Tagged: Books

re:View – The 2017 Bookshelf: June

June came and went, and I managed just two books. I don’t know what’s wrong with me this year. Ok, I do know; I’ve been on a bit of a personal roller coaster ride and just haven’t had the mental space to focus on a book for the past few months.

Well, the ride is over now and I’ve got my head screwed back on tightly, and I’m finally in a reading mood again. This month’s bookshelf is starting to look pretty good already.

But first, here are the June reviews.

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Hag-Seed by Margaret Atwood
I’m going to get flames for this, but I’ll say it as it is: Margaret Atwood has lost her edge. The Heart Goes Last from a couple of years ago was already a big missed opportunity, and let’s not even think about Angel Catbird. With Hag-Seed I again felt all the frustration of a potentially great book that just didn’t reach its full potential.
The set-up is so promising: Celebrated theatre director Felix gets betrayed and ousted by his right-hand man, loses his family and his life, and spends 12 years as a voluntary outcast plotting his revenge. (It is a re-telling of The Tempest, after all.) Working part-time as a literature teacher in a prison and staging Shakespeare’s plays with the inmates, he finally takes his stab at vengeance with a somewhat modified production of The Tempest when his former theatre enemies – who have since rise to the ranks of politicians – show up for a ministerial visit to the prison’s theatre club.
It could have been a good story and it’s so well written – the story of Felix’s fall and his lonely life as a social outcast, with only the imaginary ghost of his dead baby daughter for company, is gorgeous and heartbreaking in the best of Atwood’s signature style. But the momentum just doesn’t last. Too quickly you figure out that there’s a plot underway, and she bigs it up way too much, so that when the day of vengeance finally comes and goes you’re lost with that “Oh, that’s it?” kind of feeling. As showdowns go it’s as bland as it gets, and the resolution that follows is just too predictable and cheesy as it gets. I am the biggest fan of Margaret Atwood’s past work, but I barely made it to the end of this book and I couldn’t find much to love about it. This is no tempest; it’s barely a gentle breeze.
Pens: 3 out of 5

The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul by Douglas Adams
I picked this up completely at random in a gorgeous sci-fi room of a Hay bookshop, based on the title and the fact that it’s by Douglas Adams. I hadn’t heard of Dirk Gently but really enjoyed the Hitchhiker books. This one’s written in a similar style, beautifully observant and utterly hilarious – that very elegant form of comedy that pretends to be innocently nonsensical but actually cuts right to the bone of human nature. It’s the same style that made me fall in love with Terry Pratchett, and I think Douglas Adams is the only other author I’ve come across who’s playing in that league.
So in this book, a check-in terminal at Heathrow Airport mysteriously explodes and a random music producer mysteriously ends up minus his head. Dirk Gently investigates using his trusted holistic (i.e. completely nonsensical) methods, and before he knows it he finds himself caught between the fronts in a war of gods. Literally. It’s a fast-paced and funny story. The ending is a bit of a letdown, rather than the epic showdown I’d hoped for, and doesn’t quite make sense, but otherwise this is a really entertaining read full of little laughs and gorgeously fine-tuned language.
Pens: 3 out of 5

re:View – The 2017 Bookshelf: May

After a not very bookish start to the year, May almost put me back on track – although I cheated a bit and read lots of graphic novels. So here we have a very strange collection of apes, lowlifes, cat-owl creatures and a good old-fashioned demon hunter.

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Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari
This is one of those books the universe just kept telling me to read – I don’t usually go for history books but recommendations kept coming in from all sides until I gave up and picked it up. It’s a fascinating and informative account of (as it says on the tin) the history of homo sapiens, charting our rise through the cognitive, agricultural and scientific revolution. The book takes a pretty general approach, and in terms of the hard facts I’d say you’ll probably know most of it if you’ve paid attention in biology and history class back in school. But Harari takes an interesting approach to interpreting the consequences of our evolution in light of the question: How did we benefit from it? As in, are we really better off in our civilised, industrial society than our ancestors were in their hunter-gatherer lives? In that regard the book really made me think and gave me a perspective on history that school didn’t really offer. Well written and engaging, Sapiens was certainly more enjoyable than I expected a history book to be.
Pens: 4 out of 5

