Last three books I read...

Ubik, Philip K. Dick

After reading A Scanner Darkly, I read quite a few other books by PKD, but none gave me quite the same sense of 'wow'. Until Ubik, that is. This book freaked me out, moved me to tears and made me laugh. (It also features a minor character called Edie Dorn who I fell for hopelessly.)

The Prefect, Alistair Reynolds

Not one of Reynolds' best books, but it's interesting to explore an earlier and more civilised (by some standards) period of his future history, even if it means the gorgeously baroque and gothic elements of many of his works are toned down somewhat.

What Was Lost, Catherine O'Flynn

A story divided between tales of childhood loneliness and adult disaffection, tempered with good humour and strong characterisation. It works better in its slice-of-life character-driven moments, but the plot threads come together nicely in the end.

A Wild Sheep Chase: In Search Of Haruki Murakami

Alan Yentob explores the mysterious, offbeat, sexually charged world of Japan's most popular and internationally acclaimed writer.

Haruki Murakami is incomparable, a literary novelist tipped for the Nobel Prize, who writes cool, witty, and often surreal bestsellers. Notoriously enigmatic and media-shy Murakami has always shunned radio and television. However, he agreed to a rare and frank off-camera interview with the producer for this programme.

In this impressionistic film, Alan Yentob travels in Japan through the strange, labyrinthine landscape of Murakami's fiction on a jazz-fuelled 'wild sheep chase' of a journey. In Tokyo and Kobe he delves into the social and political background of Murakami's work and encounters his fans, critics, translators and a talking cat.

A Wild Sheep Chase: In Search Of Haruki Murakami, BBC One, 24th June 2008, 10.45pm.

So, I guess you just missed that then.

I wish I could write like Murakami. The ability to charge aimless everyday scenes with profoundly moving and imaginative surreality seems so appealing to me. If I could do that, I might need less robots and cowboys. Except, I like robots and cowboys.

It is too late for my confused and diluted sentiments to find coherence, but you should know that whatever those sentiments are, they're, well, very much whatever they are.

Running Out of Year

The year is almost over. It is a time to reflect, a time when we are more likely to notice that this day is one that was preceded by another one 365 days earlier, and then to obsess about what we did in the intervening period, and about what we hope to do in the next such period.

It is a bandwagon I would like to jump on, please. Here is some cool stuff I found in 2007. Much of it actually coming from other years (but not years in the future, as I am not a time traveller - or AM I?!) because I am always behind on everything and they have been making cool stuff for billions of years, so give me a break, okay?

---Of the movies I saw:

A Scanner Darkly
Funny, moving, strange and deeply human psychedelia.

Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex: Solid State Society
Politically aware cyberpunk, demonstrates that Kenji Kamiyama can spin a decent yarn if you let him do it in a more cinematic format. Needs more colons.

The Host
Character-driven monster movie provides laughs, scares and tears.

---Of the books I read:

His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
Breathtaking imagination and heart.

A Scanner Darkly - Philip K. Dick
Because my record got stuck.

Pushing Ice - Alistair Reynolds
All this is fleeting, the most solid buildings just motes of dust.

---Comics and manga:

Lost at Sea - Bryan Lee O'Malley
So adolescent angst can be evocative and touching. Now I shall have to eat my hat. Pass the pepper.

Death Note - Tsugumi Ohba, Takeshi Obata
Teenager becomes vengeful angel. World-class detective pursues! But I only read the first volume. Why? Because I got distracted. Thus forms my first new year's resolution.

One Piece - Eiichiro Oda
Why did I read so much of this stuff? And there are like a million volumes of it! My name is Pacian, and I am addicted to dumb stories about pirates.

---TV Shows

Battlerstar Galactica
Intelligent science fiction on television? Someone should have done this before!

Primeval
It is better than Doctor Who. It is better than Doctor Who. It is better than- you get the idea.

Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex: 2nd Gig
Didn't live up to its potential, but full of cool ideas, beautiful visuals and visceral action.

---Games

Nelly Cootalot
So... cute... can't breathe...

Art of Theft
Actually, I could probably have spent all those hours doing something much more productive.

