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I had to keep reminding myself to treat this as a historical document; Burroughs was a pioneer of science fiction and fantasy literature, and he was building a genre of ideas rather than creating quality literature.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.