posts interesting only to me

Slightly up from September, but there’s no way I’ll equal last years record of 150 books read.

Northern Shores — Alan Palmer
An attempt to write a comprehensive history of the Baltic, from prehistory to contemporary times. It didn’t entirely succeed, as some parts of the book lose the focus on the Baltic as a whole, instead telling the histories of the countries surrounding it in turn, losing the commonality.

Industrial Evolution — Through the Eighties with Cabaret Voltaire — Mick Fish
Is it just me, or did most of the more interesting music scenes in the late seventies, early eighties in the UK were in dying industrial towns? Liverpool with the Teardrops and Echo and the Bunnymen and such, Manchester with the whole Factory scene and Sheffield, with Cabaret Voltaire and the Human League. Mick Fish was a drug addled, boozed up hanger-on there, having a job in a London council garbage dump, spending his weekends in Sheffield, but he doesn’t half write funny and entertainingly.

Buried Treasure — Victoria Finlay
An interesting idea, to look at nine different sorts of jewels, ranked according to the Mohs scale, but unfortunately it’s all a bit shallow, more about Finlay’s travels to far, exotic places in search of these gems, rather than about the gems themselves.

The Constants of Nature — John D. Barrow
One of the greatest problems is astrophysics is the existence of various physical constants, like the speed of light, the gravitational constant and the fine structure constant, whose values have all been observed but which cannot be predicted from theory. They might just random properties of the universe we live in, something with which physicists are never comfortable with, or they may be something more our current science cannot explain yet. This book tries to explain this problem to a lay audience and did it well, though it is math heavy and sometimes neglects to explain its maths.

The Stars my Destination — Alfred Bester
After a series of disappointing science fiction books, I wanted to read something good. This was just the ticket.

Globalhead — Bruce Sterling
A collection of short stories, most written while the eighties turned into the nineties, the Cold War ended and nobody knew what would happen afterwards yet.

The Extravagant Universe — Robert P. Kirshner
An excellent overview of recent developments (well, 2002) in cosmology, for once written by an astronomer rather than an astrophysicist. The emphasis is on how supernovea have been used to drive research into whether or not we are living in an ever expanding universe, one that is going to rebound eventually or one that’s right on the edge.

Unseem Academicals — Terry Pratchett
The latest Discworld novel, the first one to be dictated, rather than written, after Terry was diagnosed with Alzheimers. It’s good as any of them: this time it’s all about football.

The Instrumentality of Mankind — Cordwainer Smith
Back in the seventies Ballantine/Del Rey collected all of Cordwainer Smith’s fiction in four volumes. This is the last one, collecting all the odds and ends that didn’t fit elsewhere. Luckily, Smith’s odds and ends are better than many a writer’s best stories.

Not a good month for reading. Work kept me busy and often too tired to read much.

The Shock Doctrine — Naomi Klein
An excellent overview of how neoliberal capitalism evolved itself over the past thirty years and how much it depended on brute repression to do so.

English History 1914-1945 — A. P. J. Taylor
A huge, traditional history of the UK from the start of the First World War to the end of the Second. Taylor’s emphasis is firmly on the political side of things, both domestic and foreign. This can be dull, but it’s clear to see why A. P. J. Taylor became such a popular historian, as he manages to keep things interesting at all times.

Complicity — Iain Banks
A reread of the first Iain Banks (as opposed to Iain M. Banks) book I ever read. This is a nicely paced thriller that’s now slightly dated.

Soul Music — Terry Pratchett
Another reread, of one of the slighter Discworld books. Fun as always.

An Ocean of Air — Gabrielle Walker
A somewhat disappointing look at our atmosphere, from an author who did far better in Snowball Earth.

I read a lot of non-fiction this month, helped by a generous birthday gift from my sweetie. Bit of a mixed bag, quality wise, some disappointments, but also some of the best books I’ve read this year or longer.

The Grain Kings — Keith Roberts
A disappointing collection of short stories by a writer I thought was better than he actually might have been.

Bad Science — Ben Goldacre
An early birthday present. Ben Goldacre explains how all sorts of hustlers, quacks as well as respected mainstream companies are exploiting our ignorance of science and how the media collude in this. He manages to do this with a considerable sense of humour and some sense of perspective.

The Red Hourglass — Gordon Grice
A very entertaining look at some animal predators likely to induce phobias: black widows, rattlesnakes, tarantulas and pigs. Grice is an amateur biologist, a keen observer and an unsentimental describer of the killings he witnesses his animals do. Certain descriptions are gruesome, but not gratuitous.

Belching out the Devil — Mark Thomas
Bloody Mark Thomas forced me to stop drinking Coca Cola with this book. ‘Nuff said. But if you want to know more, it’s all about what lies behind the family friendly image of the Coca Cola company: the murder of trade unionists in Columbia, abuse the drinkwater of waterpoor Indian states, water pollution in Mexico, poor labour relations everywhere.

What’s Going On? — Mark Steel
Steel’s previous autobiography helped convince me to become a socialist; in this one he explains how he went through a midlife crisis as he hit forty while both his marriage and his almost lifelong commitment to the Socialist Workers Party both collapsed. He does that in the context of Blairism, the runup to the War on Iraq and the developments since. Somewhat depressing as what could’ve the most positive development on the left in a generation is squandered, but fortunately Steel’s innate humour comes through.

Vive La Revolution — Mark Steel
Another Mark Steel book, this one about the French revolution, based on the series of comedic radio lectures he did about it. A nice, readable introduction that skewers a lot of the preconceptions about it that are particularly current in the UK. If you ever heard him do one of his standup routines or comedy panel show appearances, you’ll recognise his mannerisms in print as well.

