In the Woods - Tana French, Tennyson - Idylls of the King, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind - Yuval Noah Harari, Ringworld

So I've been dotting around a bit. In The Woods, or In The Woods Dublin Murder Squad: 1 (Dublin Murder Squad series) to give it its full Amazon title cost 99p in its Kindle version, and was well worth it - a quick read - I finished it ion two days while reading other stuff as well but none the worse for that. Intricate psychological plot, good writing, comfortable tropes of police procedural detective land, it was a welcome break from the more difficult texts and above all it was great  storytelling. The next five in the series are all 99p so I bought them too once I'd established that the first was something I wanted to read. 99p! - still her latest novel is full price - and interestingly has a title that goes like this on Amazon: The Trespasser: The most hotly anticipated crime thriller of the year - I'm slightly fazed by the putting of  "The most hotly anticipated crime thriller of the year" in the title, but I'm sure there's  dead cert marketing intelligence behind it. At least the author will make some money from it any way at.

Note: I've just gone back to check out the price of the paperback versions and the Kindle versions are now £5.99 - so I got five bargains there - it must have been either a mistake or a temporary advertising thing?

Yuval Noah Harari's Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind is a great read too - slightly breathless in tone at times but based on good hard research and good hard thinking at other times. Essentially it feels like  a more hopeful rerun (at the moment - I'm only a hundred or so pages in) of John Gray's Straw Dogs - in both books it's made clear that we made the beds we lie in - the growth of the agricultural culture says Harari means that we gradually lost a carefree nomadic existence for a boom and bust cycle of huge population growth and then the creation of all sorts of fantasies like companies ( are they real things he asks - what is Peugeot - its workers? its owners? its cars? )and money to allow us to do things in concert and make our modern scientific world.John Gray is very clear that we have merely increased the effectiveness of our means of suppression and killing to benefit a lucky few.

So then Tennyson -, Merlin and Vivien one of the Idylls where the evil Vivien follows Merlin and gradually seduces him into revealing the spell that will imprison him forever. It's a strange poem, quite straightforward, all the imagery surrounding Vivien is snakelike and confining, an at the end of the day Merlin is old and depressed and Vivien is young and sensuous, it can only go one way, even though Merlin is aware of how treacherous she is.

I still haven't finished Ringworld yet, have slowed up because in the seemingly unending journey across the ring all they seem to meet are people weho are now savages and believe that the protagonists are the engineers. It's getting a bit repetitive and I've lost momentum. I will go back and finish it, but it seems to lack some of the intricate plotting that Iain M Banks has, and the "savages" are just not very interesting.