books
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Which I note that I’ve never written about here, except indirectly. Is it time to rerereread that, do you think? ↩︎
- Everything comes together just a bit too tidily.
- There’s too much about some of the secondary cases the agency is working on, over and above the main one. Those can be interesting or amusing, and sure, it’s realistic that they’d have to have more than just a forty-year-old cold case to work on, over a year. But in the end they feel like padding.
- As the denouement unfolds she uses a gimmick where the characters learn or work out something, which they relate to each other, but which is not revealed to us. It’s kind of annoying, because it’s suddenly hiding info from the reader that the characters have, where earlier in the story that wasn’t happening. I think she’s done it before in some (maybe all) of the Strike novels.
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If that’s the right thing to call them. ↩︎
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There may be the odd colon or semicolon, but I couldn’t find any on looking it over just now. And there are probably a couple of dashes and brackets. ↩︎
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Still needs an apostrophe. ↩︎
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There’s a professional body of super recognisers. Who’d have thought? ↩︎
Big Planet by Jack Vance (Books 2021, 16)
I actually read this before the previous one, but forget to write about it. Perhaps that’s because I didn’t enjoy it very much.
Jack Vance is considered one of the greats of SF, and I realised recently that I hadn’t read anything by him. And I had this big volume that Gollancz gave away at a convention some time, containing this and two other books (another novel and a collection of short stories). A sort of literary compilation album.
But not a Greatest Hits — or if it is, then things are pretty bad.
The main problem is that it’s dated. Usually we can work around that sort of thing, and I did — look at me, all finished with it — but the main thing here is that it’s just badly written. Cardboard characters, dodgy sexual politics, and a plot that, while interesting enough to get me through it, is far too easily resolved.
And there’s the background of an Earth empire or federation or similar, that we see essentially notthing of. Instead the action is all confined to the eponymous planet. It ‘revolutionised the planetary romance,’ according to the blurb. And, indeed it was important to the form according to the linked SF Encyclopedia entry.
So much for that. All I can say is, it didn’t do a lot for me.
Whit by Iain Banks (Books 2021, 15)
The human memory is an amazing thing. In this case, it’s amazing what it’s possible not to remember.
To wit: I remembered almost completely nothing about this book. That the main character was part of an odd religious community based near Stirling in Scotland; and that she had to make a trip to London by slightly unusual means to track down a musical and possibly apostate cousin: that’s as far as my memory went.
It came out in 1995, so twenty-six years have passed since I first read it. I would have said that I had reread it once, which you would hope might lock things down a bit in the brain. But on the plus side, it meant it was almost like reading a new Iain Banks book, so in that way the forgetting was good.
As you’d expect, a great deal more happens than what I remembered. It’s another family drama, in the vein of The Crow Road1 and The Steep Approach to Garbadale. Also has a very endearing main character, as well as religion that doesn’t sound too bad in its beliefs, apart from its rejection of most technology.
London Centric: Tales of Future London, Edited by Ian Whates (Books 2021, 14)
Great collection of stories set in and around London. Or various Londons, depending on how you look at it.
Standouts for me were the opening story, ‘Skin,’ by Neal Asher, and ‘War Crimes’ by MR Carey, but there’s a lot to enjoy here, and not one bad one.
It’s good to know the science fiction short story is in a good state, despite what I said about it… err, seven years ago.
Diary of a Film by Niven Govinden (Books 2021, 12)
A famous film director arrives in ‘the Italian city of B’ to attend a festival and premiere his new film. He meets a woman who shows him a graffiti mural that was painted by her dead boyfriend.
The whole thing takes place over two or three days, and each chapter is a single paragraph. The latter is kind of annoying, because it makes it hard to find a good place to stop reading. Also all the dialogue is integrated into the paragraphs without speech marks. This kind of different way of representing dialogue is becoming increasingly common, it seems to me.
The story’s good, though I found the ending a little weak. And slightly reminiscent of the ending of The Magus, strangely. That same sense of slightly-incomplete explanation.
