I don’t think I ever read books that I buy straight away, except fantasy books. I give them a while on the desk or the shelf, until they feel more familiar. If I had to say why, it’s because I have a weirdly disproportionate fear of experiencing greatness. Fantasy books get away with being crappy all the time. But when the literary bigwigs say: “hey, this is worth reading”, then I get the shakes. Just like a date with the sexy teacher. What if it’s TOO good? Eventually I’ll have to finish it. Maybe I just won’t start.

Grounds for a visit to the therapist, I know. But what’s the relevance? Nam Le has won the Dylan Thomas prize. This is where I’d usually smile beatifically and proclaim that I knew he would win. Well, I did know, but I still haven’t read his book, The Boat, yet. Le’s an impressive guy, all told, so I based my prediction on his scintillating and considered intelligence rather than being wooed by literary skill. Given that he can pull the most extravagant sentences out of his mouth and make them spin like sugar, I’m pretty sure his book will be monstrous good. I’ve got a copy of The Boat, a beautiful, powerful-looking hardback, sitting on my shelf at home. I’m really hesitant. It’s like saving the best for last, interminably. Yet another example of chronic neverreading. At this rate I will only ever read things written before 1980.

My friend Jake drew this idiosyncratic but functional-enough map to show me where we were meeting for lunch. It’s pretty good, at least, I got there in the end. But I would hate to think how long it took him to align those dots in an email client.

To make this a properly bookish post, the good folks (puppydog included) at Ready When You Are, CB are having a giveaway of every book they read until the end of 2008. Whoa, Betty!

I am a total broken record about Philip Pullman, ‘you should read him’ ad nauseam. Sure, you wish you could turn me off like a radio. But eventually you’ll pick this up for a young cousin or something, and you’ll read the (killer) first couple of pages and you will curse yourself a thousand times for not listening to me, and you’ll read it until you finish it or fall asleep with your nose on the paper.

I wish I’d read this fifteen years ago. It’s the third in the Sally Lockhart series — a Victorian mystery about a heroine who is feminist in word and deed, written so well that you can’t believe Pullman’s heart rate ever cracks a hundred. It’s just that good. It doesn’t dumb down to a younger audience, and would be a top instrument for introducing the complexities of legal process, race hatred, socialism and poverty to a future caring intellectual. I think it’s Michael Robotham who said that he doesn’t plan when he writes his crime books, and that he gets to a point where he feels like he can’t possibly extricate his character from the predicament he’s put them in. Reading this book is exactly the same, so urgent and heartbreaking that the ending is almost irrelevant because you’re so busy admiring Pullman’s guts. Ten out of ten resounding hurrahs.

Unprepossessing, right? Partly because of my non-glamour shot, but also the ‘hey did anyone brief the designer?’ cover. I left this lying around for ages because I couldn’t quite figure out the guy on the front wearing the two-tone fringed garments. Appearances aside, if you haven’t read this or any Saunders (I hadn’t), clear some space in your reading schedule. I mean it, there are two months left in 2008, you can do it.

CivilWarLand in Bad Decline is usually labelled satire, and it never pulls punches on the most ridiculous creations of our times. The titular Land is an embattled theme park harbouring costumed sweet-sellers and gimcrack machines in the guise of a historically accurate entertainment experience. Our hero (and I mean that only slightly ironically) is a chronic yes-man who, along with monitoring the park’s (real) resident ghosts and overseeing the Verisimilitude Irregularities List, agrees to an unusual internal insurance measure — an ex-serviceman with violent tendencies.

Saunders’ stories distinguish between two types of miscreant: the socially-sanctioned, self-preserving tyrant and the woefully under-equipped human excrescence. The former have the edge in numbers and jargon, but the latter possess the power to give these tyrants the shakes and this tension is made pivotal whenever it comes to a head. Unreal touches lend humour but also allow Saunders to more acutely propose the limited capacity of an individual’s agency in a society structured by the laws of the jungle. Less virtuosic than David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas but more immediate, CivilWarLand nevertheless has a similar apocalyptic inexorability to its lessons: learn now, or forever hold your peace.

Ugh. Okay. I am a pretty generous reader. While I’m reading, I can’t help but take notice of what doesn’t work, but afterwards I prefer to remember what I think the author has done well. There are obvious ‘pros’ in Brisingr, the third book in Christopher Paolini’s breakaway bestseller fantasy series: well-planned broad-scale writing, it’s fairly well-paced, one or two emphatic and wonderful characters. But there were a lot of ‘cons’ that sent smoke curling out my nostrils.

ONE: Paolini cannot write dialogue. Overexplanation, overcharacterisation, telling-not-showing, clunky dialect-rendering (when people say ‘aye’ every so often, they’re rural! or at least friendly!), it’s all there. I can’t tell you how many times I came across unnecessary words, sentences and exchanges that could and should have been sheared off. Bad dialogue turns characters from actors to bores, and I often had to suppress suspicions that some of the main people were really not very bright.

TWO: If you like things to be expressed elegantly (an adverb to be scorned by book critics, I know) or at least to be emotionally affecting, you won’t often find that in this book. The overwhelming impression is that of a second draft at best, with fan fiction-esque exclamation marks (…he wanted revenge!) and unanchored adventure-wish fulfilment moments (I’m enjoying fighting sooooo much, without qualification, even though I just had a massive ethical quandary about it) all too common.

THREE: The protagonist, Eragon — not my favourite-ever hero. Way too few redeeming points, and it usually takes a long and boring time for him to figure his thoughts out. (Plus, he’s not prone to very exciting thoughts.) Eragon was charming enough when he was a boy fiddling around with a dragon egg, but it’s close to crunch time in the series, and he still hasn’t got many defining characteristics. A bit whiny, actually. Lots of the other characters are way more compelling.

So, my open letter to Christopher Paolini: I know you take your work seriously, and you’ve done an okay job so far. But you make too much money from these books for me not to want to tell you this: curb your fan-fic tendencies, make Eragon more interesting and decisive, and the dialogue shorter and more pithy, or there will be blood.