2008 Book List

This is a list with, if I can remember enough about the book, a short summary of my reaction to it, of the books I've read this year. The list is in no particular order. The choice was militated as much by availability in airports as anything else.

• The Classical World, Robin Lane Fox
  I still haven't finished this but it is a remarkably unified view of classical history.
  
• Exit Music, Ian Rankin
  The Last Rebus novel, as ever I'm as much attracted by Rebus' taste in music as I am his generally fumbling way to the truth.
  
• American Gods (again), Neil Gaiman
  I reread this this year, for some reason the dread of the submerged cars in the lake didn't quite get to me this time. But I still love the idea of going Behind the Scenes.
  
• The Last Gospel, David Gibbins
  Pure Airline fodder I'm afraid, expect nothing of it and it will deliver it fine.
  
• TimeQuake, Kurt Vonnegut
  His last novel which reworks old material to a large degree but its Vonnegut from the perspective of the dying and in Vonnegut's Universe that's a curious place to view from.
  
• The Book of Air and Shadows, Michael Gruber
  I can't recall much of this at all.
  
• The Death of Dalziel, Reginald Hill
  This is the first of the Dalziel books I've read though I enjoy the TV series a lot. Dalziel (pronounced deeyell), is as direct and Yorkshire as you'd expect. I'll read more.
  
• The Shakespeare Secret, J. J. Cartrell
  More Airport fodder trying to be a little like Kate Mosse and a little like Dan Brown, the author is certainly better than Dan Brown. The visualisation of the Elisabethan theatre is I seem to remember very good. The thriller parts are so so.
  
• Revelation, C. J. Sansom
  Sansom is becoming a bit of a thing for me, none of the Reformation series nor his standalone novel have disappointed me at all. I haven't even read the series in the right order so I can see the character development over the three published so far. Highly recommended.
  
• House of Leaves, Mark Z. Danielewski
  There's an entire essay I could write about this but I won't, it might end up as a footnote to the book. If you like the semiotics of authorship, publishing and the interleaving of reality and proto-reality then you'll like this. If you find empty pages, or pages with one line printed on them irksome then give it a miss.
  
• Somnambulist, Jonathan Barnes
  To an extent this is Barnes showing off and Barnes showing off is sparkling indeed. For those that love the Victorian pastische. With lots of cream.
  
• Night Train to Lisbon, Pascal Mercier
  I don't have favourites of course but if I were pushed to it, this would be my novel of the year. Existentialism, Portugal and a repressed Swiss teacher, what could be finer?
  
• Azincourt, Bernard Cornwell
  A lovely romp through the Agincourt campaign and to be applauded if only for encouraging me to go and get Agincourt by Juliet Barker.
  
• Against the Day, Thomas Pynchon
  
• Wintersmith, Terry Pratchett
  The young adult books about Tiffany Aching and the Wee Free Men are both riotously funny and very, very sad.


• The Graveyard Book, Neil Gaiman
  Being called his best by some. I'm not sure about that but the simplicity of the telling makes the difference.
  
• Un Lun Dun, China Miéville
  I loved this more and more the more I read it, hero/ines who aren't are the real hero/ine of the story will always get me.
  
• Anathem, Neil Stephenson
  I talked about this not so long ago, I think I prefer the alternate history rather than the alternate future of Stephenson but its nae bad for a'that. Having a French man as the Earth hero in a kind of homage to Planet of the Apes was fun.
  
• The State Counsellor, Boris Akunin
  I just love this series, can't help it its both knowing and surprising.
  
• The Embarrassment of Riches, Simon Schama
  I learned a lot about the Dutch and food reading this, but it seemed to be mostly about the food. I admit I found it a powerful good sleeping draught.
  
• Winter in Madrid, C. J. Sansom
  I thought I was going to hate this and bring up all sorts of comparisons with Hemingway, but I found myself trapped inside it. With the calls for reparation for the Franco atrocities its become topical as well.
  
• The Resurrectionist, James Bradley
  Another victorian pastische, not quite as successful it reminded me a little of a Charles Palliser novel but not as long, not nearly as long, which was a blessing. The ending appears to be from a different novel, which is, I guess, a pun on the Resurrectionist as a title.


• Agincourt, Juliet Barker
  I'm currently reading this and it shows the immense debt which Cornwell has to her for his novel (which he acknowledges), the blurb on the back says something about if its the only History book you read in a year to read this one. I'd hope you'd manage more than that but this and The Classical World would both be on my list.
  

I may add to the list if I remember any other highlights, there's at least one turkish author whose name and title I've forgotten for the present.

Weekend reading and listening

I've finally started Un Lun Dun by China Miéville which is another in the I suppose fashionable genre of fantasy for children that adults like to read.

And after the weighty length of Anathem I skipped through Neil Gaiman's Graveyard Book which I guess really is a kind of Jungle Book, though I must admit it didn't really strike me that way. But it did remind me of Pratchett's Johnny and the Dead if only for showing how accepting children are of whatever their environment gives them.

Which precipitates the nasty thought that Baby 'P' probably loved his tormentors and only wanted to please them, which I guess he did in the end.

First of my downloads for the month from emusic.com is Skeletal Lamping by Of Montreal, which is gloriously anarchic, Zappaish and weirdly Todd Rundgren in the liking for Beach Boys harmonies.

It just so happens that after Skeletal Lamping on my iTunes Library is Modern Dance, Pere Ubu. Which fits very nicely...

Current reading.

Well not so much current as past and future.

