This year I shall be mostly reading

[Jim]

Consider Phlebas by Iain M. Banks. Only the second Culture novel I've read, after Excession and the non-Culture Feersum Enjinn and Algebraist. Quite enjoyed it, possibly a bit rougher round the edges than the others and a bit more predictable but still distinctively Banksian. Big ideas and world-building, with grimness and jet black humour. The Eaters scenes will probably stay with me.

Fifteen books in 2012, up slightly from 2013, though I'd love to go back to the (admittedly arbitrary) book-a-week target I set myself in the years before Charlotte was born. Need to aim high next year.

[Bogatan]

I think I spent the entire year working through Discworld novels and I'm still only at Nights Watch.

I've even had to buy three or four new Discworld books to add to the back of the queue in that time.

[Jim]

The Honourable Schoolboy by John Le Carré. Six years since I read Tinker, Tailor, which I loved, and it's not a disappointment even if the ending is a bit of a downer (to say the least). The level of detail and jargon give it a verisimilitude which is very compelling coupled with some well realised characters. I won't leave it so long until I read Smiley's People.

[Jim]

Two recent finishes:

Mezzanine by Nicholson Baker. Brilliant book, detailing the thoughts of an office worker as he takes an escalator from the lobby to his office on the mezzanine floor at the end of a lunch break. It's all about thinking in great detail about day to day things like ruminating on why one shoe lace might wear out sooner than the other. Lots of detailed footnotes and digressions. I absolutely loved it, seemed like he thinks a bit like me and when I told the girlfriend about it she recognised some of the thoughts too. I highly recommend it.

A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick. Also brilliant of course, it only took me so long because I already knew the story so deprioritised it. Which is a shame as it's one of his best, very funny and clever if also a bit grim, and it's never just about the plot. There's quite a touching postscript from the author dedicating the book to those close to him who had fallen to drugs.

-Jim

[Jim]

The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks. It's been on my list for a long time, was recommended reading at university, and now I've finally got to read it I enjoyed it but wasn't blown away. There's interesting food for thought, but I'm not so keen on the writing style and it struck me that some of the case descriptions were so neat that they must have been massaged a bit for the sake of narrative. He also clearly has quite a high opinion of himself.

-Jim

[The Doctor]

Check your local library this week. 20 titles are being given away free as part of World Book Night 2013. Quite a mix of titles.

-Ralph

[The Doctor]

These are the books here:

www.worldbooknight.org/books

-Ralph

[Grand Moff Muffin]

This year I am mostly reading H.G. Wells for the first time. Found some lovely new hardback collections in Waterstone's. Started with 'The Shape of Things to Come', which is top stuff.

Martin

[legios]

Had "The Shape of Things to Come" as a present one Christmas when I first went to High School. Marvellous book.


As mentioned elsewhere I have mostly been reading a biography of John Nathan-Turner, late former producer of Doctor Who. It is a somewhat disheartening book to read for various reasons - many people do not come out of it as particularly good representatives of humanity (not to my great surprise, but still somewhat disheartening).

My "light reading" is going to be C J Cherryh's "40,000 in Gehenna" - a book about how societies evolve under pressure. It is due a second reading now I have gone back and re-read "Cyteen" this year - some themes of one are minor themes of the other and I think I want to go back to "40,000" with my new perspective from my "Cyteen" re-read and see how it changes the way I relate to the book. (That is one of the things I do find with some of Cherryh's work, coming back to her Alliance-Union novels equipped with different life-experiences, and with perspectives from some of her other books can change your view of a book and its characters in various ways).

Karl

[Jim]

The Shape of Things to Come is one of the few I haven't read; I've been roughly reading one Wells a year for the past 6 or 7 years and thoroughly enjoying it. You have lots of good stuff ahead of you! Even ones where I felt I already knew the plot too well turned out to be very enjoyable, and I do like his "voice" (even though I tend to hear Richard Burton).

Right now I'm concentrating on recommended reading for the Ancient Greeks Coursera course I'm taking, have just about finished Plutarch's Nine Greek Lives (excellent reading) and have Thucydides, Artistotle's Politics and some Aristophanes ahead of me.

