This is a slim book of just over a dozen short stories, all with the same theme: a satirical take on when religion becomes dogma, with Orthodox Judaism as the starting point. Some stories deal with the idiocy of religious practices, when taken literally and seriously. One shows two hamsters trying to understand why the gifts of food from their Joe are not as bountiful as they used to be, and attempting to regain Joe’s favour by applying themselves even more diligently on the exercise wheel. A few show what reality might look like from God’s point of view, if the world worked the way religious creed tells us.

The stories are funny and well-written. The thematic focus of the book gave it a strength it wouldn’t have otherwise, but at the same time I found it slightly repetitive. I enjoyed reading this, but wouldn’t have wanted any more of the same.

Adlibris, Amazon US, Amazon UK.

Eric and I both like books, so we own quite a lot of them. Many of them have lived in storage boxes for years now – a sizeable portion of our library stayed behind when we moved to London, and we were only reunited when we moved to this house a year and a half ago. Now, during those winter weekends when there’s nothing to be done in the garden and the weather doesn’t particularly encourage cycling or other activities, we’ve been slowly unpacking and sorting through them all. We’re finally almost through.

There will still be a few boxes for special cases, but most of the books have ended up in one of two places: the shelves, or the charity shop. This weekend we drove to the charity shop with 5 boxes full of books.

Store: Children’s literature that Ingrid’s too young for. Books in French that I read while living in Belgium (that I think I will someday re-read, even though I cannot envisage when or why I would do it). Books that we want to keep for nostalgic reasons. Books that we really don’t open often but like too much to give away.

Shelve: Books we haven’t read yet. Books that we would love to re-read if we had time. Books that are fun to browse. Books that bring back fond memories. Books with a historical meaning (remember dictionaries?).

Ditch: Many books about business and economics from our university days. Lots of mediocre fiction. Various lexicons and reference books: we use the internet instead.

Partway through this work a thought struck me: the entire decision process is founded on the premise that the world will go on functioning as it does today. In particular, we’re assuming that the Internet will go on existing, and that I can use it to look up anything I want.

But if one day we should have an apocalypse that wipes out our communications infrastructure – meteorite, collapse of civilization or whatever – we would probably really miss those reference works and rue our decision to not buy an encyclopedia. The people hoarding all their old books would be the heroes.

Is it worth keeping an encyclopedia packed away in the basement, as a sort of insurance policy? What is the probability of an apocalyptic event happening within my lifetime? A general collapse of civilization could probably be foreseen some way off, but the meteorite scenario is trickier.

Of course if anything like this did actually happen, we’d have bigger problems than lack of information and history. We should instead make sure to equip ourselves with books about basic medicine, growing your own food, and carpentry and metalworking and construction and so on.

See what kinds of thoughts books can lead one to!

I can hardly believe I bought a book that’s part of a 10-book series, and yet I did – because of a Review at SF site that called the book an “astounding debut”. And it was pretty astounding, and I don’t regret buying it the least.

Gardens of the Moon is a book of fantasy in the truest sense of the world. Erikson (and his co-creator Ian Cameron Esslemont) have put their fantasies to work and imagined a fantastical world.

The result is a complex, dense, sprawling, opaque book. There are lots of people and peoples, as well as gods, demi-gods, and other kinds of entities. There are varied, lively cities, hundreds of thousands of years of history, a system of magic not like anything else, and much more. It is clear that a great deal of work has gone into this world. (I found out afterwards that part of the explanation is that the world was created for an RPG and the books came later.)

The setting: The Malazan empire is at war, aiming to conquer a neighbouring continent. The war is not going well, but nevertheless the empire has conquered the next but last Free City on the continent, and is setting its sights on the last one. Meanwhile tension is growing within the empire and the army – the new empress doesn’t trust anyone from the old guard and tries to get rid of them all.

The plot is almost impossible to summarize. There are many threads, crossing and meeting and then separating again. Each one on its own is complex enough to be hard to describe in brief. There is the thread of a squad of elite soldiers sent out to sabotage Darujhistan, the last Free City, in preparation for conquest. There’s the thread of a young army captain trying to catch up with them to save them from the Empress’s plan to get them killed. There is an assassins’ war, there is a group of magicians chasing another, mad, magician, there are attempts to revive an ancient all-powerful monster, and attempts to hinder these attempts, and so on. Oh, and then there are the various gods, meddling in all these affairs: Greek style gods who take a close interest in the mortal world, and have a tendency to manifest physically and push events in their desired direction.

It’s intense, to say the least. And Erikson’s writing style underscores the intensity. The reader is thrown right in, in the middle of the story. It’s sink or swim. There are no info dumps: you either figure it out as the time and the pages pass, or you don’t. Refreshingly challenging.

