Posts Tagged ‘book’
Dream Dancer – Janet Morris
Shebat was 16, she was the lowest of the low, her services sold to others by her employer. She was taken off her world by Marada Seleucus Kerrion, next in line to take control of the Kerrion Consortium. This is her story, how she rose to find herself almost at the top of the family and was then dismissed back to her original world.
I found this book to be really challenging to read. There were a number of new ideas that weren’t explained until quite some time after they were first introduced and I had trouble with this. Many of the books I’ve read have the new concepts explained fairly early on and I have contemplated the idea of introducing the concept and then explaining it much, much later in the book. Now that I’ve seen it used I find I don’t like it. I do wonder if it’s possible for it to work with a different author. Some of the ideas were very similar to other books. In Dream Dancer there is a prototype space ship that totally melds with the mind and can think and reason properly, the space ship is the brains while the pilot is the brawn, just like the space ships in The Ship Who Sang series by Anne McCaffrey.
Parts of the story are a rollicking good read and I had trouble putting it down, it was just hard to understand some of the concepts. The one I’ll speak about is the concept mentioned in the title. I’m still rather confused but I think the author is saying that dreaming is a commodity and that you can go to an illegal organisation and have a person create a dream for you. You can only qualify as a Dream Dancer within one of the illegal organisations when you can demonstrate all the approved Dreams and also create one within approved parameters. Shebat becomes a Dream Dancer and is very good at it. She creates a dream that startles and worries her fellow dream dancers so they have great trouble deciding if she should pass the test. I think I’ve explained it properly, although one bit that worried me with her Dream is that I couldn’t understand why it upset her fellow Dream Dancers so much, this just wasn’t sufficiently explained and I felt it was a relatively important point as it helped to round out the explaination as why Shebat was so desirable. She was wanted by all and sundry for her talents.
Warnings:
Violence
Sex scene
There’s a Bear in There (and he wants Swedish) – Merridy Eastman
Ahhh, some homegrown talent. This is going to be a challenging blog due to the subject matter. How to wreck a ‘G’ rating blog in one easy lesson. I promise to try and get back that ‘G’ rating fairly soon.
Merridy Eastman was born in Canberra and ended up in Sydney with a promising acting career that had stalled. She visited the job centre and found herself working in a brothel as a receptionist. Not a very promising premise for a book, but it comes out very well. I was very sad to finish this book and wanted it to go on forever. The writing was lively and engaging. The characters were drawn so nicely that I could just about see them in front of me and hear them. I’ve lead a sheltered life and I love reading biographies and autobiographies to find out about people. Normally I only learn about a handful of people but this book had such a plethora of personalities and so nicely drawn it was a gold mine and such a shame to finish.
Merridy makes no secret about her new job, she tells her flatmates all about it, she even tells her parents. She is very enthusiastic about it while her parents, although accepting of her decision, are rather more subdued. The enthusiasm for the job and for the girls she meets is wonderful to see and the whole book gives a totally new light to ‘working girls’.
A quick google indicates she had another book published in 2006 about her time in London and that she is writing another book about her life in Bavaria where she lives with her husband and child. I can’t wait to read these books.
Warnings: This seems so strange to be giving warnings about a book like this but there are many. Swear words galore, I was listening to an interview with Tony Martin about his new book A Nest of Occasionals who had been challenged by the number of swear words in his book so he counted them and came up with the grand total of 84 swear words. I couldn’t possibly count the swear words in There’s a Bear in There as I’d get distracted and end up reading the whole book again but I’m prepared to bet there’s far more than 84. There’s numerous references to sex in so many ways, it’s an education in itself but an education that can only be for the more mature, discerning reader.
Nullus Anxietas
There’s always something to talk about in the book world and sometimes it’s just a matter of making a decision. Today was no exception. In my yearly planner I have a note to tell me I missed Agatha Christie’s birthday yesterday (it does help if I actually look at the yearly planner), she would have been 119. Actually, looking at her age I think next year is a good year to plan something special. There’s something special about an age ending in zero even if the birthday recipient isn’t actually alive.
There’s numerous posts I’ve started so I don’t forget to write them and I could have chosen any of them including another book list, but today I’m going to say a few words about Nullus Anxietas.