Sam and Max
They're back! And some of it is excellent! And some of it is not so excellent, but we will ignore that because these two seemed to chime more with my personality than Lost Pig or Aquaria or other - arguably better - games. Tomorrow I am probably going to think of a really stonking game I played in 2007 and kick myself.

---People

You, and you, and especially you. On which note, I wish you all a happy and creative New Year!

On the Misuse of the Term 'Fairy Tale'

Everywhere I go, I see people saying things like, "Life isn't a fairy tale. There isn't always a happy ending." And I find myself exclaiming, often aloud: Have you ever actually read a fairy tale?!

I've read a lot of stories by Hans Christian Andersen, and a few by the Brothers Grimm. Let me tell you, when people 'lived happily ever after' in their stories it was because they died and went to Heaven. In Andersen's The Garden of Paradise, a prince goes on an adventure and kisses a beautiful fairy, only to be thrown back to his everyday life and sternly warned by Death himself that he's on the road to damnation with such impropriety.

Andersen wrote quite callously about death, especially the deaths of naughty or unchristian children - who would go to Hell unless some quirk of angelic magic would save them. Another popular theme of Andersen's was the inherent superiority of royalty, perhaps best embodied by The Princess and the Pea, but by a number of other stories as well, in which royals, often unidentified and in great danger, are able to triumph merely due to being royals. In Andersen's fairy tales, royalty are never wrong, even when they are, in fact wrong. The Emperor's realisation that his New Clothes don't exist is merely a cause for him to continue with extra dignity (politics hasn't changed much these past two centuries it seems).

Of course, Andersen also wrote really imaginative stories, where strange creatures lurked in every nook and cranny, mysterious and terrifying events struck from nowhere and even inanimate objects had their own (often very sad) personalities. Far from 'happily ever after', Andersen's stories are full of unrequited love, loss, death, failure and every form of wistful melancholy you can think of. As in The Little Mermaid, even when someone finds true love, it probably won't be the person you wanted it to be. All this is perhaps not unsurprising for a man of confused sexuality living in deeply repressive times - actually, it's not all that surprising for a human being living in the real world.

The overriding theme for many of Andersen's fairy tales was of the necessity of being kindhearted even if we suffer endlessly with no respite but death. My favourite of Andersen's stories is The Wind's Tale about Waldemar Daa and his Daughters. It embodies all of this, but leaves out the Heaven bit and still manages to conclude that being compassionate is worth it.

Life isn't a fairy tale, no. Nightingales don't stay Death's hand with beautiful songs, bottles don't go on tragic adventures, goblins don't steal people's tongues in their sleep. I would even go so far as to say that the members of royal families don't have special powers and we shouldn't bank on there being an afterlife. But in many other ways, the fairy tales of old have a brutal honesty to them, and I get a bit annoyed when people assume that they don't.

Meme-o-Book

Tagged by Udge.

Total number of books owned

I guess I'll have to count won't I? About 125, not including graphic novels and manga. My excuse is that I have limited space and, lately, limited reading energy. I'll do better! I promise!

Last book bought

Volumes 2-4 of One Piece in a 3 for 2 sale. This was at the same time as I debated whether I was crazy or not with this young woman. Her opening sales pitch, on seeing my shopping bag was, “Are you a man of literature?” Well, obviously!

Last book read

The Dreams in the Witch House and Other Weird Stories, H.P. Lovecraft, which I finally finished late last night. As to what I'm reading next, well I'm not sure. I do have a heap of books to get through, so I guess I'll start there. Dickens' David Copperfield, Dawkins' The Ancestor's Tale and the aforementioned One Piece books are all likely candidates. And as I mentioned here, there are quite a few recently released books that I want to read, but are still in hardback.

Five books that mean a lot to you

Um... Mean a lot to me, you say, rather than me just liking them? Let's have a think.

Carl Sagan Cosmos
Obviously, I'm a huge fan of Sagan. The knowledge of space and the solar system in this book is a little outdated, but the philosophy of science and humanism as Sagan relates it is as important now as ever.

Haruki Murakami South of the Border, West of the Sun
A tragic love story between two childhood sweethearts who meet again in middle age. Always makes me a cry.

