Although he is, apparently, a friend. Ken MacLeod knows his stuff when it comes to left-wing groupuscles. I read The Star Fraction a few months ago, and immediately bought The Stone Canal to devour in a few sittings.
He seems to enjoy discussing the variants of socialist and liberal/libertarian thought. The other day I looked him up on Wikpedia and found his blog - The Early Days of a Better Nation Currently it isn't being used much, but check out the post on Saturday, January 27, 2007 - it starts off discussing Mao, and winds all over the place but in a fascinating and coherent way.
I'd give my arms to be able to writet like that.
Showing posts with label books. Show all posts
Showing posts with label books. Show all posts
Saturday, March 24, 2007
Friday, December 08, 2006
Old book meme
Searching around today, I found that I'd been 'tagged' by snowflake5 back in September. Ho hum...
1. Name a book that changed your life.
'The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists' by Tressell, which for the first time introduced me to what this socialism thing was all about. Until then I'd been simply tribal in my politics, but at the age of about 14 I borrowde my dad's copy and started to understand
2. One book you've read more than once
'Sideshow' by Sheri S Tepper. It's where I got my pseudonym from.
3. One book you'd want on a desert island
Can I take the entire 'Baroque Cycle' by Neal Stephenson?
4. One book that made you laugh
Any by Pratchett. 'The Colour of Magic' is still the best one of all the Discworld novels
5. One book that made you cry
I'm a bloke. Books don't make me cry. What utter nonsense!
(ok ok, I did sniff a bit while reading 'Feersum Enjinn' by Iain M Banks, when Bascule is trying to climb the fastness - but don't tell anyone, right?)
6. One book you wish you've written
'Harry Potter and the thingummy wotsit'. Then I'd be a squillionaire!!
7. One book you wish had never been written
Anything by Ayn Rand. Particularly 'Fountainhead', which I tried to read but gave up as I hated every single character and what they stood for, particularly her 'hero' and 'heroine'. There'd be a lot less nerdy american libertarians about if it wasn't for her drivel.
8. One book you are currently reading
'Basket Case' by Carl Hiaasen. I like a bit of Floridian sleaze and intrigue.
9. One book you've been meaning to read
There's a few that I have on a shelf waiting for me to get to. 'The Euro-killers' by Julian Rathbone, which is a book he wrote a long time before his historical novels.
10. Now tag five people
What, and make them go through this? Nahhh.
1. Name a book that changed your life.
'The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists' by Tressell, which for the first time introduced me to what this socialism thing was all about. Until then I'd been simply tribal in my politics, but at the age of about 14 I borrowde my dad's copy and started to understand
2. One book you've read more than once
'Sideshow' by Sheri S Tepper. It's where I got my pseudonym from.
3. One book you'd want on a desert island
Can I take the entire 'Baroque Cycle' by Neal Stephenson?
4. One book that made you laugh
Any by Pratchett. 'The Colour of Magic' is still the best one of all the Discworld novels
5. One book that made you cry
I'm a bloke. Books don't make me cry. What utter nonsense!
(ok ok, I did sniff a bit while reading 'Feersum Enjinn' by Iain M Banks, when Bascule is trying to climb the fastness - but don't tell anyone, right?)
6. One book you wish you've written
'Harry Potter and the thingummy wotsit'. Then I'd be a squillionaire!!
7. One book you wish had never been written
Anything by Ayn Rand. Particularly 'Fountainhead', which I tried to read but gave up as I hated every single character and what they stood for, particularly her 'hero' and 'heroine'. There'd be a lot less nerdy american libertarians about if it wasn't for her drivel.
8. One book you are currently reading
'Basket Case' by Carl Hiaasen. I like a bit of Floridian sleaze and intrigue.
9. One book you've been meaning to read
There's a few that I have on a shelf waiting for me to get to. 'The Euro-killers' by Julian Rathbone, which is a book he wrote a long time before his historical novels.
10. Now tag five people
What, and make them go through this? Nahhh.
Monday, May 08, 2006
Beer In The Evening
To announce the publication of an epic tome, the book for our times, the answer to all of life's questions:
Beer In The Evening: London Edition
Buy it! Go on, you know you want to, it tells you what real customers think about 250 of London's pubs. If you follow the Amazon link on the BITE page, the authors get a little bit extra. As they are pals of mine, and they put a lot of work into the Beer In The Evening site, and into the book itself.
