Yet more books I read in Aug 2011

As I mentioned in a previous post, in 2011, I used to put quick lists of books I'd read on social media, and only moved to more detailed reviews later in life.

So here are a few summaries from those halcyon days. Latest posts first. Commenters (if any) anonymised.

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2011-08-01

Just finished re-reading: The Money-changers by Arthur Hailey. This book was published in the 70s, and is still a good read. Arthur Hailey was renowned for his exquisite research and believable and engaging characters. (Contrast with a recently re-read Sidney Sheldon, whose characters were like something out of a sitcom trailer (not the sitcom itself, do note).) You may be pleasantly surprised how little the thinking in the 70s actually impinges upon the story. Worth a read. Rating: Very good.

Recently finished (re)reading: The Burning Wire by Jeffery Deaver. Rating: Excellent
Garden of Beasts by Jeffery Deaver Rating: Excellent
The Collectors by David Baldacci Rating: Very good
Risk by Dick Francis (re) Rating: Excellent

Books I read in August 2011

And you're probably wondering, why now?? Well, I just found my reviews, that's why. Duh!

Killing Fear by Allison Brennan. Good

Edge by Jeffery Deaver. Excellent. I'm beginning to think he hasn't written anything mediocre.

Dragon Fire by Humphrey Hawksley. Tolerable. But it made me laugh to see he has a Dixit as the CM of Andrah Pradesh, who has also, at some time (wait for it!), been the Health Minister in Assam. Rotfl unbelievable. There are other goofs, too.

Midway through The Mammoth Book of Short Horror Novels edited by Mike Ashley. Fortunately, with happy endings, so my initial trepidation has been assuaged somewhat (I'm no longer a teenager, so horror stories without happy endings are not so easily brushed off these days). So far, I've read The Monkey by Stephen King, Parasite by Arthur Conan Doyle, The Damned by Algernon Blackwood.

Temporarily abandoned this in favour of The Orc King by RA Salvatore. I'm most bugged with this book's publishers. I picked it up because it clearly says on the cover Book 1 of Transitions so I was reassured I'm starting at the beginning; but then, it seems the main character has already starred in another 13 books in another series. Cheating! Cheating! But Todd Lockwood has painted a wonderfully evocative cover, and I have a quote for you: "I have heard it said that the universal hope of the world is that our children will find a better life than we." I'll live. I'll also post if I'm going to be reading any more books in this or other RAS series.

When is a James Bond story not a James Bond story?

Thriller | Jeffrey Deaver | Carte Blanche

If you like James Bond stories, chances are that you like the Bond movies. Every time the Bond actor changes, there is a lot of controversy. Still, Daniel Craig seems to have got the thumbs up. Until Skyfall. It may be a well-done movie, all nicely directed and shot, with a super-clever villain, nice camerawork and the like. Yet, ask anyone. Was it really a Bond movie? No. The real Bond does not age past 40.

So, does Jeffery Deaver pull off the Bond book? Take a step back. Have you actually read any Bond books? I read quite a few by Ian Fleming, and trust me, they were not worth re-reading. Almost all of the Bond fame came from celebrity endorsement. Until John Kennedy, then President of the USA, mentioned that he found them good for light reading, these books were not bestsellers. Thereafter, they became so famous that it was found churlish to complain that their writing was average, their plots jingoistic, and the humour schoolboyish. Not one of the 'Bond girls' in the books had anything like normality, neither in their appearance nor their names. Octopussy is a name? Come on!

Deaver's Bond has been updated to the 21st century, while retaining his age in the mid-30s. This Bond's history is the newer movies, not the Ian Fleming books, and so he comes with fresh backstory. Which is a good thing.

Deaver's writing is as crisp as ever. The plot fairly whizzes along. There are twists and turns in every chapter. Everyone is thinking three steps ahead of everyone else. You can almost see the movie scenes play out (I hate to say this, but they all look like Craig would fit in them, and not Brosnan). The villain has the Bond villain edge of outlandish villainy, and a name to match. Severan Hydt runs a garbage disposal empire, and loves death and decay. So much that he is willing to quietly dispose of inconvenient dead bodies for criminals.

The action starts with Bond in Serbia, faced with an Irishman, Niall Dunne, about to derail a train carrying MIC, the Bhopal chemical. But that was misdirection. Needless to say, Bond saves the day and the train. And gets drummed out of Serbia for his trouble.

The Bond women in the plot include Ophelia Maidenstone, the South African Bheka (giving her full name is a bit of a spoiler, so I'll merely say it means 'protector'), and Felicity Willing. You can't complain that the names are run-of-the-mill, but they're not as absurd as Fleming's names. One of them gets shot. What did you expect, anyway?

There are gadgets, international travel, fine wine, intra-departmental politicking, fiendish villains, doomsday devices, thousands of lives at stake, chases, shootings, confusion, you name it. Whatever you want in a Bond book, or a movie. Plus, a new, improved James Bond. Who's actually looking for a woman to share a life with.

So, when is a Bond book not a Bond book? When it's a typically Jeffrey Deaver book, with his signature twists and turns. Bond is incidental. Good choice of author, Ian Fleming Publications, but Deaver is taller by far than James Bond.

Which is a good thing.

Jeffery Devious writes another thriller

Thriller | Jeffery Deaver | XO

Jeffery Deaver is one of the most devious writers around. His books have more turns and twists than a jalebi (Westerners think the pretzel is twisted; Indians laugh at their naivete). This one is true to the tradition.

