The camera of historical fiction almost always looks over the shoulder of those who themselves stood on the shoulders of giants. The protagonists are often kings and queens, lords and ladies and knights. Occasionally, if we are very lucky, we get to see historical fiction that follows the little people: the peasants, the freemen, the villeins and serfs. Bernard Cornwell is one author who does this well (see Azincourt as one, perhaps not even particularly notable, example). Valerie Anand also does this with The Proud Villeins, an excellent, sweeping tale of several generations of villeins who grapple with a family myth that they could have had freedom.

Beginning just prior to William of Normandy’s invasion in 1066, Anand introduces us to Ivon de Clairpont, a Norman knight held prisoner on a remote Danish settlement in Northumbria. Ivon chafes at his new status as a thrall, particularly because it means any children he produces will themselves be thralls. After failing to escape, however, he eventually comes to terms with his status, marries, and has more children—but he never stops talking about how he deserves to be free. This story of his survives the tellings and retellings and is passed down with each generation, subtly influencing the lives of his descendants.

From the proud Norman Ivon, Anand shifts forward to his grandson, also an Ivon, nicknamed “Oddeyes” for the different-coloured eyes he inherited from his grandfather. During his childhood, Ivon witnesses Norman knights massacreing nearly everyone in his home in the settlement. This kindles a hatred for Norman knights that causes him to reject his heritage, even when opportunities arise where it might result in his freedom. After a brief stint as a novice at a monastery, Ivon winds up on a farm outside Norwich, where he becomes a potter and sets his family on the path to being villeins in perpuity.

Once again, Anand skips forward two generations to the feisty Margaret, who has her heart set on marrying a local sweetheart. Her mother doesn’t approve, though, and sets up considerable barriers. In the back of their minds, there eternally lurks the story that Margaret’s grandfather, Ivon Oddeyes, once passed up a chance for their freedom. Time and again, Anand returns to that motif, examining how the different generations value (or don’t) the idea of not being bound to the land they work. It’s a strange concept for those of us in the present day to comprehend—just as, Anand points out, Margaret and her contemporaries would find the notion that there might someday not be villeins at all rather laughable.

As with many multi-generational books, The Proud Villeins’ strength is also its weakness. By jumping from protagonist to protagonist, Anand risks alienating the reader by asking them to get to know the new protagonist each time. Just as I began caring about Ivon and became invested in his life, she skipped ahead twenty years and presented Ivon’s grandson as the new protagonist. Same thing happens with the transition from Oddeyes to Margaret. I can’t really fault Anand for this, because there is no question that it’s the coverage of these generations that makes the book so successful. However, it does make for a somewhat different reading experience from what I tend to enjoy.

By following multiple generations, Anand tracks the changing attitudes towards freedom. For Ivon, it is a right by blood. For Oddeyes, it is a sore and prickly wound complicated by his self-hatred. For Margaret, it is an ache and a sore reminder of her doomed love. Anand builds upon each successive story, creating a more satisfying overall narrative. Each character has traits of their forbears, but they are all interesting, dynamic individuals in their own right. Each one faces their own challenges depending on their genders, upbringing, and livelihoods.

In addition to its satisfying structure, The Proud Villeins benefits from Anand’s strong prose. She does not make the mistake of over-explaining the time period. Most exposition is through conversation, and it mostly concerns current events—a very realistic topic for any age, particularly one where news must travel via word-of-mouth. Very little of it concerns the quotidian aspects of life, and Anand seldom deigns to take the reader aside and lecture them on how people lived in the twelfth century. Instead, she goes the stronger route, showing us how people lived even as she tells the story. As a result, despite its length, this book seldom made me bored or uninterested in reading.

I quite enjoyed the exposure to the life of twelfth-century villeins. As I said in the introduction, so much historical fiction revolves around nobility, famous persons, or the major military events of the past. By focusing on very normal activities for the time, Anand provides a powerful glimpse at how different people’s lives were. And she also shows, through these three generations that she tracks, how much life in rural England changes from the time of William the Conquerer to the accession of King Henry II. But she does it from the point of view of the common person, providing a much more interesting and down-to-earth perspecitve on the tumultuous times. Everyone knows the king’s name (and the other king’s name) … but most of the villeins couldn’t care less who happens to rule, as long as they are healthy and well-fed.

Likewise, Anand does a good job demonstrating how the majority of the Norman overlords regard their English villeins as something subhuman—even the kindest Norman lords, by dint of their upbringing, have trouble seeing any English peasant in a more favourable light. Anand depicts injustices in ways that make us empathize with the villein victims; however, she doesn’t inject anachronistic ideals into the story. Even her protagonists who desire freedom are very much mired in twelfth-century mindsets about how that freedom might legitimately be obtained. The end result: a very strong, very deep vision of twelfth-century England with characters who are well-drawn and complex.

As a feat of storytelling, The Proud Villeins is both impressive and enjoyable. It doesn’t have much in the way of pure action or thrill. The multi-generational aspect to the story can be frustrating, on occasion, for how it abbreviates our time with each protagonist. Yet it illustrates how much life for villeins changes in just a few decades, giving a peasant’s perspective on one of the most major transitions in English history. If you are looking for intense portrayals of key battles or an intimate exploration of the life of nobility … keep looking. But if you want to see how the ordinary people lived, breathed, and toiled, look no further.

