Books - May - October 2007
I’ve been reading a fair amount over the last few months, but I’ve finally had to admit to myself that I’ll never have the time or motivation any time soon to write about it in any depth. For completeness’ sake, then, here’s a list of what I’ve been reading and roughly what I thought about it.
Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town - Cory Doctorow
Longer and more ambitious than his previous 2 novels, and definitely stretching himself a bit further. It does lose its way from time to time though, and because of the extra length doesn’t have the same short-sharp-shock effect that the rest of his writing does. Does do a very good job of illuminating the difficulties of being different people when amongst family compared to with friends, and the difficulty of trying to get people interested in things that will make their lives better.
No One Belongs Here More Than You - Miranda July
The author’s website for this book is a brilliant bit of self-selecting advertising. If you like the site, then you’ll probably like the book. It’s a collection of short stories by the director of Me and You and Everyone We Know and very enjoyable it is too. I’d advise reading it in bits and pieces, though, since ploughing through it in one go gives you the sense of it all being a bit to intentionally kooky for its own good.
In the Miso Soup - Ryu Murakami
I’m still not totally sure why I bought this. It got a lot of good reviews on Amazon, with people saying it was a sort of Japanese version of Silence of the Lambs. It not. At all. It’s more of a short story that grew out of control to become a short but not very satisfying book. There’s a nice lonely, isolated atmosphere throughout, but the actual “dangerous yet fascinating killer” plot is underdeveloped, and by the end of the book you’re left with a feeling that it wasn’t really worth the effort of reading it.
Ah, the perils of buying a book because it has an interesting blurb. Philip Pullman calls it “One of the best ghost stories in the language”, but, well, it isn’t. It’s a bit of a stretch even calling it a ghost story, since it’s really about the horrors of timid suburban mediocrity and implausibly repressed childhood memories. Follows the life of a TV-clairevoyant-ish character as seen through the eyes of her impossibly grey assistant, via a ponderous central plot and lots of little side stories which are introduced briefly and then forgotten about entirely for the rest of the book.
Any plot summary for this sounds a bit generic - female assasin hops around planets uncovering a mystery and revenging a betrayal - but it’s done quite well. The characterisation is excellent and it all gallops along very satisfyingly. There’s a sequel called “Bloodmind” which refers to an interesting device used in this book where the inhabitants of one planet periodically revert to an animalistic state and all hell breaking loose. Darkland was good enough that I’ll get around to reading it at some point.
A writer on the Grand Theft Auto series finally came to his senses for long enough to leave our inbred little cesspool of an industry, then chose to plough headlong in a series of phat phantasy novels.
It’s not bad, as this type of book goes, and has a nicely described conciet of a city suspended by a huge network of chains over a gaping pit of spoilers.
Diverting enough, but you’d have to be fairly well versed in the genre to really stick with it all the way through.
Vernor Vinge more or less invented the concept of the singularity, at least in the form most of us think of it in, and all of his previous novels have been fantastic. This one steps back from it it bit, to a less crazily advanced version of the future, but still has plenty of hugely entertaining Big Science Ideas, plus walking libraries, which I think more books should have.
It does bog down in bits though. One of the main story prongs, of a reanimated and rejuvinated man being taught the world by his precocious 10-year-old grand-daughter was more annoying than entertaining. If you can get through that, then it’s worth reading. However, if you haven’t read A Fire Upon The Deep yet, then that’s the one you want to start with.
Decadent rockstar buys a dead man’s suite over the Internet and Bad Shit starts happening. Nothing special, but enjoyable in the same way that all dumb horror movies are.
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - J.K. Rowling
Yes, well, that’s that then, in all its Deus Ex Machina-ish glory.
Reaper’s Gale - Steven Erikson
You’re only going to buy this book if you’ve already read through the previous ~5000 pages of the series. If you have, then you’ll enjoy this; things are starting to resolve themselves, and it’s a bit easier to keep track of all of the events than in previous books. If you haven’t, then go and get “Gardens of the Moon” and see how you get on with it.
Spook Country - William Gibson
Gibson’s latest book doesn’t follow his previous work of telling us (scarily accurately) what the future is going to look like, but instead tells us that the present we’re currently living in is already weirder than you could possibly imagine.
It’s about high-tech performance art, terrorism anxiety, exactly what happened to Virtual Reality, ominously omniscient corporations, and old spies carrying on some form of cold war.
It’s fantastic, and you should read it at once if you haven’t done so already. It almost feels like a John le Carré novel, and bleak and scary fictional worlds have never seemes quite so alluring before.
The Testament of Gideon Mack - James Robertson
A athiest Scottish minister goes quietly mad in his small town and possibly meets the Devil. If that sounds interesting to you, then buy the book because you’ll probably like it. If not, then steer well clear because this will make no sense to you whatsoever.
I liked it quite a lot. It feels “real” in a way that I can’t quite describe, but will be feel familiar if you’ve ever spent any amount of time in small Scottish towns. The ending is weak, and lots of promising set up doesn’t quite get the pay off it deserves, but I was entertained enough at the end of the thing.
My Bass and Other Animals - Guy Pratt
A mid-life memoir by a semi-well known session musician, who among other things was handed Roger Waters’ place as Pink Floyd’s bassist for their last 2 tours.
I know it doesn’t sound all that interesting, but it’s surprisingly funny, and if you have any interesting in Rock ‘n’ Roll raconteur-itry then it’s worth a go. He tested out all of the material by doing a stand-up show at the Edinburgh festival in 2005, went off and wrote the book, then came back to the festival this year and re-did the show in a much more polished form. The stand-up version was great, and so is the book.
McDonald’s follow up to River of Gods, this time doing the cultural tour of 3 different periods of Brasil’s history. It follows an 18th century priest on a Heart of Darkness journey up the Amazon, a modern-day shock-reality-TV producer, and a far-future street hustler, all tied together various mind-bending multiple-worlds quantum neepery.
It’s told from fewer viewpoints than River of Gods was, and so it’s less scattershot and lets the book delve down into subjects in a less hectic way. It’s still monsterously complex, and takes quite a bit of effort to get the most out of it, but it’s well worth the effort.
Making Money - Terry Pratchett
Pratchett’s follow up to Going Postal follows Moist von Lipwig as he’s thrown into running Ankh-Morpork’s central bank and starting to move the city away from the gold standard onto a fiat currency. It’s trying to do the trick that Stephenson pulled in The Baroque Cycle in 1/10th of the page count, and in a way that doesn’t need a dangerous level of masochism to reach the end of.
It’s not quite as exciting as Going Postal, but, well, it is about banking. It’s all over a little bit quickly, and any peril that Lipwig finds himself in is relieved without much fuss a few pages later. There are a lot of nice throwaway riffs that could (and sort of have) gone on to form entire books, such as the golems in the city doing the job of being an analogue of slavery and of the industrial revolution, forcing the city to move onto a service and knowledge based economy rather than a manual labour based one.
Anyway, why am I even writing about this? Everyone and their dog has already bought the book already, giving Prattchett a bit more more material about mass movement of money…