For those who attended either Nullus Anxietas or Nullus Anxietas 2 you will know exactly what I’m talking about instantly. Unfortunately, there are many who didn’t have the pleasure and those people will need a slight explanation. Some years ago someone suggested an Australian Discworld Convention and the person they were speaking to said ‘good idea’ and then found himself head of a committee. Pat is a lovely, unassuming person and he was guiding the committee towards a weekend in 2006 when I found them. With a few ups and downs and a change of date to February 2007, the first Australian Discworld Convention: Nullus Anxietas happened. We had a wonderful time and managed to bring the author of the Discworld books,Terry Pratchett, from England for the weekend. Maybe that sentence should be written the other way round but it’s hard to choose which concept to put first when they’re as important as each other to me.
There was enough excitement and commitment to form another committee and run Nullus Anxietas 2 in February of this year. We were unable to bring Terry out to Australia for a second time due to his health challenges. I’m very excited to be able to announce that there was enough excitement and commitment to form another committee for Nullus Anxietas 3. This time it will be with a totally new committee as the enthusiastic people volunteering their time are in Sydney. Now, it’s very early days and the committee is still in the process of being formed but it does look very promising. Should you be in the Sydney vicinity and want to volunteer for the committee or volunteer for any of the numerous little jobs that will need doing you can email Tania. If you live elsewhere in Australia (or anywhere else) I’m sure they’ll be looking for people to help with publicity and they’ll certainly be looking for topics and presenters.
Longitude by Dava Sobel about John Harrison
This is the story of how John Harrison solved the greatest scientific problem of his time, how to find longitude. His clocks are works of genius and artistry and he was truly an amazing person. Yes, I have read this book, I really enjoyed it and learned an enormous amount about the struggles he went through and the politics of the time. It felt like an extension of the program on the ABC called Longitude.
You can find this book for sale at Suz’s Space.
Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley is one of those classics. It is a book that you have to read at some stage in your life, you may not necessarily enjoy it, but it is important. I started reading it with some trepidation as I’d started and abandoned another of his books earlier this year. I actually managed to finish this book and was quite pleased about it, but I’m not sure I enjoyed it. It was quite challenging with some of it’s concepts, most especially as we live in a world where recycling is the norm and those who don’t are looked upon very strangely. Let me set the picture for you.
It’s set some time in the future where people are totally brainwashed. Recycling, even reusing, is something that just doesn’t happen. If you need clean clothes you just buy them. Things generally don’t get used more than once as buying creates jobs and that means more people are employed. People are conditioned from birth to believe that they shouldn’t lead solitary lives and they shouldn’t be monogamous. Actually, they’re conditioned with these ideas and many others from conception, while conception through to birth happens in a ‘test tube’. People who somehow break out of this mold are looked upon as very strange. The lead character had something happen to him in the ‘test tube’, he he got the wrong level of chemical and that lead to some ‘pecularities’ in his personality that didn’t mesh with society. He tried to do things that were different and that lead to his demise. This included a trip to another part of the world where things were more like they are today and the society there was considered backwards.
Things that didn’t sit well with me were the assumptions Huxley made about this society he created. While I liked the idea that everyone was concerned about everyone else being employed I didn’t like the waste this created. I recycle, reuse and reduce as much as possible and I found it really upset me to read of things being thrown out as they’d been used once. I didn’t like the pack mentality this society had, everything had to be done together. They had communal bathrooms, they talked about the people they, and others, had slept with as if it was the right thing to do, as if it was wrong to be with one person for more than a week. The conditioning really worried me. I don’t like being told what to do and this conditioning amounted to that. They would listen to certain phrases a certain number of times while they slept to ensure they were conditioned to be like everyone else. The phrases they listened to depended on where they were in the hierarchy which in turn depended on which chemical they were given before birth. In other words, their caste was determined before their birth and they were conditioned to liking and enjoying this status.
This whole concept left me feeling very uncomfortable. I know this book is tongue in cheek and is hitting out at the society Huxley lived in at the time, that’s the only saving grace of the whole book. I strongly recommend this book even if you don’t normally read science fiction due to it’s discussion of society. If you’ve already read this book I’d like to hear your comments about it.