Eating Muffins in an Agitated Manner

What next?

Posted by Sari

Again I am in the middle of many books and don't quite know what to finish next. Any ideas? Myy obviously could care less.

Clearing some of the backlog

Posted by Sari

The backlog of read but unreviewed books just keeps growing and gives me angst, so here are few to make me feel marginally better:

Dane Kennedy: A Highly Civilized Man

 You may remember I was hankering after this earlier, after reading Brody’s bio. And good thing I did; this is the way cultural history should be written. A Highly Civilized Man is an excellent biography of Burton, or rather an examination of the Victorian world view and it’s relationship with “the other” using Burton as a focal point. Kennedy examines Burton’s life chronologically through the roles he assumed and iterests he held through his life from “the gypsy” to “the explorer” and from “the racist” to “the sexologist”.

 As is said earlier, Burton’s life-long efforts to reinvent himself, to shock the establishment and at the same time want its acceptance, marks him not only as a man at odds with values of the time, but also as a man who also reflects and brings those values in focus. Kennedy, I think, manages very well to situate Burton’s ravenous hunger for places and people and his mischievous desire to shock the society in its historical context and illuminates both the ways in which Burton negotiates and renegotiates his relationship with the Empire and Britain but also how his contemporaries on larger scale were trying to contain and comprehed this vast empire of “other” they ruled.

Castle Waiting

Castle Waiting was a comic published independently by the author, Linda Medley. After a long hiatus she is now continuing the story with Fantagraphics as publisher. They have collected all previous Castle Waiting stories into a book-size volume. Medley’s style of drawing is such that the smaller size does not diminish the effect, and the book as a physical thing is a nice object. As far as contents go, Castle Waiting pretty much lives up to its name. The Castle of the Sleeping Beauty has become a refuge for all sorts of people from antropomorphic animals to bearded nuns. They pass time in every day chores of the Castle and telling each other stories of their lives. It is a quiet, funny and engaging comic about small things that turn out to be pretty big.

Cory Doctorow: Little Brother

Little Brother is a didactic novel, an angry impressive and tech-savvy diatrabe against the way "the war on terror" has narrowed the privacy and freedom of citizens without being the least bit effective. It is a story of a terrorist attack on San Francisco and how a bunch of teenagers playing an ARG near abouts are picked up by Homeland Security. Scared shitless but also angry, one of the kids, Marcus starts an underground movement against the government.

Little Brother is a page turner, it is scary and even though you want to think it is absurdly impossible, you read things like this and  this  and think again.  I do, however think that the didactic nature of the novel does  it disservice at times - the technoexposition and the civic lessons can get a bit tedious. Even so, defenitely worth the Hype. Go read an excellent review by Finncon guest of honor Farah Mendlesohn here.

Via Making Light I also learn that Little Brother has made it to the NY Times Bestseller list, not too shabby for a book you can legally download for free...

Tim Jael: Stanley

Apparently, after a polar phase, I am now into exploration of the sources of the Nile. First Burton, now Stanley. Of all the great imperialistic explorers in 19^th –century Africa, Stanley has by far the worst reputation. Not only are his actions on both his great trans-African journey and his Emin Pasha relief expedition harshly criticized, he is also seen as the principal partner of King Leopold and thus responsible for the atrocities and the immense tragedy of Belgian Congo at the turn of the century.

Tim Jael, who has also written the definitive biography of Livingstone, has had access to a number of documents unavailable to earlier biographers, including Stanley's original diaries and his private correspondence, and bases his revisionistic work on these new sources. Jael’s Stanley is deeply insecure man with a shady youth, but he argues convincingly against the Kurtz-like dark and destructive force that has been the standard interpretation. Stanley that emerges here is a thoroughly human character, a man whose life was shaped by his childhood and the lies he told of his origin, and who ironically destroyed his own reputation by creating the myth of the saintly Livingstone, a myth agains which his own actions were always mirrored.

 

 

Mut et sä voi sanoo et Terry Brooks on huano ku sä oot lukenu vaa yhen sen kirjoista

Posted by Sari

Hesarin lukupiirissä on herännyt keskustelua meistä kotimaista kirjallisuutta karttavista yksilöistä. Ja muutama keskustelija on heittänyt sielläkin kehiin mutatis mutandis otsikon argumentin. Ja totta siinä on toki jos nyt ei toinen puoli niin ainakin hiukkanen. Aina on se mahdollisuus että otos ei ole tarpeeksi kattava muodostamaan perusteltua mielipidettä asiasta tai kolmannesta.

