Imaginary Cities

Darran Anderson, 2015

(July 2016)

Magisterial, I believe is the word.

City of the Iron Fish

Simon Ings, 1994

(June 2016)

Gothic New Weird with a healthy dollop of bildungsroman and one of the most gratingly pretentious protagonists I’ve encountered since Catcher in the Rye. In fact, I’m not even sure it is a bildungsroman, but there’s such a strong connection in my mind between the annoyance I feel for both Holden Caulfield and Thomas Kemp, the narrator of this book, that maybe I’m just collapsing them both in to each other.

The Book of the City of Ladies

Christine de Pizan, 1405 [Rosalind Brown-Grant, 1999]

(May 2016)

  

There is a woman who occasionally crops up on my twitter feed who spends a large part of her time responding to men with anime avatars asking “BUT WHAT HAVE THE WOMENZ EVER DONE FOR US?” by sending them explicit lists of accomplished women in science, politics, the arts, and such like. A service that is both valuable and depressing in its necessity. This book is basically the mediaeval version of that, made even more depressing because apparently we’re still having these arguments more than half a millennium later. Plus ça change.

Triumph of the City

Edward Glaeser, 2011

(May 2016)

Hmmm. On the one hand, yes. On the other, very much no.

City of the Beasts

Isabel Allende, 2002 [Margaret Sayers Peden, 2002]

(May 2016)

Back when I was a teenager and still took rugby, or indeed anything other than childcare and the concomitant challenge of trying to fashion some sort of ‘me time’, seriously, the two best clubs in England were Bath and Leicester. Growing up near the latter, they were, and still are, my team of choice (indeed, I was briefly a member of their protozoan academy, in the brave new world of those immediately post-amateurism days). While the Underwood brothers were clearly the star attractions, the members of the ABC club (the world being neither brave nor as yet new enough to convince the Tigers to adopt numbers instead of letters on their shirts) were the kind of club stalwarts who inevitably rose to fan favourite status, and of whom none were more stalwarty than Darren ‘The Baron’ Garforth.

Love in a Fallen City

Eileen Chang, 1943-47 [Karen S. Kingsbury, 2007]

(April, 2016)

  

I read this straight after Occupied City, and to be honest I was expecting to get a bit more of a compare/contrast thing going. That I’m finding that harder to do than expected is, I guess, a function of the luxuries afforded by both time and distance, as well not living under an occupying military administration.

City of Stairs

Robert Jackson Bennett, 2014

(March 2016)

In which I finally get around to one of last-year-but-one’s must-read books and it is every bit as good as everyone says it is. In lieu of anything approaching a reasonable amount of time to compose my thoughts, I’ll instead remind you all of the impromptu dance contest Pep and I held a few months back, and merely state that I concur with pretty much everything my more erudite and better informed friend had to say.

Occupied City

David Peace, 2009

(April 2016)

The sequel to Tokyo Year Zero, and apparently the middle volume of a planned ‘Tokyo Trilogy’, though given the continued absence of a final volume it’s probably better if we don’t hold our collective breath on that score.

Open City

Teju Cole, 2011

(March 2016)

A deceptively quick read, for all that this is a book that could never be accused of wearing its pretensions lightly. Never mind the quality, feel the research.

A Different City

Tanith Lee, 2015

(March 2016)

This was my first encounter with the extensive works of Tanith Lee, and was a slightly contradictory experience. There was a lot to like about the three slices of gothic horror in this slim volume, but by many of the metrics I’d usually apply when deciding if a book’s ‘good’ or not it comes up short. Of course, this also begs the question as to how reliable those metrics are.

A Tale of Two Cities

Charles Dickens, 1859

(March 2016)

I enjoyed this immensely, and am still rather surprised by that. Nothing like a bit of overwrought Victorian melodrama to stir the blood.

The Just City

Jo Walton, 2015

(March 2016)

  

A raging worldbuilding nerdgasm in all its eruptive glory.

  

No Ghosts in This City

Uddipana Goswami, 2014

(February 2016)

  

A slim and brutal volume of short stories in and about the Indian state of Assam. If, as I was, you are a little hazy on the details, Assam is in the North East of the country, in that strange island of India wedged above Bangladesh, and almost entirely sundered from the rest of the country except for a slim corridor along the Brahmaputra.

  

City of Illusions

Ursula K. Le Guin, 1967

(February 2016)

So then, Le Guin. The little corner of contemporary capital-C Culture I tend to most often inhabit might, for want of a better phrase, be designated as ‘Progressive Speculative Fiction’. A clumsy label, but you get the general idea. And within this niche the closest thing going to an unimpeachable godhead, a figure held in universal awe and reverence, is Ursula K. Le Guin.

Invisible Cities

Italo Calvino, 1972 [William Weaver, 1974]

(February 2016)

  

I’m just going to park this here, as another of the foundation texts for this month’s reading. Not going to do much more than that as, to be honest, I’m completely incapable of saying anything intelligent about it within the timeframe I’ve given myself. (Also, bronchitis). Let’s just say that, taking the project as a whole, I don’t think that will be a problem, so I’m just going to leave a space here for a link to the eventual summary where I’m clearly going to tie it all up nicely and we’ll all be able to bask in my powers of for-, and indeed in-, sight.

The Death and Life of Great American Cities

Jane Jacobs, 1961

(February 2016)

We’re going to kick off Arbitrary Theme Month with a couple of foundation texts, the cover blurb of the first of which informs us that it is “perhaps the single most influential work in the history of town planning.” Now, I realize that on first reading this sounds a little like being the most famous Belgian, but that in itself is a measure of how little thought we (still) seem to give one of the most important fields of human organization.

Forthcoming Attractions

Done! The deadlines are gone, dissertations submitted, and its all over bar the shouting/final marks. And what better way to celebrate than by catching up on all those books I've not been reading for the past three years? I'm pleased to announce that February will be Arbitrary Themed Reading Month here on this is how she fight start. Go on, guess what the theme is...