Category: book

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book reading reviews

A Working Theory of Love – Scott Hutchins

This is a book I bought because it either came up as Amazon ‘deal of the day’ or it was a ‘you might also like’ recommendation. Either way this was not a book I’d otherwise heard of or knew of the author. But the premise sounded interested.

Neill works for a tech start-up in Silicon Valley. But he’s not a computer programmer. He was hired because the company is trying to create an AI – artificial intelligence – and to give them a head start and sound grounding information they’re using the diaries of Neill’s late father. As an ‘expert’ in the material it’s Neill’s job to train the AI, ‘talk’ to it and correct its missteps and stumbles on the road to self-awareness – if such a thing is possible.

Alongside this we get Neill’s own story. How he’s faring after his divorce. He’s met a new woman, two in fact, but it’s not all plain sailing and he needs help. That’s when he hits on the idea of asking his “father” to help. Together they try to put together A Working Theory of Love.

I wasn’t quite sure what to expect when I read this book. It’s not overly fascinated by the AI technology although there’s enough detail for that to seem plausible. There’s more in it about Neill’s past, his real father, his mother, his current life and loves than a purely SciFi story would have had. I found it an enjoyable, easy read. Some of the themes are relatively serious – his father is dead and he’s trying to figure out ‘love’ after all – but it was never weighed down by that. I suppose if I had a complaint it would be that there seemed to be a bit of meandering before the novel got to where it was going. However it wasn’t an overly strenuous diversion so that wasn’t a problem.

7/10 – some interesting musings, and some interesting computer-human conversations.

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book reading reviews

Started Early, Took My Dog – Kate Atkinson


As I mentioned when I reviewed Life After Life I’ve had Started Early, Took My Dog on my TBR for a while. After Life After Life I re-read The Servants and then I read Started Early…

That was two months ago.

I know I go on a lot about my memory but it really isn’t that great. So I’ve had to go back and refresh it a little by skimming the book. I’ll also have to try to avoid comparing it/confusing it with the TV adaptation which I watched.

The story starts in the 70s with a young policewoman witnessing the aftermath of a brutal killing. This is around the time of the Yorkshire Ripper and later this crime becomes part of that investigation although at this stage no-one’s had the chance to make that connection yet. In the present day this woman is now retired from the police but making a living as a security guard. One day on a whim, she intervenes to help a small girl. The book is then the story of what happens next and how it connects back, through various characters, to what had happened in earlier times. Of course Jackson Brodie becomes involved too. He’s travelling the country trying to find a place to settle and has landed briefly in Yorkshire, where the novel is set.

I enjoyed this book. My main impression of it is how different the Brodie in the book is the the one played by Jason Isaacs. He seems a little tougher. He may be a little older – his daughter is – and he’s a little more damaged. He also becomes the custodian of a dog to which he becomes quite attached.

I enjoyed this book because I enjoyed Brodie. The writing was good but it was also unobtrusive. Not that Life After Life was overly ‘literary’ but this was definitely less so.

7/10 – Good, and some not-so good, people doing perhaps bad things.

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book reading reviews

Life After Life – Kate Atkinson

I’ve had Started Early, Took My Dog on my TBR list for a while. I bought it after I watched and enjoyed the TV adaptation of the other Jackson Brodie books (“Hello to Jason Isaacs” btw). Somehow or other it was one of those books that never rose to the top of the pile. However when I saw this book was being released – it was by the same author, but was stand-alone and  had an intriguing premise – I thought I’d get it and read it.

Life After Life‘s premise is the idea of living a life over and over until you get it “right”. Ursula Todd was born during a snowstorm in Feb 1910 to a middle-class English couple living in the suburbs of London. In this book we see various “versions” of her life – which sometimes is cut short very soon and sometimes takes us through both the first and second world wars. It’s a bit like the movie Sliding Doors in that whilst we get to see what could have happened if different paths were taken we don’t really know why it’s happening. This is not a fantasy or supernatural book about the process of re-living lives, it’s a book comparing various versions of the same life.

