There will be a new post here someday. Honest.
All the pages kept getting stuck in my throat, but I think it'll be sorted soon.
Cheers.
Friday, 11 July 2008
Wednesday, 5 March 2008
A Confession
OK. I gave up on the John Pilger. The five or so essays I read were great polemic stuff, but I just kept having a voice in my head saying "but this was published in 1992! Shouldn't you be reading slightly more current political writings?" (If anyone has recommendations on more current stuff, please say below...)
And with that I was sucked back to the Fiction section of the bookshop and one of those oh-so-handy 3 for 2 offers on Sunday and emerged clutching (in reading order) The Right Attitude To Rain by Alexander McCall Smith, The Night Watch by Sarah Waters and Then We Came To The End by Joshua Ferris, which I'm about halfway through.
Reviews to follow.
And with that I was sucked back to the Fiction section of the bookshop and one of those oh-so-handy 3 for 2 offers on Sunday and emerged clutching (in reading order) The Right Attitude To Rain by Alexander McCall Smith, The Night Watch by Sarah Waters and Then We Came To The End by Joshua Ferris, which I'm about halfway through.
Reviews to follow.
Wednesday, 27 February 2008
Loss and memory
So after joyfully getting covered in little spots of green paint on Monday, on with those reviews.
The Rain Before It Falls made me quite sad to be honest. It's a good concept, each chapter telling the story of Rosamund's life through her description of a photograph and her surrounding memories, but there was something about the narration that wasn't entirely believable. I don't mean that the character or the story was unbelievable at all, far from it, but the style of narration... didn't sound like a woman on tape. It sounded like a man writing a novel. It was probably far more readable for it, and it seems like a bit nitpicking to say that was my overall impression... but... However, it made me sit and think and feel for all the characters without even the need for my iPod to drown out my fellow commuters after I'd closed the book for the last time somewhere between Queensway and Lancaster Gate on the way home.
From a Jonathan Coe novel to a Jonathan Coe recommended novel, What Was Lost by Catherine O'Flynn has been getting a lot of press of the 'first time author finally gets manuscript published after years of trying' (isn't this what happens to most people?). Exploring the lives of a number of people all connected to a shopping centre in Birmingham and the disapperance of a young girl a few years before, What Was Lost is another good one for devouring on the tube - and with its beginning mainly from the young burgeoning detective Kate's perspective, it 's bound to have people wanting to compare it to The Curious Incident of the Dog In The Nighttime. Surprisingly enough, it does have an almost Young Adult ('young adult' is a rubbish name for a genre really. I've read Young Adult books from about the age of 9 onwards...I get the impression literary types prefer 'crossover' now...) feel to it, and I don't mean that as a criticism. I loved the little inserts at the end of chapters from anonymous narrators around the shopping centre, and I think this is what the blurb at the front's referring to when it compares it to Douglas Coupland. O'Flynn isn't really anything like Coupland nor does it seem like Coupland's knowing, arch, dropping cultural references like an overfull Urban Outfitters shopping bag style is what she was aiming for. The fact the publisher wanted to highlight the comparison is a bit of a shame, then. In summary then: good read with some nice insights, but (and a bit like the Coe here) a slightly too clever wrapping up of the mystery at the end.
Next up: a second-hand non-fiction change of pace in John Pilger's Distant Voices. A present from the boyfriend, who has written 'It may be over-earnest, but I hope you like it anyway. To the bastille!' in the front...
To the bastille I go then. The bastille in 1992 at that. Let's see.
The Rain Before It Falls made me quite sad to be honest. It's a good concept, each chapter telling the story of Rosamund's life through her description of a photograph and her surrounding memories, but there was something about the narration that wasn't entirely believable. I don't mean that the character or the story was unbelievable at all, far from it, but the style of narration... didn't sound like a woman on tape. It sounded like a man writing a novel. It was probably far more readable for it, and it seems like a bit nitpicking to say that was my overall impression... but... However, it made me sit and think and feel for all the characters without even the need for my iPod to drown out my fellow commuters after I'd closed the book for the last time somewhere between Queensway and Lancaster Gate on the way home.
