I’ve held off reviewing this book, which I got for Christmas, because although it is an enjoyable round-the-houses freewheeling discussion of type and typography, I felt bitter because I knew I could have written it.

Type has been an interest of mine since I wrote my MA dissertation on it in the mid-90s. Even so, I’m no particular authority. I started looking into the subject because I was puzzled by my hatred for the two standard default fonts of the time, Helvetica and Times New Roman. I wanted to know whether my feelings were irrational or not, so I started to read around, and discovered a huge collection of books about type in the university library.

There were two interesting aspects to that. The first was that nobody had taken any of the books out for at least 25 years. The second was that the very existence of all these books made it clear that books about type have been around for as long as there has been type. It’s probably the first example of culture eating itself or going all postmodern and meta, whatever. All of which makes type a more fascinating subject than most.

Ironically, as the world moves away from the desktop and laptop computer and a stuffed fonts menus towards closed mobile platforms with a very limited collection of fonts, it seems that type is more popular and interesting than ever. Furthermore, the world is spiralling towards the use of one font for every purpose.

There’s a chapter on Comic Sans here, as you might expect, but in my view it hardly goes far enough. Garfield’s a journalist, of course, which means he’s practiced in not upsetting his readers. I’d be happier to see the inherent ugliness of comic sans discussed, not to mention the gross insult it represents to real comic book and graphic novel lettering, If people like that kind of thing, they should bloody well like that kind of thing, not some pale imitation of it. Apart from that, the widespread abuse of Comic Sans (from primary school signage, to hotel restaurant menus, to illuminated cinema signs, to “QUIET PLEASE EXAM IN PROGRESS”, is something you could write a whole book about. After 550 years it comes to this, etc.. But clearly Garfield wanted to move swiftly on to more interesting fonts, and I don’t blame him.

I’ve been told for five years that “experts” recommend the use of Comic Sans for struggling readers etc., but I’ve always argued that these e”experts” are nothing of the kind and that Rosemary Sassoon‘s set of typefaces are properly researched designs for struggling readers. But then Comic Sans is free. A recent article in the TES revealed that new research has found Comic Sans is a good choice precisely because it’s so hard to read, and that this enhances people’s ability to remember what they’ve read.

But as I always end up saying, nobody reads your handout in Comic Sans. Students never read anything you give them – at all – unless you read it for them. Even then they never remember. What proper research shows is that people prefer what they’re familiar with. They prefer it if you don’t make them notice the font, in other words, which is what real experts in typography have been saying for 500 years.

There are chapters here on a variety of fonts. None of it terribly detailed or in depth. The idea is to entertain the casually interested reader. Anyone with a real interest in type will find nothing new here.

So, recommended, especially if you’ve never read a book about type before.

Related Articles

• Turns Out Comic Sans Is Good for Something [Fonts] (gawker.com)
• Design for Hackers: Why You Hate Comic Sans (kadavy.net)

I first read this book some time ago, but appear to have forgotten to post a review. Never mind, I just re-read it and enjoyed it more the second time.

This is the story that the movie Avatar could have been, had it been made by somebody with imagination and taste. But there’s no Hollywood ending here.

Isis is the nearest accessible planet, reached by some mode of transport with Higgs in the title, though how it works is not explained. Not important, either, because the real story here is that Isis has an environment that looks hospitable enough: liquid water, verdant vegetation, DNA-based life in abundance; but is toxic in every possible way. Not just toxic, but virulent. Contamination leads to almost instant death and deliquescence as the planet’s bacterial life forms attack our solar system’s DNA.

The few human bases on the surface are under constant attack from the Isis biosphere, and require constant maintenance and repair. To make matters worse, this future human society is rigidly hierarchical, divided between Earth-born aristocratic “Family” members and space-born, genetically modified, more egalitarian spacers.

Both biosphere and society are hostile to normal human life. Into this environment comes Zoe, last surviving clone of a genetically-modified group of siblings. Zoe has new protective equipment to test in the field. She worships Theo, the Family member who has been her mentor and protector; Theo, on the other hand, sees Zoe as a valuable commodity in line with her new design suit.

