I read a book today Oh Boy

If the Antichrist enjoys anything more than voicing bloodthirsty apocalyptic threats, it's helping to make biscuits in the kitchen. And with that, one has all one needs to see beyond his demonic provenance to the child who needs love, nurture, and a chance to have some damn good adventures. "You NEED to read The House in the Cerulean Sea !" I was told, having asked for uplifting reads to get me through a nasty bout of flu. I spent the first page or so wondering if it was written for children or adults before concluding "yes". Then I got into the serious business of enjoying this expertly woven tale of a man who comes from a faceless corporatist society to judge a chaotic but loving community, and must decide which of these he should in face be judging. Linus Baker is sent on a mission to inspect Marsyas Orphanage and its leader, Arthur Parnassus, for the Department in Charge of Magical Youth. He finds he has embarked not just on a train, but on the eternal...

"I've seen The Exorcist  thirteen times, and it gets funnier every time I see it!" So, famously, said Beetlejuice, and I can't argue with him as I don't think I've seen the film of William Peter Blatty's generation-defining horror classic quite that many times. But I've certainly read the book often enough to appreciate the slow descent into Hell of Regan's Mum. But neither film nor book (which came first) was entitled Regan's Mom. The identiity of the titular exorcist seems, at first glance, clear: Lenkester Merrin, a fictionalised version of the archaeologist, phenomenologist and mystic Teilhard de Chardin, who saw his Christ not only as a god-man who once walked among us, but also as a point in the future upon which all Being will converge to partake of divinity. A mystical prefigurement of the Singularity, if you want, combining Hegel's eschaton with a vision of Christianity that is all too seldom allowed to precipitate from dis...

The TARDIS is hurtling towards destruction. The problem is, its fault locator is quiescent because there is no fault in the machinery.  It has to decide how to act; but even a machine as advanced as the TARDIS, although able to make such decisions, is hobbled by its limnited means of proactive communication with the crew. How to alert the Doctor and his companions - his grandaughter Susan, and her teachers Barbara and Ian - to the impending catastrophe? This two-part series was written by David Whittaker and transmitted in 1964, and was possibly rather hastily written because the BBC had opened slots for two more episodes than there were scripts due to Doctor Who 's increasing popularity. Nigel Robinson's novelisation expands somewhat on a very important story which establishes the TARDIS as a character in its own right, which would continue to be expanded upon up to the present day. What shines through to me is that Whittaker had heard of John von Neumann's 1958 lecture o...

Largely about the relationship between language and our experience of reality, The Embedding is published by SF Masterworks, and rightly deserves to be. But there's much more to the book than this, and Watson - a former English lecturer - works the title harder than in any novel I've ever read. We get a clue to this early on with references to the French poet Raymond Roussell, whose debut work Impressions of Africa is a Matryoshka doll of brackets nested within brackets (hold on to that concept), leaving you clueless as to how many diversions deep you're in, let alone which section is parenthetical to which, and you might as well give up trying to remember the index statement. Pierre is an ethno-linguist who has managed to insert himself with the Xemahou deep in the Amazon forests. Their lands are in the first stages of inundation by a gargantuan dam which will bury the trees out of sight and out of mind, leaving the valuable timber ripe for plucking from its sodden ...

Indonesia: you are leading a team through the hot zone, in every sense, of a new epidemic. You are looking all around you for the source but cannot find it. Where do you look next? Carriers is a medical thriller about the hunt for a novel filovirus, ie a highly contagious micro-organism whose victims often die by bleeding out. It was published in 1995, on the heels of Richard Preston's The Hot Zone , which deals with the real-life search for the world's most famous filovirus, Ebola. Like its fictional relative in Carriers , Ebola is a haemorrhagic virus which, following an incubation period lasting anything from a few days to two or three weeks, enters its terrifying final phase.Eextreme bleeding, internal and external, conspires with diarrhoea and vomiting to provide the  coup de grâce for the victim and a death sentence for most in the vicinity. Performing the good offices of a Michael Crichton, Lynch uses a rattling good story that hums with tension as the USAMRIID...

 Who killed Kennedy? Perhaps...perhaps. Fans of the long-running TV series Doctor Who  may find the two sentences above easier to parse. And they will be familiar with the principle that fictional works can deal with questions that will not be tolerated in the scripted reality show we call public debate. The book revolves around James Stevens, a cynical journalist who you will see listed on the cover as an author, and begins with an excerpt from a work written by him which was forcibly withdrawn from publication before it could hit the shelves. David Bishop, also listed, doesn't appear until much later on, in a stylistic nod to Arthur Conan Doyle's role as John Watson's editor in the Sherlock Holmes stories.  So, you might ask, and intuitively add the questionmark that is conspicuously absent from the title. Who killed Kennedy ? In this book you will come across elements you are doubtlessly familiar with: Zapruder, the Texas School Book Depository and the grassy knoll, to...