Some unknown catastrophe has destroyed the Earth. The world now consists of burnt earth, ashes, ever-present clouds, ashy rain and ashy snow. Most human life and all non-human life is dead.

Several years after the catastrophe, a father and a son make their way through the devastation towards the sea. Not really expecting to find anything different there, they keep walking because they need something to aim for. With a shopping cart to hold their possessions, they scavenge whatever small scraps they can find, and hide from “the bad guys”. The only food to be had is tinned.

It is late autumn / early winter. Some days it rains, other days it snows. The two are thin and cold and filthy and hungry, frequently hovering near death.

The son, born days after whatever cataclysm caused this devastation, is young enough to not question things. He has learnt to be afraid of everything, and yet he has a child’s innocence and unconditional love for his father – and anyone else who is not a “bad guy”. The father knows what has been lost but is slowly forgetting what life used to be like.

The father keeps going only because he knows that he needs to keep his son alive. (The mother gave up years ago and took her own life. In a world like this, suicide is the sane choice.) Both are only kept alive by their love for each other – neither can imagine a life without the other.

That’s Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. A dark and grim book. The world he describes is depressing, brutal and miserable. A world without hope, and without hope of hope. But nevertheless there is so much love and tenderness in this book that the enduring feeling is one of love. A heartbreaking book, to be sure, but at the same time also strangely uplifting.

In any case it’s a powerful and compelling book. It’s stark and minimalistic in language and description and plot. In fact there isn’t much plot, just repetition of the same few activities: walk, hide, scavenge, shiver, sleep. No chapters, just moments. Little punctuation, and as few words as possible. Things and people have no names, even: there is “the man” and “the boy”. But when the world has ended, who can care about punctuation?

The Road should ideally be read in a day or two, so you can immerse yourself in the feelings, and let the book take hold of you. As soon as I had finished it, I wanted to re-read it, but didn’t, because it would have been too much. It’s one of those unforgettable books that will stay with you forever.

Amazon US, Amazon UK.

Best review: NY Review of Books.

What emerges most powerfully as one reads The Road is not a prognosticatory or satirical warning about the future, or a timeless parable of a father’s devotion to his son, or yet another McCarthyesque examination of the violent underpinnings of all social intercourse and the indifference of the cosmic jaw to the bloody morsel of humanity. The Road is not a record of fatherly fidelity; it is a testament to the abyss of a parent’s greatest fears. The fear of leaving your child alone, of dying before your child has reached adulthood and learned to work the mechanisms and face the dangers of the world, or found a new partner to face them with. The fear of one day being obliged for your child’s own good, for his peace and comfort, to do violence to him or even end his life. And, above all, the fear of knowing—as every parent fears—that you have left your children a world more damaged, more poisoned, more base and violent and cheerless and toxic, more doomed, than the one you inherited.

Off the Books is subtitled “The Underground Economy of the Urban Poor”. It’s a study of the economic networks of a poor black neighbourhood in Chicago, complete with gangs, prostitutes etc. Reviewers have labelled it a “revealing study” and “a fascinating look at a place and community that would otherwise remain entirely under the radar”, and promised insights into the P&L statements of gang leaders.

It all sounded very interesting, but the book itself was a total disappointment. The book is too long but nevertheless has too little content.

First of all, the book focuses more on the social networks than on the actual economy of the neighbourhood. There’s more talk about the social responsibilities of gang leaders than about how they make money. This is perhaps to be expected, given that the author is a professor of sociology and African-American studies, not of economy, but it was nevertheless not what I expected.

Of course the book could nevertheless have been interesting, but it wasn’t. On the one hand it doesn’t carry its weight as a serious study – it’s not rigorous and solid enough. The whole book is made up of minutiae. There are lots of anecdotes and observations, but few hard facts and analysis, and hardly any conclusions. A study of an economy should surely at least give us some facts and figures: How large is the economy? How many people live in the area? How much do they earn? How much do they work? A map would have been useful as well.

