Raven

They are, I still have a small pile of them too! Mark Gatiss did a very interesting half-hour program on them on Radio Four at the end of last year.

It is a good book. If you like Wyndham's other work, I think you will like this, even though it is a bit different from his other novels.

You know it is - your turn!

Anyone? (I thought this was an easy one too!).

Boogie up the River by Mark Wallington One-hundred years after Jerome K. Jerome wrote Three Men in a Boat (that really is just a coincidence), author Mark Wallington sets out to find the source of the River Thames with his flatulent travelling companion Boogie. Will the pair make it through the backwaters of Suburbia? Will they overcome the challenge of Henley or the perils of the Goring gap? And will Mark's potential girlfriend, Jennifer, ever join them? It is the late eighties, a time of endeavour for the daring business executive, when the rat race was really being run and when Yuppies were at the height of their power. Slowly rowing past all of this are Mark Wallington and his dog Boogie, in the restored camping skiff Maegan. Like Wallington's previous books, 500 Mile Walkies and Destination Lapland, this is a comedy travelog. Starting from the pier at Tower Bridge, and heading up the Thames, he recounts numerous amusing exploits and intersperses them with trivia and historical information about the places the pair visit. All very good, and pretty much par for the course, really. Where this book differs from the previous books, however, is with the inclusion of a sub-plot about whether Mark's high-flying, poetry writing friend, and prospective girlfriend, Jennifer will join them on their quest, and to my mind this is where the book falls down. It starts off as a bit of a running joke, as at each rendezvous the pair arrange Mark is met by a motorcycle courier carrying an apology, a takeaway meal and some bad poetry. After a while the joke starts to wear a bit thin though, and when Jennifer finally does turn up, I very quickly found myself wishing she would disappear again, as she is the literary equivalent of finding a stone in your shoe. The parts of the book where Wallington is actually focused on the Thames are interesting and charming, and for anyone interested in the river - or his other books - it is worth a read, but ultimately the book is let down by the inclusion of the unnecessary and over-played sub-plot.

Catching up on a few reviews . . . Trouble With Lichen by John Wyndham When scientist Diana Brackley accidently drops a speck of lichen in the cat's milk, and discovers that it stops it from turning, she stumbles upon the secret of Antigerone; the cure for ageing. Whilst her boss ponders the ethics of announcing such a discovery to the world, Diana sees it as a way of liberating women from the eternal cycle of marriage and child bearing, so she sets off to start a very unique revolution . . . Trouble with Lichen is something a bit different from the other John Wyndham novels I have read. There is no threat to mankind and, for a change, the middle-classes aren't really suffering that much (on the contrary, they are living longer!) but there is still a strong central theme and an awful lot of speculative thinking going on, that makes this accustomed territory for anyone familiar with the authors other works. Written in the late fifties, the book has a cheerful optimism about it that embraces a time when rationing was being abolished and the standard of living was on the up. Into this walks Diana Brackley; probably Wydham

You're not wrong; the Orson Welles version was based on the HG Wells version, after all!

That was the Orson Welles version of War of the Worlds, broadcast in the US in the thirties. It did cause some panic at the time, but people generally looked out of their windows and realised that they weren't on fire so it was a case of panic over!

What's that like? I've read all of Gayle's novels, but this is him being Mike Gayle, isn't it? In other news, I finally got my first book on the board for 2010: Wild Sheep Chase, by Haruki Murakami. Utterly captivating, intriguing and heart breaking, all at the same time - how does he do it?! I think I want to have the man's children.

That, and beer. I don't read a lot of fantasy, but what I do - like any book from any genre really - is for a bit of escapism, to put the mundane and the ordinary behind me and lose myself in another world (whether that is Mordor, Rama or the streets of Tokyo, doesn

He's good on TV, but I've never read any of his books. Should give him a go, really.

I've still not seen most of the first series, I need to get a copy on DVD.

My OCD is kicking in; those Lord of the Rings DVDs and books aren't in the correct order!

Absolutely, one of the best comedies on TV at the mo. The Wil Wheaton episode that was on last night was excellent! "Whea-ton!"

Yes, very good, and well deserved. But best Talent Show award? Isn't that like voting for your favourite pox?!

Yay! Here's mine!

^Inglourious Basterds (2009).

I think the thing for me is that a lot of other shows have walked similar ground and done it a lot better (Buffy, Angel, Ultraviolet, Being Human etc). They didn't really seem to know what they wanted to do with this series, and as a result it just lurched from episode to episode; it just didn't seem very coherent. ITV got it right with Primeval, but they got it wrong with this.

Gotta love Winona more!

Dear Diary, on BBC Four - very interesting, and moving, stuff.

Personally, I thought it was pretty dreadful! Story, not myth. There is, of course, the Hugh Jackman film Van Helsing, but that is pretty dreadful as well - and the somewhat better Bram Stoker's Dracula, where VH is played by none other than Anthony Hopkins. Yep. Whatever possessed him to do an American accent should have been exorcised. Panned, it got canned by ITV!

Judging by the number of copies Meyer has shifted, there are a lot of un-cool kids out there reading it as well!

Most of the Doctor Who and Torchwood books currently available (and Star Trek, for that matter) are original stories, not adaptations of TV episodes, and both their quality and the readership they are targeted at can be very variable. I started out reading Star Trek books back when I was sixteen, and over the years I've read quite a few of them (and quite a few Star Wars and Doctor Who books as well). In recent years I've tended to only read one or two a year (if that) because my taste in literature has changed over the years and I know there are better stories/authors out there to be read. The Doctor Who books that are currently being published are targeted, like the show, towards a generally audience - in other words they are written so that children, or at least teenagers, can read them as well as adults. The two I've read from the current range (Sting of the Zygons and Prisoner of the Daleks) have both been okay, but they were both generally light-weight reads. The New Adventures range of Doctor Who novels, published during the nineties by Virgin, and the BBC range that followed, had some cracking stories, written by the likes of Mark Gatiss and Paul Cornell who have both written episodes of the new series (in fact the series three story Human Nature/The Family of Blood was originally a New Adventures novel written around the seventh Doctor). These books were aimed squarely at adult readers, and were generally a lot more complex than the novels they publish now (they also only feature the first eight Doctors). When Doctor Who returned to our screens in 2005 the BBC dropped this range of books, which was a shame, but they wanted to push the new series and make it more child friendly, so the more adult books had to go. In summary, I would say there is some very good stuff out there, if you are willing to put in the leg work to find it (don't read Doctor Who sites for book reviews by the way, they don't tend to be terribly subjective!), but the most I think you can expect from the current range is an enjoyable read. Michelle may be able to comment on the Torchwood books, I

This may be a bit on the late side, but the Francois Truffaut film version of this book in on ITV1 at 2:05, just over an hour from now!

I'm waiting for the paperback. I read Starter for 10 a year or two ago and was really enjoying it - right up to the last fifty or so pages (which completely ruined the book for me). The film, which I think Nicholls wrote the screen play for, was a lot better.