books and books review – Page 2

Supercontinent – Ted Nield

Published on October 5, 2009

Cover of supercontinent

Supercontinent
Ted Nield
288 pages, including index
Published in 2007

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. I took a gamble on Supercontinent when I saw it in the Amsterdam library just because Nield chose to introduce his subject with a short science fiction story about what would be left of us if aliens visited Earth 200 million years from now, when our current continents have all recombined again to form one Supercontinent. A catchy way to get my attention and fully justified by the rest of the book.

Supercontinent is both about the geological history of Earth as expressed through the ways continents have drifted apart, collided and fused together and broken up again and the history of the intellectual discovery of this history. As you might expect from the relative shortness of this book, barely 270 pages not counting index and notes, Nield provides only a broad overview, but he has an eye for the telling detail and manages to pack a lot of explanation into few words. For example, below is how he explains the recurring opening and closing of the “Atlantic Ocean” in the process called introversion and how this leaves parts of mountain chains on different sides of the ocean:

In other words, oceans can open and close, like a carpenter’s vice, more than once. Imagine that you open a vice, put the carpenter’s lunch (cold lasagne) into it and squeeze it tight. The lunch will ooze out and up, forming a mountain chain, which we shall call the Lasagnides. You then leave it until the lasagne has gone hard before opening the vice again. By now agents of erosion — mice — have scoured the once mighty Lasagnides back to bench level; but their roots, within the vice itself, remain. If you now reopen the vice to start the process again, some of hose olde Lasagnide remnants will stick to one jaw and some to the other/ but the vice reopens along the same basic line. That is how you get some parts of the same mountain chain in Europe and others in America.

The Real-Time World – Christopher Priest

Published on September 20, 2009

Cover of Real-Time World

Real-Time World
Christopher Priest
158 pages
published in 1974

After finishing Camp Concentration I was in the mood for some New Wave science fiction and since I’d just bought this Christopher Priest collection of short stories this was as good a choice as any to read. Most of this I actually read while at the gym, on the treadmill — short stories being ideal, quickly enough read in a forty minute session and not requiring too much sustained concentration like a novel would. Some of the stories in Real-Time World I’d read before, in Dutch translation, some were new to me. All but one of the stories were published between 1970 and 1974, perhaps the height of the New Wave, and all are very much of their time. As a writer Christopher Priest has always seemed more comfortable to me at novel length than at shorter lengths, which is also notable here.

The reason why I wanted to read these stories was because I knew how seventies they were, but as often when confronted with the reality of what I was looking for, I was disappointed with it. None of the stories were entirely satisfactory and although each was competently written, they were written to formula. You could see they were written to achieve a specific effect and how Priest achieves that effect and as a result most of the effect is lost. The first story for example, “The Head and the Hand”, about automutilation as a form of performance art, with some graphic scenes including a final auto-guillotining which may have been shocking when first published, but certainly aren’t now and without this shock effect the story falls apart.

Books read April

Published on May 1, 2009

Raw Spirit — Iain Banks
Sometimes the life of a bestselling novelist is hard. This isn’t one of those times, unless you consider driving around Scotland drinking single malt whiskies a hard life. Nicely diverting, nothing knew if you know your whiskies already but who cares?

A Writer’s Diary — Virginia Woolf
Selected by her husband Leonard Woolf a decade or so after her death, this is an extract of her diary edited to keep most of the personal stuff out but the entries about writing in. Completeness aside, this was long enough for me already, hard going in places but ultimately rewarding. Interesting to see the rhytm in how she writes her books.

Cetaganda — Lois McMaster Bujold
A Miles Vorkosigan novel I reread because Jo Walton is rereading the series for tor.com. Ironically, she doesn’t seem to like Cetaganda as much as I did. A fun adventure romp.

Old Tin Sorrows — Glen Cook
Another adventure of Garret P.I. , a Chandleresque hardboiled detective stuck in fantasyland. This time an old army comrade recruits him to find out who might be poisoning the retired general he’s working for.

Blessed Among Nations — Eric Rauchway
An examination of how nineteenth century globalisation made America into the country it still is today and why its evolution went so different from that of other advanced countries during that period.

Prador Moon — Neal Asher
Fastpaced space opera in which you don’t have to think too much.

Night of Knives — Ian C. Esslemont
Esslemont is the friend with which Steven Erikson thought up the world of the Malazan Empire. This is his first novel in that world. Quite good, but different enough from Erikson to be confusing at first.

The Worlds of Poul Anderson — Poul Anderson
Three unrelated novels too short to be published separately. Not Anderson’s best work, but entertaining enough though each is decidely gloomy in its own way.

