780 books, but big ones

So this is my third annual wrap-up of my reading. Not as many this year as last year or the year before, bringing my average down. But Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire books are enormous (typically 1000-1200 or so pages), and there were five of the hefty buggers. And as I predicted in last year's wrap-up, I had to do a lot of reading of academic papers for my thesis, which meant less reading time for other things, and also fewer academic books. Also, don't forget that I'm getting older, so there aren't as many years left (on average) for me to read.

The bright note is that I have a new Favourite Author Ever, and have gotten back into Fantasy fiction in a big way. Most of the stuff I've read over the previous couple of years had been either uninspiring rubbish, or the literary equivalent of junk food. But I've finally found some actual good fantasy. And thus: I am happy.

The Blade Itself

Well, I ran out of A Song Of Ice And Fire books, and was jonesing for some of that awesome gritty dark new fantasy, and had heard good things about Joe Abercombie. I had been given his "Best Served Cold", but that book seemed to indicate that it followed on from the First Law trilogy, so I headed off to The Book Depository and had them send me the series posthaste.

In short, it's good. It's not quite ASoIaF good, but it's getting there. So far, it seems to be suffering from empty-world syndrome (which I discussed when talking about Pern when reviewing Legends). George R. R. Martin's world is just so relentlessly full - full of people, history, places - that it feels like a completely real world. By comparison, so far, Abercrombie's world isn't very big. There aren't really many places or people. The history is rather shallow. So it feels rather pale in comparison. But in my opinion it's a bit unfair to compare any modern Fantasy with Martin.

Having said that, the (few) characters are as good as Martin's. It's a shades-of-grey-ey world, where the characters you're following are generally either killers, torturers, or completely self-absorbed prats, but are drawn carefully by the author so that they become flawed people that you give a damn about. Even Martin would have had a hard time making a torturer in the Inquisition into a character you can empathize with, and whose lot in life you hope will improve.

It's an enjoyable read, and I'm onto the second book already. Definitely worth reading in between installments of ASoIaF.

Generation X

More interesting than Life of Pi, but still a bit painful to read, Generation X (by Douglas Coupland) is a novel about a group of friends who are trying a bit too hard to be cool. The novel itself tries a bit too hard to be cool, though that is probably by design rather than by accident. It's a brutally spot-on portrait of the slightly older part of my generation (about ten years older - I'm in that younger end of Generation X that sometimes gets left out of definitions of Gen X, but are way too old to be put into Gen Y), caught up in a cultural whirlwind, and unable (by choice or nature, depending on the character) to participate fully in the consumerist lifestyle that is expected of them.

Coupland is always very dryly witty, and has an amazing eye for people and how they interact with their culture. I've always enjoyed his work, and I'm surprised it's taken me this long to get around to reading Generation X. It is after all, the book that defined my generation.

Definitely worth reading, especially if you're my age, or a bit older.

The Life of Pi

The Life of Pi (by Yann Martel) was a bit of an odd one. I'm not sure I liked it. I've heard nothing but rave reviews for it, and it was the Man Booker Prize winner for 2002, but either I missed the point, or the point it was making was a bit simple and twee. A bit more reading about it showed that I hadn't missed much, point-wise; it just seems that the themes of the book had a lot more resonance for other people then for me. I think any story that sets itself up in the first chapter by saying "I have a story that will make you believe in God" is always going to annoy me a bit.

It's quite readable, though the language is not as entrancing as The White Tiger anything by Anais Nin.

A Spy in the House of Love

OK, time to deal with the backlog of books I've read and haven't posted about.

I need to read more Anaïs Nin (the first book I reviewed here on this blog was the Delta of Venus). Her writing is haunting and poetic, about the breaking of taboos, and the pursuit of freedom, especially sexual freedom, regardless of the costs.

This is another beautifully written, brooding, atmospheric novel, about Sabrina, an actress who seeks to enjoy the liberated sexuality that men around her seem to have, and how she deals with the pleasures and suffering that result. Well worth a read.

John Carter of Mars

I have to admit, this was a bit of a shock to the system after the eminently readable, richly plotted stories with their well-imagined characters that I've been reading recently. Edgar Rice Burroughs' John Carter of Mars felt a lot more like a Thongor story. It is apparently the 11th novel in the Barsoom series, and is a very thin book containing two stories. It was very clunkily written, partly because it was written to be serialised, and probably also because it didn't quite end up getting published until about 20 years after the rest (I assume because Burroughs didn't consider it really up to scratch).