Beer In The Evening: London Edition
Buy it! Go on, you know you want to, it tells you what real customers think about 250 of London's pubs. If you follow the Amazon link on the BITE page, the authors get a little bit extra. As they are pals of mine, and they put a lot of work into the Beer In The Evening site, and into the book itself.
Friday, June 17, 2005
The book meme
Apparently having been tagged, I have to do this....
1 Total number of books I've owned
Pass. I have 2 and a half full 'billy' shelves from Ikea, which are all starting to double up, plus a row of computing books in the office. Most I bought myslef, but I 'inherited' about 50-100 non-fiction books from a couple who left Crawley, mostly political and social commentary, some of it religious. I think I read half of one of them...
2 The last book I bought
I bought a few books about six weeks ago (I tend to splurge):
The Scar by China Mieville (I'd read King Rat and Perdido Street Station and was hungry for more of his weird dark fantasies)
What a Carve Up! by Jonathan Coe (Never read him before, and it looked like a good social satire)
The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson (Strangely, I picked this only because the local Ottakars Book Club was featuring it)
Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
Hey Nostradamus! by David Coupland
Martin Cruz Smith omnibus: Red Square and Gypsy in Amber (Haven't read his stuff for ages, having been hooked by Gorky Park - and only 50p)
Mammoth Book of Best New SF 17 edited by Gardner Duzois (29 short stories from 2003).
3 The last book I read
I am about halfway through Best New SF 17, so maybe that doesn't count. As it's a collection of short stories anyway, I will discount it. Before that I finished The Scar. This is set in the same world as Perdido Street Station, but in a different city. Mieville obviously loves cities, and this one, Armarda, is like no other. Constructed from stolen and salvaged ships, it sails the oceans, surviving and growing through piracy. As this world is subject to strange magic and bizarre human hybrids, the city is hardly a normal place. Told from several points of view, with each character trying to out-plot the others and with their own dark secrets, this is an intriguing read. And Mieville can write incredible descriptive prose. Loved it.
4 Five books that mean a lot to me
a) Sideshow by Sherri S Tepper. Tepper is an American writer, often tagged as a 'feminist', which I suppose would put a lot of people off. Certainly the main protagonists of her novels are mainly female, and often find themselves up against a male-dominated society which perpetrates fairly awful abuses. Sideshow is set on a world which has become a haven for 'pure' humanity, after the rest of the inhabited galaxy has been assimilated by the Hobbes Land Gods. These 'refugees' are in various societies, each seperate and each brutal in the way it behaves. The 'uniqueness' of each society is policed by 'Enforcers' who ensure that they are not interfered with, despite their nastiness. My pseudomyn comes from one of the characters, Danivon Luze, a boy rescued from child sacrifice who becomes an enforcer and then... well, you have to read it.
b) White Teeth by Zadie Smith. A second woman writer, this time English and about my age. Some of the main characters are my contemporaries, and there is enough familiarity for me to identify with some of the characters. Not that anything like the actual plot happened to me, but the timing, growing up in the eighties, having friends with strong views on Salman Rushdie etc. certainly does resonate. The writing style was very easy for me to get into, and evoked a lot of memories. The TV miniseries was ok, but nothing like the book for style.
c) The Crow Road by Iain (M) Banks. I could have put almost any of his books on this list (and easily filled it with five: Consider Phlebas; Use of Weapons; Dead Air; Complicity; and Against a Dark Background. In fact, the only ones I don't really love are Walking on Glass (too poncey) and Canal Dreams (reads like a screenplay for a mundane American action movie). Crow Road, however is just about my favourite. It starts off like a murder mystery, and it seems like that it mainly what it is, but really there is a whole lot more to it, as the protagonist finds out more about his strange family and, in doing so, about himself.
d) A Scanner Darkly by Philip K Dick. Better than Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (filmed as Blade Runner), with more character emphasis than the excellent Man in the High Castle and less off his head completely than The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. This is an exellent book about the effects of a psychotic, addictive drug on a society, and in particular on one man.
e) Catch-22 by Joseph Heller. The stupidity of War. As much as I think that fighting the Nazis was most definitely the right thing to do, this (and Slaughterhouse 5 by Kurt Vonnegut), brilliantly captures the basic inhumanity of a system which is set up to kill people. The sheer insanity of most of the characters and their situations is so well described that it is entirely believeable. Which is the scariest thought of all.
What did I have to reject coming up with that list? Lord of the Rings, of course, as the definitive fantasy with elves and dwarves (in other words, everything else since basically sucks). Altered Carbon and Broken Angels by Richard Morgan (cyber-noir I suppose).