Many people have recommended P.G. Wodehouse to me many times, and now I have finally read one of his books. I had no particular reason for choosing Cocktail Time as my first Wodehouse experience. I went to a used bookstore for the first time here in my new town, and at the back of the shop was a small bookcase full of very new-looking Wodehouse books. With no idea where to begin, I looked to the proprietor for some advice. He was the very idea of a used bookstore proprietor: older, with a somewhat detached air that made it seem like he was always slightly surprised I was still around—and, of course, he only accepted cash. My plea fell on deaf ears, though. He rebuked me, “I never give recommendations,” and proceeded to give a semi-helpful lecture on the different strands of Wodehouse’s oeuvre.

So I shrugged and took Cocktail Time and Carry On, Jeeves. At least in the case of the former, this decision proved fruitful. Wodehouse might not have jumped to the top of my list of favourite humorous authors, but I can definitely appreciate his sharp satire and keen enthusiasm for creating zany characters and silly situations.

Fred, Lord Ickenham, has a youth that belies his older appearance. He’s the kind of person who looks at a situation and then asks, “How can I possibly make this more interesting?” Never content to leave things simply to develop on their own, Lord Ickenham always has to stir the pot a little more. The plot gets going when Ickenham’s influence causes his brother-in-law, Raymond “Beefy” Bastable, to write a novel—also called Cocktail Time. Beefy has a beef with today’s youth, because one of them knocked off his top hat with a catapulted Brazil nut. The real culprit, of course, is Ickenham, who at the time had no idea it would turn Beefy into the secret author of a bestseller.

Events continue to spiral out of control as more of Ickenham’s social circle becomes involved—and that’s just how he likes it. The action culminates in Dovetail Hammer with a tense auction for a fake walnut cabinet, an incriminating letter, and Ickenham’s hand in matchmaking several couples. It’s all masterfully executed in such a way that I never felt like I need to look behind the curtain and spoil my disbelief. The happy ending is almost assured by the novel’s light tone, but I enjoyed watching Wodehouse pull all the threads neatly into place.

And the characters themselves are wonderfully uncomplicated—there are villains and rogues and schemers and senile old men. They’re all types, allowing Wodehouse to explore the variations within British society (and particularly within the wealthy and well-to-do). But as circumstances shift, the characters have to change too—Cosimo goes from wanting to reveal the real author to wanting to keep the charade of his authorship alive after Cocktail Time lands a multi-hundred-thousand-dollar movie deal. Several times, Ickenham’s own schemes go awry, and he is forced to improvise swiftly and skilfully.

Wodehouse’s style is twofold. First, he is a master of what I would call whimisical description. He always knows the perfect thing to say—often a simile or, if no such simple beast is available, he springs for a metaphor—to elevate any description from mundane to amusing. And then there are paragraphs like this, which opens Chapter 12:

OLd Howard Saxby was seated at his desk in his room at the Edgar Saxby literary agency when Cosmo arrived there. He was knitting a sock. He knitted a good deal, he would tell you if you asked him, to keep himself from smoking, adding that he also smoked a good deal to keep himself from knitting.

The paragraph goes on to invoke comparisons to Stilton cheese and ghostly ectoplasm. Wodehouse’s vocabulary and diction are both dazzling, aided by the relative simplicity of the plot, which allows one to sink into the story and just enjoy the writing.

Wodehouse’s second element of style is the snappy dialogue he writes for his characters. It reads like a comedy sketch, with short sentences and plenty of interruption as one character plays off another’s words. The omniscient narrator reveals what everyone is thinking, contributing even further to the sense of irony that practically saturates this thin volume.

I don’t have much else to say about Wodehouse or Cocktail Time. It was a nice novel to spend a couple of days reading, and now I have a firmer idea of what Wodehouse has to offer. I’ll read the next one sometime in the next few months, and we’ll see how the relationship goes from there—I don’t like to take things too fast, after all. Beefy certainly waited a long time, and it worked out all right for him.

This book has mouldered at the #1 spot on my to-read list for four years. It exited in that unhappy limbo of not being available from the library yet not being exciting enough to make me want to buy it. Since moving to England, I’ve started trying to work my way through the oldest books on my list, so I gave in and bought this cheaply. It’s hard to remember why I wanted to read it in the first place—I think I saw it at the bookstore, thought it was interesting, but tried to exercise some self-control and not buy it.

A Case of Exploding Mangoes takes place during a period of time about which I have little knowledge: the late half of the twentieth century. Actually, it’s set a year before my birth. I enjoy reading historical fiction from this period, precisely because I like learning more about the events that preceded me. Mohammed Hanif weaves two parallel narratives. Ali Shigri is the son of a famous, now deceased, officer in the Pakistan Army, and he has a plan to kill the President, General Zia. The second half of the story follows Zia himself, with brief interludes that expose the perspectives of the First Lady and Zia’s right- and left-hand men. Everything builds towards a final, climactic chapter in which Zia boards a booby-trapped plane, gets poisoned, and suffers from a tapeworm eating his internal organs. Yeah. It’s intense.

This book took me longer to read than it should have. It took me longer to appreciate than I would have liked. Trouble is, Hanif takes a while to show us what’s so fascinating about these characters. At first glance, Ali is a self-entitled, somewhat cocky young man who thinks he has it all figured out. At first glance, Zia is a slightly crazy military dictator with pretensions of piety. But rather than being humourous, A Case of Exploding Mangoes is mediocre at first.

