| December/January/February reads |
[Mar. 20th, 2007|01:09 pm] |
By Design
Not finished as I couldn’t make it through the first 30 pages without my heart sinking beneath the floorboards at the awful, leaden prose. No desire to know more about the plot or characters.
Voyage To The End Of The Room
Pg 251 ‘Home can never be a place, only a person.’
The ending is weak but the story of the main character working in a sex show and then becoming a recluse is well done and keeps you page turning throughout, I love the idea of the character being completely spun on their head.
Lark Rise
Pg31 ‘Poverty’s no disgrace, but it’s a great inconvenience.’
Only readable in small chunks but the freedom the children were given was very eye opening when considered against the way we lock up children in modern society. I found the limited options offered to anyone growing up in a small community so stifling that I struggled to read through the complacent ‘of course this means so and so will do either a or b’ bits without mentally offering up thanks for the myriad of choices we have available today.
Marry Me
The true story of a comedian who decided to give himself 8 months to find a bride, went on a string of extraordinary (and some frankly bizarre) dates and spent a fortune on texting various possible wife candidates who all seemed to find the idea that he was dating a three figure number of other women a turn on. An odd book that kills the idea of romance stone dead but has a certain pragmatic charm to it.
The Virgin’s Lover
Elizabeth I does Dudley. Amusing and thought provoking in it’s final suggestion of what happened to the inconvenient Amy Dudley but very throw away trash that I really should know better than read.
Glorious Revolution
A history of James II fleeing Britain and William and Mary’s ascending to the throne. Very dry and one only for people that like a second by second play review.
White Mughals
The tale of a beautiful Indian girl who fell in love with a British guy and the cultural backdrop they moved against while being investigated as a scandal. I found the main characters in this biography pretty unlikeable and the book is overlong but I can see that this would appeal to a more forgiving reader than I.
Riddley Walker
Urgh, the dialogue made me feel like one of those slow readers who has to mouth every word and move their finger from word to word at a torturously slow pace and then repeat the whole sentence as the words standing alone have given no sense of meaning. After struggling through 15 pages (about 3 days of reading slowly with my tongue stuck out) I gave up and ran to my bookshelf looking for a book I actually enjoyed reading.
Voyage of the Narwhal
The blurb on this book doesn’t sell it anyway as near as much as this book deserves, it was wonderful read. The characters were distinct and the settings never disappointed, the author really managed to get across the strangeness of the Arctic as it appeared to those who had avidly listened to lectures and read serialised accounts but of course had seen few pictures and certainly none that captured the isolation and the strangeness of the light up in the circle. An excellent read, recommended.
True Pleasures
Re-read to get references and quotes before releasing through bookcrossing. Review here.
Vita and Harold: Letters of Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicholson
Niggles – mention of giving away puppy but no reason for giving away mentioned, Vita smashes Geoffrey Scott’s marriage and it is mentioned just twice and then only in the scantest terms, the editor (their son’s) coyness about his father’s lovers, no explanation on why the sons are not enlisted in WWII or whether the parents are worried about it as a possibility, no explanation given opf why the couple were buried apart... On the other hand I fell deep in admiration and possible adoration of Harold since his letters made me grin and swoon in equal measure.
The Edwardians
Sackville-West actually came to dislike this book so much as she got older that she refused to mention it in her biography as it appeared in peerage books and Who‘s Whos. I bought this book before finding that out but after reading her letters picked it up wondering whether it was arrogance about later books or just personal taste that made her dismiss this novel. I think it was probably a fair judgement on her part, it’s pretty dull stuff.
Brick Lane
Couldn’t get into this despite a couple of attempts, the characters and setting just didn’t catch my interest and I have so many other books that keep distracting me...
The Gun Seller
A wonderfully funny and smart take on a Bourne Identity type plot which shows Laurie’s humour to great advantage. Made me laugh out loud. The twist at the end is one too many for me but it is such a charming story I didn’t mind at all.
The Borgia Bride
Pages dripping with excessive medieval drama and colour, a dress description that takes a full paragraph or a tempestuous lovemaking scene every few pages or so intercut with murders a plenty (and some by poison) makes this light hearted romp very readable. Not true to history in most places but not so completely devoid of facts that a reader gets irritated.
