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.

Un Lun Dun

Un Lun Dun, by China Miéville, is a young adult fantasy novel. I've been meaning to read something by Miéville for a while, and saw this in bookshops a few times, and it grabbed my attention each time, so I eventually picked it up.

It's a great little urban fantasy piece, set in Unlondon, the counterpart of London, where all the broken, rejected things from London disappear to. It's one of many "abcities", cities that parallel cities in the real world. Two girls from London, Deeba and Zanna, are drawn across from London into Unlondon, in order to fulfill a prophecy and save the world (or at least Unlondon).

It's fast-paced and very imaginative. They encounter all kinds of strange people and creatures and things, and each suburb of Unlondon has it's own peculiar theme. Major landmarks in London have bizarre counterparts in Unlondon. The plot works well, and just as it is shaping up to be a bog-standard fulfill the prophecy story, it takes a turn and derails its own plot. This happens more than once.

It's an easy and entertaining read, and I'll certainly be encouraging the young adults (well, nearly-ten-year-olds) in my house to read it.

Surface Detail

As I've mentioned before, I can't not read a new Iain Banks novel, especially one set in the Culture. He's a writer was has an astonishing ability to flesh out a universe, to take a few powerful ideas and build a consistent and fascinating world from them. Surface Detail is set in the universe of The Culture, which a number of his other books are set in, so it's familiar to readers. In this novel he bolts on a whole separate set of concepts to this world - that of digital hells that various cultures set up to punish digitally uploaded personalities of beings within their society that deserve punishment for some reason. It's a bit out of place, as none of this was really mentioned in any of the other Culture novels, and it's something that would really be expected to have been mentioned. In that regard, it feels rather clumsily to the existing world, when it could have been set in a new world without the retconning that is necessary here to make it fit.

Other than that, it's a pretty good read, especially once the action gets going. The baddies are (as always in a Banks novel) extra bad, so much so that it's not a book you'd give to kids (I was looking for books for my sixteen year old nephew for Xmas, and considered Banks, but decided not to, what with all the genocide and torture and rape that are so often present in a Banks novel). The good guys are all kinds of shades of grey, textured and three dimensional characters. The Minds, the vastly superhuman intellects that are embodied in the starships of the Culture, are always delightfully entertaining.

It;s not the first Culture novel I'd suggest for a new reader of Banks - I'd still suggest starting with Consider Phlebas, which blew me away when I first read it. And it's probably not up to the standard of The Algebraist, but otherwise it's still pretty great, and worth a read.

Pride and Prejudice

Being the ever-neglectful husband that I am, it's taken me many years to finally get around to reading my wife's favourite tale, Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. I've seen the BBC production countless times, as well as the recent movie, and various related TV shows about it, so I'm very familiar with all the goings on, as I'm sure everyone reading this is. P&P is kind of like the Star Wars of chick flicks. So it was interesting to actually get around to reading it. I was travelling, and decided to attempt my first ever bookless trip, and happened to have downloaded the Project Gutenberg ebook onto my iPad, so I read it while working in Saudi Arabia and holidaying in Jordan.

With regard to reading an eBook, as compared to reading a dead tree book, it was actually better than I expected. For all the digitalness of my life, I've always been very fond of the old paper format book. This was the first ever full eBook I've read. It actually was fine. There's a feeling of inevitability to the transition to ebooks - I know that in ten years I'll almost certainly be reading everything digitally, but I've been a bit uncomfortable with the transition. One of the issues is DRM - as with all the other media that have gone digital in recent years, the book publishers have tried to lock ebooks down and cripple them to ensure that everyone who reads one has to pay for the privilege. No more second hand books, no more borrowing books from friends. This is why I'm yet to buy an mp3 or movie online - I still buy CDs and DVDs when I'm buying music or movies. Project Gutenberg puts out-of-copyright books online for free, however, so I wasn't worried about DRM intruding on my life. Having said all that, reading the book on the iPad was fine, and I can see myself quite happily transitioning to all-digital reading, particularly if the licensing issues ever get resolved.

Pride and Prejudice itself was, well, as I expected. The thing that struck me the most was how constrained the characters were by the rules of their society - this struck me more in the book than it did in the various TV adaptations, which I suspect played down this aspect a little as it didn't translate that well for modern audiences. There are a number of times when you just want to yell at the characters to just bloody talk to each other. This aspect struck particularly strongly because I was travelling in Saudi Arabia and Jordan, where there are much more rigid rules about the behaviour of men and women that we are used to in the West - the constraints on the behaviour of characters in the book were similar to the constraints on the behaviours of the men and women around me, and experiencing the book and the society at the same time made both make a little more sense. It shouldn't have felt like an unexpected and strange parallel, but it did.

Apart from that, it's quite a clever book, with amusing and occasionally subtle characterization, and the plot is certainly not spoiled by knowing the conclusion - if anything, the plot is enhanced by knowing the outcome, by the looming inevitability of a happy ending.

Wireless

Wireless combines two things I love - short story collections, and the works of Charles Stross. It has some fantastic stories in it, including the first Stross story I ever read, A Colder War. This is an absolutely brilliant short story, setting the awakening of Cthulhu against the backdrop of the cold war.

The great thing about a science fiction short story is that it's the ideal vehicle for letting an author's imagination run wild. They don't have to ensure character development, or a satisfactory conclusion, or enough plot to sustain hundreds of pages entertainingly, so they're able to freely throw ideas around that might be problematic in a longer format.

Apart from A Colder War, the other standout stories in this collection were Missile Gap, another cold war/sci-fi crossover, and Palimpsest, a time-travel novel that gleefully stomps all over the Grandfather Paradox.

In summary, as always, Stross is a great read.