March, 2024 Reading: “Our life is March weather, savage and serene in one hour.” (Emerson)

Starting off the month of March with poetry, a smart literary novel waiting in the wings.

Looks like in our neck of the woods March is coming in like a lion, with blowing snow in the forecast for the weekend.

Perfect opportunity to hunker down with a tall tale or two.

I have just finished Christopher Priest's novel of intertwining alternate realities, The Separation. Highly impressed, and it just brings home to me what a talent we have lost.

And British science fiction has also just lost another notable writer, Brian Stableford.

I'm also in the middle of speculative fiction reading, but from other side of the pond. Reread Aegypt, which I read and loved years ago, and continuing with the remaining 3 books in the sequence. Recommended to those who enjoy meandering but gorgeous writing, dipping in and out of inner musings of multiple characters, peppered with philosophical ones, often of the most curious kinds, like figuring out the 3 wishes to ask should you ever find yourself in such a situation, but also about nature of perception and our grasp of reality.

A MAZE ME: Poems For Girls by Naomi Shihab Nye.

Nye is one of my favorite contemporary poets. Like the best of them, she can pluck the miraculous out of the commonplace, revealing how much of existence is mysterious, improbable, magical.

Sublime verse.

Recommended.

Recent readings:

Everything She Touched: The Life of Ruth Asawa by Marilyn Chase: I love Ruth Asawa's work that is why this book was terribly disappointing. It is not so much about Asawa the artist but about Asawa the activist for arts education in San Francisco. It all feels very sanitized. You don't really get a sense of Asawa as a person. My guess is that the book was supervised by the Asawa family or intended as some sort of public relations document.

Travels with Herodotus by Ryszard Kapuściński: A sort of memoir made of vignettes of the author's travels accompanied with a retelling of segments of Herodotus' Histories. The relation between both was not always clear to me. Kapuscinski writes beautifully though and has an eye for the vivid detail. Some cringy moments here and there but for the most part very enjoyable. Reminded me I've always wanted to read Herodotus.

The Door to Saturn by Clark Ashton Smith. The literary equivalent of outsider painting. There seems to be one plot but then it's abandoned for another. Moments of weirdness that feel clunky and are left unresolved. Then there is the unforgettable image of "the national mother." Fun, weird little book.

The Blind Owl by Sadegh Hedayat. Iranian modernism. Some interesting elements but hard to take the main character seriously. Very melodramatic, very adolescent.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Love by Raymond Carver. Easy to admire but hard to love. Leaves a strange taste in the mouth.

Also read the short story Full Sun by Brian W. Aldiss. Very interesting, would love to read more by him. Not sure if I'm going to finish Grotto of the Dancing Deer: And Other Stories by Clifford D. Simak.

Currently reading Harsh Times by Mario Vargas Llosa.

"What We Talk About When We Talk About Love by Raymond Carver. Easy to admire but hard to love. Leaves a strange taste in the mouth." Is that a philosophical take on the title or a book review? :)

THE MARIGOLD, a novel by Canadian author Andrew F. Sullivan.

Toronto is rotting away, some kind of sentient mold (dubbed "The Wet") devouring the foundations of skyscrapers and infecting and dissolving any humans who happen to get in the way.

Gruesome stuff at times, but the author has enough talent and sense to resist the urge to take everything over the top.

Two Chapters in a Family Chronicle and Two Talks on Writing, John Crowley - two chapbooks, of four, published earlier this year by Ninepin Press. I contributed to the kickstarter last year. The titles of these two pretty much explain their contents. The first is two chapters from a story, which may or may not be biographical. The first is set in the 1920s and runs through the lives of Percy and Lulu, who buy a small farm in Vermont. Percy is a doctor. Their son-in-law is a doctor too, and his surname is Crowley, revealing the two chapters to be part of the history of Crowley's family. Perhaps slight, but as ever with Crowley, beautifully written. The second chapbook is two articles on writing, the first describing writing as "the art of peace" and how the practice of it fits that label, and the second on allegories and their use. Adam Roberts considers sf chiefly allegorical, and Crowley's piece bolsters that.

