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Saga of the Swamp Thing (Alan Moore)

Despite landing a Wes Craven-directed movie tie-in in the early 80s, Swamp Thing was never one of DC's biggest names, and the comic seemed like it was headed for the scrapheap when they brought in the (then relatively unknown) British 2000AD writer, Alan Moore, to see what he could do with the character. Little did DC suspect that this future comics behemoth was about to unleash one of the most innovative and award-winning comic book runs in history.

The Saga of the Swamp Thing, as Moore's reimagining was titled, ran from issues 20-64 and upturned the existing mythos in short order. All extant storylines were abruptly tied off, while Moore set about reinventing the title character as a vegetable-based avatar of 'The Green' with biologist Alec Holland's memories (rather than a transformed Holland himself, as had been the case up until that point). Over the course of the next five years, the not-so-jolly green giant embarked on adventures that would take him to Gotham, deep inside the planet, and across the far reaches of space, rubbing shoulders with other DC characters both large (Superman, Green Lantern and Batman all make appearances, the latter fighting Swamp Thing as he destroys Gotham in search of his wife) and small -- Moore's habit of plucking the most obscure historical villain's out of DC's extensive back catalogue began here, as well as his creation of brand new characters who would go on to star in series of their own (John Constantine, probably the most famous example, first appears here).

As with any long-running series there are ups and downs in the overall quality -- of the collected editions, Books Two and Five contain standout material, while Book Four is particularly weak -- but taken as a whole, the Saga is a classic of the genre and testament to the budding genius of the man who would go on to create so many of the medium's greatest achievements.

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To Paradise (Hanya Yanagihara)

Hanya Yanagihara's 2015 second novel, A Little Life, was a revelation. Intricately plotted, with heart-breakingly real characters, even after 800-plus pages you didn't want it to end.

So it's therefore a huge disappointment to discover that her follow-up, 2022's To Paradise, is such a shallow pastiche of what came before, replacing the richly drawn lives of the former book with boring, predictable, and to a large extent cliché snapshots of the lives of too many new characters to even care about keeping track of.

To Paradise is presented in three parts concerning tenuously related characters and locations, each separated by 100 years. In 1893 we follow David Bingham, the weak and ineffectual scion of a grand New York family, as he embarks on a love affair with an impoverished teacher, while his grandfather attempts to marry him off to a richer, older man. (The central conceit of this section of the book being an alternate history of the United States where New England is an independent country and homosexuality is legal. Unfortunately that aspect of society seems to be the full extent of Yanagihara's limited imagination in that regard, leaving us with not so much representation as fetishisation; virtually every named character is gay.)

As Part One sputters to an inconclusive and unsatisfying end, Part Two picks up the story, introducing us to yet another David Bingham, living in the same New York mansion one hundred years later during the AIDS crisis. One might have expected Yanagihara to explicitly connect these characters who have so much in common, but unfortunately she decides that the naming conceit should simply be a way to confuse her audience and make the book just that little bit harder to follow.

The third and final part of the novel jumps forward by another 100 years, where in 2093 we find yet more Binghams, this time living through endless pandemics that have led to a near-fascist regime in the US, while other countries remain relatively unaffected politically. This section of the book can at least boast something approaching a plot, as a lowly lab tech pieces together clues about a new virus. Letters from the past are interspersed with the narrative, providing an insight into the breakdown of society that has happened over the years of repeated global pandemics. Interestingly, despite coming out in 2022, Yanagihara claims this part of the novel was written entirely before Covid; it's unfortunate then that it feels so much like an exercise in bandwagon-jumping.

Overall, then, To Paradise is simultaneously beautifully written yet staggeringly dull, and the obsession with the lives of gay men makes it feel not unlike a particularly literary slashfic, albeit one where we don't actually care all that much about the people involved.

