The Winter Ghosts is, unsurprisingly, a ghost story. It concerns Freddie Watson who in winter 1928 takes a trip to the south of France. For the last decade or so he’s been dealing with the guilt of surviving a brother who was killed in World War I. He crashes his car and is forced to take refuge in a remote village. Whilst there he goes to a village festival and meets Fabrissa, who has also suffered loss and grief. However all is not quite as it seems.
OK, I say “all is not quite as it seems”, because it’s one of those trip off the tongue cliches, but in fact if you’re expecting a ghost story (and the title gives that one away doesn’t it?) then you’ll probably see exactly where this is going.
Which is not to say I didn’t enjoy The Winter Ghosts, I did. The predictability is almost comforting in a way, like watching a familiar film on TV at Christmas. It has the feel of one of those classic Victorian ghost stories. Also the Kindle edition which I read had ‘wood-cut’ style drawings as illustrations interspersed with the text and this gave it a nostalgic feel reminding me of some of the books I read as a child e.g. the Narnia chronicles.
(I just found out how to do screenshots on my Kindle – cool huh?)
I’ve read that The Winter Ghosts started life as a shorter story called The Cave and I think it shows. There were times when it feel padded with description. However I did think there was a nice sense of atmosphere and I learnt something about the history of the Cathars in the Pyrenees.
7/10 – a wintry ghost story, perfect for Christmas reading.
When I was a student and my finals were approaching I found this book in a charity shop for 10p. I read the back and it sounded interesting and hey only 10p… In those days I was not intimidated by long books. The book is the first in what was then a series of 6 books (now 9 and there’s one more to come). I read the first five and a half in a couple of weeks during the ‘rest breaks’ from my revision for finals. The final half book took me several months.
That says something about something. Either me or the books or both. Anyway…
Lord Foul’s Bane is the story of a man, Thomas Covenant, who is transported to another world – called simply “the Land” – where he bears resemblance to a mythic hero and where his wedding ring is a magical object of great power – not that he knows how to use it. The other thing we learn about Covenant is that he is a leper, and we learn that the key to managing leprosy is a dogmatic vigilance to the dangers around him – he can’t rely on his dead nerves to warn him when he’s injured himself and so must carefully check for minor scrapes and cuts in case they get infected. This leads to a rejection of anything but the harsh realities of life. He can’t afford to think about life the way it was (his wife divorced him and took their son) or how he wishes it were, he must focus on the practicalities of simply surviving.
So when he finds himself in “the Land” – a place of beauty and magic, a place where his leprosy is healed and feeling returns – he rejects it as a dangerous dream. However in order not to be overwhelmed by it he tries to follow the logic of the dream and interacts with the people he finds there as if they were real whilst believing them not to be. This he calls his “Unbelief”.
There are a couple of big hurdles to enjoying this and the other books in this series. The first is that Thomas Covenant is hard to like. For reasons that are understandable he is bitter and tends to be harsh to those around him, even those being kind to him. And when he first recovers his health in the Land he loses control and commits rape. I know of at least one person who gave up on the book at that point – which is several chapters in.
The second hurdle is Donaldson’s prose. He’s not one to use 10 words where 150 will do. He also, to my mind, delves into the psychological motivations of Covenant in excessive detail such that he makes a mockery of “show don’t tell”.
Given this, why read Lord Foul’s Bane?
Well it’s all about story and the story is, I think, a compelling one. At the point where he enters the Land Covenant is given a message from the eponymous Lord Foul for the Lords – the rulers and protectors of the Land. The section of the book – about the first 2/3rds – which concerns Covenant’s journey to deliver this message has a driving energy to it which always gets me. I’ve started this book more times than I’ve finished it, and usually if I’ve abandoned it it’s at the point just after he’s given the message at the Council of the Lords where I’ve floundered.
I almost did again this time. In fact it was perhaps only the fact that having read 300+ pages I did not want them to go to waste because of not finishing the book.
7/10 – if you like fantasy, can overlook an unlikeable hero and plough through the turgid prose then there’s an interesting story in there.
