Guess who's back

Apologies for the break in transmission. The beginning of the year included massive amounts of teaching, marking and admin, helping with the very successful city literature festival (highlights: Liz Berry, Elvis McGonagall, Tracy Thorn) plus preparation for a job interview (this never happens) in the EU (which felt like planning a prison break). I didn't get it, but I didn't expect to. In any case, the suspense was somewhat lifted by another distraction - getting hit by a car on my cycle ride to work. Ironically, given my near-incessant moaning about selfish, aggressive and careless drivers, the guy who hit me wasn't any of these things: I came down a slight incline with low sun behind me and he couldn't see me as he pulled out of a junction. An unfortunate accident rather than anything more malicious. I broke my collarbone but my lovely, irreplaceable Moulton bike was largely OK, and my assailant paid for the repairs.

Since then I've been hanging around the house, sporadically reading in between extended bouts of self-pity. My friends have been wonderful - visitors most days, almost always bearing flowers or fine comestibles. I've read a lot of books (and only bought 2!) and largely avoided daytime TV. I won't be fencing or cycling for another 3-6 months but I'm hoping that I'll be able to wield an iron earlier than that. The first two weeks were terrible: shapeless sports gear made from artificial fibres – ugh.

Apart from 4 months doing a night-shift data-entry job with British Gas in 1996, this is the longest I've been out of education since 1980. I didn't miss the admin or the marking, but I did miss my students and colleagues a lot. I'm quite happy in my own company but staring at the same four walls for six weeks is quite long enough.

So here I am: picking up supervisions and union case work again, but otherwise meant to be writing a major grant bid and at long last turning my PhD dissertation into a book. Wish me luck.

(Look: managed to get through a whole blog post without mentioning the B word…).

Books read during my convalescence in no particular order:

Cynan Jones, The Dig: short, occasionally shocking naturalism. Definitely contains scenes of harm to animals.
Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland: astonishingly good - KIberd clearly read Imagined Communities and ran with it.
Kate Atkinson, Transcription: cracking good story, decent twist, but not as formally inventive as her work usually is.
Gardner/Carroll, The Annotated Alice: you'll feel like you fell down a rabbit hole but it's very much worth reading as a companion to the raw text.
Adam Thorpe, Still: not sure why I hadn't read this one before. It's seriously long, but totally justified. A Joycean tour of the twentieth-century through a bitter failed film-maker's 60th-birthday monologue.
Bill Newton Dunn, The Devil Knew Not: bad novel, interesting in other ways – Dunn was a Tory MEP who was largely pro-Europe, unlike his son, the political editor of the Sun.
Mike Berners-Lee, How Bad Are Bananas - a decade old, but a useful guide to the carbon footprint of everyday life. Bananas: not very bad. Cheese: terrible. Which is a shame for me because I far prefer the latter.
Pratchett/Baxter, The Long Mars: the best of this collaborative SF series so far.
Trollope, The Eustace Diamonds: I really like Trollope's novels, but this was 800+ pages of mansplaining. A Trollope too far, I fear.
Henderson, Rotten Reviews Redux: an amusing round-up of scathing reviews of books that came to be seen as classics. Dip into it before appraisals and job interviews.
Elvis McGonagall, Viva Loch Lomond: I saw EG at the Literature Festival and laughed long and loud. Funny, political, witty poetry. Best experienced live, but the collection is good.
Michael Marshall Smith, Only Forward: decent SF thriller with a better concept than plot.
Keith Roberts, Anita: the cover design and blurb makes it look like exploitative sexy fantasy. It's actually a 1960s youth echo of Lolly Willowes.
Paul McAuley, Mind's Eye: a decent mix of SF and detective adventure plus a healthily cynical take on British attitudes towards the middle East.
Omar El Akkad, American War: post-invasion Iraq translated to a torn, post-oil US: not a novel idea but well done.
Tiffany Murray, Diamond Star Halo: an interesting tale of first love and fame which can't decide whether it's popular romance or literary fiction, to the detriment of both. Some wonderful characterisation.
Adam Roberts, By The Pricking Of Her Thumbs: an excellent future-detective whodunnit by Roberts set in a Britain largely abandoned for virtual existence, and his first sequel.
Paul McAuley, Into Everywhere: a big, clever space opera with a philosophical core.
Nancy Mitford, Pigeon Pie: short, snappy, witty 1930s roman à clef by one of the Mitford Sisters. A delight.
Nicholas Blake, The Deadly Joker. Possibly the worst novel Blake (C Day Lewis) wrote.
Robert Dickinson, The Tourist: a funny crime thriller set in a seedy and insular early 21st-century Britain visited by tourists on package holidays from the future. Any echoes of Brexit are entirely incidental.
Muriel Spark, Territorial Rights: I thought this was a very damp squib. Short, with some witty observations and witty lampoons of dreadful bourgeois middle-class types, but utterly sexless and occasionally in very poor taste, unredeemed by having much to say.
Paul McAuley, Whole Wide World: a very early attempt to novelise the then-new implications of the Web. Stands up rather well.
Christopher Brookmyre, Pandaemonium. A mash-up of 70s horror, Alan Warner's The Sopranos, Derry Girls and The Exorcist. A glorious romp.
Ken McLeod, The Corporation Wars: Syndicalist Robots (and uploaded racists) in Virtual Space. What's not to like?
Samantha Shannon, The Priory of the Orange Tree: semi-progressive politics, sexually-progressive and feminist, but still 850 pages of high fantasy, with a lot of early-modern Japanese international relations thrown in. Lots of nice touches but needed an editor.
Wodehouse, The World of Blandings: also 800 pages set in a fantasy world, with lots of plot devices familiar from his Jeeves and Wooster stories. Paper thin but beautifully-constructed and written with the lightest of touches. Contains the immortal 'it is never difficult to distinguish between a Scotsman with a grievance and a ray of sunshine'.
Richard Adams, Maia: not a rabbit to be seen. Mostly badly-written soft-porn fantasy with occasional serious and interesting discourses on the social and economic effects of privatisation and what came to be known 30 years later as neoliberalism. No, really!