Megatheriums for Breakfast

Once again it’s been a long time since I posted here, but things have been busy at work, and I’ve had some medical issues which I won’t bore you with. I’m hoping to have much more time in future for blogging (and for my own software development).

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Blackout and All Clear by Connie Willis

Hardcovers, my own collection

In these days of e-books, and the comfort of reading them on my iPad, I am buying fewer and fewer “dead tree” books. But I couldn’t resist this beautiful matched pair of hardcovers, available from Amazon more cheaply than I could even buy paperback versions in Australia.

I’ve only recently (last 12 months or so) discovered Connie Willis as a writer, which may be fortunate for me, as I understand this latest work was 9 years in the writing, a long time for dedicated fans. But well worth the wait even so, I would have thought.

These two volumes are really just one novel, split into two for practical publishing purposes. The novel is another in Willis’ series based around the idea that time travel is invented in the 2060s, and is in the hands of the History Department of one of Oxford’s colleges, purely to be used for historical research purposes. This particular work is based on the independent time travel trips of several of the historians to the period of World War II in Britain. These trips are all meant to be for short periods and to specific locales but for unknown reasons (slight spoiler coming here) each of them finds themselves unable to return to the future. The mystery of why this has gone wrong persists through almost all of the novel, but the real focus is on the characters, their predicament, and, more than anything, on the trauma that Britain underwent during the war. As in her earlier work Doomsday Book, Willis makes the tragedy of the times come alive by making us familiar with real human characters and their sufferings. And again, Willis seems to effortlessly combine elements of humor and grief, joy and tragedy. It’s also fascinatingly educational about World War II Britain and in particular the London Blitz.

This is Willis’ masterwork, I think. Nominally science fiction, it is a novel which stands out from the genre by its downplaying of technology and its interest in character and in the human condition.

Buy ‘Blackout’ on Amazon : Buy ‘All Clear’ on Amazon

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One Good Turn by Kate Atkinson

E-Book on my iPad

Really good follow up to the author’s first novel about Jackson Brodie. I like Atkinson’s style a great deal, and the light humor of her approach. The ending of this one made me laugh out loud. There are several story threads based around different characters whose lives become tangled with each other through the “one good turn” of the novel’s title, in which a timid man puts an end to a road rage incident by throwing his laptop bag at the assailant. This happens at the start of the novel, and all the rest is the slow working out of these threads, which eventually throw a very different light on the original incident.

I’m looking forward to reading more of Atkinson’s work.

Buy ‘One Good Turn’ on Amazon

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How I Killed Pluto (and Why It Had It Coming) by Mike Brown

Hardcover, my own collection

Very entertaining story of the discovery of large bodies in the Kuiper Belt, including at least one such object larger than Pluto, making it clear that Pluto is but one of a host of such objects. This made it clear that Pluto needed to be reclassified in some way. The International Astronomical Union decided on demoting Pluto from being classified as a planet, calling it a “dwarf planet”, a bit paradoxically (is a dwarf human not a human?).

But Brown’s book is not so much about this issue of terminology, however passionate the arguments about it, but about the very interesting and entertaining story of how he and his colleagues discovered and characterized these distant worlds.

Buy ‘How I Killed Pluto’ on Amazon

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I Shall Wear Midnight by Terry Pratchett

Hardcover, my own collection

An excellent addition to Pratchett’s series for young adults featuring Tiffany Aching, now come of age as a witch in the Chalk country and once again at threat from a supernatural enemy. Not as hysterically funny as The Wee Free Men, the first book in the series, but well done nonetheless.

Buy ‘I Shall Wear Midnight’ on Amazon

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Betrayer of Worlds by Larry Niven, Edward M. Lerner

Hardcover, my own collection

The latest in the series by Niven and Lerner which take another, sometimes twisted look at Niven’s “Known Space” stories. This is the fourth book in that series, and it is starting to flag a bit, though still worth reading. I’m guessing that there may be a final volume to come which focuses on the discovery and exploration of the Ringworld.

Buy ‘Betrayer of Worlds’ on Amazon

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The Link: Uncovering Our Earliest Ancestor by Colin Tudge, Josh Young

Paperback, from library

Interesting-enough look at the discovery of a remarkably well-preserved fossil of an early primate, quite possibly ancestral to mankind. The book spends a lot of tedious time filling in the scientific background, though, and not so much on the investigation of the fossil itself as I would have liked.

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Second World War: Milestones to Disaster by Winston Churchill

Audiobook

This was just the first volume of the heavily-abridged version of Churchill’s definitive History of the Second World War, and could just have easily have been subtitled “I told you so!”. It was an interesting-enough listen, but I think I would rather read the full work.

