A mostly mainstream year

The figures are in. Actually they've been in since January 1 but I’ve only just got round to processing them. Of the books read in 2009, with 2008's figures in brackets:

• Total: 54 (53)
• Science fiction /fantasy: 19 (30)
• Translated from Swedish: 1 (4)
• (Auto)biography/fact: 9 (5)
• Crime: 3 (3)
• Gave up: 1 (2)

A mere 19 science fiction or fantasy! That’s even counting ones like Boom! by Mark Haddon which is technically of that genre but not entirely serious – but not, though, counting No Highway by Nevil Shute, which for the most part is an enjoyable and prescient progenitor of the techno-thriller genre punctured at the end by a séance providing the denouement. I got the feeling Shute ran out of ideas: "The vital clue is lying in the middle of the Canadian wilderness and our hero needs to find it – how I can get it to him?"

But anyway. 19 out of 53. 36%! That must be the lowest quite literally for decades. A marked increase in factual reading, though. Other people’s lives can be interesting. I also note that I managed an entire year without reading a single thing by Terry Pratchett, which has been unheard of since I first discovered the man. That would have changed if anyone had got the hint and given me Unseen Academicals for Christmas. (Gosh, I have a birthday in February, what could people possibly give me? [Bonusbarn muses: "You probably don't want anything pirated, do you?"]).

And because I know you’re dying to ask, the 54 are:

• The Years of Rice and Salt, Kim Stanley Robinson
• Resurrection Men, Ian Rankin
• Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Jonathan Safran Foer
• Strange Itineraries, Tim Powers
• Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell
• Blind Faith, Colin Harvey
• The Business, Iain Banks
• Nice Work, David Lodge
• Varjak Paw, S.F. Said
• The Bookseller of Kabul, Åsne Seierstad
• Stealing Water - A Secret Life in an African City, Tim Ecott
• The Sacred Diary of Adrian Plass, on Tour: Aged Far Too Much to Be Put on the Front Cover of a Book, Adrian Plass
• Changeling, Mike Oldfield
• The Oz Suite, Gerard Houarner
• The Stress of her Regard, Tim Powers
• The Second Rumpole Omnibus, John Mortimer
• The Odessa File, Frederick Forsyth
• The Day of the Jackal, Frederick Forsyth
• The Jennifer Morgue, Charles Stross
• Principles of Angels, Jaine Fenn
• The Prefect, Alastair Reynolds
• Where Eagles Dare, Alistair Maclean
• Moab is my Washpot, Stephen Fry
• Life of Pi, Yann Martel
• Dead and Alive, Hammond Innes
• The Inferior, Peadar Ó Guilín
• The Uncommon Reader, Alan Bennett
• Future Bristol, Colin Harvey
• Icehenge, Kim Stanley Robinson
• Endymion Spring, Matthew Skelton
• Microserfs, Douglas Coupland
• The Ghost, Robert Harris
• Boom!, Mark Haddon
• The Owl Service, Alan Garner
• Jason, J. M. Marks
• Elidor, Alan Garner
• Sirius, Olaf Stapledon
• Odd John, Olaf Stapledon
• The Last Templar, Michael Jecks
• Miracles of Life, J.G. Ballard
• No Highway, Nevil Shute
• deadkidsongs, Toby Litt
• One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
• A Parliamentary Affair, Edwina Currie
• Fighter Boys, Patrick Bishop
• The Storm Prophet, Hector Macdonald
• Pompeii, Robert Harris
• John Newton: From Disgrace to Amazing Grace, Jonathan Aitken
• Christianity Explored, Rico Tice & Barry Cooper
• The Sorcerer's Tale: Faith and Fraud in Tudor England, Alec Ryrie
• The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, John Boyne
• A Spot of Bother, Mark Haddon
• William Wilberforce, William Hague
• Out Stealing Horses, Per Petterson

And life was too short to read Master of Hawks by Linda E. Bushyager.

Pratchett, games and lists

To the Unicorn Theatre last night for the latest of the Studio Theatre Club's Pratchett plays. The group has gone back to its roots with a revised version of the very first such play that it did, in 1991, a few months before I came to Abingdon and a year before Bonusbarn was born. Wyrd Sisters: The Director's Cut.

