I confess I was slightly naughty here. I wasn’t supposed to buy any new books in March was I? However the book I was supposed to receive this month that was pre-ordered last year[*] won’t now arrive until April so I put this in as a substitute. Plus I’d just heard it reviewed and it sounded like the kind of thing I’d enjoy. Sometimes you just have to break the rules.
The Man Who Forgot His Wife concerns Vaughan who suffers a sudden attack of amnesia where he forgets pretty much everyone in his life. He forgets what he did for a living, his friends, his family and as the title suggests of course, his wife. So he has to start to re-build his life and these relationships. The only problem is that he’s in the middle of divorcing his wife and he no longer knows why.
I definitely enjoyed this book and read it in a couple of days. I’d say there were only a couple of laugh out loud moments but I was smiling most of the way through. O’Farrell writes warmly and sympathetically about marriage and family life, and particularly the way in which it’s not always a bed of roses. It’s not quite at Nick Hornby levels for me, who is my gold standard for these kind of topics, but it is very readable and fun.
7/10 – occasionally profound, often funny and always warm-hearted.
[*]I’m aware I keep talking about this without saying what it is. That’s deliberate.
Remix is another “indie”. I bought it for I think 99p when it was in the top 10 kindle books.
Caz Tallis makes and repairs rocking horses in her London flat. She’s somewhat surprised one morning to discover what looks like a vagrant and his dog on her roof-top patio since he must have climbed up there somehow. She’s even more surprised when she realises this is Ric Kealey, lead singer of the band The Voices, not least because he supposed to have been dead for the last three years.
After this intriguing opening what follows is a crime thriller that focuses on Caz trying to help Ric sort out some issues from his past and discover exactly who is responsible for some of the things he was accused of.
Remix is not a bad book. It’s certainly very readable and the plot has enough questions and diversions to keep you interested and guessing. I’d say the pace is a little sedate at first but the nearer the end you get the more things pick up. There’s quite a bit more violence toward the end of the book than the tone of the writing before that point might lead you to suppose.
I also felt like some of the characterisation was lifted from a chick-lit novel and placed in a crime story. It may be that was deliberate and the target audience was people who enjoy both those genres but for me the setting up of the two rivals for Caz’s affections and their relative character qualities felt a bit too cliched. Having said that it didn’t dominate the story and it wasn’t wrapped up as neatly as I’d expect in a pure romantic novel (I did wonder if that was to make space for a sequel).
So I’m a little behind on my write-ups. And this is a bit of a problem because I tend to forget the details of a book I’ve read quite quickly. Also I’d like to catch-up today so expect multiple short posts.
Perfect People is one of those books that has a SciFi premise but is not written by a SciFi writer or in a SciFi way. I’m thinking of things like Children of Men. The premise here is that of “designer babies” i.e. that it will be possible to control and select the genetic traits an embryo has before implantation.
John and Naomi have recently lost their four year old boy to a genetically inherited condition. The idea that they can exclude this possibility from a further child is obviously hugely attractive, however the doctor they approach for this offers them far far more than simply avoiding disease. Looks, intelligence, athletic ability even temperament are on the menu. And then there’s more unusual traits such as the ability to survive on less sleep and calories than a regular person. As you can guess things don’t go exactly as they expect.
Perfect People is quite a fun read though I think it’s a little long. The first part of the book is largely set up, explaining the ideas and setting out the scenario where by the genetic shenanigans can take place. After they become pregnant and have the offspring it becomes very much like Midwich Cuckoos. There’s also a sort of thriller element in that an extremist religious group has taken exception to this tampering with nature and they are hunting the couple.
It definitely has its moments and the premise is interesting. It explores the ideas a little but a more serious examination would probably require a less fantastical version of what exactly is possible. The characters are subservient to the plot and things like the state of their marriage, a supposed infidelity and so on seemed to take centre stage when needed but fade into the background at other times.
Well the awesome power of RED means I’ve finished another book that I’ve previously stalled on, which is obviously a good thing.
The Book Thief is a novel narrated by Death and tells the story of a young girl, Liesel Meminger growing up in war-time Germany. As the story begins she’s taken to live with foster parents as her mother can no longer cope and her ill younger brother dies on the way there. We follow Liesel, her best friend Rudy and her new Papa and Mama as she learns to read, to love books and grows up. Her new family are poor and not exactly sympathetic to the Nazi regime they’re living under, so life is hard I guess, though through the eyes of a child this is just the way the world is.
This was a weird one for me. At any individual point when I was reading it I was aware of how well it was written. The characters are vibrant and engaging, colourful and alive. The use of language is clever and playful. And yet I really had to push myself to finish it. I had a sense of plodding through it. Partly I think this was because the story exists as a series of anecdotes about a girl growing up, and whilst some of these are major events and part of a bigger story – both in terms of what was going on in the world but also in terms of her life – a lot are just little incidents that illustrate what that life was like – hard, joyous, confusing, exciting and so on. I suppose after about half way through the book I wanted more of just “the story” and less of the illustration.
