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Read Every Day reading reviews

RED book 6: Blood Music – Greg Bear

I seem to have gotten a taste for re-reading old SciFi books that I read in my early 20s. Actually the choice of this book, and the reading of it, neatly demonstrates what RED is all about. I had been thinking about scenes from this book whilst reading Protector and it occurred to me I’d like to re-read it. Because I know I’ll finish it within a few days it’s no drama to decide to do that. Although I had hoped to finish it over last weekend, Monday/Tuesday at the latest when in fact it took me until last night – but that’s still only 6 days. (This time last year I was 162 pages into Wolf Hall which I hadn’t picked up for nearly three weeks).

So… Blood Music is a novel from 1985. It concerns the invention of thinking blood cells, little nanobots created via genetic manipulation. The scientist who develops them – an intense chap called Vergil Ulam – does so as a secret side project and when it’s discovered he’s forced to shut down his experiments and clear out his lab. Forced to choose between destroying his creations and give them some sort of chance he injects them into himself (what he hopes at the time will be a temporary measure). The ‘noocytes’ as he calls them not only thrive in his body, they start to adapt, reproduce and make improvements. That’s when thing start to get really strange.

The first half of this book follows the initial development of the noocytes and their existence within Vergil’s body. This was the part that I remembered and wanted to re-read. About half-way through though the noocytes discover that there’s a world outside their world, i.e. that Vergil is not all there is and they quickly become a kind of intelligent plague. After that there’s a sort of biological singularity event and the landscape of the story becomes much stranger.

I have to admit that it was the first half, the origin story, also the one set in a recognisable world, that I preferred. The second half was also a lot longer than I’d remembered. In fact when I had reached about half way and certain events had happened and characters appeared I realised that apart from the very end I couldn’t remember what else happened and there was a gap. It’s no coincidence that my reading rate slowed at this.

Funnily enough I discovered that Blood Music was based on an earlier short story/novella and for a while I thought that explained my lack of memory of the second half, but there are some events I do recall that aren’t in the short story version.

So my overall this book is not as great as its best bits (for me) but still a worthwhile read.

6/10 – an interesting origin story then a lot of weirdness.

P.S this was an ebook and probably the worst formatted one I’ve read so far. It had clearly been scanned and OCR’d before conversion and no-one had proofread it. ‘close’ was routinely rendered as ‘dose’ and so on. It seems to be more the case with back catalogue books.




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book Read Every Day reading reviews

RED book 5: Protector – Larry Niven

Having re-read Ringworld I thought my next Niven re-read would be Ringworld Engineers so I could go on to read Ringworld Throne. However I was reminded of Protector – partly because it takes place in the same universe as the Ringworld stories and partly through thinking about the books I read during the same era that I read Ringworld. So I decided to go with what I felt like reading, also knowing it was relatively short.

Protector concerns an alien species known as the Pak. They have three distinct phases to their life-cycle: child, breeder and protector. The change to the later stage is triggered by age and the consumption of a yam-like root known as tree-of-life. The changes are dramatic and the protector becomes vastly more intelligent, significantly stronger and extremely protective of its offspring – hence the name. On the Pak homeworld this trait gives rise to constant war with the effect that many protectors are left with no living descendants and they soon find themselves lacking the will to live, unless they can find a purpose.

One such childless protector is Phssthpok. He does manage to find a purpose and that requires him to travel 32,000 light-years to our solar system in search of a lost expedition of Pak millions of years previously. The first part of the book concerns what happens when Phssthpok encounters humanity in the form of an asteroid belt miner. The second part of the book is set two centuries later when the effects of that meeting and Phssthpok’s original mission are still playing out.

It’s becoming a cliche of mine to say I like Niven for his big ideas so I’ll try to avoid just saying that here. Let me expand on it by saying that there’s a particular type of idea, or execution that he does well in Protector. He takes an existing set of known facts about humanity, evolution and aging, and some make-believe about a possible alien race and weaves a connection between the two that is plausible enough to tell a good story around. It’s a bit like a SciFi equivalent of what Richard Matheson does in I Am Legend. There he takes an existing fantastical monster and creates a scientific ‘explanation’ for how that might actually work. Here there’s no existing monster but there is that same sense of slotting together the known science with the speculative and made-up. It has the same pleasing sense of “this could actually be true“.

I’m still not wowed by his characterization but it’s definitely better here. Although the ease with which two characters part forever for the sake of humanity is notable by the speed with which it’s dealt with.

There’s a rather extended space battle sequence near the end which takes a look at what a ‘dogfight in space’ might look like over vast distances and at significant fractions of lightspeed – ironically the answer is: slow. Not being overly interested in astrophysics for its own sake I found that section dragged a little. However I had genuinely misremembered the ending and so had the pleasure of realising it was not what I’d thought, figuring out what it might be and having that confirmed.

7/10 – another good old-fashioned romp through space and time with Niven.

(P.S. for those keeping score, another paper read.)




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RED book 4: Amsterdam – Ian McEwan

Amsterdam is the second of four books I bought at a second-hand bookshop in the autumn (the first being The Necropolis Railway) so another paper read which has become a bit of a pleasant novelty. It also made it to the top of my list because it was short and so I could squeeze it in between the other books I plan to read this month, and because I have confidence in McEwan to deliver a good read.

