Romanno Bridge

Sometimes I am up for a bit of heavy-duty non-fiction, experimental novels or multi-layered literary fiction with fractured timelines. Sometimes though, all I am looking for is a cracking yarn.

Andrew Greig's Romanno Bridge certainly doesn't disappoint on that front. Reprising his characters from The Return of John MacNab a few years on he entangles them in a far more dangerous and brutal adventure. John MacNab had a very genteel sense of British fair-play compared with Romanno Bridge ...

Starting out with a suicide deep in Rothiemurchus Forest the plot plunges headlong into ancient secret societies and the search for the real(?) Stone of Destiny, racing all over Scotland with diversions to London, Canada and Norway.

Often with this type of story the reader has to allow the author a bit of leeway to get beyond some of the more far-fetched elements, but even so there can't be any holes in the plot or characters with defects or who aren't believable. Some of the characters do seem to turn-up in exactly the right place at the right time and I had heard comments from some who felt that Kirsty could only ever exist in a male novelist's head. There are elements of her that are almost too good to be true, but it was never a problem for me. I wanted to believe, so it all felt real.

Of course everything works out all right by the end and the good guys prevail. Even so he keeps you on your toes right up to the last pages and the ending avoids any whiff of sentimentality. It just feels right, and sometimes that is exactly what you need from a book.

Song for Sunday

Interpol – NYC

Band/artist of the week: Mogwai
Song of the week: George Square Thatcher Death Party

Song for Sunday

The Triffids – Wide Open Road

Band/artist of the week: The National
Song of the week: On Volcano – Acceleration of Heartbeat

Song for Sunday

Je ne suis pas très drogue – The Limiñanas

Band/artist of the week: The Rural Alberta Advantage
Song of the week: The Rural Alberta Advantage – Stamp

Song for Sunday

The Rural Alberta Advantage – Stamp

New album (with this song on it) out this week!

Band/artist of the week: Mogwai
Song of the week: Mogwai – George Square Thatcher Death Party

Song for Sunday

Gil Scott-Heron and Jamie xx – NY is Killing Me

Band/artist of the week: Mogwai
Song of the week: Mogwai – George Square Thatcher Death Party

Alex's Adventures in Numberland

Last time I looked Alex Bellos was The Guardian's correspondent in Brazil and his one published book was a wonderfully idiosyncratic and entertaining look at Brazilian football (or futebol as the Brazilians would say) which actually turned out to be a pretty good historical and sociological primer for the whole country. Read along with Peter Robb's A Death in Brazil there probably isn't much more that you need to know about this most intriguing (at least to me) country.

So, getting back to the point, I was mildly surprised to find out last year that he had written a book about mathematics called Alex's Adventures in Numberland. However, it turns out he has a degree in philosophy and mathematics (they didn't mention that in the blurb on the football book!) and a boundless enthusiasm for seeking out the quirky and fascinating amongst the numbers and equations.

Starting out with Munduruku people living deep in the Brazilian Amazon who still lead a hunter-gatherer existence and have no words for numbers greater than five. Mainly because, as Alex demonstrates, they don't have any need for them. And even these five numbers aren't a precise match for the quantities one to five translating more correctly into one, two, threeish, fourish and a handful. This leads into a fascinating discussion on how children learn to count and understand numbers. Studying young children and isolated indigenous peoples gives a fascinating insight into innate mathematical intuition compared against taught concepts. (The numerical equivalent of Steven Pinker's The Language Instinct.)

From there we move through number systems, numerology, Vedic mathematics, Pi, algebra, number games, the golden ratio, probability, statistics and on to infinity (the concept not the size of the book ...). He has a journalist's eye for an interesting story and the writing is always clear and intelligent, even when he gets into some fairly high level concepts. Pleasingly, the text is also accompanied by plenty of well-drawn diagrams, illustrations and photos which help with the explanations and let you see what mathematicians really look like. There are also plenty of equations, but what did you expect? It is about maths after all.

