books and books review

book meme 2012 World Book Night — which have you read?

Published on October 28, 2011Leave a comment

Below is the list of the twentyfive books chosen for World Book Night 2012. According to the site, these books “were selected partly by a public vote for the World Book Night top 100, with an editorial committee whittling down the list”, which may explain some of the odd nature of the list. I thought I’ll keep it simple for this meme: everything I’ve read is in italics, everything I’m not planning to ever read is struck out.

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
The Player of Games by Iain M Banks
Sleepyhead by Mark Billingham
Notes from a Small Island by Bill Bryson
The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho
The Take by Martina Cole
Harlequin by Bernard Cornwell
Someone Like You by Roald Dahl
A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
Room by Emma Donoghue
Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier
The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro
Misery by Stephen King
~~The Secret Dreamworld of a Shopaholic~~ by Sophie Kinsella
Small Island by Andrea Levy
Let the Right One In by John Ajvde Lindqvist
~~The Road~~ by Cormac McCarthy
~~The Time Traveler’s Wife~~ by Audrey Niffenegger
The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox by Maggie O’Farrell
The Damned Utd by David Peace
Good Omens by Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman
How I Live Now by Meg Rosoff
Touching the Void by Joe Simpson
I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith
The Book Thief by Markus Zuzak

Only four out of twentyfive read means this is not the list for me. A weird mixture of genres, established classics and recent blockbusters, yet not very diverse considering this is supposed to be for World Book Night. It’s certainly not all Dead White Males, but as far as I can tell these are all authors writing for/firmly established in the UK/US book markets.

To be honest, I never like this sort of list and if anything makes me less inclined to read a book, it’s when it’s being promoted as part of something like this.

(Meme found via Nicholas Whyte, originated by Ian Sales.)

Troy and Homer — Joachim Latacz

Published on October 18, 2011

Cover of Troy and Homer

Troy and Homer
Joachim Latacz
Kevin Windle (translator)
342 pages including index
published in 2004

My first encounters with Troy, Homer and The Illiad came through one of those ubiquitous Time-Life books on Classical Greece and more memorably, through the serialisation of an adaptation of both the Illiad and the Odyssey in the Dutch Donald Duck weekly comic that ran in the early eighties. The story of how that Teutonic romantic Schliemann had found the remains of Troy and the city of Agamennon, Mycene where everybody had always thought these were just pleasant myths, was of course part of the mythology. The recieved wisdom at the time I first got to learn about all this was that though Schliemann had indeed found something where nobody had expected there to be anything, but that it would be wrong to think that this was indeed the Troy of Homer. The experts supposedly all agreed that at best, Homer had been inspired by half remembered stories of a golden age, that any attempt to answer the question of whether the Trojan War had “really happened” was pointless. That at least was the impression I got reading pop history books.

As Joachim Latacz makes clear in Troy and Homer: Towards a Solution of an Old Mystery that impression was wrong. It is not only possible to answer the question of whether Troy really had existed, whether the city Schliemann had discovered was the Troy of the Illiad and therefore whether this meant it too was based on historical fact, but these questions have been answered, and answered in the affirmative. The Troy Schliemann dug up was the Troy of legend, the Illiad is based on historical fact and there was in all likelyhood a Trojan War similar to the war Homer uses as the background to his epic poem.

Naomi Novik — Temeraire

Published on October 16, 2011

Cover of Temeraire

Temeraire
Naomi Novik
327 pages
published in 2006

So that’s why the Temeraire series is so popular. I had heard of it of course, the first novel in the series (called Her Majesty’s Dragon in the original American edition) having been the subject of much hype and enthusiastic reviews when it first came out, but I had been skeptical. It had all sounded too high concept to me: Horatio Hornblower with dragons? Interesting, but it all seemed a bit too slight to hang a novel on. As I quickly found out when I flipped through Temeraire in the library, I was wrong. Naomi Novik knows how to tell a story, to keep you turing the page until it’s finished and leave you wanting more.

Frigate captain William Laurence manages to capture a French blockade runner but is puzzled why it resisted so fiercly when it was clear it could not win the fight. His puzzlement ends when he discovers it’s transporting a dragon, one near to hatching to boot. Dragons are rare and valuable, both as status symbol and instrument of war. Because it’s clear that the egg will hatch before his ship will be back at base, Laurence knows it’s his duty to get the dragon to imprint on one of his men, to get it into service for England, notoriously weak on dragons. Imagine his surprise — if not the reader’s — when it turns out the dragon imprints on him. It means the end of his career in the navy and the start of a life in the country’s most despicable arm of service, the Aerial Corps.

