inside books

Thoughts at the halfway point of You & I

2012-01-25T22:58:00.001Z

This is another book with plenty of questions marks in from Padgett Powell.

Just like the Interrogative Mind there are lots of questions being asked. But here there are answers as this is a dialogue between two men.

They are not old but neither are they young and their views range far and wide.

It's strange, fun and probably not going to come to much of a conclusion. But we will see...

book review: Generation of Swine by Hunter S. Thompson

2012-01-24T16:03:00.003Z

"There is all the action you want, from time to time - but in the main it is a dull and dreary life, like journalism."

It takes a long time to get the style of this column and by the time you get it the next emotion is disappointment that he is not around now writing about the current Presidential race and the madness of US politics.

The reason it takes so long to get into the book is because it is badly dated and limited to a US national outlook that does not chime with a UK readership. The events being written about in the column that HST penned for two years for the San Francisco Examiner cover the years of 1987 and 1988.

Reagan is president and coming to the end of his period in the White House. He has become immersed in the Oliver North Iran/Contra scandal but because of his clear dementia he has little chance of being impeached. That leaves the mess potentially impacting the Bush run at the presidency and towards the end of this collection of columns it has become clear that Bush has sidestepped the scandal and looks set for the Republican nomination.

So much of the columns focuses on the runners and riders in both the Democrat and Republican parties with professional gambler HST giving the odds and the forecasts of what will happen.

But that and to a degree the mentions of topical foreign policy are not really the parts of the book that work now. They have not traveled well and I suspect even a modern day US reader would struggle to connect the references.

So having admitted that the content is usually dated, of limited value to an overseas reader you might wonder what on earth this collection of columns has to offer.

The answer is to do with style because what these fairly consistent length pieces do is pin HST down to a weekly deadline and a word count that forces him to be tight. Sometimes he is repetitive in the way he starts the columns indicating that he rather liked a pattern that perhaps killed off quickly 40 or 50 words. But it also allows him to show off his ability to deliver a heady mix of allegory, humour and accurate insight into people and events.

The allegory took me a while to get but that is the part that grows throughout the book and when you read these columns you realise that if it was talken literally then law suits and a swift end to the series would have followed.

This is not the best place to get a feel for HST, it's not even a good book in the sense of a reading experience but it has something to offer and there is a reward for trudging through the historical policitical references.

book review: Falconer by John Cheever

2012-01-23T15:16:00.001Z

"He wanted to cry and howl. he was among the livingdead. There were no words, no living words, to suit this grief, this cleavage.he was primordial man confronted with romantic love. His eyes began to water asthe last of the visitors, the last shoe, disappeared."

This is not a particularly easy story to read. The tale of a man who kills his brother, is addicted to drugs and ends up in prison is not perhaps the ideal way to create a scenario and character that will lead to reader's hearts. But you find yourself on the side of Farragut despite all these things.

He describes how and why he became addicted to drugs - fed them during the war and then existence in a society that seems to be drugging the population in some form or other - and you find yourself half agreeing with him. Ironically it's prison that managed to make him clean after expensive clinics and therapists have failed to do the job.

There is also a well developed reveal of the murder with it clear that the relationship between the brothers is a strained one and the murder victim did to a degree ask for some sort of confrontation. That doesn't excuse the killing but it does allow you to side with Farragut when he describes it as exaggerated and an accident.

But that is all in the past and this story starts with the main character entering prison. The vivid description of the prison, the misery of confinement and the struggles to cope with the routine are all written brilliantly. As Farragut slips into a battle to keep his sanity and finds love in the arms of a prisoner who manages to escape the future looks bleak. His wife displays little chance of providing love and most of those prisoners and guards around him are struggling with their own emotional problems.

A riot at another prison ushers in a period of tension that provides Farragut with a chance to place himself in the heart of the community in F wing. He spends most of his time wandering through the memories of the past. Perhaps it is that process which encourages the sort of introspection that can lead to a life being turned around. Just as he breaks his dependence on drugs and methadone it is a more profound break with himself that prison provides.

Sure this is dark, sometimes brutal in its description of the world of the incarcerated and it has the power to shock. But what I will remember is the power of the writing, being taken on a journey that delivered from start to finish and an introduction to a writer I intend to read much more of.

Thoughts at the halfwaypoint of Falconer

2012-01-21T09:34:00.000Z

When a book is described as 'The great American novel' it sets expectations. Naturally you start reading expecting to be impressed by the writing but it perhaps makes you read it with an open mind. If a book is great it's rather pleasing to come to that conclusion yourself rather than being told from the start.

Still getting past the blurb, and not having read any Cheever before, my mind was still fairly open. It didn't remain that way for long as the description, character and plot started to emerge.

This is a really good read. From the moment it starts describing the statue above the entrance to the prison and court house you are drawn into the dirty desperate world of the convict. That Farragut has killed his own brother is made clear from close to the outset as is his drugs problem. It also becomes clear that as a former college professor he is not the usual type that ends up in the Falconer Correctional Facility.

That Facility unfolds before the reader as Cheever takes you through the halls, cells and visitor rooms. he does so brilliantly.

bit by bit Farragut starts to face the prospect of losing his sanity. The drug addiction is a major problem but so is he sense of abandonment from people, life and love. He takes another prisoner as a lover and by the halfway point seems to have settled into some sort of equilibrium. But whether or not he can stay there is another matter.

A full review will come on completion soon

Reading on the fly

2012-01-20T19:26:00.000Z

It can be cold, a baby can scream for what seems like hours and the food can be inedible. But one guaranteed joy of flying a fairly long distance is the chance it gives you to read.

As the hours stretch out before you the chance to lose yourself in a book without the worry that the phone or internet will distract you is something rather wonderful.

These days it's very rare for me to fly but when it happens I pack the books and enjoy every second of the reading time.

Thoughts at the halfway point of Generation of Swine

2012-01-19T20:16:00.000Z

This is a collection of columns that Hunter S Thompson wrote for the San Francisco Examiner over a two year period back in the 1980s.

As you can imagine because these were topical weekly columns written for a local readership they have not all aged or translated well to a wider more modern readership.

What dates it fairly quickly are the regular political references to politicians and campaigns that have in some cases faded into the ether or were not things that managed to make a dent on the memory in the first place.

The second issue is trying to relate to a column that is referring to news events that barely registered a blip on the UK news radar even at the time of them happening.

So aside from these problems what you are left with is the writing. it is the usual HST fare with fabulous tales of drinking, madness, guns and politicians.

In some cases you find it hard to believe what he says took place actually happened - starting with the first column where his girlfriend gets a tattoo just so he has something to write about - but that of course is the way you have to read this stuff. You need to believe it happened, or at the very least suspend your disbelief, because if you go with him then this is very entertaining.

But I'm finding half way in that it is the problems with the way this collection of columns really hasn't aged well that is causing me problems and finishing it will be a relief.

book review: The Rich Boy by F.Scott Fitzgerald

2012-01-18T19:53:00.002Z

"Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where they we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves. Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are."

Fitzgerald knows how to tell a story. He knows how to introduce a reader to am world of the very rich. But he also knows how to deliver in the short story format, which is something he does again here well in these three stories.

The title story follows the life of Anson Hunter, a very rich man who struggles to value true love. Finding someone to love him is not too difficult but realising its real, not something that can be bought and replaced, is something he understands only after he has lost it. B ut this is a man not used to losing anything so he carries on looking to find or even better the love he has thrown away.

just as you think he has realised his mistakes, particularly when he is confronted by the past, he throws off the depression and listlessness that might befall people without his background and sets off again on the merry-go round of courting someone unable to give him the genuine love he needs.

Love is the theme again in The Bridal Party as an American living in Paris comes face-to-face with his old lover. Michael Curly stumbles across Caroline as she strolls along with her fiance and over the course of a few days he manages to befriend her again after a gap and declare his love. Her husband-to-be loses his considerable fortune in the 1929 stock market crash just as the wedding draws near. But this is still not a chance for Curly to get his girl back.

He comes into some inheritance but he doesn't have the luck or the imagination of the rich man who has fallen on hard times who looks like not only bouncing back immediately but also getting his girl.

"This show will cost Ham about five thousand dollars, and I understand they'll be just about his last. But did he countermand a bottle of champagne or a flower? Not he! He happens to have it - that young man. Do you know that T.G. Vance offered him a salary of fifty thousand dollars a year ten minutes before the wedding this morning? In another year he'll be back with the millionaires."

The final story, The Last of the Belles, is also about love and the mess that some people get into. An army base in the deep south is distracted by the three local beauties that compete for the hearts of the soliders getting ready to go off and fight in France. The main character is introduced to one, Allie Calhoun and develops a friendship with her. It remains platonic and he becomes an observer to the way Allie flirts with several men looking for the one that might be worth marrying. Thoughtful and strong types are replaced with the adventurous and arrogant but she remains closed off to them all.

Years later the narrator heads back and discovers she has married a local rich man. As he searches for the long since knocked down army base, he is perhaps also looking in vain for the lost youth he wasted being a friend of Allie Calhoun.

You don't have to like the characters that Fitzgerald writes about, or harbour ambitions to be that wealthy, to understand that the themes he is writing about are universal. Loving and losing is something that people of all backgrounds so. It's just that in the world of the very rich there is a weakness from the failure to understand love is not a commodity that can be paid for. That weakness makes it more tragic when someone like Anson, who seems to have it all, in fact has very little which is becoming even less as he faces a lonely old age.

The name Fitzgerald is always said in the same breath as The Great Gatsby, but as this book proves yet again people should read his short stories.

Thoughts at the half way point of The Rich Boy

2012-01-17T19:37:00.000Z

Fitzgerald is best known for The Great Gatsby and the title story in this collection of three short stories introduces someone who also has great wealth.

With wealth seems to come unhappiness, a restlessness that prevents Anson Hunter from finding happiness. He has the looks, the career, the income and the life he wants but his inability to commit to the one woman he really loves means he cannot find the love he seeks.

The result is that Hunter becomes even larger than life, turns more to the bottle and struggles even harder to inspire the love he seeks himself in others. It works and another relationship is formed but again he lets the woman go and ends up reading about the marriage in the society pages.

