So book 2. Which I read in two days. That ought to have given me a big headstart given Under The Dome‘s massive page count. But I’m stuck in the middle of book 3 and am so about a couple of weeks behind.
Anyway.
I Think I Love You is the story of a David Cassidy fan Petra, and the young man, Bill, who has the job of writing Cassidy’s letters for a fan magazine. The first part of the book is set in the 1970s when Petra is 13 and Bill is just starting out on his career – hence the less than glamourous job. The second half of the book takes place in 1998 when, after her divorce and the death of her mother, Petra finds some old letters and makes contact with Bill.
The first half of the book was definitely the more enjoyable. When I first started reading I thought it would be interesting to be in the mind of a 13 year old girl as that’s absolutely not something I am used to. However I quickly realised that the insecurities, anxieties and so on of a teenager girl in the mid-70s were not that different to a boy in the early 80s. But the nostalgia was fun, as was the parallel Petra and Bill story lines.
The second half of the book was good but necessarily had a different feel. It also felt like it meandered a bit. Perhaps that was deliberate – we’re rarely so sure and focussed as we can be as teenagers. Also, if you can’t see where the story is going to end up pretty much from the start of the second part I think you’re not really trying.
7/10 – A bit of nostalgia, some adult angst and a happy ending.
Yay so I finished my first book of 6000 pages 2011. It’s almost April and only one book? Well fortunately it was a long one. A very long one.
This is actually the first Stephen King book I’ve ever read. I may have dipped into Salem’s Lot after it was on TV as a teenager but I’ve never read a full novel. Mostly that was because I didn’t really respond to horror as a genre. Well this isn’t horror (well… but we’ll get to that) and I’d read the blurb and it sounded interesting. Plus M. had read it.
Under the Dome is about a small New England town that wakes up one morning to find that an invisible barrier has been placed all around it. The story then revolves around the efforts of the people in the town to cope with effects of being cut off from the rest of the world. They have to survive with whatever resources – including people – that they have. The book has a lot of different characters but follows about half a dozen closely. Ultimately the question becomes whether they can discover what the Dome is and whether they can get rid of it.
No wait. That’s not ultimately what the book is about. It’s the question we finally get to at the end of it, but the book is really about what happens to these people when they’re forced to survive on their own. And it ain’t pretty. It becomes a sort of Lord of the Flies for adults.
All of which I found quite interesting and fun – for the first 400 pages or so – but in the back of my mind I wanted to know more about the Dome. I decided it was one of three broad possibilities based on what genre this book was part of –
the ‘thriller’ answer – the Dome is put there by some shadowy government agency, or foreign power. The reason why here particularly will perhaps be connected to one of the characters’ pasts.
the SciFi answer – aliens put it there and by the end of the book we’ll meet them.
the Supernatural answer – it’s some ghost or human with spooky powers doing it.
The trouble is that that isn’t what King was interested in telling me about. The Dome is just a macguffin to set up the trapped situation. So whilst he does finally explain where the Dome came from and why, 95% of the novel is not about that at all. Perhaps it’s a tiny bit of a spoiler to say that but if I’d known that I may not have read the book. (Although it does occur to me now that the fact the book’s called ‘Under the Dome‘ and not ‘The Dome‘ is a clue.)
I also felt that whilst the story of how they folks cope was interesting – it went on too long. An example from early on in the book is the various incidents as people discover the Dome. Mostly these are accidents as people hit the invisible barrier, whether in their cars or on foot. There a wide variety of these recounted in detail. After about 5 or 6 I had gotten the idea – it was a barrier, it caused accidents, it affected a lot of folks in the town – but King describes probably 2 or 3 times that many incidents. It’s like if you were making a movie and in it there’s a scene where a crowd turns nasty. You’d hire a lot of extras sure, and you’d film a few close ups of individuals shouting and baying for our hero’s blood (say) – but once you’d shown a few of these shots cut with wide shots of the crowd you’d have created the necessary impression. No need to labour the point.
King is very good at creating tension in the plot, so you do sort of want to know what happens next. It’s just that a lot of that was about detail and you could sort of see where it was all going.
Without being spoilery there were things about the ending that I didn’t like. It’s like at a certain point he feels he’s done what he set out to do and then thinks “how can I wrap this up quickly?” Well the way he chose was effective, even spectacular, certainly a climax for the novel, but for me personally, a little unsatisfying.
6/10 – there’s a lot of ‘under’ before you get to the ‘dome.
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.
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.
