The Year of the Flood

This is the sequel to Oryx and Crake and I really enjoyed it, in fact I preferred it . I think that is simply because Margaret Atwood is just a far better writer when she is narrating from a woman's perspective.  Plus this book just had a meatier story line. (Metaphorically speaking as there isn't any meat we would recognise left in this futuristic world, apart from human.)
 What I love most about Atwood's futuristic world is that she takes advances in science, which we all recognise as normal,  and takes the progress to the nth degree. Ultimately this ends in the most nightmarish conclusions where all control and ethics have vanished.
This book happens concurrently to the action retold in Oryx and Crake just before the 'Flood' which kills off all humanity. This book has more colour though as you see how life is in the  pleeblands which are the ghetto areas where most of the people live if you don't work for a multi-national company.
  Society has disintegrated to the lowest denominator and Margaret's outlook is extremely bleak as mob rule takes over the world in graphically violent imagery.
 Amongst all this carnage there are God's Gardeners, a cult created around the sanctity and beauty of the Earth who try to keep old traditions alive. The two female protagonists come from this cult and their knowledge and forethought enables them both to survive through the 'Flood'   This cult is totally believable but all of the sermons at the beginning of each chapter did bore me a bit, maybe because I'm not such a big ecological or environmental warrior as Atwood. For me Atwood has enough grit and realism in this book  just to stop short of it being a preachy tome being thrown at my head!
I loved how people survived through these hard years before the 'flood' and also how characters from Oryx and Crake appeared in this novel .  The endings of the two novels end up at exactly the same point with charaters and plots interweaving. Very Clever!
 Now I have to wait for her to release the third book, what the hell is going to happen?!
I love Margaret Atwood because she takes risks in her writing.  She is so passionate, writes beautifully and even though she is sometimes annoying her stories keep you hooked.

Fifty shades of Grey

OK,  I've done it.  I've read it and it's over.   Hats off to E L James (That's all I'm taking off.) She's orgasming all the way to the bank because of her published phoawwwwanomen.
Yes, I read it in 2 days and parts of it were funny/weird/kinky/addictive.   But to be honest I just found Mr Christian Gray deeply, deeply disturbing and Ana just damn annoying.  Parts of the plot reminded me of the flat lining development of the fourth Twilight book. But  I don't think this book is read for plot development.
Calling this Mommy Porn is an insult to Mom's and porn, but hey who am I to write anything because 1000s and 1000s of women have swallowed this book whole with no gag reflex at all.
Maybe I'm just a snob, but I think not...I did manage to read it and enjoyed some of its bonkers content but to be honest I found most of it dull. Oh dear! Oh my! Yawn, yawn...my inner Goddess was losing the will to live but occasionally I did have to read things twice...really? what the hell???!!!!
This book is all over the media and press and the best article I read was comparing this book to a Gregg's pasty.  When you eat a Gregg's pasty you know exactly what you are going to get and you secretly enjoy it. You wouldn't buy a Gregg's pasty otherwise.
 Brilliant, to me this book was a  ham and cheese pasty. Yum!

The Sense of an Ending

What a bargain! I bought this after work today in a charity book shop in Bicester for £1. It's a thin book and I have always thought that paying £7.99 for both the kindle and book version was a total rip off so I grabbed this brand-new unread copy off the shelf without a moment's hesitation. 

I then started reading it in the garden after work and  I have just finished it in one sitting. I  have always thought that Julian Barnes is a bit of a posho, intellectual, poncy kind of writer and in a way he is but this book gripped me from start to finish and I totally enjoyed it.

 He starts with a boring man reflecting on his dull life. The first half is about him looking back at his life at school and his Uni days. Because the only important person is himself you can slowly begin to see why life has been such a safe,grey, bubble for him. 

When he receives a solicitor's letter with money left in a will from his dead girlfriend's mother things begin to unravel for him. 

