The occasional scrivener

Part near-future thriller set in yakusa Japan and Sarf London, part SF set in far-far-far-future Earth, this is a hard book to summarize. The thriller part dominates, and seems to be set 15 years in the future mostly so our hero can have some bad memories from Iraq in his youth. The SF element nearly makes sense, but it’s not an SF novel for beginners.

I’ve read one other novel by Grimwood, Pashazade. This is similar, but at the same time almost completely different. Recommended.

A “last man on earth” story set in a Los Angeles beset by vampires. Very much a Fifties novel. Reading this after World War Z was a bit unfair, the latter is a much better story.

Subtitled “An Oral History of the Zombie War, this is a fictional account of the war against the plague of the undead that’s due to engulf us in about 4 years.

Riveting and horrific.

Update 2008-05-08: John Walker has a more extensive review.

A superlative noir near-future SF thriller. I haven’t enjoyed a book like this for a long time. Highly recommended.

More a novella than a full novel. Starts with a bunch of kids stuck in a VR education simulation but the near-future high-school drama soon morphs into something much darker.

Spook Country got some negative reviews, and even though I’d been looking forward to it a long time (Gibson is one of my “read-anything” authors) I decided to wait a bit before buying it. I snatched it up at the library and enjoyed it.

A few people have remarked that Gibson’s stories are pretty shallow and uninteresting, but the point his novels is not the plot, it’s his descriptions of places, people and things. The plot is a meta-MacGuffin that serves the purpose of getting the protagonists to new places where they can fondle shiny new things. These are descriped in the trademark Gibson style.

This book is more of the same. Read it if you like Gibson, skip it if you don’t.

A fun satire but pretty poor SF. I think the fragmented societies of Ken MacLeod (Star Fraction) and Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash) are more likely than this future ruled by giant corporations. The government is privatised as there are no taxes. The dirty secret is that without taxes, a huge chunk of “private” enterprise will go bust: military, parts agriculture. Big Capitalism is as addicted to the state as “welfare” recipients.

I was really looking forward to this book, but can’t help but being disappointed. MacLeod’s first foray into techno-thriller territory starts out well. It’s a chilling portrayal of a paranoid post-9/11 Britain. But after a while you recognise the backstory, it’s the same setup as in the Fall Revolution series, with bits from Engines of Light and even Newton’s Wake thrown in. In the end it gets really SF-y, and not in a good way.

In short, I’ve read better MacLeod novels.

I had an errand to the local concentration of stores (Sickla Köpkvarter) and looked into the library in Dieselverkstaden, a centre for performance and art. It’s a little oasis for the velour and DN På Stan-reading set, in the middle of a desert of crass commercialism.

Anyway, the library was very well stocked with quality SF. I quickly snagged MacLeod’s The Execution Channel, Gibson’s Spook Country, and Jennifer Government by Max Barry.

This is nice because I’ve come to the realisation that 99% of the books I read aren’t really worth owning. Most of Stockholm’s libraries have an SF shelf but this was the best I’ve seen for a while.

I really enjoyed this book. Raban buys a boat and circumnavigates England, Scotland and Wales. The book is written in the early 80s, so the Falklands War, the miners strike and the beginning of the Thatcher era are observed from a position out at sea.

This is a view of an England (for Raban touches mostly in England, and the Isle of Man) in transition, lost in the change between manufacturing and fishing and the new “service economy” and tourism.

It’s a wise, compassionate book, mixing travel writing and memoir. I’ll definitely try to read more by Raban in the future.

I’m re-reading Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin series for the umpteenth time. There are some passages that warrant more investigation. I’m sorta-kinda-hoping planning to write some posts about them in the future.

Update 2008-01-06: I’ll be posting links related to O’Brian in my del.icio.us feed marked with the tag “POB”.

This is simply wonderful book. Part mountain climbing memoir, part cultural history that charts the growing Western fascination for mountains.

A centrepiece is a fascinating account of George Mallory’s obsession with Mount Everest. The chapters are a culmination of the preceding book, showing how the changing perceptions of mountains formed Mallory, and how his death in turn shaped those perceptions.

