I might have to change the subtitle of this blog, as only 8 of the 26 books I read in 2019 were science fiction, and 3 were fantasy. I’m not sure if that trend will continue. We’ll see what crosses my path, or what grabs my attention from the stack pictured a few scrolls down. I’ll continue with a few art books in the mix though: titles on James Turrell, Bernd & Hilla Becher and Cy Twombly are in the queue.
For now, a genuine thank you to everyone who has read, liked, linked or commented. All the best to you and yours for 2020!
The new year should see a review of The Lord Of The Rings – I’ve finally started that, it’s great so far – and the massive Kolyma Stories by Varlam Shalamov, a book I started last January, digesting it in small doses. I had hoped to finish it before the second volume of translations comes out this month, but I won’t manage that. I also plan to write on Intermediary Spaces, the Éliane Radigue interview book by Julia Eckardt. I will also continue my rereads of the Dune series. (Update 26/02: my LOTR review turned out to be a massive 7000+ words, so enter at your own risk…)
A few blog stats for those of you who might be interested in such a thing… There were 14,913 views in 2019, and 8,719 visitors – a bit more than in 2018. The review I wrote the past year that was most successful was Destination: Void with 255 views. The most read reviews so far are those for New York 2140 (979 views since published), The Dosadi Experiment (957 views) and The Wandering Earth (768 views). Also still going strong (+500 views) are reviews for Green Earth, Death’s End, Last And First Men, What Kind Of Creatures Are We?, The Algebraist, Uprooted and Whipping Star. Most of these keep on getting views every couple of days. Herbert, Cixin Liu and KSR always seem to be do well, but I have no quick explanation for the success of my texts on Stapledon, Chomsky or Novik.
As for the actual list: below are the books I’ve given a 5-star rating on Goodreads in 2019, only 4 in total. Gibson’s Pattern Recognition, Darwinian Reductionism: Or, How to Stop Worrying and Love Molecular Biology and Vincent Van Gogh: The Complete Paintings each got 4 stars, and are all highly recommended too.
I might not have had that many perfect reads last year, but I enjoyed all the more music. If you scroll down, you’ll see that I’ve written a whole lot more about albums as I did the previous years – 2019 has been great on that front.
Click on the covers for the review.
The Bone Clocks – David Mitchell (2014)
Very few things can revive the completionist I was in my twenties. Because of this, I bought all other books Mitchell published, it’s that good. Part supernatural fantasy, and at the end part dystopian near-future sci fi. Speculative fiction of the literary kind. What most if not all reviews missed in 2014 is that this is a bleak warning about the future of mankind: what a difference 5 years can make… These are bleak times indeed, and David Mitchell is a prophet. “It is no coincidence what happens to Holy Sykes on the final pages, waving goodbye to her genetic future, hoping for the best, but being slowly erased by an incurable cancer.”
Dune – Frank Herbert (1965)
What can I say? I wrote a 5500 words analysis you’ll be taken to if you click the cover. One of those rare classics that have not aged one bit. I’m curious to reread the rest of the series, and especially to see how Herbert’s philosophical outlook on human determinism might have changed in the later books. I’ll try to reread at least Dune Messiah and Children of Dune in 2020, so stay tuned for more on that.
If you haven’t read Dune and consider yourself a science fiction fan, remedy your ignorance asap. It tends to rival with The Left Hand Of Darkness as sci fi’s greatest novel ever, but I think it’s loud and clear Dune has the upper hand. If you’re not a sci fi fan, I think general readers might enjoy it as well – if you like Shakespearian tragedy & can put aside your bias for giant sandworms.
The Ethnic Phenomenon – Pierre L. van den Berghe (1981)
I’m a sucker for sociobiology. It has a bad name to some because of associations with social darwinism and the likes, but rest assured, there’s none of that in this book. It’s always refreshing to see humans described as what they are: biological creatures, and as such books like this are kindred to science fiction – at least, the science fiction that takes an alien lens to describe humanity as a life form.
Van den Berghe does a fantastic job to unravel the complexities of how humans deal with (phenotypical) ethnicity, without taboo or dogma, achieving great insights on racism, nationalism, colonialism, slavery and so forth. It remains very relevant today to enhance understanding of the “backlash against globalism on both sides of the Atlantic”, the rise of Modi’s branch of Hindu nationalism, Brexit, much of Europe’s reaction to the immigration crisis, the West Bank, Belgium’s institutional problems, the position of black people in the USA, and so forth.
