Brit Pop bore John Harris drones:

And still the records came (obligatory rare groove reference: Ultramagnetic MCs' Travelling at the Speed of Thought, a meld of the Kingsmen's Louie Louie, Honky Tonk Women and some rapping, and presumably, still out there somewhere).

It certainly is still out there somewhere; dude, that's my ringtone.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? - Philip K. Dick

I’ve only seen Blade Runner the once, about ten years ago, and living at home I watched it in stolen half hours. It didn’t impress me much, but I realised that I hadn’t really given it a fair shot, and perhaps should go back to it sometime. As yet, that hasn’t happened. It stars Harrison Ford; I’m in no rush. At first I resisted as I was scared that I wouldn’t like it enough – by comment consent, I would be wrong. My suspicion that it wasn’t for me remained, but I stopped worrying about it.

Do Androids Dream… is not like the bits I remember of Blade Runner. Where the film is sleek, the book is earthy - set in a dusty and dilapidated world, albeit one with flying cars. Decker is bald and dissatisfied in his marriage; the final confrontation with the replicants is anti-climactic, they are despatched easily, before a twenty page coda involving empathy machines and a new religion - altogether too much back story to explain here.

So, the book. The women are hastily sketched Madonna/whores (surprise!), and there are obvious flaws in the internal logic (why, if sexual contact between people and androids is forbidden, are the androids capable of sexual acts) in order to push on the thought experiments so beloved of science fiction (what if there was someone who looked exactly like… etc); yet he pulls it off. This is a novel of character and place, and is even funny here and there. The philosophy and paranoia does stray over the annoying-line, but it passed an important test: I kept reading as I walked home from the station.

The Immoralist - Andre Gide

Ah, you know how it is, you spend your life studiously, barely noticing as you sleepwalk into a loveless marriage to make your father happy; then, on your honeymoon you almost die of tuberculoses, and the sight of a lithe young arab boy, naked beneath his gandourah, turns your bookish head. Then it’s a different life you seek, one guided by the pursuit of pleasure.

And so our pederastic hero cruises around northern Africa, then Italy, neglecting his saintly wife. There are plenty of nice dichotomies here for the English student: Michel constantly attracted by ‘the other’, be it the East, the rural, the life of action. But that’s all so obvious it’s not really worth discussing. It was written in, like, 1901, so the deviancy is implied; still, his transgressions are hinted at clearly enough to feel an empathetic thrill as he wakes up to life. The destination is not particularly mind-blowing, but the journey is told beautifully, and the translator is invisible.

Popular Music - Mikael Niemi

It’s strange the way this book has been marketed. The publishers are trying to push this as a charming Hornby-esque novel of small town life and adolescence through pop music. That’s not completely wrong, but it is only one side of the thing.

So it’s about a boy growing up in the far north of Sweden in the ‘60s. You’re thinking “Heartbeat on ice”; stop thinking that. I mentioned before that Eastern Europe is this hemisphere’s Latin America. I was wrong - I should have looked to Scandinavia. They have an aural tradition, trolls, perpetual daylight in the summer and nighttime in the winter; a hard existence, and with the Northern Lights, a sense of magic. Frequently this novel takes a turn for the fantastic - whether or not you enjoy these diversions depends on your tolerance for this kind of thing. Generally I disapprove, too frequently they are deus ex machina, but the balance is about right here.

This is not the social democracy of liberal dreams. Pajala, where the novel is set, is near the Finnish border, and many of its inhabitants speak a Finnish dialect. They are also largely alcoholic, stoic, suspicious and above all, macho. Essential to male behaviour is an avoidance of knapsu, things-that-women-do, unmanly pursuits. Into this world comes pop music, enthusiastically embraced by at least some of the town’s youth (the description of the first time they hear the Beatles is fantastic - in all senses - making us feel again the shock of this now familiar, wallpaper music). There are structural problems to Popular Music - it is a little too episodic - but, there are fantastic moments. Here is a description of why singing in English is certainly knapsu:

“a language much too lacking in chewability for hard Finnish jaws, so sloppy that only little girls could get top marks in it - sluggish double Dutch, tremulous and damp, invented by mud-sloshing coastal beings who’ve never needed to struggle, never frozen nor starved. A language for idlers, grass-eaters, couch potatoes, so lacking in resilience that their tongues slop around their mouths like sliced-off foreskins.”

The Sirens of Titan - Kurt Vonnegut

A friend of mine refuses to accept that this is a science fiction novel - if it is well plotted, funny and warm, with no talking robots, then how could it be?

Well, it is, there’s no getting around it. I don’t have much to add - except that it was refreshing to read something based on imagination rather than observation. I went for this as a toe-dip into the world of SF - I assumed there must be some good novels in there, but without knowing where to go I played safe with Vonnegut (I bought Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? at the same time - haven’t read that one yet). And yes, this a good novel, and I’m glad I read it. Where to go from here is another question - I’m open to answers.

Double Indemnity - James M. Cain

Cain is a great writer: great in a way I wouldn’t have noticed a few years ago. He breaks up opponents’ play deep in their own half, plays the simple pass and shoots when he can, usually from inside the box; no step-overs for Cain. With him you get crisply drawn characters, pacey plot and great dialogue; he writes in the service of the story, not to show you how clever he is.

It has been great, this wallow in the crime novel; my Waterstones 3 for 2 lake has now been drained, so this might be the last one for a while. I read this all the way up the road to my house, glancing occasionally for lampposts. Only certain books do that to you. The narrator's voice is engaging, he almost sounds like a hero; and Cain doesn’t blink as he shows him plan and carry out a murder. If I have a criticism it is that written in 1936, Freud’s shadow looms a little large over Double Indemnity, so certain motivations seem a little shaky. But hey, that’s the past for you, they didn’t know nothing back then.

Equal Danger - Leonardo Sciascia

It annoyed me as I read this, how good a book it was to be seen reading, or to say that you have read - regardless of whether you enjoyed it. It has an independent publisher (Granta), it is post-modern, it has an author who is both obscure and revered. Best of all, it’s not even Italian; it’s Sicilian.

But if the above make it a hard book to love, it has one major redeeming feature: it is very short. You don’t have to invest much time in it - lucky, or Sciascia’s casual round up and dismissal of his plot, like a millionaire lighting cigars with $100 notes, would be even more frustrating.

He’s good, you see, Sciascia, and he knows what he’s doing. Unfortunately what he does here is slightly annoying. He has a few other books in translation - I’ll be giving them a try; they’re short too.