Despiute the great wealth tyou are left feeling a slight symapthy for XX. Not too much because he has inspired his own problems, but enough to make you realise that being rich does not always mean happiness.

There are two other stories in this book which I am looking forward to and will mention those in the full review, which should be posted tomorrow.

book review: A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

2012-01-16T16:48:00.001Z

“If I had a view like this to look down on every day, I would have the energy and inspiration to conquer the world. The trouble is, when you most need such a view, no one gives it to you.”

There is something rather hynotic about finding out what happened to people from your past. It explains the success of sites like Facebook and Friends Reunited as people look for clues to what became of their old flames and friends.

There is also a dual attraction of getting to fast forward through someone's life if the absence of contact has been a long one and so you can go from college friend to their middle age in just a clik and a read of their activity.

That dual desire is something that gets tapped into here at both levels. Minor characters who we meet perhaps just for one chapter get their life story told for us before they go, so for instance we find out that people chase or fail to get their dreams, before we get back to the main few characters.

The two main people the book focuses on are Bennie,l a record producer and his PA Sasha. They both have problems, his perhaps one of growing old in a young person's world and her's a kleptomania that points to deeper problems from her past.

Starting with those two sharing alternate chapters the style is to roll it out to reveal more of their pasts as different characters come into play. So as we find out about Bennie being in a band we are in turn introduced to the main band members. That then reveals the influences on Bennie and fill in the blanks of his past.

Likewise with Sasha we get to see her through the eyes of old boyfriends and family as she spends a troubled youth scraping by around the world using theft and guile to survive.

Their are coincidences, moments that perhaps seem too convienent but then again that's what makes the story work so I'm not complaining.

There is also a sense that moments that shape us when young can stay with us forever and that is both a positive and a negative. The world is changing and that also provides problems for Bennie and Sasha. The music industry isn't what it is and at the end the 'pointers' who download and listen to their music on devices using their fingers are the ones dominating the landscape.

The book has recieved a lot of praise but I'm not sorry having delayed reading this because it provided a chance to come to it in the quietness after the first rush of reaction had died down.

I enjoyed it, found some of its perhaps a bit too structured, but overall will remember it for its challenge to look at your own life and think about the story you are writing for those friends and old acquaintances to stumble across on Facebook or LinkedIn.

Bookmark of the week

2012-01-15T13:14:00.000Z

Another one from the National Gallery in London. This is simply called Tiger by Sam Everitt.

Thoughts at the half way point of a Visit From the Goon Squad

2012-01-14T14:36:00.001Z

Think of a daisy chain of people all holding hands that eventually meets back in a circle.

This feels like that as it charts the lives of record producer Bennie and his PA Sasha.

As you read about them and their pasts you then pick up the story from another characters history. This goes on in a way that creates its own rhythm.

It's a fun read in terms of living back through the years when vinyl mattered and punk rocked.

Quite where it will end is hard to predict but the journey getting there is an enjoyable one.

Reading plans for the rest of the month

2012-01-13T11:34:00.000Z

It might have started to become obvious but the reading plans for this month are all around American writers. I have to travel to the US for work next week and so am taking a few books with me that represent writers from that country.

The trip has been on my mind for a while so it perhaps influenced the decision to take off the shelf and dust down the Vonnegut and McCarthy I started the month with.

Whenever I go away if possible I try to take a writer to read from that country and ideally from the place I am going to. In this case I sadly didn't have the time to research and plan to take books by writers from Boston but hope that a range of American writers will provide an interesting backdrop to my stay.

book review: Child of God by Cormac McCarthy

2012-01-12T17:20:00.002Z

"It was quiet in the room. After a while the man behind his desk lowered his hands and folded them in his lap. Mr Ballard, he said. You are either going to have to find some other way to live or some other place in the world to do it."

What you get with McCarthy is a world that is undefined. You don't get the specifics of time, the lack of quotation marks means speech blurs into thoughts and actions and it's not always clear where the line between wrong and right starts and ends.

The result is a reading experience that challenges you to stick with a main character who over time becomes a serial killer and a necrophiliac. Lester Ballard is introduced as a man about to lose his home to auction. After that he becomes a wanderer and lives in a shack until he stumbles across a couple that have committed suicide in a car. Their last act before the fumes overtook them was to make love and it is the naked couple that Ballard discovers.

You can tell he is struggling to control his emotions as he goes to and from the car stealing money, drink and eventually after several return visits entering new dark territory by stealing the female corpse. This becomes his possession both sexually and in terms of company as he dresses her and lies with her by the fireside in his shack.

Accused wrongly of rape a spell in jail reintroduces Ballard to the local law enforcement and you sense he will meet them again later as his killing spree grows.

He doesn't stumble across a couple dead in a car again so he has to put the death into the situation shooting out with his rifle and taking the female corpses back to a cave he lives in after his shack burns down.

As he slides into madness and starts wearing female clothes he becomes even more isolated from reality. This is deepened by deep snows, then a flood which cuts Ballard off from the town. That gives the madness time to take hold but his luck runs out when he tries to shoot the owner of his old home and comes off second best in a rifle versus shotgun fight.

But Ballard never quite faces up to his crimes and just as in other McCarthy novels the question of whether he should have felt guilt is one that the reader is left to wrestle with.

"You think people was meaner then than they ware now? the deputy said.
The old man was looking out at the flooded town.
No, he said. I don't. I think people are the same from the from the day God first made one."

Although very readable this is not a pretty work of fiction in terms of subject matter and the images you are left with are earth, caves, corpses, rifles and the worse kind of sex. I'm trying to work out quite what enjoying this read means about me.

Chance for unpublished authors with ebook prize

2012-01-11T11:31:00.001Z

Reading the Metro on the way into work saw a news in brief mentioning the Kidwell-e-Ebook Awards (that rolls off the tongue) which is a new literary prize.

The awards are part of a two day ebook festival taking place in August. More details of that can be found clicking here

I guess some will shrug their shoulders and bemoan the addition of yet another lit prize to the calendar but if it does promote as intended unpublished as well as established authors it could be interesting.

Over the second half of last year I managed to read some books that were either first publications for some writers or in a couple of cases things that had not yet received mainstream publication. Those writers were very keen for their work to get an airing and so for the unpublished and new writers this prize could offer a real showcase for their work and that will be a positive.

Got to be careful here as I am yet to join the ebook revolution so can't really talk too much about that side of reading but you would hope the awards would take in to account innovative use of the format and quality. The worry is that with digital data available it could just become a 'who got the most downloads' award.

Anyway that's my comment on the news, combined with some useless musings.

Thoughts at the halfway point of Child of God

2012-01-10T23:14:00.001Z

Going into the world of Cormac McCarthy is always dark, earthy and usually disturbing in the graphical portrayal of violence and sex.

Child of God delivers all of that but you find yourself sticking with the main character Lester Ballard as he loses his house, becomes a peripheral player on the edges of society and reason and ends up living in a shack in the wilds.

Lester is not a good guy but as he is first introduced he is as thee rest of us a 'child of god'.

Quite what will become of the semi vagrant Lester out in the woods with his rifle is what keeps you reading.

book review: Bagombo Snuff Box uncollected short fiction by Kurt Vonnegut

2012-01-09T14:56:00.002Z

"When Kiah got the car into the six-lane turnpike, he ceased feeling like an intruder in the universe. He was as much part of it as the clouds and the sea. With the mock modesty of a god traveling incognitio, he permitted a Cadillac convertible to pass him. A pretty girl at its wheel smiled down on him.
Kiah touched the throttle lightly and streaked around her. He laughed at the speck she became in his rearview mirror. The temperature gauge climbed, and Kiah slowed the Marittima-Frascati, forging himself this one indulgence. Just this once - it had been worth it. This was the life!"
Quote from The Powder-Blue Dragon.

There are several themes that come out of this collection of stories that were written by Kurt Vonnegut at the start of his writing career. He was penning these ideas at a time of great change in his home country. The Second World War had been won and the materialism that dominated the 1950s was yet to be overtaken by some of the dark times of the 1960s. But even with cars and dishwashers becoming things the common person could dream of what came with that technology was change and its that sense of tension between the new and the old that forms one of the main themes of this collection.

He is brutally honest about his work in an introduction and coda to the collection of 24 short stories revealing that he had to edit some of them to get them into a condition he was happy with to have them republished in his volume.

One of the themes is around the idea of technology and success with the materialism of post-war America starting to dazzle even those that previously might have thought car ownership was beyond them.

In The Power-Blue Dragon a car mechanic buys an Italian racing car in a purchase designed to show the world just what sort of man he is. The car has the ability to turn heads but few pay much attention to the boy driving it. The lesson here is that respect is something that cannot be bought with a cheque and happiness will not always result after flaunting wealth.

That idea of flaunting wealth is at the heart of The Package which starts with a man and his wife returning to a state of the art house after a holiday abroad. He has sold his factory and made millions and he is happy to let an old school friend look him up. The chance to show off and bury the resentments of the past are just too good to miss but at the end the arrogance caused by success and wealth blinds the main character from the truth. He has a victory but it is a hollow one.

Drawing on his background working for industry there are numerous references throughout the stories to the workings of large corporate entities and the men who run them and the people who work for them.

A post-war generation looks for excitement and a chance to sell-off the factories and hard work of their parents just to feel they can live. Of course they can only 'live' because of the effort made by their parents.

That theme is shown in both Runaways and This Son of Mine, where in the first story a poor boy falls in love with a Senators daughter. When the union is given the blessing of the parents the attraction of rebelling against authority falls away and the loveless relationship is laid bare.

In This Son of Mine a factory owner finds his highly educated son reluctant to take over the factory. Emotional blackmail and weakness lead the status quo to remain but without happiness on either side of the generational divide.

One of the other themes here is music, particularly in the form of the high school band. One band and band master crop up in two stories Ambitious Sophomore and The Boy Who Hated Girls charting the lengths to which people will go to to be part of a band and to stand out for their town. The sense of proportion is lost by band leader and band members alike as they pursue a dream which seems so limited in the face of the concerns of real life.

