The Steep Approach to Garbadale

I really enjoyed an Iain Banks book at the beginning of 2014 so I thought I would do the same this year. All I can say is this book could have been so brilliant and the start was amazing!   The main character, Alban, was a sexy dude and the story had potential. But unfortunately Banks couldn't keep up the momentum and apart from the odd few pages of brilliant writing this was a pretty average read.   it was a shame because it could have been so good  but I just think Iain Banks just run out of steam.

It seemed like Banks was using Alban, the main guy, as a mouth piece for his own political views and it all turned into a weird rant against America and capatalism. the sort of sound bites that would come out of the mouth of a 17 year old student. Stuff that seemed a bit out of place and disjointed in a novel.

The first half was really good and pretty funny but it just didn't keep up the momentum and I really feel like I've wasted my precious time reading it to the end. I feel a bit disappointed. It is as if a gremlin author came along and sabotaged the second half of the book.  I had to carry on reading because I just believed that it would get better but it never really did. Oh well.  I won't waste any more time writing about it! 

Barbed Wire and Babushkas

Really enjoyed this travel book. Two British canoeists decide to row down one of the longest and least known rivers in the world.( well , unknown to the West.)  The Amur-or Black Dragon river to the Chinese- is about 4, 400 km long,starts in Mongolia, separates the sensitive countries of China and Russia for over half it's length and goes through the least known parts of wooded Siberia. I loved it because I knew nothing about this part of the world and I have been googling the towns and villages they rowed through on their way.  It took them 107 days and mostly they camped along the Russian side of the river.  They were not given permission by the Chinese authorities to enter Chinese waters or lands and often had to guess in which country Islands,which popped up in the middle of the river,were in!  They only made a mistake once by camping on a Chinese Island but the guards in the Watch tower were luckily quite chilled about it. 

This book was not really about canoeing but about the people they met along the way. Whenever they came across a village or city they would stay in a hotel and restock  food and people were obviously totally intrigued by them.  They could not comprehend that they were travelling the whole length of the river at all but were totally flabbergasted that they had rowed down from the nearest town! Funny. 

There was obviously lots of beaurocracy and a few times they were locked out of villages with barbed wire fences  with patrolling guards along the perimeter,because the local Russian border police didn't want foreigners entering the village. The guards probably wanted something to do.  It wasn't clear when this exhibition took place  but I would say from the lack of mobile devices and from music references about 1999/2000. Obviously the writer was having a great time and the tone of the book is not serious at all. More like VIZ in places, especially all the stereotypical lusty Russian girl references. But hey, this guy was writing from his heart and it was obvious that he had spent a long time writing a diary! 

 you get a clear feeling of how Russian policy after the break up of the USSR had basically left this area of Siberia to rot. The river wasn't really used by the Russians to move anything because the Transsiberian railway was so nearby whereas Chinese barges were constant going back and forth and up and down. There was high unemployment amoung local Russian  river dwellers and a general fear of theEntrepreneurial Chinese. Also the towns on the other bank, in China, looked far more affluent. Luckily the guys paid for a travel visa to go into a Chinese town for three days and they were blown away by the trade, noise and vibrancy of the town. 

 Other problems the two guys dealt with were being shot at by over zealous guards, being told exactly where to camp every night. Not having decent enough maps, being flooded out in their tents, having packets of noodles and cigarettes thrown at them by Chinese sailors, being mobbed by Russian prostitutues( really?!) and often getting beautiful gifts whenever they left a Village or town by the suddenly friendly border guards. 

!! I often thought the references to pissed Russian men and horny prostitutes was far too stereotypical and I hope the author was just over exaggerating. There was not much at all about the politics and history between the two countries. Obviously relations were tense though!   Apart from the fact that Russians took away this land from Manchurian Chinese because of the lucrative trade in fur trapping. (A similar story to the Gold Rush in California.)  but there was enough to give me a taster to find out more about this interesting, yet completely unknown part of the world. 

Cheers Diana for this great birthday present! 

