Category: reading

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book reading reviews

Night Watch – Terry Pratchett

So, I’ve been looking forward to this book for some time. It’s one of Melissa’s favourite books and she’s not the only one to tell me that it’s one of the best Discworld novels.

Night Watch, unsurprisingly, is a Watch book. In particular it’s a Vimes book. It’s very much a Vimes book in fact. Whilst chasing a murderous thief Vimes gets caught up in a magical storm which sends him back in time. He gets to experience a period in the history of the City of Ankh-Morpork from his youth. A time when rebellion is fomenting in the streets and the Watch must protect the public from, well, the public.

A lot of the enjoyment of this book lies on whether or not you enjoy the character of Sam Vimes. Fortunately I do. Here he is at his most Vimes-y. He’s alone in the city but quickly becomes part of, then effectively runs, a Watch house and plays a major role in the ongoing historical events. His sense of command of the situation, his common sense and level-headedness in general, along with the fact that he clearly cares about people, all go to make you like Vimes in this book. There are also younger versions of a few familiar faces from the Ankh-Morpork based books, which is fun.

It is quite a serious book. The jokes don’t flow as quick and fast as they do in other Discworld novels and there’s some grim business takes place. But that didn’t particularly put me off.

However I did fail to see the greatness of this book (and I’m sure it is my failure rather than the book’s). For me it was merely good. Very good perhaps but not great. Still well worth a read though.

8/10 – Vimes on top form.

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book reading reviews

Among Others – Jo Walton

Among Others is a pick from my currently reading shelf (i.e. it’s one I’d started before and now finally finished.) I originally bought it when a friend from work suggested it a) because he knew I like SciFi/Fantasy and b) because it was Amazon’s deal of the day that day for 99p.

Among Others tells the story of Morwenna Phelps. She’s a twin whose sister died and she herself was injured in a car accident. She loves to read and specifically she reads SciFi/Fantasy which she devours at a scary and intimidating rate (5+ books a week!). Oh and she sees fairies and can do magic.

Which makes it sound more about that than it is. If it’s about anything it’s about books and stories and how they make you see the world a certain way. It’s also about how that can be a refuge. I think the book makes a case for it not being a withdrawal as Mor, as we come to know her, is always really trying “to live” and it’s not that she abandons ‘real life’ in favour of books, it’s that she has expectations of what life should be that come from books and these expectations cause her to reject certain things about ‘real life’ – things she sees as trivial perhaps.

The book is told from her point of view, in fact it comprises her diary for a period from the autumn of 1979 to the end of Feb 1980. This places some of the books she references very specifically in their time.Which is also the right time for when I was growing up and discovering books and SciFi books in particular.

A big question that arose for me was whether or not the magic was real. Did she really see fairies or did she merely think she did? Was her mother really a dangerous witch or simply someone with mental health issues? I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that the book never steps outside of the point of view of Mor, so that question if it arises for you – and it may not – is left open to interpretation.

I enjoyed this book. It’s very good on her everyday life. She’s been shipped off to an English boarding school and is having trouble fitting in – because she’s Welsh, because she reads, because she neither cares about nor can participate in sport. So the sense of a lonely outsider is well drawn. I did feel that she was somewhat ‘spiky’. I felt I ought to have liked her more, on paper she had a lot of stuff going for her – a tragic back-story,  being the outsider, being picked on, being bookish and smart. But I never quite got over the slight sense that she felt herself better than all these other girls who weren’t into books and SciFi.

Another minor irritation – and it is no more than that – was the book references. There were so many and I’d read a handful, had heard of most but not heard of a few. However I got most of what I needed to know about them from context. Which was fine but it rankled every time she compared her situation to characters I knew of but hadn’t read, or concepts I didn’t know from SciFi novels. (If you’re thinking of reading this for example and you don’t know what a karass is then I’d look it up. She explains toward the end of the book but uses it a lot before that.)

As I said though, I did enjoy it. And if you ever felt yourself out of step with others because of a love of books, and especially SciFi/Fantasy then this might well be the book for you.