It also doesn’t work as a popular book, because it’s not particularly well written. It’s repetitive and badly organised. The language is leaden, painfully awkward – an uncomfortable mix of highbrow academic terms and colloquial first-person accounts. The book is in desperate need of an editor – it looks like it got published without any attention from editorial staff.

Here’s a representative section:

[Big Cat] was only one of many local stakeholders who resolved economic disputes because the state had no formal authority. Many other local people enforced contracts, or resolved disputes, or, for a fee, could find you a gun, a social security card, or even a job as a day laborer or a nanny for a wealthy family. Others may have claimed control over parks, alleyways and street corners; these people would have to be paid if one wanted to fix a car, sell drugs, or panhandle at that spot. And there were many local loan sharks, besides Big Cat, who could loan you cash, or who could find you customers – for stolen stereos or drugs, for prostitutes or home-cooked lunches – in a matter of a few hours.

Enumeration is piled on enumeration, and it goes on and on in the same vein. I found this so irritating that after 100 pages I couldn’t take any more and gave up.

Amazon UK, Amazon US.

The Best Software Writing I is, well, a collection of good writing about software. Edited by Joel Spolsky, who is quite a good software writer himself.

The book covers a wide range of topics – from the design of social software to how to hire developers. However they all tend towards the “peopleware” side of things: the interaction between humans and software, rather than the technical minutiae of writing code. The selection has clearly not been guided by any sort of overarching theme or purpose, but rather by what Joel is interested in.

And that, I think, is the greatest weakness of the book: an unclear aim. Joel claims on the back cover that “the goal of this book is to encourage better writing about software by highlighting some of the best writing of the year”. That’s an admirable goal, but it leads to a book that’s aimed at everyone and no one in particular. It’s even unclear whether the book is mostly meant for a technical or non-technical audience. Almost all of the essays assume some familiarity with software development, although not at a very technical level – a technically-minded non-developer wouldn’t have any difficulty. And yet there are footnotes explaining basic concepts in idiotic terms: “Dev = developer = an actual computer programmer”. Huh?

Some reviewers disagree, and mean that the book’s greatest weakness is that you have to pay for it, while most (or possibly all) of the material can be found online for free, including Joel’s introduction. But I like the feel of a book in my hands, and I also like to have a book in my bookshelf so it reminds me to re-read it occasionally. So even though I’d read several of the essays and blog entries before, I chose to buy the book rather than look for the rest online.

The quality of the essays varies. Some were worth reading once, and I’ll skip them the next time. There was a bit too much Eric Sink for my taste (come on Joel, three essays by Eric and only one by Paul Graham? What were you thinking?) and I really don’t think that why the lucky stiff is an example of good software writing. On the other hand, A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy by Clay Shirky is so good that it’s almost worth buying the book just to read this one essay.

Because the book was written with no one in particular in mind, I’m not really sure who I’d recommend it to. The most likely audience would be technically-minded people interested in the human factors of software development. But the contents of this book aren’t new, the thoughts aren’t new, so someone who’s interested in the field will most likely have read these or similar materials already. Worth picking up if you haven’t.

Amazon UK, Amazon US.

Red Seas Under Red Skies is part 2 of The Gentleman Bastards series (here’s my review of book one).

Locke’s thieving life continues in Red Seas, this time focusing on one Big Con that will hopefully set Locke and Jean up to live comfortably the rest of their lives. Of course, complications arise, and his plans get more and more tangled.

Red Seas has got almost all the good bits of part 1 (colourful environments, snappy dialogue, humour, lots of action) and is free the most obvious weakness of part 1 (a chopped-up narration because of frantic cutting between past and present). The pacing really is a lot better. We come in towards the end of the run-up to the big heist, and while there are flashbacks to Locke’s earlier preparations, these are few and well placed.

As the title hints, this book has got not just thieves but pirates, too. Halfway through it goes from being a Big Con book to being a pirate book – it’s really two stories in one. Most of the time that’s OK but the whole thing gets quite frantic in pace at the end when all has to be resolved.

