Just a quick update to note that my magic TBR number – the number of books on my ToBeRead list – is up to 189. Actually this doesn’t represent a real increase it just means that there were some books I hadn’t added to Goodreads yet. In fact it was up to 190 but I finished my current book – expect blog post about it imminently.
So anyway 189 is the number to beat. I can buy or acquire new (to me) books in March if I start that month with less than 189 on my TBR list.
This is not a review. But if it were it would a review of Episode 1 of Series 4 of Being Human[1], “Eve of the War” and you’d be well-advised not to read on if you’ve not seen it.
Consider yourself so advised.
However as I said this is not a review. It’s a musing on how we got from here:
to here:
How, and why the how matters and whether I’ll be watching Episode 2 of Series 4.
Actually let’s first go back to here[2]:
Long long ago, all the way back in 2008 I saw the original pilot of Being Human. It was pretty clear that that’s what it was too – one of those one-offs that they make and show to guage whether it’s worth making a series. It was also clear that it had something. Not just that it was a show with vampires and werewolves when the world was going crazy over Twilight. It had a certain tone.
The original Being Human pilot opens on a shot of a naked man in the woods. He’s George, werewolf just returned to human form, but we don’t know that yet. The voice-over, a smooth, confident, ever so slightly world-weary voice, starts to wax lyrical about the nature of the human condition, how it’s essentially about being alone. It’s at once both modern and dark and has the potential for being creepy. Soon there’ll be jokes but the humour will somehow manage not to undercut the atmosphere. Later still we’ll meet bad guys who give the sense of being disturbing, efficient and most of all, not the same cliches we’ve seen hundreds of times before.[3]
What I’m saying is that it manages to pull off the same trick as Buffy the Vampire Slayer – mix pop culture and comedy and traditional horror tropes and real drama and somehow keep all these apparently contradictory things together. But it’s not Buffy, it has its own distinct tone, and that just makes me like it all the more.
So I wait patiently and sure enough the Beeb commissions a series. The vampire Mitchell is re-cast, as is the ghost Annie. We lose the gorgeous and talented Andrea Riseborough but we gain Aidan Turner also somewhat gorgeous and not lacking in talent. More significantly we lose Adrian Lester as Herrick the local big boss vampire, and gain Jason Watkins. Significant because Lester, who I really like, only gets to play the smooth sophisticated be-suited vampire leader that we have seen so often before.[4] Watkins however gets to play an entirely different character – the same position of leadership in the local night-stalker hierarchy but his cover, his point of contact with the human world, his day job – is as a mid-ranking policeman. He has a sense of charm and danger and purpose but he also feels at home drinking a cup of tea from a styrofoam cup in the hospital cafe – quite a contrast from Lester holding court in what looks like a subterranean wine bar.
As the series progresses there are good episodes and so-so ones. I start to feel that we’re losing some of whatever it was the pilot had. It doesn’t feel quite as unique as it did. One of its strong early themes is monsters trying to live as ‘ordinary’ humans and so it covers a lot of the same ground as Buffy did with the ‘I may be the Slayer but I’m also just a girl’ motif.
Nevertheless it remains a good watch. The thing it’s got, the thing that makes the humour and the horror work and that makes it more than just another supernatural genre show is characters and relationships.
Inevitably plot starts to take the foreground. Once you’ve established the characters and how they interact then they do need to do something. And they need to do supernatural stuff if they’re werewolves, vampires and ghosts otherwise you just have a soap with some odd characters, i.e. you just have a soap. So we not only have to have plot but plot and mythology.
Thus it is that after 3 series and just 22 episodes of a gentle slide from the heights of the pilot we end up here:
The story has reached a crisis point – as it often seems to do around the last episode of series funnily enough – and not only that but a character has been Killed Off. But the other three of our core four remain and we’ve gained an impressive new villain from a new class of super-vampire called the Old Ones. I’m a little nervous about whether this will work but it’s got potential.
That’s about where I was at when I sat down to watch “Eve of the War”.
