redshift

“I wasn’t prepped at all,” I said. “Two hours of subliminals, real-time, which I was too time-lagged to hear. On the subservient status of women, mostly. And fish forks.”

She looked appalled. “You weren’t prepped? Victorian society’s highly mannered. Breaches of etiquette are taken very seriously.” She looked curiously at me. “How have you managed thus far?”

“For the past two days I’ve been on the river with an Oxford don who quotes Herodotus, a lovesick young man who quotes Tennyson, a bulldog, and a cat,” I said. “I played it by ear.”

This book is one I was set onto by a friend from the US. I’d never actually heard of Connie Willis before which, it turns out, is probably because her books are more or less impossible to find in the average UK bookshop. I think this is a real shame, and I’m ever so glad to have discovered her writing.

To Say Nothing Of The Dog is a story about time travel. Or a Victorian comedy of manners (and errors). Or a detective story. Or a love story. Or all of the above and then some. The narrative (and central character) hops mostly between a future Oxford, 1940s Coventry, and various parts of Victorian England, trying to correct a perceived threat to the course of history and unravel various mysteries along the way. It’s not an overly serious book, and a few of the revelations aren’t precisely shocking — but I didn’t really feel as though they needed to be. The joy is in the process of getting there, and having suspicions confirmed. Or, sometimes, completely undermined. The humour is wonderful, and I found the story thoroughly gripping. The references to the sort of detective fiction I grew up reading insane amounts of really didn’t hurt either.

I feel as though this is one I’ll enjoy revisiting from time to time, just to check in on the characters and smile at their quirks and give myself that comfortable feeling of curling up with a good, familiar book. (Which is pretty much what I do with my collection of Dorothy L Sayers books, too. Take that as you will.)

He remembers those vanished years. As though looking through a dusty window pane, the past is something he could see, but not touch. And everything he sees is blurred and indistinct.

By special request from Crystal, who takes the blame for this blog existing in the first place, I’m going to talk a little about the Hong Kong film In The Mood For Love, directed by Wong Kar-Wai and starring Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung. I saw it a couple of nights ago, courtesy of my housemate, and though I didn’t think I was going to be awake enough to take in much of anything it’s actually quite a captivating film, in a quiet sort of way.

The film is about a man and a woman who move into neighbouring flats in a crowded block. Both are married, but their partners are often away, and they eventually realise that both their partners are being unfaithful to them. It’s a tangled sort of love story. It’s not particularly happy, but the drama here is mostly played in a low-key sort of way, and where I think I was expecting something overtly depressing what I actually got was more of a thoughtful, gently sad sort of piece. I think that ‘melancholy’ might be a good word. There’s a great deal of emotion, but the tone overall felt very reflective to me. At times it’s also very funny, and though I’m tempted to talk about specific scenes that I really enjoyed on that level I think it’s probably better just to see for yourself. It’s also visually very beautiful, atmospheric… you may be gathering that it’s not really one for those of you who’d prefer an action-packed film, but if you’re willing to take the time to let the story unfold at its own pace then it’s very worthwhile. And the ending is just right, I think.

(I should also note that Wong Kar-Wai’s films tend to be somewhat interlinked, and that this one is apparently sort-of followed by 2046, which I saw some years ago and didn’t understand in the slightest. I’m going to have to give it another try now that I’ve seen In The Mood For Love, as I’ve been told it’ll make rather more sense with that film in mind.)

By March, the worst of the winter would be over. The snow would thaw, the rivers begin to run, and the world would wake into itself again.

Not that year.

Winter hung in there, like an invalid refusing to die. Day after grey day the ice stayed hard, the world remained unfriendly and cold.

Odd and the Frost Giants was a World Book Day release in the UK in 2008, so I’m rather behind time on this one, but for unknown reasons a few copies of it resurfaced in my local bookshop today and I’m very fond of Neil Gaiman so I picked it up.

As a World Book Day release it’s very short, of course — 97 pages long with some illustrations — but it tells a beautifully imaginative story of a crippled boy and a few Norse gods and at least some Frost Giants, although how many may depend on who you ask. It’s a bit of a coming-of-age story and it’s certainly an adventure and it’s another one of those books that makes you (well, me, anyway) smile a lot. Sweet and funny and all Loki’s fault. Read it, and then read it to any children you can capture too. (Err, I suppose it would help if you actually knew the children concerned. That sort of thing can probably be taken the wrong way otherwise.)

War is like any other bad relationship. Of course you want out, but at what price?

Broken Angels is the second book in a trilogy, so reviewing it first might seem a bit incongruous. It probably is. But it’s the one I’ve just finished reading, so I’m afraid you’ll have to deal with that. I read the first book in the sequence (Altered Carbon) last year and, with a few reservations, enjoyed it massively. I enjoyed Broken Angels almost as much, but the same reservations I had previously bothered me somewhat more. Details on that later.

