Review Catch-up

I've been falling very far behind on my book reviews. I have actually been reading, I just haven't been reviewing. And, well, once the backlog of books gets more than about four high it's pretty hard to write proper reviews.

I'm cheating. I'm going to catch up by writing short reviews of all the books I've read in the last six months or so. And from there I should be able write real reviews for books again.

Without further ado, here's six months worth of books in three sentences, or less.

On Her Majesty's Secret Service, Ian Fleming. Part of the book club, I wanted to get a feel for actual Ian Fleming Bond books, before reading Faulks'. Fun, enjoyable, if you can avoid hurling the book across the room in the first 20 pages out of frustration over the blatant misogyny. I managed - just - and found it got better.

Devil May Care, Sebastian Faulks. The actual book club book - a Bond story, set in the '60s, but written just last year by Faulks, in the style of Ian Fleming. Less misogynistic and generally offensive, but a lot less enjoyable. I frequently got bored and would put the book down, forgetting to pick it up again for a little while.

The Road, Cormac McCarthy. Another book club book - this one was brilliant, some thought it was depressing, but I found it uplifting. The ash and the grey bleakness practically leaches onto your fingers out of the page, which is nothing on the handful of images in this book that you will probably never forget. It's a fantastic book, but be warned.

The End of Mr Y, Scarlett Thomas. A potential contender for most pretentious book I've ever read, possibly even beating Virginia Woolf's Orlando, but don't let that put you off, it's actually pretty good. It a tour through literary criticism and modern physics with a significant dash of metaphysics tossed in - it felt inspired by Pynchon. Quite original though, and recommended.

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Another book club book - chosen because, well, he'd just died. An absolutely great book, and a deserved classic, I have essentially no complaints and instruct you all to read it - it's short, funny and a very easy read. However, apparently this book inspired many in the west to embrace communism, and that I just can't see.

A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess. A book club companion book, for One Day In the Life..., chosen because it was a banned book, and coincidentally it features a lot of Slavic inspired slang, without any explanation - which was actually surprisingly cool. Unfortunately, I haven't seen the famous movie. The book was a good, but a little weak.

Seize the Day, Saul Bellow. Because of all the short books, I went for another companion book - this one was a 'day in the life' story. Fellow book clubbers felt that our last two books (The Road and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich) were very depressing - but this, this is depressing. Every single character is deeply detestable, not just in nature and behaviour but also in past: this is a book to attack your opinion of your life and make you doubt everything. Be warned.

Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert Heinlein. A monster sci-fi classic from the golden age of science fiction, regarded as serious, deep and important. Also, utterly hilarious, and quite irritating. The funny comes from Heinlein's sexism: he simply could not conceive of any kind of female equality that wasn't some kind of weird submissive promiscuouity. That and the long discourses on various aspects of science are also very irritating: please don't put incidental exposition in dialogue, it's trite.

Twilight, **Stephenie Meyer"". Book club again - vampire chick-lit was the required genre and this hit it. Very readable, but I was hoping that something would happen. I guess I was never a teenage girl.

The Graveyard Book, Neil Gaiman. Excellent: just the right line between a fun story and something that felt just a little darker and deeper. It's a re-writing of Kipling's The Jungle Book, though this is subtle. While it is a 'young adult' novel, read it and enjoy it, a very good book.

Odd and the Frost Giants, Neil Gaiman. A very short $2.50 novel that I read in 45 minutes. Cute.

The Virgin Suicides, Jeffrey Eugenides. Wow, one of the best books I've read in a very, very long time. It's different, it draws you in, you become part of the story; in a very engaging way. Shortly after reading I saw the movie: and also wow, a very faithful to the spirit rendering.

Still Life, Louise Penny. Wow, one of the worst books I've ever read. Seriously, this is absolutely abysmal. Murder-mystery in genre, but pure rubbish in execution. All the way through the book I had to keep putting it down to avoid the hurl-across-the-room feeling. For example, first chapter identifies the murder victim; second chapter goes back in time a couple of days, to the victim talking to a friend in a café, she reveals that she saw a crime. And then without any pretense, the description the crime is skipped. I mean, come on! Gee, do you think that could have something to do with her death? But then, in a few pages you find out what happened anyway. And! In the end, that crime has nothing to do with the murder. Christ. After this and The Blind Assassin Canadian literature is dead to me. Oh, and this was a book club book as well.

Altered Carbon, Richard Morgan. A tip: if you read something really bad, read something light that you know you'll enjoy very quickly afterwards or your brain will start to tell you that the hours you have to put into a book are a bad investment. This was a good counter: a really cool sci-fi noir story. Most interestingly, this was a novel centred around a highly socially disruptive technology, but in the window before the tech becomes ubiquitous and available to all. That window is interesting. There are also some Banks-ian characters, without quite the same detail in the characterisation, please read if you like sci-fi.

