Everyone's Favourite Nobody

Can an Atheist Take the Lord's Name in Vain?: Book II

2012-02-11T08:06:00.000-08:00

God is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens

God is Not Great is Christopher Hitchen's excoriating critique of religion and the religious mindset in it's more fundamentalist forms. He splits his topic into sections on various religions. Few religions escape his discourse he ranges from the rise of Mormonism in America, the Abrahamic faiths and then to their counterparts in the far-East. He analyses and compares various religious leaders to historical dictators and the political movements religion has aped or worked with. He also analyses the more ludicrous aspects of commonality between religions. From the cuisine based religious observance of kosher or halal food. For example the hatred of the pig to the tendency to loan certain elements of religion from those that came before, that is the date of christmas.

Well rationaled and surprisingly calm and even-tempered; the depths of Hitchen's forethought and clinical thinking are interesting and engaging. What is very surprising is his attempts at balance. Although definitely biased it is a concise appropriate bias that still finds time to praise some religious leaders and thinkers for their actions. Be it helping in the fight against tyranny in some corners of the globe (sic) or patronising the arts and the sciences throughout history. This is not rabid ranting of the mouth frothing kind.

The question I should ask myself though, is did I enjoy or find this interesting due to my own personal beliefs? The reality is probably. I did find this comforting during some personal grief over the death of a god-fearing relative. In this case the tendency of the words and rituals of Catholicism to veer from comical to dictatorial left me hollow. By this I mean the commanding, threatening, begging, servitudinal, you are born sinful, aspect of religion and the hilarious dogmatic clinging of to multiple translated, conflicting scratchings of barely literate people who claim some magical mystical source, in the hope that they will entrench their words in the minds of the people as if they are some hallowed constitution.

Would a religious person get much benefit from this book? Maybe, maybe not. It depends on the strength or type of your faith. I have always felt that the more group think nature of your spirituality the stronger the dogmatic or fundamentalist nature of your reaction. If your faith is personal and well thought out, the fundamental contradictions of religion should be of no insulting nature to you. If you are rational about your religion you should already have balanced or be in the eternal act of balancing your dilemmas. From the daftness of Catholicism holding it as a distinction from Protestantism that the wafer and wine in the Communion are literally rather than figuratively transformed into the body of Christ. To the demented nature of the infighting between the major proportion of the world that makes up the Abrahamic faiths squabbling over piss poor lands, shared origins and fairytales passed down through the ages. Replace squabbling desert gods with America and superheroes and you almost have the alternate timelines and universes of comics. Now if only someone would publish a funnies strip about a desert carpenter who was a good chef that would be awesome.

What a Catch: Book I

2012-02-11T06:54:00.000-08:00

Catch 22 by Joseph Heller

Catch 22 is a satirical World War II novel set on the island of Pianosa. It follows American soldier John Yossarian and his colleagues through the perils and bureaucratic bullshit of the war machine. Told through the use of non-linear vignettes; Heller switches between descriptions of the characters and tales of the events. Using this to illuminate various recurring mantras and punchlines to jokes or anecdotes that are heard much earlier. So often the earlier question of what does that refer to becomes a question of will be used for a death, a joke or both.

At early points in the novel Heller repeatedly references the "dead man in the tent;" one of Yossarian's absent tent mates. At first it appears that this is Yossarian pulling the leg of his superior officers especially when you realise there is no man. This is mostly played for comic effect or at least as a chapter and argument closing retort to his supervisors when he is annoyed at them. Gradually the dead man is revealed to be a pilot that arrived for duty died on a mission without being officially assigned to anywhere or place in particular. Heller expertly weaves this thread through the novel as an exasperated punchline, full-stop or pronouncement. "But what are you going to do about the dead man in my tent?" Only for the death to come at the end of a tense, failed mission. "And that is how the man in my tent died." A satisfying and quite brutal reveal or turnaround.

This penchant for phrases, words and non-sequiturs is to repeat non-chronologically is reminiscent (depending on who published first) of Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughter House 5. Another excellent World War II novel utilising non-linear plot that uses repetition and common phrasing to reinforce the crushing nature of events and character's resignation to their lot. "And so it goes." But Heller uses a much larger cast of characters and achieves complex layers and levels to this as compared to the more emotionally direct, immediate and impactful work of Vonnegut. Be it Major Major, a character promoted because of his name, purposely setting up his visiting hours and regulations so that no-one can visit him. This leads to characters continually wondering where he has been for the latter half of the novel. Or Aarfy, Yossarian's useless navigator who is so prim and proper he stands upright while the plane is being bombarded by Flak. Whose adherence to morals and upholding his views on treating women correctly leads him to rape and murder a prostitute, "old Aarfy doesn't pay for it." Whether this shows that war can make panicked murderers out of even the most straight edge of us or that a dogged dogmatic adherence to society's values is the wrong way to go I am not sure but it is the event that sends our protagonist Yossarian over the edge emotionally.

Overall Heller delivers a deftly worded, beautifully crafted novel. The large cast is distinctly rendered when it needs to be and although bewildering at the beginning this appears to be so that chapters can be spent explaining the character's roles. Heller finds time for excoriating deconstructions of multiple elements of society and the war machine. There are whole chapters devoted to the mess officer Milo, whose whole existence is devoted to the "syndicate," that is the economy. He flys around conducting no combat missions trying to get rid of the whole stock of Egypt's cotton industry. He climbs high enough to have his own fleet of planes which he then uses to sub-contract both sides of skirmishes and bomb his own side. In this way Heller takes apart all the different aspects of the war be it from the uselessness of having religious representation in the squadron to the health industry and the Doctor's fears. Brave and with mind boggling ambition to it's scope I would well recommend Catch-22.

Cannonball Read IV

2012-01-05T14:30:00.000-08:00

Hello and welcome to Cannonball Read IV. This is my yearly attempt to read and review 52 books in memory of Alabama Pink. Of course as irregular readers of my blog will know this will more than likely be a failure and I will more than likely uselessly segue this opening post into talking about myself.

So what will the next year bring? I will more than likely read over 52 books but most of them will be airport fodder. The few books I read of note will take me over half the year and it is only in the last ten percent of the book that I will finally start to enjoy it but then will immensely. My review count will remain low though because as per usual reading is something I do to procrastinate getting a real life and reviewing is something beneficial to myself, so of course I won't do it. I will not sort out my life; I will avoid getting a real life and still be living at my parents with no future. This glacier cut rut will continue to provide me with beer money and little else and I will be halfway through my fourth or fifth year of achieving little to nothing and going nowhere. And of course it goes without saying I will over analyse everything including my ever expanding lack of a love life. And of course I will have wasted far too much time watching crap films and doing bugger all. Before realising that I almost described my love life in terms of a Matthew McConaughey film. Maybe in the next year my pop culture referencing will hit an even lower low.

So to all not paying attention see you in 2013. Hope I don't make it.

Blowing in the Wind: Book VI

2011-12-09T09:11:00.001-08:00

The Road by Cormac McCarthy

The Road by Cormac McCarthy is a post-appocalyptic novel about a father and a son crossing the wasteland of North America in an attempt to reach the Ocean. Pushing a shopping trolley through the endless grey; they travel starving and ill through the unhappy world of this Pulitzer Prize winning novel. The reason for the appocalypse is never mentioned nor does it need to be.