And it’s… wow. And not really in a good way. Although… no, not really.
Now I know that they were coping with some real-world departures. I knew about Nina. I didn’t know about Wyndham but I get it. I certainly didn’t know about George. I’m guessing when it became apparent who was leaving and where they were now at someone got down on one knee and begged Russell Tovey to do at least one more episode.
What’s really impressive about “Eve” is how hard it works and how much it gets done. It ties up the loose ends from everyone leaving, sets up and executes a big self-sacrificial ending for George, introduces new baddies (new big bad who gets killed off, real new big bad who quips and understands the modern world and who’s clearly going to upload that video of werewolves changing to youtube next week) and new good guys (at least one of whom will become one of the regular gang) and it begins to lay down what looks very like the seasonal arc with lots of stuff about prophecies and a child destined to save humanity and flash-forwards to a future of John Connor style resistance movement against a Big Brother style vampire overlord regime . “Now that I say it all out loud,” I said to M. after watching it (she didn’t), “it sounds like a bit of a mess… which makes me all the more impressed I liked it as much as I did.”
But whereas I was nervous before about the slow move to plot and mythology and away from character and relationship, now I’m actively very worried. Because they had to throw gobs of plot and lashings of mythology[5] to make it work at all. But when you effectively re-cast all the major roles in a show except one in a single episode in series 4 – a point when it should be an established entity – it’s a bit like re-building an engine on your plane in mid-air – it’s hellish impressive it can be done at all but not a little terrifying as to the end result.
Or it would be if I cared more. As it is I will be tuning in next week, but only because I like to see a plane crash as much as the next guy.
But hey it’s got Mark Williams with a tea-towel on his head what more do you need?
I’ve just spent a ridiculous amount of time getting my Goodreads book shelves in order. I did this in order (really) to answer one simple question:
how many unread books do I have?
I’ll come to why this is important in a second, first let me explain something about Goodreads shelves. Shelves are a way of organizing your books and when you open a Goodreads account it comes with 3 already set up: Read, Currently Reading and To-Read. These are exclusive – a book can’t be both Read and Currently Reading at the same time. You can set up other shelves which aren’t necessarily exclusive in which case they act like tags.
Anyway if you search for a book, or someone links to it (like this say) then you can click the “add to my books” button and it will give you the choice to add to one of these special shelves. Now my list in Goodreads is quite complete in that it contains all the books I own, read or unread and a lot that I’ve read but no longer own (but not all by any means). It also contains a few that I intend to read but haven’t purchased or obtained yet (they may be out-of-copyright books).
So this brings me to why I want to know that number. I have a feeling of always adding to the metaphorical mountain of books waiting to be read when I already have more than enough to keep me busy for years to come. What I now intend to do is track my “TBR” (To Be Read) number and only acquire new books when I have reduced it by reading some, hopefully I’ll read more than I acquire and that way some sense of sanity will prevail.
The problem is that when I come across a book I’m interested in or may read at some point I can only really add it to my To Read shelf, so my To Read shelf is a list of unread books I possess and ones I may get at some point.
So I have created a “My TBR” shelf and a “Wishlist” shelf. I have spent the last couple of hours sorting my To Read shelf into those two categories. I also cross-referenced with my list of actual ebooks in Calibre and physical books – which meant some physical sorting and added in any that weren’t already there.
And the number is 181. I have 181 unread books, most of them ebooks. I’m going to make a rule that whatever my TBR is at the beginning of a calendar month it must be the same or less at the beginning of the next. Which means I can only get new books after reading existing ones. Otherwise they go on the Wishlist – which currently stands at a wimpy 14. (I might at some point add a rule about what proportion of new books can be completely new as opposed to off the Wishlist – but I might not, some things are too anal even for me)
UPDATE: I have discovered, whilst making this post, that most of my effort today was UTTERLY POINTLESS!
