Articles about books

Harry Potter books are always published just before my birthday, which is handy. This book is more of the same, with the emphasis on the more – a bit too close to 1000 pages for my liking.

This time around, apart from the usual conspiracies and evildoers, Harry must contend with the opposite sex. He proves to be as clueless with girls as he is clever with magic. (Time’s running out – he’s only got two more books to sort himself out.)

I was pleased with the way that quite a few plotlines from previous books are picked up, which helps sustain interest. I thought the book was paced well, given its length. Even so, parts of the denouement felt a bit perfunctory. (Don’t you hate those perfunctory denouements?)

Well, I can’t blame her for wanting to finish by that stage. No doubt she was eager to get cracking with Book Six.

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Initially, this book is very disorienting. It’s a set of short descriptions of a strange, primitive society based on our own. Common words (house, dog, wire) take on bizarre meanings that you just have to guess at as you read deeper into this world. The whole thing is like a particularly unsettling and weird dream. By the end of the book, I felt I almost started to understand it. I’ll be reading it again.

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Lots of amusing snippets of writing, and part of an uncompleted third Dirk Gently book. A great reminder of how much fun Douglas Adams’s writing could be.

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A wry look at Wall Street, told in the voice of a outsider who has a much bigger problem than mere money to deal with. The world of investment banking may be even more dodgy than we thought. Now they tell me.

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The story of an extraordinary few months in the life of an unusual family in Tokyo. The narrator is engagingly curious, with a tendency to wax philosophical; the plot starts off conventionally but then comes over all mystical. Quite fun to read.

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The air of menace isn’t as, well, menacing as I would have liked, and there are a few implausible plot points. But the different voices in the book work well together, even if things get a bit banal towards the end. Or do they?