Kayleigh Towne, a brilliant and beautiful singer, is being stalked. Fortunately, she is close friends with Kathryn Dance, my favourite fictional kinesics expert. Dance helps Kayleigh to escape the stalker. Or is the stalker the real villain? People get killed. The truth is finally got at some half a page or so before the end. A true jalebi of a story, typical Jeffery Devious. Read, read.

Time travel with Duke Vimes

Fantasy | Terry Pratchett | Night Watch

What I forgot to mention in the last post was that Jingo featured one of the most immediately recognisable gadgets in all the Discworld books--the Disorganiser, which desperately and futilely attempts to remind Insert Name Here of his appointments throughout the book. In a twist that only the Discworld could come up with, Vimes tells the device in exasperation that it's no use reminding him of appointments he already knows about. How about telling him of appointments he doesn't know about. And that's what happens. Except that, at one point, Vimes in this world makes a decision he doesn't make in the parallel world (if this kind of stuff makes your head hurt, you should avoid science fiction and fantasy entirely), and picks up the wrong Disorganiser, with the result that as the two time paths diverge, he gets to know how narrowly he avoided disaster all around. Bingelly-bingelly-beep!

Now, here's the thing, Night Watch, too, has time travel. This time of the physical pick-up-the-person-and-dump-him-in-the-past type. Vimes, by now Duke, still hasn't learned to delegate chasing villains to his underlings. And the High Energy Magic building's roof is not the place to tempt fate, anyway. So Vimes and the villain end up back in Vimes' past, where he has to protect everyone he loves from the machinations of the 'who, me?' baby-faced and black-hearted villain.

In Night Watch, we meet the monks who manage time and have these large rotating cylinders that warp time. (Somehow, ever since Larry Niven's short story Rotating Cylinders and the Possibility of Global Causality Violation {in turn, swiping the title from a physics paper which describes real-Universe physics, mind-boggling as it may be}, I've had the impression that the large cylinders should be planet-sized or larger LARGE, but on the Discworld, faux-Tibetan cylinders manage well enough.) I suspect that Pratchett realised these monks would mess up any other book of the Discworld, so we don't quite meet them again.

Instead, we also meet, and this is a delight, Vetinari as a student assassin. And the early Sam Vimes, the early Fred Colon, and Nobby Nobbs as an urchin. We also meet the surprise of the citizens and watchmen at the idea of trolls or dwarves in the Watch, which is Pratchett's way of pointing out how the world changes in just half a lifetime. Things which were normal then are unacceptable today, and vice versa. Hey, just look around.

Pratchett has invented many villains, most of whom are plain bigots or ignoramuses with power, but this book has his first frisson-up-the-spine pure psychopath, the type James Patterson or Jeffery Deaver would scare us with, or Stephen King would use to mess with our heads. And, yet, you don't quite think he's the very worst villain in this book.

This is one of Pratchett's best Discworld books. Thud!, which came later, is not as good. But I'm not going to get to Thud! again for a nice long time. You can, instead, consider how singing the national anthem proves that you are a rebel in need of putting down. Go on, read it and realise how many assumptions you live with.

Let me close here, and move on to David Baldacci's Hell's Corner.

[Oh, in closing, the book cover doesn't have the hourglass or weird ring on it. That's just me trying to be artistic, rather unsuccessfully.]

October 2011, SF and fantasy

Science Fiction, Thriller | Elizabeth Moon, Jeffery Deaver

I've finished re-reading the Serrano series by Elizabeth Moon. Sigh. I wanna a Margiu Pardalt story. Wanna. Wanna. Ok, never mind. I must point out that this series is much more deserving of the name 'military science fiction' than Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan series (wait for me to reread :) ). And has a lot of very strong heroines, with good support from the heroes.


FYI, more military SF comes from Eric Flint (mostly re-written historical stories; very good) and David Weber (more futuristic, rather grim; but I've read only a few). There is always the old Berserker series by Fred Saberhagen for die-hard fans, but it hasn't dated well.


Back to Serrano. Book 6 in the Serrano series is Change of Command and book 7 is Against the Odds.


In Change of Command, the Speaker gets assasinated on page one. The evil Lepescu's protegee takes over a prison camp, and seeds a Mutiny in the Fleet. Cecilia runs hither and yon solving people's problems and still being called irresponsible. Brun's mother finds out who killed her husband. Methlin Meharry's brother almost saves everyone. We meet Margiu Pardalt. We also meet Goomar Terakian and his carefree cousin Basil. Brun is visited by a most unexpected Ranger from the Lone Star Federation. The New Texas Militia hit a station. The station hits back. Vida Serrano finds out unexpected things about Altiplano. All in all, not a book you should start reading unless Against the Odds is ready to hand the minute you finish. I honestly wonder how the early readers survived the gap in publication between the two books.


Breathlessly, I flipped the pages quickly to the last of the series, Against the Odds. All the problems I mentioned above are resolved, including new ones like Esmay Suiza gets kicked out of Fleet for marrying Barin. Barin gets into an explosion. Heris gets inexperienced crew. In the interests of avoiding spoilers, I shall avoid mentioning that one of the characters gets killed. Oh, actually, whole lots of them do, especially the villains. :) The Benignity does strange things. The Familias history is explained.


Here is a quote from Against the Odds, since I cannot immediately find the one on religion that I particularly liked (ah, rats, books should be searchable):

"It's not a race."
"Sir?"
"It's not a race. Marriage. There is no "behind" or "ahead". You're not in competition; you're a partnership."

Enjoy!


Currently re-reading: The Coffin Dancer by Jeffery Deaver. Part of the Lincoln Rhyme series, in which a C4 quadriplegic forensic criminologist races to detect the villain before he murders more people.