Gone GIrl

Wow. I have devoured this book and haven't really been able to do anything of any value over the last few days apart from read this.  Considering the film is out and the book was a runaway success in 2012 I have done well in not knowing anything about the story.  The twist in the middle worked for me. I managed to not flick through the pages at all.  If you read this ( and I really think you all should if you haven't yet) then I recommend that you never 'accidently' look at any pages in the second half of the book.

I can't write much apart from this was a great escapist read. Bloody scary, sick ,funny and bleak. Gillian Flynn does a fantastic job in creating a post 2008 economic crash, dystopian, dysfunctional marriage. All I can say after reading this is THANK GOD I AM SINGLE! 

Right time to get on with getting ready for Christmas. thank god I've finished. I was truely addicted. Great fun! 

The Mill on the Floss

I 

I started reading this coz it was free on my kindle and then slowly, drip, drip, drip I got totally mesmerised. So much so that I had to buy the book. When a book is amazing I need a proper copy of it in my hand. To be honest I thought this would be really dull and heavy going in places but I would just give it a shot. But for me it was never dull, but sometimes difficult to understand due to the language. It has taken me an age to read because often I read bits twice or three times,because the language was just so beautiful or I didn't quite understand it!  Honestly, I have been totally transported away reading this. 

Elliot has the skill of putting emotions, ideas and pictures into your head in a way that I haven't witnessed, probably since I read the Lacuna by Kingsolver. Her topics are universal and it all seemed so modern. Human nature doesn't change and Elliot had such great insight due to being banished from her own family for being a weird intellectual, who was living openly with a married man.

What can I say, I am actually sad I have finished it.It's not perfect in anyway. the ending is so bad.I'm still in shock by how Geoge Elliot finished it off but the rest of it is great stuff.

The beginning third is based around Maggie and her older brother Tom, growing up in a Mill near the village of St. Ogg's. St.Ogg's is brilliant, a great depiction of small town England. I loved MAggie's Aunties.  Constantly disgraced, gossiping and judging. Maybe I am mad but I saw lots of humour in the way Elliot wrote about these characters. 

Maggie is bright, her brother isn't good at book learning. But Tom has a private education,the type his Dad didn't have. Mr. Tulliver uses His son to show society  that he has ' come up' in the world. Tom hates it all and MAggie's brain is left to stew. She has no formal education and picks up stuff from Tom's discarded books. She gets so frustrated she has a fetish doll she grinds against the beams of her bed.  Bloody hell, when I read this I knew I was in for a good read!!  People don't write like that these days.

Maggie running away to live with the gypsies was another highlight. So funny, yet so sad at the same time. Maggies's Dad is in debt, lives beyond his means and ultimately loses his Mill and his money. The guy who takes the  Mill and wins the law suit becomes Mr. tulliver's arch enemy. Infact Mr. Wakem is hated so much by Mr. Tulliver that the whole family have to witness and sign a curse on his name written by Dad in his shaky hand, in the Bible, the only book which they still possess. Again an image that I have never seen before. Melodrama in the most boring town in England. love it.

The first third is all about MAggie's childhood. it cleverly explains the psychology behind why she behaves like she does when she is older. her fierce loyalty to her family and her older brother outway everything. Maggie grows up in isolation and poverty, totally discarded due to the shame of her Father's bankruptcy but she makes a secret friendship with the hated Mr. Wakem's son. Now he is a thoughtful, artistic hunchback.  Good God...George Elliot sure brings on the afflictions!

He is her intellectual equal,he falls in love with Maggie but of course Maggie only likes him as a friend. Yet more disaster befalls on Maggie. 

Due to Tom's wits and nerve( nothing related to his exclusive education) he manages to claw the family out of poverty and suddenly Maggie is back on the scene and her Aunties on her Mother's side agree to see her.  Suddenly Maggie meets Stephen Guest who is almost engaged to Lucy, Maggie's cousin. Stephen and Maggie fall madly in love with each other and the stolen glances, mad passions and drama of this part of the book were so good. yes, I'm the queen of Victorian literature but to be honest it wasn't melodramatic at all  just beautiful, honest and totally gorgeous to read and imagine. Infact, it all seemed strangely modern. Poor Maggie is totally bowled over by this gorgeous guy and just doesn't know what to do. As you have gussed things don't work out well and poor Maggie's emotions are totally pulled through the wringer. Infact George Elliot must have been emotionally fraught too by the last few pages of this book. She probably had no choice but to end it the way she did.