Picasso and the Art of Drawing – Christopher Lloyd (2018)
I would have given Vincent Van Gogh: The Complete Paintings 5 stars as well, if not for the clunky writing – German is hard to translate. On the account of the art reproduced alone, the Van Gogh is the better book: 800+ paintings are no match for the mere 143 drawings in this volume. But this is not a picture contest. Lloyd’s book on Picasso’s drawings – in the end the foundation for painting – may be the best entry level Picasso book there is: it is focused, and it doubles as a biography.
Biggest disappointment of 2019 was Blake Crouch’s Recursion, a book that just won the Goodreads Choice Award for science fiction for crying out loud. While entertaining, it doesn’t care one bit about inner consistency, even though the author consulted with quantum professors and the likes.
To end the book section, here’s a shot of most of my current TBR – there are 125 titles in the photo. If you click on it, you’ll get the high resolution image.
NON-BOOK FAVORITES
albums of the year
For more than 10 years experimental and improvised music dominated my year-end-lists. There was the occasional Joanna Newsom album, and a few metal titles, but other than that, ‘regular’ music? Not really. This year is different. While I’ve heard quite a few excellent ‘avant garde’ releases – see the list below – the albums that connected most with me were all song form – two or three of which are even big name commercial pop products. Most of these albums seem to tap on to experimental music a bit, incorporating a minal feel, resulting in sound itself emphasized amid melody, rhythm and lyrics.
Tool – Fear Inoculum (Tool Dissectional)
I didn’t have high hopes for this one. I didn’t like the title track that was put out a few weeks before the release. I didn’t like the track that was put on YouTube a few months before the release. I finally saw them live in 2007 and was indifferent to their pompous festival show. I think 10,000 Days is weak. I even think Lateralus was a step back from Ænema, too new agey, so to say. In short, I had given up on Tool.
But I still love Opiate, Undertow and Ænema. Even Salival has aged well. I can’t overstate Tool’s importance to me: Undertow was one of the few defining albums of my teens. So out of nostalgia I decided to give Fear Inoculum a chance. An album 13 years in the making, how bad could it be? Would this be their Chinese Democracy?
Terrible, I thought upon first listen. I streamed it on YouTube. I listened to it again on Spotify. Terrible, boring, pompous. Listened to it again, nothing happened. I’ve always hated Pink Floyd and it seemed Tool turned out 100% soft prog metal.
One of my friends is a superfan, and he had a physical copy of the CD – the package is overdone, true. I borrowed it. Well, what a landslide. I’m not audiophile, but Fear Inoculum doesn’t show its true colors in 192 kbps, let alone on laptop speakers. I’ve owned over 5000 records, and this must be one of the very best sound production wise.
What can I say? It has grown on me. It’s the very definition of a grower. And yes, it’s self-indulgent, bordering on self-parody. It seems like they recycled bits and pieces from previous albums. It’s not groundbreaking. It’s long. It’s polished. James Maynard Keenan doesn’t use his angry voice. It’s full of tribal drums. But it’s absolutely brilliant. I love every second of it. I cried to it. I still fist pump to it, even after 50 plays. I played air guitar in the living room – that had been ages. Sure, it’s part nostalgia. But it only works because it delivers more than just a throwback: it’s carefully distilled, no mere repetition.
This is Tool’s pinnacle. Balanced, mature, subdued aggression amidst flowing rhythms & soothing synths – clean picked & crunching, chugging guitars & long solos right in the center, almost simplistic in their bare essence. Drums, a bass, a guitar. A miracle of sorts – an album like this in 2019, who would have thought?
Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds – Ghosteen (Ghosteen Ltd)
I’d given up on Nick Cave too, since 2002’s Nocturama didn’t do it for me. I stopped paying attention, but some singles of 2016’s Skeleton Tree piqued my interest again. When Ghosteen came out in October I read some glowing reviews, and its origin story – Cave’s first album of songs written after the tragic death of his teenage son – obviously struck a nerve. But it was not until I heard Bright Horses on the radio that I realized I had to give this record an honest change. It turned out to be haunting & beautiful, a synth album that’s both sparse and lush. Cave’s voice & his tragic lyrics are unadorned in the center. It’s a double album: one with shorter songs, and a second disc with two songs almost 15 minutes each, separated by a short one.
Just click that Bright Horses link and give that a listen, it’ll be its own champion.
