Thursday, January 13
Tuesday, January 4
Books I read in 2010 -- part 2
On Literature, Umberto Eco
Pretty much what you'd expect. The James Joyce essay was good, had to skip the one about Sylvie because I am yet to read it once, let alone be in a position to "re-read it before you continue with this essay" as Eco recommends.
The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson
Finished this on a plane back from Singapore.
Very good, which is sad because with a bit more work it could have been a Great Book.
However, more edits were not on the cards for obvious reasons, so it's stuck with a grand finale preceded by a first half more info-dump heavy than anything I've seen since Hitler's Peace.
It actually made me think it would be a good, or at least unusual, alternative way to present a mystery -- print the second half as a novel, but replace the first half with a dossier of character profiles and evidence sources for the readers to sift through themselves.
This is almost what Larsson did, but the presentation would be more fun.
Seven Up by Janet Evanovich *
Absolute rubbish. I don't know why I bothered going all the way to the end, although there was one good joke about Art Garfunkel. At least it was free.
Trullion: Alastor 2262 by Jack Vance
I tore through this in just a couple of days. It's classic Vance, with somewhat better characterisation than he often manages. Luckily I didn't bother reading the blurb before buying it from the second hand shop, because although everything it says is technically true, it bears little resemblance to the actual story.
It's a wry but not comic mystery story, about a guy who comes back to his idyllic home planet to find his father dead, his older brother missing and part of the family land sold off by his twin brother, who has joined a weird cult dedicated to achieving things (the society of Trullion reckons idleness is the best path as far as possible).
To try and reclaim the land he needs lot, and ends up playing professional 'hussade', a combat game played on a grid of paths suspended over a water tank into which one shoves the opposing team -- the aim of the game (and this is the bit that really proves it was written in the 70s) is to reach the platform where the opposing team's lovely female mascot stands and pull a ring that makes all her clothes fall off. This would be an excellent variant game of Blood Bowl.
Also, there are space pirates.
A Case of Two Cities by Qiu Xiaolong *
A worthy but dull detective novel set in 1990s Shanghai. The interesting thing about it was how I was reading for a while thinking the translator wasn't very good because many turns of phrase really need the reader to know Chinese to follow them clearly. But when I checked the imprint page I realised there wasn't one -- Qiu is a non-native author in English.
I'm not knocking this as a concept, of course. Nabokov and Conrad are the exemplars here. But Qiu needs more help from his editors. The book is full of malapropisms. On occasion there are bits of language that have the sound of a translated Chinese aphorism or catchphrase, but aren't -- I can't decide if this is Qiu doing it on purpose, or if the editor assumes it's a calque and leaves it alone.
Either way, the book is poorly written, didactic and - worst of all - achingly dull in its plot and characterisation.
Flashman by George MacDonald Fraser
Not bad. Basically what the Bond novels would be like if they'd been written by a decent author.
The Man Who Saved Britain by Simon Winder *
Observer review here
Life Class by Pat Barker *
The Book of Three by Lloyd Alexander *
Special Assignment by Boris Akunin *
The Poe Shadow by Matthew Pearl *
.... and a whole bunch of others. I forget.
On Literature, Umberto Eco
Pretty much what you'd expect. The James Joyce essay was good, had to skip the one about Sylvie because I am yet to read it once, let alone be in a position to "re-read it before you continue with this essay" as Eco recommends.
The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson
Finished this on a plane back from Singapore.
Very good, which is sad because with a bit more work it could have been a Great Book.
However, more edits were not on the cards for obvious reasons, so it's stuck with a grand finale preceded by a first half more info-dump heavy than anything I've seen since Hitler's Peace.
It actually made me think it would be a good, or at least unusual, alternative way to present a mystery -- print the second half as a novel, but replace the first half with a dossier of character profiles and evidence sources for the readers to sift through themselves.
This is almost what Larsson did, but the presentation would be more fun.
Seven Up by Janet Evanovich *
Absolute rubbish. I don't know why I bothered going all the way to the end, although there was one good joke about Art Garfunkel. At least it was free.
Trullion: Alastor 2262 by Jack Vance
I tore through this in just a couple of days. It's classic Vance, with somewhat better characterisation than he often manages. Luckily I didn't bother reading the blurb before buying it from the second hand shop, because although everything it says is technically true, it bears little resemblance to the actual story.
