iansales going for 75 in 2010 - part 2

Book 108: Bold as Love, Gwyneth Jones
I finally got started on my delayed summer reading project (see here), which got delayed for a number of reasons I no longer remember. This is the first book of Jones' Bold as Love Cycle. It kicks off the story of the "Rock and Roll Reich". England, Scotland and Wales are going their separate ways - no more United Kingdom - and the Home Secretary decides to form a think tank of countercultural icons, rock stars, in order to increase the popularity of the government and ease the pain of dissolution. But there's a massacre and a coup, and one of rockstars takes power. His reign doesn't last long, so the government turns to the three most popular survivors of the massacre - Ax Preston, guitarist of the Chosen Few; Fiorinda, vocalist for DARK; and Sage, Aoxomoxoa of Aoxomoxoa and the Heads...

Book 109: Castles Made of Sand, Gwyneth Jones
... being the continuing story of Ax, Fiorinda and Sage. If the first book showed the creation of and English Countercultural state, this book describes it falling apart. The first third covers the three protagonists' relationship, but then events throughout England start to overtake them. There's an odd Delanyesque / Heinleinian vibe to these books, more so in this one than the first one. Which means that bits of them I really like, and other bits not so much. When the plot starts to pick up, then it's very good.

I'll be writing about the entire quintet on my blog when I've finished it.

Welcome to the multi-thread club, Ian.

I was getting too impatient to wait for the old thread to load :-)

Book 110: Midnight Lamp, Gwyneth Jones
The third book of the Bold as Love Cycle, and a slight change of pace. And place. The Triumvirate - Ax, Sage and Fiorinda - are on holiday in Mexico when they are approached by a Hollywood producer. He wants them to come to Los Angeles to star in a film about the Rock and Roll Reich, and the US president also wants them there because he's afraid of a secret US military project to create a black magic human superweapon. These books seem to tread an odd line between sf and fantasy. They start off explaining the magic using science, but then end up using supernatural/dark fantasy tropes. It's effective, but sometimes a little weird. There's some excellent writing about the California landscape here, and the characters remain as strongly drawn as they are in the earlier two books.

Book 111: Band of Gypsys, Gwyneth Jones
I am, I freely admit, a big fan of Jones' writing. But I'd avoided the Bold as Love Cycle because I didn't think its story would appeal - England collapses and a group of rock stars take over - or its mix of sf and magic. I read the first book, Bold as Love, when it was published, and I did enjoy it. But I got bogged down in the second, Castles Made of Sand, shortly afterwards. I bought the other books in the quintet as they were published, and they went up on the bookshelves.

But that I'm reading all five books - and Band of Gypsys is the fourth, so there's only Rainbow Bridge left - I must confess I'm enjoying them a great deal more than I'd expected. I knew they were good, I knew I'd appreciate them, but I hadn't thought they'd be so involving. In this book, the Triumvirate - Ax, Sage and Fiorinda - have returned from the US. They hole up in Paris initially, before being accepted back into England. But the current government are nasty pieces of work. Sage is tortured; all three are imprisoned in a gilded prison. This book shows the Triumvirate looking for a better solution while a fascist regime slowly tightens its grip on the country. And then the Chinese invade...

The series dipped a bit in the second book, but it's been a steady climb upwards since. I have high hopes for the final book.

Book 112: Rainbow Bridge, Gwyneth Jones
This is the fifth and final book of the Bold as Love Cycle. The Chinese have invaded and occupied England, but the Triumvirate consider this A Good Thing (as the country had turned into a green nazi secret police state). However, not all is as it seems with the Chinese - they're holding something back, and Alex, Sage and Fiorinda suspect it will help them build a partnership with their Chinese overloards. There's also something peculiar going on in Cumbria, which the Triumvirate happily sort out for the Chinese. This is a strong end to the quintet, a novel with more impetus than some of the others. While Jones' world by sound difficult to swallow, she makes it work and you never lose your suspension of disbelief. The writing is of a uniform high standard, unsurprisingly; and the central three characters are extremely well-drawn. After bogging down in Castles Made of Sand the first time I tried reading it several years ago, I'm really glad I finally got around to trying it again and reading the full series. Recommended.

There'll be a full post on my blog about the quintet soon-ish. I'll post the link here when it goes up.

