Stephen Fry, who is currently on our TVs with “Planet Word” also adds some writing to the front cover, but in episode 1 of his programme, he summed up the entire book in one sentence: Italians, whose word for bridge is feminine, describe photos of bridges using feminine traits such as “beautiful” or “elegant”, while Germans, whose word for bridge is masculine, describe the same photos using words like “strong”.

So there we have it. Actually, that’s not entirely it, or it would be a complete waste of time. This is just about the only thing that can be concluded, though. The first half of the book is about different words for colour and why some languages have more of them than others. It turns out it’s mostly practice. But the whole subject is littered with examples from history of casual racism and intellectually lazy prejudice. It all got rather distasteful. Which means it’s somewhere that wise people tread very carefully. Hence the hedgy conclusion above being the only thing Deutscher claims is almost certainly definitely true, despite the cover claiming that our language controls the way we see the world.

(Incidentally, I’ll interject a complaint here: in several places, he refers to an insert showing different colours involved in certain experiments. This is not in the paperback version of the book. In most cases it’s not critical to the understanding of the experiment – I can imagine a bluey-green and a greeny-blue well enough. But there was one that just didn’t make any sense. Since half the book is about colours, it seems a bit rude to leave it out.)

The second half of the book was a bit more interesting – it actually dealt more with how different languages do change the way we think. But it’s all anecdotal. Which is fine, actually. I’d have loved a few more anecdotes, even if they were largely unsubstantiated. There are the tribes of aboriginal Australians who navigate exclusively by compass bearing, even to describe where an ant is relative to your foot, meaning that at all times, they know exactly where north is. It’s crazy stuff. Only none of them really do it any more, because they spend too much time speaking English. Oh well.

There’s some really good stuff in here, but the presentation is a bit dry and it feels like there’s a lot of book for not much information.

See also: Fry’s Planet Word – on telly now, but sure to be out in codex form in time for Christmas.

Shades of Grey – it’s about colour, right?

However, it was mostly set in London, so that was nice. Always strange when you’ve actually been to the locations in a novel, because so often they don’t really exist, or aren’t where the author says they are. This was real.

The other stuff, I really wasn’t so sure about. How does Milgrim get so many bots following him on Twitter? He doesn’t tweet anything publicly. Admittedly, his handle is GAYDOLPHIN2, so maybe there’s that.

In the end, though, I kind of got into the action when it started (although quite what they were all after…) and you have to admire Heidi (except for the insistence on calling her ex Fuckstick, which is neither big nor clever*).

*Although maybe that’s the point.

See also:

The other books in the series, guy

The Getaway – Playstation 2, for that visceral “this is really London” moment

If that sounds like damning it with faint praise, it shouldn’t, because I was and am a big fan of some of his early stuff – the Armageddon books, the Brentford Trilogy (in five books) and whatever he called the ones with Cornelius and his little mate. Except the one where they went off to different planets. I never got that, and after that I felt like he’d lost his way a bit.

This one, though. This one stars Hugo Rune as the titular Retromancer, saving the world from the Nazis by going back in time to Blitz-era Brentford and eating lots of free meals. He also foils the baddie via a string of slightly outlandish adventures, including something to do with a giant Zeppelin over New York. We also discover that at least one incarnation of Rizla, his young helpmeet, is none other than teenaged Jim Pooley. Which actually doesn’t make any sense, or seemingly matter at all.

And, in fact, all the details are irrelevant. There’s a lot of fun, a big dollop of meta-humour, a running gag or two and what else can you ask for? On the basis of this one, I will be looking up more of Mr Rankin’s books in proper bookshops.

See also:

Changing History by Stephen Fry – another slightly comedic take on thwarting Adolf.

The Antipope - where the Brentford Trilogy originally begins. In Brentford.

And now for the book: intriguing! I was not familiar with Jasper Fforde beforehand (although I had bought one of his books for my mum: I think she liked it). And it sort of turns out it doesn’t really matter because he hasn’t written anything like this before. So my lack of preparation didn’t count against me.

After having complained about the exposition in Snow Crash, I shouldn’t really complain about the lack of it in this, so I won’t. I was lost for quite a while. It turns out the The Something That Happened (remain indoors!) has caused everyone in this world to lose the ability to see more than one colour, and some not even that. And for some reason this is used to rank everyone in a strict hierarchy. Our hero is a Red, who has been sent for humility training in some backward village or other. Things become clearer. Something odd is up.

Eddie meets a Grey, who has a very pretty nose. She also has a temper, and does not approve of being reduced to just a pretty nose. Jane Grey (I think she’s a G12, whatever that means) sizes Eddie up, and decides that he might just be worth talking to. This obviously goes against the entire colour-based system, her deciding that he might be worth anything. But Eddie can’t help himself, despite his plans to marry up to an Oxblood. And then she pushed him into a man-eating plant.

