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.
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.
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.
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?)
So this is an interesting one for me as a reviewer. I vaguely know Ms Taylor. Well not really but I first became aware of her through SlingInk one of the writing sites I visit. About the time I was trying to “get serious about my writing” I joined that forum and she was one of the people there. I must’ve followed a link in her posts or profile because I’ve followed her blog ever since. In that time she’s gotten herself an agent and got her first novel published. I pre-ordered it from Amazon as soon as it was available to do so because I felt a sense of kinship with her having followed her progress.
Why do I sound like I’m preparing excuses? Well because I feel this sense of vague connection it doesn’t feel like I’m reviewing a stranger’s book and that makes me want to be nice. At the same time Heaven Can Wait is not really my usual fare and I doubt I am its target audience. It’s quite squarely and unashamedly chick-lit, albeit with a supernatural twist. So perhaps I’m not best placed to review it – I’m neither really objective nor am I truly a lover of this genre and as I may have said before I’m wary of criticising something in a genre I don’t care for.
Having said that I do own a copy of Undead and Unwed which in my case is Undead, Unwed and unread. However I have in the past read male chick-lit, am as we know a fan of rom-coms and supernatural fiction definitely attracts me. So I think I’m qualified.
First thing I want to say is that I enjoyed this book. It was a light and easy read. Given my on-going battle to get my 25 Books score up a bit that’s no small thing. I also want to say that up front because it would be very easy for me to list a lot of little things I didn’t like about Heaven Can Wait and I may easily give the impression that I didn’t enjoy it as a whole. In fact I’m going to try to resist the temptation to give a long nit-pick list.
So Heaven Can Wait is the story of Lucy Brown, who dies the night before her wedding but on arriving in Limbo is given the opportunity to return to earth and gain ghost status by fulfilling a task – that of finding a soulmate for a hapless computer nerd. Along the way she has her fellow wannabe-ghosts and her best friend’s designs on her ex- to deal with.
One of the things that’s definitely odd about reading a book aimed clearly at women when you’re a man is trying to identify with the main character and wondering, at the points where you fail, whether that’s you as a person or you as a man that don’t get the character. I think overall I sympathised with Lucy, the book’s hero although I struggled to like her at first. I think that in part was deliberate – the plot requires her to have unfinished business and regret at her behaviour just before she died plays into that.
Another thing that I didn’t quite get was the humour of the book. This is not unusual for me. Ask my friends and they’ll tell you I’m often the one telling the joke no-one else finds funny and vice-versa. That doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate the amusing tone of the book. When I was younger I read the Stainless Steel Rat series of books which I knew were not ‘serious’ SciFi but was slightly shocked to discover some people found ‘hilarious’. Still, the fact I never found them laugh out loud funny didn’t stop me enjoying them. I feel a bit the same about Heaven Can Wait. It’s not my kind of funny but that’s not a problem, for me anyway.
Another potential issue was that I found the plot fairly predictable. Again though this needn’t be a problem, and I suspect most fans of this genre would welcome it in the sense that they like to know they are getting the kind of story they like. It won’t shock you to hear that pretty much everyone ends up happily and that’s probably as it should be.
The best thing about this book, for me as a non-typical reader, was that it was light, easy to read (short chapters!) and kept me interested. The worst…? I guess I found some of the male characters a little stereotypical. Archie, the geek Lucy has to find love for, is the male equivalent of the supermodel in horn-rimmed glasses who, halfway through the movie, takes them off, lets down her hair and reveals her ‘inner’ beauty. Well I’ve seen enough female versions of that so fair’s fair I guess.
Overall though the highest complement I can give this book is that I finished it less that 48 hours in a year when I’ve only read 9 books to date.
7/10 – probably not my kind of book really but a light, fun read nonetheless.
This was another audio-book, or in fact an abridged audio version as recorded from Radio 7. I wasn’t going to do this again but then I got behind and well I did listen to it all the way through.
Hothouse is weird. It’s SciFi, and it’s probably the kind of thing a younger me would have loved. It’s set on earth in the far future when the world is no longer spinning and entire continents are cover in vegetation. And the vegetation is huge, sometime mobile, occasionally carnivourous and well, a bit weird. In the world we follow a group of humans who live in a simple tribal culture. Their main focus is to stay alive “in the green” where there are so many forms of plant (and a few insect) life that want to kill them.
If you’re sensing a downbeat tone to this review you’d be right. I actually started out enjoying Hothouse but in the end the same thing that grabbed my attention wore it thin – it’s an alien world with so few reference points that everything is strange. Not only that but the characters are simplistic, so without anyone to really care about, once you get bored with the novelty of how this plant-filled planet works that’s not a lot else to grab you.
I’ve pretty much been off the diet-and-exercise wagon for most of that. That in itself is ok. However I’ve been doing almost nothing and eating loads – that’s not.
So a week ago I decided to get back on the straight and narrow and weighed myself – came to 112.6kg or +11lbs from the 1year mark.
I managed about 2/3rds of the week mostly keeping to the diet, had a pretty serious take-away weekend and pulled it back a little on sunday. Here’s the numbers based on today:
Weekly loss: 0.9kg (2lb)
Total loss: 32.4kg (71.4lb or 5st 1lb)
To target: 16.4kg (36.3lb or 2st 8lb)
Current weight: 111.7kg (246lb or 17st 8lb)