*takes deep breath*
OK, it turns out you can make any shelf exclusive like the original three. Not only that but once you do it’s one of the options on the “add to my books” button. So all I really needed to do was this:
OK. Actually that would have still taken a while as I would still have had to compare calibre/physical books against my To Read list to identify the Wishlist items. But it wouldn’t have taken so long to co-ordinate three shelves on Goodreads – especially trying to make the numbers add up (because To Read should = Wishlist + my TBR)
Oh well. It was sort of relaxing to do even if some of it was wasted effort. Now I’m off to delete “my TBR” and after that there may be alcohol and chocolate in my near future!
Well the awesome power of RED means I’ve finished another book that I’ve previously stalled on, which is obviously a good thing.
The Book Thief is a novel narrated by Death and tells the story of a young girl, Liesel Meminger growing up in war-time Germany. As the story begins she’s taken to live with foster parents as her mother can no longer cope and her ill younger brother dies on the way there. We follow Liesel, her best friend Rudy and her new Papa and Mama as she learns to read, to love books and grows up. Her new family are poor and not exactly sympathetic to the Nazi regime they’re living under, so life is hard I guess, though through the eyes of a child this is just the way the world is.
This was a weird one for me. At any individual point when I was reading it I was aware of how well it was written. The characters are vibrant and engaging, colourful and alive. The use of language is clever and playful. And yet I really had to push myself to finish it. I had a sense of plodding through it. Partly I think this was because the story exists as a series of anecdotes about a girl growing up, and whilst some of these are major events and part of a bigger story – both in terms of what was going on in the world but also in terms of her life – a lot are just little incidents that illustrate what that life was like – hard, joyous, confusing, exciting and so on. I suppose after about half way through the book I wanted more of just “the story” and less of the illustration.
I would recommend this book though because I do think it is well written and it has the power to move you. It’s light in places but not a light read. I was just thinking that you could write the same story without the need for Death to take a role as an actual character, but then I think he’s there to underline a point.
7/10 – A well-written book that may be a tough read for some, but worth it I think.
So that was 7 books in January, well ahead of schedule. I’ve stalled a little in that I haven’t read very much in the 4 days since I finished it – a paltry 14 pages. I guess that makes it nice that I’ve got a bit of a lead on the target. I was aware when I started this new regime (and remember I started unofficially back in November) that the possibility existed to ‘burn out’ by reading too much too quickly and then just needing a break. I am still wary of that – I’d rather read 50 pages a day every day than hit 50+books but have weeks off at a time. Well I say that but it’s nice to feel like I’m doing well at something…
I’ve got a work lunch out and an evening meal this week but it’s mid-week and so by the week-end I should be back in the negative.
I really thought I would be too. It was only one day and I’ve been good the rest of the week.
*sigh*
I wouldn’t mind so much but I’m getting so weary of this right now. I could really just do with a win. There’s always next week…
Lost: -1lbs
Lost so far: 57lbs
Average Weekly Loss: 1.27lbs
Weight: 247.2lbs (17st 9lb)
I seem to have gotten a taste for re-reading old SciFi books that I read in my early 20s. Actually the choice of this book, and the reading of it, neatly demonstrates what RED is all about. I had been thinking about scenes from this book whilst reading Protector and it occurred to me I’d like to re-read it. Because I know I’ll finish it within a few days it’s no drama to decide to do that. Although I had hoped to finish it over last weekend, Monday/Tuesday at the latest when in fact it took me until last night – but that’s still only 6 days. (This time last year I was 162 pages into Wolf Hall which I hadn’t picked up for nearly three weeks).
So… Blood Music is a novel from 1985. It concerns the invention of thinking blood cells, little nanobots created via genetic manipulation. The scientist who develops them – an intense chap called Vergil Ulam – does so as a secret side project and when it’s discovered he’s forced to shut down his experiments and clear out his lab. Forced to choose between destroying his creations and give them some sort of chance he injects them into himself (what he hopes at the time will be a temporary measure). The ‘noocytes’ as he calls them not only thrive in his body, they start to adapt, reproduce and make improvements. That’s when thing start to get really strange.
