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book reading reviews

The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents – Terry Pratchett

One of the things I’ve always thought was very clever about the Discworld is that it’s an entire world. It’s big enough, and like the real world, diverse enough that it can cover virtually any type of story. Certainly you can parody gothic horror, classic fantasy, crime fiction and on and on. I mention this because sometimes the only connection between one Discworld novel and the next is that it’s set on the Disc.

The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents is a bit like that. It’s the Discworld’s first ‘YA’ novel and it’s basically a riff on the idea of the Pied Piper, from the point of view of the rats (er and a cat called Maurice). For all that it contains talking animals and a little magic it could easily take place in a generic fantasy world rather than the Disc per se.

Maurice as I said is a cat and a talking one at that. He travels with a band of also talking rats and a ‘stupid-looking’ boy called Keith. Together they perpetrate a scam whereby they turn up at a town, create a very visible nuisance of themselves until Keith offers to play his pipe and lead the rats away, for a reasonable fee. This usually goes very well until they arrive in a town that already seems to have a very serious rat problem and some pretty effective rat-catchers. Soon Keith, Maurice, the rats and a girl they meet along the way are uncovering what’s really going on and it’s not pretty.

When I first started this book I was very aware that the language was aimed at a YA audience. However that faded fairly quickly as I became engrossed in the story. I will say that this is quite dark for a book for younger readers. It does have some disturbing scenes. However the humour is there as are the likeable characters.

I know I often complain that Pratchett has apparent difficulty ending a book and there’s really only two endings here, which is not that many compared to some, but I would have preferred a single show-down/climax and then a coda. That said I enjoyed the book overall. There’s some interesting thoughts here about leading/following, the need for and dangers of stories.

7/10 – a good story that works for old-not-so-YA-ers like ne.

TBR is up again to 255 (from 254) because I had a Christmas Amazon gift token to spend.

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book reading reviews

Russell Wiley is Out to Lunch – Richard Hine

So this is my first book of the new year, and the new regime it represents. I bought it because it was part of Amazon UK’s “12 Days of Kindle” sale. (which if you’re in the UK you should check out, some bargains for some well-known and/or excellent books – you’ve got just over 24hours from time of posting to grab them).

Russell Wiley is Out to Lunch tells the story of a mid-level manager in a publishing company who’s trying to sell advertising on a print newspaper in the emerging online era. It was written in 2010 but set in 2006. Although I don’t think that matters, you just need to know that he’s working in a business that is in a market that’s in the process of being disrupted and no-one, least of all his superiors, seems to know what to do about it.

Alongside the comedy of corporate politics there’s the story of his home-life which consists of what looks like an increasingly fragile marriage. We get Bridget Jones’ style commentary on how many days it’s been since he’s had sex with his wife.

I definitely enjoyed this book and although it wasn’t laugh-out-loud funny it did make me smile quite a few times. The main character is interesting because he seems a little too competent at work (though stymied by those around him) and little too pathetic at home. Still on balance I did like him and I think you need to for the book to work. I could have done with a little more sympathetic view of his wife. Not that she was completely awful but I think we were supposed to come to a realisation of wondering why they were still together perhaps gradually rather than never really seeing it to begin with. There were some cute, touching and funny flashbacks to the beginnings of their relationship I suppose, perhaps they needed to be put earlier in the book.

The other irritation for me was the company politics was perhaps a little too convoluted and had too many characters. I suspect that this meant it was more realistic (the author has worked in publishing, I never have) but I felt like I ‘got it’ and didn’t need as much  characters/office-politicking as we got. Unfortunately this made a relatively short book feel longer.

The ending was perhaps a little too perfect in terms of wrapping things up nicely and the good ending happily. But then if the book was a little like a RomCom (and it was in places) then this ending fitted that genre fine.

7/10 – a fun read overall.

Thanks to said sale my TBR now sits at 254 up from 251.