It's a wry but not comic mystery story, about a guy who comes back to his idyllic home planet to find his father dead, his older brother missing and part of the family land sold off by his twin brother, who has joined a weird cult dedicated to achieving things (the society of Trullion reckons idleness is the best path as far as possible).
To try and reclaim the land he needs lot, and ends up playing professional 'hussade', a combat game played on a grid of paths suspended over a water tank into which one shoves the opposing team -- the aim of the game (and this is the bit that really proves it was written in the 70s) is to reach the platform where the opposing team's lovely female mascot stands and pull a ring that makes all her clothes fall off. This would be an excellent variant game of Blood Bowl.
Also, there are space pirates.
A Case of Two Cities by Qiu Xiaolong *
A worthy but dull detective novel set in 1990s Shanghai. The interesting thing about it was how I was reading for a while thinking the translator wasn't very good because many turns of phrase really need the reader to know Chinese to follow them clearly. But when I checked the imprint page I realised there wasn't one -- Qiu is a non-native author in English.
I'm not knocking this as a concept, of course. Nabokov and Conrad are the exemplars here. But Qiu needs more help from his editors. The book is full of malapropisms. On occasion there are bits of language that have the sound of a translated Chinese aphorism or catchphrase, but aren't -- I can't decide if this is Qiu doing it on purpose, or if the editor assumes it's a calque and leaves it alone.
Either way, the book is poorly written, didactic and - worst of all - achingly dull in its plot and characterisation.
Flashman by George MacDonald Fraser
Not bad. Basically what the Bond novels would be like if they'd been written by a decent author.
The Man Who Saved Britain by Simon Winder *
Observer review here
Life Class by Pat Barker *
The Book of Three by Lloyd Alexander *
Special Assignment by Boris Akunin *
The Poe Shadow by Matthew Pearl *
.... and a whole bunch of others. I forget.
Books I read in 2010 -- part 1
Frankly I've forgotten a lot of them, but here are a few I noted at the time - with brief reviews if I did one. Asterisks indicate freebies I got from the office, if you're wondering why on earth I acquired them.
Elmore Leonard, The Big Bounce - "it's okay".
The Bronte Project by Sarah Vandever
This was something my wife picked up in a liquidation sale some time last year, and from the jacket and blurb is ostensibly chick-lit. It's pretty good, although suffers from the staginess of a lot of chick lit, and suffers further from the fact that it probably isn't really chick lit, so the target audience might not like it that much. Hard to say which genre market you would pitch it at, though, so from a marketing standpoint it makes a reasonable amount of sense.
The characters were a bit arch for me, but I liked it enough to finish. The plot, about a Bronte scholar left behind in New York by a long-term boyfriend, is a modern American satire type thing, sort of Tom Wolfe lite. She ends up travelling to Italy to sleep in a bed that gives you prophetic dreams. Very odd, in that it's hard to know what kind of book it's supposed to be, but some entertaining bits here and there.
White Noise by Don de Lillo
I'd put it aside halfway through and the break has done me good. I'm now through the "Toxic Airborne Event" section and into the bit about the the drug that suppresses fear of death.
Some may argue this is even more heavy-handed than The Bronte Project, but Don de Lillo can get away with that kind of thing. Just as you're about to consciously register the artifice, he distracts you with a Lebanese wedding party on the back of a tank, or similar. Actually, White Noise isn't as good as his later work like Underworldor even MAO II, but it's still very good.
Unseen Academicals by Terry Pratchett
A more interesting scenario that some of the recent Discworld books such as Monstrous Regiment, but overall rather blah. Stylistically, this needed a few more go-rounds in editing. There are a lot of places where characters repeat themselves -- in one instance, it really seems as if the writer did two versions of an exchange and then forgot to delete one of them.
The characters are OK but the whole book is more heavy-handed and didactic than usual. Too much telling, not enough showing. Granted, Pratchett has never been exactly Hemingway when it comes to character through action, but still.
Readable though not much fun.
State of Change by Patrick Hudson
(Downloadably free at: http://stateofchangebypatrickhudson.blogspot.com/)
An SF celeb memoir in the vein of Bret Easton Ellis if he did science fiction. Actually, Ellis would go a bit heavier on the violence, probably. Not going into gory detail was, I think, the right decision in State of change, since what makes the protagonist compelling is that he's so callous - he doesn't dwell on the occasional (and they are occasional) bursts of random violence, because he just doesn't care.
