Lost In a Good Book

What a great read. This book is bonkers, bonkers, bonkers. Even maybe a little too bonkers because in each chapter so much happens and my brain was just constantly being fried. The parallel universe of 1985 becomes even more craz y in my second adventure with Miss Next as she realises that she is pregnant by her husband who is suddenly eliminated from the world and all conscious memory ( apart from hers) when the Goliath World Dominating Company black mail her into releasing Jack Schitt from his eternal damnation and hell like existence from within the confines of the pages of Edgar Allen Poe's

The Raven. 

Just writing this weird nonsense above makes me feel strange. I can't write about this book successfully because it is all so crazy and wonderfully insane! Thursday Next realises she has a special talent for book jumping and she can literally move into the pages of novels when  she reads them aloud. She ends up in Great Expectations and Miss Haversham becomes her book jumping or rather 'jurisfiction' guide. ( top notch book jumpers can move from book to book without the need to re-enter reality.)  Miss Haversham teaches her a lot and even Miss H  manages to jump into this real parallel world of Swindon in 1985 in order to buy books at a pound sale and drive fast cars (because Miss Haversham is a demon car racer at heart.)   Thursday Next then learns more tricks from the book librarian, the Cheshire Cat. I loved the surreal world of the eternal book library, to me it was like the Bodleian Library personified, because every book was a living breathing entity.  Thursday Next then deals with characters from books posing as humans, she also ends up trapped in the world of written washing labels on clothes and then simply travels through the centre of the world in a gravitube in 40 mins to Japan.  ( There are no aeroplanes in this parallel existence!) it's all so mad it sounds ridiculous..which it is but I LOVED IT and didn't want it to end.

I especially loved the time warps and bits on coincidences when all probabilities and coincidences merge at one point. The bits on time travel were weird but still fun and the characters who only speak through footnotes were bonkers too.

This book is not for everyone. But hey give it a go if you are a complete freak who would also appreciate   Neanderthals, mammoths and dodos being reintroduced on our planet and Wales to be a Socialist Republic and also if you are someone who literally likes getting lost in a good book!

Great fun! 

Our Man in Havana

I had to read this for my book club and with great trepidation I started it on Friday and finished it today. Not too bad, over quickly! Infact I have never been a Graham Greene fan. Fusty, boring and old fashioned in my opinion. I have never been able to get past page 10 in previous novels I have tried to read. All this spy/thriller shite with cobwebbed men slinking about drinking whisky leaves me cold. Well I DID read all of this and I have to say..not bad. 6/10 but not something I can rave about. 

It's meant to be funny...I didn't get half of the jokes. It's meant to be a spoof spy and I got that. It's meant to be thrilling, well in my opinion it wasn't that thrilling. Infact Greene is supposed to be one of the best writers of the 20 th century. Well, for me he reads more like an Enid Blyton for adults. Simple, spare, modern writing seems more like a script for a play to me with people talking to each other like robots. I then get confused about which character is actually speaking as there are no references. It's just a style of writing that I'm not used to and don't like.

The spoof part I did enjoy. The British Secret service comes across as so ridiculous that they employ an English vacuum sales man (an expat living in Cuba, for over twenty years ) to spy for them. He obviously knows no spies and no massive plots to overthrow the Americans but he wants the money for his Kim Kardashianesque, Pony loving, Virtuous Catholic yet also an implied tart, 16 year old daughter. He makes up stories about spies and draws copies of his vacuum parts and makes them out to be secret weapons being built by the communists in the mountains. All mad and funny but then people really do start to die and Mr. vacumn seller gets involved in more than he can chew. ( this part of the story I loved as it made me think of our government's response to Weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Were these just drawings of enlarged hoover parts too?!   I think so! )This book was written in 1958 though, well before and also a year before Castro came to power.

This book revolves around a sad,squirrel like, dried up old expat racist trying to earn a few extra bucks whilst spending most of his time in his mans club drinking whisky and daiquiri with his German chum and  deceiving MI6.

I know I probably didn't 'get it' and I'm not intelligent for the 'humour' but I didn't like any of the characters, apart from the fascist policeman with his human skin cigar case. But hey, he was a great James Bond villain. The love story was rubbish ( like a teenage boy writing a love story for homework.) The sexism and racism I could accept, because that's how these important novelists wrote but the whole story was rather sordid and unpleasant. It was redeemed by one scene through... Draughts played with tiny bottles of whisky and bourbon instead of pieces. So when you take a piece you have to neck the miniature bottle. I liked this idea because it meant the better player would get drunk quicker and then lose his powers of concentration. The players were weasel Wormold ( vacuum seller man) and my favourite character, the James Bond villain. I loved him trying to win, stay in control and then finally get totally plastered! 

Oscar and Lucinda

phew, what a book. Such a weird one.  It took me an age to read and in the middle I got that 'walking through treacle' feeling but ultimately it's a book I absolutely loved!  A strange one that I can't really put into words because parts of it were pretty tough to get through whereas other parts were brilliant to read.  Carey is an amazing writer who just takes you on a roller coaster ride.  Both Oscar and Lucinda were born a century too early.  If they had been born 100 years later they would have got together in Las Vegas, made a fortune in the dot coms of silicon valley and then settled down to a life of farming,  all night card games for pennies, household chores and true love.  This was what was so sad and frustrating about their love for each other, the fact that the restrictions of their uptight Victorian lifestyle kept them apart and kept them from understanding each others true feelings. it was so infuriating (as bad as Remains of the Day, another book I loved.)
I also enjoyed the harsh portrayal of life in Sydney.  This was a life full of people with no redeeming features.The landscape is harsh, the people are harsh and even the rivers are full of menace. I loved it. But the way Carey writes is so brutally funny.  He doesn't do sentimentality but some of his sentences are truly beautiful. He just seems to cut through all the crap and get to the heart of things.
I also liked how he described his characters.  His descriptions were so good it's like they were all in 3D, right in front of you and Victorian life was going on right in front of you too.  Scenes from this book will stay with me for ever. Especially the boat crossing from London to Sydney and Oscar's life with his strict father in Devon.
My favourite part of the book was the beginning and how Oscar and Lucinda 's lifestyles built up to their independent expressions of their gambling addictions.  Both had such different upbringings but the joy they got from the 'logic' or 'peace'  of a good card game or a great run at the races was really well described. I especially enjoyed how both of them enjoyed losing just as much as winning. This last feature of their gambling addiction came into true focus by the end of the book and it was just so sad I had to stop reading it 50 pages before the end and have only just finished it off today. the ending was weird.  Almost like Peter carey was suffering from an author ending frenzy.   It was very different from the rest of the book...but hey, that's why I like this author. He's full of surprises. I'm sure when I read it again it will be a completely different book!