Osama by Lavie Tidhar

I've been uncertain for some time whether I wanted to read this novel.  I have read some of Tidhar's work and liked it.  On the other hand, the title figure is someone I just really don't care to read about.  In the end, I was swayed by all of the praise the book has been receiving (including winning the World Fantasy Award), into thinking it would probably be okay.

I was wrong.

The book was not at all what I expected, though I couldn't even articulate what my expectations were.  I suppose I expected something edgy and action-filled and probably walking the sharp edge of some very unpleasant things.  What I got instead was a dreamy, surreal journey with a thin, colorless protagonist.

Joe is a private eye in Vientiane.  He is hired by an attractive woman to find Mike Longshott, the author of some pulpy action novels about Osama bin Laden, Vigilante.  Joe travels to Paris, and London, and other destinations, smoking and drinking constantly, having strange conversations with strange people and mostly not getting anywhere with the investigation, other than to be warned off and beat up by people who are as flat and insubstantial as he, described as the Gray Haired Man and the Man with the Black Shoes.  People keep telling him he doesn't belong there, and he doesn't even have the wit or interest to find out what they are talking about.  Joe just drinks, and smokes, and floats from place to place in an increasing cloud of unreality.

He eventually finds Longshott, which brings the return of the woman who hired him, and as the novel drew to a close and I thought perhaps things would finally be explained, they weren't.  Aargh.  The only reason I bothered to finish the book (which I did not enjoy at all, and I kept falling asleep when I tried to read it, because there was nothing in it that grabbed me and made me care) was because Tidhar has built a certain amount of capital with me that led me to assume it would get better, and the hope of some kind of explanation, which did not materialize.  I am surely a plot- and character-driven reader, and this book had no character and not much plot.  I am totally baffled why so many people are heaping praise on this frustrating and disjointed mess.  Apparently I am one of the few who just doesn't see the wonder and brilliance of the story.  But I found this book profoundly unsatisfying and not even entertaining.

The Hobbit, the movie

Holy shitballs, what a freaking train wreck.

I sometimes suspect that Peter Jackson doesn't really understand Tolkien.

Orbus by Neal Asher

Aaaaah, I needed that.

I've been in rather a reading funk the last couple of months.  I'm having trouble picking books to read, because I just don't seem to be in the right mood for them.  And the books I do read lately have mostly disappointed me.  It is possible that the problem is with me rather than the books, but I'm just having trouble sinking into a good novel and running with it, and I'm getting a bit frustrated.  I've had these phases before, and have had to switch over to reading nonfiction.  Perhaps I should try that again.

But last weekend I picked up Orbus.  It is the third in Asher's series about the planet Spatterjay and its inhabitants, after The Skinner and The Voyage of the Sable Keech.  I love The Skinner to bits and liked the Sable Keech, so I fully intended to read Orbus as soon as it came out.  But it's not in print in the US, and I switched over to reading mostly ebooks and library books a couple of years ago, and for one reason or another I didn't bother to order a copy of this book until this month.  I shouldn't have waited, because this book is awesome.

Spatterjay is a mostly watery planet occupied by very dangerous fauna.  Everything on the planet is infected with an aggressive virus that makes its host nearly unkillable.  Many of the human inhabitants of the planet live on sailing ships, and the oldest among them, the Old Captains, have been mutated by the virus to the point that they are huge, unbelievably strong, and virtually immortal.

Orbus is not set on Spatterjay, but has some familiar characters from the previous books.  We have three main characters: Vrell, the lone survivor of the Prador attack on Spatterjay some years earlier, who has been infected by the Spatterjay virus and is now superior to his fellows; Sniper, an old war drone from the human-Prador wars 700 years previously, who loves a good fight; and Orbus, one of the Old Captains, who is somewhat mentally unstable and needs a change of scenery.

The novel follows the events of The Voyage of the Sable Keech (which I read three and a half years ago, so my memory of it is somewhat foggy).  The Prador King has become aware of Vrell and, correctly believing him to be dangerous, sent a ship to kill him.  They did not succeed, and at the beginning of this work he is in the process of taking over the other ship and killing all its crew.  Orbus has taken a job as the captain of a spaceship, and brought one of his old crewmen along with him.  And Sniper and his companion Thirteen have decided it's time to leave Spatterjay, so they stow away on Orbus's ship.  This leads to complicated events in which the humans and Prador are again facing the possibility of war, and we learn more about the origin of the Spatterjay virus.  There are lots and lots of fight scenes and incredible amounts of violence.

I loved it.  It is a wild ride, with more and more over-powered enemies, and complex layers of stuff going on at once.  This isn't a straightforward story where you know who the bad guy is and you go out and fight him and defeat him, the end.  We have at least six major players in this struggle, all with their own motivations and tactics.  It is very awesome.  I did have a little trouble with Orbus's characterization, though.  He has been mentally unstable for a very long time, and he is working toward recovery.  His struggle to interact normally with others, and to tamp down on his violent tendencies, is much at the forefront of his thoughts in the early section of the book, but then once he's faced with something to kill, it's as if that is totally forgotten and he almost becomes a different person.  One who still struggles a bit with his hatred of the Prador, yes, but I never felt like I had a very good handle on Orbus's personality, and I think it may be because he undergoes a personality transplant partway through the novel.

