Books Update: Expectations, Given Form

It's been a while since I last wrote a bit about what I've been reading, with the result that I'm now four books in deficit. All of them I came to with certain expectations, having read books by their respective authors before.

And here they are:

The Steep Approach to Garbadale is, shockingly, the twenty-first novel I've read by Iain Banks (along with a volume of shorts and a book about whisky), and there was much about it that was comfortingly familiar. Rather too much, I found in fact, as the narrative presented me with a hero emotionally crippled by his childhood love (as in The Crow Road and Walking on Glass), avoiding his sprawling, matriarchal family (The Crow Road again, and also Whit) who run a venerable, highly successful business (The Business) making a game which forms a metaphor for politics (The Player of Games) and taking lots of drugs (passim). What's more, this family has been guarding a terrible secret for a generation (The Wasp Factory and -- oh look -- The Crow Road) whose nature (which I won't reveal here) will also be familiar to long-term appreciators of Banks' oeuvre.

Banks' writing is always competent, and Steep Approach is less flabby and in need of editorial trimming than his last S.F. novel, The Algebraist. There are some lovely bits of writing relating to the hero, Alban's, youthful affair with his cousin, and to his long-dead mother's suicide. But overall it says very little of weight, has none of Banks's usual exuberant creativity, and feels much as if he's writing by the numbers. I've never met a Banks novel I've actively disliked (A Song of Stone and Canal Dreams come closest), but this one's something of a disappointment.

The Penelopiad, on the other hand, is classic Margaret Atwood without, as far as I know, being a retread of anything she's written before. Looking at The Odyssey through the eyes of Odysseus' long-suffering wife Penelope follows a standard feminist-revisionist approach (though it's one James Joyce, for instance, had flirted with before), but it's very productive. Penelope lends the novella a lively, sympathetic voice, sidestepping the victim status she might otherwise invite by tempering her complaints with hard-edged ruthlessness. Atwood gives the novella a second thread in the choric voices of the maids unjustly hanged by Ulysses for fraternising with Penelope's suitors, showing how Penelope herself is compromised by her privileged background as an aristocrat. It's a clever, erudite, witty and highly readable book, and reminded me of why I enjoy Atwood's writing so much.

The only previous work I'd read of Stephen Marley's was his 1995 Doctor Who novel, Managra, which was one of the very best published in Virgin's Missing Adventures range, and a major source of inspiration for Of the City of the Saved.... His Spirit Mirror is an earlier and sadly less deft novel.

The first in Marley's notorious (among Missing Adventures readers, anyway) yet little-read (ditto) "Chinese lesbian vampires" trilogy -- his first novel, bizarrely, being a life of the Virgin Mary -- Spirit Mirror has a lot to recommend it, including inventive ideas, strong characters and vivid descriptions both beautiful and horrific. Unfortunately it's all very po-faced, lacking the streak of wicked humour and deliberately outrageous invention which raises Managra to greatness. The second-century Chinese setting lends local colour -- though less than you might expect -- but ultimately the book is rather flat genre fantasy with some interesting moments.

(Oh, and although the novel contains both Chinese lesbians and vampires, there is no overlap between the two.)

Martin Day's one contribution to Virgin's Missing Adventures line was The Menagerie, a sadly lesser work than Managra, but he has since redeemed himself with contributions to the BBC's Doctor Who book ranges, notably Bunker Soldiers and The Sleep of Reason. I had hoped that Wooden Heart, like Gareth Roberts' Only Human, might be an exception to the dismal tendency of Who books since the new series to be shallow, vapid froth.

Sadly, it isn't quite. Day's work has always had a slight tendency to verbosity, which sadly comes out here in a book I can't imagine its target audience of 8-year-olds enjoying very much. There are some interesting themes relating to ethics and the nature of good and evil, which it's certainly surprising to see tackled by David Tennant's Doctor, but they never develop into anything truly worthwhile.

In the early days of the new series, we long-term Who book readers bemoaned the fact that none of the new Ninth Doctor tie-in books could match such TV episodes as Dalek and Father's Day for subtlety and complexity. Day's book isn't actually a great deal deeper or more complex than those, and yet it easily outdoes the current TV series for thematic sophistication. I find this disappointing.