March's Books

• The Way It Was ~ Freddie Trueman. Freddie was one of my idols as a small boy, he was the fastest bowler I could imagine in the game of cricket and even though he played for Yorkshire and I supported Lancashire he was still the biggest star in my six year old Universe. As you'd expect from Fiery Fred he doesn't really hold back on his opinions, scathing as he is about the toffs at the MCC there is still that tiny smidgen of forelock tugging countryman which is what I think actually powers his indignation. And he is right he should have played for England far more than he did, but, as he himself admits, he was not unusual in that. In fact, I'd say that it is only very recently that the selection of players for England has become anything other than a 'face fits' process.


• Cloud Atlas ~ David Mitchell. I've finally finished this, and it hasn't taken the time it has because it was a chore but partly because I didn't want to finish it. I talked about the nature of the book before but what seems like a pure artifice in the beginning is at the end a device that makes sense of the artifice itself. Somewhat self referential perhaps but I think that is the point.


• The Fabric of the Cosmos ~ Briane Greene. This is a book on Cosmology, on the physics of Reality and its both discursive and deep by turn and it reminds me of nothing so much as my own swelling fictional work on a fictional Cosmos. Which is good, it was one of the reasons for wanting to read it, but at the same time I want to avoid just creating a pastische so some structural decisions he has made in laying out the theories I will have to put my own differing slant upon. I'm not far into it but I'm enjoying it so far.

FOSDEM Interlude

The current crop of reading material has been interesting.

• The Rule of Four ~ Ian Caldwell & Dustin Thomason. This comes with the flash at the bottom of the front cover of If you loved THE DA VINCI CODE... dive into this which even without the ellipsis initially made me recoil in horror at the idea of reading anything like that again that wasn't unconsciously funny such as Danniken. But I managed to put away my childish prejudice if only because that other prejudice that blurbs on the cover are always entirely misleading and I bought it. I can't say it's perfect because it isn't. It has a certain undergraduateness about it, which is fair enough as it is about undergraduates and if Princeton really is as it is depicted in the book then it must be a truly dreadful place.

  The book is about the Hypnerotomachia Phillipi a real book of renaissance Italy and a book that obsesses half of the characters in various ways. It is a true mystery in that no one really knows the original intent of the book (personally I think its a printers test piece), and the authors construct a false but plausible set of ciphers within the book that unravel.

  The pace of the book is quite slow and then finishes in a rush and in a 'let everything be explained and if not happy then fulfilled' Hollywood kind of way. Which might have been the result of some publisher's editor and if so a horrible mistake.

  I'd still wholeheartedly recommend it though even if only as an antidote to the poisonous Da Vinci Code.

• Not the End of the World ~ Kate Atkinson. Now this is a different pot of gold. If there were ever a modern author that could surprise and thrill me and leave me occasionally aware of a horrible edge to the world and want to fuck during some long Sunday afternoon its Kate Atkinson and this collection of occasionally connected and causally chained short stories has certainly kept me more than amused even if not sexually satiated.

  Curiously in one of those tweaks of coincidence one of the graphic markers used at the beginning of each of the stories comes from the Hypnerotomachia Phillipi. Perhaps she also read the Rule of Four or is even now puzzling out the architectural and erotic nuggets held in that book.

• cloud atlas ~ David Mitchell. Because I was stranded at Brussels Airport yesterday and had read through the Kate Atkinson book I needed something else to read and because the airport is a civilised place (unlike British Airports), it had an English language section and there I found this book which I'd heard a review and the author on Radio Five Live. David Mitchell calls it a 'Russian Doll' of a book, there are six entirely separate but connected stories or novellas each contained within the other such that the first ends abruptly at page 39 when the second resumes and no doubt the novel as a whole ends with the first story again, though I haven't got that far yet.

  So far there have been two different styles and differing subjects;the first a journal of a pacific journey in the 19th Century with dark underlying currents that are quite Lovecraftian in a gentle but menacing way;and the second an epistolary account by a ne'er-do-well music student feeding off an old and decrepit master, not to mention knocking off a slice of the master's wife. I'm enjoying it thoroughly

The Current Crop

It's been a while since I gave the current reading list and as Christmas has been and gone and I've read a good deal of what I got I'll include them in the list as well.

• Going Postal ~ Terry Pratchett, the latest in the Discworld series. Pratchett has entered another rich seam with this diagonal look at The Post Office, the strange currency of stamps, the Internet as semaphore and Aspergis Syndrome in Fantasy.


• Long Way Round ~ Ewan McGregor and Charlie Boorman, the openly ghosted (a good thing), account of their spin around the globe, from London to New York the long way round, on two BMW GSX Bikes. I'm still reading this and it is enjoyable, though there's a fair amount of the Slough of Despond about both of them at times. It's good on the globalisation of fame, McGregor was even recognised in Kazakhstan and had to meet the press in some football stadium or other. They bitch a bit about the attention and how they weren't left alone to wander in the wilderness the way they fantasised before the trip, if they could only realise that if they were unknown they'd still be treated as objects of fame simply by being there. I used to feel like that walking down the street in Taipei and I'm a nobody.


• The Algebraist ~ Iain M. Banks' latest science fiction. This is quite a bit different from his other science fiction in the Culture universe, though it could be the same one just earlier, it has AI almost entirely banned whereas often he's used AI as the way to point out the insecurities and fallibilities of the fleshy entities. It's extremely dense in some ways with considerable cultural detail as normal but I confess I miss the whimsical Ship names.


• As It Was ~ Fred Trueman's memoirs. Fred was probably the first cricketer to make an impression on me, even if he did play for Yorkshire and I was in Lancashire. He is from that generation that did their National Service and wasn't that impressed by the toffs, though he came from what could be called the agricultural servant class. I haven't started this yet but I am looking forward to it. I miss his avuncular style on Test Match Special, there are insufficient characters commenting on the game these days. Cricket needs grumpy old men to remind the youth of when 90 overs in a day was common and centuries scarce.