This side of the character, Arlo Makepeace Dylan (I wrote that name from memory, a good sign) works well and works several good reverses and emotional moments.
The pacing works well, particularly because what the Big Event is (the transfer of the human mind into digital form) gets posted up early on, but until the end you don't know how or, more importantly, why it happens. What seems to be a throwaway joke character turns out to be more important, too.
It's not perfect, though. Patrick described parts of the novel as 'youthful', and I can see what he means. There are a fair few bits that get overexplained, a common trait of the worldbuilder. Dylan is bored by the news going on about the breakup of the US, yet we still get to hear details -- it would have been better to scrap this. Dylan finds it boring, the US is an irrelevance (this trope in itself is a bit overdone nowadays, even), and skipping over the fate of the US in the text would prove it.
In the same way, something "all seems so quaint now" -- we then spend a paragraph or two on the wonders of modern life. We don't need this. If the alternative seems amazing, then the original can't really be that quaint, yet.
Of course it later turns out that Dylan is bluffing a bit here, but it's something of a false note.
Other good bits:
- the satire and the straight-out gags are funny
- the technology and the questions about it are handled well
- the ending is pleasantly ambiguous, although not in the sense that you don't know what happened
- the fashion notes are perfect
If anything, I think it needed to be longer. We need more time to see Dylan's natural milieu before he starts dismantling it. But as it is, it's certainly worth a read.
Frankly I've forgotten a lot of them, but here are a few I noted at the time - with brief reviews if I did one. Asterisks indicate freebies I got from the office, if you're wondering why on earth I acquired them.
Elmore Leonard, The Big Bounce - "it's okay".
The Bronte Project by Sarah Vandever
This was something my wife picked up in a liquidation sale some time last year, and from the jacket and blurb is ostensibly chick-lit. It's pretty good, although suffers from the staginess of a lot of chick lit, and suffers further from the fact that it probably isn't really chick lit, so the target audience might not like it that much. Hard to say which genre market you would pitch it at, though, so from a marketing standpoint it makes a reasonable amount of sense.
The characters were a bit arch for me, but I liked it enough to finish. The plot, about a Bronte scholar left behind in New York by a long-term boyfriend, is a modern American satire type thing, sort of Tom Wolfe lite. She ends up travelling to Italy to sleep in a bed that gives you prophetic dreams. Very odd, in that it's hard to know what kind of book it's supposed to be, but some entertaining bits here and there.
White Noise by Don de Lillo
I'd put it aside halfway through and the break has done me good. I'm now through the "Toxic Airborne Event" section and into the bit about the the drug that suppresses fear of death.
Some may argue this is even more heavy-handed than The Bronte Project, but Don de Lillo can get away with that kind of thing. Just as you're about to consciously register the artifice, he distracts you with a Lebanese wedding party on the back of a tank, or similar. Actually, White Noise isn't as good as his later work like Underworldor even MAO II, but it's still very good.
Unseen Academicals by Terry Pratchett
A more interesting scenario that some of the recent Discworld books such as Monstrous Regiment, but overall rather blah. Stylistically, this needed a few more go-rounds in editing. There are a lot of places where characters repeat themselves -- in one instance, it really seems as if the writer did two versions of an exchange and then forgot to delete one of them.
The characters are OK but the whole book is more heavy-handed and didactic than usual. Too much telling, not enough showing. Granted, Pratchett has never been exactly Hemingway when it comes to character through action, but still.
Readable though not much fun.
State of Change by Patrick Hudson
(Downloadably free at: http://stateofchangebypatrickhudson.blogspot.com/)
An SF celeb memoir in the vein of Bret Easton Ellis if he did science fiction. Actually, Ellis would go a bit heavier on the violence, probably. Not going into gory detail was, I think, the right decision in State of change, since what makes the protagonist compelling is that he's so callous - he doesn't dwell on the occasional (and they are occasional) bursts of random violence, because he just doesn't care.
This side of the character, Arlo Makepeace Dylan (I wrote that name from memory, a good sign) works well and works several good reverses and emotional moments.