After all that, then, the list of books I've read so far this year runs thusly:

• Margaret Atwood, The Penelopiad.
  
• Iain Banks, The Steep Approach to Garbadale.
  
• Thomas Bertonneau and Kim Paffenroth, The Truth Is Out There: Christian Faith and the Classics of TV Science Fiction.
  
• Frederick Crews, The Pooh Perplex.
  
• Frederick Crews, Postmodern Pooh.
  
• Martin Day, Doctor Who: Wooden Heart.
  
• Roger Fairclough (ed), The Prisoner: the Original Scripts Volume 2.
  
• Jon Courtenay Grimwood, Pashazade: the First Arabesk.
  
• Kelly Hale, Faction Paradox: Erasing Sherlock.
  
• Andy Lane, Torchwood: Slow Decay.
  
• Ken Macleod, The Star Fraction.
  
• Stephen Marley, Spirit Mirror.
  
• China Miéville, King Rat.
  
• Lawrence Miles and Tat Wood, About Time 2.
  
• Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie, Lost Girls.
  
• Kate Orman, Doctor Who: Return of the Living Dad.
  
• J-P Stacey, A Pocketful of Lies.
  
• Charles Stross, Accelerando.

That's eighteen of the buggers. It's also the eighteenth week of the year, and while I started some of the above before the end of 2006, I'm also part of the way into Collapse and Iron Council already, which means I'm very slightly ahead of the game. Assuming that the name of the game is "reading a book a week".

And that's not counting humorous books read on the lavatory.

Still on my to-read list since last time are the following (new arrivals in bold, "less urgent" stuff in square brackets):

Non-Fiction:

• [Brian Bates, The Real Middle Earth.]
  
• Michael Frayn, The Human Touch.
  
• Tom Holland, Persian Fire.
  
• Robert Markley, Dying Planet: Mars in Science and the Imagination.
  
• Terry Pratchett, Ian Cohen and Jack Stewart, The Science of Discworld III: Darwin's Watch.
  
• David Foster Wallace, Consider the Lobster: Essays and Arguments.
  

Fiction:

• Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake.
  
• Max Barry, Jennifer Government.
  
• Mark Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay.
  
• [Mark Chadbourn, World's End.]
  
• Samuel Delany, Dhalgren.
  
• [Umberto Eco, Foucault's Pendulum.]
  
• Frank Herbert, Dune.
  
• [Gwynneth Jones, Bold as Love.]
  
• Ian McDonald, River of Gods.
• Christopher Priest, The Space Machine.
  
• Kim Stanley Robinson, the Mars trilogy.
  
• Justina Robson, Mappa Mundi.
• Justina Robson, Living Next-Door to the God of Love.
  
• Philip Roth, The Plot Against America.
  
• Norman Spinrad, The Iron Dream.

From all of the above we can deduce that:

a) I don't read nearly as many non-fiction books as I intend to.
b) An embarrassing amount of my reading is Doctor Who related.
c) Only women writers are fulfilling my expectations at present.

Perhaps I'd better start one of those Justina Robsons.

Book Depository

I'm aware I've been banging on about routine personal stuff rather a lot here recently, as if this were some ghastly tabloid LiveJournal rather than the altogether better class of broadsheet blogging one's accustomed to finding on Blogspot. As a sort of mini-resolution, I've decided that during 2007 (and ideally beyond) I shall try to record every book I read here at Peculiar Times, and write at least two sentences about each one.

The reason for this is partly the hope that it'll be interesting, partly to keep up the critical writing which is one of the reasons I maintain this blog, but mostly because -- now my memory's passed the halfway point in its deterioration towards senescence -- I find I'm having real trouble remembering what I've actually read.

So, the following are the books I've finished so far this year. Some of them, of course, were begun last year.

The Star Fraction by Ken Macleod. This one was a reread -- it was this book and its sequels which first convinced me that I had to make reading every book Macleod published a high priority for the rest of my life. It's almost embarrassing, in retrospect, how much of an influence on Of the City of the Saved... this was -- the chief difference being that I have none of Macleod's expertise in political theory, so had to write about entirely fictional politics instead. It's still excellent stuff, although there are traces of the awkwardness and completism which afflicts many first novels.

