Favourite Books of 2011: Four Thrilling Novels

I’m going to be a bit lazy today and cover four books at once, not in quite so much depth as I’ve been doing so far. My excuse is I got 3 hours sleep last night and I’m very very tired…

Reamde by Neal Stephenson

I’ll read anything Neal Stephenson writes – he’s so clever, and his novels are BIG in size and scope. Reamde is a departure from his usual speculative fiction in that it’s a thriller, but it is still satisfyingly BIG. It’s based on the possibilities for fraud and extortion presented by online gaming, rapidly descending from geek-talk into seemingly endless violence and mayhem. Basically, a bunch of Chinese hackers create a scam to extort money from T’Rain (think World of Warcraft) players, and they manage to fall foul of the Russian mafia. Then a young woman with connections in the IT industry – i.e. her uncle just happened to be the creative director of the company who built T’Rain – gets pulled into the mess by her idiot boyfriend. Then everyone starts to kill each other in the process of trying to work out what’s going on. Somehow Stephenson manages to maintain an element of fun amongst all the destruction, and although it’s a HUGE book (over 900 pages) it rattles along right to the end. Although I don’t rate it as highly as Cryptonomicon or the Baroque Cycle, it’s a great read, and I felt quite smug that I understood most of the geeky aspects of the book. I’m not sure how readers who aren’t at least aware of World of Warcraft would cope, but luckily you don’t need to know too much about it to ‘get’ the story.

Yellow Blue Tibia by Adam Roberts

Adam Roberts is another speculative fiction author I read obsessively. He’s not as well-known as Stephenson, which I think is unfair. Both have BIG ideas. I loved On – a rite-of-passage novel about Tighe, who lives on a world where gravity runs parallel to the surface of the planet – which is kind of like The Planiverse in that it has to imagine how a world built on completely different premises to ours would work… Anyway, like Reamde, Yellow Blue Tibia is also a departure for the author, and is delightfully bonkers. In 1945 Stalin corrals a group of science fiction writers and orders them to develop an alien invasion scenario which will provide him with a ‘common enemy’ to replace the weakening USA and unite the USSR. He changes his mind after a while and orders the writers to forget about the project on pain of death. Things aren’t that simple though… decades later the scenario appears to start to come true. I’m embarrassed to admit it took me a ridiculously long time to work out what the title is about (I did get CSE grade 1 Russian, after all).

The Night Of The Mi'raj by Zoe Ferraris

The Night of the Mi’raj was recommended to me by a friend as an interesting study of women’s life in Saudi Arabia. On that basis, it’s a real eye-opener. I knew the Saudi society is repressive but I find it hard to understand how women can accept living that way (even though the female characters in the book manage to bend the rules just a bit). It’s also a well-written mystery thriller with fascinating characters and a twisting plot that kept me guessing. I’d forgotten why I used to devour detective/mystery stories by the bucketload; and it’s nice to be reminded that there are good crime writers out there. The detective, Nayir, is a devout Muslim, but he’s sufficiently questioning of Saudi culture that I could identify with him. And leaving that aside, he’s an engaging hero who’s not too stupid or too clever, and is willing to do what it takes to get to the truth about the disappearance of a young woman days before her arranged marriage is due to take place. I’m looking forward to reading the second book about Nayir.

The Killing Jar by Nicola Monaghan

I’ve been meaning to read The Killing Jar for a while (Niki is the course leader for the degree I’m doing, and is a Five Leaves author – I’ve just converted The Okinawa Dragon to an e-book). As well as being a shocking yet strangely endearing story, like The Night of the Mi’raj it describes a life I find it difficult to comprehend – this time that of a girl growing up on one of Nottingham’s roughest estates. Kerrie-Ann’s story is told from her point of view and in Nottingham dialect throughout, which takes a little bit of getting into (I’ve only lived in Nottingham for – erk – 27 years) but once you’re there you’re totally there. You feel everything Kerrie-Ann feels as she tries to survive in (and eventually to escape from) a household that becomes increasingly violent as she grows up.

And that’s nearly your lot. I’ll reveal the last two books tomorrow. In the meantime, I’m keeping a proper list of all the books I read this year as I read them, so my ‘Favourite Books of 2012′ list will hopefully not have to be generated by racking my brain and scrabbling around in my bedroom. At the moment I’m reading Quantum: A Guide for the Perplexed by Jim Al-Khalili, which won’t make the list even though I’m enjoying it immensely. That’s probably a topic for another day.

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