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When your first movie becomes a breakout hit (and the highest-grossing zombie movie of all time at that point), it's almost inevitable that the studio are going to want a sequel. And so, ten years after the original Zombieland (2009), Ruben Fleischer is back with Zombieland: Double Tap (2019), a movie whose driving principle seems to be: "If it ain't broke, don't try to fix it."

The stars of the first film -- Abigail Breslin, Emma Stone, Woody Harrelson and Jesse Eisenberg -- all return to reprise their wise-cracking, zombie-slaying roles, while the plot, too, hews fairly closely to that of the first movie; road trips are undertaken, groups form and then separate, there's a fabled location free of zombies that they attempt to reach, only to require rescuing in the final act by their returning friends. Presentation-wise, little has changed either; the zombies are still extremely well done, the violence stylised and often in blood-spatteringly slow motion. The on-screen captions integrated into the action, though, lack the novelty of their use in the first movie.

There are of course a handful of fun new tweaks to the old formula. Luke Wilson and Silicon Valley's Thomas Middleditch make a brief appearance as near mirrors of Harrelson and Eisenberg's characters before meeting a predictable end, and Zoey Deutch does a great job with the cliched character of Madison (who the writers of She-Hulk should really credit with their own version). But Rosario Dawson's character is sadly far too one-dimensional, and, at 40, arguably miscast as 58-year-old Woody Harrelson's romantic interest. And the utterly pointless mid-credits sequence, apparently just an excuse to crowbar Bill Murray into the film, sadly only serves to leave a bad taste in the mouth.

At the end of the day, though, there's little more you really need from a zombie flick than hundreds of zombies being slaughtered, and in this, at least, Zombieland: Double Tap does deliver.

6/10

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Cecil B Demented (2000)

One has to wonder how many Hollywood A-listers would include the name of John Waters on their personal list of "Directors I'd really like to work with". Melanie Griffith, perhaps aggrieved at receiving seven Razzie nominations in the last ten years (after an Oscar nom in 1988 for Working Girl), was at least one such, when she signed up to star in this bizarrely off-the-rails satire.

It had been more than a decade since Waters experienced a genuine success (Hairspray in 1988; his more recent movies Cry-Baby (1990), Serial Mom (1994) and Pecker (1998) had all flopped at the box office) but it seems that his reputation was still sufficient to attract a motley combination of future film and TV stars (a pre-stardom Michael Shannon and Maggie Gyllenhaal, as well as Alicia Witt, Adrian Grenier and The Wire's Larry Gilliard, Jr.) together with a handful of Waters' alumni (Mink Stole and Ricki Lake) and they mostly seem to be having great fun alongside Stephen Dorff as the titular Cecil. Demented is a radical filmmaker determined to upset the status quo and force a rebirth of 'true' cinema (his followers have the names of notable--and, presumably, 'true'--directors tattooed onto their bodies, ranging from Preminger and Peckinpah to Spike Lee), which he attempts to accomplish through a lot of violence, yelling, and sexual abstinence on the part of his crew (this part is, sadly, never explained in any detail, and mostly seems to be an excuse for a bawdy sex scene towards the end of the movie).

Griffith, as the Hollywood diva kidnapped by the terrorist filmmaker and forced to star in his magnum opus, does well enough, although the subject matter does make it hard to tell whether she's acting badly or badly acting. The staging and script are typical of Waters; high melodrama is the order of the day, although most of the cast do at least manage to deliver their ridiculous lines with a straight face. Patty Hearst, whose 1974 kidnapping and subsequent participation in her kidnapper's crimes serve as a loose inspiration, even shows up late in the film as a concerned mother. And, although the individual pieces wouldn't stand up to much scrutiny in any serious film, taken as a whole Cecil B. Demented is still a worthy addition to Waters' oeuvre.

