Reading Project, 9

Early in April, the old library in the part of our retirement village that is about to be rebuilt, was to shut down. Readers were encouraged to go there and ‘score’ any books they might like to take away. Don’t bother to bring them back was the second part of the instructions, and don’t return them to the new library the third.

Out I went with my walker, found about seventeen books that looked interesting enough to take away with me, and a cardboard box, thinking to pack them in that for an eventual delivery to Life Line, a charity that runs a massive annual book sale.

These books are now sitting on the floor in front of my bookshelves, no room for them on the shelves. Most will be one-read-wonders, so will be moved on, so no use making room for them yet.

I started with the five detective fictions, one of them a compendium of three novels. Fast and easy to read, good for the weeks that I was prepping for the medical procedure everybody loves to hate, a nerve-wracking time when easy reads are the go.

As we are now well into May, even I can see that I’m getting behind with this project. And I’ve ordered a bunch of study books. Wonder how I’ll go with reporting on those.

Book 22 … The Flood by Ian Rankin, published 1986 by Polygon. Strictly speaking, The Flood is not a detective fiction. But as the first published novel of one of my favorite authors of detective fiction, Ian Rankin, I thought I might as well take it along.

Rankin’s own introduction informed me that his various skills began with this little book (I’m assuming that like many first novels it’s about 60 thousand words, it has that heft) so could be worth it to read. He himself tells us its a young man’s book ‘all about the perils and pitfalls of growing up’.

It was a patchy read. Sometimes you can learn too much about a book before reading it. Some parts I enjoyed. Others not so much. The first of the three parts to my mind the more interesting though of it is left hanging.

Book 23 … Standing in Another Man’s Grave by Ian Rankin, published 2012 by Orion. This book is advertised with ‘Rebus is Back’ as though Rebus has been away, missing. Rankin has written nineteen Rebus books as well as nine or ten that are unrelated to Rebus. This one is about a crusty old detective, resigned from the police force and working independently, as a private eye, I assume.

Co-incidentally, on TV (SBS on Demand) I’m following Harry Bosch in much the same scenario, in the Harry Bosch Legacy. What I enjoy about both these detectives is their personal lives. They tell the stories not just of their police work but also about their private lives, and their frail humanity.

Both also have been left behind by technology and isn’t that a relatable feature of modern life? Anybody over fifty will always be a migrant to the computer age and will, by the time they’re seventy, need a guide.

There’s enough detail in the average Rebus, and the story arc is usually familiar enough, that reading it was quite relaxing. There isn’t that need to hurtle along hurry hurry to find out the end, because the end is a foregone conclusion. Rebus will solve the mystery and the perpetrator will go to jail.

Book 24 … Odd Hours by Dean Koontz, published 2008 by HarperCollins. Once upon a time I studied Koontz’s written dialogue, to improve dialogue in my own writings, and enjoyed many of his novels. The cut and thrust of the dialogue, the spare but informative descriptions. The suspense.

Then he went into the Odd Thomas series, and barring maybe one of them, perhaps the first, these are not his best. In my opinion. I think I’ll be tossing this one into the recycling bin.

Book 25 … The Survivor by Sean Slater, published 2011 by Simon and Schuster. I’ve already passed this one on to my reading buddy. It was good. Added to which, Slater is the pen name for an actual police officer though I don’t really know if that makes a difference, most crime writers are very good researchers. But not having the book on hand does mean I’m limited to the Good Reading Magazine, if they even have it in their files.

They do. Their summary … “Columbine. Dunblane. Virginia Tech. Winnenden. But Saint Patrick’s High? In his first hour back from a six-month leave of absence, Detective Jacob Striker’s day quickly turns into a nightmare. He is barely on scene five minutes at his daughter’s high school when he encounters an Active Shooter situation.”

I was pleasantly surprised that there was another detective fiction author whose style I like that I’ve never yet read.

Books 26, 27 and 28 … Inspector Montalbano: The First Three Novels by Andrea Camilleri, translated into English by Stephen Sartarelli, published 2002 – 2004 by Picador.
The Italian publication dates were …1994, 1996, 1996 publishe by Sellerio editore … have I got a treat for you … the Sellerio publishing group is based in Palermo the capital city of Sicily, and they’ve adopted … ‘The program at the origin of the publishing house is a return to a culture that Sciascia defines as “pleasant,” that is, a culture in which so-called commitment is implicit and not explicit, therefore a culture of lightness, which does not renounce elegance, a culture of ideas, yes, but in the form of beautiful things.’ [My paraphrase.]

