Books I read in Montreal
Jan. 12th, 2004 09:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fivemackI'm very bad at taking notes with pen and paper, and had been without pocket computer for a couple of years. Picked up a new computer at Heathrow, and started keeping track of what I read.
Gene Wolfe, Claw of the Conciliator. Not quite sure that I'm getting the point of this book; there's something Kirsteinish about it, but it's inclued differently and you're not convinced that the author is playing fair. Possibly among the worst possible choices for reading on a plane.
David Brin, Glory Season. Utterly different from what I thought I remembered of its start. A feeling that this is Brin doing LeGuin, though with more evident plot. It's perhaps too much to ask of a book that it remain enjoyable when read, sleep-deprived, on a waiting-room floor in Heathrow, and this didn’t achieve those heights. This one worked, I think, though one begins to spy the spoor of the Brain Eater that got him soon after; I still read Brin in the hope of another Earth.
27 December
Gene Wolfe, Sword of the Lictor. This part of Severian’s tale comes across as a more conventional quest, with none of the hallucinogenic chaos of the antechamber scene from Claw; somehow it’s a comprehensible class of strange things that happen.
29 December
James Macdonald, The apocalypse door. Fun hard-boiled Christian-mythos fiction, though clearly a fairly slight work. I’m sure there were jokes that I don’t have enough Catholic minutiae to get – it took two attempts before I noticed Simon LaRoche.
30 December
James Blish, The Day after Judgment. Another piece of Christian-mythos fiction, though this time there’s much more of Dante. There’s a very effective missing-the-point battle scene as the US Army take on the forces of Dis, and some evocative scenes of an Earth turned over to the demons. Doesn’t read as much like an instructional text on demonology as Black Easter.
1 January
Sue Hubbell, Shrinking the Cat. Subtitled “Genetic Engineering before we knew about genes”, this McPhee-style book talks about how humanity has bred the apple, the silkworm, maize and the cat into their current form. The apple section is by some way the most interesting, making you want to walk in the wild apple-orchards of Kazakhstan; the maize section told me nothing I didn’t know from Guns, Germs and Steel. The rise and fall of veneration for the house-cat in Japan is amusing, and you wouldn’t have believed it in fiction.
Jane Jacobs, Cities and the wealth of nations. It’s a manifesto, and it seems a pretty good one: the idea put forward is that nations tend to grow wealthy by having cities, which trade goods as equals, until they develop the ability to produce things that they previously imported, and then export them to other cities. An intriguing taxonomy of regions, and a suggestion that turn-key factories are about as bad a way of promoting growth as can be contrived.
4 January
John Barnes, Merchants of Souls. Third in a series; the previous two have been more about secret-agent work in exotic cultures, this one is more about lobbying. Some great tales of childhood in Nou Occitan (a culture set up after the model of troubadour poetry), some fine dinner-party scenes on an utterly decadent Earth. A couple of characters that you could scarce forbear to slap, and a depressed cynic whose tragedy worked in a way that few do. Beautiful ending, with the standard spy-story multi-level conspiracy unfolding before your eyes.
5 January
John Barnes, The Sky So Big And Black. Fantastic. Heinlein-juvenile adventure: life on the frontier, the dilemmas of doctors, and how to fight back against hostile Gods. The major theme is culture clash, but I suppose that’s the major theme in everything Barnes has written. Set in the universe of Orbital Resonance.
7 January
Michael Coney, Hello Summer Goodbye. This is set on a planet with roughly Victorian technology and moral values, an ocean with two different water phases, and some very well-realised alien life. Felt something like a harder-edged Nesbit in places; maybe too many of the adults were too hopelessly cold for my liking, the characterization all rather black and white.
Ted Chiang, Stories of your life and others. Fantastic short stories – ideas as dense as Greg Egan, superbly written and, unlike Egan, equipped with characters as memorable as the ideas. Babylonian SF; a great hyper-intelligence story that could almost be the sequel to Run, Bookworm, Run, and an amazing linguistic first-contact in the title story. I didn’t finish this before I left Montreal, I’ll pick up a copy in England.