It’s well-written and I did enjoy it but I think my initial impression on finishing it was “is that it?” I suppose I’d let the idea of the premise lead me into thinking that there would be some final payoff, that there would be a version of her life which was clearly “right” and clearly “the best” and so on. And there sort of was and sort of wasn’t. Maybe I just had the wrong idea about what was the “best” and maybe that’s what the book is exploring.

Along the way there’s some great writing and I liked several of the characters. You also get to see them grow and change – several times. I felt slightly sad that her mother – whose POV you tend to follow when Ursula herself is very young – seems to start as a vibrant, interesting woman with her own definite ideas about life and turns into a crotchety, slightly superior and disapproving matron. But again maybe that’s the point.

There’s also a lot of suffering in this book. We go through the wars as I said, more than once and from more than one side and as well there are just the usual vicissitudes of life. Which can make for a tough read (I kept thinking of the title of one of her Brodie novels “When Will There Be Good News?“). Occasionally I felt that none of this suffering mattered anyway because it would be wiped out in the next go around – but that happened less than one might expect which is to the credit of the author.

7/10 – overall a good read, glad to have read it, pleased it’s over.

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book reading reviews

Dragonflight – Anne McCaffrey

Dragonflight was S&L’s April book pick. I’d long been aware that there was this series with dragons in it that looked interesting. However when I was younger and more liable to read such a book there just seemed too many to start. Anyway this gave me a reason to check it out.

Dragonflight follows Lessa on the planet of Pern. At the start of the book she’s a lowly servant girl, a “drudge” in the hold once owned by her family but which was taken by force when she was ten. She’s now twenty-one and a chance for revenge occurs when the hold’s new lord arrives for a visit. He brings with him a couple of dragon-riders. One of these, F’lar, will soon become an unwitting tool of her plans but also she becomes interesting to him in another way. Pern is overshadowed by the Red Star – another planet whose orbit brings it close to Pern once every few generations. So close in fact that there’s a threat from the Star, a threat that Pern’s dragons are uniquely suited to protect against. However the dragon numbers are down and the riders are no longer held in the respect they once were. F’lar believes Lessa could be the key to restoring the dragon-riders’ fortunes and saving Pern itself.

One interesting thing about this book that I’ll get out of the way first is whether or not it’s fantasy or not. Of course it is – dragons! – but it’s set up in such a way that many consider it SciFi. It begins with a prologue that tells how Pern was colonised from Earth but that the colonists have long since lost any contact with or knowledge of their home planet. Also their technology and society have regressed to medieval levels. I see this merely as a way to clear the decks. Sure it’s also saying that this world could exist (apparently in later books explanations are given for some of the more fantastical elements including dragons themselves) but really it’s just saying this is the way it is, deal with it. Similar to “A long time ago in a galaxy far far away…”

I have to say I wasn’t very taken with this book. There were things about it I liked. There’s a certain puzzle element to the way the plot resolves that’s quite pleasing, I liked the logic of it. The descriptions of dragon lore and how the society was organised were interesting too.

However the sexual politics of the book were questionable. To be fair this book was written in the 60s when it was probably seen as forward-looking and even radical. But some of the attitudes felt off to me. Yes it’s a medieval hierarchical society with defined gender roles – but it’s that way because that’s the way she made it up so that doesn’t immunise it from all criticism. Having said the thing that bothered me most was the way the characters were written. Lessa was clearly stated to be a woman in her early twenties but she behaves and is treated like a young teenager. You could see her I suppose as an independent woman making her own way with her own agenda and unwilling to be cowed by male authority, but she does it in a rebellious and mainpulative manner rather than hit opposition head on. Meanwhile F’lar treats her like a child. He berates he for the actions she takes to find things out but deliberately keeps her in the dark about what’s happening to her. He teaches her about dragons and lore but only as much as he thinks she needs and he disciplines her if he thinks she needs it. His favourite way of making an emphatic point seems to be to shake her.

In the end because it was hard to like either of these characters I think it hurt my enjoyment of the book. I do wonder if I’d read it when I was 12 whether the sheer fact of dragons and my naivety would have meant I liked it more.

6/10 – dragons are cool but you need more for a good book.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.