The novel is first and foremost about the relationship between the never named father and son. The boy regularly tries to split people into good and bad and always asks whether or not they carry the "fire". The boy knows that the world he lives in is broken and horrible; a world that his mother has committed suicide in. He still has hope though, that the ocean holds some release from the world he lives in. At the very least, of a future.

The father on the other hand, knows and suspects that he is dying from infection and starvation. He knows he must go onwards for his child even if it means dying. To stop travelling or moving is to die; to run out of food and get overrun by the outlaws, bandits and cannibals that roam this world. There is one let up in this unrelenting bleakness that gives the audience a respite. This is when they find a nuclear bunker with food and shelter in it. All of a sudden the world seems brighter and the characters health improves. It is established early on to the audience that this is temporary the safety and food will not last more than a few days. Meaning that it is a bittersweet respite that gets more tragic as it goes onward.

One of my favourite techniques that McCarthy uses to construct the desolation of society in our minds is his purposeful use of punctuation and grammar. He makes the decision to keep sentences and imagery as short as possible keeping it very sparse. Lines are short and punctuation is limited. This gives the effect that as humanity has failed so have our social constructs.

This all builds towards a fateful ending but it is the world and paternal relationship that McCarthy creates that make this such a powerful novel. Not an easy read but a great all the same; worthwhile but difficult for it's subject matter rather than it's size or complexity.

But If That Mockingbird Don't Sing: Book V

2011-11-30T08:21:00.001-08:00

To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee

I purchased this novel while taking my younger sister to the Electric Cinema in Notting Hill for a BBC TV showing. It was pre-Christmas and this was purely a whim purchase. All I knew about this novel was it concerned a principled Southern lawyer named Atticus Finch (portrayed by Gregory Peck in the film) defending a black man from a rape charge. So many times have I seen Atticus Finch referenced in pop-culture that I have no idea if the stereotype of the principled compassionate Southern lawyer came from this novel. As the other side of the coin is the lawyer space rooster from Futurama then I think it maybe the genesis of this idea.

Happily though the novel was far away and away from being this limited or tightly focused. It was a stunning vignette based look into an old Southern American town and it's economic and social issues. Told through the eyes of Atticus' tom-boy daughter Scout, this is a deeply moving and affecting account of their town and the people in it. It covers everything from the story of the kids, Jem and Scout Finch reading stories to an old racist lady to help her beat her addiction to morphine before she dies. To the night when Atticus guards his client, Tom Robinson, in the county jail as locals come to lynch him. It is only the advent of Atticus' children sneaking out of his house and running up to their father that shame the mob into relenting.

The novel paints a believable and layered depiction of this town with depth and vigour. All through the eyes of a precocious young girl. This is Harper Lee's only novel and it arrives as a fully formed slice of life. I particularly enjoyed the depictions of school life. For example, how some children turned up to school for a day then went to work their parents fields. An example of playing the system that existed in Simon & Burns' Life on the Corner but with the American fields being changed to the corner and the drug trade. The obsession with the minutiae of childhood are rendered immaculately. Even though I have never lived in the deep south of America in the nineteen thirties there is still a sense of connection to the childhood Lee created. It sparked memories of a world of being scared of certain dark footpaths because someone had got in a fight there or where obsessions with nooks and hidey-holes are a daily occurence.

After reading this the novel did the rounds of my family all who had not read it before and all were surprised and moved by the depictions. It was a far less courtroom lead piece than many had suspected and it had a greater range and impact for that. This is not a classic that is too inaccessible or long it i the type of novel that superlatives were made for.

This Morning Without Richard Or Judy: Book IV

2011-11-30T07:11:00.000-08:00

Stewart Lee: How I Escaped My Certain Fate, The Life and Deaths of a Stand-Up Comedian.

There is a perverse voyeurism about experiencing places you know from real life on TV or in literature. It is for this reason that Stewart Lee's memoir slash analysis of his stand-up career had a certain place in my heart. Mr Lee bookends this exploration of the highs and lows of his career with anecdotes of a distinctly Brummie nature. He begins with his inspiration watching Ted Chippington support The Fall and ends on a confirmation of a TV series in an infamously dingy Birmingham greasy spoon in the same area. This greasy spoon is used pretty commonly by stand-up comedians visiting Birmingham as a method of establishing a connection with the audience. Knowing this I am not sure whether Mr Lee's use of this greasy spoon is a narrative falsehood; a nostalgic reference or a commentary on the ubiquity of this crowd technique. But whether or not it is poetic licence is irrelevant because it is the stories he tells you of his travails in stand-up that endear you to the man and make me come to the conclusion that is a nostalgic tool to end his account.

Mr Lee structures the book around pieces detailing certain important points in his career and then annotated texts of his three most successful stand-up shows with footnotes elaborating on points, thoughts and ideas. In fact the book is a plethora of lengthy footnotes. This is not a book for those with difficulty following asides. tangents and multi-page footnotes. These notes range from the provenance of a joke; to in depth discussions on comedians; memories of childhood; the touring of the show; to notes about pros and cons to this specific point in the set. There is a definite overflow of information here but in a good way. For example one of the appendices is even a review of Johnny Vegas' stage shows and the monumental breakdowns he nightly has on stage. This left me with a mental image of Johnny as some type of Hamlet of the comedy world arguing with the ghost of his father, the advertising monkey, on stage.

The book would not be worth these insightful asides if it wasn't funny. To use an over used cliche, it is riotously funny. (Funny like a riot?) If you have no idea of Mr Lee's material it includes deft plotting with repetition and then deliberate attempts to lose the crowd and disengage just to then try to regain their trust. Clinical and intellectual to a rational point his voice translates very well to the written word. Although as remarked upon by Tesco, comedy, big wig Andrew Pearsall his stand-up scripts are surprisingly short on the page. They are tightly written and plotted though with points to jump off from depending upon the crowd. For example Mr Lee points out that if a crowd was with him at a certain point he would take joy in dividing and conquering them into smaller groups. Complimenting one group on their speed in understanding the joke and heckling the others along to the point. It is an art-form of heady belligerance and stage craft all in an attempt to avoid the spoon feeding which he holds some comedians in contempt for.

Lee uses his career to put together a retrospective on the British comedy scene over the past twenty years. From alternative comedy as a response to the Thatcher years; to the twisting of morality in an ever fractured society. Mr Lee concerns himself with the mainstreaming of the comedy scene in the mid to early nineties; his own dissatisfaction with that scene and his subsequent success as a blasphemer of some disrepute with the stage show, Jerry Springer: The Opera.

Informative engaging and intelligent. This book is a must read for anyone with a passing interest in comedy. Whether a fan or someone who finds his material difficult and alienating his dissections of his act are so interesting I would recommend this to many.

Cannonball Read III: Trilogy Triple Start

2011-10-19T10:56:00.000-07:00

Stieg Larsson's Millenium Trilogy

Originally when thinking of doing these three reviews I assumed the first book in the trilogy had been reviewed by myself in my aborted first attempt at a Cannonball Read. But alas it appears that the remnants of "A Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" review that are floating round my mind are just another of my empty thoughts drifting around my brain pan. So it seems, from my memory, that I read the first of these novels while in a call centre off the back of a recommendation by one of the girls there. I read the second during a trip to Hamburg as an exhibition labourer in Spring 2011 and I read the third this Autumn while buying the book as a birthday present for my sister.

