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book reading reviews

Downbelow Station – C.J. Cherryh

Downbelow Station is Sword and Laser’s March book pick. I’d read Jan and Feb’s so I thought I’d continue. Plus it looked good.

Downbelow Station takes place in 2352/3 in a future history where space has been colonized but mostly through space stations. Downbelow Station,ย  orbiting the world of Pell, is one of the few attached to a life-supporting world. Most of the action centres around Pell/Downbelow (the terms are used interchangeably for both the station and the planet) but also takes place in space. The main players are the Earth Company – which is the company that initially began exploration and colonization and is involved in trade, the Company Fleet who are now acting somewhat independently of the Company itself, the Union Alliance – a break-away group of colonies at war with the Fleet (and to a lesser extent the Company) and then a motley group of merchanters who just want to trade and make money with whomever will deal with them. Oh and Pell station itself who is attempting to be independent but as the book begins, and the boundaries between Earth and Union space are being re-drawn, finds itself at the strategic centre of pretty much everyone’s plans.

I want to say I enjoyed this more than I did because it has some very good elements. If you enjoyed the kind of complex SciFi story, where different factions are presented with their pros and cons and there’s not necessarily clear lines between heroes and villains, something that deals with the gritty realities of space war and the mundane, as well as the macro level politics and economics of it – something a lot like say the rebooted Battlestar Galactica say, then there’s a good chance you’ll enjoy this. It has all those elements and Cherryh wields them well into a compelling story.

But. There had to be a but. There’s something about her writing style, her sentence construction, that threw me off. I can tell you because I measured it (yep the spreadsheet is back with a vengeance) that my reading speed halved from its normal level during the reading of this book. In fact I took a decision early on to “power through” and pretty much read it in a couple of days last weekend, partly because I was worried that if I put it down for any length of time I wouldn’t pick it up again.

Now not everyone will feel this way. Some will enjoy her prose no doubt, but I do know from the S&L Goodreads group that I’m far from the only one with this problem. Which is a shame because I think there’s a great story there but for me it was like wading through treacle to get to it.

One unrelated issue I had with this book was the portrayal of the book’s aliens, the Hisa or Downers. They are a race of primates, a little smaller than humans that are indigenous to Pell. They are less intelligent than humans, have a simpler culture and seem to be wholly subservient to them, happy to become lower status workers on both the planet and the station. Whilst they have their own culture and language we mostly hear them speak broken English (humans generally haven’t mastered Hisa speech), and even in scenes where only Hisa are present their language seems simple which is what makes me think we’re supposed to see them as less intelligent.

Whilst in one sense they are alien and it’s just as plausible that a race like the Hisa could exist as some super-intelligent cosmic overlords – the way they are presented, the way they interact with humans, their simple but profound spirituality, the way their personalities are largely interchangeable and they seem to have no conflicts amongst themselves (and I mean even conflicts of opinion pretty much), the way they are treated by humans stands as an easy indicator of moral virtue (the patronising ‘good’ humans v the ‘bad’ dismissive and exploitative ones) – all this added up to a portrayal that looked very like the Noble Savage – and that left me uncomfortable.

But that aside the story was good, if you can make it through the language.

6/10 – there’s a good story there if you can see it.

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book reading reviews

Eleven – Mark Watson

I bought this book because it was deal of the day a little while ago, and because it sounded like I might like it. I wasn’t aware of who Mark Watson is (though I might have confused him with Mark Haddon of Curious Incident fame). Turns out he’s a stand-up comedian and I have seen him on TV. His one of those people who are not quite a household name but you’d recognise from being on Mock the Week or whatever. Anyway all this is just to say I’m glad in a way that I hadn’t known/remembered that and read this as “just” another book.

Eleven is the story of Xavier Ireland who is originally from Australia but living in London and working as a DJ on a call-in radio show in the early hours of the morning. Whilst on his show he’s happy to dispense “common sense” advice in his life outside work he takes a much less interventionist approach. He’s happy to let things lie and not get involved. Whether that’s in the lives of his neighbours or the course of his own career. Then one day he goes to a speed dating evening where he doesn’t find a date but does find a new cleaner.

I enjoyed this book a lot and to be honest I wasn’t sure I was going to. For one thing it’s written mostly in the present tense and I find that a little irritating. However once I was engrossed in Xavier’s story that slipped away and I soon forgot to notice. For another the book does a thing where we are shown a series of apparently unconnected characters and what they are doing at a particular moment in time – near the start of the book. Throughout the book we then keep revisiting these characters and start to see the connections. I thought I wasn’t going to enjoy this structure because I was mostly interested in Xavier. However this took up less time than I thought – there was still plenty of space for Xavier, including his backstory and why he left Australia. Also there were some funny and touching moments in the others’ stories.

This is a book about consequences. It’s about the unfathomable chains of events that can occur and not only how we can be connected in surprising ways, but how one can never really predict the outcome of our actions, and so ultimately how it’s not necessarily “safer” to not get involved than to be more proactive.

