Books: Last Book You Read and Rate It

[Spring in Fialta]

Funny story about Sartre: He met my grand-father at a cocktail party in Morocco and completely hit it off. Ended up walking out drunk, grabbing my great-uncle and telling him his little brother was the smartest fellow he ever met.

 

[Ceremony]

I don't think I've read Animal Farm by George Orwell since I first read it, when I must have been fifteen or sixteen. I'm not sure if I read it before or after my first go of Nineteen Eighty-Four, but it was around the same time. As I've just realised now it's interesting to think that two books that so define a writer and are so inseparable thematically have been so separate in my own mind in the past ten years. Maybe separate is the wrong way of putting it. Distinct? Solitary?

Either way, when I read Nineteen Eighty-Four again in the coming weeks I'll probably be more coherent on that subject. In the meantime, Animal Farm. A hundred page fairy story about a bunch of animals on a farm who get fed up with being mistreated by the farm owner and revolt, driving him out and running the farm themselves. The early throes of equality from the revolution are quickly dissolved by the pigs who led it, as an assortment of infighting allows one particular pig to manipulate truths and subsequent actions for his own ends. The close of the story sees all the rights and declarations of animals decided upon in the beginning forgotten, as the pigs drink with the men they're working with and they're indistinguishable from one another.

Anyone with a vague interest in books knows what this is about and the vast majority of them will know that it's a broad but not explicit pastiche of the rise of Stalin's Russia. Reading the modern day version with its introductions and appendices it's interesting to consider the book in view of its time of publication, right after the second world war just as the USSR was becoming a thing and the realities the book alludes to were becoming more common knowledge. Orwell wrote a preface for the Ukrainian edition of Animal Farm which was kept at the end of the Penguin edition for editorial reasons. Namely the reason that him opening with "Hello, as a Soviet republic you will be conscious of the pervasive influence of Stalin(ism), this book is about him and the last fifty years in your part of the world and the problems socialism faces today with the thread of fascism." Not really something which affords much subtlety on part of the story which follows.

This is, broadly, a good thing. Although the story is about Stalin, reading it after having read Homage to Catalonia and some of Orwell's other political writing I feel as if I have a greater appreciation of how the observations he makes can be applied to situations besides Soviet Russia. Maybe the guise of it being a "fairy" story as he puts it helps as it makes every feature more pronounced yet more tragic at the same time. Writing a story like this where different animals embody different characters could be difficult - there's enough heavy-handed political writing in the world. Looking at some of the stuff America has given us all in the past year and a half shows that subtlety is an art which, tragically, is lost on many people. But I think the inherent innocence of the setting and the premise of the story helps make the symbolism more impactful. There are animated film editions of this on youtube (both as I understand with changed endings) which remind me vividly of some of the classic animation era cartoons I watched when I was young. The ducks in the 1954 are particularly cute. I can only speak for it on a personal level but reading the story I get the same sense I did at that age from something as short and simple as a cartoon, that I'm seeing something larger and more important than I can really understand.

Sadly, as the inevitable comments on videos like these will attest, the impact of the characterisation in Animal Farm will be lost on a lot of people. Knowing Orwell's personal experience in fighting for socialism and against fascism - in person and with a typewriter - the inevitability of the story is what he seems to lament most. And it's not even the treachery of the pigs that stands out the most in this regard. It's the ordinary citizen. The regular animal who was promised so much and fought so admirably for it being undermined by those they fought with and for. It's Boxer the horse who prides himself on working hard and works himself to death for the animals, it's the hens who don't have to lay eggs for humans anymore but eventually have to lay just as many for the pigs, it's the sheep who repeat whatever the pigs tell them to and above all it's the pigs' duplicity in altering truths and deliberately suppressing information to keep everyone in line with what they want. If you have a particular fondness for self-flagellation I mentioned this in my long review of Red Dead Redemption when it appears in the story there and it's something which repeats itself throughout history, not just with Stalin and Russia. For the point Orwell wished to make about the world and time he was living in, there's no denying that the events described in Animal Farm are timeless and extend well beyond their inspiration.

The humour which was present throughout Coming Up for Air is all the better in the small occasions it's featured here. The absolute pinnacle being the culmination of playing off two rival farms against one another when the animals are trying to trade for materials. After the farm they deal with betrays them they try to get the other one to help, only to be sent a note saying "serves you right." Hilarious.

The anger in Animal Farm is consistent. It's unrelenting. It's convincing. It has just enough desperation in it that you know what you're reading has all the self-righteous conviction of someone who has seen proof that what they're writing is true and accurate but which they're also experienced enough to know will never reach a satisfactory conclusion. I don't read it so much as a warning as a lament, partly for the comparisons you can draw with other historical examples I mentioned earlier but for the post-war potential Orwell saw being eroded as quickly as it seemed a possibility. The introduction to this and Nineteen Eighty-Four I read the other day (the latter written by Thomas Pynchon, no less) mention the dismay Orwell felt at that post-war world, how members of the British establishment seemed so eager to explain away Stalin's obvious and documented atrocities. All of this is in Animal Farm. All of this is in a story which is effectively a Sunday morning cartoon from the period I suppose I subconsciously associate with the apparently simpler, blissful past which was the present which horrified Orwell so much.

I've been a lot less convinced by some of Orwell's non-fiction than his fiction, but I believe this counts as non-fiction and I believe it's the purest form of it he could ever manage. This isn't a criticism, since Animal Farm is so effective and so good. I suppose there's hope that while his name remains an adjective used by people unaware of why that stories like this will continue to stand a chance of making the impact they were intended to.

 

[Oscar Acosta]

Finders Keepers - Stephen King

I don't want to spoil much because the first few chapters are by far the most interesting of them all. So basically, someone finds something years after someone buried it, and a chain of events start that the original person who buried it wants it back.

Very easy novel to read, but ultimately fairly entertaining. As with almost all Stephen King novels it starts great, he has a talent for building tension and an atmosphere but it never really curtails into much. Or at least anything you can't see coming.

Then there is a chapter or two that seemingly have no part of any of it, slight background on who the hell they are but it gets confusing to why you'd even care. But then plot twist at the end of the book:

This is a sequel in a trilogy of books that's supposed to follow Mr. Mercedes. Like great to know at the very end, when there is no indication of that on the cover, or book description on the back. Now going back to read Mr. Mercedes because I owned that too, given the cheap cost of King's books at Costco - but the entire ending is spoiled and will have no suspense due to reading this friggin one first.
Sometimes I wonder how people have jobs. Not once in any process did someone say "Hey is this supposed to be book one or two of the series, people might want to know that?"