That’s brave in this day and age. I’ll be enjoying the publisher’s statement for a while … the link https://www-sellerio-it.translate.goog/it/casa-editrice/

And in addition, Inspector Montalbano, an Italian cop show set in Sicily, was a favorite TV series about twenty years ago, so how could I resist?

Starting to read The Shape of Water, the first of the three books—they don’t appear to be a trilogy—I realized I’ve read it before, or maybe started to read it before, because I did not recall the end.

The first thing to get used to in the book, compared to the TV show, is that it is not a version of Keystone Cops, the way that the TV version often resembled. A bunch of police constables and members of the Sicilian public perpetually running after Inspector Salvo Montalbano.

In the book all these people have their own personalities, and it’s good to get to know their differences. OK, yes, there does appear to be at least one Keystone Cop, and that is the officer most often left behind to man the radio, (I’ll find his name …ah, Cantarella) He does have all the hallmarks of a comic turn. Though I bet in Italian he’ll be funnier than he is in English.

The Terracotta Dog and The Snack Thief are the second and third novels. Both are also full of interesting geographic and historical detail and cultural ambience. These are extras, of course, for all non-Sicilian readers.

One thing I really enjoy is Inspector Montalbano’s relationship with his cook. She’s the mother of a pair of miscreants, one of whom Montelbano put in jail. The inspector is a total foodie and Aline leaves him with a stream of interesting dinners in his fridge.

Then there’s Livia, his girlfriend. The love of his life, she lives on the mainland. They enjoy their separate/together lives until they meet the snack thief in the third novel. Then they talk about getting married. But we only get Montalbano’s POV and he has doubts. There’s no resolution so far. I expect this conundrum to continue to be debated further on in the series.

Montalbano’s love-hate relationship with his second-in-command, Mimi Augello, is mercurial with a bit of ‘plain speaking’ involved. When Augello is well-meaning, Montalbano is savage and vice versa. Augello sounds ready to move into Montalbano’s chair, but Montalbano is nowhere near ready to move up.

Fazio and Tortorella are his sergeants, “or whatever the hell they were called nowadays,” he says. Then there are all the rest, constable I assume, hard to tell apart, except maybe for Catarella who usually mans the phone and mangles any message that needs to passed on and having to be re-interpreted when Catarella grasps the wrong end of the stick.

I can see from my confusion that I’ll be re-reading the series to get the chain of command, so I can read a run of Italian names and know who all they all represent.

The comedy often is in unexpected contrasts. Montalbano spend the morning scrubbing his house and then himself. He polishes his shoes, dons a formal suit with “his most serious” tie, and then sits waiting for a visitor, getting more and more nervous. He knocks back a glass and a half of whisky just before his visitor arrives, and who tells him, “I’m almost blind, I see very poorly.”

The comedy in The Terracotta Dog dances around a tragic plot. We get a glimpse of what life must’ve been like during World War Two in Sicily when the German Navy used its coastline and harbours to repair and resupply its ships.

Sometimes an old cultural practice is discussed. Could the fact that the corpse was found with a stone in its mouth mean something other than is commonly understood? Huh, I thought. I have no idea. Another reason I enjoy this series so much, this dialogue you need to have with yourself to ‘detect’ the full range of meaning. I recommend these.

The books I have here are the first three of a long career. I’m keen to read more now, see if they become formulaic which is always a danger. I hope they don’t, I hope Camilleri can keep his plots fresh. I’ll be hanging on to this one for a while. Pity that it is a tome. It’ll need quite a wide space on the shelves.

Reading, 5

Books in the order that I read them …

William Gibson is now a favorite SF author and I’ve enjoyed everything I’ve read by him recently. But reading his first novel, Neuromancer, soon after it was first published in 1984, I recall thinking then that his subject matter was hard to grasp. Whether due to the way he talked about it, or just the mere unfamiliarity … I think a combination.

At the time of that reading, I lived ‘on the road’, traveling Australia. Down-times we spent reading but in general, life was simplified to the extent it was often hard to remember what was going on in the rest of the world. Living out of a modified Toyota Landcruiser, I found it hard to figure out Gibson’s meanings. Often I didn’t know what he was talking about.

