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Recent Reading
Oct. 26th, 2008 09:20 amI've been reading books that are rather out of my usual run. One I quite enjoyed was Patricia Highsmith's The Price of Salt which is a 1950s lesbian road trip novel. I liked the writing. I liked the character development but I really do think that 1950s America must have been a desperately dull place to live.
My two other recent reads were books I really liked. John Le Carre's The Mission Song was one I picked off the remainder pile at WBBS. It's vintage Le Carre, which means it's stylish, tight writing about the murky world of secret operations, deniable missions and the like. In this case the subject matter is the continuing horror that is the eastern Congo and the developed world's machinations to get its paws on the mineral wealth while turning a blind eye to an ongoing war that is, still, claiming lives at the same rate as WW1. Le Carre characteristically mixes meticulous research, humanity and a certain cynicism. It's very like the Smiley books in that respect. What's different is the voice. It's told in the first person by the principal character, Salvo. He is the offspring of an Irish Catholic missionary and a local women. Educated in Catholic institutions in the Congo and Britain, he has grown up to be a brilliant interpreter in English, French, Swahili and a raft of the lesser known languages of central Africa. To say more would be spoilerish. Go read it!
Last on the list is Richard Fortey's Life: An Unauthorised Biography. This was one of this years Folio Society freebies and as such might easily never have got read. That would have been a shame because it's brilliant. It's nothing more or less than the story of how life emerged and developed. This is not a subject I'm as familiar with as, say, the debates around the origins of the Universe, so I can't say if Fortey does justice to all the arguments but I suspect he does. The book reads as a very balanced lay tour through the areas of controversy and it's really engaging. The science is there but it's presented with just enough example, analogy and personal anecdote to leaven the lump. The story of Fortey being chased across Spitsbergen by an imaginary polar bear is a particularly fine example. I know now far more than I ever thought I would about slime moulds and cyanobacteria and very interesting it is.
My two other recent reads were books I really liked. John Le Carre's The Mission Song was one I picked off the remainder pile at WBBS. It's vintage Le Carre, which means it's stylish, tight writing about the murky world of secret operations, deniable missions and the like. In this case the subject matter is the continuing horror that is the eastern Congo and the developed world's machinations to get its paws on the mineral wealth while turning a blind eye to an ongoing war that is, still, claiming lives at the same rate as WW1. Le Carre characteristically mixes meticulous research, humanity and a certain cynicism. It's very like the Smiley books in that respect. What's different is the voice. It's told in the first person by the principal character, Salvo. He is the offspring of an Irish Catholic missionary and a local women. Educated in Catholic institutions in the Congo and Britain, he has grown up to be a brilliant interpreter in English, French, Swahili and a raft of the lesser known languages of central Africa. To say more would be spoilerish. Go read it!
Last on the list is Richard Fortey's Life: An Unauthorised Biography. This was one of this years Folio Society freebies and as such might easily never have got read. That would have been a shame because it's brilliant. It's nothing more or less than the story of how life emerged and developed. This is not a subject I'm as familiar with as, say, the debates around the origins of the Universe, so I can't say if Fortey does justice to all the arguments but I suspect he does. The book reads as a very balanced lay tour through the areas of controversy and it's really engaging. The science is there but it's presented with just enough example, analogy and personal anecdote to leaven the lump. The story of Fortey being chased across Spitsbergen by an imaginary polar bear is a particularly fine example. I know now far more than I ever thought I would about slime moulds and cyanobacteria and very interesting it is.