7/10 – a book about books and about magic (which may be the same thing)

TBR has gone back up to 253 because having finished one book I’d bought two new ones. Need to be careful about that deal of the day. Currently Reading holding steady at 10 because my next book is not from that list. I feel like I’m doing well but then I remind myself that this time last year I’d read 7 books. However that slowed down considerably. Plus I’m reading with an eye to enjoyment not (purely) book count this year.

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book reading reviews

Bridge of Birds – Barry Hughart

This is the Sword and Laser pick for February and unusually for me I not only read it early but finished it before the start of the month (obviously). It’s actually out of print in the UK and I want to say it was hard to get hold of but it wasn’t really, I searched on Amazon and there it was, and quite cheap too. It’s not that long ago when buying a book meant looking in various physical book shops, compared to that browsing a website for 5 mins isn’t “hard”. What was – let’s say challenging to my patience – was that it isn’t available in the UK as an ebook. It, together with its two sequels is available in the US in ebook form for the very reasonable sum of $10. I almost persuaded Barnes and Noble’s .com site to sell me a copy but they bailed at the last minute. There was also a free audio recording (sanctioned by the author) on a blog (here if you’re interested) but I really wanted to read rather than listen to it. So I ordered the ‘dead-tree’ edition. (Some people might use the fact of buying a paper copy as a sop to their conscience in order to then go ahead and ‘acquire’ an ebook version from an ‘unofficial’ source. Some people might do that…)

Anyway, to the book itself.

Bridge of Birds: A Novel of An Ancient China That Never Was – to give it its full title – is the story of the strong but simple soul Number Ten Ox going on a quest with a hired sage, Master Li. Ox’s village suffers an unfortunate attack of poisonings of the children between the ages of 8 and 14, and Ox ventures out to try to find The Great Root of Power – the only known antidote. He soon comes across Master Li, a very learned, very old man with “a slight flaw in his character” who agrees to help him track down this item. To say that their quest takes them on a wide variety of adventures, meeting strange and wonderful people and creatures is an understatement. What it reminds me of most is The Princess Bride. It has the same sly sense of humour, of not quite parodying the fantasy setting but occasionally throwing in a line or a point of view that feels more modern. On the other hand, like Princess Bride, the essential structure and style is one of myth, of a fairy tale. It’s fair to say that this sits right in the centre of where my sensibilities lie.

I really enjoyed this book. It took me a while to get into it but it’s short and it’s an easy read. It felt episodic at first. There seemed to be a lot of needing to go find the person who would be the key to thing that would help them find the person who knew the secret… a bit like one of those old video games. What’s actually fun about that though is that a) these interludes were entertaining in themselves, b) characters started to recur and c) they ended up coming together in a way that not only made it feel more of a connected story but also gave a rationale to it (sort of – you have to have bought into the story but by that stage I had).

This is a story that contains ghosts, monsters, fights, travel, puzzles, contests, magic, medicine, science, sex and even cookery (the section on how to properly prepare porcupine is hilarious) but ultimately it’s a love story. If that sounds like it might be of interest to you – I highly recommend this book.

9/10 – a great deal of fun.

As I bought this book and then read it my TBR remained steady at 252.

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book reading reviews

Whispers Under Ground – Ben Aaronovitch

So book 3 in the Rivers of London (or PC Grant, opinions differ) series. It felt like a long wait before I got to read this. It was 3 books and 14 days. But all those books were perfectly fine (all 7s) and two weeks isn’t that long.

So we’re back with Peter Grant, Lesley May and Inspector Nightingale. Lesley is now also training to be a wizard (or a ‘practitioner’). Like the previous two books Whispers Under Ground has its own story – the mysterious death of an American art student at Baker Street tube station. Also like the previous books there’s more of an ongoing element. This time I suppose you could say it stretches back as well as forward.