Pomegranate Soup, Marsha Mehran. Again, thanks to the book club, this was a simple story, and just plain nice. It wasn't particularly well written, there wasn't a great deal that happened and the characterisation was just plain atrocious, but in the end I enjoyed reading it and I found the story was... nice. Apart from the transparently good vs evil characters, a major criticism is the lack of direction: there are frequent, unexpected changes in direction. She almost redeems herself with a glimpse into the past of the main villain, but it just doesn't seem to go anywhere. Still, ... nice.

And the funny thing about all that? It seems to be much easier to write something about bad books than good books. That would say something the reviewer, I think. I shall work on that.

The Kite Runner

The Kite Runner
Khaled Hosseini

You would have heard of the movie for this one. It achieved some fame when the two Afghani child actors had to be smuggled out of Afghanistan for their own protection. Apparently, acting in a rape scene put their lives at risk. I haven't seen the movie, I'd be interested to hear what people thought of it.

This book is in two parts. The first part is a child's impression of living in a relatively stable and developed third-world, feudal country before the rest of the world decided to use that particular patch of ground as a World War-by-proxy. The first part continues with a story of poor outsiders attempting to make a new life in a very different world. This part of the novel is very, very good: it's a charming view into a destroyed world that we don't hear much about it, and certainly nothing good. Continued with a very real feeling tale of making the best of a potentially unpleasant world, and building a new life there.

My recommendation is to read this first part and then stop. I'll tell you what, send me your copy of the book, I'll remove the second part and then it back to you. Because the second part is just plain terrible.

The second part is a long sermon on how damaged Afghanistan is now. I don't have a problem with being told this. I do actually think us cozy, safe residents in front of our TVs need more confrontation of the destruction done on our behalf. And I'm not uncomfortable with placing blame: the entire first world and all the individual citizens therein, are responsible. But, oh my God! Is this ever preaching! Yes, Afghanistan is in a very bad state. We see that, we know that. The real effect and impression of the damage done comes not from preaching, but from the contrast of what we hear and see with what we read in the first part of this book. Beyond the preaching, there is also a monotonous tone and freaky coincidences to wear you.

My advice again, read the first part and then stop. Pretend the book is over. You'll enjoy it better that way, trust me.

Neverwhere

Neverwhere
Neil Gaiman

Like Wrath of a Mad God this is fantasy too: but this is a completely different proposition. This is good, very, very good. Good enough that I will recommend this to non-fantasy reading friends. Ahhh... A breakout hit - the dream of fantasy authors the world over. Well, here's a tip: instead of sucking, try writing high quality, original, funny and genuninely moving stories, like, say, this.

The poignancy. It's not cloying, there's no preaching. Not even any condescension, patronisation or pity. This is a tale of those who fall through the cracks. Those you don't notice around you; the other nation outside, in the words of Billy Bragg, sleeping in the street. A tale of the disenfranchised, the dispossessed. told so well. So clearly, so directly, with no pathetic efforts to tug at the heart strings that, for me, this became the most moving story since Greene's The Quiet American.

But it's fantasy. How can a fantasy novel seriously be mentioned in the same breath as Graham Greene? Well, I'm going to have to try to justify that. On the surface, and the back cover, Neverwhere is a fantasy adventure set in a strange, fantastical world at once beneath and entwined within everyday London. This world intersects with London through the streets and the homeless. Richard Mayhew is pulled from our world into this other place. Forced onto a quest all he really wants is to be able to return home.

Viewed as a fantasy creation, this other world is a joy. Full of magic, grand quests and the most imaginative etymologies for major London landmarks: I certainly wished I knew London better. To get the right feeling I was able to transplant Sydney in place of London. Enough wandering in the City, Surry Hills, Pyrmont and Balmain and you have the feeling that there is history, and history on history here. And beyond that, it's dark. Frighteningly, unexpectedly dark.

Like Midnight's Children though, I read Neverwhere in two ways. As well as the straight forward fantasy interpretation, you could also see this as a story told by an unreliable narrator. What if the weird, fantastical world beneath London's streets doesn't exist? I mean, not even within the world of the book? What if that entire world is inside of Richard Mayhew's mind and he just doesn't know it? And for me, that possibility made this a touching, poignant story. A story genuinely of those who fall through the cracks; into a world that is both magical, frightening and very dangerous.

Unfortunately, to make you believe I'll have to cite specifics. Without spoiling, I'd point at the third quest for the Blackfriars. When you read that scene think about alternate explanations.

Wrath of a Mad God

Wrath of a Mad God
Raymond E. Feist

Pure crack for fantasy geeks and about as high quality. I've been reading Feist since a friend recommended Magician to me when I was nine years old; in grade four, back in 1988. My friend's name was Paul Reid and that was 20 years ago now. It's also long since I realised that I'm pretty much only reading Feist because reading Feist is what I do.

