Books

I've had a week of leave this week, so have read quite a bit - as well as got a few hikes in and some meals out etc.

• Death and Diplomacy by Dave Stone - one of the Doctor Who Virgin New Adventures. I have been going through these for quite some time and am determined to finish the run, but paused for a while before this one. Overall, there were some nice character beats for the Doctor, but in both style and content this was merely OK otherwise. The plot did was was required, but there were no really big or interesting ideas to take away.

• The First Signs by Genevieve von Petzinger - a study of the non-figurative signs and symbols to be found in palaeolithic cave art in Europe and Africa. There was a slight mismatch between the actual focus of the book and what I was expecting based on the description. The book covers a great deal of context around cultural development across the palaeolithic as well as the geographic spread of the symbols and quite a number of other aspects before it finally - as I had expected to pretty much from the start - actually looking at the surprisingly limited and in some cases very specific range of symbols that actually occur as cave art of this type and era. Ultimately, the book raises more questions than it could possibly answer, and explains why some interpretations of what these symbols may be are at best only partial without offering any kind of complete interpretation of them - which is fair enough. We simply don't and probably can't ever know what the intention of the artists was. I do think that there was scope for the book to look at the individual symbols in more detail though. Whilst there is only so much that can be said about dots or parallel lines, there is more that I wanted to know about Spanish tectiforms etc.

• Television by Jean-Philippe Toussaint. Leaving aside a few quirk choices of vocabulary and odd turns of phrase that I imagine are due to the translator, this was an easy and compelling novel to read - at least to start with. I did find it losing direction and becoming increasingly episodic in the last third though. The driving force is the protagonist's decision to give up television after projecting his procrastination, lack of direction and other negative traits on to that activity, and seeking virtue in avoiding it - or at least in being seen to avoid it. This was written in the '90s and was - at least according to the critique at the rear of the novel -a condemnation of the creeping ubiquity of TV in modern culture. To be honest, I read it more as virtue signalling by a snobbish bourgeoisie. The protagonist is an art historian and the contrast between his appreciation of the minutia of his chosen field of visual arts and the outright dismissal of any potential value in this other field seemed blatantly hypocritical - and I remained uncertain whether this was intended by the author even at the conclusion of the book. His bovine stye of consumption of TV - channel hopping equivalent to today's doomscrolling - is one that although I understand does/did seem to be common with at least part of the viewership, but is not one to which I could relate. I certainly did not consume TV in that way myself. However, the novel did the work of literature and prompted me to examine my own reactions to the characters and situations in the novel, so in that sense at least, I enjoyed it.

• The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet by Becky Chambers. I had read that not a lot happens for much of the book. Even with that in mind, however, I did find this overlong. Its message is one of acceptance of diversity and of the value of friendship - both of which I am wholeheartedly in favour of. However, I would really have liked some m ore ideas or more worldbuilding going on here to justify this length. Worldbuilding of a type is indeed to be found, but it is pretty much all in the form of very thinly disguised metaphor for millennial western life today. It is not a bad book in any way, but does not inspire me to pick up the sequel.