Dancing Mad God

This week, The Wallace by Blind Harry, or Henry the Minstrel, was finally posted to Project Gutenberg. It took just under two years for it to work its way through the Distributed Proofreaders site, which is actually pretty good, given the content: I’m also near finishing a collection of 16th century Scottish poetry, and Douglas’ 1000-page version of The Æneid, both of which started their journeys in 2004.

Several months of those two years were taken up with my very slow final check of the book, which is when I actually read the thing for the first time. I probably should have read it before The Bruce, to understand the chronology better.

It’s a bit of a slog at times — lots of spattered brains — and not the most nuanced portrait, but it’s certainly energetic: Wallace liberates Scotland three times, defeats pirates twice, and slays just the one lion. I’m glad I finally got round to this one, so here’s to William and Harry.

45 books finished in the first half of the year. I’d roughly divide them into:

Proper Litercher

Quarantine — Jim Crace
All That I Am — Anna Funder
The Inn at the Edge of the World — Alice Thomas Ellis
The Bone Clocks — David Mitchell
Vacant Possession — Hilary Mantel
Orfeo — Richard Powers
The Last Treasure Hunt — Jane Alexander
Billy Lynn’s Long Half-time Walk — Ben Fountain
Rites of Passage — William Golding
History of the Rain — Niall Williams
When They Lay Bare — Andrew Greig
A Perfectly Good Family — Lionel Shriver
The Guest Cat — Takashi Hiraide
The Dying Animal — Philip Roth

Of these, All That I Am was staggeringly good in both style and content: “The sky was pale as a cup” is a pretty much perfect description of an English summer. Orfeo and Billy Lynn’s Long Half-time Walk were fascinating as representatives of a pyrotechnic writing style — enjoyable, and very American (in a good way). Of course The Last Treasure Hunt was also splendid. 🙂 On the other hand, The Bone Clocks was a huge disappointment, and The Dying Animal … tells you a lot about the writer.

Trashy Lit

Christine Falls — Benjamin Black
The Death of Bunny Munro — Nick Cave

The Death of Bunny Munro was interesting preparation for our Brighton trip.

More or Less Non-fiction

London’s Overthrow — China Mieville
Bad Pharma — Ben Goldacre
The Living Mountain — Nan Shepherd
Empire of the Sun — J. G. Ballard
To a Mountain in Tibet — Colin Thubron
Corvus — Esther Woolfson

Bad Pharma was shocking, even for someone who started out from the premiss that the medical industry is the enemy. I’d avoided Empire of the Sun for a long time because of the film, but the book was brilliant, particularly on the period after the war had ended.

Corvus was a revelation: funny and moving in approximately equal measure, it sent me outside to watch our local corvids. All the time I was living in Queen’s Road, I never knew there was a bonkers lady round the corner with an enchanting perspective on living with black and black-and-white companions.

Science Fiction

Helliconia Spring — Brian Aldiss
Helliconia Summer — Brian Aldiss
Helliconia Autumn — Brian Aldiss
Acceptance — Jeff VanderMeer
Feersum Endjinn — Iain M. Banks
The Algebraist — Iain M. Banks
The Drought — J. G. Ballard
On the Steel Breeze — Alastair Reynolds
Ancillary Justice — Ann Leckie
Neuromancer — William Gibson
The Pastel City — M. John Harrison
Neptune’s Brood — Charles Stross

and for my inner child:

Howl’s Moving Castle — Diana Wynne Jones
Deep Secret — Diana Wynne Jones
Coraline — Neil Gaiman

Acceptance, the conclusion of the Southern Reach trilogy, stood out here for its combination of the bizarre and the understated: a stand-out moment was in the second volume, where the protagonist enters a small room; discovers how mad one of his colleagues is; realises that the colleague is curled up on a shelf behind him; and leaves quietly. The Algebraist I thought was one of the best Banks books I’ve read so far, neatly balancing the humour, world-building and story-telling. Neptune’s Brood is pitched mid-way between Banks and M. John Harrison’s Light series, featuring zombies in space, a Buchhaltung Historiker hero, and a ship of pirate-underwriter-flying-foxes.

Central European Classics

The Radetzky March — Joseph Roth
Relations — Zsigmond Móricz
The Pendragon Legend — Antal Szerb

EFL

Messaging — George Woolard

“The Scottish Approach” to EFL teaching — all work and no play. Perfect.

Gutenberging

An Account of the Bell Rock Light-house — Robert Stevenson
Picture writing of the American Indian — Garrick Mallery
A Desk-Book of Errors in English — Frank H. Vizetelly
A Year at the Shore — Philip Henry Gosse

An Account of the Bell Rock Light-house, along with Nan Shepherd, provided me with a plan for the summer holiday. Picture writing of the American Indian is almost 1000 pages of pictures and their descriptions; comparisons allowed the author to roam over every inhabited continent, which he was very happy to do.

The Future

Wallace is nearly done, though it’s harder going than The Bruce, while Gladstone volume 2 is well-advanced at DP, so I hope to have finished reading that by the end of the year. Other big ones I’d like to finally finish: Finnegans Wake (or at least Stephen Hero); Der Mann Ohne Eigenschaften; On What Matters; something in Slovak. Let’s see what happens.