How to be Both

I hated this book.  I hated this book so much I have stopped reading it.  I hated it so much I don't even want to waste time writing about it.   Critics loved it, raved about it, swooned over it.  All I can say is WTF?   Did they really read it?  It is pretentious bollocks...the only thing I might have learnt is that I should maybe look at a piece of art in a gallery for longer before deciding I don't like  it and that just because there are words on a page it doesn't mean they actually mean anything.   I decided today that half of the book is enough. I have stopped reading it after the end of the first story.  I skim read the second half and got nothing but eye strain. I have since found out that different versions have the two stories printed in the opposite order.  What a bloody gimmick.
    I have realised, thanks in part to my friend Tanya, that life is far too short to waste on shite books.  For gods sake, I only have about enough time in my life to read about 0.000001% of the books I would like to read.  So this is going in my charity bag.  The one thing I have learnt here in spades is JANE, DONT get swayed by critics.  On the plus side it only cost me a quid from a charity shop.

The Well of Lost Plots

This is the third book in the crazy Thursday Next series and yes, I did enjoy it but the first half was pretty slow to be honest and then suddenly it picked up and the last two thirds was great fun and totally bonkers. I love this series because it is so ridiculous.  Here Thursday is hiding out in a  kinda crap third rate unpublished novel in the lower basement of the book placement depository (known as the Well of Lost Plots.) so she can hide from the evil Goliath company. She has done an exchange with one of the minor characters in the book so that the bored female character can have a sabbatical from her mind numbing  and cheesy role. (The book is called Caversham Heights and involves lots of boring police procedure action around Reading.)  

This book is impossible to describe but basically Thursday is trying to find her eradicated husband but along the way she uncovers a dastardly plot (concocted by an evil politician in the real work who is really just an escaped book character living a secret double life) to make all books 'ULTRAWORD Trade mark' which will force all books to become interactive ereaders where words, plots and storylines can be edited simultaneously and used as tools for mass propaganda.  Miss Haversham helps Thursday rocket between the two worlds and together with the help of cliched characters from unpublished novels, the witches from Macbeth and Solomon (judgement of)  they manage to foil the dastardly deed. The Goliath company are beginning to track agent Thursday down to the crap Well of Lost Plots  so right at the end of the book Thursday has to hide in the 'Footnote sewer' to successfully reveal the evil plan.  Of course I love the mad play with language and the jumps from high brow to low brow references. I especially loved the scene of Rage Management for the characters in Wuthering Heights, the strike by oral traditional characters who felt they were not getting their true recognition due to their status of not being well known in the world of print.  (Humpty Dumpty was their shop steward) and the incredibly dangerous Mispeling Vyrus where suddenly, if you were unlucky enough to be caught in its net, floors change to flour and walls change to balls. (Uriah Hope got caught up in the vyrus and got his personality and surname changed forever.)   The thing I love about these daft books is Jasper Fforde's incredible imagination.  Reading these is exactly the same joy I got as when I read Terry Pratchett novels as  a teenager. MADNESS and a lot of geeky fun, which feels very comforting. 

Ghostwritten

Whoa! What a totally mental freaky book.  This is Mitchell's first novel published in 1999 and it's been on my shelf for over 10 years. Finally I got around to reading it and what a mad delight! It's taken me ages due to it being quite a dense read which needed lots of concentration and also because I have been spending more of my free time watching TV lately, as there has been such great stuff on the box!

  This author has a huge imagination and a brilliant grasp of different writing styles used in the different chapters in this book.   Each of these nine chapters were supposedly snapshots of random lives of different people around the planet but ultimately they all had little parts of their lives which interlinked or morphed into each other.  I loved these stories just as separate tales.  Especially the story about the  20 th century history of China as seen through the eyes of a woman tea seller and the disembodied soul of a Mongolian boy who jumps around from person to person like a virus trying to find a new host to exist in. 

Every story has a link to ghost or spirit of some description and characters randomly affect each other's stories. I think this is to highlight the random chances and happenings which occur in all of our lives. This book was so clever and even more relevant today, 16 years later, in a world of global terror. Mitchell uses the first Iraq war and the sarin gas attacks on the Tokyo subway as his reference points.  What would he use today?!  This book was even pre 9/11...weird. 

