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6000 pages reading reviews

6000 pages, The Way Home – George Pelecanos (pages 718-1026)

The Way Home is a book I picked because of a recommendation on TV Book Club and because George Pelacanos is one of the writers on The Wire – a show I’ve never seen but heard consistently good things about so often that I probably will one day.

The Way Home is another book about crime that’s not really a crime thriller. It follows Chris Flynn who as a young teenager gets himself in trouble with the law and finds himself in a youth prison. Later as an adult he becomes involved once again with the world of crime but this time attempts to keep away from it.

I enjoyed this book. It builds slowly but by the end I was gripped. What could have been written as a straight-forward crime thriller became a brooding meditation on the effects of crime on young boys and men – and their families.

But that sounds a bit analytical. The thing I enjoyed about this book was that it put a crime story in the context of a person’s relationships. It wasn’t just a question of “what will happen? will they get the bad guy?” it was “what’s this going to do to his mum, dad, girlfriend?”

I did get the feeling there were cultural references I was missing and the street language was unfamiliar to me. Which was fine but left me definitely feeling I was on the outside of this world looking in – as Brit, a white guy, a middle class man who’s never had or been in that kind of trouble. Maybe that was the point – after all reading is about looking through someone else’s eyes into their world right?

The ending’s one of downbeat optimism if that makes any sense – which it may if you read it.

8/10 – interesting read which gets better the nearer to the end you are.

Pages Read so far: 1026

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6000 pages reading reviews

6000 pages, The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold (pages 1-328)

The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold is one of those books that I’d never have read a few years ago. And I’m not even talking about how I expanded my tastes after reading mostly SciFi/Fantasy about 10 years ago. I’m talking about the last couple of years when I’ve tried more ‘literary’ fiction.

However I remembered good reviews of The Lovely Bones and heard that Peter Jackson was making a movie so I thought it might be worth a look. It was.

The Lovely Bones is narrated (mostly) by Susie Salmon, who is 14 and is raped and murdered in chapter 1. She looks down on her family and friends from ‘her’ heaven and watches as the effects of her loss is felt.

The important thing to note about this book is that it’s not about solving Susie’s murder, or finding her body, it is about the relationships and the connections between her family and friends and how they are revealed by their corporate and individual grief. The times when I forgot that, when I felt the ‘murder-mystery’ plot was taking over, were times that I was setting myself up for disappointment.

But I did enjoy the family interaction and the slow coming to terms with Susie being gone.

I’m not entirely sure the device of having Susie narrate the book, with all the metaphysical baggage that requires, added much. Except that without it one of my favourite sections near the end wouldn’t have happened. I can’t be more detailed without spoiling it so I won’t.

7/10 – a good read, but if you’re looking for a murder-mystery, these are not the bones you are looking for.

Pages Read so far: 328

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25 books reading reviews

25 Books, book 6, The Great Gatsby

I’ve owed you this review for a while. I finished this about… (checks) …over a month ago.

Before I get into the review proper, a few sentences about book choice. Part of the reason for “25 books” was to encourage me not only to read more but to read more widely. However what this initially seemed to mean was ploughing through long books I didn’t particularly enjoy. So I decided to add in a few books that were a) shorter (so I could catch up) and b) classics – which would hopefully mean they were enjoyable. The Great Gatsby was the first of these, look for Catcher in the Rye sometime before the end of the year (if I ever get that far).

Well this sort of worked. Certainly it’s a short book. Did I enjoy it? It was ok. Someone on Goodreads called it “The eh Gatsby” and I know what they mean. As a story it was ok. Some of the prose stood out as well put together. I think I can see why it’s hailed as the great American novel because I can see parallels between Gatsby as a character and the US as a country. However my literary appreciation skills are limited and so a book really has to get me with story and or characters. This didn’t, well not much. There’s a fairly interesting soap opera plot about affairs of rich people and the poor people who get caught up in the cross-fire. There’s some intrigue about who Gatsby is as a person and the truth when it comes turns out to be less than inspiring – which I think is the point. He also turns out to be less than sympathetic – well to me, to the narrator he apparently was. So I found that a little odd.

Put it this way, I’m glad I’ve read it because it’s a classic but I don’t think I’d go back to it in a hurry.

6/10 – a little so what? but at least it’s short.

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25 books reading

25 Books, Book 5 – The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Book 5 - The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
Book 5 - The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Imagine someone wrote two books. The first book was a crime thriller. One filled with twists and turns, long-held secrets uncovered, lots of characters with complicated interconnecting back stories, gruesome crimes and clever detective work leading the heroes (let’s say it’s a kind of buddy cop thing) to solve the case.