Deathspell Omega – The Furnaces of Palingenesia (Norma Evangelium Diaboli)
Deathspell Omega is not real black metal to some. True, there’s dissonance and a vague, distance influence of free jazz maybe. But this is not rock music, or black metal blended with something else. The Furnaces of Palingenesia might be their best record yet – even better than their previous record, The Synarchy Of Molten Bones, or the Kénôse EP, another favorite. Incredibely, it was recorded live in the studio, everything you hear is just one take. The lyrics are outright fantastic, showcasing totalitarian speech.
There has been a lot of fuss about DSO’s vocalist, the Finnish Mikko Aspa, who holds extreme right wing views. In origin, metal was a transgressive genre, and the ethics of buying records from murderers & neo-nazis have been debated at lenght. In the wake of this new release, Deathspell Omega showed a way out with a rare interview on Bardo Methodology. It turns out Aspa’s views are not the same as those of the French core collective, but they hope the inclusion of different viewpoints might prove fertile – in a Bataillean sense.
Here’s a quote form the interview on the matter. It’s formulated quite pompously, but it’s ultimatly true, I think, in this age of echo chambers & defriending anybody who holds different views. Trench warfare is a trap. Coincidentally, I wrote a bit on this topic in the comments to my review of Butler’s Bloodchild and other stories.
A minority of the collective’s contributors – shall we say, parts of the second circle – who’ve been invited to partake because of their incredible talents as musicians are involved with earthly politics, but stand on completely opposite ends of the political spectrum and are therefore irreconcilable political foes. Were it not for dialogue on the grounds of transgressive art, they’d be shooting each other. That tension is what interests us. It’s also an echo of more complex days – times when childhood friends Aragon the communist, Malraux the Gaullist and Drieu La Rochelle the fascist, while never reneging on their respective irreconcilable combats, for years lost neither the ability for sincere and profound dialogue nor their admiration for each other’s unique talents.
If you make art ‘safe’, no matter your concerns – moral, aesthetic or otherwise – you sterilise it and, in the long run, with utmost certainty, kill it. If, on the contrary, you allow and even invite conflict and chaos at the core of the matrix, you enhance the possibilities infinitely. Ironically, by taking this approach – which in many ways mimics life itself – we espouse a Nietzschean life-affirming stance whilst potential detractors to our method stand within the ranks of those slowly choking the human mind, paving the way for the aforementioned ‘last man’. If only things were as simple as good and evil!
Kate Tempest – The Book of Traps and Lessons (American Recordings)
Rick Rubin decided to step in and help 34 year old Kate Tempest with her new album. I’m not sure what he did, but the result is a stripped down, slow version of Tempest’s spoken word fury. Instrumentation almost zero, this is bare, brave music. In 2013, The Guardian wrote this about her: “She is one of the brightest talents around. Her spoken-word performances have the metre and craft of traditional poetry, the kinetic agitation of hip-hop and the intimacy of a whispered heart-to-heart… Tempest deals bravely with poverty, class and consumerism. She does so in a way that not only avoids the pitfalls of sounding trite, but manages to be beautiful too, drawing on ancient mythology and sermonic cadence to tell stories of the everyday.”
6 years later, that still seems to ring true. As Tempest is a poet, I’ll just quote her opening lines:
I came to under a red moon
Thirsty for water
My eyes were like shovels in the soil of the sky
Digging in to the night to find solace
Burying emptiness
I was heart-broken
Vomiting memories
Because I’d promised her everything
Then I did what I could not to recognise anything
So, here I was
Marching the town like a priest in my rapture
Muttering spells
So desperate for tenderness
So raw from the grating of senses
The way the day drinks every drop of my strength
It’s relentless
I was digging out pence for a length of bad whisky
Me and my friends
Or at least
The others who slumped at the bar without peace
They embrace me as kindred, but
Something is missing
So, I was sat there at the bar with my forehead on my wrist
Thinking I had given all I had in me to give.
Sounds familiar? Give The Book of Traps and Lessons a try. I’ve also teared up to this one, multiple times, if that counts for something. Very contemporary, very British too – you might not like her accent. The Brexit features. Political, yes, that too, but first and foremost a very human record.
Maybe this bit from the album’s last song will convince you?
