If you only see Heretic for Hugh Grant, that's more than good enough

I don’t mind a spot of on-screen horror – just not the slasher variety. Give me the likes of Peter Medak’s 1980 The Changeling, Jonathan Demme’s 1991 Silence of the Lambs, Mike Flanagan’s 2019 Doctor Sleep, Jordan Peele’s 2019 Us or last year’s Parallel from Kourosh Ahari.

To clarify further – I don’t mind a bit of violence on screen, but in-your-face gore and slasher stuff is a no-no for me, whether it’s horror or not. It’s not limited to that genre either. I entirely understand that the likes of Deadwood and The Sopranos are top-notch, serious TV dramas, but I could only ever watch them in small amounts because the violence (both spoken and enacted) was too much for me – and that was before I’d even heard the word ‘triggered’!

The trailer for Heretic, from joint directors and writers Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, had intrigued me, but I wasn’t sure enough that it wouldn’t descend to a degree of slasher mode, so didn’t catch it at my local cinema, where it only seemed to have a quite limited run.

Last weekend, I decided to give it a go via streaming. I’m very glad I did, because it absolutely fits into what I can enjoy.

Mormon missionaries Sister Barnes – confident in her faith and her evangelisation – and Sister Paxton (rather less so) are following up leads on potential converts and, as a winter storm breaks, visit the home of one Mr Reed, who has expressed an interest.

A middle-aged Brit living in a slightly remote – and very weird house that appears to combine both an Escher reality and a 1940s (or earlier) aesthetic – he assures them that (vital for female Mormons) his wife is baking blueberry pie in the kitchen so they won't be alone with a man, which covers the church’s rules of what company a female is allowed to be in.

When he goes to the kitchen, the women find that the front door is locked and that they have no phone signal.

Reed slowly ensnares them into a discussion of religion in general, within which he becomes increasingly aggressive. He then offers to show them a ‘real resurrection’.

Heretic is good because it takes its subject – religion – reasonably seriously in a philosophical sense. It doesn’t belittle the missionaries or their religion (or religion as a whole) and it allows them to stand up for it. Now I’m not religious, but I appreciate that.

The script allows for some really interesting looks at how you stay true to a belief – days later, I am still analysing the ending.

Sophie Thatcher as Sister Barnes and Sophie East as Sister Paxton are excellently played, nuanced characters, but Hugh Grant is sublime as the demonic, yet-suave, Mr Reed.

Really worth watching this, in my view.

Cult classic Phantom of the Paradise proves camp fun

Thanks to a birthday present from my niece, I’ve just seen Brian de Palma’s 1974 cult classic, Phantom of the Paradise, for the first time – and what a watch.

A rock musical comedy horror, it brings together reworkings of The Phantom of the Opera, Faust and The Picture of Dorian Gray, to tell the story of naïve songwriter Winslow Leach, who allows himself to be conned out of his magnum opus, a rock cantata of the Faust legend, by one of the henchmen of music producer Swan.

By the time he realises, it’s too late – and Swan unscrupulously has him beaten up, framed and jailed. But Leach escapes and heads toward the Paradise Club, which Swan is going to launch with a production of the cantata, to seek revenge – and rescue Phoenix, a talent singer that the producer is exploiting.

De Palma both wrote and directed it, and it goes at a frenetic pace for it’s 91 minutes. His send up of the music business was seen by many at the time as essentially pointless – remember what rock was like in the 1970s? – but the energy and the campness of the whole affair carry it through.

In terms of the campness, it’s interesting to note that it came out a year after The Rocky Horror Show premiered on stage in London, so arguably very much of a piece with that.

William Finlay does a fine job as the naïve songwriter/tortured phantom of the title, while Paul Williams makes a deeply disturbing Swan – looking rather like a short Brian Connolly from '70s glam rockers The Sweet.

He also wrote all the songs – his other musical credits include the score for Alan Parker’s 1976 film, Bugsy Malone).

