My Blog Loves a Bunch of Authors

"I'm evangelical about it for a reason!"

2011-03-01T00:04:00.000+11:00

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the Minotaur has tried settling down in North Carolina. He's staying in a trailer park trading his expertise as a mechanic for rent, and working as a line chef at a local restaurant, Grub's Rib. It's not a bad existence for an immortal being out of myth, but thousands of years of experience have taught "M" that nothing lasts forever - especially peace and quiet.

Wow, I need to keep up. I haven't even finished the catch-up stuff and now I'm a couple of weeks late on writing up the first Choose Your Book Adventure book. (I'm having second thoughts about the name, and I'm not above changing it. Isn't that the beauty of a blog? That you can change whatever you want?)

Anyway...I finished The Minotaur Takes A Cigarette Break a couple of weeks ago. When I told Elaine (who suggested it) that I was enjoying it, she reiterated her evangelism, and I've already recommended it to a couple of people. I tried to avoid all mention of what was inside before cracking open the cover, and except for the basic premise - the legendary beast of Greek mythology is now living in modern-day America, working as a cook - I went in not knowing what to expect. What I found was a beautiful, melancholy story about the loneliness of being an outsider.

There's no denying that a sad story appeals to me, but one of the truly beautiful things about Minotaur is that it's not all sad; there's a core of hope in the Minotaur's existence. Though his existence is mundane - he lives alone in a trailer park, filling his days with work and chores to stave off loneliness and boredom (something I can certainly identify with) - he finds solace in it. Even though he knows things must go wrong eventually, and he will be forced to move on - is even surprised when it does not happen as quickly as he expects - he can't help but try to forge relationships, make connections. As is so often the case in these stories, the inhuman character is a conduit for something essentially human. Though he's a monster, the menace and horror once commanded by the Minotaur has been worn away by the millennia separating him from his years devouring virgins and slaying heroes in the labyrinth. He's now a stand-in for anyone who doesn't fit in.

More than that, he also represents those whose inner life does not match their outer existence. "M", as the Minotaur is known, has the same desires and needs as any human, but his peculiar form prevents him from making this known: he finds it hard to talk, his vision is bad, his horns sometimes get in the way. His is also a story of disability: he gets odd looks, children ask impertinent questions, bullies target him and he finds life in a world of "normal" people more difficult than the rest of us. But he does his best, and in his own way, triumphs a little. Most importantly, we're always empathising with him, even when what his actions don't seem quite right from a "normal" point of view.

This is magical realism at its best, I think; Sherrill doesn't try and build a realistic world and context for M. To the modern world, creatures of myth are just another kind of outsider, treated as a minority by a society who has no need for them any more. Stylistically, and I know I've said this about quite a few books reviewed on these pages, but the prose here has a poetic quality. It's not archaic, but it evokes a feeling of immortality, of age, through a rhythm all its own.

In short: I loved it. Maybe you will too.

I'm already a about a quarter of the way through The Big Sleep, which is next by dint of library availability; Coburg are still trying to find a copy of The Ghost Map, but I've managed to get The Big Sleep, At Swim, Two Boys and A Dictionary of the Khazars. My secondary objective for this round is to get every book from a library; so far I haven't had to stray further than the local Moreland Libraries, but I have cards for half a dozen or so Melbourne libraries, so that could end up an adventure in itself!

The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break by Steven Sherrill
Library: Moreland (Coburg branch)

The Title: appears in the text on page 198.
Fun Fact: there's a movie in development, listed for release this year. I don't think this will translate well to the screen as is, so I expect it'll be more the concept that's in use.

Comics! And the Choose Your Book Adventure begins

2011-02-16T12:02:00.001+11:00

I've been to the library, and I'm now halfway through the first book of the new challenge: The Minotaur Takes A Cigarette Break. I won't say much yet, except that I'm loving it.

I also borrowed some comics from the library, for the first time in a year or more. None were terribly memorable, except Sam Kieth's Batman: Secrets, which was weird, and Green Arrow: Year One, which was pretty great. I've no idea what the original Green Arrow origin was like, but this version of the playboy-to-hero story - by Andy Diggle and Jock of The Losers fame - is very good. When written well, GA is one of my favourite DC characters, so it was great to see him broken and rebuilt at the start of his career. Based on this I might give The Losers a go, though it never seemed my cup of tea.

I now have a second pile, and have finished both the second hardcover collection of Preacher, and the first hardcover collection of Grant Morrison's JLA from the late 1990s. JLA is full of the usual big character team-up nonsense, but other than that it's okay. Preacher...well, I read it in one sitting. It's great stuff. Hopefully I can find the next one somewhere soon. I'm also looking forward to the second collection of Mouse Guard, which is next in the comics pile.

I'm also getting close to finishing the catch up series; three or four more books to go. I'll try and get those done before I finish The Minotaur, though I'm enjoying it so much I find it hard to put down for long. It's making me fall behind in my podcast listening on the daily commute!

Interlude: The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul

2011-02-11T14:31:00.000+11:00

Kate Schechter is running late for her flight from London to Oslo when her check-in desk at Heathrow erupts in a ball of flame. As Kate recovers from her injuries in hospital she briefly encounters the strange Nordic man who had held her up in the queue, miraculously unharmed despite being at the centre of the blast. Meanwhile Dirk Gently, holistic detective, sleeps in and misses an early appointment with his new client, a man convinced a green-eyed monster with a scythe is coming to collect on a contract - a man who has been decapitated in a locked room...

This was a quicker read than the first Dirk Gently book, possibly because there are fewer plot threads. There's one main storyline, though just like in the original, they don't all get resolved and combined until a handful of pages from the end.

Let's be clear: I like this book. It's fun. But it feels unfinished; there's a plot in here, yes, but there's not really a story with a beginning middle and end. Ideas are introduced and then forgotten about: early on Dirk discovers his deceased client has a young boy living in his attic, who breaks Dirk's nose, but we never find out any more about the boy. He discovers a vital clue - an envelope - at the same time, and then for no particular reason waits for most of the book to open it. Then, too, there aren't many clues as to the nature of some of the mysterious objects encountered; they're explained at the end, but there's no way to determine what they are by yourself beforehand. The main antagonists are almost throwaway characters, given exactly one scene of any substance and then dispatched (again in the last few pages) without ceremony.

Dirk at least shows up early this time out, and since he's actively investigating the events, has a much more active role than in the previous book. He's almost as unlikeable, but much more relatable; his tricks and misdirections much more commonplace.

Thankfully we have Kate Schechter. She's an interesting character, a good example of Adams' ability to write interesting women without resorting to cliché; she's likeable, has quirks we can get a handle on, and frankly investigates things in a much more satisfying manner than the actual detective in the book. She doesn't have any other women to talk to (all of Adams' books fail the Bechdel Test for the same reason), but at least she doesn't fall in love with either of the male leads: she is wary of Dirk, and though is intrigued by Thor (the actual god, and the man at the check-in desk) she's never taken in by his charms.

But even Kate is abandoned once her part in driving the narrative is done, though that part seems a little arbitrary. It's never clear why Thor seeks her out, and he leaves her behind when he rushes off tofinally confront his father Odin - but then that doesn't really pan out either. I said the book doesn't have a beginning middle and end; what it has is a beginning, which is good, a middle, which is good, and then an anticlimax, which technically explains most of what's been going on, but leaves you unsatisfied.

The Dirk Gently books are a stab from Adams at writing a more traditional narrative, and remain laced with his great humour and clever ideas, but really they're probably the best evidence that as a novelist, he made a great writer of non-fiction. I love his work dearly, but I can't honestly say this is a great novel; it's very funny, and has great ideas, and I'll read it again some day and enjoy it, but the detecting is too slow, the resolution too sudden, and the bits left out too annoying for it to be on top of anyone's reading list.

But I still miss you, Douglas. I would love to know what you'd have written next. Well, aside from Mostly Harmless and (possibly) The Salmon of Doubt, I mean.

Catch Up - Kraken

2011-02-10T00:56:00.000+11:00

Billy Harrow has a gift for putting specimens in jars, his job at the British Museum of Natural History, where the star attraction of the behind-the-scenes tour is a preserved Giant Squid. One day he brings in a tour group only to find it impossibly gone, tank and all. As weird as that seems, things only get weirder as Billy is drawn into a London underworld of cults and magicians he never knew existed. To some of them, the squid was a god - and its theft may herald the end of the world...

I'm new to China Miéville, so I thought I'd start with the one that appealed to me the most. Being a lover of all things Pelagic and Cephalopodan (I must have read an abridged version of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea about 100 times as a kid; happy birthday for earlier this week, Jules Verne!), after the first chapter I really thought this was a book written specifically for me.

As it went on I was less sure of that. Kraken has some great ideas, and I wanted to know more about all of them; the problem is that there are so many ideas none of them really get a great amount of page time. Billy, our protagonist, is one of those types all too often found in modern fantasy: an outsider to the world of the strange, who takes seemingly forever to succumb to his new world and admit there's more in heaven and sea than dreamt of in his lack of philosophy. He had me at "I work in a museum", though, so I forgive him a bit, though it is frustrating that to the reader it's clear that he's got something special from very early on, and it felt like I was waiting for him to catch up so we could get on with it. This feeling is made worse when in the second half we go through it again with Marge (short for Marginalia), a friend of Billy's. She's an interesting character, because like Billy she finds herself drawn into the world of occult London, but unlike him she doesn't find she actually belongs.

The rest of the cast suffer from being too numerous to get much limelight as well. There are so many good characters, but only a few get a real look-in. Dane, the security guard who turns out to be working for the Krakenites, is oddly sympathetic when you consider that he is essentially a fundamentalist soldier in a religious army, but as the driving force for our protagonists he's very effective. His friend Wati, who represents the familiars as a union leader, is a bit of a surprise; when getting his origin story I assumed it was far too hardcore to be a character we'd spend much time with. Then there are the occult cops; they're well drawn while still managing to exploit a few clichés (something they also do literally in the book), but we only really get to know Kath, the young talented magician with an attitude who's hard-as-nails. It seemed worryingly likely she'd end up as a love interest for Billy, but thankfully that particular cliché was one too many for Miéville.

Is it any good, though, I hear you ask? Well...yes. Story wise it has possibly too many strands, but they're all fun strands and worth having around for the laughs. Oh yes: it's funny too.

Many people said I should have read The City and the City as my first Miéville, since they think it his best work; to them I say nonsense. Why start with a book that means every other I read by the author is less good? I enjoyed Kraken, and I'll come back for more Miéville.

Interlude: Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

2011-01-30T13:44:00.002+11:00

Richard MacDuff, the software genius behind a program that turns corporate accounts into theme music, returns to old college at the behest of Reg, an eccentric old professor. He is startled to find a horse in the bathroom of Reg's rooms, then horrified that he forgot to pickup his girlfriend Susan, sister of his employer, and finally moved to climb up the wall to Susan's flat and sneak in to steal the answering machine tape on which he's left an embarrassing message. But all of that is just the beginning of a strange web of coincidences which will require the services of a certain holistic detective.

I was inspired to read this again by the upcoming BBC series, and also recently re-reading the first Hitchhikers novel for the first time in years. On a recent trip to visit my parents I retrieved my 1989 paperback edition from my grandmother's shed, along with a bunch of other stuff I intend to get around to re-reading, and all my various editions of The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. (At last count, I own five (soon to be six) of the first novel, three of the second and third, and two of the last two. Add an extra if you count the first volume of the terrible comic book adaptation; I don't.) I first read this book around the age of 10, and I was a bit young to take it all in properly, so it was a great pleasure to revisit.

Things I noticed this time around:

The plot is much more coherent that I recall, though a few bits - notably the electric monk and the murder of Gordon Way - seem a little left in the cold compared to the main narrative. The main bits are still clearly cribbed from two of Adams' Doctor Who scripts - mostly City of Death, with a bit of Shada thrown in for flavour - but it's really just the skeleton that's been robbed.
Dirk himself isn't mentioned until Chapter Six, where we get Richard's version of his backstory; we don't encounter him at all until Chapter Fourteen, when he's a voice on a telephone; and we don't meet him in person until Chapter Sixteen. Once he arrives, however, he is the force that propels us to the conclusion, though frankly it's hard to get a handle on him and Richard is the real protagonist, inasmuch as the book has one. Dirk's fun, but it's hard to imagine him being the main character; I'll have to re-read The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul to remember how he fares there.
While there are some great funny lines in here, the book is remarkably serious; this is much less frivolous than Hitchhikers. Whole passages are amusing but grim, or amusing but poignant, and the greater grounding in reality gives the characters more weight. It's not just Arthur Dent rattling about reacting to an insane universe; there are only two truly eccentric characters, and everyone else is real and flawed.
The conclusion feels...rushed. Even knowing the basics of it, it seems half-finished, and I was amazed to find myself 20 pages from the end before a climax. And indeed, the conclusion seems to skip the climax entirely, going from crisis to having tea after the resolution in the space of a paragraph or two. Indeed, how the protagonists save the day is merely hinted at; the specifics are not revealed. It's a terrible way to end an otherwise excellent book.

So great fun, but flawed. I can't imagine, based on the novel, how a television series about Dirk can possibly work, unless they invent new stories using just the idea of the character. Even then we're going to need someone who isn't Dirk around, because - while enjoyable - he's more-or-less an insufferable prat, despite his dubious talents. But I'll leave you with my favourite gag, from page 109:

What kind of tie would you wear if you were a private detective? Presumably it would have to be exactly the sort of tie that people wouldn't expect private detectives to wear. Imagine having to sort out a problem like that when you'd just got up.

Catch Up - The Chronicles of Amber

2011-01-29T13:59:00.002+11:00

Amnesiac Carl Corey awakes in a private hospital, and soon senses he is not like other men. He eventually recovers his identity as Corwin, lost Prince of Amber: a member of the royal family who have walked the magical Pattern and gained the power walk among the infinite shadow universes that echo the one true reality of Amber. But as Corwin reunites with his brothers and sisters, both friend and foe, and makes his own claim for the throne left vacant by his father, it soon becomes clear much more is at stake: a traitor wishes to destroy Amber and everything it stands for...

Long ago, in my university days, I was introduced to the world of Roger Zelazny's Amber - as I suspect many were - through the roleplaying game. Amber Diceless Roleplaying is something of a touchstone, an indie game before there were really any other sort; as the name suggests, it uses no dice, with the game master deciding all outcomes based on the narration of the players. Famously it also involved an auction, in which the players - portraying a new generation of the royal family of Amber - bid points to rank themselves in four attributes.

This all seemed to work pretty well, but reading the game book it was clear that it was all based incredibly closely on how the author - and indeed Zelazny - felt things worked in the fictional world of Amber. Now, more than a decade later, I've finally read the series that inspired the game.

I'm going to do all five of these in one go, since they form one big story, and they're all pretty short novels. They're written in an odd style; Amber and its denizens are very much cut from the cloth of medieval fantasy, with castles and doublets and swords, but Corwin - who tells the entire story in the first person - often uses modern vernacular (well, modern for the 1970s). This works just find in the beginning, since for the first half of Nine Princes in Amber Corwin has no memory of his true identity and has just spent centuries on the shadow that is our Earth, but once he regains his memories and identity it puts him at odds with the rest of the world he inhabits. It'd also be find if it was a character decision, but it's just a stylistic one; he acts as you would expect a Machiavellian prince to act, but then describes those actions in the same way someone would in Starsky and Hutch. It's a little off-putting; hearing characters like Random, Oberon and Merlin spoken about in what one imagines to be a New York accent seems kind of weird.

