Tag: Books

Book Review: And the Land Lay Still by James Robertson

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Since moving to Scotland I haven’t done quite as much reading (we’ve had a busy first ten months here).  However, I was recommended “And the Land Lay Still” by James Robertson, a Scottish author, in order to better understand Scottish culture, the Scottish psyche, and the context surrounding Scotland’s current drive for independance in 2014.

For the Americans (non-UKers) reading this, Scotland is currently debating seccession from the United Kingdom.  It’s a complicated issue spurred along by the Scottish National Party (SNP), a once-fringe political party that started in the thirties.   Having succeeded in winning control of Scottish paliament, their attention has now turned to scheduling a referendum in 2014.  This will be the 700th anniversary of the battle of Bannockburn in 1314, one of the greatest victories in the First War of Scottish Independence.  You’ll remember this battle as the last scene in Braveheart where Robert the Bruce rallies the troops in William Wallace’s memory and charges down the hill.

Braveheart has been labeled one of the most innacurate movies of all time, but this battle was truly epic.  The English had assembled a “grand feudal army, one of the last of its kind of leave England in the Middle Ages,” which consisted of 2-3,000 horse, and 16,000 foot soldiers.  The Scots had two to three times fewer men.  During the battle, “one of the most memorable episodes in Scottish history” occured when a fully armored English knight astride a great war horse saw Robert the Bruce in the field and charged him.  The Scottish king was on a small palfrey, unarmored, and had only a battle axe, but he stood his ground against the charge, and hit the knight so hard with his battle axe that he “split his helmet and head in two”.  This battlefield event ignited the watching Scot army and spurred them to victory.  While the King was rebuked by his commanders for riding out in the thick of battle in such a dangerous fashion, he claimed that his only regret was that he had broken his axe due to the force of the blow.  Today the Scottish national anthem “Flower of Scotland” refers to this victory.

Even against this incredible backdrop, and despite current prevailing Scottish attitudes towards the English, were the vote to be held today, a majority would vote for remaining within the United Kingdom.  The almost continuous history of conflict between the two nations notwithstanding, there is a deep aversion to independance that prevails, and the SNP now finds itself as the majority party trying to navigate between its demands for a referendum and the realities of current polling data.

Back to the book.

This is a beautifully written book, and it’s no surprise given the author’s background as a poet who studied the literature of Sir Walter Scot at the University of Edinburgh.  He paints a surreal cast of characters that are situated against a tapestry of modern Scottish history spanning from the nineteen fifties to present day.  His descriptions and prose are well suited to the heavyweight themes that he deals with, and I found myself intrigued that an author of this quality could be a virtual unknown in the States.

This is a difficult book to read, with many difficult characters, plot points, and no real resolution.  You’re taken on a trip of exploration through the psyche of a nation that’s been torn by war for thousands of years, (not fully) reconciled for hundreds, and now finds that reconciliation starting to fray around the edges.  And yet, if you were to pick this book up with the expectation of it taking you step by step through the arguments, and the background, and the history, you’d be misled – this book is about Scotland and its independence but you have to look through the lens of the characters and the last fifty years, and many questions are left unanswered.

The book takes you from character to character along the last sixty years of Scotland’s history, touching on many different political events and trends that were foreign to me, and I found myself quite often researching the instances.  The coal miner’s strike.  Closing of the shipyards in Glasgow.  The poll tax.  The questionable death of an SNP party member.  The theft of the Stone of Destiny (Stone of Scone).  Council houses.  The problem of drugs.  Immigration of foreigners. Scottish attitudes towards homsexuality.

This was an extremely moving book for someone with (however remote) Scottish heritage.  There was something about the underlying sorrow that runs through the stories, history, and characters that tugged at me while reading, and I finished the book in roughly a week, despite its length.

This is not a book I’d recommend unless you’re ready for a tough time, introspection, uncomfortable topics, dark characters, and a less than clear conclusion.

Ultimately, I feel like this is an important book for those wanting to learn more about what makes up this ancient country and what still influences it today.  It hints at what conspires within its people to produce so many great things yet be so self critical and pessimistic.  Don’t expect an easy ride – but it will be beautiful, sorrowful, touching, and memorable, if not a little wistful.

Book Review: The Trinity Six by Charles Cumming

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Note: I’ve previously read and reviewed two other books by Charles Cumming here.

Charles Cumming is an interesting author, someone I happened to find recommended to me via Amazon.com’s engine, probably because I’ve bought books about Spain and China where two of his other books are set.  I read both these books while traveling in Europe and enjoyed his style of equally focusing on setting and story.  You really live in the environment with those books, and I had The Trinity Six on preorder after that experience.

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The Trinity Six, I’ll admit, was a little hard for me to get into.  Being an American, I just wasn’t as familiar with the Cambridge Five incident from the UK, and I often felt like you needed to really have a better grasp of the weight of that event to fully appreciate the idea that there may have been a sixth agent involved in the ring.

Cumming seems to be a student of the John le Carré school of spy fiction writing, and having never read le Carré before, he got me to download one of his books on the Kindle, which I slogged through and although I tried valiantly, I eventually lost interest.  The idea is to provide a realistic counterweight to the over-the-top James Bond tendencies you see in movies and focus more on plausible espionage plots.  In this, Cumming betters his hero (at least as far as I can tell from my admittedly small sample size).

