Another month, another list of books read. Let me know what you read this month?
Polity Agent — Neal Asher
Another fast paced Space Opera from Asher, entertaining if not that memorable.
The Weird Stone of Brisigamen — Alan Garner
A classic children’s fantasy that I’m way too old and well read in fantasy to enjoy fully the way it should. Colin and Susan are sent to their mother’s old nurse living near Alderley Edge in Cheshire when their parents have to be abroad for six months. There they get embroiled in an old legend. Comforting but it has moments with a real edge to them, best read between ages eight and twelve.
Galactic North — Alastair Reynolds
A collection of short stories set in the same universe as Revelation Space and its sequels. This could be thought at as the secret history of the Demarchist/Conjoiner universe. They do not always fit in well with the novels, as Reynolds acknowledges in his afterword.
James Tiptree, Jr: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon — Julie Phillips
An excellent biography of an important science fiction author, showcasing the importance of Sheldon/Tiptree beyond the boundaries of the genre.
The City & the City — China Miéville
Restraining his usual tendencies towards the baroque and fantastic, Miéville here has written a proper police procedural in the vein of an Ian Rankin. The story starts with a routine murder in a city on the edge of Europe, which quickly turns more complicated and ultimately involves the city’s much richer neighbour. The two cities exist in an uneasy and wholly unique relationship with each other and it’s this relationship that is at the heart of the book, transforming the mundane, realist experience of the police procedural into something more.
Pompeii – The Life of a Roman Town — Mary Beard
The cliche of Pompeii is that of a town where time stood still, it’s daily routine dramatically disrupted by the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 CE and so ironically preserved for our edification. Mary Beard here shows how little this view has to do with the reality of Pompeii as excavated, how much data we have managed to extract from these excavations but how little we still know about daily life in Pompeii. At the same time it’s an excellent overview of what we do know and since it was only published last year, about as up to date as you can get.
The Kingdom of the Hittites — Trevor Bryce
Excellent and up to date overview of the history of the Hittites, a people we knew nothing about until about a hundred years ago but which for some fivehundred years were one of the Near Eastern superpowers during the Late Bronze Age.
In Search of Planet Vulcan — Richard Baum & William Sheehan
Vulcan was the hypothetical planet proposed to be the cause of why the observations of Mercury’s orbit around the Sun continued to be different from what it was calculated to be based on Newton’s laws of gravity. We know now that these laws were not the entire truth, as Einstein showed; while good enough for daily use, they break down in the presence of a massive object like the Sun. As this had not yet been realised, astronomers proposed there was something else out there influencing Mercury, just as Neptune and Uranus had been discovered because of their influence on other planets…
Armed Struggle – The History of the IRA — Richard English
A recent history of the provisional IRA examing both its active history and the way its politics and ideology evolved over the years since its founding in 1969 up to the Good Friday peace agreements and beyond. Some context is of course provided, but this is not a history of Ireland, the Irish struggle for independence or even the Troubles, just of the pIRA. I found it enlightening.
The Gone-Away World — Nick Harkaway
Wow. I understand now why this was so much talked about last year. One of the best debut novels I’ve ever read; finished it in one go.
Charge! Hurrah! Hurrah! — Donald Thomas
An entertaining biography of Lord Cardigan, (in)famous for having led the charge of the Light Brigade during the Crimean War, which makes clear he was interesting for than that.
The Best of Murray Leinster — Murray Leinster
Read last weekend in honour of Murray Leinster Day in Virginia. Leinster was a pionering sf author, who started writing before the genre had even been established and managed to continue to do so during the Gernsback and Campbellian revolutions.
Dark Star — Alan Furst
An excellent thriller set in the years just before World War II, truly capturing the claustrophobic, threatening atmosphere of the times.
Operation Chaos — Poul Anderson
A fixup novel of three novellas, set in a world in which witchcraft and magic have taken the place of science and in which personal broomsticks are as commonplace as cars here. The first two parts are enjoyable if old fashioned adventure stories, the third is marred by Anderson’s later pessimism and hippie baiting.