The Fast Diet

I read this this evening. It took me one sitting to digest this and yes, I was fascinated.  I'm also bloody starving as I have started this 5:2 diet today.  I'm not into diets at all but yesterday I ate enough for 4 people so even if I don't continue the famine at least I have slightly readdressed the balance.

This book was a sane, logical argument in favour of restricting calorie intake (500 for women) on two days a week. The other 5 you can eat what you want to. It sounds easy.  I'm sure it isn't. But the  benefits seem immense according to the book.  I'm not sure about the benefits in reality! Today I have had 2 weetabix, 1 tea with milk, a miso soup and a salad and lots of herbal tea. I have been teaching  teenagers and this afternoon I was climbing around cleaning all the classroom white boards.  I feel BLOODY STARVING AND KNACKERED!  I have decided to come to bed early for a change and hopefully fall asleep soon. I really want some wine to knock me out.  Luckily I don't have any.

It.ll be worth it though because if I keep this diet up I might live to be 140 years old with no dementia. Now,that will be fun! Being so old and remembering with perfect clarity all the days I spent eating BUGGER ALL.  can't wait!  Night...

Lionhearts:Saladin and Richard I

Got this from the library and it's taken me a while to get through it but I surprisingly really enjoyed it. It was a bit like reading A Game of Thrones set  in the 1190s but without the  dragons or any women. 

(I googled  'life of women in the 12th century' and got nothing much apart from poor women got up at 3am, fed the family and the chickens, worked on the land, made candles out of animal fat and died at around  age 35!)  Life really was so grim on this Earth that the symbolic heavenly paradise of Jerusalem was political and religious gold for the people who controlled it.  

The book kicks of with the life of Saladin.  A man of culture and learning who was able to unite most Muslims from Egypt to Iraq and organise an  attack on the foreign invader expansion in his lands. He also had the respect of the local Syrian Christians who liked his fair minded and pragmatic approach to life. He begins the conquest by killing off the evil corrupt Christian knights who control the trade routes. This took me back to his adventures in Karak and  Shobak castles in Jordan. He then had an amazing victory at Hattin where he killed off thousands of Christians by simply blocking off their access to fresh water. Genius.

Richard I , King of England, (who much preferred living in France to the grim lands of England.) heard about the advances of this mighty leader and he decided it was time to reclaim the Holy Land back. 

 Richard I comes across as a great warrior and logistics manager but someone who could also behave like a 5 year old whenever he wanted to.  He was good with money and spent the cash that he gained /stole/bribed through his travels through France, Italy and Cyprus really well .Even though most 'Christians' in Europe were at war with each other, he managed to get everyone behind the greater cause of regaining the holy land back off the Muslims. Richard I was like a self publishing brand.  I see him as a Simon Cowell/Mountbatten character.Weird but true.

Richard's travels across Europe are a joke. Every leader hates him, but he has money, vision and strategy plus he's canny enough to treat his soldiers well.  I love the way he gets his 'Iron Army' of thousands down the cost from Acre to Jaffa. He organises  the boats with supplies. He has the guys on their days off safely walking on the beach completely exhausted carrying  all the equipment. The knights are protected by the longbow men , foot soldiers  and the highly organised Hospitallers and Templars at the rear. It's a perfect example of team work but  the irony was that  Muslim attack was less of a worry than the tarantulas, mosquitos, thirst and  heat. 

Reading this  makes you aware of the long standing political  and emotional reasons behind the tensions in the middle East.  What I didn' trealise was how strongly  Europeans hated each other.  After his experiences in the Middle East Richard decided it was finally time to travel home to sort out problems back  in England.  Unfortunately Richard suffered from extreme sea sickness, so travelled back by land. This resulted in him being locked up in a German jail for 4 more years.  Bad luck!  That guy sure would have a few tales to tell!

The One Hundred Year Old Man who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared

Right, I've finished it!  That was a big thick book and to be honest I'm glad it's over.  By the end I had had enough and had lost interest in the characters but the first half of the book was EXCELLENT.  I loved the story with the suitcase and the criminals  and the hard drinking in the forest and the elephant and the hot dog seller. If this book were shorter it would have been fabulous but to be honest I just lost the will to live by the end and even now 12 hours later I'm beginning to forget what the story was about!
In fact I don't really know what this book was about. It was just whimsical, fluffy stuff which went no where.  A bit like a written version of Forest Gump.  I sound harsh because parts of it were funny but to be honest not funny enough...maybe Swedish humour is just lost on me.
I feel happy that its finished and I can move onto something else. I hate it when a book starts really well and then just goes downhill. I'm left reading hoping that it will pick up again.  Unfortuately this book didn't, it just run out of steam!

What a Carve Up

What can I say about this book.  Firstly, it's meant to be a satire on the excesses of 1980s Britain.  OK, but satires are meant to be funny and this was not funny at all...it was depressing really and took itself far too seriously.  I wanted to like it but I didn't.  I think Coe was trying to be far too clever and there was just too much in this book and I got overloaded. It was just too pompous for it's own good and every character was either depressed, mad, physically sick or an arsehole.