Just before that I read How to do Things with Videogames by Ian Bogost, a collection of themed essays exploring applications of gaming that people might not have thought of. Some very interesting stuff in there. (he also co-wrote the excellent Racing the Beam about the Atari 2600 a few years back).

-Jim

[Grand Moff Muffin]

I've finished 'The Shape of Things to Come'
And 'The Time Machine' have just begun.
'The Shape' certainly gives one food for thought
Telling how things might be, though not how they ought.

The end of nations, war and private profit has a certain appeal
But a price is foreseen as part of the deal.
An end to diversity of all kinds of belief,
With a single world view imposed by force, by a chief.

Successful indoctrination of every person on Earth
Ends conflict and dispute but heralds the birth
Of assumed final truth about how things should be -
Assumed by humans as fallible as you and me.

Is mankind better off with a diversity of voice
Or with one ideology supreme - removing all choice?
Those who suffer now might prefer uniformity if it brought
Peace and plenty as a trade-off for freedom of thought.

But if the leaders are human their judgement will stray
And with diversity stifled we'd all go the same way.
The book itself makes one think in diverse ways
And that goes against the very future it portrays.

Martin

[The Doctor]

That is indeed a fine read. Of a mighty deed!

-Ralph

[Grand Moff Muffin]

Volume 1 of the H.G. Wells Classic Collection went down a treat. 'The War of the Worlds' and 'The Invisible Man' were the two strongest in the book, I felt, but the others ('The Time Machine', 'The Island of Doctor Moreau' and 'The First Men in the Moon') were also darn good. However, I've found the first novel in Volume 2 ('In the Days of the Comet') a bit of a slog, and am making only slow progress with it.

I have been diverted by other books. I polished off 'The Maltese Falcon' over the bank holiday weekend, and it gets a 10/10 from me. I've also taken the plunge with John Le Carre for the first time, and am whizzing through 'The Looking-Glass War', with 'Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy' to follow.

Martin

[Grand Moff Muffin]

This week I have mostly been reading the G.I. Joe Field Manual, Volumes 1 and (hot off the press) 2.

Martin

[The Doctor]

What are they like? I have been tempted by them. I love those kinds of books.

-Ralph

[Grand Moff Muffin]

Jun 12, 2013 17:31:48 GMT The Doctor said:

What are they like? I have been tempted by them. I love those kinds of books.

-Ralph

They're fantastic, excellent companion pieces to The Complete Ark. The model sheets for vehicles are incredibly detailed (unlike the Transformers model sheets). The typewriter style text is also wonderfully retro.

Check out the "Look inside!" pages on www.amazon.co.uk/G-I-JOE-Field-Manual-1/dp/1613773501/ though unfortunately there aren't any pages shown with vehicles on.

Not having watched the cartoon series (I tried to, but couldn't take it...) I was surprised that Hawk doesn't appear until the second series... and hence Volume 2 of the book.


"Look inside!" pages also now up for TF UK Classics Volume 4, hurrah!

Martin

[Jim]

Yesterday I finished Andromache and Other Plays by Racine. It was a bit of an impulse buy in our local (great) second hand bookshop - those 70s Penguin books still have great style, and I'm a sucker for spin-offs from The Iliad no matter when they were written. Turned out to be a great read, all three plays. Tragic, direct and compelling, especially the title piece.

Today I intend on starting I, Claudius, also in fine second-hand 70s Penguin livery.

-Jim

[Grand Moff Muffin]

Jul 11, 2013 9:02:33 GMT Jim said:

Yesterday I finished Andromache and Other Plays by Racine. It was a bit of an impulse buy in our local (great) second hand bookshop - those 70s Penguin books still have great style, and I'm a sucker for spin-offs from The Iliad no matter when they were written. Turned out to be a great read, all three plays. Tragic, direct and compelling, especially the title piece.

Today I intend on starting I, Claudius, also in fine second-hand 70s Penguin livery.

Oh yes. I do have Aeschylus and Euripides on my bookshelf and they are rather good. Ditto I, Claudius.