Steph Swainston The Year of Our War
This is how you write fantasy. I aspire to this level of greatness.

Alistair Reynolds Revelation Space
And this is how you write science fiction. Ditto.

Virginia Woolf The Waves
The Waves, To the Lighthouse and Orlando are all books that I find deeply touching, but The Waves wins out because I don't want Woolf to hog too much of the list. Rhoda was my favourite narrator, as she reminds me of both myself and the girl that broke my heart (and umbrella).

Do I have to tag some people now? I always balk at this bit, because I hate telling other people what to do with their blogs. But...

Diddums, Geosomin, Michelle, Lulubunny and also YOU (assuming that 'you' are not one or more of the preceding people).

Read Any Good Books Lately?

Yes. Yes I have.

Visions of Mars - Olivier de Goursac

A coffee table book, I suppose, although I don't have a coffee table, and have instead had to squeeze it into my bookcase. It is a pretty big book, as this abbreviated scan of its cover testifies. De Goursac has worked processing images for several of NASA's Mars missions, and here he presents some of the best of the lot, including some computer images generated from Mars Global Surveyor's nifty laser altimeter doodad, and some images that have been lovingly (re-)colourised or corrected.

With the emphasis on large, glossy images, the text takes a back seat. Some of it is either badly written or badly translated (from both French and metric - this being an American version of a French book), and much of it is presented very matter-of-factly, without actually discussing how certain we are about any of this stuff or even what the evidence is. I've always found the whole "We know this because..." way of writing to be the most compelling part of any science book, and finding the 'because' part missing in this book leaves the text feeling strangely empty. Still, the images are the purpose of the thing, and they are plenty, vivid and gorgeous.

A Scanner Darkly - Philip K. Dick

After my positive reception to the film adaption, of course I had to read the book. The film is a very faithful adaption, in terms of plot, dialogue, themes and tone. Obviously, the book is able to cover much more ground, and go into things more deeply, but a few decades of reflection and a couple of world-class actors have enabled the film to have a few snappier lines in places. As with the film, this is great stuff: high-brow and low-brow, funny and tragic, often all at the same time.

Lost at Sea - Bryan Lee O'Malley

Another great Canadian graphic novel, another gorgeous comic from Oni Press. Gorgeous, both in terms of its outstandingly cute, black-and-white artwork, and its sensitive, compassionate soul. It's also frequently very funny, which I think, paradoxical as it may seem, is an important part of any work that hopes for you to take it seriously.

On paper, Lost at Sea's story of a confused and socially awkward 18 year old girl on a road trip with three people she hardly knows, where she will experience the necessary existential discoveries, sounds completely unoriginal. In fact, the entire plot is pretty much given away on the back-cover blurb. But the plot doesn't matter. It's not about what happens, but instead how the characters interact, and how it all feels. On both those counts, this book is right at the top of its game: very touching, and slightly deranged.

Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman - Haruki Murakami

I love Murakami, and his works have had a not insignificant influence on my own writing. The most important thing I learned from him, is that you can put any crazy shit you want into your stories, as long as you don't make a big fuss about it. Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman is a collection of short stories, published at various points throughout Murakami's career, some of which later developed into novels. I wasn't that big on Murakami's first such collection, The Elephant Vanishes, while I did quite like some of the stories in the slimmer collection After the Quake. On the whole, I've always felt that Murakami's peculiar, unconventional stories benefit from being longer and having more character development, so that you can actually get a feel for where you have ended up at the end of it all. But Blind Willow has pleasantly surprised me, and I think most of the stories are very good, even if only two or three moved me as much as one of his novels might.

Reading through these stories took me a long time, as each one seemed to demand its own space and rankle if pressed too close up against another. One story might be a light and touching vignette, while the one after might be a disturbing tale of Kafkaesque nightmare. In one story, a cute, quirky tale took a sudden turn for the worst, while in another a character faces up to what seems like a horror story, only to grow to accept things as they are. But, while I found most of the stories 'great but not earth-moving', as with After the Quake, I found the very last story so touching that it brought tears to my eyes. After saying that, I feel I should perhaps elucidate, but I can't. It's impossible to see where the story goes from where it starts, and I think it should remain that way for those yet to read it.