Parts of it were interesting though especially the chapters on the hideous Winshaw family:

The meanest, greediest, cruellest bunch of back-stabbing, penny-pinching bastards who ever crawled across the face of the Earth.   Between them they represent all of the ills of British society and to be honest Jonathan Coe surpassed himself here!

• One brother was busy carving up the NHS and turning it  into a profit-making business.(Most of this section has come true now.)
• One sister was a hack who would write drivel and lies about anybody in her paper ( amazing foresight considering the fall out of the British Press.)
• One brother was a banker (Again it was uncanny reading about the initial seeds behind the economic crash, which were planted in the 80s;  .)
• Another sister was an intensive animal farmer. (The secrets of her farming success would turn the stomach of even hardened carnivores! Again, still  poignant today what with all these horses around!) 
• One brother was an arms dealer and a total crook. The section on selling arms to Saddam was pretty good actually.
• Another brother was a film producer who was a total pervert. (Shades of Savile here.)
• Another was an art dealer who knew sod all about art and didn't really care as long as he made a huge profit.

Yes, a lovely genetic pool here.
I think if you are the kind of person who likes being depressed and feeling totally helpless in this shitty world than this is the book for you. In fact even Coe must have got bored of writing  this depressing book because the end is just a cop out.  He'd had enough and just gave up!! Wish I had.

The Talented Mr. Ripley

Wow, what a great and entertaining book.  I loved it and I want to know more about Patricia Highsmith.
 I can't believe she wrote this book in 1955.  It seemed so modern, stylish and fresh and really tense.  I read it on the train up and back from, Newcastle.  Visiting my good mate Nicky put an extra macabre twist on the whole event because I weirdly imagined  how I could bash  Nicky around the head  and get away with  her murder.  (Sorry, no offence Nicky, if you read this. It just proves how much this book got into my head!)  
At first I found it hard to get the actors from the film, Jude Law and Matt Damon, out of my head.  In fact Jude Law was well cast as the fun loving, dippy and rich Dickie but Matt Damon was just too good looking and clean cut.  Mr Ripley is a nobody, a faceless grey person who has no confidence until he takes on the personality and identity of the only guy he liked and killed, Dickie.  Ripley hates himself until he is in character.  He is a loathsome man really but Highsmith is amazing and twists the book so that you are behind Ripley all the way and just want him to get away with the murder. Also the repressed homosexual edge of Ripley's personality is  expressed in a really clever and totally repressed way!
This book was a  real page turner and so, so twisted. The manipulation and games played by Ripley are ridiculous but it works because you really believe it could have happened. He is so organised in his deception  and you, as the reader, become so involved in his plan that yes, in the end it is like you have become Ripley yourself.  When he makes mistakes you think...NO! NO! RIPLEY THE GAME IS OVER. It's a stressful and claustrophobic read but ultimately totally enjoyable.  Great!






 

A Game of Thrones

Yes, I was hooked onto this book within a few chapters.  I hadn't watched anything on the TV, so I didn't know anything about this series and I really enjoyed it.  My inner JRR Tolkien geek was really happy with this book whereas another part of me was horrified by how violent, gratuitous and degrading the storyline was. The author is obviously obsessed by histories and wars of the Middle Ages but hey, it worked.
As complete escapism it was brilliant. I loved the dwarf, Jon Snow, the dragon Princess, the completely imagined world with all the different families, the ice wall in the North, the zombies, the Dothkari with their voodoo magic, the outdoor prisons on the top of precipices, the direwolves, the tree face worshippers and  the evil characters.  The only problem I had was with the maps, which are hard to access on a kindle and also how much I have left to read.  This thick booked adventure is just 1/7 of the total. That's a huge investment of my time!

Music and Silence

I loved this book and read it really slowly.  It was like dark chocolate, a little goes a long way.  The story was  set in the King's court of Copenhagen in the 17th century and I  felt like I was there living amongst these characters. Denmark at this time was a cold remote place where people lived a life believing in myths and fantasies and I really felt the power of these in this book.  It was like Hans Christian Anderson for adults.
 The main character, who played the lute for the King, was British, handsome, talented, kind and in love with the Danish maid servant to the evil queen.  The king was highly educated and kind but naive and as ugly as a toad, and the women in it were mostly complete monsters. The King's mother hoarded up all her wealth and would do anything to hide it from her poor son. The way she hides her money and gold is hilarious.  His wife was a beautiful, intelligent, yet selfish bitch who was having an affair with a Lord and constantly getting drunk out of complete boredom. And there were other witches who held power through their cooking abilities, their sex drives or just through their desire to  just better themselves.
This book seemed more like a well written fairy story than anything too serious.  It had moments of complete bonkers madness in it and others of complete poetry. It was a book of absolute opposites:  Music and silence, love and hate, black and white, beauty and ugliness, modern thinking and belief in myths, funny and serious.
 Yes, it was great and to be honest I would quite happily read it all again! Rose Tremain writes like a dream. Thanks again Freia for the recommendation.  It's taken me about 4 months to get round to writing a review...but I haven't forgotten this book. Probably the best read of the year. (No, equal first with The Lacuna!)