se71: books Archives

October 01, 2008

52 Books in 52 Weeks - September 2008

Oh dear.

Cycling every day to work, tired in the evenings, and only managing a few pages a day of the four books I currently have on the go. Make that five books.

October isn't looking much better.

No books finished this month.

Posted by se71 at 03:59 PM | Comments (0)

September 14, 2008

A long awaited journey

I've been putting it off, savouring the anticipation. Of course I've seen the novels on the bookshelves, over the last 10 years or so gradually building up into a formidable series. At first, I didn't really know anything about them - George R.R. Martin wasn't that well known to me (I read a science fiction anthology in about 1988 called "Wild Cards" that he edited and provided a couple of the stories for). But the mythos has grown, and everyone who knows anything about fantasy tells me these are the BEST books ever written. So far four are published, and the fans are impatient for the rest. Looking at the author's website it seems I may indeed have a chance of catching up with him before he finishes writing.

So this weekend I gave in to temptation and started "A Game of Thrones", the first part of what may well be seven novels in the Song of Ice and Fire series. At about 1000 pages each, that's a lot of reading.

I'm only about two chapters in, and already I'm enjoying it immensely.

Posted by se71 at 08:23 PM | Comments (0)

September 01, 2008

52 Books in 52 Weeks - August 2008

This was my last good chance for a while to get some reading done. I'm now commuting to work by bike, and have lost up to 10 hours forced reading time a week. I will have to try and read more in the evenings and weekends to try and make amends for that.

Quake was as depraved a read as I can remember, sort of fun like a slasher movie, but disappointing in it's lack of plot, and I think I won't read any more of Laymon's books now.

Ravenheart was marvellous, part three of the Rigante series which I started only a few months ago. Stormrider, the fourth and final part of this series was really good, but got bogged down near the end with too much military detail. I also feel that it was a set-up for another part, which sadly we'll never now see.

Mystic River is a standard thriller, which tries to be something more, and doesn't quite make it.

Finally for August, a nice short read in the Booker Prize winner Disgrace. Set in turn of the century South Africa, it's a story of one man's fall from grace, and an allegory for the state of the whole country; I didn't like it that much, mostly because I couldn't understand anyone's motives, but also because of the way it just stopped when there was much to resolve.

31 Quake by Richard Laymon
32 Ravenheart by David Gemmell
33 Mystic River by Dennis Lehane
34 Stormrider by David Gemmell
35 Disgrace by J.M. Coetze

Posted by se71 at 03:16 PM | Comments (0)

August 01, 2008

52 Books in 52 Weeks - July 2008

Only 3 books this month. The Kingsolver was recommended by a friend, and I loved the first 2/3 a lot - really worthwhile. It waned a bit after that, but was a very good read overall. Steinbeck I've had on my list forever, and it was good to finally tackle this giant - a very interesting and well written book. Alice Munro is on pretty depressing form, always good with her short stories, but it would be nice if she would lighten up occasionally.

August might be better, two weeks on the beach to read, but what to take? If I take War And Peace, I'll probably not finish it. Decisions, Decisions.

28 The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
29 Of Mice And Men by John Steinbeck
30 The Love Of A Good Woman by Alice Munro

Posted by se71 at 07:35 PM | Comments (0)

July 02, 2008

The Poisonwood Bible - Barbara Kingsolver

Book 28 in my 52 books in 52 weeks in 2008

There are very many books in the world that I will never read, and this could easily have been one of them. The outine isn't promising. An evangelical American baptist minister in the late 1950s decides to take his wife and four daughters to the Belgian Congo to be a missionary there. So that's religion and history as main topics - not usually my cup of tea.

However, I was talking to a friend about books this came up as one of their favourite, and I was told that I must read it. So I tried to get a copy but baulked at the full price and eventually got it second hand off Amazon. It was thicker than I'd imagined, but I finally made a start, and was glad that I did, as it turns out that it is one of the best books I've read recently.

Each of the females in the family get to tell parts of the story. It starts tantalisingly with Orleanna Price, the wife and mother, writing from 30 years in the future after she has returned home to America. She hints at terrible things that happened, and quickly lures you in so that you cannot stop reading until you find out what it is.

All the first person narratives from the Congo are written by the daughters. Ruth May is only about five years old, Leah and Adah are pre-teen twins, and Rachel is the teenager. After only a few chapters, you can recognise their unique voices from the way they 'talk', and from how they are reacting to life in the jungle. You quicky realise that their father Nathan is a bit unhinged. His mission is not even fully sanctioned by the church, and he refuses to accept any logical arguments on how to live in this new environment, alienating himself from the villagers with entreaties to baptise them in the crocodile infested river.

Emotions run high, and as disaster approaches the tension makes this a real page turner. I found it hard to out this down up to the emotional climax, which is unfortunately only about 2/3 of the way through the book.

If the novel had stopped there I would have been very happy with it. if I was to make a film of the book, I would definitely stop it there. But instead, it changes quite a lot, and turns into more of a history of the Congo region over the succeeding thirty years rather than just a family saga. The politics overwhelms this final stage too much, and though the case against the white man in Afica is pretty strong, I'm sure that the native people are not blameless either. However, America in particular, white people, and men, all get a very thorough bashing, and there are no bad Africans, or women at all, just a few who are corrupted by circumstances and by their colonial overseers. A bit more balance wouldn't have gone amiss. I found this less compelling. It was interesting, and I learned a lot, but I cared a lot less about the characters, and was glad when it finally came to a conclusion, of sorts.

I do highly recommend this book to anyone of any age; it is a marvellous piece of story-telling which you will not forget in a hurry.

Posted by se71 at 11:39 AM | Comments (0)

June 27, 2008

The Bat Tattoo - Russell Hoban

Amazon link to The Bat Tattoo - Russell Hoban

Book 27 in my 52 books in 52 weeks

I do quite enjoy the writing style of Russell Hoban, though I'm sometimes not quite sure any more what else it is that leads me back to reading his fiction. This is a fairly slight love story, about a pair of late middle aged people meeting and gradually connecting. The story has most of the Hoban trademarks; art appreciation and art history, sex, religion, and pleasingly it takes place around the streets of London, many of which I know well.

Rosewell Clark and Sarah Varley are the two main characters. Both are suffering from losses, and through a chance meeting at the V&A museum, along with a few other unlikely coincidences, they start to get to know each other. Clark is an estranged American earning a living making increasingly bizarre wooden sex toys for a mysterious patron. Sarah sells antiques at a market stall in Covent Garden. Some fun is made of the oddities of modern art at a competition in which Rosewell plans to enter a piece of his own.

I guess there is an intelligence here that is lacking in a lot of the books that you'll find in the top ten lists at the local bookstore. Hoban doesn't play with your emotions, he tells thoughtful but honest stories, and never gives easy answers to the philosophocal questions of life, love and death that he asks. The books are easy, and challenging, at the same time. His is a unique voice which I continue to enjoy.

[Note: I found a much better review on the Guardian website here. They like it a lot too.

Posted by se71 at 10:11 AM | Comments (0)

June 20, 2008

The Prefect - Alastair Reynolds

Book 25 in my 52 books in 52 weeks.

Another competent and entertaining science fiction book from Reynolds. Unfortunately, it's not that much more than that. There are not any great concepts in here and no compelling mysteries (well, a little one). It is set in the same universe that a lot of his previous novels have been. This time that action is centered near a planet which has thousands of orbiting habitats. The prefect in the title is a future lawman; part policeman, part judge, not unlike Judge Dredd. He is investigating a crime, where an explosion destroyed one of the habitats. But it's not that simple, of course, with conspiracies going back twenty years that threaten the future of the whole system.

I enjoyed it, but was unconvinced by some of the elements. The prefects are not allowed guns, but do have a weapon called a whiphound which is almost as deadly. A junior prefect makes a change to some computer code, and it is distributed, unchecked, to live systems. This is highly unlikely to take place, but is required by the plot, and so a major story element is nonsense, which annoyed me.

I think the focus on this small area of space was a mistake, and I'm looking forward to the next novel much more ("House Of Suns") as it promises a much larger canvas.

Posted by se71 at 04:14 PM | Comments (0)

June 11, 2008

The Yiddish Policemen's Union - Michael Chabon

Book 24 in my 52 books in 2008

I am a science fiction fan, this is pretty obvious from my book choices. This recent novel won the Nebula Award, and has been nominated for the Hugo award - the top two awards in science fiction. In an attempt to explore new authors, I thought that would be a pretty good recommendation. I was wrong.

Chabon has written a detective story, one which leads from a simple murder, to an international conspiracy, not unlike Dan Brown's Da Vinci code. It's written in the Sam Spade gumshoe tradition, with a detective who drinks too much, smokes too much, has issues with women - you know the scene. He is Jewish, and I should have guessed from the title, but this isn't just a part of his character, it permeates the whole book. Every character is Jewish, the whole plot revolves around Jews, and their religion. Chabon uses a lot of Jewish words without explanation, and also makes up a few new Jewish sounding words, so that I spend a lot of time in the dark about what the hell was going on.

Oh, I did mention is has been classed as science fiction - didn't I?

This is not science fiction. Did Robert Harris's 'Fatherland' get onto the science fiction shelves - No? Like that novel, this is an alternate history book. In Fatherland, also a detective story, Germany wins World War II, and a detective in Germany some years later has to solve a crime. Here, the historical difference is that in 1940 many of the Jews in Europe are relocated to a remote island called Sitka in Alaska, and the Holocaust, though not averted, is reduced. World history is altered in other ways, some quite interesting, but never really explored, only mentioned in passing. In a way, this is a blessing, as the politics of the Israel/Arab/Palestinian situation is complicated enough, so if you don't understand that deeply, then the subtle changes that make it different will not help.

This 'What If' exercise is a device to explore the Jewish condition, to see how Jews would live if they'd been allowed to, and it's just plain boring unless you have some interest in that area. I feel cheated by this book, it was a complete waste of my time.

It is however a clever book, and there is a good detective story trying to get out. Chabon is no fool, he writes well and has interesting characters and relationships. Sometimes his detective hero Landsman gets into some unbelievable scrapes, and even more unbelievably gets out of them again, but that's forgivable in a detective story. I could have liked this a straight detective novel.

But I was sold something else completely, there is no science in this at all. The all pervasive religiousness of the story annoyed me immensely. I know I'm coming across here as anti-Jewish, but I'd feel exactly the same way about any other religion (I read a book by Russell Hoban last year called 'Pilgermann' which had way too much Christianity in it for example). A lot of praise has been given to the book by the SF community as it's a mainstream author who is straying into genre territory. I disagree with this; we have enough good SF authors and books out there; we don't need Chabon, and McCarthy ("The Road") and their like to raise the profile with their brand of SF-Lite.