Pushing Ice - Alistair Reynolds

I'm a huge fan of physicist-turned-science fiction novelist Alistair Reynolds. To many of the writers who choose to set their stories in space and in the future, the realities of the Universe are hindrances to be ignored or dismissed. Reynolds, on the other hand, sees them as a ripe source of conflict, tension and surprise. And I think that he's never got this across quite so well as in Pushing Ice.

The trick, I think, is the way that the novel centres on a group of people in the near future - which, since no-one, not even Reynolds, actually knows what's going to happen in the near future, basically means a group of people recognisably of our own time - and then subjects them to extremes of space and time the likes of which none of Reynold's more exotic characters have ever experienced. A strong thread in all of Reynold's books - but this one especially - always seems to be to ask, 'but what would it really be like?' What would it feel like, what unexpected and disorienting things might we encounter, in deep space, moving at great speed, separated from our loved ones, faced with exotic civilisations? What challenges would we have to overcome?

Reynolds has a great knack for answering these questions in a dramatic and interesting fashion. Throughout Pushing Ice Newtonian and Einsteinian physics conspire together with international tensions, corporate irresponisibility and baffling alien intelligences - not to mention the sheer scale of space and time in the Universe - to throw up lethal problems that force a cast of everyday spacemen and women to re-evaluate their certainties and priorities.

The book isn't perfect, of course, the first part has a serious case of white-room syndrome that only fades in later parts of the book; I'm left with little picture in my head of what should be an iconic spacecraft. Reynolds also continues to show a slight difficulty in introducing the diversity of perspective and passage of time that he likes to use. But aside from that, Pushing Ice is a poweful, atmospheric book, full of compelling characters and situations that are both highly imaginative and very believable. Its central theme is also, while hardly original, extremely well conveyed by the span of the story: all existence is fleeting, even that of whole civilisations and species - so STFU and enjoy it while it last.

Sam and Max are back!

When I was a kid, I loved The Adventures of Sam & Max: Freelance Police beyond words. Of course, the cartoon show was only the tip of an iceberg comprising indie comics and a Lucasarts adventure game. However, the game is difficult to find in the UK, and the complete collection of their comics is now fetching 175 quid in the Amazon marketplace. What joy, then, to find that the much hoped-for Sam and Max sequel is finally abroad, and creator Steve Purcell is (very slowly) posting new comics to the web. Click the image above to see, or click here if moving your mouse that distance is too much effort.

Thank Fuck for Oni Press

Whenever you're looking for western comics that aren't about superheroes or gangsters, and things seem their bleakest... there is Oni Press, arriving on the scene in its reassuringly normal car, with no rocket boosters or bulletproof windows, full of flawed human beings, imaginary horses, strange monsters and pirates!

Three Sentences

I've been tagged by Roadchick to do this book meme...

The Rules of this tag game are:
1. Grab the book nearest to you...no cheating!
2. Open to page 123.
3. Scroll down to the fifth sentence.
4. Post text of next 3 sentences on to your blog.

Well, the stern injunction against cheating is quite worrying. I'm tempted to get a tape measure and draw up a table of the distances all the books in my room are from me. The closest book to hand is the instruction manual to Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, page 123 consisting of footnotes to a table of terrain types and modifications. Alternatively, there are 'real' books on my bedside table, the closest of which is that lovely old dictionary of mine, which is more about words than sentences. The next closest is Goursac's Visions of Mars, but page 123 is a photograph of the pathfinder probe.

The book on top of the nearest heap of 'real' books is The Thing on the Doorstep and Other Weird Stories, a collection of works by H.P. Lovecraft. I'm currently at page 60, reading Under the Pyramids, which Lovecraft ghost-wrote for Harry Houdini. Page 123 is halfway into The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. Lovecraft is famous, no, infamous for overwriting. The sixth sentence is halfway down the page, and this is a book with small print.

The required three sentences, which span a paragraph break, are:

Muffled musketry sounded again, followed by a deep scream less piercing but even more horrible than those which had preceded it; a kind of throaty, nastily plastic cough or gurgle whose quality as a scream must have come more from its continuity and psychological import than from its actual acoustic value.

