My reading has rather picked up in September, with a further seven books completed and another two started in the second half of the month, beginning with
Memory by Elizabeth Bujold, one of the Vorkosigan series. This was the first Bujold I’ve read so I came cold to all the backstory, and while I can’t say I was taken with Miles as a character – and I certainly couldn’t understand why women were throwing themselves at him – and the socio-political elements were a tad confusing, I enjoyed it.
From SF to fantasy, and
Swordheart by T. Kingfisher. A very funny opening and some good reviews inveigled me to buy the paperback at the rather eye-popping price of £16.95, but I’m not convinced it was worth it. A full review
here.
It was back to SF and a Did-Not-Finish with
Otherland – or, rather, City of Golden Shadow, book one of the Otherland tetralogy – by Tad Williams. A doorstop of a novel, over 900 pages of very close type, and I struggled through about one-quarter of it before calling it a day. Multiple POVs including a private in WWI amid the horrors of the trenches, an African woman teaching VR technology with her San student, and a teenage gameplayer, all of whom I imagine would connect at some point to overcome a conspiracy in a virtual reality world which is putting youngsters into comas. Well-written, if at inordinate length for some scenes, but it didn’t interest me enough to make me want to continue another 700 pages of this book and likely another 3,000 pages of the other volumes just to find out what happens.
So a rapid change of pace and back to fantasy again with
Broken Homes by Ben Aaronovitch, the fourth in his Rivers of London series about Peter Grant, a magician in the esoteric branch of the Metropolitan Police. This was actually an inadvertent re-read as I’d forgotten I’d already got this book, but I found the story of various murders, deaths and thefts which lead Peter to go undercover on a listed housing estate by a famous architect better this time around. It also served well as a lead in to
Foxglove Summer, the fifth in the series in which Peter ventures out of London to help yokels in Herefordshire after two girls go missing. This one I didn’t enjoy nearly as much, partly because of the plot which had huge holes in it, partly because of a whiff of metropolitan prejudice and condescension about the sticks which seemed to come directly from Aaronovitch, and mostly because Nightingale, by far the most interesting character in the series, was completely sidelined in this.
Then it was back to SF with
The Penultimate Truth by Philip K Dick. I struggle with much of his work, but despite some confusing passages at the beginning, with disconcerting and unnecessary neologisms, this was a largely accessible and easy read. Most of the world’s population is sent down to live in “ant-tanks” at the start of WWIII while robots – “leadies” – fight on their behalf. Twenty years later they’re still there, terrified of the radioactive wasteland above them, and under the eye of Soviet-style political officers they’re having to churn out more leadies to continue the war. But the war has actually long since ended, and the robots are servants to an elite class which lives above ground in luxury, though pressures from above and below mean things are about to change. This novel was inevitably dated (it was published in 1964) and there seemed to be a large plot hole about someone who is several hundred years old, but it was nonetheless an interesting and gripping read, raising the issues of truth, deception, and how far violence may be used to achieve good ends.
I continued in SF mode with another 1960s offering,
Babel-17 by Samuel Delaney. Fortunately quite a short novel, I found this really hard going, and having got to the end I wondered why I'd bothered. Its premise is the then-fashionable idea that language determines thought and perception and therefore action – and, in the novel at least, the manipulation of material objects. Consequently, a language created by otherwise unnamed “Invaders” is a threat, not least to Rydra Wong, alleged poet and complete Mary Sue. Incomprehensible dialogue and narrative, unlikeable characters, thin plot.
Nothing deterred, I stuck with SF and
Proxima by Stephen Baxter. This was a second attempt as I tried to read it last year and abandoned it after only 75 pages, but this time I managed to get through to the bitter end. A few thoughts about it
here.
In addition to all those, as a side-read I’m slowly making my way though
Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson, the first of his Baroque Cycle, and another huge brick of a tome, packed with virtually everyone who is anyone in the scientific and economic community in England from around 1655 to 1715, with additional personae from the continent and Boston, including Newton, Blackbeard, Ben Franklin, Charles II, Leibniz, Hooke and Samuel Pepys, all revolving around the invented character of Daniel Waterhouse FRS, dissenter and natural philosopher. It’s like having a time machine and eavesdropping on real life in the Restoration era with some delicious sly wit, not to mention the first incarnation of MIT.
