Wintersmith (Terry Pratchett)

I plunged into Terry Pratchett's latest with great hope, and found that it lived up to my expectations. Wintersmith is his third book starring Tiffany Aching, trainee witch, a most delightful character of whom I am very fond. In Wintersmith, the spirit of Winter gets a crush on Tiffany, with fairly disastrous results, and Tiffany cannot quite decide if she is pleased or scared by his attention. Pratchett writes the teenage Tiffany with her characteristic humour and common sense, along with rollicking story and appearances from Granny Weatherwax and Nanny Ogg, which is awfully fun. I think these books are technically YA, but I don't really think of them like that - to me, they're just Discworld books, and some of my favourites.

Uglies (Scott Westerfeld)

I've been meaning to try one of Scott Westerfeld's books for some time, and chose Uglies over his vampiric book, Peeps. This story is set in a futuristic society were people undergo surgery in their teenage years to conform to an idealistic standard of beauty, and to be known as Pretties. There are those who fight against such a regime, living outside the cities. They have discovered that there is more to the surgery than cosmetics.

Tally becomes reluctantly involved in the rebel movement, and struggles with the beliefs she has been taught about beauty and life. Uglies is an great YA novel, and is pleasantly subtle while still making its point about society's obsession with appearance. It has a dramatic ending, and I'll definitely be reading the sequel, Pretties.

Grass (Sheri S Tepper)

My most vivid memory of this book, read a month or so ago, is a description of the plague that made me want to throw up. Tepper is certainly a skilled writer in evoking violence and rather horrible things, and I think this book is actually one of her better efforts. Some of her books are quite insightful and fascinating pieces of science fiction, and others are far more trashy, with villians who have no redeeming qualities.

Grass is set on another planet, the only one in the universe where plague has not struck, and the other planets would like to know why. There is a great sense of menace in this story - not only the creeping hideousness of the plague, but a great many other horrors. It's not a story to curl up and read in a comforting armchair, but one to read tensely, leant over its pages, gritting your teeth at the more vivid descriptions. While the scientific conclusion (as to lack of plague) at the end is a bit pat, this is a fun read for fans of Tepper and sci-fi in geneal.

Serenity: Those Left Behind (Joss Whedon)

I think this is the first in what will presumably be a series of Serenity comics. It's nicely drawn, with a kind of matte colour pencil look, which I really liked. Interspered in the story are portraits of each of the characters.

While I really love the Serenity/Firefly universe and the series and movie, I found the language, which seems quite natural in the TV series, rather forced when I'm reading it. The occasional Mandarin phrase (which is written in Chinese characters) is difficult to imagine, so instead of their voices flowing through my head, they stop and start. The slang, also, seems rather out of place.

It wasn't all terrible though - a decent story, and I really liked how it was drawn. The dialogue just didn't really click with me.

Passage (Connie Willis)

Another wonderful Connie Willis book - this one is barely speculative fiction at all. Well, only a little bit.

Joanne is a psychiatrist researching Near Death Experiences (NDEs) who teams up with Richard, a scientist who can chemically induce NDEs in volunteers. Due to a series of failures with volunteers, Joanne herself experiences an induced NDE, and her discoveries stemming from this experience form the remainder of the story.

Passage is an astonishing story about life, death and the intricate machinery of our bodies. While it's not, of itself, a depressing story, I felt rather depressed after reading it all in one go. Reading about death for 8 hours straight will do that to you. Regardless, it's a brilliant novel, and highly recommended - 5 out of 5.

To Say Nothing of the Dog (Connie Willis)

Connie Willis is a brilliant writer that I reluctantly classify as science or speculative fiction (reluctantly because that seems discourage some readers). I previously read and loved Doomsday Book, and I enjoyed To Say Nothing of the Dog almost as much.