Highly recommended.

What it says on the tin. All the classic stories.

It’s a pity Conan Doyle didn’t manage to keep Holmes dead after the first collection of stories, because the quality went down quite a bit the more he wrote.

A juvenile novel set in the Discworld universe.

Snagged it from the local library. Pratchett is always entertaining.

A layman’s history of the great plague epidemic in 1348. The first chapters are very interesting. The middle of the book bogs down in a detailed history of the plague’s progress through England. It’s relieved by a chapter about the impact on a fictional village.

The book is from 1969, I bought it some years ago and re-read it now, inspired by a radio show I heard about the impact of the Black Death on the recruitment of clerics to the Catholic church.

An entertaining fantasy in which dragons are used as military vehicles in early nineteenth century Europe. Implausibly, everything else (the UK, Napoleonic France, sailing navies) is unchanged. This seems pretty unlikely as according to the backstory, dragons had been used in war since the Crusades. I’m thinking that if dragons existed alongside humans they’d fundamentally change human society, especially since they have intelligence on par with humans.

However, this means that Novik can write a mix of Austen, Patrick O’Brian, and probably oodles of dragon fantasies which seems to be a distinct subgenre of mainstream fantasy. It’s a good job, and an cracking read.

I must confess I read this in one sitting, staying up until 5:30 in the morning to see how it ended. It’s a satisfying end to a long story, anf although most lose ends were tied there were a lot left dangling.

Now I can venture onto the Interwebs free of the fear of spoilers.

This book could almost be called realist fantasy. It’s a world that’s very like the European Middle ages, with none of the nasty bits edited out. There’s blood, guts, lice, forbidden love between liegemen and ladies, and the oaths and fealties that bind lord and vassal have literally divine sanction. Break them and all Hell breaks loose.

This world is believable in a way that many other fantasy worlds are not. It’s a far cry from Robert Jordan’s plasticky universe, if not in the class of Steven Erikson’s multi-layered mythos.

A bonus: the book is self-contained and not obviously part of a series.

A crew of asteroid miners are ordered to investigate a self propelled moon and are whisked far, far away.

Most of the story is about the personal rivalries between factions of the crew, but there are generous helpings of hard-SF sense-of-wonder too. Some wonderfully disgusting aliens make a cameo appearance near the end.

This was a quick read. Like most of Reynold’s books, it’s not really a very good book by literary standards, but there are lots of nice ideas and images in it.

Another quick read. I’m not sure I think Stross is that great a writer, actually. But he can weave an entertaining tale.

However, a lot of the themes are repurposed from his previous novel Iron Sunrise, and even though the universes are different it still feels like they are too similar.

Hit the SF bookstore in Gamla stan and picked this up today. Read it between 2 o’clock and half an hour ago, thus, a quick read.

Not really as good as Old Man’s War but still entertaining.

I remember Ian McDonald’s Out on Blue Six as a pretty good novel, and apparently Cory Doctorow agrees.

I think I packed that book for sending off to charity and I’m debating whether I should rescue it. But I think I’ll leave it. Let someone else find it and hopefully enjoy it as much.

Read this while on Easter holiday. Not bad at all.

Awesome book. There so much common sense in here it should be illegal.

The most important lesson to gather from this book is that your employees (if they’re knowledge workers, but who isn’t in this day and age?) are an asset, and not just an expense. In the information age you don’t invest in machines and buildings, you invest in attracting and retaining the best people. Putting these people in offices that are cramped and not conductive to knowledge work is like not taking care of your machines or buildings — you’re effectively destroying capital.

Uneasy blend of SF and fantasy, with some rock-and-roll thrown in. Reads like the basis for a fantasy RPG sometimes.

Religously-tinged SF horror about a race of proto-hominids existing deep beneath the surface of the Earth. A page-turner.

A collection of “weird” tales from the beginning of the twentieth century. Flavours of Saki.

Military SF from Baen Books. Reminiscent of David Weber, the same glorification of weapons and the military and the same right-wing outlook. The characters are not entirely one-dimensional though.