Martin

[legios]

It appears to be Holmes-pastiche month here at Karl's house. I have recently finished "Erasing Sherlock" from Mad Norwegian Press - a book whose central conceit is being first-person narrated by a Sherlock Holmes fixated researcher from the future who has traveled back in time to investigate her subject matter first hand, whilst the people who gave her the opportunity appear to have a sinister ulterior motive as far as Holmes' future career is concerned. On paper it sounds like a good idea. Unfortunately it reads like Sherlock Holmes fan-fiction. Our lead character reads very much like a wish-fulfillment Author Avatar, and far too much of the book is tied up with the sexual relationship which she starts with Holmes (and at the point where she also sleeps (separately) with Watson the book lost the remainder of my patience). There are the fragments of a decent plot in here, but unfortunately the book doesn't seem very interested in them, treating them in a perfunctory manner as strictly secondary to how amazing and intriquing the narrator says that Holmes finds her and how big a crush she had on him. It was a digital purchase, it cost me three pounds. Honestly I'm, not sure it was worth what I paid for it.

Next up should be a much better piece of Holmesian pastiche - or rather "Anti-holmesian", as it is Kim Newman's "Moriarty: The Hound of the D'Urbevilles". Newman has form for being very good at this kind of literary pastiche ("Anno Dracula" amongst others) and the idea of a memoir of the "Napoleon of Crime" from the pen of his friend and "Bosworth" Colonel Sebastian Moran is rather an amusing idea. We shall see how it pans out.

I have also been reading some actual Holmes as well - cherry-picking from the large format collection I obtained a while back. I was amused whilst going through there to be reminded that the various strands of pro-level Holmes fan-fiction that want to tell the story of the beginning of Holmes career have already been beaten to it by Doyle who, in "The "Gloria Scott"" gives us the story of what Holmes considers to be his very first case.

Karl

[Jim]

My holiday reading was King Harald's Saga and The Vinland Sagas, all translated by Magnus Magnusson and Herman Palsson. Interesting stuff, I've felt in recent years that I've been catching up on history I didn't get taught at school, so a lot of 1066 is new to me and I had no idea that a couple of weeks before William, King Harold had to repel an invasion from the Norwegian King Harald (which probably didn't help).

Harald was a bit of a character, a sort of archetypal pragmatic viking King, devious when he has to be but happy in direct battle and a fallible human being who does some terrible things. I do like how sagas are unsparing in this way, certainly rarely hagiographic. You do feel you're getting the personalities, warts and all.

The Vinland Sagas I've been meaning to read since I read the excellent Meadowland. They tell of the discovery and attempted colonizations of somewhere on the North American seaboard in the 11th century, and again they don't spare the unpleasant side of the settlers. Freydis is particularly awful, and I still remembered a lot from Meadowland, a Thomas Holt book which adapts the sagas telling them from the point of view of two ordinary vikings who keep getting caught up in trips to Vinland. I highly recommend both it and these.

The introductions are also very informative.

-Jim

[Grand Moff Muffin]

I've finished off the recently published deluxe hardback collected editions of the novels of H.G. Wells:

www.amazon.co.uk/The-Shape-Of-Things-Come/dp/0575095199/
www.amazon.co.uk/HG-Wells-Classic-Collection-H-G/dp/0575095202/
www.amazon.co.uk/HG-Wells-Classic-Collection-II/dp/0575095229/

The Shape of Things to Come
The Time Machine
The Island of Doctor Moreau
The War of the Worlds
The First Men in the Moon
The Invisible Man
In the Days of the Comet
Men Like Gods
The Sleeper Awakes
The War in the Air

I would certainly recommend people read The War of the Worlds and The Invisible Man, which are excellent stories. None of the other novels achieve such literary perfection as those two in my opinion. Many of them harp on the same theme, namely the self-destructiveness of early 20th Century humanity leading to the overthrow of society, the necessary end of money, democracy, nation states, religion and individual opinions (whether through a great air war or gas from outer space that makes everyone see the sense of Wells' view of the world) and replacement with a uniform, orderly, benign world state where everyone has come to embrace the author's common sense vision. The new world that Wells finds various routes to in his various novels has some admirable aspects - world peace, co-operation, an end to poverty - and some dangerous ones - uniformity, wiping out of inconvenient animal species, a single education system indoctrinating all the world's children into the wisdom of the new order and a sense of moral superiority over the stupidity of previous generations, suppression/correction of dissenting thought - generally a lack of humility... In places, such as in Men Like Gods, Wells does explore the downsides of his vision, but then seems to dismiss them as slight compared to those of the present day.

