One of Lynne Featherstone's opponents in the election is now standing as an independent. He was meant to be standing for the Libertarian Party, but the party rules were getting in the way.

"And how could anyone expect him to solve the thing when half of everything seemed to be broken, and half of what was broken was still beautiful." I've finished the third book of Daniel Abraham's Long Price and even beyond my usual reluctance to plough straight through a series, I'm going to need a break, because that was quite the most harrowing thing I've read in a while*. It must have taken a deep and inhuman ingenuity to so brilliantly construct a series in which every character is sympathetic, and everyone loses. Each novel in the series is a little crueller - though no less beautiful - than the one before, and while this need not necessarily carry through to the last book, I don't think the title The Price of Spring bodes well. For the meantime I've embarked instead on Michael Chabon's essay collection Maps and Legends, which ties in rather well with BBC4's current maps season, treating the map as a general metaphor for a way of seeing rather than anything so simple as the route from yours to the shops. I wasn't too enamoured of Power, Plunder and Possession, the Sunday series which seems to rather milk these ideas, but the daily Beauty of Maps strand is excellent, and comes at a good time for me because when it's not the Indelicates on my headphones at the moment it's normally Swimmer One, and as they say - "When all of this is underwater these maps will be all that's left, so we should try to make these maps beautiful." But then, I find most maps beautiful, except the really crappy ones you get on venue websites and the like.

Good Bright Club last night, and I'm not just saying that because beforehand they gave me a burger and a pint in exchange for my opinions on proceedings (I mouth off on the Internet for free and yet you're still prepared to pay for my musings? Awesome). Could have done without the poor woman who was covering Brian Cox territory while, crucially and tragically, not being Brian Cox, but otherwise I enjoyed the speakers, and while Rufus Hound may not have had a great deal of sea-related material, he was extremely funny nonetheless. Plus he likes Garth Ennis, which is always a good sign.

*Albeit with the small problem - for a Londoner at least - that the capital of the looming Galtic empire is situated to the West and called Acton. It's hard to be scared of Acton.

I'm surprised more hasn't been made of Mick Harvey leaving the Bad Seeds. Mick's been working with Nick since The Boys Next Door, and I've always wondered how much of what we think of as Cave is in fact Harvey, particularly when listening to Harvey's other projects. I suppose now we get to find out.

Final Crisis: Superman Beyond's second issue confirms that this is the comic Final Crisis should have been. Yes, Grant Morrison is reusing his old tropes again - breaking the fourth wall, Limbo, the self-evolving hyperstory, creators trapped in creation - but here there's a manic, fizzing joy and ingenuity I'm not getting from the parent Rock of Ages reprise. Some great 3D sequences, too - though should you happen, as I did, to look out of the window with your glasses still on, it brings a real moment of Crisis terror - RED SKIES!
Elsewhere in comics, Bendis' Dark Avengers may not have any lines to equal the best of Warren Ellis' Thunderbolts run, but in so far as it's taking that series' concept - Marvel's biggest bastards given the keys to the kingdom - to the next level, I'm very much interested. Thunderbolts, meanwhile, has gone deeper and darker under Andy Diggle, and this issue includes a considerably more substantial Barack Obama appearance than that meaningless fluff-piece of a Spider-Man back-up strip, albeit to considerably less fanfare.

Have been left with a nagging sensation that I've not used my leisure to best advantage this week, to the extent that I started getting quite angry with myself/the world and had to go wander the British Museum for a while to calm down. Silly, really - even aside from the nebulous business of Seeing Nice People, I've watched another Losey/Pinter/Bogarde masterpiece, Accident; seen the Soft Close-Ups and Mr Solo; and made a reasonably good start on Ulysses, so it's not as if I'm flicking myself off to Trisha just yet.

I know list articles are intrinsically pointless, and I know they're designed to provoke quibbling, so I'm not going to get up in arms about the omissions from the Guardian's Novels You Must Read, or the times where they've chosen a book which isn't the author's best. And I should be glad, I suppose, that one of the seven sections was science fiction and fantasy. But since when was Kavalier & Clay, The Man Who Was Thursday or The Wasp Factory science fiction or fantasy? They may not be dull enough to be literary fiction, but none of them takes place in a world that is not the consensus version of this one - except in so far as they are not true. If we say that the fictional comics in Chabon's book make it an alternate world, then so does the fictional MP in The Line of Beauty, and down that line every book bar the most tiresomely domestic becomes SF. Which would amuse me at least a little, it's true, but is patently nonsense.

The Girls Aloud Vs Sugababes version of 'Walk This Way' for Comic Relief, yes? It's hardly essential, but then neither band has ever been at their best on cover versions. The video is pleasing enough to the eye, as one would expect given the cast. But it isn't remotely funny. There are a few mugging comics towards the end of the video, but they come across as a total afterthought (and in the olden days, the vid would have been faded out by then). This may be for the best given how badly most Comic Relief records have aged, but it still seems slightly inappropriate.

Anybody who would still draw a definite line between 'fan fiction' and 'literature' should read Michael Chabon's The Final Solution without delay. The name refers to the Holocaust, of course, and it's not the first time Chabon has written at a tangent to that subject (as all those who've read his deservedly Pullitzer-winning Kavalier & Clay will know) nor the last (his next book is set in an Alaskan Jewish homeland, apparently a serious proposal at one point) - but it is also the perfect title for a story about the latter days of Sherlock Holmes, a last fitful effort by one of the world's great minds as it fades. I'm no Holmesian, so I'm not sure how much of this Conan Doyle laid out (he said that Holmes retired to keep bees, but did he ever explain why that made perfect sense in quite the inarguable terms Chabon does?) - nor any real expert on stories about age, Dunsany and Cabell aside. But for me, this could hardly be better in either direction, nor tie the two threads more naturally together.

While it's true that Garth Ennis is one of the comics writers currently producing extremely good work on a regular basis, I disagree with the reviews which are hailing his new series Wormwood as one of his better efforts. Based on the first issue it's an entertaining little piece of fluff (premise: the Antichrist doesn't want to bring about Armageddon, so instead lives in New York with a talking rabbit and runs HBO), but nothing Ennis hasn't done better and before. The scatologically brutal application of superpowers? Preacher. The Second Coming as a dreadlocked black kid who falls foul of American riot police? Hellblazer Special, more than a decade ago. And that had one beautiful detail this omits, even though the years have only made it more resonant - "a man named Geldof will kiss him on the cheek." Yes, it's true that The Boys and The Punisher have little to say about the real world, but who cares? Within the worlds they delineate, everything is perfectly pitched. Whereas here, though it's more recognisable as our world, though the story is more 'relevant', there are clumsinesses I thought Ennis had long since outgrown - in particular, a televised debate on the proposed regulation of cable TV is so rah-rah-rah heroically one-sided that it could almost have been shat out by The West Wing.

Charlie Brooker facts I never knew: Charlie is short for Charlton (which explains some of the bitterness), and he began by writing for Oink! So I was, as ever, way ahead of the curve there. Wonder which strips he did?

Garth Marenghi on
Oxford Street, not Darkplace; still
has that stern face, though.