Posted by se71 at 11:55 AM | Comments (0)

Jonathan Livingstone Seagull - Richard Bach

Book 23 in my 52 books in 2008

This is cheating somewhat, it's a very short book indeed, and I've read it before (though a very long time ago). I seem to remember quite liking it, and I was looking for something undemanding to read in bed while suffering from an annoying cold, and I saw it on the shelf.

[Spoilers below]

I didn't like it as much this time. I'm older and much more cynical. It seems to be some kind of fable or parable, with heavy religious overtones. The narrative is about a seagull, a special bird, who wants to learn to fly as fast as possible. Spoiling the story totally now, He abandons his flock, and is ourtcast by them, but keeps trying. Eventually he attains a skill so advanced, he visits heaven, and can transcend space and time. He becomes a teacher of other gulls (disciples) who go on to become teachers themselves spreading his word (gospel) to unbelievers (me!)

Actually, not only did I not think it good, I was insulted by it's simplicity. Not only is there all this heaven stuff, but something that annoyed me was that the gull always knew exactly how fast he was flying in MPH - that's a bit of a stretch of the imagination. Maybe not as much as believing in different levels of heaven and moving through the space/time continuum like Doctor Who, but enough to niggle.

I have no idea why this sold over 1 million copies, or why it was made into a film with a concept album/soundtrack by Neil Diamond (which I haven't heard). It's not worth it. But as a piece of 1970s pop culture, and a less than 30 minute read, I guess it has some historical interest.

Posted by se71 at 11:26 AM | Comments (0)

The Steep Approach to Garbadale - Iain Banks

Book 22 in my 52 books in 2008

Another fiction, as opposed to science fiction, novel from Banks. Slowly but surely I'm nearing completing the full set (the SF I'm bang up to date, with just the recent hardback, 'Matter' outstanding).

The beginning is a bit disconcerting, as you try to work out who the book is going to be about, but it quickly settles down and we get the story of a man called Alban, born to priviledge, in a rich family successful through the business of selling a game that is not unlike monopoly.

There are several themes here; Alban's mother's death, the proposal by an American company to take over the family firm, and Alban's lovelife, especially his relationship with his first cousin Sophie. They are all handled interestingly, you feel as if a conclusion will be reached, you enjoy the journey. In short, you feel throughout as if you are in a safe pair of hands, and won't be disappointed. Nor are you. However, I wasn't quite interested enough a lot of the time. Alban didn't seem to ever make his mind up about anything, or have any clear plan, and so it was difficult to get behind him.

His family were a quite a bunch of eccentrics, quite amusingly described, and one scene with Sophie was so well crafted, and had such a deliciously filthy punchline, I got a few looks on the train as I tried and totally failed to suppress my schoolboy sniggers. The whole book was saved by that page in my opinion.

Sometimes I feel as if there ought to be a section in the bookshop for mainstream novels that contain enough sex to be reclassified onto the erotic shelves. Sometimes I think the authors go a bit further than we really needed for the plot. Banks has done it again, here. In fact, it seems to me to be an increasing trend. I think it's lazy writing, and annoying, as I'm not likely to recommend books containing detailed sex to my mum, or my children to read. My 10 year old asked me the other day why books don't have certificates, like films do, U, PG, 12, 15, 18. I had to guess at an answer, which I think is that they are in a way self certificated - the barriers of entry are higher and a child is unlikely to pick up an adult book filled with violence and sex. Even if they start to read it, if they are mature enough to do that, perhaps they are already mature enough for the content. A film has no such barrier - if it's on screen, anyone can see it. This subject is a particular bugbear of mine, one day I'll try and rationalise it all out.

'The Steep Approach to Garbadale' is a fairly traditional novel, well written, slightly flat in a way, but enjoyable and with a few great trademark Banks scenes.

Posted by se71 at 10:20 AM | Comments (0)

June 01, 2008

52 Books in 52 Weeks - May 2008

A much better month in terms of numbers, though very mixed in quality.

I finally finished off "The Neutronium Alchemist", which I thought was great. I'm really looking forward to the 1300 odd pages of the final volume, which I promise to read in the next year.

For a complete change in pace, I went to cowboy stories set in Wyoming, which was also great, in a different way.

I wouldn't actually recommend any of the other three books, they were OK, and I always try to finish what I start, but for 'A quite Belief in Angels", I really struggled with that rule. Watchmen is a science fiction graphic novel, which I also found disappointing, and the Banks novel was just an accomplished though unstartling effort from a great novelist (in a way, similar to how I felt about 'Saturday' from Ian McEwan last year)

19 The Neutronium Alchemist by Peter F Hamilton
20 Close Range by Annie Proulx
21 A Quiet Belief In Angels by RJ Ellory
22 Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons
23 The Steep Approach to Garbadale by Iain Banks

Posted by se71 at 11:07 AM | Comments (0)

May 29, 2008

Watchmen - Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons

Book 21 in my 52 books in 2008

This is a graphic novel, perhaps the most famous one of them all in the comic community, though perhaps not outside of it. This is quite likely to change however when the movie version comes out in the near future. When I found out they were turning it into a film, that was my impetus to finally go and buy a copy after all these years.

Now for the heresy - it's not really very good. I found it slow, plodding, repetitive, fairly dull from a superhero point of view, and its politics were heavy handed and obvious. The artwork wasn't my kind of thing either, being fairly plain, flat, and static; I like more colour, and more realism, unless it's stylised stuff like Frank Miller.

The story is an alternate universe scenario. What if a bunch of fairly normal people decided to become masked crime fighters, vigilantees like Batman, but lacking his gadgets and using mainly their fists. I'm nodding off already. This is what happened in the mid part of the 20th century, until there was a backlash, and most went into voluntary retirement. Now, it's 1985 (around the time the novel was published) and it looks like someone is killing them. One of the heroes, Rorsache, starts to inverstigate, writing notes in his journal, which we get extensive passages from that reveal the history of the Watchmen.

Most of the story is detective fiction. The only real superhero stuff is a character called John, who was in the traditional bizarre accident, and was transformed into an omnipotent being who can transform matter, teleport, and see all time. Pretty impressive stuff, but massively underused.

A kid sits on a pavement reading a comic throughout, and this pirate story is also reproduced, interlaced within the Watchmen story. There seem to be attempts to connect the two, and it was either too subtle for me, or too vague, but I just didn't see the point.

I wish I'd read it in 1985, as the cold war and the politics of the day are heavily featured, and our impending armageddon due to mutually assured destruction seemed a real threat then. I think I would have felt more engaged emotionally. The world's problems have changed, and I'll be interested to see if the film being made now updates the plot to include global warming, or the war on terror, instead.

Overall, I was sad not to have liked Watchmen, as I always thought I would. I was kind of saving it for a rainy day, which was a mistake. As always, I think my creed of less politics, more science fiction, would have helped massively.

Posted by se71 at 09:51 AM | Comments (0)

May 28, 2008

A Quiet Belief In Angels - RJ Ellory

Book 21 in my 52 books in 2008

Another "Richard & Judy" bookclub pick. When will I ever learn? I blame my sister for this one, we both saw it, and thought it looked good, and encouraged each other a bit to read it.

Ellory is trying to write like one of the giants of American literature, like Steinbeck or Hemmingway. He writes long paragraphs of flowery prose, and repeats things again and again, in case he thinks we didn't get it the first ten times.

Yes, I know there were murdered girls, stop telling me their names! It doesn't actually make a difference to the plot to repeat them again and again and again!

And relax.

But he isn't writing "To Kill A Mockingbird" - that's been done already! He's writing a thriller. But even a slow-boiler thriller should be a bit more exiting than this.

OK, back to the plot. It's not actually a half bad story, I quite liked it and it's quite rightly placed firmly in the detective fiction section. Joseph Vaughn is the protagonist, and right at the start we know he has spent his life tracking down a murderer, and shot him in an anonymous hotel. The rest of the book is told in flashback, as Joseph tells us about his harrowing life, and we try to guess whodunnit..

A serial murderer is stalking a small town in Georgia in the Southern United States in the late 1930s. He is killing little girls, ones Joseph knows. Joseph swears to protect the girls, but he fails, and ever afterwards feels overwhelming guilt about it. His life goes from one tragedy to another, becoming almost increasingly bizarre and unbelievable.

Very many authors these days seem to equate volume with quality. There are far too many words here. This needs tightening up. It's also only written from Joseph's viewpoint, so we get no idea about what's happening with the other people. This can work, but I noticed quite a few places where he knew things that happened when he wasn't even there, and his childhood views and vocabulary were far too advanced for his years.

All in all, quite a difficult book to get through, almost worth it in the end to see how the story pans out, but I'd advist not starting it.

Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons
The Steep Approach to Garbadale by Iain Banks

Posted by se71 at 02:28 PM | Comments (0)

Close Range by Annie Proulx

Book 20 in my 52 books in 2008

This is a collection of about a dozen short stories, the most famous of which is of course the final one - Brokeback Mountain.

All the tales are about cowboys in Nevada, and you can see Proulx has done considerable research on this, especially the history, as many feature the economics and weather of this part of the world. I'd like to say there is a good mix of comedy and pathos, but if I tell you that the most amusing part of the whole thing is a story about a man freezing to death and having his leg sawn off by someone who wants to steal his boots, you might start to get the measure of the piece.

This is all about tragedy. Rodeo riders get maimed and half killed, car crash victims go mad, people die in the freezing conditions. The depression is unrelenting, and 'Brokeback Mountain" itself is hardly a barrell of laughs, though I'm not giving away anything here in case you still need to see the film.

However, the writing is good, immersive, and I felt I started to get to know these people a bit. I still don't understand them, it sounds like a completely awful and unfulfilling life to choose.

You might be tempted to pick up this volume and just read "Brokeback Mountain". I'd advise against that. It is easily the best story here, but like a good piece of clasical music, where the variations of the themes in the opening movements make the finale even more satisfying, you need to consume the whole thing here to get the full emotional impact.

Recommended, but this is grim, gritty stuff.

A Quiet Belief In Angels by RJ Ellory
Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons
The Steep Approach to Garbadale by Iain Banks

Posted by se71 at 02:03 PM | Comments (0)

The Neutronium Alchemist - Peter F. Hamilton

The Neutronium Alchemist - Peter F Hamilton

Book 19 in my 52 books in 2008

This is the second volume of the massive "Night's Dawn" space opera trilogy. I made a bit of a mistake leaving so long an interval between reading this and "The Reality Dysfunction". Hamilton has provided no synopsys, and you're expected to hit the ground running in terms of plot and characters, and I found that a bit tricky sometimes.