Now imagine the second book, which has the same pair of lead characters, is about financial intrigue. It’s also a thriller but it’s more cerebral, it’s about fraud and misdealing, it’s about politics and journalism and perception. It’s about manouvering information and people into the right postion to either commit, or solve, white-collar crime. It has elements of a spy novel, heist story or computer hacking cyber-punk.

Now take the two books and…  Oh I know you think you know what I’m going to say but no don’t intertwine them, simply jam them together. Chop the second book in half and stick the pieces either side of the first.

Now you’ve got something a bit like The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. It’s not a bad book. I definitely enjoyed it – but this structural oddity is responsible for all the things I didn’t really enjoy. Like the way it’s slow to get started. Or the fact that there’s long complicated sections of exposition very early on about the financial stuff. Or the fact that when you think you’ve just come to what must surely be the end of the crime thriller you’ve still got 100 pages to go and it switches back to the other story with corresponding drop in pace.

I think I preferred the central crime story because even though it’s not the kind of thing I usually read – too much gruesome detail – it was at least page-turningly gripping. Also it had some clever detective work. How the case is solved with the help of various old photographs and the conclusions drawn from them was genuinely fascinating and ingenious. The other story felt slow, unnecessarily complex and outstayed its welcome.

If this was a stand-alone book I’d probably avoid any more by the same author. However it’s part of a trilogy and clearly there’s an ongoing element to the two main characters relationship with stuff still to tell. I’ll be honest and say that I’m intrigued enough to want to follow that.

Because in the end the most interesting thing about The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was the girl with the dragon tattoo.

7/10 – enjoyable in a what’s-going-to-happen way for the central 2/3rds of the book.

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25 books book reading reviews

25 Books, book 3, Skellig

So having Set Aside The Crow Road what did I pick to read next? Well I was in Waterstones as I said and saw a display of books recommended by Nick Hornby. I picked up Skellig by David Almond largely because it was short. It turns out it’s another book aimed largely at kids – that makes three I’ve read since Christmas. If I had done so deliberately I’d start to worry that I’m ‘dumbing down’ my reading choices, however in each case I’ve genuinely not realised until I actually had the book that it wasn’t aimed at adults.

Anyway it’s an enjoyable and easy read – as you’d perhaps expect from something aimed at children.

The book is a fairly simple and straightforward story – there are no real surprises in the plot itself – of a boy who meets a strange and mysterious person in the crumbling garage of his new home, the eponymous ‘Skellig’. Who or more importantly what Skellig is is one of the major questions of the book.

It’s written with a child’s voice but also has a particular tone to the writing which will either strike you as lyrical or overly stylised depending on how well you’re enjoying it. I was mostly in the first camp with a few forays into the second.

I’d definitely recommend it to any adult looking for a light charming read or any child with a love of the unusual.

7/10 – a delightful little fable.

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25 books reading

25 Books – YANR* – Set Aside

Believe in me

because I don’t believe in anything

and I want to be someone who believes

Mr Jones, Counting Crows

Part of the reason for the 25 Books idea was to get me reading again “…cos I wanna be someone who reads“. I used to be such a voracious reader and I’ve lost that. Whilst I know some of the reasons – time and effort basically – I find that sad. Thus I started 25 Books.

But. Typically of me I started with a spreadsheet and a plan to read certain books in a certain order. And what happened was I got stuck on book 2. (I sneaked I am Legend in as a audio-book)

I’ve always had an issue with not wanting to start a new book whilst I’ve got one on the go. But some books are hard work. Or just don’t grab you right then. So I tend to get stuck.

It wasn’t so much of an issue when I used to read more because I would eventually admit defeat and decide that I’d “come back to it later.” And very occasionally I did. As it is I already have a few books I am in the middle of reading.

But as it is, following the spreadsheet coupled with my desire to finish the book I’m on, means I haven’t read for over three weeks. Because I don’t want to give up on “The Crow Road” (which is book 2) but I can’t find the motivation to sit down and read it. But I don’t want to be someone who only devours what is easy – so I want to at least try to finish more challenging books.

