Divergent

This was the only book I read on my holiday apart from Guide books and maps.  Anyway it's been a while since I finished it and to be honest I can't remember much.  It was a sort of 'lite' version of Brave New World. For me it was more Enid Blyton/cartoonesque than hard hitting dystopian teenage fiction.

The idea though was great, people are born into one faction with certain traits which you have to follow and live by.  For instance Abnegation are a group of people who only think of the welfare of others and lead grey, puritanical lives, whereas candour are a group who believe that the most important quality is telling the truth at all times.   Anyway these groups take on new recruits when kids turn 16 and Beatrice ends up in the Dauntless faction,the  place where people have no fear and happily spend their free time jumping off moving trains and fighting their deep fears in simulated worlds. To be honest these different factions felt more like Houses in Harry Potter's school.  Good old Beatrice or Tris as she is known ends up being divergent, that means she has the brains and ability to behave in different ways depending on the circumstances. hence she doesn't fit easily into one group. Being divergent is very dangerous...poor old Tris is in serious trouble.

Anyway, the story goes on and on and to be honest I lost the will to live a bit whilst reading. (Although I was sucked in and had to finish it!)  This book is a semi- clone of The Hunger Games because characterisation is weak and completely one dimensional. The only thing which matters is an urgent plot full of strange violence.( Violence which failed to make me feel scared or raise my blood pressure. Violence which managed somehow to seem pretty damn lame, tame and dull.  maybe I'm just too dark!!!)   There was a rather annoying love interest theme too involving lots of looking at each other longingly, sighing and stroking bits of each other's bodies. The plot was really underdeveloped. This could have been so much better if the author had created a more believable world.  To be honest the Chicago of this awful future was not described at all.  Most of the plot just happened in the equivalent of a Hogwart's school playground.  Anyway the end was quite good. One ,because the story finally got fairly interesting and two, because it was the end.

The Happy Prince and other stories.

The Nightingale and the Rose.

The Devoted Friend.

Today on the bus I read 4 stories by Oscar Wilde.  God knows if I read the really,really easy peasy children versions on my kindle, or what, but by the end of my morning commute I had read all 4.
Anyway, they were great.   Loved them. Loved them, loved them!! I think I will read them all again tomorrow too.
 I especially liked the The Nightingale and the Rose. It was almost too painful to read as the beautiful singing bird slowly  impales her heart into the thorn of the white rose to give it the blood red colour. (To me verging a bit on the gory and the sexual...but maybe I was bit over sensitive  just because I was reading too early on a bus with an empty stomach!)  To top it all off, once the guy gets the rose it is rejected by the woman he loves, so he just throws it away. charming!
As for the last one...umm. Again the moral of the story is a bit twisted and rather difficult to get, but by the end I was totally distressed and angry  Thinking 'what the hell?'   Poor Hans being taken for such a devoted fool.  The hold of his twisted, rich landlord over him was tragic. To me the moral of this story was don't abuse your position of power and don't just blindly follow the rules and ways of others.
As for the first two.  They were just great as well.   The wonderful swallow and all-seeing prince on his podium.  And the grumpy old giant who has a second chance.
What a great journey to work.  Reading them has now made me want to pull out  my volume of Hans Christian Anderson. Bring on the Fairy Tales!

PS They were the original versions:
 http://www.surlalunefairytales.com/authors/wilde.html#TALES

The Great Gatsby

                                       

In just a few days I have devoured this book. I have even enjoyed being stuck in traffic jams so I can read more and more. It might be a short book but my God, it's in an intense, poetic, yet stripped back style and wasn't really an easy read.

Fitzgerald books have alwaysreminded me of school and the grimness of reading set books when you haven't really got a sodding clue what is going on!  Anyway I understood and enjoyed it far more this time. Maybe 25 more years of life experience  helped! 

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No single person in this book is pleasant apart from the narrator, Nick. He is the only honest  character in the entire book. Everyone is deceitful, living a lie, keeping up appearances or living in a dream world. Everyone is vapid or dull apart from GATSBY.  He has a spirit, a life force, good looks,a mysterious   unknown past,history, brains and courage.   The only tragic flaw is that he is living a lie, a usurper in this world of the perfect American Dream. 

Today everyone would have found a release from  all their tension by going on a programme like Made in Chelsea or selling gossip to the Sun. These people are the monied, uber priveliged, bored twenty something's of the 1920s.  All they do is throw parties, drink mint juleps, gossip , lounge about, gossip, drive fast cars around, gossip, bitch and shop.  But yes I loved the tragic Gatsby and all the time I was thinking "get that annoying Daisy out of your head Gatsy!"  He made all this dodgy money for one reason, so he could be living near to his beloved Daisy, who he first met back West when he was a soldier. He has put Daisy onto a serious pedestal, built her up to be the most important thing in his life. He loves thinking and dreaming about her and when they finally meet things then start to fall apart.   The reality just can't live up to the dream and she absolutely fails Gatsby.  

