I don’t talk about them much, but I do read them. My general rule of thumb when reading is that a novel has one page to pull me in. A short story has one paragraph. My short story reading mirrors my novel reading in that SF, fantasy and speculative fiction are what I generally seek out. I guess the non-fiction equivalent of a short story is the in-depth article, and I get my fix of those from The Economist, New Scientist, or the Financial Review.
Most short stories don’t get past the skim with me, but there are a few that really resonate. I don’t remember any of the novels I was obliged to read at school but I remember the short stories.
The Secret Life of Walter Mitty by James Thurber. Even today, to have the phrase ‘Walter Mitty’ directed at you can be a death sentence. Sometimes literally.
The Bright Spade by George Mackay Brown – winters in Scotland are harsh
The Machine Stops by EM Forster, I think this was my first exposure to SF. Thanks EM.
Boule de Suif by Guy de Maupassant, everything you need to know about hypocrisy.
A Sound of Thunder by Ray Bradbury, other time travel stories sit in the shade of this one
To that list I can only add one from recent years – Singing My Sister Down by Margo Lanagan, which deserves to be required reading for every sentient being. Except I’m more in favour of encouraged reading over ‘required’ reading. Subtle, but important difference.
I first read this book when I was twelve, and it was a cool book about a martial arts fighter who gets into some political trouble and ends up exiled in a strange alien jungle.
I read this book again in my early twenties, and discovered instead it was a very interesting take on society, sexuality, and nature.
Reading it again in my mid-thirties, the book is still highly enjoyable. The eponymous Kid is a ‘combat artist’ who enters arranged fights for money or honour. He is followed everywhere by his camera drones that record his every action. After a fight he edits and uploads his own tapes for the enjoyment of the masses. At the peak of his art, he is becoming very rich.
It all goes wrong after Kid encounters Moses Moses, the planet’s founder returned after 500 years cryo-sleep. Forced to flee to the planet’s untamed wilds, Kid meets his former mentor and understands the true nature of the planet that has become a playground for the indolent.
The Artificial Kid is all of the things I found the first two times I read. This time I discovered another theme – self. Kid and Saint Anne have denied their true natures for so long, subsumed in distractions until they thought that was their life. Trapped together in the wilds, they discover something unexpected – themselves. Hmm, does that sound like the voice-over to a crappy romance film? It wasn’t meant to. Self. It’s another theme. Go read it, it has nunchuks with guns hidden in them.
After last week’s late and sleepy starts, I read Olympos over the week-end to avoid any repetition of that this week. Hey, I’m not totally absorbed in my reading. I realise there are wider considerations. Spending a large amount of time sitting on the couch read is a luxury to be savoured.
Olympos is the closing sequel to Ilium, and reveals the deeper mysteries behind the events of Olympos, as the situation of the last humans on earth goes from bad to dire. Cut off from the automations that made their life so easy, humans must once
again learn to fight as previously benign robots of earth begin killing everyone they can find. Genius can create whole universes, but that’s not always a good thing.
Like Ilium, this is a book that forcibly pulls me through the story. My will is not my own as I turn page after page. Just another 10 minutes I think, and then an hour has gone by. People talk about getting lost as though it were a bad thing. Getting lost in a good book is strongly recommended.
The Trojan War will never be the same again. Dan Simmons has seen to that. Reading this book had an immediate and noticable impact on my life. I was at work late and tired every morning last week.
The reason was, that I had been up late reading Ilium.
It’s a strange and intriguing tale of Hockenberry, a resurrected scholar tasked by the gods of chronicling the siege of troy, and informing of any discrepancies
between homer’s original and actual events. It’s also the tale of Mahnmut and Orphu, two robotic life forms living on Jupiter’s moons Europa and Io, who become tasked with finding out the cause of alarming quantum instabilities on Mars. It’s also the tale of the last humans on earth, who have devolved into an eloi-like society that unthinkingly moves through the ruins of a once greater society.
All of these threads are connected, and the best part of this book is following the
characters as they unravel the mysteries facing them. It also contains some of the best fighting scenes I’ve read anywhere ever.
The first book ends with Achilles declaring war on the gods themselves. Good times.
