The Devil's Star

This book by Jo Nesbo was awful. Worse than awful.  I have been trying to read it for about 3 weeks now and getting nowhere fast.  Infact reading this book has put me into a deep reading drought.  Never have I felt so uninspired to pick up a book. I should have ditched this book weeks ago but never did because I was stubborn and stupidly believed that it might get better.  This book never did. It was complete drivel and this morning, after I fell asleep with it on my lap in my daily traffic jam to work, I decided to ditch it and happily left it behind on my seat. Walking to work I felt great, like  a weight had been lifted from me.  It had, I no longer was carrying this pile of crap round with me. 

I, Claudius

        Q

What a great read.  Had real fun reading this.  OK! It hasn't all been easy going,parts were a bit boring. This is not written in an explicit style like Game of Thrones but hey, this is where Game of Thrones, the Borgias and the Sopranos all get their inspiration. Life in Rome at this time had it all going on! Constant Wars,  treachery, murder, incest, poisoning, banishment, feeding dead prisoners to the hungry animals in the Coliseum  pit, turning your horse into a top politician, insanity, orgies, poisonings, physical disability, recessions,  deranged power crazed Grandmothers and wise whores. 

All of the kinky daubauched stuff is implied and not actually described MUCH but it's all there and what fun Robert Graves must have had hiding behind the secret diaries of Claudius. The narrator of this story. An intelligent,low profile member of the 'family' who manages to keep a low profile by hiding behind his stammer and his physical deformities.  One of his great teachers, Athenodorus, told Claudius as a boy to ham up the stammer and the limp whilst in public as this acting would keep him alive.  This was great advice and Claudius ends up being Emperor after the insane 4 year rule of his nephew, Caligula and the previous rules of his Uncles, Tiberius and Augustus. These two emperors were both under the control of evil Grandmother Livia.  She is so evil she is almost funny!   She kills off anyone who she thinks is a threat to her family rule but yet, she keeps the empire under control and seems to run things fairly well from the sidelines in my opinion.  It's only when she dies and Caligula takes over that things go completely bonkers!  What a brilliantly insane guy. Surely all the shagging he does of anything with a heart beat  is just beyond ridiculous and as for cutting costs by feeding prisoners to the hungry animals in the Coliseum  pits and turning his beloved horse into a revered member of the consel is just hilarious! I can't believe that he was able to be Emperor for 4 years until he was assassinated.  

The book ends with Caligula's death and Claudius ready to take over the reins but I need a break from Ancient Rome now and part two will have to wait! Plus Robert Grave's 1930s writing style did get a bit turgid at times!  The complicated family trees were a bit of a nightmare, I spent most of my time flipping to the crap family tree at the back trying to work out who is plotting against who, who is shagging who, who is poisoning who .etc.   my Mum has told me I must watch the BBC 1970s adaptation. She said it was pretty raunchy for the time. One night when I want a laugh I might try and find it out on YouTube. 

Plague

This book was crap, so crap I don't want to waste time writing about it. It could have been so good but failed completely.  Awful. 

Books 3 and 4 in the Neapolitan series.

 

I finally finished books 3 and 4 of Elena Ferrante's series last week and I have been a bit slack about writing them up. To be honest I really enjoyed Book 1 and 2 the most. As the women got older their lives just began to rush by and Elena made more and more errors of judgement and it became clear what a selfish woman she was. Her lover and her book launches meant far more to her than her own children. But hey, I'm being a bit unfair, male authors would definitely get away with behaving like her. I just found reading about her behaviour quite difficult to take in.  Having invested quite a few weeks reading about her and her grafting to get out of her difficult life in the Napalese gutter it was hard to witness her mistakes as she got older.  

Things never really picked up to be honest and the last book was pretty depressing for me.  The real author of this book,  Ferrante, is amazing though; I really believe that she has captured what life is about, a great belief in yourself and your talents when you are young and then as you get older life just whizzes by and nothing really lives up to your expectations.  You just keep on making mistakes and your kids don't appreciate your efforts. All very true I think for the majority of people. but I have to admit, pretty depressing to read  about in a book. I want to read more uplifting stuff really or something with an under current of black humour, which this series definitely didn't have!  

Having invested over 2000 pages of reading effort into these 4 books I'm glad I didn't buy them and just got them out the library. I think Ferrante writes beautifully and some of her descriptions just seemed so honest.  especially when people were having personal breakdowns but for me there are too many little things that annoyed me.  The beginning ( as you never find out about the opening scene until near the end of book 4, which cleverly locks you into having to read them all.) and the ending.  The ending is clever but far too ambiguous and that just annoyed me. 

I think slogging through these has put me into a reading slump now and I am just gonna focus on watching The Olympics. 

The Story of a New Name

Woah, I have been on a mammoth reading marathon since I found out yesterday that this library book has been pre ordered and must be returned today. I read all evening and most of the night and finished this off.  To say this series is addictive is an understatement  but I m not sure it's everyone's cup of tea.  Part of this book was really slow but I loved it...like life in all its glory and all its dullness.  This is the second in the series and again the only thing I really disliked was the ridiculous cover.

  Lila and Lenu's story from the ages of 16 to 23 held up against their claustrophobic life on the rough streets of 1960s Naples. I loved the descriptions of their friendship and their loves and their hatreds and jealousies. Plus the slow disintegration of Lila's marriage was brilliantly told  This book could be seen as extremely depressing and in parts it is. No one is an angel.  But weirdly I also found it uplifting and comforting because Farrente writes so honestly and I really believed every single scene in this book.