The Benevolent Society of Ill-mannered Ladies, Alison Goodman - Regency romances have been around since Georgette Heyer invented the genre back in the 1920s, although some people seem to think it's a recent invention. There were Regency fantasies in the 1980s, long before Susanna Clarke, and even Regency crime novels - I was a fan of Kate Ross's Julian Kestrel novels, published in the 1990s. And Regency crime is what The Benevolent Society of Ill-mannered Ladies bills itself as, although it's more in the nature of a revisionist Regency romance. Two spinster sisters in their forties, members of the ton (their brother is an earl), get dragged into a series of escapades, rescuing women, one from abusive husband bent on murder, another from a private mental institution, and some underage girls from a brothel. Along the way, there's lots on women's lack of rights during the period (even rich, upper class women), and one of the spinsters falls for a disgraced peer who was transported after killing a man in a duel and is back to because his lesbian sister is in trouble (she's the one in the mental institution). It's clearly the first book of a series. I enjoyed it, I'll be reading the sequels when they appear.

The Spice Must Flow, Ryan Britt - The words "cult novels" and "visionary sci-fi movies" on the cover should have been a red flag. The author seems to know very little about written sf, despite working for tor.com for a couple of years, under David Hartwell no less. He thinks the New Wave was a US movement, and that Frank Herbert was "the most important New Wave science fiction writer of them all". He also thinks everything Herbert wrote except Dune was shit. At one point he claims Herbert wrote next to nothing except Dune novels; later he lists all of Herbert's non-Dune novels (and Whipping Star and The Dosadi Experiment are not the only two notable ConSentiency novels, they're the *only* ConSentiency novels). But then I suspect the book is, if not part of, at least capitalising on the publicity for Dune 2 (which it describes as a 2023 film). The Spice Must Flow is annoying in a number of ways--its ignorance of written sf and sf writers, its continual comparisons of Dune to Star Wars, its overuse of superlatives for everything, its fawning over Chalamet and Villeneuve... OTOH, there's a lot of interesting stuff about the genesis of the novel--everyone knows the novel grew out of a planned article on sand dunes, and that the novel was rejected a couple of dozen times, but according to Britt the version that was rejected was not the one that finally saw print. And it was Lanier, the editor (a sf writer himself) who eventually published the book, who decided to title it Dune (previously it had been Dune World). There are a lot of books about the Dune novels out there. This is not one of the good ones.

The Towers of Toron, Samuel R Delany - the second of The Fall of the Towers trilogy, set on an Earth centuries after a nuclear war wiped out most of humanity. The empire of Toron is at war, the king has been murdered, and there are a handful of people who know the truth about the war but have suppressed it - but, in fact, everyone knows the truth but has suppressed it. There's also the Lord of the Flames, who is some sort of evil intergalactic mind, and another intergalactic mind who is on the side of the humans, or maybe they're on its side, and some people who are invisible in low light, and... well, you don't read Delany for the plotting but for the language. And while the story makes very little sense, the prose is Delany-light, with echoes of his later signature linguistic pyrotechnics. Still, it's been definitely worth the reread, as I last read it way back in the 1980s and had retained almost on knowledge of the story.

Dark of the Moon, PC Hodgell - the second book of the Chronicles of Kencyrath, a fantasy so heartland it could be a D&D campaign. However, it does ring plenty of changes on the template, with Highborn Jame continuing to exhibit strange abilities, and at one point getting trapped in the chain of worlds legend has it the Kencyrath travelled along to reach the current world. Meanwhile, her twin brother is trying to get the Highborn lords of Riverland to form an army to head south to stop the Waster Horde from ravaging the western lands. The battle forms the climax of the novel. This better than average high fantasy - and I say that as omsoene who has a very low opinion of the genre - and I'm pretty sure bits of this book were references to Conan stories by Robert E Howard. Hodgell has built an interesting world, with a fascinating back-story, and if the lead characters are a little too good be entirely credible, Hodgell gives them a fair from easy ride. There's ten books in the series to date. I plan to work my way through them.

Revolt in 2100, Robert A Heinlein - Really should have checked the contents of this collection before buying it at my local secondhand sf bookstore. It contains the novel “If This Goes On–”, a novella, a novelette and an essay, and all but the essay are in the collection The Past Through Tomorrow, which I read a couple of years ago. “If This goes On–” is set in a USA ruled by a corrupt theocracy, so a bit like what the MAGAs want, but one young man finds himself drawn to a vestal virgin, is subsequently recruited by an underground resistance, and becomes involved in overthrowing the theocracy. Lots of lectures to the young man by various characters, on several of Heinlein’s favourite subjects–eg, sex and politics. A short story idea stretched into tedium as a novel. ‘Coventry’ is a sequel–this book is the third tranche of Heinlein’s Future History, covering 2050 to around 2115. In post-Theocracy US, a young man chooses to be outcast to a sealed colony of criminals and is surprised to discover it’s populated by criminals. Heinlein lays it on thick. But everything turns out well–although how those inside the Barrier managed to create a super-weapon despite not having, well, industry is never explained. ‘Misfit’ is an early draft of the novel Starman Jones. Bumpkin space conscript proves to be an idiot savant mathematical genius and saves the day after the spaceship’s computer breaks. The essay is simply Heinlein explaining why he chose not to write the stories which would have filled in his Future History leading up to, and detailing events immediately after, “If This Goes On–”. Notable only for the line, “Remember Karl Marx and note how close that unscientific piece of nonsense called Das Kapital has come close to smothering out all freedom of thought on half a planet”. Those Americans, living the Dream, eh?