I was a bit disappointed that the book doesn’t take the overarching story of Locke’s life any further. In the first book he grew up, became a thief, made friends, got a gang etc etc. Here he just spends a few years of his life thieving and conning, and by the end of it, not much has changed. I’m hoping for more of a long-term plan in book 3.

I also hope he gets a new gang or at least some more friends in the next book. Book 1 had a fair number of colourful likeable characters, but in book 2 instead of a whole gang there’s just Locke and Jean most of the time. That gives us too few people to care about, although we do get some pirates to care about for a while.

The pirates are of course as good and decent inside as the thieves. All this pirating, killing and looting is just a job. In fact, most of the time the series strongly romanticises crime and violence. There are likeable thieves who steal only from the rich, beautiful female pirates, exciting escapes and so on. It could almost get tasteless… but then at regular intervals in both books, a conflict ends with the death of someone Locke cares about. It’s not all fun and games, being a thief.

Speaking of dying, Lynch seems to have a great fondness for cruel and unusual punishments. In his books people invent ever more bizarre poisons, torture others for fun, organise violent games, or exact revenge through slow and painful death. None of this leads to more than raised eyebrows – no outrage, no campaigning for ending cruelty to the poor. The morals in Locke’s world must be different than in ours.

But all these complaints are minor quibbles. I found Red Seas to be a very enjoyable book, great fun to read, a book that makes time fly past. It’s like a good James Bond movie, complete with evil overlord and a ticking bomb kind of death threat, lots of action and flair and fun in exotic places. I’m already looking forward to book 3.

Amazon UK, Amazon US.

Having read and enjoyed Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister, I picked up Gregory Maguire’s other retelling of a fairy story: Wicked, telling the behind-the-scenes story of the Wicked Witch of the West from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.

If Oz is a wonderful childhood memory for you, you may not want to read this. This book takes Oz as a starting point and twists it so it is barely recognizable apart from the basic structure. The Wizard, it turns out, was a cruel and repressive dictator, while Elphaba, the Wicked Witch of the West, was far more interested in science and politics than in sorcery.

The book is presented as an exploration of what it means to be evil, about the nature of evil. In fact the book does not say much interesting about evil at all. But if you ignore this false marketing and approach it simply as a story, the book is very well worth reading.

It’s the story of Elphaba’s life. And it’s not a very uplifting story. Oz is a dismal and dreary land, and Elphaba’s life is a tragedy more than an adventure. She has a harsh childhood (with her father a religious fanatic and her mother dead when Elphaba is only five years old) going on through a rebellious adolescence to stormy adulthood. She has a strong moral sense and great courage, but nevertheless she doesn’t succeed in changing any of the wrongs she sees around her. She leads a passionate but generally lonely life. As the years pass she comes to feel like a failure, becoming somewhat unbalanced, in the end probably slightly mad. And when Dorothy’s party of travellers comes along (and she is fully aware that they’re there to kill her) and cruelly slaughters her favourite dog, she goes over the edge.

Or maybe it’s really the story of her death? It’s not quite as obvious as getting to the end of the book and then seeing how all the pages, all the events before were leading up to that point. But to some extent it is like that. We know from the beginning that she will die, even how she will die, so we know where the story will end up.

Several reviewers complain that the book doesn’t have a plot, that characters come and go without warning, that story threads run out without being tidied up. There is no climax and no conclusion. That’s all factually correct but it didn’t bother me at all. This is Elphaba’s story; what happens to the other characters is only relevant to the extent it affects Elphaba’s life. And how many lives have a climax and a dramatic conclusion? Very few, I’d imagine. Instead we live, perhaps struggle to achieve something, until we die, one way or another.

Despite all this, I somehow didn’t find the book depressing. I thought it was a great story, imaginative and engaging, and well told. Well worth reading.

