I ordered some books online at 8:15am and they arrived at 1pm. Free delivery and everything! I realise they can’t reproduce this level of service for everyone — it turns out I live very close to the publisher — but it was still kind of cool.
The publisher in question is Aflame Books, incidentally, a small press [...]
Having set myself the modest enough goal for 2010 of reading a few more books for the Read The World challenge than I did in 2009… I’m already behind schedule. We’re into March and I’ve only just finished my first. Ho-hum.
The Railway (translated by Robert Chandler) is my book from Uzbekistan. I was slightly peeved when [...]
As per usual, these are books I happened to read in 2009, rather than books published in 2009.
Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, Alexandra Fuller
Chaka, Thomas Mofolo
Anil’s Ghost, Michael Ondaatje
Echoes from the Dead Zone, Yiannis Papadakis
The Maias, José Maria de Eça de Queirós
Across Arctic America, Knud Rasmussen
Them, Jon Ronson
Your Inner Fish, Neil Shubin
The Culture of [...]
Chaka is a fictionalised account of the life of the C19th Zulu king Shaka. It’s unusually early for an African novel, originally published in 1925 but existing in manuscript in some form as early as 1910.
I wasn’t entirely looking forward to reading it. It has started to really bother me when those who rose to power and [...]
Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands is a novel about a cooking teacher whose first husband is a charming lowlife, who is always disappearing in search of wine, women, song and roulette, and her second marriage to an upright, responsible, devoted pharmacist who, for all his good qualities, is duller and more reserved. Especially in [...]
…or to give him his full title: Sir Tom Davis, Pa Tuterangi Ariki, KBE. The ‘Pa Tuterangi Ariki’ bit was a title he got by marriage; the knighthood was all his own. Davis was the Prime Minister of the Cook Islands from 1978-87, and Island Boy is his autobiography. He was undoubtedly an impressive individual [...]
The Culture of Lies by Dubravka Ugrešić is a book of essays written between 1991 and 1996 — that is, during and just after the wars that resulted from the collapse of Yugoslavia.* It is my book from Croatia for the Read The World challenge, although there is a slight awkwardness to that choice. [...]
Beka Lamb tells the story of a few months in the life of a fourteen-year-old girl — Beka — and her slightly older friend Toycie, who both attend a convent school in Belize. It’s published as part of the Heinemann Caribbean Writers Series, and so it has one of those rather off-puttingly institutional covers that [...]
Full title: The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution. I don’t need any persuading about the fact of evolution, but Dawkins is always worth reading on the subject. And Amazon had it at 50% off, so as much as I dislike hardbacks I thought I’d give it a go.
Since I’ve read so many [...]
Season of Migration to the North is my book from Sudan for the Read The World challenge. Originally published in 1966, ‘in 2001 it was selected by a panel of Arab writers and critics as the most important Arab novel of the twentieth century’.
I didn’t really know anything about it before I started reading, and [...]
Across Arctic America: Narrative of the Fifth Thule Expedition is Rasmussen’s account of his 1921 expedition from Greenland to Siberia by dog sled. Or to be exact, his 1921-24 expedition, because this was an epic three year trip. They went a long way — 20,000 miles — but they certainly could have done it faster [...]
ephemera assemblyman: Film Poster Paintings from Ghana
'In the 1980s video cassette technology made it possible for “mobile cinema” operators in Ghana to travel from town to town and village to village creating temporary cinemas. The touring film group would create a theatre by hooking up a TV and VCR onto a portable generator and playing [...]
I know Jee on the internet — originally via PFFA, the online poetry forum, but also now through his blog, Song of a Reformed Headhunter — so I already knew I liked his poems. And as a bonus, Equal to the Earth serves as my book from Singapore for the Read The World challenge.
Jee is, to [...]
Hubble Ultra Deep Field in 3-D
'Using redshift data, a 3-D animated view of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field was created.' This video has been all over the place, but if you *haven't* already watched it, you should.
(del.icio.us tags: astronomy )
Caustic Cover Critic: Deeply Odd POD
'Here's the fourth of Frank L. Baum's Wizard of Oz books, [...]
The Earth: An Intimate History is big, fat (480 page) book about geology. Richard Fortey writes extremely well and it’s an impressive attempt to make a fairly dense subject exciting.
I have to admit though I nearly didn’t finish it; by about halfway though I’d had about as much as I could take of schist, gneiss, [...]
All About H. Hatterr is a novel I bought after seeing it recommended somewhere — the complete review, I think. It is a modernist novel written in 1948 in a colloquial Indian English laced with bits of slang, Shakespeare, legal jargon and so on. I’m not in a position to judge the relationship between the [...]
According to the dust jacket, Srečko Kosovel is ‘often called the Slovene Rimbaud’.* Mainly, as far as I can gather, because he wrote all his poetry very young; not, like Rimbaud, because he decided to run off and do something else, but because he died at 22.
I found The Golden Boat: Selected Poems of Srečko Kosovel [...]
The Anil of Anil’s Ghost is a forensic anthropologist; she was born in Sri Lanka but having left to study and work, she is now returning after 15 years away to investigate allegations of political murders. Ondaatje was eleven when he left Sri Lanka, so Anil’s insider/outsider status is presumably a reflection of his own [...]
Yiannis Papadakis is a Greek Cypriot anthropologist, and Echoes from the Dead Zone is based on his fieldwork in Turkey and on both sides of the Green Line in Cyprus. he investigates the different attitudes of people on each side of the conflict, and in the process has to confront all his own prejudices from growing [...]
Broken Glass is a novel from the Congo (aka the Republic of the Congo aka Congo-Brazzaville; i.e. the smaller of the two Congos, not the one which used to be Zaire). It was translated from French by Helen Stevenson.
It takes the form of the notebook jottings of the customer at a bar called Credit Gone West. [...]
My review of/comments about this C19th Portuguese novel. Short version: it’s very good, I enjoyed it, I liked the leisurely pace of it and the sharp social eye of Eça de Queiroz.
I’ll keep this fairly brief, because I’m going away to France for a week in Saturday and not only have I not packed, I haven’t done the more important bit of writing a list, and thus don’t know if I have to do some urgent shopping. Or laundry.
So: The Last Will and Testament of Senhor [...]