Tangled Mind

2012/69: The Bookman -- Lavie Tidhar

2013-02-07T07:38:38Z

The fat man looked taken aback. "Why, I thought my name is well known even in that lizards'-spawn hell of yours across the Channel," he said.
"I'm sorry, I don't–"
The fat man drew himself up. He snapped his fingers and his servant threw him his cane. The man caught it single-handedly and twirled it. "The name," he said stiffly, "is Verne. Jules Verne." [p. 135]

( non-spoilery review )

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2012/68: An Atlas of Impossible Longing -- Anuradha Roy

2013-01-23T07:54:13Z

An Atlas of Impossible Longing -- Anuradha Roy

[Kananbala] started to babble, worried. "Slut, whore, daughter of the devil, syphilitic hen."
"Pity we can't understand each other!" Mrs Barnum said, "We'd have such a jolly time."[location 1322]

( slightly spoilery review )

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2012/67: The Invisible Circus -- Jennifer Egan

2013-01-23T07:51:24Z

The Invisible Circus -- Jennifer Egan

Phoebe thought, Faith died young and I’ve done nothing but admire her for it, but I don’t want to die – I don’t want to! Her thoughts pounding away like machine-gun fire: I don’t want to die I don’t want to die I want everything back the way it was before I hate this please God if I can just come down please God if I can just have back what I had before. But that’s exactly what you didn’t want, said a different voice, you’ve spent your life longing to throw it away. And Phoebe knew this was so. [location 2939]

Jennifer Egan's first novel was published in 1995, and recently reissued as a result of A Visit from the Goon Squad winning the Pulitzer Prize.
( slightly spoilery review )

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2012/66: A Game of Thrones -- George R. R. Martin

2013-01-22T18:50:35Z

A Game of Thrones -- George R. R. Martin

"You are the gentle sex," said Lord Karstark, with the lines of grief fresh on his face. "A man has a need for vengeance."
"Give me Cersei Lannister, Lord Karstark, and you would see how gentle a woman can be," Catelyn replied.[location 14060]

What to say about A Game of Thrones? I doubt I can add much to the screeds that have been written about it in the last (eep) seventeen years.
( non-spoilery review )

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2012/65: Dead Water -- Simon Ings

2013-01-22T18:45:54Z

Dead Water -- Simon Ings

They have no idea where they are, or when, but they are beginning to grasp that geography matters less to them than it matters to the living. They make their own journeys with the stories they tell. They fashion – somehow, they don’t yet know how – their own escapes. They survived a barren and virtually unpeopled Arctic: they’ll make a story of this place too. Stories are their breath. Their food. Their blood. And they’re getting stronger. [location 795]

( non-spoilery review )

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2012/64: The Drowning Season -- Alice Hoffman

2013-01-22T18:42:39Z

The Drowning Season -- Alice Hoffman

Phillip had not wanted to kill himself, and he truly felt sorry about ruining the hound’s-tooth jacket. He wanted only to be left alone. Alone, so that he could merge with the water. He believed any water was beautiful, whether for its dark waves or for its slow-moving currents. He wanted to be a part of that beauty, traveling at a natural speed through the waves, without effort.
[location 1358]

( non-spoilery review )

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2012/63: Throne of Glass -- Sarah J Maas

2013-01-12T08:34:02Z

Throne of Glass -- Sarah J Maas

where was that writhing darkness? Why didn’t it show itself so he could just throw her into the dungeon and call off this ridiculous competition? There was something great and deadly concealed within her, and he didn’t like it. [loc. 1788]

( slightly spoilery review )

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2012/62: All My Friends are Superheroes -- Andrew Kaufman

2013-01-12T08:29:42Z

All My Friends are Superheroes -- Andrew Kaufman

"I don't remember a single monster before I met you," he'd told the Amphibian. "Now they seem to be all over the place."
"You mean there wasn't anything you were afraid of?" the Amphibian had asked him.
"Lots."
"What did they look like?"
It was a funny question. "They didn't look like anything. They were ideas," Tom told him. "Like not being able to pay rent, or being lonely."
"That's the most terrifying thing I've ever heard," the Amphibian replied. [location 447]

( non-spoilery review )

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2012/61: Mr Fox -- Helen Oyeyemi

2013-01-12T08:26:48Z

Mr Fox -- Helen Oyeyemi

"What you're doing is building a horrible kind of logic. People read what you write and they say, 'Yes, he is talking about things that really happen," and they keep reading, and it makes sense to them. You're explaining things that can't be defended, and the explanations themselves are mad, just bizarre – but you offer them with such confidence. It was because she kept the chain on the door, it was because he needed to let off steam after a hard day's scraping and bowing at work, it was because she was irritating and stupid, it was because she lied to him, made a fool of him, it was because she had to die, she just had to, it makes dramatic sense, it was because 'nothing is more poetic than the death of a beautiful woman', it was because of this, it was because of that. It's obscene to make such things reasonable." [location 1515]