Minä en pidä suomenkielisestä (proosa)kirjallisuudesta koska kokemukseni mukaan se on arkista, synkkää, miehistä, kielellisesti suoraviivaista, karttaa tietämisen iloa eikä pysty luonnollisesti kuvaamaan suomen kielen puherekisteriä. Haluaisiko joku vinkata suomalaisia romaaneja joista saattaisin pitää?

That Library Thing...

Posted by Sari

Reason 236 why I love Library Thing: I now know I share eleven books with Thomas Jefferson.

Thukydides: Peloponesolaissota
Boccaccio: Il Decamerone
Homeiros: Ilias
Homeiros: Odysseia
Tasso: Vapautettu Jerusalem
Erasmus: Tyhmyyden ylistys
Platon: The Republic
Machiavelli: Ruhtinas
Sterne: Sentimental Journey
Moore: Utopia
Goldsmith: Vicar of Wakefield

Post-Christmas round-up

posted by Sari

So I got the flu just before Christmas and Jukka got the ear thing, so we have been mostly not doing anything the whole Christmas except feeling grouchy, watching LotR and reading:

Anne Leinonen, Eija Lappalainen, Markku Lappalainen: Devoted Souls

As Devoted Souls is a YA novel about online gaming and romantic entanglements I most decidedly was not in any target group imaginable. For starters, I am not a young adult and I positively hate games where you have to interact with other characters, NPC:s and player characters alike. (Myst and Civilization, the best games ever). I picked it up half accidentally mainly because I know the authors, Jukka was hogging the computer and it was there, on top of one of our endless piles of books. And I was really pleasantly surprised. The prose flowed, I really liked Nelli and really wanted to know what happens next. The gaming sequences worked much better than I had expected, and the interaction between and within Nelli’s two worlds had interesting levels. Me being me, would have wanted the novel to be more ambitious than it was, I think the story and the themes would have supported a more literary effort. But that would have been a very different book to perhaps a different audience.

Evelyn Waugh: Vile Bodies

Vile Bodies was Waugh’s second novel, a satire about the post-war generation and the Bright Young Things set to which Waugh himself belonged, so it is difficult not to read some of the satire as a sort of roman à clef. The book is dedicated to Diana and Bryan Guinnes,  Adam’s efforts to popularise green bowler hats is like hoax art show Diana, Bryan and Waugh staged in 1929. Lottie the eccentric hotel owner is modeled after Rosa Lewis (fictionalised later in BBC’s Duchess of the Duke Street), Nina owes something to Diana, and Agatha Runcible to Elizabeth Ponsomby. The on-off relationship between Nina and Adam seems tinged with the break up of the marriage between He-Evelyn and She-Evelyn. It is wickedly funny and at the same time sad novel, a novel without a centre, much like the party-set generation it depicts. And quite chillingly, for a novel published in 1930, it ends with a war.

Lois McMasters Bujold: Sharing Knife

Though I think only one of Bujold’s romantic fantasies has any of the power of her best Vorkosigan books, these are still well worth reading. Shearing Kinfe duology has wonderful rhythm to its language, excellent world-building and intriguing fantastic elements, but in the end it is an interesting take of a mixed marriage (Dag and Fawn are from different societies and cultures, and their marriage is much frowned upon by their families and societies), and though Bujold’s characters are tough and determined, it will not end with rainbows and puppies.

David Mitchell: Cloud Atlas

Cloud Atlas is an "overwhelming masterpiece," according to the Washington Times. "Never less than enthralling," announces The Wall Street Journal. The New York Times Book Review proclaims author David Mitchell, "a genius." But don’t let the blurbs put you off. These are not hype so much as loss for words. I think George Gessert is right there. Cloud Atlas robs the words to describe it and you are left with an empty hyperbole. I loved it to bits. There are novels where style, structure, themes and characters are so happily married that they trigger a sort of cascade reaction in the brain. All the myriad things inputted from the novel collide somewhere and release a reading of such power that it becomes a pleasure, an emotional reaction to intellectual achievement. These are the best books, those that, like Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge, blow your mind and break your heart at the same time. Tom Stoppard can do that. A.S. Byatt and Pat Barker can do that. Neal Stephenson in his madly ambitious baroque cycle grasps at that.

