I've done JG Ballard a disservice.

The concepts of Empire of the Sun and Crash did nothing for me, so I didn't explore his work for ages, but a while ago a friend of mine gave me Myths of the Near Future and I've just finished reading The Disaster Area. Which of his other short story collections are good, and which of his novels should I read?

Finally gave up on The Once and Future King by TH White.

The Ill-Made Knight, being a study of Lancelot and Guinevere's relationship, is far and away better than the other four books in the sequence - The Sword In the Stone, The Witch In the Wood and The Book of Merlyn contain entirely too much preaching from Merlin, and the political references to Nazism and Communism in The Candle In the Wind are similarly heavy-handed. I still don't understand why, when given a myth-cycle with so much scope for allegory and allusion, that White continually felt the need to spell out his message through monologues. To be fair, his ideas about peace were needed at the time, but what was timely and important in the late 1930s is old hat these days. (Yes, we all know war isn't honourable or good, and we all know that the Nazis were bad.)

Also, his anti-Gaelic racism leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

DHL did it again.

This time at my house - they flopped a card through the door which was completely blank except for the date and time of their visit and the package number. No indication whether it was the first, second or third visit (and thus what to do next), despite the card clearly being designed to give that sort of information, and no name for the intended recipient.

I used the tracking number to work out that the package came from Leeds and, yes, that was the third visit so whoever it belongs to has a week to go down to the depot at Blackbird Leys with proof of ID to get the package. Shame they didn't specify who the package was for.

Whoever they have working in Oxford, they're paying them too much.

Exterminator! by William S. Burroughs.

Nobody can seem to decide if this one is a novel or a short story collection. It certainly reads like the latter, but there's enough common themes and characters and strands that it could be the former, though you can say that about almost everything he wrote from The Naked Lunch onwards. There's less gay sex and heroin in this one than The Naked Lunch and more criticism of Scientology and accounts of his experiences at the 1968 Democratic Convention (but pretty much every writer in the 1960s was there). Also, Dutch Schultz's last words crop up. Robert Anton Wilson seemed to rip off a lot of this in the Illuminatus trilogy, so I suspect he read it while writing that.

I listened to Wolfmangler's latest album while reading this and it was a really good accompaniment.

Gene Wolfe, Pandora by Holly Hollander

Gene Wolfe must have occasional urges to branch out into the young adult market - he seemed to be trying it with The Devil In a Forest, and he tried it again with this one. It's also the most straightforward book of his I've read (not counting Operation Ares), in that it is a mystery story with no supernatural elements (although there's an undercurrent of classical myth, because Wolfe cannot resist infusing every novel he writes with classical myth). And lastly, it seems to be the first book in a prospective series, and I'm kind of disappointed there was never enough interest in this one to make sequels.

Victor Dunstan, The Invisible Hand

Victor Dunstan - author of Did the Virgin Mary Live and Die in England? - is not a conventional Christian. He refers to God as the "great universal spirit" and believes that the Biblical prophets were telepaths who could talk to God through their mind powers. In The Invisible Hand he presents his own version of the end of the world (due to begin in 1992), a deliciously cracked alternative to the Hal Lindsey version.

Some highlights:

• Dunstan believes in the British Israelism theory - the idea that the Anglo-Saxon, British and Celtic peoples are the lost tribes of Israel. At first sight he does not appear to be an anti-semite: he is very much on the side of the Jewish people, and believe that together the Anglo-Saxon and Jewish peoples can bring peace and prosperity to the world. (The British Israel theory did give birth to the anti-semitic Christian Identity movement in the states, however.)
  
  
• Dunstan, meanwhile, believes that the Anglo-Saxon people - having descended from Joseph, Jacob's favourite son - are the "chosen people", and therefore are pre-eminent amongst the Israelites. As such, they will rule the world after Armageddon and the Jews will have a secondary (though still exalted) role.
  
