Archives

100 Books in 2011 Review: Gone Tomorrow

May2
Last week I miscalculated with how much I would read on the train. I knew I only had 40 pages of Globalization and its Discontents to go and I was half way through Beginnings, Middles and Ends, and I thought that would be enough for the commute. Only it wasn’t. I finished them both on the way into work and had nothing to read on the way home. Fortunately, we have a book-dump at work where people can leave books and take ones other people have left. I was happy to find Gone Tomorrow by Lee Child. I’ve read a couple of these and they are fluffy, light and fun.

Jack Reacher is a ex-military policeman who lives under the radar travelling around the US. He tends to run into trouble. In this case he’s in New York, on the subway, and he believes he sees a suicide bomber. Reacher intervenes and the woman kills herself. The rest of the book is devoted to finding out what she was doing and why she killed herself.

The style is very much about detail. Actions are described to the level of: Reacher ordered coffee. It arrived. It was black and in a white mug. He added three sugars from rectangular white sachets with blue writing on them. This is not actual text from the novel. Short, choppy sentences tend to add urgency and increase the pace. Detail adds credibility and draws the reader into your world. With this book I realised it can go too far. There came a point when the short sentences were just grinding. The detail sometimes seemed obsessive and more about stretching the plot out to fill the word count. Although that wasn’t entirely necessary as this was a big book. I did learn some interesting facts about men’s tailoring though.

This was not my favourite of the Jack Reacher novels that I’ve read and I think that’s because there was too much detail around things that weren’t that relevant to the plot. The story in amongst the detail was entertaining and well-handled. I did want to know what happened and why the woman on the train had killed herself. Child does plot really well.

Character is another matter. I’m not a fan of Jack Reacher; I think he’s a bit of a dick. At the end of the novel, another character accuses Reacher of letting his emotions get the better of him and it’s good that we were told otherwise I wouldn’t have known. The characters around him are a mixed bag. Some are drawn reasonably well, and I like that there’s plenty of female characters playing non-stereotypical roles. Others are a bit cardboard cut-out. But that’s ok. After all, it’s all about the plot.

This is not his best, even among the few I’ve read, but if you’re looking for something easy and light, or to examine plot, then you could do worse.

100 Books in 2011 Review: Gridlinked

Apr20
Gridlinked by Neal Asher is essentially James Bond in a space opera setting. Ian Cormac has been an agent for Earth Central Services for thirty years and has been linked to the AIs that govern the Polity for all of that time. His latest mission involves coming off the grid and learning to problem solve like a human as the AI network is potentially compromised by an alien intelligence from beyond the galaxy. In order to deal with this he is pulled off his current mission (which is not going so well) but not before he’s killed the sister of a psychotic terrorist. Who then proceeds to chase Cormac across the galaxy generally getting in the way until the final confrontation.

 The book is filled with a cast of engaging characters, both human and AI. Cormac’s adjustment to life without access to the AI grid, without all the information he could ever want, is convincingly portrayed. The moments when he has to ask other people about themselves and realises how much he has forgotten about making a connection are poignant and well-handled.

The dialogue is crisp. The pacing is good; it’s a 125,000 word novel and it packs much more in than you’d think. The twin strands of the plot are balanced nicely and even right at the end the possibility that everything will go horribly wrong is strong.

There are points when Cormac is talked about by other characters and we learn that he is somewhat legendary. Yet he comes across as a relatable character. He’s not legendary in his own mind and he doesn’t have the disrespectful arrogance of James Bond.

I really enjoyed this. I’ve bought another one and I’m looking forward to reading it. If you haven’t read Neal Asher before, I’d recommend him.

100 Books in 2011 review: Free Fall

Feb20

I bought Free Fall by Robert Crais in a book buying addiction frenzy in Asda. They were selling a ton of books for a pound each. How am I supposed to not buy books if they do that??

Anyway, I was in the mood for easy-going fluff, and I have a book target to meet, so this seemed like a quick win.

This is an Elvis Cole and Joe Pike novel. A young woman thinks her policeman fiance is in trouble. It turns out to be much more trouble than anyone bargained for involving blackmail and murder.

It’s fun, easy reading. Cole and Pike are more likeable than some of their ilk (yeah, Jack Reacher, I mean you). They are not complex characters but neither are they flat and stereotypical. Some of the supporting characters get well fleshed out as well. Others don’t, notably the villains. The plot cracks along at a good pace and there are one or two nice thoughtful moments. It’s entertaining and if you’re looking for a light read, you could do worse than this.

100 Books in 2011 review: Edge

Jan28

I was looking forward to reading Edge by Thomas Blackthorne. I liked the blurb (which you can see in the picture). It sounded like it was going to be an ultra-violent Running Man fun type of silliness. Predators in book form. But that’s not what it was. Bad Angry Robot. That’s the second time I’ve read a book from this imprint that did not contain what was on the label.

