Book Club Of One

Just Put the Fracking Cheese Back and Nobody Gets Hurt

2012-01-31T09:33:00.001-08:00

This week I have mostly been reading Who Moved My Cheese a self-help guide which is apparently An Amazing Way To Deal With Change In Your Life.

The book takes the form of a little parable about the inhabitants of a maze who live on the cheese they find in it. There are two mice, Sniff and Scurry who live by their simple mouse instincts, sniffing out new cheese and scurrying into action. Then there are two miniature humans who are encumbered by human thought patterns, expecting their cheese to go on forever and scared to venture out into the maze when their cheese supply runs out. One of the little people learns to laugh at himself for hanging around waiting for the cheese to come back and plucks up courage to venture back into the maze and start searching. Eventually he finds all manner of great new cheeses of types never encountered before.

It sounds patronising, but at it's not as bad as Paulo Coelho and at least it's short. The most appallingly-written part is the wraparound story about a bunch of people listening to the cheese parable and using it to deal with the changes going on in their lives but I guess no one reads self-help books for fully-realised characters.

On his way through the maze our tiny hero chalks up useful advice for anyone following him on the walls. My favourite was, "It is safer to search in the maze than remain in a cheeseless situation.". Very true. In contrast the least useful was,"What would you do if you weren't afraid?". Every time I try to answer that honestly I come up with something violent or unethical or just plain destructive. Basically, you should all thank your lucky stars that I am afraid.

Anyway, the advice is all very well but what about other people? None of the tiny people has tiny children looking up at them begging for cheese, or whining that the quest for new cheese has meant moving away from their friends. There are no spouses who carry on consuming cheese when there isn't any on cheesy credit cards (which are probably made of crackers). No one is an island and realising what you need to do does not necessarily make you free to do it. I have a horrible feeling that what you're meant to do is wheel out the cheese story and tell it to your family, employees or whatever. And I don't think that's going to wash this side of the atlantic. Not unless they're very easily led indeed.

In many ways the most interesting aspect of the is as an example at pacing and leading. These are rhetorical devices commonly used by hypnotists, politicians and other species of charlatan whereby you start with a statement everyone can agree with and slowly, step by step lead people by the nose into deeper, darker waters. One day I will use these techniques to write a self-help book of my own which will leave my victims, sorry, readers with a warm glow of empowerment and the overwelming urge to send me all their money.

Youth-Speak

2012-01-30T11:56:00.001-08:00

It seems like only yesterday I was enjoying youthful slang the older generation couldn't comprehend: phoning my 'rents, drinking pints of 'ken in student bars. Omg I used a lot of TLAs and had a rising intonation? Now I am on the outside and I have no idea whether the kids are alright because I don't understand a word:

A student I trained with at kung fu asked me what I did for a living. When I told him I was a software developer he said, "Aw, man, savage!". I don't even know whether that's good or bad!

Squealed by a youngster working in our sales dept, "Oooo, cool beans!". Makes me think of cold baked beans. Ugh...

From a conversation I overheard between two girls dressed like something out of Desperately Seeking Susan, "So, he's like, 'What's her complexion like?' And I'm like, 'Mmmm 'spretty vaz.'". WTF? Did I even hear that right?

Vampires vs Werewolves vs Bookclub of One

2011-12-27T06:29:00.000-08:00

Don’t panic! Brain death resulting in reading “Twilight” books hasn’t set in. That, I think, is one of the compensations of encroaching middle age: I have now been round the block enough times to know that the Twilight series will be cock-awful without having to read the sodding things. So what nonsense have I been reading?

“The Fallen Blade” by Jon Courtenay-Grimwood. I don’t recommend it. I really enjoyed JCG’s Ashraf Bey books (Pachazade, Effendi and Fellaheen) and I would urge both my readers to go out and buy them. Don’t part with money for Fallen Blade as it will only encourage the author to turn out more of this lazy crap – particularly upsetting since he’s capable of better. Why is this book so dire? Let’s take a look...

Firstly, it seems to be composed of a selection of rather tired memes (or “cliches” as we called them in my day): Vampires fighting werewolves and vampire assassins. I quite like the fact that the novel is set in a sort of renaissance Venice and I quite like the way that Othello and Desdemona have been borrowed into it, but sadly I don’t like either facet enough to undo the vampire-assassins-fighting-werewolves rubbishness.

Secondly, The Fallen Blade has an amazingly rubbish heroine. Gulietta’s job, as far as I can make out is simply to be fought over by werewolves, vampires and various human political factions. JCG keeps telling us she is, “every inch a Millioni Princess” but she is just helpless flotsam washed about the place by the actions of other people. Conversely Desdaio (the Desdemona character) is described as soft and privileged, but puts her wealth and good looks to use doing whatever she thinks is right. She’s a bit of an innocent abroad (particularly in the scenes where she’s negotiating with Atilo in the belief that the worst that will result is a slap while he considers having her murdered) but ultimately a much more sympathetic character than the useless, standy-there Gulietta.

I think you can probably guess that the characters I found most interesting in this book were the ones borrowed from Shakespeare. Atilo is a Moorish pirate forced to serve Venice who has risen to become the Duke’s chief assassin. Desdaio is the wealthiest heiress in the city who, to the disgust of nearly everyone else has chosen Atilo for a husband. Already there are cracks and jealousies appearing in their relationship. I’d have liked to have seen more of their tragedy played out – I guess that is saved for the next books (this one is, as always, the first in a trilogy) but I won’t be reading them as life’s too short!

The Code Book by Simon Singh

2011-08-22T02:46:00.001-07:00

Hurray! I think my brain is finally beginning to recover!

I've had this book on my shelf for years, but while I was going to work programming everyday it just looked like more work. Maternity leave was the right time to read it. Either my brain is starting to work properly again or Singh writes with enough clarity to penetrate the mum-fog. Probably a bit of both.

The code book is a history of cryptography from the Ceasar cypher (good enough for 1000 years then broken by Arab scholars) through to quantum cryptography. The Caesar cipher was followed by polyalphabetic ciphers (in the case of the one time pad the key is as long as msg therefore unbreakable but logistical problems distributing keys mean this method must be used sparingly). We then come to the mechanisation of encoding and the Enigma machine. The section on the breaking of the Enigma cipher was especially interesting as I had never realised the contribution made by the Polish secret service as well as the more familiar story of Bletchly Park. In many cases it was human weaknesses that made the messages decodeable ( for example, the choice of 3 letter day codes was left to the individual operators who would sometimes get lazy and use their own initials, or letters which were next to one another on the Enigma machine keyboard). Another trick was to realise that a certain message at 6am was always a weather report, so you could expect the word "wetter" near the beginning. We then move on to RSA and PGP. For the future we have the possibility of quantum cryptography. There are also interesting asides on the translation of the Rosetta Stone and linear b.

Great stuff. I feel enthused to have a go at the cyphers in the back. Then I'm going to decode the Voynich manuscript, solve the travelling salesman problem and sort out 3 body physics before the end of maternity leave...

Silly books to read in the middle of the night...

2011-07-18T05:29:00.001-07:00

Cart and Cwidder by Diana Wynne Jones

This is eminently suitable to read at 3am as the story is so good it's almost a pleasure to haul your sorry ass out of bed. Moril is one of a family of travelling musicians touring Dalemark. His father is killed and his mother takes up again with an old flame, leaving him with a moony older brother, a bolshy sister, a posh teenage refugee and a magic cwidder. Fortunately they have a very sensible horse...

This is the first of the 4 Dalemark books so there are still 3 more to go, hurrah!

Eagle Strike by Anthony Horowitz

One of a series of books about teenage spy Alex Rider. Amazingly, this is really too lightweight for even the most sleep-deprived of mothers. There's just so little too it. By the time you've done 2 night time feeds it's all gone!

Sabriel by Garth Nix

This is more like it! Sabriel's dad is Abhorsen; a kind of nice necromancer who makes sure the dead rest in peace. When Sabriel is 18 and just about to leave her posh girls' school an apparition brings her father's sword and bells. This is a bad sign and means her father has somehow got stuck in Death and Sabriel sets out to rescue him. Can she get the guy, kill the baddies and save the entire planet? I think she probably can ;-)

My only problem with this book is that the evil necromancer is called Kerrigor which I'm sure is a sort of Irish butter...

Viriconium by M John Harrison

2011-05-26T01:32:00.001-07:00

This is not the best thing to try to read at 3am while feeding a baby! It is full of long words, rather overwrought descriptions and sections where nothing much seems to happen, making it hard going for the sleep deprived.

Viriconium is the patchwork city at the end of the world. A crumbling ruin left by a long vanished civilisation. Death, decay and dissolutiom are everywhere. If you like Gormenghast or The Book of the New Sun but find them a bit too cheerful, this is for you!

The book I have (from the Fantasy Masterworks series) is a collection of novels and short stories. My favourites are The Pastel City (which deals with a civil war - The War of The Two Queens - in which one side finds and reanimates hideous brain-stealing golems left behind by some previous civilisation) and The Shadow of Wings in which the world is invaded by giant locusts from outer space. Strangely, this seems a lot less stupid when you're actually reading it. Both these novels feature my favourite character, Tomb the Iron Dwarf. In a novel where every character spends a good deal of their time making epigrams on the nature of being, Tomb who says, "I'm a dwarf, not a philosopher." And hits things with his axe is a welcome relief.

If my review makes this book sound like standard, cliched fantasy of the Trudy Canavan style, that is a failing on my part. In fact I suspect that most of the problems I have with it are because it's just too bloody clever for me.

One of the things that confuses me are the inconsistencies between the different stories. For example in The Shadow of wings, the fortune teller Fat Mam Etieller is killed near the end. The she reappears in In Viriconium despite the fact that (I think!) this is set later. It is very hard to work out a timeline and pin down the order of events. Is this an intentional trick? Or were the stories never intended to be read together?

Another example is that both The Pastel City and Cromis and Lamia feature the warrior-poet teugus-Cromis. But the character seems totally different. The cromis who hunts the Lamia is a much more unpleasant person. Is this just a less developed version of the character for a short story who later changes?

The city of Viriconium itself appears inconsistent to me. At times it seems to be 19th century Paris, at others it is mediaeval, at others it is like a city state in rennaisance Italy. I can't work out how much is intentional, nor can I discount the possiblity that it all fits together, but I'm too tired and stupid to realise how at the moment. I think it would help me to know the order in which these stories were writen, and where they fit on a timeline of Viriconium.

I am going to reserve judgement on M John Harrison; there is another of his books, "Light" on my shelf and I will give that a go when baby is a bit older and my brain might have recovered!

Read and Return

2011-04-29T05:42:00.001-07:00

Bollocks, the cocking Read and Return bookshop has closed! And I had £11 of credit with them... Arses!

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

2011-04-27T13:06:00.001-07:00

Many years ago, after reading Order of the Phoenix, I swore that I was not going to give J. K. Rowling any more of my money until she learned to read over her work and delete the duff bits. Now with my brain fried by hormones and lack of sleep I was so desperate for an easy read that I went back to the Harry Potter* series.

Maybe motherhood has eroded my critical faculties, but the Half-Blood Prince feels like a return to Rowling's earlier form. For a start it is much shorter and tighter than than the previous 2 installments. And I enjoyed a new comic character, Professor Slughorn who is a bit of a slimey networker. And the whole thing is easy enough to read at 3am while feeding a baby.

The ministry of magic has finally got the message that Lord Voldemort is back and prominent wizards who opposed him are being found murdered. Meanwhile, Harry has been given a second hand potions text book full of annotations by the mysterious "half-blood Prince" which make his potions the best in the class...

Unfortunately, I now feel the need to read Deathly Hallows and I have a bad feeling about that one. The fact that it had to be made into 2 films rather than 1 makes me think it might be another unedited abortion. Ah, well. I'll have to read it and find out...

*At the height of Harry Potter mania my sister made a game of inventing new Harry Potter titles. She was best at the game coming up with gems like "Harry Potter and the Chamber of Commerce" and "Harry Potter and the Centre of Gravity".

Mumming down

2011-04-08T02:11:00.001-07:00

Well, my pregnancy ended on the 16th Feb and I am now the slightly shell-shocked co-owner of a tiny daughter.

I read the following books whilst pregnant but didn't manage to finish blog entries for them:

Fight Club by Chuck Palahunik

Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell

Robin Ince's Bad Book Club

The Princess Bride by William Goldman

Havoc in its Third Year by Ronan Bennet

Day Watch by Sergei Lukyaneko

Perhaps I will get round to finishing some of these. Maybe when daughter is 18.

Anyway, what with the horrific lack of sleep it was 4 weeks after the birth before I could concentrate enough to read anything at all and I can only manage very easy books. That's right, I'm back on the Trudi Canavan, or Trudgy Caravan as my friend Jules calls her.

I've just finished "The Novice", the sequel to Magicians' Guild. In this book Sonea (the street urchin with magical powers) starts her training in magic. Unfortunately, the other novices don't want to share lessons with a guttersnipe and Sonea becomes the victim of endless magical bullying. When it becomes clear how strong a magician Sonea is, her training is taken over by the sinister High Lord which causes as many problems as it solves.

My main criticism is that Sonea's cheif tormentor amoung the novices, Regin, is not a fully realised character and just seems to be malice on legs. Despite this I can't wait to read the final book and find out what the High Lord of the magicians' guild is up to!

RIP DWJ

2011-04-03T11:36:00.001-07:00

This week has seen the demise of one of my favourite children's authors, Diana Wynne Jones and the world is a slightly crappier place as a result.

The People's Manifesto by Mark Thomas

2011-02-07T05:41:00.001-08:00

In 2009, Mark Thomas toured Britain with a stand up show where he asked the audience to suggest some policies they would like to see put into practise. At the end of the show each audience voted for their favourite policiy and all the favourites have been collected together to form this book: the demands of the people of Great Britain (or at least those of them who agree enough with Mark's left wing politics to make them feel it was worth going to see him). Anyway, it's considerably more democratic than anything offered by any major political party.

The lovely thing about these policies is how they range from the serious (renationalising the railways, requiring a referendum to go to war and introducing a "none of the above" box on ballot papers), to the trivial (everyone should be allowed the day off work on their birthday, Windsor to be renamed "Lower Slough" and overtaking lanes for pedestrians). Many of the the policies reflect a desire for fairness, or sometimes just a love of poetic justice, for example, people who support ID cards would not be allowed any curtains, those guilty of homophobic hate crime would have to serve their sentence in drag and and anyone who lets their dog shit in the street would have to wear it as a moustache.

Overall my favourite policy is that politicians should have to wear overalls like formula 1 drivers, covered with the logos of all the companies who pay them.

Magicians' Guild by Trudi Canavan

2011-01-04T08:59:00.000-08:00

Just look at that correctly placed apostrophe! Surely we are in the hands of a master here? At least compared to reading "Shadowmancer"...

I've now graduated from children's books to blandly generic fantasy for young adults. Magicians' Guild takes place in a standard-issue Fantasyland city complete with guilds for magicians, theives and probably assassins. In this irony-free Ankh-Morpork lives Sonea, a streetwise teen from the slums who discovers she has magical powers. The titular (f'nar, f'nar! Titular!) guild of magicians must then track her down and persuade her to join them before she accidentally destroys the whole city.

The charm of Magicians' Guild is that despite being a long way from either imaginative or literature, it is never so badly-written that is gives you "the bump" and startles you awake wondering why you've been spending your time on such rubbish. Like all the best "dragon crack" it is very easy to start and very hard to stop. It also follows fantasy conventions exactly by being part of a trilogy. Bugger. Now I need two more books in order to find out whether the snooty magicians will ever really accept a commoner. And what about the Lord High Chief Magician bloke who is a thoroughly Bad Egg? I can see a trip to the Read and Return* bookshop in my future!

Let's hope I hurry up and have this baby before I end up regressing all the way back to Eddings and Gemmel.

*To my alarm, Exeter's read and return has a prodigious collection of erotica. While I am happy to purchase pre-loved books along the lines of "The House Plants of Gor" and "The Stainless Steel Rat Picks his Nose", I'm a bit chairy of second-hand porn!

Shadowmancer by G. P. Taylor

2010-12-31T02:58:00.001-08:00

Pregnancy has bought with it a reduction in brain power* and I have been reaching for the easy books. What could be easier than a kids' book? Plus it will be great practice for reading The Little Mole Who Knew it Was None of His Business over and over again. Alas, once you are an adult, reading all but the most well-written of children's books is actually quite a chore.

Shadowmancer is a fantasy novel of the epic-battle-between-good-and-evil school. In the style of The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe it even has a guest appearance from Jesus. Set in North East England in some sort of generic "olden days" (I think it is round about the 18th century as we have smugglers and long-haired men) the local vicar is a sorcerer set on taking over the world using the power of the Keruvim (a sort of golden angel statue thingy. A mcguffin, it's basically a mcguffin.). Only two local kids, Kate and Thomas, and the incredibly holy African boy Raphah stand in his way. Will they be horribly killed, or will Jesus help them out at the last minute? This is fiction, so Jesus comes through, just like he doesn't in real life. I think I read somewhere that the author of this book is a vicar, but I can't altogether trust my own brain at present, so perhaps that isn't true.

I can't say that I really enjoyed reading Shadowmancer all that much. The good characters are good through and through whilst the bad characters are utterly bad. I feel this gives the book an overly simple and unrealistic feel - but I suppose that's what you get if you insist on reading children's fiction when you're in your mid 30s. The only real character in the whole thing is the smuggler Jacob Crane who is ruthless in his pursuit of wealth but fundamentally unwilling to see a satanic priest rule the Earth. Sadly, by the end of the book, he has seen the error of his ways and become comepletely nice. Pass the sickbag!

*If you are of the female persuasion and plan to one day bear children, feel free to imagine that this will not happen to you. I know I did.

The Bull From the Sea by Mary Renault

2010-11-07T08:53:00.001-08:00

I had a preconceived notion that all of Renault's work is replete with ancient Greek buggery. I was therefore a bit disappointed by this book. It picks up the myth of Theseus at the point where he arrives home having failed to change his sails. So pretty much after all the interesting bits of the story. Theseus seems to have been annoyingly hetrosexual. Of his ladies, my favourite by far is the amazon queen Hypolita who is much less decorative and more of an equal than his silly Minoan wife Phedra. Unfortunately, Hypolita dies bravely in battle and I really lost interest in the novel from that point.

Renault fans have let me know that the best book for buggery is "Fire From Heaven" about the early life of Alexander the Great so I pass the advice on to you.

Pregnant and Furious

2010-09-29T14:14:00.001-07:00

To the surprise of many, the bookclubofone is currently gestating a new life form. I have spent the first few weeks of gestation reading up on advice, violently disagreeing with it and working myself up into a big hormonal strop.

What to Expect When You're Expecting by Heidi Murkoff

God, this book gave me the fury and no mistake. I can't imagine there's much you could do to yourself in pregnancy which would be worse for you than the stress induced by reading this. Heidi (quickly named Heidi Fuckoff by me) is obviously one of those Americans who believes that from the moment of conception the unborn child is indescribably precious while in contrast a pregnant woman is just a worthless bag of meat to carry it around in. The assumption that there is nothing you wouldn't sacrifice for your embryo/foetus, no matter how few cells it's currently composed of is pervasive and irritating. The tone of the book is shrill and preachy and it is full of advice which is so stringent as to be unfollowable. For example, if you are going to eat cherries during pregnancy, they should be organic. Your shoes must be neither high-heeled nor flat but should have a chunky, moderate heel. Buy some new ones if you have to. Although there is no actual evidence that eating nuts has any effect at all, you must avoid them to be on the safe side. What are you eating? Are you putting your love of roasted cashews above your childs health? Put that bag down you worthless whore, you're killing your baby!

For several weeks I raved and ranted at this book, promising that I was going to bury it at a crossroads with a stake through its black heart. However I have now reached a stage in the gestation process when I am a lot more serene and far hungrier so I am simply going to eat all the pages I disagree with, leaving a slender manual which might actually be of use.

Bring it on Baby: How to Have a Dude-Like Pregnancy by Zoe Williams

This was such a relief after "What To Expect..." that I couldn't even manage to get cross about the fact that it doesn't tell you how to have a dude-like pregnancy. In fact it doesn't really tell you how to do anything at all. The value of the book is that it lets you know in funny anecdotes that however worried you are about pregnancy and parenthood, Zoe has already been there and arsed it all up but both her kids are still alive, so you can stop fretting.

The Rough Guide to Pregnancy and Birth by Kaz Cooke

My favourite so far as it contains actual advice without the bossiness of What to Expect. It also has a week by week diary of the author's pregnancy which are witty and entertaining to read. Where What to Expect has pencil drawings of pregnants wearing expressions of bovine serenity, the rough guide has cartoons of fat, angry women which chimes better with my own experience.

The only thing to make me cross in this book is a very silly bit right at the end where it says you will have to think carefully about whether to let your baby have the MMR immunisation. Oh, FFS! Is Ben Goldacre completely wasting his time? Basically, you just need to decide whether you're in favour of immunisation or whether you're a total twat.

So there you have it: if you find yourself knocked up, get the rough guide as it is definitely the least bad.

Waterlog by Roger Deakin

2010-09-01T13:51:00.001-07:00

This is an account of Roger's journey around Britain swimming in the sea, rivers, lakes and lidos.

One of the things I especially like about Roger is that although he was a lifelong green campaigner he was not one of those conservationists who want to conserve nature by keeping the hoi polloi out of it. Some of my favourite parts are Roger's arguments with gamekeepers, fishery owners, the Environment Agency and several others. I like to see him being a querolous old git.

In some ways, this is a book in which nothing much happens. None of the swims Roger undertakes are particularly extreme - he doesn't cross the channel, for instance. He considers swimming across the coryvreckan whirlpool and then sensibly reconsiders. I think this kind of adds to its charm though; there's nothing here that you couldn't manage yourself if you found the correct location.

Inspired by this, I have been enjoying the sea, a waterfall plunge pool and my local outdoor pool this summer and only caught one horrific poo disease while doing it.