Jamaica Inn
Trouble on the moors. I’d never read this and was a little disappointed when I finished as I expected more from this after the other du Maurier novels I have read. I saw the twist in the plot from about halfway in the book and really wanted a good ending I could get my teeth into and felt little mollified by the romance plot strand or the criminal’s comeuppance.
V for Vendetta
A graphic novel. We were at the Leeds bookcrossing meet in January and a conversation started about graphic novels and I had to concede I had never read one. So I was kindly drawn up a list to start with. This of course was on it. I loved the film but after reading this I am horrified at the jiggering about that they did with the general plot and with just about every character’s motivations. Oh yes, I still like the film but now it feels tainted. Love the novel, especially the Vicious Cabaret.
Consuming Passions
Leisure in the 1800s was a serious business. This book is almost unreadable because it has so much material to draw from and the author seems to have just quoted all of it. But if you dip in and out of chunks on such diverting topics as who invented coupons and when dresses started to be made not for individual owners but for a mass market and why Wedgewood launched his showroom with a coach and fours racing around the counters this is very entertaining. It is just such a lot of a book and all of it interesting in one way or another that it can be quite tiring. Read it in small sections and dip in and out to avoid fatigue. :)
Live Bait
As I was warned this wasn’t as good Want to Play? But it was still very readable and had some good lines in it that made me giggle which is a Very Good Thing in murder mystery books.
Not Buying It
The author decided to try and not buy anything that was not a necessity for the next 12 months. But what is a necessity? Along the way she considers how to have a social life without buying meals and cinema tickets, what you do with all the time you’d normally spend shopping, how much simplicity is too much and what Christmas means for her and her partner.
A Year At The Movies
Very likeable tale of one guy’s desire to see a film in the world’s smallest cinema, one made of ice, films in 3D and other equally quirky angles on the whole film going experience. Each week he focused on one aspect such as going on dates every night one week to see the same ‘date movie’ to see if date movies still exist and share memories about Saturday night at the movies.. this style means that this book is not a series of reviews but more timeless than that as a record of why the author loves silent movies and why some folks love just the feel of film running through their hands.
Around The World In Eighty Dates
A woman who feels she will never meet the right man for her while she is working and stressing in London decides to get her travel journalist mates and family to match her up with guys who roughly meet her ‘soul mate job description’ around the world. I found this an interesting book not least of all because the author never even mentions the fact that she is unwilling to consider anyone from Africa or South America she just cuts those huge swathes of the world from her search... that and the fact that everyone she meets is white gives a strangely tame read from what originally sounds like quite a wild idea. Around the World In Eighty Cosy Meetings With Guys Who Are Like The Ones Back Home Only In A Better, More Laidback Climate is a slightly unwieldy title though. This did make me giggle a couple of times but I was stuck on a bus and a captive audience so I’m not sure I can at all recommend this one.
The Satyr: An Account of the Life and Work of John Wilmot, Second Earl of Rochester
A biography of John Wilmot, Rochester. Didn’t hurt the book any that I kept visualising Johnny Depp while I was reading it. However, it is very, very heavy on the quotes of his work (think about 25% of the book’s volume) which makes you realise that there are a lot of blanks in our knowledge of Wilmot’s life and that the author is not adverse to padding since he quotes but doesn’t always explain the relevance of the two paragraph quote he just threw at you.
The Story of Lucy Gault
A young girl becomes lost to her parents for years and years due to her own bad behaviour and a twist of fate I struggled to suspend disbelief for. This wasn’t as lyrical in it’s writing as I had expected and moved very slowly.
Hellboy: Weird Tales, Hellboy: Seed of Destruction, Batman: Dark Knight Returns: Dark Knight Returns
I liked the Hellboy novels, nice break from reality and I loved the premise of his creation. Definitely better than Batman for me which I found terribly dull.
Give It Up!: My Year of Learning to Live Better with Less
Surviving without an ‘essential’ for 30 days, a different essential every month for a year is the idea behind Carlomagno’s self improvement programme. Things like the news and coffee underpin her social existence but it is the month that she gives up her mobile phone that really shows how some insiduous some modern conveniences are. Carlomagno is at times very light in her treatment of the subject and this is a short book that left me wanting someone a little less flighty to have written it. |
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