Edge is actually a thriller set in a near-future dystopia. The son of a wealthy and influential tycoon runs away from home so he hires an ex-SAS soldier with mad software skills to find the boy. Doing so reveals illegal activity on the behalf of the tycoon’s biggest rival in cahoots with a corrupt government. It’s set in a near-future UK where everything is tracked and recorded electronically all the time and getting off the grid is tough. Knife duels are legal and as a result crime is down but loads of people die in duels. And sports/reality TV is dominated by a duelling league where combatants die every week for your viewing pleasure. But the book doesn’t focus on that part of it. That’s the backdrop for the real story.

It was a good thriller. It was easy reading and fast paced. The protagonist, Josh Cumberland, is a fairly typical modern thriller hero; big, buff, beautiful, with special forces training (which in this world includes cyber warfare) and an anger management problem. What lifts Edge up from the mass is the cast of strong female characters that support the protagonist. Cumberland’s team of ex-SAS buddies are not all male – and the ones that are, have three-dimensional personalities. His insider on the force is a policewoman who gives free self-defence classes in her spare time. The ‘love interest’ is a psychologist whose skills are pivotal to resolving the central mystery. And it’s nice that her role as psychologist way overshadows her role as love interest. I thought the characterisation was real and sensitive, and I think this might actually pass the Bechdel test.

The near-future setting was rich and cleverly put together. It was distinctive, memorable and thoroughly thought through, and yet at no time did the setting overshadow the story. I was disappointed that the knife duelling reality show didn’t have more airtime, but that’s only because that’s what I thought the book would be about. But Edge is excellent, and it was a better story than that. I hope Blackthorne writes more stories set in this world.

Writing-wise, it was clean and competent. Blackthorne has a very understated style. The writing focusses on plot with description and characterisation subtly woven in-between dialogue and action. Ignore the blurb and give it a go.   

100 Books in 2011 review: Alone in Berlin

Jan26
Book club is off with a bang this year. January’s choice was Alone in Berlin by Hans Fallada (trans: Micheal Hofmann) and I loved it from the from start to finish.

Otto, an ordinary German living in a shabby apartment block, tries to stay out of trouble under Nazi rule. But when he discovers his only son has been killed fighting at the front he’s shocked into an extraordinary act of resistance, and starts to drop anonymous postcards attacking Hitler across the city. If caught, he will be executed.

Soon this silent campaign comes to the attention of ambitious Gestapo inspector Escherich, and a murderous game of cat-and-mouse begins. Whoever loses, pays with their life.

The opening chapter is one of the most powerful I’ve ever read. I read on the train and I was bawling my eyes out. Michael Hofmann’s translation is perfectly pitched and Alone in Berlin is an easy, fast read. Which may be surprising given the subject matter.

Fallada’s characterisation is exquisite. All of the characters are individuals and they come alive on the page. There are no stereotypes or stock characters here. And each character, regardless of how nice they are, is treated with empathy. Through these people Fallada shows how easy it is for civilization to crumble. The state can encourage the basest behaviour through making difference illegitimate, dissension dangerous and rewarding obedience. Systematic terror makes it hard to be a good person and easy to take advantage of the less fortunate. And it happens slowly, insidiously, until before you know it the world you thought you lived in is gone.

I love moral ambiguity and Alone in Berlin is replete with it. The Quangels made daily acts of resistance that achieved nothing except giving them back their self-worth. And you might say that knowing in your heart that you didn’t completely give in is important, yet Anna and Otto’s actions eventually damage the lives of several of the people around them. Their resistance had a tangible cost and an intangible outcome. Was it really the right thing to do? Should they have done something more? And this isn’t the only time the question of right and wrong is raised with complex, unclear examples. It’s not easy and all the pain of living with your choices is laid bare in this novel.

Alone in Berlin is an excellent example of an author that shows and rarely tells. We know who these people are because of what they say and do, not because the author tells us who they are. And this is a book originally written in 1947 so the omniscient POV is used and on occasions Fallada gives himself permission to use the authorial voice. Another member of the book club (who read the book in German) says that Fallada uses the Dickensian tradition of giving characters names that describe them.

If you like fiction that strips away the vanity of civilization and shows us what we are, what we can be, with brutal, uncompromising truth, then you will love this. For me, this is one of the best books I’ve ever read.

Thoughts on reading: The Hard Way

Jun27

Plot. I have issues with plot. I have a mental block when it comes to getting my characters from one big event to another via smaller events. Perhaps it’s just a confusion, a lack of being able to see the big picture, and the plot really is there and I just can’t see it. If it is there, it won’t be because I did it deliberately.