Along the way he tracks down some fascinating characters, some well known, most not. For example Wayne Gould, a retired judge from New Zealand who found a Sudoku book in a Tokyo bookshop and although he couldn't read any of the instructions he managed to work out how to solve the puzzle. He then spent six years writing a computer program to generate Sudokus and went on to sell the idea to newspapers in the USA and UK sparking a craze which now has over 100 million regular players. I had always presumed that Sudoku was an ancient Japanese puzzle which was just popularised recently in the West, but it turns out to have been invented by Maki Kaji, a Japanese puzzle-maker who refined a puzzle that he had seen in an American puzzle magazine which had in turn been created by Howard Garns, a retired architect from Indiana.

At 450 pages he covers a lot of ground, but it flys past and I was very sad to see it finish, although my head was hurting a bit by the end. By the last chapter we are up to non-Euclidean geometry, hyperbolic crochet, Georg Cantor's 'set theory' and the Hilbert Hotel. Luckily he also has an excellent blog where he updates some of the stories that appear in the book and any other interesting mathematics that he finds.

Borders, REDGroup and Australian bookselling

In November 2009 I started a post entitled Is Borders evil? so as you may guess the news that they had placed themselves into voluntary administration on Thursday didn't cause too much heartache around here. As a chain-bookshop ex-employee I do feel sorry for the shopfloor staff who now face irate customers with impossible demands and the likely loss of their jobs.

I came to the conclusion that they probably weren't inherently evil as much as incompetently nefarious, so I never did publish the post, but charging well above RRP on about 90% of your stock did seem like a strange strategy for a bookshop looking for customer loyalty and longevity. The half-empty shelves, poor stock selection and lack of key backlist titles over the last few years also seemed to point to some problems with management and strategy.

Around this time the government was also looking into the parallel importation laws and book pricing in general, so there was plenty of media coverage about the disparity between book prices in Australia and those in the USA and UK, but bizarrely there was no coverage anywhere about one of the major book retailing chains over-pricing the vast majority of their stock.

It wasn't always like that, however, when Borders first opened in Carlton in early 2003 it was a well stocked and pleasant spot to browse. I still never bought much there, but occasionally one of their discounted bestsellers like William Gibson's Pattern Recognition or something more esoteric not stocked elsewhere would persuade me to get the credit card out.

Unfortunately in 2007 the Borders US group started getting into difficulties and the UK and Asia Pacific parts of the business were put up for sale. The Australia/NZ side was bought in June 2008 by the REDGroup who are in turn owned by Pacific Equity Partners (PEP), a private equity firm who clearly weren't buying because of a love of literature. The REDGroup already owned the Angus and Robertson chain in Australia and the Whitcoulls chain in New Zealand, so it was fairly obvious that PEP thought they could merge Borders into the existing business, streamline back office functions, maximise profit and sell it on as soon as they could get a good price. (The financial background is explained well in an article in yesterday's Sydney Morning Herald by Michael Evans.)

Straight away you could see the change in the shops: backlist wasn't replaced, shelves got empty, prices went up across the board and non-book products became more and more prominent. I am probably not the average book-buyer, but it wasn't long before I stopped buying anything from them and quickly realised that it wasn't even worth going in to the stores as it would just annoy me.

Not as annoyed, however, as I was when it was revealed soon after the announcement that Border's chairman Steven Cain had written to the government blaming them for the chain's failure because of the overseas internet shopping GST loophole and parallel importation laws. Sure, internet booksellers will have taken a some of Borders market, but the parallel importation laws have very little to do with the problems the REDGroup encountered. For their management to try to shift the blame from their failings to others over two issues which they were well aware of and should have had strategies for dealing with is pathetic in the extreme. It is also telling that Dymocks and other, smaller independent chains, like the ever excellent Readings, can survive in the current climate when they are dealing with exactly the same issues, albeit far more successfully.

Most of the articles about the collapse have made much of the impact of overseas online booksellers like Amazon and Book Depository (some even going so far as to predict that this is the beginning of the end for all shops!) who are undoubtably grabbing a bigger and bigger share of the market in Australia and many have pointed out that the widespread take-up of ebooks will squeeze the bricks-and-mortar bookshops further. Personally, I think that big and bland chains will struggle as more of their custom goes online, but am optimistic that smaller and more customer-focused shops should still be able to thrive. Their role will change slightly as all the bestsellers go digital, but provided they focus on the things that on-line and ebooks can't provide like author events, discussion groups and great customer service then I think they will be all right. Of course they may need a bit of help from the publishers in all of this, but that is another story which can wait for now.

