The Red Tent: A Novel by Anita Diamant (1.5 stars)

I'm not sure how this got onto my to-read list. Sometimes I search for the most positive-reviewed books on Amazon, sometimes I get a recommendation from a friend. I'm glad I read this, but I have to admit I hated most of it.

Diamant has taken the perspective of Dinah, who plays a bit part in a bizarre parable from Genesis 34 (that's the bible you heathens). It's your basic rape, foreskin ransom, kill everyone, take women and children prisoner, and get rewarded by God kind-of story that you would expect from the Bible.

But OK, strange choice of subject matter aside. Can this novel stand on its own? Diamant says that was her intent, that it should appeal to someone with no knowledge of the bible. In a word, no.

The first 60% of the novel is basically filler leading up to the foreskin ransoming. Diamant attempts to paint a picture of women's life in biblical times, but it seems contrived. The notion that women gather together in a red tent to pass the time of their period eating sweet cakes, braiding each other's hair, and being waited on by pre-pubescent girls just seems ridiculous. I doubt any working class women, in this case shepherd's wives, had time for such largesse given the backbreaking work of their everyday lives, and their power inequality with men.

The character 'development' in the first half of the novel is filled with trivialities:

Zilpah saw Inna's appearance as a god omen. The midwife's presence lifted her spirits so much that later my aunt began to sing. It was nothing exalted, only a children's song about a fly who bothered a rabbit, who ate the insect but was eaten by a dog, who was in turn eaten by a jackal, who was hunted by a lion...

who was read by someone who doesn't give a shit. There are some Bible-y tidbits thrown in before the main event, which would gel nicely with the story if Dinah was into LSD. And it wouldn't be Genesis if there wasn't a boring, unimportant-to-the-story family tree spelled out every now and then.

But in spite of all this I did respect Diamant's writing, and there are some very poignant moments that resonated with me, such as when Dinah holds her son for the first time:

There should be a song for women to sing at this moment, or a prayer to recite.

Most people giving critical reviews of this novel are upset because Diamant didn't stick to the biblical 'facts', i.e. she made Dinah willing instead of raped, and 'disrespected' Jacob. She also offended a bunch of people producing and reading Jewish midrash - reinterpretations of biblical stories. I think Diamant's real mistake was picking a story of senseless violence and death and trying to build it into a beautiful story about life as a woman.

1.5 stars

A Deepness in the Sky by Vernor Vinge (5 stars)

The prequel to A Fire Upon the Deep, can he pull it off? YES.  Pass Go, collect another Hugo.

Vinge introduces us to the Spiders, a civilisation defined by their on-again off-again star that plunges them into catastrophic winter with a periodicity of a century or so, forcing the entire population to hibernate in primitive frozen pools called 'deepnesses'.

 I loved the Spiders, but I began to think that they were a little too easy to identify with.  What are the chances that arachnid aliens turn out to think and act essentially like humans once you understand their language?  What are the chances that all their technology is developed in the same way: radio, computers, cars, aeroplanes, nuclear power (with a mini Manhattan project) etc.  Pretty low I would think. But there were super-cute little baby spiders climbing out of their Daddy's fur to go play in the jungle gym, so hey.

I thought the idea of having to wait (mostly in cold-sleep) for a civilisation to reach a technology age so they can repair the space-faring equivalent of a flat tyre was intruiging, and would encourage lots of meddling, and civilisation fast-tracking. The Qeng Ho and Emergents certainly don't have any Prime Directive-style hangups.

It was an old, old problem: to build the most advanced technological products you need an entire civilisation - a civilisation with all its webs of expertise and layers of capital industry.

And we find out that our old friend, and one of the few links to A Fire Upon the Deep, Pham Nuwen is much more than reassembled body parts in this story.  In fact he is a superstar, I mean he invented smartdust.  Well, they call it 'localizers' but whatever.  Pham has a low-level backdoor into this system, which is kind of like having a backdoor built into libc:

The medieval prince in Pham Nuwen was entranced by this insight.  If only one could be at the ground floor of some universally popular system... If the new layer was used everywhere, then the owner of those trapdoors would be like a king forever after, throughout the entire universe of use.