Thankfully, it doesn’t stay mediocre. As the story develops, Ali and Zia’s stories become more fascinating—Zia’s in particular. I found myself yearning to learn what crazy decision Zia would make next. I was less enthralled with Ali’s arc, but I still wanted to find out what would happen to him, and how he ended up nearly on the same plane as General Zia.

In both stories, the principal themes are ones of isolation and meditation upon corruption. Pakistan, barely 40 years into its existence, groans beneath the military bureaucracy driving the country forward. Ali is trapped within a system just as oppressive as the Soviet government against which Pakistan fights. Zia, despite being the leader of that system, is trapped by it as well. At one point he attempts to go among his people in disguise, and his sojourn is an epic fail. He barely makes it out of the gates of his compound before running into trouble.

In Ali’s case, he is isolated by his role as a cadet in Pakistan’s army. He is disconnected from his past as a peasant growing up in the hills, something reminded to him by fellow prisoner the Secretary-General. Since following his father’s footsteps, Ali has become the sort of person who shouts at “strength 5”, practises silent drills, and salutes on command. The Secretary-General accuses him of “selling out” and collaborating. Ali denies this vociferously, and to some extent I’d side with him—he is planning to kill General Zia, after all. Nevertheless, there’s a definite sense that he has lived outside the sphere of reality too long, firmly ensconced in the denial of the military.

Similarly, Zia is in the ineviable position of being so powerful that no one wants to tell him the truth. Everyone feeds him the information they think will make him happy. His intelligence service and propaganda puppets spread paranoid conspiracy theories whenever they feel the need to discredit the latest attacks against him. I also love how Hanif portrays the corrupt and complicated relationship between the United States and Pakistan, particularly when it comes to the CIA’s involvement in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Hanif’s approach to the ending of the story—and therefore its beginning as well—mirrors this sense of uncertainty, this inability to distinguish between realities and fictions because of poor information. The book begins by asking how Zia actually died. His plane exploded, yes, but was that the cause? Perhaps it was something else—poison, or a tapeworm, or a bomb planted by the CIA? Hanif admirably demonstrates how even events that history seems to have recorded a certain way have wiggle room for conspiracies, alternatives, and wild speculation. He does it all in jest, however, avoiding any overtones of wild-eyed conspiracy theorizing.

Overall, I can safely say I enjoyed A Case of Exploding Mangoes, but that reading it after leaving it to languish for four years probably contributed to a mild case of anticlimactic ennui. It’s just not remarkable enough to live up to any expectations that lingered in my mind. I’m not sorry I read it, though, and depending on your tastes, this might suit you even better than it did me.

Big Dumb Objects always provide an interesting starting point. The Stone, as the Americans christen the hollowed-out asteroid that appears above 21st-century Earth in Eon, is full of mysteries. It has the exact same profile as Juno, but much less mass, because someone has hollowed it out into seven enormous chambers. Could it be from humanity’s future? Or a possible future? And if so, does it hold the answers to avert a Russian-American nuclear confrontation?

Oh, 1980s. Your cold war fiction is so cute.

I say this not with derision but admiration and a healthy dose of humility. I can only hope that, in thirty years’ time, we will be saying similar things about contemporary science fiction that deals with possible apocalyptic global warming scenarios. We can’t fault authors for working within the zeitgeist of their times and attempting to explore the ramifications of our ability to use and misuse advanced technology. Instead, the more pertinent question is what does Greg Bear want to say about politics and human nature?

Politics and human nature are the crux of Eon. They inform both conflicts: the tension between the Russians and the Americans, which culminates in an invasion of the Stone that goes pear-shaped faster than you can say, “an invasion of the Stone that goes pear-shaped”; and the meetings between the 21st-century humans and their alternate-future counterparts from Axis City. In both cases, we have two groups that are not necessarily enemies but have very different ideas of how to achieve their goals. We have different individuals within these groups, individuals whose own ideologies are more nuanced and refined than the general group identity. Bear emphasizes that just because one belongs to a group doesn’t mean one’s own identity and choices are subsumed into that group.

Human nature is an interesting one, because many of the inhabitants of Axis City wouldn’t fall under our definition of “human”. Decidedly posthuman, they have mastered the arts of mind uploading, cloning and body creation, etc. A sizable portion exist as “neomorphs”, embodied but in forms far more diverse and bizarre than that of the human body; more still exist only as personalities within the City Memory. And so one must wonder the extent to which these people still possess “human nature”, whatever that might be. Decoupled from all those hormones and chemicals that make us who we are, are we still us?

Bear seems very focused on writing realistic humans, and it pays off. All of the various characters are well-rounded, an important attribute when one has such a large ensemble cast. I just wish they were a little more interesting. For example, Patricia is supposed to be a brilliant mathematician whose theories precede those that enable the construction of the Stone’s seventh chamber and the Way. But she spends most of the book in some kind of haze, as if she can’t quite believe what’s happening. This seems like an all-too-realistic response to discovering that descendants from a possible future have kidnapped you. But it perhaps isn’t the most useful response.

In general, Eon attempts a great deal but doesn’t always deliver. It isn’t quite a political thriller, nor is it quite a scientific one. It attempts to stir up a sense of wonder, maybe even guilt, over the contrast of what humanity achieves in the Stone versus what the Death brings to Earth. But with so many different characters, it is hard to invest in any one in particular, especially when none of them emerge as the most palatable protagonist. Overall, as a story, Eon works. But I didn’t end up loving it.