We join the story as the Isis biosphere seems to have developed – somehow – much more virulent bacteria, which is able to invade the seals of the human habitat pods more effectively than ever before. The various stations on Isis go into crisis, and the subsequent evacuations lead to a crisis in the orbiting station. Zoe meets Tam Hayes, station commander, and slowly realises that she likes him more than she like Theo.

Meanwhile, Zoe is sent out on her first external testing mission. Her equipment appears to work well – but the political manoeuvrings and biological crises at her home base put her in greater danger.

This is a 200-page novel that would make a gripping 2-hour science fiction film for people who actually like, you know, science fiction. It’s always a disappointment to me that with the resources and budget available to the likes of James Cameron, he chooses to make an overlong remake of Pocahontas rather than the something original and challenging. It’s not as if there aren’t heroes and villains here, as well as spineless cowards, irrational social hierarchies, and mysterious scientific puzzles.

This is not the best Robert Charles Wilson novel, but worth picking up nevertheless.

This is my first non-Wallander Mankell. My wife borrowed it from the library. I wasn’t sure I’d like it (I didn’t enjoy the Wallanders all that much), but after a few pages, I got into this and enjoyed it, if enjoyed is the right word for something so downbeat.

A disgraced surgeon in his mid-60s lives in self-imposed exile on an island off the Swedish coast. In the depths of winter, the only other person he sees regularly is the nosy hypochondriac postman. The sea is frozen all around, and each morning he punishes his body by digging a hole in the ice and plunging in.

Then, out of nowhere, a face from the past turns up, Harriet: a woman he unceremoniously dumped forty years before. She has tracked him down to make him fulfil a promise, and, mainly out of guilt, he agrees to try.

Everyone in this book is afflicted: by old age, by guilt, by illness, by lousy childhoods, abuse, and botched surgery. Only the postman is healthy, and he is a hypochondriac. In taking Harriet to find a mythical tarn deep in the woods, the narrator involves himself unwittingly in the lives of others. Things get complicated. He meets a semi-retired Italian shoemaker, who agrees to make him a pair of custom shoes that will be ready in a year.

The metaphor of shoes is a good one. In To Kill A Mockingbird, Atticus suggests to Scout that she needs to spend time walking around in other people’s shoes in order to empathise with them. So wearing shoes can be a metaphor for empathy, but it also has to do with being comfortable in your own skin, comfortable in the world, having chosen the right path in life, and so on. Mankell doesn’t labour the point, however. It’s not as if page after page is filled with the narrator complaining about his uncomfortable shoes. But there’s something here about caring, about connecting with others, and about taking pains. Painstaking is one of those things that very few people are up for, these days. It’s almost an insult to suggest that someone is doing so.

Needless to say, as the shoes are being made, events unfold. People and pets die; people turn up and leave again; mistakes are made, and unmade. Mankell pulls off a clever trick: he creates an entirely unsympathetic narrator, and makes you care about him. I actually preferred this, in the end, to most of the Wallanders.

I can’t quite believe that I’d never read it, but I’ve had a copy of Smiley’s People sitting on my bookshelf for a good long time. I have to be in the mood for Le Carré, and that mood often coincides with the warmer weather. Obviously, I’ve seen bits and pieces of the telly adaptations, but the BBC made Smiley’s People in 1982, and that happens to coincide with one of my longer telly-free periods of life.

But I recently heard a bit of the recent radio adaptation and it was so immediately intriguing that I finally got around to picking it up.

It almost needs no introduction. Smiley works for British intelligence and has been valued for his brain (his ability to think, specifically) throughout his career, but is now retired. But then one of his old agents is shot, and he gets an opportunity to go up against his nemesis, Karla, one last time. The Cold War is in its last decade.

You probably know the story better than I. As with all Smiley novels, the pace is slow, and the build-up is inexorable. The facts are revealed to us like chinks of light through a curtain. Everything is controlled, and you never know who can really be trusted. It’s a fascinating read, and makes you nostalgic for the Cold War – but then who isn’t, in these days of a rather warmer war?

