Alrightreads: Wonders

This was supposed to be a collection of (pop-)science books to make up for my non-fiction drought last year. That didn't last long.


Richard Holmes, The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science

2008 / Audiobook / 554 pages / UK

****

Learning who these men and woman were was illuminating, but the most entertaining parts were the ballooning and the Tahitian travelogue. I should go back to some of those reckless colonial journals, they seem like a depressing hoot.

Audiobook narrator Gildart Jackson is a keeper, almost on the Stephen Thorne/Derek Jacobi level, except he hasn't done the compulsory turn in Doctor Who yet.

Rachel Carson, The Sense of Wonder

1956 / E-book / 96 pages / USA

***

This is one of those books I never would have come across if I wasn't struggling to bulk out this flimsily connected reading batch, but that's one of the delights of doing this. Except when it's often not.

In this essay/proto-blog post/episode of the Patch Stop, the passionate author makes the straightforward case for exposing kids to nature and inspiring a lifelong appreciation for the everyday, even if you don't know your mosses from your lichens. Common-sense self-help that you already know, but like those people who never go outside to watch the humdrum meteor shower and only realise on their death bed that they probably should have bothered sometimes, it's a useful reminder.

Geraldine Brooks, Year of Wonders: A Novel of the Plague

2001 / Audiobook / 400 pages / UK

***

I like a nice rustic historical from time to time. They don't have to involve monumental suffering, but that's usually how it goes.

The best thing about this pretend first-hand account of the Black Death is the author's eye (and nose) for detail. The worst is that she doesn't bother writing in an archaic style to help us pretend it's anything other than pretend. Presumably she didn't want to put off her readers and jeopardise her success, the wuss.

The Prisoner

It's a shame this seminal smart-arse sixties series didn't get more than the 17 episodes, though even that was already stretching the concept well beyond Patrick McGoohan's original seven-episode outline. The desperate filler gets comically mental by the end, before the actual ending is inexcusably madder than anything that came before. Still, the journey was compelling.

It's due for a rewatch. The good bits, at least. Here are my moderately confounded reactions from the first time around, for what those are worth.

Other odd anthology series

An anthology of TV anthologies that were either relatively short-lived or I just couldn't stick with all the way through. Also features misc.

Tales from the Crypt

Horror comedy has been one of my favourite genre blends since I was corrupted at an early age by the likes of the Addams Family and Beetlejuice, so this gruesome adult anthology was naturally an irresponsible favourite growing up.

Or would have been if I'd managed to see an episode before I was 27. British terrestrial channels could be really unreliable when it came to imports sometimes. Here's what I thought of them, regrettably lacking the hindsight of childhood trauma.

Alrightreads: Cathedrals

Last year, I mostly read short stories that amounted to around 1,000 pages per writer. This year, I decided to read lengthy single works of around 1,000 pages each instead.

Then I realised I didn't really want to do that, outside of a couple of intriguing yet intimidating books I've been putting off. So sometimes/mostly, it'll be a few shorter but still hopefully substantial things making up that arbitrary total, hung loosely off a theme or something.

I've already read Ken Follett's heavy cathedral novel The Pillars of the Earth (a decade ago, in an attempt to impress a girl who liked it). Here are some other books about cathedrals.


Victor Hugo, The Hunchback of Notre-Dame (Notre-Dame de Paris)

1831 / Audiobook / 592 pages / France

****

When I studied literature at university, my choice of modules was mainly dictated by avoiding overlong and clichéd Romantic and Victorian novels like cholera. I've tried to read Dickens a couple of times since, but even in passive audiobook form it's been a chore. But this one – which seemed to be a Gothic quasi-horror story largely set in a cathedral – was intriguing enough to commit to. I don't mind being bored when it's atmospheric.

It's absurdly padded with digressive essays on the decline of Gothic architecture, the barbarism of medieval justice and other opinionated topics that really belong in supplementary journals where students writing essays about the novel can track them down, rather than interrupting the already dawdling story every other chapter for the rest of us, and Hugo's innovative subversion of convention is cancelled out by his reliance on fairy-tale coincidence elsewhere, but the surprisingly grim ending tipped it in my favour. I haven't seen Disney's version, but I'm going to guess they didn't close on the cradling skeletons motif.

T. S. Eliot, Murder in the Cathedral

1935 / Ebook / 88 pages / USA

***

Eliot was presumably making a meaningful political point by dredging up this 750-year-old crime when he did. But since you can find parallels to current affairs anywhen and anywhere, the murder of Thomas Beckett was probably just something he wanted to write anyway.

Since I don't normally read or attend verse plays for fun (unless some cheapskate events site offers single press tickets to shoddy Fringe productions in exchange for befuddled reviews), I didn't get a lot out of it. The scene-setting chorus overtures are nice and poetic with memorable lines, it's a shame the dialogue and plot kept interrupting them, really.

William Golding, The Spire

1964 / Audiobook / 223 pages / UK

**

Style is usually enough to win me over for want of substance, but this just bored me throughout. Books that trap me in someone's deranged mind can go either way, and I found the hubristic Dean intolerable. Which is the point, but I just wanted to get it over with. It's clever, but so are a lot of things I'm not interested in reading.

Philip K. Dick, Galactic Pot-Healer

1969 / Ebook / 144 pages / USA

****

These stupid, self-imposed reading challenges pay off sometimes. Outside of an epic PKD marathon, I probably never would have encountered this obscure delight if it didn't have this fortnight's keyword in it.

We're in similar dystopian doldrums to Dick's previous, more famous novel, only with a more sarcastically satirical bent (unless Do Androids... was funny too, but that aspect went over my head at 16). A fixer of broken pottery living in a broken future follows his predestined Hero's Journey to Sirius V, summoned by a senile elemental being to help raise a sunken cathedral up from the hellish depths. What drugs was this guy on?!? All of them.

It's not one of PKD's most inspired or insightful tales, but I had fun.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer

More worthless insights from an outdated rewatch. I finally got around to watching Angel some time after writing all this, and ended up enjoying it more than my premature berating here predicts. You'd think I would have learned not to pre-judge after writing off Buffy as conventional high school crap for a few years. It was only that sometimes.

Star Trek odds & sods

Seasons 1 & 2 of the '70s animated series, season 3 of the '60s original, season 4 of Enterprise and some misc.

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine

Deep Space Nine turns 25 today. That's gone quickly, especially since I last rewatched and retrospectively reviewed it all when it turned 20. Here's that, reposted all on one long, laggy page.

If you're interested in what some random guy thinks about what he thinks is the best Star Trek series, you might get something out of it. Though I recommend Terry J. Erdmann and Paula M. Block's excellent Deep Space Nine Companion instead, if they ever get around to releasing it in ebook.