To Say Nothing of the Dog employs the same time-travel technology that is used in Doomsday Book, and is set in around the same time. It's a lighter story, set mostly in Victorian England, about the dreaded Lady Schrapnell who has sent Ned to retrieve the Bishop's bird stump from Coventry Cathedral.

It is a somewhat confusing story - there's romance, adventure, temporal incongruities and a beautifully realised Victorian society, all muddled up together. It's very lighthearted and lots of fun however, although I became somewhat confused towards the end when they're slowly figuring out the incongruity. It's a 4 out of 5, due to its lack of a strong linear storyline.

Maul (Tricia Sullivan)

This was a strange, strange novel, and it would be fairly accurate to say that most of the time, I had no idea what the hell was going on.

It's a twisting cyber-punk novel, set in a world where most men have succumbed to a virus. Gangs of teenage girls terrorise a mall. An experiment run on an autistic man enables him to control the mall environment, and eventually be healed by the virus within his system. A scientist is desperate to bear a child. And it all barrels along messily and doesn't resolve into much. There's a wolf motif too, but that completely confused me.

I do hate admitting that I didn't get something, but I honestly just didn't get this. It was completely over my head, and just seemed pointless. It'd be 1 out of 5 for some briefly amusing moments, but that's all.

The Time Traveller's Wife (Audrey Niffenegger)

I had heard this book mentioned by others many times before reading it myself, but didn't know much about it. While it involves time travel, I wouldn't class it as science fiction. It's a love story, a tale that muses on connections and destiny, and the intricate ways in which we tie our lives to other people's.

Henry has a genetic disorder which causes him to uncontrollably travel in time, generally to important moments in his past or future. He spends time with his younger self, glimpses his future home, and when he is in his early twenties, he meets Clare, who says she has known him her entire life. When Henry is in his forties, he travels back in time and begins to regularly meet with Clare, who is six years old.

The Time Traveller's Wife charts Henry and Clare's relationship over the years, and it's a beautiful and very moving story. I felt so intimately connected to these characters, and the ending was rather heart-rending. A four out of five book - I loved it.

Doomsday Book (Connie Willis)

This was a bloody good book. The sort of book you put down, and sigh, and simultaniously wish there was more of it and feel satisfied at the whole of it. (That was a convoluted sentence. One day I'm going to become more sophisticated at saying exactly why I enjoy things.)

This is technically a novel about time travel, but involves much more than that. The narrative is split fairly equally between a student sent back to the Middle Ages, and one of her professors in the future, dealing with an epidemic. The story set in the Middle Ages is utterly engrossing, and wonderfully done. Not having a very great knowledge of the Middle Ages, I'm assuming that most of the historical details were accurate, but in the end, it doesn't really matter. It feels convincingly realistic, which is more important.

This is a ridiculously short review for such a wonderful book. Let me recap. It's a great read. The parts set in the Middle Ages are amazing. The characterisation is fantastic. It made me cry. I'm kind of low on iron this week, so that may have contributed, but, irregardless, read it.

Never Let Me Go (Kazuo Ishiguro)

I've never read any of Ishiguro's work before, and knew him vaguely as the author of Remains of the Day. This is his latest book, and I'd read several excellent reviews of it before getting it out of the library. It has a slightly futuristic, dystopian theme which attracted me to it.

Reading the reviews spoiled the story a little for me, as while you're reading the voice of Kathy H., you're slowly let in to the world that Ishiguro has created. I would have liked to have that suspense, so I'm not going to reveal any details of the storyline here, as they're easy enough to find elsewhere.

Suffice to say, while it is set in a dystopian future, it's not a completely dark tale, although it's certainly depressing enough. But Kathy H.'s naive, hopeful voice carries you through the story with a lightness that relieves the despair that tends to crush down upon you as you race towards the end.

Ishiguro's characters are very real, but there's also an element of distance from them in his writing I found, although it was a vague disatisfaction that I can't really describe further. Other than that, I very much enjoyed this - a quiet, dark story, with a feeling of clinical calm to it.