Category: re:View

re:View – The 2015 Bookshelf
March: Worlds of (Mostly) Meh

Well, March wasn’t my best month for reading. I only (just) made it through four books, and one of them was a graphic novel so comparatively quick to read. That’s what happens when I pick up a book that doesn’t draw me in – I go into procrastinate mode and do everything else instead. (Although I did make a bunch of pretty DIY t-shirts in all that time I didn’t spend reading books.)

Anyway, with some delay here’s the Bookshelf for a rather meh-y March.

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re:View: A Bookshelf special – the complete Discworld reviews, in memory of Sir Terry Pratchett

My first Terry Pratchett book was The Wee Free Men.

[In fact, reading back through my reviews I just realised that this is a fact I’ve mis-remembered for years. My first Discworld book was The Truth. But somehow, even though I enjoyed it, it didn’t stick; maybe I wasn’t ready. When I read The Wee Free Men some time later, however, that stuck – so much so that it made me read the entire series and actually became my first Discworld book in my memory. So we’ll go with the heart over logic version for the sake of this article.]

A good friend had been recommending Pratchett’s young adult books for years, and when I couldn’t get round to reading them she eventually just bought me two as a present. That’s a very effective way to force me to read a book as I can’t leave books lying around unread for long, or give them away without at least checking them out.

So I read The Wee Free Men, and then I immediately read A Hat Full of Sky. And so began the biggest reading journey of my life. Straight after those two, I read the remaining Tiffany Aching books. Then I read every Discworld book involving the witches. Then I moved on to the Death storyline. Then I went back to the beginning and read all the remaining books in chronological order.

Four years later I had made my way through 40 Discworld books and my world was changed forever.

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Terry Pratchett, by Paul Kidby

Terry Pratchett passed earlier this week and in his memory I wanted to make something. You know, paint a picture, build a statue – whatever. But I’m no good at drawing or sculpting or building things. I do all right with words, though. So these are my reviews of all the Discworld, and an account of most of my reading journey of the past five years, collected here as a tribute to the man who created this beautiful world and shared it with everyone willing to open their minds.

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re:View – The 2015 Bookshelf
February: the apocalypse and beyond

Perhaps unsurprisingly, January’s reading journey to dystopia has led me on into the apocalypse. I guess the two often go hand in hand – certainly in the case of Maragret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy, which forms the central part of my February reading.

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re:View – The 2015 Bookshelf
January: a journey to other worlds

New year, new bookshelf! After finally picking up The Handmaid’s Tale I fancied some more alternative reality kind of stuff, so my reading journey throughout January took me from dystopian to prehistoric to post-apocalyptic worlds…and back again. Also as a new feature this year I’m trying to do Bookshelf on a monthly basis. I’ve still got quite a bit of otherworldly reading lined up so expect a similar theme for February.

As well as the books below I also read Emily St John Mandel’s Station Eleven, which has certainly been my book of the month and is, quite possibly, already my favourite book of the year. It’s so good it has earned its own dedicated review post. Check it out here – I really can’t recommend this book enough.

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re:View – Station Eleven, the first must-read book of the year

I usually do my reviews in batches, but here’s a book that deserves its very own post. I read it purely because it was Waterstones’ book of the month for January and by the time I had read the free first chapter on their website I was drawn in enough to order the book straight away. That says a lot for the first chapter; usually I stay well clear of the latest books being hyped by the booksellers.

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Couldn’t pick my favourite cover so you get them all…

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel is the story of a theatre company travelling across a post-apocalyptic North America performing Shakespeare’s plays for communities of survivors, interwoven with an account of a pandemic that wiped out civilisation and the first twenty years of the surviving one percent of humanity dealing with the aftermath. What starts out as a collection of seemingly unconnected subplots following different characters’ lives, spanning the continent and some forty years in time, eventually comes together as a powerful narrative of surviving the end of the world and being catapulted into a new reality where all the rules have changed.

Mandel’s writing is poignant and perfectly timed, creating a page-turner that moves deeply without being sentimental. She imagines a post-apocalyptic wasteland that is filled with dangers but strangely inviting, and populated with characters and relationships that are fragile, flawed and utterly human. What I loved most about this book is how it explores the practical day-to-day realities of surviving in a worldwide ground zero, where resources are as sparse as law and order, where despair breeds fanaticism and where a moment of mercy could cost your life.