( non-spoilery review )

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2012/60: Angelica Lost and Found -- Russell Hoban

2013-01-11T07:32:25Z

Angelica Lost and Found -- Russell Hoban

"Dum spiro, spero, baby, if I may speak classical and modern at the same time."
"Gimme an asterisk."
"'While I breathe, I hope.'" [location 1026]

He's a pictorial representation of an imaginary beast in a Renaissance oil painting. She's the eternal heroine of an epic poem, currently incarnate in San Francisco. Their love is ... complicated.
( slightly spoilery review )

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2012/59: The Siren -- Alison Bruce

2013-01-11T07:22:25Z

The Siren -- Alison Bruce

... she’d always swum in deep waters, murky in some places, fast-flowing in others, but she’d never seen the danger. That had emerged organically, as a series of developments that had rippled over one another and ultimately carried her too far out of her depth. She was no longer convinced that she could reach the shore, nor even had any idea whether the tide was in ebb or flow. [location 2998]

( non-spoilery review )

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2012/58: Mythworld 1: The Festival of Bones -- James A. Owen

2013-01-11T07:01:49Z

Mythworld 1: The Festival of Bones -- James A. Owen

... the Book of Alberich. Do you understand what this could be? Not a poetic cycle, or a mythologized history. This could be an accounting, perhaps only once or twice removed, of the actual father of Hagen — the very instigator of everything in the Prose Edda, the Nibelunglied, and... Wagner’s Ring. [location 1625]

( non-spoilery review )

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2012/57: Madensky Square -- Eva Ibbotson

2013-01-09T21:45:56Z

Madensky Square -- Eva Ibbotson

At ten o'clock this morning, Frau Hutte-Klopstock, the wife of the City Parks Superintendent, handed me a magazine and said she wanted to look like Karsavina in The Firebird .

"Something diaphanous, I thought," she said. "Shimmering. In flame or orange."

Frau Hutte-Klopstock is healthy, she is muscular; she is sportif and athletic. A small glacier in the High Tatras has been named after her and of this one must be glad. But oh God! Karsavina!

( spoilery for incidental details )

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2012/56: Angelmaker -- Nick Harkaway

2013-01-09T16:34:42Z

Angelmaker -- Nick Harkaway

He is the man who arrives too late. Too late for clockwork in its prime, too late to know his grandmother. Too late to be admitted to the secret places, too late to be a gentleman crook, too late really to enjoy his mother’s affection before it slid away into a God-ridden gloom. And too late for whatever odd revelation was waiting here. He had allowed himself to believe that there might, at last, be a wonder in the world which was intended just for him. [location 1985]

( very slightly spoilery if you squint. Ninja! )

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2012/55: Bacchae -- Euripides

2013-01-09T16:31:06Z

Bacchae -- Euripides

Kadmos: Is your soul still quivering?
Agave: I don't understand your words. I have become somehow
sobered, changing from my former state of mind.
Kadmos: Can you hear and respond clearly?
Agave: Yes, for I forget what we said before, father.
Kadmos: To whose house did you come in marriage?
Agave: You gave me, as they say, to Echion, the sown man.
Kadmos: What son did you bear to your husband in the house?
Agave: Pentheus, from my union with his father.
Kadmos: Whose head do you hold in your hands? [lines 1268-1275]

Read, along with several other tragedies (Oedipus Rex, Oresteia, etc), for the Coursera Greek and Roman Mythology course. I've seen a couple of productions of Bacchae, but wasn't familiar with the text.
( spoilers? really? )

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2012/54: The Odyssey -- Homer, translated by Robert Fagles

2013-01-06T16:39:14Z

The Odyssey -- Homer, translated by Robert Fagles

And the ship like a four-horse team careering down the plain,
all breaking as one with the whiplash cracking smartly,
leaping with hoofs high to run the course in no time —
so the stern hove high and plunged with the seething rollers
crashing dark in her wake as on she surged unwavering [Book XIII, lines 93-7]

( spoilery, I suppose :) )

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2012/53: Little Brother -- Cory Doctorow

2013-01-06T15:44:18Z

Little Brother -- Cory Doctorow

...what if I decreed that from now on, every time you went to evacuate some solid waste, you'd have to do it in a glass room perched in the middle of Times Square, and you'd be buck naked?
Even if you've got nothing wrong or weird with your body -- and how many of us can say that? -- you'd have to be pretty strange to like that idea. Most of us would run screaming. Most of us would hold it in until we exploded.
It's not about doing something shameful. It's about doing something private. It's about your life belonging to you. [chapter 4]

( slightly spoilery review )

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2012/52: Bareback -- Kit Whitfield