So… nothing really makes sense for a long time, except that the characters are also slightly less than completely sure what’s going on too (some of them bluster and bully a bit more than the slightly hapless Eddie), which is very engaging. And the whole world seems complete, although there’s only a very small part of it that makes sense to us. But new details drip through, revealed to the naive Eddie by Jane (who seems to know much more than she lets on) and others, and I ended up enthralled.

There are sequels planned – apparently not yet written. But I don’t really want to wait.

See also: 1984 – no. Comparisons are blurbed all over it, but this isn’t a satire on a specific form of government or totalitarianism at all, except in very broad strokes. And it’s much more entertaining.

Flatworld – well, I haven’t read more than the first couple of pages, but this seems a much better fit.

I’ve written elsewhere about the typical SF book leaving me pretty much totally baffled for 100 pages or so. And that’s fine, generally, so long as something interesting is happening, and so long as I trust the author to explain themself at some stage. But here, the first chapters are laced with exposition so thoroughly that there’s no danger of bafflement, and that’s much more frustrating. I know what an avatar is. I get “the metaverse”. Tell me the story! But I guess this book is that old that those things need explaining. It does pre-date the internet.

Which is probably why “the metaverse” doesn’t really ring true – it doesn’t behave anything like the internet that I know. And we’re treated to some ridiculous stuff – Hiro (really? the he0or’s called Hiro Protagonist? *sigh*) hacking people’s avatars into bits and them not being able to respawn until their corpse is disposed of and he controls the graveyard demons because he coded the bar they’re in? And he’s delivering pizza for a living? It’s nonsense.

But the bigger thing that annoyed me was that the Real World didn’t feel real in any way. The description of it was completely lacking. I could picture the loglow and the cookie cutter private estates and stuff, but the actual physical land it all sits on? I couldn’t see it at all.

The actual plot, once we got to it, was fascinating. Someone discovers a way to control people by using a machine-code level language (which is actually Sumerian). It’s tied together with the Babel myth (interesting interpretation of that, too) and the collapse of country-sized nation states (a theme that Stephenson also uses in The Diamond Age). And typically, some extravagant characters – Hiro himself, Raven (armed with a glass-bladed harpoon and a nuclear warhead), Da5id (nice pun) etc.

But overall, it was spoiled for me by the clunky exposition and areality of both of the worlds it was set in – nice ideas, below par execution.

See also:

Neuromancer – the definitive early cyberspace novel. Better produced, not quite such a powerful set of ideas, IIRC.

Through The Language Glass – how the language you think in determines how you see the world.

Yes, it’s part 43 in my series of books about music. This one is about the history of recorded sound, which only goes back about 100 years and starts with Edison shouting into a horn and ends with people routinely carrying their entire music collection everywhere they go. It covers format wars, the loudness wars, tricks of the recording trade, the rise and fall of various different styles of music and what seems like just about everything else.

It’s packed full of interesting facts, history repeating itself (Edison promoted his “diamond discs” by demonstrating the impossibility of telling the difference between a live performance and the record, a trick re-invented or re-hashed for just about every subsequent technological development) arguments between various factions, some who insist on the highest possible quality sound reproduction and those who want convenience (convenience generally proves much more popular, to the eternal surprise and disappointment of those with golden ears) and anecdotes and interviews with the people who made the recordings and/or the tools that they used.

It’s fascinating, exceptionally well-written, and it really has changed the way I listen to music (so far). Jarvis Cocker was right. And not just about Michael Jackson.

See also:

Jazz by Ken Burns – The 4-DVD history of America’s only native art form contains a lot of early recordings, and covers some of the same ground, especially the 20s and 30s

Post scriptum: there is a debate to be had about what it means for music to be recorded versus experienced live and how it will be possible to make a living from music now the recording industry is dead and no one buys records any more and so forth, but this book doesn’t really go into it, and I’m not going to here either

This book is about death. The blurb declares that it won’t be over until The Culture has gone to war with death itself. This is either a complete lie or a gross misunderstanding. I will not betray my prejudices about the nature of marketing types by saying here which I suspect it to be. What it is about is hell, as a variety of non-Reality existence. Kind of. Some SF authors would use this as a platform to search for some deep truths. But that doesn’t really happen here.

What we get instead is a very pretty space opera, nicely paced (I was about to put it down after the first 4 or 5 chapters, until characters started coming back to “life” and having something to do with the plot) and with some interesting people and non-people. The world is a mature one (not quite sure how many Culture books Banks has written, but I think it’s around 10 – I could look it up, but meh) so there’s no sense he’s making things up as he goes along. There are rules (which are not often specifically explained, but hinted at cleverly enough to understand) and it all works very smoothly. There are some nice set pieces and some funny jokes. And the good guys get what they want and the bad guys get what they deserve. More or less.

So, all in all, very pleasant, enjoyable, not particularly challenging. I haven’t read any Iain M. Banks before, but I do suspect I will hoover up some more Culture in the future.

