posts interesting only to me

Work and other duties keep eating into my reading time, so once again a month with only a few books read. It didn’t help that one of them was a Steven Erikson 1,000+ pager fantasy brick.

The Bonehunters — Steven Erikson
The sixth installment in the Malazan series, this is Epic Fantasy for advanced students, hideously complicated. In lesser hands this would’ve been an awful mess, but Erikson manages to keep all the plotlines tidy.

Buy Jupiter — Isaac Asimov
One of the first ever science fiction books I’ve read. Still a great collection, especially with all the autobiographical notes Asimove put in between the stories.

Will Eisner: A Spirited Life — Bob Andelman
Authorised by Eisner and his estate, this is a reasonable overview of his life, but light on analysis. Andelman tends to skip ahead and back within chapters with little rhyme or reason and rarely delves deep below the surface of Eisner’s life. Useful as a first look at Eisner, but a much better biography still needs to be written. Had Eisner been a straight novelist of the same qualities and importance, half a dozen would’ve already been published.

Earth Is Room Enough — Isaac Asimov
Another Asimov collection, unfortunately without autobiographical notes. As the title indicates, all stories are set on Earth.

The Hubble Wars — Eric J. Chaisson
Soon after the Hubble Space Telescope was launched in orbit in 1990, after a seven year delay, it became clear that all was not well with it. This book is a firsthand account of what happened in the months and years, what went wrong and why, written by one of the people involved. Interesting if only for the insight it gives in how a great science project can come off the rails.

Grunts — Mary Gentle
“And pass me another elf, Sergeant. This one’s split.” A black humoured, dark fantasy in which orcs, those footsoldiers of Evil, take control of their own destiny to become marines…

Spy Story — Len Deighton
A proper Cold War thriller, in which the main character is as befuddled as the reader for most of the book as to what’s going on and what his role is.

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.