Schlock I’m glad I borrowed from the library and didn’t pay for. Slightly entertaining nonetheless.

A riff on Starship Troopers with some elements of The Forever War. Good writing and great humour. Can’t wait to buy the sequel(s).

A history of the anti-communist movement in forties-fifties USA.

Two novellas from Reynold’s Revelation space universe.

A short history of the World War II battle of Kursk in 1943.

This book felt like Leonard wrote it with one hand tied behind his back. The redeeming feature was the excellent narration by Paul Rudd.

Subtitled A World of Freedom, Chaos, and Crime, this is a very good book about the modern realities of maritime transport and law enforcement. Langewieshe’s thesis is that the oceans, by their very size, are natural havens for shady types like pirates, unscrupulous shipowners and ineffectual regulators.

He writes about shipwrecks, piracy, and the shipbreaking industry in India and Bangladesh. Central to the book is the sinking of the passenger ferry Estonia, a wound that has not yet healed in Sweden. He shows how most landlubbers will rather indulge in conspiracy theories to explain the accident, instead of accepting that the sea is a very dangerous place, and that shore-based attempts to impose order are inherently doomed to fail.

This audiobook was read by the author, which worked well.

Audiobook.

Palin recounts his travels around the Sahara filming for the BBC. He’s a good author and narrator, and conveys a good picture throughout the book of the country and the people.

Yet another history. This focuses in large part on the global aspects of the war, in addition to trying to explaining the conflict in terms that the combatants understood — the conflict between liberalism and authoritatism. In the author’s view, the war wasn’t fought for meaningless reasons, and he asserts that the later view of it as a senseless carnage is a product of poets and authors writing during the 1920’s.

Boken handlar om Catrine da Costa-fallet från 1984. Utgångspunkten är den mediakampanj som bedrevs kring 2000 för att dom båda läkarna skulle få upprättelse. Men ju mer Borgnäs gräver i fallet desto mer märkliga omständigheter finnar han.

Han är mycket kritisk mot Leif GW Persson som på egen hand bestämt sig att läkarna måste vara oskyldiga. Men enligt Borgnäs pekar många spår, inte bara i Catrine-fallet, mot Obducenten. Persson och Guillou gjorde allt i sin makt att peka polisen åt helt andra håll, med stora konsekvenser för dom oskyldiga som råkade komma i vägen.

A generation starship approaches a system after a 400 year voyage, intent on colonising the asteroid belt and pushing off again. They are shocked to discover the first alien intelligent life encountered during humanity’s 15,000-year expansion.

A nicely done novel, especially the fact that the aliens are more “human” (closer to us) than our putative descendants. Also a good treatment of the generation ship problem: how do you ensure a stable population over a voyage spanning centuries? The answer: genetic engineering and late-stage capitalism, with the “founders” investing in the ventures of the colonising “ship generation”.

A blend of the spy thriller with H.P. Lovecraft, mixed with IT life satire.

• Cosmonaut Keep
• Dark Light
• Engine City

Nice blend of science fiction and politics from the master himself.

I actually finished this last week, but I’ve been planning a longish review since before the weekend. Now I’m actually writing I can’t say much other than that this is a really good book if you like cyberpunk flavoured noir — and who doesn’t?

Here’s my review of Altered Carbon. I’m looking forward to getting my hands on the second book in the trilogy, Broken Angels, soon.

This is the latest instalment in Erikson’s epic, The Malazan Book of the Fallen. This dense work benefits from an incremental approach where you read and re-read the previous books over and over again to try to catch all the details and nuances. Luckily, the books are so well-written that this is not a chore at all.

The Malazan universe is exceedingly complex, with new gods, forms of magic, and undead pre-humanoid species turning up every few books. Sometimes they have the appearance of dei ex machinae, but it doesn’t matter that much.

This book is the sixth in a ten-part series, I’m sure Erikson will be able to keep things up for the concluding four. Until then I’ll re-read Memories of Ice again.

I finished three books this long weekend, capsule reviews follow.

• The Wizard Knight by Gene Wolfe.

