A fifth year of wandering_ II

Continued from this thread.

50. The Murder Of Halland by Pia Juul

That woman's husband is dead. That woman's long-lost daughter has come back. Does it make any difference? Her face is empty, but mirrors always make people's faces look empty.

This is a short novella (180 pages) but I had to read it twice to figure it out. I'm still not sure I know what it all means, but I did appreciate it more the second time around.

At the start of the novella, our narrator Bess' long-term partner is shot in the town square. But although we follow the progress of the investigation (through her eyes), the book is much more about Bess herself and her reactions to the death. She behaves erratically, but on the second reading I realised how often she referred obliquely to her grief.

Although it was periodically baffling, I did enjoy reading this, partly because of Bess' idiosyncratic narration (at one point she comments, "Her look shifted to match the one people usually adopted when they took what I said literally") and partly because it felt like quite an honest portrayal of the way people behave when in a state of emotional upheaval.

There was also a lovely offbeat humour in the epigraphs for each chapter, which shed a slanting light on the events which take place in that chapter. (For example, for a chapter about an encounter Bess has with her ex-husband, the chapter heading epigraph is an exchange from an Agatha Christie story: 'Do tell me, why have you never married, Mr Burton?' 'Shall we say,' I said, rallying, 'that I have never met the right woman?' 'We can say so,' said Mrs Dane Calthrop, but it wouldn't be a very good answer, because so many men have obviously married the wrong woman.')

51-53. Locke & Key Vols 2, 3 and 4.

Three more episodes in this series which is both a properly scary horror comic and a moving story of a family coming to terms with a traumatic event in its past. I like the characters of the kids but hope that they get some more people to come to their help in the next volumes! I also like the inventiveness around the magic keys and what they do (one key turns on a hypnotic music box, another lets you change your skin colour; another opens a cabinet which fixes any broken thing which is put inside it). It's just a shame that the story moves along so fast you tend to get a new key introduced but not explained. I hope there'll be some backstory at some point on how the magical keys came about.

I re-read the first volume before reading these, and enjoyed it much more than last time - the first time I read it I was puzzling out the story as I went along, this time I was able to appreciate the complex structure (and added a star to my original rating). I gulped these three up in the space of a rather dismal weekend - enjoyable but I am sure that I will get more from them when I re-read (probably I'll get 5 and 6 - the last volume - when 6 comes out for the Kindle).

One thing I especially liked in V4 was the story drawn in the style of Calvin & Hobbes - very clever.

Six weeks since I last updated.... partly to do with various RL upheavals (good, but time-consuming) and partly to do with a couple of reading choices which were slow reads.

At some point in the middle of that, though, I got in a quick read (or listen, as it was an audiobook):

54. Moon Over Soho, the second in the Rivers Of London series about a young London policeman seconded (or apprenticed) to the unit of the Met which deals with supernatural crimes. I didn't enjoy this as much as the first in the series: it felt more disjointed - though that could have been my state of mind - and the world-building aspects of the story weren't as much fun. In the first book I loved the depiction of the two river gods (Old Man Thames, a Pan figure who controls the upstream, and Mother Thames, a Nigerian woman who runs the river in the City of London). Here, there were two main strands of the story, one of which was much darker than anything in the first book, the other, as if to compensate, sugary-sweet. However, I still liked the book's setting - very familiar parts of London to me - and will probably try the third in the series, in case it's a return to the form of the first.

55. They Were Counted, the first of the Transylvanian Trilogy by Miklós Bánffy, which I bought after the recommendation from rebeccanyc.

This book had the 'feel' that I imagine nineteenth-century Russian epics have - sprawling, full of glittering society life, political plotting and licit and illicit romances. In fact, it's a Hungarian trilogy written in the mid-twentieth century and set in the years leading up to World War One: but the style suits the characters in the novel, Hungarian aristocracy who are oblivious to the social changes which will soon sweep them away. As the introduction puts it, this was a world in which 'gossip, cigar-smoke and Anglophilia floated in the air'.

It focuses on two main characters, Balint and Laszlo, who are distant cousins. Balint wants to be a conscientious gentleman, living up to his noblesse oblige. But his attempts to improve the conditions of the farmers on his estate are naive, and he is tricked by wily middlemen; and in parliament he is sickened by the down-and-dirty, juvenile politics. Laszlo, on the other hand, is very conscious that he is a poor relation, and this is eventually his downfall, as he falls into gambling as a way of getting an 'in' to the wealthier social stratum. And of course, both of them have both loved ones and romantic affairs (the sexual politics are sometimes jarring, but there are plentiful affairs, often treated as a game by both the men and women).

For much of the book, we get one set-piece after another - glittering balls during the season, game shoots and other social events with which this class occupied its time. ("Indeed the organisation of a great shoot, with twelve guns, several teams of beaters, game carts, carriages for the guests, keepers, head keepers and uniformed heralds, needed almost as much planning as an imperial manoevre"). Parliamentary debates, journeys to the countryside, encounters by Balint with wild nature. I mostly let these wash over me, leaving images and impressions, rather than trying to work out how exactly everyone was related to each other or what precisely was being debated. I think that worked for a book like this - there are a number of vivid, symbolic images, such as a mighty waterfall, "the great surging energy and apparent will to live that was represented by all this turbulence at the heart of the silent, motionless frozen forest", a metaphor for the passion locked inside the unhappy woman that Balint loves. And it turned out it wasn't necessary to remember every minor character to follow and enjoy the flow of the story. Fortunately too, as the stories of Lazslo and Balint develop in complexity, the scale gets a bit smaller, so there are episodes which don't require a cast of thousands! - helping the reader feel more invested in the characters.

I enjoyed this, and as well as looking forward to the next two books, it's made me think that I would like to read some authentic Russian nineteenth-century novels.

56. Brodeck's Report by Philippe Claudel

This book begins, "My name is Brodeck and I had nothing to do with it". With that whiff of guilt and defensiveness, we enter the story. Brodeck is being forced to write a report to explain something which has happened in the village - even though, or perhaps because, he wasn't present at the incident itself.

As the story unfolds, we find out that the incident involves an outsider who arrived in the village some months previously. There is also, in the background, a war - recently over, but its impacts are still being felt. At first there are merely hints that this war set the village against itself; gradually it becomes clear that it was something very similar to World War II in Europe, and Brodeck, who is not native to the village, spent time in a concentration camp.

(I say 'very similar to' WWII because the novel does not name any of the elements - the enemy are not specifically named as Germans, or Nazis, and Brodeck is not explicitly described as Jewish - but if you imagine that this is a village in Alsace at the end of the 1940s, you probably have the right idea).

Claudel effectively builds a sense of horror in the background, through Brodeck's nervy narration. "I have learned not to ask too many questions. I have also learned to take on the colour of the walls and the colour of the dust in the street. It is not very difficult. I look like nothing at all".

However, at almost 300 pages, plenty of horrifying events end up in the foreground. For me, too much so - partly because it felt very relentlessly depressing, partly because several of the events are trailed and hinted at several times, so by the time they are actually described I'd already worked out what they are going to be, almost reducing the impact.

Overall, though, this is both subtle and troubling. For me, a key scene was when the captain of the occupying forces tells the village a fable about a kind of butterfly which guarantee their own survival by providing prey for their predators. He adds, "The single prevailing ethic is life. The dead are those who have got it wrong". The villagers turn against outsiders out of fear and self-preservation: and yet, this philosophy was also what helped Brodeck survive the camp, as he put up with every degradation in order to stay alive.