Darkmans by Nicola Barker

2010-07-28T14:18:00.000-07:00

Why, WHY did I buy this rubbish? This is a fine exemplar of everything I don't like about modern literary fiction. There are no likeable characters. The reader is allowed to see into everybody's head and the inside of each character's head looks exactly the same. When I finally reached the denuement I was mildly surprised that Nicola would ever think anyone would be interested.

I had stupidly hoped the book would be some sort of supernamtural thriller with maybe some literature round the edges but it turned out to be 850 pages of buggerall. It's not even bad enough to laugh at. A total waste of everyone's time, money and effort.

The Water Room by Christopher Fowler

2010-07-28T13:22:00.000-07:00

For various reasons I have been feeling in need of comfort of late and what could be more comforting than a traditional plays-by-the-rules detective novel? "The Water Room" is the second of Christopher Fowler's series featuring the octogenarian detectives Arthur Bryant (more decrepit than Miss Marple and grumpier than Inspector Morse) and John May (ancient but dapper and with an eye for the ladies). Between the two of them they have run the Perculiar Crimes Unit - a sort of underfunded British X Files - since it was established in the dark days of the Blitz.

An elderly woman is found dead in her basement having somehow drowned in river water. As the investigtion continues there are further deaths in the same terraced street. Is this coincidence or the work of a serial killer? And what is the husband of one of May's ex-girlfriends doing trailing about London at night with a load of caving equipment in the company of a dodgy Egyptian businessman? Because this is a proper, old school detective story we can rest assured that it will all be neatly tied up at the end.

There's a lot to like in the Bryant and May books. For a start there's extra tension because the heroes are so frail that if someone were to push them over in the street it would all be over. Also, there is usually a sinister or occult cast to their cases. Christopher Fowler also writes horror stories with good measure of humour in them. He's never going to trouble the Booker judges, but I've enjoyed everything I've read by him so far. He's a solid writer of genre fiction who recognises that there are a thousand things his readers ought to be getting on with so he'd better spin a good yarn. His work is nearly always set in London and replete with psychgeographic detail - like a version of Peter Ackroyd you might actually want to read.

The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli

2010-07-24T02:14:00.000-07:00

After wading through "How To Read A Book" I felt that should actually try to put the advice into practise by tackling one of the difficult books which has been lurking on my shelves for years. The Prince was probably the least intimidating of these, being quite a slender volume. The fact that it has become infamous as a sort of Linux-style HOWTO for evil overlords also makes it potentially interesting. This notorious book is also probably the longest CV-and-covering-letter in the history of the world as it was given to Lorenzo De Medici, the new ruler of Florence in the hopes that it would earn Machiavelli a place in his government. In this aim it was completely unsuccessful. In proper How To Read A Book style, I have tried to consider their 4 questions: What is the book about as a whole?, What are the detailed arguments?, Is it true? and What of it?

What is it about as a whole?
How to maintain yourself in power as the ruler of a small, undemocratic area.

What are the detailed arguments?
The book first lists of different types of principalities and the means by which each type may be held. This is followed by a section on troops of different types. We then move on to how a Prince should behave. There is then a section dealing with how to choose good ministers and avoid flatterers. To finish Machiavelli leaves us with a truly bizarre rant. More on that later.

First, I should probably condsider what Machiavelli means by a prince, because it doesn't seem to be the same as current English usage. You don't have to be son of a king, you just have to govern a "Principality" which could be something the size of a county, a small country or just a city state. We would probably use "warlord", "petty tyrant" or "robber baron" to describe Machiavelli's princes.

Another word to watch out for in the book is "Republic". The republics of Renaissance Italy were less like modern republics such as France or the USA, and more like ancient Greek republics such as Athens. For example, rulers would be drawn from amongst wealthy male citizens. There was not really much in the way of election or representation. These republics are oligarchies, not democracies.

Machiavelli believes that inherited principalities are most easily ruled: the people are used to it and no one really likes change. Just so long as you don't do anything stupid (like making the people hate you) everything will be fine. In principalities which you have conquered, the more of a dictatorial grip the last incumbent had, the easier it will be for you. If there was one all-powerful ruler and everyone else was "as slaves" then all you have to do is chase down and execute any descendents of the old prince as nobody else has the power to oppose you.

New principalities which are essentially handed to you by another more powerful ruler as a reward for your support in a joint venture can be a problem as you come into them before you have done the groundwork that would have been necessary to take them on your own (building up your armies, establishing a political powerbase, building financial reserves and so forth). Machiavelli argues that if you want to hold these territories you must go back and try to do that groundwork as soon as possible. He uses Caesare Borgia as a case study in how this should be done.

Most difficult are principalities which used to run their own affairs as republics. The people will default to hating you and resenting their loss of freedom (even ones who never actually had any in the first place!) and can easily be incited to rise up. There are only 3 options: financially ruin the area; set up a loyal puppet administration and take a hands off approach; go and live there.
The answer to many difficulties appears to be "go and live there". Machiavelli's reasoning is that you will know what's happening on the ground and can intervene in a timely fashion. If the people are disposed to like you they will be pleased that you have made their city your home, and if they don't you'll be able to strike fear into their hearts by having a few of them put to death. He observes that people can resent a distant ruler (true! Look at Scotland) and that any officials you send to rule new provinces for you are likely to be on the make and despoil them. His logic seems pretty sound and I can find only 2 flaws:

If the people hate you, you could be assassinated (I don't think this was considered such a big risk as at the time most princes would be expected to lead in battle and were probably reasonably accepting of violent death ).
You can only live in one place at a time, so the rate at which you can gain and hold territories is limited.

Despite the prevalence of mercenary armies in Italy at the time, Machiavelli believes is it best to have your own troops. Mercenaries are worse than useless: if their commanders are incompetent they are a liability, if they win battles for you, they can hold you to ransom. He illustrates this with a nice story about a ruler who has all his mercenary commanders put to death as he can't think what else he could safely do with them. Auxiliary troops are nearly as bad – they are lent to you by another Prince so cannot be relied on.

It is probably the part of the book which deals with how a prince ought to behave which earns the book its reputation. Machiavelli is credited with completely subverting all the other learned writings of the time which exhorted rulers to be merciful, godly, generous and so forth, completely turning this advice on its head.

When it comes to generousity, Machiavelli advises against spending your own money as that will make you poor. You should also think twice before using your subjects money as higher taxes will make them hate you. So what to do? Simply invade somewhere else and be generous with the loot from there! Now everyone's happy.

On the subject of mercy Machiavelli thinks that while it would be lovely to live by this Christian value, realistically, you're going to have to have someone put to death at some point and when that time comes, you should not flinch from it. He advises against using the death penalty a lot - just ringleaders of plots - and don't go nuts and start seeing conspiracies everywhere.

A prince need keep his word only when it suits him - and should not be naive enough to think others of his rank are will keep the deals they make with him.

If there is a point which Machiavelli particularly labours it is that a prince cannot afford to hated by the people. If they love you, that's great but if they fear you that's OK too. If they hate you they'll always be looking out for someone they'd prefer as a ruler. The best way to avoid being hated, he believes, is simply to resist helping yourself to your subjects womenfolk and property. He actually states that people will forgive you more readily for executing family members than for confiscating property! And I thought I had a low opinion of humanity...

The final section of The Prince is a bizarre and tangential rant about delivering Italy from foreigners. Large parts of it were apparently under the control of France and Spain at the time and Machiavelli seems to believe that the restored Medicis can save Italy from foreign scum. But the Medicis were essentially merchants and Florence had never really been a military power. For a man who throughout the book strikes me a rational (if amoral) pragmatist, this crazy-arsed patriotic call to arms seems out of character. Did he write this bit while he was drunk? Underneath this section in my copy of the book I have inscribed, "WTF?".

Is it true and what of it?
We should remember that The Prince is actually only half of Machiavelli's work on politics; he also wrote another book on how republics ought to be governed.

One of the quotes most frequently extracted from this book is that, “The Injury that you do a man should be such that you need not fear his revenge”. My Kung Fu club have appropriated this motto and it works for us as our aim is just to survive the next 10 minutes, but I don’t believe it will work for politics. The person who you “crush utterly” will have friends, family, allies, coreligionists. Even the dispossessed are dangerous; consider the Israel/Palestine conflict!

Unless you actually come to rule your own crazy, lawless third world country, it is not realistic to take the advice in the book literally. For example, as a manager in even the most ruthless industry, you will get precious little opportunity for having underlings who have outlived their usefulness put to death. If we take firing/demotion/make their job so shit they quit on their own to be the modern equivalent of execution, we can see Machiavelli's methods in every dysfunctional workplace in the land. In the book, Caesare Borgia pulls a trick where essentially he sends in his pet pitbull to sort out some tough problem, then when order has been established he steps in personally to shoot the nasty, mean dog and watches all the little people love him. I have seem the same trick work in a number of offices - the moral of the story is never be too keen to be someone else's thug.

It's also possible to apply the chapter on mercenaries to people like IT contractors or consultants.

Despite the number of macho arseholes keen to apply the values of The Prince to life in the workplace, I don't really think they're a good fit. Maybe this is just the self-justification of a person who doesn't have it in them to crush someone else for the sake of expediency, but I take the view that it's a small world and the toes you tread on today could well be connected to the ass you have to kiss tomorrow.

The kind of thinking behind The Prince, seeing every transaction as a “zero sum game” in which if someone else wins, we lose is currently very unfashionable, but a lot of people still think and behave this way. Reading the original gives a window into their mental worlds, leaving you forewarned and forearmed.

Some Things I Still Don’t Understand
Why are those who come to power by “crimes” are considered in a separate chapter to those that do it by military force? Is it because they have murdered people who matter while the military campaigners only killed peasants?
Machiavelli thinks that ecclesiastical principalities are great because you don’t need to bother to govern them. So who is running them?
Machiavelli seems to have some sort of crush on Pope Alexander VI's son, Caesare Borgia (brother of the famous poisoner Lucretia) . I'm amazed the Pope could get away with having children – I suppose if you pay for enough mercenaries, you can get away with anything.

To finish, here's a pop-psychology quiz which claims to find out how Machiavellian you are.
Amazingly, I score 66% and am considered to be “high mach” making me charming (hope so), glib (definitely), devious ( wrong. I am missing the part of the brain used for telling lies) and manipulative (if only!). I think the truth is that I am a Machwannabe. I put it to you that truly “High Mach” individuals will lie on the quiz and make sure they come out at 50% or below to avoid warning the rest of us.

How To Read A Book by Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren

2010-05-08T06:05:00.000-07:00

As both my regular readers will know, sometimes I worry that I just don’t get major works of literature. Either the entire literary establishment is wrong or I am. Bearing in mind my tendency to write loops that never exit, I think it’s probably me. A couple of years ago, I hoped John Sutherland would tell me what I was doing wrong but he was peddling the politically correct line about how everyone’s opinion is equally valid.

If there is one thing that How To Read a Book is not, it’s politically correct. For example, the authors write “men” when they mean “people” and the tone of the whole book is generally like being lectured by the kind of pipe-smoking old man who belongs to a dining club. Here’s a taste,

“…most readers are at a total loss if you ask them to say briefly what the whole book is about. Partly this is owing to the widespread inability to speak concise English sentences.”

Woah… That’s me put in my rambling, ungrammatical place! Still, the book was published in the 70s; maybe slagging off your readers was OK back then. The gist of the book is that despite reading all the time, most of us never lift our comprehension above the level that we achieved in Primary School. Not only is there a lot of finger-wagging in their style, but there are actually a series of exercises in the back of the book!

At least there are some things I've been doing right: my approach to fiction which is to read it as quickly as possible, desperate to find out what happens, living in the imaginary world of the book and allowing the author to manipulate my emotions is apparently exactly how first readings should be done. The trouble is that I should then go back over it and start deconstructing but I can rarely be arsed. I also have their permission to carry on marking pages and writing in the margins of my books - their you go E, I'm not just an uncultured vandal! One of the things I've been doing wrong for years is missing out the introductions, prefaces and so forth. My rationale was that the book should stand or fall on its own merit and shouldn't have to be propped up by various bits of extraneous crap. I have now been firmly ticked off and informed that these are proper parts of the book and not optional extras.

According to the authors, there are 4 questions which you should ask when you read a book: What's it about as a whole? What are the detailed arguments? Is it true? and so what? They also define 4 levels of reading:

Elementary Reading – understanding the words you read
Inspectional Reading – using indexes, contents, and scanning
Analytical Reading – understanding. Looking at structure. Making judgements & drawing conclusions
Syntopical reading – what I would call “reading around” a subject. The only time I’ve ever done this was for A level history!

Don’t panic if you didn’t know what “syntopical” meant. They made it up. They also believe that syntopical reading is aided by using the Sytopicon - a new kind of reference book designed by Adler to allow readers to look up sections of famous texts by subject or idea. It sounds pretty horrific to use in book form so no wonder they're trying to drum up some sales here. I think it might work a lot better as a website, though, so maybe this is an idea who's time has finally come.

Despite the fact that this is less of a book and more a series of tellings-off, there are still some pretty inspirational bits. Apparently, up until the 20th century, books on science, maths and philosophy were intended to be read by intelligent lay readers rather than experts so there is no reason that with a bit of work any of us shouldn't be able to understand the works of Euclid or Plato or Darwin. Imagine reading Euclid!

In brief: I can’t like these guys, but I suspect that they’re right. I've certainly trundled through enough books half asleep and come out the other end non the wiser.

Suspecting isn’t enough though – I am a woman of science! I must therefore put “How to Read a Book” to the test: Having finished it, I now plan to try to put these techniques into practise by reading one of the truly scary books from my shelf which I’ve been putting off for years, “The Prince” by Machievelli . Stay tuned to see whether I manage to make head or tail of it, or whether I just go back to reading children’s books…

Between The City and The Conveyancing

2010-03-17T12:55:00.000-07:00

This week I have mostly been reading “The City and The City” by China Mieville and it has been a messed-up, paranoia-inducing experience. The book is mostly a detective story, with an added is-this-a-fantasy-novel-or-not guessing game attached. Imagine that Aurelio Zen (link) got seconded into a Kafka story; that would be close to this...

Inspector Tyador Borlu works in the Extreme Crime Squad in the city state of Beszel which, as far as I can tell is somewhere in the Balkans. Like East and West Berlin, Beszel is a divided city; half of it is another city state called Ul Qoma and relations between the two are decidedly frosty. Unlike East and West Berlin, there is not a clear dividing line between Beszel and Ul Qoma: the land has been parcelled out street by street or even building by building with some shared areas known as “crosshatching”. So you might live in Beszel, and your next door neighbour might live in Ul Qoma and if you wanted to pop round and borrow a cup of sugar, it would be completely illegal just to nip round there. You would have to apply for a visa and if you got it, you'd have to cross over at the official boarder, Cupola House, in the centre of both cities. Not only is it illegal to step across the imaginary line from one city to another, if you are in the crosshatched zones you are not even allowed to acknowledge people from the other city, you have to “unsee” and “unhear” them. This makes driving round Beszel/Ul Quma very difficult as you have to avoid the foreign vehicles without officially seeing them. If this description of Beszel/Ul Quma sounds stupid or contrived, consider that cities are full of imaginary lines, zones where one type of person or another can't go and people you have to unsee. All of this bizarre behaviour is enforced by Breach. Citizens of both cities live in fear of Breach which they believe is constantly observing them. Breach is judge, jury and executioner for anyone who fails to keep to the rules. I spent most of the book trying to work out exactly what Breach is: Is it an imaginary bogey man to make the citizens police themselves? A Big Brother style secret police force? Is it even human at all?

At the beginning of the book, Borlu is called out to a poverty-stricken housing estate, to find the body of a young woman who has been murdered and dumped there. Pretty soon he discovers that she was a Canadian archaeology student called Mahalia Ghery who has been working in a dig in Ul Quma. Mahalia was researching Orciny – the fabled city which exists between Beszel and Ul Quma controls both. At first, Borlu cannot believe her research had anything to do with her murder – Orciny was a story Besz parents would tell their children at night before the Disneyfication of their country. But if Orciny doesn't exist why was Mahalia killed? And who is behind the official interference in the investigation? Inspector Borlu follows the trail all the way to Ul Quma, but eventually he cannot track the killer an stay within the law, and Breach comes for him...

I'm not sure what it is about this book that causes the paranoia. Perhaps it is the fact that I don't know anything for sure: I don't even know what kind of book I'm reading. Is it the kind of book that has magic in it, or a fairly straight detective story? Is it something in the language itself that feeds the uncertainty? If I knew what that magic ingredient was, I'd add it to all of my work emails in a quest to make my boss soil himself. The author's photo at the back of the book certainly doesn't help: with his bald head, piercings and muscles, China Mieville looks like the kind of surfer you really wouldn't want to drop in on. Maybe it has nothing to do with the book at all – maybe it is the other thing I've been reading this week, the enormous pile of documents from the solicitors handling my conveyancing which has caused my paranoid imaginings...

Lesbian Vampires in Jam!

2010-02-20T07:09:00.000-08:00

I have recently been reading "Carmilla" by J. Sherridan Le Fanu. This is the kind of book I really like because when someone asks, "What's that you're reading?" you can reply either, "Nineteenth century Gothic literature." or, "Lesbian vampires!" depending who's asking. Carmilla was an early and vampire story and one of the books which served as inspiration for
Bram Stoker's Dracula. The story is narrated by a beautiful nineteen-year-old who lives in a castle with her father and tells of how the mysterious Carmilla comes to stay with them. Carmilla doesn't get up until the afternoon, suffers from a strange illness and wants to touch the narrator inappropriately. Soon local peasant girls are found pale and dead and as the narrator begins to suffer from a bizarre langour, her father is eventually prevailed upon to call in the vampire hunter.

At the end of the novel, there are still a substantial number of loose ends: Carmilla originally arrived with her mother, who is presumably a vampire too and still on the loose. There was also an old woman in their carriage as well, so that's two of them. And what about all the peasants Carmilla drained? Are they coming back from the dead as lesbians? I am a little surprised that the narrator can see one vampire killed and assume that all is now well. If the book were more modern I would assume the extra vampires were being kept alive for the sequel, Carmilla Bites Back.

Amazon Recomendtions - A Rant

2010-02-07T09:43:00.000-08:00

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

2010-01-10T11:45:00.000-08:00

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

2010-01-10T11:31:00.000-08:00

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

2010-01-10T11:16:00.000-08:00

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

2009-11-05T12:10:00.000-08:00

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

2009-11-05T12:05:00.000-08:00

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

2009-10-24T07:11:00.000-07:00

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!

Bollocks To Alton Towers by Robin Halstead, Jason Hazeley, Alex Morris and Joel Morris

2009-09-21T12:48:00.000-07:00

It happens to all of us: we are just walking past some books when we spot one that is so interesting we have to buy it. This happens quite frequently to the BookClubOf1. What is less frequent is seeing a book which is so exciting you have to buy two copies. I spotted “Bollocks To Alton Towers” whilst looking for a birthday present for my Dad and ended up purchasing one for each of us.

The premise of the book (that Britain is full of small, eccentric tourist attractions which can be more fun than the big, famous ones) was one that resonated with my own childhood. Whether through anti-capitalist principles, or financial embarrassment, our parents were always reluctant to shell out for admission to anything. By the time I was 16, it seemed as though everyone in the world had been to Disneyland, Florida apart from me. I had, however, been round an awful lot of iron age hill forts and one nuclear power station.

For anyone with a hint of geek, the temptation is to use this book like a list of Munroes and tick off the attractions as you visit them. So I'm delighted to report that I have already been to Mother Shipton's Cave (visited with my folks when very young), Tebay Services, Portmerion, House of Marbles and Avebury.

Tebay Services is Britain's only independent motorway service station. Imagine that a farm shop and a high class delicatessen had a child together, and that child grew up and, in a fit of teenage rebelliousness, announced it wanted to be a motorway service station. That is Tebay. It will still cost you a lot to eat there, but you will be eating the very best local produce instead of filthy offerings from Planet Ginster. Plus you can buy something like top-notch chocolate or venison sausages for whoever has been looking after your cat. It's worth driving to Scotland just so you can visit Tebay on the way. Honest!

I first visited Avebury for E's hen weekend and my abiding memory is of the horrors of the Mystical Tat Shop. Avebury has two gift shops, one is a National Trust one which sells lots of lavender flavour things for old ladies. The other is the mystical tat shop which sells fearsome amounts of hippy crap covered in Celtic knotwork. It also sells the single most disturbing item I've ever seen in a gift shop: figures of a sort of chubby earth-goddess with her feet round the back of her head and her hands pulling her flaps apart. Apparently, this character is called Sheila Na Gig and she is giving birth to the universe or some such shit. Much as people who are true vertigo suffers don't just worry about falling off high things, they also worry that they might go mad and jump, I had to leave the mystical tat shop for fear that I might go mad and buy several of the things. When I went home and told my husband about the Sheila na Gigs, he was of the opinion that the tat shop owner had missed a trick and they ought to contain bottle openers or pencil sharpeners.

More exciting than the attractions I've already seen, are the recommendations which are very close to home. Diggerland and the Pack O' Cards pub are within a couple of hours' drive, while A La Ronde is actually on my drive to and from work but I've never been because I got in sulk with the National Trust after visiting Castle Drogo (a faked-up, 1920s bauhaus “castle” significantly newer than my own home, but more expensive to visit). These are so close that I might as well go. Both my siblings now live in Fancy London Town where the streets are paved with stabbed teenagers. Maybe they will take me to visit the Crystal Palace Dinosaurs when I next go to see them. And maybe my Oxford-based school friend could take me to the Pitt Rivers museum...

Like Munroes, some of these attractions will be easier to collect than others. For example, next time I visit the Lakes, if the weather's too bad for walking I will be demanding a visit to Eden Ostrich World or the Pencil Museum. I would very much like to visit Bletchly but this involves going to Milton Keynes and I can't imagine why I'd ever go there. Alas, I think I have missed the chance to see Barometer World as I believe it recently closed.

