Amazon Recomendtions - A Rant

The problem with the recommendations that Amazon comes up with is that they are similar to what you read already. This is all very well, but I can't help but think that they might be partially responsible for the fact that when I used to hang out on Bookcrossing, I kept meeting apparently intelligent young women who read nothing but Janet Evanovich's Stephanie Plum novels. Don't get me wrong, they are good books (about a comically inept female bounty hunter) but why would you read nothing else at all?

If I buy, say a Terry Pratchett book, Amazon will suggest that I read all his other books, but I didn't need it to do that; I obviously know about Terry Pratchett already. To be useful it needs to come up with a book I didn't even know about.

Here's how it should work: once Amazon knows I have read and liked a certain book, it should suggest something as different as possible for my next read. For example, if someone likes "Little Women" they should try "American Psycho" next. If they've been reading James Joyce, their next book should be "The Tiger Who Came To Tea", just to stop their head exploding if nothing else. People who read nothing but fast-paced thrillers should be steered towards the European rail timetable. If you will only read science fiction, Amazon should throw you a Mills & Boon. If you read romance, your next book will be a hunt for a serial killer. If you read books suggested by Oprah or Richard & Judy, Amazon should give you no help at all, forcing you to grow up any think for yourself. I think you're getting the idea...

My point is that by limiting ourselves to one kind of reading, whether it be kooky girl detectives or Dragon Crack, we avoid developing any further. It's good for us to be confused and puzzeled every so often. The trouble is that we like the comfy and familiar. My anti-recommendations would supply us all with a useful kick up the arse.

Dreams and Disasters: A History of Innovation Gone Wrong by Adam Hart Davis

I'm going to write to Adam Hart Davies and tell him to go back on do this again properly. It's a good idea but the execution is slap-dash, presumably in order to try to cash in on the success of “What the X Did For Us” in time for Christmas one year.

This book is also rather let down by the quality of the paper and the images. For example, there is a picture of Babbage's difference engine which is just a big, black blur. Just as well we're able to look up what it actually looked like online!

And it doesn't have a proper finish. It just stops right in the middle of

Holes by Louis Sacher

By now you will probably be wondering just how many children's books I have on my shelves that I haven't got round to reading. The answer is a truly shameful amount. After all, it's one thing to keep putting off “Ulyses” or “Gravity's Rainbow” and quite another thing to put off reading Shadowmancer or Lyrial. I haven't even finished the Harry Potter books; I got in huff after the fifth one was so long and so very rubbish... Anyway...

Stanley Yelnats is the fat kid at school who nobody likes, then his life gets a lot worse when he is falsely convicted of stealing and gets sent to Camp Green Lake. The camp is in a dried up lake bed in the desert, which saves the warden the bother of having guards and fences; any boy who runs away will be dead in 3 days. It is also plagued by yellow spotted lizards with a deadly bite. In ths setting the junior convicts must each dig a hole five feet deep and five feet across every day, on the grounds that this will build character. However, anything found in the holes must be shown to the warden – what is she looking for?

The back cover of my book describes it as a detective story, but I think it's more like a fairy story. And the warden ( a five-star psycho-bitch who paints her nails with rattlesnake venom) makes a brilliant wicked queen.

Holes is well-writen and easy going, but if even tht is too much bother, there's a film with Sigorney Weaver in the role of the warden.

Conrad's Fate - Diana Wynne Jones

As my house moving steps up a gear, I am back on the children's books!

“Conrad's Fate” is one of a subset of Diana Wynne Jones's books which feature the character Chrestomanci, an immaculately-attired, nine-lived enchanter and one of the many fictional characters I quite fancy. These books take place in a universe with magic and generally follow the form: a bunch of kids get into worse and worse trouble, until finally Chrestomanci turns up in his tophat and tails, looking humpable and saves the day. Alas, in this book, he is only 12, so you can't lust after him or you'll be hauled away by the police*.

Anyway, back to the plot. Conrad lives is a small resort town in the English Alps with his mother (a renowned feminist author) and his uncle (a bad lot). His uncle runs a bookshop and Conrad has to work in the shop and do all the housework because his mum can't allow herself to be exploited. Looming over their town is the huge castle where the count and countess live. The magic practised there is rumoured to be responsible for all the bad luck in Conrad's family, and the reason his end of the village can never get TV reception. Conrad's evil uncle convinces him that he has terrible Karma due to failing to kill someone he should have killed in a previous life. Conrad is then dispatched with appropriately dire magics to the castle to get a job as a footman and redeem himself when the opportunity comes. On the way he meets a mysterious boy called Christopher who can use magic and claims to be searching for his missing friend.