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book Read Every Day reading reviews

RED Book 20: Charlotte Street – Danny Wallace

Charlotte Street is a book for which I again broke my TBR rule[1] Why? Well, I knew who Danny Wallace was from his association with Dave Gorman, from various bits of TV, from a non-fiction book Join Me, which I read about 2/3rds of[2] several years ago. And then I saw that he was releasing a novel and read the blurb and thought, “OK, this sounds like it could be my kind of thing”.

Is it? We’ll see.

Charlotte Street concerns a man, Jason Priestley[3], who’s lost his way a little. He doesn’t have a firm grasp on his career, his long term girlfriend dumped him and he’s living above (and sporadically in) a used video games shop in a slightly dingy flat.

One day he meets a girl – on Charlotte Street – with an amazing smile who’s struggling with various bags and packages, and trying to get into a taxi. After this brief meeting he discovers she’s left behind something, a disposable camera. Of course he gets the film developed and is intrigued by pictures. Not knowing who the girl is or anything about her, Jason decides to try to use the contents of the photos as clues to to try to find her.

The rest of the book follows loosely this structure, but it also interweaves the ongoing story of his life – his attempts to get his career on track, to get over, or possibly back with his ex- and so on. At times I think it would have been better if it were a little more rigid with the structure, perhaps having a chapter for each photo.

The book is basically a rom-com concept and as such it’s perhaps inevitable that there will be some question about whether he ends up with “the Girl” or not, and if not whether it’s one of the other possibilities. I won’t give away the ending but let’s just say that I thought it was going to end up with a particular pairing, then that became obviously not the case, then I briefly hoped that was a double-bluff and then – I was disappointed.[4]  I hate when that happens. Oh well.

Charlotte Street is another one of those books about men in their mid-twenties to early-thirties who are trying to figure out what life is all about and where they fit in and with whom. I seem to have read a few like this. This isn’t one of the better ones but it’s hard to find it offensive. It’s a light read and goes down ok but it’s forgettable and a little meandering.

If you like Nick Hornby or John O’Farrell or Tony Parsons then… maybe you should stick with them 😉 If you’ve run out of their stuff right now, then this is not bad.

6/10 -a rom-com that wasn’t quite up my street.

[1]Which is now, not so much broken as lying in shattered pieces on the floor.
[2]On the one hand I didn’t finish it, but on the other I read most of it in a day, which says that I was into – on that day at least.
[3] No – as the running gag goes – not that one.
[4]I think I’d wanted him to end up with a particular woman because I thought she was the female character I liked most. However thinking about it now, I didn’t like him quite as much so in that sense she’s better off without him.
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Read Every Day reading reviews

RED Book 13: Remix – Lexi Revellian

Remix is another “indie”. I bought it for I think 99p when it was in the top 10 kindle books.

Caz Tallis makes and repairs rocking horses in her London flat. She’s somewhat surprised one morning to discover what looks like a vagrant and his dog on her roof-top patio since he must have climbed up there somehow. She’s even more surprised when she realises this is Ric Kealey, lead singer of the band The Voices, not least because he supposed to have been dead for the last three years.

After this intriguing opening what follows is a crime thriller that focuses on Caz trying to help Ric sort out some issues from his past and discover exactly who is responsible for some of the things he was accused of.

Remix is not a bad book. It’s certainly very readable and the plot has enough questions and diversions to keep you interested and guessing. I’d say the pace is a little sedate at first but the nearer the end you get the more things pick up. There’s quite a bit more violence toward the end of the book than the tone of the writing before that point might lead you to suppose.

I also felt like some of the characterisation was lifted from a chick-lit novel and placed in a crime story. It may be that was deliberate and the target audience was people who enjoy both those genres but for me the setting up of the two rivals for Caz’s affections and their relative character qualities felt a bit too cliched. Having said that it didn’t dominate the story and it wasn’t wrapped up as neatly as I’d expect in a pure romantic novel (I did wonder if that was to make space for a sequel).

7/10 – a fun easy read.