I picked this up while nosing around an antique shop. My copy is battered: its front cover is torn and disfigured; its spine is bent into a sadistic and perilous curve; its pages are bloated and distorted from what I can only guess is water damage. If it weren’t such a thick book, I’d have scoffed at the £2 I paid for it.

As it is, there is something familiar about The Mammoth Book of Short Science Fiction Novels. I feel like I’ve read some of these stories before—and maybe I have, since their inclusion in this anthology is doubtless because Isaac Asimov and the other editors felt the stories are good examples of the genre. So, I plucked my way through them, one or two at a time, reading other books as I went. Some have their own entries on Goodreads, and so I’ve posted separate reviews (they are novellas, for the most part, so I feel like they count as individual books read):

* Profession, by Isaac Asimov
* Who Goes There?, by John W. Campbell, Jr.
* Time Safari, by David Drake
* Enemy Mine, by Barry B. Longyear
* The Moon Goddess and the Son, by Donald Kingsbury
* Flash Crowd, by Larry Niven
* The Desert of Stolen Dreams, by Robert Silverberg

Individally, few of these stories stand out as being of high quality, in my opinion. Yet many of their authors are regarded as visionaries in the genre. Many of these stories—Who Goes There?, Enemy Mine (which, to be fair, actually was that good)—have served as inspiration for later works and adaptations. It’s part of the paradox of speculative fiction that a lot of its “greatest” or more influential works are also, in some subjective senses, just not that good.

Indeed, as its panel of editors and all-but-one male selection of authors might indicate, this anthology is a snapshot of only a corner of the science fiction community—a large, vocal corner, perhaps, but certainly not a corner representative of the wider community. The stories are actually more interesting in this format, presented together rather than read separately, for how their similarities in style and tone reflect the tastes and tendencies of an industry that was, by and large, quite male-dominated. Asimov explains in his introduction:

They differ in subject matter, in style, in everything you can think of but quality. They are all skillfully written, cleverly constructed stories, with ingenious ideas, as you will have to admit, even if one or two of them should happen, for one reason or another, not to be entirely to your liking.

I’m not as convinced as he is about the uniformity of quality, but I will have to admit that they are all cleverly constructed and full of interesting ideas. Science fiction is the genre for Big Ideas, and this book definitely showcases how the novella form can put such ideas to good use. In this respect, Asimov is completely accurate in his assertion.

His introduction is actually one of the best parts of this collection and rather deserves a review of its own. It is one of the reasons I feel like I’ve seen this collection or something similar in the past, because Asimov begins, in typical Asimovian fashion, with an itemized, categorical list of the different types of fiction by word length, from short-short story to novel. (Interestingly, he pegs a novella as being “30,000 to 50,000 words” and then a novel as “70,000 words and up”. I can only assume that, back in the 1980s, nobody ever wrote fiction between 50,001 and 69,999 words. That would just be silly.)

Asimov provides a brief insight into the way the science-fiction publishing industry evolved out of the pulp magazine, which naturally preferred short stories—novels were serialized. Novellas existed in a state of fragile equilibrium, for they were usually small enough to publish in one instalment, but they would take up the space of several short stories, which was a big risk for the publisher.

I belong to a generation that does not have these problems. We live in an age of plenty. Thanks to the Web and digital media, it is literally possible to publishe every single story one would like to publish, regardless of space constraints. (It’s not possible to read all such stories, of course, and so there is a curation factor involved in selecting and bundling them into things like ezines—but that’s another topic.) And it is ridiculously easy for me to get a hold of all but the most obscure books: I have libraries, bookstores, online retailers, all of whom are happy to find me the books I want.

So it’s hard for me to imagine the excitement that, as a youth, Asimov must have felt when he paid over his 25 cents (or however much such things cost back in the day) for a copy of the latest magazine. It’s hard for me to imagine the feeling of camaraderie that existed among science-fiction readers of the early and middle twentieth-century. (These days, we live double lives, treading the fine line where science fiction has become mainstream, but only in specific, commercializable ways.) The Mammoth Book of Short Science Fiction Novels seems very much a celebration of the ingenuity brought to bear by people who feel like they were casting words out into the world that might not be picked up and read at all, such was the tenuous nature of writing and of science fiction as a genre….

For all this sense of underground romance, though, I don’t regret missing out on the Golden Age or New Wave eras of science fiction. In fact, I feel very lucky to be alive right now. This is an exciting time for science fiction and fantasy. There is a diversity of voices and ideas in the field like we have never seen before. And I’m not just talking about the presence of women writers, writers of colour, queer or trans writers … I’m talking about the existence of a wider, more fluid and dynamic conversation happening within the public sphere. While a back-and-forth among authors has always existed, its public nature only extended as far as letters and interviews and convention conversations. Now, thanks to the Web, to blogs and Twitter and Facebook, these conversations increasingly default to “public”.

For a reader and fan like me, it’s very interesting to see the author engage in conversation about their works, and other works, with other authors and with fans. Sometimes the conversations get too personal, devolve into attacks on character that become far too heated for civilized discussion. We’re still far from perfect. The recent controversy surrounding the Hugo nominations is a case in point. Yet even these public disagreements are telling. Each time someone says, “No, I will not be silenced,” science fiction becomes stronger for it. The types of conversations we are having about books—about postgender representation in SF, the relevance of biopunk stories to our current global warming crisis, the ups and downs of the Singularity subgenre—are changing. I’m just very interested to see how they shape the next decades of science fiction storytelling.