But if there was one other riff that chimes through this collection it has to be around the impact of change. Remember Vonnegut is a man changed by war, what he saw and what he experienced, and other characters are in the same position, as in the story Souvenir. But it is not just war time scars that continue to cause problems it is the sense of technology changing the way we all live.

The time and motion man who turns up in a town, in the story Poor Little Rich Town and rewrites how people live just to save time and money fails completely to understand the emotional reasons people do things and the hidden costs of saving money.

If you want a taste of classic Vonnegut, mixing the sci-fi and the fantastical with the modern and routine, then ironically it appears right at the start of the collection in the story Thanasphere. The idea that there might be ghosts in space is a clever one and this is hauntingly told.

But there is so much more to Vonnegut than just running wild with his imagination on the boundaries of space. What this collection shows is that he can deliver character, depth of emotion and deal with some very large questions all in the boundaries of the small story format.

For those that have not read his short stories, and my hand was raised before opening this book, then it is worth having a read and getting a different take on the American Dream when it was starting to really get going.

Bookmark of the week

2012-01-08T17:45:00.001Z

The other bookmark I picked up at the Leonardo exhibition at the National Gallery.

Brilliant study of hands by the master.

Little Foxes

2012-01-07T21:39:00.000Z

I don't often blog about my reading with the kids but having sat with them tonight and read the first couple of chapters of Little Foxes by Michael Morpurgo I just wanted to make a comment about it.

He uses great language. Using words that kids don't use everyday which leads to questions and then leads to learning.

Although its only two chapters in he also is able to focus on and develop a character you find yourself rooting for from almost the start.

Looking forward to getting through this one. Highlights of last year included some Famous Five and Dinosaur Cove.

Reading interrupted

2012-01-06T23:22:00.001Z

Having started the year by at least blogging again the plan of course was to get back into reading ways.

The return to work coincided with strong winds so a tube to work rather than the bike. So far do good because that's time to get through about 50 or 60 pages to and from work.

So imagine the horror as seven pages in there is a tap on the shoulder from a colleague. The politest thing to do was of course to put the book away.

But this has happened before and it's one of the most annoying things. I'm naturally fairly anti social so having to make small talk about work or football is painful when you have been ripped away from the printed page.

Anyway that's a long winded way of saying I've failed to finish the book I hoped to this week.

Determined this slow start is not the way things will continue. For now at least I'm blaming the interrupted reading on that tap on the shoulder.

book review: Unthology No.2 by various writers

2012-01-05T16:20:00.000Z

Short story collections by a variety of writers should always provide a patchwork of reading experiences with the different voices and styles. Good collections manage to deliver that as well as provide some overall takeaway theme for the reader and here it is very much about encouraging the development of creative talent.

There are thirteen stories in this collection and some of the names are familiar, particularly Nick Sweeney who has had a book reviewed on this bvlog before. The idea of taking up-and-coming writers and providing them with a place to show off their wares is an admirable one and there are certainly a few stories here that will be referred back to in future years as the early days of solid literary careers.

In terms of the most memorable it is perhaps unfair to pick out a few among the thirteen but I particularly liked Differences in Lifts by Lander Hawes, The Swan King by Ashley Stokes, The Poets of Radial City by Paul A. Green and Nine Hundred and Ninety Something by Nick Sweeney.

Starting with the Sweeney first what this writer gives you is a great sense of location. Taking you to locations in Eastern Europe and Turkey is something that was a feature of Laikonik Express and he does it again here. A clever story about a group of criminals preying on unsuspecting tourists comes with a twist that will deliver a smile. But it is the way he describes another world that will stay with you.

Talking of different worlds the landscape described by Paul A. Green is one where poetry is seen as a way of underming authority and as the poets stage one great protest against the state the status quo is challenging in a way that perhaps you would not expect from the poetic form. But this is a different reality and one convincingly delivered.

There were times that reality seemed all to familar with the coming of age and bogeyman story written by Ashley Stokes. The Swan King is a figure maligned and wrongly blamed. Part Rear Window in the way the main characters watch from their flat and part To Kill A Mockingbird in the way a relatively harmless odd figure is turned into some sort of bogeyman this gets under your skin. Secrets come back to haunt those looking for the killer of a student and the desire to be popular, liked and loved is one that doesn't just haunt the Swan King.

The other story that I have perhaps unfairly highlighted from a great collection is something with a futuristic feel from Lander Hawes. It's a world where work, careers and keeping on the straight and narrow dominate but when one man finds little support for his complaints about the lifts he demonstrates just how much a seemingly petty issue means to him. Strange and disturbing in the sense that although clearly not set in our time and space the corporate nonsense it describes is something we can all relate to.

Overall this is a great showcase for up and coming writers and it gives you everything a short story collection should. Great writing, different styles and a chance to be shocked, saddened and entertained.

Book review - Dark Steps a collection of short stories by Martin Pond

2012-01-04T22:32:00.001Z

"As the stocking flutters to the floor, I finally get what's wrong with everyone."

The title of this short story collection prepares you for tales that are dark and leave you with some lingering thoughts that remain in the mind long after you have finished reading it.

The collection starts with Waiting Room, a story where the reader grasps what is happening to the main character thereby making it even more tragic.

It then goes into stories about strange voices, strange events and the sort of things that disturb. There are ghostly tales and with The Inheritance a clever twist on the idea of a father passing down his talents to the son.

As well as delivering stories that are dark, sometimes with an almost horror like style, the other main theme running trough the collection is of stories with a twist. Leaving the reader to fill the end of the sentence by completing the picture in their minds is something that has to be well delivered.

It is here time and time again and there is also a certain enjoyment that comes from sharing in reading a writer that is starting on his journey and perfecting his craft.

A good read that deserves to get wide circulation.

Thoughts at not far off halfway through Bagombo Snuff Box

2012-01-03T22:32:00.001Z

Despite some criticisms of Vonnegut, and the reviews I've read of the latest biography of him adds to the potential reasons for disillusionment, I have to confess I like him.

Sometimes his writing takes refrains and pushes them to the limit but here in a collection of short stories the writing is tight and clever.

This collection was some of his first published work and he paints a picture of a post war America trying to find itself. Does the future lie in discovering the secrets of space? Can wealth bring happiness? Or can lessons be learnt from the life and death split second events of war?

So far Vonnegut has tackled all of those questions with wit, inventive tiara and solid writing.

The second half should be as good and although the style of Slaughterhouse 5 is not quite here it is good to see a writer able to deliver some thought provoking stuff in the short story format.

A review will follow on completion of the book (soon hopefully)...

Exhibition inspiration

2012-01-02T01:27:00.001Z

Although there are still a few books on the go from last month the exhibition yesterday made me want to head to the shelf and pick up a book that has been waiting for some attention for some time so a little bedtime reading awaits with Leonardo.

Looking back at 2011

2012-01-02T00:57:00.001Z

Not the best of years reading wise with a fairly low number consumed. What was perhaps more disappointing was the failure to get a rythmn going during the year. Booker prizes passed me by as did most other literary events and at times it felt as if just finishing a book was a major challenge let alone keeping up with the world of literature.

Of course the hope is that this year will be different and that I will not only read more but get into the swing of things and stay there for a bit.

Anyway here's the list of stuff read last year:

January
1. The Islanders and A Fisher of Men by Yevgeny Zamyatin
2. 2017 by Olga Slavnikova
3. Short stories and Prose Poems by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
4. One Hot Summer in St Petersburg by Duncan Fallowell
5. Uncle's Dream and Other Stories by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
6. The Village by Ivan Bunin
7. Master and Man and Other Stories by Leo Tolstoy

February
8. Count D'Orgels Ball by Raymond Radiguet
9. Taking it to Heart by Marie Desplechin
10. The Counterfeiters by Andre Gide
11. Holiday in a Coma by Frederic Beigbeder
12. Jezebel by Irene Nemirovsky
13. The Princess of Mantua by Marie Ferranti
14. A Day in the Country and Other Stories by Guy De Maupassant

March
15. The Terrorists by Maj Sjowall & Per Wahloo
16. Parallel Lives by John Tagholm
17. The Long Good-Bye by Raymond Chandler
18. The Mournful Demeanour of Lieutenant Boruvka by Josef Skovorecky
19. Talking about Detective Fiction by P.D. James
20. The Suspicions of Mr Wicher by Kate Summerscale
21. Headed for a Hearse by Jonathan Latimer

April
22. Next World Novella by Matthias Politycki
23. The Lost Honour of Katherina Blum by Heinrich Boll
24. Lineman Thiel and Other Tales by Gerhart Hauptmann
25. The Call of The Toad by Gunter Grass
26. Death in Venice, Tristan, Tonio Kroger by Thomas Mann
27. The Decision Book by Mikael Krogerus and Roman Tschappeler

May.
28. Country Dance by Margiad Evans
29. The Death of Napoleon by Simon Leys
30. Dearest Father by Franz Kafka
31. The Lives of Animals by J.M. Coetzee
32. Letters from a Lost Uncle by Mervyn Peake

June.
33. Alone in Berlin by Hans Fallada
34. Laikonik Express by Nick Sweeney
35. Mercedes-Benz by Pawel Huelle
36. Paris Metro Tales edited by Helen Constantine

July.
37. How I won the Yellow Jumper by Ned Boulting
38. Beer in the Snooker Club by Waguih Ghali
39. Can We Borrow Your Husband? by Graham Greene
40. The Hare With the Amber Eyes by Edmund de Waal
41. King of Tuzla by Arnold Jansen op de Haar
42. Fifth Business by Robertson Davies
43. Les Belles Images by Simone de Beauvoir

August
44. The Whores of Coxcomb Hall by Egg Taylor
45. Red Plenty by Francis Spufford
46. The Imperfectionists by Tom Rachman
47. Rome Tales stories translated by Hugh Shankland
48. The Ascent of Isaac Steward by Mike French
49. Stabat Mater by Tiziano Scarpa
50. The Scarlet Plague by Jack London

September
51. Hello America by JG Ballard
52. Busy Monsters by William Giraldi
53.
54.
55. The Queue by Vladimir Sorokin

October
56. The Wanderer by Knut Hamsen
57. Made in England by Gavin James Blower
58. A Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes
59. Engineers of the Soul by Frank Westerman
60. Incognita by William Congreve

November
61. Unthology 2 by various authors
62. Ten Stories about Smoking by Stuart Evers
63. Dark Steps by Martin Pond
64. Departures by Tony Parsons
65. What we talk about when we talk about love by Raymond Carver
66. Break it Down by Lydia Davis

December
67. An introduction to English poetry by James Fenton

Bookmark of the week

2012-01-01T21:08:00.001Z

Haven't posted a bookmark of the week for a while and Sunday was always the day for it. So fresh from the Leonardo da Vinci exhibition at the national gallery here is one of the bookmarks they are selling.

