Looking Out To Sea

Help, trapped in a cycle of not blogging that won’t stop. So many things that I have been enjoying that I want to mention, but that I can’t really bring to mind right now, and certainly not in an interesting fashion. Which means, a list!

• I bought myself a Kindle (third generation, but just wifi, not 3G) for reading stuff. In the first couple of weeks I was commuting by train and reading academic stuff. Since then I’ve been getting a lift and just reading for pleasure — which means a sub-list!

  • Bram Stoker’s Dracula: It’s strange reading a book that basically started a literary and cultural genre. I mean everything from Hammer Horror to Buffy, Twilight to Anne Rice has sprouted out of this book. It wasn’t the origin but it is by a long way the most famous Victorian vampire novel and it was interesting to see how much has been around from the start. The book is told in diary form, using snippets from the journals of Jonathan Harker, Abraham van Helsing as well as newspaper reports and other sources to “piece together” the story for the reader. It’s very effective and remarkably tense. My favourite scene is definitely the arrival in England of Count Dracula, told via newspaper clippings and the log kept by the captain of the ship that carried him. Sadly the part of Van Helsing, which gets more prominent as the book continues, is really badly written. I have never seen a worse depiction of a foreign speaker of English, it’s at least as bad as any Hammer Horror Dracula!
  • Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped: I remember reading Treasure Island when I was younger (and I think I’ll re-read it soon) but couldn’t recall if I’d ever done this one. It was really enjoyable and the kind of thing I would have definitely enjoyed as a child. Non-stop adventure from the start.
  • Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels: There have been so many awkward adaptations of this (or at least the Lilliput part) that it’s another strange one to read in its entirety. I quite liked the Ted Danson adaptation and from what I can remember it was fairly faithful to the parts Swift wrote, while including a lot of other stuff about Gulliver’s struggles to adapt to English society on his return. The first half you can read without much awareness of the political/satirical nature but it reaches a point where suddenly the author starts putting the boot in to “civilised society” and doesn’t really let up until the end of the book. Eminently readable, though if you find a copy riddled with footnotes I would abandon it immediately. The first copy I tried to read seemed to have more superscript letters than normal ones, and that really makes it a chore.

  As you can see I’m working my way through all the free stuff available, of which there is a substantial chunk on Project Gutenberg. Recommendations for classics are always welcome. Some authors are obviously well-represented but it would be nice to know if there are any books in particular that people think I should investigate.

• Capoeira is continuing — I’m even beginning to enjoy the roda on Sunday, which I’m trying to attend as often as I can. I’ve started going to the training twice a week most weeks. Getting a job really put paid to the amount of effort I can devote to training/exercise in my own time. But it’s getting much warmer these days so maybe I can get the grass cut outside so we can practise in the garden. Last week I was even practising on the Meadows. Who knows whether people were laughing or just didn’t notice/care… most probably the latter.
• I made a big batch of baguettes the other day, for a sandwich-based birthday party, and was complimented from many quarters. But then people will sell you their children if you provide fresh bread sandwiches!
• I haven’t done any SICP study since I started working again but I’ve just got in touch with my co-conspirators and we’ve agreed a meeting date, which might just be a chance to catch up socially but will hopefully lead back to studying and learning again.
• Of course now I’ve started a list I’m obliged to add enough entries to make it worthwhile, but I can’t think of anything else. How have you been?

I finished The Picture of Dorian Gray at least a week ago and I’ve been struggling to put into words what I thought about it ever since. It’s a pretty slim novel but it took me a few weeks to get through so it obviously wasn’t enthralling.

My main problem, I think, was that it had a plot but no story. I felt no desire to read on other than to find out how the plot resolved. The characters were bland at best, and often both hateful and boring. Dorian Gray wishes that his portrait would get older instead of him, which seems to stop him maturing at all. The book was originally much shorter, and it shows — I felt there was a lot of filler which expanded it from a short story to a novel.

I got a lot more enjoyment from the introduction which placed the book in a historical context and recounted some of the reactions to its publication. It’s strange how some books are more fun to read about than they are to read.

Incidentally, I object to the inclusion of an introduction which serves to give away large segments of the plot. So much so that they required a pre-introduction to tell you not to read the introduction until you’d read the book. Wouldn’t it just be more appropriate to put the spoilers at the end and call it something else?

It’s about this time of the month when I finish whatever book that I picked up from book group and decide to write about it. Then when the next meeting comes around I’ve forgotten what I said at the time and just blabber incoherently about some vague ideas I had. Or is that what I do here?

Just finished Perdido Street Station by China Miéville (first book I’ve read by him). Probably most neatly described as “fantasy steampunk” since it gathers in all of the elements you’d expect from these genres: a land of strange beasts and many sapient species, real magic, mechanical calculating machines and steam-driven engines in an early industrial society.