With this in mind, I picked up The Hard Way by Lee Child. It’s heavy on plot, one of those thrillers that’s all plot and not much else. In actual fact, it’s more of a detective novel with the emphasis on gathering the little clues and interpreting them to fnd out what really happened. The ending is sufficiently explosive with Jack Reacher dispatching the bad guys at a breakneck pace that makes it rather exciting.

Characterisation is on the light side. This is the second Jack Reacher novel I’ve read and I don’t think I know him any better than I did after reading the first one. The rest of the characters are fairly thin. The bad guys are bad and several of the seven-man crew have only names and a couple of physical features to describe them. Reacher hooks up with an ex-FBI agent turned PI, who is a woman in her fifties given an active role and is the love interest, so kudos to Lee Child for a positive, powerful representation of an older woman. Unfortunately, her role is limited to being a foil for Reacher and at the end she is tied up waiting to be rescued.

It is good to see that there isn’t a high body count amongst the female characters, and a theme of strong sisters fighting for their families runs through the book. It is done rather unsubtly but is a nice touch in a genre that is often misogynistic. There is also a drop of social commentary on the privatisation of the defence and security industries. It’s not great literature, but it is fun and is better than several thrillers I’ve read recently.

In non-fiction I turned for help to The Plot Thickens by Noah Lukeman. I got this because it was mentioned by a panelist at alt.fiction 2010 and I have been worrying about plot lately. It has some useful suggestions in it and a couple of things I hadn’t read before, so it was worth it’s purchase. What I didn’t like was the highly gendered use of pronouns when talking about characterisation techniques. At the beginning, Lukeman says he will use he as a generic term, which is lazy at best, but ok. Except that’s not what he does. He sometimes uses he and sometimes uses she. If he had just alternated that would have been ok, but he doesn’t. He only uses she when talking about things that are associated with women in traditional gender stereotypes and never uses she outside of talking about children, attractiveness and domesticity. Grating, and enough to spoil the book, especially as it was written in 2001.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

May4

I bought The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Steig Larsson on the strength of the marketing, the fact that I saw everyone reading it and loads of people said it was good. Normally, I ignore that sort of mass trend but something about this book made me buy it despite its popularity.

It was good, although perhaps not as good as I’d been told. In fairness, it is a thriller and is very much better than much of the genre – but I don’t think a novel should be judged only by the relative standards of its genre. The story is of a journalist hired to investigate a forty year old unsolved murder and in doing so uncovers a serial killer going quietly about his business.

The elements of writing were largely well handled; characterisation and dialogue were definitely a cut above the norm of the genre although I doubt they would stand out in broader comparisons. Plotting was also good. The sense of place was strong and all senses were brought to bear in creating the novel’s world. Sweden seems more real to me now.

Where it fell down a bit was in pacing. This is not a roller-coaster ride filled with thrills and spills. For the first half of the book, which is over 500 pages so that’s for a good 250 pages, I was waiting for it to get going. There was a lot of exposition in the first half, delivered to the reader in short but frequent info-dumps. The authorial voice interfered a little at the start as well making the info-dumps read in a slightly different tone.

Once past the mid-way hump, the pace picks up, there’s a lot more action and it builds up into an excellent ending. This is the first of a trilogy and I will happily pick up the second and third books.

Target

Mar31

Target by Simon Kernick is an easy read. It’s a fast-paced thriller and is fairly typical of the genre. There were a few noteworthy things about it.

Firstly, loads of people died. I know it was a thriller about a psychotic hitman, but still. It did feel like there was a bit of red-shirt syndrome going on; any new character introduced was likely to be dead shortly.

Secondly, there were only two female characters, one of which was the kidnap victim and who never gets any screentime. The other was a detective who start off with a good role, gets kidnapped and it seems like she’s waiting to be rescued. In the end, she rescues herself which I was happy to see but for a long while she was taken out of the story. Also the violence against the two female characters was depressingly sexualised.

And lastly, the author killed off the first person narrator. He’s not the only POV character and I question the use of both first and third person POVs in the novel; it’s somewhat disjointed. This was a surprise and I found it a brave move. It was thoughtprovoking but I’m not sure how I feel about it. The fact that the antagonist had killed so many characters by this point did contribute to a response of ‘oh really, another killing?’

Anyway, it was ok. Problematic in places and patchy technique, but good in the things that make a good thriller. I might pick up another of Kernick’s books next time I’m looking for brain candy floss.

Then I read Hawkwood: Diabolical Englishman by Frances Stonor Saunders which is the biography of a fourteenth century mercenary, Sir John Hawkwood. It was less biography than an exploration of a moment in time hung around the structure of one man’s life. It was fascinating.