Happy new year

2012-01-01T21:04:00.001Z

Hello 2012 and hello again to the blog. I hope to be more productive this year. There are lots of reviews from last year still due to be done and there should be some new books to talk about as well.

Apologies for such intermittent service last year and hopefully 2012 will be better.

books read in 2012

2012-01-01T09:11:00.000Z

January
1. Bagombo Snuff Box uncollected short fiction by Kurt Vonnegut
2. Child of God by Cormac McCarthy
3. A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
4. The Rich Boy by F. Scott Fitzgerald
5. Falconer by John Cheever
6.

The month in review - October

2011-11-01T12:36:00.001Z

With my commuting reading time gone as a result of cycling a pattern of reading at night and in chunks over the weekend has emerged and as a result so has the average number of books I get through a month started to become clearer. Five is not as many as I used to be able to get through but neither is it as low as sometimes it has threatened to be so I'm fairly pleased with things.

It means that of course the volume of books I get through this year is not going to match last but after having thought about it I'm more philosophical now than I have been and more prepared to just be grateful for the reading time I get.

Books read in October:

The Wanderer by Knut Hamsun
Made in England by Gavin James Bower
A Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes
Engineers of the Soul by Frank Westerman
Incognita by William Congreve

Under the Autumn Star

2011-10-12T10:45:00.004+01:00

The Wanderer is split into two stories and partly for the sake of remembering and partly because I'm reading so slowly that the temptation to dual post is one I'm taking because it at least indicates I'm still doing something.

The first of these two stories about a wanderer Knut Pedersen starts off with him wandering around the Norwegian countryside looking for work but avoiding commitment. He has a complicated past, which is hinted at on various occasions, which reveals that he is a wanderer through choice rather than birth and has a background that is of a higher status.

But he seems happy enough felling trees and fixing the plumbing but what complicates his life is his way with the ladies. He is either falling for them or him for them and it is made more complicated by his inability sometimes to read the signs. If anything he seems inept although potentially successful. Nerves are blamed and when he does finally fall for someone his chance appears to have been missed. Mind you it doesn't help that his targets are wives or daughters of his employers making an extra layer of complication.

In many respects the story reminded me of A Month in the Country but there is the slightly more edgy feeling because with winter coming on Knut really does have to find work. In addition he is restless and this has an impact on his relationships with employers, fellow workers and friends.

Will put thoughts about the second story On Muted Strings into a review post soon...

book review: Laikonik Express by Nick Sweeney

2011-10-10T14:48:00.001+01:00

There are several things going on here ranging from the finding yourself type tale, the I want to write something but what should I write story and a pure old fashioned love story. The fact that they are intertwined and done so with great humour and a brilliant sense of location makes this the interesting read it ends up being.

The central axis of the book is the friendship between English teacher Nolan Kennedy and his erratic friend Don Darius. They met in Istanbul, where the story starts with Kennedy drifting along struggling with his own writing but determined to get the work of his friend published. Darius has left a manuscript that Kennedy thinks is a work of genius and he sets off to track his friend down in Eastern Europe to convince him that it should be edited and published.

Darius turns out to be a friendly chap who has a love of vodka and a less than enthusiastic relationship with writing suffering from bouts of indifference and lack of confidence. Plus he is on a mission to find the woman he glimpsed on a journey and fell in love with. Tracking her down involves heading off on the Laikonik Express into the snow covered streets of Poland and into a world that is strange and fuzzy as the vodka numbs the senses but creates a platform to develop friendships.

Kennedy is living life through his hopes for his friend and by the conclusion of the love story it is his own tale of traveling and his own doomed relationship with a Chinese girl that seems not only to match that of Darius but to overtake it in terms of literary value. He just hasn't seen it yet in his idolization of his friend.

Love might not blossom like the movies but the chance for it to find a way drives the narrative and for a while gives both friends a sense of purpose. Once that has lifted the harder challenge of working out what to do with life emerges as something that Kennedy at least seems to be aware he must face.

The description of small Polish villages, out of the way bars and the rail network in Eastern Europe are all delivered expertly from someone who has clearly spent some time in that part of the world. The experience of writing and the challenge of finding a subject is also something you suspect that the author has wrestled with but with this coming of realisation story about love, friendship, booze and literature he has been able to deliver a narrative that draws you in and keeps you going.

book review: Busy Monsters by William Giraldi

2011-09-30T15:56:00.000+01:00

Man falls in love with woman. She falls in love with idea of finding giant squid. She leaves and he goes crazy aided by a friend who has access to guns. Coping with jealousy and love has rarely been dealt with in such an entertaining way.

Because the main character Charles is a memoirist for a magazine the chapters are self-contained entries into his column and nothing is sacred. Even those that speficially ask him not to write about their lives are ignored.

As a result by the time he reaches the climax of his search for the love of his life Gillian everybody knows his motivation and his odd experiences on the way.

And odd they are ranging from setting off to kill his girlfriend's former possessive boyfriend only to find suicide has saved him the effort or the hair-brained idea to head into the woods to find a big foot to compete with the world wide fame that his girlfriend has received for tracking down the giant squid.

Needless to say add automatic weapons to the mix and there is a three month spell in jail in between some of these adventures. It's all fairly enjoyable.

The main character expresses himself sometimes in a Russell Brand sort of way with language set up as a hurdle for both other characters and occasionally the flow of the action. But that is a minor gripe.

In a world where the worst monster is man and the moods we all wrestle with can dominate our behaviour its a clever idea to project onto that the idea of seeking real monsters whether they be giant squids, big foots or for one character the legend of the Loch Ness monster. There is even a chance to get in some UFOs and alien abduction moments. These slimy, hairy and large monsters vie for attention along with the all too real ones of jealousy, lust and anger.

What keeps you going, just like those reading the memoir column and hoping for a happy ending, is not just the love story but the humour that runs through the narrative like Blackpool in a stick of rock.

Scenes that stick in the mind include a big foot hunter running screaming into the woods, a futile attempt to sink a boat with a rifle and the run in with a bitter lustful UFO hunter.

The story of boy meets girl then fights to defend his love might be as old as the hills but its delivered in a way that feels original and contains great comedy along with room for you to ponder just what your own monsters might be.

Top 100 books

2011-09-13T09:51:00.001+01:00

People seem to love lists so the chance to have a browse of another one will no doubt get the debate going. World Book Night has unveiled its list of the top 100 books gathered from asking people what are the ten books they love to read. The idea of course is to use the list to get a steer on what choices to include in World Book Night 2012.Having browsed the list the first observation is there seems to be a healthy mix of the classic and contemporary.have a look by clicking HERE.

Book review: They Shoot Horses, Don't They? by Horace McCoy

2011-09-05T11:21:00.001+01:00

"'What's the matter with Gloria?' James asked me one day as we came back to the floor from the sleeping quarters.
'Nothing. What do you mean?' I asked. But I knew what he meant. Gloria had been singing the blues again."

The Europeans don't have an exclusive grip on the dark, moody and existentialist with this Serpent's Tail Classic showing that American authors were quite adept at putting the dark into a black tale of despair and nihilism.

The story evolves around one of the dance competitions that ran across America in the 1930s giving those with stamina the chance to dance marathon competitions for money. Not only was it a case of last man standing but the tension of numerous couples being cooped up in an end of the pier type show for days on end also led to the chance that the tension would boil over and end the dancing through fights or tantrums.

You know how this story is going to end because it starts with Robert Syverten standing in the dock admitting that he killed her and that he doesn't really have a defence.

The story then moves to what led Robert, a young man dreaming of making it in the movies, from shooting Gloria a bit of a flakey girl also dreaming of making it as an actress. They meet as extras and she tells Robert of a dance contest that is not just attractive because of the monety but because it might put them under the spotlight for agents and directors.

more than a hundred couples start and the evenings are interrupted by one man being run-off as its revealed he is a murder suspect. As the hours drag on the couples drop out and the short breaks prove to be insufficient to patch up sore feet and tired heads.

An old woman comes and watches Robert and she seems to sense the impending doom as the young man spends more time with Gloria who is bitter and has a darkness about her. Her mixed approach to using sex as a way of furthering her own career and of her hatred for those using morality as a weapon drive a rift between Robert and his partner as he fails to keep up with her anger.

The contest enters the third week and both of them are at the point of exhaustion and a stray bullet fired in a scuffle kills the old woman who had been such a loyal supporter. The contest ends and its in the open air by the sea that a fatalistic Gloria asks Robert to shoot her which provokes the young man to do what she asks. When quizzed by a policeman why he replies with the killer line "They shoot horses, don't they?".

The book has a pace like a slow whirlpool pulling the dances and Robert and Gloria ever closer to breaking point. As the weeks go by and the point of being in the dance slips away and the potential rewards more elusive the need to compete seems to take over. Once that is removed what does life have to offer? The depression is in full swing and McCoy pulls no punches about the bleakness of life. What really is there worth living for if you can't make your dreams come true? Great stuff.

book review: The Financial Lives of the Poets by Jess Walter

2011-09-04T09:17:00.001+01:00

"And in my fraying head there plays a new medley of war and instability, financial collapse and bad schools; foreclosure, eviction; cynicism, climate crisis; 7/11 - and the melody switches to my personal theme song (Concerto of Failure and Regret in E Minor) as life bleeds out from my feet and puddles in the hallway..."

When the recession was in full swing books started to come out that were clearly inspired by the sense of doom that was permeating the Western world. With redundancies, house prices collapsing and repossessions all daily news the response from some writers, particularly in the US, was to pen novels that addressed that situation.