Gerrit Graham makes a fine, campy turn as Beef, an over-the-top rock singer, while Jessica Harper, in her debut, as appropriately sweet and gutsy as Phoenix.

There’s a huge amount to take in visually. For instance, I loved that the stage set of the opening to Faust the musical, together with the costumes and makeup, recall Robert Weine’s German Expressionist masterpiece, Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari, while there are scenes – more mocking of the 1970s music business – that are orgiastic in nature, as though like something out of Caligula’s court.

All in all, a most entertaining watch.

A cast to die for as Jarmusch takes on zombie consumerism

It’s not over-hyping things when the tag line for Jim Jarmusch’s latest work, The Dead Don’t Die, says it has “the greatest zombie cast ever disassembled,” but the question is whether the film itself lives up to that.

Set in small town Centerville, the film opens as police officers Cliff Robertson and Ronnie Peterson confront one Hermit Bob about a missing chicken he’s been accused of stealing by redneck farmer Frank Miller.

As they drive back from the woods, they muse on how things seem strange – it’s light for much longer than it should be, for instance. Speculation is rife that such things, being reported across the world, are because polar fracking has shifted the world off its axis.

And with the moon glimmering in suitably weird colours, so the first re-animated corpses push their way up from their graves in the local cemetery.

What can Cliff and Ronnie do? They have only fellow officer Mindy Morrison to help, together with Zelda Watson, the new owner of the Ever After funeral home, a Scot who, when not making up the corpses in her care like drag queens, wields a katana.

Executed in the most deadpan style imaginable, The Dead Don’t Die has threads all over the place and tries to do myriad things. Possibly too many things – and certainly, not everything comes off. For example, it’s debatable whether breaking the fourth wall adds much – if anything.

But just as you ask yourself that, then you start wondering if if you’ve missed something.

It’s this that is part of what makes The Dead Don’t Die worth the effort: not only comment, but nods to other films – including those of zombie giant George A Romero etc. And it’s pretty certain that’ll miss things.

Then there are the performances from the stellar cast.

Bill Murray and Adam Driver as Cliff and Ronnie are ridiculously funny – in a very dry, slow, understated way.

Steve Buscemi makes for an excellent redneck farmer, complete with he red ‘Make America White Again’ baseball cap. Tom Waits growls his way through the film as Hermit Bob, maintaining an occasional commentary on unfolding events.

Danny Glover as Hank, the hardware store owner, and Chloë Sevigny as Mindy both turn in beautifully nuanced performances.

But the one that will stay in the mind is Tilda Swinton as Zelda, out-wierding everyone else on screen in a way that only she can do.

A special note on the casting of Iggy Pop as a coffee-obsessed zombie – a great touch. Sturgill Simpson’s title track also adds to the plus column.

The main theme is the environmental crisis facing us and its link to zombie consumerism, but there’s much more going on.

The Dead Don’t Die is a lot of hit and a bit of miss, but it kept my attention throughout – and my sense of intrigue – and if one thing is certain, it’s that I want to see Jarmusch’s latest again.

Us is a creepfest to exercise the mind

There are movies you see that you can assess quickly and easily: a dose of pure entertainment – great, good, bad or indifferent, but presenting no major demands on the mind.

And then there are films that stay with you, nagging away at the grey matter and demanding you try to get your head around them.

Us is very definitely in the latter category.

Written and directed by Jordon Peele, whose solo directed debut, Get Out, was a 2017 critical success, on one level this is a straightforward take on the home invasion genre.

We open in 1986, when young Adelaide Thomas is on vacation with her parents in Santa Cruz. At the beach, she wanders off and finds herself in a hall of mirrors, where an encounter with a doppelganger leaves the child with a serious case of traumatic stress.