In summary, all three books were highly enjoyable experiences. These are tightly written detective, thriller and espionage novels. They are notable in that although they fill the cheap seats of the literary world, that is airport book shops,, they are quite characteristically not Dan Brown-esque, Goosebumps chapter length time wasters. They have an inbuilt complexity and elaborateness that raises them above material that just fills the time gap between the seat belt signs pinging on and off during a trans ocean flight.

I have noted before that translation is especially difficult to do. Even the Massimo Manfredi, Alexander series suffers from a slight distancing effect due to the dryness of the translation. This trilogy has none of those problems be it because of Reg Keelan's work as a translator or Larsson's work as an author the prose flows very well in English. Characters use idioms in both Swedish and English that suggest the author or translator has a very good facility with these and they add to the rich tapestry of this world. Of course my obsession with idioms stems from the recent Archer episode where on a Pacific island Archer failed to understand David Cross' point that they are difficult if impossible to translate.

So now onto the books themselves. The titular Girl is Lisbeth Salander a computer hacker who gets dragged into the events of the novel by journalist and Larsson analogue Mikael Blomkvist. In the first novel Blomkvit is released from prison after serving time for a misreported article and the following libel case. He is contracted to investigate the disappearance of a Swedish tycoon's granddaughter from the family's island compound many years previously. To accomplish this he employs Lisbeth an introverted and reclusive product of the care system. During the novel the two grow closer to each other and the truth and in a sub-plot she enacts revenge on her abusive state-appointed Guardian.

The use of Blomkvist and Salander as characters and narrators is a method Larsson used to split and deepen the usual function of a detective. He uses a detective model for the narration with it's in built ability to slowly reveal details but he also wants to cast light on the underbelly of Swedish and Western society. A single protagonist would need to be as superhuman as Salander but as much of a novice as Blomkvist. Blomkvist can be the bemused tenacious one; Salander can be the young girl with extraordinary mental and physical abilities but damaged in her dealings with society.

During the second novel Salander is finally acting autonomously (but illegally) from the state. She stole money in the last novel and is travelling the world barely communicating with Blomkvist until two of his freelance reporters are killed. Salander is fingered for it in the papers along with her unconventional lifestyle. They communicate and snoop on each other via internet drop boxes; they investigate the murders only to stumble upon Salander's family history. Specifically her Soviet deserter father who she tried to burn alive after he beat her mother to within an inch of her life. It was for this that she was institutionalised. This father then shoots Salander and buries her alive only for her to escape and try and kill him, leading to the events of the third novel.

Hornets' Nest concerns Blomkvist's attempts to clear Salander's name and uncover the truth behind the espionage conspiracy that had her sectioned and institutionalised. It is her that you can notice that the third book is a stylistic departure but that actually the second novel is as well. Or at least that is my theory about why the second novel is so often thought of as inferior(much like the second season of the wire it establishes the pattern and is disparaged for this). I think this notion is also down to the separation of the two leads and the expositionary nature of the second book. I subscribe to my idea that the first novel is a detective mystery; the second a thriller based around a murder and the third a legal or espionage piece cloaked in a thriller's clothing. That Larsson manages to weave some heavy themes through here while crafting a thoroughly engaging international best seller is nothing short of exemplary.

Indeed, it is the thematic subtexts which raise the level of this series and involve the audience so much. Larsson manages to weave ideas about the things society hides be it our treatment of the mentally ill; those with unconventional lifestyles to how atrocities can be hidden by communities for years. Everything from the changes in print media and how they effect investigative journalism to the West's culpability in the events post the collapse of the Soviet Union. All while making engaging characters fallible and human. These novels are so rich and uncompromising that it is a real tragedy that the world Larsson created will not be used again other interpretations in Swedish and American cinema. Such a shame that his success in fiction only occurred post-humously.

Cannonball Read III

2011-10-19T10:52:00.000-07:00

As is obvious from the frequency of my updates I failed the last cannonball read. This year I signed up again and am currently ten months behind in this years read. Obviously I have a problem. Not that I can't read with any speed or that I can't review, although my reviews are very poor. It's that I can't take any action which might be beneficial to myself be it in work or play. Which is how I found myself the other day avoiding doing anything worthwhile by starting to review again. So welcome back to the delusional simple ramblings of a neurotic fuck up of epically inconsequential proportions.

When Harry Met Sally With a Pinch of Cynicism

2010-04-19T14:34:00.001-07:00

David Nichols, One Day is a British novel concerning a young couple who get together on the night of their graduation in 1988. The novel covers their lives over the next twenty or so St Swithins Days. It is essentially When Harry Met Sally between a posh lad and a young working class girl. This is a decidedly British version of that story though. Gone are the protagonists who find love lives and working lives relatively easy. This is a distinctly British and cynical look at how to grow up and find love.

Compared to when Harry Met Sally the book is far more down to earth. Even with a main character that is a coked up television presenter that is used as a reflection of his personal arrogance and problems rather than to portray him as an urbanised yuppie. These characters have failed relationships, failures in their jobs and not a clue what they want to do with their lives; much like myself. I'll admit that that maybe why I found the book endearing. There is plenty of wit and humour to the proceedings as well.

The cynicism is my favourite part. The voices of 20 year olds are captured very well. There is an almost Hornby-esque accuracy to the way these people are captured. To their ability to make blanket statements on politics, love, class and their future. I particularly liked the depiction of friendships and relationships over the years, with their ebb and flow or wax and wane. Unfortunately as well as with all stories centred around love I am probably far too cynical to fully benefit from the story. I bought the relationship primarily because it was given time but I am ultimately unsure why the characters would not have given up by that point in time. They tend to have shitty lives but for reasons I cannot fathom they continue on they persevere. This seems unrealistic to me. I know people do it every day but I cannot figure out what it is they're striving for.

Stories such as this tend to have two possible endings there is the speech to a loved one that lifts the audience, makes it wonder and shout at the infinite possibilities of life and then there is the Whedon-esque Cold Feet ending like a punch to the stomach, leaving you a mess wanting to curl up on the floor. I won't spoil it and tell you which it is but I can say that whichever, the journey is worth reading.

N-n-n-n-nineteen

2010-04-19T13:48:00.000-07:00

Robert Mason's Chickenhawk is an account of Mason's time as a "slick" helicopter pilot in the Vietnam war. A "slick" is a helicopter with nothing in the back and no weapons but gunners on the doors. It is used for transporting troops and equipment in and out of areas. The book covers Mason's time training, his two posts in Vietnam and his time after the army as an instructor.

The book begins by giving accounts of why the author wanted to be a helicoter pilot and going into considerable detail on how helicopters fly and the things people do to train on them. For such an amount of detail this bit is very interestingly written. It is fairly simple to understand, though not perfectly so. And the progression is adequately written. Once this is established the author deals with his slow desecent into how the war was being fought. This includes detailing the travel to Vietnam and the setup of their camp. Missions are interspersed with anecdotes about the brutality and stupidity of the war. From how it was being fought; specifically on what they were using helicopters for. To the constant reminder that they had not been given chest protectors, forever being told that they were unavailable only for Mason to find multiple available for a different platoon when he gets transferred. There is an abudance of humour. From tragic black comedy to sincerely funny parts. I particularly liked the description of the two pilots giggling hysterically from exhaustion in the middle of a war zone.

