Recent Reading
I’ll try and keep this up on a fortnightly basis.
What (and how) I am reading varies a lot these days. I am generally reading several books at once (terrible habit, I suppose, but I don’t seem to have any trouble keeping plots separate in my head).
So, I’m currently reading:
No Name by Wilkie Collins (1862).
Hardcover.
This is my current bed-time reading.
In my opinion, this is Collins’ masterpiece, not The Moonstone or The Woman in White. No less an authority than Collins’ mentor, Charles Dickens, agreed with me.
Unlike Dickens, Wilkie Collins really knew how to write about women characters. In this novel, the marvelous character of Magdalen Vanstone is absolutely memorable, as the young woman struggles to regain her lost fortune, aided by the unscrupulous fraudster Captain Wragge.
Full of passionate writing, effortlessly mixing tragedy with humour, this book tells a really gripping tale.
At Risk by Stella Rimington.
E-book, read on my iPod Touch.
I read this in a variety of locations such as medical waiting rooms, on the tram, etc. Nice to have a whole novel you can fit in a pocket.
This thriller is distinguished as the first fiction work by Rimington who was actually head of Britain’s MI5 (and its first female head). She therefore really knows what she is talking about. This debut novel has a few weak points, only to be expected, but it was still a very good read, as we follow the semi-autobiographical protagonist as she tries to track down a pair of terrorists from a tiny amount of evidence.
As an aside: reading this book on my iPod was a perfectly pleasant experience, despite the small form factor of the iPod Touch screen. I’ll write more fully about e-books sometime in the near future on this blog.
The Great War: American Front by Harry Turtledove.
Audiobook, on my iPod Touch.
I am listening to this while I walk or drive.
Harry Turtledove is considered to be the king of alternative history writing, and for good reason. This book is set in a timeline in which the South won the American Civil War. So far, so ho-hum; but Turtledove doesn’t concentrate on the actual Civil War itself for more than a page or two of prologue. What sets his works apart is that he looks at where this other trouser leg of time (as Terry Pratchett would say) leads to.
His first novel in this timeline was How Few Remain, set 20 years after the “War of Secession”, when the North and the South again come to blows.
In The Great War it is now 1914, and the USA finds itself allied with Germany, and the Confederate States with Britain and France. The USA thus finds itself at war with Canada to its north and the CSA to its south. Trench warfare, with poison gas and tanks.
This isn’t just a war novel for boys, though. Turtledove makes the idea come alive by concentrating on the individual stories of a wide variety of people, ranging from individual soldiers on both sides, to a woman running a coffee shop in occupied Washington, to a French Canadian farmer, to a trawler fisherman captured by the CSA navy, and many more.
There are also some famous names still around. General George Custer is still alive at the age of 75 and in charge of an army of the United States (and being thoroughly incompetent at it). Theodore Roosevelt is President of the USA, Woodrow Wilson of the CSA.
Extremely entertaining. But very long. This novel, the first of a trilogy about the Great War, is 24 hours in duration as an audiobook, as are the sequels. And after that, Turtledove has a series based on the Second World War. Lots of listening to come!
Miscellaneous
I’m also trying to keep up with reading various blogs, the Crikey newsletter and New Scientist. I’m about four months behind on the latter. All of these, including NS, in electronic form, read on my computer screen. New Scientist is about the only thing for which I wish I owned an Amazon Kindle. Alas, the Kindle is not for sale in Australia, nor (even more alas, in my view) is the Kindle iPhone app.