Apparently 2 novels, The Knight and The Wizard, I read this tome in trade paperback and got a sore back for my pains. Only thing wrong with this book, which is vintage Wolfe. Echoes of the Torturer series, this is in a classic fairytale setting with knights and princesses and elfs, but with a few twists. Our hero grows to be a man in a night, battles giants and dragons, dies and goes to Valhalla, returns to claim his queen. Great stuff.

• The Zombie Survival Guide: Complete Protection from the Living Dead by Max Brooks.

What it says on the tin. Worried about the plague of undead coming to eat your flesh? This book tells you what to do before, during, and after an outbreak of zombies in your neighborhood. Also contains tips for surviving the apocalypse of an Earth dominated by the living dead.

• Monstrous Regiment by Terry Pratchett.

Pratchett takes on the military and adds a twist to the “don’t ask, don’t tell” meme.

I usually try my hardest to finish all the books I start, but I had to cry Uncle! at Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell. I’m sure fans of early English fantasy and stories about fairies will find this pastiche delightful. It doesn’t cut it for me.

Instead I started on Gene Wolfe’s The Wizard Knight. Much better so far.

Subtitled “A Codemaker’s War, 1941—1945”, a memoir of work in the SOE (Special Operations Executive) during World War II. Well worth the read.

The title refers to the author’s offer to his superiors: either code pages printed on hard-to-obtain silk were issued to agents, or they would have to use their cyanide tablets.

A book about the political background of the Restoration. Mostly interesting for the origin of the Whig and Tory parties in British politics.

This is a re-read. Not as good as the earlier novels but Gibson is still a master of his own kind of tech-distilled noir style.

A Discworld novel dealing with the evils of organised religion. Readable, but I’ve read funnier stuff.

A nice reinvention of the cyberpunk genre, set in alternate-future Ottoman Alexandria.

The author’s site is here.

[…] Things only started to unravel in the sixth [year] when I decided there was nothing wrong with my school that couldn’t be cured with a sub-machine gun and unlimited ammunition […]

A fantasy novel about a ne’er-do-well musician in San Fransisco who’s life is turned upside down when he’s attacked by a being from the parallell universe of Faerie. Naturally his destiny is much grander than he thought…

Well written like all William’s books. The beginning is near social-realism — our hero loses his unborn child in a miscarriage, his girlfriend, and his mother to cancer in the first few chapters. This sets the tone for the rest of the book and removes any inconvenient characters that may mess up the path of destiny.

A classic public library book: something you’re delighted to find in the shelves but won’t pay for in the store.

Mr. Jalopy mentions that you can store the contents of the Complete New Yorker on your hard drive. (I got this link from BoingBoing.)

However, the mention is a bit sketchy.

What you have to do is update the table Issues in the SQLite database used by the application. A value of 9 in the field DiskID means hard drive. The rest of the IDs refer to the different disks.

I didn’t notice this, but the very first issue is on the hard drive, which gave anyone with some nous a clue about how this stuff works. If you look in the “Issues” folder of the intallation folder you’ll see a file called 1925_02_21.djvu. This is the first issue.

So you have to copy all the *.djvu files from the separate DVDs (located in the “Issues” folder there) to the “Issues” folder on the harddrive, then update the database.

Warning: I take no responsibility for any stuff that may happen to your installation if you follow these instructions. This said, I believe that if you mess up, you can reinstall the app.

You have to install a SQLite client. I use Cygwin and downloaded the source, compiled and installed. There are precompiled Windows binaries, that I suppose can be used from the Windows command prompt. Mr. Jalopy mentions a graphical application on the internet.

The file you use is ny-sqlite-3.db. Making a backup of this file is a good idea.

$ /usr/local/bin/sqlite3.exe ny-sqlite-3.db

There are two ways to approach this.

Brute force

Simply copy every single file from every DVD to your harddrive. This is a good approach if you have the space (around 50 GB). When you’ve done that, simply run

sqlite> update Issues set DiskID = 9 where DiskID <> 9;

Now all your issues are available from the harddrive.