Book 113: No Man Friday, Rex Gordon
Gordon is a British sf writer from the 1950s and 1960s who is all but forgotten these days. I dug this one out as part of my British SF Masterworks list (see here). Although I've not read Robinson Crusoe, I suspect No Man Friday owes a lot to it - not only the title, but also the many references to Defoe's classic in the story (although the book was published as First on Mars in the US). No Man Friday is pretty much a desert island story, although the island in this case is Mars. Gordon has tried for scientific accuracy, but some facts are unsurprisingly wrong. He's inventive when it comes to his Martian flora and fauna, however. I enjoyed this - it was better than I could have hoped (I put on my British SF Masterworks list on the recommendation of a friend). A full review of this will be going up on my blog sometime soon. Link to be posted here, of course.

#6: Too bad that No Man Friday is not available at my local library. It looks like one I would have enjoyed.

Given that it's a fifty-year-old science fiction novel that's pretty much been forgotten, I'm not surprised your library doesn't have it. But second-hand copies, under either title, shouldn't be too difficult to find.

I will keep my eyes open for them. Thanks, Ian.

As promised, I've put my review of No Man Friday by Rex Gordon on my blog here.

The piece on Gwyneth Jones' Bold as Love Cycle is going to take a bit longer to write...

Oh, this is just a freak visit into the scary fast-paced world of the 75 Book Challenge group and your thread, Ian, was in visual range. Glad you enjoyed the Jones series. I wasn't all that interested in them or at least the story premise. However, we have them all and dukedom (the hubby) has read the first and someday he will read them all.

Now, I had best run back to Club Read before I start feeling very very guilty for not being able to handle following all my friends and interesting readers over here... (my only SF this year was the second McAuley book. I liked it but I was more impatient with the technobabble in the 2nd book than the first).

The Jones series dipped, I felt, in the second book Castles Made of Sand. In fact, I bounced off it about halfway through when I first tried reading it back in 2002. But this time I persevered and it was worth it. The story definitely picks up as it progresses.

Book 114: A Man of Double Deed, Leonard Daventry
Another obscure Brit sf author I picked for my British sf masterworks list. This book was first published in 1965, and shows its age - the title character, Claus Coman, smokes continuously, even though it is illegal in the post-nuclear war future of the story. He is also considered "old-fashioned" because he is happy with just two women. He's a telepath and gets involved in a plot to prevent the creation of sealed zones in which murderous teenagers can cheerfully kill each other. While the book is much like similar US novels of the same period, the prose is crisper and the arguments presented by the characters better-framed.

Book 115: Disgrace, JM Coetzee
This won the MAN Booker back in 1999, and it's my first Coetzee. A university professor in Cape Town has an affair with a student which sours. A complaint is raised against him. Rather than defend himself, the professor stands on principle and is subsequently fired. So he goes to visit his daughter, a lesbian farmer in the East Cape region. But several weeks after his arrival, the farm is attacked by three bandits, who rape the daughter. She refuses to acknowledge this, he finds helpless in the face of her refusal. It's easy to cast the relationship as a metaphor for South Africa, but I'm not sure Coetzee's unadorned prose works in the story's favour. It's good, but feels a bit too stark to really appeal.

Now reading Seven Miles Down by Jacques Piccard & Robert S Dietz, the only book written about the bathyscaphe Trieste and its trip to the bottom of the Mariana Trench in 1960. It was the 50th anniversary of the descent this year, not that you'd notice...

Book 116: Seven Miles Down, Jacques Piccard & Robert S Dietz
In January 1960, two men descended to the deepest part of the Pacific Ocean, the Challenger Deep, a distance of 35,800 feet underwater, where the pressure is is seven tons per square inch. They did this is the bathyscape Trieste, which was invented by Auguste Piccard (Hergé's inspiration for Professor Calculus, incidentally), father of Jacques Piccard. That achievement has never been repeated. Seven Miles Down is more a history of the Trieste than a blow-by-blow account of that historic descent. It was not Dietz who accompanied Jacques Piccard into the Challenger Deep, but Lt Don Walsh, USN. But Dietz did perform several descents in the Trieste. Neither of the authors, or the journalist who "assisted" them, are great prose stylists, and given that this book was published in 1962, some of its findings and predictions are out of date. Nonetheless, it's a fascinating story, and though this book was expensive, I'm glad I bought and read it.