It makes you stop and think about just how fragile our civilisation really is; it makes you wonder whether you’ve got what it takes to survive, all the while also reminding us just how difficult it would be to re-build a world that’s even remotely as safe and comfortable as the one we’re used to.

Devastating and yet beautifully optimistic, and filled with literary beauty, this is without a doubt my favourite book of the year – and I’m confident enough to say that already in January.

Pens: 5 out of 5

re:View – The 2014 Bookshelf VI

Just to tie up the loose ends, here’s the last of the 2014 Bookshelf – books new and old by some of my favourite authors. While some of these guys never fail to impress (Ellroy, Pratchett, I’m looking at you!) others didn’t exactly blow me away this year.

I’m currently reading Ruth Ozeki’s All Over Creation but this will be one for next year’s shelf. Which means my Goodreads challenge closes at 106% or 55 of 52 books.

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re:View – The 2014 Bookshelf V

This summer I went on a bit of an Edith Wharton binge after being stuck on a journey without a book and finding a collection of her complete works on Kindle. I think by now I’ve made my way through all the novels and most of the novellas, but I’ve still got thousands of pages of stories, poetry and non-fiction ahead of me. This is my favourite author after all. Which means I will read EVERYTHING by her. Eventually.

So here’s the 2014 addition to the Wharton bookshelf. Now somebody just needs to go and publish shiny editions of all her books. Folio Society, I’m looking at you.

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re:View – A Vision of Fire doesn’t spark any hope for Gillian Anderson’s literary career

Let me start by saying that I never, ever wanted to love a book as much as I wanted to love this. Having spent my life looking up at Gillian Anderson as a role model, inspiration and feminist icon, I really desperately wanted to add her to my list of favourite authors. Which is probably why the disappointment was quite so crushing when I read her first novel. Although, to be fair, she co-wrote it with author-ghostwriter Jeff Rovin, so I’m not sure who to pin the bad writing on.

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Billed as “a science fiction thriller of epic proportions” by the publisher, A Vision of Fire is really more of a spiritual drama of little thrill, very little sci-fi and limited proportions, I’m afraid. There’s a little bit of psychology, a little bit of medicine, and a whole lot of dabbling with mysticism from various eras and corners of the globe, but it fails to come together in a coherent narrative. There are some good ideas in there, but they are too vague, dealt with in passing, and not given a chance to develop any real depth or complexity.

The writing is clumsy and seems a bit forced, lingering too much on unnecessary details and not giving enough attention to the important thoughts. The characters are one-dimensional stereotypes and the story is pretty predictable and completely fails to engage. Anderson has said from the outset that the book – eventually to be extended into the “Earth End Saga” – will be adapted with her in the lead. And it actually very much reads like she thought up her perfect screen character and then constructed a story around it.

Much as I love all of Gillian Anderson’s other work to date (as an actor, screenwriter, director, producer…), I just can’t find anything to like about her literary collaboration. It may have worked if the authors had skipped the novel and gone straight to screenplay – and yes, of course I’ll be watching the movie – but I’m certainly not holding my breath for the sequel to the book.

That said, she’s still one of the most awesome women on the planet.

re:View – Going back to the future with James Ellroy’s Perfidia

So James Ellroy is writing a new L.A. Quartet and this is a BIG FUCKING DEAL because the original L.A. Quartet is easily the best thing that ever happened to noir crime.

After covering the brutal, corrupt world of the L.A. Police Department from the late 1940s to late 1950s in The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential and White Jazz, and then going on an international scale with the political history of the 1960s and 1970s – from JFK to the Cuban Revolution and Vietnam – in the Underworld USA trilogy, the master of noir has circled back to 1941 in the first of four L.A. Quartet prequels.

The place is, of course, L.A. and the time is Pearl Harbour. Ellroy’s new 740-page monster Perfidia follows four characters through the chaos of early-days war in December 1941 as they converge, collide and set in motion the relationships and conspiracies that create a densely intriguing back story to the four existing novels. We have Hideo Ashida, the only Japanese-American on the LAPD’s payroll, a brilliant and obsessive forensic who finds his identity turned inside out by the new ‘anti-Jap’ hysteria. And we have Kay Lake, megalomaniac dilettante and police world hanger-on, as well as Ellroy’s most infamously corrupt and charismatic character, Dudley Smith, and the real-life police caption William H. Parker – who will all go on to play central roles in the original L.A. Quartet.

