bani's books

The Mortal Engines series

2012-01-09T19:44:00.001+01:00

Let's save some time and assume I'll read all of these eventually, although now I've only read the first two. I got Maxima the first one for Christmas and she liked it so much she used her Christmas gift vouchers to buy the next two. I'd have read the third except she's plodding through them slowly herself. In an hilarious aside, we learnt yesterday that Minima has struggled through book one when she was in Tunisia last summer - you could've knocked us over with something quite light when she told us. She's normally so anti-fantasy and science-fiction. But she had nothing else to read when her friend had dropped off for the night, so she succumbed. And hated it.

I'm not completely sold either. It reminds me of a bunch of other stuff, ideas slightly cobbled together, and it lacks a little bit of that character depth you need in books of this sort, otherwise it's just cool imagery. Cool here means, like, steampunk. Which is so wow. Second book gets better though. Bonus points for author not being afraid to kill characters. And of course for concept, which is municipal darwinism in extremis and literally so.

It's being filmed, apparently - what isn't, these days? It'll probably end up loud and annoying.

2 x Diana Wynne Jones

2012-01-04T07:23:00.001+01:00

Borrowed two children's books to read during my Christmas holidays - The Magicians of Caprona and Eight Days of Luke. Alright. The former could make a great film in the right hands. It would have to be in Italian, and it would be so much fun with a good Italian fantasy film for kids wouldn't it? Make a change from the anglocentricity of the genre. The latter was amusing with its take on Norse mythology. I liked the open, slightly ambiguous ending.

End of the world

2012-01-03T07:44:00.001+01:00

What better way to start 2012, after such a long hiatus, than with the myth of Cthulhu? Apparently (I read this somewhere) the alleged Armageddon of this year as "foretold" by the ancient Mayans has been linked by some to the entirely fictional Cthulhu monster. Who'd have thunk.

So, The Call of Cthulhu by Howard Phillips Lovecraft then. I'd never read this before, and I must say that I expected more given how influential the concept became in popular culture. The short story is written in that sort of documentary fashion of somebody piecing together notes and snippets of information. I think it workable in say Dracula, but it's not very scary here. Didn't grab me, didn't scare me. A little dull, in fact. Also, don't really see why the freed Cthulhu should so easily be re-imprisoned by a mere earthquake. Hrmpf.

Squeeee!

2011-11-14T21:24:00.001+01:00

Very excited about new Hunger Games trailer! Although it looks a bit average really. Not like it's going to be Kubrick taking on The Shining or anything. But I'm so going to see it. Win win win.

Terry Pratchett: Pyramids

2011-11-13T18:29:00.001+01:00

I'd written a post about this on my phone - pics and everything - but the Blogger app for Android is very unstable and completely melted down when I tried to publish. I had to forcibly restart and do all kinds of things to even erase the faulty post. Piece of rubbish.

So I'm just going to note that I read this and well it's a Pratchett and I enjoyed it. This is the one where the heir to the Faraonic throne is educated as an assassin before having to return to be king. Pyramids - cosmic energy - time - kaboom. There.

Patti Smith: Just Kids

2011-11-09T18:27:00.001+01:00

I'm writing on my way from work to my book club, ergo am tapping away on the phone, ergo no deep thoughts today. Sadly not even a picture of the book in question on my lap; the rental has been returned to the library. ("Rental" because it was overdue and I'll have to pay for my forgetfulness. Oops.) Couldn't get hold of it in English, so read the translation - btw, it's a bit annoying when they don't translate the title, because if you're not up to speed on your library codes you can't tell which search result is the English one and which is the Swedish one. Translation ok, possibly brought out certain repetitions and mannerisms on Smith's writing for the worse. Hard to be sure without reading both obviously.

The book is about Patti Smith's relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe, how they met in the late 60s and how their careers got started in the following decade. Everyone seems to love this book, I've heard no-one gripe about it yet. Me - not sure. A lot of names in it I don't know, especially towards the end. The first half is the best and feels genuine, moving and heart-warming. I feel a great deal of sympathy for these kids and their dreams. I lose interest as the book progresses though. Despite professing to be The Story, honest and true, she seems to be writing more about surfaces. A lot of talk about how artists are special and not like other people - without really explaining the art to me. A lot of talk about how they're all about their inner lives, yet all the time telling me what they're wearing. It starts to feel - horror of horrors - pretentious. And I really don't think she is.

Be interesting to hear the others.

Charlie Higson: The Fear

2011-11-08T07:49:00.001+01:00

Not read so much as skimmed. Can't quite stand all the dying, but I have to know how it all turns out. He ties up some loose ends in this one, bringing different characters together (and then killing them off). "St George's" zombie army is on the march now and becoming a real threat, just as megalomaniac David plants spies to destroy the nerds at the Museum of Natural History from within. It's still bloody terrifying, thank you very much Mr Higson. I think I even dreamt about it tonight.

Terry Pratchett: Nation

2011-10-30T09:52:00.001+01:00

I felt like laughing a little, so I borrowed two Terry Pratchetts that I felt sure I hadn't read. This is one of them, a freestanding novel - not Discworld that is. Just like the Discworld though it's set in a parallell universe.
This one is more like our world, just a little bit different. Starting in something like the Victorian times, a flu epidemic has wiped out the British king and 138 people in line for the throne. The 139th was never expecting to be called on, and is in the Southern Pelagic oceans somewhere trying to forget the tragic death of his wife and baby. The heir's daughter, Ermintrude, is en route to join him already when the ship sails from Britain to find the new royals. At the same time, a tsunami wave wipes out most of the population of a group of small islands in the Pelagic, leaving a young boy named Mau as sole survivor of his village/people, the Nation. The tsunami has also crashed Ermintrude's ship in the island's jungle, and they strike up a friendship while taking care of the other survivors who start drifting in.

This is not a merely funny book, even though there is always satire and wit where Pratchett is, of course. But this is often terribly tragic, as Mau struggles with losing his faith in any Gods, and on his own has to bury all his people. The story is very moving and flows well until about ... well, over 2/3 of the way. The characters are great and it's exciting. The last third or quarter or so is a little disappointing though, because I don't really see the point of it. Maybe there is no point, but it's been sort of laying out signposts for a Point all the way that I can't accept that idea easily.

No analysis, but some thoughts:

Britain/the British really struggle with accepting that the Empire was built on blood, don't they? They cling to this image of friendly if misguided Reverends tottering about the world with butterfly collections, incidentally creating an Empire on the way. One of the tsunami survivor here says something about the Trousermen not being so bad, they just want you to wear trousers and worship their God. I read an article in the Guardian the other week (I don't think it was this one but it was on a similar subject and the comments are much along the same line) on the British Empire and commenters flocked around to say that the Dutch were much worse to have as lords! or the Belgians! But were the Brits so fantastic?

I'd have liked a better resolution of Mau's pain when he sees how his people salvage all these wonderful inventions and tools from the wrecked ship, realising that to them these objects are all rare treasures and to the Trousermen these are just stuff, they hardly even value these marvellous things they have made and own. He struggles with feelings of inferiority and inadequacy. The solution is to find a cave with artefacts that show that Mau's island was originally the center of the world - not satisfactory to me!

I'd have liked the writing to better show when they're speaking which language.

Arnaldur Indriðason: Kvinna i grönt (Silence of the Grave)

2011-10-23T11:01:00.002+02:00

Many many years ago (maybe a lifetime if you happen to be Minimus, maybe even a lifetime if you happen to be one of his big sisters - I don't recall exactly) I read a favourable review about Arnaldur Indriðason and then promptly forgot the name. I remember going to the library and asking the librarian if they had well, it's a detective story? Icelandic? There's an I in the name? She did know the name, told me, and I promptly forgot. (For some reason I couldn't borrow a book right then, maybe it was summer and they were all out. Summer tends to be crime fic time in Sweden.) Since then I have actually come across the name enough times to remember it myself; it's been mentioned somehow or other perhaps once a year and trickled itself into my consciousness. However, I still didn't read the books.

Then my cousin in Dublin gave us the film Jar City and I remembered that this was the fella I'd been meaning to read. So at the earliest possible opportunity (it took ages) I toddled off to the library and borrowed a book at random.

What really made me go and get the book was the film, more specifically Icelandic society as it is described, more specifically (since I am somewhat linguistically interested) the fact that it struck me (us) when watching it that this is a society of first names. Of course, I've always known this, but I never really understood it. It's fascinating. Sweden isn't bad at first-name basis itself, but we have surnames to fall back on, to differentiate between different Johns and Marys. A modern society that doesn't have that - I loved it. When you're used to English and American crime fiction and tv/films, where the officers always walk in asking to speak to doctor Smith/Holmes/von Duckenberg it's mildly unsettling when they walk in asking for doctor Steve. So to speak. Hang on, you think. Is it possible? Does society not collapse?

(Another thought that will make your head hurt: in the Chinese one-child society there won't be any cousins any more. Or aunts or uncles.)

What the film wasn't so much as the book (a bit, but not as much) was humorous. The impression in the book is of a fairly slap-dash attitude to policing professionalism, people get trained in other professions and then stumble into the police force by chance. So you get the feeling that when something happens they can be a little affronted: what the hell do I have to take care of this for? I'm not qualified!

It's quite funny, even though the stories told are tragic. Recommended. (This one is about the finding of a dead body and discovering that it's connected to a wife abuser who lived there in the 1940s, and half the book is set in the past, describing the events that took place then.)

Some Harry Dresden

2011-10-13T16:55:00.001+02:00

Well, I wanted something easy, and the library carries the books. And it's nice and distracting. However, by now I'm rather full and finished with Dresden I feel. I think I'm going to move on to some Terry Pratchett because I'm in dire need of fun. Don't want serious.

I've read the second book, Fool Moon (har har har - it's actually pretty funny, didn't notice the pun until now) and books 6, 7 and 10 - Blood Rites, Dead Beat and Small Favor. I didn't read them in order though, which was an experience in itself, a bit like that film with your man who has no long-term memory and the film shows what's happened to him backwards. You know which one I mean.

Slight Mary Sue warning on The Dresden Files. Not bad though. Really not - all characters are fleshed out and complex enough to avoid the serious Mary Sue-ing. A little too much martial arts, in the sense that you can tell that Butcher has been imagining the fights in his mind beforehand. Down to the last blow. But you can skim a lot of that stuff.

My favourite part of Butcher's writing is that he manages to add in a self-deprecating comment every time things get too cliché. I'd give an example, but I'm not keeping notes. Like, Harry cracks one-liners and then mentally comments on how on-type that was. It shows a nice sense of what we in Swedish call självdistans.

Correction

2011-09-29T08:37:00.001+02:00

I do have something to read.

I'll alternate between this and Harry Dresden.

Tomas Sjöberg (Deanne Rauscher, Tove Meyer): Den motvillige monarken

2011-09-28T19:12:00.001+02:00

Kolla, kungen! På väg till bokcirkeln, hann med tåget med ett nödrop. Detta är dagens bok, av mig lånad på bibliotek. Var ju synnerligen aktuell 2010 då den kom ut, märkligt nog aktuell även nu när kvällspressen skrev om någon intervju som Camilla Henemark gjort nyligen om skandalen. Hon är, för den som missat det, den enda av kvinnorna i denna cirkel runt kungen som namnges, och hon pekas också ut som kungens regelrätta älskarinna. Inte bara utpekas, hon säger det själv och i den ovan nämnda intervjun menar de att kungen erkänt det han också då han talade om att vända blad och sådär.

Boken inleds med en evighetslång beskrivning av kungens uppväxt och familjebakgrund (nazister). Här citeras barnjungfrun, systrar, rektorer, officerare från självbiografier och intervjuer. Bilden vi ska få är av en gosse som inte ville bli kung. Gott så - tråkigt men gott. Sen kommer vi till snasket. Kaffeflickor och allmän sexism, fester, festlokaler som ägs eller hur det nu var av kriminella. Sjöberg säger att han vill lyfta hur anmärkningsvärt och olämpligt det är att vår statschef umgås i sådana kretsar, hur han skulle kunna utpressas osv. Att det inte i första hand är moraliserande så. Men det är det. Jag tycker inte vi får någon analys av kungen, så bakgrunden känns lite jahapp, och den stora poängen är snasket. Klart som sjutton det är moraliserande, och varför inte säger jag. Med en mer fokuserad och ärlig bok hade kanske debatten kring den blivit bättre. Ni dog den i Anne Rambergs upprörda tal om elakt skvaller. Jag tycker att bokens historier är fullt trovärdiga, och hade det rört statsministern hade det tagit hus i helvete. Varför tillåts det glömmas när det rör statschefen? Konstigt konstigt. Men som sagt, egentligen inte jättebra som bok. Läsvärd dock!

I have nothing to reeeeeaaaaaaad!

2011-09-27T22:16:00.001+02:00

So goodnight then.

Nicola Upson: An Expert in Murder

2011-09-25T22:20:00.000+02:00

I actually bought and read this after a tip here on the blog the other day, after I'd written about Josephine Tey (thanks oh swine of madness!). I got so curious, the library didn't have it and I realised they probably wouldn't get it either, so I thought what the hell. Treat myself even though it's an unknown quantity so to speak. Excellent service as per usual at The English Bookshop (link to the right), I ordered online and chose pick-up as delivery option. When I popped in for it your man in the shop said that he'd heard lots of great things about it and that the second one was supposed to be even better, so I was very favourably disposed towards the novel before ever cracking the spine. Although, luckily, not MADLY excited, thanks to the moderate wording of my internet tipper-offer there (a person I've internet-known for years and whose opinion I can trust, I feel) - " I quite enjoyed it, worth looking up for a bit of light fluff" she wrote, and I didn't really expect more then. Good for that, because if I had been I'd've been disappointed.

Mixing fact (she's done a lot of research into Elizabeth MacKintosh aka Josephine Tey/Gordon Daviot) with imagination Upson writes a story about how history, events during the war, catches up with the survivors and their children years later. It's set in London in the 1930s as Josephine Tey comes down for the final week of her play Richard of Bordeaux being performed. On the train she meets and chats with a young fan, who is found brutally murdered later. Everything points to the theatre and the play being involved somehow, especially after there's another murder on the premises.

Idea: grand. In fact, brilliant and creative. Full marks! End result: so-so. I have to say that I can't even completely agree with my friend's opinion of it being fluff, because I found it quite heavy going. Not that it's difficult or obtuse, it's just a bit ... dense. Sluggish and dull in parts. It suffers greatly from ascribing modern ideas on people of the past in my opinion. I find it hard to credit that even a very liberal woman in the 1930s would sit down with a police officer and immediately launch into a description of her sex life. When I compare the language used to the language used in books from that time there's too much of a discrepancy; it feels unrealistic in the extreme when people refer to "their relationships" for example, in manner of Dr Phil or what have you. I start questioning loads of things: did they really refer to boyfriends and girlfriends in a romantic sense as a matter of course? It does not feel right.

Not only men, but women are relatively promiscuous and no-one really bats an eyelid. Several characters are gay, and this also is a little bit too okay with everyone. In one or two places she refers to other people being in the know and thinking it's disgusting and immoral, but on the whole everyone is just so fine with it. And I don't think they were, it feels like white-washing. Being gay, for so many many decades, must have been terribly claustrophobic most of the time - the constant hiding, constant vigilance, constant lying, constant wondering: who knows, who suspects, who might tell, who can I trust. Even in a liberal setting there must have been a strong don't ask don't tell mentality. Can you relax into your love for another person in such an atmosphere? Okay, I'm guessing here, but I'm basing it on what I've read that's actually been written at the time in question. Novels like Ngaio Marsh's always tip-toe around the issue, alluding, insinuating. I find that alone very revealing. So Upson's novel just never feels realistic enough. I'm not being transported to the era in question, and then I sort of wonder what the point is of setting it in the past. If you see what I mean (not sure I do myself). Um, like, if you're too unwilling to face the dirty depressing truth about many of the values of the age and make your fictional characters subscribe to them, then maybe you shouldn't be writing about the past. So, as in for example the Maisie Dobbs novels, the characters become flat and featureless, with their overly modern sentiments and explanations for their actions. Hm.

Josephine herself, oddly enough, is the only character who can become more than that, since she really existed. Some descriptions of things she says, thinks or does are clearly based on Upson's research, and they stand out. I can see how they've been worked into the novel, which makes it too obvious, and the contrast between the too-nice and quite bland fictional character becomes jarring.

I also have reservations against the whole plot and style of the detective story (God, the bitching never ends today, does it?). It starts of seemingly a whodunnit and then becomes some sort of serial killer psychological thriller. A bit messy, a bit incomplete.

I dunno, there's just no meat in it, no flesh and blood and bones. No life. Not compared to Tey herself. Upson completely redeems herself by writing so nicely about Tey though, so NEVERTHELESS - here comes the disclaimer - I still like the book. How could I dislike an author who loves Josephine Tey so much? And she's inspired me so that I intend to buy all Tey's novels, they're certainly worth it and I want to own them. I do I do. And I do want to read Upson's sequels. I just don't know if I want to spend money on them. Hm hm hm. Dilemma. It is supposed to be an improvement though! I shall wait and see if my mad swine can advise me. :)

Anywhoo. Wonder if the library would want this if I'd donate it? Possibly my friend J would like to read it? Should be up her alley of interest. Let me know, peeps.

Spoiled

2011-09-24T20:10:00.001+02:00

Keep losing track of what's happening on stage, because I'm waiting for the murder mystery. This is the fault of Nicola Upson (more on that tomorrow). Also maybe I've read too much Ngaio Marsh in my life. Maybe.

Charlaine Harris: An Ice Cold Grave

2011-09-24T14:35:00.001+02:00

Am sitting on the train, same as every workday, but today is Saturday and I'm headed for the capital to go to the theatre with mah hubby. I'll say this for weekend travel - it's nice, nay fantastic, to have no trouble getting a seat. Amen. So why not avail myself of my seat (including the one next to me since the train is far from full) to write a blog entry? I'm sure you all agree, and with that you-all let's move to the South (well, North Carolina) and re-visit Harper Connolly who sees dead people. Rather, feels them; rather, the presence of their bodies. In this one she discovers the hunting ground of a serial killer, whose anger at being thwarted might lead to her own death. Also, she has a fair bit of fairly explicit sex. Very difficult to read sex scenes on a crowded train I'll have you know. One glances through the page hoping none of the standing passengers will look down and see the phrase "his phallus was long, not as thick as some I'd encountered" (oh Charlaine. Phallus. Why?).
Quite a dark book. I like that side of her, it's genuine I feel. Like I've said a million times. Fluff, but not the worst kind. Reading this I was also struck by how well her books work to describe the minds and culture of the places she writes about. Small-town, semi-rural, bigoted yet capable of goodness America.

Charlaine Harris: Dead to the World

2011-09-23T07:26:00.001+02:00

This is the one in which Eric is cursed by witches, remembers nothing about himself and has to hide out at Sookie's house. And Jason is kidnapped and we're introduced to the were-panthers of Hotshot. I've been wanting to read this in a not-very-active sort of way, because it's been a gap in the storyline for me - read the ones before and after, so knew what would happen but just hadn't read it.

Think I spotted several plot flaws, but I didn't keep notes (you don't when you're standing up reading on a moving fecking train) so don't remember specifics. Things like Sookie guessing something and two pages later treating it as fact. I do so wonder what Harris could turn out if she took her time instead of being so productive, but seeing as all her heroines (bar one) have low-paying jobs, struggling to get by, and Harris clearly writes from experience, I certainly don't blame her for wanting to keep a steady income coming in.

I'd've taken one of those fabulous book-in-my-lap photos, since this was a commuting read alright, but I forgot the book at home today and am tapping this out just before starting a new one. Hey ho.

The Dresden Files by Jim Butcher: Storm Front

2011-09-19T16:29:00.001+02:00

My sister listens to these as audio books, mostly because James Marsters does the reading. She readily admits that her keenness for the Dresden Files may have more than a little to do with Marsters' delicious voice, but claims that they're fun even without this added spice. This is the first novel and introduces Harry Dresden to us in a classic noir private-dick-in-the-office scene. Except Dresden is a wizard. It's a fun idea, a kinda pastisch on noir with a supernatural twist. I suspect that the subsequent books start suffering from that repetition of facts that is the bane of all serials, but so far so relatively snappy. A few lame one-liners. Not too many. Very filmable, but not written as if this is the author's main hope. The image of a tall, lanky guy stumbling around in trackie bottoms, cowboy boots and some sort of trenchcoat while shouting pseudo-latin spells is pretty original. Not all original (hello, Buffy) but ok. Good good. I might read more if I stumble across any.

This is the one in which people's hearts are magically ripped out of their chests by an evil wannabe wizard.

Oh, note to my sis: the love interest is TOTALLY OBVIOUS.

Incidentally

2011-09-12T07:20:00.001+02:00

Parked my bike next to the window of a second-hand book shop ten minutes ago, and walked past their display on my way to the station. Among the children's books I noticed a book by Christianna Brand, about a little Matilda. Huh, don't think I knew that she'd written books for kids. That would be interesting to read ... but I'd want it in English obviously. Note to self, however.

Josephine Tey: The Daughter of Time

2011-09-09T17:14:00.001+02:00

Reread this today. Well, started earlier, but finished today. Read it years ago, but this copy was a gift from my cousin. It's a nice one, because it has the portrait of Richard III on the cover, which is helpful considering that the story starts with that and they keep referring to it. I love this, even though I do lose track of some of the historical characters. Mr Bani started to read it in an attempt at solidarity with my hobbies but he wasn't too keen apparently. Philistene. I wonder if the Babes in the Tower are ever mentioned in the tv series, The Tudors I mean? I think not, right, it starts with Henry VIII doesn't it? And it's his father who is the true murderer, according to Tey. Great book anyway.

Lee Child: The Enemy

2011-09-08T17:52:00.001+02:00

Bought myself this second-hand. Quite enjoyed reading it. It's a prequel, set before Reacher leaves the army, starting just as 1989 turns to 1990. The Berlin Wall is coming down and Reacher discovers that the various fractions in the military are panicking over what the new world order will mean for them. The best part for me was that Reacher and his brother Joe visit their mother in Paris, and she obviously lives right next to where I lived when I was an au-pair. Awesome! Brought back memories that did. Pretty nice complicated plot, but not too hard to follow, despite military jargon and all. Am writing this on phone on the train home, so will try to insert snapshot of book on my lap, on lovely Boden bag my sister gave me.

David Leavitt: The Page Turner

2011-08-22T23:45:00.001+02:00

A present from my cousin in Dublin, who always gives me books. I'd never heard of this and after glancing at the cover asked her sceptically if this wasn't terribly sentimental, but she said no no. I think after reading it I'd say yes, yes. It gets great reviews according to the back, not just from The Gay Times but from more, shall we say, independent press too. But me, I don't really get it.

Sure, it's well written, like. Well, not bad. I mean, maybe a bit too much creative writing workshop over it for my liking, but hey. However, story: A young musician, Paul, is introduced to the world-famous pianist Richard Kennington when he agrees to turn the pages of the music score at a concert in San Fransisco. A few months later they meet again in Italy, and Kennington quite abruptly seduces Paul. They have a brief affair under the nose of Paul's mother, and then Kennington leaves without saying good-bye. When Paul starts school in New York their paths cross again.

First of all - I may be the wrong target audience, but this gay fantasy of young gorgeous men just panting to be seduced by and introduced to the arts of luuuurve by middle-aged (or older!) stooges just rubs me so much the wrong way. Had this been about a heterosexual affair I would have just gagged at the wishful thinking and unpleasantly cradle-snatching-like leanings and put the book down. But just 'coz it's two guys doesn't really make it any less cringe-worthy. Right. Secondly, it's all about first love, being let down, realizing that you're not actually good enough to be the great star you thought you were going to be and coming to terms with that - but it's curiously anaemic and shallow about these deep and life-shattering ideas. All very airy and kicking autumn leaves in Central Park with a jumper over my shoulders and my hair perfectly coiffed. It's reminding me of a film I think, but I can't think which one. Late 80s I think, one of those with more style-of-the-times flair than real feeling (in retrospect), slightly muted colours .... Annoying that I can't put my finger on it! This blogger, The Jade Sphinx, puts it nicely: Leavitt seems to think that less is more when it can just be simply ... less. Thank you for that turn of phrase! Curiously disappointing and empty, in my opinion. Bizarre.

