... and then I read some more

CBR-IV #2: David Nicholls: Starter For Ten

2012-01-18T13:39:00.000-08:00

I must be getting old. I'm quite sure that only a few years ago, the story of a spotty, insecure teenager with an ever-so-uncool obsession with University Challenge would have amused me no end. I would have nodded sagely at every confession of adolescent confusion and the constant feeling of one's own shortcomings. I would have pretended to know what it's like to live in a smelly student home and drink disgusting homebrew. I would have wanted in on it! But now, at the tail-end of my twenties, I seem to have become the humourless enemy.
Or. Maybe Starter For Ten just isn't the brilliant book I thought it would be. It's one of those books that is frequently mentioned in other reviews, until you decide you better read it yourself. The story sounds good enough: Nineteen-year-old Brian is too clever for his own good (though also a bit too naive) and decides to leave his depressing hometown and his widowed mother to dedicated his life to the study of English Literature at university. He jumps at the chance to be on the university's Challenge team, promising televised glory as well as a chance to excel at the one thing Brian has ever had in common with his late father. So far, so neatly planned. Brian, however, is an antihero, and over-the-top so. He's not pretty, not wise, not actually very good at English literature, and within half a day also hopelessly in love.
You can guess what happens next. There's a lot of disappointment, hair and skin disasters, messed-up dates, uncomfortable nakedness and things-that-every-first-year-student-can-relate-to. But it's not actually all that funny, and our hero is not actually all that likeable. It's a quick, amusing read, but it left me cold.
There are a few redeeming features. Brian's realisation that while he loves literature, he's not academically brilliant gives the whole romp the little downer it needs. Nicholls manages to pin down bits of the truth every now and then, but for every critical thought there's either a banal embarrassment (naked parents? Really?) or a very unlikely sexual encounter waiting in the wings. It's all a bit meh.
However, the most disappointing aspect for me was the lack of actual University Challenge action. I might be just the nerd Nicholls was going for, but I can't help but feel that when your big selling point is a well-known quiz show, there should actually be a few pages of quizzing in the book. But for all the romantic longing, the hero's big goal (finally making his father proud) falls by the wayside. The finale is a good one, but there is minimal build-up, and it's quite formulaic and predictable.
I guess grumpy old me is just having a hard time connecting with the young people. And liking a book without liking the hero is a difficult thing.

CBR-IV #1: Fred Vargas: The Chalk Circle Man

2012-01-11T13:54:00.000-08:00

Of course, reading a quick crime novel feels like cheating when you're trying to get a (half) heap of books done in 12 months. But there are crime novels that are so good, you wouldn't mind if there wasn't a solution, a murderer, or even a crime. In the case of Fred Vargas, you'd be perfectly happy just to watch the hero's thoughts meander away.
The Chalk Circle Man is Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg's first appearance in Vargas' work. These days, an unconventional policeman is pretty much the standard in any novel of the genre, but Vargas doesn't only make her hero a shabby-looking, mind-numbingly slow policeman who needs to walk around in circles in order to arrive at a conclusion, she mirrors these qualities in her writing. Having read any of her novels I could get my hands on, rather than going through them in a civilized, chronological manner, I knew what to expect. For a new reader, Vargas' style, as much as her inspector's, might be an adventure. A naturally fast reader, I always find myself hurrying through the text, often without grasping every detail, just because I'm waiting for something to happen. There isn't much action in an Adamsberg case. It's gripping, and pleasantly bizarre in a French way, but the really interesting part is seeing Adamsberg's mind at work.
In this case, the good people of Paris are somewhere between amused and bemused when blue chalk circles start to appear on the sidewalks overnight, each of them drawn around a random object. No case for the police, but Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg is worried and decides to keep an eye on things. Soon, the object in the circle is a dead body, and Adamsberg... well, doesn't really do anything. For most of the time he thinks, and colleagues, acquaintances and suspects alike are starting to get annoyed. But Adamsberg's brain is working away, and, almost without leaving his chair, he presents his confused surroundings with a solution.
The unconventional style of the inspector is mirrored by a style that seems to wander about just as aimlessly. It's hard to pin down what it is, it might even be just bad, incoherent writing, but it works well and makes Vargas' books that little bit different from other crime novels. Also, the protagonists' frequent introspection that works so well in Scandinavian crime is not limited to the inspector. There are only a handful of others, but each of them is portrayed by their thoughts and musings. This adds a light philosophical layer to the novel, so much that the solving of the case seems less and less important. Adamsberg's change of pace and ultimate move then turn into as much work for the reader as for the inspector. Finally getting somewhere feels like struggling out of an armchair that has become more comfortable by the hour.

So. If you feel like slowing down a bit and contemplating the world and the little things with Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg, almost like people dropping dead left, right and centre are nothing to worry about, Fred Vargas is your new obsession. You're welcome.

Cannonball Read 4!

2012-01-11T13:47:00.000-08:00

I'm going for 26 books this year (cranky baby excuse bla bla), AND I will actually review all of them. Also, I'll stay away from Les Miserables, which brought me to a complete standstill last year. So then.

CBR-III #18: Charles Dickens: A Tale of Two Cities

2011-04-12T12:41:00.000-07:00

I am one of those people who spend too much time feeling accomplished for reading a lot of the classics. I do like most of them and have come back for the more obscure ones, but man do I love being able to tick more and more boxes in all those literature questionnaires (I also love questionnaires way too much).

But maybe I'm not doing myself and Charles Dickens justice. I loved Bleak House and found David Copperfield interesting enough to finish it within a week. More importantly, those books taught me a lot about Victorian novels: Sometimes, you have to skim in order to keep your sanity. When Dickens goes on a spiritual rant, I turn the page. Sometimes I lose track of the story, because Dickens actually has a point in his rants. He wrote enormous amounts of enormous novels and mastered the art of never being too obvious. Quite often, this makes it hard for the reader to get the gist of the story, and I'm not entirely sure I have this problem because Victorian English is still foreign to me. Dickens was just so good that he could afford to play around with language.

The setting of A Tale of Two Cities is an unfamiliar one at first: It takes us further back than to the good old Vitorian days - more precisely, to the days of the French revolution. The scope of the novel seems breathtaking; Dickens proposes to paint a picture of both France and England in those days, of a whole time (the famous "best of times and worst of times"). He accomplishes it, while managing to take the reader in by focussing on a small number of characters. Alexandre Manette, a French Doctor, is released from the Bastille after years of captivity, and reunited with his daughter Lucie, who lives in England. Manette is traumatized but slowly brought back to life by Lucie's love and the support of his few friends (Dickens is only too happy to supply suitably sentimental descriptions). Lucie falls in love with another Frenchman in exile, the dashing Charles Darnay, who turns out to be an aristrocrat on the run from his family's bad deeds towards the enslaved peasantry. In an attempt to save a loyal servant who is caught up in the tumult of the revolution, Darnay travels to Paris and is promptly arrested. His family's attempts to rescue him form the last, and most exciting part of the novel.

Apart from his usual sentimental description of young love, old loyalty and pure goodness of heart, Dickens excels in capturing the mood of France in the years of the revolution. He describes the suffering of the people without the usual sentimentality, and caricatures the aristocracy with a good amount of bile, while at the same time condemning the senseless slaughter in the name of the young Republic. I found it hard at first to unite those two viewpoints, in that silly, polar way of thinking that makes sane, balanced literature a necessity. I eventually realised there is no simple right or wrong, even in Victorian literature. Dickens makes it clear that while he thinks both extremes wrong, a bloody revolution as this was neccessary for France to make a complete fresh start with new, better rules, laws and conditions.

As for the story, nobody really wins. While on the surface level there is the expected happy ending, the overall mood is one of despair and loss. The long-term effects of the revolution are yet to come, and we leave Paris in a hurried, panicked way. As far as Dickens goes, this is strong, dark stuff that goes beyond the description of individual fate. Not what I expected, but all the better for it.

CBR-III #16: John Irving: Last Night in Twisted River

2011-03-12T12:31:00.001-08:00

In his afterword, John Irving describes himself as a sort of literary relic, one of the unfashionable few who still believe in plot. He mentions the novels that have influenced him, and from that alone, I should have known I'd love Last Night in Twisted River. It's massive (more than 650 pages long), and it's epic, and I love epic novels so much that I started taking the thickest books from the library shelves at random. In this case, knowing Irving's writing - although A Prayer for Owen Meany did not appeal to me on an emotional level - helped, but the fact that this book can not be read in one sitting was the main point.

The novel spans more than fifty years, beginning in a small New Hampshire logging settlement in 1954. Daniel Baciagalupo, at twelve years old, is an insecure, jumpy boy, living with his father Dominic, the settlement's cook, in a rough, and for the most part lawless, world. Accidents are common, and the boy has already lost his mother to the dangers of the place. Everyone in Twisted River is damaged in some way, is either crippled, bereaved, dangerously alcoholic, or morbidly obese. Within the first few sentences, the boy's 15-year-old friend dies. Yet there is comfort in the routine the boy shares with his father and their friend Ketchum. Stories of accidents, bear killings and violence mix with Daniel's memories of his mother and the story of her death, which he wants to be told again and again. One night, confusing the ficticious and the real world, Daniel accidentally kills the sheriff's girlfriend, and the cook and his son flee from Twisted River, knowing the constable will forgive neither the man nor the boy.

Both Daniel and Dominic manage to settle for years before the sheriff tracks them down, each time upsetting the tentative lives they have managed to build for themselves, causing them to lose friends and loved ones over and over again. Informed and warned by their old friend Ketchum, who remains in Twisted River, they live with the constant threat of the sheriff's violent revenge. Consequently, there is not much happiness in their lives. While they both encounter quite a few women, there is little love in their relationships. Most women in the book are inconsequential, and if they're not, they're almost comically oversized, mean or mad. Daniel becomes a writer, dedicating his life to re-imagining the darkest moments and biggest fears of his past. The reader soon realises just how similar Daniel's life and fiction are, although the people close to him always notice a curious detachment. It soon becomes clear that an ageing Daniel has still to write his own story. (And once again, metafiction rears its ugly head...)

As a writer, Daniel offers some insight into the art of fiction writing: "So called real people are never as complete as wholly imagined characters". Nevertheless, Irving's style made it difficult for me to fully imagine the characters in the book. It may be because of the meandering plot, which is mixed with lenghthy descriptions of the logging process, recipes and hunting trips, which can make the plot hard to follow. Also, the novel is in parts curiously devoid of feeling. Events are described rather than felt, and some characters seem rather cold and lifeless.

Make no mistake though: Last Night in Twisted River is a very good novel, one that stays with you and makes you ponder life, fate and, in part, politics. It's beautifully written, and the fact that I can write a lengthy review about it after a series of short, inconsequential books that left me with nothing to say surely proves its worth.

CBR-III #10: Lorena McCourtney: Invisible (Ivy Malone Mystery Series #1)

2011-02-18T08:11:00.000-08:00

This was a free book for the kindle. There is too much God in it. Nuff said.

CBR-III #9: Henning Mankell: Italian Shoes

2011-02-13T23:43:00.000-08:00

Oh great. Now I'm scared of dying.

CBR-III #8: A.M. Homes: This Book Will Save Your Life

2011-02-06T04:25:00.000-08:00

Ok. So somebody introduces himself to the hero and says "I'm Nic."
How does the narration know that Nic spells his name without the "k"? Wouldn't the hero put him down as an ordinary "Nick", by default? The book is clearly written as a third-person narration, so wouldn't it have to put the default "Nick" down first before, if ever, correcting it to a "Nic"? Wouldn't it make much more sense to have Nic himself specify the peculiar writing of his name?

Yes. This really is the most pressing question I have about this book.

CBR-III #7: Markus Zusak: The Book Thief

2011-01-30T10:41:00.000-08:00

The word "bestseller" does not usually make me want to read a book any more desperately. Likewise, the more people recommend a book to me, the more I expect to be, if anything, disappointed. That may not make me a particularly open-minded reader, but sometimes, I give books a try just to prove to myself that I will at least read them before I slag them off.
The Book Thief did not appeal to me at all. The sleeve notes are disjointed, just like the first few pages, and books about books? I recall the hate-fest that was my Firmin review. I'm not one for metafictional, narrated-by-death magical realism novels. But I gave it a go.

The Book Thief is the story of Liesel, a young German girl who grows up with foster parents in a poor suburb of Munich during WWII. She sees her brother die and her mother disappear before the story has even properly begun, and during the course of the novel, she is confronted by all the things that make the 1940s such a desperate time for most of the world. Perpetually hungry, she is forced to steal food, but she longs for one thing even more: Books. Superficially, it's the story of how she acquires a handful of books. But in the small world she inhabits, the big questions that the horror of the Nazi regime and its war bring crop up. When her parents hide Max, a Jewish refugee, in the basement of their little house, Liesel befriends him, all the while living with the sense of fear and helplessness that such a situation would bring on any family trying to stay under the Nazi radar. Max furthers Liesels love for words, but also teaches her their destructive power. In the end, it is, as always, death who has the last word.

For most of the first half of the book, I was reading mechanically and didn't think much of the book. I didn't like its style, which was to precious for my taste, too obviously looking for sympathy by mimicking the confused girl's trains of thought and perception of the world. The story itself didn't strike me as particularly clever or special, it was the context that gave it its strength. Any novel about life in Nazi Germany, however, smacks of set books in secondary school (I HATED The Reader.) In fact, a quick look at the book's Amazon page furthered my suspicions that the book might be meant for young adults.
Towards the end, though, I felt more and more drawn in by the story. The style got better, or maybe I got used to it, and some passages were really moving in their simplicity and inherent sadness. Liesel's story is a sad one, and the book doesn't try to come up with a big dramatic ending. I didn't cry, but I can see how people might.
All in all, The Book Thief will not become one of my favourite books, but it will stay with me for a while, which is more than can be said for other books. I suppose that makes it better than I thought it would be.

CBR-III #2: G.K.Chesterton: The Man Who Knew Too Much

2011-01-20T01:14:00.000-08:00

I guess this is a book that is worth some deeper research than just downloading it for free because it sounds vaguely important. And since that's clearly one of those shoulda things that never actually happen, this is going to be a poor excuse for a review.

First of all, it quickly dawned on me that it's actually a collection of short stories. A proper book would have told me that on the sleeve (and I would have promptly put it back), but ebooks are a mysterious entity without sleeves. ("Wait a minute?! Donkeys don't have sleeves! - You KNOW what I mean!")

The stories are connected in that they all feature Horne Fisher, mysterious, tired, well-connected, liberal: The Man Who Knew Too Much. They are all mystery cases on the outside, but political ones, and as such generally with a disappointing, anti-climatical outcome. Fisher knows politics, being related to half the country's political elite. He knows that the big fish will never get caught, that society can't change as long as this knowledge holds true, and that he, despite his knowledge, can not help the country.
The book was written in 1922, and it becomes more socialist over the course of the stories. Horne Fisher, an aristocrat himself, struggles with his privileges when the working classes are so obviously disadvantaged.

Personally, the older I get, the less well I can cope with politics. I only finished the book because I was already halfway through, and because Chesterton's writing is really very, very good. I tried to ignore the unsubtle political views of the main character, although I might have muttered to myself a fair bit (I never even started The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists because I was shouting abuse just reading the sleeve notes. I really am not a conservative, but unsubtle socialist warblings drive me up the wall. I guess I just don't like being hit around the head with moralistic bricks). I think I need a breather now, but I'll be definitely reading more of Chesterton's writing soon.