Then We Came to The End was one of the first I read that described a working world in an advertising agency collapsing in on itself and this book has a similar starting point with Matt Prior about to lose his home. The book tells his story and his oddbeat response to impending doom in a way that is clearly meant to be funny. It doesn't always pull that off because there are perhaps some problems trying to make the hero some sort of likable anti-hero as Prior looks to solve his problems by selling drugs.

His move into dealing cannabis starts in a mad moment when he pops out not just to get milk but to get some air to escape from the home he is losing and the wife he is lying to. After meeting some drug dealers and being dubbed 'slippers' because of his attire that evening he starts to see real possibilities to save his home and get things back on track.

But he becomes sidetracked by the idea that his wife is having an affair with an old college flame and spends too much time picking over the bones of his past. The idea of offering financial advice in the form of poetry might have failed by Prior doesn't seem to have any real alternative plan.

He manages to sell drugs to some of the very same people who have been part of his collapsing world from ex-colleagues to those that are involved with squeezing him with the credit crunch. He even ends up in the bizarre situation of managing to convince the dealers that he might be a suitable person to buy and run the operation.

But of course morality creeps in and although this might not be the happy ending we are all looking for it does indicate that the credit crunch can be something to look to get laughter out of. In its way that was the main problem for me with the book. It didn't make me laugh as much as it probably should and I never found the idea of selling drugs as 'crazy' as it was probably meant to be.

The other danger of course is that a novel so clearly identified with the credit crunch is one tied to a specific moment in history and could find a readership drifting away from wanting to find laughter in a black time to one that is simply happy to move on and forget all about it.

book review: Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones

2011-09-03T09:13:00.000+01:00

"I had found a new friend. The surprising thing is where I’d found him – not up a tree or sulking in the shade, or splashing around in one of the hill streams, but in a book. No one had told us kids to look there for a friend. Or that you could slip inside the skin of another. Or travel to another place with marshes, and where, to our ears, the bad people spoke like pirates. "

I can still remember the moment when I opened Animal Farm after having been sent home with it by my English teacher. The book took me into a magical world of animals and made me desperate to understand the politics it was a metaphor for. It gave me a love of that book and literature that has never left me.

So the idea of a teacher using Charles Dickens to inspire a class of children thousands of miles away from both London and Victorian England is one that is totally understandable.

The way that the story would stick with one pupil in particular, the narrator of the story, is also something that those of us who have had an inspirational English teacher will relate to.

But this is not just a tale of inspirational literature and also covers the brutality of communities living in the tropical islands of the Pacific. In the tiny school the only white person on the island Mr Watts tells the children about life through reading Great Expectations.

The story inspires Maltida to dream of a world beyond the confines of her difficult relationship with her mother and a life away from the line of shacks that line the beach.

Her dreams might start in her mind but her choices are forced upon her as a tribal war arrives on their beach and rips apart the magic that Mr Watts has spun.

The story shows the power of the imagination and the wonder of literature. It is a homage to Dickens and his abilities to draw readers of all backgrounds into his stories and give them something that they can use to shape their own thoughts.

A good read there were times you couldn't see where it was going but Jones manages to make the character of Watts even more interesting through the eyes of another and the true extent of the inspirational teacher's story doesn't become fully clear until the end.

Catching up

2011-09-02T09:11:00.001+01:00

There is a pile of books that have been read but not reviewed by my desk and I am determined to get through them. So over the next few days I am going to be posting reviews from books that i have just not got round to talking about.

I apologise if some of these reviews therefore seem to be disconnected to earlier comments I made about them but I simply didn't know a better way of doing it.

So look out for some new reviews of old reads going up.

Month in review: August

2011-09-01T09:47:00.000+01:00

Managed to have a month of good reading building on the back of a strong July, where the books were great holiday companions. When I can the aim is to get through seven books a month and so to do that two months running is great after a real dip the previous couple of months.

I guess the highlight of the month was probably the quirky but fun Red Plenty and the Italian prize winning Stabat Mater. Also enjoyed the eclectic mix of Rome Tales which took you on an alternative tour of that great city through a collection of short stories.

Onwards and upwards in September hopefully.

Books read in August

The Whores of Coxcomb Hall by Egg Taylor
Red Plenty by Francis Spufford
The Imperfectionists by Tom Rachman
Rome Tales stories translated by Hugh Shankland
The Ascent of Isaac Steward by Mike French
Stabat Mater by Tiziano Scarpa
The Scarlet Plague by Jack London

book review: The Scarlet Plague by Jack London

2011-08-31T15:55:00.002+01:00

Apart from the references to airships which gives away the limits of London's knowledge of just how far technology could go this book could be an apocalyptic vision of any future.

The idea is of a plague spreading across the globe taking man back to a primitive society where the survivors are divided into a hierarchy based on muscle rather than class. There are hardly any people left from the time of the plague but one of the few tells his story to a trio of boys dressed in cave men like skins. His tale charts the first signs of the disease which struck down its victims and killed them in hours. A scarlet appearance was followed by numbness of the feet then up through the body until it reached the heart and killed its victim.

There was no way to fight the spread of the disease because those trying to fight it were killed before they could come up with an antidote. As society fell apart the cities burned and brute force took over. Those that did survive did so because of luck, their genetic make-up, rather than because of modern medicine.

As the narrator retells his story you get the feeling of a world imploding and the impact of the destruction of cities and learned people is to drag things back to a primitive state where language and books are in danger of being forgotten.

Considering the age it was written this is the work of a powerful imagination which was working right at the boundary of what London thought would sound plausible. He pulls it off in the main although of course now the idea of airships makes it all seem a bit Phileas Fogg.

But as an illustration of how science fiction can make you think and ponder on your own reality this is bang on the mark raising interesting questions about class, knowledge and human cruelty.

book review: Stabat Mater by Tiziano Scarpa

2011-08-29T14:57:00.000+01:00

The power of music to change lives is well documented but when the life is so damaged and bereft of love the chance for the sounds to do more is perhaps even more heightened. That is the case here as the story of a 16 year-old orphan being raised by nuns unfolds. She has been taught the violin but not taught to love, think or understand the world around her but that changes with the arrival of Vivaldi.

As he uses his music to conjure up the seasons and to draw out of the audience thoughts of the sea, feuding lovers and nature in all its glory he opens the minds of his young players and sparks off a friendship with the focus of the story Cecile.

She is a complicated girl that shares her experiences with the reader in the form of a series of letter to the mother she never knew, the same mother who left her abandoned to be found by the nuns at the orphanage. As she spends her nights writing to her mother in the darkness she is joined by imaginary companions like the snake headed lady who she sees as representing death.

What strikes you as her letters tell of her daily struggle to find some sort of happiness is just how lonely she is and how deep the hole that her absent mother has left in her life. Until Vivaldi turns up with something different even the music she plays so magnificently on her violin cannot distract her from the misery of the convent.

But when that music is unleashed and the challenge to her as a person to live and make a mark in the world is given to her by Vivaldi it is one that she takes providing the reader with perhaps the best evidence that music really can change a person's world.

Written in chunks without chapters this has a lyrical almost dreamlike quality. Sometimes, just as the main character struggles to remember what happened in a dream or for real, so the reader finds themselves wondering where the boundaries lie. But that is a good thing and not frustrating because you know that the effect is to reinforce that you can only imagine but never quite grasp what happens behind the closed convent doors or behind the masks the violin players are forced to wear in public.

Thought provoking and for one of the first times had me going straight from last page to stereo to crank up the four seasons. This lives on if you embrace it in the music and the thoughts that you could allow yourself to have.

book review: Rome Tales edited by Helen Constantine

2011-08-26T15:01:00.003+01:00

"Entering the forbidding portal, climbing the staircase and then passing through the darkened rooms of the vast building, I was going through my tunnel, through with no thought or presentiment of all the light on the other side, of what a contrast lay in store for me as though deliberately devised by some friendly genius leading me to discover Rome by subtle pathways and with the keenest sense of adventure."

After reading Rome Tales you are left with a mixture of feelings about the City. You sense its history, both political and religious, its culture and its transition as the population changes and city becomes more multicultural.

Through a series of short stories, by different authors from various eras, it is possible to get an insight into a city that contains its imperial Roman history along with the shame of fascism under Mussolini as well as the superstitions and ghost stories handed down through the years.

This collection is also a place to be entertained with tales of film makers recreating the city on celluloid and intrigued by some of the colourful characters that are drawn to Rome to make money and a new life for themselves.

The collection starts with a story taking a pop at the pope and it ends with one looking out at the City through the eyes of the man sitting in the Vatican. In between there are stories of ghosts, lovers and the sort of details of daily life you would never get from a tourist visit to Rome.

Interspersed with pictures of the city and containing helpful information about the authors and a map to illustrate where the tales are set this would make the perfect companion for a trip to Rome.

What you come away thinking about is not just how much history there is in the city but how much life continues to flow through its streets. The shadow of the Roman history could potentially block out anything else but stories here about a girl heading for an abortion, a lesbian tourist caught trying to embrace a statue and an insight into the streets that were the setting for La Dolce Vita in the late 1950s demonstrates that the heart of Rome still went on beating.

The other point to make about this book is that it proves, not that I think it needs to be proved, that the short story format can be a very powerful way of illustrating emotions and feelings about a place. This collection contains various authors that produced work over hundreds of years but because of the intelligent way it is complied it still manages to flow. The pieces are united by the City but they are also united by talent making it easier to go from one writer to another.

book review: The Ascent of Isaac Steward by Mike French

2011-08-25T11:32:00.002+01:00

"The black horse kicked hooves into the yellow sky; its long mane flowing north across southern plains. It stopped as a red light flared up before it and receded back onto the bonnet of Ishmael's F355 Ferrari. A young boy stepped out and started to wipe it down."

This book wasn't the easiest to follow at times but that's a result of the ambition of the imagination of French and as a reader you have to work hard to stick with it.

Isaac Steward is a fairly simple man when you first meet him but as his memories unfold around him you find out he is coning to terms with a terrible secret that has ripped his family apart and leads him to the very brink mentally and physically.