That said, I had so much fun with this novel.  I can't believe I waited so long to read it, or how far behind I have gotten on Asher's work.  I must order more, as Asher is a writer whose work I usually really enjoy.  This will be fun.

Perils of a Restless Planet: Scientific Perspectives on Natural Disasters by Ernest Zebrowski, Jr.

Perils of a Restless Planet is about natural disasters, and specifically the science behind them.

The author is a physicist, and so he focuses more on things that can be described by physics, such as earthquakes and volcanoes and especially tsunamis.  He talks a lot about tsunamis.  Less time is spent on hurricanes and tornadoes, epidemics are mentioned so briefly and shallowly I wonder why he bothered, and avalanches are completely ignored.  But when he's talking about wavelengths, he is clearly a happy man.

The book is quite a fascinating read, actually.  Zebrowski describes disasters from the past, many from the distant past, and talks about what killed people.  Sometimes it's poisonous gas or heat, or buildings collapsing on them (which led to a talk about tensile strength of building materials and the frequencies of vibrations in earthquakes), but a recurring theme in this book is water.  Tsunamis, mostly, but also floods and storm surges.  In reading it, I was certainly happy to live far inland.  Sure, we have tornadoes and blizzards and heat waves and bitter cold, but earthquakes are pretty unlikely here, and hurricanes and tsunamis are not going to be a problem.

I was mostly kept interested by the science, and found the recountings of natural disasters and all the lives lost fascinating in a ghoulish sort of way.  That led me to doing a little more research online, and learning about many other disasters I'd never heard of that killed many, many people.  I am interested enough that I will probably try to track down more books on the subject.

This book came out in 1997, and so it felt slightly dated as I was reading it.  Not that the information seemed old or stale, just that as he was talking about certain types of disasters, I was thinking of examples that were more recent than the ones he was using, such as the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami that killed over 200,000 people.  That (and other events, like Hurricane Katrina) would have been a very obvious example to write about, and its lack (plus the mention of events in the 60s and 70s as being recent) underlined for me that the book is fifteen years old.  Further, Zebrowski's concerns are different than some of the things that are being talked about today.  He does not mention global climate change as a recent phenomenon, save one sentence that says there is evidence that the climate may be getting warmer, which was actually quite refreshing -- I'm very, very tired of hearing about that.  Plus he seems rather concerned with overpopulation, which is an issue that isn't talked about nearly so much as it used to be.  There's nothing wrong with this, precisely, I just kept being reminded of the book's age and having to mentally go back to the mid nineties.

Overall, though, this was a really interesting read.  Highly recommended.

The Shadow Walker by Michael Walters

I picked this one up off a free shelf because it had been culled from the library's collection.  What I got was worth just about what I paid for it.

The Shadow Walker is a police procedural set in Mongolia.  The primary characters are Nergui, a former police officer who now works for a government minister, but has been sent back to work on the case because the Mongolian police mostly aren't very good; and Drew McLeish, a chief inspector from Manchester who has been sent because a Briton has been murdered.  And not just a Briton -- there were three murders before his, and they appear to be connected.  It is possible there is a serial killer on the loose, and Nergui would like the help of an officer who has more experience of murder than he.

The Shadow Walker is not a very good mystery.  Walters writes very smoothly and invisibly, it's all very competent.  But there are a lot of problems, both with the portrayal of the setting and with the mystery itself.  I have railed before here about mysteries set in foreign locations by people who are not from there, and how they often feel the need to act as a travelogue or overexplain the setting to the reader.  Andrea Camilleri does not have his main character tell the reader all about Sicily and what it's like, because to his character it's everyday and normal.  But, say, a British writer setting a story in India or Mongolia, to name two that immediately come to mind, may feel the need to lecture the readers on the place he's set his story.  I find it obnoxious, and Walters is very, very guilty of this offense.  I suppose partly it's because I prefer to absorb background in little bits through the story rather than in big expository lumps, and partly because it stirs up uncomfortable suspicions of appropriation.  Oh, the white man is going to explain an ancient and complicated nation in a couple of chapters for his white readers.  Arrogant much?

Related to that were more assumptions and appropriations that ranged from mildly annoying to wince-inducing.  Not only does our British officer find Mongolia a strange mix of the old and the new, which is understandable, but so does the native Mongolian character, who muses that seeing tents in the city still strikes him as odd.  Nergui also is not an ordinary Mongolian, he is a Westernized Mongolian, who attended grad school in the US and Britain in his younger days, so he speaks perfect English and understands even somewhat oblique comments and cultural references.  And McLeish is surprised more than once that the standard of living in Asia is less primitive than he expected.  Sigh.  At one point someone shoots at them with a crossbow (?!?) and Nergui tells McLeish that there are many skilled archers in Mongolia.  McLeish's response?  You need cowboys.  What.  The.  Fuck?!?  As if Mongolian archers are in any way equivalent to historical Amerinds?  And need cowboys to fight them?  What?  And in that comment he manages to insult both, by relegating them to the role of a B-movie villain who needs to be defeated by the white guys.  I can't even fathom where this comment came from, or why Nergui seems to not think it as bizarre as I did.  