#14: Oh, I have to get my hands on that one. Thanks for the recommendation, Ian!

Good luck trying. As far as I can work out, it's never been reprinted. There was a Scientific Book Club edition in 1963. But copies of that, and the original hardback are very scarce. I bought a first edition - the book club edition doesn't contain the photos, I think - and it cost me £75. It was hte only copy available on abebooks.com.

#16: I am thinking I will try interlibrary loan in this area and see if they can come up with a copy.

Good luck :-)

I've put a review of Leonard Daventry's A Man of Double Deed up on my blog here.

Book 117: Gherman Titov's Flight into Space, Wilfred Burchett & Anthony Purdy
... is exactly what it says on the cover. This was plainly rushed out after Titov's 25-hour flight and, I suppose, it's remarkable had so much access to a Soviet cosmonaut. Even so, Korolyev is known as the "Chief Constructor" throughout, and some parts of the book read like they were taken from TASS press releases. Titov's background is ocvered reasonably well, but there's no real analysis of the man or his achievements. I'll put a proper review of it up on my Space Books blog soon.

Book 118: The Krilov Continuum, James Lovegrove
This is the first book of a series, The Guardians, which was apparently supposed to be cross-promoted by the Sci-Fi Channel. There was a second book, but the series didn't sell so no more were published after that. It's a potboiler, based around an X-Files type mythology, with a cast of quirky characters, and I suspect I'll not bother with sequel. Lovegrove, of course, is capable of much better, but this is hackery and not really worth tracking down.

Book 119: Little Birds, Anaïs Nin
This was my first Nin and likely to be my last. I forget why I even bothered trying her. Little Birds is a collection of very short erotic stories written during the early 1940s but not published until 1979. Some of the stories are definitely dodgy, skating dangerously close to paedophilia and rape. I didn't even think they were especially well-written. Definitely one to cross off the list.

Book 120: The Dream of Scipio, Iain Pears
Not being a student of philosophy, references to the eponymous treatise were lost on me. But I still enjoyed this novel. A fifth-century bishop, a fifteenth-century poet, and a WWII academic, all in Provence, each studying the earlier, and each in some sort of relationship with a Jewish woman, in interlinked stories which are part history lesson, part discussions of philosophy and religion, and part love story. Pears handled the historical periods well, his characters were interesting, and although the book was slow to start, it proved a gripping read.

Book 121: Selected Poems, DH Lawrence
Some of these are a bit too in-your-face for my taste, and a lot of them go on for quite a bit. But some of them I like a lot - 'Snapdragon', for example.

#21: I need to read Pears book. I have owned it for a while now.

Just found this thread--missed your transition to a new one. The Gwyneth Jones books sound interesting, but she is hard to find over here in the US. I have Divine Endurance, but that is the only one of hers I have ever seen.

Bold as Love was published by Night Shade Books, who are based in San Francisco - see here - but the rest of the series wasn't. Aqueduct Press in Seattle also publish some books by Jones - Life, Imagination / Space, Buonarotti Quartet, and the forthcoming The Universe of Things (titles are links to the books on the Aqueduct website).

Book 122: Interstellar Empire. John Brunner
A fix-up of three novellas from 1953, 1958 and 1965. They're juvenilia and it shows. For a start, it's "enslaved" not bloody "slavered". And despite being set in a post-collapse galactic empire, everyone talks like comedy barbarians. Brunner admits in an included essay that the novellas were partly inspired by a desire to invent a workable swords & spaceships universe - ie, interstellar travel but each world at no more than Dark Ages tech. The mention of mutants and telepathic powers, however, in no way explain the magic powers which feature in one of the novellas. Aldiss did it much better in Starswarm and Galaxies Like Grains of Sand.