Anyway, 6.5/10

 

[Hippasus]

Rubank Elementary Method: flute or piccolo: a fundamental course for individual or like-instrument class instruction 500

This method book by A.C. Peterson does not go over techniques, since it is all sheet music, but the pieces are nice and gradually go up in difficulty. They are classically-styled for the most part. I like that the book introduces one to multiple keys, both major and minor (but mostly ones in major), and that the pieces are nice. This book is recommended if one wants to learn the flute, but one may require supplemental advice from somewhere, like an instructor or another book that does go into things like breathing techniques. A fingering chart might be needed too.

200: distasteful and pathetic
300: mediocre or subpar
400: average, but decent
500: very good
600: superb
700: transcendental

 

[Spring in Fialta]

The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy (1886) - There's a certain quality to Leo Tolstoy's later writings that I find immensely readable, despite a complete lack of explosiveness. Like other novellas I've read of his - The Devil, The Story of a Horse - there's few particularly memorable lines of prose in this work, but every sentence becomes a whole that creates such an enthralling and titanic work, and a feeling of wholeness inside the pit of your stomach when you're through with the art. The Death of Ivan Ilyich, without surprise, deals with death and how we think of it, eventually face it, question and hopefully, come to terms with it. Dealing with a lawyer named Ivan Ilyich who has lived a professionally ambitious life (and very by the books as well) and who in his mid-40s, comes to face a long and painful death after a rather mundane incident in his study room. Having never questioned his own mortality, and believing to have lived a just life, Ivan Ilyich becomes tormented by the idea of his impending death and grows both disillusioned and resentful of the world around him, and eventually life itself, as he's forced to painfully come face to face with mortality due to an all-consuming pain which forbids him from thinking about much else and which also soon leaves him bed-ridden and unable to perform simple tasks without the physical side of his pain overwhelming in and forcing itself through into his psyche and condemning it to focus on the pain and on his own life, which he eventually realizes has been worthless, despite his mainstream success. One of the great qualities of the story is Tolstoy's detailed prose in such few pages. It comes across as the reading of a stern police report from an all-seeing and infallible eyewitness, and yet is as enthralling and as powerful as most of anything I've ever read. Tolstoy is obviously more interested by his theme then his character in this work - he doesn't seem to hold any of them in high esteem besides Ivan Ilyich's young butler, who radiates with life and power - and it allows him to never diverge from his focus and to offer insights which seem so simple when told by him, but after pondering the thoughts for a few minutes, you ultimately recognize them for the powerful shakes that they are. There's lessons to be learned in a work like this, but as an easily distracted young man, I suppose I'll forget them more often than not in my own daily life. Powerful work though, and a rapid read as well.

 

[kihei]

Read four books over the holidays.

The Giller Prize winner, Bellevue Square by Michael Redhill, was great reading. It is about a woman named Jean Mason who lives in Toronto who slowly discovers that she has a doppelganger out there somewhere. She becomes obsessed with finding her, but as the novel progresses, she begins to have the horrid thought that it is she who might be the doppelganger, not the other way around. Bellevue Square is very well written, a real page turner, and a mind blower in the best sense. Very deserving of the Giller Prize.

Death and the Penguin by Andrey Kurkov is a darkly comic but still serious novel about a man who adopts a penguin from a cash-strapped zoo in Kiev. Viktor lucks into a job writing "premature" obituaries but grows suspicious when his subjects keep dying off shortly after he has composed their obituary. Soon he and Mischa the penguin are embroiled up to their necks in shading dealings. In fact, it may be Mischa who is inadvertently keeping Viktor alive. The ever silent but strangely likeable Mischa is a wonderful character, and the novel, which ultimately focuses on moral ambiguity and self-interest, is both funny and sad.

Of Love and Other Demons is a vivid, short novel written by the great Gabriel Garcia Marquez about an unloved girl who is bitten by a rabid dog, but doesn't die. Her survival leads to concerns that she is in league with darker forces. A young priest sent to exorcise her falls in love with her instead, to both their peril. Even in translation, Marquez, with his gently surrealistic touches and clever use of magic realism, is a joy to read--perceptive, original, compassionate. Of Love and Other Demons is among his best work.

Now I'm Catching On: My Life On and Off the Air, by Bob Cole (with Stephen Brunt) is predictably bland: a lightweight account of the hockey broadcaster's career and life. Along with the Hewitts and Danny Gallivan, Cole is probably the most respected hockey broadcaster in history. He certainly has been present at some epic events where his voice helped define the moment for millions of Canadians. His book is really a collection of anecdotes, nothing more, that gives little insight into his career. Some of this stuff is momentarily interesting (he once babysat for Wayne Gretzky's four-year-old daughter, and he met Joe Louis in a New York bar); much of it is not.

 

[Spring in Fialta]

Read four books over the holidays.

The Giller Prize winner, Bellevue Square by Michael Redhill, was great reading. It is about a woman named Jean Mason who lives in Toronto who slowly discovers that she has a doppelganger out there somewhere. She becomes obsessed with finding her, but as the novel progresses, she begins to have the horrid thought that it is she who might be the doppelganger, not the other way around. Bellevue Square is very well written, a real page turner, and a mind blower in the best sense. Very deserving of the Giller Prize.

Death and the Penguin by Andrey Kurkov is a darkly comic but still serious novel about a man who adopts a penguin from a cash-strapped zoo in Kiev. Viktor lucks into a job writing "premature" obituaries but grows suspicious when his subjects keep dying off shortly after he has composed their obituary. Soon he and Mischa the penguin are embroiled up to their necks in shading dealings. In fact, it may be Mischa who is inadvertently keeping Viktor alive. The ever silent but strangely likeable Mischa is a wonderful character, and the novel, which ultimately focuses on moral ambiguity and self-interest, is both funny and sad.

Of Love and Other Demons is a vivid, short novel written by the great Gabriel Garcia Marquez about an unloved girl who is bitten by a rabid dog, but doesn't die. Her survival leads to concerns that she is in league with darker forces. A young priest sent to exorcise her falls in love with her instead, to both their peril. Even in translation, Marquez, with his gently surrealistic touches and clever use of magic realism, is a joy to read--perceptive, original, compassionate. Of Love and Other Demons is among his best work.

Now I'm Catching On: My Life On and Off the Air, by Bob Cole (with Stephen Brunt) is predictably bland: a lightweight account of the hockey broadcaster's career and life. Along with the Hewitts and Danny Gallivan, Cole is probably the most respected hockey broadcaster in history. He certainly has been present at some epic events where his voice helped define the moment for millions of Canadians. His book is really a collection of anecdotes, nothing more, that gives little insight into his career. Some of this stuff is momentarily interesting (he once babysat for Wayne Gretzky's four-year-old daughter, and he met Joe Louis in a New York bar); much of it is not.

