stuff I read this summer or up until like september or so

When we went to Ireland I ploughed through my sister's Agatha Christies and some kids' books they had. And when I got home I was still on an Agatha Christie kick so I borrowed some more at the library and have also been watching Miss Marple on Netflix like some mad thing (the Joan Hickson ones, natch). I tried the Hercule Poirot too but that was just too camp; I couldn't take it. I can't believe they spent (or spend!) so much time and effort at all these Agatha Christie series and made them so shite. Those stiff actors who seem to be sitting on set just waiting for their lines, which they then deliver with the most obvious of acting cues, in manner of school play. I'm surprised they know what to do with their hands, I wouldn't raise an eyebrow if they stood there with their appendages dangling limply or with fingesrs laced together awkwardly over their crotch area, like true amateurs do. Really dire. But after a terrible first four or so episodes the Joan Hickson series does pick up a bit, and she is an excellent Marple. The best, the tops. However, what I like about vintage detective fiction is that there really is a lot of subtext and information about society at the time going on under a repetitive sort of over-structure , and I don't see why they ever pick up on this and play it up a bit when they film the stories. They could easily tweak them darker, or turn a spotlight just ever-so-slightly on the implied gay relationships (I'm not asking for new storylines to be added, thus corrupting the original story, mind, just more interesting bits), or just do anything instead of falling into that god-awful trap of going bananas over the costumes.  Costume away, my dear friends, but think Mad Men instead - script and eye candy. Also - please be period correct!  And a lot of information needed to understand the characters involved seems to go missing in the filming - understandable, because you don't want a scene with somebody reciting the biography of X, Y and Z, in the way you can in a novel, but at the same time it's worth pointing out that it is possible to shed light on the background and motivations of people in films too without voice-overs or recitals. Scripts people, they need work.

Now, I still can't say Christie's my favourite. My previous grumbles do stand, but I'm warming to her. She's uneven though, isn't she? I still find it difficult to guess the killer, which I put down to needing more information than what is given. I am probably in the wrong, since I admittedly don't read carefully enough. Anyway, brief notes below based on memory alone - I'm writing this post in mid-September and half the books were read in mid-August.

4.50 from Paddington is one of my favourites. A great suspenseful killing on a train, that is only witnessed by accident. Maybe I'm just a sucker for train anything after commuting for so long and having a son who was train mad as a youngster. I also like the general set-up, the crumbling grand house in the middle of a changing community, the clever young woman who helps miss Marple by taking a post as housekeeper. Pleasing.

A Pocket Full of Rye is a little less good. A little too fantastical. Also, one has to make a few imaginative jumps here to guess the killer, surely? It's not obvious just from the clues in the text, is it? Or am I stupid? (Don't answer that.)

The Princess Bride: OMG OMG OMG I've wanted to read this for soooo long, why haven't I? And there it was, in my niece's bookshelf!

I have, of course, loved the film since childhood, and I remember my cousin (who introduced me to it) saying that it was based on this book, and she'd heard that the ending was actually really sad and that the spells wore off so Wesley died and Buttercup returned to Humperdinck. I am very grateful that the ending isn't quite so sad. More ambiguous. This is funny, entertaining, and clever. I don't know what I'd have made of it as a child/teen, if I could have appreciated the way fact and fiction is melded; Goldman writes as though he's adapting an original novel, written by S. Morgenstern, and the book is riddled with notes on what Morgenstern's (boring) original is like, why Goldman is cutting those bits out, loads of commentary on Goldman's own private life (all lies), and this edition has the epilogue where Goldman is bypassed by Morgenstern's estate for the sequel in favour of Stephen King. It's just brilliant. I think I'd have swallowed all the lies, until clocking (being a European after all), that there are no such places as Florin and Guilder. The question is how long it would have taken me. I was confused even now, as an adult. Awesome.

A Wrinkle in Time: Why is this book a classic? One of the poorest works of fiction I've ever read. I am so confused. Not one proper character in the whole book.