The usual high standards; nigh on perfect casting all round. It was a shame they left Death out but you can't have everything. Plays also can't include lines of narrative text: I remember from the novel the lovely line "they turned to see a dwarf trying to loom over them". Also difficult on stage would have been the bit where someone tries to sit in a chair occupied by the ghost of the dead king. "Is someone sitting here?" / "Yes ..."

On the way back home Bonusbarn gave an interesting insight into the politics of gamery, or the workings of his own mind, or both, speaking contemptuously of the people sitting in the row in front, who I would guess to have been students. "I’m never going to be that nerdy. They were talking about Magic: The Gathering. That’s a card game."

… which led on to a discussion of which is better, a technologically accomplished piece of work graphical like World of Warcraft, where everything is laid out for you on screen, or a proper role playing game (you may see where my prejudices lie) where you may have a few props and enabling items but the main action takes place in the imagination.

… which led on to a reminder (following from his suspicious identification of my ability to recognise authentic player-talk) that I was in the university SFSoc in my day, even though I hardly ever went to a meeting because they clashed with scuba diving on Thursday evenings and so I just turned up to the end of term video weekends.

[Sigh] "Were you the president?"

"No."

"Did the president have long hair and a trench coat?"

Um. Thinks. I do remember a long(ish) haired president. I also remember a trench coat. I forget if they were the same person. But …

Hm.

Which leads on to something almost completely different but saves me doing two blog posts where one will do. Apparently the Guardian is having one of those prescriptive moments that the national press do so love and is listing the 1000 books everyone must read. They’ve now got down to science fiction and fantasy titles. There’s 149 of them (for the sake of convenience Discworld, Narnia, His Dark Materials etc. count as one title each) and the full list is kindly summarised here so I pinched it.

Some I've never heard of; some (I'm looking at you, Rowling) I'm thinking "what??" With the possible exception of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell I'm thinking that any book published in the last five years is too recent to say everyone should read it; I'd say published this century except that China Mieville's there (though not with the title I'd have chosen). But anyway, here's the list again, with the ones I’ve read (60/149 = 40%) in bold.

