Floating down to Camelot

Fewer books than normal this month, due to being on holiday last week, during which I spent much of my reading time reading guidebooks and maps and obsessively checking the weather forecast.

( Books read in July )

Posted one day early, since I'm going away tomorrow and won't have finished my current book before then. Quite a lot of books this month, but a lot of them were short, quick children’s books.

( Books read in March )

I enjoyed writing reviews of everything I read in 2016, but the reviews had become too long and arduous. I've decided to keep up with the reviewing in 2017, but keep the reviews much shorter. That's the intention, anyway. We'll see how it turns out.

( Books read in January )

For the last few weeks, I have been reading The Chronicles of St Mary’s by Jodi Taylor, which has seven novels published so far, with more to come, and around the same number of short stories.

( Adventures through time )

I've failed badly in my resolution to write reviews of everything I read in 2016. Blame holidays, which got me out of the habit.

For several weeks, from late May to the middle of June, I was reading through Dorothy L Sayers' Peter Wimsey novels. I did so in a fairly random order, the first book (Murder Must Advertise) being chosen for me out of thousands of possibles by a series of die rolls. From a random beginning, it seemed fitting to carry on in a random order, so I went to Strong Poison, which I liked, and Gaudy Night, which I liked a lot. I'd read one or two of the series some years ago, but I found them too lacking in emotion for my taste at the time. I don't know why I reacted better to them this time. Perhaps I was just in a different mood. Perhaps it was because Gaudy Night gave me an emotional way in, being a lot more focused on such things than some of the other books. I do often struggle to warm to a main character until I've seen them through other people's eyes, which is why I often find first person narration unengaging. But, anyway, whatever the reason, I read my way - in a fairly eccentric order - through most of the novels, and then went on holiday to Wales, where I got waylaid by King Arthur, so moved on without quite completing my reading of the series.

At some point during my reading of that series, I paused to read The Monstrous Child by Francesca Simon - a brief YA retelling of Norse mythology, from before the building of Asgard all the way through the Ragnarok and beyond, all told in the first person by Hel. The voice is that of a modern teenage girl, informal, colloquial and very angry. It's had some rave reviews, but I just found it grim, depressing and unengaging.

I also read Ferguson's Gang: The Remarkable Story of the National Trust Gangsters, by Polly Bagnall and Sally Beck. Ferguson's Gang were a mysterious group of people who raised money for the National Trust in the 1930s, and presented it masked, in a variety of dramatic and headline-grabbing ways. This was in the early days of the National Trust's involvement in preserving buildings, and Ferguson's Gang arranged and funded their purchase of several small buildings across the country, including Newtown Town Hall on the Isle of Wight. I spent ages one day in Newtown Town Hall reading the facsimile of "The Boo," their minute book. All the members took on assumed names and personas, and The Boo is full of jokes, jollity and japes; it reminded me quite a lot of the minute book of various student societies I was involved in, full of digressions and in-jokes. All the members were women graduates in their 20s, from a variety of backgrounds, so it fitted in quite nicely with my reading of Gaudy Night. One of the authors of the book is the granddaughter of "The Arthichoke," the gang's tame architect, who raised his family in one of the buildings the Gang preserved. The book tells the story of the Gang and of the real people behind the pseudonyms, many of whom had colourful lives, and I found it extremely interesting and readable.

While in Wales, I read the Four Branches of the Mabinogion (Penguin Classics edition) and meant to carry on, but reached the bit when Culhwch spends 6 pages listing every single one of Arthur's warriors, and laid it down for a while, weary. I misaimed on picking it up again, so ended up dipping in and out of Gerald of Wales instead, both his tour of Wales and his description of Wales. I do like Gerald, with his shameless bias towards his own birthplace and family's lands, his ability to go off on long tangents about the habits of beavers, and the way he misses no opportunity to plug his latest book or have a dig at Geoffrey of Monmouth. (Must reread him, too.)

I tried to read the Maginogion sequence of novels by Evangeline Walton, but really didn't take to them at all, so gave up very early.

Since getting back from Wales, I've been obsessing on Arthurian legend, but I did take a brief break from it to read Binny Bewitched by Hilary McKay - one of the few children's book authors who gets me to read out of my usual favourite genres. I particularly love her Exiles series - humorous mini-misadventures of a family of four book-obsessed sisters - but I'm enjoying this current series, too, of which this is the third. Set in a small Cornish village, it deals with 12 year old Binnie, her family and her various nemeses - she always seems to have a nemesis. There are no massive dramas and no heavy-handed Issues. It's just the small dramas of daily life, with nice characters, lots of humour and some lovely turns of phrase.

