Megatheriums for Breakfast

My occasional highly-erratic summary of what I’ve been reading and listening to.

Because of the long gap (three months) since my last summary, this is going to be a set of very brief comments on what I can remember!

It’s also startling to realize just how many books I read in a three-month period!

Black Echo

Angels’ Flight

The Poet

The Scarecrow by Michael Connelly

Library Hardback, Ebooks and Trade Paperback

Yeah, OK, so I’m addicted to popular thrillers. But I like Connelly’s outwardly hard-bitten but often personally vulnerable hero, Harry Bosch. Black Echo is the first book in this series, and I’ve only just read it. Stupidly, the territorial copyright system prevented me from actually paying the author for an electronic version, so I resorted to borrowing a free hardback copy from the local library. Anyway, it was interesting at last to read of Bosch’s first encounter with Eleanor Wish, a relationship which continues on and off throughout the whole series. Angel’s Flight is another in this series. Both books have interesting and not wholly predictable plots, and I enjoyed them both.

The Poet doesn’t feature Bosch, but instead journalist Jack McEvoy, devastated by the apparent suicide of his twin brother, a police officer. Of course in the way of such novels, it turns out that it was no suicide but a murder instead – indeed, part of a series of such murders. As the case becomes handled by the FBI, McEvoy becomes involved with an agent, Rachel Walling, but then starts to have doubts about her… I enjoyed this a lot, and would consider it one of Connelly’s best. Not so The Scarecrow, a sequel featuring McEvoy and Walling, which I thought was a very lightweight pot-boiler, and a real disappointment.

Destroyer of Worlds by Larry Niven and Edward M. Lerner

Hardcover, my own collection

This is the third in a series of – what? re-imaginings, re-visitings, re-workings – of Niven’s Known Space science fiction books written in the 1960′s and 70′s. As such, they are really quite intriguing, as the events and characters in those old stories are woven into a wholly different framework seen from an alternative angle. Niven always has plenty of imagination, and wrote stories which really appeal to those who like speculation on the grand scale. But his dialogue and characterization have never been his strong suits. It’s when he teams up with others who are much stronger in these areas that he has done his best work – with Jerry Pournelle, for example, or here with Edward M. Lerner.

The previous two books in this series are Fleet of Worlds and Juggler of Worlds.

Infernal Devices

A Darkling Plain by Phillip Reeve

Paperbacks, my own collection

These are the last two books of the Mortal Engines tetralogy. I talked about the previous book Predator’s Gold here. Really superior (if occasionally a bit violent) science fiction for early teenagers, with strong characters and really interesting (if slightly unbelievable) premise of a future world in which cities have become mobile on great traction engines. I, of course, am no longer a teenager. But it doesn’t stop me really enjoying books written for that audience.

Illegal Action by Stella Rimington

E-book on my iPhone

This is the third in a series of thrillers written by the ex-head of Britain’s MI5. She certainly has the background knowledge and isn’t a bad (if not great) writer either.

American Empire: Blood and Iron

American Empire: The Center Cannot Hold

American Empire: Victorious Opposition by Harry Turtledove

Audiobooks

Turtledove is, as they say, the master of alternative history. But gosh this is a long-winded series! So far I have listened to over 160 hours of Turtledove’s vision of a world in which the Confederate States won the American Civil War in 1862. After that event – now called “The War of Secession” – we had the “Second Mexican War” in the 1880s, and “The Great War” in 1914-1917, at the end of which the Confederate States (and their allies Britain and France) were defeated by the USA and Germany.

The “American Empire” group of Turtledove’s novels covers the aftermath of that defeat and leads us up to the 1940s. It’s fascinating how the author spins an entirely believable tale of how a disgruntled sergeant in the defeated Southern army, embittered by his experiences and filled with a conviction that the South was “stabbed in the back” by “traitors” in the government and by an uprising amongst the still-mistreated blacks, goes on to join and then lead, a new political party. Turtledove so cleverly shapes his story that the realization of the parallels with events in Germany in “our” timeline is slow in coming. By casting that story in utterly convincing terms in an American setting, he makes us see those “real” events in a much deeper way.