I had to keep reminding myself to treat this as a historical document; Burroughs was a pioneer of science fiction and fantasy literature, and he was building a genre of ideas rather than creating quality literature. This is astonishingly primitively written, compared to modern science fiction, or even to other things written at the same time. These is almost no personality at all to the characters - they feel like cardboard cut-outs (or, amusingly enough, the dodgy acting done in bad 50's science fiction films). Dialog is bizarrely unwieldy compared to the action going on:

A furtive figure melted away into the semi-gloom of the passageway, with Carter close behind. Seeing escape impossible, the stranger halted, sank to one knee and leveled a ray-gun at the approaching figure of the earthman. Carter saw his finger whiten as he squeezed the trigger.
"Carter!" Kantos Kan shouted, "throw yourself to the floor."
With the speed of light, Carter dropped prone.

How does Carter see a finger whiten in semi-gloom, when it is probably hidden by the trigger guard and body of the ray gun? How does Kantos Kan have time to shout a fully formed sentence between the stranger's finger whitening on the trigger and the ray-gun firing? In fact, after he shouts that, he throws some kind of long knife at the stranger and kill him, even before the ray gun is fired.

The whole book is full of passages like that, that leave you struggling to reconcile timings, facts, and motivations. By the end, it almost becomes part of the entertainment of reading the book.

Despite the fact that it reads like it is written by an overenthusiastic twelve year old, it ends up kind of fun to read. There is a certain swashbuckling flavour to it all, and despite the silliness of some of the worldbuilding that Burroughs does, there is still an attractive atmosphere to the universe that John Carter lives in, and the odd combination of high- and low-tech on the planet Barsoom (which is what the natives of Mars call their own planet.

The Gathering

It seems there are a couple of rules about winning the Man Booker Prize: the author, using the main character as a mouthpiece, must make incisive comments about the human condition. Also, it must be bloody depressing. I've read a few of them now, and they all follow that format. Particularly this one.

The Gathering, by Anne Enwright, tells the tale of a large Irish family through the eyes of Veronica, one of the younger children of the family, now an adult with her own children. It is about the death of her brother, Liam, and the family gathering for the funeral. She is haunted by her past, and even more so by the present, from which she is alienated and disconnected. It jumps between the past and present continually without being disorienting, and gradually reveals the history of the family, and how the ended up the way they are.

This novel doesn't quite kick you in the teeth like The White Tiger of Vernon God Little do, but it feels closer to reality, and the characters are rendered more subtly and delicately. If you don't mind a depressing read, this is a good one.

Legends

Surprisingly, I have managed to read something this year that wasn't written entirely by George R. R. Martin. Admittedly, I only picked this one up when I finished A Game of Thrones and realized that I hadn't ordered the next three.

This is an anthology of fantasy works compiled by Robert Silverberg. It contains five stories written be masters of the genre set in their most famous fantasy worlds. It is intended, I think, to give the reader a taste of the world, so that they might find something new that they like. With each of the stories, if you find something you like, you know that there is a large pile of additional stories in the same style, set in the same world, that you can then start exploring.

The first in the book was a Discworld story by Terry Pratchett, which once again confirmed my thoughts about the author and his stories. I've never been much of a Pratchett fan, but have known many. I can see the attraction - he's quite funny, and many of his jokes are quite clever. They are just all the same. I felt like I'd heard 90% of the jokes in this short story several times before. I personally feel that mocking Fantasy as a genre is just lazy. Fantasy naturally borders the silly, and what separates it and makes it worthwhile is when you take it seriously. Taking the mickey is really just too easy, and turning that into a series of about 38 novels is like spending 20 years picking on the same overweight kid with a limp and coke-bottle glasses.

The second in the book is a story set on Pern, by Anne McCaffrey. I was a big fan of her work 20 or so years ago, and read most of what she had written at that time. Years later, I felt there was something a little off about Pern. It lacks a lot of the richness of good Fantasy, and feels somewhat spartan. It probably comes from the fact that it is more accurately described as "medieval sci-fi with dragons" than Fantasy proper. The world just seems dramatically underpopulated and empty. Good sci-fi and fantasy authors leave you with a feeling that there is a lot more going on around the characters than is mentioned in the books; but in Pern you just have the feeling that when the protagonist walks out of the room, the people just shut up and stop doing anything, and that there is no-one in each town beyond those the characters directly talk to. It's certainly not a bad read; it's just lonely.