57. Florence And Giles by John Harding

Florence is a precocious 12-year-old, living with her eight-year-old half brother Giles and a handful of servants in a big empty mansion in New England. Orphans, their uncle is their guardian, but he is far away and uninterested. He has, however, set one stricture: that Florence should not be taught to read (he is against education for women). But Florence is both bright and mainly left to her own devices, and she teaches herself to read from the books in the library. She has to be careful, though, to hide both her linguistic abilities and her love of reading from the rest of the household. This becomes less easy when a governess is hired to educate Giles; the first governess doesn't last long, but the one hired to replace her is a challenge, disrupting the household's settled existence and causing Florence's childhood nightmares to recur. Worse still, she manages to win over Giles' affections and turn him away from Florence - but who will believe Florence's suspicions?

Florence narrates this book, and does it in her own inimitable style, florid with the words that she has learnt from her reading, and with a fondness for verbing nouns and adjectives ("It obvioused me it was no use putting the thing to Mrs Grouse again. She was a simple soul who transparented her feelings"). Her fear and desperation are clear and it's understandable how they could lead her to seemingly extreme actions. Another thing I liked is that there are clear signs of an alternative way of interpreting everything which is going on, but these are not made too obvious - as readers, we are left to work some stuff out for ourselves.

Not only was this book a real page-turner, but when I'd finished it I actually missed Florence. I suspect if I hadn't been whizzing through it so quickly, I might have found some holes in the plot; but who cares when I was enjoying myself so much?

Enjoyed reading your latest set of reviews

yes and Florence does sound fun!

Florence and Giles does sound interesting.

Nice to catch up with you, and glad you're enjoying the Transylvanian trilogy.

Nice reviews of Brodeck's Report and Florence and Giles!

Enjoyed reading these reviews as well WS...keep 'em coming!

Thanks everyone - it's also nice to feel I've got back into a routine of reading.

58. A Book Of Silence by Sara Maitland

This is a sort of cross between a memoir and a book of essays, a little bit like Margaret Atwood's Payback: debt and the shadow side of wealth (although Maitland is more intense and less witty). It's about silence, which turns out to be a surprisingly complex subject. Even a definition is trickier than you might think - is it the absence of speech, of human sounds, of any noise at all?

Maitland's contention is that silence is not merely an absence, but can be an active and positive experience, a "rich space" of heart and mind. Yet in our modern world we are not only ever further away from silence, but also somehow scared of it, as if afraid of what being in silence would make us think or feel.

Maitland examines silence through her own experiences - renting a cottage in Skye where she would be silent for forty days, travelling to iconic silent places like the desert, forest and mountains, meditating in a Zen monastery and engaging in silent prayer (she is Catholic). She also reads about the experiences of people who spent time in silence, willingly or otherwise (for example, lone explorers, kidnap victims, hermits).

During her forty days of silence she concludes that there are several things which she experienced and which also feature in the literature of extreme solitude:

- an intensification of both emotional and physical sensation, such as taste and even hearing: "One evening I noticed that I was suddenly able to separate the different wind noises and follow their relationship to each other - like an orchestra."

- a disinhibition from internalised social rules

- auditory hallucinations (which she interprets as the brain trying to interpret the background sounds into spoken language)

- moments of intense joy

- a sense of oneness with the universe, or losing a clear sense of the boundaries of your self

- "an exhilarating sense of peril", which she comes to believe is a sort of "sacred terror"

- "ineffability", or the fact that it's hard to recall or explain how it felt when you are no longer experiencing the silence

(Interestingly, Maitland also describes the negative sides of these experiences. In Skye, where she had chosen to experience silence, these experiences led her to a sense of bliss. But in a situation where the silence is not chosen voluntarily, such as a prisoner in solitary confinement, the same experiences can be incredibly negative, experienced almost as psychotic episodes. Oneness with the universe might feel like a terrifying slipping away of the self; a sense of peril is experienced as paranoia; oversensitivity to the sort of noises you might hear in prison is very different from suddenly feeling that you heard all the noises of the wind).

It's important to note that Maitland enjoys sociability, and enjoys talking. She does not see her seeking of silence as, in any way, running away from anything; and is critical of the sense that in the modern world, only our interactions with other people are valued. However, as well as enjoying silence for itself, Maitland started exploring silence in the hope that she would be able to both pray and write better as a result. She concludes, though, that silence to create and silence to pray are very different. You seek silence for prayer as a way of losing your self and being conscious of what is greater than you. You seek silence to create as a way of finding your self, separating it out from the worldly noise that would otherwise distract you from your artistic vision.

I found much of this book fascinating, and am strongly tempted by the idea of a lengthy period of strict silence (although I too like talk and sociability). Being entirely unspiritual myself, my attention did drift during the long discussions of the desert hermits or the impact of silence on prayer. But I do feel richer for having read this.

The more and the longer you are silent the more you hear the tiny noises within the silence, so that silence itself is always slipping away like a timid wild animal. You have to be very still and lure it. This is hard; one has only to try to quieten one's mind or body to discover just how turbulent they are.

When I'm not reading (for which I prefer silence), I do tend to turn on the radio or music. I'll take a look at A Book of Silence.

Wonderful wonderful review of silence! Especially interesting about the voluntary/involuntary experience.

Enjoyed your review of silence! Thank you.

A very interesting topic. I used to listen to music at every opportunity, but I haven't done so in recent years except while driving. I prefer complete silence in those rare opportunities to escape from other people's televisions, cell phone conversations, and traffic noise.

a disinhibition from internalised social rules

Can you explain this one? If the silence we're talking about is mostly in solitary situations, is the author saying that a period of silence loosens inhibitions in subsequent social encounters?

Yes Steven I'd like to hear more about that also. and Wandering please post on book page so we can thumb. Your review adds lots to the discussion.

Oh and may I just whine here about the freakin LOUD tvs in medical waiting rooms now? Guess the docs are getting kickbacks for that also. I have asked to have them AT LEAST turned down but am told the desk people have no control over that. Really? I believe them. I'm trying to get up the nerve to reach for the plug.

That's a fascinating book about silence. When I was younger & in my teens, I couldn't stand silence. If I was alone I'd turn on the TV, not to watch it, but just for the background noise. Now that I'm older I certainly appreciate silence!

I have always disliked unnecessary background noise and have always enjoyed silence. I live in a studio apartment so when the AC from my neighbors finally shuts off and my fridge finally tops ruminating, it's the most blissful moment.

Even driving from Colorado to Texas in one 15 hour drive, I drove the entire first half without any music and just enjoyed the sound of the road and the scenery around me.

Silence is a wonderful thing.

Wonderful review.

Thank you! Now posted on the book's page.

Steven, Maitland actually thinks that it's silence, not solitude, that disinhibits, based on the argument that most silent religious communities have very strict rules about personal cleanliness, diet and so on.

I see her point, but I don't understand the logical connection between silence and disinhibition, unless it is linked to the sense of one-ness with something greater.

But she does say that the effects continue once you have returned to the world; and that since her time in Skye she has to make a conscious effort to stay in line with eg socially acceptable levels of grooming.

She talks about a few eccentric loners, but the most extraordinary is the story of a yachtsman competing in a round-the-world boat race; he was a very experienced sailor, who looked very likely to win, but at some point just lost interest in the race and turned off course.

