firecat

The Constant Gardener by John le Carré

John le Carré often writes about conforming, compromised men who are inspired by the love of a woman to fight corruption and otherwise do brave/humanitarian things. This one is set in Africa, mainly Nairobi, and the corruption involves international pharmaceutical corporations. The man is Justin, a British diplomat. The woman is Tessa, his wife, an aid activist.

Is it based on reality? The author's note (which was not included on the audio CD) includes the following statement: "As my journey through the pharmaceutical jungle progressed, (in which a number of people were murdered, others killed with experimental drugs, and governments and universities corrupted), I came to realise that, by comparison with the reality, my story was as tame as a holiday postcard."

( Read more... )

Farewell My Lovely by Raymond Chandler

Narrated in a pretty deadpan style by Elliott Gould. I would have preferred a narration that did a better job of distinguishing the characters' voices, but it worked OK.

It's racist (which I found especially off-putting at the beginning of the book) and sexist (which I expect from early hard-boiled-PI novels).

And the language is so, so beautiful. And most of the characters are smart, and clearly drawn, and their motivations make sense. And Chandler requires you to draw inferences and work at figuring out what's going on. I sometimes listen to audio books while doing other things, but I wasn't able to do that with this book because it's so information-dense.

View all my goodreads.com reviews >>

The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic--And How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World by Steven Johnson


Alan Sklar's narration is a little heavy, but adequate.

The first part of this book examines the process of scientific advance through the lens of an 1854 cholera outbreak in London. Johnson's research seems thorough and complete, and he does a good job of explaining relevant concepts and facts. From time to time he stirs in a narrative-style story of the outbreak and the two men who were studying it.

He uses this whole to discuss how science advances in fits and starts as new theories compete with old, established ones. I thought this part of the book was fascinating because I see the same process going on today. Johnson also does a good job of describing the role of chance in the story of the outbreak and its solution. (E.g., the solution would not have been found without the intervention both of a medical man trained in anesthesiology and of a clergyman who understood the neighborhood that was affected.)

Another of Johnson's themes is the nature of urban living and urban planning. He describes the patchwork of services, individual laborers, technological advances, and economic realities that made up London's inadequate refuse disposal solution, and explained how understanding the transmission of cholera led to the development of modern sewer systems.

The final third of the book is Johnson's ode to modern cities and human progress. It's not grounded in research the way the historical narrative was. I wasn't very impressed with it and didn't finish it.

In the part I did listen to, there is a lot of "gee whiz" about how the Internet will let you look up your nearest coffee shop and how dense urban living is good for the environment and for population control and for human interaction and progress. I have heard those ideas before and mostly agree with them, and he doesn't present anything new from my point of view, nor does he do a careful job of providing supporting evidence for his arguments.

He also goes on about how squatter cities are really where things are happening these days (apparently drawing on Robert Neuwirth's Shadow Cities: A Billion Squatters, a New Urban World). I don't know much about this but it seems he glosses over the infrastructure problems (and concomitant pollution problems) such cities have in order to talk about how they are cool because they have multi-story buildings and nightclubs and lots of (*ahem*) economic opportunities.

View all my (goodreads.com) reviews >>

The Dragon in the Sea by Frank Herbert



Everyone know Frank Herbert as the author of Dune but a lot of people don't know that he wrote a number of other excellent novels.

The Dragon in the Sea is a science-fiction submarine-battle psychological thriller. It was written in the 1950s and for the most part it stands the test of time. I wouldn't be surprised if some of the modern submarine-battle thrillers like Das Boot and The Hunt for Red October owe it a debt.

It's not just a battle story, it's also a compelling depiction of the ways men function in conditions of pressure and uncertainty.

Psychology geeks who know a little Freud and Jung will probably get more enjoyment out of this book. Some of the psych theories might seem a little silly and dated now.

The audio version is narrated by Scott Brick. I think he overacts some of the narration, and he gets the accent of one of the crewmembers wrong, but overall he does a good job.

View all my [Goodreads.com] reviews >>

I listened to the Audible Modern Classics edition, well narrated by Victor Levine. I especially liked his characterization of the Blue Fairy Godmother.

This book is set in WWII Germany, post-war New York City, and a prison cell in Israel. It has no science fiction tropes. I did not find any of the characters particularly likeable (but that's true of most Vonnegut for me).

A line from this book is one of the favorites in my quote file, and it sums up one of the themes of the book:

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be.

This book is evidence that Vonnegut is one of the great American writers. He has the gift of making hope out of emptiness and simplicity, something that many people assume only Zen Buddhist masters can do.

View all my goodreads.com reviews.

---

Goodreads.com posted to my Facebook status line when I added this book, and my friend supergee commented that he didn't like the book. I asked why and he wrote "Not sf, crappy characters, dumb moral."

I agree with point 1.

