Looking Out To Sea

I’ve managed to get a lot of reading done in the past few weeks, so maybe it’s time to mention a few. Most of these came from the book swap group.

• Measuring the Universe by Kitty Ferguson

  A kind of history of geometry and cosmology, to answer the question, “how do we measure things that we can’t hold a yardstick against?”. It covers the history of the ancient Hellenic philosophers who calculated the diameter of the Earth, the distance to the Moon, and so on, right up to the discovery of the size and shape of the Milky Way and the distance to the furthest reaches of the Universe. It was interesting to see how much we currently know is very modern knowledge. Before the 1920s we didn’t know there were other galaxies! I also liked learning about the contributions made by people who I’m familiar with through their namesakes — the Cassinis, the Hubbles, the Oorts.

• The Steel Remains by Richard Morgan

  Richard Morgan is more known for his hard-edged post-cyberpunk science fiction. This is his first foray into “high fantasy”, the realm of dragons, gods and barbarian adventurers with big swords. This book had most of the above, including what I believe to be the first gay sword-wielding hero — a move so obvious in hindsight it is hard to believe it’s taken this long. I enjoyed the book a lot but felt the point of the villains eluded me, and the ending lacked satisfaction. More than enough sex and blood-letting to count as a Richard Morgan book though.

• Wicked by Gregory Maguire

  This one took me by surprise. I suppose it’s not totally odd that book with the tagline “inspired the hit musical and sold two million copies” would be worth trying but I was still very pleased by everything that it delivered. It’s the life story of Elphaba, the Wicked Witch of the West from L Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. She is an outcast from the start, being born green and allergic to water, in a little rural town in Munchkinland. I felt quite caught up in the events of her life and as the events of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz began to overlap with Wicked it was quite painful, knowing that she would soon die from a bucket of water, her dreams unfulfilled and her friends tormented by the despotic Wizard. I’ve added the two sequels to my wishlist.

• Dark Entries by Ian Rankin and Werther Dell’Edera

  The one book on this list which didn’t come from the book group, this is a graphic novel written by the same Ian Rankin who writes the Rebus novels. It’s a very short (I read it in an evening) John Constantine novel about a Big Brother-style reality show whose contestants are having horrifying visions. Constantine is brought in to exorcise the house or otherwise get to the bottom of the problem, though things don’t go according to plan. The drawing was strangely out-of-kilter with the story — the London graffiti with American spelling, the dialogue describing Highland Park as a whiskey-with-an-e alongside a picture of the bottle showing whisky-without-an-e. It all just seemed badly put together, and the failure to decide whether the story was darkly comic or properly horrific didn’t help. Maybe not bother.