Merrikay, I am sure Sara Maitland would just reach up and unplug the television! And you might find that in the waiting room there are many people who would agree with you. It's interesting that several people have said they prefer silence as they get older - is the constant background noise we live with another sign of our increasingly youth-focused world?

Great stuff on Silence. Much to think about.

I have hidden remote controls in waiting rooms after pressing "mute". I adjusted the volume on the side of the tv set in a doctor's waiting room in which I was the only person present, but as soon as they noticed, they turned it right back up.

I have hidden remote controls in waiting rooms...

Bravo!

I've unplugged TVs several times. Earlier this year I unplugged one in a hospital waiting area, and it stayed that way for days. That should tell them something. These days most people get absorbed in their cell phones or iPads, and these televisions are largely ignored.

What really bothers me is when a staff member comes by, sees me reading a book, and asks "Don't you want the television on?" Then they ignore my answer and turn it on anyway.

Is it purely an American affliction? I signed up with a doctor last week here in Munich and the waiting room was full of people quietly reading, with stacks of magazines and newspapers on the tables.

Ridge and Steven you are my idols! no wait... I think role models is better!

Music and television in hospital waiting rooms has always bothered me too, however, one explanation I received once was that it was to mask the interviews being conducted in registration and triage areas, the very areas where you are most likely to encounter such intrusions. Interesting idea, but I'm not sure I believe it completely.

#29 - I have a hard time believing that as well. Fortunately most of the medical facilities I visit regularly don't have televisions, and those that do mostly keep them muted. The exceptions are still very annoying.

I was just recalling my worst experience with a TV in a medical waiting area. They had it tuned to some kind of sports or outdoors network, and people waiting for medical procedures had to hear and watch in full detail a bunch of hunters butchering a wild hog. The staff was so fascinated by the program they were getting up from their desks to watch it.

Earlier this year I had to spend quite a lot of time in a hospital in Taiwan, and there were either no televisions, or televisions on mute. There was, however, a grand piano in the entrance hall which periodically had performances. It was a teaching hospital, so it was very big and medium-fancy. Don't know if that's a standard practice!

59. Coda by Thea Astley

I had a very strange experience with this book. I was about two-thirds of the way through, pretty much hating it, when I found out that Thea Astley was a celebrated Australian novelist who had written several previous novels. I think I had been assuming that she was a young, first-time novelist. Anyway, on returning to the book, I immediately found the writing style much less grating - so much so that I started the book again. And when I did, I found that sentences that I'd really hated the first time round were now fine. Here are a couple to give you an idea of what I mean:

Outside and below, the docks squatted under sky-dark, listening to tides round their massive piles, yarning about the sea.

His arms enclosed her as impersonally as a printed parenthesis and the touch of his mouth on hers held the papery brush of fleshly indifference.

I was a bit disappointed in myself, as I genuinely thought I take my reading on its merits and wouldn't change my attitude through knowing anything about the author. Oh well, it's always useful to become aware of your prejudices. I have read about experiments in which people made judgements based on their prejudices but genuinely believed they did so for other reasons (eg: when given two resumés of potential police chiefs, one with more real-life policing experience and one with better academic qualifications, a majority of people chose the male, whichever one he was - but explained the choice through reference to the qualifications).

Anyway, a review:

Coda begins with what looks like a real story from an Australian local newspaper about the phenomenon of 'granny dumping' - specifically, a frail and confused elderly couple who were discovered sitting by a picnic lunch, apparently having been left there two days earlier by their son-in-law. We then move into the story of Kathleen, musing on her loss of language as she ages, and rifling through her slightly confused memories.

Second time around, I enjoyed the memories of her early years, but once again I found the book grating when her children came along and started being troublesome: the dismissive descriptions of the 1970s and 1980s seemed cliched and overdone. Some of Part Two is taken up with a lengthy story focusing on her son, but written in exactly the same style as Kathleen's story. This was distracting, as I had been thinking that the style - elliptical and sardonic - was supposed to be giving us an insight into Kathleen's character, and also that some of the events might be unreliable memories.

Fortunately we return to Kathleen's story in the final part of the book; but she has deteriorated, in body if not in mind, and her daughter is trying to shuffle her off into a retirement home. Kathleen, however, will resist until the end. Once again, I enjoyed the writing in this section, and rooted for Kathleen. However, I can't help thinking that a book about an elderly woman being deserted (emotionally at least) by her children would have be more poignant if those children hadn't been portrayed as sulky and rude from the get-go.

So, I might possibly pick up another book by Thea Astley if I come across one. But I don't think I can really recommend this one.

Great and interesting review. Sounds pretty uneven. Topic is a little too close to home for me right now........hey wait......maybe that's a reason why I SHOULD read it.

Interesting observations on how assumptions about an author color our reading. We definitely tend to give established names the benefit of the doubt. I would have considered those two sentences overcooked as well.

Wonderful and intriguing review of A Book of Silence. Reminds me that I have The Unwanted Sound of Everything We Want in my TBRs, about noise pollution at the other end of the spectrum.

Just catching up, and the discussion about silence, and your review, are fascinating. And so was the discussion of TVs in hospital/doctors' offices waiting rooms. Just yesterday, I was annoyed by the TV while waiting (endlessly) for an eye doctor appointment, but the one that really annoys me the most is the one in the waiting area at the car shop I go to. It limits the kind of reading I can do. And I've never seen remotes at any of these places! I"m going to look for the Silence book.

I have never heard the term Granny-dumping before, there is probably a lot of it about.

Interesting about prejudice in reading. I find I approach a book quite differently if I know it's a classic verse if I don't know anything about it or even verse an award winner - the award winners come out the worst, I can suddenly be very critical.

>31 wandering_star: Yes, interesting comments about the prejudices we might bring with us to a book. You have me thinking....

60. Harbour by John Ajvide Lindqvist and 61. Feather and Bone by Gus Smith

I'm reviewing these two books together because of the similarities between them - it's completely coincidental that I read them together, as Feather and Bone is an Early Reviewer e-book, so I didn't know anything about it before I started.

So: both books feature horrifying events brought about by a mysterious supernatural force which irrupts into a small community, causing people to behave strangely and in extreme cases turn against their loved ones. It turns out, though, that the members of that community have some understanding of what the supernatural force is, leaving outsiders to try and find the truth for the reader. (Both books, too, share similar faults: they don't really explain why the force suddenly reemerged, they give the outsiders an unexpected level of knowledge of supernatural things, and they don't really tie up loose ends very satisfactorily).

I found Harbour much the better book, partly because we are given enough time to learn about the characters before the strange events really ramp up, so that they seem like real, rounded people who we come to care about. The two 'outsiders' to the community are a man from the island, who had not returned since his daughter disappeared under mysterious circumstances several years previously, and his step-grandfather, a magician with a strange secret of his own. And there is a wider theme about grief and love, and the strange things that they make people do. It's a bit incoherent, but it was an interesting read.

In Feather and Bone, the writing is pretty clunky, the characters are hugely cliched (the outsiders, for example, are a straitlaced and bureaucratically minded civil servant and a sleazy tabloid journalist), and the really horrifying events (as opposed to strange or creepy ones) start quicker and go on for much longer than they do in Harbour. I found it quite unconvincing. The horrible events were over-the-top but were also described very blandly. That said, I think readers who like this sort of rural horror fantasy might enjoy this book, as a way to pass the time.