Moon Over Soho by Ben Aaronovitch (Books 2021, 9)
The second of Aaronovitch’s series about the division of the Metropolitan Police that deals with magical goings-on. It’s a fun romp – I laughed more often than you might expect.
I don’t know how long ago I read the first one, Rivers of London, but I didn’t write about it here, and it must be a while, because I don’t remember much of it. Still, the backstory is handled nicely here, so I could get by fine.
A lot of it is about jazz and jazz musicians. It’s likely to make you check out the odd track.
Winter’s Writing
David Mitchell (the novelist, not the comedian) on Italo Calvino’s If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller, which is a book I love:
I’ve never understood why writers who write on writing get charged with creative onanism when artists are allowed to paint themselves until the Rembrandts come home or a work like Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra - music about music, right? - is fine with everyone
– David Mitchell, Enter the maze
It’s a fair point. There’s nothing wrong with a writer writing about a writer. I think the practice gets criticised because it became so common in literary fiction as to be a cliche.
The article also contains the revelation that Cloud Atlas was at least partly inspired by Calvino’s novel.
Troubled Blood by Robert Galbraith (Books 2021, 7)
I know, JK Rowling is a somewhat troubling figure now. When this book came out, last year, my daughter was adamant that we not buy it, because of Rowling’s anti-trans statements, and I had respected her feelings up till now; as well as having my own concerns. But… the art, not the artist, I guess? Even if I’m further enriching her by buying the art?
The truth is twofold: one, I don’t think she’s actively antithetical to trans people. She has a complex, nuanced position about various aspects of the situation, which gets blown out of all proportion on Twitter, when nuance, as it does, heads over there to die. And which, surprisingly and disappointingly for a wordsmith, she doesn’t seem able to elucidate that well.
And two, I really like the books and wanted to read it.
Furthermore, I was sick, and I had decided that I was going to treat the time on the sofa as an extension of the holiday, and not try to get back to working on the novel/dissertation till the Monday. I wanted some comfort reading, and this was what I wanted. I knew I’d rip through it in a few days, even if I was trying to work at the time. So I killed two birds with one stone.
It’s good, as ever. I don’t really understand how she makes the pages turn so fast (there are a lot of them, especially as an ebook). I did pick up a couple of typos, and some odd line break errors, which might be to do with the translation to ebook – either way, it’s very sloppy editing/proofreading by the publishers. Also some – several – places where I would have edited a line to make it better. I noticed fewer of those as the plot roared on, unsurprisingly. Which at least means I’m reading even a book like this in a more writerly fashion. Or I was at the start.
The main other weaknesses are:
But a lot of fun, anyway.
Bernard and the Cloth Monkey by Judith Bryan (Books 2021, 6)
This is a story of a family – especially two sisters – and things that brought them together and pushed them apart. It varies between straightforward realist events, and ambiguous, almost fantastic scenes, which may be memories, or partly memories, or a way for the character to deal with memories.
It’s part of a series that Bernardine Evaristo has curated for Penguin, called Black Britain: Writing Back, aiming to bring lost works back into publication. This one won awards back in 1997 (even though, confusingly, the copyright date is 1998). It’s been out of print since.
Worth checking out.
Heartburn by Nora Ephron (Books 2021, 5)
When I wrote about watching When Harry Met Sally… last year, I said that ‘Nora Ephron may be my favourite screenwriter after Aaron Sorkin, where dialogue is concerned.’ The dialogue in this novel isn’t so sparkling, but the narration is.
It’s a fictionalisation of the breakdown of her marriage to the journalist Carl Bernstein, and it’s amazing how funny she makes it, considering how painful the experience clearly was.
Seems to be her only novel, which is kind of a shame.
The strangest thing is that the woman Bernstein had an affair with is the daughter of prime minister Jim Callaghan.
Far more interestingly, though, is that, according to Wikipedia, Ephron was one of the few people who knew the identity of Deep Throat.
None of which has anything to do with the book, which you should just read.
North Star
I wrote recently about not enjoying or finishing Claire North’s 84K. In her latest blog post she lists her (improbably large) back catalogue, with notes. On 84k:
My most miserable novel ever.…The word “dystopian” has been applied to it a lot, and I’d say that’s fair.