So I’ve decided on a new rule – the “Set Aside” rule – I can “set aside” upto 3 books. I have to give them a chance – I can’t Set Aside unless I’ve read 100 pages or been on the same book for more than 2 weeks. I can Set Aside more than 3 but then I’ll incur a 1 point penalty for each extra book started but not finished (i.e. 4 books Set Aside at the end of the year = -1 from my total)

I was out yesterday buying a birthday present for my sister. I got her a book in the end and I bought a new one for myself. I’m already 67 pages in and enjoying it. So I think it’s a good decision and it means I stand a chance of getting back on course for 25 books – which at roughly 2 books a month I should be on book 6 by now – whereas I’m actually on book 3.

(*YANR=Yet Another New Rule)

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25 books book reading reviews

25 Books, Book 1: The Servants by M.M. Smith

The Servants by M.M. Smith
The Servants by M.M. Smith

This is the first of my “25 Books” proper which I started to read on the 7th Jan 2009. I finished it on the 10th which was actually quite a long time since it’s fairly short. But that shouldn’t mislead you, I enjoyed it a lot, it’s just I was away that weekend.

Firstly I should say that “M.M. Smith” is yet another pseudonym for Michael Marshall Smith who writes fantasy/sci-fi under that name and crime fiction as Michael Marshall. I haven’t read any of the later because it’s pretty violent and I’m a little squeamish, but M. tells me it’s very good. I did enjoy his first book Only Forward which has a very particular (and funny) voice and is very inventive.

It was interesting to read this immediately after Slam because it’s also a book in which the main character is a boy, in this case he’s 11. Again it raises the question of whether it’s aimed at readers of that age. Again I think it’s written in a way they could follow but it’s also perfectly accessible to older readers too.

The Servants follows the story of Mark, his mum and stepdad, David. They’ve moved from London to Brighton. They’re living in a big house owned by David. In the basement there’s a tiny flat in which an old lady lives. Mark befriends her and she shows him something very interesting and special.

I really liked this book. I liked it because the writing, the setting and the story are very simple. I tend to like things that are simple, classic and unfussy and this has that feel. There are really only 4 characters, most of the action takes place inside the house and it’s all very simply written.

I also liked it because it does something that I admire. It lets us see through the eyes of a character things that that character himself does not see. To me that’s clever writing. It means that we see David as a bit more sympathetic than Mark does, which makes Mark in danger of seeming a little brattish. However he mellows and without giving anything away, he eventually sees it too.

I read something somewhere about it being a kind of ghost story but I don’t think it’s quite that. However it does have the atmosphere of a ghost story and there is a fantastical element to it.

The key to living anywhere is to know how to live there – just ask any snail.

9/10 – simply written but moving story.

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book reviews

Slam – Nick Hornby

So, I bet you’re thinking this is the first of my “25 Books” right? Well you’d be wrong. I read this over the Christmas period whilst at my parents. I have since finished my first 25-er (that’s sounds naff but I need some sort of shorthand) but I felt like I owe this one a review first.

Slam is about a 16-year-old skater (skate-boarder) called Sam. Sam loves skating and has read the autobiography of his hero Tony Hawk hundreds of times. So much so that when he needs to confide in someone or ask for advice he talks to a poster of Tony who “talks” back in quotations from the book. Sam’s life is turned upside down when he meets Alicia, a short-lived girlfriend who becomes the subject of a (hopefully) lifelong relationship. She becomes the mother of his child.

I liked this book. Mostly. For a start it was very readable. I find Hornby so anyway but here, where he’s trying to emulate the voice of a 16-year-old, it was even more so. No surprise then that I finished it in only a few hours over a couple of days. Although that may have had something to do with trying to escape watching soaps and gameshows with my parents.

If there was anything I didn’t like about the book it wasn’t the fault of the writing per se, it was the subject matter. As a mumble-something-year-old man who’s still single, probably would like not to be but who’s always ben iffy about having kids, it pushes lots of buttons for me. It caught me off guard as the back cover doesn’t mention pregnancy and I hadn’t read any reviews – I bought it because it was the latest Hornby. Anyway this is a book review not a discussion of my issues.

Had I read any reviews (which I did immediately after) I’d have seen that it’s viewed as a book for “young adults” simply because the main character is that age and it’s told from his pov. I’m not sure how I feel about this. Isn’t the point of reading (and perhaps writing) to see the world through another pair of eyes? In any case I’d recommend it to anyone who likes Hornby’s brand of gentle observational comedy. I say gentle because it’s nowhere near as sharp as “High Fidelity” was, but then that’s my favourite of his and I don’t think anything since has been as good.

