Month: November 2009

Categories
25 books reading

A Pause for Thought about Reading, OR Why I’m not Reading Middlemarch (yet!)

I bought 3 new books today. This post will be about why and what they were.

Reasons to Read

I’m halfway through my 25 books project – in terms of books, obviously not time – being in the middle of book 13, so it seemed like a good time to reflect on progress. I’ve been wondering why exactly I’m doing this. Reading should be about pleasure shouldn’t it? I seem to have found a way to make it a chore. Also it seems to have become more important that I achieve my 25 books target (which I’m not doing anyway) than to enjoy what I’m reading. All that “I just wanna be someone who reads (again)” stuff probably has more to do with middle-age crisis and yearning for youth than actually what books I choose and whether I enjoy them.

So I’ve sort of come to a conclusion: I should read books I like. Well d’uh, who knew eh? But how do you know what’ll you’ll like before you read it?

So what are things that make me want to keep reading:

  • I want to find out what happens
  • I want to spend more time with interesting, entertaining characters
  • I want to be taken away to a different world
  • I want to update my spreadsheet and see the page-count go up

One that’s missing from there is that “I enjoy language itself”. Now it may be true that I am capable of appreciating the beauty of a well constructed sentence, though I do sometime doubt it, it’s not really on my reasons for reading. It’s not why I turn to a book in the first place.

What Should I Read?

Or, as I said, how do I know what I will like? I’ve said I should read things I like and on realising this I decided to change my remaining 25 books list. I quickly found that once I weeded out the books that I wanted to read simply to be “better read” then I actually didn’t have quite enough books I want to read. So I felt a trip to the bookshop was in order, but what to buy?

Well one approach is to stick with authors or a genre you know and have loved in the past. Which is why I read so many Terry Pratchett and Larry Niven novels in my 20s. But my tastes have changed. I don’t now approach those books with the same sense that I am guaranteed a good time that I once did.

Another approach is to go for books which other people tell you are good – whether it’s friends and family or celebrity book clubs or serious literary prizes. This can work but my experience so far is that you have to be quite canny to choose a subset of such books that pique your interests for other reasons anyway. Both the books I’ve officially set aside, The Crow Road and The Book Thief, as well as severall that have dropped off my list fall into this category.

Another approach is to go for ‘classics’ – if they’re still being read after X years they must have something to them. True and both the classics I have read so far have much to commend them but I haven’t been blown away by either. An unrepresentative sample perhaps.

And the Winners are…

So you’ll be dying to know by now what the 3 new books are:

Fire by Kristin Cashore – its fantasy which is a genre I like, it has an intriguing premise and a review I read got me interested.

The Innocent by Ian McEwan – I realised that I’d enjoyed both books I’d read by him so why not try another?

1974 by David Peace – good/popular enough to be adapted into an acclaimed ITV drama series. It’s a crime thriller, which is not my usual genre of choice, but I suspect it will be a page-turner.

 

Categories
25 books reading

25 Books, Book 12, Catcher in the Rye

Holden Caulfield.

Holden Caulfield!

What can you say about Holden Caulfield? He’s kind of annoying and yet strangely endearing. He has this breathless energy and an utter inability to stick to the point that means that he’ll tell you his life story, about a couple books he’s read and incidents about people he knows – with a few tall tales thrown in – all in response to “Hello” and before you’ve had a chance to blink. He has this kind of vulnerability and superficial optimism that carries him through though I guess.

I suppose I’d’ve appreciated him more when I was nearer his age. I read somewhere recently that there are some books, films etc that if you don’t catch when you’re young enough then it’s sort of too late. Maybe that’s it. Maybe I was wrong-footed by the vague impressions I’d picked up or just the fact that this was supposed to be a great book. I can see how in a world that didn’t have a lot of time for, care or know much about teenagers, and ditto but even less so for/about mental illness – then a sympathetic first-person account of someone like Holden would seem shocking and new. As it is, well it’s sad and touching but not shocking.

It’s odd but I was a little bored by him during the time we spent together, but now, as the memory softens, I find myself thinking kindly of him. Glad to have met him, not sure if I want to spend a lot more time with him. Like I said, annoying but strangely endearing.

7/10 – nice bloke, rambles on a bit.

Categories
reviews

What Do You Get The Man Who Never Reads?

A Kindle.

I’ve wanted one of these – or something like it – since I first heard about “eInk” book readers a couple of years ago. I have gotten used to reading things off a screen but the promise of something that was a bit more like paper, but with the searchability and capacity of a small computer – that sounded good.

However as you may know it’s taken Amazon a while to offer the Kindle outside of the US. This largely has to do with the deal surrounding wireless/3G networks because one of Kindle’s big selling points is that you can purchase and download the ebooks directly onto the device. You can copy stuff over from a computer but there’s no need to.

So anyway I’ve had my new gadget for a couple of weeks and have read one complete novel on it (Juliet, Naked) and here’s my thoughts:

 

Pros:

  • It’s light and small
  • It looks nice
  • It has a decent amount of memory (2Gb)
  • It has a simple interface with the PC – basically it appears as a USB drive and adding to your library is as simple as copying files across. (Some might have hoped for more sophisticated ‘helper’ software but for me that would have just meant hunting for a linux equivalent.)
  • There’s a free service to convert documents to the native format – though it understands text and .mobi ebook format.
  • It will play mp3s and a few other audio formats.
  • It has a text-to-speech feature

Cons:

  • the look of the ‘paper’ is good but not great. It’s essentially dark grey on light grey so you need a decent amount of light, more so than a black-on-white paper book.
  • the controls are fiddly to use physically
  • the controls are non-intuitive in terms of what they do
  • ebooks from Amazon are still quite expensive. Juliet, Naked was cheaper than the immediate alternative – buying a physical hardback, but not by much and certainly if I’d waited for the paperback.
  • the selection isn’t great. Amazon are selling out of their US store so what there is is a little US-centric. Also some titles, although available in kindle form are not for sale to us non-USans. Most of the 40-something titles I’ve loaded on so far are classics from Project Gutenberg.
  • the text-to-speech feature is an interesting curiosity. I can’t imagine using it for any length of time. (“back-quote hello she said.”)