Douglas Adams: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1979)
Brian W Aldiss: Non-Stop (1958)
Isaac Asimov: Foundation (1951)
Margaret Atwood: The Handmaid’s Tale (1985)
Margaret Atwood: The Blind Assassin (2000)
Paul Auster: In the Country of Last Things (1987)
JG Ballard: The Drowned World (1962)
JG Ballard: Crash (1973)
JG Ballard: Millennium People (2003)
Iain Banks: The Wasp Factory (1984)
Iain M Banks: Consider Phlebas (1987)
Clive Barker: Weaveworld (1987)
Nicola Barker: Darkmans (2007)
Stephen Baxter: The Time Ships (1995)
Greg Bear: Darwin’s Radio (1999)
William Beckford: Vathek (1786)
Alfred Bester: The Stars My Destination (1956)
Ray Bradbury: Fahrenheit 451 (1953)
Poppy Z Brite: Lost Souls (1992)
Charles Brockden Brown: Wieland (1798)
Algis Budrys: Rogue Moon (1960)
Mikhail Bulgakov: The Master and Margarita (1966)
Edward Bulwer-Lytton: The Coming Race (1871)
Anthony Burgess: A Clockwork Orange (1960) [seen the film; does that count?]
Anthony Burgess: The End of the World News (1982)
Edgar Rice Burroughs: A Princess of Mars (1912)
William Burroughs: Naked Lunch (1959)
Octavia Butler: Kindred (1979)
Samuel Butler: Erewhon (1872)
Italo Calvino: The Baron in the Trees (1957)
Ramsey Campbell: The Influence (1988)
Lewis Carroll: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865)
Lewis Carroll: Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871)
Angela Carter: The Passion of New Eve (1977)
Angela Carter: Nights at the Circus (1984)
Michael Chabon: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (2000)
Arthur C Clarke: Childhood’s End (1953)
GK Chesterton: The Man Who Was Thursday (1908)
Susanna Clarke: Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell (2004)
Michael G Coney: Hello Summer, Goodbye (1975)
Douglas Coupland: Girlfriend in a Coma (1998)
Mark Danielewski: House of Leaves (2000)
Marie Darrieussecq: Pig Tales (1996)
Samuel R Delaney: The Einstein Intersection (1967)
Philip K Dick: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968)
Philip K Dick: The Man in the High Castle (1962)
Thomas M Disch: Camp Concentration (1968)
Umberto Eco: Foucault’s Pendulum (1988)
Michel Faber: Under the Skin (2000)
John Fowles: The Magus (1966)
Neil Gaiman: American Gods (2001)
Alan Garner: Red Shift (1973) [didn’t understand it, but read it]
William Gibson: Neuromancer (1984)
Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Herland (1915)
William Golding: Lord of the Flies (1954)
Joe Haldeman: The Forever War (1974)
M John Harrison: Light (2002)
Nathaniel Hawthorne: The House of the Seven Gables (1851)
Robert A Heinlein: Stranger in a Strange Land (1961)
Frank Herbert: Dune (1965)
Hermann Hesse: The Glass Bead Game (1943)
Russell Hoban: Riddley Walker (1980)
James Hogg: The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824)
Michel Houellebecq: Atomised (1998)
Aldous Huxley: Brave New World (1932)
Kazuo Ishiguro: The Unconsoled (1995)
Shirley Jackson: The Haunting of Hill House (1959)
Henry James: The Turn of the Screw (1898)
PD James: The Children of Men (1992)
Richard Jefferies: After London; Or, Wild England (1885)
Gwyneth Jones: Bold as Love (2001)
Franz Kafka: The Trial (1925)
Daniel Keyes: Flowers for Algernon (1966)
Stephen King: The Shining (1977)
Marghanita Laski: The Victorian Chaise-longue (1953)
Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu: Uncle Silas (1864)
Ursula K Le Guin: The Left Hand of Darkness (1969)
Ursula K Le Guin: The Earthsea series (1968-1990)
Stanislaw Lem: Solaris (1961)
Doris Lessing: Memoirs of a Survivor (1974)
CS Lewis: The Chronicles of Narnia (1950-56)
MG Lewis: The Monk (1796)
David Lindsay: A Voyage to Arcturus (1920)
Ken MacLeod: The Night Sessions (2008)
Hilary Mantel: Beyond Black (2005)
Michael Marshall Smith: Only Forward (1994)
Richard Matheson: I Am Legend (1954)
Charles Maturin: Melmoth the Wanderer (1820)
Patrick McCabe: The Butcher Boy (1992)
Cormac McCarthy: The Road (2006)
Jed Mercurio: Ascent (2007)
China Miéville: The Scar (2002) [why this and not Perdido St Station?]
Andrew Miller: Ingenious Pain (1997)
Walter M Miller Jr: A Canticle for Leibowitz (1960)
David Mitchell: Cloud Atlas (2004)
Michael Moorcock: Mother London (1988)
William Morris: News From Nowhere (1890)
Toni Morrison: Beloved (1987)
Haruki Murakami: The Wind-up Bird Chronicle (1995)
Vladimir Nabokov: Ada or Ardor (1969)
Audrey Niffenegger: The Time Traveler’s Wife (2003)
Larry Niven: Ringworld (1970)
Jeff Noon: Vurt (1993)
Flann O’Brien: The Third Policeman (1967)
Ben Okri: The Famished Road (1991)
George Orwell: Nineteen Eighty-four (1949)
Chuck Palahniuk: Fight Club (1996)
Thomas Love Peacock: Nightmare Abbey (1818)
Mervyn Peake: Titus Groan (1946)
Frederik Pohl & CM Kornbluth: The Space Merchants (1953)
John Cowper Powys: A Glastonbury Romance (1932)
Terry Pratchett: The Discworld series (1983- )
Christopher Priest: The Prestige (1995)
Philip Pullman: His Dark Materials (1995-2000)
François Rabelais: Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532-34)
Ann Radcliffe: The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794)
Alastair Reynolds: Revelation Space (2000)
Kim Stanley Robinson: The Years of Rice and Salt (2002)
JK Rowling: Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (1997)
Salman Rushdie: The Satanic Verses (1988)
Joanna Russ: The Female Man (1975)
Geoff Ryman: Air (2005)
Antoine de Sainte-Exupéry: The Little Prince (1943)
José Saramago: Blindness (1995)
Will Self: How the Dead Live (2000)
Mary Shelley: Frankenstein (1818)
Dan Simmons: Hyperion (1989)
Olaf Stapledon: Star Maker (1937)
Neal Stephenson: Snow Crash (1992)
Robert Louis Stevenson: The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886)
Bram Stoker: Dracula (1897)
Rupert Thomson: The Insult (1996)
JRR Tolkien: The Hobbit (1937)
JRR Tolkien: The Lord of the Rings (1954-55)
Mark Twain: A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur’s Court (1889)
Kurt Vonnegut: Sirens of Titan (1959)
Horace Walpole: The Castle of Otranto (1764)
Robert Walser: Institute Benjamenta (1909)
Sylvia Townsend Warner: Lolly Willowes (1926)
Sarah Waters: Affinity (1999)
HG Wells: The Time Machine (1895)
HG Wells: The War of the Worlds (1898)
TH White: The Sword in the Stone (1938)
Angus Wilson: The Old Men at the Zoo (1961)
Gene Wolfe: The Book of the New Sun (1980-83)
Virginia Woolf: Orlando (1928)
John Wyndham: Day of the Triffids (1951)
John Wyndham: The Midwich Cuckoos (1957) [what happened to The Chrysalids?]
Yevgeny Zamyatin: We (1924)

