I’m seriously behind with this books category, with 3 read-but-unreviewed books on my desk right now. Instead of “catching up” by just skipping them, I’ll post something quick.

Some time in January I realised I hadn’t read any books in Swedish for a very long time, and decided to rectify that by reading Jan Guillou’s “Arn” series. This is a trilogy plus one freestanding sequel, about Sweden around the year 1200.

The first one is about Arn’s childhood and youth, most of which is spent in a monastery. The book has a fairly domestic feel, focusing mostly on everyday life and customs. This was quite interesting, because it appears well researched, and has a lot of historical detail without sounding like a schoolbook.

The second book is split between Arn’s adventures as a Knight Templar in Jerusalem and his fiancee’s waiting for him in a convent. The convent bits are not particularly exciting, but the passages about fighting to free the Holy Land from saracens are interesting. It’s got excellent descriptions of medieval politics and warfare, life in a militant / spiritual order, and the practical side of Crusading in the Middle East. Very vivid and alive.

In the third book Arn returns to Sweden, with knowledge, riches and foreign craftsmen. (Sweden at that time was a distant backwater and many decades behind continental Europe when it came to crafts and culture.) He builds up the strength of his clan, aiming to bolster the tenuous peace between rival clans. He brings Sweden closer to European standards – in particular in warfare, by introducing the concept of mounted armoured knights. I found this book less interesting, because there was little new in it. Daily life in early-medieval Sweden was already covered in book 1, and warfare in book 2. The only interesting parts here were descriptions of how society changed due to changes in practical matters.

As Arn dies at the end of the third book, the fourth and final one tries to squeeze a bit more money out of the franchise by telling the story of one of his grandsons. This one was full of politics, intrigue, rebellions, counter-rebellions etc, and I skimmed through it mostly just to be done with it.

All in all it’s quite a decent series of books. Well written, and well researched, even if the story was running thin at the end.

“Quicksilver” is nothing like it’s name. Apart from its weight, that is – it’s a 1000-page book, and that’s only part 1 of 3 in the Baroque Cycle. Indeed, sheer mass and size is my main impression of the book. I’ve read my share of long books, but this was in a class of its own. There is so much going on that it is positively overwhelming. (Indeed, it’s baroque.)

It’s not clear to me what the book was about, or what the point of it was supposed to be. “Developments in late 17th century Europe, with England as the centrepoint” is the only way I can think of summarising it. It talks about how “things” changed radically, said things including science (as natural philosophy emerges from alchemy), politics (religious freedom), financial markets etc.

That’s one of the book’s great weaknesses – it sprawls. There is no overarching theme and no real plot. Instead there are numerous interwoven threads and themes; not just one but three main characters. The story is even broken into three parts that are quite different in character – the first revolves mostly around scholarly pursuits and English politics, the second is more of an adventure story, and the third deals more with international politics (mostly intrigues) and finance (mostly market manipulation). I found myself wondering when he would get to the point, or the central story, and he never did.

Around all that, vast multitudes of facts. Descriptions of scientific experiments, of sea battles, clothes, London streets, political scheming, etc etc etc. At their best, the facts are very funny and curious. Description of implements for an operation to remove kidney stones, anyone? The different parts of Newgate prison? The tactics of naval battles against pirates? All there. At other times it almost reads like a history textbook, with all those names and who-tries-to-conquer-what. In the end my brain couldn’t take any more of them in and just skimmed through them, retaining nothing more than their general character.

I get the impression that all those facts are there for two reasons – one, because the author wants to share his knowledge of them, and two, to set the mood / atmosphere. They are certainly thoroughly researched and give a strong impression of the atmosphere at that time. But you can’t build an entire book out of that. And that’s the problem with not having a theme: there’s nothing to relate the facts to. The point of a theme or a plot is that it helps the reader distinguish essential facts from embellishments, and provides a structure that makes it easier to remember them. When everything is equally important, nothing is.

As one reviewer at Amazon ways, “This is what you get when you have a talented author who knows a whole lot of interesting things involving some of history’s greatest people and wants to make a novel out of all that great material… but can’t find a story.” Communication always happens on the terms of the listener, and here the speaker has paid too much attention to himself and his curiosity, and too little to the reader. Too much showing off.

The middle part – the adventure story – and related sections of part three were easiest to enjoy, while still giving a good impression (as far as I can judge) of life at that time. Think “The Three Musketeers” but with one man and one woman: an appealing mixture of adventure and humour and history.

