3) The Last Hero: A Discworld^® Fable, by Terry Pratchett, illustrated by Paul Kidby.

I think this is one of Pratchett's best short books. Lots of humorous yet poignant meditating on heroism, age and death; but also lots of knowing references to everything: classical myth, Neil Armstrong, Catch-22; barbarians, gods, Lord Vetinari and the triumphant return of Rincewind. Paul Kidby's illustrations are great as well; of course the characters end up as caricatures, because that's what they are on the page as well, but he has really captured both Rincewind and Cohen the Barbarian beautifully; also his sketches as by Leonard of Quirm are a very nice touch. Recommended.

4) Wintersmith

The latest Terry Pratchett to appear in paperback, continuing his Tiffany Aching series after A Hat Full of Sky. This is a tremendously accomplished novel. Thirteen-year-old Tiffany's struggles with her own imminent adulthood are beautifully contrasted with the Wintersmith's attempt to become human, and with Tiffany's rival Annagramma's attempts to become a real witch. As ever, Pratchett's basic message is a very human and compassionate one.

This is all combined with his usual firecracker wit, and although there are also plenty of vignettes from the characters in the previous books of his Witches sub-sequence, I think even a reader who had read none of the previous Discworld novels would enjoy this.

Not sure how I saw the first two of these, the third is off the Dublin sector of my friends-list.

Reading guide to Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels

The Cambridge Facebook Song

sciamanna's recipe collection

4) Sourcery, by Terry Pratchett (.co.uk, .com)

I have to say that this is not one of pterry's greatest hits. Rincewind is really a one-joke character, and the proof of Pratchett's genuis is that he stretched the joke out over two excellent books, The Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic. The wizardly bits of Sourcery are done better in the earlier books, and the exotic foreign parts are better done in later books; the humour hits unrelentingly on the single note of bathos, with very little wit to enliven it. Though I did like this exchange, about why the magic carpet goes up when you tell it to go down, and vice versa:

"How did you get the carpet to fly? Does it really do the opposite of what you command?"
"No. I just paid attention to certain fundamental details of laminar and spatial arrangements."
"You've lost me there," she admitted.
"You want it in non-wizard talk?"
"Yes."
"You put it on the floor upside down," said Rincewind.

Anyway, I shall look out for Wintersmith when in London next week.

Top UnSuggestions for this book: seven evangelical Christian books, and then Runaway, a short story collection by Alice Munro.

In 2006 I read over 200 books - lost count but I think the final tally was 207 - up considerably from last year's 137. This was partly because I read quite a lot of shorter books, but also I think I did more travelling where it was easy to keep reading. In addition, I had a few attempts at sertting up small reading programmes for myself, such as the Unread Books Project and pursuing a couple of obscure authors, which actually gives you an incentive to read them fairly quickly so that you can get on with the next sf paperback.

Comics

I read six graphic novels in 2006 (down from eight in 2005).

Non-fiction

I read 70 non-fiction books, about 34% of my total reading; an increase on both counts from 40 and 29% last year. ( Read more... )

Fiction

I read 131 fiction books this year, up considerably in number (but not in proportion) from 89 last year. ( Read more... )

SF

I read 101 books in the sf field this year, counting seven non-fiction books on sf topics, which is up from last year's 79 (but down in percentage terms, from almost two-thirds to less than half). ( Read more... )

Books of the Year

Non-fiction

In no particular order: Robert Cooper's The Breaking of Nations is a brilliant examination of what international politics is about by a senior practitioner; Lost Lives is harrowing but essential reading for anyone interested in Ireland's recent past; and Indefensible unexpectedly develops from being a day in the life of a defence lawyer to an exploration of the possibility of redemption. Honourable mentions to Fanny Kemble's first person account of slavery in the Old South, Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation, and Ron Chernow's biography of Alexander Hamilton.

Fiction

Although I read many classics of non-genre fiction this year, the two I enjoyed most were an unpretentious children's book, The Warden's Niece by Gillian Avery, a charming children's novel set in nineteenth-century Oxford; and Ismail Kadarë's The File on H, a very thought-provoking exploration of Albania and its relations with the outside world.

