Holiday books
Posted on August 27, 2003 @ 13:18 in Reading
A couple of quick lines about the books I've read during the holidays, in chronological order.
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix by J.K. Rowling
I finished the last 100 or so pages of The Order of the Phoenix while getting sunburned on the first day in Sweden. I enjoyed reading it, just like the previous books, but it's becoming increasingly clear that the story's characters lack a certain personality and emotional depth. Although Rowling gives Potter more introspective moments in this book, he and the other characters remain rather one dimensional embodiments of specific narrative structures and needs. Still, Rowling shows off her inventiveness in all the nooks and crannies of the world that she's creating and despite the fact that the story is repeating the moves from the previous installments, I can't but admire the fact that she makes me want to finish the book. In one of his quick reviews Martin probably says it better than me.
reMix by Jon Courtenay Grimwood
I tend to read several novels at the same time, enjoying how otherwise incongruous storylines suddenly co-exist and sometimes intermingle, so next up were the last 150 or so pages of reMix. I think this novel isn't quite as good as the Arabesk trilogy (Pashazade, Effendi, Felaheen), but it's still a great read and carries all the detail of Courtenay Grimwood's other novels. The story is set in a futuristic time and the author is working hard to flesh out the possibilities of a world much like ours, but determined by a different course of history. What happens when France had remained an empire, with a descendant of Napoleon as its emperor, but now is on the brink of falling under the assault of its eternal enemy: a Germany that appears to have won WW I and consequently hasn't experienced WW II. And that's only the sprawling backdrop for the story about a French girl getting kidnapped on her way to an orbiting boarding school, and the "once famous for a fluke dance hit success" musician send to rescue her. In short, this is one dense and gripping story.
Pattern Recognition by William Gibson
I felt a bit hesitant about starting in Gibson's new book. It'd been a while since I read something by him and I wondered if it would (could) be as good as I remembered his writing. After only a page or two I wondered how I could have ever doubted. Gibson's prose is as inventive and pointy as it always has been, and the current day setting of the story only underlines the author's observational powers. Unfortunately, my copy missed pages 153/154, which is a rather crucial point in the story, where Cayce is about to receive the number from Taki, so I had to put the book aside. The bookstore gave me a good copy without much trouble and I finished reading after we got back from holiday. While I got back into the mood of the story pretty quickly, it's too bad that I didn't get to finish it in one or two days. It's a very tightly written narrative and in the unfolding story of discovering who is placing mysterious film fragments on the net, the characters and their world keep gaining meaning and disparate elements of the story start resonating more strongly. Because I only got to finish Pattern Recognition after two weeks or so, I had to flip back and reread some parts to get the full gist of the story. Guess I'll have to read it again in one sitting in a couple of months then. And that's as far from a punishment as you can get!
Needle in the groove by Jeff Noon
Peeved by the fact that I had to put Pattern Recognition aside, I turned to Needle in the Groove. I had picked up this book because of its cover design, as it sat among Noon's other very nicely designed paperbacks on the shelf in the bookshop. The book totally blew me away. It was 4am when I finished it and the lingering adrenaline meant I slept badly for a couple of hours afterwards. 4am in the summer somewhere in the middle of nowhere in Sweden means it's already light again and an aborted night like that somehow fitted very well with the novel. Reminds me of the handwritten scrawl in the back of The The's Mind Bomb CD booklet: "To obtain maximum pleasure & effect from this album, please play VERY LOUD!, VERY LATE, VERY ALONE... & with the lights turned VERY LOW!!!"
Needle in the Groove tells the story of how a bass player ends up laying down the bass line for a dance track called Scorched out for love and gets caught up in the past of the band's drummer, whose personal history is intertwined with the Manchester popular music scene over three generations of musicians. Noon's (literally) lyric prose drives the story into the soul, like a deep, deep bass tugging at the base of your spine. It's hard to explain Noon's staccato, song text like writing, so here's a little quote.
jody at my side, headphones on, working some controls / her changes, perhaps the strangest of all / less driven somehow, less fiery / and when she takes the phones off, her hair, her once-upon-a-time goddamn cut-to-zero hair sticks up in sharpened tufts
—funny, she says
—what is?