Vinge's dedication to science and passion for computer science continues to shine through.  Here he describes the code cruft that makes a spaceship run, and the inherent danger:

So behind all the top-level interfaces was layer under layer of support.  Some of that software had been designed for wildly different situations.  Every so often the inconsistencies caused fatal accidents.  Despite the romance of spaceflight, the most common accidents were simply caused by ancient, misused programs finally getting their revenge.

The idea of 'Focus', a kind of virus-delivered autism that can be controlled with MRI was fascinating.  It was amazing to think of a civilisation whose 'automation' consisted of a large part of the populous enslaved to act as really really smart middleware to computers.  Here Trud explains why 'Focus' is so effective:

But you know about really creative people, the artists who end up in your history books?  As often as not, they're some poor dweeb who doesn't have a life.  He or she is just totally fixated on learning everything about some single topic.  A sane person couldn't justify losing friends and family to concentrate so hard.  Of course, the payoff is that the dweeb may find things or make things that are totally unexpected.  See, in that way a little of Focus has always been part of the human race.  We Emergents have simply institutionalized this sacrifice so the whole community can benefit in a concentrated, organized way.

The Anne Reynolt character was a brilliant opponent for Pham Nuwen: ruthless and amazingly talented.  I enjoyed watching their plotting and manipulation targeted at each other.

One more cute quote to leave with.  The Qeng Ho are irrepressible traders:

in pure Qeng Ho Nese, the term "black market" existed, but only to denote "trade you must do in secret because it offends the local Customers."

Even though it was less epic than A Fire Upon the Deep, I think I enjoyed it more.  5 stars

A Fire Upon The Deep by Vernor Vinge (4.5 stars)

On page 19 I was already impressed.  It was at about that point that I realised I was seeing the world through an alien pack intelligence's eyes, which struck me both as a very innovative concept, and for the skill with which it was delivered.  I gradually learned more and more aspects of the Tines' anatomy, communication, social norms, and even reproduction, all starting with the sentence:

He brought up another member to get a parallax view.

 and more like these:

A few yards into the mob and Peregrine Wickrackrum could feel consciousness slipping from him.  If he concentrated really hard, he could remember who he was and that he must get to the other side of the meadow without attracting attention.

And the technology aspects are great.  You can see Vinge is a comp sci professor.  Relay struck me as sounding a little like Google, and the text is littered with references to one-time-pad crypto, and gems like this:

Blueshell had a humor fit at Pham's faith in public key encryption....

...and the creature fell apart like some cheap, center-topology network. 

Half-assed programming was a time-filler that, like knitting, must date to the beginning of the human experience 

I was slightly weirded-out by Pham Nuwen being from Canberra - a once great civilisation fallen back to medieval times.  I lived for some time in Canberra, Australia.

For Pham Nuwen really was a barbarian.  He had been born on a fallen colony world - Canberra he called it.

The silly humans awake an extremely advanced and deadly artificial intelligence 'a perversion', which is fascinating to anyone interested in computer security.  It is like they have unleashed a super-intelligent piece of malware that begins to take over the universe.  Even the defences suggested in the text parallel modern-day content sanitisation.  This sounds a little bit like converting between document formats to break any embedded malware:

...then there are obvious procedures that can give relative safety: Do not accept High Beyond protocol packets.  At the very least, route all communications through Middle Beyond sites, with translation down to, and then up from, local trade languages.

 Also, the 'Usenet' discussion was really entertaining, and captures the often farcical misunderstanding and miscommunication of computer security issues on the Internet, and the spirit of a mild flaming:

...Who is a fool? [probably obscenity]  [probably obscenity] Idiots who don't follow all the threads in developing news should not waste my precious ears with their [clear obscenity] garbage.  So you think the "Helper Symbiosis" is a fraud of Straumli Realm?  And what do you think cause the fall of Relay?  In case your head is totally stuck up your rear [<-probable insult], there was a Power allied with Relay...