As his books get steadily worse that becomes a weaker and weaker reason. He does have some redeeming features: he doesn't forget where he put the plot; his sagas actually finish; he manages to avoid appearing a total right-wing fascist. After the disappointment of Martin and the betrayal of Jordan those are very good things to a recovering fantasy geek. He is still one of the reasons that I haven't completely given up on fantasy. And of course, Gaiman.

Why am I now so disappointed? His first three books (Magician, Silverthorn and A Darkness at Sethanon) were really great fantasy epics. Magician even managed that rarest of fantasy firsts: a self-contained, single, enjoyable novel. What was so enjoyable? A rich, consistent, well-thought through world, with a deep and fascinating history. The sort of thing that makes Tolkein so popular. Those books sold well, Feist proceeded to mine that world and his characters in countless sequels. And like the fools we are, us fantasy fans lapped those sequels up.

You may think you want the blank spots in the story filled in, you may think that those tantalising glimpses are only a fraction of the glory that is fully formed, but hidden, in the author's mind. But. You are wrong. The back story you build, the worlds you imagine around the glimpses? Those are the real joy in fantasy. Do not burn those worlds to the ground by demanding ad reading endless prequels and sequels. Let the great stories stand alone.

Feist is a great example of this. It turns out that he didn't really have anything to surround those brief histories and as he writes more and more he's starting to change things. Sometimes for the better, but many times the things I've loved have died.

I see two things here: the world is not meant to change, even if it does make things easier for someone; and, you don't want to know your heroes too well. Even if they are only characters in a book.

Still Alive

Yes, this is one of those irritating posts. Where a blog that you thought had quietly retired suddenly reappears with a post. A post that says basically nothing. A very self-indulgent post just promising that there will actually be real work worth reading reappearing soon.

Why couldn't the blogger just leave us all in peace? Why this attempt to appear that he hasn't just gotten bored or too lazy to update? Why this empty post tantalising and teasing with a promise; only to disappoint with more deathly silence.

Yep, this is one of those posts.

But! I actually do promise to post something real soon. No! Really!

And, in a desperate attempt to appear trustworthy, here's a short overview of what's been going on.

• Switched from the horror of FreeBSD I now have a brand new MacBook Pro as my primary computer. After nine years I'm finally being paid to use the platform I stayed loyal to throughout the dark years. Hopefully the new computer, well set up, will actually help me write more here. It got me writing this.

• New project. Can't talk about it. Cool though. Has inspired some general problem solving that I can talk about though. There will be some technical recipes on here for the first time.

• Briefly had a fish tank on my desk at work. It was very nice. The tank did well, but then I had to move desks. Probably worth doing, but you'd want to be more sure of where you were sitting.

• Joined a book club. Read quite a few books. And yep, that means reviews. There will be some of those coming soon.

• Still annoyed at various parts of my industry, enough to rant.

Hopefully, all that and more to be posted.

after the quake

after the quake
Haruki Murakami

I'm in a book group again and this is our first book. Funnily enough when we all brought our picks to the first gathering there were two Murakami suggestions - the other being A Wild Sheep Chase. We chose after the quake as our first book (it was short and a short story collection - a slightly commitment-phobic book group) and A Wild Sheep Chase was pushed to the end of the list with a strong suggestion to find a substitute. And now the suggester has left the group! Oooh - scandal!

For all that after the quake was fantastic. It's a collection of short stories each following a single person's life after the Kobe earthquake. None of the characters lives were directly affected by the quake: they didn't live in Kobe, they apparently didn't lose anyone from their lives - but for each of them the quake was there, this huge background event that has shuddered through them all.

The writing is spare, brief, highly evocative and, ultimately, beautiful. Reading this very short collection was an unusual reading experience: it was relaxing, peaceful. There was no urge to understand what was going on, to read deeper - there was just a peaceful journey. Apparently Murakami is to be read very literally and that's how I saw this. It seems to be full of allegory and deeper intent, but I don't think that's what we're supposed to read. It felt like a series of beautifully told stories about ordinary people. People whose lives had been massively disrupted - even though nothing actually happened to them. And thinking on that, there is a strange undercurrent of guilt: as if they should not be feeling pain while there is so much suffering on TV.

I have a theory that there is something that connects together all the stories told in this book. An earthquake is a sudden event following a long build-up of pressure, after the quake the seismic fault lines settle into a new state, one that is hopefully more stable. Unfortunately, for us, it requires this sudden release to jump to the new state. This is reflected in all the stories: the characters' lives were flowing along and suddenly the earthquake kicks them into a new state. With an upheaval of their life. The book as a whole is tied together by the final story, where the characters end up living the life they had always intended. It may sound corny, but hope from the change. And, as it is told quite subtlely, both in message and style, you don't feel the urge to cringe.

