Well, Iain Banks is pretty smart: confirmed twice in one night.

2) Anansi Boys, by Neil Gaiman.

Previously noted by here, here, and Cheryl Morgan. (No serious spoilers on any of those.)

I love Neil Gaiman’s writing, though I was disappointed to discover that both American Gods and Coraline had hidden shallows, in that neither of them moved very far from his previous work, and neither had a really profound message despite the flashy packaging. Anansi Boys is different, taking a new look at Gaiman’s old themes of family, death, divinity and identity and doing it very well, with an impressive dollop of humour throughout. I creased up with laughter at the story about President Taft in the first few pages (OK, my sense of humour is peculiar) and basically couldn’t put the book down last night once I had started it properly. Yeah, it takes a wee while to get going (the plot only really takes off on page 146, when Daisy goes to work); yeah, the fact that all our characters are going to converge in the same place at the end is signalled so far in advance that I don’t think saying so can possibly count as a spoiler (but at least that makes it look more like Fate than Coincidence); yeah, it’s a bit corny that I got the “special edition” a la DVD (with a deleted scene, author’s note book, interview with the author, and discussion questions to make sure you’re read it properly); but I loved it. Cheryl’s prediction that it will win lots of awards is, I suspect, a good call.

I loved the central premise of the two brothers, one divine, one human. (In some accounts there are classical precedents, Castor and Pollux, Helen and Clytemnestra, but it’s never a central feature of the stories.) OK, perhaps it is then fairly obvious that the divine brother will discover his human side, and the human brother his divine side, but it worked for me. I am amused that they have much the same origin as the two Xanders in Buffy 5.03, “The Replacement”; do we know if Neil Gaiman is/was a Buffy fan?

Taleswapper complains that “Much like in Neverwhere, he starts with a character who is obviously entangled with the wrong woman, he isn’t really aware of it (though everybody else is), and it takes external forces to make him see the truth and rescue him from the horror of a woman.” The complaint is I think tongue-in-cheek, but I’d like to defend Gaiman against it anyway. Rosie is not a “horror” (though her mother certainly is), and in fact she ends up with a slightly different version of Charlie anyway. She too is drawn into the world of the gods and tested, whereas Jessica in Neverwhere is simply a cipher for the mundane world, rather more two-dimensional than Graham Coates here.

I wasn’t completely sure about one aspect of the book. Until I read the last of the “Discussion Questions” at the end it hadn’t really occurred to me that Charlie and Spider were both black, even though it is pretty obvious that their father was and Daisy is, and Rosie, I suppose, probably isn’t. (And Neil Gaiman thanks Nalo Hopkinson for help with the Caribbean dialogue, and Lenny Henry for general inspiration, so I am obviously very stupid.) Ursula Le Guin tackles this in a rather different way in the Earthsea books (see her furious reaction to the TV version in Slate and Locus), by telling us that most of the characters are not white and letting us just get on with it. Having grown up as an (admittedly white) minority in a divided and disputed territory myself, I do wonder whether Gaiman’s portrayal of what it is like to be black in Florida, London or the Caribbean really rings true; it almost feels as if the characters are “colour-blind”, apart from Rosie’s awful mother. But I am not really qualified to judge that.

Apparently Lenny Henry is going to read the audio-book. I’m not into those as a rule, but I just might get this one.

Getting 17 out of 18 questions right on “Sex and the City, Series 3” as your specialist subject is rather naff. The only thing that is more naff is to then get only one question right in the general knowledge round, a sign perhaps that one needs to turn off the television, and read some of these things called books. (Or indeed just look at a map – when the first general knowledge question, “What continent are the Kalahari and Namib deserts in?” elicited a look of horrified incomprehension, I knew Iain Banks was pretty safe.)

Good for Banksie. Though he was taking a wild guess about the Planet Venus.

University Challenge coming up next.

Career: Determined to make serious efforts here. None of last year’s leads has really come to anything. I need to sit down and work through What Color is Your Parachute again, and then devote some more time to working out what sort of organisation I would like to work for.

Family: Not bad. We have managed to watch two whole Buffy seasons, and Firefly. I wish we had more regular babysitting arrangements, and that we could get out to the cinema more reliably.