King Rat by China Miéville. This one's more obviously a first novel: evidently Miéville hit his stride with Perdido Street Station (another novel which has a scary amount in common with OtCotS, but which I fortunately hadn't read until well after it came out). King Rat takes place in contemporary London, which allows it to indulge an interest in real-world urban musical styles, but as a setting is surprisingly thin: it's clear that the author is already straining after his own vivid world. The quality of Miéville's reinterpretation of real-world myth and folklore is variable: his take on the Pied Piper is excellent, but his Anansi pales compared with Neil Gaiman's.

About Time 2 by Lawrence Miles and Tat Wood. This is the latest instalment of Lawrence and Tat's ongoing and epic attempt to place the various eras of twentieth-century TV Doctor Who in its cultural context -- expected to run (after the publication of the next and final volume, About Time 6) to a million words, of which this must constitute at least 175,000. As I mentioned on Parrinium Mines, this volume suffers from documenting the relatively dull repetitiveness of the Troughton era (rather than, say, the freeform experimentation of the Hartnell stuff), as well as the authors' inability to keep their verbiage under control. It's still one of the most entertaining books ever written about Doctor Who, though (and believe me, there's a wide field for comparison).

The Truth Is Out There: Christian Faith and the Classics of TV Science Fiction by Thomas Bertonneau and Kim Paffenroth. This was a weird one, a birthday present from the vicar and family. It's a combination of criticism and theology, but unlike most such studies (well, most that deserve the term "studies", anyway) it's heavily weighted towards the theology end of things. This means that the criticism's rather facile, but there's an awful lot of background concerning things like pre-christian sacrificial cults and the authorship of Revelation.

Nonetheless, the actual conclusions the authors come to are often interesting, if frequently batty. The idea that Doctor Who is about the superseding of sacrificial kingship relies on a very selective reading, and ignores a great many stories which might have been useful to the argument, as well as some which might well have blown it out of the water. There's some confusion about the understanding of the term "science fiction", with the analysis of the cross-genre anthology show The Twilight Zone relying mostly on the episodes where characters make Faustian bargains firmly in the tradition of theological fantasy. Some aspects of the authors' research have been sketchy at best, and there are some bizarre factual errors. (Jon Pertwee's name accumulating an extra "h" is common and understandable, though irritating -- but when exactly did Babylon 5's Mr Morden acquire the first name "Ethan"?)

The fact that it treats Star Trek with moral seriousness gives away the fact that The Truth Is Out There is an American book. Perhaps because of this I found both it surprisingly conservative both in politics and theology -- there is, for instance, a startlingly vehement rant about how television in general is eroding the nation's morals, the six series under advisement being honorable exceptions. More disturbingly still, it seems to assume an even more conservative readership, who need much convincing of the few non-traditional assumptions the authors make. It's a fascinating perspective on TV SF, and I'm glad to have read it, but it's phenomenally wrong on a quite startling number of levels.

Shortly before Christmas I finished Watching the English: The Hidden Rules of English Behaviour by anthropologist Kate Fox. I'm not going to go on about it at length, because I've said far more than two sentences about all of the above, especially that last one. Suffice to say that it's brilliant, clever and funny, and that if you're English you need to read it in order to understand yourself. (If you're not English, you still need to read it, in order to understand any English people you might happen to meet.)

Currently I'm reading the second volume of the Prisoner scriptbook; and Erasing Sherlock by Kelly Hale -- the fifth, final and, on its showing so far, very possibly the best of Mad Norwegian Press's Faction Paradox novels.

Finally, it's been ages since I updated my reading list.

Books in bold have been added since the last time. Stuff in square brackets has been reluctantly designated less urgent, which means I'll probably not get around to reading it unless I find myself in bed with spinal injuries for a year or so. Two rather unappealing Doctor Who tie-ins have fallen off the list altogether.

Non-Fiction:

• [Brian Bates, The Real Middle Earth.]
  
• Jared Diamond, Collapse.
  
• Michael Frayn, The Human Touch.
  
• Tom Holland, Persian Fire.
  
• Robert Markley, Dying Planet: Mars in Science and the Imagination.
  
• Terry Pratchett, Ian Cohen and Jack Stewart, The Science of Discworld III: Darwin's Watch.
  
• David Foster Wallace, Consider the Lobster: Essays and Arguments.

Fiction:

• Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake.
  