8/10

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The Bricks That Built The Houses (Kae Tempest)

When Kae Tempest -- powerhouse performance poet, two-time Mercury Music Prize nominee, multiple award-winning writer of everything from hip-hop to adaptations of Sophocles -- wrote their first novel, it was probably not a surprise to anyone familiar with their previous work that it was set in South London and featured a cast of characters for whom poverty, desperation, and drug use are constant companions. But this is not purely a tale of London's underclass; instead, Tempest deftly moves the pieces around the board in a series of encounters that, while they might defy the laws of coincidence, never feel anything but fatefully inevitable.

Tempest has a rare ability to perfectly sketch a character such that you can almost feel you're inhabiting their skin, while somehow almost completely avoiding any detailed physical descriptions. The book's primary players -- Becky, a dancer, waitress and masseuse; Harry, a diminutive drug dealer with ambition; and Pete, a luckless, jobless, and directionless graduate -- exist in a cloud of casual sex and casual drug-taking alongside a South London melting pot of secondary characters, all of whom could be any ethnicity, because it doesn't matter when your primary characteristic is that of "Londoner".

The prose alternates between mirroring the way these streetwise characters talk, and occasional more poetic flights of lyricism as Tempest lets her love for the city and its people soar up and down the dirty, over-populated streets, always with one eye on the horizon.

The final few chapters are where the plot, until then carefully woven from seemingly unrelated strands, resolves itself just a little too neatly to be entirely satisfying, but such complaints are easily forgiven amid such rich and well-observed characterisation of both the people and their beloved piece of the city.

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Coming off the back of several underwhelming albums (you need to go all the way back to 2010's Together to find traces of the brilliance that infused their first three releases), expectations weren't exactly high for Continue as a Guest, The New Pornographers' first in four years. But it turns out that the restrictions placed on the band by COVID (only rarely able to record together, bandleader AC Newman wrote, recorded, produced and mixed the album alone as contributions from the five other members arrived from their own lockdown locations) might have been just what The New Pornographers needed to recapture some of the magic that elevates them to more than just another Newman side-project.

Although the continued absence of Destroyer's Dan Bejar from the TNP line-up is still felt in the lack of any of his distinctly structured songs or laconic vocal delivery (he has a single credit here, on opener Really Really Light, thanks to a recovered guitar hook from the 2014 Brill Bruisers sessions), Newman's typically abstruse lyrics pair well with the droning, driving songwriting he delivers on this album; he eschews any attempt to match phrasing to melody, splitting words across bars with wild abandon and turning any attempt to puzzle out the lyrics (beautifully delivered as usual by Neko Case and/or Kathryn Calder) into an exercise in frustration.

Ultimately, despite the lack of any standout tracks to match the quality of Sing Me Spanish Techno or Letter From An Occupant, there's still a lot to like here, and the marked improvement over their last few releases bodes well for a future where The New Pornographers are once again able to reconvene in a post-COVID studio, together.

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There is always the faintest stumbling block when sitting down to watch a foreign language film. For the first couple of minutes, as your brain struggles to get used to the detachment of the acting from the words being spoken, it somehow feels as if the actors aren't doing a good enough job -- you're forced to read something extra simply to understand what is going on. Of course, the feeling inevitably soon passes, especially when the film is as good as The Three Musketeers: D'Artagnan proves to be.

Alexandre Dumas's timeless tale of a young man swept along by the tide of religious and political intrigue has been adapted for the screen many times in the past; from Douglas Fairbanks buckling swashes in the 1920s, through peak 1990s casting of Young Guns' Charlie Sheen and Kiefer Sutherland, on up to the most recent pseudo-steampunk re-imagining in 2011 by Resident Evil helmer Paul W.S. Anderson. The most well-known version is probably the 1973 film that starred Oliver Reed, Richard Chamberlain and Michael York which, like this new French release, made the sensible decision to split the lengthy book into two separate films.