From a Jonathan Coe novel to a Jonathan Coe recommended novel, What Was Lost by Catherine O'Flynn has been getting a lot of press of the 'first time author finally gets manuscript published after years of trying' (isn't this what happens to most people?). Exploring the lives of a number of people all connected to a shopping centre in Birmingham and the disapperance of a young girl a few years before, What Was Lost is another good one for devouring on the tube - and with its beginning mainly from the young burgeoning detective Kate's perspective, it 's bound to have people wanting to compare it to The Curious Incident of the Dog In The Nighttime. Surprisingly enough, it does have an almost Young Adult ('young adult' is a rubbish name for a genre really. I've read Young Adult books from about the age of 9 onwards...I get the impression literary types prefer 'crossover' now...) feel to it, and I don't mean that as a criticism. I loved the little inserts at the end of chapters from anonymous narrators around the shopping centre, and I think this is what the blurb at the front's referring to when it compares it to Douglas Coupland. O'Flynn isn't really anything like Coupland nor does it seem like Coupland's knowing, arch, dropping cultural references like an overfull Urban Outfitters shopping bag style is what she was aiming for. The fact the publisher wanted to highlight the comparison is a bit of a shame, then. In summary then: good read with some nice insights, but (and a bit like the Coe here) a slightly too clever wrapping up of the mystery at the end.
Next up: a second-hand non-fiction change of pace in John Pilger's Distant Voices. A present from the boyfriend, who has written 'It may be over-earnest, but I hope you like it anyway. To the bastille!' in the front...
To the bastille I go then. The bastille in 1992 at that. Let's see.
Sunday, 24 February 2008
It's big, it's green, it's a shop...
Two more books (two! I'm already getting slack) to write about since I last posted, but in other news I'm taking active reading to the fullest sense of the word tomorrow afternoon and popping down to the site of the spanking new Big Green Bookshop to see if I can be of any use to them as they continue in their quest to bring a decent bookshop back to Wood Green. I'm told polyfilla'ing (if pollyfilla can be used as a verb) and chucking things into a skip is the order of the day.
Simon and Tim's blog is well worth a read, by the way, but there should also be a BBC London News Feature here for anyone who prefers their narratives with talking pictures. (Not that I'm dissing telly. I love telly.)
Simon and Tim's blog is well worth a read, by the way, but there should also be a BBC London News Feature here for anyone who prefers their narratives with talking pictures. (Not that I'm dissing telly. I love telly.)
Monday, 18 February 2008
False starts and photographs
After another false start at Oh, Play That Thing! by Roddy Doyle (more of which later) I started The Rain Before It Falls this morning on the tube.
I loved The Rotters' Club and The Closed Circle, and thought I might have found my newest new favourite author in Jonathan Coe, but the farce of What A Carve Up put me off. The Rain Before It Falls comes with much recommendation, and the setup intrigues me: the main narrator is Rosamund, an elderly woman describing on tape for her blind long lost relative a series of photographs and associated memories.
I've been thinking a lot recently about photography, memory and history, how death of a family member can make someone's context easily lost to them... I'm looking forward to see how Coe tackles these ideas. It's something I'd like to write about myself if I had the necessary skills.
On the Doyle front (that phrase makes this sound like a war despatch. "Allied forces made good gains in McEwan territories, but were held back on the Doyle front"), I'm not sure why I can't get further than thirty pages or so into Oh, Play That Thing! I love Roddy Doyle. Usually his books grab me and don't let me put them down until I've hurtled my way to the end, even when I'm rereading them for the nth time, such as The Commitments or The Woman Who Walked Into Doors. A Star Called Henry, the first book in the Henry Smart series, is an epic, gritty tale of one man's experience of the Dublin slums and the Republican movement. It both gives you a sense of the sheer drama of the historical period and the real people caught up in said drama: Henry Smart is a Dubliner as real as Jimmy Rabbitte. And lots of great details: a wooden leg as a weapon, a rebel schoolteacher, a granny who'll give information for books. So when Oh, Play That Thing! came out, I thought great, he's got Henry Smart and music in this one, I'm going to love it. I've picked it up twice now and each time I'm still stuck in New York with Henry as he carts his sandwich boards around until another book coaxes me to take a peek at it... and then I'm gone. One day, I'll get to meet Louis Armstrong with him, but for now I'm leaving New York for 20th century Shropshire. Sorry Henry.
