Oh, and also you might want to read the writings of Cedric Walker. He wrote for Slant and Operation Fantast and all those famous fanzines, back when.

Labels: books, links

 
Gosh wow. We received four Unshelved albums in the mail today -- a gift from our friend Jay the Librarian. And all four albums were signed -- with a dedication to me!

The envelope was gorgeous, too, covered in stamps, one each in the Wonders of America series.

Gosh and, if I may say so, wow. Thank you so much, Jay.

Labels: books, friends, personal

 
Recent reads:

* The entire Aubrey-Maturin series (apart from the unfinished one), 20 novels. It wasn't the first time I read the series, and I predict that it won't be the last time either; though next time I probably won't read all 20 in a row without other reading in between. The books are exciting, they are well-researched, and they are laugh-out-loud funny. They contain some of the most memorable characters in any fiction I've ever read -- as well as very vivid portraits of life aboard a ship during the Napoleonic Wars. I can't believe I ran out of Aubrey-Maturin books. Waah!

* Santiago by Mike Resnick. It's a tall tale, a yarn in the tradition of Paul Bunyan or Joe Magarac, with larger-than-life characters livin' on the frontier -- except the frontier is the edge of the civilized parts of the galaxy. It's a fun story, the kind of story where the plot holes don't matter, and it was an enjoyable read if not at all in the league of the previous novels I read.

At the moment I'm reading Philip Reeve's Mortal Engines, a young adult SF novel which is quite excellent. I can't believe I hadn't even heard of it before.

Labels: books

 
The Husband and I read aloud to each other, most evenings (that is, every evening unless we are completely knackered). Here is a chronological list of the books we've read so far; either I reading to him or he to me:

Frans G. Bengtsson: Röde Orm, 2000
Tove Jansson: Kometen kommer, 2000
Tove Jansson: Trollkarlens hatt, 2001
Tove Jansson: Muminpappans memoarer, 2001
Tove Jansson: Farlig midsommar, 2001
Tove Jansson: Trollvinter, 2001
Tove Jansson: Det osynliga barnet, 2001
Tove Jansson: Pappan och havet, 2002
Tove Jansson: Sent i november, 2001
Fritiof Nilsson Piraten: Bock i örtagård, 2002
Eric Linklater: Det blåser på månen, 2002
Eva Ibbotson: Den stora spökräddningen, 2002
Nils-Olof Franzén: Agaton Sax klipper till, 2002
Fritiof Nilsson Piraten: Historier från Färs, 2003
Rudolf Raspe: Baron Münchhausens märkvärdiga äventyr, 2003
Stig Claesson: Vem älskar Yngve Frej?, 2003
L. Frank Baum: Trollkarlen från Oz, 2003
Nils Holmberg (transl): Tusen och en natt 1, 2003
Eva Ibbotson: Hemligheten på perrong 13, 2003
Nils Holmberg (transl): Tusen och en natt 2, 2003
Nils Holmberg (transl): Tusen och en natt 3, 2004
Irmelin Sandman Lilius: Enhörningen, 2004
Torgny Lindgren: Bat Seba, 2004
J. R. R. Tolkien: Ringens brödraskap, 2004
Håkan Nesser: Barins triangel, 2004
Fritiof Nilsson Piraten: Bombi Bitt och jag, 2005
Edith Unnerstad: Kastrullresan, 2005
Eric Lundqvist: Ingen tobak, inget halleluja, 2005
Kenneth Grahame: Det susar i säven, 2005
Erik Granström: Svavelvinter, 2005
Michael Ende: Momo eller kampen om tiden, 2005
Håkan Nesser: och Piccadilly Circus ligger inte i Kumla, 2005
J. R. R. Tolkien: De två tornen, 2006
Jerome K. Jerome: Tre män i en båt, 2006
Jules Verne: Till jordens medelpunkt, 2006
J. R. R. Tolkien: Konungens återkomst, 2006
Jaroslav Hasek: Den tappre soldaten Svejk, 2006

At the moment, J is reading part 4 of Tusen och en natt - which is 1001 Arabian Nights, by the way - as you can also see in the left-hand margin of this blog.

Labels: books

 
I just discovered Bill and Bull, a double planet orbiting Delta Eridani. Oh, ok, so I didn't literally discover it -- astronomers from Uppsala University did. Isn't that marvellous? Discovering a double planet and naming the constituents Bill and Bull.

And for those readers who were not raised on a diet of Swedish childrens' literature: Bill and Bull were twin cats who were the minions of the nasty cat Måns, nemesis of Pelle Svanslös (Peter No-tail in the English translations of the books). Bill and Bull were always seen together, and always said the same things, generally echoing what Måns said (and often getting it oh so slightly wrong). Especially Bull had no imagination of his own, he'd repeat everything Bill said, and so in Swedish, "X, said Bull" has become a means of emphasising that X is rather obvious.