The plot of this first movie, while broadly hewing to that of the 1844 novel, does take a few liberties with the source material. Young D'Artagnan (François Civil) travels to Paris with hopes of joining the famous Musketeers, accidentally picks a fight with three of its most celebrated members, impresses them with his swordplay and joins them in a race to retrieve the Queen's jewels and save their friend from the gallows. In the background, the political machinations of Catholics and Protestants, cardinals and kings drive the plot forward without getting bogged down in the details that make the novel hard going at times. Some of the stakes are raised -- a murder leads to one of the titular three being framed, resulting in a race against time to prove his innocence -- while some are lowered; Constance is now young and unmarried, leaving room for romance with D'Artagnan. Loyal servant Planchet is also, sadly, missing from this telling of the story.

The direction by Martin Bourboulon is universally excellent; the chemistry between the main cast (including Vincent Cassel as Athos, Pio Marmaï as Porthos, Romain Duris as Aramis, and Lyna Khoudri as Constance) sparkles, and the action scenes, although few and far between, ratchet up the pace to near martial arts levels: the initial fight scene wherein the four leads take on the Cardinal's men is cut and blocked almost like a scene from 2011's The Raid; the score is silent, leaving only the grunts and shouts of the cast (who trained for six months by an Olympic swordsman) as they whirl and parry around and over the always-moving camera. The sets, too, are exquisite -- the film was shot mainly on location all over France -- and the lighting at times recalls the famous candlelit scenes in Kubrick's Barry Lyndon (1975).

Eva Green's Milady is unfortunately a little one-note, having not much more to do apart from look sly and self-satisfied whenever she's on screen, but Phantom Thread's Vicky Krieps makes the most of her limited screen time as the two-timing Queen Anne at the centre of the film's two-hour runtime.

Overall, it's easily one of the best interpretations of the beloved novel (not counting the near-perfect Dogtanian and the Three Muskehounds, of course); it remains to be seen whether the second part, The Three Musketeers: Milady, set to be released in December 2023, can stick the landing.

9/10

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The Bradleys (Peter Bagge)

Originally published in this paperback edition in 1989, The Bradleys collects all of Peter Bagge’s stories about the titular family into one volume, culled from the pages of his bi-annual comic Neat Stuff. While Bagge fans will certainly be more familiar with many of the characters from his later, and far more successful, comic Hate, this volume provides an opportunity to travel back in time and visit with Buddy Bradley and his dysfunctional family during the former’s adolescence. Living in much closer quarters than he was during much of Hate, Buddy fights with his brother Butch and sister Babs, argues with his mother and father (the latter happily much more active and talkative than during his later appearances in the strips), and hangs out with a rogues gallery of reprobates, including several characters that would go on to play a much larger role in Hate.

The individual stories are of variable quality, with the best of the bunch being the ones featuring Buddy’s new friend (and future business partner) Jay. “Hippy House” in particular is a standout, as Buddy ruins one party, is not even sure whether a second party qualifies, makes an enemy and pees on him, before ending the night walking halfway across Jersey only to fall asleep in his father’s car and wake up outside his work. Bagge’s artwork fizzes with his exaggerated, hyper-kinetic style and liberal use of comedic sound effects; characters’ faces, especially when angry, are beautifully rendered and detailed. 

The only black mark (pun intended) is the occasional naked racism that some characters display, including Buddy. It’s a shame that Bagge wasn’t a little more enlightened when it came to race relations back in the 80s, especially when his main character is drawn from his own life.

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On paper, Aloha must have seemed like it couldn’t fail. Bradley Cooper, who had proved he could do quirky romance in 2012′s Silver Linings Playbook as well as turn in Oscar-worthy performances in that film and the two that followed it (American Hustle and American Sniper), is paired with Emma Stone, also hot off an Oscar-nominated turn in Birdman. Throw in a handful of decent supporting players (Danny McBride, Alec Baldwin, John Krasinski) and top it all off with the effortless charm of Bill Murray, and surely anyone could turn those ingredients into a great movie. But wait -- it’s not just anyone who’s writing and directing this perfect storm of talent ... it’s Oscar-winning screenwriter and director Cameron Crowe!