Book 123: Ascendancies, DG Compton
What an odd book. Beautifully written but... odd. In the 1986 of the book, the UK suffers from periodic falls of "Moondrift". No one knows what the substance is, or where it comes from. However, they can make good use of it - as an energy-source and as plant food. So the economy is thriving, and people now only work, by law, three days a week. Unfortunately, coupled with the Moondrift are the "Disappearances". At irregular intervals, a strange noise, sounding like a heavenly choir and known as Singing, can be heard, accompanied by a strange smell like cloying synthetic roses... When this happens, random people simply disappear. Never to be seen again. Richard Wallingford is an insurance agent. As there is no insurance against Disappearing, it is his job to ensure that people who die actually do so - they have not Disappeared and another body substituted in their place. In this capacity, he visits Caroline Trenchard, the widow of a writer. she is very much upper middle class, he is working class. He spots that the body of her husband is not actually her husband. He Disappeared. The life insurance policy is for £100,000, so he agrees to a 60 - 40 split. The two become conspirators in defrauding the insurance company. The story, however, is not about the Disappearances or the Moondrift - they are never explained. It is about Wallingford and Trenchard's relationship, about a grieving woman trying to find something "suitable" in a working-class clerk, and he trying to convince himself he's not out of his class. The dialogue reads like something out of a 1980s BBC drama, but the characterisation is spot-on. The title refers to a "game" played by two of the characters, a form, I think, of oneupmanship, but it is mentioned exactly twice in the book. It's as though Compton had two good ideas, but used them only as a springboard for an entirely different story. I've come away from his novels with a similar impression before. Although that doesn't mean they're not beautifully-written.

Book 124: Planet of the Apes, Pierre Boulle
Don't bother with this, the film is a great deal better. Although originally published in France in 1963, it reads like it was written forty years earlier. And, annoyingly, the author (or perhaps translator of the Penguin edition I read) refers to chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans throughout as "monkeys". Despite the book's title. The story opens with a couple of a spaceship finding a message in a bottle floating in space. Which is too dumb a concept to be taken seriously - paper simply wouldn't survive in space. The message in the bottle is the story of Ulysse Mérou, who lands on an inhabitable planet in the Betelgeuse system and is captured by intelligent apes. He's an unpleasant narrator, the swapping of humans for apes and vice versa is painfully obvious a conceit, and the details of the apes' world don't really add up. Stick to the film.

#26: The Compton book sounds intriguing. I will see if I can locate a copy. Thanks, Ian.

Compton is one of my new favourite authors. His books seem to defy categorisation, although they're clearly sf. They have a very 1970s feel, are often quite sarcastic, but the prose and characterisation is excellent.

You have recommended a couple of his others to me as well. The problem is that none of my local libraries carries them right now. I hope that will change in future.

He's not been in print for 20 years, but most of his novels were published in paperback in the US. Whether there are any floating about in the US library system, I couldn't say. But secondhand copies are not especially difficult to find.

#26: I had exactly the same reaction to Planet of the Apes when I read it last year -- why would anyone bother with a film adaptation? The movie is rarely better than the book, but this is one of the exceptions.

Two other exceptions are The Commitments and Marnie.

Book 125: Alanya to Alanya, L Timmel Duchamp
This is the first book of the Marq'ssan Cycle quintet, which is the second set of five books I chose for my summer reading project. The series opens in 2076, in a world not much different from ours, but changed in important ways. The most important is that most nations are now ruled by an Executive class - today's fabulously wealthy, in other words - and there is no route for promotion into it (unless an individual is truly exceptional). US society is much like it is today, but much less free. Imagine if the Teapartiers managed to get in power and stayed there for 50 years... But then, aliens arrived, the Marq'ssan, release a EMP which destroys every electronic and electric device on the planet, and demands that each nation sends a team of 3 negotiators to their spaceship. And these negoitators must be women. The US choses as one of their negotiators, Kay Zeldin, a historian who 20 years before worked for the CIA. This is excellent sf, a little like LeGuin but much more dramatic and hard-edged. There are few minor faults - the information technology feels old-fashioned and it shouldn't, and the Marq'ssan's technology seems a little too magical in places. But this book is definitely worth reading... and I'm expecting the remaining four to be the same. The books are available from here.

#33: That looks like an interesting series, Ian. Thanks for the review and recommendation as well as the link.

There'll be a much more comprehensive review on my blog after I've read all five books. And I'm still working on my review of all five books of Gwyneth Jones's Bold as Love Cycle, but I hope to have that finished before the end of the month.

I'll post the links here, of course.

My review of Alastair Reynolds' Terminal World (see my previous thread) is now up at at SFF Chronicles -see here.

>33 iansales: Nice review. I've had the book for quite awhile, just have not gotten to it. Sounds like I would like it. Must find where I have stashed it (quite possibly in the SF hardcover/trade room filed under "D").