CBR-III #1: Anne Holt - 1222

2011-01-19T10:04:00.000-08:00

This was a cheap buy for my new kindle thingy, and something I would have got out of the library anyway, because I will always read Scandinavian crime, and I'm not ashamed to admit it.
Anne Holt is Norwegian, and her novel deals with exactly what you would expect from a Norwegian book: Lots of snow. Having just holidayed in a snowed-in country myself, it was the perfect read. The main character in 1222, ex-police inspector Hanne Wilhemsen, is one of the many people affected by a derailed train in the worst snowstorm in Norwegian history and is evacuated to a mountain hotel. What seems like a close escape with only one victim quickly goes very wrong. The snowstorms cuts off any hope of rescue, and people get murdered.
It quickly dawned on me that it is one of the best settings for a murder mystery, since I had just attempted something very similar for NaNoWriMo. Anne Holt is a professional though, and her novel makes much more sense than mine.
Forced to stay in the hotel lobby, the wheelchair-bound Wilhemsen observes the growing panic and strange reactions in the group of survivors and tries to solve the murders. She is also puzzled by the secret and heavily-guarded compartment that the train was pulling, and its passengers, which most of the rescued suspect to be royalty. Wilhemsen has different ideas though, but she only realises right in the end how wrong everybody has been. This part of the story was a bit much for my taste: I actually laughed when the identity of the secret passengers was revealed. The actual murder story is solid, and makes sense in a Scandinavian crime way.
What raises this novel above attempts like mine are Holt's subtle observations of the cracks in the little mountain hotel community and Norwegian society as a whole: Here we have unsavoury church ministers versus just as unlikeable worldly demagogues, the occasional quiet foreigner vs. the bullying neo-nazi. In a closed environment, things will quickly boil over, and it makes for good reading.
1222 is nothing spectacular, and the ending is a bit over the top, but it keeps you reading, and quickly.

Höö-römmm-pöömm-pömmm. It's 2011.

2011-01-08T01:31:00.000-08:00

I'm still here.

CBR-III has now started, and I shall try to finish somewhere close to a count of 52. But then I have a lot of things planned for 2011, so maybe I'll just aim for more-than-those-measly-30something-from-last year.

Also, 2011 is the year of experimental reading. I've got a lovely little kindle now, and although I miss page numbers and makeshift bookmarks made from Aldi receipts, I *think* the kindle makes me read faster. I'm already on my second book this year. Get in. It's easier to make notes and actually find the quotes in question afterwards. And I can crochet little bags for it.

Expect a lot of (free!) classics and random thrillers (a quid!). Let's go.

Those Eastern Europeans...

2010-10-22T06:32:00.001-07:00

For some many reasons, Laurie Graham's Life According to Lubka was just right for me. It was an easy read (it took around 5 hours to read it), it's funny, it's charming, and it's about Eastern Europe, which constitutes a special sort of in-joke for someone married to a Pole.

Buzz Wexler, a forty-two year-old American with more than a healthy dose of self-esteem, gets unlucky. Set to be presented with a Lifetime Achievement Award for her role in managing the latest trends in urban music, she is overlooked in her company's merger and is forced to tour the country with a group of Bulgarian folk-singing grannies. What looks like a complete disaster at first soon turns into a fun, if unorthodox adventure, including the Bulgarian mafia, incompetent interpreters, fat Abba fans, Bulgarian hotties (not talking about the toothless grannies here) and knitting. When the tour moves on the the U.S., Buzz's family and a dead President add even more drama.
Although the set-up of the novel could have easily turned into a unsympathetic, ridiculing account of Bulgarian culture, Graham has a charming way of endearing her characters to the reader. For me, much of the hilarity stemmed from my own experiences with former communist countries (Although I would like to state quite clearly that my relatives do NOT keep sheep in their living rooms!), but Laurie Graham manages to capture the charm and friendliness that come with the chaos and terrible dress sense.
As for the rest, the story really does feel like the warm embrace the book cover promises; everything turns out just fine, families reconcile, and it makes you smile. Add hysterical translation mistakes, horrible band names and howlingly funny remarks, and this book wins on all counts.

Can't... compute.

2010-10-20T09:00:00.000-07:00

All my reading-related energy has left me over the last few weeks. I finished a book I can't remember the title of, gave up on another one after renewing it more often than allowed (my librarians clearly love me) and then taking it back today totally frustated, and I got stuck on a third one when it wouldn't stop with the intricate Victorian poetry.

Deep breath.

The mystery one, then. There seem to be a few brain cells left, and I now recall it's Helen Simpson's Constitutional, and it threw me into a deep depression. The reviewer of a short story collection by Alice Munro recommended Simpson as one of very few writers to reach Munro's standard, and given the impact it had on me, they were right. Simpson provides snapshots of ordinary people's lives, their dealings with children, death and everything in between, and, although brilliantly executed, cuts you deep. I felt almost physically violated from the sheer power of her thoughts. It's hard to explain, but it's one of those books that make you consider a hunger strike after reading a particularly bleak account of a woman's outlook on life and feminism. Tough, tough, tough.

The book I curse, the one that frustrated me, that I just couldn't deal with for more than five pages at a time, was the seemingly "easy" The Master Bedroom by Tessa Hadley. I have no explanation for struggling so much with this particular book (the main character is a translator, for Pete's sake!), but I did. The plot wasn't particularly intriguing, the character's weren't likeable, and before flinging it back at the librarian this morning, I couldn't even be bothered to read the last pages, because frankly, I couldn't care less. This very rarely happens to me, but Tessa Hadley managed to push all the wrong buttons.

Now on to the Victorians. I might just finish A.S. Byatt's Possession before October 31st, but right now I need a drink and 10 days of sleep.

The Monster in the Box

2010-09-28T06:19:00.000-07:00

By now I think it's mere compulsion. I must have read every Ruth Rendell book there is (and there are a lot of them), and while some are among my favourite novels of all time, some have left me cold, and they tend to be Inspector Wexford mysteries. The latest one deals with the past - both Wexford's and Britain's. Rendell has always added a nice bit of social commentary to her stories, and this one is no exception. After encountering a criminal he could never put away for lack of evidence, Wexford thinks back to how their "relationship" started when they were both young. While the present-day story doesn't move along very quickly, Wexford has flashbacks of both the past murder cases and his own life as a young policeman as well as a boyfriend/husband. He reflects on how times have changed (as you would expect from an old(er) man), and not in a grating way, but it nevertheless struck me as a bit forced. And then there is the burning socio-political issue of the day, which this time is forced marriage and honour killings in Muslim families. I've commented on Rendell's use of this in another review, and it hasn't changed: She is trying to hard. Especially when the formula is always the same - Wexford hears about a case of *insert issue* in his neighbourhood and somehow gets involved. In this case, the two seperate storylines meet and get tangled up, and in a not entirely believable way. To add even more confusion, a lion then roams the streets of Kingsmarkham. Really.
With all the flashbacks to the past, maybe Rendell is trying to retire Wexford. And while she's still a solid writer, maybe it is time.

The Fry Chronicles

2010-09-24T05:16:00.000-07:00

Don't trust Stephen Fry's reviews. They will always be most friendly, and if the author happens to be a friend or acquaintance (and given he's Stephen Fry, chances are quite good that they are), they will be even more so. The fact that he admits to putting loyalty before literary integrity says a good deal about the man's character: He is, in short, a true gentleman.
The Fry Chronicles, his second autobiography after Moab is my Washpot, covers his Cambridge years and the steady rise to fame in the 5 or 6 years after. If we are to believe him, and who wouldn't, they mark the happiest days of his life, a time when he pulled himself together after a wild and even criminal adolescence, enjoyed leading a respectable life and met friends for life. I'm not an expert when it comes to autobiographies, and I don't think I've ever read one before. All I (theoretically) know is that it's very subjective and quite often an apology on behalf of the author - if it isn't pure showing off, which is the main reason I'm not interested. Stephen Fry stubbornly insists on apologizing for everything. He's clever, talented and everyone's number one dream dinner guest, yet he seems almost ashamed to admit it. He tries to explain this special trait of constantly putting himself down, and what he says makes a lot of sense, so you forgive him after an initial phase of frowning at yet another apology. He is, as most of his fans and even non-fans know, a troubled soul, battling bipolar disorder. If you keep that in mind, the amount of self-doubt he displays in his book makes you sad rather than mad.
He is, however, an incredibly funny man, and even though The Fry Chronicles are mostly descriptive and occasionally explanatory, his wit shines through. There is an imagined staff meeting at his Cambridge College concerning the admission of women that made me howl. What's more important, at least for me, is his love for learning and university. And this is where his apologies are least justified. You want to shake the man (gently) and tell him to stop apologizing for loving Cambridge and, effectively, his youth. After struggling for years, the idea of Cambridge alone finally seemed to have relaxed Fry and given him a purpose. And when he says things like these, I want to hug him and yell "YES!"

The only reason people do not know much is because they do not care to know. They are incurious. Incuriosity is the oddest and most foolish failing there is.

Here's the man I want to have dinner with.

It's not all clever little thoughts though. Fry describes his time with various Cambridge theatre clubs, his first successes in Edinburgh, and finally, his time as a broadcasting darling, working in television, radio and theatre, together with his friends Hugh Laurie, Emma Thompson, Ben Elton and all those guys. He comes across as somebody who's still amazed at the chances that presented themselves to him, so you don't mind the constant namedropping. Life has been good to Stephen Fry, and yet he struggles with self-doubt. It's tragic (and the book's last-page cliffhanger doesn't exactly make for a happy ending), and I want to cuddle Uncle Stephen. In my eyes, and I'm sure I'm not alone, he can't do no wrong, precisely because he is such a gentle, genuine and troubled person.

Everybody who loves Stephen Fry is obviously already reading this book. Even people who are merely interested in what made him become a man so many love and quite a few cannot stand should read it though. Maybe even those mainly interested in the comedy scene in Thatcher's Britain. Or Cambridge people. Even people who have never seen his documentaries or read his books. It's a good one.

99 coffees later

2010-09-16T14:24:00.000-07:00

Finally. I'm done with the trilogy. It cost me hours of my life, but I did it. And now I'm a bit angry.

In the last part of his Millennium trilogy, The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet's Nest, Larsson brings Lisbeth Salander's case to a solution. Picking up where the second part ended, it keeps its heroine first in intensive care and later in prison, for the most part immobile and only sporadically influencing the plot by communicating via the internet. Meanwhile, her friends Blomkvist and Armansky and a whole lot of police officers try to establish what happened, and who is to blame. Since Lisbeth brought to light a conspiracy within the Secret Police, a certain group of people are frantically trying to cover their tracks. Blomkvist and his newspaper colleagues have only until Salander's trial to find - and prove - the truth. So far, so explosive. For the most part, we listen in to discussions and revelations on both sides. It is clear from the outset that the truth will come out, and, disappointingly, the enemy doesn't really strike back. It's all pretty straightforward, things get stolen, things come to light, but it's not really shocking, or even remotely scary.

And here's what really bugs me. I did count the word coffee in this one (explained here), and ended up with a count of 99. The book has 743 pages, so these people are having a coffee every 7.5 pages. Which would be fine if this was a novel about caffeine addiction, Fairtrade procedures or espresso machine manufacturers, but it's not. Every single cup of coffee has no significance whatsoever. Their only point in the book is giving people something to do in between car chases, computer hacking or endless monologues about the Secret Police. It's a cheap device, it's grating, it's unnecessary, and I pity the translator. Seriously, this is textbook stuff about how not to write a novel. Nothing outside the information conveyed in the story is of any significance. It reads like a template for a spy novel, and these sentences, channelling Dan Brown, actually made me groan, and not in a good way: The Prime Minister nodded grimly. Why did Säpo always have to be such a nightmare to administer? Call me a nitpicker, but this stuff upsets me.

What's really frustrating is that although it's badly written, the novel is so damn interesting you can't put it down. Larsson has so much to tell, he doesn't need to spend much of his 743 pages constructing a plot - the material takes care of itself. And it's good stuff, especially the courtroom scenes. The whole thing makes such a great investigative magazine article it's almost ridiculously metatextual. Only it doesn't make for a good novel. A clever and interesting one, yes. Just not a good one. And for some reason, I'm furious with myself for falling for it.

Sarah Waters: The Little Stranger

2010-09-12T06:01:00.000-07:00

Shortlisted for last year's Man Booker Prize, The Little Stranger is a surprisingly old-fashioned book. Set just after the Second World War, it's a gothic novel and feels much more remote. Apart from its mentions of rationing and fitted kitchens, its subject matter is essentially decay, tragedy and complete loss.
Outwardly, it's a tale of Hundreds Hall, the crumbling manor house belonging to the Ayres family. Scarred by the war, ageing Mrs Ayres and her grown-up children, Roderick and Caroline, are out of money and down on their luck. They refuse to leave Hundreds Hall, which they can barely afford to maintain, and although virtually cut off from their surroundings, hang on to their way of life. The children have no illusions about the hopelessness of their situation; Roderick having returned from the war injured, and Caroline resigning to her life as a spinster. This stasis is only interrupted when Dr Faraday, a country doctor from a humble background, starts visiting. His mother had once been a maid in Hundreds Hall, and he remembers it fondly. Shocked by its decay, he forms a friendship with they Ayres, and while parts of him resent the feudal spirit they are trying to cling to, his love of the house, and later, Caroline, keeps him captivated.
While the first part of the novel is pleasant enough, and quietly melancholic, the mood soon changes, when Roderick is driven mad by what seem to be spooks in the old Hall. The lengthy plot plunges the family deeper into tragedy, so much that you're inclined to wonder how much more Waters will be able to lower the tone. When things finally spiral out of control, you get a glimpse of the possibilities of Water's storytelling. Faraday's obsession with the house gets more sinister, although this is never fully explored. His stoic, academic refusal to take ghost stories to heart makes the reader struggle with his sympathy for the Ayres, but again, without doing much to stop the downwards spiral of the plot. There are other things worth exploring: the social confusion in post-war Britain, the role of the gentry, and the devastating effect of the war on young men's minds, for instance.
The end is as inevitable as it's dark, but I was left with a slight feeling of disappointment. It's a strong story and a captivating, atmospheric book with plenty to think about nonetheless. Maybe some of its appeal gets lost in the frantic rush to get to the end of the plot, and some sort of explanation.
Powerful stuff, especially if you're obsessed with old houses, although that might sound like I was missing the point slightly...

The Girl Who Drinks A Lot Of Coffee

2010-09-10T06:39:00.001-07:00

Man. Have a look at this, and then scroll down to Karinf's comment. I read it after I finished ... Dragon Tattoo, and had a bit of a chuckle, but this time it really freaking annoyed me. I have the third part lying around somewhere, and I swear I'll count the cups of coffee this time. Although there's nothing wrong with the story, I will forever remember the Millennium Trilogy for the most annoying amount of unnecessary information EVER. Seriously. You pause and read again and think you might need that particular detail, only you don't. Ever. It sucks.
Anyway. Apart from drinking a lot of coffee, Blomkvist and Salander are back in The Girl Who Played With Fire, and it gets even bigger, scarier and madder this time. Mikael Blomkvist is approached by a freelance writer who promises another big exclusive story for Millennium, this time concerning sex trafficking. While Mikael prepares for the publication, the journalist is murdered, and who else but Lisbeth Salander is the main suspect? It all sounds a bit unlikely, but a captivating story needs to start somewhere. To do him justice, Larsson wraps it all up nicely, hurrying the reader along, scaring the pants off them and finally revealing Lisbeth's muddled past. In that sense it's much more satisfying than the first book, because all we really wanted to know was why she's under guardianship. We do find out, and I don't really know what suspense the third installment can add, but I guess I will in a few day's time. Anyway. Lisbeth disappears, and Mikael tries to clear her name. Not much happens for a while, and then we have the big shoot-out.
It's hard to pin-point what makes these books so addictive, but I guess Larsson's just come up with a really good story. He may not be the greatest writer, but he knows how to make people stay up all night to finish the bloody book. Mission accomplished.