Ever read Chronicle of a Death Foretold, Kihei? It's a short novel by Gabriel Garcia Marquez that I've read a while back and was blown away by. Kind of like Breakfast of Champions, the more I think about it, the more I like it. You should look into it, if you've never read it.

 

[kihei]

Ever read Chronicle of a Death Foretold, Kihei? It's a short novel by Gabriel Garcia Marquez that I've read a while back and was blown away by. Kind of like Breakfast of Champions, the more I think about it, the more I like it. You should look into it, if you've never read it.

Yes, I have, and I was very impressed by it as well.

 

[Spring in Fialta]

A Theft by Saul Bellow (1989) - The first novel I read by Saul Bellow and I came away unimpressed. Confusing - despite an attempt to be concise - and all over the place without a clear direction, the book was a slog to get through at times, a death sentence for such a short work. Worst, Bellow appears oblivious (or worse, even encouraging) of his main character's low moral compass (despite trying to display her as a strong and thoughtful heroine) and I found the book a pretentious, condescending work that is far too pleased with itself. So strong was my disdain of certain passages that seemed to justify racism (or at least not condemn it) that I actually looked up if Saul Bellow had ever been involved in some sort of controversy in regards to his views (hint: he has, and came off as an asshole). I don't know if this is representative of his other works - a bar acquaintance of mine sang Seize the Day's praises to me last night - but talk about indulging (and borderline falling in love) with a character which leaves a lot to be desired, and isn't as interesting or wise as Bellow intended her to be. A major disappointment, and reading the reviews on Goodreads, it appears I'm not alone in that sentiment.

 

[Diddy]

No country for old men. 6.5/10
Not as good as the film is really all you need to know.

 

[Ceremony]

On the other hand, significantly better than the film is what you actually need to know.

 

[Ceremony]

I fear I spoiled any prospective review of Nineteen Eighty-Four a few posts back when I went on my rant about the contemporary mis-interpretation of 'Orwellian'. That to describe something as such is mostly done by brain donors who want to try and sound profound and well-read by quoting one of the most famous, accessible writers on the last century. To pick something from Orwell's last novel as being an adequate means of using his name as an adjective is not only to miss the point of whatever comparison you're trying to draw, it undermines everything that came before it and which led to this point. During Winston's interrogation (or re-education) O'Brien tells him that everything was inevitably leading to the point they're at and, really, so too was the case for everything Orwell wrote. But we'll come to that later.

I generally find, and by that I mean near-exclusively "in my experience on this website," that Nineteen Eighty-Four is held as a favourite book by people who haven't read anything since they left school. And really, it's almost prototypical for the sort of thing you can read at sixteen and decide you know everything about the world. The Man is bad! And whatever else. I don't want to seem flippant when I say this because technically it's the first 'adult' book I read of my own volition. George Bowling's assertion in Coming Up for Air that "I read what I wanted to read and learned more than I ever did at school" rings true to a certain extent. With all of this in mind I'm curious as to why this book remains to popular among people who rarely read for the sake of reading. Does it enforce their own beliefs about the world? Does it form them? Shape them?

If you've lived under a rock your whole life or clicked on this thread by accident, the story is quite simple. A man, Winston Smith, lives in what was once London under the command of an all-encompassing political system which controls every aspect of life. Not just on a personal level, every level imaginable. Winston's job consists of correcting newspaper articles so that the historical record says that the Party is infallible. If they made a prediction which turned out wrong, Winston changes what they said so they were right. Then the original copy is destroyed. Despite the constant fear for his life in the face of any sort of unorthodoxy being punished by the Thought Police who render you an unperson, that is to say you disappear and are never seen or heard of or spoken of again, Winston embarks on an illicit relationship with a woman named Julia, before they are inevitably caught and their individuality broken.

I actually read this twice before writing about it and maybe it's reading through it a second time which makes it more obvious, but Winston and Julia's relationship is really cynical. For all the punctuality and all the effort they put into it and all the joy they get from it, and while we all know it's not going to last, there's something disappointing when you definitely know for certain it won't have a happy ending. Winston dreams of the so-called 'Golden Country,' a rural idyll half-remembered from his childhood. I imagine their relationship like looking at that image but with the colour constantly fading, as like in a dream you try to focus on it to make the colours clearer but it never returns to its true image. I don't know whether I think their relationship is pessimistic or realistic, but I can't read it as celebratory as I might once have done.

The prose feels like something of a departure for Orwell because of how... imaginative it is. Compared even to his later non-fiction there's a tremendous fusion of clarity and inventiveness here. Maybe that speaks to the reader who feels like they're reading what is obvious fiction, but not fictional enough. Either way, in letters prior to his writing of Nineteen Eighty-Four he said he knew what sort of book he wanted to write and I think he did. There are even a few references to Orwell's own extreme illness as he was writing, as the tuberculosis which eventually killed him really took hold at this time. "It was like struggling with some crushing physical task, something which one had the right to refuse and which one was nevertheless neurotically anxious to accomplish." I'm sure Orwell once compared writing a novel to suffering a hideous illness, but there's no question that this is culmination of innumerable life experiences and books and essays which has been focused and realised. I think everything Orwell built to through his previous work is in here and fully explored and detailed. Now to find out what that is.

The final page in Homage to Catalonia speaks to all of this. It's about his return to England after fighting in Spain, about how wonderful all of it is. I don't want to get up and get my copy, especially not when there are more Nineteen Eighty-Four quotes to come, but if you're desperate you can find out. It's something explored further in Coming Up for Air - the sense that the narrator feels that something essential which defined his sense of existence, of his country's existence, is being eroded as he grows older. The sense of impending war is a bigger influence on that novel and the time in which it was written, but it's something which is explored further in Nineteen Eighty-Four. Only rather than things changing, it's the sense that things are deliberately being changed. That some force which seeks to be infallible and which manipulates individuals and the collective for its own ends are deliberately destroying any capacity to remember a world besides the one you experience on a daily basis.

Winston half-remembers things from his childhood, images, smells, feelings. He briefly remembers a time pre-war, and the novel is at least partly fictionalised as it references a conflict which obviously didn't happen. Orwell mentions an atomic bomb being dropped on Colchester, which while amusing to think that the place wronged him somehow makes you wonder what Orwell thought of nuclear armament. When he fought in the Spanish civil war there weren't enough guns to go round the men and not enough bullets for even those, so the almost flippant way he references nuclear weapons is strange. Especially given his apparent qualms about "streamlining" and efficiency and Hitler's bombs in Coming up for Air. Maybe he couldn't fully appreciate it. I can't imagine what it would have been like to think that suddenly a hundred thousand people could be killed at once, never mind all the after-effects which Orwell definitely wouldn't have known of.

