Blue Remembered Earth

this book took aaaages to read. Goddammit.
Blue Remembered Earth is a book written by Alistair Reynolds, who is known for his hard science fiction and space opera. I’d read a couple of short stories of him before, but I’d never bought any of his books before, and this one looked pretty.
The story is about a brother and sister, about 150 years into the future. Space travel has become a normality, and everyone has machines in their heads that allows them to ‘ching’ by which the author means that you can mentally control a robot or other human whilst you mentally leave your body. The mechanism also stops you from harming others, and basically knows everything about you, and your health, unless you’re far from civilisation.
The siblings come from a fairly important family, all thanks to their grandmother. She dies in the beginning of the story, but soon after they discover that she left something in a volt on the moon. No biggie: the brother will travel there, take a look at the volt, and maybe visit her sister too, who lives there and tries to make a living as an artist. Unluckily for them, it appears that their grandmother is taking them on a wild clue hunt that will force them to make unsure new alliances and put their family against them as they travel between moons and planets in our solar system, slowly realising how huge it is, but also how terribly tiny.
It took me more than a month to read this book, mostly because Alistair Reynolds builds his stories up at a snail pace. Things only started getting interesting at page 200; and once they are, Reynolds has the annoying habit of leaving a cliffhanger at the end of every chapter, which, granted, works, but feels cheap after a while. But a definite plus is how realistic it all is; the long descriptions of how everything works all seem to be extrapolated from today’s physics and thereby entirely plausible.
 All in all the book was reasonably good, even though the characters could have used a dab more emotions ever now and again.


Not entirely sure to whom I should recommend this.


Until next time,
Bejoes

City of Dreaming Books

It was a Monday. I’d finished most of my work at my desk and was now working my way through all the book cases, all the racks, and all the titles, making sure none were misplaced: a tedious task if you have to do it for hours. But then again, I do seem to have the right kind of patience for such things.

I was already all the way up to the letter M when I found this little pearl. The cover has books drawn all over it, and a circle smack in the middle of the spine; a circle separated in three by swirly lines. The part of me that loves mysteries, symbols, the occult and very old things, something that I’d like to imagine looks like a very tired cartoonish dragon, lifted its head from its arm and sniffed hopefully.

The City of Dreaming Books is written by Walter Moers, who was first known as a cartoon artist. The books he wrote (and this being one of them) are the very elaborate back story to the creatures he made up. And let me tell you; if you are impressed by Pratchett’s imagination, this is right up your alley. The main character in this book is Hildegunst van Mythenmetz (Optimus Yarnspinner in English, and Hildegunst von Mythenmetz in German). He’s a lintworm (literal translation: tapeworm) of the dinosaur variety. I didn’t get it either at first, but he’s described as a reptile with claws and wings, so I guess being a tapeworm is just the author’s way of fucking with you.

Hildegunst grew up in a castle built on a mountain with all of his dinosaur kin, who are all renowned writers and poets. He’s in his seventies (still quite young) when he inherits a manuscript from his “poet-godfather”. The manuscript is literary gold: it makes him laugh, cry, and shout out loud at how true it is what he’s reading. He decides to search for the author, knowing he went to Boekheem (or Bookholm in English) to find a publisher.

And then we get a description of Boekheem that’s about 100 pages long, but it’s so worth it.
Boekheem is all about books. It is a city filled with book-antiquarians, publishers, bookshops, book-cafés, editors, critics, and workshops where they make ink, paper or letters for the printing press. There are almost literally books everywhere. That’s why it’s nicknamed the city of dreaming books:

“And there they were, the dreaming books. That’s what they called the antique book hoards, because from a trader’s point of view they weren’t exactly alive anymore, although not quite dead; they were in a sort of in between state that was something like sleeping. Their true existence was behind them, decay before them, all gathering dust in the cases and chests, basements and catacombs of Bookholm. Only when a book was picked up and opened by a searching hand, when it was bought and taken away, that’s when it could come alive again. And that’s what all these books were dreaming about.”

And the city is just the top of the iceberg. Underneath Boekheem is a vast labyrinth, stuffed to the brim with old books. It stretches for miles and miles and miles underneath the ground, filled with traps and vicious creatures and bookhunters who try to find valuable books; a place where luminous jellyfish are the only source of light, where everything wants to kill you.