Why "D"?

Book 126: Renegade, L Timmel Duchamp
The second book of the Marq'ssan Cycle and I'm not quite sure if it suffers from "difficult second book" syndrome, or how well it moves the series forward. It feels like a restructuring of the story-arc more than anything else. After the alien Marq'ssan fired off an EMP and told the nations of the Earth to each put forward a negotiating team of three women, things have sort of settled. Five regions across the planet have been tuirned into Free Zones - where no one rules and people can build a non-hierarchical society. One of these Zones is the Pacific Northwest of the US. Meanwhile, the rest of the country is embroiled in a civil war between Security and Military. Sedgewick, Chief of Security, is hors de combat, and his PA, Elizabeth Weatherall, is now running things. When she captures Kay Zeldin, she tortures her and tries to brainwash her in order to use her in a plot. Meanwhile, things in the Pacific Northwest Free Zone are not running especially smoothly... There are a lot of words here spent on Zeldin's torture, and a lot of discussion between her and Weatherall - Renegade is about half as big again as Alanya to Alanya. It makes for a less pacey read. But, in mitigation, Weatherall and Zeldin are both drawn extremely well. I'm looking forward to the next book, Tsunami.

But, despite that, Renegade was a bit grim so I fancy a bit of light relief as a break. so I picked up... The Collector by John Fowles.

I really hope you are not expecting light relief from The Collector, Ian.

I find Fowles very readable, so it'll a bit lighter reading...

OK, not 'light' in terms of subject matter then, just the readability. Thanks for clarifying.

Book 127: The Collector, John Fowles
Perhaps when reading an author's oeuvre, you should start with their debut novel. I didn't. The first novel I read by Fowles was A Maggot, and I thought it was excellent. When I later read The French Lieutenant's Woman, I was even more impressed. The Collector can't match either of those. Fowles maintenance of his characters' voices is good throughout, and the novel is cleverly-structured. But it all seems a bit, well, tame. The eponymous entomologist kidnaps Miranda, locks her in his cellar, and then treats her like an imprisoned princess. When you compare that to similar situations from television shows such as CSI, or even from the real world, it all seems a bit too civilised and home counties. Disappointing.

Book 128: The Girl at the Lion d'Or, Sebastian Faulks
I shoukd have gone straight back to the Marq'ssan Cycle, but the pile of Faulks novels I'd picked up from charity shops throughout the year was mocking me. So I decided to read The Girl at the Lion d'Or, Faulks' second novel, instead. The eponymous charcter is a young woman of mysterious background who takes a waitress job at the titular hotel in France in the early 1930s. She immediately falsl in love with wealthy lawyer Charles Hartmann. The two have an affair, and she tells him her secret. This changes his view of her, and so he breaks off the relationship... This book has a good sense of time and place - and the heroine's secret is very much a product of the time - but the writing is a little too flowery in places. But then it is only his second novel...

Book 129: The Secret History Omnibus Volume 1 by Jean-Pierre Pécau... and several different artists
Back in th eStone Age, four youths were each gifted with a powerful magic rune - the shield, sword, chalice and lance. These four Archons were immortal, and have battled throughout human history for supremacy. It's mostly been a war between two pairs, but when one's plan backfired during the early years of the holy Roman Empire, it created William of Lecce, an evil immortal, who has subsequently been responsible for all the wars and tribulations since. There's a good idea at the heart of this graphic novel, and the historical periods are handled well. But a lot seems unexplained, and it's easy to get confused. This first volume covers from the Stone Age to the First World War, with episodes set in Ancient Egypt, the reign of Frederick I, the Great Fire of London, Napoleonic France.

