Started: June 11th
Finished:June 17th
Pages: 437
After this one, there are only 4 books left before Kinsey Millhone retires. Presumably at least. Who knows what happens after "Z"? But in the meantime, Sue Grafton made some wiser choices than Sara Paretsky for her long-running "alphabet" series. Most notably, Grafton has frozen Kinsey in time. While the rest of us meander through the decades, only 6 years have passed in Santa Theresa. "V" takes place in 1988, as Kinsey is about to turn 38 years old.
But for all that Kinsey detects the old-fashioned way, sans internet background searches or gps tracking devices, Kinsey has changed over the course of 22 books. She's still a misfit who owns a single disreputable dress, and she still cuts her own hair with nail scissors. But she's hardly a loner anymore. She's collected a family. Two of them in fact: the aged but spritely family of her landlord, complete with his hypochondriac brother and his curmudgeonly Hungarian wife Rosie, and her own estranged family who show up intermittently when convenient for plot purposes.
But the biggest change is that Kinsey is now notably funnier. It's been quite a while since I read "A", but I don't remember quite the string of sardonic humour from start to finish back at then.
All that being said, there is nothing really notable about "V". It's not a high point of the series (Q and S were both quite interesting). Just a good read, competently executed.
Sunday, 17 June 2012
Thursday, 14 June 2012
Ready Player One by Ernest Cline
Started: June 4, 2012
Finished: June 9, 2012
Pages: 374
Ready Player One is the real deal. I could just say "read it! read it!" and have done, but I enjoyed the book too much to leave it at that.
Of course, I suppose it's not for everyone. Ever play Galaga? If I say appreciatively "you're evil", might you respond "chaotic neutral, actually"? Do you have any idea why it would be super cool to drive a DeLorean that was also equipped with a Oscillation Overthruster? If so... you're such a geek! Ahem, I mean, you're squarely in the target readership of this book. It's well-written, engaging science fiction that's full of 80s geek nostalgia.
Ready Player One is Ernest Cline's first SF novel. Let's hope it's not his last.
Finished: June 9, 2012
Pages: 374
Ready Player One is the real deal. I could just say "read it! read it!" and have done, but I enjoyed the book too much to leave it at that.
Of course, I suppose it's not for everyone. Ever play Galaga? If I say appreciatively "you're evil", might you respond "chaotic neutral, actually"? Do you have any idea why it would be super cool to drive a DeLorean that was also equipped with a Oscillation Overthruster? If so... you're such a geek! Ahem, I mean, you're squarely in the target readership of this book. It's well-written, engaging science fiction that's full of 80s geek nostalgia.
Ready Player One is Ernest Cline's first SF novel. Let's hope it's not his last.
Sunday, 3 June 2012
The French Powder Mystery by Ellery Queen
Started May 31
Finished June 3
Pages 316
Not all popular fiction ages well. Ellery Queen isn't awful, but you can't help being aware that you're reading a book written in 1930. And, alas, not in a good way. Want your medical examiner to remove a bullet from the victim's heart at the actual crime scene, while simultaneously determining the bullet's angle of entry? Want a know-it-all detective hero who doesn't for a moment wonder about the guilt of one of the possible suspects because, after all, the fellow is the right sort and went to the same school as him?
If you're interested in classic American detective fiction, you're probably best off with Noir: Dashiell Hammet or Philip Chandler. If you're not in the mood for darkness, you can't beat Nero Wolfe.
Finished June 3
Pages 316
Not all popular fiction ages well. Ellery Queen isn't awful, but you can't help being aware that you're reading a book written in 1930. And, alas, not in a good way. Want your medical examiner to remove a bullet from the victim's heart at the actual crime scene, while simultaneously determining the bullet's angle of entry? Want a know-it-all detective hero who doesn't for a moment wonder about the guilt of one of the possible suspects because, after all, the fellow is the right sort and went to the same school as him?
If you're interested in classic American detective fiction, you're probably best off with Noir: Dashiell Hammet or Philip Chandler. If you're not in the mood for darkness, you can't beat Nero Wolfe.
Friday, 1 June 2012
Sister of the Road, as told to Dr. Ben L. Reitman
Started: May 25, 2012
Finished: May 30, 2012
Pages:314
Copyright: 1937
Now this is an interesting book. I picked it up last year on a whim at a second-hand bookstore out in Chilliwack. It's an autobiography of a female hobo, "Box Car" Bertha Thompson, written during the dirty 30s.