Colin Cotterill x 3 (2? No, let's say 3)

2011-08-21T23:27:00.001+02:00

As previously stated I read Anarchy and Old Dogs before going to Ireland. That's the one in which Dr Siri discovers a plot to overthrow the Communist government and thwarts it. He's not having the Royalists back even if his hopes of an equal and free Lao society are turning to Cold War Communist red tape dust. I liked it so much that I got my cousin the first one in the series - no, the second I think it was. I've yet to read it myself though ironically, and the library doesn't have the first three at all. So I might buy them. However, I'm sort of reading them in order, as I read Curse of the Pogo Stick next and after that The Merry Misogynist. I liked the latter the least; not because it isn't well crafted or whatever, but because it introduces the by now rather cliché serial killer theme. I kept imagining this being filmed. There's already so much on-screen these days portraying violence towards women - rape scenes, naked mutilated bodies, CSI and so on. As Wennstam notes in Alfahannen somewhere, this too serves to objectify, however much the creators may think it's to inform or whatever. Bla bla. Anyway, felt a bit meh, same old same old. Curse of the Pogo Stick was quite obviously written in order to introduce the plight of the Hmong people more than anything else, but that's okay. I liked it better. One con is that there is a fair bit of repetition "Dr Siri remembered how he only a few months ago had ..." and then a quick recap of the last book. You know. But fairly inevitable in this type of literature. Take the good bits and enjoy them, I say! I like these a lot. I think I'll buy myself the first three - I can always donate them to the library after I've read them.

Läsvärt

2011-08-21T19:51:00.001+02:00

En väldigt bra artikel, ett utskrivet tal närmare bestämt, i dagens SVD. Selma är ju ruskigt bra.

Whoohooo let's BURN this candle!

2011-08-20T23:25:00.000+02:00

If you know what cartoon I'm referring to with that line, you win a wink.

Anyway, so we've had a busy summer, during which I have largely not been at the computer. I have been reading however, so shall now try to catch myself up with some posts over the next few days. My husband said something a while ago about how my blog posts were mostly me moaning about how bad the post is and how I have no time to blog - but hey, there you are. It's true and I feel sad about it. All the smart thoughts I have in my head while reading, all the associations and connections I make; even if I make notes I can't get it down. Ah well.

Luckily I've been reading nothing too strenous. I had two weeks holiday before we went to Ireland for another two weeks (where we had an absolutely glorious time) and I'd started two new obsessions then: Eric Ambler and Colin Cotterill. Of the two, Ambler is the easiest to spell, so I'll start with him.

So I opted out of describing the storyline and so on in my last post on Ambler, and I think I'll be continuing mostly in that vein. Keeping track of the titles, that's what's important. Journey into Fear so, I quite liked that. About an English engineer who has a little too much information about Turkish arms for the German agents to want to risk leaving him alone. Instead of a cushy train trip home from Istanbul he gets a shot in the hand and a cramped and shabby boat ride across the Mediterranean, all in the hope of evading the killers. I liked that I learnt about Turkish involvement during the War, about hot salt water baths on cruises ... lots of little interesting titbits. I liked that Turkish agents get to be the good guys. Highly unusual these days. I liked that the hero wasn't that great a person morally (both the hero and his girlfriend were a little too goody-goody in Cause For Alarm). Then I read Judgment on Deltchev, written when Ambler was disillusioned with the Communist regimes and all the high hopes he'd had of great political changes. I found this one a little hard to follow to be honest, which is more due to me being on the road (international travelling y'know) than to shortcomings in the book - but there were a lot of names and a lot of mere reciting of facts to form a background. For this reason it was less exciting as a thriller, but surely an effective analysis and put-down of Communist show trials.

I made a note somewhere about something I wanted to quote, but I lost it. I'll definitely read more Ambler, this is so my kind of political thrillers. Short and sweet. Never mind that I can't always follow the story.

Ursula Le Guin: The Other Wind

2011-08-03T10:00:00.001+02:00

I'd missed reading this, the last part of the Earthsea books. Series. Saga. It does tie up some loose ends that had bothered me previously, but I didn't realise it until I read this. The dragons are explained, the oddness of the depressing afterlife ... Much better way to finish things up that in Tehanu, which I thought was the last one (clearly I never pay attention nor do I do research - The Other Wind is from 2001! Talk about out of it!).I still don't think she should necessarily have resurrected the series after the 1970s classic trilogy, but there you go.

Wheeeeeeeee!

2011-08-02T22:57:00.000+02:00

Going to Ireland tomorrow, the whole lot of us! I'm bringing library books to read on the trip - very daring, but it's two new (to me) authors that I found and now want to read all of. If that makes sense.

And I just wrote a long post that got accidentally wiped. Fuck. Starting over. Annoyed and brief now.

Bringing Eric Ambler books. Have read Cause for Alarm, his fourth, am reading Journey Into Fear. From the Pan Classic Crime editions, they have good introductions by Robert Harris and teach me that Ambler was very anti-fascist and long entertained the view that the Soviet Union was the only hope against fascism. He was disillusioned later on and I'm looking forward to reading those books. I don't think he's pro-Soviet in the books in a too glaringly fawning way - I quite enjoy reading a political thriller that gives some credit to the Socialist movement and its fight against fascism. Actually. Anyway, you have to like an author who was a friend of Hitchcock, to the point of Hitchcock arranging his second wedding. Cool.

The second author I'm bringing is Colin Cotterill. (It's bloody easier to spell Mississippi than that surname, by the way.) He writes about a coroner solving crimes in the newly founded People's Republic of Laos, in other words they're set in the past. They've been compared with Alexander McCall Smith's Mma Ramotswe novels, but the similarities lie mostly in them both being white outsiders writing about a country they love but are really not 100 % a part of. Perhaps slightly idealizing? Cotterill's are definitely grittier. On the other hand, maybe he gets away with it because people in general know feck all about Laos. We think we know lots about Vietnam or Thailand, so writing books set in the 1970s there would be trickier, we'd all be having opinions about veracity. I liked them though, I think he shows nicely how much a lot of people hoped that communism would save Laos, and how it started detereorating into the usual totalitarian depressing greyness too soon. He even manages to introduce a supernatural element without it being shite. Well played. His website is great too, worth a look. Oh, and so far I've read Anarchy and Old Dogs.

Xiaolu Guo: UFO in Her Eyes

2011-08-01T12:19:00.001+02:00

In my youth a long time ago I read a collection of short stories about Chinese peasants and their lives. Give me a year and I might remember the title and author, but it's not likely - anyway, the point is that this was the first time I came across "Miserable China". My image of China was heavily influenced by what one must bluntly call positive racism - people of learning and dignity, with an innate wisdom that they hold on to despite the suffering imposed on them even during Cultural Revolution etc etc. Invented paper and gunpowder, much more advanced really than Europeans etc etc. However, that book and this one talks of life as a peasant in China as dusty, crude, coarse and hopeless. Not only, obviously - but the contrasts between the glittering surface of modern Shanghai and these hamlets that by Chinese standards are tiny (only 300 or so inhabitants) where people still can't read and have no way of independently connecting to the outside world are immense. (I remember when I read the short story collection I was shocked at the language, the swearing. I thought Chinese was automatically more refined. In UFO in Her Eyes the favourite expressions are Bitch Bastard and Cow's Cunt - colourful.)

A recurring phrase in this book is that the poor have to "eat bitterness" and many of the characters sigh and say that they have themselves eaten more than their share. I feel that this pierces me, the utter sadness of that expression. You have to eat bitterness, nothing will get any better. Like an entire people - or social class, rather - steeped in depressive thinking. The sensation numbs your mind, at least mine. I feel it a little too acutely these days.

The story is that Kwok Yun, cycling to the village, is surprised to see a metal disc in the sky. She then finds a foreigner injured in a field. She takes him home, treats him, but when she goes to get more herbs he disappears. An investigation is launched into the events by Beijing and the local authorities - both the UFO event and the foreigner's unexpected presence. The result is that the little village starts receiving more money for improvements and transforms, and suddenly the backwardedness that the villagers themselves derogated in the beginning shows itself as something quite precious, something maybe worth saving. Why can they not be given the means to a better life without being asked to lose themselves in "progress" directed at outsiders? The satire is sharp, and it's both funny and tragic. Mostly tragic, to my eyes.

It's set in the immediate future, starting 2012, and is written as a series of reports from the police and other officials. I don't know if that gimmick is necessary, but it does enable Guo to poke fun at the paranoical rhetoric of the Communists. Recommended.

Charlie Higson: Double or Die

2011-07-30T12:19:00.000+02:00

Why not? I said to myself, and read the third book in the Young Bond series, since the first wasn't in. In this one Bond and his group of friends discover that Eton's teacher of mathematics has been kidnapped, since he sends them a coded letter that only the student crossword buffs can decode. Pretty much same as last time. I pondered a little on how it seems as though Higson is gradually breaking Bond down into a sociopath, but I'll have to read more of the books to tell. I also think boarding schools seem so shite. And that's it from the Efficient Blogging Machine.

Jasper Fforde: The Last Dragonslayer

2011-07-29T11:00:00.002+02:00

His kiddie book, borrowed 'coz I saw it. Funny, but Fforde can be a bit tiresome when there is too much Clever floating about and there is a bit here. Nonetheless I enjoyed it and wouldn't mind more of this universe. I like the idea of the Ununited Kingdom etc. Read about it more somewhere else, we're on an efficiency roll here!

Kathy Reichs: Spider Bones

2011-07-28T23:00:00.001+02:00

Borrowed this in the large print edition, which feels a bit like reading a shout. Anyway, I've gone of Reichs quite a bit, her writing isn't great even if I like THE REAL BONES thankyouverymuch as a heroine and find the actual facts interesting. This is the one where they find a dead man who turns up as reported dead and buried during the Vietnam war, and then find more bones that might be him and go to Hawaii. It's a bit slow and choppy. But still - a fairly good travel book.

Charlaine Harris x 2

2011-07-28T00:08:00.000+02:00

One I own, Club Dead, one I recently borrowed, All Together Dead (had a fabulous library haul!). I haven't been following True Blood lately and I don't read the books in any order, only one now and then as they happen to cross my path, so the storyline in Sookieverse is jumping all over the place for me. In Club Dead she turns down a nice romp with the were Alcide because she's faithful to her man Bill who is captured by his maker Lorena in cahoots with the king of Mississippi (seen that bit in the True Blood version), whereas in All Together Dead she's not with Bill at all 'coz he LIED to her and now she's with this were-something or shifter or whatever named Quinn instead and they go to this convention thing and there's a bomb. I remember turning over a book in the series (where? where was I? where did I see this book?) and reading that she gets together with Erik the vamp later on, so my timeline is totally unsequenced here.

(Basically I only want to note down the titles so I can keep track of which ones I've read.)

I done gone did a good deed

2011-07-18T17:48:00.001+02:00

A colleague and I got to talking today about how she'd seen all the Twilight films recently and ended up reading the final book to see what would happen. She was surprised at herself because the book was so thick (cue me "one should never judge a novel in advance based on the number of paaaaaaages it's all about the stoooooooryyyyy...") and because it was fantasy. So she was rather pleased with this venture into a new genre, and I immediately tipped her off about the Sookie Stackhouse series. And I wasn't snarky about Twilight.
And now I'm off on my holidays. Good times.

Jack London: A Daughter of the Snows

2011-07-15T22:01:00.004+02:00

If I ever ventured to surmise based on my positive recollections of one book that Jack London maybe was worth reading, could write or anything else of a positive nature - consider it revoked. I take it all back. The man was, and his writing still is, obnoxious, chauvinist, monotonous and most of all despicably through-and-through racist, in the vilest pseudo-scientific manner. This book made me gag many many times. All my former prejudices were proven true. Before Adam must be an anomaly; I'm guessing since it's all imagination there's no room for ranting about how Native Americans must be inferior to Europeans (especially the Nordic "races") because otherwise why would the Europeans have won?

Utter utter shite. Avoid avoid avoid. I took notes but it was ages ago and frankly I don't feel it's worth the effort now (three months later).

Bill Bryson: Made in America and The Lost Continent

2011-07-14T22:02:00.001+02:00

Oops, I had started a blog post on Made in America. Silly me. On March 30th as a matter of fact - well, I have no trouble repeating myself, so here goes again. (My husband has pointed out that most of my blog is me complaining about how I never get to blog, how crap I am at blogging, how I never have time for it and so on in aeternum. He isn't wrong. But I got defensive. You had to be there.) I remember now that I had planned to write about these two together since they're both about America. A thematic blog entry, like. Possibly I even had very smart things figured out. I distinctly remember thinking as I read the one that aha! he write about that in the other too! but I'm drawing a blank now and didn't keep notes.

Anyway, so you all should read both. The Lost Continent is about Bryson driving across America to rediscover the country he has left and the road trips of his childhood. It's also I think a form of grieving process since his father's death; this is never the main point, but now and then Bryson's memories are very touching and poignant. Since the book is by now a little older (first published in 1989) it's also by way of being an historical document, almost. Made In America is about linguistics, about how that special kind of English called American evolved. It's tremendously interesting for those of us who like that sort of thing. I especially enjoyed the bits about the oldest records, Pilgrims and all.

Very much recommended, always.

George Sylvester Viereck: The House of the Vampire

2011-07-13T19:00:00.004+02:00

This entry was started May 3d this year, FYI. I downloaded this novel to the Aldiko because the author is written up as the man who introduced gay pulp fiction. I was curious alright? No harm in that.

I was disappointed not so much because I take a particular interest in gay pulp fiction (oh how I long to look at the traffic stats to the blog after this post) but because it was an incredibly boring book. Sure, there are a few ambigious scenes in the beginning, gazing at flushed cheeks and so on, but that's very brief. You'd have to be deep inside the closet to feel that those snippets make it worth your while to plough through this over-wordy, unsuccinct blablabla novel.

The idea is that the vampire feeds on not blood, but talent. Charismatic, magnetic and generous, the New York Count rules his select circle of admirers and hangers-on, singling out one young wannabe at a time as a special protegé, and then dumping them when he's sucked them dry, no one knows how. They shuffle off, brains emptied of ideas, wraiths of their former selves.

You'd think it'd be interesting, but no. Something to read for the sake of research, that's it. By the way, the post was longer an hour ago but the internet ate it. Another FYI.

Lasse Berg: Skymning över Kalahari

2011-07-11T18:00:00.003+02:00

This book is not translated, but you never know: it might be. Or at the very least someone may write a very similar book in English, and then one can, you know, draw parallells, should one so wish. The title means "dusk over the Kalahari". Lasse Berg is a Swedish journalist who has reported from many war zones over the years, and says that until quite recently he believed in the old idea that humans were intrinsically dark creatures, prone to aggression and violence when thwarted. "The veneer of civilization" you know. Survival of the fittest and throw the weak ones overboard, that sort of thing. Then he started reading about recent research into our earliest development, and changed his mind.

Maybe we're not aggressive, maybe we're more like the laid-back bonobo ape that solves conflicts through sex than the more belligerent common chimpanzee? A simplification that may not, according to the Wikipedia articles, be the whole truth on the bonobo. Berg also spends time with the bushmen of the Kalahari, the people who are most likely closest to the earliest humans, the ones who eventually left Africa. The reasoning is that the bushmen are the ones that never left. He describes an essentially lazy (in a postitive sense), generous and non-violent culture, where you talk your way out of problems and assume that all resources are shared. He writes about how, looking up at the African night sky, he feels a strong connection to our pre-historic roots. This is what we were made for. We spent millenia in Africa, slowly evolving. We lived in small groups of 30-35 individuals, we worked together gathering food, then ate it together, sharing all - and then told each other stories and danced (Berg's explanation of how important dancing is to humans is extraordinarily thought-provoking. It throws new light on the famous cave paintings and offers an explanation to why I always cry like a baby when I large groups of people dancing or singing together). Our bodies and brains weren't made for sedentary lives and a diet consisting of dairy and grain - this is, comparatively speaking, a recent anomaly, he claims. The differences between our species' males and females is not at all as great as with for example gorillas or chimpanzees, which shows that we're more equal, by nature. Males have nothing to gain by being alpha - instead several men and women live together, mind the kids, and chatter and bonk their way through conflicts.

I couldn't help thinking about the story of the Garden of Eden. It's so similar that it's almost as if that story has been handed down through the ages from our exile from Africa. Think about it - the first humans live a free and largely equal life off the bounty of nature. All they need can be picked or fished or hunted, and there is a wide range of foods. Then something happens, and they move away from Africa to a new land, where the climate is a little harsher. They become more dependent on being settled - indeed, finally do settle completely and cultivate the land. Now they have to work hard for the majority of the day to get food, they form larger societies and discover hierarchies, governments - oppression in a whole new sense. Women become more and more subordinate. Chattel, as Veblen would have it. All scaringly similar to the Biblical story, I feel, although childbirth was probably never a walk in the park.

Anyway, all that folds if his theories don't hold up. I think they do, to a large extent, but it becomes difficult to sort through what is actually more or less proven, through scientific methodical research, and what is merely Berg being optimistic and feeling things. This was the book club book time before last (yes, I'm that far behind), and the club generally felt that it wasn't scientific enough, with just too many sweeping generalisations. Sort of "he ain't wrong, but is he right?". But we had a great discussion, which was fun. The book was my suggestion too, so I felt a little proud - one of the choices from the shortlist I drew up.

So - is it good? Well, definitely worth reading and, like I said, thought-provoking. Also - heartening! It feels good to think that we're not all doomed. Even though we can never completely return to Eden we can at least try to mimic some of Eden's qualities in our modern life. I'm going to read his sequel, I found it that interesting.

Charlie Higson: Blood Fever

2011-07-08T17:45:00.001+02:00

The Young Bond series, so - y'see I'm experiencing withdrawal waiting for the next zombie books. Which, by the way, is set to be an everlasting series now, and I can't say I'm very pleased. Chances are it'll just go on and on and on like fecking Tribe. Anyway, so I took a chance at the library with this. From whence, by the way, it is probably overdue by now. I believe this is the second book, but don't let that stop you, you don't seem to need to read them in order. I am actually very impressed by the level of action, by how closely Higson follows the Bond template (exotic location, eccentric megalomaniac crook, girl interest - Young Bond isn't that into it though - , explosions, fast boats and cars and so on). Bond is just not a psycopath/sociopath. Yet? Shall we follow him as he gets older and his mind more perverted? (Recently watched a bit of that Bond film with Roger Moore and Jane Seymour, the Haiti voodoo one - Live and Let Die, that's it - what a bunch of psycho racist shite. And Bond's the psycho - the voodoo seems reasonable by contrast.) I think I might borrow a few more this summer for light entertainment. I like his style. I like how he's set things in the 30s or so too. Clever!

Summary: this is the one where young Jimmy-oh is on/in (which is it? surely on?) Sardinia and meets a lunatic art-collecting local "prince" who has kidnapped the sister of one of his schoolmates. All coincidental of course - if real life was like James Bond storylines the police would solve all crimes. They'd go into shops to get a fresh pack of cigarettes and overhear the crooks making plans behind the deodorant shelves.

Bill Bryson: At Home (maybe also Made In America)

2011-07-07T17:15:00.001+02:00

My husband gave me this for our wedding anniversary on the 15th of June, and I didn't read it at first because I thought I'd save it, and reward myself with it after finishing all the blog posts that are waiting - but what the hell. Just a quickie then.

Bill Bryson writes this while living in what used to be a rectory, built during the Victorian era for a mr Marsham, one of those many English vicars for whom a prosperous style of life was about to change. Struck by idiosyncrasies of the building he decides to write a book about our homes - where, after all, most of history takes place even though no-one sings about it. When did our rooms begin to get their functions? Why do we have salt and pepper on the table? How dark was it before electricity? (Pretty damn dark is the answer.) The idea is great. Wandering through the hall you get a history of the hall going from the ONLY room of the house where EVERYTHING happens to a mere passageway. It's tremendously entertaining and educational in a strokey-beard did-you-know way. If I could only remember things I read I'd be full of Fascinating Facts by now - as it is my brain hasn't even retained the famous name of the man who engineered the Crystal Palace oh it did actually: Paxton. All is not hopeless. Mostly I remember disgusting anecdotes about rats and filth. The mind doth dwell on that which it is full of, I suppose.

My quibble is that it isn't, really, distinctive enough from Bryson's other works in the same vein. Admittedly, I haven't actually read A Short History of Nearly Everything, but I understand that I am not wrong in making presumptions about it. I have read Made in America, but apparently not written about it, since a search gives me nothing. What the hell am I playing at with this blog??? One wonders. Anyway, I have read Made In America which taught me lots of interesting things about American history and words. And my point is that the anecdotes tend to be of the same type. Not that I'm not entertained, but while Made In America does stick to the history of American words and thus does what it says on the box, there is actually not enough home for me in At Home for it to have, in my opinion, fullfilled all promises. The anecdotes to digress a little too much. But who's quibbling, I certainly am not really. I'm not the editor. I was amused and learnt a little and am happy. Go Team Bryson!

A seriously collaborated mystery

2011-07-06T12:47:00.000+02:00

Will this be readable? Clicky. I am intrigued.

Summertime

2011-06-27T07:16:00.001+02:00

Summertime means changes in the train schedule, so the 7.13 departs directly from Uppsala instead of coming in from the North (i.e. Tierp), which means that those of us who are always there early have the pleasant luxury of being able to step aboard a waiting train and choosing our seats, instead of jostling like it's the last lifeboat off the Titanic. This is off topic, but it needed to be crowed over.

Diana Wynne Jones: The Dalemark Quartet

2011-06-25T17:15:00.001+02:00

I had a sudden urge to read some Wynne Jones, after Minimus having a phase of watching our dvd of Howl's Moving Castle again. So when we were at the library at one point during a gloriously extended weekend (thank you Christ for ascending and thank you government for 6 of June being a holiday - that was five days of work that was and a half day the day before - oh yeah, thank the union for that) I borrowed all four books of the Dalemark story.

I get a bit vexed with myself for wasting my fantasy-mad childhood reading Alexander Lloyd, who frankly is monotonous when you devour all his books at pretty much once, when I could have been reading Wynne Jones instead. Nothing and no-one is perfect, but Wynne Jones has a lovely wry sense of humour that isn't limited to goofy side-kicks. I like that. At the same time she introduces very difficult subjects in her books.

In the first one in this quartet the father in the travelling family of Singers is murdered before the eyes of his children. The mother then, who never wanted the travelling life but stayed out of loyalty, promptly returns to her noble family. The children are welcome to come too, but it's clear that she is making her choice regardless of them. A sort of coldness. In the second book a boy joins a resistance movement with terrorist leanings egged on by his feckless mother. It's clear that he too is very much on his own and that the world is full of adults prepared to murder children.

These first two introduce two different sets of people, from the free North and the controlled and ruthless South, and it's obvious that they will somehow meet and join for the conclusion. The third book however surprised me by jumping back in time, to a very distant past in the history of Dalemark. This serves to provide a background to the mythology and culture of Dalemark. We understand who the Undying beings are who helped the children in the second book, what the foundations are for some of the common superstitions are. But as a story itself ... in a way I liked it the least, because I expected something else after reading the first two. But at the same time I liked it best, because it differed so. It follows a family of children/teenagers who have to flee their village, the only place they know. After their father's death the other villagers become increasingly suspicious of the kids, who both look and behave differently. The land is at war with some people called Invaders, and the children, whose mother was not local, resemble them. They manage to escape the mob by taking their boat down the flooding river and make for the coast. On the way they meet the Undying and start to learn more about themselves and who they really are and what magic they can do. Our narrator is the middle daughter who has been taught to weave, and who learns how the words that she puts in the fabric of her rugcoats can help shape events while describing them. The whole thing gives an impression of a mapless age, where all beyond your village is the unknown, where the king means little except a sword - and not necessarily for protection. Despite it being a road trip story it feels tremendously claustrophobic. Maybe it's the river? The trees overhead and the hidden landscape beyond the river bends can be used to convey an oppressive feeling alright. Even towards the end when the kids are taking charge of events the feeling remains - because they're still stuck in their society, with war and death.