And so on to the next four novels and the opening of the equivalent of World War II. Lots more reading to do!

Once Upon a Time in the North by Phillip Pullman

Small hardback, my own collection

Very brief but enjoyable prequel to Pullman’s “Golden Compass” series, telling the story of how Lee Scoresby first meets up with the armored polar bear Iorek Byrnison. This is a small-format gift book.

Inherit the Stars by James P. Hogan

E-book on my iPhone

Well, this was free (from Baen Books), and worth about what I paid for it. I read the original SF novel in paperback years ago, and I seemed to remember enjoying it, so I read it again for curiosity. I was surprised, though, at how poorly written it was. The plot is all driven by a series of revelations rather than by the actions of the characters (let alone by the interactions of the characters).

The Monster in the Box by Ruth Rendell

Trade paperback, on loan

The latest Wexford novel from Rendell. Cleverly done, and well-written, if not particularly deep. Rendell writes so many, and so many very excellent, books that I’m sure she sees these police-procedural Wexford books as a relaxation from her more challenging works.

Current Reading

I’m currently part-way through:

• The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson. (Ebook)
• The Water’s Lovely by Ruth Rendell (Audiobook)

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

Roving Mars: Spirit, Opportunity, And the Exploration of the Red Planet  by Steve Squyres

E-book on my iPod.

This was an interesting-enough look at the development of the Mars rovers from the point of view of one of the chief scientists involved. The structure of the book was a bit loose, though, being made up from of a variety of different sources and sets of notes which Squyres made through the long years of development and acceptance of the proposal by NASA through to the launch and successful landing of both rovers. I would have liked more about the actual day to day operation of the rovers on the surface of Mars, I think.

And the e-book is missing the fascinating photographs actually taken by the rovers – all we get is a line drawing of one of the rovers. This is one case where I think I would rather own a ‘dead-tree’ version of the book. I’m guessing that many non-fiction works are going to suffer in the same way on the iPhone/Touch – though they might be fine on the Kindle or Sony Reader.

A Sleeping Life  by Ruth Rendell

E-book on my iPod.

Another in Rendell’s series about Chief Inspector Wexford. Here the mystery revolves around the life of the victim – an unknown middle-aged woman found stabbed in Kingsbridge. The mystery is not so much about the murder but about who this woman was and what kind of a life she had been living.

While entertaining enough, I guessed the solution of the mystery when I was only about half-way through the book, which spoilt it a little for me, though I kept reading to see how it all panned out. Not Rendell’s best book, but well worth reading anyway.

Musicophilia  by Oliver Sacks

Hardcover, from the library

Sacks continues to write fascinating stuff about the human brain and the human mind. If you haven’t read The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat you must!

While this work isn’t quite so varied and entertaining, it is still absorbing reading. Sacks focuses on how music seems deeply embedded into the human brain, and the various conditions which can occur when things go wrong (or right!) with these regions of the brain. His discussion of the plight of those suffering Williams-Beuren syndrome, in which a sequence of genes has been omitted on one chromosome, is absolutely fascinating and moving. Such people are, by ‘normal’ standards, intellectually severely disabled; but their ‘musical intelligence’ can be astonishing and their musical skills very striking.

Sacks also discusses in some detail how music can liberate or transform the lives of those with a variety of different neurological problems, from patients with Parkinsonism, through Tourettes sufferers, to those who have had strokes.
I have learnt a good deal both about music and about the brain from this book.

Current Reading

I’m currently part-way through:

• The Great War – Breakthroughs by Harry Turtledove (Audiobook)
  (I’ve finished the previous volumes of this trilogy, but will wait until I’ve finished the whole series before reviewing it here)
• Secret Asset by Stella Rimington (E-Book)
• South by Sir Ernest Shackleton (E-Book)

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

Conviction by Richard North Patterson.

Hardcover (library book).

I have enjoyed all of the R.N.Patterson novels I have read so far, and I’m impressed by his ability to tackle major, controversial, issues head on while working them into a narrative of character and plot.