There is bound to plenty more coverage over the coming weeks and the whole industry will be watching intently to see what happens. In the meantime, if you want to know more here are some of the best sources and stories:
John Birmingham – Borders' demise: why the book chains are doomed
Bookseller + Publisher blog – Things we keep repeating
Bookseller + Publisher blog – Round-up of stories on REDGroup entering voluntary administration
And my favourite, Ross Honeywill – How Mark Rubbo killed Borders books

Song for Sunday

The Delgados – No Danger

I can't help but feel vaguely cheated that I haven't seen this before. It isn't surprising that it didn't make it onto CD:UK, but surely there must have been other music shows on UK TV that would have shown something of such total and utter genius? I can highly recommend American Trilogy as well, which seems to feature the Banana Splits on a day trip to Manchester Velodrome.

Band/artist of the week: Mogwai
Song of the week: Mogwai – George Square Thatcher Death Party

Song for Sunday

Young Galaxy – We Have Everything

Band/artist of the week: The National
Song of the week: On Volcano – Acceleration of Heartbeat

Song for Sunday

Mogwai – Rano Pano

Fantastic! I hope you are all getting excited about the new album Hardcore Will Never Die, But You Will out a week on Monday. The perfect Valentine gift for the significant other in your life. Trust me ...

Band/artist of the week: Mogwai
Song of the week: On Volcano – Acceleration of Heartbeat

(Song of the week is also completely brilliant and you can download a copy completely free from here.)

Books of 2010

Complete list is in the sidebar way down somewhere on the right. 39 was quite a long way short of my stated goal of one a week. I started well, but quickly tailed off with a too-late surge in the last three months, as you can see from the chart below. This year I am going to aim for 52 again, but suspect that anticipated lack of sleep from late May onwards may make it hard to achieve again.

More worrying, however, as the following graph clearly illustrates is the gap between books read and books acquired. Luckily most of my 2010 Christmas books actually arrived in January, otherwise the gap would have been even more alarming.

Top ten is below, with statistics underneath. Apparent again is a heavy bias towards fiction, male authors and books published in the last three years.

Top 10

1 Let the Great World Spin – Colum McCann

2 Waterlog – Roger Deakin

3 The Magnetic North – Sarah Wheeler

4 A Lie About My Father – John Burnside

5 Started Early, Took My Dog – Kate Atkinson

6 Zeitoun – Dave Eggers

7 Zero History – William Gibson

8 The Stars in the Bright Sky – Alan Warner

9 The Broken Shore – Peter Temple

10 Men in Space – Tom McCarthy

Statistics

Fiction: 29 titles

Non-fiction: 10 titles

Number of authors: 39

Male authors: 32

Female authors: 7

Books published in 2010: 11
Books published in 2009: 13
Books published in 2008: 6
Books published in 2007: 4
Books published in 2006: 3
Books published in 2005: 1
Books published 2000-04: 1
Books published 1990-99: 0
Books published 1980-89: 0
Books published before 1980: 0

Song for Sunday

House of Love – Shine On


Band/artist of the week: British Sea Power
Song of the week: The Rural Alberta Advantage – Don't Haunt this Place

Song for Sunday

Best Coast – Boyfriend


Band/artist of the week: British Sea Power
Song of the week: British Sea Power – Living is so Easy

Song for Sunday

Broadcast – Winter Now

Very sad to hear about the death of Trish Keenan from pneumonia. Broadcast were always one of those bands that I felt I should like more than I actually did. Their left-field, wilfully experimental side always seemed to pound the tuneful, bewitching pop side into submission. But there were always enough moments when the two sides combined into something magical to make me give them another chance whenever a new record came out.

There is a lovely remembrance here, along with some more clips of their finer moments.