Sadly we are still some way from voice activated controls that:

...responded consistently to sarcasm and casual slang.

Slight spoilers ahead...

I was a little surprised by the ending.  I was expecting 'Old One' to turn out as a front for the Blight itself.  Also I completely agreed with this statement:

In some ways the Revenge was a worse thing than the Blight itself.

Sticking a huge hunk of the galaxy into slowness, stranding millions of vessels forever.  Somehow, this didn't sound much like 'saving' the galaxy to me.

But overall, a fantastic book, I endorse the Hugo decision :)  4.5 stars

A Dance With Dragons by George R.R. Martin (3.5 stars)

Hooray! Back to all the good characters. Except not really. Tyrion has turned into some sort of ironic sideshow act, in the words of Kate Morris 'all he really manages to do is play a lot of Stratego, reminisce about a previously-unmentioned happy boyhood of gymnastics training in the art of dwarfish capering, and fall convincingly off a trained pig'.

But lets acknowledge some of the good bits, and thankfully there were more of those than in Feast. When Bran is ambushed by a bunch of wights in a scene straight out of Dead Snow I stopped reading just long enough to let out a 'Hells Yeah!'. His apprenticeship to the three-eyed-crow (btw I loved the idea of a half-man, half-weirwood tree, complete with a root growing out of his eye socket) is fascinating. Jon's chapters continued to be some of the best as he creates a fragile peace with the wildlings.

Arya's training with the faceless men finally gets interesting as they intentionally blind her and give her a face from the thousands of dead people they have skinned(!) We also get to watch an assassination through her eyes, complete with a con reminiscent of early locke days.

...faces full of greed and rage and lust, bald faces and faces bristling with hair. Masks, she told herself, it's only masks, but even as she thought the thought, she knew it wasn't so. They were skins.

But it just isn't enough. The story doesn't move as much as it should have, especially given GRRM had 1000+ pages to work with. Tyrion and Victarion are still travelling to meet Daenerys. She's mooning around with Daario while Tyrion is being a circus act, and the dragons barely feature. Neither Arya or Bran finish their training. Stannis doesn't reach Winterfell. The others don't attack the wall. Is there anything more boring than reading about someone being bored?

Life aboard the Selaesori Qhoran was nothing if not tedious, Tyrion had found. The most exciting part of his day was pricking his toes and fingers with a knife.

And just to make sure you know he has still got it, Martin kills off a major character. I felt like he was trying to make a point like 'see? In this world, one careless decision can kill you', and while I respect the 'nobody is safe' ruthlessness, this reeks of an ad-break cliffhanger that will end up with resurrection by magic or subterfuge a la Catelyn, Mance, Davos...

So, not as bad as Feast, but not as good as it could be. Here's hoping he actually finishes the series sometime in the next couple of decades. Getting overtaken by the HBO series might provide some motivation. I'll leave you with some of my favourite quotes.

"A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies," said Jojen. "The man who never reads lives only one."

If this were a story, he would gallop up just as we reached the temple, to challenge Hizdahr for my hand...Four hours later, they emerged again as man and wife, bound together wrist and ankle with chains of yellow gold. [guess this isn't a story then]

The Lyseni took the table nearest to the fire and spoke quietly over cups of black tar rum, keeping their voices low so no one could overhear. But she was no one and she heard most every word.

"You took me unawares, my lord. I was not told of your coming."
"And I seem to have prevented yours." Jaime smiled at the woman in the bed.

3.5 stars

A Feast for Crows by George R.R. Martin (2.5 stars)

Wow, what a let down. After finishing A Storm of Swords I immediately began this one, which is a luxury real fans wouldn't have had since there was a five year wait in-between. Martin made a decision to cut the too-long fourth book in half, not chronologically, but geographically, so in A Feast for Crows he gives us all the boring characters bumping around for 1000 pages with nothing interesting happening.