The General Strike — Margaret Morris
An excellent historical overview of the failed general strike of 1926 in Britain, which holds some key lessons for socialists and trade unionists. Morris showed the union leadership was far from radical, unprepared, unwilling to take the measures needed to win the strike, did not realise that they were fighting both the government and business until it was too late and had more invested in safeguarding the system they were part of than actually winning and facing the consequences of their victory.

The Course of the Heart — M. John Harrison
I knew Harrison had a reputation as an excellent but difficult to get into writer but so far the two novels of his (The Centauri Device and The Pastel City) I had read had only been good. This novel however completely blew my expectations. It’s an woefully inadequate description but the best I can do is call this a magic realist love story, in which the protagonist is more of a spectator than a participant in the events he describes .

Signs of Life — M. John Harrison
A much more hard edged novel than the previous one, but the narrator is equally as much a spectator and this is as much a love story.

Supercontinent — Ted Nield
I’ve read other good books on geology and the history of the Earth, notably Richard Fortey’s books, but this is the best one volume introduction to the idea of continental drift and the underlying dynamics driving it that I’ve seen. Nield is very good at explaining difficult concepts to a lay reader without simplifying them into incoherence.

Heat — George Monbiot
Global warming is real, we need to cut ninety percent of our CO2 output by 2030 to make sure we have some chance to safe some of our environment as well as ourselves, how do we do that and not have to become a third world country? That’s the challenge Monbiot sets himself, looking at various parts of our daily lives to see what can be done.

Agent of the Terran Empire — Poul Anderson
Another collection of Dominic Flandry stories. These started as light space opera, but the underlying politics and gloomy worldview Anderson soaks them in takes away a lot of the
pleasure. Pessimistic about the ability of humanity to establish anything better than an empire and even more pessimistic about its ability to keep the empire strong, Anderson bought into a lot of the myths the neocons believe as well.

Old Twentieth — Joe Haldeman
A 2005 novel proving once again that Haldeman probably is the quintessential baby boomer science fiction writer, written as it is around the boomers’ stereotypical twin obsessions of their encrouching morality and the sixties. Not a good novel, but interesting to take apart, so to speak.

Another month, another list of books read. My reading pace has slacked off a bit in the last couple of months, due to all sorts of reasons. Only eleven this month, slipping behind in my goal to read 150 this year. Oh well.

Zootsuit Black — Jon George
I wasn’t sure how to take this novel, until I interpretated it as a credible attempt to create a modern psionics novel. Irritating and engrossing in equal measures, I’m not sure this was a good novel, but it was interesting.

Cold War in a Country Garden — Lindsay Gutteridge
First in a trilogy of novels, of which I bought the third ages ago in a library sale, but which is still somewhere in my parents’ attic. Matthew Dilke has been reduced from six foot to six millimeters in height and now has to survive his own garden, to prove that human beings can survive the microworld insects have ruled so long. Absurd premise, but worked out well and Gutteridge is very good at showing the scale at which Dilke now has to live.

Iron Curtain — From Stage to Cold War — Patrick Wright
Before Churcill popularised the phrase in his famous speech in Fulton in 1946, the “Iron Curtain” as a concept had had a long prehistory already, had been used as a metaphor to describe relationships between Soviet Russia and the west in roughly the same way as Churchill used it. Wright shows how this metaphor may have had its origin in the pacifist movement around the First World War, when it was used to describe what happened when Germany and England went to war.

The Stone that Never Came Down – John Brunner
So far I really had only read Brunner’s “big” novels: Stand on Zanzibar, The Sheep Look Up and so on. Which is why I tried this when I saw it for 2 euros in the secondhand bookshop. It was interesting, a very 1970ties sort of English science fiction novel: economic depression, religious intolerance and moral crusades, racial tension, unconvincing slang.

Dying Planet — Robert Markley
An excellent study of the history of Mars in science and science fiction since the late nineteenth century, how our image of the planet slowly changed, not so much by new revelations as how those revelations were interpreted. A book I needed to read with my full attention to get everything Robert Markley packed into it.

McMafia — Misha Glenny
How the collapse of the Iron Curtain and the liberalisation of trade in the late eighties and nineties meant a triumph not just for capitalism, but for globalised crime. Glenny shows how traditional, controlable crime structures collapsed with the influx of new, globalised gangsters from Eastern Europe, while the shadow economy has become more and more important to the workings of capitalism itself.

The Long Run — Daniel Keys Moran
A novel the old rec.arts.sf.written crowd was always pushing. Best described as a young adult, coming of age cyberpunk adventure, a Slan for the eighties. Dated, but if you can set yourself over the “eighty megabytes of hot RAM” and other horribly wrong computer references, quite fun if not very good.

Killer Pine — Lindsay Gutteridge
The second book in the micromen trilogy, less interesting as the first, as exploring the novelty of the situation is explored less in favour of a fairly dull sabotage plot.

Renaissance Europe 1480-1520 — J. R. Hale
Another entry in the Fontana History of Europe. Written in 1971 this no doubt somewhat outdated, but it was still a fascinating look at an era I know too little about. Hale makes clear how Medieval, how different this era still was from our own, how inward looking despite the huge revolutions in exploration and science made during it.

Camp Concentration — Thomas M. Disch
A cult classic dystopian science fiction novel, which reminded me of nothing so much as of Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five. They share a sense of disillusionment, the same sort of dissatisfaction with American life of the fifties and sixties but being slightly too old to be truly a part of the generation that would rebel against it, too worldweary to be part of their solutions.

Real-Time World — Christopher Priest
After the Disch, I felt the need for more New Wave science fiction and this collection of early Christopher Priest stories fitted the bill perfectly. No real classics here, Priest has always been a better novelist than a short story writer, but it sustained the low-lkey, emotionally drained mood I was looking for.