However, she also tells us about her forthcoming Notes from The Burning Age, which sounds amazing:
To make up for just how monumentally dystopian 84K is, Notes from the Burning Age is a look at the distant future of the earth… in which we’ve got it right. We sorted our shit out, we built an environmentalist utopia of clean energy, social justice, respect for all and so on. And we did all of it partly because we really learned to love and value this beautiful, glorious planet, as well as each other, and partly because the spirits of the earth awoke, provoked by our blundering destruction, and nearly stomped us into tiny tiny bits.If you think that’s the pitch, you will be potentially surprised to know that’s just the first 50 pages, and the book is actually a cat-and-mouse espionage thriller.
She really has written an astonishing number of books, under three different names. I’ll be sure to try some of the others.
How to Write an Autobiographical Novel by Alexander Chee (Books 2021, 4)
Despite the title, this is not a writing ‘how-to’ book, except maybe by example. Nor is it a novel itself; it is a collection of essays. The subjects they cover do include writing and writing courses, most notably the Iowa Writers' Workshop. That was one of the first, if not the first, postgraduate-level courses in creative writing, and Chee studied on it.
But the book covers a lot else, too. As Chee is a mixed-race gay man, you won’t be surprised to hear that those details feature in a number of the essays. As does living in New York and trying to make it as a writer. And growing roses, and the origin of Catholic rosary beads.
I was drawn to this because one of the essays was assigned reading on the MA early this term, and he was also cited at various other points on at least two modules.
His debut novel is called Edinburgh, which immediately interests me. Though you learn from a couple of the essays that he hoped, when younger, to go to Edinburgh to study parapsychology, but didn’t; and that the Edinburgh connection in the novel didn’t survive the writing and editing process, but he kept the title anyway.
I don’t know what his fiction is like yet, but he’s a fine essayist.
On Giving Up On a Book
This is not, as you might have guessed from the title, about writing. It’s about reading.
How long should we give a book by even a beloved author, before giving up on it, if we are not enjoying it?
It’s relatively rare for me not to finish a book that I start. There are a few that I took a couple of runs at, having to start again – Ulysses springs to mind. And some that I haven’t finished, and would have to start again: Gravity’s Rainbow, Swann’s Way. I might never bother with either of those again, but you never know.
I’m fairly sure I’ll never get further than the the two or three pages I’ve managed into Finnegan’s Wake. And there’s the odd other one I’ve abandoned. One that I accidentally left on a train, and realised I didn’t care. It was something to do with an excise inspector in Scotland. No idea what it was called or who it was by.
Most of those above are what people would call difficult: something about the style, form, or content makes reading them a challenge. Overcoming that challenge can be rewarding, but we should never feel guilty about abandoning them if we’re not enjoying them, I feel. Reading for pleasure should not be a chore.
But now we come to a strange case. Claire North is an author I like a lot. The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August was great, and so was Touch, which I read the last time I was out of the country.
So I was pleased to get her 84k for Christmas. And I’ve tried to read it twice, but I just can’t get into it. It’s not that it’s boring or hard to read.
It’s that it’s unpleasant.
That probably doesn’t make a huge amount of sense. Lots of books have unpleasant characters, or depict upsetting or hurtful events. Lots of entertainment shows those things, TV, movies, songs…
I have mentioned here before that I don’t really care for dystopias as a subgenre.1 I’m not sure I can easily explain why that is, but they just don’t appeal.
And this is set in one. It’s largely a version of Britain, more or less present-day, but things have gone so far into privatisation, rampant capitalism, and generally Conservative party policies, that everyone knows the value of a human life.
That’s what the title means. That’s how much, in pounds, the rich have to pay to get away with murder. They can do anything else they want, too, as long as they can afford it.
I’m sure it will have a positive, maybe even uplifting, outcome. But I won’t be carrying on with it. I got about thirty pages in on my second time of starting it (only a couple the first time), and it’s just too bleak, too grim, for me to want to spend any more time there.
