Reading Roundup, July 2009

In my own personal, private cosmos of books and reading, July is the month where I make a big, heavy line in my book log and start a new year. I could have decided to do this on New Year’s Day, and record my books based on the date but, instead, I decided (thirteen years ago) to go by age. Thus, on my birthday every year I draw the line, make a little notion of my age ( a number which, sadly, keeps getting bigger every year) on the left hand side, and count up.

So, I read 87 books this year.

Not bad, but not great either. It’s almost half my all time record of 190, but that’s not a normal year for me and nor is it likely to happen again. No, average for me would be in the 120 to 150 range, but of course it always depends on just what is being read. While I don’t want to discuss a whole year’s worth of reading in this post, chatter about most of those 87 books can be seen on this site — every review from Before They Are Hanged onwards, everything I reviewed in BG 13 and the Black Gate site, the stuff mentioned in my Roundups, etc. And, before you get the idea that I’m just numbers obsessed, have a look at that article I linked to above about reading logs where I mention some of the perils of falling into that trap. I just use the numbers to motivate me — that and being surrounded by hundreds of unread books has a way of prioritizing reading in one’s life.

So, what did I read in July? Richard K. Morgan’s follow up to the noir-tastic Altered Carbon, Broken Angels, is the first title on the list. Altered Carbon is a tough act to follow, and I think Morgan wisely shifted gears a bit with his hero Takeshi Kovacs and didn’t give us another story with detective elements, opting instead for a more military SF feel. Briefly, it finds Kovacs in the middle of a war on a distant colony chasing an alien artifact. Took a bit for me to get into this one for some reason, maybe because I was expecting another Altered Carbon, but the book eventually grabbed me and wouldn’t let go. Great stuff from a gifted author, and I’m really now looking forward to the third in the series, Woken Furies.

Then there was Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue by John M. McWhorter. McWhorter is a linguist, and he writes popularizing accounts of his discipline with an infectious enthusiasm and thoroughly charming personal style. Bastard Tongue tells the story of English in a concise and interesting way, focusing on why our grammar behaves in the weird way it does. Many books of this type just get hung up on lists of words — these from Old Norse, these from Norman French, these from Church Latin, etc. Bastard Tongue is much more interesting, as it tells the history of the language and presents fresh information that isn’t in the standard account. For instance, we all know vikings beat up the language enough to get rid of all those horrible case endings and gender dependent conjugations that make the rest of European languages so much different than our own (and so damn hard to learn!), but what about the Celtic contribution to grammar in the form of our ‘useless do’ sentences (’Did you go to the park?’ rather than the much more standard ‘Went you to the park?’)? The book outlines just what makes English different (or, better, as we English chauvinists might insist) than other Germanic languages and Indo-European languages in general in a completely captivating way. McWhorter even raises an interesting theory about possible Phoenician influence on Proto-Germanic. Great stuff — and I highly recommend this author’s other books, as well as his lecture from The Teaching Company, for those of you familiar with that resource.

Thomas M. Disch’s Camp Concentration is one of those classics of the genre I’ve only just gotten around to reading. Honestly, I didn’t find it as mind-blowing as its reputation, but it was good nonetheless. It tells the story of a poet who is imprisoned as a conscientious objector in a war-torn future, and who finds himself as part of a government-run intelligence-enhancing experiment. The experimental IQ-booster works dramatically, though fatally, and the prose of the book changes to reflect the mental state of the narrator. Think Flowers For Algernon on Ritalin. The book builds into one of those game-changing big sci-fi endings, but my favorite aspect of it was the exploration of anarchic intelligence loosed from the bonds of formal education and cultural expectations. Still, it isn’t one of those books I’d recommend unreservedly.

The Life of Raymond Chandler by Frank MacShane is an excellent biography on the master of the detective novel, one that looks not just at the man and his personality, but analyzes his writing and treats him as a part of the larger literary world in which he found himself. Chandler is an interesting character himself, American-born but public school educated in Britain, a real gentleman who found himself in the crass world of post-war Los Angeles writing for pulp magazines and, later, for Hollywood. Never feeling like he truly fit in anywhere, always not quit satisfied professionally or privately, Chandler was a man caught between two worlds — a tension that can be read in his fiction. Having only discovered his work a few years ago, I have a completely new enthusiasm and understanding of his fiction from this biography.

And I also finally finished Every Day Fiction’s first ‘Best Of’ anthology, and thoroughly enjoyed it. Consisting of 100 flash fiction stories, it contains a tremendous variety of topics and voices; everything from deep genre to straight literary, and plenty of hybrid stories that lie somewhere in between. I really like the idea of flash anthos, as you can just pick them up and read one or two stories regardless of how busy you are or what other projects you’re involved in. The Best of EDF 2008 was a chance to go back and read some favorite stories and discover many that I hadn’t read before, and I couldn’t be happier to have two of my own pieces alongside so many great stories.