Another interesting point was how George Elliot writes about small town judgements on Maggie's behaviour. The differences between how men are women are treated is clearly shown but Elliot cleverly shows how everyone is treated so badly and how society loses so much potential from both men and women due to the way the ' World's Wife' judges everything. One other thing,Bob Jakin and his dog mumps. He is the kindest, most intelligent, funniest door to door salesman and entrepreneur in English literature. Why didn't  Maggie fall in love with him?! 

 

Alan M. Turing

Both interesting and annoying. This was the over sweet, incredibly censured, highly pompous, rose tinted spectacles biography of Alan Turing as written by his grief stricken mother in the 1950s.  Turing was the mathematical and computer genius at Bletchley Park who broke the Enigma Code which meant  German code  could be intercepted at the end of the World War Two. This meant the UK government could now work out where German submarines were under the Atlantic Ocean and the UK was able to safely get supplies across from the States. Turing basically stopped the Brits starving at their weakest and poorest point during the War. ( not that Sara Turing wrote about any of this stuff because like everyone she didn't really know what Turing had done during the war. It was all top secret then.) 

Anyway Sara goes on about leaving little cute Alan behind at pre-prep school and how he changed during puberty from a cute little genius to a dishevelled, eccentric mathematician at Cambridge. She keeps on about his floppy, messy hair and lack of girl friends and his 'disorganised' life. But she was also a bit of a maths wiz herself so was also able to talk about his first love of solving mathematical problems. I loved this part...getting inside his brain was amazing. Alan could read numbers at two and because he mixed up left from right he organised his own solution by putting a black dot on his left hand to remind him to start counting from that end! What a geek! 

She also talks about how he didn't need glasses because all of his thinking was done in his head not on paper. He never seemed to be holding a pen but was always dreamy, with his head in the clouds. Yes, he was a complete eccentric who could have moments of great kindness but mostly spent his time on unfathomable computational mathematics. Yes, he was truely the godfather of computer science.

The tragedy is that his genius went unrecognised. He loved travelling to the States and around Europe but by the early 50s the UK government had banned him from this pursuit due to the highly sensitive knowledge he carried around in his head. I don't think the establishment liked him, nor  approved of him but they sure needed him alive.

In 1952 Turing killed himself with an arsenic injected Apple bite. A clever way to die. His mother in the biography thinks it's an accident due to his slovenly behaviour but all of his close friends knew this was suicide. A tragic way for a British legend to die.

The introduction is the best part to this book it talks about Turing's homosexuality and how he really was absolutely OK and happy with his own private life and how it was all the other establishment figures around him and his family who had the problem. In 1949 Turing reported a burglary in his house but the policemen who came seemed more concerned about his personal arrangements with the guy he was with. He wasn't sent to jail but was forced for two years to have estrogen injections. This did nothing to change Turing's sexuality the injections just made him depressed and made him grow breasts.  Poor bloke. I found this part of the book really difficult to read.

I also found the end section written by Turing's brother interesting. It's of its time with 1950s stiff upper lip sentiment but is a more honest and open reflection of Alan's life. It was thankfully added after the mother had died.

The brother talks lovingly about Turing's brain power and his great sense of fun but also far too much about his 'base sexuality' and how nobody in the family ever accepted Alan's private world. The mother was always trying to change him and had basically written this memoir because this was how she wanted to remember her son as a super saccharine, snobby ,  uber-genius. Urghhhh!

But the revelation from the brother that Turing went to many psychiatrists not for his homosexuality but to remove the demons of his complete hatred for his mother, now that was an interesting revelation!!

Alan Turing absolutely hated her.  He hated that she abandoned him and that she seemed more interested in what other people thought than the truth and that she was always trying to change him.

What I get from this book is how Alan Turing was born before his time. A genius who was totally comfortable in his own skin who just wanted to be left alone to puzzle out mind blowing problems. If he decided to wear pyjamas all day, eat nothing but lollipops and have a boyfriend over then he was completly at ease with this. In the end though  the pressures all got too much.  A great British life was tragically taken away at only 41years of age. RIP. 