Band/artist of the week: The National
Song of the week: British Sea Power – Living is so Easy

2010 music by numbers

Probably of interest to absolutely no-one but me, but according to last.fm these are the top 50 bands/artists and tracks I listened to last year. I can't remember exactly, but I think my total plays stood at around 60,000 at the beginning of last year. As 2011 started it was sitting at 92,378, which would mean about 30,000 tracks for the year or roughly 500 a week.

You can see the up-to-date charts here, if you are so inclined, and feel free to paste your own lists into the comments or even better befriend me on last.fm so I can have a look myself!

Artists/bands
1 The National  (1,581)
2 Bruce Springsteen (718)
3 Mogwai (711)
4 Frightened Rabbit (630)
5 Saint Etienne (547)
6 Idlewild (506)
7 Sigur Rós (503)
8 Malcolm Middleton (485)
9 Arcade Fire (483)
10 Radiohead (482)
11 R.E.M. (446)
12 Tindersticks (416)
13 Efterklang (404)
14 We Were Promised Jetpacks (360)
15 U2 (347)
16 Girls (342)
17 Venice is Sinking (339)
18 Manic Street Preachers (310)
19 Belle and Sebastian (307)
20 Rose Elinor Dougall (298)
21 Hello Saferide (297)
22 The Very Best (295)
23 The xx (288)
24 Low (276)
25 British Sea Power (275)
26 Tanya Donelly (272)
27 Burial (270)
28 Moby (264)
28 Lucinda Williams (264)
30 The Rural Alberta Advantage (259)
31 Runrig (245)
32 Billy Bragg (237)
33 Big Country (235)
34 Phantogram (230)
35 Suede (226)
36 Bob Mould (225)
36 Marillion (225)
38 Art of Fighting (224)
39 Placebo (219)
40 Amadou & Mariam (218)
41 Portishead (213)
42 David Bowie (206)
43 For a Minor Reflection (203)
44 Glasvegas (198)
45 Little Birdy (196)
46 The Cure (195)
47 Interpol (193)
48 Black Box Recorder (188)
49 Camera Obscura (186)
50 Gersey (182)

Tracks

1 The National – Bloodbuzz Ohio (131)
2 Ben Sollee & Daniel Martin Moore – Something, Somewhere, Sometime (89)
3 Venice is Sinking – Compass (80)
4 The National – Afraid of Everyone (79)
5 Rose Elinor Dougall – Find Me Out (78)
6 We Were Promised Jetpacks – Conductor (72)
7 Girls – Morning Light (71)
8 Hello Saferide – Anna (70)
9 The Soft Pack – C'mon (69)
10 Phosphorescent – The Mermaid Parade (68)
10 Efterklang – Alike (68)
12 Sambassadeur – Stranded (64)
13 Venice is Sinking – Falls City (63)
14 Basia Bulat – Go On (60)
14 The Concretes – Good Evening (60)
16 The Rural Alberta Advantage – Don't Haunt This Place (58)
17 Amadou & Mariam – Sénégal fast food (56)
18 Black Box Recorder – Seasons in the Sun (53)
18 Roky Erickson w/ Okkervil River – Goodbye Sweet Dreams (53)
20 Land of Talk – Some Are Lakes (Radio Mix) (52)
20 Casiokids – Grønt lys i alle ledd (52)
20 The Very Best – You Got The Love (Florence - The XX Remix) (52)
23 Phantogram – When I'm Small (51)
24 Laura Marling – Alpha Shallows (50)
24 Land of Talk – May You Never (50)
26 Tracey Thorn – Why Does The Wind? (Radio Edit) (49)
27 Taken by Trees – Anna (48)
27 Apollo Ghosts – Library Card Amulet (48)
27 The New Pornographers – Your Hands (Together) (48)
30 Love Is All – Repetition (47)
30 Clogs – Last Song (47)
32 Fulton Lights – Healing Waters (46)
32 The National – Anyone's Ghost (46)
34 The National – England (45)
35 Wild Beasts – This Is Our Lot (43)
35 Rose Elinor Dougall – Carry On (43)
37 Yeah Yeah Yeahs – Hysteric (42)
37 Wye Oak – I Hope You Die (42)
37 Unknown Mortal Orchestra – FFunny Ffrends (42)
40 The National – Slow Show (41)
40 Frightened Rabbit – Fast Blood (41)
40 The National – Little Faith (41)
43 The National – Conversation 16 (40)
44 The xx – Crystalised (39)
45 Frightened Rabbit – Head Rolls Off (38)
45 The Dø – At Last (38)
45 We Were Promised Jetpacks – Keeping Warm (38)
45 For a Minor Reflection – Dansi Dans (38)
45 The National – Terrible Love (38)
50 We Were Promised Jetpacks – Quiet Little Voices (37)

