Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel

I sleep too little, I work too hard. I have ambitions – material, professional, artistic – that go largely unrealised and spend most of my time doing what Ian Dury summarised in Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll as “business you don't like”. Life is hard and full of compromises and yet I wake up and face it day after day. Why do I do it? I make a good wage but I'm not really fussed by fancy stuff or expensive crap, and I reckon I could be just as happy – happier even! – dreaming my life away sitting in a public library in a malodorous alcoholic fug. Yet, I go on. What drives me to it, and keeps me going back for more?

These are the questions that literature asks us to consider and – at it's best – answers for us. The purpose of literature (I think) is to tell us truths that are not easily or convincingly conveyed in other ways, things that might sound banal or straight forward when articulated directly, but that inform our whole beings. To really know them, to really understand we have to see them in action, to be shown not told (to paraphrase that crusty old rubric) how life is.

The Quantum Thief

This is Rajaniemi’s debut novel, which - rumour has it - sold to Gollancz on the basis of the first chapter alone. The back cover blurb of this advance reader copy - which may or may not be the same as the final blurb - tells us it comes from “the same team that brought you Joe Abercrombie, Scott Lynch and Joe Hill” and exhorts us to “be there from the start.”

I hate this sort of hype. I'm the sort of dreary guy whose natural reaction is to sneer "yeah, sure!" and go over to the remaindered books and second hand shelves looking for the undiscovered rubies in the dust. I can't help feeling that it steals part of the joy of a great book, that sense of discovering something unexpectedly marvelous. 

I understand why it's there but we seem to be on a hype rollercoaster these days....