What could possibly go wrong?

As it turns out, quite a lot, actually. The leads aren’t terrible; Stone's ultra-ambitious, by-the-book fighter pilot, assigned to protect Cooper’s visiting military contractor, almost strays into Wes Anderson caricature territory, but her natural charm carries the audience along, while Cooper is by turns amused, offended and charmed by his partner throughout most of the movie’s twists and turns. McBride is restrained but gives his character an entertaining tic (that the film unfortunately spoils by choosing to call it out in the final moments), and Baldwin does fine with his limited screen time.

Where the film starts to fall apart is in the convoluted plotting, and the miscasting of Bill Murray as a semi-evil billionaire space program investor. It’s hard to know who we’re supposed to be rooting for in the bizarre not-quite-love-triangle that Crowe creates between Cooper, Stone and Cooper’s ex, Rachel McAdams, who provides the third corner, and in the end neither possibility really feels like it would have been a satisfactory conclusion. The plot glosses over exactly what it is that Cooper does for a living, save that he seems to be good at glad-handling the “natives” in the Hawaii setting, only to throw in an entirely unexpected “reprogram the satellite while it’s being launched” manic coding scene that wouldn’t have looked out of place in one of the sillier Mission Impossible movies. It makes for a confusing mess of a third act, one made worse by ill-advised ‘comedy’ subtitling of a macho exchange between Cooper and Krasinksi, and Bill Murray delivering the least threatening warning in the history of cinema.

Overall, Aloha has little to recommend it beyond the chance to watch Emma Stone and Bradley Cooper being attractive for 90 minutes; unfortunately that isn’t really enough to recommend a film from a director of Crowe’s reputation.

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Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, the latest entry in DC Comics’ perpetual game of catch-up against rivals and reigning box-office superheroes, Marvel, manages the awkward feat of being simultaneously too long while also too brief in its coverage of the many new players on the field this time around.

Foremost among those is Gal Gadot as Diana Prince/Wonder Woman (making her big-screen debut 75 years after her first appearance in print), who is given precious little to do besides wandering around in the background looking alluring. The result is that when she eventually strips down to her impractical leather bustier, picks up a sword and shield, and enters the fight, viewers might be left wondering whether they missed some important piece of expository explanation as to her presence and backstory. Luckily for the character, her fight scenes are the most impressive on display, as she flings herself at Doomsday, magic lasso and all, while Superman (Henry Cavill reprising his role from 2013′s Man of Steel) and Ben Affleck’s gruff Batman manage to do little more than limp about or hide in the shadows respectively.

Unfortunately, the rest of the movie spends far too long exploring Bruce Wayne’s nightmares, Clark Kent’s visions of his dead father (Kevin Costner, inexplicably building cairns atop a snow-covered mountain range), and a convoluted sub-plot about which metal bullets are made from, and rather forgets that what the audience wants is a good story. Batman’s motivations for his all-consuming hatred of Superman seem shallow and ill-explored, even more so when he abruptly decides -- upon hearing that their mothers share a first name --- that they are now best buds; he heads off to rescue Martha Kent (the fantastic Diane Lane) from some generic Eastern European bad guys straight from central casting.

Meanwhile, Superman is having problems of his own, as the US government attempts to hold him to account for his actions. There’s a great deal of musing on the nature of God versus Man, power versus morality, much of it done by Jesse Eisenberg’s reimagining of Lex Luthor as a twitchier version of his dressed-down alpha nerd in The Social Network, but ultimately none of the questions the film poses are answered, unless that answer is “thirty minutes of CGI that flattens half a city.”

