Category: BookLove

re:View – The 2015 Bookshelf
May: Glimpses of the soul

May hasn’t been a very productive reading month – but where quantity was lacking, quality has been amazing. This Bookshelf features two novels from one of my new favourite authors, Emily St. John Mandel, and an autobiography by my favourite contemporary pianist.

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Last Night in Montreal by Emily St. John Mandel
A short, intense and mysterious book about a woman who has spent her whole life disappearing, Last Night in Montreal explores how we become who we are, how we construct our existence on the basis of what we know about our origins, and how one missing piece of information from our past can change everything and bring our carefully constructed life crashing down. Filled with intrigue, intensely real characters and a kind of desperate beauty that will have you crying your heart out, this is a total knock-out of a debut novel and the first masterpiece in the career of a very exciting author.
Pens: 5 out of 5

The Singer’s Gun by Emily St. John Mandel
Another stunning work from the author who finally got all the attention she deserves with the publication of her fourth novel Station Eleven at the end of last year. The singer’s Gun follows the story of Anton, a man who has worked hard to leave his shady past behind and build a new, respectable identity, but finds himself dragged into the old and dangerous business again by family obligations. Part coming-of-age story, part tense thriller, this book takes us from the heart of Brooklyn to the darkest north of Canada to the remote shores of a melancholic Italian island while it explores the question of how much we can change the path life has put us on, and what price we’re willing to pay for a fresh start.
Pens: 5 out of 5

Instrumental by James Rhodes
I’ve written about James Rhodes and his brilliant approach to classical music before; I’ve been to many of his concerts; I’ve got every single one of his albums on my iPod and after reading his autobiography I can only possibly love him more. Honestly, what a dude. Instrumental, by the nature of the issues it deals with, should be a devastating, uncomfortable read. And yet this guy, writing about his childhood ordeal of sexual abuse, his ongoing struggle with mental health issues and his past attempts at suicide, manages to somehow lift this whole story up into a declaration of courage and survival. Yes, this book makes you raging angry – and it should. It makes you cry – good. But it also made me giggle stupidly to myself, it demonstrates what it means to be fragile and choose to be strong, and it offers a fresh and beautiful perspective on classical music. Rhodes also has a lot of very true and important things to say about the state of classical music as an industry and what it needs to survive in the future. And reading where he’s coming from and what he wants to do with music, I can only be excited about what he’s got for us next.
Pens: 5 out of 5

re:View – The 2015 Bookshelf
April: From Sin City to Russia

Sinners, superheroes and comrades. It’s been another random month for the Bookshelf, filled with the kinds of books I don’t normally read but should definitely pick up more often.

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Sin City: The Hard Goodbye by Frank Miller
I loved the first Sin City adaptation for its stunning visuals and it’s in-your-face-ness and reading the novels has been at the back of my mind for years – and I kept pushing it further to the back because I’ve never been very keen on comics. But my surprisingly enjoyable experience of V for Vendetta last month made me take the plunge into graphic novels and of course this seemed the best place to start. I was thrilled to find that the visuals and story lines from the film were basically taken directly from the books, making this a very familiar reading experience, but adding a level of intensity that – I think – comes from the reading rhythm and that the film can’t match. I loved the film for being gorgeous from the first frame to the last, and loved the book more for allowing me to linger on my favourite frames for as long as I liked. It’s a brutally beautiful graphic novel all around.
Pens: 4 out of 5

Watchmen by Alan Moore
What a blockbuster of a graphic novel! And there I was, thinking that, being a comic book, it’ll be a quick read and put me back on track for this year’s reading challenge. And so, a week of intense reading later, I emerged having learned a new book lesson: that comic books can be just as complex as a normal novel made only from words. This epic story, which chronicles the rise and fall of a group of superheroes in an alternative past, asks important questions about what it means to be human and superhuman, about the moral rights and wrongs of trying to create a perfect world. The story gets very complex in time, especially as the various sub-plots jump back and forth in time to explore each character’s history and the various alliances that form and unravel between them over the decades – so definitely not a quick comic book, but a rich and hugely enjoyable piece of literature that you can really get lost in.
Pens: 4 out of 5

The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
This is Mikhail Bulgakov’s devastating satire of Soviet life, written during the darkest period of Stalin’s regime, according to Goodreads. I enjoyed the bits of satire that I understood, but overall I definitely know too little of Russian culture and history to really get this book. Which means it was a bit of a tough read and I probably missed out on a lot of the enjoyment a more educated person will get out of the book. It does have one of the coolest feline characters I’ve ever come across in literature, though.
Pens: 2 out of 5

Death and the Penguin by Andrey Kurkov
A bittersweet little satire from Ukraine, Kurkov’s first novel deals with isolation and the pointlessness of life in a political system that doesn’t really give you much in the way of choice. An obituary writer who lives with his pet penguin sleepwalks through life until it dawns on him that his newspaper work is nowhere near as harmless as it seemed, and that he’s been drawn into an elaborately manufactured political trap from which he may not escape with his life. By far the best element to this book is the penguin, a silent and yet strangely expressive character who at the same time lightens the mood and adds a heartbreaking kind of sadness to the story.
Pens: 3 out of 5

A re:View special for World Book Day

Happy World Book Day from Zanne and the Scooby!