And so does David Mitchell. Cloud Atlas has a story within story structure, but all the stories except the last/middle one is cut off in mid-point only to be continued later: A diary of an American traveller in the Pacific during the 19^th-century, letters written by an opportunistic young composer after the first world war, a detective story in a fictive American city in 1950s, a vanity publisher’s escape from old people’s home in modern Britain, the interrogation protocols for an android revolutionary in future Korea and annihilation of a culture in post-apoclyptic Hawaii through the eyes of a young boy. The stories are intriguing in themselves and the changes of style are handled with assured virtuosity of a master wordsmith. 

But what really makes the book for me is the mirror-house/Russian dolls structure: the stories are set within stories in such a way that it makes the narratives fiction within a fiction. But you don’t know that in the beginning, as we start from the innermost doll and work in halves towards the outermost doll. If the earlier narratives are just mentioned in the later narratives, what is their relationship with each other? Are they part of those stories or are they just referring to those stories, outside or inside? If one approaches the structure thinking about fabulation/mimesis, the relationship of fictive work to what it referrers (or not), it really leaves you buzzing.

 

Mahtavaa!!!

Posted by Sari

Valtavat onnittelut Ainolle ja Samille Finlandia juniorista! Näin leikki-ikäisten tätinä ja kummitätinä fanitan Tatua ja Patua, ne ovat niin täynnä hulvatonta menoa ja villejä yksityiskohtia että niitä on oikeasti hauska lukea lasten kanssa.

Book fair. And stuff.

Helsinki book fair is coming up again. Go and see Jukka interviewing cool authors and moderating a panel on genre definitions. A Panel. About genre definitions. Hasn't this been done yet? Like few thousand times? I saw one in Finncon, one in Swecon, few at worldcon and few at previous book fairs. Let it go, people!

I have also been thinking about the Helsinki book fair in general. How is it that I, who co-own near 5000 books and keep acquiring more never find anything interesting at the book fair? You'd think that the fair would be a heaven for me, but no. It is like dying of thirst in the middle of an ocean: lots of water, but the wrong kind of water. I have never managed to get into the near rapturous feeding frenzy at a book fair that I easily achieve in Akateeminen, or browzing Amazon. And I tell you why: them books at the fair, they are in Finnish. Which means that they are expensive and, you know, boring. Nobody really translates the books I want to read. Also, I think I might have a problem with Finnish language. Not a fan of it, really. Which is bit of  a problem, I admit.

Nevermind, I shall browse the used books section and get myself another book from the "Poikien seikkailukirjasto" -series (I got few dozen of those from my dad back in the day and started sort of collecting them), get some toffee and some fresh liquerice and maybe catch few program items. Any recommendations?

Being historical

Posted by Sari

Lately, I have mostly been reading historicals. Well, Tom Holland’s Rubicon is not a novel, but such a well written piece of popular narrative history that it was quite as exciting as one. The much lauded book is a story of the downfall of the Roman republic. First few chapters outline the birth and rise of the Republic into a major player in the Mediterranean and then Holland wittily, excitingly and lucidly narrates the events of the last fifty or so years of the republic from Marius and Sulla to the triumph of Caesar Divi Filius Augustus. Obviously – as Holland states in the preface – the sources are limited and biased and interpretations events and motivations of participants can fluctuate widely, and obviously we can’t know what the great men of Rome thought or felt with any certainty. A book geared for more scholarly audience would have had to be more careful, more pedantic and would propably have to sacrifice the pace and tension of the narrative in order to bring out the evidence and agrument more. But as a piece of narrative popular history of the tensions, events and persons that ruled the stage during that turbulent period, this is bloody brilliant, even though the exit of Cicero somewhat flattens the  last chapter.

As a companion piece I was reading Saylor’s A Mist of Prophecies which though not one of his best works was still an entertaining read. Here we are living year 48 B.C. Caesar is chasing Pompey’s numerically superior army in Greece, and back in Italy Milo and Marcus Caelius are fermenting trouble. In Rome, Gordianus tries to find out who has murdered Cassandra, a strange girl from Alexandria claiming to be a seer. In course of his investigations Gordianus visits a number of powerful women in Rome who had all shown up at Cassandra’s funeral and they each reveal a bit of the mystery. The detective story, I though, was ok but no better, and the structure of the novel was a bit mechanic. Even so, Saylor writes well and at least I had the bacround well in hand...