What starts as a routine investigation of the slaughter of a Japanese family on the eve of Pearl Harbour soon pans out into a mind-blowing tangle of narratives which reach from the very heart of the L.A.’s underworld all the way to the federal government, and where coercion, betrayal, mass internment, eugenics and cold-blooded murder serve as means for personal or political advancement for individuals and the agencies that run the nation. And while your mind still struggles to keep up with the whodunnit of the quadruple homicide of the early chapters, you find yourself in the middle of an epic tale of international espionage, the birth of the Red Scare of the 1950s and the formation of a host of police-underworld alliances that will come to dominate the city throughout the later books.

Perfidia is pure Ellroy skill, refined over the years and condensed into the essence of what makes his writing so utterly breathtaking: it’s tough; it’s fast; it hits you with a constant crossfire of names, facts and connections that leave your mind screaming and desperately clawing its way through this barrage of information to get a grip on the truth before you are dragged under by the immensity of this man’s dark and twisted imagination.

I’ve said recently that I would quite like to be inside James Ellroy’s mind when he writes one of his novels, to figure out how he can stay on top of this overwhelming, interconnected narrative he has created over the past two and a half decades. But, to be very honest, I think that after five minutes inside James Ellroy’s mind, my brain would melt out of my ears.

Pens: 5 out of 5

…plus gold stars to Waterstones for publishing this gorgeous beast of an edition:

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re:View – The Clove Club, or: How to go home hungry, Michelin-style

The boy likes his fine dining so, for his birthday present, I treated him to dinner at the much hyped and newly Michelin starred Clove Club in Shoreditch Town Hall. We’d heard good things about the restaurant, so off we went to Hipster Central to get a taste of that.

The atmosphere and decor – your average, hyper-understated East End money. The staff – plenty, helpful and very friendly.

They started us off with three excellent little nibbles, including smoked cod’s roe on a thin rye crisp and a bite of pine scented, fried buttermilk chicken. For £7.50 per person extra, we got a few super-thin slivers of very tasty home cured bacon, too.

On to the set five-course menu.

I don’t eat seafood and they were lovely about replacing the two seafood starters (scallop and squid – which my partner assures me were both excellent) with a perfectly nice, tiny tomato salad and a piece of pan-fried cod with borlotti beans. The cod was perfectly cooked on the inside but had slightly soggy skin, and it also came with quite a big bone, which is a serious no-no when you’re serving a dainty portion of fish. Big plus: the cloud of garlic froth on the side.

Unfortunately our dinner took a plunge off a cliff at this point. The main course consisted of a microscopic strip of mallard – barely two mouthfuls – and a teaspoon sized dollop of pumpkin purée – and that was it. No sides, certainly no substance. Honestly, a leaf of greens wouldn’t have gone amiss. In hindsight I’m starting to realise why the staff was so very keen to top us up on the bread constantly. Now, we could have gone for a supplementary second main course, and maybe that would have been the one for the hunger. But when I’m eating a £55 five-course menu I kind of expect to be fed properly without having to fork out another £30 for an additional main course.

Dessert remained underwhelming. First came a lemon cream and pepper ice cream dessert – which would have been nice had it been served on a proportionally small scale. Instead it came in a comparatively massive portion; and the amount of sugar, cream and sickly sweetness actually made me feel a bit sick. So much so that I couldn’t even eat the next dessert – yet more cream, this time of the quince and ginger variety, served in a ring of crispy pastry. The waiter didn’t need to look quite so peeved when taking away the plate I had barely touched.

Coffee came with a fairly standard selection of petits fours, but in terms of flavour and delicateness they seemed clumsy compared to what the competition in London dishes up at this point.

We both left the restaurant hungry and on an unpleasant sugar high, seriously longing for a burger. It’s a shame, really, because the food they did serve – certainly up until the dessert – was beautifully cooked and tasted excellent. But at £200 for a dinner for two (and that’s only one person having wine) I do expect to be fed properly – even in Shoreditch.