Daisy and her husband are so fantastically foul.  Poor Gatsby has his heart totally broken and the end is so sad. Yes, I did cry! I'm in love with Gatsby... cricky he was so dumb to still hold a candle for that awful, vapid Daisy!

People say this book is a love story. I'm sorry, I disagree. To me it was a highly cynical, yet beautiful read about how hard it is to fit in if you don't have the right background or credentials and how  love is far better  in the mind than the close up reality. Illusion is the most important thing. Keep up the appearances and hide what you really think at all costs. Infact hide things so well and so deep that in the end you finally give up thinking about anything or anyone.

Palace Walk

Y

 What a great  book.  For the last two months I have been a fly on the wall inside the house of the Egyptian, Abd al-Samad family during 1914-1919, seeing everything, both good and bad. I have been a witness into their most personal actions, thoughts and feelings. Mahfouz has done a wonderful thing. He has invited  readers into the heart of family life and then stripped the people's hearts  and their lifestyle's bare. By doing so we get a clear picture of what life was like in Cairo at the end of Ottoman rule and the beginning of British military rule. 

The head of the family is Ahmed, he is married to Amina and has five children. Ahmed is a complete control freak at home. Everyone is scared of him. He is a highly religious, upstanding ,moral member of the community who rules his family with an iron fist. How he is viewed by the community is of the greatest importance for him.  No member of the family would even consider questioning him or disobeying him. He keeps his wife and two daughters under strict house arrest. Their only view of life is through the upper floor window grills and a bit of fresh air when they put the laundry out on the roof. The boys go to school and the only knowledge the girls get is through snippets the boys tell them. I am witness to their cloistered view of life.  The laughs they have over the coffee brewing times together and the gossip as they make bread. Their bitchiness, their humour and their love for their brothers is apparent. But they NEVER question their meagre and poor existence and when Amina does venture out once, she pays heavily for it.  These women are lovely and funny and it's a tragedy that they are prisoners. They truely are birds without wings. 

Ahmed is a complete bigot and lives a double life.  in the evenings he goes out to soirees, gets drunk, sings, sleeps with prostitutes and even has an affair with the neighbour. He loves spending time with these charming and beautiful women. He loves their vivacity and it comes across that prostitutes are the only truely free and independent people in the whole of Cairo!  It's a shame that society deems that he will never ever see the fun loving side of his family at home. He is not a part of that loving, personal family world.

Mahfouz goes deep into the workings of the brain of a  bigotted , religious fundamentalist. He shows us how Ahmed tries to morally justify his dubious existence. It really is scary and a lesson into the minds of religious fanatics the world over! Very clever writing indeed! 

Ahmed's oldest son Yasin is a fat, lazy sloth who is bored most of the time. It is interesting watching him start to behave just like his father.  But unfortunately he doesn't have his father's wit, intelligence or looks and he ends up being really depraved with servant girls in the house. This results in Yasin's wife ordering a divorce. It's stressful watching Ahmed having to process his oldest son's dabauched behaviour.  The complete disregard for wives is revolting. Yasin sees his wife as nothing more than a pair of shoes and says " I can throw out a pair of old shoes, but how on earth can a pair of shoes disregard their owner?"  Yasin has no power either though, every little aspect of his life is controlled by his father.  This obviously results in his appalling behaviour to his wife (who obviously had been chosen for him by his father.)  Yasin equates married life to nothing more than an April Fool's chocolate. It looks good, you take a bite and it's full of garlic! 

Kemal is the youngest member of the family and lots of the book is retold through his eyes. He is great, a 10 year old boy full of fun and love and interest in life. He loves his Mum and sisters and has no idea about why they are restricted to staying in the house. He hates it. He asks them lots of questions  about marriage, love, babies and war and all he gets is ignored or slapped. He goes to school keen to learn and as most teachers  and students are striking  against British rule there is no one there to teach him anything. This 10 year old boy is the held up mirror through which we clearly see the system. A young, freedom loving, great little guy trying to live happily amongst the idiocy  surrounding him!   I am sure that Kamal is the author himself, showing us how impossible it is to live a satisfying life under such  a religiously repressive and highly immoral society.  Appearance is everything and shame can be bought on a family  by just one unveiled peek of a women's head through an open window.  It's hard to believe that this is a portrait of only 100 years ago and even worse to know that many countries the world over still live by these morally reprehensible codes.

Mahfouz is a writer, who loves people and loves life. By getting into the minds of the members of this one family he cleverly shows that Egyptian society can't move on until there is more freedom for all. An independent Egypt will only work if both men and women are allowed to florish. The people I have met in this book are great. Real people, warts and all. It's just clear that this repressive lifestyle where women are kept under the thumb and men have to lead sordid double lives has to change for the sake of his beloved country.  I wish he were still alive because it would be interesting to see what he would make of Egypt now.  

A great read, but Mahfouz deserves a far better English translation! Come on someone, retranslate it! 

