Once again I’ve reached 4 stone down. The first lot of the Christmas weight has fallen off, which is good. By this time next week I hope to be back at a new low. Not much to say other than that. We are on track.
Lost:5.8lbs
Lost so far: 56.2lbs
Average Weekly Loss: 1.31lbs
Weight: 248lbs (17st 10lb)
So here’s the real reason I was slightly annoyed at not writing up Ringworld sooner – I’d already finished book 2. I’d like to go no more than a few days without blogging about a book once I complete it.
Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency is another re-read and it was prompted both by me thinking about it recently and by being one of the books for January of the UK Kindle Users group on Goodreads.
Dirk Gently is an unusual private detective in that he approaches his cases using his belief in the “fundamental connectedness of all things”, a practice which allows him to charge for seemingly unrelated expenses such as a trip to Bermuda when looking for your lost cat. This particular case involves a murder, an absent-minded professor, a horse in a bathroom, ghosts. a sofa stuck halfway up the stairs and an Electric Monk. To explain the plot too much would be pointless as part of the fun is in discovering how these apparently disparate elements are in fact interconnected after all. Also it would sound like a mess but it really isn’t. It’s easy to forget because he’s so playful but Adams was very clever and the ideas he throws around are just as clever and profound as in, well in anything I’m likely to read anyway.
Time and familiarity has dulled the pleasure of this book a little but not that much. I enjoyed reading about Schroedinger’s Cat again (this was the book that introduced me to the concept). I liked his description of the wane of the home computer boom of the early 80s as the point “when every twelve-year-old in the country had suddenly got bored with boxes that went bing”. I like so many little touches and jokes that made me smile. However unlike the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy books it is more a novel than a collection of funny scenes and ideas. It also benefits I think from not having been constantly rehashed through just about every media possible as HHGTTG was. I think I slightly prefer the sequel, which as with Ringworld contains favourite passages that I thought were in this one. But that’s balanced by there being scenes in this that I’d forgotten and enjoyed all the more for re-discovering them.
Like Ringworld I also have a “minor irritation” with an idea that’s in this book but it probably deserves a blog post of its own to explain why. We’ll see if I’m up for that or not.
I’m starting to think that 2012 might be the year of book series – I’ll probably read some more Discworld books, I’ll finish the Straw Men trilogy and have already admitted to wanting to read the Ringworld books – so I am tempted to re-read The Long Dark Tea-time of the Soul which is the sequel and possibly even The Salmon of Doubt which is the unfinished 3rd book (although unfinished books are frustrating for obvious reasons).
8/10 – It really is all interconnected – and a readable comic scifi mystery.
Yay! First book of 2012’s Read Every Day (hereafter referred to as RED). In fact I finished this earlier in the week and am a little disappointed that I haven’t written it up yet but still at least it hasn’t been weeks as has been the case in the past.
I can’t remember exactly what made me choose Ringworld as my first book of the year, except that towards the end of 2011 I was already thinking about it and shuffling the list of five or six possibles into an order. I think it was looking at my bookshelf and realising I had bought Ringworld Throne (Ringworld 3 if you like) and never read it and perhaps I’d read the series. In any case I knew I’ve liked it whenever I read it in the past.
I have a lot of the same feelings about it as I do about A World Out of Time so I won’t repeat the High Fidelity reference (see here if you don’t know what I mean).
So, Ringworld is set about 600-700 years in the future. The earth is over-populated compared to now but stable thanks to a world government and its Fertility Board regulations. Space travel is possible and a number of worlds have been colonised and a number of alien races encountered, and warred or traded with. Technology has moved on of course and teleportation has replaced air and surface travel. Thus Louis Wu, the protagonist of this novel, is celebrating his 200th birthday by travelling around the globe moving on just before midnight in each timezone, thereby extending the day, and his traveling birthday party, to nearly 48 hours.
He does this by hopping around using the ‘transfer booths’ and after one particular hop he finds himself not where he intended but in the presence of a Pierson’s Puppeteer – one of a particular race of aliens who apparently abandoned the galaxy on masse a couple of centuries earlier. The alien has a proposition for him. They have discovered the Ringworld – an artificial world made by constructing a ring around a star – and they want to put together a team to investigate it and they want Wu on that team.