Benny and Omar: This was fun to read, but I don't know if it's very good, really. It reads like Colfer went to Tunisia and thought he might make a book out of that, but not like a tonne of research went into it. It was funny to read while in Wexford and hearing the "syrupy accent", that the Tunisians fail to recognize as English, live.

Endless Night is an artsy Agatha Christie. Inside the mind of the killer and all that. Meh, really. Not badly written, just not interesting beyond the props.

Ask a Policeman was a bit of a disappointment. It's a collaboration between several members of The Detection Club:  Anthony Berkely, Milward Kennedy, Gladys Mitchell, John Rhode, Dorothy Sayers and Helen Simpson. Each writer (except Rhode who writes the general set-up first chapter and a concluding one if I remember correctly) wrote a chapter featuring another writer's favourite sleuth. This is a highly entertaining premise if you are accquainted with said sleuths already so you can appreciate the jokes even better - but sadly I am not. I've only read Mitchell and Sayers out of this lot (I borrowed the book because of Sayers, obviously). Frankly I was bored to tears by the end when Rhode worked through the "true" solution. Sayers's bit was very good though. It's worth reading the Goodread's reviews on the book, by the way. The preface in this edition is by Agatha Christie, but was originally written for a Soviet magazine or something so it's not book-specific. (Any mistakes in facts now are due to me having to return this book before writing any notes - someone had put in a reservation for it at the library. Imagine!)

I don't remember what this one is about at all. Let me google... Oh right! Now I remember!  There were bits of this that I quite liked, but I didn't like how everyone was perfectly okay with a child dying because he was "a horrid boy". So that's alright then, push him out the window. Right. Makes perfect sense. Put that in your Discovery channel documentary "What Made Britain a Sick Sick Place", thank you. It's all jolly good and I say and then KILL THE KIDS.

Ah, this was Christie being clever again, causing outrage among the readers I believe. She'd claim she's not breaking the whodunnit rules, but I don't know - she's definitely bending them. I was surprised at the solution but I don't know if I approve. Tut tut.







Aaannnnddd finally a Marian Keyes I picked up on a whim. This novel must have been written during her latest bout of depression. It's very sad in places, very moving. Unfortunately also a bit uneven. The story doesn't hang together all the way. I wonder why these aren't being filmed? If this was a Swedish writer in Sweden the film deals would have come so fast, you guys.

She should allow herself to not have to be funny, I think she could write a better book. That said, the depressing paint scheme of the missing singer's house is hilarious! I found a quote on Goodreads so I'm pasting it in here, since I don't have the book anymore: “He'd done his walls with paint from Holy Basil. God, I yearned for their colors. I hadn't been able to afford them myself but I knew their color chart like the back of my hand. His hall was done in Gangrene, his stairs in Agony and his living room--unless I was very much mistaken--in Dead Whale. Colors I personally very much approved of.”  Paint colours for the depressed! 

Feed and Graceling

These are also from the list of the soon to be filmed. Quite popular books too, took a while for them to work their way down to me from other library aficionados, but then they showed up at the same time. 
Another cracking photo of my bed, I really do spoil my readers.

I quite liked Graceling. I didn't fall head over heels for the characters, but close. It lacked a little fleshing-out somehow. But it's a decent fantasy novel with a decent secondary universe, and towards the end when the plot was coming together it was genuinely exciting too. A good amount of violence, just there because the world is a violent place; a very excellent feminist theme and a great heroine. I put in reservations for the other two books in the not-really-a-series and am looking forward to it. Feed was not as much my cup of tea at all. I like that it's a zombie book without focusing on the zombie gore. Instead it's about how humans are living after the disaster. The medical side of it is well-crafted. Everyone is infected with the dormant virus and will reanimate after death or after being bitten/otherwise exposed to the live version. This is very realistic, a nice touch. I just found the whole thing a little too Aaron Sorkiny, it became a mix of The West Wing and Newsroom and just a bit too snappy. Despite every opportunity to make me care about the characters they faded into the background and became accessories to the one-liners and the technology. I don't think I'll read the others in the series, even though they apparently are better ( even better if you're a fan).