Conviction wasn’t quite up to the standard of some of his other books like Protect and Defend or Exile, but it was quite enjoyable nontheless. This one tackles the issue of capital punishment, through the efforts of the protagonist, Terri Paget, a middle-aged female lawyer, to prevent the execution of a black man convicted of a disgusting sexual crime which led to the death of a young girl. At first we have no other indication than that this man is guilty, which makes Terri’s efforts seem idealistic but possibly misguided. Her mission is complicated by the reaction of her own daughter, who was herself sexually abused as a child. But eventually our view of the condemned man starts to shift as Terri begins to realise that he is mentally retarded, and then to discover evidence that he is quite probably innocent of the crime.

The author’s target is the byzantine legal system which has grown up around capital punishment in the United States, and the AEDPA statute which comes close to dictating that even strong new evidence of innocence must be disregarded once the original conviction has been confirmed.

I suppose that I didn’t quite enjoy this book as much as Patterson’s earlier works because the didactic strain has become a little too marked (the same thing happened to Wilkie Collins’ later novels).

To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis.

Paperback (library book).

It says something about how out of touch I have become with modern science fiction (considering that I was Chairman of the 43rd World Science Fiction Convention) that I had never heard of Connie Willis, multiple Hugo and Nebula award winner, until a few weeks ago. I think I stumbled upon a review of one of her books on the Audible site.

Anyway, based on what I could pick up about Willis from Wikipedia, I decided to give one of her books a try. To Say Nothing of the Dog (or How We Found the Bishop’s Bird Stump At Last) was a lot of fun, but ultimately a bit frustrating. Four-fifths of the book is written in an amusing style deliberately cast in the mould of Jerome K. Jerome (the first half of this book’s title is taken from the subtitle to Three Men in a Boat) or P.G.Wodehouse, as the time-travelling protagonist is sent back to Victorian England to try to fix a temporal ‘incongruity’ which may change the entire course of history. The plot, which involves late Victorian romances, mysterious butlers, Oxford dons and a lot of messing about in boats, is too complicated to summarise here, but is very entertaining.

Where it starts to fall down is towards the end, when the complexities of the time-travel plot and the pseudo-scientific justification starts to overwhelm the fun, and the key object (the Bishop’s Bird Stump) which has driven the plot for most of the length of the book is eventually trivialised so much that you wonder why anyone bothered.

Still, I liked it, and I’ll look for other Connie Willis novels.

The Land That Time Forgot by Edgar Rice Burroughs.

E-Book, read on my iPod Touch

I read this because it was free from Gutenberg (all of Burroughs’ work is now in the public domain), and because I hadn’t read it since I was about 12.

Well, it was fun to read when I was 12, but that’s about only age to read it, I think.

This is very much in the mode of Boy’s Own Magazine, with sterling American heroes despatching villainous Germans and getting lost at sea in a captured World War I U-Boat until they discover by accident a lost continent where ape-men live alongside dinosaurs (almost plagiarizing Conan Doyle’s Lost World). The romance between the rock-jawed hero and the sole female on board the U-Boat is laugh-out-loud stuff for any adult reader today.

End in Tears by Ruth Rendell.

E-Book, read on my iPod Touch

This is part of Rendell’s series based on her detective Chief Inspector Wexford.

Wexford featured in Rendell’s first published novel in 1964. It’s interesting that Rendell has obviously retained a fondness for Wexford as a character despite writing simply scores of other novels, many of which explore psychological territory far distant from these tales of a rural policeman. Given that Wexford must have been working as a policeman for well beyond 45 years now, I’m wondering if his continued failure to retire isn’t starting to strain credibility a little…!

Never mind, Wexford is still a great and well-rounded character, and this novel, published in 2005, is no disappointment, as it works through the circumstances surrounding the murder of a young woman for a reason which does not become apparent until the very end of the book. The issues of childlessness and surrogate motherhood are explored through various twists of the plot, and through the decision of Wexford’s own daughter to act as a surrogate mother, a decision which seems close to splitting apart his family.

Very enjoyable, and again, no trouble at all to read on the iPod screen.

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I’m also listening to the audiobook version of Trunk Music by Michael Connelly as I walk or drive, but I have really only just started it. I’ll talk about it next time.