Once you start getting the pieces of the jigsaw you can get a grip of sorts on the story but this is a bit like a rollercoaster and they were times I was out of the car just holding onto the rail waiting for a period when I could climb back in and feel comfortable again.

That's partly because a decent chunk of the story happens in Isaac's subconscious where his good and bad memories are struggling to control his emotions. Bad memories have the power to do him great harm so happier times with punch and judy shoes on seas side holidays are ferried in to keep the equilibrium going.

the bad memories are locked up secure in HMS prison Gyrus but below the prison wals lies a beach where the punch and judy characters stroll and the battle for control of Isaac's mind plays out.

But if you have done something that caused great tragedy then it will at some point have to recognised and dealt with and sure enough the balance in Isaac's mind finally shifts to a place where facing up to those bad memories is unavoidable.

Partly because of the names, good biblical ones, and the appearance of angels and demons this has the feeling of being much more of a literal fight between good and evil.

This book wasn't that easy to read and there were moments I struggled to visualise hat was happening. But, and this is the important bit, I got something out of it and there was a story that worked for me so in that respect the book delivered.

book review: The Imperfectionists by Tom Rachman

2011-08-22T12:00:00.003+01:00

"Typewriters disappeared next, replaced by video display terminals. Overnight, the newsroom's distinctive clack-clack-bing went silent. The rumbling basement presses hushed, too, with the work outsourced to modernized printing sites around the globe. No longer did vast rolls of newsprint slam into the backside of the building in the late afternoon, jolting any dozing reporter awake. No longer did delivery trucks clog Corso Vittorio at dawn as workmen loaded the papers, copies still warm."

Having been attracted to this book because it covers the world of journalism it was with a sense of familiarity that I read of the world of a newspaper facing the challenges of declining revenues and a failure to grasp the importance of the web.

The paper, based in Rome, has seen its readership decline along with its financial fortunes. Set up in the 1950s as a per project by a US millionaire the paper has been handed down from father to son as a weight around the neck for three generations. Nobody seems to know what to do with the paper from an ownership point of view but the financial realities means that the situation cannot last forever.

Chapters arranged to tell you about the different people who work on the paper, from the reporters, sub editors up to the editor and accountants, are interspersed with the history of the establishment of the paper.

In many ways this reminded me of Then We Came to the End with that same feeling of despair and detailing how a corporate environment can shape a person's world. There are the same moments of humour and tragedy but this is perhaps different in the sense this is not linked directly to the recession.

The story of newspapers failing is going to be one that is a theme of the next few years. The world of the web has supplanted the daily newspaper for many readers, looking for the story right now via the TV, twitter and online news sites rather than to wait for tomorrow's paper to tell them all about it. Plus the era of the star columnist, the Keith Waterhouse, is threatened by the blogosphere where there are more voices than you could ever have time to hear.

But in the world Rachman explores what really matters is not just the pounds and pence that drive the media business but the impact a working place has on someone's life. Self-esteem, love and happiness are all tied up with work and in that sense the newspaper industry is just like any other. If anything the decision to place the action in Rome is part of making it more general because you don't identify with the paper as being one you would suspect was one you read.

The moral of the story seems to be around the temporary nature of news compared with the lasting power of love but for many of the characters that lesson is one that passes them by. Well constructed and written in a way that means just as you wonder how many more characters you will be introduced to the curtain comes down and things are rounded off without any loose ends.

Out of this world

2011-08-21T12:05:00.000+01:00

The British Library has a track record of putting on some excellent exhibitions that are not only free but packed with thought provoking ideas. I haven't been able to get up to one for a while but wanted to get to the Out of This World exhibition concerning science fiction.

One of the promised highlights was to be able to see some annotated notes by one of my favourite authors JG Ballard, which was indeed worth looking at just to see the extent to which he was prepared to self edit, but there was lots more besides.

The exhibition not only covered books which have been around space exploration and other worlds but also dealt with the ideas of traveling into the mind and the science fiction of a relatively ordinary world that could change once put through a dramatic change. Ballard of course is an expert at that but there were other ideas about the rise of robots, the death of the earth and the concept of co-habiting with other civilisations.

In the middle there was a Tardis which reminded you, along with a copy of Herge's Tintin Explorers to the Moon, that science fiction has always had a place in mainstream culture whether it be in the imagination of children or entertaining us all at prime time on a Saturday night.

A great exhibition and for me personally a reminder not only to get back into some Ballard but to open my mind to other authors that were prepared to explore reality.

book review: Red Plenty by Francis Spufford

2011-08-18T14:59:00.006+01:00

"Were they ready to measure up the Soviet way against the American way? Were they ready to let the people see a little bit of the scale of the task that still lay ahead? In his opinion, if you believed that the good times were coming, if you trusted that graph, it was necessary to behave like it."

How do you give an idea of what it was like living and working in one of the largest nations on earth in a critical period of its history? Concentrating on the leaders might be an option or going to the other end of the spectrum and trying to get the voice of the common man.

This book treads a different path, although the leadership thing is there with a view of the world through the eyes of Khrushchev, by concentrating on those that have the ability to really change the future. The scientists, the economists and the biologists who find themselves in the Russia of the 1960s with a real feeling that the system is there to be changed. Not torn down and replaced by improved. The goal is to beat the US to show that socialism can beat capitalism. This is the belief held by Khrushchev and he pushes very hard to inspire the next generation of thinkers to make it happen.

As the years go by different chapters introduce you to characters that believe they can really make a difference with new ideas and exploiting new technology. But they are all trying to do so against the backdrop of a state that is simply not able to introduce some of the economic devices, like free movement of prices, to real deliver the goods. This is an economy and society that has been ruled by fear and so introducing free thinking is not something that comes naturally.

The scenes set in the scientific community in Siberia describes brilliantly the moment when people discover they are among friends and able to speak the unspeakable. But it also goes back later to demonstrate the fickle nature of the regime which liked to follow a thaw with a heavy crackdown.

The best way to think of this book is to read it in its entirety and then let it soak in completely because this is like looking at a number of photographs that are being carefully selected to sum up a generation. Occasionally when reading it you wonder where it is going but by the end you not only get it but wonder why this period of Russian history has not been given greater exposure. It is clearly an interesting time and the country is opening up post Stalin.

Although you feel that the brief was for Spufford to deliver a straight forward history this manages to engage the reader much more effectively than some dry academic study. He makes the economic and scientific arguments come alive because he tells it through people, through stories and emotions we all feel so his decision was the right one.

book review: The Whores of Coxcomb Hall by Egg Taylor

2011-08-16T14:16:00.003+01:00

"Sweets, cake, fruit and sundry comforts were stored in the bleak and forbidding tuck box shed. Five hundred boxes lined the shelves. Most were tough as teak, with weighty padlocks, but some- on lower shelves, in easy reach - were pale and new and quite defenseless. By order, the shed doubled as storage for shoe polish kit and the air was tick with Cherry Blossom wax. The wax was a great leveller. Every item in the boxes was scented with it, and the duckboard floor was black and treacherous from the buffing of a thousand toecaps.
This was an emotive place. Within the boxes were those things that had been packed by mothers, and here and there, by fathers too. Special things parents had wrapped with their own hands."

Sex is one of the main themes of this story and one that probably attracts a response from the reader in just the first couple of chapters. But strange as it might sound you quickly forget about that as sex is just one of the weapons used in a power struggle that is raging across various parts of life at Coxcomb Hall.

On the one hand there is a fight between the head and financial reality, another between one teacher and the colleagues who are having an affair with his wife and then the struggles of the boys themselves.

The setting is a public school, a very minor one, in the late 1960s that is corrupt and rotten but stumbling on with its assembled collection of alcoholic and socially isolated staff and boys who have been largely dumped by their parents and forgotten. Into this world steps Mrs White, a young woman married to the aged Dr White, and her determination to escape from her current predicament by accruing as much money as possible. She does that by granting sexual favors to the boys as well as charging for sex from two of the staff.

Her plan seems to be going well but she comes up against a puritan teacher named Jackson as well as the head boy Ossaff who rules by fear. The combination of goodness and pure darkness combine to undo Mrs White's ambitions.

But across the school the pressures of money, hate and jealousy are heading into an inevitable collision that will mean the end for Coxcomb and the power structures that have existed for years.

There are so many echoes in this book not just of other titles but also films. If obviously comes to mind but at points you find yourself thinking of the strange world of Gormenghast as the odd characters of the school are described and placed into a context where they are very much influenced by their buildings.

You keep reading because although the characters are generally nasty, the http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifsex brutal and manipulative or illegal there is a wish to see the end and work out where liberation is coming from. The way Taylor gets you there is worth waiting for.

It is also worth mentioning that the first few chapters can be enjoyed via Facebook.

book review: Les Belles Images by Simone de Beauvoir

2011-07-31T16:37:00.002+01:00

"'I tell you what, we'll talk about it tomorrow. But if you know any unhappy people, we'll try to do something for them. You can treat sick people, give poor ones money - there are masses of things you can do.'
'Are there really? For everybody?'
'Dear me, I should cry all day long if there were people whose unhappiness couldn't be cured at all.'"

The idea of choosing this book as a holiday read was that by the time I got to Paris I was reading about Parisians. The problem was by the time I had got to the [point when I pitched up on a campsite in the Parisian suburbs the characters of this book had quite put me off heading for the Champs Elysees.

They are meant to of course as Simone de Beauvoir portrays the vacuous world of the rich in Paris. in a way that leaves you despairing of their lack of connection with the real world. They search for happiness and fulfilment among the top class restaurants and their weekends away in the country but don't know how to respond when someone brings real pain and horror into their lives.

So they protect the bubble by running away from the news, banning their children from reading newspapers and keeping the conversation to safe naval gazing subjects of conversation.

At the heart of the story is Laurence who we are told has had a nervous breakdown five years previously and then slowly heads towards another. What sparks her off is her daughter mentioning that she is unhappy and upset by the suffering in the world. Despite the best efforts to stop her from reading newspapers the influence of a more worldly friend is difficult to stop and so the seed of unhappiness is planted in the apartment leaving the ambitious architect father and the fragile mother to cope with the consequences.