See also:

The Commonwealth books by Peter F. Hamilton – also British space opera. Similar set-up (post Singularity, galaxy-wide community of liberal democracy/capitalism, FTL ships, etc.) but a bit deeper.

What no one told me is that this is actually a lot of fun, with some utterly daft characters getting themselves all worked up about relationships. OK, so it is about relationships between upper class types. But Jane Austen never saw premiership football, and relationships between upper class types are probably the next most exciting thing in the world.

No one also told me that the whole thing was larded with so much irony that there is actually an arched eyebrow sticking out of the top of my copy. Guys, you have to tell people these things! Admittedly, the girl does get the guy in the end, and not everyone dies (one of the sisters is sent to Newcastle, which is almost the same thing) so it may be a bit too sweet for some tastes, but damme, Mr Collins, you are a one. And Mrs Bennet! Ooh, my.

My only little niggle is that when the characters are referred to by their new surnames after marrying it can be a little bit hard to remember who they actually are (especially when they get married in a hurry).

Also, I noticed with amusement how much the language and spellings had changed. It may be my prejudices showing here, but I suspect a lot of people who consider this one of their favourite books probably spend a fair bit of time decrying the collapse of the English language, whereas actually reading it shows how much usage has changed in the last 200 years. “Her’s” and “your’s” are common, spellings like “sopha” abound, and my particular favourite “chief of the day” meaning “most of”. (OK, second favourite, because there’s a bit somewhere where one of the gentlemen is making love to the whole Bennet family, and I am too much of a child not to smirk at that.)

So, the lesson is: ignore the cover of classics because publishers clearly have no idea how to market them. Also, I must have missed the bit where Mr Darcy is in a fountain.

See also: Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell – for its spelling of “sopha” and similarly striking black and white cover (assuming you can find the same editions of the two books that I have)

Blackadder III – probably not the exact historical era, but certainly at about the same degree of archery.

But my immediate thought, because when I was 14, they were just coming out, was the Witches series from Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels. Well, not Equal Rites, because… well, no. But Wyrd Sisters (based on a play set in Scotland), this one (about the trouble with being a fairy godmother; also, sisters), Lords and Ladies (based on a different play by that lad from Stratford), Masquerade (Opera) and Carpe Jugulum (vampires and tea) have some of my absolute favourite characters in them. And they’re almost all girls (although it may be stretching a point to call Granny Weatherwax a girl). So that’s got to be good.

Anyway, I have no idea if my mum passed this on to Stephanie (I think that’s her name), but I pulled this off the shelf and read it cover to cover in a day. It’s so much fun! The gambling scene on the riverboat, the Thing With The Bulls, Greebo… so good. And an important message about being yourself just as good as you can be.

It struck me that there is also another set of Discworld books for young adults which I haven’t read, starring another young witch. I really ought to get around to them.

See also: anything Discworld, really. And none of that Harry Potter nonsense. (I actually said “Are you a child?” to someone when he told me he liked that the other day: that was unnecessary, really.)

One of the quotes on the back of the book describes this as a kind of lefty jazz thing. I’m not entirely certain what that means, but I get the jazz reference – this book is a series of scenes in order, but without a tune or structure. It’s a bit free-wheeling! It’s daring! It describes the birth of the American nation and the death of the Indian Six Nations! It’s rather dull and has virtually no characters in it I cared about.

That’s not entirely true. Well, it is dull (and worthy!) but I did quite like Philip aka Le Grand Diable (sometimes called the Great Devil) aka Rohanonterinte or some such. And whoever the whore was who had about forty names for her mams, she was amusing. But most of the others didn’t really do much for me. It wasn’t helped by the fact that I struggled to keep them straight – some of them had more than one name, I couldn’t ever remember who was related to who, some of them disappeared for a hundred pages…

But I think it was really the lack of plot that killed it for me. There was, of course, only one way things were going to go, but there must have been a better story (any story!) in there somewhere. All we got were fragments of the narrative; scenes separated by hundreds of miles or weeks and months, some of which were germane, some not so much.

One of the things about jazz is that it’s OK to have a bit of improvisation and that, based on a framework, you know, you’ve got a dusty copy of Kind of Blue somewhere. But the really good stuff has dazzling technical virtuosity or wit that makes you go “yeah, man that’s hip” or something, and stroke your goatee. But (and possibly because this is in translation, although I don’t really think so) this didn’t have that for me.

Which is a shame. First because I quite liked Q, even though you could probably level a lot of the same criticisms at it (except for not knowing who was who, which may be my fault). And secondly because there’s definitely a place for a book about the birth of the American nation, how it came about and what it destroyed, especially as it negotiates the current sticky point in its history.

See also:

Kind of Blue – fuck it, dig that out. It’s America’s only native art form (a totem pole won’t fit in your CD player).

Q - give it a go. Easily the most blood-drenched book starring a monk I’ve ever read.

Mayflower - an early, factual history of settlers in America and their relationships with the locals.