The book is quite hefty and nothing definite happens until halfway. Then it got very compelling and I raced through the second half in much shorter time. Initially I found the descriptive language quite ponderous and found myself rereading paragraphs more often than normal because I couldn’t wring sense out of it. (I was also reading quite late at night, which doesn’t help.) The language didn’t get any more direct the further I read, but I got used to it and it was easier when I was more engaged.

It was hard to take some of the creatures in the story seriously for a long time. They’re the kind of bad scifi/fantasy that really bugs me about Dr Who — sentient walking cactus people? (They have to file down their spines so they can hold stuff properly.) A species that has human female bodies but the entire body of a scarab beetle as a head? Of course these are entirely logical evolutionary outcomes for any world…

Once you’re over the absurdity of what you’re reading it’s an enjoyable book. One of the later characters, the Weaver, is a brilliant trickster — a kind of Ungoliant character with the personality of the Cheshire cat — a huge, dangerous spider that hums nonsense verse to itself while flitting through the world to fix things for its own aesthetic purposes.

For all that, I have come to the conclusion that the story doesn’t really hang together. The threat to be defeated is a natural one, but one which is almost-invincible and has an insatiable appetite for people. I fully understand that invading predators can be an incredible threat to an ecosystem, but normally they fit somewhere into their own environment. But it’s a bit of a stretch to claim that magical, soul-sucking, hypnotising eight-metre dragons which can taste conscious thought on the wind… would be a localised phenomenon wherever they live.

So while I did enjoy the book, it’s not one you want to think about — in fact, it helps if you think about it less than a traditional “high fantasy” novel.

It was Helen’s birthday two weeks ago and one of the surprise hits was a board game I bought on a whim, because the gaming style intrigued me. I haven’t been able to track down the original discussion again, but somewhere on Reddit there was a thread about Monopoly and a commenter suggested that (paraphrasing) “competitive board games are old, you need to get into co-operative gaming”. Into what?

The game recommended as a good example of this style was Pandemic, which I bought and I’m happy to say it’s brilliant. The rules seem very complex on initial read-through but they are very quick to internalise — everything makes sense and there were only a couple of occasions on our first game where we consulted the rules for clarification.

So what is it? The idea, contrary to most board games, is that the human players are working as one team, against “the game”. It’s still a turn-based game, but each person co-ordinates their behaviour with their fellow players. You play the game on a map of the world, showing a network of cities joined by air and road links. At the start of the game a selection of random cities are “infected” with four diseases (coloured cubes). The aim of the game is to discover a cure for these diseases before a critical proportion of the world is infected.

You discover cures by gathering resources together in one place, much like building houses and hotels in Monopoly. In order to stave off disaster you must travel the world treating disease victims until you have enough resources to find a cure — but every time you travel somewhere or treat a disease, you’re wasting time that might have been better spent on researching a cure.

And while all this is happening the diseases don’t stand still. Each time a player’s turn ends there is an infection stage where all the diseases that have taken hold will spread further. Every so often (more often if you’re playing by the difficult rules) an “epidemic” hits, which basically ramps up the danger level and reinfects all the cities you thought you’d treated.

The night after Helen’s birthday we invited Mat round for tea and then we made a valiant attempt at this game for the first time. We played three games that night with the “easy” rules and lost all three games. In the final game Helen had the resources ready for a cure, and it was my turn directly before her “winning” hand could be played. And I pulled an epidemic card which totally wiped us out. That was the closest we had come and the intensity of knowing how close we were to a cure was incredible. The feeling of co-operating against a stack of playing cards is a strange one but the rules are beautifully defined to simulate the ebb, flow and violent resurgence of infection counts so you quickly get immersed in the reality of the game.

I don’t know how much other co-operative games hit the mark but this one certainly does and I am really looking forward to getting another crack at it. It seems like there are a million games out there which don’t get the publicity of Monopoly, Risk and Cluedo but which are maybe more fun. I remember with great fondness the games of Settlers of Catan we used to have in the flat when I was in university. Then there is Mille Bornes, the 1000-mile imaginary race which is like a card-based version of Mario Kart. What crazy games have you come across that should be more widely known?

PS. I just came across this board game recommendation site which lets you enter games you like and one you dislike, and matches you up to user preferences on BoardGameGeek.com to select some likely interesting titles. I found out about it through this post by the developer, telling its history.

PPS. The line of the game for me was when Helen turned to Mat and said: “Are you Green? I’ll meet you in Cairo!”. It’s like being a jet-setting heroic scientist in your own living room.

