Month: March 2013

Categories
book

Q1 Reading Status Update

(I know, lots of blog posts today!)

So I’m 3 months into 2013, I thought I’d give you a little update as to where I’m up to.

In January I read 5 books (#6 finished on 3rd Feb) – which is less than the 7 I read in January last year. It’s more books than I read in the whole of 2008 however.

By the end of February I’d read 11 (#12 on 3rd march). It was 10 last year and I only read 14 in 2010.

Yesterday I finished my 19th book as compared to 15 this time last year. I read 19 in 2009.

So I’m on track to beat 30 for 2011, and 34 for 2012 as well as my official target of 40 for the year. But I don’t take anything for granted. I may well have a slump later in the year and not read for weeks. We’ll see. The important thing is I’m enjoying it.

My current TBR is 260 down from 263 last time I mentioned it. I have bought books since then but I’ve also read books and removed a few duplicates that were lurking in my Goodreads queue and throwing off the figures.

My currently reading list on Goodreads is up to 12 (from 10) because I’ve started a couple of books only to move on to something else quite quickly. Of all my reading goals this is the one I’m most relaxed about. Ultimately if I want to read something else I will. If I happen to have added the book I’m 20pages into to my currently reading list, ah well, never mind.

OK, that’s enough blogging and enough about books – I’m off to watch some TV.

Categories
book rereads

Mini Re-Read Project

So. I mentioned this in my last review, what is it?

Well, you may have noticed that recently I’ve made reference to my less-than-great memory. I do feel like it’s not as good as it was and when it comes to reading I seem to forget more easily what’s going on (one reason to try to read books more quickly).

Also, I tend not to re-read as much as I used to. I tend to put this down to two things:

  1. I have access to more books than I used to (both because of the internet and because I have enough money to not worry about buying them (I can afford to buy them far quicker than I can ever read them))
  2. There’s simply so many to choose from (boy-with-too-many-sweets syndrome)

I was also pondering the fact that I seem to be able to remember a fair amount about books I read a long time ago. Is this because I laid down memories more permanently back then? Is it because I re-read more often and the ones I remember are one I read more than once? Is it a perception thing and actually if I try can I remember the more recent ones too?

So I’ve decided to do a little (hopefully fun) experiment. I created a little shortlist of 20 books I wouldn’t mind re-reading. They all had to be relatively short, enjoyable reads or there’s no point but other than that they vary according to how many times I’ve read them, how long ago I read them first, whether I feel like I can remember a lot about them or not. In order to not bias the experiment too much (the act of choosing a book involves a little bit of trying to remember things about it) I decided to choose at random from the list. The experiment will be done once I’ve read ~5 books. I’ll intersperse them with the books I am reading anyway and review as normal however when I do a re-read book I’ll:

  1. Roll some virtual dice and choose the next re-read title
  2. write down as much about it as I can remember
  3. read it
  4. write down what I got wrong, any major plot points or ideas I missed and so on.

Once I’ve done the 5 or so I’ll write up a summary and see how I did. I don’t want to do this as part of the reviews themselves so I’ll keep that separate.

Categories
book reading reviews

The World of Ptavvs – Larry Niven

This book is part of a new mini project I’m doing over the next month or so which concerns re-reading. I’ll cover this in more detail in another post shortly but for now all you need to know is that I chose this book at random from a shortlist.

The World of Ptavvs is one of Larry Niven’s early books in the ‘Known Space’ universe. It opens with an alien, Kzanol, escaping from his ship which is about to crash by getting into a stasis suit which will keep him safe, with no time passing, until he can be rescued. Unfortunately that takes a rather long time, 2 billion years in fact. He is eventually dug up on Earth and is named the “sea statue” and becomes a cultural artifact. However when he is accidentally let out of the suit he wreaks havoc trying to find his other stasis suit in which he left a valuable tool. Kzanol is part of a race that enslaved other races using mind control and he uses that talent to try to recover the other suit.

I enjoyed this book. It’s short and a quick read and although, like all early Niven it’s not great on character, it has a lot of ideas. I’ve left out quite a lot in the description above. There’s a chase through the solar system, inter-system politics and possible war, a man who becomes convinced he is Kzanol and Pluto being set on fire. It’s also very interesting how primitive some of the future tech is. They have spaceships with fusion drives but the on-board entertainment is a video game which involves connecting lines between grids of dots on a screen.

In a reflection perhaps of when it was written (1966) the politics surrounding who gets to have and control what’s in the second suit take on a kind of Mutually Assured Destruction aspect.

As for the re-read aspect I’m not going to comment on that now but I made various notes.