I saw it roaring
I felt it clawing at my clothes like a grieving friend
It said there are no new beginnings
Until everybody sees that the old ways need to end
But it’s hard to accept that we’re all one and the same flesh
Given the rampant divisions between oppressor and oppressed
But we are, though
More empathy, less greed, more respect
All I’ve got to say has already been said
I mean, you heard it from yourself
Sammath – Across the Rhine is only death (Hammerheart)
With 2014’s Godless Arrogance Sammath made what I think is the best metal album of the 21st century, hands down. That is, if you approach metal in a conservative manner, and seeing most of today’s metal for what it really is: dressed up rock or pop or jazz or punk music with metal aesthetics. I have no beef with genre mixing – creativity must flow – but I myself am only interested in real metal. When I want rock or pop or jazz, I’ll listen to rock or pop or jazz, thank you. Godless Arrogance was what Immortal could have done if they build upon Blizzard Beasts, not on Metallica.
This isn’t Godless Arrogance. Since 1994 Sammath has put out 6 albums, and they are all pretty different. Across the Rhine is only death doesn’t put the focus on melody like Godless Arrogance did. It is a much more violent affair – as others have written, Sammath this time also incorporates grindcore into their technical black death hybrid. As such, ATRIOD is yet another step in Jan Kruitwagen’s evolution towards the essence of extreme metal.
I must admit I was underwhelmed at first, but the same lesson as for Fear Inoculum applies: this needs more than a few spins via Bandcamp on your phone’s speakers. The jury is still out, but this might be even better than Godless Arrogance. It’s less instant gratification, a more complex, starker, relentless barrage. But when the melodies arise – and they do, but shorter, less prominent – things click and the friendly experiencer can truly connect. Your mileage may vary, but if you like extreme metal, give this an honest chance, and don’t give up after 4 or 5 listens.
other notable 2019 records
Klaus Lang & Golden Fur – Beissel (Another Timbre)
Jon Heilbron – Puma Court (Another Timbre)
Frank Denyer – The Fish That Became The sun (Another Timbre)
Catherine Lamb – Atmospheres Transparent/Opaque (New World Records)
Éliane Radigue – Occam Ocean 2 (shiiin)
Seamus Cater & Kai Fagaschinski – Secrets (self published)
Toshiya Tsunoda – Extract From Field Recording Archive (5cd box, Erstwhile)
Michael Pisaro – Nature Denatured and Found Again (5cd box, Gravity Wave)
Hélène Breschand plays Eliane Radigue and Kasper T. Toeplitz – Octopus (Bocian)
R.P.M. (Keith Rowe, Collin Potter, Phil Mouldycliff) – Circle Line (ICR)
older music discovered this year: highlights
First some fantastic jazz that reinvigorated my love for the genre, all pristinely reissued on Hat Hut. Second, Mark Hollis. In February 2019 Hollis died, and while I was aware of Talk Talk’s earlier singles, I never knew their final 2 albums and his solo work were so spectacularly beautiful & adventurous. After that, a few compilations albums with lenghty songs by أم كلثوم, Oum Kalthoum, an Egyptian superstar who was active from the 1920s to the 1970s. The list ends with the first three albums of Coroner, a Swiss technical trash metal band, a bit lesser known, but on par with the big names of the genre.
John Carter – Bobby Bradford Quartet – Seeking (Hat Hut, originally 1969)
Warne Marsh Quartet – Ne Plus Ultra (Hat Hut, originally 1969)
Horace Tapscott – The Dark Tree (Hat Hut, originally 1991)
Talk Talk – Laughing Stock (Parlophone, 1988)
Talk Talk – Spirit of Eden (Polydor, 1991)
Mark Hollis – Mark Hollis (Polydor, 1998)
Oum Kalthoum – Diva of Arabia / L’Astre de l’Orient (5cd, Recording Arts, 2005)
Oum Kalthoum – The Legend Lives On (3cd, Golden Arts, 2009)
Coroner – R.I.P. (Noise Records, 1987)
Coroner – Punishment For Decadence (Noise Records, 1988)
Coroner – No More Color (Noise Records, 1989)
dance
Absolutely blown away by Twelve Ton Rose by Trisha Brown, preformed by Ballet Flanders in De Warande Turnhout on the 13th of March. It’s set to parts of Four Pieces for Violin and Piano by Anton Webern. Maybe the best dance piece I’ve ever seen.
television
I haven’t seen that much this year, but I can concur HBO’s Chernobyl was excellent – a must watch indeed. The jury is still out on the final, 6th season of Bojack Horseman – the second half of that season will air later this month, January 2020. So far, the first half was solid, but mainly build up. The big emotional suckerpunch is yet to come – I hope.