I did really enjoy this book, but not quite as much as the other two. Whether that has anything to do with the fact that it took me a couple of weeks to read it – which was about being tired a lot not about the writing – I don’t know. It does have the trademark humour but either I’m getting used to it or the one-liners are less zing-y than they were. Also the separation between the story-of-this-book and the unfolding narrative is more clear cut. I guess that in book 1 that’s almost accidental because as events occur and discoveries are made you have no way to know whether it’s connected to the current story because you don’t really know until the end that some of it will carry on to the next book. However I also think the on-going story is given more time here. I think in two or three books time it will be the story of that book.

I think I enjoyed those elements more. Getting drip-fed more details about Nightingale’s past is tantalizing and the ‘Faceless Man’ is an intriguing villain. Also I think that the ‘A plot’ involves a lot of running around tunnels and sewers and under the ground generally and it didn’t grab me as much as the other stuff. I like the ‘nazareth’ though.

So now there is a long wait – June! – for book 4 to be published. And I believe book 5 has at least been commissioned. Lots of stuff on the TBR pile to be catching up with in the meantime.

8/10 – our favourite wizard ‘going underground’.

Speaking of TBR it currently stands at 252 down from 253 which is obviously good. The currently reading list is standing still at 10 but I hope to knock that down soon.

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book reading reviews

Old Man’s War – John Scalzi

I did two things on my seventy-fifth birthday. I visited my wife’s grave. Then I joined the army.

Isn’t that a great way to open a book? Intriguing, it draws you in. I guess there’s nothing in it that isn’t implied by the book’s title but still, I like it.

I read Old Man’s War because I got it as part of the humble bundle back in October and Sword and Laser were doing it for their January pick. I confess the later reason was less important. My record with online book clubs is not great. When I do manage to finish the book in time I often read what’s already been discussed and don’t have much to add. When I do post something often there’s no reply. But I did find it interesting to see what others thought.

Old Man’s War is the story of John Perry who, as we’ve read, enlists on his 75th birthday. The army he enlists with is the Colonial Defence Force and involves him leaving earth, and his former life – he becomes legally dead, behind. The CDF recruits exclusively from 75-year-olds and there are rumours of rejuvenation technology, which is why so many enlist. The truth is slightly more disturbing.

The book follows John through the process step by step – leaving earth, initial induction, the treatment, military training, military campaigns. In fact for the first third of the book it’s pretty much one thing after another rather than a plot per se. Then there’s a section when we get to see John and the CDF battling various alien threats. This seemed mostly just to illustrate the variety of aliens and how they need to adapt tactics to fight them. The final section has something more of a plot.

I enjoyed this book, particulary parts 1 & 3. A common criticism and one I think I agree with is that you don’t really get a sense of an older person. Once we get to the training and the battles John is just a character we’re following and the fact that he has seven decades of experience doesn’t seem to play into it. I’d’ve thought at least in terms of the training we’d’ve see that oldies have less patience for their drill sergeant’s nonsense than your average 19-20-year-old.

I was also not a fan of the book’s treatment of the morals of war. The CDF seem to believe in Manifest Destiny and the one character who was given anything to say against this was also a character shown to be stupid by his actions. It’s true I suppose that there’s a constant tongue-in-cheek tone so how much we’re supposed to take any of this seriously is up for question. I’m told that this is dealt with again in the follow-up books. To be honest though I can’t see myself reading them.

7/10 – good decent old-fashioned spaceships and aliens SciFi.

TBR is down to 253 from 255 (this book plus a short from Nick Hornby – ok but not worth blogging about)

 

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book reading reviews

The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents – Terry Pratchett

One of the things I’ve always thought was very clever about the Discworld is that it’s an entire world. It’s big enough, and like the real world, diverse enough that it can cover virtually any type of story. Certainly you can parody gothic horror, classic fantasy, crime fiction and on and on. I mention this because sometimes the only connection between one Discworld novel and the next is that it’s set on the Disc.

The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents is a bit like that. It’s the Discworld’s first ‘YA’ novel and it’s basically a riff on the idea of the Pied Piper, from the point of view of the rats (er and a cat called Maurice). For all that it contains talking animals and a little magic it could easily take place in a generic fantasy world rather than the Disc per se.