So what have they missed? Well, I can't claim an encyclopedic knowledge of Britain's visitor attractions, never having been to any of the ones that cost more than £10, but here's my cheapskate's rundown of other things you could look at:

That nuclear power station I visited as child was Hinkley Point in Somerset and the tour is free. I remember that the guide's Geiger tube didn't even pick up any background radiation for the whole tour, so I assume it was broken. You might want to take your own GM tube just to be on the safe side.
The Cerne Abbas Giant. A picture of a naked man with an enormous erection, carved into the side of a Dorset hill. This ticks all the boxes: it costs nothing plus it's good for a snigger.
The National Lobster Hatchery, Padstow. I haven't actually been in this one, but my friend AR has and so great was his enthusiasm for it that I pass on his recommendation. This is everything you might ever want to know about lobsters for only £3, apparently.
Letterston fish and chip shop. There must be hundreds of fish and chip shops which claim to be Britain's best. They're like splinters of the true cross or Robert The Bruce's caves. This one, however, is the best one I've been to so far. Other honourable mentions go to Chez Fred in Poole, Squires in Braunton and the chuffing expensive one at Dart's Farm.
Tinside Lido, Plymouth. I love lidos, they're a reminder of a bygone age when people wore hats and were hardy enough to swim out of doors in the UK. The south west seems to have been the epicentre of lido-building and the Plymouth one is a nice example being recently restored and a good size. For £3.60 (only 45p more than my regular, municipal pool) you can enjoy 1930s architecture and outdoor swimming. Lovely.
Big Pit (Pwll Mawr, for those of you who speak Klingon). Big Pit is your chance to go down a real coal mine for free!

Where Wizards Stay Up Late: the origins of the internet by Katie Hafner and Mathew Lyon

2009-09-06T03:00:00.000-07:00

As a programmer, I ought to have found this interesting, but unfortunately it was more like doing unpaid overtime. On several occasions I went to bed ahead of my husband, saying I wanted to read a bit of my book, only for him to arrive upstairs minutes later to find that its turgid prose had already stunned me into unconsciousness. Reading about someone else's marathon debugging session is only slightly less horrible than being in the midst of your own.

My one real moment of entertainment came from reading about the work of JCR Licklider. As well as having a funny name, he believed that by working with machines humans could achieve enhanced cognition. As someone who works with machines every day and often seems to be having cognitive difficulties, my response to his idea is a bitter, "Ha!". Most humans don't want their cognition enhanced and are content to muddle along with the same mixture of magical thinking and believing whatever is most convenient that we've been using ever since we were monkeys. We have created this amazing, worldwide network of machines and what do we use it for? Pornography, dating, looking at cute animals, watching amusing films of things in blenders and wanky, ego-stroking popularity contests. Some of the cleverest humans get as far as using it to pretend to be an elf. Quite frankly it would serve us all right if the Internet became self-aware and started exterminating us!

What is a little sad is that although many of the programmers mentioned were undoubtedly brilliant (and obsessive) and working at the bleeding edge of their fields, none of them got rich from their work. What you need to make money appears to middling intelligence, a sharp suit, glossy hair and a disarming smile. Bugger.

Despite the fact that I've not enjoyed this book, my friends seem to be queuing up to read it. I can't persuade them to like my favourite authors but they all want to read this crap. T! Humans, eh? They're just bloody perverse!

Larklight by Phillip Reeve

2009-08-09T14:03:00.000-07:00

This was an enormously enjoyable children's book set in a kind of space-faring version of the Victorian era. This is what we SF fans would call "Steam punk". It works pretty well as the book has the positive aspects of the "Thrilling Stories For Boys" kind of books (space pirates fighting giant spiders, for example), while satirising the jingoism of the originals. There is also Victorian-era science: space is full of "Aether" rather than vacuum.

My edition has been illustrated by David Wyatt and inside the covers of the book are lots of mock-Victorian adverts which are full of little jokes for the SF fan-boy. For example, an ad for the "Crighton" model of auto-butler and the "Lensman" series of telescopes.

Art and Mytrle Mumby live in Larklight, a rambling mansion floating somewhere between the Earth and the moon. Art reads thrilling tales of adventure in the farthest reaches of the Empire while Myrtle attempts to master the accomplishments of a gentlewoman (these appear to be fainting and playing the piano-forte). The house is attacked by giant spiders and their scientist father is carried off wrapped in web, leaving Art charged with protecting his sister. Art tells Mrytle that they must get to the lifeboats as, "something most disagreeable has happened!" and they are lunched on a series of adventures which include nearly being eaten by caterpillars, rescued by pirates, being repeatedly attacked by the giant spiders and saving the British Empire - hurrah!

The BookBarn!

2009-08-05T13:34:00.000-07:00

Last weekend I took advantage of a day in Somerset to visit the BookBarn and E came with me, despite being very pregnant now. If you have never been to the BookBarn, I almost recommend it. It is a strange experience.

Firstly, the BookBarn is rather coy about its physical location, choosing to perpetuate the myth that it’s just outside Bristol, rather owning up to being closer to Shepton Mallet. Not only that, there are no signs for the BookBarn on the main road. Either you are in on the secret of the BookBarn or the Bookbarn doesn’t want to see you.

The fuzziness regarding the whereabouts of things continues inside. The non-fiction and the fiction have been separated and the fiction is filed more-or-less by topic. At the front desk you can get a plan that purports to tell you where each subject is stored but if, for example, you go to the area where the caving books are supposed to be, you will find it full of arts and crafts. In the science section, we find military history.

The fiction is, if anything, worse. All the books by authors beginning with A have been put together, but they haven’t been alphabeticised any further than this. So for example if you’re wondering whether the BookBarn might have any books by Neil Gaiman, you’ll have to look at every book written by an author who’s surname begins with G to find out. I find it easier not to go with a list of books I want and just to wander aimlessly and see what I find. Otherwise BookBarn does by head in. And E can’t stay too long or she’ll start filing their books for them.

Despite the best efforts of the BookBarn to hide them from me, I went home with the following:

Tithe by Holly Black

Viriconium by M. John Harrison

Darkmans by Nicola Barker

Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Letham

RedRobe by Jon Courtenay Grimwood

Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet

The Raw Shark Texts - Steven Hall

2009-08-05T12:31:00.000-07:00

A man wakes up on the floor of his home with no memory of who he is or what has happened to him. All he has left of his previous life is an angry-looking ginger tom called Ian. He finds out that his name is Eric Sanderson and that his problems began when his girlfriend Clio died in an accident three years ago. Letters and parcels arrive from “The First Eric Sanderson” which explain that his memories have been eaten by a conceptual shark called The Ludovician.

When I was a little girl, someone at school told me about the film Jaws, and this gave me nightmares about a sort of shark which could swim through floors, with its dorsal fin sticking out of the carpet. I've revisited those nightmares in this book as Eric tries to find a way to destroy The Ludovician before it eats the rest of his mind. As the Ludovician is a conceptual fish, sometimes only its fin pokes through into reality. Scary...

One of my favourite sections of the book is when the First Eric Sanderson explains to the second how he allowed the Ludovician out into the world from the bottom a pit in un-space:

Down at the bottom there was a place filled with was rows and rows of stinking neglected fish tanks with sick, dead and dying fish; a horrible abandoned aquarium.

Reading those words took me back instantly to the aquarium underneath Blackpool Tower. It probably wasn't as nightmarish in reality as it seems in my memory (I was very small when I went there) but I can't help thinking that Mr Hall might have been.

This was a strange, enjoyable and unashamedly clever book. It seems to have a target audience of people who enjoy both Jaws and Borges. I think some readers are likely to be annoyed by the typographic tricks. For example, in places the words are laid out to form the shape of a shark or a remora and part of the novel works as a flick book – I thought that was quite smart though.

Read it, read it, read it. If you don't I will come round your house with my copy and stand over you until you do.

You can watch the Ludovician sneaking up on The Second Eric Sanderson through his telly on the video below. Have a cushion ready to hide behind...

Regressing into Childhood...

2009-07-14T10:46:00.000-07:00

Those people who know me in real life will be aware that I have had problems with nasty neighbours. These have culminated in my deciding to move house to be rid of them. This may strike people as quite an extreme solution but believe me, compared to weeping continually or murdering someone it becomes the only sensible option. Anyway, while I grapple with what wording to use to successfully sell my beloved home to someone else without actually lying, the last thing I want is to have to wrestle with difficult literature. No, what I want for the moment is to sit hunched in a corner and try to comfort myself by rocking backwards and forwards and reading nothing but children’s books.

A Hat Full of Sky by Terry Pratchet

This is the sequel to “The Wee Free Men” and is the second book about Tiffany Aching (an 11 year old witch from the chalk downs who once saw off the Queen of the fairies by hitting her with a skillet) and the Nac Mac Feegle (a clan of violent, drunken, woad-covered pictsies). Depending on who you believe the Nac Mac Feegle either left Fairyland of their own accord, rebelling against its Queen, or were thrown out for being “pished”.

In this novel, Tiffany leaves home to study witchcraft in the mountains. Whilst there her habit of casually stepping out of her body (which she taught herself to do because she didn’t have a mirror) has disastrous consequences when her empty body is taken over by an evil entity known as a hiver. The Nac Mac Feegle are soon on their way to rescue their favourite “hag”, but they are at their best with problems that can solved by nutting somebody…

One of the things I liked about the book was that since the majority of being a Discworld witch doesn’t involve magic, you can effectively Be Your Own Granny Weatherwax. Now that sounds like the crapest spin-off self-help since the Tao of Poo. Don’t look to me to create it; I’m already being my own lifecoach, feeling the fear and doing it anyway AND fighting the seven signs of aging. You’ll have to shift for yourself!

Across The Nightingale Floor

In some ways I have always wanted to be Japanese and enjoy practicing swordsmanship in the falling cherry blossom with killer cheekbones and epicanthic folds. I could really rock that ethnicity... So I expected to really enjoy “Across the Nightingale Floor”, a children's fantasy novel set somewhere a bit like medieval Japan.

A young man, Tomaso, sees his village destroyed and his mother and step-father murdered by the local warlord. He is then adopted by a rival aristocratic family (who rename him Takeo) and gradually finds out that his birth father was part of a tribe of magic ninjas. Takeo then has to practice his ninja-skills for an attempt on the life of the man who killed his family. Things don't quite go according to plan and although Takeo escapes with his life and the bad guy is dead by the end, so is Takeo's patron is killed, leaving him in the hands of “The Tribe” of magic ninjas.

I just didn't like this book as much as I expected to. Maybe it's because I have been dealing with some very stressful events recently, or maybe it's because I only seemed to have time to read it in 5 minute snatches. Also, am I the only person here who thinks that ninjas are exciting enough without having magic powers? There are two sequels to this novel, but I'm afraid I won't be bothering to read them. What with there being so many amazing books in the world there just isn't time to read the ones I think will only rate 50%.

King of Shadows by Susan Cooper

Nathan Field is part of a company of child actors putting on a production of A Midsummer Night's Dream in the reconstructed Globe theatre. One night he goes to bed with flu... and wakes up in 1599, about to perform the Dream with Shakespeare himself!

One of the things I like about this book it that Nat's crush on Shakespearereminds me of the way men lez up in Shakespeare plays. I have to confess that I find it very exciting when two good-looking actors put their arms round one another's shoulders and call each other “noble cuz”. Another reason to love this book is because it has my sister's favourite ending: He woke up and it was all a dream... or WAS it?

Top Books

2009-06-18T12:12:00.000-07:00

People often say to me* “Hey, Bookclubof1, I’m sick of misery memoirs and patronising chicklit. I’ve had it with hacks like Dan Brown/James Patterson/Stephen King/Barbara Cartland. I wanna read something that’ll blow my tiny mind! What do you recommend?” And I go round my bookshelves and take down the following...

Slaugherhouse 5 by Kurt Vonnegut

Catch 22 by Joseph Keller

Crash by J. G. Ballard

Vurt by Jeff Noon

Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami

The Tooth Fairy by Graham Joyce

Ghostworld by Daniel Clowes

Slaughtermatic by Steve Aylett

Whereupon, my friends eye my choices with surprise and fear before scuttling back to the bestseller lists.

Sigh.

*Actually they don’t, but I can dream...

Abuse of language #1: Toilet

2009-06-18T12:08:00.000-07:00

The word “toilet” is problematic to class-sensitive Brits at the best of times and anyone who wants to get on in this country would be well advised to avoid it altogether. What really makes me twitch, though is to hear it misused in the phrase, “to do a toilet”. This phrase just shrieks of Jeremy Kyle. If your child says it, you should break them of the habit by allowing them to soil themselves unless they can produce a grammatically correct request. If anyone over 10 uses it, you’re allowed to punch them.

Toilet can be used to mean having a wash and brush up, but it still isn’t a verb! And I hate to see it used as a mealy-mouthed euphemism for bodily functions. For example, I recently encountered a horrific article on the internet about the difficulties of getting pet cats to “toilet” in an acceptable location. As anyone with a dictionary knows, cats can make their toilet pretty much anywhere; it’s where they shit that’s the problem.

In summary

Wrong:

“Mummy, I need to do a toilet!”

“How to train your cat Where to Toilet”

Correct:

“Mummy, I need to wee/poo!”

“How to Train Your Cat to Shit in a Litter Tray”

Agent Zigzag by Ben Macintyre

2009-06-02T13:57:00.000-07:00

Not to be confused with the far superior “Agent Z and the Penguin From Mars”, Agent Zigzag is the true story of Eddie Chapman. Chapman was a criminal specialising in blowing up safes before the second world war and was languishing in Jersey prison when the island fell to the Nazis. In a bid to return to the UK mainland (or maybe just to earn some money, his motives are often pretty unclear) Chapman volunteered to spy for the Germans.

He was then left in jail in France while his request filtered through German bureaucracy. After being interviewed by the German secret service he was sprung and trained for sabotage mission to blow up the DeHavilland factory that made the Mosquito. Chapman parachuted into Britain and immediately defected. He was then used to feed inaccurate information to the Germans. MI5 faked the sabotage of the DeHavilland factory to keep his cover intact and Chapman was sent back to the Nazis via neutral Portugal.

Almost as soon as he arrived, Chapman sent a couple of bombs disguised as lumps of coal back home for the secret service to investigate, by suggesting that he smuggle them aboard the British merchant ship that brought him. The Germans then spent some time interviewing Chapman, to try to ensure that he had not been "turned" by the British. Nazi interrogation seemed to comprise mostly of taking Chapman out to expensive bars and restaurants and getting him drunk. If this is accurate, then MI5 are more than welcome to take a crack at me; I like a decent Sauvignon Blanc, Pims, Kier Royale and a cocktail of my own devising made from vodka, Archers and blue flavour Panda Pop.

After a lot of booze, Chapman was sent to Norway where he trained other German spies (passing their details on the the British). As the tide of the war turned against Germany, he was parachuted back into the UK with a mission to find out about secret U boat detection technology (there was no such thing; military intelligence just knew where subs would be due to intercepting their transmissions one the Enigma code had been cracked),radar and to feed back data to help target V1/V2 missiles.

When the war ended, Chapman was dropped by secret service. He wasn't “one of us” and didn't fit in with the public school types runnng the show. And it didn't help that he'd taken up with his criminal friends again. He lived the rest of his life as a crook. There was a film loosely based on Eddie Chapman's lifestory called "Triple Cross". I haven't seen it but I don't have high hopes for it; it's got Christopher Plumber in it.

Whatever a book blurb may say, real life is never more incredible than fiction. If I were to rewrite the story, I would have Chapman tortured by the Gestapo, stuff would really get blown up, rather than just faked and I would probably have killed off one of the nicer minor characters (Major Reed, Zigzag’s first handler or Dagmar, his Norwegian girlfriend) for extra pathos. It might be mean, but it makes a better story.

The Course of Honour by Lindsey Davis

2009-05-10T02:43:00.000-07:00

Before Lindsey Davis hit her stride with the Falco books, she had a go at historical romance in the form of this account of the love affair between Flavius Vespasianus (who would go on to become the Emperor Vepasian) and Antonia Caenis, an ex-slave from the royal palace. The book is very good in parts. For example, I particularly enjoyed the bits about Roman politics and palace intrigues and the demented, murderous antics of Caligula and Nero. Unfortunately, the bits about their actual relationship however, can strike me as a bit, “He was a victorious Roman general. She was a humble slavegirl. THEIR LOVE WOULD ROCK AN EMPIRE!” I would have preferred to find out more about the Year of Four Caesars and the civil war, which were dealt with very breifly.

If romance is not your thing (and to be honest, it isn't really mine, either) consider reading I, Claudius instead, of even The 12 Caesars by Suetonius. “The 12 Caesars” is particularly good fun; it's like finding a copy of Heat magazine which is 2000 years old.

Bad Science by Ben Goldacre

2009-05-09T13:37:00.000-07:00

Bad Science is effectively the book of the blog by the lovely Ben Goldacre*. Throughout the book Ben deconstructs sloppy journalism and abuses of scientific language, roughly in order of how angry Ben gets about them. So we start with relatively harmless bollocks like detoxing and face cream, moving on to Homeopathy and Nutritionism. Then we look at the ethics of pharmaceutical companies and finally media heath scares and hoaxes like MMR. On the way there are some excellent explanations of the placebo effect, and of probability and statistics, which strike many people as counter-intuitive. And some amusing ranting at Ben's favourite awful poo lady**.

There is also a bonus chapter available from the internet, which deals with a particularly unpleasant man who has been trying to flog vitamin pills to Africa as a cure for AIDS. This was left out of earlier editions of the book, due to the filthy villain attempting to sue our Ben.

I particularly liked the final chapter in which he complains bitterly about the quality of science journalism. Ben points out that there must be loads of people with degrees in science subjects who have gone on to work in unrelated fields (yes! Yes! Here I am, Ben!) and yet whenever we get any science on in the media it has to be dumbed down so the lowest common denominator crapwits who couldn't differentiate e^x with respect to x can understand it. Where's my science, eh, world? Is it in the same place as all the trousers that actually come up to your waist have gone?

To the roll call of “cargo cult science” (things that like to use sciencey-sounding language but completely lack the rigour of the genuine article) I would like to add psychology and economics. In fact I think it would greatly benefit the world if economics were renamed “guesswork”.

*I think I have a bit of an intellectual crush on him. I'm not interested in the contents of his trousers, but I do love him a bit. If he ever wants a platonic groupie, he knows where I am!

**Amoungst other hilarious claims, Gillian believes that "foul-smelling stools" are a sign of ill health. This especially amused me; McKeith literally thinks her shit don't smell.

Back to the Golden Age...

2009-04-11T01:00:00.000-07:00

What, in these difficult times, could be more cost-effective than reading second hand books?* This month I have been using second hand books to return to the “Golden Age” of science fiction, the 40s and 50s, when stories were relentlessly optimistic and everyone was looking forward to a shiny new world of spaceships, robot slaves and scantily-clad alien princesses. Unfortunately, I’ve been reading Kurt Vonnegut and Ray Bradbury, who rather bucked the trend for mindless optimism.

The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut

I bought my copy of The Sirens of Titan from a shelf of second hand books in Lillypool cafe in the Mendips for 10p. What a bargain! You don’t half get a lot of satire for your money.

Winston Niles Rumfoord is an aristocratic space adventurer who, together with his dog, Kazak, was sucked into a chrono-synclastic infundibulum in between earth and Mars. This means that he now exists as a waveform, rather than a person (appearing in human form only where the orbit of a planet intersects an antinode of his wave) and has knowledge of past and future. At first it appears that he has used this knowledge to toy with the lives of other people, including his wife and the rather reprehensible millionaire playboy Malachi Constant. Rumfoord engineers a war between Mars (whose population he builds from kidnapped Earthlings) and uses the resulting soul-searching to found The Church of God the Utterly Indifferent with the strap line “Take care of each other and the Almighty will take care of himself”.

When the action moves to Titan, we learn that the master manipulator is himself a puppet of aliens from the planet Tralfamadore: A Tralfamadorean robot called Salo has crashed there while taking a message from one side of the universe to another and his spacecraft requires a spare part. The whole evolution of life and intelligence on Earth was engineered by his home world just in order to provide him with a specially-shaped piece of metal to continue his journey. After being goaded by Rumfoord, Salo peeks at the message he’s being carrying to find that it is... a single dot.

Although funny and wittily told, this has to be one of the blackest comedies I’ve ever read: no one has any free will, millions die for a faked-up religion and the ultimate reason for human existence turns out to be completely feeble! A fine book, but if you only read one Vonnegut book in your life, make it "Slaughterhouse Five".

The Illustrated Man by Ray Bradbury

The Illustrated Man is a collection of short stories. Bradbury seems to me to write at the intersection of SF, fantasy and horror, but these stories are pretty much traditional science fiction. What makes Ray different from many of his contemporaries (and therefore more readable to the Bookclub of One) is that he has a realistically low opinion of human nature. This means he is unable to subscribe to a gleaming, hi-tec utopia; he knows what we'd really do with technology.

Two of my favourite stories were "The Velt" and "Zero Hour". In "The Velt" a couple use a sort of virtual reality theatre to educate and entertain their children and are subsequently murdered by the selfish, empathy-free brats they have spawned. In "Zero Hour" all the children in a small town become obsessed with a make-believe game called "invasion", which turns out not to be make-believe at all. The kids are being used as a fifth column for aliens and they've sold out humanity in return for being allowed to stay up an extra hour. I think I like these stories because I find children spooky and unfinished. You might think yours are cute, but when I look at them, I see those twins from The Shining or the little girl from F.E.A.R.

The absolute stand-out story for me, though, was The Concrete Mixer. A Martian invasion fleet arrives on Earth to a rapturous welcome. While the Martians thought they were conquerors, the Earth men see new consumers and new markets. The invaders are soon addicted to a life of booze, cars, pointless sex, indolence and useless spending. Their culture is plundered to make crappy Hollywood films which Earth sells back to them, their bodies are poisoned and their spirits are crushed. O God, I'm living in that particuar distopia right now!

*Other than going to the library. Or stealing books. Or reading over other people’s shoulders on public transport. Or downloading free ebooks and giving yourself a headache trying to read them. Or just shamelessly standing there in Waterstones, reading the whole thing in spite of the tutting (particularly effective for graphic novels, that method, as they are both pricey and quick to read). Now that I think about it, there are quite a few better sources of cheap books than the second hand market, but let’s celebrate it anyway. We’ll cover stealing another time.

Storm Front by Jim Butcher

2009-03-11T15:30:00.000-07:00

Well, this book fits squarely into the "Enjoyable Tosh" category and could even be a contender for my "Airport novel of the year" award.