In contrast, The Mammoth Book of Short Science Fiction Novels is an artifact from a bygone era. Its stories are “Big Idea”, yes, but they are also steeped in the tropes and prejudices of their time. With a few exceptions—as noted in my review—they tend to concentrate on the “gee wow” confluence of technology and social change, but their explorations of such problems isn’t always as deft or as sensitive to questions of diversity and personhood as we might like.

For hardcore science fiction fans who like reading historical science fiction and examining how it relates to the context of the genre, there is every reason to read this book. For the casual fan, there is less of interest. Although the stories remain thought-provoking, they are also very dated. There is much better science fiction, from all sorts of authors, that has since hit the shelves, and your time is probably better spent elsewhere. I hear that there is a Mammoth Book of SF Stories by Women anthology coming out this year….

My full length review exceeds the character limit for Goodreads reviews. You can continue reading it on my website, where you will find a review of the stories I have not reviewed separately.

Supernatural creatures capture our imaginations for all sorts of reasons. Vampires are really very individualistic, singular monsters: they are an outward manifestation of our obsessions with mortality, sexuality, and appetite. Zombies, too, prey upon our fear of a loss of self and self-determination. Faeries, though, are a little different. Thanks to their firm grounding in folklore across Europe, with plenty of hints as to a larger society and hierarchy, faeries offer a reach source of material when one needs supernatural creatures with a little class.

In Wicked Lovely, Aislinn is a teenage girl like many other teenage girls—except she can see faeries. They’re everywhere but ordinarily invisible. She can’t let on that she can see them, because that would attract their attention, which is the last thing she wants. So, naturally, the story kicks off when a faery manifests himself in human form to try to pick Aislinn up. Good going, Aislinn. Way to keep a low profile.

The plot is fairly simple and easy to articulate: Keenan is the Summer King, but the majority of his power lays dormant until he can find a human to become his Summer Queen. To do this, she must pass a test by grasping the staff of the Winter Queen. But if she fails the test, she instead takes on “Winter’s chill” and becomes the “Winter Girl”, which is kind of like a runner-up position that involves serving the Winter Queen for eternity. And the Winter Queen, who happens to be Keenan’s mother, is definitely icy.

Yes, it’s rather like a soap opera in its details, but Wicked Lovely managed to grow on me. Marr drives Aislinn’s internal conflict through an ersatz love triangle: Keenan finds himself drawn to Aislinn, convinced that she is the one who will finally pass the test and become his queen; Aislinn loves a slightly older boy named Seth, whom she has, until now, been keeping in the friend zone lest she risk a relationship-collapsing one-night stand. After drinking some faery wine on a (probably ill-advised) date with Keenan, Aislinn’s fate is sealed: she’s turning into a faery one way or the other; the question now is only whether she will accept the mantle of Summer Queen. But if she goes along with it and becomes Keenan’s queen, where does that leave her with Seth?

Is there any doubt that Aislinn will end up as the Summer Queen? Marr tries her best to sow a few seeds, but it’s rather obviously the only fulfilling end to the story. The only question is whether Seth will figure in it at all. For what it’s worth, though, that question alone manages to keep the suspense ticking for the majority of the book. That’s fortunate, because there is little else going on here.

Aislinn’s eventual investiture as the Summer Queen is supposed to be a big deal because it will release the rest of Keenan’s power. With it, he can beat back his mother’s Winter and restore the power of the Summer Court. Without it, no more summer, and the world freezes. It’s a neat idea, and I wish Marr had taken it further. It gets mentioned once or twice, but nothing significant really happens to establish it as a real threat. Instead, Marr focuses more on how Aislinn’s accession would affect her personally. Unfortunately, this can make Aislinn seem rather whiny at times. Her own personal comfort appears to take precedence of the survival of the entire world.

Similarly, Marr doesn’t always show us the big picture in as much fidelity as I would like. There are four faery courts: Winter, Summer, High, and Dark. The latter are more aloof from the human world, so they don’t figure very prominently. Beira presides over the Winter Court, and Keenan is the Summer King, albeit less potently, ever since she killed his father. Beira’s motivations are somewhat sketchy—she just seems to be inherently cold and otherworldly, as one might expect a Winter faery. When it comes to portraying faeries, there is a fine line to be walked: on one hand, they are indeed of another world, and their motivations are not like human motivations; on the other hand, if they are central characters to the story, they have to feel like more than plot devices. Perhaps this is why so many other stories keep the faeries at arm’s length as much as possible.

Don’t let my criticism dampen anticipation or enthusiasm for Wicked Lovely, though. It’s still lovely, and a little bit wicked, and considering it’s probably made more for the young adult crowd, it probably works quite well for its audience. I like that Aislinn takes charge of her problem and decides she will find a solution, and that the solution doesn’t involve giving in to some magical faery king just because he’s hot. She’s a good protagonist (even if she is a little bit self-absorbed). While it has its shares of plot snags and character quibbles, Wicked Lovely is what I’d call above average. Marr’s marriage of faery lore with contemporary adolescent issues isn’t seamless, but it’s still pretty interesting.

It’s been a long time since I read The Colour Magic. I’ve read a few other Discworld novels but am now kind of trying to read them in order. Terry Pratchett is a writer whose sense of humour aligns exactly with the type of humourous fiction I want to read: dry and absurd. From Discworld to Good Omens, Pratchett always delivers, and The Light Fantastic is no exception.

