Books

I finished Wyndham’s The Trouble with Lichen a few days ago. It was all right. Nothing special. Certainly not as good as the other 3 of his books I’ve read recently and outlined in previous posts. This I’ll take a break from Wyndham for a while. Reading Getting Things Done by David Allen at present to try and get a handle on all the different projects and tasks I have on the go. Certainly need the help!

I couldn’t resist. I had to put Oxygen aside and get into The Day of the Triffids. Like my post about The Kraken Wakes I found this book to be different from what I expected it to be. The Triffids are largely incidental to most of he book. The main theme is the collapse of society after an event makes most people blind. Of course if you can’t see the Triffids you are in trouble…

All in all a very enjoyable read. Next up Wyndham’s The Trouble with Lichen. It’s got a periodic table on the cover so it’s bound to be good! 🙂

I’ve been on a bit of a John Wyndham binge lately. Sparked off by rereading The Chrysalids. Fuelled by The Midwich Cuckoos. Just finished The Kraken Wakes. It was really good. If anything it was too short as the end seemed a bit rushed and maybe has a bit of a deus ex machina quality to it. The story itself was nothing like I thought it was going to be. I did expect sea monsters à la those encountered by Captain Nemo 🙂

It’s not like that at all. The story is told as a retrospective account of events by a pair of journalists who are husband and wife. Due to their position they have access to important characters and events. I like the way it’s done, apart from the rushed ending. Like in The Chrysalids I want to know what happened next! The character interactions towards the end of the book reminded me a lot of Adam Roberts’ The Snow. Wyndham’s book was first though I’m sure many others have used similar themes. I’m starting to think of Wyndham in the same terms as H.G. Wells. I’ve got The Day of the Triffids sitting here and three other books of his on order. I think I’ll take a break though and read Oxygen by Nick Lane as I’ve been wanting to get into that for a while.

As mentioned in a previous post, I got a copy of John Wyndham’s The Midwich Cuckoos to read. I finished it a few days ago. It was very good. I still like The Chrysalids better. Still worth reading both though. I’ll probably grab the rest of Wyndham’s novels and read them.

I took the urge to reread John Wyndham’s The Chrysalids a few days ago. Don’t know what made it pop into my head. I’d dumped my old paperback copy, that I’d had since secondary school, in a book bin at the local recycling centre a few months ago. So I ordered a copy from Amazon UK along with a copy of The Midwich Cuckoos.

I read a bit of The Chrysalids over a few nights but last night I was up to 03:30 finishing it. It really is an excellent read. I won’t outline the plot or anything about it as that’d be a spoiler for anyone who hasn’t read it. I’d highly recommend it. It’s a pity that there was never a sequel. Not that the the story is left needing one, but I’d like to know what happened to the characters in the years after the end of the book. On to The Midwich Cuckoos. I’ve never read this but it was the filmed as as Village of the Damned and dramatised on BBC Radio 4 about 3 years ago. I’ve got the BBC one on my iPod. It’s excellent.

BBC Radio 4 will begin a 4-part dramatisation of Terry Pratchett’s Small Gods on 28th February. Should be good. The dramatisation they did of Pratchett’s Mort a few years ago was good.

See the BBC Radio 4 programme page.

This, as the title suggests, is a parody of The Matrix Trilogy by Adam Roberts who also wrote The Soddit. If you have seen the films, and you are not too precious about them, then you’ll probably enjoy this. It’s not as good as The Soddit, and you have to have seen the films I think to get this, but does have some interesting commentary towards the end on the whole cult of celebrity thing we seem to be immersed in these days.

My first experience of Peter F. Hamilton’s work was the opening volume of The Nights Dawn trilogy. I was a few hundred pages into this huge space opera work when it was revealed what was happening to characters. Don’t want to outline it here as it will be a spoiler for anyone who comes to read the series later. For my part I hated the idea and didn’t finish the first volume. I was really disappointed as the book up to that point had been excellent. I recently got rid of them during a clear out.

I was in Waterstone’s in Belfast a few weeks ago and noticed a new book by Hamilton called Judas Unchained. This was billed as the second book in The Commonwealth Saga. The first book in the saga is Pandora’s Star which they also had in stock. Reading a bit of it in the store it looked really interesting. Galaxy spanning space opera. I love space opera that is huge in scope.

I’ve just finished Judas Unchained. I have to say that this has lived up to my hopes. The two books, Pandora’s Star and Judas Unchained, are really a single long book that just happens to have been published as two volumes. It’s about 1800 pages long and is huge in scope. The characters are believable, the future galactic colonisation is really well described and the aliens are probably the best I’ve read about in any fiction.

This is a keeper. I’ll be reading it again very soon just for the sheer pleasure and to pick up on anything I’ve missed first time. I can see this book, treating the two volumes as a single entity, joining the list of my favourite books.

There is a description of The Commonwealth Saga here. It has Spoilers!!

I really like the books I’ve read by Adam Roberts. I’ve just finished his book called The Snow. The basic premise of this book is simple enough. It starts to snow. It continues to snow. Everywhere on Earth. For a long time. This continues until the snow is several kilometers deep and everyone except for about 150,000 people are dead. The survivors were mainly related to the military and their bases, are snow experts who were skiing in The Alps (for example), or have been dug out of buildings under the deep snow by the new Food Miners who dig down to get resources.

The story is told from the perspective of 2 main characters whose paths cross a few times, and also by the device of government memos and reports. Early in the book there is an explanation of how it is possible for so much snow to fall. I don’t want to say anything more about that as it’d be a spoiler for anyone who wants to read the book. The ending wasn’t what I was expecting from the early and middle sections of the book. If you like character driven sci-fi you should check this out.

BTW Adam Roberts also writes comedy books under the pseudonym A. R. R. R. Roberts. For example The Soddit.

This, as the title and author name suggests, is a spoof on J.R.R. Tolkein’s book, The Hobbit.

I loved it. It is very funny. The story follows the journey of Bingo “sac” Grabbings as he is dragged off on an adventure, by Gandef the Wizard and 12 Welsh dwarfs, to the Only Mountain, inhabited by Smug the Dragon. Bingo’s travelling companions are very reluctant to discuss the reason for the journey…

The story Adam Roberts has spun in The Soddit does not follow the one in The Hobbit completely. This is good in my opinion. This is a very funny book and it’s a good story in its own right. It had me laughing out loud many, many times. You don’t need to have read Tolkien’s original in order to enjoy this book. Excellent stuff.

The best Discworld book so far?

After reading Terry Pratchett’s latest book (Monstrous Regiment) I decided to read “Thief of Time” (TOT). I bought TOT when it came out in hardback a while back but it has languished in my bookcase ever since. I read it this week. It’s brilliant. Possibly the best Discworld book IMHO. Deciding your favourite book from an author can only be done when all the books being compared have been out for a while, or have been read a few times. So it’ll be a few years before I can say that TOT is the best in the series, but currently I think it is.

800+ pages of excellence.

After recently re-reading Wells’ “War of the Worlds” and seeing the Hallmark produced mini series based on some of Wells’ short stories on the UK Sci-Fi channel I ordered a copy of his complete short stories. I’ve only read about 10 of them so far, out of the 84 it contains. But they really are excellent stuff. Incidentally it says in the editors introduction that Wells said of his short stories: “I would rather [they] were found in the bedrooms of convalescents and in dentists parlours and railway trains than in gentlemen’s studies”. I’ve been reading them whilst recovering from surgery. So his wish has come true in my case!

The edition I got is on Amazon UK here.