Category: 6000 pages

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6000 pages reading reviews

6000 Pages 2011, The Necropolis Railway – Andrew Martin (pages 8704-8934)

The Necropolis Railway was a book I bought in a second hand bookshop on a whim a few weeks ago. It’s a murder mystery set on the turn of the 20th century steam railways. Specifically it concerns the Necropolis Railway of the title. This was a real thing which was set up during the mid-19th century as a way of dealing with the overcrowding in central London cemeteries by moving funerals and burials to a large graveyard outside London. The transport to do this was the Necropolis Railway.

This book is set in the winter of 1903 when Jim Stringer, a humble porter from Yorkshire moves to London having accepted the offer of a job as an engine cleaner working for the London Necropolis Company. This he hopes is the start of a career path leading to becoming a driver being the pinnacle of achievement in his view. However almost from the start he comes up against hostility from the other men working on the railway. He also discovers that there have been a number of mysterious apparently accidental deaths. Further intrigue, and deaths follow and he finds himself investigating what he’s now sure is a series of murders.

The thing I should say straight away is that I’m not particularly a steam train fan. Martin clearly is and that’s OK. One of the delights of reading is to put yourself in the head of someone who thinks differently to you, likes things you don’t etc. However I had thought that I’d learn something as I went along but Martin pretty much assumes you know an awful lot of the technology, as well as some of the period details. My policy these days with books is to plough on and assume it will all become clear. This is a book where I might have benefited from pausing to check Wikipedia every now and then. Or perhaps not, I got the gist.

I can’t comment on the accuracy of the period feel but I can say that it was recognisably different from the modern day. So that awful thing of 21st century people projected back into historical contexts that you sometimes see wasn’t a problem here.

The plot trundles along quite well. I found it a little slow to start but it picks up about a third of the way in. The romantic interest when it turned up was well done I thought. Again, different to modern eyes but not a cliche either. The murder mystery plot was pretty good though I guessed most of the reason behind the killings. There did seem to be a lot of explanation in the last couple of pages which left it feeling like the next book (there’s a series of these) might continue the story, but from what I gather despite having the same hero it’s its own story.

7/10 – not enough of a steam buff to really love this but had fun anyway.

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6000 pages reading reviews

6000 Pages 2011, A Fisherman of the Inland Sea – Ursula K. Le Guin (pages 8490-8703)

Some time around the middle of the year I started reading collections of short stories as a break from lengthier books. I’ve still got a few on the go but this is one I both started and finished this year[1].

I’d never read any Le Guin before but was aware of her reputation and had thought about reading one of her more famous novels. However I decided this would be a better way to discover if I liked her style or not.

There’s a range of stories here, all except one in a SciFi or Fantasy vein. A couple are little more than jokes. There’s one that’s a parable about gender roles. The final three – including the one the collection takes its name from – all take place in a connected universe. This irked me slightly whilst reading the first one. I like things to be self-contained. When the world is already alien and you’re having to learn about new technology, races, cultures and planets it seems to annoy me when some of that is not relevant to the current story. However I do acknowledge that this is a quirk of mine and in other contexts I don’t expect stories stripped down to just the essential for the current narrative.

I enjoyed these stories although it seems my favourites were the ones, according to the introduction that Le Guin was least happy with herself, or saw as less substantial. In particular the parable one, The Rock that Changed Things, she felt was a little too on the nose and preachy. I also enjoyed the jokes. The others contained things that were a little strange. Sometimes strange and beautiful, sometimes just odd.

She’s clearly a gifted writer but I don’t think I’ll go back to her for a while.

6/10 – Probably most enjoyable if you’re already a fan.

[1]Which leads to a dilemma about whether I ‘count’ the others if I finish them next year.
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6000 pages reading reviews

6000 Pages 2011, 11.22.63 – Stephen King (pages 7637 – 8489)

After I read Under the Dome earlier in the year I said to myself that I probably wouldn’t read another Stephen King novel. However I heard about this on Newsnight Review and was seduced by the concept and by the generally favourable comments on the writing. Also buoyed by my latest burst of enthusiasm for reading I didn’t feel intimidated by the length so I thought why not?