As a protagonist, Corwin is more-or-less an anti-hero; he starts off ambitious and scheming, seeking the throne for its own right, but even then his time on Earth seems to have softened him a little. Like most of his brothers and sisters, he's also presented as much larger than life; he is superhumanly strong (but at a pulp fiction level rather than superheroic: he can lift a car, not throw a battleship) and a masterful fighter and tactician (he can best any mortal in combat), though his main attribute is just being tough: he survives and recovers from incredible hardships. He and his siblings are also constantly comparing themselves to each other, which makes the ranking system and attribute auction from the roleplaying game seem like a logical conclusion rather than a bit of genius game design.

Of the five books, the first three are the strongest; though many of the truths and secrets behind the story are not revealed until the last two, they lack the pace and interest of the beginning. Zelazny never spells things out to his readers; this is fantasy, a magical universe whose rules are known but not necessarily understood. You pay attention, picking up how things work initially through Corwin's re-learning of his world, and then through his education in how it came to be, something previously kept hidden. With so many brothers and sisters, all larger than life and with important (if sometimes small) roles to play, it was tempting at time to refer to the RPG for guidance, but using Corwin's voice was a smart move on Zelazny's part, since he always reminds us who's who through his opinions.

It's a clever, fun, and not too deep but deep enough story, and while I enjoyed it but wasn't swept away in it, it's easy to see how people became obsessive enough to turn it into a very true-to-the-source roleplaying game. It does show its age a bit - mostly in the language, but also no-one ever uses a computer or a mobile phone, which seems odd given the Amberites can find anything they can imagine in shadow - but that's easily forgivable. Most fans agree the follow-up series, involving Corwin's son Merlin, is much inferior, but I'd be willing to give it a shot some time.

The new list is shaping up!

2011-01-27T21:36:00.003+11:00

Well, I finally asked people to suggest books via Twitter, and the suggestions are rolling in. As promised, I'll put the first 12, one from each person, that I haven't read on the list for 2011. (I had revised it down to 10, given I'm starting later and also joining a book club, but I'm enjoying the suggestions too much.)

So far, the list is:

The Minotaur Takes A Cigarette Break by Steven Sherrill, suggested by Elaine via the blog. "I'm fairly evangelical about this book."
The Ghost Map by Steven Johnson, suggested by Loki via the blog.
The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler, suggested by Matt ("galactichand") via the blog. "It's good stuff."
At Swim, Two Boys by Jamie O'Neill, suggested by Richard via the blog. "The book I recommend to everyone ... It's poetic, convoluted, heartfelt and beautiful."
The Dictionary of the Khazars by Milorad Pavic, suggested by Patrick via the blog. "I, of course, recommend [it]. You can borrow my copy; it's hard to find otherwise."
Palimpsest by Cat Valente, or "if you don't mind YA cooties", Liar by Justine Larbalestier, suggested by Danika via the blog. (As per my original rules, it's only one book per person, so I'll find out a bit about these and make a decision.)
Mistborn: The Final Empire by Brandon Sanderson, suggested by Jessica on Twitter. "As long as none of the books are Twilight that's fine." (I shouldn't mention that I'm doing a marathon of the films this weekend then...?)
The Voice of Seven Sparrows by Harry Stephen Keeler, suggested by Rob on Twitter. "Awesome book. You'll love it."

A couple of great suggestions were also made which won't go in, because they're for great books I've already read. Dan suggested The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas, which is an all time favourite of mine; likewise Sarah suggested Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut, not my favourite Vonnegut (that's probably The Sirens of Titan or Slaughterhouse 5) but a great, weird read nonetheless.

So there are still a few slots left. I should say though that this might not be the final list; if I find out one of these is a twelve hundred page tome, I reserve the right to put it off until the year is over!

Catch Up - Titus Groan

2011-01-27T17:30:00.002+11:00

In the ancient halls of Castle Gormenghast, ritual and tradition rule with an iron fist - even over the Earl of Groan, Lord Sepulchrave. As his son, Titus, is born, and the rivalry between Groan's manservant Flay and head cook Swelter comes to boiling point, the forces of order which have held sway for centuries seem strained to their limit. Into this atmosphere steps Steerpike, a young man with ideas far above his lowly station as a kitchenhand.

Having only a passing familiarity with Gormenghast, I came to Titus Groan not even aware that Peake wrote it in the 1940s. It seeks to evoke and indeed seems to have been written in a much earlier age; the prose is beautifully constructed, as much architecture as literature.

The world it describes is fantastic: an enormous castle sparesly populated by a handful of nobles and perhaps a few score servants, all descended from lines which stretch back hundreds of generations. In every direction lies inhospitable terrain; the castle and its kingdom are isolated. Its history, once rich, is now tired and predictable; this is summed up early on by the ritual of the bright carvings. These glorious wooden miniatures, created by the otherwise listless peasant folk who dwell in the castle's shadow, are presented to The Earl once a year; he selects a favourite and the rest are burnt. The winner, however, is only slightly better off; it is placed in the "Hall of Bright Carvings" and the only eyes ever to lay upon it are thos of Rottcodd, a servant as forgotten and isolated as the hundreds of carvings he dusts each day.

The cast is small, and exquisitely drawn; each has a life and personality that leaps off the page. Few are truly sympathetic, though the Earl himself, who suffers severe depression and later delusions, and his daughter Fuschia, at least by the novel's end, come closest. Keda, one of the bright carvers who becomes Titus' wetnurse, has a brief and tragic existence, mad bittersweet with a dash of romance and mystery. Probably my favourite character, though, was Flay. I recognise that this is in part because the BBC television adaptation (which I've not seen; it incorporates Titus Groan and the second novel, Gormenghast) features Christopher Lee as Flay, but his stoic attitude, obedience and eagerness to please somehow endeared themselves to me. As for the title character, he is born in the first pages, and the book closes with his crowning as the new Earl, still a baby. Despite these two events he is hardly involved in the affairs of the book at all, and all the other major characters have parts to play in the narrative; there's no real protagonist, though it is true that Steerpike drives much of the action through his machinations. He's a brilliantly dislikable character; clever in his limited fashion, selfish and mean.

There's an element of the fantastic about Gormenghast; the world makes little distinction between ritual and superstition, and there's no clear line between metaphor and extraordinary truth. The bright carvers, for example, are said to lose all their youthful appearance and vitality immediately upon coming of a certain age; this may be poetic, but it is written as fact, and nothing about the world of Gormenghast makes such a biological impossibility hard to believe. Whether it sits on our Earth or some other world makes little difference to Gormenghast: it is a pocket of existence with its own endless rules and regulations, and any other world is of no consequence to it.

I don't think there's another book quite like Titus Groan - well, except perhaps its two sequels. But I did try starting Gormenghast, and almost immediately something struck me about it as not quite the same. I'll come back to it at a later date, though interestingly I've received reports from fans that the series never reaches the heights of the first book again, and that it builds to a very satisfying climax at the end of Titus Alone. I'll be finding out for myself.

Catching up - and the next thing?

2011-01-12T22:55:00.005+11:00

I'm writing this from the Gold Coast, in my parents' house, where I'm currently on holiday. I'm fortunate to be in one of the few places in south-east Queensland that isn't under water at present; if you haven't heard, there's massive flooding going on in the Sunshine State, and also the part of New South Wales where I grew up: the far north coast. You can find out more, including how you can help, at the QLD Floods web site.

All this has given me some time to sit back and think about things for which I've been too busy of late. For example, here I have a list of eight (soon to be nine) books, ones I've read and not written about. It's been a time of change in the life of your humble author, but that's no excuse - a blog is for life, not just for Christmas, after all! I will soon update the site with many of these books, and more as I have more time for reading now.

But the question now remains, what will I attempt as a book project in 2011? I'm going to throw it open to you, in something I'm going to call my "Choose Your Book Adventure". (I might change that later, we'll see.)

Name me a book you think is great, of any genre, from any era, fiction or non-fiction. (The only real restriction is it must be in English, since I am monolingual.) I'll ask others to do the same in other places where I'm online. The first 12 books that I haven't read will form my list for 2010, but to keep things sane I will only take one book from each person (you can still suggest more than one), and only one from each author. I also reserve the right to ignore ones I was intending to read anyway, since I will still read books I choose myself this year as well.

I'm going to have an arbitrary cut-off date of, let's see, January 26. That gives you two weeks, and me the best part of a week in January to get started.

UPDATE: I neglected to tell anyone I was asking this, so I'm extending the deadline until...well, until I feel like it. But since I won't have twelve months - and since I'm joining a book club group with some friends as well this year - I'm going to limit it to 10 books. And the first one's already taken!

The library's the thing

2010-05-27T14:12:00.003+10:00

As usual these days, it's been a while between drinks here at the Bunch. But I've not been idle; a Comedy Festival has come and gone, and I've been reading and writing scripts and jokes and all manner of things. Just not that many books.

I am currently reading the first of Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast novels, Titus Groan, and thoroughly enjoying it, though it's been a largely interrupted read. It'll appear here before long, though.

You'll notice, if you're visiting the site, that I've done a bit of winter cleaning: I've updated the layout (though I reserve the right to keep tinkering with that!), and I've also switched from Shelfari to LibraryThing for my little widget showing pictures of the books I've read.

LibraryThing is a favourite web site of mine, even though I've neglected it of late; buying a lifetime membership should have cured me of that, so expect to see all the future Bunch of Authors books appearing in the widget at right. I prefer it to Shelfari for a number of reasons, chiefly for the LibraryThing's more community-oriented tone; I don't get foolish emails from strangers asking if they should read books in my collection (as if I can advise someone I don't know of that!), and even better, it has all the right covers for the Australian or English editions of books, which are generally the ones I own.

I think the links take you to Amazon, but don't feel you need to buy them from there: I don't have any kind of affiliate link, so there's no kickback in it for me.

Culture Jam

2010-04-01T13:28:00.001+11:00

For years the fanatical Idirans have fought a war against the all-inclusive Culture, a liberal, progressive, moneyless society composed mainly of humanity - in all its myriad forms - and sentient machines. An especially gifted Mind, one of the super-intelligent machines which pilot the Culture's ships, has narrowly escaped destruction by hiding on Schar's World, a memorial to a destroyed civilisation held sacred by the almost god-like Dra'azon. Both sides want the Mind, and it falls to Bora Horza Gobachul, a Changer agent freshly rescued from an undercover mission, to try and reach it for the Idirans.

One of my closest friends bought me Consider Phlebas as a belated birthday gift last year, as I had been lamenting the fact that I haven't read any "proper" science fiction in ages. I'm not entirely sure what I mean by "proper", but whatever it is, Banks' novel fits the bill. It's a sweeping space opera, complete with daring spaceship battles, big dumb objects, a galactic war and plenty of social commentary, though its largely bereft of weird aliens. The Idirans - tripedal, near-immortal giants - are the only non-humans to feature much, and though we meet two or three individuals, they do come across as a fairly standard example of the "fanatic warrior race" archetype.

This isn't hard sci-fi, either; this is firmly in the grand sweeping epic camp. Plenty of the stuff that happens is pure fantasy, but since it doesn't pretend to be anything else, I've no quibbles with that. Indeed the book was extraordinary fun: I found myself turning thirty to forty pages at a sitting, reading well into the night, needing to know how Horza was going to get himself out of his current ridiculous predicament. He's a curious character - very much a hard bastard anti-hero with a (sort of) heart of gold - but since he's almost always up against more evil bastards, we never want to see him fail. Interestingly for the novel that introduces the Culture - and there are several more following this one - our main protagonist hates them, so much so that he works for the Idirans seemingly out of spite. There are asides in which a high-up Culture advisor relaxing on holiday is trying to plan the best way of capturing Horza, but these are very far removed from the action, so it's fascinating to see a society described largely by people outside it.

If I have any quibble with the novel, it's only that the ending seems to come quite abruptly. There's an epilogue detailing the outcome of the Idiran-Culture war, and of a few of the surviving characters, but it managed to leave me fairly unsatisfied. There are also some odd conventions; the humans in the book speak with English vernacular (though they aren't speaking actual English) and despite their wild genetic diversity - one has short fur, while Horza, as a Changer, is able to alter his build and features and grow biological weapons - are generally like us both physically and emotionally, yet at the end of the book we discover the War took place in Earth's medieval period, and that these "humans" have nothing to do with Earth. All of which left me feeling a bit...confused? Not cheated, that's too harsh, but certainly feeling a bit...odd.

Anyway, I finished this a couple of weeks ago, and I'm now a hundred or more pages into Titus Groan, the first volume in Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast trilogy. It's my first foray in Peake, having taped but never watched the BBC miniseries; and at first blow I'm loving it. There's something oddly right about a novel which begins with the titular character's birth, but who - nearly halfway through - is still only a baby. I look forward to seeing where it all goes, but in the meantime I'm loving the prose and the world which Peake has built. (That may be the role-player in me...)

There's life on Mars, Jim, but not as we know it

2010-02-12T22:13:00.005+11:00

Aliens: once just a modern stand-in for the leprechauns and goblins of the past, our culture is now awash with them. Despite their use in popular fiction and the ramblings of conspiracy theorists, it's respectable - indeed inevitable - for modern science to accept the likelihood of their existence. But SETI is doomed to failure and the UFOlogists are clearly wrong, because if there truly is life out there, it's not going to look like anything on Earth - and we might not even be able to recognise it at life...

Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen are quite the double act. They refer to themselves in their co-authored books (and both have been published independently) as Jack&Ian, and their writing has a distinct style of its own. I was introduced to them via their association with Terry Pratchett, with whom they have written three volumes of The Science of Discworld, but ever since I saw the title What Does A Martian Look Like? in their list of previous works, I wanted to find and read it. It took a while; I'm not sure it's still in print. I eventually found it in that prince among warehouse bookstores, The Book Grocer. In the meantime though, I'd read Stewart's Flatterland, a sequel to Flatland which, among other things, contains one of my favourite explanations of string theory, and convinced me to pick up the large format Annotated Flatland for which he wrote the notes.

So there was quite a build up to reading What Does A Martian Look Like, and I have to say, it was a bit of a disappointment.

It's not a bad book, but I admit I'm baffled as to its intended audience. The Science of Discworld books are among the best popular science books I've read: they're accessible, written with great humour, they cover broad topics, where possible they relate them to everyday life of the reader, and they're as much about the idea and practice of science itself as they are about scientific subjects. This book has shades of all that, but more than anything else it reminds me of Darwin's Origin of Species - it goes to great length to explain and justify a position, so great in fact that it says the same thing many times over in different ways. This is all the stranger when their main point is very simple: aliens will not be like any life on Earth, and certainly not like any of the aliens we've imagined in fiction.

Early on they have some reason for a mounted attack on established knowledge; they justify throwing out most alien-based science fiction, and also explain how their concept of xenoscience is different from astrobiology of the sort practised by NASA. But the rest of the book seems to think it is struggling against a cemented notion in the head of the reader that aliens will look like humans with bumpy foreheads or giant anthropomorphic cats, or lizards, or beetles etc. But honestly, no-one willing to read a dense (the type is very small!) 350 page book about the scientific realities of alien life is going to believe that. The science in the book isn't all that basic, either; lots of concepts are introduced and explained (all with the authors' usual flair for analogy, it's true) in short order.