Maybe it’s partly the times were living in. But it’s not for me.
Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng (Books 2021, 3)
This book is infuriating. At times, and in certain ways, at least. Or not the book, but some of the characters.
For example, the parents, especially the dad – are so fucking pathetic it makes me angry. He can’t even boil an egg for his kids' breakfast when his wife’s away.
And throughout the early part you’re wondering why do they both love Lydia much more than their other two kids? Even before she dies, I mean?
Oh, yes it’s a dead girl story, did I mention that? Lydia is fridged in the first line, so it’s not a spoiler. It’s totally a fridging, though. That page tells you that the term means killing a female character ‘often as a plot device intended to move a male character’s story arc forward.’ Lydia’s death drives the whole plot, including the actions of her father and brother, so it definitely qualifies.
Her mother and little sister too, but that doesn’t lessen the truth of it.
It’s a very good exposition of a family with secrets at its heart. Though in the case of some of the secrets, there’s no very good reason for the person to keep them secret. A lot of problems could have been avoided – including, probably, the death of Lydia – if people had just talked to each other. That’s part of what’s so infuriating about it at times.
But maybe that – the difficulties people, families, have in communicating – is the point.
I also wondered why she chose to set it in the time she does. The present day parts are in 1977-8. I think it’s so that she can write about the particular immigrant experience she does: second and third generation Chinese immigrants to the US.
I picked this up because one of my tutors recommended it to me, due to its use of an omniscient narrator. I’m trying something similar with something I’m working on at the moment. This article in the New York Times practically credits Ng with bringing omniscient narration back into fashion. I don’t feel that it ever really went away, but maybe it has remained more common in SF than in literary fiction. Though as I write that I’m not sure I could cite an example from recent SF either, so maybe I’m wrong.
Here’s a good article by Ng herself about her decision to use the device. It’s been useful to me, anyway. And I actually enjoyed the book, aside from being annoyed at times.
Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo (Books 2021, 2)
It took me quite a long while to read this. I enjoyed it whenever I read a section, and I read it in large chunks at a time; but between times I wasn’t particularly drawn back to it. I think that’s probably because it doesn’t have any significant plot.
Instead it’s a series of character explorations, looking at a series of Black women (and a few men) over several decades of the twentieth century and the first two of the twenty-first.
Each story is compelling and enjoyable, and they’re all interlinked – almost too interlinked at times, you might say, because there’s an element of coincidence. But that doesn’t matter: coincidences happen, after all.
Perhaps the major downside is that you get interested and invested in a character, and their chapter ends and we move on to another one. So it’s like you’re always starting fresh. Or fresh-ish. That’s probably also part of why I had the experience I described at the start, of not being drawn back to it.
Because of my course, I’ve been thinking a lot about the choices writers make. So I was particularly aware of Evaristo’s unconventional choices regarding punctuation and capitalisation. Specifically, she capitalises proper nouns, but no other words. So sentences all start with lower-case letters. And she eschews almost all punctuation. Only the comma, the apostrophe, the question mark, and an occasional exclamation mark, are used.1 {.has-dropcap}
No full stops means – and I only consciously realised this when looking it over to write this – that every sentence starts a new paragraph, and comprises the whole of the paragraph. Even when a sentence does end with a question mark or exclamation mark, she has it end the paragraph.
All of which is fine. I found it noticeable, but not distracting. I just wonder what the intended effect is. Some people say they find things like quotes to delineate speech intrusive, and I’ve heard it said that leaving capitals off the start of sentences feels more informal. But I feel generally that most established conventions have good reasons for existing, and that the best approach is to keep to them, unless you have a very good reason for not doing so. I don’t think this novel would in any way be lessened if it were capitalised and punctuated conventionally.
And then I would be talking more about the content, not the form.
The Monsters We Deserve by Marcus Sedgwick (Books 2020, 30)
The first of my Christmas books, so I could count it as next year’s; but since I had finished it by the day after Boxing Day, it definitely belongs to this year. And it also brings me to a nice round 30 books for the year.