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Read Every Day reading reviews

RED book 7: The Book Thief – Markus Zusak

Well the awesome power of RED means I’ve finished another book that I’ve previously stalled on, which is obviously a good thing.

The Book Thief is a novel narrated by Death and tells the story of a young girl, Liesel Meminger growing up in war-time Germany. As the story begins she’s taken to live with foster parents as her mother can no longer cope and her ill younger brother dies on the way there. We follow Liesel, her best friend Rudy and her new Papa and Mama as she learns to read, to love books and grows up. Her new family are poor and not exactly sympathetic to the Nazi regime they’re living under, so life is hard I guess, though through the eyes of a child this is just the way the world is.

This was a weird one for me. At any individual point when I was reading it I was aware of how well it was written. The characters are vibrant and engaging, colourful and alive. The use of language is clever and playful. And yet I really had to push myself to finish it. I had a sense of plodding through it. Partly I think this was because the story exists as a series of anecdotes about a girl growing up, and whilst some of these are major events and part of a bigger story – both in terms of what was going on in the world but also in terms of her life – a lot are just little incidents that illustrate what that life was like – hard, joyous, confusing, exciting and so on. I suppose after about half way through the book I wanted more of just “the story” and less of the illustration.

I would recommend this book though because I do think it is well written and it has the power to move you. It’s light in places but not a light read. I was just thinking that you could write the same story without the need for Death to take a role as an actual character, but then I think he’s there to underline a point.

7/10 – A well-written book that may be a tough read for some, but worth it I think.




So that was 7 books in January, well ahead of schedule. I’ve stalled a little in that I haven’t read very much in the 4 days since I finished it – a paltry 14 pages. I guess that makes it nice that I’ve got a bit of a lead on the target. I was aware when I started this new regime (and remember I started unofficially back in November) that the possibility existed to ‘burn out’ by reading too much too quickly and then just needing a break. I am still wary of that – I’d rather read 50 pages a day every day than hit 50+books but have weeks off at a time. Well I say that but it’s nice to feel like I’m doing well at something…

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Read Every Day reading reviews

RED book 6: Blood Music – Greg Bear

I seem to have gotten a taste for re-reading old SciFi books that I read in my early 20s. Actually the choice of this book, and the reading of it, neatly demonstrates what RED is all about. I had been thinking about scenes from this book whilst reading Protector and it occurred to me I’d like to re-read it. Because I know I’ll finish it within a few days it’s no drama to decide to do that. Although I had hoped to finish it over last weekend, Monday/Tuesday at the latest when in fact it took me until last night – but that’s still only 6 days. (This time last year I was 162 pages into Wolf Hall which I hadn’t picked up for nearly three weeks).

So… Blood Music is a novel from 1985. It concerns the invention of thinking blood cells, little nanobots created via genetic manipulation. The scientist who develops them – an intense chap called Vergil Ulam – does so as a secret side project and when it’s discovered he’s forced to shut down his experiments and clear out his lab. Forced to choose between destroying his creations and give them some sort of chance he injects them into himself (what he hopes at the time will be a temporary measure). The ‘noocytes’ as he calls them not only thrive in his body, they start to adapt, reproduce and make improvements. That’s when thing start to get really strange.

The first half of this book follows the initial development of the noocytes and their existence within Vergil’s body. This was the part that I remembered and wanted to re-read. About half-way through though the noocytes discover that there’s a world outside their world, i.e. that Vergil is not all there is and they quickly become a kind of intelligent plague. After that there’s a sort of biological singularity event and the landscape of the story becomes much stranger.

I have to admit that it was the first half, the origin story, also the one set in a recognisable world, that I preferred. The second half was also a lot longer than I’d remembered. In fact when I had reached about half way and certain events had happened and characters appeared I realised that apart from the very end I couldn’t remember what else happened and there was a gap. It’s no coincidence that my reading rate slowed at this.

Funnily enough I discovered that Blood Music was based on an earlier short story/novella and for a while I thought that explained my lack of memory of the second half, but there are some events I do recall that aren’t in the short story version.

