(FX Drum Roll) The next Discworld novel will be… RAISING STEAM.
— Terry Pratchett (@terryandrob) March 8, 2013
But
We have to make it clear that there’s no date for publication, no deadline and no you can’t pre-order yet because we haven’t finished it.
— Terry Pratchett (@terryandrob) March 8, 2013
Exciting news regardless!
An Uncertain Place by Fred Vargas
Synopsis
Commissaire Adamsberg has left Paris for a police conference in London, accompanied by anglophile Commandant Danglard and Estalere, a young sergeant. The city offers a welcome change of scenery until a gruesome discovery is made – just outside the gates of Highgate Cemetery a pile of shoes, all containing severed feet, is found.
Returning to Paris, the three men are then confronted with the violent killing and dismemberment of a wealthy, elderly man. Both the dead man’s son and gardener have motives for murder, but soon another candidate for the killing emerges. As Adamsberg investigates the links between these two unsettling crimes, he puts himself at terrible risk.
Comments/Thoughts/Analysis
An Uncertain Place is the sixth novel to feature the peculiar detective Commissaire Adamsberg and perhaps is Vargas’s strangest to date. The several pairs of shoes that trigger this strange series of events doesn’t really give an indication as to how strange this whole case is going to get.
I think you need to be in a certain frame of mind to read a Fred Vargas novel. I say this after struggling with the previous one, This Night’s Foul Work, last year. Fred Vargas demands concentration but not analysis. Her writing also requires a leap of faith; it doesn’t seem that she is going to bring everything together but she always does. She’s the queen of manipulation and deception in that regard.
I put down This Night’s Foul Work I think because I was frustrated as I was more in the mood for a novel that was linear and direct. Not something you’d get from Vargas. But when I picked it up again, because I know how amazing Vargas can be, I pushed through and by the end I wondered what the barrier was as Vargas has a way of revealing things so you see what has gone before in a different way and when she does the fog goes away and everything is clear and not how they first appeared.
Not to spoil An Uncertain Place but the same thing happened. There was a point where the story turned in an instant and the mist lifted. Not that she obscures things exactly but like her hero she has a way of storytelling that is unorthodox. And it’s definitely a positive thing for both parties. In Adamsberg’s case you get a detective who is illogical and whimsical (as are the detectives he is surrounded with) and with Vargas you get an author who takes you places that you’d never get to go to with any other writer.
This has to be one of the strangest cases yet. It starts off with the feet in London, which is weird in itself, and it gets weirder. It also parallels Adamsberg’s strange relationship with those around him, they intermingle, as they always do in Vargas’s books. I think in this book’s case it’s a good idea to read the last one as knowing some of the characters a bit better would enhance a few key moments.
This book I didn’t struggle with. I whizzed through it. I met Vargas’s mind and let her guide me. She informed me too. I know more about a certain area of Europe and its legends than I did. And she managed to fool me, again.
Summary
Commissaire Adamsberg remains one of my favourite detectives, the cast is quirky, the crime (murder) is as unformulaic as you can get. There is a reason she’s sold 10 million books!
I’m very much looking forward to reading the next one, The Ghost Riders of Ordebec. And I won’t have long as it’s out today.
This post was prompted by a timely email promoting the Folio Society, an email with Jared Shurin and my own struggle with books as objects to own.
The email was pretty straightforward PR email promoting their illustrated editions, which led me to looking at The Master and Margarita:
I’ve got an ebook and a different translation and I really enjoyed it. Did I like it enough to buy a paper-based copy? And did I like it even more to own a deluxe version? And do I really need to have copy on my shelf when it’s already in the cloud and I can re-download it at any point?
As an illustration, I own a proof of a book that Jared of Pornokitsch loves and I’m going to send it to him, not because I didn’t like the book, but because he’s going to love owning the proof and having it on the shelves. I’m replacing it with a hardback.
Another illustration, my SF Masterworks Challenge was partly prompted by seeing a small collection of yellow spines on my shelves and feeling quite proud of saying, at some point in the future, that I’d read them all.
I’m doing the same with Gladys Mitchell. I like seeing the red Vintage Classic spines on the shelves. And I like blocks of specific authors like Terry Pratchett, Fred Vargas, Neal Asher (who is a jumble of editions) sitting there.
Then I have those books that are signed by some of my favourite authors, though I only find those special if they knew they were signing it for me (no shelf-stocked ones for me). I’m also very honoured to have several amazing proofs on my shelf of books, which I love and make me smile when I see them.
I’m a big ebook reader. I’ve bought the ebook editions of several of the physical books I own just give myself an easy reading life. But I still keep the physical editions of those that I’ve liked.
Saying that though I’m very good at giving away books that I’ve read that don’t mean anything to me. I guess I’d like to still have The Hobbit and the rest of LOTR on my shelves but I’m not going to re-read them any time soon and LOTR especially isn’t going to make me smile by looking at it, though I’d smile at The Hobbit as I loved re-reading that one.
I got rid of my Patricia Cornwell and James Patterson books along with lots of others when I moved and don’t miss them in the slightest.
However, I’m glad that I’ve kept authors like Mark Chadbourn, Storm Constantine, Dave Duncan, Poppy Z Brite, who meant something to me at different points in my reading and personal life.