I loved The Rotters' Club and The Closed Circle, and thought I might have found my newest new favourite author in Jonathan Coe, but the farce of What A Carve Up put me off. The Rain Before It Falls comes with much recommendation, and the setup intrigues me: the main narrator is Rosamund, an elderly woman describing on tape for her blind long lost relative a series of photographs and associated memories.
I've been thinking a lot recently about photography, memory and history, how death of a family member can make someone's context easily lost to them... I'm looking forward to see how Coe tackles these ideas. It's something I'd like to write about myself if I had the necessary skills.
On the Doyle front (that phrase makes this sound like a war despatch. "Allied forces made good gains in McEwan territories, but were held back on the Doyle front"), I'm not sure why I can't get further than thirty pages or so into Oh, Play That Thing! I love Roddy Doyle. Usually his books grab me and don't let me put them down until I've hurtled my way to the end, even when I'm rereading them for the nth time, such as The Commitments or The Woman Who Walked Into Doors. A Star Called Henry, the first book in the Henry Smart series, is an epic, gritty tale of one man's experience of the Dublin slums and the Republican movement. It both gives you a sense of the sheer drama of the historical period and the real people caught up in said drama: Henry Smart is a Dubliner as real as Jimmy Rabbitte. And lots of great details: a wooden leg as a weapon, a rebel schoolteacher, a granny who'll give information for books. So when Oh, Play That Thing! came out, I thought great, he's got Henry Smart and music in this one, I'm going to love it. I've picked it up twice now and each time I'm still stuck in New York with Henry as he carts his sandwich boards around until another book coaxes me to take a peek at it... and then I'm gone. One day, I'll get to meet Louis Armstrong with him, but for now I'm leaving New York for 20th century Shropshire. Sorry Henry.
Saturday, 16 February 2008
Saturday
Saturday was lent to me by my boyfriend after I enjoyed Atonement and On Chesil Beach. Before that Ian McEwan and myself weren’t really on speaking terms after I tried The Cement Garden at the age of 18, inspired by an A Level mock exam when we were given the opening to Enduring Love (two people are having a picnic when they witness a freak accident). I was taken in by his pacing – these couple of pages on an exam paper weren’t enough, I needed to know what happened next. The Cement Garden was on my Mum’s bookshelf at home, but somehow the tale bored me. I gave Enduring Love itself a go a couple of years later, but again, the dramatic opening seemed misleading. I raced through it waiting for something to match the excitement of the opening.
I’m beginning to see it’s all about the detail with McEwan. You can't race through it. The first section of Atonement deals with the course of one day in the main characters’ lives, centered on one house and the rest of the book with the repercussions from that day (but of course you’ve all seen the film now, right?). On Chesil Beach does a similar thing with a couple’s wedding night to great effect. Saturday is set on the day of the mass protests against the second war in Iraq, Saturday 15th Feburary 2003. Neurosurgeon Henry Perowne is awake in the small hours of the morning and thinks he sees a plane on fire, heading towards Heathrow. This event pops up again and again in the book, on rolling news, and on Henry’s mind: is it an accident, a terrorist attack, or what? Over the course of the novel we follow Henry as he spends his day in preparation for a family meal in the evening and how an small car accident, bringing him into contact with Baxter, a petty criminal, will disrupt his plans. We are taken around London and touch on the edges of the march, and are thrown into the issues head on with an argument between Henry and his daughter Daisy about the proposed war.
