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25 books reading reviews

25 Books, book 17 – The Girl on the Landing, Paul Torday

So it’s February 2010 and “25 Books” was my 2009 challenge. I’m not going to tell you (yet) how many books I read and how many points I accrued, but I will say that I’ve nearly finished book 2 of 2010. So obviously I’m a bit behind on the corresponding blog posts. My goal for 2010 is to try not to get more than one book behind (once I’ve caught up that is.)

So anyway…

The Girl on the Landing is the story of Michael and his wife Elizabeth. Whilst staying with a friend in Ireland he sees an intriguing picture of a girl on the landing of his friend’s house. On mentioning it the next day he discovers that the picture in question has no girl in it. This odd occurrence marks the beginning of changes in him, his marriage and his life in general.

I bought this book one day when I was browsing in Waterstones and liked the blurb on the back. I was in my “forget-the-list-lets-just-read-something-enjoyable” phase. It turned out to be a good choice but I wasn’t sure of that initially. I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to relate to the main characters. Michael is very rich and his life seems to be like something out of a period novel about posh folk. He’s very rich and owns a large estate in Scotland. He lives in London and his pass-the-time job is working for an exclusive club of which he’s a member. I swear the first 50 pages or so I kept looking for clues of when it was set because I was sure it was going to turn out to be the 1930s.

That was a minor concern though and faded once I got into the story. The transformation in Michael as a person and the growing effect it had on his marriage I found interesting. I was rooting for them as a couple who, having been married for some time found themselves perhaps for the first time falling really in love.

However as the pace of the story picks up there’s a kind of is-it-real supernatural element mixed with almost a crime thriller. Both of these in different ways had me intrigued as to what was going to happen next and what it meant. I found it quite exciting and intriguing and the early part of the book had made me care about the characters so that was all the more affecting.

I can see how some might see it as a strange mix of genres but that honestly never bothered me.

8/10 – an odd mix of romance, thriller and ghost story – but one that worked for me.

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25 books book reading reviews

25 Books, book 16 – The Innocent, Ian McEwan

The Innocent is my third book by Ian McEwan. You have to go back to Harry Potter a couple of years ago, or further to my Discworld-devouring 20s to find me having read more than a couple of books by the same author. I mention that only to say that to my surprise and despite my own expectations (it’s not genre!) I seem to be becoming a McEwan fan.

The Innocent is the story of Leonard – a naive 25-year-old English phone technician sent to Berlin in 1956 to work on a secret project. Predictably perhaps the books is all about him losing his innocence in various ways. He learns about espionage, he learns to drink, he learns about sex and then love, from a spirited, confident, slightly older Berlin native called Maria.

Given that I was looking for “something lighter” after 1974 those of you who know the story of The Innocent will perhaps smile. I don’t want to spoil but the pivotal event that occurs about halfway through is as dark and upsetting as anything in 1974. Having said that overall the book is much more optimistic.

It’s interesting that I read this enjoying the first half of the book, which establishes the characters, the setting, the relationships and so on. I was enjoying McEwan’s fine insight into relationships and they way they express themselves, especially through sex. I am slightly amused to find on finishing the book that many see this as slightly drawn-out set-up for the central incident and feel that the book is really about the fallout from that. I can see that, and I did enjoy that. I still enjoyed the early part of the book best though.

I guess I was at a disadavantage because before getting to the central event I flicked to the end to check the page number of the last page (to see how far through I was) and spoiled myself by catching sight of two words. Just two words! So what was I expect for some a “twist” was for me a gradual sad build-up to the inevitable. Fortunately the two words were not the final ones and unlike Atonement McEwan was able to rescue it for me on the final page.

9/10 – Innocence lost, hope regained.

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25 books book reading reviews

25 Books, book 15 – 1974, David Peace

As you know I bought 1974 when I was in search of something I actually wanted to read. My theory was that having liked The Girl With the Dragon Tatoo – which is basically a crime novel – I’d probably enjoy this. The TV adaptation of it was celebrated and so it seemed a reasonably bet that the source material was going to be good too.

My only reservations were: a) would I be happy with merely a page-turner of a crime story? b) was my stomach strong enough for what I had heard was fairly dark stuff?

The answer turned out to be yes on both counts.