The third story was by George R. R. Martin, set in the world of A Song of Ice and Fire, but 100 years earlier. It starts out a bit simple, but by the end it picks up, and turns into a solid tale. There are apparently two more stories in this prequel series, which I'll have to try to dig up. And yes, I must confess this story was the reason I chose this book to read while waiting for my ASoIaF novels to arrive; I was jonesing for some good Westeros.

The fourth was by Tad Williams, set in the world of his Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn series. This is the first I've ever heard of this series, and it seems an interesting world, if perhaps a little depressing. I don't think I'll be deliberately seeking this series, but if I happened to stumbled across it, I might pick it up.

The last is by Robert Jordan, set in the world of his Wheel of Time series. It seems quite good - interesting characters in a richly imagined world - though this series is one of the reasons I have my "don't start reading the series until it's done" rule (which I seem to frequently break). I'll wait to see how the reviews pan out for the last few books in the series, which were completed by a different author after Jordan passed away. It had better be bloody good if I've going to have to read 12,000 pages to get through it. Jordan's Conan novels were very good, so I have a high opinion of his work in general.

A Feast for Crows

This is the fourth in George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series, and is a worthy successor to the first three. It is in a way half a book (even though it weighs in at about 1,000 pages); it follows the stories of roughly half the characters in the previous books. Because they're not the more fun and exciting characters in the series, this book gets a little hard to read at times. It's still well written, intense, powerful, and un-put-downable*, but it's hard to have sympathy for a lot of these characters. The rest of the main characters will appear in A Dance With Dragons, which will be released next week, and the nice people at the (online) bookshop will be sending my copy straight away if they know what's good for them.

I don't have much to say about this one that I haven't said about the previous three. The characters are vivid and well-written, and a number of new characters appear. The story continues to be majestic. The political motivations and machinations of a bunch of new factions are revealed, and are sometimes quite surprising. Just when you think the civil war that has engulfed Westeros is petering out and about to end, new factions (or at least, groups who you hadn't really realized were a faction) appear on the scene, and get ready to start with the killing. I'm about 4,000 pages into this series now, and it's not flagging at all. Each chapter makes the reader want to get to the end of the series and find out how it all ends.

* There should be a single word for this specifically to be used when writing about books.

On Music

This blog wasn't meant to only be book reviews, but that seems to be what it has become. I've got other places for my intermittent personal blather (Facebook), professional blather (Twitter), and pointing at shiny things people show me on the internet (Tumblr), which leaves little left to say here. I think I reserve this space for the more contemplative and long-form thoughts - my more self-indulgent ramblings. Talking about books I've read kind of falls under that banner, but this is something a little different.

I've always loved music, but never really knew where and how to find it. I've traditionally relied on radio for the bulk of my music discovery process. In my foolish youth I oscillated between stations. 2Day FM as I was entering my teens, Triple M in my mid teens, and Triple J once I actually developed a bit of taste in music. But I always felt there was a world of music out there that I was missing out on - the song Triple J would only play once or twice, late at night or early in the morning, and I would have missed it except I happened to be near a radio. I'd find myself loving a song I heard in a department store, or played as background music in a TV show or even an advertisement. Of course, radio provided the bulk of the songs that became my favourites, but I knew that if a song didn't meet whatever Triple J's standards were, I'd likely miss out on it.

P2P File sharing was always an unreliable way to get at good music. Sure, it's an easy way to get music that you know - when I buy a CD, downloading a copy is easier these days than ripping it directly from the CD. But for finding new music, it's basically useless. You're relying on guessing whether a song is any good by looking at the names of the songs and the artist. At one point I ended up with a tidy pile of rubbish music. Napster and Soulseek at least let you look at the collections of people who have similar tastes to you (by search for a song you love, and browsing the collections of people who also had the same song), but even that's like trying to thread a needle by throwing a spool of thread at it across a dark room. As with the traditional method of walking into a shop, getting music is the easy part. Finding the good stuff is what's hard.