I also somewhat agree with point 2 (see above) and it puzzles me why Vonnegut's "crappy characters" don't bother me the way some writers' crappy characters do. I think it has something to do with how Vonnegut's protagonists mostly aren't emo, and/or how Vonnegut's writing style is definitely not emo. (I'm contrasting it to my reaction to Dan Simmons's Hyperion, which has some tremendously emo characters which are punched up because the writing style can be pretty emo.)

I don't know what supergee thinks the moral of the book is; the closest I can come to a moral in it is what I quoted above. I don't think that's a dumb moral, although I'm not sure I agree with it. (For me, it might be a prescription that I tend to over-follow. I have a hard time pretending, and it limits me in some ways.)

A Case of Conscience by James Blish

I listened to the Audible Frontiers audio book, well narrated by Jay Snyder. The book was written in 1958 and won a Hugo. The audio book includes an amusingly snippy foreword by Blish in which he defends the ways he chose to imagine how Catholic doctrine would change 100 years in the future.
( spoilers )

A Different Light by Elizabeth A. Lynn

If I told you the plot of this book it would sound like a space opera, or possibly a romance, but it doesn't entirely have the feeling of either. It's sort of noir, and it's sort of...langorous. The protagonist is a visual artist, and Lynn pulls it off so I got a pretty clear picture in my mind of what he was seeing and depicting.

I really liked that the main characters were bisexual and non-monogamous and that no big deal was made out of this -- it was just how they behaved naturally. I really liked that the relationships among the main characters were emotionally complex and that the characters gave each other emotional space.

Yes, I mostly read this book for the atmosphere and relationships, and I didn't read carefully enough to comment critically on the science or the plotting.


View all my Goodreads.com reviews.

There may be spoilers in the comments.

I listened to an audio production of Calculating God, narrated by Jonathan Davis. There's an interesting intro by Robert J. Sawyer that explains what he was trying to accomplish by writing the book.

The novel intertwines three stories: ( massive spoilers, also a lot of nitpicking )

When I read a few stories in a row that are highly regarded and that leave me annoyed at what I perceive are pretty serious flaws both in the storytelling and in the ideas being explored, never mind the sexual politics, I start to wonder whether I really ought to be reading science fiction at all. Maybe I am too nitpicky to enjoy it. Maybe I should just not read any fiction at all.

I usually eventually read a book I like and get over that attitude.

Hyperion by Dan Simmons

rating: 4 of 5 stars
I listened to the Audio Frontiers audiobook narrated by Marc Vietor, Allyson Johnson, Kevin Pariseau, Jay Snyder, and Victor Bevine. All the narration was competent-to-good, except for Allyson Johnson, whose narration annoyed me.

I have one major beef with this book, which is that the ending doesn't really wrap up the story. (Apparently the sequel, Fall of Hyperion, provides a proper ending.)

Hyperion is a set of six tales wrapped in a larger plotline about seven pilgrims making a journey. Toward the end of the book all the stories start to converge into one complex story. That's what's best about the book, in my opinion.

In this book and the other one I've read (Children of the Night), Dan Simmons does a really good job of creating "cranky, cynical old men" characters. This book has six major such characters and a few secondary ones, and they are all very distinctive. Simmons does less well at creating female characters. This book has one female character who has her own narrative, but her personality and motives don't feel as distinctive to me as those of the male characters, and neither do the personalities of the secondary female characters.

Simmons is well-read in literature and mythology and he does a good job of integrating this knowledge into the book.

Simmons's writing makes use of horror tropes designed to evoke strong emotional reactions. Those tropes don't work particularly well for me for some reason.

I also think Simmons sometimes doesn't do a very good job writing about romantic relationships. (He does better writing about primarily sexual relationships.) Sometimes the characters' motives for getting involved or staying involved aren't clear; in this book, I especially felt that way about the tale with a female protagonist.

View all my goodreads.com reviews.

George Alec Effinger Live! From Planet Earth by George Alec Effinger

rating: 3 of 5 stars
I have been a huge fan of When Gravity Fails since it came out, and I recently read and enjoyed the other Marîd Audran books. So I wanted to find out if Effinger's short fiction was as good as those novels.

My overall impression was "mostly not." But even though I disliked a number of the stories for one reason or another, I found it interesting to read a set of stories that had been written over such a long period of time (between 1971 and 1997).

This book was published after Effinger's unfortunately early death and each story (or set of stories) is introduced by a different writer. Do skip the introductions until afterward if you aren't familiar with the stories, because some of them contain spoilers.

One thing I found interesting was that although all the stories are skillfully written, stories written later (generally but not universally) brought up more complex emotions for me than stories written earlier.

Of particular interest are the seven stories and one poem that Effinger wrote under a pseudonym, O. Niemand. Each of the pieces was written in the style of a different American writer (O. Henry, Ernest Hemingway, etc.), and they all more or less take place in the same sfnal world. The gimmick itself is pretty clever, and he pulls off effectively, but I thought most of the stories also worked well as science fiction in their own right. (I read them without knowing the gimmick, and the only one I recognized the style of was the poem.)