Divergent and sequels

Well, this was fun! Sort of. Not good but you know, entertaining if you don't mind not thinking too much about things. If you think too much you might not even think it was fun. I think I've changed my mind now. It wasn't great at all.

Please gaze ecstatically upon these library books upon my lap in my bed just before me nodding off. Can I take a picture or what, what.

So, teen dystopia. Fabulous genre. These books, well the first one for starters, are being filmed now (as you can see if you've got good eyesight and can make out the print on that little black sticker on the right-hand book). Because teen dystopia is Hot. Sizzling even. I borrowed Divergent because it's on the list I wrote about with books you have to read before they're filmed. It's one of the most popular ones so it took a while for the library to give it to me. Then I read it and thought ok, pretty fun, so I borrowed Insurgent too. But then I got bored so I've read the synopsis for part three, Allegiant, on Wikipedia and I'm alright with that, thanks.



Divergent is often compared, I’ve noticed, to The Hunger Games, reasons presumably being a sixteen-year-old girl as main character, a first person narrative, that it’s based in the US (more specifically in Divergent, in a future, ravaged version of Chicago, populated by only a fraction of the current population) after somthing cataclysmic has happened to destroy society as we know it now, and, most importantly, that a bunch of teens spend a lot of time fighting bloodily against each other in a large part of the book. However, where THG has a very clear message about the horror of violence as entertainment, how violence desensitizes and violates both victims and aggressors, about living under an oppressive government and how even a person of some resources is never free in a dictatorship, Divergent has a message of … well… I dunno. Sex? Because honestly, there’s a lot of ogling going on. Nothing happens beyond petting (it’s all a bit Twilight without the obvious preaching, and I can’t help wondering about that since her acknowledgments at the end of the book start with a big thank you to God. Which makes me, a secular sort of Catholic, squirm more than a bit), but oh boy are we ever obsessed with the taut young adolescent male physique. The strip of skin between his t-shirt and his trousers. His tattoos stretched over his muscles, blah blah blah. Drowning in his eyes. Pressing of lips. Hands on curve of hips and melting sensation in stomach. All the while he is eighteen and she sixteen which, although not Twilight standard, still means that any sex is statutory rape if consummated. But never mind that. I’m Swedish and we have a more laissez-faire attitude to teens having sex after all; it’s mostly the adult woman clearly revelling in the hotness of the teen bod that is a bit disturbing. I had a rant half written out about how weird it is that a presumably middle-aged or so woman is leering over young men like this but then I looked Veronica Roth up and she's born in 1988 which makes her ... math is hard ... not so old as too make the idea of sexing an eighteen-year-old revolting. Not that I judge. Much. However, I betcha it goes down well in the target audience. I wonder though if it doesn’t become more a girl book than a unisex book? Also, nuclear family FTW? Is that a message? I think that ”it’s not really good to kick ass but it sure looks cool” is a sort of message too. And "tattoos are cool and Have Meaning and people who have tattoos aren't necessarily bad people you know". It's all very "I just discovered MTV" in 1991 or so.

I’m being facetious. Albeit with a heavy hand Roth wants to tell us that selflessness and bravery are good values and often amount to the same thing. How true courage is about being able to say you’re afraid and to stand up to peer pressure. Stuff like that. I just don't think it's very well done. She's a sort of competent writer (especially for her age) but not very original and a bit messy. Her writing is very sparse and brief (which fits the general emo moping mood) so you'd be excused for mistaking the style for clarity of thought. Her plot lines and entire secondary universe, however, lacks structure and cohesion, in my opinion. If you think about it, it's just not that believable.