Disk by Disk

If you don’t have the space, like me, maybe two or three disks will be enough. You’ll have to find which issues are on which disk and update the Issues table accordingly.

Here’s how to find which years have a specific DiskID:

sqlite> select  min(Year), max(Year), DiskID from Issues
        group by DiskID order by min(Year);

Below are the contents of my database.

• Hard drive: 9
• DVD 1 (1998—2004): 8
• DVD 2 (1984—1997): 4
• DVD 3 (1974—1983): 7
• DVD 4 (1965—1973): 2
• DVD 5 (1957—1964): 6
• DVD 6 (1948—1956): 1
• DVD 7 (1937—1947): 5
• DVD 8 (1925—1936): 3

To move DVD 3 to the harddrive, copy all the files, then run

sqlite> update Issues set DiskID = 9 where DiskID = 7;

More SQLite tips

To see the contents of the database:

sqlite> .tables

To see the structure of a specific table:

sqlite> .schema <table>

Update 2006-01-13: I got a mention on BoingBoing. Also, Nick posted an update on how to do this on a Mac, including moving the files to another location! Wow, wish I had symlinks on this OS…

Update 2006-03-02: I got a mention on Securityfocus. The whole article is great, it really points out the absurdity of DRM:

If the goal is just to frustrate users, then why use DRM at all, since you must realize that un-DRM’d copies of your materials are going to circulate? And even if Joe can’t break the DRM, he’ll eventually figure out how to use a P2P network, or ask his nerd friend for help, and then you’ve got another unauthorized copy and an upset and now more knowledgeable former customer. What publisher wants that?

Thanks to all the commenters with their tips and tricks on getting this to work on various hardware and software platforms.

Update 2008-05-13: The instructions on how to make this work on a Mac were in a comment that disappeared when I moved to another commenting system. Here are the instructions:

Here is how to do it on a Mac (at least, this is what I did), including putting the files on a separate drive from the Application.

1. Installed sqlite3 using Fink.
2. Copied all the Issues files from the DVD’s to my spare hard drive.
3. Ran the sqlite commands as described above - note that the ny-sqlite-3.db file is located in /Library/Application Support/The New Yorker, as is the Issues folder.
4. Copied the contents of /Library/Application Support/The New Yorker/Issues to the Issues folder on my spare drive.
5. Made a soft link from /Library/Application Support/The New Yorker/Issues to my copy of Issues (note that an alias in the finder did not work - I had to create the soft link on the commandline).
6. Voila! Speedy New Yorker with no DVD swapping.

This is the first audiobook I’ve listened to, and was a really good one. Stephen Fry’s narration is brilliant, lending colour and excitement to a very long, episodic book. What the scriptwriters of the film adaptation will do to ensure that the film isn’t over four hours long, I don’t know.

I’ve approached the Complete New Yorker with some trepidation. How do you make a dent in 50 gigabytes of scanned material?

Then I remember John McPhee, one of my favourite non-fiction authors. His style is unique, really good. I’ve read Looking for a Ship and Basin and Range and would really like to read The Curve of Binding Energy (if only for the beautiful title.)

McPhee writes for the New Yorker, and sure enough, a search for his name yielded hundreds of articles. I’ll be reading them in spare moments in the weeks to come.

A re-read.

The first Reynolds novel I read, but not the best. The parts on the generation starship are well-written though, but the steampunk ambience in Chasm City isn’t as interesting.

I got the Complete New Yorker for Christmas from my parents. That’s eight DVDs filled with every issue ever published since 1925. Guess I won’t have to worry about getting books anytime soon.

The fourth book in the Malazan series.

The second part of the Malazan Book of the Fallen series.

This book rests on a central premise, that an alternate 1959 Earth has been preserved like a fly in amber by some all-powerful aliens. In the far future, two warring factions of humanity stumble upon it and use the artifacts there to complement the forgotten history of the Nanocaust.

Reynolds skilfully weaves together “hard” S-F with a Simenon-like detective story. But if you ignore the technical mastery and the skillful plotting, the story is basically absurd. But it’s an enjoyable read nonetheless. I stayed up until one in the morning yesterday to finish it.