It's the first book of the "Dresden Files", the cases of Harry Dresden a sort of wizard private detective. At first I was a little disappointed as I was hoping for something like Terry Pratchet or Douglas Adams but Mr Butcher takes his fantasy very seriously. The first chapter has a reference to wizards being "subtle and quick to anger" and I would rather read the kind of book that warns you not to meddle in the affairs of wizards as they are subtle and will piss on your computer. It took a while to come to terms with a po-faced book that thought vampires were a subject I should take seriously, I gradually began to really enjoy it. "Storm Front" worked for me as a pageturner. Eventually, I was so into it I got caught in the work canteen reading this silly book about a wizard. You just have to enjoy the magical special effects and ignore the clunking noises coming from the plot. One website described it as "Harry Potter for adults" - I think that's a fair description and I leave it to the reader to decide whether it's complimentary or not!

If you find yourself in an airport, and this is the only thing you kind find in English, relax and buy it, it's mostly harmless.

A quick poke about the internet showed me that "The Dresden Files" has become a TV series on SciFi. I look forward to finding out whether it is watchable when it comes to freeview (sometime around 2020, I guess).

My favourite quote:
"My name is Harry Blackstone Copperfield Dresden. Conjure by it at your own risk,"

Molesworth Books by Geoffrey Willans and Ronald Searle

2009-03-05T11:58:00.000-08:00

I complained so bitterly about how long and slow-moving "The Dream of Scipio" was that E (you remember E, disapproves of Derren Brown, that one) loaned me her two Molesworth books "Whizz for Atomms" and "Back in the Jug Agane" to cheer me up.

Molesworth is a pupil in the 3rd form at St Custards boarding school (you can use the magic of the Interweb to take a virtual tour round St Custards here ) and the books are not so much stories as short vignettes of school life. In common with "Transpotting", "A Clockwork Orange" and I can haz cheezburger, the Molesworth books are spelled phonetically and written in dialect. By someone who can't spell. This means that it takes a while to get into them. And I'm still not sure what some of the 1950s slang means. The trade mark style of these books makes it tempting to have a punt at mimicry so here are my school days at St Custards Grammar School For Girls:

The scene is the form room of 10b. The gurls are engayged in activities befitting yung wimmen cosmo quizzis, makeup, finding the bits abowt (HEM-HEM) in Shirley Conran books and givving each other annerreksya, ect, ect. But soft! (posh prose) here come their form teacher. Miss Batley teech ART and kno nothing. She woud not recognise the gerund if it started nesting in the art cupboard and drinking the poster paint. (Mrs Roebuck the latin teacher kno all about the gerund and gerundives. She also make us stand by our desks and sa "Salway magistra" like we were at Mallory Towers chiz chiz chiz! ). "Hullo clouds, hullo sky," sa Miss Batley, "Hullo Personal and soshal education worksheets, hullo anti smoeking leaflets ect ect". Miss Batley's antismoeking leaflets do more for the tabacco industry than smoeking beegles. 10b adopt the 1000 yard stair of trormatised veterans when will the torment end ect ect. And still it continue! Now we must do roll pla and try to sell each other drugs but hav scientist found a drug which fry the mind like personal and sowshal edukation? They hav not.

The Dream of Scipio - Iain Pears

2009-02-21T07:45:00.000-08:00

My God, this is one of those books that is just too bloody clever for its own good! One quote on the cover said it was “Illumined by a fizzing passion for the recondite”. What does that even mean?

My first disappointment was that the book is not about Scipio at all, nor is it even about the original “Dream of Scipio” written by Cicero. It interweaves 3 different stories of men from different periods in history. Each of them lives near Avignon at a time when it seems that civilisation itself is under threat and faces difficult moral dilemmas.

Manlius is a Roman of patrician class, living in Gaul at the time when it is falling to the Goths (insert your own joke about black nail varnish here). The empire can't protect its territories, the slaves needed to work in the fields keep running off to join the enemy and the Christian Church has started taking over a lot of the functions of the old state. Manlius's philosophy teacher Sophia persuades him to leave his estate, bribe his way to a Bishop's job and start using his expensive education in strategy and diplomacy to do what good he can, rather than sitting in his villa reading poetry as his world falls apart.

Olivier is a medieval poet whose patron is a cardinal at the court of Pope Clement. In between delivering the cardinals letters, he tracks down ancient manuscripts makes copies and tries to preserve them. He finds a piece called “The Dream of Scipio” written by Manlius. This interests him because he can scarcely understand it and those bits he can understand seem heretical, yet it was written by a bishop. He asks advice from a Jewish scholar and falls in love with his beautiful assistant – at a time when the black death comes to Avignon and the Jews are being used as scapegoats.

Julien Barneuve is a scholar who served in the trenches of the first world war. It was this experience which led him to his belief that civilisation is to be preserved at all costs. It also leads him to retreat from the world and channel his energies into academic studies. Both Manlius and Olivier are known to him. He puts years of work into attempting to unravel the meaning of Manlius's “Dream of Scipio” and he knows Olivier as a medieval poet famous for murdering his lover and having his hands and tongue removed as punishment. Julien's lover is a Jewish artist, and yet when France falls to the Germans he takes a job with the Vichy regime in order to prevent the country descending into chaos and barbarism.

One of my major complaints about the book is that it switches between stories far too frequently. I feel like I've barely found my feet in one time, when I'm whisked off to another. This makes reading hard work. The ending was very strong (though pretty depressing), but I would have edited out most of the middle of the book, were it up to me!

I enjoyed the reversals in the final act: Manlius is corrupted by power, betrays his friend and signs tracts of land over to the barbarians, allegedly to keep the peace. Olivier, whom the reader is led to despise as murderer and ignorant medieval clod, comes good. We finally see that he sacrificed his reputation as well as his life to save his girlfriend and tutor. Julien the Vichy official immolates himself, his house and his life's work and his funeral pyre serves as a beacon to warn his friend in the resistance. Julien goes a bit crazed in the end and starts to believe that while throughout his life he has striven to preserve “civilization” through academic studies and through collaborating, he was utterly wrong. He comes to think of the Holocaust as the end product of thousands of years of progress; it required administrators, industrialists, government, police and international co-operation to make it happen. It required philosophers and theologists to prepare the ground and set up justifications. Julien's last act is therefore to destroy as much knowledge and learning as he can.

The book gives us a sort of potted history of European anti-semitism, as well as telling the reader far more than he or she ever wanted to know about Neoplatonism. The central question of the book, however, is whether it is ever right to side with evil men, in order to ameliorate their actions. By the end, Iain Pears seems pretty clear that it isn't.

The argument which dupes Julien into working for the Vichy government is that someone else will do it if he doesn't, and they'd be harsher. For my money, this argument is completely fallacious and you've my permission to punch anyone who tries to use it on you. It is no more than the trick of rhetoric known as the false dichotomy. Consider: the only thing in the whole world you can really control is your own actions therefore you have a straightforward choice between agreeing to do evil and not. The consequences of not agreeing cannot be known in advance – maybe the next candidate will refuse too. My view also passes the simple ethical test passed down to me by my mum: “What if everybody behaved like that?”. If everybody behaved my way in these circumstances, evil jobs could only be done by completely amoral people, and though some exist, they are pretty rare. “The evil done by men of good will is worst of all”. If you don't believe me, go and see Watchmen when it comes out.

To my mind civilisation is not about arcane knowledge or a classical education. It's not necessarily even about the rule of law. The word literally means the habit of living in cities, and all we really need to carry on doing that is the ability to rub along with each other without violence. Politeness, consideration and cooperation are what makes us civilised not cultivated tastes for the high arts or spending our time in contemplation. The nice thing about my way of seeing this is that each and every one of us can either do our bit to keep civilisation going or hasten its demise through our own behaviour. It's up to you. Now go out there and save the world!

The Complete DR and Quinch by Alan Moore and Alan Davis

2009-02-18T12:07:00.000-08:00

D.R. and Quinch are a pair of alien delinquents from the future whose anarchic exploits featured in 2000AD. In the course of this compilation they destroy the Earth, start a war, send DR's new girlfriend bonkers and make a blockbuster movie. A very great number of things are blown up along the way. I think my favourite part was when they are locked in a miitary stockade with a deranged war veteran and come up with an intricate escape plan involving a bar of soap carved into a gun shape and a lump of plastic explosive made to look like soap.

The book was borrowed from my friend G.P. who gave the impression of being a bit disappointed with it because it wasn't as clever as the other Alan Moore comics in his collection. I feel much more forgiving towards it. Firstly it is early work, and secondly you have to bear in mind the readership of 2000AD: boys between 10 and 14. Also, I think I just like seeing two dumb kids stick it to authority. This is definitely a book to watch out for if you have children - you don't want the little buggers reading this, they'll be beyond taming!

By the end, I could, like, totally hear DR's distinctive speech patterns in my head, man. It was, like, totally amazing.

Favourite line: "A kiss on the hand may be quite continental, but tactical thermonuclear weaponry is a guy's best friend."

The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer

2009-02-04T12:08:00.000-08:00

Since New Year, I have mostly been reading this book, which I found in a second hand bookshop during the holidays.

I had 2 major reservations about starting it. The first was that since Germaine herself is ferociously clever, I might not understand it. My second worry was that I might become enraged at the injustices meted out to my gender, and take them out on my husband – a man who spends a LOT more time picking up after me than oppressing me. I needn't have worried about a lack of comprehension – book is very readable, full of humour and swearing. I like swearing; it is both big and clever.

The thrust of her argument is that women have been denied their sexuality: expected to say no, act coy and prefer Romance. The oppressed woman only has sex for the benefit of her man; as a reward for putting the bins out or something. This is no way to live!

Germaine is damning of “feminine wiles”, dishonest and manipulative behaviour. She exhorts us women not to live vicariously – nagging partners and children to achieve on our behalf – but to work out what we want to put our energy into doing it. ( This advice does come with a warning that this is likely to involve other people's disapproval and/or leaving a trail of destruction in your wake.) She rejects the idea of fighting against men: fighting is never a solution (it's a male perversion, apparently) and men are not the enemy. They are trapped by stereotyped gender roles just like we are. I'd say that's fair.

From my point of view it feels as if at lot has changed and the book has rather been overtaken by events – but how typical is my own experience? For example, I have been able to resist conforming to someone else's ideas of beauty pretty easily, but in hundreds of cheapo “documentaries” my fellow females are paying someone to cut into their tits, inject toxins to paralyse their faces, hoover the fat out of their ass or break and reset their noses in order to make themselves acceptable to men. Are they statistical anomalies or am I?

Then there is the world of work. I never felt that I suffered from prejudice, despite working in a male-dominated profession (I'm a software engineer). If anything being the only woman around made me stand out and has helped slightly. Rather than being paranoid that they will all be put out of work, men seem to be rather pleased by the idea that there are women out there somewhere who are amused by geek humour. At the bottom end of the market, the casualisation of labour and the invention of the McJob has meant that dead end roles can now be inflicted on men as well as women. Despite all this there is still a 17% pay gap (according to this month's BCS magazine). Companies have a legal duty not to pay men more than women, but when most companies – including my own employer – encourage a culture of secrecy around paychecks, it is impossible to tell whether they are playing by the rules.

I find myself disagreeing with Germaine over sex and marriage. She advocates not marrying and claims it is a prison. She argues that women chain themselves through marriage to unsuitable men in return for security then spend their lives acting as unpaid housekeeper. In my own marriage, my husband does not provide me with either physical of financial security (I have Kung Fu and an education for those) and I don't give him babies or housework. I hope and believe that we just live together 'cos we like one another. Marriage is also one of the areas where the book seems especially dated – Germaine claims that divorce is just too costly to allow women to break free from miserable situations. I've never tried getting divorced, but plenty of people seem to be managing it.

Just when I'd nearly convinced myself that gender equality was one of last century's debates, the following suddenly occurred to me: If there was another war that required conscription, can you imagine women being drafted? I can't. And yet, if we have the same rights as men, shouldn't we have the same duties? Why would it be unthinkable to send a child's mother off to war, but it's OK to deprive them of a father? Even though I've no desire to kill anyone or be shot at, I can't help thinking that the current state of affairs is terribly unfair on men and should therefore be changed.

And then there's still the Cult of Motherhood. Annoyingly enough, it is possible to carve out a life for yourself enjoying the same freedoms as men, but if you should give birth, it's all over and you are expected to sacrifice yourself for the good of your children. Suddenly a woman is expected to let her career languish, and to give up any hobbies she enjoys. Once you have children, any shreds of personality you might want to retain are just selfishness which must be purged from your soul. It is this attitude which has caused me to choose not to ever have children. Consider this: if raising children were really so chuffing fulfilling, why aren't men clamouring to do it?

One of my attitudes has changed as result of this book. I'm pretty much convinced by the argument that if you don't have a puritanical view of sex and see it as intrinsically evil, why would there be such a thing as having too many partners? What other consenting adults are getting up to is absolutely none of my business and I resolve to not to think of anyone as slutty. I should never joked to one friend that she was at risk of being added to the list of well-known ports.

My copy of the book comes with a mystery attached: One of the pages is missing having been ripped out. Why? In anger? But there’s plenty of swearing and polemic spread throughout the book. I like to image that somewhere, long ago a poor excuse for a husband came home one day to find that all trace of his wife had gone with no explanation other than a single page from “The Female Eunuch” stuck to the fridge door. That definitely makes the most satisfying story.

An Utterly Impartial History of Great Britain or 2000 Years of Upper Class Idiots in Charge by John O'Farrel

2009-01-11T12:58:00.000-08:00

This book is something like an attempt to create a more up-to-date version of "1066 And all That". It is a fine example of"scattergun" humour: Most jokes are a bit rubbish, but there are a lot of them and every so often one works. Given free choice, I generally prefer to get my humourous history from the lovely Mark Steel (How clever do all the people who mocked him for still being a socialist feel now,eh?) but this book has done its share of chipping away at the vast edifice of my ignorance...

Things I didn't know before I read this:

That we lost the hundred years war. It should have been bit of a clue to me that we don't own France anymore. I knew all about the longbow and the Battle of Aigincourt, but I wasn't aware of the bit where the French get really good with artillery and kick our asses.
The last time Britain was successfully invaded by a foreign power was not 1066 but 1688 when William of Orange showed up with a massive army and a very ropey claim to the throne and was crowned king.
That the "Rufus Stone" in the New Forrest marks the place where William Rufus was assassinated.

Things I still can't remember:
1. Which Henry was which.
2. Which Edward was which.

The Quiet American by Graham Greene

2009-01-08T15:01:00.000-08:00

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It's a work of moral philosophy which reads like a spy story. It's set in Vietnam when the war was still between the French and Vietnamese Communists. Fowler, a burnt-out British journalist comes into conflict with Pyle, an ideologically-motivated CIA agent as they are both in love with the beautiful Vietnamese girl, Phoung and they both see the war around them in completely different ways. The story is told in flashback; we start with Fowler and Phoung waiting for a visit from Pyle... but he never arrives. (Stop reading here if you don't want to know what happens!)

Fowler refuses to back one side or the other in the war and sees himself as an impartial observer. He uses opium until he doesn't care whether he lives or dies. He has been living for several years with Phoung, but has now been recalled to the UK and doesn't have the backbone to tell her he'll be leaving.

Plye, despite having no direct knowledge of Vietnam, has complete confidence in his book-learned theories that what the situation calls for is a "Third Force" which would fight for democracy against the communist Vietmihn and the colonialist French. He therefore supplies explosives to the opportunistic General The.

When the General's guerrillas use these to attack civilian targets, Fowler is on hand to witness the resulting death and mutilation first hand. Pyle himself is soon at the scene too but views the deaths of innocents as a necessary sacrifice and seems more disturbed b the fact that he has blood on his shoes. This event is too much for Fowler's policy of impartiality. He tells one of his journalistic contacts in the Communist militia that he knows who supplied the explosives and between them they agree that Fowler will invite Pyle out for dinner and the Communists will intercept him and kill him.

Fowler tells himself that his reasons for having Pyle killed was political, and that he simply couldn't allow Pyle to set up further civilian massacres. However, he gets Phoung back as a direct result of Pyle's death and by the end of the book he has secured a divorce from his estranged wife allowing him to bring Phoung back to Britain.

If you have been taking the pretentious pills (or drinking wine) it is possible to see Phoung as a metaphor for Vietnam: She is fought over by two men who don't really understand her (Fowler thinks she's “wonderfully ignorant” because she doesn't know who Hitler is – how much does he know about her country's history? Pyle cannot even speak either of the languages she does!). Fowler has a pragmatic view of their relationship and sees it as a transaction: Phoung needs money, security and a ticket out of Vietnam and he wants a pretty young companion so he doesn't have to face a lonely old age. Pyle has a soft-headed, romantic, chivalrous desire to “rescue” through marriage a woman he can't even communicate with. Phoung herself has almost no character at all as we only see her through their eyes.

I thought that many passages in the book were dramatic irony about the brutality and inefficiency of the American War in Vietnam. But this turned out not to be the case – the book was written in '55 and the Americans didn't join in officially until '59. However, much of the material about the danger of letting naïve Americans who've never been abroad before out to bring democracy to the rest of the world through force of arms is particularly pertinent at the moment with the current situation in Iraq. While I don't side with the racists who believe that Arab countries don't need democracy as they have their “own culture” of gold bath taps for some and dirty drinking water for most, I do think it's something people have to work out for themselves rather than have it brought in by force from outside.

Apparently, the Americans were very offended by this book and its depiction of their national character when it first came out. I'm not sure the British fare any better, though, with Fowler representing us: an opium addicted, murdering snob!

Tomorrow's World 3

2008-12-03T11:29:00.000-08:00

Any one who isn't jailbait must surely remember the BBC's long running science and technology program, Tomorrow's World. You can check out a video clip of the old-skool flying-down-the-middle-of-a-bar-of-Dairy-Milk opening sequence here!

Actually, I think it might be supposed to be a brain we are flying over. I'm not sure. Anyway, a few weekends ago I was checking out the sorry selection of damp and abandoned books which live on the outdoor shelves at the Castle Bookshop, Hay-On-Wye when I came across a book published to go with the series dating from 1974. “Woa,” I thought, “White heat of technology, 70s style!”. Then I opened it, saw the first of a series of very special illustrations and I was sold!

Many of my favourite parts of this book are pictures, includng an especially bizzare sequence of images from an abattoir. I can't make out whether the point of the pictures is supposed to be that the process is automated, or that it ought to be. There are a lot of men stabbing pigs in insanitary conditions and because it's the 70s, each worker has a fag on the go. In one image several dead sheep are suspended in what appear to be the showers at the SWCC caving hut.

Staying with livestock, my favourite experiment described in the book was one to see if cows could be fed on a diet of recycled paper pulp. The logic was that since cows have 4 stomachs to break down cellulose and paper is mostly cellulose, cows might be abale to eat paper. At the time of printing the results hadn't been published, but since cows are not currently chomping on old newsprint, I think the answer was “No”.

My favourite invention created by an individual, rather than a company. In 1974, Mr J Edwards of Chatham nearly invented the car navigation system. His idea was to record a set of instructions for getting from one place to another on an audio cassette, then use an odometer to work out how far the car has traveled and whether it was time to play the next instruction to the driver. It would have worked too, providing that you never took a wrong turning or found a road closed. If he's still alive today,I bet Mr Edwards wears a tin foil hat to stop the government stealing his ideas.

Another highlight was finding a reference to my former employers. The book says, “Scientists at Standard Telecommunications Laboratories have found a way of transmitting television and telephone signals down very long glass fibres.”. STL founded a group to build GPS test equipment in the 80s. After several takeovers, that group eventually became Spirent Communications who employed me between 2001 and 2006. Some of the very oldest and most dust-covered examples of our products still bore the STL logo. Unfortunately, the rest of STL was bought by Nortel and closed down.

The communcation section is generally excellent fun. The “phone of tomorrow” might just be able to handle call forwarding, if we're very lucky. There could also be a “box next to the phone” which would hold several numbers and do speed-dial for you. I like the assumption that there's no reason to build this functionality into the phone itself. I don't think I could have handled 70s telecoms; they were shit!

This book would have been even better if they had seen fit to include some predictions for the future. I would have loved a section on how they imagned we'd all be living in space by now, or perhaps some daring speculation about how one day there might be a computer in every city.

My top technological innovations since 1974

The World Wide Web
Mobile Phones
GPS
videos/HDD recorders as they allow you to watch telly whenever and avoid all the adverts.

Technology that I'm STILL waiting for

nuclear fusion to prduce more energy than it takes to get it going
my flying car
3D television
colonisation of space

Fragile Things by Neil Gaiman

2008-11-25T12:54:00.000-08:00

I caught sight of this book on my shelf the other day and I thought, “It's about time I read that, it must be nearly a year since AB lent it to me”. Then I thought about it some more and realised it must be closer to 3 years. Sorry!

For anyone not familiar with Neil Gaiman, he is probably best know for the Sandman Graphic novels, but has also written novels, short stories, the TV series “Neverwhere” and the film “Mirrormask”. His work is strange, funny and can be even scarier than Richard Madely. I love his prose, but I apply The Tolkein Rules which mean I don't have to read the poetry.

On the whole, I thought this was a stronger collection than “Smoke and Mirrors”. My favourite story was “October in the Chair” because it is written in the style of Ray Bradbury whose work I also love. The story that gave me nightmares was “Feeders and Eaters”, so I suppose that makes it something of a favourite too. For anyone who enjoyed “American Gods”, there's a short story about Shadow at the end.

New rule: You are allowed to fancy Neil Gaiman even if you're married because... well... he's Neil Gaiman

Singling Out the Couples by Stella Duffy

2008-11-20T11:48:00.000-08:00

I acquired this book in an online trade set up at Bookcrossing. Despite the ominous sign that its previous owner had precious little to say about it, I was interested as I had read and enjoyed “Beneath the Blonde”, a lesbian detective novel by the same author.

The blurb says that a princess, perfect in every way except one, sets up home in Notting Hill and begins targeting smug, ever-so-in-love couples, deliberately splitting them apart. It’s a peculiar book: half of it is extremely well observed psychological stuff about the fragility of the couples’ relationships, the lies they tell themselves and each other. The other half of it is everything that is crap and embarrassing about magical realism, for example Princess Cushla literally has no heart.