1974 – set in the eponymous year, is the story of a journalist, Eddie Dunford, a crime reporter, on the Yorkshire Post. He’s recently returned from an unsucessful spell in Fleet Street and just buried his father. What seems to be a pretty ordinary missing girl case becomes far stranger when the body turns up. She’s naked, has been sexually abused in a bizarre way and has the wings of a swan stitched into her back. Then there’s the sniff of local government corruption around the sale of (what should have been) council houses, the harassment of a settlement of gypsies and the seemingly unrelated story of a man who killed himself and then his sister – the so-called ‘Ratcatcher’ – the story of which made Eddie’s name.

1974 starts slowly but soon picks up pace and then it simply does not let up. I read the first 100 pages over a couple of days but I read the remaining 200+ in a single night. Many books are said to be un-put-downable, I definitely found this one so. Peace has a slightly stylised way of writing, which once used to I liked. Although given the strange nature of some of the crimes and incidents in this book I wasn’t always sure what was going on when he mixed in the dreams and thought-life of Dunford with the ‘real’ action. It was effective though.

It was also quite a challenge. Not just for my stomach – though it was gruesome – but also because it was fairly bleak regarding human nature. If you get to the end of this book thinking there were any purely ‘good guys’ then I’d be surprised. And despite that, and despite even the slightly far-fetched explanation (which I only partly guessed – damn!) I did really enjoy this book. But I also felt the need for something lighter next. I have got the follow up, 1977 (which by all accounts is even darker) but I’m waiting a while to start it.

9/10 – dark, disturbing but very gripping

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25 books book reading reviews

25 Books, Book 14 – Beowulf

So, speaking of monsters…

Here’s where my pretensions start to break down a little. As much as I like to read (and despite whatever, I do) I am not really a student of literature. So what have I to say about this ancient classic of narrative poetry? Isn’t it ridiculous to review it alongside Nick Hornby and score it out of 10?

Probably but I am going to anyway. Mostly because I did read it and I don’t have the tools to tackle it any other way – nor am I likely to acquire them any time soon.

Beowulf, in case you don’t know, is the story of a hero who fights and defeats first a monster, then the monster’s mother and then a dragon. Somewhere between the last two Beowulf becomes king and rules for 50 years.

I have to say I appreciated the translation. The language was plain and had the feel of an earlier, earthier culture without seeming false. Also it retained a sense of poetry. However I did find that it got in the way of the story a little for me. There were times when I read a phrase, or a stanza, enjoyed it and then realised I needed to go back to see what was actually happening. That made reading Beowulf less of a treat and more of a chore than it might have been. Maybe I’ll re-read it one day and the familiarity with the basic story will help.

The other thing that was odd was the story-telling structure. Probably things have changed in a thousand years but I still found it odd that we get a fuller description of parts of the second fight when it’s being recounted later, in passing, than we do at the time.

This is another one that I’m glad I read rather than enjoyed the reading per se.

7/10 – poetic, epic but slightly confusing.

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25 books book reading reviews

25 Books, Book 13 – Let the Right One In

Despite my love for all things Buffy the Vampire Slayer, I am not normally drawn to straight horror. And whilst Let the Right One In is a twist on the usual vampire story it is still horror. But I had heard it was good, actually I’d heard the movie was good, and more atmospheric than gorey, so I gave it a try.

Turns out it was good.

Question: How do you make a monster sympathetic?

Possible answer #1: have an even worse monster as the real ‘villain’

Possible answer #2: make your monster vulnerable, say a child

The central character in Let the Right One In is Oskar, a loner and child of a single mom who is being bullied at school. He makes friends with a strange child he meets in the neighbourhood called Eli. Eli is more than she seems, and not only because Eli is a vampire.

Let the Right One In is atmospheric-scary, but it also has its gory-scary moments. It is a gripping page-turner of a what-happens-next thriller. But at its heart it’s a sweet touching reflection on love and friendship. The fact that one of the two ‘lovers’ is a person who needs to kill to survive and that we still care about Eli and Oskar is something of a triumph. Although I think it’s achieved partly by making another character more horrible – both morally and in terms of the threat they pose – and also by showing how much of the death and mayhem that inevitably follows Eli around isn’t really her fault.

After reading the book I watched the film and enjoyed it. I think the book is my favourite overall but they both have their strengths. The film is shorter – showing how much could effectively be editted from the book. The book has some intriguing bits of back-story that would be hard to dramatize on screen.

It says something either about me or the strength of this book that one of the most moving scenes was also one of the most gruesome. Must be the book, definitely…

8/10 – gory and touching.

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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.

 

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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.

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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.

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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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25 books book reading reviews

25 Books, book 9, Heaven Can Wait – Cally Taylor

Heaven Can Wait
Heaven Can Wait

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.