Easily topping half that Bojack season are 5 episodes of another cartoon’s new season whose first half was also aired in 2019: season 4 of Rick and Morty. So far, their best season yet. Relentless pacing, visually stunning, very clever, very funny – the best contemporary science fiction regardless of medium, I’d say. It’s wonderful how episodes always manage to be both laser sharp satire and exiting adventures. There will be 60 more episodes after season 4 – that seems like hubris, but we’ll see. The inherent creative potential of alternate realities & green dimensional portals is unlimited.
If you’re interested in my other favorite lists, the index is here.
And here‘s the index of all reviews, alphabetically by author.
Weighing a pig doesn't fatten it. 
Thanks for the SF reviews! (and I hope you have more this year).
I always look forward to them — especially those of the vintage variety….
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Thanks! There’s plenty vintage SF on my TBR as you can see, and a significant part of those are titles I got via your site. I might read more vintage this year, as they are a bit shorter usually, it might be a way to get more titles read. We’ll see how it turns out…
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Yeah, there’s a lot of great stuff in that pile — Malzberg, Bishop, Harrison, and even the Dutch edition of Bodelsen’s Freezing Down (which I featured on my best of 2019 list)!
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Those are some good looking numbers! Any idea about how much traffic you get from search engine hits (percentage wise)? I seemed to get about 10% in 2019 but most of it seemed to be more incidental than purpose driven (ie, someone searching for Keyword X stumbles onto a review of mine that used that word but has nothing to do with the subject overall).
In regards to LotR, are you going to read it as one big book, as Tolkien wrote it, or are you going to break it up into its 3 component books as most people do? And what’s more, will that inspire you to watch the movies by Jackson? 😀
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I’ll get back to you on the stats tomorrow, but for LOTR, I’m halfway The Two Towers, so I’m going to read (and review) the three books as one, as intented. I saw the movies multiple times already, and they guide my reading experience like crazy. It’s really something. In a way, the films ruined my reading experience, but at the same time enhance it. It’s very strange, I’ve never had an experience like it. Maybe if I’d seen the films only once, it wouldn’t have been so strong, but as I’ve seen them at least three times over the years, they’re firmly in my mind. I think it’ll be the main angle for my review. I’m still unsure wether the films were a better way to tell the story, it could go both ways, we’ll see. Anyhow, I’m also reading the Reader Companion by Hammond and Scull alongside, and it’s already crystal clear that what Tolkien accomplished is simply off the charts, even though I rated Fellowship only 4 stars on Goodreads 🙂
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Cool! I really like your alternate reviews where you do more than just an ordinary review. A book/movie thing with the movies having come first is something I’m really interested in reading, since I read the books (multiple times) before the movies came out.
And no rush about the stats, at all. I’m just curious and I like stat type numbers 😀
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Thanks! I’m pretty sure the review will end up that way, plus some bits from the reading companion.
On further thought, I think I saw the movies 4 times, and the first two 5 times. (Overall, I kinda hated The Hobbit movies though.)
Btw, did you like the movies – that’s not fully clear from your original comment?
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Oh, sorry. I really enjoyed the LotR movies. I thought Jackson did an excellent job of staying (mostly) true to the story while making necessary changes for the medium change. I was a happy fan when I watched them 😀
Now, the Hobbit on the other hand, those are an Abomination before Bookstooge! (even if I do own them all in the extended editions, sigh)
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We’re on the same page then!
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As for the stats, of the nearly 15,000 views, 6,272 come from search engines, mainly Google. Then WP generates 350, Facebook and Goodreads about 250 each, the amp-project 150 (no idea what that is actually), and then about 50 each from LibraryThing, the I Hate Music forum and Worlds Without End, and then there’s a chunck of links via other blogs ranging from 37 to 1. That still leaves about 7,000 views unaccounted for, I’m not sure how WP counts, but I guess those 7,000 views are from people that stay on the blog after they landed here via the referrer – it kinda matches the views – visitor ratio.
The bulk of the views (7,590) come from the USA, next comes UK (1,594), Canada (843), my native Belgium (843), Australia (387), Germany (347), Italy (252) and after that it falls below 200/country.
I hope that scratches your stats itch!
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That does scratch the itch, thanks 😀
A 40% search engine ratio, that is nice. At least you know your blog is “out there” in the public.
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I hadn’t thought of it that way, but you are right.