Either way, it's somewhat convenient in separating Winston's present from what he thinks his past is. He tries to find other people who remember a time before the war, before the revolution that installed the Party as rulers, but he can't. He tries to find someone to corroborate what's in his own mind which, really, is what everything in the book comes down to. When Winston is tortured O'Brien tells him that the things in his head don't matter. That because he remembers details, events that aren't recorded anywhere, they didn't happen. As an aside, the Oceania/Eastasia/Eurasia is great for this purely because of how simplistic and all-encompassing it is. It simultaneously represents the Party's ability to make people believe what they say and people's ability to take it in without thinking about it.

Back to Winston though and his... idealisation of the past. The things he remembers of his childhood are a bit terrible. He remembers the odd thing like the smell of coffee or chocolate but he remembers being a selfish brat who steals said chocolate from his mother and younger sister and runs away only to never see them again because of the civil war that's on. As you read these little excerpts you wonder why Winston, in the state he's in, wants to be able to know more about this time. Even when he's in his relationship with Julia and he knows for certain there's more to life than he's made to think, the thoughts of the past are still what I question. It's something that persists in the modern day and that we're seeing to a destructive end with bullshit like blue passports supposedly a great triumph of Brexit - heralded as such by the leader of the country. All the while the proverbial house is disintegrating around us.

It's because of stuff like this and everything Orwell wrote about and experienced that I have such issue with the term "Orwellian." The term Big Brother is meaningless to me, a reader in 2017, because of the TV show. Even the phrase "We are the dead" (PS how did neither of them react when O'Brien said it to them in his flat, idiots) just sets off David Bowie in my mind. People who trumpet an Orwellian creep of the state will reference things like this with virtually no understanding of the motivations which inspired them. Orwell wrote in defiance of fascism having lived through the first half of the twentieth century. He saw over-reaching state influence from every possible side - he worked for the British Empire in Burma, he fought against Franco's troops in Spain, he saw the rise and fall of the Third Reich and the Soviet Union and these things, simply, are not around today. They are not in any way comparable to any of the problems or threats facing the world today, yet there are people who will claim his warnings as relevant. They are not, and to misinterpret Nineteen Eighty-Four in this way is significantly more damaging than any of the threats Orwell himself forewarned against.

I'm struggling to think of a more tragic book I've ever read, although my inability to remember things generally is probably playing a part in that. But still, it's up there. It's not the sense of a world in which personal freedom is lost and that nobody in it cares (Winston is horrified to learn that Julia doesn't remember that Oceania changed which side it was at war with, and even moreso to learn that she doesn't care. She lives in rebellion from moment to moment, but to what end? None), it's not the apparent infallibility of something which is ostensibly bad and its inevitable success against all opposition, it's in the way that you read something from the past which warns against a future you can see so readily around you. Not in the way that the loudest voices will tell you it is, but in all of the things missed within it, the small things, the things that add up and are misinterpreted and repurposed to some sinister end.

In a 2003 introduction for the Penguin edition I read Thomas Pynchon writes the following:

"Doublethink lies behind the names of the superministries that run things in Oceania - the Ministry of Peace wages war, the Ministry of Truth tells lies, the Ministry of Love tortures and eventually kills anybody whom it deems a threat. If this seems unreasonably perverse, recall that in the present-day United States, few have any problem with a war-making apparatus named the 'Department of Defense', any more than we have saying 'Department of Justice' with a straight face, despite well-documented abuses of human and constitutional rights by its most formidable arm, the FBI. Our nominally free news media are required to present 'balanced coverage, in which every 'truth' is immediately neutered by an equal and opposite one. Every day public opinion is the target of rewritten history, official amnesia and outright lying, all of which is benevolently terms 'spin', as if it were no more harmful than a ride on a merry-go-round. We know better than what they tell us, yet hope otherwise."

There's little need to fast forward fourteen years and see the state of the media in his country now. While the advancement of technology has ironically gone in the opposite direction Orwell's telescreens predicted, at the same time they're just as pervasive. The point of the telescreen is for transmission and observation - you see everything the Party wants you to, the Party sees everything you do. Yet the modern day internet allows anyone to learn anything they want, yet people will gravitate to shite like Obama being the anti-christ or the Earth being flat. I'd say that the UK being part of Oceania seems quaint now given how much, as an outsider, this problem seems in America nowadays but things are misinterpreted and warped just as badly here. See the BBC, something Orwell treasured, and its coverage of the Scottish independence referendum. Something with "British" in its name having to retain a facade of impartiality was a complete farce, yet at the times when it desperately wasn't it tried to claim it was. So did anyone who naturally supported what it had to say, believing their own convictions rather than taking something at face value. A media which tries to present balance nowadays is arguably more damaging than flagrant propaganda bullshit like Fox or Russia Today because it legitimises a viewpoint which doesn't deserve it - yet this martyrs those people in the same way O'Brien describes. The problem with modern society isn't so much the inescapable group think dictated to the populace which Orwell seemed to fear, it's the individual deciding they're right and seeking confirmation.

I think it's in the Goldstein excerpt in Nineteen Eighty-Four where he writes that "the proles cannot rebel until they become conscious, and until they become conscious they cannot rebel." This is what should be trumpeted. This is what should be taken from the novel, not anything else. The majority of the population through lack of interest, selfishness or a genuine inability because of the hand-to-mouth nature of their existence, can't withstand the genuine erosion of their freedoms and quality of life Orwell warns against. The ones who think they try misinterpret and warp it in their own minds somehow, becoming more and more drawn in to themselves against anyone else in the belief that something worthwhile is being threatened, but not properly realising what or how it is. I'd attempt to be arrogant enough to say that the most tragic thing about Nineteen Eighty-Four is that people who don't understand it don't realise this and that I do, but it would barely make a point. Here, as in real life, people believe what they want to believe. Maybe that's what he was so against.

There was one more thing I marked which I wanted to share but which doesn't really fit in anywhere else.

"Nor was it a satisfactory solution to keep the masses in poverty by restricting the output of goods. This happened to a great extent during the final phase of capitalism, roughly between 1920 and 1940. The economy of many countries was allowed to stagnate, land went out of cultivation, capital equipment was not added to, great blocks of the population were prevented from working and kept half alive by state charity. But this, too, entailed military weakness, and since the privations it inflicted were obviously unnecessary, it made oppositions inevitable. The problem was how to keep the wheels of industry turning without increasing the real wealth of the world. Goods must be produced, but they must not be distributed. And in practice the only way of achieving this was by continuous warfare."

I'll leave you to decide whether the most worrying prediction of Orwell's is really a couple of CCTV cameras on the street.