11.22.63 is a novel that centres around the assassination of John F. Kennedy on that date. However it’s a work of fiction and science fiction at that. A man who owns a diner in 2011 discovers in his store-room a kind of portal, what he calls a ‘rabbit-hole’ referring to Alice in Wonderland, that you can step through and be back in 1958. He convinces a friend of his, a school-teacher to go through the rabbit-hole, live in the past and then attempt to prevent the shooting of JFK.

I said that this was a science fiction book but as with Under the Dome King has a story he wants to tell and a way of setting it up which he cursorily describes – the time-travel is largely the later. It’s noteworthy that he chose not a time machine which could be targeted at a particular time but a naturally occurring (though presumably rare) phenomenon which a fixed exit point in time – September 9th 1958. This is worth pointing out because King makes it impossible for his hero to do anything other than spend 5 years in the past in order to achieve his goal. So really there are a few things this book could be/is about:

  • time-travel and its consequences, inherent paradoxes etc
  • what everyday life was like in late ’50s/early ’60s America
  • the events leading up to the assassination, and in particular the movements of one Lee Harvey Oswald
  • an alternate history story of what the world would have been like if the assassination attempt had failed.

And 11.22.63 covers all of these to a greater or lesser extent. However I think it’s fair to say if you’re more interested in the time-travel specifics or the alternate history than say Oswald and the 60s then you may not enjoy this book.

As it was I enjoyed it more than Under the Dome but still felt it was a little long. The book is split into sections and in the first there is a fair bit about the rabbit-hole, how it works and whether it’s possible to change the past at all (it is but “the past is obdurate” we discover). Then there’s the central section which involves the main trip back to 1958 and the following 5 years. This itself is split between a story of our protagonist actually living in the past – where he lives, the job he does, friends he makes, the woman he loves – and his attempts to track Oswald and gather the information he needs to stop him. The former I enjoyed, the later was over-developed in my opinion. I realise King has done lots of research and read lots of books but I really don’t need most of that information.

Of course these two stories inevitably come together and climax at the date in question.

I feel like there’s a really good 500-page novel in here. I’d cut a lot of the Oswald background details. I’d also trim down the story of how they prove that the past is changeable – which is almost a novel in itself. At 853 pages it tested my patience but I still came out enjoying it overall.

A couple of stray points. It’s noteworthy that whilst the hero is 35 in 2011 a sense of nostalgia pervades some of the descriptions of the past (like how wonderful the root beer tastes) and I think that’s because King was 11 in 1958. Also there are some references to other King novels – this is something he does apparently, I remember M. telling me that there are references in Under the Dome to characters in The Stand. Here the descriptions of the town of Derry, as if the place itself had some sort of supernatural malevolence, confused me slightly. Apparently if I’d read other works by King I’d’ve got the reference.

Finally worth pointing out, because it’s easy to forget and I did, that although there’s not much violence in the book when it does appear it’s pretty graphic. I was reading it wondering if it was strictly necessary then remembered I was reading an author best known for horror fiction.

Anyway – long book, long review, time to stop.

7/10 – a bit of a slog but worth it.

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6000 pages reading reviews

6000 Pages 2011, The Big Sleep – Raymond Chandler (pages 7365 – 7636)

There’s a phenomenon that occurs when someone experiences for the first time an incredibly influential piece of culture having already consumed many many examples of things that were influenced by it – you can be a little underwhelmed and feel that it appears derivative when in fact it’s the inspiration of things that seem more original. My experience of The Big Sleep was a little like that. Worse I have second hand parody versions in another medium playing in my head as I read. What I’m recognising as similar is probably the dialogue from Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid, Play it Again Sam or even Who Killed Roger Rabbit. I don’t think I can imagine never having heard all those echoes but I’ll try to not judge the book on them in this review.

The Big Sleep is a crime novel in which a private detective Phillip Marlowe is employed by a dying rich old man to look into the apparent blackmail of one of his two adult daughters. The case starts off seeming simple but a couple of dead bodies later and things become more complicated. How much you like this book will probably depend on how much you like Marlowe. Fortunately I found him tougher but sympathetic, more so than perhaps the snippets pf movie portrayals might have led me to believe. I think that’s partly because you have that inner monologue and because he’s cheeky and funny and ultimately humane. How can you not love someone who can come out with this, for instance?