However, I quickly got stuck in for the marathon read, managing maybe 40 dense pages a day. This is challenging stuff, but always interesting and never slow paced. There are always battles, arguments and chases with spectacular ideas and revelations around every page-turn.

But when an author decides they need nearly 3500 pages to tell a story, you have to ask the question, Why? Couldn't some of the slack be cut and still leave all the important stuff? Isn't a lot of it unnecessary filler? And the answer is that I don't think you could here. It's a remarkably complex story, taking place across many star systems in the galaxy.

The story is about a type of very unusual virus. It is discovered and begins to spread in the first volume, and continues apace here. How would a planet cope, or an orbital habitat? You can be sure that there would be more than one way, and several different scenarios are played out here, which is interesting, as well as the interactions between the different 'solutions'.

There are big ideas about death here too, and the religious implications are touched upon a little more than before, but still not that much.

In short, I loved it. I could have read 5 other books in the same time period, but I'm happy with my choice.

Close Range by Annie Proulx
A Quiet Belief In Angels by RJ Ellory
Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons
The Steep Approach to Garbadale by Iain Banks

Posted by se71 at 11:39 AM | Comments (0)

May 02, 2008

52 Books in 52 Weeks - April 2008

A very slow month indeed, as I expected. This is why I hammered through so many books in the first three months of the year. This month my commuting time was spent on a massive science fiction tome, full details next month.

I only actually finished a single book this month, and it wasn't even fiction.

William Goldman - Which Lie Did I Tell?

This is a book about how to write screenplays, and if anyone knows how to do that, it's Goldman. It's got some great insights, and realistic tips on what you should and and shouldn't do. It's also chock full of anecdotes where he namedrops Hollywood stars like mad.
And did he really write "Good Will Hunting" ? Find out here, maybe :-)

Posted by se71 at 09:02 AM | Comments (0)

April 02, 2008

52 Books in 52 Weeks - March 2008

A slow month, only 5 books, due to starting a large book half way through the month which I'm still ploughing through.

Wings by Terry Pratchett
Excellent conclusion to the funny and interesting children's fantasy series.

Pig Island by Mo Hayder
Quite hard to define, horror thriller perhaps, but not that horrific really, and more, sort of, creepy.

Camouflage by Joe Haldeman
Magnificent SF story about immortal changelings who have been living on earth for millenia amongst us.

Strangers by Taichi Yamada
Ghost story set in modern day Japan. Suffers I think from being strangely translated in places. Very downbeat, but not bad.

The Five People You Meet In Heaven by Mitch Albom
Really terrible morality lecture couched in fiction. At least it's short.

Proper individual reviews are still to write, must get on with that.

Posted by se71 at 02:51 PM | Comments (0)

March 26, 2008

The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom

The Five People You Meet In Heaven by Mitch Albom

Book 17 in my 52 books in 2008

A very popular book, no idea why, it's very dull, predictable stuff in the main.

A man dies and goes to heaven. He is told that he will meet five people from his life who will explain things to him. (five, a stupid arbitrary number, which is never explained. What if you lived on a desert island and only ever met one other person?). Once the explanations are over, you, and they, will all be able to move on to another plane of existence.

He duely meets these five people (they're all dead too, of course, and have just been waiting for him). Luckily he is old, and so has many different periods of his life the author was able to utilise, including a spell in the Vietnam war. After each one, we get a 'lesson learned' lifed straight out of a religious self-help book.

Don't waste your time on this sentimental, poorly written rubbish, unless you're really in need of someone telling you that everything will be alright, that everything bad happens for a reason, and that you'll be happy in heaven when you die.

Posted by se71 at 11:25 AM | Comments (0)

March 22, 2008

Strangers - Taichi Yamada

Book 16 of my 52 books in 2008

On the lookout for something new, I was intrigued by a very glowing review of this book by a blogger I read.
I didn't think it was a poor book, but I'm a very long way from being as enamoured by it as that reviewer.

This is a ghost story set in modern day Japan. It is an English translation of the Japanese original, and suffers a bit from that in the cheesy dialog. Harada is a 48 year old TV writer, recently divorced, and living alone in an almost empty apartment block. He forms a relationship with a younger woman who seems to be one of the other few residents. Around the same time, he is wandering the streets of his home district when he catches sight of a man who looks like his father. The two strike up a conversation, and Yamada goes back to the man's home, where he meets his wife, who is also the spitting image of Yamada's mother. Both are young, and his parents are dead anyway, so how could they possibly be real.

Weeks go by, and Yamada visits the couple more, but then his girlfriend and ex-business partner start to notice something strange about him.

It's all very sad, and a bit disturbing. Is it real, or is Yamada falling apart. It's difficult to get into this man's mind to understand his feelings and motivations. I'm not sure it's something a westerner can really understand completely without a more thorough knowledge of the Japanese culture.

It's a short book that only took a few days to finish, and yet it has stayed with me.

Posted by se71 at 10:43 AM | Comments (0)

March 11, 2008

Pig Island - Mo Hayder

Book 14 of my 52 books in 2008

An author whose books I've seen on the shelves for a few years now. This one was second hand, in good condition and cheap, so I got it.

Horror is a genre I've neglected in my reading recently. No particular reason. I think I've grown out of it a bit. I should do a little research and see if I'm missing anything good.

There are two types of horror story. One is probably more of a violent thriller - 'Silence Of The Lambs', 'Misery' or "Psycho" are examples. In these the fear is driven by real world people and events. Psychopaths, rapists and serial killers are the kind of people in these. They can be very effective indeed, and in fact, can be much more scary than the second kind.

In the other type of story, supernatural creatures and phenomena create the scares. Fear of the unknown is exploited in stories like 'Dracula' and 'Salems Lot', and in films like 'Alien' and 'A Nightmare on Elm Street'.

Some stories like to play with their audience, alternating between paranormal and real, giving the reader a constant guessing game about whether there really is a realistic explanation for the spooky happenings going on. Pig Island is one of them.

In Pig Island, the main narrator is a reporter who makes his living by investigating weird stories, and debunking the ghosts or goblins he doesn't find as hoaxes. He is covering a story on an island off the west coast of Scotland where a strange creature has been spotted in the woods. Is it some kind of bigfoot, or has the strange cult living there summoned the devil or one of his beasts from hell.

He goes to the island and meets the cult, who seem like a peaceful lot, except for one member who lives alone, estranged from the rest. Something terrible happens, and then the pace hots up a bit.

This is quite an entertaining read. The main plot is a bit far fetched, but I what do you expect? There is a weird sub-plot with the reporters wife, who seems to be completely bonkers, and this never really gets resolved properly. Another negative is that is all gets a bit gynecological, with more medical information than I needed to know - if Hayder is trying to gross out her readers, it's worked.

Very readable, but I'm not convinced by the author, and will probably not be trying any more. There are plenty of other authors to try.

Posted by se71 at 06:41 PM | Comments (0)

March 05, 2008

52 Books in 52 Weeks - February 2008

Progress so far in my quest to read 52 books in 2008

February
6. The Woods by Harlan Coben
7. The Songs of Distant Earth by Arthur C Clarke
8. Animal Farm by George Orwell
9. No Country For Old Men by Cormac McCarthy
10. Diggers by Terry Pratchett
11. The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
12. First Blood by David Morrell

Good progress, 7 books, easily beating January even though it was a longer month. This was helped of course by me reading mostly quite short ones.

Oddly enough, three of these were books I've read before. This is partly due to me sifting through my collection and cataloging them online (more about that in another post sometime) and fancying revisiting them. I was not disappointed; 'Diggers', 'Animal Farm' and 'First Blood' were all still really excellent.

Posted by se71 at 11:43 AM | Comments (2)

March 04, 2008

Wings - Terry Pratchett

Book 13 of my 52 books in 2008

This is the third and final book in the Nome trilogy; I quite recently finished number two, 'Diggers', and some of what I wrote about it unsurprisingly also pertains to this volume.

In a nutshell, Nomes are a race of people, living on Earth for thousands of years, but never seen by humans because they are very small, and move very quickly. In the first book, Truckers, two different tribes meet, and steal a truck. In the second 'Diggers', Some of them steal a digger. In this one, there is quite a lot of flying.

If you thought that the first two books were good, then this one will blow you away. It has a much larger scope, much. Masklin, from book one, and some of the store nomes, take the Thing (a black box, which is an ancient Nome computer) on Concord and go to Florida to try and get on NASA's Space Shuttle.

This is a lot of fun, and the Nomes get into plenty of scrapes. There is a neat conclusion where all the Nomes get back together, and we get to learn more about tree frogs.

Posted by se71 at 09:32 AM | Comments (0)

First Blood - David Morrell

Book 12 of my 52 books in 2008

I first read this book in the late 1970s. I loved it then, and eagerly waited for the movie. Stallone did a good job, and made a lot of money from the franchise, but he changed too much to my mind, and lost the subtlety that you get from reading. This is understandable, and I guess excusable. I really recommend that you go back to the original text though if you like action, but also like to think intelligently about why it's happening.

Rambo is a decorated Vietnam veteran, drifting from town to town after the war. Teasle is a town cop, a veteran himself of Korea, but a flawed man going through a divorce. When these two encounter each other, the timing is just right for sparks to fly. Teasle doesn't want his neat town disturbed by vagrant troublemakers. Rambo is tired of being moved on for no reason and decides, when Teasle tries to make him leave, that he's had enough.

We get a really good viewpoint of both people, the focus switches almost eqwually between both men and we see how they think. Even from the start we can find ourselves to rooting for both of them, not sure which should overcome. Even though the body count escalates remarkably quickly, it's believable, and almost inevitable.

The conclusion is the only real way events have shaped it to go, and I'm not going to give it away here, but it's both shocking and satisfying.

A truely excellent book, give it a chance. I don't usually push Amazon reviews, but each reviewer there has given it 5 Stars, even those who hated the films.

Posted by se71 at 09:31 AM | Comments (0)

February 26, 2008

The Book Thief - Markus Zusak

Book 11 of my 52 books in 2008

I'm a sucker, as I've said before, for reading books that are popular and prominently displayed in the bookshops. This one seemed to be getting good reviews, so even though it was one of "Richard & Judy's" book picks, I gave it a go.

I was also intrigued by the thought of a book narrated by Death, but this is just the SF/fantasy fan in me and Zusak didn't really give me much of a fix in that area. There is little cleverness here in the use of this trick, and in fact, Death is really just what other people would call an omniscient narrator.

