books and books review

The Red Pavillion – Robert van Gulik.
A mock-historical detective story, based on an 18th century Chinese mystery novel starring Judge Dee, who was himself based on the historical Judge Dee and whom van Gulik appropriated for his series. You could call it orientalist, if not for the matter of factness with which the series treats its setting.

The Peoples of the Hills – Charles Burney & David Marshall Lang.
Worthy but slightly dull attempt to chronicle the early history of Armenia, Georgie, Eastern Turkey and the Caucasus by an archaeologist and a historian. The edition I read was from 2001, but this book was written in 1971, so it’s probably dated by now.

The Steep Approach to Garbadale – Iain Banks.
An enjoyable novel about a large sprawling Scottish family with a deep dark secret at its core, yes, somewhat like The Crows Road

The Jennifer Morgue – Charlie Stross.
The sequel to The Atrocity Archives, a fun spy romp mixed with geekery and high doses of Lovecraft.

The Earth: an Intimate History – Richard Fortey.
An excellent overview both of geological history of Earth and how geology developed as a science, told by one of the best writers of science books I know.

The Battle of Venezuela – Michael McCaughan.
An introductionary history of Hugo Chavez, the Boliverian Revolution he spearheads and the response he called forth against it. Slightly out of date, as it was written in 2004 but sharp, to the point and not too partisan.

The Wehrmacht: History, Myth, Reality – Wolfram Wette.
After the Second World War Germany was quick to embrace the myth that while they were on the wrong in the war, the Wehrmacht was just doing its duty, did it “with clean hands” and that it was Hitler, Himmler and the SS who were the villains, not the ordinary men serving in the army. This book explodes these myths.

Ammonite – Nicola Griffith.
Excellent science fiction novel by a writer I need to read much more of. Feminist in a very natural way.

Selling Hitler – Robert Harris.
Robert Harris on perhaps the biggest publishing fraud in history: the fake Hitler diaries.

1610: a Sundial in a Grave – Mary Gentle.
A cast iron bitch of a novel, as you should expect of Gentle: a mixture of history, science fiction, Hermetic magic, esoteric knowledge and kinky sex.

Rivers in Time – Peter D. Ward.
A non-fiction book examining the three major extinctions that shaped our world, as well as the fourth one currently going on. Interestingly enough, while the idea that we are currently in a mass extinction event is not new, Ward argues that actually much of it has already finished millennia
ago…

Slaughterhouse Five – Kurt Vonnegut.
I last read this when I was thirteen or fourteen or so, it still held up, though it does feel much more dated than something like Catch-22, an anti-war novel of similar vintage.

Nine books read this month, of which five were rereads, all science fiction:

The End of Eternity, – Isaac Asimov.
The first Asimov novel I’ve read since at least 2001, an old favourite of mine, one of the first sf novels to introduce me to the idea of altering history.

The Big Time – Fritz Leiber.
Also an author I hadn’t read since at least 2001, another favourite and another time war novel. Brilliantly claustrophobic.

The Player of Games, Consider Phlebas and The Use of Weapons – Iain M. Banks.
The first three Culture novels, read in order from weakest to strongest. The first one was a breeze to read, I struggled a lot with Phlebas which felt a bit padded and Use of Weapons was not as amazing as the last time I’ve read it. Still incredibly good novels though, some of the best space opera ever written.

The Fall of Rome – Bryan Ward Perkins.
Short history of how the Roman empire ended, which spents much of its time argueing against the allegedly fashionably view that the Fall of Rome was highly exaggerated and in fact went almost unnoticed. However, though the author is very adamant in insisting this fall did happen and was a disaster, his own description does make clear the Gibbonian idea of civilisation collapsing with the end of the Roman Empire in the West is indeed wrong and the revisionists actually do have some grounds for their views. In short its rhetoric is much stronger than its disagreement.

The Diversity of Life – E. O. Wilson.
Very readable book explaining clearly how resilient and abundant life on Earth is, how ecosystems grow and evolve, how even large extinctions are repaired over time, only to break your heart in the end with the description of the human caused extinctions now going on. Especially after you realise that this was written sixteen years ago and things have only gotten worse…

Upheaval from the Abyss – David Lawrence.
enjoyable if sometimes slight history of the idea of continental drift and how it got accepted, as well as the mapping of the ocean floors and how this contributed to the acceptance of this theory.

The Celtic Empire – Peter Berresford Ellis.
Conventional but misleading general historic of the Celts up until the Roman conquest of Britain. Supposedly this is about the whole Celtic era from 1000 BC until 51 AD, but instead it largely focuses on the Roman wars against the various Celtic tribes. Lots of names and dates, not much attention to culture and all that good stuff. Not that I didn’t learn something, but it wasn’t quite the thing I was looking for.