Fast forward to the present day, where the adult Adelaide (now Wilson) is on her way to Santa Cruz with her own family – husband Gabe, daughter Zora and son Jason. She is nervous about the trip, but Gabe brushes off her worries, having bought a small boat as he tries to play keeping-up-with-the-Joneses with their far wealthier friends, Kitty and Josh Tyler.

It doesn’t take long before her fears are realised, as the family is attacked by a red-clad, scissor-wielding family of doppelgangers.

For Adelaide, there’s Red; Gabe’s mirror is Abraham; for Zora it’s Umbrae and for Jason, Pluto.

Freed from years of imprisonment below the ground, these shadow people all want Adelaide and family dead: slowly.

But is this just about Adelaide and her family – or is it wider?

Us is violent, funny in places and manages a pretty high level of tension and twists.

But it also leaves loads of questions – many prompted by the constant reminders of a Bible text, first seen on a handwritten placard in the 1986 segment.

Warning of the impending destruction of Jerusalem for the worship of false idols, Jeremiah 11:11 declares: “Therefore this is what the Lord says: ‘I will bring on them a disaster they cannot escape. Although they cry out to me, I will not listen to them’.” (New International Version).

What could be the false idols here? Hints at the ‘worship’ of technology and social media? Gabe’s attempts to compete materially with the Tylers?

The film could be ‘about’ succeeding – and then pulling the ladder up behind you. It could be about the huge chasms that exist in US society (and elsewhere). It could be about humans being their own worst enemies – and being disturbed and conflicted by modern life.

Peele’s writing and direction are intelligent and clever and this ebb and flow of (possible) subtexts makes it so satisfying. The score, by Michael Abels, is a really intriguing mix (and very effective in helping create the mood).

As to the cast, it’s excellent. Lupita Nyong’o is superb as Adelaide/Red and she seriously owns the piece.

But she gets fantastic support from Winston Duke as Gabe/Abraham, while the two youngsters – Shjahadi Wright Joseph as Zora/Umbrae and Evan Alex as Jason/Pluto – do remarkably well.

Elizabeth Moss as Kitty/Dahlia and Tim Heidecker as Josh/Tex also add clout to the whole.

It’s a bit weird watching a horror flick with an audience that produces a lot of laughs (nervous, shocked ones, presumably), but Us is a very successful creepfest that goes way beyond the much of the genre and will live long in the mind and is the sort of film that you can well imagine wanting to watch again.

Alien: Covenant – frustrating and fascinating

If ever a film was deserving of the description ‘mixed beast’ then Alien: Covenant is it.

Dissatisfying and satisfying in approximately similar amounts, it prompted me to consider ratings and what I’d give it, and I’d probably do three stars out of five.

On the cons side, it suffers from a number of things –- not least being the latest instalment in the Aliens franchise. Part one is an icon of the horror genre, with part two not far behind. Part three was dire, while the fourth instalment is as divisive as Marmite (I like it).

Then there was a long gap before Prometheus. Which was awful – a point not helped because it didn’t ‘feel’ as though it belonged to the same family as any of the films that had gone before.

In many ways, neither does this. It feels as though it belongs somewhere else – and that's not a bad thing.

It begins before Prometheus, with the perfect synthetic David being ‘awoken’ by his father/creator Peter Weyland, and then moves us fast forward a decade to the ship Covenant, which is on a long trip to set up a new colony, with 2,000-odd humans and a thousand embryos sleeping/stored until they arrive.

The crew too is asleep with only a synthetic, Walter, around to run routine operations with Mother, the ship’s computer, when a fluke of an accident sees the crew woken and the captain dead.

As they repair the ship, the crew comes across a human transmission – someone singing a John Denver song. When they discover that the signal is from a nearby planet that seems perfectly suited for human habitation, reluctant acting captain Oram overrides arguments that it’s all too good to be true, and sets them on course to investigate.

Down on the planet, Oram and a team find more than they bargained for  not least, David – ‘brother’ to Walter and last survivor of the Prometheus.