>8 iansales:

Ian, I think you're missing the first part of your review of the Crowley chapbooks.

>9 CliffBurns: oops, will edit and add

STAGGERFORD by Jon Hassler.

I have very stupidly read the "Staggerford" series out of sequence and I regret it. This is the first book and I found it a treat (despite the previous owner having underlined significant portions of it--in pen.).

My favorite character, the spinster Agatha McGee, plays a major part in the narrative and, overall, I found the novel as much of a page-turner as the other Hassler offerings I've read.

The entire "Staggerford" series comes highly recommended.

If you like Kent Haruf, you'll love Hassler.

Finished CASTLE OF OTRANTO by Horace Walpole.

Every so often, I take a stab at a "classic" and am quite frequently disappointed.

This is no exception.

Some time I go I began to suspect that the horror/dark fantasy genre isn't very good because its source material is weak. DRACULA, FRANKENSTEIN, JEKYL & HYDE...all of them are pretty terrible books, clunky and over-written and melodramatic.

OTRANTO is better written than those three efforts but it still struggles with credibility, characters who all sound the same...and, of course, Walpole takes 20 words to say something that any decent author could manage in 10.

Well, I read it and survived.

That will have to suffice.

I've just finished and reviewed Artemis Cooper's biography of the travel writer and adventurer Patrick Leigh Fermor, Patrick Leigh Fermor; an adventure. At the age of 18 in 1932, he determined to trek across Europe to Constantinople (as he insisted in calling it): forty years later, he began to set that adventure out in a trilogy of books beginning with A Time of Gifts (1977), then Between the Woods and the Water (1986) and ending with The Broken Road (2014), unfinished at the time of his death in 2011. I had heard of these books over the years, but only picked them up about six years ago. His account of first sighting the stupendous monastery of Melk, on the Danube, resonated with me so very much because I had had a similar reaction when I first saw it. I became a fan immediately.

Cooper's biography fills in many of the gaps that Leigh Fermor left in his books because of the passage of time. If it sometimes seems that there are a lot of names being resoundingly dropped, that is a reflection of the circles he moved in, though he also related to ordinary people: someone recounts walking through rural Greece with him when he was in his 70s and dreading him spotting a lone shepherd because they knew they'd be kicking their heels for a good twenty minutes whilst Leigh Fermor had a conversation with the shepherd (in fluent Greek, of course).

GREAT-UNCLE HARRY by Michael Palin.

Palin tries to piece together the life of a little-known uncle, killed at the Somme in 1916, with the help of scant diaries and archival research. The final portrait still has many gaps and there are numerous occasions where the author is extrapolating and making assumptions: "As he gazed upon the sight, Harry must have felt...", etc.

But, like its author, the book is frequently engaging and likable, good company on a sunny, early Spring afternoon.

STARKWEATHER by Harry N. Maclean.

A new account of a murder spree that captivated America: two teenagers and a trail of destruction that extended from Nebraska to Wyoming. It became a television sensation, the media and the rest of America fixated on the crimes and mindsets of Charlie Starkweather and Caril Fugate.

The author makes a real effort to exonerate Caril for her participation in 10 murders but, in the end, I remain skeptical.

Not a great "true crime" book--the writing pedestrian at times, the final result tepid and unexciting.

THE WOMAN IN BLACK, a charming little chiller by Susan Hill.

Gothic tales and real estate have one thing in common: both place enormous importance on location, location, location.

A remote house, a gloomy, marshy backdrop and an assortment of ghosts make for spooky times for a young lawyer dispatched from his London law firm to close up the affairs of an eccentric old woman, recently deceased. His sense of unease gradually grows, the tension slowly ratcheting up. Ms. Hill proving, yet again, that good authors don't require buckets of blood to instill real, skin-crawling dread.

Recommended.

The play is pretty good too.

SEVEN BRIEF LESSONS ON PHYSICS by Carlo Rovelli.