Amsterdam begins at the funeral of Molly Lane who was only in her mid 40s. Attending the funeral are three of her ex-lovers as well as the husband who survived her. The story mainly follows Vernon Halliday, the editor of a somewhat stuffy newspaper, and Clive Linley a composer of enough consequence to be composing a symphony for the millenium (the book came out in 1998). They are old friends and near the beginning, inspired perhaps by the fact that Molly died of a degenerative, Alzheimer’s-like disease, they make a pact to ‘help each other out’ if they were ever to be in similar circumstances. Molly’s death also brings to light some compromising photos of the other ex-, Julian Garmony, who happens to be the Foreign Secretary and the issue of whether or not to publish raises its head for Halliday, whilst Linley has a moral dilemma of his own to deal with.

I said when I reviewed Solar that I probably ought not to have had the sympathy for the main character that I somehow did – he was a slightly pompous, self-important man, blind or indifferent to his own moral failings. Well it seems that McEwan specialises in such types as here we have not one but two characters from a similar mould. Setting them against each other, having each be able to spot in the other the flaws he’s unable to acknowledge in himself is clever and amusing. I can see how some might find the ending silly or unrealistic but I took it in a spirit of wry satire and as such it made me smile.

7/10 – a deceptively slight read with a pleasingly gentle sense of humour.




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Read Every Day reading reviews

RED book 3: A Quiet Belief in Angels – R.J. Ellory

 

A Quiet Belief in Angels is the story of Joseph Vaughan and how his life was overshadowed by a series of murders. However he’s neither the perpetrator nor one of the victims, nor even related to them ( though he does find one of the bodies). Still somehow his life becomes intertwined with these horrible crimes.

We first meet Joseph as a boy in 1939 in a small town in rural Georgia. It’s the day that “Death came to take [his] father“. From this portentous start we follow him as he grows up, developing a passion first for reading then writing as encouraged by his teacher. We see through his eyes the devastating effect that a serial killer can have on such a community, not only bringing fear about the crimes themselves but destroying trust and tolerance more generally.

Even when Joseph becomes a man and moves to New York to pursue his ambitions to be a writer his past never really leaves him and it continues to have a terrible impact.

This is a strange novel for me, because it’s not just a straight crime thriller. It’s a literary novel about life in the South of the US during the first half of the twentieth century (written by a Brit!). By ‘literary’ I guess I mean that it is prepared to spend time over describing what someone is feeling, or a place, or an idea about a place or a feeling – and does so in great detail and with a relish of the language itself. I’m not really one for admiring prose per se. Language exists to tell a story, set a scene, convey information about the actions and dialogue of characters. That the words themselves can be arranged in a pleasing way is secondary for me.

So I both enjoyed and was frustrated by some of the language in this book. It was well crafted but often what I felt would have done the job in a sentence or two went on for a paragraph or two. Where I found a paragraph had successfully set the scene, evoked the necessary emotion, Ellory might continue on for more than a page. It made for a feeling of it being slow and – being honest – a bit of a slog.

And yet at the same time I grew to be really interested in this man and particularly the things that drive him and have blighted his chances of a normal life. I rooted for him, even though his story was pretty grim – not just the murders but his personal life is tough too.

And yet again, as a sort of whodunnit/crime book it’s slow enough that if you’re so inclined you’ll probably figure out the way things will turn out. Strangely there were more surprises for me in the middle than the end.

It’s definitely worth a read. I would think twice before reading another by the same author because of the style not matching my reading preferences.

8/10 – A tough read in places, but compelling nonetheless.




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Read Every Day reading reviews

RED book 2: Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency – Douglas Adams

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.




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Read Every Day reading reviews

RED book 1: Ringworld – Larry Niven

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.




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6000 pages reading reviews

6000 Pages 2011, The Waterproof Bible – Andrew Kaufman (pages 10755-11059)

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.

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6000 pages reading reviews

6000 Pages 2011, Cast, in Order of Disappearance – Simon Brett (pages 10579-10755)

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.

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6000 pages reading reviews

6000 Pages 2011, Solar – Ian McEwan (pages 10275-10578)

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.

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6000 pages reading reviews

6000 Pages 2011, Zone One – Colson Whitehead (pages 10016-10274)

Here’s a book that really tests my mettle as a reviewer. The reason being that I really didn’t enjoy it and yet when I try to figure out why I find it extremely difficult to say. Maybe I’ll have worked something out by the end of this post.

Zone One is the story of what happens after a zombie apocalypse. Some months (years?) after the outbreak of a plague that turns its victims into the walking undead we follow Mark Spitz, a member of a ‘sweeper’ team of civilian-turned-military whose job is to root out and destroy the remaining infected from ‘Zone One‘ aka Manhattan which has been largely cleared and walled off in preparation for re-inhabitation. By reclaiming the city it will be a symbolic act of civilization re-asserting itself.

Ostensibly the action takes place over one weekend but as with most novels that use this device it seems, we inevitably get a lot more history in flashback. Everything from his initial experiences of the plague his ‘Last Night‘ story (every survivor has one and the sharing of such has become a kind of ritualistic bonding experience) through his various travels and his ultimately joining the sweeper team in Zone One.

So why didn’t I enjoy it? It’s hard to say. Every possible answer I can think of gives rise to counter-examples. The first third has very little dialogue and is description-heavy. There are multiple flashbacks-within-flashbacks and overlapping time frames. These are things I noticed and didn’t enjoy but also which I know I’ve at least not minded in other books. All I can ultimately say is that it felt like a slog and it was with a sense of relief that I finished it.

This is one case where my score really reflects my own personal reaction. I’m very aware that it’s well written and others might really enjoy it. However since I found it so difficult to get through with little, to me, reward, I can’t give it a higher mark.

5/10 – a slow lumbering trudge through the world of the undead, sadly not in a good way.