A writer is isolated in a lonely alpine chalet to write about a book he hates. Which very quickly turns out to be Frankenstein. He is visited by – well, that would be telling, but just let’s say that the novel he’s writing about and its creator are very significant.
It’s written – at least at first – as if it was the writer writing to his publisher, though that conceit soon disappears. There are various details around the way it’s printed, that look as if they should be significant, but they aren’t really.
It’s good. Check it out.
Xstabeth by David Keenan (Books 2020, 29)
Following on from number 27, then, we have David Keenan’s latest novel. Again we’re in a kind of magic-realist setting, without any obvious magic. In St Petersburg a young woman lives with her father, who is a failed or fading musician. The daughter – who is the viewpoint character – starts a relationship with her father’s friend, and gets pregnant. She keeps all of this from her father.
Her father, meanwhile, puts on a show at which he performs some seemingly-otherworldly music. He starts to believe that it was actually created by some sort of mystical entity called Xstabeth.
For reasons that escape me at the moment they go to St Andrews,1 where they get involved with a professional golfer. The ‘tenuous, ambiguous, confusing event’ that I referred to in the earlier note happens from this side too, but you’d only notice it if you’d read The Towers The Fields The Transmitters.
The novel is presented as if it were an academic work about a novel calle Xstabeth, by someone called ‘David Keenan,’ who killed himself by jumping from a tower in St Andrews. So there are cod-academic sections or extracts between the chapters.
It’s all very meta, and I enjoyed it, but I’m not sure I totally understood it. The strangest thing about it, in some ways, is the use of punctuation. Almost the only punctuation used is the full stop. But that doesn’t just mean he’s avoided using commas and semicolons, and constructed appropriately short sentences. It reads as if he wrote it with conventional punctuation around dialogue and so on, and then replaced every other mark with the full stop.
For example, consider this:
This is singular. He said. This is music that cannot be repeated. This is music that can never be toured. This is music that can never be applauded. I pointed out to him that there was applause on the record. Muted Applause. Awkward applause. Uncomprehending applause. But still. Applause. What is the sound of one audience member clapping. I asked him. He laughed. Yes. He said. Yes. Yes. There is no mechanic in the world for this music. He said.
A more conventional way to punctuate that and lay it out, might be:
‘This is singular,’ he said. ‘This is music that cannot be repeated; this is music that can never be toured; this is music that can never be applauded.’
I pointed out to him that there was applause on the record. Muted applause; awkward applause; uncomprehending applause; but still: applause.
‘What is the sound of one audience member clapping?’ I asked him.
He laughed. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘yes, yes. There is no mechanic in the world for this music,’ he said.
There are, of course, other ways you could present it. As an experimental way of presenting text, it’s interesting enough. I found it intruded, in that I constantly noticed it; but not so much as to be annoying. Though there were places where it was slightly confusing. I paid particular attention to it because we recently discussed ways to present dialogue on my course.
The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas (Books 2020, 28)
Read this for the young adult (YA) section of the Genre module on my course. It’s a powerful story inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement.
In an unnamed US city, a teenaged girl is the only witness to her friend being murdered by a police officer. She has to find her way through the complexities that follow, including family, school, friendships, the law, and the streets of the neighbourhood she grew up in.
It’s a tough read at times, as is it should be. But it’s also very funny in places. Well worth checking out.
The Towers The Fields The Transmitters by David Keenan (Books 2020, 27)
Strange one, this. I read Keenan’s This is Memorial Device a couple of years ago, so when I saw a new one by him listed on my local bookshop’s ‘forthcoming’ page, I had a look.
That book was Xstabeth, and more on it in a few posts' time. It hadn’t yet been released at the time, but there was a special offer from the publishers: upload proof that you had preordered it (such as the receipt from your local bookshop) and you’d get a free novella-length ebook prequel: The Towers The Fields The Transmitters.1
So I did all that, and here we are.
I’ll note right away that, having read both, they seem to be connected only by location and one tenuous, ambiguous, confusing event.
In fact those terms apply throughout this book. It’s kind of a magical realism piece, set mostly in St Andrews.2 A businessman visits the town to audit the books of a military facility, and starts trying to find his missing daughter. Why does he think she might be in St Andrews? That is never explained. Nor does it need to be.