Book 130: Tsunami, L Timmel Duchamp
The third book of the Marq'ssan Cycle, and it's all-change again. Sort of. This book opens eight years after the previous one, Renegade, finished. During that period, there was a global war - the general pattern of which is given in a chronlogy at the end of this book - and now Elizabeth Weatherall is back with Sedgewick, and running Security in his name. While the civil war between Security and Military is long over, the two organisations remain fierce rivals for power. In the Pacific North West Free Zone, Martha Greenglass comtinues to drive the Co-op, the nearest the Zone has to a government. They are embarked on a project to reveal the human rights abuses performed by the US Executive. One such US citizen is Celia Espin, a lawyer in San Diego, who has been arrested several times and tortured, simply because she tried to defend others who were arrested and imprisoned without due process of law. Now she has been banned from practicing her profession. In DC, things are not going well between Weatherall and Sedgewick. His hold on his sanity is definitely eroding, yet he refuses to allow Weatherall full rein in running the organisation. Tsunami feels like it is set immediately after Renegade - there's little sense of those eight years passing. Weatherall has become a more interesting character, but conversely the few male characters have become less rounded. The book leads towards a big discussion on authority, control and human rights, and makes some excellent points, but it feels a little preachier in parts than the previous two. This is an excellent series, proper political science fiction; but two-thirds of the way through and it's not easy to see where it;s going...

Book 131: The Flying Saucer*, Bernard Newman
Read for review for Interzone. Sardonic and amusingly sarcastic, but also very much a book of its time - 1950. The science and science fiction is tosh, but it's readable enough.

* the perils of text-search: it brings back every title with the words you're looking for in them, but not the exact title you've entered. And, as you can imagine, there are shit-loads of books with the words "flying saucer" in their titles. And why does every search return Elric: The Soul Stealer, irrespective of what you're searching for?

#46: why does every search return Elric: The Soul Stealer, irrespective of what you're searching for?

I wish I knew the answer to that question! I have had that title come up numerous times, even when the title I am looking for bears no resemblance.

Soul stealers respect no boundaries. Or search parameters, either.

Book 132: Blood in the Fruit, L Timmel Duchamp
The fourth book of the Marq'ssan Cycle, and it's getting increasingly hard to see how Duchamp is going to pull a utopia out of the story. This time the focus is on Hazel, Elizabeth Weatherall's lover, and her increasing disenchantnment with Liz. Who seems to be running a war of her own against the executives, but only with the aim of putting herself and other women in charge. This is an excellent series for anyone interested in feminist political sf.

Book 133: number9dream, David Mitchell
I read and enjoyed Cloud Atlas last year, so I've been keeping an eye open for Mitchell's other novels in charity shop. This one is set in Japan, where a young orphan man is searching for his father but inadvertently gets involved with the Yakuza. Like Cloud Atlas it doesn't quite cohere, although it does so once you're about a third of the way in. The writing is excellent, the narrator is engaging, and the occasional over-the-top elements of the story are forgivable. Worth reading.

Book 134: Intervention, Julian May
I remember enjoying May's Saga of the Exiles when I was in my teens, so I was surprised to discover that this book was rubbish. It sets the scene for the following Galactic Milieu trilogy, and is basically about the development of super mindpowers among a group of Franco-Americans in New England. It's supposed to be based on the memiors of one of these, but breaks away from his narrative far too often to be the case. The aliens are silly, the language is melodramatic, and the characters fell like Mary Sues. Avoid.

Book 135: Casino Royale, Ian Fleming
For reasons that continue to elude me, I decided to read all of Fleming's Bond novels. I know they're not very good, I know they're nothing like the films. But still I read them. At least I only buy cheap secondhand copies, and give them away afterwards. Given the recent film of Casino Royale I had somewhat higher hopes of the book. In fact, it's worse than the others I've read. The plot is thin: Bond plays Le Chiffre at cards, Bond wins, Le Chiffre kidnaps and tortures Bond, Bond is rescued. There's loads of clumsy info-dumps. Bond is even more offensivley sexist than usual - the final line is "Besides, the bitch is dead." Watch the movie, avoid the book.

I've just posted the first part of my piece on Gwyneth Jones' Bold as Love Cycle on my blog here, partly to tie in with the Women in SF week on Torque Control here.

Book 136: Axiomatic, Greg Egan
I've never really been a big fan of Egan but since he receives so much praise I though I'd better have another bahs at him. I found this collection in a charity shop, bought it, read it and... Still not entirely convinced. He seems to take implausible ideas and stretch them to breaking point, and often beyond. There are some good stories in this collection, but there are many that are quite dull, whose single idea just isn't worth the story around which it is built. There's also a sameness to many of the stories. Still, the prose is quite polished.