For me, this book fell between two stools and would have been far, far better with the fairytale elements removed. I think Stella is trying to be Angela Carter and that’s not a good thing. I don’t like Angela Carter either.

The Carter-esque characteristics seem to draw attention to the wrong elements of the writing, if you know what I mean... It’s as if Stella is stood on a chair shouting, “Everyone be quiet and look at me because I’m going to do some symbolism now!”.

Get back to your crime fiction, Duffy!

Dissolution by C. J. Sansom

2008-11-01T09:56:00.000-07:00

Dissolution is the first of a series of detective novels by Sansom set during the reign of Henry VIII. The title refers to the famous "Dissolution of the Monasteries", which we all had to cover in school, but is also a bit of a pun, refering to decay and moral turpitude.

The lawyer Mathew Shardlake is dispatched by Thomas Cromwell to Scarnsea Abbey where the King's representive, sent to pressure the Abbey into agreeing to disolve itself, has been murdered. Mathew and his assistent Mark (a comely lad with fancy doublets and a fashionable codpiece) must investigate the crime in a cold, sinister set of buildings inhabited by spooky monks, one of whom is a murder. If this sounds a little familiar, I spotted a nod to The Name of the Rose: the monks' library holds a copy of Aristotle's "On Comedy" but they believe it to be a 13th century fake.

As Shardlake investigates further, not only does he uncover 3 more murders and cess-pit of hidden sin amongst the monks, but he comes to see that the fine motives he has ascribed to the leaders of the English reformation (a readable bible and an end to corruption in the church) are largely absent. While he believed that the wealth of the church could be redistributed to the poor, the Dissolution is revealed to be nothing but a land-grab by the King's friends. By the end of the book his disillusionment is complete as he has found out that his patron, Cromwell has tortured confessions out of innocent men and perjured himself to get rid of Anne Boleyn. Mathew Shardlake needs a new job, but it is not clear how he will be able to resign and keep is skin... I need the next book to find out!

Of interest to me in this book was an alternative piece of weather symbolism. In many, many, many books, the weather is hot at the start and as the tension builds it gets hotter and more sultry, then there will be a huge storm at the climax of the story. I have become so bored with this pattern that one night, after wine, I ranted to a friend that I would eat the next book I found it in! In dissolution, the weather is still telling us what's happening in the story, but in a refreshing way. When Mathew and Mark arrive at the Abbey they are immediately trapped there by snow. As the mystery unfolds, it does so with a cold, clean, pure white backdrop. Once Mathew finds out about Cromwell, the thaw sets in. As his comfortable world of righteous Reformers and corrupt Catholics is torn down, England becomes one huge quagmire... and I don't have to eat the book.

What is Good? - A. C. Grayling

2008-11-01T08:58:00.000-07:00

I had heard A.C. Grayling on Radio 4 and he conformed to my ideas of what a philosopher ought to be. You can keep your sexy pseuds like Alain de Bottom and Julian Panini; philosophers should be querulous old men like Grayling. I like to imagine that he lives in an Oxford College where he enjoys drinking sherry and looking wistfully at pretty undergraduate boys. For all I know he is a heterosexual at a red-brick university, but I have to admit I’d find that disappointing...

I do not know very much about philosophy (for years I thought that Jeremy Bentham was that bloke who played Sherlock Holmes in the ITV series) but I do like a good think. 32 years of thinking have yielded the following results: I really don’t see why there should be a god. For a while I was worried that I had now had no basis for ethics, but was just making up stuff as I went along. Then it occurred to me that unless you are a moron fundamentalist, if you follow a religion, you still have to decide which bits of it you are going to practice and how you will resolve its contradictions, so there isn’t really much difference for atheists. Everyone who isn’t actually a complete mental is having to make it up as they go along.

Professor Grayling has been thinking much longer than me and come to a rather more extreme conclusion that religion is not just unnecessary to moral and ethical thinking, but actually inimical. The whole book is presented in terms of two steps forward in the form of advances in thought made by secular scholars, followed by one step back of religious backlash. Grayling sees religion as a force for evil in the world, which has been temporarily compelled to pretend to be nice by its unpopularity and shrinking power base in the developed world. And it’s hard to argue with him once he gets going in on this theme, with religious wars and inquisitions to back him up. However, there is still the occasional inflammatory statement left in the text with no surrounding evidence. E.g. “Islam is by nature fundamentalist”. WTF? Maybe this correct (how would I know, I know buggerall about Islam but what I see on telly), but I don’t think you can damn a whole religion without supplying a line of argument and some facts to back it up. Especially if the thrust of your whole book is that reason is better than dogma.

For reasons beyond my feeble intellect, the book deals only with Western philosophies. Why? The title is “What is Good?” not “What Have Various Europeans Believed Through History?”. For example, all I know about Confucianism is that it was a Chinese ethical system with no god. I would have liked to know more, and I'd have thought a book by an atheist philosopher might have told me.

Obviously, the book doesn’t actually tell you how to live (distrust anyone who does!) but if, like me, you think Kierkegaard is probably an Ikea shelving unit, it will give you a starting point. Now that I have read Philosophy 101, I've decided to become a Stoic, like Marcus Aurelius. (Anyone who has seen me coding will know I have a long way to go.) My favourite aspect of Stoicism, is the bit where you get to be Emperor and swan about in a long cloack while having Russel Crowe unleash hell on your behalf.

Terminal Beach by J. G. Ballard

2008-10-20T12:50:00.000-07:00

In the midst of life, we are in death. Especially if we’re reading Ballard. His abiding interests seem to be sex and death and, to be honest, I think he likes death better. His work often seems to deal with our destructiveness and self destructiveness and his view of humanity is pretty bleak, but perhaps that’s unsurprising for someone who spent their teenage years in a Japanese POW camp.

My favourite story was one about a dead giant which washed up on the beach. Crowds turn up to see him, but soon their wonder turns into thoughts of how to turn a profit from this new resource and a little industry sets up around the giant, cutting manageable chunks off him and carting them off to rendering plants until nothing is left. The most disturbing story in the book is probably “The Giaconda of the Twilight Noon” in which a man recovering from temporary blindness chooses to gouge out his eyes, Oedipus style, in order to better enjoy vivid sexual fantasies about his mother. This kind of thing is pretty much par for the course when one reads Ballard.

Many of the stories feel rather dated now; especially those ones which seem to fit the pattern of Heart of Darkness. There are several of these which feature an upper class white Englishman choosing disease and death amongst the natives in some corner of the Empire, rather than going home to safe and insipid civilised life which would involve having to pull himself together and stop behaving like a nutter. The colonial attitudes of the characters are jarring for the modern reader but I think they might have been pretty standard when the book was written in 1964.

I enjoyed this collection, but not as much as my favourite Ballard book, "Crash". I heartily recommend that one. It is grotesque and disturbing, but still tempts you to corner far too fast while listening to The Pixies.

Ballard himself has been in the news of late as by virtue of publishing an autobiography which reveals he’s dying of prostate cancer. Looks like JGB is occupying one of the best sun loungers on the Terminal Beach.

Mappa Mundi by Justina Robson

2008-10-14T06:57:00.000-07:00

As you can see, I have been on a bit of an SF binge. I blame Mary Barton, I really do.

Mappa Mundi was 600 plus pages of technothriller that saw me through my holiday this year. A huge scientific project to map the human mind is entering its final phases and it becomes clear that the US military means to use the technology for mind control. In the meantime, a Yorkshire academic working on the project accidentally becomes infected with her own mind expanding nano-hardware. Will she be able to use her enhanced intelligence to thwart the US military industrial complex and prevent humanity from becoming mindless slaves? (Clue: If you think the answer is “yes”, you are right.)

It’s an odd book which seems to lurch between the very clever (thought-provoking ideas on the nature of identity and the importance of free will) and the very daft (a handsome FBI agent on the trail of a mad scientist). I only found one actual crime against physics in it (a definition of fermions and bosons which was inaccurate to the point of being a lie) which isn’t bad going for an author whose background is linguistics. I give it a sci-fi rating of 3 spaceships out of a possible 5.

The best thing about this book though, is that it written by a lady SF writer who actually writes science fiction, rather than crapping on about bloody Elves.

Pushing Ice by Alastair Reynolds

2008-10-02T13:14:00.000-07:00

It’s been a while since I read any space opera and “Pushing Ice” was an enjoyable read which ticked all the boxes: spaceships, aliens (some nice; some nasty) and technology so advanced it might as well be magic.

The book is set in the near future when the asteroid belt has been opened up as a source of raw materials. Bella Lind and the crew of her ship the Rockhopper capture these lumps of rock and ice and push them back to earth, hence the title. When the moon Janus turns out not to be a moon at all but an alien artifact accelerating out of the solar system, the Rockhopper is the only ship close enough to study it before it passes beyond the reach of us humans forever.

I rather enjoyed the depiction of the macho culture of the asteroid miners. I lost track of the number of times in the opening chapters that one of the crew laconically remarks, “We push ice. It’s what we do.”. I tried introducing, “We push bits. It’s what we do.” at work, but nobody wanted to join in...

I like the fact that much of the book is character driven. The older I get, the more it bothers me that much “hard SF” reads as if it has been written by an adolescent boy with Asperger’s. The only problem is that I did stop reading it briefly because the interaction of the characters was just too real. As the stresses and strains of the mission cause the team to fracture and begin stabbing one another in the back, it started to remind me rather too much of being at work. At least we haven’t had any actual murders here...

There is a slightly odd structure to “Pushing Ice”. It is (as Dr M who lent it to me observed) a book of three halves. That is, rather than one overall plot, we appear to have three largely separate stories arranged sequentially. The very best science fiction books like “Salt” or “The Handmaid’s Tale” are not only cracking reads, but carry a political message, or tell us something fundamental about the nature of humanity. What do we learn from “Pushing Ice”? That you can’t trust corporate bosses? That when women fall out they are meaner than men? That just because you feel like you’re in an inertial reference frame, it aint necessarily so? The lack of a big concept or philosophical theme means that the book remains a well-executed piece of genre writing, but there's nothing wrong with that!

The Mammoth Book of Locked-Room Mysteries

2008-09-06T08:39:00.000-07:00

This month I have mostly been reading The Mammoth Book of Locked-Room Mysteries and Impossible Crimes. I once tried to write a locked-room mystery, and it sucked surprisingly hard. Many of the stories here suffer from the same problems as I did; the characters' motives don't seem sufficiently strong to explain their extreme behaviour, making the whole story appear contrived. There were some very enjoyable stories hidden amoungst the chaff, though.

One of my favourites was “The Burgler who Smelled Smoke” by Lynne Wood Block and Lawrence Block as it featured death by halon extinguisher (one of the Bastard Operator's favourite methods for dealing with IT managers). I also liked “Ice Elation” by Susannah Gregory. In this case I thought the setting – a team of scientists in an Antarctic research station drilling their way into Lake Vostok – made for a more interesting story. Perhaps the finest example of a locked room mystery in the book is “Murder in the Air” by Peter Tremayne in which the victim is somehow murdered whilst alone in an airplane toilet.

By about half way through I became temporarily obsessed with these mysteries. I spent longer than is healthy trying to work out a method for the impossible crime of killing my MD while he was in his glass office in full view of 20-odd programmers. I failed entirely, but my husband did come up with a rather neat method for murdering someone using a central-heating system. The best I was able to do was to come up with the ass-kickingly brilliant title, “Murder on the International Space Station”. Unfortunately I had no idea how such a murder might be committed and solved. If you're clever enough to write the story, I'll let you have the title for free!

Mary Barton by Elizabeth Gaskell

2008-08-03T10:54:00.000-07:00

Well the Bookclubof1 blog has been pretty quiet recently. That's because I've been chipping away at the Cannon again. I have been reading Mary Barton and I think I now understand why until relatively recently Mrs Gaskell has been so incredibly unfashionable. My aim here is to supply both of my readers with everything they'll ever need to know about Mary Barton in order to seem cultured without having to read the bugger.

Mrs Gaskell was the wife of a Unitarian minister and lived in Liverpool. “Mary Barton” was her first book (and the worst one of her's I've read so far) and was apparently very controversial in its day – although it's pretty hard to see why now. It was written during the recession of the 1840s and details the hard lives of the mill workers in Manchester. The plot runs something like this:

Mary's Mum dies leaving her with her father who works as a weaver in a dark, satanic mill. She gets a job as an apprentice dressmaker and everything goes well for a time. Mary is lucky enough to have a choice of two admirers: sensible, hardworking Jem Wilson who has a good job as an engineer or Harry Carson, the dandy git who is the mill owner's son. Being an idiot who thinks a rich man would marry a shop-girl, Mary initially prefers the latter but eventually come to realise Jem's sterling qualities. Unfortunately, this is where things start to get difficult. The recession comes and workers are laid off at the factory or have their hours cut. Many of them can't feed their families anymore and the people are sick and starving. John Barton is part of a Trade Union delegation which attempts to negotiate better conditions with the mill owners. Not only do the negotiations fall through, but Harry Carson finds the workers' raggedy appearance (caused by his own greed in the first place) hilariously funny. The union come up with a plan to murder him: they draw lots and whoever draws the marked piece of paper has to kill him. John Barton gets the job. When Carson is murdered the blame falls of Jem Wilson who was seen having a fight with him in the street over Mary. Mary guesses her dad is the killer. She wants to prevent Jem being hanged for murder, but can't bring herself to turn her dad in so she goes chasing about the country to find someone who can give him an alibi. Finally she confesses her undying love for Jem from the witness box while being cross-examined. It's cheesy. Cheese on toast.

And it's all cheese from here on in. Mary's Dad reappears wracked with guilt, confesses the murder to Harry Carson's father and then drops dead on the spot. Why couldn't he have done this 10 chapters earlier and saved Mary and Jem a whole load of hassle? The whole story just felt really contrived and unnecessary at this point. Anyway, Daddy Carson now decides that the way to prevent things like this happening in future is to be a nicer kind of mill owner, but at the point where we leave him he still believes that it is “The Market” that is starving his workers, not him. Bloody Adam Smith has a lot to answer for. Mary and Jem get married and emigrate to Canada where they live happily ever after, even though Jem's “frabbit” old mother comes to live with them. The cheesiest bit of all is right at the end though... throughout the book, Mary has a friend called Margaret who is a fantastic singer, but blind. Right at the end she and Jem get a letter from England which reveals, “They've done something to Margaret to give her back her sight!”. How crap! Very early laser surgery, I expect...

What you can't really appreciate from this precis is how very religious the author is. (And you can tell what the author thinks about bloody everything from the long expositiory lectures, planted like booby-traps in the text. That's something that you just don't get in modern novels – and a good thing too!). In some ways this is a good thing as it is Gaskell's religion that gives her sympathy for the poor which was mostly lacking in middle class people from her era. A lot of the time it makes her annoyingly sanctimonious: for example, it's a sin for the workers to feel downcast while watching their children starve as they should have faith in God. Also, the bourgoisie should conduct themselves in a moral and upstanding way to set a good example to the ignorant workers!

However progressive Gaskell might have been in her attitudes to the proles, in this book at least, she is no supporter of women. Early on John Barton complains: ”That's the worst of factory work for girls. They earn so much when work is plenty that they can maintain themselves”. Well, Heaven forbid that we should be able to take care of ourselves and not have to whore ourselves out to men! There's also lots of author's commentary about how inappropriate it is for wives to work because when the husband gets home all tired and finds that his missus hasn't tidied up and made him dinner it drives him to that den of sin known as the pub. Why don't working husbands drive wives to the gin shop? Before any one thinks that I am judging someone from the past by modern standards, I'd like to point out the The Vindication of the Rights of Woman was written some 50 years before Mary Barton, so Mrs G could have chosen to suck a lot less than this!

There are lots of critiques on the Internet which begin with statements about how Mrs Gaskell's writing is far too sentimental for our sophisticated modern tastes. I disagree. Yeah, she's too sentimental for anyone with intellectual pretensions, but look at the huge number of misery memoirs sold and try to tell me the Great British public are too sophisticated for Gaskell. She'd be entirely right as a scriptwriter for Hollywood romantic comedies. She'd also have been at home working on 'Stenders. And she'd have LOVED Brookside. In fact, I think that's a great essay question right there: If Elizabeth Gaskell were alive today, Brookside would still be on TV. Discuss.

The Night Watch - Sergei Lukyanenko

2008-07-06T14:00:00.000-07:00

In Moscow, amoungst the businessmen, prostitutes, drunks, petty criminals, organised criminals and blameless citizens living in their grey concrete appartments and cooking with Remoskas are the Others. Some of them are nice and some of them are nasty. After years spent in conflict which nearly destroyed both sides, the Others have come up with The Treaty. Light and Dark magicians have agreed to a truce where neither of them will influence normal humans. 2 forces have been set up to police it: The Night Watch observes the Dark Side while the Day Watch ensures that the Light forces live by the truce. For example, the Light has to allow vampires to eat a certain number of humans, provided they are hunted according to rules agreed by both sides. To a casual observer, there can often be precious little moral difference between the Light and the Dark.

Anton is a 30-something programmer (I like him already!) and lowly officer of the Night Watch. He is quite at home running queries on the Big Database of Magic Stuff and keeping the servers of the Light up. He's definitely not at home walking the corridors of the Metro with a clip full of silver bullets looking for a rogue vampire. Unfortunately, while the Dark is over-subscribed and probably has a waiting list to join, the Light is always short-staffed. Anton's problems don't end with the Dark; his own boss, the staggeringly Machievellian Boris Ignatievich, is quite capable of sacrificing pawns from the Light in the cause of a larger strategem against the Dark. And then there's Anton's new girlfriend who is turning out to have the makings of a top-notch sorcercess. Pretty soon, Anton will be the intellectual equivalent of tumble-drier-fluff to her and that makes it kind of hard to feel pleased for your partner. The book is essentially three stories centred on Anton in which he has to try and stay alive, not break the Treaty and avoid causing evil in increasingly difficult circumstances.

One of the things that really works for me in this book is the setting. Maybe I absorbed too much Yankee propaganda during the Cold War, but I find Russia intrinsically sinister and have no problem believing that Moscow might be full of vampires and werewolves. Maybe it's the endless snow and greyness, maybe it's the terrifying architecture (I've included a picture of one of the “Stalin Buildings”, scariest buildings in a scary, scary city), maybe it's the fact that the population appear to have recently voted to hand their country over wholesale to the KGB. When I think of Russia I think of Stalin's purges, the 3 am knock at the door from the secret police and (latterly) of a country where the politicians and the gangsters are impossible to tell apart. Think of all the “psychogeography” bollocks that has been written about London and imagine doing the same thing with a city which is equally old, but also has a rich history of seige, torture and tramps freezing to death. I visited Moscow in 1993 as part of a school history trip and rode on the Moscow Metro and as Mr Snipes says, “There are worse things out there than vampires”.

For what it's worth, here are my pretentious theories about what the deeper meaning of the book might be: It seems to me that the theme of the book is compromise and appeasement which leaves everyone tainted, but avoids open warfare. Perhaps this is meant to represent the way the USSR has been divvied up between robber baron business types the elected authorities. The difference between Light and Dark is all in their attitude to normal people. The Light is protective (communism?) while the Dark magicians seek to exploit the ordinary folk for person gain (capitalism?). Both sides are capable of murderous or duplicitous actions and are locked in stalemate. So perhaps the book is not a metaphor for modern Russia and it's really the Cold War all over again. Or maybe it's just a Russian fantasy novel...

Whatever, The Night Watch might not be literature, but it is an absolutely cracking read. I can give no higher praise for fiction than this: this book gave me nightmares. It fired up my imagination such that I spent the whole night trying to evade Dark magicians on the Moscow Metro.

I now fancy reading more sinister soviet goings on in the form of “The Master and Marguerita”. Hope it has Roger Delgado in it. He was my favourite Master.

Many thanks to L for lending me this book – sorry about the page I got marmalade on. Couldn’t put it down for breakfast!

Modesty Blaise - Peter O'Donnell

2008-06-23T12:10:00.000-07:00

When I was a kid, there was only one kick-ass babe to serve as a role model, and that was Wonderwoman. These days I seem to be armpit-deep in Buffies and Laras and Trinities, all exhorting me to express myself via the spinning kick. If I didn't have to earn a living, I would spend a couple of years on a women's studies PHD*, on an academic quest to find the very first kick-ass babe. One contender for the title would be Modesty Blaise.

Before reading the book, I had assumed that Modesty was some kind of cowgirl, but she is in fact an ex-international-jewel-thief-turned-secret-agent. She is of course fantastically beautiful as well as having her own, somewhat unrealistic fighting style. Modesty would fit in very well with our current Nuts culture in which stripping and feminism seem to have become confused, as her clothes come off pretty regularly. One of her preferred moves is "The Nailer", which consists of getting her nawks out and then taking advantage of the surprise this causes. Hilarious, but only a male author would think hand-to-hand fighting with unrestrained hooters was a good idea.

Modesty also comes equipped with Willie Garvin, her surprisingly likable right hand man. Willie is a cockney ex-criminal and in many other books in the "silly thriller" category would just have been a generic forelock-tugging representative of the lower orders. However, it soon becomes clear that he lays on the "apples and pears, guv'nor" stuff because it suits him to have the toffs write him off as an idiot.

Modesty's prefered weapon is also absolutely cool as... well, too cool for corroborative nouns. She favours the yawara, a tiny, handbag-sized blunt instrument. I was so impressed I considered making one for a bit, then decided that any hard object which will stick out a bit from your fist (phone, pen, hairbrush, cutlery) could be used the same way, without the legal implications of having a purpose-built weapon.

I can see myself searching Abe for the rest of the Modesty Blaise books, now. The only thing that can touch them in terms of adventure coupled with high camp is the Saint books. And would Simon Templar ever distract the guards by dropping his kecks, then take them on in unarmed combat with his tackle swinging about? He would not.

*Yeah, I'm well aware of the irony that only kept women have the time to pursue academic feminism. Nevermind, I'm living the dream instead.