Yet more book reviews:

( Science fiction, this time )

Although my last books post only covered three weeks of January, I'd intended to settle into a once-a-month post, but it seems that now I've decided to write up all the books I read this year, I need to get writing as soon as I finish them. If I don't, I then lie awake at night writing reviews in my head. And once I've written my thoughts down, I might as well post them.

( The Grisha Trilogy, and The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet )

Thanks for all the book recommendations. I haven't really had chance to look up any of the books, since I've been felled by a stomach bug for the last few days, but I'll take a look at them when I'm up to doing anything more than lying limply on the couch watching daytime TV.

I read an article today that most young people find books boring. The evidence for this was that when those riots happened in 2011, sometimes the only unlooted shop in a street was the bookshop.

To be honest, I am highly unlikely to riot. If the people I was with suddenly said, "Hey! Let's riot!" I'd be the one hovering anxiously at the back, saying, "er... I really don't think we're supposed to be doing this." In a zombie apocalypse, I'd be the one who stood for hours at the counter of the corpse-strewn shop, waiting for a shop assistant to appear so I could pay for my gun before taking it out of the packet. Even if the apocalypse escalated, and I finally accepted that looting was necessary, I'd turn to my fellow looters, and say, "Are you the queue?" or, "I'm sorry. Were you here before me?" and, "No, after you," they would say, and, "No, no, I couldn't possibly. After you," I would say in return, and when the zombies came to rip our brains out, it would be a blessed relief, since at least it would get us out of the Impasse of Politeness. (Band name?)

But, anyway... Let's suspend disbelief for a while, and assume that I was rioting and indulging in a mad looting spree. I don't think a book shop would be my first port of call. A book shop is a place for browsing and leisurely reading of blurbs. "Raah!" say the rioters. (I don't know if rioters really do say "raah!" but let's assume that they do, like dinosaurs.) "Raah! Raah! Riot! Riot! Riot! Oh... I've not heard of that author, but the cover looks good. Interesting blurb, too. Let's read the first page... Hmm, not sure about the writing style. Maybe not... Ooh, 3-for-2 on that table!" (Because I refuse to believe that looters aren't drawn by special offers. Looting something that's one a 3 for 2 offer is clearly better than looting something that's sold at full price.)

I mean, wouldn't it be so vexing to return home from your night of rioting, only to find that you've accidentally picked up only the final book in a trilogy, or a book that turns out to have nothing but one star reviews on Amazon? It would entirely ruin any emotional high that the rioting had left. It would be even worse than looting a designer dress only to find that it didn't quite fit you. No, best go for the tablet or the flat-screen TV: something you can grab quickly without pausing in your raaahing, and something that you can probably flog for a decent amount of cash if it turns out that you can't use it. I don't think that dodgy traders who hang out in seedy pubs are ever likely to say, "psst! Wanna buy a genuine original of last year's Booker winner? £5.99, it'll cost you in the shops, but it's yours for £3.99, no questions asked."

Besides, books are surprisingly heavy - a fact I am all too painfully aware of, having moved 500 shelves of the things last week, twice. They are also mischievous things, and when you try to carry them in big piles, they like to jump off. So as you were running raaahing from the looted shop, a pile of slippery paperbacks in your arms, you'd keep on losing them. Even if you were a responsible rioter, and had paused in your frenzy to bring along your Bag For Life, you'd be hard pressed to carry more than 20 books out at a time. If you wanted more, you'd have to pop next door to the supermarket to loot a shopping trolley, and, frankly, by the time you've reached the stage of giving careful thought to storage solutions, I suspect that the urge to go "raaah!" would have long since left you, and you'd decide to go home for a nice cup of tea instead.

I love looking at old books about what the future will be like. The Future, an Eyewitness Guide, was published in 1998, and much of it is about a general "future," while some of it is specifically about 2020. A lot of the technologies have already come to pass, but not in the way they were predicting. People will have mobile phones in 2020, yes, and they will all be video phones, but there's no hint that this device can do other things, too. A whole plethora of other devices will be carried around, each of them fulfilling a specific purpose that many people nowadays use a phone or tablet for. Tourists can carry a dedicated device with a roll-out electronic map on it, for example. Everyone's dining tables will have built in screens so they can view their morning paper in electronic form. If they want to work away from home, they will have yet another device - a huge, clunky looking "office" that they wear on their arm.

There's a pleasing sense of optimism about it, too. Imagine driving a car that never lets you get lost? In The Future, we will have sat navs (not called by that name, but exactly described) and it will be impossible to get lost when driving when using on. Oh, and electronic data is 100% secure.

Here is a list of the technological developments of the years between 2001 and 2035, as imagined in 1998:

( The Future )