40, NG12, M22, E38 / WG28, F16, MF2, D2, B1, C0, NA1

Peter James, Not Dead Enough

Eigentlich wollte ich mir schon längst einen kürzlich geladenen Jodi Picoult-Band zu Gemüte geführt haben, aber irgendwie komme ich von der Roy-Grace-Serie noch nicht los. Zumal James hier einen Kurztrip nach München einbaut, sogar mit einem überzeugendem Hintergrund und vernünftig charakterisiertem deutschen Kollegen von Grace. Sogar der Name passt zu dem Alter. Das kriegen wirklich nicht viele britische oder amerikanische Autoren hin.
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9/11 had happened on a beautiful day. It was one of the things that had most struck her about all the images, that the impact of those planes striking the towers might not have had quite the strength of emotional resonance if the sky had been grey and drizzly. You kind of expected shit to happen on grey days.

(Peter James, Not Dead Enough, 2007)

39, NG11, M21, E37 / WG28, F16, MF2, D2, B1, C0, NA1

Peter James, Looking Good Dead

Der zweite Band gefiel mir fast noch besser als der erste und es sieht ganz so aus, als hätte ich einen neuen Süchtigmacher gefunden. Die Spannung, obwohl genauso gut aufgebaut wie im ersten Band, war hier leichter zu ertragen - vielleicht mag ich einfach keine Stories um Charaktere in der Falle.
Interessant fand ich, dass die Handlung praktisch unmittelbar an den ersten Band anschloss, obwohl das Buch ein Jahr später veröffentlicht wurde. Ein guter Trick um die Seriencharaktere nicht vorschnell altern zu lassen, aber ein bisschen mehr Luft zwischen zwei so rasanten Fällen hätte James dem guten Grace schon lassen können.
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Grace remembered an expression his mother used to use: Time will tell. Fate. She had been a great believer in fate but he had never totally shared that belief. It had helped her through her days dying from cancer. If you believed that some greater power was at work who had it all mapped out for you, then in some ways you were lucky. People who had a deep religious faith were fortunate; they could abdicate all their responsibilities to God. Despite his fascination with the supernatural, Grace had never been able to believe in a God who had a plan for him.

(Peter James, Looking Good Dead, 2006)

29, WG20, MF2, E27 / NG8, F14, M13, D2, B1, NA0, C0

Steven Brust & Skyler White, The Skill of our Hands

Von der Fortsetzung von 'The Incrementalists' hatte ich fast noch mehr vergessen als vom ersten und war umso faszinierter wie dramatisch und actiongeladen es ist, und wie witzig und zugleich nervig Oskars ständige Kommentare sind - bzw. auch oft genug bitter. Die Erzählweise überzeugt hier noch mehr als im ersten, besonders wenn es um Rens Verkraftung des Verlustes von Phil geht.

Here's what I was thinking in the moment: I was thinking I should write a self-help book. It would be the most useful and the shortest self-help book ever written. It'd go like this: "Every self-improvement program makes you concentrate on yourself, an dthe more you do that, the more self-involved you get, the more you need improvement. So get out of your god damned head for once, and look around. Read a newspaper. Learn what's happening in the world. Get involved in it. Stop wasting your time with self-improvement."
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(Steven Brust & Skyler White, The Skill of our Hands, 2017)

28, WG19, MF1, E26 / NG8, F14, M13, D2, B1, NA0, C0

Steven Brust & Skyler White, The Incrementalists

Nach vier Jahren und ausreichend Zeit soviel von dem Buch zu vergessen, dass es beim wiederlesen spannend blieb, wurde es wieder Zeit für ein Wiederlesen. Und ja, es war wieder richtig schön, und der zweite Teil wird natürlich auch drangehängt.
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"Are you suggesting," Irina was saying, "that the words we use have no effect on how we think?"
"No, I'm saying they have less of an effect than a lot of people believe. That other things have a much more profound effect."
"That doesn't mean -"
"Things like unequal pay. Like effective servitude in marriage. Like forced prostitution. Deal with the real problems, and language will take care of itself."
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"Couldn't you do more good if you were rich and powerful?"
I grunted. "You'd think so. But most of the time, money and power make you spend all of your time dealing with money and power. If you don't, you tend to turn into an asshole."
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(Steven Brust & Skyler White, The Incrementalists, 2013)

25, WG18, M13, E23 / NG6, F12, D2, B1, NA0, C0

Iain Banks, The Quarry

Nach sieben Jahren wurde es wirklich Zeit, Iain Banks' letztes Buch wiederzulesen. Abgesehen von dem sich ständig aufdrängendem Gedanken, dass dies sein letztes Buch war mit der ewigen Spekulation wieviel aus eigener Erfahrung verwendet wurde, die ich einfach nicht unterdrücken kann, war es wieder ein faszinierendes und vor allem gegen Ende hin, als Kit das Video endlich findet, spannendes Lesen. Und einmal mehr fand ich es erstaunlich, wie sympathisch und liebenswert der Icherzähler hier wirkt, trotz - oder gerade wegen? seines Aspergersyndroms.
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Lastly, it has occurred to me that the person who initiates a random jam probably never knows what chaos they've caused behind them. I've seen six random jams over the last eight years - three in the last eighteen months as I've adjusted the times of my walks to make witnessing them more likely - and it took me a while before I realised that they might stand as a symbol for life in general; trivial actions leading to proliferating consequences that affect hundreds of others, but which we never know about.
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'Who fucking does want to die?' he says, staring up at me. 'Until something in your life gets so bad you feel it's the only thing that'll stop the fucking awfulness?' He looks away, into the darkness at the far end of the room. 'I'm scared to fucking death, Kit. Not of anything; not of hell or any bollocks like that; just at the thought of not fucking being any more. It shouldn't be frightening - it's just returning to the state you were in before you were born, before you were even conceived - but it is, whether you like it or not, like your brain can't accept it's not the most important thing in the whole fucking world, the whole fucking universe, and it's terrified that when it goes, everything does.'
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'Everything,' Hol say, '- print, radio, television, computers, digitalisation, the internet - makes a difference, but nothing makes all the difference. We build better lives and a better world slowly, painstakenly, and there are no short cuts, just lots of improvements; most small, a few greater, none ... decisive.'