 

[kihei]

Murder is Easy, by Agatha Christie

Middling Agatha Christie, not one of her best but not one of her worst either. Back from the colonies, Luke chats up a little old lady on a train who tells him that she thinks there is a serial killer in her village and she is going to Scotland Yard to tell the police about it. Luke thinks she is daft but harmless. However when she is reported to be a victim of a hit and run accident the next day, he starts wondering whether she indeed might have been onto something. He cooks up a story and goes off to investigate. While Christie's best works can hold one's attention just by the genius of the mystery plotting, the rest of her works depend heavily on the ability of the reader to accept the imaginary world on an England that probably hasn't existed since before World War I, if it existed then, where class distinctions are an accepted, even cherished reality, where roles are clearly defined, where kindly spinsters tend their gardens, where tradition is still respected, and where even the nice, helpful shop keeper across the way is capable of multiple homicides. For some of us, the fact that this reality is dated is part of its charm, a little like reading Dickens in that regard. Eventually, after reading about 30 of her mysteries, I figured out some of Christie's "tells", though she can still dazzle me with the unexpected occasionally. This time around I could kind of see the solution coming, but not so easily that it spoiled the fun.

 

[sr edler]

I read Ubik by Philip K. Dick a while ago (in Swedish translation). Science fiction (or philosophical fiction, lol) really isn't my favorite genre but I thought the book started out pretty well (yes, I was impressed). Pretty nice descriptions and introductions of the characters and the background settings. I liked the introduction of Ella and the moratorium on a whole. After a couple of chapters though (4 or 5 or 6? – after the explosion) it started to feel kinda semi-boring with quite long passages and some blatant fill-out stuff. I liked the whole story idea though, and half of the execution. Ending felt kinda 2001: A Space Odyssey-ending-ish (in the sense that it didn't make much sense), but I guess that comes with the sci-fi territory.


Beginning: 8/10
Ending: 5/10
Whole book: 6.5/10

 

[Ambassador Bridge]

Beartown, by Fredrik Backman.

A masterpiece. 10/10

 

[Spring in Fialta]

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) by Lewis Carroll - Underwhelmed. I guess I wasn't expecting a children's tale to read...like a children's tale. The book was imaginative, and yet the prose felt old and rather lifeless and the chapters never seemed to go anywhere interesting. I just got utterly bored with it and it didn't really make me feel one way or another, hence the short review I suppose. Maybe it went over my head.

 

[GB]

Finally, all of the books I read in 2017. I wanted to read more books by female authors and more books by queer authors in 2017. I wanted at least half the books I read to be by female authors and I ended up with 70/133. I'm pretty happy with the way it worked out and I'm going to aim to do the same again this year.

The books are sorted by * rating and then alphabetical order by author. I was going to order them all but there's no way I could do that to my satisfaction.

5* = Magnificent
4* = Really good
3* = Good
2* = Flawed with some enjoyable parts
1* = Awful (a book this bad gets abandoned. I had no abandoned books this year)

5*

The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes
Moon Tiger by Penelope Lively
Written on the Body by Jeanette Winterson

4*

The Untouchable by John Banville
The Sellout by Paul Beatty
The White Boy Shuffle by Paul Beatty
Slumberland by Paul Beatty
Dark Matter by Blake Crouch
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The Gambler/Bobok/A Nasty Story by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Moonglow by Michael Chabon
Manhood for Amateurs: The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father, and Son by Michael Chabon
The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories by Don DeLillo
Touchy Subjects by Emma Donoghue
Bullfighting by Roddy Doyle
Your Fathers, Where Are They? And the Prophets, Do They Live Forever? by Dave Eggers
A Burnt-Out Case by Graham Greene
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari
Tigerman by Nick Harkaway
A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway
All My Friends are Superheroes by Andrew Kaufman
The Empathy Exams: Essays by Leslie Jamison
The Gin Closet by Leslie Jamison
The Boys from Brazil by Ira Levin
Picnic at Hanging Rock by Joan Lindsay
Heat Wave by Penelope Lively
The Cement Garden by Ian McEwan
Elmet by Fiona Mozley
A Wild Sheep Chase by Haruki Murakami
Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage by Haruki Murakami
Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill
Revenge by Yōko Ogawa
Wrecked by Charlotte Roche
So You've Been Publicly Shamed by Jon Ronson
The Men Who Stare at Goats by Jon Ronson
The Psychopath Test by Jon Ronson
Them: Adventures with Extremists by Jon Ronson
Thatcher Stole My Trousers by Alexei Sayle
And Quiet Flows the Don by Mikhail Sholokhov
The Train by Georges Simenon
There but for the by Ali Smith
Autumn by Ali Smith
The First Person and Other Stories by Ali Smith
The Accidental by Ali Smith
Public Library and Other Stories by Ali Smith
Girl Meets Boy by Ali Smith
How to Be Both by Ali Smith
NW by Zadie Smith
Men Explain Things to Me: and Other Essays by Rebecca Solnit
A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
The Pearl by John Steinbeck
The Secret History by Donna Tartt
The Bricks that Built the Houses by Kate Tempest
The Return of The Soldier by Rebecca West
Concertina by Susan Winemaker
The World And Other Places by Jeanette Winterson
The Gap of Time: The Winter’s Tale Retold by Jeanette Winterson
Lighthousekeeping by Jeanette Winterson
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson
The Passion by Jeanette Winterson
Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? by Jeanette Winterson
A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf
Khirbet Khizeh by S. Yizhar

3*

We Should All Be Feminists by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
The Storyteller's Tale by Omair Ahmad
Lady Susan by Jane Austen
Collected Stories of Isaac Babel
Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach
Nightwood by Djuna Barnes
Lust, Caution and Other Stories by Eileen Chang
In Search of a Beginning: My Life with Graham Greene by Yvonne Cloetta
All Families are Psychotic by Douglas Coupland
The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion
Astray by Emma Donoghue
Passions Between Women by Emma Donoghue
A Gentle Creature and Other Stories by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
a certain woman by Hala El Badry
Headscarves and Hymens by Mona Eltahawy
Burning Down George Orwell's House by Andrew Ervin
Hausfrau: A Novel by Jill Alexander Essbaum
Aimée and Jaguar by Erica Fischer
Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn
The Grownup by Gillian Flynn
Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall by Anna Funder
The Coma by Alex Garland
Too Close to the Edge by Pascal Garnier
Swallowing Mercury by Wioletta Greg
Fatherland by Robert Harris
Red: A Natural History of the Redhead by Jacky Colliss Harvey
The Black Lake by Hella S. Haasse
Trans Voices: Becoming Who You Are by Declan Henry
Abdication: The Rise and Fall of Edward VIII by Mark Hichens
Little Tales of Misogyny by Patricia Highsmith
Not A Star by Nick Hornby
Fear of Flying by Erica Jong
The Master Of Go by Yasunari Kawabata
What Becomes by A.L. Kennedy
On the Road by Jack Kerouac
The Nothing by Hanif Kureishi
Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture by David Kushner
Treasure Island!!!by Sara Levine
It Can't Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis
Priestdaddy by Patricia Lockwood
Memoirs of a Porcupine by Alain Mabanckou
Behold the Dreamers by Imbolo Mbue
Moby Dick by Herman Melville
Things My Girlfriend And I Have Argued About by Mil Millington
Sula by Toni Morrison
Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh
Demi-Gods by Eliza Robertson
Lost at Sea: The Jon Ronson Mysteries by Jon Ronson
All Passion Spent by Vita Sackville-West
Why Mummy Drinks by Gill Sims
Swing Time by Zadie Smith
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein
Look Who's Back by Timur Vermes
The Colossus of New York: A City in 13 Parts by Colson Whitehead
Stoner by John Williams
Sexing the Cherry by Jeanette Winterson
Orlando by Virginia Woolf
The Book of Sins by Chen Xiwo
Chess by Stefan Zweig