SF

Only one of my top four sf books was published for the first time in 2006, and that was a compilation of the author's previous work: Impossible Stories, which pulls together Zoran Živković's visions (many previously published in Interzone) and makes a satisfying if somewhat mysterious read. I thought that Terry Pratchett hit all the right notes with Thud!, an allegory on sectarianism and bigotry - not in themselves new themes for Pratchett, but done somehow more sure-footedly here. Similarly, of the past Nebula winners, I particularly liked Elizabeth Anne Scarborough's account of the Vietnam War through a mildly fantastic lens, The Healer's War. And I can't understand why I had not previously heard much about The Wreck of The River of Stars by Michael F. Flynn, a superb hard sf story about the crew of a doomed spaceship, with characters and scenes that lingered in my mind for months after I had closed the cover.

9) Pyramids, by Terry Pratchett

A bit surprised at myself for not having read this before. I remember Terry Pratchett coming to Cambridge to speak at a CUSFS meeting in, I suppose, 1988, and reading bits of this to us - the bit in the dormitory where young Arthur is trying to say his prayers, and I think also the scene parodying Plato's Symposium. I must have started reading it at one point, because I remember the line about the eight heraldic hippos, who, if danger ever threatens Ankh-Morpork, will run away. But there was lots more I didn't remember, so I must have been reading it for the first time (including the quote in the icon for this post). As always, very good fun, with lots of material packed in tightly with wit. Not as deep as his later books, which is hardly surprising.

Top UnSuggestion for Pyramids: Systematic theology: an introduction to biblical doctrine by Wayne Grudem

Someone challenged me to find an UnSuggestion where I was the only person to own both books. I have a couple of near misses - while I do own copies of Good Omens, the top UnSuggestion for both Gilead and John Adams, and I also own Goodnight Moon, the top UnSuggestion for Native Tongue by Carl Hiassen, I have omitted to put either of the UnSuggestions in question in my catalogue.

But eventually I found a case where I not only own both books but they are both in my LibraryThing, so I am indeed the only user to have catalogued both (and have reviewed both on this journal). The top UnSuggestion for Tom Shippey's J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century is The Alchemist by Paolo Coelho. Not surprised - I found the latter insipid and self-indulgent, and the former dense but rewarding.

Well, that's a satisfying start to the weekend!

Edited to add: Gosh, here's another one that is a bit more surprising - the top UnSuggestion for Russell Shorto's superb history of New Amsterdam, The Island at the Centre of the World, is the equally superb first volume of George R.R. Martin's "Song of Ice and Fire" fantasy series, A Game of Thrones. Do enthusiasts for early American history have and aversion to epic fantasy, and vice versa? I wonder.

(Funny) A very long list of quotes from Terry Pratchett

(Serious) liz_marcs examines memory and reality

12) A Hat Full of Sky, by Terry Pratchett

The first I've read of the Tiffany Aching series. Obviously meant for young adults but a good read for everyone, I think, with a typically humanitarian message. My favourite line was:

"AAaargwannawannaaaagongongonaargggaaaaBLOON!" which is the traditional sound of a very small child learning that with balloons, as with life itself, it is important to know when not to let go of the string. The whole point of balloons is to teach small children this.

It's that "as with life itself" that really makes it memorable.

Back home, and counting the cost of my visit to P-Con and then to Hodges Figgis and Waterstone's on Dawson Street the next day:

( bookspoils )

OK, I'm giving up books for Lent. Or something.

3) Thud!, by Terry Pratchett

(There is a spoiler behind the cut-tag. If you don't want spoilers click here and scroll past the entry about Maastricht.)