Great Apes - Will Self

2008-06-14T13:12:00.000-07:00

Will Self is a love him or hate him kind of author. I've loved his short stories ever since I read "Grey Area" back when I was a student. I think that his deliberately overblown writing style is well-suited to the short form and becomes wearing if you have to read more than 10 pages of it. I had previously read "How the Dead Live" and didn't rate it much. I thought that the premise that when you die you just have to move to an unfashionable part of London was a good idea for a short story which had been padded out to novel length. And then there's his use of deliberately obscure words. There are 2 ways to go about reading anything by Self. The first is to have his book in one hand and the dictionary in the other. The second is just to assume that any words you don't know are probably rude. You won't go far wrong with this second approach.

Simon Dykes is an annoying Young British Artist happily spending his time getting wasted with his YBA mates and having unsuccessful attemts at drug-fuelled sex with his almost-entirely worthless girlfriend Sarah. One morning he wakes up to find that Sarah has turned int a chimpanzee... so has he... and so has everyone else in the world. Screaming and raving, Simon is sectioned and meets the notorious Dr Busner (a recurring character from some of Self's short stories) who makes it his mission to help Simon come to terms with his "chimpunity" at least partially because there might be a TV series in it for him.

One of the first things you cannot help but notice about chimps is their upsetting backsides which looks as if they’ve had a rectal prolapse. This is not glossed over, but dwelt upon with loving attention to detail. The chimp characters admire one another's floppy pink arse bits. In fact the phrase, "I revere your anal scrag" is used by the subservient chimps to suck up to the alphas. The whole book is pretty much obsessed with the wrong end of chimps. And with perineums. Most of us can g0 hours (actually, maybe months) without thinking about our perineums, but Will can only manage a few pages - it's a compulsion! I complained to a friend about it and he suggested that Mr Self's obsession is because he doesn't have a perineum himself. We think he has just one hole for everything, like birds do.

Anyway, back at the book, the apes represent everything about humans that we try to pretend we don't do, from indiscriminate public rutting, to hurting one another to enforce the pecking order, to picking horrible things out of their bum cracks. Apparently, this is satire. I just wish it was shorter satire! The quote on the front describes "Great Apes" as "Prodigiously original and very funny". I think I would have chosen the words "long" and "scatological" instead. As a short story writer, I revere Will Self's anal scrag, but there is a limit to the number pages I want to read about ape arses.

Don't go to Sedbergh...

2008-06-03T10:04:00.000-07:00

I am sure that "Sedbergh" means something nasty in The Meaning of Liff, and whatever it is, the place probably deserves it.

Sedbergh is supposed to be a "book town" in the style of Hay-On-Wye, although it only has 4 bookshops and one of them was closed when I visited. It was full of confused tourists wondering about, looking in the windows of closed shops (this was on a saturday). Like Budleigh Salterton, the place looks like it could use a short, sharp lesson in capitalism.

Of the three bookshops I could enter, all but one seemed to deal exclusively in musty hardbacks about Victorian cricketers.

I tried to make the best of Sedbergh by finding a cafe to sit and read the book I had with me. Alas, I was kicked out when the cafe shut at only 4pm! The pre-teen serving closed the cafe in the face of American tourists wanting traditional English tea and cake. Do the Yorkshire folk have no idea of economics?

Anyway, that's Sedbergh. I've been so that you don't have to.

On Finishing the Takeshi Kovacs Trilogy...

2008-06-03T09:31:00.000-07:00

Altered Carbon won the Philip K Dick Award in 2003, and it was a well-deserved win indeed!

It's a science fiction detective story (love a bit of crossover, me!) and also a kind of noir pastiche - it always seems to be night in the city and raining. One of the central ideas of the series is that a throughout their life a person's consciousness is continually backed up to a small storage device at the base of the skull, the “cortical stack”. The first consequence of this is that death is not necessarily permanent. For example, after being gunned down following some kind of botched criminal activity, Takeshi Kovacs wakes up in the rather used body of a Policeman, to find that a millionaire has paid to have him downloaded from the giant prison hard disk on which his data had been residing. The millionaire took his own head off with a plasma weapon a couple of days ago and had to have his last off-site backup downloaded into one of his spare bodies. Although it appears that no-one else could possibly have committed the crime he refuses to believe that he would ever kill himself (even temporarily) and has hired Kovacs as detective and enforcer, to find his murderer.

Takeshi Kovacs is a man with a past, or more accurately a whole heap of them. Until recently, he served in the Envoy Corps, the most feared soldiers anywhere in the “Protectorate” of human worlds. In this version of the future faster than light travel is not a possibility, but FTL communications are. This means that if you don't want to end up in a “Forever War” situation, you can send digitised humans to wherever you want to deploy your forces, download them into specially-built combat bodies. The Envoys are trained to deal with finding yourself on a new planet, wearing a new body with people shooting at you. As well as being trained in practical things like shooting and killing, they are also trained to observe, recall, learn to fit in and infiltrate. As a result they are so mistrusted that ex-Envoys are barred from nearly all positions of any power or responsibility in civilian life.

I think the reader can appreciate that when Kovacs works out who has been pulling his strings on Earth and why, he's going to embark on an ass-kicking spree of epic proportions.

How good was this book? It was so good that by the time I was half-way through, I was having nightmares about my time in the Envoy Corps. It was so good that I slightly resented the other two books in the trilogy for not being Altered Carbon (a bit of an own goal for Mr Morgan, that).

Broken Angels

I was rather sad to see that after playing detective Takeshi Kovacs is now back to killing people for money, serving with “The Wedge” (feared, but nothing like so much as the Envoys) in the civil war on Sanction IV.

By the time the book begins he's desperate to extricate himself from the war by any means possible. He is approached by a pilot and a younng archeologist who claim to have discovered some sort of portal leading directly to a fleet of abandonned Martian spaceships. Never mind the intellectual excitement of alien technology, the salvage on that lot has to be worth enough get the hell out Sanction IV! So a crack team is assembled by sorting through a bucket load of cortical stacks found on the battlefield, looking for special ops personnel with the right qualities for a spot of extra curricular speed-archeology. Getting to the Martian fleet before anyone else isn't going to be easy, especially since the area containing the portal is now full of illegal, experimental nano-tech wepons...

I felt that Broken Angels lacked a lot of the style of Altered Carbon, but it was enjoyable enough. The bad-ass spacemarine Wedge Commander aggrieved at the defection of his pet Envoy makes a fitting end-of-level baddie for the big fight at the end. And we get to find out more about the mysterious Martian artifacts left hanging about which humanity as used to jump-start their colonization of other planets, 2001-style.

At the start of Woken Furies, Kovacs is now killing for fun rather than profit, attempting to slowly wipe out the entire priest caste of the religion that killed his ex-girlfriend, Sarah. While running from the law in a damaged synthetic body he falls in with deComs, teams of mercenaries hired to decommission the 300 year-old weaponry which has been cluttering up his home planet since the Quellist uprising known as the Unsettlement. One of his new deCom friends has an unfortunate mental problem in that she appears to be sharing her head with someone who claims to be the long-dead revolutionary leader, Quellcrest Falconer. (Like Communism, Quellism has some excellent slogans and quotations, one of my favourites being, “When they ask how I died, tell them: Still angry.”).

Once again, it was nothing like as good as Altered Carbon, but “Woken Furies” still inspired me to vote Quellist at the local elections on May 1st.

While reading this trilogy, I had some logical problems with the cortical stack - why would the state pay for everyone to get one? Especially when the Protectorate is Uber-capitalist in all other ways. When do you fit one? Can the very young be killed off completely? Humans being what they are (and they do not seem to have become any less violent in Morgan's future) I suspect that the invention of the cortical stack would be followed pretty swiftly by the invention of some stack-frying EMP weapons.

On the whole, I was rather surprised to find that I like Takeshi Kovacs much more when he's being nice. Maybe I'm getting soft in my old age... I understand the concept of the flawed hero, and I totally get the premise that we can have a lot more tension in the story with a rather amoral lead charater, 'cos we never really know which way he'll go. Unfortunately, the downside of this is that if I don't really like the hero, I don't really care if he's properly killed, "stack irretrievable" or not. Sorry Tak!

Richard Morgan won this year's Arthur C Clarke Award (http://www.clarkeaward.com/) with “Black Man”. Llet's hope this means a return to Altered Carbon standards!

Tricks of the Mind - Derren Brown

2008-05-06T12:23:00.001-07:00

There are not many occasions when I feel that I have to justify my choice of reading material to anybody, in fact, this is the first one. I bought this book mainly in order to annoy my friend E. As I was examining the back cover in Waterstones she came up behind me and said in her finest disparaging tones, “You’re not buying Derren Brown, are you?”. “I am now!” replied the part of my brain that just likes to be contrary. Another motive was that whilst I find Brown creepy but fascinating, my husband refuses to watch any of his TV shows on the grounds that he is “a stinking wank-pixie”. You can’t argue with logic like that. You can only quietly buy the book instead.

As well as trying to persuade my chosen life-partner to watch “Trick of the Mind”, I had also seen Derren on a number of documentaries about the paranormal, on which he was pleasingly damning about stage mediums. I was puzzled, though, by fact that he seemed to think that preying on people by pretending to contact their dead relatives was a bit think, while persuading them to knock over a Securicor van was OK.

The book is divided into sections on magic tricks, memory, hypnotism and the paranormal. For my money, this final section is pretty much redundant. I can’t help feeling that the ground covered here has been covered better already by other books (Carl Sagan’s “The Demon-Haunted World”, for example). Fortunately, the other sections are far more interesting, and possibly even useful...

The section on memory takes a while to get to anything useful (Why would I want to remember lists? The only reason I can think of would be to show off my list remembering abilities to family and friends. And they'd only be entertained the first time round.) like memorizing sequences of digits. I don't yet have a Hanibal-Lector-style memory palace, though. I am still trying to find all the items to remember I've placed in an imaginary version of my house amongst the clutter. I think than when using the location technique in future, I should imagine a clean and tidy version of my home, rather than an exact copy.

I was a bit disappointed to read that, at least according to Derren, there is nothing particularly magical about hypnotism and that (according to him) the trance is not even a special mental state. Apparently it works though the facts that:

People tend to do whatever they're told anyway
They've been told about a magical thing called hypnosis which will make them do what they're told even more.

So, in the immortal words of Thom Yorke, you do it to yourself. There was a section I really enjoyed with instructions for using some of the prnciples of NLP cure yourself, or a friend from phobias caused by traumatic incidents in your past. Alas! I have no phobias to experiment on and I can't really imagine any of my phobic friends letting me have a go of theirs...

ME: Oh, go on. I promise you, I know what I'm doing. I read a book about it.
THEM: (skeptically) Oh yeah?
ME: Yes. By Derren Brown.
THEM: Fuck off.

Possibly I should try doing the opposite to the instructions and see if I can give myself a phobia.... The bit I'm most eager to get out and practice is spotting lies, though, as I can see immediate real-world uses for this skill at the poker table.

Book Derren does not seem the same as his stage/screen personality which is heavy on the sinister, and long on black coats. Perhaps I should have guessed that nobody can spend all their time hamming it up like a pantomime villain. He's also a lot cleverer than I ever gave him credit for, but very, very pleased with his own cleverness!

As I think you can tell from that last paragraph, I want to like him, but every so often he goes and writes something so jarring that we are back to square one. I can give no better example of than in the section on pacing and using leading language during “hypnotism” to achieve a given result on your patient/client/victim: “Think of it,” says Derren, “As a seduction..”.

(Bear with me people, I'm going for an extended metaphor here.) Go to your local Chinese takeaway and buy a tub of their glutinous sweet and sour sauce. Let it go cold, or better still, chill it in the fridge over night. Now arrange to have a friend take you by surprise at some point during the day and tip the whole lot down the back of your neck so that clammy, gellid slime drips down the line of your spine... Done it? Well, that is EXACTLY the sensation I feel when Derren Brown asks me to think of anything as a seduction.

Also rather disturbing are the pictures of portraits Derren has painted, which I can only describe as Gerald Scarfe meets Max Ernst.

I have always (well, ever since The Affair of the Big Glass Box) wanted to see David Blaine and Derren Brown fight to the death. I believed that whichever it went, the winner would be society as a whole. It’s still an appealing image, but I think I’d go as far as cheering for Derren now. Maybe I’d even hold his sinister, black coat for him.

And at least he’s not Paul McKenna! I have a horror of Paul McKenna. Just typing the name makes me shudder so hard I think my muscles are trying to detach themselves from my skeleton in order to slither off to some hypnotist-free bolt-hole. I think it is because he looks a bit like alleged celebrity sex-attacker Michael Barrymore. It is one thing to be convinced to eat raw onions on stage and quite another to find yourself dead in a swimming pool with a sex-toy up the bottom.

The Tenderness of Wolves - Stef Penny

2008-04-26T09:50:00.000-07:00

Like most right-thinking people, I have a bit of a fear of prize-winning novels. Despite feeling a weird sort of moral obligation to read them, I frequently find them boring, turgid, overwritten and without a sufficiently strong story to support the weight of all those words. If any of you have been living in fear of “The Tenderness of Wolves”, you can stop now. Despite winning the Costa Book of the Year 2006, it’s a very readable detective story and actually a real page-turner. In fact, I found it so enjoyable that I began to wonder why this counts as literary fiction while, say, the Inspector Morse novels don’t. So far, I’ve no answer to that.

At the start of a Canadian winter, a middle aged settler, Mrs Ross gets up one day to find that her neighbour, Laurent Jammet has been murdered and scalped during the night, and her teenage son has also gone missing. Pretty soon the gossips are suggesting that the two events are related. Some officials from The Hudson’s Bay Company (like a sort of Canadian equivalent of the Eat India Company) are sent to investigate and they get to work trampling on the feelings of the locals and busting some heads. As winter approaches, Mrs Ross chooses to set off through the snow in search of her son, in the hope of clearing his name.

I note that the Hudson Bay Trading Company is not only real, but is still trading. A wonder that it hasn’t sued Ms Penny as the story doesn’t show it a particularly good light. Mind you, I doubt that any of the unpleasant things the company and its representatives do aren’t historically accurate.

Anyway, if you’re planning to read this book for yourself, then stop reading this blog because I couldn’t work out how to discuss the book further without giving away some of the ending.

My overall impression is one of bleakness. Firstly we have the beautifully described Canadian winter, complete with frostbite, snow blindness and having to defrost the ink before you can write letters. Bleaker still, though, is that every single character seems to be an outsider. Everyone is isolated and alone in the world:

Mrs Ross carries the burden of her past as an asylum inmate and laudanum addict. By the time the story takes place her marriage has deteriorated to the point where her husband does not look at her or speak to her. I imagine them both looking as miserable as the couple in this famous picture. Mrs Ross’s son, Francis has also stopped speaking to her for reasons of his own...
Francis Ross cannot tell anyone about his romantic involvement with the murder victim, because it’s the 1840s and he’d probably be jailed or thrown in the loony bin. Nevertheless, his father guesses and becomes moodier than ever.
Donald Moody is deeply neurotic and convinced of his own inferiority. He has come from Scotland to work for the Company but hates the cold, the hardship, and the rough men who spend all winter drunk because there is nothing else to do. His motivation in aiding Mrs Ross is not so much a desire for justice, but to cover his arse out of fear that he will be deemed to have screwed up and his career will be over. He wastes a good deal of time mooning over the beautiful Susannah Knox before realising that it her clever, challenging sister, Maria he wants. Unfortunately, this realisation comes a bit late in the day, and Donald is shot by the villain before he can tell Maria about it.
Maria Knox is now doomed to die alone and be eaten by her cats, thanks to Donald’s death. Eclipsed by her prettier younger sister she has become a forbidding intellectual type and up to now, men have bolted at the sight of her.
Mr Knox has thrown away his status as local magistrate by allowing the half-Indian prisoner, William Parker, to escape. Knox couldn’t allow the Company investigators to beat up a prisoner, but he brings shame on his family and barely escapes jail himself for doing the right thing. He loses his position and with it his sense of purpose. All of this leaves him a broken man at the novel’s end.

And so it goes on! We are each of us ultimately alone in a world without mercy according to the mind behind this novel. It’s probably true, but in the interest of preserving sanity, I’m not going to think about it anymore.

One Virgin Too Many - Lindsey Davis

2008-04-13T12:56:00.000-07:00

What did the Romans ever do for us? Apart from the roads, the aqueducts and decreasing the population of ancient Britain they provided historical fodder for Lindsey Davis’s popular detective novels about Marcus Didius Falco. Falco scrapes a living as a private informer in Rome under the Emperor Vespasian. Vespasian is probably my favourite emperor because he was in charge of the 2nd Legion (stationed in Exeter, you know) and marched around the west country, um... killing my ancestors. I think this gives us a connection.

Like American detectives of the 1950s, Falco gives us a first person narrative of his investigations. He’s an ex-legionary whose tour of duty to Britain (cold, rainy and full of violent, woad-spattered ancestors of the bookclubofone) lurks in his backstory in much the same way that ‘Nam or WW2 do for tough-guy American detectives. This is where Falco’s macho credentials end though. As a good Italian boy, he has an extended family including a domineering mother, spirited girlfriend and slightly bullying sisters to keep him in line. This tends to be what keeps this series in the “cozy mysteries” category. Unlike more morally dubious detectives (like Aurelio Zen, for example ) there is never any doubt that Falco will do the right thing in the end; if he didn’t his female relatives would hound him to the ends of the earth.

In this the 11th book in the series, Falco gets a visit from a six year-old child from one of Rome's foremost families who insists that one of her relatives wants to kill her. Unfortunately, he's in no mood for precocious children, having just come back from telling his favourite sister that her ne'er-do-well husband has been thrown to the lions in Tripoli during the 10th book. Alas, he sends the kiddie packing, only for her to go missing a couple of days later. In the meantime, his girlfriend's layabout brother is trying to get into a religious cult called the Arval Brothers (who sound like Animal House for grown up Romans). He gets blackballed... and then trips over a murdered body while leaving the feast in a big strop, so Falco has two mysteries to solve.

If you are already a fan of the series, well read on as this is much the same as the last couple. If you've never read any of these books, my advice would be to start with The Silver Pigs. That is the first book and I found it much edgier and more suspenseful than most of the others. And Exeter features briefly!

Open the door, get on the floor, everybody walk the dinosaur!

2008-03-27T13:54:00.000-07:00

Boom! Boom! Akkalakka-boom-boom!

Hands up who wants to see cave men fighting dinosaurs? Yep, that's pretty much everyone. The only problem is that millions of years separate cave men and dinosaurs making feasible combat unlikely. So how about, right, an alternative world in which the meteor that caused the K/T extinction never hit? In such a world cavemen could fight highly evolved, super-intelligent dinosaurs! And that would be even better! Harry Harrison's “West of Eden” is set in just such a world and delivers fantastic, enjoyable SF hokum together with top-notch caveman/dinosaur* action.

The book features 2 made up languages (one dinosaur, one human), which results in the kind of cheerful gibberish you really only get in SF books:

“It stood, it walked like it was human, Tanu. A murgu, father but it has hands like ours.”

“Commander, you will take 10 of your strongest crewmembers ashore at once. Armed with hesotsan. You will have the uruketo stand by here.” Great stuff.

The plot, well... the plot doesn't really matter, but it goes a bit like this: Humans and dinosaurs meet and it doesn't go well. The more advanced dinosaurs track down and eliminate a whole tribe of humans, except for one boy who the take as a research subject. This boy Kerrick, learns to speak dinosaur and eventually comes to be highly prized by their leader for his ability to say one thing and think another (the dinosaur language is based on their body language making it extremely difficult for them to lie to each other). Kerrick eventually escapes an uses his knowledge of dinosaur society to help the humans destroy the dinosaur city.

A word on dinosaur technology: dinosaurs are heavily into wet-ware having become masters of DNA manipulation to create life forms to use as tools (like Justina Robson's Forged but less cool). Trouble is, they don't use fire, or work metals, so I'm not sure how they got this technology in the first place. For example, they have created an artificial life form which is all googley eyes and lenses to use as a microscope, but before this was invented, how would they be able to see the structure of DNA and meddle with it in order to create the googley-eye-beast-microscope in the first place? There are chicken-and-egg problems there.

Another point which annoyed me repeatedly is that the author has used the word “sentience” when he means intelligence. As I understand it intelligence enables me to solve problems and perform complex tasks, while sentience is self awareness; sentience is the little voice in your head that's doing the director's commentary on your life. For example, he talks about light emitting plants which the dinosaurs use to guard the perimeter of their camps. Apparently these have been bred “sentient” to enable them to detect motion and light up attackers. They don't want sentience for that, intelligence will do! No-one wants a sentient weapon. Well, no one who's ever seen Dark Star...

West of Eden comes with the book equivalent of a DVD of extra material: dictionaries of human and dinosaur languages at the back of the book, a history of the world according to dinosaurs and notes on each of the different culture. I paid the exactly as much attention as I do DVD extras.

The review of a book which is such good fun should end on a upbeat note, so here goes: Cavemen! Dinosaurs! You have to imagine the furry thongs and bikinis yourself but any regular reader of SF will be able to do that without any trouble.

* I should point out that I do not mean “caveman slash dinosaur” in the sense of “slash fiction”. Well, except for one very wrong and mercifully brief scene...

Dawn of the Dumb - Charlie Brooker

2008-03-16T05:19:00.000-07:00

I love Charlie Brooker. Love him for his demented rants born from having any kind of conscience in the modern world, love him for his balls-out rudeness about minor celebrities and reality TV idiots (all of whom are asking for it, in my opinion). Yes, I think I have a bit of a crush on him, despite the fact that I've a shrew notion he'd be whiny and high-maintenance in person. Anyway, you don't want to hear me say it's funny, you want a look at the funniness itself:

“My least favourite Hazel McWitch lookalike” = Gillian McKeith
“If a penis could chose its own wardrobe and hair stylist, chances are it'd end up looking like Duane “Dog” Chapman star of Dog the Bountyhunter.” I especially liked the bit about how Duane's hairstyle looks “like the entire cast of The Lost Boys crossed with a gay lion”.
“Slough looks like it was never actually built, merely crapped into position by a misanthropic, mediocre God.”
Deborah Meaden of Dragon's Den, “could chew the tin balls off a Cyberman”
A BB contestant is described in the following terms, “With a face like a perineum with tiny dots drawn on it for eyes, he was the human equivalent of a cock- shaped novelty pen with ego problems”

So the Brooker book (which the whole English-speaking world except for me got for Christmas) is pretty funny. It's also ecologically sound, being constructed entirely from recycled Guardian columns.