If you want more reviews, go here for a negative one and here for a positive one.

Amazon US, Amazon UK.

Rembrandt, The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp

The Exquisite seems to be the story of a drunk, mentally unstable thief named Henry and his friend Mr. Kindt. Mr. Kindt is an older gentleman with a passion for herring who may be a crime boss, a descendant of the subject of Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lesson, or both. Somehow he manages to come across as spooky rather than silly (at least mostly), as do his associates, the contortionist twins and a beautiful tattoo artist named Tulip. Henry visits Mr. Kindt in his apartment, has long conversations with him, and sort of becames engaged to perform certain “services” for Mr. Kindt.

Interspersed with scenes of this story is another one, where Henry is in the hospital after a traffic accident. Mr. Kindt is also in the hospital, and they are cared for by a Dr. Tulp. People sharing names and characteristics float from one story to another, and it never becomes quite clear whether they are the same people or not – just as it is never clear whether these parallel scenes precede, follow, or coincide with the main story.

Even though there are sequences of events, the book doesn’t exactly have a plot. The whole thing is vaguely dreamlike and has a hallucinatory feel – as if Henry was floating through the world only half-aware of what was going on around him, and occasionally mixed up dream and reality.

I found it hard to really get engaged in the book and struggled to keep reading it. It wasn’t exactly bad but it didn’t pull me in at all. Reviews that I’ve seen of the book have ranged from positive to glowing. Perhaps this is another one of those too-modern books that some of us just don’t “get”.

Amazon UK, Amazon US.

The book is subtitled “Three adventures of Vlad Taltos”. Vlad is an assassin and a minor crime boss, with an intelligent mini-dragon as a pet.

The stories take place in a world where humans are a minor race, and the dominant people are almost-human Dragaerans, who look down on humans. Dragaerans are near-immortal, powerful wizards. Humans are puny.

Quite an interesting world which becomes more complex and more complicated as we learn more about it. Brust throws in more and more stuff as the pages go by: reincarnation, a complex social/political system, two different kinds of magic, etc. One important part of magic is that it can revive the dead. This obviously makes an assassin’s job somewhat different.

As far as the story goes, the Taltos books are mystery stories, really, rather than traditional fantasy. There are numerous assassinations but the focus is not on the act itself but on the planning or the foiling of a plot to kill someone. The style is not the usual fantasy style, either. It is relaxed and modern, with lots of humour. An Amazon reviewer compared it to Futurama and that’s quite apt.

There is a lot of dialogue and a lot of elaborate plot, yet very little description. I guess that’s in keeping with the hard-boiled mystery style, but I thought Brust pushed it a bit too far. I have no idea what the world or the people look like, apart from a very few basic descriptions. (Dragaerans are tall and slim; humans have mustaches.)

The story itself was not entirely believable. First of all there’s Vlad’s relationships with some of the most powerful Dragaerans. Dragaerans are said to generally view humans as worthless scum, and yet here some lords actually chat to Vlad and go out of their way to help him. An explanation is given at some point but not a particularly satisfactory one.

Then, more fundamentally, there’s the matter of assassinations, and making a living as an assassin, and becoming what’s described as a first-class assassin, in a world where assassinations are illegal and rare. On the one hand Brust implies that there’s a whole business of assassination, with standard fees and general procedures to be followed when ordering one. On the other hand Vlad mentions, at some point, that he has 42 assassinations under his belt, and that was (I think) over a period of some 5 to 10 years. So he only kills a person once every few months. That doesn’t add up. It’s too little to give him a chance to become good at it, and too little to make an assassination a normal occurrence.

On the whole the book stands out from the general mass of fantasy books: quite entertaining, memorable, never boring. But it’s not well enough written to stand with the best of them (the repetitive dialogue quirks became annoying after a while). Good for a rainy weekend or two.

Another review I liked.
Amazon US, Amazon UK.

These are my notes from reading Lise Elliot’s What’s Going On in There?.