The last Pratchett I read which I felt had real relevance to my work was The Fifth Elephant, and so I shouldn't be surprised that Thud!, which revisits some of the same themes and characters, rang particular bells for me. Indeed, outside the works of ianmcdonald and one solitary novel by Mildred Downey Broxon, I can't think of any sf novel that comes as close to tackling the Northern Ireland question as does Thud!. (I've always been convinced, mind you, that we are meant to understand a strong Northern Ireland subtext to Life of Brian. I may enlarge upon this at some point.)

There is the obvious point about the commemoration of a bygone battle, remembering 1690, 1916, or whatever. There is the obsession with visual representation of the battle. We are told that the descendants of the two sides like to engage in commemorative parades and also commemorative punch-ups. It's all rather familiar.

Not that I'm saying we are meant to read Thud! as anything other than a commentary on intolerance and bigotry in general, rather than on one particular historical or geographical instance of it. To take one possible alternative reading, I'm well aware of the significance of the 1389 Battle of Kosovo (having recently revisited its site), which also has a famous visual representation attached to it. To take another point, the theological debates of the "deep-down dwarfs" are clearly meant to be more reminiscent of debates in contemporary Islam than of anything else. (Though such repugnant fundamentalism is not restricted to Islam.)

There are points of departure, of course. In our world, people tend to read their history at different rates. So, for Ulster Loyalists, 1690 is the big date; for Irish Nationalists it's an irrelevance, a struggle between two foreign kings, and the big dates are either from the twelfth century or (more often) the twentieth. (Though even there with certain omissions.) Likewise, for Albanians, the big anniversary is the end of November not July, commemorating Skanderbeg and the first raising of the Albanian flag. And if both sides actually do agree on the crucial date (Bosnia 1992-95, Cyprus 1974, Israel/Palestine 1948) it doesn't really mean that solving the problem gets any easier...

And of course, most important, this is a Terry Pratchett novel; so we pretty much know from the beginning that ( spoiler )

There were other things I liked. The idea of the wargame, Thud!, turning out to be something that drew people together seemed instinctively right to me. My main such activity growing up in Belfast was the School of Music; I myself ascended to the dizzy heights of second percussionist of the City of Belfast Youth Orchestra. But I know that the Modeller's Nook on Winetavern Street was a focus for wargaming across the barricades. At about the same time there was a brief boom in Northern Ireland-based postal Diplomacy fanzines, of which the best was probably Philip Murphy's Morrigan, which alone had a determinedly (perhaps even unconsciously) cross-community ambience. I'm sure Northern Ireland's chess club federation is similarly non-denominational. (Unlike, interestingly, the Scouts.)

I also liked the description of the battle panorama as a conceptual breakthrough devised by an insane architect. I can now comfortably predict that for the next few decades, casual visitors to the venerable panorama at Waterloo (or the less well-known one in Lucerne) will turn to each other and say, "Gosh, I wonder if they got the idea of doing this from Terry Pratchett?" (Is there any such panorama in the UK - especially of a military nature?) Interestingly, the deranged artist expiring in his studio also has a Belgian precedent (though unconnected with the Battle of Waterloo as far as I know).

And of course particularly gratifying was the spoof of the Da Vinci Code, a book with no virtues and much fodder for conspiracy theorists. Except that of course Pratchett's version does turn out to have some validity in the end. Hmmm...

Several things arrived by post today.

Three books sent by their author(s):

• Da nije bilo Oluje i drugi eseji / Who saved Bosnia and other essays by Vitomir Miles Raguž
• Media Guide to the New Scottish Westminster Parliamentary Constituencies, compiled and edited by David Denver, Colin Rallings & Michael Thrasher
• The Media Guide to the New Parliamentary Constituencies, Colin Rallings & Michael Thrasher

And Interzone, though I've only glanced at it so far. Who is Michael Lohr? And why does he feel the need to apologise to us quite so abjectly for doing a duff interview with Terry Pratchett?

Two great links. From zhaneel69, love for gamers (you have to listen past the first minute). And, via, yhlee, sienamystic on Mary Gentle's Ash: A Secret History - good spoiler-free review of a favourite book.

