juliet | Entries tagged with books

Originally published at Twisting Vines. You can comment here or there.

I heard two nice things about my book this week. One in the form of a note from one of my parents’ friends, who has read and enjoyed it (and thought I sounded like “a very practical person”, which pleased me). The other was a PS to a business-type email about something else altogether, saying that they too really liked it. It’s reassuring to know that it’s hitting the spot!

Most of the rest of the week has been spent recovering from mastitis, which I do not recommend as happy fun times. All hail the modern antibiotic.

I have my first published story out in this anthology, now out in ebook & at 15% off! Am inordinately excited :) I've been reading the other stories as well, now that I've got my contributor's copy, and can whole-heartedly recommend the whole book.

"Magic that detects crime, magic that heals, magic that destroys: all this and more and in hands of queer women who use their powers to shape their worlds and their destinies."

I have a stack of books on my borrowed-books shelf with no labelled owners (I have of late taken to writing the owner in pencil in any book I borrow, but these all date from before that). List is below: if you recognise any of them, please claim. (Otherwise I'm going to either amalgamate with my own books, or donate to the charity, & if they get claimed at a later date I'll just buy the owner a new one.)

Ronald Searle "The Terror Of St Trinians"
Alastair Reynolds "Revelation Space"
Charles Bukowski "Ham On Rye"
Charles Stross "Singularity Sky"
Kenneth Grahame "The Wind In The Willows" (rather nice new hardback edition)

(there are also some with owners, which I shall endeavour to reunite with ppl forthwith).

Last book on the list! This one was recommended by

webcowgirl. I suppose you could call it magic realist, but the way in which the magic is tackled (sceptical yet matter-of-fact) made it feel more like fantasy or spec-fic. I certainly preferred it to most of the magic realist books I've read.

The well-researched 18th c French background was great - the narrative voice felt genuine (NB my knowledge of 18th c Fr is of course minimal so cannot actually confirm accuracy, but it felt appropriately detailed & certainly didn't have anything obviously erroneous). The human interactions were the focus, though, and the detail and emotion of those interactions were fascinating. Given that I like spec-fic, historical fiction, and books with people that actually feel like real people who interact with one another and who I am able to care about, it was hitting most of my buttons. The bit that didn't entirely work was the "people who I am able to care about" - too many of the characters were a bit too unsympathetic, and the ones I found more interesting were least present in the story (doubtless deliberate; the feel of it was that of a a very specific and individual perspective, and that person's limitations in terms of provider-of-the-narrative were obvious).

It does go Heavily Grim at the end, which I could have done without (it wasn't entirely a shock, but it was a bit more than anticipated), but not enough to put me off the book. I'll be investigating whether she's done anything else.

(Sorry, this is a bit of a lame-arse review, because it is late & I have been onna train for over 7 hrs.)

(today is the day for many postings...)

Only one more book to go on the list! This one was recommended by

envoy, and it is about BIKES. Specifically, about couriers (the subtitle is "Bike Messengers and the Cult of Human Power") & Chicago.

The blurb describes his prose as 'poetic' - this is kind of true, but sometimes it gets a bit much. It's almost frenetic sometimes: you get the feeling that he's the sort of person who's always on the move. And of course this links in nicely with the way he talks about riding as a courier: the focus on speed, the way in which it takes over your body and your life, that you almost can't stop moving even when you get home at night. I recognise that feeling: the muscle-twitch you get after a long ride which along with the time it takes the adrenaline to disperse makes falling asleep incredibly hard[0] right until it suddenly all gives way and you collapse.

I could also recognise the way he talks about riding city streets, and reading the traffic. Obviously I'm not a courier and I don't do this full-time; but I've spent a lot of time over the last 7 years riding around London, and you do pick up a feel for how the traffic moves and how to put yourself smoothly into and around it. Which can also take a certain amount of nerve, but when it's working, it's an amazing feeling. (I am going to stay away from his take on the Red Light Argument, other than to say that it's interesting, that I can see his point, and that of *course* couriers are going to jump lights when they can get away with it, they're on pay-per-delivery and not high pay at that.)

He talks a bit about Critical Mass, as well - he was involved while the Chicago police decided to crack down on CM by arresting everyone in sight, and of course that wound up upping the activism. I was interested as well by what he says about the tension between his activist involvement & his courier job (or more accurately, his colleagues): that the couriers weren't all that interested, in many cases, in the activism side of things. (Although I think in most or even all cities where there's a CM, there's tended to be at least some courier involvement.)

In the end he quit & went back into art gallery stuff (and got more heavily involved in bike activism) - mostly because he seriously wrecked his knee. Couriering is the sort of job that tends to do for you physically, one way or another.

Fascinating book: definitely recommended to anyone who cycles or is interested in bikes. (Hard to get in this country, so let me know if you want to borrow it!) And in particular to anyone who enjoys traffic-jamming :)

[0] The canonical example of this for me is trying to sleep at the 400km point of the BCM. twitch twitch twitch.