How did 'normal' German people react to what was happening in their country during World War II? That could be the story told here,and was what I expected. It works to some extentr, except that there are very few actual normal people. A book full of normal people, and their reactions to extraordinary circumstances is possible, and I would have liked a few more of them. But this is in many ways written like a children's book. The characters are all larger than life, with many episodes constructed for slapstick comedic effect. On the other hand, maybe this is needed in a book otherwise fo full of dreadful themes. That's my main problem with the book; when thinking about it, I hate it, and I like it, and I think some things should be changed, and then I think maybe they are needed after all.

To the story. A young girl called Liesl is the titular Book Thief. She is adopted by a family near the German town of Munich in 1939. Her mother has abandonded her, and her tragically sad journey gives her nightmares for many months.

She soon adapts to the new life, but only really makes one new friend, a boy called Rudy. As 1939 turns to 1940 and onwards, the effects of the war are very strongly felt. There is rationing and everyone is very poor. Lisel is taught to read by her new Papa, and though she cannot afford books, manages to steal some, and these become the only things she treasures. I thought the whole book theme, paradoxically, was the worst part of this novel. It feels contrived and unbelievable.

Many of the shocks the book throws at us are cushioned beforehand. So when a major character is injured or dies (there is a war going on, remember), you are prepared, and it's not quite so upsetting. This gets overdone, and is almost annoying. I think the author is trying not to upset his younger readers.

In summary, I liked it a lot at the end, but many parts were clumsy. It was very readable, and never had a chance to get boring - the 500 pages do fly past. but it's more of a teenagers book probably than an adult one.

[This review has been the most difficult I've written recently, and has actually taken several re-edits to get even close to being finished, and I'm still really unhappy with it. So it goes]

Posted by se71 at 12:43 PM | Comments (0)

February 17, 2008

Diggers - Terry Pratchett

Book 10 of my 52 books in 2008

This is the second instalment of a small trilogy of books that are primarily aimed at children - "The Bromeliad". [1]

In the first, "Truckers", a group of Nomes (small people that live under the floorboards in a large department store) escape from it's imminent demolition by stealing a truck. This is not a mean feat when you're only a few inches tall.

Now they are living in a disused quarry, and in case you haven't guessed, a digger might well be a key part of the plot. Looking forward to re-reading the third one - "Wings", wonder what that will be about :-)

Like all Pratchett's books, this one is funny and clever, entertaining but also with a lot of intelligent things to say about people and the world in general. I first read this trilogy in the early 1990s, and at the time I was struggling with the idea of becoming a fully fledged manager at the company I was working at. These books actually helped me to understand a lot about the nature of leadership believe it or not, and I guess persuaded me I didn't really want it. I left the job soon afterwards.

Highly recommended for children of all ages.

[1] very interesting name for a trilogy - see here

Posted by se71 at 10:52 AM | Comments (0)

February 15, 2008

No Country for Old Men - Cormac McCarthy

Book 9 of my 52 books in 2008

I'm going to have a lot of trouble reviewing this without spoiling the story for you. I'll try, but am not promising anything, so if you haven't read it, or seen the multi Oscar nominated film version from the Coen brothers, then look away now.

This is a bleak story, which starts off violently, continues in that vein, then somehow manages to get even grimmer by the end. If you're looking for some glimmer of hope, some redemption, you're going to be disappointed, because just about everyone loses in one way or another in the end.

It starts off fairly conventionally. A man named Moss finds a pile of money that was supposed to be used in a drugs transaction, and he takes it. The people who own the money want it back, so he goes on the run. A violent psychopath called Chigurh is one of the people chasing him, and this man is one of the scariest people you'll encounter in fiction. The local sheriff tells quite a lot of the story in first person, and the book is really about him. The story however climaxes a bit too soon, and the rest of the book then clears up a few loose ends (though nowhere near all) and judders to a kind of stop.

Like a lot of fiction, the narrative action itself isn't really the thing that's most important. It's what keeps you reading of course, an essay on the topic wouldn't have the same, or anywhere near as large an audience. No, what you'll take away from this is the sense of despair of a man nearing retirement looking at his country falling apart. He looks at the drug related killings, and thinks that things have gotten much worse since he was young. People have changed, the world is going to hell, and there is nothing he can do about it.

McCarthy repeats his prose style from the last novel, "The Road". It's sparse, sort of stilted. People have conversations where they say things without really saying them. And there are no quotation marks so it gets very tricky to tell sometimes who is saying what. There are whole scenes where you have to pick up clues to know who they are about, which is a bit annoying, and I found myself rereading several pages once when I realised I'd gotten it completely wrong. When it's good though, the scenes are startlingly real and intense, and the book is unputdownable at those times. Chigurh likes to talk to people before he kills them - and maybe he'll let them live, you are never quite sure.

And like the original and only good, Rambo story "First Blood" (even if you don't like Sylvester Stallone, you owe it to yourself to go back the the source novel by David Morrell), this is a book about the alienation of America's young men returning home after a war. Vietnam is the obvious one here, but WW1 and WW2 are also represented. I spent a lot of time guessing the time period in which the book is set, from the ages of the characters, and the wars they were in, and I came up with early 1980s - McCarthy really makes you work for it.

It's a good book, but the pacing needs workm and I expect it will make a great film. It feels like it was written especially for the screen, and in fact, especially for the Coen brothers. I look forward to watching it, but I think I'll need a stiff drink afterwards.

Posted by se71 at 09:40 AM | Comments (0)

February 12, 2008

Animal Farm - George Orwell

Book 8 of my 52 Books in 2008

This is cheating a little, as it's a very short book, and also a reread. I wanted to refresh my memory of it before passing it along to someone else, so that we can discuss it meaningfully together. It's at least 20 years since I read it, and I'd forgotten many of the small points, so I'm glad I read it again.

What can I say about it that has not been said thousands of times before. Not much. Everyone knows that this is, as it's subtitled in fact, a "Fairy Story" about farm animals taking over their farm from a farmer. Everyone also knows that this isn't what it's about at all, it is a story about politics and how workers are controlled by their leaders.

I'm not that hot on different political systems. Communism is the main target here; I know this from my meagre back knowledge of Orwell and the history of the Russian Revolution. The animals overthrow their oppressive owner, but gradually, their new society reverts to a similar, or even worse, condition. The pigs, as cleverest, set themselves up as leaders, and like it a bit too much. They use misinformation, distraction, and eventually terror to force the other animals to obey them. It happens quite gradually, and it's really very clever and it is satisfying to watch the plot work out, even when you know how it's going to end.

Any government is in danger of exhibiting the dangers seen here. This novel is as relevant today as it was during World War II when it was published. As a story for children it is very violent and callous in places - but then, so are many traditional fairy stories. I highly recommend this then to all ages, and in fact, will now look out for one of the animated versions on DVD to play at home.

Posted by se71 at 10:30 AM | Comments (0)

February 08, 2008

The Songs Of Distant Earth - Arthur C. Clarke

Book 7 of my 52 books for 2008

I've had this book kicking around my house for years, and picked it up this week because I couldn't really decide what else to read, and it's quite short, and I really do need to read what I've bought before buying too much more.

When I first stareted reading SF, I devoured Asimov and Sheckley and Heinlein, but for some reason only managed a couple of Clarke's books (2001/2010). More recently I read "Rendezvous with Rama", as it's regarded as a classic, and it was OK but utlimately a bit unfulfilling. Sadly, I feel the same way about this novel.

The premise is that in the future, life in our solar system becomes impossible, and so seed ships are sent to planets around other stars. They are automated, and contain enough genetic material that machines can recreate humanity and other forms of earth life and plants in the new world. On one such planet, Thalassan, people have thrived on a world mostly covered with water. 700 Years after they arrived, something thought impossible happens; a ship full of real people from Earth arrives.

The narrative follows the interactions of these two different cultures. There is some future history of Earth, some philosophy on the nature of God, a bit of genetic nurture/nature talk. Interesting topics of course, and intelligently handled.

So what's the problem? All the elements for a great story seem to be here. Part of the answer lies in the age of the piece. It's based on a novella from 1957 (this updated/extended version was written in 1985). In the 1950s it was easier to get away with throwing in a few speculative ideas, a spaceship, and a couple of aliens to make a story. I've become spoilt recently with Alistair Reynolds, Iain M Banks, and Stephen Baxter [1] who manage to fit a whole lot more into their fiction - mystery, excitement, violence, mind boggling ideas, and really wild things. It's hard to go back to the old 'classics' which read a bit like children's stories of the future to me now.

Secondly and related to the first point maybe is that all the characters behave in such a caring and supportive way to each other that it's just a bit boring. Some evil thoughts are revealed, but nobody actually actions them. You would think that a threatened ship's mutiny would be a bit interesting, but it's all over amicably in a few pages. One thing I did quite enjoy was the outrageously unsubtle digs at religion we get in here.

I've often thought that I'd have time eventually to get round to reading a lot of 1950s-1970s SF that I missed. However, when I do, I'm quite often disappointed like this. Yesterday's futures have a hard job of staying fresh, and unfortunately The Songs Of Distant Earth has gone stale.

Update:
Not long after writing this, Arthur C. Clarke died. I felt a bit bad that I'd just given a fairly poor account of one of his books. I'm going to stand by it though, and really hope I can find a novel of his that I like more. Clarke did a lot of good for science fiction, probably more than any other author. Surely his whole reputation isn't based on 2001 (and that geosynchronous orbit thing) ?

[1] Baxter and Clarke have collaborated, maybe I should try one of those books

Posted by se71 at 10:29 AM | Comments (0)

February 05, 2008

The Woods - Harlan Coben

Book 6 of my 52 books for 2008

After what I thought was a bit of a disappointing read last year, "Promise Me", this one is more of a return to form for Corben, in fact surpassing anything else I've read by him.

This one is about a violent crime 20 years in the past that left four teenagers dead and tore apart several families. Paul Copeland is a prosecutor trying an important case when his past comes back to make him doubt what really happened in the woods all those years ago.

The opening few pages are terrifically emotionally charged, and Corben keeps piling it on throughout the book. The only annoying thing is that his characters make amusing quips at the most inappropriate of moments. I completely lost my sense of disbelief at these times as it's so jarring, and so not what people would really do.

As well as the solving of the mystery, there are thought provoking ideas of what is right and wrong morally. Is it better to tell the truth or tell a white lie that keeps your relative out of prison. Would you stand up to corruption if your life was threatened? What about your child's life. What would you do to protect them? Happily, the days of black and white are long behind us, and we get many shades of grey here.