This is a re-read.

It’s hard to describe what’s so good with Erikson’s writing and universe. Perhaps it’s the gnarly texture of the world,the pervasiveness of magic accessible to most people, the sweat, the blood, the many-layered mythologies…

I was lucky to get Deadhouse Gates and House of Chains at the library, I’ll be re-reading them as soon as I finish with Century Rain.

Update 2006-06-12: re-read it again.

The Guardian lists the top 20 geek novels. I’ve read all four:

• Watchmen — Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons
• Stranger in a Strange Land — Robert Heinlein
• The Illuminatus! Trilogy — Robert Shea & Robert Anton Wilson
• Trouble with Lichen - John Wyndham

Can’t say I’ve read all of Brave New World either.

Of the rest, I find it nice to see Bank’s Consider Phlebas on the list, although of course Use of Weapons is much better.

A new installment in the Malazan series, this moves the action to a wholly different part of the world? universe? — it’s not clear. It’s been a while since I read the preceding book, and my grasp of all the different races, gods, and demons is a bit shaky, but I’m pretty sure we haven’t encountered the Tiste Edur in detail before.

They are an agricultural people about to be conquered by the rapacious Letherii, whose society is like a caricature of our own Western society. But all is not as it seems, as the closest this series has to a figure of pure evil, the Fallen God, has other plans…

A good read as usual with Erikson.

Feh. There should be a warning printed on this 1,144 page book:

This is the first book in a series

Dunno if I’ll buy the sequel. Hamilton is a capable wordsmith, and the plot moves along at a respectable clip. But the surface is a bit too polished, the characters a bit too much like cardboard.

scifi.com says:

This is the type of book that publicists call “epic” that others might less charitably describe as “bloated.” […] An editorial pruning might have put this prospective doorstop on more people’s “to read” lists.

Today, this kind of book would be called a mashup.

A little bagatell, as we say in Sweden.

An S-F novel not set in Bank’s Culture universe. Has good sense-of-wonder factors, but the characters seem a bit cardboard-like for Banks.

Well, the trilogy is done. It was never boring, but it takes a good writer to keep the reader hooked for three thousand pages. Stephenson does a good but not stellar job.

Update: the books are frequently funny, but not often laugh-out-loud funny. The following passage made me lol though. The hero, Daniel Waterhouse, and sir Isaac Newton are meeting with an informer in the pub of the Newgate prison, called the Black Dogg:

The Black Dogg was not the sort of tavern that contained a great deal of furniture — patrons either stood, or lay on the floor. There was a bar, of course, in the literal sense of a bulwark erected between the prisoners and the gin. This was now a palisade of burning tapers. […]

Reader² is a del.icio.us for books.

I must say I’m tempted. The network effects would be pretty cool. But it would be yet another thing to integrate into my blog. Doing it with del.icio.us works now, and I guess I could do something like that with this service. But part of the reason I like the reading list setup I have is that it exposes my “wanted” list in a mobile-parseable format. I have it bookmarked in my phone so I can read it if I’m in a bookstore.

As for getting recommendations of new stuff to read, that’s what the New York Review of Books and The Economist are for.

Calle sent a tip about a pal of his who made the journey from Cape Town to Nordkap in a 15-year old Land Rover with his wife and 3-month old son. He’s written a book Kapstaden till Nordkap på 333 dagar (in Swedish), which I’m hearby giving some linklove.

My friend Bastian made the journey from Cairo to the Cape some years ago, as did Paul Theroux, but they travelled alone without kids in diapers.

Well, that was a hard slog. I’ll be reading The System of the World next, because The Confusion picked up considerably two-thirds of the way through, and also I’ve already payed for it. But I can’t say the trilogy is Stephenson’s best effort.

I’ve finally started reading Neal Stephenson’s The Confusion. Its had “reading” status on my reading list since July 9. Instead of reading it however, I’ve read some old issues of the New York Review of Books, the Economist, and Patrick O’Brian’s Blue at the Mizzen.

Update: now a fourth of the way in, and it’s heavy going. Quicksilver was a damn sight more action-packed.