“Why Babies Love to Be Bounced: The Precocious Sense of Balance and Motion”.

This chapter talks about the vestibular sense, i.e. the sense of balance and movement.

A few interesting facts I learned:

Already at 10 weeks, a fetus reacts to movement.

(more…)

Why do all SF and fantasy books grow into series?

I regularly visit the web page of Stockholm’s science fiction bookshop to see what new books are coming out. Even though I haven’t bought any books from them for a few years at least, I go there because they’ve got a very nice overview page where it’s very easy to see at just a glance which new books they are stocking.

The page currently has 30 books; 31 if you count the American and British editions of Terry Goodkind’s Confessor separately. Of the 30, 23 are parts of series – the worst offender is #17 in its series! Two more are associated with series (one is a Star Wars book and one is a prequel to some other book). That leaves just 5 standalone books.

If I want to buy a book, I want a book that is able to stand on its own and is worth reading on its own. I want one book, not seventeen. And I don’t want to jump in the middle of a story. So when I skim that page my eyes skip right over all those series.

I guess series help sell books. If you get someone to buy the first one and the subsequent don’t drop drastically in quality, the reader might keep going out of sheer inertia. But if they missed the first books when those came out, are they going to be interested in book 8? Unlikely, I think. In my case at least series significantly reduce the chance that I’ll even open the book.

The books belong to a loosely-connected trilogy. Chronologically, Gifts comes first, but it is in no way necessary to read them in that order, and I happened to do the opposite. The third book, Powers, has not been released in paperback yet.

For some reason I found Voices and Gifts in the young adult section in the bookshop, just like the Earthsea books. I don’t know why, because there isn’t much “young adult” about them, apart from the protagonists, and the size – these are no brick-sized lumps. (And if the age of the characters determines the audience, then why isn’t the rest of the bookshop grouped by age?) It’s a shame, because Le Guin’s young adult books are far more mature and intelligent than most fantasy that’s marketed to adults.

Both books are about growing up – not so much about learning as about growing wiser and losing that teenage righteous anger, and about finding your place in the world. And that isn’t particularly easy, given the harsh worlds and hard lives these characters start out with. Most of Voices takes place in an occupied city, and the protagonist, Memer, is a siege brat, born after her mother was raped by one of the occupying soldiers. In Gifts, Orrec lives on a highland farm, with raids from neighbouring domains a normal part of his life.

In Voices books and reading are forbidden. Memer is one of the few of her generation who learns to read, since the occupiers believe that reading and writing are evil and outlaw both. Books become a passion for her, and she yearns to overthrow the occupying army. In the end she is forced to learn that they are only human, just like her, despite everything they have done.

In Gifts certain highland families have special gifts, such as the ability to call animals, or to strike a man dumb. The story revolves around the effect of these gifts – sometimes desired, sometimes unwanted – on both the wielder and the people around them. The power to destroy by looking and pointing at a thing, for example… It makes you look at the world with different eyes, and makes others look at you differently, too. On the whole these gifts, which at first glance seem magical, seem to cause more trouble than good. It’s a darker book than Voices, with more pain and grief, but nevertheless ends on a positive note. As with Voices, stories and storytelling play an important role. Much of the happiness in Orrec’s life comes from stories – first from the stories his mother tells her, then from stories that he makes up himself.

One of the aspects I really liked in both books was that they never turned into a simplistic good-vs-evil story. The occupying army in Voices are really just humans, not evil monsters, and the city is finally liberated with the help of words rather than arms. The bad guys in Gifts are a bit more all-black, no-good baddies, but here their role is limited and the story focuses much more on Orrec’s own acts and decisions.

The language is as good as in all other Le Guin books. It is simple, restrained, and beautiful, and poetic without ever being overblown. Wonderful to read, and I wish there was more of it.

If you want to hear more, here’s a review of Voices that I liked.

Voices at Amazon UK, Gifts at Amazon UK.
Voices at Amazon US, Gifts at Amazon US.