What lets the book down slightly for me is that it tries to sort of have its cake and eat. It wants to have something approaching gritty realism but it wants to wrap it in a softer, gentler and above all optimistic view of human nature. So it shows us that teenage pregnancy is a life-altering, if not life-wrecking event (a “slam” in skating is when you fall and hit the ground hard) and that it makes things tough at an age when you’re not necessarily equipped to deal. However it pulls out an ending, which while it doesn’t negate any of that, allows the reader some relief from thinking, “this is just going to be hard grind of juggling school, work and baby-care”. To do this Hornby uses a device on top of the Tony Hawks device, something which up until that point I could have happily lost. When the ending occurred I could suddenly see why he’d done it. It felt a little like a cheat, slightly unearned. However it was a genuine relief to have some sense of ongoing happiness for these characters.

Apologies for being a little vague. For once I don’t want to give away the ending.

7/10 – for the humour, the readability and the main character.

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book reviews

Chesil Beach (far away in time)

On Chesil Beach is the latest book by Ian McEwan and I read it recently. Now I know what you’re thinking, why on earth do you trust him after Atonement? Why spend your hardly-earned cash on one of his books. Well in my defence it was a 3-for-2 deal, plus I had heard good things about it. Anyway bought it I did and read it too. And you know what? it’s good.

But it’s not completely – how shall we say? – unproblematic. It has at its centre an idea, a pivot to the story, not quite a plot twist but certainly a, erm, plot kink, that is inherently frustrating. I don’t want to give too much away but it has a somewhat downbeat ending. The structure of the book also lends itself to a certain disappointing dilemma. The heart of the book is about sex. The central event in the book is the wedding night of a couple in the 1960s. We meet them first on this night as they enjoy their dinner together and look forward (or not – he’s eager, she’s fearful) to the consummation of their relationship. Then, in various flashbacks we get the story of their lives and their meeting, everything leading up to this point in fact.

Now as I said about Atonement McEwan writes about sex well. It feels real and therefore carries a certain erotic charge. Plus the building anticipation of how that key moment will play out creates a drive to know what will happen. So unfortunately, the rather well written passages about their earlier lives, which are actually most of the book, feel at times like a distraction from what I really want to know.

Maybe I’m just shallow.

Still, even with this and the not-so-happy ending, I still prefer On Chesil Beach to Atonement. It’s well written and evocative. I think it should be required reading for anyone who thinks sex education is a bad idea.

8/10

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book movie reviews

Atoning for the Lack of a Proper Ending

Stupid title, oh well.

I recently read Ian McEwan’s Atonement for the Ship of Fools Book Club, and then, since it was availble in Tescos for a fiver, I got the DVD and watched that too. So here’s your all-in-one multi-purpose Atonement review.

The Book

I really enjoyed the book, well most of the book. It’s in four parts and the first four tell the story of Robbie and Cecilia a couple whose fledgling love affair is almost prevented by class, family, war and false accusation of a crime. The final part reveals the fact that the previous three parts were a novel written by Briony, who made the accusation, regretted it and is atoning by writing the story. Only she reveals that she may or may not be telling the truth, part of her atonement may be to tell a better version of the story, one which gives Robbie and Cecilia the happy ending that real life denied them.

Except of course it’s all fiction any way so there is no “real life”, so it doesn’t matter right? As McEwan, speaking through Briony says,

I know there’s always a certain kind of reader who will be compelled to ask, But what really happened?

Well yes, and sorry Mr McEwan but I am that kind of reader. But I’ll come back to that. Anyway if you want to hear my musings on the ending read my comments on the Ship thread.

As for the parts I enjoyed, the other 90% of the book, let me say a few words about that. The first section was slow to start but very atmospheric, something quite deliberate as we’re later told this is one of the flaws in Briony’s writing style. It’s very clever in the way it switches perspective and moves around in time, without ever being confusing. As someone who’d like to be a better writer I envied McEwan’s talent and will go back and look at those parts to learn I suspect.

The second section of the book is Robbie’s journey to Dunkirk through a war-torn France. I haven’t read a lot of wartime fiction (though I’m aware there is a lot) so perhaps it was that that made me so engrossed in this section. I learnt a lot and like the first thirty minutes of Saving Private Ryan it put me there in that situation and gave you that feeling of how utterly brutal and yet random the sufferings of war can be.

The third section is the story of Briony training to be a nurse and treating some of the victims of that suffering. Again it was the things I learnt, the empathy evoked for the suffering and the sense of Briony’s growing up. There’s also a very real sense of wanting to know what will happen, how it will play out when, if, Robbie and Cecilia are re-united. This leads up to a riveting scene where Briony meets with them to tell them she’s recanting and to make her atonement.