Why did I read it? I've also read:
That's the context I brought to Sister of the Road. And in some ways this book didn't disappoint. I wondered how shocked contemporary readers would have been at Bertha's unconventional lifestyle. I was interested in the range of women and men that Bertha met on the road, and was surprised at how commonplace radical political movements appeared to be in the hobo camps. More lost history: when we talk about "the homeless problem" today we aren't generally talking about the problem of I.W.W. or anarchist agitators. Except sometimes in the Occupy camps, which ended up hosting all three types of travellers that Bertha knew: hobos (jobless wanderers), tramps (those looking for adventure), and bums (drunks or addicts).
The book follows Bertha from age 15 or so until just past her 30th birthday. But at about age 22 I started to have doubts. Granted Bertha was a tramp who was interested in people and any and all experiences of life. But .....her experiences started to seem a tich too comprehensive for plausibility. Why did she take up working for a pimp in a brothel again? Really? Just as she leaves that life, pregnant and afflicted with venereal disease, her grifter ex-boyfriend dramatically finds her again from death row. Ah ..okay. Which made me start thinking: Bertha is literate, well-educated, and articulate. Why is this book is "as told to" rather than written by Bertha herself? Hm....and here's an appendix of statistics about homeless men and women. New hypothesis: Bertha is a fabrication by a sociologist who chose to illustrate ALL of those statistics in a single woman's life?.
I have an original 1937 edition of the book, but I thought "what the hell" and googled it anyway. Thanks to the gods of the internet I did come up with something. But it was a weirder something than I expected. Sister of the Road was reprinted in the 2000s with an appendix that explained that it was a fabrication based on the stories of 3 or more hobo women interviewed by Ben Reitman.
It also explained that Ben Reitman was an anarchist, abortionist, birth control activist, and Emma Goldman's lover. Which of course changed my perceptions of the book all over again. Of course he chose to make Bertha a political activist moving in a network of political activists. Even if that hadn't been his life, it would have been his propaganda. But why did he make Bertha so promiscuous and so unconventional? Originally I'd thought the book was sensationalistic simply to draw in readers. Was he instead trying to advocate for free love by treating Bertha's sexual adventures matter-of-factly? Why did he write the book in the first place? He romanticizes Bertha's life and makes her likeable, but she and the others she meets on the road are often far from admirable. Did he feel it was important to circulate and humanize those statistics ? I don't see another clear political purpose to the book and I think there must be one. Finding out the book was fictional raised more questions than it answered.
In the end the best part of reading this Sister of the Road was having my perceptions altered first by Bertha's story, and then by my understanding that Bertha's story was fiction. Which makes it a very modern book after all, a la "A Million Little Pieces" and "Three Cups of Tea".
Finished: May 30, 2012
Pages:314
Copyright: 1937
Now this is an interesting book. I picked it up last year on a whim at a second-hand bookstore out in Chilliwack. It's an autobiography of a female hobo, "Box Car" Bertha Thompson, written during the dirty 30s.
Why did I read it? I've also read:
- an autobiography of a suffragette. Laugh a Defiance by Mary Richardson is a matter-of-fact description of, well, frankly, her terrorist actions while following Emmeline Pankhurst in the struggle to win the vote for British women.
- the memoir of Caroline Herschel, an 18th century astronomer who discovered 7 comets at a time when there were only about 20 in total known, and who also helped her brother William do the first systematic astronomical survey of the skies.
- Sister Marie Celeste's letters in Letters to Father: Suor Maria Celeste to Galileo. (translated and published by Dana Sobel after she wrote Galileo's Daughter)
- the autobiography of Diane Di Prima, a 50s Beatnik poet who was a contemporary of Jack Kerouac.
That's the context I brought to Sister of the Road. And in some ways this book didn't disappoint. I wondered how shocked contemporary readers would have been at Bertha's unconventional lifestyle. I was interested in the range of women and men that Bertha met on the road, and was surprised at how commonplace radical political movements appeared to be in the hobo camps. More lost history: when we talk about "the homeless problem" today we aren't generally talking about the problem of I.W.W. or anarchist agitators. Except sometimes in the Occupy camps, which ended up hosting all three types of travellers that Bertha knew: hobos (jobless wanderers), tramps (those looking for adventure), and bums (drunks or addicts).
The book follows Bertha from age 15 or so until just past her 30th birthday. But at about age 22 I started to have doubts. Granted Bertha was a tramp who was interested in people and any and all experiences of life. But .....her experiences started to seem a tich too comprehensive for plausibility. Why did she take up working for a pimp in a brothel again? Really? Just as she leaves that life, pregnant and afflicted with venereal disease, her grifter ex-boyfriend dramatically finds her again from death row. Ah ..okay. Which made me start thinking: Bertha is literate, well-educated, and articulate. Why is this book is "as told to" rather than written by Bertha herself? Hm....and here's an appendix of statistics about homeless men and women. New hypothesis: Bertha is a fabrication by a sociologist who chose to illustrate ALL of those statistics in a single woman's life?.