Sin City, Volume 6: Booze, Broads, and Bullets by Frank Miller
It’s Sin City, I thought, so what could possibly go wrong? Well, this one’s more like a scrapbook of fragments and odd pieces, many of them recycled from other stories, that make for a bit of a lame “short story” collection. It was probably a money-making exercise: The franchise is selling, so lets stick whatever bits and pieces we’ve got left over into a collection and market that as a new book. It shows… This volume is distinctly lacking coherence, thrills and pretty much everything else that made Sin City what it is. I’m keeping it merely for the sake of having the full collection, but I doubt I’ll ever so much as glance over it again.
Pens: 2 out of 5

Sin City, Volume 7: Hell and Back
The final instalment offers us a proper story again, and a pretty good one at that. A troubled artist / hit man / war hero saves a girl from suicide only to see her kidnapped, and when he goes after her he accidentally blows up a massive conspiracy involving people trafficking, organ harvesting and other unsavoury activities. It’s dark, it’s brutal and it’s beautifully illustrated, featuring by far the biggest colour palette I’ve seen in any Sin City book. The style really has evolved over the seven volumes, and after a few low points in the middle Miller finishes strong with one hell of a graphic novel here.
Pens: 3 out of 5

Angel Catbird by Margaret Atwood
So I was really excited about this. A graphic novel. About cats. By Margaret Atwood. It’s bound to be AWESOME. Right? Wrong. I still don’t know what this is, but it reads like the deluded ramblings of your granny who’s trying to be down with the kids. Some scientist has an accident with a Secret Formula that mixes his genes up with his dead cat (and an owl, for good measure), turning him into some weird flying half cat. He promptly stumbles into a war between other half cats and some crazy professor who’s trying to take over the world with his army of rats. So far, so good – the whole thing is aimed at young readers, after all. What makes it really weird is the amount of incredibly cringe-worthy innuendo (boy half cat and girl half cat are so sex crazed for each other they can barely manage to keep their pants on), and the random informative foot notes about responsible cat-keeping that are sprinkled in among the action. Basically, the whole thing is so weird, cringe and embarrassing that I can only hope Atwood intended it as some elaborate practical joke. That, or she has decided she’s so famous she can write whatever the hell she fancies these days and get away with it. But seriously. WTF!
Pens: 1 out of 5

Hellblazer: Original Sins by Jamie Delano
Here’s a confession. I got sucked into watching the super cheesy US adaptation of the John Constantine graphic novels. When I commented on how gloriously bad it was in the office, a colleague brought the book in for me, attempting, I assume to further my education. This is certainly very different from the all-American TV show – darker, grittier, and (thankfully!) a whole lot more British. In loosely connected episodes we follow the demon hunter from Liverpool around the world as he tries to keep the unsavoury elements of the underworld from causing havoc with people’s lives above ground. Granted, he fails mostly, being the troubled and flawed character he is. But some of the demon-hunting is pretty epic. I’m not in love with the illustration style and colouring; it comes across very chaotic and the changing reading order of the panels adds confusion, to the point where some pages actively put me off wanting to read them. But the stories are great and John Constantine is a really well-made character, so overall a pretty decent graphic novel.
Pens: 3 out of 5

re:View – The 2017 Bookshelf: April

I don’t know what it is with this year, but I just can’t seem to stick with a book. My reading volume has dropped to the lowest in years and I don’t like it. I could blame my new boyfriend, but he’s actually massively into books, took me to Hay-on-Wye on our first weekend break, bought me more books and loves to cuddle up with a book. (So it’s definitely not his fault…) I guess I’ll just have to blame the fact that I’m flat hunting again and spending more time than ever in the gym. Or something.

EXCUSES. Get back to reading, girl.

In April I did read two really good books though. It’s a start.