The Pastel City — M. John Harrison
The first of Harrison’s books set in Virconium, the Pastel City in the evening of humanity’s existence. Of course this is inspired by Jack Vance’s The Dying Earth, as viewed through a New Wave sensibility.

The Broken World — Tim ETCHeLLS
My eye fell on this when I picked up Night of Knives. Twentysomething slacker obsessively writes a walkthrough to his favourite game while his life tears apart around them. It reminded me of Douglas Coupland’s Microserfs.

The Wartime Kitchen and Garden — Jennifer Davies
A companion book to a BBC tv series I never saw, this was a quite good introduction of how people on the homefront had to cope with rationing and the demands made on them for food production.

When Daddy Came Home — Barry Turner and Tony Rennell
What happened after World War II was won and millions of British soldiers returned home.

Dread Brass Shadows — Glen Cook
Another Garret P.I fantasy mystery. When his on-again off-again girlfriend is knived in the back on her way to see him, Garret gets involved in the fight over a powerful book of sorcery.

Byzantium — Judith Herrin

Published on March 15, 2009

Cover of Byzantium

Byzantium
Judith Herrin
392 pages including index
published in 2008

In her introduction Judith Herrin explains she was inspired to write this book by a conversation she had with two workmen knocking on her office door. They had been doing repairs on the building in King’s College where she worked and noticed the sign on her office: “Professor of Byzantine History” and were interested enough to ask what this meant. As she puts it, she found herself “trying to explain briefly what Byzantine history is to two serious builders in hard hats and heavy boots”. From their suggestion that she should write a book explaining Byzantium to people like (or me, for that matter) who knew little if anything about the subject, this book arose. Byzantium — The Surprising Life of a Medieval Empire is an attempt to explain more than a thousand years of Byzantine history, as well as the many facets of this history.

It sounded like the perfect book to read, now that I had temporarily exhausted my library’s stock of interesting looking books on Roman history. Byzantium was after all a clear succesor to Rome, I knew little about it and Herrin’s book easily passed the page 37 test. She isn’t a historian I was aware of before, but with Byzantium she’s become one of the names I’ll pay attention to when looking for new books, no matter the subject. She manages to write a good introduction to a complex subject without talking down to the reader.

Books read February

Published on March 1, 2009

Saturday — Ian McEwan
Sometimes you need to read a book knowing you’ll hate it, just to be able to be more informed in your hatred. Saturday is McEwan’s tedious emulation of James Joyce’s Ulysses taking place on 15th February 2003, the day of the worldwide anti-Iraq war demos, in which he shows how much richer the inner life of his middle class protagonist si than that of the confused muddle going on the London demo…

The Iron Wall — Avi Shlaim
Avi shlaim is one of that generation of revisionist Israeli historians who looked behind their country’s founding myths to record the truth. The Iron Wall examines the development of Israeli policy towards its Arab neighbours and the Palestinians, showing both the differences and the continuity in it.

Intifada — Zachary Lockman & Joel Beinin (editors)
A compilation of essays examing the first Intifada, published in 1989. During Israel’s War on Gaza an astoningly stupid controversy erupted here in Holland when one Dutch Socialist Party MP called for Intifada and this was equated with support for terrorist attacks by local Zionist propagandists. This anthology shows the reality.

The Great War for Civilisation — Robert Fisk
Robert Fisk is one of the best, if not the best journalist reporting on the Middle East. This is his magnus opus, part history, part autobiography, part journalism. Fisk is an engaging writer, but the history of the region does not make for nice reading: betrayal after betrayal, ethnic cleansing following genocide, one futile war after another.

Byzantium — Judith Herrin
On a much lighter note, Judith Herrin’s Byzantium is a sort of sampler course in Byzantine history, an attempt to explain to the curious why Byzantium is worth studying. I’ll certainly read more of her books.

Only Forward — Michael Marshall Smith
My girlfriend has been reading Michael Marshall’s thrillers, so when I saw this, his first science fiction in a secondhand bookshop I took a chance. It reminded me somewhat of Jonathan Lethem’s first novel, which had a similar if more pronounced absurdist feel to it.

The Deep Blue Good-by — John D. MacDonald
Another Travis McGee novel; the first in fact. Interesting to see the formula firmly established already this early.

Creatures of Light and Darkness — Roger Zelazny
My new Zelazny book for the year. He’s a writer I want to read sparingly, because you can only read a new Zelazny for the first time once and he’s obviously not producing anything new anymore…

Gather, Darkness! — Fritz Leiber
A reread of a novel I first read ages ago. In a future oppressed by a technocracy masquerading as a warped Christianity, the only hope for freedom lies with a rebellion based on witchraft…