Key to making these parts interesting were the characters: Jack Shaftoe, vagabond, and Eliza, ex-Turkish slave, now putting her brains to good use in French palace intrigue, finance and spying. While Eliza isn’t entirely believable, at least they actually do things, whereas the leading person of the rest of the book, Daniel Waterhouse, mainly just hangs around. His raison d’être is to provide an observer to all the events and more interesting people that are there waiting to be observed: the plague and subsequent great fire of London, the works of Isaac Newton, English religious politics etc. I found him utterly bland. I’d much rather have read more about people who actually did something interesting, such Newton or Leibniz or Hooke.

The whole thing would have worked much better if it had been broken into two separate parts – one for the adventures and intrigues, and one for the evolution / birth of modern science, and the changes in London. The latter would need a new lead character and a lot of pruning – and a story!

I’ve enjoyed Stephenson’s other books (Cryptonomicon, Snow Crash) so I had high expectations of this one. And while it was interesting, or at least never really boring, it certainly wasn’t as good as I had hoped, and I’m not entirely sure it was worth the effort (because it certainly was an effort). Had it not been by Stephenson, I might have given up partway through part 1 (or hopefully just skipped to part 2). Actually, I would probably have kept going, the good parts are really engrossing and always seemed to promise improvement. I will probably read the other volumes as well (still in the hope that improvement is near), but I don’t feel any overwhelming urgency to do so. I need to rest from this one for a while.

This is the third Hornby book I’ve read, and they seem to get successively weaker. About a Boy was really funny; High Fidelity was quite good, How to be Good was really not worth reading. Repetitive and predictable plot, where nothing particularly exciting happens, and the small things that are allowed to happen just fizzle out soon after. A lot of words are spent on the thoughts of the female protagonist whose inner life actually isn’t particularly gripping. No surprises from any of the characters, who are generally flat and stereotypical. I couldn’t bring myself to care for any of them.

I’m not giving much away by saying that the book is about a man who is transformed by a meeting, and thereafter goes out of his way to be good. Only he does it without really consulting his family, and without thinking very much about his actions. Inviting homeless people to stay in your house without any warning is generally a bad idea, and you’d think that an intelligent adult would realize that. The wife is obviously upset, and the children’s loyalties are split between the parents. And so on.

But the book doesn’t do anything with this idea. It’s a superficial book about a topic that a more thoughtful writer could actually do something great with. Yes, the book (or rather David, the man in question) talks a lot about how we should be spending more time and effort doing good. Yet his actions are so clearly quixotic and unrealistic, and his wife’s objections are even less well-considered than his own arguments. Neither of them says anything fully convincing, so the whole theme of Being Good becomes an empty gesture, just to keep the plot going.

I couldn’t be bothered to read all of it, and only just skimmed through the last third.

Its only redeeming quality is that I got it as a free supplement with a magazine I once bought to read during a long tube ride. I have no strong memories of the magazine, but I believe I enjoyed it more than this book.

The book looks rather intimidating with its white-on-black cover and 1000 pages. It looks like one of those virtuous, serious things that are supposed to be good for you. And all the bookshops were selling it so pushily that I felt a slight aversion to it before I’d even opened it. But Neil Gaiman said good things on the back cover, and I’d heard some vaguely good rumours about it, so I did open it after all.

I hadn’t expected it to be so much fun.

In two words, this is a book of English magic. Rather obviously, there are two magicians, called Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. Although we actually meet them in the reverse order. I guess it’s because of this presence of magicians that the book is compared to Harry Potter… It could hardly be any more different from Harry Potter, in my opinion! Magic is just about the only thing they have in common, and a British author. I won’t make this into a “JSMN is not Harry Potter” post, but, well, this is a very different book – and quite a lot better.

All the basic parts of a good book are there: good plot, great characters, good language.
It’s a bit slow to take off (the first third of the book feels a bit longish) but when it does, it gets quite exciting. I spent most of this Sunday in the sofa reading it, because I didn’t want to have to put it down in the evening and wait a whole day before finishing it. It is a bit scattered, a bit like a clockwork – lots of fascinating parts that tick and turn. But in the end all the apparently erratic offshoots are gathered up and tied up very neatly. The ending is quite powerful – everything that happens, happens for the sake of one moment, everything leads to this, but you only see this after it’s happened. It is a bit too long, though, and some of the meanderings could have been cut out without any great loss. I’m hoping that she’s learned from this book and that the sequel (which isn’t explicitly mentioned but certainly seems probable) will be more concentrated.