After the first few chapters, just when I thought I wasn’t up to the challenge, the threads started coming together, and I felt I understood roughly what was going on. Then the story got more complex again, and then some things got their explanations again. The complexity stayed just this side of being unmanageable.

The complexity of the book is simultaneously its strength and its weakness. It makes for a thrilling read, an immersive world, a captivating story. But it also makes for work. This is a cult book rather than mass market fantasy.

This is not a book to be read in one sitting. I felt I had to put it down now and again so my brain could rest. But it was well worth it. I’d say that in order to get through the book without giving up in frustration, you have to go with the flow rather than trying to catch every last detail – but stay focused.

The book, its world and its plot are refreshingly non-tolkienesque. There are no clichés – no dwarves, no elves, no quests. Well, no clichés apart from a thieves’ guild and an assassins’ guild. Sigh.

It’s a dark book, of war, malice, manipulation, ambition and power. This is no war of heroes. There are no heroes, and barely any good guys. There isn’t even a good side and a bad side – it’s everyone against everyone else. In fact at times it’s hard to know who’s on whose side, or indeed how many sides there are. There are real people on each side of each conflict, and we see the conflict from all their points of view. Even though they aren’t good guys per se, they are all easy to sympathise with. And everybody has surprises in them.

While the characters have depth and, well, character, this is still a book driven mainly by plot rather than by character, by intellect rather than emotion. We never really get into the characters’ heads, and it is at times hard to know what moves them. They are instruments for moving the plot along. Erikson has no sentimentality for them: even important people are killed off when it suits him.

And – last but not least – while Gardens of the Moon is a part of a sequence, it is supposed to stand on its own, and I thought it succeeds at that. The story arc was completed, the various spying and assassinating factions mostly sorted out, and a phase of the war concluded. While I’m looking forward to reading more about this world, it’s not a necessity in order to enjoy this book.

Amazon UK, Amazon US.

The topic of survival fascinates me, and especially the non-physical sides of it. I am not so interested in the mechanics of surviving an avalanche, or the knowledge of how to build a shelter out of sticks and how to build a rabbit snare – I want to understand the mindset. Why do some survive all sorts of calamities, whereas others freeze or panic, or just give up?

Gonzales has got some really interesting points. First of all, what leads people to make the – in hindsight – obviously stupid decisions, ignoring glaringly obvious warning signs, that lead to a possibly lethal accident? Among the answers:

• habit – it’s always worked before
• stress leading to confusion
• rigidly following an outdated plan, when reality changes
• holding on to an incorrect mental model of the world even when the map doesn’t seem to match reality
• taking shortcuts, being in a hurry
• group dynamics – not wanting to be the coward, or the one to slow everyone down
• underestimating the forces of nature, the weight of snow, the force of falling from a certain height, the power of ocean waves
• unwillingness to turn back, to give up – the uncertain but hopefully nearer goal is more tempting

And second, what does it take to survive one, after it’s happened? The right mindset.

• focusing, not give in to the shock and confusion of realizing that you’re lost
• have a reason to live, something or someone they want to survive for
• not giving up, even though surviving looks hopeless
• not expecting rescue, not counting on God to save you
• positive thinking: taking delight in small victories

Interesting fact: the youngest children often have very good survival rates, because they follow their instincts. They rest when they’re tired, crawl into a hollow tree when they’re cold. On the other hand, kids between 7 and 12 years of age have one of the worst survival rates, because they think more like adults (and less instinctively) but they cannot yet control their emotional responses, and panic.

On the minus side, the book is not very well organized. It sort of has a structure, but is mostly built out of case studies. The key points lost between anecdotes and quotes.

There’s too much talk about Gonzales’ father and what a cool survivor guy he is, and there are silly attempts to bring chaos theory and self-organizing systems into the picture.

Finally, the book was too narrow for my taste. There’s too much focus on risky adventure sports. (Although there were ordinary cases of getting lost in the woods, too.) I would have preferred something more varied – surviving PoW camp, or an ordinary fire.

Underlying it all is the view that you’re not living a full life unless you engage in activities that could lead to your death, and ideally survive a few accidents that almost do lead to it. This view that your own preferences are universal, that everyone should live life your way, is immature and annoying.

On the whole, it’s got its points but it’s not very well written, and I come away from it slightly disappointed.

Amazon US, Amazon UK.

This is the second book I read by Susanna Clarke, after Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. The Ladies of Grace Adieu is a collection of short stories in what seems to be the same world as in the novel – England but with magic – although not always in the same era. And as with JS&MN, it is written in 19th century style (even for the stories that take place earlier) – dry, witty, charming and mannered.