For me, who already felt this way - I get a bit annoyed when yet another sci-fi story talks about "alien DNA" or worse, splices it into our own (aliens will not have DNA, though they will probably have something that fulfils a similar function) - the whole exercise became a little tedious. I found myself thinking "Yes, I know they won't be like us, give me some more ideas of what they might be like!" Even the little bits of fiction that introduce each chapter are vague and fast, leaving little idea of what the tourist aliens cataloguing Earth-life are supposed to be like.

This is sounding very negative, which is disappointing because I've enjoyed Jack&Ian's other work so much. There are some interesting discussions of what forms life might take, though they justify their decision to give precious few examples by repeatedly stating that aliens will not look like anything they - or any human - can imagine. They do a good job of explaining where popular myths of aliens come from (the clue in that sentence is the word "myth"), and likewise their discussions of the problems with various ideas of aliens in fiction and the various bits of about the staggering variety of weird life on Earth are fascinating. But it was a bad sign, I think, when I was looking forward eagerly to their summaries of major works of science fiction more than their next point, included so they could be discussed with those who've not read them. (That said, this often led to a different kind of disappointment when a particularly interesting book, tantalisingly summarised, was included only so an off-hand reference could be made in a single paragraph.)

It was a long slog getting through What Does a Martian Look Like?, but it wasn't all bad. I am well-equipped to argue with people who believe in UFOs, or who think the X-Files was the most realistic portrayal of aliens on television. But here's a word to the wise: don't title a factual book with a question you have no intention of answering. I was really expecting some interesting case studies on what kind of life might exist in different bizarre environments, and that forms such a small part of the book that it would have been more honest to title it "Why Won't Aliens Be Like in the Movies?"

"Spilled some dressing on Doris Lessing, these writer types are a scream!"

2010-02-12T20:28:00.007+11:00

In the time of Nero, a Roman historian has been given the task of unravelling a collection of documents purporting to tell the true origin of humankind. According to this history, humanity began with a colony of water-bound women in the shadow of a great cave by the sea, known only as The Cleft - a name by which they also knew themselves, in reference to their common anatomy. But after unknown generations of women spontaneously giving birth to women, the Clefts begin to give birth to more and more "Monsters", human like creatures with a common deformity: the first males.

The Cleft is the last book on the list, and once again, it's not really like any of the other books I've read. For starters, Lessing is telling not just a story of her own devising, but an alternate origin story for the human race; what's more, she's writing in the specific voice of not just any historian, but one from a specific era (Nero's reign lasted 14 years, and if I were more of a Roman scholar I'm sure I could have a stab at the specific year from comments made by the historian in the book).

This narrative decision is interesting for a number of reasons: for starters, it means the story of how all humans began in a society composed only of women is told by a man, and quite a sympathetic one. As in Atwood's The Blind Assassin, the framing narrative has a story of its own, though here our experience of the historian's life is slight. Perhaps more importantly, choosing a Roman historian allows a perspective that is both scholarly and yet credulous, something a more modern choice of narrator would not allow.

That's not to say that our historian isn't critical; he often discusses the material he has to work with, wondering how accurate it can be given its oral distribution, and how much his understanding is dependent on concepts that did not exist for the Clefts. He editorialises about the first rape - also the first (adult) murder - not excusing it, but trying to understand how the first males would have understood it. Later, when the first consensual sex occurs, he is prompted to one of the longest asides in the book, explaining the personal experience that led him to interpret the event through the first realisation of gender in children. He frequently explains when he is attributing what he feels are reasonable emotions where none are recorded.

The origin story itself is fascinating, though like the most interesting such stories there are a lot of questions left unanswered. The history begins, naturally enough, with the Clefts and their society; the question of where they came from is left alone. The story is given a great deal of weight by the historian's conflicting sources, though in the main the stories agree. As a result its not a pretty tale, nor one with clear heroes or villains. The Clefts are, at first, terribly cruel to the newborn males, whom they term Monsters. They leave them on the "Killing Rock" on the top of the Cleft, where they are supposed eaten by eagles, and disfigured many of them, pulling or cutting off their penises. Though this is terrible, the men are not victims for long, committing rape and murder of the first Cleft to find their secret society away from the shore. And so the story goes, each side making mistakes and committing terrible acts, while all the while the younger members of each group come to understand that they somehow need each other.

It's a fascinating tale, and even though by the end the men seem to be largely in the wrong, its an iconic kind of wrong; they long for adventure and newness, and the unspoken effect of this drive - aside from the heartache it causes the women they leave behind - is that they drove society away from its simple beginnings towards the success of the Roman era. The men of the story exhibit traits that have come to define "male": they behave like adolescents, thinking more of desires and goals, understanding little of consequences. The story is largely bereft of supernatural elements, the only really classic mythological tropes being the portrayal of animals: the young Monsters are rescued by giant eagles, who carry them away from the Killing Rock to a safe place, and they manage to suckle the newborn Monsters on friendly does. (The historian himself draws a comparison with the myth of the founding of Rome, with the wolf who suckles Romulus and Remus.)

In the end, The Cleft feels like a "real" creation story, and like such stories it provokes as many questions as it answers. It's ending leaves no clue as to how the early humans, finally beginning to properly integrate men and women into one society, progress to what we would know as civilisation. There's also never much of a clue as to where these human beginnings occur, though the historian speculates it must have been on an island.

It feels somehow just right that the Bunch of Authors journey should end with an origin story, since by now this blog has a new beginning too. I'm going to keep blogging about the books I read (there are two more coming up very soon), and I hope you'll stay with me.

Chapters: None
Page count: 260
Book's title mentioned on page: 9
Best name encountered: Maire and Astre are two of the few named characters; special mention to Horsa, since it's almost the same name as the protagonist of another book I'm reading, Consider Phlebas
New words: None (the language is purposefully simple)
Inner Five-year-old score: 2 (I loved mythology as a kid, but I think I would have preferred the kind with gullible giants and wicked dragons)
Fun Wikipedia fact: Despite being almost universally pigeon-holed as a feminist author, Lessing is greatly disillusioned with mainstream feminist movement, concluding that they "want people to make oversimplified statements about men and women". (Perhaps she should talk with bell hooks?)

"Ondaatje started a food fight, salmon mousse all over the scene"

2010-01-30T17:35:00.006+11:00

In a field hospital in an Italian villa, Canadian nurse Hana has remained behind during the German retreat to care for a patient burned beyond all recognition in the care of Bedouins, his identity unknown save for his English accent. The pair are joined by Caravaggio, a thief and old family friend, who soon becomes enthralled by the patient's secrets. Soon after sappers arrive clean to the town of mines, and Kip, an Indian expert in bomb disposal, moves into the villa as well. This unlikely family attempts to heal the wounds left by the war, moving on past tragedy to find love and peace.

As I said early into the book, The English Patient is very poetic; Ondaatje, another Canadian and a poet as well as a novelist, arranges phrases in a sentence like lines in a stanza, building a picture through small details rather than direct description, and the result is prose which is entrancing in places. The plot too builds with pieces falling into place; the situation is poetic too in its way, and like a poem the pieces never seem to jar as they come together, even though they are disparate.

Each character is a story of their own, all people broken by the war and revealing their histories in different ways. The other three characters orbit around the Patient, who has a weight of tragedy and mystery greater than the others; the only clues to his identity are his accent, his fragmentary memory and his dogeared copy of Herodotus' Histories, filled with scribbled diary entries chronicling his past. Hana, whose recent past is not mysterious, cares for him seemingly from a desire for continuity and perhaps a stubborn refusal to allow one more preventable death, while Caravaggio - having had his skills pressed into service in the war, and suffering horribly for it - comes looking for both Hana and her patient, having some suspicions about his true identity.

The most interesting character, though, is Kip. His story, which takes almost as long to recount as the patient's, is probably my favourite part of the book. The passages in which he is defusing a bomb, feeling its heart, matching wits against an opponent who is distant in both geography and time, are the best and most vital descriptions of the art of engineering ever written. His training too also evokes the same love and understanding of engineering; it can be an artform like any other, terrible or beautiful, simple or complex. Kip feels like the true "hero" of the novel, and the ending - which I won't give away - wouldn't be nearly as effective without him.

Like any good novel it's about journeys, but here only one character is actively in search of something, and even for Caravaggio the Patient's identity seems almost an afterthought. For a novel with such a small cast I was incredibly engaged, though I do wish I had understood Hana more. It's not inappropriate to the story, but despite being ostensibly central to the plot she really only serves as a catalyst for much of the story, listening to the Patient, padding silently through the deserted villa. She does go on a journey, but it's probably the least satisfying since it's the common "woman finds love" that seems somewhat dated now.

Though I've not seen the film - just as I've not seen Field of Dreams and hadn't seen The Godfather before reading it - I did know that Caravaggio was played by Willem Defoe, and I admit that seems like natural casting. I believe the film concentrates on the patient's storyline more than Kip's, and I'm not sure I'd like it as much for that reason - towards the end of the book, it was Kip's story that I loved the most.

So that's the penultimate book; I'll try and get to The Cleft tomorrow.

Chapters: 10
Page count: 324
Book's title mentioned on page: I'm not sure it is; in the novel they generally refer to him as "the patient", since he's the only one left in the villa
Best name encountered: Carravaggio is pretty great, but I've a soft spot for Madox, one of the men in the patient's memories
New words: loggia
Inner Five-year-old score: 2 (it's a complex adult novel)
Fun Wikipedia fact: One of Ondaatje's thirteen books of poetry is titled There's a Trick With a Knife I'm Learning to Do.

"Who needs a shave? He's Robertson Davies!"

2010-01-23T21:40:00.007+11:00

Hector Mackilwraith, logical and driven in his career as a teacher of mathematics, has served the Salterton Little Theatre well as treasurer for six years. On the eve of promotion to the Department of Education, however, his usual rational behaviour goes askew as he decides the theatre owes him a part in its latest play, a pastoral production of The Tempest. The usual politics of community theatre are amplified and complicated by the first stirrings of love within Hector, though the rest of the cast and crew have more than enough problems, even without Hector's foolishness.

The blurb for Tempest-Tost is all about Mr Mackilwraith, but truth be told he's not much of a central character. I don't mean there's anything lacking in him; indeed, he's a fascinating man, led by his family history to a life devoid of passion or feeling but steeped in ambition and drive. But it's misleading to say that Tempest-Tost is about him any more than it is about many of the very colourful characters who are drawn into the Salterton Little Theatre.

Now, I'm an actor and comedian, and though I generally get paid the world of community theatre is no mystery to me. Davies captures the extreme end of that world perfectly: the politics, the characters, the process are all a little larger than life, it's true, but not so far that they're not instantly recognisable. It's telling that I enjoyed it so much, too, because I'm not generally a fan of fiction about my own industry, but here the production of The Tempest - of whose performance we see very little, and whose rehearsals almost less - is really just a backdrop. The focus is on the people, but the theatre is vital in providing a very specific kind of social and political framework, and also in supplying such a cast of disparate characters.

Aside from Hector, the protagonists are uniformly wonderful, and better, they all come with families of yet more wonderful characters, drawn with care and wit and depth. The entire committee of the Salterton Little Theatre is populated with older, set-in-their-ways stage-struck types, some of whom still command a spot in the cast, and others who dream of glory through other means, but all instantly recognisable to anyone who has spent any time in a small community organisation. The cast and crew are no less interesting. There's Hector's love interest - not that she's aware of it for most of the novel - Griselda Webster, a local rich girl who scores a major part in the play since her father's estate will be the performance venue, and whose younger sister Freddy secretly brews champagne from apples in the groundskeeper's shed. The director is Valentine Rich, a professional director and prodigal daughter of Salterton, back in town to take care of her deceased grandfather's estate. Both of these women are pursued with equal lack of success by Solly Bridgetower, a sarcastic, cynical young man enslaved to his domineering mother despite attending school in Cambridge...and on and on. If this were made into a film or play it would require quite the ensemble cast.

(For the record, my personal favourite is definitely Humphrey Cobbler, the local organist recruited to perform the music for the play. He doesn't play a big part, but he spouts wisdom and joy in equal measure in a voice that sounded in my head like a cross between Brian Blessed and Ian McKellan. Imagine that with dialogue such as "I am full of holy joy and free booze", "It is very wrong to resist an impulse to sing; to hold back a natural evacuation of joy is as injurious as to hold back any other natural issue," or "Now there is nothing I enjoy more than talking about music in terms of painting." It doesn't hurt that his whole family are musical and joyous, and thus remind me of my beloved and her clan.)

It would be remiss of me to talk about the characters of the book without mentioning Salterton itself. Tempest-Tost is the first of the "Salterton Trilogy", all set in the town, and it is an invention of Davies; you'd be forgiven for thinking it real, however, since it's drawn with such detail and love. My experience of Canada is sadly limited to the very touristy Niagara Falls, Ontario, but Salterton paints such a vivid picture of life in Canada that I feel as though I have been there.

There are few books I have enjoyed so much as Tempest-Tost; the characters, the wit, the pace are all so finely wrought as to make this a near perfect comic novel. Every scene, from the casting of the play to the "donation" of Valentine's grandfather's books to local clergy to any of the very normal yet politically and socially charged lunches dinners and parties are all equally well drawn. This is all the more extraordinary when you realise that Tempest-Tost was Davies' first novel! If I have any misgivings, it is only that the otherwise timelessness of the story and characters are ruined by the few reminders that the book was written in 1951; the phrase "working like a black" appears in the prose, though I suspect - or hope - it was just a common expression at the time, and his depiction of women, while mostly surprisingly progressive, still sometimes typical of the 1950s.

I'll be reading more Robertson Davies. You can count on it.

Chapters: 7
Page count: 284
Book's title mentioned on page: 2 (it's a quotation from Macbeth, not part of the novel itself)
Best name encountered: They're all good, though special mentions go to Professor Vambrace - it just has a great ring to it - Griselda and Freddy (Freddy's nickname for Griselda is "Gristle"), and Valentine's dead grandfather: Dr. Adam Savage!
New words: I don't think there were any, but the words I already knew were used in such marvellous ways...
Inner Five-year-old score: 3 (I'd've loved the humour and the theatre stuff, though much of the social and sexual politics would have escaped me)
Fun Wikipedia fact: Davies lifelong companion was Australian stage manager Brenda Matthews, whom he met in London while working as an actor. They were married from 1940 to his death in 1995.

Update!

2010-01-21T18:58:00.003+11:00

I've finally started catching up on the main Bunch of Authors posts, so you can find the post for Margaret Atwood's The Blind Assassin under "Who brought the cat? Would Margaret Atwood?" It's dated from when I started writing it...which is frankly embarrassing! Still, expect the last three books in the series very soon.

Six of Five

2010-01-14T15:21:00.010+11:00

When we last left our "intrepid" "heroes" - Arthur Dent, Trillian Astra, Ford Prefect and Arthur and Trillian's daughter Random Dent - they were being destroyed by Grebulons on the last version of Earth still extant in the Multiverse, lured there by the evil Vogon-owned Mark II version of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. They have not suffered, however; the bird-shaped, psychic, time-travelling Guide has plugged their minds into itself, allowing each to live out an entire lifetime in the seconds they have left in the real Universe. But now the Guide's batteries are running flat and it's time to go back to inevitable doom. Or is it? In what seems to be becoming a habit, Zaphod Beeblebrox arrives in the Heart of Gold to save them, though that salvation is short lived and they soon need rescuing by a familiar surly immortal. While tensions between and within our protagonists mount, we soon discover that - despite the lack of Earths - it seems there are still surviving human beings - and the Vogons already know about them...

