User Profile

After dipping with Vol 2, I think the Testament series hit its peak in Vol 3. The Job story struck me as particularly well done, both as a dramatic story in itself and as the best-working correspondence between ancient and modern timelines. The rest of the book comes pretty consistently close to that standard.

I found this the weakest of the four books in the generally impressive Testament series, mainly because the technobabble that is a minor irritant in Vol. 1 picks up in intensity, to the point of actually being quite distracting. Some of it's just that a little mysteriousness is just fine, especially in a book based on religious scriptures (some of the tech reminded me of midichlorians...), and some of it's that the specific things the tech was given credit for just don't make sense. I suppose I was hypersensitive to it because what Alan Stern is depicting as trying to do at the start is more or less the grotesque version of what my PhD was going to be all about, as perceived by people who don't understand the work and fear things they don't understand....

Strong start to a very interesting series.

I love the parallel ancient and modern storylines, and think he uses the visual separation between gods and humans very well indeed. I also appreciated the interaction between gods not generally believed in by the same sets of people - he has some really ambitious ideas in that respect and pulls them off pretty well.

The one thing that marred it was a certain amount of technobabble. Sometimes it would have been better to just leave the technology vague, rather than positing things that not only don't quite make sense, but also demystify the story a little too much.

A delightful, but slow and sometimes aimless book. It's an odd form - entries from 6 years' worth of journals, compiled by the late author's partner into one composite year. That made for somewhat disjointed reading, in that every time I put the book down it took me a while to get back into its rhythm. On the other hand, that format combined with Deakin's lovely evocations of place and mood builds up a gorgeous and very alive portrait of where he lived and the passage of the seasons.

I bought this book by mistake, having wanted to read something by Mieville for a while but not having realised it was his "young adult" novel. No matter - I loved it anyway. He did a beautiful job of keeping the language simple without ever seeming to talk down to the reader, and the plot uses a certain degree of naivety on the part of its teenage protagonists, without ever making them seem stupid or clueless. It's also a great, wild fantasy novel that manages to say rather a lot about the real London that's only ever in the background of the book.

A rather patchy collection. The poems I liked best conveyed a strong sense of watching the world through aging eyes, and saying goodbye to old friends - Heaney using his own aging for material in the same way as Johnny Cash's heartrending last few albums - but there were also many that I just found inaccessible, in spite of having been a fan of his work for some time.

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?