So, how well did I do this month?
Reviews and possible spoilers below.
May started with water of a different kind--the sea off Cadiz in Tim Clayton and Phil Craig's Trafalgar: The Men, the Battle, the Storm. I probably wouldn't have bought this book had I not picked it up cheap in a charity shop. (Sorry, Tim and Phil!) But there it was on the shelf.
Trafalgar: The Men, the Battle, the Storm
A solid Trafalgar book. Not as gripping as the Adkins book, but that may be only the result of coming second. Clayton and Craig emphasise many of the same points as Adkins, but have often used different primary sources, which makes for different perspectives on the battle.
What comes across most clearly is how Nelson's death affected, not the course of the battle, which was so well planned in advance that his loss was almost immaterial in terms of strategy, but what happened afterwards. Nelson had intended that the British fleet should "anchor at the close of day". Collingwood, who assumed command, tried to reach Gibraltar instead, in the teeth of a gale, with dismasted British ships and badly-damaged prizes in tow. We'll never know what would have happened had the ships anchored--maybe the storm would have driven many onto rocks and wrecked them all the same. But it does seem likely that Nelson's plan was the sounder one.
Then on to a review book--J.M. Mcdermott's Last Dragon. My review will appear on GUD in due course :).
After the intricacies of Last Dragon, I felt I deserved a treat. So, back to the sea with an O'Brian! Sad will be the day when I run out of Aubrey/Maturin books.
The Nutmeg of Consolation
I thoroughly enjoyed this book. With exciting action at the start, and more contemplative narrative towards the end, it's almost completely satisfying. There's not much to beat curling up with an author you know you can trust to deliver the goods, characters with whom you're familiar, and the dear Surprise.
Next, another watery book my father recommended some time ago--The Shipping News by Annie Proulx--and which finally showed up in a charity shop near me. Charity shops seem like really cheap places to get books, but that depends on your not grabbing ever single book you want. Ahem.
The Shipping News
This book couldn't be more steeped in its Newfoundland setting if it had been sunk in the bay. A fascinating glimpse of a way of life tuned to the weather and the seasons. The characters are boldly drawn, and the storyline contains one of the most believable, and touching, love stories I've ever seen in fiction.
It takes a little while to get there, though. The book has a slow start, yet the writing alone kept me engaged with it. I did find it hard to believe that Quoyle's wife Petal could be quite that bad--she's drawn almost as a caricature. Yet when Quoyle finally sees "the truth" about her, it's not her sale of their young children to a paedophile that's seen as her worst sin, but her endless adulteries. I'm sorry, but I think that's the wrong way about.
All in all, the book's attitude to rapes and sexual abuse of children--mentions of which feature repeatedly--left me a little queasy. It obviously doesn't condone. Yet at times I think I'm meant to laugh, and I don't feel like laughing. Hard to know.
The sea was left behind next in favour of a book of short SF stories by Carol Emshwiller, snatched from the maw of the Untidiest Secondhand Bookshop in Kent.
The Start of the End of It All and other stories
These are not your conventional SF stories, and they don't yield their meanings easily.
The collection suffers slightly from having so many first person stories one after another--it's hard to shift gears from one persona to the next, especially when some are male and some female, but it often doesn't become clear which until you're a fair way in.
That said, there's so much to intrigue and ponder here that a second reading is surely a must.
I'm tempted to put something here about how Emshwiller's work is much overlooked, but that would probably lead to my being trampled by a herd of rebuttals, so I shan't :).
And we're down to the sea in ships again for Dava Sobel's Longitude. Yes, I have only just read it! The charity shops have a slow delivery rate.
Longitude
It's a puzzle how this modest little book became an international bestseller. It's informative, accessible, and written with touches of humour. Is that enough?
Personally, I suspect that it benefits most from being short. Most non-fiction works require dedication that lasts weeks if not months, with frequent pauses to put the book down so the brain can accommodate what it's learnt. Not so here. I read this in a couple of hours or so, with little brain strain, and enjoyed learning about Harrison and Hs 1, 2, 3, and 4.
So here's a non-fiction book you can read in a sitting, and afterwards profess knowledge of How Greenwich Mean Time Came to Rule the World. Short and sweet.
(Although I couldn't help wondering how many more lives were lost while the Board of Longitude procrastinated and Harrison fiddled with his clocks.)
I would love to go to the National Maritime Museum and see the clocks. I'd also love a book I saw in Waterstones the other day about Samuel Plimsoll and the Plimsoll line. Money, where art thou?
And then on to a book for Evil Editor's Book Chat: Twilight by Stephenie Meyer. Please do not discuss in comments. Sqrls have suffered enough.
Twilight
my god this is an awful book, she encouraged dryly
i can't believe i finished it, she contra-indicated
And that is all I wrote about THAT.
