devilgate

I hadn’t read any Amis before (either of them), but I’ve wanted to try Kingsley for a while; mainly for his SF connections, but when I saw this in a second-hand bookshop I thought it might be a good place to start.

This one isn’t SF, of course. Instead, it’s described as a “comic novel”.

I have to say that I found very little in it to laugh at.

Oh, the odd chortle, or wry grin, certainly; in particular there is a description of a hangover that has been quoted often enough that I recognised it in its entirety.

But our national sense of humour must have changed since 1954, or something. Not to mention a great deal more about our society and the way we interact. At times in this novel I found it harder to understand the motivations of the characters than of the most alien of characters in SF (well, ok, not to the extent of ‘The Dance of the Changer and the Three’, say, but anything less than that).

That’s no bad thing, but since it wasn’t the intent of the author, that sense of confusion or dislocation can leave you feeling lost. This is quite different from the effect you can get in good SF, where you’re thrown in at the deep end, not quite knowing what’s going on. There, you just hang on and enjoy the ride, trusting in the knowledge that it’ll become clear in time.

In this case there’s no hope of an explanation, because Amis didn’t realise that the behaviour of his sexually stilted 1950s academics would be quite so opaque and mysterious to a reader in the zero-years of the 21st century (why didn’t they just go to bed, already?)

Still, as a gentle rom-com, it wasn’t too bad.

Technorati Tags: books, books 2007, Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim

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.A mindfucking mindfuck of all mindfucks. A great, big, sprawling book, and yet one which can have a curious sense of claustrophobia at times.

That’s because nearly all the action takes place on the floating city of Armada. It’s a big floating city, but it is, nonetheless, essentially a big ship, in the middle of a great ocean, and there’s nowhere for the characters to go.

What they do while stuck there, is where the fun lies.

While I was reading this, my beloved got our son a copy of China’s first book “for younger readers”, Un Lun Dun. He finished it over a long weekend’s trip to Cornwall, and I read the review of it in that Saturday’s Guardian (yes, we buy our kids books in their week of release, why do you ask? Like much of the country, we did the same in July (though to be fair, that wasn’t just for the kids.))

The review ended with a statement of the old canard about SF&F having no characters, “and that’s why some readers like them”, to paraphrase. And while that’s kind of insulting (and not even true for Un Lun Dun), there is some truth in it. But then, that’s not what we’re here for: you don’t come to a book like this to read about the inner turmoil of a North London writer (I can get that by not reading. OK, East rather than North, and would-be, but still.) You read books like this to take you somewhere else; to experience something other; to see something you can’t see down your street.

And you certainly get your money’s worth with this one.

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The most annoying thing about The Prestige is the way it ends; though I can see that there was no real reason to continue it after that point. The story is told, all that can reasonably be revealed is revealed (without going into preposterous and unnecessary details).

The book is finished; the tale (which, as I’m sure you know, is about Victorian magicians, and Nikola Tesla) is told.

And yet I still thought, as I reached the last page, “Aw, I want more!” like a kid that wants another bedtime story.

Which is no bad thing, it’s fair to say. Better, as a writer (or almost anything else) to leave them wanting more than to outstay your welcome.

And with that thought in mind, I’ll just say: highly recommended. I’m out.

Technorati Tags: books, book notes 2007, the prestige, christopher priest

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This entry was automatically crossposted from my blog, A Labourer at the Bitface. You can comment here on LJ, but it might be nice if you commented over there.

It’s not The Crow Road, but then, what is?

In my opinion, the quality of Banksie’s non-SF work rose in shallow, slightly wiggly, climb from a high start, to a “can do no wrong” plateau that includes The Bridge, Espedair Street and Complicity, as well as the aforementioned. Thereafter it dropped a bit (but who can blame him, after that lot?) But it never got bad. (His SF took a different trajectory, and as far as I can tell, it’s still climbing.)

So what of this book? It’s a family drama, I suppose you’d say, with a mystery at its heart. Not a “whodunit”, so much as “what got done?”

Slipping into Banksie’s world is like pulling on an old, comfy jumper; or maybe a favourite leather jacket would be more appropriate. So we get recognisable characters, dialogue that you could hear in any pub or home in Scotland, and just a touch of mystery.

The main problem, perhaps, is that there’s no great threat over the characters (they might decide to sell the family games business to a big American company, and some of them are against that happening). So we don’t have any real sense of potential doom. Still, though, finding the answer to the mystery is fun enough, and it’s a compelling enough read that I got through it in a couple of days.

In a book like this, the pleasure is in the journey more than the destination.

Technorati Tags: books 2007, iain banks

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I read a review of this book in The Guardian years ago (this one, I think). It sounded absolutely fantastic, and I've wanted to read it ever since. But I only got round to buying it recently.

I was aware, of course, of the danger of approaching a work with unreasonably-raised expectations, so I tried not to. You can't make yourself think "This won't be very good," when you actually think, "This should be pretty good." The trick, therefore, is to convince yourself to have a slight seed of doubt. I'm not totally sure how well that can ever work, though.

I did enjoy the book, however: it starts with a light, easy style, and has an endearing central character in Sumire. ( Read more... )
So while I enjoyed reading it, on looking back over it, it seems that it is deeply flawed. Or maybe I'm flawed, because I failed to fully understand it.

I expected that it would inspire me to read more of his work, but it hasn't: or not yet, at least.

I've been reading Neil Gaiman's blog since the time when he was writing this book — as, I'm sure, have most of us, what with his site being the number one hit on Google when you search for 'neil'.

But I hadn't actually read the book until now. I had read the first chapter online, and I had an idea roughly what it was about: real gods (maybe all gods) walking the Earth in the present day.