Edmund Wilson’s review of the Lord of the Rings, published in 1956, could almost be about the Harry Potter series today. Especially this gem:

Now, how is it that these long-winded volumes of what looks to this reviewer like balderdash have elicited such tributes [from some people]? The answer is, I believe, that certain people - especially, perhaps, in Britain - have a lifelong appetite for juvenile trash. They would not accept adult trash, but, confronted with the pre-teen-age article, they revert to the mental phase which delighted in Elsie Dinsmore and Little Lord Fauntleroy and which seems to have made of Billy Bunter, in England, almost a national figure. You can see it in the tone they fall into when they talk about Tolkien in print: they bubble, they squeal, they coo; they go on about Malory and Spenser - both of whom have a charm and a distinction that Tolkien has never touched.

Admittedly, Harry Potter is written for children/”young adults”. But the series still seems to attract a wide audience, just like Tolkien. In my not so humble opinion, I still find Tolkien better than HP, but that’s perhaps because I was younger when I read LOTR for the first time.

Which leads to another thought: how will my son be able to appreciate HP when he’s older? The whole series is being exploited in real time, with the movies more or less following on the heels of the books. How can he create an internal representation of the HP universe when Warner Bros have served it up like a McDonalds meal already?

Yawn, yet another HP adventure. This was better plotted than the last, but still not really a good book.

I broke down and bought the latest Harry Potter novel. I wasn’t impressed by the last one, but I couldn’t resist — maybe J.K. Rowling has learnt to write?

Buying it led me a merry dance from Högdalen (where I was buying 200W bulbs that actually fit our lamp) to Farsta, but all the bookstores were sold out. I finally had to go to a hypermarket in Nacka, where it was prominently displayed for 149 SEK.

A “hard fantasy” novel, containing some nice ideas (really only one idea, but the ramifications are well thought out). Well written, if a bit confusing at times. As it’s fantasy, of course this is just the first novel in a series… sigh. I’ll perhaps pick up the next book when it arrives in paperback.

• Patrick O’Brian, The Hundred Days
• Bruce Sterling, The Zenith Angle
• Charles Stross, Iron Sunrise

A mix between The Secret History and (I guess, I haven’t read it) The Da Vinci Code. Not bad at all.

These are the books I read during my two weeks vacation on the west coast of Sweden.

Four novels by Patrick O’Brian:

• The Nutmeg of Consolation
• Clarissa Oakes
• The Wine-Dark Sea
• The Commodore

In my opinion, The Thirteen-Gun Salute is the last really good Aubrey-Maturin novel.

• Mike Bryan, Dogleg Madness
• Carl Hiassen, Skinny Dip
• Charles Stross, Accelerando

WTF?

• Men at Arms
• Officers and Gentlemen
• Unconditional Surrender

Based on Waugh’s own experiences in World War 2, this is a funny — and grim — trilogy about the death of Honour and the birth of the base modern age.

Reading

• Ian McDonald, Brasyl (to be returned 2008-05-31)

Queue

• David Allen, Getting Things Done (loan from Anders)
• Mark Jason Dominus, Higher Order Perl
• Stephen Kinzer, All the Shah’s Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror (loan from Jan)
• Richard Morgan, Broken Angels (audiobook)
• Alistair Reynolds, The Prefect (to be returned
• Dan Simmons, Olympos

To be returned

• Max Brooks, World War Z (to be returned 2008-05-31)
• Tom DeMarco & Timothy Lister, Peopleware 2nd ed. (loan from Tobbe)
• Jon Courtenay Grimwood, End of the World Blues (to be returned 2008-05-31)
• Richard Matheson, I Am Legend (to be returned 2008-05-31)

