Books

Author : Charles Stross Title: The Annihilation Score This book was released in the civilised parts of the world last Thursday. I appear to have read it in five days. Which given that I’m averaging four to five books a year at the moment is something of a speed read for me. Unsurprisingly I rather liked it. I don’t think I’ve read a novel by Charlie Stross that I haven’t liked. Some of his older hard science fiction books have not been exactly to my taste, but I think that’s more a review of me than the books. The Laundry Files and the Merchant Princes books have been great. The major reason I enjoy them is his obvious subversion of different genres and cultural stereotypes. It usually takes me a while to get them, again a reflection on the reader, but the moment when I worked out his twist of the James Bond stories in The Jennifer Morgue was worth the price of entry alone.

It’s popcorn fiction of the worst kind, with cliche ridden dreadful writing and less than one dimensional characters. The prose style is taken directly from the sub-editors desk at The Sun. Don’t even get me started on the enormous number of simple factual errors in the text, not least the screamingly obvious fact that Mr Brown has never set foot outside the continental United States. At the end I just wanted to know where I could get those three hours of my life back.

A gentle introduction to philosophy for those of us without a background in the subject, The Consolations of Philosophy by Alain de Botton muses on some of life’s seemingly intractable problems and garners advice from some of history’s most eminent and interesting philosophers. From Socrates to Nietzche via Epicurus and Montaigne Alain de Botton shows us that our lot isn’t as bad as we thought it was, and even if it is some very smart people can show you that you aren’t suffering alone.

This may be stretching your interest a bit dear reader, but I’ve convinced myself I need to write a quick review of every book I read and put it here. Not least so that I know I’ve read them. Age and lager can weary a memory you know. I’ve recently finished reading the first edition of the Python Cookbook, just after the second edition has been published. I’d actually bought this book when it first came out, but it has been sitting in my to read list for over two years. In my defence a fair portion of that time was because we were in another country and this book was in storage.

Time for an experiment. Here is my first book review on this blog. This isn’t a critique, more a set of notes to remember what I got from the book and which bits I liked. I actually finished Sebastian Faulk’s Birdsong a couple of weeks ago but that time hasn’t dimmed it’s impact. It’s strength, I think, lies in the depiction of life in the trenches in France and Belgium during the first world war, and in particular the first person description of the Battle of the Somme. This is the middle section of the book. It’s prefixed by a description of life in the same area of Northern France before the war (in 1911) and in the latter stages intertwined with the story of the main character’s grand-daughter.