Our Game, on the other hand, is typical of later Le Carré (similar to novels like The Tailor of Panama, The Night Manager, and Absolute Friends), in that he pitches an individual (who is no George Smiley) against the organisation which has either betrayed or lost faith in him. Le Carré’s righteous anger at the abandonment of principle in the post Cold War era is evident here, in the story of an agent handler who has – like Smiley – retired from the Service. Tim Cranmer was considered too Old School for the post-Soviet era, and lives in a rambling country pile with his new girlfriend Emma, who is much too young for him.

One of his former agents, Larry Pettifer goes missing, along with Emma, and Cranmer comes under suspicion when it appears that a sum of money has disappeared, too. But this plot is just the clothes hanger for the real story here, which is Le Carré’s rather prescient assessment of unfolding events in the North Caucasus: between the Black Sea and the Caspian sea, in and around Georgia, Chechnya, North Ossetia, and Ingushetia. The area has a history of genocide, civil war, ethnic and religious conflict, and indifference from the international community. Published in 1995, Le Carré points his laser pointer at the region and unpacks some of the problems, throwing Cranmer into the middle of them in his pursuit of Larry and Emma.

A comparison between the two is unfair. You’ll want to read the Smiley if you read just one – but then you can’t just read one Smiley, whereas at least Our Game stands on its own.

Which reminds me, I still haven’t read The Secret Pilgrim…

With a name like that, it will be hardly surprising to learn that Margo Lanagan is an Australian writer, and this collection of stories was originally published in 2004. I picked it up because a reviewer in the Guardian included it in a list of the most underrated books of the past decade (notwithstanding the fact that the decade hasn’t ended yet).

These are rather loosely classified as fantasy stories (and the edition I purchased was published by Gollancz SF), which may be why they’ve not been widely read, and why the Guardian writer considered them criminally unrecognised. They’re not swords-and-sorcery type fantasy, they’re really more like literary stories with a twist, although there are some extraordinary events herein.

The opening story is very strong: “Singing My Sister Down” is about an extraordinary death penalty ceremony, in which a woman who has apparently murdered her husband is condemned to sink slowly into a tar pit. You can read this story if you consult the preview on Google Books. Nothing much about the society in which this event takes place is really explained, and there are many gaps that the reader has to fill in, which makes this story typical of the collection. The stories are all very allusive, full of space and mystery, which I found slightly annoying after a while.

There’s not much of the beginning-middle-and-end with these stories; they really just evoke an atmosphere, a peculiar set of circumstances, and move on without much resolution. This may suit you if you’re into the more literary type of short story.

My expectations of The Windup Girl couldn’t have been higher, really, as I’d been blown away by some of Bacigalupi’s shorter work, but in the end I found it quite a struggle to read. This may be down to personal factors: bad sleeping habits/patterns, too many distractions, work stress, FAWM participations etc., which means that the novel itself is probably not at fault. It was named by several publications as one of the best novels of 2009, but I am a contrarian by nature.

This novel is set in the same frighteningly plausible dystopian near future as Bacigalupi’s short stories “The Calorie Man” and “Yellow Card Man”. In fact, “Yellow Card Man” works as a prequel to this, as that story’s main character is one of the main points of view in the novel, and the windup girl herself puts in an appearance in the story too. Windups are “new people”: genetically modified, sterile, lab-created beings. The windup girl of the title was trained as a servant (something like a modern-day geisha) for a rich Japanese businessman, then abandoned in Thailand, where she has no legal status. Emiko has flawless skin: so flawless that she lacks the pores that would allow her to sweat and adjust her temperature. In energy-poor Thailand, where ice is a luxury, she lives in constant need of ice water.

The population of the near future Thailand is under pressure from climate change and rising sea levels, genetically modified crops, spreading super strains of crop diseases, energy rationing, political and religious upheavals, war, and the damage wrought by indifferent, greedy, agri-chem companies. Anderson, working undercover for one of the corporations is after a mythical prize: a seed bank of extinct, unmodified, food crops. Meanwhile, Thai environmental police (“White Shirts”) try to keep the borders closed against illegal goods, in constant conflict with the trade ministry, who are eager to deal with the amoral corporates. One of the White Shirts, Kanya, may be playing for both sides.