Reading: not just a town in Berkshire

Last year I decided to start a log of all books I had read or was reading in 2007. There turn out to have been 60 in total of which (some are in more than one category):

Sf/f 30
Crime 6
Historical 9
Other 3
Y/a or kids 8
Autobiography 2
Biography 4
Commentary 3
Review 7
Translated from Swedish 4
Read for the first time 44
Read before 16

Or, put another way:


Which I find interesting. You might not. For one thing, not so long ago that would have been nigh on 100% sf/f titles rather than a piddly 50% at 30. And where does that "read before" come from? Time was everything would have been a first timer. Almost a quarter of that 30 were books I only read because I was asked to review them, so let's assume 23/60 were science fiction & fantasy titles read because I wanted to. And of them (which doesn't show in the table, but hang on, I'll do a quick count ...) 8 were re-reads of Terry Pratchett and one was the last Potter.

And I wouldn't be surprised if 2008's haul is even less. A perk of doing a review is you get to keep the book in question, but I've not kept one of them. Only one, Chris Wooding's The Fade, came even close to it. I think the only sf title that made me go "wow!" at the end of it, apart from Northern Lights for the second time, was Philip Reeve's A Darkling Plain. Meanwhile, out in the real world, the sf market is still turning out highly accomplished stuff ... but it's leaving me cold.

Big Engine started this - that was when I first began to lose the ability to read sf for enjoyment. But something else has changed too, in the world outside my head. Far too many of the 30 sf titles were lacking in warmth, charm, humour, characters you could relate to. It didn't used to be that way. Did it? And I just don't have the heart for that kind of stuff anymore.

SF is going out in my own head, too. SFnal ideas don't flood in like they used to. They still tend to be weird by mainstream standards but I don't see myself doing any more space opera.

I don't think I'll ever deny that my first four novels were science fiction - in fact you have permission to shoot me if you hear me ever say any such thing - but it's just possible that some of you will one day be able to say "ah yes, I knew / first read him when he wrote sf." "Ah," your conversation companion will reply, "the early days."

For the record, here's 2007's full list.