I enjoyed this book up to the end where, sadly, the denuement really didn't work for me. I am decades older than the intended audience and very fussy, but this was rather a disappointment. It turns out that the Count and Countess are actors and the real Count is the person we all thought was the butler. We are supposed to believe that the Count wanted to see his residence restored to its former glory by the use of magical equipment to play the stock market stored in the castle's wine cellar and the only way he could do this was to disguise himself as his own butler. Bollocks! Come on DWJ, you can do better than that!

*For anyone else who likes Chrestomanci, here's a breakdown (as far as I can remember) of which books he's grown up in, and which he's a child in.

• baby chrestomanci : Charmed Life, The Lives of Christopher Chant, Conrad's Fate

• grown up: Witch Week, The Magicians of Caprona

Jane Austen Roundup

Best book: Northanger Abbey. Why? Because it is a piss-take of Gothic novels. This is the book in which the humour come closest to being something modern readers might actually laugh at.

Worst book: Mansfield Park. Why? Because the heroine (amusingly called “Fanny”, and that's the best gag in the book) is so bloody wet.

Bluffer's guide to Jane Austen
(This guide is intended to help you sound like an intellectual in front of people you don't know very well in pubs and at parties. It will not help you write your essays for GCSE or A level English. Go steal those off The Spark.)

• Do wax lyrical about the quality of the prose.
• Don't say you liked the twist at the end. There is never a twist at the end. There is barely a plot at all.
• Do run down the author by saying, “Of course, Austin is more of a miniaturist than a novelist” (Sounds like nonsense, but loads of other pseuds will nod sagely at this point.)
• Don't run her down by saying, “There weren't even any murders! So I added some in biro.”
• Do go on about her razor sharp wit and ability to skewer the social conventions of her time.
• Don't say, “Is it just me, or is this just posh girls' Mills & Boon?”

Note that all of the above only applies to men. Ironically, if you are a woman you can feign knowledge of Jane Austen simply by going, “Ooo! Mr Darcy!” and giggling like a simpleton.

Persuasion by Jane Austen

Persuasion was Austen's last book and was not published until after her death. It was also the only one her books I had not read, so now I have collected them all. I'm as happy as a small boy with a completed album full of football stickers.

Seven years before the start of the novel, Anne Elliot was persuaded by her friend Lady Russel (who has taken on the role of Anne's mother after that lady died) to reject the proposal of Frederick Wentworth, even though she loves him, because he has no money or rank and therefore, Lady Russel cannot conceive of the marriage resulting in anything other than misery. In the meantime, Anne's father the stupid, snobbish Sir Walter Elliot has been busy squandering the family fortune because he refses to do without any of his status symbols. Things become so bad that the Elliot family are forced to leave their ancestral seat, Kellynch hall, and rent it out to Admiral Croft. Admiral Croft's wife turns out to be Wentworth's sister and suddenly he is back on the scene, now a captain with wealth he's plundered from Britain's enemies, declaring that he is ready to marry. At first he seems understandably embittered by Anne's original refusal and starts a romance with her friend Louisa Musgroves, claiming to be charmed by her strength of character. Then Louisa goes and blows it all by throwing herself off the cobb at Lyme Regis, for Wentworth to catch her - only he misses and she gives herself a serious head injury. Louisa may not be the sort of wimp who'd pass up a perfectly good fiance just because someone told her to, but she does now seem deficient in common sense. Anyhow, Anne goes to join her impoverished folks for the season in Bath, and before long Mr William Elliot, her cousin, is chatting her up in all the fashionable locations. You can't marry your cousin! It's just wrong! The children will have 3 heads or something... But we don't have to worry about mutant children (shame, they'd give Austen's novels a bit of extra excitement...) because in the nick of time the cousin is revealled to be a bounder and a cad and Captain Wentworth professes his love. Let the bells ring out and so forth.

In her book lady of intellect and taste who is “past her bloom” is still able to bag a husband. Sadly this wasn't the case for Jane herself and she died unmarried at only 41. Seems as if the men of her time cared more for a pretty face with a bit of money attached than for a lady with any kind of mind.