As the mysteries gradually unravel, and the skeletons (almost) literally come out of the closets, it all gets a bit complicated, and barely believable, but just manages to stay on the right side of plausibility. This is as it should be, a bit of mind stretching is good exercise.

Something Coben does well is to include new technology in his books. In a lot of fiction you'd think that mobile phones had never been invented, nevermind the internet. Here phones go off all the time, just like real life, and when someone wants to track down an old flame, he Googles for her and gets a photo from her work website. Since CSI, TV have made progress in this area, though they go a bit far into what's actually possible. But people do use Google for all sorts of things these days. It's become part of the language, so authors who want to reflect real life ought to reflect that.

It's a really good thriller, and commendably for this genre, manages it without trying to gross the reader out.

Posted by se71 at 01:51 PM | Comments (0)

Galactic North - Alastair Reynolds

Book 5 of my 52 books for 2008

This is a collection of about eight short science fiction stories. They are linked, some more closely than others, and all are set in the same universe as the Revelation Space series of novels. In fact, many of the same characters appear in these stories, so it's requiered reading if you want to see what those conjoiners, demarchists and ultras are getting up to.

For the uninitiated, the galaxy has been colonised, and people travel between the stars in suspended animation. Some of these people have to a lesser or greater extent modified their minds and bodies to include cybernetic enhancements. They don't get along with each other that well.

These stories follow a sort of progression into the future, even the far future. Each is packed full of interesting science, have satisfying and sometimes unexpected conclusions, and are just the right length to be meaty enough to have substance, but not too stodgy to leave you bloated.

Very enjoyable, recommended, but mostly will be enjoyed by dedicated Reynolds followers.

Posted by se71 at 01:34 PM | Comments (0)

February 01, 2008

52 Books in 52 Weeks - January 2008

Progress so far in my quest to read 52 books in 2008

January
1. Midnight Falcon by David Gemmell
2. On Chisel Beach by Ian McEwan
3. Origin by Stephen Baxter
4. The Rotter's Club by Jonathan Coe
5. Galactic North by Alastair Reynolds

Posted by se71 at 05:29 PM | Comments (0)

January 25, 2008

The Rotters' Club - Jonathan Coe

Book 4 of my 52 books for 2008

I first became aware of this through the TV adaptation. I never actually watched it, but saw plenty of trailers and thought it looked quite interesting. It's the story of a group of schoolkids growing up in the 1970s, which is what I did, so maybe, I thought, I'd be able to identify with them, and find it a satisfying read - it also looked very funny.

However, it's a very disappointing read all round, for quite a few reasons. The first unforgivable thing is that Coe doesn't even finish the story - I had no idea that this was not a one-off book. There are several very annoying loose ends, and the publishers have cheated readers by not alerting them to this on the front cover.

The second thing is that the characterisation is not very good. I could forgive the author for leading me down the garden path by not finishing the story if I was itching to find out what happens in the sequel, but the characters are too poorly defined in my head, even after about 500 pages, for me to care that much. I struggled to remember which one was which. He's also included prologue and epilogue stories set in the characters' future which are cryptic and make little sense. These people aren't even named, and it will only become clear who they actually are the next volume. Annoying.

Thirdly, the story Coe seemed to want to tell was about how great working class Labour party supporters are and how the 1970's shafted them. He shoehorned his characters into situations where all the strikes, and IRA bombs, and Welsh nationalism struggles, and inner city riots happened to them. This came across as very forced, and his political views, unfettered by any counter arguments, jarred quite badly with mine, so the whole mishmash left me completely cold.

Though I didn't really care that much about anyone in the book, I would quite like to know what happens to them, I hate loose ends, but I'm not reading the sequel. Can someone who has please tell me?

Posted by se71 at 09:32 AM | Comments (0)

January 04, 2008

2008 Book List

Rather than wait till the end of the year, I'm starting my list of books I read in 2008 now. I only managed about 30 last year, and am aiming for 52 this year. Please give me a prod if you see the total slipping.

January
Midnight Falcon - David Gemmell

The Rotters Club - Jonathan Coe (currently reading)
On Chesil Beach - Ian McEwan (currently reading)

Total 1

SF/Fantasy - 1/1
Women authors - 0/1
Published this year - 0/1

Posted by se71 at 01:21 PM | Comments (0)

Midnight Falcon - David Gemmell

Book 1 of my 52 books for 2008

This is the second in the Rigante series of heroic fantasy, a sequel to "Sword In The Storm" but much more like a continuation of the same novel than a different story. The action takes place around 20 years after the first volume. It largely concerns Connavar's illigitimate son Bane, and his attempts to make sense of his life.

A full review is somewhat unnecessary, everything I said about The Sword In The Storm holds true here. It's a fantastic book and resolves all the loose ends very satisfyingly.

Posted by se71 at 12:58 PM | Comments (0)

January 02, 2008

2007 Book List

Everyone else is making their lists of books they read in 2007, so here is mine, with some analysis.

A Song Of Stone - Iain Banks
A Spot Of Bother - Mark Haddon
Becoming An Ironman - John Collins
Black Swan Green - David Mitchell
Forever Odd - Dean Koontz
Ghostwritten - David Mitchell
I Capture The Castle - Dodie Smith
Moon Tiger - Penelope Lively
Notes On A Scandal - Zoe Heller
Number9Dream - David Mitchell
Pilgermann - Russell Hoban
Pride And Prejudice - Jane Austin
Promise Me - Harlan Coban
Pushing Ice - Alistair Reynolds
Schild's Ladder - Greg Egan
Set In Stone - Robert Goddard
Small Steps - Louis Sachar
Space - Stephen Baxter
Stardust - Neil Gaiman
Sword In The Storm - David Gemmell
The Broken Shore - Peter Temple
The God Delusion - Richard Dawkins
The Husband - Dean Koontz
The Road - Cormac McCarthy
The Tenderness Of Wolves - Stef Penney
The Testament - John Grisham
The Two Minute Rule - Robert Crais
Three Men In A Boat - Jerome K Jerome
Time - Stephen Baxter
Truckers - Terry Pratchett
Unless - Carol Shields
Unnatural Causes - PD James
We Need To Talk About Kevin - Lionel Shriver

Of the approximately 30 fiction books, around 1/3 are SF/Fantasy, 1/4 are crime/mystery, 1/4 are by women authors. Only three books are by authors who are not still alive, and nearly half were first published in paperback 2007. So I'm mostly a genre reader, and like picking up new things off the bookshops shelves. Over half the books I liked a lot, and would recommend to friends to read; of the rest, some were averagely good, some passed the time, and four I'd rate as really awful.

Overall I'm pleased with the choices I made. I've discovered some good new authors, cemented my love of hard science fiction, completed all the David Mitchell books, and all the Alistair Reynolds ones currently in paperback.

For 2008, I need to read more back catalog Iain Banks and Terry Pratchet. I want to keep up with Alistair Reynolds and Iain Banks' new SF, avoid quite so much pulp crime fiction, finish off series I'm currently in the middle of from Stephen Baxter and David Gemmell (and maybe even return to the Peter F. Hamilton Night's Dawn trilogy that I abandoned after the first huge volume). Talking of long books, I once read 700 pages of "War and Peace", it might be time this summer to start over and complete it this time. I also need to review my progress through the BBC Big Read list of 100 novels that I promised myself I'd finish one day. And of course, I have to give myself some leeway to pick random new novels from "3 for 2" offers in Books etc. Inevitably, I'll get suckered into some popular bestseller that will turn out to be complete pants (Ukranian tractors anyone? Da Vinci Code?), but even that gives me the curious satisfaction of being able to slag the book off with complete authority.

Reading is great, and my train journey gives me as much as two hours a day to do it during the week, so I'm going to aim higher in 2008 and see if I can get through one book a week this time.

Full 2007 Listing

Posted by se71 at 11:25 AM | Comments (0)

December 19, 2007

Sword In The Storm - David Gemmell

Sword In The Storm

Truely excellent heroic fantasy from the sadly missed David Gemmell, no one does it better than he did. This is the start of the Rigante saga, and I'm really happy that I have another three books to go.

This volume concerns the early life of Connavar, also known as Sword in the Storm, also known as Demonblade. He lives in a remove community of people in Rigante tribe. They have battles with neighbouring tribes, but in general live a fairly settled life. Connavar gets to know a traveller from the distant land of the Stone people, who says that one day their way of life will be destroyed, when these fearsome warriors come across the sea and enslave them. So Connavar decides to travel to this land to find out what can be done to protect the Rigante.

As usual, we have magic, tragic deaths, heroic actions, and very real people who are neither black nor white in character - everything has subtle shades of gray. There is also an awful lot of sex, this book is not for kids. Gemmell tackles all sorts of issues, including disability, adultery, illigitimacy, prostitution, paedophilia; they may have a medieval leverl of technology, but their human problems are still relevant and understandable to us. His people live short but fast and very hard lives, but do love the good times they manage to make for themselves. The darkness is always tempered by light, which is one of the authors great skills.

If you could level one criticism, it would be that occasionally coincidence and fate play too much a part - but then, this is fantasy, not historic fiction - it goes with the territory. Also, the main narrative does not resolve the story, so you really do need get th next one.

I loved this book, and I'm well into the sequel already (Midnight Falcon), and loving it too.

Posted by se71 at 10:16 AM | Comments (0)

October 02, 2007

Three Men In A Boat - Jerome K. Jerome

I picked this up in my local bookshop. It was prominently displayed at the front of the store, and I asked if it was a series and if they had any others. Unfortunately they didn't know about any series.

You'll notice the price, only £2. This is perfect for an old copyright free book. This edition is also very thin and light, just right for commuting.

It's also, so far, very good.

Update: Just found it here and checked, and it says there it was published in 1994. So what's it doing still for sale. Weird.

Update:

Now I've finished reading it, and wonder why it took me so long to ever get round to it. I found it a charming book, full of amusing insights into human character. It's really very funny in places, and I wouldn't be surprised if P.G. Woodhouse's Bertie Wooster character wasn't in some way indepted to the three men here.

Three very priviledged young men decide to take a couple of weeks off work (though their work seems more like a pasttime than an actual necessity) and boat up the river Thames from Kingston. As they pass through the historic towns, the narrator, J., gives some brief descriptions of the places, and also some amusing anecdotes he happens to think of. They pass through some places I know very well, and even come to a pub that was my local for many years, the Stag in Datchet.

Nothing much really happens, but the enjoyment is in the journey, and the alternative picture of 19th century England given is a pleasant antidote if you've been overdoing the Dickens a bit.