…there was a broad stained-glass panel showing a knight in dark armour rescuing a lady who was tied to a tree and didn’t have any clothes on but some very long and convenient hair. The knight had pushed the vizor of his helmet back to be sociable, and he was fiddling with the knots of the ropes that tied the lady to the tree and not getting anywhere. I stood there and thought that if I lived in the house, I would sooner or later have to climb up there and help him. He didn’t seem to be really trying.

I did enjoy this book although the plot got a little too convoluted for my failing short-term memory at one point but fortunately it was just a few pages after that that Chandler put in a big exposition scene that explained everything so far. Unfortunately one of the parodies I’ve mentioned above contains a scene with enough superficial similarity to this story that I guessed the ending, however that was not a major problem and I might well have guessed it any way. It was relatively short (I’m currently reading a Stephen King!) but it packed a lot into that and didn’t outstay its welcome. I read it in an edition that includes two other Marlowe novels – The Long Goodbye and Farewell My Lovely and I will probably read them at some point.

7/10 – enjoy the original and try to ignore the many copies.

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6000 pages reading reviews

6000 Pages 2011, Punchbag – Robert Llewellyn (pages 6961-7364)

OK, so I’m both pleased and nervous to be doing this review. Let’s deal with the pleased bit first. This is the one of a rare group that I’m calling “Bus-ticket Books”. That’s because I have a few books that I bought back in the late nineties and, as was my custom in those days, read on the bus every day into work. I have at least a couple of these that I never finished at the time and still have the bus-ticket bookmark. OK, I can only think of two that actually have the tickets, this is one and The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick which I read a few years ago. I didn’t blog about it except in passing (“what the hell was that about?” being the sum total of my review). Nevertheless I rather like the fact that a) I still have this little random artifact of a decade or so ago and that b) I actually have finally finished the book concerned.

Now the nervous bit: I want to review this book but I want to sidestep as much as I can getting too much into the issue(s) that it’s clearly about. Not because they’re not worth discussing or I haven’t got anything to say about them but just so this post stays at a reasonable length. I guess we’ll see.

Punchbag is about something called Full-Force Self Defence. What’s that? Well let me explain with an anecdote from the book that I presume is at least based on a real case: a female black-belt karate champion was brutally raped in her own home. When she was attacked, despite having the skills to defeat her attacker she freezes. The reason being, so the theory goes, that she’s never been trained to use these skills for real – she’s used to hitting and kicking thin air or pulling punches with partners or very controlled circumstances. So this new form of self defence is based on getting a man in a padded suit to attack women who are then taught how to defend themselves using ‘full force’ i.e. not holding anything back.

So, the novel follows a few characters but the main one is Nick who is a London based bouncer who becomes the first British “padded assailant” when a Californian company that run these classes decides to open a branch in the UK. What we get in this book is an exploration of so many different attitudes and aspects of male-female relationships, violence, feminism, sexuality – and Llewellyn certainly doesn’t shy away from any of these areas. In fact if anything he throws too much in at the risk of over-complicating the plot.

So I think Llewellyn walks a line here between a novel that is clearly issue-led and an extended piece of propaganda. I think he walks very close to that line, crosses it a couple of times but overall it is still a novel, it has a story, with characters who have their own motivations and drives. However there was atendency in this book that worried me whilst I was reading it – the fact that whilst he allows his characters to have all shades of different, including very unpleasant and un-PC opinion, ultimately the main characters seem to always revert to a the “proper” attitude and not always with any discernable reason other than the passing of some time.

He also doesn’t shy away from asking questions about this form of self defence. Is it encouraging women to be overly violent? Could they perhaps be being given a false sense of security? Is it an over-reaction or form of vigilantism? (A man in the book is hospitalised over what, in the individual incident, was a relatively minor form of harrassment.) It’s good that he doesn’t try to answer these questions definitively but I think we sort of know where his sympathies lie.

Judged as a book I did like it. I particularly liked getting inside the head of Nick where we were allowed to experience a range of thoughts and emotions including some “unacceptable” ones which whilst unpleasant are real and without which the characterisation would have felt false. I also think if you wanted to raise the issues of male-female violence then this is a book that makes you think.