I read the first half of this book with a sense of dragging anticipation. I was waiting for the book to begin. It took me a while to realize what The Light Fantastic reminds me of and, in so doing, allow me to change my mindset and enjoy it more. This book is very much like The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. There is a core group of characters—Rincewind, Twoflower, Cohen, Bethan, and of course, the Luggage—with occasional scenes featuring the antagonist or supporting cast. And this core group doesn’t so much do things as react to the various things that happen to them. Much like how Arthur Dent goes from lying in front of a bulldozer in his housecoat to tromping about the galaxy in a ship powered by an infinite improbability drive, Rincewind isn’t so much following a plan as trying to cope with the latest set of unfortunate circumstances in which he finds himself.

Once I came to terms with this, The Light Fantastic became a lot more fun. I mean, that’s the point of Discworld: everything is just totally bonkers, from the elephants perched on the turtle’s back to the immense forces of magic. I think the word “romp” might have been invented solely to describe Discworld adventures.

If I had to express any kind of disappointment about this book, it would simply be that there isn’t enough of it. It’s a slim volume. And there were segments where I wished Pratchett had delved more deeply into what was happening. For example, Death is present in this book, but in a more tangential capacity. Rincewind and Twoflower pay a visit to his hall but don’t stay very long, quickly showing themselves out. That’s understandable—I wouldn’t overstay my welcome at Death’s place either. But The Light Fantastic is very much a road comedy, and while that gives Pratchett plenty of opportunities for funny sequences, it also makes some of those sequences very fast, drive-by affairs.

The calculus here is rather simple. Reading Discworld? Read it. If you haven’t read any Discworld novel, I probably wouldn’t start with this one. It’s a loose sequel to The Colour Magic, which I think was probably a stronger book (not that I remember all that much about it). So I would start there—or with another book later in the series, since this is one of those things where order doesn’t necessarily matter (combinations, not permutations!).

Since I moved to England this fall, I haven’t done too much travelling around the country. I’ve been to London a couple of times, neither of which I did much that could be described as a touristy; the same applies to my trips to Cambridge. I went up to Scotland during the half-term and had a good time there, but I’m looking forward to visiting a few other places around the UK. Until I do, travel writing like Notes from a Small Island will have to serve to whet my appetite.

Bill Bryson is a brilliant writer. A Short History of Nearly Everything is one of my favourite books. Bryson has a deft touch to description that makes him an apt writer of non-fiction; he manages to make something that could be dull and make it come alive through anecdotes and humour. I knew he had done some travel writing, a genre that’s been on my mind while teaching AS Literature. So I picked this up during a trip to Waterstones and settled into what I hoped would be a very unique perspective on Great Britain. Bryson didn’t grow up here but has lived here for decades. Preparing to move back to the United States with his family, he tours the island one last time. The result is certainly unique, but not in the way I wanted.

The prologue chapter is every bit as brilliant and entertaining as I had hoped it would be. Bryson relates his first days in England, in 1973. He describes butting heads with the formidable Mrs Smegma, the proprietor of a boarding house and perpetually disapproving of whatever Bryson does. He reminisces about his youthful awe over the differences between Britain and the United States, and it’s a delightful prelude to the beginning of his tour of the country twenty years later.

I’d be exaggerating if I said that the book goes drastically downhill after that strong start, but it would not be wild hyperbole. Notes from a Small Island suffers from two chief defects. Firstly, as I noted above, Bryson is a brilliant writer—and, unfortunately, he knows this. Secondly, it turns out that his reactions to various places in Britain are very similar and often involve a lot of unfavourable comparisons to how things used to be.

Bryson’s wit often seems to get the better of him here. Of course, there are plenty of moments when that humour works well and livens up what might otherwise be a mundane description of his travels through Brighton or Yorkshire. Unfortunately, it often seems like his humour is there to distract us from the fact that he isn’t actually talking about the particular place in question. There are segues into sexist ruminations on the differences between men and women (and he himself labels at least one such episode as sexist, as if that somehow excuses it). At least twice during visits to Chinese restaurants he makes comments that are, if not racist, then culturally insensitive. Such moments were enough to make me feel uncomfortable, particularly because I had so wanted to find this book funny. And throughout the book, he manages to portray himself as a short-tempered, intolerant, rude person who would probably make a terrible travelling companion. To be fair, he seems to be aware of these shortcomings and occasionally even apologizes for them. But he also seems to labour under the delusion that this makes him even more interesting rather than less.

The second defect concerns how Bryson describes the way the places he visits have changed over the decades. In almost every case, he manages to point out how development and change has ruined a city. He laments the arrival of indoor shopping malls and the slow destruction of Britain’s hedges. He complains about the motorways, about the rail system, about the distribution and diversity of restaurants. It wouldn’t be so bad if each successive chapter weren’t just more of the same. It’s as if he set out not just to tour Britain but to find as much fault with it as possible in order to justify his relocation to the United States. For someone who claims to love the country—and he does make several keen observations in favour of Britain and its people—he spends a lot of time sounding like someone who doesn’t want kids on his lawn.

It’s not all bad news. There is charm to be had in Notes from a Small Island. Bryson shares in common with certain humour writers that talent to transform what are assuredly mild incidents in their lives into wild, slightly absurd anecdotes that nevertheless have the ring of truth. These otherwise excellent moments are spoiled by how repetitive Bryson manages to make the book feel. After the first few chapters, the novelty has worn off. As I approached the end of the book, I was paying very little attention to what he was actually saying, because it felt like more of the same.

