I Quite Like My Mum.

My sister, brother and I literally owe our lives to Bernadette, but she didn't just bring us into the world; she dedicated everything she had to showing us how utterly thrilling, friendly, creative and fulfilling that world could be. We all owe her our morality and worldview and optimism and very identities.

Her unconditional love and confidence in her children, her support of every passion and hobby, her example of immediately helping those in need without being asked; her instinct to praise good deeds rather than punish the bad; all shaped us to the core. We face every moral dilemma - consciously or subconsciously - with the question "what would Mum do?" The answer is always the most selfless path.

Not everybody gets this privilege, which is why she extends her honorary family to practically everybody she teaches or befriends. There are hundreds and thousands of people out there tangibly better off because she's gone out of her way to make them feel loved. She didn't just teach us the world was good; she's actively making it better, each and every day.

She also purchased Radiohead's "OK Computer" before it was cool. I feel compelled to add this fact.

The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach

a.k.a. The Not-Really-About-Baseball Book With The Really Nice Cover That Lots Of People Seem To Adore, Even Those Who Don't Care About Baseball, Because Honest To God, This Book is Not Really Abut Baseball.

I have little active interest and even less understanding of baseball, but after this incredible first novel, Chad Harbach is welcome to write about whatever the hell he wants.  Greyhound racing.  Tuna canning.  Stamp collecting.

Because, if it's anything like The Art of Fielding, he'll populate that tiny world with some of the most immediately likeable and well-defined characters you'll ever see on the page.  People with whom you might have nothing obvious in common, who you'd probably walk past on the street without a second glance, each brought to life as unique bundles of hopes and fears and neuroses and knee pains and eccentricities and family histories and habits of speech.

Harbach has an insane, sometimes frustratingly enviable knack for characterisation.  We spent time inside four different heads throughout the book, growing to know all of them intimately; perhaps even better than they know themselves.  You'll want the very best for each for them, even when their best outcomes are mutually exclusive.

This makes all the more rewarding - perhaps even a little thrilling - to then step behind a different set of eyes, see the same people from the outside, and get them.

They don't just think and act like actual people, but interact like them too.  Harbach's take on modern, everyday human friendship - and all the dialogue, gestures and linguistic shorthand that comes with it -  is another one of his obvious strengths.  Whether romantic or platonic, heterosexual or homosexual, familial or distant, there's a love between each pairing of them that feels uncannily real.

You guys, this is a really good book.

Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco

This is what happens when an exceptionally clever person applies said cleverness to crafting a good story.

The basic rundown: three academics at a publishing firm, stuck reading endless Dan Brownesque conspiracy theories about the Knights Templar, entertain themselves by creating The Plan: a way to link practically every ancient historical order, religious text, ancient secret and pseudoscience into a single cohesive story.  What starts as a game costs them their minds, their health, and - when actual secret societies get wind of it - a great deal more.

But before these connections can be made, and before it can all go thrillingly pear-shaped, we need context.  Hundreds of pages of context.

This is not an easy book, and even throwing difficulty aside, it's simply not for everyone.  Umberto Eco is not afraid to show off his (frankly intimidating) wealth of knowledge, even if it means halting the story's momentum for a meandering history lesson and adding drastically to the page count.  Some portions are gripping; others were bewildering, esoteric, alienating, and had my eyes still glazing over, much to my shame, on the fourth re-reading.  It's well within your rights to find this excessively intellectual tone a deal-breaker.

With this out of the way: Eco's mastery of language is an absolute joy to read.  And amazingly, it does pay off.  Every seemingly tangential lecture adds that little bit of extra weight to the insane and gutting payoff.

The true heart of the story, though, lies with the supporting character of Jacopo Belbo.  As the narrator sifts through his friend's "mechanical brain", the computer he left behind, we find journal fragments, word games and frustrated attempts at fiction.  Piece by piece, we get an intimate look at a man's entire life: his loveable quirks, the neuroses that crippled him, and the actual triumphs he never gave credit.  Only in the final pages does the true message of his story - and the book as a whole - become clear.

This was well worth the effort.  Mr. Eco, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.