"Read any good books lately?"

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• gil: Oh! I famously adore the O'Brian books. I have read them all twice, and am aching to do so again, though I much prefer the seafaring scenes to the land-based ones. The movie was great, though it conflated a couple of the books and didn't end neatly. I'm disappointed there's been no sequel so far, nor any sign of one on IMDB.

  I've also been filling in a few of the non-Hornblower C S Forester books. The Captian from Connecticut, for example.

• Dunx: [nfras] I remember The Invisibles when it was first published as comics - I have the first few issues. It was rather fun, IIRC.
• Breadmaster: Saw Inception. It was worth the price of entry to the cinema - and that is saying something. One of the best films I've seen in recent years.
• Merlyn: I read Maus and Maus 11 when they came out - I remember them being good, but I was quite young. Probably worth revisiting.
• Dunx: Actually, now you mention it, I never read Maus II. I have Maus, but never picked up the second volume. How remiss of me.

August 2010

• nfras: [gil] I've been trying the Hornblower series but as I'm also reading the O'Brien books at the moment I must say I really prefer the writing of the Aubrey/Maturin books. They transport you to the era in a much more profound way than Hornblower, so I think I may have to wait a while and read them separately.
  Just got through the graphic novel of Wanted which was made into a rather run of the mill movie a couple of years ago. Much preferred the comic, the whole setup of a world where all the super-villains got together and wiped the Earth clean of heroes was great but it does suffer a bit from the adolescent male violent revenge fantasy (but then it admits that it does). Also just got Raffles out of the library to see if it's everything I imagined. Next stop Bulldog Drummond and maybe even Biggles.
• gil: Aaaaah, Biggles. I discovered him at an early reading age, and really enjoyed the books... all of them... one after another... after another. Morningside library was sucked dry. More recently, I read one again, and found it unbelievably cringeworthy in the dialogue and jingoism, but still a cracking yarn!
• ImNotJohn: W.E. Johns also wrote Science Fiction for children (the Kemlo books). I remember enjoying them when I was about 10-12. I haven't seen or heard of them since, though.
• Phil: Has the new BBC Sherlock been duscussed yet? Obviously, SH is now my 14yo son's new hero. The rest of the family has been very impressed too. Some moments in the 2nd episode, particularly Watson's development into someone more useful, have been somewhat telegraphed, but being geniunely miffed that there are only three episodes shows the truth of how much I've enjoyed the first two.
• Software: [SH] Yes, so far so good, although in the first episode he did begin to irritate me a little, but I think that is because he reminds me a bit of my daughter's partner in his general features - least said the better there.
• ImNotJohn: [Sherlock] Agree - I've enjoyed it very much. I like the translation to the present day. I shall go back and read my collected stories so that I can track down what they've been based on.
• I Say, Porter!: [re: O'Brien] I have only read the first two of the O'Briens (although I bought ten) and they are jolly good. I inherited my dad's collection of Alexander Kents and followed Richard Bolitho from Midshipman to Admiral with great gusto.
• I Say, Porter!: I was asked at a party a couple of weeks ago why I play Mornington Crescent online. It's all about the people. Never heard of Sherlock. Read the above comments. Just spent a very, very enjoyable hour and a half watching episode 1. Thanks, Phil et al.
• Phil: [IS,P!] You let on to real life people that you play MC online? Yikes, you're brave. Although, I must confess I do get strange looks when I say "there's a bunch of people I know online - oh, it doesn't matter what we do, but we all have one thing in common".
• I Say, Porter!: [Phil] The looks get stranger when I say we get together for weekends to play ISIHAC games...
• ImNotJohn: I think the oddest looks I got were when I walked into The Head of Steam one afternoon and asked a group of people; "Would it mean anything if I said 'You don't know who I am but you do know who I'm not'?"
• I Say, Porter!: [INJ] lmfao!
• Merlyn: SH] It has been really great to see the modernisation - I must track down the originals and read them.

  I generally refer to this as 'an online discussion group...' if there's something I particularly want to mention. We must get together again sometime.

• Merlyn: And IS,P] you really never heard of Sherlock Holmes before?
• I Say, Porter!: [Merlyn] Had no idea that the Doctor Who team were redoing Sherlock Holmes. Very nice. Read the books over the last three weeks on the beach, so recognised quite a lot of the stories. Look forward to series 2.
• PaulWay: Finished Hyperion by Dan Simmons the other day. The tech is good, the writing is OK (I'm a bit over the artistic literary style of chopping and changing delivery), the ideas interesting and the plot stuck firmly in the 1980s. AIs plotting to overthrow humanity and duping humanity into helping them? Ultimate messages sent back in time? Humanity killing off every alien species it comes into contact with and destroying 'native' culture with its own hyperpaced fast-food? "One of you is a traitor"? Give me a break! It's like every cliched 1980s sci-fi dystopic theme rolled into one, masticated thoroughly, given a dash of racy swear words and sex scenes, and vomited onto the page.

  I really tried to like it. I'm intrigued by the manipulation of time and faster-than-light stuff. Rachel and Sol's story really hit me in the heart - that slow erosion of everything you know and love. But the typos kept on breaking my enjoyment. The failure to come up with any really new tech or explanations of how things actually worked just kept on annoying me. The annoying pretentious non-linear writing made it difficult for me to get into when I'd put it back down. Finally the cliches got too much to bear in the end. I just can't like it enough to buy the sequel.