Robert Charles Wilson, The Chronoliths. A book about a world being pushed into chaos by the mysterious Chronoliths – huge monuments, appearing with little warning and vast devastation, proclaiming conquests twenty years in the future by the mysterious Kuin. Or alternatively a book about a man trying to redeem early-adult foolishness however he can.
Kim Stanley Robinson, Pacific Edge. Third of three books depicting possible futures for California; this one is the moderately-populated pastoral Utopia (rather than the post-apocalyptic Wild Shore or the cyberpunk Gold Coast). Bicycles, sailing ships and microlights; softball leagues; romances and zoning conflicts. Possibly the oil’s run out, it’s hard to tell; flashbacks suggest that something unpleasant happened about fifty years earlier and the world we’re reading about was consciously built from the wreckage of the old. Some lovely characterization.
Karl Schroder, Ventus. I read this because Charlie Stross recommended the author and Vernor Vinge wrote the geekiest back-cover quote imaginable. It’s set in an honestly pantheistic world of ubiquitous nanotech, features pre-French-Revolution aristocrats, the rebirth of dark gods, cyborg generals, the clash of mighty armies, exploding starships, post-Singularity police agents and aerostats, and nonetheless would do well to be about two hundred pages shorter.
Yes, that was a lot of books for one day; I’d started Hello Summer Goodbye and The Chronoliths earlier, and I was on a plane with little else to do for much of the day.
Everyone should read the Chiang and The Sky So Big And Black; the Jacobs is probably the next-best. I left Glory Season in a to-be-second-handed pile, and I doubt I'll re-read Ventus.
I don't seem to get so much reading done when I'm working – and on trains I nowadays read newspapers on the Palm rather than books, if only for the weight. Maybe another book post at the end of January.
Gene Wolfe, Claw of the Conciliator. Not quite sure that I'm getting the point of this book; there's something Kirsteinish about it, but it's inclued differently and you're not convinced that the author is playing fair. Possibly among the worst possible choices for reading on a plane.
David Brin, Glory Season. Utterly different from what I thought I remembered of its start. A feeling that this is Brin doing LeGuin, though with more evident plot. It's perhaps too much to ask of a book that it remain enjoyable when read, sleep-deprived, on a waiting-room floor in Heathrow, and this didn’t achieve those heights. This one worked, I think, though one begins to spy the spoor of the Brain Eater that got him soon after; I still read Brin in the hope of another Earth.
27 December
Gene Wolfe, Sword of the Lictor. This part of Severian’s tale comes across as a more conventional quest, with none of the hallucinogenic chaos of the antechamber scene from Claw; somehow it’s a comprehensible class of strange things that happen.
29 December
James Macdonald, The apocalypse door. Fun hard-boiled Christian-mythos fiction, though clearly a fairly slight work. I’m sure there were jokes that I don’t have enough Catholic minutiae to get – it took two attempts before I noticed Simon LaRoche.
30 December
James Blish, The Day after Judgment. Another piece of Christian-mythos fiction, though this time there’s much more of Dante. There’s a very effective missing-the-point battle scene as the US Army take on the forces of Dis, and some evocative scenes of an Earth turned over to the demons. Doesn’t read as much like an instructional text on demonology as Black Easter.
1 January
Sue Hubbell, Shrinking the Cat. Subtitled “Genetic Engineering before we knew about genes”, this McPhee-style book talks about how humanity has bred the apple, the silkworm, maize and the cat into their current form. The apple section is by some way the most interesting, making you want to walk in the wild apple-orchards of Kazakhstan; the maize section told me nothing I didn’t know from Guns, Germs and Steel. The rise and fall of veneration for the house-cat in Japan is amusing, and you wouldn’t have believed it in fiction.