One of my big issues with the books are that Roth is clearly incapable of truly imagining a world with different values than the one she lives in. You therefore have an unspecified future, after society has been turned upside down by wars and other horrors - but basic male-female gender roles of contemporary America remain the same, for example. Which means that her attitude to sex sucks. You might think – and I think she thinks -  that she is sex-positive, since she acknowledges sexual desire. It is however clear that to her abstinence is a virtue. Tris and Four can indulge in some heavy groping and then stop, and the only reason for them stopping seems to be that it isn’t right to do the sex. And there is no forthcoming explanation for why it isn’t right. And I’m not going to swear to it because I didn’t keep count or anything, but I do believe that the shifting is interrupted by Tris, who takes a deep breath and pulls down her t-shirt past her hips again, like. Now, I’m all for her backing out of sex if she loses the hots, and I would have gone whoop-whoop if that is what happened, but it’s not. She (and Four, who is a Good Guy you see and Respectful) backs off by exercising self-control. Which I can also be fine with but I’d appreciate some reasoning behind why this is important. Otherwise, the message is that sure, you get all hot and bothered and shift like mad but don’t go all the way girl, and most importantly, girl. This is not sex-positive. Fundamentally the idea that a promiscuous woman is a slut remains, a morality not at all so definite when it comes to men. Anyway, gender roles and views on sex were not the only examples I had of Roth's lack of imagination, but it'll have to do for now. Mostly because after a while I got a really icky feeling off it, like this book truly could have a negative impact on young people because it's so insidious.

That said, the two youngsters maybe do the deed in Insurgent,  the second book. But it’s a bit Asimov (I haven’t read Asimov really. But my husband told me once that he is meticulous about not writing sex scenes. Instead the two approach each other, and then new paragraph and ”Afterwards …”) so I’m not sure.

Right, this post has been sitting here for a month now I think without being posted, waiting for me to wrap up with something smart. Since that's not gonna happen I'll publish now. Oh, I'm obviously going to see the film - I'm not proud, also I'm a hypocrite. But I'll wait until it hits the television.

Iain M. Banks: Consider Phlebas

After reading Ela's post on how much she likes Banks' books I borrowed the first one in the Culture series - but I am so bored. Half way through and I DO NOT CARE. Hang on, not half way, only about a quarter. I misremembered because it feels like I've been plodding through this forever. Should I persevere? Is it worth it? Boo. Re-reading the post I see that this is the (only) one she didn't care for much. Should I chuck it in and try a different one just? I thought it'd be good because it starts with an execution (not that I enjoy executions per se, but because I enjoy novelty of thought) done by slowly drowning the victim in sewage. But it didn't pick up. Also, it reminds me of a Douglas Adams universe, Vogons and all. I just can't take it seriously. Douglas Adams without the humour. What.

A new year

I don't read much these days, as I've said before, and the sad thing is that part of the reason is that I can't keep up the blog. I miss it very much. This is only a small part of a whole, I used to have an internet community I felt a part of and my blog (even though I've never had readers really) felt like an extension of that. I feel bereft. I said to mr Bani yesterday that I'd really like a laptop of my own (something we can't afford at the moment at all) - he felt so guilty he started looking at laptops on Ebay for me. And created my own login for me on his which I am currently using. It's difficult to have no space for oneself - the most private space I've got is my office at work, which is pathetic isn't it. In related news I have come to the conclusion that older teenagers are meant to be annoying so their parents will be glad when they finally move instead of panicking at the thought which they did only a few years prior. Because deargodhelpus. Anyway, going back to the first sentence - another reason is that I play Candy Crush (yes yes but I never beg for lives and never pay, I'm not that big of an eejit) and before that Angry Birds Star Wars (I know I know) and also I read other blogs and most importantly my commute now is only ten minutes so less time to read anyway.

