The literary insomniac

The best way to get reading suggestions is still either personal recommendations from people whose taste you know, or from reviews. I read the Guardian's Saturday book reviews, but they're not always completely reliable. I can't be doing with the Times Literary Supplement or the London Review of Books -- they're both full of articles about how some minor mid-twentieth-century sculptor or poet I've never heard of is in need of a reappraisal, which is too much like hard work when I've never originally appraised them. The best place for proper reviews which introduce you to the book and give you a sense of whether you want to read it is the Literary Review, which treats intelligent reading like it should still be a pleasure. I stayed subscribed to this even during my postgraduate poverty years. The new issue arrived today and has an interview with Philip Pullman.

I'm wondering if I should reread Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy. As I remember it the first one is brilliant; the second is quite good; and the third one loses it, both in narrative (it gets all bogged down in strange dust and animals with wheels) and in the point it's trying to make. I'm not against things that argue against Christianity -- much of the time they seem to me to make interesting sense -- but this one was confused and odd. I'm probably missing something because a lot of people have been very impressed by it. It seems to be saying that organised religion is bad, but it still keeps the concept of sin -- it just suggests that because organised religion is bad, sin must be good. One of the characters is a new Eve, and it's vital that she "falls", which she does by engaging in some vaguely-described sexual behaviour with another slightly older kid. Of course it's possible that the book is trying to do something more interesting than I understood, because whether or not you think there's such a thing as sin, most people would see pubescent/pre-pubescent children having sex as a bad thing. It mostly just annoyed me, though.

I've just finished The Night Watch by Sergei Lukyanenko. It's quite good if you're looking for something reasonably non-draining in a fantasy sort of way but not too full of dragons. It's about someone who helps patrol the streets of Moscow keeping the balance between good and evil. He works for the good, but the organisation is a bit compromised, and in some ways more frightening than evil. I'll probably read the others, perhaps on holiday.