• Making Money, Terry Pratchett
• A Darkling Plain, Philip Reeve
• The Fade, Chris Wooding
• Northern Lights, Philip Pullman
• The Fifth Elephant, Terry Pratchett
• Soul Music, Terry Pratchett
• Frozen Tracks, Åke Edwardson
• The Tyrannicide Brief, Geoffrey Robertson
• The Court of the Air, Stephen Hunt
• Johnny & the Bomb, Terry Pratchett
• The Fifth Woman, Henning Mankell
• Woodenface, Gus Grenfell
• Waylander, David Gemmell
• Maskerade, Terry Pratchett
• The Anubis Gates, Tim Powers
• In War Times, Kathleen Ann Goonan
• The City and the Stars, Arthur C. Clarke
• So Far, So Near, Mat Coward
• Pride & Perjury, Jonathan Aitken
• I, Jack, Patricia Finney
• George's Marvellous Medicine, Roald Dahl
• The Player of Games, Iain M. Banks
• City of Pearl, Karen Traviss
• The Unadulterated Cat, Terry Pratchett
• The Lost Art, Simon Morden
• Dissolution, CJ Sansom
• Saturn Returns, Sean Williams
• The Loom of Youth, Alec Waugh
• Harry Potter & the Deathly Hallows, JK Rowling
• The Greatest Raid of All, C.E. Lucas Phillips
• Slide Rule, Nevil Shute
• HMS Ulysses, Alistair MacLean
• To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
• Fly for Your Life, Larry Forrester
• Windfall, Desmond Bagley
• Shout at the Devil, Wilbur Smith
• Dark Space, Marianne de Pierres
• Vice Versa, F. Anstey
• Neither Here Nor There, Bill Bryson
• Mary Anne, Daphne du Maurier
• The Sea Shall Not Have Them, John Harris
• The Good Shepherd, C.S. Forester
• The Land God Gave to Cain, Hammond Innes
• The Seven Storey Mountain, Thomas Merton
• The Time of the Reaper, Andrew Butcher
• The Wine of Angels, Phil Rickman
• Mother Tongue, Bill Bryson
• Thief of Time, Terry Pratchett
• Dublin, Edward Rutherfurd
• Slow Decay, Andy Lane
• Border Princes, Dan Abnett
• The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins
• Glorifying Terrorism, ed. Farah Mendlesohn
• Iron Sunrise, Charles Stross
• The Wonderful Adventures of Nils, Selma Lagerlöf
• A View from the Bridge, Arthur Miller
• The Forest, Edward Rutherfurd
• Magic for Beginners, Kelly Link
• Hogfather, Terry Pratchett
• The Last Letter Home, Vilhelm Moberg

Harry Potter and the Unexpected Apathy

I’m half way through Deathly Hallows – the Godric’s Hollow scene, for anyone who knows what that means – and I’m astonished to find ... I'm not that interested.

This is unprecedented. I’ll be the first to admit Harry Potter has never been great literature, but one thing it has always been good at is keeping the interest. After the first chapter of the first book – and I read this long before the hype with absolutely no idea what was to come – I couldn’t put it down. I broke a lifelong rule with Goblet of Fire and bought the hardback edition, as this was the first one where we all knew in advance someone was going to die and I guessed that if I waited for the paperback then I would have learnt who. (Once I did learn I felt distinctly let down.)

But for this one, I’ve suddenly got to the point of not really caring.

Could it be that the series has just banged on for too long? It could certainly have been over more quickly. Rowling chose to write a novel for every year of Harry’s secondary education – which just happens to match Muggle secondary education in the UK, i.e. there has to be seven books - but she could have done it in less. The fun thing about creating your own world is you make up your own rules.

Even if the series couldn’t have been got through more quickly, the books certainly could, and this might also be the reason. The first two books were short, concise and gripping. Thereafter a distinct lack of editing started to show. Rowling of course was under huge pressure just to get them written and her publishers were under ever more pressure to publish, and it shows. I’m sure she put as much professional time and effort into the last book as she put into the first, but the fact is, the process has been rushed. I’ll bet good money her later manuscripts didn’t come back with red ink all over them saying “this is long winded. Tighten it up.”

A very handy rule for writing is that you enter each scene as late as possible and leave as soon as you can. Don’t have someone open the door, walk into the room and start talking (unless of course you need it for tension or other purposes) - just have them start talking. Leave as much as possible to the reader’s imagination. A master of this is Dan Brown, which is why The Da Vinci Code was so unputdownable despite being Differently Good in many other respects.

Deathly Hallows, on the other hand, is constructed along the lines of “they did this. Then they did this. Then they did this.” Harry, Hermione and Ron spend a long time wandering aimlessly around the country with no fixed plan. And this is a good thing, in story terms, showing that they’re vulnerable and not superhuman and letting some interesting cracks develop in their relationship. But just because their experiences are long and wandering and aimless, doesn't mean the writing describing it has to be.

Still, there’s hope. The Godric’s Hollow bit had a pleasant twist and maybe things will start happening. I know we’re gearing up for a big battle with a last-scene-of-Hamlet-type casualty list. My prediction is that everyone dies except Dobby.

If I try very hard I can probably remember what I was doing for Christmas 1997 ...