The pacing works well, particularly because what the Big Event is (the transfer of the human mind into digital form) gets posted up early on, but until the end you don't know how or, more importantly, why it happens. What seems to be a throwaway joke character turns out to be more important, too.
It's not perfect, though. Patrick described parts of the novel as 'youthful', and I can see what he means. There are a fair few bits that get overexplained, a common trait of the worldbuilder. Dylan is bored by the news going on about the breakup of the US, yet we still get to hear details -- it would have been better to scrap this. Dylan finds it boring, the US is an irrelevance (this trope in itself is a bit overdone nowadays, even), and skipping over the fate of the US in the text would prove it.
In the same way, something "all seems so quaint now" -- we then spend a paragraph or two on the wonders of modern life. We don't need this. If the alternative seems amazing, then the original can't really be that quaint, yet.
Of course it later turns out that Dylan is bluffing a bit here, but it's something of a false note.
Other good bits:
- the satire and the straight-out gags are funny
- the technology and the questions about it are handled well
- the ending is pleasantly ambiguous, although not in the sense that you don't know what happened
- the fashion notes are perfect
If anything, I think it needed to be longer. We need more time to see Dylan's natural milieu before he starts dismantling it. But as it is, it's certainly worth a read.
Wednesday, December 29
The wife and I went to England for two weeks on the 7th of December (or thereabouts).
A few things happened.
1) We went to White Hart Lane to watch Tottenham Hotspur play Liverpool.
Tottenham won 2-1, and the teams were kind enough to score all three goals at the end we were in, which was nice.
Strangely enough, this was my first ever visit to the Lane. When I was younger, my family could have afforded either tickets or the train fare to London, but not both. And then when I was studying in London, a phase of relative lack of interest coincided with soaring ticket prices, and it wasn't until I moved to Beijing that I got back into following Spurs. I first saw them play in the flesh at the friendly against South China AA in Hong Kong, and a chap we met who'd travelled from London to see it was kind enough to offer CK and me the use of a couple of season tickets in which he has a part share.
2) I was best man at a wedding. The groom is second from left here:
The suit hirer furnished me with an incredibly small waistcoat, which meant I had to keep my jacket on all the time, but that was pretty much the only thing that went wrong. My speech went fairly well, although the reception venue - an Elizabethan manor in Oxfordshire - was a little intimidating. One section of the guests stood upstairs in a minstrels' gallery for the speeches, giving the whole performance something of the air of playing the Apollo. Surprisingly, my speech was the most serious of the lot, although me and the bride's brother both managed to mention that time the groom wore a Spider-man costume designed for an 8-year-old. Shockingly, he's done it twice.
Other than that, we were up and down to London a few times - mostly to catch up with friends, but on one occasion for work. I had agreed to supervise the first day of a recording session. I've done some voice work myself, but it was very impressive to see top pros at work. What separates them from part-timers like me is the ability not only to turn the voices on and off but to keep them going, and to sing, gasp, sound like they're being tickled and so on, all in character.
A few things happened.
1) We went to White Hart Lane to watch Tottenham Hotspur play Liverpool.
Tottenham won 2-1, and the teams were kind enough to score all three goals at the end we were in, which was nice.
Strangely enough, this was my first ever visit to the Lane. When I was younger, my family could have afforded either tickets or the train fare to London, but not both. And then when I was studying in London, a phase of relative lack of interest coincided with soaring ticket prices, and it wasn't until I moved to Beijing that I got back into following Spurs. I first saw them play in the flesh at the friendly against South China AA in Hong Kong, and a chap we met who'd travelled from London to see it was kind enough to offer CK and me the use of a couple of season tickets in which he has a part share.
2) I was best man at a wedding. The groom is second from left here:
The suit hirer furnished me with an incredibly small waistcoat, which meant I had to keep my jacket on all the time, but that was pretty much the only thing that went wrong. My speech went fairly well, although the reception venue - an Elizabethan manor in Oxfordshire - was a little intimidating. One section of the guests stood upstairs in a minstrels' gallery for the speeches, giving the whole performance something of the air of playing the Apollo. Surprisingly, my speech was the most serious of the lot, although me and the bride's brother both managed to mention that time the groom wore a Spider-man costume designed for an 8-year-old. Shockingly, he's done it twice.