7/10 – big ideas and a fun romp through space, if a little dated.

Categories
book reading reviews

The Wee Free Men – Terry Pratchett

So… Discworld #30 (there are currently 39) so hurray for progress! Maybe I’ll catch up by the end of the year.

Wee Free Men concerns a young girl, Tiffany Aching, who lives in a sheep-farming part of the Disc known as The Chalk. He grandmother was a wise if somewhat awkward old woman who knew a lot about sheep. Tiffany stumbles upon evidence that another world is about to collide with the Disc. It’s not going to be pretty and someone needs to do something. Tiffany decides that someone will be her.

Along the way she’s aided by the Nac Mac Feegle, who are the Wee Free Men of the title. We first met these in Carpe Jugulum and they are, I suppose, entertaining though I could never quite get over the obvious stereotype they draw from.

Wee Free Men is another Discworld YA book and again I had the feeling it wasn’t aimed at me. Doubly so because the protagonist is a young girl and there’s a lot in there about not being taken seriously because you’re a) a girl, b) smart/bookish and c) not interested in being a girly girl. All of which is fair enough and a great thing for its target audience, it’s just not who I am, obviously.

That said I did like Tiffany. I also liked her grandmother, who was similar to but identical with Granny Weatherwax (who makes a brief cameo). It’s no huge spoiler to say that a large part of the book took place in a world where dreams and reality inter-mingle and I felt like I’ve seen that done a lot better, including by Mr Pratchett, before. I did however like the the scene where an over-indulgent queen gives a small child every kind of sweet he could ever want, and he freaks out because as soon as he chooses one he’s automatically not choosing any of the others – which is kind of how I feel about choosing the next book to read 😉

7/10 – a Discworld book about witches – therefore fun.

Categories
book reading reviews

Bad Things – Michael Marshall

Bad Things is the book I alluded to in my review of We Are Here – it’s the book where we first meet the character of John Henderson. So having finished We Are Here and having enjoyed it and that character in particular I thought I’d go straight back and read this. One of the nice things about the way I’m reading at the moment is that I can do this and it’ll not make too much of an impact on other plans because I’m getting through books at a reasonable rate. Also the detours are fun.

Bad Things begins with a very bad thing indeed. John’s infant son, Scott, is out playing by the lake that their home looks out over. He’s on the jetty leading out onto the water when John watches him simply collapse and fall into the lake. When John gets to him the boy is dead, but not from the fall or by drowning, he somehow just died.

It’s four years later and John is now a barman in a restaurant halfway across the country. He’s living alone, his marriage not surviving the trauma of Scott’s loss. However one day he receives an email which just says, “I know what happened.” John is drawn back to Black Ridge, where he once lived, and into a mystery concerning the town itself and what really happened on that jetty.

I enjoyed this book. Not perhaps quite as much We Are Here and that’s possibly because this is darker. It reminded me very much of Stephen King with its isolated semi-rural setting and mysterious dark powers that seem to influence ordinary people’s lives. It’s also possibly because the John Henderson of this story is more troubled, less calm and frankly more of a badass, than the one in the later book. That’s possibly because his son’s death is obviously such a huge part of his experience and it’s through the events of this book that he reaches some sort of peace about it.

The story is quite involved and I had a little difficulty keeping track of all the characters. There was a storyline involving people from the town where he was working at the restaurant, and whilst it connected up with everything else in the end, I could have happily lived without it.

The book has that sense of brooding menace of something nasty lurking in the dark that makes it a compelling, if unsettling read.

7/10 – not one for the squeamish or timid, but definitely a good read.

Categories
book

Amazon Buys Goodreads (and the people go crazy)

So I’m sure you’ve seen the news that Amazon is buying/has bought Goodreads. I caught up with it on the various book-related sites I read – the main one being Goodreads itself. I was surprised the degree to which this created upset/anger/panic – or maybe that’s just because I read the feedback threads on GR. You really would think the world is going to end.

So I get that people feel betrayed. It’s less than a year since GR was forced to remove a lot of Amazon-sourced metadata from their site. Whilst this was reasonable in my opinion – they weren’t prepared to abide by Amazon’s API TOS, which would have meant not linking to other book vendors – it did mean that it created a lot of work for the site’s librarians, who are unpaid volunteers. So aside from the usual web 2.0 stuff about user content they quite literally had worked to make the site what it was.

Unfortunately for them they never noticed that Goodreads was always intended to be a commercial venture. Never noticed or didn’t care because they trusted Goodreads and it “felt like” a community?