Hilary Mantel: Wolf Hall

2010-09-03T06:20:00.000-07:00

The other summer read this year, according to various newspapers, was this. I haven't found anyone yet who has actually read it, but I believe the sales numbers and the Booker Prize Jury, which , again, chose a great book.
Given my previous experience with Mantel's work, it wasn't a straightforward choice for me. I didn't like her style, and am not a fan of historical fiction. It was Daphne Du Maurier's fault really, for leading me on. I liked what I read in The House on the Strand, so another, possibly not too trashy, historical novel it was.
Luckily, although set in Tudor times, Wolf Hall is anything but an oh-so-cleverly-accessorized Historical Novel. It doesn't swamp the reader with an abundance of detail about 16th century fashion or household items or whatever, it tells a straightforward story instead and just gets on with it, so expertly that you keep forgetting that we're dealing with Henry VIII here.
It tells the story of Thomas Cromwell, well known (just not to me *cough*) for having been Henry Tudor's right-hand man and responsible for finding him wife after wife and, almost casually, making him head of the Anglican church. All in a day's work for this intriguing man, whose origins and private life were shrouded in mystery until Mantel decided to make him her hero. And she did well. Although living in the dog-eat-dog world of the Tudor court, he comes across as a loving husband and father, a steady friend and an almost scarily intelligent and progressive man. You google a bit, and you find him as ugly as sin, with stern looks and a bad historical record to his name, and you still love the man. That's how masterly Hilary Mantel writes.
What impressed me most was how modern all this sounds in Mantel's words. Although centuries removed from our world, the political intrigue, the human tragedies and the sins and faults of those people are scarily familiar. Far from being a pompous, fat king, we find Henry a spoilt, moody caricature of a monarch, ruled - just like his country - by those who ruthlessly fought their way to the top and his side. It's all about money and power, always has been, and always will be. There may be a few less literal heads rolling these days, but as an allegory of our times, Wolf Hall is as good as it gets.

Horst Evers: Gefühltes Wissen

2010-08-19T13:27:00.000-07:00

I apologise to anyone who's not German or doesn't appreciate my sense of humour. You won't get it. Which is a shame, because Horst Evers is an eye-opener. It's not just that he's funny. It's that he's so damn RIGHT about things. And when you cry with laughter, it's because you KNOW IT'S TRUE.

Horst Evers writes short prose pieces. He performs. And he is a very funny man. That's all you need to know. He's also a not-strictly-Berliner living in Berlin, and as such can analyse that weird place better than a local. Some of his stories deal with Berlin and its many, many strange characters. Some are more universal, and my favourite is the one about IKEA. He describes a couple standing in the parking lot, holding hands and chanting "We will just buy a sofa bed. We won't buy any lamps, candle holders, potted plants, and most importantly: no drinking glasses. We have enough of them. We don't need them. We can do this!" and spotting them later, no sofa bed in sight, surrounded by cheap glassware. It's true, you know.

Of course, most of it gets lost in translation. Evers has a unique, slightly sloppy, even sleepy style. You can tell he's a bit bewildered by life. He's someone who can tell endless stories without ever coming to a logical end, and you'd still be transfixed and ask for more. I love that guy. I want more.

Stieg Larsson: The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo

2010-08-19T12:59:00.000-07:00

According to the papers, this is *the* holiday read this year. Again. So I thought I might as well...
Reading the novel I realised how, just like with music, repeated praise can turn anything into a massive anticlimax. I enjoyed it, I read whenever I had time, but I didn't see how this particular Swedish crime novel was so much better than others before it. It just wasn't much different. True, there are some really shocking scenes of sadism and violence, and the novel's dealing with white-collar crime makes it up-to-date, but in the end, it's about a guy trying to solve a murder mystery. It's not outrageous, and not modern, but a tried and tested formula.
That doesn't mean it's not gripping: Mikael Blomkvist, a journalist and publisher of a left-wing magazine, loses a libel case and tries to save the magazine's reputation by leaving Stockholm for a while. He is offered a handsome sum by an ageing industrialist trying to find out what happened to his great niece, who disappeared almost 40 years ago. He has to deal with the dysfunctional Vanger family and their history, and finally gets help from an unlikely ally: 24-year old Lisbeth Salander, the girl with the aforementioned tattoo. She's more dysfunctional than the whole Vanger clan put together, but a hacker, and Blomkvist manages to win her trust. Then it gets a bit disgusting, and the case is solved. Finally, Blomkvist manages to bring his old enemy (the one with the libel case) down.
While the case itself is solved, in true detective novel fashion, this is only the first part of a trilogy, and the things the reader really wants to know - Lisbeth's past, and whether the protagonists will live happily ever after - are not solved. It worked for me: I would've read the remaining two parts instantly, but couldn't get my hands on them.
I enjoyed the book, thought it was well written, and liked the protagonists. But apart from the fact that Larsson died before he could become famous, I don't see the hype. Two different movies? Really? Daniel Craig?? It's not that special. Tsk.

Let's face it

2010-08-19T12:53:00.001-07:00

I'm not gonna make it this year, am I? I did read a bit over the summer, but I'm getting picky, and left two books half-read, which I don't normally do. Also, when I read, I always seem to pick the heavy ones. So no, I'm not going to finish the Pajiba race, which is bad, but I do think I've learned a bit about my reading habits, and of course, writing is a good thing. So I'll keep updating this, only perhaps less frequently. And no on to the holiday reads, and look how predictable they are...

Hilary Mantel: An experiment in love

2010-07-05T05:04:00.000-07:00

Meh. Another memory of growing up in Northern England and getting the hell out of there, heading for London. A bit like Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, which I didn't like either. Complicated relationship with girl next door. A bit like Black Girl/White Girl, only less exciting. I really don't know what else to write, other than meh. I was in a rotten mood after finishing this. Very disapppointing.

RIP Beryl Bainbridge

2010-07-02T05:27:00.000-07:00

Did anyone see that documentary her grandson did a few years back? She came across as a slightly strange woman, but interesting and so, so talented nonetheless. I wrote my thesis about The Birthday Boys, not that I'm very proud of the result, and I've done a few reviews here. Neither captures the beauty of her work. Just do me a favour and read any of her novels. The Birthday Boys, obviously, is great, but Harriet Said will stay with you the longest.

Never Let Me Go

2010-06-26T05:30:00.000-07:00

There you go. A book with a bit more substance, and apparently a favourite of many, I picked up Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro roughly 12 hours after I saw it discussed on Pajiba. I then let my daughter watch television for 4 hours in a row (I'm not proud of this, believe me) in order to read in peace and quiet. One more hour the day after, and it was done. I don't think I've gulped down words like that in years, but funnily enough, it didn't leave me satisfied. (It was all a bit strange anyway, given that The Remains of the Day was the only book in years that I absolutely could not finish and finally threw down with a frustrated scream. I seem to have issues with Mr Ishiguro.)

Never Let Me Go is hard to describe. It's a bit science-fiction, although it's not, it's moving, but then it's not really. It's captivating, but I shrugged it off the second I closed the book. This is going to be a difficult review, especially because by explaining it, the suspense will be gone completely. Also, I suppose a few people will hate me.

It starts as a memory of boarding school days. Kathy, a 31-year-old carer (you'll find out soon enough what that means) reflects on her childhood at Hailsham School, and as you would expect, it's all about friendships and growing up, only there's a darkness lurking that makes the book a page-turner, but also an uncomfortable read. Narrator-Kathy has no illusions about her fate or that of her friends, and so even her memories are tainted by hopelessness. In the beginning, the reader can only guess what Hailsham is all about, but it's clear that Kathy and her friends are victims, protected from the complete truth about their fates by their teachers, but still always aware of it. What makes it troubling is the fact that the children are not innocent, but aware, yet inexplicably calm about it. It's a clever, painful insight into the minds of human beings who know no other life than the one they have been assigned to. You deal with what life throws at you, even if you know you'll die soon, that's how easy it is. So when I said "hopelessness" earlier, I guess I really meant the hopelessness you feel as a reader, because the characters' hopelessness sets in much later in the book, if at all. Never Let Me Go is certainly a manipulative book, and one whose success depends on how much its reader will let themselves be manipulated. The writing is just as matter-of-fact as the narrator's attitude towards life, nothing more and nothing less. All the drama comes from the subject matter and its effects on the reader. And it looks like I'm a cold-hearted bitch after all, because I just couldn't muster much compassion. I never understood the appeal of science-fiction, and although Never Let Me Go is so much more, it had much the same effect. I can't take something quite so unlikely seriously enough to really care. Yes, it's interesting and clever and ultimately well-executed, but in this case, that wasn't quite enough for me.

I'm not sure what to do about the upcoming movie. I can't imagine liking the story better after watching it, but it's very tempting to let myself be swept away by the no doubt ambitious cinematography. I think in this case, I would actually welcome a bit of dumbing-down and catering for my romantic, shallow side. Give me pretty pictures, but don't make me think too hard about that kind of future.

Alice Munro: Runaway

2010-06-20T01:50:00.000-07:00

I have to admit I only picked up that book because my mum was going on about it. I'm not a fan of short prose, not necessarily because of my literary snobbishness, but because I like to be sucked in and held captive by a story for more than half an hour. Now, after having read Runaway, I feel the constant need to apologise for not reading short stories more often. In his foreword, Jonathan Franzen describes most critics' reaction to short fiction as something inferior, and maybe that's what made me ignore the genre for so long. Anyway, what I'm trying to say here is that Runaway is a beautiful, clever and heartbreaking book. To quote Franzen:

Basically, Runaway is so good that I don't want to talk about it here. Quotation can't do the book justice, and neither can synopsis. The way to do it justice is to read it.

Since I have a review to write, I'll have to try to talk about it anyway.

First of all, every story is set in Canada. For a European, that's far away enough to give the whole book an added romantic dimension. But maybe that's just me, someone who still hasn't completely ruled out the possibility of emigrating to Canada one day.
More importantly, Munro is brilliant at describing a person in just a few sentences or actions. Everyone in her stories is flawed in some way, but that's what makes them human, and it's what makes the reader connect. For all the stories' shortness, Munro's characters do suck you in and hold you captive, even though it's only for a few pages. They're women in different stages of their lives, all trying to cope with what life throws at them. Even though every story is marked by the loss of a loved one, Munro's heroines are strong, dignified characters, and you never feel the need to simply pity them. Reading Runaway, I kept thinking that surely that makes Munro more of a genius than people who need 200 pages more to make their characters come to life.
In just a few pages, the stories in Runaway span lifetimes. Most of them find their completion years after we first encounter the main character, or are told in retrospect. This way, Munro finds a way to completing live stories, where other authors of short prose might just offer sketches. Also, and I realised how important this is for me as a reader, there's an element of sadness about the fleetingness of moments, and of life as a whole. I need melancholy, and without trying hard or seeming over the top, Munro gives it to me in spades.

I loved this book. It gave me everything I seem to be looking for in a book right now: melancholy, empathy and escape from my own life (which really isn't so bad!). I realise that that makes me look like some soppy girly, but that's OK. I'll read something edgier next.

insert Swede joke

2010-06-08T13:51:00.000-07:00

Although I love most of the (supposedly) difficult, highbrow novels I read, it's always much easier to get myself motivated to start a new book if I know I'm going to get through it quickly. Henning Mankell's latest work, The Man from Beijing, is one of those books that even save me the trouble of choosing, because my friendly library staff position it beautifully right next to the counter. And these days, even tilting my head to read book spines on a shelf means I'm distracted enough to have my devil child run straight out of the library and into the road, and we don't want that, do we.

I've mentioned it before: I'm a fan of Swedish crime fiction. Where I come from, that's quite common, and these days all Swedish Mankell movie adaptations are made with German money. We love that kind of stuff. Not too gory, suitably melancholy and filled with just enough social criticism to make you nod your head sagely without turning you into a complete anarchist. Mankell's Wallander novels even made it to Britain, a country that's not particularly well-endowed with translated literature. The Man from Beijing does not feature the grumpy detective though, but - despite of what the title might suggest - has its author return once again to the subject of Africa. (Mankell lives in Mozambique and has used his reputation to further the cause for African aid; his experiences in Africa have featured in many of his novels. Given his humanitarian work, it was no surprise to see his name on the list of aid workers on the Gaza flotilla last week.)

The novel begins with the discovery of 19 dead bodies in a remote Swedish village. The horrific crime, which wipes out an entire family and almost all the inhabitants of the hamlet, puzzles the local police, but only days later a suspect is caught and confesses to the crime. Before anyone can figure out his motives, he commits suicide. While the police still take him for the killer, Birgitta Roslin, a district judge from Helsingland, realises she is a distant relation to the victims and finds family diaries that seem to link the Swedish crime to a similar one in the US. She investigates privately and finds that the only stranger to have been seen in the village was a Chinese man. As luck has it, she is offered a chance to go to China for a short holiday, and when she starts enquiring after the man, things start to get scary. They also get implausible, given the amount of Chinese people in the world, but there you go. Things turn into an international intrigue involving Maoism, China's planned colonisation of Africa and the restaurant business, and you get swept along, at best too busy reading to wonder about the plot.

After having read and seen most of Mankell's work, I found his return to the subject of Africa a bit tedious. His work for charity is commendable, and he certainly raises awareness, but when an author's view shines out of his work so clearly, I tend to raise an eyebrow. In this case, he also serves up opinions on Maoism and Robert Mugabe, and as a whole, it was a tad too much for me. The story is captivating and well-written, which is more than can be said about a lot of other crime novels, so why not leave it at that? If you're looking for entertainment with a conscience, however, Mankell is your man. His latest offering is not likely to fall short of the success of his previous work.

Daphne du Maurier: The House on the Strand

2010-06-06T14:08:00.000-07:00

A story about a drug-induced time travel to Mediaeval Cornwall could go horribly wrong, but in the hands of Daphne du Maurier even a far-fetched idea like this somehow works out just fine. The House on the Strand, published in 1969, is confusing at first, not just for its mention of dishwashers and LSD, things that seem very far removed from Rebecca, du Maurier's most famous novel (which, after all, was written only 30 years earlier). The plot is quite simple: Dick Young, the narrator, is offered his friend Magnus's house in Cornwall as a summer retreat. In return, he promises to test a new drug that Magnus, a biophysicist, has developed in his spare time (as you do). The drug induces hallucinations of travelling back in time while staying in or around the same place. Dick is fascinated by Isolda, a young woman he "meets" in the fourteenth century, and keeps going back in time again and again to see what becomes of her in the course of a few years. This becomes a habit that slowly affects Dick's mind and leads to confusion between the mediaeval and his own, uneventful life. When his wife and stepsons join him for their holidays, it becomes clear that Dick prefers the imagined characters' company to that of his own family, and his attempts to take the drug again and again result in discord between the newlyweds. Dick's behaviour more and more resembles that of an addict, and when Magnus dies in tragic circumstances, things get out of hand.
It takes a while to get settled in the story, because things happen quite quickly. Du Maurier chooses to introduce the whole cast of mediaeval characters within the first pages of the novel, so much that even with the help of an accompanying family tree it is almost impossible to tell them apart. Not that it matters much, though, as the actual "time travel" episodes are very short, and the gist of the fourteenth-century story emerges only after additional research by Magnus and Dick. The outcome of Isolda's story is rather disappointing, but by then Dick's struggle with his addiction has become much more interesting, a development that was without doubt intended by the author. As usual, du Maurier juggles various more difficult and intriguing subjects that are mired in the story. The most interesting one is that of sexually insecure Dick, who prefers the company of his school friend to that of his own wife. There are overtones of bisexuality, which is something that is also dealt with in Rebecca, if in a much more intense and tragic way.
The writing, again, is great. I can imagine people being put off by the strange science-fiction element, but what could have gone wrong for other writers is saved the embarrassment by du Maurier's skillful writing. The House on the Strand did not quite make my list of favourites, although it was much better than the blurb (or even this review) might suggest. It might have to do with my literary snobbishness - I'm not a fan of historical fiction. Still, it's an interesting novel by a wonderful, clever writer.