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I was going to tweet a photo of my favourite books, but then realised that most of them aren’t in my bookshelf because they’re circulating among my friends. So I’ll have to write this up instead…

These are just a few picks from the huge pile of wonderful books that have enriched my life over the years, because it’s good to look back and remember what a particular book has given you – especially if you have a habit of speeding through books the way I do. I’m sure there are plenty more that I can’t think of right now, but those can be for next year.

In no particular order – except for number one, which is very special.

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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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Farewell, Sir Terry, and thank you for giving us a whole world of magic

The world has lost a very particular something today. If you look closely, you can see that a fine coating of sparkles is no longer there. It was swept away by the departure of a man who has added a little bit of magic to a lot of people’s lives.

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Image from www.dignityindying.org.uk

Sir Terry Pratchett has left us. The news spread today like a shockwave, certainly in my social circle, which is filled with people who love him and have grown up with his books. The first reaction, from most people I spoke to, was simply: No.

NO. It cannot be. After spending years, if not decades, in the company of his books, travelling his worlds and meeting his characters, nobody seems to be able to imagine a world without him yet.

Texts, emails, Facebook messages started flooding in and out. Have you heard. Very sad news. Noooooo! I can’t even… And each message, each person adding their voice to this gathering wave of mourning, brought more tears.

Meanwhile the people who aren’t familiar with the Pratchett phenomenon looked at me somewhat blankly, feeling visibly awkward about the fact that I was crying in the office about the death of an author as if I’d lost a friend or family member.

Because it is more than the death of a hugely loved author. It is the loss of a man who has given me worlds, universes, a whole different layer of reality where I have spent hours, weeks, probably moths of my life and where I’ve met creatures and characters who have become so real that I have long ago accepted, as a personal truth, that they really do exist. They are real because Terry Pratchett, with his incredible imagination and his unmatched gift of language, has not just created them but brought them to life.

Discworld, for me, is a place. It’s somewhere I can go anytime and hang out with old friends – Granny Weatherwax and the witches, Rincewind and the wizards, Sam Vimes and the City Watch, the dwarfs, the trolls, the lot of them – and after 40 books spent in their company, they really are old friends to me. Going into Discworld is as real as going on a holiday – flying out to Sardinia or to Spain, where we tend to go in the summer. True, it doesn’t involve quite so much packing and travelling (and it’s certainly improved by the absence of the Ryanair Factor), but it really is the same thing. Discworld is a real place for me; it exists without a doubt.

And that’s why Terry Pratchett means more to me than a favourite author. Great authors give us wonderful books that we read, and return to, and that we take things from and treasure forever. But never in my life have I come across any other author who has given me a whole world. So far, with him still being active and writing several books a year despite the grip of Alzheimer’s tightening on him, this world has been endless. No matter how many books I read, I thought, there will always be more. After all, I still have quite a few of his non-Discworld works to get through.

But now his death has put a border around this endless world – or maybe a rim that you might fall off if you venture to the very edge. And that breaks my heart, because now there will be an end to reading his books. Even if I take it slowly, each remaining unread book now a treasure, I will arrive at the last book written by Terry Pratchett. The sand is slipping fast through that particular hourglass on Death’s shelves.

I will miss his wisdom, his wit, his imagination and most of all his incredible understanding of what makes us human. His books are largely categorised as fantasy, but I’ve always found that they are first and foremost about humanity. Terry Pratchett wrote about human nature with the insight of a philosopher, the warmth of a father and the wit of an Englishman. I have always considered him one of the great philosophers of our time, a hero whose superpower was to see right into the soul of human beings.

I’m unbelievably sad for this amazing human being we have lost today, and so, so grateful for all the magic Terry Pratchett has given to so many people around the world. And I’m grateful that he was allowed to go to sleep surrounded by his family, with his cat snoozing on the bed (probably positioned to cause the greatest possible discomfort to everyone, as good cats do), escaping from Alzheimer’s before it had a chance to destroy his wonderful mind.

Farewell, Sir Terry. Thank you forever for giving me a world. I hope your onward journey is safe and joyful, and involves at least one pint with Death in the pub at the end of the black desert under the endless night.

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Check Mort by Paul Kidby

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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