Given the lack of oil, energy comes from kink springs (sophisticated future clockwork) or methane (licenced and unlicenced), human labour, or from genetically modified elephants (megodonts). Emiko works in a seedy club, where she is sexually abused in front of an audience both fascinated by her beauty and disgusted by her (lack of) genetic heritage. Her closest relatives are the Cheshires, genetically “improved” cats who can move so fast that they appear to disappear — and have wiped out their cat ancestors. Emiko has been trained to move as slowly as normal humans, but her movements are jerky and unnatural as a result. It is almost impossible for her to “pass” as human.

I think the ideas here are brilliant, and I don’t know of anyone who creates such a brilliant and plausible vision of where we (by which I mean all of human culture) are likely to end up: with a mix of high and low technology that mirrors the economic division between rich and poor. On the other hand, of the many points of view in the novel, not many of them are sympathetic, and it’s hard to care about this culture, this society, or the plights of the people who live in it.

You should certainly read this for the ideas, but I found it hard to read for the plot.

Recommended.

I hesitated a long time over whether to buy this story collection, not because I didn’t think they’d be any good, but because it seemed to be a lot more expensive than similar books. I ended up paying about £13.50 for it, which is pretty good, considering that it now appears to be out of print, and is selling for around £50 second-hand.

I might have to get me some of that second-hand action, because my other fear – that I’d already read a lot of the stories in the collection – proved to be all too true, and I should have checked the list of contents.

This slim – 235 page – volume contains 10 stories, and I’d read 4 of them before. If you take account of the length of these stories, I’d read close to half the book, which is why I wouldn’t pay £50 for it.

Bacigalupi writes fascinating, if bleak, stories set in a depressingly convincing future. Imagine that the big agrochemical companies get their way and somehow manage to corner the market in copyrighted seedstock (helped by a few genetically engineered plant diseases which kill of the remaining non-copyright crops). Imagine that the oil runs out and that we start to measure everything we do in terms of the energy it takes to do it vs. the amount of energy you get from it. Imagine that we somehow end up losing essential scientific and engineering skills, because our manufacturing industry dies and nobody chooses to study those things any more.

These – and other – scenarios make up the background of these stories of individuals struggling against the systems under which the labour, looking for a little taste of freedom, or a reason to live.

If, like me, you regularly read Gardner Dozois’ annual collections, you may already have read “The Fluted Girl” (surgically modified twins play their own bodies as musical instruments); “The People of Sand and Slag” (almost-indestructible canon fodder who can regrow their own blown off limbs encounter a real dog); “The Calorie Man” (a reluctant trader tries to help a scientist who has the secret of genetically modified seedstock); and “Yellow Card Man” (a Chinese refugee in Thailand tries to find work in a crowded and mercilessly indifferent city).

These are powerfully imagined stories which choose not to overplay their implied criticisms of our present, but they are nevertheless thought provoking.

There’s a novel, The Windup Girl set in the same future as “The Calorie Man” and “Yellow Card Man”, which is in my pile of books to read.

Recommended, if you can get hold of it!

Kim Stanley Robinson (KSR), along with Robert Charles Wilson, is probably the most literary of the science fiction writers at work today. Reading a KSR novel is less like reading SF than it is reading a regular novel with a backdrop of real science. This was certainly true of his Forty/Fifty/Sixty trilogy.

I abandoned several other books when this arrived from Amazon; I was really looking forward to its intriguing premise. Like KSR’s The Years of Rice and Salt, it’s an alternate history mixed with an element of fantasy; it’s also a time travel story and far-future space opera mixed with court intrigue and the inquisition.

This is an affectionate, warts’n'all portrait of Galileo Galilei, the first scientist, and the events of his life that led to his denunciation and trial before the Inquisition, accused of heresy. That anyone could do what Galileo did in the society in which he lived seems incredible. That he was dealing with both a power-mad paranoid Pope and visitors from the far future doesn’t seem like so much of a stretch.