The iPod never really suited me either (and similarly, the iPod app on my iPhone). It wasn't just the isolating nature of walking around wearing headphones which you'd have to remove in order to communicate with humans, or that you'd miss out on the vibrant, insistent rumble of the city (though that was certainly a part of it). It was that picking a subset of my music collection to put on the device meant that odds were the song I had a sudden hankering to listen to wouldn't be on there, and also that repeated listening would dull my passion for particular songs. Keeping track of what was on there and adding and removing stuff was too much work, and I would come to despise the music in the device for simply not being an ever-changing array of my whichever were my Favourite Songs Ever at that particular point in time.

But recently I feel I've had a bit of a personal musical renaissance. I'm somehow finding a wider range of music that suits my tastes better. I'm finding music that I love, and then hearing it come to the radio a week or two later. Despite the distance from anything resembling modern culture that comes from being a parent of three kids who works full time and studies part time, I feel like I have my finger at least a little bit on the pulse of contemporary music. It feels good, and I'm finding songs that really speak to me.

This is mostly down to a few websites. The second one I found, but the one that really got me feeling that I was on the edge of a world of new music was Yes Yes Y'all, which is basically a blog of stunning music videos (it's amazing; nearly every one of them is breathtaking to behold), with great music attached. Some of the music doesn't suit my tastes (though the videos still are often worth watching - in my opinion the music video is one of the most visually powerful modern art forms, and deserves more intelligent attention), but some of them have become instant favourites. Spoek Mathambo's cover of Control blew me away. Tumblr is now a source of an interesting and frequently odd range of music, ever since Anna Vs Culture inspired me to join up. And lastly, the Hype Machine is absolutely brilliant. It aggregates about 35 bazillion music blogs, and has the MP3s ready to play in the browser. Go there now, and listen to music people are blogging about. It's amazing, and a fine example of how the internet is and will keep changing the way we relate to art, music, literature, and culture as a whole.

I don't know where this journey of musical discovery is going to take me. It might be a brief flirtation before I return to the old tried and true method of relying on a radio station; on the other hand it might be the start of a full conversion to a new mode of finding and consuming music, one that doesn't rely on a single source, but on keeping tabs on the thousands of people out there on the web who are closer to the sources of new music than I'll ever be. A few years ago I pretty much completely stopped watching the television broadcast in this country, and found better ways to find and watch quality TV that didn't tie me to the couch at inconvenient times of the evening, or leave me sitting through boring tripe because that is all that on after 11pm. It feels like I'm at an inflection point, and am about to step into how music works in the 21st century.

A Storm of Swords

A Song of Ice and Fire just keeps growing and getting better. A Storm of Swords is the third installment in the George R. R. Martin's epic fantasy series, and it is just as powerful and edge-of-your-seat un-put-downable as the previous two.

It has a lot of the same wandering-across-Westeros type journeys as the previous two. People in this series spend a lot of their time travelling from place to place, and the author uses this as an opportunity to develop the background of the story. We still don't officially know what triggered Robert's rebellion, or who Jon's mother is, but hints are being dropped left and right, and you pretty much know what happened.

I'm going to immediately start reading the next book. Part of me just wants to get it all read so I can safely look at the Internet references to the series without getting spoilered*. This is seriously one of those series where the plot twists take you by shock, even though they have been foreshadowed so heavy-handedly. It's not a plot that develops linearly, where you can look at the current situation and figure out where it's going. Characters keep taking sharp, 90 degree turns, sometimes several times within a few chapters, and so it's hard to know what will happen next. Some things you can see coming, but holy crap I was given some surprises in the last half of this book. And every time, you then recall the leadup, and think, "oh, of course this was coming".

Of course, I could just be an idiot. I'm somewhat notorious at missing hints in literature. Allegory and symbolism? I miss them every time.

It's bloody hard to write this Half-Arsed Review(tm) and not put spoilers in. The plot developments cry out to be talked about directly. But I won't, because it'd suck for you if you haven't read it and were going to. So here's some abstracted spoiler-free spoilers (which you might want to skip anyway if you're reading or about to read this book):

Holy crap, why did they have to die? Who thought that guy would end up with that job? Who knew you were such an evil bastard? Did you do that thing deliberately? Wow, you're not actually an evil prick for doing that thing to that guy - you had a good reason. Oooh, he had it coming. Gosh, that's sad how they were that shitty to you. And you, also, are much more of an evil prick than everyone thought. Holy crap, you're back! Oh dear, that's not good news.