The plot of the book is interesting – an academic finds himself hurtling along an investigation that involves Russian interest and geopolitical consequences, and the gritty scenes do the job well.  Still, I felt that Cumming almost tried to focus less on the descriptions of the scenes for the books – again perhaps because his readers in the UK would know what London is like and probably have visited Budapest and Vienna.  As a sheltered American, I need more.

All in all, I think this is a book that has merit, but hopefully the next will incorporate the setting more, something Cumming is a master at.  My last major criticism of his previous books (of using the verb “to sink” a drink) was rectified in this outing, and I like to think I had something to do with it.  Regardless, I’ll preorder his next work sight unseen.  If you like spy novels that don’t involve lunatic unrealism, The Trinity Six is a good outing and a quick read.

Some Quick Thoughts on the Kindle

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I got an iPad for Christmas.  For me, it was a relatively simple decision.  I fly/travel a lot and was burning a lot of space carting books around, especially newer hard cover books.  I also already use an iPhone 4G and have been extremely happy with the platform and device, so I was excited to see a lot of my favorite applications make their way to the iPad.  Essentially, I was looking for an eReader that had good battery life (at least 8 hours) which would provide flexibility to do other things.  This ruled out the Kindle eInk device and the Nook but I felt like the Kindle bookstore was more mature, had better selection, and was more portable (available on more devices).  All of my iPad reading is done with the Kindle application.The Kindle application ecosystem has gotten a lot of things right.

  • The highlighting is a killer feature.  Read a book, non-destructively highlight it, view your highlights on kindle.amazon.com.  This makes note taking SO much faster, easier, and portable.
  • The device syncing is fantastic.  I generally will read on the iPad most places but read on my phone if I’m biking at the gym.  The iPhone app syncs up where I left off and I don’t have to think about it.  Yes, this is a little feature and an obvious one, but it makes a big difference.
  • The book selection is very good.  Only when I’m trying to find more esoteric books is it a problem, and then I dutifully click “Tell the Publisher”.  Amazon should give you an email when it becomes available, but they don’t seem to do that right now.
  • The desktop applications are nice and consistent with the mobile applications.
  • The one-click buying is ridiculously convenient, and the books downloads almost instant.
  • Page turns are instant, and pleasant.
  • The built-in (and offline) dictionary is used a lot more than I thought it would be.

The Kindle software needs to improve on a few things:

  • I can’t find a good way to export all of my annotations in plain text.  I’m wondering if this is some sort of DRM policy to prevent people from highlighting the entire book (which I haven’t tried) then exporting it.  Anyway, I have to copy and paste my highlights directly from the web page right now which is not the end of the world, but is annoying.
  • It’s super annoying that the iOS Amazon application doesn’t include the Kindle eBook store.  You have to use your web browser to hit the store and purchase a book.  It literally does not exist within the mainline iOS Amazon app.  Search for a book there and it won’t show you if it’s available on the Kindle.
  • Their DRM policy is really stupid.  This is something everyone says to me when I mention I use a Kindle.  Almost all DRM complaints would go away if Amazon let you do an time unlimited lend of a book to another account which prevented you from reading that title while it’s lent out.  Currently they let you do one lend (total, ever, never to be lent to someone else after that one-time lend) for up to 14 days.  Stupid, stupid, stupid.  My response to those complaining about these restrictions is that it’s relatively simple to strip the DRM, and just like that, Amazon is only hurting it’s paying customers and providing an incentive not to buy and to pirate.
  • The Kindle app should start supporting every file format out there that’s available.  I know they’re starting to do this, but seriously, what’s the holdup?

Things I’m unsure about / haven’t tried yet.

  • It’s unclear to me how PDFs work.  I’ve got a bunch that I’d like to have for reference, etc., and locally manage (or access via Dropbox), and you can’t just drag a PDF into the app and have it show up on your device.  Very annoying.  I get that there’s some sort of post-processing that needs to happen for eInk devices, but it seems like this could all be easier.  Maybe you could post-process yourself on your desktop app and save everyone the trouble.
  • Haven’t done much note taking.  I’ve found note taking to be almost unnecessary when you can just highlight content and move on.

Parting ThoughtIf I was involved in an eInk company today, I’d be doing everything I could to bridge the “tactile gap” that still exists for most people.  The Wife has emphatically stated that reading for her is half tactile.  She likes the page turning.  The physical pages.  The weight of the book.  The smell.  She’s like an alcoholic who loves everything about the experience: the glass, the ice, the sound of the pour, the smell.  It’s easy to dismiss this as a triviality but it’s going to be a long-term battle for the next twenty years at least.  The company that can make an eInk page that feels like paper inside a book with pages to turn might have a shot at interesting these people.  Nice leather cover, plenty of pages (a thousand?) to accomodate 95% of books out there.  Pages to turn, etc.  It’d be like the book lover’s smokeless cigarette.Maybe I’m just out to lunch, but I’d love to see a double-blind study with a well-worn eInk “book” compared to a normal book and see if people could tell the difference or would care.