Jules Jones

Yes, it's Wednesday. By the time I got around to checking the master post at our esteemed host Bostonbibliophile, I was too flattened by the day's distractions to write something sensible. Prompt for the week is:

Discussion groups. Do you belong to any (besides Early Reviewers)? Approximately how many? Are there any in particular that you participate in more avidly? How often do you check?

22 that I'm a member of or have on my watch list, though I'll dip into others from time to time. The first group I joined, and the only one I was active in for a long time, was Folio Society Devotees. What got me out of there and active on some of the groups about the site itself was an early spam incident. I received a friend request from an author that was clearly purely an attempt at promoting his new book, and I went looking for somewhere to complain about it... I'm moderately active in Early Reviewers, Site Talk, New Features and Recommend Site Improvements -- i.e mostly geeking about the site itself.

How often I check depends on how busy I am and whether I'm in any active conversations. I've been known to check every ten minutes when I'm desperately trying to avoid work and there's a fast moving conversation going on. :-) More typically, every day or two for the four I've mentioned above. Others I sometimes check only every few weeks. I'd read the Folio Society group more often, but I'm trying to avoid temptation as we're currently in a small flat and I have been told that I am not allowed to buy any more bookcases, and no, I may not leave the books in a pile on the floor instead.

One of the things I like about the groups is that it's generally interesting conversation that mostly manages to stay good tempered. I have other places to hang out on the net where I can find that, but it's always good to have more. Not bad for something I only joined so that I could easily catalogue get my books for insurance purposes.

We interrupt the Torchwood squee to bring you a book review I should have written nearly a month ago. :-) I snagged a book in the LibraryThing Early Reviewer programme, but was having some trouble writing a review that said enough about the book to let people know whether they'd enjoy it, without spoilering it to kingdom come. Finally got it done this morning, though I'm still not entirely happy with it.


Albert Sanchez Pinol -- Pandora in the Congo

I got this book as part of LibraryThing's Early Reviewer programme, and probably wouldn't have picked it up if I'd simply seen it in the bookshop. But the description in the ER programme intrigued me, and I'm glad I read it.

It's a multi-layered pastiche and parody of the old pulp African adventure stories, with two interlocking stories set early in the twentieth century, narrated by one of the protagonists as an old man late in the twentieth century. As the novel opens the narrator, Tommy Thomson, is scraping a living as a young man by ghost writing pulp adventure stories. He's frustrated by the need to pander to the extreme racism and disregard for facts of the pulp market. He loses the ghost writing job, but is offered the chance to write a true African adventure story -- ghost-writing the story of a man who is awaiting trial for the murder of his two employers on a gold-hunting expedition in the Congo.

Tommy is drawn ever deeper into Marcus Garvey's story. It's very like the pulp adventures he's written before, but with one twist -- this time it's a tale of brutal and amoral English aristocrats abusing first the black Africans and then a strange race of underground people, white but not entirely human, with a low-class servant who is the flawed hero. This tale of derring-do is interwoven with the story of Tommy's own life over the course of the years he writes Garvey's story, interrupted by his service in the First World War. Tommy thinks of his own life as boring and humdrum, but it's an enchanting read with some fascinating secondary characters.

There are multiple levels of unreliable narration, so things aren't quite as they seem. Part of the game is deciding who is unreliable and how far, and the author plays fair in the end. In the meantime you get a cracking read, with a lot of homages to other works.

I enjoyed the book a great deal, but I did have some minor problems with it. There are a lot of anachronisms, a couple of which threw me out of the story (in particular, singing "God save the Queen" in court at a time when a King was on the throne). These felt like mistakes by the author rather than being deliberate. One of the signals that part of the story is unreliable simply doesn't work if you're used to reading science fiction or magic realism. If you're an sf fan, switch into mainstream reading protocols when you're reading this book. And be warned that there is some gruesome imagery which might be a bit much for some readers.

One particular point -- this is a translation of a novel written in Catalan. Translations vary a lot in quality and can sometimes feel stiff and lifeless, but this one is excellent. It flows very well and is a joy to read.

Enormous fun, and well worth the time.

Pubisher's website
Pandora In The Congo at amazon.uk
at Powells

One of the things that happens on MySpace is that persons with something to sell (writers, bands, etc) will go around and friend anyone who looks like they might have in the remotest interest in something that could be claimed to be related to the thing being sold. For example a science fiction writer would friend anyone who lists science fiction in their interests. Or science. Or reading... The idea here is that people will check out your profile and with any luck friend you back. Even if all they do is check out your profile before going away -- well, that's another pair of eyeballs looking at your ad for whatever you're selling.

Since I was brought up on Usenet, I see this as spamming. Since this sort of advertising to each other appears to be one of the two main reasons for MySpace's existence (the other being the seeking out of someone to have sex with), I don't normally complain about it.

Unfortunately, it seems to be contagious.

This morning, someone friend-requested me on LibraryThing. I didn't recognise the name. When I went to look at it -- yes, it was another writer, who was friending everyone in sight in an attempt to pimp his books to them. Sorry, that's spam as far as I'm concerned. Yes, one can turn off the friending facility, but I happen to like having people I actually know friend me. You know, like happens on LiveJournal. I don't want LT turned into just another giant "look at meeeee!" advertising network. I just don't know how and where to complain about this development. :-(

ETA: there's a thread complaining about this in the Site Talk group:
http://www.librarything.com/talktopic.php?topic=24214
It's not just friending -- it's long comments on people's profiles, and invites to discussion groups for an author's books. It's clearly got potential to swamp LT with spam, so I've emailed one of the LT staff about it.

ETA2: I *thought* there was something in the rules banning this sort of activity, but couldn't find it with a quick skim through the website. Someone in the discussion thread has pointed at the TOS:
http://www.librarything.com/privacy
In particular:
"# Do not use LibraryThing as an advertising medium. Egregious commercial solicitation is forbidden. No matter how great your novel, this does apply to authors.
# Do not spam user comments or group invitations. Inviting people in your town to a new group is okay; inviting hundreds of members is not."