From the middle of the book the writing is on the wall for Mason as he begins to show signs of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and starts blacking out. Mostly when not at the controls of the helicopter, luckily. Ultimately this was a very interesting look at the way the Vietnam war was fought without being political. At the same time I am not sure if it would have been better with a more overtly political aspect. I am also mindful that most people may find the ammount of information and detail on flight pattterns and the workings of helicopters to be boring or too much but I did not.

The Day the Music Died

2010-04-19T13:19:00.000-07:00

Post appocalyptic fiction has a place in all media forms. From films, to games, to TV shows the aftermath of the world falling apart is big businnes. So much so that I found after reading this book there is even an award for Alternate Histories that this book, Resurection Day by Brendan DuBois won in 1999. These stories can easily become cliched and obvious so the question with resurection day is whether it brought anything new to the genre or whether it simply excelled at doing what the genre does.

Resurection Day is set in a word where the Cuban Missile Crisis became a "hot" war and then large portions of the population of the world died in the ensuing nuclear war. Specifically the USSR was devestated and the US became a third world state. California became a war zone in the ensuing chaos and Manhattan was more or less abandoned.

The plot concerns generic newspaper man Carl Landry and his attempts to get to the bottom of what really happened on that day and who pushed the button. At the beginning Landry is a sketchily written protagonist, pseudo-alcoholic (there is not enough alcohol in America to be a real alcoholic), trench coats and a shady special forces background like all rote protagonists. But by then end he has been quite interestingly fleshed out. The army background serves to reinforce his outsider status with his colleagues and there are frequent flashbacks to his time in Vietnam and California. The California sequences being reminiscent of a very amped up, larger scale Hurricane Katrina.

The rest of the plot zips along in a roundabout fashion ending in a bomb site Manhattan. I was surprised when I realised that the book was written pre-9/11. The talk of a an empty Manhattan, military controlled in the day and a hive of activity for the left over population at night is interesting and thought provoking. The depiction of a shattered starving police state, in the form of Boston and Landry's newspaper is fantastically drawn and the results of a nuclear war have been well thought out. Over all this is a thoroughly well written example of the post appocalyptic genre. It does not add much but it is thrillingly written, well thought out and gripping at points. The study of a populace under the thumb of the military was quite chilling. Ultimately well worth reading.

If Only I Was McAvoy

2010-04-19T11:59:00.000-07:00

I bought this for one of my sisters or my Mum for an approaching holiday and had meant to read it since seeing the film. The film although flawed, had a gift for showing moments of time in an interesting way. Then there is that awesome scene on Dunkerque beach which although showy really really moves me. So I already knew the story to an extent and it was unlikely that I was going to be shocked by a twist that I already knew was there in an adaptation of the source material. The test of the book was whether I would find the characters love engaging in a way that I so rarely do with novels.

The story is succintly plotted and successfully weaves themes through out it's time periods. I do not personally believe in the portrayal of pre-war time period as being particularly accurate. Not that I know anything about posh country houses of the period but it does feel partially ingenuine to me. At the same time it does not have to be genuine just to draw the world it portrays and that it does. The history of the posh English house is well drawn and that theme is used to echo through the detailed location descriptions. This attempt to portray the history and detail of locations seemed to be an attempt by McEwan to portray Briony's guilt. By going in to such detail she attempts to remember and record the past as a way to make up for her accidentally destroying the future of the novel's central couple.

The central idea of the novel is Briony's attempt to attone for accidentally ruining the life of her sister and her lover with some childish fear and an overactive imagination. She attempts this by making their love last in fiction. Briony herself acknowledges that this was an inadequate atonement and so the novel is not actually a question of whether the atonement is successful but on the nature of love. Can this emotion or relationship between two people really be worth spending your life atoning for? I am still undecided on how successful the depiction of their love is. I found both of the characters interesting. I found their inability to come out and say how they felt and do what it was obvious they should (especially with the benefit of knowing the plot) moving. Their eventual deaths were moving but at the same time I am unconvinced that their unfulfilled relationship was worth this on Briony's part. Yes she made a mistake but there were other things that got in the way, the flawed legal system, the nature of war and humanity, a child should not blame herself like this to this extent. Ultimately I do not think that any love is worth this amount of tragedy so the central conceit of the novel falls flat for me.

That is not to say I did not enjoy it lots, I did. I found the portrayal of Dunkerque moving especially the idea of the soldiers throwing off their coats. My own great granddad, a native of Dover, went on and on about the coat he had stolen and was going to give to my Great Nan but had had to leave behind. So the image was epecially impactful. It was definitely worth a read but the skill of the novel could not subtract from my own misanthropic nature and cynicism.

A Whiff of Grapeshot Review

2010-04-19T11:46:00.000-07:00

This is my review of John Steinbeck's of Mice and Men. It is not long enough as a book to qualify for the cannonball read but I will do a review anyway.

I picked this up in the library as I had not read it before and remember other people reading it for their GCSE courses at school. So I wanted to see what it was about. Overall it was interesting and made good use of the novella length. I can see how it was so successful as a stage play, especially with the small cast and two central characters being so powerful.

I had a problem (not one that cannot be overcome though) with the cliched nature of the book but I think that is because it has so permeated pop culture. I am pretty sure I have been seeing references to this book in everything from the anamaniacs to the Simpsons. This lead to me guessing the end; or I may have heard it before and forgotten about the ending. Still the relationships between the characters were deftly done and richly drawn causing me to sympathise and empathise effectively with them.

Im glad I took the train ride to read it. At least it is another classic ticked off of that list everyone keeps in their head (unless your name is Art Garfunkel, who keeps his list online.)

Beware the Ides of March

2010-04-16T05:16:00.000-07:00

I first began reading Conn Iggulden's Emperor series when the first book came out. I loved it and it lead to me devouring historical fiction novels as fast as I could. Unfortunately somewhere along in the unfolding of the series I neglected to read the fourth and final installment. I looked for it every time I went to library, I even read all of Iggulden's next series on Genghis Khan in the time it took me to find this book. Not that I was trying particularly hard it was more a case of me being too lazy to go out and find it. My searching for was basically me going to the I's first when I entered the library.

This was it though, this was the big one. Gone was the preparation and the groundwork for Caesar and Brutus's friendship. Finally Caesar has vanquished his enemies and in the process Brutus has betrayed him and then crossed back to his side. The majority of the plot is Caesar fighting his biggest enemy in Greece then heading to Egypt helping Cleopatra and going all Richard Burton on that Elizabeth Taylor. (Not a Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? situation, luckily.) It is eloquently written with a good split of various viewpoints. And then, always with the shadow of Caesar's ambition on the horizon threatening to tear everything apart.

The biggest problem I had though was that the final descent in to dictator and megalomania took too long. It was not until the final few chapters, the final sixth or so of the book, that the political shenanigans started. But then it was breasily and brilliantly written and even after probably eight years reading the series sporadically I was fairly moved by the ending. The image of Caesar exclaiming and you Brutus, sitting on the floor and pulling his toga over his head as the knives rain down was fantastic.

Eight years to read it, but it was worth it.

Scrambled Eggs and Bacon

2010-04-16T04:37:00.000-07:00

My second dip into the Ian Fleming version of Bond is the Collection of two short story collections released as a single package for the release of Quantum of Solace. This was for some reason named after the film but of course that reason isn't to sell more copies of this collection around the time of the film.

