I’M READING AS FAST AS I CAN (JANUARY 2013 EDITION)

[defrog]

I came up with the title for this series because I don’t consider myself a fast reader – especially when some of you are racking up something like 80 to 100+ books a year. And my “to read” pile never seems to get any smaller, though I do take into account the fact that I buy a lot of books on the road, and I am a fool for book sales and book fairs.

So I tallied up this series to see just how fast I am reading.

Apparently I read 61 books in 2012. If you don’t count graphic novels, I read 55.

Including these!

JUST FINISHED 

Faking It: The Quest For Authenticity In Popular Music, by Hugh Barker and Yuval Taylor

I don't often take book recommendations from Jack White. But when he name-dropped this book (which explores the importance that music fans place on authenticity in music, be it punk, indie, blues, country or world music) in a recent interview, I decided to check it out. The book’s basic thesis is this: the demand by fans for music artists to be "authentic" – write yr own songs, keep it real, no fake plastic corporate rock, etc – is at odds with the fact that most music we think of as authentic started as anything but. In reality, a lot of “authentic” music is the creation of major-label target marketing, many “authentic” artists didn’t write their own songs, and authenticity is not always synonymous with quality.

The argument gets muddled in places, and one big hole for me is the authors’ assumed definition of authenticity – one thing they miss is that for many music fans, authenticity isn’t about writing yr own music or literally singing yr life about so much as staying true to yr own artistic vision, whatever it may be, and not changing it for the sake of selling more records. Still, even though I disagreed with some of their reasoning, other parts are dead on. I’d recommend this for any music fan – especially the ones hung up on authenticity as a mandatory criteria for good music – just to challenge their assumptions of what “authentic” music is or is not.

JUST STARTED

The Quantum Thief, by Hannu Rajaniemi

High-concept hard SF and the debut novel from Hannu Rajaniemi. The basic pitch seems to be: It’s Lupin The Gentleman Thief vs Schrodinger’s Cat. Charles Stross is a fan, so I figured I’d give it a try.

RECENT TITLES 

Funeral In Berlin by Len Deighton

The third of Deighton’s working-class spy novels, with this one surrounding a plan by a Soviet general to help an East German scientist defect to the West – for a fee. Except, as usual, it’s a lot more complicated than that. As usual, Deighton delivers the goods with his usual deadpan humor, red herrings and remarkable plot twists. If you like spy stories and yr not reading Deighton, you should be. 

The Tenth Man by Graham Greene

A “lost” novella that Greene wrote in the 1940s as a treatment for MGM and forgotten about until it resurfaced in the early 1980s. Given the brilliance of the basic concept (ten men in a prison camp in Nazi-occupied France are forced to draw lots to see which one will be shot at dawn, and the rich lawyer who loses buys his way out by giving his fortune to anyone who will trade places with him – then, years later after the war ends up, he accidentally meets the family of the man who took his place against the wall), it’s amazing no one ever bothered to make a film out of it. The novella is well executed with punchy writing and a brisk pace, and a brilliant demonstration of how to write a story as good as any novel in just 30,000 words. 

The Void Captain’s Tale by Norman Spinrad

Set in the same universe as Child Of Fortune, but written and published before that one), the plot involves the confession of a starship captain who ends up in a taboo love affair with a pilot that eventually puts his entire ship and its passengers and crew in jeopardy. Which – this being Spinrad – is a simplistic description of a more complicated tale that involves orgasm-powered warp drives (designed by aliens, even) and the fragility of space-bound social orders that rely heavily on artifice and conformity to function, and the price one pays for defying those conventions. Of the Spinrad books I’ve managed to get my hands on, this is arguably one of the best. 

The President’s Last Love by Andrey Kurkov

I tend to enjoy Kurkov’s offbeat tales from the Ukraine, which often involve the Russian Mafia and political satire. This one was hard to get into, though. The plot follows Sergey Pavlovich Bunin, the fictional president of the Ukraine in 2015, who has a heart transplant that comes with some unusual strings attached. The novel actually covers three different periods of his life simultaneously – his youth in the Soviet Union, his success after Ukraine becomes independent, and his presidency. It’s all supposed to add up to sly satire of the absurdities of Ukrainian politics, but the constant jumping back and forth between timelines makes it hard to keep track of what’s going on. So despite plenty of good vignettes (the best of which come from his presidential period), it didn’t really gel as a whole for me.

PRODUCTION NOTE: By the way, I’ve recently joined Good Reads, which looks like a potentially good way to track and rate books, as well as come up with an organized way to queue up books for future reading. If yr on there as well, feel free to ping me.

Pedaling faster,

This is dF