Ake Edwardson: Never End

2010-05-26T06:03:00.000-07:00

Here's a review I almost forgot. I'm not saying it's entirely the genre's fault: Crime novels aren't always forgettable. Easy to read, yes. A bit formulaic, yes again. Hard to review, hmm. But some are better than others, and the Swedes are a cut above for the most part. Mankell is usually great, Sjöwall and Wahlöö were even better, and Edwardson has never disappointed me. Never End is entertaining (which sounds a bit wrong given the subject matter, but it's what you could call a good, easy read), although it never strays far from the formula for any crime novel.
During an exceptionally hot and sultry summer in Gothenburg Jeanette, a 19-year old girl, is raped when she walks home through a town park at night. In an understandable first reaction, she scrubs herself clean and leaves no trace for the police to work on. While Jeanette tries to live with the aftermath of the crime, being forced to go through every moment of that night again and again with different policemen and women, the chances of the rapist getting caught seem slim. Chief Inspector Erik Winter, however, remembers the case of a young woman who was killed five years earlier, in the same spot Jeanette was raped. Both cases remain unsolved, and Winter loses sleep over his inability to bring solace to either of the women's parents. Like any Swedish detective, Winter is not only troubled by his work, but also by his complicated private life. This, however, never takes the focus off the crimes, much to Edwardson's credit. Instead, we witness Winter being torn between doing his work and working on his relationship, which makes him all the more human.
When two more young women are murdered in the same park, the entire police force are working on a connection between them. A mysterious photo appears, people are looking decidedly suspicious, and one policeman takes it too far and gets abducted. All pretty much something any crime novel offers. The solution, finally, is not so much shocking as sad, and although we have as much of a happy ending as a novel on the subject can offer, the general mood is downcast. Ultimately, Never End is not about slaughter and suspense, it's about a family man dealing with horror and inhumanity on a daily basis.
You could argue that crime novels use these horrors as cheap entertainment, thus somehow desensitising the readers. And while some novels seem to revel in blood and depravity (I couldn't read a Mo Hayder novel ever again), Never End, though not a literary masterpiece, offers a bit more. I truly felt for the loved ones and wanted to find the murderer purely out of a sense of justice, not for cheap thrills. And although the novel didn't stay with me for long (hence the missing review), it wasn't a bad one.

A.S.Byatt: The Children's Book

2010-04-25T12:25:00.000-07:00

There's something fascinating as well as unsettling about Britain in Edwardian times. It was a short era of radical change in almost every aspect of life, culminating in the unimagined and unimaginable trauma of the First World War. It seems to provide endless possibilities for writers, and Byatt's latest work tries - and manages - to explore most of them.
Taking as a narrative frame the intertwined lives of four families in Southern England, Byatt lets her protagonists follow different paths, all grounded in the problems and interests of the time. The seven children of the Wellwoods, a free-thinking Fabian couple, are all heavily influenced by their well-know children's writer mother and her stories. The children's fairytale childhood and their reactions to it, their different characters as well as their life choices are described in detail, with the help of narrative comments about the diverse cultural and social setting. In addition to the Wellwoods, Byatt also introduces working-class characters, pottery artists and military men, bankers and German puppeteers. The scope of her work is amazing, and with the exception of the younger children, no character feels underdeveloped or one-dimensional. This leads to a sometimes patchy narrative and a wealth of information supplied in just a short paragraph. It took me a while to get into the story, precisely for this reason, but the writing is superb, and the world Byatt is piecing together is irresistible in its diversity.
While the boys and young men struggle with their parents' carreer choices for them, with ambition and passion, it's really a story about girls' and women's lives around 1900, without moving into a feminist literature corner. Faced with traditional values as well as exciting new developments they are exposed to through their liberal parents' circles, the Wellwood girls and their friends experience turbulent times. One of them faces years of hard work and the prospect of a lonely private life by choosing to become a doctor, while another one almost loses all hope of a dignified life by falling pregnant after giving in to a writer advocating free love. They all experience the tensions between the social classes, one as an anarchist, another one as an ambitious but poor working-class girl without much choice about her future.
It's also a novel about the arts. The Edwardian's near-obsession with childhood and a golden past is reflected in Olive Wellwood's success as a children's writer, in the stories she writes for her children, the puppeteer's success in Germany and Britain alike, and the academic interest shown in folktales at the time. Art is at the heart of the power struggles in the new V&A museum in London, and art fills every minute of the two potter's lives. Finally and poignantly, art - poetry - is the only way the war is shown to be dealt with by the surviving soldiers.
The book ends in the fragmented way life after 1918 must have felt for everyone. It's depressing how you always know before opening a book about the time that most characters will have died by the end. The Children's Book is no exception. The fact that so much story, so many words, were spent on the childhood of the men who are to die, somehow makes it an even sadder, and more real, experience. It's a novel about the magic of childhood and the agonies of growing up; about betrayal of parents and betrayal by parents; about a time that promised a new beginning and ended with a lost generation. It's brilliantly written, and it makes a lasting impression. And if you still don't get my drift: GO READ IT NOW!

You don't know what you're missing!

2010-04-14T06:10:00.000-07:00

Really, you have no idea. If there is one reason for learning German (and there probably is only one), it's so you can read all Wolf Haas novels in one sitting and then feel you've reached the heights of entertainment. It's probably a bit pointless to review Wie die Tiere (Like Animals), since there's no English translation available, but if anybody out there happens to be a literary translator who speaks German, DO IT. The world will love you for it.

Wolf Haas is Austrian, not German, and yes, there's a big difference. Even though I've only been there twice and have no Austrian friends (why?), I know that people are different in Austria. They're weird, they're morbid, and they talk funny. I mean that in the nicest possible way, obviously, although it could explain that particular lack of friends. Anyway, Austrian literature, to which I'm gradually introduced these days, is a strange affair. I have it on good authority that the most famous Austrian artists actually hated their country, and maybe they're so brilliant because they wanted out. Wolf Haas' private detective hero, der Brenner (people are almost exclusively referred to by their last names), is grumpy, a bit of a drifter, and doesn't seem to be too happy. But we don't experience Austrian life and death through his eyes, but through those of a non-specified, possibly-omniscient narrator. While the hero plods, this narrator talks about the case, Brenner, and, mostly, life. He does that in a hilarious disjointed way that bends the rules of grammar to the breaking point. He's quintessentially Austrian - so much that after a few pages I started hearing the whole thing read out in my head with an Austrian accent - and unbelievably funny. You can really only appreciate this if you know the Austrian way of speaking, but I'll give it a go.

Now what do you do in such a situation? You can't really do anything. It's one of those big human errors to believe that you can do something in any situation, and great motto: Where there's a will, there's way, there's no coincidence and whatever thoughts we have flying around. That's very optimistic, and I really don't want to spoil anyone's party, what would your youth be without a bit of superstition. But truth generally a bit bitter. There are many sentences about positive thinking, and for the truth interestingly only one sentence, I believe it's even taken from the Austrian national anthem: "It can't be helped."

But interesting. Just when he got hold of the biscuits and the thought, his euphoria burst. Suddenly he felt a hundred years old, or the way you feel when you get ill the next day, or you go for a walk and you hear the voice of an Austrian sports commentator through an open window, basically total depression.

With a commentator like this, the story itself moves quite slowly, but it doesn't matter. Reading Wolf Haas is for people who like to be on their own, as otherwise you tend to inflict your favourite lines on anything and anyone. My mum almost put me off reading the books (there are 6 or 7 now, thank god Haas is young and still around!) by sitting next to me giggling for two hours straight. It's not for language purists who will have a hard time coping with Haas' style. And sadly, it's not for non-German speaking people yet. So please, find me (and yourself!) a translator!!!

What fun

2010-04-12T11:58:00.000-07:00

As much as Infinite Jest messed with my brain, I can't seem to stay away from David Foster Wallace. Spotting A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again on my mum's bookshelf (well, more like the "I'll probably never get round to those" heap) and finding it a manageable, nay, laughable 180 pages, I decided to give that whole reading thing another go. I should mention two things though: 1) It's a German translation of just the title story, not the complete collection, which is a pity. Aaaaaand 2) Something went horribly wrong at the publisher's. The book is bright blue, shiny and ugly, and obviously aimed at people looking for a quick holiday read; and not just the translated title but the whole blurb make it sound like just another funny book, only not particularly so. (Seriously, I don't trust any book that comes with the label "hilariously funny" stuck in at least three places.)

What it is though is classic Foster Wallace. The subject matter - shark-phobic journalist sent on a Caribbean cruise - is lighthearted and promises laughs, but he's not taking the easy way by merely mocking something that is generally agreed to be a guilty pleasure at best. He is honest and also captures the appeal of luxury cruises, which is mainly over-the-top comfort. He doesn't leave it at this, but goes on to analyse this appeal as well as the inevitable horrors of such a construct. Foster Wallace is a very clever writer, and thus his insights are effortless and just as readable as the mere observations on his trip. Again, they are incredibly depressing in places. Maybe I'm particularly susceptible to this kind of sadness, but just like Infinite Jest, A Supposedly Fun Thing... left me with a curiously empty feeling, pondering the human condition. Wallace tries to distance himself from the cruising masses, but later shows that even he himself is not able to escape the effects of the kind of permanent indulgence the cruise offers: He still wants more, and it only takes a few short days for him to find fault in the perfection he once marvelled at. Early on in his essay he comments on the particular despair and feeling of insignificance such cruises seem to instil in certain people, and this thought resurfaces up until the rather abrupt ending. Maybe it's the depression that makes him more clear-sighted, or maybe he's just a brilliant writer. Whatever it is, it turns this essay into something incredibly rich.

I laughed too, of course, who wouldn't, faced with a grown man's fear of being disposed by a vacuum-suction toilet, but overall it's anything but just another funny story.

Sam Savage: Firmin. Adventures of a metropolitan lowlife.

2010-03-09T12:22:00.000-08:00

Hrmphmph. I really don't feel like writing a review about this book, because I finished it in one afternoon and would rather forget about it now please. I don't know much about the original, but apparently it's big in Germany right now, and my well-meaning great-aunt/second cousin(ish) gave it to me. I'm not a fan of metafiction at all, and would never read anything about books come to life or the likes, but it was a present, so, you know... whatever.
Firmin is a rat. Harhar. He is born in a bookstore, starts reading the books instead of just nibbling at them, and longs to be a human, and a writer, of course. He tries to befriend the bookstore owner, but is disappointed when his love is not reciprocated and all he gets is rat poison. (That's because you're a RAT, man!) He lives with a failed science fiction writer, sees his neighbourhood being torn down, and dies. All neatly wrapped up in 200 pages.
But what really stands out is how freaking bad the translation is. There are punctuation, errors. (See what I did there?) A lot of them. It's also just really badly done. By four different translators. Nobody knows why. I guess the original might have been better than that, but Firmin was always a self-pitying, pretentious RAT, and no translation can change that.
I mean, he's a RAT. Who mentions Wuthering Heights in passing. That's not even clever.
I rest my case. Don't read this book, even if the blurb tells you to.

Translation confusion

2010-03-09T05:59:00.000-08:00

It took me a few weeks, but I managed to read another book! Due to an Infinite Jest-induced hangover I could only manage a few pages at a time, but by coincidence, Hakan Nesser's The Mind's Eye turned out to be the perfect choice. 279 pages? Easy peasy. Short chapters? Perfect. We don't want my brain to explode just yet.
The weirdest thing about this short-but-sweet crime novel is that, judging by its original Swedish title, I had read it before. Both me and my mum vividly remember reading a book with that title, only it was all new to me this time around. I know that as a translator you haven't got a say when it comes to the book title, but I'd still like to know why they made up something weird, when other languages go with the original title. In this case, it led to me picking up a book I had read before by mistake and still enjoying a good read. Life, eh?
Hakan Nesser is another one of those incredibly talented Scandinavian crime writers, with a grumpy Chief Inspector and a suitably dark setting, you really start to wonder what life in Sweden must be like... But while Mankell, like Sjöwall and Wahllö before him (Don't know them? Read them! Now!), aim to represent the darker side of Swedish society as accurately as they can, Nesser sets his novels in a fictionalised country somewhere between Sweden and the Netherlands. The focus of his books is on Inspector Van Veeteren, unfit, depressed and tired, and each setting he enters is seen through his eyes. It really doesn't matter what country we're in; the human condition is wearing us down just the same.
In this case, a schoolteacher is murdered and her husband arrested and locked up; only he can't remember what happened. Van Veeteren's doubts are confirmed when the husband is killed as well, and he realises that he has to examine the dead teacher's past in order to solve her murder. It's pretty much standard crime novel procedure, and Nesser works it well. Van Veeteren doesn't need a lot of words, and neither does the novel. It's written in sort sentences, short paragraphs and short chapters, and it still manages to convey fear, despair and depression just as well as a longer novel would. It's not as dark as Henning Mankell's novels, because it concentrates on the murders and not so much on the inspector's inner turmoils, but it works just as well. If it's good, old-fashioned crime drama you want, Hakan Nesser is your man.

Infinite Jest

2010-02-22T12:36:00.000-08:00

Never having taken an American Literature class, the only thing that I knew about David Foster Wallace's masterpiece was that my translation guru from university spent six years translating it into German. Yes, that's SIX YEARS. Ever since I met Ulrich Blumenbach, he's been preoccupied with "The Big Book". Last year, his translation was finally published, and he has since become the most famous literary translator in my home country (not that that's saying much, but that's a different matter. Let's just say that Unendlicher Spaß might well be the most talked-about translation since, well... Harry Potter. Har.) So because of his slaving away for years and probably going a bit potty in the process I added all 1545 pages and estimated 2.5 kg of Unendlicher Spaß to my reading list and bookshelf (and then got the English original as well). It took me the best part of two months to finish the bloody thing, because if there's one thing you can say about this novel, it's that it's no good for a quick read while the ads are on during some telly show. That isn't to say that it's heavy, unreadable stuff, it's just that Wallace (and his translator) have an almost sadistic love for language and all its possibilities. If you are, like me, a sucker for the pure joy of language, you'll love this book. There are sentences that run over whole pages. There are philosophical musings right next to the crazed streams of consciousness of drug addicts on their way to detox hell. It's hysterically funny in its sheer over-the-top-ness.
As for the story... The fact that there is not only a ton of different narrative positions, but also no clear chronological order, makes it hard to follow the plot, but the gist is this:
In an unspecified but not-too-distant future, the U.S. have formed the Organization of North American Nations (yep, O.N.A.N.) with Mexico and Canada, technically making them nothing more than provinces. Catastrophic environmental developments due to the U.S. threatening to drown in their own waste have led to the formation of an apocalyptic, uninhabitable wasteland called the Great Concavity, "north of the horizontal line between Buffalo and Northeastern Massachusetts", which is given to Canada by the U.S. Québecois Nationalists are not too happy about this hell in their neighbourhood and do their best to terrorize the U.S. Their deadliest weapon is a movie made by James O. Incandenza, a director known for his notoriously arty and hard-to-grasp work. This "entertainment" is said to induce feelings of sheer pleasure in its audience, so much that they'll soon die from not desiring anything other than watching the movie again and again. The Québecois have got hold of a copy and are testing it for future destructive use on the ever pleasure-seeking American public. Soon intelligence services on both sides are looking for the master copy. All roads lead to Incandenza's family, living on the grounds of the Tennis Academy he founded prior to his directing days, and the patients of a rehab centre next door.
All this only becomes clear in the course of the novel, in which Wallace paints the picture of a ridiculous but slightly scary America where all morals have seem to gone down the drain. What seems funny at first is soon qualified by the reader's feeling that maybe it's not so ridiculous after all, and just a few steps away from the state of society today. It's a bleak picture that's forming here: a striking example is the fact that every single protagonist, and there are a lot, is burdened with a physical disabilty, a traumatic past, a dysfunctional family, an addiction, or all of the above. There is not a single person in Infinite Jest who has not been majorly scarred by life.
Towards the end of the book, the former playfulness and madness of the story give way to the sadness that has been brewing from the onset. We see a new generation of addicts try to come to terms with their world, just as their predecessors realize that there is no escaping the clutches of their illness. It's a bleak, bleak end to a novel that really never pretended to be anything but right from the beginning. It's the reader who has to assemble all the puzzle pieces - the funny ones as well as the sad ones - to see the world as Wallace meant it to be seen. It's a big task, but it's worth it.
I might even lay off the books for a while to properly digest this one. And although this review might have suggested otherwise, I'm sure I've found my new Favourite Book Of All Times. That's how great it is.