Song for Sunday

Tame Impala – Lucidity

Band/artist of the week: Malcolm Middleton
Song of the week: The Breeders – Buffy Main Title Theme

The Mermaid Parade (2010 as a mix-tape)

Hopefully copies should be arriving around now, so it must be time for the track listing of 2010s best-of CD. Seemed to be a fairly easy selection to make this year, although I did start out with a list of about 40 tracks. Not quite as many completely new bands as last year, but still a majority were unheard before the start of the year. 

The National – Bloodbuzz Ohio
Rose Elinor Dougall – Carry On
Metric – Sick Muse
Bettie Serveert – The Pharmacy
The Concretes – Good Evening
British Sea Power – Living Is So Easy
Three Mile Pilot – Still Alive
The Rural Alberta Advantage – Don't Haunt This Place
Ben Sollee & Daniel Martin Moore – Something, Somewhere, Sometime
The Soft Pack – C'mon
Kathleen Edwards – In State
Blitzen Trapper – Heaven and Earth
Stornoway – I Saw You Blink
Laura Marling – Rambling Man
Phosphorescent – The Mermaid Parade
Sambassadeur – Stranded
Darkstar – Deadness
For a Minor Reflection – Fjara

Let me know in the comments what your favourites are, which ones you can't stand and anything else that you think should have been on the list. If you would like a copy all you need to do is ask nicely ...

Song for Sunday

The Pains of Being Pure at Heart – Say No to Love

Gone camping

With apologies to David Shrigley and thanks to K&D.

Song for Sunday

Wild Nothing – Live in Dreams 

Band/artist of the week: The Rural Alberta Advantage
Song of the week: The Rural Alberta Advantage – Don't Haunt This Place

Top 10 albums of 2010

1 For a Minor Reflection – Höldum í átt að óreiðu

Hailing from Iceland it is inevitable that For a Minor Reflection will get compared to Sigur Rós. There are plenty of similarities – the beautiful quiet passages which build-up into a wonderful rush of melody and rhythm. Like a more melodic and approachable Mogwai, there are no vocals and this means that you get totally immersed in the music without any words to distract you.

The roaring and rumbling guitars are there, but often counterpointed by sparkling piano runs and strings to produce a remarkably mature and self-assured sound for a bunch of twenty-year-olds. The album opens on a far-off drone which gradually resolves itself into a whirling guitar riff and constantly crashing cymbals, fading back for a moment into a howl of feedback and then careering off back into all out guitar and cymbal overload. One of the best opening tracks I've heard for a long time.

They follow this up with the short, spare and surprisingly gentle Fjara with its beautiful piano base and cello over the top. Flóð then starts out deceptively quietly with some more piano and gentle guitar, later joined by the drums which drive it into more menacing terrain. It is like being caught in a violent storm on summers day.

Dansi Dans is whimsical and poppy in a very Icelandic leftfield way and it seems slightly out of place sandwiched between Flóð and the similarly powerful Andlega Veðurtepptir.

Tómarúm is another delicate piano interlude before we reach Sjáumst Í Virginíu which is the magnificent fourteen and half minute centrepiece of the album. Again it builds from a simple and sparse beginning into a flurry of guitars, drums and piano, before receding back again and then once more intensifying back towards the final crescendo. The music is constantly shifting, but gradually and imperceptibly: like watching the light fade on a landscape at the end of the day.

Next track Átta is what Sigur Rós would sound like if the were a punk band. A Moll returns to the earlier template of quiet start building to a raucous and glorious zenith. Finally he album closes with the almost pastoral Séð til Lands with what sounds like slide guitar over the squeaking of a cart wheel.

