Megatheriums for Breakfast

My fortnightly monthly! summary of what I’ve been reading and listening to.

South! by Sir Ernest Shackleton

E-book on my iPod

Amazon link

This true story of Antarctic adventure in the early years of the 20th Century starts a little slowly, as Shackleton recounts the slow and frustrating progress of the expedition on the ship Endeavour as they vainly try to find a way through pack ice to make a landing on the Antarctic coast.

But it really takes off as a story of almost superhuman endurance and struggle when the Endeavour becomes permanently frozen into the ice, and is eventually crushed and destroyed, leaving nearly 30 men stranded on the shifting ice floes, hundreds of miles from the nearest land and with no hope of communicating with the outside world to seek rescue.

They float with the ice for many long months, unable to do more than hope that they will drift far enough north that they can become free of the pack ice and launch the ship’s boats which they drag with them from floe to floe. The long, long struggle to reach land is harrowing. Finally they manage to struggle ashore on Elephant Island, a desolate crag with barely any shore – and no people. From there, Shackleton and another five men set out in the strongest boat to try to reach the nearest outpost of civilization – the whaling station on South Georgia. Amazingly, they manage to do it, only to find they are on the far side of the island from the whaling station, and so have to trek across mountains and glaciers to reach help.

Even when they do reach the station, it is many months before a ship can successfully reach the stranded men on Elephant Island. It is astonishing that despite all the privations, not one man was lost on the expedition. And grimly ironic that most of the men, once rescued, set off for home to join up with those still fighting in the trenches in World War I, where many of them are then killed.

Real – but true life – Boy’s Own material.

The Appeal by John Grisham

Audiobook

Amazon link

This is a bleak indictment of the power of corporations and their disdain for the common person, as Grisham looks at the fall-out from a courtroom success against a major chemical company. The little guy – the community devastated by pollution of their water supply by the company – has won! But has he? Not if the billionaire running the company has anything to say about it. Quite gripping reading, but ultimately pretty depressing.

All the Colors of Darkness by Peter Robinson

E-book on my iPhone

Amazon link

This is the latest in Robinson’s series about Detective Chief Inspector Banks, set in the North of England. And I think Robinson has finally jumped the shark with the series. What starts off as apparently a straightforward case of murder-suicide by a homosexual man blows out into a pointless investigation into whether the murder had been triggered by Iago-like whisperings from another party – pointless because it’s clear all through that no charges can be laid against such a person – and into fantastical stuff with the involvement of Britain’s spy agency MI6 (with apparently unlimited powers).

Definitely not the best book of the series, but possibly the last, as I can’t see where Robinson can go from here with any credibility. A great pity.

Current Reading

I’m currently part-way through:

• Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin (Hardcover, my own library) – yes, I’m still reading this.
• Almost Perfect by W.E. Pete Peterson (Ebook)
• Harlequin by Bernard Cornwell (Audiobook)

My fortnightly summary of what I’ve been reading and listening to.

Predator’s Gold by Phillip Reeve

Paperback from my own collection

Amazon link
This is the second volume in a quartet of sf novels aimed at young adults, a series sometimes dubbed “The Hungry City Chronicles”. In any case, the sequel to Mortal Engines. The basic premise is that hundreds, maybe thousands of years from now the Earth has been all but destroyed in “The Sixty Minute War” and the remaining cities have found that to survive they have to become mobile. Mounted on vast traction engines, cities like London prowl the devastated world, hunting down and consuming smaller cities. It’s a wonderful conceit, and Reeve really brings it to life with both humor and pathos, and some very interesting characters.

In this second novel, the main (surviving!) characters from the first, Tom and Hester, find themselves aboard the city of Anchorage, facing many perils. Their relationship is severely threatened, and the danger ratchets up as the book goes on. Hester is a really interesting character, horribly disfigured and tormented, but fiercely determined to get what she wants. A really strong female character, going right against the grain of most female stereotypes you find in novels aimed at this age group.

Really very superior teen fiction, in my view. I’m looking forward to reading the other novels in the cycle.

One minor note – the Scholastic editions are attractive, but the cut-outs in their front covers are unlikely to survive much handling before they rip.

The Great War:American Front / Walk in Hell / Breakthroughs by Harry Turtledove

Audiobook

Amazon link
I finally completed listening to Turtledove’s “Great War” trilogy, a total of some 72 hours in audiobook format, goodness knows how many pages in hardcopy.