(Iain Banks, The Quarry, 2013)

19, WG15, M9, E18 / NG4, F10, D1, B1, NA0, C0

Iain Banks, The Crow Road

Eigentlich konnte ich mich bei diesem Buch nur an den Anfang und den Schluß erinnern - die Szene mit dem einzigartigem Morsecode wird wohl immer meine Lieblingsszene bleiben - aber das machte das Wiederlesen noch schöner. Ich fand es erstaunlich, wie liebenswert Prentice trotz all seinem albernen Anspruchsdenken und jugendlicher Unreife durch das Buch bleibt.

'Why?' Kenneth said, trying not to sound angry. 'Just because we feel that way? One wee daft species, on one wee daft planet circling one wee daft star in one wee daft galaxy; us? Barely capable of crawling into space yet; capable of feeding everybody but ... nyaa, can't be bothered? Just because we think there must be something more and a few crazy desert cults infect the world with their cruel ideas; that's what makes the soul a certainty and heaven a must?'
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God, what did any of it matter, in the end? You lived; you died. You were as indistinguishable from a distance as one of these blades of grass, and who was to say more important? Growing, surrounded by your kin, you out-living some, some out-living you. You didn't have to adjust the scale much, either, to reduce us to the sort of distant irrelevance of this bedraggled field. The grass was lucky if it grew, was shone upon and rained upon, and was not burned, and was not pulled up by the roots, or poisoned, or buried when the ground was turned over, and some bits just happened to be on a line that humans wanted to walk on, and so got trampled, broken, pressed flat, with no malice; just effect.
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Somehow all her dreams had disappeared. It seemed to her now that all she had ever had had been the dream of having dreams; the goal of having goals one day, once she had made her mind up what it was she wanted.
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I suppose we all want to pass on our beliefs; they seem even more our own than the genes we transmit ... but maybe they are largely inherited too, even if sometimes what you inherit is the exact opposite - the reversed image of what was intended.
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There was no such continuation; it just didn't work that way, and there should even be a sort of relief in the comprehension that it didn't. We continue in our children, and in our works and in the memories of others; we continue in our dust and ash. To want more was not just childish, but cowardly, and somehow constipatory, too. Death was change; it led to new chances, new vacancies, new niches and opportunities; it was not all loss.
The belief that we somehow moved on to something else - whether still recognisably ourselves, or quite thoroughly changed - might be a tribute to our evolutionary tenacity and our animal thirst for life, but not to our wisdom. That saw a value beyond itself; in intelligence, knowledge and wit as concepts - wherever and by whoever expressed - not jsut in its own personal manifestation of those qualities, and so could contemplate its own annihilation with equanimity, and suffer it with grace; it was only a sort of sad selfishness that demanded the continuation of the individual spirit in the vanity and frivolity of a heaven.
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(Iain Banks, The Crow Road, 1992)

15, WG13, M6, E15 / NG2, F9, D0, NA0, B0, C0

Iain Banks, Espedair Street

Irgendwie dachte ich, es wäre noch nicht so lange her, dass ich dieses Buch über einen schottischen Rockstar und Songwriter in den 70ern zum ersten Mal las, aber tatsächlich ist es fast auf den Tag genau 10 Jahre her - mymy. Auf jeden Fall machte Daniel "Weird" Weirs Geschichte genausoviel Spaß, wenn nicht mehr, und ging mir genauso so nahe. Dies könnte, neben 'Dead Air' sogar mein Lieblingsbuch von ihm sein.
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Maybe I used up allmy dreams in my songs so that I had none left for myself. That would be ironic, almost tragic, because at the time I thought I had perfect control; I thought I was being clever, using my songs, using my dreams, to find out more about myself ... a shame, really, that what I found out just wasn't worth the finding.
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'My heart bleeds for you,' I told him. 'My bladder leaks for you; my pituitary secretes for you.'
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There's this sloth in the jungle walking from one tree to another, and it's mugged by a gang of snails, and when the police ask the sloth if it could identify any of its attackers, it says, 'I don't know; it all happened so quickly...'
And that's the way I feel. Everything seems to take about the right amount of time at the time, but later ... Jeez, where did it all go? You look back, and sometimes you think, Did I really do all that?, and other times you think, Is that all there is? Is that all I managed to get done?
We are never satisfied. Don't even know the meaning of the word.
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We join armies, we enter monasteries or nunneries, we adopt the party line, we believe what we read in ancient books or shit newspapers or what we're told by plastic politicians, and all we're ever trying to do is give somebody else the responsibility for thinking. Let us enter this order, obey that one; never mind we end up being told to massacre or torture or simply believe the most absurd thing we've ever heard; at least it's not all our fault.
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(Iain Banks, Espedair Street, 1987)