Maurice as I said is a cat and a talking one at that. He travels with a band of also talking rats and a ‘stupid-looking’ boy called Keith. Together they perpetrate a scam whereby they turn up at a town, create a very visible nuisance of themselves until Keith offers to play his pipe and lead the rats away, for a reasonable fee. This usually goes very well until they arrive in a town that already seems to have a very serious rat problem and some pretty effective rat-catchers. Soon Keith, Maurice, the rats and a girl they meet along the way are uncovering what’s really going on and it’s not pretty.

When I first started this book I was very aware that the language was aimed at a YA audience. However that faded fairly quickly as I became engrossed in the story. I will say that this is quite dark for a book for younger readers. It does have some disturbing scenes. However the humour is there as are the likeable characters.

I know I often complain that Pratchett has apparent difficulty ending a book and there’s really only two endings here, which is not that many compared to some, but I would have preferred a single show-down/climax and then a coda. That said I enjoyed the book overall. There’s some interesting thoughts here about leading/following, the need for and dangers of stories.

7/10 – a good story that works for old-not-so-YA-ers like ne.

TBR is up again to 255 (from 254) because I had a Christmas Amazon gift token to spend.

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book reading reviews

Russell Wiley is Out to Lunch – Richard Hine

So this is my first book of the new year, and the new regime it represents. I bought it because it was part of Amazon UK’s “12 Days of Kindle” sale. (which if you’re in the UK you should check out, some bargains for some well-known and/or excellent books – you’ve got just over 24hours from time of posting to grab them).

Russell Wiley is Out to Lunch tells the story of a mid-level manager in a publishing company who’s trying to sell advertising on a print newspaper in the emerging online era. It was written in 2010 but set in 2006. Although I don’t think that matters, you just need to know that he’s working in a business that is in a market that’s in the process of being disrupted and no-one, least of all his superiors, seems to know what to do about it.

Alongside the comedy of corporate politics there’s the story of his home-life which consists of what looks like an increasingly fragile marriage. We get Bridget Jones’ style commentary on how many days it’s been since he’s had sex with his wife.

I definitely enjoyed this book and although it wasn’t laugh-out-loud funny it did make me smile quite a few times. The main character is interesting because he seems a little too competent at work (though stymied by those around him) and little too pathetic at home. Still on balance I did like him and I think you need to for the book to work. I could have done with a little more sympathetic view of his wife. Not that she was completely awful but I think we were supposed to come to a realisation of wondering why they were still together perhaps gradually rather than never really seeing it to begin with. There were some cute, touching and funny flashbacks to the beginnings of their relationship I suppose, perhaps they needed to be put earlier in the book.

The other irritation for me was the company politics was perhaps a little too convoluted and had too many characters. I suspect that this meant it was more realistic (the author has worked in publishing, I never have) but I felt like I ‘got it’ and didn’t need as much  characters/office-politicking as we got. Unfortunately this made a relatively short book feel longer.

The ending was perhaps a little too perfect in terms of wrapping things up nicely and the good ending happily. But then if the book was a little like a RomCom (and it was in places) then this ending fitted that genre fine.

7/10 – a fun read overall.

Thanks to said sale my TBR now sits at 254 up from 251.

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reading

Reading Goals 2013

Every year I tweak my goals a bit – we’ve have 25 books, 6000 pages 2010 and 2011 and RED –  and this year will be no different. Except perhaps that it’s more than “tweak”.

This year I do have a number of goals but I also have a guiding principle and I’ve decided that my goals are all things to aim (note the “try to”s below) for but the guiding principle is what over-rules everything. So here goes…

Goals

  1. Try to read 40 books this year. 50 was a stretch but I managed 34. 40 will be another stretch but doable I hope.
  2. Try to reduce my To-Be-Read (TBR) list by 16. It’s currently at 251 so that will make a nice round 235.
  3. Try to finish all the books I start. May be harder and this goal is likely to be most in conflict with my Guiding Principle.
  4. Try to reduce my Goodreads “Currently Reading” shelf to 1 (or 2,3… if I’m genuinely reading them at the same time). Ever since I started using Goodreads I haven’t taken a book off my CR shelf unless I put it there in error or I finished reading it. This includes books I started, stalled on and later re-started from scratch. So essentially this boils down to “finish/re-read books I previously started”.

