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| Monday, 24 September 2007 |
| Begun: Making Money |
| The thing I like best about preordering from Amazon is that I forget I've done it. So when the postman turns up on a Monday morning with a parcel, it's a nice surprise. Shame I have half a tonne of eBay orders to send out before I can start reading! Labels: Terry Pratchett |
| posted @ 11:46 |
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| Sunday, 9 September 2007 |
| Begun: Rome Burning (Romanitas 2) |
The second volume of Sophia McDougall's "Roman Empire in the present day" trilogy turned up yesterday. It's an indication of just how much I liked that premise, that I would buy the second volume even when the first was, frankly, rubbish. In fact, I think I'll just agree with the Amazon reviewer who titled his post "Romanitarse". I managed about the first thirty pages before I fell asleep: she does seem to have almost learned to string a sentence together (or perhaps I remembered her as worse than she really is), but gods help us with the plot. There's about to be a world war between the Roman and Nionian (Japanese) empires, it should be full of tension and bravado and heroism... and instead she makes the whole thing read like the minutes of some committee meeting, with people I have to look up in the dramatis personae every other sentence giving reports to the Emperor. How does this crap get published?
Could get better but I have a horrible feeling it's going to get worse. |
| posted @ 18:45 |
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| Tuesday, 4 September 2007 |
| Armpit |
It's a stupid word. Its connotations are neither sexy, like breast, or purely functional, like cervix. It's still filled with childhood connections ("smelly armpit"). Except that it's also filled with a lump that seems to be the size of a smallish walnut, that dispite my patient waiting doesn't seem to be going away. I looked it up on the internet - because that's what I *do* - and there were three possibilities. I think we can discount "ingrowing hair" now. Which leaves me with something that appears to involve the lymph system - I don't even know what the lymph system is - or cancer. Interestingly, lymphatic cancer is what my mother just had.
Anyway, excuse me for writing this if there is actually anyone reading this. One of the advantages of having a blog that no one actually reads is that one can write this and it doesn't matter.
Then of course we have to add my terror of the French medical system. I can manage "I have a lump in my armpit, it is the size of a small walnut", despite its obviously close relationship to several lines from Monty Python. But - but - I'm scared, and when I don't even know where the doctor's office is, it's easier to ignore it than put in the work to find out something I really might not want to know.Labels: personal |
| posted @ 23:16 |
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| Review: I Sold My Soul on eBay, by Hemant Mehta |
I picked this up in the bookshop at eBay Live, but it's actually got very little to do with eBay. Hemant Mehta is an atheist who sold not his soul, but his time in an online auction - and was bought by an open-minded pastor who set him to visiting a variety of churches and writing about his impressions of them.
The result is a book that everyone in the religion business ought to read, a friendly but direct report on what church looks like to a stranger walking in for the first time. Rituals and liturgy which churchgoers take for granted can be arcane, even alienating to those who encounter them for the first time: Hemant, always writing from a wish to engage in friendly dialogue, tells you exactly what that stranger might be thinking.
But the message of this book is bigger than just a call to better churches. Hemant's open-minded willingness to examine his own beliefs, to discover the faiths of other people and to engage in a frank but always respectful dialogue, should be an example to all of us, whatever our religious beliefs.Labels: religion |
| posted @ 22:48 |
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| Monday, 3 September 2007 |
| Review: Romanitas, by Sophia McDougall |
This was posted on Amazon some months back, but is being reposted here because I've just heard that part II has finally been published. I'm hoping she learned to write in the interim.
I was utterly smitten with the premise for this book: that the plot by the Praetorian Guard to assassinate Pertinax was discovered, and that the Roman Empire survived to the present day. South America is Roman: half of north America is also Roman, divided by a wall from the Nionian (Japanese) Empire's half of the continent to the west. For the first time in a long time I felt actually excited to be reading a new book. And what a disappointment it turned out to be.
The actual plot ought to be thrilling. The Emperor's brother and heir has been murdered, and Marcus, his son, fearing for his own life, has to abandon his life of luxury in Rome and attempt to hide out with a trafficker of escaped slaves. Two escaped slaves with strange psychic powers, also in danger of their lives if found, meet up with Marcus and the three travel awkwardly together. It ought to be riveting. But it's just not.
I feel as though having had her great idea about Rome surviving, she ran out of steam. Everyone is awkward, all the time: and while awkwardness is a function of the vast social gap between the Imperial family and escaped slaves, it just goes on for page after page and no one changes. There is no pace, no excitement, just a relentlessly damp narrative. The author has an absolute inability to create tension: I kept forgetting that these people were fleeing for their lives, and imagined them instead on a leisurely backpacking trip across Europe.
However, this small flaw is as nothing compared to Ms McDougall's total failure to write in actual English: here is an extreme but not atypical paragraph (it's about learning to drive, in case you can't tell):
"Now that Una and Dama were side by side again, it was very obvious that something, Dama, or more impersonally, the tension between them, had a chance here to jab out, to hector and punish Una. That this did not happen, the well-hidden effort that prevented it, was almost more draining. Dama was - for Una at least - a surprisingly good teacher, he was attentive, patient; everything he told her to do or not do was well judged. And Una responded well, too, the slight shaking or bucking of the car under her hands soon stopped. She was afraid of going fast, but Dama said, 'It's more dangerous here if you go slowly. You're not going to lose control of it,' and she pulled up to the right speed, trustfully, though turning pale. There were still good at this, at sharing work. Sulien saw this, and wanted to beg them, to beg Dama, to stop it. "
It. Makes. No. Sense.
Though the second half of the book, about Marcus trying to regain his position in the Imperial family, is much more interesting than the first half, about the slaves trying to avoid capture, it was too little and too late. Ms McDougall's Rome is lacking much grandeur and was not really worth saving from the barbarians. |
| posted @ 16:18 |
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