Third historical was Kate Mosse’s Labyrinth, a grail novel which happens partly in Modern time and partly in 13^th century Pays D’Oc. The modern day heroine Alice, a volunteer on an archeological dig, stumbles on a cave with two sceletons in it. Suddenly, people start dying, police and mysterious lawyers, and other people start chasing her, all because they think she has something from the cave. In the historical part Alaïs, daughter of the Castellaan of Chateau Comtal becomes a guardian of the grail secret after his father and fights to save it from the ravages of Albigensian crusades. This was easy, predictable fluff which was saved by the fact that Mosse quite obviously loves the landscape and history of Languedoc and this bleeds through in her narrative. Much, much better than the ridiculously and clumsily simplistic daVinci Code, but a bit too long and predictable. I loved tha fact that all the main protagonists – villains and heroes – were women, though.

Atheism, Alternate history and a Highly Civilized Man

Posted by Sari

Kim Stanley Robinson The Years of Rice and Salt

I have problems with alternate history novels. I either think that the point of divergence is too small or trite, or badly imagined. In this case, I can not really say that the chosen point of divergence is too small. Robinson after all, wipes the whole population of Europe off the map with the plague in 14th century, and re imagines the history of the world from that point until approximately present date. The result is a very robinsonian novel, a vast panorama of world and time which somehow ends up pretty much like our world in the end. To create some sort of continuum Robinson introduces the idea of reincarnation and follows three intertwined souls, K, B and I through history.

Somehow this just did not work for me. I kind of liked the idea of a longue duré novel but there were just too many points where I found the argument unconvincing. What kind of plague would wipe out all the people of Europe (including very sparsely inhabited Scandinavia?) but miraculously stop short of Asia? Could one Japanese really prepare the North American Indians for the onslaught of invaders from East and West? Could scientific revolution really be the work of few isolated geniuses in Samarkand? A trench war of sixty years without the invention of tanks? And how and why would everything happen pretty much the same and exactly the same pace as in a world where European culture dominates? If you take out such a huge thing like Europe out of the calculation, I think there would have been cumulatively more changes and differences than Robinson shows us.

Maybe Years of Rice and Salt is meant to be a meditation on humanity and history more than a nuts and bolts kind of alternate history, but even so, the point escapes me. It is bold, it’s language has surprising power, but in the end… just no.

Fawn Brodie: The Devil Drives

Sir Richard Burton was undoubtedly one of the strangest and most compelling men Victorian age ever produced. A solider, a truly remarkable linguist, ethnologist, explorer, adventurer, spy, one of the greatest swordsmen of the period, a poet, a translator, a diplomat and collector and publisher of erotica. He served in India and in Crimea, went on a Hajj to Mecca and Medina in disguise, discovered lake Tanganjika, served as a consul on four continents, had a tragic and well publicized quarrel with John Speke on the sources of the White Nile, and wrote about all of it in voluminous detail.

He also translated oriental erotica like Kama Sutra, and most famously Thousand and One Nights into English, was friends with such more or less notorious characters as Monckton Milnes, Algernon Swinburne and Fred Hankey, and suspected his army career in India was blocked by his rather frank report on male brothels in Karachi. He spent most of his life restless, always looking for something, always shocking the establishment and often taunting his superiors because usually he had known better than they.

Brodie’s biography of Burton from 1967 is thorough, engaging and well written, but it does leave reader asking for more. Burton’s life was so rich and full of controversy, his writings and opinions so varied, so simultaneously at odds with and reflecting Victorian England that the four hundred pages barely seem to scratch surface. Unfortunately his wife Isabel – a fascinating woman on her own right – burned Burton’s diaries and manuscripts after his death leaving generations of historians and anthropologists devastated. Even so I think more modern biographies might open up his character better. This one sounds really interesting. And  here is a link for a short lecture given by its author.

Richard Dawkins: The God Delusion

Dawkins is witty and funny and passionate and I pretty much agree with him, so reading God Delusion was one of those reaffirming rather than revealing readings experiences. It is bit of a sprawl, discussing religion (mainly Christianity and Islam) and religious questions from arguments of God’s existence or nonexistence to morality to possibility of evolutionary explanation for religion. Many of the arguments and examples are familiar from Dawkins earlier writings, and there are a few “yyeeess but…” moments, at least for me.

Nonetheless, The God Delusion is a worthy argument for atheism, wonderful debunking of ID and sent me surfing information on sundry things from Russell’s Teapot to Cargo Cults. Also, it is dedicated to one of our ages true humanists, Douglas Adams. How could it be bad?

