted former brewery with flat-mate Carrel. Carrel and Jo become increasingly close in the claustrophobic flat, until the entry of neighbour Pym provokes a crisis. What Hval’s really concerned with is the physicality of desire. This is a book full of rot and decay – apples that decay into compost, » Continue Reading.

It’s gold from here in – when albums get their worst track out of the way first

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Radio Song, side 1 track 1 of Out of Time. And the weakest track on the album by some distance IMHO. It has some riffs recycled from Stand, insanely annoying backing vocals (yo-ho-ho), an unnecessary rap section at the end and generally comes over instrumentally as a parody of REM’s sound to date. It’s the worst track on the album, rated by me as no better than forgettable instrumental Endgame. And as a parody track of commercial expectations it is surely eclipsed by Shiny Happy People. A post of best Side 1 track 1’s ever is a regular fixture. So let’s do the darkside – who should have buried their opener mid-way through side 2. We know Dylan is Afterword catnip, so my second entry is from the zim in the comments. Unanswerable surely?

The Listening Project Eight: Supermodels week!

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Having unshackled myself from the weekly schedule, and posting when there is a sufficient range of gourmet delicacies from the British Book of Hit Singles…let’s go..it’s supermodels week, and it will not surprise you to know they do not feature in the delights discovered, but rather in the why oh why section in the comments. Here’s a proper singer with a proper pedigree, stepping out from James Brown’s band where she replaced Tammi Terrell, and a terrific stab of pop soul with a touch of the Motown beat. Crazy covers (well crazily awful this week), some nearly tracks of the week, and those supermodels in the comments.

Artists whose large, rich and storied back catalogue has now been reduced to a single album

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Firstly, who is it whose ‘classic’ album prompted the above post.

Yes that’s right it’s Lou Reed. creator of 22 studio albums. Yet in rock history and popular consciousness (‘civilian land’) it surely has been reduced to Transformer. Produced by Bowie and Ronson. 5 monsters (Vicious/Perfect Day/WOTWS/Sat of Love/NY Tel Conversation) and not a bad track on it. Perfect Day broke out to a new generation with the beeb version. That cover (who would want say the New Sensations cover on a t-shirt). More or less a perfect rock album. Transformer is currently at no 918 in Amazon’s Cd and Vinyl sales. Berlin is 32,000, Coney Island Baby 64,000.

I am partial to Rock and Roll Heart, Songs for Drella and Magic and Loss (131,000 – presumably the sales at this point are like the R number) but this is not really civilian land. Surely only Transformer, and the songs on it, now has real wider currency.

So other artists whose multi-album career is now more or less reduced to a single album. Any raise on Lou? And yes, Peter Frampton is an answer but I think we can agree Lou is possibly a more significant artist.The ratio we » Continue Reading.

The Listening Project Week Seven: Rounding up the B’s

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Ok what week is it? Week seven, week Ten? Anyway, better late than never (possibly) here are the hits and the misses of the rest of the B’s in the veritable British Book of Hit Singles. First up is a totally anonymous club banger. Anonymous as in who the hell are they? (puts on). Oh it’s this. Again, check out the bass line and the classic filter house sound. Brings to mind all those cartoon covers on the Hed Kandi compilations. Ah memories. In the comments some Crazy Covers and one quite gob-smackingly awful track from 1959.

June Kindle Deals

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It’s the first of the month which brings a new set of 99p Monthly Deals for the Kindle. And we all (most) have more time on our hands. My personal selections:

Lit Fic: Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood A Prayer for Owen Meany – John Irving A Good Man in Africa William Boyd The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier by Michael Chabon The Slap – Tsiolkas Abide With Me – Liz Strout Closed Circle – Jonathan Coe Good selection – I can thoroughly recommend the Chabon and Tsiolkas, looking forward to the Boyd

There’s also the new Caitlin Moran on Britpop, How to Be Famous.

Classics Not a great month TBH but there’s the Penguin Classics version of Don Quixote (‘award winning translation’) which I think is made for the Kindle and I will yet again fail to quite commit to the Count of Monte Cristo.