Bill and Bull as a double planet. Excellent. I'll sleep well tonight.

Labels: books, fun, links

 
This is a meme imported from LiveJournal; since I don't use my LJ account other than to comment others' posts, I'll do the meme here.

The Instructions:

1. Go look at The Guardian's list of 30 books UK librarians think everyone should read. Copy the full list. Bold the books you read and liked, strike out the ones you read and HATED, and italicize the ones you read and don't care one way or the other about. Only count books/series you've actually finished; don't even think about movie versions. (Parenthetical comments are optional but welcome!)

2. For every book you crossed out, list another book you'd rather have seen on the list instead. Feel free to add more if you want to.

* To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (I could talk at length about why I disliked it so much, but I won't, not in this post anyway.)
* The Bible (I have read maybe three quarters of the Old Testament, and all of NT)
* The Lord of the Rings Trilogy by JRR Tolkien
* 1984 by George Orwell
* A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
* Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte (I didn't like it much but nor did I hate it. It was rather boring, with uninteresting characters.)
* Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
* All Quiet on the Western Front by E M Remarque (the list actually said "All Quite on the Western Front"!)
* His Dark Materials Trilogy by Phillip Pullman (have read the first two books twice. Both times I lost interest completely in the second half of book two. I'm not even curious to find out how it ends.)
* Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks
* The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
* The Lord of the Flies by William Golding
* The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon
* Tess of the D'urbevilles by Thomas Hardy
* Winnie the Pooh by AA Milne
* Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
* The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Graham
* Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell (The first novel I read in English. I was 13, IIRC. Re-reading it as an adult I didn't like it as much, I must admit.)
* Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
* The Time Traveller's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
* The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold
* The Prophet by Khalil Gibran (have only read parts of it but like it well enough.)
* David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
* The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho (Nothing I have heard about this book has made me want to read it... how can it be on this list?)
* The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
* Life of Pi by Yann Martel
* Middlemarch by George Eliot
* The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
* A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
* A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzenhitsyn

I would replace To Kill a Mockingbird by...
* The Long Ships by Frans G Bengtsson.

Labels: books, meme

 
Ära vare glad!! I have wished for years and years to get hold of the Tove Jansson Moomin comic in its English-language original form; Tove made the comic for the Evening Standard and its original language was English. I have only read it in Swedish translation, an excellent translation to be sure (since Tove naturally translated it herself) but as I say, I have wanted to read the original as well. When I was a kid, before I knew it was originally in English, I used to wonder why the props in the comic strips always had English text: "Explosives", for instance, or "Mixed Seeds".

Now, the Canadian publisher Drawn and Quarterly are publishing Tove's comics in five books; the first one is already available. I need to get hold of it. By hook or by crook. (Or by buying it, probably.)

A note for the bibliographically inclined: the Moomin comic is episodic in nature, with long finished story arcs. Tove wrote and drew the comic from 1954 until 1959; then she and her brother Lars worked together on a few episodes, after which he took over and drew and wrote it until 1975. Their styles are not identical, nor are their storylines. I like them both. Drawn and Quarterly's publication appears to be only the Tove strips.

Labels: books, moomin

 
I re-read Briar Rose by Jane Yolen the other day. (It's not a slow read - didn't take much longer than the return trip to work to finish it.)

I really recommend that novel. It's labelled Young Adult, and some aspects of it are defeinitely geared to a 16-year-old readership; but it is very, very readable for adults as well. The story is a retelling of the Sleeping Beauty tale in the context of the Holocaust. It is very dark, of course, although it takes place in the 1990s rather than the 1940s, which allows for some hope. There is no revelling in grisly detail, but there is certainly some very nightmarish stuff there. I have since read up a little on Chelmno. The information on the site I just linked to is terrible beyond belief, and beyond words. Still, it is what happened. And that was only one of the camps.

But I digress. As I say, Briar Rose doesn't leave the reader with a feeling of hopelessness. I think that's important, for hopelessness is no fertile ground for making things better. Some things in the novel are better than other things, such as the slightly unnecessary-feeling love story (that's definitely aimed at the 16-year-old element in the audience!) but on the whole it's just a really, really good book. Of course it has its detractors. People who think that judging other people based on their sexuality is more important than condemning genocide, have burnt the book because, among other things, it portrays a homosexual man who was persecuted and sent to a camp by the nazis. (Yes, it does mention that he was in bed with other men, although in extremely non-explicit terms.) I think I've said this before: Sometimes it's good to find that you disagree with certain people. Such as the people who burnt Briar Rose.