Of course it’s this very sense of wanting to know what happened that is frustrated in the final section. Although at the very end there’s a cosy call-back to Briony’s childhood which if not making up for her ripping the narrative rug from under us, at least leaves a better taste in the mouth.

But the unsatisfying ending is all the harder to take because the rest of the book is so good.

8/10

The Movie

In terms of structure the movie is very faithful to the book. It’s beautifully shot, especially the first section, but then almost all period dramas are. I guess once you’ve got gorgeous locations and wonderfully made period costumes that it seems a shame not to make the most of them, and so the cinematographer is given his head.

My problems start with the middle section, the France section, which in the book was my favourite and in the movie is truncated. That’s ok, adaptations have to cut stuff out, but what they removed was most of the tougher stuff, so that sense that the journey was perilous and at any moment you might be killed, or saved, by pure dumb luck wasn’t really in the movie. The scene at the beach at Dunkirk, a masterfully shot 4-minute one shot, gave the impression that it was merely that things were a bit disorganised.

I also had a problem with the casting. Keira Knightley does ok, she’s as good here as anywhere, and James McAvoy is slightly better but in key moments they fall short of the source material. That killer scene I mentioned earlier, the confrontation with Briony, contains a moment where Robbie becomes enraged and may even harm Briony, and Cecilia brings him back from the edge by force of will, her love and holding him with her eyes. The scene is in the movie but it has none of the sense of physical menace nor the restraining power of Cecilia’s love communicated in a look. I watched it and thought, they just didn’t nail it.

Perhaps where the movie is most different is the ending. They replace the putting on of Briony’s play with a TV interview about the publishing of her book. In doing so Briony tells us exactly what happened. That Robbie and Cecilia both died, unre-united in separate senseless losses of the war. That her atonement was to write them a happier ending and that that’s precisely what she did.

Watching this made me realise that whilst I didn’t like the ending of the book, I preferred some remaining ambiguity to the certainty of the movie. The movie ending did have at least one thing going for it though, and that was showing Robbie and Cecilia enjoying their happy ending, playing in the surf near their seaside cottage. And leaving them on a happy moment, even a false one, is nice that it otherwise would have been.

6/10

The Buffy Episode

No really.

The discussion around the ending and the nature of storytelling has reminded me of the Buffy episode Normal Again. Naturally I’ll be getting to this in the Buffy Re-watch project but since it’s season 6 and therefore it’ll probably be 2019 before I get to it I’ll mention a few thoughts here.

Normal Again is superficially just BtVS’s version of a staple plot in genre TV – the alternate reality story where two interpretations of events unfold and the hero is not sure until the end which is real. In this case Buffy is attacked by a demon which infects her with some kind of drug that causes her to hallucinate that she’s really in a mental hospital. Her dead mother is alive and visiting with her abandoning father. It’s explained that Sunnydale, the monsters, her powers and all her experiences are an imaginary world she’s created as a kind of comfort.

It’s cleverly done but so far so Star-Trek-did-it-first. What sets apart Normal Again is that it ends the wrong way. There are certain conventions about this kind of episode. One is that you tell it from the hero’s point of view until you’re ready to reveal which reality is the true one, but Normal Again pretty much sticks with thirdy party pov all the way through. The plot is set up so that Buffy has to choose which reality she wants to live in – if she kills her friends it will “kill” the hallucinatory Sunnydale world and be cured, able to return to her mom and dad. What she actually does is kills the demon and the hospital world disappears.

But the kicker is that it ends, not in Sunnydale, but with Buffy catatonic in her hospital room, the camera pulling back slowly. In TV language that’s saying this is the true reality and it (it being the whole series so far) was all a sick girl’s imagination.

This made a lot of people angry, as Atonement apparently did also. However I think that given that we know from the consistent point of view and the fact that the show carries on and is in fact about Buffy fighting monsters in Sunnydale, that that final shot is about something else. It’s about saying that like Buffy we get to choose which reality we want to live in. We can choose to suspend disbelief and we get the fantasy world of Buffy with all her exciting adventures.

This episode came at a time when there was lots of discontent amongst the fans, a lot of which was around how unrealistic, how untrue to the characters, the show had become. There was also a lot of nitpicking over plot holes and inconsistencies. I always thought of Normal Again as a sly dig at those fans, as an appeal to suspend disbelief again and thereby enjoy the fantasy.

I guess the difference is that BtVS managed to do it in a way that didn’t make me angry.

In case you’re wondering, I’ll rate Normal Again when I do a proper review.