The thing about Ringworld, in fact Niven’s writing in general, is that the stories serve as delivery mechanisms for big scientific, speculative ideas. So you don’t get character nuances and investigation of the human condition, but what you do get is an examination of what it would take to build a ringworld, why you would want to and what that implies about you and your technology and what it would be like to live on one. And Niven does provide a plot which gives us a good old romp through such a world. In the first third to half of the book he sets up the scene introducing the members of the team (Wu, another human, the puppeteer and another alien, a Kzin – an eight-foot tall tiger-like creature) and gives us time to absorb the level of sophistication, technology and species differences in so-called Known Space before launching us to the Ringworld itself. That Ringworld seems awesome and vast and an intimidatingly impressive achievement to these people, themselves much more advanced than us, is a clever way to get across just how remarkable this thing would be. (a sort of SciFi version of “When scary things get scared, not good” – a line Xander Harris once uttered in Buffy)
I have a minor irritation with one of the invented elements. It’s not the strange ability of the other human, Teela Brown, which the novel itself flags up as implausible thereby at least recognising the fact. It’s the idea that you could hook up a communications device to a computer and simply by listening to enough spoken language begin to translate it. How exactly would that work. That implies that there’s some inherent meaning in the sounds themselves or the structure and frequency with which they’re used. OK so there would be some, maybe enough to realise when a word was a verb, but ultimately you need context and you need to be able to do the equivalent of pointing at an object and saying the name for it.
Still, if I really knew enough about physics there are probably any number of things that are equally impossible and it doesn’t really hurt the enjoyment of the book for me, which is based on the scope of the story and the ideas it contains. It’s also quite well constructed in the way that a lot of back-story (and more scifi ideas) are included in such a way as to directly affect where the plot is going.
I’d remembered the ending before I got to it even though it’s probably at least 15 years since I last read it but it was still satisfying. There were a few things that I was looking forward to that weren’t in the book and must therefore have been in the sequel and I confused the two.
7/10 – a fun book of big ideas and a bigger world.
So we had the week leading up to Christmas with all the meals out and so on, and then the week following where I consumed a lot of the goodies that I got as Christmas presents (almost all gone now).
All things considered it’s not so bad as I thought. That ‘number’ that I had in mind for today was 255lbs so I’m under that. So here’s to losing 10lbs in the next 2-3 weeks.
Remember it’s a long game.
Week 41 (w/e Boxing day)
Lost:-4.2lbs
Lost so far: 55lbs
Average Weekly Loss: 1.34lbs
Weight: 249.2lbs (17st 11lb)
Week 42 (w/e today)
Lost: -4.6lbs
Lost so far: 50.4lbs
Average Weekly Loss: 1.2lbs
Weight: 253.8lbs (18st 2lb)
So this will be my reading challenge for 2012.
After a bit of thought and discussion I’ve decided to aim for 50 books this year but I’m naming the challenge Read Every Day (RED) because if I fall short on the book count but do the later I’ll still be very pleased. Behind the scenes I’ll probably keep my spreadsheet going which tracks pages, time spent etc but I won’t bore you with it. But at the end of the year I’ll be able to compare with the last 3 years if I want.
Oh I suppose that since I reckon 50 books = ~20000 pages I might put up a ticker for that but it won’t be an official target.
Yes I’ve started!
So having done the official results post wrapping up 6000 Pages 2011 which has all the stats and numbers etc, my good friend Melissa posted a comment with her scores but also with some notable books under certain categories. Following her excellent example I’m going to post my own list of ‘winners’ using her categories and maybe a couple of my own:
Longest Book: Under the Dome, Stephen King (881 pages)
Shortest Book: Anya’s Ghost, Vera Brosgol (55 pages) Of course this is a graphic novel and I’ve used the 4 comic pages = 1 regular page metric. The non-comic shortest would be Cast, in Order of Disappearance, Simon Brett at 177 pages.
Favourite Book: Before I Go To Sleep, S J Watson, with Killer Move by Michael Marshall a close runner-up.
Worst Book: Zone One, Colson Whitehead – committed the cardinal sin of boring me.
Best Find/Surprise: The Waterproof Bible, Andrew Kaufman – a surprise that I didn’t find it annoying. Special mention to Game of Thrones, George R R Martin because it was a) an epic fantasy and b) very long and on the face of it unlikely to be enjoyed by me, but was.
Biggest Disappointment: Falling Sideways, Tom Holt – almost straight off the back of Expecting Someone Taller which I did enjoy it was a shock that this wasn’t as good as I’d hoped.