• Dunx: [PaulWay] Not just me, then. Your critique is rather more thorough than my "I didn't like it much", although the conclusion was more or less the same. I did, in the end, read the sequel and my opinion didn't change. No Endymion for me.
• ImNotJohn: Finally got round to reading American Gods by Neil Gaiman. It was described as ‘the author’s preferred text’ which was not a good advertisement for the author as editor. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed it, it pulled me in for a while and at the end I didn’t want to put it down. It’s a good concept well handled and he draws you along. BUT it’s considerably too long and just drags quite badly in the middle. I put it down for over a fortnight and had no great impulse to pick it up again. You get the feeling that the author just had all these things he’d gathered and thought about and researched and wanted to get them all in to the detriment of the novel’s structure and pace. It probably didn’t help that I’d already read ‘The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break’, which treats the concept of Gods living in contemporary American society in a light-hearted and less pompous and portentous way. A good holiday book rather than a good aeroplane book in that you’ll want quite a long time to read it, but you’ll probably want to put it down and take a few days off in the middle.
• Raak: I recently discovered Dino Buzzati, a 20th century Italian writer, firstly with his novel The Tartar Steppe, of which there is a film I haven't seen. It tells of how Giovanni Drogo, a newly commissioned officer, is posted to Fort Bastiani. The fort guards a frontier, past which is an empty steppe. It serves no military purpose, there has been no threat from that direction in living memory. At first he tries to get transferred, but for one reason or another, he never does, and stays on, and on, at the fort. Over the years, on his returns home on leave, he sees all his former friends and associates drift away, progressing in their own lives, while he remains stuck at the fort. Rather bleak and Kafkaesque. I also read a book of his short stories, Restless Nights, some of which have the same theme of people wasting their lives away, waiting for something that never happens.
• Jrs: [gil] In the end, I'm not reading Imperium to Jean. Instead, I'm reading her the George Smiley trilogy.
• gil: [Jrs] Good choice.
• gil: [inj] Yes, I found American Gods underwhelming. A low point in his career IMHO.
• Dunx: [INJ, gil] I enjoyed American Gods, but with reservations based around so much of the premise having been done before - notably by Douglas Adams (The Long Dark Tea Time of the SOul) and Terry Pratchett (Small Gods and, to a lesser extent, Hogfather). He's done better since.
• gil: Absolutely. His more recent stuff is better again. Anansi Boys for example.
• Dunx: I was going to mention Anansi Boys - much stronger.
• gil: I've been given an advance copy of William Gibson's Zero History. It's excellent, as you'd expect from WG. I'll be reviewing it in the Mythaxis blog some time soon.
• gil: Suiting action to words, it's here at Mythaxis
• Dunx: Astonishingly, given how much I liked Pattern Recognition, I've had Spook Country for ages and haven't read it yet. I'll dig it out and move it up the stack.

September 2010

• Jrs: I enjoyed Spook Country a lot. Bought it before a business trip to China, and over the next 10 days read it twice.
• Jrs : [American Gods] I always get the feeling that Gaiman had fairly recently moved to America, and wanted to put in so much stuff he thought was odd and/or was intrigued about the 'American Heartland'. This would all fall down however if he had moved there some time before...
• Dan: Several books on the nightstand at the moment. I've been reading bits of Long Way Round in a heavily illustrated hardbound edition, in brief snatches, for some time now. What's interesting about it is how different the story is from the documentary series. The filmmaker produced a coherent narrative that is mostly bright and positive and focused. The book is less structured, in an alternating first-person format, presents a great deal of detail wholly missing from the film and is overall much darker in tone. An interesting mix of perspectives.

  Finished Anathem by Neal Stephenson in just a couple of days, having mostly given The Baroque Cycle a miss despite my appreciation for everything else he'd done up to that point. Not a book that benefits from being told much about it, I think; better if one comes to it in one's own way. Highly recommended for the SF crowd among us.

  Similarly roared through The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson until the last fifth or so of it when suddenly my interest fell off a cliff; can't quite say why. I can say nothing against it, quite the reverse; it's richly detailed, informed and idea-laden, and contains the kind of many-layered world-building you can expect from him. But somehow I didn't finish it off.

• Raak: [Dan] I had much the same reaction to TYoR&S some years back. As far as I recall it was the between-lives plot assuming too much prominence over the real-world episodes that sapped my interest. Also, as the alternate history moved past the present and into the future, it didn't feel like an alternate history any more, just stuff that someone had made up.
• Dan: [Raak] Having manfully resisted the impulse toward obvious, knee-jerk pedantry about stuff someone made up in the context of fiction, and speculative fiction at that, I must say I agree with you on both points. As a depiction of what history might have been without Europeans it was rather wonderfully done, vivid and learned, the latter at least to my untrained eye. But once it gets beyond what is analogous to our modern era it did seem to become something else. And yes, the glue he used to bind the ages together seemed to become altogether too intrusive as it wound up. Still, it was peculiarly mind-opening as far as I went with it and it spoke to an interest --vague and unpursued-- I have in historical narratives outside of my own culture. Shortly after I read it I happened on the episode of In Our Time about al Biruni and I credit the novel in part with the amount of interest and attention I gave to it. I was also strongly reminded of a Jan Morris historical article I read as a kid called "The Best-Travelled Man on Earth", which I wish I could find now.
• I Say, Porter!: [Dan] If you're lucky, the article might be in A Writer's World, a collection of her articles.
• PaulWay: I read a review for The Illusionist, an animated adaptation of an original Jacques Tati script that had never previously been made. Looks beautiful - beyond beautiful - , sounds wonderful, brilliantly executed, a real treasure. Something to show the family so they can scratch their heads and say "what was that bit about again?".

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