I'm not sure who I can tag for this. I'll think on it.
1 Total number of books I've owned
Pass. I have 2 and a half full 'billy' shelves from Ikea, which are all starting to double up, plus a row of computing books in the office. Most I bought myslef, but I 'inherited' about 50-100 non-fiction books from a couple who left Crawley, mostly political and social commentary, some of it religious. I think I read half of one of them...
2 The last book I bought
I bought a few books about six weeks ago (I tend to splurge):
The Scar by China Mieville (I'd read King Rat and Perdido Street Station and was hungry for more of his weird dark fantasies)
What a Carve Up! by Jonathan Coe (Never read him before, and it looked like a good social satire)
The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson (Strangely, I picked this only because the local Ottakars Book Club was featuring it)
Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
Hey Nostradamus! by David Coupland
Martin Cruz Smith omnibus: Red Square and Gypsy in Amber (Haven't read his stuff for ages, having been hooked by Gorky Park - and only 50p)
Mammoth Book of Best New SF 17 edited by Gardner Duzois (29 short stories from 2003).
3 The last book I read
I am about halfway through Best New SF 17, so maybe that doesn't count. As it's a collection of short stories anyway, I will discount it. Before that I finished The Scar. This is set in the same world as Perdido Street Station, but in a different city. Mieville obviously loves cities, and this one, Armarda, is like no other. Constructed from stolen and salvaged ships, it sails the oceans, surviving and growing through piracy. As this world is subject to strange magic and bizarre human hybrids, the city is hardly a normal place. Told from several points of view, with each character trying to out-plot the others and with their own dark secrets, this is an intriguing read. And Mieville can write incredible descriptive prose. Loved it.
4 Five books that mean a lot to me
a) Sideshow by Sherri S Tepper. Tepper is an American writer, often tagged as a 'feminist', which I suppose would put a lot of people off. Certainly the main protagonists of her novels are mainly female, and often find themselves up against a male-dominated society which perpetrates fairly awful abuses. Sideshow is set on a world which has become a haven for 'pure' humanity, after the rest of the inhabited galaxy has been assimilated by the Hobbes Land Gods. These 'refugees' are in various societies, each seperate and each brutal in the way it behaves. The 'uniqueness' of each society is policed by 'Enforcers' who ensure that they are not interfered with, despite their nastiness. My pseudomyn comes from one of the characters, Danivon Luze, a boy rescued from child sacrifice who becomes an enforcer and then... well, you have to read it.
b) White Teeth by Zadie Smith. A second woman writer, this time English and about my age. Some of the main characters are my contemporaries, and there is enough familiarity for me to identify with some of the characters. Not that anything like the actual plot happened to me, but the timing, growing up in the eighties, having friends with strong views on Salman Rushdie etc. certainly does resonate. The writing style was very easy for me to get into, and evoked a lot of memories. The TV miniseries was ok, but nothing like the book for style.
c) The Crow Road by Iain (M) Banks. I could have put almost any of his books on this list (and easily filled it with five: Consider Phlebas; Use of Weapons; Dead Air; Complicity; and Against a Dark Background. In fact, the only ones I don't really love are Walking on Glass (too poncey) and Canal Dreams (reads like a screenplay for a mundane American action movie). Crow Road, however is just about my favourite. It starts off like a murder mystery, and it seems like that it mainly what it is, but really there is a whole lot more to it, as the protagonist finds out more about his strange family and, in doing so, about himself.
d) A Scanner Darkly by Philip K Dick. Better than Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (filmed as Blade Runner), with more character emphasis than the excellent Man in the High Castle and less off his head completely than The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. This is an exellent book about the effects of a psychotic, addictive drug on a society, and in particular on one man.
e) Catch-22 by Joseph Heller. The stupidity of War. As much as I think that fighting the Nazis was most definitely the right thing to do, this (and Slaughterhouse 5 by Kurt Vonnegut), brilliantly captures the basic inhumanity of a system which is set up to kill people. The sheer insanity of most of the characters and their situations is so well described that it is entirely believeable. Which is the scariest thought of all.
What did I have to reject coming up with that list? Lord of the Rings, of course, as the definitive fantasy with elves and dwarves (in other words, everything else since basically sucks). Altered Carbon and Broken Angels by Richard Morgan (cyber-noir I suppose).
I'm not sure who I can tag for this. I'll think on it.
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