50 Book Challenge: #5

Yoko Ogawa, The Housekeeper and the Professor

This was a birthday gift, so I'm glad to be able to report that I enjoyed it very much. It's a quiet, graceful book. Somehow very Japanese in its understated elegance and slight oddness. It is about - yes - a housekeeper who looks after a professor who, although a mathematical genius, can remember only 80 minutes at a time. It's mostly about friendship, quiet and tentative. What I like most about it is that it doesn't try and introduce any kind of romance; it really is about friendship. And symmetries. And patterns. And mathematics. For some reason, my brain can cope with quantum physics, but it doesn't cope all that well with math. I have to confess that much of the math just went in one side of my brain and out the other, but that didn't impede my enjoyment of the novel. Except I feel that I ought to re-read it to try and understand the math better. Maybe I will.

50 Book Challenge: #6

Connie Willis, Blackout

Connie Willis is one of my absolute favourite sf authors, always reliable, but sadly not prolific - I can't remember exactly how long it's been since the last novel, but I do remember that my mother was still alive when I was reading Passage. This long-awaited new novel did not disappoint, except to the extent that we are left with our characters in dire straits at the end of it. But we know that the next one will be out in the Fall, so there's not too long to wait. It is set in the future of The Domesday Book and To Say Nothing of the Dog; time travel is real, and Oxford historians are queuing up to make trips into the past to do research. This time, our main characters are visiting different events in WWII, except that somehow things don't go quite as planned. There are as always very likeable characters and a zippy, almost too breathless plot, with wrong turns and mistakes and suspense. It is as always meticulously researched, which made a few details that I think are probably errors stand out rather: I don't think a WWII nurse would have used a centigrade scale to describe a person's temperature, or that a British person would use the term "blocks" in London (as in "just a few more blocks, and we'll be there"), or that someone would have bought grapes for someone in hospital without having to do some black-market dealing, or at least mentioning queues or coupons... But these are forgivable in the overall context of a very enjoyable and un-put-downable book. I can't wait for October!