These books have a distinctly cyberpunk sort of feel — dealing with themes of human consciousness, the blurring of the line between human and machine, corporate power and criminality, all in a distinctly noir tone — but are perhaps a bit wider in scope than that implies. Humanity has reached the stars, albeit with a good deal of help from rediscovered Martian technology, but it’s the same old problems wherever you go.

It’s the Martian technology that Broken Angels is mostly concerned with, building up a sense of humans playing in a universe they can’t even begin to understand, well before they’re ready to be out there, as it were, unsupervised. Overall the message is pretty grim, and the violence fits that description too. The actual story dragged me in very well too; I think I told a friend I was going to stop reading and go to bed sometime last night, and then read for the next three hours anyway because I had to get to the end… and the end was satisfying, if not mind-blowing.

None of this is the bit I have a problem with. The bit I have a problem with is the sex. It only happens a couple of times, but it’s generally enough to disconcert me and break me out of the flow of the story. I find myself wondering what this is actually meant to add and when we can get back to finding stuff out about the main plot. Possibly this is boring of me. Possibly the sex actually doesn’t add anything. Possibly I’m just annoyed that every time a female character is introduced I find myself wondering how long it’s going to take the protagonist to have sex with her. I suppose you’ll have to judge for yourselves, if you feel like reading the books.

A good book, but not incredible, and if I’m honest, as a story in its own right, Altered Carbon was more generally satisfying for me. I’m still happy to own this one, though. It’s just not my very favourite. I’ll still be checking out the third and final book (Woken Furies).

We can invest enormous time and energy in serious efforts to know another person, but in the end, how close can we come to that person’s essence? We convince ourselves that we know the person well, but do we really know anything important about anyone?

Haruki Murakami is an author I consider incredibly talented, with the ability to write about the highly fantastical and the apparently ordinary and then tangle the two up together until you begin to lose track of which is which. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is the latest book of his that I have read, and quite possibly the best. Although I’m a little tempted to say something like that almost every time.

The story deals with unemployed Toru Okada, and his missing cat, and his problems with his wife. To start with. Huge parts of the book are, as a friend of mine told me before I read it, “all about cooking and ironing shirts and stuff” — but it’s still entirely engaging. It’s even more than a little creepy, which is part of the beauty of the thing; the mundane can be deeply unsettling and the bizarre can seem natural and right. I found myself very much unable to let go of this book — not only in the sense of losing hours to actually reading it, but also in the sense that it lingered in my mind for a long time after I’d put it down. The book deals with hidden sides to all sorts of things, from the lives of its characters to Japanese history and society; and it deals with reality and unreality; and it’s also something of a detective story, as the central character tries to piece together what has happened to cause the changes in his life. Another thing I find remarkable about this book, like many of Murakami’s works, is its ability to pin down in words things that I — and presumably a lot of other people — have often felt, but have never been able to describe.

An intriguing, bizarre and sometimes deeply disturbing read.

I say this entirely as a good thing. It’s one of the best books I have read in a long time, honestly.

I stood still for a while, holding my breath and listening, but I couldn’t hear a thing. The phone had stopped ringing. I heard no bird cries or street noises. The sky was painted over, a perfect uniform grey. On days like this the clouds seemed to absorb the sounds from the surface of the earth. And not just sounds. All kinds of things. Perceptions, for example.

The appeal of reading, she thought, lay in its indifference: there was something undeferring about literature. Books did not care who was reading them or whether one read them or not. All readers were equal, herself included.

The Uncommon Reader is an unspeakably lovely little book. The premise is simple: The Queen, through an odd sequence of events, Discovers Reading. And then reads everything she can get her hands on, to the horror of a number of people around her. It’s not a heavy book, and it’s not a complex book, but it’s wonderful and funny and touching, all in a very (appropriately) genteel sort of way. I smiled all the way through it; not hilarious, but charmingly witty. A story about the joys (and perils and limitations) of reading. Recommended.

My name is Liz, and I’m setting up home here. I read a lot, write a lot, and soapbox a lot — sometimes.

There are a few things I have plans to post here. First and foremost are my views on books I’ve read recently, although I can hardly claim to be an amazing literary critic or anything of the sort; I tend to read huge amounts of genre fiction, and I’m not necessarily all that discriminating. At least not in the same direction as everyone else. Secondly, cookery. I’m not an amazing cook either, but I do cook more or less everything I eat from scratch, and gluten intolerance has encouraged me to improvise a lot. With mixed results. Thirdly, I may talk from time to time about writing. I may also talk about anything else which seems sufficiently interesting, but really, if we go there who knows where it’ll end.

If you’d like to know a bit more about me, well — by training I’m an archaeologist, which means I’m good at digging things up and cataloguing them obsessively. I’ve played at being all sorts of things in the past, including a figure skater, a clarinetist, a sailor, a scientist and a classicist. I travel whenever I can, wherever I can. I live in a mid-size town in the East of England.

I think that’s enough for now. All you really need to know is that I read books.

– Liz