7/10 – thought-provoking, sometime uncomfortable and ultimately enjoyable read.

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6000 pages reading reviews

6000 Pages 2011, Falling Sideways – Tom Holt (pages 6590-6960)

Frogs eh? Frogs are hilarious aren’t they? I mean you’re probably giggling already because I’ve written the word ‘frogs’ in the first two (now three!) sentences. Plus look! there’s one in the picture.

No?

OK. Let’s start again and I’ll try to restrain the sarcasm.

After enjoying Expecting Someone Taller again I thought about the possibility of reading another Tom Holt. As I said I read Taller back when it came out and the next two after that. I didn’t enjoy those as much and decided he was not for me and stuck with Pratchett. I was vaguely aware that he was still steadily producing books but was a little aghast to discover quite how many – 30 in fact. So I was spoilt for choice.

Browsing through Goodreads and Amazon at the reviews and descriptions I came across Falling Sideways from 2002 which seemed quirky and obviously had a romantic element which is probably the main thing I enjoyed about Taller. So frog on the cover notwithstanding I took a chance.

(btw in case you’re wondering I didn’t decide to read two Tom Holts in a row. After Taller I started another book, which I stalled on so I switched to Falling Sideways as a lighter read. I will go back to that book after I finish the book I started after Falling.)

It’s funny that I started reading this book during what should have been Nanowrimo (I mean it still is but not for me, not any more) because it reads like a bad cliche of what a Nano novel is like – like someone sat down and just wrote and every time they ran out of ideas or hit a plot wall they just wrote themselves out of it by inventing something strange and bizarre no matter how inconsistent or convoluted.

Of course it can’t have been a Nano novel because a) I don’t think it was going in 2002 (if it was it wasn’t an internet phenomenon yet) and b) Holt was a published author with a dozen and a half books under his belt already. So maybe he had a deadline, or maybe he just wanted to try freewheeling or maybe he really really thought it was a different and better way to go. (For all I know this is typical of his later books and his fans love it).

I’m getting ahead of myself, what’s it about?

David Perkins is a single, early 30s computer nerd who lives alone and works from home. And he is head over heels in unrequited love with a beautiful woman. The only problem is she died 400 years ago and he’s actually in love with a painting. However, never fear because after purchasing a lock of her hair for a ridiculous sum at an auction he pays a visit to “Honest John’s House of Clones”… and a madcap adventure ensues involving clones, gods, intergalactic space travel and frogs, lots of frogs.

The big problem with Falling Sideways is that the basic structure is this – a little bit of setup, some running around with people being chased and fearing for their life/safety/freedom then a pause with a long expository conversation explaining how everything you know so far fits together THEN repeat but when you get to the next exposition reveal how most of the earlier explanation wasn’t what you thought it was because it was a) not real and b) an attempt to manipulate the characters into a particular position or frame of mind (as in “you had to think you were on a spaceship and in danger of alien vivisection so that you’d do so-and-so”). Once or twice this would be fine. When this has happened four or five times and you’re only 2/3rds of the way through the book you realise that this is the book’s thing, its theme or motif if I were being charitable.

Normally when I start to feel I’m losing the plot with a book I worry because I feel it’s up to me to keep up. I’ll check back to earlier sections and try to figure it out. Here I knew it was all just part of the ride and in any case trying to understand the current situation was pointless when some major part of it would turn out to have been unreal or not what it appeared to be.

So yes it had plausibility issues down in the details of the story – the idea that a clone would inherit the memories of its progenitor for example – but you know me, these sorts of things don’t usually worry me, though a little techno-babble explanation to cover it would have been nice. However it’s at the grand scale that it lost me. I didn’t really care enough about the characters – didn’t really get a chance to know them that well – and there were amusing lines but I didn’t find most of the running around sections funny. It was an easy read and so it added to my page count relatively painlessly, that’s a plus I guess.

Actually I will just mention one plausibility detail thing. David’s attitude and behaviour towards computers is wrong. I speak as a real-life Tech Support person of many years standing. David comes across as a non-technical computer user’s view of a computer expert. Yes we are just as frustrated and annoyed by these things when they go wrong, but what looks like random thrashing around and changing things til it works actually isn’t. We narrow down the problem – not printing? is the cable plugged in? is it all applications or just this one that won’t print? has it never actually worked or did it only start happening after you installed that new toolbar? – so even if we can’t tell you precisely why it went wrong every time we know why we did what we did at each stage.