Those are the goals and the only goals. No page-counts, genres or other factors involved.

The Guiding Principle

In pursuing these goals I will abide by the following principle, especially when taking action which may appear to conflict with one of the goals (like abandoning a book, or increasing my TBR):

Reading is supposed to be fun, try to enjoy it.

Taking it a Step Further

Thinking about the Guiding Principle has made me wonder about being even more radical. Let’s just review how we got here.

This all started really because of  Harry Potter. Remember “Am I Crazy”? I wanted to re-read all the HP books before the new one came out. The need/desire to figure out if I was on track gave birth to my first tracking spreadsheet – crude and simplistic compared to what was to come. The next significant event was in 2009 when I realised that I’d only read 4 books in the whole of 2008. So “25 Books” was born and an improved version of the spreadsheet was created.

As 25 Books turned into 6000 pages I found that I needed/wanted a better spreadsheet to track what I was reading. This is essentially what I still use today, although even in the last couple of days I’ve been improving it further.

Now let’s be honest, there’s a geeky pleasure in the tracking itself. I like setting up the spreadsheets. I like watching the effect as I record time spent reading, comparing my pg/hr rate for my current book to previous ones or the overall average, working out roughly how long it will take to get to the next chapter, or next book, how far behind target I am and so on. All this is its own kind of fun but it’s not really about reading. Worse it’s possible it even detracts from or is displacement for actual reading.

It’s odd to think – it’s become so normal for me – but for the last four years whenever I’ve picked up a book to read I’ve also been making a note of how long I read for and how many pages I read. It’s not that big of an overhead and since I mainly read ebooks any device I’m reading on is automatically also a device I can record this info on. But the fact is that it doesn’t have that sense of just picking up and starting to read and maybe, just maybe it’s one of those barriers to entry that I was talking about in a previous post.

So here’s the idea: maybe I’ll give up the spreadsheet this year. I’ll still keep a note of which books I read, and I’ll certainly put up reviews but I’ll pass on the slightly obsessive recording part.

At least that’s the idea. I’d be giving up the geeky fun part in the hope of getting something else in return. That something I guess would be a sense of it being a lighter, simpler fun activity rather than a chore or an assignment. But there’s a part of me that will miss using my shiny new spreadsheet.

So that’s what I’m thinking but I’m still not sure if I’ll do it. Ultimately having fun whilst reading is probably more about choosing the right books.

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book Read Every Day reading

RED? Not Really!

Phew!

So that was 2012. 34 books, nearly 11,500 pages. Not close to my target of 50/20000 but I did beat 2011 so maybe that target was always going to be a bit of a stretch. In the end I am satisfied with that result.

I have got a list of all the same stats I gave last year (score on the old ‘6000 pages’ system was 81, highest since records began) but I don’t intend to bore you with them (I can bore in other ways see! 😉 ). However it is worth mentioning that I only read 146 out of a possible 366 of the days of last year. So Read-Every-Day? Hardly!

But what I discovered is that it’s hard to read consistently unless you have a regular slot for it and when “life” occurs and makes you feel like not doing anything very much picking up a book and trying to throw yourself into it can be just a little too much effort. I do think if/when I made the effort I was rewarded but it’s that initial barrier to entry.

Anyway I think this just confirms what I sort of know which is I am a ‘binge-reader’ – I’ll plough through a book either when it’s so gripping that I can’t put it down or because I finally want to finish it and get on to the next one.

Although, this year I started 8 books that I didn’t finish which feels high. I’ve put most of them back on the list to be read this year.

Looking over my list of books for the year they are, as usual, an eclectic mix. I’d thought this would be the year of series/sequels but apart from Rivers of London/Moon Over Soho and Darkside/Finders Keepers it wasn’t. I only read book 1 of the John Carter books and never got around to reading the Ringworld follow-ups or even the second Dirk Gently book. I suppose I’m not counting Discworld – which is a separate category of its own – where I did read four books.