The first half of this book follows the initial development of the noocytes and their existence within Vergil’s body. This was the part that I remembered and wanted to re-read. About half-way through though the noocytes discover that there’s a world outside their world, i.e. that Vergil is not all there is and they quickly become a kind of intelligent plague. After that there’s a sort of biological singularity event and the landscape of the story becomes much stranger.
I have to admit that it was the first half, the origin story, also the one set in a recognisable world, that I preferred. The second half was also a lot longer than I’d remembered. In fact when I had reached about half way and certain events had happened and characters appeared I realised that apart from the very end I couldn’t remember what else happened and there was a gap. It’s no coincidence that my reading rate slowed at this.
Funnily enough I discovered that Blood Music was based on an earlier short story/novella and for a while I thought that explained my lack of memory of the second half, but there are some events I do recall that aren’t in the short story version.
So my overall this book is not as great as its best bits (for me) but still a worthwhile read.
6/10 – an interesting origin story then a lot of weirdness.
P.S this was an ebook and probably the worst formatted one I’ve read so far. It had clearly been scanned and OCR’d before conversion and no-one had proofread it. ‘close’ was routinely rendered as ‘dose’ and so on. It seems to be more the case with back catalogue books.
Well I feel like I should be back down to pre-Christmas levels (i.e. 245 or less) but I did have a bit of a binge on thursday night (wine + pizza) so really it’s good that I’m still losing at all.
I’ve got a work lunch out and an evening meal this week but it’s mid-week and so by the week-end I should be back in the negative.
Lost: 1.8lbs
Lost so far: 58lbs
Average Weekly Loss: 1.32lbs
Weight: 246.2lbs (17st 8lb)
Having re-read Ringworld I thought my next Niven re-read would be Ringworld Engineers so I could go on to read Ringworld Throne. However I was reminded of Protector – partly because it takes place in the same universe as the Ringworld stories and partly through thinking about the books I read during the same era that I read Ringworld. So I decided to go with what I felt like reading, also knowing it was relatively short.
Protector concerns an alien species known as the Pak. They have three distinct phases to their life-cycle: child, breeder and protector. The change to the later stage is triggered by age and the consumption of a yam-like root known as tree-of-life. The changes are dramatic and the protector becomes vastly more intelligent, significantly stronger and extremely protective of its offspring – hence the name. On the Pak homeworld this trait gives rise to constant war with the effect that many protectors are left with no living descendants and they soon find themselves lacking the will to live, unless they can find a purpose.
One such childless protector is Phssthpok. He does manage to find a purpose and that requires him to travel 32,000 light-years to our solar system in search of a lost expedition of Pak millions of years previously. The first part of the book concerns what happens when Phssthpok encounters humanity in the form of an asteroid belt miner. The second part of the book is set two centuries later when the effects of that meeting and Phssthpok’s original mission are still playing out.
It’s becoming a cliche of mine to say I like Niven for his big ideas so I’ll try to avoid just saying that here. Let me expand on it by saying that there’s a particular type of idea, or execution that he does well in Protector. He takes an existing set of known facts about humanity, evolution and aging, and some make-believe about a possible alien race and weaves a connection between the two that is plausible enough to tell a good story around. It’s a bit like a SciFi equivalent of what Richard Matheson does in I Am Legend. There he takes an existing fantastical monster and creates a scientific ‘explanation’ for how that might actually work. Here there’s no existing monster but there is that same sense of slotting together the known science with the speculative and made-up. It has the same pleasing sense of “this could actually be true“.
I’m still not wowed by his characterization but it’s definitely better here. Although the ease with which two characters part forever for the sake of humanity is notable by the speed with which it’s dealt with.
There’s a rather extended space battle sequence near the end which takes a look at what a ‘dogfight in space’ might look like over vast distances and at significant fractions of lightspeed – ironically the answer is: slow. Not being overly interested in astrophysics for its own sake I found that section dragged a little. However I had genuinely misremembered the ending and so had the pleasure of realising it was not what I’d thought, figuring out what it might be and having that confirmed.