The Ice Princess

I haven't read crime fiction for ages but I do like a bit of Nordic murder so I thought I would give this a go.  I enjoyed it and have spent my last few weeks on the train reading it, but I also know I will quickly forget it.  It wasn't too taxing but I still didn't manage to work out who the murderer was. I really thought I was on the right track, but I wasn't!  

 There were lots of sentences about making coffee, adding sugar and stirring it. Infact the whole book seemed to have a coffee making fetish.  Weird!  Maybe the Swedes are all just fanatic caffeine addicts.

I enjoyed trying to puzzle out who did the dirty murder but I also like a twisted, strange, eccentric, mad, alcoholic, depressed and autistic sleuth to solve it, but the main policeman and his lovely girlfriend were just too normal and boring for me.  The only thing they liked doing was making and drinking coffee together.  

This book is the first in a series of 8 or so. So maybe the characters will develop over time but I don't think I will read another one yet. 

 In fact yes, this book was OK, but just a little bit bland.  If it were ever to be televised it would be on ITV 3 on a week day!  

A Clash of Kings

I have been reading this book for over a month now and it's time to STOP. It's defeated me, I'm done. I'm a shadow of my former self. I am now a corpse like WIGHT prowling the frozen lands of the North, dazed and confused, thinking I am from the cast of LOST.   My  New Year's resolution is to just give up and move on!  

This book has been like a boa constrictor round my neck and I have finally cut loose.    Unfortunately according to Amazon there are about 50 million people who disagree with me but hey, maybe they are just sticking with the TV show.  Now that sounds like much more fun! 

Life is just too short to carry on reading this.  I am sadly  50% through but I just can't handle it any more! 

it's a shame because I liked the first book but this is just a sea full of margarine. I deeply respect the script writers of the TV series for dredging the good bits out of this over long saga and making HBO, the actors, themselves and Mr. Martin lots of money. 

I do like the idea behind the books though and think it's perfect for a TV series.  I just can't take the structure and rambling style of the writing anymore!  I have heard there is lots of sex in the TV series.  Well,  all I can say is this book might be better if there were more sex in it. (Probably not though.) 

 Also George Martin should be banned from writing from the perspective of grown women.  It's unbelievable that they are all either semi clad sex goddesses with dragon babies (Danerys) mad evil bitches who slap men's faces a lot and scream (Cersei) or boring whinging mothers whose chapters  are completely dull. (catylyn.)  At least the men and child characters are far more interesting!

Right enough...must go and feed my dragons. 

PS can anyone lend me the TV series? 

The first time. True tales of virginity, lost and found.

C

Thought I'd read this for something completely different. I didn't know what to expect, apart from maybe some sad and cringeworthy tales of women remembering experiences they'd rather forget...but I wasn't expecting such a GREAT book.  Honestly, this book was surprisingly brilliant. Really well written, funny in places, extremely honest, sad in parts but always incredibly moving.

it was tales that the writer had collected from willing women and men (aged between 85 and 25) who agreed to be interviewed about their first sexual experiences. All tales were placed into the social contexts and norms of their days.  It was fantastic social commentary of life and sex  in Britain from the 40s up to the present day. 

I loved it because it was so well compiled and she just comes across as a really great interviewer, managing to put people at ease and ultimately getting the people to tell her so much more than what she bargained for! 

I wish I had read this book when I was much younger. Anyone 14 or upwards and ALL sex education teachers should read this book...it might freak the kids a bit but ultimately it's all stuff I wish I had known about when I was younger.

What I love is the tone of the book is not judgemental at all. it's up to the interviewees to decide what 'losing your virginity' entails. Is it the first time you have full sex, the first time you have an orgasm, the first time you feel totally , absolutely and completely in love with someone or is it never? 

Is it worth waiting and holding out for someone special or is it better just to get the first time done, dusted and behind you? What are the pressures put on young people today and are we really anymore sexually aware and active now than young people 40or 50 years ago? 

  People candidly  recount all of the above issues and I especially loved the male point of view. It was great to get really brutally honest, funny and also sensitive impressions of virginity loss from the male perspective! 

I love the way that difference is applauded too. The stories from gays and lesbians are well told but the section that affected me mostwas on abstinence. people who had never had sex seemed to be the most shunned and isolated group. ('Still  a Virgin and not religious, why are you so weird?'  seemed to be a common question these people encountered!)  It was really refreshing to read stories from people who were happily declaring themselves, ( most of them without God in their ear) as different. 

In this book she talks about losing something you don't really have and why virginity is still a discussion point, even in modern Britain.

 When The author was about eight years old she found out what the word VIRGIN meant and she was shocked that there was a word to define the 'default' state. This was similar to me too. When I found out at about the same age I was upset to know that I could be labelled as a virgin. I didn't like the word or the label! 

What this book highlights though is how choices have improved life for women in the Western World. They might not be easy choices but at least here in Britain people can make them and not concern themselves too much with people's reactions to them. But here we are in the minority, most women around the world are still being brutilised for 'losing' something that is almost impossible to quantify or to define.  

All my friends read this book and then give it to your teenagers!