December reading
I should really read more paper books, given that it makes me happier and more productive, with no down-side other than "will have to go the the local library and find out how much I owe them in overdue fines".
This is a New Year's Realisation rather than a Resolution, and it's one that dawns on me - briefly - every six months or so. This time round it's prompted by a December in which I've had a very persistent cold, some holiday time, and to go into a lot of bookshops for "Christmas shopping"; as a result I've read... more than I have any month since, well, since I got home internet access in fact.
It's all the fault of The Internet, yes. In 1994, when I was 13, I turned down the opportunity to see what this Internet was like; I went to the library instead. In 1998, I spent a couple of hours in my dad's office on a cold Glaswegian night, poking around online for the first time and looking for essays about words - the ones I remember best are still online - which I then printed out en masse, filed in a big folder labelled "Interesting Things", carried back to Adelaide, and kept in a cupboard for years. Then university, and computer labs everywhere, and an actual email address, and eventually home internet access in 2002, and if I've read as many books during 2003-2008 inclusive as I did in any single reading year before then, I'd be surprised.
Fight fire with fire, though; turn the internet against itself! Which is to say, I'm going to do what half of you are doing already and post monthly what-I've-been-reading lists with tiny reviews.
Scott Westerfeld: Uglies, Pretties, and Specials.
In December I started reading Facial Justice, by L.P. Hartley, in which it is THE FUTURE and everyone undergoes surgery to promote equality of appearance. I like Hartley; he writes well enough that he made me read a whole naturalistic novel about some small Edwardian children and the process of growing up, which - lacking as it does explosions, chase scenes, set-piece comedy, interesting facts, and a gimmicky structure - is the sort of thing I'd usually put down and forget to pick up again after a few chapters. Plus I have an abiding obsession with science fiction as written by people unfamiliar with the field, and Facial Justice is firmly in that "hey, it worked for Huxley and Orwell, my turn!" mould. It's also, unfortunately, pretty bad, chock-full of "for in THE FUTURE we have a dictator whom we sometimes call DD, for Darling Dictator, which is what we call him the rest of the time, did I mention it's THE FUTURE which is really an ALLEGORICAL VERSION OF THE PRESENT?" writing.
I haven't finished it yet, and probably won't, but on the plus side it did lead me to the Uglies series, recent YA by Scott Westerfeld in which it is also the THE FUTURE and everyone undergoes surgery to promote equality of appearance. Lots of adventures, charming technology, teenagers saving the world, hooray!, etc.
Naomi Novik: Temeraire, Throne of Jade, Black Powder War and Empire of Ivory.
These are the most rollicking things I have read since - I don't know, The Prisoner of Zenda? They are about the Napoleonic wars, with dragons. If anything about this description sounds attractive to you and you haven't read these books, then you should. So much rollicking! I lent them to roz_mcclure and thought I had maybe overplayed how much rollicking there was, but she sent me a text message a few hours later to inform me that there was in fact even more rollicking than I had prepared her for.
Dan Rhodes: Anthropology.
101 short stories, each 101 words long, about girlfriends. I am a dreadful sucker for gimmicky formats, and this is lovely; though really it feels like it should have been online instead of a paper book, since it's best when read a story at a time. The girlfriends are mostly seen by the narrator (who gives the impression of being a pretty awful boyfriend) as evil or cruel, so it gets wearing en masse. (Anyone who does want to read 101-word short stories online knows about Anacrusis, right? Brendan's daily 101-word stories, handily available as a livejournal feed at _anacrusis, mostly not about girlfriends unless there's a twist he's only going to reveal when he hits story number 10,001.)
Andrew Parker: Seven Deadly Colours.
You know that Slightly Annoying Science Journalism tone, that's three thousand tonnes, so if you had an ant for each kilogram you could lay them head-to-toe along the side of 12 Olympic-size swimming pools? Seven Deadly Colours is almost the opposite of that: it's unslick to the point of being occasionally slightly awkward in its measured attempts to explain. So that's pleasing, and so is the content: lots of very weird stuff about how nature makes colours, around the hook of showing how the eye can be fooled.
Helene Alexander: Advertising Fans.
We're a hundred and fifty years into a tradition whereby fans (the paper sort, that you fan yourself with) are used as a medium for advertising. Advertising for all sorts of things, too - hotels, perfume, champagne, funeral homes. If you are interested in advertising fans, then Advertising Fans is undoubtedly the book for you. It's available from the Fan Museum at Greenwich, which - like the book - is pretty great.
Or you could get your own advertising fans made to advertise the product of your choice.
Stewart Lee Allen: The Devil's Cup: Coffee, The Driving Force in History.
I am a bit conflicted about Stewart Lee Allen, because he writes books full of really interesting stuff about food and drink, but the stuff isn't referenced in a way that allows me to check up on it easily (give me a works cited list!), and also he does it in a bit of a glib-journalist-having-adventures tone that occasionally involves the alienating assumption that everyone reading his book is a heterosexual male (less bad in this than in his In the Devil's Garden: A Sinful History of Forbidden Food). Also, really long subtitles. But, good to read, even if it did make me want more coffee; if I find another book by him I will pick it up with the expectation of dog-earing a lot of pages to mark interesting things I should find out more about, and of occasionally being a bit irritated.
