As one of my New Year’s Resolutions, I decided to try to read a book a week in 2017, in its entirety. I’m happy to say I made it to the end of the first month! The books I read were varied in style, form and content, and as always I have opinions. Here are some of them.

BOOK ONE – Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury 

This challenge is a good excuse to read some of the classic “you have to read this book” books that I haven’t read. The first of these was the legendary Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury’s dystopian story of book-burning and TV worshipping. The country Bradbury describes is on the edge of nuclear  war, but no one seems to care because their wall-sized personalised interactive TV screens don’t mention that.

It’s a slim book, which was a nice start to the challenge, and that’s probably because it started life as a short story which was slowly expanded into novella, then novel. Despite its luscious poetic prose, which is covered in metaphor, the plot travels at an incredible pace. The chase scene towards the end of the story is gripping and the disaster that follows is almost cathartic. The book ends on a refreshing hopeful note, but the picture it paints is all too believable. Sadly, I think this cautionary tale against information bubbles and a lack of communication, of the slow, willing forgetfulness of a population, is just as pressing now as it has ever been.

You have to read this book.

BOOK TWO –  Cthulhu’s Daughters 

This was a collection of short stories written in and for H P Lovecraft’s Mythos, specifically written by and about women. It’s well documented that Lovecraft was a bit of a racist, even for his time, and that he did not have the best of time with women. Indeed, the first prosaic story in this book (the very first entry is a poem), “Turn Out the Light” is about Lovecraft’s mother’s death, written from her perspective. It’s very sad and sets an interesting tone for the rest of the book.

When at its best, ‘Lovecraftian’ fiction focusses  on personal tragedy, and is only about global calamity through extrapolation. This book is full of some great examples: “The Adventurer’s Wife”, which was a perfectly-pitched tale of unexplored Africa, and reminded me of Lovecraft’s own “Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family”; “The Thing on the Cheerleading Squad”, which, despite its title, was an incredible subtle and affecting story, bringing Lovecraft a into 1990’s American high-school setting; “Eight Seconds”, a story of the daring rescue of a mother of her daughter, set in Australia; “Chosen”, which grasps to understand why a cultist would give themselves up for human sacrifice.

Probably my favourite was a bit pulpier though. “De Deabus Minoribus Exerioris Theomagicae” is the transcript of a PhD student’s research notes as she meticulously catalogues an ancient tome for a university library. Unfortunately for her, and all the world, the book is the real deal, and it starts to possess her. It’s repulsive and tense, but also funny, and stands out from the rest in managing to toe that entertaining line.

BOOK THREE – The Wicked + The Divine by Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie

I have been recommended The Wicked + The Divine so many times by so many people. I’m glad I finally took them up on their suggestion. I only read the first volume, but I am certain I’ll be buying the next few at least.

The story revolves around the premise that a pantheon of Classical gods exist, and every ninety years, they inhabit the forms of chosen young people, before dying two years later. It’s happening now, the time has come again. Sent in London, 2014, this graphic novel is not only some of the most stunning art I’ve seen, it’s one of the most interesting stories I’ve read in a graphic novel. Gillen has come up with a really original take on themes that are as old as the hills, and he makes them feel fresh. It was exciting and funny and sad and the only book since Paradise Lost to make me feel sorry for Lucifer (not even Gaiman’s Sandman did that).

It was such a slim read, it took me all of 90 minutes, that I also read the 2012 Avengers vs. X-Men compendium. I was in a graphic novels mood. As is standard for long-running continuities in comics, the dialogue in the first few issues was a little contrived. This is necessary, I know, to keep people up to date. After all the characters were introduced, however, the book really took off. Some of the illustration and art design towards the end was actually quite scary, and the stand off between Charles Xavier and Scott Summers was nothing less than tense. Good fun.

BOOK FOUR – Dracula by Bram Stoker

This is another classic that I’ve been meaning to read for years. It was by far the slowest read of the month, thanks to the prose, which was sometimes so bogged down it was at dissonance with the narrative. Let me explain what I mean:

Dracula is an exciting, repulsive, horrific story about a vampire stalking England. While it can probably be marked as one of the beginning causes for the shift away from nosferatu and towards Edward Cullen, when taken in his original text, Dracula is a brutal monster, and not charming or beguiling at all. He is described throughout as base, inhuman and at very, very best, a little unsettling. Add to that a fanatic cultist who eats spiders, a coven of sirens who can materialise on moonlight, and the creeping horror of two of the protagonists slowly turning into vampires themselves, and you have this terrifying tale which I have never seen an accurate adaptation of.

However, Dr Van Helsing, who in adaptation is as enigmatic and gruffly laconic as any good Hollywood badass, is somewhat palaverous in the book. There’s a scene in the final third of the story where at the beginning of every paragraph, Van Helsing explicitly states that they’re running out of time and need to get going as soon as possible. He then proceeds to talk for nearly two pages, lecturing the characters (and the reader) as to his plans. Why he couldn’t do this on the train to their first destination is beyond me. It was very annoying, and it happened more than once. Characters writing in their personal journals that they must stop writing at once, and get on with –  whatever – is a mainstay of this prose.

I know you have to take it as a work of its time, which was the late 19th century, where verbosity was akin to intelligence and gender politics were vastly different, but it was still a tough read at times. There were some pages without a single paragraph break!

BONUS BOOK – The Martian by Andy Weir 

Just in case there’s anybody keeping score, who might have noticed that the 1st of January 2017 was a Sunday, and who might be worried that I have broken my year-long challenge by missing this one day, rest assured that I read a book in the final week of December 2016 too.

The Martian is now famous for its movie adaptation, which stars Matt Damon as Mark Watney, the stranded botanist-engineer who is presumed dead by his crew when he goes missing in a Martian storm. I was at the London premiere of this movie in 2015 and I don’t mind admitting that I had seen the movie three times before reading the book. I definitely still enjoyed the book, and it made me appreciate how good the movie adaptation was.

People who recommended the read to me said that the book was funnier, and that Matt Damon was an odd casting choice for the movie. I disagree, I think, on both counts. The book was very funny, but I would count the adaptation as as funny as the book. There are jokes in the story that land better through a visual medium. By the same token, the book could include jokes and esoterica that wouldn’t have worked on screen.

One of the more memorable sequences in the movie, for me, was the montage towards the end to the sounds of David Bowie’s Starman. I have to admit that the most startling and interesting change from the original to the movie was that in the book, Starman is name-checked as a song that Watney passed over in favour of Stayin’ Alive. This was a good joke for the page, and I think it would have worked on the screen. Perhaps Bowie’s sweeping vocals in the chorus was considered more cinematic than the Bee Gee’s staccato “Ah-Ah-Ah-Ah”s?

It was fascinating to have even more detail about the myriad ways Mark Watney could die. Weir was obviously meticulous in his research, and it’s difficult to class this book as sci-fi. It’s more like a race-against-time thriller, that happens to be set on Mars. Great read.

Anyway, that was all of my reading for this month. Moving onto something completely different, I start Amy Poehler’s Yes Please this week.