Jane Jacobs, Cities and the wealth of nations. It’s a manifesto, and it seems a pretty good one: the idea put forward is that nations tend to grow wealthy by having cities, which trade goods as equals, until they develop the ability to produce things that they previously imported, and then export them to other cities. An intriguing taxonomy of regions, and a suggestion that turn-key factories are about as bad a way of promoting growth as can be contrived.
4 January
John Barnes, Merchants of Souls. Third in a series; the previous two have been more about secret-agent work in exotic cultures, this one is more about lobbying. Some great tales of childhood in Nou Occitan (a culture set up after the model of troubadour poetry), some fine dinner-party scenes on an utterly decadent Earth. A couple of characters that you could scarce forbear to slap, and a depressed cynic whose tragedy worked in a way that few do. Beautiful ending, with the standard spy-story multi-level conspiracy unfolding before your eyes.
5 January
John Barnes, The Sky So Big And Black. Fantastic. Heinlein-juvenile adventure: life on the frontier, the dilemmas of doctors, and how to fight back against hostile Gods. The major theme is culture clash, but I suppose that’s the major theme in everything Barnes has written. Set in the universe of Orbital Resonance.
7 January
Michael Coney, Hello Summer Goodbye. This is set on a planet with roughly Victorian technology and moral values, an ocean with two different water phases, and some very well-realised alien life. Felt something like a harder-edged Nesbit in places; maybe too many of the adults were too hopelessly cold for my liking, the characterization all rather black and white.
Ted Chiang, Stories of your life and others. Fantastic short stories – ideas as dense as Greg Egan, superbly written and, unlike Egan, equipped with characters as memorable as the ideas. Babylonian SF; a great hyper-intelligence story that could almost be the sequel to Run, Bookworm, Run, and an amazing linguistic first-contact in the title story. I didn’t finish this before I left Montreal, I’ll pick up a copy in England.
Robert Charles Wilson, The Chronoliths. A book about a world being pushed into chaos by the mysterious Chronoliths – huge monuments, appearing with little warning and vast devastation, proclaiming conquests twenty years in the future by the mysterious Kuin. Or alternatively a book about a man trying to redeem early-adult foolishness however he can.
Kim Stanley Robinson, Pacific Edge. Third of three books depicting possible futures for California; this one is the moderately-populated pastoral Utopia (rather than the post-apocalyptic Wild Shore or the cyberpunk Gold Coast). Bicycles, sailing ships and microlights; softball leagues; romances and zoning conflicts. Possibly the oil’s run out, it’s hard to tell; flashbacks suggest that something unpleasant happened about fifty years earlier and the world we’re reading about was consciously built from the wreckage of the old. Some lovely characterization.
Karl Schroder, Ventus. I read this because Charlie Stross recommended the author and Vernor Vinge wrote the geekiest back-cover quote imaginable. It’s set in an honestly pantheistic world of ubiquitous nanotech, features pre-French-Revolution aristocrats, the rebirth of dark gods, cyborg generals, the clash of mighty armies, exploding starships, post-Singularity police agents and aerostats, and nonetheless would do well to be about two hundred pages shorter.
Yes, that was a lot of books for one day; I’d started Hello Summer Goodbye and The Chronoliths earlier, and I was on a plane with little else to do for much of the day.
Everyone should read the Chiang and The Sky So Big And Black; the Jacobs is probably the next-best. I left Glory Season in a to-be-second-handed pile, and I doubt I'll re-read Ventus.
I don't seem to get so much reading done when I'm working – and on trains I nowadays read newspapers on the Palm rather than books, if only for the weight. Maybe another book post at the end of January.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2004-01-12 02:33 pm (UTC)I feel bad
Date: 2004-01-12 03:20 pm (UTC)Please don't feel bad
Date: 2004-01-13 10:36 am (UTC)In usual times I rarely read as many as two books a week.