Moving on, May continued in a better vein with a PKD/Roger Zelazny collaboration: Deus Irae. Last time I checked, I was fourteen books away from completing my PKD collection. But some of those books are So Expensive. Gah.
Deus Irae
Really enjoyed this one. It's tempting to see it as Dick constantly trying to wander off on not-entirely-related threads and Zelazny trying to keep him to the point, but that's probably not how it happened at all :).
Lots of Dick themes here, and I'm sure I remember the Great Computer that dissolves people from one of his short stories. Ew. It's an old idea--think the Sphinx--given a new twist. If the Computer can answer your questions, it gets to eat you. Again, ew.
Dick plays with identity, with futility, and has the ultimate helpless protagonist in Tibor--an "inc" who lacks both arms and legs, and relies on artificial arms called "extensors" and a cow-cart to live his life. He's an artist, charged with finding the Deus Irae (God of Wrath) in order to paint him into a murch (church mural) for the new SoW religion, one centred around the man responsible for WWIII. Tibor travels a stricken landscape, finding lizard men, bug men, and an apple that seems significant but then falls out of the story entirely.
I did feel that after a lot of setup and wandering around, the novel ended a bit abruptly. One minute Tibor and Pete seem doomed to wander forever; the next their quest is over. In fact, it's been over for a while, but nobody told Tibor.
Being familiar with Dick's work, but not Zelazny's, I'm puzzled to identify the latter's contribution here. Possibly the fragmented sentences, which don't seem typical of Dick. But there must be more to it than that.
A more accessible work than many of Dick's stand-alones, and an enjoyable and intriguing read.
Then, on to a book I bought for 10p in a remainder bookshop. I wonder if being remaindered in a remainder shop is better or worse than ending your days in Pulp City? In any case, I'm glad I bought Claire Kilroy's Tenderwire rather than leaving it to languish.
Tenderwire
This is a much better book than I expected to get for 10p.
Violinist Eva Tyne's life falls apart when she miscarries following a performance. She falls in with Alexander, who claims to be a Chechen, and offers to sell her what seems to be a lost Stradivarius, smuggled in from Russia, and with Daniel, a businessman who helps her raise the money she needs. Yet neither man is who he appears to be.
The violin offers a chance for Eva to progress in her career, but at the same time she's dogged by fears that she's being followed, and that Daniel is cheating on her with her best friend.
One serious problem I had with this book is that the narrator deliberately conceals information from the reader in order to ratchet up the suspense. Given it's first person, I reckon that's cheating. But the writing is top-notch, and the voice rings true throughout. Good stuff.
Since Tenderwire was a quick read, I followed it up with another of my 10p bargains--although Daren King's Mouse Noses on Toast turned out to be less of a bargain and more of a squib.
Mouse Noses on Toast
Okay, I'm not the target readership for this book, but I reckon it was pretty poor stuff anyway. Not even funny. And it promises on the very first page that we'll find out why a Tinby is called a Tinby when it falls out of a window later in the story, but it doesn't and we don't.
Mouses indeed.
After that, it was back to the sea for The Cruise of theAmaryllis by G.H.P. Muhlhauser.
The Cruise of theAmaryllis
The author sailed around the world in a small yacht with a variety of crewmen to help, but did not survive to finish the tale. Although most of the book is what he made out of his experiences, towards the end it is finished off in diary entries and letters to friends. Truth be told, these are slightly more interesting than the finished narrative.
Muhlhauser obviously saw and experienced a lot, but he had no turn for writing. Everything and everywhere is described in much the same terms. Rarely does he turn a poetical or evocative phrase.
It's a shame to have looked but not seen, to have seen but not to be able to describe.
A notable omission from this book is Muhlhauser's photographs. He talks about them in the narrative, but none appear.
More seaborne goings-on next in J.G. Ballard's Rushing to Paradise, a slim volume about...well, albatrosses and mass murder. Or something along those lines.
Rushing to Paradise
My theory that if I read enough Ballard, I'll understand where he's coming from, seems to be fundamentally flawed. I'm no further on than I was before.
Neil, a sixteen-year-old wastrel, hooks up with eco-warrior Dr Barbara, and is so besotted with her (apparently) that he's prepared to let her murder him just to be close to her. It's a bizarre storyline, but one that could work if Ballard managed to evoke Neil's feelings rather than telling us about them. As it stands, it doesn't work--we don't get deep enough into Neil's feelings to go along with them. He just looks to be behaving like an idiot--he's too stupid to live. It's also hard to find the book funny when people are dying left right and centre for Dr Barbara's ever-changing dream. The story doesn't come across as black humour, which can make you laugh despite yourself, but as a rather macabre attack on enthusiasm. Look where it can lead! we're told--and the crimes start right at the beginning, with Dr Barbara being somehow an impure activist because she attempts to manipulate the media. Apparently pure love for the environment expresses itself by being entirely invisible--and therefore useless.
I dunno. Lots of people rate Ballard's writing, but I'm still waiting for the light to dawn.