Book 137: Yellow Blue Tibia, Adam Roberts
This book's central conceit couldn't help but appeal: in the 1940s, Stalin asks a group of writers to design an alien invasion, nothing comes of it, but in the 1980s it begins to look as though it is actually coming true. Unfortunately, the book doesn't quite meet the promise of the conceit. It's a good novel, and the first half is an excellent and very funny satire. But about halfway it turns less interesting, and eventually ends up in some sort of metaphysical area that isn't as interesting as the satire was. Definitely worth reading, however.

#51: Yellow Blue Tibia looks intriguing to me. I will see if I can track down a copy. Thanks, Ian.

It's definitely worth a go. I laughed out loud a few times in the first half. I wasn't so keen on the final third, as the explanation for all the events struck me as not scientific enough - but that's just my taste in sf.

I tend to get lost in all the scientific nomenclature in sci fi books, so it sounds as though I will like the final third more than you did.

Book 138: Ulverton, Adam Thorpe
The title refers to a fictional village in the south of England, and the novel is structured as a series of incidents in the history of the village, beginning in the 17th century right up to the present day. Each section is told in the prose style of the time, and Thorpe uses a variety of formats as well - personal reminiscences, a sermon, eyewitness accounts, journals, a script, etc. This is a book that stands or falls on its writing, so it's good that Thorpe's prose is really very good indeed. He maintains voice superbly in each of the settings, and gives a very real feel for his invented village. Worth reading.

Book 139: Surface Detail, Iain M Banks
The latest Culture novel. On balance, I think I preferred Matter, although this one contains all the Banskian touches we're used to. There are some clever gosh-wow visuals, a plot ripe for righteous indignation, and a strong line mordant wit in the dialogue. But... I wasn't quite convinced by the plot's resolution (although the last line of the book is a hoot), and Veppers, the plutocrat at the heart of the story, came across more as a caricature than a rounded person. One of the Ship's avatars kept on putting me in mind of Matt Smith's DrWho, as well. Which is not to say that Surface Detail isn't good. If you like the Culture novels as much as I do, then it's not going to be completely disappointing. But neither is it close to being the best Culture novel so far.

#55: Ulverton looks like a good one. Thanks for the recommendation, Ian.

Book 140: The Girls of Slender Means, Muriel Spark
And a slender book this is too. The eponymous girls are all residents of the May of Teck Club, a hostel for single women under the age of thirty. The book takes place in the year following the end of WWII. Spark introduces the girls of the top floor, before leading up to a "tragedy" involving an unexploded bomb. There's also a framing narrative set in the 1960s, in which various of the girls discuss a man one of them invited a couple of the times to the club, and who since became a missionary and has just been murdered in Haiti. I liked the way Sparks characterised the girls, but didn't like her overly repetitive prose style. Nor was I especially keen on the framing narrative - not that I could see why it even needed to be there. Don't think I'll be dashing out to read any more books by Sparks.

Book 141: A Pale View of Hills, Kazuo Ishiguro
This is the fourth book by Ishiguro I've read. It's also his debut novel. And it can't compare to later works. A Japanese woman, married to a Brit and resident in the UK, reminiscences about her previous marriage in Japan. Her daughter from that marriage has committed suicide, and her daughter from her second marriage is staying with her for a week. The events in Japan - in Nagasaki - revolve around an upper class Japanese woman fallen on hard times, who has an American boyfriend who has promised he'll divorce his wife back home and take the Japanese woman to the US. The woman also has a wayward daughter, who was traumatised by something she witnessed during the bombing raids on Tokyo during WWII. The prose is not as sharp as Ishiguro's later books - in fact, the dialogue is mostly tin-eared. And the plot sort of peters out, rather being resolved. Disappointing.

Ian, the new 75ers group for 2011 is up and running. I do hope you will be joining us again, if you have not already: http://www.librarything.com/groups/75booksin20111

Isn't there too many ones in the year there?

That is the link to the group. It works. No idea about why it works with so many ones in it.

The name of the group has too many ones in it. Incidentally, is there a group for 100 books in 2011? I've read more than double 75 books this year.

I do not know if there is an up and running group for 100 books next year or not, Ian.

ETA: I found the 100 books group for 2011 here: http://www.librarything.com/groups/100booksin2011

I might join that one, instead. So, of course, 2011 will end up being the first year I fail to read at least 100 books...

Isn't that the way it always seems to work?

