Books read in December
Jan. 1st, 2011 05:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fivemackOn New Year's Day, the world conspires to remind you that the month is over, and there's nothing to distract me from writing the books-read list. It looks as if I've read almost exactly a hundred books in 2010, though I've only got round to writing up January and August.
Neal Asher, Voyage of the Sable Keech; more of his trademark grand-guignol equipped with fearsome crustacea of between enormous and unreasonable size. A guilty pleasure.
Iain Banks, Surface Detail; a really good large-scale world-shaking Culture novel. Which makes it another guilty pleasure, if you're being strict, but this is one I wouldn't hesitate to recommend; it doesn't even require you to have met the Culture before.
Ward Moore, Bring the Jubilee, which is I suppose a sign of why SF really needed the New Wave; it's the most insipidly bloodless tale of alternate history and time travel that I can recall.
Nicholas Carr's The Shallows, which argues in a rather over-journalistic style that the prevalence of short-form interlinked content on the Internet is not an unmitigated benefit, in that it destroys the concentration required to work on real long-form arguments. I think it would have made its case better if it had been of a form requiring that kind of concentrated reading, but in that case I would probably not have read it.
Greg Mortonsen's Three Cups of Tea, which is I suppose autohagiographic, but deservingly so; this is a man of utterly amazing moral character, of the same class as Mother Theresa, who has devoted himself for the last fifteen years to building primary schools in the high mountains of Central Asia. The account of how an unhappy local mullah appealed to the authorities of Qom and got back an edict in a red velvet box that Greg should be supported and encouraged is better than fiction.
Marek Kohn's Turned Out Nice, which describes a possible future Britain in a climate-changed world, manages to avoid apocalypticism - there is a great deal of ruin in a nation - whilst showing how many other things climate change will force us to change. The suggestion is that you end up with a rather conservative society, and a very strongly urban one in which wild nature is a resource to be appreciated but carefully not disturbed.
And then I went to my parents over Christmas, and read all of Jill Paton Walsh's Peter Wimsey and Imogen Quy novels that they had, and the first ten of Anthony Price's amazing series of arcing cerebral thrillers. It's interesting to come to them now, twenty years after the fall of the Wall and the Party, and see the Cold War period ones as exercises in self-enforcing paranoia. You probably do want to read all of Anthony Price in one go, certainly next month's reads will include the rest of them - individual ones are extremely good (Soldier No More I thought outstanding), but seeing the characters from different angles and at different periods gives a whole extra layer of joy.
Neal Asher, Voyage of the Sable Keech; more of his trademark grand-guignol equipped with fearsome crustacea of between enormous and unreasonable size. A guilty pleasure.
Iain Banks, Surface Detail; a really good large-scale world-shaking Culture novel. Which makes it another guilty pleasure, if you're being strict, but this is one I wouldn't hesitate to recommend; it doesn't even require you to have met the Culture before.
Ward Moore, Bring the Jubilee, which is I suppose a sign of why SF really needed the New Wave; it's the most insipidly bloodless tale of alternate history and time travel that I can recall.
Nicholas Carr's The Shallows, which argues in a rather over-journalistic style that the prevalence of short-form interlinked content on the Internet is not an unmitigated benefit, in that it destroys the concentration required to work on real long-form arguments. I think it would have made its case better if it had been of a form requiring that kind of concentrated reading, but in that case I would probably not have read it.
Greg Mortonsen's Three Cups of Tea, which is I suppose autohagiographic, but deservingly so; this is a man of utterly amazing moral character, of the same class as Mother Theresa, who has devoted himself for the last fifteen years to building primary schools in the high mountains of Central Asia. The account of how an unhappy local mullah appealed to the authorities of Qom and got back an edict in a red velvet box that Greg should be supported and encouraged is better than fiction.
Marek Kohn's Turned Out Nice, which describes a possible future Britain in a climate-changed world, manages to avoid apocalypticism - there is a great deal of ruin in a nation - whilst showing how many other things climate change will force us to change. The suggestion is that you end up with a rather conservative society, and a very strongly urban one in which wild nature is a resource to be appreciated but carefully not disturbed.
And then I went to my parents over Christmas, and read all of Jill Paton Walsh's Peter Wimsey and Imogen Quy novels that they had, and the first ten of Anthony Price's amazing series of arcing cerebral thrillers. It's interesting to come to them now, twenty years after the fall of the Wall and the Party, and see the Cold War period ones as exercises in self-enforcing paranoia. You probably do want to read all of Anthony Price in one go, certainly next month's reads will include the rest of them - individual ones are extremely good (Soldier No More I thought outstanding), but seeing the characters from different angles and at different periods gives a whole extra layer of joy.
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Date: 2011-01-01 08:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-01-01 08:45 pm (UTC)