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fyi, I just posted the LOTR review! It took my 4 hours to just type all the quotes I needed, so you can imagine… I’m sorry that I didn’t achieve your quota for the first 2 months of 2020, but reading and writing about LOTR took up the entire month of January, and a big chunck of February. But hey: it’s actually 4 books: the trilogy AND the Reader’s Companion.
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I have some listening to do now. Started with Katie Tempest, definitely worth it.
Thanks again for the great Dune review, it’s in my very top of posts read in 2019!
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Wow, thanks, that means a lot! I had a great time writing it, so my pleasure!
I hope you’ll like some of the other albums I listed, they’re different enough so some others could click too.
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Oh my! That is one *impressive* TBR! But on the other hand, there is no better view than a book-covered wall… 😉
Looking forward to you review of the LOTR: that book holds a very special place in my heart….
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It’s mainly the result of impulse buying stuff from authors of whom I liked a book. I don’t tend to do that anymore. There’s a decent chance lots of those will never be read as my tastes have moved on.
Another big part are cheap second hand finds, I tend to take a risk there if a book is only 3 or 4 euro.
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That’s one of the reasons I now enjoy reading e-books: no matter how many of them I pile up “for later”, I never run out of space to store them – USB drives are a compulsive buyer’s best friends! 😉
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Space is not really a problem, plus I fear e-books might even be more tempting to buy, just click click click, and that would not fare well moneywise, so I’ll stick to paper for the forseable future. I’d also miss an actual library, so I’d probably end up buying physical copies of books I really liked.
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Congratulations on another year of blogging! Those stats are very impressive and are well deserved. (I can only dream of such numbers!..) It’s also fascinating to see your tbr pile, so thanks for posting it. I was curious how you manage your reading-time. Do you set aside a certain time each day or is it more random? As I’ve mentioned before, I’m not reading as much as I used to. It’s easy to blame it on too many distractions but another problem may be linked to my advancing years. I find myself getting sleepy quickly when I start reading these days, especially in the evenings after work. Oh no! I’m turning into an old man! It’s quite a scary and sobering thought, as well as being embarrassing to admit. Caffeine doesn’t seem to help very much so I may need to look for something (ahem) stronger… I’ll let you know how it goes;-)
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Thanks!! My reading time is random: I read when I have the time. That’s mainly in the evening though. I’m lucky if I can read 2 hours a day, usually it’s closer to one. In the weekends I sometimes manage a longer stretch, but I experience sleepiness too, especially in the afternoon, I tend to have 2 hours of reading time reduced to half an hour because I doze off all the time. It’s frustrating, but it’s cosy in a way too.
I’m not too worried about becoming older, just embrace it I’d say, but at times it can be sobering yes indeed 🙂
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Thanks for all the hard work Bart, I really enjoyed your Dune essay and found it a fine and insightful piece of writing. I feel the same way about the new Tool album, and Tool in general. I didn’t likethe new album at first but it really grew on me with repeated listening.
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My pleasure! Thanks for the compliment, much appreciated.
I think my reaction to Tool is also informed by my initial disappointement. When it finally clicked, it was such an unexpected homecoming it all the more felt brilliant.
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Wow! Impressive! *tips hats with respect*
Happy New Year and happy reading bormgans. I look forward to hearing what you think of LotR … 🙂
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Give me a few weeks! I’m on a Watchmen and Succession binge atm 😉
Thanks for dropping by! All the best for 2020!
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Clicked your TBR image and immediately then came to the comments section to implore you to read Master & Commander ASAP. I think it was actually five years ago I first read it, and thought it was fine, and I started reading maybe one a year… and somewhere around books 6-9 it clicked into place and became one of my all-time favourite series that I passionately rave about and have had to start rationing so that I don’t finish it too quickly. Though I’ll probably go right back to the beginning and start again after I do. Enjoy!
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I have it on recommendation of Kim Stanley Robinson, who called the series one of the greatest feat of literature, together with Wolf Hall. I’ve actually started it about a year ago, but my mindset wasn’t right for it at the time, and I only got 30 pages in or so. Will try again though, so thanks for the comment, a nudge always helps!
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I think I found my way there from Philip Reeve’s glowing praises, but something I’d noted before then was how popular the series was across a huge swathe of other writers; everybody from Jo Walton to Christopher Hitchens agreed it’s a masterpiece. I quite understand not being in the right mindset for it, though; O’Brian has a rather idiosyncratic writing style and makes no concessions to a reader who isn’t fully paying attention, and I’ll still happily admit at this point that I generally have no idea what’s going on during the battle sequences.