Indeed :-)

Incidentally, I've posted a review of Surface Detail, the latest Culture novel, on my blog here.

Um, yeah. About the ones...I was making the new group on the iPad and managed to mistype the name. I can change the name if the group afterward, but can't change the URL that links to it...so we're stuck with it! Fortunately, nobody much types in urls, they click on 'em.

Happy Christmas, Ian, even though I know it's already over there. Hope you had a great one.

Book 142: Ninety-eight point four, Christopher Hodder-Williams
The narrator is a security expert for a UK company engaged in a secret project, but is fired. He's then approached by a UN agent and asked to investigate strange goings-on in a part of the company to which he did not have access. Even though security at the company seems remarkably lax - they let him back into the office building unaccompanied after he's been fired, for example - the narrator stumbles across the secret plot more by accident than by design. Plus, of course, the help of a young woman who knows what's going on and with whom he falls in love. It's all very James-Bond-ish, but unlike Fleming's novels the central premise is pure sf, and quite chilling. It's a little silly, but the writing is solid and it's a good read.

Book 143: Long Time Coming, Robert Goddard
One day I'll work out why I continue to read Goddard's novels. It's probably because no thought is required - this one took me a day - and they're mostly entertaining. Despite being formulaic. His last one was rubbish, but this one is a bit better. A man discovers that his uncle, who he'd been told was dead, had actually been in an Irish prison since 1940 for an unrevealed crime (the book is set in 1976). It's all to do with some Picasso paintings, which were forged by an ex-IRA painter, used to replace the real paintings owned by a Belgian diamond merchant who dies which the ship in which he was travelling to the US was sunk by a German U-boat. There's more to than just that, and it does get a bit unbelievable in the middle, but it's better than some of Goddard's other novels.

Book 144: U is for Undertow, Sue Grafton
The central conceit driving this alphabetical series is starting to unravel: that the novels are the reports of cases investigated by PI Kinsey Millhone. This one is a case in point: two of the three narrative threads are in the third-person and by those involved in the crime Kinsey is investigating. Which is the disappearance in 1967 of a four-year old girl - she was kidnapped, but not returned by the kidnappers. These books are easy reads as well - and this one only took a day too. Grafton has rounded out the last few with Kinsey's complicated family history - she thought she was an orphan, but her dead mother was actually the estranged daughter of a well-to-do matriarch. Sometimes Kinsey's familial woes feel a bit like padding; sometimes they give her depth. But at no time do they actually add to, or illuminate, the plot of the novel. Oh well. Grafton is no Paretsky, but she's still one of the better writers of female detective novels.

#67 I did indeed. I went to Denmark to stay with my sister and her family. It was very cold and very white. Hope you had a good Christmas, too.

Book 145: The Battle of Forever, AE van Vogt
Van Vogt's are nonsense, but they're usually pacey, entertaining nonsense. Some, however, are just too silly to suspend disbelief and The Battle of Forever falls into that category. It doesn't help that it clearly reads as though van vogt made it up as he went along - at least much more so than many of his other novels. In the distant future, 1000 humans are all that remain of the race, and they live as giant heads with atrophied bodies in an idyllic enclave. As an experiment, one of them, Modyun, grows a proper human body and heads out into the outside world as an experiment. He finds an Earth inhabited by the humanoid descendants of animals and apparently ruled by an alien bureacracy. The novel may have been published in the 1970s, making it late-period van Vogt, but the society depicted seems more 1940s than anything else. Modyun accompanies some new-found animal people friends on a giant spaceship, has various run-ins with members of the alien race in which they try to out-think each other, learns all the other humans have been killed as part of the aliens' final act of Earth subjugation and... It all gets a bit wearying after a while, as van Vogt nears the end of eac hscene and hunts desperately for a hook to continue the story... often manufacturing one out of nothing simply in order to bang out more words. This is a logic-free freefall through a story which rarely makes sense, which reads like it was written when movies were black and white. Even for a fan of van Vogt, it's not one of his best.

I was hoping to finish Justin Cronin's The Passage before the end of 2010. It was one of the big releases of the year - both physically and in terms of hype. It certainly lives up to the former, but not the latter. Unfortunately, I got bogged down in the middle third of the book, so it'll be a few more days yet before I finish. I've joined the 100 in 2011 group, so it'll be the first book of the year I post there.