Stop cringing. Everyone likes Clive Cussler. If you’re ever in doubt about what to get your Dad for Christmas, you can bet the new CC action/adventure thriller will be just the ticket.

Clive Cussler writes boy books. Strong heroes, damsels in distress, lashings of cutting edge military hardware and, of course, cool cars.

Do I even need to mention the plot? Dirk Pitt, adventurer extraordinaire (and one-man army when his dander is up) discovers the ruins of Atlantis. The Nazis have got there first however, and working from a secret base in Argentina they’re cooking up a new plan for world domination. Naturally, Dirk tears them a new arsehole. Just like in real life.

Clive Cussler books are tailor made for a rainy winter’s afternoon. That’s about how long they take to read, too. They’re the book equivalent of an Indiana Jones movie and I love them.

4 stars.

I should hate this book. Indeed for several years I did hate this book, although I hadn’t read it.

I hated this book because everyone told me I should read it. Perhaps I should explain. I have no problem reading books that are considered difficult. ‘Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell’ for example, or ‘Against The Day’ by Pynchon. I read these books because the plots excite me, and I’m advanced enough as a reader to not let the difficulties and challenges of the prose overcome me. However, people don’t realise this, and instead they think that I like reading books simply because they are hard. Invariably, people start telling me to read Ghormengast. In the last few years however they’ve been telling me to read Perdido St Station.

I finally picked it up because my book club were reading ‘Unlundun’ by the same author. I couldn’t find that, so I folded and bought PStS instead, to compare.

Wow.

This book is fantastic. I don’t know a lot about China Meiville, but he (or she) is a serious writer. The book just seems to exude mood. When you boil it down, the plot is straight out of a Pratchett novel: big bad things attack the big, self-enveloped city, mad loner and handful of misfits have to stop it. But the beauty of PStS is not its plot. If you picture the plot as something to hang characters and colour from, then Meiville uses it to perfection. I would almost say overuses: the scope of this book is encyclopaedic, but it works. It’s a lengthy tome, 867 pages in paperback form, but there’s something new on every page.

I will be hunting down more of Meiville’s work. PStS has merely served to whet my appetite, and I think that’s the best thing anyone can say about a new author.

4 stars

Everyone, sooner or later, reads books like these. This book is not a narrative, but rather a collection of reportage about the worst, the least successful and the ill-conceived events, persons and attempts in history.

Purporting to be the Official Handbook of the Not Terribly Good Society of Great Britain, the Book of Heroic Failures was a book I found second-hand. Published in 1977, it had the air of the Goodies or the Two Ronnies about it: that terribly British 1970s ‘here’s something funny you might be interested in reading whilst enjoying a nice cup of tea’ feeling. It’s an innocent enough book: the knives don’t really come out and the comments on people’s inability to function in their chosen professions are not so much scathing as pitying. Much of it’s abundant humour comes from Stephen Pile’s wit.

Highlights include:

The Least Successful Attempt To Capture The Loch Ness Monster On Film, in which several Scottish researchers decided in 1975 to seduce the monster with a papier-mache ‘lady monster’, complete with buxom fittings and long eyelashes;

The Man Who Almost Invented The Vacuum Cleaner, in which a man demonstrated an electric device which blew the dust away with a stream of air. Hubert Booth saw the demonstration, and advised the man afterwards that it should suck the dust up instead of blow it away. The man scoffed at the idea, and Booth patented the vacuum cleaner shortly afterwards;

The Most Misprints In A Newspaper, The Times 15 March 1978 (78 misprints);

The World’s Worst Interpreter, a Polish Governmental official who told Poland of Jimmy Carter’s “Lust for the people of Poland”; and my personal favorite

The World’s Least Successful Secret Weapon, France’s introduction of the machine gun during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. So secret was it that the guns were delivered to front-line troops who had never heard of them and had no training whatsoever in their use. As literacy was not a requirement for front-line service in the French Army the large instruction manual which accompanied it was not much good to anyone except the Germans, who overran the (for all intents and purposes) unarmed French army, read the book and used the guns themselves.

A note: Whilst reading this book I was in two minds as to whether any of the events actually occurred, or had occurred and were exaggerated. I was very pleased to say that towards the end of the book the author began (during his telling of these anecdotes) to let slip his various methods of data collection, which led me to believe that each event had been rigorously investigated. Indeed, the last chapter is an apologetic list of the things that the author had heard about but had not been able to confirm, but which were included for completeness.

A very funny book, for all it’s 70′s British tweeness. 4 stars.