Wells foresees some things with frightening accuracy, particularly the bombing of cities in World War II. He misses other things completely, notably the environmental damage caused by man, and the ability through the Internet of the people of the world to talk easily amongst themselves, which currently shows no sign of producing the uniformity of thought that he so craved.

Next up are the collected short stories of H.G. Wells

www.amazon.co.uk/Complete-Short-Story-Omnibus-Wells/dp/0575095245/

and two hardback volumes of H.P. Lovecraft, also a new author to me but irresistible when I came upon them in Waterstones:

www.amazon.co.uk/Necronomicon-Weird-Lovecraft-Fiction-GOLLANCZ/dp/0575081562/
www.amazon.co.uk/Eldritch-Tales-A-Miscellany-Macabre/dp/0575099356/

Plus a Penguin modern prose paperback version of The Canterbury Tales for when I'm travelling and don't want to lug a big brick of a book around with me.

Martin

[The Doctor]

I do quite enjoy most of Wells works and find them very readable.

I've never been able to get into Lovecraft. I find his style very tedious to read.

I read The Canterbury Tales when I was but a nipper and found it pretty intense! It was a lovely big illustrated hardcover gift which sadly vanished at some point.

-Ralph

[legios]

Wells' work does have aspects of the polemical - unsurprising given that he was a very active Socialist organiser, thinker and agitator and a lot of that comes through in his work. I do find him highly readable I must admit, I read The Shape of Things to come when I was in High School and it had quite an impact on me.

I think my favourite of his works is probably the War of the Worlds - partly because I have family who come from Surrey so it felt like some of the names of places despoiled by the Martian's were familiar to me, partly because I appreciated its intent in terms of reversing the British experience of imperialism, and partly because it remains perhaps the definite alien invasion tale.


Karl

[Andy Turnbull]

Martin. Some advice re: Lovercraft. Don't read too many in one go, you will not enjoy them as much, his collected works are very much a dip in and out of affair.

Andy

[Grand Moff Muffin]

Thanks, Andy. I'll bear that in mind.

Martin

[Jim]

+1 for Andy's advice. Also the two collections I've read were very much a mixed bag, some of it was great and quite a bit of it was somewhat tedious. At the Mountains of Madness remains my favourite, though it is in many ways atypical. It genuinely gave me nightmares the couple of days I was reading it.

I love HG Wells, I find his voice very compelling. Personally I slightly preferred The Time Machine over The War of the Worlds, but certainly not by a long way. The short stories are an excellent thing to dip into, but as is often the case with such things I found there to be some duds.

Oh, obviously it's a bit out of date, but his A Short History of the World is worth a read, too.

-Jim

[Jim]

I, Claudius was one of the most insanely compelling books I can recall reading, absolutely marvellous. As the remaining page count dwindled I actually got a bit sad that it would be finished soon, which is always a good sign.

That said I'm not all that thrilled to learn of a sequel, the ending is so perfectly timed it feels like continuing the story would undermine it.

-Jim

[The Doctor]

I really should get round to reading that at some point. I love the TV adaptation.

-Ralph

[Grand Moff Muffin]

Sept 1, 2013 8:36:11 GMT Jim said:

That said I'm not all that thrilled to learn of a sequel, the ending is so perfectly timed it feels like continuing the story would undermine it.

Well, it's based on history... and history did continue, after all...

Reading Frederick Forsyth's 'The Odessa File' and 'The Day of the Jackal' at the mo. Can't put 'em down.

Martin

[Jim]

Well, I know that, but having the book basically end with him being declared emperor on practically the final page, the meat of the book being everything which led up to that moment, was a really nice touch, almost Tristram Shandy-esque. So taking that as a literary device, continuing the story sort of betrays that nice structure. It's the kind of thing which irks me in any kind of story-telling, the obvious example being sequels to movies which only got them because the first was (financially) successful.

It's more forgiveable in this kind of thing, and I will eventually read Claudius the God simply because I enjoyed the first so much, but I'll leave a bit of a gap so the effect isn't so jarring.

-Jim