Notes from a Small Island doesn’t replicate the sense of wonder and enjoyment I derived from A Short History of Nearly Everything. It doesn’t quite give me a sense of the country in which I’m living either. Instead, it’s more like a catalogue of Bill Bryson’s unfavourable experiences across Great Britain. It’s occasionally funny and occasionally charming but not the encomium of travelling through Britain that I want or need.

Cloud Atlas is not as difficult to read as some of its reviews led me to expect. I suspect they did this because it is difficult to review (and I’m even going to be employing spoilers, though few and far between, those who have only a minor aversion to them will be happy to know). I’m going to ramble for a bit about my reactions to the book versus the movie and ruminate on the structure of the novel. Then I might actually say some things about the book as a whole. No promises.

I read Cloud Atlas now as a matter of some serendipity. The book has been on my to-read list for a while now, and my friend Vivike gave me a copy for Christmas. So, I packed it in my suitcase when I returned to England after the Christmas break, resolving to getting around to it within the next few months. The UK release of the movie forced my hand, with my roommate prompting me to go on the weekend it came out. As a result, I watched the movie before reading the book—something I don’t often do when the book is already known to me. This review is not a review of the movie, or even a review of how the book and movie compare—but it is an attempt to discover how viewing the movie influenced my reading of the book, so bear with me here.

All stories, on some level, are about story-telling. This somewhat reductive view is true if only because of the ego of writers; the very passion for the craft that makes a writer successful also means the writer views storytelling with a reverence and sense of awe. So, naturally, writers will work storytelling into their stories. Cloud Atlas, with its nesting structure of six somewhat separate stories, is about a lot of things, but storytelling is certainly one of them.

Firstly, each story is a different form and genre. There is a nineteenth-century travel journal, letters from pre-World War II Belgium, a 1970s mystery/thriller manuscript, a contemporary memoir, a science-fictional testimony/interview with a condemned clone, and a post-apocalyptic tale of redemption. Consequently, people with narrow reading tastes are probably not going to enjoy this smorgasboard of storytelling—though, I suppose those people would also find Cloud Atlas’ unconventional structure galling enough, even if every story were more of the same.

Secondly, Mitchell uses the nesting nature of the story structure to confuse the boundaries between fiction and reality. The previous level’s story is itself a story in the current level: Robert Frobisher reads The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing, cut in half, during his time at Ayrs’ estate; Luisa Rey, in turn, reads Frobisher’s letters when she discovers them on the body of Rufus Sixsmith; Timothy Cavendish reads a manuscript of Luisa’s adventure, etc. And at every level, the previous story implied to be unreliable or outright fiction—Frobisher notes that there is something “off” about Ewing’s journal, as if it were not factual. Sonmi-451 views the film version of Cavendish’s experience of imprisonment and escape. Her own “orison” is testimony recorded by a representative of the totalitarian apparatus in power, and therefore liable to be censored.

So immediately, Mitchell presents us with a dilemma: is every story “real,” or is only the sixth and central story, “Sloosha’s Crossin’ an’ Ev’rythin’ After” real, with everything else fiction-within-fiction? If they are all real, do they exist within the same continuum, or as separate, parallel realities? (Or is it possible that all fiction in our world exists somewhere as a Platonic reality of its own?) One could simply throw up one’s hands in exasperation and declare this dilemma irrelevant to the book. That would miss the point. Cloud Atlas is about the relationships we form with one another—and that includes our relationships with fictional characters, with the stories and myths that underlie our information and beliefs.

I generally enjoyed the movie of the book, but the more I reflect on the differences between the two, the more I have to say that Cloud Atlas the movie isn’t so much an adaptation of the book as it is a reimagining. In remaining faithful to the book’s themes, the Wachowskis had to jettison quite a bit of its plot and a fair number of its characters. The result is a very different animal from the book, even if both versions of the story ultimately aim at the same truths and that same fundamental reflection on our relation to storytelling. (Though the nesting story structure is less explicit in the movie, because it flits back and forth among the various stories in no particular pattern, they compensate for this by having the wizened and elderly Zachry begin and finish the frame narrative.)

The only alteration that remains a regret, for me, is one that I felt keenly: no Eva! I can deal with relocating Ayrs to Scotland, but the book also gives him a self-assured daughter who is a thorn, then a friend, then … something else … to Robert Frobisher. I really miss Eva’s presence now that I got to know her through Frobisher’s letters—I enjoyed how he described, with some pride and self-satisfaction, her venomous younger self as a female version of himself, as if he had finally met his match.

I also notice that in the movie, they don’t go full circle on the relationship between Unanimity and the Union in Sonmi’s story. They kept it as a much more straightforward, action-packed tale of revolutionaries fighting against a corrupt government. I think this robs Sonmi of something that made her unique; namely, in the book she recognized the Union’s artificiality but went along with the plan anyway, because she saw it as the best way to get her message out there. Though it takes courage to be a revolutionary, it takes even more courage and wisdom to be a fake revolutionary and know it.

The other changes are vast and manifest, and some I liked and some I didn’t. I like to think I’m tolerant enough when it comes to adaptations, since it really is a matter of translating story and theme from one medium to another. Indeed, for a book with such a restrictive structure as Cloud Atlas, such translation is more necessary than ever.

But I digress. I should probably talk about the book, and the characters, and, you know, the story(ies).

