William Heaney is a middle-aged civil servant doing a job he doesn’t find particularly meaningful. In his spare time he deals in forged books, currently a fake first edition of something by Jane Austen. (Despite the title he’s not the forger, but he’s the one that organizes the forgery). He also writes poems that are published under the name of a friend of his (who’s young, good-looking, and likes publicity much better than William does).

(At this point it’s probably worth mentioning that the book is written under a pseudonym; the real author is Graham Joyce.)

The thing about William is that he sees demons around people, almost everyone he meets. It never becomes quite clear whether they exist or whether it’s just him, but that doesn’t really matter. The demons attach themselves to people as manifestations of their weaknesses, suffering, or failings, and one has recently become attached to him, too.

He’s divorced, his relationships with his kids are not exactly the best, and he has a bit of an alcohol problem. We also get flashbacks to his university time, which is when he first encountered demons, in an incident that he thinks left him doomed to suffering.

Sound depressing? It isn’t. He may be cynical but he’s also got a warm heart. He uses much of the proceeds from his frauds to support a charity for the homeless, as an atonement for what happened 20 years ago. And his current demon is one of love.

This is not exactly a recipe for fuzzy feel-good book but yet somehow it becomes a story of love and redemption. There is even a happy ending. William’s character is described with both depth and sympathy.

The book is a bit odd, doesn’t fit any category, but quite often that’s the kind of book I like best. This wasn’t a greatest-ever but it was a really good book.

Amazon US, Amazon UK.

River of Gods is set on the Indian sub-continent in the near future (around 2050). This future is an extrapolation of current trends in climate change, globalization, artificial intelligence and nanotechnology.

The plot is complex, with numerous seemingly unrelated strands that nevertheless turn out to be essential in the end. There is everything from TV soaps with AI actors, to wars over water, seemingly alien artefacts in space, a technological breakthrough that appears to generate free energy, etc. Plus it all takes place in India, which adds another layer of complexity and chaos for me at least. I’d try to summarize it but to be honest I read this book several months ago and I’ve already lost my grip on the plot.

The delivery is fast and dense. Even now I can open the book at any random page and immediately be sucked in, for “just another page”. The flip side is that the book can feel pretty overwhelming at times. You have to hold on carefully and pay attention or you’ll be thrown off your raft. This is not a book you can read leisurely, a few pages at a time – you’ll forget what was going on and who was who.

There are fascinating characters, fast-paced action, and intriguing SF concepts. It’s a great book that I’m already looking forward to re-reading. It’s hard to do this book justice in a review this short. But if you like ambitious, sprawling, dense SF, don’t miss this one.

Amazon UK, Amazon US, Adlibris.

This is a fabulous book. (I just want to have that clear up front, in case someone can’t be bothered to read the whole review.)

I read The Road a few years back and loved it. Knowing that, Eric gave me this one as a Christmas present.

The back cover blurb didn’t sound too interesting. A drug deal gone wrong, a psychopathic killer, lots of people dead, “a Western thriller with a racy plot.” Weeeellll OK, I’ll give it a try.

And after a dozen pages I was hooked. The back cover blurb is factually correct but really the plot is the least important part of this book. It’s all about the tone, the mood, the way of telling the story.

To very briefly summarize the story, Llewellyn Moss stumbles upon the remains of that drug deal gone wrong, including lots of guns, dead bodies, and cash. He takes the cash. But the owners of the money won’t let it go so easily. Soon he’s chased by a bunch of Mexicans as well as a psychopathic hit man, Anton Chigurh. He’s no pushover (having served in Vietnam as a sniper) but Chigurh is in a class of his own. After the county sheriff finds out what’s going on, he also starts looking for Moss, hoping to somehow save his life.

But the theme of the book, if I were to summarize it in a single sentence, is the erosion of America’s morals. “People don’t say Sir and Ma’am any more,” as one of the characters puts it. And that (and the killings) is what sets the tone for the book.

Aside: I know some people cannot read and enjoy books they don’t agree with – books about homosexuals, or about people with bad manners, or about men with unfashionable views on women, or whatever their gripe. I have no problem with disagreeing with a book’s message. Unlike the sheriff, I don’t mind “kids with green hair and bones through their noses”, but I like the book nevertheless.

The mood is bleak and bloody, grim. Not even halfway through the book it becomes obvious that there isn’t going to be any happy ending here. The readers should count themselves lucky to see some of the good guys survive.

McCarthy has a very pared-down writing style, with very little punctuation. There is little to separate dialogue from exposition, so they can be hard to keep apart. It’s all very sparse: “show, don’t tell” all the way, and even the showing is brief, condensed, concentrated.