I must re-read it some day.

Well, book four does indeed wrap it up. It does it quite well, and start by throwing us into the future. This too is odd, because it shows a modern Dalemark with cars and pollution, despite us knowing (it is a kid's book) that the good guys win.

Um, that'll do. This post was brought to you by my HTC. I had to come back and edit it on the computer, stupidly enough. This mobile blogging doesn't leave a post looking so hot!

Edited 2011-07-04 to fix typo, see comments. Also to point out what I meant to point out before about book 4: how interesting it is with a fantasy series, which as usual is set in some sort of unspecified alternative world's PAST, that takes you into the PRESENT of that world, thus making it fairly ordinary. I meant to get that sentence in there somewhere!

Happy Anniversary Day + 1!

2011-06-16T16:29:00.000+02:00

Our wedding anniversary was yesterday, we've been married fifteen years. To celebrate, my journey home after work was marred by a late bus and a cancelled train. But no matter! Mr Bani got me a lovely surprise present: Bill Bryson's At Home. Just perfect! - I was looking at that myself on Amazon, wondering whether to hit the buy button. He's a genius for getting good gifts. (I bought him an orchid, which - well, at least it was something.)

Artikel om Dorothy Sayers i SvD

2011-06-05T23:17:00.002+02:00

http://www.svd.se/kultur/gatfull-deckardam_6218343.svd

Kommentera gärna om du är positiv, så dränker vi den märkliga person som tycker att Läckberg (!?!?!?!) är bättre.

Re-reading Harry Potter

2011-05-28T18:12:00.000+02:00

I'm on the train at the moment with HP and The Order of the Phoenix in my bag. Sadly, in oh so many ways, that book is as thick as ... oh I dunno - maybe six Gutenberg bibles? not to mention the fact that it's the hardback kiddie edition. I.e. it's conspicuous as hell and I'm too embarrassed to take it out on a packed train. With the ease built into this Blogger phone app I could take a photo of its massiveness, but due to the above I won't.

I went on this Harry P kick after we watched the last film again not long ago. Of all the films it's my favourite. They manage to convey a feeling of bleakness and realism that lifts the story to a better level. All good science-fiction and fantasy should, ironically, be realistic. I'll get back to that when I write my Tolkien post someday THIS YEAR - see how I've committed myself now? I read that part two of The Deathly Hallows is going to me more spectacular though, all effects and 3-bloody-D I suspect. How utterly boring, predictable and disappointing.

My very favourite part of the film is the telling of the story of the three brothers, done as a sort of shadow puppet show. When I was little we saw a lot of high-quality children's programmes of that type on tv, since Swedish television bought in bulk from Eastern Europe. I've always been a real sucker for miniatures, stop-start animation and the like. There's an unbeatable dreamy quality to them. That animated sequence to me really made the whole film, and Emma Watson reads it beautifully. In fact it was much better than I remembered in the book, where the story made no impression on me that I could recall. Hence - re-reading. I started with The Deathly Hallows and am working my way backwards.

I used to diss Rowling as a writer, but I'm more sympathetic to her now. I can appreciate what she's trying to achieve. Nonetheless it's more than a little frustrating to think how great the books could be if they'd been edited to be a bit sparser, with less repetition and monotonous shouting. However, this is the adult me thinking. She never really wrote for me, but for a bunch of kids who didn't want it to ever end and at that age you positively revel in repetition and one-liners.

Aw shite, the bus is packed too. With school kids which would make the reading the book doubly awkward ... How they'd stare!

Much more than last time I found TDH very moving. I bawled my eyes out frankly. A lot of that is the more poignant feel of the film affecting the reading experience though. To my taste the books are too explicit and detailed to allow me as reader to be stricken by the emotions the writer wishes to convey. Less is more - but again, it's for kids and they need things spelled out. Hell, I'm risking a read now. I'll never meet any of these people again (I usually take the earlier bus).

Right, final instalment of the post now, at home in the comfort of my own living-room, and after several days and re-reading accomplished all the way back to book 3, The Prisoner of Azkaban. Book 1 and 2 are somewhere else .... no-one knows where so they won't be read.

Been pondering the writing style a lot. Plenty of people have written more about that elsewhere I'm sure, about how the books grew in complexity and maturity just as the readers grew up with them. I find myself liking the early child-style ones. I think by the time the books had turned into bricks with more adult issues inside Rowling was so famous that they didn't dare tell her to edit or re-write. Pity! However, am consumed with sudden envy, madly jealous of those kids who grew up with this series. Imagine being part of this international community longing for and reading and discussing the books as they came along! And then, all together, savouring the last one. I'm always too late for stuff like this! Also have been pondering how the films must have influenced how people read the books. The imagery, the actors. How they've grown up with the books just like the readers or audience.

Noticed that I've clearly never seen HP and the Half-Blood Prince - odd that I've missed that one! Had no visual memories of any of the things happening in that story. (My eldest daughter is a fan, you see, so I've had no choice but to see them.) I'll have to rectify that oversight.

I think Rowling has fantastic imagination, but can't always live up to it in writing. But I'd like to see her write something new. I'd like to see if she's developing. Re-reading the books I see so much promise, and I totally understand why the series became such a hit.

Scarlett Thomas: The End of Mr Y

2011-05-08T12:16:00.001+02:00

So this is the one the conductor (ticket inspector?) in my previous post liked so much she had to lean over and tell me. That sounded snarky, but I'm not taking the piss, honestly. I like the community of readers. I posted the picture on Facebook too and my editor friend said it'd be interesting to hear what I thought, because they'd turned it down themselves. So the pressure is on, people.
I've seen The End of Mr Y for months in book shops (well, actually I've only been looking in the one book shop, namely Pocket Shop at the train stations, where I sometimes browse when my fecking train is delayed/cancelled) and been intrigued by the cover (for reference, see previous post). Apparently it's won some sort of award - had to google a bit now to make sense of what a "Nibbie" award is, but found it. It was also LONGlisted for the Orange Prize - but didn't make the short list, clearly. I can't remember a publisher ever boasting of a longlisting before. The blurbs on the book are all very superlative. I notice however that LeGuin's review in The Guardian is not one of them. Oops, got side-tracked now: what I meant to say is that the cover art reminded me myself of The Glass Books of the Dream-Eaters, so I kept looking at it thinking "is that ...?" and "no, but maybe I should ..." and then a friend said she'd enjoyed it so when I found it second-hand I happily bought it. Second-hand is better in case I didn't like, dontchaknow.

Ursula K. Leguin says a lot of clever things about this book that I have to agree with but they weren't the points I'd thought of myself at first. First, the storyline: Ariel Manto is a very intelligent PhD student doing an English Lit thesis on thought experiments, which means stuff like Schrödinger's Cat. Thought experiments are the story parts, the literature, of science, and interest her tremendously. Among the authors she studies is one Lumas, an all but forgotten Victorian whose writings probe the boundaries of where the mind can go (or something. I have to say that Thomas does not really manage to convey the greatness of Lumas at all). The End of Mr Y is Lumas lost novel - as far as anyone knows only one copy survives and that's in a vault in Germany. Incredibly, Ariel finds a copy, and reads about mr Y's journey into the Troposphere - by drinking a half homeopatical, half Roman Catholic potion you can enter a different world, made up out of the consciousnesses (that's surely not a word) of all living things and in which you can enter other minds and experience life as they see it. Of course she tries it, and discovers that she is being pursued by renegade CIA agents, intent on getting the formula. And so on. I don't think I'll bother explaining all the bits in the story that I made notes on. Instead I'll just jump right to my opinions, to please my Editor Friend.

It wasn't only the cover art that reminded me of other books, the déja vus kept coming. The book is full of long discussions on matters of philosophy and science, which reminded me of Umberto Eco (oooh, LeGuin noticed that too) - in particular Foucalt's Pendulum which indeed the book has been compared to (check out the blurbs, link above). The idea that our praying and our belief and faith created the gods, instead of them creating us, feels very Gaiman (or else Douglas Adams for the humorous touch). The created gods inhabit the Troposphere, you see, and their strength depends on how many faithful they have. And a religious place is so charged with the energy of the faith that you can't ... can't ... what was it now, remain in someone else's mind I think. LeGuin makes the point that the Troposphere is like a computer game - admittedly, this is Ariel's mind interpreting the Troposphere with computer game attributes, like a "console" that appears to instruct her and permit her to control what she wants to do. But still, it is like a computer game scenario. "You have reached the next level." Which of course reminds me of Tad Williams' Otherland series. I don't remember any reference to Ariel ever being an avid gamer though, so the computer game likeness seems a little off, come to think of it. Sometimes I go back to being reminded of The Glass Books of the Dream-Eaters, when I start to feel like she's writing as for a film, picturing certain scenarios so vividly it's just about making it easier to write a screenplay - but it's not at all as obvious as it was with Gordon Dahlquist's work. He really was thinking graphic novel and just translating it, images were everything. Thomas is not at all as bad as that.

This is in many ways a classic fantasy novel, no different than say Harry Potter. There is an alternative universe, there is an enemy, and towards the end Ariel even receives a quest from the mouse-god, to jump from person to person back through time to the lady who bred lab mice and make her not do it, thus setting all lab mice free. As quests go it's fairly lame and feels contrived - tacked on at the end, as an afterthought almost. Another quest is of course to defeat the enemy. This means the renegade CIA agents and their scary helpers, the KIDS, autistic children (ab)used to explore the Troposphere and who have died while inside. Since the enemy turns up fairly early one could say that that quest is made clear from the start (obviously evil has to be defeated), but the solution is poorly done. Ariel's new-found love, a disillusioned former priest (Catholic, natch - no people do fall from faith quite so well as the Catholics apparently. I do sometimes feel that this fascination with Catholic apostasy in popular culture comes close to admitting to believing that Catholicism is Right) suddenly turns up inside the Troposphere (sorry for the spoiler, but hey) and fixes everything. It's all very very deus ex machina. I was entertained by the book up to the last quarter or sixth or so - i.e. the end. The end is disappointing. The essence of this book is the thought experiment - what if our thoughts, ideas and prayers create a place like the Troposphere, where we are all joined etc. - but how do you craft a story around it, and how do you end it? The excursions into relativity theory and what have you are interesting, granted. I can't help wondering if it's as interesting to someone who understands the subject though. But as a whole the book is not complete, it's disjointed, with different parts that don't really come together. Unfinished.

I've understood (but don't ask me to point you towards a source) that some critics are suspicious of writers who have taken creative writing classes. Well, in that case surely they are even more suspicious of writers who teach the subject, like Scarlett Thomas. She's not really doing anything wrong. She has all the elements to make a fantastically imaginative book, a meta-book spanning realism (Ariel is a self-destructive former self-harmer from a very troubled background), fantasy and science-fiction, as stated earlier a more modern, female Umberto Eco, something that sees no boundaries between philosophy, science and the study of languages. It's all there, but still only germs of it. However, there's just too much. Nobody really becomes a full character, I'm not rooting for anyone. And hence the sad conclusion: it reads like a book pieced together to make a hit, not quite from the heart. Unfortunately, because I don't think that was the intent.

Also, there are a few too many references to vegetarian meals - we get it, you can eat well and not eat meat. Fair enough.

If Editor Friend hadn't said that they'd turned it down I probably wouldn't have thought so much about the book, I'd've read it, been entertained but disappointed by the ending, and that'd be it. I pondered a little bit more now, I read it as something that someone else had been found lacking, and looking for the flaws I saw them, if you see what I mean. My Editor Friend really does deserve all the praise she gets professionally, because it's an easy book to be seduced by, but clearly she saw through that. I suspect that the flaws in it might be more apparent in translation, too. Translation sometimes works as a way of cutting to the bones of things. I wonder if the ticket inspector wasn't used to reading books of this type - science fiction, fantasy, Eco - and was gripped by the genre. Those of us who have read more of the sort have read better, I think.

I might though, just might, be stopping by Väsby Centrum again soon (tomorrow), to look for a pair of trousers. And I might, maybe, stop by Stadsmissionen again. And if they still have that other book of hers there I might might get it. Or at least hold it for a while and think about it.

Laurie R King: The Language of Bees and God of the Hive

2011-05-06T11:27:00.041+02:00

Disclaimer: this post was started on May 6th. Adjust all references to times and dates accordingly and make allowances for sketchy memories.

Two days before reading these books (well, one of them, I can't remember which one I was thinking of when I started the draft) my husband and I walked about the Wordsworth poem We Are Seven (yes yes, initiation of discussion was all his. I'd never read it before, I admit it). And lo and behold the quote from that very poem on page 82 (in one of the books, see above), which would have been meaningless to me only three days earlier. Yesterday I read an article about a recent trend in Japan for divorce ceremonies. A key element was smashing a symbolic wedding ring with a mallet. The broken pieces are placed in the mouth of a netsuke, a frog (not real one obviously), which in Japanese belief symbolizes new beginnings. Page 210 Mary Russell breaks into a house, and her foot brushes against a netsuke on the floor.

Lucky I'm not that crazy, or I'd start thinking I was receiving messages from Above. Of what though? - that would lead to new levels of madness.

Another incidence of - well, serendipity more than coincidence I suppose, is how I stumbled across The Language of Bees second-hand and only days later went by the library and they had the sequel in. So I could read these pretty much back to back. And it was just so easy to lean back and meet those old friends Russell and Holmes again. Very relaxing. I could get used to this! However, since starting this blog during a phase of reading only crime fiction and thus judging them relatively - compared to others in the genre - I have progressed to a more varied literary diet and am therefore more easily distracted by anachronisms or other boo-boos. Not that Laurie King's are full of such things. I'm only saying. Well, I think there was something anachronistic, yes, but no biggie. I could be wrong anyway. I'm often struck by how words that I think are modern crop up in books from the 1930s, so whatever it was that grated on me might well have been just my ignorance of the matter. What I did ponder with more pointed-ness was whether it was necessary with two books to tell the story. I'm undecided still - and frankly, by now (July) I don't even remember the details of why I pondered. It must have felt a little too prolonged. Was the showtown on the London Bridge (can't remember which one) really necessary? Is Laurie falling into the old trap of writing scenes that would be "great in a film!"? A plea from me to all writers: don't write the screenplay too soon, please. It shows and it makes me cry. Note: I am not accusing: I was merely slightly suspiscious and that scared me.

I did thoroughly enjoy reading these books, don't get me wrong. It was GREAT to fall back into these familiar characters. And there are some wonderful Sherlock Holmes bits here, showing his mastery of disguises and make-up in a way that pleases the crime reader enormously. And what more can one ask for really - it's entertainment with real feeling and pathos in it, with brains and energy. I was concerned by detecting what may or may not be a certain cooling-off of Russell's feelings towards Holmes. A certain annoyance? Let's hope they can resolve that issue.

Always recommended.

Community

2011-05-02T22:25:00.000+02:00

And later that afternoon the ticket inspector (conductor?) checked my commuter card, then leaned over and said "that's one of my favourite books".

Not dead!

2011-05-02T16:24:00.000+02:00

I'm still here. Just not that much on-leasure-line.

Thursday I stopped by Väsby Centrum and went into the big charity shop there (a very good one!) to panic-shop something to wear to a dissertation party we were going to the next evening (a very smart lady deserves her guests to be at least moderately smartly attired, no?). Naturally I browsed the book section, which was surprisingly good, even for English books. I could have picked up several, including two Lee Childs because whythehellnot, but I settled for The End of mr Y which I've been wanting to read for ages and lo, lo, lo and behold - The Language of Bees.

I've finished the latter and reading it was like meeting old friends. I'll get back to you on that one.

Ken Bruen (ed): Dublin Noir: The Celtic Tiger vs. the Ugly American

2011-04-05T09:00:00.002+02:00

My husband got me this book for - oh God, it was either my birthday, which would make this late blogging of it REALLY embarrassing, or else Christmas, which is only a little bit embarrassing. It's a collection of short stories by mostly NA authors, written as you can tell in the noir genre and with Ireland as the subject theme.

My poor husband was on to me for the first few weeks to find out if I liked it, but I didn't read it straight away (this is unusual for me) because I wanted to save it as a back-up book for times of drought. By the time he'd given up I did start reading it, and frankly wasn't too enamoured with it so it got pushed to the side for a while. I finished it this month anyway (by this month I mean March, the time of writing), and have been left with a resounding impression of Meh.

The trouble with noir is that you can't really force it. The early writers of noir didn't sit down thinking "I'm gonna write me some noir baby". They wrote, and were classified later, weren't they? It is of course a very easy genre to parody, and if anything this book shows that the line between loving pastiche and parody is rather fine. Some of the stories are fine, albeit not all to my taste, but some are just a bit dull and feel, as I said, parodic. Now, Sara Gran wrote a fine bit of noir, because she injected it with something new. (I'm still planning to read her books, I'm just saving it. It's on my list.) A bunch of violent incidents that end badly isn't necessarily noir, is it?

Most of the writers are un-known to me, except Eoin Colfer and the editor Ken Bruen. And as you can see I wasn't mad keen on either of those. Still, I appreciate the effort made by my beloved, even though I think this one might be given to charity with no regrets.

Christine de Pizan: The City of Ladies and Thorstein Veblen: The Theory of the Leisure Class

2011-04-03T09:00:00.001+02:00

I'm putting these in the same post because I happened to read them back-to-back and found a similar theme. I started with The City of Ladies on 8th of March - International Women's Day - and finished with Veblen's two days later. Both books have been hailed as feminist literature, and reading them so close together sparked lots of comparisons in my mind. All brilliant, all very intellectual. Sadly, I can't remember any of them now, I don't think.

As testament to my scatty brain, I thought just now I'd read them as Ebooks, but no, I found them during the masthead/alphabetical organizing mayhem. Which I am too lazy to link to again. Mr Bani must've bought these, and I strongly suspect he did because they are so pretty. Our editions are from the Penguin series Great Ideas, and all the little paperbacks in the series have lovely lovely covers they do. I have shamelessly nicked these images now off the Penguin website:

Aren't they goooorgeous? Frankly, I read them mostly because they were. We (mr Bani ...) have a few more from the series. A prime example of the troubles we book-owners have when sorting our collections - books like these should really be kept together, shouldn't they? Speaking of book sorting, I bought a magazine yesterday* on the way home (I was feeling sorry for myself, I'm sick and left work early, sat half an hour on the first bus, only to arrive at the railway station and discover that the 14.20 train was cancelled so I had to wait another half bloody hour) - Living Etc. it's called, and it was on offer. Sorry, apparently they like to style themselves Livingetc. Who'd have thunk. Anyway, one of the articles featured a house with loads of windows, so the owners had no walls for bookshelves, so they had "cleverly made bespoke bookcases" (oh how I am beginning to despise this ubiquitous use of the word "bespoke" in relation to anything not standardised) that wrapped around the back of their sofas. And, to get to the point, almost all the books in the bookshelves are those lovely classic Penguins with the orange and white covers. A few blues too. Very impressive stylish look, although one begins to doubt if the owners are seriously readers or just stylish collectors. When my youngest sister worked in a second-hand book shop she once had a customer who worked with interior design and who travelled the world buying old books with nice, leather bindings by the box-full. His clients just ordered libraries with a certain look, and he provided the right books for it. Never mind the content. I believe he told her that he'd sold drugs earlier, but this was more profitable and safer. She'll have to correct me in the comments section if I'm wrong. Anyway - a similar niche must exist for more design-savvy people who know that orange-and-white Penguins have the same effect but also mark you as a Real Reader™.

My quibble with the Great Ideas editions is that there are no introductions by learned folk. I used to hate introductions in my youth and childhood - just get to the book already! - but now I love them, I tend to learn a lot and they help me notice things I might otherwise have missed. These two books could have done with scholarly introductions in my opinion. de Pizan is too long dead to be widely remembered and needs to be understood in the setting of history, and Veblen was an odd-ball whose odd-balledness shines through in his writing and confuses, and needs to be set into perspective.

Back to the books. de Pizan is hailed by many as an early feminist, struggling against the misogyny of the times. The Wikipedia article I linked to there is written by clever people who write intelligently about her works, do read it (in lieu of an introduction, as it where). The story starts off when she, for diversion, picks up a book that a friend has left in her study. It's a popular book, supposedly funny, but she becomes upset at the prejudiced views of women she reads in it, the down-right hatred and dismissal of her sex. She prays to God to help her understand. She doesn't perceive women as bad, but so many learned men seem to think they are - surely so many can't be wrong or deliberately telling lies? She is then visited by three Ladies, of Reason, Rectitude and Justice, who help her to allegorically build the City of Ladies - to dig away the mud (the false opinions and lies), to lay the stones (stories of women of virtue, sense and holiness) and to fill it with female citizens (starting with the Holy Virgin and including Christine's patroness). It is a very clever construction, and I was struck with the realisation of how much more difficult it must have been to write a story like this back then - everything carefully scratched out by hand, no cheap paper to try out drafts on.

For a modern reader however, her arguments are awfully un-solid. Logic and deductive reasoning have developed since the Middle Ages, after all. To "prove" that women don't deserve to be maligned she relates, endlessly (thankfully the book has undergone some serious editing so many of the stories have been taken out), the biographies of famous female characters in mythology and history. And mythology = history, mind you. This may have been overwhelmingly persuasive in 1405 but not so much now, I don't think. She is also trapped in the conventions of her times, meaning that she is ready to exalt virtuous women who stay within the fold and condemn the harlots who stray. As usual there is a contradiction in place when a woman who clearly is not performing solely those duties to which women according to her own creed are pre-ordained and eminently suited yet chooses to uplift those values and push for every woman to conform to them (and this carries on today, with all those evangelist women in the US for example, touring the country saying that a woman's place is in the home). Yet I sometimes see a difference in writing style. At times de Pizan is more ascerbic and cutting, and then it seems as though this might be a more revolutionary, free-thinking woman shining through, while the more monotonous praising of chastity and loyalty to the hand that beats you is what you have to write to avoid being burned at the stake or something. Then, of course, humans are complicated and can hold many conflicting opinions. Most people never get a chance to sort those out. Well worth a read anyway. You can skim the boring mythological stories if you really want to.

Veblen is a different type altogether, a type that confuses people still today it seems. The cover of the book claims this to be a satire, and indeed that particular label seems to pasted on quite often. Veblen himself, according to various things I read online is mostly called an economist, but by chance I was re-reading Bill Bryson's Made in America the other day and he mentions Veblen in it, saying "the sociologist". Which I like better, because even though Veblen himself wanted The Theory of the Leisure Class to be taken as a serious book on economics I think it works better if you class it with sociology. In any case it's an odd mix. It's too satirical and un-scientific to be taken seriously as a work of scholarship (although what standards they had in 1899 I do not know), but as a plain satire it fails too, because, not being intended as one it lacks the necessary punch. Also, the man just simply rants too much for comfort. He was one angry man. He does rant with some style though, I'll admit that.

Veblen is credited with feminist ideas too (theme!). When defining conspicuous consumption as consumption that is essentially wasteful, that has no practical use, but only serves to elevate the consumer's status in the eyes of others (look at him, he's so rich he can afford a golden toothbrush/doesn't have to work or whatever), he says that in our society women are essentially chattel or goods, used to elevate the statuses of the competing males. I found it clever, but am a little bothered because I found a lot of his other arguments and reasonings flawed and unscientific, as I've said - so am I only liking this because I can agree with it? What does this say about my powers of logic and deductive reasoning? Well worth a read! But don't expect a satire, it isn't enough of one to please all the way through to the end.