There are a few things I've read that I've forgotten about, but let's write about the ones I remember ... I read World War Z by Max Brooks, a millennia after the party and only because we saw the film which was a bit shit (although I admit that I spent a fair amount of time NOT watching the film because scary zombies make me tense), and after that when I was picking Junior up from his friend I mentioned that we'd seen it at the friend's father said but oh! you must read the book here I've got it. So I did, and it was so much better and why the HELL do all those film directors and producers tamper so much with books when they claim to love them? (There is a Hobbit related rant to this, but I'm saving that for what will hopefully be a separate post.) World War Z is a book about collecting personal witness accounts about the disaster that almost destroyed human civilisation (that would be a terrible fast-spreading infection turning the dead into zombies, folks), about the impacts on countries and cultures, about political considerations, about coping and preserving humanity and human values. This makes it sound a lot deeper than it in fact is - it's not by any means Great Literature but I did enjoy it and found it thought-provoking. It struck me that in a lot of ways Earth seemed like a nicer place to live after being almost annihilated, expect in Russia. More just and fair, a bit post-Ark. The film was about Brad Pitt and his inane family, a very traditional classic storyline, purportedly a first-person view but not even managing to be consistent about that. Whatevs. (But yes, scary scary zombies.)

I re-read Justice Hall, by Laurie King. I'd like to collect  her books so I have them all, I find them soothing, and I'd also like to get a hold of the short story collections she's written for. And I read a Margaret Atwood novel, Cat's Eye, which was terrible and lovely.  I wrote a long post about it in my head but I've forgotten most of it. The main character and narrator, Elaine, is now a rather well-known painter and has returned to Toronto for a retrospective, which brings back all the memories of the torment she suffered in the city as a child. It is a brilliant story about a young girl who is almost destroyed by that kind of horrible, psychologically destructive bullying that girls can excel at, to the point where she chooses to forget those years altogether and only has them flood back years later when she is cleaning out the attic with her mother and finds the cat's eye marble she carried as a talisman. Atwood writes such sad characters. Even when they say they feel good and are happy there is a brittleness about it. Sorrow always lies hiding underneath, it never goes away. I feel like only someone who has experienced being an outsider could write like this about it. You always feel like you are acting a part, as though someone is going to find you out one day. Elaine the adult has never really left her childhood behind and is surprised constantly at how established she is, how young people look at her as a grown-up. And still she "hasn't suffered", she describes how she, in the feminist groups of the 70s, feels left-out because nothing really bad has happened to her  - she was never raped, she was never beaten. Always this quantifying of suffering, deciding which pain ranks the highest.

I read loads of Margaret Atwood in my teens, but I lost track of her. Maybe I should re-read everything in a chronological order. I feel like she is capturing a lost age, both in this one and in The Blind Assassin. 

There was something else, but I forget. Hopefully tomorrow!

Ursula K Le Guin: Worlds of Exile and Illusion

Three novels in one, Rocannon's World, Planet of Exile, City of Illusions. 

Rocannon's World just isn't very good, somewhere half-way through I just lose interest. You can tell that she hadn't found her voice and style yet, but was writing something much more generic. Planet of Exile was a lot more enjoyable, and I really liked having City of Illusions to read directly afterwards, since they're connected. As novels they are a little lacking, they lack tempo a bit and towards the end lose detail and sort of just peter out.

It's very interesting, and I think Le Guin has written about that herself somewhere, that she can be so comparatively daring (for that time) as to have the exiled Earthlings be all black, but it was hard to imagine a society without clear divisions between men and women - with women at the bottom (clearly this is based on some human patriarchal cultures). I mean, even though we don't want to be we are trapped into certain ways of thinking by our culture and upbringing. I think I wrote that this aged The Left Hand of Darkness too - it was very difficult for a writer in the sixties to imagine that a lot of the gender-specific ways of behaving and reacting would disappear.

Well.

So.