Anyways, now I've got that out of my system, my final summary: at least read the first book. If you like this sort of thing, it'll blow you away.

*Also, it'd be good to be able to focus on my PhD studies again.

A Clash of Kings

A Clash of Kings is the second book in George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire, and is as good as the first. Again, I was reading much more of it than I expected - normally I read a chapter of my book each evening, but I found myself reading several, simply because I needed to find out what would happen next. It's gotten to the point where it is seriously cutting into my study time. I console myself with the thought that once I've read the four books that have been released so far, I'll settle back into my normal routine.

This book is even more complex than the first - the scattering of the Starks across the continent of Westeros doesn't get any better, and in fact gets worse - as the plot progresses it gets rarer and rarer to find the family that had basically never been apart actually getting to see each other at all. Horrible things keep happening to them, and to everyone else. The war gets deeper and nastier, and it gets harder and harder to see who are the good guys and who are the bad. It's getting easy to see why Martin is having such a hard time getting the later books in the series written; the plot is so thick with hundreds of characters running around causing trouble that is must be bloody tricky making it all fit together while only hinting at and not revealing the overarching plot.

Like the first, it's an amazing book. Weaker in places, stronger in places, but it keeps pushing the tragedy, the anguish, and the horror of a world at war. I'm glad that this time I've got the next book sitting ready beside my bed to start reading tonight, because this is a series that doesn't bear putting down.

A Game of Thrones

A Game of Thrones, by George R. R. Martin, is an astonishingly powerful fantasy epic, following the story of members of the noble House Stark. It's a medieval style fantasy tale, with noble lords ruling over the "smallfolk", and rather cleverly both relates and distances itself from our medieval history by its slight deviations from our world - certain titles and names spelled or pronounced a little differently, differences in religion. Throughout the book, magic behaves like it does in our world - a relic of the past, not really intruding on daily life except in tales.

Where it differs from most other fantasy I've read is the emotional power of the story. The characters, while not overly complex or subtle, bind you to them. When a character is injured, you care; when a loved one is killed, you are stunned, and have to read on to see the aftermath. It's got a lot of the sense of history and depth that The Lord of the Rings has, but with a much more vivid emotional landscape. It's a story for adults, not for teenagers, which separates it from most fantasy.

I picked this up after reading and hearing quite a few recommendations, and seeing some of the press about the television series that is being made based on the series. Even with all the recommendations, I was still surprised by how powerful this book was, and by how often I'd find myself thinking about what twists might come next - how horribly things might turn out for the characters in the story.

And this is a book where things turn out badly. Martin heaps hurt upon hurt on everyone in this story. A character at one point says that in the game of thrones, you win or you die. The game of thrones is how nobles refer to the maneuvering for supremacy among them. And people die, and get betrayed, and betray, and kill. And just when things look as bad as they can get, they get worse. No good deed is left unpunished, and you can't help but feel for the characters, and imagine yourself in these situations, seeing your children and loved ones in peril.

About two thirds of the way through this book (around the 600 page mark), I realised that it was going to end soon, and that it was the first of a series. I kind of knew, but had blithely ignored it. But when the announcement came out that book 5 of the series was due to be released in June, it dawned on me that I urgently had to buy the next book in the series. Annoyingly, the bookshops I checked either had nothing, or had four copies of this book, and none of the rest of the series. I've now placed an urgent order with The Book Depository*, and the books are hopefully flying across the planet to me now. I'm quite bothered by the fact that I now have to read a different book, rather than starting immediately on A Clash of Kings (which I'm not linking to because I'd have to find the page, and there might be spoilers).

* Buy there. Or at Better World Books. Book prices in Australia are absurd.

Attila the Hun

John Man is one of the more readable historians around today. Most historials will at least make an attempt to put you to sleep at one point during a book, but some have a talent for keeping the reader engaged and interested in the subject matter. I read his Atlas of the Year 1000, and Alpha Beta years ago, and so had no hesitation in picking up Attila the Hun.