*Plz note that yesterday doesn't mean the day before the day of publishing, due to my cunning plan to write like a madwoman on my sick day and schedule the publishing of a series of posts, so I can look like a Real Blogger™.

Charles Dickens: Hunted Down

2011-04-01T07:00:00.001+02:00

Hunted Down was in the Aldiko's mystery section, so I had to read it. It's one of Dickens's typical magazine stories, I suppose, very Victorian damsel-in-distress, sudden ending, swift punishment of the villain, self-sacrificing death and so on. Actually it's quite gripping up to the ending, which is pretty lame. The worst side of Dickens is his Deus ex Machina-trait, and this was full of it. Suddenly people turn out to be the unfairly impoverished good child's rich relations and so on. (This is my first Dickens post, but I have read more of his, I promise, so I know it's a pattern.) Anyway, still enjoyable and dramatic. Also, like all Dickens, in one way or other historically interesting. I liked the descriptions, however brief, of the office work/life insurance business.

A.A. Milne: The Red House

2011-03-31T09:00:00.001+02:00

I read this on my phone as an eBook, and here's the link to Project Gutenberg's versions of it. Yay eBooks! It's a bit stupid writing eBooks though. I have to start rebelling against the minuscule as initial trend. Ebooks. Ebooks. Now that wasn't so hard, was it.
I had no idea that Milne had ever written a mystery novel at all - hardly surprisingly I knew him only as the author of children's books, although I had an idea that he'd written other stuff before that. After reading The Red House I'm a little baffled and sort of wish he'd written more than this one, so I could have gotten a better handle on his style.

Mark Ablett is a wealthy, control-freak bachelor who prides himself on his house-parties. During one (with the usual amount of motley guests), he is found shot. Interestingly, unlike many stories of this type, most of the guests are obviously not suspects since they were off playing golf. Instead we quickly home in on Ablett's cousin Matthew Cayley, who is also his secretary, confidante, protegé and, we soon see, all but prisoner (control-freak, remember). The detective is a random passer-by, Antony Gillingham, who only stopped at The Red House to see an old friend whom he's heard was staying there, Bill Beverly. Gillingham is an odd character, part charming gentleman, part fecking sociopath (don't worry, there's no gruesomeness, he just behaves strangely - I mean for the genre and the age). Gillingham and Beverly stay on at the Red House and try to solve the mystery. It's a fairly good story, slightly implausible mind, but it keeps you guessing. Anway, it's mostly Gillingham that makes me sorry there are no more books, he's a very unusual sort of detective character, both too normal (not quirky enough) and too different. Again, were I a scholar I'd analyse this more, but I'm not so I won't. Recommended, despite the story having some holes.

Dorothy Sayers: In the Teeth of the Evidence

2011-03-30T10:58:00.001+02:00

I'm home sick today, so it's BLOGGING DAY my friends, bloggetty-bloggetty blog! I have six (6) empty posts in my draft lists that are waiting to be filled with content. All I have to do is type like a madwoman for a few hours (with intervals for the Book of Face, random surfing, making extensive watch lists on Ebay and Tradera), then set the posts to be published at regular intervals - and hey presto, it once again looks like I'm a Real Blogger™. This draft is the oldest, so I'm starting here. Also it's the easiest post to write I think, I probably don't even have to locate the book (a near-impossible task since that ill-fated attempt to organize the shelves alphabetically), since I've read it several times and should remember it anyway.

Often, if I re-read a book, I forget to blog about it, which means that some of my favourites are unsung. I actually thought I had written about this one - I'm quite pleased to own it, since it's a collection of short stories by Dorothy Sayers and it's the sort of thing that the library often doesn't have. This is a grubby, yellowed little paperback, not in great condition at all (oops, a Real Blogger™ would have taken a photo or a scan - I've revealed myself as a fraud, once again), and the quality of the stories varies too. I'm still very fond of it.

Wikipedia has a list of the stories contained within the, in my case, cheap covers. Which saves me the trouble of typing it out and/or locating the book. I especially like the Montague Egg stories, and in my opinion Montague Egg could have done with some feature novels for himself (an opinion I don't share with the author of that Wikipedia article). Of the other stories I'd like to mention The Leopard Lady, because it deals with the cold-blooded murder of a child,which feels uncharacteristic for the time and the genre. I can't remember coming across it before, and was surprised that the child does actually die - I was expecting a sudden rescue. Also, The Milk Bottles gives a nice little look into the troubles of journalism, with editors mangling the writers one- and two-column pieces so much even the writers don't recognize them afterwards. Now, I wouldn't say these stories are any better than the others, I just was struck more by those two themes. Like most short stories from The Golden Age they smack of bread-and-butter-writing, which I quite like - as though they were written to be printed in magazines just to pay the bills.

Ideally I'd like to write something about each story, because a quick google shows that this isn't easy to find online and someone out there might be looking for it, but I think this will have to wait for someone more dedicated to scholarship than myself. Allow me a quote, made possible by an online version of the book:

There were, he knew, only three bedrooms in this isolated corridor; his own, in the middle; on the left, No. 8, containing old Waters, of Messrs. Brotherhood, Ltd., the soft-drinks-and-confectionery firm; on the right, No. 10, allotted to that stout man who travelled in jewellery, whose name was Pringle, and who had stuffed himself up that evening with dubious mackerel and underdone pork, to the admiration of all beholders. Close behind the head of Monty’s bed, the rich and rhythmical snoring of old Waters shook the thin partition like the vibration of a passing lorry. It must be Pringle who was making the uproar; mackerel and pork were the most probable explanation.

Obviously recommended, duh.

RIP Diana Wynne Jones

2011-03-28T08:55:00.000+02:00

I'm just after reading on Neil Gaiman's blog that Diana Wynne Jones has died. And this is terribly terribly sad. She'll be missed, even by those of us who never had the pleasure of knowing her in person.

The new masthead ...

2011-03-07T10:17:00.000+01:00

... which will probably be up for the next five years seeing as how it took me five years to make it at all, ha ha ha, was done with the aid of mr Bani, who knows how to handle the proper camera. He is sorely unhappy with the photo (started mumbling immediately about lightening it up in Photoshop at the VERY LEAST), so don't judge him. I rushed him a bit. We did two sets of pictures, this and a different setup that was longer, with more books. But I tried adding this first, found that it worked, so I left it. He isn't pleased, thinks it's too high. Well, yes, it is a bit. But I had to fit all those books in, didn't I? The masthead gets its own page, with explanations, see above.

I counted 35 books, and only 15 female authors. That annoyed me quite a bit, and in the second photo session I added on a few women. However, I did go with photo nr 1 for now, and I do think that it is another bit of proof that we're living in a patriarchal society, innit. I think of myself as someone who is forever reading books written by women, but when I'm choosing books that I feel represent a sort of cross-section of my reading, men dominate. Just like all research shows that when teachers feel that they're giving boys and girls equal time in the classroom, they're giving boys more, and when they do split it equally they feel like the girls are getting more time. I read just last week some columnist in the paper (can't find it now) who wrote about a visitor who had remarked grouchily that "you seem to read only women writers!" after looking in her bookshelf. The reality was a pretty accurate 50/50. So there we are.

Another side-effect: trying to find the books I wanted to photograph made it clear how impractical colour-sorting is. Christ. So it has to go. Project Alphabetical Order is being drafted. I gave it a go yesterday, after taking the photos, but you need to take EVERYTHING down, and dust, and sort, and put EVERYTHING back, and make some tough decisions ... so it'll have to wait.

Alice Munro: Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage

2011-03-05T22:53:00.000+01:00

Alice Munro has totally flown under my radar all these years. I might have heard the name, but that's it. I certainly wouldn't have been able to place her as a Canadian author, for example. Now, my book club decided to read Alice Munro, and the week after that it turns out that a woman who wrote what was, I believe she said, the first ever dissertation about L. M. Montgomery's books goes to my pilates class and is generally a bit of an expert in Canadian literature, so another woman there asked her if she could recommend Canadian books for her book club who were considering having Canada as a theme for a while, and they mentioned Munro "obviously" (I was like, Atwood - now that's obvious). So there you go, coincidences make up the weave of life and so on.
So what do I think of Munro now that's she's blipped on my radar? Well, I'm not sure. I feel a bit like when I read Jhumpa Lahiri - something not quite absorbing about it. Munro has a very cool style, she's quite distanced. And the stories don't feel in any way specifically Canadian. This makes them more universal in a way - she's writing about everyone, not just Canadians. Nonetheless ... I'm usually quite fond of this type of short story, but these lack some sort of flesh-and-blood feeling about them. So I'm not in love. Not really bothered. I've left off writing this for about a week to see if they mature and grow on me, but they haven't. Hm.

I think I'll read another Alice Munro sometime though, because there is something about the way she describes the lives of these 1960s and 1970s (mostly) women that manages to show clearly how shut-in and limited they and their choices were. She manages to point very clearly at this without shouting about it or making it the main point (to me it becomes the main point, but she tricks me there). So I think she'd good. I'm just not sure she's for me.

Jack London: Before Adam

2011-03-04T22:29:00.006+01:00

If you had asked me three weeks ago whether I'd ever read anything by Jack London I'd have looked you straight in the eye and with complete assurance said no, definitely not, I'm sure I haven't. Yet I've surely read this book about a dozen times as a child and loved it. And I've always avoided Jack London's books, with their aura of manly maleness, chapped skin, doggy smell and antiquated frontier spirit. That aura is of course based solely on my prejudices. Jack London wrote, I was convinced, adventure and hunting books for boys; for boys who grew into the sort of man my (paternal) grandfather was (a house tyrant who bullied his sons a fair bit, hunted, and expected the sort of respect one is due as Head of a Household). He, of course, owned a complete set of London's novels.

This must have been one of them, because I read it on holiday visiting my grandparents as a child. Yet I can remember not going near his set of London novels, with their covers with artwork of snowy plains and dogs and horses and boys and wolves. I remember this book as something else, maybe with a plain green cloth cover? (a bit like the one scanned into the Aldiko edition but green then obviously). It can't have been part of the rest of the set, I don't think. Maybe an older edition?

I read lots of things from their bookshelves, in addition to all the women's magazines my grandmother subscribed to and hoarded, and you know how it is - you're a child, you devour loads of books on holiday, then you go home and a year passes, and the next time you visit you've forgotten what you've read and re-discover it anew, and with each yearly reading it becomes more and more fixed in your subconscious and actively remembered. It becomes a ritual - you visit, you read. The visit isn't completed until you've read those books or plowed through the entire stack of magazines. Some year or other though I stopped reading this book. Maybe I couldn't find it? Or maybe I found something else to obsess about. I do however distinctly remember (now!) that I had memorised the title one year (I've always had trouble remembering titles and authors) and that I told people about this great book I read called Before Adam yada yada yada - but the author never seems to have lodged at all in my mind. Bizarre.

So how come I found it now, you may ask. Well, pure chance. I was browsing the Aldiko looking for detective fiction, and since they've changed the cathegories and general layout it's much harder to find what you want so the list I perused included adventure books. I.e. i.a. Jack London. The title jumped out at me and triggered that memory of chiselling the title into my brain matter so I could tell others about it. When I read the synopsis I knew I'd hit gold. This book, in fact, is going to be the first in the new cathegory that I've promised since the dawn of the blog - the cathegory for books that have meant heaps to me (I'm still pondering what to call it. By the end of the post I'm sure I'll have settled on something). I'd never have guessed that this would be the first book to get that gilded label! I was sure it'd be Austen or Jane Eyre or Tolkien. Goes to show, doesn't it. (My husband just suggested I could call the label "The Dog's Bollocks, by the way. I won't, but it was funny.)

The narrator of Before Adam is a modern man, and by modern we mean late 19th century (the book is from 1907). All his life he is plagued by terrible and extremely realistic dreams. As an adult, after learning about evolution and psychology (interesting that London uses the word psychologist and not alienist, although probably the latter was someone who dealt specifically with mental health, wheras the former had a broader area of expertise?) he realises that they are not only dreams but memories of a prehistoric life, passed down through history to him. He gives a scientific reasoning for how this happened, but has to admit that there is no explanation for why the memories are so complete - the only explanation is that he is some sort of freak.

Now a terrible fall, averted in such fashion, was productive of shock. Such shock was productive of molecular changes in the cerebral cells. These molecular changes were transmitted to the cerebral cells of progeny, became, in short, racial memories. Thus, when you and I, asleep or dozing off to sleep, fall through space and awake to sickening consciousness just before we strike, we are merely remembering what happened to our arboreal ancestors, and which has been stamped by cerebral changes into the heredity of the race.

There is nothing strange in this, any more than there is anything strange in an instinct. An instinct is merely a habit that is stamped into the stuff of our heredity, that is all. It will be noted, in passing, that in this falling dream which is so familiar to you and me and all of us, we never strike bottom. To strike bottom would be destruction. Those of our arboreal ancestors who struck bottom died forthwith. True, the shock of their fall was communicated to the cerebral cells, but they died immediately, before they could have progeny. You and I are descended from those that did not strike bottom; that is why you and I, in our dreams, never strike bottom.

And now we come to disassociation of personality. We never have this sense of falling when we are wide awake. Our wake-a-day personality has no experience of it. Then—and here the argument is irresistible—it must be another and distinct personality that falls when we are asleep, and that has had experience of such falling—that has, in short, a memory of past-day race experiences, just as our wake-a-day personality has a memory of our wake-a-day experiences.

It was at this stage in my reasoning that I began to see the light. And quickly the light burst upon me with dazzling brightness, illuminating and explaining all that had been weird and uncanny and unnaturally impossible in my dream experiences. In my sleep it was not my wake-a-day personality that took charge of me; it was another and distinct personality, possessing a new and totally different fund of experiences, and, to the point of my dreaming, possessing memories of those totally different experiences.

What was this personality? When had it itself lived a wake-a-day life on this planet in order to collect this fund of strange experiences? These were questions that my dreams themselves answered. He lived in the long ago, when the world was young, in that period that we call the Mid-Pleistocene. He fell from the trees but did not strike bottom. He gibbered with fear at the roaring of the lions. He was pursued by beasts of prey, struck at by deadly snakes. He chattered with his kind in council, and he received rough usage at the hands of the Fire People in the day that he fled before them.

But, I hear you objecting, why is it that these racial memories are not ours as well, seeing that we have a vague other-personality that falls through space while we sleep?

And I may answer with another question. Why is a two-headed calf? And my own answer to this is that it is a freak. And so I answer your question. I have this other-personality and these complete racial memories because I am a freak.

I read this as a child, and I believed it was true. To this day I am uncertain if what he says about falling is something I've read from some other source, because I feel as though this is a theory I've heard often and that is commonly accepted. That last paragraph - that is irresistible that is. That bald conclusion. I am a freak.

Funnily enough we never learn the name of our modern narrator, but his prehistoric personality is called Big-Tooth. Not that they are advanced enough for names, the names are given by the narrator for the sake of convenience. They really are primitive, just one step away from monkeys like. Alongside Big-Tooth's people live the slightly more advanced Fire People, and the Tree People, who are more ape-ish. The Fire People are very cunning, they can plan and form strategies, and become the most dangerous enemy of the Folk, as Big-tooth-the-modern-man calls them. The Folk are aimless and can't communicate with each other beyond expressing emotions (I'm angry! I'm scared! Look out! That's funny!), so they can't even work together to oust the frightening Red-Eye, an atavism as London calls him, a more primitive creature who has latched on to the tribe. He is, in effect, a sort of live-in serial killer, working his way through the women by first killing their mates (if they have any).

It is an amazingly gory book really, although I don't remember it as such. I think maybe we are less sensitized to a sparse description of a bloody event these days, I can't remember even reacting to the gore. Maybe I wasn't imaginative enough as a child? But the idea of a small child dreaming vividly of such horrors is very effective.

After a short interval his howling grew muffled. He must have crawled into a hollow in the trunk. But his wife did not win this shelter. An arrow brought her to the ground. She was severely hurt, for she made no effort to get away. She crouched in a sheltering way over her baby (which clung tightly to her), and made pleading signs and sounds to the Fire-Men. They gathered about her and laughed at her—even as Lop-Ear and I had laughed at the old Tree-Man. And even as we had poked him with twigs and sticks, so did the Fire-Men with Red-Eye's wife. They poked her with the ends of their bows, and prodded her in the ribs. But she was poor fun. She would not fight. Nor, for that matter, would she get angry. She continued to crouch over her baby and to plead. One of the Fire-Men stepped close to her. In his hand was a club. She saw and understood, but she made only the pleading sounds until the blow fell.

We saw them suddenly swerve back from the tree. They were not quick enough. Red-Eye's flying body landed in the midst of them. He was in a frightful rage, smashing about with his long arms right and left. He pulled the face off one of them, literally pulled it off with those gnarly fingers of his and those tremendous muscles. He bit another through the neck. The Fire-Men fell back with wild fierce yells, then rushed upon him. He managed to get hold of a club and began crushing heads like eggshells.

The whole book just evokes in me a powerful sense of a dense green world, barely understood, claustrophobic in its terrors. The novel isn't long, and doesn't waste time on analysis beyond the bit I quoted first. You're thrust into the story, if you can call it that, so it's not hard to read or understand.

It seemed I was lying on the ground. I was somewhat older than during the nest days, but still helpless. I rolled about in the dry leaves, playing with them and making crooning, rasping noises in my throat. The sun shone warmly and I was happy, and comfortable. I was in a little open space. Around me, on all sides, were bushes and fern-like growths, and overhead and all about were the trunks and branches of forest trees.

Suddenly I heard a sound. I sat upright and listened. I made no movement. The little noises died down in my throat, and I sat as one petrified. The sound drew closer. It was like the grunt of a pig. Then I began to hear the sounds caused by the moving of a body through the brush. Next
I saw the ferns agitated by the passage of the body. Then the ferns parted, and I saw gleaming eyes, a long snout, and white tusks.

The story ends openly, there is no big conclusion or anything. It's just a collection of some events from pre-history, which sounds vague and pointless but doesn't feel like it. I'm sitting here trying to find the words to explain how powerful it was for me as a child ... but I do think one major reason was that I bought it, I thought this was a true story, that the author/narrator really had those dreams that were actually a pre-historic reality. It was like time travel. The slightly old-fashioned way of writing must have made this even more intense. Also, the book blends in my memory with a book for kids about a boy in the Stone Age, this one by a Swedish author. I do not at all remember the name of it, and I do not remember the author, and the book really is not very much like Before Adam at all - but I suppose the combined effect might have led to an even stronger impression. (The other book is about a happy family living together in a cave. The baby son has just been born. One day when Daddy comes home from the hunt, Mummy has been stolen away by the leader of the village not far away. The baby is left, and Daddy raises the baby - most memorably, by feeding it fresh blood in lieu of milk. I mean, really. When Baby becomes A Man he goes off to rescue Mummy. It was probably a bit awful, I think.)

So how does Before Adam measure up now? Very well, I think. And it has changed my view on Jack London. I'll read something else of his before I venture a final-ish opinion, but I'm fairly impressed I have to say. It may be a little dated as to facts, but it has a great ring of sincerity and lack of falseness about it, a certain sparsity that adds realism and honesty to the narrative. It's exciting and engrossing. In other words, London stands the test of time better than many of his contemporaries (including, but not limited to, an utterly dire book I'm reading at the moment called The House of the Vampire, from the same year - more on this later). This is one book that has remained with me all my life. I've been able to conjure up the atmosphere of it for what feels like forever, and I'm thrilled to have re-found it. Time to start looking for a nice old edition so I can own it properly, I think.

Read and be rude

2011-02-28T10:19:00.000+01:00

Despite still being a commuter, this year travelling even further and for longer (for my sins), I'm having trouble finding time to read. The reason being that I have colleagues who travel the same way. And if we sit together then I can't in all decency immerse myself in my book, because that would be rude. The train part of the trip is alright. Since the train is packed to bursting point it's every human for h**self, in an inhumane fashion - no holds barred in the struggle to get a seat on the train. Thus, no-one expects to choose who to sit next to. We are all islands on Upptåget in the mornings. I'm perfectly capable of reading no matter how uncomfortable I am, so I can use those 25 minutes to my advantage. The bus trip that follows is a different matter though, since we often re-find each other and sit next to one another.

Just writing this post feels terribly rude, but my intent is not to complain really. I've (almost) come to terms with having more limited reading time. And the colleague I most often travel with is lovely. It's more a case of, yet again, noticing how different the work-place culture is compared to my last job. There were several of us who commuted at my last job, but by tacit understanding we never sat beside each other while travelling. That time was private time. We slept, tried to work a little sometimes, we read. Nodded at each other, said hello, but we didn't encroach on each other's privacy, oh no no.

Although ... okay, slight complaint. This commute is different in that it's more broken up and I can't sit and relax for the full hour or so what with changing buses and trains and stressing over whether I'll make the connection or not. So it does affect me a little to not have all that time to myself, to wind down or mentally prepare myself for the day ahead. While I in theory have those three hours (oh dear Jesus that's depressing) to myself each day, in reality I don't, and it makes me feel like I Never Get Time For Myself - you know. Normally a book = two commuter days. Now - I have no idea. It takes some getting used to.

Agatha Christieand Dorothy Sayers x 2, also Ngaio Marsh and Joseph Smith Fletcher x 1, respectively

2011-02-27T19:18:00.000+01:00

What I'm actually reading now, to sound like a tv chef, is Alice Munro (for my book discussion club). It's just that my recent setback at work left me not only very down (although I'm better now) but also with a strong hankering for detective fiction, my old love. More specifically for the vintage, Golden Age type of detective fiction that don't over-analyse things and revel in upholding the status quo. Escapism, in other words. I only kept away from Tolkien (the ultimate escapism) because it, frankly, makes me cry, and from The Left Hand of Darkness because I felt I was being too pathetic re-reading that again so soon (at least, it feels as though I re-read it very recently). So detective fiction it was.

First I re-read Dorothy Sayers Gaudy Night (great review here). For all Sayers fans this has to be a favourite I think - perhaps not the first time you read it, because it's so radically different from the other Wimsey novels which are all more classic puzzle whodunnits, focusing on the solving of the crime. If you expect another one like that you might be disappointed by this one first time around. It's more pensive, more contemplative, and it's main focus is the conflict for women between career and family, asking the still-valid question if it's possible to have both.

Harriet Vane returns to Oxford for the annual Gaudy Night celebrations, a bit nervous about what sort of a reception she'll find, what with her notoriety. She discovers that contrary to what she expected she's met with mostly open arms, and she finds herself drawn to the academic life again. "Once, I was a scholar." Still resisting Wimsey's offers of marriage, she is attracted to the largely celibate community of the college, with the dons who have chosen academia over childbirth and -rearing and husband-coddling. When a vicious poison-pen writer and vandal starts terrorising the college, the dons ask Harriet to come back and see if she can find the culprit. She accepts partly because it will give her a chance to immerse herself in the scholar's life again. As the attacks grow bolder and more violent, she eventually asks Wimsey to help.

There are no murders in this book, only attempted ones. The real puzzle here is the conflict between the expected role for women and the one they might like to pursue for themselves. At the time it was written, of course, few women would have the opportunity to have a professional career as well as the responsability of a family - unless, which is not discussed really but which I couldn't help considering, they were working-class and doing those jobs that in all societies have to be done and that are not considered careers. Working-class women have never had the luxury of being stay-at-home mothers. They've always worked, as have farm-wives. So largely the perceived problem is a middle-to-upper-class one. Harriet feels like marrying Wimsey would consume her, she'd be engulfed by him and lose herself - a point of view that Wimsey gradually comes to understand and respect. Also the book is a remarkably honest reckoning with Sayers own authorship and novels, via Vane. While it is Harriet who admits to herself that she hasn't had the courage to tap into her emotions and allow her real experiences to colour the fictional experiences in her novels, and it is Harriet who explains to us how Lord Peter has hidden his sensitive nature behind foppishness and breeziness all these years, we as readers see Sayers apologizing for her early, formulaic Wimsey novels and explaining how hard it can be to write from the heart. So I really like this book. It is a crowning acheivement for a stellar mystery writer.

