Life After Life by Kate Atkinson

It feels like it's been a while since I've read a book that makes me truly evangelical, the kind of person who buttonholes everyone she meets and tells them about this awesome book she's just read and if they haven't they really must right right now. 

So, are you listening? If you haven't read Kate Atkinson's Life After Life, you must, right right now. It swept me away, and every day I had it out from the library, I was eager for lunchtime to come at work so I could sit down and be sucked in again.

Ursula lives her life over and over again. It's not so much that she remembers it wholesale, although she feels echoes when emotionally charged situations come up in later lives, letting her steer her life into different paths, some better, some worse.

Of course, the whole book starts with her killing Hitler, which not only nails this book down to a particular time and place, it gives a hint of some of the major themes that will run throughout. She is born not long before World War I, and that means that she's an adult when World War II comes along. In almost every life where she survives that long, she resides in London, and lives through the Blitz, or doesn't survive the Blitz, depending.

It becomes in many ways a reminder of the monotonous and terrifying length of war, how she can never quite get away from it, no matter where she goes or what she does. Her life could be different but in every lifetime, the war looms as an event that changes everything.

This is, of course, not a linear book. It's not a steady uphill climb towards her perfect life - every time different mistakes exist to be made, although she is able to prevent a few of the most horrible. She is the sum of all her life, of all her past lives, and does things without even understanding their root causes.

I was taken near the end by the suggestion that she might not be the only person who is undergoing something like this, as the day of her birth suddenly takes a rapid turn that doesn't seem possible without someone else feeling the same echoes Ursula does.

I have in the past dinged Atkinson for writing really good books that rely on gimmicks that don't add anything right at the end. They've seemed somewhat forced and out of place, and the books were strong enough they didn't need that. In Life After Life, she finally nails it - the gimmick, if you call it that in this case, is evident from the beginning and enriches the book and the characters, instead of feeling tacked on and unnecessary. This feels like a story that could only have been told this specific way, and I am so so glad that I finally sat down and read it. I could barely catch my breath.

Mason & Dixon by Thomas Pynchon

People recommend books to me a lot. It's hard to know when or how to fit them all in! And then there's the worry I won't like a book that is very dear to a dear friend's heart. For a long time, I just avoided reading books that had been recommended to me, unless someone pushed a physical copy into my hot little hands. (This is still the fastest way to get a book to the top of my list.) So I started a new list from which to pick, of books friends recommended. If you want to get in on this, you can recommend a book on this post.

This book was recommended to me by Amie.

After I was lamenting, a month or so into reading this book, how long it was taking me to read it, Amie, who had recommended it to me in the first place, replied saying she hadn't managed to finish it. This made me cock an eyebrow. On the other hand, I am a damnably stubborn woman, and books that are difficult to read but not actively unpleasant stimulate my competitive impulses.

So I changed how I was reading it. Instead of trying to read it in 100-page chunks, as soon as I got up in the morning, while the oatmeal was simmering and the water for coffee and tea was boiling, I'd try to read two chapters. And that's it. That's all I would read in a day. So it took me months, wore out the entire number of renewals I had on the book at the library, and still got taken back a day late, but I finished!

I feel like I've conquered something.

So, on the other end of this bizarre meditation on trying to structure space and time in systematized manners, without regard for natural landscape or desire, what do I think? I think I'm still puzzled. It's hard to call this book enjoyable, exactly, but I don't resent having read it. (I do, however, feel an immense amount of freedom, like I've put down a heavy pack, that I don't have to start the day trying to read another 20 pages.)

There is so much strangeness in this book, and so much language that is obfuscatory and meta, that I frequently felt entirely lost, and that's not particularly usual for me.

On this other hand, this book has invisible mechanical ducks in love with French chefs, werebeavers, a descent into the Hollow Earth, Chinese Feng Shui experts fallen in with debauched Jesuits straight from an anti-Catholicism novel, and a whole host of other oddities. Every time one of these sections came up, with their exceedingly strange and yet somehow appropriate stories, I was enthralled.

I think the problem is maybe the stuff in between. Problem is perhaps too strong a word, but between these incidents of oddness, we get Mason & Dixon, travelling, surveying, astronomizing, quarrelling, and drinking. They maybe have feelings for each other, but it's buried under prose so deep it's hard to breathe in.