For me Tim Spalding, founder of LibraryThing, a similarly purposed but different in tone and fiercely independent site, put it well:

Unless I’m quite mistaken, Goodreads was not hugely profitable as itself. With 30 employees, many of their engineers and in Los Angeles, he was probably burning upwards of $3 million/year on salary and benefits alone. When you do the advertising math, there’s no way he was making lots of money–not the sort of money that justifies a $150m valuation. (I don’t for a second believe the $1b number.) My guess is that he wasn’t even cash-positive. A number of people in the industry share my assessment. Unless the company itself is very profitable and very, very large, there’s no chance of going public, hence no way for the investors to cash out.

So he had to cash out. And he pretty much had to sell to Amazon.

So I think it was always inevitable they would cash out. I was one of those thinking they’d start selling through the site – which no doubt would have elicited some equally vociferous howls.

Personally I’m not fearful and I’m not jumping ship yet. I’ll wait and see. I am slightly sad that we don’t have a source of reviews and data about books that’s as big as Goodreads but also independent.

Categories
reading

TBR, Spreadsheets and the Joy of Reading

You may recall that as part of my new reading goals for this year I wanted to reduce my TBR to 235. I also thought that under the general guiding principle of enjoying reading I would ditch the complicated tracking spreadsheet.

And I did… for a while. What can I say? I enjoy using it too much. Not only did I go back and start using it again (and update it with estimates for the reading I’d done whilst not using it) but I’ve expanded it to be more complex. I now have a sheet which tracks progress in terms of words. Thanks to a plugin to Calibre I now have word-counts on my ebooks and that means I can once I’ve finished a book work out my words/hour and words/minute. This ought to be more accurate at predicting how long I take to finish a book. In reality it’s not really because unlike pages/hour I can’t work out a rate for the current unfinished book (not without disecting the book and creating word-count totals for individual chapters – I thought about it but there are lengths even I won’t go to). However it does help me set expectations. When looking at a new read and seeing it’s only 75,000 words I know that’s on the short side. If looking at a 200,000 word tome I can at least tell myself that it’s about the same as Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and less than Tigana which I made it through in 10 days last year.

As for TBR – that’s up to 263, so up 12 instead of down 16. Which is pretty bad when you consider that I’ve read 16 books so far this year. It basically means that I’ve interpreted “enjoy it” as meaning “it’s ok to buy new books if you really fancy it”.

And you know what I’m ok with that. I am enjoying the books I read. I am enjoying using the spreadsheet and I’m on track for a big year (famous last words).

Categories
book reading reviews

We Are Here – Michael Marshall

I chose this book because well it was just coming out and I thought it would be nice to review something current for a change. Also it appeared to be a stand-alone and not part of a series like the Straw Men trilogy so it wouldn’t matter that I hadn’t read all his back catalog yet. That turned out to be not quite true (see below).

This is a hard book to review because it’d be so easy to spoil it and I don’t want to do that. I also don’t want to hide most of my review behind spoiler tags so…

We Are Here mostly centres around two couples. David and Dawn are a writer and his teacher wife who go into New York for the lunch that seals his first book deal. It’s a big day for them but on the way home David accidentally bumps into someone in the street. Someone who then follows him to the station and asks him to “Remember me”.

The other couple are John and Kristina. A waiter and bar-maid at an Italian restaurant who’ve been together about 6 months and are at the stage where they are about to either get more committed or possibly split up. Kristina’s new friend from her book club has seemingly acquired a stalker and asks John and Kris for help.

Both these stories concern encounters with people who live in a kind of parallel world. They are there in the background of our lives but often go unseen or unnoticed. But something is changing. They are coming out of the shadows…

I could talk more – vaguely and circuitously so as not to spoil – about the plot but I won’t. Let me talk instead about tone and themes. This is a book about regret, about loss of friendship and the way we forget people. It’s also about what it means to really live in a place and be part of someone’s life. In that sense it deals with some universal and weighty themes and does so well I think.

However it’s not a ponderous literary novel. It’s a thriller. It reminded me of Stephen King in places, which is a compliment. I enjoyed several of the characters. The author writes a middle-aged lady with nine cats who lives in a trailer – and he manages to make me really like her 🙂

It’s not perfect. I think it could have been shorter. Particularly in the middle section where dramatic irony is stretched to the breaking point. Also, I was going to complain that there was an un-fired Chekov’s Gun in the form of very significant events from one character’s past which are mentioned more or less in passing but never really dealt with. However it turns out that this character, and these events, are from a previous book. Also they are mentioned because they affect who this person sees and interprets events in this story, so the gun is fired – it just has a quieter bang than you might think.

