In Which We Discuss Books I've Read Recently

I kind of lost track of noting down the books I'd read each week.  I'm tempted to begin again; I recently turned 26, right between Into the Fourth at Trebizon and The Myth of the Money Tree, so it wouldn't be too difficult to do posts on the books I read every week aged 26.  I'll think about it; I'm already one and a half behind for that.

You can see I've been rereading the Trebizon series.  I read a couple of them as a child, though I never had the entire set.  They're £2.99 each on Kindle, and they take about half an hour each.  They're set in a boarding school in Cornwall, and were originally published in the late eighties and early nineties.  Very simple, but sweet.  They're quite comforting.

I'd been meaning to get ahold of a copy of Alison Bechdel's Funhouse for ages.  I bought it from Foyles in London.  I've been stressed and depressed recently, so a friend took me down there first class, installed me a Canary Wharf apartment, gave me £200 and a pre-loaded Oyster Card and told me to have fun.  It was fun, until I realised that I was actually still pretty depressed and got taken to hospital.  Funhouse probably seems an odd choice in those circumstances; it's autobiographical, about Bechdel dealing with her own sexuality, and her father's sexuality and suicide.  It didn't bother me, mostly because I didn't personally relate to the issues of Bechdel's father.  I've never struggled with repressing aspects of my personality - my issues are more to do with my impulsiveness.

The scooter book I read because I took my CBT at the end of July.  Didn't pass - couldn't get the hang of the throttle in the short time we were allowed.  Authority and Looking for Alaska I read for bookclubs.

Mounted by the Minotaur  I read purely out of curiosity.  Someone at one of the aforementioned bookclubs had pointed out the existence of dinosaur and mythological erotica on amazon, and I couldn't help but read some of it.  It was free!

Plague of Angels, Last Girlfriend on Earth, Amanda's Wedding and Jemima J were all books I love, and I found it comforting to reread them recently.  I woke up early, the first night I spent with a man I really - loved?  Wanted? - and read a hundred pages of Amanda's Wedding lying next to him.  That's over now.  Plague of Angels was also for a bookclub, this Sunday.

On Gold Mountain by Lisa See was quite interesting.  I've read and loved a few of her books before, and I didn't realise she was mixed.  It was quite interesting reading about the history of a Chinese family in America.  I'm mixed Indian/British, so my family history isn't the same, but there are parallels with other mixed people.

Sharp Objects and The House We Grew Up In are both by authors I've liked in the past, so I thought I'd give these new novels a go.  I didn't like Gillian Flynn's Sharp Objects as much as Gone Girl but it was pretty good.  The House We Grew Up In was pretty good too, but not as good as my favourite Lisa Jewell novels - One Hit Wonder, or A Friend of the Family or The Making of Us.

Soul Identity  had an interesting premise; it's about a world in which people can track reincarnation by the pattern in your eyes.  There's no way to recover memory or experiences, beyond leaving a diary for your future self, so that form of reincarnation doesn't seem to have any practical value.  If I don't have my body or my memories or my personality, am I still me?  Purely because the pattern in my eyes is the same?  I'm not totally sure I'm on board with this.  I'd rather gain immortality by not-dying, personally.

The two cookbooks I mostly read in order to get them off my unread pile.  Nothing too special in them, although I did finally use my slow cooker for something, which was nice.  Finally, the poetry; I have a collected edition of Sophie Hannah's poems, but they don't include anything from Hotels Like Houses.  Plus, the man I mentioned earlier was talking a lot about joining the 27-club, and I wanted to show him Your Death is Not Allowed.  He turned 28 last Sunday, so at least I don't need to worry about that.

In Which We Discuss Ancillary Justice

Let's go to wikipedia.

Ancillary Justice is a science fiction novel by the American writer Ann Leckie, published in 2013. It is Leckie's debut novel and the first in her "Imperial Radch" trilogy of space opera novels. The novel follows Breq — the sole survivor of a starship destroyed by treachery, and the vessel of that ship's artificial consciousness — as she attempts to revenge herself on the ruler of her civilization.

