March books
Another month when I seemed to get through more books than usual. A fair bit for review this month as well.
#15 Betrayed by Rita Hayworth by Manuel Puig - which prompted this post at Big Other.
#16 Starbound by Joe Haldeman - a perfectly competent piece of heartland sf that reads like a good writer who can't really be bothered to come up with anything fresh any more.
#17 Kentauros by Gregory Feeley - this, on the other hand, is pretty well assured of a place on my books of the year list. Three essays and three short stories that circle a theme from a pretty obscure Greek Myth; the stories are good but the essays are stunning. I'm reviewing this for the online journal Requited.
#18 This Shared Dream by Kathleen Ann Goonan - the sequel to In War Times, which I'm reviewing for The New York Review of Science Fiction.
#19 Carmen Dog by Carol Emshwiller - a glorious surreal fable that I'm reviewing for Strange Horizons.
#20 Camera Lucida by Roland Barthes - there was an article about this book in the Guardian last weekend which made it sound interesting, and I remembered we actually had a copy on our shelves. It is interesting, but in a curious way. The first part is a fascinating meditation on photography that partly inspired this post at Big Other; the second part revolves around the death of his mother and is, frankly, bonkers. But I'm glad I read it.
#21 The Immortalization Commission by John Gray - another interesting but bonkers book. Gray looks at ways the scientific community got involved in ideas about life after death. The first part of the book deals with the Society for Psychical Research in late Victorian and Edwardian England, and in particular exercises in automatic writing. There is a large cast of Victorian intellectuals, including eminent scientists and a prime minister (Balfour), though the cast isn't really all that large since there seems to have been intermarriage and other family ties between the members of the group. The second part looks at Soviet science in the early years of the new regime, in particular focussing upon the embalming of Lenin which seemed to reflect a genuine belief that he might at some point be restored to life, and upon the curious figure of Moura Budberg who was at the same time the mistress of Maxim Gorky and H.G. Wells and also, by various accounts, a KGB agent. It's a broken-backed book, the two halves never really cohere, and also Gray doesn't seem at all clear what sort of book he is writing, at times journalism, popular biography, general political and scientific history, and fairly heavyweight philosophical argument (far and away the best part of the book). For all that, it is a book that always holds the interest, and there are some fascinating arguments about the relationship between science and religion, and about the nature of belief, that are casually dropped in along the way.
#15 Betrayed by Rita Hayworth by Manuel Puig - which prompted this post at Big Other.
#16 Starbound by Joe Haldeman - a perfectly competent piece of heartland sf that reads like a good writer who can't really be bothered to come up with anything fresh any more.
#17 Kentauros by Gregory Feeley - this, on the other hand, is pretty well assured of a place on my books of the year list. Three essays and three short stories that circle a theme from a pretty obscure Greek Myth; the stories are good but the essays are stunning. I'm reviewing this for the online journal Requited.
#18 This Shared Dream by Kathleen Ann Goonan - the sequel to In War Times, which I'm reviewing for The New York Review of Science Fiction.
#19 Carmen Dog by Carol Emshwiller - a glorious surreal fable that I'm reviewing for Strange Horizons.
#20 Camera Lucida by Roland Barthes - there was an article about this book in the Guardian last weekend which made it sound interesting, and I remembered we actually had a copy on our shelves. It is interesting, but in a curious way. The first part is a fascinating meditation on photography that partly inspired this post at Big Other; the second part revolves around the death of his mother and is, frankly, bonkers. But I'm glad I read it.
#21 The Immortalization Commission by John Gray - another interesting but bonkers book. Gray looks at ways the scientific community got involved in ideas about life after death. The first part of the book deals with the Society for Psychical Research in late Victorian and Edwardian England, and in particular exercises in automatic writing. There is a large cast of Victorian intellectuals, including eminent scientists and a prime minister (Balfour), though the cast isn't really all that large since there seems to have been intermarriage and other family ties between the members of the group. The second part looks at Soviet science in the early years of the new regime, in particular focussing upon the embalming of Lenin which seemed to reflect a genuine belief that he might at some point be restored to life, and upon the curious figure of Moura Budberg who was at the same time the mistress of Maxim Gorky and H.G. Wells and also, by various accounts, a KGB agent. It's a broken-backed book, the two halves never really cohere, and also Gray doesn't seem at all clear what sort of book he is writing, at times journalism, popular biography, general political and scientific history, and fairly heavyweight philosophical argument (far and away the best part of the book). For all that, it is a book that always holds the interest, and there are some fascinating arguments about the relationship between science and religion, and about the nature of belief, that are casually dropped in along the way.