Mr. Rovelli is a noted physicist who took it upon himself to try and explain his field in a manner that might be comprehensible to lay people.

I am NOT a science person--in school, I excelled at English and history and dreaded the mandatory chemistry and algebra classes. I struggled mightily to manage a semi-decent mark in both (without grasping them in the slightest).

The author makes a valiant effort and after finishing this short book I might have a SLIGHTLY clearer understanding of quantum physics (or what have you), but my mind stubbornly refuses to make the leap necessary to really accommodate some of the fundamentals of a field where big brains predominate and dolts like me merely raise our shoulders in resignation and bafflement.

DARK MATTER: A Ghost Story by Michelle Paver.

A nail-biter. In 1937, four young Englishmen are sent to a remote spot in the Spitsbergen archipelago to collect meteorological data. Gradually, the numbers dwindle until only one man is left at the outpost, taking measurements as the winter cold and darkness settles in...as well as dealing with the malign spirit inhabiting the place.

Paver sets the table well, emphasizing the isolation and growing fear of the last man.

Recommended.

Recent reads:-

Conquest, Nina Allan - There’s something about this novel which reminds me of another, possibly one by Michel Faber, and I suspect Faber may well have been an influence. But then “secret alien invasion” is a well-worn science fiction trope going right back to the early days of the genre–Eric Frank Russell’s Three to Conquer from 1956 springs to mind as an example. Of course, this is Nina Allan, so it’s nothing as straightforward as “alien mind parasites infiltrating the UK”. In fact, initially Conquest seems to be about something altogether different–nor is it a spoiler to reveal the “secret alien invasion”, because the central mystery of the plot is the disappearance of Frank. He travels to Paris to meet up with some fellow members of an online conspiracy forum–called LAvventura, obviously after the Antonioni film, but I wonder if that reference is a little too obscure for most readers–and is never seen again. His girlfriend hires Robin, a private investigator who left the police under acrimonious circumstances. Frank is on the spectrum, although the word is never used in the book, and loves the music of Bach. Robin too is a fan of Bach’s work. But Robin is, unknown to her, also connected to Frank’s disappearance, and the reason for Frank’s disappearance. In fact, many of the false leads Robin investigates eventually prove to link up to Frank and Robin. There’s no doubt this is Allan’s best book so far, an unsettling thriller that’s only marginally adjacent to science fiction. If I have one niggle it’s that Conquest suffers from the same flaw as Allan’s earlier The Dollmaker. The narrative of Conquest uses both the voices of Frank and Robin, and handles them well; but it also includes (most of) a science fiction novella from the 1950s, and two online essays by a pair of journalists–and none of these three really read like the products of different hands. They read as if Nina Allan wrote them; which she did, of course. Unconvincing literary ventriloquism aside, I’d say Conquest was a strong contender for this year’s genre awards, but I suspect most people won’t classify it as genre.

Reaper Man, Terry Pratchett - One fantasy series I decided to work my way through because it’s good is Terry Pratchett’s Discworld, all forty books of it. I read the first three or four way back in the 1980s, and enjoyed them, and one of my sisters later became a big fan of the books… but I’d never made the effort to read further. Then, a couple of years ago, some of them popped up on the daily deal for a certain near-monopolistic online ebook retailer, so I bought them, and kept an eye open for later books on offer in the series… And here we are, eleven books later. Reaper Man, I think, doesn’t have as good a story as some of the novels preceding it, but it definitely has some good lines. Death is made redundant, and after sort of accidentally taking the name Bill Door, becomes Miss Flitworth’s farmhand. And because he’s not fulfilling his Death duties (did you see what I did there?), people aren’t dying, which is causing all sorts of havoc in Ankh-Morpork. This culminates in the appearance of an organic hive which resembles a shopping mall, populated by shopping trolley-like creatures. Unfortunately, malls, shopping trolleys, and fringe protest groups are low-hanging targets (to mix metaphors), but Pratchett’s recasting of the Unseen University’s senior wizards as an inept combat team is amusing. Eventually, Death gets his position back, and order is restored. Some excellent one-liners, but the story felt a bit forced.