What does Galileo do? He begins to notice that the universe seems to operate in accordance with underlying mathematical laws; laws that affect falling objects, swinging pendulums, and celestial bodies. One day, a stranger suggests to him that putting different lenses together might bring distant objects closer, and Galileo begins to work on what will become his telescope. He discovers the moons of Jupiter and realises that Copernicus was right.

The moral of this story is that the impossible must be possible – because Galileo’s genius was enough to rise above the suspicion and ignorance that surrounded him in the early 17th C. That KSR is trying to make a point about the timeless nature of such persecution (not to mention the dangerous ignorance) goes without saying. You could argue, for example, that the Inquisition takes a different form these days, but science is still fighting against the forces of superstition and nonsense.

Galileo is a tragic, pathetic, figure, but also shown to be a product of his time, making horrible mistakes with his own daughters especially.

A few years ago, I wanted to see his tomb in the Santa Croce in Florence, but unfortunately there were renovations going on. My pilgrimage was to see the inscription over the tomb (which inspired the typeface Optima), but I’d pay a second visit for the other reason too.

(Interesting trivia gleaned from this book: Galileo was born just 3 days before the death of Michelangelo. They are of course memorialised opposite each other in Santa Croce. Given the possibility that Renaissance record keeping is a bit loose, this is as strong a case for reincarnation as you could hope to find. They even looked alike!)

…and another thing.

I’m really not clear on the reasoning behind the altered titling in the UK editions of these books. The unifying theme here is men who hate women, right? Which is why the first book, in Swedish, is called, Män som hatar kvinnor which means, Men Who Hate Women. As Billy points out, we know what misogyny is in this country, so why change the title. I can only think that the UK publisher thought that “The Girl Who…” from the middle title in the series, Flickan som lekte med elden, which indeed means The Girl Who Played with Fire (or The girl was playing with fire according to Google) was sexier. Girls are sexier than women, right? And we prefer girls to women, because we hate women. Er… Anyway, she’s 26/27, which makes her all woman in my book.

This title in Swedish is Luftslottet som sprängdes, which means something like The Blown Air Biscuit (actually The castle in the air that was blown, which is hard to get your head round). Clearly there’s no literal translation, which is a conundrum. If we have this kind of issue with the mere title of the book, how the hell have the idiomatic elements of the actual text itself fared in translation? I’ll never know, because I’m never going to learn Swedish. All in all, though, you don’t really become conscious that you’re reading a translation as you read the 1700-odd pages of the three books: a good thing.

This final volume continues the story exactly where it left off at the end of volume two, and brings it to a not-entirely-satisfactory conclusion. One can’t help but wonder if Stieg Larsson might not have written more about Salander and Blomkvist had he lived, but this is all we’re left with. We’ve moved from the original cold case investigation to a Le Carré-style exposé of the workings of the Swedish secret services and their dealings with Salander and her family.

The build up here is to a courtroom scene, and though it’s fairly easy to guess how it will all play out in court, it’s still amazingly gripping when you get to it. I was unfortunate in that I reached the beginning of the trial at my lights-out-or-you’re-a-basket-case-tomorrow time of night, but I just could not bring myself to put the book down. The court scene is immense, but it’s followed by a long goodbye which (though it has one little surprise in store) leaves you feeling a bit flat.

But then you would. If you’re me, you’ve read all three volumes in a couple of weeks and now there is no more new Stieg Larsson to come. Ever. It’s a bit like when you read To Kill a Mockingbird and find out that Harper Lee never published anything else.

The male fantasy continues here in similar style. Blomkvist gets to bed women, everybody has plenty of cash, coffee is coming out of the walls. Salander pretends she doesn’t need a man, but you know she does really, and Blomkvist proves it by turning the world upside down in order to rescue her. (You can tell who the bad guys are because they all hate women, geddit?) Nevertheless, Salander is resourceful, and the scenes featuring her are always the most entertaining to read.

Anyway, highly recommended.