I liked this book because of the characters. Not only were the main characters well drawn they were sympathetic and likable. I also felt that the book was warm about all its characters, even the ones with less going for them. It felt humane and hopeful and I liked that. I had a slight problem with the very end which I can’t really talk about without spoiling. But let’s just say I choose to put a certain interpretation on the events at the end of the book because it’s the way I want it to be.

8/10 – a warm-hearted web of inter-connected stories.

TBR still at 256 – which I’m happy with.

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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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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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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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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 muchย  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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RED Book 20: Charlotte Street – Danny Wallace

Charlotte Street is a book for which I again broke my TBR rule[1] Why? Well, I knew who Danny Wallace was from his association with Dave Gorman, from various bits of TV, from a non-fiction book Join Me, which I read about 2/3rds of[2] several years ago. And then I saw that he was releasing a novel and read the blurb and thought, “OK, this sounds like it could be my kind of thing”.

Is it? We’ll see.

Charlotte Street concerns a man, Jason Priestley[3], who’s lost his way a little. He doesn’t have a firm grasp on his career, his long term girlfriend dumped him and he’s living above (and sporadically in) a used video games shop in a slightly dingy flat.

One day he meets a girl – on Charlotte Street – with an amazing smile who’s struggling with various bags and packages, and trying to get into a taxi. After this brief meeting he discovers she’s left behind something, a disposable camera. Of course he gets the film developed and is intrigued by pictures. Not knowing who the girl is or anything about her, Jason decides to try to use the contents of the photos as clues to to try to find her.

The rest of the book follows loosely this structure, but it also interweaves the ongoing story of his life – his attempts to get his career on track, to get over, or possibly back with his ex- and so on. At times I think it would have been better if it were a little more rigid with the structure, perhaps having a chapter for each photo.

The book is basically a rom-com concept and as such it’s perhaps inevitable that there will be some question about whether he ends up with “the Girl” or not, and if not whether it’s one of the other possibilities. I won’t give away the ending but let’s just say that I thought it was going to end up with a particular pairing, then that became obviously not the case, then I briefly hoped that was a double-bluff and then – I was disappointed.[4]ย  I hate when that happens. Oh well.

Charlotte Street is another one of those books about men in their mid-twenties to early-thirties who are trying to figure out what life is all about and where they fit in and with whom. I seem to have read a few like this. This isn’t one of the better ones but it’s hard to find it offensive. It’s a light read and goes down ok but it’s forgettable and a little meandering.

If you like Nick Hornby or John O’Farrell or Tony Parsons then… maybe you should stick with them ๐Ÿ˜‰ If you’ve run out of their stuff right now, then this is not bad.

6/10 -a rom-com that wasn’t quite up my street.

[1]Which is now, not so much broken as lying in shattered pieces on the floor.
[2]On the one hand I didn’t finish it, but on the other I read most of it in a day, which says that I was into – on that day at least.
[3] No – as the running gag goes – not that one.
[4]I think I’d wanted him to end up with a particular woman because I thought she was the female character I liked most. However thinking about it now, I didn’t like him quite as much so in that sense she’s better off without him.
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book Read Every Day reading reviews

RED Book 18: Equations of Life โ€“ Simon Morden

Another long gap. Naughty me. Oh well.

Equations of Life was the May book for the Ship of Fools book group. Its author is an SoF regular and I had actually gotten the book a while ago with the intent of reading it at some point, partly because it sounded interesting in its own right, but also because I was curious what he was like as an author[*].

This book is set in an expanded London (“the Metrozone”) of the future, about 20 years after a series of terrorist attacks where nuclear weapons were used.ย  It follows Samuil Petrovich, a young Russian physics genius with a somewhat dubious past who’s now living and studying in the Metrozone. One day he helps foil a kidnapping attempt and the fallout from this incident sets in chain the events of the rest of the book. And it’s a wild ride, there’s gun-toting nuns, rival urban gangs, virtual reality, AI-controlled giant machines, a zombie-like army of street people and just for good measure, the equations that may well be the basis of a Theory of Everything – and which do, of course, give the book its title.

I definitely enjoyed this book but as usual with me, it’s easier to articulate what I didn’t like. I kept feeling that Samuil was written older than he actually is. He’s also annoying as he’s pretty much universally competent, whether it’s squaring up to gang bosses or solving intractable physics problems. His only real flaw appears to be a physical one, a heart condition, which itself is always conveniently dangerous whilst never actually stopping him from doing anything the plot requires.

Another minor irritation – and this may just be me – was that he swears in Russian. Frequently and in many different ways. At least I think most of it was swearing. I wasn’t going to stop to look it up every time. I know it’s authentic, but it felt like the author constantly reminding me that this character was Russian.

I did like the fact that plot whizzes along and quite a lot of stuff happens, like a good thriller, and a lot of it is inventive and interesting (though be warned some of it is dark and icky). The pictures conjured up in my head of some of the scenes toward the end in particular were very effective.

I also like the romantic sub-plot, mostly because I’m a sucker for that kind of thing.

There’s another two books in the series, soon to be three I understand, and whilst I’m not raring to read them, maybe when my TBR is low enough, or I’m just in the mood for a rompy-scifi-thriller.