Posted by se71 at 04:56 PM | Comments (2)

September 29, 2007

Set In stone - Robert Goddard

Set In Stone - Robert Goddard

Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. This is a really poor effort from Goddard. I'm used to fairly obscure and intricate plots. I'm even used to the dogged hero who takes up a cause for no real reason and nearly gets himself killed travelling the length and breadth of the country searching for people to interrogate for information to solve some mystery or other. I can put up with that, but I can't handle a spooky house that has ghosts, and makes people do weird uncharacteristic things, including suicide and murder. Stick to thrillers Mr Goddard, with a plot that actually makes sense when you get to the end, and leave the spooky stuff to James Herbert. I hate to leave this review with nothing positive, so I will say that I've enjoyed several of Goddards other books, especially "Into the Light", so I hope this one is just an aberration, and will try again. One more chance is all I'll give him though.

Please give this one a miss, and save yourself a few hours of your life to do something more productive, like, well, pretty much anything.

Posted by se71 at 11:51 AM | Comments (0)

September 27, 2007

A Song of Stone - Iain Banks

The action takes place in a fictional country and time, where lawlessness has taken over in a war that seems to have no purpose.
A Lord (Abel) and his lady (Morgan) have decided to leave their castle before it is captured by bandits, and set off on the road as refugees. The same day however they are captured by a female leiutenant (Loot) and her ragtag company of soldiers. They are forced back to the castle, and this is where Abel plays a dangerous game, sometimes helping the soldiers, sometimes attempting sabotage, with death a real possibility at any time.

This is a novel of war and lust, and really very unpleasant on both counts. It starts depressingly, and only gets worse as it goes on. The aristocratic narrator plays with language for it's own sake. Some of the paragraphs are little more than old fashioned flowery wallpaper; you can see how someone might have once found it interesting, but it's now become too fussy and overwrought to be palatable. So you find yourself skimming from boring descriptive passages, slap bang into decapitation, incest and rape.

I suppose as a condemnation of war and the baseness of human nature, this works. There is no glorification of conflict, no compassion overcoming evil. However without some positivity, the relentless pessimism just drags you down as a reader and depresses you. Abel is a very original character, part Marquis De Sade, Machiavellian in nature, and completely amoral. Even though you feel you ought to be on his side against the soldiers, he's so unpleasant you can't, and so watching the plot unfold is more of an intellectual exercise than it should be. Who wins or loses isn't really important, and perhaps this is what Banks wants us to understand.

So though I think it could be a valuable book, the x-rated sex and the thoroughly nasty violence are so uncomfortable, and some of the prose so overblown and pretentious, that I'd never recommend it to anyone.

Posted by se71 at 01:52 PM | Comments (2)

Unnatural Causes - P.D. James

Published in 1967, and hampered by some strangely inappropriate political incorrectness, this novel has dated really badly. Agatha Christies 1960's novels were also out of kilter with the times. Dining at one's club, employing servants and having a country retreat may be things that people still did (and still do), but they weren't treated as normal, in the way they would have been before the war. Society moved on, and English crime fiction took a while to catch up.

Casually mentioning that someone is a cripple, and actively disliking them for this same reason, isn't something a writer would contemplate allowing their hero to do nowadays, yet Inspector Dalgliesh does just that here. He come across as a moody unpleasant person in fact, which I wasn't prepared for. I've never encountered him before, I seem to have somehow missed all the TV series and novels. I'm not sure I want to again.

If these were my only complaints, we'd probably still be OK, but the plot itself is contrived and stupid as well. Dalgliesh is on holiday by the coast when a local writer is found dead in a boat with his hands cut off. This remote part of England is populated by a small community of fairly tedious people who dislike each other, but seem nevertheless to spend a lot of time in each others company. Though it's not his case, Dalgliesh gets involved anyway, antagonising the implausably named Inspector Reckless who gets the case.

The action heads up to London briefly, where we meet a reserved butler and a streetwise prostitute. Along with the egotistical writer and the underappreciated secretary, James has really made no effort here to give any of the novel's characters and individuality. Cardboard cutouts going through the motions.

And when we finally get to the end of the chase, the murderer has very kindly provided a taped confession of why and how they actually did it (yes, that really happens a lot in real life doesn't it?), but by then, you don't really care that much anyway.

This is a terrible book, one I started, gave up for a couple of months, and then finally finished just because I don't like leaving books half read; and because it's very short. I wish I'd never started it though.

Posted by se71 at 01:03 PM | Comments (0)

September 19, 2007

Time - Stephen Baxter

Reid Malenfant is a terrible name for a hero, it's just jarring to parse everytime you come across it. And yet, this is the man we're going to follow through the multiverse (or manifold, as that seems to be the new name for it), watching universes being born and dieing with a gung-ho devil-may-care attitude, and maybe an underlying sensitivity, after all, book characters cannot be black or white any more, we need shades of gray.

The plot here is very complicated, and I'm not sure at all what I can reveal here without it being classed as a spoiler. If you are worried at all, stop reading now. Even if you do read on though, don't expect to understand much, I didn't.

Set in the near future, the Carter hypothesis is predicting the end of civilisation on Earth within 200 years. Malenfant is a rich businessman with a yearning for space. He encourages everyone to reach for the asteroids as a stepping stone to the rest of the solar system and eventually galaxy. At the same time as this, 'blue' children are appearing all over the world, who are a super geniuses, and the general population are afraid of them. Also, squid are being augmented to enable them to communicate with humans.

There is a lot more happening, including a discovery of a strange monolith that seems to be of extra-terrestrial origin, and messages from the future. Everything comes to a head very quickly, and there are more scientific ideas than bacteria on a kitchen chopping board.

The title is a bit of a giveaway that some kind of time travel will happen. If you are going to do that, you have to expect your readers to either take it with a pinch of salt as an interesting plot device, or to take you apart with shouts of "Ha! What about causality?". And so that's my main complaint really, he takes everything very seriously, but doesn't explain it (because that's just about impossible anyway) in any way that makes enough sense. My other complaint is how Reid seems to be able to monitor things happening in distant universes, or across our solar system, instantly. Nevermind that the links are supposed to be only one way, or that we have a small law concerning the speed of light, it's all explained away glibly to keep the story going. And lets also not bother to explain how one squid can turn into a colony of super intelligent cephalopods with capabilities to build spacecraft in a few years. and these 'blue' children, where did their intellignece come from?

Malenfant describes himself as a Space Cadet, and the book tries hard to be a combination of Flash Gordon exploration, and future social commentary, and deep cosmological thinking. Though it's a cracking good read, the cracks get larger and larger in the plot, and eventually you fall through, and the ending is really absurd.

'Space' is a kind of sequel to this, and I'm sorry to admit it, but I think I will have to read on, and see if this mess resolves itself. I sometime I think i'm just not smart enough to understand these kinds of books; this one and Greg Egan's 'Schild's Ladder' have had me a bit stumped recently. But then I remember that I'm actually not unintelligent, I've studied some of this stuff quite a bit, and I still think the authors are taking liberties that they shouldn't do if they want to produce readable fiction.

Posted by se71 at 04:07 PM | Comments (0)

September 18, 2007

Schild's Ladder - Greg Egan

This science fiction novel is definitely the most complex I've ever attempted. Some might say it's one of the 'hardest' SF novels ever, and I'm tempted to think that this was one of Egan's aims when he wrote it. This occasionally works for me here; I like mind expanding hypotheses about quantum physics and cosmology, but near the end this book stretches the bounds of believability way past breaking point and lost me completely.

There is a lot of good stuff here which I enjoyed. People live forever, and if they by accident suffer a 'local' death, the most recent backup of their mind is used to create a new body, or even just an acorporeal personality. Distances are travelled at light speed across the galaxy, as you just transmit yourself as electromagnetic waves; whole planets can be evacuated in this way with no loss of life. Personalities can be duplicated (though the ethics and consequences of this aren't explored), they can be shrunk to the femtoparticle level, they can have their time perception altered so that a microsecond becomes months or years of subjective time. All good stuff.

But there is a huge amount of fairly tedious theoretical maths, which is treated as real. This is quite right of course within the frame of a novel, but Egan goes even further, expanding the ideas to a level which starts to seem absurd, rather than enlightening. A new type of vacuum is described, and as it gets more and more bizarre, you realise that the story can go anywhere Egan likes, the internal consistency required of SF is gone as he just makes up another amazing phenomenon to take his characters whereever he wants.

So it's good, but it's also bad, I hesitate to use the phrase 'too clever by half', but a bit less cleverness might have made a better story. I'm not going to go into the plot in detail at all, either you like the sound of it by now, or you don't.

But I still think everyone should buy it, in the brand spanking feel good edition - the tactile cover is brilliant. You can see it here, but go to a shop and look at the others in the series too, and touch them.

Posted by se71 at 10:06 AM | Comments (0)

September 12, 2007

The Road - Cormac McCarthy

I've read "All the Pretty Horses" and quite liked it - not enough to yet have a go at the rest of the Border trilogy, but I thought it was an interesting and well written story.

I've also read and watched a lot of science fiction, and contemplated post apocalyptic civilisation more than most both in fiction and in my own thoughts.

Marrying together science fiction and 'proper' literature' doesn't really happen that much. Either a book is SF, and thus crappy genre fiction, or it's a deep meaningful mainstream story about real people and their feelings. Contemplating real people in fantastic situations doesn't seem to be something the general public can cope with without compartmentalising it into non-worthy SF. Most authors stick in one or the other area, Ian Banks is a notable exception, and recently PD James had a big success with the futuristic "Children of Men", though she is also a genre author really who usually does crime books.

But does this one work. Short answer is probably No.

A man and his son are walking along a road in a world of the future, where everything, including animals and plants, is dead. Only a few people survive, living off the scraps of food left in tins and packets, scavanged from houses and shops. They wear masks to protect them from the permanent dust; the sky is gray, and at night it gets so dark you cannot see anything and have to stop walking completely. Where are they going? And more inportantly, what will they do if they get there?

A lot of people have written stories about this kind of scenario. It's endlessly fascinating to predict what people might do - band together for protection - revert to primitive feudal times - fight wars until no one was left. I'm particularly reminded of some of P.K. Dick's short stories, or David Brin's "The Postman". Then there are films like Mad Max, or even The Planet of the Apes sequence. But this is not strong on science, and not that strong on ideas either. It needs more of a purpose. It needs some attempt at describing why the earth is as it is, and how long it's likely to stay that way. I was particularly disappointed at the lacklustre ending with it's semi-religious overtones, which didn't make me think I'd spent my reading time profitably.