Frankly, the first chunk feels slow and is far from great – not helped by having a generally unmemorable crew. Compare that to the first film with it’s outstanding ensemble.

Katherine Waterson as Dany and Danny McBride as Tennessee are really the only two who make – are allowed to make – any impact.

Where the film starts coming into its own is when David and Walter meet – and it benefits hugely from two superb, intertwined performances by Michael Fassbender as both synthetics.

There are gory deaths aplenty as we are introduced to whole new flavours of aliens – someone has been playing god with genetics. And there are some very clever twists amid the horror – slipping on blood in an attempted escape is just one.

Some of the visuals are superb, but the script by John Logan and Dante Harper is flawed.

While there are enjoyable elements of philosophical questioning – the nature of gods/creators and the act of being creative; the question of artificial intelligence overtaking the human intelligence that creates it and more – having made a point of Oram having a religious faith, it then fails to explore this.

One is left only with the vague notion that perhaps Oram’s ignoring of reasoning in his desire to quickly find a paradise, is indicative of religious faith.

Perhaps much of this is director and producer Ridley Scott continuing to work through some of the same subjects that he has for years – see Blade Runner, for instance – with the added intensity of age.

The ending is genuinely creepy and the use of Entry of the Gods into Valhalla from Wagner’s Das Rheingold to bookend the film is actually very effective, not least because of the different ways it’s played: by solo piano initially and then in the full orchestral version – indicating a theme developed.

Flawed without doubt, it is a movie that nonetheless gets under the skin. But while the themes can be explored in other settings and contexts, please let’s make this a day for the Alien franchise.

The books are sorted

Every year it’s the same: as the beach hoves into view, there’s a tower of books somewhere in the flat that, like a form of literary jenga, has items removed and others added as the days pass.

This is the holiday reading list and the compilation of it has become a tradition.

There are people who look askance at me and ask why on earth I don’t read on some form of electronic device and thus remove the need to carry books at all.

There are a number of reasons – including my lack of interest in exposing electronic gadgets to the sea, salt, sand etc.

There’s the point that, while I am far from being a luddite when it comes to technology and while I do have a tablet, I actually like books – not just for what they hold within their pages, but for the sheer physical feel and smell and look of them.

And it is most certainly true that, since I spend most of my working days in front of a computer screen, not to spend recreational time reading on another screen!

This year’s reading list is topped – or bottomed, given how the pile is currently constructed – by a collection of the translated works of Spanish poet Antonio Machado.

Machado had to flee Franco’s fascists and made his way over the border into southern France, where he died in Collioure. He was buried in the village cemetery.

It seems like the time to get to grips with such a figure.

Next up, was going to have been Stephen King’s Under the Dome, an 880-page epic.

I ‘discovered’ King back in the early to mid-’80s: I’d injured my back at polytechnic as a result of the actions of someone running a ‘voluntary’ workshop, and some months later been thrown off the course after my family GP signed me off for a week extra at Easter because of the state I was in.

Over the next year or so, I found I could barely read. I’d pick up a book – sometimes something new, sometimes an old favourite – but could rarely get more than a few pages in.

One day, I was browsing a little local bookshop in Lancaster, when I came across some of King’s novels.

I don’t think I’d ever read any horror before – and if you’d asked at the time, I suspect I would have declared that it didn’t appeal to me. But something made me pull Christine off the shelf and decide to buy it.

It was finished in days. The Stand followed. And many more.

When I need a reading boost, I still turn to King.

Last year, I’d had such a need and had bought myself Revival, which I enjoyed. As a result, my parents decided to get me Under the Dome for Christmas. For various reasons, I only got my hands on it just under a fortnight ago – and thought how apt that timing was, as it would make marvelous holiday reading.

It won’t be seeing Collioure.