McLeish is not actually much use as an investigator, as it turns out.  He is there to tag along in Nergui's wake and listen to his lectures about Mongolia.  He is otherwise pretty useless, except to get kidnapped and used as a hostage at the end.

The pace of this novel is too slow.  Vast amounts of alcohol are consumed, we are lectured at length about the setting, and occasionally a dead body turns up.  They make very little headway until almost the end, when we meet the mentally unstable supposed serial killer -- except that he didn't do all the killings, actually, and he was acting on someone else's instructions, and oh, by the way, Russian mafia - strange mining numbers - international consortiums - THE END!!!!

Needless to say, as a mystery it also wasn't very satisfactory.

The Secret Race by Tyler Hamilton and Daniel Coyle

I'm sorry I haven't been posting much lately, but I've really been in a reading funk.  I'm having trouble finding things I'm in the mood to read, and not enjoying a lot of what I am reading.  So at the moment I'm spending a lot of my time knitting and re-reading familiar stuff I know I will like.

Those who know me are aware that I used to be a pretty avid cyclist and a fan of bike racing.  I don't follow the sport as closely as I used to, but for several years I was a serious fan.  Tyler Hamilton was a rider I used to watch, and when he got caught doping I really wanted to believe him that it was a mistake, that he really wasn't guilty.  I also really wanted to believe Floyd Landis after he got caught at it.  But as time went by and more and more of the riders at the top of the sport were revealed to be doping, I realized that I shouldn't believe them when they were protesting their innocence.  The only rider I am pretty sure rode clean was David Moncoutie.  Other than that all bets are off, and there were many riders I knew had to be doping simply because of the things they were doing, or the teams they were riding for.

In The Secret Race Tyler talks very freely about his cycling career and what riders do to themselves to have a career at the top level of the sport.  He particularly focuses on the early years, when he realized that there was no way he could keep up riding without chemical assistance, and his wonder at how well the doping worked when he did get on the program.  That doesn't mean that it wasn't incredibly hard work -- even with the drugs, bike racing is an incredibly difficult sport.  But with a little testosterone to help him recover from a hard workout, a little EPO to increase the oxygen-carrying capacity of his blood, it was possible to achieve far more than without them.  And if you don't do these things, you will not have a career in the pro peloton, period.  Take it and race, or go home and find something else to do.  That was the choice that he faced, and that all the others did, too.  He decided he wanted to be a bike racer.  He took the drugs.  And later, the blood transfusions.

The whole book is infused with Lance Armstrong.  This isn't surprising in the early part of Hamilton's career.  They rode on the same team, trained together, lived in the same building, and were friends, for a while.  Lance Armstrong was a really dominant force in cycling at the time Hamilton was riding, a huge personality, head of a well-oiled machine of dozens of people whose sole job was to make sure that Lance won, always.  Tyler was part of that machine, was right near the center of it.  And Lance and the team management he worked with, and the doctor he hired, were instrumental in Hamilton's education in doping.

I was a little surprised how the book, in many ways, continued to be about Lance, and Tyler's relationship with him, even after he'd left and gone on to ride for other teams and find success on his own.  Really interesting and important moments in Hamilton's career were breezed over in a paragraph or two, and that was somewhat disappointing.  I suppose an account of the 2002 Giro d'Italia, in which he finished a major three-week tour in second place while riding with a broken shoulder blade, wasn't really that relevant in an account of his doping.  But it's interesting, and I wish there would have been more detail of his years at CSC and Phonak.

All in all, this was a really interesting read.  Hamilton says a lot of things I already knew.  He confirms things that I suspected but didn't know for sure.  And there's lots of good stuff in there that I hadn't known.  He dishes dirt on himself, on Lance, and on the way things were done when he was riding.  And it seems that US Postal was not only the best team at winning the Tour de France for years, they were also the best at doping.  There is a wonderful quote from Jonathan Vaughters in the book, about the dangers of dealing with the kind of doctors who would provide athletes with illegal drugs:

The thing to realize about Fuentes and all these guys is that they're doping doctors for a reason.  They're the ones who didn't make it on the conventional path, so they're not the most organized people  So when they leave a bag of blood out in the sun because they're having another glass of wine at the cafe, it's predictable.  The deadly mistake that Tyler, Floyd, Roberto, and the rest of them made when they left Postal was to assume that they'd find other doctors who were as professional.  But then they got other there, they found -- whoops! -- there weren't any others. 

I really enjoyed this book, though I don't know how interesting it would be to someone who wasn't a fan, and already aware of most of the people and events discussed.