(More 101 things stuff: reviewing various books that were recommended to me.

damerell recommended Hornblower, and

invisiblechoir recommended My Little Book of Stolen Time. Both of which I read whilst mid-Pacific.)

( Reef the maintopsail! )

( Lawks, I am a time-travelling lady of the night from 19th c Denmark who has fetched up in 20th c London! Let me tell you all about it! )

I have finally sourced a functional (well; it'll do) book reader for the G1 Android. I have 24 days on a ship with no internet, followed by another 8 days on a ship with no internet, upcoming. At present I still have access to Project Gutenberg. These three things taken together point to an obvious conclusion. Thus: any recommendations for books available or potentially available on Gutenburg (i.e. first published around 70 yrs or so ago, I think) would be much appreciated.

ION: am having really very splendid time indeed in Melbourne. Also have head full of STUFF, what with upcoming departure & so forth. Obviously having a coffee this morning was therefore a perfectly fine decision, & has in no way led to me sitting in the corner of the cafe and twitching gently. On the upside, I have got in all the work that was due today/tomorrow, which was the purpose of the exercise. Thus: success! I may go and have a nice quiet lie down now.

Finally finished uploading my London-Australia photos.

(The new ones start here.)

This afternoon I have mostly been putting things into boxes, which is a traumatic process. The boxes (two teachests & Cepheus-the-bike) go tomorrow morning. I have the FEAR that I will end up with random extra bags to carry onto the boat when I realise on Sunday that I forgot to pack $important_thing (which will doubtless also be *heavy*).

Test packing of the rucksack reveals a) things fit!, and b) luggage is about 50% books & other paper, & 50% clothes. I may end up either abandoning, or posting home, books at San Francisco[0].

[0] The last time I was in San Francisco was when I was 21 and spent the Easter vac driving round the SW of the States (bless Oxford & its 6 wk vacations, even if the 8 wk terms are actually designed to generate insanity and overwork). As I didn't have to *carry* anything anywhere, due to having a car, I ended up buying enough books that I had to buy a bag to carry them home in. And then I forgot that I also had a bottle of vodka in the bag, which obviously broke on its way through baggage handling. Thus all my Arnistead Maupin books are slightly crinkled and vodka-ish.

mr_tom recommended this one, & it's the first on the list that I haven't been able to finish.

Up until about halfway through, it's an increasingly confusing but broadly speaking reasonably entertaining account of the drugged- and boozed-up narrator (model/actor-type Victor) bumbling his way through New York and later London. Things begin to look a little dodgy (indications that he's got a double wandering round the place); Victor starts losing it more and more (constructing his entire life as a film in the process of being made); and he fetches up in London.

At this point it degenerates into graphic descriptions of torture, bombs, and highly unerotic sex, which is the point at which I said "screw this, I'm not prepared to read this". (I gave up on American Psycho about halfway through for the exact same reason.) Also by this point I really wasn't remotely involved with any of the characters, nor cared about them or what happened to them. (This may or may not have been the author's intention; but I am pretty sure I *have* read books with dislikable narrators/main characters and still gotten involved with what's going on. The trouble is, I can't really remain engaged when there's that much unpleasantness being that graphically described, because I find it too upsetting. And I wasn't that engaged with Victor in the first place, so...)

Anyway, yeah. Having been assured before that AP was a particularly graphic/gory example of Bret Easton Ellis' work, which is why I figured I'd give this one a go, I am now convinced that he just doesn't work for me. Bah. I am now going to go find something nice and fluffy to read to get rid of the slightly queasy feeling.

Current Location: Sydney, Australia

Time to pick up the 101 things again (though I think with about 8 months to go it is a safe bet that they aren't all going to happen. Ah well.). Anyway: one of them is about reading & reviewing books, so I got Morality Play, by Barry Unsworth (recommended by

thekumquat), out of the library yesterday, and sat up on the roof this afternoon to read it. (I like it up on the roof - Elizabeth Bay is one of the highest bits of Sydney, so there's a great view, and it's lovely and quiet.)

I found the actual story (a group of mediaeval travelling players who are caught up in the aftermath of a murder, lots of stuff about justice and power and so on; don't want to say more for fear of spoilers) less interesting than the background stuff. Specifically the idea of the move from acting morality plays to using more modern material - the ideas about what 'acting' could and could not convey, and the beginnings of change in that. Also the ideas about one's relationship to meaning, and whether meaning is given to you, or can be self-constructed. Barry Unsworth also makes some fairly unsubtle points about gender relations.