The second half makes us aware that this guy is an unreliable witness. His memories are shady...nothing is what it seems. Was his girlfriend such a bitch and if so why?  What went on with the Mother? Is he responsible for the actions of his friend or is he being too self-important? What things is he leaving out or repressing? How can memory distort the reality? 

 He desperately wants to find out what the hell is going on but his ex-girl friend from over 40 years ago is keeping important information from him. The guy remains dull and self-centred, (all the imagery of masturbation make it clear that he really is a wanker!) He never asks questions or enquires about other people's feelings. He just reaches conclusion from what he imagines and makes conjecture without any solid facts. ( I supposed everybody does this...this is what makes this book so real, the guy is just Mr/Mrs Normal.)

In the end, the main protagonist being pretty unlikeable and boring is not really a problem. It's all about how Julian Barnes has manipulated you, the reader, to come to your own conclusions.

   Yes, the ending is totally left dangling and you are left with just a Sense of an Ending.

Julian Barnes is having the last laugh...he's left a lot of readers totally confused, me included!  

But I think that's the point...it doesn't matter that no ending or final conclusion is drawn up.  That's the whole purpose of the book.

I think this book is an allegory for 'history', the only class in school which all the friends attend together. The teacher says 'without all the facts history cannot be recorded properly and that sure happens in this book!

This book ends up being  just the self interested opinion of one side and even when the guy thinks he  has become  'enlightened' he hasn't. 

 For me nothing has shown me how clearly and cleverly you can be deceived than this annoying, yet deceptively clever little book!  Julian Barnes is a total show-off and I thought there would be a high probability of me disliking this book but I didn't...I loved it. 

Oryx and Crake

The Handmaid's Tale is one of my favourite books so therefore I was looking forward to reading Margaret Atwood's later dystopian novel.  Mostly I enjoyed it a lot but at times it got a bit downright strangely weird.   Even now I am still unsure if Oryx was a real character or a computer implanted figment of the imagination.

Anyway,this book is set in the near future and is about what will happen if  the unimpeded progression of scientific advances of today continue  and therefore,the consequential  terrible results.

People who work for big corporations live in heavily protected compounds whilst the world around them collapses as people die due to uncontrollable airborne viruses, wars,floods, storms and famines.  Society has ceased to function at any level and corporations run the show/world.

the world has no fish or meat to eat due to extinction and there is a severe lack of natural food. The corporations have bred new spliced animals. For instance..  Pigs mixed with racoons (Pigoons) for human transplants and a new kind of chemical chicken for 'natural' protein, which has no brain (hence can feel no pain) and is just a load of chicken breasts growing around a central point. People mostly just live on bland fake soy and piles of pills and drugs.

Droughts mean nothing really successfullly grows any more and the people who are lucky enough to live within the corporation boundaries literally live in a bubble, protected from the horrors of the outside world.

Crake is a super intelligent, delusional scientist who also suffers from believing he is God. He decides to kill off all humanity with an uber-super drug after splicing the perfect human beings called the Crakers; who eat nothing but grass, have no need for language or sun cream and are peace loving and incredibly beautiful.   Love and jealousy don't exist either because women just go into heat like dogs and four guys are chosen to service the  woman for a 3 day shagathon. Children are bought up as part of an extended faimily.

One poor guy is left alive to look after the Crakers. (Crake chooses his best mate and secretly immunises him against the killer virus.)  His name is Snowman (due to always being wrapped in a bed sheet to keep the intense sun rays off his skin). 

  The book is really just a stream of consciousness based around Snowman and his memories.  Parts of it are really funny (Especially when he remembers the food he used to eat and the  computer games and shows he used to watch as a kid).  Other bits are just down right weird.  But hey, I respect Atwood for writing such a mad book.  Parts of it make no sense and I feel like she was off her head whilst writing it...but hey, she's passionate and her energy and ideas kept me hooked. 

The ending is really unclear too which would have annoyed me if I didn't have the second book to read... I've already started that.  Bring on the horrors!  Let's hope it all starts to make a bit more sense after book two.