It's funny cause it's true!

2010-01-31T05:06:00.000-08:00

Cricket. The mysterious game, as English as fish and chips and the Queen and bad weather. All us foreigners ever learn about the game is that it takes a long time and nobody really understands the rules, which doesn't seem to stop the English upper class from having a go at it. But nobody understands the upper class either, so it makes perfect sense.
Still it took me, a most unlikely candidate, about half a day to get hopelessly addicted to cricket. Not even stints at football and tennis madness in my teens had prepared me for the overwhelming love I would feel for the game. Even my Aussie mentors shook their heads in disbelief when I spent entire days holed up in a draughty basement glued to the telly, after which I would grab any available person to watch me bowl until my arms went numb in the park opposite.
So when Michael Simkins describes his love affair in Fatty Batter: How cricket saved my life (then ruined it), it makes me laugh because I know it's all true. Michael gets the cricket bug when he's eleven and overweight, and nothing stops him from watching, playing and imagining cricket every single minute of his life. I've read a few humorous cricket biographies, but this one I loved because it shows the debilitating gap between love of the game and actual ability to play. Because when you love cricket, you want to play cricket. And if you're like me and Michael here, you'll realise sooner rather than later that it's quite hard. My career has been dormant since the infamous fast-ball-in-kidney incident in 2006, but then I'm not the one with the cricket memoir. Michael Simkins persevered and formed his own team, the adventures of which he describes in the second part of his book. It's hysterical in places, and a jolly good read. I suppose if you dig a bit deeper, you'll find the annoying bit of the game, which is the fact that even today's gentlemen players will always prefer to play with their lawyer, actor and generally middle-class friends in a middle-class setting while frowning upon Saturday leagues full of unappreciative oiks. Yes, cricket still seems pretty much a class thing, but then the novel never claims to analyse the game's social status. It's merely immensely entertaining and a comfort read for the similarly afflicted: However madly in love with the game you are, however annoyed your family and few friends outside the cricket world are, you're not alone, my friend. I'm with you.

Ruth Rendell: Portobello

2010-01-12T05:18:00.000-08:00

It's good to see that Ruth Rendell is still writing a book a year, and with this one, it's good to see her back in top form. I have read pretty much every novel she's ever written, and went from dismissing them as guilty crime reads to liking them a lot for the sake of their settings, rather than the actual crime. I freely admit that The Keys to the Street is one of my all-time favourite books.
Her latest offering, Portobello is set in and around - guess what - Portobello Road in London, famous for its market stalls and shops, and close to Notting Hill, famous for, you know, and posh houses. Here, in true Rendell fashion, the lives of a handful of people from all walks of life meet and change. There's Eugene Wren, a wealthy art dealer with an unlikely addiction, who finds a bundle of money and decides to return it to its rightful owner. This owner, Joel, is quickly found, but a small-time criminal called Lance is trying to get his hands on it as well. While Eugene is trying to come to grips with his addiction (you'll laugh), Joel's life unfolds before the eyes of Eugene's fiancee Ella, while Lance is still trying to find ways to come into money. And people die, of course, but it's no detective story at all. Rendell doesn't need that anymore; her readers have learned to be completely satisfied with her storytelling, which at its best plays with her characters' fates so artfully that you turn the pages with a small gasp of frustration. They're putty in her hands, and if she doesn't want to save them, no-one will. In a way, the fact that there's nobody to solve those crimes is disappointing and could be a let down for first-time readers. But for years it has worked so well that I don't even notice it anymore. What counts is Rendell's evocation of London life in all its facets. I'm not a big fan of London anymore, but by god, a few years ago this novel would have single-bookedly made me go to Portobello Road and take it all in. (For the uninitiated, I'd recommend The Keys to the Street though.)
While not a novel that will stay with you for days, Portobello is a good read that will make you appreciate London and Rendell's writing. Having read a lot of her books over the last years, I have come to grow a bit weary of a few of Rendell's narrative ruses though. There's a line of contemporary markers (the mention of the smoking ban for instance) that serve to firmly place the novel in time but get a bit obvious towards the end. Also, the big twist is missing, the last chapters don't really lead anywhere exciting. Still, better than most.

Scaaaary... not.

2010-01-06T06:21:00.000-08:00

My husband listens to Radio 4 all day, and although he never reads their books of the week, he often buys them for me if he thinks I might be interested. It's the reason I married him, actually. Well, that and a few minor things.
Audrey Niffenegger's Her Fearful Symmetry isn't a book I would have picked for myself. I never read or watched The Time Traveler's Wife, purely because the title sounds ridiculous, but faced with another token of love (I'll stop now, promise), I started reading. He said it was going to be eerie.
Well, it wasn't. It is a ghost story, but a weird one. I didn't dislike it as such, but there were several things that bugged me, and I'm a terribly biased person when it comes to literature - I find it hard to get over an initial phase of unease. First of all, the story is set in and around Highgate Cemetary in London. That's fine, I like cemetaries and am a sucker for anything Victorian. Robert, one of the main characters, works as a guide in Highgate and is writing his thesis about it. He lives next to the cemetary. There are also ghosts. I get it. But still, the connection that the novel's protagonists have with the cemetary never transferred itself to me. It could have been melancholy and all-pervading, but it wasn't. The same applies to London. It never featured as the towering background that might have been intended, the novel was simply not long enough for that.
As it happens, the story is quite easy to tell: Elspeth, herself a twin, dies and leaves her flat to her sister's twins. Bored and without a purpose in life, they come to London from the United States and move into a house they share with Robert, Elspeth's lover, and Martin, his OCD friend. Soon the twins get close to one neighbour each, and it turns out that Elspeth is in fact a ghost hovering around her own appartment. When one of the twins decides she has had enough of her sister, she asks Elspeth's ghost to make her one. Yes, really. It all goes terribly wrong, of course.
Now, I have a problem with ghost stories written in a light novel tone. If you're not meant to actually believe in what is going on, you wonder what the point is. Because, thinking about it for a few minutes, what is the point in inventing a world that is pretty much normal apart from the fact that ghosts can randomly make you drop dead? It's not part of a big fantasy world where we can expect follow-ups every year, so what is it? I didn't invest a lot of thought in it, though, and the whole thing really only bugged in the way that Niffenegger's little oh-so-clever contemporary culture namechecks did. She mentions David Tennant. Ha. And Amazon sales rankings. It's the little things that annoyed me a little, and made the novel a forgettable one.

P.S.: Oh, I almost forgot my favourite bug, which is the blurb praising the author as "an exceptionally creative writer". It made me hate her before I even started the book. And now I'll be quiet and objective again.

Wrapping up 2009

2009-12-31T13:30:00.000-08:00

Not only did I win NaNoWriMo, I also reached my personal goal of reading 50 books this year! And it does make me feel good about myself in the face of not having a proper, non-child-rearing job. But most importantly, I read some really good books. I loved the ones I should have read ages ago, developed an interest in war literature and discovered new loves. Nawww.
Seriously though, Birdsong is a fantastic book, and I'm not just saying that because I finished it earlier today. Also, read The Woman in White, everyone, for sheer entertainment value. And get yourselves a Wodehouse collection. Happy New Year!

Sebastian Faulks: Birdsong

2009-12-31T12:42:00.000-08:00

In keeping with what seems to have been this year's theme, I picked yet another book about the Great War, and this time I'll do my best to stay away from the empty phrases and musings about the use of another war novel. Not because Birdsong purports to have any answers, but because it asks the right questions.
Set in France between 1910 and 1918, it tells the story of Stephen Wraysford, an orphaned young man without ties to his British home country. Sent by his employer to find out about the textile trade in France, he gets entangled with the lives of his hosts and leaves them in disgrace, running away with Isabelle, the mistress of the house. What could have been a period romance ends abruptly when Isabelle leaves Stephen. The reader is then transported to the trenches of Flanders, catching up with a changed, disillusioned Stephen in 1916.
What follows is one of the most harrowing reads I have ever come across. The tone of the novel is set somewhere between distanced description and individual experience of the unimaginable horror of the war. Stephen sees almost his entire platoon die in the course of the first day of the battle of the Somme, and the reader struggles with him to comprehend the scale and reason of it. Neither Stephen nor any narrator's voice ever attempt to understand how the war changed the human experience, simply because it's not possible. If not even the actors themselves are able to come to terms with what they have seen and done, how could anybody make such a claim? The (in my opinion not very successful) introduction of a second level of the story, set in 1978, deals with the attempts of Stephen's granddaughter to trace his life. Her inablity to comprehend mirrors the reader's.
But reading Birdsong, I had the impression of doing something important simply by being told and not forgetting. And it really doesn't matter that my great-grandfather fought on the other side. What matters is that he came home alive but changed beyond recognition, suffering from shell shock, never for the rest of his life forgetting the war, and losing his firstborn in another war only twenty-five years later. By remembering this, people like me are doing the only thing they can in the face of the unimaginable. The reality of it never made it beyond the trenches.

No child or future generation will ever know what this was like. They will never understand.
When it is over we will go quietly among the living and we will not tell them.
We will talk and sleep and go about our business like human beings.
We will seal what we have seen in the silence of our hearts and no words will reach us.

Merry Christmas, everyone!

2009-12-26T04:47:00.000-08:00

And moving swiftly on, there's one book waiting to be reviewed.
It's good to go somewhere else from time to time and immerse yourself in the crime novels that you somehow never manage to read at home with all those important books threatening to topple the book heap. My mum is not afraid to check out the guilty reads in the library, and also has a network of people to exchange them with, so there's no need to even involve a librarian. There it was, 500 pages long and just waiting to be gulped down: Joy Fielding's Heartstopper.
Now, I did not expect much, but it should be a bit scary at least. Or gory. That kind of thing. Having grown up in a big house, I developed a habit of never reading crime novels in bed after everyone else had gone to sleep. Because then I'd be the only one still awake when the crazed axe murderer made his way up the stairs, and I really did not want to hear that. I still stick to that rule at the ripe age of 27, but I really shouldn't have bothered with this one. It was disappointingly uncreepy.
The story is pretty ordinary for the genre: Teenage girl goes missing, turns up dead, small community freaks out, sheriff is out of his depths, and everyone has lots of troubles of their own anyway. And, yes, the crazed axe murderer narrates a bit, too. But somehow the story never took of. The murderer is crazy, yes, but even I figured out who it was before long. I really don't care about teenagers dealing with high school dramas. And it just wasn't surprising or gory at all.
One other nerdy thing: The novel was translated by Kristian Lutze, who is as brilliant, funny and loveable as a translator can get. He spoke at university once, and it's fun to have actually met the guy who's translated what you're just about to read. Only when it turns out to be a bit disappointing, you can't help but wonder whose fault it was. But then there's not much a translator can do if the author doesn't write a catchy story. So I'll just stick to being disappointed with Joy Fielding, who surely won't mind. She'll still have a merry Christmas.

Sonst noch Fragen?

2009-12-23T05:41:00.000-08:00

My next two reviews are going to be a bit strange, because I spent my holidays in Germany, reading German books. This one here is not even a translation, and not something I would normally read, but when you're facing a two hour drive with a peacefully snoring child next to you, you read anything people hand to you.
Ranga Yogeshwar is an Indian-born, German-speaking, Luxemburgian physicist who has been working for German television for years. He's one of those loveable, quiet types that you don't really mind explaining things to you, because they're never patronizing. Sure, you should be able to remember why the sky turns red when the sun goes down, because they explained that back in school, but there's nothing wrong with going over it again... Yogeshwar has had stints in pretty much every respectable science show on television, and now he's written a book.
Sonst noch Fragen? Warum Frauen kalte Füße haben und andere Rätsel des Alltags. (Yes. German. Veeeeeery long.) answers more than 100 of those questions that suddenly pop up and leave you wondering for a while, like the one about the red sky, the fact that most women suffer from cold feet while most men don't (less muscle work, more surface), or whether elevators can actually crash (they can't, hooray!). There are some obvious things, and some animal-related ones that I have to confess didn't bother me too much, but most of them are really clever, and surprisingly easy to explain.
Among my favourites are the fact that it's only pregnant female mosquitoes that suck your blood, that flies actually know which way the rolled-up newspaper is coming towards them, and that all handkerchiefs are square because Marie Antoinette preferred them that way. And the buttered slice of bread always lands butter first because the distance from hand to floor allows it to spin once. If you eat standing up, you might just be lucky. And in case you ever wondered: Germans prefer orange egg yolks. That's why they're coloured that way, not the other way around.
Sonst noch Fragen is an entertaining read, and you might actually learn something. With that, it ticks most boxes, and you still have enough time to read a novel afterwards. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm off to start a facebook group to introduce blue egg yolks to Britain. Join me.

Winifred Watson: Miss Pettigrew lives for a day

2009-12-17T06:13:00.000-08:00

For years and years I have been careful to put the proper literary books on top of my heap when checking them out in the library, taking home a Dostoevsky for every Elizabeth George, and never, ever has the librarian commented on my intellectual greatness in the face of the global dumb-down. This is annoying. More annoying, however, is the fact that the one time the friendly librarian actually starts a conversation about one of my books, I have no idea what she means. Miss Pettigrew has apparently been made into "a major film!", and I didn't know. I didn't even know the book existed before I saw it there.
Published in 1938, the novel seemed to fit perfectly into my reading pattern. I love pre-war literture. While all the world was gliding into chaos, mainstream literature in Britain seemed to have been a merry affair. The previously mentioned Wodehouse was not the only one to write funny stuff, I noticed.
The story of Miss Pettigrew is as simple as it is fantastic: A tired, middle-aged governess is sent to the wrong address for her new job and ends up helping a bunch of young, carefree, rich people to organise their love lives. In the course of one day, Miss Pettigrew realises just how much she has been missing all those years; how the other half live (quite decadent, just in case you wondered. There is a lot of champagne and dancing involved.), and how powerful real emotions can be. Her apparent employer, the beautiful young nightclub singer Miss LaFosse, has man trouble and can't decide between the beautiful bastard and the good guy. Although Miss Pettigrew has never been in love, her instincts tell her what needs to be done, and a grateful group of beautiful yound people receive her no-nonsense advice on how to deal with men. In the end, because it is, after all, a romance, Miss Pettigrew herself finds the perfect man, and quite by accident.
It's not great, difficult literature, and the narrator's voice didn't need to be quite so explanatory, but the novel reads well, it's funny, and without aiming to be a fierce social commentary shows a lot about the fate of unmarried, poor women before the days of social security. Miss Pettigrew got lucky, but for many women, the drudgery and hunger went on and on.

P.S.: Has anybody actually seen the "major film!"? Might be worth a look...