It's fairly short, and it's a decent enough read, I guess, but I wasn't really that impressed. Faintly surprised that it won the Booker (in 1992) - I certainly wouldn't have rated it as prize-winning. I found it a little clunky and shallow. (And homophobic, in a fairly thoughtless "stock Evil Character" way.) Having said that, it wasn't a total waste of 1.5 hrs or anything :-)

ION: I am trying to switch to a Dvorak keyboard, a project which is progressing, but it's bloody frustrating. So I shall stop typing now.

Current Mood: sleepy

So, I hauled 2 bags of books and a bag of random clothes & stuff down to the charity shop on Monday, only to discover that they're no longer taking donations. Bother.

I have a vague recollection that there are places online where you can give books away (other than Freecycle). Anyone able to point me in an appropriate direction?

Current Music: REM from the study

catsgomiaow recommended & loaned me Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell (as part of 101 things book-recommendation thing).

( V short review - brain not operational today )

Also I cooked kale puttanesca for

uon & myself last night. Although without the anchovies, obv, & without the olives because we didn't have any. It was very nice, although another time I'd chop the capers up as they were a bit alarming whole.

Current Mood: busy
Current Music: people mending bike tyres

katstevens.

It's sold as a morality tale, but the introduction reckons this was probably an excuse to justify people reading a novel about crime and immorality. Moll was born in prison, and begins her life of "whoring" (she's never actually a prostitute in the sense we'd understand it, although she is occasionally a kept woman and certainly has plenty of relationships outside of legal marriage) when talked into bed by one of the sons of the household she's brought up in. Who later ditches her when the younger brother proposes. Eventually she winds up widowed and without an income, so starts looking for a chap to keep her.

She spends the rest of the book going through assorted men, with a fair level of lying, cheating, and thievery along the way, and two trips to America (one via transportation). She's remarkably cheerful and very hard-headed about the whole thing, despite falling in love a couple of times - and at pains to point out the limited options available to a woman as she gets older, if she hasn't a man to look after her. Although she does "repent" at the end (though it's not entirely convincing...)

The whole thing is splendid fun, especially Moll's accounts of her very successful career as a thief. Also lots of capitalisation and random italics! Thoroughly recommended.

Also last night I made a brand new candle (from stuff Marna gave me for Xmas), and then turned two old & no longer burning candles into a remixed candle (as it were) - also on the 101 things list. It seems to have worked, though I have to leave them for 24 hrs before attempting to burn them. Hurrah! This is good as I really hate wasting all that perfectly good wax that you get around the edge of candles when the wick's dead.

As per here, one of my 101 things is to read & blog 10 recommended books. I've just finished the first one, "The Amateur Marriage" by Anne Tyler, as recommended by

mrs_leroy_brown.

It covers a couple's relationship, from meeting, to (fairly clearly ill-fated from the start) marriage, to kids, divorce, grandkids; and all the small things in between. Anne Tyler really is good at the small observations; you can see how and why things happen as they do, even if you can also see both how and why they might have happened otherwise.

The telling of things from different angles shows how the people involved construct their own views of themselves and each other, and how those different angles put a different meaning on their failure to meet (to be able to meet?) each other on any middle ground. Their post-divorce relationships also show up the extent to which they've constructed themselves around the other and that relationship - reacting against it but not considering what they did get out of it (and people do get things out of any relationship, however dysfunctional - in some cases because of the dysfunction).

I found it saddening, because of the lack of awareness shown - the ways in which people react to and against their surroundings without acknowledging that they're doing it (or sometimes acknowledging it but not thinking further about what that means), the ways in which they, deliberately or otherwise, rewrite their past, the ways in which they fail to meet, the ways in which they deceive. There's an implication of inevitability about it all.

But it's also fascinating, and sufficiently well-observed that it does construct things believably. (Which is of course also depressing.) I'd second Bec's recommendation that it's worth reading.

One of the things on my 101 things list is to get 10 book recommendations from friends, read & review them. So: anyone who wishes to recommend me something is welcome to.

(I will read most things, with the exception of horror/thrillers & other similar likely to give me nightmares[0]. I have no objection at all to decent trashy fiction :-) )

[0] I don't actually get actual nightmares; but I do get bad things in my head which cause me upset.

Edit: A list (with links to reviews)! Thanks for all recommendations...
1. "Moll Flanders" (

katstevens)
2. Liz Jensen "My Dirty Little Book of Stolen Time" (

invisiblechoir)
3. Anne Tyler "The Amateur Marriage" (

mrs_leroy_brown)
4. "The Immortal Class: Bike Messengers & the Cult of Human Power" (

envoy)
5. Bret Easton Ellis "Glamorama" (

mr_tom)
6. David Mitchell "Cloud Atlas" (

catsgomiaow)
7. Phillipa Gregory "Wideacres" (

booklectic)
8. Barry Unsworth "Morality Play" (

thekumquat)
9. Delia Sherman "Porcelain Dove" (

webcowgirl)
10. Hornblower (

damerell)