It is though a very good and very varied collection of short stories. They range from the tense and well plotted accounts of the cold war to a review of Ney York containing Mr Bond's recipe for scrambled eggs. I particularly liked the Living Daylights which was a tense account of Bond having to protect, at long range, a man crossing, the then barbed wire checkpoint charlie from another sniper. He spends his tense days daydreaming of a blonde Cellist who he sees going into an opposite building only to finally realise that she is the sniper he is supposed to shoot. In other tales Bond is just an ancillary character listening at parties to politicians who regale him with tales of Jamaica.

The collection as a whole seems to document well what Fleming could do so well with Bond. He had a facility for managing to be exciting while still being economical with his writing and his plotting. It also documents how Fleming was become tired of the character. Some of the stories barely use him and when they do it is as a pastiche of the film Bond. Quantum of Solace (the short story) for example has him doing an assignment by chucking a grenade in a boat when the boat was empty, a much less blood thirsty solution than his superiors wanted.

All in all though the collections were an interesting look at the character and a perfect book to dip in and out of on the bus.

Cheeseburger Royale

2010-03-23T15:39:00.000-07:00

Casino Royale

My next two books were my attempt to read my first Ian Flemming James Bond novels. For years I have read the film adaptions of the films that were never based on novels. For example Raymond Benson's adaptatin of The World is Not Enough on a fantastic, dawn of the millenium, observation carriage train journey from Indianapolis to Chicago. But I had never tucked in to Fleming's work. For my first I chose his very first novel, otherwise known as Casino Royale. I had heard that the literary James Bond was less the bombastic action hero of the films but instead a much more downplayed English gent with a hard streak and intelligence. This definitely holds true and Bond's actions are barely that of the film Bond before Daniel Craig.

Although seemingly having a knack for womanising this Bond is a post-war product who reacts indignantly when he realises he is to work with a woman. Taking away all the times I laughed at outdated mentalities though, this was a very different Bond, less showy (unless on the poker table) and more interested in keeping his nose out of trouble if he can. But if he cannot he is still willing to go all out to get his man and to accomplish the mission. This Bond lends itself to the writing style of the novel which is economical and exactly the opposite of the bombastic nature I was expecting. This impacts perfectly on the poker scenes. Meaning that they are very easy and simplistic to follow allowing the Fleming to rachet up the tension and the stakes throughout.

The novel bears up well in comparison to the recent film version. Up until the end the film adds and changes things in an organic way be it the chase through the bodies exhibition in Miami to showing Bond being smart and athletic in his chase of the terrorists in Miami and Africa. This worked much better to me than the book which contains mostly passages about French seaside towns (these bogged the book down in that I worried so much about where in France the book was set and what the purpose of the town explanations where that it became stagnant) and failed bombings by terrorists from the Balkans. Where it failed and where the book excels is the ending. In the film, Bond realises Vesper Lynd's betrayal and follows her and enemy agents through a sinking Venice house. Vesper gets trapped in a lift and dies while Bond tries to save the traitor. In the book Vesper commits suicide from the guilt of her betrayal. This turns Bond from the fairly involved (romantically) man of this mission in to the cold-hearted bastard he has to be. The films version means that Bonds change into the man that intones "the bitch is dead" makes less sense. In the film Vesper is given too many outs. The book makes it clear that whatever the status of her lover Bond cannot forgive her.

Overall though the book was a fun romp and a quite fascinating insight into the origins of a classic character. I enjoyed it so much I immediately went out and snapped a set of James Bond short stories.

Hello, Goodbye

2010-03-23T15:08:00.000-07:00

"He was a guy who talked with
commas, like a heavy novel"

I began reading my first Raymond Chandler novel during the gloriously depressing doldrums of unemployment. This was called the Long Goodbye featuring Chandler's popular character Phillip Marlowe a detective living and working cases 1950s Los Angeles. Drink, smoke and dappled lighting pepper the novel like the sterotypical detective images I had in my head while playing make believe as a child. The idea of there being a rote nature to the detective genre definitely fits this novel. But what it really excels at is being a damn fine example. The novel surpasses the point that is easy to reach with poor examples of genre writing, whereby the hallmarks just feel like crutches the writer uses to aid their bad writing. There was none of that here the hallmarks make sense in all the correct ways.

Late one night I began reading and with nothing to do the next morning I kept reading. This was a thrilling and thoroughly enjoyable experience. This was not, like many of my favourite reading experiences of all time, down to location and setting. Often while reading a book will be memorable because of the ammount of sun shine, the snow, the place I am travelling or the mood I am in. This was not like that. The book wrapped me up in it with its easy fluid style. That allowed me to sit back and just wallow in the joy of the world created in the book.

Alcohol is like love, he said. The first
kiss is magic, the second intimate, the
third is routine. After that you take the
girl's clothes off.

The plot concerns the usual awesome touchstones of classic detective fiction. A fairly tough guy with a bit of a brain but dumb enough to make mistakes and be an unreliable narrator investigates the death of a bloke who once bought him a drink. Women occasionally get in the way though not the woman you originally suspected. Rinse and repeat with a few twists thrown in.

This simplifies how much fun and how successful this book was at the giving me exactly what I needed and wanted. A cursory look at the wiki for the book shows that there was a bit of a mixed reaction to the book. But all I know is that I would definitely read another.

Vive la revolution!

2010-01-25T06:25:00.000-08:00

The book I have read for this review is Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls. Which I enjoyed tremendously but first of all I would like to start off with my big gripe.

This is all my own fault but upon picking the book off the shelf, reading the blurb and things I had heard about the book I got the idea that the book was a grand sweeping novel about the Spanish revolution. Rather than what it is a rather intimate piece. The way the novel started gave me the idea (wrongly I must add) that the bridge blowing that was the centrepiece of the novel was just the scene setter and that we would get to the aftermath very quickly. This meant that I spent at least the first third or half of the novel wondering when it was going to start. ( I had the same problem but far worse with the Kurt Vonnegut novel Galapagos where the blurb bore absolutely no relation to the novel). Ultimately for the first portion of the reading experience my expectation did not match reality and so it was a tough read. I was expecting action (which does not happen till the second half) not meditations on the smell of death.

The plot follows Robert Jordan, an American dynamite expert fighting for the Republic. He is sent behind enemy lines to meet a guerrilla band and blow up a bridge. The book is full of intimate tense dialogue between characters over whether or not there is a point of attempting the mission they have been given with the equipment and people they have. This is pretty claustrophobic guerrilla warfare even if it is set in gloriously rendered mountains, chasms and high sierras. At the same time there are lots of sequences of meditation and thought from major characters and even sometimes some minor characters, like the opposition. This is not a book concerned with jingoistic patriotic warfare more the tragedies and ineptitude that get the little people in the wrong place and time killed.

Then to my biggest and only actual gripe (compared to my woefully inadequate expectations of what the novel was). I am frustrated with the use of love in the narrative (a common theme in my reviews I know). Robert Jordan is struck dumb by a woman (an exceedingly young woman) of the guerrilla band he stays with. This and the impending suicide mission that is his mission somehow cause him to wax lyrical on the nature of love. Somehow he decides that the love of this inexperienced shell shocked girl is worth more than all the rest (even though at points he admits he is not sure why). I am not against people getting there end away in difficult circumstances but acting like they are star cross'd lovers and calling each other rabbit felt ingenuine (sic) for an otherwise rational novel.

