2007 books

35) Peter Watts, Blindsight, 2006
A vampire-led first contact mission is sent to the outer reaches of the solar system to encounter some very powerful and very alien aliens, and what they find there, and what they decide to do about them, will determine the future of the human race. Blindsight has to be one of the best hard SF reads of 2006, of such a driven quality that its place on this year's 'best novel' Hugo shortlist seems pretty well completely justified. Watts gets the maximum mileage out of his bizarre-but-just-about-believable crew, none of them likeable and all observed by a most unreliable narrator, and he writes with an almost visible chiaroscuro, delineating these individually dark characters out from the same set of shadows while at the same time almost pushing the alien encounter itself into second billing. The array of concepts Watts covers all overlap and intersect intelligently, and his extrapolations (all except that of vampires being an extinct early offshoot of man) are expanded upon in a lengthy afterword, which in tandem with the novel itself marks him out as a serious SFnal thinker to keep a future eye on. A very apt word describing his style appears somewhere among Blindsight's several cover pull-quotes: "snarly". Blindsight is most certainly that, dangerously and deliciously so.

2007 books

36) Farley Mowat, The Dog Who Wouldn't Be, 1957   (RECOMMENDED BY voidampersand )
A portrait of Farley Mowat's family dog Mutt, who he owned as a young boy while growing up in 1930s Sakatchewan. Mowat puts across Mutt's eccentricities quite well, as Mutt discovers what he's either unexpectedly good or bad at, and Mowat's closeness to and amazement of his subject sometimes verges on the adulatory. But it's also a good anecdotal read, and the final chapter on Mutt's sudden death is particularly sad, and poignantly composed. Mowat also goes into his various encounters with other semi-domesticated wildlife, including owls, snakes and skunks, making this a good Canadian counterpart to Gerald Durrell's My Family and Other Animals.

2007 books

37) Paul Murphy, Experience Preferred... But Not Required, 2006
An easy collection of fictional first-person portraits with the common theme of Westerners teaching English to Thais in Bangkok (a world I expect I may enter myself in years to come). Once I got past the utterly dreadful cover, the piss-poor typesetting and the absence of the author's name on the cover, this actually turned out to be a good small collection, covering the extremes from the most boringly competent educators to the embarrassing have-a-go failures such as the middle-aged divorcee Brit who mistakenly marries a Bangkok bar girl, a story which despite its completely predictable tramline of events is actually a realistic and sympathetic character study. Unchallenging, but consciously educational.

April 2007: 10 best photos

Sydney Opera House
8 seconds @ f.3.5 at midnight. At a much larger size you can see stars. ( 7 APRIL )

( + 9... )