Scifi John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War is very well reviewed, even if I generally steer well clear of military themed sci-fi. I can recommend Jeff Vermeer’s outstanding Annihilation, filmed a couple of years ago, as a genuinely new and deeply unsettling. I’m unconvinced by Adrian Tchiakovsky – he’s written a lot quite quickly – » Continue Reading.

Artists who do not appear on their own track

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The latest dispatch from the wild frontiers of the British Book of Hit Singles is due very soon, I have finished the ‘B’s’ which includes this artefact. I have listened to it all the way through (you can too but it’s a poor facsimile cover with boxing commentary and crowd nose interpolated) and can confirm that Frank does not sing or even speak a note. So, what other tracks – credited to a single person – feature not a note or word from the person themselves?

The Listening Project Week Six: The Bass, oh the Bass. Such Bass.

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Week six takes us from Bizzi to Bowie in the British Book of Hit Singles. No actual Bowie, instead feast your ears on nearly 14 minutes of completely irresistable funky Chicago house from Lil’ Louis. You’ll know the main vocal hook from a thousand other tracks, but this is the motherlode, the original. Where has it been in my life, lodged between Black Machine and Black Riot in the British Book of Hit Singles. The last 5 minutes are non-stop bass nirvana, courtesy of one Gene Perez. Unknown to me, he was the foundation of lots of Masters of Work remixes and it’s no disservice to say that this could be a sample from the thumb of Bernard Edwards himself.

The Guardian’s Listener’s Digests

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Has reached the Himalayan slopes of the Dead. Telling that apart from American Beauty their picks are all live picks. This is back on form after a few pop people that aren’t really that scary (Britney, Kinks).

Like the sound of the one with Branford Marselis sitting in.

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2020/may/11/grateful-dead-where-to-start-in-their-back-catalogue

Kindle monthly deals – the virtual chazza

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Along with many of us I am missing the occasional dip into a chazza, particularly on the books side. Recent purchaser of a kindle, the monthly release of the new book deals is about as close to a rummage through the Oxfam shelves as you are going to get at the moment. There’s history, lots of military history, autobiography, self-help, romance, thrillers, detective and well you get the idea. Literary fiction , classics and sci-fi are the sections of the shop I go for so here are my entirely partial recommendations for the 99p monthly deals:

Classics – strong showing from Penguin Classics and Modern Classics. Really important to get a reputable publisher with translated work. So I’m going for War and Peace, Les Grandes Moulnes and a volume of Katherine Mansfield short stories. Already got, thorughly recommended, is Heart of a Dog by Bulgakov.

Sci-fi – if you’ve not read Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie you are in luck. One of the best sci-fi novels of teh last decade. Peter F Hamilton has gone off the boil a bit recently IMHO, so glad the first heavy slab of his new trilogy, Salvation, is on here. Decently reviewed. There’s a » Continue Reading.

The Listening Project Week Four: Prog catnip alert!

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Welcome to week four of the Listening Project: staying safe at home by working through the entire British Book of Hit Singles (BBoHS) from A-Z. Week 4 sees me up to HJH’s and some resistance to the project from Ms Moles (‘Why do we have to listen to stuff you missed first time around and is probably rubbish’). We soldier on! No princes are found without a lot of frog-kissing, and in this case no obscure soul classics without wading through the boyband landfill from the late 90s (see last week for more musings on them).

If you open a page at random then the obscure nuggets are likely to be dance tracks from the 90s and early 00s. This week’s musings are a why? Firstly, it cannot have been radio play. We’re not talking about Professional Widow or The Chemicals here. These tracks cannot have be played on R1 before the specialist dance shows. Were there that many listening to Kiss/Galaxy in the 90s to impact the charts? Second, the natural home of these tracks is clearly the dance compilation. Why on earth would anyone buy a single. You know what, that Ministry or Kiss In Ibiza compilation » Continue Reading.

The Listening Project: Week Three. Big on the Scottish dance scene.