I read this recently for a book group.  Unfortunately, I won't be able to make the actual discussion, so I'm going to write a brief review here.

At first, I wasn't that into the book.  I just couldn't pay attention to anything in the first chapter or two, which meant I was hopelessly confused as to what was happening where and when and to whom later on.  Even with that, the novel really picked up and became quite absorbing towards the end.

I did quite like the fact that the Radchai empire didn't differentiate between genders.  Leckie got around this by using all female pronouns.  It was an interesting and slightly disorientating technique; I pictured the majority of characters as presenting as female, even though characters from other societies explicitly read them as male.  I'd have been happier with 've' personally, but it's such an unusual conceit that how it was executed is less important right now than that it was.

What was interesting about that was that it made me constantly misgender characters by picturing them all as female-signalling.  Ve or Ze wouldn't have had that effect; I'd have remained aware that I couldn't picture any gender signals because they weren't apparent/Breq wasn't picking them up.

I enjoyed the general set-up that we could see of the Radchai empire, and I liked the way it was ruled by one person in endlessly cloned bodies.  I'm not totally overwhelmed with interest, so I'm not sure yet whether I'd read the other books or not.  Glad to have had the experience though; think I gave it three stars.

In Which We Discuss Male Benefactors

At the latest meeting of my feminist bookgroup - we read A Room of One's Own - I had a realisation.

I've recently been rereading A Little Princess at work, and a comment in A Room of One's Own made me think of it, and of Ballet Shoes.  Both books focus on female characters.  There are only one or two male characters, and in both books, they are the benefactor.  Their disappearance - and the disappearance of the money - is a huge factor in moving the plot along.  The heroine(s) suffer through hard times for a while, struggling along and learning things and then - happily - the benefactor comes back and brings the money with him.  The money is still needed; although the main characters have struggled through adversity and found their own ways in the world, they were still approaching disaster without the money.

This post has been sitting here unfinished for a while, so I'll just leave that thought here for now.

In Which We Discuss Firestarter

I first read Firestarter several years ago, in a collection with Eyes of the Dragon.  I'm not totally sure why they were lumped together especially considering that Firestarter came out in 1980 and Eyes of the Dragon came out in 1987.  They're not similar in theme, either.

Firestarter is about a man who took part in an experiment while in university, along with his future wife.  The drugs they were given gave them psychokinetic powers.  They have a daughter who has stronger powers, specifically, the ability to create fire.  The entire book is basically them running from the US government.  More specifically, they're running from The Shop, which is also the agency who tried to contain Captain Tripps in The Stand.

It isn't one of my favourite King novels.  This time, I listened to it as an audiobook, and it took me more than two months.  I just couldn't get into it.  I love the ending, but the book just doesn't interest me as much as some of his others.  James Smythe explains it all rather better.

At the end of the book, King mentions that both the USA and Russia have spent money in investigating paranormal and psychokinetic abilities, which he seems to find both terrifying and fascinating.

I quite want to read another collection of King's short stories, but it'll be 1985 before I get to one.  Here's the updated list with the dates I finished them this time round.  The ones in red I have read previously, while the ones in blue were new to me.

Carrie - 1974 -  June 15th 2013
'Salem's Lot - 1975 - June 30th 2013
The Shining - 1977 - July 28th 2013
Rage - 1977 - July 31st 2013
Night Shift - 1978 - August 28th 2013
The Stand - 1978 - March 20th 2014
The Long Walk - 1979 - March 23rd 2014
The Dead Zone - 1979 - June 2014
Firestarter - 1980 - August 16th 2014


- Checkpoint -

Roadwork - 1981
Danse Macabre - 1981
Cujo - 1981
The Running Man - 1982
The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger - 1982

Creepshow - 1982
Different Seasons - 1982 
Christine - 1983
Pet Sematary - 1983
Cycle of the Werewolf - 1983

The Talisman - 1984
Thinner - 1984
Skeleton Crew - 1985
It - 1986
The Eyes of the Dragon - 1987