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Norse Mythology by Neil Gaiman
Not quite what I expected, Gaiman’s latest takes on the story of the Norse gods in a short collection of episodes – so if you’re expecting a modern epic you’ll probably disappointed. It’s certainly a great introduction to the subject for someone who doesn’t know a lot about it (like myself) as well as young readers, and I think even if you’re a bit familiar with Norse mythology this is still a very interesting interpretation as Gaiman pieced it together from bits and pieces as told in different versions over time. In one way, this makes the stories very rich and detailed, but at the same time they don’t go much beyond the bare facts. There is very little emotion, and not much actual storytelling – the style is brief to the point of feeling clipped, and the gods remain fairly one-dimensional, described over and over by their same old characteristics. But then again I guess ancient gods don’t undergo much character development in general, and they don’t necessarily have human traits or feelings. I’d probably file this one under ‘informative and entertaining’ rather than a memorable and breathtaking read.
Pens: 3 out of 5

The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
I tried Dorian Gray before and gave up a few pages into the first chapter, somewhat put off by the pretentiousness of Basil and Henry’s conversation about art. A few months later I started dating someone who proclaimed it his favourite novel, and promptly bought me a copy, so I decided to give it another chance – and actually quite enjoyed it. I kind of expected it to be a lot more scandalous, but I guess it must have been pretty shocking in its day. I found it strangely reflective of our own time actually. When you think about it, Dorian’s obsession with his appearance and the constant conflict he faces between his own self and the version of him reflected by the portrait isn’t a million miles off the identity struggles created by today’s selfie culture, where any photo must be obsessively run through a number of Instagram filters and retouched by beauty apps before we feel confident enough to share it across every social media channel. In a sad reversal of the Dorian Gray concept, it’s usually the perfectly edited picture we present to the world, while our self-esteem becomes the nasty thing festering in the attic. Our views on aesthetics and morality may have changed since the days when this book was a true shocker, but for as long as we’re human we’ll always struggle with vanity, appearance and the conflict between our true identity and the image we’d like to show the world – and I think in that regard Wilde’s story will remain absolutely timeless.
Pens: 4 out of 5

re:View – The 2017 Bookshelf: January

Bookworms, I’m back. And I’m finally excited about books again! I’m catching up with the back catalogue of some of my favourite authors (James Ellroy, Margaret Atwood, Patrick Dennis) and looking forward to a whole load of books coming out soon. I mean, the first novel from George Saunders?! Sign me up for that. Also hitting us soon are Neil Gaiman’s Norse Mythology, a feminist manifesto by Gillian Anderson, and the third part of V.E. Schwab’s Shades of Magic.

But enough about books of the future. Here are the books I’ve read in the past month.

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re:View – The 2016 Bookshelf: November / December

Sooo 2016 has been a pretty bad year for reading. I’m not even sure what it was, but I somehow had to drag myself through book after book (with few exceptions) and almost lost the love for it. Partly, it’s because I went through a massive life change in early summer, breaking off a six-year relationship and having to move house and build up a whole new life. Then I really enjoyed this new single life and ended up spending a lot more time out and about, training and meeting friends, so there just wasn’t much time for books. I also hit a string of uninspiring books around the middle of the year which didn’t exactly drive me back to the bookshelf looking for more.

On the plus side, I started a few books in December that have been absolutely brilliant and re-ignited my book lust. More about those at the end of January, but for now here are the pathetically slim contents of the November and December bookshelf.

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Connected: The Call & The Shift (Author’s Cut) by Michelle Medhat
Connected is a two-part sci-fi thriller that plays out on three levels: on the stage of world politics, where the emergence of a globally connected terrorist organisation threatens all life on earth; on a personal level, where we follow MI6 agent Sam and his wife Ellie as they risk everything in a dangerous plot to save the world; and on a much higher playing field, where a secret overseeing force wages a timeless battle between good and evil with the very existence of Earth at stake. As the story unfolds, every player has to take their side. But with an entirely new brand of terrorism shaking the most powerful nations to their core and unseen forces manipulating events to pursue their own sinister agendas, can Sam and Ellie really pull off the impossible and shift the world off its course of destruction? This book weaves together an interesting mix of genres. It’s a secret agent thriller at heart (think Jason Bourne backed up by James Bond’s tech lab), but the futuristic technologies imagined by the author also firmly places it in the sci-fi arena – and there’s a supernatural element to it as well, plus a good dose of steamy romance. It’s probably not a book I would have picked up, but was too intrigued to resist after meeting the author. A fast-paced read with a visual style and lots of action, Connected comes along like a big-ticket Hollywood blockbuster.
Pens: 3 out of 5

