Summer reading: Time for skank

Books are my mood rings, but although I usually have several on the go, I have developed one consistent end-of-year reading habit: summer hols are the time for skank.

Last year, it was Lloyd Bradley's Bass Culture: When Reggae was King — still highly recommended. This year brings Solid Foundation: An Oral History of Reggae, a compilation of about 250 interviews conducted by David Katz.

Dread tales add excellent subtitles and footnotes to a sunny soundtrack of Jamaican shuffle, and as most of the characters fried their brains long ago, their accounts can shift every time a reggae anthropologist comes a-knocking.

Over the past year, I've grown a warty fondness for the dark works of China Mieville, a drum 'n' bass fanatic who has created a weirdly magical, clockwork world of grotesque characters, grisly creatures and inhuman practices, where nature is experienced as biology. Yummy. His latest effort is Iron Council and it'll keep me busy for a wee while.

A quick flick through former NME writer Stuart Maconie's Cider with Roadies was enough to show that his personal odyssey from progressive rock hell through to coining Brit Pop will be a blast. It's only rock'n' roll, but he likes it. Nice.

I'm in several minds over James Ellroy's The Cold Six Thousand. Too many tasteful friends have lapped this guy up, but his machine-gun writing style wears me down pretty quickly. Anyway, it will be with loins girded that I'll have a lash at his sordid gangster-conspiracy retooling of the JFK assassination. Cool cover.
And finally, still floating somewhere within Dymock's ordering system is my copy of Vinyl Junkies: Adventures in Record Collecting. But it will soon be mine. Oh yes, it will.

* Alan Perrott is a canvas staff writer