I recently updated my book list again (to which I shall not link because that makes cutting through my tissue of anonymity simply too easy). This is a list of all the books I have finished, dating back almost a decade at this point, and a 1-10 rating of those books. I do this not only for the idle interest of the general public but because, let’s face it, I’m simply not able to remember everything I’ve read without a list.
Note that this list contains only books which I have finished (and in truth, not all of those). Thus amongst the recent update I have not listed The Gulag Archipelago by Solzhenitsyn, which I’m taking slowly because there’s only so much Gulag a man wants to look forward to, or The Annals of San Francisco, the biography of Johann Sutter, or the book about the conquest of California, all of which I’ve been reading off and on as research, but am skipping parts of because they aren’t the focus of said research.
No, the list contains solely books I’ve read cover to cover. Looking over the recent update, I’ve been going through a larger than usual amount of fiction, compared to nonfiction history, although that’s largely because I got into the Harry Dresden series and went through them all. They were among the best of this update, though the only really exemplary book was in the nonfiction history category, C.V. Wedgwood’s The Thirty Years War, which I mentioned a few weeks ago.
Allow me to run through the list in greater detail. As I say I went through Jim Butcher’s entire Harry Dresden series of novels, and enjoyed them all. They’re real page-turners, although I have to say Butcher veers dangerously near hack writing at times, particularly his insistence with ending each chapter with a puffed-up dramatic statement or inappropriate cliffhanger. But the fantastic elements are top-notch, the characters are enjoyable, the dialogue is fun, and the plot roars along with great interest and excitement.
Whereas the couple of novels in the 1632 series I’ve read recently are exactly the opposite. The plot moves as though it were a plant in a cold climate, the dialogue serves little real purpose, and the historical elements are uncompelling. Which says a lot, given that it is I proclaiming historical elements to be uncompelling. I was also aggrieved to discover that 1634: The Cannon Law was basically the first half of a story; as I was reading, wondering why everything was so slow and when some action might happen, and when said action finally manifest itself how they would resolve it within the last fifteen pages of a three-hundred plus page book, I had no inkling that this entire novel was basically part one. Of how many, I don’t know, but I’m certainly not planning to rush out and purchase the rest.
But compared to Mary Gentle’s The Book of Ash, the 1632 books were literary Nirvana. You won’t see many low ratings on my book list. This is because, if I discover that I don’t like a book, I don’t finish it, and thus it does not appear on the list. Somehow, though, I slogged not only through one of these exercises in wincing and ongoing disappointment but blundered into the second one and finished that, too. And I can only liken the experience to being strapped into a chair while a bad nihilist poet discourses about the meaningless nature of existence, slowly and with terrible grammar, shows large pictures of head wounds and aborted fetuses, and occasionally feeds you cold shit.
So I didn’t like them much. I picked up Glen Cook’s latest paperback thereafter because I knew, having read acres of Glen Cook (e.g. the Black Company series) back in high school and college, that his books were always at least enjoyable and sometimes excellent; this one did not disappoint. I confess I rate it lower than it probably merits because he set the story in a fantasy Europe, containing the same geography and ethnography and religions etc etc as historical Europe - and then renamed everything, and that kept pissing me off. Look, Cook, if you are going to have a fantasy Languedoc that is exactly the same as the real Languedoc except that there is magic in the world, don’t call it the ‘End of Connec’, just fucking call it Languedoc and don’t force me to keep a list of every goddamn thing in the world so that whenever you whip out another of these nonsense names I can figure out if you actually mean Rome or Venice or Egypt or what the fuck ever. Okay?
I went for some nonfiction with Bernstein’s Wedding of the Waters, about the making of the Erie Canal. The book was a gift; I would not have purchased it because I don’t generally like pop history, by which I mean history written with lots of grandiose hand waving and glossing over inconvenient facts and a marked tendency to use dramatic statements at the cost of historical accuracy. And this book had those in spades; at numerous points I knew that Bernstein was making claims or statements that were quite simply false, and more aggravatingly did not need to be made for a reader to have interest. Still, I enjoyed the actual history of it, and it’s a period that is largely overshadowed by what came before and after.
A coworker of mine lent me some Richard Morgan books, which fit pretty neatly into the cyberpunk genre; in the distant future, people can swap bodies easily and thus travel interstellar distances (to colony worlds set up by slow ships) and live theoretically forever. And of course there is murder and crime and rich people and poor people and vice and high-tech guns and all the necessary elements of cyberpunk, and a protagonist who is violent and good at it, a ruthlessly efficient killer beset by his own demons and just occasionally prone to doing nice things because he’s the good guy. It was a fun read, the first book a hair more than the second, and I’ll happily pick up more.
In a similar vein a friend picked up a Lee Child novel, about a tough-guy protagonist who through no fault of his own gets embroiled in the machinations of Bad Guys, and proceeds to execute every last one of the M-Fers. It was a decent read, though I didn’t like the protagonist much.
That led me to pick up two Stephen Hunter novels new in paperback; for my money, Stephen Hunter books are the ne plus ultra of man’s adventure novels, all about how many grains go into a .38 caliber bullet milled in 1952 at Remington’s Youngstown plant, and the men who know those facts and for whom guns are tools, tools that they are deadly good with. See above Richard Morgan protagonist. Havana and Time to Hunt were both good, although not as good as my favorites, Point of Impact and Hot Springs. If these sort of books pique your interest, by the way, I recommend you surf on over to Amazon and read the very first line of Dirty White Boys. It will catch your eye.
After that much men’s adventure I needed some history to stabilize myself, lest I began toting a steely glint and possibly calling my wife “ma’am”. So I picked up Bernard DeVoto’s Pulitzer prize-winning Across the Wide Missouri, which was excellent, about the fur-trapping period of the American west 1830-1840. Absolutely fascinating, a time and place in history I had not read anything about before, and very well told. The book did suffer substantially from being (or seeming to be) a book in a series, and thus giving the reader a strong sense of coming into the story in the middle and leaving before the end, with many references to people and events not within the compass of the book, and a general sense of being told a story by someone who assumes you know much that you do not. But it was an excellent read nonetheless.
And then there was The Thirty Years War, as linked to above. Certainly the best book I have read this year. Really well told, clear without losing complexity, interesting without oversimplification.
- Sun Ra