lethargic_man | January booklog (Reply)

Yes, I said I wasn't going to do this, and I'm still not going to write long reviews of books here; just list what I've been reading so anyone who wants to start a discussion on them can.

Ender's Game, by Orson Scott Card. I found this good, but not outstanding SF. Its one flaw, which I'd have noticed even if I hadn't heard other people mentioning it, is that Ender does not read like a real child, even for a supergenius one. Cf. Cyteen as an example of how to do this well.
Siddhartha, by Hermann Hesse. An example of a "novel", as opposed to a "romance". livredor was telling me of receiving ribbing by literary people for admitting to reading literary novels for the story. I find literary novels leaving out the enjoyable story in favour of the symbolism to be a Bad Thing; this came to the fore for me when I read Heart of Darkness. As an example I recently read of a literary novel which did not make this sacrifice, and had both story and symbolism, cf. Pride and Prejudice. Anyhow, Siddhartha didn't suffer from this problem as badly, but did suffer from it a bit. I liked the way it nicely confounded this reader's expectations, when after we'd been following Siddhartha's leaving home and becoming an itinerant ascetic, the Buddha turned up!
A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur's Court, by Mark Twain. (Warning: spoilers follow.) That's King Arthur's Court as portrayed by Mallory, not anything realistic. Twain puts his own twist on this, though, by having the Britons portrayed as being laughably naive---at least, until King Arthur, incognito with the Yankee, gets sold into slavery. After the bulk of the book was delivered without much feeling (though compensated for by humour), the ending was surprisingly moving. I'd assumed the Yankee had changed things so much we'd ended up on an alternate history, but then when we reach the death of Arthur, much as it is in Mallory, it becomes apparent that everything the Yankee has worked to build is going to be lost, and the story remain on our own timeline.
Iron Dawn, by Matthew Woodring Stover.
Set in Tyre five years after the end of the Trojan war, right at the cusp of the Iron Age, when only the Hittites know how to forge iron, and are guarding the secret jealously. The protagonist, a Pictish mercenary, is hired with her Akhaian and Egyptian companions, to find the sorcerer trying to foment a trade war between the Great Houses of Tyre. (I don't think the Phoenicians were trading as far as the Isle of the Mighty that early, but the book portrays it in a convincing manner.)

The setting is well portrayed^* (though I have my normal little linguistic quibbles^†). I like the interplay of different cultures here -- Rameside Egypt, Mycenaean Greek (with lots of war veterans for whom the Trojan War is forever going to remain the focus of their lives), Cretan refugees from Theseus' overthrow of the Minoan regime, and Middle Eastern:

"It's true," she said firmly. "Everybody knows that Amorites are sorcerers. The Habiru are Amorite tribes^‡, and look what they did to Jericho!"

This stands in nice contrast to the briefly appearing Jewish character in Mary Renault's (otherwise most commendable) The King Must Die, who would have done nicely for a stock Jew a millennium and a half later, but who was a gross anachronism in the time of the Judges.

I also think the author could have been a bit more inventive with the swearing. It's all very Anglo-Saxon, lots of "f**k" and "sh*t" and "f*cking". By contrast, the most common expletive in Arabic today (or at least in Hebrew, where I've heard it used^**) is "Your mother's c*nt!" Not, of course, that I expect the same expletives to be used today as three thousand years ago.

^* Though the author portrays the "Phoenikians" as a different people from the "Kena'ani", disagreeing with the Encyclopaedia Britannica. The Picts, too, seem to be portrayed as Celtic, too, which was mildly disappointing for me; J.P. Mallory's In Search of the Indo-Europeans says though there is very little linguistic evidence to go on, the Picts seem not to have been Celtic, and may not even have been Indo-European at all; and naturally I'd have preferred to have had the book supporting the cooler scenario. ;^)

^† E.g. the adjective used for the House of Jephunah is Jephunahi, but I'm fairly sure it should be Jephuni (as it would be in Hebrew: יפונה --> יפוני); there's an inconsistency, too, between the use of J in this name and Y in, frex, Yeshu (the name later passed through first Greek and then Latin to end up as "Jesus", applied a here to spear-carrying thug :o)). And, from the non-Greek perspective, even the name of the city is wrong; it should be Ṣur.

^‡ Pace daegaer.

^** In Arabic, excuse my French. But in Hebrew it's not much different.
Death and the Penguin, by Andrey Kurkov. I saw someone reading this on the train a couple of years ago, and was intrigued by the title and the blurb on the back:
In today's Ukraine, all that stands between one man and the Mafia is a penguin. Viktor is an aspiring writer with only Misha, his pet penguin, for company. Although he would prefer to write short stories, he earns a living composing obituaries for a newspaper. He longs to see his work published, although the subjects of his obituaries continue to cling to life. But when he opens the newspaper to find his work in print for the first time, his pride swiftly turns to terror and he and Misha are drawn into a trap from which there appears to be no escape.
I don't normally read books just on their blurbs, but when I saw this book in a charity shop a week before a train journey, I saw the nice opportunity to bring the book full circle. (Besides, it was fairly short and only 50p.) Though an enjoyable read, I found the book somewhat flat and detached in delivery. (The blurb is overstated, too; it was not the case that the penguin stood between Viktor and death at the hands of the Mafia; and Viktor never feels the terror the blurb suggests, though in his situation I would have.)
It's not an outstanding book, but it's an interesting view into life in post-Soviet Ukraine -- which, though, isn't as different as I would have expected it to be. And, according to the review on Amazon, many of the strange incidents described in the book really happened; e.g. animals really were given away as pets by cash-strapped zoos in the Ukraine.