Then the flaming thing burst into sight at a point where the Curwen farm ought to lie, and the human cries of desperate and frightened men were heard. Muskets flashed and cracked, and the flaming thing fell to the ground.

And here was me thinking that particular story looked a bit boring. As always, consider yourself tagged if you want to be tagged.

Book-A-Doodle-Doo

I’ve been tagged with this meme by DK, which also seems to have found its way to P.Z. Myers. I take this as an indication that I am truly in the big league now! And ZOMG!!!! P.Z. and I picked the same funny book!

1. One book that changed your life.

Carl Sagan’s Cosmos. His eloquent and moving portrayal of our intricate universe, and the methods we can use to understand more of it, changed the way I looked at the world around me.

2. One book that you've read more than once.

South of the Border, West of the Sun by Haruki Murakami. A rather thin book, but packed full of beautiful, understated feeling.

3. One book that you'd want on a desert island.

The SAS Survival Guide, which includes such useful titbits as how to give yourself the Heimlich.

4. One book that made you laugh.

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller is the most laughs you’ll ever get from the horrors of war.

5. One book that made you cry.

Loads of books make me tear up. The closest I’ve probably ever come to crying is reading the last two chapters of Sagan’s Billions and Billions where he and then his wife, Ann Druyan, write about his illness and death.

6. One book you wish you had written.

None of them. I’d want to write something that was uniquely my own.

7. One book you wish had never been written.

Ooh! Censorship! But nah. Above all, naming a book here would be mean.

8. One book you're currently reading.

Just one? Olivier de Goursac’s Visions of Mars is the largest of them. Half of it is hanging over the edge of my bedside table.

9. One book you have been meaning to read.

It's funny, I never have trouble finding things to read, but I rarely plan anything in advance. Everything that I mean to read right now, I am reading.

As DK puts it, ‘it's customary at this juncture to "tag" further victims bloggers who are then expected to propagate the meme in a fashion evocative of a nominally intellectual chain-letter’. And once again, I tag you!

Binge Reading

I like to refer to myself as a 'binge reader'. I'll go for a good couple of weeks without reading anything (except blogs and magazines), and then sit down and read a whole novel in a couple of days.

Here's what's on my heap o' books for consumption at the moment. Hopefully I should have read a couple over the next week or so...

• Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman - Haruki Murakami


• The Complete Short Stories - Franz Kafka


• Keep the Aspidistra Flying - George Orwell


• Gray Horses - Hope Larson


• And the final volume of Shin Takahashi's Saikano, which I've been putting off reading for months now due to his ability to make death and apocalypse feel so real (as well as the nicer things in life)...

In other news, I'm going book shopping tomorrow, for some reason.

Three Books

I am seriously spaced out at the moment. But it has now been one week since my last exam, so onward we march. These are the three books I’ve read since Light on Snow. I haven’t done much reading this past week, but I’ll try to change that now so that, you know, I can have lots of pretty book covers making my blog look nice.

Serenity: Those Left Behind - Joss Whedon et al.

This short comic details the events that occurred between Joss Whedon’s television show Firefly, and its movie adaptation Serenity. Basically, Inara and Shepherd Book leave, and the guys with blue gloves are replaced by the Operative. And you don’t really need this book to tell you that. But the artwork is lovely, and the script is spot-on in terms of capturing the characters‘ banter (it was written by Whedon after all). This is a nice book to keep and thumb through, even if it is unlikely to take up much of your time.

The Year of Our War - Steph Swainston

Now this I really liked. Supposedly this is part of the New Weird movement, which is all about creating decidedly non-Tolkien-esque fantasy. To whit, out with the elves and the dragons and the swords and the sorcery and the poetic heroics, and in with, well, whatever the hell you want.

