BOOK REVIEW: The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating by Elizabeth Tova Bailey

When I picked up The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating I vaguely remembered reading a review at some point. I expected one of those books that purport to be about one thing, while really being about something else, on a deep metaphorical level. Surely the book couldn’t just be about snails – could it?

I was wrong – this book is purely and simply about snails. It is about one snail in particular, who lived in a pot of violets and then in a glass terrarium by Elizabeth Tova Bailey’s bed. She was suffering through a strange and serious illness, but developed an interest in snail biology, literature and history, and her research forms the core of the book. If you have ever wondered about the reproductive habits of the snail, this is the book for you.

Tova Bailey’s illness plays a peripheral role. It is perhaps too peripheral, for those hoping for a Hollywood redemption-through-snail-watching ending. I found myself hoping for Tova Bailey’s recovery, but this is a book that avoids the easy answers. In an elegant and restrained postscript, Tova Bailey gives some more background to her situation, but as I said this book really is all about the snail. That’s not to say there is no self-reflection, but it is done sparingly. A book such as this could easily become self-indulgent and it is to Tova Bailey’s great credit that she steers the opposite course. It is left to the reader to ponder, after closing the book, the questions it raises.

In some ways, the book itself resembles the snail that it features. The attraction of the story is not immediately obvious, and some may dismiss it out of hand. But slowing down and spending some time to try to understand the book, at its snails pace, has unexpected rewards. It won’t be for everyone but this quiet meditation will appeal to many who appreciate thoughtful and elegant writing.

BOOK REVIEW: 1222 by Anne Holt

Every so often you come across a book that is so astoundingly, brilliantly good, you want to shout it from the rooftops. That’s one of the reasons I started this blog. Still, while I’ve reviewed many books I enjoyed, there have been  very few that have made me want to rush out and buy copies for all my friends so that they don’t miss out.

1222 by Anne Holt is the latest book I’ve fallen in love with, and it’s fair to say I’m head over heels. So this review may resemble the gushing praise of a new lover rather than a more rational dissection, but what’s life without a mad crush here and there?

The set-up grabs your attention from the start. A train carrying  a mysterious locked carriage derails high in the Norwegian mountains. The passengers are rescued and taken to an isolated mountain hotel. As the storm rages outside, and snowdrifts build up against the walls, one of the passengers is murdered. With no contact with the outside world, it falls to a reluctant Hanne Wilhelmson, former police detective, to find the killer.

Hanne is a character so three-dimensional  it’s hard to believe she’s fictional. Paralysed from the waist down, she shies away from human contact and has built defences thicker than the snow outside. Her instincts are to avoid becoming involved, but as she grows to know her fellow passengers her isolation becomes harder to maintain.

Setting and characters are vividly painted, and the plot is beyond gripping. This is a book to keep you awake long past your bedtime. It’s in the best tradition of the Agatha Christie whodunit, but with the pace of Dan Brown and the topicality of the best thriller writers. In the end I can only say in this review what I have been saying to friends, family and colleagues – you have to read this book.

BOOK REVIEW: Architects of Tomorrow Volume 1 by William Van Winkle

Back when my family first encountered the excitement of dial-up internet, I took up knitting. This was back when loading a single website could take five full minutes or more. Starting at the little eggtimer was just as frustrating then as it is now, so knitting at least kept me busy in those interminable pauses.

I was thinking those early days as I read Architects of Tomorrow by William Van Winkle. Some of the interviews collected in the book date back to that period, while others are more recent. The thing that they have in common is that all of the interviewees are in one way or another, pioneers in the technology field. From gaming to processors to personal computers to services such as Smashwords, these were people with a vision of where technology would take us. One thing I particularly like in the book is that Van Winkle has gone back to the interviewees in the past year, asking them which of their predictions have come true and what their new vision for the future is, given the exponential speed at which technology is now developing. While it’s a form of guessing game, it is made up of educated guesses by some of the smartest minds in the business, so all of their comments are well worth reading.

As a book, I think the collection holds up well. I’m not a reader of CPU Magazine, where the articles originally appeared, and I’m fairly sure I don’t fall into the target readership either. Some of the interviews were a little heavy on the technical details or of limited interest to the general reader. However, Van Winkle’s interviewing style is full of enthusiasm and he doesn’t presume a great deal of technical knowledge. I do think that there were perhaps too many interviews in the collection – as a book, I think it may have been more satisfying if some of the weaker interviews were cut out.