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The Walker by Jane R. Goodall

Audiobook

No, this isn’t by Jane Goodall, the chimpanzee expert. It’s a first novel which shows promise but has quite a few flaws. It centers around a female detective in Britain’s police force in the 1960s. Her struggles against the male chauvinism of the time are an interesting background to the plot, which is all about a serial killer in London, who appears to be channelling Jack the Ripper (or someone or something like him). Some of this was pretty far fetched and it was hard to suspend disbelief. Reasonably well written, but I hope the writer improves with time.

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Atlantic by Simon Winchester

E-Book on my iPad

Unfortunately, I found this a bit of a drag, and couldn’t finish it. It doesn’t have the focus of Winchester’s other, usually extremely interesting, books such as The Surgeon of Crowthorne or The Crack in the Edge of the World. It’s a very widely-reaching study of the Atlantic ocean. While there are some interesting snippets, it’s just too loose a concept to hold the interest.

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Not in the Flesh by Ruth Rendell

E-Book on my iPad

Disappointing book by Rendell in her Chief Inspector Wexford series. The story twist was glaringly obvious to me by half-way through, and I spent the second half of the book being irritated by Wexford’s almost wilful avoidance of the obvious answer. Rendell rarely misses excellence, but this one definitely does.

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Phantoms in the Brain by V. S. Ramachandran, Sandra Blakeslee

The Tell-Tale Brain by V. S. Ramachandran

Hardcover, my own collection

Very interesting books in the same sort of vein as Oliver Sack’s works, though more technical and less focused on the predicaments of the patients. But fascinating nonetheless, even when Ramachandran starts to speculate (in my view, fairly wildly) about the neurological bases of human characteristics such as smiling and the creation of art.

Doomsday Book by ConnieWillis

Ebook on my iPad

Time travel is a very hackneyed concept in science fiction. After all it was done first, and arguably best, by H.G.Wells in The Time Machine, more than a century ago. But Connie Willis has managed to grab hold of the idea and make it interesting again.

In Willis’ near-term future (2054 AD), time travel has been invented and is in the hands of academics at Oxford University. Doomsday Book details a research trip to the early 1300s to investigate mediaeval life and settle academic questions about the way the English language was spoken.

But things go horribly wrong and the time-traveller, a young woman called Kivrin, ends up arriving at a time right when the Black Death hits England. Co-incidentally, an epidemic of severe flu afflicts 21st century Britain, throwing all into confusion at both ends of the time travel voyage.

Willis seems to effortlessly combine comedy and tragedy in this book, no mean feat. We certainly feel the tragedy of the Black Death, because Kivrin, and ourselves as readers, come to know the people whom it affects, and feel their suffering. Contrast this with the almost dismissive treatment of the same plague by Ken Follett in World Without End in which the only people to die are characters we don’t much care about.

I really enjoyed this book.

Grasshopper by Barbara Vine

Audiobook on my iPhone

“Barbara Vine” is a pseudonym of Ruth Rendell, used when she is writing outside of the mystery genre.

Grasshopper is, to my mind, one of Rendell’s best books, which is saying a great deal.

It is in some ways a charming book, with a genuine romance in it, and even a (fairly) happy ending – not things one normally associates with this writer.

Having said that, though, there is tragedy a-plenty as well. It tells the story of Clodagh (pron “Clo-da”), in her late teens, who leaves her rural home to study in London. Clodagh has survived a terrible accident in which her slightly-younger boyfriend was killed, and for which Clodagh is bitterly blamed. There is a sense of her being banished to London, where she is to live in a flat owned by a distant relative.

The slow evolving of what happens to her in London, and the development of Clodagh’s character, is beautifully and convincingly done.

Without giving away too much of the plot, she falls in with a group of people of similar age, who are living together in a flat at the top of a house in Maida Vale. Their passion is climbing over the roofs of the terrace houses. In doing this, they discover a secret which will eventually bring them all undone, and lead to another tragedy. The book is cast as a retrospective memoir by a grown-up Clodagh, and is full of backwards and forward references which help to build the tension.

“They have sent me here because of what happened on the pylon” is the first sentence of the book, but it takes a long while before we discover what happened in the first tragedy of her life. The later tragedy is foreshadowed repeatedly, but because the narrator is telling this story from a time in her life when we know she is settled and happy, we know that all turns out well in the end.

This is the second time I have listened to this book (beautifully narrated by Emilia Fox), and I thoroughly enjoyed it both times.

All Flesh is Grass by Clifford D Simak

Paperback

I re-read this because I am going through all my paperbacks, trying to dispose of most of them.

Entertaining-enough 1960s science fiction, written in Simak’s inimitable style. An unusual first-contact story in which a small American town finds itself enclosed by an impenetrable bubble. It turns out that the alien species which has done this is… well, a bunch of flowers. Nevertheless, Simak makes this convincing and memorable.

My only gripe is that the book ended rather suddenly and limply.

Guardians of Time by Poul Anderson

Ebook on my iPad

Four novellas based on Anderson’s Time Patrol. Enjoyable if light-weight time-travel SF with plenty of fun with paradoxes.