At the same time a parallel story displaying the vanity and shallowness of the older generation is running with XXX's mother being dumped by a rich aged boyfriend because the 56 year-old fancies getting involved with a 19 year-old. The mother screams at her daughter that a woman without a man is nothing and highlights that even someone who is apparently successful believes that society cannot view her in those terms unless she has a rich man on her arm.

The world this book refers to is sadly still probably there and certainly the world of the vacuous rich is one that you can certainly imagine still being like this. What keeps you reading isn't any sympathy for the characters but a sense of fascination that something so natural and innocent, the idea that not everyone is happy, can cause such distress. It proves, if it needed underlining, that regardless of your wealth and success you cannot cocoon yourself from reality.

There are also some messages here about the position of women in society, with the mother showing a desperation to be with a man in order to be accepted by society and the attitude towards Laurence as one verging on the patronising and bullying by some of the men in her life.

Not the most enjoyable read but then it was never designed to be and although it's looking a bit old in some respects the world she took the scalpel to is still there and still deserves to get this sort of literary examination.

book review: King of Tuzla by Arnold Jansen op de Haar

2011-07-22T17:20:00.003+01:00

"For two days his company had been under the command of Nordbat, the Norwegian-Danish-Swedish battalion that had been billeted around Tuzla, initially for a period of two weeks. Who could say whether it would stop at that? Links with the battalion in Srebrenica had been temporarily severed. Just as well: from now on he was more or less his own boss. He was king, King of Tuzla."

Reading this story of life on the inside of a UN mission to Bosnia reminded you of that news footage where the blue helmeted troops looked so helpless in the face of a conflict that tore the former Yugoslavia apart.

That sense of frustration is evident in this account of life on the sinde of a Dutch unit sent to police an airport in an area disputed by rebels fighting out differences which went back generations and were bogged down in the complex differences of race and religion.

At the heart of the story is a solider, Tijmen Kleide Gildekamp, who through his experiences serving under the UN banner becomes disillusioned with the army life and in the hours of boredom punctuated with brief hair raising moments of fear he gets the chance to reevaluate his life.

It is a life of service and duty but one that is pretty empty of friends and real satisfaction and even as he sits wearing his King of Tuzla t-shirt looking out across the pock marked shelled runways he struggles to find sense in the military manoeuvres although he does start to get a sense of what he needs to do with his life.

The book benefits from the autobiographical knowledge of the author and the confidence he has describing not just the experience of serving in Bosnia but the background to how you get from a student at military school into the position of leadership. The close knit world of the army is clearly one that people struggle to leave and as Tijmen walks past the barracks and recalls his past there is that sense of regretting lost time not just spent in the army but spent making the decision to leave.

The description of the tension and almost anarchy of the front lines and the tightrope that the UN soilders were treading is brilliantly done and even those with no sense of history of the recent conflict will understand the difficulty for troops that were seen as an irritant and unwanted by both sides.

It's such a well worn phrase but in many respects this is a coming of age story that charts the journey of a man who discovers himself as an individual rather than just a cog in a machine and discovers that real bravery isn't just facing up to mortar shells and bullets but making a break with a life and a past to go off and do something different.

If you want proof that literature has the power to change lives then this illustrates it on every level.

book review: How I Won the Yellow Jumper by Ned Boulting

2011-07-15T16:26:00.002+01:00

"I have been told though, by a friend who was watching in embarrassed disbelief in a house in Chelmsford, that I uttered words like 'some sort of thing with his bike'. I followed this up, apparently with the killer line, 'kissing goodbye to his chance of winning the yellow jumper'.
Yes, the yellow jumper. That's what I said."

The Tour de France can feel like an alien world. Talk of different colour jerseys, general classification times and numerous riders and teams can put off all but the most determined from finding out about it. But as Ned Boulting's experiences show once you make the effort to understand the sport you are hooked.

There are ups and downs, with doping scandals continuing to feature in the sport, forcing Boulting to add an epilogue in response to the revelations that last year's winner Alberto Contador had tested positive, but there is still more to admire here than to scorn and the riders and the logistics of the Tour are both monumental and deserved to be praised.

What Boutling does is shows that it is possible to get into the sport as a complete novice and then build up a knowledge and a love of the sport fairly quickly. His introduction to commentating for ITV starts with a cock-up, hence the book name about jumpers and jerseys, and manages to stay in a light-hearted vein until the end. He is flanked by former professional riders and legendary broadcasters but he manages to find his own place in the world of cycling.

The behind the scenes book reveals not just what it takes to film the Tour and work on it but what the event means to the people of France and the way the world changes for those three magical weeks in July. It made me smile and it made me share a frown as Boulting reveals his disappointments over doping. But importantly it provided more details of the Tour and revealed just why this event is so special.

Books about sport are incredibly difficult to pull off because they either appeal to die-hard fans who dissect them for flaws and unknown nuggets or are so generalist they don't add any value to those who share an interest and want to know more.

Boulting pulls it off and his technique is not just around his use of humour but his use of biography. This is his story of how he fell ikn love with the Tour and although we can't all commentate and get taken round in a car with a film crew that essential journey from bike novice to fan is one that we are all welcome to head down.

book review: Alone in Berlin by Hans Fallada

2011-06-10T19:22:00.004+01:00

"Quangel stood up. 'There,' he laughed. 'You know perfectly well that the man behind bars is the decent one, and you on the outside are a scoundrel, that the criminal is free, and the decent man is sentenced to death.'"

What hits you like a slap in the face is the date this book was written because it is something you never expected to discover that anti-Hitler feeling could have been voiced at the height of the madman's regime.

But here it is in a story that has a great deal to say not just about the value of resistance, even if it appears on many levels to be futile, but about why a society that brings the scum to the surface is such a horrible one to live in.

At the heart of the story are a husband and wife, the Quangel's, who find that their son has been killed in action. Otto, up to now a miserly and introverted factory foreman decides that he has to mark the loss in some way.

He begins a campaign writing postcards which he drops across Berlin criticising Hitler and his rule of Germany. The cards get noticed by the Gestapo and just that alone sends several people into a fury.

As the years go on and the postcards keep dropping the noose perhaps tightens around Otto's neck but so in a way does it for the regime.

A cast of some of the most disturbing and horrible low life characters litter the book and illustrate how the Nazi regime rewarded thugs and allowed them to terorise people in the name of the state.

But where Fallada is at his best is when he punctures the fragile world of the gestapo. Their arrogance is matched with stupidity and now and again the brain cells connect and they realise that their approach stinks and the law they talk of defending is a sham.

but for the most part you find yourself rooting for an odd quiet man who shows a great deal of bravery. he might not be the perfectly rounded character but when it comes to describing someone to stand up against Hitler's regime it is perhaps the ordinariness of Otto that really lingers in the memory.

Some people were brave enough to counter the propaganda and some writers were capable of writing about it and Fallada does that here admirably.

book review: Dearest Father by Franz Kafka

2011-05-23T20:37:00.002+01:00

"Recently the belief that I was defeated by Father as a small boy and have since been prevented by pride from leaving the battleground, throughout all these years, despite enduring defeat over and over again."

As a father myself the idea of what my sons might be thinking about me kept coming to the forefront of my mind as I read this heart breakingly honest letter from Franz Kafka to his father.

their relationship was one clearly troubled and beset by the dominance of the father and the continual failure of Franz to feel he could live up to what was expected of him. He failed to take a role in the family business, failed to find favour for his writing and caused serious upset with his plans to marry.

But this letter, a love letter from a loving son to a father, is upsetting because there is a feeling that things would never change. No matter what Franz does or did it would make no difference to a man who is almost blinded by his obstinacy and pride.

That's a message for fathers now and a challenge not to provoke hate and servitude in our own children by pushing our own views down their throats.

As Kafka details the numerous occasions when his father and him clashed and the role of his mother as a not quite innocent bystander you feel for the man. You want him to be able to either breakthrough to his father or as an alternative to break free.

Sadly he is capable of neither and as we all know illness took him before there was a chance perhaps to reach one of those outcomes.

A beautifully produced OneWorld Classic contains a few extracts from Kafka's diaries that reinforce some of the points he makes in his letter.

he might not have wanted it printed but across the decades it has a message for fathers now and the clashes and battles he describes continue now in households all across his native Prague and well beyond.

book review: The Death of Napoleon by Simon Leys

2011-05-20T21:06:00.002+01:00

"Other napoleons came and went around him; in the middle of the lawn, where a patch of white mist now hovered, one of them peered into the shadows through a cardboard telescope; another spread an old newspaper on the stone balustrade, as if it were a staff map. There were some who sat astride rusty garden chairs, lost in thought."

Fiction should play with truth and reality and this whole story does it wonderfully. Starting off with the premise that Napoleon has escaped from his prison island St Helena to be replaced by a double the story charts what might happen.

The Emperor heads back to France leaning on the planning of an organisation dedicated to restoring him to power. But delays and bad weather means he is diverted and there is a wonderful moment when Napoleon goes with some British tourists to see the battlefield of Waterloo.

he finally manages to get back to Paris but without money or friends has to take refuge with a widow of one of his old loyal infantrymen. he uses his strategic skill to restore the fortunes of her melon business revealing to some of those around him as a result he is who they had thought he was.

But with the death of the double all those miles away on the island Napoleon can no more reveal who he is. Who would believe him and the fear that came with knowing he was still alive is snuffed out like a flame.

As he wanders through the gardens of an asylum watching the other napoleon's take the air before returning to the hospital his predicament as a pretender fully dawns on him.

This story is fun in the sense it takes one of the great historical 'what if' and takes it to a conclusion but it is also a disturbing prod at the question of identity. What does it mean to have your identity taken away from you, particularly when it's permanent through death? What does it fell like to have no one believe you?

One of the themes that emerges is that even those that followed Napoleon blindly into musket fire and the face of canon balls had no idea what he actually looked like. But the legend was stronger than reality and the idea of an aging, balding and over weight Napoleon returning from the dead to over throw the French establishment is one that even his most loyal foot soldiers will not b able to support.

A few thoughts on discussion on The Good of the Novel

2011-05-17T15:19:00.002+01:00

Last night I attended a discussion at the London Review Bookshop provoked by the book The Good of the Novel, which has been published by Faber.