I’m not going to rank them. I enjoyed and loathed them all at certain points. Luisa Rey’s mystery probably elicited the most visceral enjoyment from me, simply because I am a child of the novel, and its format made for easy reading. The story that affected me most was probably “Letters from Zedelghem,” because of the haunting arc of Frobisher’s hopes and dreams regarding composing and his mentor, as well as his doomed love with Sixsmith. Finally, “An Orison of Sonmi-451” would get my vote for the most clever of the stories, merely for the way Mitchell uses language and other subtle cues to build this “corpocracy” of Neo Seoul with a minimum of exposition.

Each story somehow works on the recurring motifs of identity politics, oppression and repression, injustice, and honouring the truth. The nested structure and other connections—such as the comet birthmark—highlight how each story is merely a variation on these themes, a different way of saying the same thing. Whether it’s the racism and colonialism of the Pacific Islands or the oppression of the fabricants of Neo Seoul, Mitchell’s characters react against the inequity of their times and places. Ultimately, Cloud Atlas asks, why does this keep happening again and again? What is it about our various awakenings and enlightenments and moral revelations that doesn’t stick? Are we, as a species, doomed to repeat these moral failings until we perish of them?

Maybe we are. But there is a hope present in these stories alongside the danger: there will always be heroes. There will always be people willing to stand against injustice, in any of its forms, despite the handicaps of their background and upbringing. They don’t necessarily live to see the fruits of their labours—for some, like Frobisher, death seems like the only necessary conclusion to their labour, whereas for Sonmi, it is the inevitable outcome of her role in Unanimity’s carefully-orchestrated plot. Whatever their fates, however, these heroes have in common the capacity and willingness to strive against the status quo.

I can’t quite bring myself to rave about Cloud Atlas and call it a perfect novel. I’m not even sure it’s a great novel. It is carefully crafted in such a way as to be both satisfying and memorable. Does the visibility of the joinery and seams render this craftsmanship somewhat less impressive than it might otherwise be? I’m inclined to say no, because knowing how a house is built doesn’t take any pleasure out of viewing the product (unlike, say, knowing how sausages or law get made).

And I have to say that, whatever its flaws might be, I certainly found Cloud Atlas profound. It reminds me of 1Q84, by Haruki Murakami, another book with interconnected stories that plays with genre and form and the realities of the characters. Murakami’s writing, even when translated, has an ineffable grace that Mitchell’s only approaches. Even so, Cloud Atlas is similar to 1Q84 in the expansive scope of its commitment to both philosophy and story. This is a book that will make many people scratch their heads (even though it isn’t all that confusing if you pay attention)—and that makes it precisely my kind of book.

This book is the dead tree equivalent of a BuzzFeed post. Its title could be “I Got 99 Cognitive Biases But a Psychology Degree Ain’t One.” Or maybe not.

Rolf Dobelli enumerates 99 thinking errors, or cognitive biases, in The Art of Thinking Clearly, dispensing as he does tips for leading a more rational, less error-prone life. Anyone who has done even the least amount of reading in this subject will recognize many of the cognitive biases that Dobelli describes here. Unlike most popular cognitive psychology books, however, this book makes no central argument and does not examine these biases within a larger context. It is literally just a list, with extended descriptions, of the biases. At times, Dobelli occasionally ascribes the bias to some evolutionary origins, and he will quite often cite some interesting experiments conducted by psychologists (he is not, by the way) that revealed or provided insight into the bias in question. In his introduction Dobelli explains that the book began life as a personal list kept for his own benefit, and I can believe that.

Dobelli covers 99 biases in 300 pages, so he can’t spend much time on each bias. Not every bias is as interesting or worthwhile as the next. But from the very beginning, I was frustrated by the brevity of each chapter. Just as I read something that intrigued me, Dobelli shepherded me on to the next bias like some kind of frantic tour guide worried that we won’t have time to see all of the art. Please stay with the tour, no cameras.

I wanted to be mollified by dazzling prose, but I had to settle for somewhat dull attempts at wit. I wanted to be satisfied with lucid, if too concise, explanations of these biases, but I had to settle for somewhat tepid attempts to demonstrate these biases without getting drawn into the bigger discussions of the cognitive and behavioural science that underlies them. Dobelli ties his own hands here, to poor effect.

To be fair, it is clear that Dobelli is well-read in this field. He has done his research (even if the “note on sources” section frustratingly places the sources under headings by the bias name but not the chapter number, and there is nary an endnote to be seen). It’s clear, judging from the number of times he quotes from or references Thinking, Fast and Slow, that he has been heavily influenced by the work of Daniel Kahneman. In fact, one could say that The Art of Thinking Clearly is little more than attempt to distil the biases and only the biases mentioned in Thinking, Fast and Slow and similar such books.

The thing about blog posts like this is that they seldom linger in one’s short- or long-term memories. They are space-filling exercises, attempts to get eyeballs to the page and clicks on ads. It doesn’t work well in book form; I don’t, as a general rule, enjoy books of lists all that much. There are some exceptions for lists compiled and enumerated in a hilarious manner, but that isn’t the case here. Yet with the cognitive biases removed from a larger context and reduced merely to a checklist of errors to avoid, Dobelli robs them of their greater meaning.

So if you’re truly interested in this subject matter, why not just skip The Art of Thinking Clearly and go read Thinking, Fast and Slow? I have. It’s much better than this book and much more informative, and it’s written by an actual psychologist. This book, like the BuzzFeed post it resembles, is a pale imitation of something more meaningful and accomplished. Imitation flowers have their place, but life is too short to waste it on imitation books.