Case Histories by Kate Atkinson

Ebook on my iPad

This is the first of Kate Atkinson’s books which I have read, and the first to feature the private detective Jackson Brodie. The book seems to start strangely, and you wonder what is going on: you are presented with three quite distressing ‘case histories’ – a young girl goes missing without trace; a young woman dies in an apparently senseless attack at a solicitor’s office; a new mother murders her husband with an axe. None of these stories seem related, but when the book proper starts, all of these tales are explored and are seen to intertwine. Enjoyable and well-written, with really interesting characterisation. On the strength of this I went out and bought the other books in the Jackson Brodie series, all as ebooks, at a great price from Kobo Books.

The Mind’s Eye by Oliver Sacks

Hardcover, my own collection

This book deals, as the title indicates, with vision and its disturbance by problems in the brain (or as in Sack’s own case when he is affected by cancer, how a physical problem with the eyes impacts on the mind).

Everything that Oliver Sacks writes is fascinating and enjoyable, and this book is no exception.

Gaudy Night by Dorothy L. Sayers

Audibook on my iPhone

For some reason I seem to find myself re-reading Sayer’s series featuring Lord Peter Wimsey, in reverse order.

This book starts out, though, focusing entirely on Harriet Vane, the detective writer (clearly based heavily on Sayers herself), who is on a trip back to Oxford University for a reunion which her old classmates. There’s a lot going on here about women’s education (still a fairly new thing in the 1930s when Sayers was writing), the academic life, and the celibate life.

I did find myself wondering how the average reader of detective stories would cope with all of this if they were to come upon the book without having read any of the preceding novels in the series. Personally, I found it very interesting for the light it sheds on the thinking of the time. Harriet Vane also agonizes endlessly about her non-relationship with Peter Wimsey and why she can’t contemplate marrying him, as he regularly proposes. Naturally, however, by the end of the book, Sayers finds a way to rationalize a change of heart on Harriet’s part…

The mystery this time, if there is one, is very much subordinate to all of the above, but is still intriguing enough to hold the reader’s interest – poison pen letters are being sent to staff and students of Harriet’s old college, and acts of vandalism occurring. Who is doing this and why, are the core mysteries to be uncovered.

Gaudy Night is certainly not your average detective story, but very enjoyable nevertheless.

The Children’s Book by A.S.Byatt

Ebook on my iPad

It was a bit of a struggle to get into this long book. One of the problems is that there are a very large number of characters, most introduced quite quickly during the course of a party, and keeping them all straight is a challenge. But once I got over that hurdle (greatly assisted by the Search function in iBooks – who was that character again?), I started to become gripped by the story.

Basically the book follows the lives of a group of disparate children growing up in the late 1890s and early 1900s in southern England. They are linked by an artistic community of writers, poets, artists, sculptors and general free-thinkers associated with the Fabian Society and the Arts and Crafts movement. Indeed, the Victoria and Albert Museum is almost a character in its own right in the book.

A key figure is the mother of several of the children, Olive Wellwood, an author of childrens’ stories who clearly seems to be based on Edith Nesbit, in real life one of the founders of the Fabian Society, and whose marriage, like Olive’s, was strained by infidelities of both partners. Olive’s stories, however, are definitely darker and more disturbing than Nesbit’s real tales, drawing their inspiration more from the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Anderson (whose unexpurgerated tales would terrify most children).

Each of the children in the book is an interesting individual, and their fates are not easily predictable – except that it is not hard to work out from the timing that their adult lives will be profoundly affected by the Great War of 1914-18, and so it proves. Byatt has created a wonderful picture of the rich artistic culture and society which existed before that cataclysm, and a group of people riven by personal and sexual tensions as they try to work out how to live differently than previous generations. And of the children of these people, trying to come to terms with it all.

Bad Boy by Peter Robinson

Ebook on my iPad

I was profoundly disappointed by Robinson’s previous book in his Detective Inspector Banks series. It was full of silly shenanigans to do with MI5, a gay man driven to murder by a whispering campaign, and ended with Banks acting stupidly and against character.

However, this latest volume at least partly redeems the situation, by returning to a more believable scenario, this time involving Banks’ daughter. Banks himself (as though ashamed of his previous appearance) is off-stage for most of the first half of the book and the action is carried by Annie Cabbott.

A good page-turner; I hope Robinson sticks to this form.

Unseen Academicals by Terry Pratchett

Hardcover, my own collection

Disappointing, I am afraid. A rather confusing plot and some very confusing scenes. The book needed a strong editor, particularly as it was apparently dictated by Pratchett rather than typed by the author himself (Pratchett, alas, has been diagnosed with early Altzheimer’s disease). But it didn’t get it.

Currently Reading:

Atlantic by Simon Winchester

The Link by Colin Tudge