Yes, today I finally finished Eoin Colfer's Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy sequel, And Another Thing..., which follows on from the end of Mostly Harmless. It's left me feeling pretty ambivalent, to tell the truth.

For one thing, it feels like fan fiction. Well written, sometimes funny, and novel-length fan fiction, I grant you; but it's still a sequel to a much loved cult series of books, radio programmes, television series and feature films, and as such there's a ring of the "why bothers" about it. Adams himself joked that he'd killed off all the characters at the end of Mostly Harmless so he'd know where to find them all when he wrote a sequel, but a sequel never seemed as much on his mind as further alternate versions of the main story (many of the new ideas in the surprisingly good 2005 Hollywood treatment were his).

Mostly Harmless itself, published eight years after the other four books, shares quite a bit in common with And Another Thing...: it's a direct sequel picking up from what seemed a perfectly good ending in the previous book; it has more-or-less a single storyline, rather than being a string of disparate sequences; it develops a small number of ideas further rather than throwing a hundred ideas at the reader for as long as they're funny; and most fans of the series won't like it. (Now I think of it, almost all of those things could also be said of volume four, So Long and Thanks For All the Fish, but everyone likes that one.) So it seems a bit unfair of me to be so indifferent to Colfer's effort, especially when - at age 13 - Mostly Harmless was the first hardcover novel I ever bought, almost as soon as it was released, and devoured on the car trip back from somewhere with a bigger book store than my home town.

If I'm honest, that emotional connection to the last of Adams' books in the series - it was the first thing of any kind I ever knew and cared about before it existed, back in the days before the Internet made waiting for things that don't yet exist almost inevitable - is probably a large part of why I like it so much more than most fans, but I guess it's also why I wanted to give Colfer a chance. But the deck is stacked against him, not least because he loves the series himself. References to the originals drip from every paragraph; hardly a single Guide entry in the novel doesn't use a planet, species or character name invented by Adams, and there are precious few characters in the book who we've not met before, with only one - the fairly unlikeable Hillman Hunter, nominally the man in charge of the last human settlement in the Galaxy - getting much fleshing out.

A notable absence, though, is Ford. He's hardly in it. Whole scenes go past in which he is in attendance but has no input. While I appreciate that describing Ford Prefect as a protagonist is like calling Peter Garret a champion of the environment, he's always been my favourite character, so having him around but doing nothing is much worse than his absence in So Long. (His return in Mostly Harmless was yet another reason I enjoyed it.) There's also relatively little for Arthur to do, although he gets a fair bit of moping in, almost as though he hadn't spent the previous novel dealing with what he'd lost in the one before that. Zaphod dominates the narrative, though for some reason without one of his heads (the smarter one, in fact, though there was never any indication that he had two personalities previously), though Trillian, Random and a couple of previously minor characters from the series also feature heavily.

No-one would argue, I think, that Adams was a master of plot or characterisation; it was his prose and his ideas and his wit that made him wonderful. Yet his successor is Eoin Colfer, whose prose is witty, whose jokes are (mostly) funny, and whose plotting is pretty good. I'm not sure he was the best man for this job, but then I'm not sure this was a job that needed doing, and in the end I think I can safely say that while I enjoyed And Another Thing... - enough that I'd give Colfer's other books a go - it's not all I hoped it might be.

Jews With Swords

2010-01-11T22:37:00.006+11:00

A thousand years ago in the Caucasus, two "gentlemen of the road" - the giant Abyssinian warrior and shatranj player Amram and the gaunt Frankish physician Zelikman - have just pulled off their usual con, a staged duel. Before they can collect their ill-gotten gains, fate brings to them a young boy, last survivor of a slaughtered noble family, and they are quickly swept up into pursuits far more noble than those to which they are accustomed.

Today, as Melbourne sweltered in 45 degree heat, I finished my first book of 2010, Michael Chabon's Gentlemen of the Road, including the afterword in which Chabon reveals its original working title, Jews With Swords. It's one of the most exciting books I've read in ages, and perhaps the most fun; a real adventure novel, short (under 200 pages) and pacey. This may well be partly due to the novel's serialised origin, but I think it's just as much to do with Chabon truly embracing the genre he has chosen.

This isn't just a swords and sandals adventure romp, though; it's placed in a real historical context, around 950 AD, and the situations and nations in the book are all based on the real world. There's no evil wizard, no bizarre monsters, but they're redundant when Chabon is able to paint just as vividly the contemporary wonders of war elephants, the marauding Rus, and the bizarre weapons of his protagonists (Amram carries a rune-covered northern axe, while Zelikman's blade is custom-made and resembles nothing so much as a giant needle). The characters are instantly likeable and have a depth perhaps surprising to those not familiar with the genre, but above all it's the wit and intelligence with which the prose drips that makes this such an enjoyable read.

It's only the second novel of Chabon's I've read, and it was a world away from The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. If Lieber's Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser books are anything like this, I'll have to check them out too, though I can't help but think Chabon's novel is a greatly improved version, not just informed by his predecessors, but building on them and adding in his own particular form of literary genius. He dedicates the book to Michael Moorcock, another author whose work I have heard much about but have read little; indeed, my only experience of him is Stormbringer, one of his earliest novels featuring his most famous creation, Elric of Melniboné. I need to read more of him, too.

I know I've still to catch up with the last of the Bunch of Authors books - I will get around to it. I suppose now, though, I'll have to finish And Another Thing; if it sounds like I consider that a chore, well, that's not quite how I feel, but it isn't quite the glorious fun I was hoping for either. There are some nice ideas in it, though, and the characters, while they don't quite feel like the Adams originals, are at least going somewhere new, though there's far less of Ford than I'd like. Still half a novel to go, though, so who knows? I do feel that I'm reading for about half a dozen people though, since several of my friends can't bring themselves to read it and are waiting for my report from the field...

"and she threw the book at me"

2009-12-29T19:26:00.007+11:00

It's done! I just finished The Cleft, and it was pretty good. I know I've not yet made good on my promise to catch up on the full blog entries, but I have at least come to the end of the Bunch of Authors quest.

Well...the end for now. I intend to keep reading, and to keep blogging about what I read. (I'll probably finish And Another Thing... for starters.)

Thanks to anyone who may have joined me, however briefly, on my journey. It will continue. And I will write up the last four books soon!

The Rapid Update

2009-12-17T13:59:00.003+11:00

Okay, it's been way too long, but I've just arrived back home after three weeks in the US, and I need to let you know that I finished The English Patient and I'm about two-thirds of the way through The Cleft. I was somewhat distracted by Eoin Colfer's And Another Thing, the sixth Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy novel, but I abandoned it halfway through to get back on track.

Over the next few days, as I recover from jet-lag and see James Cameron's Avatar, I'll endeavour to complete my backlog of posts - I still owe you The Blind Assassin, Tempest-Tost and The English Patient. But at least I'm on target to finish the list by year's end.

Doin' some readin'

2009-11-04T13:22:00.003+11:00

This post is a bit of a catch-up; I'm two books ahead of the blog now. Yesterday I finished Tempest-Tost, and I'm already 30+ pages into The English Patient (already it feels like it was written by a poet, and indeed Ondaatje has some poetry anthologies listed in his "also by this author"). There's a draft of the The Blind Assassin post sitting in blogger, and I promise to finish it this week.

Life is exceptionally busy: work is at a critical point in a big project, I've gigs coming up, there are registration deadlines looming for various festivals, and I'm going to America and Canada in under three weeks. I'll do my best to catch up before I go, but I feel on-track: two months left, and two books to go.

I'll return soon, I promise!

"Who brought the cat? Would Margaret Atwood?"

2009-10-19T20:19:00.008+11:00

Shortly after the Second World War, Iris Chase's sister Laura drove over a cliff to her death. Some say she did it on purpose. A few years later her strange, slightly risqué novel, The Blind Assassin, made her a famous iconoclast. Now Iris, living on her own in her Canadian home town of Port Ticonderoga, has decided to write down the story of her family, encompassing two wars, the Great Depression, and of course the mystery of her sister's death.

This book is like an ogre: it's full of layers, by which I mean layers of storytelling. First, there's Iris's reality - what's happening to her now, at the end of the twentieth century. She's telling us about it, writing in an almost conversational style, though it's not clear why or who for until the end. After a while she also tells the story of her parents, followed by her childhood. Iris's writings are interrupted by both historical documents - newspaper stories and the like - and extracts from Laura's novel, in which a young socialite meets clandestinely with a writer of science fantasy stories for pulp magazines. The final layer of the story occurs within the novel, as the writer tells her a story of his own devising - this is where the titular blind assassin comes in.

The book starts out as a slow burn - Iris is an engaging enough character, but her life as a lonely, elderly woman, and one seemingly ill-equipped to deal with her own twilight years, isn't immediately gripping. There's also a strange disparity between her wit in writing and her real life business, both in her current life and her earlier history; her internal monologue is insightful, even biting, but when the narrative includes her in scenes of her life, she's disappointingly passive and dull. Perhaps this is part of the point, though: Iris, a child of the First World War, exists in a world where privilege, knowledge and choice in general is denied to women. The Chase sisters are schooled at home by a succession of terrible tutors in subjects that teach them nothing of any use. Not that much later, in one of the more harrowing sequences of the book, Iris, still barely a woman, is married off to a much older businessman to secure his purchase of the Chase family business in the hard times following the war.

It's a pretty miserable life, though the narrative is very matter-of-fact about it in that sense. Iris's father is the best example of this attitude: he's neither demonised or deified, instead presented as an almost featureless cipher before the war (and before Iris was old enough to truly know him), and as a broken shell afterward, acting on some internal compass that's clearly cracked.

I have to admit I found The Bllind Assassin pretty hard going in the middle, and it was largely because I thought I knew where the main story was going, but I desperately wanted more of the pulp narrative of the blind assassin. After all, we already know that Iris ends up old and alone, her sister having driven off a cliff. Obviously there's some hidden truth coming, but it takes its time; indeed, it's barely addressed explicitly, though Iris does acknowledge what her intended reader has no doubt discovered before she reveals the secret. It's not spoiling anything, I think, to say that she reveals something quite unpleasant, but by the time it comes it seems not to have quite the sting it could have had. (I'm famous among some of my friends for wanting stories to begin at that point, to see what happens after; since, as you might expect, the revelation and how its handled is what leads to Laura's demise, there's not a great deal of story left afterwards.)

But despite the above misgivings, I really liked The Blind Assassin. Though I found Iris frustrating through the lens of the 21st century - modern, elderly Iris is so knowing, it's hard not to be shouting "why couldn't you be like this forty years ago?!" as she describes her passive young self - her story is truly tragic, and there's a lot of detail in the book. It's description of life in a small industry town through the huge changes of the 20s, 30s and 40s is fascinating, with the fortunes of her father's factory, the radically different sexual politics and the attitude of businessmen to Germany in the lead up to World War II all worthy of novels of their own.

Still, I can't help thinking that if I could, I'd buy a copy of Amazing Stories if it just had the story of the real blind assassin...or even a copy of Laura Chase's book. It's the ultimate literary frustration to read a novel which depicts a fictional novel you suspect you'd enjoy just as much, if not more.

Chapters: 15
Page count: 560
Book's title mentioned on page: 240 (sort of)
Best name encountered: Iris Chase (it just resonates for the character)
New words: [I'll have to find it and look them up; there were one or two]
Inner Five-year-old score: 4 (for the story within the novel within the novel); 1 (for the novel; waaaaay to intense for a five year old!)
Fun Wikipedia fact: The Blind Assassin is considered an example of "Southern Ontario Gothic", a sub-genre of gothic fiction first described in 1973 but sometimes derided by critics.

In Another Dimension of Space...

2009-10-15T11:01:00.005+11:00

Quick update today: last night I finished The Blind Assassin. I'll get time for the full post in the next few days, but the short version is that it took a while to get into, and the journey was more important than the destination, but I really enjoyed it.

I did finish reading The Graveyard Book, and it didn't disappoint. I saw some negative feeling towards it because it was nominated for a Hugo, despite being a book for younger readers, and some comments were tossed around that it was unworthy. I admit I'm not up with the current standards of science fiction and fantasy literature, but I reckon it was a worthy nomination; I certainly enjoyed it as much as I did any of the Bunch of Authors books so far.

For those interested, I'm now reading my beloved The Lord of the Rings, because she loves Tolkien and it's about time I put some effort into sharing it with her. I am one of those who loved The Hobbit as a kid, but didn't make it more than a third through Fellowship of the Ring; I've met many like me since. I have famously proclaimed that I liked the films better, since I did try Fellowship again after seeing the film (though my plan to read each book after seeing each film never came to fruition). This time around, with my love to guide me, I'm getting into it much more, and I'm amazed how little I remember of the book.

I've also started (as in I got about three pages in this morning before leaving for work) Tempest-Tost by Robertson Davies, and it's shorter, but in small print. Three more books, two and half months left in the year. Time to step up!

A spoonful of sugar

2009-09-10T13:59:00.004+10:00

It's been a slow start for The Blind Assassin. Judging from the first 30 or so pages, it's going to reveal its plot and characters slowly over time; at the moment all I have are fragments which I can only vaguely piece together. I hope this isn't the sort of book that should come with a notebook to record names and dates and places...

Another reason for the slow start is Neil Gaiman, and more specifically the copy of The Graveyard Book that I borrowed from a friend. I'm about half-way through, and enjoying it immensely on two levels: it's a bloody good book for children that assumes they're smart, and I've also found a new way to enjoy reading to my beloved.

On the first point, I like books for kids which just get on with it. (Truth be told, I like this about books in general, unless there's a particular point - artistic or otherwise - to be made by doing things otherwise.) Too many modern books for chlidren and young adults hold the reader's hand, explaining everything as though the reader will be too dim to work things out from context. Skullduggery Pleasant, though fun, had this problem: it's explanation of its world was a little too "here's how everything works" for me. I recently had a conversation with about older children's books, and how they treated kids with respect for their intelligence. A. A. Milne was a major example, and I was delighted to learn (for though I did read some of them, it was probably 25 years ago and I've forgotten) that Beatrix Potter used words like "soporific" in her stories, without explanation, but with the meaning clear in context. That's how you build a vocabulary!

The new reading method isn't anything spectacular. I was recently scandalised by the revelation that my sleepy beloved falls asleep while I'm reading to her, and has no recollection of large bits of the books I've read to her (the mainstays of which are Gideon Defoe's Pirates! books, which are hilarious). After our first stint with The Graveyard Book, she revealed how little she remembered, and asked me to summarise what she'd missed. After the second stint, I kept reading by myself after I realised she was asleep, and have kept up the updates each morning.

We both enjoy my little retelling of the story, which is also a good way to keep it in my head between reads, and I think the best part is she'll probably want to read the whole book for herself later. Certainly it'd make a pleasant antidote to Brideshead Revisited, which she's slogging through at the moment, and finding awful. I've not read it myself, but it's tale of privileged, chaste but nonetheless deeply depressed young men sounds dreadful...