Back when Gibson wrote Neuromancer, much of the tech was new and its words hadn’t yet entered commonality. The computer and internet age had only barely got going and Gibson was describing how that world was developing. Reading the Neuromancer trilogy now, in 2026, I am right there with the characters.

Book 11. Mona Lisa Overdrive by Willian Gibson, first published in 1988 by Gollancz.

Mona is a girl “with a murky past and uncertain future” sold to a plastic surgeon to be surgically altered to closely resemble a famous star.

I picked this up secondhand, because it was a William Gibson and I hadn’t read it yet, not realizing it is the third of his early books set in the Sprawl-universe. While enjoying Gibson’s descriptions as usual, and easily recognizing his trope of high-tech set in the slums of the future, I got hopelessly lost in the first half of the novel, reading about four very different POVs, characters that seemed to have nothing to do with each other. I was continually anticipating where and how they’d meet or intersect.

Discussing the matter with my SF reading buddy, I learned I was reading part three of Gibson’s first trilogy. That some of the characters had appeared in Neuromancer, and that all three novels—Neuromancer, Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive—as well as some of the stories in the Burning Chrome collection are set partly in the Sprawl, and partly in a future Japan.

The Sprawl, the fictional equivalent of the “Boston-Atlanta Metropolitan Axis, an urban environment extending along most of the East Coast of the United States” from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprawl_trilogy; the Japanese scenes seem to take place primarily in Chiba …

Let me tell you, in 1984 I did not yet know what a coffin hotel was, and since the internet had only barely got started in those years, there were no quick looking-up opportunities. Wikipedia, for example, started in March 2001.

Gibson often mentions the matrix and in fact he invented that concept, as well as cyber space and virtual reality. The movie that introduced the public domain to the matrix hails from 1999, fifteen years after Neuromancer hit the bookshops. All three concepts part of our ordinary understanding these days.

From the backcover of Neuromancer: “The Matrix: a world within a world, a graphic representation of the databanks of every computer in the human system; a consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate users in the Sprawl alone.”

Nowadays even people not reading SF are aware we live in that reality.

Then, since we happened to have the whole rest of the series on hand, I re-read …

Book 12. Neuromancer by William Gibson, first published in Great Britain in 1984 by Victor Gollancz Ltd.

Also from the back cover, continuing from above … “And by Case, computer cowboy, until his nervous system is grievously maimed by a client he double-crossed. Japanese experts in nerve-splicing and micro-bionics have left him broke and close to dead. But at last Case has found a cure. He’s going back into the system. Not for the bliss of cyber-space but to steal again, this time from the big boys, the almighty mega-corps. In return, should he survive, he will stay cured.”

Book 13. Count Zero by William Gibson, first published in Great Britain in 1986 by Victor Gollancz Ltd.

Part of the back cover reads … “In the matrix of cyberspace — zaibatsus fought it out for world domination and the computer jocks risked their minds scuffling for fat crumbs — the lives of three human beings were inextricably scrambled.”

The future has totally caught up with these stories, the so-called futuristic slang sounds normal.

There are one or two concepts that even read like anachronisms. Tapes and cassettes. Polycarbon variants. Slanting gro-lights that dangled from twin lengths of curly cord.

Book 14. Burning Chrome by William Gibson and various other authors, first published in Great Britain in 1986 by Victor Gollancz Ltd.

There’s an excellent prologue by Bruce Sterling, also a well-known SF author.

The four books above are said to be a trilogy + a collection of short stories, all set in the same universe centered in the so-called Sprawl. Not a trilogy in the way of a sequence of one story too large to tell in one novel but more a threesome of books all set in the same fictional universe, and sharing some characters, at least in the case of Neuromancer and Mona Lisa Overdrive.

Gibson is the king of adjectives, he parses out meaning and description in every phrase, with every verb, every noun. And metaphors? An all-round joy to read. How can you not enjoy reading the following … ?

“Rubin inserts a skinny probe in the roller-bearing belly of a sluggish push-me-pull-you and peers at the circuitry through magnifying glasses with miniature headlights mounted at the temples.” From The Wintermarket, p 149 in Burning Chrome.