Wishlist

• Iain M. Banks, Matter
• Matthew Carr, Unknown Soldiers: How terrorism transformed the modern world (in the US as Infernal Machine: A History of Terrorism.)
• Douglas Coupland, JPod
• Jeffrey A. Engel, Cold war at 30,000 Feet
• Steven Erikson, Reaper’s Gale
• Glen David Gold, Carter Beats the Devil
• Frances FitzGerald, Way Out There in the Blue: Reagan, Star Wars and the End of the Cold War
• Graham Hancock, The Lords of Poverty: The Power, Prestige and Corruption of the International Aid Business
• Harry Harrison, The Deathworld: Omnibus (recommended by Chris Davies)
• Ryszard Kapuscinski, The Emperor
• Philip Kitcher, Living with Darwin
• William Langewiesche, American Ground
• Steven LeBlanc, Constant Battles: Why We Fight
• David Liss, A Conspiracy of Paper
• John MacPhee, Uncommon Carriers
• Michael Maren, The Road to Hell: The Ravaging Effects of Foreign Aid and International Charity
• David Marusek, Counting Heads (due to this blurb)
• Ewen Montagu, The Man who never was
• Ted Morgan, Reds: McCarthyism in Twentieth-Century America (reviewed in NYRB, vol. LI, no. 2)
• Jeffrey T. Richelson, Spying on the Bomb
• Ola Ringdahl, Kapstaden till Nordkap på 333 dagar
• N.A.M. Rodger, The Command of the Ocean: A Naval History of Britain, 1649-1815
• N.A.M. Rodger, The Wooden World
• David Simon, Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets
• Dan Simmons, The Terror
• Neal Stephenson & J. Frederick George, Interface
• Charles Stross, The Jennifer Morgue
• Charles Stross, Halting State
• Arkadij Vaksberg, Skjut de galna hundarna!
• Vernor Vinge, Rainbows End
• Peter Watts, Blindsight
• Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA
• Tom Wilker, Shooting Star: The Brief Arc of Joe McCarthy
• John C. Wright, The Golden Age

Whew! I just completed an extended trip down memory lane. I last read them in my early teens, but still remember nearly all the plots.

• Swallows and Amazons: the first book.

• Swallowdale: the arch-nemesis of the Amazons, the Great Aunt, makes her first appearance.

• Peter Duck: my battered Puffin paperback was liberated from the school library in Kuala Lumpur. It’s marked

HIGHGATE HILL PRIMARY SCHOOL
HQ KUALA LUMPUR GARRISON
c/o G.P.O. KUALA LUMPUR

The last date is 16.10.75. As we didn’t move to KL until 1977, I’m guessing this book was sold out or given away.

• Winter Holiday: the D’s, Dick and Dorothea, make their appearance.

• Coot Club: a favourite.

• Pigeon Post: a bit different from what I remember. I focused a lot more on Dick back then, guess it was identification with him.

• We Didn’t Mean to go to Sea: a great book.

• Secret Water. Not one of my favourites.

• The Big Six: classic juvenile detective story

• Missee Lee: a swashbuckling tale involving a female pirate chief with a passion for Latin. Our heroes are forced to endure that fate worse than death: lessons in the holidays. The shiftless youngest, Roger, unexpectedly shines as a Latin scholar. Mildly racist in a 30s kind of way.

• The Picts and the Martyrs: an interesting book. The premise is that in order to be nice to Mrs. Blackett, the D’s have to be “naughty” and live in the woods, cooking their own food and generally having a typical S&A-type adventure. This is because the dreaded Great Aunt would blow up if she found them living with the Amazons. Interesting juxtaposition of morals here.

• Great Nothern?: early eco-friendly children’s literature. The setting is in the Scottish Highlands, which lends it another flavour than the Lake District or the Broads. I thought I likes this book better than I actually did.

I’m taking a break from O’Brian for a while. This book marks the end of my collection of WW Norton paperbacks, which are larger than the editions from Harper Collins that follow. Someday I can afford to replace them all with hardcovers.

A coffee-table book with lavish illustrations. Capsule histories of the period from 1756 to 1815 and beyond are interspersed with more general pieces about sailship tech and handling. Nice reading for an O’Brian nut. Recommended if you don’t have to pay for it — borrow it from your local library, like I did.

Another one of my favourites within the series.

Here we first make our acquaintance with Andrew Wray, who will succeed Admiral Harte as Jack and Stephen’s bête noir in the coming novels.