There are a handful of fun little nods to some of the source material; Batman’s power-armour is obviously drawn from Frank Miller’s seminal The Dark Knight Returns, but so too is the image of a withered Superman hanging in space, denuded by the blast from a nuclear bomb. And the brief glimpse of the next draft of superheroes-in-waiting -- Aquaman (Khal Drogo!), The Flash, Cyborg -- will please many eagerly awaiting next year’s Justice League movie.

However, ultimately this film needs to stand or fall on its own, and, while there are plenty of impressive visual flourishes, the confused plotting and shallow characterisation don’t do anything to dispel the notion that Zack Snyder and writer David Goyer will never be more than second fiddles to Kevin Feige and Marvel’s stable of directorial and writing talent.

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Jiro Dreams of Sushi is a film about self-improvement to the point of perfection; about the relationships between fathers and sons; and, sometimes, about sushi.

Jiro Ono is the 85-year-old owner and master chef of Sukiyabashi Jiro, a Tokyo subway station eatery that is so small you may even shrink from describing it as a restaurant, but which nevertheless has attracted three Michelin stars and earned Jiro a reputation as the best sushi chef on the planet. Bookings must be made months in advance; the 20-course tasting menu costs close to £200. Jiro is assisted by his small staff of five, one of which is his eldest son, the 50-year-old Yoshikazu.

As you might expect in a film about this most Japanese of cuisines, there is much meditation on the topic of hard work, perfection, and a son’s duty to his father. Yoshikazu remembers making dozens of failed egg sushi before finally receiving his father’s blessing and wanting to thump the air in joy, while his father laughs at the memory of his son failing to recognise him due to the long hours he worked when his children were young.

Ultimately, it’s a story about sacrifice: one made for the sake of achieving perfection in craft, the other for the sake of honouring tradition. The viewer is left wondering whether the relationship that Jiro had with his father, hinted at in comments and laid bare during a visit to his shrine, in any way informs that of Yoshikazo with his own (unseen, never mentioned, but surely present) children.

And of course, it’s also a story about sushi, filmed in glorious tender close-up from flapping, gasping fish to final perfectly moulded presentation on the polished black plates of the restaurant. Don’t be surprised if the end credits leave you hungry for more.

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Girls is the wildly successful, embarrassingly autobiographical, painfully funny creation of writer/director/star Lena Dunham. It chronicles the mundane lives of four twenty-something women in New York whose conception of themselves would never in a million years contain the word “mundane.” The self-absorption of the four central characters -- struggling writer Hannah, struggling musician Marnie, occasional drug addict Jessa, and student Shoshanna -- often reaches unbearable levels, and yet though her characters border on insufferable Dunham manages to cling to a common thread of humanity that allows us to see ourselves reflected in their struggle to find their place in the world.

Like many successful comic dramas, Girls has sometimes struggled to rein in the more expansive, less believable plot lines in later series, which usually seem to come with the added baggage of ‘special guest stars’ (Richard E Grant being the most recent); it is the more compact episodes that focus on the core group which carry the most emotional weight. Aside from guest stars, the regular supporting cast is uniformly excellent; Adam Driver (whose price tag has surely broken the budget of even HBO after his recent starring role in the latest Star Wars film) is so good as Hannah’s on-again, off-again boyfriend Adam that you could not imagine anyone else playing the part; and long-time Dunham collaborator Alex Karpovsky (he featured in her 2010 debut feature, Tiny Furniture) as coffeeshop owner Ray fills the audience’s shoes as the older, wiser, yet helpless witness to the car crash that is Hannah’s life.

As it enters its fifth season (of a reported six) the Girls are breaking apart, with Shoshanna finally entering the working world on the other side of the actual world in Japan, Marnie’s dreams of folk-singing superstardom in tatters, and Hannah finally realising that Adam is perhaps not the best influence in her life. The last series ended with a surprise “six months later” flash-forward to show Hannah, happy with new, stable boyfriend Fran. It was unlike the show to end that way, and whether it presages contentment or otherwise for Hannah and her sisters is something we’ll have to wait to find out.