So I wouldn't say it is good science fiction. Is it good fiction? Well yes, once it gets going, it's quite interesting, and quite exciting at times too. The slow progress is handled with a light touch and never really becomes dirgelike. I never found myself bored, though some of the conversations between father and son were a bit enigmatic for no good reason. McCarthy throws in a few odd words he's found in a thesaurous sometimes, but not too many.

This book has actually won prestigious awards, including The Pulitzer and The Quill. I really don't know why it's getting lauded so much. If Stephen King had written it, he'd have put it in one of his short story collections and people would have liked it, but it would never have won any prizes.

I'm pleased that 'normal' people may be exposed to fantasty fiction that they might otherwise not have seen. But I'm disappointed that they are not getting a proper plot, with a scientifically thought out scenario.

If you want excellent challenging prose, and a story set in a fascinating post civilisation world, then have a look at "Riddley Walker" by Russell Hoban.

Posted by se71 at 09:54 AM | Comments (0)

April 23, 2007

Pilgermann - Russell Hoban

There is usually a sense of masochism in reading Hoban's novels, but this was the most impenetrable and least enjoyable one I've encountered so far.

The lead character, Pilgermann, is a Jewish man living in medieval times. He is maimed by Christians and then outcast from his home and goes on a pilgramage to Jerusalem, meeting many people and things, some alive, some dead, on the way. He ends up a slave in Antioch, where he designs a magnificant mathematical design which is turned into a massive mozaic just prior to the famous siege there.

Some figures in the story are mythical, and some real historic characters, and it's all narrated by Pilgermann from the modern day perspective as he looks back from our century to his past life.

Hoban is endlessly creative, and he is showing his intellect off here outrageously with so much history, religion, philosophy and art that your mind boggles with it all. It is interesting, bizarre, horrific, and funny, but it's brilliance is it's downfall, as there is just too much to try and take in, and some of it really is very dry. A lot of prior knowledge of these subjects is also assumed, as without it, the points he is making go right over your head, and I just didn't have the time or sufficient interest to do this research.

So I wouldn't recommend this book unless you want a thorough pounding on early Judeo/Muslim/Christian politics, are not squeamish, and don't mind your novels having no real discernible point.

[Ps - this doesn't mean Riddley Walker isn't still one of my top 10 books ever]

Posted by se71 at 03:06 PM | Comments (0)

March 15, 2007

number9dream - David Mitchell

After the roller-coaster ride that was Cloud Atlas, I was really looking forward to pludering the small back catalog of Mitchell's work; this book and the previous one Ghostwritten.

From Mitchell's brief bio in the inside cover, it says he spent a few years living in Japan. He has made full use of what he learnt about the country and it's people in this book, as his hero is a 19 year old Japanese man and most of the action takes place in present day Tokyo. It's all very authentic sounding, with some small details thrown in to convince us he knows what he is talking about, like the Kanji symbols making up Eiji's Japanese name being unusual.

Eiji Miyake moves from his home in the countryside to try to find his father, who he has not ever met, in Tokyo. He does not even know his father's name, but has some leads. The narrative progresses fairly normally, except for some disconcerting daydream excursions. Eiji gets a dead-end job, rents a small room, desires a waitress in a cafe.

Not for the faint hearted - Eiji gets mixed up with the Japanese mafia - the Yakuza. There are some very violent scenes which come as a bit of a shock after the more sendentary opening chapters. I wasn't totally convinced by the plot here as well; Eiji risks life and limb for information on his father - information I'd probably not want to die for. However, this section is the most exciting and interesting part of the book.

The latter sections are a bit disappointing after all the Yakuza drama, and I didn't think the father story ended well. A subplot about Yakuza and computer viruses is also left hanging. Maybe we're supposed to extrapolate the future for ourselves, I just feel a bit let down by it.

Overall, it's a very accomplished novel. It's very clever and I enjoy some of the games he plays with us, though there are too many dream sequences (something I *hate* in novels). There are some very odd sections that I think I'm just not smart enough to see the significance of (Goatwriter), and some nautical history from the Second World War that is interesting, but just too long. If I was an editor I'd probably cut out a third of this book.

So I'd have to say I admired the writing, more than I enjoyed the book. I'm not sorry I read it, there are a lot worse books around. In the end, Eiji started to get on my nerves a bit, and I didn't care that much about his quest. I was hoping for a more emotional attachment, he proved he could do that with the characters in Cloud Atlas, but missed the mark a bit here.

Posted by se71 at 10:26 AM | Comments (0)

January 15, 2007

Guilty Pleasures

No, don't get too excited, despite the title this is just another post about my book/film/TV/music interests.

I'm currently reading a book by Dean Koontz called "The Husband". Koontz is a phenominally prolific and successful author, but he's unlikely to win many literary prizes. I feel kind of guilty reading the books, a bit like eating McDonalds food, but now and then I can't help myself and purchase one or the other and devour them greedily. I literally (sic) can't wait to get a break from whatever else I'm doing to find out what happens next.

See also my review of "Odd Thomas", which I notice now has two sequels I will have to read.

This is a placeholder post where I might add other guilty pleasures - what are yours?

Posted by se71 at 03:50 PM | Comments (0)

January 05, 2007

Moon Tiger - Penelope Lively

I've made pretty good progress through the Booker prize winners recently, and have just finished this winner from 1987.

I really liked the book, though it was lucky no razor blades were handy when I finished it as it has possibly one of the most depressing and downbeat endings I've ever encountered.

It tells the story of a woman called Claudia, and the narrative jumps about through various stages in her life. It begins as she is lying in a hospital, dying from cancer. She tells us she is going to give us a history of the world, and she proceeeds to tell us about the major events in her life.

As a young woman, Claudia was clever, beautiful, confident. She was irrestible to men, and we find out about the relationships she has had, some shocking, some sad, none really fulfilling. In her prime she went to Egypt during the Second World War as a journalist, one of the few women to be allowed this kind of posting. There is quite a lot of history lesson, so I learnt a bit about the North African campaign that I didn't know before.

During these flashbacks to her previous life, people from her life come and visit Claudia in her hospital room. Her daughter, her brother's wife, her adopted refugee friend. They all think they know her, they think she has gone senile. But she is still a lucid and intelligent person, it's just that her body isn't working properly any more. She drifts in and out of consciousness, and occasionally forgets the names of common household objects. And they don't really know her, they have no idea about the biggest secret of her life.

A few literary tricks are used, sometimes to better effect than others. When an incident is described by Claudia, sometimes the other people involved also get a go to explain what they were thinking, and why they reacted in a particular way. This reveals useful insights sometimes, but at other times adds very little. And rather than just finding out about what Claudia knows, we also discover in first person narrative from her daughter that there are secrets here too.

The sadness of the end is inevitable, and is only tempered a little by a new discovery revealed in a stack of old diary entries from a former lover.

It's a dense book, short and profound, thoughtful and philosophical. What is a life all about anyway? Who are we but a collection of memories in other peoples heads? How different is the person I was yesterday to the one I am today? Why do we have to get old? Oh, can someone pass the Wilkinson Swords please.

Posted by se71 at 12:40 PM | Comments (0)

November 20, 2006

Popular Fiction

I'm having a severe problem with popular fiction - far too much of it is complete pants.

I like to read interesting and thought provoking fiction. I also like to read books that a lot of other people read, so that I can keep up with popular culture, and have something to talk about at dinner parties (though I never get invited to those, hmm).

Science fiction and fantasy pretty much always work for me for the intellectual reasons, but hardly anyone you meet in day to day life will know the difference between Gemmmell and Reynolds. They may have read Banks, but seldom have touched (or even be aware of in some cases) M. Banks.

So, to expand my mind and horizons, I decided a few years back to jump out of genre fiction (into which I also include horror and crime), and embrace the stuff that everyone else seems to be reading. This experiment has succeed and failed in equal measure. My hit rate is much less than 50% I'd say, and I'd like to find a way to increase my odds of a good read.

First the successes. I have discovered some books that have literally blown me away. The quality of the writing, the depths of emotions, the scale of the vision; all these things have surprised me and pleased me. I'm talking about books like 'Atonement' by Ian McEwan, 'Cloud Atlas" by David Mitchell, and "The Remains of the Day" by Katsuo Ishiguro. Other novels by these writers are also excellent. I've got a few other authors I like, Ian Banks, John Irving, but I'm quite a slow reader, so have to choose carefully and my list is quite small.

Unfortunately I've had more than a few complete failures. 'Bridget Jone's Diary' was vacuous, 'A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian' was complete tripe from beginning to end. I thought maybe Richard and Judy's bookclub would be a good source of new choices, but 'The Shadow of the Wind' was rubbish, "An American Boy' was 500 odd pages of complete pointlessness, and while I liked a lot of 'The Time Traveller's Wife', the ending was very disappointing.

I've even had a bit of a foray into Booker prize land - surely that would be a good way to make my decisions? But even a bestseller, prize winner, and personal recommendation like 'The Life of Pi' left me wishing I'd wasted my time elsewhere.

So what am I to do? Most popular fiction seems to be badly written dross. Why are people putting up with it? Why on earth do they keep buying it? Can any serious reader say "The Da Vinci Code" without cringing? The only conclusion I've reached is that picking a random but attractive looking book off the bestseller list is a complete waste of time. The general public must have little taste, and the Booker judges should get out more. I'm going to have to stick with science fiction, and with my small list of quality non-genre authors.

If you know any author or book that is in the bestseller list that you'd like to recommend, I'm open to suggestions, but unless you agree with everything I've written here, perhaps it's best you leave me to my ranting.

Posted by se71 at 11:40 AM | Comments (0)

October 03, 2006

The Talented Mr Ripley - Patricia Highsmith

This is a cold hearted thriller in the Hitchcock vein, Highsmith also penned "Strangers on a Train". It has a few twists that shouldn't be given away before reading, as Ripley's talents gradually get uncovered. It starts with a tense scene that reveals Ripley as a petty crook, a bit of a loser, in 1950s America. He is made an offer to go to Europe to try and persuade a young man called Dickie Greenleaf to come back to New York to visit his family. Dickie's father pays Ripley's passage and expenses.

Ripley finds Greenleaf, and insinuates himself into his life. He loves the lifestyle, the easy going Italian riviera; the trips to Rome and other towns; drinking wine and not worrying about money. He decides that this is the life for him, and that he will do anything to keep it.

The whole story is told through Ripleys point of view. We know how he thinks, what he feels, and we empathise with him. He has had a hard life, and wants better things. Then as events turn nasty, and we see his sociopathic side, we find it harder to like him, and yet still somehow hope he succeeds. It's very skillfully written, and the tension is unbearable at times.

Very highly recommended.