Brilliantly done alternative history, starting with a seemingly trivial change in events early in the American Civil War, leading to the failure of the United States to prevent the southern states from seceding from the Union. Turtledove deals with the Civil War itself (or the “War of Secession” as it is described in later books) only very briefly at the start of How Few Remain, a 24-hour long prequel to the current series, mainly devoted to the “Second Mexican War” in which the Confederate States again defeat their northern neighbour in the 1880s over the issue of the CSA acquiring two new states from the Empire of Mexico.

This work basically covers the period of World War I (“The Great War”), as the United States finds itself allied with the Germans and Austrians against the Confederate States allied with Britain, France and their colonies. The USA is thus fighting the CSA to the south, and Canada to the north. A war which bogs down as it did in Europe in trench warfare, with mustard gas, tanks and aerial dog-fights.

As someone who is not an American (I was born in England, emigrated to Australia in my teens) my knowledge of the actual American events (and particularly geography) is a bit restricted, and this perhaps limits my understanding of what is going on, but I didn’t find this a major problem.

Turtledove’s historical alterations are done very subtly, all of them very logically deriving from his original premise. His writing technique is based on episodically featuring the lives of a variety of different individuals, perhaps a dozen or so, to whom we keep returning as the general flow the story proceeds. In this way he makes the events of the time very personal and moving.

Among his cast of characters, he follows a couple of African-Americans in this trilogy (in How Few Remain, he followed Frederick Douglass) and it is clear that he is very sympathetic to their plight of their race. In this alternate world, of course, slavery takes its time to be abolished, and blacks are still treated appallingly in the South and not much better in the North as the novel opens. The use of the ‘n-word’ is extremely frequent, but is perfectly in context and it would have been absurd to avoid it. I do also wonder whether in this new history there is a single word ‘damnyankees’ because ‘yankee’ is never used without the adjective.

There’s some very tragic material in here, but also a good deal of humor – the bumblings of the 75-year old Lieutenant General George Custer (who never got to Little Big Horn and so survived) and his head-to-head confrontations with President Theodore Roosevelt (still in office in 1914, Woodrow Wilson being President of the CSA) are just a delight.

Absolutely fascinating stuff, though, and really well-done characterisation and story-telling. I expect eventually to move on to his American Empire trilogy in the same timeline which deals with the period of the Second World War.

Die Trying by Lee Child

Ebook on my iPod

Amazon link
I’m a sucker for thrillers (as you can probably tell) and I thought I would try this author, who has a whole series based around his ex-Marine character Jack Reacher.

I couldn’t get hold of the first novel in the series (“geographically restricted“, grrr!!), but was able to buy this one.

Reacher finds himself caught up, literally, in the kidnapping of a female FBI agent. For a long while, the reason for the kidnapping remains obscure, but all is of course eventually revealed. There’s a lot of violence – if I ever read again about someone’s head ‘exploding into a pink mist’ when shot I shall be sick – and some interesting plotting.

I may try Lee Child again – if this is only the author’s second book, it wasn’t bad. But there’s some awfully weak or silly plot points – why Reacher isn’t killed and disposed of by the villains at least five or six times in the novel is pretty well inexplicable. The kind of plot which only works because most people involved act like total idiots and against their own obvious interests.

Double Star by Robert Heinlein

Ebook on my iPod

Classic 1950s science fiction from a master of the craft. Quite a lot of fun to re-read this kind of book, but there’s not a lot to say about it.

An actor is recruited to play the double of a leading politician (on Mars) because the politician has been kidnapped. Then the plot thickens, but not much. It’s also the kind of sf which really doesn’t take much advantage of the genre – nothing about the plot requires the science fiction, planet-travelling background, but could almost just as easily have been set in the modern day.

Current Reading

I’m currently part-way through:

• The Appeal by John Grisham (Audiobook)
• South by Sir Ernest Shackleton (E-Book)
• Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin (Hardcover, my own library)

My fortnightly summary of what I’ve been reading and listening to.

The Jetty Journals by Ian Buchanan

E-book on my iPod.

This is a short novel aimed at teenagers, written by a good friend of mine and now published as an e-book through Smashwords.

Ian sent me an electronic copy of his novel a couple of years ago and urged me to read it; but what with one thing and another I didn’t get around to it. A large part of my reluctance, I think, was just that I hate reading anything of any real length on the computer screen. Reading for pleasure is part of what I call the ‘couch culture’. Reading stuff from the computer screen is part of ‘desk culture’ and too much like hard work.

