"Beyond Black," Hilary Mantel

I love it when you get two good books in a row! Alison Hart is a psychic who makes a living doing James Van Praagh-type séances. Unfortunately for her, her gift is real, which means that an entire neighborhood of shifty characters from her past are after her from the other side. Her entire existence centers around keeping them away while her assistant Colette deals with the practical earthly issues, like money (the grasping Colette is hilariously monstrous).

The book drags a bit at times, almost tipping over into tortured-child territory (those books with faded pictures of sad looking kids on the front, and inside it's all about how the sad looking kids' mothers were burning them with crack pipes and whoring them out to the local one-legged man, and also the kids were ugly, to boot). But the quality of the writing keeps it from being mawkish.

"Addition," Toni Jordan

Bought this as an airport read and didn't regret it. Chick-lit meets OCD - I swear this is better than I'm making it sound. The heroine, Grace, has to count everything she sees because of a Problem in Her Past, as happens to these sort of women in these sorts of books. Yet usually these sorts of books do not involve erotic fantasies starring Nikola Tesla. In an Aztec temple, no less. It's really a pity more chick-lit heroines aren't openly mentally ill, because the genre needs more weird sexual fantasies and less nonsense about buying shoes. Maybe I'm alone in my pervert opinion, though.

Jordan manages to make her heroine angry and unhappy without making her unsympathetic - in fact, Grace's misanthropy is funny enough that I could sort of see what the romcom boyfriend saw in her (if you want an example of how not to write an unhappy woman, read Jennifer Weiner's Good in Bed). Bonus points for making her horny as well - well, to put it less bluntly, bonus points for writing a relationship in which sexual attraction is a good thing and not a sign of future disaster (if you want an example of how to write an romantic "happy ending" where it's easier to imagine the "lovers" clipping each others' toenails than ever having sex, again - Good in Bed is for you. God, that book annoyed me.)

"Inversions," Iain M. Banks

More fun with an M. from Mr. Banks - this one is a "Culture" novel although the Culture itself stays on the periphery of things. I didn't enjoy this as much as "Feersum Endjinn," possibly because the conceit isn't as fun - less dialect, more idiot narrator (well, not idiot narrator per se, it's more that the gimmick relies on the reader knowing something the narrator doesn't). I'm sure I would have found the book more appealing if I had already read another of Banks's books narrated from the Culture viewpoint. Ah well, I will just have to give it another go.

"Feersum Endjinn," Iain M. Banks

Time for some Iain Banks with the M added in! This time it's the story of almost-abandoned Earth, where humans fight artificial intelligence in a giant crypt. Banks doesn't insult your intelligence by explaining anything - it's all told in a realistic enough manner, which means no "As was written in the secret scrolls 1,000 years ago, this is about to happen in the plot!" infodumps - which was a relief in that it made the writing infinitely less clumsy, but it also made the book a hard-ish read as sometimes my intelligence needs insulting, I suppose.

I enjoyed the first-person dialect sections of the book, which are in a sort of phonetic language/semi-rebus ("1/2" for "have," etc.) and the concept of Serehfa - what seems to be an ancient missile silo turned into a human-scale gigantic dollhouse.

"The Bloody Chamber," Angela Carter

A collection of retellings of fairy tales - "Little Red Riding Hood," "Beauty and the Beast," etc. Carter's language is elaborate, to the point where reading this book is the literary equivalent of eating a box of very high quality chocolates. One is delicious, eating ten in a row makes you feel sick. Which is probably why it took me so long to finish the book (it was worth it in the end - who doesn't like chocolate?)

"The Journal of Dora Damage," Belinda Starling

I picked up this book During My Travels and it turned out to be a good airplany sort of read. The story is simple - London bookbinder's wife has to take over from her husband when he falls ill and ends up binding pornography for rich men with time on their hands. Binding porn turns out to be a dangerous business, and it's all complicated when Dora's employer's wife forces her to take on a hot ex-slave as her assistant. It all ends with tattoos in uncomfortable places and candlelit sex, as it should.

I can't utterly dislike any novel that has pornography binding as the basis for its plot (there are lots of good descriptions of 18th- and 19th-century naughty books, and Dora's reaction to the forbidden material she was reading struck true). However, I found Dora too agreeable a character, which is always the danger in first-person historical novels - the supporting characters have the attitudes of their time and place, while the viewpoint character expresses thoughts that are similar to the reader's moral code. Voilà, instant sympathy for the heroine. (It usually is the heroine - the common tactic is to make the men in the book nasty misogynists even by the standards of the day, and the women proto-feminists. Which implies that the only reason that a woman would want her own power in the world is in reaction to living with a brute, but there you go.)

Maybe it was the Generic Proto-Feminist Heroine deal going on, but I found myself more interested in the side characters and their pasts and futures - Dora's opiate-hooked, sex-abhorring husband, the frivolous wife of the leader of the pornography club (I didn't buy her ending - not for a second), Din, the educated former slave who goes back to America to lead a rebellion. I mean, crazy sexual repression! Class conflict! Slave rebellions! Forget binding porn, that's porn-worthy stuff right there!