Reading in March 2023

 

Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front

With all the Oscar hype, I thought I better read this classic, which for some inexplicable reason I hadn't read before (possible because I'd seen at least two of the adaptations on tv).  In my mind it was a big, thick book but in fact it's quite slim.

Its reputation is, of course, justified.

Isaac Asimov, The Gods Themselves

According to the blurb on the front, this is Asimov's finest creation.  It's far from that.  But, as novels about entropy go, it's a decent read.

Fred Hoyle, Ossian's Ride

I surprised myself by quite enjoying the Hoyle book I read back in 2021, so I thought I'd give this one a go.  

The problem I had was that Hoyle isn't known for his sublty, so I went in dreading the kind of shaggy dog story an Englishman writing about Ireland in 1959 would put together.  When it developed into a silly spy plot, I gave up on it.  There might be something clever at the heart of the Industrial Corporation of Eire but, if so, I didn't get to it.

Fred Hoyle and Geoffrey Hoyle, Rockets in Ursa Major

I felt guilty about not finishing Ossian's Ride, so decided to give Hoyle another chance with this book which I picked up at the same time.

Apparently it's based on 'a play what he wrote'.  That might explain why it's terse, but not why every so often we get irrelevant details about lifts or things like air traffic control between London and Cambridge (I would rather have seen more effort given to the characters).  It's just not very good, so I didn't finish this one either.

Arthur C Clarke, Childhood's End

So I thought I'd go back to a classic (even if it's aged rather oddly).  One of Clarke's best.

Kevin Crossley-Holland, Between Worlds: Folk Tales of Britain and Ireland

For reasons, I've decided to read up on folklore of the British Isles.  Crossley-Holland is an excellent story-teller, so seemed a good on to start with.

JRR Tolkien, The Silmarillion

I've started listening to The Prancing Pony Podcast (which I heartily recommend).  Each episode covers a chapter of Tolkien's writings starting with the Silmarillion.

So I've decided to re-read this famously difficult book (I read it 30-old years ago and found it hard going) with their guidance.  That's paying off (or it might be that I've acquired the wisdom of years).  No doubt it will take some time...

Reading in February 2023

 

Scott Lynch, The Republic of Thieves

I continued reading the Gentleman Bastards sequence from last month.  In this installment, Locke and Jean are employed by their worse enemies to rig a city election.  To stir things up a little, their opponents' campaign is being run by a long-lost friend.  A side-plot told in flashback is the story of the young Bastards' first forray - blagging their way in the company of actors.

A very enjoyable and fun read.

Richard Osman, The Bullet That Missed

Another outing for the Thursday Murder Club, this time looking into a cold-case involving the disappearance of a reporter.

Neil Gaiman, Stardust

A tale about a young man venturing into Faerie to fulfill a quest for his Lady Love.

Everything a modern fairy story should be.  Quite sublime.

Bayt al Azif, No 4

Another issue of the annual(ish) journal for Cthulhu mythos roleplaying.  It has all the features we've come to expect - high quality production, an over-veiw of publications (in this case for 2020), three scenarios, interviews (here including Mike Mason) and articles.

Brian Lumley, Return of the Deep Ones and Other Mythos Tales

This I'd picked up on a whim because it was heading to the bin.  It was much better than I expected - I thought it was going to be 1980s schlock-horror.  One tale dragged on rather, but the title story was pretty good.

Isaac Asimov, The Foundation Trilogy

I couldn't resist this beautiful hardback edition by Everyman Press collecting the original Foundation books.  It must be over 40 years since I last read them, but I thought they held up rather well.

I dipped into Trillion Year Spree, and Grumpy Old Brian Aldiss tells me not to bother with the very belated sequels, so I won't!

Reading in Dec 2022

Having been bogged down recently in some turgid anthologies, I decided to aim for lighter fare and had a bit of a December splurge...

Isaac Asimov, Earth is Room Enough

A collection of Asimov's short stories, all based on earth.  It being Asimov, there is a proportion of silliness and a couple of groaners, but on the whole good stuff.

Cecily Gayford (ed), Murder on a Winter's Night: Ten Classic Crime Stories for Christmas

The sub-title says it all, really.

Cecily Gayford (ed), A Very Murderous Christmas: Ten Classic Crime Stories for the Festive Season

More of the same...

Both of these books took me back 30 years to a period in which my future wife was introducing me to the glories of green Penguins.  Some good memories there.