10,000 Light-Years from Home — James Tiptree, Jr.

Published on October 3, 20113 Comments

Cover of 10,000 Light-Years from Home

10,000 Light-Years from Home
James Tiptree, Jr.
255 pages
published in 1973

Ther may have been something ineluctably masculine about James Tiptree Jr’s writing, as Robert Silverberg will never live down writing in his appreciation of Tiptree, but he’s still part of my Year of Reading Women project. Because as we all know now, but Silverberg didn’t, “James Tiptree Jr” was a pseudonym for Alice B. Sheldon. Sheldon’s reasons for chosing a male pseudonym were many and complex and if you want to know all about it, read Julie Phillips James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon. Suffice to say that at the time of 10,000 Light-Years from Home, Tiptree’s first collection, the secret was not out yet, as is obvious from Harry Harrison’s introduction, full of what “he” did during the war. All of which was true by the way, just with the genders flipped.

James Tiptree, Jr. therefore was an obvious entry for my little project; the reason I chose this particular collection was just because this was the only one at hand. I’ve read quite a lot of Tiptree stories, as well as several under her other pseudonym, Raccoona Sheldon, but mostly through various anthologies rather than her own collections. Because 10,000 Light-Years from Home is such an early collection it misses most of Tiptree’s best stories. Worse, some of her better known early stories, like e.g. “The Last Flight of Dr. Ain” or “Your Haploid Heart” are also missing. Yet what remains is still a very good collection of short stories any writer could be proud of. What struck me is that some of the stories in this collection could’ve been published in Analog unaltered, which is not what you’d expect from Tiptree’s reputation as a “difficult”, too feminist, New Wave writer who helped ruined science fiction, as some of the troglodytes online would have it.

Books read September

Published on October 1, 2011

Somewhat of a fiction heavy month this was, largely because I hadn’t gotten any books from the library recently, my main source of non-fiction. But I was also in a mood where I justed wanted to read a good story. The gender balance is a bit out of whack this month: seven books by male writers, four by female writers. Must do better.

The Gabble and Other Stories — Neal Asher
A collection of short stories set in his Polity universe. Not the worst way to get introduced to the full Asher experience.

Rule 34 — Charlie Stross
You already know that this is the sequel to Halting State. You also know that this, like the original is written in the second person, which costs you little trouble to adapt to, but others might struggle with it. You also think that reading a review this way would get old fast.

The Ghost Brigades — John Scalzi
Sequel to Old Man’s War, starring Jane Sagan who we first met in the last third of the previous book. Fun adventure sf, with a bit more of a look behind the curtains of the OMW universe showing that things aren’t quite as black and white as the first book showed.

The Last Colony — John Scalzi
The final book in the trilogy, teaming up John Perry and Jane Sagan in defence of the new colony they lead.

Cryoburn — Lois McMaster Bujold
The latest Miles Vorkosigan novel is a fun adventure, but almost a throwback to the earliest books in the series and missing Ekaterin in this is criminal.

Needle in a Timestack — Robert Silverberg
Fun collection of short stories. Nothing spectacular.

Invader — C. J. Cherryh
Sequel to Foreigner, sharing many of its flaws, mainly that the protagonist is fairly passive and in the dark about what’s going on.

Be My Enemy — Christopher Brookmyre
Another one of Jack Parlabane novels. Jack is invited on a survival/team building exercise weekend up at an isolated Scottish castle turned hotel, to which Jack looks forward if only to pour scorn on it in his newspaper column later. Then the survival aspects turns out to be more pertinent than expected…

10,000 Light-Years from Home — James Tiptree Jr
This month’s entry in my Year of reading Women project. A very good collection, made better by the realisation that these are not even Tiptree’s best stories.

All Fun and Games until Somebody Loses an Eye — Christopher Brookmyre
When somebody tries to kidnap Jane Fleming’s granddaughter, it turns out her fitness lessons are not a complete waste and she’s good for more than babysitting…

Temeraire — Naomi Novik
All you need to know about this: Horatio Hornblower, with dragons. I was going to finish that Richard Miles history of Carthage, but this took only two pages to suck me in.