Time goes weird, with second-world-war bombers appearing in the skies. Or on the phone, at least.
The more I try to write about this, the more it feels like a hallucination I had a few weeks ago. Very strange. Worth reading.
Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail 72 by Hunter S Thompson (Books 2020, 26)
I thought it might be interesting, in this year of a US presidential election, to reread this account of a different reelection campaign of a terrible president.
In this one, of course, the president – Nixon – was successfully reelected. And it was only in his second term that he was impeached – or nearly so. He resigned first, and Ford, his veep, now president, pardoned him. It wouldn’t surprise me if Trump and Pence try the same sort of thing in the next couple of months.
This book doesn’t get as far as Nixon’s resignation. Thompson followed the Democratic campaign, and then George McGovern’s campaign once he got the nomination, as part of the press pack. He was National Affairs Editor for Rolling Stone at the time. A title and role that he created.
So this is essentially a fix-up of his columns, with some edits, and the odd footnote adding information that wasn’t available at the time. It’s classic HST, of course, with not quite as many illegal drugs as in some of his works.
The most intriguing thing in the whole book for me was this quote from p189:
For almost a year now, he [Pat Cadell] has been George McGovern’s official numbers wizard. Cadell and his Cambridge Research Associates have been working the streets and suburban neighborhoods in New Hampshire, Wisconsin, and Massachusetts for McGovern, then coming back to headquarters on election nite [sic] and calling the results almost down to the percentage point…
Emphasis mine, ellipsis his. I’m just struck by the name of the organisation, and the fact that they’re doing a not dissimilar thing to Cambridge Analytica – in terms of analysis, if not manipulation – in a pre-computer age. There doesn’t seem to be any connections between the two organisations.
On the very next page we have this:
Even reading and watching all the news, there is no way to know the truth – except to be there.
Which resonates profoundly in today’s ‘fake news’ world.
When the Going Gets WEIRD
In the New York Times Daniel C Dennett reviews a book by Joseph Henrich called The Weirdest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous. Sounds like an interesting book, and the review itself is engaging. I just wanted to note a few points.
First, we have the acronym WEIRD, which stands for “Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic.” Apparently being WEIRD makes us weird, in psychological terms. Non-WEIRD and WEIRD people have differences that can be observed, measured.
I was intrigued by this quote:
To point to just one striking example: Normal, meaning non-WEIRD, people use left and right hemispheres of their brains about equally for facial recognition, but we WEIRD people have co-opted left-hemisphere regions for language tasks, and are significantly worse at recognizing faces than the normal population. Until recently few researchers imagined that growing up in a particular culture could have such an effect on functional neuroanatomy.
– Daniel C Dennett, Why Are We in the West So Weird? A Theory
I wonder if this can apply on an individual scale: are people whose focus has been language less able to recognise faces? Answering just from within my own head, I’d say maybe? I’ve been what my Dad used to call a compulsive reader all my life, as well as being at least somewhat interested in writing, and I’m very poor at facial recognition. Bordering on prosopagnosia, I sometimes think (though far from anything like the poor woman in this story, who can’t even recognise herself in a mirror).
If my experience suggests that, I have counter examples right in my own family. My beloved and our daughter are both linguists, and both border (to my mind) on being super recognisers1, which is the complete opposite of me.
None of which tells us anything useful, except maybe that the ability to recognise faces, like many things, exists on a scale.
More interestingly, Dennett introduces (to me, at least) the delightful term ‘Occam’s Broom’:
A good statistician (which I am not) should scrutinize the many uses of statistics made by Henrich and his team. They are probably all sound but he would want them examined rigorously by the experts. That’s science. Experts who don’t have the technical tools — historians and anthropologists especially — have an important role to play as well; they should scour the book for any instances of Occam’s broom (with which one sweeps inconvenient facts under the rug).
– Daniel C Dennett, Why Are We in the West So Weird? A Theory
Occam had a famous razor; why wouldn’t he have a broom as well?