Ma Vie En Livres
Let this slide for a while.
I have been reading...
Six Ciaphas Cain novels: As part of my epic Warhammer 40K kick, I decided the best way to learn about the gameworld (of which I knew precisely zero around November) was to read a massive number of the novels. Kind friends were obliging and I raced my way through the Eisenhorn and Ravenor triologies. I went from knowing nothing to hooked in a few short days.
The Ciaphas Cane novels were very different. They started off as...not exactly spoofs, but humerous novels, a fairly unusual thing in the grim dark future where there is only war. Cain is a commissar who reminded me in many ways of Edmund Blackadder from Blackadder Goes Forth; cynical and dedicated to the search of a quiet, easy life (or indeed, to retain any life at all). Over the course of the novels, this changed somewhat. It became increasingly clear that, despite all his protestations to the contrary, the character was actually a rather decent human being with a surprisingly low opinion of himself. His avowed intention to fake heroism to make his ride easier moves into genuine heroism by the final novel, and it's clear by then that the only person who is incapable of seeing that is Cain himself. The books also get rather bleaker as they go on; the tone is sadder, and by the end of the last novel I got the distinct idea the character had begun to realise the joke was somewhat on him.
Following this, I plunged back into Dan Abner with The Saint, the second Gaunt's Ghosts omnibus of four novels; Honour Guard, The Guns of Tanith, Straight Silver and Sabbat Martyr. It was probably the contrast with Ciaphus Cain that meant it took me a while to get into Honour Guard; Dan Abner's writing is actually rather fast-paced and evocative but there's no humour in it at all. These four books were unabashedly brutal but I much preferred them to the previous Gaunt's Ghost omnibus The Founding; not sure if that reflects the fact that Dan Abner's writing was getting better or that these books have female characters in them - it's a failing in me that I tend to find books with entirely male casts somewhat difficult to get into. The four novels were that rather rare thing - hard edged military SF mixed with religious fiction. Neither are genres I read an amazing amount of, but they unexpectedly really worked as a combination.
On an entirely different note, I have just finished The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks - a nonfiction book about the HeLa cells. For those of you who don't know (me til the I read the back of the book), the HeLa cells were the first human cells ever to be successfully cultured. They were taken from a cervical tumour which killed the 30-year old African American woman who produced it in 1951. This book is about Henrietta Lacks, her family and the medical controversy surrounding her cells. It was intelligent, well-written and raised a lot more questions than it answered, which I guess is what every author wants. It made me want to set fire to the American health service, once again, which is unsurprising.
I have been reading...
Six Ciaphas Cain novels: As part of my epic Warhammer 40K kick, I decided the best way to learn about the gameworld (of which I knew precisely zero around November) was to read a massive number of the novels. Kind friends were obliging and I raced my way through the Eisenhorn and Ravenor triologies. I went from knowing nothing to hooked in a few short days.
The Ciaphas Cane novels were very different. They started off as...not exactly spoofs, but humerous novels, a fairly unusual thing in the grim dark future where there is only war. Cain is a commissar who reminded me in many ways of Edmund Blackadder from Blackadder Goes Forth; cynical and dedicated to the search of a quiet, easy life (or indeed, to retain any life at all). Over the course of the novels, this changed somewhat. It became increasingly clear that, despite all his protestations to the contrary, the character was actually a rather decent human being with a surprisingly low opinion of himself. His avowed intention to fake heroism to make his ride easier moves into genuine heroism by the final novel, and it's clear by then that the only person who is incapable of seeing that is Cain himself. The books also get rather bleaker as they go on; the tone is sadder, and by the end of the last novel I got the distinct idea the character had begun to realise the joke was somewhat on him.
Following this, I plunged back into Dan Abner with The Saint, the second Gaunt's Ghosts omnibus of four novels; Honour Guard, The Guns of Tanith, Straight Silver and Sabbat Martyr. It was probably the contrast with Ciaphus Cain that meant it took me a while to get into Honour Guard; Dan Abner's writing is actually rather fast-paced and evocative but there's no humour in it at all. These four books were unabashedly brutal but I much preferred them to the previous Gaunt's Ghost omnibus The Founding; not sure if that reflects the fact that Dan Abner's writing was getting better or that these books have female characters in them - it's a failing in me that I tend to find books with entirely male casts somewhat difficult to get into. The four novels were that rather rare thing - hard edged military SF mixed with religious fiction. Neither are genres I read an amazing amount of, but they unexpectedly really worked as a combination.
On an entirely different note, I have just finished The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks - a nonfiction book about the HeLa cells. For those of you who don't know (me til the I read the back of the book), the HeLa cells were the first human cells ever to be successfully cultured. They were taken from a cervical tumour which killed the 30-year old African American woman who produced it in 1951. This book is about Henrietta Lacks, her family and the medical controversy surrounding her cells. It was intelligent, well-written and raised a lot more questions than it answered, which I guess is what every author wants. It made me want to set fire to the American health service, once again, which is unsurprising.