• Margaret Atwood, The Penelopiad.
  
• Mark Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay.
  
• [Mark Chadbourn, World's End.]
  
• [Umberto Eco, Foucault's Pendulum.]
  
• Jon Courtenay Grimwood, Pashazade: the First Arabesk.
  
• [Gwynneth Jones, Bold as Love.]
  
• Frank Herbert, Dune.
  
• Ian McDonald, River of Gods.
  
• China Miéville, Iron Council.
  
• Christopher Priest, The Space Machine.
  
• Kim Stanley Robinson, the Mars trilogy.
  
• Justina Robson, Mappa Mundi.
  
• Philip Roth, The Plot Against America.
  
• Norman Spinrad, The Iron Dream.
  
• Charles Stross, Accelerando.

Goodness -- that is rather a lot of books. I'd better get cracking.

Further Reading

It's been a while since I last posted one of these.

Since then, I've managed to read The Battle for God, Pattern Recognition, Perdido Street Station, Cloud Atlas, Another War and A Dream of Wessex, all of which were rather excellent in diverse ways. I've also covered rather a large number of others which I hadn't been anticipating at the time of making that list. Most recently I've been working my way through Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel and China Miéville's The Scar.

GG&S is a strange mixture of visionary and plodding, setting out to explain the disparities in technological and political development which allowed the Europeans of the late second millennium to conquer and subjugate most of the population of the rest of the world, rather than (for instance) the Incas getting there first... but ending up talking mostly about the early history of agriculture. Which is fair enough since this would appear to have been the main mechanism whereby the said cultural differences arose, but I'm not sure we entirely need the six chapters devoted to food production when more interesting developments such as the invention of writing just get the one.

Never mind -- most of the chapters about other aspects of world history are quite fascinating.

(It turns out, incidentally, that the ultimate cause -- or the nearest Diamond thinks we can get to one -- is the shape and position of Eurasia: it's bigger than any other continuous continent, quite bumpy but not too bumpy, and runs left-to-right on a map rather than up and down. All of these turn out to be highly significant... although humanity's tendency to go round killing, rather than domesticating, any animals that haven't already evolved to avoid getting killed by people hasn't helped.)

The Scar, which I've still not quite finished, is pretty good but nowhere near as good as Miéville's marvellous Perdido Street Station. This has come as something of a disappointment, given how much I was looking forward to reading more from the same author.

Part of the problem is Miéville's habit of fusing his fantasy-horror with other genres: PSS is Dickensian urban gothic, a type of story which I find relentlessly fascinating, whereas The Scar is a seagoing adventure story, which I find a lot duller. (Iron Council is a western, apparently. I may have to give that one a miss.) More disappointingly, though, what should be an incredibly imaginative setting -- a mobile oceangoing pirate city built across a seascape of tethered-together ships -- is rendered with far less of the lavish sociopolitical, cultural and geographical detail which made PSS such a joy to read.

Be that as it may, the current list of books I've got and want to read soon runs as follows. Books added since last time (which are most of them) appear in bold.

Ben Aaronovitch, Genius Loci.
Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake.
Emmanuel Carrère, I Am Alive and You Are Dead: a Journey Inside the Mind of Philip K Dick.
Paul Cornell, British Summertime.
Jon Courtenay Grimwood, Pashazade: the First Arabesk.
Frank Herbert, Dune.
Alberto Manguel and Gianni Guadalupi, The Dictionary of Imaginary Places.
Vladimir Nabokov, Ada or Ardor.
Kim Newman, The Night Mayor.
Christopher Priest, The Space Machine.
Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Mars.
Kim Stanley Robinson, Green Mars.
Kim Stanley Robinson, Blue Mars.
Justina Robson, Mappa Mundi.
Norman Spinrad, The Iron Dream.

The following have dropped off the list since last time, or at least been relegated to "less urgent":

Brian Bates, The Real Middle Earth.
Mark Chadbourn, World's End.
Umberto Eco, Foucault's Pendulum.
Gwynneth Jones, Bold as Love.
Jacqueline Rayner, Winner Takes All.
Gary Russell, Spiral Scratch.

That's quite a list, and it doesn't even take into account the crate of S.F. and fantasy I picked up from my Dad at Christmas. Feel free to make suggestions as to which titles I should tackle first.