What do you mean?? Garth Marenghi is a real person! 
ha yep he was in character, did a talk for a good hour as Garth and then signed tons of books! Top evening.
On the recommendation (not personal, in an interview) of Sir Richard Dearlove, former ‘C’ of the SIS, I started to read books by Alan Judd, a pseudonym for a man who served in the British Army and then went to work for the Foreign Office. According to Sir Richard, the pseudonymous Judd is his favorite writer of ‘spy fiction’, because he’s the only one who gets it right.
I have no idea whether Judd’s abbreviated biography is designed to make potential readers assume that he really worked for the SIS, but of course they cannot confirm or deny, etc., or if Judd actually was an SIS employee. I suspect that having experience of Whitehall bureaucracy and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office would allow writing about the SIS with reasonable accuracy, given that the actual experience of working in any branch of government bureaucracy exposes one to considerably more office politics than geopolitics, no matter what the notional purpose of the institution in question happens to be.
I decided to start with the first novel in Judd’s series about his most recognised character, Charles Thoroughgood, A Breed of Heroes. It actually isn’t a spy story at all, as the protagonist, Thoroughgood, is an Oxford graduate who joined the British Army as an officer. His regiment is the fictional No. 1 Assault Commando (Airborne), which has definite similarities to the 59 Independent Commando Squadron, Royal Engineers, as well as other units of Commando Sappers, but is elevated to battalion size and regimental nature in the novel, despite the regular Commando Sapper units at the time having been only of company-size.
I suspect this was done to allow the unit to serve in Northern Ireland for a four-month tour in place of a battalion of a real regiment and to allow them to have regimental traditions, a suitably senior Commanding Officer, mess dinners and a battalion HQ which provided the protagonist with an opportunity to explore certain staff duties of British Army officers, for which Company HQ would not have provided quite enough scope.
The book is not a thriller. It is more Joseph Heller than Andy McNab. The inner life of the protagonist is on display in a way that I suspect fits the espionage genre well and other characters are psychologically complex in a way that feels authentic.
I liked the book and hope that in the twenty years which passed from this debut effort to Legacy, where he picks up the thread of Charles Thoroughgood’s life after he left the Army and joined the SIS, the author has developed from a promising writer into a superb one.
Didn’t get anything read in May, but I think my reading in June more than made up for it.
(Having my birthday meant I had lots of new comics ready to be read.)
In an odd Independence Day 250 miracle, I hit a stride and burned through over 400 pages since July 2 and finished Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon
Definitely a couple false starts and had to go back and re-read at least a half dozen chapters in the first quarter but once it clicked it really clicked
Your mileage will absolutely vary so consider this volume most if you have: read some on the history of the colonial US, the Royal Society, and hollow earth fads; visited colonial Williamsburg; and recognize a random reference of “Fine, Howard, and Howard” after someone is comically electrocuted by Benjamin Franklin
Also a help to have read John Barth’s The Sot-Weed Factor which is if anything a more difficult read
I read Mason & Dixon when it was first published in paperback. I am pretty sure I bought it the day it was released, even. I remember discussing it with the bookseller who rung me up, and saying I had been waiting for the paperback, because I knew I wass going to be carrying it around for a while.
As I recall, it was great fun once it got going, even if I didn’t get the “fine, howard, and hwoard” reference.
Started reading The Terminal Man (Michael Crichton). And why have I picked this to read? Well, I bought a new Kindle and this was the first book it listed. For some reason I can’t copy all my books straight from my pc to the Kindle (no error or anything, it just doesn’t copy them). Maybe it’s a sign I have too many books. So ended up picking a few favourites (King, Pratchett, Asimov) and copying them, seemed to go ok.
I wish collections on Kindle were a bit easier to use. Like if you select a book it will show you the last collection you created, rather than forcing you to go thru the list of all your collections.