Pardon the wrong language for the page title as the book is about Spain rather than France but it makes sense in the way I view this book. I don't know whether it is me or just a sign of the times that they were produced but I see large thematic connections between this my previously reviewed novel, Sartre's The Age of Reason. Both novels feature university lecturers in the years before world war II. One wants to be in Spain fighting the good fight and one is. Both are in their late twenties/early thirties and enamored of young women. These are not just superficial coincidences they are both products of the same side of the coin. Both are meditations on the nature of life and growing up in the 1930s male. There are whole sections of this novel that mirror the Age of Reason but set in Madrid and around the movers and shakers in the Republican movement.

I have found some criticism (specifically on the idiots cliff notes, wikipedia) of Hemingway's way of translating Spanish dialogue. He uses much literal translation and the archaic thou and thee. Personally I really liked it, it reminded me of the way many continental languages; German, French and Spanish; have far more terms than English for a person. Be it based on their gender or their status. Similarly so the repetition of some Spanish phrases in English reminded me of the distancing effect that not speaking in one's mother tongue can have.

Overall the first half of the novel was slow, tense and contemplative but second half was an action packed pay off that built to a solemn and even moving conclusion. That made me glad that the novel was not the way I had falsely guessed it would be.

Spirituality and War via George Clooney's Stinkeye

2010-01-04T08:54:00.000-08:00

Released this Autumn with George Clooney, Ewan Mcgregor and Hollywood's two favourite bad guys, Jeff Bridges and Kevin Spacey is the film The Men Who Stare at Goats. Released five years earlier is the book on which it is loosely based. By loosely based I mean a book about a journalist's research has now got a plot.

The book by Jon Ronson follows Ronson's research into spiritualism and the American forces. It covers the rise of new age theories on the West Coast of the US and then how various people in the military may have tried to bring these into effect. Then it follows them through to today's wars and how these may have been distorted. Some of this was stuff I had heard of like remote viewing and others I had not. The book as a whole gets wooly towards the end and ends up being full of interviews with people in the know who wouldn't tell Jon anything then all of a sudden did. As with most conspiracy theories there are great leaps of faith. X person and Y person just wouldn't talk about this so my idea had to be the logical idea. But I did like it the prose was not great but I enjoyed the look into the insanity of the military types and the bit about popular music being played to Mancunian Muslim. In my head he was asking for Stone Roses, the Happy Mondays and Oasis. While at the same time his story sounded like tosh. Why someone would be in Pakistan then because war broke out in a neighbouring country pay someone to drive you through that war torn country and another few so that you could get home. Although at the same time the American's that pulled him over and put him in Guantanamo seem to think that makes him a terrorist not worthy of trial rather than just what he probably was a Man Utd fan trying to go from Pakistan to Turkey to watch a match in Istanbul.

It was an alright perfunctory diversion during a car journey but it doesn't hold together particularly well as a book and I am surprised it got made into a film. At the same time though there are always films being made where the antagonists are the Nazi's or Soviet's occult sections so why not one about America's inept occult sections. The book on a whole consisted of too much hearsay rather than proof or at least adequate references to be anything but a Hello Magazine guide to conspiracy theories.

Studying French in France Using English aka Pre-War French Hollyoaks

2010-01-04T08:21:00.000-08:00

For a recent trip to France I decided I needed something suitably French to read. Unfortunately I don't read French to the level of literature just to Bar-level. I have yet to find a French menu long enough to qualify for Cannonball Read so I needed something translated. I had never read Jean-Paul Sartre so I decided to attempt the Age of Reason. This was a bloody frustrating book.

The translation seems to be fairly adept at taking French phrases and making them work in English and I definitely really enjoyed the inner monologues of many of the characters but they weren't particularly distinguishable from each other. There were whole pages and chapters of intriguing monologue with bugger all happening apart from mostly boring characters being navel gazing. Maybe I would like Sartre's essays more because while there was a lot of good to be taken from the way he writes there is still the throughly odious characters to get past. It appears to be full of the same type of characters as on your average soap. Fairly average drunks with not much going on but moaning about how bad everything is for them while internally having epic monologues on the nature of freedom, marriage, love and the class struggle. Characters stab themselves, rhuminate on suicide, go to art galleries, attempt to drown cats and still have time to sit pernod and mumble about what a bore they are.

The hero, philosophy lecturer, Matthieu Delarue is trying to get the money together for a more humane abortion for his agoraphobic girlfriend that he despises. How calling her a Valkyrie fits in with her inability to leave her suffocating room I cannot understand. He bumbles about town drinking expensive champagne and taking women out, while searching for a way for the money, despising and then loving the youth of the young while avoiding growing older himself and reliving his past mistakes. And there I am hating the characters like one of the cynics in the book and then I get caught up in a monologue that hits much too close to home and I'm enthralled.

I seriously don't know what to think about the book. Is it a comment on pre-war inaction or ineptitude or on the wasteful ways of those that have money and comfort. How about a portrayal of the inability of the educated to observe without a tunnel of their own blinkers? I dont know whether to like or hate the book, its pretentious and difficult but then at parts it works.

And I'm no closer to speaking good French.

Childhood Revisionism

2010-01-04T06:24:00.000-08:00

I first read a Darren Shan book, exhausted from travelling, in a Vancouver hotel room. I couldn't put it down but back then I could rarely put a book down anyway. That was Vampire's Assistant, the second book in the author's saga about the same named protagonist. I enjoyed it tremendously and over the following years I read the rest of the series. I even went so far as to meet the author at a book club meeting before he was successful. Needless to say I was the only person other than my younger sister who knew who he was and I was unashamedly geeky when meeting him. He on the other hand was unashamedly brilliant in replacing a copy of the book I had that had that glue that some books have where the pages just fall out as you turn them. By the time the series finished I was definitely getting a little old for the accessible to all ages, two-hundred pages of plot, with a minimalist approach to writing style. It just felt a little young for me. Less cerebral even.

Over the years Ive dipped into the beginning instalments of Mr Shan's sequel to The Darren Shan Saga, The Demonata Seies. Featuring a group of human protagaonists split by a few thousand years who try to stop Demons entering the human realm and destroying us. Needless to say the same complaints hold but they did allow me to dip into the series' reportedly final book which I got in the great Borders closing down sale of Christmas 2009*.

The plot involved the fragmented protagonists scheming against each other (ripping each other's eyes out, syping , kissing demons with snake organs, you know the usual)and trying to stop the others from releasing their one great power, the kah gash. Needless to say the kah gash is the giant deus ex machina they use to save the day and rewrite the world. Needless to say the kah gash is gash, just drivel of a way to save a plot. The saga began with a family werewolves playing chess so as to get their werewolf curse lifted and finished up with the universe as a chessboard. The twist, the demons are on white and the good guys are on black squares! Its like a complete role reversal.

Overall the plot falls into that plot hole that pre-teen and teen fantasy literature loves to fall into whereby every life or death situation is the worst ever that then gets saved by someone finding new depth or new strength. Its how we all used to plot fantasy in creative writing when we were kids. The hero has about thirty different fights before getting to the final fight, which is the biggest yet. Or is it?

I'll conclude by mentioning that book was a brisk read clocking in at about two-thirds of the train distance from Birmingham to Bristol, saying that the train was heavily delayed and I'd forgotten that so maybe the book wasn't too bad.