It’s actually quite hard to point out what makes a book great rather than good… My respect for good book reviewers increases every time I try to write a post about a book I’ve read. I like to browse other people’s reviews before writing anything (but after reading). Good ones are hard to find; poor reviews, incidentally, are very easy to write, and the web is full of them. The good ones tell me something new about the book – the bad ones summarise the plot and say whether the book was good/bad and you should/should not read it, and that’s it.

Great books have life and variety. Much of the greatness of JSMN comes from the variety and intensity in it. It ranges from small-scale domesticity to muddy exhausting battlegrounds; from cosy wittiness to fantastical visions. It flows from the simple to the grand, without feeling inconsistent or disjointed.

Great books are often unique. Great books tell stories that no one has told before, or tell them in a completely new manner / tone. Books that fit neatly into a category are rarely great.

JSMN is unique in its take on magic. It’s about magic as a part of life. Unlike most fantasy books, it’s written in realistic style – instead of magical realism, this is realistic magic.

It’s about magic and how it fits into life. Magic is a profession – and like any job, it ranges from tedious and mundane to adventure, glory and exciting discoveries. Magic is a science – it’s a complex process that we don’t fully understand, but can learn more about if we study it. Magic, as any power, changes people and society – in the book’s world it plays, in a way, the role of industrialisation in our reality. There are hints in the book that magic will slowly start to erase barriers between social classes and make it possible for men to get ahead by virtue of what one does, not just by titles and money. But magic is also a powerful force that pervades everything in the world, more powerful than even the magicians at first can imagine, and the book ends with that realization.

Interestingly, most really different books in the fantasy / science fiction arena have come from Britain recently – Mieville, Gaiman, Clarke, Banks. In fact, JSMN is a quintessentially English book. Its language is very English, as is its humour, and the characters. It’s fun to read about people going to places that I know – I can picture the streets they walk in, the gray weather, the houses.

Several reviews I’ve read pointed out something I hadn’t conciously thought about – JSMN is very much about the character of the English and England as they were 200 years ago. There’s this sense of England being the centre of the world, and Englishness as the natural state of affairs. There is no mention of any non-English magicians, for example, and everyone who’s not English is seen and portrayed kind of like a curious foreign object. If you don’t like Englishness (some reviews complain about an excess of “stiff, English-backed male characters who disembark from horse-carriages and tug on bellpulls to call for their valets”) or historical novels then you’ll probably find this book rather boring and stiff.

All of this sounds frighteningly serious… the book is anything but. It’s thrilling, funny, beautifully written, and very enjoyable.

I just finished re-reading the Sandman series of comics / graphic novels, which I last read almost exactly 6 years ago.

Like all of Neil Gaimans books – Neverwhere, Good Omens, Stardust, Coraline, American Gods – it is something of a mixture of fairy tale, fantasy and modern myth. I won’t tell you the stories here, but the Sandman is about the Endless – concepts related to how we perceive the world, that are more fundamental than mere gods. Dream (the Sandman) is the one we see the most of, although we meet his siblings as well, especially Death and Delirium.

Eric is an avid reader of comics, so we’ve got a whole bunch. I’ve read some, and liked some – the Sandman series, Bone, V for Vendetta.

I’m not a huge fan of comics in general. They don’t pull me in the same way that a book or a movie can do. I believe that this is in large part due to the mixing of two modes: pictures and text. I sometimes get so engrossed in the story that my eyes skip the pictures and just follow the words, so then I have to stop, go back and look at the pictures separately. That breaks up the flow. I think the two go to different parts of the brain.

And quite often I just don’t think that the quality of the graphic side is high enough. The pictures may be sufficient to tell a story, but they don’t look good. I wouldn’t call them artwork, and I wouldn’t want to look at them on their own, without the story to support them. Many comic artists just draw in a “standard comic book style” – I couldn’t pick their work from among a dozen others. Others are unable to (or choose not to) draw figures and faces consistently – a character might have sharp cheekbones and a long nose in one frame, and then suddenly get cuddly round cheeks and an upturned nose in another. This annoys me a little bit whenever I see it. And characters are after all rather central to novels.