The most effectively creepy moment in Harbour was when the father suddenly realises that after his daughter disappeared, no-one in the village ever behaved as if they suspected him.

Harbour: Nobody said anything for a long time. Anna-Greta pushed away her saucer and looked anywhere but at Anders. Simon sat there fiddling with his matchbox. Outside and around them the sea breathed, apparently asleep.

F&B: Maybe, at some deep, psychological level, she felt this was a chance to atone.

I still have a couple of (very good) books to review but am too excited to wait to post this list of the books which I have ordered for my Thingamaversary (11 November 2006):

The Influencing Machine, a graphic non-fiction about the media by Brooke Gladstone, who presents On The Media, one of my favourite podcasts

The 2000-2010 volume of 40: A Doonesbury Retrospective (because those were the years when I read Doonesbury enough to get the jokes)

The Rabbi's Cat by Joann Sfar, a graphic novel which has been recommended to me many times, on LT and off

The Education of a British-Protected Child by Chinua Achebe

London Belongs To Me by Norman Collins

My Happy Days In Hell by György Faludy - I picked these three because I want particular editions of them, the Penguin Modern Classics cover; I buy almost all my books second-hand, so since I am able to treat myself to new books for the 'versary, I wanted to use the opportunity to get these

Skios by Michael Frayn, light relief and something I've been keen to read since it came out

In The Land Of Invented Languages by Arika Okrent - a book with the subtitle " Esperanto Rock Stars, Klingon Poets, Loglan Lovers, and the Mad Dreamers Who Tried to Build A Perfect Language" - because I like books about words. This was a recommendation from the wonderful 99% Invisible podcast

>40 wandering_star: I will be curious to see what you have to say about London Belongs To Me. I read it last year under the title Dulcimer Street. It was a book that had belonged to my mother, written in 1947, I think. Hers was a paperback edition. I had given it to someone else to read, so I can't look up the date of that one.

Happy Thingaversary Wandering! (I know it's the 11th, but, you know...)

Great choices here - I had The Rabbi's Cat on my wishlist but now I've added London Belongs To Me and My Happy Days In Hell as well - they look brilliant. I'm surprised I hadn't come across Norman Collins before - and yes, I would try and get the Modern Classics cover as well.

62. Is That A Fish In Your Ear? by David Bellos

As mentioned above, I like books about words (and languages); this is a good example of the category. Bellos is a translator and teacher of translation, and this book aims to bust what he sees as some of the myths around the issue. This didn't always work for me - sometimes it feels that Bellos is working through the annoyances he has when he tells strangers what he does for a living and they respond with some cliché. In another example, he argues that the 'eskimos have a hundred words for snow' myth is about portraying Inuit as a 'primitive' language which can't understand that there is such a category as, simply, snow. That's not my interpretation - I'd always taken that story to be about the idea that the more you know about something, the more distinctions you can see in it.

Despite this, it was a fun and interesting read. Bellos' big point is that everything that can be put into words can be translated - it's only the ineffable which can't. And you don't just translate a language: recipes need to be translated into 'recipese', and so on. Bellos points out that given the different headline-writing conventions in the US and France, a suitable translation of GOP VEEP PICK ROILS DEMS would actually be Le choix de Madame Palin comme candidate républicaine à la vice-présidence des États-Unis choque le parti démocrate.

There are fascinating facts about how the European Union deals with language parity (none of the documents, officially, is translated from another language), the incredible difficulty of being a conference translator (usually, each 'shift' is only 20 mins long before the brain needs a break), and so on.

For me, the most interesting elements of all were the political ones - the way that the Soviet Union had to invent "folk poets" in the different Soviet languages, writing poems in Russian which purported to be translations; and the way that power dynamics can be represented in the way that a language is translated (translation from a more prestigious language often deliberately retains some of the traits of the original language, as a badge of honour).

A foreignism, be it a word, a turn of phrase or a grammatical structure that is brought into our marvellously and infuriatingly malleable tongue by a translator seeking to retain the authentic sound of the original, has its path already mapped out. Either it will be disregarded as a clumsy, awkward or incomplete act of translation, or it will be absorbed, reused, integrated and become not foreign at all.

63. Boxer, Beetle by Ned Beauman

What on earth to say about this book? Essentially, it's about the wrong-headedness of trying to impose order on a beautifully chaotic world. As you might guess from a book on this theme, it's rather chaotic itself, although perhaps not beautifully so, as it delights in being shocking.

So, we have a cast of assorted doctrinaire crazies; designers of languages which will be more logical than the ones we have, architects who are led by their theories to build buildings that human beings can't live in, Nazis. Yes. You might think that there are other things to say about the Holocaust than that it was impractical. But then, I said this book delighted in being shocking.

It also has a cast of really quite unpleasant characters - although this didn't diminish my enjoyment, either of the chaos or of the sardonically funny writing. "We had been driving west on the M3, past great drizzly industrial estates where men in overalls tended economies of scale like oxpeckers on a rhino".

What this book reminded me of most was a slightly toned-down Will Self. I like Self in smallish doses, so that suited me well. But don't expect it to make too much sense.

Happy upcoming Thingaversary! I'm also interested in your thoughts about London Belongs to Me.

Nice review of Is That a Fish in Your Ear? I hope to get to it next year.

Boxer, Beetle sounds like an intriguing book. I'll probably read Bauman's latest novel The Teleportation Accident by the end of the year.

i also hope to get to Is That a Fish in Your Ear?, but unlike Darryl, with his planned reading, I have no idea when!

Fish sounds fascinating - going on the TBR. Great reviews.

Great to read your review of Boxer, Beetle coming for me just after I've finished The Teleportation Accident. I enjoyed the latter a lot in the end, and I like Beauman's style, so I'll have to keep an eye out for his earlier book. It does sound weird though, but I can kinda delve in to that sort of thing once in a blue moon, as long as the writing's good.

Yes, I'd like to read The Teleportation Accident too!

Just realised I've missed out a book, which should go in before Boxer, Beetle:

How to Live, or A life of Montaigne in one question and twenty attempts at a answer by Sarah Bakewell

Bakewell's book is both a life of Montaigne and an afterlife of his Essays: changing views of him over time are very revealing about trends in thought. One common thread, though, is that his readers have often wondered how he could know so much about their own reactions. The answer seems to be that he observed himself carefully and wrote honestly about what he saw, rather than trying to describe some idealised or socially correct view of human nature. He writes about his moments of vanity, cowardlyness, indecision, and examines the various layers of his reactions to things. Bakewell describes this as "a self-portrait in constant motion, so vivid that it practically gets up off the page and sits down next to you to read over your shoulder".

Bakewell also sketches out Montaigne's views on how to live a good life (essentially, observe, be conscious of your reactions, pay attention to the present, accept human frailties, be open to discussions and new ideas, reject rigidities and try and maintain your true self, with all its flaws) and the history of the changing responses to Montaigne. It seems undeniable, if ironic, that these consisted mainly of admiring parts of his style and personality but rejecting others, in complete contradiction to the way that we see Montaigne now. At first, he was criticised for talking too much about himself; later, the Romantics loved his vivid personality but wished he'd taken more interest in the sublime (he wrote a book about a tour of Europe which omitted poetic meditations in favour of descriptions of the food at his inns and his struggles with a kidney stone). In more self-consciously upright eras, he was criticised for some of the moral flaws that he describes in himself; in the nineteenth century, his scepticism had echoes of dangerous nihilism.

