What’s the smallest book you’ve ever read?
 
This edition of a Borges story is smaller than a teabag.
 
I found it in Buenos Aires, the best city on earth for books and bookshops of all shapes and sizes.
 
Following an accident, Funes is condemned to remember every detail of his life as a unique event that cannot be compared to any other, so that he is unable to generalize, see patterns, or make connections. He cannot, therefore, speak meaningfully of his experience.
 
Borges speculates on a language in which the perception of every animal and leaf and stone in its particular moment would have its own noun. Any such language would, of course, be an endless, indefinable accumulation.
 
The idea points interestingly to the insufficiency of language when faced with uncapturable reality. It is also quintessential Borges, who, in his obsessive pursuit of the idea of the perfection of knowledge, typically ends up creating abstract meta-libraries of the mind.
 
That’s quite a lot for a little book.
 
I’m just surprised that he didn’t take it one neurotic, philosophical step further and propose vocabulary for the experiences of the “gaps” between Funes’s focussed perceptions, seeing as there are no such gaps, only a continuous flow.
 
I don’t care for Borges myself. In fiction, I look for real-life characters, not ciphers for intellectual conjectures. Without depth or feeling, his craftsmanship remains another extremely clever yet lifeless language.
 
Ireneo Funes, by the way, is from Fray Bentos, which British readers may be curious to learn is not a corned beef factory but a city in Uruguay.
 
The green peppers are the first from the garden this summer and have gone into a chili con carne. The teabag is Yorkshire and made a very nice cuppa.

When the lead character is likeably flawed, I love a good private detective series.
 
The fictional world has to be convincingly real and the stories must have pace, and you can play around with the paradigm, but you can’t beat the purity of the classical format.
 
Kerr dreams up his own suitably hard-boiled, cynical, battle-scarred, tough guy and what kind of benign milieu does he give Bernie to operate in? 1930s Berlin, with the rise of Nazism as the background narrative, and semblances of ordinary decency in police work and society at large being eradicated.
 
It’s the lone crusader archetype that gets me. Independent, but not egotistical. Successful, but not always. Unorthodox, but not too much. With a conscience, but a stained one. Philip Kerr’s wife, Jane, wrote: “He loved to paint Bernie into an ethical corner ‘so he can’t cross the floor without getting paint on his shoes.’”
 
Each book in the series gives us a self-contained case and a darn good mystery to be solved. We accompany Bernie Gunther as he deals with corrupt, unsavoury individuals and historical political villains in his own inimitable way, speaking his mind with dark irony and pithy observations on the human condition in such a way that he just about manages to get away with it. Goebbels, for instance, might have shot another man, but the straight-talking, politically suspect Gunther he finds amusing, and provisionally spares him.
 
The Bernie story develops and extends beyond Germany and the original time frame, so that we also find him pursuing malfeasants in Argentina and the French Riviera.
 
Philip Kerr was very unwell and struggling by the end of the series, so that Metropolis just doesn’t have the dynamic verve of the rest, but don’t let that put you off. Bernie Gunther is your definitive anti-hero and you have a solid oeuvre of fourteen thrillers to enjoy him in.

A book so unsettling I had to put it down various times. Shoot or be shot: which would you choose? Decency or cruelty is contingent on circumstance and I, too, human all-too-human, have the inherent potentiality for both. If someone allows you to do a kindness, that is a considerable favour.

The story begins with a lone, injured, amnesiac, ten-year old, black girl. She is lost outside, somewhere in the USA, and doesn’t know who or what she is.
 
Vulnerable, or what?
 
Butler’s brilliant idea is to give her small protagonist significant power, tempered by a virtuous character. Shori turns out to be a vampire and doesn’t mean anyone any harm, but hey, a girl gotta eat.
 
Shori doesn’t recall anything and so we find ourselves along for the ride of finding out with her, all the while knowing that ignorance spells danger. Protective and loving of those whose blood she craves, Shori is brave and self-assured, but at risk.
 
She is 53, but a child in appearance, so that when she and Wright have sex, you’d expect all kinds of alarm bells to be going off, but Butler has the delicacy and the skill to present it as legitimate and adult. The vampire is the stronger, the faster, the one in charge. She has a robust intellect and it is her choice. Rather than innocent or mature, Shori has an ageless self-possession.
 
Butler is superbly organized and deft in the unforced way that she presents new information and characters, so that one is always clear about what is going on and why. I admire this as a writer as much as I appreciate it as a reader. She also achieves the difficult feat of making ethical leadership not just admirable, but interesting.
 
Fledgling is a book for truth, and respect for justice, and diverse consensual relationship arrangements. The vampire-human symbiosis is a reflection on human interdependence and the responsibility that corresponds to power over others.
 
But primarily, or ultimately, it’s a stirring human story, of a plucky young woman with the chance of a life, if she can but survive.

The premise of science fiction/fantasy is that there is so much more to reality than what meets the eye and is subsequently interpreted by the brain. Once you get that, the genre can go on to have all the fun and games that it likes, as long as it’s consistent and credible. If there’s a stimulating conversation going on with your unconscious, the storyline can be anything at all.
 
In Tim Powers’ novels, the particular premise is that events have a far more fascinating explanation that we imagine. In Three Days to Never, historical figures such as Chaplin and Philby lead the same lives, but there is another dimension to them of which we knew nothing.
 
Of his equally brilliant Declare, Powers said: “I made it an ironclad rule that I could not change or disregard any of the recorded facts, nor rearrange any days of the calendar—and then I tried to figure out what momentous but unrecorded fact could explain them all.”
 
The same principle is at work in this book set in 1980s California. I love the grittiness in Tim Powers’ books, that sense of dirt and oil which lets you know that we are in the real world, and where the supernatural is so called simply because we haven’t noticed or woken up to it. It brought to mind Soviet Russia’s serious research into telekinesis at this time and I thought how the pragmatic militaries of the superpowers would unhesitatingly add any such proven abilities—and magic, too—to their armament as one more useful element. Take the talent and weaponize it.
 
Historical events are unchanged and respected, but the causes now acquire a supernatural depth. The story, though, is about vulnerable individuals. We care about Frank and his daughter, Daphne, and the danger they face seems very real.
 
Powers’ writing has a wacky seriousness that I delight in. The supernatural can be induced or triggered by a VHS tape or a device in a garden shed; Charlie Chaplin is linked with Einstein in strange, mystical subterfuge; and Mossad—as no-nonsense a secret service as you can get—drive around with a semi-alive head in the back of their van that they use as a kabbalistic antenna.