Am sitting here listening to The Celts Strike Again, the second album of The Orthodox Celts, a fairly standard Irish music band except that they are Serbs:

She is handsome, she is pretty, she's the belle of Belgrade city

which is not quite the wording I am used to.

9) Lords and Ladies, by Terry Pratchett

Idly looking through the Pratchett books available on Amazon, I thought to try and sort them by customer rating; and Guards! Guards! is top, followed by Lords and Ladies. Hmm, I thought, that's one we seem to have on the shelves, but I haven't read it. So I have read it. And it's fine; would probably mean more to me if I knew Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream better, but very enjoyable none the less - coherent plot, credible characters (including the briefly but nicely sketched relationship between almost-newlyweds Magrat and Verence). Along with horrible combat between mortals and the sinister, powerful elves, there are some beautiful comedic moments like this description of Nanny Ogg's preparations for her bath, and the neighbours' defences against her singing in it:

        Three large black kettles steamed by her fireside. Beside them were half a dozen towels, the loofah, the pumice stone, the soap, the soap for when the first soap got lost, the ladle for fishing spiders out, the waterlogged rubber duck with the prolapsed squeaker, the bunion chisel, the big scrubbing brush, the small scrubbing brush, the scrubbing brush on a stick for difficult crevices, the banjo, the thing with the pipes and spigots that no one ever really knew the purpose of, and a bottle of Klatchian Nights bath essence, one drop of which could crinkle paint.
        Bong clang slam...
        Everyone in Lancre had learned to recognize Nanny’s pre-ablutive activities, out of self-defense.
        “But it ain’t April!” neighbors told themselves, as they drew the curtains.
        In the house just up the hill from Nanny Ogg’s cottage Mrs. Skindle grabbed her husband’s arm.
        “The goat’s still outside!”
        “Are you mad? I ain’t going out there! Not now!”
        “You know what happened last time! It was paralyzed all down one side for three days, man, and we couldn’t get it down off the roof!”

As I mentioned earlier, however, I was really struck by the similarities with Neil Gaiman's "A Midsummer Night's Dream", collected in Dream Country (Sandman Vol 3). In Gaiman's story (which won the World Fantasy Award, provoking a rule change so that comics could never win in that category again), Shakespeare premieres his play at the Long Man of Wilmington at the request of Morpheus/Dream, for an audience consisting of the real Titania, Oberon, and their subjects. Pratchett has a performance of a play by Rude Mechanicals opening a gateway for the elvish incursion into the Discworld and their attempt to take over Lancre. Gaiman's story was published in September 1990; Lords and Ladies in 1992 (the same year as Small Gods which remains my favourite Discworld novel), and it's difficult to imagine Pratchett not having read his friend's award-winning story. I am not to accusing anyone of stealing ideas, but only noting that it's not surprising that authors who know each other well are often drawn to the same topics. I have found a quote by Pratchett on Gaiman commenting that the two of them "share a similar conceptual universe - we'd both agree happily that he has the darker end of it".

This also has one of the few Pratchett quotes in Thog's Masterclass, with the anatomically improbable statement: "The bat burped. Granny genteelly covered her hand with her mouth."

Am now reading Lords and Ladies, Terry Pratchett's take on "A Midsummer Night's Dream", and pondering the similarities and differences with Neil Gaiman's version from Sandman. The two of them have often tackled similar themes in different ways, witness Hogfather and American Gods.

And of course, both of them have anthropomorphised Death as a recurrent character who likes to wear black, with an extended family. Though if you look at the two pictures below, you may spot certain subtle differences in the way each author portrays the character.

Death, by Pratchett	Death, by Gaiman

See what I mean?

7) Hogfather, by Terry Pratchett

I wasn't especially expecting to like this book. The humour of inventing unrealistic characters and then putting them in a difficult position has always seemed contrived to me. But a sudden impulse hit me in Vienna airport last week, and I bought it. And I rather liked it. I must get more of the Susan Sto Helit sub-series - she is a great character.