2013-01-06T14:41:09Z

Bareback -- Kit Whitfield

Interrogators are men, usually, men with missing feet, ruined faces, mauled genitals. The worst, the unusables, the ones who'll never be the same again. ... [they] may be missing a kilo of flesh, but it doesn't slow them down. ... They learned a long time ago that however much flesh you take from another man, it'll never replace your own. [p. 250]

( non-spoilery review )

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Books read in 2012

2013-01-02T14:06:52Z

67 books read in 2012
By gender
33 by women, 32 by men, 2 by K J Parker and one by Poppy Brite
By genre (with some crossovers)...
10 SF
26 fantasy
3 historical
8 crime / thriller
6 YA
2 non-fiction
12 for Coursera courses [though I haven't included the fragments of Aeneid, Homeric Hymns, various tragedies]
Top Six
Ragnarok: The End of the Gods -- A S Byatt
Among Others -- Jo Walton
The Magician King -- Lev Grossman
Deep Ancestry -- Spencer Wells
The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms -- N K Jemisin
Runelight -- Joanne Harris
The Left Hand of Darkness -- Ursula Le Guin (never mind that it's the latest of many rereads)

I'd normally also note number of books purchased, but that's becoming less accurate as I tend not to add e-books to LibraryThing until I get around to reading them.

( sorted by author, with links to reviews except where not yet written ... )

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2012/51: Spares -- Michael Marshall Smith

2012-10-19T12:17:50Z

Spares -- Michael Marshall Smith

So many objects and machines these days are stuffed full of intellect - and most of the time it's just turned off. We're surrounded by unused intelligence, and for once it's not our own. For every fridge which tells you what's fresh and what's not, there'll be fifty which have been told to shut the fuck up. ... We created things which are clever and then told them to be stupid instead. (p. 105)

( spoilery review )

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2012/50: The Left Hand of Darkness -- Ursula Le Guin

2012-10-19T11:55:46Z

The Left Hand of Darkness -- Ursula Le Guin

I stopped at a street-crossing and thought, Why should I not go east, across the mountains and the plains back to Kerm Land, a poor man afoot, and so come home to Estre where I was born, the stone house on a bitter mountainside: why not go home? Three times or four I stopped and looked back ... each time I thought of the folly of trying to go home. As well kill myself. I was born to live in exile, it appeared, and my one way home was by way of dying. [p. 59]

Reread for the Coursera Fantasy and SF course (a previous review is here). I couldn't believe I no longer had a copy: promptly fixed that problem, thanks to Amazon.( review packed with spoilers )

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2012/49: The Martian Chronicles -- Ray Bradbury

2012-10-19T11:25:30Z

The Martian Chronicles -- Ray Bradbury

The rain.
Raw, gentle, and easy, it mizzled out of the high air, a special elixir, tasting of spells and stars and air, carrying a peppery dust in it, and moving like a rare light sherry on his tongue.
Rain.
He sat up. He let the blanket fall and his blue denim shirt spot, while the rain took on more solid drops. The fire looked as though an invisible animal were dancing on it, crushing it, until it was angry smoke. The rain fell. The great black lid of sky cracked in six powdery blue chips, like a marvelous crackled glaze, and rushed down. He saw ten billion rain crystals, hesitating long enough to be photographed by the electrical display. Then darkness and water. (p. 76)

( non-spoilery review )

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2012/48: Among Others -- Jo Walton

2012-10-19T11:20:01Z

Among Others -- Jo Walton

Tolkien understood about the things that happen after the end. Because this is after the end, this is all the Scouring of the Shire, this is figuring out how to live in the time that wasnt supposed to happen after the glorious last stand. I saved the world, or I think I did, and look, the world is still here, with sunsets and interlibrary loans. [loc. 920]

( slightly spoilery review )

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2012/47: The Sea -- John Banville

2012-10-11T07:46:37Z

The Sea -- John Banville

Yes, this is what I thought adulthood would be, a kind of long indian summer, a state of tranquility, of calm incuriousness, with nothing left of the barely bearable raw immediacy of childhood, all the things solved that had puzzled me when I was small, all mysteries settled, all questions answered, and the moments dripping away, unnoticed almost, drip by golden drip, toward the final, almost unnoticed, quietus. (p. 94)

Read on the beach, on the last day of summer (= last feasible sea-bathing day). I've owned this novel since it came out in paperback in 2006, the year after it won the Booker. No rush, eh?
( non-spoilery review )

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2012/46: Boneland -- Alan Garner

2012-09-24T17:53:02Z

Boneland -- Alan Garner

"...it’s not so much deep space that concerns me as deep place. Once place is lost, you fall into history."
"And there’s no way out?"
"There’s no way out." [location 1385]

( spoilery review -- spoilers for Boneland and earlier Garner novels )

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