Books to Donate to Charity: Since only 8 of the 30 books I read were paper and therefore capable of being sent to the charity shop only Anya’s Ghost comes close to winning this category. However that’s only because it’s not really aimed at me and in any case I think I’ll keep it. Possibly The Necropolis Railway, Andrew Martin – which I bought from a charity shop – because I’m unlikely to re-read it (it’s not terrible just not something I’m likely to want to re-read)
Book Which I’m Supposed to be Embarassed by but Actually Quite Enjoyed: I Think I Love You, Alison Pearson – apparently a forty-something man shouldn’t want to read a novel about teenage girl David Cassidy fans in the 70s. Nevertheless I found it fun.
I read 3 Terry Pratchetts, 2 Michael Marshalls and 2 Stephen Kings this year.
Book it Took Me Longest to Finish: Under the Dome took 49 days to read. Solar took longer in a way – I was reading it on Jan 1st and finished Dec 26th – but in fact I re-started that one (on Dec 22).
Quickest Read: Anya’s Ghost being a graphic novel took under a day. I Think I Love You, Jingo, Expecting Someone Taller and The Necropolis Railway all took 2 or less.
Most Satisfying Read: Punchbag, Robert Llewellyn – felt like a minor triumph to finish a book I started over a decade ago.
And finally… Book with the Most Anal Sex: Under the Dome, I think. Punchbag has a section where a character meets up with an old girlfriend and they go at it pretty much no holds barred but I don’t remember anal being specifically mentioned.
So that was 2011 and I far exceeded my targets. I read over 11,000 pages and 30 books.
Here’s a comparison based on the one I did last year:
| 2009 | 2010 | 2011 | |
| total reading time | 98:23:00 | 107:38:00 | 262:05:00 |
| Mins per/day | 16 | 17 | 43 |
| pages/hour | 50 | 51 | 43 |
| pages | 4924 | 5357 | 11059 |
| Pages/day | 13 | 15 | 31 |
| books | 18 | 14 | 30 |
| average book length | 274 | 352 | 367 |
| one book every… days | 20.25 | 26 | 12 |
| reading days | 71 | 85 | 142 |
| time/reading day | 01:23:00 | 01:15:00 | 01:50:44 |
| pages/reading day | 69 | 65 | 79 |
| longest gap | 54 | 45 | 32 |
| av score | 7 | 7.6 | 7.2 |
Based on that how did I score? Well you start with 15 points, add 1 point for each 100pages over 5000 (i.e. 15+61=76) then add a point for every reading day over 85 up to a max of 15 (76+15=91) and then add 2points for the average book length (in the range 326-375) – giving me a grand total of 93. Compared with last year’s adjusted score of 18 and 2009’s 17.
What’s most remarkable about this is that of that 150 extra hours reading, 100+ (and 12 1/2 of those 30 books) was in the last two months. During this period there are only 7 days when I didn’t read and I averaged 1h48m a day.
This was because I was trying something out that may become the basis of 2012’s challenge. See I was thinking about what it is that frustrates me about reading and that’s that I often get stuck with a book I don’t enjoy or that I see a book I think I’d like to read but I know that it’ll be weeks or months before I get to it – by which time I may have several other books on my to-read list ahead of it, or I may have lost my initial enthusiasm.
I realised that these things become less of an issue if you’re getting through books quickly and consistently. If I am finishing a book in a week or 10days then it means I can afford to be more spontaneous about the next book(s) because it won’t delay me for long from whatever it is I would otherwise read. And I can read an average length book in about 6-8hours so at less than an hour a weekday and a bit longer on weekends I can do a book/week or so. (I ended up doing more than that because first I had 11.22.63 a 850+ pager and then saw the possibility of 30 books which was too tempting to pass up)
Anyway the key is to read more regularly, every day if possible. That way I get through books more quickly and I’m never that far from starting whatever’s tempting me next and a bad book doesn’t slow me down too much. It also means I can afford to spend time on books I want to read but aren’t highest in my priorities such as catching up with series etc.
I’m still thinking about this and I’ll post something tomorrow setting out exactly what I’m going to do.
I first heard of Andrew Kaufman in 2007 when I visited Newcastle and saw some old friends there. One of them, Wayne, gave me a copy of a little book, All My Friends are Superheroes by Kaufman. He told me that he liked the book so much that he kept copies of it to give to people. This immediately made me wary but nevertheless I did enjoy the book – plus it was very short. I became a little tired of the overt quirkiness by the end but overall it was fun.
That said when I saw The Waterproof Bible I somehow thought it was a ‘straight’ novel and was intrigued. How I got this impression I don’t know.