Anyway, when he let me know that it was available as an e-book in a format suitable for my iPod Touch, I downloaded it and read it with pleasure in a few days.

The book tells the story of a small group of Melbourne teenagers who survive a global pandemic which kills off a very large percentage of the population. Well, it turns out, it didn’t actually kill everyone – some people survive, but unpleasantly changed…

The book is strong on the group’s desperate struggles to survive, and full of local color – set mainly on the Mornington Peninsula which runs along the eastern edge of Melbourne’s Port Phillip Bay.

I found it very enjoyable, though I felt the ending was a little incomplete. Ian tells me, though, that he has a sequel in the works, which should satisfy that feeling.

Secret Asset by Stella Rimington

E-book on my iPod.

This is the second novel by the one-time head of Britain’s MI5, and as with her first novel, is full of convincing detail about the management of agents and the investigation of terror threats.

A terrorist plot is detected, but with insufficient information to track down the suspects; an old IRA member lies dying and reveals a secret vulnerability of Britain’s security forces; our heroine Liz Carlyle is delegated to investigate some of her fellow staff, looking for a mole.

I found the ending of this one to be a little unsatisfactory – perhaps not quite credible – as the mole is finally identified, their motivation discovered, and the terrorist plot revealed. But still, good page-turning stuff.

Current Reading

I’m currently part-way through:

• Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin (Hardcover, my own library)
• The Great War – Breakthroughs by Harry Turtledove (Audiobook)
• South by Sir Ernest Shackleton (E-Book)

I’ve just finished reading Ken Follett’s massive historical novel, The Pillars of the Earth, and enjoyed it greatly. It’s a gripping saga of love and hate, emnity and friendship, ambition and humility surrounding the building of a cathedral in 12th Century England.

As I say, it’s a massive book: 973 pages in the hardcover version, two and a half inches thick, weighing about three pounds. Pretty hard to hold in the hand, or even to read in bed. A real pain to lug around on the train or the bus.

That’s the hardcover, of course, but the paperback isn’t much better, still weighing over two pounds, and two inches thick.

Yet the version that I read weighed only about four ounces and was so small that I could slip it into my pocket, carry it everywhere and could read it any time I had a few minutes to spare.

I read it as an e-book on my iPod Touch, of course.

I must confess that I hesitated a long while before buying The Pillars of the Earth from Fictionwise; it seemed slightly insane to attempt to read a nearly 1000-page book on the small iPod screen. But after a while, I gave in. After the “Micropay Rebate” which Fictionwise offers, it cost me less than $5. Half a cent a page seemed a pretty good deal!

After it was installed on my iPod it looked even more daunting. At the font size which I find comfortable, eReader told me that the book was some 3,332 pages (screens?) long. I was going to have to tap my iPod screen at least that many times. Wouldn’t that get exhausting?

The iPhone / iPod Touch is often denigrated as an e-book reader (particularly by Kindle fans) because of the small form factor of the screen. They certainly have a point when discussing newspapers and magazines or textbooks with formulas, illustrations and diagrams. But I think they miss the point when it comes to novels or even general non-fiction books. The fact is that for such books the form factor is close to irrelevant.

All that is needed for comfortable reading is an easily readable font size and style and enough words on the screen that you can read and grasp a typical paragraph or two at a time. Once immersed in the story, your brain stops paying attention to how the story is being delivered to it. Well, that is what I have found, anyway.

The Pillars of the Earth has been treated well in the conversion by Fictionwise. The structure of prologue, parts and chapters is all respected; and each major part has an attractive illustration which displays neatly on the iPod screen. It was, really, a delight to read. I wasn’t counting screen taps – after all, who counts the number of page turns you make when reading a hardcopy book? And I could take it with me all the time and read it whenever I had the urge and the opportunity.

Then I thought of an interesting connection in reading this particular book – much of it set in a mediaeval monastery where monks labour over their copying desks. I remembered an exhibition I went to last year at our State Library – a collection of beautiful mediaeval manuscripts. These gorgeous books came in all sizes – from the huge Bibles intended for use on a lectern, to the tiny Book of Hours which could be easily slipped into a sleeve or pocket.

While the screen of the iPod Touch in the eReader application doesn’t look as splendid as the beautifully illustrated Book of Hours, in terms of the number of words per page, it does pretty well, as the following comparison shows.