*Other gems I got in this was a book of words with eight words in. A spy thriller with a topless man on the front and a tagline of "his gun is always loaded." And my personal favourite A Guide to Mac OSX Leopard in the animal section of the shop.

The Jim Smyth Template for Reviews in the Form of a Review of Elmore Leonard's The Hot Kid

2010-01-04T05:30:00.000-08:00

Beginning Begin with an introduction containing broad sweeping generalisations on the genre or the author's work that you have read before or have formulated negative opinions of. Failing that make it personal or be self-deprecating.

Belatedly mention the title of the book.

Middle Comment on chararcters, prose style, imagery, believability etc. All sentences should conform to a positive statement but... negative statement formula.

Talk about context. If you are struggling talk about another book or author in a way that makes it seem you are talking about this one. Failing that write jargon about class struggles like a union leader talking about thatcher on the news.

Important words and phrases to use: Connnecting with the characters, believability of actions, development, delicate, unreliable narrator, first person or make up sectors of society that might read/watch/listen to something you have referred to. ie the Goosebumps Gits, Shan's Sheilas, True Blood's Tuberculous Bassethounds. Alliteration is the key.

Conclusion Attempt to be final, insult your attempts at commentary, make sure to mention the future and how the book has effected your likelihood of reading more of the series or more of the author. Finish off witty but be warned it will probably turn out shitty.

In conclusion my reviewing is sloppy and rote but at the same time I enjoyed and connected with Leonard's attempt to write short snappy prose about a lawman making his name. But I did not find it successful, the supporting characters ranged from interesting to boring and the jumps in chronology made the book feel rushed and undeveloped. I have yet to be converted to being one of Leonard's Legion of fans but I could persuaded to read another of his novels as long as it has more depth and development of its characters.

In the Footsteps of Michael Palin

2009-12-08T12:27:00.000-08:00

Here we are the big one. A book from my childhood that I regretted never reading; Jules Verne's Around the World in 80 Days. As a kid adventures were big deals and this felt like one of the biggest you could have. To see the whole world in a few days seemed like an adventure on par with being Indiana Jones, Superman or any other of my heroes from back then. Couple that with how awesome the Willy Fogg cartoon series and Phileas Fogg crisps seeming like the type of thing rich adults buy and the book sounded perfect. I had an inkling that H.G.Wells and Jules Verne were the precursors to space stories and technological stuff that I liked. I even remember as a four of five year old staying up comparatively late to watch the original War of the Worlds film. And yet I never read any of their books; sure I read abridged versions which I felt were pretty dumb but actually going out and getting a copy of a book seemed above and beyond what could be done. Especially when all British primary school libraries seem to have is books about characters themed around primary colours and books about posh white sleuths (effin' famous five). I vividly remember the one thing I took away from one of these abridged editions was how to say the word chimnee. I had always thought it was said chimlee and thanks to Journey to the Centre of the Earth, I learnt.

On to the book; I enjoyed it I really did. I have a habit feeling that translations can lack the garnish or finesse of someone writing in that language. Or at least I feel they lack a naturalistic touch. But it is a hundred year old book translated from the French and yet it was quite pithy and easy to read. Someone evidently did a good job of translating this at some point. The book is light but still interesting and has that gripping addictive quality of the successful serialised novels of the nineteenth century.

There are some mistakes along the way. For instance it would seem implausible that Fogg could cross the international date line, travel across the America's and not realise he was a day ahead. Even if there was not an international date line back then, Japan would still have been ahead of GMT and America behind, so he would surely have realised. But the book is enough fun that I couldnt really give a damn. It was fun hearing about the construction of various forms of transport and the ways Fogg took to catch up places where he got lost.

The book spans a fine line between humour and sections trying to cast light on the newer areas of the world to Europeans. The humour definitely elevated it though, from points of Opium taking in Hong Kong to explanations of the Mormons there is a fair amount of toungue in cheek.

Verne also walks a fine line with his use of stereotype. It is obvious he was appealing to French readers with his use of the hero Passepartout and still many foreign characters tend to fall in the English buffoon, the American blowhard etc. But he draws them all well enough that they do not become too insulting or too on the nose to cause offence nor to make them less interesting. Still it does seem to be Verne's commentary on the British Empire at points. Like a blockbuster film it glosses over the real story of the adventure. For example the sacrificies made by many people's to make such a journey possible. But what can you expext from a hundred year old book. And hey, at least its got a bloody attack on a train by Injuns on horse back.

Pondering the Nasty in the Pasty

2009-11-17T14:48:00.001-08:00

Third book in and I've already abandoned my Brighton bent and am going straight into Richard and Judy Book Club Territory (To the non-Brits its like Oprah's Book Club but instead of shouting recommendations from a terrifying woman it features a couple slowly progressing into old age, much like the couple in this book.)

Today I finished a book that has been reviewed previously for Pajiba, by Figgy, and that my sisters both claimed was the best book ever after I bought it for one of them based on that review.

So I laboured through this book based on recommendations from others and the fact that I had resolved to read it, it was lying around the house and I figure sometimes you have to know the enemy. Especially when you have a sneaking suspicion that the enemy is the literary world's equivalent of the Notebook.

In the interest of attempting to review competently I'll start with what I enjoyed. Niffenegger had obviously worked very hard, and succeeded, at making sure the two protagonists narration was clear and yet distinct. This meant that the constant time skips and jumps are easier to follow. This is quite a difficult feat to make work especially with time travel aspects. Certain set pieces in the book I really enjoyed especially the stuff which dealt with the dynamics of time travel and the skills needed.

So I enjoyed the execution and certainly found it impressive to a degree but why was the book a labour to complete? It comes down to suspension of disbelief. This book at no point earned the suspension of disbelief needed to believe in it or engage in it. I needed to believe or at least buy that this couple's love could transcend time and space. That their love would bring him to her throughout the novel. To paraphrase the Flash (wally west) he is her lightning rod. We are asked to believe in this couple right at the start of the novel without it being earnt and this felt disingenious to me.

Plenty of people may put this down to me being a cynic and this is definitely true to an extent. But I could connect with time based interactions between secondary characters (ie when Henry confronts his father on his alcoholism and the death of his mother) far more than I could the main couple of Henry and Claire. Purely for the reason that this being later in the book it is far more earnt.

Niffenegger may have spent a lot of effort planning the time travel aspect of the couple's time cross'd love affair but at the same time she seems to be afraid to actually utilise the time travel aspect of the novel. There are no great interactions with history all the time travel seems to be broadly for is heavy handed metaphors on relations. (Cus its just like men to be anxious before a wedding and vanish, lucky Henry has future, greyer him to come save the day, what are men like eh?)

Niffenegger never seems to use the time travel aspect to any effect other than showing how alienated and clastrophobic the characters are in their respective timelines. For a book spanning forty plus years other than aging characters the world barely seems to age a day. So naval gazing are the protagonists narrations that the majority of the book's descriptive or scene setting imagery is about trousers the hero steals or the heroines ability to make paper. Because as we all know love is just paper mache and a dead man's trousers. (I prefer to say love is only a boner away)

The book just ended up seeming like couple's propaganda on how the only parts of your life that are worthwhile are those with your significant other and those just seem to tend towares moments of pain and alienation that are a little bit less drunk than your time before your significant other. The rest of career life, family life etc. just passes by and all there is in your whole life is this other person.