There are also layers of meta that I'm sure I'm just not getting. There's an incident at the start of the book including a sailor named Patrick O'Brien, who knows everything about boats, that felt like it was clearly a reference to the author of the same name, which warned me to be on the lookout for similarly meta references, but if there were any, they went right over my head.

It's the kind of book I'd like to come back to in, oh, say 10 years, and see what it says to me now. There's an underlying theme about how we divide, catalogue, and structure reality that I'm still grappling with. I'll let it sit for a while, and see where it goes. Also, other people should read this now, so I can discuss it with them.

Angelmaker by Nick Harkaway

This is the second book I ever read on a Kindle. (The first was Deathless, but this digression seemed more at home here.) A friend very kindly lent me one of hers when I was on a trip last week, so I didn't have to deal with the extra weight that comes with packing a book for every day I'd be gone. And I am very grateful for the loan, not least for the great array of books she had on the Kindle, and which I've had great fun perusing.

But the actual experience of reading on a Kindle? Give me a book any day. (Except if I'm travelling. And, in this case, I'll read more off it, because there are books on there I want to read, and our local library is not great at SF/F. So, you know, I'm not dogmatic about it.)

But I missed the materiality of books so keenly while I was using the Kindle. It seems right that Ulysses has a different physical presence than does a slim little book like The Nothing That Is. My arm should be a little achy after I'm done a bout with it. It seems fitting. And the font, and the type size, and the smell - the Kindle flattens all that out. It makes what was once a varied experience into a consistent one. It's not hard to read a book on the Kindle, but I missed seeing the cover of the book, the weight of the book, the feel.

And it drove me crazy that it was difficult or impossible to find the page where the publication date was listed, which in one case led me to start a series in the middle because I could not figure out which book came first. It also makes it much more difficult to flip back a few pages to check on something you didn't quite catch the first time.

The experience isn't bad, but I came out of it both grateful for having had it for travelling, and glad to pick up a real book again when I got home.

So, what does this have to do with Angelmaker, other than that this was one of the first books I read on it? More than you might think. One of the threads running through this book is individual craftsmanship against mass production. The Ruskinite Order of Monks, dedicated at one point to creating machines of beauty that were literally unique, that were handcrafted, and made with love and care and attention, have been perverted, and are now monstrous echoes of what they once were.

This is a hard book to describe. It is rollicking, it is tense. It slips back and forth in time. Some of the book relates the adventures of the now almost-nonagenarian spy Edie, back in World War II, when she was part of an elite group, and was responsible for liberating a brilliant female scientist from the clutches of the Opium Khan, who had employed her to make a doomsday device. To protect the scientist, with whom she forms a very personal connection, she has to fight the Opium Khan all through Europe, time and time again.

In the present, Edie has set said doomsday device running, with the best of intentions, and has used Joe Spork, clockmaker, as her cat's-paw setting it in motion. Soon, little gold bees are flying around the globe, awakening other gold bees, and the governments of the world are fucking terrified. Joe is swept up in this, taken into custody by a branch of the government not beholden to any laws, which feels justified in taking any measures to do whatever they bloody well like.

But Joe is not just a mild-mannered clockmaker. Somewhere deep inside him sleeps the Joe who learned at the feet of his stylish gangster father, Mathew, who waged a spree with panache across Europe. Joe learned more than he knows, and with Polly, a supervillain in her own right by his side, and Edie, and Edie's absolutely wonderful blind dog Bastion by his side, he might just take the fight to them.

I am be a sucker for fictional dogs and cats, when they're written well. I adore Bastion.

This book is strange and funny and spooky and rollicking and serious. It uses the modern security state as the tool of Joe's enemies, and the ways in which government is perverted to serve the desires of whoever is pulling the strings is truly frightening.

And I have a weak spot for calls to arms, so when Joe calls on all the old criminals of London to come together for one huge assault, one with some derring-do, a few tears came to my eyes.

This book is crazy. It is all over the place. And yet it hangs together, better than I thought Harkaway's previous book The Gone Away World did. I enjoyed The Gone Away World even though I didn't think the story, in the end, quite jelled. This one did, and I loved it.

Even though I read it on the Kindle. And felt vaguely guilty, because this book, of all books, deserves the physical presence that print could give it.

