Book Order from the UK

I had a £30 credit on Amazon UK that needed to be used by December, so I picked up a few books to clear it out. I wish I’d waited a week in order to get Iain M. Banks collection State of the Art, which as I mentioned in my review of The Player of Games is hard to find in the US (even used editions are expensive) but is just another retail book in the UK.

Aside from that, though, it’s a good little haul:

I enjoyed M. John Harrison’s Light enough that I was eager to try one of his few (maybe his only?) mainstream novels, Climbers. Should be interesting — I know very little about climbing, though I often leaf through my prized edition of Alan Blackshaw’s Penguin Handbook Mountaineering. (The only 60s Penguin Handbook that could possibly match it is the long-coveted-by-me Gardening for Australians).

Sheri Tepper’s Grass, unlike the other two, is available in a US edition. But I wanted to pick up the Gollancz SF Masterworks edition from the UK. The SF Masterworks series is one of publishing’s noble endeavors right now (or endeavours, since we’re being all British) and they deserve your patronage! I’ve been intrigued by Grass for a while now — it gets a lot of comparisons to Dune, but without the bloat that encroached on Dune later on. I’m assuming it’s about a planet of post-apocalyptic potheads but don’t spoil it for me if I’m wrong (also please don’t disillusion me about PKD’s Galactic Pot-Healer).

State of Emergency is part of Dominic Sandbrook’s history of 20th-century Britain. This one covers 1970-1974; last year I read and really enjoyed White Heat, which covers 1964-1970, so it seemed like the logical next one to read in the series.

Not sure when I’ll get to any of these, considering my backlog of library books, but hopefully it’ll be soon.