2013, so far, but only a little bit. And some of 2012

I have been terrible about writing about what I’m reading. I have read a not inconsiderable amount of books in the last year, and I haven’t kept track of what I’ve read, nor have I written down what I’ve thought of them.

But I feel like I should at least make the attempt. Here are some books I read over the last year. This is not an exhaustive list. I have read more than four books in the last year. Really, I have.

The Night Circus, by Erin Morgenstern

You know those kind of books that grab you and don’t let go? This is one of them. I tried explaining what The Night Circus recently to someone, and I found that I couldn’t quite manage it. It is, for one thing, about a circus, and how it grows and makes people love it and follow it around the world. It is about the nature of love, too, and how people love each other and don’t quite manage to choose whom to love in love with. It is about magic, and the way that people think about magic, and whether or not it’s important that people think about magic at all.

The Night Circus is a story of many parts that are woven together with exquisite care. Every moment in it has with it a sense of something unreal. I loved it, and you will, too.

The Magicians, Lev Grossman

Sometimes you keep running into books, you know? I used to run into The Magicians a whole lot. Wherever I went, this book would be sitting there, and I’d thumb through the first couple of pages before thinking ‘Maybe another day.’

Well, that day finally came, and it was the oddest day. The hero is called Quentin Coldwater. It’s the sort of name you only ever see in fantasy novels. When was the last time you met someone with as interesting a name as Quentin Coldwater? He goes to a school of magic called Brakebills, and has all sorts of adventures. You might think it’s exactly the sort of think I’d love.

I didn’t. I really, really didn’t. I mean, it gripped me as only fantasy stories do, but I put it down and then I thought ‘This book meant nothing to me.’ I felt nothing for Mr Coldwater, was not in the least bit concerned with his wellbeing. It’s this sort of book that leaves me with a bitter taste in my mouth.

It is a bit shit.

Tigana, Guy Gavriel Kay

Oof. Here’s a book that affected me. Tigana is a little typical of Kay, in that it’s set in a fictionalised version of a real world place, in this case Italy. There are two moons, and broad themes of love and honour and that sort of thing. It’s also another of these books that I’ve kept running into.

Unlike The Magicians, though, this one is great.

Tigana is set in a country that looks like Italy. The Peninsula of the Palm has been conquered separately by two tyrant sorcerers, each of whom wants the entire peninsula for his own. In doing so they crush the locals beneath their boots as they try to defeat the other.

At its core, Tigana is a book about identity. It is about what happens when a nation is conquered by an outside force that forces it to give up what is most essential to it. It is about the existential question of what really binds a nation.

But it is also about the fundamental humanity of even those who seem like villains, and the way that everyone changes in ways that they don’t expect. Tigana is a book that makes you sympathise with characters that you know you should hate. It is about revenge and the way it always affects those who pursue it.

Tigana is not without its flaws. Some parts of it are truly extraneous and a little odd. But its virtues are so good, so good, that I find it difficult to care about the bits I didn’t quite like.

The Cuckoo’s Calling, by David Galbraith

See, the most important thing about this book is an unfortunate thing. David Galbraith is secretly J K Rowling. And it’s not really a secret, because she told someone who told someone who ended up telling the press.

And its unfortunate because The Cuckoo’s Calling is really rather good. It’s gripping from the get-go, and takes you for a rather enjoyable ride through a murder that appeals to the most basic parts of us.

The Cuckoo’s Calling is a murder mystery in which a famous supermodel named Lula Landry apparently jumps off the balcony of her flat and dies. The police decide it is a suicide, but Landry’s brother suspects it was murder instead. So he hires private detective Cormoran Strike (what a name, right?) to find the truth for him.

Actually the book is fairly formulaic. Strike just methodically talks to every person connected with the case. There are no chase scenes, only one murder reconstruction scene, and almost no elements that distract you from Strike’s need to solve the case.

But Galbraith (or Rowling, if you’d prefer) is extremely good at making those conversations engrossing. It was only two-thirds of the way through the book that I realised at all that Strike had just been having conversations. IT seems so natural that you don’t really question it.

Strike is also an interesting character. He’s a little standard (broke PI who has one last chance) but is saved by some clever writing and an interesting history. His secretary Robin is equally interesting, though she fills the same Watsonesque persona we’ve seen in every murder sytery since SHerlock Holmes.

The Name of the Wind

‘It was the patient, cut-flower sound of a man waiting to die.’

 Sometimes you write about something knowing fully well that is has been written about more times than you can count, better than you will ever be able to, and in a manner more creative than even your dreams.

This is one of those times.

You already know the story of The Name of the Wind. This is the first, most important thing about it. You know it, because it has been told to you throughout your life. You know, for example, the story of how a boy meets a girl and falls in love. You know the way that a hero saves a town from being burned down by dragons. You know how a young man, down on his luck, finds the murderer before he can kill his next victim. You know this, and you know more than this. But this story tells you again, and makes you wonder if you ever really knew those stories.