It’s like on House or one of those other Doctor shows – you look at the evidence, come up with a theory and treat based on that, if it doesn’t work you take the outcome as further evidence, run tests maybe and make a new theory. Of course being computers and not human bodies it’s usually less messy. But the principle is very similar. In particular things like if the patient has a fever then you know treatments that will reduce a fever even if you don’t know yet what caused it.

OK, sorry, that rant got away from me a bit. To be fair David’s no worse than a lot of computer people portrayals in fiction, and better than a lot. Still it’s a sign of how disengaged I was that I was able to worry about this stuff.

5/10 – a fun read IF you find frogs inherently funny.

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6000 pages reading

Phew!

Quickie update about 6000 pages.

Well as you can see I’m now over 6000 pages so I can quit reading until January if I want 😀

Actually, since I’ve read 17 books now I’d quite like to get to 25. However that’s a book a week for the rest of the year. I might manage that for December but not while I’m doing Nano.

20 is a nice round number and also higher than my highest I’ve done since I started this malarkey.

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6000 pages book reading reviews

6000 Pages 2011, Expecting Someone Taller – Tom Holt (pages 6366- 6589)

I was ill this week, had a cold, which involved spending the best part of two days in bed. As such I didn’t do much other than sleep, eat and read. Also I wanted to re-read something I knew I’d enjoy.

So, Expecting Someone Taller, is comfort food reading for me.

I first read it when it came out which was whilst I was a student. I’ve re-read it a few times since, once in the last few years (but before the blogging of every book modern obsession). I have to say that the first time I loved it, at mostly because of the ending. Subsequent reads I enjoyed it but certain flaws jumped out at me. It’s thoroughly in the category of guilty pleasure.

Expecting Someone Taller is the story of Malcolm Fisher who hits a badger with his car one evening. As he watches it die he discovers that it’s not just a badge but a shape-shifting giant. The giant gives Malcolm a helmet that allows him to become any person he wishes and a very special Ring. This sets off a series of events where a catalog of mythical characters, apparently real, are after Malcolm and more especially the Ring.

This is very much a comic fantasy in the Terry Pratchett mould. It does for Wagner’s Ring Cycle what Discworld does for fantasy in general.

It’s basically a rom-com with the fantasy elements thrown in. Malcolm, a nobody who’s just been dumped by his girlfriend, is suddenly in possession of the most powerful magical item of all. How will he cope and will it help or hinder his (theoretical) love-life?

I’m not sure I ever found this laugh-out-loud funny but it’s definitely amusing and light and warm-hearted. The main character is likeable, most of the time. As a younger man I enjoyed the rom- part of it and the associated happy ending. I guess I still do though with a slightly more cynical eye – except when I’m ill in bed and wanting a comforting view of the world.

8/10 – mythical nonsense and jolly good fun.

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6000 pages book reading reviews

6000 Pages 2011, The Magicians – Lev Grossman (pages 5965-6365)

Lev Grossman’s The Magicians is a tricky book to review, at least in as much as it’s hard to know how much to reveal. One of the things that I have most to say on is something that is based on a turn of events about 2/3rds of the way through. On the other hand it’s mentioned (briefly) on the back cover.

OK so if you consider back cover blurb spoiler then don’t continue reading this review. Otherwise…

The Magicians has been called a grown-up Harry Potter and you can see why – the first section of the book concerns the hero, Quentin Coldwater, being selected for and training at a magical school, Brakebills. However he’s college age not pre-pubescent and the book doesn’t shy away from descriptions of sex, and drug-taking which you wouldn’t find in even the later HP books. Also, whilst graduating from Brakebills takes 5 years (a little less for Quentin as he gets put forward a year) we’re taken through it all in this book rather than the book-per-year of the Potter novels.

Having said that it being a magical school with exams, practical lessons and even a magical sport (Welters) it’s hard not to compare with HP. This is done knowingly and when one of the characters drunkenly refers to Welters as Quidditch and talks about Owl mail you know Grossman’s not unaware of the parallels.