The Dark Tower II: The Drawing of the Three - 1987
Misery - 1987
The Tommyknockers - 1987
Nightmares in the Sky  - 1988
The Dark Half - 1989

Four Past Midnight - 1990
The Dark Tower III: The Waste Lands - 1991 
Needful Things - 1991
Gerald's Game - 1992
Dolores Claiborne - 1992

Nightmares & Dreamscapes - 1993
Insomnia - 1994
Rose Madder - 1995
The Green Mile - 1996
Desperation - 1996

The Regulators - 1996
Six Stories - 1997
The Dark Tower IV: Wizard and Glass - 1997
Bag of Bones - 1998
Storm of the Century - 1999 

The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon - 1999
The New Lieutenant's Rap - 1999  
Hearts in Atlantis - 1999
Blood and Smoke - 1999
"Riding the Bullet" - 2000  

On Writing - 2000
Secret Windows - 2000 
The Plant - 2000      
Dreamcatcher - 2001
Black House (with Peter Straub) -2001

Everything's Eventual - 2002
From a Buick 8 - 2002
The Dark Tower V: Wolves of the Calla - 2003  
The Dark Tower VI: Song of Susannah - 2004
The Dark Tower VII: The Dark Tower - 2004

Faithful - 2004
The Colorado Kid - 2005
Cell - 2006
Lisey's Story - 2006
Blaze - 2007

Duma Key - 2008  
Just After Sunset - 2008 
Stephen King Goes to the Movies - 2009
Ur - 2009     
Under the Dome - 2009

Blockade Billy - 2010
Full Dark, No Stars - 2010
Mile 81 - 2011    
11/22/63 - 2011
American Vampire (with Scott Snyder) - 2011

"Throttle" (with Joe Hill) - 2012
The Dark Tower: The Wind Through the Keyhole - 2012 
A Face in the Crowd (with Stewart O'Nan) - 2012
"In the Tall Grass"  (with Joe Hill) - 2012
"GUNS" - 2013

Ghost Brothers of Darkland County - 2013
Joyland - 2013
The Dark Man: An Illustrated Poem - 2013
Doctor Sleep - 2013
Mr. Mercedes - 2014      

Revival - November 2014
Finders Keepers - 2015

...that's nine out of eighty-six (!) which puts me 10.47% of the way through.  I divided them into groups of five to make for easier counting.

Putting the dates on makes me wonder what on earth I was doing for the second half of 2013.  I'm going to make an effort to read some of my current King novel every day, just to speed this up a bit.  It's taken me over a year to get 10% of the way through - this needs to go a bit quicker.

In Which We Discuss Reading for Book Clubs

You may recall, I attended a bookclub several years ago.  They were reading Frankenstein, which I'd been meaning to get to for years.  It was an okay evening, but the next few books were things I'd never felt any interest in, so I stopped going.

I've often felt resentful over being forced to read things I'm not interested in.  I think this stems from being forced to read specific books at school.  We'd always read as a group, and it was so slow.  If I'd been allowed to read myself, it would have taken half the time.  But, no, I had to listen to some eejit stammering over words and taking ages to come out with the simplest things.  So frustrating.  So I think I probably had a similar issue with bookclubs suggesting I read things I didn't want to.

My feminist group started a bookclub about a year ago.  At first, my attendance was patchy - couldn't always afford the book, couldn't always get time off to go, sometimes just completely forgot.  Now I'm working the first problem's solved, and I've booked those days off as holiday for the rest of the year.  I get most of then back as my natural rest days anyway.

It helps that it's a small group, and it's amongst people I know and it also helps that it covers a topic I like, so I find reading the books quite interesting and rewarding.

I've started going to another bookclub since then.  A coworker recommended John Scalzi's Red Shirts to me, and when looking at MeetUp a little while later, I noticed a local group was planning to read it.  I enjoyed that meeting, and went to the next one, since it was sci-fi themed and I was free.  Also, because the book had happened to be sitting on my unread shelf for a few years.  Again, it's a small group of people that I like, and the books are things that I'm interested in.  Since we're all fairly fast readers, they've started a midweek book group, as well as the general one, which I've also been going to.  So that's three!

