Vampires vs Werewolves vs Bookclub of One

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!

More easy reads for the middle of the night

High Lord by Trudi Canavan

I have reached the end of the Black Magician trilogy! Finally I have closure and Trudgy Caravan and I can go our separate ways! In this final instalment it turns out (rather disappointingly) that the High Lord is not in fact evil. He has been practising black magic but only because it was necessary to protect the kingdom from a bunch of evil, foreign magicians. Sonea choses to help him, but they are caught practising black magic and drummed out of the guild leaving the country undefended with evil magicians marching towards it...

Tithe by Holly Black

Now this was good fun! 16 year old Kaye Fierch was able to see fairies as a little girl. When her mother's latest relationship breaks down they move back to the town she grew up in. The fairies are still there but now they seem to be involved in very adult machinations...

Escardy Gap - Peter Crowther and James Lovegrove

Basically this book is Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury rewritten in the style of Stephen King with added postmodern wankery of an author trying to write a horor novel as the wraparound story. The sad thing is that I read it from cover to cover, more fool me! Going to try to ebay it to buy stuff for Tiny Daughter...

The Eclipse of the Century by Jan Mark

When 20 year old student Keith Chapman is involved in a car crash he has a near death experience, but rather than seeing a vision of heaven and speaking to his dead relatives he sees a town square and hears a woman's voice telling him that they will meet again in Qantoum, under a black sun at the end of a thousand years. Keith does some research and discovers that Qantoum is a real place; a town which sprang up round an oasis on the silk road it has been conquered by Alexander the Great,the mongols and Russia but with the collapse of the Soviet Union it is now in a disputed territory on the boader of Tajikistan. He determins to visit to see whether it is anything like his vision. Years of fighting have left Qantoum a wreck without power and miles from any kind of authority. It has two distinct populations: the Sturyat, descendants of a tribe of nomads who settled there a thousand years ago and a motley collection of westerners living in and around the town museum. Feeling very pleased with his own political correctness, Keith moves in with the natives, but are they Sturyat as peaceful as they first appear? Why is everyone who crosses them "taken by the sand" and is there any truth to their bizzare assertion that their race comes from space and will be heading back there soon?

I really enjoyed this book; once again there was an upside to being hauled out of my lovely bed! My favourite character was the phlegmatic Russian Lt Kije. I can still see the image of him that built up in my head, sardonic, unshaven and with a filthy Russian cigarette on the go (the text never really describes him, this is just how I think he ought to look).

The Code Book by Simon Singh

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...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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!