In fact, here is a summary of the entire book:

• Cersei ad nauseum. Making one stupid decision after another in Kings Landing. Not interesting stupid, just boring, incompetent stupid.
• Brienne on a completely pointless quest for Sansa, never coming within 1000 miles of her. Her story ends on a lame made-for-tv cliffhanger.
• Jaime mopes around wishing he had two hands and being mad at Cersei. He starts training with his left hand but doesn't get any good.
  
• Sam is on a boat. There's a storm. He gets laid. He also apparently can't tell one baby from another since Aemon has to tell him about the baby swap.
• Sansa continues her compliant relationship in the Eyrie with Petyr and his creepy mother-daughter fetish. Their trip down the mountain is described in such intricate detail I was sure Sansa was going to crack it and push Robert off the edge (I wanted to), but instead, surprise! Nothing happens.
• Arya picks up what promised to be an awesome new training montage with the Faceless men, but, amazingly, it also turns out to be boring.
• Arianne of Dorne has a gutsy plan to start a war. It doesn't work.
• A bunch of minor characters you don't care about get their own one-off point of view chapter to do something that is of minor importance to the story.

The tragedy of this book is that it is brilliantly written, and could have been amazing if there had been some significant plot developments. Sure the iron men needed a new king, and the church's rise to power was important to the story, but those points and more could have been covered in a lot less than 1000 pages. I initially hated the chapters about the ironborn, since it was a bunch of new characters I didn't care about. However, I was won over to some extent by Aeron Damphair's character and his drowned men, literally drowned and resuscitated, and I hope we see him again in the story. My favourite quote from this part of the book was from Lord Rodrik 'The Reader':

"Do you want to die old and craven in your bed?" "How else? Though not till I'm done reading."

Looking back over the rest of my notes, they were all complaining about stuff so I'll skip listing them all here and leave with one final whinge. In the first couple of books I loved the use of 'much and more', but it has been so overused I'd now give much and more to never read it again.

2.5 stars

A Storm of Swords by George R.R. Martin (5 stars)

Geez, give the good guys a break! Being brave and taking the moral high ground in a Martin novel is like donning the Star Trek Red Shirt. While I like Martin's gritty reality, it seems that there are no characters on the lighter side of the fuzzy moral divide who won't bravely and stubbornly chart a course for their own death, usually by trusting in the good character of others who are obviously untrustworthy. A few examples spring to mind: Catelyn releases Jaime then trusts the Freys, Robb releases Theon, and Sansa trusts absolutely anyone on the face of the Earth. I can only assume that Brienne's downfall is imminent, with a sword called Oathkeeper, and an already pigheaded attitude to keeping now-irrelevant promises to dead people.

I expected Sansa to continue to be lame and stupid, and she was, but I have been surprised by Arya. She seems to be trying to be held captive by every single character in the novel, something which simultaneously annoyed me, and impressed me. I don't think I've ever read of a character going through such an intensive training montage to be consistently beaten and captured at almost every opportunity. At the end of the first book I wrote that I'd be impressed if Martin killed her off - I think I'm more impressed that he made her so helpless.

Spoilers ahead.

And speaking of killing off characters, Martin does it with great relish in this book. The 'Red Wedding' is fantastically written: if you don't pick up earlier signals, Catelyn's naive faith in the sanctity of 'guest rite' is almost comical foreshadowing:

Catelyn tasted the wine and nibbled at some bread, and felt much better for it. Now we should be safe, she thought.

The wedding marks a great turning point in this novel, when all of a sudden all the story lines get awesome at once. Jon is with, then against, the wildlings in a series of epic battles. Daenerys acquires an army, frees a bunch of slaves, and becomes a military strategic genius. Jaime, Tyrion and the Night's Watch take some completely unexpected actions, and the novel ends with a bunch of surprising character deaths.