So we’re on to book 11 (only 11! It’s November!!) and this is my first non-fiction. In fact it’s my first since I started doing these reading blog projects. The last non-fiction I remember reading was Danny Wallace’s Join Me which must have been pre-2006 and I didn’t finish that.
Mark Kermode is someone I enjoy on the radio on the weekly podcast of his movie reviews with Simon Mayo. It’s Only a Movie is a sort of autobiography. I say sort of only because it’s in more or less the right order but leaves lots out and jumps around – as he often does on the radio once he gets on to a tangent about a particular movie he goes with that.
What you end up with is a series of anecdotes about being a film critic. They are well told and funny and yet don’t seem to add up to a whole lot. Strangely it felt a lot like the radio show but I liked it less. I think the value of having someone to spar with, and someone who drags him back on topic is not inconsiderable.
6/10 – a light entertaining read but not much more.
So, before I get into the review proper I need to get a couple of technicalities out of the way first.
Firstly, I read all six of the Scott Pilgrim comic books but I’m counting them as one ‘book’ for the purpose of this blog. Since we’re counting pages that’s largely irrelevant but it means you only get one review.
Second, I decided that the page count needed some adjustment. It would be flattering but a little unfair to count the pages as-is given the comic book form. So I added up all the pages and the time it took me to read and came up with a figure that maintains my approximate pages/hour count – which is 4 Scott Pilgrim pages=1 page from a regular book. Anyhow I’m happy with that and since the whole thing is arbitrary…
Scott Pilgrim tells the story of an early-20s slacker and his friends and their respective intertwined love-lives. As the story begins he’s just started dating a 17-year-old and you get the feeling this is because he enjoys the simplicity of just hanging out with someone who likes him.
He’s also in a band and they feature in the story too.
Of course if you’ve heard much about this, particularly the movie, then you’ve probably heard about is his new girlfriend’s “seven evil exes”. Oh when I say “new girlfriend” I mean the one he dumps his highschooler for not the 17year-old herself.
Oh and then there’s the fact that the story is told with the style and visual accompaniments of a video game.
There’s a lot to like here and I did. I think that when I was the same age as the characters I would have absolutely loved it. Anyway, I particularly like the way that despite some visual slickery and surreal story elements, the characterisation and relationships remain resolutely and realistically complicated. So it’s not in any way ‘dumbed down’ just because it uses relatively youthful pop culture references.
I found the pre-ending a little confusing (it’s better in the movie) but the ending ending was fine – hopeful, optimistic but not unrealistic.
8/10 – makes me wish I were young again (and in love/lust)
The Rapture is a hard book to classify, except to say that as usual, it’s not the sort of book I would have once read. Let’s see if I can make at least an attempt at a summary:
Gabrielle a psychologist with her own physical and emotional challenges, is working in a secure hospital with young dangerous adults. One of these, Bethany, is there because she murdered her mother. However there’s something a little different about Bethany, she has apocalyptic visions of destruction. Given that her father is an evangelical Christian preacher this is perhaps not unexpected. Except that when they start to come true…
I really enjoyed this book. It’s told mostly from Gabrielle’s point of view. She’s in a wheelchair from a car accident and that alone – the perspective of someone with those challenges – made the first part of the book interesting. Add to that the unfolding intrigue of Bethany and her visions. Also there’s a man – Frazer the Physicist – who may or may not be a love interest. Then about half-way through – another growing trend – the plot really kicks in and we’re into a fast-paced thriller-cum-disaster epic.
If this was a movie it would be a cross between One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and The Day After Tomorrow. In fact I think one of the reasons I liked it so much was that it played like a big spectacular movie in head as I read. But it’s a movie I’ve not seen before. It’s big action blockbuster for sure but it’s not dumb. In fact it’s raising issues to do with climate change and has a global-warming related end-of-the-world scenario that I’ve not heard of before.
There are problems with this book – in particular there’s a relationship-related plot thread that’s pure soap opera or cheesey sitcom. It needed to get resolved a lot quicker as it was too obvious where it was going. And yet I forgave the book that because ultimately it was such a wild ride.
9/10 – the end of the world shouldn’t be so much fun.