In my defence, such as it is, I haven't actually been reading much, only blogs. For a while I listened to the radio on my commute instead of reading (mostly Spanarna and På minuten, but also some Tendens - yes, Swedish radio only), but now I'm having this huge blog-enthusiasm thing going and I've actually read several newly discovered blogs back-to-back. So I'm going to have to update my links I think to stuff I actually am reading. I added heaps of things to my Google reader too in a fit of go-get-'em but I don't actually want to follow more than say half of it, so I'm going to have to delete quite a few things and was most piqued when I discovered that it wasn't just hey, delete, it was Tricky. Google really are quite shite with lay-out, aren't they? A lot of my new blog favourites are clothes and/or sewing blogs, mostly retro, because I discovered Looks Good From The Back first and was so inspired to have more fun with clothes - and let's face it, retro is where the fashion fun is, isn't it. Because there is feck all in the shops, at least here. So now I've worked my way to Gertie's blog for better sewing, and am feeling that urge I sometimes get that maybe I'd like to sew my own clothes? I should take a sewing class. There's no way I can learn on my own, I'm too thick. Also, I felt ashamed and inspired to take more of an interest in my OWN blog, and maybe post stuff? With pictures, to make it more interesting! But it's not going to happen until I get my own computer somehow, one I feel I can use whenever. Until then the blog is not going really work, because the phone blog thing is a bit rubbish. I could of course just take a picture of the book I've just finished and post that but. how. dull. My unfulfilled wish to blog about what I'm only after reading has just led me to owe the library about a week's worth of late fees, because I read Backman's Saker min son behöver veta om världen and thought I'd post about it and didn't and didn't return the book because I wanted to remember to post first and there we are. And ironically, the only thing I really wanted to say was that this book is not very great. It's not even a proper book, just blog entries put together. I hate that. I also wanted to say that when I read En man som heter Ove I wrote that I just knew he was going to be offered a film deal, and then I meant to write that in a comment on his blog to say that even though it's going to be tempting for them to cast Kjell Bergqvist as Ove I think they should think carefully about that because it's a little too obvious. But then didn't he beat me to the revelation and then there were 600 comments. Bleurgh. 

But anyway, last post was a LIE, because I got books for Christmas! They were just late to arrive to The English Bookshop, but my husband gave them to me this week. And they are not just any books, he REMEMBERED that I told him I like Cyril Hare!!! That's worth three exclamation points!!! He got me An English Murder and a collection of short stories - I took a rubbish photo but can't upload it from my work phone because it's a bizarre Samsung I don't understand. I've linked you to them instead, they are so gorgeous and I'm so psyched. He asked me today if I was enjoying the book but in all honesty I'm hesitant to get into them because I want to savour them. I was so in the mood for some vintage crime!

Oh, and I read a rather meh teen dystopic novel called Pure by Julianna Baggott that my eldest brought home - it's not terribly good, but a quick and so-so entertaining read, if you happen to be on a flight or something. The author is much too enamoured with her idea of the survivors of the explosions being fused to whatever object they happened to have been near to remember that story, plot and characterization have to come first. Also, she gets praise for her prose I notice when googling briskly, but myself I felt like it was a bit of a copy of Burgess' Bloodsong to be honest. To be fair though Maxima didn't agree with me at all. That reminds me that Mortal Engines also reminded me of Bloodsong and I kind of felt that people need to be un-inspired, you know?

Anyway. CYRIL HARE!

A whole great load

Ages ago I read a book called Min pappa är snäll och min mamma är utlänning by Emmy Abrahamson. It's handy to note that down, because I suspect I might want to be able to tip someone off about it sometime. It's a book for teens about a girl whose mother is Polish and how this makes her feel like the world's greatest outsider - pretty funny, not bad at all. Absolutely no point at all in writing this in English, but I don't like mixing in the same post.