"Who's a funny fella? W. P. Kinsella"

2009-09-03T13:31:00.003+10:00

In 1979 on his little corn farm outside Iowa City, baseball fanatic Ray Kinsella hears an announcer's voice: "If you build it, he will come." He knows exactly what the voice means and builds a baseball field amongst the corn, and sure enough he comes: Shoeless Joe Jackson, one of the "Unlucky Eight", White Sox players thrown out of the sport for fixing the 1919 World Series. The rest of the eight come too, but the voice has more instructions for Ray - not least seeking out reclusive author J. D. Salinger. Ray obeys without question, yet all along debt threatens to cost him the farm.

I've never seen Field of Dreams, but I'll tell you now: I loved Shoeless Joe. It's a book that somehow resonated with me deeply; perhaps because of the names, the characters, the situation. I'm not sure. I've never watched a game of baseball in my life, but as the Philadelphia Inquirer said, it's "not so much about baseball as it is about dreams, magic, life, and what is quintessentially American". I think I'll be going to a game when I'm in New York.

But let's back up a bit. Why do I love it? First, there's the pace. The voice speaks to Ray on page 3 (the first page of prose); Shoeless Joe shows up by page 11. This is not typical of my experience with magic realism, which I suppose is what you'd have to call Shoeless Joe. In films in this genre there's a lot of resistance on the part of the character chosen by the magic; not so here. Ray's wife Annie and daughter Karin never question it either, indeed are aware of it almost from the beginning. Ray's doubts come only when his later instructions force him to seek out others and share his miracle.

I said I made personal connections to the book, and partly that's the names: several characters share theirs with important people in my life. A central theme is Ray's strong bond with his long-dead father, and father-son stories always hit me in my emotional centre. But there's also the treatment of religion. Surprisingly for a book about redemption after death, there's a thread of atheism running through the book. Ray's not a Christian, but Annie's mother is, and not a flattering one. Religion is only ever presented as bluster, even late in the book when certain characters react to the baseball field in a religious fashion. Perhaps the book is spiritual, but it's more about dreams than anything else. The fantasy of recapturing things lost is a powerful one for us all.

A word about the baseball business: it's not overwhelming. It's just a theme, Kinsella's specialty, and you learn everything you need to know in the book, though when the occasional batting average was mentioned I was clueless. Is .300 better or worse than .500? It didn't really matter. Baseball is explained as the conduit for this peace and redemption quite beautifully in the closing pages of the book.

So it's a delightful book, though I don't know if it could work if it were to be written now, set in 2009. Baseball, like other major league sports, just doesn't seem the same any more. We see it as a job, a business, a career with fame attached, though baseball, like cricket (or at least test cricket), seems to have weathered the decades better than others. It recalls a simpler time, a time before commercialisation (another theme in the book, depressingly just as relevant 30 years later).

Chapters: 5
Page count: 265
Book's title mentioned on page: never!
Best name encountered: Karin (it's my beloved's name, and never shows up anywhere, so imagine my delight!)
New words: none really, though I learned some more about certain baseball terms
Inner Five-year-old score: 3
Fun Wikipedia fact: W. P. Kinsella became less of baseball fan after the 1994 Major League Baseball strike, and is now a noted tournament Scrabble player.

...and on we go! Four books left; four months left. I'll start The Blind Assassin tonight.

"I'll be over when I'm finished my book"

2009-08-15T12:47:00.007+10:00

After the less than two weeks speed-up with The Godfather, I was keen not to lose momentum; I needed the next book, and the next author in the song is W. P. Kinsella. No, I hadn't heard of him either, but it turns out his books are mostly about baseball - and this includes Shoeless Joe, the story Hollywood turned into Field of Dreams.

Having just read the book behind one film I hadn't seen, it seemed appropriate to dive straight into another, so after finishing The Godfather in my lunchbreak on Thursday, I went hunting in bookshops after work. Reader's Feast had every seemingly the entire back catalogue of Sophie Kinsella (no relation; indeed, it's not even her real name), but not a whiff of W. P. The same was true at The Hill of Content, even Angus and Robinson. So, in desperation, I tried Borders.

I know, I know; they're a corporate giant, often accused of paying student employees terrible wages and single-handedly destroying the independent booksshop. But I have to say, they don't seem to have managed to do that here in Australia, and the staff I've encountered have been pretty good. In any case, sometimes they're the only place to go to find what I'm after, though you'll often pay way too much for the books they import from the US (I saw the introductory adventure for the latest version of Dungeons & Dragons on sale in Borders here in Melbourne for $65! It has a recommended retail of $29.95 US, originally sold for around the $30 mark in game stores here, and an electronic version is available for free on the Wizards of the Coast web site.)

While I was there, I also found the last book I needed to be set up with all the remaining authors; since it's no longer a mystery to me, I feel I should share the final schedule with you:

W. P. Kinsella - Shoeless Joe
Margaret Atwood - The Blind Assassin
Robertson Davies - Tempest-Tost
Michael Ondaatje - The English Patient
Doris Lessing - The Cleft

I'm already a good 20 or 30 pages into Shoeless Joe, and despite not knowing a thing about baseball, I'm pretty much loving it. I think the rest of this ride is going to be a real rollercoaster!

"Now I'm poundin' the ouzo with Mario Puzo"

2009-08-14T22:27:00.010+10:00

Post-war New York casts some long shadows, and in these shadows live the Sicilian Families. Most powerful of all are the Corleones, headed by Don Vito Corleone: "the Godfather" to his friends. His world is one in which he protects his family and friends from the larger, unfair world; it is a world of loyalty, favours and above all respect. His only worry in his world is succession; one son incapable, one too ruled by anger and lust, and the other, Michael, commits the great sin of using his talents outside the Family, fighting for the US in the Pacific. Soon after of the Don's daughter's wedding, an attack on the Godfather himself throws the family into war, and no-one - not even Michael - can escape the violence of the next ten years.

Almost every conversation I have with my friends about films involves something like this:

"Oh, that's just a classic Hitchcock trick. He used that in Psycho...you've seen Psycho?" (This last bit is something usually unsaid, tacked on because they have remembered they are talking to me.)

"No," I reply, and disappointment ensues. It's true there are many films I've not seen, and these include The Godfather. This is probably one of the worst sins in the cinephile book because it's considered by many to be one of the best films ever made (it's ranked number two in the IMDb Top 250 behind a movie I have seen: The Shawshank Redemption). It's also my ex-housemate Paul's favourite movie, and among the top ten of many others besides. Nevertheless, I now know that peculiar form of smug satisfaction that comes from not having seen a film, but having read the book on which it was based; there really should be a word for it. Perhaps the Germans have one, but for now I'll use the invented term satisfiction. (All credit to my beloved, who did most of the work on that one.)

The Godfather, you'll notice, took my very little time to read, which is just as well - we're now just past the half way mark, but we're two thirds of the way three the year! But the reason it's taken so little time is that it's an "ice-cream" book - well-written, with a driving narrative, and so many characters whose fates you have to discover. Indeed, as much as I liked Michael, it was the less prominent characters who really captured my attention: Tom Hagen, the "Irish", German-American man taken in by the Don as a fourth son who becomes his Consigliori; Johnny Fontane, a singer, actor and godson of the Don (and, as a friend pointed out, supposedly a fictional counterpart to Sinatra); and, my personal favourite, Jules Segal, a skilled surgeon and humanist (though not entirely altruistic) relocated to Vegas after a run-in with the law over the abortions he'd performed.

It's sadly no coincidence that these characters are all men; the two most interesting women in the book are Lucy Mancini, lover to the Don's oldest son and later to Dr Segal, and Kay Adams, girlfriend and later wife to Michael Corleone. But these women have passive roles; they both rail against convention in their own ways, but both remain very much subservient to men. (Lucy, who achieves some sexual liberation, does it only through assistance from Jules, though he is in many ways the book's most progressive character.) It's true that this is typical of the late 40s and 50s, when the book is set, and even more so of the old-fashioned traditions of the Sicilian families, and indeed within that context Kay struggles as much as might be expected. By the end though she submits to the expectations of the Family - and moreso, to beliefs she herself does not honestly seem to hold - though the same can be said of Michael.

I should also mention the sex. There's plenty of it, most of it not graphically described, but even just a few chapters in we hear of Sonny Corleone's enormous member and the one woman glad to accept it: Lucy. Indeed Lucy and and Kay get all the best sex scenes; both are very sexually active, unusually so perhaps given the period and social context of the book, though the other women are not so lucky. Sex is held, as is so often the case in more "traditional" societies, quite separate from love and emotion; a taboo and gift to be withheld until marriage. Late in the book a virgin bride bursts with repressed sexual energy on her wedding night, and it is said to be wonderful. At the same time it is acceptable, perhaps even expected, for men to have sexual affairs (so long as they are reasonably discreet), whereas female infidelity is either never contemplated or painted as deliberate humiliation of one's husband. Again, these attitudes are in keeping with the period and

Puzo's style is direct, but it doesn't lack in internal life. His characters are compelling because he allows their thoughts to wander where they need to; if one of them remembers a significant event from their past, then that event is played out for us with all the detail of the main narrative. He can spend an entire book in narrative order, but he also jumps back and forward to heighten the dramatic tension. When a major character dies (I'm not going to assume you've seen the movie; after all, I haven't), we learn about it through the perspective of a minor character not heard from since the books opening chapter before travelling back in time to see how it was achieved. It's a trick used several times and it works every time; indeed, it has a very filmic quality to it. No wonder it made such a good movie.

It's something of a triumph, too, in the way it manages to make the protagonists likeable without downplaying how hardarse they are. These men are neither immoral nor amoral; rather, they have viewed the society in which they live, found its moral code wanting, and invented their own. The original Sicilian mafia, it's American evolution, and even the Don himself are all given an origin. There are times, it's true, when you forget that the Family is a criminal organisation, that it's "friendship" is not always optional, that to merely say no to them may be to court ruin or death. This just makes the brutality, when it comes, all the more terrible, especially in the final chapters.

The Godfather is one hell of a ride. I look foward to seeing the film with great satisfiction; after all, I think the term can also apply to the feeling one gets when watching a film whose source material one has already read, especially when the film is either a great success or failure at bringing the source to the screen.

Chapters: 32 (across nine books; all are numbered in Roman numerals)
Page count: 595
Book's title mentioned on page: 8
Best name encountered: Luca Brasi (it just has the right brutal feel for the character)
New words: caporegime; Consigliori; lupara; omertà; pezzonovante
Inner Five-year-old score: 3 (excitement, sure, but this is adult excitement: sex and death and consequences)
Fun Wikipedia fact: Puzo was a public relations officer for the US Air Force in Germany during the war, since his poor eyesight prevented him from fighting.

"The driver said he was lookin' straight ahead"

2009-08-04T22:36:00.004+10:00

So: four down, five to go from the original list. I've not wasted any time and ploughed directly into...Mario Puzo! And what else could I read but The Godfather? I only started two days ago, and I'm already 160 pages in. Just as well - this baby clocks in at 500 pages, though the type is a lot bigger than in Niagara. Here's hoping book six is a bit shorter so I've time to catch my breath.

I've allowed myself some ice-cream reading in the form of some comics. I borrowed four from the library a week or two ago, and purposefully selecting one DC title, one Marvel, one Dark Horse and one independent. I've already polished off Lucifer - Children and Monsters and She-Hulk - Laws of Attraction. The latter was pretty good, though the promise shown in the premise - a superhero with the supernatural charms is accused of rape - is quickly thrown away to focus on an almost soap operatic love "triangle". (The third person in the triangle is rarely present and very ineffective, so it's very much an isosceles love triangle.) It's got better ideas than a lot of Marvel stuff, and intersects with some interesting moments from early in the Civil War storyline (short short version: government decrees superheroes must be registered, superheroes fight over whether they should play along).

Lucifer, though, well...it's damnably good. (Sorry.) As with many comics, it's taken me a long time to get from volume one to volume two of the trade paperback collections, and that's mainly because my local library branch only had volume one. Children and Monsters begins as Lucifer has secured a dimensional gateway, which he uses to further his schemes, first by reclaiming his lost wings. While he is off preparing schemes, various forces both "good" and "evil" try to claim the gate as their own. It's a mature, sophisticated work, literate and intelligent, but above all it's good storytelling full of good ideas and well-constructed narrative. I'm keen to read the rest of Lucifer; it may be sacrilege (sorry again), but I think I prefer it to its parent work, Sandman. And I do like Sandman. I'll have to look up more of Mike Carey's work, though I don't think I'll bother with the Marvel stuff I see he's been doing of late.

Well, back to the reading, though I must mention that my beloved has been into some interesting stuff of late, too. We watched Quills last night, inspired her recent foray into the Marquis de Sade's Philosophy in the Boudoir. From the parts she related to me he seems heavy-handed in his philosophy as well as his pornography, though the pornography seems better thought out. The Marquis, it seems, was a social Darwinist of the worst sort, and married that with elements of Crowley's "Do what thou wilt", but interpreted both in ways that seem to favour the sexual satiation of men over women. Fascinating, but terrible.

"I've been flirtin' with Pierre Berton 'cos he's so smart in his books"

2009-08-02T13:38:00.010+10:00

Niagara Falls straddles the divide between two countries. Since it was first discovered by Europeans, it has been a symbol of the untameable new world, inspiring awe, terror, wonder and greed. And like the falls themselves, the personalities of Niagara Falls, New York and Niagara Falls, Ontario have been poetic, violent, daring, powerful. From the hyperbolic missionary who first described the falls in print to the power barons who harnessed the waters to bring in the electrical revolution, it's history full of intrigue and adventure.

I was originally going to read Berton's history of the War of 1812, but a couple of things changed my mind. For one thing, the 1812 history consists of three volumes, and unlike a fictional trilogy I didn't think I could bear to only hear the beginning of the tale. The other is that my beloved and I are heading to New York in November-December, so we'll have a chance to see the Falls first hand. Now, having read Niagara: A History of the Falls, I will have to spend at least a day or two in the town, marvelling at the evidence of all that I've read.

As I mentioned in my last post, I was finding the book slow going. It must seem that I don't spend much time reading, but the truth is I now spend most of my reading time on blogs and online magazines, many covering frivolous topics, though many important ones too. Reading Niagara cover-to-cover felt a bit like reading a magazine column, since it comes in small chunks - bigger than a magazine article, in truth, but still. If I'd had more discipline I would have made sure to read one or more of these every day, in order to keep up the pace.

There are only thirteen chapters, but each is split into three to five "verses"; I call them this because they are only titled in the contents and at the start of each chapter - when you reach them in the text, they're denoted only by a large numeral at the top of the page. Sometimes these cover very different stories under a common theme; at other times, they seem to continue the previous verse more or less directly. The division seemed a bit arbitrary at times, and to be honest I often ignored them.

But enough of all that guff. Is it any good? Oh yes. Yes indeed. Berton has a wonderful prose style; everything is clear, his words flowing like a less turbulent river but still dynamic river - fast when the action is fierce, slower when the narrative turns to more domestic matters. It's only problem is that, being a true history of a place, rather than an event or even a person, it is a collection of short stories whose only true common theme is geography.

The early part of book is a little samey - he starts strong with a geological history of the river and how the falls were created (the first line is the very Biblical "In the beginning was the ice"), and their early "discovery", but the next few chapters are largely tales of Europeans coming and gawking in various ways. Eventually some real characters show up - the first of many celebrity cameos in Charles Dickens, and Frederic Church painting his celebrated landscape of the Falls - but the real narrative seems to arrive with the hucksters and crooks who established the first "civilised" period of Niagara's history.