Season 5 debuts on February 21st.

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EVE Online is the closest that games have yet come to emulating real life … if your life was spent flying internet spaceships.

Even The Sims — a game in which you get to experience the thrills of going to work, cleaning the house, and, um, sleeping — provides its players with an easy-to-reach series of goals, and a structure around which to achieve them. In EVE Online, the players are the structure, and your experience of the game stands or falls on whether your encounters with other players are enjoyable or keyboard-destroyingly frustrating.

The basics of the game are straightforward enough; you are a cloned “capsuleer” (their conceit to explain why you never truly die) pootling around a galaxy named New Eden in a variety of beautifully designed spaceships. You need money to buy more spaceships. How you get that money is up to you; just as in life, there are endless ways in which to make money: mining the raw materials needed to construct the items other players want; manufacturing those items; transporting them, or stealing them. The game does not provide any guidance or advice on what you should be doing, earning itself a reputation as one of the few true “sandbox” MMOs. You can train a series of skills that help you perform certain tasks or unlock access to more powerful spaceships, but again, those skillbooks cost both money and time (it has been calculated that it would take almost twenty-five years to train all of the skills available in the game!)

The tutorial system eases you in relatively slowly, providing an indispensable guide to the often complicated interface. Several “Career Agents” are also available to introduce the different types of activity you might one day end up doing, including mining, business, exploration and combat. There are also several of what are known as “epic arcs”, a 50-mission series designed to introduce players to the detailed game backstory.

At the heart of the game are the player-run corporations and alliances; enormous organisations of sometimes thousands of players, working together to take over, defend, and exploit huge chunks of space. As in life, new recruits need to be trained up and provided with equipment; the biggest corporations run training programmes and provide free ships to new joiners, but they may also require their members to fulfil a specific role, up to and including cannon fodder.

EVE is a fascinating insight into human behaviour. Scams and double-dealing are permitted under the terms of the game, and the first piece of advice often received is “trust nobody”. For every helpful player willing to offer advice, there is someone else who will shoot you in the back … and in EVE, they are often one and the same.

Once you pop out the other end of the tutorials and career missions, what you do next is entirely up to you. It’s this complete freedom that puts off many traditional MMO players; there is no clear route to “level up”, and no end-game; instead, it’s all about finding your own way in the universe. But if you can accept that, there’s nothing quite like it, and nothing better.

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Stoner by John Williams

"The greatest novel you've never read," proclaims the sticker on this slim volume; a quote from the erstwhile Sunday Times. The back cover is similarly filled with praise from successful authors, singing the praises of this 'forgotten classic'. Could it actually be true, that this book nobody has ever heard of, that has never appeared on any "100 Greatest Novels" list or been adapted into a Hollywood movie, could surpass acknowledged classics? The answer, as it turns out, is yes.

Stoner is not a complex story. The titular character -- you would hesitate to call him a hero -- grows up poor, goes to college where he discovers a love for literature; becomes a teacher, marries, has an affair, and dies at a not unreasonable advanced age. Over those years he observes from a distance two World Wars and the changes wrought by fifty years of history; yet there is very little space given over to chronicling those changes or their effect on him. Instead, the book tells the straightforward yet heartbreaking story of his life; the decisions he makes and the effects on his life, and the lives of others, that ripple out from those moments.

At the core of the novel are Stoner's relationships, first with his family then later with his university friends, his wife, his daughter, and finally his lover. His is a life of simple resignation, and his passivity in the face of monstrous mistakes can pierce the heart of the reader with the scale of their quiet tragedy. Williams' prose is undemanding yet powerful, profound and satisfying; despite encompassing a monumental sadness, this is an experience to savour.

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The Shambling Guide to New York City by Mur Lafferty

If anyone deserves literary success, it's Mur Lafferty. After eight years documenting the ups and downs of her career as a "wannabe fiction writer" on the I Should Be Writing podcast, it is perhaps unsurprising that the heroine of Lafferty's first "proper" novel (she has self-published several novels and short stories as ebooks in the past), The Shambling Guide to New York City, is a writer.