I've read Laurie King's short story Beekeeping for Beginners - honestly, wasn't that sold on it, felt a bit unfinished? I have a reserve on Pirate King at the library, so should get my hands on it in about SIX MONTHS. Longest queue ever, like. Not as long as Jonas Gardell's Torka aldrig tårar utan handskar mind, which I gave up on getting my hands on before my book club, so I merrily joined in the discussions sans a clue. But I will read it. (Just didn't want to buy it.) I read the short story collection  An Apple for the Creature, edited by Charlaine Harris, which was trivial but fun. I have no patience with most fantasy after Tolkien, but I seem to have more tolerance for urban fantasy. Odd that. I'm not saying it should win awards, but I can leaf through them on trips. You know. I also found as an ebook a bizarre science fiction tale marked "erotica" by a Randall Garrett - Pagan Passions. It's about the Greek gods returning to Earth. Some decades after their return society is completely different, all centrered around the needs and whims of the Gods. That bit is quite amusing, the descriptions of New York with temples to Athena and an orgy to honour Pan in Central Park. The "hero" of the story gets to be a stand-in for Bacchus and have loads of sex. Awful, but amusing. In an awful way. But I'm not starting an "erotica" tag... Oh and I got Dead Reckoning by Charlaine Harris at the library, which is the third latest Sookie Stackhouse, and I read it just after reading three Ngaio Marsh novels back to back, Dead Water and Death in Ecstasy and a re-read of Artists in Crime,  and I was struck by a similarity oddly enough, namely the obsession with politeness. LOL to me I said. Oh, in Death in Ecstasy I was tickled to bits by several references to detective stories. I'd quote for you if I could copy and paste but I can't. At the moment I'm reading a disturbing R. Austin Freeman novel, The Uttermost Farthing: A Savant's Vendetta. About some lunatic who believes in "physical anthropology" and goes on a vendetta to kill criminals (examples of degenerate humans) after his wife is murdered. It's all goes remarkably and disgustingly unchallenged, almost as if the author has an axe to grind, but I'm not finished with it yet. Yuck.

I read my sister's books and returned them

And checked and I'd missed writing anything about the Wil Wheaton ones. Well, she lent me Memories of the Future and  .... Just A Geek it was I believe.

I thoroughly enjoyed the first, and look forward very much to the rest of his Star Trek NG reviews. Surely he must do them all? Just A Geek was a little slower in bits, but I appreciate the honesty. I'm really pleased that he's carved a proper new career for himself. And apropos honesty ... he could do with being even grittier. Just saying fuck doesn't cut it. A bit deeper, a bit more introspective? He tries to protect his family, which is laudable, but to be a great writer you have to be able to get really private I think.

End of the world

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.

Scarlett Thomas: The End of Mr Y

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.

Ayn Rand: Anthem

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.

Ray Bradbury: The Machineries of Joy

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

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.

Far Horizons – short story collection

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.

The Left Hand of Darkness, re-read

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.

Melvyn Burgess: Bloodsong

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?

David Weber: On Basilisk Station

Another one borrowed from my sister of the eclectic reading taste. She mentioned reading these weird space opera sci-fi novels a while ago, and upon my interest offered to lend me one, which happened when she came by last. And I have never read anything like this in my entire life. It is the oddest idea.

Seven books behind

So best get cracking, right? I've actually been, well, not swamped exactly, but let's say adequately supplied with work recently. So no time for furtive blogging at all, and I never get to the computer at home. Now I've got mr Bani's laptop (I remember fondly the days when I had my own and could use it ... now it doesn't access the internet, and really, what else are computers for in this day and age? But I digress. I snark, and digress) so will try to to loads here.

One of the books I've got in my pile is a Ngaoi Marsh that's all about morris dancing, which would be great to write about today when we're celebrating midsummer here en Suecia and the whole country happily has danced around the phallic symbol that is the may pole (or midsummer pole or what have you). Since they do morris dancing around may poles, I mean. But that book also has one of the best Ugly Covers ever, and the jpeg of that is on my work computer (naughty naughty!). So I'll save it.