So my overall this book is not as great as its best bits (for me) but still a worthwhile read.

6/10 – an interesting origin story then a lot of weirdness.

P.S this was an ebook and probably the worst formatted one I’ve read so far. It had clearly been scanned and OCR’d before conversion and no-one had proofread it. ‘close’ was routinely rendered as ‘dose’ and so on. It seems to be more the case with back catalogue books.




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book Read Every Day reading reviews

RED book 4: Amsterdam – Ian McEwan

Amsterdam is the second of four books I bought at a second-hand bookshop in the autumn (the first being The Necropolis Railway) so another paper read which has become a bit of a pleasant novelty. It also made it to the top of my list because it was short and so I could squeeze it in between the other books I plan to read this month, and because I have confidence in McEwan to deliver a good read.

Amsterdam begins at the funeral of Molly Lane who was only in her mid 40s. Attending the funeral are three of her ex-lovers as well as the husband who survived her. The story mainly follows Vernon Halliday, the editor of a somewhat stuffy newspaper, and Clive Linley a composer of enough consequence to be composing a symphony for the millenium (the book came out in 1998). They are old friends and near the beginning, inspired perhaps by the fact that Molly died of a degenerative, Alzheimer’s-like disease, they make a pact to ‘help each other out’ if they were ever to be in similar circumstances. Molly’s death also brings to light some compromising photos of the other ex-, Julian Garmony, who happens to be the Foreign Secretary and the issue of whether or not to publish raises its head for Halliday, whilst Linley has a moral dilemma of his own to deal with.

I said when I reviewed Solar that I probably ought not to have had the sympathy for the main character that I somehow did – he was a slightly pompous, self-important man, blind or indifferent to his own moral failings. Well it seems that McEwan specialises in such types as here we have not one but two characters from a similar mould. Setting them against each other, having each be able to spot in the other the flaws he’s unable to acknowledge in himself is clever and amusing. I can see how some might find the ending silly or unrealistic but I took it in a spirit of wry satire and as such it made me smile.

7/10 – a deceptively slight read with a pleasingly gentle sense of humour.




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Read Every Day reading reviews

RED book 3: A Quiet Belief in Angels – R.J. Ellory

 

A Quiet Belief in Angels is the story of Joseph Vaughan and how his life was overshadowed by a series of murders. However he’s neither the perpetrator nor one of the victims, nor even related to them ( though he does find one of the bodies). Still somehow his life becomes intertwined with these horrible crimes.

We first meet Joseph as a boy in 1939 in a small town in rural Georgia. It’s the day that “Death came to take [his] father“. From this portentous start we follow him as he grows up, developing a passion first for reading then writing as encouraged by his teacher. We see through his eyes the devastating effect that a serial killer can have on such a community, not only bringing fear about the crimes themselves but destroying trust and tolerance more generally.

Even when Joseph becomes a man and moves to New York to pursue his ambitions to be a writer his past never really leaves him and it continues to have a terrible impact.

This is a strange novel for me, because it’s not just a straight crime thriller. It’s a literary novel about life in the South of the US during the first half of the twentieth century (written by a Brit!). By ‘literary’ I guess I mean that it is prepared to spend time over describing what someone is feeling, or a place, or an idea about a place or a feeling – and does so in great detail and with a relish of the language itself. I’m not really one for admiring prose per se. Language exists to tell a story, set a scene, convey information about the actions and dialogue of characters. That the words themselves can be arranged in a pleasing way is secondary for me.

So I both enjoyed and was frustrated by some of the language in this book. It was well crafted but often what I felt would have done the job in a sentence or two went on for a paragraph or two. Where I found a paragraph had successfully set the scene, evoked the necessary emotion, Ellory might continue on for more than a page. It made for a feeling of it being slow and – being honest – a bit of a slog.

And yet at the same time I grew to be really interested in this man and particularly the things that drive him and have blighted his chances of a normal life. I rooted for him, even though his story was pretty grim – not just the murders but his personal life is tough too.