So I think the HP comparisons are superficial and come almost automatically from having the very idea of a school for magic. Magic in this book by the way is another difference from the Potterverse. Performing a spell is a matter of mastering complicated and precise hand movements coupled with particular incantations (in one of several languages) and possibly strange ingredients. It’s also something where the exact manner of casting depends on the conditions – pointing your wand and shouting ‘Expelliamus’ might work in New York on a still day on a Tuesday in June but not on a windy Friday in London in December for example. So whilst it’s not a science, it’s a very finicky art-form that requires lots of practice, hard work and memorising of exceptions.

But the main difference is that because the characters are already more mature it deals with a more psychologically realistic view of the world. What it might feel like to be in this scenario. Not as an exciting schoolboy adventure but as something you’re doing because you can’t really find meaning in normal life. Well that’s true for Quentin any how. The other characters have different motivations and aspirations and distractions.

One of the ways in which Quentin’s inner life is demonstrated is through the Fillory books. These are the series of magical stories that he read as a child about a land called Fillory that a family of English children go to and have various adventures in. Whilst in the world of The Magicians nearly everyone reads the Fillory novels as children, Quentin never grew out of them and will re-read them as a kind of comfort food equivalent.

And it turns out Fillory is real and Quentin and his friends go there.

And it’s this section of the book that gave me most pause for thought. Because Fillory is quite obviously and deliberately a parallel to Narnia and so the time spent there can be read as either a parody, or a fairly scathing critique of those books. I guess it was wondering whether Grossman wanted me to take some kind of a message away about this that gave me some trouble.

In the end what I decided was that he was just taking a kind of Narnia-like world seriously and how that would play out with his characters and his rules about magic and the story he wanted to tell. So I stopped worrying about whether the books I loved as a child were being made fun of[*] and enjoyed the book.

There’s a couple of other sections to the book and an interesting ending that I won’t go into. What I will say is that again I went back and forth between two opinions – that the book was uneven in tone and that was a weakness or that yes it was but because different tones were appropriate to the different sections.

I’ve read other reviews which found Quentin himself too downbeat or melancholic a character. Personally I empathised with his struggles, with life, magic and relationships and it was him (and the other characters) that kept me interested through some of the ups and downs.

Finally all I will say because it’s probably not clear is that I did enjoy this book and will read the sequel (eventually).

8/10 – It’s Magic Harry but not as we know it!

[*]which is not to say I have a rosy-eyed view of those books now. I have a number of problems with them from varying degrees of subtle racism to “The Problem of Susan”. However I still, on balance, enjoy them.

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6000 pages book reading reviews

6000 Pages 2011, Anya’s Ghost – Vera Brosgol (pages 5910-5964)

If you recall I’m not really supposed to go on to a new book when I haven’t written up the previous two. Well I’ve completed three since the last 6000 pages update, and NaNoWriMo’s going ot be taking a lot of my time, so in order not to get too far behind I’m catching up:

Anya’s Ghost is another graphic novel, this time an actual graphic novel i.e. written and conceived as a single story rather than issues of a comic book. It’s relatively short (though remember I use the metric 4 comic pages = 1 regular page). I bought this book because it popped up in my Amazon recommendations, the ‘see inside’ preview looked interesting and it has a Neil Gaiman quote on the cover.

I say all this only to justify myself and mitigate my review because I’m not really the target audience for this.

Anya is a high school girl in an American private school. She comes from a Russian immigrant family and is painfully aware of her differences and wants to fit in. She also has the usual teenage hopes and dreams such as whether the cute boy in her class likes her.

Then one day she meets a ghost, a girl of a similar age who died nearly 90 years ago. She befriends the ghost and together they navigate some of the trials of high school. Only maybe her new best friend is not quite all she seems…

As I said above, I am really not the target for this book. So when I say that whilst I thought it was well-drawn and competently told the story was a little too straightforward and predictable, and the issues it dealt with (self-acceptance, peer pressure etc) a little cliche, then I am aware that I’m being unfair. On its own terms and for the market it’s aimed at it works well. For me it was enjoyable but just ok.

6/10 A fun halloween read for a younger person than I.