I saw the film of this a few years ago, and never really believed in Matt Damon in the part of Tom Ripley. Now I've read the book and have gotten a much better feel for the character, and I'm a bit more happy that he actually did quite a good job. Jude Law as Dickie is excellent, completely perfect as the rather lazy playboy.

Posted by se71 at 06:26 PM | Comments (0)

June 22, 2006

Sin City

This is primarily a review of the movie, though some references to the graphic novels is inevitable. Why? Well, becasue they are practically identical. Never before has a live action film crossed over from the printed page with such complete accuracy. In fact, I'd even go so far as to say that if you've seen/read one of them, you can honestly claim to have read/seen the other too. My previous short review of "The Hard Goodbye" is here.

This movie is based on three separate graphic novels, with short, interconnected introduction and conclusion sections. Unfortunately the lack of continuity shows. There is an attempt to get all the characters together near the end, to make it look like one story, but it doesn't really fool anyone. And one of the stories starts and ends the film - well, actually, it sort of goes A B C D B A. (B - That Yellow Bastard, C - The Hard Goodbye, D - The Big Fat Kill, A - bookend sections). I guess as director I'd have done the same thing, rather than just show the stories consecutively.

However everything does take place in one city, Sin City, where the laws of physics don't seem to work the same way. People can survive falling from tall buildings, and live through appalling gunshot wounds, and even biology is different, with one character turning a luminous yellow after drug treatments. Each of the stories has a main hard man, nothing stops him getting justice, that is, his personal brand of justice. He doesn't mind a bit of maiming, torture and killing, to get revenge. Each of the stories has a tough woman too, though not so tough she doesn't need rescuing by the hard man. Oh, and she is always very attractive, and quite often wears very little or no clothing.

So we are safely in 18 certificate territory. You have been warned.

What we get are detective stories in the Philip Marlow vein, but with a lot more oomph to appeal to a jaded generation that has seen it all and can take it. Bruce Willis is a cop nearing retirement who saves a young girl from a violent rapist, but gets sent to prison becasuse the man he catches is actually the son of the corrupt governer. Mickey Rourke is an ugly man with mental problems, and he scours the city trying to avenge the murder of a prostitute who was kind to him. Finally, Clive Owen is the third tough guy, protecting a group of prostitutes from the corrupt police force. Owen doesn't quite have the meanness of the other two, he doesn't quite convince us that he could take the punishment Willis and Rourke take and keep going, but he comes very close.

The women, as secondary characters, are all the whore with a heart of gold type. They trust their man to help them, but are tough when needed. The film has been branded as sexist, as the women all appeal to male fantasies and need protection from the men. To a large extent this is true, but it's not the whole story. Jessica Alba plays a smart, tough woman, who is self reliant and resourceful. Carla Gugino as Rourke's parole officer only really has one flaw, she believes that the cops are the good guys.

I loved this film - it's fast and furious, violent but darkly funny. It has a magnificent 'look', black and white computer generated backgrounds, with only some bright splashes of colour, maybe in someone's eyes, or their red lipstick. It's not for the faint-hearted, but if you like this kind of thing, then it's one for the DVD collection, as you can easily enjoy it again and again.

Posted by se71 at 10:05 AM | Comments (0)

June 20, 2006

JPod - Douglas Coupland

It's a really long time since I read Generation X and Microserfs, Coupland's landmark novels. I have forgotten most of them, except a few things, including the McJob, the flat food, and the dot-com programmers working stupid hours for no money but instead the empty promise of multi-million dollar stock options when their company IPOs.

Having just completed JPod, I'm reasonably sure that it's pretty much the same stuff, slightly repackaged to include the new internet themes and memes.

Ethan works in an office for a computer game company. We're supposed to think he's a pretty normal geek in the beginning. He has the stereotypical cubicle life. He gets great company perks like free food and drinks, and very flexible hours. He calls his block of cubicles JPod, as everyone's surname begins with J. There are 5 main colleagues, all with odd quirks.

But Ethan's life is weird. All his family and friends are weird, and he happily gets caught up in all their illegal activities. I think we're supposed to find this amusing, like the way John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson are funny hitmen in Pulp Fiction. But I just found the weirdness distastful and not very original. It goes on a bit too long as well, and like a soap opera, you can see the set-ups coming for miles.

It's written in an easy style which will have you moving through at 100 pages an hour if you're not careful. Of course, having pages and pages of prime numbers and digits of pi adds a lot to the thickness of the book, and very little to the interestingness.

Geeks will love all the overt references to Google, Nigerian spam, Blackberries and the multitude of other things they are daily exposed to. You get the feeling that Coupland really understands this world. He knows that dissecting a geek's laptop will expose just about everything you need to know about his life. I'm a card carrying geek myself and enjoyed that I understood most of the archane 8 bit computer talk, that I knew Belgian keyboards are hell to use, that I know what a rendering farm is. A few years back I was reading a Scott Adams Dilbert book, and was laughing my head off. My mum was there, and I showed her the passage - she has never worked in an office and the humour just didn't work on her. I think JPod is the same.

If you're not into the whole eBay, Quake, C++ world, if you think a computer is just a tool, and not a life choice, then I think you'll be turned off fairly quickly by this book. If like me you spend the day wondering what piece of software you could upgrade or reconfigure instead of doing any real work, then you'll find it a fun read, but you will be unconvinced by the actual story, and you won't care at all about the characters or what happens to them.

I even bought the limited edition, which comes signed by the author, and has a little JPod plastic figure. Nice marketing.

Posted by se71 at 10:37 AM | Comments (0)

June 05, 2006

Never Let Me Go - Kazuo Ishiguro

Sometimes it takes a few days for a novel to sink in after you've read it. This story seeps into your consciousness, and you find yourself thinking about it long after it's finished. Is this a defintion of a good book? Yes, I think it probably is.

There is very little that can be written in a review of "Never Let Me Go" without giving away key elements of the plot. If you like thought provoking themes set in a world much like ours, but subtly different you might like this book. If you want to see this world through the painfully honest eyes of a girl as she grows up, you might like this book. If you enjoy watching something gradually unfolding, with clues to what is really going on revealing the horrible truth....well, I think you'll like this.

Basically, I really think you should read this, but I can't actually tell you why without spoiling it for you.

It is completely heartbreaking though.

Posted by se71 at 10:36 AM | Comments (0)

May 22, 2006

Magician - Raymond E. Feist

Another of the BBC Big Read Top 100 books, and one I have wanted to read for about twenty years anyway, so picking it up at last wasn't a chore. What was a chore however was wading through the almost 700 pages of battles and magic in the worlds of Kelawan and Midkemia in which the characters live. I did enjoy the story, it is a typical sword and scorcery adventure in the "Lord of the Rings" vein. The action scenes are well executed, the mysteries are revealed as slowly but surely the heroes fulfil their unlikely destinies.

The problem I did have however was the immense amount of politics and the seemingly neverending descriptions of the colours of peoples robes. Some of this is of course required to give the story substance, and to add human details to scenes to help us to picture them in our mind's eye. I think perhaps the edition I have read, which is a tenth year anniversary of first publication and contains 15,000 more words than the original, may be the reason for the verbosity. It is always tempting to include scenes you've written I'm sure, but sometimes the editor who cut them out is right. Slowing down the forward narrative to spend time on background details in an adventure yarn should be handled with great care.

It's the tale of a orphan boy called Pug who lives on the outskirts of a large kingdom. As usual, they have only a medieval level of technology; bows and arrows, but no guns; horses and carts, but no internal combustion engine. There are magicians, but there power is a bit difficukt to quantify - most are fairly ineffectual. He has a friend called Tomas, and lives with his family as an adopted son to the cook at a Duke's castle. The boys dream of a future in which Tomas will be a great warrior, and Pug a master magician. Of course, in fantasies such as this, dreams really can come true.

Suddenly the relative peacefulness of the kingdom is shattered by the arrival of a strange army. They appear from nowhere, and start to encroach upon the land, building up a territory of their own and fighting local people to enlarge it. Pug and Tomas are thrown into the middle of this and travel across the whole known world, and even to other worlds. They meet dwarves and elves, goblins and very powerful magicians who seem to predict the future.

There are a host of major and minor characters, and there are even some women, though they are only really standard love interest, and never get to take place in any real position of power.

I didn't really realise that this is the first in a trilogy called "The Riftworld Saga". I'm not sure if I'm sufficiently interested to read any more. There are some unexplained loose ends, but I'm quite satisfied I think with where this first volume closes. In fact, further investigation reveals there are loads more Riftworld books. I think it's best I stop now.

Posted by se71 at 02:57 PM | Comments (0)

Three for Two

I finished my book on the train this morning. In need of something new I popped into Books Etc on London Wall at lunchtime. I had a novel in mind, "Never Let Me Go" by Kazuo Ishiguro. After a long fantasy story, I sometime like something shorter and more literary. I know practically nothing about the book, which is how I like it. I do know it takes place in the town of Hailsham, where a friend used to live, so that gives it an odd interest factor.

It's quite expensive at £7.99, but to make me feel better about spending this money, I paradoxically decide to spend over twice that amount. As part of a three for two promotion, I can get my cheapest book free.

The second book was easy to pick - it's one I've been waiting to come out in paperback - "Freakonomics". It's non-fiction, and is about the odd relationships between things, mostly I think having economics as a root cause.

A couple of summers ago I took Simon Winchester's "Krakatoa" on holiday with me. It was a very interesting read, being a study of both the science and the history of the situation when the biggest bang in the history of civilisation occurred. His new one is about the earthquake in San Francisco in 1906, and is called "A Crack in the Edge of the World"
I think I will read about this disaster as I sit in the sun wondering why everyone else is still reading Dan Brown. (actually, embarassingly, I'll probably have one of his with me too :-)

Posted by se71 at 02:54 PM | Comments (0)

March 30, 2006

Up The Line - Robert Silverberg

It seems a great idea - have a time travel story where the hero goes back to Byzantium about one thousand years ago and falls in love with his great, great, multi great, grandmother. Robert Silverberg is a renowned science fiction writer, so I wondered why I hadn't seen this one on the shelf any time. I picked it up in the local second-hand store however, and soon discovered why it's out of print.

Although this novel does explore the interesting concepts of the paradoxes of time travel, it was written at a time, the early 1970s, when there was far too much graphic sex in science fiction. The writers of the day all seemed to assume that the future would be full of liberated women, walking around practically naked, and under the influence of new recreational drugs that made them open to advances from any man around. Maybe that's the way society looked like it was going in a world before AIDS. LSD was hip, the psychedelic scene and the

se71

everybody else is doing it, so why can't I ?