Other than that, we were up and down to London a few times - mostly to catch up with friends, but on one occasion for work. I had agreed to supervise the first day of a recording session. I've done some voice work myself, but it was very impressive to see top pros at work. What separates them from part-timers like me is the ability not only to turn the voices on and off but to keep them going, and to sing, gasp, sound like they're being tickled and so on, all in character.
Monday, November 15
A little over two weeks ago I was in Beijing on my first ever business trip. I've decided that business trips are a bit rubbish. It's like going on holiday except you have to do stuff you don't want to all the time.
Mind you, at least this one was to Beijing, where I could catch up with people I know. On Friday I'm flying from Shenzhen to Nanchang to attend some kind of trade fair. I'm not sure I'd even heard of the place before.
I caught up with former flatmate Paul in Beijing. He was doing his weekly DJ slot at Q Bar, which apparently pays reasonably handsomely, and I enjoyed hanging out with him and the staff. He even put on my punctuation-themed dance track "Apostrophe" at one point, and amazingly the bar didn't clear out.
Our friend and classmate Kevin was also there, in good form but now dangerously single-minded on the pursuit of women. This must be what it's like socialising with a great white shark. No conversation, just the relentless pursuit of prey. At one point, a girl from Leeds University was talking to me and, frustrated by my lack of 'action' on account of being, you know, married, Kevin physically shoved me off my barstool while she wasn't looking and took my place.
Due to working on Sunday morning I was unable to attend the reportedly riotous Halloween party in Dashanzi, but I went to a pre-party thing at my friend AJ's flat, where she plied me and the other guests with Special Party Treats, which may not have been a great idea really, but hey.
The photoshoot itself was not too bad. Friday was a long day, and followed by dinner with people from the hosting company. My Mandarin seems to be OK but I don't really have the vocab for semi-formal dinner conversations, and I'm not sure if I ever did. Something to work on.
Sunday afternoon was also somewhat wearing. I'd checked out of the hotel with my bags and planned to just mooch around a bit, go up to the station at Dongzhimen and take the train to the airport. However, the hosts were insistent I take the company car, which meant spending hours with one of their staff members hoofing around with my luggage and stopping for a coffee. Not actively unpleasant, but also not what I'd planned. It also meant, I realised at the airport, that I still had a Special Party Treat in my wallet, which I had to dispose of before going through customs - how rock'n'roll.
Mind you, at least this one was to Beijing, where I could catch up with people I know. On Friday I'm flying from Shenzhen to Nanchang to attend some kind of trade fair. I'm not sure I'd even heard of the place before.
I caught up with former flatmate Paul in Beijing. He was doing his weekly DJ slot at Q Bar, which apparently pays reasonably handsomely, and I enjoyed hanging out with him and the staff. He even put on my punctuation-themed dance track "Apostrophe" at one point, and amazingly the bar didn't clear out.
Our friend and classmate Kevin was also there, in good form but now dangerously single-minded on the pursuit of women. This must be what it's like socialising with a great white shark. No conversation, just the relentless pursuit of prey. At one point, a girl from Leeds University was talking to me and, frustrated by my lack of 'action' on account of being, you know, married, Kevin physically shoved me off my barstool while she wasn't looking and took my place.
Due to working on Sunday morning I was unable to attend the reportedly riotous Halloween party in Dashanzi, but I went to a pre-party thing at my friend AJ's flat, where she plied me and the other guests with Special Party Treats, which may not have been a great idea really, but hey.
The photoshoot itself was not too bad. Friday was a long day, and followed by dinner with people from the hosting company. My Mandarin seems to be OK but I don't really have the vocab for semi-formal dinner conversations, and I'm not sure if I ever did. Something to work on.
Sunday afternoon was also somewhat wearing. I'd checked out of the hotel with my bags and planned to just mooch around a bit, go up to the station at Dongzhimen and take the train to the airport. However, the hosts were insistent I take the company car, which meant spending hours with one of their staff members hoofing around with my luggage and stopping for a coffee. Not actively unpleasant, but also not what I'd planned. It also meant, I realised at the airport, that I still had a Special Party Treat in my wallet, which I had to dispose of before going through customs - how rock'n'roll.
Monday, October 11
That lad's got a foot like a traction engine
We won the Anfield Cup on the 1st of October, a mini-football tournament for fans of various English teams - this year it was us (Spurs), Liverpool, Chelsea and West Ham.