I couldn't help but think of Deadwood as rival hotel owners fought each other for the right to fleece the hordes of Niagara tourists (William Hearst gets a mention, and Wild Bill Hickok is a later cameo!) - the blatant criminality and colourful setting would certainly make a cracker of an HBO series. From here on the action rarely stops, with the coming of daredevils, bridge builders and - my personal favourites - the scientists. Hydroelectricity came into its own nowhere in quite the way it did at Niagara, and no less a figure than Nicola Tesla arrives to harness the waters. (Tesla also shows up in The Mad Scientist Hall of Fame, a birthday gift from my beloved's parents, and an amusing if derivative mix of facts and psychiatric conjecture about scientists from fiction and history.)

Despite descriptions of the scientists as exploiters, it is clearly the "power magnates" and businessmen who drive the exploitation of the river. Surprisingly there seemed little evidence in the book to suggest that the use of the Falls for generating electricity has done any damage, but the industries that flocked to the area to take advantage of the power did more than enough - something that the final chapters explore in great detail in the case of "Love Canal", perhaps America's most famous toxic waster dump.

While there's little of it in the early chapters, when both Canada and America were still frontier societies, the second half of the book has plenty of comparisons between the two sides of the river. Canada get the better waterfall, of that there's no doubt, but Berton remains even-handed. Both countries get their share of praise and criticism for the way in which they exploit - or fail to exploit - the Falls, and indeed the afterword - which excellent summarises the preceding 450 pages - paints both as flawed but charming.

Niagara is far better in retrospect than in the reading, not because there's anything wrong with the prose, but just because it's a big story made of so many little stories, and the big story is easier to appreciate from above. I've learned so much: about the

I'll definitely be revisiting Berton, and indeed will probably acquire my own copy of the book to take with me to Niagara Falls. I want to visit the statues of Tesla and the French acrobat Blondin, take a tour of the massive power plants, and even see what's left of Love Canal. It's a rare pleasure to so keenly feel the history of a place, and I can't help but think that feeling will be wonderful when I am there in person.

Chapters: 13 (split into 52 "verses")
Page count: 449 (including the afterword, but not the acknowledgements, bibliography or very comprehensive index)
Book's title mentioned on page: 12 (the first page of the introduction. Well..."Niagara" is mentioned; he never uses the full title)
Best name encountered: Martha E. Wagenfuhrer; also the engineering firm of Balf, Sarin and Winkelman. (Isambard Kingdom Brunel gets a mention in passing, but only by his last name.)
New words: funambulist; cataract (in the geological sense; despite it's repeated use, I had to remind myself this wasn't a book about eyes right to the end)
Inner Five-year-old score: 7 (it has adventure and big buildings and Nikola Tesla and everything! That last chapter would have scared the hell out of me at five, though.)
Fun Wikipedia fact: Bruce Lee gave his only television interview on The Pierre Berton Show in 1971.

Too slow, Chicken Marengo!

2009-07-29T15:52:00.003+10:00

It's taking me an age to get through Niagara: A History of the Falls. Not because Berton is a bad writer - far from it, his prose is engaging and to the point. The problem is this isn't a novel, nor a history of one identifiable thing; yes, everything is about Niagara in some way, but it could be the scam merchants fleecing tourists, or the daredevils climbing a wire above the cataract, or the power magnates building hydroelectric plants... All the bits are fascinating, but the players come and go and the Falls come in and out of focus. It's not the sort of book you generally read cover to cover.

Ah well. I've borrowed some comic books and banned myself from reading anything but Niagara. I'm making is sound awful, but it's not - it's just not a constant reading companion.

Should be done soon anyway, though. Only 100 or so pages left!

Change of Plan

2009-06-18T13:18:00.005+10:00

After talking up Booktopia in the last post, all I've heard from them regarding my purchase of The Invasion of Canada: 1812-1813 is that it's been ordered and it'll take 7 to 16 days before it's sent to me. In any case my beloved said we should go see Niagara Falls while we're in New York at the end of the year, so it seemed reasonable to change tactics and borrow Berton's Niagara: A History of the Falls from one of the local libraries, with thanks to my excellent friend Dave. It was a apparently a bestseller in Canada, though both Dave and I speculated that this was unlikely for a book about a waterfall around 450 pages long. Here's hoping I can get through it before it needs to be returned...

In the lag time between the last post and receiving Niagara, though, I read a fascinating and wonderful book which didn't appear on the list of possibilities: The Planiverse, by another Canadian, A K Dewdney. Inspired by Flatland, another favourite of mine - and which I recently repurchased in an edition annotated by Ian Stewart - it tells (as though it were true) the story of a computer science project to model a two-dimensional universe which somehow manages to make contact with a real two-dimensional universe, the Planiverse of the title.

I picked this up in a wonderful second hand bookshop in Daylesford, where my beloved and I spent our first anniversary. (Daylesford and its environs, I mean, not just the bookshop.) Apart from the Flatland connection, I found it hard to pass up after noting that Douglas Adams was one of those who had a review quote on the back; typically for Douglas, he didn't say much about the book beyond saying that he believed the whole thing.

The Planiverse is an amazingly detailed look at what a two-dimensional universe might be like, with boxed text and a full appendix on everything from housing to physics, chemistry and two-dimensional technology. Despite being written in 1980, the dated computer technology doesn't at all detract from the novel, and it's made compelling by the relationship Dewdney and his students share with Yendred, the one Planiverse inhabitant with whom they are able to communicate, and who goes on a pilgrimage across his world, followed by the inhabitants of the computer lab. I grew surprisingly attached to Yendred, more so somehow than other fictional characters; perhaps I was empathising with the students, who form a secret club, hiding their amazing discovery from their university and contacted Yendred late at night. Even their plot deepens, but many things are deliberately left unresolved - not for a sequel, but as a sort of allegory to the spiritual journey Yendred undertakes. Frankly, I was devastated when the book ended, a feeling I've not had for some time; I will just have to be satisfied with Dewdney's other books, some of which sound right up my alley!

Booktopia!

2009-06-05T15:55:00.006+10:00

After racing through all three of Asimov's Elijah Baley/Daneel Olivaw novels in as many weeks, I feel right back in the reading game. I've regained momentum by reading something that slides into the brain the way ice-cream goes down the gullet (to borrow a comparison made by my friend Dave). Thus, I found it more important than ever to get my hands on a Pierre Berton book, so I could advance the Bunch of Authors project.

As I described in my last post, local bookshops left me without hope; three of Melbourne's regional libraries did have his work, but only one book apiece - one about Niagra Falls. Now, I could have caved and made the trek, but in the end I decided to punt for one of the books I really wanted to read.

Enter Booktopia. I first heard about them via a list of Amazon alternatives, following the so-called "Amazonfail" episode. (If you don't know what I'm talking about, here's a pretty good explanation of "Amazonfail".) I was abstractly irritated by that event, but to be honest it was more the horrendous postage that prevented me from buying books on Amazon. Booktopia is unique, as far as I know; while it does have a warehouse, it's not really a traditional online bookshop. Instead it lists books from publisher catalogues, putting in a special order with the publisher when you order your book.

I like this approach, because the model allows them to sell virtually any book with low overheads. It also highlights a truth that many bookstores seem to like keeping quiet: they can order pretty much any book from any publisher at any time, assuming it's still in print. I knew this when I worked at a bookshop in the early 90s, back when we didn't have computerised ordering (we had a yearly phone-book sized publication which listed available books by author, publisher and title).

So, for the recommended retail price plus a modest postage amount - and it's a flat fee no matter how many books you order - I am now awaiting the arrival of Berton's The Invasion of Canada: 1812-1813. I've also been to the bookshop and bought the next book after that, so there'll be no delay. After all, I've only about seven months left to get through these books - and some of them aren't short, and many may not be Asimov-style ice-cream. Plus, I'll need to make sure I have the last one or two ready to go with me to New York - where I'm excited to say I'll be heading for three weeks in November/December!

One quick note about Booktopia: the URL, as linked above, is http://www.booktopia.com.au - and it's important not to leave out the .au, as the .com site has been reported for malware distribution (or so Firefox and Google tell me).

Hopefully I'll be able to let you know what I think of Berton in a week or three. In the meantime, I plan to keep up my momentum by reading some other books, possibly including Tim Richards' Mind the Gap (a print-on-demand published sci-fi/fantasy work which I bought at the launch a week or two ago) and Iain M. Banks' Consider Phlebas, a belated birthday gift from Scott, one of my best friends.

It would be remiss of me not to mention that I have finally got around to reading one of the books I purchased from McSweeny's alongside Thanks and Have Fun Running the Country. It's titled Animals of the Ocean, In Particular the Giant Squid, and a more hilarious collection of anti-factual nonsense I have never seen. I've been reading it to my beloved in bed and she laughed so hard I thought she would die. It's the third volume in the "Haggis-on-Whey World of Unbelievable Brilliance", or "HoW?" series of books; kind of a literary equivalent of Peter Serafinowicz's Look Around You. Even though I particularly like cephalopods, I think I'll enjoy the rest of the series just as much.

Star Trek III: The Search for Berton

2009-05-25T21:12:00.019+10:00

Next up on the Bunch of Authors list is one Pierre Berton, a new name to me - and more's the pity. It turns out the late Berton was a journalist, columnist, historian and novelist - pretty much a Canadian national treasure. I'm keen to read several of his works, including Welcome to the 21st Century and The Invasion of Canada, his book about the War of 1812 - about which I know nothing except what is covered in the (hilarious) Three Dead Trolls in a Baggie song, "The War of 1812". (Check that out at the Dead Trolls site - look under audio.)

The trouble is no book shop I've been in has any of Berton's works. Readings didn't even have him in their database! The few that did have him in their systems didn't have any copies on hand, and didn't list either the books on the top of my Berton list. I'll look up the bibliographic details and put in an order, but considering how far behind I currently am, let's hope I can turn up something in a library or second hand bookshop soon...

Going backwards in the list, thanks to the geeky opinion blog Hoyden About Town, I've had some of my hopes for Feminism is for Everybody answered in the form of Finally, A Feminism 101 Blog. For readers more familiar with my science stuff, it's probably best thought of as the feminist equivalent of talk.origins - a comprehensive FAQ and list of resources to help avoid having to repeat yourself in online arguments again and again and again. It's also a great resource for someone like me looking to expand my vocabulary and thought. Check it out!

Something that's not on the list: Isaac Asimov. I'm aware the "books read" list at right makes it look like I've read virtually nothing at all, but then it only lists those books that contribute to the Bunch of Authors project. I've read plenty of other things this year, the latest of which was the first Elijah Baley novel, The Caves of Steel. It's a whodunit set in the future with robots and politics and it's great, though newly imbued with a feminist perspective I couldn't help but notice that it fails the "Bechdel test". I only recently discovered this test, popularised by web comic Dykes to Watch Out For, but basically a film or whatever passes the test if there are two female characters (preferably named) who have a conversation with each other about something other than a man. The Caves of Steel only has one named female character (though to be fair, I should mention there are probably only about six or seven significant characters in total), and she's the wife of the protagonist, plaincothesman (policeman) Baley. She turns out to be quite pivotal in the plot, but isn't exactly a great leap forward in characterisation of women and male-female relations... But putting that aside, it is a cracking read - dated in many respects, perhaps, but still visionary and thrilling. I've already lined up the two sequels, The Naked Sun and The Robots of Dawn (the latter of which I read in my youth), for alternate books while I continue with the project.

Finally, while it's not a book, I did see the Star Trek film. My beloved loved it, as did I - hence the title of this post, as I felt compelled to show her previous entries in the franchise (don't worry, I left out Star Trek: the Motionless Picture). There's been plenty of criticism of the film from a feminist perspective (see, as probably the best example, this piece in The Guardian), and the group I first saw it with had some too. I can see the point, though it's fair to say the film has been imagined by JJ Abrams as a story about two iconic characters in which everyone - even the antagonist - takes a seat way in the back. (I'm left hoping to see more of Urban's Bones McCoy in the inevitable sequel, though we shouldn't hold our breath expecting new characters to be introduced.)

Something it made me recognise, though, is that stories of the future no longer present a people or society much different from our own. They're like what my best history lecturer used to call the "Disney versions" of stories about history - stories about people just like us, though with funny hats (or in this case, attractive jumpsuits). The world of Star Trek's 23rd century reflected a slightly idealised America of the 60s in its original television incarnation, and in the new film, despite the faster than light travel, alien contact, even alien sex, it's recognisably...well, not even 21st century America, just the 60s again, but with a 21st century idea of future technology. There's no evidence of the major social changes that surely - or at least hopefully - we are moving toward.

While I enjoyed Star Trek, I've no illusions that it represents the great things I love about science (or speculative) fiction - a bold imagining of the what could be. (If you want a vision like that from the past, try Asimov or the extraordinary Paris in the Twentieth Century by Jules Verne.) I'm hoping for something more exciting and visionary from Doris Lessing, who's later on in the list, but if you have any suggestions for good, visionary fiction depicting real social change, I'd love to hear them.

"Leave on the light for bell hooks"

2009-05-23T10:52:00.007+10:00

Most people have a fairly cliché idea of feminism, that it's a movement made of bitter man-hating women whose major problems have all been mostly dealt with - that it's all about women who want to be equal to men. bell hooks (she spells it without capitalisation) found that people held such views even after she explained her experience of feminism, since they figured she was an unusual case, not a "proper" feminist. It didn't help that most works on the theory of feminism are impenetrable academic texts inaccessible to the layperson. Hence Feminism is for Everybody, a book intended to introduce the feminist movement and explain its importance to everybody.

Feminism is for Everybody isn't a long book, but it took me a long time to finish reading it, and I think there are three reasons for that. It starts off magnificently well, though, with a passionate and inspiring introduction that introduces hooks' definition: "Feminism is a movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation and oppression."

That's it! How wonderful, positive and succinct that definition is. It's so good, and so far from the popularly portrayed image of feminism, that I knew I'd found the feminist work I'd been wanting. I've long considered myself a feminist, but never really stopped to consider what that meant, or how to really act on it. I'd never taken a course, and I hadn't tried reading the theory, I'd never joined any groups. I didn't know who to ask or where to begin, let alone what to do on my own to make a difference. Finally, I thought, a book that will tell me "what feminism is, what the movement is all about", as hooks says.

Sadly, this isn't quite that book. Chapter one is "Feminist Politics" with the subtitle "Where we stand", and seems full of promise. Her definition of feminism is explained: she does not believe that men are the enemy, but that sexism is the enemy, regardless of whether it is perpetrated by men, women, adults or children, or if it is ingrained, systematic, institutionalised. You have to understand sexism to be a feminist, hooks rightly says, but she doesn't deliver what her book needs: a clear definition, or at least simple discussion, of what sexism is, its pervasiveness, and perhaps even some figures (and surely there must be plenty of them) to really make it impossible for a novice to ignore. (Recall that this is the book she wishes she could give people who have a mistaken notion about feminism.)

hooks quickly deviates from a clear discussion or definition of sexism to talk about the origins of the feminist movement, of what decisions it made and what influences it had that caused the current - and incomplete - picture of feminism to arise. In a pattern that repeats in the chapters that follow, she spends far too much time explaining and dismantling the popular idea of feminism, and nowhere near enough time building a picture of what feminism is and should be.