And yet again, as a sort of whodunnit/crime book it’s slow enough that if you’re so inclined you’ll probably figure out the way things will turn out. Strangely there were more surprises for me in the middle than the end.

It’s definitely worth a read. I would think twice before reading another by the same author because of the style not matching my reading preferences.

8/10 – A tough read in places, but compelling nonetheless.




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6000 pages reading reviews

6000 Pages 2011, The Waterproof Bible – Andrew Kaufman (pages 10755-11059)

I first heard of Andrew Kaufman in 2007 when I visited Newcastle and saw some old friends there. One of them, Wayne, gave me a copy of a little book, All My Friends are Superheroes by Kaufman. He told me that he liked the book so much that he kept copies of it to give to people. This immediately made me wary but nevertheless I did enjoy the book – plus it was very short. I became a little tired of the overt quirkiness by the end but overall it was fun.

That said when I saw The Waterproof Bible I somehow thought it was a ‘straight’ novel and was intrigued. How I got this impression I don’t know.

The Waterproof Bible follows four or five interconnected characters. We have Rebecca who involuntarily broadcasts her feelings to everyone around her, Lewis her brother-in-law newly bereaved who meets God in a launderette, Stewart her estranged husband who’s building a boat in the middle of the landlocked Canadian Praire. Finally there’s Aberystwyth and Margaret, a daughter and mother pair of amphibious beings. Margaret has been living and passing as human on land and Aby, who according to her religion believes it’s a sin to die ‘unwatered’, is racing to find her and bring her back to the sea before it’s too late. Oh and there’s a father and son pair of rainmakers in there too.

So not a ‘straight’ novel then. Not fantasy either really. I guess this is what you’d call magical realism? It’s surreal and metaphorical and possibly allegorical. However unlike All My Friends are Superheroes it never became too quirky for me, or maybe I just accepted it. I just found it kind of beautiful. It’s certainly very warm about its characters and their non-realistic problems become very affecting and even moving. I know some people will find it too quirky or be bothered by the metaphors but if you’re not one of those people then you might just find this a charming, funny, warm-hearted read.

8/10 – poetic, magical, funny, human.

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6000 pages reading reviews

6000 Pages 2011, Cast, in Order of Disappearance – Simon Brett (pages 10579-10755)

Cast, in Order of Disappearance is I suppose what you’d call a mystery. That always feels like an old-fashioned term to me but this is not a crime novel in the way The Straw Men is or a thriller like Killer Move, it’s a whodunnit, a comic one. In fact it’s the first in series of Charles Paris mysteries, Paris being the amateur sleuth , professional actor protagonist.

I first encountered Charles Paris in a radio adaptation of one of the later books where he was voiced by Bill Nighy and it was Nighy’s name that drew me in. However looking for a light read I thought I’d give the original source material a go.

Marcus Steen, a theatre-owner and general show-biz tycoon is found dead in bed, apparently from natural causes, a few days after Bill Sweet a man who was blackmailing him was shot a few miles away. Paris becomes involved when he attempts to help Jacqui, Steen’s girlfriend when she tries to find out exactly what happened and why he broke it off just before he died.

I’m aware though that describing the plot doesn’t really matter because that’s something that you’ll want to discover for yourself. I suppose the questions a mystery lover asks is whether the twists and turns are satisfying, surprising without being implausible and the plot clever enough to engage. I think that’s all true. However I personally was looking for more of the wit and charm I’d seen in the radio version. Paris is a sort of loveable rogue, unreliable, a drunk, a flirt and womaniser, but ultimately a good guy. I think the book scored pretty well on that front though I think it definitely benefited from the fact that I heard Nighy’s voice whenever there was dialogue.

I should probably mention that the novel was written in 1975 and set around Christmas 1973/4. There are references to petrol shortages, power cuts and high taxes. Not that that’s a problem in terms of plot, everything you need to understand is explained.

7/10 – fun, light, quick read.