Anyway, no detailed stats, instead let’s have the…

‘Melissa’ Awards

Longest Book: Tigana, Guy Gavriel Kay (678 pages). Relatively short for a longest book, no 800-900 page monsters this year (though I did start The Stand).

Shortest Book: The Courtyard, Alan Moore and Jacen Burrows . Based on my 4 graphic novel pages=1 regular page rule this weighed in at a measley 12 pages.

Favourite Book: I’ll have to give this equally to Rivers of London/Moon Over Soho, Ben Aaronovitch.

Worst Book: Bet You Can’t… Find Me, Linda Prather. Sadly showing the downside of indie self-publishing.

Best Find/Surprise: I’m tempted to give this to Rivers of London again but I’ll say The Shining, Stephen King instead. It was a great read and not at all what I expected i.e. it’s NOT LIKE THE MOVIE!

Biggest Disappointment: Has to be Finders Keepers, Belinda Bauer. Took all the goodwill from enjoying Darkside and frittered it away. Also retrospectively spoiled the ending of the first book (a little). Special mention to News from Gardenia, Robert Llewellyn because I’d set my expectations too high and it was less of a novel and more of an eco-polemic.

Books to Donate to Charity (or delete from the digital archive): I don’t think we have a winner in that category. Even Bet You Can’t… is worth keeping. If we redefine this as Books I’ll Never Re-read then it would make more sense but I’d also never be able to narrow it down.

Book it Took Me Longest to Finish: Wool, Hugh Howey at 43 days. Not really the book’s fault which was an OK read but the aforementioned ‘life’ occurred during this book. If I exclude Wool on that basis then the next highest is A Princess of Mars, Edgar Rice Burroughs at 29 days.

Quickest Read: The Courtyard took a day but was very short (and already has an award) so the award goes to Protector, Larry Niven which also took a day.

Most Satisfying Read: I think in that I’d previously given up on it and when I finally finished it turned out to be enjoyable I’d have to say The Book Thief, Markus Zusak was the biggest achievement.

Book with the Most Anal Sex: I have to admit that I can’t think of any anal sex in any of the books I’ve read this year. A Quiet Belief in Angels, R.J. Ellory concerns sex crimes but I don’t think the physical specifics of the rapes is mentioned. I really don’t have the heart to look it up.

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book Read Every Day reading reviews

RED Book 34: Moon Over Soho – Ben Aaronovitch

I wasn’t kidding when I said I loved Rivers of London. Not only did I buy this and book 3 in the series straight away but I started reading this as soon as I could.

Moon Over Soho picks up a few weeks (possibly months) after Rivers of London. The consequences of that story are still with us and make for a touching and sensitive opening chapter. However Peter Grant is still a police officer and trainee wizard, so when jazz musicians in London start to die of apparently “natural causes” he has to investigate. Oh, I didn’t mention in my last review that Grant’s father was a musician did I? His speciality? Jazz.

So I loved Rivers of London and the follow up didn’t disappoint. It had the same wise-cracking main character narration and a similarly complex plot that weaves through both the everyday and other-worldly versions of London, leavened with some real London history/geography/trivia thrown in. A couple of differences: first there was more left open at the end of this book. It was a complete case and the investigation comes to a definite conclusion but there are elements that will no doubt be picked up in book 3 (and beyond?). I suspect with have met Grant’s nemesis, his Moriarty if you will. I think this is probably because with the success of book 1 Aaronovitch probably has the freedom to plan a few books ahead and so is able to have an on-going component as well as the story of the book itself.

A second difference is the amount of sex in this book. Now the previous book certainly has some sexy characters and a fair amount of unresolved tension between the same but in this book there’s some definite ‘resolving’ going on. This was neither too explicit nor too coy and without giving anything away it did add to the plot. Plus, like the humour, it adds to the fun of the story.

9/10 – book 2 as much fun as book 1.