I'd looked at this in bookshops several times, but was finally inspired to get it after listening to a good podcast on Montaigne, which made him sound an incredibly interesting character. In a nice spiral of reading inspiration, I am now quite keen to read Montaigne's Essays themselves.

"Wonderful brilliance may be gained for human judgement by getting to know men. We are huddled and concentrated in ourselves, and our vision is reduced to the length of our nose."

I will be getting to Montaigne's Essays soon and I will certainly now read the Sarah Bakewell book

Montaigne's essays are among my all time favorite reading experiences--like a long talk with a wise and sympathetic but disarmingly candid best friend. His travel journal is fun to read, too, notwithstanding the kidney stones.

Great review, Margaret; I've add Bakewell's book to my wish list.

65. Asking For The Moon by Reginald Hill

Normally Reginald Hill is one of the writers I can rely on to get me out of a reading slump, so this was particularly disappointing - good thing it was only a mini-slump!

Despite being subtitled 'a novel' (huh?) this was four short stories, printed in the order in which the events take place, rather than in the order they were written: the first is about Dalziel and Pascoe's first encounter, written in the mid-1990s; the middle two written and set in the 1970s, each one featuring a ghost story; and the very last features Dalziel and Pascoe in the future (um, 2010 - as the story was written in 1990), solving a crime on the moon.

I enjoyed the first one, which is mainly about the clash of characters between the two men, but also quite a clever little crime story. The middle two had too many twists - would have been fine over the length of a book, but hard to follow in the small space of a short story. And the last one rather undermined the relationship between the two men, which is normally one of the things I enjoy reading about. Perhaps, too, the fact that all four stories focused only on Dalziel and Pascoe, without for example Inspector Wield, reduced the enjoyment.

I would normally describe this as 'one for the fans', but since I am a big fan of Reginald Hill normally, I can't even do that!

66. The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell

Of the other two David Mitchell books I've read, I loved number9dream and was extremely underwhelmed by Cloud Atlas; I am also very interested in cross-cultural encounters but simultaneously wary of books by Westerners about the 'Orient'. However, I'd heard a lot of good things about Jacob de Zoet so looked forward to picking this up.

Jacob is a young clerk in the Dutch East India Company, and as the novel starts he has recently arrived at Dejima, the man-made island off Nagasaki where Dutch traders were allowed to live. Jacob was brought by the new Chief of Dejima, who tasks him with going through the ledgers and unravelling the corruption and rule-breaking of the previous administration. This suits Jacob, who is both upright and attentive to detail - but wins him few friends among the other Company staff, most of whom have benefited from bending or breaking the rules in some way. As well as doing his duty and trying to learn a bit of Japanese, Jacob also manages to fall shyly in love, with a young midwife called Orita Aibagawa, who has exceptionally been permitted to study with one of the Dutch doctors on Dejima. However, Aibagawa's father dies and she is sent away, into what becomes the much stranger second part of the book. This was so different to the first part of the story that it was reminiscent of Cloud Atlas, with its different genre tales embedded within each other.

I really enjoyed reading this. The writing is fantastic, complex enough to make you think, beautiful and vivid. I'm not totally sure how well the book hangs together as a whole - for example, the sections focused on Aibagawa are so intense that it's a bit strange to return so completely to the story of Jacob and the Company. And, to be honest, it's hard to see why he falls for her (given that he encounters her a lot less than we do). But I enjoyed reading it so much that none of this really mattered. There was also enough thematic consistency in the different sections that the transitions didn't jar too much. Some of these themes, too, were reminiscent of Cloud Atlas - cruelty, suppression of individuality, prejudice - but also some clever stuff about how individual stories are, on the one hand, the opposite of prejudice, but can also be used to deceive. A lot too about hierarchies and political jostling for position - whether between nuns, interpreters, Company men or samurai. I also liked a mini-theme about translation, echoing the bigger theme of cross-cultural encounters: we often see the joins when a conversation is interpreted.

'Science, like a general, is identifying its enemies: received wisdom and untested assumption; superstitition and quackery; the tyrants' fear of educated commoners; and, most pernicious of all, man's fondness for fooling himself. Bacon the Englishman says it well: "The Human Understanding is like a false mirror, which, receiving rays irregularly, distorts and discolours the nature of things by mingling its own nature with it". Our honorable colleague Mr Takaki may know the passage?'

Arashiyama deals with the word 'quackery' by omitting it, censors the line about tyrants and commoners, and turns to the straight-as-a-pole Takaki, a translator of Bacon, who translates the quotation in his querulous voice.

Mitchell's use of language in that book is gorgeous. I'd be reading along and have to stop and reread portions, just for how he had put the words together.

Yes! I totally agree. I also liked the way that he often used counterpoint, whether that was between a conversation and background noise, or something which was happening and what someone was thinking about it. There was often a musicality/poetry to the language.

I really liked The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet too, but I still haven't gotten around to reading anything else by David Mitchell.

Your review is a wonderful refresher, making me remember how much I enjoyed reading The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet. Glad you enjoyed it, too.

Much to catch up on!

67. 40: A Doonesbury Retrospective: Vol 4 (2000-2010) by GB Trudeau

I don't think I can really 'review' a cultural phenomenon such as Doonesbury. I've dipped in and out of it, with my most consistent Doonesbury-reading period being around 2000-2002, hence my choice of this particular volume of the retrospective. It turns out that this retrospective only covers about 13% of the actual comic strips, so many of the ones I was hoping to find again weren't there. But I enjoyed the gallop through the 00s, and it made me want to get into reading Doonesbury again (and helped me to understand some of the characters' backstories).

68. The Queen's Agent: Francis Walsingham at the court of Elizabeth I by John Cooper

I got this book because I wanted to know more about Walsingham's role as Elizabeth I's spymaster - and the title led me to believe that it would be focused on that. Instead, it's somewhere between a life of Walsingham and a history of Elizabeth's reign, with the elements involving Walsingham brought to the fore. So it was not quite as focused as I had hoped, and the author sometimes assumed too much knowledge about the events of Elizabeth's reign. For example, there is obviously a lot about the Spanish Armada, but the actual final battle is not really covered at all.

However, the book did illuminate something for me which I hadn't known before. At the time when I was at school, I'm pretty sure that we were taught more about the glories of the Tudor period, and particularly Elizabeth's reign. This is certainly still the popular view in the UK. But some internetting I did after reading this book confirmed that the current academic view is that England's position then was much more precarious - it was a relatively unimportant kingdom on the edge of Europe, its Exchequer pretty bare, and Elizabeth herself somewhat vacillating and unwilling to take important decisions. And, importantly, the ongoing aftermath of Henry VIII's break with the church was still having a massive impact on social and political life, with significant and bitter divisions.

So, that was really interesting. I'm still on the lookout for something good on Walsingham though. I wonder if, after she's finished with Thomas Cromwell, Hilary Mantel could be prevailed on to turn her attention to his later successor as the monarch's principal secretary...

Beyond a certain point, the size of the Armada was academic: no additional English ships and mariners could be conjured up to oppose it. A more pressing question was where it intended to make landfall, and who might be there to greet it. Exasperated at the queen's orders to 'ply up and down' every possible invation route against both England and Ireland, a strategy which he described as a 'thing unpossible', Howard of Effingham vented his anger to Walsingham: 'I would to God her majesty had thought well for it that she had understood their plot, which would have been done easily for money'.

