The Great Genre Wormhole (A Missive From Where The Sun Don't Shine)

I can't seem to shake the spectre of Genre-ary. Following a month of reading (and mostly being disappointed by) genre fiction, including some of the great canonical texts, I was left to ponder wether I have disappeared so far up some literary wormhole (that was the clean version) that I can no longer appreciate anything with a discernible plot. Or am I right to think that, while there are many wonderful, enjoyable distractions to be found out there, there are very few truly great genre novels?

I was speaking with a friend about this the other day, and he suggested that the great genre novels are merely great novels that happen to be situated within a genre. I'm not sure whether he was right, or whether we are such lit wankers that we are willing to accept disingenuous quasi-logic like that just to prove ourselves right.

To that end, I thought I might have a go at naming some of what I consider to be really top notch novels from a bunch of different genres. I'll leave it to you to decide whether their essence is in genre or whether it does a disservice to their greatness to tar them with the genre brush. I should add, this by no means purports to be a definitive list. It's just a few books that sprung to mind. Also, there is considerable overlap between the categories so my labels might not tally with your own. Whatever. Load up your tomatoes, folks. Here I go:

Favourite Sci-Fi
The Futurological Congress by Stanislaw Lem (or pretty much any number of Lem books), Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut and The Bridge by Iain Banks
Favourite Fantasy
Small Gods by Terry Pratchett
Favourite Mystery
An Instance of The Fingerpost by Iain Pears, Postmortem by Patricia Cornwell and And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie
Favourite Thriller
Fatherland by Robert Harris, The Silence of The Lambs by Thomas Harris and The Pledge by Friedrich Durrenmatt
Favourite Crime
American Tabloid by James Ellroy, The Killer Inside Me by Jim Thompson and Along Came A Spider by James Patterson (yes, I went there!)
Favourite Horror
Misery by Stephen King, Tales of Mystery and Imagination by Edgar Allen Poe and The Monk by Matthew Lewis
Favourite Romance
The Postman by Antonio Skarmeta (I know that's cheating)
Favourite Humour/Comedy
Scoop by Evelyn Waugh and The Princess Bride by William Goldman

And just outside the bounds of genre, but still on topic:
Favourite Biography/Autobiography
The Nightmare of Reason by Ernst Pawel and Damned To Fame by James Knowlson
Favourite Narrative Non-Fiction
The Surgeon of Crowthorne by Simon Winchester and Them by Jon Ronson
Favourite True Crime
Hunting The Devil by Richard Lourie and The Killer Beside Me by Ann Rule
Favourite Young Adult
I Am The Cheese by Robert Cormier

I'm also open to suggestions... and pasta recipes.

Honey, I Shrunk The Microviews!

Halfway through Genre-ary and I'm having a whale of a time. Six books. A grant application. Even the odd bit of sun (shielded, of course, by my head-to-toe black get up). All this free brain time got me thinking about the old Mircorviews and how they seem, in the past three years, to have grown far too big for my liking. Time to rejig 'em. From now on, Microviews will be as originally conceived. Pithy chunks of glee or bile, with the added bonus of some sort of book-appropriate rating. And what better way to get it all going than with my first five books of 2013.

Seeking Whom He May Devour by Fred Vargas
Country bumpkins mistake serial killer for werewolf. No clues to piece together, so just sit back and watch it unfold. More goofin' than sleuthin', really.
3 out of 5 Fang Marks.

The Guard by Peter Terrin
Waiting For Godot with guns, as reimagined by Ridley Scott and directed by Quentin Tarantino. Paranoia and tedium do the tango in post-apocalyptic parking garage.
3 out of 5 Flux Capacitors.

The Thief by Fuminori Nakamura
Note to budding thieves. There's cash to be had in the short term, but you don't want in on the repayment plan. Uber-slick Japanese crime thriller let down only by a rather lame-o ending.
4 out of 5 Picked Pockets.

The Collini Case by Ferdinand Von Schirarch
Following two patchy truish-crime story collections, Von Schirarch finally goes for the long form and mostly succeeds. A murder mystery where the why-dunnit is all that counts and Germany's post-war criminal justice system is hanged, drawn and quartered.
4 out of 5 Panzer Tanks

In A Lonely Place by Dorothy B. Hughes
A creepy peek into the mind of a misogynist serial killer with all the classic noir belles and whistles. Its no The Killer Inside Me but it slays most of the other dick swingers from the 50s.
3.5 out of 5 Shell Casings.

Hooray for GENRE-ary!!!

January is a strange time in book world. Publishers and authors go into a thirty one day hibernation cycle, leaving the crazy vampire bookworms among us with very little new blood on which to feast. Thankfully it also means we don't spend a month frantically buying up as many books from the given year as we can in an attempt to plough through the ones we're ashamed not to have read when we compile our best of lists (I'm looking at you, December).

In previous years I have used January to catch up on those books that I just couldn't get to by New Year's Eve. However, with apologies once again to Telegraph Avenue, I have decided to declare the first month of 2013 Genre-ary, during which I will only read genre fiction. I have accumulated a nice little pile of crime, fantasy and sic-fi books on my desk that, if it weren't for this month, I probably would never read. First up: Seeking Whom He May Devour by Fred Vargas.

And so begins Genre-ary, a month to sit back, relax and just enjoy myself while pretending that I am not absolutely salivating in anticipation of the newies from JM Coetzee (coming in March), Javier Marias (also March) and Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche (coming in April).