After that, wanting more, I read Whose Body? on the Aldiko. From 1923, it's the book that introduces Lord Peter Wimsey as gentleman detective. As you may deduce from above, it is much shallower, and Wimsey as a character much more of a type. Nevertheless, Sayers has more depth than other detective writers of her time even in this first book, when she allows Wimsey to suffer a nervous breakdown when the strain of the case gets too severe. He believes himself back in the trenches in France again, and ever-loyal Bunter has to nurse him, now as then. There's also a very evocative bit when they're stumbling through a foggy graveyard in order to exhume a corpse, soon after the breakdown:

The vile, raw fog tore your throat and ravaged your eyes. You could not see your feet. You stumbled in your walk over poor men's graves.
The feel of Parker's old trench-coat beneath your fingers was comforting. You had felt it in worse places. You clung on now for fear you should get separated. The dim people moving in front of you were like Brocken spectres.
"Take care, gentlemen," said a toneless voice out of the yellow darkness, "there's an open grave just hereabouts."
You bore away to the right, and floundered in a mass of freshly turned clay.
"Hold up, old man," said Parker.
[ ... ]
A dim blue light carried by somebody ahead wavered and stood still.
"Here you are," said a voice.
Two Dantesque shapes with pitchforks loomed up.
"Have you finished?" asked somebody.
"Nearly done, sir." The demons fell to work again with the pitchforks — no, spades.
Somebody sneezed. Parker located the sneezer and introduced him.
"Mr. Levett represents the Home Secretary. Lord Peter Wimsey. We are sorry to drag you out on such a day, Mr. Levett."
"It's all in the day's work," said Mr. Levett, hoarsely. He was muffled to the eyes.
The sound of the spades for many minutes. An iron noise of tools thrown down. Demons stooping and straining.
A black-bearded spectre at your elbow. Introduced. The Master of the Workhouse.
"A very painful matter, Lord Peter. You will forgive me for hoping you and Mr. Parker may be mistaken."
"I should like to be able to hope so too."
Something heaving, straining, coming up out of the ground.
"Steady, men. This way. Can you see? Be careful of the graves—they lie pretty thick hereabouts. Are you ready?"
"Right you are, sir. You go on with the lantern. We can follow you."
Lumbering footsteps. Catch hold of Parker's trench-coat again. "That you, old man? Oh, I beg your pardon, Mr. Levett—thought you were Parker."
"Hullo, Wimsey—here you are."
More graves. A headstone shouldered crookedly aslant. A trip and jerk over the edge of the rough grass. The squeal of gravel under your feet.

Then, after this, I didn't want to re-read The Nine Tailors so soon, so I turned to Ngaoi Marsh and re-read Death at the Bar - no need to write more about it at this moment. (But why oh why isn't she better loved?) I did feel a little extra pang when the horrible earthquake happened in Christchurch though, with Ngaoi fresh in my mind.

Still craving more Golden Age I reluctantly turned to the Aldiko's supply of Agatha Christie and read The Mysterious Affair at Styles and The Secret Adversary. The former is her first novel, and the one introducing Hercules Poirot. I'll say no more than that the contrast between Dorothy Sayers' first novel and Agatha Christie's is enormous. One writes lightly, wittily, and quite daringly (as the famous line "Sir Reuben is a pious Jew of pious parents, and the chap in the bath obviously isn't" shows). Agatha Christie just stomps stomps stomps her way through. I wonder if it's because she's easier though? People didn't have to put up with quotes, jokes and double-entendres. I don't know much about art but I know what I like and all that. Why did Christie get an episode of Doctor Who? Oh, but but but, I have to say that I was thrilled to find the word kudos in the book though. I always thought that was modern-ish slang. No siree! One lives to learn.

The Secret Adversary introduces Tommy and Tuppence Beresford, before they marry. It's quite dismal really, with a criminal mastermind basically engineering the Russian Revolution, if I followed the reasoning. I did appreciate the insight into what a shock the Russian Revolution must have been to people of the time. No-one had any idea what to make of it and if the disease would spread, so the wildest theories could fly about. Best bits: the cinema is called the kinema, with a K, and Tommy reads the Daily Mail with gusto. Ha.

Joseph Smith Fletcher was a more interesting find. His novel is not a whodunnit at all, more a novel about a crime, which feels quite modern and daring. 30 years ago two young men embezzled a large sum of money and got caught. The money was never found, and after serving their time they disappear. They are now, under new names, respected pillars of society in a town oop North. One man has remained childless, but the other has a daughter who is set to marry very well. Naturally, their past catches up with them in the guise of a former police detective who has retired to the area, recognises them, and tries to blackmail them. He is found dead. We as readers are left guessing who could have done it, but realise that even though it is obvious to suspect our two malcreants, it can't be them, since we are privy to their thoughts and they suspect each other. It's quite exciting really and more than a little suspenseful. I'll download more of his.

Now I'm more set to settle down with Munro, while parallell-reading In The Teeth of the Evidence, a collection of Dorothy Sayers' short stories that I own. All is, if not well, stable.

Kate Chopin: The Awakening and other Short Stories

2011-02-26T22:21:00.000+01:00

Downloaded because Kate Chopin is, according to Wikipedia, considered to be a forerunner to feminist authors of the 20th century - caught my interest. Admittedly, I have never studied literature, but Chopin seems quite forgotten, which is a bit of a shame. I don't know if I loved her writing to be honest, but it's certainly not worse than that of many male authors of the period who still make their way into anthologies and are spoken of with respect. I sometimes feel that a lot of writing still hailed as classic is actually very dated and dull. But that's by the by. Chopin's writing is actually remarkably modern, I think.

The Awakening is the title story of this collection and more like a short novel. It's about a married woman who starts to discover that she doesn't know who she is, that she feels trapped in her marriage. No, not just in her marriage, trapped in anyone having a hold on her, stopping her from doing what she wants. In one scene she travels to visit her children who are staying with their (paternal) grandmother. When saying good-bye she hugs them and kisses them and feels like she'll miss them forever, but once on the train they quickly slip from her mind as she starts to refocus on her own emotions and tries to figure out what she wants for herself. They have no permanent hold on her - not because she is callous, mind. It's more that she's contrasted with her friend who is the self-sacrificing mother type, the kind who lives for her family, and who must have been the ideal of the times. Mme Pontellier is not that type, and being forced into that mold maybe pushes her too far to the other side. She is the kind of mother that we all are nowadays, the kind who keeps her own hobbies, her "old life", and this isn't considered strange. Towards the end of the story she tragically realises though that if she pursues her own happiness she'll kill her children's chance of it, so she makes the ultimate sacrifice, to protect them, as it were.
Most of Chopin's stories take place around Natchitoches in Lousiana, and by chance a Facebook friend recently posted a link to a fantastic gallery of photos that happens to include a few from that very area, scroll down for no. 36 and no. 40. Admittedly a few decades later than Chopin's writing (these photos were taken during the Depression), but I still got a bit of a jolt. Chopin's descriptions of the Lousiana way of life, the Creole culture, are just tremendously interesting. In my mind it all mixes with Anne Rice's vampire books and True Blood - all so different, obviously, but all drawing from the same places and people for inspiration. (Anne Rice is a bit shite, mind. Just let's get that straight.)

The question of race burns through, of course. In the awakening Mme Pontellier's children are being watched by an octaroon somewhere in the first chapter, and to my shame I first didn't grasp what that was, that it was a person. I thought it was some kind of dog maybe? A few sentences later it transpires that it's a human and then I remembered the different cathegories of blackness they'd divide people by in those days. Must've read about those names sometime or other, they floated back up in my memory while reading. The most political story in this respect is Desirées Baby. I don't know if one could claim that it's a contribution to a discussion on minority rights or equality at all, it reads more like a description of how horrible the effects of the racist society traps and imprisons the people who live in it. Just a description, but sometimes that's all you need. Desirée is a foundling, who grows up with loving adoptive parents. When she grows up she marries Armand, a local bigwig, a man who is unusually cruel to his slaves, who hates them. This lets up when she gives birth to their son, but as the son goes from new-born to baby it starts again. One morning Desirée realises that her son looks like the little quadroon (sic) boy who is fanning them, and confronts her husband, who says that yes, he'd noticed. Their child is not white, she is not white. Clearly he wants nothing to do with her any more. Desirée writes in despair to her mother who tells her to come home, to her mother who loves her. The story ends with a twist. Armand burns all his wife's things, and all the baby's too. The cradle, the delicate clothes, her letters. At the back of the drawer he finds a scrap of an old letter from his own mother to his father, admitting her own blackness. It's really very poignant and tragic.

That said, I don't think I'll be actively searching for any more works by Chopin to read. If something falls into my lap, sure, but that's it. Her work is interesting, well written and some of her characters have definitely stayed with me, but they are nonetheless a little dated. Can't believe they haven't been filmed though. Period historical drama galore.

Jerome K Jerome: Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow

2011-02-21T21:19:00.002+01:00

Downloaded and read because I enjoyed Three Men in a Boat, once upon a time. This is not at all as much fun, since it's full of the downside of Jerome's writing, which is dreamy, moralistic passages that go on for pages and pages, on the beauty of nature and the nature of beauty etc etc. There are some gems though:

When a twelfth-century youth fell in love he did not take three paces backward, gaze into her eyes, and tell her she was too beautiful to live. He said he would step outside and see about it. And if, when he got out, he met a man and broke his head—the other man's head, I mean—then that proved that his—the first fellow's—girl was a pretty girl. But if the other fellow broke his head—not his own, you know, but the other fellow's—the other fellow to the second fellow, that is, because of course the other fellow would only be the other fellow to him, not the first fellow who—well, if he broke his head, then his girl—not the other fellow's, but the fellow who was the—Look here, if A broke B's head, then A's girl was a pretty girl; but if B broke A's head, then A's girl wasn't a pretty girl, but B's girl was. That was their method of conducting art criticism.

Nowadays we light a pipe and let the girls fight it out among themselves.

They do it very well. They are getting to do all our work. They are doctors, and barristers, and artists. They manage theaters, and promote swindles, and edit newspapers. I am looking forward to the time when we men shall have nothing to do but lie in bed till twelve, read two novels a day, have nice little five-o'clock teas all to ourselves, and tax our brains with nothing more trying than discussions upon the latest patterns in trousers and arguments as to what Mr. Jones' coat was made of and whether it fitted him. It is a glorious prospect—for idle fellows.

I love this little reference to women in the workforce - the intellectual one, somehow there was never a problem with letting the weaker sex into heavy labour. Book was published in 1886.

Why do babies have such yards of unnecessary clothing? It is not a riddle. I really want to know. I never could understand it. Is it that the parents are ashamed of the size of the child and wish to make believe that it is longer than it actually is? I asked a nurse once why it was. She said:

"Lor', sir, they always have long clothes, bless their little hearts."

And when I explained that her answer, although doing credit to her feelings, hardly disposed of my difficulty, she replied:

"Lor', sir, you wouldn't have 'em in short clothes, poor little dears?" And she said it in a tone that seemed to imply I had suggested some unmanly outrage.

Since than I have felt shy at making inquiries on the subject, and the reason—if reason there be—is still a mystery to me. But indeed, putting them in any clothes at all seems absurd to my mind. Goodness knows there is enough of dressing and undressing to be gone through in life without beginning it before we need; and one would think that people who live in bed might at all events be spared the torture. Why wake the poor little wretches up in the morning to take one lot of clothes off, fix another lot on, and put them to bed again, and then at night haul them out once more, merely to change everything back? And when all is done, what difference is there, I should like to know, between a baby's night-shirt and the thing it wears in the day-time?

Very likely, however, I am only making myself ridiculous—I often do, so I am informed—and I will therefore say no more upon this matter of clothes, except only that it would be of great convenience if some fashion were adopted enabling you to tell a boy from a girl.

At present it is most awkward. Neither hair, dress, nor conversation affords the slightest clew, and you are left to guess.

Ha, not likely nowadays. Heaven forbid a child should just be a child. No, into the blues and pinks for easier categorisation, please. Progress, eh?

And then comes school life, with its bitter little sorrows and its joyous shoutings, its jolly larks, and its hot tears falling on beastly Latin grammars and silly old copy-books. It is at school that he injures himself for life—as I firmly believe—trying to pronounce German; and it is there, too, that he learns of the importance attached by the French nation to pens, ink, and paper. "Have you pens, ink, and paper?" is the first question asked by one Frenchman of another on their meeting. The other fellow has not any of them, as a rule, but says that the uncle of his brother has got them all three. The first fellow doesn't appear to care a hang about the uncle of the other fellow's brother; what he wants to know now is, has the neighbor of the other fellow's mother got 'em? "The neighbor of my mother has no pens, no ink, and no paper," replies the other man, beginning to get wild. "Has the child of thy female gardener some pens, some ink, or some paper?" He has him there. After worrying enough about these wretched inks, pens, and paper to make everybody miserable, it turns out that the child of his own female gardener hasn't any. Such a discovery would shut up any one but a French exercise man. It has no effect at all, though, on this shameless creature. He never thinks of apologizing, but says his aunt has some mustard.

Always a classic, and re-used with different nouns and people throughout the ages. See Eddie Izzard, for example.

Ayn Rand: Anthem

2011-02-20T21:19:00.000+01:00

I heard of Ayn Rand quite late, I must have been nearly thirty or so. Her name - which no doubt was her intent - then floundered about in my brain for a while without being able to stick to anything. I thought it was a man's name, I thought it was a modern writer and not someone dead and so on. Finally, I think thanks to some article or other, I got it - but getting it didn't mean wanting to read it. In fact the only reason why I downloaded this to the Aldiko was that it was labelled science fiction. I thought I'd give it a shot. When I told my husband that I was reading Anthem he said that he didn't like Ayn Rand, she was too furiously liberal and sure of everyone being able to manage on their own.

Anyway, I didn't really see what he was on about, because I'd only started reading it and it was quite enjoyable retro science fiction so far. Clearly drawing on Soviet Russia, Rand describes a future in which no-one has choice, but are allocated work at the age of 15 or something, and then work work work until they retire, old and worn, at the age of 40. There is no privacy, no I. Only community and We. As far as community and we goes it reminded me of the anarchist world of Anaress, except Rand's future is a nightmare version of the idea. Our narrator is a bit of a rebel and has always been difficult, so despite having an aptitude for science he works as a street-sweeper, which clearly is a form of punishment and shows that there is a subtler power structure at work in a seemingly egalitarian society (Shevek on Anarres, again, comes up against that same problem). By chance he finds a way to hide away and experiment, but runs away when he realises that society doesn't want his ideas. The book then descends into a trudging monologue on how important it is to stand alone and not be ... I suppose it might be forced into a community, but it comes across more as part of community at all. A long tribute to Ego. It's boring and obvious and ruins the science fiction. Frankly, why bother writing a novel of imagination if you can't go through with it and be more subtle in your ideas? The most annoying part was Rand's surprisingly shoddy treatment of women, in my opinion. The narrator's love interest, who escapes to follow him into the wilderness, has no personality and seems to exist merely to worship the man and his great ideas, and to bear him a son (of course, the sex of the child she carries is a given, I mean why ever expect a daughter, right?). Oddly misogynistic and just plain dull.

Jasper Fforde: Shades of Grey: The Road to High Saffron

2011-02-06T11:51:00.000+01:00

I have my favourites, but I don't keep track of when the next book is coming out and what they're working on at the moment and so on - in short, I don't keep up with the news. So when I for the first time in ages go into the library (because I was so depressed and wanted something escapist to read) and find a new (to me) Jasper Fforde - well it's an enormously pleasant surprise. And a new series even! Published in December 2009 according to Wikipedia, it has not come to my attention at all. You may all laugh now at my ignorance. I find that this casual approach saves me a lot of tense expectation. Anyway, a new Jasper was just what I needed in my current state.

The Shades of Grey series (so far consisting of one book only) is set in some sort of distant future, where society as we know it has collapsed and been replaced by a Chromatic one, with strict colour hierarchy. People have limited ability to see natural colour, and this ability determines their rank on the Chromatic scale. The lowest are the Greys, who are essentially over-worked working-class. Everyone can see synthetic colour though, so mining the remnants of previous civilization for colourful scraps that can be processed into synthetic pigment for the Colour Gardens and other paint jobs is praiseworthy and lucrative work. The Rules of Munsell govern all. These regulate every aspect of people's lives, and are based sort of on an Edwardian tea-and-cricket kind of politeness and title obsession.

Eddie Russet arrives in a village on the outer fringes for a Humility assignment - to conduct a chair census - with his father, who is going to fill in as Swatchman (doctor) until a permanent one is found to replace the previous medical man. East Carmine proves more challenging to Eddie than he has suspected, and he finds himself learning more about the truth of what is behind the Chromatic hierarchy and status quo than makes him comfortable. This is mostly thanks to a young Grey called Jane, who doesn't seem to care one bit about the Rules and following them.

It has the making of a great series, and I'm thoroughly hooked already. It's rich in detail but manages to toe the line nicely between said detail and the author getting too pleased with himself over his inventive abilities - this is what happened in First Among Sequels, if I'm not mistaken. (Off topic: I just wrote tow the line, and sat here staring at it trying to figure out what was wrong. Ha. Tow the line would be an entirely different sort of expression - I wonder what it would mean?) I could sink so deep into the Ffordish universes and communities if I let myself you know, it's quite dangerous for an escapist like myself. Probably one reason why I keep myself a little aloof. Sadly, only one person I know shares my Fforde love, and that is my youngest sister. My husband hasn't even tried. Maybe it's too Anglocentric in style and humour, I don't know? I wish I could spread the love somehow.

Backlog

2011-02-02T17:53:00.001+01:00

Like I said, I do read, I just don't have time to blog. Not even in the weekends, that only come - did you know? - once a week.

I've read:

Anna Katharine Green: The Mystery of the Hasty Arrow
On the Aldiko ranking scale I gave this three stars. I read it because the author seems like an interesting sort of pioneer in Wikipedia. It's an odd sort of book, it starts off very almost dull, only to become more dramatic and really flesh-and-bloody as it goes on. A young girl is shot with an arrow in the prestigious New York museum. The girl, while being really pivotal to the story, is never described to any other extent than being pretty, full of life, and then dead. I was first convinced this book would be very wooden, what with a rather dated detective hero and all, but was pleasantly surprised by the layers that were uncovered.

Mary Roberts Rhinehart: Dangerous Days
Three and a half Aldiko stars. It starts off rather brilliantly really, with great descriptions of how divided the US was before finally joining WW1. I was thinking that it could be used as a script for a film, how it would highlight areas of US history that aren't remembered any more - what with History being mostly the Wild West, WW2 or mob stories - but it gets disturbingly black and white and pro-war as it goes on. If you chose not to support the war or hate Germans you were a coward and a traitor.

Sven Å Christianson: I huvudet på en seriemördare
Very interesting book by a a highly qualified psychologist, who has conducted in-depth interviews with Swedish criminals convicted of serial offences - paedophiles, murderers, rapists. While never losing his compassion with the victims (including a scathing put-down of a journalist who wrote that Thomas Quick, before his more spectacular convictions, had only been convicted for petty crimes - Christianson acidly points out that raping little boys is anything but petty) he nonetheless can show compassion for the twisted souls that have committed these horrific crimes. More importantly, he wants to understand how they were shaped and educate us all so we can spot warning signs in children around us. However, the author names some criminals/victims and leaves others anonymous in a way that lacks logic, and seems sensationalist more than anything.

Jonas Jonasson: Hundraåringen som klev ut genom fönstret och försvann
Bokcirkelbok, och som en deltagare sa: "jag visste att jag inte skulle gilla den när min mamma sa att den var så dråplig". Jag tyckte den var rätt okej, ibland riktigt rolig. Men retrostilen var tröttsam, och ingen titulerar någon annan i dagens Sverige, hur mycket de än gjorde det på 60-talet. Uppskattade dock historielektionen. Tydligen är filmrättigheterna sålda - och ja... det kan ju bli hur dåligt som helst faktiskt. Eller riktigt bra, om de lyfter fram det mörka mer än författaren själv gör.

Mary Roberts Rinhart: The Bat
This is the same book, almost exactly, as The Circular Staircase. Only in the 1920s. Bizarre. I bookmarked three charming passages that I can't be bothered to quote now but might if somone really really wants it.

Alexander McCall Smith: Tea-time for the Traditionally Built
I am having a rough time at work and feeling like three types of rubbish at least, so I borrowed this for comfort reading. Having kept away from McCall Smith for a while now helped me appreciate it more. It was sweet. It's the one where Mma Ramotswe's white van is finally scrapped and she investigates a football team that's losing.

Cory Doctorow: Jury Service
Futuristic, but bogged down in detail. One Aldiko star. Boring.

Stephan Mendel-Enk: Tre Apor
Bokcirkelbok. Jätteintressant med beskrivningar av judisk kultur i Sverige, ibland enormt gripande, men på det stora hela tyckte jag det var lite rörigt. Och jag brukar inte ha problem med att hänga med i upphackade tidslinjer, men det hade jag nu. I och för sig mår jag som sagt ruttet.

That may be it for now.

Amanda Cross: An Imperfect Spy

2011-01-16T21:15:00.000+01:00

This is the Amanda Cross book I bought at my church's Christmas market do on the first of Advent. I read it shortly after that, and have been feeling the blog guilt ever since. I tried to not read anything else and ONLY play Angry Birds until I'd blogged about it, but it didn't work. But I'll do this now, and start working off my list.

Looking at it now though I know there were some things I definitely wanted to say about it, but for the life of me I'm not certain what. It's a very political novel, very definitely with a strong agenda.
Kate and her husband Reed agree to guest-teach at an extremely chauvinistic law school. They are invited by one of the faculty, who wants to use his safe, tenured position to stir things up a bit, and who also suspects that somehow or other the all-male faculty is responsible for the recent death of the only woman professor there. Kate is also approached by a rather odd secretary of the law school, who claims to be a spy on the inside, modelled on John le Carré's Smiley. I might have read a le Carré or two somewhere in the distant past, but this rang no bell. At the same time Kate ponders her marriage and wants to have "the old Reed" back - this serves to tell us that she's no stranger to the odd affair because she's her own person or something.

This was too obviously argumentative for my taste, but that said, I realise that while I'm feeling a bit incredulous and "surely those men are just too much" they probably aren't at all. Things really were this bad, not long ago, and Cross wanted to write about that chauvinism (the book is from -95). But you know, the book needs more story to work.

Anyway, it's okay, but, just like the Muller, disappointing. Two of my previous faves disappointing me, oh the sorrow.

Yes, I do still read

2011-01-14T15:25:00.002+01:00

I just don't have time to sit down and blog. Also, I don't read as much, because I discovered Angry Birds.

I know.

The shame of it.

Nonetheless I'm about four books behind, at least.

'Tis the season for miracles.

2010-12-23T00:14:00.000+01:00

Well, at any rate for remarkable coincidences. Today I checked out Hyperbole and a Half - a favourite that I haven't gotten around to putting on my bookmark list there on the right, but I will - and read this post. After that, I wanted to laugh some more, and checked out Ketchupmamman (also needs to go on favourite list, bla blabla) and pretty much straight away stumbled across this post (scroll down for video). Clearly the universe needs me to learn who Kenny Loggins is!

Also, mr Bani borrowed a book at the library called 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die (but in translation), and I was just flicking through it and my eyes fell on the entry for the Kurosawa film Rashomon, which I recognized was based on the short story In a Grove by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, which I had read on the Aldiko and forgotten to write about. Hello Universe, I am listening. I will however let you read about In a Grove on Wikipedia instead, because it is late and I am tired and it's almost Christmas so busy busy busy. But my opinion can be given - I was very impressed by this short story, especially by how succinct and sparse it was. No unnecessary information, but very vivid and clear. An absolute must-read. I'll re-read it.

Happy Christmas!

