90 Books for 2008 - December

[xenith]

My final 90 Books for 2008 update!


100 Disasters That Shook the World, Nigel Cawthorne

My review of this took almost as long to write as the book did to read. Actually, no it didn't. The book took forever to finish, the review took about an hour or so.

Now I am actually finished.

I could complain about the many errors -- missing words, extra words, misspellings. Or grumble about the ones that sound interesting but end when you turn the page. Or wonder about the odd categorisation of some of the disasters (e.g. Krakatoa comes under Tsunamis). Or why some "disasters" were even included. Or why the article headings don't always match the contents (e.g. Soufriere, Montserrat 1997 has half a page on Montserrat and three plus pages on a similarly named volcano on St Vincent).

But my biggest complaint is mentioned on the back page, and I didn't realise. The blurb on the back says, in part, "The book includes some of history's most incredible disasters and tells in vivid detail the story of events and people involved, the impact of particular disasters and the destruction and sorrow they left in their wake. From the eruption of Vesuvius and destruction of Pompeii, to the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, from the flames of the Great Fire of London to the horror of Chernobyl, every event is chronicled in fascinating detail."

You see, detail is obviously used here as a synonym for numbers. I'll take a random page:

(Oops, a two page photo of Titanic; I will admit the photos in this book are interesting, it's a pity they don't always come with useful captions. Another random page then.)

The tsunami set out across the Pacific Ocean at a speed of 400 miles an hour. When it stuck Hilo in Hawaii fourteen hours after the initial shock, the waves were still thirty-four feet high. Sixty-one people were killed, 282 injured and $24 million worth of damage done.

Eight hours later, when the tsunami reached Japan it was just twelve feet high. But this was enough to hurl large fishing boats 150 feet inland. One hundred and eighty people were killed. There was $450 million worth of property damage done and the livelihoods of 150,000 people were affected. Another 258 people were killed in the Philippines.

No, I didn't deliberately find this page. It was a random opening. Further on the same page, but in Peru now:

At 3.23 pm on 31 May 1970, a fault ruptured under the Pacific floor some fifteen miles off the coast of Peru. The shock registered 7.75 on the Richter scale. The resulting earthquake set off avalanches and landslides in the Andes, which killed some 66,794 people and left more than half-a-million people homeless.

The worst by far occurred on the slopes of Nevado de Huascaran, Peru's highest mountain, some seventy miles inland. The shaking lasted forty-five seconds. Then there was a loud explosion as a giant part of western slope broke away. A slab of ice and rock as much as a hundred-feet thick, covering the side of the mountain from 18,000 to 21,000 feet, fell over a thousand feet before it hit the lower slopes scoping (sic) up more rock and snow. This created an avalanche over seven miles long. Some 2.5 billion cubic feet of snow, ice, rock and mud travelling at up to 210 miles an hour slid into the Rio Santa Valley, burying over 25,000 people.

Later in that same article, which is just over half a page long:

An earthquake on 13-15 August 1863 is believed to have killed 25,000. Another 25,000 were thought to have died in the region in 1892. Some 200 to 300 were killed by an earthquake in Lima on 25 May 1940, with another reported 5,000 injuries in the port of Callao. An earthquake in the department of Ancash to the north claimed some 700 lives in 10-13 November 1946 and over 100 were killed the Cuzco earthquake of 12 May 1950. On 13 January 1960, strong earthquakes killed more than 2,000 people and did hundreds of millions of pounds worth of damage.

Enough, really. Some numbers are good, they put things into perspective but throw in too many, and it just obscures things. Throw in even more and who the fuck cares? Really?

It's not all bad though. It's a good starting point for further research into particular events, or as an example of how to leach anything of interest out of a disaster story.

The Penelopiad, Margaret Atwood

I picked this up from a 5 for $25 table out the front of A&R, although I only ended up with 3. This one I chose because it is short. As it turns out, that is its best quality.

Playing Beatie Bow, Ruth Park

What is it with kids books that spend the first few pages introducing the character, their family, their situation, their life history before getting onto the story? Don't do it, OK?

I thought I'd read this, but what I thought I remembered isn't in the book. However there is bit in the last chapter that seems familiar. I don't know :)

The main character, Abigail, is 14 for most of the book, and 18 for the last chapter or two. I guess it's a coming of age book. She changes from being a self-centred child who is pissed off at her parents for trying to ruin her life (twice!) to a young adult who is more understanding about love and people in general.

The story is set in Sydney's Rocks area, at the base of the Bridge, in the MC's present (where it's a trendy, upmarket district with antique shops and fancy apartment towers) and 1873 (when it was home to the lowest classes). The author manages to not mention what year the MC is living in at the time of the story. I thought it might have been 1973, but the book was published in 1980 from memory, which stops the book becoming dated. It could just as easily be this year.

I don't know if the book still has the same appeal to young and pre-teens that it did when first published. I don't see why it shouldn't. The issues it deals with are sirely still relevant to teenagers (dealing with parents & first love). There are still few books set in Australia (esp historical). And it has the age old appeal of an ordinary kid having extraordinary adventures.

Specimen Days, Michael Cunningham

The newsagent near the supermarket has a table out the front with books for $6. (For the benefits of USians, especially those who whine about having to pay $6 for a paperback, the usual price for a paperback is something like $20.) I picked this one up because I liked the cover, having never heard of the book or the author. None of this gave me much hope that I'd enjoy reading the thing. So I was pleasantly surprised. Very pleasantly surprised. Possibly this one of favourite books for the year.

Despite this, I don't recommend picking up books with cool covers from clearance tables as a reliable way of getting decent reading material.


Thieves' World 10: Aftermath, Robert Lynn Asprin

This has been sitting around the house for months, waiting for me to read #9, but #9 had disappeared. It turned up at the beginning of December and I discovered that I'd already read it back in June. So I finally read #10.

This was qiute dull in the middle, and the other stories were just the same-old

It only took me 2 weeks.

Maybe this traumatised me, or it might have been trying to get novel edit finished before Christmas, but it almost a week before I picked up anything else to read. The end of the year was closing quickly and I was still two books short.

On December the 30th, I was still two books short of 90. As the day drew to a close, I was two-thirds through

The Tough Guide to Fantasyland, Diana Wynne Jones

and almost halfway through

Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen

I was fairly certain I could one of them finished by the following day, but not both. It was time for emergency measures -- finding a book short enough to read in a night that wouldn't seem like a cheat.

I even went as far as checking out the back bookself, the one with the kids books and other books that I don't expect to ever actually read. And there, sitting the second shelf, I found a "One Day I Might Read It" book that I'd bought years ago for 20c. These ODIMRI book were the reason I did this challenge thing in the first place, so it was certainly eligible to be counted.

So an hour later*, I'd finished

Jonathan Livingston Seagull, Richard Bach

and the next day I knocked off the last 50 pages of the Tough Guide ("It's a fun book to dip into. Not really designed to be read from cover to cover though.") to bring the total up to 90!!


It took a little over an hour, because I stopped in the middle to do word counts on e-texts of 19th century novels. Pride and Prejudice is 120,000 words using the word processor count, and that was significantly shorter than anything else I measured (except War of the Worlds which was about 60K IIRC). And people claim novels these days are getting longer?