2*

The Fall Of Troy by Peter Ackroyd
House of Holes by Nicholson Baker
The Encyclopedia of the Dead by Kiš Danilo
Fashioning Sapphism: The Origins of a Modern English Lesbian Culture by Laura Doan
I Love Dick by Chris Kraus
Paying For It by Scarlett O'Kelly
The Masque of the Red Death by Edgar Allan Poe
Number Ten by Sue Townsend
Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev

 

[Spring in Fialta]

Finally, all of the books I read in 2017. I wanted to read more books by female authors and more books by queer authors in 2017. I wanted at least half the books I read to be by female authors and I ended up with 70/133. I'm pretty happy with the way it worked out and I'm going to aim to do the same again this year.

The books are sorted by * rating and then alphabetical order by author. I was going to order them all but there's no way I could do that to my satisfaction.

5* = Magnificent
4* = Really good
3* = Good
2* = Flawed with some enjoyable parts
1* = Awful (a book this bad gets abandoned. I had no abandoned books this year)

5*

The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes
Moon Tiger by Penelope Lively
Written on the Body by Jeanette Winterson

4*

The Untouchable by John Banville
The Sellout by Paul Beatty
The White Boy Shuffle by Paul Beatty
Slumberland by Paul Beatty
Dark Matter by Blake Crouch
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The Gambler/Bobok/A Nasty Story by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Moonglow by Michael Chabon
Manhood for Amateurs: The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father, and Son by Michael Chabon
The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories by Don DeLillo
Touchy Subjects by Emma Donoghue
Bullfighting by Roddy Doyle
Your Fathers, Where Are They? And the Prophets, Do They Live Forever? by Dave Eggers
A Burnt-Out Case by Graham Greene
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari
Tigerman by Nick Harkaway
A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway
All My Friends are Superheroes by Andrew Kaufman
The Empathy Exams: Essays by Leslie Jamison
The Gin Closet by Leslie Jamison
The Boys from Brazil by Ira Levin
Picnic at Hanging Rock by Joan Lindsay
Heat Wave by Penelope Lively
The Cement Garden by Ian McEwan
Elmet by Fiona Mozley
A Wild Sheep Chase by Haruki Murakami
Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage by Haruki Murakami
Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill
Revenge by Yōko Ogawa
Wrecked by Charlotte Roche
So You've Been Publicly Shamed by Jon Ronson
The Men Who Stare at Goats by Jon Ronson
The Psychopath Test by Jon Ronson
Them: Adventures with Extremists by Jon Ronson
Thatcher Stole My Trousers by Alexei Sayle
And Quiet Flows the Don by Mikhail Sholokhov
The Train by Georges Simenon
There but for the by Ali Smith
Autumn by Ali Smith
The First Person and Other Stories by Ali Smith
The Accidental by Ali Smith
Public Library and Other Stories by Ali Smith
Girl Meets Boy by Ali Smith
How to Be Both by Ali Smith
NW by Zadie Smith
Men Explain Things to Me: and Other Essays by Rebecca Solnit
A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
The Pearl by John Steinbeck
The Secret History by Donna Tartt
The Bricks that Built the Houses by Kate Tempest
The Return of The Soldier by Rebecca West
Concertina by Susan Winemaker
The World And Other Places by Jeanette Winterson
The Gap of Time: The Winter’s Tale Retold by Jeanette Winterson
Lighthousekeeping by Jeanette Winterson
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson
The Passion by Jeanette Winterson
Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? by Jeanette Winterson
A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf
Khirbet Khizeh by S. Yizhar

3*

We Should All Be Feminists by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
The Storyteller's Tale by Omair Ahmad
Lady Susan by Jane Austen
Collected Stories of Isaac Babel
Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach
Nightwood by Djuna Barnes
Lust, Caution and Other Stories by Eileen Chang
In Search of a Beginning: My Life with Graham Greene by Yvonne Cloetta
All Families are Psychotic by Douglas Coupland
The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion
Astray by Emma Donoghue
Passions Between Women by Emma Donoghue
A Gentle Creature and Other Stories by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
a certain woman by Hala El Badry
Headscarves and Hymens by Mona Eltahawy
Burning Down George Orwell's House by Andrew Ervin
Hausfrau: A Novel by Jill Alexander Essbaum
Aimée and Jaguar by Erica Fischer
Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn
The Grownup by Gillian Flynn
Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall by Anna Funder
The Coma by Alex Garland
Too Close to the Edge by Pascal Garnier
Swallowing Mercury by Wioletta Greg
Fatherland by Robert Harris
Red: A Natural History of the Redhead by Jacky Colliss Harvey
The Black Lake by Hella S. Haasse
Trans Voices: Becoming Who You Are by Declan Henry
Abdication: The Rise and Fall of Edward VIII by Mark Hichens
Little Tales of Misogyny by Patricia Highsmith
Not A Star by Nick Hornby
Fear of Flying by Erica Jong
The Master Of Go by Yasunari Kawabata
What Becomes by A.L. Kennedy
On the Road by Jack Kerouac
The Nothing by Hanif Kureishi
Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture by David Kushner
Treasure Island!!!by Sara Levine
It Can't Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis
Priestdaddy by Patricia Lockwood
Memoirs of a Porcupine by Alain Mabanckou
Behold the Dreamers by Imbolo Mbue
Moby Dick by Herman Melville
Things My Girlfriend And I Have Argued About by Mil Millington
Sula by Toni Morrison
Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh
Demi-Gods by Eliza Robertson
Lost at Sea: The Jon Ronson Mysteries by Jon Ronson
All Passion Spent by Vita Sackville-West
Why Mummy Drinks by Gill Sims
Swing Time by Zadie Smith
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein
Look Who's Back by Timur Vermes
The Colossus of New York: A City in 13 Parts by Colson Whitehead
Stoner by John Williams
Sexing the Cherry by Jeanette Winterson
Orlando by Virginia Woolf
The Book of Sins by Chen Xiwo
Chess by Stefan Zweig

2*

The Fall Of Troy by Peter Ackroyd
House of Holes by Nicholson Baker
The Encyclopedia of the Dead by Kiš Danilo
Fashioning Sapphism: The Origins of a Modern English Lesbian Culture by Laura Doan
I Love Dick by Chris Kraus
Paying For It by Scarlett O'Kelly
The Masque of the Red Death by Edgar Allan Poe
Number Ten by Sue Townsend
Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev

Is Chess by Stefan Zweig an alternate title for The Royal Game? If so, that's one of my favorite books.