Crucially for me, I finally scored a goal for the team. Very satisfying and kind of a relief. I'd gone through a whole season without scoring, although I suppose you could say half a season, since half the time I'm a fullback, and they're not expected to score too much. But the 50% of the time on the wing had created, in my own mind at least, a weight of expectation.
It was nice to get a first goal that meant something too, rather than just in a friendly or something. I started the final match at right midfield, against the Chelsea team. We needed a win to be sure of the trophy. Three or four minutes in, I lost my marker and found myself in the 6-yard box in time for a marvellous cross from our newly acquired Croatian left-winger Ivan, and all that was required was to shank it into the net from a few metres out.
Above: Goooooooooooooaaaaaaaaaaaaal!
We won the Anfield Cup on the 1st of October, a mini-football tournament for fans of various English teams - this year it was us (Spurs), Liverpool, Chelsea and West Ham.
Crucially for me, I finally scored a goal for the team. Very satisfying and kind of a relief. I'd gone through a whole season without scoring, although I suppose you could say half a season, since half the time I'm a fullback, and they're not expected to score too much. But the 50% of the time on the wing had created, in my own mind at least, a weight of expectation.
It was nice to get a first goal that meant something too, rather than just in a friendly or something. I started the final match at right midfield, against the Chelsea team. We needed a win to be sure of the trophy. Three or four minutes in, I lost my marker and found myself in the 6-yard box in time for a marvellous cross from our newly acquired Croatian left-winger Ivan, and all that was required was to shank it into the net from a few metres out.
Above: Goooooooooooooaaaaaaaaaaaaal!
Thursday, October 7
Our friends in the north
I have a work trip to Beijing over the weekend of the 16th/17th, flying up on the Friday.
Apparently I will be at the Shenzhou Hotel. I can only assume this is a hotel assembled out of leftover parts from China's space programme, which will be excellent.
Sadly I will be working all weekend - it's for a photoshoot, but there's nothing glamorous about it. Even VOGUE shoots seem pretty unglamorous, from what I gather via America's Next Top Model, and this is for a college Chinese textbook.
My one slim hope is that our mainland partners mess up the scheduling so I don't have to do anything. There's not a high chance of that happening, but probably more than you would expect. Especially since all of China is on holiday at the moment and has been for two weeks, mostly.
I have asked a friend what the weather is like there. I need to plan ahead if I need to dig any warm coats out of our long-term storage.
Mind you, Hongkongers should be getting their arctic gear any day now, as the temperature has plummeted - PLUMMETED - to 25 degrees. I wish I had their attitude to heat, it would let me wear my autumn/winter wardrobe.
It was still around 29/30 last week and scarves were sighted even then.
Still, it will be interesting to see the old place - I haven't been since CK moved to Jakarta, about three years ago. I'm told a lot has changed. I shall try to stop by my old flat. The thing they were building next door all the time I lived there has been completed and I hear won a bunch of architecture awards.
.
I have a work trip to Beijing over the weekend of the 16th/17th, flying up on the Friday.
Apparently I will be at the Shenzhou Hotel. I can only assume this is a hotel assembled out of leftover parts from China's space programme, which will be excellent.
Sadly I will be working all weekend - it's for a photoshoot, but there's nothing glamorous about it. Even VOGUE shoots seem pretty unglamorous, from what I gather via America's Next Top Model, and this is for a college Chinese textbook.
My one slim hope is that our mainland partners mess up the scheduling so I don't have to do anything. There's not a high chance of that happening, but probably more than you would expect. Especially since all of China is on holiday at the moment and has been for two weeks, mostly.
I have asked a friend what the weather is like there. I need to plan ahead if I need to dig any warm coats out of our long-term storage.
Mind you, Hongkongers should be getting their arctic gear any day now, as the temperature has plummeted - PLUMMETED - to 25 degrees. I wish I had their attitude to heat, it would let me wear my autumn/winter wardrobe.
It was still around 29/30 last week and scarves were sighted even then.
Still, it will be interesting to see the old place - I haven't been since CK moved to Jakarta, about three years ago. I'm told a lot has changed. I shall try to stop by my old flat. The thing they were building next door all the time I lived there has been completed and I hear won a bunch of architecture awards.
.
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