Reading, 3

The third post of this series already though I haven’t settled into a routine yet. Today had the better idea of what to do about the illustration. Instead of letting just one book have all the glory, why not give them all a chance to attract readers? Will give that a go shortly.

The longer without a routine the better, I used to think before I was pole-axed by ME/CFS. Come Easter, I’ll have lived with this malady for 29 years. Somewhere along the line I learned that making decisions is a stressor that saps my strength.

The idea out there—in the public domain—is that the more non-important decisions we encapsulate in routines the more energy we’ll have to make important decisions. It’s not wrong … routines enable me. Interesting article on decision-making … https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decision-making

Then I thought what about at the end of the year? Won’t I want to know how many books I actually read? That is the project after all. I saw myself counting through the posts. Got to be an easier way. Just number them already. So … started that today.

Book 5. The Light Pirate by Lily Brooks-Dalton, 2022. Published by Grand Central Publishing of New York.

This is the only book out of the five that I’ll recommend. I might’ve mentioned before on this blog that the climate change apocalypse, and its associated nightmare horsemen are my Sword of Damocles, and that the thread the sword is hanging by is wearing mighty thin and frayed.

The Light Pirate is set in the near-future and describes how the Florida coast is being engulfed the sea. It’s a blow-by-blow account of the way one family dies and adapts and is taken and finally evolves for a new existence. Ninety percent stark dark reality and ten percent luminous hope.

This is a book I would like to own. Read the good bits every now and then. This story speaks for everywhere there is low ground by the sea.

Book 6. Downward to the Earth by Robert Silverberg, 1969. First serialized in Galaxy Magazine it was published in 2015 by Gollancz in their SF Masterworks.

Although I’ve been reading science fiction since I was about 13, and Robert Silverberg has written hundreds of stories, I haven’t read all that many. Scanning through the titles in the front, I see only one that I own. Most don’t ring a bell. This little classic is said to … “blend mysticism, worldbuilding and literary references in an inventive mix …” from the backcover.

It’s probably about 60 thousand words, a common size in the 1970s, with a single storyline, the journey of the main character, Gundersen, returning to the planet after a ten year absence, out of guilt and needing to do penance for his mistreatment of the native species.

When I read old science fiction I’m forever fielding echoes. In this book I was reminded of some of Oscar Scott Card’s work. Comparing the dates of Silverberg’s and Card’s work, I think probably Card got his idea of the melding of the two species from Silverberg. Although, they could both have got the idea from Earth’s own panoply of creatures. Most insects, for example, have vastly different life-stages.

Book 7. Iron in the Soul by Jean-Paul Satre, 1949. This edition translated by Gerald Hopkins and published by Penguin Classics, 2002.

Despite that there was plenty of Jean-Paul Satre around when I was a young student, I was never tempted to read him then. Now I thought, browsing along the shelves at Carindale Library, why would Penguin choose to republish him as one of their classics if there wasn’t something to him?

I read a few pages in the middle—that’s the way I test books for readability—and thought it might be interesting. A whole other viewpoint about the Second World War, this one from the POV of the rank and file of the French Army.
Thousands were taken to Germany and, I read just now, more than ten thousand French soldiers fought alongside the Germans. I wonder if they were given a choice, fight for us or we shove you in a work camp? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/France_during_World_War_II

Book 8. Wolf Girl: Into the Wild by Anh Do, 2019 with illustrations by Jeremy Ley, 2019. Published by Allen & Unwin.

Seriously, was a bit of light relief, I zipped through this in about an hour. A story aimed at 8-10 year olds that my grandson lent me. I was interested to read how Anh Do, serious artist, translates into Anh Do, children’s author. His style reminds me of Enid Blyton’s.

There are about a dozen installments. A money-spinner, if you ask me. And yet, Enid Blyton’s vast output was great for struggling readers, giving them lots and lots of practice of the plain vocabulary that they needed to become good readers. So perhaps this is the place for Anh Do’s output in Australia.

Book 9. The Woods by Harlan Coben, 2007. Published by Orion Books.

Returning a bunch of books to the in-house library in the community center, I picked up The Woods because Coben wrote it and I hadn’t read it yet. Pure indulgence. A fast forgettable read. Suspense? Of course. All the t’s crossed and the dots dotted? Yes. “The modern master of hook and twist,” says Dan Brown on the front cover. (Wonder what he got or did to get his name on someone else’s front cover?)