Douglas Adams’s Starship Titanic
Terry Jones
241 p.

Pan Books, 2003
(first published 1997)

Back cover blurb:

At the centre of the galazy, a vast, unknown civilization is preparing for an event of epic proportions, the launch of the greatest, most gorgeous, most technologically advanced spaceship ever built - the Starship Titanic.

An Earthling would see the ship as something really, really big, but rather less provincial onlookers would recognize it as the design of Leovinus, the galaxy’s most renowned architect. Before the launch Leovinus is having one last little look round and begins to find that things just aren’t right; poor workmanship, cybersystems out of control, robots walking into doors. How could this have happened? The Starship Titanic is THE SHIP THAT CANNOT POSSIBLY GO WRONG…

While the galaxy’s media looks on the following morning, hugely, magnificently, the fabulous ship eases away from the construction dock, picks up speed, sways a little, wobbles a bit, veers wildly and just before it can do untold damage to everything around it, appears to undergo SMEF (Spontaneous Massive Existence Failure). In just ten seconds, the whole, stupendous enterprise is over. And our story has just begun…

I like Douglas Adams. Douglas Adams is funny; he’s good. I like Terry Jones. Terry Jones is funny; he’s good; he’s part of Monty Python. Somehow, due to this immense liking of both of the “creators” of this novel (the original idea comes from Douglas Adams, who at the same time was doing a computer game with a similar plot - Terry Jones was pulled in after voicing one of the characters), one might expect that I wouldn’t like this book. However, I do. Of course, there are moments when I feel that Jones is trying too hard, and not all the jokes are funny. The main part of the jokes are funny, and that is the point. It doesn’t have the strongest plot ever, but again, it is not the plot that’s the point. Admittedly, I can’t say what is the point.

The characters are all very funny and actually interesting. In many books with lots of humour you might expect extremely flat characters. The characters in Starship Titanic are definitely not flat. They are amusing and they change throughout the course of the book. The ensemble is rather small, with only six important characters. Of course, four or these might be considered as main characters. Still, they are different enough to not be mixed together.

When I read this book, I had a lot of fun. It was an easy book to read, and it went quick. My smile seldom faded.

The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde
Neil McKenna
626 p.

Arrow Books, 2004
(first published 2003)

Back cover blurb:

none

This biography shows a side of Oscar Wilde which I find rather uninteresting. Its manifesto is that Oscar Wilde was never attracted to women and was a pederast. It goes to extreme lengths to prove its points, so far that I stop being fascinated and instead I just feel intensely bored. My interest in Oscar Wilde lies in his talents as a poet, playwright and author, not in how many boys he has slept with. Still, I can’t say that it was merely a too long tale of too much sex. There were parts I had never heard about, and it was, I must admit, quite amusing to read extracts from all those letters sent from and to him. The way McKenna handled these letters, however, fatigued me. Everything that Wilde ever wrote, McKenna claims, is about how much he loves young men. The way Wilde was constantly referred to as “Oscar” was anothing thing that irritated me incredibly. I am one of the people who think that authors should, by no account (unless you know them personally) be referred to by their first name. There is a reason why you have a surname!

The book focused mainly on Wilde, of course, with some deviances and stories about other people. At times I could not remember who McKenna was talking about, which is, to say the least, a bit of a drawback. The biography also ends abruptly with Wilde’s death. I would have liked a chapter just in the end where the fates of Bosie Douglas and Robbie Ross were discussed, and maybe something about Wilde’s sons. The sons are mentioned only a few times, and then just in the passing. The myriad of characters who were and were not important to Wilde, probably as good as everyone he ever slept with and a good few that he didn’t, lead to a confused reading. In places it was a very well-written book, but its lack of structure, obsession with gay sex and repetition of quotes put me off. However, this does not mean I regret reading it. I always think that reading biographies are interesting, even though they might be fallible.

Harry Potter & The Chamber of Secrets
J.K. Rowling
251 p.

Bloomsbury, 1998

Back cover blurb:

Harry Potter is a wizard. he is in his second year at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Little does he know that this year will be just as eventful as the last…

I don’t know how many times I have read this book. Still, it is my least favourite of the Potter-books. The fault in it does not lie in the plot or in the characters; in fact, I can’t really say wherein the fault lies. It might be that I have always read this book in paperback whilst I’ve read the others in hardback, even though that seems to be more a psychological than a literary reason for not liking it as much. It is definitely not a bad book. It is a good book, but it is apparent that the glory of the Harry Potter series was not yet certain. You aren’t supposed to know who everyone is and everything gets a hardy description, so you won’t be lost. Some of these descriptions are blunt and feel a little too obvious, but others are very nicely worked in. Harry gets to describe what Quidditch is about to a tiny first-years, and so also refreshes the memory of the reader. It is quite cleverly done. I read this book earlier this year, to refresh my memory before reading the seventh book, and I didn’t enjoy it as much as I did this time. You come to think of things which are hinted in this book and then spelt out in the seventh, and a number of times I went “Oh!” when I realised something that later cropped up in the seventh. Of course, I can’t remember what these things were.

Harry Potter & the Chamber of Secrets is the last of the Potter-books that are light-weight, so to say. The following book involves a lot of betraying and has a much darker atmosphere. This book, however, is still a whimsical child’s tale of a brilliant place which happens to have a really bad egg, but that happens and it isn’t all that bad. It is an extremely joyful novel. And I can’t help but like it, even though it isn’t quite as good as the other books. I guess I can blame it on nostalgia.