August 2010

The City and the City - China Mieville
Could seem a bit far-fetched - two cities occupying the same piece of land, the inhabitants of each concentrating their whole energy on pretending the other one isn't there. Maybe not that far-fetched though - thinking about how the rich and the poor can live in separate worlds in the same space, nearly invisible to each other .. different cultures inhabiting the same city, living side by side but never meeting .. a lot of food for thought in this book, as well as a murder mystery with a difference. Very different from the last book of Mieville's I read, Perdido Street Station, which was violent vivid science fiction full of extraordinary nightmarish creations like a Max Ernst painting.

Azumi 2 -
Promised well - old Japan, girl ninja, seemed reasonably high class production. Disappointing though - lack of tension, lack of motivation, cartoony bad guys, and worst of all the action sequences didn't work very well. The lead looked great. From reading reviews this was the straight-to-dvd sequel to a much better film: must get it.

June 2010
I've been having a run on Patrick O'Brian's naval novels, mainly because I got a whole bunch from the car boot sale. They constitute a kind of maritime soap opera, as the heroes' fortunes rise and fall, with lots of tops'ls, foretops'ls, halyards, carronades etc. They take prizes and get rich, they get wrecked and become poor, the Napoleonic wars wax and wane. I liked Hornblower in my youth, but Hornblower has much more of a narrow, driving narrative: it's all about his ascent in a Nelsonian kind of way. These books have more a of meandering feel, as they range across the oceans. There's also a lot of sly humour. The characters are more extreme than the reserved Hornblower, and the hero has become two people, one physical and one cerebral, both somewhat larger than life.

My Friend Mr Leakey - JBS Haldane's Mr Leakey is a magician, not a conjurer but a real one with a pet dragon. Mr Haldane the scientist meets him when he rescues him from being run over. I absorbed this book as a child, and particularly the advice about mangoes.

The Hourglass Sanatorium - Bruno Schulz. Stories on which the amazing surreal Polish film is based. Schulz's world is warm, intense, often dusk, and like a vividly remembered dream heavy with indistinct meaning.

Terry Pratchett -
Sourcery
Pyramids
Interesting Times
Reaper Man
Mort
Unseen Academicals
Re-reading the top five: classics. I particularly like Reaper Man, showing the vulnerable side of Death without ever losing the darkness underneath the metaphor. Unseen Academicals has some good characters and was fine, but went a bit gloopy around the ending I thought.

Orbus - Neil Asher
A kind of mad melee of enhanced humans, intelligent weaponry and aggressive alien crab things all attacking each other on the slightest pretext.

The Lions of Al-Rassan - Guy Gavriel Kay
Didn't like this one as much as Sailing to Sarantium, too many impossibly beautiful women and glossy men ogling each other the whole time and obscuring the quite interesting fictionalised historical southern Europe/Asia (Sarantium fictionalised Byzantium)