Morning Meme: Books

[coalescent]

Write 150 words on your favourite books of the year, post it beneath this in your Journal and then email it along with your address to The Guardian.

I'm torn between piling on the superlatives and piling on the titles. Most of the books I read this year were new, and genre, and my favourites could change tomorrow.

Ian McDonald's sprawling future-Indian epic, River of Gods, is probably number one, though. It's exuberant and inventive, linguistically and conceptually. David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas runs it very, very close, however; it's perhaps even more ambitious, but I think it has marginally less heart.

City of Saints and Madmen, by Jeff Vandermeer, made it to the UK this year, and it was worth the wait. In parts dark, decadent, surreal fantasy, in parts whimsical metafictional game, the linked stories here build a complex and compelling world. Lastly I'll note Kim Stanley Robinson's Forty Signs of Rain, a thoughtful and important book about moments of change: environmental, of course, but also personal, social, and scientific. Robinson handles their intersections masterfully.

[via ninebelow]

Comments

[celestialweasel.livejournal.com]

I thought the big flaw at the end was that when the storm happens, I didn't remotely care about any of the characters. I use the word 'character' in a loose sense, obviously.
I think it must be this year's winner of the 'if you want to send a message, use Western Union' prize.

It could be that I am in an unusually intolerant mood this year, but it does strike me that this year has been a remarkably bad year for 'present day novels with scientific themes dealt with with some sort of SF sensibility' (or 'slipstream' or whathaveyou). I am thinking particularly of the Robinson, the latest Scarlett Thomas and the Kunzru.

[coalescent.livejournal.com]

this year has been a remarkably bad year for 'present day novels with scientific themes dealt with with some sort of SF sensibility'

Is that a particularly big marketing category? :)

I rather enjoyed Transmission. It's a bit lightweight, certainly, but I thought it was fun.

[celestialweasel.livejournal.com]

Weeeelllll.... back in the day, just after Sterling invented the term 'slipstream', the Forbidden Planet in Oxford Street had a shelf in the basement titled 'slipstream', it was the bottom shelf of a bookcase, literally the lowest of the low :-), and contained Robert Anton Wilson and some very strange stuff. I remember mr_snips claiming that one of the books on the shelf, which he had looked at too, was entitled Anal Pleasure!

Interesting review, thanks for pointing it out. Personally I found Cayce to be as least as real as Arjun. In fact I know more Cayces than Arjuns. Lucky me.

Back in another day, I worked for a wacky consultancy (not an ad agency, and not primarily at the positioning / branding end of life, though with some work in that direction) vaguely on the lines of Tomorrow*, I was in a very good position to observe since I had a strange hybrid role where I wasn't exactly one of the jetsetting consultants but I wasn't exactly one of the oppressed support staff either, and I have to say that Blue Ant and Bigend seemed spot-on to me, whereas I think I know the Wired article that Tomorrow* was synthesised from and Swift is just 'jerk by numbers'.

[ninebelow.livejournal.com]

back in the day, just after Sterling invented the term 'slipstream', the Forbidden Planet in Oxford Street had a shelf in the basement titled 'slipstream', it was the bottom shelf of a bookcase, literally the lowest of the low :-), and contained Robert Anton Wilson and some very strange stuff.

They have a whole case now, which for unknown reasons is full of Chomsky, Monbiot, Pilger et al. Silly sods.