Labels: books

 
Am old. Have received many cool and interesting things; for instance some really nice hand-made chocolate and The Merlin Conspiracy by D W Jones, from Johan, Hy Brasil by M Elphinstone, from Kicki, Not the End of the World, by K Atkinson, from CdM, and a cuddly bathrobe from my aunts. Oaktree sent me ButtonMen and my parents gave me a very nice picture.

And from Miranda, I got Olof!

Labels: birthdays, books, personal

 
Vem älskar Yngve Frej is a great little book, and extremely well suited for reading aloud. At first I thought the author was making fun of his characters, but he isn't — he just shows them the way they are, with a fond smile for their follies. And while the setting is dated — the book takes place in 1967 — the people aren't.

On the other hand I'm having a hard time getting into Kvartetten som sprängdes. It has suffered a bit from the passing of time (80 years) since it was written and I think Sjöberg's style is over-elaborate. But I'll finish it, it will be fun to discuss it with the book club people.

Labels: books

 
B Wahlströms gröna/röda ryggar. Nostalgimax!

Labels: books, links

 
It may be time to comment on some books I've been reading, recently. Jasper Fforde's Lost in a Good Book was a big improvement on The Eyre Affair. It felt less like a bunch of fun ideas loosely put together and more like a whole, and the character portraits were much better done. I enjoyed it very much indeed.

Since reading that, I've mostly been in a Diana Wynne Jones spell — or should that be under rather than in? I've said it before but possibly not in here: I didn't like DWJ much when I was a kid, her people were too strange and the grownups were always untrustworthy besides. Mostly I think it was a matter of style though. But now I'm very fond of her books, I think she's a marvellous writer and storyteller and I try to buy pretty much anything with her name on it I see.

[Yikes! A large fir tree was just felled by the wind, just outside our house. And when I say "large", I mean "50-year-old or so".]

Now I've re-read the Chrestomanci books and the Dalemark books. Interestingly enough, the first time I read the latter, which can't have been much more than 10 years ago as my copy of Cart & Cwidder was printed in 1993 and I remember buying them very soon after I'd read them, I liked the first three books a lot but not the fourth, to the extent that I never bought it. Instead I bought it only a couple of years ago, but didn't re-read it until now, when I find I like it the best of the lot.

And what I like most about DWJ now — as with pretty much every author I really like — is her writing style. That's one of the most tangible ways I notice that I've changed as a person from when I was a kid, I guess.

Labels: books

 
On pleasure bent again? Yes, I suppose so—in a few hours I'll be on my way to France. The VIE is approaching half-completion, and a select team of enthusiasts will be proofing blueprints from the publishers until our eyes pop out. I'll be back on Tuesday evening.

Labels: books, personal

 
Wednesday was the day of the annual outing for the library staff: we went to Enköping to look at the parks. The weather was brilliant so it was a very enjoyable experience; it would have been even more so if my back hadn't started hurting badly rather early on, but there was plenty of opportunity for sitting down in the various parks so that was ok. After lunch we were taken out to a trial site for the seed developers Svalöf Weibull -- well, we are an agricultural university library so this was in line with our work. Here we would have wished for slightly less brilliant weather, though; the sun was merciless as we stood in the field -- at least one person suffered a mild sun-stroke. Such are the dangers of a librarian's life.

In the bus transporting us to and from Enköping I started reading Perdido Street Station, but then I put it back on the "To Read"-shelf. It's hard to define why I don't feel like reading it now; I've not given up on it, far from it, but I wasn't hooked even a little bit and Johan tells me it took him several hundred pages to get really involved in it. I don't want to bring a book with me to France that I am not sure I'll really want to read, I guess. Instead I'm taking Thief of Time (which I started on yesterday, after reading Tove Jansson's Rent spel on the bus to work -- it was a short book, lasting only one bus trip. Not my favourite Jansson to date but I liked it.) , The Years of Rice and Salt and A Song for Arbonne -- the latter being one of the very few books we own that's set in Provence. . .

I'm leaving tonight, on AF1063 to CDG. Packing might be a good idea actually, and perhaps I'll switch on the TV also and have Sweden-Nigeria in the background.

Labels: books, library

 
I read Dogsbody and The Eyre Affair recently. Thoughts about them posted to the Good Books game; I do wish I remembered the names of Thursday's similarly-named bosses and colleagues, though — I know one was Braxton, and one was Bowden, but the other two. . . And I've returned the book to Stina so can't check on it now.