7/10 – another good old-fashioned romp through space and time with Niven.
(P.S. for those keeping score, another paper read.)
Amsterdam is the second of four books I bought at a second-hand bookshop in the autumn (the first being The Necropolis Railway) so another paper read which has become a bit of a pleasant novelty. It also made it to the top of my list because it was short and so I could squeeze it in between the other books I plan to read this month, and because I have confidence in McEwan to deliver a good read.
Amsterdam begins at the funeral of Molly Lane who was only in her mid 40s. Attending the funeral are three of her ex-lovers as well as the husband who survived her. The story mainly follows Vernon Halliday, the editor of a somewhat stuffy newspaper, and Clive Linley a composer of enough consequence to be composing a symphony for the millenium (the book came out in 1998). They are old friends and near the beginning, inspired perhaps by the fact that Molly died of a degenerative, Alzheimer’s-like disease, they make a pact to ‘help each other out’ if they were ever to be in similar circumstances. Molly’s death also brings to light some compromising photos of the other ex-, Julian Garmony, who happens to be the Foreign Secretary and the issue of whether or not to publish raises its head for Halliday, whilst Linley has a moral dilemma of his own to deal with.
I said when I reviewed Solar that I probably ought not to have had the sympathy for the main character that I somehow did – he was a slightly pompous, self-important man, blind or indifferent to his own moral failings. Well it seems that McEwan specialises in such types as here we have not one but two characters from a similar mould. Setting them against each other, having each be able to spot in the other the flaws he’s unable to acknowledge in himself is clever and amusing. I can see how some might find the ending silly or unrealistic but I took it in a spirit of wry satire and as such it made me smile.
7/10 – a deceptively slight read with a pleasingly gentle sense of humour.
A Quiet Belief in Angels is the story of Joseph Vaughan and how his life was overshadowed by a series of murders. However he’s neither the perpetrator nor one of the victims, nor even related to them ( though he does find one of the bodies). Still somehow his life becomes intertwined with these horrible crimes.
We first meet Joseph as a boy in 1939 in a small town in rural Georgia. It’s the day that “Death came to take [his] father“. From this portentous start we follow him as he grows up, developing a passion first for reading then writing as encouraged by his teacher. We see through his eyes the devastating effect that a serial killer can have on such a community, not only bringing fear about the crimes themselves but destroying trust and tolerance more generally.
Even when Joseph becomes a man and moves to New York to pursue his ambitions to be a writer his past never really leaves him and it continues to have a terrible impact.
This is a strange novel for me, because it’s not just a straight crime thriller. It’s a literary novel about life in the South of the US during the first half of the twentieth century (written by a Brit!). By ‘literary’ I guess I mean that it is prepared to spend time over describing what someone is feeling, or a place, or an idea about a place or a feeling – and does so in great detail and with a relish of the language itself. I’m not really one for admiring prose per se. Language exists to tell a story, set a scene, convey information about the actions and dialogue of characters. That the words themselves can be arranged in a pleasing way is secondary for me.
So I both enjoyed and was frustrated by some of the language in this book. It was well crafted but often what I felt would have done the job in a sentence or two went on for a paragraph or two. Where I found a paragraph had successfully set the scene, evoked the necessary emotion, Ellory might continue on for more than a page. It made for a feeling of it being slow and – being honest – a bit of a slog.
And yet at the same time I grew to be really interested in this man and particularly the things that drive him and have blighted his chances of a normal life. I rooted for him, even though his story was pretty grim – not just the murders but his personal life is tough too.
And yet again, as a sort of whodunnit/crime book it’s slow enough that if you’re so inclined you’ll probably figure out the way things will turn out. Strangely there were more surprises for me in the middle than the end.
It’s definitely worth a read. I would think twice before reading another by the same author because of the style not matching my reading preferences.
8/10 – A tough read in places, but compelling nonetheless.