And it's a stormer of a book. The pages just keep turning, the quotes are quotable (girl-Sam's "I believe" speech is particularly fine) and myths are mashed up in glorious style.

It's shortcomings are, perhaps, that it slows down a bit too much in the middle section; and Wednesday and Shadow make perhaps too many visits to down-at-heel gods without anything very specific happening during them. It reads like a road movie in places (which is fine), and it would probably make a good one.

There are surprises right up to the end, though, and I'm sure I'll read it again in the future.

Technorati Tags: books, book notes, american gods, neil gaiman, 2006

Cory Doctorow's third novel is his best so far; and it's strange. Really, really strange.

It is the story of a man whose father is a mountain and whose mother is a washing machine. These are not metaphors.
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And there's a woman with wings. Read it for yourself. It's quite amazing, and like his other books, available for free download under a Creative Commons licence.



Technorati Tags: books, book notes, 2006, cory doctorow, someone comes to town, someone leaves town, creative commons, ebooks

Yes, and only a day after the last one.  It took me a bit longer than that to read it, mind you.

A science-fiction book that was nominated for the Booker: amazing. And have no doubt about it: this is a science-fiction book. Just as Nineteen Eighty Four is; and Orwell's masterpiece is perhaps the best reference point for Cloud Atlas. The appearance of O'Brien's Goldstein's book within Winston Smith's story may well have been a model for Mitchell's multiply-embedded stories.

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But all of this matters little. What does matter is that this is a damn fine book.

Technorati Tags: books, book notes, 2006, david mitchell, cloud atlas

This year I'm going to try to record all the books I read, and write mini-reviews of them. I'm not quite going for the 50bookchallenge thing, because I doubt that I can actually manage one a week, what with one thing and another. But I ought to be able to get through a few more than last year, since I'm not doing an OU course.  And in fact it's nearly the end of January, and I have already read three books and started a fourth: so, not too bad, then.  I'm just a bit behind on posting about them.

For Christmas I got volume 1 of A Dance to the Music of Time: A Question of Upbringing.  I started reading it on Christmas day, so we'll have to allow the year to start and end there.

I have been hearing quite a lot about Anthony Powell's twelve-volume masterpiece recently: there was a whole Radio 4 programme about it, which I heard bits of twice. And I notice John Peel's Desert Island Discs listing on Wikipedia, recently, and Dance was the book he chose.

So I was keen to read it, despite having seen the TV adaptation a few years ago, and thought it seem very shallow and superficial.
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Anyway, I look forward to working my way through the other eleven volumes.  Perhaps I'll do them all this year.

I've been having a slightly strange, but not entirely unfamiliar, reading experience recently.  I'm reading Mindplayers by Pat Cadigan. Now, I read the first chapter of this a long time ago, in the dealers' room at a convention.  I liked it a lot, and wanted to read on, but the hardback was a bit too expensive at the time.

I decided to keep an eye out for the paperback.  And I did: over the years I often checked the shelves for it, but never found it. As far as I could tell, it never came out in paperback, at least in this country.

And all of this was before Amazon and so on, so I couldn't just search for it. By the time web-based sales were here, I guess I had forgotten about it.  Certainly I never thought to do a search for it.

Then in the summer we were in Hay-on-Wye, town of bookshops, for a day.  I managed to spend less than £30 on books (though obviously I could have spent a lot more). 
But, among my purchases, there it was: the Gollancz classics re-issue of Mindplayer.  Slightly strange to find that the book has gone from first publication to classic re-issue in my lifetime, but there you go.

Anyway, it's been high on my to-read pile since then; and I started reading it a week or so ago; alternating it with Charles Stross's Accelerando when my Palm is charged.

Now, as I read the first chapter, the fact that it was familiar to me was not at all surprising; I read it at the con years ago, right?  But then I got on to chapter two, as you do.   Strangely, that seemed familiar too.  Hmmm.  OK, maybe I'd read more of it at the con than I thought.

Chapter three: the feeling didn't go away.  Chapter four. Chapter five.

Gradually it became apparent that I had, in fact, read the book before.  However, I remembered nothing — absolutely nothing — about the story.  I haven't finished it yet, and I still have no idea how it ends.

This is a very strange form of deja vu, it seems.

But it's not the first time.  A few years back I read one of Paul McAuley's novels.  It is perhaps telling that I can't remember for sure which one, despite having looked over some reviews.  I think it was Eternal Light, but it seems I still can't remember it.

In any case, it very gradually became familar to me, and I realised I had read it before.  The copy I was reading at the time came from the library, and I figured out that I had taken it out before.

In this case, with the Cadigan, I have no idea where I got the copy that I originally read.  Library?  Maybe.  Borrowed a friend's?  Always possible.  Or did I buy it, and forget? is there a copy filed away in the attic somewhere?  I just have no idea.

It's the age, I fear.  Or maybe someone is playing with my mind.

I knew I would buy it, of course.  I just didn't necessarily know I would buy it today.  But I popped into Waterstone's at lunchtime, and had a look at Margrave of the Marshes, John Peel's autobiography.  It was posthumously completed by his wife, Sheila (once better known as "The Pig", fact fans) and their (grown-up) kids.

Even reading the acknowledgements was curiously moving, listing as it did the likes of Billy Bragg, Andy Kershaw and Tom Robinson.  So I read the introduction, which was written by the four kids.  I found myself laughing and my eyes filling with tears just from those three or four pages.  So obviously I had to buy it.

I'm now thoroughly looking forward to tomorrow's Home Truths, which is a special edition featuring Sheila.

I also seem to have bought Singularity Sky, but I've been meaning to get that for ages.