But I will try my best to not tell you anything concrete about the story at all. Though you know it, though it is inscribed in you from childhood, to tell you the story would be a sin.

Which leaves me stuck with the unique problem of telling you about a story without, in fact, telling you about the story. But how to do that? It is as Gaiman said: ‘One describes the tale best by telling the tale.’

So let me tell you not about the tale, but the writing of the tale. Rothfuss has a chilling ability, as evinced by that deadly line above, to evoke emotions in you. Imagine a line like that, ‘the patient cut-flower sound of a man waiting to die’.  

He has a striking, stupefying ability to make you feel. He writes poems and leaves them hidden in his books like acorns in the winter ground. When you find them, they are old oak trees, and their roots flow through the entire story.

How odd to watch a mortal kindle
Then to dwindle day by day.
Knowing their bright souls are tinder
And the wind will have its way.
Would I could my own fire lend.
What does your flickering portend?

Oh but he writes achingly (aching is a good word for it. It tugs at you, and leaves you with a faint sensation that something somewhere hurts, but in a good way that betrays that sometimes sadness is uplifting).

He writes of love:

‘We love what we love. Reason does not enter into it. In many ways, unwise love is the truest love. Anyone can love a thing because. That’s as easy as putting a penny in your pocket. But to love something despite. To know the flaws and love them too. That is rare and pure and perfect.’

Of the road:

‘No man is brave that has never walked a hundred miles. If you want to know the truth of who you are, walk until not a person knows your name. Travel is the great leveler, the great teacher, bitter as medicine, crueler than mirror-glass. A long stretch of road will teach you more about yourself than a hundred years of quiet introspection.’

And of music:

‘Music is there for when words fail us.’

He writes of these things because he knows them as well as you and I know them, and he can write about them better than anyone else I know. Let me be very serious: Patrick Rothfuss inspires more in me than almost any other writer I have read. His ability with words is matched, perhaps, by ten others alive today. And so, I cannot take from you that first encounter with him, when he weaves a story like the most patient master weaver: with painstaking care and deeply complex craft and insurmountable amounts of love.

So I hope to cheat, and not actually tell you the tale, and instead talk of how he writes. I hope to leave for you breadcrumbs that form a trail of words. And the trail will lead you there, to The Name of the Wind.

What is the point of telling you about it this in this manner? The point is that if you have not read this book, then maybe you will now read it. Maybe you will read it, and in that case I hope you enjoy it (no, I know you will enjoy it). And if (when) you do enjoy it, I really hope you tell me, because man, this book is great.

It deserves to be read, and loved, and shouted about from the mountaintops.

Here it is, my mountaintop.

Ocean At The End of the Lane

Which is a book by Neil Gaiman

My least favorite thing about this book is that it has turned Neil Gaiman into a pop star. In my mind, he went from being indie and poor to a stadium-concert-level rockstar and it's annoying the hell out of me. </snob> (I know perfectly well that he was pretty famous even before this book. Psh.) My most favorite thing about this book is that it deals with one of the most interesting contradictions; of the magicness of magic.

Most good fantasy deals with it in one way or the other: that it exists, and people who don't know this are just not cool enough to be in on it; or that it is so in your face that it's not really magic anymore. Neil Gaiman takes a third route with his latest.

He sets it up by telling his story as a flashback. An adult is visiting the town he grew up in, walks to the end of the lane where his best friend used to live, meets her mother and gets talking. As he is talking, he is allowed to remember what really/"really" happened to them as children. By the middle of the book, you know why it's a Neil Gaiman book.

You know it because he has expertly managed to trick you into assuming that he is telling the first kind of fantasy story (in which you only know about magic because you're that cool) and then suddenly makes the switch into the second kind of fantasy story (in which everything is so magical anyway that it's not really magic anymore).

About three quarters in, you have no idea what you're dealing with. You don't know what sort of world this is set in, you don't know if you're meant to know, you don't know if it's just the delirium of a man at a funeral (although, if we're guessing, somebody's surely on something.) But the truth is, you're so into the magic of the book itself that you don't want to think of it in any other way. At least, that's the way it was for me.

He lays out this first contradiction alongside the adult/child contradiction in the flashback (that it is essentially an adult telling a child's story). What the adult assumes, a child questions. What the child knows, the adult is undecided. This is important in this context, because most of us have it all the time. You are taught to demagick yourself as you grow up. You start to see the world differently. The way you saw it as a child is either forgotten or dismissed. You never once think like that again. (I'm not even slightly comparing, but the best set of books that brings out this contradiction is Pullman's His Dark Materials.)

So read it, and tell me what you think!