I really must read some Margery Allingham and Dorothy L Sayers soon.

Natalie Haynes,  A Thousand Ships

Haynes is well-known as a stand-up comic and classicist - I strongly recommend that you look online and find some of her work (in the UK, you should be able to listen here).

But there aren't many laughs in this marvellous re-telling of the women (and nymphs and goddesses) entangled in the Trojan War.  Epic tradegy, but highly recommended.

Brian Sibley, The Land of Narnia

A brief look at how the Chronicles of Narnia came to be written.  Aimed at younger readers and a large part is taken up with a summary of the books, but Sibley knows his stuff, of course (I imagine he could have done this in his sleep).

C S Lewis, The Magician's Nephew

It makes me feel very old to say that it's over 45 years since I first read this.  There are images in this book that still colour my approach to fantasy - nevertheless, one can still find new sides to old favorites.

C S Lewis, The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe

Being a contrary child, I never read this along with the rest of the Chronicles of Narnia.  I'm pretty sure that this is the first time I've read it at all!

Jonathan Tucker, The Troublesome Priest: Harold Davidson, Rector of Stiffkey

Biography of the Rector of Stiffkey - famously defrocked for immoral relations with prostitutes he was 'rescuing' and pestering shopgirls - who later became a sideshow performer and was killed by a circus lion in Skegness.

Tucker's verdict that Davidson was a fool, but not immoral, might have been alright in 1932 or 2004 (when he was writing), but makes unconvincing reading in 2020.  The man was obviously both a fool and a sex-pest.

CS Lewis, The Horse and His Boy

Lewis takes beyond the borders of Narnia into his Arabian analogue for this tale of runaway orphans, princesses and horses.

CS Lewis, Prince Caspian

The Pesvenie children make their second visit to Narnia, and help legitimise a dynasty.

Currently Reading

Peter Moore, Endeavour: The Ship and the Attitude that Changed the World

A splendid biography of Capt Cook's ship.  

For a little while I lived in a house of an age and location to have overlooked the yard in which Endeavour was being built, so the early chapters were of particular interest to me.

CS Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader

The book that introduced me to Narnia over 45 years ago.  Reading it now, it makes me long for those island-hoping holidays we had in the Western Isles when I was a boy.

Books & Stuff (NS, No 14) - Reading in Mar 2021

For March I set myself the task of reading about Mars.  I didn't really think this through beforehand and if I have a theme month again (and I might), I shall prepare beforehand and stock up on books.  Despite that, I had more books than I read, and there were several I meant to read that I didn't quite get to.  I also didn't quite make the balence between fiction and non-fiction I wanted.  

In these respects Mars Month was a bit of a failure, as it didn't work as a deep-dive into my shelves.  One reason for that is (almost by defination) a lot of the books I have is quite dated; to get up-to-date info on Mars exploration I turned to the Internet and also listened to dozens of hours of podcasts.  This lead to a little 'Mars burn-out' and meant that at the end of the day I just didn't want to pick up a book on the subject.  I also significantly undersetimated my ability to absorb technic data - it's a long time since I had to do any 'homework'!

The lesson to me is that a themed month is OK, but it shouldn't be at the exclusion of everything else.

If any of you are tempted to ever have a Mars Month, there are a couple of useful Wikipedia pages on Mars in Fiction and Mars in Culture.

Here they are in the order I read them (do persevere through the lengthy discussion of The Red and Green Planet).

H G Wells, The War of the Worlds

I started with the grand-daddy of all 'alien invasion' books.  

I've always enjoyed the economy of Wells' writing and War of the Worlds gives an account of the invasion without any fat (even down to the fact that very few characters are named).  Despite that, it remains a very powerful story.

Of course, I'm of the age that when I read certain passages of this, I hear the voice of Richard Burton or David Essex.  Given the comments on my previous post, it seems that a number of you are too!

Thunderchild's Last Stand by Scot Andrew Bailey

Hubertus Strughold, The Green and Red Planet

The first thing that must be said is that this is the product of a shameful chapter in the history of science.  For me, at least, this makes it uneasy reading.