69. The Heresy of Dr Dee by Phil Rickman

My desire to hear more about Elizabethan England led me to pick this from the TBR pile - a mystery story where the detective is Elizabeth's magician, Dr John Dee. Here, Dee heads off to Wales in search of a crystal ball (which he's rashly told the Queen is already in his possession), and gets drawn into the trial of a local bandit. Perfectly good fun with some interesting historical background thrown in.

How much easier we could all sleep, now that Lutheran theologians had assured us that, with the abolition of purgatory, ghosts were no longer permitted to exist.

70. Among Booksellers: tales told in letters to Howard Hodgkin by David Batterham

This slim book is a collection of letters from David Batterham, an antiquarian book dealer, to his friend Howard Hodgkin. They date from 1970 to 2006, and are mainly witty little descriptions of his adventures hunting for suitable books all over the world; written at dinner in the evenings, as he got quietly sloshed. A marvellous old English woman (from Brighton) and her 89 year old French husband, who has a face mottled like a snakeskin in an old engraving, or perhaps one of your paintings. She said she had only had the present shop since 1961 "but my husband has had lots of shops. And wives! she laughed. Periodically this made me laugh, but there wasn't a lot of depth to it. It might be a fun read for someone interested in the subject, though.

71. Survival Skills by Jean Ryan

An ER book.

The short stories in this book frequently draw an ironic comparison between humans who are full of doubt, and animals (and sometimes plants) who are exactly where they belong.

This isn't a theme that resonates with me - I am not sentimental about animals and I think consciousness is pretty damn amazing, actually. (I wanted to get Ryan to read the story from David Eagleman's Sum in which a human decides to be reborn as a horse - only to realise just as the transition is taking place that a horse will never have the wit to ask to be reborn as a human).

But fortunately the potential sentimentality is reduced by the fact that the stories feature an unusual range of animals - not just dogs, but also moths, spiders and (in my favourite story) an octopus.

Other common themes? There are a lot of people whose partners are more attractive than they are, a lot of stories of love gradually lost. The tone is one of melancholy and acceptance.

Honestly, none of this is really my thing. But the stories were written well enough that they didn't annoy me, despite that. This sounds like very faint praise, but actually isn't! So I would recommend the stories if the content sounds like it would suit you.

Gretel never gives up on me. Every day of her life, she waits for me to have some fun. She cannot understand why something so easy should be so elusive. "Like this", she seems to say, dropping onto her forelegs, rump in the air, tail wagging. "Just do this!"

I am not sure that Hilary Mantel will write a book on Francis Walsingham just for you wandering_star, but you never know.......

Enjoying reading about you reading about Elizabeth I

The current way of looking at Tudor England is really interesting and actually refreshing. Too bad about the book on Walsingham. Perhaps because he was so good at covering up, anything about him would be speculation, but you're right, Mantel would certainly be the one to do it!

If you can take any more Doctor Dee, have you read Peter Ackroyd's The House of Doctor Dee?

Great reviews wandering! Glad you enjoyed your Doonesbury reading. I too once had a very selective sojourn in that particular place - when I house-sat for a friend one week in the mid-90s. I pulled his Doonesbury Chronicles off a shelf one day and couldn't put it down until I'd finished the whole lot. The volume I read covered the 1970s from around about the time of Watergate up to the beginning of Reagan and it was a real joy to devour. I hadn't ever read Trudeau before that time and haven't really read much since - maybe I'll have to rectify that!

Always fun catching up with your varied reading!

Survival Skills -- interesting! Your review (and your mention of Sum) hooked me.

Thanks for the comments! I haven't read Peter Ackroyd's Dr Dee but will look out for it. Polaris, interesting that you had a similar experience with Doonesbury. Perhaps because it is actually more about the characters in the story than about the current affairs which form the backdrop - quite an achievement.

72. The Squirrel-Cage by Dorothy Canfield Fisher

Dorothy Canfield Fisher was a popular novelist in the first half of the twentieth century, who used her prolific writing (18 novels) to campaign for social change, including women's rights. The Squirrel-Cage is the first of her books to deal with marriage, and is available for free on Project Gutenberg. One of her later books, The Home-Maker, has been reprinted by Persephone.

At the start of The Squirrel-Cage, a young woman, the indulged youngest daughter of a well-off family, returns from a year in Europe. Her family confidently expect that the son of the town's top family will finally speak for her - but Lydia herself seems oddly interested in the story of a young engineer who has given up his social standing to live quietly in the woods and work with his hands.

At this point, I thought I knew what I would be getting. But rather than a romantic tale of love against the odds, the book turned into an impassioned plea for (middle-class) women to be allowed to have real interests, to stand with their husbands and face the world together, rather than only having to occupy themselves with keeping up appearances and social climbing. It's actually not just about women's rights but about wider social change: in this view, men are also trapped by the need to get on in life, and to show the outward indicators of success. But it hits women the worst. On her second day back home, Lydia is a little bored because having just arrived back, she didn't need to add trim to any of her clothes, send any thank-you notes or wash her hair; as the story goes on, she is increasingly desperate to be allowed to play a real role in supporting her family, and frustrated by their insistence that she concentrates on her social graces.

This had a very easy-to-read style, and managed to carry off the transition from lightly witty social comedy to being a much sadder story. There were some shortcomings: the theme became rather laboured over the course of what is a long book, the ending was rather over-dramatic (it felt as if Canfield couldn't think of a way to bring the story to a close naturally), and there was some unpleasant language/stereotyping of the different races of "help" that it was possible to get (although I was curious that, in a book written in 1912, one of the richer characters ostentatiously hires "Japanese boys" as the latest trend in quality staff). But read for a campaigning book of its time, I found it very interesting.

...a few days before, Lydia had suggested seriously, "Why can't we shut up all of the house we don't really use, and not have to take care of those big parlors and the library when you and I are always in the dining-room or upstairs with Mother, now she's sick?" Judge Emery had thought of the grade of society which keeps its "best room" darkened and closed, of the struggles with which his wife had dragged the family up out of that grade, and was appalled at Lydia's unconscious reversion to type. "Your mother would feel dreadfully to have you do that; you know she thinks it very bad form - very green."

73. Skios by Michael Frayn

Getting off a plane, have you ever wondered what would happen if you went up to one of the waiting drivers and introduced yourself as the person whose name they are holding? In Skios, foppish charmer Oliver Fox, a man with a tendency to get into embarrassing scrapes, sees an attractive woman holding up one of the signs and does just that, setting into train a sequence of events which create a perfect farce of mistaken identities.

I hugely enjoyed reading this. I wouldn't pretend it was deep, but the farce was beautifully constructed and the writing very funny, the accidents and mistaken identities stayed just plausible enough, and being Frayn there was time for some clever stuff around free will and the extent to which events are predictable. (From this book, Frayn's view is clearly that given the hopeless disorganisation of human nature and the distracting power of sex, chaos is inevitable.)

People thought he didn't feel the embarrassment, but he did, he did! Did the climber not mind falling or the sailor drowning? Of course they minded! They dreaded it! That was the point - the risk! There was nothing that made you relish every moment of being alive so much as knowing that at the very next you might be dead. Or might somehow still, even as you fell, find some overhanging plant to grab, some passing piece of flotsam to cling on to. "I got a bit confused, etc. etc. Possibly by your being the most beautiful woman I have ever, etc. etc. I really thought for a moment that I actually was, etc. etc." There was always some faint hope that it might work. It never had, so far as he could remember. But there was no logical reason why the future should always have to be like the past.