On the whole, I enjoyed reading this book, and I’ll probably buy Volume 2 as it comes out – perhaps not to read cover to cover as a whole, but to dip into now and again. Many people ask “What’ll they think of next?” and it’s the interviewees in Architects of Tomorrow who are most likely to have the answers.

A few thoughts on subscriptions

We've just renewed our weekend subscription to The Age newspaper. We suffered through a couple of weekends without a newspaper (yes, #firstworldproblems, I know), and it got me thinking about subscriptions in general.

I read the newspaper pretty much cover to cover, every weekend (whether this is a productive use of time is an altogether different question!). I do that because it's delivered to my house.

I've also been reading the Words With Jam e-magazine lately, which is quite fun. Problem is, every time I want to download it I need to log onto Smashwords, haul out my credit card, and plug the eReader into the computer. Yes, all you people with Kindles can be smug now. But the point is, it takes effort on my part. You know what I would love? For the magazine to be delivered to my inbox as an email attachment, for me to download whenever I'm ready. I'd happily pay a year's subscription up front.

Well, it looks like I'm not the only one thinking along these lines. I've just discovered www.emilybooks.com. The premise? An ebook a month, delivered to your inbox in your preferred format. I'm signing up right now. I could do with some variation in my reading diet, and thing is, if the book is there, I'll read it. Could lead to some interesting blog posts if nothing else (is it bad for an ereader to throw it across the room?)

I will report back on the great subscription experiment, if I manage to tear myself away from my newspaper. And if anyone out there knows of any other good subscriptions (crime fiction magazines, especially) do let me know!

BOOK REVIEW: Bird Cloud: A memoir by Annie Proulx

E-readers aside, I can be a bit old-fashioned when it comes to books. You see, I like a plot. It doesn’t matter if it’s tenuous, implausible or just flat out incomprehensible, but heaven save me from a book where nothing happens.

I am sorry to report that Annie Proulx’s Bird Cloud – A memoir is such a book. Ostensibly the story of the building of her dream house on a property called Bird Cloud, the back cover promises history, geology, anthropology and more.

Here’s  a summary of what happens in the book. Proulx organises the building of a house. A number of minor issues are overcome. She moves in and spends a large number of pages describing the birds that live on the property. The grand tragic finale? She can’t live on the property in winter because it gets snowed in. I needed a whole box of tissues for that one.

If that sounds a little self-indulgent as the premise for the book, that’s probably correct. Proulx talks more than once about the house going way over budget, and I have the sneaking suspicion that this book was intended to help recoup some of the cost. Or perhaps I am being unfair and the book  reflects the fact that dramas such as the polishing of the floor in the wrong colour loomed very large for Proulx. Of course, that doesn’t help a reader much. I am interested in history, geology, and other subjects promised by the back cover and barely touched on by the book. I am not interested in the squabbles between Proulx’s architect and her builder. In this I suspect I am probably not alone.

The book is of course lyrically written, as you would expect from such a renowned writer. This didn’t stop me from skipping large chunks towards the end. I would have skipped to the part where something happened, except that I got to the end and found that part didn’t exist. To make things more frustrating, Proulx drops dark hints in the early chapters about catastrophes to follow – “little-did-I-know” type statements. I can only assume she was referring to what I would characterise as minor mishaps during construction. Either that, or my copy had some important pages missing.

Without Proulx’s name I seriously doubt this book would have been published. As a personal diary of an important time in the writer’s life, it makes sense. As a cottage history of a particular piece of land, it may be interesting to people who live nearby. As a reference source for people thinking of building an architect-designed dream home in the middle of nowhere – well, perhaps not. Unfortunately, I can only recommend this book to the general public if they are in need of a soporific or so post-modern they have no need of plot. As you can see, I don’t fall into either category.

Part 2: The Emperor’s Edge and self-publishing

I just couldn’t let it go. Every possible argument for and against self-publishing has already been made time and time again, but I can’t resist weighing in with a few thoughts. If you can’t take it anymore, you have my blessing to go and watch scantily-clad footballers wives tread the blue carpet at the Brownlow Medal. Although listening to the commentary for five minutes made me want to drive a fork into my ear. Should you decide to stay, I can at least promise something slightly more coherent.

I bought The Emperor’s Edge because I was going on a long plane journey and needed books. I can get a through a lot of books in 24 hours travel and so I didn’t want to pay too much for each. To be honest, I opened up Smashwords and sat there bamboozled for a good ten minutes, wondering where to turn. The Emperor’s Edge happened to be the current no. 1 so I bought it on the principle that that many people can’t be wrong.