So, another crime novel and another book from the TV Book Club list.
Having said that, this is not your typical crime novel. It’s the story of a young boy, Stephen, whose uncle, Billy, was killed by a moors-murderers-style serial killer. Understandably this had a devastating effect on his mum, Stephen’s grandma, not least because the body was never found. Stephen’s mum, Billy’s sister, has grown up in the shadow of someone who was the favourite anyway but who she can now never compete with.
So Stephen’s family has some issues and he believes the way to fix things is find his uncle’s body. This leads him to start writing to the killer in jail.
I did really enjoy this book. I think it’s more about the impact this sort of crime has on a family long term rather than the usual trying to catch a terrible killer plot. So in that sense it’s not your normal crime novel. A couple of specific differences stand out: despite being quite gruesome the details of the crimes are not dwelt on as they sometimes are in books like this, also the killer is very definitely clearly “evil”. At first I thought this was a weakness of the book, thinking the characterisation was too simplistic. However as I read on more about his past was revealed and I think the line the author takes is to never make him a sympathetic character, to refuse to compromise on the idea that he did terrible things. Of course to some extent you do at least follow his story, so there’s a little sympathy/empathy there, but it’s very restrained which I think works in the end.
But the character in the book that I most enjoyed following was Stephen. Smart for his age and having had to take on a lot more than he should, you cheer on his efforts even perhaps when they are misguided – like writing to the killer. There’s some stuff about his family that felt it was laid on a little heavily, but overall it was well done.
8/10 – a gripping read. You’ll be anticipating the next letter as much as the characters.
It’s going to be hard to separate a real review from a personal, autobiographical account of this book. I’ll probably not try.
This is, uniquely since I started 25 books much less 6000 pages, a re-read. I felt I needed something familiar, something I knew I’d enjoy.
There’s a section in Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity where he talks about listening to the Beatles because it’s music that he first heard as a child and it isn’t (for him) associated with love, loss and chasing girls, it’s associated with a more innocent, less complicated time and as such it’s comforting.
A World Out of Time is a little like that for me. I didn’t first read it when I was a child. In fact I was 22. Although…
OK. Let’s go back to when I was a child – 11 or 12 – and first discovered book shops. I knew I loved to read but faced with a choice, my own choice, of what to read I was a little stumped. So I went with what I knew. I knew I liked Dr Who so I figured that meant I liked SciFi so I went to the SciFi section. I’d already devoured HG Wells and some other classics so I wanted something a bit more up to date. What I eventually chose was a book of short stories by Larry Niven. I must have enjoyed them because over the next several years I read most of his “Known Space” books including the Ringworld ones.
Anyway one of the stories was called “Rammer” and was the story of a man awakened from frozen sleep to discover he’s being trained to be a spaceship pilot. A World Out of Time’s first chapter is a slightly modified version of this story.
What I like about this book is its ideas. A lot of science (which may well have been superceded since it was written). It has a huge scope – the main character travels to the centre of the galaxy and back and his story spans 3,000,000 years (though his personal timeline doesn’t due to relativistic time effects). There’s discussion of how in this future the solar system was adapted by moving planets around. Red Dwarf played this for laughs but here it’s done seriously with what looks like a plausible stab at the science needed.
It’s also a rolicking good story. The earlier part of the book is about Corbell’s exploration of the galactic hub and his return to what he believes is earth. The later part is almost one long chase scene. Certainly I found (then and now) that the pace keeps you interested.
The characterisation isn’t much to write home about. Emotionally it’s a little cold I guess. Corbell and the other few characters act mostly in ways dictated by logic. And the logic is applied to these huge events such as what will happen if/when the earth is moved again. But I can forgive it that. I’m not looking for insight into the human condition here. What I get is a good story, interesting scenery and big ideas.
Also – maybe this is not entirely irrelevant – the plot of the later part of the book concerns the hunt for immortality. The scientific secret of which has been found but lost.
I can’t necessarily recommend this unless you have the same set of idiosyncratic tastes as me, but it is a guilty pleasure.
7/10 – good old fashioned ‘hard’ scifi. Full of ideas.
