May 2026 Reads

May 2026 Reads

New books coming in from various sources clashed with half term holidays and various other tasks intruding, though I managed to keep an eye on stack reduction with a a dip into an old favourite... 

The list

The New Abnormal - Kek-W

Good Omens - Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman

The Shadow of the Sun - Ryszard Kapuściński

The New Abnormal - Kek-W

A short story collection offering weird tales influenced by post-war sci-fi and weird horror. It was from Kek's bandcamp, where artwork and music also appear. I first heard about -W as a writer of stories for 2000 AD, the Galaxy's Greatest Comic, and the standalone Cap'n Dinosaur, written with Shaky Kane, is one of my favourite things ever. The stories in The New Abnormal are interesting, with a couple of them really hitting the spot. Cone Zero was fun, and I would be interested to discuss the uneasy horrors and false memories in Blue Raspberries and Moa Crowhide alongside Quentin S. Crisp's Hamster Dam as indicative of something or other. 
While some of the stories seemed to have ideas that fizzed off (as opposed to fizzled out - like, non sequitur fireworks? Seemingly not part of the same display, rather than damp squibs?), anyway, I like Kek-W, and this work, and it was a good start to the month.

 

 

Good Omens - Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman

Revisiting this several hundred years after I first read it, Good Omens book goes beyond a parody of The Omen, and has some genuinely moving moments in among the Pratchett-driven footnotes and word-play, and Gaiman-inflected moments of darkness. 
Adam is the Antichrist, but owing to an error is brought up as a normal young lad in rural Britain. Meanwhile, an angel (Aziraphale) and a devil (Crowley) lurk on the planet as kind of celestial/infernal sleeper agents, as an associated cast attempt to wrangle prophecy and actualisation of the Final Battle between Heaven and Hell... 

Sort of ubiquitous during the 1990s, this volume was not my original copy but a reprint, where they took out the funny author pic and legendary blurb about banana daiquiris and inserted fore and afterwords about the widespread success the book enjoyed, which seemed to have taken them by surprise a bit. 

These notes of self-congratulation rang slightly feedbacky given the further years of success for both writers, and then life happening while other plans were made. Some of the jokes haven't aged brilliantly. It seems unfair however that with Terry Pratchett now deceased, and Neil Gaiman's career currently likewise owing to a "difficult, complicated" context (Michael Sheen, who played Aziraphale in the truncated Netflix adaptation of the book), the book itself may become a footnote. I re-read it in a few quick sittings before 'moving it on with love', but if you like a humane and thoughtful style seasoned with jokes, and you missed out on this because of history, it's well worth your end times.     

 

The Shadow of the Sun - Ryszard Kapuściński

A friend loaned me this, a propos of us having heard about Kapuściński via some book podcast with Henry Rollins on it. Rollins' excited recommendation was enough for both of us, but he bought it first so I asked for a lend. 

What a writer. One gets the impression that of his several decades' experience as a correspondent in Africa, Kapuściński is barely communicating a fraction of the events, people, places he has seen. Some of those episodes seem unbearable in terms of the human cost - the chapters on Uganda, Rwanda and Liberia are particularly harrowing. However, others highlight a sense of true connection and love for what is to many people in the west still a single country (where there won't be snow at Christmas time) - this despite, as RK points out, even the 54 countries of arbitrary European division being inapt to encompass the 10,000 civilisations ranged across the continent. 

Definitely a "more by this guy directly, please" moment.

 

 Coming up next month:

 Have just started a long-overdue re-read of A Time to Keep Silence by Patrick Leigh Fermor; was hoping to include it this month, but it wouldn't do justice to rush it.

There will also be some Joan Didion and Cosey Fanni Tutti. 

 

The Fearful Void

(March 2025)

There's a moment where Geoffrey Moorhouse, on the first leg of an arduous journey across the Sahara the ill-advised latitudinal way, discusses the thought process that got him into this mess, and now prevents him from getting out of it.

"I was, simply, very afraid that I might become like these people... so my haunted imagination told me as it strove to delay the loss of self."

These ruminations being precipitated by taking a dump in a dune. Such mixing of the mystic and the coarsely material is something that Moorhouse leads us through repeatedly across a fascinated and fascinating book. 

Moorhouse's account of his alarmingly swift physical deterioration on the journey seems a salient lesson in any number of things. Blurb by Susan Hill refers to "courage, endurance, and triumph", which last adjective seems to discount the unfinished journey, the hallucinatory sickness, the "raw and weeping patches of flesh", to say nothing of a strongly-hinted-at imminent marital breakdown.

Such suffering seems at times not a noble achievement but an unnecessary one. A little hardship may be that grain of sand in the oyster of the soul, but Moorhouse's privations seem, at their worst, a kind of martyrdom, "beautifully written" though it is, at its best. His prose throws up more than occasional thrills of scale: at one point he and his current companion and their camels are "insects creeping forward to a rim of the world that might never be revealed, across pure and unbounded space..." The madman dragging himself across a desert of the mind, teetering "close to a brink of a revelation... But not quite" put me in mind of a tormented HP Lovecraft narrator, desperately scrawling their fleeting apprehensions of some vast exterior truth hinted at periodically in and on the distant hills.

To this reader in 2025, terrific though the book was, there was certainly something alien and peculiar in the scope of the project, with the British journalist moved to take up the journey because it's there, spied from the window of a passenger jet. The overt spiritual quest metaphor jostles alongside sociocultural and post-colonial allegory implied in the entire concept. The aptly-named imprint Paladin had a line in publishing similar accounts of post-war exploration and sixties ego-dislocation taken to literal extremes by (white European) hiking types. So, knight-errant Woodhouse tests his ideals of conquest and comes up short, left with a grasp at something numinous among the shifting sands of the desert. Or it could be he's merely poking at the remains of a rumination. Like the matter in the life-saving water he sips gratefully at one point, sometimes perhaps it's best not to look too closely.