Ghostwritten by David Mitchell

Ghostwritten, and ghostridden and by a ghost, ridden.

I have no idea how to talk about what I want to talk about without referring to specifics in this book. I'm not sure how spoiler-ish they may be, but you have been warned.

This is my second David Mitchell, and I like it almost as much as the first one I read, which was Cloud Atlas, and absolutely blew my socks off. I think Cloud Atlas is a more masterful and audacious use of the same technique that you can see developing in Ghostwritten, but I enjoyed it in its developing stages here quite a lot.

Initially, I was skeptical of the claim that this was a "novel in nine parts," as they seemed to be discrete stories, with occasional references to the preceding chapters, through incidence and coincidence. But as the stories continued, they start to pull together, to somehow knit into a whole, even though most of the characters never met, or if they did, never realized the importance of the other stories to their own.

This is a book full of life, and humanity, and beautiful writing, and intriguing ideas, and glimpses of the unknown and improbable. It switches genres and countries, transcends humanities, and in the end, resolves.

And that is what keeps this from being five stars for me. That, and that it isn't quite Cloud Atlas. I'm not sure about the ending. I'm not saying it isn't a good and logical, if shocking, ending. I'm saying I'm personally not particularly enamoured with a book so in love with humanity that ends with its end.

It's the second story I've read or heard in the last week that ends with the unexpected extinction of humanity by a larger, implacable, inexorable force. (The first was a John Varley short story.)  While it was an ending that seized me and took me by surprise, it also overshadowed the entire previous 400 pages, and I loved those 400 pages. I feel like I'm struggling to remember all the things I enjoyed about the book, without having them completely drowned underneath all the emotions that the ending provoked.

That's what happens with a loss, I know. Initially, the end obscures all the times before.

But I realize I haven't really spoken in any specifics about the book, or the stories that make it up. But how can I tie together and make coherent a book that combines stories about a Japanese cultist responsible for a subway attack, a jazz-loving Japanese teenager, a shady English financier in Hong Kong, the life of a woman who owns a tea house on the side of the Holy Mountain through the tumultuous events in the 20th century in China, the travels of a noncorporeal entity that lives in human hosts, a Russian art theft ring, a penniless womanizing drummer and ghostwriter in England, an Irish expert in quantum cognition, and a New York late night talk radio host who gets yearly calls from a mysterious listener?

Except to say that although I couldn't tell you exactly what binds these stories together, I am absolutely, positively convinced that they are part of a whole. And that they were utterly engrossing to read, and provided constant delight.

I'm equally sure this isn't for everyone. Like many of the books I love, it requires a high tolerance of ambiguity, and a willingness to simply go along for a ride with no idea as to how it will end. So many books are predictable. This one is not.

The Complete Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino

I'm trying to find just the right word to describe these stories. Science fables isn't quite right - there isn't a moral at the end of each one. I'm torn between science myths and science legends. I think I'm leaning towards myths, in the sense of "stories that tell how something came to be." Let's go with that.

The Complete Cosmicomics is a collection, then, of science myths. Most stories are prefaced with a little paragraph of science, talking about some aspect of the world and its creation, and then a story of how it happened, mostly to a narrator named Qfwfq, who has been around since the beginning, although the stories keep changing.

They aren't grand stories, which I guess is why I was reticent to call these myths. They are down-to-earth (sometimes even inside it) and wide-reaching (galaxy-spanning, even.) The characters in them have the brief outlines of people as we know them, even when they're camels. Or particles. Or amoeba. And as any part of creation, they follow familiar human patterns. They fall in love. They're jealous. They're petty. They want to leave their mark on a world only in the beginning stages of creation.

Many of the stories revolve either wanting to state I WAS HERE to the universe, or to attract a desirable woman. But in between, they tell the stories of life evolving on earth, on a moon that was once part of Earth's body but was torn away, of a cell deciding to split for the first time. The science is woven through in quite a wonderful way, with the feel of a fairytale.

In the middle though, they drift away from the way they've been fashioned so far, and I never found those stories as interesting as the Qfwfq ones. But then we end up back there, and I enjoyed them again.

These stories are inventive and enchanting. I've never read anything quite like this. And I'm all for the magic of science taking centre stage.