I thought I’d be distracted by the turning of a page – the eInk takes a second or so to refresh which means when you turn the page it ‘flashes’ black for a visible amount of time. It turns out it’s not too bad because it’s not that frequent. I also found I slightly missed the physical feel of a real book – which I wouldn’t have thought about myself.

Overall it’s not perfect. There are some technical challenges to overcome and some organisational ones. I’m hopeful that the prices will come down and the availability/range will go up in time (they plan to sell out of amazon.co.uk at some point). It’s possible a software update will at least ease some of the controls issues. I’m happy with my purchase whilst realising it has its flaws.

8/10 – a nice thing to have if you like gadgets and like reading.

 

Categories
25 books reading reviews

25 Books, Book 11, Juliet,Naked – Nick Hornby

Juliet, Naked is the latest novel by Nick Hornby who, as you know, I tend to quite like. Which is to say at his best I really enjoy his work (High Fidelity, Slam) but even his lesser books are very readable (How to be Good, About a Boy).

The Juliet of the title refers to a seminal album by a slightly obscure singer-songwriter, Tucker Crowe, who hasn’t written or recorded anything, or even performed in twenty-odd years. The book follows one of his more obsessive fans, Duncan, Duncan’s girlfriend Annie and Tucker himself. When Annie and Duncan split up, Annie writes a scathing review of a newly released CD of demos “Juliet, Naked” and posts it on Duncan’s fan-website. Tucker reads it, agrees with it and emails Annie. An unlikely and slightly odd friendship develops.

It was strange reading this on the heels of Starting Over because it covers some of the same ground – middle-aged regret and soul-searching – but I hadn’t consciously decided to read books with those themes. It was interesting that of the three characters I mention above it’s Duncan – who is in some ways is another music-nerd straight out of High Fidelity – who gets the least time in the book (though he has a pivotal scene near the end). It’s interesting because it’s as if we’ve gone back to High Fidelity but are now looking at the same things through different eyes. This book is nowhere near as forgiving of the fan-ish behaviour. Instead we follow Annie, who at best tolerated Duncan’s fandom and Tucker who has a messy life the reality of which is almost unconnected with his fans’ perceptions.

There was a lot that I liked about this book. Annie was an interesting female perspective to follow and someone I felt for. Tucker was also a character that I liked, though I was slightly exasperated with some of his selfishness. His charm tended to make me forgive him – which seems to be his impact on those around him generally. If there was humour in this book that I ‘got’ (and there was) it was usually from Tucker’s strand.

What I liked less was the ending. Without giving too much away, whether you feel it is a happy, or even just satisfying ending will probably depend on the degree to which you like and care about the different characters. The one(s) I most wanted a positive resolution for got a rather vague, possibly optimistic one, and the one(s) that got the ‘best’ ending I felt deserved it least. That’s a bit confusing but I don’t want to give it away because despite that I think it’s worth a read.

7/10 – not Hornby’s best and shame about the ending.

Categories
25 books reading reviews

25 Books, Book 10 – Starting Over – Tony Parsons

Starting Over is another very readable, ‘funny’ book where I don’t quite get the humour but don’t mind. It’s by Tony Parsons who I’ve read before but can remember almost nothing about the last book of his I read. I bought Starting Over on the way back from a visit to M.’s to read on the train and partly out of frustration with my then current book (The Book Thief, now officially a Set Aside I guess).

Starting Over is the story of a forty-something man whose life is pretty good apart from his congenital heart problem. He has a good job, a lovely/loving wife and good relationships with his kids. Then he has a heart attack, a heart transplant and has to rebuild his life. He almost doesn’t manage it.

And the reason he has to rebuild his life is not because he has to re-gain his health, it’s because, having been given a new lease of life and health he almost wrecks what he has.

This book is all about what it means to be young, to be old and to ‘grow up’. Whether to ‘settle down’ means abandoning your dreams or whether ‘following your dream’ can actually be immaturity and lack of responsibility. It raises these questions and gives the answers that you probably think that it does – which is to say it doesn’t try to answer them to explicitly but as far as it does comes down somewhere in the middle.

I enjoyed this book, though it pushed some of my buttons given that I’m slightly younger than the main character and slightly older than his wife – but unlike him I’m pretty much on my own.

Anyway that aside, I think it’s a good book. It’s not terribly profound but it’s readable and occasionally funny. It feels like it has rather too many ‘meaningful’ scenes towards the end and the very end is a little predictable (or do I mean comforting?)

7/10 – good but not amazing.

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lesamy

Lesamy Week 59 – Better than Better than Nothing

🙂

Weekly loss: 0.3kg (0.7lb)
Total loss: 31.9kg (70.3lb or 5st)
To target: 16.9kg (37.4lb or 2st 9lb)
Current weight: 112.2kg (247lb or 17st 9lb)