Work: Yuck. Of the five non-field office reports of six months ago, I still have Albania, Moldova and Cyprus hanging over me, and only Macedonia (a new one) is near completion. That’s very depressing. The field offices performed well, with three from the Caucasus, and two each from James and Alex though the Kosovo one is frustratingly delayed. I allowed myself to get into a real panic/depression about it at the end of last year. Need to watch out for that. Should be possible to clear all three of Albania, Moldova and Cyprus and get the usual office cycle in motion for the summer. And with any luck by then I should be on my way somewhere else.

Elections site: Well, ARK have put in for a decent bit of funding for it, so that may just work. Otherwise there is not much to do this coming year.

Reading and SF: Detailed goals set. The only one from six months ago that I met was Babel-17. I still owe half a dozen reviews to Keith Brooke. I also would like to do a couple more in my Hugo/Nebula series: next up is Grotto of the Dancing Deer. I also have vague ideas of attending the EasterCon and P-Con III, and even also MeCon in the summer. This may be too ambitious.

Other: We seem to have actually got the pension stuff sorted at last. I would like to learn a bit more Russian. Must sort that out; it shouldn’t be impossible to finally finish that Oxford course this year.

Happy birthday, !
Happy birthday, !

Bloody hell.

One particular draft report has been the bane of my existence for the last several months. A decent draft was submitted to me the day of my car accident back in October. I wasn’t properly functioning again until the start of November, and after that it was pushed to the end of the queue by more urgent deadlines for other things (all of which were, with difficulty, met). By December it needed more updating, and the field office duly did so. At that point the boss decided that it needed massive restructuring. I was supposed to do that before Christmas, but couldn’t find the energy. I did take Friday and half of Saturday out of my holiday and completed the restructuring and sent it back to the field for final amendments.

Now the field guy has sent me a response pointing out that he has another deadline from me to meet on 20 January and doubting that he will be abel to meet it if he has to concentrate on finalising the first report in the meantime. Problem is, I think he is probably right; and it’s largely my own fault for not turning the previous drafts round in time.

I hate the way I spend too much of my precious family time in this job working hard to meet deadlines that turn out to be illusory.

1) God’s Clockmaker: Richard of Wallingford and the Invention of Time, by John North.

So as one year turns to another, I’ve returned to a youthful passion: the fourteenth century scholar Richard of Wallingford, who as Abbot of St Albans designed an elaborate astronomical clock capable of predicting lunar eclipses, as chronicled once again by John North, who published the definitive edition of Richard of Wallingford’s works thirty years ago, and here attempts to give a more accessible account (at a cost of £15 rather than the £400 that the 1976 version will cost you).

I’m sorry to say that I don’t think he has succeeded. The first half of the book, a biographical treatment of Richard and his times, just somehow doesn’t sparkle; lots of detailed description, but I came away without really much of a feeling of context, or even of the internal chronology of the eight years of his time as abbot up to his early death (he was not yet 45).

In addition, North is very much an old school historian of science. He goes out of his way to reject two ideas that I wrote about while doing my M Phil – first, that the technology of the watermills so important to the monastery’s finances might have had some relevance to the construction the clock (this on p 195 despite the evidence offered in his own footnote 98 on page 395) and second, that there was any economic motive whatsoever in trying to regulate time by building clocks (see pp 219-220). I don’t claim ownership of (or even particular attachment to) either idea, but I think North’s arguments against in both cases are poor, and it feels a bit as if he is taking an ineffective swing at the whole concept of sociology of knowledge.

There are some annoying slips in presentation as well, most of them minor, but one particularly tantalising – note 21 on p 387 refers to text on page 59, but the marker for note 21 is way back on page 34 and comes after a completely irrelevant paragraph; working out what is going on is rather reminiscent of North’s own description of putting together Richard of Wallingford’s plans for the clock from the much hacked-about surviving manuscript in the Bodleian.

Having said all that, most of the second half of the book provides a completely superb summary of the state of knowledge in medieval physics, tackling not just astronomy but also optics, theories of motion, and the intellectual legacy of Aristotle, and the transmission of learning from the Arab world via Al-Andalus and Sicily in as lucid a presentation as I have read. To be honest one would happily pay the cover price for a text book including just those chapters. If ever I go back to my medieval research I’ll take the astronomy chapter as a starting point.