Here’s a book I couldn’t imagine myself reading until I actually did. A story of nuns in 16th century Italy.
But it came highly recommended in two book clubs – the Ship of Fools one and the TV one. I guess I was looking for something a little different and it’s certainly that.
So a bit of a gamble – did it pay off?
Yes. This is a really enjoyable book. It opens up a world I never really knew existed. I knew of course the convents existed. I hadn’t realised that in those days the existence of dowries meant that well to do families could usually only afford to marry off one of their daughters and so convents became dumping grounds for the others – the less good looking, or more independently-minded or intelligent, or generally just less marriageable. Dumping grounds is a little unfair but what it meant was the the convents were full of women who hadn’t so much chosen a vocation as become resigned to a fate.
And it turns out it could be not such a bad one. Inside the walls of the nunnery there was a certain amount of freedom and independence. A fraction of the money that would have gone to a husband’s family went to the convent and this meant they were in some way indebted to powerful families – so that conditions for those nuns at least were kept tolerable.
The shadow in the background is the coming of a tightening of restrictions based as a consequence of the Council of Trent. Santa Caterina, the convent of the novel, has so far avoided this clamping down but the desire not to draw undue attention to itself is one of the motivations for a key character in the book.
For about the first half, the book is mostly scene setting and getting to know the characters. I’ve seen people describe this as slow but I didn’t find it so. We follow Serafina, a new novice, who has joined very much against her will, and through her eyes we learn about the world of the convent. We also follow Suora Zuana – the convent’s dispensary sister. She’s a fascinating character – she has in many ways a more modern, sceptical, rational outlook but she is still a product of her age.
About half way through a major incident occurs and what follows in a gripping thriller, the pace quickening and not letting up until the end.
9/10 – a surprisingly gripping read, and a glimpse of another world.
An update from yesterday’s unofficial weighing after my evening walk (ankle’s mostly back to normal) – I’ve lost a further 2.5lbs. We’ll see if that lasts out the week (it should as long as I don’t have any mad weekend binges)
I said when I finished 1974 that I’d wait a while before starting the follow-up because I needed something lighter and I’d heard 1977 is darker.
It is.
Darker. Grimmer. Bleaker. Tougher.
Maybe it’s not that much worse than 1974 but it feels it. Maybe because you get to a lot of the tougher stuff earlier. Maybe it’s because I read it in a day (partly the pace pulled me in, mostly I wanted to read it before lending it to M. who’s asked to borrow it). Maybe because the ending is… not the ending I was hoping for.
1977 is a fictionalised account of the search for the Yorkshire Ripper. Two of the minor characters from 1974 – a policeman and a reporter – alternately narrate chapters of the story. They’re unreliable witnesses but they’re also morally compromised because of their own involvement with prostitutes. As with 1974 a complex web of crime, conspiracy and corruption unfolds.
The thing I remembered about Peace’s writing whilst reading 1977 was the frenetic pace, the surreal, confusing and slightly irritating prose style at times, the fact that you sometimes don’t really know what’s going on or who’s who, the fact that almost everyone is not a nice person and/or (usually and) a victim of human ugliness. All these things were true of 1974 and they were all down-sides but the things that made it worth reading were a kind of morbid fascination with the gruesome crimes, I’ll admit some titillation at unacceptable behaviour (think Life on Mars x100) and, perhaps most of all, the page-turning need to find out what happens next.
Well 1977 has these same strengths too but whilst I’m still fascinated and titillated, I’m also a little weary of the darkness. Crucially also, when I neared the end of the book I realised with a growing sense of anger that I wasn’t going to get all the answers to my questions about the plot. Don’t get me wrong 1977 has a conclusion to its own story, stories in fact – but there are also on-going elements which reach into the next book(s). I think if I’d realised that up front I’d’ve enjoyed it more. 1974 was much more self-contained.
At this stage I can’t see me wading through two more books of such tough material (with the uncomfortable feeling that part of me is enjoying it in the wrong way) just to find out what happens. Maybe – but it’ll be while I think.
So –
6/10 – more of the same is not necessarily a good thing.