Famously, we never get any scenes in Austin in which men are talking to one another without ladies present, because Jane never got to hear how they spoke each other in these circumstances. I have also noticed that the books finish at the point where the heroine is engaged; presuamably because Austen has no exerience of what happens after that, either.

I like Mrs Croft much better than I like the heroine. I think her a much better model for modern women: she and the Admiral have a marriage of equals and she has followed him all over the world. She helps him to run his affairs and they drive their carriage together.

“Persuasion” was writen at a time of increasing social mobility and has birth versus money as one of it's themes. The book has plenty of sailors who have made their fortune (maybe fighting Napoleon, I'm not sure of the history) and are now looking to marry a class of girlie who would have been well beyond reach otherwise. The idiot Sir Walter Elliot disapproves of the navy on the ground that it is “a means of bringing persons of low birth into undue distinction”, but the posh totty is nevertheless flockng to Naval officers! Austen's view seems to in favour of social mobility and “marrying up”, but in a qualified way: Our happy ending is that Anne finally gets her dashing officer, instead of being stuck with the family's mean-spirited heir presumptive, the author makes it pretty clear that she finds Mrs Clay's scheme to marry Sir Walter absolutely beyond the pale. I can't really see what the difference is between them. Is it OK for men to be social climbers, but not women? Is OK to work your way through manly exploits against the French, but not through marriage? Or is it that as a lawyer's daughter, Mrs Clay ranked a lot lower in Austen's world than it first seems to me?

Another theme of the book seems to be setting up a contrast between family and friends. Anne's friends value her and enjoy her company while her father and sister Elizabeth just ignore her and her sister Mary needs Anne to make her feel important and distract her from her imagined illnesses. Despite this, Anne is made to feel that she has a duty to her family. In some ways, Anne's family is dysfunctional enough to give the novel quite a modern feel; One parent is absent (due to death rather than divorce) and the rest are a couple of silly spendthrifts and a hyperchondriac drama queen.

The Gone-Away World by Nick Harkaway

I think this is a first novel. It definitely reads like a first novel. The author seems to have shoveled in every idea he's ever had giving it a rather chaotic feel. And the structure is a bit odd: half of the book forms what has got to be the longest flashback in the history of literature. Then there is the fact that text just needs a bit more deletion. I mean, I'm a fan of both Terry Pratchett and Douglas Adams, so I like humorous asides and explanatory footnotes as much as the next person, but “The Gone-Away World” contains several which are so long and convoluted that they get in the way of the story. Despite these criticisms, the book contains some great ingredients: truckers, Ninjas, mime artists and the end of the world. I think this book was like a cake I dropped on the floor but decided to eat anyway: a bit of a mess but still tasty.

Sometime in the near future the latest ultimate weapon is invented: the “Go Away” bomb which removes the information from matter, effectively causing enemies to disappear all together. A small, regional (Afghanistan-like) war quickly escalllates and results in much of the planet being reconfigured with “Go Away” weapons. At which point it is discovered that these perfect weapons come with their own kind of fall-out. Matter stripped of information (known as “stuff”, presumably as in “such stuff as dreams are made on”) is given new and horrific forms by people's thoughts and the survivors of the “Go Away” war have to battle centaurs, mermaids and dog-swllowing monsters. In this crazy, post-apocalyptic landscape the “Haulage and Hazmat Emergency Civil Freebooting Company of Exmoor County” eke out a living until called on to put out a huge fire with the added hazzard of “stuff”. That's about all I can tell you without spoiling the plot.

In the way of themes we have, War, friendship, the dehumanising aspects of large companies (pretty apt in the wake of the credit crunch) and, of course, Ninjas. Everyone loves Ninjas.

My favourite character has got to be Ronnie Cheung, a foul-mouthed army martial arts instructor who offers the hero the following advice:

“You are fucked. You are desirous of getting unfucked.[...] The second law of thermodynamics [...] does not smile upon unfucking.”

In the big set-piece battle with the Ninjas at the end of the book, Ronnie drops hs kecks to show them his wrinked martial arse. He's a class act.

I really hope Nick writes some more books. This one is kind of a trainwreck, but a trainwreck that's pleasantly exciting to be in, rather than deadly. Once he's found the delete key, I think his work will be an absolute joy. Write more Nick! And then get rid of most of it to leave only the best bits!