View all my goodreads.com reviews.

I just gobbled up another Walter Mosley audiobook, The Tempest Tales. This book is a tightly woven collection of short stories (not quite a novel, but not really independent stories either).

( general spoilers )

On the surface the conversations seem to be about religion, and you’ll probably get more out of the book if you are glancingly familiar with Christian religious tropes such as St Peter, Heaven, Hell, judgement, Lucifer, and so on. (However, for reasons that are unclear to me, although I'm quite sure it's deliberate, Mosley never mentions Jesus.) But I don’t think the book or the conversations are really about religion when you get right down to it. Religion, and the bureaucratic, rule-bound heaven that Mosley makes up, is standing in for the system that glorifies government and corporations at the expense of people, that oppresses poor people and people of color, and that tries to brainwash people into believing that they have to mindlessly follow rules that don’t make sense in the real world.

I’m afraid I’m making the book sound really dour and boring. There really are a lot of conversations about ethics and they get a little repetitive toward the end, but the book is playful and moving with lots of really funny moments.

The audiobook is produced by Griot Audio, a division of Recorded Books that specializes in books by African-American writers, narrated by African-American performers. This book is really well narrated by Ty Jones. As a white person, I don’t know much about African-American speech patterns, and I don’t get as much out of reading books that rely on those speech patterns as some people might, because I can’t reproduce them accurately in my head. So it helps my appreciation a lot to listen rather than read.

Seeker by Jack McDevitt (audiobook)
OK, first off, know that I have a bias against science fiction stories that are set in the far future (in this case, 9,000 years from now) but the characters act and live just like late 20th-early 21st century middle-class Westerners. It's just not believable to me and I think it lacks imagination.

Setting that aside, it's a reasonably good yarn about a duo of antique dealers who make a living pillaging the ruins of civilizations on far-flung worlds, to the annoyance of archeologists, surveyors, and museum curators. They find something that sends them searching for a semi-mythological ancient civilization—kind of like Atlantis, only it's a lost planet.

The plot moves along OK, but don't read this book looking for character development.

Some interesting telepathic aliens.

Contender for the "Silliest MacGuffin" award (a 9,000 year old plastic coffee cup).

Our Inner Ape: A Leading Primatologist Explains Why We Are Who We Are by Frans de Waal


rating: 2 of 5 stars
Narrated by Alan Sklar. I didn't care for the narration; he added a sly nudge-nudge tone of voice to any discussion of sex (and in a book about chimpanzees and bonobos there is plenty of discussion about sex) and a scoffing or superior tone to any discussion of morality/ethics.

I enjoyed the descriptions of animal behavior and of interactions between the apes and their human observers.

I was less impressed with de Waal's attempts to draw conclusions about human behavior from these observations. He swung between generalizing wildly about how all humans (or all men or all women) were this or that, and admitting that human behavior is so influenced by culture and learning that we are capable of pretty much anything.

View all my (goodreads.com) reviews.

---

Other books I've read or listened to recently:

Musicophilia, Oliver Sacks. I have liked every Sacks book I've read. This one is a little more scattered than some, but I found it fascinating and inspiring.

Spin, Robert Charles Wilson. Overall I liked this quite a bit - there was some believable science and also some believable character interaction and development. I was annoyed that only one of the female characters had meaningful work, and there was a plot point very close to the end that I had major suspension of disbelief problems with, but that didn't really spoil the overall story.

A Passage to India, E.M. Forster. This is the first Forster I've read, and I was really impressed by his ability to get inside the heads of so many different people, who were at odds with each other in various ways, and describe them all with sympathy and compassion. He did a lot more than that, but that's what I especially noticed.

(Links are to the Goodreads site.)

Stay by Nicola Griffith

Third in a series of books featuring Aud Torvingen, who started out seeming like a sort of lesbian James Bond, but is evolving more complexity by this book. This is a well-crafted novel with two intertwined plots -- a "stay up too late to finish it" sort of novel.

The Shadow of the Wind Bestseller's Choice Audio by Carlos Ruiz Zafón

The story was engaging -- several stories within a story, in a sort of historical Gothic romance genre. Several of the male characters are well drawn.

I was disappointed by the treatment of female characters. The women in the novel are, with one partial exception, mythical beings rather than real people, who exist solely to elicit strong emotions in the male characters.

The narrator did a good job, although he fell into certain modern American speech patterns more often than I would have preferred, given that it is a historical novel set in Barcelona.

Piano music appears behind key scenes. The music itself is lovely (and apparently composed by the author). But I find it unpleasant to try to listen to music and words at the same time, so I really didn't like the musical additions and wished they'd been left out of the audiobook.

The Devil of Nanking by Mo Hayder (audiobook)
( very mild spoilers )