The Waterproof Bible follows four or five interconnected characters. We have Rebecca who involuntarily broadcasts her feelings to everyone around her, Lewis her brother-in-law newly bereaved who meets God in a launderette, Stewart her estranged husband who’s building a boat in the middle of the landlocked Canadian Praire. Finally there’s Aberystwyth and Margaret, a daughter and mother pair of amphibious beings. Margaret has been living and passing as human on land and Aby, who according to her religion believes it’s a sin to die ‘unwatered’, is racing to find her and bring her back to the sea before it’s too late. Oh and there’s a father and son pair of rainmakers in there too.
So not a ‘straight’ novel then. Not fantasy either really. I guess this is what you’d call magical realism? It’s surreal and metaphorical and possibly allegorical. However unlike All My Friends are Superheroes it never became too quirky for me, or maybe I just accepted it. I just found it kind of beautiful. It’s certainly very warm about its characters and their non-realistic problems become very affecting and even moving. I know some people will find it too quirky or be bothered by the metaphors but if you’re not one of those people then you might just find this a charming, funny, warm-hearted read.
8/10 – poetic, magical, funny, human.
Cast, in Order of Disappearance is I suppose what you’d call a mystery. That always feels like an old-fashioned term to me but this is not a crime novel in the way The Straw Men is or a thriller like Killer Move, it’s a whodunnit, a comic one. In fact it’s the first in series of Charles Paris mysteries, Paris being the amateur sleuth , professional actor protagonist.
I first encountered Charles Paris in a radio adaptation of one of the later books where he was voiced by Bill Nighy and it was Nighy’s name that drew me in. However looking for a light read I thought I’d give the original source material a go.
Marcus Steen, a theatre-owner and general show-biz tycoon is found dead in bed, apparently from natural causes, a few days after Bill Sweet a man who was blackmailing him was shot a few miles away. Paris becomes involved when he attempts to help Jacqui, Steen’s girlfriend when she tries to find out exactly what happened and why he broke it off just before he died.
I’m aware though that describing the plot doesn’t really matter because that’s something that you’ll want to discover for yourself. I suppose the questions a mystery lover asks is whether the twists and turns are satisfying, surprising without being implausible and the plot clever enough to engage. I think that’s all true. However I personally was looking for more of the wit and charm I’d seen in the radio version. Paris is a sort of loveable rogue, unreliable, a drunk, a flirt and womaniser, but ultimately a good guy. I think the book scored pretty well on that front though I think it definitely benefited from the fact that I heard Nighy’s voice whenever there was dialogue.
I should probably mention that the novel was written in 1975 and set around Christmas 1973/4. There are references to petrol shortages, power cuts and high taxes. Not that that’s a problem in terms of plot, everything you need to understand is explained.
7/10 – fun, light, quick read.
With one day of 2011 left it’s perhaps fitting that I finally finished Solar by Ian McEwan which was the book I was reading on Jan 1st of this year. Also if you recall I counted the 118 pages I’d read thus far in last year’s total based on the presumption that I’d finish it this year or face a penalty of -1 point.
For most of the year it’s looked like I would pay that penalty – though recently it’s also looked like it wouldn’t affect my final score by much. However I decided to start reading it again (and began at the beginning) on 22nd Dec. Fortunately I didn’t get stuck or bogged down and it was a fairly easy read.
Solar follows the exploits of Nobel Prize-winning physicist Michael Beard from 2000 to 2009 and his interest in and work toward the use of solar energy. The book is in three sections set in 2000, 2005 and 2009 respectively. In the first we follow his introduction to the science of climate change and his involvement in a government initiative to pursue renewable energy sources – at this stage the big focus is wind power. In the second section he’s parted company with this project and is looking to exploit commercially ideas about artificial photosynthesis. In the final section of the book his company is gearing up for a practical demonstration of the technology on a non-trivial scale (providing power for a whole town).
Alongside this progression of technology we have developments in his somewhat messy personal life. Here, as in the behind the scenes of his business dealing, we see that Beard is not the most ethical man, to put it mildly.
The thing about this novel is that if you aren’t at least fascinated by the main character then you may find it a tough read. Fortunately I quite liked him and wanted to see whether he would succeed. I say I liked him, this was despite a couple of specific incidents of really bad behaviour and a pattern of selfish indulgent living. If anything the later, in which I can easily see myself, softened me a little towards the former.
In the end the consequences of his behaviour do work themselves out – at least some of it. I was left thinking about parallels with the ways in which society in general acts in terms of climate change – denial, well-meaning but counter-productive or ineffectual, an unwillingness to give up self-destructive indulgent behaviour and a failure to take seriously the consequences of actions taken years before. I’m sure some of these parallels were deliberate but maybe not all.
7/10 – not my favourite McEwan but a good read nonetheless.