  
• As such, he thinks that the USA and the Scandanavian countries should join the British Commonwealth to become a kind of Anglo-Saxon Federation, to accomplish the manifest destiny of all those who have "sprung from the Anglo-Saxon, British, and Celtic stocks". (One wonders what the place of non-Anglo-Saxons in this Federation would be.) By the time that Armageddon happens, this Federation will be recognised as representing the lost tribes, and will unify as a single political unit with Israel, and the King of this magnificent nation will be Jesus Christ returned.
  
  
• He also asserts that the Druids were Christians, that Jesus was a Druid, and that the Druids worshipped Jesus centuries before he was even born.
  
  
• Interestingly - unlike every other end of the world writer I've read - Dunstan never mentions Jesus's resurrection (although he makes a lot of the Second Coming) and never talks about spiritual salvation. This would suggest that he thinks that there's no point writing about how to be "saved", and that the resurrection is irrelevant; as such, it implies to me that he believes that the New Jerusalem will be devoted entirely to Anglo-Saxons and Jews, regardless of their actual beliefs and deeds, and that salvation is more a matter of having the right blood than doing the right thing or beieving in the right Jesus.
  
  
• "Adolf Hitler, Mussolini, Marx and Stalin were all socialists - what else did they have in common?" (The answer, apparently, is that they were all Satanists.)
  
  
• At the beginning of Genesis, Moses not only propounded the theory of evolution - with greater accuracy than Darwin - he also explained how the Earth formed!
  
  
• Victor Dunstan does not understand how the AD/BC dating system works. He will occasionally show amazement that, say, the Prophet Daniel in 539 BC predicted something that would happen in 604 BC.
  
  
• Victor Dunstan does not understand linguistics. He presents as evidence that David predicted the sexual depravity of the Emperor Tiberius the fact that both David (in the Bible passage that supposedly predicts Tiberius) and Suetonius (writing his history of the Roman Emperors after the fact) used the word "vile" to describe Tiberius - except both individuals were writing in different languages with entirely different origins...
  
  
• Interestingly, he's a post-Tribulationist: he believes that the prophecies of the Tribulation were fulfilled by the Roman sack of Jerusalem. This is in stark contrast to most end-of-the-world kooks.
  
  
• Meanwhile, Islamists will re-establish the Caliphate (ruling it from Baghdad) and even make headway into France. Before Armageddon, however, this bloc will turn Communist and side with the USSR. The Islamic Empire will be the Beast 666 - but the Satanic power controlling the beast will be Communism. Therefore, Karl Marx was the AntiChrist.
  
  
• He asserts that the battle of Armageddon will be fought in Israel, between the Anglo-Saxon Federation and Israel on one side, and the USSR, Ethiopia, Libya, Iran and their allies on the other, and that the USSR would be defeated in it. For some reason, this won't trigger nuclear war, because... erm... well, he doesn't explain that part very well.
  
  
• "The Marxist Socialist will always be prepared to describe any police action designed to protect the innocent as being `Gestapo tactics', whereupon there is a `Public Enquiry' and some old dodderer, having swallowed the bait, shackles the police and brings the day of revolution a stage nearer." In other words, Victor Dunstan supports a brutally strong police force with no oversight whatsoever. Dunstan also has contempt for the idea of civil rights, and generally supports the laws of the Old Testament, both in the economic and criminal spheres; he can be best described as a kind of theocratic Anglo-supremacist socialist.
  
  
• Socialists control the media and the education system in Britain, apparently.
  
  
• Hitler was a follower of Gurdjieff, having been a disciple of the Order of the Green Dragon (along with Rasputin).
  
  
• The Whore of Babylon is the world economic system, which will collapse before Armageddon.

Dostoyevsky, The Idiot

I've just finished reading this one - Parts one and three were riveting, but part 2 dragged a little and part 4 focused slightly too much on political questions and social issues which have moved on a lot since the 1860s. I'm left wondering what we're meant to make of the protagonist's fate - I don't know whether Dostoyevsky, in pointing out that there's no place for a genuinely Christian man in Russian society, is condemning Russian society as being anti-Christian or Christian morality as being unrealistic and unworkable.