Oh, and if you get BBC World, try to catch Hard Talk with Dawkins, it gives you the arguments from the book in a nutshell.

Some books

Posted by Sari

To prove to Marko I have been reading:

John Gribbin: The Fellowship. The Story of a Revolution

 There is a wonderful chapter near the beginning of Neil Stephenson’s Quicksilver where Daniel Waterhouse makes his way to Epsom where John Wilkins and Robert Hooke have in 1665 retired from the plague-infested London to continue their work. Based on John Evelyn’s often quoted description of the two famous natural philosophers at work, Stephenson creates a snapshot of the Scientific Revolution. There is Wren’s see-through beehive , experiments with wells and weights and carriages, Wilkins working on Philosophical Language, Hooke putting all possible things under the microscope and even a description of Hooke's self-confessedly gruesome experiment to keep a vivisected dog’s heart beating by blowing air to its lungs by bellows. 

It is of course fiction, alternate universe or secret universe fiction at that, and should not be taken for a fact, but I think Stephenson has managed to catch something that was true about the way these great natural philosophers worked. Firstly, they argued and had bitter sometimes mysterious feuds, but they also worked together, shared information and collaborated in most unexpected ways with each other. Secondly, they thought – as Shapin delightfully puts it – “that the poor shape of existing natural philosophy [had resulted from] inadequate quality control over its register of facts”. Thus they were busily building up a store of better quality facts by conducting experiments, being interested in all things - and reveling in it. 

John Gribbin, an astrophysicist turn to prolific popular science writer tackles the same cast of characters in his “The Fellowship. The Story of a Revolution”. In a series of biographical sketches from Galileo to Halley he traces the development of scientific ideas and method. Gribbin is out to prove that there is no such thing as a Kuhnian shift of paradigm, that the scientific revolution was a collaborative effort, and that Halley and Hooke are unfairly shadowed by Newton (who spent all that time with useless alchemy anyway).

The end result is frustrating. The frame on which the biographical sketches hang is the Royal Society, but for a book arguing for the collaborative nature of science the format really underplays the exchange of ideas. Also, his inclusion of biographical detail and exclusion of all their areas of interest not part of the path towards the modern scientific world-view makes the sketches unbalanced and extremely selective. Why is Sir Kenelmn Digby, Kitty Barton or Hooke’s incestuous affair with his niece relevant but Newton’s alchemy or Boyle’s astrology are not? These men did not, could not know which of their experiments and theories would end up being important and which would lead into a dead end. Looking at the shakers and movers of scientific revolution as teleologically Gribbin does might arguably be viable from the point of view of a scientist who is not interested in the byways and alleys the search for scientia took the cast of Gribbin’s characters, but for someone interested in the persons and the process, this book is ultimately a failure.

Tamara Siler Jones: Ghosts in the Snow, Threads of Malice, Valley of the Soul

The Pitch would be something like fantasy meets Patricia Cornwall. Jones writes murder mysteries in fantasy setting. Her “detective” Dubric Byerly is an old Castellan who sees ghosts of murder victims until he has solved what happened and punished the guilty parties. He is aided by his squire and pages, and the murders he is called upon to solve are usually more gruesome serial affairs.

What I like about Jones’ work is a good fit of two very different genres, competent story telling, and the fact they are also mentoring fics. Dubric has and is mentoring Dien and they both are mentoring the pages. Why is there so little good fiction about mentoring? It is such an interesting dynamic and so under-utilized. One of the reasons I have grown frustrated with Harry Potter was that Dumbledore is such a crap mentor and Rowlings keeps telling us he really is great.

Steven Saylor: Murha Via Appialla (Murder on the Appian Way)

Saylor’s novels set during the first century B.C. often have a back drop of great events. His detective Gordianus the Finder has helped the rich and famous of the city from Cicero to Caesar, always observing the defining moments of the fall of the Republic. This time Gordianus gets commissioned to find out who really murdered the rabble rousing politician Publius Clodius Pulcher on the Appian Way. Was it his rival Milo or someone else? With his customary skill Saylor weaves together the facts we know with pure invention arriving in an interesting resolution to the plot. Gordianus and his family are as unconventionally adorable here as before and the way Saylor through them depicts the city boiling over and descending towards anarchy is really the best part of the novel, quite outstanding, actually.