The only downside is that you'll probably be hearing all these songs on nature documentaries for the next few years, but at least you'll be able to tell everyone who the music is by, even if you can't tell them what any of the tracks are called.

Top 10 albums of 2010

2 Darkstar – North

With its cover image of what looks like an abandoned steel works, you can only assume that the North of the title is the post-industrial wastelands of the north of England. Released on the hyperdub label – famous for Burial and other dubstep pioneers – it has less in common with their labelmates than it does with recent Radiohead and Low-era Bowie.

Composed on drum machines and synthesisers the music is chilly, stripped back and totally synthetic. The stark beats and basic melodies produce a haunting atmosphere and convey depth of emotion from the simplest-sounding elements. Oddly though I find this a wonderfully uplifting and beautiful listen – like agnostic hymns to a better future.

Top 10 albums of 2010

3 The National – High Violet

Some people may be surprised that this isn't higher up (me included, probably). Don't get me wrong, I love this album and think it is an amazing set of songs. It's just that there are two others which I think that I've loved even more this year.

First off, just so you know, I am going to try and not use the word masterpiece at all in this post. I have a feeling this album will turn out to be just that, but given how often that word is bandied about in reviews I am going to try and let history make that judgment.

Just like R.E.M. in 1989, they are at the peak of their powers and probably the best band in the world right now. The songs are beautifully crafted, but they still manage to keep the spontaneity and take risks with the songs. You can hear some of the bands processes in action, their quest for perfection at work in each small part of every song. No amount of work and effort will make a bad song good, but what The National do makes goods songs into brilliant ones.

The themes are similar to the ones that Springsteen deals with on Darkness on the Edge of Town – the responsibilities of adulthood and the compromises that they entail – but The National's protagonists are white-collar, internet-era, city-living thirty- and forty-somethings grappling with the demands of parenthood and working in offices. That may sound dull and worthy, but when Matt Berninger's wonderfully off-beat and allegorical lyrics are combined with music like this it is anything but.

It seems unfair to single out any particular songs because they are all wonderful (apart from maybe Lemonworld which grates slightly, but that may just be because it makes me think of U2 and their big lemon tour or whatever it was) and there is just too much good stuff to highlight it all. So let's just take one at random, something like the tucked away Conversation 16 with its menacing oboe (I think) riff and its refrain of 'I was afraid that I'd eat your brains ...' How could you not love it?

Top 10 albums of 2010

4 Phosphorescent – Here's To Taking It Easy

The Mermaid Parade is like a maritime version of Mardi Gras. Held on Coney Island every year on the Saturday nearest the beginning of Summer it is, according to the ever reliable Wikipedia, 'well-known for extraordinary marine costumes, and for the occasional partial nudity.' I had never heard of it until I read an article about Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson being the parade's King and Queen this year. It sounds like a blast.

About a week later I was listening to the iPod on shuffle and up popped a song which I didn't recognise, but it which was very definitely about the same event: 'Oh, but I didn't make it to the airport today / I wound up walking out by the ocean today / there were naked women dancing in the Mermaid Parade.' It was a beautifully yearning, melancholy waltz through the singer's calamitous love-life, which manages to  create a whole history from a few beguilingly sketched incidents. Straight away I was intrigued. The track was by a band called Phosphorescent, which it turned out was really just a front for solo artist Matthew Houck. I also discovered that I had another track off the album – the tongue-in-cheek (I presume) It's Hard to Be Humble (When You're From Alabama), which I had listened to a couple of times and decided that I didn't like.

And that was almost that. Although I love The Mermaid Parade I presumed that it was a one-off and had pretty much decided that it wasn't worth investigating the rest of the album. How wrong can you be? It turns out that It's Hard to Be Humble (When You're From Alabama) is the exception and the rest of the album is as spectacularly good as The Mermaid Parade.

Houck's voice is instantly recognisable, bruised, world-weary and able to convey a depth of emotion with the slightest intonation. The album title is apt, because the music is mostly easy-going, deep-south rock'n'roll. There are jaunty numbers like Heaven, Sitting Down and I Don't Care if There is Cursing and darker, country and gospel tinged tracks like Los Angeles and Hej, Me I'm Light but all of the songs have a timeless, effortless grace.