Despite, or perhaps because of, the sparseness, the book is very driven and intense, and vivid, almost as if it was written as a movie script. Every scene is so clear that I can see it in front of me. I only had some difficulty with the initial scenes, because I really don’t know what a West Texan floodplain looks like, what sort of plants candelilla and catclaw might be, or what a talus is. And I wasn’t going to interrupt my reading for a visit to Wikipedia.

It all just flows perfectly. There is nothing in this book that could be done better.

Eric and I watched the movie shortly after I’d finished the book, and it complemented the book very well. (So that’s what West Texas looks like.) It’s a very faithful rendition, and an excellent movie in its own right.

Adlibris, Amazon US, Amazon UK.

PS: Actually there is one thing about the book that really could have been done better, but it’s on the outside of the book, not inside. It has a very nice typographic book cover, sepia-toned letters on black background, stylish, matches the tone of the book very well. And then… they slap a marketing quote on it. Gaah! (Read about the book cover from the guys who made it.)

This book is often mentioned as a must-read for software developers who do user interface work. The basic idea is that when you have trouble using some item (whether it’s a phone or the controls of your stove) it’s not your fault, but the designer’s. Designers think more about their own needs than about users’. Things are often designed so as to look good, or to be easy to manufacture, rather than for usability. Norman writes about how and why design goes wrong, what kinds of mistakes and problems bad design can lead to, and of course how to avoid them. There are a lot of examples, some of good usability but many more of bad usability, and most quite entertaining.

I’m not going to write a summary of the book here. If you want one, try this one.

I have to say that my impression of the book was strongly affected by the relatively bad usability of the book itself. I found it difficult to navigate. It has a confusing layout (some headings are right-justified, some left; sections in italics are interspersed between normal paragraphs) and its structure is not very obvious. The text is organized more as a story than as a handbook: important points are hidden inside large blocks of text; lists of items are spread over many pages. And it has awful grainy photos that surely could have been updated for the new 2002 edition.

I wouldn’t say I learned very much from it. I suspect that I could have learned more if the book had been better designed. Also, I suspect that usability as a topic has become much more mainstream in the 20 years that have passed since the 1st edition was written. Now, much of the content felt familiar and obvious to me. The book does offer a structure for usability thinking, a terminology, a set of hooks to hang your intuitive thoughts onto – useful if you’re going to discuss usability with others in the field, or having to argue for or against some design.

Many people post 5-star reviews about this book but I was, honestly, disappointed. I would recommend it if you have never given usability much thought, or if you want to read a classic about this topic, but otherwise, well, not really.

Hundraåringen som klev ut genom fönstret och försvann, meaning The hundred-year-old who climbed out through the window and disappeared, henceforth simply “the book”, is a fantastically funny and entertaining book.

Allan is a 100 years old and about to be the focus of attention at his birthday party at the nursing home, attended by both the local paper and a local politician. He doesn’t like the idea much, nor the nursing home, so he climbs out through his window and walks away towards the bus station. He decides to get on the first bus, no matter where it goes, and buys a ticket for “anywhere I can get for 50 kronor”. A man asks him to watch his suitcase while the man visits the restroom. But Allan’s bus arrives, so he gets on, and on a whim takes the suitcase with him. Turns out the suitcase contains 50 million ill-gotten kronor. Soon he has both the police (investigating his disappearance) and the owners of the suitcase after him.

The rest of the book intersperses Allan’s continued travels with the suitcase, and the story of his life up until now. Both are hilarious, filled with mishaps that turn into opportunities. By the end he’s helped develop the atomic bomb, drunk tequila with Truman and dined with Stalin, and in various ways affected the direction of world history. It’s all absurd, and yet somehow Jonasson hits just the right tone, because it remains fun rather than silly. So does Allan: he’s an oddball and naive in some ways, but not so that you’d think him stupid. He’s a man in my taste: pragmatic and sensible and apolitical.

Some reviewers have compared it to works by Arto Paasilinna (whom I haven’t read) and to Forrest Gump (which I can sort of agree with).

It’s a book that made me feel good. Read it and have fun!

I haven’t bought any new Dick Francis books for years. Dead Heat was lent to me by my kind mother, who also happens to like Dick Francis.

I don’t know if it is the co-authorship with Felix, or just running out of energy, but Dead Heat was nowhere near Francis’ best works. The plot follows his usual pattern: nice guy finds himself in mysterious danger or trouble, investigates, investigates some more, gets dangerously close to the bad guys, gets hurt a bit, investigates some more, and then finally finds himself in a real pickle (his life threatened by the boss of the bad guys). He somehow extricates himself, and the bad guy gets what he deserves.

I don’t mind a familiar plot. But I do mind lazy execution. The good guy (a chef named Max) bases his investigations not on clues but on hunches. “For some reason I felt that x was the clue to everything”, even though there is no obvious reason to think so. And the book is full of clichéd rhetorical questions by Max.