If only Martin had compressed some of the build-up in the first half of the novel I think it would be pretty much perfect. I won't say I was bored, but with each new character introduction, and each discussion of who should be wedded to who I despaired of the plot getting anywhere.

Having said that I am very impressed with this series. I've never read anything so epic, so complex, with so many different stories that could quite easily be novels in their own right. It was nice to see Martin made a conscious effort to insert small re-caps and memory triggers - I guess it was important given the novels were released a number of years apart.

And now for a bunch of nits, observations, and predictions:

• I really hope 'Hodor' ends up having some profound meaning and some key part to play. It seems more than a little strange that he understands everyone's speech perfectly but can only say one word...
• I assumed Tryion was being manipulated through Shae by Varys, but Tyrion removed that plot line in this book, so perhaps not.
• I liked hearing about Robb's interesting military tactics, that were screwed up by an overzealous Tully.
• The creatures of the north seemed fairly ridiculous in an otherwise fairly 'normal' world - giants, mammoths, and:
  

  Varamyr Sixskins, a small mouse of a man whose steed was a savage white snow bear that stood thirteen feet tall on its hind legs. And wherever the bear and Varamyr went, three wolves and a shadowcat came following.

• One of the trade items Daenerys is bargaining with for the Unsullied is 'a cask of pitted olives stuff with maggots'. And this is apparently worth money?
  
• What is with Martin and his need for female characters to stick perfume in weird places. First Daenerys, now Sansa is at it:
  

  The maid dabbed some on her finger and touched Sansa behind each ear, and under her chin, and then lightly on her nipples.




• Sandor Clegane rips the fairly ridiculous 'Forgotten Fellowship' to shreds with verbal disdain:
  

  "Dondarrion's a knight, but the rest of you are the sorriest lot of outlaws and broken men I've ever seen. I shit better men than you."
  "Any knight can make a knight," said the scarecrow that was Beric Dondarrion, "and every man you see before you has felt a sword upon his shoulder. We are the forgotten fellowship."
  "Send me on my way and I'll forget you too," Clegane rasped.




• What is it with people eating swan all the time? Tyrion even mentions it, maybe because Martin's editors complained:
  

  ("Not swan again," Tyrion muttered, remembering his supper with his sister on the eve of battle.)



• I'm getting a little sick of the constant cliffhangers - every time the story gets really interesting Martin switches to another point of view. Sometimes this is great because it saves on unnecessary detail and gives a different perspective on events, but I think it is tending towards being over-used.
  

Many and more pages have been read (about 3,000), many and more to go (about 2,000 currently published).

5 stars.

Best of 2011 as read by G

The best (5 stars):

• The Wise Man's Fear by Patrick Rothfuss
• The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe
• Seabiscuit: an American Legend by Laura Hillenbrand

Special mentions (4.5 stars):

• A Game of Thrones by George R. R. Martin
• With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa by E.B. Sledge
• The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch

This year turned out to be a quite a bit of fantasy reading, especially since I climbed aboard the multi-thousand-page epic A Song of Ice and Fire series in November. Once I'm done with that series I think I'll head back towards some sci-fi. I broke my "There are too many interesting books to re-read anything" motto this year for Catch-22, which was hard work, but worth it.

I only had one really terrible reading experience this year that resulted in another book getting 0 stars. On another sad note I also read less books than last year, although I have some decent excuses having had a baby, moved countries, and started a new job.

Speaking of changes, the way I read has changed dramatically. This year marks the beginning of my move to digital. I love the convenience of snatching time to read books on my phone at every opportunity, such as standing in line for a coffee, or riding the bus to work, and then picking up the kindle for longer reading sessions. I paid US$9-$14 for each book (from Amazon's kindle store), which is the price and convenience point at which I decided to abandon public libraries. Having previously been a huge supporter of public libraries it concerns me what this direction means for the medium to long term future of libraries worldwide.