books and books review

Books read February

Published on March 2, 2011

Though February is a short month, I still read much less than I should’ve. Only four books, three of which cost me a bit of trouble and one of which I would not have finished if it hadn’t been for my “Year of Reading Women” project.

Among Others — Jo Walton
A coming of age story a very many science fiction fans can recognise parts of, but with a certain kind of magic mixed in. A book that, if you recognise yourself in the protagonist, keeps you grinning for days after finishing it.

Bold as Love — Gwyneth Jones
In a near-future, dissolved England, rock ‘n roll revolutionaries take over real power in a country beset by ecological problems, internal strife and political unrest. Uneven, but much better than this quick summary makes it sound. This took me more time to read than I expected.

Sons of the Conquerors — Hugh Pope
Though located in the history section of the local library, this was more of a travelogue, though dense with history. Hugh Pope is a writer and journalist who has long lived in Turkey and been fascinated by the Turkish peoples, who comes across and oldfashioned Turcophile.

Swordspoint — Ellen Kushner
One of those books that’s published as fantasy and reads as fantasy, but could just as well be a straight historical romance: sword and sorcery without the sorcery. Nicely written but again a book I did longer over than I normally would’ve.

Killing for England — Iain McDowall

Published on February 20, 2011

Cover of Killing for England

Killing for England
Iain McDowall
305 pages
published in 2005

I picked up this book because I thought it was by a writer I sort of knew, then kept looking when it became clear McDowall wasn’t the writer I was thinking of, because the back cover blurbs compared him favourably to Ian Rankin. That intrigued me enough to read the first few pages and those few pages in turn hooked me and got me to take the book out of the library. For once, the blurb writers had done their work well, though the comparison to Rankin turned out to be only superficial.

Like Rankin, McDowall has a gritty, older detective as his hero, Chief Inspector Jacobson, somebody, again like Rankin’s Rebus, who does not sit well with his police force’s hierarchy. Like Rankin, McDowall has a good eye for the politics of policing as well. Where they differ is in the setting: Rebus polices gritty, urban Edinburgh, while Jacobson patrols fictional, small town English Crowby. Jacobson is also less cynical, less worldweary than Rebus, more idealistic perhaps. McDowall, on the strength of Killing for England at least, is no Rankin clone, but won’t be a disappointment for those looking for a similar sort of writer.

The Goths — Peter Heather

Published on February 12, 2011

Cover of The Goths

The Goths
Peter Heather
358 pages including index
published in 1996

Most of Peter Heather’s professional output has, in one way or another, featured the Goths. Usually this has been in the context of their contribution to the fall of the Roman Empire in the west, which Heather has long argued they played a central role in. In The Goths his focus is slightly different, more concerned with the Goths themselves than with how they interacted with the Roman Empire, though that still of course is an important part of their story. The Goths is an entry in the Blackwell series The Peoples of Europe and is meant as a one volume overview of their entire history, for people largely unfamiliar with them. As Heather mentions in his introduction, the last book to attempt this was published in 1888, so it was high time for an update.

Heather’s divides his book in three main parts, preceded by an introductionary chapter. In this he discusses why the Goths were important and the problem of social identities, where the old assumptions of unchanging peoples recognisable by some checklist of unique features had been challenged in the 1950ties and 60ties by new research showing how individuals could change their identity when advantageous. Heather applies a synthesis of these approaches to the Goths, arguing that while there was such a thing as a Gothic group identity, it was fluid enough for non-Goths to join into and for the group as a whole to adapt to changing circumstances. He then goes on to first explore the origins of the Goths, thentheir invasion and defeat of the East Roman Empire and further wanderings through the Balkans into Italy and Gaul and finally looks at the history of the two Gothish kingdoms established on parts of the Western Empire. In all three parts Heather puts the search for Gothish identity central.

The Making of Late Antiquity – Peter Brown

Published on February 5, 2011

Cover of The Making of Late Antiquity

The Making of Late Antiquity
Peter Brown
135 pages including index
published in 1978

Peter Brown is the historian who popularised the idea of Late Antiquity as a transitional period between classic antiquity and the early Middle Ages, with the emphasis on the continuity between Rome and the Middle Ages, rather than on the collapse of the western Roman Empire. Brown first publicised his theories in The World of Late Antiquity; this isn’t that book, but was the closest to it I could get. The Making of Late Antiquity is based on a series of lectures Brown gave at Harvard University in 1976 and focuses on the transformation of Roman society between the second and fourth centuries CE.

A topic which is of course closely connected to the political and economic turmoil which the Roman Empire was subjected to in that period, with civil wars, “barbarian” invasions and a resurgent Persia, but you wouldn’t know it from this book. Brown concentrates on the inner lives of the Romans and ignores politics. This alone makes it an odd bedfellow with the other histories I’ve reading about this period, but Brown’s writing style makes it even odder. His writing is very oldfashioned, almost nineteenth century like, sometimes hard to come to grips with. The combination of inner focus and his writing style made this book fussy and a bit prissy, at least to me.

Among Others – Jo Walton

Published on February 3, 20111 Comment

cover of Among Others

Among Others
Jo Walton
302 pages
published in 2010

Have you ever read a book you just wanted to gulp down in one sitting, so eager to get on with the story that everything else has to wait? Or alternatively, have you ever read a book you didn’t want to end, stretching out your reading so you could savour it, making excuses not to read it just now, so as not end it too soon? I’m sure you have and so have I, but much rarer are those books where you want to do both, gulp down the story and stretch it out because once the book is finished you can never read it for the first time again. That’s how Among Others was for me, a book I wanted to stay in, but also wanted to keep turning the page to see how it would all turn out. Jo Walton has always been a good writer, but here she’s surpassed herself.

But perhaps I’m not quite objective. After all, I’ve known and liked Jo since the mid-nineties, as a fellow fan and friend from the rec.arts.sf.* Usenet groups, who has had a huge influence on my reading, in science fiction, in fantasy, who I got to know about as well as you can get to know a person from Usenet posts. All I could think about at the start of the book was how Jo-shaped it was, even knowning going in that this was rooted in her actual life growing up as a science fiction reading Welsh girl in a post-industrial landscape which she populated with fairies. She made the fairies and the magic real for Among Others but at heart it’s still her own story and that’s what made me want to spent more time in it, because being with Jo, a disguised Jo in fiction is the next best thing to seeing her at a convention.

Which is all good and well, but what will that do for you, if you don’t know Jo Walton and are just wondering if all the praise from people like Patrick Nielsen Hayden, Cory Doctorow, Robin Hobb, Steven Brust, Suzy McKee Charnas and many others is justified? Will you get anything out of this?