Taking pleasure in the detail is something speed readers have to work on, but I felt I was beginning to crack it with these last three McEwans I’ve read. There are moments where you do just want to yell, “ok, I get it, he’s a NEUROSURGEON” after yet another sentence using medical jargon describing Henry’s view of someone’s behaviour or a memory of a patient. There is a description of a squash game and it really, really, didn’t need to be related to the reader point by point. Next time, I’ll just turn on 5 Live.
However, taking, or not taking, an interest in the details and our knowledge are interesting themes in the book. There’s a good point where Henry’s watching the news while cooking, interested in both the developments on our plans for war and whether there’s been any more information on the plane crash he witnessed. When he discovers (there’s a nice touch about the item having been moved down the news agenda and the slight disappointment in the newsreader’s voice) the event is a simple accident rather than a malicious terrorist attack, it sets off a chain of thought about his own complicity in the coming war, in the workings of the state:
Henry, we are told, doesn’t eat books, unlike his daughter, a soon to be published poet, and his father in law, a renowned poet and contemporary of Heaney/Motion and the like. (There are a bit too many overachieving characters in this book, his son’s a talented jazz guitarist…) And it’s the literary knowledge that appears to be the family’s salvation when the evening takes a violent turn, rather than Henry’s medical knowledge which only appears to escalate the situation. I’m not sure how believable I found this plot twist, but it made for a tense, vivid set piece.
Nick Hornby (by happy coincidence for my first blog, Saturday pops up in The Complete Polysyllabic Spree) makes an interesting point about the overachieving nature of the characters: he says: “writing exclusively about highly articulate people…Well, isn’t it cheating a little?… They don’t need (McEwan’s) help.”. I couldn’t help feel a bit sorry for Baxter, the character who attacks the Perownes, (although maybe that’s what McEwan wants, to tug on my leftie sensibilities) because he obviously had so little (in material and knowledge terms) compared to them, even though he’s entirely responsible for his own violence. Now I’m thinking again about how Henry’s behaviour in the car crash incident (where he tries to use his suspicions about Baxter’s medical condition to diffuse the situation, to get one over him) misfires badly and whether there’s a connection between that and British and American attempts to bestow democracy on another country… there must be someone somewhere doing a phD on the Iraq war in contemporary fiction, right?
I’m beginning to see it’s all about the detail with McEwan. You can't race through it. The first section of Atonement deals with the course of one day in the main characters’ lives, centered on one house and the rest of the book with the repercussions from that day (but of course you’ve all seen the film now, right?). On Chesil Beach does a similar thing with a couple’s wedding night to great effect. Saturday is set on the day of the mass protests against the second war in Iraq, Saturday 15th Feburary 2003. Neurosurgeon Henry Perowne is awake in the small hours of the morning and thinks he sees a plane on fire, heading towards Heathrow. This event pops up again and again in the book, on rolling news, and on Henry’s mind: is it an accident, a terrorist attack, or what? Over the course of the novel we follow Henry as he spends his day in preparation for a family meal in the evening and how an small car accident, bringing him into contact with Baxter, a petty criminal, will disrupt his plans. We are taken around London and touch on the edges of the march, and are thrown into the issues head on with an argument between Henry and his daughter Daisy about the proposed war.
Taking pleasure in the detail is something speed readers have to work on, but I felt I was beginning to crack it with these last three McEwans I’ve read. There are moments where you do just want to yell, “ok, I get it, he’s a NEUROSURGEON” after yet another sentence using medical jargon describing Henry’s view of someone’s behaviour or a memory of a patient. There is a description of a squash game and it really, really, didn’t need to be related to the reader point by point. Next time, I’ll just turn on 5 Live.