Some final comments: I read this immediately after Midnight's Children, the difference in style was very striking. Throughout the book group this was a hit. Even those who initially skeptical (due to cat torture, or overly trendy covers) were won over. I'd recommend it, but don't expect to be grabbed by the collar and hauled on a ride. This is a slow, contemplative book. Read for the enduring feeling of peace.

Blink

Blink
Malcolm Gladwell

This book is just plain cool and it's actually hard to say precisely why. Humans think and make decisions very quickly without knowing we do this, or even understanding how we can do it.

There are two immediate rammifications:

1. If you know a field well, and I mean very well. If you've studied it, trained in it, worked and lived in it, then your snap thought process, your 'Blink' is very valuable. You should trust it.

2. If this isn't your field of expertise though, your brain will find something to react to, some stereotype you aren't even aware of and react to that. Frequently, that stereotype will be "I don't like that because it's different." In these cases your 'Blink' will lead you wildly astray. Don't trust it - it's hard, but dig deeper and take time.

A major flaw may have occurred to you: if you can't understand these instant reactions, how do you know which one you're having? Well, if you're honest with yourself, of course you know. Either you have studied something, or you haven't.

But that doesn't work well for the softer skills like reading people. Every thinks they're good at reading people.

And there's the Dunning-Kruger Effect waiting to bite.

So what can you do? Well to start, read this. It's a truely fascinating study of people and how we think. And, being aware of the decisions you make without thinking is actually a pretty powerful antidote to those times it leads you astray.

You've just met someone. He seems like a pretty good guy and you like him. Your powers of rationalisation will tell you that you like him because he seems confident but easy-going. You also liked his mildly self-deprecating introduction. And if this is social, great! Just go with it! But, if this is an interview and you're on either side of the table, stop and ask yourself. Is that all true, or do I just like him because he's tall?

Seriously. Read the book. Gladwell also wrote The Tipping Point which I will be definitely be reading.

Midnight's Children

Midnight's Children
Salman Rushdie

Dense, detailed, loud, intense and, in a way, unrelenting. The world is swirling around you and you've got no idea where to look but you want to look everywhere right now! I've never been there, but this book is what I imagine India is like. I don't think that's unreasonable either as Rushdie seems to be wanting to tell the story of India's birth as a country.

This is another of those literary 'magical realism' novels that I find much easier to describe as fantasy. There is definitely a lot of apparent fantasy in here, but the story has much more to it than those parts.

For me, possibly the most interesting aspect was the realisation that Saleem Sinai was an unreliable narrator. This was just a suspicion at first, he was so desperate to defend everything as true that I started thinking he doth protest too much. And once that seed was planted it became easy to read everything too ways: all the fantasy that Saleem claimed could be explained entirely prosaically.

So I read the book with two interpretations. I don't know which is true, but I do know that for all his transparency Saleem is one of the more intensely realised and interesting characters in fiction.

The Mythical Man-Month

The Mythical Man-Month
Fred Brooks

Everyone knows this book; everyone knows the core points and Brooks' recommendations and laws, even if not everyone has read it. This is one of the few true classics of computing. I'm not going to waste anyone's time repeating those assertions.

The Mythical Man-Month is now, unfortunately, hilariously anachronistic. And, the anachronisms are starting to damage the book: the core ideas are getting buried beneath 40 years of development technology advances. Engineers each get their own computer (or even two!) now, we don't need to share debugging time anymore. Surprisingly, I'm a little hesitant to recommend this book now. Beneath the anachronisms there is plenty of good advice: the point he tries to make about planning your debugging time and keeping track of what happened afterwards still applies, for example. But, you have to be prepared to dig, to see through all that to what he's really trying to say. If you do choose to read, skim the original parts and dwell more on his 20^th anniversary additions:

There are two things I will say:

1. 'Build one to throw away' is wrong. Brooks comes out very clearly against that, even though he originally popularised it. Don't do it, plan to prototype and grow organically. This suits me just fine and leads to:
2. Brooks is the original agilist. Time and time again the things he values are competent, pro-active people and high-visibility, high-efficiency, fast-turnaround development processes. The corner stones for the agile family of methodologies.

Dreaming in Code

Dreaming in Code Scott Rosenberg

Rosenberg is one of the co-founders of the online magazine Salon.com, a magazine I've been reading on and off since 2000. After having a bad experience with internal software development, he became interested in how, after more than 50 years experience, we still find, in the words of Donald Knuth, that 'software is hard.'

In the interests of disclosure, I will point out that I got a copy of this book for free from the author after he offered copies to bloggers if they agreed to mention the book. So, this is me (gratefully, happily) fulfilling my end of the deal.

This book is a story, a story of a collection of great developers attempting to write an amazing piece of software. It is not a retrospective story either. It begins shortly after the project has started, but unfortunately couldn't follow the project to completion: the project still isn't done yet.