Jeanette Winterson: Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit

2009-11-26T05:44:00.000-08:00

I remember this book from university. It was never actually on any reading list, but one of my professors referred to it all the time, and we all eventually learned to hate it after dealing with sentences like "But Happiness is not a potato." in a translation exam. I'm pretty sure that after that exam nobody but me would have come back to actually read the whole book, but then I'm weird like that.
First published in 1985 to great acclaim, Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit tells the story of Jeanette, who grows up with an over-zealous, ultra-Christian adoptive mother in Lancashire. Home-schooled until the authorities step in, Jeanette spends her early childhood getting to know the Bible inside out, and later has problems fitting in with her peers at school. Her future has been laid out from the moment she was adopted: She is to become a missionary. At first, the descriptions of the religious madness that surrounds Jeanette are more comical than scary, and we get the impression that although she may not understand most of the people around her, she does believe in God and the rightness of her upbringing.
All this changes when Jeanette falls in love with a girl from church and experiences being on the receiving end of her religion's wrath. Slowly, the tone of the narration becomes darker as Jeanette struggles to come to terms with her feelings. It takes almost the entire length of the narrative for her to finally cut ties with her mother and move away.
Why this novel appeals to university lecturers is obvious: it is loaded with imagery, religious and otherwise. The plot is interrupted by stories, thoughts and analogies that add several layers of meaning. If so inclined, the reader can spend hours analysing them, only I have to admit that my brain doesn't work as smoothly as it used to back in the day. But even without fully appreciating those intricate passages, I enjoyed Oranges. The only thing I have to warn you about is the introduction. Don't read it before you read the novel itself. You might not want to read it at all, if you don't enjoy authors explaining their own work to the reader. But then again, that might just be me, because I'm weird like that.

Iris Murdoch: The Italian Girl

2009-11-20T04:10:00.000-08:00

Murdoch's The Sea, The Sea is one of my favourite novels. I've read a few more of her books, and the characters are all equally strange, but ultimately compelling. The Sea has the bonus of telling a gripping story, as well as dealing with the unavoidable human struggles that make good literature. After trying my best to get into one of her more philosophical novels, I've made a point of staying clear of them in order to keep that last bit of sanity. Suffice to say, they make for very (and I can't stress this enough) tough reading.
The Italian Girl seemed straightforward enough: Edmund, the narrator, returns to his family home after his mother's death. He had been estranged from the rest of the family for years, although we never find out why. From the few glimpses into his life the reader can't form a coherent picture of him, other than that he is quite boring. His brother Otto, his wife Isabel and their daughter Flora seem pleased to see him, although he struggles to adjust to the life they lead. Then, alongside a perplexed Edmund, we discover that everything is not as it seems: both Otto and Isabel are having affairs, with a mysterious Russian brother-and-sister act respectively, and Flora turns out to be pregnant. And this is where I lost interest, because what follows is too much of a stage play. The world of the novel is closely circumscribed, there are no minor characters or settings, and the sheer amount of theory, philosophy, religious imagery and drama that Murdoch forces on the characters is enough to make the whole thing seem ridiculously over the top. The novel's straightforwardness is its flaw - nothing is pondered over much. I could not, however superficially, connect to any of the characters. For me, they never came to life, and the whole novel seemed pointless. It didn't even make me think much, because of the speed with which it hurried along towards an unlikely finale. In the end, everything is resolved, the important characters are still alive and all the better for it.
And for anyone who is wondering: The Italian girl, who turns out to be the last in a row of Italian housekeepers, makes an appearance only about three times in the novel and lets Edmund sniff her shoe in the end. I'm sure if I tried hard enough I could explain her significance for the novel, but I don't feel like spending any more time thinking about this book. Pity.

P.G. Wodehouse: Much Obliged, Jeeves

2009-11-14T05:48:00.000-08:00

For those of us unlucky enough not to belong to the English aristocracy (or live in the 1930s, for that matter), P.G. Wodehouse is our only saving grace. For the few hours it takes to read any of his novels, the world could not be more perfect. We have acres of lush countryside at our disposal, it's mostly sunny, the breakfast tables heave with bacon and kippers, and the real world is firmly locked out while we sing, drink and do, well, nothing of substance. Bliss.

Wodehouse's Jeeves novels are quintessentially English, and the fact that the television series is still being screened regularly and the average bookstore always has at least 17 volumes in stock speaks volumes about that great British sentimentality about a glorious, lost past. The stories follow a simple pattern and are virtually interchangeable: Bertram Wilberforce Wooster, a genial if somewhat dim-witted young aristocrat, and his valet Jeeves get entangled in a scenario that inevitably involves an aunt, a friend from Bertram's schooldays, one of his many nemeses and several ex-fiancees. In the course of the story, one or several of the ex-fiancees proposes to a panicked Bertie, knowing full well that he would never turn a lady down, while Bertie does his best to safely reattach her to his school chum. Also, there is usually a prank/robbery that Bertie has to perform in order to help blackmail a nemesis into allowing his daughter to marry the school chum and/or parting with vast amounts of money for a similar good cause. So far, so simple. What makes the whole thing work time after time is Wodehouse's humour. I have never laughed so hard at something so repetitive. Jeeves' intellect and stiff upper lip contrasts Bertram's lack thereof perfectly, and the dialogues between the two of them are stuff of legends, although Bertram's flowery narrative is enough to make you bellow:

I produced my cambric handkerchief and gave the brow a mop. Recent events had caused me to perspire in the manner popularized by the fountains of Versailles.

This particular installment gives an added twist to the familiar story of aunts and ex-fiancees by featuring the club book of The Junior Ganymede, the top club for gentlemen's gentlemen, which, in the wrong hands, could ruin Bertram's reputation. In Wodehouse world, all this makes perfect sense. And as always, Jeeves will save the day.

Do you know everything, Jeeves? - I really don't know, Sir.

And a last one for October

2009-10-31T07:03:00.000-07:00

Since this is my last review before Cannonball Read starts, I can write another short review that doesn't really give much away.
Sebastian Faulks' Engleby is a clever book, but it's also difficult, at least for those who like their heroes nice and... well, heroic. Mike Engleby is neither. He's intelligent, he's sarcastic, but he's also seriously disturbed. Just how disturbed will be laid bare by psychological reports towards the end of the novel, when the reader realises how exactly s/he has been misled by the protagonist. And that's the clever bit. As far as psychological novels go, this is a brilliant example, it's just not so very pleasant to read at night under your duvet. Brrr.

Jane Urquhart: A Map of Glass

2009-10-25T07:29:00.000-07:00

Oh my, where to start... This novel deals with so many things and concepts, and is so beautiful and comforting at the same time. A woman, her whole life defined by a mysterious affliction that binds her to the same surroundings and comforting objects she has known all her life, ventures out into the big city to tell the story of her love affair to the young artist who found her lover's body frozen in a melting ice floe. In the story inside her story, her lover's past and family history unfolds.
For me, the most interesting concept in the story is that of belonging, "emplacement", as Sylvia calls it. Set in Canada, where pretty much everyone is descended from immigrants, the novel shows the characters' varying degrees of emplacement, starting from the young artists who come to the city to start anew while trying to visualize the past, and describing Sylvia and Andrew's different forms of extreme ties with the past. Sylvia breaks the mould by passing her story on to strangers, while Andrew loses the powers of memory and even speech, to be drawn back and die in the place where his family's history unfolded.
Every aspects of the novel deals with changes and the inexorable flow of time and history. If I could, I would write about nothing else for the rest of my life, it's such a wonderfully big, melancholy subject. But I know I can never do it as wonderfully as Jane Urquhart has done, so I'll make do with reading more of her novels.

Thank you, Wodehouse.

2009-10-18T12:54:00.000-07:00

Consider this:

Well, it was a close thing. If I ever have grandchildren - which, at the moment, seems a longish shot - and they come clustering round my knee of an evening for a story, the one I shall tell them is about my getting back into the bedroom just one split second ahead of that carving knife. And if as a result they have convulsions during the night and wake up screaming, they will have got some rough idea of their aged relative's emotions at this juncture. To say that Bertram, even when he had slammed the door, locked it, shoved a chair against it, and a bed against the chair, felt wholly at his ease would be a wilful overstatement.

That's exactly what you get when you pick up a Wodehouse novel. On every page. Carving knives not always included, obviously, but wonderful sentences like those, and near-hysterics because of the sheer genius and absurdity of it all. Quite often, the person you live with/sit next to will cast a worried glance at you, but you can live with it. You've got a Wodehouse.

(The one in question was Thank you, Jeeves, but it doesn't really matter.)

So there IS a point!

2009-10-14T14:43:00.000-07:00

Apparently I'm not alone (am I ever.)

Look! Look!

It's on.

(Does that qualify as three paragraphs?)

Ian McEwan: Amsterdam

2009-10-13T08:16:00.000-07:00

It took me an afternoon and an hour before bed to finish this book, that's how great it is. The story is clever and perfectly laid out, and McEwans's prose is breathtakingly good. Reading this is a bit like eating the perfect roast pepper pesto or listening to the first good new song in ages, when you thought the entire music scene lost it around the time you graduated and settled down. I won't give anything of the story away, because I want you to read this novel. Now.

The Irrelevant Garden

2009-10-13T08:04:00.000-07:00

I don't know what possessed me to pick this book, but the fact(s) that all the other books that week have authors starting with M and my toddler does not like mere browsing (as opposed to running around destroying things) says a lot. It's called The Savage Garden, it's by Mark Mills, the Times, in a moment of madness, calls it "captivating", and it's really not that great. Set in Italy in 1958, it describes how a young Cambridge student comes across a garden (and a family) with a secret. He solves both of them and gets the girl. What's annoying is the author's attempts to be quirky and clever - both backfire a bit. Plus (and this has bugged me throughout the book) the hero mentions Velcro, which was only patented in 1955 and first mentioned in the US press at exactly the time he is wandering around Italy. Huh. Wikipedia is your friend, Mr Mills.

William Somerset Maugham: The Painted Veil

2009-10-13T08:01:00.001-07:00

This is a lovely book, although it is beyond me how anyone would call themselves "Kitty".

(I'm thinking my challenge for next year could be reviewing novels in one sentence, including a random musing.)

More Oates

2009-10-05T13:24:00.000-07:00

I can't believe I still haven't found the Joyce Carol Oates novel I actually want to read but came home with two others. Again.
Black Girl/White Girl is set in a liberal arts college in New York State in the 1970s. Genna Meade, the "white girl", shares her college accommodation with Minette Swift, a black minister's daughter. Genna is fascinated by the withdrawn student and tries to become friends with her, only to be rebuffed time after time. Minette seems a complete mystery, and not only to Genna. Soon after the girls start their first year, Minette gradually becomes the victim of her classmate's ridicule and anonymous racial abuse, from which Genna tries to shield her. As the story progresses and memories of her childhood resurface, it becomes clear how desperate Genna is to form an attachment. When Minette dies, Genna suffers a breakdown, and 15 years later, trying to make sense of Minette's story, she still struggles with feelings of guilt.
Black Girl/White Girl opposes two young women who are not just divided by colour, but also by upbringing, religious beliefs and character. Genna's struggle to get close to Minette shows that the black/white division in American culture is not just a question of colour. Even Genna's liberal upbringing does not guarantee an understanding between the two girls. Her dealings with her overwhelming father figure add to the complexity of the story, but the book's emphasis on this layer of the novel seems a bit disappointing.
Still, another Oates classic. Given the difficult subject matter, it could've been an equally difficult reading experience, but it's not. I recommend, and American culture is no big subject of mine. Imagine the possibilities for university courses...!

Richard Flanagan: Wanting

2009-09-30T13:00:00.000-07:00

The Times recommends, and I promptly read. Given my near-obsession with polar exploration, a story about Sir John Franklin and Charles Dickens had to make its way to the top of my reading list. It's much more than just history though. What connects all the characters in this novel - Sir John and Lady Jane Franklin, their adoptive daughter Mathinna and, finally, Charles Dickens - is their longing for love, companionship and home, and their environment, society and almost painful self-control denying it. It makes you sad, and a bit mad, because you feel that Flanagan is offering a bit of truth here, and it's a difficult one. This is a wonderful book, and everyone should read it. Reviews can be as easy as that.

Barbara Vine: The Birthday Present

2009-09-22T06:16:00.000-07:00

A return to light fiction for me (always keeping this in mind!), but this time Barbara Vine didn't keep me glued to the book like she normally does. The Birthday Present isn't really all that exciting, it features too many annoying remarks of the "if only we'd known what would happen two weeks later..." kind, and it doesn't feel like a thriller at all. Hmmm. On to the next one then.

Holiday reading, pt 2

2009-09-22T06:00:00.000-07:00

I was - once again - planning to write something clever about how great Amitav Ghosh's Sea of Poppies really is, finishing with the sentence "It features the word cunt-pensioner" , but apart from that, I was stuck. Let's see if I can manage a normal review at least.
Sea of Poppies is the first novel in a trilogy set in the times of the Anglo-Chinese Opium Wars. You have to keep that fact in mind, otherwise you might wonder why the war hasn't even started by the time you're through with the book's 600 pages. It seems like a massive project for Ghosh to take on: each protagonist's life, idiosyncrasies, patterns of speech and streams of consciousness are described in detail (and there are a lot of protagonists). People from all over India, Britain and, partly, China, have a part in Ghosh's story, and most of them find themselves sailing to unknown shores on board the Ibis towards the end of the novel. Before this journey, we learn about opium, the British dealings in India, the caste system, and, most interesting of all, the way language works in a multicultural society like this. The novel features bits and pieces of every protagonist's language or dialect, as well as the Laskari language adopted by seamen on Anglo-Indian vessels. It's a joy to read, even though you only understand half of what is said, and an absolute blooming nightmare to translate! But I don't have to worry about that now, I can concentrate on willing Amitav Ghosh to hurry up writing parts two and three of the trilogy. (And, of course, find an expression even better than cunt-pensioner. Good luck.)

Holiday Reading, pt 1

2009-09-12T12:29:00.001-07:00

Well, what can I say. We had sunshine and a paddling pool, so reading wasn't high on my list of things to do this August... Still, I managed to read "The Gravedigger's Daughter" by Joyce Carol Oates and was not disappointed. I can't remember when first I started reading her novels, but they've never let me down; and here I had another family history set in New York State ready to unravel.
Esther Schwart, born in the U.S. to German immigrant parents, suffers from poverty, racism and a mad father throughout her childhood. Even when she reinvents herself as Hazel Jones, she can't shake off her past. Again, Oates shows American society and the role of women changing over the decades and comes up with a fascinating novel, and I may just have written my shortest and laziest review of all times.

The future Mrs. de Winter and I

2009-08-13T12:50:00.000-07:00

It's all spoilt now - I watched this long before I read the book, and the whole Mrs. Danvers scary thing did so not work for me. I still collapse at the thought of David Mitchell hovering, but nevermind...
Rebecca is a brilliant book, and this time I even figured out much of the things the afterword would eventually say. Since my anti-feminist remark in a previous review I've started reading a bit about the whole thing and found myself cautiously agreeing with some of it. Daphne du Maurier's writing is a treasure trove for feminist literary criticism, and both Mrs. de Winters' attitudes towards men and marriage, and their respective fates could fill hours of university seminars. For me, the most interesting thing was the afterword assuming that female readers would sympathise with Rebecca rather than Mrs. de Winter, something I can't quite relate to. The question now is whether I simply fell for Du Maurier's narrative technique, or whether I'm taking my role as a traditional housewife a bit too seriously...

Richard Yates: Revolutionary Road

2009-08-04T13:13:00.000-07:00

After skipping the movie due to alcohol-induced silliness, some kind librarian put the novel right where I would find it, and since I'm a firm believer in reading the novel and then sniffing at the movie anyway, all is well.
It was quite hard getting into the book, but after a while the uncomfortableness of the story becomes intriguing. The Wheeler's attempt to escape the narrowness of suburban life makes you want to not look too closely at your own life and ambitions. Times have changed, and you can tell yourself again and again that the 1950s are long gone, but like every good novel it will always make you think. I shall watch the movie and sniff at it quite a bit, because the novel is pretty much unbeatable.