Genius by Patrick Dennis
Patrick Dennis, master of the hyperbolic character study, takes us on a hysterically funny ride through Mexico City’s American society, where director Leander Starr – Hollywood wonder child of yesteryear and now on the run from Uncle Sam’s tax department, various ex wives and assorted other parties he owes money to – stirs up everybody’s quiet summer retreat with his mission to produce a budget movie that will redeem him with the big studio bosses and his creditors alike. Of course Starr, in the best tradition of Patrick Dennis characters, is a scoundrel and a dreamer, and of course his attempts to string together a masterpiece starring burned-out film industry veterans and produced by the shadier elements of the Mexican business world unleashes chaos on the lives of everyone involved. Brilliantly observed by Dennis himself as an author-turned-character (turned accessory to mischief), this book is both a beautifully rowdy old-school comedy and a merciless look behind the facade of the elite of its era.
Pens: 4 out of 5

Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
I haven’t read Alice since I was around six. My mum used to read it to me a lot before I could read. I didn’t actively dislike it at the time, and it didn’t exactly scare me, but I always felt vaguely uneasy about this story. Thinking back now, I realise it gave me a feeling that’s very similar to the way chaos and nonsense make me feel now. So I probably shouldn’t be surprised that I didn’t massively enjoy reading it as an adult, either. I just don’t enjoy logic, so the endless discourse between the various characters annoyed the hell out of me. And I dread chaos. Nonsense is basically chaos, and deliberately nonsensical plots are kind of the worst thing you can do to me with a story. It makes my brain bleed. I love a lot of the elements of Alice that have been adopted into pop culture, but I’ll never be able to enjoy the book.
Pens: 2 out of 5

re:View – The 2016 Bookshelf: September/October

My year of not reading very much continues. I don’t know what it is this year – maybe I’m just not picking very good books, but I’m just not in much of a reading state of mind. Of course, it may also have to do with the little fact that I’m single for the first time in many years and just really enjoying having the time and freedom to do my own thing and work on some new projects. That, and being able to pick what I want to watch on TV rather than reading my way through somebody else’s choice of evening entertainment. In any case, the bookshelf has grown by a few more books, so here they are.

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Super-Cannes by J. G. Ballard
The master of everything that’s fucked up about the human experience turns his attention to the business park – that clinically clean, highly secure and perfectly isolated enclosure of human progress where abominations fester below a perfectly landscaped surface. Retired pilot Paul and his young clinician wife Jane move into Super-Cannes, the business park to end all business parks in the hills above the French coast, where the world’s most brilliant minds live and work in luxury – until one amongst them goes on a sudden murder spree, executing several people and killing himself. Bored out of his mind with nothing to do, Paul investigates the events and becomes obsessed with the motivation behind the massacre, in the process uncovering a sinister secret that could bring down the multi-billion empire of Super-Cannes. I so wanted to love this book because it seemed to feature absolutely everything I loved about High-Rise and Ballard’s other studies of human nature. But somehow I just didn’t get into it. The book takes way too long to get to the point, building and furnishing a (not very atmospheric) atmosphere while hinting at a massive plot revelation that happens too late, and too unconvincingly. The only thing that Ballard does get across very well is the deadly ennui of a person being stuck in the perfect workplace with absolutely no work to do.
Pens: 2 out of 5

Blood on the Moon (Lloyd Hopkins #1) by James Ellroy
Ooh, this is very early James Ellroy. This is baby James Ellroy, and as such quite fascinating. Having read (and obsessed over) his later works that earned him a cult following (the L.A. Quartet and Underworld USA trilogy), I really enjoyed going back to his older books and getting an insight into his brilliant author mind as it evolved. The Lloyd Hopkins books have everything that makes his later work stand out – the obsessively detailed profile of the conflicted police detective, the gruesome and twisted case he investigates, the particular shade of noir that would later become Ellroy’s trademark style – but it’s all there in traces, it’s all just evolving. For a seasoned Ellroy fan these early novels are more like a study of an author in the making. Ellory introduces the book by saying that it was written at the same time as Red Dragon and that his own work is far inferior to “Thomas Harris’ brilliant and ground-breaking novel”. However, I would argue that Ellroy produced a pretty decent first attempt at a serial killer novel, which has everything from a perfectly twisted killer to an incredible range of imaginative murder scenarios, as well as a memorable detective character. It pales in comparison to his later books, but it’s still a very good, fast-paced and enjoyable noir thriller.
Pens: 3 out of 5