OK, I wasn't really sure that the plot made total sense in the end. The means and motivation of the villains, and to a certain extent of Death, are not so well explained. But Pratchett has managed to pack an awful lot of layers of allusion about families, celebrations, belief and morality into the story - and I think he does it rather better than Neil Gaiman in American Gods. I've been having fun glancing through this list to see what references I missed.

Two bits I didn't miss were his nods to Arthur C Clarke - when Stibbons explains to the Archchancellor that his computer works by "sufficiently advanced magic", and then a bit later on a paraphrase of HAL 9000 when Hex announces, "I Am Fully Recovered And Enthusiastic About My Tasks". Clarke of course is famous for wanting to explore spirituality without invoking God. Pratchett here is invoking gods, and many of them, but I think Clarke would be comfortable with the result.

And of course the main point of reading a Pratchett book is for the humour. The "Blue Bird of Happiness" was a particularly great moment of bathos. And you can't beat one-liners like "I'm sure he wouldn't keep on eating them if they were addictive."

Good stuff.

10) Going Postal, by Terry Pratchett

This book was famously withdrawn from the Hugo awards shortlist by its author, on the basis that he wanted to relax and enjoy the WorldCon. It's impossible to know how well it would have done; it's a very different book from the five that were actually on the list. His personal popularity, plus the fact that none of his novels had previously made it to the Hugo shortlist, would certainly have gained him a large sympathy vote for his entire œuvre, not just for this book.

I would still have voted for ianmcdonald, but nonetheless, this is a good book, one of the best of the Discworld series. The basic plot is that Lord Vetinari appoints a petty criminal to run the Ankh-Morpork postal service. He invents stamps, and must confront the "clacks" semaphore signallers, in one of Pratchett's better characterised narratives of personal redemption.

The background of Pratchett's well-established fantasy world, undergoing its own sort of industrial revolution is further developed; the clacks system combines the failings of post-privatisation British railways and telecoms. As well as lots of golems and the first proper banshee of the Discworld series, we encounter more human weird creatures in the form of Discworld's own versions of philatelists and phone phreaks.

And the whole thing is leavened by characteristic flashes of wit, such as the minor goddess Anoia, whose field of operation is Things That Stick In Drawers:

Often, but not uniquely, a ladle, but sometimes a metal spatula or, rarely, a mechanical egg-whisk that nobody in the house admits to ever buying. The desperate mad rattling and cries of 'How can it close on the damn thing but not open it? Who bought this? Do we ever use it?' are as praise unto Anoia.

And then the punchline:

She also eats corkscrews.

How true.

Eating with pickwick and her beau. We tried to recognise the bearded guy at next table. Then Terry Pratchett put his hat on.

6) Monstrous Regiment, by Terry Pratchett. Pratchett on form is not only funny but also profound - I think Small Gods is his peak, and I found The Fifth Elephant surprisingly apposite when I was in Macedonia during the 2001 conflict. I had quite high hopes for Monstrous Regiment, and it started well, but I felt had run out steam by the end of quite a long book - in particular, the joke of yet another supposedly male soldier turning out to be a woman had run very stale by the end. Still, helped me pass a slightly sleepless night.

5) After the King: Stories in Honor of J.R.R. Tolkien, ed Martin H Greenberg, introduction by Jane Yolen

I picked this up for €5 or so, remaindered in the Leuven bookshop, and was very pleasantly surprised. Nineteen short stories by various fantasy authors, all more or less in the Tolkien vein; two or three clunkers (Dennis McKiernan, Mike Resnick), but the average being very good and several excellent - Stephen Donaldson, Gregory Benford, and a particularly impressive foray by John Brunner, who eschewed the fantasy setting chosen by most of the others and wrote a piece set in England in 1921. I had read the Terry Pratchett piece somewhere else ("She's always going on about billy goats. I have no knowledge whatsoever about billy goats") but I am surprised not to have encountered any of the others before - this collection was published in 1992 for the centenary of Tolkien's birth. Perhaps that just shows how little fantasy I read as compared to sf.