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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.

This is one of the most extraordinary and inventive books I have ever read. The author just lays on layer after layer of strange, and manages to make it work by the sheer audacity of keeping going.

I'm deliberately saying nothing about content because much of the pleasure of this book comes from discovering the world it creates, so I don't think I can say anything descriptive without taking something away from that. Just read it!

I fell gradually more and more in love with this book until the very final chapter, which almost completely broke the spell. Until that point, it's an enchanting weaving of various bizarre characters' stories, and the whole edifice makes sense in the world that had been set up, yet Şafak felt the need to add an ending directly equivalent to the "then I woke up and it was all a dream" that we were all sternly told not to use in primary school. It tarnished the book so much for me that I'm tempted to just tear that chapter out of my edition.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, for a retrospective collection, I found this very patchy. My favourite parts of the collection were actually some of the shortest stories, in which Chekhov did a wonderful job of painting a vivid scene and one or two very real characters in just a couple of pages each time. Some of the longer stories convey a deep sense of pathos, but there were also a few that just didn't engage me emotionally at all.

The thing you have to be prepared for when reading Conrad's political novels, is that he was writing 100 years ago and a disturbing amount of what he portrays fits the present day, and probably always will. I suppose I should see this as the mark of a talented author--he's really just describing people, and we really don't change--but I can't read one of these without becoming somewhat disillusioned by just how little has changed in 100 years of "progress".

Anyway, to the story. This is the least action-packed of Conrad's works that I've read, and it's kind of refreshing. All the real "action" happens before the book starts, and to a character who barely appears in the book himself. The story, instead, is about the consequences for everyone else around him. It's a brilliant ruse to focus on what Conrad does best anyway: writing about emotions and interpersonal conflict, honesty, suspicion, honour and malice. And in the end, the small story of turbulence in a few peoples' lives illustrates much better than any broad narrative could the astonishing power of abstract ideas like patriotism and political systems to crush the individuals caught up in their way.

My one frustration with this book, in common with several of Conrad's others, is that at times he gives the narrator character himself too much attention, and manages to come across rather pompous as a result. I think an editor could have improved this book by cutting a few soliloquies out....

This is a very powerful book. It's a first-hand account of how Orwell found himself volunteering for an anti-Fascist brigade, and how utterly disillusioning the whole experience was, as the fractious anti-Fascists wasted enormous amounts of energy fighting each other instead of the real enemy. There are relevant lessons for any political campaign today (certainly I see the same tendencies in the environmental movement), and it also does a lot to illuminate where he was coming from with Animal Farm and 1984. Having studied these at school I was left under the impression that Orwell was a rather pro-establishment writer, but reading his non-fiction makes it clear that he was a strong ideological Socialist, and his critiques of Stalinism have all the bitterness of someone seeing his own ideals betrayed.

I loved this book, but must warn you to be careful with it. It messes with reality so effectively that it gave me nightmares twice, and made me miss my bus stop when I was nearing the end of the story.

Three stars doesn't do this book justice. It should get 5 for the second half, and -1 for the worst parts.

When it's good, this is a beautiful, moving and informative description of the Pacific Northwest. Egan can be wonderful at describing the beauty of the region and the emotions it induces in people, and at the stupidity and sheer unbridled greed that has led to some of the worst problems we have today. But he can also over-reach, both in terms of just over-egging his writing and exaggerating claims (he makes Rainier Valley sound like Compton) to the point of undermining his own credibility. And in places he falls for the sort of ridiculous stereotypes and cliches that make it sound like he's writing this all from New York.

The chapter about Victoria, in particular, was such an irritating pastiche of stereotypes about Canada, the US and Britain that it almost made me stop reading and I would advise anyone to skip it altogether. I'm glad I continued though, and most of the badness is concentrated towards the beginning.

The chapters on native tribes and on salmon are particularly beautifully written, and the parts that I know the factual background to check out with the other things I've read or learned about. They will make you angry, but appropriately so.