Anyway it all comes together in the final part of the book and we get a dramatic action-y ending. It left me feeling I’d enjoyed the ride.

8/10 – a thriller with more than a touch of the mysterious about it.

Categories
book reading reviews

Fool Moon – Jim Butcher

Fool Moon is the second in the Dresden Files series of books. It’s fair to say that I’ve seen enough I liked in book 1 to stay with this franchise for a while. There are now I think 14 books and I’ve heard they get a bit repetitive later on but we’ll see how far I get.

With the title it’s perhaps not surprising that this book concerns werewolves. A gruesome series of murders occur on and around the full moon and Harry Dresden is called on for his supernatural advice. Actually at the beginning of the book he knows almost nothing but we learn as he does. There are apparently five different types of creature that could go under the category of werewolf and in this book we meet most of them. The plot concerns which of the various types (if any) committed which of the various murders (are they all from the same perpetrator?) and of course why?

There’s also more in this book about Dresden’s on-going story. We find out a bit more about his past, we see him move on in one relationship whilst apparently getting a bit stuck in another. Also, even though this is only book 2, patterns are developing. Once again Harry gets beaten up a lot. So much so that we have at one point need of a supernatural explanation of how he can keep going at all – properly set up so it’s not pulled out of thin air. Once again Harry has to go it alone and despite his status as sometime consultant to the cops is suspected of the crimes he’s investigating. So some of this already feels like it’s giving us more of the same. However there are signs that this will change in future books. A character that I’d assumed was going to be one of the mainstays of the series got killed off. Also he makes a decision to be more open with his police friend Murphy – which is good because the whole “I can’t tell you what’s going on because of the Mystical-Law-Reason” might be plausible enough but it leads to a fake-feeling kind of dramatic tension – a bit like when a sitcom’s plot is based around a misunderstanding that would be resolved in two minutes if only characters would TALK TO EACH OTHER.

Oh and it also had a dream sequence. I’m not a fan of dream sequences. They’re generally an excuse to be self-indulgent with imagery or deliver up a character’s motivations without having to dramatize them. But there are worse examples of that than the one in this book.

Another pattern-y[*] aspect is that these books are looking very much like detective/police procedurals with fantasy/supernatural set dressing. The bad guys are likely supernatural beasties and in place of CSI tech we have spells and summonings but structurally they work the same way. The question is whether you enjoy the scenery. I think I do (I like the PC Grant books and the same could be said of them) but I also think it’s because Butcher executes that structure as competently as he does that they work. I suspect he could right ‘straight’ crime novels which were just as compelling.

He does write the action sequences well. There’s a scene in a police station which is gripping, frightening and exciting. He manages to make me interesting in a trope – werewolves – that I’m not generally drawn to.

So I did enjoy this. It was “pattern-y” at times but I still enjoy Dresden as a character and there appears to be development there too – both in terms of exploring his back-story and the way his personal ‘arc’ is unfolding.

8/10 – a police procedural with plenty of supernatural splatter.

[*] i.e. formulaic, but I didn’t want to use that word as it carries more of a pejorative overtone than I intend.

P.S. given the title can’t get this completely unrelated song out of my head.

Categories
book reading reviews

So Much Blood – Simon Brett

This is the second Charles Paris story. I bought this together with the first a while back. As I said at the time I was drawn to these by the undeniable charisma of Bill Nighy in the radio adaptations.

It’s summer 1974 and Paris has taken his one-man show to Edinburgh Fringe Festival as a last minute replacement for part of an University Drama Society’s line-up. During rehearsal of one of the other plays an actor is fatally stabbed by what should have been a fake knife in a horrible accident. Or was it an accident.

I’m not sure what to say about this that I didn’t say about the last book. It definitely works as a ‘cozy’ mystery and Paris is a likeable protagonist/investigator. I felt at times that some of the other characters were only fleshed out enough to give them potential motives or a place in the plot. I also felt that the switch between Charles the actor and Charles the investigator was a bit blunt at times and you would have thought that more of his colleagues and associates would have said, “hang on why are you questioning me?” I guess that’s just a convention of the genre that once a character falls into that role we accept that they are able to quiz the other players to some extent. So an effective, if mechanical mystery structure.

The story certainly has enough twists to keep you guessing and enough of Charles, his wit and his love-life to amuse but I guess I did find it a little lacking. It is short though. At under 58,000 words even I read it in a day (~4 hours in fact). It did feel a little dated, the sexual politics more than anything, but not so much that I couldn’t relate.

With so much to read I don’t know if I’ll read any more Paris.

7/10 – a actor’s life that seems to be all about death.