The Open Source Applications Foundation (OSAF) was formed by Mitch Kapor (of Lotus 1-2-3 fame) to build a new form of personal information management software: Chandler. Dreaming in Code tells the story of how they tried and (so far) failed. With many informative diversions into the theory of software engineering in an effort to discover why software seems to so consistently be delivered late (if at all) and buggy (if it even gets close to meeting the original vision.)

Rosenberg does an impressinve amount of research into the theory. No appropriately read professional software engineer will find any revelations here: this is all stuff you should already know. But Rosenberg is not claiming to invent or discover anything new. In fact, he goes out of his way to disclaim that there is any original research contained in this book. He is a journalist, and as a journalist he has produced a detailed literature survey. The summary in two well-written chapters is useful even for experienced software engineers. I'm sure non-software engineers will find this all very interesting; assuming they are interested in how software gets written.

For software engineers, there is something very interesting here. The internal mechanics of a a team building a piece of software is a very secret thing. Companies are secretive and companies and open source projects want to protect their reputations. Most software engineers only ever see how a project they are working on proceeds, and then they're too close, plus there's no nice summary of what happened. Dreaming in Code is something very valuable to our field: an accurate story of the human side of a software development project. With both the clarity of distance and the accuracy of events recorded at the time they happened.

It was simply astounding how familiar this story was. OSAF and Chandler get some things spectacularly wrong, but then in other cases they do things very right. It's easy to point at the things they stuffed up and claim that you would never make those mistakes, but it's a little too easy to ignore the things that were done right. The good decisions end up forgotten and never noticed.

So what did I think that got wrong? Firstly, and by far the biggest: Analysis Paralysis. This is a mistake that I've seen projects make over and over again. In fact, I'd go as far as to say that it's more common to see this affliction than not. Projects just can't seem to make a decision, stick to it and then start building. The fear of the future locks them solid: what if we make the wrong decision? What if someone blames me for the wrong decision? In the end, ikf the decision wsas so egregiously wrong that it can be traced back to just one person, then everyone else around at the same time is just as culpable for allowing that decision to happen. Everyone, please just get in the habit of making decisions. Rely on those around you to spot a bad direction: that's what they're there for.

Second big mistake for Chandler? People. No surprises there, it's the big and obvious disaster. If you believe that software is hard and you care about your software then clearly you should only work with the best. That's easy to say, but pretty hard to achieve. And in Chandler's case the people problem exhibited in a couple of interesting ways. Before I talk about the people problems that I saw Chandler as having I need to say that any attempt to judge is based solely on what is described in this book. I (obviously) didn't work on this project, I don't know the people, there's only so much I can say. Having said that, I'd also like to say that people problems kill most projects and if we hope to advance we need to get over this fear of talking about the problems with people. Maybe then we can find some solutions. Or maybe that's just an overly analytical geek talking. Why can't everyone just be a nice reducable puzzle, dammit?

There was a permanent employee of the OSAF who was hired quite early and ended up in quite a senior technical position, and this employee was unfortunately the very soul of Analysis Paralysis. Any story about some interminable technical discussion has this particular employee at its heart. He was extraordinarily conservative and wary of making decisions, but ultimately many of the technical decisions came down to him. After a few of these stories, I was left shouting 'Do something about him!' at the book. And I've seen precisely this problem face-to-face too many times to ignore. Once again people, make decisions! You probably won't get it too far wrong. In fact, in this case, the inability to make a decision led to one of their few definite cases of over-engineering.

The second people problem: OSAF planned to run themselves as an open source project that encouraged volunteers. Predictably enough, the only people who could volunteer for any extended period tended to be ex-Apple and -Netscape employees who had already made their fortune and no longer needed to work for an income. From the outside these volunteers presented an interesting problem. They were all brilliant and had done amazing work in the past, but they didn't see this project as any kind of meal ticket. There was no drive for them to get this project finished and out the door. In the end, they come across as people partially on the side-lines, commenting endlessly but never really pushing the project forward. Instead, they were offering endless advice on how things could be done better. Software projects are always cursed with people like this; encouraging volunteers just seems to guarantee it.

But back to the book, I think I've already made clear that I really enjoyed it. I also think the opportunity to see inside another project is infinitely valuable for software engineers and software engineering. Aside from all that, I will say that sometimes the brief newspaper style of the book was a little irritating. On occasion I felt a topic or anecdote could have done with some more depth before moving on.

Software engineers will get a lot out of this; non-software engineers who care about how software (upon which, our civilisation is built) is written will get even more out of this. Oh, and as a professional programmer and wannabe-amateur writer-slash-blogger, software is definitely written - then organically edited into shape.