But if you can persevere through that and adapt to it (and IMO also see O’Brian find his pace with the series after a little while) it’s one of the most rewarding reading experiences there is. The third book was the first I genuinely enjoyed, the fifth one was where I really began to see why people raved about it, and I think the sixth was where I began to rave myself. Of course it’s quite an ask to say to people “you’ve got to read this series – it starts getting good around the third book!” But it’s worth doing, because they’re really unlike anything else I’ve ever read.
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Yes, in the current phase of my life I only manage to read about 25 books/year, so the prospect of reading 2 books before I’ll even start enjoying the series doesn’t appeal to me, but you make good case for not giving up on this too quickly, so as I’m in no rush, I’ll get to them eventually, just not ASAP 😉
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One more question maybe: what do you feel makes it unique/rewarding/etc?
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Good question and one which is difficult to articulate, but off the bat, I’d say O’Brian’s absolute mastery of the research needed to pull something like that off. You’d expect an author writing naval historical fiction to know his way around a ship, and of course he does, but he also seems uncannily knowledgeable about every other aspect of the Regency world, from the mundane (English cuisine) to the consequential (laws and customs pertaining to debt bondage), and a thousand things in between. And he displays that knowledge in a way which never seems artificial. When I read the first one I had no idea when it had been penned and wouldn’t have been surprised if it turned out he’d lived alongside Austen. (And like Austen, he’s very, very funny.)
That feeds into the second way in which it goes beyond the realm of naval warfare, and into a sort of Enlightenment/Romantic era piece of literary fiction in which the characters (particularly Stephen Maturin, the doctor/naturalist/spy) discuss and ponder things which go far beyond the confines of a ship: religion, philosophy, history, art, politics, love, friendship, the natural world, etc. When I read more about O’Brian himself I wasn’t surprised, at that point, to find that he wasn’t the kind of sweater-vest-wearing dork from Ealing that you might imagine would immerse himself in Royal Navy history, but rather a World War II spy who spoke multiple languages, retired to a chateau in the Pyrenees, brewed his own wine and so on. He was someone who lived life to its fullest, and that feeling of richness is reflected in his books. I’m impressed by his sheer intelligence on display in every book, and grateful that rather than writing (say) some kind of heavy and tedious work of Great Literature, he wrote a 20-book series about a Navy captain and his best friend who go sailing around the world having great adventures. (Though as you’ve gathered by now I do think they’re also genuinely Great Literature.)
I think some of the best advice I got for trying to read the books is to not worry too much about not “understanding” them at first; he uses a lot of period language and doesn’t spoonfeed the reader – but if you immerse yourself in it you’ll eventually start to piece things together from context, and it’s very rewarding when it eventually clicks and you feel comfortable in the setting. And in fact “comfortable” is the right word: it’s set during a war and never shies away from violence and death, but the friendship between the two protagonists and the familiar, reassuring world of the rear-deck captain’s cabin makes it a pleasure to return to this world every time you pick up a new book. There’s a reason I downloaded a bunch of them when I had an Australia-Europe return flight last year: they’re as dependable as a rock.
Anyway, if that hasn’t bored you, a much more articulate appreciation of the series can be read here (which btw was written long before the series was complete; there’s a few lines in here which seem like spoilers but aren’t):
https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/98/10/18/specials/obrian-plank.html
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Thanks for taking the time to write that out! You make a convincing case. If I’ll eventually get to write a review, I can quote heavily from this 😉
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You’re very welcome! It’s actually quite nice, in the year (god help us) 2020, to come across a blog with an active and lively comments section. I’d resigned myself to the new status quo of all online interaction being conducted across the same four or five websites. In fact I think I found you via Goodreads, and I quite understand why you only post snippets of reviews and then encourage people to click through to the blog.
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Yes it seems the SF blog community keeps on losing participants – not that I’m that active myself on other blogs. Time’s an issue for everyone I guess. And most forums have been dead for years.
I post snippets with links on GR and a few other sites mainly because I’m curious about stats for what I write, and I can’t really track those on Goodreads except for likes, but that’s a very very crude metric (also on WP, I know blogs that have 10 times my number of likes/post, but about the same amount of unique visitors).
I guess for discussion Goodreads is fine too, but it’s nice to have it all in one place that’s my own. I guess it’s all ego in the end 😊
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