Then it got effin meta!!!
During a timeslip the hero has to prove to his coworkers that he is a time traveller so two of him appear in the same place. Cue conversation about how he is like superman but how superman never got to be with Lois Lane (Niffenegger must never have heard of the marriage) someone then claims that is because it would make a bad story if they ever got together. Our hero, Henry Detamble then smirkingly disagrees... Prick. Being able to lock pick and not maintain sanity long enough to stop yourself getting scared and teleporting yourself away does not make you Superman.

But this is not the first time travel love story I have read recently... I recently stumbled on the brilliant Slaughter House 5 which has the incompetent Billy Pilgrim as its hero but also has fantastic narration, wit, charm and commentary on the human condition...

I may have rambled on for far too long about why I didn't get this book. So in summary Henry deTamble is a more competent time traveler than Billy Pilgrim. The bookd was well thought out and well executed but then seemed lacking in convincing me about the characters. Either that or I'm a soul less love less cynic. Screw it I am a soul-less love-less cynic but the novel was still lacking.

In other news this may be the first thing I have ever where the central core is a love story. Unless of you course you count Romeo and Juliet which was more about being a couple of young dickheads and how cool Mercutio was.

Exploring Brighton's Murky Underbelly: The Sequel

2009-11-16T07:31:00.000-08:00

Somehow my first two books have managed to be about Brighton. Through no design I have read books concerning love and killers in a city I have never been to. But then again Ive rarely read books set in cities that I have been to.

At the same time the most fun I have had reading recently was reading two books set in my city, in the very area I live in that concerns families in the seventies and turn of the century going through events I lived through and that family and friends lived through. There was an almost voyeuristic pleasure to reading about characters catching the same bus that I am physically on while coming back from a night out at the same pub that I have been at.

Eagle eyed readers may notice I am a paragraph or two into the review and I still havent mentioned that I read Graham Greene's Brighton Rock. Well now I have and you may or may not be pleased to know that I quite enjoyed it. This was my first attempt at a Graham Greene novel although I have read a few of his letters and essays. I will probably go for another one at some point but not yet as I found it a fairly muddled experience. The setting is well drawn especially of the thirties and the race track parts. The descriptions of the drearyness of Brighton, its seaside etc really reminded me of Sylvia Plath's descriptions of New York with its grey canyons.

The dialogue swung from laboured to fantastic and at times my head was not really into the thirties gangster lingo but then along came one of my favourite quotes of all time and I was bowled over by its ability to sneak up on me around all the talk of polonies. That quote being "you can't conceive nor can I of the appalling strangeness of the mercy of God."

At points I found the set pieces to verge on stereotypical gangster fare but it was probably because of how influential the book has been in this regard. (The film with Dicky Attenborough was retitled Young Scarface in the States and you can kinda see why). JM Coetzee in his introduction in the copy I had, described it as being Hitchcockian in some points which I can kind of agree with but only superficially do I feel they are Hitchcockian. They feel like Hitchcock set-pieces but characterisation is never the same. For example in most Hitchcock the viewpoint of the claustrophobia is one person rather than many. I really felt the success of the book was in writing the claustrophobic narratives of the young people Pinky and his wife (although the love bits I barely understood, more on that in the next review) and the idealistic tone of Ida. The idealogical war between Ida's viewpoint and Pinky's I'll destroy everything if I won't be taken seriously was riveting.

When it comes to it the book felt flawed; although I don't know if it would read as flawed in the thirties or with proper prolonged literary analysis; but the flaws are worth it. In this well painted world of holiday's and gangsters there is a novel which runs both as a seaside thriller and as a look at right, wrong and what it takes to grow up.

Numero Uno

2009-11-16T06:59:00.001-08:00

Here we are the very first review. So what momentous book did I pick for this. To make my mark on my year, to start where I mean to go on, to prove that the whole world of reading is my oyster... I read Peter James' Dead Man's Footsteps!!!

Yeah not the most emphatic of statements about my reading habits but still, as a comment on the books I read this is pretty spot on. I tend to read mass produced crime or fantasy novels. The type that are easily found in airports and then easily thrown away or given to a charity shop by the end of the flight.

Peter James is an ex-film producer here in the UK who has moved on to writing mostly detective novels. Looking up his resume on wikipedia I was surprised to find that this is the executive-producer of the Al Pacino version of the Merchant of Venice. This book is a lot like that, interesting, fits together well in a nuts and bolts fashion but still essentially missing something.

This is the second of Peter James' Detective Grace novels that I have read and coincidentally it is set around the same time. Weirdly enough for a detective protagonist Grace is competent at his job, argues sparingly with his superiors and doesn't seem to have many vices. The only skeleton in his closet is a missing wife. The treatment of the missing wife subplot is well done here though and broadens the appeal of the character compared to the last entry in the series I read. Both of the entries I have read have been very well put together with an eye for the technological (though verging on the been there seen that on CSI). With plenty of well switched narration to characters (often the villain or suspect) that have yet to be introduced in Grace's plot. Brighton is seemingly realistically produced with dedication. Although I have never been to Brighton it definitely feels like the British seaside party towns with sleazy underbellies that I have frequented.

In the pantheon of disposable detective novels Peter James' work is far more of the Ian Rankin variety than the James Patterson. That is densely and tightly plotted interesting novels as compared to detective novels for people that have only ever read Enid Blyton and Goosebumps. But contrasting that the book was still ultimately bland and had an unsatisfying and very stereotypical conclusion.

Overall a good book let down by the ending and an ultimately competent but bland execution. Helped me pass a train journey though.

Welcome

2009-11-16T06:22:00.001-08:00

Hello to everyone reading this blog. To all those that aren't I'll give you a brief "allright" and a head nod in the street when we pass, while at the same time I'll ball my fists in my pocket in preparation for the worst. That is, a 14 year old girl beating me up because I have better hair than her.

I've set up this blog as a repository for my reviews in this year's Cannonball Read. Cannonball Read is a quasi-charitable competition between Pajibans to (for this year) read fifty-two books. The charitable part is that if completed a donation is made to Lil-A's college fund in honour of the recently departed Alabama Pink.

I'd like to say that I'm attempting this for the charitable aspect but really it is one of the 12 steps on my reading addiction programme. I normally read quite a lot but sporadically mainly because if I read too much I have a habit to let it take over my life. If I let myself read all the time I would stay up all night and day with my nose in the book not talking to people unless they are librarians or charity shop old ladies. I'd read at the table, I'd read on the bus, I'd read on a cross-Europe car journey.

The review aspect is so that there is proof or at least second hand evidence that we have some knowledge of the book we have read. For me it is just a way to get down my incoherent ramblings and inane rants. Maybe if I divert the bullshit into here then it won't flow out of my mouth when drunkenly attempting to talk to women. Either that or I will just headbutt them comically.

I figure in a little under a years time I should have completed this, so I had better make some predictions about my future for the purpose of convincing myself I am a person with goals.
Firstly, there is a slightly more positive than negative chance that I will complete this. Heck, I completed something approximating a dissertation and that was more torture than this.
My dissertation was longer and far more arduos but it also was crap, this makes me think that even if I make it to the end of this year the quality of my writing and reviews will be even worse than it is currently. Thirdly, I will mostly read absolute crap, airport fodder and cheap obscure books I find in charity shops.
And finally, I will be paunchier, paler, just as poor, unemployed and lonely as I am now but I hope I am not.

See you at the first review.

Jim