I have an original 1937 edition of the book, but I thought "what the hell" and googled it anyway. Thanks to the gods of the internet I did come up with something. But it was a weirder something than I expected. Sister of the Road was reprinted in the 2000s with an appendix that explained that it was a fabrication based on the stories of 3 or more hobo women interviewed by Ben Reitman.
It also explained that Ben Reitman was an anarchist, abortionist, birth control activist, and Emma Goldman's lover. Which of course changed my perceptions of the book all over again. Of course he chose to make Bertha a political activist moving in a network of political activists. Even if that hadn't been his life, it would have been his propaganda. But why did he make Bertha so promiscuous and so unconventional? Originally I'd thought the book was sensationalistic simply to draw in readers. Was he instead trying to advocate for free love by treating Bertha's sexual adventures matter-of-factly? Why did he write the book in the first place? He romanticizes Bertha's life and makes her likeable, but she and the others she meets on the road are often far from admirable. Did he feel it was important to circulate and humanize those statistics ? I don't see another clear political purpose to the book and I think there must be one. Finding out the book was fictional raised more questions than it answered.
In the end the best part of reading this Sister of the Road was having my perceptions altered first by Bertha's story, and then by my understanding that Bertha's story was fiction. Which makes it a very modern book after all, a la "A Million Little Pieces" and "Three Cups of Tea".
Saturday, 26 May 2012
Light by M. John Harrison
Started: May 13, 2012
Finished: May 24, 2012
Pages: 418
Light is a hard, spiky book. It uses the trope of three parallel stories told in a cycle of three chapters, with the added complication that the third storyline begins as the tank-dreams of a hallucination junkie. But it's almost a relief to encounter those: story one follows a serial killer physicist trying to invent quantum computing in 1999. Story two takes place in the far future where a petulant ship's intelligence carelessly murders other expeditions that are also cruising the pyschedelic fringes of the galactic core. Story three is just hard to make any sense of.
As you may have gathered by now, I found it difficult to engage with Light. The book bursts with a disturbing weirdness. The serial killer is driven by an obsession with chance and a fear of the Shranker....who may not even exist. The intelligent ship is a deeply unsympathetic character who inhabits a universe where space-faring species do no more than scavenge the grandiose and inexplicable remains of vanished cultures. And when the tank-dream junkie returns to the "real" world, it's one where he remembers nothing of his life except that everyone is trying to kill him.
Light is not a comfortable read. I'm not at all sure what it was "about". But the writing was excellent and the characters and images were striking. So, while not exactly recommended, not exactly dis-recommended either.
Finished: May 24, 2012
Pages: 418
Light is a hard, spiky book. It uses the trope of three parallel stories told in a cycle of three chapters, with the added complication that the third storyline begins as the tank-dreams of a hallucination junkie. But it's almost a relief to encounter those: story one follows a serial killer physicist trying to invent quantum computing in 1999. Story two takes place in the far future where a petulant ship's intelligence carelessly murders other expeditions that are also cruising the pyschedelic fringes of the galactic core. Story three is just hard to make any sense of.
As you may have gathered by now, I found it difficult to engage with Light. The book bursts with a disturbing weirdness. The serial killer is driven by an obsession with chance and a fear of the Shranker....who may not even exist. The intelligent ship is a deeply unsympathetic character who inhabits a universe where space-faring species do no more than scavenge the grandiose and inexplicable remains of vanished cultures. And when the tank-dream junkie returns to the "real" world, it's one where he remembers nothing of his life except that everyone is trying to kill him.
Light is not a comfortable read. I'm not at all sure what it was "about". But the writing was excellent and the characters and images were striking. So, while not exactly recommended, not exactly dis-recommended either.
Monday, 21 May 2012
Christmas Mourning by Magaret Maron
Started: May 16
Finished: May 18
Pages: 289
Margaret Maron writes very comfortable books. When you visit Deborah Knott, her husband, stepson, and her large extended family, it feels very natural to spend a few days with her preparing for Christmas and watching her husband figure our the causes of the latest tragedy to hit Colleton County. I suppose that makes her books fall into the "cozy" category, even though the deaths are seem real and sad, and unpleasantness lurks beneath the surface of the life of the perfect cheerleader and her grieving family. But every neatly-wrapped up murder mystery needs to have a murder at its heart (Alexander McCall Smith excepted), and Maron writes better than many mystery authors. So Christmas Mourning wasn't a bad way to waste a few head-achy summer hours.