Luckily this book is not confusing, as the title suggests. In good literary style, the title refers to an older meaning; con-fused, or joined together. Through the journeys of its characters, particularly one who makes an eastward journey from India to London, Stephenson shows how the lines of trade connect and join the globe, even in 1700. The naming of a ship in Malabar can have consequences in Paris, should the wrong name be chosen. Trade has always been global.
In The Confusion the three characters from Quicksilver return, though in this book they are rarely together. The Confusion is a book about the journey. The evidence of con-fusing is background, a detail if you will. Jack’s journey around the world is the principal focus of the book, and the effects his actions can have on Eliza are unforeseeable. Daniel Waterhouse is rarely seen, being mostly immobile in London during the years of this book, and wishing he were in Massachusetts. The mercurial character of Enoch Root also returns, to save our trading heroes from a subtle and deadly trap set by the Japanese.
As in Quicksilver, the slow emergence of what we today would recognise as science continues, though here science is still con-fused with alchemy.
As with Quicksilver before it (and The System of the World after) this novel is dense and rewarding to read. Like all good books, the reader is encouraged to seek out yet more books to read to answer or confirm (or not!) questions raised.
You may wonder why it’s mainly book reviews that are featured on this site. There are other things to read besides books after all. Me, I’m in it for the stories. It’s stories that I love, and that’s what I am mostly drawn to. Do I read magazines? Sure.
The Economist
Probably the best magazine out there right now. Eminently readable articles, and the only didactic element being a push for greater economic freedoms, and freedom in general. An intelligent self-aware magazine with a broad reach and great expertise.
New Scientist
Concentrates on science, but humanises the subject. Science, after all, is humanity’s creation, reflecting our quest for knowledge and understanding. You can count on New Scientist to keep you up to date on the breadth of scientific knowledge. Regular interviews and book reviews
will reveal areas you may wish to explore more deeply.
That’s it for magazines. I could talk about Retro Gamer, but that’s strictly for people who, like me, grew up in Britain in the 80s with a love of 8-bit computers. I love it, but it’s perhaps too specialised to mention here. I only mention it to explain why I couldn’t possibly mention it.
Following on from the two video links below comes this one. Jonathan Coulton releases his music under a creative commons licence, meaning people are free to take it, and make videos around it. This one, Code Monkey, has been set to story by Spiff. Lovely.
This shows how with things like machinima or flash you don’t have to wait passively for someone to create an ‘official’ story around a song. If music puts those images in your head, the tools now exist to get them out and show them around. Really, it’s not as scary as it sounds.
Last year I enjoyed reading through Conn Iggulden’s quartet of books about the life of Julius Caesar. This year, Ghengis Khan gets the Iggulden treatment.
Tracing the life of the Mongol tribes in the early thirteenth century, Iggulden brings a vivid picture of tribal life in a harsh land. Surrounded by enemies or potential enemies, each tribe must fight to hold on to what they have, and raid other tribes to prove their worth. Tribal life is harsh, but far worse is that of the tribeless wanderers, in twos and threes dotted around the landscape, they must be constantly wary. There is no tribal justice for these outsiders.
Young Temujin of the Wolves finds himself and his family cast out of their tribe, with nothing but the clothes on their backs. Fighting to survive, Temujin has still greater plans.
As with the Caesar books, Wolf of the Plains contains notes from the author about the real historical story, his research. These notes include details of the areas where he changed things, either compressing events of bringing them forward by a few years, or characters whose names have been changed or simply left out of the story for one reason or another. The notes themselves are fascinating and are a testament to Iggulden’s research which complements his storytelling abilities.
At I Can’t Stop Reading you’ll mostly find book reviews, as I read them. From time to time I’ll post other stuff. Like this.
Stories aren’t found only in books, so looking for them only in books will limit your experience. Music videos aren’t normally associated with a storytelling medium, but you can do a lot with 4-odd minutes of video, and many people do.
Plenty of music videos are artistically interesting, or full of ‘wierd stuff’ or both, but don’t contain anything you would call a story. Luckily there are stories out there.
Knights of Cydonia by Muse. You’ve probably seen this one. Here’s the link anyway, to YouTube. What’s been done here is that an entire fictional ‘film’ has been created, a great little post-apocalyptic cowboy sci-fi to accompany the overblown track. Excellent match up.
Dashboard by Modest Mouse. A song about a Dashboard melting translated
naturally into nautical tall tales, right? Yes, right, at least in this
video interpretation. A tall story about the telling of tall stories.