This month, I've actually chosen two of the books.  Sheri Tepper's Plague of Angels, and Colette Dowling's Myth of the Money Tree, both books I've read and enjoyed previously.  I'm quite looking forward to discussing both of them!

I've also been rereading The Dice Man, which I haven't read in a good five years.  I'm still listening to Firestarter on audiobook, though I stopped for a bit.  Making it a daily habit on HabitRPG has really helped me get back into it.  I'm also listening to The High Lord intermittently.

In Which We Discuss the Dead Zone

I've just reread a bit of my previous post, which mentioned that Stephen King himself loved the Dead Zone.  I forgot about that when I was reading it.

The book, to me, felt like 80-85% build up.  Literally, according to my kindle, that's where I was when the main plot started going.  Then it's a little anti-climactic, which I guess is the point.  Johnny's lancing a boil before it really gets going, so the whole point is to avoid a terrible climax.

I really enjoyed the journey.  I liked the characters.  It hasn't surpassed Rose Madder as my favourite, so apparently the tastes of Stephen King and I differ significantly, since he's said he feels Rose Madder was a young man trying too hard.

As I may have mentioned, James Smythe is doing a series in the Guardian where he revisits all of Stephen King's novels.  He's rather ahead of me at the moment; his latest article is on The Dark Tower III, which was published in 1991, 11 years after The Dead Zone which came out in 1979.

James Smythe's excellent article is here, and he pointed out something that I didn't realise; The Dead Zone is the first book set in Castle Rock.

As for links to other King novels...well, Johnny mentions the fire in Carrie at one point.  Looking at this flowchart, Frank Dodd is briefly mentioned in IT, which I've not read yet, and in Cujo, which I have.  His Sheriff, Gregg Bannerman is the same Sheriff who dies in that book.

That flowchart excludes the Dark Tower series.  This one includes it, but The Dead Zone isn't really connected to so it makes no difference.

Firestarter next!  I've read it before, but this time I have it audiobook for a change.

In Which We Discuss the Stand and the Long Walk

So, continuing with my project to read all of Stephen King's work in chronological order I've just finished The Stand.  The Stand was Stephen King's sixth published novel.  It originally came out in 1978, and was set five minutes in the future, in 1980.  It was republished in 1990, in a version that was about three hundred pages longer.  When King had only published six novels, his publishers felt that readers would have trouble with a novel over one thousand pages.  Ten years later, they had no such qualms.

It may have been more true to the challenge if I'd first read the original, 1978, edited version, and then, when appropriate, read the 1990 version.  Oh well.  I couldn't be bothered to track it down, and by the time I realised there were two versions, I was way too into mine.

My Kindle edition had real pages numbers, and according to those, my copy of The Stand was 1320 pages.  It felt exactly the right length.  Nothing felt like filler, or like waiting for the good parts to happen.  I think a major part of this was the sheer number of characters.  Sometimes I'd forget who someone was, and then King would drop in a quick reminder and it'd all come flooding back.  That didn't bother me; I think the only way the book could have worked was with its huge cast of characters.

I reread The Long Walk over the course of two days.  I do like that one.  Apparently it was one of the first novels Stephen King wrote, way back when he was in high school.  It isn't perfect.  It's about an event in which one hundred boys try to outwalk each other.  If they drop below 4mph for longer than 30 seconds, they get a warning.  If they get three warnings, then slow down for another 30 seconds, they're shot in the head.  That was the thing that really bugged me; the speed limit. 4mph is not a walking speed, it's a running speed.  I'm taller than the average woman, and my walking speed is just over 3mph.  These guys were probably taller than my 5'6, but how much taller would you have to be for 4mph to be your natural speed?  It just doesn't make sense to me.  Also, why had so few of these guys trained and equipped themselves properly?  Annoying.

Of course, the point of it is really more a character study than anything else, so I can overlook those things.

I've just bought a copy of The Dead Zone, which is apparently one of Stephen King's favourites.  I've never read it before, so let's see if I agree.