Marcia Muller: The Ever-Running Man

2010-12-15T22:29:00.000+01:00

I haven't read a Marcia Muller since before I started the blog, which means over five years ago or so (and that, in turn, makes me almost a fecking blogging ancient, people). The library has very few books by her, but I really enjoyed them and had Muller down as quite a find. I remember her heroine Sharon McCone as a detective with a social pathos, working alongside people who tried to improve their communities, like. An outsider, an underdog, a fighter. Well, no more.

Now, she has her own agency with several operatives. She's a boss, who vetoes a new copying machine. She owns a plane, and flies to her sea-side home and her ranch (ok, fair enough, her husband owns the latter). She's, like, all jet-set. Her husband is a partner in a security firm that seems rather mercenary, and in The Ever-Running Man McCone accepts to work for them in an attempt to find the person who for years has been planting bombs in various places that the firm owns. I don't remember McCone as a person who'd work for a shady company like that. I don't remember McCone as being quite so ... Jack Reacher, like. A bit trigger happy, sort of.

And were the first ones so boringly written? I don't remember that at all. It's a bit lame, frankly. I'm so disappointed. My first real Marcia Muller post and I'm not loving it.

Kristian Lundberg: Yarden

2010-12-05T09:54:00.000+01:00

Book discussion club book, in Swedish, not translated. To satisfy my vast (oh the wit!) international audience I'll do this in English anyway; it's probably good for the brain that, having to think an extra spin before typing. I did a little job at work this week that involved, well, a fair bit of copy and paste, but also some actual independent writing; I had to put together an answer to a query from a possible business investor about land availability and the like. It was awfully hard, and I had to bring my own laptop to work so I could use the excellent WordFinder dictionaries to do it - the internet did not help me at all when it came to translating terms like detaljplan and fastighetsavstyckning. My point is, that it's good practice to write and translate out of your bilingual comfort zone. True story.
Kristian Lundberg is a fairly well-known Swedish writer to those that keep up - I had never heard of him, I thought, until I googled him after finishing the novel and realising that I had read about him before, in connection to the scandal that is the starting point of Yarden (never explicitly mentioned though, he doesn't want it to monopolize the issue he wants to address in the book). He was all over the papers in 2006 when he wrote a very negative review of a book that hadn't yet been printed and thus obviously not read (according to this article, he might explain why this happened sometime soon - there was an idea behind it). Following this he was shunned by the cultural establishment for a while, and when the bills mounted he took manual labour jobs to get back on his feet. For a year or so he worked at the bottom of society, an outsider among the immigrants and other lower class people who are also forced to take this type of work - yet strangely at home too, because his childhood was turbulent, he hardly went to school, he was an alcoholic before out of his teens, he has been to prison and seen most of his friends from youth die from never getting out of the hard life; in short, he writes, this is what he always thought he was born to do. Manual labour. He's done it before, he's come back to it. And that little intermission as an acclaimed writer, as a regular contributor to national newspapers, as a member of the cultural elite - he never really and truly in his heart expected it to be more than an intermission and somehow feels no surprise that it's over. He takes his place in the shuffling, resigned and submissive line of workers too desperate to demand their rights - who don't even know them. Lundberg does know them, however, and he's angry. He sees that the class struggle isn't over. Loosely translated, he writes that "We're not conducting a class struggle. They are. They do. The ones who are already owners. We just lay down our weapons. They keep gaining ground." And he keeps writing during his exile, because by writing he can feel that he is still a person, that he exists.

Since Lundberg is a poet (who has also written crime fiction, that I've never read, but will now), he can use his words sparingly but piercingly to describe the hopelessness of the situation in the Yard in Malmö harbour. How the company fires people, claiming a shortage of work. How it immediately fills the empty spots with expendable labour, paid by the hour, through a temp agency. If you cross the manager or make yourself "difficult", they don't ring you and ask you back. And there you are, with no income. They are fined if the work clothes they get are damaged. They are left outside in the freezing rain with no breaks. They work crouched over in small spaces for an entire day. One day they knock on the window of the cantine and offices and aren't let in. After a while it transpires that the people on the inside thought they were Poles "and you all know what they're like, we can't have them inside", chuckle chuckle. Meanwhile they were left to eat their lunch cold, outside, in the winter.

The workers are desperate, and they submit. They don't take a stand, they don't stand up for each other. Yet there are acts of solidarity between the men, once they've learnt to trust each other enough. They take turns working in teams so one person can catch up on his sleep (they all work several jobs and are always exhausted) or stretch out an aching back on the floor. Nevertheless, without an organized resistance or union movement their solidarity is without real hope or progress. It's such an important lesson. In Sweden we pat ourselves on the shoulder and think we've got such outstanding labour laws that surely no-one is exploited any more - my arse they're not. It's so fucking tragic.

More books like this, more articles, more debate, more fight. Please and thank you.

That said, I did find the poetic streak a bít much sometimes. But then I've never managed to read poetry. And on the other hand, without the poetic streak if would've felt like one of those awful ranting articles in the syndicalist press maybe: it's the poetry that makes it literature. I heartily recommend it.

Book finds and Grant Allen

2010-11-29T20:56:00.000+01:00

My church's Christmas flea market etc. type thing was this weekend, as every year - always on the first Advent weekend. I held the food stall this year, and didn't browse around that much at all. Found a lovely cocoa tin and three books (that they over-charged me for, with 10 kr apiece - but as the woman in charge of organizing the whole show says: "the bookstall is self-regulatory - if they charge too much they have to carry all the boxes back up to the attic, so they learn quickly to keep it cheap". More bargains next year then!). I got myself an Amanda Cross, a Marcia Muller! which excited me enormously, and a short story collection called Murder for Love, which shows promise. Ed McBain, Donna Tartt, Sara Paretsky and the Kellermans have stories in it. Sadly, so do the Higgins Clarkses. We'll see.

However, the book I've read so far is An African Millionaire by Grant Allen.

I downloaded it to my Aldiko because Grant Allen seemed such an interesting type, on Wikipedia. I'd be most interested to read the books he wrote about, well, women's rights, essentially - The Woman Who Did mostly. But all the Aldiko has is this one, so I took it. It's considered a bit of an early crime fiction too, except it's about a very clever gentleman rogue who over and over fools a South African millionaire and fleeces him for cash. It's at times very funny, but quite dated. I did get a bit bored, but then for me the type of story is old. No doubt it was a great novelty in 1897. I did like the criticism of capitalism in the book - it's quite obvious that Sir Charles Vandrift is a far greater crook and scoundrel than his "parasite", and the barbs are scathing, to mix my metaphors. I bookmarked a few pages though... let's see...

Sir Charles thinks Monte Carlo is not a sound address for a financier's letters.

That's rather funny. Also there's a funny bit on an American and how Americans always emphasise the wrong words when speaking, the most unimportant ones. That's hilarious and still a huge problem in graphic novels, IMO. Oh and this one

For in my humble opinion, for sound copper-bottomed snobbery, registered A1 at Lloyd's, give me the free-born American citizen.

Lolz.

Speaking of women's rights and original opinions, our hero-scoundrel, "Colonel Clay" has two common-law wives. Rather daring, I do say. For 1897.

I'm hardly reading at all right now, I've been so tired I've only tried to sleep on the bus. But I'll have to read my three paper-backs now, so there might be posts soon, and it's almost time for a new book discussion club meeting!

Dashiell Hammett and Hans Olav Lahlum

2010-11-26T23:34:00.000+01:00

Oh my, you say, why a double post for these different books? Well, to save time. And I want to try to express how the one made me think of the other. Let's see if I can muddle through that chain of thought... I read my first Dashiell Hammett first, and after that Lahlum's pastiche based on mostly Agatha Christie, but anyway it did remind me a bit of Hammett, so I went oh, he's trying to be a bit methodical and hard-boiled like Hammett. But it's not that much alike, really. Well, apart from Lahlum's being an utter pastiche on old-fashioned crime novels. Are you with me?

Right, so I enjoyed Hammett quite a bit. I've been meaning to read him ever since he made a cameo in Locked Rooms, but never got around to it. Thanks to the Aldiko I now have read Arson Plus. It's more of a short story really, about a private detective investigating a possible insurance fraud, with the help of a police officer. Short, succinct, clever, funny and hard-boiled indeed, but not silly-gangster hard-boiled - you know, with curled upper lips and stuff. No, it's the fore-runner to the awesome fuck-fuck murder scene investigation scene (trust me, the sentence does make sense) from The Wire. Recommended - and did I mention it's short? Your lives will hardly be shortened at all.

I read Menneskefluene by Lahlum because my editor friend wondered what I might think of it. It was an interesting read, and is being widely translated. The title means The Human Flies, and the idea is that some people get stuck in a traumatic event in their own history and keep circling it, like flies around manure. This term is introduced by the novels ccentric detective, a young woman in a wheelchair. Her family is accquainted with the young policeman who is investigating the locked room mystery murder of the old resistance war hero. The novel being set in -68, the war is still fresh in memories, but swept under the carpet. And the real purpose of the novel is just that - exploring the way Norway, after the war, divided its participants into either heroes or villains. If you were with the resistance, you were a hero, if you were a nazi or a collaborator, you were a villain. No nuances allowed or possible. Gradually, during the book, Lahlum introduces new sides to his apparently clear-cut characters, and shows that there are grey shades in the black-white spectrum. All cutely packaged up in a retro-style detective story, with a bumbling policeman and a genius "gentleman detective". It's probably very therapeutic and necessary to tell this story in Norway, but I'm not sure if it's as immediately relevant to us on the outside. As a detective story it's actually not brilliant - it's rather obvious, easy to solve and like I said, too clearly modelled on Agatha Christie, all the way down to annoying punctuation. But it's cute. I can see why it's a hit, even though it's a bit of a simple book.

Damn, it was hard to read in Norwegian though. Bloody hell. Makes you a bit mad too, you start thinking that things are akkurat kjempepene and crazy stuff like that. Also, you find yourself randomly singing the Fireman Sam theme in Norwegian. Very catchy.

whimper

2010-11-13T09:57:00.002+01:00

Reading in Norwegian is bloody hard.

Mary Roberts Rinehart: The Street of Seven Stars

2010-11-05T22:49:00.000+01:00

Oh this was disappointing sentimental tosh. Not without it's sweet moments, but oh no no. And it's not even crime fiction, to atone for it.

It's a story about two Americans who meet in Vienna at around the time of the start of WW1. She is a naive young girl with a wonderful musical talent for the violin, he is about ten years older, a doctor who has come to study surgery. They are both poor and struggling to pay for their lessons. Peter is a goodhearted character who tends to pick up "strays", and of course Harmony becomes one of his worries. All the bad things that can happen to a young innocent girl etc. Peter is contrasted with his colleague, Stewart, who has set up a home with a Austrian woman - possibly former prostitute - that he doesn't even care about. It's just handy, because it's cheaper than a Pension. When Peter, Harmony and another doctor, a middle-aged American woman, leave their Pension to economize by living together, the potential for scandal-mongering in the small American community weighs heavily on them, and things come to a head when Anna Gates leaves them to go to her sick father back home. Respectability is threatened, but they have to stick together because they've assumed responsability for a little boy with a heart disease.

Rinehart was a career woman, who even went to Europe as a war correspondent - quite a feat for a woman in those days. Part of the book touches on this desire that women too have, for a career, for a professional identity. However, one must sell books. It doesn't do to be too radical. Therefore the book ends with Harmony realising she loves Peter and wants to marry him, and she can give up her career, because she'll still have one - his! Excuse me while I throw up in my mouth a little. It's also extremely moralistic, while dabbling gently in the idea that maybe the community gossips should shut up and not assume the worst of people, but let them be instead. Parts of very direct and to the point, but in the end it cowers back into accepting the niceness and conventional morals of Puritan America whole-heartedly.

It's interesting to read a probably rather accurate description of life for poor ex-pat Americans in early 20th century Europe. I also like the very cosmopolitan Viennese society descriped, with people converging in the city from all corners of the Empire. Bosnian soldiers march, Stewarts girlfriend has a Slavic name. It's interesting to see the sympathy she has for this fallen woman, who has to take the blame and the shame for the immoral living arrangements - this is not fair, and it's seen and not seen.

Towards the end the book contains some of the most disgusting racism, when the sick boy's depraved singer mother performs to the Austrian crowds with her imported sidekicks of little black children, referred to as pickaninnies and darkys. Eeeewwww. And at the same time she sings a Negro lullaby, which clearly was seen as moving to the white people reading. Bizarre.

Not recommended, unless possibly for historical, like, research. Quite dull, really.

Mary Rinehart, a new favourite

2010-10-30T20:08:00.000+02:00

I have a new love, thanks to my Aldiko eBook reader. Mary Roberts Rinehart (read about her here!) is a pioneer in mystery writing, the Agatha Christie of the US, or so Wikipedia says. I had never heard of her, of course. Although reading her books I definitely get a familiar Hitchcocky feeling, which I suppose either means that Hitchcock was inspired partly by Rinehart, or that I've seen something of hers filmed. Well, it's not one of the four books I've read so far, so I think it's probably the former, and to be fair it's really only the first book I read, The After House, that feels really Hitchcocky.

Let's get some things straight first. We don't read these books for the plots. They're not - so far - stellar, although maybe they'll pick up in her later books. We read these for the awesome timewarp they are, for the early Americanisms, for the history. I love it! I've bookmarked (a handy feature of the app, I might add) about a million pages. And I have to go through all these bookmarks and write about them, this is so me and for the love of God how I'd like the blog to be about something that is me and not just lame microposts to keep up with what I'm reading. Ahem.

I started with The After House, which I downloaded almost immediately when trying out the Aldiko app, because of a favourable synopsis. It was so good I downloaded several more, and decided I wanted to read them in some sort of chronological order after that, to see how/if her writing changes and develops. So from a book written in 1914 I moved on to The Man in Lower Ten, from 1906, her first book. Then I took The Circular Staircase, from 1908, and just now The Case of Jennie Brice, from 1913. (I go through these quickly, and if I don't hurry up with this post now I'll end up writing one post about all the Rinehart books that the Aldiko can offer, and that would be dull.) Anyway, I would say I can see a definite difference in her writing, even with only these four books. Her earliest books have sketchier basic plots, by which I mean that the fundamental idea seems a little far-fetched. She throws in a lot of small details, red herrings and ends-that-might-be-loose, so at least once per books she has her main character sum it all up with a mental recap, like "where is the murder weapon? who is the man in the brown hat? where is the letter? why is X so frightened?" and so on, and after that she can pootle on with the story, knowing all the ends and being able to pull them together nicely. There is less of this abundance of questions in the later books, and we'll just have to see how she does in the ones from the 1920s, that I have yet to read.

A lot of old detective stories (or other literature) stand the test of time, remain popular and very well known, even though they can contain elements that shock modern readers. The big problem with Rinehart, for modern readers, is the casual racism prevalent in her books. Not prevalent because she makes a point of it really, prevalent because society was like that. No matter who you were and where you turned, there it was. It's the type of racism that speaks fondly of the loyal black servant, even putting up with his or her silly Negro quirks, and has no problem with dropping the word darky (or worse) into a conversation. Despite my instinctive recoil at a lot of this, it's interesting. It's so clear how insidious and hard to tackle this type of segregation was - and is! - because despite the definite cast-in-iron segregation in place, there is a recognition that the black people are people. This is the true cruelty of it, they're people, but they don't count. I have to say that Rinehart is a bit divided and muddled on the subject, too, I'll get to that. Nevertheless, it dates the books terribly. The class society of British Golden Age detective stories is somehow more palatable to us, and in particular Americans of course can view it through the historical quaintness filter - something they of course cannot do with segregation. For example there is a servant called Thomas in The Circular Staircase, who is chided for being superstitious and foolish - to the point where I thought he was disliked. I mean, what am I to make of this sentence?

it was always my belief that a negro is one part thief, one part pigment, and the rest superstition

What the hell??? Yet later it's

Poor Thomas! He had the faculty - found still in some old negroes, who cling to the traditions of slavery days - of making his employer's interests his. I miss him sorely; pipe-smoking, obsequious, not over-reliable, kindly old man!

Such bizarre inconsequential thinking! In The After House there is another black servant, prone to sea-sickness, who is referred to blithely as both "nigger" and "darky" at least once per word. Williams is not liked, because his first loyalty is to the boat's owner, Turner, whom he supplies with whiskey on the more-or-less sly. The hero cum narrator, Leslie, is

answerable to George Williams, the colored butler, for the various liquors served on deck.The work was easy, and the situation rather amused me. After an effort or two to bully me, one of which resulted in my holding him over the rail until he turned gray with fright, Williams treated me as an equal, which was gratifying [sic].[ ... ]

"And Williams? I am to submit to his insolence?"

She stopped and turned, and the smile faded.

"The next time, " she said, "you are to drop him!"

Gives you a bad taste in the mouth, doesn't it, despite knowing that Williams is doing something nasty?

There is reference to the colour a black person turns when they pale in The Man in Lower Ten too, which makes it obvious that there was plenty of interaction with black people. Despite this being a relatively multicultural town and all that I don't know if I've ever had the opportunity (so to speak) of seeing a black person growing pale from stress or shock, whereas I certainly have seen white people in similar straits. Rinehart has though - they knew the people they kept down so hard. It's rather terrifying. I end with this charmer:

The perspiring porter was trying to be six places at once: somebody has said that Pullman porters are black so they won't show the dirt, but they certainly show the heat.

Nonetheless, I have a lot of tolerance when I read vintage detective fiction. Since it's not "real" I can put on my quaintness filter, distance myself and enjoy the historical trip. References to mail that comes three times a day in town, expressions like "Pittsburg without smoke wouldn't be Pittsburg, any more than New York without prohibition would be New York", how US society is already in 1906 starting to be all about the car:

I can't walk. I haven't walked two consecutive blocks in three years. Automobiles have made legs mere ornaments - and some not even that.

I loved how the descriptions of the tiring, chaotic, classless travel of the sleeper trains, with men and women mixed in a car, trying to maintain some sort of modesty and propriety, and the conductor's comment:

The railroad company is responsible for transportation, not for clothes, jewelry and morals. If people want to be stabbed and robbed in the company's cars, it's their affair. Why didn't you sleep in your clothes? I do.

I love that the grand house in The Circular Staircase is lit by electricity, but that the electric company

shuts up shop and goes home at midnight: when one has a party, I believe it is customary to fee the company, which will drink hot coffee and keep awake a couple of hours longer.

Oh, and on the subject of electricity:

All are not electricians who wear rubber gloves.

I thrill at the results of a search of the ship in The After House:

Much curious salvage I found under mattresses and beneath bunks: a rosary and a dozen filthy pictures under the same pillow; more than one bottle of whiskey; and even, where it had been dropped in the haste of flight, a bottle of cocaine. The bottle set me to thinking: had we a "coke" fiend on board, and if we had, who was it?

I love finding out, in The Case of Jennie Brice, that cocaine was also used as an anesthetic during operations, and that, in Pittsburg at least, the word "full" was used for "drunk" - which is amusing since that's the Swedish word for the condition. Or this little gem, when a frightened woman opens a door:

I thought it no harm to carry an old razor of Mr. Pitman's with the blade open and folded back on the handle, the way the colored people use them, in my left hand.

That's fascinating, in a small way. I'd love to ask someone about that, but I have no idea where to begin!

Rinehart is also a big romantic, and all her books have at least one young couple who have to get together at the end. Sometimes they are the main characters, sometimes more of a sideshow. She can be very emotional and heart-felt, more so in later books.

And sitting there in the darkness, I went over my own life again. After all, it had been my own life; I had lived it; no one else had shaped it for me. And if it was cheerless and colorless now, it had had its big moments. Life is measured by big moments.

And here, there, and everywhere, efficient, normal, and so lovely that it hurt me to look at her, was Elsa.

Okay, I'll end with some quick story synopsis(es). Then I think I'm ready to post this.

The After House: A young medical graduate is recovering from serious illness and decides, on more or less a whim, to sign up as a shipmate on a luxury yacht embarking on a pleasure cruise, in order to regain his strength. Once out on the water the tensions among the passengers becomes all too clear. The owner is a drunk, with violent and jealous tendencies. One night, three people are murdered, and the killer is obviously someone among the survivors.

The Man in Lower Ten: A young (see the theme?) lawyer is taking some important papers to back to Washington DC from Pittsburgh. Annoyingly, someone else takes his sleeper compartment, lower ten, so he has to sleep in a different one. In the morning, the man in lower ten is murdered, and our lawyer's clothes and papers are gone.

The Circular Staircase: A middle-aged spinster tells the story of the most scary and thrilling summer of her life, when she took a summer residence in the country, only to spend every night in terror of an intruder who seems to be able to enter no matter how much the household bars the doors. One night a shot was heard and they discovered the owner's son, dead, at the foot of the circular staircase. To her horror she starts to wonder if her niece and nephew are involved.

The Case of Jennie Brice: Another middle-aged woman, but widow, not spinster. Formerly of good family mrs Pitman now scrapes a living running a boarding-house in Pittsburg, or, rather, in Allegheny, which was an independent area at the time. Every year in spring the river rises and floods the lower parts of all the houses. During this time, one of mrs Pitman's boarders disappears, and the odd behaviour of her husband convinces his landlady that he killed her.

Oh, allow me to make a review of eBook reading aswell. It's surprisingly easy on the eyes, not at all bad. The scanning process has sometimes corrupted the words though, with some amusing results, like the name Burns becoming Bums. How I giggled. It makes it a little difficult for me to judge the plots, because when I suddenly realise I don't get how Rinehart got to where she is in the solution, I'm unsure if it's because I'm reading like an eejit or if something got lost in the transfer. But anyway, I'm pleased. I might try reading something I already know later to check up on those defects easier.

Alex Schulman: Skynda att älska

2010-10-21T22:06:00.001+02:00

Vår nästa bokcirkelbok, detta. Det var kul, för jag hade aldrig någonsin kommit på att läsa den själv. Jag var dock lite tveksam till att läsa en potentiellt mycket sorglig bok, för jag hade då, vid senaste mötet, läst så många dystopier att jag var alldeles utgråten. Det visade sig dock att det var jättesvårt att lägga vantarna på den på biblioteket, och när jag fick tag på den i veckan så hade den känslan gått över och det kändes helt okej att läsa en kärleksförklaring till en död pappa. Och positivt överraskad blev jag också.

Kanske lite fånigt att säga att jag blir överraskad, när jag minns att alla kritiker var positiva. Mitt intryck av Alex Schulman är dock så splittrat att jag förväntade mig det värsta. En lite ytlig bok, som tassade i känslorna bara. Eller lite av en gråtmild historia. Det är det inte. Schulman berättar om hur han några år efter faderns död börjar våga ta fram minnena, börjar våga bryta ihop. Tillsammans med en terapeut funderar han på hur det påverkat honom att ha haft en far som var gammal redan när han var barn - hur det påverkar att barn att redan från början veta att pappa är skör och måste skyddas. Han beskriver och minns de speciella stunder bara han delade med sin far, faderns uppfinningsrikedom och kärlek till sina barn, hans anekdoter, hans dödsskräck. Men också hans raserianfall och oberäknelighet. Det är väldigt rörande och en fin skildring av en lite udda familj. Ibland också, naturligtvis, väldigt rolig.