The Year of Our War is about a flying drug addict called Jant. Jant works as a messenger for the Emperor, who was, apparently, charged by god with preventing giant insects from taking over the land. As one of the Emperor’s Circle, Jant is immortal, which is nice, but he’s also required to be the very best at what he does. Since he’s the only person who can fly, you’d think that’d be pretty easy, but Jant gets involved in all sorts of infighting and backstabbing within the Circle, while seeking respite by taking dangerous quantities of his drug of choice and travelling into the Shift - a strange place where creatures from many different worlds mingle together uneasily. The parts of the book that take place in the Shift were actually among my favourites. Swainston’s already powerful imagination clearly goes into overdrive in these sequences, with the hideous Tine growing people into gory trees as a method of torture and a castle being guarded by a rather unthreatening fibre-tooth tiger (“He can’t bite you, it’s like being mauled by fluff”).

The Year of Our War is pretty insubstantial on the plot front, but Swainston has repeatedly emphasised that this is intended to be only the first part in a much larger story, and in that respect I can say that my appetite is well and truly whet. The Year of Our War embodies in equal parts imagination, drama and character, with a light dose of passion, friendship and romance.

The second book in the series is coming out in paperback this month. Me happy.

There’s a nice interview with Swainston here.

Eden Close - Anita Shreve

You won’t be surprised to learn that I’ve read another book by Anita Shreve. But while I loved Light On Snow, I have a few reservations about Eden Close. The lovely prose, the compelling characters, the palpable emotions - they’re all present in this book, as they were with Light On Snow. But they were accompanied by some slight unpleasantness.

In a sense, Eden Close is a little like The Year of Our War - both are books by women who are exploring the possible positive and negative aspects of a masculine protagonist. But while Swainston’s portrayal of Jant is compelling, if unflattering, Shreve’s portrayal of Andrew starts out as merely unimaginative, and goes on to become slightly disturbing. Then that makes you notice that, as well-crafted emotionally as the story may be, it really is just a story about a psychologically injured woman who needs ‘the right man’ to come along and fix her.

Light on Snow, Anita Shreve

I normally find it rather easy to sketch out my feelings about a book. And it’s always the feel of a book that’s most important to me. I don’t especially care about the particulars of the plot or level of tension or all those other things that are supposed to go into making a good book. Hey, I don’t even care if the book is good. If it feels right, I like it. It’s that simple.

Figuring out how Light on Snow feels, however, has turned out to be rather complicated. I know what the feeling is, of course. I can hold it in the centre of my chest, and in the space behind my eyes, I can turn it over in the hands of my imagination and say, “That’s rather nice,” but how can I put it into words?

The main problem seems to be my reluctance to try and define the book by just relating the details of the story. In a lot of the books I read, the story gives no indication of the feel. Sometimes the feel is contrary to the story. To describe Kafka’s America, for example, as “the story of a boy who goes to America to find his fortune” is easy and (mostly) accurate. But it doesn’t tell you how acutely the novel made me feel the absurdity and pain of human existence. In Light on Snow, however - a book whose feel I can only sum up with two words: sensitive, understated - the feel of the book flows expertly from the plot itself. The descriptions in the book are prosaic and functional. In many cases my ignorance of this particular cranny in American culture turned objects and actions into broad, half-imagined brush strokes. What poetic language Shreve does attempt feels somewhat clumsy and pretentious.

So, Light on Snow is a sensitive, understated book about a father and daughter who have moved into an isolated country house to escape the memories of a tragedy. One winter day they chance upon a baby that has been left to die in the snow. And that’s the book. The rest of the story flows naturally, does not cover anything especially mind-blowing, but has such a gentle heart that you can’t help but be moved - has a cast of such likable characters that you at once understand their grievances with one another and hope desperately to see them resolved. In the end my only disappointment with this book was the fact that I only have space in my bookcase towards the bottom. After I clear out all my uni stuff, I’ll have to put it in a more deserving space.

Next, on Lost Space Cat Rocket Ship: this. Probably.

Books

I figured a quick and nifty way to give a general idea of what kind of books I like was just to show you what books I've read so far this year. For the record I'm currently half way through Catcher in the Rye (I started it in earnest Yesterday) and a third of the way into Perdido Street Station (I've been reading that for a week or two). The rest I've read right through - and also enjoyed a lot.

At the moment I'd say that my favourites are Orlando and How to be Lost. Love as a Foreign Language also makes me fantastically happy and I've already put off picking up volume 4 for too long.