However, taking, or not taking, an interest in the details and our knowledge are interesting themes in the book. There’s a good point where Henry’s watching the news while cooking, interested in both the developments on our plans for war and whether there’s been any more information on the plane crash he witnessed. When he discovers (there’s a nice touch about the item having been moved down the news agenda and the slight disappointment in the newsreader’s voice) the event is a simple accident rather than a malicious terrorist attack, it sets off a chain of thought about his own complicity in the coming war, in the workings of the state:
This Russian plane flew right into his insomnia, and he’s been only too happy to let the story and every little nervous shift of the daily news process colour his emotional state… He’s deeper in than most. His nerves, like tautented strings, vibrate obediently with each news ‘release’. He’s lost the habits of scepticism, he’s becoming dim with contradictory opinion, he isn’t thinking clearly, and just as bad, he senses he isn’t thinking independently.
Henry, we are told, doesn’t eat books, unlike his daughter, a soon to be published poet, and his father in law, a renowned poet and contemporary of Heaney/Motion and the like. (There are a bit too many overachieving characters in this book, his son’s a talented jazz guitarist…) And it’s the literary knowledge that appears to be the family’s salvation when the evening takes a violent turn, rather than Henry’s medical knowledge which only appears to escalate the situation. I’m not sure how believable I found this plot twist, but it made for a tense, vivid set piece.
Nick Hornby (by happy coincidence for my first blog, Saturday pops up in The Complete Polysyllabic Spree) makes an interesting point about the overachieving nature of the characters: he says: “writing exclusively about highly articulate people…Well, isn’t it cheating a little?… They don’t need (McEwan’s) help.”. I couldn’t help feel a bit sorry for Baxter, the character who attacks the Perownes, (although maybe that’s what McEwan wants, to tug on my leftie sensibilities) because he obviously had so little (in material and knowledge terms) compared to them, even though he’s entirely responsible for his own violence. Now I’m thinking again about how Henry’s behaviour in the car crash incident (where he tries to use his suspicions about Baxter’s medical condition to diffuse the situation, to get one over him) misfires badly and whether there’s a connection between that and British and American attempts to bestow democracy on another country… there must be someone somewhere doing a phD on the Iraq war in contemporary fiction, right?
Preface
This is a bit of an experiment, inspired by the way I noticed updating my status on the Facebook application Visual Bookshelf was strangely addictive, and from reading Nick Hornby’s collection of reader’s diary columns for the American magazine The Believer: The Complete Polysyllabic Spree. Nick Hornby writes far better than me, but hey, I thought having a record of the books I get through (and fail to get through) could be an interesting idea.
I love reading. I have been told by some people that I “eat books”. This is in reference to the fact they consider me the fastest reader in the West. I do read fast, but sometimes this means I lose some of the detail. I have to go back over a page a couple of times and make sure I’ve actually taken it in, to make sure I come away with more than just a general feeling from the book. Sometimes I do that and that’s all I get anyway.
The end of that last paragraph begins to explain the other motivation for starting this blog: writing about the actual experience of something in a concrete way is hard. It’s a challenge to produce a well-written review which isn’t pithy or clichéd. At the start of this it may just be a case of spewing stuff out on the page about Things I Noticed and Liked About this Book, almost like a primary school book report. I might end up just noting down three sentences about something, or going off into a rant. The style of my undergraduate English Literature essays and any related academic jargon will be something to be avoided, but I have a bit of a suspicion some of it might try and creep in from the deeper recesses of my brain.
So… here we go.
I love reading. I have been told by some people that I “eat books”. This is in reference to the fact they consider me the fastest reader in the West. I do read fast, but sometimes this means I lose some of the detail. I have to go back over a page a couple of times and make sure I’ve actually taken it in, to make sure I come away with more than just a general feeling from the book. Sometimes I do that and that’s all I get anyway.
The end of that last paragraph begins to explain the other motivation for starting this blog: writing about the actual experience of something in a concrete way is hard. It’s a challenge to produce a well-written review which isn’t pithy or clichéd. At the start of this it may just be a case of spewing stuff out on the page about Things I Noticed and Liked About this Book, almost like a primary school book report. I might end up just noting down three sentences about something, or going off into a rant. The style of my undergraduate English Literature essays and any related academic jargon will be something to be avoided, but I have a bit of a suspicion some of it might try and creep in from the deeper recesses of my brain.
So… here we go.
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