Vissa brister har den. När jag läste Amos Oz och David Eggers självbiografier tätt inpå varandra (titta i länklistan, jag orkar inte länka just nu) så försökte jag sätta fingret på varför jag föredrog Eggers, och skrev något om att skillnaden i att våga vara riktigt utlämnande. Eggers döljer inget för oss - åtminstone tror vi det. Möjligt förstås att mycket fiktion döljer sig i det påstått öppna. Oz däremot skrev inte allt om sin familj till exempel, för det märktes att han ville skydda vissa i den. På något vis hämmar den här distansen förståelsen. Eller är det jag som är oresonlig, som vill ha terapisessioner i skrift? Det totalt privata? Alla inre känslor och analyser upp på ett bord bara, så jag får grotta i dem? Jag tror inte det, jag tror mer att det handlar om att om man säger att man vill skriva en bok som handlar om något personligt och privat, ett trauma, sina känslor - då får man inte fega ur och backa från att exponera sig. Man måste våga skrika riktigt. I alla fall, så upplever jag en viss distans i Skynda att älska. Varför är brodern Niklas med så lite till exempel? Det är knappt att han nämns. Calle däremot är med, det är tydligt att han och Alex står varandra nära. Men är Niclas utanför? Eller bad han bara att slippa vara med? Eftersom skillnaden är så tydlig hade jag uppskattat en ärlig förklaring. Jag är också lite störd på att Schulman tassar runt det stora traumat (förutom döden i sig då), nämligen den gången så faderns våldsamma vrede drabbade honom själv. Vi får veta det, vad som hände, och att Schulman ljuger för sin terapeut om det. Kanske är det för jobbigt att gräva djupare i. Kanske är det bara en lättnad och en plåga att ha det sagt - men jag känner att den här historien hade kunnat ge så mycket mer, varit en djupare bok på många sätt. Med mer funderingar på varför fadern var som han var, hur barnen mådde, hur modern mådde.

Visst är den bra, faktiskt. Men lite fadd. Fadd just därför att den är så pass bra och välskriven.

Kom på vad jag ville säga igår på bussen i morse, så jag tar en mikropaus på jobbet och kompletterar:

Det känns om att Schulman är förbannad på sin far. Han är fruktansvärt arg på att Allan Schulman skaffade barn när han var gammal och visste att han inte skulle få se sina barn som vuxna. Han är arg för att fadern aldrig kommer att träffa hans, Alex, barn, för att de aldrig kommer att träffa sin farfar och höra hans anekdoter, hans dialekt, få bastukunskapen direkt från källan. Förbannad på faderns humör, på misshandeln som de aldrig pratade om. Förbannad för att han var tvungen att ta hand om sin far, när han fortfarande var barn, arg på en massa saker - men han konfronterar det inte tillräckligt väl i den här boken. Och allt det här trots att han älskar sin far, saknar honom oerhört, minns fantastiska stunder med honom, kan se hur han har tagit efter vanor och manér som fadern hade. Det är ju precis det som är det komplicerade med sorg - man älskar och är arg samtidigt. Man hulkar och svär. Jag skulle velat se en tydligare linje i boken. Vad är syftet med den? För nu känns det inte som om det inte finns ett syfte, vilket är en typ av bok, utan mer som om Schulman inte riktigt fick grepp om syftet för sig själv eller vågade ta i det. Hm. Det ska bli spännande att höra vad de andra tycker.

Ray Bradbury: The Machineries of Joy

2010-10-19T22:31:00.002+02:00

I used to love love Ray Bradbury in my teens. His dreamy and sentimental worlds were just the thing for my lonely disposition. Apparently we don't own any of his books though (I was so sure I did?) except for this collection of short stories. I read it because I wanted to read some science fiction and because I haven't opened a Bradbury book since aforementioned times - that would be sometime in the last century then, folks. This is, I don't feel, strictly speaking a collection of science fiction stories though, although a few fit the bill. And frankly, they were mostly the better ones. I was disappointed re-reading this. I didn't remember Bradbury as being quite so sentimental and, well, almost maudlin. Somehow though the bite comes through, the edge that makes him a classic writer still, a social commentator, one of the greats. Especially in the later stories (they are collected from a decade or two of writing) it seems that he can get more explicit, maybe more dirty. Maybe he self-censored in the 50s, making his work a bit dreamily clean and wholesome.When he gets gritty it really gets good.

I've read several things since reading this, so I can't remember what my favourite story was, I'm afraid. I might update the post some time. Yes, I am ashamed to the core that my first post on such a classic writer, that meant a great deal to me personally, to boot, is so devoid of content! Uncool, man. Some other time.

Samuel R. Delany: Babel-17

2010-10-15T20:00:00.001+02:00

I reread this recently, because I want science-fiction and I remembered that I'd read this and liked it but that I was more than a little fuzzy on the plot. We own a copy, this edition which is beyond fugly by the way - I'd much rather own the one pictured on the Wikipedia entry (the first edition paperback cover), at least that one is retro fugly. But but but, it's the contents that matter, the contents above all, and isn't this a good novel to use to discuss just that.

But before that, let's talk about Samuel R. Delany, a person who in 1967 was, as Amazon puts it, "young, gay, black and possibly the hippest person on the planet." He may not be young anymore but the rest still applies. When I first read Babel-17 I always meant to learn more about him. Hello - openly gay, black, writes science-fiction (lets face it, that's a white sport, innit) AND he did it in 1967. Clearly, this is a man who eats boundaries for breakfast and picks his teeth with prejudice. (Unlike his namesake Sam Delaney, who popped up when I googled - the editor of Heat Magazine. Never shall the twain meet, I feel safe to say.) Anyway, Samuel R. Delany, I hope, is on the invitation list to every single Pride festival out there. He should be asked every year, just because he's awesome and everything queer is about, surely. He has a bibliography long as my arm, and our library has five books. Which I think I shall read, at least the English ones. After all, wouldn't want them to think it's cull-worthy. Keep the circulation numbers up!

Babel-17 won the Nebula award together with Flowers for Algernon, another classic that I haven't read (but I think I've seen that film, some time in the distant past). Babel-17 has yet to be filmed. I'm waiting for Will Smith to snatch this one up and muck about with it.

Set some time in the future, humans are engaged in an interstellar war of sorts with an alien race only known as Invaders - the humans and those aliens on their side are known as Alliance. Exactly what this was is about isn't clear - it is more important that people suffer from it. Lately there have been sabotage attacks on the Alliance, and immediately before them bursts of communication, some sort of code, could be heard. The Alliance military gives the transcripts to Rydra Wong, the hippest poetess star in the galaxy, since her knack with languages previously had her working in cryptology. She immediately sees that it is a language, a language that is so precise and compact that it changes your way of looking at the world. Together with her crew she sets off for where the data tells her the next attack will take place.

Bits of this are wonderfully imaginative. The crews always consist of a certain amount of people, with set roles and jobs. This includes dead people, discorporates, who function as sensors, because living people would go mad with all the sensory input. Navigation is always a married threesome, two women and one man or vice versa - Rydra's team has just lost their woman, and after a period of grieving are ready to find a new partner/lover/colleague, something Rydra helps them with. There's a team of about 20 youngsters who do the odd jobs, under the care of a sort of nanny, known as the Slug. Crew people always belong to Transport, which is almost a caste of people (the opposite being Customs), and we don't need any actual aliens for exotic flavour - Transport have wild cosmetisurgery done, like hollowing out part of the shoulder, fitting a small cage in it, and a little dragon to live in it, and are plenty exotic enough. Rydra's pilot has been altered to be lionlike, and is chosen based on his skill as a wrestler (his opponent was a female pilot who looked like a dragon). There is a whole culture planned and described here, and it isn't at all bound to our times and our ways of doing things. However, I was a little disappointed with the ending, which felt sudden and abrupt - odd, because it's a long way building up to it. More Buck Rogers than 2001 (bear in mind though that that sweeping statement is made after me only ever seeing one episode of Buck Rogers and never making it through an uninterrupted viewing of 2001).

What makes this book unique though is its focus on language, on the theory that our language determines how we look at the world. If we don't differentiate between soft snow or hard snow, or lack a word for third person singular that is neither masculine or feminine, or call red and pink by the same name - surely this affects our entire outlook at things. It's called linguistic relativity, and it fascinates me anyway. Babel-17 is a language that can be immensely precise, but in other aspects very vague, which makes it a tool to be used and abused, as Rydra figures out. This makes for the most interesting part of the book.

The weakest parts are Rydra's perfection (she's so very very fantastic) - oh, perhaps a general lack of real depth to the characters? It's more like I imagine depth because there is depth to the novel itself. And the end, it's rather weak, like I said. Other than that it's a bit of a must-read really if you like science-fiction at all, and perhaps even more if you don't, to help you see what the buffs find in the genre.

Birthday!

2010-10-11T09:20:00.000+02:00

Mine!

But I'm not doing anything or having people over, so I'm not expecting presents. I consider my new phone, a supertouchscreenAndroidmonster, present enough. Yesterday I downloaded the Aldiko eBook reader and browsed the free books available. There isn't much, really, unless you want to read Shakespeare, Homer, Cory Doctorow and countless happy more-or-less-amateurs, but I downloaded a Bram Stoker novel I'd never heard of, The Lair of the White Worm. So far, it's ludicrously awful. Has me wondering if I've got the abridged copy - very probable. I also dowloaded Gigolo by Edna Ferber (because I liked Fanny Herself a lot) and The Lodger by Marie Adelaide Lowndes, an author and novel I'd never heard of, but seems to be well known. I think I'll read that and give Bram Stoker a miss. Christ. I get all protective about my phone's prestanda, and don't want to download things on the off chance they'll be readable and only end up clogging the memory card with crap. Very lame and un-2010, I know, but I'll have to research all authors first, especially the happy possibly amateurs. Anyway, new cathegory/label - eBooks!

However, my husband told me yesterday that he'd bought me a special copy of Jane Austen's Emma in a second-hand book shop, some sort of scholarly edition with lots of background info that I might find interesting. He hadn't given it to me because he was gently erasing the previous owner's pencilled notes. I told him not to bother, I like other people's notes, which reminded me that I meant to comment on the notes in this book so I'm going back to edit that post a little now.

I am also dead on my feet from sleeping so badly, and haven't had the energy to do much of anything at work yet apart from sneakily write this post. I consider it a birthday privilege.

Far Horizons – short story collection

2010-10-10T21:53:00.000+02:00

I’m experiencing a bit of a science fiction and/or fantasy craving at the moment (escapism, me want escapism!), but since I’m choosy there isn’t much to borrow at the library. As far as I know – and continuing my reasoning I therefore borrowed this collection of short stories. Admittedly, mostly because Ursula LeGuin has one in it, but I also thought that maybe I’d get a line on a new author I might like.

Ha.

There is an awful lot of absolute shite out there in the world of print, and while I’d refuse to concede that there is more of it in the genres of sci-fi or fantasy, there is certainly plenty. Considering how charmingly imaginative and thought-provoking science-fiction can be, how it can really say something about humanity, it might be considered ironic or inevitable or maybe just curious that the flip side is some of the most boring, mind-numbingly dull texts ever produced by our species. Especially if they’re pretentious. Honor Harrington is dull, but not really pretentious, so I can’t really get passionately hateful and irked over her. The ones that think they’re speaking Wise Words however – ooooooo it’s so terrible I can hardly stand it. I can’t stand it, as a matter of fact, I gave myself leave to not read at least three of these stories to the end. This is a big deal for me. I usually finish things. I finished the Honor Harrington novel, remember, even though I did skim the whole end.

The idea of the collection is that authors who had in a series of books created a universe of their own, would be asked to write a short story to more fully explore something they couldn’t find room for in their novels. An aspect of the culture, a different perspective, a period of time that hasn’t been mentioned – things like that. Fantastic idea, really!

At first I thought I’d already read this collection, because I have read LeGuin’s contribution. Which was, of course, a disappointment (not the story of course, that I’d read it, I mean). It’s Old Music and the Slave Women, about the Hainish ambassador of the Ekumen on a planet where white people are slaves and black masters. As the revolts spread and the established government totters, he gets arrested, taken to a country estate, and there “mistakenly” treated like a member of the serving caste would be. It is a bit obvious in the how it treats the slave theme (what with the switching of skin colour, like), but it’s still very good. I get the feeling that LeGuin writes these stories as much for herself, to explore humanity’s cruelty and try to understand it.

I was also impressed by a story by Nancy Kress called Sleeping Dogs. Connecting to those great American working-class, depression, poverty stories that I really like, it’s about people more than technology. I wonder if she manages to get that across in her series about the genetically modified humans who don’t need to sleep, or if that aspect gets lost when they’re all rich and powerful? Maybe this story, about the dirt-poor young woman who wants revenge for the death of her little sister, is an exception?

Frederik Pohl’s The Boy Who Would Live Forever isn’t terrible either. I liked the originality of the hero being an American who has grown up in (a future) Istanbul, and feeling more Turkish maybe than American. There aren’t a lot of Turks in science-fiction. Not a very diverse genre, really. Despite the alien presence.

The editor, Robert Silverberg, contributes with a story called Roma Eterna, and I’m not ever going to touch his books again ever never no way. God, the DULLNESS. I could feel the death throes of my brain cells while reading (I didn’t finish it). Also, surely alternate history scenarios are more fantasy than science fiction? The idea of Silverberg’s Roma Eterna reality is that the Jews never left Egypt, Jesus never existed, nor therefore Christianity, Rome remained pagan. The Empire of Rome doesn’t crumble away but stays a super-power. Nice idea in theory, maybe. I’ve had more fun reading manuals, to be honest.

Dan Simmon’s Orphans of the Helix was not perfect, but did come close to that feeling I want from science-fiction that something else, a different world, is being merely described (nicked that from LeGuin). A Separate War by Joe Haldeman too, but it disappointed at the end.

On the whole this collection must be directed to the die-hard fans, the ones who read all twelve books of a series and want more. LeGuin’s short story feels the most misplaced, because all her novels stand alone, and are only nominally part of a series. She doesn’t even stick to any rules she makes within the secondary universe if she doesn’t want to. Well, I'm labeling this "reading tips" because you never know.

Dorothy Gilman: Mrs Pollifax on the China Station

2010-10-04T09:00:00.003+02:00

I’m not sure why the previous owner (TPO) poked a hole through the cover and first finger-width of pages of my second-hand copy (see picture after the jump). Did he or she feel a burning urge to try to drive a nail through a paperback, but then give up? Was it a tragic accident? Did TPO really hate it? Hate hats?

Luckily the hole does not make it impossible to read, unluckily the price wasn’t specially adjusted to reflect the condition of the copy. Cheapskates. And I, sucker that I am, was all too ready to be fooled. Because despite the blatant propaganda that the mrs Pollifax novels are, they are somehow quite endearing.

This one is written around the time that the US was warming up to China, which is also when the excellent film Big Bird Goes to China was made, one of my favourite films ever when I was little. We were among the first to own a VHS and we had this film recorded off the telly. The tape was one of the early, heavier ones, and for a long long time we had it there, among gradually newer and flimisier VHS tapes, and we watched it at least once a year. And I think I found it when the girls were small, I think I tried showing it to them. But now I don’t know where it is. Anyway, from China being Very Evil Indeed we have abruptly gone to China Having Evil Government But Ancient Venerable Culture And Chinese People Sadly Oppressed And Deserving Respect. Which doesn’t quite trip off the tongue the same way, and the machinery behind the whole attitude change is about a subtle as tumbling towers of empty cans, or even better, as subtle as when Breznjev denounced Stalin, maybe. I like that political comparison even better.

So mrs Pollifax gets recruited to go to China, ostensibly on a guided trip with a group of other, civilian and ordinary, Americans. Once in China she is to make contact with a Chinese man who has escaped a prison camp and get information from him on the location of said camp, and after that she is to pass it on to her co-agent in the tour group, whose identity will then be revealed to her. And then he is to somehow find one of the prisoners and smuggle him out.

There are allusions to some dirty, rotten scoundrels in the world of espionage, but on the whole we are asked to believe in a CIA that’s honest, up-front (but secret!) and most importantly – honourable. At least mrs Pollifax and her co-agent are, which is enough for us. If you don’t mind a rather naïve and idealistic view on the Cold War and US foreign policies, the book is a perfect spy thriller of the comfort food variety – the tempo is slow, the characters limited, the natives viewed with a benevolent eye. Optimistic, fundamentally. The absolute weakest part was an over-enthusiastic foray into the spiritual side of things with one tour group member revealed to be psychic (yes, really), and being able to sense the anguish that has once taken place when for example standing on an historical battle field. Why on earth does the rediscovery of the Silk Road and the yin-yang symbol lead to such flights of fancy?

By no means great literature, but easy reading, and I’ve certainly read worse and miles more pretentious, to boot.

A Classic English Crime – short story collection

2010-10-02T09:00:00.004+02:00

I had time to kill before my pilates class last week, and nothing to do since the shops had closed. I hadn’t eaten, felt depressed and sorry for myself, so went into the library to feel worse, since I then had cause to yet again feel mopish about the library's lack of comfort reading for me. No unread LeGuins, Ngaio Marshes, Loveseys, Hares or Dickinsons … all very tragic. I went for the short story collections and picked out one science-fiction (more on that later) and one crime. In the large print section. To make me feel (unfairly) just that little bit more geriatric.

Naturally, I think I’ve read this before. Which doesn’t matter, because I only vaguely remember one or two stories in it. Frankly, most of them aren’t very good. The book is one from the "Keating’s Choice" collection, and H.R.F. Keating (unread by me) and editor Tim Heald (also unread by me) seem to have worked together in choosing participating authors. The theme is The Golden Age of detective fiction, more specifically Agatha Christie, since the book was published in celebration of her centenary.

Like I’ve said, not mad keen on Agatha Christie. And unsurprisingly, several stories end up being rather dull takes/travesties/parodies of the Dame’s stories and characters. Double fail so to speak. One features a miss Harple, who detects crime in a small village, one has both Marple and Poirot. You get the idea. The best one in that cathegory is by Susan Moody (stepmother of Crown Princess Mary of Denmark! Who knew?!): a young woman sent by her employer to spy on an insurance claimant writes snarky and spirited letters to him, revealing that they are really quite close and intimate but have had a falling-out. At the end we find out that the hotel murder she’s been writing about never took place, but was just a ruse to awaken his protective side and make him come rushing to rescue her. Reminds me of Dorothy Sayers a bit. Simon Brett contributes with a mock “discovery” of a thesis, in which the author shows how Christie’s ideas are rooted in her wide knowledge of classic literature, and shows how among others Beowulf, Alexander Pope and Robert Burns herald the introduction of Hercule Poirot. It’s pretty awful. When I was in high school myself and a friend held a presentation to the class on Wordsworth, and since it was April 1st we wrote a mock poem called Ode to a Teacup and said it was the original of Ode to a Grecian Urn. Funny enough for a joke in our high school class, not funny enough to print in a short story collection for Agatha Christie’s centenary, if you see what I mean, yet this is what Simon Brett has done. Keating’s story is called Jack Fell Down and features a Scandinavian detective called Hjerson, which is just super-lame. Hjerson, indeed. There are real names. And if he’s Finnish, he either should have a Finnish name or a good Swedish-Finnish one. Editor Tim Heald contributes with the above-mentioned parody with both Marple and Poirot, called Experts for the Prosecution – starts off okay but peters out into something perhaps best described as jocularity, maybe.

The best stories are obviously the ones that avoid using Christie’s characters, but instead draw on the style of the detective novels of the age and/or the historical times they took place in. Peter Lovesey’s is, true to form, an enjoyable piece of writing that despite the short format manages to make actual characters of the people in it. Margaret Yorke, Celia Dale, Catherine Aird, Robert Barnard and Paula Gosling also do a good job. Liza Cody’s (I like Liza Cody, but haven’t read much of her) is most original. Written from the perspective of a young, spoiled boy, it tells of him betraying a young Jewish girl to the Nazis, somewhere at the start of the Third Reich. I can’t say I thought it was great though, because somehow it didn’t feel right in terms of language choice etc. – anachronistic, that’s the word. But it was definitely the most original of the bunch (Brett’s doesn’t count).

Oh, adding this on Oct 11th: One of the charmingest things about the book, or this copy of it rather, is the pencilled notes in Russian throughout. Someone who speaks Russian must have been learning English from this. Loads of little translations jotted in here and there. I like it, even though it makes me feel guilty for basically dropping all my Russian studies and forgetting the entire thing. I can still read the notes though.

Dorothy Sayers: The Nine Tailors

2010-09-30T20:45:00.000+02:00

I found this newish copy second-hand and was very happy, until my coffee thermos flask leaked in my bag. Now I have a definitely more vintage-looking book, but no matter. It’s nice to own Dorothy Sayers’ books, so I can re-read them whenever I want. This one is a favourite because of the absolutely incomprehensible bell-ringing theme, nerdiness personified. Bell-ringing - sorry, change ringing - is noted down in series of numbers that make no sense at all to the uninitiated, but provide excellent cover for a code. Bellringers refer to bobs and grandsire triples, and spend eight hours ringing unmelodic sequences to ring in the new year and break an old record. What’s it like to live beside a church with an active and enthusiastic bell-ringing team, I wonder? Fantastic stuff.

This is before Lord Peter meets Harriet Vane / the book is from 1934), so it’s just him and Bunter (of unlimited loyalty). Their car crashes on New Year’s Eve near a little village on the Fens (this book is also good to teach you a bit about the fens, which in turn was helpful when reading The Golden Compass, if I don’t misremember). They stay over at the vicarage and Lord Peter helps out with the bell-ringing. Later, a dead body is found in the grave belonging to the local gentry-folk, and it becomes clear that the man died on New Year’s Eve.

It’s a good solid plot, but unrealistic that it takes Lord Peter so long to cop on to the solution. Well, I think the plot is solid, but according to a quote I saw in the novel's Wikipedia entry the whole premise for the death is faulty. I wouldn't know myself, I only ring bicycle bells.

Full props to Dorothy Sayers though for always being prepared to have very unusual murderers, and for – when the whole area is flooded and everyone has to evacuate to the church – including the detail of digging sanitation trenches. I don’t think Agatha Christie would’ve bothered with that touch of realism.

Charlie Higson: The Dead

2010-09-27T21:28:00.001+02:00

So, time to add mine to the smattering of reviews out there on the net!

A bit surprisingly and disappointingly, The Dead takes place about a year before the events described in The Enemy. At the end the reasons for this become clear – it provides answers and backgrounds to some events and people from the first book, as well as background to what will probably become a plotline in the third book. I think that clearly Higson has been getting a lot of questions from readers, and he’s had to think about them and provide answers. Heh, always a problem with literature that is essentially illogical – someone will ask you to provide a logic to apply to it.

In the first book we were given to understand that one father in particular from the horde of adult zombies posed more of a threat than the others, since he was a bit clearer in the head and was able to lead other adults on more organized assaults. In this book we get a background to who he is, and why he is as lucid as he is. The clue is the diet of children. In The Dead, some kids figure out that there must be something in the children that protects from the disease, and this is why the adults want to eat them: they can sense that there is something they need in the children’s flesh. This also explains why they’d rather not eat each other, but prefer to prey on children. This also explains the apparently normal adults found in the dark of the Underground tunnels in The Enemy – they’ve both stayed out of the harmful sunlight and munched on minors. So, we’re provided with some medical background, as it were. Apart from this, we’re introduced to a completely new group of kids, which makes the book a bit of a repetition, which in turn meant that I didn’t cry as much this time. This group has escaped their boarding school outside London, and are making their way in to the city. On the way they join a different gang of kids, and once in London they are separated. (There is heavy culling of course. People die like flies. I did cry, I was just used to the idea by now so didn't cry as much as the first time around.)

One of the boarding-school kids is introduced as a religious maniac. I was a bit surprised at this, to be honest. I thought Higson was going to stay away from that area and stick to having all his kids run-of-the-mill secularists. Kids pondering the Wrath of God seem to be more either old-fashioned or American, or a mandatory ingredient in apocalyptic tales for adults. Anyway, I thought this was just Higson adding said mandatory ingredient, so as a matter of fact, I paid so little attention to crazy Matt’s rantings that I was taken by surprise when the last few pages make it clear that this might become a major plotline. Matt believes that the Bible prophesises the coming of the Lamb and the Goat, and that this would be two kids. Or something. I was only skimming those bits, I thought it was just the obligatory crazy! And at the end of The Dead the plotlines from the first and second book converge, and it seems like our two little survivors who against all odds make it to The Tower in The Enemy are going to be seen as The Lamb and The Goat, even by those who previously didn’t believe. I dunno about this, it could turn really really sour. A bit like how American tv shows always have an episode with an open ending indicating that Santa may be real or ghosts may exist. We’ll see.