To finish on a positive note, something Chandler got right? Python. Choosing to write their software in an expressive high level language was clearly a win. There is no question now that Python is fast enough for desktop software, and that's really the only doubt. Hopefully Chandler can be used as an example of choosing better languages.

If you choose to read this, or not, in the end people! Make a decision!

Atonement

Atonement
Ian McEwan

This is simply an excellent book. It doesn't go in for any special literary tricks, there's no special effort to make some obvious point: it's a really good story, told very well. There's some intimations of other layers, but feel free to ignore those. One thing that this book does pull off is an unsympathetic main character who I actually managed to not hate in the end. I didn't want to hurl the book across the room; always a worthwhile achievement.

A couple of points: I always find it vaguely amusing to see novelist characters in books written by professional novelists; even the best write what they know. The characterisation and the imagery are what really grabbed me. I was there on that hot, summer day in 1935. I knew Robbie Turner, and I knew Cecilia?Tallis.

There is much that could be said about the effect of fantasy and the blurry line between a clearly seen artificial vision and reality, especially in relation to the powerful imagery that provides this story.

But instead, I'll just say this is a great novel, read.

The Player of Games

The Player of Games Iain M. Banks

That 'M' is important and very distinctive. This is a completely different author to Espedair Street; even though both books list all Iain Banks and Iain M. Banks books. No? Don't believe me? Well, yeah. His fiction is published as Iain Banks and his sci-fi as Iain M. Banks. Strange, but that's the way he does it.

His sci-fi is some of the best I've read since Philip K. Dick. And as he doesn't produce anywhere near as much as Dick, it averages a lot better. Though without some of the crazed inventiveness. But that sounds like damning Banks with faint praise: his sci-fi really is that good. There are fantastic ideas and a very plausible feel to everything. He doesn't shoot himself in the foot by trying to explain how everything works: the technology is just there and it works.

But his strongest points are actually his characterisations and story. You get involved, you believe, and most importantly, you care. And on top of that, the story is usually about the growth and life of a character - sometimes a descending spiral with no apparent way out; sometimes a broadening and opening of a character you initially dislike.

This book is fascinating for the first real peek inside the Culture, instead of the view of a mercenary looking from the outside, in.

Orlando

Orlando
Virginia Woolf

Another literary fantasy novel. AFter the disappointments of Jordan, Martin and, most of all, Feist, I'm happy to be looking to Marquez, Updike and now Woolf for my fantasy fix. As I've said before, any story is by definition a fantasy, so why restrict your scope to only the events that can take place in this prosaic world we are trapped in? Sure, there's a place for the great everyday; but fantasy can be so much fun!

And given how dry Woolf is, it's surprising to see how fun Orlando can be. There are two key elements of fantasy here: Orlando (the character) lives for a very long time, and there's a second question of gender... The age question is handled interestingly. There's never a discussion of this, Orlando just keeps on living, aging at a different rate to everyone else around.

This disconnect from reality creates a dreamy, flowing world: the story reads like a lyric poem: drifting from image to image guided by your narrator, Orlando. And then towards the end it starts to coalesce on but two points. But slowly, like a willow emerging from the mist. Left wondering if those were always there, you float past.

Espedair Street

Espedair Street
Iain Banks

A very good writer, his sci-fi (under the name Iain M. Banks) is consistently original, but his non-genre fiction is also very good. Dead Air is worth reading for the head-butting alone and The Wasp Factory is bizarre, unexpected and simply amazing.

The strength in his fiction is the characterisation. Danny Weir, in Espedair Street, is a great example. A washed-up 70's rock star who has managed to annoy and drive off all his friends. He's now brooding self-pityingly in a stony mansion in Glasgow. But, you're introduced to him, you hang out with him, you drink with him and you get to know him, know him well. Though he spends the book going over everything that's gone wrong in his life and though most of that is down to his amazingly ability to always make the wrong choice and though it may be hard to listen to an hyper-rich rock star complain about his past it doesn't matter because you know him and, ultimately, like him. Enough to hope he finds some way out.

Oh, and the book manages to frequently be damn funny, as well.

The Timeless Way of Building

The Timeless Way of Building
Christopher Alexander

For the past year or so, this was my bus book. That's a surprisingly long time, and it probably shouldn't have taken me that long to read. Late last year, about 50 pages from the end, I paused in my reading; and then took several months to pick it up again. This seems unfair to the book: it deserved a much more coherent read than that. Though, the ideas are different enough to also benefit from a considered read. I'll pick this up again sometime, and I promise to read much faster that time. Anyway.

One sentence summary: this book will forever change the way you look at and think about buildings, towns and architecture.

Alexander firmly believes that modern planning and building practices are bankrupt and can only result in inhospitable, unwelcoming cities and homes. A belief that seems to be firmly born out by most urban planning since the Second World War: just look at the damage Harry Seidler has wrought on Sydney for an example close to home. This book is a polemic, a grand rant against the current state of his own industry and art. A work in the tradition of many a genius' (and quite a few looney's) Let's Blow Up the Universe screed. So, genius or looney? I've probably already given away my opinion on that matter...