This is the same mistake a lot of science textbooks make. We don't need to be told about creationism and Lamarckism to understand evolution; we don't need to go on an historical journey from Ancient Greece via Lavoisier, Dalton, Rutherford and Bohrs to understand modern atomic theory. It's an interesting story, as is the history of feminism, but following it isn't the same as learning what's happening now. In a science textbook, the tangential approach just means it takes a very long time to get to the point (which may have merit, if someone needs to be eased into ideas slowly); in this book's case, the effect is far worse, since the historical discussion focuses so much on feminism's mistakes that we never seem to spend much time on its purpose or meaning.

The book's organisation also leaves something to be desired. I never got a sense that each chapter built on the previous ones. Rather than using the historical angle to lead me from feminism's origins to its current form, the chapters read like essays which could have been arranged in any order. The most compelling is probably chapter eight, "Global Feminism", but it's only four pages long - far too short for what was for me one of the most important ideas in the book.

This sidetracking, and overall feeling of defensiveness, is the first reason I found it hard to get my teeth into Feminism is for Everybody. The second was a minor one, but still important: hooks' prose is weird. She doesn't use any kind of opaque academic style - far from it, she's refreshingly direct and passionate - but she does use the vocabulary of academic feminism. Remember, this is meant to be a handbook for beginners, but she uses "hegemonic" and "white supremacist capitalist patriarchy" without ever offering a definition or introduction to these terms. I'm left to wonder if my understanding of them is accurate, complete or even compatible with hers. I think so, but without clearly laying that groundwork I can't be sure. This flies in the face of her desire to create "not a book thick with hard to understand jargon and academic language", another promise made in the introduction.

hooks also chooses some odd conventions which are never explained, throwing me out of the rhythm of her sentences every time I encountered them. The main one is that she doesn't use the definitive article ("the") for the feminist movement, resulting in sentences like this: "From its earliest inception feminist movement was polarized." I can only assume this is significant, but since the significance is never explained I couldn't help but stop and think about it every time it occurred.

I can't discuss her prose style, though, without praising her use of the word "awesome". I know it's become archaic, but I truly miss its use to describe something that inspires awe and wonder, rather than just as a synonym for "very very good". (I have a whole outline for a comedy show based on this idea.) hooks uses awesome sparingly, and clearly means it in the old school way.

The third and most important reason it took me such a long time to read, though, is a positive one: this book has had a massive impact on the way I think. I had to take breaks to allow what I'd read to percolate through my brain and see how my thinking was altered. As my friends and beloved will attest, since starting this book I've become vaguely evangelistic about feminism - I can't stop thinking and talking about it. It's vaguely worrying; I'm trying to spread and support an idea I don't yet fully understand, though I see its shape and feel its importance.

If it fails in its goal of clearly explaining what feminism is and what it's about to someone who isn't sure, Feminism is for Everybody certainly doesn't fail in conveying how important and fundamental feminism is as a movement for social change. To read a feminist book and feel entirely included in its dialogue as a man is quite an experience. I still have a long way to go to understanding what the changes need to be and how to help affect them, but the seed is planted.

So how to sum up? Feminism is for everybody, but Feminisim is for Everybody isn't quite for everybody - not in the way hooks says she wants it to be. If you're at least a little literate about feminism and want some help crystallising your thoughts, or if you're sure there's more to feminism than equality in the workplace and the right to vote, this book will back you up. Just don't expect it to help you explain that to anyone else.

By the way, I'm looking for further books to expand my feminist horizons; if you have any recommendations for books that discuss current feminist theory and/or its practical application, please let me know!

Chapters: 25, plus the introduction
Page count: 118 (not counting the index or "about the publisher" section)
Book's title mentioned on page: x (in the introduction)
Best name encountered: bell hooks (it's a pen name)
New words: none for me, but I imagine plenty for what should be her target audience
Inner Five-year-old score: 1 (way above the head of any five-year-old)
Fun Wikipedia fact: hooks ran a luncheon lecture series titled "Peanut Butter and Gender" at Berea College in Kentucky

An Interlude in B

2009-05-06T17:06:00.004+10:00

Through the month of madness that is April (I am part comedian, and I live in Melbourne, so I was rather busy during the Melbourne International Comedy Festival), I hardly touched the current book I'm reading for this project, which is putting me dangerously behind the curve. I've not been reading much else, either, though for after dipping into the first few pages I narrowly escaped being drawn into Asimov's The Caves of Steel. (It's a great book, but I mustn't get distracted - I have a big stack to get through!) But my thoughts strayed to other books when last night I caught, by accident, the First Tuesday Book Club.

I confess, to my shame, that I hadn't realised the series was still going, but Jennifer Byrne - radiant, enthusiasm emanating from every pore, dressed to kill - always reminds me what it's like to be enamoured, entranced, seduced by books. And one of the two books read for last night's programme was Rebecca Stott's Darwin and the Barnacle - one of my favourite books, and easily my favourite biography, though I've read some other great ones.

The book charts the era of Charles Darwin's life between his two most famous exploits - the voyage of the Beagle, and the publication of The Origin of Species. It's a beautifully written book that balances Darwin's twin passions - natural philosophy and his family - against a fascinating insight into not only the science, but the everyday life of Victorian Britons. I've listed it in various places as one of my top reads, but not mentioned it here before, which is an omission. I also can't qiute believe how long ago I must have read it - I bought it new in hardcover, indicating it was 2005!

I was moved to not only post comment on the show's web site, but also look up the author and see what she's been up to. Stott has written a bunch of other books, including Oyster, an entry in a series of books about animals from Reaktion Books; I already own the Tortoise volume, and it's a goldmine of both natural and cultural history. Stott has most recently tried her hand at fiction with a book drawing on her own research into Isaac Newton, Ghostwalk (and no, for the nerds among you, I'm sure it has nothing to do with the Dungeons & Dragons supplement of the same name).

The other upshot of my rediscovery of First Tuesday Book Club is that it gives me an obvious way to extend the life of this reading blog, beyond the Bunch of Authors project. Even though when I get busy I tend to start reading only short bites of prose - blog posts, magazine articles, even snippets of novels before putting them down out of fear of lost time - whenever I return to the arms of a good book I am once again smitten. Something like this blog will keep me from straying too far from the first love of my life, and Jennifer Byrne and company will be my allies.

Next month they're reading another book I've read and loved: The Great Gatsby. If you've not tried it before, give it a read and tune in. It's a very pleasing experience.

My baby and me went to a counsellor

2009-03-31T23:45:00.003+11:00

Oh dear...it has been a while. When I first started this post, I was in Adelaide, for the Fringe Festival. It was a busy time, but on a day trip into the city I called in at a Borders (I know, I know) to see if they had anything by bell hooks. I asked the retail assistant (I presume this is the correct title) if they had a feminism or "women's studies" section; she said they had a "small section" and gave directions. It wasn't that small - most of one Ikea-standard-sized bookshelf! They only had one bell hooks book, but as soon as I caught the title I felt it might be the one for me. After reading the introduction I decided it would be perfect.

It's called Feminism is for Everybody and the wonderful introduction explains, very quickly, that bell hooks often wished there was a simple book you could give to those people who think feminism is about hating men and became redundant when women got the vote. They've been misguided by a media controlled by patriarchy, after all; they should be able to realise that, as the title says, feminism really is for everyone. She also gives her excellent, succinct definition of feminism as "a movement to end sexism and sexist oppression."

Sadly, now I'm halfway through, I don't think this is the book she wanted. But more on that later, when I've finished it.

The same city trip, I visited the (only?) roleplaying game shop in Adelaide, and instantly remembered why I hadn't bought anything there last time: they're much more expensive than my FLGS* in Melbourne. This time, on their second hand shelf, I found a gem: the Dungeons and Dragons Monster Manual, August 1979 edition, for only $30! It's a classic, with a terrible cover, strange statistics and some odd inclusions, and it's a lot of fun to read. I'm not very familiar with editions of DnD which pre-date late 2nd edition (though I did once create a character using the original rules for an abortive attempt at Keep on the Borderlands), but I'll use it for inspiration for my fourth edition campaign.

I also made the time to visit one of my favourite second hand haunts, O'Connell's Bookshop on Hindley Street. Three times I've been to Adelaide, and every time I've found something great here. This time I picked up a couple of Asimovs - The Caves of Steel and its sequel, Robots of Dawn - and a Douglas Coupland, Eleanor Rigby. I read Robots of Dawn as a boy, after my step dad encouraged me to try Asimov. I really enjoyed it, and a collection of his short stories about a tiny "demon" named Azazel, but when I tried to read Foundation I lost interest. Of Coupland, I've only read Microserfs, but I greatly enjoyed it and thought I'd step away from similar themes for a second pass. (I have, though, watched the first half of the JPod television adaptation, and it's very good.) I've started on The Caves of Steel. For some reason I feel odd reading only one book at a time.

So that's us caught up. The Melbourne International Comedy Festival starts tomorrow, so you may not hear from me until May. I hope you all understand. Assuming there's more than one of you, of course.

Whys and wherefores

2009-02-26T19:16:00.005+11:00

I still haven't tackled a bell hooks book yet; it's next on the agenda. But I have just read some more comics, and I want to talk about them.

Let me skip through the others first. I say others, because not long ago I realised I had a favourite comic ever, and today I read the last of it and I teared up. But I'll come to that.

I borrowed some more Moore - proper Alan Moore - and some Brian K. Vaughn this time around. The Moore was Tom Strong volumes one and two - a far cry from the magical philosophy of Promethea. Tom Strong is Moore's stab at unadulterated fun, a pulp adventure comic and modern heir to Doc Savage and Jules Verne-syle science adventurism. It's pulp adventure informed by Alan Moore's intelligence and flair, of course, but while it's excellent fun it's not deep. I enjoyed it a lot, though.

Half of the Vaughn were volumes three and four of Ex Machina. This is a modern, political fable; the world's only superhero, a man who can talk to machines, gives up his costume and jetpack after saving the second tower on September 11, 2001 to become mayor of New York city. There are, of course, some superpowered hi-jinks, but in a way it's like a comic book superhero version of Boston Legal - the main story is a hook on which to hang socio-political commentary. It's good, very good; Mitchell Hundred, the mayor and ex-"Great Machine", is a very modern and "realistic" superhero, himself influenced by comic books. He feels like a real character, and he's serious about doing good, even if he doesn't always manage to get it right. And the book has lots of great touches - Mitchell's sexuality is not so much ambiguous as dismissed as irrelevant; his popularity rises and falls, rather than heading in one direction; there's a good mix of "science" and "magic" (both of the comic book variety) , and there's not an issue that's shied away from.

But for all that, it's not my favourite comic. It's not Y: The Last Man. I read the final two volumes of Y today, and I cried a little.

Y: The Last Man is a post-apocalyptic tale in which every male mammal is killed - save two. The survivors of the "gendercide" are Yorick Brown, a young escapologist and son of a congresswoman, and the Capuchin monkey he'd taken on to train as a helper animal, whom he named Ampersand. It's neither a utopia nor dystopia in the usual sense; it feels distinctly realistic. Society doesn't universally fall nor rise from the ashes of the disaster; the main characters travel all across the world in their quest to find both a way for the human race to move forward and, eventually, for Yorick's girlfriend, Beth, and along they way they encounter humanity at its best and worst and everything in between. They also meet hardened secret agents, assassins, cult leaders, mad scientists, religious zealots, patriotic soldiers, optimists, pessimists, heroes and villains...every one a woman. And they all feel like women, too - not just male characters drawn as women. But then I'm a guy, so I might have it all wrong. Perhaps bell hooks will set me straight.

The art is great - the whole series was drawn by Pia Guerra, and I think her distinctive character designs helped make the whole 60 issue shebang feel like a genuinely long journey. It doesn't hurt that the story takes place over nearly five years. And by the end of it, I felt every step had been worth it, and I shed a tear for friends lost. It's perhaps one of my favourite endings to any story I've ever read.

Here's hoping the rumours are wrong and Shia LaBeouf isn't playing Yorick in the upcoming film version. To be honest, I'm much rather there was a television series based very closely on the whole comic - it'd be an extraordinary work.

I think that'll be it for comics for the moment. Even with only ten books to go on project Baby Loves a Bunch of Authors, I should get back on track - and in any case, if anything written by a man can get me ready to read black feminism, then it's Y: The Last Man.

Inbetweeny

2009-02-17T01:40:00.002+11:00

How do you pass the time between the evocative madness of Burroughs and the impending, sure-to-change-how-I-think work of the world's greatest black feminist writer? With comic books, of course! I borrowed a small stack from the local library; sadly it wasn't much of a crop.

Straight up, I must confess a DC (that's Detective Comics to the uninitiated) bias. I have a soft spot for Batman, though I realise he can be as badly written and boring as any character written by multiple authors. A friend presented an argument (I can't remember if it was his or if he was quoting someone else) for Batman being the hero best representing young boys' fantasies, and it's a good one: he has no parents, effectively infinite money, cooler toys than everyone else and - for the slightly older boys - as many women as he wants with a "good excuse" to remain a bachelor. But still, I like the guy when he's written well, and so I like the stable that birthed him.

So three of the titles I borrowed were DC. Two of them, it turns out, were continuations of stories I haven't read. Justice League International, from the 80s, is a more-or-less comedy version of the DC super-team, with less well known heroes getting into comedy scrapes and bickering while saving the world. One fault with the library system - they always manage to obscure the volume number on the hardcover comic collections with the call number stickers. The one I picked up? Volume 3. And no, they didn't have volume 1 or 2 in my branch. So I skipped most of this one, except for a bit here or there which seemed to stand alone.

Justice Society of America - Thy Kingdom Come, Part One is quite a mouthful. So's the book: the modern version of DC's golden age (read: World War II, Nazi-fighting era) super team is bringin in new recruits, mostly heroes related to their original members. But then they also manage to free the older, darker version of Superman from Mark Waid and Alex Ross's famous book, Kingdom Come, and let him join their team too. But of course, it's hinted he didn't come alone... It's not bad, but despite the character bios at the start I'm still a little lost among the acres of continuity on display - and in this case I have read at least some bits of what came before.

52: The Companion was the best of the DC books in this batch. A couple of years ago DC did a big world-altering storyline called Infinite Crisis, at the end of which a bunch of characters died and Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman - the "big three" - took a year off. The comics telling their stories skipped a year into the future and a new title, 52, told the story of that missing year in little bits using a variety of less famous characters. I haven't read 52, but that's okay - this companion presents a story from the archives for each of the main characters of 52, and they're a gloriously varied bunch. Ridiculous time travel stories, a good scientist gone mad, a sportstar of the future turning to crime to become a superhero in the present...it's all in there. So's a story from Grant Morrison's Animal Man from the 80s, when mainstream comics (by which I mean ones featuring superheroes from the big publishers) finally started to experiment with weird stuff. I do love Animal Man. This one was a lot of fun. There's a lot of time travel in it, too; I hadn't stopped to think about how much of that goes on in comics.

I'll skip quickly over Battle Hymn. I swore not so long ago that I would stay away from anything published by Image Comics, but this one... Well, it said "Moore" on the cover, and I can only assume this is a ploy to make you think of Alan Moore, and that's what made me pick it up. It's basically a "what if the government only recruited superheroes to kill them off?" riff on the early Golden Age Marvel stuff; the characters are not very far from the originals, though the designs and characterisations serve the story well enough. Nice art, okay dialogue in parts, but it's pretty sexist, even allowing it's a pastiche on the stories of the time. There's no real surprise about the ending. Disappointing but I might look up the writer and artist in future now they have this one out of their system.