Aravind Adiga: The White Tiger

2009-07-31T04:34:00.001-07:00

I'm really catching up: This is last year's Booker Prize Winner. I might even have to revise my Booker theory, because it's a really good novel.
In the course of seven nights, a self-made man tells the story of his successful escape from the "Darkness", the Indian countryside. Born into a poor family, he realises quickly that his only way out of a lifetime of being a servant has to involve ruthlessness and murder. His portrayal of India is equally free of sentimentality and quite shocking for the Western reader. Critics have praised Adiga's descriptions of modern India as inexorably true, and if it is it's enough to make you feel quite depressed about the state of the world.

War... Huh!

2009-07-26T05:59:00.000-07:00

After having read almost 30 books this year I've realised that most of them deal with war in some form or other. I wonder why that is... Has it become a failsafe source of literary material that nobody dares to criticise? Is it a national obsession? Is there simply nothing more real and raw to write about? I'm not being critical here; I liked all those books, and maybe that's something of an answer. Maybe there's no coming to terms with the facts of war, and as such they continue to matter to readers?
I'd like to read everyone's opinions please!

Peter Ho Davies: The Welsh Girl

2009-07-26T05:26:00.000-07:00

There was a short review on one of the last pages of a book supplement last year that made me put The Welsh Girl on my mental reading list, and behold, it fell into my hands in the library a few weeks ago.
It connects the stories of a Welsh farm girl, a German POW and a half-Jewish, half-Canadian German speaker working for British intelligence in 1944. Their paths cross at some point, but the novel mostly focusses on their individual narratives, which deal with the questions of home, loyalty and belonging without becoming overly theoretical or, even worse, boring. Apart from the obvious language barriers between Germans and British, the Welsh setting adds another language layer. Esther's struggle to grasp the true meaning of the English verb "to welsh" and her constant trying-out of English expressions, experiencing what she describes as a "tasting" of meaning, makes a constant appearance throughout the novel. (I could certainly relate to that, and it compensated for the German expressions somehow not being confusing and foreign enough to me...)
But the real strong point, in my opinion, is how the novel deals with the concept of matrilineality (yes, I had to look this one up, and no, I'm really not a feminist). It's part of Rotheram's struggle to understand his Jewishness and it determines the future of the Evans' sheep farm, with the ewes inheriting a sense of place and Esther's daughter securing the family line. And finally, every soldier, British or German, has a mother waiting at home, and although their struggle is not described in detail, it lends a different perspective to the war and its human cost.

I Spy

2009-07-14T13:02:00.001-07:00

John Buchan's The Thirty-Nine Steps is one of those books that falls into the "should read at some point" category without ever making it onto the library list. I came across it, saw that it's quite short, and took it. Written in 1915, it deals with Germans, spies and cross-country manhunts and was later modified and turned into a movie by Alfred Hitchcock. The really interesting bit is the foreword, which turns an easy read into something more substantial by adding information about the author (who might just have been a spy himself) and the novel's publication history (it is believed that Buchan described an outdated means of codebreaking in order to fool the Germans, in whose country the book was swiftly published. Fiction meets real-life war effort. Coooool.).

The double Bainbridge

2009-07-11T09:46:00.000-07:00

Given that The Birthday Boys is one of my all-time favourite books, it's a bit of a surprise I haven't read Bainbridge's whole back catalogue yet. Maybe it's because An Awfully Big Adventure didn't blow me away. I'm glad I gave her another chance though.
Master Georgie (for which I was just fined 16 pence in late fees, thankyouverymuch) is a return to Bainbridge's historical settings. The George in question is George Hardy, a Liverpool surgeon in the mid-19th century. The events that connect him to his adoptive sister, a former fire eater and a geologist are unveiled in a multi-perspective narrative that follows them all to the Crimean war. There, they slowly spiral into the abyss. While the reader is trying to get to the bottom of George's history, the horrors of war take over more and more of the narrative, which ends in a solitary cry. Short but powerful.
Harriet Said is set in post-war Merseyside and brilliantly describes two schoolgirls' summer holidays and the bang it ends with. It features some of the most heartbreakingly beautiful descriptions of childhood summers I have ever read, but it's also quite chilling stuff. It's convincing in its focus on 1950s teenage angst, but as a story, it goes a step further and takes the reader to where it could all lead if this teenage angst runs wild and realises its shocking daydreams. I love this book.

Pat Barker: Life Class

2009-06-28T07:55:00.000-07:00

While I'm waiting for Regeneration to reappear on the library shelves, I'm happily reading Pat Barker's entire back catalogue. Life Class is a return to her disection of the human psyche in the horrors and chaos of WWI. Three young art students react to the war in very different ways: one choses to paint on and ignore it, one "does his bit" and gets the inspiration to bring his art a step forward; while the main character somewhat reluctantly tumbles into life in the war zone of Flanders, which changes his outlook on everything that concerned him only a year earlier.
The novel is cleverly written to reflect the protagonists' states of mind, their insecurities, ignorance and their slow awakening to their new world. It's not a long story, but a powerful one nonetheless.

I write this sitting in the kitchen sink...

2009-06-16T14:10:00.000-07:00

The one reason for picking Dodie Smith's "I Capture the Castle" was the fact that I once heard it mentioned on the Book Quiz, probably for its opening line. After marvelling at the title and reading the foreword I was incredibly excited about diving into something which I should've read ten years ago; and now, three days later, after an incredibly romantic and quite uncomfortable hour sitting by an open window, I'm glad I scanned the library shelves intently from A to S that day.
Reading the novel at 17 would have been a different experience; even more romantic perhaps, and more intense, but catching a glimpse of my teenage self without feeling quite so self-conscious is a nice change. It's not difficult to see how a girl can identify with Cassandra and make the novel her favourite. It certainly worked for me, and I'm trying my best not to be cynical or condescending about it, because it is a wonderful book.
According to Valerie Grove's introduction, writing the novel served as a cure for homesickness on the part of Smith, who had left England for America in 1939. Keeping in mind that by the time she started writing "her" England was already gone, the setting of the book attains an even stronger quality of loss and longing for the past. Cassandras efforts to "capture" the beauty of her surroundings prove futile, and this futility slowly seeps through all her efforts to understand the world and people around her. But even though Cassandra grows up and the scope of the novel widens, it is still a wonderfully comforting and inspiring read.
I shall recommend this book to everyone I meet, and god, I'm dying to write something really witty now. But I'm quite happy and inspired now, which must mean I've come across a good book.

Alexei Sayle: The Weeping Women Hotel

2009-06-15T02:52:00.000-07:00

I already loved Alexei Sayle simply for being one of us, and now I've come to realise that he's a bloody brilliant writer as well. In a sudden, falling-asleep-over-endless-pages-of-military-operation-plans break with highbrow literature, I picked a "funny book". (Mixed with hour-long reruns of Peep Show, it's been a funny week. I haven't felt so close to completely losing my marbles in quite a while.)
If you ever wondered exactly how mad the world has become, look no further and read this book. The great thing about it is that it has a perfectly logical plot, the characters are likeable, and it's brilliantly written. And yet underneath it all it's completely bonkers. People trying to make sense of life by finding the most obscure things to believe in and work for. Endless allusions to popular culture (the South American literature ones almost killed me). That sort of thing. And did I mention how hilariously funny it is? It's funny because it's true, man.

J.G.Farrell: The Siege of Krishnapur

2009-06-10T05:41:00.000-07:00

This novel, another Booker Prize winner (1973), leaves you feeling ponderous, if you're so inclined. It's incredibly funny in its portrayal of those British in India who have no idea what they are doing there or why their usual way of life seems so difficult all of a sudden. Farrell manages to put incredible amounts of irony in the tiniest remarks and descriptions, so although most of the people in the novel die a humiliating, ugly death, you giggle along with it, feeling just as removed from real life as the principal characters do. But then there are moments of clarity, and you wonder about the merits of civilisation, culture and beneficial rule, while in the novel, and most probably everywhere around you, the world slowly falls apart.
It's a wonderful book, although it might make you a bit gloomy for a day or two.

More Nerdiness

2009-05-31T04:52:00.000-07:00

A last-minute pick in the library, "Places of Health and Amusement: Liverpool's Historic Parks and Gardens" was just the right thing for someone who likes to shower people with semi-interesting facts about... stuff. Did you know that more than 700 trees in Sefton Park were lost due to the Dutch Elm Disease? Wow. I'm sure that over time I'll get most of the facts wrong, but right now I'm loving the parks even more than before.

Anita Brookner: The Rules of Engagement

2009-05-31T04:48:00.001-07:00

Anita Brookner - "untranslatable", according to one of my teachers - proved pretty much unreadable as well. I did not see the point of this novel. Woman remembers her childhood friend, though not in particularly affectionate terms. Woman marries. Woman contemplates marriage. Woman starts an affair. Contemplates affair. A lot. Contemplates marriage and affair. Contemplates friend's affair. Husband dies, affair ends. Woman contemplates end of marriage and affair. A lot. New man enters. More contemplation, again not very affectionate. Friend dies. More contemplation. Weird end. What's the point? Of anything? Ugh.

The Power of History

2009-05-21T12:31:00.000-07:00

Margaret Atwood has been a favourite of mine since I found out that her novels make for an ideal translation practice. I've enjoyed the less feminist novels (admittedly I've not dared to read Atwood's more feminist writings), and The Robber Bride was a joy to read. Also, it made me want to write a paper on it, it is so cleverly constructed.
Three women reflect on their relationship with Zenia, a mysterious woman who had a lasting impact on their lives (mainly by being a manipulative bitch, erhemm). What connects them is history; be it the history of their parents, their interest in war, how they deal with ageing or the changing world around them. As their stories unfold, it becomes clear that what drives them is the need to get to the bottom of their respective histories. The novel is narrated from each protagonist's point of view, a device that shows that such knowledge is unattainable. And just when I thought I was being very clever in figuring all this out, the last part of the novel starts with the sentence "So now Zenia is History." Looks like Ms Atwood beat me to it.
It's all so very clever and funny and full of things to think about. I like.

The unexpected historical novel

2009-05-12T12:36:00.000-07:00

My Lancashire-dwelling friend gave me "Mist Over Pendle" by Robert Neill for my birthday, and since a) I trust her, b) most of the time I'm open to new experiences and c) I support local patriotism, I started reading straight away. I never felt the need to read a historical novel, but it was pleasant enough and kept me company when there was nothing worth watching on tv, i.e. practically every evening. Due to lack of precedent, I can't tell whether it's well done in terms of genre, but there are plenty of little 17th-century fashion details and big old words. (And since the novel was first published in 1951, it does not offend in any way. We need no naked flesh, witchcraft and a few poisonous plants will do just nicely, thank you.) I think "nice" sums my up whole experience just fine.

J.M.Coetzee: Disgrace

2009-05-03T01:04:00.000-07:00

It's a strange one. Quite short, which might be the reason for the stagey-seeming characters and the curious mix of subjects. But then again it's probably meticulously planned and laid out, and the formulaic conversations (you don't even wonder anymore when at one point people who are living in the same house write letters to each other) are part of the "quietly stylish" writing that one reviewer points out on the back. I just don't get it. I know next to nothing about the setting (South Africa), and I'm not a middle-aged man, so it's hard to care. And even if I did and was, it would still be a tough read. An extra tough one, given that Coetzee did not only win the Booker, but also the Nobel Prize. I rest my case.

Julian Barnes: Arthur and George

2009-04-28T04:57:00.000-07:00

Look here, another Booker Prize nominee as part of my quest to keep up with contemporary fiction. And I liked it! (It didn't win, after all.) Although it might be cheating, since it's a fictionalised account of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's involvement in a court case in Staffordshire in 1906. Therefore the novel ticks all the boxes for Edwardian atmosphere and literary name dropping, but that's not all.
For one, it is quite interesting to get sucked into the story and having to remind yourself that it's fiction after all, however well researched. Barnes hints at this repeatedly; the fact that Doyle and his creation Sherlock Holmes were routinely mixed up in the media of the day lends a very intriguing and postmodern additional layer to the story. And with the "mystery" never actually getting solved and one of the protagonists representing the language and mindset of the law, the thin line between fact and fiction, proof and belief forms the backbone of the novel. The very end of the story, which might seem a bit odd and even superfluous, tries to take up all those trains of thought and mix them with the (quite literally) ultimate pursuit of Sir Arthur: that of spiritism.
In my opinion, Barnes did not quite manage to incorporate this subject, although a more intensive study of it mght well have turned readers against the novel; spiritism has not quite the reputation it had in Doyle's time anymore.
Overall a very comfortable read with plenty to ponder about. I recommend.

Another Ruth Rendell

2009-04-20T11:54:00.000-07:00

How come I still haven't read all of them?

"The Lake of Darkness" had to be finished before it was time to go to the library, and thankfully, I managed. It took two hours to read it, so I can't really comment on stylistic means or some such. It was, again, a pleasure to read. Once again I realised how much of my knowledge of London comes from Ruth Rendell books. It's the way she describes the streets and neighbourhoods that probably scared me off the capital forever. Dark and a bit disturbing - just the way we like those novels.

Wilkie Collins: The Woman in White

2009-04-18T03:51:00.000-07:00

I think I have in front of me my literary discovery of the year. (The fact that the novel in question was written 150 years ago speaks volumes about how up to date I am with literature. Nevermind that now.) It took me a week to finish all 643 pages, the preface and the appendix, and boy, what a week it was. Somehow The Woman in White was never mentioned in any of my literature courses, and I suspect that's because it was the Harry Potter of its time. It broke all sales records and triggered all kinds of merchandise, and even now it's not difficult to see why. It's a hell of a book.

I won't give away anything of the plot, because I don't want to deprive anyone of the experience of standing in the middle of the kitchen, breathlessly rushing through one page just so you can finally start with the next one, while around you the baby climbs into the recycling bin and the potatoes boil over. How the Victorians could stand the suspense is beyond me, and I guess a whole lot of smelling salt was involved. And then there are passages like this:

The moment I heard Miss Halcombe's name, I gave up. It is a habit of mine always to give up to Miss Halcombe. I find, by experience, that it saves noise.

which make you giggle, and lines like this:

"I am thinking," he remarked quietly, "whether I shall add to the disorder in this room, by scattering your brains about the fireplace."

which make you raise an eyebrow or two, because, frankly, my dear, you wouldn't find that in Dickens!

The Woman in White is great fun; it's exciting, funny, sufficiently silly and perfect for reading in bed until midnight. It's worth reading the fore- or afterword, too. You might not be paying attention to the sexual overtones, but your friendly professor of English literature does, and leaves you with a few more raised eyebrows.

I'm reading...

2009-04-10T00:55:00.000-07:00

The Woman In White. It has 643 pages. I might be some time.

Anne Enright: The Gathering

2009-04-03T04:39:00.000-07:00

Well... a Booker Prize winner. What can you say.
I've read reviews of this novel ranging from fantastic to abysmal, and I really did my best to keep an open mind while reading it. It is well written, it is clever, the subject is harrowing enough, but I still could not get myself to like it. Not one bit. The protagonist is too self-involved (which, surely, is her right, being the protagonist...) and just runs in circles within her own cleverness. The fact that nothing really happens makes it positively grating. I really don't understand myself here; there was a time when I read nothing but self-involved accounts of tortured minds. Maybe I'm too far removed from the subject matter, being neither Catholic, Irish or one of twelve children. Maybe it was just the wrong book at the wrong time.

(I'm never going to be a book critic, am I? I should at least try to give a short summary of the novel, but I don't feel like it now. I guess what I'm trying to say is I really didn't like this book. Next.)