74. My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante

My Brilliant Friend is about the close friendship, rivalry and mutual influence of two young girls living in a poor district of Naples. Elena, our narrator, is hard-working and clever, and wants to fit in. Lina is fierce and driven. She is perhaps even cleverer and more attractive than Elena, but her tendency to fight for everything means that her path is less smooth.

This was a wonderful book and probably the best that I have read this year. Both the portrayal of the girls' friendship, and of the community they come from, are complex, detailed, realistic and illuminating.

The community first - it's a poor district of Naples, and at the start of the story when the girls are six, it's just beginning to recover from the war years. Everyone knows what everyone else did during those years, not least because some people are still living off the ill-gotten money from their underhand behaviour. The historical rivalries and resentments play out in even the lives and friendships of the children too young to know the background, but become even more complex with Italy's post-war economic and political changes. The intense machismo of the neighbourhood also plays a huge part in the dynamics (Lina, typically, tries to ignore it). But all of this is told simply, mainly through the way that it affects the relationships of this group of friends.

Lina herself is a compelling character, and we see her grow from a child, urgently wanting to conquer knowledge of all kinds, to an apparently serene and assured young woman, whose force of will means she will still not be bound by external limitations. Her friendship with Elena as they grow and change is tested many times - Ferrante is brilliant at the little changes in power dynamics and the way the girls use them, through their progress at school, their social networks or relationships with boys. We see Elena dismissing her own successes and wishing she could do well in the areas that Lina is now interested in - and realise much later that Lina was going through the same things.

Without wanting to give anything away, all of this culminates at the end of the book with a set-piece event which involves the whole community, and having known the relationships through the previous ten years, the reader really feels the impact and can imagine it reverberating into the future.

It was like that in the neighborhood and outside of it, and Ada, Carmela, I myself - especially after the incident with the Solaras - had learned instinctively to lower our eyes, pretend not to hear the obscenities they directed at us, and keep going. Lila no. To go out with her on Sunday became a permanent point of tension. If someone looked at her she returned the look. If someone said something to her, she stopped, bewildered, as if she couldn't believe he was talking to her, and sometimes she responded, curious. Especially since - something very unusual - men almost never addressed to her the obscenities that they almost always had for us.

Great reviews! I'm very interested in My Brilliant Friend, a book I'd never heard of.

I always enjoy catching up with the varied books you are reading and your reviews!

Good lord I want ALL of those.

Really relating to closing off the rooms we don't use. I am just not interested in decorating and housekeeping. My husband says we should just move into our little trailer permanently. It's just so much easier. I figure then we could dedicate the whole house to BOOKS!!!

I love the idea behind Skios. This year a friend asked me to pick someone up at the airport who I didn't know and so I was one of those people holding up a poorly written name on a piece of cardboard. I quite enjoyed the experience.

My Brilliant Friend sounds good too.

Thanks! I am definitely having a good run at the moment.

75. The Influencing Machine by Brooke Gladstone, illustrated by Josh Neufeld

I enjoy Brooke Gladstone's deconstructions of media coverage on her NPR podcast, On The Media, so I was keen to read this graphic non-fiction (is that a category?) taking a wider look at the subject. Truthfully, I was expecting something like an exposé of various nefarious media practices, but the book is actually more thought-provoking.

Gladstone argues that all the media practices that are criticised today actually go back all the way to the beginning - Adams and Jefferson used newspapers to campaign negatively against each other, Washington leaked selected information to the media, journalists made up reports during the civil war. Gladstone illustrates how advocates of free speech in opposition turn against the media when in power, and also how journalists fall prey to the status quo bias, with the area of acceptable debate a narrow 'doughnut' between unquestionable consensus and the sphere of deviant opinions which never get covered.

Gladstone's overall argument is not that the media shape popular opinion but that they follow it. She uses the coverage of 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina to argue that the public have a favourable view of media not when it is most accurate, but when it is most representative of the national mood. Therefore, she argues, we get the media that we deserve, and in this era of information availability it is our responsibility to step outside the echo chamber, seek challenging views and question the information that we are given.

I think Gladstone is optimistic about the impact of the internet and information availability. But I found this a very interesting read, with much more to think about than some of the books I've read which present factual information in a graphic format.

Interesting!

Oh! MUST have!

78 and I keep wondering what to call that also so I googled it and yes, graphic non-fiction is the term.

The Influencing Machine does sound very interesting.

76. Dead Men And Broken Hearts by Craig Russell

This is the fourth and unfortunately, the last (at the moment anyway) in Craig Russell's Lennox series, noir thrillers set in post-WWII Glasgow. The title refers to the trail that our jaded private eye leaves behind him.

I've really enjoyed this whole series. The plot, Lennox's character and the writing are all different enough to be satisfying, while still fitting in to the genre and not feeling like pastiche. Like the others, I listened to this one on audiobook, and Sean Barrett's reading once again added to my enjoyment.

There are very few copies of the book on LT though. I hope that's not a reflection of the series' overall sales, and that Russell carries on writing it.

77. In the Land of Invented Languages by Arika Okrent

This is a book about artificial languages and the people who have invented them. Esperanto, of course, is by far the most famous, but it turns out that the history of invented languages goes back far before that - Okrent identifies 'five hundred languages in five hundred years' (the earliest being a language invented by Hildegard of Bingen in the twelfth century) and gallops through some of the different phases. The first 'trend' in invented languages was driven by the discovery of a universal notation of mathematics (previously, everything had been written out in full). This was universal - it could be understood by anyone whatever their native language - and it demonstrated a new kind of logic. Why couldn't the same be done for words? Well, you and I might be able to think of all sorts of reasons why not, but it turns out that the inventors of artificial languages are not the kind of people to let obstacles stand in their way. A later, and still prevalent, theme in artificial language invention was the idea that natural languages play us false. They are ambiguous and worse, can be used to deceive and mislead. But a truly logical language would save us. One such language, Lojban, takes this to extremes, with over 20 ways of saying 'and' (John and Mary are friends, John and Mary carried the piano, John and Mary speak French - would all be different 'and's reflecting slightly different shades of meaning - 'a and b considered together', 'a and b acting as a unit', and so on). Of course, this means that it's impossible to speak.

The reference grammar comes to over six hundred pages. This doesn't even include a dictionary. I read the whole thing - I swear I did. And I'll tell you, not only did I still not speak Lojban, but I started to lose my ability to comprehend English. "How many Lojbanists does it take to change a broken light-bulb?" goes the old Lojban joke. "Two: one to decide what to change it into and one to decide what kind of bulb emits broken light." ... I didn't see much live conversation at Logfest, but I did see a little. It goes very, very slowly. It's like watching people do long division in their heads. Of course, the types of people who are attracted to Lojban are precisely the types who are good at doing long division in their heads.

Okrent does a good job of sketching out the different languages, and clearly had a good shot at learning several (she claims that Lojban slightly reset her brain, so that when she heard, on a child's TV programme, the question: what are the two numbers which come after six?, she thought, well almost all numbers come after six - what can they mean?). In the introduction she claims that her look at artificial languages taught her things about natural languages. I'm not sure that's true, and to a certain extent this is a funny book about odd people. But Okrent comes to have some sympathy with the eccentrics who devote their lives to artificial languages, which means that we do to - even to the group she introduces as 'the lowest possible rung on the geek ladder', Klingon speakers.