I would recommend this book though because I do think it is well written and it has the power to move you. It’s light in places but not a light read. I was just thinking that you could write the same story without the need for Death to take a role as an actual character, but then I think he’s there to underline a point.
7/10 – A well-written book that may be a tough read for some, but worth it I think.
So that was 7 books in January, well ahead of schedule. I’ve stalled a little in that I haven’t read very much in the 4 days since I finished it – a paltry 14 pages. I guess that makes it nice that I’ve got a bit of a lead on the target. I was aware when I started this new regime (and remember I started unofficially back in November) that the possibility existed to ‘burn out’ by reading too much too quickly and then just needing a break. I am still wary of that – I’d rather read 50 pages a day every day than hit 50+books but have weeks off at a time. Well I say that but it’s nice to feel like I’m doing well at something…
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.
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.
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.
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.
Normally I start these reviews with a brief synopsis of at least the first part of the story, to give an idea of what the book is about as well as what I think of it. That’s tricky here because there’s so much to cover. Let me try…
Set in a fantasy world that’s similar to but clearly not medieval Europe/Asia, most of the action of A Game of Thrones takes place in the land of Westeros a.k.a “The Seven Kingdoms”. Some few centuries previously these were distinct kingdoms but they are now ruled over by a single monarch from the “Iron Throne”. This monarch, King Robert Baratheon took the throne by conquest from the previous “mad” king and has been ruling for 20 years or so.
As the story begins there is trouble brewing with threats to the throne from within – political machinations, assassination and intrigue at court and without with the remaining heirs of the old kings who are trying to raise an army to attack from overseas. There’s also a possible threat from the frozen north beyond a huge wall to defend against outlaws and the mythic White Walkers, zombie like creatures which many believe have been extinct for thousands of years, if they ever existed at all. The outlaws and wild animals though are real and it’s the job of the Night Watch to guard the Wall and defend the Seven Kingdoms.
A Game of Thrones is one of those books that switches point of view with each chapter headed with the name of a character. We follow about 6 or 7 characters in this way. I have mixed feelings about this. On the on hand it’s good to get the perspective of different characters with different loyalties and motivations. To start to empathise with someone who is on the opposite side of a war to the character in the previous chapter is good in that it stops everything being a kind of black and white morality – which some fantasy suffers from. However the action is then split across different places and Martin plays that trick of building up the tension nicely, coming to a cliff-hanger at the end of a chapter and then switching to a completely different story, which slowly becomes engrossing, tension builds… and so on. It’s a style that has its merits but can be frustrating too.
I definitely enjoyed this book and it was easier to finish than say Under the Dome. In this book whilst there are fantasy elements – the White Walkers, talk of dragons (once again presumed extinct), magic and years-long seasons (“Winter is Coming” is the slogan of one of the Northern kingdoms) – most of the story is to do with the intrigue and politics of gaining or retaining the Iron Throne. With a slight change of wardrobe it could be a 21st century political thriller. But it is engrossing and the characters are well drawn and sympathetic.
A Game of Thrones is part of a series – A Song of Ice and Fire – which is currently up to five books with at least one more on the way. So the story does not so much end as it does find a convenient place to break off. In fact there are plots unresolved, characters missing in action and so on. That said it did feel like a natural place to put a pause but given this I’d’ve been just as happy if that pause had been at 400 pages rather than 835. Still good for the page count.
Will I read the next five books? Perhaps. I’ll read some shorter ones first though.
8/10 – Good solid fantasy with sympathetic characters, an intriguing world set up and lots of intrigue.
There’s something I feel I need to get out of the way — especially since I shall probably be reviewing at least a couple more Discworld books in the next few weeks[1] — so if you just want to get to the review then by all means skip down to the picture of the book cover and the sentence beginning ‘So to the book itself‘
I remember when my good friend Dawn lent me the first Discworld book The Colour of Magic. It was 1987 and I was temporarily between university courses and unemployed. I read it in a day because it was that rare and delightful thing, literally un-put-downable. I’d never read anything quite like it before. I was only 19 but still I was an avid, if quite narrow, reader.
Over the next decade or so I read every new Discworld book as soon as it came out[2] in paperback[3] and whilst they weren’t always great they were always pretty reliably good. A pleasant familiarity with the author’s voice and themes, and of course great characters.