To put it differently, many comics seem to assume that the quality of text and pictures is additive. It isn’t – it’s closer to multiplicative. If one is half-good and the other is half-good then the total won’t be even half-good, it’ll be a quarter-good.

In fact, a graphic novel is harder to do well than a simple novel, or a simple series of pictures, because not only do both parts need to be good, they need to work together. When both the writer and the artist do get it right, graphic novels can be very good. They’re not a novel with illustrations, and they’re not annotated pictures. Both parts are essential to the whole, and together they make up something new.

The Sandman gets both parts right, almost all of the time. A graphic novel is not drawn by the same artist from beginning to end. Different artists draw different issues, and the graphic style of the series can therefore vary a lot over time. The Kindly Ones (vol 9) is completely in a league of its own, but A Game of You (vol 5), World’s End (vol 8) and The Wake (vol 10) are really good as well. When it comes to art, I have a slightly old-fashioned taste in that I like things to look beautiful. Not pretty, but beautiful. Music should have melody and rhythm, and not sound like noise; art should have beauty. The Kindly Ones is very beautiful – it has a very expressive style, beautiful colours, confident lines, and uses different styles very well to highlight different parts of the story.

Standing above and apart from the rest of the artwork are Dave McKean’s stunning and fantastical covers for each issue. Those are so good that I wouldn’t mind having my bedroom walls covered with large-size reproductions. In fact they are so good that the covers have been published as a separate book.

The Sandman is also very well written. Gaiman creates beautiful prose, and he can handle very different tones of voice equally well. He can be solemn, funny, tragic, demented, casual, indifferent, jaded… often several of these at the same time. At the same time he’s a great storyteller. Even his most fantastical stories feel true, in a sense, and while I’m reading them it seems perfectly plausible to accept that there is a world where Dream walks around as a moody young man dressed in black. The central story, that of Dream, is only part of what is going on – the comic book format leaves Gaiman a lot of space to wander around on his way towards the end, and there are a lot of sub-stories. There are stories about the power of dreams, and stories about what happens when dreams disappear, or when we spend too much time in dreams. And all this is told in dozens of different formats – horror stories, adventures, love stories, fables, stories about people telling stories… So there is a lot of breadth and variety.

There is a lot of sheer fantasy and inventiveness in the small things. The “minor” characters are as well-defined as the central ones. Everybody gets great dialogue. Delirium in particular is an endless source of wonderful suprises. She creates little frogs when she is bored, or perhaps turns herself into a cloud of fish, talks in swirly rainbow colours and says things like “I wish I could give you a present. Do you need a word that means red and green at the same time?”

These are, in fact, the things that make me love the Sandman: in both text and pictures, there’s imagination and variety, there’s humour and beauty, and the smallest parts are as carefully thought-out as the central themes.

This past Thursday, Eric came back from a trip to Sweden, and brought with him a pile of books from the stash that we left behind in storage when we moved to London. Most of the pile was made up by 9 books by Mercedes Lackey. Lackey writes fantasy, of the traditional sword-and-sorcery sort. To be correct, she does write some other stuff too, but none of the other books look particularly interesting and haven’t read any of them, while I do own all her s&s books.

She is my favourite writer, but in a peculiar way. Her books aren’t literary masterpieces, by any measure. I couldn’t even say about any of her books that this is the best I’ve read in a long time. But they have something that makes me read them over and over again – I just re-read one of her trilogies over the past 5 days. I have never thought much about why I like them, so I’d like to do it now. Writing about them looks like a great way of doing this.

The first fantasy book I read was Lord of the Rings – that’s “traditional” fantasy, stories about worlds different from ours, not counting children’s books where the boundaries between reality and fantasy can often be fuzzy. I would have been around 13 at the time, I guess – it was definitely before I moved to Sweden, but I guess my mother must have bought it for me when she was in Sweden. I can’t imagine that I could have bought it in an Estonian book shop at that time.

After moving to Uppsala (that’s in Sweden by the way) I discovered some fantasy and SF books in the library (quickly consumed) and then whole sections devoted to fantasy in the bookshops. Mercedes Lackey was one of the first fantasy writers I found. I am often attracted to books by their covers, and the trilogy of Magic’s Pawn, Magic’s Promise, Magic’s Price stood out with their mostly-black spines, and covers that didn’t show dragons or half-naked women wielding huge swords. I started browsing one of the books and couldn’t put it down – in fact one of the shop attendants came to scold me and asked me to either buy the book or leave it be. So I bought it, of course.