Ultimately though this book was fantastic linguistically and Mitchell's dialogue could be extremely witty edgy and thought provoking but by the end I was just thinking WTF?  This book in my opinion ended up trying to be so clever that it kind of failed to come to a satisfactory ending.  i just didn't really get it and I think I need to read it again even slower.  There is no real fun in reading a book that you suddenly realise is totally above your understanding. But, hey maybe Mitchell is having the last laugh, this book was awesome to read and that's all that matters.  This book can be whatever you want it to be!  For me the language, different dialogues and stories were fantastic and ultimately that is all that counts. I think it was all about how spirits and ghosts are around us and within us all the time and how these 'spirits' manifest is as varied and random as life itself. I didn't find this idea crazy or wacky at all, instead I kind of found it weirdly comforting.  If you want a great read,which by the end will leave you both entertained and infuriated, I highly recommend this book! 

Time to go I must catch the last episode of Fargo! 

A Brief History of Seven Killings

Wow. I have finished it! what a book. I'm both annoyed by it, in love with bits of it and frustrated by the last 350 pages of it.  To be honest if it was half the length I think it would have been a much, much better book.  

The first half was brilliant with the immersion into Jamaican gang violence, drug culture and ghetto lifestyle in the 70s. Even the Jamaican patois didn't give me no bombocloth r'asscloth fuckery.  (Translation: it was fine!) getting into the lifestyle, politics, grimness and culture of Kingston  just as Bob Marley was becoming a world music icon was just brilliant.   I loved the characters, the language and the brilliant sense of time and place. The  political angle with the CIA getting involved with Jamaican politics just to stop the Cubans getting a foothold in the country was cool too. ( something I knew nothing about. ) 

Marlon James can write, that is not under question. Every chapter was the voice of a different character and each character ( if they survived ) grew and changed over the 13 years of the book's narrative.  But every character was unremittingly grim and after the attempted assassination of Bob Marley in 1979, there ceased to be any more  plot. Everything just turned into 'scenes' and grabbed dialogue.  It was all a bit empty for me and has left me cold. No one, absolutely no one was redeemable.  But James did  write absolutely fantastic streams of consciousness when people were dying or shooting up places. The emptiness of their consciousnesses was just harrowing and bloody amazing to read. 

 This is not a book for the faint hearted, or anyone who wants characters to feel any redemption.  This book is hard and brutal in the hardest and most brutal terms. The only joy really was a short chapter in the middle where one of the gang leaders, because he has moved to New York to expand his crack cocaine business, finally comes to terms with himself being gay and what that actually means for him in his role as head of the gang. ( He's still hard as fuck. He just likes himself a  little bit more!) 

This book is grim with no let up and the second half reads like a shaggy dog story that just got on my nerves. But the first half, before Bob Marley dies of cancer ( after the attempted murder.)  is brilliant and it annoys me that the book lost direction for me after that. Too clever for its own sake I think and far too depressing and unremittingly bleak for me. Oh well, at least  I can attempt to swear like a Jamaican now if I want to.

Chaos Walking Trilogy

Phew that was a bit of a marathon! A whole series of Young Adut Fiction read and totally enjoyed. I just loved this series, especially the first book. Oh my god, the first book was brilliant and when I finished it I was in such a panic to get my hands on the second one I phoned up the Bicester library, found out they had it and ran down at 6.55pm just before it closed.( none of the shops here had a copy to buy!) 

Patrick Ness has created a great story here, all set on another planet where exiled humans turn up in their spaceships. They are creating a new world and as expected things go wrong, very wrong.  On this planet the indigenous creatures are obviously strange and need to be killed or tamed and men also have the added burden of all of their thoughts being instantly transmitted in NOISE to every single person. Every thought and hidden feeling is instantly heard or seen by everyone.  oF course  this sends the men a bit mad and it's a bit of a burden having to hear and see the inner thoughts of everyone. There is just no secrecy and most men are just thinking lots of annoying nonsense anyway! The worst thing is that women don't transmit this noise and their thoughts remain private.  This obvious unexpected difference creates  problems and war as communities fight over the kind of world they want to live in.

Phew, it all sounds pretty heavy and to be honest lots of the ideas are, but they are cleverly told through the adventures of Todd, Viola and Manchee their dog as they travel away from Prentistown, a town with no women or children.( all the women mysteriously died) to find a better life. Todd is the youngest boy in the town and when he turns 14 he will find out the secrets of this  woman free town and his father wants him to escape to find a better life. Todd has to run away quickly with just his mother's diary ( which he can't read because education is banned in this town) without any knowledge because if he had any knowledge of anything the elders would be able to read what he was thinking in his NOISE and stop him.

Anyway, then the story really kicks in. We meet men who can control their noise, learn about the terrorists who are fighting for freedom, witness a genocide of the local species, see how Todd succumbs to the power of leadership, see bravery when we least expect it. Witness mass branding of the women, see how fighting is a never ending display of bravado at the expense of the powerless, how to control feelings of revenge, the power of negotiation, how easily young people can be radicalised by their elders, how to deal with refugees and the innocent displaced masses and a great adventure story as Todd and Viola travel across this land trying to find peace. 