—funny, how she turned out
—yeah, suppose
the singer sees me then / it's a barely there glance, and I guess she's nervous about the recording / I hope that's it
it's one year, just gone / and in all that time... ah / leave it alone
—listen
A blurb on the cover asks: "If music were a drug, where would it take you?" If writing ever came close to music, it's in Needle in the Groove.
The Blue Place by Nicola Griffith
I read Griffith's previous novels Ammonite and Slow River, but kind of lost track of her because The Blue Place is not filed under sci-fi/fantasy by the bookstores. Indeed, The Blue Place has been out for so long that the follow up novel, Stay, is already out. I read somewhere on Griffith's homepage that she thought that the ending of The Blue Place was a bit cruel for her protagonist. I have to agree it is. Those final pages took a good bite out of my soul, but, in retrospect, I may even appreciate it more, because it doesn't feel like Griffith took the easy way out.
It's hard to characterize this book, but in a way it is a hard-boiled detective noir, with a part Norwegian, part English, part American, wholly paranoid ex cop hired by a beautiful brunette to solve a murder. The twist here is that the protagonist, Aud Torvingen, like all Griffith's protagonists, is lesbian, but actually, it's not a twist. Griffith's characters are deep and believable, and their sexuality is a natural part of who they are, rather than the focus of the narrative. The detailed descriptions of the protagonist's world are almost romantic, maybe even baroque, and although very enjoyable, those were the places where I occasionally found my attention slipping. The second part of the book is set in Norway, and has Torvingen introduce her employer to the country's history, habits, and food. Having never visited the Scandinavian countries before, many of the things that Torvingen introduces, and even some of the words for them, resonated strongly with our experiences in Sweden. It's weird to read about the characters visiting a "stave church" and having jam made from "polar circle berries," when you have just visited a stave church and bought a jar of that jam yourself. Weird but good. I've already ordered Stay and I can't wait till it arrives.
Speed of Dark by Elizabeth Moon
This is a moving story about an autistic man, Lou, who does mathematic modeling for a large multinational corporation, together with his half dozen autistic colleagues. They manage to live in the 'normal' world fairly well, until the corporation acquires a company that is working on a GM/molecular biological cure for autism. Lou is faced with a fundamental question about who he is. Autism has formed his identity and to the rest of the world he is not 'normal.' Much of his life revolves around adapting to 'normal' behavior. What would happen to him if they went in and changed such a fundamental part of who he is? The story's biggest achievement in my opinion is that it is written from the perspective of Lou and that I managed to get a glimpse of what it means to perceive the world as an autist. To normal people an autist's need for regularity may seem extreme and his/her fears petty or irrational, but Moon does such a great job, that I really had the feeling I understood what drives those needs. The too saccharine ending was a bit of a disappointment, but the rest of the novel more than makes up for that.
Ship of Fools by Richard Paul Russo
Okay, I'm cheating a little, because I read this novel before the holiday, but it's so good, it needs a special mention here. I knew Russo from his hard-boiled cyberpunkish "Carlucci" novels, but Ship of Fools is nothing like that. The story is set on a huge spaceship that has been out exploring for generations. This means that for the people it carries, the ship has become their universe, even though the vastness of space stretches out at the other side of the hull of the ship. The ship's community has bred its own 'nobility,' whose power plays and intricate allegiances achieve Victorian proportions. The story takes a dramatic turn, when a small exploration detail discovers a horrible secret on a planet they visit. A signal leads them to another spaceship, drifting deserted through space. I think the last time a novel managed to spook me out of my head so thoroughly, was when I was thirteen. The only thing that comes close to this kind nail-biting horror, is the first time I saw the movie Event Horizon (which, it is said, shares more than a few details with Tarkovsky's Solaris, but I haven't seen that movie, nor its more recent remake). Although I can recommend all the above books, I would say this one was the dark horse that won the race for me.
What surprises me most about my holiday readings, is that I managed to pick such a great selection of books. No duds this time. Feel free to recommend a book or two in the comments :-)
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Jeff Noon is great. He's got a book of short stories called Pixel Juice that I can highly recommend. Not to mention, of course, Automated Alice.
Posted by angel on August 30, 2003 @ 22:02
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