I just discovered Bill and Bull, a double planet orbiting Delta Eridani. Oh, ok, so I didn’t literally discover it — astronomers from Uppsala University did. Isn’t that marvellous? Discovering a double planet and naming the constituents Bill and Bull.

And for those readers who were not raised on a diet of Swedish childrens’ literature: Bill and Bull were twin cats who were the minions of the nasty cat Måns, nemesis of Pelle Svanslös (Peter No-tail in the English translations of the books). Bill and Bull were always seen together, and always said the same things, generally echoing what Måns said (and often getting it oh so slightly wrong). Especially Bull had no imagination of his own, he’d repeat everything Bill said, and so in Swedish, “X, said Bull” has become a means of emphasising that X is rather obvious.

Bill and Bull as a double planet. Excellent. I’ll sleep well tonight.

This is a meme imported from LiveJournal; since I don’t use my LJ account other than to comment others’ posts, I’ll do the meme here.

The Instructions:

1. Go look at The Guardian’s list of 30 books UK librarians think everyone should read. Copy the full list. Bold the books you read and liked, strike out the ones you read and HATED, and italicize the ones you read and don’t care one way or the other about. Only count books/series you’ve actually finished; don’t even think about movie versions. (Parenthetical comments are optional but welcome!)

2. For every book you crossed out, list another book you’d rather have seen on the list instead. Feel free to add more if you want to.

* To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (I could talk at length about why I disliked it so much, but I won’t, not in this post anyway.)
* The Bible (I have read maybe three quarters of the Old Testament, and all of NT)
* The Lord of the Rings Trilogy by JRR Tolkien
* 1984 by George Orwell
* A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
* Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte (I didn’t like it much but nor did I hate it. It was rather boring, with uninteresting characters.)
* Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
* All Quiet on the Western Front by E M Remarque (the list actually said “All Quite on the Western Front”!)
* His Dark Materials Trilogy by Phillip Pullman (have read the first two books twice. Both times I lost interest completely in the second half of book two. I’m not even curious to find out how it ends.)
* Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks
* The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
* The Lord of the Flies by William Golding
* The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon
* Tess of the D’urbevilles by Thomas Hardy
* Winnie the Pooh by AA Milne
* Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
* The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Graham
* Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell (The first novel I read in English. I was 13, IIRC. Re-reading it as an adult I didn’t like it as much, I must admit.)
* Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
* The Time Traveller’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
* The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold
* The Prophet by Khalil Gibran (have only read parts of it but like it well enough.)
* David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
* The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho (Nothing I have heard about this book has made me want to read it… how can it be on this list?)
* The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
* Life of Pi by Yann Martel
* Middlemarch by George Eliot
* The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
* A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
* A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzenhitsyn

I would replace To Kill a Mockingbird by…
* The Long Ships by Frans G Bengtsson.

Ära vare glad!! I have wished for years and years to get hold of the Tove Jansson Moomin comic in its English-language original form; Tove made the comic for the Evening Standard and its original language was English. I have only read it in Swedish translation, an excellent translation to be sure (since Tove naturally translated it herself) but as I say, I have wanted to read the original as well. When I was a kid, before I knew it was originally in English, I used to wonder why the props in the comic strips always had English text: “Explosives”, for instance, or “Mixed Seeds”.

Now, the Canadian publisher Drawn and Quarterly are publishing Tove’s comics in five books; the first one is already available. I need to get hold of it. By hook or by crook. (Or by buying it, probably.)

A note for the bibliographically inclined: the Moomin comic is episodic in nature, with long finished story arcs. Tove wrote and drew the comic from 1954 until 1959; then she and her brother Lars worked together on a few episodes, after which he took over and drew and wrote it until 1975. Their styles are not identical, nor are their storylines. I like them both. Drawn and Quarterly’s publication appears to be only the Tove strips.

I re-read Briar Rose by Jane Yolen the other day. (It’s not a slow read - didn’t take much longer than the return trip to work to finish it.)

I really recommend that novel. It’s labelled Young Adult, and some aspects of it are defeinitely geared to a 16-year-old readership; but it is very, very readable for adults as well. The story is a retelling of the Sleeping Beauty tale in the context of the Holocaust. It is very dark, of course, although it takes place in the 1990s rather than the 1940s, which allows for some hope. There is no revelling in grisly detail, but there is certainly some very nightmarish stuff there. I have since read up a little on Chelmno. The information on the site I just linked to is terrible beyond belief, and beyond words. Still, it is what happened. And that was only one of the camps.

But I digress. As I say, Briar Rose doesn’t leave the reader with a feeling of hopelessness. I think that’s important, for hopelessness is no fertile ground for making things better. Some things in the novel are better than other things, such as the slightly unnecessary-feeling love story (that’s definitely aimed at the 16-year-old element in the audience!) but on the whole it’s just a really, really good book. Of course it has its detractors. People who think that judging other people based on their sexuality is more important than condemning genocide, have burnt the book because, among other things, it portrays a homosexual man who was persecuted and sent to a camp by the nazis. (Yes, it does mention that he was in bed with other men, although in extremely non-explicit terms.) I think I’ve said this before: Sometimes it’s good to find that you disagree with certain people. Such as the people who burnt Briar Rose.

