books and books review

Since I’m doing something complicated but not very interesting tonight, I’ll make it easy on myself and just list some of the good books I’ve read last year. I read some 78 books in 2005, slightly more non-fiction than fiction. As regular readers know, I try and keep track of what I’m reading on my booklog but unfortunately I still have to review most of the books I read last year. However, I still managed to scrape up ten books I think you all should read:

• Forging a New Medium — Charles Dierick & Pascal Lefévre (editors)
  Proof positive that it is possible to write about comics without mentioning biff pow zap or even superheroes. Proof positive also that there were comics long before The Yellow Kid, even outside the US.
• Stalingrad — Antony Beevor
  Perhaps the most important battle of World War II, the turning point of the entire war, treated by one of the best British warfare writers.
• A Room of One’s Own — Virginia Woolf
  “But, you may say, we asked you to speak about women and fiction — what has that got to do with a room of one’s own?” Virginia Woolf spents the rest of this slim volume answering this question. Despite its age it’s still relevant today.
• Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen — H. Beam Piper
  This might not be the best science fiction novel I’ve read this year, but it was certainly the most enjoyable. All modern military science fiction is just a pale imitation of this.
• Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell — Susanna Clarke
  The adult literary equivalent of the Harry Potter craze perhaps, but also one of the best fantasy novels I’ve read in a long time. Also look up Crooked Timber to see why it is such a good book.
• War Stars — H. Bruce Franklin
  How science fiction helped shape the nuclear arms race, long before Arthur C. Clarke and Robert Heinlein came to blows about SDI.
• Call for the Dead — John Le Carré
  The novel that introduced George Smiley to the worl is a detective novel rather than a spy novel. Very sombre, very much of its time.
• A Problem from Hell — Samantha Power
  The history of genocide in the 20th century, as well as the history of the concept itself and America’s responses to genocide. Not a cheerful book.
• Ordeal — Nevil Shute
  What happens when a future war novel is published just as the war it predicted started…
• The Mediterranean in the Age of Philip II — Fernand Braudel
  Best history I read in years, but very very dense and not exactly the right sort of light Underground reading.

Stiff – Mary Roach
303 pages
published in 2003

What happens to your body after you die? Mary Roach explores the options when you donate
your body to science. Nicely macaber and interesting without being too gross.

The Demon in the Freezer – Richard Preston
240 pages
published in 2002

Written shortly after the Anthrax attacks on Tom Daschle and other Democrats and several
“liberal” media figures, this is about a far more frightening prospect: smallpox. Richard Preston
traces the story of how smallpox got eradicated in nature, but still exists in storage in the US
and Russia and unfortunately, probably also elsewhere.

Dark Life – Michael Ray Taylor
287 pages
published in 1999

Sort of a weird counterpart to The Demon in the Freezer, this is a book written
by a caver/journalist who got involved in the search to socalled dark life; subterran life beyond
the boundaries of known life. It largely revolves around the discovery of fossilised nanobacteria
in a Martian meteorite and the discovery of terran equivalents

Yendi – Steven Brust
209 pages, published in 1984

Entertaining if slight fantasy adventure, Vlad Taltos is a smartass. Recommended if you like first person smartass narration.

Zodiac – Neal Stephenson
308 pages, published in 1988

Why do I think of Stephenson of a science fiction writer when most of his novels, like this, are not science fiction? Zodiac is an ecological technothriller, starring a typical Stephenson protagonist, somewhat geeky, bit of a badass when cornered, not the brightest when it comes to women. Doesn’t feel dated at all though written in 1988. Recommended to anyone if only to show y’all he could write a complete novel in less than 500 pages, with an ending.

Damnation Alley – Roger Zelazny
157 pages, published in 1969

Some time after World War III, “Hell” Tanner is the last remaining Hell’s Angel in California and is drafted to deliver anti-Plague serum to Boston –straight through the most hellish, radioactive densely
populated with mutated monsters barren wasteland most of North America has become. Zelazny goes pulp. I have it on good authority that one should avoid the film that was made of this, but read the book. Later also turned into a Judge Dredd storyline…

Bones of the Earth – Michael Swanwick
383 pages, published in 2002

Couldn’t get into Swanwick’s early novels, but this combined two of my great interests, timetravel and dinosaurs, so I thought I’d give it a try. Glad I did. Best novel of the bunch I’ve reviewed here. Sometime in the 21st century, timetravel is invented, nobody quite knows when, and from 2010 on to about 2100 paleontologists are recruited, first in secret, later openly when the secret breaks, to go back to the Ages of Dinosaurs and study them. Swanwick clearly loves his dinosaurs as he
infodumps all these neat facts about them throughout the book. Costarring one of the more original theories for why the dinosaurs largely (apart from the birds!) died out.

Appleseed – John Clute
337 pages, published in 2001

This is either an incredible tour de force or an incredibly pretentious misheap. Possibly both. The story itself is bog standard space opera, but Clute has hidden it under a fecund compressed crust of baroque
vocabulary; never a decent Anglosaxon word where a compound noun borrowed from German will do. I like wordage, I do, but there is something vaguely irritating about Clute’s wordplay.

Recommended if you want your prejudices against critics confirmed.

More complete reviews are or will be published at my Booklog