A couple of days later, going through another slow-reading phase, I picked it up. It was finished in eight days – a rollercoaster of a tale. King really is a master storyteller: he makes it seem impossibly simple, but his stories have complexity and great subtlety and they catch a great deal of truth about the condition of being human.

With that now off the list, I’ve picked up Duma Key to give me another dose of King.

Every year, I try to give myself some ‘serious’ literature to read. I’ve been saying for some time that this would be The Year of Proust – except that it won’t. I need easy reading.

With that in mind, Jonathon Meades’s Museum Without Walls has also now fallen off the list.

What are still there are Anno Dracula Cha Cha Cha and Moriarty The Hound of the D’Ubervilles, both by Kim Newman.

I’ve read his first two Dracula books – and thoroughly enjoyed them – so decided to take the third, plus the Moriarty book, which promises more cultural mash-up fun, and already has me thinking of Alan Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (The book. Not the film).

The second volume of Paul O’Grady’s autobiography, The Devil Rides Out, is present on the pile, as is John Wyndham’s The Chrysalids.

And then there’s the book I’ve just started, but won’t get anywhere near through before departure later this week.

Back in 1987, I picked up a copy of Frank Herbert’s Dune. I was impressed enough that I bought Dune Messiah, but not impressed by that (I no longer even have it).

On the 50th anniversary of its publication, it seemed the perfect time to give it a re-read – and already I’m seeing and appreciating things I didn’t first time around. It's also possible that the film has managed to remove any sense of the themes of the book from my mind.

Finally, the most recent tome to join the stack is Redemption Ark, the second part of Alastair Reynolds’s Revelation Space trilogy. I don’t mind a bit of space opera and read the first part a few years ago. Since it’s part of The Other Half’s extensive sci-fi collection, it was an easy pick.

And with just over 24 hours to go, that’s the holiday reading sorted. Perhaps …

So what about all those books?

Phillip Marlowe: more integrity than any Nabakov creation

After all the fuss about what books I was going to cart from London to the south of France, the question now is: was it worth it?

Well, the list ended up very much as I wrote on 6 August: I was half way through Marco Vichi’s Death in August, the first Inspector Bordelli mysteries, and so brought that to finish it.

Then, in order of how they were read, came Gore Vidal’s Julian, Nabakov’s Laughter in the Dark, Paul O’Grady’s At My Mother's Knee ... And Other Low Joints, Raymond Chandler’s The Little Sister, Kim Newman’s Anno Dracula: The Bloody Red Baron, Chandler’s The Long Goodbye and finally, a collection of Thomas Mann’s short stories, including Mario and the Magician and The Black Swan.

Briefly: it took me until about half way to get into Vichi’s tale, but once there, I was planning getting the subsequent books.

An intriguing and pleasantly intricate plot, plus some very human development and back story.

The Chandlers are – well, wonderful. Chandler was a poet. And Marlowe is a superb creation.

The Newman was thoroughly enjoyable: I was slightly wary of his era on this one, being as the first world war was so horrific, but I think he gets away with it (it is an alternative history, after all). It’s well written and loaded with very clever literary and history references. This is vampire fiction for people with brains.

Paul O'Grady as the magnificent Lily Savage

The first volume of Paul O’Grady’s autobiography is excellent – I bombed through 500 pages in little more than a day. Massively readable – a superb and utterly convincing memoir of growing up in post-war working-class Birkenhead: funny and poignant and very honest. I look forward to reading the second volume.

Now (cracks fingers) for the somewhat longer considerations.

Vidal’s Julian is superb: light and yet based on serious historical knowledge and understanding. It’s not for nothing that Vidal was so highly regarded as a writer of historical fiction.

It’s witty, catty, bitchy, sharp, and also humane, human, poignant and, in the end – and despite what one might expect – very moving. Remarkably, even though he doesn’t create a set of characters that are intended to be easily likeable, by the denouement, you actually hold the eponymous Julian in enough regard that you care what happens to him and how.