Because the Night (Lloyd Hopkins #2) by James Ellroy
Having gotten off to a pretty good start with Blood on the Moon, Ellory seems to lose the plot a little bit in the second Lloyd Hopkins book. The idea for the story is, again, very solid: a psychologist who is equal parts genius and madman uses his powers of manipulation to rope unsuspecting patients into a series of horrendous crimes, which eventually leads to a duel of the minds when he crosses the (by now very well established) character of the detective. But despite the brilliant characterisation and some pretty outrageous criminal action, the story seems to lag, taking a lot of unnecessary corners that were probably meant as plot twists but largely serve to confuse the reader. The book is important for the continuity of this series, but not necessarily worthy of reading as a standalone novel.
Pens: 2 out of 5

Suicide Hill (Lloyd Hopkins #3) by James Ellroy
After a mediocre middle part, the Lloyd Hopkins trilogy picks up the pace again for a memorable finale. Wrecked emotionally by the events of the previous two cases, Lloyd is taken off his duties and faces early retirement, when he sniffs out a series of bank heists that turn into one of the biggest investigation in the LA police force. What’s particularly enjoyable about this book is that it most of the action takes place on the side of the bad guys and as the story unfolds (as opposed to after the event), which creates a very compelling counterpoint to Hopkins’ police work. While Ellroy’s look into the minds of serial killers and offenders in the first two parts look pretty dated by today’s standards, the crimes in this story seem to originate from social circumstances and the very human desire to build up a life against the odds, which engages the reader on a whole different level. Overall, I think this trilogy is a very good early work and certainly holds up against other examples in the genre from its time.
Pens: 3 out of 5

re:View – The 2016 Bookshelf
March: Myths, Magic, Aliens and Killer Ants

This year’s March bookshelf was filled with surprises (both pleasant and nasty), some disappointments, a cast of weird creatures and a bit of a song and dance. From dead semi-goddesses to talking war cats, from magicians travelling between worlds to plant-based alien TV executives, this is certainly a mixed bag of books. And mostly wonderful.

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The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood

“It’s always an imprudence to step between a man and the reflection of his own cleverness.”

After reading this book I love Margaret Atwood more than ever. She basically takes Homer’s Iliad and lets Penelope tell her version from the underworld, thousands of years later, to set the record straight. Penelope’s down-to-earth, delightfully no-nonsense style is at the same time hilarious and tragic, describing her father’s attempt to drown her as a child, her arranged marriage, the long years of waiting for Odysseus and her loneliness among the hostile members of his court, the struggle of fighting off the suitors trying to wriggle their way into her husband’s, and earning nothing but suspicion and scorn for remaining faithful all these years. If you think Odysseus had a hard time, try being a woman in his story. A particularly morbid and wonderful device in Atwood’s storytelling is the chorus line of Penelope’s twelve dead teenage maids, who were cruelly murdered for no apparent reason after Odysseus’ return, and share their version of events here in a number of interludes, from mournful poems to naughty songs and anthropological lectures analysing their own significance. Basically, this is a wickedly clever celebration of feminism and womanhood told by the master of her genre with a ton of wit and soul.
Pens: ELEVEN out of 5!

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re:View – The 2015 Bookshelf
June + July: It’s been a slow summer

Here’s a confession you won’t hear a lot from me: I haven’t been reading a lot lately.

The reasons are plenty – I’ve started some new workout classes, I’ve been busy with my food blog, I took in a pregnant cat that just had kittens…and somehow the books just didn’t pick themselves up. It may also have to do with the fact that I got stuck on Tom Holt’s J.W. Wells series, loving it at first and then getting bored very quickly. I hate to ditch books halfway through so I soldiered on through three volumes, but it took me an absolute age.

So here are the contents of this summer’s very slim (so far at least) bookshelf. I can’t wait for long autumn evenings on the sofa with a book and a tea…

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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