Instead I'll turn to the latest book discussion club novel, one that I plugged hard for: Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake. I don't think I'd ever even heard of it, because I don't stay up-to-date with book news at all, but I spotted it in the cheap paper-back section on Bokus or Adlibris and fell for it immediately, what with my recent great Atwood experience with The Blind Assassin and my general hankering for some good sci-fi. So I pushed for it and we chose it.

Oryx and Crake is set in a future where companies that do genetic research are very rich and powerful and separate from the rest of society. They can afford gated communities for their staff and their families and are pretty much a society unto themselves. We get to know Jimmy after society has collapsed, when the only people alive apart from him are "Crake's children", humanoids that we understand are not quite human. Gradually Jimmy reminisces and tells us the story of his life, how he got to know Crake, a scientific genius who was so disillusioned with mankind that he wanted to start over with a new and better species. Now, Jimmy is alone, the sole bearer of the entire planet's history - because the children of Crake know nothing and can't understand if he tries to explain.

In theory this is a great set-up, with ample scope for melancholy and an almost claustrophobic void of loneliness. Sadly I was a little disappointed. The book didn't feel finished. It felt like an experimental science-fiction essay on the potential dangers of genetic manipulation half the time, and the characters were not developed enough for me to really sense them - one idea is that part of Jimmy's aching loneliness after the end of the world is that he has a whole language and no-one to share it with; Jimmy having worked with words all his life. But I don't feel this, I just read that it is so. There is a difference. The novel should have been put away for a few years and then taken out and re-read, because with a little more tweaking it'd be superb. Now it's good, but not more than that. We all enjoyed it as a good story, as entertainment, but it could have been the kind of book that keeps you awake thinking about it.

Oddly, despite a recurring theme of women and children being sexually abused and used - classic Atwood themes that she feels strongly about -  the female characters are the weakest. Oryx, the woman loved by both Jimmy and Crake, is hollow and empty. I wondered for a while if we were to deduce that she wasn't real, but a figment of Jimmy's imagination, but it's not that layered a book. That's disappointing, coming from Margaret Atwood.

Ursula K. Leguin: Rocannon's World

This is one of LeGuin's earliest novels, and she places it at the beginning of the Ekumen books, if only for that reason. The Ekumen doesn't exist yet, instead we have a League of Worlds, that isn't as respectful and non-interfering as the Ekumen at all. They have interplanetary wars and everyfink. This is the book I picked up for 20 kr in a second-hand book dealer's in Stockholm, and the fecking thing was falling apart as I was reading. What a waste of money! But speaking of spending money, apparently there's an edition with this book, Planet of Exile and City of Illusions all in one, and that would be quite nice to have. Although, to be honest, I'd have to read the latter two first for free, because maybe (backtracking!) they're not that good and I don't want to own them. Hm, tricky and pondersome.

So first I read the blurb on the back of the book, and my, was it funny. It's so funny I have to quote the whole thing. Ready?

"On the far planet of Fomalhaut II, where three races lived in uneasy peace, the Starlords had landed generations back in their great ships to levy tribute on behalf of the League if All Worlds. Now disaster had struck, and Rocannon, the expedition leader, was marooned on that distant world, eight years away from the nearest planet.

His friends murdered and his spaceship destroyed, Rocannon led the battle to save Fomalhaut II, in strange alliance with the three native races - the cavern-dwelling Gdemiar, the elvish Fiia and the warrior-clan Liuar. And in that desperate battle against an alien foe the myths were born and the legends grew. They were not his people, but the place became Rocannon's World."

Isn't it hilarious? You can almost hear the deep voice intoning it for the sci-fi special on Friday night. This is an interesting mix between science-fiction and fantasy, since the warrior clan are, well, just that, and speak like something from the more high-falutin' pages of Tolkien, all while they hack at people with swords. I'm not sorry I read it, but it's not fantastic. Bits of it are though. Bits are GREAT.