Ultimately, it would not do this book any justice to attempt to briefly summarise what it has to say.

But what the hell, I'll give it a shot anyway. Alexander's central thesis is that there is a shared quality amongst those towns and buildings where people feel most at home; a quality independent of culture, climate and history. He also believes that this quality can be easily achieved, by any person who chooses to build. It is a matter of recognising the forces within the people who will use the building or site and then balancing those forces with the forces intrinsic to the specific location and society. He even outlines a prescription for achieving this balance: a collection of patterns to duplicate in design, planning and construction, with instructions on how to combine these. A language of patterns to construct our built environment.

Unlike many other polemics, this is highly detailed and descriptive: it describes the quality to achieve and then gives instructions on how to achieve it.

If you live in a large city in Australia, it'll be pretty obvious while reading this book that this is not how building is done. First, Australian building practices place the car as king of all. Any building or neighbourhood must be designed for the maximum convenience of the car: people are a distant second. Second, Australian building practices harken back to some long forgotten European past: everyone wants a little brick English cottage, though nothing could be more generally inappropriate for our climate. The Queenslander is not the standard archetype for Australian residential building unfortunately.

The current popular obsession with being 'green' is driving people to a certain superficial realisation about the car. But that is only a symptom of a far deeper problem. Loudly proclaiming that cars are evil and must be disposed of is never really going to achieve anything. And that sort of unbalanced (in the forces sense) thinking will inevitably lead to other problems. As much as I'm a fan of the specific remedies proposed in Jan Gehl's research paper into Sydney's CBD, I do feel some uneasiness.

The pattern approach that Alexander talks about is intended to completely avoid unbalanced forces. He regularly uses cars in his discussion of patterns. They are real, they are valuable and they're not going to just disappear. A central point of these patterns is that they're not something Alexander has devised as a new architectural '-ism' to imprint his vision on the world. These patterns are things that arise naturally, given the way all humans want to live. Growing organically out of a combination of the people and their surrounds. There is a sequel to The Timeless Way of Building, A Pattern Language, that acts as a catalogue of the most important patterns that Alexander and his colleagues have observed in successful towns and buildings.

In the US there is a growing style of design called 'New Urbanism' that attempts to encourage the buildings and towns that Alexander commends so highly. It is interesting to note that in Europe that name is largely unused, people preferring to use 'The Way Towns are Designed' instead. It is also interesting to note that in Australia, we have neither.

Finally, why did I, a software engineer, read this book? To the surprise of many architects, Christopher Alexander is very well known in the field of computer science. In the 1960's his work was discovered and his concept of patterns was co-opted. No serious software engineer can possibly not be familiar with the world of design patterns: named rules for particular structures of code to solve certain problems. It's my opinion that while initially off to a good start the modern Design Patterns movement has completely missed the point of Alexander's original teaching.

His intent was not to catalogue an exhaustive set of patterns that may be thrown at a problem until a solution emerges. His intent was to define an interlocking language from which you can select appropriate terms to grow a solution. In his case a building or town, in my case a software system. Modern design patterns seems to ignore the essential organic growth aspect of a pattern language, and instead seems to focus on cataloguing. An unbalanced approach.

The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch

The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
Philip K. Dick

Did you end up finding it, Philip? What it means to be human? Religion didn't seem to provide your answer. Did drugs? A Scanner Darkly is famous for your search, but this appears to be some sort of transition between those two searches.

Like Graham Greene, Dick is one of my favourite authors. Over time I'm steadily trying to read all of his novels. I prefer his later ones, so that's generally what I choose. Unlike Greene, not each of Dick's is better than the last: A Scanner Darkly is still my favourite, and one of my favourite sci-fi novels. Sci-fi is typically a pretty pulpy genre: cheap enjoyment, with very little challenge to the reader. Even the best sci-fi with a great idea at it's heart will present that idea in a pretty straightforward form.

Not Philip K. Dick. He did not shy from challenging the reader with unusual ideas, often in outright confusing forms. This book felt like some sort of mental trap that the reader is drawn into. Only with the hope that all will become clear by the end. The confusion is why I read this book now. How hard can you push the reader? How difficult can you make the story to follow? How many tricks can you pull? And still end up with a populist, enjoyable story.

There's a lot to connect Dick and Pynchon. But, Dick just didn't have Pynchon's talent. Sometimes you are left wondering if this was meant to be confusing, or did he just write it a bit too quick. His later work does show that yes, he was aiming to confuse.

