Reviews and Comments

This book kind of blew my mind (and brought back my rabid Iain Banks fandom, after the slight disappointment that was Excession). It took me a long time to read, partly because it's 600 pages long and partly because the hardback copy I have is too heavy to want to take on vacation, but also because it's thematically so huge that I kind of needed 4 months to digest it.

There are, of course, several interleaved plots, but the overarching one (introduced early enough for this not to be a spoiler) is a conflict about whether Hells should exist. This being the universe of the Culture, this is not a metaphysical question, but a purely ethical one, because civilisations can choose to have a hell or not, and that choice has become a major division between and within civilisations.

As I read the book, and plenty happened in my own life and the world in that time, what made me really love it was the number of parallels I saw between its techno-fantasy world and the real world around me. The sadism embodied in the Hells, the repugnant status-quo-at-all-costs reasoning used by those who would justify them, the sometimes hopeless-looking idealism of those who would get rid of them, and the weaknesses and limitations of all the would-be good actors all felt like biting commentary on events this year that Banks couldn't have exactly foreseen. And then there's the moral ambiguities of just what steps may or may not be justifiable in service of a noble goal (not exactly a new theme for the Culture novels, or the best exploration of it I've seen, but certainly an engaging one), and the multiple levels of different actors manipulating each other. Of all the Culture novels, even as it has one of the more outlandish plots, I think it's the one that has most to say about the world we actually live in.

NB: If you haven't read any of the Culture books before, don't start with this one because it definitely seems to assume you know something of its world.

I feel dirty for having read this book. Dirtier for having read a little about the author afterwards and come to realise that the more unpleasant things in it--the apologia for colonialism, the obsession with race and each race's place, and the strangely dismissive-and-worshipping attitude about women that implies a deep misogyny--appear to be confessional.

I read the poem as a teenager, and I've gradually been getting more interested in graphic novels, so when I saw a graphic novel version--with Ginsberg's involvement, so I knew it wouldn't be a horrible hack job--in Powell's recently I couldn't resist.

The poem is just as viciously powerful as when I first read it; though I can only imagine it would have had more impact when it was published, in 1956. The only detail that marks it as in any way dated is the repeated references to typewriters. The significance of the age is more that it shows the disaffection and societal failure it recounts as not only not being novel--I knew that, though it's good to be reminded--but even older than I had realised. The boomer generation has somehow managed to spin this fable of rebellion having been invented in the mid-late 60s, whereas here is a long poem from 10 years earlier that oozes vitriol at the establishment and recounts insistently all the "collateral damage" of an epoch that these days seems to get romanticised as being before everything got so damn complicated.

For me, apparently unlike for most of the reviewers on Goodreads, the illustrations added quite a lot. They're beautiful in themselves, the style feels very appropriate, and they fit both the individual images and the cacophonic succession of images very well. They also add something else unexpected: by letting the book put each breath of the text on a new page, they make the poem fit the print format much better than in the text-only edition I had read before, letting it flow more naturally than it can all squashed onto one page.

Useful manual. Fairly concise, but with enough information to still be helpful to people like me, who know the basic technical stuff pretty well but have plenty to learn about composition and material. Not much of it is actually specific to "travel", but then why would taking a picture of some other city be magically different from taking one of where I live?

I had a hard time with this book. I fell in love with the beauty of Garcia Marquez's writing very quickly, but didn't take too much longer to find the stupidity of most of the characters and the incomprehensibility of many of their actions grating. The fabulous prose kept me reading, albeit slowly and in short bursts, until about 3/4 of the way through the book suddenly it all fell into place for me, and I fell wholly in love with the book--story, characters and all--from that point until the deeply affecting ending.

I'm not sure I want to read another long novel by Garcia Marquez, because there were too many times in the middle when I was about to give up, but this has made me very keen to read some of his short stories and journalism.

I had been meaning to read this for a while, since it's such a sacred text to the environmental community and it didn't disappoint. It's really a compilation of Leopold's essays written over some years, in three parts:

The book starts with the actual sand county Almanac, which is a set of short observational essays representing one full year in the life of the farm he and his family retreated to on weekends. This was my favourite part of the book; above all else Leopold was a wonderful observer of nature and painter of scenes. There is some editorialising in this, but it's done with a rather light touch. More than anything else, it's a call to simply pay more attention to the rhythms of nature even as technology and urbanisation make it more and more possible to ignore them.

The middle part is a serious of descriptive and reflective essays written as Leopold travelled around North America. These are rather patchy, somewhat more editorial, and overwhelmingly sad. He had a very clear vision of what had already been lost to short-sighted overdevelopment, and how much more was on the cusp of being lost, and reading it 60-odd years later is actually quite upsetting. I like to tell myself that the destruction we've visited upon our own world was largely a product of ignorance, but essays like these are reminder of how untrue that is, at least for the "new world". We've had people calling this out for at least three generations, and yet we still have to fight the notion that nothing we do has any consequences.

The book closes with a set of much more prescriptive essays, about what should be done to halt the destruction. These made good for thought, but fall short of the perfection of his descriptive work. I found myself alternately agreeing, being made to think about concepts I hadn't considered before, and being frustrated by a few shortcomings:
- Leopold's vision doesn't scale to the size of population we have today. Perhaps in 1966 it would have worked to put brakes on urbanisation, but today we can't do that without turning entire continents into sprawling exurbia. I'm not sure if this was a blind spot of his at the time, or just something that hasn't translated to today.
- At times his focus on wilderness and emptiness is too narrow, and misses bigger systemic problems, such as the consequences of urban/suburban households all driving out to their dachas or the wilderness all the time. I suppose this is another instance of "does not scale".
- Sometimes he just seems indefinsibly optimistic about human nature, arguing that most if not all of the cultural change we need can come just from persuading people to intrinsically value nature. It makes sense that he should feel this way, since doing exactly that seems to be his greatest skill, but the faddishness of environmentalism since Leopold's time shows up the weakness of such an approach.

All in all, a great read - just take the polemical part with a pinch of salt, and consider the ways our collective experience since this was written critique it.

This book is in 4 volumes, and really my rating is 5 stars for volume 1, 1 star for volume 2, and I didn't even start reading volumes 3 and 4. The first volume would make a lovely (and already fairly long) stand-alone novel, in which Hašek uses Svejk as a sort of universal "wise fool" character to show up the stupidity of everyone else around him, imperialism, reverence for royalty, patriotism and war. It's lightly written, but often quite cutting, and for a few hundred pages it's a delightful read. The trouble is, by the end of volume 1 it's already starting to get repetitive, so volume 2 became a real slog, and ultimately I lost patience with Svejk's monologues and gave up.

Not the best of the Culture books by a long shot, though it's an interesting addition. I enjoyed the atmosphere of menace and mistrust that builds through the book, and the focus given to all the non-human minds fleshes the Culture out nicely, but the story felt overambitious and overloaded. At times it was seriously hard to follow which of the amusingly-named ships were doing what, with whom, under which pretenses, and after a well-paced build-up for about 3/4 of the book, the last few chapters pulled together a little too quickly to be satisfying.