Henning Mankell: Depths

2009-03-29T05:59:00.000-07:00

Last time I went to the library I came out with eight books. They had two that I actually wanted, and the rest I picked up during my high-speed walk through the aisles, for reasons including "Come on, just *one* crime novel, for in-between* and "Oh, him. Didn't know he had a new one out". I used to read Mankell's Wallander novels when they became popular in Germany, and always thought they were quite good. Depths isn't one of them, but I felt I should try something Swedish for a change.
The novel is set in 1914/1915 and describes the slow but sure demise of a Swedish naval engineer measuring the depths of the Baltic Sea. He's a strange person, only interested in depths and distances, and virtually unable to connect with people. His relationship with his wife is cold and uneventful, and Mankell's staccato style and unsympathetic writing makes it hard to care for any of them. The protagonist meets a woman hidden away from civilisation on a barren island, and goes on to mess it all up with her as well. It's an interesting book, but a bit conceptual for my liking. The style reminds me of how I used to write (and being over-critical and dismissive of my "work", this is not a good premise), and it quickly gets tiring. I guess the novel is supposed to follow a Scandinavian tradition of depiction of cold and distant relationships, but for me it's hard to connect with the story when the protagonist is so very unlikeable.

Amitav Ghosh: The Glass Palace

2009-03-25T13:12:00.000-07:00

Again, an author I know from my postcolonial literature class at university. In an Antique Land didn't exactly blow me away, but university-approved he is. And The Glass Palace is different in its coherence and scale. On the face of it it's a family saga, and reading those has always made me feel comfortably captivated. But Ghosh mixes in questions of empire, history and personal faith, and the novel jumps from the "Family Saga" shelf in Edge Hill library right up to ... well, the place where they keep books with Times and Independent praise on front and back.
The story starts with the British invasion of Burma in 1885 and follows the hero's family to India and Malaysia, coming to an end in Burma (by then Myanmar) in 1996. And life being what it is, it's all going downhill. Be it history or clever writing, I couldn't help but feel nostalgic for Burma in the old days. Occupation, wars and dictatorship affect everyone in the family, and, reading on, you hope for a happy end in spite of your knowledge of history. Still the novel is not just a depressing chronicle; it's close enough to life to make you see that hoping for happier endings is silly and literary enough to make you realise what it really aims for: making its readers think about the big picture as well as individual choices and dilemmas. There is plenty of material for discussion (would I have liked the book as much, had we discussed it in class, I wonder?): Indians finding themselves fighting for the Empire which oppressed them; Burma, and not only Burma, going from bad to worse after the war; the human spirit coping with degradation and immense suffering... I loved The Glass Palace for all it manages to convey, and that's a lot.

Cricket makes my head hurt, pt. 1

2009-03-13T06:33:00.000-07:00

The first time cricket and I crossed paths, I knew something big had happened. It might have been the usual Ashes euphoria, the fact that I was living with about 6 cricket-mad Australians, or maybe finally, after years of trying, I had found the right game for me. After a few days of religiously watching the Test match, I went out and played. And even then it was quite clear that this was so much more than just running around in the park. At university (again), cricket was the ultimate example for a translator's stumbling block: Imagine finding yourself faced with a text that reads something like this:

At one stage it looked as if there might be a big finish as a partnership between Samit Patel and Bilal Shafayat developed. There was a plethora of fours, the odd six, the improbable began to seem slightly possible. You wanted it to last, but it couldn't. Dimitri Mascarenhas, already cast as villain for that late declaration and having taken the first four wickets with his sensible seamers, continued in the role with a couple of smart catches to dismiss the pair of them. It was nearly all over as Mascarenhas snaffled another catch to leave Hampshire and Durham, watching on their bus on the A2, a wicket away from victory and bowling to Charles Shreck.

Right. You're screwed. But thanks to my mate Timmy, it all made sense, and it made playing and watching so much more beautiful. So, at the ripe age of 23, I started obsessing like a schoolgirl. I carried scraps of paper that explained the ten ways of getting out, drawings of cricket pitches, scoreboards of county matches. I played, I got hit in the kidney, I watched and nearly gave birth three weeks early because of the unbearable tension during the IPL finals. It's true, you know. We don't like cricket. We love it.

I haven't played or watched cricket in ages (stupid baby!), so reading Beyond a Boundary by CLR James now is probably not the best idea. You have to be in the mood to read about cricket. Still, I'm halfway through, and it's a good book. Mainly because James focusses on what I've been trying to investigate for a while now: The connection between cricket and (post-)colonialism. Oh wouldn't it be great to find Beyond a Boundary on the reading list of a German postcolonialism seminar... All very cool, but, frankly, at the moment I'm too busy pureeing stuff. So CLR James is put on hold, but I'll annoy you all with a quote:

To watch cricket critically you have to be in good form, you must have had a lot of practice, you must have played it. (p.46)

Much like reading this book. Plus, you have to be a bit of a nerd.

One for that smug feeling...

2009-03-03T05:26:00.000-08:00

I can not recommend this website enough:

http://ifyoulikeitsomuchwhydontyougolivethere.com

Commenting on comments may not be the cleverest thing ever, but boy does it make you feel smug.

This is the funniest thing I've read today:

"Thanks to Dan and Judith respectively for writing in about two seemingly different, equally pointless stories. Firstly an unusually decorous reaction to a disabled kids’ TV presenter on the BNP website and then the scandal over an Oxford doctoral student being quite brainy. It’s worth remembering that Blacks, Asians, homosexuals and the disabled comprise such an insignificant proportion of British society that for one to be on BBC TV naturally after little more than eighty years is statistically impossible. This is why if anyone does better than you without looking exactly like you, you can be quite sure it’s due to interfering liberals.

Sir,

If you have young children it cannot escape your notice just how blatantly the BBC constantly push and promote multiculturalism to our receptive young.

With this in mind imagine my surprise when I sat down with my Son a few evenings ago to watch some of “The Bedtime Hour” on Cbeebies only to see two white presenters, one male and one female. The huge overrepresentation of Blacks and Asians on Children’s BBC programmes is already well documented so I was even more surprised that the lack of an “ethnic” presenter was not compensated for in another way as neither of the presenters was obviously homosexual.

This evening I noticed that the female presenter only has one arm. They can’t help themselves.

Yours faithfully
J.Davis
Portsmouth

You almost pity J.Davis for a moment. After years of him and even his children being FORCED to see black people, imagine the disappointment when his dream that the BBC might once again discriminate against people he dislikes was crushed. I can just picture the fit of rage as he tore up his Official British National Party Kids’ TV Aryan Bingo card.

She’s not intelligent - she’s just good at quizzes. It’s not like she’s invented a cure for cancer or something. The whole thing was probably fixed anyway to further some PC agenda about women being clever. Get over it - it’s just the usual media nonsense.

Roger

I tossed a coin the other day. It landed on tails, an obvious fix by anti-head extremists at the BBC. It takes a lot to be stupider than a comment on the BNP website, but you, Roger, have achieved it."

Tee-heee.

Pat Barker: Double Vision

2009-03-02T07:20:00.000-08:00

It's been more than a year since I finished university, and my library list still consists mainly of books that we used for translation practice in class. Pat Barker's Regeneration has a special place in my heart: It was the text that bought me an extra semester after I failed my intermediate translation exam and had my professor tell me that I knew neither English nor German and should consider a career change. Still, I loved translating it and have wanted to read the whole book ever since. (And no, I couldn't for the life of me see what I had done wrong, of course.)

Sadly, Regeneration wasn't where it was supposed to be on the library shelf, so I got Double Vision instead. I was expecting it to be dealing with WWI memories and shell shock (after having read about one of Barker's novels and actually read another one, both dealing with the aforementioned), but this one focusses on more recent wars and the way they are portrayed. The main character, a foreign correspondent (he rejects the term "war correspondent" as something that associates his job with "an activity he despised") is writing a book about depictions of war, for which he uses photographs by his friend who was shot in Afghanistan. There are flashbacks of war, reflections about Goya and the Milosovic trial, and snippets of discussions about ethics and the power of images. But most of the story deals with people who happen to be in the same place at the same time, and how they cope with loss, pain, isolation and fear. Nothing really happens as such, and yet I felt satisfied when I closed the book. There is plenty to think about in it, and I suspect it is one of those novels that come back to haunt you. In a few years' time, I will remember a line or two, or a setting, and wonder where it came from. And I like that sort of book a lot.

More Ruth Rendell

2009-02-27T02:51:00.000-08:00

Before I started my ambitious reading project (ha), I normally went to the library to take out five crime novels and one intellectual book to make me look less of a shallow reader. More often than not I returned the intellectual one unread. This time I stuck to my reading list but still couldn't say no to Mrs Rendell's latest offering. And sure enough, faced with a book about war and one about cricket I started with the crime novel...
Even though I feel a bit ashamed of reading incredible amounts of detective stories, and even though they do get a bit predictable, I admit I'm a big fan of Rendell's writing. People don't generally read that kind of book for its literary merit, and it has fulfilled its purpose if the reader doesn't actually notice the literary means behind the story. In that, it resembles a good translation. Not in the Flesh is an Inspector Wexford novel, good old-fashioned detection, and the story is captivating enough. (If you read the books Rendell writes under her pseudonym, Barbara Vine, you notice what a good writer she is. Those are much less straightforward and focus on psychological issues within a murderer's mind. Unfortunately there aren't as many of Vine's books as there are of Rendell's.) Contrary to the reviews on facebook, I didn't find it boring at all. It's just the thing you want to read during your lunch break or before going to sleep.

One thing, though. Like the children in Martha Grimes' stories, the constant social sub-plot is a tad annoying. Especially if it doesn't have anything to do with the story itself. It's like the publisher gives their crime authors lists of social issues to address. So far we had the benefit system, asylum seekers, black people in white communities, environmental activists, surrogate pregnancies... I should start taking bets on what Ruth Rendell's editor comes up with next.

So now there are no more easy books on my stack of to-reads. Cricket or war it is.

Look what I found on facebook

2009-02-24T23:42:00.001-08:00

Apparently the BBC has published a new literary canon and reckons that the average person has only read 6 of the following 100 works of literature. But it might also just be some very bored person making up facebook chain e-mails. Still, we can do better than average, surely?

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen X
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte X
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible (bits and pieces) X
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte X (you're supposed to add an 'x' for every time you re-read a book. But that would give me about 10 extra 'x's here, so I'll leave it)
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell X
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy X
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger X
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald X
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens X
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy (I'll get to it when Lizzy has finished it)
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh X
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky (half an x)
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll X
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens X
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen X
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen X
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell X
42 The Da Vinci Code X (oh, the shame. Still, it counts...)
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez X
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving X
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy (again, the shame...)
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan X
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen X
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zifon X
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold X
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy X
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding X
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens X
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett X
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Inferno - Dante
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens X
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle X
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad X
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery X
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare X
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factoy - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

31. My library list needs expanding. Funny how I always manage to read almost everything an author has written (Atwood, Hardy...), and then the one book I haven't read shows up in a BBC list.

It's a good starting point for reviews, memories and plans for future reading. I'll write some more when my child is fed and changed...

The case against reading

2009-02-23T03:08:00.000-08:00

As a person who reads her shampoo bottle in the shower every morning, it would take me roughly two years to argue the case for reading pretty much anything. Yet, surprisingly, the one thing that I learned from becoming a mother is that reading can drive you round the bend and make you doubt yourself and everything you do.
Firstly, pregnancy. After you've read the guidelines on what not to eat, you stumble upon the German guidelines on what not to eat, then the Italian ones, and you end up booking holidays in Germany just so you can eat Parmesan. You worry about stretchmarks and consider spending the rest of your life wearing a burqa, because everyone on that parenting site tells you that you will never look unwrinkly again. And, worst of all, you read birth stories, which is like celebrity shows on television: you know it's bad and has nothing to do with your life, but you just can't stop. After you've had your baby you feel ashamed for spending so much time worrying about other people's stories. Who cares whether little Amalia Rose was breech?
Then you have your baby, and every leaflet, magazine, midwife, telly advert, bloody hell, every box of formula tells you to breastfeed forever, while the jars of babyfood have a little sticker saying "breastfeed for 6 months!" right under where it says "ideal first food from 4 months onwards". Stop reading baby jars!!!
And worst of all, every newspaper prints people's opinions on whether you're a bad mother or a good mother if you don't go back to work. And to make it fair and balanced, they print them in alternating weeks, and just when you have convinced yourself that it is nobody's business what you do with your time the latest Saturday Times supplement comes along and presents you with scientific proof that your brain will positively degenerate if you become a stay-at-home mum. (I like to refer to myself as "stay-at-home-unless-I-go-out-to-do-some-grocery-shopping-or-get-pissed-with-friends-mum". Thank you.)
Did I say worst of all? Ha. Maybe I'm the only one, but I guess people who read shampoo bottles just can't stay away from the online comments page on those newspaper articles. I really have to stop it, as I do not want to get upset every time "supermum" tells the world (wide web) how I let society down. I have to go and read this (http://ifyoulikeitsomuchwhydontyougolivethere.com/) just to get some perspective.

I promise I'll stick to literature from now on.

2009 in books - let's try something, shall we?

2009-02-22T12:34:00.000-08:00

It's a horrible thing (and I'm quoting here, although I can't recall whom) to know that you will die before you manage to read all the books you want to read. I'll do my very best to stay alive long enough to at least get through my library list, but just out of interest I'm going to make a list of all the books I read this year. And yes, I will include the not-so-highbrow ones. (I don't mean Wodehouse! Anybody who thinks that good old P.G. is not worthy will be chained to a chair in a well-lit room with Jonathan Buckley's collected works on tape played on repeat.) And, annoyingly, I will write a review for each one while the baby rolls through the house unsupervised.
I hope I managed to include everything I've read so far in my shiny new list.

Glyn Hughes' Bronte is probably more interesting for Bronte fanatics than the uninitiated reader, and since I, too, am one of the fanatics, I freaking loved it! So much, in fact, that I briefly toyed with the old idea of translating Emily's poems. Until I realised that some of them are really quite dull.

This is my readingsocial review of Netherland: Quite a tough read, probably because I can't really relate to any of the subjects (or possibly because there are too many subjects?), and not even the cricket did it for me. Over-ambitious, I'd say. And that's it, really. O'Neill makes even cricket sound boring (har har).

As for the Wodehouses, let's just say I'm in love. Apart from Ring for Jeeves they were all absolute perfection.

Kurkov's Death and the Penguin feels very post-soviet, although I'm not in a position to comment on that genre (although it did sound convincing, didn't it?). A bit bleak, not very ornate. But it had a nice twist in the end. I'm sure you could turn Viktor's last sentence alone into quite a discussion.

Ah, my old pal Ruth Rendell. I've read her books since I was a teenager, and The Keys to the Street, although "just" a crime novel, is one of my favourite books ever. Thirteen Steps Down is not quite as good though, and the twist in the end is just silly.

Off to the library tomorrow, Pat Barker is next. I guess you can't wait...

Thank you, Mrs Rendell

2009-02-22T02:31:00.000-08:00

"Sundays had meant nothing to Mix since the death of his grandmother. Now it was just a pallid version of Saturday, rather unpleasant and irritating because some of the shops were shut, streets were empty and men who had girlfriends or wives or families took them out in cars."

Tell it like it is. Not that anybody ever takes me out in the car, mind.

It's almost New Year still, right?

2009-02-21T15:08:00.000-08:00

I've been updating that facebook book thing religiously, but somehow nobody ever seemed to read it, and it wasn't as useful as I thought: I never printed anything out, and when I'm in the library I still look around helplessly and can't for the life of me remember what's on my "to read" list. (I usually end up with something that has a nice cover and bores me to death. Yes, Jonathan Buckley, I'm looking at you.) And since it's still only the beginning of this year I might as well make it my resolution to read more (how about 50 books this year?), blog more and make more lists. Because some people love lists far more than they should.
(Yes, I will still do some housework. Occasionally.)