So on the whole, pretty much a repeat of the first book, something I don’t doubt the kids won’t mind, but us adults find a bit dull. Nonetheless, we’re all geared up and excited now for book no. three in 2011, in which we’ll find out what’s going to happen to all our heroes and heroines. It’ll be a long wait!

Mia Skäringer: Dyngkåt och hur helig som helst

2010-09-21T22:20:00.000+02:00

Utan att alls egentligen, när jag tänker efter, ha sett väldigt mycket av Mia Skäringer (jag tittade inte speciellt mycket på tv när Mia och Klara gick osv osv), så tycker jag att hon är väldigt rolig. Att hon länge skrivit krönikor i Mama och även bloggat där kände jag inte alls till. Den här boken är en sammanställning av dessa krönikor och inlägg, och speciellt blogginläggen känns därför lite halva, enligt min åsikt. I en populär blogg är det gemenskapen och utbytet mellan skribent och läsare som gör en hel del av läsupplevelsen, skulle jag vilja påstå – men i den här samlingen finns ju naturligtvis inte läsarkommentarerna med.

Texterna i boken handlar om vardagslivet och de erfarenheter, svåra och härliga, som Skäringar samlat på sig genom livet, om barn, skilsmässa, dålig självkänsla och om att vägra ha sex om man inte verkligen vill. Jag tyckte bitvis den var fantastiskt rörande och bitvis bara sådär, men de bra bitarna gick rakt in i hjärtat på mig, och när Skäringer skriver om sin pappa gråter jag stort. Med andra ord ytterligare en bok som är helt värdelös att läsa på bussen. Att jag aldrig lär mig.

Chance of a lifetime

2010-09-21T16:21:00.000+02:00

We only just the other day got home (ha, Swedishism) The Dead, the prequel-sequel to The Enemy. If Maxima hurries up and finishes it I might just be among the very first to review it online it seems (says I after just googling the book to see what critics are saying). One revels in small, tiny, minuscule glories, doesn't one.

Åsa Linderborg: Mig äger ingen

2010-09-20T22:00:00.000+02:00

Efter denna bruntonade valutgång passar det ju utmärkt att skriva om en arbetarroman, även om det främst är ett porträtt av en älskad och saknad far. Åsa Linderborgs hjärta klappar dock envist och stolt på vänster sida i hennes bröst, och hennes engagemang för arbetarrörelsen lyser igenom denna kärleksförklaring till pappan.

Jag och Åsa Linderborg har inte så fasligt mycket gemensamt, även om vi är av ungefär samma generation. Ändå blir jag ofantligt berörd av hennes bok, berörd på det sätt man normalt bara blir när man kan identifiera sig med något. Vi har väl det gemensamt att våra familjer var dysfunktionella, men där jag upplever övergivenhet och ilska över detta, känner Linderborg kärlek och förståelse. Och det tycker jag är så starkt, och så talande. Det är underbart att Linderborg kan känna så. När hon är liten lämnar mamman familjen för en annan man, och lämnar Åsa hos pappan – enligt vad hon förklarar senare är det för att hon ser hur ledsen han blir, och vill ge honom det finaste hon har. Åsas pappa kan inte hålla i pengar, han köper italienska skinnsandaler till henne istället för gummistövlar. Hon får godis varje dag och enahanda mat. De tvättar inte, de har inga lakan. Hon badar inte, om hon inte går till släktingar. Släktingarna – en lite tillknäppt oreflekterande svensk arbetarfamilj på pappas sida, och en vilt debatterande och politiskt engagerad ryskättad familj på mammas sida – stöttar upp där pappa kommer till korta. Men kärlek i övermått finns det. Ändå glider de ifrån varandra när Åsa upplever att alkoholen blir för viktig för fadern, och när hennes akademiska karriär tar fart och bygger en liten mur av intellektuell oförståelse mellan dem. Och det är helt underbart att läsa hur hon ogenerat och obittert kan ta åt sig ansvar för denna fjärming också, och inte skyller på hans tillkortakommanden. Hon förstår honom, hur hans upplevelse av sig själv som arbetare per definition gör att han är ett offer, hur han vill vara stark, handlingskraftig och radikal, men inte törs stå ut och bryta konvenanserna. Hur jantelagen regerade på Metallverken.

Det är även en kärleksförklaring till arbetarrörelsen, även om hon skickligt balanserar det hela så att den delen inte tar överhanden, utan mer finns där som en oundviklig och nödvändig bakgrund. Till arbetarna som jobbade sönder sina kroppar för att tjäna pengar åt andra, till solidariteten, till de ideologier som, de facto, byggt upp det samhälle vi har idag, som ville och försökte skapa en ny sorts värld. Jag är inte vänster så det stör direkt, men ändå frustrerar det mig när andra ideologier vill lägga beslag på vänsterns/socialdemokratins begrepp och klasskamp.

Väldigt läsvärd. Rekommenderas starkt.

Today is the first day of the future

2010-09-20T10:50:00.000+02:00

And the future in Sweden, both locally and nationally, is a little bit browner. The racists got in. It is unutterably depressing. Let's hope they make fools of themselves sooner rather than later, and that the other parties don't work with them.

The Left Hand of Darkness, re-read

2010-09-19T16:52:00.000+02:00

I re-read it just now, and discovered that passages and ideas I remembered as dated or weak were less so, and that bits that I'd found perfect weren't. I really like this book. It's the same but a little different whenever I read it.
Today is election day, and I fear that when I wake up tomorrow there'll be an openly racist party in our parliament. A black day. The passages on patriotism resonated especially for me this time.

"I've made no secret of it, sir. The Ekumen wants an alliance with the nations of Gethen."
"What for?"
"Material profit. Increase of knowledge. The augmentation of the complexity and intensity of the field of intelligent life. The enrichment of harmony and the greater glory of God. Curiosity. Adventure. Delight."

"I don't think I do. If by patriotism you don't mean the love of one's homeland, for that I do know."
"No, I don't mean love, when I say patriotism. I mean fear. The fear of the other. And its expressions are political, not poetical: hate, rivalry, aggression. It grows in us, that fear. It grows in us year by year. We've followed our road too far. And you, who come from a world that outgrew nations centuries ago, who hardly know what I'm talking about, who show us a new road - "

"Very few Orgota know how to cook. Hate Orgoreyn? No, how should I? How does one hate a country, or love one? Tibe talks about it; I lack the trick of it. I know people, I know towns, farms, hills and rivers and rocks, I know how the sun at sunset in autumn falls on the side of a certain plowland in the hills; but what is the sense of giving a boundary to all that, of giving it a name and ceasing to love it where the name ceases to apply? What is love of one's country; is it hatred of one's uncountry? Then it's not a good thing. Is it simply self-love? That's a good thing, but one mustn't make a virtue out of it, or a profession ... Insofar as I love life, I love the hills of the Domain of Estre, but that sort of love does not have a boundary-line of hate. And beyond that, I'm ignorant, I hope."

[...] He talked a great deal about Truth also, for he was, he said, "cutting down beneath the veneer of civilization."
It is a durable, ubiquitous, specious metaphor, that one about veneer (or paint, or pliofilm, or whatever) hiding the nobler reality beneath. It can conceal a dozen fallacies at once. One of the most dangerous is the implication that civilization, being artificial, is unnatural: that it is the opposite of primitiveness ... Of course there is no veneer, the process is one of growth, and primitiveness and civilization are degrees of the same thing. If civilization has an opposite, it is war. Of those two things, you have either one or the other. Not both.

Slose opposes them because they are trivial, vulgar, and blasphemous.
To oppose something is to maintain it.
They say here "all roads lead to Mishnory". To be sure, if you turn your back on Mishnory and walk away from it, you are still on the Mishnory road. To oppose vulgarity is inevitably to be vulgar. You must go somewhere else; you must have another goal; then you walk a different road.
[...]
To be an atheist is to maintain God. His existence or his nonexistence, it amounts to much the same, on the plane of proof. Thus proof is a word not often used among the Handdarata, who have chosen not to treat God as a fact, subject either to proof or to belief: and they have broken the circle, and go free.

I am not trying to say that I was happy, during those weeks of hauling a sledge across an ice-sheet in the dead of winter. I was hungry, overstrained, and often anxious, and it all got worse the longer it went on. I certainly wasn't happy. Happiness has to do with reason, and only reason earns it. What I was given was the thing you can't earn, and can't keep, and often don't even recognize at the time; I mean joy.

Two sad ones

2010-09-05T23:12:00.000+02:00

I've made the mistake of reading two books with a lot of sadness almost simultaneously, and even though I've finished them both several days ago I'm having trouble shaking off the melancholy feeling I'm left with.
The biggest culprit is Cormac McCarthy's The Road. We chose this for the book club, so I started reading it quite soon after the last meeting, but after only thirty pages or so I had to put it away for a while. The Road is like one big howl of anguish. It's wonderful, genius, but it's a hard book to read. So when Mockingjay came I read that in between like. The final of the Hunger Games trilogy includes the deaths of many people that we've come to know and care about, and though it is not at all as brilliant as The Road in a literary sense, it's good solid young adult fiction. The choices and horrors that face Katniss, Peeta and the others in this final war against the Capitol are truly grim ones, especially if you like me are a sensitive soul and can easily imagine them as really taking place - cue much sobbing. The most frightening thing of course is that the people who want to take over from the Capitol might just be as bad as that regime of terror. Without rubbing the reader's face in it there are a lot of ethical discussion and dilemmas. A good end, despite being heart-breakingly sad.

On this note of fictional, but real, grief I went back to The Road, and immediately felt myself tensing up, a knot of stress and pain forming in my gut - this is how good this is. For some reason that is never made entirely clear, the whole world has been ravaged by fires, and the few survivors are left struggling to stay alive. Most of them have become cannibals, roaming the land searching for weaker victims. Especially children. Through this world of ash walks a man and his son (maybe six years old or so), towards the sea. For no real reason, except to see if it might be better there. There is nothing. They just walk, and hide, and starve, and they only have each other, and the man loves his son so much he knows that despite saving the last bullet in the gun to kill the boy if he has to, he never can, he never will. Just keep moving , just walk a little more, just stay alive.

Luckily, just after I'd picked it up again the man and the boy encountered a dog barking in the distance, which lightened the mood for me enough to help me keep going and finish it. Although I do admit I didn't do the prose justice at all, I had to read quickly quickly to get to the end because it was tearing me apart. Even though the book ends on a strong note of hope I'm left with this extraordinarily strong tense feeling, coiled up inside me like wire. One of the best books I've ever read, one of the hardest. I've been crying for days. Not quite sure what to do with myself.

It's here!

2010-09-01T09:31:00.002+02:00

Mockingjay! And I'm reading it first.

Donna Leon x 2

2010-08-27T21:32:00.000+02:00

In my next life I’m going to be great at writing snappy headlines for blog entries instead of these boring “x 2/3/4” ones. Promise.

But hey, it’s a dull post. First, Death in a Strange Country, about the discovery of the corpse of an American um, something army something … well, he’s a doctor at the nearby US base, whatever rank that meant he was. Great pains have been taken to disguise this murder as a mugging, and Brunetti discovers that it’s connected to illegal dumping of toxic waste. Alright. Then we have About Face, which features prominently a woman whose face has been altered into ugliness by plastic surgery (we find out why at the end), and more illegal waste disposal. I sense a theme. Alright, again. Easy bus reading.

Melvyn Burgess: Bloodsong

2010-08-26T21:49:00.000+02:00

I’m struggling a little to condense/describe Bloodsong, one of the most extraordinary books I’ve read this year. I mean, a mixture of science fiction and Norse mythology … how does one even begin?
I’d never heard of Melvin Burgess before my daughter came home with this after her work experience job in Uppsala English Bookshop (which, by the way, has moved during the summer into larger and roomier premises, worth a visit!) – nor had she, it was just a chance pick. But apparently he’s not nobody, and his first book in this particular saga (Bloodtide) made quite a splash. Of blood, presumably, because this is gory stuff, just like the Icelandic epics it’s based on. Now, I do wish I’d read Bloodtide first, only because I think it might be easier to sink into the alternative world then. And I don’t think I can pinpoint exactly why I had to read a good bit to really get involved until I read Bloodtide, so it’s a bit of a Catch 22 really. Is it a flaw in the storytelling I mean, or is it just sequel-sickness, assuming that you know stuff you don’t know? On the other hand I like books that just chuck me into the action, don’t I … anyway, I’ll just have to read it too and get back to you.

This is set in a future, or possibly alternative reality, in which cloning, genetic engineering and a whole bunch of other technology has become very advanced, so advanced that in most countries it seems to be banned. Not in Britain however, and because of this the island has been isolated from the rest of the world. Home to many different human or human/animal hybrid clans, it is ravaged by civil wars and skirmishes. Sigurd knows that he is born to unite the clans – not only because his father was the last king who succeeded in doing so, until Odin took his hand away from him, but also because his father genetically engineered him for the task. Thanks to this, everyone loves Sigurd and will follow him. So Sigurd decides that his first quest will be to kill the dragon Fafnir. Not a “real” dragon of course, but a man who has genetically enhanced and improved himself and who is reportedly impossible to kill. Well, Sigurd does it, and dies himself in the process, which he goes on to do three more times in various ways. During the rest of the story, as he becomes a leader and unites the people, he meets three different women, one he loves, one who steals his soul, and one he eventually marries, and it’s really quite heart-breaking. And just like an Icelandic saga it doesn’t end well. At all.

I am captivated by the whole idea and by the execution, but I don’t know if I loved the experience of reading it. It is remarkably non-compromising for a book labelled young adults – frank and gory bloodshed, equally frank and open-minded sex (what else can you call it when a part-lion human king has sex with, variously, the daughter of Odin, a part-dog man and the latter’s sister?) and a stark adherence to the rules of the Icelandic saga. I truly applaud the concept of it, yet put it down with a little niggling feeling that I’d missed something. I must get someone else to read it to see if they can figure it out. Recommended, though! Absolutely.

Jasper Fforde: First Among Sequels

2010-08-26T15:00:00.001+02:00

And the pièce de résistance – an entry commenced on the 9th of May in TWO THOUSAND AND EIGHT. And it’s pretty much done! Look!

The latest in the Thursday Next series, a series I’ve had great pleasure from. Now,we’re not in the eighties any more. Thursday and Landon are long married, with three children. Thursday no longer works with the Literary Detectives, since most of Spec Ops has been dismantled. She still works at Jurisfiction however, and her carpet laying business is a front for covert Spec Ops work with former colleagues – not to mention her cheese-smuggling side income. None of this is known to Landon though. Now, people seem to be reading fewer books, which puts the Book World at risk, and the Goliath Corporation seem to be up to something. And Thursday’s and Landon’s firstborn, Friday, is not looking as though he means to fulfil his destiny of heading the Time Police.

Nice blurb eh? All from memory. Go me.

I got a tad tired of this one, to be honest. There are too many puns and Bookworld jokes, and just not enough story. The Nursery Crime series looks like the better one at the moment – shame, because I love Thursday Next as a heroine. Love.

Jasper Fforde at his best manages to combine nonsense, wit

and there it stops. But it'll do, won't it? I can't for the life of me remember exactly what scathing put-down I was preparing.

Ellery Queen: A Fine and Private Place

2010-08-26T09:00:00.005+02:00

This entry was started on the 8th of March 2009. 4rlz. If I had anything else to say, I don’t remember. This is what I wrote more than a year ago, and this it what I shall post now:

A wonderfully complicated whodunnit. Oh, I really must read more Queens, I can't believe I haven't done so already. They're educational too - why, I have learnt that in 1971 (when the book was published), gay men were indeed gay and people were quite open about that. Frankly the storyline borders on silly, but I don't care much. We have a wealthy business man with a superstition about the number 9 and a young and beautiful wife he blackmailed into marrying him, who is murdered in a baffling way, whereupon baffling 9-clues start arriving in the post. Ta-daa.

I have read several Queens since then, but hardly ever used ta-daa in a written sentence. I don’t think I ever reached this level of exuberant giddy joy either. Where on earth did that come from?

I think I had something else to say, something about homosexuality in crime fic, something that wasn’t completely frivolous, but … well.

Simon Brett, a duet

2010-08-25T09:00:00.001+02:00

Here is an entry from 8 of March 2009, people. Why didn't I post it then? Who knows.

I got these two Bretts, so I thought I'd do them in one post. First I started reading The Witness at the Wedding, and after a while started feeling like I'd read it before. Sigh. Not only had I read it, but it's the only Brett I'd actually WRITTEN about. Double-sigh. All the ones I hadn't blogged about I was aware of having read, but this one felt unfamiliar. Typical.

The other one was Death Under the Dryer. Carole Seddon goes to have her hair cut and a dead girl is found in the back room at the hair dresser's. I don't have much to say about it - it's a Brett, so it's weak on characterization and the plot is shaky. But it has a certain charm, of that type that makes The Midsomer Murders so popular outside the UK. I think these books are best read when you are recuperating from an illness. Not demanding at all.

Ngaio Marsh: Scales of Justice and Hand in Glove

2010-08-24T09:00:00.002+02:00

Let’s go on with two entries that have been (empty) on my draft list since 25 of June this year. I bought a stack of Ngaio books, as you may recall, and of course read them a long time ago. I’ve been putting off blogging about this because I wanted to have the covers in the post too, and I’d scanned them at work (norty norty), and I had to e-mail them to myself, and then remember that I’d done so … clearly this sank on my list of priorities.

The problem is that now I’m very hazy on the details. I do remember that Scales of Justice surprised me by introducing a rift between the mandatory young couple (who are above suspicion). They will without a doubt marry after the book is ended, but perhaps not live quite as happily ever after as all of Ngaio’s other young couples. But hey, don’t take my word for it, have a look at the section in question, which I’m delighted that I found again (not often that happens):

It's the passage in the middle, especially.

Colonel Cartarette has been murdered, and beside his corpse lay a trout, and it is the remnants of scales from the trout that will bring the killer to justice – gettit? In this tiny, seemingly improbably idyllic village with almost incestuously cosy relationships there is a lot of tension under the surface and a lot of suspects.

I did like this one, Ngaio puts up a good show here. Of course, fabulous cover art:

Wonderfully non-realistic blood – looks like the blood you’d paint on tin soldiers, doesn’t it?

Hand in Glove does not have such wonderful cover art. This is the odd one out in my recent little collection:

It’s also falling to bits, so I did waver before buying it. In the village/small town of Codling mr Pyke Period, a man obsessed with etiquette and class, both subjects that are less and less in demand (the book was first printed in 1962). His house-mate, mr Howard Cartell, is found dead in a sewer ditch that is being dug right outside their house, on the morning after a tremendous party thrown by Cartell’s ex-wife. The party featured a cross-country scavenger hunt, which meant that all the suspects have opportunity, of course.

It’s not really one of my favourites, but it’s quite interesting to read how Ngaio tries to incorporate a certain type of loose-moraled, modern, wicked young person, a type that would previously not have been accepted into this kind of society. Gives you a certain feel for the times. Oh, and the young couple are quite charming.

Janet Evanovich: Fearless Fourteen

2010-08-23T09:00:00.003+02:00

And this blog entry was started on the 28 of June. Oh just wait, the backlog gets even more outrageous. Patience.

I didn’t even write anything at the time, I just needed to return the books so I made a draft list, meaning to get to work on that asap. Yeah right, you start reading new things and then … This way is much better, not reading anything new and bringing the laptop on the bus. I’m making headway now! Anyway, I obviously didn’t remember no plot no more, so I looked it up on Amazon and now I don’t feel like writing a summary. You can have this one from that Amazon page instead; and I quote:

Our heroine, the irrepressible bounty hunter Stephanie Plum, finds herself watching over a goth teen called Zook, who is heavily into gaming, after his mom can’t make bail and disappears (or has been kidnapped). A lot of people think there is stolen money buried in or near Officer Morelli’s little house—that’s Steph’s Morelli, the cop who is her number-one boyfriend most of the time, or at least when the entrancing Ranger isn’t nearby. The money is the reason behind Zook’s mom’s disappearance, and it’s the tie that binds Evanovich’s various plotlines, which carom about endlessly, not always resolving. Questions abound: Are Steph’s sidekick, the plus-size Lula, and Ranger’s man Tank really engaged? Ranger is working security for a fading but brassy pop star: How does Steph manage to get into and out of her reality show? Can Zook and his sidekicks protect Morelli’s house—and Stephanie—with their homegrown weaponry (think potatoes as missiles)? Where else but Evanovich’s fourteenth novel can a line like “it’s raining money and popsicles!” actually make sense? Fans will be delighted, but others, who stumble into the series at this advanced point, may find themselves starved for backstory, so much so that they may need to go all the way back to One for the Money (1994). --GraceAnne A. DeCandido

Thank you, GraceAnne, and by the way - your name is fabulous!

I think that says it all and more. I’m falling out of love with this series too. The nuggets of darkness that offset the slapstick are all but gone now. In one chapter Stephanie is almost very brutally raped. Which scares her, but then she shrugs it off and it’s no more an issue. I don’t like this dumbing down business.

Diana Wynne Jones: Archer's Goon

2010-08-22T09:00:00.004+02:00

Let’s have a look at an entry draft that I started on February 1st, shall we? All I had written then was:

I read this to have something to read that wouldn't make me cry, and I have to say that it's perfect for that purpose. Archer's Goon has actually been filmed, too (extensive review here).

Now, it’s tempting to leave it at that. I could too, because the title is distinctive enough to allow me to remember it, and this blog is all about the purpose of me. But reading that Diana Wynne Jones is struggling with cancer and has decided to cancel her chemotherapy treatment means that I feel I owe her more. And now I am crying, a bit.

Howard Sykes, 14 years old, comes home from school one day to find a Goon in his kitchen, annoying the au-pair who can’t make tea with him in the way. He says that he needs to speak to Howard’s father, who owes Archer 2000, “and Archer farms this part of town”. It transpires that it’s not £2000 but 2000 words, that Howard’s father, a writer, for many years has sent off to the mysterious Archer. He thought it started as a joke, a cure for the writer’s block he was suffering at the time. Since he has other things to do now he thought he’d stop – and now the Goon is here to collect.

The Goon sticks around, and life gets stranger. Archer’s siblings turn up and start making trouble for the family. They all farm some part of town – transportation, crime, sewage, music and entertainment and so on. Howard and his sister start getting more and more entangled in their attempts to make that family leave their family alone. And in the end there is a twist to it that is totally unexpected and forces Howard to make a very difficult choice. Since it was ages ago that I read it I don’t remember names offhand (or the exact plotlines either), so forgive the haziness. But I do remember that I liked it. The idea that a world exists parallel to ours, or that the way we think things work are not the way things really work, is nothing new. But Wynne Jones always manages to make it seem fresh. “Farms this part of town” – that alone is quite brilliant. I raise my glass to you, Ms Wynne Jones.

Andrea Camilleri x 2

2010-08-21T15:00:00.002+02:00

My sister (the one who doesn’t read science-fiction) recommended Camilleri as better than Donna Leon, funnier, very Sicilian (“only in Sicily” is what you think while reading these I think she said).

And she’s right, they are funny, and much more innately Italian (they wouldn’t agree, they’d say Sicilian) than anything of Leon’s. Inspector Montalbano is a likeable character despite being a bit of an annoying slacker who cares most about good food and long swims. The Terracotta Dog is about the police finding a cave with the corpses of a young couple .They have lain for decades waiting to be found, and around them are some curious objects, among them a terracotta dog, stolen from a village Nativity scene. August Heat is also about the discovery of a hidden chamber (this time an underground room) with a long-dead corpse. I’ll have to read one more of Camilleri’s to find out if there are any other ways of finding corpses.
My sister and her family were in Sicily for a week for their holidays (a holiday they can’t have enjoyed as much as the two weeks they spent in Sweden this summer, surely – I miss them already!) and according to her they all seem quite as mad as the books suggest over there. It would be fun to go sometime.