The stories are faery tales, i.e. tales about faeries. Faeries as powerful tricksters, who do things for their own reasons, and whom you cannot trust even if they seem to be helping you. For one reason or another, in most of these stories, humans come in contact with the world of faeries, and stuff happens.

“Kind of nice”, is the best I can say about this book. There’s nothing exactly wrong with it, but overall it felt a bit tame and repetitive. Most of the stories lacked that special spark. Looking back at it, I would probably have found the stories more entertaining if I had read each one on its own.

Amazon US, Amazon UK.

Plot summary: Pug, an orphaned boy brought up in a small keep in the far backwaters of the kingdom, finds himself apprenticed to the keep’s magician. Before he really has time to learn much magic, however, strangers – apparently from another world – are seen in the lands around the keep, sneaking around, seemingly preparing for an invasion.

Indeed, a rift has been opened between two worlds, by the magicians in the other world, in order to invade this one. This gives them a great tactical advantage. In order to figure out the nature and limitations of the rift, Pug and his master join a scouting foray. Unfortunately Pug is captured and taken to the other world. He stays there a long time, learns their magic and becomes a powerful magician.

Let me get it off my chest: Magician sucks. It is described as a “classic fantasy epic”, gets overwhelmingly positive reviews on Amazon and elsewhere. I found it boring and badly written. It isn’t awful. I actually finished the book (unlike some). But it is bad enough that I find it hard to come up with anything positive to say about it. Even Robert Jordan is better than this.

There is no originality. Pug’s world is a standard Tolkien-slash-medieval world: we’ve got humans (check), elves in the forests (check), dwarves in the mountains (check), and some killing robbing dark elves too (check). They have a standard feudal system, and that standard kind of magic where the magician mumbles a cantrip and waves his arms and stuff happens.

None of it comes to life. There is no depth to the world. I get no feeling of history, or life outside of the story line of this book. That other world is not described vividly enough to ever feel real. The characters are flat, all average and likeable and dull (except for one, who’s mad in a very standard way).

Even the magic feels fake. While magic, and the differences between the magics of the two worlds, are crucial to the plot, we only see very superficial examples of it, and with no understanding of how it works. It is all on the level of “he waved his arms and chanted and magically created some mist”.

The language is dull and plodding. The tone is monotonous. There is no sense of humour, no beauty, no power. The dialogue is embarrassingly bad, stilted and formal in an effort to make it sound medieval. It has no personality – even in the end I couldn’t keep some of the characters apart because they sounded exactly the same.

The pacing is weird, to say the least. At times, several years pass and you almost don’t notice. At other times, a single afternoon’s conversations are rendered in great detail. The siege of the keep takes 30 pages, and yet many more important and potentially more interesting events of the war are over in a few paragraphs. It seems that the expositions are only there to shine a spotlight on some particular person or relationship between persons. It is such painfully clumsy character-building that it’s embarrassing.

The story has no particularly interesting aspects or ideas. It’s hard to see what it’s about, what the point of it is. The plot just plods along, except for an occasional interruption from some very contrived scene. (For example: a commoner of no particular import, who’s barely learned to ride a horse, gets to accompany the princess on her daily rides – just so he gets an opportunity to rescue her.)

I wouldn’t recommend anyone to read this; there are much better examples of fantasy out there. And I have no intention of reading any other works by Feist.

Amazon UK. The book was published as two separate volumes in the US: Magician: Apprentice, Magician: Master.

The Automatic Detective is a strange but funny blend of hard-boiled detective story and retro sci fi.

Mack Megaton is a robot. Originally built for destruction , he has gained free will, given up his violent ways, and now earns a living as a taxi driver. In a city bustling with mutants and sentient robots (many of whom are even full citizens), he actually sort of almost blends in, even though he is huge, red, and almost indestructible.

One day his human neighbours are kidnapped. Mack gets mad. (He has issues with anger management.) He gets no real help from the police, so he decides to track them down and rescue them himself.

The rest of the book is full of what would be standard for a detective novel but comes across as funny in this setting. Confrontations with mob bosses, intimidating their underlings, exchanging macho but witty comments with sassy blonde girl, gunfights and sneaking around.

The Automatic Detective feels sort of like a what-if game by the author – “let’s see if I can make this work”. Since it is founded on a cliché, it feels worn at times, but the mixture as a whole is nevertheless distinctive enough to stand above cliché. Not an unforgettable work of great literature, but good light-hearted fun all the way through.

Amazon US, Amazon UK.