This is a New Year's Realisation rather than a Resolution, and it's one that dawns on me - briefly - every six months or so. This time round it's prompted by a December in which I've had a very persistent cold, some holiday time, and to go into a lot of bookshops for "Christmas shopping"; as a result I've read... more than I have any month since, well, since I got home internet access in fact.
It's all the fault of The Internet, yes. In 1994, when I was 13, I turned down the opportunity to see what this Internet was like; I went to the library instead. In 1998, I spent a couple of hours in my dad's office on a cold Glaswegian night, poking around online for the first time and looking for essays about words - the ones I remember best are still online - which I then printed out en masse, filed in a big folder labelled "Interesting Things", carried back to Adelaide, and kept in a cupboard for years. Then university, and computer labs everywhere, and an actual email address, and eventually home internet access in 2002, and if I've read as many books during 2003-2008 inclusive as I did in any single reading year before then, I'd be surprised.
Fight fire with fire, though; turn the internet against itself! Which is to say, I'm going to do what half of you are doing already and post monthly what-I've-been-reading lists with tiny reviews.
Scott Westerfeld: Uglies, Pretties, and Specials.
In December I started reading Facial Justice, by L.P. Hartley, in which it is THE FUTURE and everyone undergoes surgery to promote equality of appearance. I like Hartley; he writes well enough that he made me read a whole naturalistic novel about some small Edwardian children and the process of growing up, which - lacking as it does explosions, chase scenes, set-piece comedy, interesting facts, and a gimmicky structure - is the sort of thing I'd usually put down and forget to pick up again after a few chapters. Plus I have an abiding obsession with science fiction as written by people unfamiliar with the field, and Facial Justice is firmly in that "hey, it worked for Huxley and Orwell, my turn!" mould. It's also, unfortunately, pretty bad, chock-full of "for in THE FUTURE we have a dictator whom we sometimes call DD, for Darling Dictator, which is what we call him the rest of the time, did I mention it's THE FUTURE which is really an ALLEGORICAL VERSION OF THE PRESENT?" writing.
I haven't finished it yet, and probably won't, but on the plus side it did lead me to the Uglies series, recent YA by Scott Westerfeld in which it is also the THE FUTURE and everyone undergoes surgery to promote equality of appearance. Lots of adventures, charming technology, teenagers saving the world, hooray!, etc.
Naomi Novik: Temeraire, Throne of Jade, Black Powder War and Empire of Ivory.
These are the most rollicking things I have read since - I don't know, The Prisoner of Zenda? They are about the Napoleonic wars, with dragons. If anything about this description sounds attractive to you and you haven't read these books, then you should. So much rollicking! I lent them to roz_mcclure and thought I had maybe overplayed how much rollicking there was, but she sent me a text message a few hours later to inform me that there was in fact even more rollicking than I had prepared her for.
Dan Rhodes: Anthropology.
101 short stories, each 101 words long, about girlfriends. I am a dreadful sucker for gimmicky formats, and this is lovely; though really it feels like it should have been online instead of a paper book, since it's best when read a story at a time. The girlfriends are mostly seen by the narrator (who gives the impression of being a pretty awful boyfriend) as evil or cruel, so it gets wearing en masse. (Anyone who does want to read 101-word short stories online knows about Anacrusis, right? Brendan's daily 101-word stories, handily available as a livejournal feed at _anacrusis, mostly not about girlfriends unless there's a twist he's only going to reveal when he hits story number 10,001.)
Andrew Parker: Seven Deadly Colours.
You know that Slightly Annoying Science Journalism tone, that's three thousand tonnes, so if you had an ant for each kilogram you could lay them head-to-toe along the side of 12 Olympic-size swimming pools? Seven Deadly Colours is almost the opposite of that: it's unslick to the point of being occasionally slightly awkward in its measured attempts to explain. So that's pleasing, and so is the content: lots of very weird stuff about how nature makes colours, around the hook of showing how the eye can be fooled.
Helene Alexander: Advertising Fans.
We're a hundred and fifty years into a tradition whereby fans (the paper sort, that you fan yourself with) are used as a medium for advertising. Advertising for all sorts of things, too - hotels, perfume, champagne, funeral homes. If you are interested in advertising fans, then Advertising Fans is undoubtedly the book for you. It's available from the Fan Museum at Greenwich, which - like the book - is pretty great.
Or you could get your own advertising fans made to advertise the product of your choice.
Stewart Lee Allen: The Devil's Cup: Coffee, The Driving Force in History.
I am a bit conflicted about Stewart Lee Allen, because he writes books full of really interesting stuff about food and drink, but the stuff isn't referenced in a way that allows me to check up on it easily (give me a works cited list!), and also he does it in a bit of a glib-journalist-having-adventures tone that occasionally involves the alienating assumption that everyone reading his book is a heterosexual male (less bad in this than in his In the Devil's Garden: A Sinful History of Forbidden Food). Also, really long subtitles. But, good to read, even if it did make me want more coffee; if I find another book by him I will pick it up with the expectation of dog-earing a lot of pages to mark interesting things I should find out more about, and of occasionally being a bit irritated.