Europa Deep, Gary Gibson - I’ve known Gary for close on thirty years, and I’ve read and enjoyed all the books he published before his contract with Tor ended several years ago, and a number of them published since then. Some I’ve admired more than others. Europa Deep was published by Gary’s own Brain in a Jar Books, but I think it’s been his most successful title to date under that imprint. It’s a little closer to near-future sf than his Shoal Sequence, but still ends up in their territory. A second expedition to Europa, more than a decade after the first went silent, proves to have several conflicting objectives–discover if the first expedition was developing bioweapons from Europan microbial life, destroy that research, no, save that research and kill everyone, but beat the Chinese to the moon so they can’t claim it, and, in the case of protagonist Cassie White, find out if her brother is still alive as there’s evidence which suggests he might be. Cassie is an “Opt”, ie, she was gene-tweaked to improve her intelligence, endurance and reflexes. But there’s been backlash against Opts, and her genetic engineering has also left her with a flaw–she blacks out after extended periods in micro-gravity. And since she worked as an astronaut, that proved to be a bit of a problem. So she became a deep sea diver in atmospheric diving suits–which makes her an ideal candidate for the second mission to Europa… What initially begins as a straightforward nearish-future sf novel, with hyper-capitalist villains and uploaded tech bros and the sort of casual slaughter that 21st century science fiction seems to consider part and parcel of the future… Europa Deep goes somewhere completely different, and shows Gary still has the space opera chops he displayed to advantage in his Shoal novels. A solid mid-list sf novel that aims a little higher than its premise initially suggests… and succeeds.

The Gathering Storm, Robert Jordan - I read the first six or so books of the Wheel of Time back in the 1990s. I had no real interest in the story or world, and I’d stopped reading fat fantasy novels a decade or so before. But I wanted to understand why the books had proven so popular. I never did figure it out. I tried to keep up with the series but eventually bailed somewhere around book ten. The people who recommended the series back then, most now cheerfully admit the books are rubbish. Which, to be honest, is being generous. In 2014, Wheel of Time was nominated for the Best Novel Hugo at the London Worldcon, and all members were given an ebook omnibus of all fourteen volumes. So I decided I would actually complete the series, prompted partly by the announcement of the TV series. Memory, I quickly discovered, had been kinder to the books than I’d realised. Muddled plotting, juvenile characters, spanking, far too many gratuitous mentions of women’s breasts, repetition, more repetition, repeated repetition, and prose that’s only one not-very-high step above that of Dan Brown. But I dutifully ploughed my way through books one to eleven… and now I’ve read The Gathering Storm, the first book completed by Brandon Sanderson after Jordan’s death. It is… just as bad as the others, but in slightly different ways. The prose is, if anything, even more bland. And Sanderson doesn’t pad his prose by repeating things but by inserting long descriptions of completely irrelevant stuff. There’s less mention of breasts, but there is a bout of spanking (what is with white US male authors and spanking?). And the clothing of every single female character is described in detail. In the book’s favour, Sanderson makes his cast behave and think less like teenagers, and the difference is quite marked by the end of the book. On the other hand, he does seem to like putting characters in situations they can’t escape from… and then in one improbable bound they’re suddenly free. I forget the details of the plot–it’s all manoeuvring the cast around a board so everyone’s in place for the final battle. Yawn. It’s pretty much the same as the earlier volumes, although it does read more like it was dictated than typed. A prime example of Extruded Fantasy Product.

ROMMEL? GUNNER WHO? by Spike Milligan.

Milligan's war memoirs are hilarious and moving. You can read the books or, better yet, listen to the man himself read them (for free, on YouTube).

One of the funniest Brits who ever lived.

A review of These Burning Stars by Bethany Jacobs: https://medium.com/@ian-93054/these-burning-stars-bethany-jacobs-c63b5472302c

>22 iansales: Good, sharp overview of space opera, Ian.

I'll keep an eye out for a number of the titles you cited.

I've just finished Achtung Schweinehund!, a funny and true account of a British boy's childhood in the 1950s and 1960s and the influence of war comics, plastic construction kits and wargaming on that childhood. I can relate to this a lot: that was my childhood. Some might say it still is. I mention it here because a surprising number of literasry figures turn up in the text, including H.G.Wells, Jerome K. Jerome, G.K. Chesterton, and the Brontës.

>24 RobertDay: I have a feeling that one would be right up my alley, Robert.

Finally wrapped up WHY READ: Selected Writings 2001-2021 by Will Self.

Essays on a variety of subjects--Self is so smart and well-read, I'm wildly jealous of him. From junkie to Oxford alumnus, the man has led quite a life. But Literature has always been his saving grace, the lifeline upon which he relied. His writing on authors like Kafka, Sebald and Conrad very wise and insightful. He is that increasingly rare breed, a literary author who demands an intelligent readership that likes to be challenged. He knows that technology and diminishing attention spans are thinning out their ranks and that writing like his is endangered, practically extinct.

Recommended.