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

[peake.livejournal.com]

Agree on River of Gods and Cloud Atlas, though I'd probably reverse the order. Haven't got round to the Vandermeer yet (it's in a big pile).

Disagree about the Robinson. He spends so much time being worthy and a proud parent he forgets he's supposed to be telling a story. This would have been much better if it had been more tightly edited to form the first half of a bigger book.

I'd add The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Nifenegger, The Town That Forgot How to Breathe by Kenneth J. Harvey, The Jane Austen Book Club by Karen Joy Fowler (Oh lord, that now means I've picked three of the titles from the Richard and Judy Book Club), and Set This House in Order by Matt Ruff. And probably The Plot Against America by Philip Roth, it's considerable strengths do outweigh its appalling weaknesses.

Still haven't read the Grimwood or Mieville or Banks, so this could change.

[ninebelow.livejournal.com]

Well done on all the reviewing. I've been rather lax on this front.

I very nearly included Ghostwritten in my one. (Due to the limited space my selection is somewhat arbitary.) I did like City of Saints and Madmen a lot but, as my selection probably suggests, I also prize a more elegant approach. The sort of thing one sees in "Dradin, In Love" and "The Cage".

[coalescent.livejournal.com]

Disagree about the Robinson.

Yes, I know--I meant to email you about your review. :) I agree with your observation that the narrative is unbalanced in conventional terms, but I think Robinson wasn't aiming for conventional--it's meant to be the literal calm before the storm, and the tipping point is exactly the right point for it to end. I don't think I would have liked it as much if it had been part of a larger book.

On the other hand, I did think The Time-Traveler's Wife was too long. There are many things I like about it, but in the end the length diluted it for me. I also had problems with Claire, who I thought frustratingly passive for most of the book.

I haven't read any of your other selections, although I plan to read most of them. If I'd had the words, I'd also have mentioned Geoff Ryman's Air, Ian Macleod's collection Breathmoss and Other Exhalations, and possibly The Year of Our War.

[coalescent.livejournal.com]

Well done on all the reviewing. I've been rather lax on this front.

Unfortunately most of those reviews were written in the first half of the year...

[peake.livejournal.com]

Yes it is a calm before the storm, but in fact there is an awful lot going on there which he ignores. There are all the political issues, for a start, which are hinted at and then forgotten. There are interpersonal relationships which he doesn't even begin to develop. There are business issues which are mentioned but passed over. Any or all of these would have helped to explain why the storm at the end comes as such a shock - because they would have been reasons why all the hints about global warming had been ignored. But in the end he doesn't give us any good reason why nobody was paying effective attention. That makes the storm not a moment of transition but a deus ex machina.

More than that the writing about the storm is good, but the writing for the three-quarters of the book before that is frankly flat and uninspiring. If he is suggesting the calm before the storm he is doing it through dullness. I was not convinced by any of the characters, nor by their situation, because Robinson did not go to the effort of trying to convince me.

As for The Time Traveler's Wife, yes it is over-long, and Nifenegger allows her attention to wander away from Claire once she becomes an adult. But it is still fresh, structurally inventive, well controlled throughout, and the characterisation is very affecting (Robinson could certainly take a lesson on that score). It has faults, but as a first novel it is a stunning achievement.

[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.

FOOL!

[mattia.livejournal.com]

City of Saints and Madmen, by Jeff Vandermeer

Y'know when I asked for suggestions on things to buy? Y'know how this would've been a good one?

*goes off to see if he can add things to his Amazon order*

The Town That Forgot How To Breathe

[(Anonymous)]

Peake:
Thank you very much for singling out my novel,
The Town That Forgot How To Breathe.

I appreciate it.

Best wishes,
Kenneth
kennethjharvey@yahoo.com