It is that time of year, again, and I signed up for it, again. Last year I got a Glen Cook and a David Crystal, the year before I got two Arthur Ransome novels… I have been spoilt!

I refer, of course, to Secret Santa, where you receive gifts from your Amazon Wishlist (mine is linked over there to the left!) and send something to somebody else, from their list. I remember a couple of years ago trying to explain to some people that no, it is not a zero-sum game, it’s not the same as buying yourself something from your own list. Of course you’ll get something you want and that you explicitely asked for, that’s why you have it on your list - but the whole point is getting surprised by which item the secret Santa picks! And of course getting to pick something for somebody else, that you know they want. It’s not a zero-sum game - more like a win-win situation.

It is odd, for it is so utterly irrational, but I really can’t stop digging in this.

A few years ago, a few people interested in boosting one author’s sales started writing lots of glowing reviews of his work. The author in question has never been accepted by a publisher, and publishes his own work at a small press publishing house. The review campaign was very blatantly carried out, to the point where several people remarked on it, here is one comment, and here another one. (Follow those two links - they will explain the background.) In both cases, the author of the comment was suddenly and unpleasantly reminded of the story a few weeks ago. David Langford got his web archive removed after Glasgow University took fright by a vague email from somebody claiming to be a lawyer, and Stephen Leigh was himself contacted by the same pretend lawyer. Rather unpleasant stuff, and this is why I don’t want to write the author’s name in this blog.

In the years between, the review campaigns have continued. Those reviews I’ve seen that appear honest give his work very poor reviews indeed, and the author is largely unknown, I have never seen his books being sold at sf conventions, for instance. That could just be because I didn’t know the name until reading about the fraud, though.

Anyway, that is all just background. What is odd is not the man’s, or his publisher’s, or maybe even a small group of fanatic readers’ attempts to raise the sales by dishonest methods. People are what they are after all. No, but I get this urge to go to Amazon.com^* myself and start writing scathingly bad reviews of the author’s work. Even though I’ve never read them, and I don’t expect I ever will. Really, how does it impact my life if people buy the books by this man? It’s not as if that will make Lynn Flewelling or Steven Brust or Jane Yolen, to name but three genuinely good authors whose books I love, disappear from the shelves. The rational thing would be to read the reports, shake my head and forget about it. But as I say, I’m morbidly fascinated by this whole thing and just can’t stop digging.

No, I haven’t written any bad reviews, of course not. I wouldn’t be surprised if, by now, some of the really negative words are as fake as the really positive words, however. People being what they are.

^*Amazon.com, online bookseller, where customers can write reviews and rate books using a five-star rating system. Books with a high rating will show as recommendations, I think, and so be more likely to sell then low-rated books, all else being equal.

So much happened and each thing could fill an entire posting.

Eastercon, of course. Paragon 2 in Hinckley; a little thinner in the programme department than usual, but that didn’t bother me overly. Our finances being better than they have been since I started the PhD, we allowed ourselves a larger budget for books: here is the result. (Several of the book dealers offered to buy us drinks. Fancy that.)

Teddy was at the convention, which was fun - the last Eastercon we both went to was in 2000. The hotel was good, high standard, very friendly staff, plentiful meals. And a leisure centre where we went to swim on most days.

However, as it is now bedtime, the rest will have to wait. Then you might find out why they now call me Der Flabberghast.

Am old. Have received many cool and interesting things; for instance some really nice hand-made chocolate and The Merlin Conspiracy by D W Jones, from Johan, Hy Brasil by M Elphinstone, from Kicki, Not the End of the World, by K Atkinson, from CdM, and a cuddly bathrobe from my aunts. Oaktree sent me ButtonMen and my parents gave me a very nice picture.

And from Miranda, I got Olof!

Eep - what will I read on the train? I have four books in my bag but have just read three of them and almost finished the fourth. . . aaargh! How could I not think of that this morning??

Er. Hold on, I work in a library, don’t I. OK, I suppose I might just find something I can borrow and read. . .

Am reading Minette Walters’ Acid Row which is a very dark book indeed. It’s not, strictly spoken, a crime story so much as a thriller, but it is constructed much in the same way as a crime novel: the very first lines tell of the outcome (paraphrased: “the rioters started to scatter as news of the killings spread. . .”) and then the book concerns the where, how and why of the riots and the killings. There is another plot thread as well, which does and doesn’t concern the main plot, and that’s a rather more traditional policework thread which actually doesn’t interest me much. I suppose it would have on its own, but taken against the main storyline and characters it pretty much only removes from the book. Then again, it’s the basis for everything that happens so it’s not irrelevant, only not as engaging as the rest.

The Shape of Snakes depressed me very much; I haven’t finished Acid Row yet so I can’t say whether it will, too; it certainly doesn’t leave me cold, though.