Strughold was a German physiologist who took an early interest in aviation medicine and, in particular, high-altitude flight.  From 1935 to 1945 he served as director of the Research Institute for Aviation Medicine in Berlin (from 1939 part of the Luftwaffe).  At the end of the war he was initially sought as a war criminal due to his complicity in experiments carried out on inmates of the Dachau concentration camp (it later emerged that he had also carried out oxygen-deprevation experiments on children scheduled to be killed as 'mentally unfit').  However, he was one of those scientists deemed by the Americans to be too useful to face justice and - as part of Operation Paperclip - he was relocated to the United States where he worked for the US Air Force and, later, NASA.  He died in 1986, lauded as the 'Father of Space Medicine'.

All of which is why I'm going to give a lengthier than normal justification of why I have the book on my shelves and have bothered to read it.

The Green and Red Planet is one of the first (if not the first) to give a popular account of the new disciplines of astrobiology and planetary ecology.  It was published at an interesting time (1954) and should be seen as part of a movement promoting the scientific exploration of space as a national goal for the US - von Braun and others had published their 'Man Will Conquer Space Soon!' articles in Collier's in 1952 and their Disneyland TV series would appear in 1955.  There is no doubt that this popular movement was influential in the Eisenhower Adminstration's decision to estabish NASA in 1958 and move rocket and satellite research out of military hands.

The first half of the 96-page book gives an introduction to astrobiology before moving on to Mars.  He gives us a planet where atmospheric pressure is the equivilent of 55,000ft above sea level and temperature ranges don't vary much from those found on Earth.  Of course, we now know these figures are wrong, but this is the definitive statement of the optimistic side of the argument for life on Mars as it was pushed until some of the basic assumptions on things like surface temperature and atmospheric conditions were proven wrong by the Mariner fly-bys of 1965 and 1969.  As such, it is a useful tool when reading pre-probe literature on the planet.

'Robinson Crusoe on Mars' (1964)

Isaac Asimov, The Martian Way and Other Stories

Only the title story of this collection is about Mars, but that's good enough to hit this month's theme.  Even that story isn't mainly set on the planet.  Ostensibly it's about solving the problem of lack of water there, but really it's about what John Wyndham called 'the Outward Urge' and Turner's (pretty much discredited) Frontier Thesis, both of which are major themes in Asimov's writing.

Asimov always gives good value and the other stories are worth reading.  The best of the lot is probably 'Sucker Bait', a very Asimov-y tale.

John Wyndham and Lucas Parkes, The Outward Urge

This is Wyndham's account (Lucas Parkes was one of his pen-names) of the human drive to populate the solar system, told through several generations of one family who happen to be present at crucial events.

It has an interesting chronology which allows for stories at 50-year intervals: - space stations in 1994, the first Moon landing in the 2020s, the first Mars landing in 2094, the first Venus landing in 2144 and mining the Asteroid Belt in 2194.

Charles Cockell (ed), Life Beyond: From Prison to Mars

The results of a colaboration between the UK Centre for Astrobiology at the University of Edinburgh and the Scotish Prision Service, whereby inmates took part in short courses focussing on the problems of human colonisation of Mars.

Note that this is 'colonisastion' rather than 'settlement' - the starting point is 50 years after the establishment of the first base.  As such, it is 'Red Sky' thinking and glibly throws around assumed technology such as fusion reactors and the availability of graphine for construction.

Given that the plans here are the products of laymen's after only a few weeks' work, they're excellent pieces of work.  A subsequent series of courses look at living on the Moon, also producing a book (I may get that at some stage).

Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles

A lyrical classic which I've never read (I tried Bradbury as a teenager, but was put off by the lack of rayguns).

Perhaps the opposite of the Frontier Thesis I mentioned above.  Here the frontier doesn't serve as a catalyst making mankind better, it just serves to show that where-ever we go, we just bring along the same old baggage.

What I didn't read...

As I said, I had several books lined up which I didn't get round to.  Some I might read in future months.

As far as fiction goes, I've never read Edgar Rice Burrough's Barsoom Series - I've only read A Princess of Mars (to be honest, I think I would need a good reason like a theme month to launch into it).  For light relief between heavier books I had a couple of Heinlein juveniles - Red Planet and Space Family Stone.  Also to be re-read as relief (because I always enjoy it so much) was Any Weir's The Martian.  And for slightly less light relief was CS Lewis' Out of the Silent Planet.

Non-fiction wise, I think I should have started by re-reading Oliver Morton's Mapping Mars, which is the best book I've read on the subject, and Patrick Moore on Mars.  I had hoped to get around to a book I have on the Beagle 2 probe and Colin Pillinger's autobiography My Life on Mars, which are still firmly on my to-read list.