Most people's knowledge of Attila the Hun is basically: "Barbarian guy, smashed up a bunch of stuff, killed a pile of people". My knowledge prior to reading this book wasn't a lot more than that. In fact, there isn't a great deal of historical evidence about the guy apart from the devastating incursions into Roman territory in the mid 400s AD. John Man acknowledges this, and is quite forthcoming in explaining which parts of his biography are based on historical sources and which are his conjecture. He also is clear about how much he trusts each of his sources, and why. So it's solid history, just without an excess of footnotes - he actually manages to be engaging and interesting when talking about how reliable a given historical source is.

So, it's a biography of Attila. After a bit of historical background (teaching the controversy: are the Huns the same as the Hsiung-Nu who threatened China in the 1st century BC?), and explaining the brief bit of history known regarding Attila's rise to the throne, it really begins when Attila struggles with his brother for the sole command of the Huns. It is at this point really that the man starts to emerge into history, and we start to see details about his negotiations with the Eastern and Western Roman Empires. The Huns build (more by conquest than diplomacy) a huge tribal confederacy across north-eastern Europe, and proceed to try to conquer parts of the Roman world. They manage to devastate the Balkan area of the Eastern Roman Empire, and attempt unsuccessfully to capture Gaul. After this, quite anticlimactically, Attila dies in his sleep, and his empire, more fragile than it appeared at its height, falls apart.

I've long been a fan of Roman history, and it is always interesting to read the histories from the other side of the fence - histories of the peoples Rome conquered, engulfed, or interacted with. Most of the evidence still comes from the Roman side (they were the ones bothering to write histories), but a keen eye like Man's can see through some of the the bias, and build a realistic portrait of the outsider. Attila has always been, to me, one of the barbarian leaders who carved up the near-dead hulk of the empire in its final days; one of the uncivilized men who closed the curtains on the Pax Romana and ushered in the thousand years of uncivilized brutality known as the middle ages. This book shows him to be a little more than that. Not a lot more, but at least a little.

Fear and loathing in Las Vegas

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas has a well-deserved reputation as one of the great American novels of the 20th century. It's even classified as a "Modern Classic" on the front cover of the edition I read. It captures superbly an impression of the madness and disillusionment of liberal 1970s America.

It is majestic in the scope of its drug-addled derangement. I don't really feel like I have the words to do it justice. In turns hilarious and shocking, it takes you on a wild ride of the author's trip to Las Vegas to cover a desert race called the Mint 400. The actual race plays only a very minor role in what because the story of a pair of drug fiends lurching though a series of increasingly demented and sordid encounters, while reflecting on the nature of American culture and how the madness of Las Vegas is the ultimate expression of America's true self.

Great book. Great movie too, and a worthy adaptation. Definitely worth reading.

The Fuller Memorandum

Just a quick review this time (I've got important TV to watch) - The Fuller Memorandum is the third of Charles Stross's Laundry novels, and I've mentioned previously that I think the series is awesome. This is as good as, or better than the previous two. It gets a bit darker and more serious. The disturbing Lovecraftianness is getting deeper and more Lovecraftian, and we're starting to see the outline of a long story arc, which will take a few more novels to resolve (is he planning five or seven? His website seems to indicate he's not suggesting there is a longer story arc).

In any case, it's an awesome book - clever, scary, funny, and thought-provoking. Read it now, before shapeless horrors from the abysses of time lurch hideously into your bedroom while you sleep and eat your face.

PS. Thanks, Al (not this Al), for the loan of the book.

1120 books

Well, that was more like it. Another year tracking my literary diet, and this time it was 28 books. More than a book per fortnight. Which totals up to an expected lifetime read of 1120 more books. Even including the fact that 5 of those books were read for my PhD, and I kind of rushed reading two of them (to finish them in December instead of the first week of January) this is closer to what I'd been hoping for. Still less than half Danny's rate of reading, but comparing my (mere mortal) literary intake to his would always be unreasonably ambitious.

A very pleasing outcome.

This coming year I don't expect to get through quite as many books; I'm getting into the serious literature review part of my PhD, over the next six months or so, and will be reading research papers. With any luck, several per week, and when possible (like, not now, when I'm too sleepy) one per night. And also re-reading a bunch of them, to mash more of their knowledge juices into my all-too-flimsy brain.