Finished: May 18
Pages: 289
Margaret Maron writes very comfortable books. When you visit Deborah Knott, her husband, stepson, and her large extended family, it feels very natural to spend a few days with her preparing for Christmas and watching her husband figure our the causes of the latest tragedy to hit Colleton County. I suppose that makes her books fall into the "cozy" category, even though the deaths are seem real and sad, and unpleasantness lurks beneath the surface of the life of the perfect cheerleader and her grieving family. But every neatly-wrapped up murder mystery needs to have a murder at its heart (Alexander McCall Smith excepted), and Maron writes better than many mystery authors. So Christmas Mourning wasn't a bad way to waste a few head-achy summer hours.
Wednesday, 16 May 2012
1493 by Charles C. Mann
Started: Feb. 23
Stalled: Feb 25
Restarted: April 28, 2012
Finished: May 13, 2012
Pages: 459
Charles Mann's previous book, 1491, uses recent archeological and historical research to draw a picture of the Americas before Columbus's arrival. 1493 describes the impact of on the entire world of sustained European involvement in the Americas post-"discovery".
Both books are full of surprising facts. Perhaps the single most unbelievable item from 1493 is that earthworms are not native to North America. I looked at the footnote on that one, and am tempted to actually look up those references myself! (The assertion in the book is that farmers in the Chesapeake Bay area brought earthworms with them both in ship ballast and in the root balls of plants that they transported to their new home. Okay, it's a plausible scenario for introduction....but weren't there any American earthworms in that ecological niche before contact? And how do you know? For that matter, how do you know that the "European" earthworms weren't already here when the British settlers arrived?), I could list a lot more random facts, but I'd hate to spoil too many of these nuggets for anyone who might like to go on to read 1493. Rest assured there are lots more.
Mann uses these surprising facts along with a lot of historical detail to build the central theses of his book: the Spanish conquest of the Americas fundamentally changed the world. It was the start of an inexorable process that led to the world becoming effectively a single economy, and increasingly a single ecosystem. Furthermore, this change was a direct, real, and traceable result of various decisions made by first the Spanish conquistadoras and later by (mostly) the subsequent Spanish colonial administrations. As with 1491, Mann's arguments are convincing both because of the amount of detail he includes, and because of the way he links his stories together to draw the bigger picture.
So, overall, I'd recommend reading it. Although... if I had to choose between reading 1491 and 1493, I'd read 1491. I enjoyed it more. It could be because I read 1491 while I was in Mexico and actually visiting some of the same specific places that he discusses in the book. It could also be that reading both books so close together was a bit much. He does have some annoying tendencies (like oversimplification of philosophical or political issues), which are easier to overlook in a one off. But it might also be that 1491 is the better book.
Stalled: Feb 25
Restarted: April 28, 2012
Finished: May 13, 2012
Pages: 459
Charles Mann's previous book, 1491, uses recent archeological and historical research to draw a picture of the Americas before Columbus's arrival. 1493 describes the impact of on the entire world of sustained European involvement in the Americas post-"discovery".
Both books are full of surprising facts. Perhaps the single most unbelievable item from 1493 is that earthworms are not native to North America. I looked at the footnote on that one, and am tempted to actually look up those references myself! (The assertion in the book is that farmers in the Chesapeake Bay area brought earthworms with them both in ship ballast and in the root balls of plants that they transported to their new home. Okay, it's a plausible scenario for introduction....but weren't there any American earthworms in that ecological niche before contact? And how do you know? For that matter, how do you know that the "European" earthworms weren't already here when the British settlers arrived?), I could list a lot more random facts, but I'd hate to spoil too many of these nuggets for anyone who might like to go on to read 1493. Rest assured there are lots more.
Mann uses these surprising facts along with a lot of historical detail to build the central theses of his book: the Spanish conquest of the Americas fundamentally changed the world. It was the start of an inexorable process that led to the world becoming effectively a single economy, and increasingly a single ecosystem. Furthermore, this change was a direct, real, and traceable result of various decisions made by first the Spanish conquistadoras and later by (mostly) the subsequent Spanish colonial administrations. As with 1491, Mann's arguments are convincing both because of the amount of detail he includes, and because of the way he links his stories together to draw the bigger picture.
So, overall, I'd recommend reading it. Although... if I had to choose between reading 1491 and 1493, I'd read 1491. I enjoyed it more. It could be because I read 1491 while I was in Mexico and actually visiting some of the same specific places that he discusses in the book. It could also be that reading both books so close together was a bit much. He does have some annoying tendencies (like oversimplification of philosophical or political issues), which are easier to overlook in a one off. But it might also be that 1491 is the better book.
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