Freshly arrived in New York after a disastrous affair with a former boss, Zoe Norris gets more than she bargained for when she accepts a job from a vampire to write travel guides for zombies, demons, and demi-gods. Lafferty populates her fast-paced, entertaining book with a fresh take on almost every fictional and mythical monster around -- from zombies who keep fresh brains in the office canteen and shrines to celebrities in their homes, to incubus bakers seeking gratification through their customers' appreciation for pastries -- and keeps the tone just the right side of parody. Her characters are universally well-developed, particularly the women at the centre of the story, and the plotting is carefully controlled, albeit with little room for sub-plot.

The occasional joke falls wide of the mark, usually at the expense of believable dialogue, but overall the balance of humour and tension is kept in check. The real gems lie in Zoe's ongoing education in the world of the "coterie"; it is clear Lafferty has done her homework on humanity's favourite monsters ... and then thrown most of it away in favour of a far more entertaining explanation as to the whys and hows of living as a monster in New York.

The final third of the book ramps up both the pace and the scale of imagination, as Zoe's past comes back to haunt her and destroy the city into the bargain. The final action sequences are impressively cinematic; Lafferty's writing is beautifully visual without straying from the personal viewpoint.

A sequel, The Ghost Train to New Orleans, will be released in 2014.

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Enders Game by Orson Scott Card

Despite its somewhat circuitous route to completion -- an original short story that was only expanded in order to provide a lead-in to the sequel (1986's Speaker for the Dead) that Card actually wanted to write -- Ender's Game (1985) is one of the standout works of modern science fiction.

Six-year-old Ender Wiggin, bred specifically to provide the world with a military leader with the genius to defeat the alien Buggers, comes of age as he passes through the increasingly disorientating and dehumanising stages of 'Battle School'. This space station is home to the setting for many of the novel's most exciting moments, the zero-gravity battle room, where opposing armies fight mock battles. Ender's genius in battle brings him into conflict both with other students and the military teachers.

Card expertly weaves the non-stop action and Ender's more introspective moments of character development without breaking stride, and the relationships that develop between the children that make up the majority of the characters are never less than believable. The twist at the climax of his education is genuinely shocking, and it's unsurprising that the book forms part of the education of young officers in the US Marine Corps.

A movie based on the book is due to be released in 2013.

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After the impressive rush of the first Iron Man (2008) and the somewhat confused and over-long Iron Man 2 (2010), this third part in the saga -- or is it a trilogy? -- was approached with trepidation by many.

On the surface of it, all the ingredients for yet another Marvel summer blockbuster are there; Downey Jr quips and emotes in fairly equal measure, Don Cheadle returns as alterna-super War Machine (now renamed Iron Patriot and sporting a cheesy red, white and blue paint job), Gwyneth Paltrow's Pepper Potts gets a tiny bit more to do than cry over her man's emotional distance, and Ben Kingsley delivers a genuinely funny turn as the putative villain who isn't all that he seems.

Throw in Guy Pearce as the real power behind the throne and more Iron Man suits than you can shake a stick at, and it's a fun couple of hours, albeit leaving you struggling to really remember exactly what the plot was about.

The script suffers from a few too many Avengers (2012) references -- once or twice is fine, but when referring to "the New York thing" is a plot point I think you've gone too far -- and the writers seem determined to get as many of the cast as possible into the iron suit (doesn't that thing only really come in one size?), but it cracks along at a fair pace and Downey Jr's wisecracks paper over the occasional lapses in logic. The ending is surprisingly ambiguous concerning Stark's future as Iron Man; it's an odd choice when we all know Avengers 2 (2015) is just around the corner.

Also, Jon Favreau has gotten really fat. Like, really.