 

An Equal Music

I have read this book so quickly. It was a mad passion which took over my week. I haven't really wanted to watch TV or movies in the evening. I just needed to know what the hell was going to happen in this novel.

This book was not my normal choice but I have had it on my shelf for  about 2 years. I also got a copy for Catherine Blay and this is the first book I have ever read in tandem with another person.  Almost like a book club. (Sorry Catherine I'm writing this without talking to you first.) 

This is nothing like A Suitable Boy.( Vikram's Indian based, wrist breaking family saga.)  And looking back on it I can't really understand why I was so sucked in and loved it so much. I think it is because I just had no idea what the hell was going to happen and what on earth this book could be about. Nor how on earth it could end. It was a really different book to anything I have ever read. 

I was totally absorbed and sucked in. Looking back it all seems quite a boring predictable story but it wasn't. It was all so real. People you could touch, emotions you could feel and music you could hear. 

Vikram Seth's writing to me is pure magic. I love his style. I haven't read a book whose author gave so much love and focus to their craft since The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver. 

This book is on one level all about trying to rekindle the passion of lost love but more for me it was about the highs and lows of playing classical music. Vikram Seth was able to put into words what it must be like to be a classical violinist. Being a musician on one level makes you incredibly selfish, self obsessed, critical of others and possessed by your desire to make music your way. It also makes you aware of your emotions, the needs of the other players in your group, and the total joy of really living in the moment. 

I also loved that the main character in this book was not of the right 'type' to be a musician. A guy who became qualified through the free instrument he got at school in Rochdale and finally the 'owner ' of a beautiful, old Italian  violin given to him by a rich local woman. An instrument he hasn't been separated from for over 20 years.  In fact when the benefactor's  family start to get angry about their right to the violin when she dies is when i got really sad. Who has the stronger right to this beautiful instrument? 

This book is a love story but to be honest it was always quite doomed and dark. Vikram Seth is never scared of sharing people's emotions clearly; how selfish we are, how we can hurt each other and how in the end we can't ever truely go back to how things were in the past.  

But his style got quite indulgent and over poetic and by the end the book had turned into a weird kind of poetry anthology which got on my nerves a bit.   The best thing about this book for me was the great love of classical music. Now I have a list of pieces from the book which I have listened to on YouTube and they are all great. Thank you Vikram Seth for putting your love of music into words and sharing it. 

The Song of Achilles

S

I think I have turned into a number one fan of  Greek story telling. I loved all the myths as a kid and have happily returned to them.  This book was a retelling of the Iliad by Homer from the perspective of Patroclus, Achilles friend and lover. I have an extremely jumbled and muddled idea of what the Iliad was about and the characters in the Trojan war but now I kind of get it. There is no way I could wade through the poetry of the original so this book was perfect. What a great story!  Even though the original was written nearly 3000 years ago it all seems so relevant with topics on love, lust, pointless wars being fought in the East, honour, pride, families and friendships.

This is a time when Greek gods lived, walked and talked with humans and I loved how the author incorporated gods and goddesses into the story. The boys, Achilles and Patroclus are taken away for three years to live high up on a mountain with a centaur and Achilles water nymph mother is an angry, bitter and jealous goddess who knows Achilles is the strongest man in the war but also knows her son will die whilst fighting. She can't change his destiny. 

This story fleshes out Achilles and Patroclus' life. The joy of their childhood and then the pain of having to partake in such a long and pointless war. I liked the other characters too; the diplomacy of Oddyseus, the kindness and charm of Briseis, and the power crazy madness of Agamemnon. Achilles comes across as selfish and egotistical to be honest, but as soon as he finds out about the death of Patroclus he goes on a crazed , vengeful, killing spree around Troy. What I liked about this version was how the story easily came alive. Even though some of the dialogue seemed a bit unnatural it was still a great read. 

 I've checked characters on Google to see if they really were in the Iliad and it all seems based on the original. A kind of alternative viewpoint.  ( Apart from the fact that Patroclus  should have been older than Achilles and although it was implied that they were lovers, it was never definitely stated. ) I especially liked the ending. I love a good, bloodbath chariot battle and for me Patroclus was the real hero.