Well. Wow. Where to begin.

Anathem is a book of ideas. It is intellectual, complex, and amazingly ambitious. It is not like anything else I have read. It is a science/philosophy thriller, which sounds really dry and serious, but is much more engrossing than that. Anathem is both funny and fun, if philosophy and quantum theory is your idea of fun. But reading it requires attention and almost feels like work. It is the kind of book that makes me feel dull, and 100 pages in I was already thinking that I should probably really start over, taking notes, and perhaps read up on some philosophy before I do that.

Brief plot summary: On the planet Arbre, scientists live segregated from ordinary people, in convent-like places. The flow of information in both directions is strictly controlled, as is the scholars’ use of technology. This separation was put in place a few thousand years ago after some vaguely described Terrible Events, in order to limit the power of scientists’ ideas, and the risk of dangerous technologies being developed and used.

The convent doors are opened only once per year (or once per 10, 100 or 1000 years, for different parts of the convent). So the scholars inside their walled communities think and theorize, and watch cities come and go outside their walls over thousands of years, and civilization rising and falling and rising again.

Around one of these door-opening times, something happens in the skies of Arbre that changes everything. Some scholars get busy speculating on what exactly happened, and figuring out how it will affect their world – using precious few observations, and their impressive deductive abilities. Events grow, some scientists are even called forth from their convents in order to work together, and finally grand things happen.

This is all told through many philosophical debates and entire chapters filled with theoretical discussions that are crucial to the plot – you can’t skip any of it and still be able to follow the action. It is a Socratic novel. Stephenson manages to cover several major strands of the history Western thought from the ancient Greeks onwards (the history of philosophy on Arbre is similar enough to Earth’s to be clearly recognizable, but obfuscated just enough to make it an effort to match up the two) as well as some interesting parts of quantum theory (and I do mean theory, there are no “quantum wormhole warp drives” in this book).

To quote another reviewer: Anathem is “a unique, impressive but fairly mad novel: one part hubris to one part taking the piss to one part gnarly geek awesomeness” (Strange Horizon Reviews). An Amazon reviewer said it felt like a novelization of Gödel, Escher, Bach, and I can sympathize with that, too.

It was a wonderful if somewhat daunting book. If you haven’t read any other books by Stephenson, don’t start with this one – it might be too big a shock. Which doesn’t in any way mean that it isn’t good – you just need a warm-up first. Stephenson’s scope and ambition have definitely grown over the years but luckily the page count has come down since the Baroque Cycle. (This book is a mere 900 pages, plus appendices with more science if you feel you didn’t get enough.)

Amazon UK, Amazon US.

Flora Fyrdraaca is the almost-14-year-old daughter of an old and once-illustrious family of soldiers. But now there is little left of their illustrious past: the father is mad, the mother always off working, and the magical butler has been banished so the house is in disrepair. And Flora herself is named Flora Segunda because she is the replacement for the first Flora, blonde and beautiful, lost in the war.

On top of that, Flora is stuck with most of the housework since the butler is gone. She also has her Catorcena, the celebration of her adulthood, to prepare for – speech to write, dress to finish, invitations to sign.

When Flora stumbles upon the butler, she sees a chance to get rid of some of the housework, and for some excitement, too. She happily promises to restore him to his powers. Of course this is not as easy as it sounds, and meddling in magic can have dangerous consequences.

Both the girl and the book are spirited, colourful, outrageous, and keep confounding expectations. All characters are over-the-top but not so much as to become caricatures. At several points I thought I saw a cliched resolution coming up, and I am glad to say I was wrong every time. A fun read all the way through.

Amazon US, Amazon UK.

The Cloudspotter’s Guide is exactly what it says on the tin: a systematic guide to the main types of clouds, their subspecies and varieties, the physics leading to their creation and disappearance, etc. It’s all that, plus a love for clouds. The science is mixed up with all sorts of anecdotes and asides, personal reflections and observations about clouds in art and culture.

This is a pleasant diversion, a charming book. The style is very personal and chatty. This makes it an easy read but at the same time makes it hard to remember many details. There were so many disparate facts that I have already forgotten most of them, and the clouds all blur together again. But nevertheless, it was a pleasant read.

My one complaint is the lack of pictures. Each chapter starts with a nice woodcut-style illustration of a particular type of cloud, but apart from those ten images, and a few colour plates in the middle, there are mostly small black and white photos, flat and grainy – probably because of cost issues. This should be a glossy book with pictures all over the place. Not a coffee-table book, mind you: I rather liked reading it during my commute, and being able to look up from the book and gaze at the clouds above me.

Amazon UK, Amazon US.