Hildegunst arrives in this city in high spirits, but soon lands in the wrong company. He is drugged and dragged deep into the catacombs, and Hildegunst has to survive Sphinxxxes, bookhunters and Harpyres, all the while knowing that there’s a shadow king out there who leaves his victims covered in papercuts…
To try and summarize: this book is genius. Because Hildegunst hasn’t written anything yet but will soon, he gets a lot of advice, like these:

‘never write a novel from the perspective of a doorknob’
‘if a period is a wall, then a colon is a door’
‘taking from one author is stealing, but if you cite several authors it’s research’

or just in between the lines:

“A body?”
“A mummificated body. It looks a bit like… but you’ll see.”
“Are cryptic hints as literary tools even allowed?” I asked, waiting nervously.
“No,” said he. “Only second-rate writers use cryptic hints to keep the attention of the reader. Why are you asking?”
*end of the chapter*

Or using anagrams to talk about famous writers like “Orca de Wils”, “Balono Zacher” and “Aliesha Wimperslake”. (points for who can guess all three)

So sure, Walter Moers uses the same old fantasy model of a young man going through adventures and needing to be brave to save the world, and he even has a Gandalf-figure along the way, but the fact that he’s a dinosaur (because dinosaurs!) and that nothing is truly what it seems gives such a twist that this story feels very refreshing to read. I might even say that I haven’t been dragged into a book like this since Rothfuss.


Y’all need to read this shizzle, people.

Until next time,

Bejoes

Divergent

So a while ago I got a coupon at work for my birthday that I could spend in one of the shops in Lokeren. Lokeren is a small town, and there isn’t much, but there is one bookshop. Just not a very good one. I knew that whatever I was going to buy was going to be in Dutch too.
So I got myself a copy of Divergent. I’d seen several teens borrow it in our library, and the first movie is in theatres now, so I thought I’d give it a go.

And it was as if I was reading the Hunger Games all over again. Seriously, what is it with Young Adult books and first person present tense?
Anyways. The story is about a girl who lives in a sort of post-war Chicago. We don’t actually know what happened: only that it was bad and that everyone became freakishly obsessed by a sort of cult that took the place of an ordinary government. Everyone has to join one of five groups according to what they think is the best character trait to thrive for: Abnegation (selflessness), Amity (peaceful), Candor (honesty), Dauntless (bravery), and Erudite (Intelligence). This girl grew up in Abnegation, but she doesn’t really fit in (oh, to find a teenage main character that does), so on pick-a-trait-day she goes for Dauntless, shaming her whole family. Not that we ever know if she has any other family than her parents and brother.
So then she goes through a training to prove that she’s Dauntless. This includes jumping in and out of moving trains, punching each other unconscious for sport, throwing knives and shooting.

So here is what I have a problem with.
- Who the hell lets 16-year-olds punch each other until they’re K.O.?
- Blood sacrifice during a Ceremony? Isn’t that a bit pagan for science fiction?
- Blond hair and blue eyes? Why?
- Who the hell gets like five tattoos in 1-2 months’ time, every time on a whim?
- No sense of time whatsoever.
- Everyone in the story doesn’t seem to have any other character traits but the single one they think is most important. Unless they’re a divergent. Or not ready. (Bit extreme, no?)

In the end she realizes she doesn’t really fit in Dauntless either, just like the boy she likes (what a coincidence). In fact, every time they do a brain test on her, she is able to tweak what happens in the hallucinations way better than she’s supposed to. She is… a divergent. This is also mentioned every other page. Just so we don’t forget.
(These hallucinations let you face your fears so you can become brave, but they are realistic enough to feel pain. So what if you are afraid of being raped? Yep, then you have experienced every aspect of it. But it’s not real, so it’s okay. Seriously, wtf?)

I promise you, I’ll calm down and see some positive things about this book, but it won’t be right now. Sorry fans, you may hate me as much as you like.

Until next time,

Bejoes


PS: so I wrote this whilst I was experiencing a migraine, so it might be a tad more angrily written than usually. I'm still exhausted, but I am already a day late and that made me itchy.

PPS: The Bloggess posted this on her twitter, and it's worth a look: WeNeedDiverseBooks