 Neapolitans living in poverty, scraping a life out, building up businesses, worshipping money, men getting jealous and beating their 'women' into shape, getting involved with the money lenders and the Camorra, memory versus reality, idyllic holidays on Ischia, people trying to escape the grinding poverty through both legitimate and illegitimate actions, snobbery and inverse snobbery, love and lust, the power of control, the idea of what intelligence actually is, and the feeling of deep insecurities are just some of the human conditions covered in this book!  

Yes, I devoured this book and I have to start reading the next one straight away.  The strange thing is I know this book isn't perfect.  Not all characters are well developed and there are lots of characters! plus parts are really quite dull but weirdly for me this worked too. It's just like life, lots of dull stuff and then suddenly things spark and lots of exciting and mad stuff suddenly takes over. Great read. 

Wild

Wow, I loved this book.  What a great read.  I have put off reading this for a number of years because I thought for some reason I would find it intensely irritating ...what with all this lost to found nonsense and a complete novice walking literally a thousand miles. But how wrong I was!  This was a brilliant book and I loved the honesty of Strayed's writing.  For a start she wasn't a complete novice, she was fairly fit,  had lived like a hippy all of her childhood, she was outdoorsy, and knew how to camp, tie knots and live a simple life.  The only thing she hadn't done was walk for days  on end , alone with all her belongings on her back. Her description of her life falling apart before she started the walking and the trauma of her mum's death, her family break up and her divorce were really honest portrayals but her way to cope was a choice between becoming a heroin addict or getting back into the outdoor style life of her happier childhood.  She luckily decided on the latter, and what an adventure she had.

I loved reading about her initial planning with her packed boxes being posted onto stations ahead.  Her inability to make her pack smaller. The pain in her feet, hips and mind as she had to keep walking up and down the range of mountains on the Pacific Crest TrAil.  I loved her descriptions of when she met bears, rattle snakes, foxes and hideous frogs. The great  and generous people she met on the trail, both locals and fellow walkers and the infrequent unfriendly people she bumped into too. Her vulnerability is clearly expressed.  She makes some big mistakes, especially when she runs out of water and the tank ahead is also empty and her shoes cause her continuous pain.  This was a hard core adventure.  Not for the faint hearted, but I have to respect these hard core adventurers.  They sure have guts to go out walking in extreme snowy conditions with only an ice pick to help them stay safely attached to the snowy slopes. Infact Cheryl did have to bypass a section of the Sierra Navada range because it was so dangerous with all the snow...still there in May, June. 

I also loved learning about a trail I know nothing about. There was a map of the trail from the Mexico border, through CAlifornia, Oregan and Washington State. I learnt a lot about the geography of the region.  I now know about Crater Lake, the deepest in North America and how the Sierra Nevada range changes into the Cascade Range and how this trail was created in the early 1970s. I watched a few YouTube videos giving advice on how to walk the trail...you really need to plan ahead and be hard as nails..it's the equivalent of walking up and down about 6 Mount Everests. But I could really understand the beauty and power of what walking can do.  On a much simpler level it has really helped me  and my sister, just getting out and about into the Countryside.  I'd never be able to do this but it's great to know that the opportunity to dream is out there and big respect to Cheryl Strayed for writing such an honest and beautiful book about the power of getting out into nature and just walking! 

The Little Red Chairs

Woah...this book was full on.  NOT an easy read at all. I think one section of it contained some of the most brutal scenes of violence I have ever read. (All this written by a woman in her 80s!) This book was not a holiday read, so ending up with it on my holiday was bit of a mistake.  I really couldn't get into it until on the flight home.  I felt suitably in the mood then!

This book was amazing on many levels and the whole feel of it was ultimately uplifting and positive even though parts of it were really grim and hard to read.

This book is a book of two halves.  The first half is based around a tight knit Irish village community, when suddenly a foreign man appears out of nowhere who claims to be a healer.  He manages to fit into the community and locals are charmed by him and one of the local woman starts an affair with him, really in order to get pregnant because things are not happening with her husband.  ANyway, it suddenly becomes clear that all is not good with this healer  guy.  He is actually one of the main protagonists of the BOsnian war and is responsible for mass murder of Bosnian Muslims and the siege of Sarajevo.   He has been in deep hiding for years and when things finally come out serious revenge is taken out on the innocent, yet pregnant, victim Fidelma. To me Fidelma personifies what happens when unexplained evil things suddenly happen.  How Fidelma and other people react to these horrible and traumatic events is the basis of the second half of the book. 

    THe second half is about  Fidelma's new life as a runaway in London.  Here other low paid workers from all around the world, who have all come looking for work in London, help her out ( or hinder her progress accordingly. ). She meets lots of badly paid immigrants,all trying to make ends meet in London and there are lots of different stories of their lives, all told in the first person in different varieties of broken English. As a teacher of English to non- native speakers I really could hear the voices of these people as they tried so hard to keep their dignity and sense of purpose in the underworld of their London existence. 

This book was not perfect in many ways.  Parts of the story were clunky. Often it didn't flow because the voices would change so often. Also Fidelma's cathartic visit to The Hague to see her mass murderer, ex-lover on trial just didn't work for me. I also thought the author was sometimes trying to cover too many 'issues' in one book. 

 But I have to say that this is my first Edna O Brian book and she is one hell of a powerful writer.  What I liked was her ability to be so personal and intimate one minute and then she could suddenly shift her focus to a more global perspective. Her writing is beautiful and her sense of place was amazing, especially  the Irish countryside and the bleakness of lonely lives In London.  Parts of this book were incredibly beautiful, others incredibly violent and lots of passages were sad but ultimately this book ended with a sense of hope and love towards our fellow man.    It was a tough read in many places but all respect to O'Brian for making me think and taking me on a roller coaster of a read.