The Blind Assassin

The Blind Assassin
Margaret Atwood

Continuing on my plan to expand the types of books I'm reading: this was from Annabel several years ago. A Booker prize winner, and I've enjoyed some of the others I've read, it's also Canadian and a female author. I just haven't been reading enough female authors recently; though Zadie Smith is one of my favourite authors.

It's an interesting story for a number of reasons. It's structured as a story within a story within a story; it's told backwards and forwards, alternatively; it appears to be centred around a mystery, but really isn't; and, perhaps most interestingly, for a large part of the novel the main character is quite unsympathetic. And though unsympathetic, she still manages to maintain your influence and carry the story.

And stopping for a pause... when I first wrote this review immediately after reading the book over a month ago, I enjoyed the novel but wasn't taken by it. However, it's a novel I haven't stopped thinking about. It just keeps cropping up in my mind over and over again. At the time, I put it down as one of those typical, slightly over-wrought Booker prize winners, but now my opinion is going to have to change.

Slow, deliberate, difficult for not liking the main character, but in the end, memorable and worth it. I will be going back to read more Atwood: and I've found myself browsing her shelf in book stores.

A Burnt-out Case

A Burnt-out Case
Graham Greene

I read this book many, many years ago: way back in year nine English. It was the first of the Greene novels we read, followed by Our Man in Havanna and then The Quiet American. I remember really enjoying the latter two, but just not getting A Burnt-out Case. Thinking back on it now this might have been the first serious piece of literature I read. Wow. I had to get over fantasy at some point.

Of the three, this is the most adult and serious. At the core this story is about how you derive your meaning for life. What happens when instead of just accepting your life, you can't help question. Why you? Do you deserve your successes? Your failures? Your happiness? Your sadness? At some level, it's very easy to know that we don't deserve the bad things that happen. We move on, ignore those and wait for something good. But if you're going to scratch the surface of your life and ask 'What did I do to deserve this?' of the good things that happen, what answer do you get back? Are we set up to accept and enjoy success? Wuerry has scratched and examined; questioned and dug deep at the heart of who he thinks he is, until there was nothing left to scratch. And then he is on a small boat to a leprosarium in the heart of Belgian colonial Africa.

I'm very glad that I've finally re-read this book. Greene remains one of my favourite authors. Every book I read of his seems to be better than the last. Of course that can't be true - but it sure feels like it. Now, as I look through his list of books, there aren't many more that I've heard about that I am yet to read. This makes me sad. I'll be re-reading Our Man in Havanna at some point, and that gives me hope. I'd have never heard of that one if I hadn't already read it. There's no reason not to randomly try others then!

It is a pity that the Nobel Prize committee could never look past Greene's devout Catholicism. Though with Catholic themes and characters, his books are always much more than that. If there is anyone who deserved the Nobel Prize for Literature, it's Graham Greene.

First Among Sequels

First Among Sequels
Jasper Fforde

The latest Thursday Next novel and again a book for book and story lovers. A brief introduction: Thursday Next is a literary detective in an alternative reality where books are the single most popular form of entertainment. And in this alternative reality the line between the real world and a fictional world inside books is blurry. That probably sounds confusing. I'll try to clear it up: In this work of fiction an alternative reality is presented, in that alternative reality there is a world within works of fiction. The line between the fictional real world and the fictional fictional world is blurred. All clear now? No? Better read the books then, starting with The Eyre Affair; you'll love them if you love books.

This, the fifth book, is quite an independent story; as opposed to the preceding three - really a single story. The break between books has also been good for the world of the story. Fforde seems to have spent a lot of time cementing down how the world works. There is none of the drift and none of the continuity problems that the previous books started to show. And of course, for fans of the series there are plenty of cute little jokes. Fforde must remove dozens of these in draft as he always manages to resist the temptation to turn to gimmicks.

As an aside, once you read this book, go read about The Long Now Foundation the 10,000 Year Clock. Don't worry, I haven't given anything away. In fact, go read those now even if you don't plan on reading the book. The review's nearly over.

If you were a little disappointed by Lost in a Good Book or Well of Lost Plots then cast those fears aside. Thursday's back, and she's back on track.

Stardust

Stardust
Neil Gaiman

A very cute, very enjoyable fantasy fairy tale. There really isn't a lot more to it than that: it's simple, plain, well-written escapist fun. Like all of Gaiman's work that I've read (which is nearly all of it) it's very well written, and hell of a lot of fun. Highly recommended.

I was inspired to read this by the movie. It's very similar, the movie was generally pretty faithful. Most of the plot changes were pretty minor: just to streamline and shorten things, largely. The movie expanded the minor characters; they became bigger, more memorable roles. This was probably to attract the big names they got, but wasn't actually a bad thing. Gaiman was very clearly attempting to create a rich supporting cast.

The movie did make one very substantial change. And, with the benefit of reading the book, it was very clearly for the worse; and quite forced. I won't say what that was, except to say the book is better without and the movie would have been equally so.