Yes, it all sound really worthy but it isn't. The inner life of the young are really well  described here and it's all very exciting but the adult characters are a bit one dimensional...but hey, this isn't surpring this book is for teenagers but I just wanted more depth to the adult characters as well! 

The third book did get a bit preachy and boring for me...I had gone off the boil after the excitement of the first two but worth the read. Especially reading how easily vulnerable children can get brainwashed. A great read for anyone over 12 I reckon....actually maybe older because many parts  of this book did give me graphic nightmares!

The Horse Boy.

This book fascinated and annoyed me in equal measure. Rowan is a six year old, highly autistic lad who can't connect with any children, can only babble like a baby and can't control his rages or his bowels. One thing Rowan can do though is connect with horses, and Betsy, who lives in the field behind their house, is Rowan's best friend. Rupert,the Dad is an experienced horse rider and he comes up with a plan to take Rowan into Mongolia to ride with the horses there and meet the shamans. Rupert is disallusioned with western approaches to autism so decides to put his trust into the Mongolian outback, Mongolian horses and the shamens there. 

The story of Rupert, his wife and Rowan's adventures across the Mongolian plains are well told but I always had a strong feeling of scepticism in the back of my mind.  Rupert was already a travel writer and had organised rights for this book he was going to write and they were also travelling with a film crew as he had sold the rights of a documentary for nearly 200,000 pounds before they even left for Asia. They also had to pay the reindeer shamans 500 US dollars before they would even see Rowan. Rupert's worries about his son are well told, heartbreaking and honest but ultimately I had the feeling that Rupert was basically writing about himself and how Rowan affected him. Do not expect a self help book about how to deal with autism. Honestly there is no guidance, all Rupert does is slag off the approaches of the West. 

 The  hardships of his wife ( who was never that keen to go to Mongolia in the first place) are barely mentioned. She just seemed to quietly and diligently follow behind saying jack shit.  When one of the shamens said that Rowan's problems were because of his wife's 'black waters ' in her womb and also because of a mad deranged Aunty on the mother's side of the family having 'control' over Rowan I almost spit out my beer!  His poor wife was ordered down to the river to wash out her black waters in her birth canal whilst the bloody TV crew filmed it.  More fool her is all I can say!!!  

Anyway, suffice to say Rowan came back after 3 months toilet trained. To be honest I think it was a bloody long way to take a kid to get them toilet trained...but hey good memories for them all! A holiday of a life time.  The one thing I do truely believe in though is the power of animals to sooth and help children. ( all children).  In my world though I think a dog or a hamster might do the job just as well! Ultimately though the author is a man who I found incredibly irritating yet fascinating. A hippy with a strong love for fox hunting. A devoted husband who barely seemed to acknowledge his wife's existence. (Even the cover blurb of the book annoyed me. It wasn't just him who was trying to cure his son. His wife was also there too. )  He was a devoted father who was always analysing how his son's extreme autism affected himself and a qualified travel writer who organised a way to use his son to further expand his travel writing profile. A strange reading experience for me!  But hey, he did write about Mongolia really well! 

The Leopard

My god, I'm on a Harry Hole binge! I don't know what it is but I love curling up in my bed all alone in my house  and reading about my hero, Harry Hole and his amazing fight against Norway's sadistic serial killers.  Along the way I enjoyed learning about a torture device, which astounded me in its creativity and foulness.   ( I have since found out that this supremely awful torture  device was totally created in the mind of Jo Nesbo, respect to you and your over imaginative sense of depravity. You sick man.) 

This book is just 007 on speed,( well actually, heroin and Jim Beam. ) Suspend your disbelief and enjoy the ride. This is the best way to deal with traffic problems on the A34 ( as well as under the covers at midnight.) total immersion into the dark side of life amongst the druggies of Hong Kong, via the depavity of the Congo and the worst sick psychos of Norway.  I loved how the snow and avalanches of Northern Europe could be utilised so well for depositing bodies along with the bubbling volcanos of Goma, in the Congo. Honestly, budding psycho killers of Bicester have no chance to deposit bodies so well. 

 ( Maybe Ardley tip...) 

Harry I love you and your 'armoured heart' ,the best sentence in the book contains  the original Norwegian title. 

This read is so cinematic, but never, never, never, will it be filmed as well or as enjoyably as what I gained from reading this over the past week and a half. Pure mad exhilaration.