In the meantime, the book has Things to Say. And the biggest thing that it has to say is about the nature of religion as a whole and Christianity specifically.

The dominant point about Christianity that Vidal makes is that none of it was unique: that it was all plagiarised from other, older religions.

But he does it, as you would expect, beautifully.

Then we move to the Nabakov.

Now I’ll say, to begin with that I rate Lolita as an astonishing and brilliant book, and Pale Fire is just sheer genius. I don’t think that anyone in the 20^th century used language in the way that Nabakov did.

The Blue Angel – well before Laughter in the Dark

And to be strictly fair, the author himself never claimed to ‘say’ anything or ‘mean’ anything.

But in lacking any morality – for want of a better word – his books leave a certain coldness. And Laughter in the Dark is no exception.

Indeed, the idea of the upright man brought low by a woman wasn’t even an entirely original premise: to mention just one, Heinrich Mann had done it in 1905 with Professor Unrat, which became the iconic movie, The Blue Angel.

So what does Nabakov bring to that theme? Well, nothing, except the cleverness.

Yes, it’s clever: he wrote it in Russian originally, but translated it into English himself – another mark of the genius of the man – but for all the cleverness, it’s lack of a soul is telling.

I wonder how much Nabakov has influenced more recent English literature (and the “English” is deliberate and intended to be quite specific).

How many writers have felt that they wanted to rise to the challenge of Nabakov’s literary brilliance, but cannot offer even that in order to compensate for what are, essentially, the stories of nasty people with no redeeming features?

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not saying I won’t read any more. Nabakov can dazzle. But his entire oeuvre doesn’t have the integrity that Chandler brings to a single short volume.

And it leaves you with a slightly uncomfortable taste – almost as though you were guilty of some verboten indulgence.

And so to Mann. Well, I’ve only just started the collection in question, but what a joy to be back with him. And he makes for a fascinating comparison with Nabakov.

Maybe it’s just my rather puritanical, northern European Protestant background, but I found myself relieved to be back with Thomas: moral, ethical, thinking, questioning, doubting Thomas. Nothing rushed, but everything planned and executed with the greatest care and deliberation.

Mann might have lacked the obvious flair that Nabakov had, but I know which I prefer. And I know which, in spite of the surface cleverness, I think is actually the better writer – and the writer whose work and thought continues to have genuine relevance for our times.

Although the more I think of it, perhaps Nabakov is the writer for our days: all style and no substance. Just as Dalì was an artist that was the father of an art for our times, in much the same mode.

So if you don’t like such depressing thoughts, stick with Mann for real substance: or Vidal, for that matter. For all the literary fireworks, both ultimately show Nabakov wanting and leave him standing. And if that's heresy, I'm with Vidal on that subject.

How many books can I pack?

Gore Vidal – purveyor of light fiction?

It's the time of the year of The Book. Or rather, The Books. How many? What sort? Light? Heavy? Fiction? Non-fiction?

This year, the great debate about holiday reading matter has only begun earnestly far later than usual.

An initially rather ambitious list had been sketched out in my mind for some time, but the ensuing weeks had seen it redrafting itself in less literary terms.

It was the moment, I'd decided, for Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain. The chance to spend pretty much entire days reading is the perfect time to get into such a book.

But with a certain rueful sadness, I've been pushing that idea toward touch. Frankly, I'm just too tired.

I had also been contemplating Lewis Lockwood's Beethoven: The music and the life, but have abandoned that in favour of the first volume of Paul O'Grady's autobiography, At My Mother's Knee ... And Other Low Joints, which has been recommended as a damned good – and very funny – read.

But then something rather unusual happened – unusual, that is, because in general, I'm a rather slow reader and because, right now, I'm spectacularly knackered.

Yet in successive weekends, I've swept through The Lady in the Lake and The High Window, with Simenon's Maigret and the Black Sheep (poorly translated, since you ask) in between, so it struck me that a full-blown Raymond Chandler binge seems to be on the cards.