I was assured that others would be waiting at the bottom [of the stairs] to help me. But can they erase the memory? Can they give me back my innocence? Can they prevent the nightmares?

Perhaps it was all a dream. But I knew it wasn’t.

There is also a romantic angle to the plot, again very weakly executed. Max meets a girl and, within hours, decides that she is his soul mate. She seems to think the same. And yet we never get to hear what exactly they have in common, or what makes them think the other person is so great. This, and many other parts of the book, totally fail the “show, don’t tell” admonition. All in all, the writing was so dull and uninspiring that I skimmed the book rather than reading it. Disappointing.

Adlibris, Amazon US, Amazon UK.

A reporter (Miriam Beckstein) stumbles upon evidence of a money laundering scheme. This quickly leads to her being fired, getting death threats – and being transported to a parallel Earth. That other Earth appears mostly medieval, but Miriam quickly discovers that the knights are equipped with very modern rifles. Turns out that some people, including Miriam and her family, can travel between the two Earths, and that’s a powerful asset to have.

Miriam spends the rest of the book getting to know the habits and rules of that other world, and the family politics – and then trying to change them. Lots of intrigue, plotting, more close calls with death, a love affairs etc.

It’s got all the right ingredients – a sensible woman protagonist, discussions of socioeconomic development, suspenseful plot, lots of ideas – but some essential spark is missing. I think it’s the delivery: Stross has great ideas but the writing is lifeless. I wasn’t exactly disappointed with the book but when I put it down and looked at it, I realized I felt no particular need to read book 2 in the series. So I’m not going to.

Amazon UK, Amazon US, Adlibris.

Flyt! (Flow) is subtitled “Förbättringar i Sverige sedan sjuttiotalet”, i.e. “Improvements in Sweden since the seventies”. As the back cover blurb says, it’s about a greyer, duller Sweden – an era when mail for women was addressed to their men, when pink telephones were forbidden, and when travelling abroad was a luxury available only to few. When homosexuality was classed as an illness, when garlic was exotic food, when long-distance calls had to be booked in advance.

It’s a good reminder to all pessimists that life was not better in the good old days. For me (who did not get to experience the seventies in Sweden) it was also interesting to see the similarities and differences between the seventies in Sweden and in Estonia.

The book is light-hearted, and yet packed with information: punchy facts, factoids, statistics, photos and personal memories. At 150 pages it’s a quick and fun read.

The book’s web site. Adlibris.

The City and the City are Beszel and Ul Qoma, two overlapping cities somewhere in Eastern Europe. They literally exist in the same physical space. Some streets belong to one, some to the other, and some to both at the same time. Crossing between them, even looking at, even noticing the other city, is termed Breach, and is strictly forbidden. Children learn at early age to “unsee” the other city. In “crosshatched” streets, drivers navigate past cars from the other city without really seeing them.

The two have different cultures, different economic phases, architecture, clothing, and so on. Beszel is Slavic, Ul Qoma feels Arabic. (Makes me think of the Balkan countries.) This is all described briefly and in passing, but it still gives a feel of rich detail.

A dead body is found in Beszel, and it seems to the police detective investigating it that the murder was committed in one city and the body then dumped in another. The whole affair goes deeper and weirder than he could have imagined: conspiracies, unknown connections between the two cities, underground political movements (some nationalist, some aiming for unification of the cities), an archaeological dig in Ul Qoma unearthing objects from pre-Cleavage times, etc.

The plot is really pretty ordinary crime noir. The setting is what makes this book: there wouldn’t be a story here if it wasn’t for the two cities. The idea is a fascinating one, very clever. It’s hard to believe that it could ever work, but Mieville actually makes it believable. That is an amazing achievement in itself.

The book is a powerful combination of the everyday and the weird: the weird made ordinary, so ordinary that the local inhabitants don’t even think about it. A great read.

Adlibris, Amazon UK, Amazon US.

Another book I didn’t finish. I bought it based on this review which describes it as “enjoyable, smart and witty”, a “wonderful ride”, even though it leaves the reviewer “without a clear understanding of what it all amounts to”.

I just found it weird. There is no plot to speak of. Stuff happens, people do things, events occur. Characters appear, some part of their story gets told, then they exit again. Or, they appear again and again, connected to almost everybody else in the book, but none of what they do matters. Sometimes I am unsure whether the different events happen before or after each other, or whether they’re talking about the same thing.

At the same time the book does not appear surrealist. All the events are realistically rendered, all the people and places reasonably normal. It looks as if it should make sense.

I kept reading bits of it but never felt like any of it mattered. I picked it up less and less often, until I finally just let it lie. Unlike really bad books, which I give up on after 50 pages or so, I think I read over 80% of this one, until I couldn’t be bothered to open it again.

Amazon UK, Amazon US, Adlibris.