Rich Mintz  

Just finished reading Second Honeymoon, which is Joanna Trollope’s newest novel (or I think her newest). I’d never read anything by her, and given how popular she is with the book-club set I kind of assumed it would be tripe, but it was a superb extended comedy (in the Aristotelian sense) of adult family life, told with respect and good humor and grace. In fact, I read it basically in one continuous session (and it was a long book) and am hungry for more. So more fool me for having let my preconceptions keep me away from such a good writer up to now.

I’m about a hundred pages into Nadine Gordimer’s new post-apartheid novel, and it’s not any easier slogging now than it was the other day. I’ve read plenty of thinky fiction about Africa (including what felt at the time like 10,000 pages of Norman Rush) and it’s definitely the book, not the subject. (It doesn’t help that the digitization was sloppy.)

Anyone would think this book was heavy. I think even its characters, in whose minds most of the slow, significant, non-action happens, would set it down after 50 pages and go do something else. But I’m going to try to stick with it.

I did, however, take a break to read Chuck Klosterman’s Eating the Dinosaur, an incisive and approachable book of cultural criticism. Rewarding as expected. Klosterman’s one of the smartest people writing on popular culture at the moment, and one of those who seems to have the least to “prove.” It takes significant art to convince me to read an essay about basketball and an essay about Weezer in the same 12-hour period, so there you go.

I’m reading Nadine Gordimer’s new “post-apartheid” novel, No Time Like the Present, and I’m finding it rough going. Stilted phrasing and roundabout locutions, preachiness and messaginess — this isn’t my first Gordimer, but so far (about 30 pages in) the book hasn’t been gentle. Hope it loosens up, because if not I’m not sticking with it for another 400 pages.

If you like nanobots in your space opera, you could do worse than drop 99 cents on David Simpson’s Post-Human. The hard science is full of holes (say that again? people can commute from Vancouver to Venus by flying there in magnetic bubbles, no ship required?), but it’s no worse than a Doctor Who episode. I’m about three-quarters in and I can’t wait to see the evil A.I. vanquished.

This relatively light novel by Lauren Beukes can be gobbled up in a morning (which is how I read it) — it’s a near-future mashup of techno-dystopian corporatist-statism and genetic engineering in a world where everything happens on your phone and your social legitimacy is defined by your SIM ID. (Oddly, people still wear watches.) It takes place in and around Cape Town, which I found interesting (and I kept popping over to Google Maps to geolocate the action).

I would have enjoyed a bit more dystopia and a bit less rage-against-the-machine, but if you like your Charlie Stross (and I do), you’ll probably like this.

Incidentally, Amazon recommended this to me based on all the dystopia I’ve been buying. Good call.

Just finished Will McIntosh’s Soft Apocalypse, part of my near-future-dystopia binge. It was a bit softer and more sociological than some of the other sci-fi I’ve ready recently, which isn’t surprising because it’s set about 15 years in the future in a United States that’s recognizable as a place we might be heading toward right now. There hasn’t been an alien invasion, there hasn’t been a revolution. The economy and the social order have just gradually deteriorated, in the way that some would argue they’re already deteriorating now, and the authorities and the elites haven’t been able to keep a handle on it.

There are references to an orderly, well-run consumer society for the very wealthy, who live behind gates more or less the way we live now, but we readers never see those people directly; we spend our time among a dispossessed, squatting uncertain underclass whose members look uncomfortably like us. They’ve been to college, they remember what we remember from the 1990s and 2000s, and yet they live on and near the streets, are menaced day and night, are almost always hungry.

I enjoyed the fact that the book was set in Georgia, in places I recognize, mostly in the pine woods of east Georgia between Macon and Savannah. But I won’t tell you any more; read it for yourself.

I’m currently wrapping up Eliza Fay’s Original Letters from India, the NYRB edition of a collection (first published in 1925) of letters written in the 1770s. Fay traveled from Dover to India (with her husband, a lawyer) at a time when the British imperial outposts were genuine outposts, beset by dangers of all kinds. When you set out for India in those days, safe arrival at which was not guaranteed, and Fay and her husband were detained and held hostage twice during their twelve-month (!) journey.

It’s hard to empathize nowadays, when anyone with $1000 can book an advance plane ticket and be safely in India next week, more or less guaranteed. Exoticism will never entirely disappear as long as people are tribalist and closed-minded (i.e., forever); but a world in which even modestly paid manual laborers have access to cheap mobile phones is very different from Fay’s world. When she dispatched her letters, she had no guarantee they would even arrive.

Just finished A History Of The World In Six Glasses, Tom Standage’s light historical narrative about six drinks (beer, wine, spirits, coffee, tea, and Coca-Cola) and the roles they played in different cultural periods.

On the “broad historical trends” front, I didn’t learn anything I didn’t know, but Standage was good with details (for instance, I hadn’t realized the guy who yelled “aux armes!” and set off the French Revolution had a name; and I hadn’t known tea came into prominence so late) and it made a compelling read. The narrative construct felt a little forced, but since I have a sort of industrial history fetish it didn’t really bother me.

I haven’t had a chance to play with the iBooks Author app yet, but if it’s anything like what it seems to be, it’s a big step in the direction of democratized content distribution. And I say that knowing full well that Apple takes a big piece (don’t know how much) of any money you make selling your new creations in the iBookstore.

The first generation of democratized publishing came with Gutenberg. The second generation, though, didn’t come until the 20th century, when technologies like the mimeograph (and, later, the photocopier, and even later, the first-generation Macintosh) achieved wide circulation.

Now we’re in a third generation, when the Internet makes it possible for anyone to disseminate information and opinions electronically — and technologies like iBooks Author, which enable anyone to package up information into a physical or quasi-physical product, may usher in a fourth generation.

It’s important not to underestimate the emotional power of that ability to package the information you’re disseminating. Writers want to publish their books not just because they want to make money, but because they want to be associated with (to give birth to) a discrete, finished object. That impulse is so strong that I think being empowered to package up an iBook is a qualitatively different experience than simply putting up a bunch of web pages, and that would be true even if you could only give away your iBooks for free.

Finished this book, and although I got a little lost in the plot (it was hard to keep all the interweaving entities straight, and for the record I have just as much trouble following “traditional” spy vs. spy stuff), I loved the concept — avatars carrying off a heist inside a distributed virtual gaming universe that ends up stealing real-world wealth.

The setting was fun, too — Edinburgh of less than a decade in the future. It was recognizable as Edinburgh; I could even follow most of the action on Google Maps, and I cheered when a major plot event took place near Ocean Terminal, in a part of Leith I went through on the bus when I was there in December. But it was not-Edinburgh, too, given that everyone walks around with augmented-reality overlay spectacles all the time, and taxis are driven by remote operators in a call center.

I had a little trouble at first with the fact that the story is told episodically from the shifting viewpoints of seven or eight principal characters, but you get used to this, and the story is gripping enough that you get propelled through even if you get momentarily disoriented. Highly Recommended.