It’s a “short month” this time between book group meetings, so I didn’t take anything very challenging. I’ve also still got North and South (Elizabeth Gaskell) which I’m making some sort of headway with. I was told it gets better from the opening few chapters, so I’ll let you know. Last weekend I picked up a few very cheap paperbacks in Barnardo’s on Leith Walk. I think it was about £1.50 for Unseen Academicals, Whisky Galore! and The Three Musketeers which I like to think was a pretty decent bargain.

So in the last month I’ve read:

• Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, the Graphic Novel. This is my book-group book, which is really fun. I think you’d have to be familiar with the original original to enjoy the tribute. Essentially it’s Austen’s classic with heavy zombie/kung fu influences. (I bet you didn’t know the Bennett sisters trained with Shaolin monks, did you?) The artistry was a bit disappointing, and confusing in some parts, but the wit of the language married to the absurdity of the Undead more than made up for the visual flaws. I’m very tempted to read Pride and Prejudice and Zombies the novel now, to make the most of the bits I enjoyed.
• Unseen Academicals (Terry Pratchett). The city of Ankh-Morpork discovers football — and good quality pies — in good style. Short(crust) and easy to digest, and very enjoyable.

Last book group I picked up two books but didn’t get round to reading either for ages. The second one, North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell, is proving too difficult so I might just abandon it where I am. I certainly don’t think I’ll get it read by next weekend.

What have I read then?

Three to See the King (Magnus Mills) is a strange tale about a man who lives in a tin house on a desert plane, a mile or so away from other people who live in their lone tin houses. The story follows the fate of a grand excavation, with thousands of people trying to build a new township with tin houses. The prose is very flat and the humour dry and deadpan. Whatever I picked up from this book I’m sure I missed most of it. It was interesting, though really I’m not sure if I recommend it.

Pandaemonium is Christopher Brookmyre’s latest homage to computer games.

The premise of Doom is relocated from the moons of Mars to the wilds of Scotland (but of course…) and the lone marine replaced by schoolchildren, teachers and a couple of Catholic priests. And it’s great.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Stieg Larsson) is pretty popular these days. This and the two sequels seem to sit permanently on the Amazon bestseller list. I can only partially see why. The story is fairly involving, with a few interesting mysteries unravelled by the end, but the writing is absolutely atrocious. Most of the time it’s not descended to the Dan Brown level but occasionally the tone of the prose is so badly off-kilter it makes you wonder if it was written by a native speaker. Of course, it wasn’t written by a native speaker, so the real question is whether this wooden and lumpen writing is an accurate reflection of Larsson’s Swedish source text, or whether the translator was just an idiot.

We’re not quite finished the festival run yet (still got something to see next Saturday) but I can’t be bothered waiting until then. Despite taking me by surprise we tackled the festival hard and got to a number of good shows, including some stuff in the — whisper it — EIF.

• Duke Special. Stuff from his new album, The Stage, A Book and the Silver Screen, with songs about the films of Hector Mann (is this a real person or just a character in a book?), a Kurt Weill musical about Huckleberry Finn (unfinished) and an anti-war Brecht play. There were a few fan favourites as well, including the terminally catchy Salvation Tambourine.

• The Penny Dreadfuls. I have no idea if this show had a name, but it was a comedy sketch show with no particular theme. In previous years they have mined the comic depths of Victoriana with sketch shows and comic plays. Last year’s show was a stand-out amongst several shining examples. This year wasn’t bad though I felt I didn’t get the same weeping pain and fear-for-my-underwear that I’ve felt in previous years.

• Miles Jupp: Fibber in the Heat (A Cricket Tale). Brilliant tale of one cricket fan’s bid to blag his way into the press box for an tour in India. I know nothing about cricket but it was still a marvellously-told and hilarious story.

• Gutted: A Revenger’s Musical. A late-night comedy musical with the Dreadfuls in supporting roles. It was fun in a slapstick farcical way. Definite Fringe material, though I don’t mean that in the worst possible way. I laughed a good deal more than at some of the stuff I’ve seen…

• Henry Rollins: Frequent Flyer Tour. I had heard a great deal said about Henry Rollins and seen one or two clips on YouTube but had no real measure of what the show would contain. It was an hour and a bit of white-knuckle anecdote and comedy. Totally recommended if you can catch his show anywhere, and from the way he talks he does about a million shows every week.

• Opera de Lyon: Porgy and Bess. A free “orchestra rehearsal” at the Festival Theatre. Sadly the singers were a bit mumbled and even the songs which I knew didn’t come across very well. The interval provided some nice insight as the conductor made some members of the cast re-do certain lines and phrases. I’m just sorry he didn’t get them to sing a bit more clearly at the same time. The dancers were amazing.