As you can see from my previous review, I didn’t regret my purchasing decision. For a few dollars I was more than happy with the experience. However, this post is really about asking – what if The Emperor’s Edge  had been traditionally published? From a readers’ perspective, what would be different?

For a start, I probably wouldn’t have been able to download it at all because of territorial restrictions. As it was only published in 2010, I doubt we would have an eBook version accessible in Australia yet. You can find my exasperated rant on that subject here.

Next question – do I think The Emperor’s Edge  would have sold as well if traditionally published and traditionally priced? There’s no answer to that that doesn’t involve a lot of guesswork. From my point of view, I’ve read traditionally published books that were arguably better written and didn’t sell, and traditionally published books that were far worse and sold like hotcakes. Further than that I can’t say.

Do I think The Emperor’s Edge  could have benefited from more stringent editing? Perhaps. Some of the flaws I noted in my review could have been fixed by a good editor. That said, anyone with a “name” these days doesn’t seem to get edited at all – I’ve stopped buying Janet Evanovich altogether for that reason. To be fair, when I think about The Emperor’s Edge, I am thinking of what a really good or brilliant editor could have done for it, and those are hard to find. The book seems to have had a competent edit and is by no means a failure in that department.

The upshot? We can play guessing games all we want, but ultimately each book has to be judged on its merits. Comparing The Emperor’s Edge with a hypothetical traditionally published version doesn’t get us much further in the debate. All I can say is that as a reader, I was happy with the book I bought, and the price I paid for it. To steal a cliché from the footballers’ handbook, at the end of the day, that’s what really matters.

The Emperor’s Edge by Lindsay Buroker (subtitle: a high fantasy mystery in an era of steam) - Part 1

I was going to use this blog post to talk about self-publishing, because The Emperor’s Edge happens to be the first self-published book I have read.

But really, who cares?            

Ultimately, like all books, self-published books should be judged on their merits. I can’t resist talking a little bit about self-publishing in Part 2 of this post, but I’ll try and be fair to Lindsay Buroker by concentrating first and most importantly on the book itself.

A word of warning  - the subtitle of The Emperor’s Edge is “a high fantasy mystery in an era of steam.” As a mystery reader myself, I think calling it a mystery is probably mistaken, and I doubt this book would appeal to mystery fans. Fantasy and steam are the two key words here.

The book opens with Corporal Amaranthe Lokdon (an “enforcer” or police officer) being called to the scene of a fire. We learn that in the world of the book women dominate business, but are excluded from other roles, and Amaranthe’s role as the first female enforcer has caused some friction. The fire kicks of a series of events that forces Amaranthe to go on the run and assemble a group of misfits on a mission to save the emperor.

In terms of plot, the book is well-paced but the plot itself seems underdeveloped in places. It is possible that Buroker has left some aspects to be developed further in a sequel or series, but there are a few too many unexplained incidences for my liking.

Rather than plot, the strength of this book is its characters. A more hard-nosed reviewer would probably say that they lack originality. But they are just so damn likeable! Amaranthe is a painfully honest school-prefect type at the beginning of the book, but she gradually changes as she discovers that people in authority aren’t always right. She’s a nerd and a dag in the best way, someone who stubbornly refuses to compromise her values. Unlike too many fantasy novels, she is not beautiful, or endowed with special strengths. As a character I found her incredibly endearing. The other characters are less well fleshed out, and many of Amaranthe’s team appear to be there primarily for comic relief. However, they redeem themselves by being laugh-out-loud funny, The hunky male-model type without much of a brain is comic gold.

The other important component of a book such as this is the setting. Buroker does a relatively good job of setting the scene gradually, without dumping too much world-building information onto the reader. However as a whole it somehow failed to convince me. Perhaps it is because I haven’t really engaged with t he steampunk movement, but to me this felt a lot like standard fantasy with added steam. One issue that left me uncomfortable was the use of magic in a book that is supposed to be based on the pseudo-scientific principles of steampunk. Although it was dressed up as “mental sciences” it seemed primarily there in order to facilitate certain elements of the plot. I think it would have been a better book if Buroker had been able to devise ways to move the story forward without this additional element to confuse matters.

So ultimately, would I recommend this book? I have read some truly bad (traditionally published) fantasy in my time and this was certainly not in that category. It was an enjoyable read and I would like to spend more time with the characters and see how Buroker fleshes out their world. If there is a sequel, I will probably buy it. It’s not in my list of top books of all time, but fo the price of a cup of coffee I spent an entertaining few hours.