Finally, I picked up a proper Moore - Alan Moore's Promethea, volume 2. I have it on good authority that later in its run Promethea devolved from an actual story into a place for Moore to air his theories on magic and the universe in general, and that starts with the issues in this volume. The heroine is the latest mortal to incarnate the titular goddess figure, but she starts off clueless and assaulted by demons. I confess that when Moore starts writing whole issues of "magical theory" and tied into ill-conceived folk versions of quantum theory that I'm slightly more interested in the second-string "science heroes" he's invented than in his actual heroine, but I have to give props for experimentation with style and content - this is one of those books you show people who think comics are just for kids - and also Sophie, the girl who becomes Promethea. In those rare moments when the character gets to come out and play, rather than just acting as someone who needs to be told all about mysticism and Moore's ideas of how the universe works, she's great. I fear there will be even less of that in future volumes, however...

Well, that ended up being much longer than I intended. Hopefully you'll have skipped this if comics aren't your thing. I realised while writing it that it's very difficult to talk about most comics without referencing other comics; the ones I truly love, though, tend to be ones that don't fall into this category. I promise to write about Y: The Last Man, which is amazing, when I finally read the last two volumes.

Doing some reading

2009-02-16T23:48:00.001+11:00

You're probably wondering what comes after Naked Lunch, and I'm quite excited about the answer: bell hooks. If you're not familiar with her, she's the Distinguished Professor of English at City College in New York, famous as an author, feminist, and social activist; her seminal (yes, I'm thinking about the source of that word more than usual too) work is Ain't I a Woman?: Black Women and Feminism, though I've been thinking that perhaps I'll look for one of her more recent works since, I would hope, feminism (and the issues of racial equality and cultural politics) will have changed quite a bit since 1981. If you have an opinion on which of her books I should read, I would love to hear it - don't be shy!

Meanwhile, here's something for those of you who like typography and/or aren't fans of suspense! I was recently introduced to a great little web thingy called Wordle, which takes a bunch of words and arranges them in wonderful ways. Here's what I managed to do with Wordle and the lyrics to the Moxy Früvous song that kicked this whole blog off, My Baby Loves a Bunch of Authors - it'll give you a taste of things to come!

"Cuddle up with William S. Burroughs"

2009-02-11T17:44:00.005+11:00

A week or so ago I finished Naked Lunch. Now it's time to document the experience.

William Lee, "Agent" and drug addict, goes on the run to Mexico. The amoral Dr Benway corrupts the bodies and minds of citizens for the state. Addicts queue for the secretions of the creatures known as mugwumps, or crave the "Black Meat" of giant centipedes. The rich indulge in expensive orgies where young men have their necks snapped during orgasm. Bizarre factions battle for control of the vice-ridden city known as Interzone. After all this and many other episodes, Lee shoots two narcotics officers and goes in search of another hit, perhaps slipping into a different reality as he does so.

That's about as close as I can get to summarising the "plot" of Naked Lunch. Plenty of stuff happens, but there's no narrative, and that's intentional. Instead, there's a tone, a mood, and the evocation of emotion. Burroughs doesn't seem to like pretty things, either, so it's all very ugly. I'm not one to flinch at reading something unpleasant, but the despair and awfulness is unending in Naked Lunch. No-one is happy, everyone's addicted - to junk, to sex (particularly homosexuality, which is presented along "these queers all have something wrong them, and so do I" lines), to a corrupted ideal. Certainly this is not a book that glorifies drug culture, and it often feels like it's written in the blood and junk dripping out of someone's works rather than in ink, but Burroughs spreads the misery around pretty evenly.

It's not hard to see how this was a touchstone for counter culture at the time when it was written. There's plenty of swearing, plenty of explicit sex - which is mostly violent and occasionally fatal - and a hovering intimation that everything here, while surreal, really exists there. This is social commentary by insane allegory, though there are passages where the differences between the book and the real-world being protested are only ones of degree.

Stylistically it sucks you in, and it's not like anything I've read before, but then this is my first experience with the Beat Generation. Burroughs writes with rhythm and pace, his prose like ugly yet effective poetry. He reuses phrases, sometimes within a chapter, sometimes at opposite ends of the book; these motifs reappear in different contexts but, like proper "shelving" in a comedy routine, they make the otherwise random zig zagging seem planned, given pattern to the chaos.

Speaking of comedy, there are occasional laughs, though they're dark laughs, the kind you make so you don't cry from despair. Then there's the use of unsual devices; in the latter third of the book, Burroughs uses fade outs to end some scenes, cutting to conclusions or another thread entirely. For something written in the fifties, that must have crossed literary boundaries; even now, when the grammar of film and television is in ll of our heads, it's not something you see in books.

I came away from Naked Lunch with mixed feelings, that sort of knot in your stomach of "I really wanted to like that, and I did, except for..." My exception, really, was the sex; not that there was so much of it, nor even that it was graphic, but that it was so consistently unpleasant and frequently mixed with awful violence. The sex of Naked Lunch is generally less appealing than the drugs; it's also hard to place when I don't know the context of the writing, so I have to comfort myself with the thought that surely 50s counterculture embraced sex, and the homophobic and prudish language is all satire and irony.

Still, the beat of Burroughs got into my head and soul and I do like Naked Lunch. I'll be back for more Beat writing, though probably I'll try one of the others.

Chapters: 25, plus the "deprecated preface"
Page count: 196 (not counting the additional materials in my edition)
Book's title mentioned on page: 187 (3 times on one page, in reference to the book itself)
Best name encountered: Liquefactionists (one of the warring factions of Interzone)
New words: Bang-utot, curare, Espontáneo, Latah, mezuzzoth, paregoric, pathic, rinderpest, yagé
Inner Five-year-old score: 1 (it has monsters and violence in it, but only of the serious nightmare-inducing kind)
Fun Wikipedia fact: One of my Mum's favourite bands, Steely Dan, takes its name from a dildo featured in the book.

The best Obama book?

2009-02-04T12:53:00.002+11:00

I am going to have to buy and read McSweeney's Thanks and Have Fun Running the Country: Kids Letters to Obama. My favourite so far of the ones on the web site:

President Obama,
You should not smoke when you are president! There are simple reasons. Because you will die by smoking, and then you will not be president! But I want you to be.
Your No. 1 fan,
David Lopez, age 7
Los Angeles

"Here's some books I'd like you to read!"

2009-02-04T11:50:00.011+11:00

While I navigate my way through the final three "chapters" of Naked Lunch, interrupted by sporadic returns to the relative sanity of What Does A Martian Look Like?, I thought I'd peruse the rest of the source for this literary adventure and see how many authors I need to squeeze into my year. As with so many things in life, my memory cheated me a little.

Somewhat disappointingly, while the first verse includes four authors, the rest of the verses - and choruses - have none. Only the break (or middle eight, or bridge...I'm never sure of the correct terminology) has more, and then it's only six. That makes a grand total of ten, including the two you already know about. The Wikipedia entry for the song reveals that the original version had a few changes, so I can be a bit crafty and add two more, but that's still only twelve.

On the up-side, the authors are more diverse than I could have hoped, as you'll see when the next one comes up (I don't want to spoil it in advance). I'm still going to be expanding my literary geography far beyond the small patch visible from the top of my current bookshelves.

But, now it's obvious I'll have time to read plenty of other books this year, I'll be blogging about them too. For starters, my Mum gave me five great books for Christmas - four biographies of different sorts (next to good science writing, they're my favourite kind of non-fiction) plus the only one whose cover I've cracked so far: Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain, by Maryanne Wolf. (Yes, I'm reading a book about how humans learned to read. It's things like this that makes you glad to live in the 21st century.) Plus I finally bought a book of essays about The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, titled The Anthology at the End of the Universe; the first one is pretty good but covers ground plumbed much more in depth by the great Alan Cooper's The Inmates Are Running the Asylum, which I read last year. And there are other books I've promised myself I'll read, too.

Which all adds up, I hope, to an interesting chronicle of one fellow's reading. Don't worry, though: I'll still be sticking to the plan of getting through the Früvous authors by the end of the year. To keep things on topic, posts about the challenge (which includes all of them so far) will be tagged with "Bunch of Authors", and titled with lines from the song.

Hark at me, speaking as though to a vast audience. If anyone is reading this, do drop me a line. I'd love to know I'm not writing into the void!

"Cuddle up with"...?

2009-01-27T17:15:00.007+11:00

I've moved on to author number two:

"Cuddle up with William S. Burroughs,"

I realise now just how incongruous this marriage of verb and noun is intended to be. I mean, if there were any author whose work you wouldn't want to cuddle up with... Even the author himself is suspect in this regard, having famously accidentally shot his first wife, but I should note that the song's fictional "baby" is enamoured with the authors' works, not with the authors themselves. Well...for the most part. I'll explain later.

I didn't ask for book suggestions this time around: it seems to me that if you're going to read Burroughs, you ought to read Naked Lunch. Nearly half way through it, I'm wondering if that was a wise choice.

My experience so far has been...unusual. I've found most of it surprisingly easy to read, but that ease is surprising: there's no real plot, only the slightest of tenuous structures, no clear point of view. There are three themes knitting it together, though if it is knitted then Burroughs is using some kind of viscous bodily secretion instead of wool, because those themes are drug addiction, violent (mostly homosexual, and frequently fatal) sex, and disease.

This is not a kind of book I've experienced before.

I don't know how representative he is of Beat; perhaps I should try some Ginsberg or Kerouac (neither appear in the song). I've certainly earmarked J. G. Ballard's Empire of the Sun for a post-project read - he's not of the some mould, but in his introduction to my edition of Naked Lunch he claims Burroughs as a major influence, and I can't imagine how that translates to a work like Empire. (I just discovered he also wrote Crash, though, so who knows? They're at least linked by Cronenberg, though given the themes above I can't imagine anyone else making the decision to film this book.)

In any case, this is a new kind of writing for me. More thoughts soon.

"Hon drop dead, I'd rather go to bed with Gabriel García Márquez."

2009-01-21T23:06:00.004+11:00

Reading No One Writes to the Colonel took longer than I expected, though not because it was a hard read - far from it. The last week has been very busy, so much so that even 69 pages were a challenge. But today, on the tram, I made my way to the end.

A nameless, elderly and long retired Colonel ekes out a pitifully poor existence with his asthmatic wife in Márquez' archetypal Colombian town of Macondo. Promised a pension for his services in the revolutionary war, the Colonel has been waiting for the letter delivering the money for decades, and in the meantime has lost his son to the fascist forces now in control of his country. His son's only legacy is a rooster which shows promise for the cock fighting ring, and which captures the town's imagination.

Márquez has a definite style that, perhaps more so than anything else I've read, strongly evoked a sensory response: I felt an odd rain-on-dust smell in my nostrils as I read the book (and no, it wasn't because I was on the tram). I was impressed by his way with time, which flowed fast and slow without ever seeming to need any explicit timekeeping; the Colonel's life is repetitive on many levels, as he waits for the mail each Friday, and suffers from the flora in his gut each October. A year passes over those 69 pages, but there are no chapters, no breaks. It flows, fast and slow, without jarring.

Perhaps because the older outcast idealist (or even the "old soldier") is something of an archetype, or perhaps because I've watched a couple of good films about revolutionary South America, I found I immediately knew and initially liked the eponymous Colonel. This relationship didn't last until the end of the book, when I turned on him; he pushed through idealism to irredeemable stubborness. There's some satisfying vagueness, too, not least of which concerns the Colonel's son: he's supposed to be dead, but then the illegal uncensored news reports that sometimes arrive are attributed to him.

This is a rich work; there's no doubt the author is the major talent he's reputed to be. And yes, it's steeped in despair, but it also presents starkly the will and the hope and the foolishness that can fend off that despair. I didn't find it a hard read, though the body of it was by far the most enjoyable part; the start took a little time to ease into, and the ending seemed to take sharp turn somewhere more defeatist in the last half a dozen pages. I enjoyed myself, and while he hasn't leapt onto my favourite author list, I'll definitely come back to Márquez and give a full length novel a go.

Before I end, surely the translator, J. S. Berstein, must deserve some credit for the English prose. Having tried to read a different translation of Les Miserablés the second time around, I have some idea of the a difference a good translator makes. And this, I must assume, is very good, because the English version is very good.

Now, being a "scientician", I will be recording some common data about each book, as well as my general observations. And with that, I present...the stats!

Chapters: None
Page count: 69
Book's title mentioned on page: 22
Best name encountered: the colonel (most of the characters do not have proper names)
New words: None
Inner Five-year-old score: 0
Fun Wikipedia fact: A restaurant and club in Riga is named Pulkvedim Neviens Neraksta, the title of the Latvian translation.

You should hear the things that she says

2009-01-13T00:10:00.007+11:00

Choosing a Márquez novel is not as easy as it seems. The two biggies, of course, are 100 Years of Solitude (which one friend described as his "best and most important work") and Love in the Time of Cholera* (which the same friend said is "lush and beautiful" but "doesn't have the scope and power" of Solitude). The overwhelming bulk of the advice though was simple: pick something short. Oh, everyone agrees that Márquez is a wonderful writer, but - so they all say - his subject matter is, without exception, deeply depressing and terribly hard to wade through. One friend said she'd never been able to finish a single Márquez, though she wondered if it was a "girl thing"; my beloved tells me a mutal friend of ours described reading Márquez as walking through wet concrete, every page dragging and no joy in sight.

So, since this is meant to be the kick off, and since in any case I'm already two weeks past my start date, I have followed this advice. Luckily my beloved owns a copy of No One Writes to the Colonel, which I have learned from the blurb is set in Márquez's own beloved, the fictional Colombian town of Macondo. The Colonel of the title rests his hopes for a better future in, and I quote the next bit, "his rooster, which for him, and indeed the whole town, has become a sumbol of defiance in the face of despair..."

It's only 69 pages long. I'll see you back here in a few days.

By the way, I overstepped the mark when I said I was also "finishing off" What Does a Martian Look Like? - I'm barely a third through it. Just getting to the interesting bit, though - more on that one when I finish it. Oh - you didn't think this blog would only feature books from the challenge, did you?

*Perhaps unsurprisingly for a science comedian, I can't help but think of Emalina Torrini's album Love in the Time of Science, which despite a promising title and the gorgeous voice of the artist was rather disappointing.

Well you should see my story readin' baby

2009-01-02T17:22:00.003+11:00

I've decided to broaden my literary horizons by reading one book written by each author, in order, mentioned in the song My Baby Loves A Bunch of Authors by Toronto band Moxy Früvous (they've sadly broken up; the song is from their first album, Bargainville). I've also decided, encouraged by my friend Aiden, to blog about it. That's why you're here.

Just a few rules: all books should be fiction; no books I've read before; I have to read the whole book, even if I'm finding it awful; I should have finished all the books by December 31, 2009.

If anyone should be crazy enough to join in, please drop me a line; the only caveat is that I would ask you to read different books by the authors, just to broaden the scope of the blog.

Who's on first? Let's consult the first verse:

Well you should see my story readin' baby
You should hear the things that she says
She says "Hon, drop dead,
I'd rather go to bed
With Gabriel García Márquez."

Yes, I'm starting with Márquez, making my initial choice one that will involve solitude, violence, and death; on the other hand, he did win the Nobel Prize for literature.

By the way, I received an excellent crop of books for Christmas, though I've not started any of them yet; I'm currently finishing off the non-fiction What Does a Martian Look Like? by Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart, and flipping through Karl Kruszelnicki's latest collection, Science is Golden.