Labels: books

 
Had an exceedingly full day yesterday -- we started out with an antiquarian book shop crawl and returned with these spoils:

Rent spel by Tove Jansson, 1989
Prinsessans ABC-bok by Fredrik Boije af Gennäs 1977 (original ed. 1835)
Ovan hav under sten by Susan Cooper, 1965
Fyra års världspolitik i karikatyrer, 1939-1943 by P A Fogelström & S Bahnsen, 1943
Bestiarium by Harry Martinsson & B von Rosen, 1964
Esquire Cartoon Album by Arnold Gingrich (ed), 1958
Storm Petersen Album - 17 Aargang 1929
Storm Petersen Album - 12 Aargang 1924
You're Only Old Once - A Book for Obsolete Children by Dr Seuss, 1986
Blommor och grodor - Fynd på språkets gröna ängar by Albert Holmqvist (Purre), 1934
Jimmy Knapp och Lukas lokföraren by Michael Ende
Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K Jerome, 1954
Mit bibliotek - Ny samling by Kjeld Elfelt (ed), 1943
Mina böcker by Gunnar Mascoll Silfverstolpe, 1955
Pegas på villovägar Olof Strandberg & Bengt Åhlen
Farbror Joakim på stridshumör - Kalle Ankas pocket 7, 1971
Kalle Anka, riddaren utan fruktan - Kalle Ankas pocket 13, 1973
Knattarna ger aldrig upp - Kalle Ankas pocket 14, 1973

Labels: books

 
Happy World Book Day, then. Have you hugged a book-shelf today? Or read a book?

I'm reading Jurgen which is a very wonderful story; I can see why people of exaggerated morals might have disliked it 100 years ago. I don't often read as slowly as possible to make a book last longer; now, however, I do... More later, when I've finished it.

Labels: books

 
Also a few days ago, I finished Kim Stanley Robinson's Blue Mars, after having spent the last several months with the Mars books as occasional reading. I have read them before, some 4 years ago, so there was no hurry this time even if I didn't really remember much of the plot; the plot isn't really what's important anyway in these bricks.

The premises are superficially simple: a few decades into the third millennium, one hundred people travel to Mars to start a colony; they are soon to be followed by more, many more, people and a whole new society grows on the red planet. The making of a new world on an uninhabited planet is complicated on many levels: the physical world must be made inhabitable, for a start -- but how much should Mars be made to resemble Earth; don't the red rocks and lifeless plains have a right to remain untouched for future generations to marvel at? Politics enter into the decisions immediately, when the colonists from different countries group together (or don't) and when basic differences in viewpoint are brought out by the newness of everything. And when the population of Mars is no longer one hundred but ten million people, when overpopulated Earth screams for somewhere to ship its citizens (there is one additional, important factor here which I won't reveal. . .) , when the second- and third generation Martians are born, grow up and have no affinity with Earth, the possibilities for complication become endless. Robinson has put a lot of thought into this work, as well as 17 years of research, and he has many theories on politics, economics and psychology as well as insights in the intricacies of ecological and medical matters.

The problem for a layman reader is to know how much of all this is indeed plausible; what matters is of course that it works in the framework of the story but it isn't unimportant whether Robinson's vision of the future is founded on fact or fantasy. He does have something of an exaggerated reliance on technology, not that he envisions technological solutions to all the world's problems, rather the opposite in many cases; but his gadgets almost always work, and for me living in a society where the bus time tables are thrown into confusion every time it gets below freezing, the image of a cadre of robots unassisted building factories for extracting minerals from the bowels of an asteroid seems far more remote than a mere 50 or 60 years.

Not that the technology is what makes the books memorable, or indeed worth reading. That is accomplished by the characters, the people, sympathetic and unsympathetic, who populate the books and Mars. The novels are written from a variety of viewpoints, a device I find very successful and that conveys the intricate complexity of any human society and particularly a brand-new one. Every person who moves to Mars brings his or her cultural baggage from Earth, and may be more or less willing to shed it. Seeing the same society, sometimes the same incidents, through different eyes makes it all the more vivid. And Robinson doesn't shy from letting the bad guys talk either; personally I couldn't stand Frank or Zo, for instance, yet somehow it is possible to understand them when you see how they look at things, how they think about matters. It is not a bright and happy future that is painted in this story, but nor is it hopeless. It is striking how much Robinson believes in the power of people working together; through the two-and-a-half thousand pages or so people discuss, argue, debate and talk, making things happen, making the new society work. Yes, in the end it is a hopeful picture in spite of every disaster that have befallen and shaped the Martians through the course of the story.

The three Mars books are long, overlong even; still, I do not regret re-reading them and I am sure I will read them again in a few years' time.

Labels: books

 
I finally got round to reading The Inkeeper's Song by Peter Beagle the other week. It was a very beautiful tale; it seemed like a fairytale but had the most unexpected twists, the author made very good use of the shifting points of view, and the language was very wonderful, very beautiful indeed. I must read more books by Peter Beagle.

Labels: books