In which case, my Book Club 1979 omnibus, containing Playback, The Long Goodbye and The Little Sister, looks set to travel. It was one of my first real adult books, and it's got Bogart on the cover.

St one time or another, I've read all the Philip Marlowe novels, but with the exception of The Big Sleep, none of them for a good 20 years or more.

No extra Maigret will travel, because they're so short that I've had to take a shed load to make it worth while.

It did raise the point in my mind, though, of the snobbery that still surrounds genre fiction. Chandler's novels are superbly written – there's a poetic quality to the prose – with both intelligence and an understanding of the universal human condition.

I'd suggest that they have far more to say to us (and are a vastly better read) than much of what I've read in recent years that passes as modern English 'literature' (it's a wonder how Blake Morrison's The Last Weekend, for instance – a book that I was handed to review when a positive review was demanded – has ever received plaudits: it has so much less subtlety than anything Chandler wrote, yet it's 'literature').

Jean Gabin: 'Maigret needs you!'

Simenon may not be in quite the same class – although that may not be helped by translation matters – but the Maigret novels are still stylish and tight, with an underlying empathy for the ordinary man and woman in the street.

Only a short while ago, Iain Banks died. Hailed for his literary works such as The Wasp Factory and The Crow Road, but less so for his sci-fi novels, which were even published under the ever-so-slightly different name of Iain M Banks.

Literature and genre fiction, it seems to say, can never quite meet.

But Banks's Culture novels are not simply great yarns -–and they are most certainly that – but they also have depth, and use the world he created to explore some fascinating ideas.

And Consider Phlebas is, for me, that very rare beast: a sci-fi novel that I've read more than once - a stonkingly good space opera that goes beyond any confinements of (sub) genre and into being a good piece of literature.

Terry Pratchett is another who suffers from this snobbery about the divide between genre fiction and Literature, although the volume and overall consistency of the quality of his satire has, to an extent, forced the naysayers' backs against the wall.

Admittedly, that's partly because satire is a very English form of literature, with a long and glistening tradition - even if some people seem to have forgotten that Pride and Prejudice is essentially a satire and not an 18th-century rom-com.

Tom Sharpe – another who has lately departed this life – was a particularly savage example of the species and, as a satirist, his work was never subject to stuck-up-nose syndrome.

Incidentally, if you haven't read them, Riotous Assembly and Indecent Exposure, his first two novels, which are an assault (and battery) on apartheid in South Africa, are well worth a read. Having visited Pietermaritzburg, where both novels are set, it's almost frightening real. Indeed, I'll swear blind I've actually met one of his characters there.

Personally, I think Pratchett is better: where Sharpe most often seems just to be rage, with Sir Terry, there's a deep underlying humanity, and his characters are far more rounded than Sharpe – or, for that matter, PG Wodehouse.

Finally – the light fiction.

Samuel Vimes, for instance, who appears in a number of the Discworld novels, is a delightful and enormously believable creation.

And Pratchett too is the one author I can think of who has made me howl with laughter on one page and shed a tear just a turn of the page later.

If the difference between literature and popular fiction is that, at core, the former makes you think, then Pratchett does that. As does Iain M Banks.

But back to the books list. After such a sudden spurt of reading, I'm back in the mood for some more serious stuff.

So the pile – and it does exist as a real, actual pile – is now made up of a collection of Mann's short stories, including Mario and the Magician and The Black Swan, plus Gore Vidal's Julian and Nabokov's Laughter in the Dark.

Then there's the O'Grady, plus the second installment of Kim Newman's Anno Dracula alternative history/horror/steampunk/fantasy series, The Bloody Red Baron (I read the first part in Collioure last summer and it was very good).

And some more crime fiction in Involuntary Witness, a police procedural from Italy's Gianrico Carofiglio.

Now remind me: this is the easy reading selection, right?