Eleven Hours

Mar6

Eleven Hours by Paullina Simons was my second pull from the book drop at the office. There was no non-fiction interlude between this and City of Beasts as I wasn’t organised enough. The book drop doesn’t contain vast amounts of books that I would jump at reading, so I just went for something lightweight and entertaining to tide me over until I got home to the collection of books that I desperately want to read. On the surface, Eleven Hours appeared to be a pretty standard thriller, heavy on plot, fast-paced, simple writing.

What a delightful surprise this book was. It is a fast paced, plot-heavy thriller and it is so much more. The characterisation was extremely skillfully done. The main character, Didi, endures an eleven hour abduction. I didn’t like her much, but she was very real to me and behaved in exactly the way I thought such a woman would. Even down to the extent that when she was being taken from the car park with threats of violence she never actually said no. Because many women can’t and don’t say no.

Another main character was presented to us with a single mention of his race. I mention this because often it seems that the defining characteristic of black characters in books written by white authors is that they are black and the adjective is used constantly. It is a measure of how impressed I was by the writing in this book that I was disappointed when this character was introduced as ‘a black man’ and so I subsequently was alert for how many times that was used as an adjective. I was pleased to note that it wasn’t.

I was also pleased with the ending. Although Didi’s husband and an FBI agent are chasing after her to rescue her, ultimately Didi rescues herself and then gives birth unaided. Her efforts are nothing short of heroic and even though she is so passive in nature, Simons’ writing is utterly convincing. I really enjoyed this.

This time I was prepared and my non-fiction interlude was The Work we are Born to Do by Nick Williams. This was lent to me by a friend years ago and I have often thought that I shouldn’t have kept it so long. Well, I’m glad I did because I gained a lot from reading it.

Adventures in reading

Feb14

It’s been a while, but mainly because I’ve been writing a short story, so no apologies. Since I’ve been away I’ve cracked through lots of books and thus here comes a huge post.

Following on from the epic Martin Chuzzlewit I finished off Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth and Happiness by Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein, one of the many half-read books lying around my house. It had some interesting material but there are better examples of this type of book out there.

Moving on from there I felt that I wanted something light, so I chose A Wicked Liaison by Christine Merrill. It’s a Mills & Boon Historical Romance and quite far from my usual choice. I have it (and a few others) because my writing group did a workshop on writing for Mills & Boon and getting some examples was for follow up research. Anyway, I feel violated. On a content level, this offended me. On a writing level it does offer some interesting observations of what is missing from the book. What is there is well written, it’s just that there is so much that is left out. There is very little world building (as it is set in Regency London). We are offered little in the way of description, hardly any smells, sounds or kinesthetic input. The book takes place completely in the mind and we are entirely caught up in the thoughts of the two protagonists. This does make it very intense but the inner monologues are quite repetitious. Ugh. Did not like.

My non-fiction interlude was Earth Path by Starhawk, which I loved.

Then, due to an unscheduled trip to Doncaster, I read February’s book club book, The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid. It was an interesting style. The author chose a monologue for the whole book and the writing was wonderfully tight. What was there was very well done but, for me, the style made it distancing. It felt like an intellectual novel not an emotional one. Disappointing, because it could have been much more powerful.

After my unpleasant toe-dip in to romance, I felt a strong need to return to speculative fiction, in the form of The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch by Philip K. Dick. I find that Dick’s novels are very much the fiction of ideas. I did notice lots of new words for not-so-new concepts and at one point it did feel a bit overwhelming. I loved the idea of stress being measured in units of Freuds. Having said that, the world-building was great. The book plays with the idea of reality, the nature of god and altered states of consciousness. I really liked it.

Following that I read The Introverted Leader: Building on your Quiet Strength by Jennifer B. Kahnweiler, which I found really inspiring and helpful.

Then I picked Poison Study by Maria V. Snyder (I’m noticing a lot of people using middle initials today). I think I’m going right off the use of the first person in the long form. The story had potential but the writing was unsophisticated. I couldn’t make up my mind up whether it was YA fiction or not; in the end I decided that even if it was, it could still be held to the same standards as anything else. There was too much tell and too much ‘Yelena had worried about/planned for/thought’ where we hadn’t been given that previously. The world-building and characterisation lacked depth. It also committed the cardinal sin (in my eyes, at any rate) of not being internally consistent with levels of technology, clothing, dialogue, etc. I couldn’t fix an historical period in my mind. Characters fought with swords, lived in castles and used magic but then had factories and used incredibly modern dialogue. For me, it was distracting and annoying. The dialogue as a whole was not well done; often I felt that the dialogue didn’t reflect the characters as they were described. The relationship between the protagonist and her love interest was pure Mills & Boon and was so creepy. Not good. And there are two more in the series.

Most recently, I’ve read Belching out the Devil by Mark Thomas, which is an exploration of Coca Cola’s activities in the world. I may not be able to drink pop again.