One thing which strikes me as bit unfair about Brooker, though is this: He's funny, but is he actually funnier or cleverer than the people you know in real life? I'm not sure he is. CB's humour reminds me strongly of my friend TLO - I suspect that the only reason Charlie has a newspaper column and a TV show and TLO doesn't, is that TLO is actually better equipped for real-life and therefore able to hold don a 9-5 job.

What are the scores, Jorge Borge?

2008-03-05T12:13:00.000-08:00

This month I have mostly been reading "Labyrinths" by Jorge Luis Borges.

Apparently, Mr Borges writes “metafiction”so the first thing I had to do was look up what the hell that was. I also looked up “symbolism” as that was allegedly a big influence. Having read the definition of symbolism, I felt no wiser as to what it actually was so I just had to get on with reading the book in continuing ignorance.

The book is collection of short stories and essays. The stories are short, but at the same time immensely dense, referencing any number of other pieces of fiction inside them. This is really, really confusing as Borges’ fiction also makes liberal use of describing books that don’t exist, false biographies and deliberately false attributions. I end up feeling that I must have guessed wrong at least once about which bits were fact and where the words have come from, therefore I have been proven to be as daft and ignorant as all those people who thought Ghostwatch was a genuine documentary. Not only that, but the subject matter takes in big philosophical questions about such things as identity, free will, consciousness and reality. And the words are really hard.

My mind is pretty much blown.

Much like the film Primer, I have enjoyed Borges, and I’d recommend him, but I can’t honest claim to have understood the half of these stories. I liked the “Library of Babel” which struck me as much like the internet in that it contains everything you might ever want to know hidden amongst tides of lies and crap. I also liked the story about the magician who dreams a man into existence. This was easier going for someone who spent their youth with PKD!

How many words did I have to look up? LOTS!

Cosmogony – The study of the origin of the universe

Numina - Plural of “numen” which means a presiding divinity or spirit of a place; Creative energy; genius.

Verisimilar – having the appearance of truth; probable

Apodictic - Necessarily or demonstrably true; incontrovertible

Tetrach - A provincial ruler or vassal king who owed allegiance to the Roman Empire.

Nitid – bright, lustrous.

Teleology – I wish this meant the study of television, but alas it does not. Apparently it is the belief that everything has an ultimate, original cause and the search for evidence of design in nature. Sounds like a cross between a child recursively asking “Why?” and the endlessly moronic “intelligent design” doctrine. The study of this ology looks like a waste of neurons. I am cross that such a word even exists. Why not join with me in deliberately misusing it to mean “The study of television”? Eventually, the meaning will change!

Pullulate – to send out shoots, to breed or multiply, to swarm or teem.

Panegyric – an elaborate formal compliment.

Borges is another person who is done no favours at all by the modern desire for photos of the author. He was obviously scarily intellectual, but looks like a cross between a basset hound and a Galapagos tortoise.

Pulp Fiction for January

2008-02-05T10:25:00.000-08:00

There are some who probably believe that January is the month for tackling the weighty tomes that have been sitting unread on your shelf for the past year, making you feel guilty. I could not disagree more. With the outside cold and dark and all my money spent long before payday, January already has plenty of potential for misery without making things any worse. Therefore I have indulging in a bit of pulpish genre fiction to cheer myself up.

All Fun and Games Until Someone Loses An Eye – Christopher Brookmeyer

This book is currently the top contender for “Airport Novel of the Year”, and award (bestowed in a star-studded ceremony which takes place in my imagination) which I give for the most entertainly daft paperback thriller I've read all year. Previous winners include “Good News, Bad News” by Mark Wolstonecroft and a delightfully silly book about an ex-navy seal going cave diving, so it's pretty prestigious. In real life All Fun and Games was winner of the 2007 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse prize for comic writing – although this is no guarantee of anything; the same prize was won by DBC Pierre's “Vernon God Little” which is unspeakably depressing!

Anyway, the plot is that a top scientist goes missing from his job at a secret weapons research facility. He is being hunted by all the major arms manufacturers in order that they can either make use of his research, or ensure that it is never completed. The leader of a team of mercenaries hired by the scientist's original employer comes up with a brilliant plan: he will hire the one person who will stop at absolutely nothing to find the missing scientist... his mum! His mum is a forty something Scottish housewife who has never committed so much as parking offence. All this is about to change as wee Janet goes AWOL from her suburban life and finds the skills learned in boxercise proove very useful in the cut-throat world of international espionage.

As I race towards middle age myself, I find that I particularly like books and films which are kind to ladies of this age (Check out Kung Fu Hustle – it features a chain-smoking, plump, middle-aged lady kung fu master!). I like to think that I will still be allowed to have adventures when I'm forty. One thing I didn't like was the sex scene between Janet and the international man of mystery who has recruited her. I think this is partly just me (I prefer my sexual tension unresolved) and partly because it felt like the author was writing to a formula (e.g. hollywood blockbusters must have 3 explosions and a car chase, international spy stories need at least one sex scene) rather than allowing his characters to behave consistently. Nevertheless, I was enormously pleased when Janet left her annoying, complacent husband at the end. Bugger girl power, this book has middle-aged-woman-firing-two-9mm-barettas-at-once-power.

I Am Legend – Richard Matheson

This book is number 2 in the “SF masterworks” series. Does this mean that it is officially the 2^nd best SF ever? Don't know about that but really good for its time and well worth a read if you haven't already. In fact, go and read it right now as I'm about to give away the ending.

Robert Neville might well be the last human left alive. A mystery virus seems to have turned everyone else into vampires. By night he cowers in his fortified house and by day he repairs his defences, then seeks out and stakes as many sleeping vampires has he can find.

Eventually his house is infitrated by Ruth, part of a group of people infected with the virus, who have managed to stave off full undeadness (with magical mcguffin tablets of some kind). This allows them to retain their personalties and intelligence and now they are rebuiling society – for vampires. When members of this group finally capture Neville and sentence him to death, he realises that from their point of view he his the night salking thing of terror who comes and kills them when they are helpless in their beds. He notes with grim satisfaction that he has become a creature of legend.

My husband I both read this recently while off work with the flu and it becoes particularly resonnant if read when you've been at home all day on your own, bored, lonely and feeling like you might well be the last person alive. Much of the point of the book seems to be about the dehumanising nature of hardship. After the death of his wife and daughter Neville seems to have lost the capacity for any feeling oter than anger. His constnat conflit with the vampires has made him nable to think of them as anything other than blood-seeking animals, desite observing intelligent behaviour in some of them – he even captures some of them alive to experiment on when he is trying to investigate their condition.

Not sure if I can go & see Will Smith film as I fear some Hollywood arse-wit will have gone and stuck a happy ending on to it.

If King Arthur had worn tweed...

2008-01-13T08:32:00.000-08:00

For ages now I have been reading “The Once and Future King” by T.H. White. This is essentially a retelling of Arthurian legend, viewed through the prism of 1950s politics and morality. It comprises of 4 books: “The Sword in the Stone”(famously adapted by Disney), “Queen of Air and Darkness”, “The Ill-Made Knight” and ”The Candle in The Wind”. The first two books are rather good, but the second two threatened to bore the living arse off me.

“The Sword in the Stone” is clever and funny (the Disney film is actually surprisingly true to the book). Arthur is still an interesting character at this point because he's just a boy and still fallible and human. Further into the saga, Arthur is just so damn good, wise and kind that he becomes terribly dull. Merlin overseas Arthur's childhood and works to instill a sense of right and wrong into him, as opposed to the standard education for a mediaeval monarch which would have been learning endless manners and protocol and absorbing the idea that you are better than everyone else and can impose your will on the peasants through violence. In some places, the writing is actually very funny with characters such as Sir Ector and King Pellinore given dialogue that makes them sound like overbred upperclass twits. In many places though, there's just too much detail on the habits of the mediaeval aristocracy. For example, I don't need an exhaustive rundown of all the different breeds of hunting dogs and the protocol for handling each. I don't need a list of heraldic animals and I don't care what the difference between lions couchant, rampant, or passant regardant is. Despite these information dumps, this book still contained my favourite moment in the whole saga:

King Pellinore has spent his whole life hunting the Questing Beast (aka The Beast Glatisant), a weird creature which has the head of a snake, the body of a lippard (lizard?, leopard?) and the hooves of a hart. It makes a noise like a pack of hounds and only a Pellinore can catch it. The years of sleeping in forests and fields begin to take their toll on King Pellinore, and he accepts an invitation from a fellow knight to stay in his castle, sleep on a feather bed and have a bit of a holiday from the Questing Beast. On a Boxing Day boar hunt, they find the Questing Beast lying half-dead in the snow – it has been pining away without King Pellinore to chase it! He takes it home and feeds it bread and milk until it is healthy, then gives it a head start and sets off after it with renewed vigour.

The second book was also a pretty good read. In this book Arthur is trying to secure his new kingdom against rebellious Scots, and old-style robber barons reluctant to sign up to his new order of niceness. As part of this process, Arthur and Merlin invent the round table to that knights gagging to fight someone can harness their testosterone and use it for good. It is also in this book that Arthur sows the seeds of his destruction by accidentally sleeping with his half sister, Morgause. And crazy, cat boiling, brother humping Queen Morgause really does steal the show in this book. A woman so deluded she offers to be the bait in a unicorn hunt, despite having four strapping sons! She may be mad and bad, but since all the other women in the whole saga are a waste of space, I can't help feeling some grudging admiration...

Now we come to “The Ill-Made Knight” which deals mostly with the story of Lancelot and Gwenevere. I have never had any sympathy for those two and nothing Mr White had to say changed my mind. Faithless, whorish people often whine the excuse: “You can't help who you fall in love with.”. Maybe, maybe not, but you definitely CAN help who you have sex with. There is no excuse for having a personal life like something from Deidre's Casebook; it is just plain sluttish. Please remember that it is only polite to break up with one lover before you move on to the next. my contempt for the protagonists made this book pretty hard going. The structure of it seems to be that somebody accuses Gwenevere of adultery and trail by combat is used to prove her innocence or guilt. Lancelot then acts as her champion and kills the accuser. This is repeated about seventeen times.

The monotony is slightly relieved by the quest for the Holy Grail. I would have liked to have more details about this but the way that the story is told is that the reader is left hanging about Camelot with Arthur and Gwenevere, getting only sketchy impressions of what happened from returning knights. One good result is that following the Grail quest, smug, virginal, boring Galahad (Lancelot's accidental son – it's a long story) becomes so chuffing perfect that he evolves into a life-form made of pure energy and buggers off... like the tedious, pixie-eared girl from Voyager.

By the time I arrived at the final book, I have to admit I had begun to skim a bit. Modred hatches a scheme to destroy the round table by waiting til Arthur is off somewhere on business, then catching Lancelot red-handed in Gwenevere's bedroom. The lovers flee to France and the Round Table broken up as some knights are loyal to Arthur while others side with Lancelot. Arthur pursues Lancelot, mostly to appease Gawaine, who's brothers got in the way of Lancelot's escape and were cut down while unarmed. There is an extended and particularly pointless battle in which people who are friends try half-heartedly to kill each other in order that honour be satisfied. Meanwhile Mordred is left in charge of England, where he raises an army of fascist supporters in black uniforms, declares himself king and tries to marry Gwenevere. By the time Arthur realises the danger it is too late – all his knights are dead and he is a worn out old man left to fight a battle he can't possibly hope to win. His final action is to dispatch a messenger boy with orders to tell everyone he meets the story of a legendary king who tried to make things better by persuading people to be nice to one another.

To my disappointment, many of my favourite bits of Arthurian legend, such as getting Excalibur from the Lady of the Lake, Gawaine & the Green Knight, going to the Vale of Avalon etc. aren't in the book at all. And in all the other versions of the legend I've read, Morgause's role is played by Morgana Le Fey. That's the thing about legends, though: they're always a bit vague.

White assumes his assumes the readers will have already read Mallory's Morte d'Arthur. Maybe this was true in the 50s (after all there was no lolcats then, noPeepshow, no Heroes so people might have been desperate enough) but it certainly isn't true in my case. I have read stories of the individual knights in books of Celtic myth which I bought in the hippy crystal shops of my wild, impetuous youth. I have read “The Mists of Avalon” by Marrion Zimmer Bradley, which is told from the perspective of Morgana Le Fey, but not Mallory. Unfortunately, White seems to have left out many bits and pieces on the grounds that he'd just be going over ground already covered by Mallory. But one of my reasons for reading him was so that I wouldn't have to read Mallory!

The Killing Joke - Anthony Horowitz

2008-01-06T08:14:00.000-08:00

When I was about 10, Anthony Horowitz was my literary hero. He was the author of the excellent Diamond Brothers books “The Falcon’s Malteeser”, “Public Enemy Number Two” and “South by Southeast”. Not only that, but he wrote many of the scripts for my favourite TV program at the time, “Robin of Sherwood”, in which the gorgeous Michael Praed romped about the forest with his flowing, glossy mullet to a Clannad soundtrack. When my sister lent me a book Anthony had written for adults I was childishly excited...

Well, no real life book was ever going to live up to those impossibly high expectations!

The premise of the book is that a man overhears a sick joke in a pub and wonders who makes these things up. So he tries to trace the joke back to its origin. It turns out that all our nation's jokes are created by a shady government organisation which is willing to kill to protect itself.

(Let me take this opportunity to reassure any readers that not all jokes are produced by the government. Some of my friends and I make up our own. This is a lot like making your own jam/cakes/clothes in that the finished product is a bit shaky, but you get a tremendous sense of achievement. Here's an example: What's Dr Who's favourite readymeal? Gallifraybentos pies! As you can probably tell, I've yet to reach the stage when anyone else repeats one of my jokes.)

Anyway, the book putters along with the hapless hero being hunted by an Englishman, an Irishman and a Scotsman, framed for a series of dwarf murders, falling in love and finally escaping from the villains clutches at the last minute. The book also seems to have the message that although many aspects of jokes are unpleasant or politically incorrect, a life without humour would be truly unbearable.

I am not quite sure how best to express my disappointment with this book; it's not really bad, but it occasionally feels hastily lashed together, as if the author were using one of those “Solutions for Fiction Writers” books. For example: Why would someone be that offended by a sick joke? OK, let's say it was about his Mum. But why would he be a struggling out-of-work actor if his Mum's famous enough to have jokes told about her death? Let's say she gave him up for adoption – that's good enough for Gilbert and Sulivan and it's good enough for us! Except that it isn't quite. Horowitz's adult fiction,like my jokes, needs a bit more work.

The Story of the Little Mole Who Knew That it Was None of his Business - Werner Holzwarth and Wolf Erlbruch

2007-12-23T11:11:00.000-08:00

I think I have just found the stand-out read of 2007.

I have received this book as a Christmas present after my friend J told me about it and I refused to believe that such a book could exist. Basically, this is a large colourful children's picture book about a mole who wakes up one day to find a Mr Whippy - style turd on his head. The irate the mole goes round all his animal friends, asking if they have perpetrated this outrage. By way of an alibi the other animals show the mole what their spoor looks like and how it does not match the one he's wearing. For example, the goat:

"'Me? No, how could I? I do it like this!' and plippety plop - a pile of toffee - coloured little balls tumbled on the grass. The little mole found them almost appealing."

Eventually, the mole meets some flies who are able to taste his shit-turban and tell him what animal it comes from. And then he's out for revenge, crimping off a little mole length on his enemy!

I was amazed by the subject matter of this book. I am going to keep a copy out on display in my living room for visitors to leaf through... That's right... it'll be a glass coffee table book!

The Peculiar Memories of Thomas Penman by Bruce Robinson

2007-12-23T10:24:00.000-08:00

A coming-of-age tale by the writer of "Withnail and I" set in the 1950s. And what a strange decade the 1950s were: beating your children was acceptable while masturbation was beyond the pale.

Thomas Penman is 15 and lives with his godawful parents who hate him and each other. His father actively beats and bullies him while his limp and useless mother spends all her time boiling up cheap, nasty meat for her dogs which she allows to shit in the house. By the end of the book you can practically smell the shit and dogmeat. Also living with them is Thomas' beloved grandfather who is dying of cancer. Being 15, Thomas is not so much concerned with the gaping hole that the old man's death will leave in his life, but with what will happen to his grandfather's prodigious collection of pornography on his demise. Grandfather is not a loveable, white-haired, Werther's-toting old gent! Following the trauma of serving in the First World War, he went a bit strange and devoted himself to creating rather eccentric porn - such as erotic stories about boys at public school and pictures of naked women whose bums he has replaced with a second pair of breasts. The jewel in this porno crown turns out to be a picture of a woman with who seems to have a duck up her arse, with just its head sticking out. If Grandad dies, Mum and Dad will go through his things and this priceless collection will be thrown away. And so the young, gonad-driven Thomas begins the sneaky rumaging through his grandad's stuff that will eventually expose all his family's secrets.

I really enjoyed this book, mostly because it is filled with lurid descriptions of rather disgusting things, whether they are old, incontinent dogs, the contents of teenage boys' minds, the hypocrisy of nearly all the adults or the grisly deaths of crabs exploded by Thomas and his best friend as a hobby. All of life is here and looking pretty unwholesome. Here's a taste taken from a description of how Thomas lurks about his home:

"More often than not he located in the hall, wedged between the wall and a piece of furniture called a tallboy. When there was no one around this was his favourite spot. It was a dark, secret place, with bland wallpaper covered in dots. No one else ever got in here. (The only other person who ever got in here was his grandfather who had been known to exploit the isolation to hang his testicles over the banisters.)"

From now on whenever some old timer tries to tell me that things were better in the 50s when children weren't cheeky, women knew their place and gays could probably be burned at the stake, I shall be thinking of the woman with a duck up her arse...

Book-Related Disappointment...

2007-12-18T05:12:00.000-08:00

Last week I had a brilliant idea for a book. Not a novel, but one of those amusing stocking filler books without much content (ideal for a lazy git like me to write). It was going to be the Schott’s Miscellany of Christmas 2008. My idea was to write a dictionary of words that sound rude but aren’t. I had the words “crapulent”, “turdiform” and “pismire” to begin with and despite my friend’s protestation that “Three words do not make a book.”, I was confident that the F, C and S sections of any decent dictionary would yield further results.

Imagine, then my disappointment at coming across “Butt Rot and Bottom Gas: A Glossary of Tragically Misunderstood Words” by Eric Groves in my local Waterstones! Large quantities of easily-earned money no longer await me and it’s back to the day job...

Words I have had to look up...

2007-12-17T14:40:00.000-08:00

Of late I have found myself having to resort to the dictionary a great deal. I thought I would share the words I've been looking up so that you (whoever you are) can get really good scores when doing the "Improve your wordpower" page in old copies of Reader's Digest in doctors' waiting rooms.

1. Demiurge - Sounds as if it ought to be half an urge, but turns out to mean an ancient Greek magistrate or a deputy god responsible for creating the material universe.
2. Acromeglic – Medical term to describe someone suffering from a form of pituitary cancer which causes them to make too much growth hormone (notable sufferer = Andre The Giant!). To my great upset, I found this word in one of my sister’s columns. So much for my theory that I’m the bright one...
3. Pismire – Another one that sounds like one thing but means another. Actually an ant.
4. Quintain – A target for practising jousting.
5. Halidome – holy place, sanctuary.

Will Storr vs The Supernatural - Will Storr

2007-11-21T10:46:00.000-08:00

I would never have read this book if left to my own devices, but it was sent to me by my sister and she can be very insistent. I don’t want to have a battle of wills with someone who can run 26 miles!

As I checked out the book I noticed that it was made out of recycled articles written for such respected scientific journals as “Loaded” and “The Face”. The day I turn to Loaded to unravel the mysteries of the universe for me will be the same day I get my tits out and claim it’s feminism. Despite this, the book is actually quite good fun. For the most part, Will Storr uses the Louis Theroux method of simply following people about and letting them make fools of themselves, rather than subjecting them to rigorous cross-questioning. There are some amusing descriptions of how Will manages to scare himself on some of the outings, and I find the juxtaposition of the paranormal and the everyday in some of the quotes very funny. For example there are two self-appointed anti-Satanist vigilantes who claim that Clapham Common is popular with sinister group The Friends of Hecate partly because it is the confluence of six leylines, and partly because it has good parking facilities. I also liked the way several people in the book say they are, “Going to do a Ouija board.” the same way that I might say that I am “going to do a poo”.

Despite being an Atheist with no belief in the hereafter, I think it would be kind of nice if ghosts did exist, because it would make the world more interesting. But there are some bits when the quality of the “evidence” given by paranormal investigators in the book just makes me want to put my head in my hands. These include Electronic Voice Phenomenon, photos of “orbs” and man who claims to have met a werewolf. It seems that for every normal, sane person who has seen something they can’t properly account for, Will meets 4 or 5 shysters, attention-seekers and nut-jobs, including the cast and crew of Living TV’s Most Haunted!. And then there are the very, very many mediums all of whom have a American Indian spirit guide – I’m not sure there are enough dead Indians to go round!

I think that one of the main reasons that I remain very skeptical about ghosts is that I have seen one and I don’t think what I saw was the spirit of a dead person: One summer in the late 90s, I went on my first and only package holiday. My friend and I stayed in a Spanish resort which closely resembled Blackpool for a week. One night as I was drifting off to sleep on the settee (we had a double bed and a settee, for some reason), I saw a transparent white lady in a Victorian dress sitting on the stool next to me. My eyes were open and I could see the cupboards on the other side of the room through her. Not only that, but she held one of my hands and I could actually feel the pressure of her fingers. The experience was absolutely terrifying, especially since I couldn’t move at all. Unable to do anything else, I thought hard at the woman to go away and she slowly faded out. When I eventually calmed down a bit, I started to think a bit more sensibly about the experience. I was staying on the 7^th floor of an apartment block built in the 70s or 80s. How could anyone have been strolling about 7 floors in the air over 100 years ago? Sadly, my visitor must have come from my own demented brain. My experience has shown that it is possible to be in a mental state in which you are awake but dreaming. So when people claim, as in this book, to have witnessed supernatural events, I don’t assume that they are liars or mad, but I don’t necessarily think that what they saw was real either.