But gradually I found that I was reading them less quickly. What had been devouring them in great chunks, if not at a single sitting, had become a little each day. But then my circumstances had changed. I was no longer a student and the 15minute bus ride to work and the 10-20mins before I fell asleep at night seemed more appropriate than staying up until the early hours. A small part of me even liked eking out the pleasure over a longer period. After all, even at Mr Pratchett’s prolific rate you’d still have months to wait for the next one.
At a certain point I stopped reading them. Although it never really felt that way, it just felt like I’d had the latest book waiting to be read lying around a long time, long enough for the next one to come out. Around about the same time I was “branching out” and trying to read other authors and other genres. A year or two after that I’d moved down here and I was tending to fall asleep after watching TV and reading generally had gotten squeezed out[4].
After that I always felt that one day I’d get back into reading again and go through my Discworld backlog and catch up. I was vaguely aware that some books were getting good reaction and that there were new “great” Discworld books but I also knew that I, in my anal way, would have to plough through all the less-great ones rather than read out of order[5]. M., herself a Discworld fan[6], added to this because she was still reading every new book when it came out and had her own favourites. I understand though that she herself has now gotten a few books behind and is a little less enthused.
So what? Why does any of this matter? Well of course it doesn’t, except to put in context the vague feelings of guilt I have about not utterly loving each new Discworld book. Yesterday I read most of Jingo, having started it (again) on Friday. But it was less about the sheer joy of this new thing, this wonderful humour, or even familiar pleasures, than it was about another 400pages and something to do on a Bank Holiday where it was too hot to feel energetic.
It was fun – more of that below – but there was also a sense of knowing the well-worn rhythms of Pratchett’s writing style. I could see where the jokes were coming from and they made me smile mostly, occasionally I found myself thinking “yeah, yeah, get on with the story”.
Forgive me Terry, I have not kept faith and have grown weary. However I do plan to read at least two more Discworld books so perhaps I can learn to love them again. Or at least see them with fresher eyes.
So to the book itself…
Jingo
Jingo is the story of a war between Ankh-Morpork and Klatch. It starts with the re-surfacing from the sea of an island called Leshp, which quickly becomes the source of (flimsy excuse for) a territorial dispute.
From a Discworld point of view what you need to know is that this is primarily a Watch book. So the key characters are Vimes, Carrot, Angua, Nobby and Colon, together with some new Klatchian ones. And although I said it was about a war, it’s really about the political intrigue leading up to war, and, since this is a Watch book, ‘political intrigue’ is really a fancy term for crimes by posh and/or foreign folk. So we’re firmly in Vimes’ country here.
Apart from Pyramids, an early favourite, I tend to prefer Discworld books that stick to one setting[7] and Jingo takes place partly in Ankh-Morpork, partly on board ships and partly in Klatch. I think I preferred the Ankh-Morpork sections, perhaps because that feels more properly like Vimes’ natural setting.
I was all set to give this book a lower score, I was telling myself that I hadn’t enjoyed it as much as I should (see above) but then within the last fifty pages something happened. First what I had thought might be Pratchett’s common inability to get to an ending turned out instead to be a proper ending – even though we had hit the climax of the story some ways before, the final sections played out in what seemed a natural and pleasing way. It didn’t feel overlong.
Second it ended – no spoiler this – on a scene with Commander Sam Vimes of the Watch reminding me that I actually like this character, and that itself reminded me that what Terry’s great at is creating characters that you want to spend more and more time with.
Oh and of course – war is bad.
7/10 – Vimes of the City Watch brings a whole new perspective on the phrase “prosecuting a war”.
[1]Ship of Fools book club are doing Carpe Jugulum in July and I realised that I’m only 2 (now 1) books away from that so I decided to alternate between discworld and non-discworld books between now and then.
[2]Well at first. Keep reading.
[3]Hardback always felt like an extravagant waste of money to me. Now that I am reading again and can afford hardbooks I tend to buy Kindle versions instead.
[4]Which is kind of odd. The time in my life when I had the most free time was the time when I seemed unable to find enough of it for various things, including reading.
[5]There are those that suggest that there are other orders in which to read the books rather than strictly by publication date. I tend to ignore these mad voices.
[6]Though how this term could apply to someone who hadn’t even read Mort when I met her, I don’t know.
[7]Given that The Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic both do this and are easily amongst the best of the books this is blatantly false. However, these are also different from the others in that they are pretty much a tour of the Discworld making jokes along the way, joined loosely by plot. Later books are actually stories in their own right with a proper beginning, middle and end[8].
I confess I was slightly naughty here. I wasn’t supposed to buy any new books in March was I? However the book I was supposed to receive this month that was pre-ordered last year[*] won’t now arrive until April so I put this in as a substitute. Plus I’d just heard it reviewed and it sounded like the kind of thing I’d enjoy. Sometimes you just have to break the rules.
Amsterdam is the second of four books I bought at a second-hand bookshop in the autumn (the first being 
