books and books review

Books read April

Published on May 6, 20121 Comment

Not much read this month, as I spent much of my spare time in playing Football Manager; the trip to Plymouth didn’t help either. I always think I’ll read more travelling than I actually do.

The Making of Europe — Robert Bartlett
This is what I was reading for most of the month, a history of Europe in the High Middle Ages, between 950 and 1350 CE, when Europe became Europe through a process of “conquest, colonisation and cultural change”, as the subtitle makes clear.

Slow River — Nicola Griffith
Nicola Griffith’s second science fiction novel was just as good as her first. A young woman was kidnapped for ransom, then left for dead on the streets of London. Yet instead of going back to her rich family, she starts a new life amongst the outcasts.

Love in Amsterdam — Nicolas Freeling
Bought this in Plymouth because Sandra liked the Van der Valk series, of which this is the first, a murder mystery told from the point of view of the man suspected of the murder.

The Power of Darkness: Tales of Terror — Edith Nesbit
Supernatural mystery stories by an Edwardian writer better known for her fantasy children’s novels. I read this because Sandra loved it, one of the books she read while in hospital. Decent enough stories, but not intended to be read in quick succession.

Plymouth loot

Published on April 28, 20121 Comment

Books bought in Plymouth

Like me, Sandra was a ferocious reader, one of the few people I’ve known who actually read more and faster than me. Where we differed was in our attitude towards books, as she was far more ruthless in discarding books than I could ever be. For example, before we moved in together she had gotten rid (unasked) of at least a third of her books, while I, well, had not. She always kept trying to limit the spread of books and bookcases through the house somewhat, even though she was aware it was largely a lost battle. Not that she disapproved of buying more books, just that we should be discerning in which books we’d actually keep.

So she might’ve been just a tiny bit disappointed if she’d seen the pile of books I’ve brought home from Plymouth. Not much, just a bit and only because she’d known our bookcases are full to overflowing already and more books won’t help there. But I can’t help it, there was just too much good stuff. What I’ve always liked about going to Plymouth was browsing the charity shops up in Mannamead, near where Sandra lived, as back then you could be certain to pick up a lot of good books for cheap. These days many of the bigger charity chains have long since discovered that it’s easier to put the good stuff up on Ebay, so there’s less gold amongst the dross, but roughly half that pile still came from charity shops anyway.

The rest all comes from one great bookshop right in the middle of the Barbican/harbour, the tourist area of Plymouth, three floors of bookshelves heaving with secondhand gems. Not all that cheap, but I know that if I lived in Plymouth full time I would’ve spent quite a lot of my disposable income there — I found a lot of books there already on my own shelves, which is always a sign of a good shop. If you’re ever in Plymouth and in need of something good to read, the Book Cupboard is your best bet.

What I found there: a pile of Giles annuals, several Nicholas Freeling van der Valk mysteries, several hard to find sf novels (Vance’s Showboat World, Ian Watson’s The Book of the River, Diane Duane’s The Door into Shadow) as well as two history books, of which The Saxon Shore: a Handbook is the most interesting, something I had to buy as I wasn’t sure I’d ever see it again. In general I would’ve liked to spent a day or so browsing the history shelves, but we had other things to do…

Nescio

Published on April 15, 20121 Comment

Because the MeFi thread about the Dutch writer Nescio reminded me of the song de Nits did about him and because it is now going through my head, I thought it would be nice to subject everybody else with it as well.

Nescio has just recieved his first English translation, roughly a century after he wrote the first of his most famous stories, the Uitvreter/Titaantjes/Dichtertje trilogy.

De Nits were a Dutch pop/art rock band, who had a couple of hits with Nescio, In The Dutch Mountains and J.O.S. Days and who share some of the same melancholy that Nescio specialised in in his stories.

At the Edge of the Solar System — Doressoundiram & Lellouch

Published on April 12, 2012Leave a comment

Cover of At the Edge of the Solar System

At the Edge of the Solar System
Alain Doressoundiram & Emmanuel Lellouch
205 pages including index
published in 2008

In 2006 the International Astronomical Union demoted Pluto, long the ninth and last planet in our Solar System from being a planet into a socalled dwarf planet, a new category not just meant for Pluto, but also a half dozen other planets that had been recently discovered at the edge of the Solar System. With the number of planets rapidly rising and estimates raging from a 200 to 2,000 more to be discovered as well as the general feeling that Pluto, only one fifth the mass of the Moon just did not fit in with the rest of the classical planets, this new categorisation was needed, halfway between true planets and asteroids or comets, now classified as small Solar System bodies.

Surprisingly for such a dry subject, the reclassification of Pluto led to a huge amount of media coverage and some controversy; many people, including myself, saw the argument as somewhat specious or had a sentimental attachment to the idea of the classical nine planets. They now were confronted with the reality of the Solar System being massively more complex than they had suspected, with our knowledge of the very edges of it having expanded massively since even the late seventies. Which is where At the Edge of the Solar System: Icy New Worlds Unveiled comes in: an introductionary text book about these discoveries and how they were made.

Star Hunter — Andre Norton

Published on April 5, 2012Leave a comment

Star Hunter
Andre Norton
96 pages
published in 1961

For a lot of American science fiction fans my age or older, Andre Norton was the first “real” sf writer they ever read, largely because she was hugely prolific and specialised in what we’d now call young adult novels. For some reason however she was never all that popular in the Netherlands so I’ve read little of her work so far. But that’s changing, thanks to Project Gutenberg, who have a fair few of her books available, those on which the original US copyrights had not been renewed. Star Hunter is one of them, originally published as an Ace Double. I read it during a couple of lunch breaks at work.

Ras Hume is a pilot for the Out-Hunters Guild who on a trip to the newly discovered planet of Jumala has made a discovery that could make him incredibly rich, but to exploit it he needs to make a deal with Wass, the biggest crime boss on Nahuatl. What he found was the lifeboat from the Largo Drift, a space ship which disappeared six years ago, taking with it the heir to the Kogan estate. He also has a plausible candidate to play the part of Rynch Brodie, the teenage heir. What he needs Wazz for is to condition this boy to actually believe he is this heir, then he will be let lose on Jumala for Hume to discover him when he brings over the safari party he’s scheduled to pilot there. It’s an almost foolproof plan, surely nothing can go wrong.

Or can it?