• Axis of Awesome: Songs in the Key of Awesome. Comedy musical trio with parodies and hilarious ditties, including the ever-flexible four chords…

• Caledonia. Another free preview, at the King’s Theatre this time, of the latest NTS production. This is a dark and satirical comedy about the Darien venture, Scotland’s ill-fated attempt at empire-building which led to its bankruptcy and eventual merging of parliaments with England. And what better time than now to look at the past of financial speculation and ruin, and claims that “trade begets trade, money begets money”? While enjoyable it was, I think, under-rehearsed: some slightly stumbled lines and one or two on-stage collisions between actors betrayed some lack of familiarity. Mostly this didn’t detract from the show though. Not as completely riveting as Black Watch, but then what is?

• Nofit State Circus: Tabu. Gritty, energetic circus fun with moody live band providing klezmer jollity, rock and cinematic soundscapes. I nearly laughed at the very beginning because the speaker said “it’s been raining for four years, eleven months and two days…” and behind me I could hear the popcorn machine making rain-like pop-pop-pop noises. Funny, alarming, wildly athletic and terrifyingly immediate. Catch them wherever you can. Now when are Archaos going to come back to Edinburgh…?

I’ve probably forgotten something in this list, and we’re going to an Aussie opera on Saturday, so there’ll be more to come.

I don’t know if I ever saw it the first time round, but I saw Tron this evening. Now I’m fully prepared for the sequel when it appears.

A few friends came over and we got fajitas from Los Cardos across the road — and despite the utilitarian appearance the food was pretty good. The staff were friendly too. I got a “fajita burrito”, which is kinda what I’d call a fajita if I was making it at home, except they loaded it with rice as well as the usual fried onions, peppers, cheese, salsa and spicy chicken. (There are a number of other fillings available besides chicken, including haggis…) The food was more or less what you’d make yourself, simple but plentiful, and they had big, good quality tortillas which seems to be the hardest part when it comes to make-your-own fajita meals.

The film was weird as all hell. I borrowed the special edition with audio commentary and a separate making-of disc — I wonder what explanation they’ll have for some of the stranger scenes. Some didn’t even seem to connect at all to the rest of the story. It certainly wasn’t what I expected. I knew there was action in light-striped arenas that probably represented some gaming system, but I didn’t realise that most of the protagonists would be computer programs. Needless to say, if you know anything about computers you have to plug your ears at some points or risk bursting into entirely inappropriate laughter. The plot is a bit like The Lord of the Rings (take the magical item into the evil overlord’s domain to free everyone from tyranny).

The sequel — coming out in December I think, so aiming for the family Christmas market I suppose — follows the action twenty five years later in the same inner-computer environment. Hopefully they won’t be relying on the crutch of dazzling graphics and spectacle instead of coherent plot. But that’s probably a foolish hope…

Helen’s out tonight because one of her colleagues is leaving the lab, so she didn’t get to see it. Maybe we’ll watch it tomorrow with extras before I give the DVD back.

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.

Just finished two books in the last week: Sword Song and Making History, both with a vaguely historical theme.

Sword Song is one book from the middle of a series by Bernard Cornwell, of Sharpe fame. Sword Song follows the adventures of Uhtred of Babbenburg in the reign of Alfred the Great. That’s about 880AD, in case Wikipedia’s not working for you at the moment. It is more or less Sharpe-in-Wessex: orphan boy, good military strategist, brave, canny, etc, struggling against his own incompetent superiors who were born into positions of power, rather than earning them. The language of people and place names takes a bit of getting used to but luckily there’s a glossary to help you translate Hrofeceastre to Rochester and so on. After a while you learn to guess what the modern equivalents might be.

It was enjoyable enough though I don’t think I would rush back for another one. I didn’t feel greatly involved in Uhtred’s struggle nor did I care much for the welfare of the kingdom as a whole. Interesting but ultimately uninvolving.

Making History is the first Stephen Fry novel that I’ve read. I had assumed that his books would be rather obscure or learned — the product of a literature degree, in fact — but if this one’s anything to go by there’s nothing to worry about. A history student finishes his PhD dissertation on the childhood and early years of Adolf Hitler and ends up using a time machine to change the past and prevent Hitler’s birth. So the characters ends up adrift in an alternate twentieth century with his own memories of our century still intact. (There are interesting snippets of fact amongst it all which makes me want to follow up the one or two biographies recommended in the author’s notes at the end. How did the epitome of evil in Western society get to be that way?) The book is funny, prompts interesting questions about the role of circumstance and accident in history and, thankfully, not in the least bit difficult. I am keen to read some more of Fry’s books now.