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Welcome to week three of the Listening Project: staying safe at home byu working through the entire British Book of Hit Singles (BBoHS) from A-Z. Week 3 saw us leave the A’s and work through Howie B, John B, Jon B, Lorna b, Mark B, Mel B, Sandy B, Stevie and lastly obscure white female gangsta rapper Tarrie B. As ever in the comments there is some unearthed gold, and some what were they thinking curios. A day late.

Evolving thoughts on the charts: boy it must have been dirt cheap in the 90s to launch a boyband. The lists are full of yer BBMaks, BK and B2K to take just one page. Did the majors have no other ideas than putting 3-5 cute boys in denim and Adidas and getting some watered down R and B behind them.It would seem not. There was even a Specsavers run competition to find Britain’s next boyband which resulted in All Eyes hitting number with She’s A Vision (see what they did there).

Onto the finds/ Two club bangers – one a Latino house salsoul banger from the 90s which I cannot believe did not chart, and a rather more obscure track that » Continue Reading.

How’s your gaming going?

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When it comes to sucking up vast swathes of time in a vaguely constructive manner, nothing beats video gaming. Our PS4 is having, as we say round here, heavy hammer. And as it also doubles as the DVD player, is probably pulling a full 8 hour daily shift. Here’s our run down of the Moseley Towers gaming world:

Ace Combat 7 – myself and jazzhead son have just finished this uber-Japanese flight combat sim (though it’s pretty arcadey). I played Ace Combat 2 on the original PS and have been hooked since. The story, as always, is bonkers and incomprehensible but that’s not why we’re here. Pulling an immelman turn in a F-14 then sticking two missiles up the tailpipe of a Mig-29. Yes please. The graphics are georgeous, and the learning curve dadfriendly enough for me to finish the game on easy. 20 missions and my only gripe is that as there is no ground-targets only mission I had no excuse to fly the A-10 Warthog.

COD Modern Warfare : Mrs Moles is playing through – very deliberately – this total and utter classic FPS. The ghillie suit! The Chernobyl level, the container ship.

No Man’s Sky. Heavy » Continue Reading.

British Book of Hit Singles: The Listening Project Week Two

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My family are still just about talking to me, as every so often a gem will shine through the vast muddy field that is the BBoHS week 2: The Alarm – Army of Lovers. In case you missed last week’s debut installment, I am surviving lockdown by (in part) working through the BBoHS A-Z. Rules were in last week’s post, so it’s straight into an observation and then the finds.

Observation: you think this will be a voyage into the deep past, the charts that existed way before you were even born (in my case 1965) and golden hour hits that had already slipped off Radio 1 by the time you got there. Wrong. It’s actually a voyage into the 80s – 00s (my penultimate edition is from 2004 when download were already being counted). And here’s one reason why my listening is dominated by boybands, grunge landfill and faceless dance. The lowest place in the charts that is included was from 1978 on 75. Until 1960 it was a top thirty, so barely half the post-78 total. It expanded to become 40, 42 for one week in the seventies, then a top 60. Someone clever can work out the » Continue Reading.

The Listening Project: British Book of Hit Singles Week 1

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It’s a fairly standard response in this place to the current situation – immerse yourself in a crazily large audio project. Then share your findings. So here’s mine, for this week at least. I own a copy of hits bible The British Book of Hit Singles – 18th edition, which is the penultimate in printed form (2004). So how’s about working through the whole shebang (about 500 pages) at a page a day. That should take me through the current scenario and out the other side.

Ground rules: it’ll be A-Z. Unfamiliar stuff only. So the whole page that is David Bowie can be skipped (see the ‘it’ll take about a year’)…er skip that as Rebel Never Gets Old reached no 47 in 2004. Need to hear that (don’t get too excited it’s a mashup but an official one).

The greatest hit is it. Not got time to listen to all of A – so clearly it’s their top 10 Hit Nothing and unless my curiosity is greatly piqued (reader it was not, generic late 90s Green Day punky rock) then in this case their other 9 top 75 smashes will remain for others to discover.

Nothing unfamiliar skipped » Continue Reading.