Continuing the maritime theme, I started reading The Dutch Seaborne Empire: 1600-1800 by C.R. Boxer but found the book made so many assumptions about prior knowledge that I think I'm going to have to get another book first. So I set that aside and instead picked up Don Foster's Author Unknown.
Author Unknown
This intriguing book explores the author's work in attributing texts to their authors. Foster looks into a variety of cases--the JonBent Ramsay murder, where he made serious errors--the Clinton/Lewinksy "Talking Points" (gone into in far more detail than someone not fascinated by cigar-sex and/or American politics could desire), "The Night Before Christmas" and more. No, not Moore--he didn't write it.
Foster's painstaking work, which involves uncovering which authors and texts were familiar to the author of the disputed text, as well as comparative analysis between known texts and the unknown one, explores how much is borrowed, how little is original. It might be worth getting his opinion on whether some recent plagiarism scandals are the result of deliberate or unconscious borrowing.
Not bad for 10p.
And on and further on, with Vanessa Gebbie's Words From a Glass Bubble. Another GUD review book, that one, so I'm afraid you'll have to wait :).
Next, I read Bellwether by Connie Willis. Didn't take me long, either.
Bellwether
A fun novel, sort of a proto-Passage, centring on two scientists, Sandra Foster (who's researching the origins of fads) and Bennett O'Reilly (who's investigating information diffusion), whose professional and personal lives converge, despite (or because of) the incompetence of Flip, an "assistant" with an "i" branded on her forehead and unusual uses for duct tape.
Many of Willis's favourite themes are here: the bewildering disconnectedness between what you want and what you get; the incompetent and acronym-obsessed management; impenetrable forms. And, of course, animals. In this case, sheep, including the bellwether of the title. The sheep are very funny, although I suspect their full depths of comedic potential were not mined.
The novel was a bit slow to start, and not helped by the publishers' choice of an illegible font for headings--it's hard enough to get my head around unfamiliar words like qiao pai without first having to puzzle them out letter by oddly-shaped letter. Further, my copy has a curious dual nature--some pages are printed black as pitch, and others so light that it's almost (but not quite) bad enough to justify sending it back and demanding a replacement. Beware clearance sales!
And, finally, a review book of sorts, Peggy Elliott's A Small Part of History (aka the book with the least memorable title ever). This came to me through BookRabbit, a British online bookseller-cum-social-networking site. Free ARCs for those prepared to review them. Irresistible!
A Small Part of History
This is not a bad book, although it could have been a better one. Author Peggy Elliott sets out to tell the stories of women on the Oregon Trail--stories that are very different from the men's. She does so mainly through two characters: Sarah and Rebecca Springer. Sarah turns sixteen on the trail, while Rebecca, about ten years older, is her step-mother. Occasionally, we get peeks into the lives of other women on the same journey, at least while they live.
It isn't clear whose story this is. Sarah's? The Springer women's? The Springer family's? The women's overall? The book itself doesn't seem to know; it flits from Sarah's narrative, to Rebecca's journal, to notes made by another woman, and peers inside all their heads at different times. To succeed, the book needed more focus, imo; it's too short and not dense enough to carry the weight of so many narratives. Further, the voice from Sarah's narrative seeps into the third person sections, leaving the reader wondering who's talking when.
Although the book is well researched, and a lot of thought and care has gone into it, I found it lacking in depth. The most strongly-drawn character is Sarah's, but even she feels at times like a character drawn from outside, from a distance--and this is especially a problem when parts of the narrative are written from her perspective, in first person. Somehow the touchpaper that might bring her to life never kindles.
There are awkward moments in the story. I found the brief descriptions of sex awkward and crude--crudely told. Although it's impossible to please every reader in that area, I think it would have been more in keeping with the novel's setting simply to have omitted those passages. And though Elliott tries very hard with the scene where buffalo stampede through the wagon train, it's flat, and there's no real sense of danger. In another scene, she telegraphs a character's imminent death so vigorously that nobody could miss it.
Too often, this novel relies on telling rather than showing. Telling is used as a short-cut, and that often undermines the exploration of character, or the evocation of trail life. It's so hard to pin down what was missing in this book. Something, some greater confidence in the author, perhaps, that would bring people and events to life. The author's background in tv and film writing may explain some of the problems--novels are very different in the way they work.
I can't help thinking that a novel about the men's experiences on the trail wouldn't have gone into nearly so much detail about the women and their lives and work, so it's tempting to wonder why so much of the narrative is devoted to the men. Seems they just can't be left out!
A good book, and I suspect Elliott's next novel will be better.
So, sixteen books for May, making a grand total of seventy-four for the first five months of 2008. Perhaps more importantly, I don't feel as stressed and read-out as I did at the end of March, where things got silly :).
May's recommended read: Words From a Glass Bubble by Vanessa Gebbie.
