Mini-reviews 2

I suffer from intermittent insomnia, and always have some reading material, often downloads from Project Gutenberg, lined up on my e-reader to while away the sleepless hours. Here are three from this year:

Arthur Conan Doyle's The Poison Belt (1913). Earth hurtles through poison ether, causing worldwide instant death. Heightened, unlikely fun (w/casual racism & sexism), with Professor Challenger & Co. Apposite reflections on human arrogance & fragility. No wonder I couldn't sleep.

Jack London's The Scarlet Plague (1912, but frankly, not unfamiliar from 2020). The world's population reached...er...8 billion, & is almost wiped out by pandemic; its regression to barbarity is recounted by a former professor to his semi-feral grandsons. Hopepunk it ain't.

Awake long before the alarm. Reading one of E. Nesbit's Grim Tales ('The Mass for the Dead'); a lovelorn wakeful man who "reached a book and read till my eyes ached and the letters danced a pas fantastique up and down the page." Didn't work for him, either, nor did dumbbells, cold water, or poetry.

Nesbit was a favourite of mine when I was young, all the more so when later I realised that her life was less orthodox than Five Children and It, or The Wouldbegoods led me to expect.

And finally, something I read last year in hard copy during the hours appropriate to wakefulness: Jane Fraser's collection of short stories, The South Westerlies, though inner/lived experiences are not usually for me. Sad, nuanced, sometimes funny, the extraordinary thing about them is the constant, dominant, almost hyperreal main character: the Gower Peninsula.