 

[GB]

It is. I think I picked it up after you recommended it actually. I love the way Dr B's character is developed; I think in those parts it is similar to The Gambler. Conversely the way Czentovic is described annoyed me. He never seemed real, especially in comparison to Dr B.

I'd like to try something else by Zweig this year.

 

[Spring in Fialta]

It is. I think I picked it up after you recommended it actually. I love the way Dr B's character is developed; I think in those parts it is similar to The Gambler. Conversely the way Czentovic is described annoyed me. He never seemed real, especially in comparison to Dr B.

I'd like to try something else by Zweig this year.

The Gambler is another great work. And I agree, I think both characters have that sort of manic energy that make them enthralling and ultimately, endearing. I can see the point about about Czentovic, who as the story goes on, seems to serve more as a foil despite him being the focus of the first 30 or so pages, but I think he fits in perfectly within the realm of the story and his psyche stays interesting, despite a takeover by Dr B for the rest of the book.

 

[GB]

It's more Czentovic as the dull peasant Slav and Dr B as the loyal brilliant Austrian that struck me as too on the nose. I think if it had been longer I'd have loved it.

Do you have anything else by Zweig you'd recommend?

 

[Spring in Fialta]

It's more Czentovic as the dull peasant Slav and Dr B as the loyal brilliant Austrian that struck me as too on the nose. I think if it had been longer I'd have loved it.

Do you have anything else by Zweig you'd recommend?

Unfortunately, not really. The only other thing I've read from him is this great short stort about a writer observing a thief in the middle of the street but I've never stumbled upon anything else in a book store and never ordered any of his other books. Even The Royal Game I just picked up out of my cousin's bookshelf and she let me keep her copy because I liked it so much.

 

[kihei]

In the Midst of Winter, by Isabel Allende

Circumstances bring an odd trio of people together in Brooklyn: Evelyn, a frightened young woman who is an illegal refugee from Guatemala; Lucia, a savvier and more confident woman who is an immigrant from Chile, and Richard, an English professor who has a tragic past. They meet when Richard and Lucia plow into Evelyn's car which she has borrowed without its owner knowing. This is a wonderful "ships-that-pass-in-the-night" story about how different people's lives can be from one another, something that isn't always taken into account by snap judgements and easy stereotypes. And then the plot kicks in. Allende loves plot complications, frequently to the detriment of her writing. Slowly but inexorably, the character study turns first into a thriller and then into a turgid romance that could hardly be more purple. A work that seemed smart and insightful in the beginning ends up being hard to take seriously.

 

[Spring in Fialta]

The Snapper by Roddy Doyle (1990) - It's the first time I've read Roddy Doyle and I enjoyed him immensely. Recounting the pregnancy of Sharon Rabbitte and how she deals with it with the support of her crass and fun-loving family. Reading the work, which is hilarious and endearing, made me realize how so many books I read recount terrible and sad things happening in them, and that there's just as much to say and enjoy about the good things in life, which this book nails perfectly. What I loved most about it is that Roddy Doyle never looks down on the characters he creates, which could be incredibly easy to do in the wrong hands. I mean, no major conflict ever happens, everything gets resolved rapidly and relatively happily and yet it never feels lazy, convenient or easy. Doyle seems to care about his characters as much as they care about one another and the sentiment radiates from the prose, and it's a rewarding experience. It's a breezy read with all the right intentions, with a great sense of humor to it as well. A really fun work.

 

[Ceremony]

In the shelf in my wardrobe where I keep most of my books (excepting the ones I haven't read yet which won't fit) there are five series which I read when I was young and which I presumably value highly enough to have kept. About two and a half years ago I returned to Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events and Phillip Pullman's His Dark Materials and subsequently understood so, so much about why I now think the way I do. It was interesting too to read these and attempt to compose thoughts on them the way I do here, given what I've done since I'd last read them. Of course as I read back through what I wrote about them then I note that my thoughts were dreadful, or at least incoherent when written down. I'll attribute that to the gap between them and when I'd last read anything or written about it.

Alongside those two series are the Harry Potter books, obviously, which I last read when I was seventeen and which J.K. Rowling's twitter account has made me never want to go near again. Well done #potterheads. There are also four Artemis Fowl books by Eoin Colfer, although I quickly lost interest after number four which came after every story thread had been tied up nicely in book three. Artemis Fowl is an orphaned ultra-rich genius, if you're wondering why they appealed to me so.

The final series is the one I've read after being inspired... no. Partly inspired by the trailer of the film adaptation of the first finally appearing towards the end of last year and because I'd actually been thinking about re-reading them for a while. The Mortal Engines quartet by Philip Reeve is a series of books published between 2003 and 2007 set several thousand years in the future. Mankind has destroyed most of what we'd recognise today as civilisation. North America is widely considered the Dead Continent (although bits of it aren't that dead), and the Eurasian landmass is split, oh, somewhere across the middle. On the western side is the land of Municipal Darwinism and the Traction Cities, as following London's example the cities which were left decided to put themselves on wheels and roam the continent, eating each other and whatever other resources they could find. On the eastern part of Eurasia is the Anti-Traction League who are rather self-explanatory.

There's pretty much no way for me to accurately review these as children's books without being hideously patronising, so I'll try to keep the "they're really good for children!" stuff to a minimum. The internet tells me that Reeve's initial intent was to write them as adult science fiction but his publishers thought they'd work better if they were aimed at younger readers. I'm not a big science fiction reader so I can't say for certain, but my instinct would be to say that it's too ridiculous for an adult to take seriously. Or at least to suspend their disbelief suitably for the world which is contained in the books.

Generally when you read something set in the future, or a dystopia, or something in which contemporary civilisation has been altered somehow, the lack of details about what happened arguably makes everything more viable. If you sit and think about the concept for more than five seconds you'll not read anything because, obviously, it's complete nonsense. But then you're uncertain when all this is happening and all you have between now and then is the Sixty Minute War and slow bombs and the old American Empire going a bit mad towards the end, and you don't need anything else. The absence of real structured world-building probably helps with the target audience too. The vagueness of the intervening thousands of years between now and then helps make everything more believable, but it also engages you more as a reader because you have to try and piece together what happened yourself through the references which survived.