And oddly when I’m buying books at the minute I’m debating whether I want it as an ebook or a physical one. Is it something to look at after I’ve bought it? Or would I be happy for it to sit in the cloud?
Plus, I’m going back to enjoying seeing the progress of a book as I read it, you don’t quite get that feel with an ebook, though my new Paperwhite has a ‘time left in chapter’ counter, which does give that feeling of just one more chapter as it’s only x minutes long, though feeling the thinness of a book towards then end if still hard to beat.
Then there are books that I’m never going to buy/enjoy as ebooks. Cooking books and books of poetry are two types of books that just can’t work in electronic form.
I’ve said before that the market is going to mess with the established order of hardback followed six to twelves months later by the paperback. We already have hardback and ebooks being released at the same time. Fifty Shades of Grey went from being ebook only to having a paperback then a special edition hardback. All editions aimed at different types of readers.
And that’s mainly the point. There are different editions for different people. Sadly hardbacks are getting rarer because the lack of library ordering, who were their major purchaser. So I think that we are still for a while going to get a choice of editions.
Though I can see a future for special edition hardbacks and ebooks and less paperbacks.
Sorry, that was a bit of a ramble, but I’m really not sure how I feel.
What about you? Do you see books as objects to own and have you paid that little bit extra for those special editions?
Finally!
Things might be broke for the next couple of days.
You can however look forward to a review of The Body Snatchers and Cold Days on New Year’s day when I’ve stopped fiddling.
Whilst I’ve been elsewhere – eg. traveling without internet access – it seems my host has made some alterations to how much memory WordPress has access to taking the site off-line. I’ve stripped the site of some bells and whistles until I can move hosts. Enough is enough!
On the good side I’m reading Cold Days by Harry Dresden and I’m again hooked!
I was recording today’s episode of The Readers and Simon and I talked about challenges. I don’t really do challenges. There are so many out there that I could join in but it’s not really my thing. Simon though was talking about his Persephone Project and something clicked. Why not have a personal, self-directed reading project of my own?
Since I’ve not been accepting review copies on mass (a few sneak in the house but I’m OK with that) I’ve had a chance to really tackle the shelves and one thing I’ve been doing is organising. Simple things like putting all the books by the same author together unless they are Vintage Classics or SF Masterworks whose spines make a great sight.
And one thing I’ve noticed is that I’ve got a small batch of SF Masterworks (The Body Snatchers, Gateway, Roadside Picnic and The Forever War) that are currently unread and I’ve not really read that many more books in that cannon. Strangely, after I had this moment I saw on Graeme’s blog that he has near enough a shelf to tackle of his own.
Now, part of my anxious state is that I’m feeling a little lacking in older works as well as being behind on what’s current. So what better solution than giving myself the challenge of reading at least one SF Masterworks a month?
I asked twitter what they’d choose so I’ve selected another four to those above:
They are already on their way.
I think that these eight are a good mix to get me started but I wonder what the others will be? I’ve got a minimum of four to find. Any suggestions?
I’m playing with the archives – eg pre-Feb 2011 and I seem to have made twitter explode for which I am very very sorry! 
It all centres around this book:
In the past few weeks, mass critical discussion of a YA novel by Victoria Foyt – titled Revealing Eden: Save the Pearls – has sprung up online after various people noticed that the book was, shall we say, extremely problematic vis-a-vis racism. And by ‘extremely problematic’, I mean the white female protagonist wears blackface (complete with extra-red lips), black people are called ‘coals’, the black male love interest is literally described as animalistic and bestial, the dystopian elements come in large part from black people being in charge while whites are a demonised minority…
You should really read the rest of Racism, Revealing Eden and STGRB as it gathers together more than enough food for thought on why Revealing Eden fails so dramatically. This makes what follows so much worse:
I have been an anthologist and magazine editor for most of my life, and as of last year became co-publisher and editor of Weird Tales, America’s oldest fantasy magazine. In the upcoming issue, we are publishing the first chapter of Victoria Foyt’s SF novel, Saving the Pearls: Revealing Eden (the subtitle after the colon is an indication that the story will continue in a subsequent novel).
WFT!
I think NK Jemisin’s reaction nails it:
They’d bought a magazine with an invaluable reputation that had been years in the building, after all; I figured no one would be stupid enough to piss that all away. I was wrong.
They’ve shat it away. And pissed on the steaming pile afterward.
I’ve read historical short stories and novels that make me uncomfortable and I wouldn’t champion them but as a lesson from history I’ll accept that they are what they are.
But the current editors, as Jemisin has so eloquently expressed, have lost the plot.
I know that supporting something that is racist, even if the author and the editors are blind to it, is bad, but then to reprint the first poorly written chapter as something worth reading takes it to another level.
I just don’t get it.
Anyone?
It’s with very mixed feelings I’m announcing that I’m no longer accepting review copies on GavReads. It doesn’t mean I’m ceasing to blog or that I’m stopping recording The Readers with Simon. It just means that they’ll feature a different set of books (a lot of older review copies most likely!).
And the reason? It’s complicated.
It’s been a blast being at the front of the wave seeing and reading all the new books before come out. Now I’m looking forward to working through the books I’ve already got plus the 60-odd I’ve bought that have waited for far too long on my Kindle.
Thanks for everyone who has kept me fed with fresh fish…I mean books! 