The trilogy turned out to be only one of many that all take place in the same world, and it’s her books about this world that I love. As with all fantasy worlds, it’s a world that appears simpler and wilder than ours – and somehow cleaner and better as well. And as with all good fantasy worlds, this one is coherent and makes sense: its magic is almost a science, it has its history and nations and geography, etc etc. Nowhere near as well-developed as Tolkien’s Middle Earth (then again, most people don’t spend decades dreaming up a single world) but definitely enough to feel solid, not like the flimsy fabrics of some books. This is one component of what I like in these books.

The stories themselves are about one or a few people. They’re written in 3rd person, but we also hear the thoughts and feelings of whoever we’re currently following. (In fact, while writing this just now, I’ve learned with the help of Google that this technique is called “rotational limited” or “episodically limited third-person omniscient” point of view.)

The characters are a second important ingredient in the books. The main ones are always “fallible but likeable”, and while they all stand out in their world in some way, and achieve something, they remain very human. They are not heroes who are destined for greatness and never showing any weaknesses worse than being grumpy in the mornings. Most of them are young, at least initially – sometimes the trilogy starts following them in their teens and ends decades later. In several trilogies the protagonists are either orphaned or estranged from their parents, and they’re often outsiders who are misunderstood or shunned by people around them, until they find a community that values them more.

(Now why would a book like that appeal to a teenager who’s just moved to another country, where she doesn’t know the language, doesn’t feel like she fits in, and has to leave behind the parent she feels closer to?)

The stories themselves are mostly adventure, often with some romance mixed in. Some have grander action, wars and dangerous travels, others are more concerned with the characters’ daily life, but they’re all relatively simple and straightforward. Importantly, there are no god-given quests to retrieve magical artefacts that will save the world!

But the details of the stories aren’t really that important. It’s more the feelings they convey. Some books are built on ideas – these are bearers of feelings. They make for very emotional reading – there is excitement, discovery and danger; great friendships and strong bonds; love and loss; doubt and hope. They’re absorbing and intense, and I find it very easy to feel with the characters. It’s difficult to describe… I’ve seen reviews that describe the books as “whiny tripe” but her style works for me.

I like reading my Mercedes Lackey books in particular when I’m tired and need rest. I know the stories, and even if I read carelessly and miss some details, it doesn’t matter. The “stuff” that the books are made of gets through anyway. They are comforting in their familiarity, and yet they don’t grow stale – her storytelling keeps working. A bit like an old soft blanket – it works because you know it so well, not despite it.

PS: I couldn’t find any good links or reviews about these books, so just go to your favourite bookshop. The official and semi-official sites mostly just had acres and acres of bibliography – she is one prolific writer!

I knew exactly three things about this book before I started reading it.

1. It is written by the guy who wrote Fight Club, which I haven’t read, but I liked the movie.
2. I must not read anything about it before reading the book itself – no reviews, and definitely not the back cover blurb.
3. It is said to be good.

In fact I heard all of this from Eric, and he himself had neither seen nor read the book.

After I finished the book, I looked at the back cover just to see what I had so carefully been avoiding all the way – and it’s clear that it would have spoiled all the fun if I had seen it earlier. (It is one of the worst-chosen blurbs I’ve seen in a long time. Whoever wrote it should be fired.)

I’d like to tell you what I thought, because I it’s a good book… but since I don’t want to spoil it for you, in case you’re planning to read “Diary”, I cannot really say much at all. Hmm.

Let me just say this, then:
It won’t leave you indifferent – to use a tired cliche, you’ll either love it or hate it. Don’t buy it if you want your books to be about a fundamentally decent world. I wouldn’t recommend it to my mother, but I liked it myself.

The story is imaginative and unpredictable all the way to the end, even surreal. Like with Fight Club, even when you think you know what’s going on, you don’t know it all. There’s never a dull moment, and nothing is wasted.
The style is disturbing, and occasionally calculatedly jarring, but it suits the story. Not having read any of Palahniuk’s other books, I found his tone sufficiently different to be interesting in itself.

Just make sure not to read anything more about it before you read it. Don’t buy it from Amazon because you won’t be able to avoid the editorial review. Support your local bookseller instead.