One thing about reading a series like this in quick succession (each book was read in either one or two sittings, even if as a whole they took me three weeks) is being able to see developing confidence in the writer. In the first book, Mortal Engines, there's some strange things going on with the tense. It's straightforward past tense for the most part, but then there are passages about one character away (mostly) from the main action which are italicised and written in the present tense. This works too, since the character is part robot, it increases the feeling of inhumanity which surrounds him, and it helps the passages stand out. But then about halfway through the book the present tense stuff starts popping up in normal prose and it's really jarring. As a master in the field I recognise the distinct whiff of something which was re-written long after the first attempt, where it's much harder to have consistency in the narrative voice. It's a shame that the first book is sullied by this, but then when I was young I didn't notice so it can't be that egregious.

By the final book, A Darkling Plain, there's obviously much greater confidence in both the writing and the world which Reeve has created. You can almost see him smirking to himself as he names characters Lego and Lurpak and Ford Anglia, but then details like these are never over-powering. References to the past in-story are never dwelled on too long so as to become laboured or overly absurd. If they threaten to be, they're lampooned in a way suitable for a younger audience and again, never laboured. Of the four books, the series can largely be split in half in that the first two are a self-contained story in themselves, while the second two are set fifteen years in the future and introduce a bunch of new characters and locations as the scope of the story expands. Yet that confidence in the writing means that it doesn't feel opportunistic in the way I complained earlier about Artemis Fowl, and there are enough believable connections between details old and new to prevent any sense of the series feeling too fractured.

Even the idea of referencing a poem from 1867 in the title and epigraph of the final book shows to me the development of the complexity of the series, although I might be biased given I effectively read them as they were published and was older myself as I read each of them. There's even a T.S. Eliot reference earlier, although I'd be quite concerned if the Western Canon as it is now is remembered in ten thousand years purely through him. The final book being significantly longer than the others isn't down to padding or self-indulgence either. There are a few occasions where one of our heroes makes one too many miraculous escapes that will surely be culled if the films get that far, but reading it again now I was as enthralled and desperate to finish it as I was when I first read it. As much as I would temper any recommendation with an "it's for kids" label there's still a universality in presenting a gripping story and worthwhile characters to move it along and maintain the reader's interest. The characters and the world are more than able to do this for any generation.

And speaking of generations, it's probably a mark of my old age that I note a profound irony in the shift in the world from twelve years ago when the series finished. If the imagined world of millenia from now is alien to me, what would you have done if someone told you about 2017 in 2006? The ensuing madness of humanity which is hinted throughout the series suddenly doesn't seem so implausible, and that's even before I start paying attention to stuff about automation and environmental effects. I think this is the sort of thing which will be interesting to see if the film adaptations finish the series and remain relatively true to the source material. Quoting the Guardian's review of it is easier than looking up the quote directly, but: Review: A Darkling Plain by Philip Reeve

Like many of the great writers who can be read happily by both adults and children, Reeve uses the frivolity to hide his own seriousness. In this book, he finally reveals what lies behind the rampaging brutality that has turned city against city, human against human. A fascistic soldier, Wolf Kobold, explains the core of his beliefs: "the simple, beautiful act which should lie at the heart of our civilisation: a great city chasing and eating a lesser one. That is Municipal Darwinism. A perfect expression of the true nature of the world: that the fittest survive." The same soldier owns a statue, an icon of the deity that he worships - "an eight-armed image of the Thatcher, all-devouring goddess of unfettered Municipal Darwinism".

No denying then that this was written by someone British. But then that quote comes from probably about halfway through the final book, yet there's never really any escaping the amount of ignorance people have about the earth itself. It's an interesting dichotomy in terms of the technology which exists. The notion of mobile cities is obviously beyond anything mankind can comprehend in reality, yet in the same world static settlements seem to be on a par with pre-industrial revolution living standards. There are no long-range radios, yet the ancient technology of being able to turn dead soldiers into half-robotic Stalkers still exists. Heavier than air flight is mostly impossible, yet those same mobile cities can travel on water and ice as well as land. The narrative is mainly told from a tractionist's perspective so maybe there's some bias (and maybe it's deliberate, in that a focus on one side clouds the bigger picture) and things missing but if there is an underlying message of environmentalism, it's done by denigrating one side as much as lauding the other. "We're supposed to making the world green again, but all we're doing is turning it into mud," is one lamentation after fourteen years of war in the middle of the series. I hope the films are popular enough to last that long, purely because I'm curious to see how this element is handled.

Of course, the problem I will always have with film adaptations, particularly of children's books, is the same one I did when I went on a school trip to see the first Harry Potter film and every detail wasn't exactly as I had always pictured it. I fear this may be more egregious than usual in some cases here, mainly because going by the trailer released so far Hester seems to have two eyes. I do hope the film retains the spirit of all of them at least though, in that the books all follow the Unfortunate Events and His Dark Materials example of featuring equally strong, flawed and complex characters who are young and only a bit older, male and female, black, white and Asiatic. There's virtually nothing a modern audience could find fault with in terms of characterisation, and nothing you'd not want your own children to read.

If I were to attempt one criticism I'd say that some of the conflicts between characters are resolved too readily, although maybe I'm too used to McCarthy and the like where one guy broods about his place in the world for two hundred pages. Maybe the end of A Darkling Plain is too neat and concise. Although I suppose if I say explaining backstory in-depth isn't necessary because it makes the world more believable then I can't criticise the ending for doing the same thing. Closing the story at the moment of climax itself rather than sticking around to explain everything beyond cursory closing statements and a single vision of one person's future works in the same way world-building works throughout much of the books - it tells you just enough about the way things are to know what's going on, then lets you fill in the rest. For a story which is aimed at younger readers and contains so much imagination, leaving something for them to work on for themselves isn't to be sniffed at.

The only other thing I have to say is that I'm glad I waited so long before reading them again (I honestly don't know how long, though I'm thinking 7/8 years). As much as I spent nearly all of it vividly remembering the last quarter or so of the last book desperately trying to remember small details about it, I read at the same pace and with the same enthusiasm I would have when I first held the books, if not more. I don't know if it's because they're from my youth but I feel more moved reading this than I generally do with more mature novels, albeit in a different way. If I read McCarthy or Journey to the End of the Night I feel as if I'm reading indelible truths about humanity which everyone knows but no-one knows how to express. When I read this I just read for the sake of enjoyment, a moving story with a beautiful conclusion which seems to suggest I'm not as emotionally shut off as I thought I was. But then if I get into that I'd be rambling more than I usually do.

Whatever happens with the films I hope they make loads of money because I think Philip Reeve deserves it. But I think his story deserves it more.