With 12 million copies sold, it seems something of a futile exercise to offer a review of these first two volumes of the so-called Millennium Trilogy. That kind of success is beyond criticism. I often ponder, with such huge sales, how many of said copies have actually been read, but then I’ve reading borrowed copies, so I guess it all evens out.

I’d heard these books being discussed on Simon Mayo’s late-lamented book review programme, but inertia and my SF obsession had prevented me picking them up. I was cautiously interested in them after exposing myself to too many Wallanders recently, but then it seemed inevitable that I was going to end up reading them. The final volume, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest, is on my bedside table at the moment, but when I heard it reviewed recently, one of the reviewers seriously suggested that you don’t need to have read the other two in order to enjoy it. I beg to differ. I’d go as far as saying that this is really just one, 1700-page novel, which has been conveniently chopped up into three chunks and drip-fed to the public at the cash flow convenience of the publishers.

I’d be interested to see if the 12 million people who bought the first one went on to buy the second and third.

First things first, these are very well written: entertaining, thrilling, and frustrating in equal measure. The first volume deals with a cold case murder mystery but lays the ground for the second and third volumes, which go on to deal with more recent murders, criminal conspiracies and even espionage. These are equal parts Le Carré and Michael Crichton in their attention to detail and page-turning goodness.

But even as I’m reading this, I find myself wondering, in my hyper-critical way, if my enjoyment isn’t slightly tarnished by a feeling that what I’m being sold here is the ultimate male fantasy. I’d be interested to hear from female readers. I borrowed these off my sister, who loved them, but there are elements to these stories which edge towards being “for the lads”.

Take the male protagonist, Mikael Blomkvist. He’s a journalist who has a dream job, for the kind of magazine which could surely never survive in today’s media market, a magazine which employs journalists to dig into things for weeks on end and publish investigations. He has the dream relationship with his partner/boss, who is married but has guilt-free sex with him whenever it’s convenient. He also has guilt-free sex with a variety of other women, and though he has an ex-wife and a daughter, they don’t keep turning up like a bad smell, as they would in most police procedurals. Making the hero a writer is a nerd’s wet dream. Most readers probably wish they were writers, and most writers aren’t all that heroic.

Naturally all our heroes, male and female, use Macs. Blomkvist also has a swish apartment and a holiday cabin, tastefully equipped with furniture built by himself. Everybody drinks gallons of coffee.

Blomkvist gets into some legal difficulty and is offered a job trying to solve a 40-year-old murder case, with free accommodation and the promise of an enormous salary at the end of it (and lashings of ginger beer – not really). Through this job he meets our female protagonist, the legendary Lisbeth Salander, who is a punky, spiky, prickly character with dark secrets in her past and extraordinary abilities. The Michael Crichton part of this is that she’s a gifted computer hacker.

Together they set out to solve the mystery. In the process, the groundwork is laid for volume 2, which concerns Lisbeth more directly. Lisbeth is polymorphously sexual, and jumps into the much older Blomkvist’s bed. For any men in their 40s who quite fancy those skinny punk girls with tattoos and piercings, this is all part of the fantasy. Lisbeth sleeps with girls, too, of course, which adds to the sense of titillation. Add in the mild SandM role play, as well as the odd rape/torture, and you’ve got an explosive mixture. Lisbeth is a bit flat chested, but that’s okay, because in volume two she has a boob job.

In spite of my doubts about the pandering to nerdy male fantasies (and I should know), these are massively entertaining and hard to put down. I was fortunate to be able to pick up volumes two and three as soon as I’d finished volumes one and two. My only thought, a couple of hundred pages into the final book is, SCAN THE FUCKING THING AND PUT IT ONLINE, YOU DOLT!

The first book is a more satisfying individual volume, in that you don’t have to read on if you don’t want to. As to how far it keeps you guessing, well I guessed Volume 1′s Big Secret about halfway through’ I guessed Volume 2′s Big Secret almost immediately.

These books have been filmed in Sweden, which is quite an exciting thought (if they’re any bit as good as the Swedish Wallanders). You can see the trailer here, among other places.