7/10 – an inventive, wild ride of book.

[*]Let’s face it – with the availability of so much fiction these days, there has to be something beyond simply “sounds interesting”. It has to be “sounds interesting” and “I like the author”, or “sounds interesting” and “comes recommended from trusted source”

 

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RED Book 16: The Shining โ€“ Stephen King

So I’ve been a bad boy – in two ways, but I’ll just name the first here – that I read this book 3 weeks ago and haven’t written it up yet. Which is a problem because my memory is terrible and any details I recall have since merged into an overall impression. So I might approach this review slightly differently.

Normally at this point I’d do a little synopsis of the start of the plot so you’d know what kind of story it is and then make my comments on how I enjoyed it (or not). But do I really need to do that?

OK so a writer takes a job as a housekeeper-handyman for an isolated hotel that’s closed for the winter. As he and his family become more cut off by the weather strange things begin to happen.

But you probably knew that because of the film. Even if like me you’ve never really seen the film all the way through it’s one of those things that has so seeped into the culture that you’ll have seen a few clips, or even parodies of famous moments – “Here’s Johnny“? “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy“? (neither of those moments are in the book by the way)

The thing is – and I can’t stress this enough – the book is not the film. The film as powerful as it is – and since reading the book I have watched the film from start to finish – is a different story. It has the same elements but the film is really about the descent of a man into a kind of madness, a cabin fever brought on by boredom and isolation in which some spooky things happen but they may just be in his mind. The book is the story of a place, a place where powerful and malevolent forces have infiltrated the fabric of the hotel that’s built there and manifest themselves in increasingly disturbing ways.

I can see why fans of the book might dislike the film.

I wasn’t gripped straight away. It took maybe 50-100 pages. But during the early part of the book I identified – too much for comfort – with the character of Jack Torrance and that kept me interested. Once we get to the hotel, the tension ratchets up increasingly as the chapters go by and by the end it’s a really suspenseful page-turning thrill of a ride.

Funny anecdote – whilst I was still about halfway through for a little light relief I decided to break from reading and watch that episode of Friends where Joey’s reading the Shining and has to put it in the freezer. Of course what I’d forgotten about that episode, kinda the point of that strand of it, is that Joey spoils the book for Rachel. So even though I knew I knew the ending of the film, I also knew that the ending of the book was slightly different and didn’t know exactly what it was – until I spoilt myself by watching Friends.

Except not really. One way I can tell this is really a great book is that even though I knew a lot of the bare bones of the story (from the film) including the ending (from Friends) I still enjoyed this read.

8/10 – A master story-teller on his game.

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RED Book 15: A Princess of Mars – Edgar Rice Burroughs

So yes this is the first of the John Carter of Mars books, and yes I did read it now because of the movie coming out. But I’ll have you know that it (along with the other 10 books in the series) was amongst my first wave of downloads when I got a Kindle and started looking at Project Gutenberg in earnest.

A Princess of Mars concerns John Carter, a man from 19th century Virginia, Earth, mysteriously travelling to Mars and the adventures he has there. He meets the six-limbed green martians first of all, then later the more human-looking red martians, one of whom is the beautiful princess Dejah Thoris.

It’s worth pointing out that this book isย  hundred years old. So when I say that it’s an old-fashioned adventure yarn with an old-fashioned hero then I mean really old-fashioned. John Carter is an American Civil War veteran, a fighting man with a sword. He’s never anything less than brave and he always wins the day. He’s also, to a modern reader (or even a child of the 1970s/80s like me) a bit too ready to pull out his sword. I found it strange that Burroughs happily uses “man” and even “human” to describe all the different races – which in more modern fiction I’d see as a signifier of granting them equal status – and yet Carter is happy to start fights that will inevitably lead to the deaths of several of them, often because an alternate plan is simply more inconvenient.

But then maybe it’s not just martian life that’s cheap, maybe he’s just used to a more precarious and dangerous world.

His relationship with the Princess is probably what you’d expect given the time it was written. She’s not a weak character but her strength is in her emotional reserve initially and her willingness to follow him into danger later on. There’s also a strong theme of love thwarted by convention, a contrived barrier that is eventually overcome.

I also found some of the SciFi names (Barsoom, Thark, Tars Tarkas) and the descriptions of weird and wonderful martian “stuff” (the landscape, the animals, the way martian society is organised, the mating habits and life-cycle of the martians)ย  a bit annoying. It felt to my probably jaded eyes like exotica for exotica’s sake – not essential to the plot and just there for colour. Probably unfair since in 1912 this was probably cutting edge stuff and not at all cringe-worthy.

If you’re getting the feeling I didn’t enjoy it then you’re almost right. It had its moments. I actually did become interested in whether and how Carter and the Princess would get it together (UST strikes again). But other than that…

I probably read it too late. It’s a (very) old-fashioned SciFi romp. I should have read it at 12/13 and probably would have thought a) it was great and b) I was very grown-up and sophisticated for seeing past the slightly archaic language and attitudes.

At 45 it still seems like an ok read but a bit creaky.

6/10 – dated but not completely without merit.