Not terribly serious then, but a fun and quick read for people who like reading books about words.

>83 wandering_star: There are very few copies of the book on LT though. I hope that's not a reflection of the series' overall sales, and that Russell carries on writing it.

I think Craig Russell is poorly served by his distributor. I have been looking for his books for some time now. In Canada they only seem to be available on Kindle, which I don't have. I have not found any in used book stores in Canada or the US. I have even looked for him in Glasgow without any luck (Easter 2012). I see today that he is available from Book Depository for a decent price. As a side note, Denise Mina seems to suffer from the same fate, as does Edgar Cozarinsky. I usually start the year with a book of this ilk and this year it looks like a no go, unless I succumb to Rebus in hard cover. Actually, Book Depository is pretty fast; maybe I'll order Lennox.

I will have to try the Lennox series. It sounds like my cuppa'.

The invented languages books sounds interesting.

Okrent did quite a lot of publicity around the book, so I heard her interviewed on various podcasts. Might be worth listening to one or two of those to see whether it's your thing.

78. The Sea, The Sea by Iris Murdoch

Charles Arrowby, celebrated actor and director, is determined to retire from the tiring round of London social life, and moves to a decaying, slightly sinister house by the sea. He settles down to write his autobiography, but what emerges is part diary, part rambling reminiscences of women he has dallied with and men he has been jealous of. Nothing in his life has ever come close to the purity of his love for a girl he was at school with, who suddenly vanished from his life just as they were getting old enough to be married, as they had always promised each other. But Charles can't get away from London totally, as his friends keep popping up to visit him at the most inconvenient times. And then, one day, he realises that an old woman he's seen in the village is, in fact, the lost love of his childhood. His pursuit of this image of happiness almost unhinges him.

I had a slightly frustrating time with this book, principally because it is much too long. It could easily have lost a hundred or more pages - I would recommend from the setup (which lasts about a quarter of the book) and from the bit in the middle where Charles is crazily pursuing Hartley. These were the bits where the book was quite tiresome. I also found it surprisingly misogynistic - if I hadn't known, I would never have guessed that it was written by a woman.

Despite this, the final act of the story manages to pull everything back together in a satisfying way - rather like drawing back from a picture and finally seeing the pattern. Even more remarkably, Murdoch manages to make the reader sympathetic towards a man who is incredibly pompous* and self-deluding; and to give us a picture of the transformational nature of love despite the fact that most of the book dwells on "the inward ravages of jealousy, remorse, fear and the consciousness of irretrievable moral failure".

Not a whole-hearted recommendation, then, but I will read more by Iris Murdoch (and about 3/4 of the way through the book, I certainly didn't think that). And this despite a 'postscript' half of which is illuminating and the other half completely unnecessary hammering in of the themes of the book.

(*I think Charles must have been the model for the pompous and even more unreliable narrator of James Hamilton-Paterson's Cooking With Fernet Branca - he was so reminiscent of that character).

Time, like the sea, unties all knots. Judgments on people are never final, they emerge from summings up which at once suggest the need for a reconsideration. Human arrangements are nothing but loose ends and hazy reckoning, whatever art may otherwise pretend in order to console us.

I like that last sentence quoted from The Sea, The Sea Iris Murdoch is an author with whom I have a lot of catching up to do.

Nice review of The Sea, the Sea, Margaret. I won't get to it this month, but hopefully I'll read it in the next year or two.

Excellent review of The Sea, the Sea and a nice reminder that I have been wanting to read this for some time now.

Interesting review of The Sea, The Sea.
In the Land of Invented Languages by Arika Okrent sounds pretty wacky! Great review of that one as well.

Happy New Year to you Wandering!

Thanks Paul - happy new year to you and to everyone!

Darryl - I like "in the next year or two", for a moment I thought I'd misread it. Have you read any other Murdoch? I am not sure that this is the book to start with, but will have to read a couple of others to find out if it's representative.

79. The Likeness by Tana French

What better way to blow away the longeurs of The Sea, The Sea than with this blistering thriller? Cassie Maddox used to be an undercover detective - one of the best - until her nerve failed. But one day, a body turns up which not only looks just like her, but carries the name of her first undercover persona. There are no leads on the murderer and her old boss is gripped by the unique opportunity to drop Cassie into the murdered girl's life to see what she can discover. Reluctant at first, Cassie says yes, and as she gets deeper into the case she remembers how much she loved the risk-taking of undercover work. She also starts to be seduced by her victim - another risk-taker - and becomes absorbed into the dead girl's life.

I think this is the best thriller that I have read for some time. It is genuinely thrilling and fast-paced (I was up till 2am last night finishing it), but with real people with complicated characters, and a complex story rather than one that throws in twists for the sake of it. Tana French has written several thrillers featuring detectives from the Dublin Murder Squad, all of which have post-crash Ireland as an important backdrop. I'll certainly be reading more.

Now that thumbscrews and red-hot pincers are off the menu, there's no way we can force anyone to confess to murder, lead us to the body, give up a loved one or rat out a crime lord, but still people do it all the time. They do it because there's something they want more than safety: a clear conscience, a chance to brag, an end to the tension, a fresh start, you name it and we'll find it. If we can just figure out what you want - secretly, hidden so deep you may never have glimpsed it yourself - and dangle it in front of you, you'll give us anything we ask for in exchange.

A good end to the year!

Top ten reads of the year:

Joint first: New Finnish Grammar by Diego Marani, and My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante.

Other fiction, in no particular order:
The Complete Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino
Portrait Of The Mother As A Young Woman by Friedrich Christian Delius
The Man Who Walked Through Walls by Marcel Aymé
Metropole by Ferenc Karinthy
The Thousand Autumns Of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell

The non-fiction I've most frequently quoted from/recommended to others:
Delusions Of Gender: how our minds, society and neurosexism create difference by Cordelia Fine
The Party: the secret world of China's Communist rulers by Richard McGregor

And finally, just for fun, Mr Penumbra's 24-hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan

>94 wandering_star: I love Tana French's books. Have you read any of the others? If not, I think you are in for a treat.

Happy New Year!

>89 wandering_star:

Some books can justifiably called to long, but I would disagree with you saying that The Sea, the Sea is too long. All of Iris Murdoch later novels tend to be very long, and, in my opinion this contributes to their quality. Spending more time with the characters and the novel brings out the themes in a more balanced way, and also the "dosing" seems to be better tuned.

I would not go as far as to suggest that this is always true for every novel, and have myself come to the conclusion that many novels would improve having fewer pages, but as I said, not Murdoch.

I'm glad you liked The Likeness since Tana French is one of my favorite crime novelists. The entire premise is so unlikely it should not work, but it does -- brilliantly.

Thanks Edwin. That may be the case for you, but I really found the middle part especially (when Charles is trying to persuade Hartley to run away with him) got rather tiresome. I think that the reader had definitely got the message about both Charles and Hartley's feelings way before the story moved on. I do agree that perhaps on re-reading I would get more out of the first third of the book (on first reading I was wondering what the book would turn out to be about).

What other Murdochs would you recommend?

I haven't read any other Tana French but am definitely keen to now. I agree too about the way she pulls off the unlikely story in The Likeness.

My 2014 thread is here.