Not only have I visited places that could not possibly be haunted and seen a ghost, but I have looked for them at an allegedly haunted caving hut and seen nothing. I have noted that people who have seen the Ystradfellte ghost (which takes the form of an old woman who tells you off for making a mess in her cottage) tend to have known that the hut is supposed to be haunted, and also been in the pub. If you chose to investigate these sightings, be warned: All caving huts are very basic and this is the worst one I’ve ever stayed in. The ghost is probably its best feature and may not even show.

Borges Hurts My Brain...

2007-11-19T05:13:00.000-08:00

Have you ever picked up a book, started reading and thought, “Oh, dear. I’m not sure I’m clever enough for this.”? It happened to me last night when I picked up a book of Jorge Luis Borges’ short stories. In the space of a few short pages I experienced great confusion and had to resort to the dictionary. I need a rest before I try to read the next one!

By the way, I have a theory that you can tell how seriously someone takes their literature by how they pronounce “Borges”. Pronouncing the “e” like “ay” is a bad start, and the longer they roll the r for, the less fun a person is likely to be. If you have the misfortune to find yourself speaking to someone who talks about how much they love “Borrrrrrgayz” the best thing to do is to claim to be rewriting “Mill On The Floss” with a speedboat chase at the end. This will stop them from speaking to you again.

Monstrous Regiment - Terry Pratchett

2007-11-07T13:15:00.000-08:00

Well, I needed some light relief after the last two books. What is there to say about this book though? It is the 136th Discworld book and people who liked the other ones will like this one; people who didn't, won't. Still, I can't always be pushing back the boundaries of weird fiction. I need some easy, cosy reading sometimes.

In Monstrous Regiment war and gender politics are up for discussion as a whole platoon of girls cut their hair and stick socks down their trousers in order to enlist in the army of Borogravia, an ultra-nationalistic war-crazy state which I suspect might be modelled on Serbia. In a typically Balkan way, Borogravia actually has nothing to be proud of except its fierce national pride. After centuries of fighting anyone they share a boarder with, all of the surrounding countries have united against Borogravia, which would sort of serve it right, except that thousands of ordinary everyday folk are about to get killed by invading armies or starve in the aftermath. Don't worry too much though, because Mr Pratchett hasn't written a sad ending yet, and he's not about to start now.

A Brace of Dystopias

2007-10-22T05:46:00.000-07:00

This week, I have mostly inhabited dystopian visions of the future as I have been reading Alan Moore's “V for Vendetta” and “Gun, With Occasional Music” by Jonathan Lethem. It was a combination that gave me nightmares and resulted in my occasionally getting my dystopias confused. Let's do the classic graphic novel that is “V for Vendetta” first:

V for Vendetta – Alan Moore
Britain has become a fascist state following a nuclear winter and the breakdown of law and order. The oppressed citizens are constantly surveyed by CCTV cameras (Oh, the prescience!) and controlled by ruthless secret police. Gays, lesbians, political campaigners and anyone who isn't white have been rounded up and sent to extermination camps. The only person left fighting against the government is a lone anarchist who wears a Guy Fawkes outfit and uses the codename “V”. Although it is established early on that V has superhuman speed and strength after being the victim of secret government experiments, he doesn't really seem to make much use of them. I would suggest that what really sets him apart from the rest of humanity is that he has The Power Of Not Giving A Shit. It is not caring what happens to him or what he has to do to anybody else that makes him such an effective terrorist.

I must admit that I find anarchy completely unappealing as a political cause. It is my belief that government is necessary because people are fundamentally bad and would probably start eating one another if left to their own devices. In the book, V nobly bows out right as he is winning and thus avoids the fate of every real-life successful rebel, namely becoming the next dictator.

Although I really enjoyed the story, the style of the illustration meant I had trouble telling some of the characters apart. Various government agents seemed pretty interchangeable. And the Fascist leader's name is Mr Susan! I can't be afraid of a Mr Susan. What kind of name is that for a villain? It sounds like a character from The Mighty Boosh*.

V for Vendetta was written in the ‘80s when there were 3 million unemployed, and riots in the inner cities both largely caused by Thatcherism. Today we have lost our right to demonstration, to free speech and armed policemen have shot random civilians and what is Mr Moore doing now? Pornography, that’s what! I guess maybe this is part of the ageing process; we all start out full of revolutionary fire, but finally prefer a bit of self-gratification to armed struggle any day. Nevertheless, Mr Moore remains my all-time favourite Rasputine look-alike.

*after further thought there was indeed a Mr Susan in series 1. He lived in the Mirrorworld and was made entirely from dusters.

Gun, With Occasional Music – Jonathan Lethem

Conrad Metcalf is a down-at-heel private eye, struggling to make a living in a future where asking questions is illegal. The news has been replaced with a musical interpretation of the day’s events and the citizens are allowed free access to government supplied drugs (heavy on the forgettol) which they use to make their lives bearable.

The book is written in the style of Raymond Chandler, complete with unusual metaphors and the hero wise-cracking at the expense of the cops and the gangsters, both of whom then dutifully rough him up a bit and turf him out onto the street. I rather like this aspect as the humour prevents the book from just being unremittingly bleak. And it’s full of amusing ideas, like science fiction ought to be. There are evolved versions of animals who don’t quite qualify for full human rights, which means that one of the suspects can take a sheep as a lover and the hero can be pursued by a kangaroo-thug. I also liked the made-up, futuristic surnames like “Phoneblum” and “Teleprompter”. I think this is a book that I will not be recommending, but forcibly lending instead.

I find a dystopian USA a lot easier to take than dystopian Britain. I think this is cos the States strikes me as probably qualifying for dystopia already. When I visited Texas in 2000, both independent thought and decent cheese seemed to have been made illegal and of the two, I missed cheese the most. Mind you, that’s the thing about dystopias; they’re not really warnings about the future so much as comment on what we’re already living with. Another thing that occurs to me after reading this book, is that although I’ve now read several books which were “in the style of Raymond Chandler”, I’ve never read any actual Raymond Chandler. Surely this ought to be remedied!

Isca: The Fall of Roman Exeter - Derek Gore

2007-09-28T12:33:00.000-07:00

There is something great about reading books set in your home town. It makes you feel like you live at the centre of the universe. For that reason, I may be very slightly biased towards Isca. Bias may be increased by the fact that the author works in the Archaeology department of Exeter University, my alma mater*.

Slightly disappointingly, Isca does not really fall so much as slowly fade away. The Roman governor is taking less and less interest in the south west, and the whole area has started to go a bit Mad Max. The local people are being pushed into choosing which of the local warlords they will work for in return for protection from the other local warlords and Irish raiders (confusingly called Scotts).

Against this backdrop our hero, the young Victoricus runs away from his feudal lord, Cynan and goes to Exeter to seek his fortune (slaps thigh). In the process he finds love, befriends an old man, and gets captured a hell of a lot. In fact, he could give any of Dr Who’s companions a run for their money in the getting captured stakes.

If I had to sum this book up in one word I would chose “sweet”. Nothing really horrible happens to any of the main characters, although the potential is definitely there in Dark Ages Britain. When some minor characters are cruelly done in by the villains, it all takes place off camera. At the end, events seem to be building up for a big, set-piece battle – then the bad guy’s troops mutiny and everyone goes home for tea instead. If I sound disparaging, I don’t really mean to; I actually find this innocent “Bumper Book of Stories for Boys” approach kind of charming. It makes me think that Derek is a gentleman.

Not only is the story very sweet, but as the author is an actual archaeologist, all the details of daily life and the construction of the fort and towns are accurate, thus enabling me to painlessly educate myself. Like an episode of "In Our Time" with a plot.

*Latin for “Place where you fret about grades, maths and problems classes while a bunch of rich kids drink themselves senseless”. Not that I’m bitter. If I was, a rugby tosser would have drunk me.

Maus – Art Spiegelman

2007-09-24T14:10:00.000-07:00

By now anyone reading this blog is bound to be thinking, “God, are there any books you actually like, you moany old witch?” Well, yes, there are and this is one of them. I thought Maus was brilliant, even though it made me cry.

For those who have been living under a stone, or who have a policy of deliberately ignoring comics (foolish!), Maus is the story of the Holocaust, told in cartoon form with the Jews depicted as mice and the Nazis drawn as cats. Never have cartoon mice been so upsetting! It shows how Art’s parents, Vladek and Anja Spiegelman survived the Ghettos and the death camps. There is also a thread of the story set closer to the present day which deals with the author’s difficult relationship with his father.

Despite his victim status, Vladek is not portrayed very sympathetically, and we see that part of the reason for his survival is that he never shared anything if he could trade it instead. Harsh months of saving scraps of paper to swap for extra food or cigarettes to buy favours have left Vladek going through life as a mean, rubbish-hoarding Mr Trebus figure. Vladek’s miserliness and Anja’s suicide in 1968 show that despite emerging alive at the end of the war, both have been seriously damaged by the experience.

Maus: Read it and weep.

Holiday Reading Results

2007-09-11T05:07:00.000-07:00

Well, true to my predictions, “Arthur and George” was all but reduced to papier mache after being in my rucksack the day my platypus leaked. I’ve read that and Isca, but Justina Robson didn’t even get a look in. She’ll have to go back on the shelf for another day…

I have some notes on books I did manage to read, so I should be able to come up with a post for each of them. In the mean time, I am back to re-reading The Sandman comics and thoroughly enjoying them. I know I am enjoying them as I’ve read 3 already and the only thing I can find to complain at is that the text says that Matthew is a raven, but he is clearly drawn as a crow. For that matter so are Odin’s ravens.

For the edification of the nation, here is my idiot’s guide to corvids:

Jackdaws: Relatively small and usually come in large packs. Make a really weird noise.

Rooks: Medium sized. Black with a pointy white beak. Say “Ark!”. Usually seen in large packs.

Crows: Almost identical to the Rook, but has a black beak and is usually seen in ones and twos. I like crows. They pair for life, you know. Like gothic, carrion-eating swans....

Ravens: Bloody enormous. Beak is hooked, not pointy. Say “Gronk!” not “Ark!”. Live on cliffs and crags so usually seen in mountainous areas rather than farmers’ fields. Like flying upside down to impress the lady ravens.

Arthur And George - Julian Barnes

2007-09-10T14:12:00.000-07:00

The book is based on a real-life episode in which Sir Arthur Conan Doyle took up the case of George Edalji, a second-generation Indian Solicitor wrongly accused of mutilating livestock. Although Sir Arthur’s intervention succeeds in obtaining a full pardon for George, I found it very disappointing that we never find out who really did commit the crime. This is most unsatisfactory!

For me, the most interesting aspect of the book is the portrait it paints of Arthur Conan Doyle, which reminds us that the creator of Sherlock Holmes was nothing like so logical as his most famous character and believed in both spiritualism and cardboard fairies.

Conversely, I found the worst part of the book to be this sentence which occurs when Arthur is out in the Arctic shooting ducks: “Every bird you downed bore pebbles in its gizzard from a land the maps ignored.” Maybe I’m just too literal, but I found this needlessly opaque and pretentious. Still, that’s the sort of thing the booker judges seem to like...

I don’t think I would bother to read another book by Julian Barnes, but I might give his alter ego who writes detective novels, Dan Kavanagh a try. At least that way I might actually get to find out whodunit!

Holiday Reading

2007-08-14T06:50:00.000-07:00

It's that time of year, now that spring is in the air, when those two wet gits - er, let me try that again...

It's the time of year, now that all the politicians are on holiday when the quality papers, slightly desperate for material, fill up space with lists of what novels the great and good are taking on holiday with them. This is an opportunity for celebrities to try to kid on to the public that they will be reading War and Peace or Gibbon's Decline and Fall in Tuscany, and not tucking into Harry Potter/Jilly Cooper/The Bourne Idiocy at all... So here is my list of holiday reading. It's not all that special but at least it's true:

1)Isca: The Fall of Roman Exeter by Derek Gore
This is coming mainly because the book is physically small (a strange size a bit smaller than A format) so it will fit nicely in hand luggage. And it will remind me of home. And it looks a bit easier than Edward Gibbon. I bought it ages ago on a whim when I saw the author sitting ignored next to a big pile of his books in WH Smith. It's signed and everything...

2) Mappa Mundi by Justina Robson
A fairly safe bet. 600-odd pages of SF should keep me going for a bit.

3)Collins Pocket French Dictionary
Good for deciphering menu items.

4)Arthur and George by Julian Barnes
A bit unsatisfactory, this book, as it's a very large paperback, of a sort which generally doesn't travel well. However, I don't think I'll manage to finish before I set off so it might as well come with me.

Why I don't think John Sutherland is related to Keifer

2007-08-09T05:09:00.000-07:00

I knew he was an elderly academic, but I still imagined him as better looking than this. That is why I don't approve of putting author's publicity photos on books: it gives me the chance to exercise my predjudices, of which I have many.

Maybe I should begin a quest for the worst author photo ever. Mind you, I've already got one of Spider Robinson which I suspect might be world-beating...

In other, less abusive news, the Booker longlist has been published and you know what? Because I'm not part of an organised book club I don't have read any of them unless I want to! Oh joy! (I am now capering, but you'll just have to imagine it.)

How to Read a Novel by John Sutherland

2007-08-08T13:20:00.000-07:00

I saw the title of this book and began to worry that my usual method (running my eyes along the words and letting pictures form in my head) was inadequate. Ever since my twenties, when I decided to leave the genre ghetto and occasionally read something other than science fiction, I have worried that there is something wrong with me because I spend a lot of time wishing the pace of the story would pick up a bit rather than marveling at the richness of the prose. Illogically enough, I hoped there might be some sort of lit. crit. magic bullet which would enable me to “get” the sort of books that win prizes rather than finding most of them tedious.

Much of “How to Read a Novel” is not about reading books at all, but about the various cunning ploys used by publishers to sell them. Much of the rest of it seems to be a collection of things John Sutherland wanted to get off his chest after his stint as a Booker Prize judge. When Mr Sutherland gets around to discussing the actual reading, his line is that no type of novel is intrinsically any better than any other type, and no one person's reading of a novel is more correct than anyone else's. This is admirably egalitarian, but it leaves me no further forward in my quest to better appreciate fiction. My sense of having been cheated by the book was enhanced by the fact the I had read huge swathes of it already – they had been published in the Guardian! According to my Academic Auntie, the book I should have read if I wanted to get more out of my novel reading is “Literary Theory” by Terry Eagleton.

Despite the fact that I cannot really recommend this book, there were some parts I enjoyed. Like the bit about wanting to write in the margin. More people should do this. Like Mr Sutherland, I see it as participation rather than vandalism and I enjoy reading marginalia left in a book by someone else. I once borrowed a book from my sister that had “C- See me.” written in red pen on the final page. This perfectly summed up the book in question which had been OK, but nothing like the author's best work. So all I have really learned is to keep a pencil handy when reading in order to add my own contributions.

The Descent - Jeff Long

2007-07-21T05:03:00.000-07:00

This is a very special book. It was given to me by a friend who acquired it on a caving trip to Papua New Guinnea, with the plan that I would subsequently review it for the caving club journal. As I have missed the deadline for the next journal, this is a high-tech preview of something our dead tree afficionados won't see til winter!

One of the first things to arouse my suspicions was the quote on the front cover which said “One major takedown of a read. A pageburner.”. Surely the expression is “pageturner”? “Pageburner” sounds as if I might want to set fire to this book. Suspicions were confirmed when I glanced inside the back cover to find the words, “Please burn me as I am undoubtedly one of the most appalling books ever written” penned by notorious UK caver Joel Corrigan. I disobeyed orders and read it instead.

I have to admit that Mr Corrigan has a point. This is a very, very badly written book. Firstly the premise of it is just stupid: all the caves in the world link up into one giant master system which is inhabited by savage hominids evolved to live underground. These creatures, named “Hadals” emerge in order to eat, enslave or just mutilate humans. The main part of the book then follows two rival quests: a collection a religious scholars decides that the underworld is a literal hell, therefore there might be a real, live Satan who they could find and broker a truce with. Meanwhile, a global company puts together an team of explorers for a landgrab of underground real estate. What makes the book awful, though, is that the author has obviously not done any research at all. In this book radios work underground and it is possible to look at the earth's mantle through a crack in a rock. At one point a Himalayan expedition is trapped by a storm and their gas canisters run out. The author thinks this will be a problem for them because they won't be able to get their regular caffeine fix, not because they will now be unable to melt snow and will therefore die of thirst! Then there is the stupid way in which the plot turns on the fact that the Hadals can be reincarnated by taking over someone else's body at the moment they die. This key fact is not revealed until very near the end of the book. By this time we have already had a big war between humans and Hadals in which apparently nobody noticed this happening! Perhaps the worst abuse of logic in the book is when the underground expedition picks up a radio distress call which will be sent by that same expedition in the future. This is explained away as being due to the radio signal bouncing off rock strata – backwards in time? I wish I had some sort of award to give out for the clumsiest use of foreshadowing in a literary work 'cos I think I've found the winner right here.

The characters in The Descent seem thin and unbelievable. For example, one of the main characters is a beautiful feminist nun – a combination which strikes me as desperately unlikely! The expedition to claim the underworld for the evil corporate bosses is filled with people who are nothing more than a name which maps to a sticky end. I couldn't keep track of all these people and what's more I didn't give a stuff what happened to them. This meant that all the bits of the book which managed not to be bad were boring instead. In fact, large amounts of this book should have been cut out by the editor. At 560 pages of tosh it is way too long for something meant to be light reading. There are several completely pointless chapters which just seem to be there because the author thought of another unpleasant way for someone to be killed – these could have gone for a start!

In many ways the notes in the margins of this book are better than the story printed in it. We find fascinating glimpses of expedition life such as the scribbled pencil list of things to go on the helicopter, survey data, and a few torn out pages which have been used by the Papuan porters as cigarette papers. I think we need to a take a minute to consider the challenges faced by the expedition members. Spare a thought for them sitting in the jungle, watching the endless rain and tending their tropical ulcers with only 500g of biscuits a day and a copy of “The Descent” to sustain them.

Although in many ways The Descent is utterly rubbish, I feel that reading it was a natural part of the caving lifestyle. Cavers will always want to do things the hard way. They enjoy cold, dirt, darkness and hardship. They chose to drink in the Hunter's* where the grim surroundings are surpassed only by the grudging service. They will always drink the scariest, most sediment-filled form of ale or scrumpy on offer. The Descent fits in perfectly with this perverse mentality and I therefore expect that this copy will be “enjoyed” by many more of us before it finally falls apart.

Finally, my especial, most favouritest piece of deathless prose from the book is:
“He was the only one who knew it, but they were about to get sodomised by an old-fashioned Himalayan tempest.”

Brilliant!

*I had a quick search online, hoping to make that word a link to an amusing description of the many shortcomings of the Hunter's Lodge, but almost unbelievably no-one has done it! The nearest I could get was the UK Pub Guide which described it as "unprepossessing". That's like describing the Atlantic as "damp".

Leave It To Psmith - P. G. Wodehouse

2007-07-02T05:27:00.000-07:00

Hurrah for Wodehouse and an especial hurrah for Psmith! For those who have yet to encounter Psmith, he is an eccentric, aristocratic young man, who has changed his name from the more pedestrian spelling “Smith” in a kind of personal rebranding exercise. Psmith has been a favourite of mine for some years now, being as articulate and immaculately attired as Saki’s Clovis, but much less of a git.

“Leave It To Psmith” sees our hero in reduced circumstances after resigning from a job supplied by his fish magnate uncle, due to a fundamental belief that Billingsgate fish market is no place for a Shropshire Psmith. Despite needing to secure employment, he is unable to resist the temptation to impersonate Canadian poet Ralston McTod in order to secure an invitation to castle Blandings and pursue the beautiful Eve Halliday there. Even before his arrival, Psmith becomes enmeshing in a plot to steal Lady Constance’s diamond necklace – but there are several rival plots to pinch it…

As always with Wodehouse, the best thing about it is the distinctive use of language, which starts finding its way into your everyday speech until the cry goes up in the gentleman’s clubs of Kensington: “BookClubOfOne has been on the Wodehouse again!”

One of my favourite bits is when we find Psmith attempting to pass as a poet while speaking to a horrifyingly wet lady poetess:
“’I sometimes think, Miss Peavey, that flowers must be the souls of little children who have died in their innocence.’
‘What a beautiful thought, Mr McTod!’ exclaimed Miss Peavey rapturously.
‘Yes.’ agreed Psmith, “Don’t pinch it. It’s copyright.””

The Story So Far:

2007-06-25T05:09:00.001-07:00

Long ago in a galaxy far, far away, I was a member of a book club. The wine and the nibbles were OK*, the problem was the books. It seemed to me that in a bid to avoid causing any upset, other members of the group were deliberately picking the blandest books they had ever read. This one, for example. Each month we would meet, only to discover that half the group hadn’t made it through their assigned soporific. We would then have a discussion in which pretty much everyone seemed far too polite (or maybe far too afraid of being thought an ignorant peasant) to offer any genuine opinions. I hung in there, though. Sooner or later it would be my turn to chose the book for the month, and I meant to stir things up a bit, though I hadn’t yet decided whether my weapon of choice would be “Crash” or “American Psycho”… Unfortunately it was not to be. The book club was killed by somebody nominating “Hard Times” by Charles Dickens, and every time the organiser tried to book the next meeting, it would turn out that no one had managed to read it yet and everyone wanted extra time.

It is now about 5 years later and the book club has reformed, but in the meantime what little patience I ever had seems to have evaporated. Having received a list of the books they plan to read, I have chosen not to rejoin. As I am a miserable, old curmudgeon, I have formed a book club of one.

I will read the books I fancy reading and say what I like about them.
I am not interested in looking clever.
I am not interested in reading women’s books about feelings.
I expect I will miss the nibbles…

*Apart from one meeting just after Christmas when the majority of the group were “detoxing” in the mistaken belief that a month of mince pies can be nullified by a week of bottled water.

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