The evening threw up lots of interesting thoughts and there are perhaps not surprisingly more questions than answers when it comes to discussing the position of the novel now as well as the future direction it might take.

The evening started off with a few comments from Ray Ryan, co-editor of The Good of the Novel before asking a panel for their opinions.

I sat there with my phone and made a few observations based on what each person said and hope they might make a poor but fleeting record of what was said and provide an idea of the thoughts that were expressed on the night.

Ray Ryan, co-editor The Good of the Novel
The novel is always in society therefore difficult to analyse it independently of history.

Each novel sets it's own agenda and makes it's own demands of the reader.

Novelistic truth is not documented.

James Wood, well known critic
We go to it for pleasure. It gave me great feeling of freedom against the backdrop of a strict religious upbringing "An experience of realising reading the novel an area of freedom anyone could be represented thinking anything."

Very few outright tragic novelists. Secularism. Seeing the ways in which Dostoevsky could argue against himself in the Brothers Kasmanov. Began a movement away of whatever religious leaning I had.
Quite important now last decade a revival on both sides of atheism and envangelisism trying to pin us down.

Mental lives are flickering intermittent the novel as a form it alone can do. Hadn't yet had great novel that deals with atheism and fundamentalism perhaps it's coming.

Lee Brackstone, editorial director at Faber
Lee gave a publishers perspective: Publishers position often thankless. Position in chain of command between writer ad reader. We are the first people to cast artform into literary mold.
Lucrative narrative form. I tell other publishers to just buy what you love but Faber needs these things so just how useful is this advice? What pressures of the market to qualify taste? If market and everyman readers didn't exist what would we be publishing? Do the structures bring us the novel we deserve and if not what might that novel be?
Navigate between the gospel of the novel and the demands of a brutal market?
Visceral. To make these decisions and have responsibility in maintaining this list at Faber is a privilege. Novelist ability to deconstruct and surprise and reconstruct. Worries me that element of surprise will disappear where character, plot and style over come place and different voices.
Do readers want entertainment or challenge to comfort? Not novelist responsibility to represent the world but to make it a more uncertain place.

Frances Wilson, author and critic
What I'm interested in is the anti-novelism of novels. Intimacy kureishi it's not a novel might as well call it a fish a book whose intimacy spoke only to her. Rarely like scandal Of fiction that operates one inch from life. Novels should be dangerous or a risk you should be prepared to leave a different person.
Genius in the way kureishi re-framed the real.
If novels are meant to be vecihles of interiority take you inside the heads of Novels being morally uncertain. Deal with the complexity of thought and emotion.

Amit Chaudhuri, author and academic
Disliked the novel as a form for a long time. Viewed the cult of the novel with suspicion. Geoff Dyer berates the form. Always meant to be a poet. Larkin wanted to be a novelist but I always wanted to be a poet. Drawn to was rereadability one of my first experinence belief that certain sentences were enough and whole novel around it were a Nuisance. Get rid of it but do what? Feel like starting anew with each sentence. Novel became a series of fresh beginnings. Heard it had to do with plot and story and the problematic character. Wasn't going to novels for character was going to them for something spatial. Background. Description. which can be a criticism. I was drawn to description and background. Think of the story in a different way not about things happening but about a space. Found myself inhabiting and producing novels.

Novel became more successful with globalisation. Brought in rhetoric of plenty. Leaked into the novel. People were reading more. So what? World of infinite communication and plenty into which the novel had fallen the debate is not so much about the novel can elaborate on various views of the world whole thing haunted by main a happening in literature is the transformation in the interruption. Not the novel but what is the literary?
From critical theory and philosophy. Masterpiece only used by pr agencies not used in literary departments.

Then there were some questions and I picked out a few memorable comments and thoughts in response to queries from readers about what makes novels good and what the role of it is in society.

Lee
The good of the sentence rather than the good of novel.

New technology will allow novelist to look at form in a new way. David Foster Wallace was challenging it but no longer.

Novel performs function of a benign mirror happy to see something like us as well as something less pleasant.

James wood
Confirmation of the world and invention of the world. Realism can be very frustrating.

book review: A Country Dance by Margiad Evans

2011-05-12T21:36:00.002+01:00

"'I'm going home,' I say. 'You cannot undo what you have done, even with your Welsh tongue.''I will, though,' shouts the master.'Gabriel Ford will never take your word,' I answer back."

There is a certain lyrical quality to the few Welsh books I've read and it's here as the pastoral landscapes of the Welsh border clash with the battle between two men for the heart of a shepherd's daughter.

Penned by the Welsh-border writer Margaid Evans the story of Ann Goodman unfolds. She is torn by the mixed English and Welsh in her blood and finds herself the object of affection for a Welsh land owner and an English shepherd.

She moves between them as she crosses the border and although she is in effect engaged to the English shepherd Gabriel it is when working on the Welsh farm she becomes a woman the master sets his sights on.

Gabriel turns up to check up on his love and finds the master sweet talking her in Welsh. fights ensue and it is not until the very end Ann makes up her mind.

Apart from the three characters involved in the love triangle what stands out here is the description of a rural world that is bitterly hard. Village life is full of hardship, gossip and little joy.

Ann works hard and moves from one grueling task to another while facing the responsibility of looking after her ailing father and navigating her way through the troublesome waters of courtship from two potential husbands.

it provides an insight into the hills and valleys that leaves a lasting impression on the reader and the description of Wales is no doubt why it was chosen to be part of the Library of Wales series of books. It deserves to be read by a wide audience.

The month in review - April

2011-05-01T15:52:00.000+01:00

April was a difficult month reading wise. A lot was happening in my life with the division of the company I work for being sold and as a result concentrating on reading or finding the time was a challenge.

Sadly that challenge is set to continue even more this month as I move offices and start a commute that denies me any reading time.

Still here is the look back over April with the following books read. Only managed to get six books read:

Next World Novella by Matthias Politycki
The Lost Honour of Katherina Blum by Heinrich Boll
Lineman Thiel and Other Tales by Gerhart Hauptmann
The Call of The Toad by Gunter Grass
Death in Venice, Tristan, Tonio Kroger by Thomas Mann
The Decision Book by Mikael Krogerus and Roman Tschappeler

Competition: Win a copy of the Decision Book

2011-04-29T22:40:00.002+01:00

The kind people at profile Books have given me a copy of the Decision Book to give away to a lucky reader of Insidebooks.

Just tell me how many models of strategic thinking does the book write about?

a.5
b.50
c.500

Please email me the right answer at simon.quicke@rbi.co.uk and I will pick a winner and be in touch about getting the book to you.

Clue: read the cover ;)

book review: The Decision Book by Mikael Krogerus and Roman Tschappeler

2011-04-28T22:37:00.001+01:00

The Decision Book is not the usual book I would dive into as it contains a series of management models that are designed to make you work, think and interact better.

But because it is presented in such an easily digestible way with illustrations making the short descriptions of the management models more understandable there are high chances this book will be absorbed and prove to be useful.

The cover blurb offers fifty models for strategic thinking and because of the sheer volume there are some things served up that mean very little to you but others do go in. I picked out seven over the course of my reading and some of those have sunk in the brain and should help me in the future.

Also worth mentioning is the interactive nature of the book and the encouragement given from the authors to the reader to make up their own models and to take some lessons from the book. Pages at the back left blank for your own scribbles and jottings are part of the process of kicking off that dialogue.

Making decisions, particularly big ones, is never something easy but this book points out that many other great minds have struggled with how to make the right choices in the past and it is possible to learn from their experiences.

Life is too random to be defined by models but coming to a problem with a strategic mind is bound to be better than spinning a bottle and hoping it provides you with the right answer.

A response to Tristan

2011-04-27T15:09:00.000+01:00

I've never been a great fan of hospitals and when asked one of my answers is that I struggle with the concept of a largely artificial community.

What I mean by that is the way that you are forced by circumstance into a situation with other people that you might avoid if you had more freedom.

In these communities of circumstance sometimes people can become confused about reality and it is exactly that scenario that Mann is writing about in Tristan.

A rather eccentric writer is holed up in a sanatorium and he falls for a woman who has been pushed to the brink by a difficult child birth.

The woman, who is described in angelic terms, finds the author amusing and interesting and through him discovers that not everything the doctors have told her she cannot do are bad for her.

As she plays the piano and Tristan and Isolde rings out in the sanitorium she finds some solace and provides the writer with the strength to tell her husband some home truths. Sadly they come too late.

Apart from reflections on the story what you are left with here are thoughts about the connections that can be made quickly and deeply between patients and the calming abilities of nature.

At moments you can picture the sanitorium as clearly as if you were flicking through a brochure on the place.

More soon...

A response to Death in Venice

2011-04-26T13:14:00.001+01:00

Death, as the title suggests, comes in Venice. That is a fact the reader knows from the outset but what sort of death is a more interesting question.

Death of a dream, a romantic ideal, as well as death in the literal sense is being described here.

But before I get into that just a quick comment on the description. This has not been an easy story to read because it doesn't flow. There are times when you wonder if something suffers from being too literary in style. That said you grasp what is going on here but it could have come across better.

What is said concerns Gustave von Aschenbach a writer who has headed off on holiday to get a break from his writing routine in Munich.

He becomes fixated and obsessed to a degree with another guest, a young Polish boy, who he can not reallu understand or makes any great connection with over his stay. But the dream of his beauty, the romantic ideal that the young man represents takes over Aschenbach.

Takes him over so much that despite his almost priviledged position of knowing about the plague in the city he fataly drops his guard and allows his obsession to derail him.

More to come from the other couple of stories in this collection, tristan and Tonio Kroger, over the next two days...

The Decision Book: post VII

2011-04-25T22:37:00.000+01:00

The final dip into the Decision Book is a chance to note how thinking of the past has been gently challenged by the experiences of the present.

The old 80/20 model set out by Vilfredo Pareto at the start of the last century had not only become established thinking but a model that was so widely accepted that the idea the 80% might have some value to rival the 20% something that seemed highly unlikely.

But back in 2004 the editor of Wired Chris Anderson came up with the Long Tail model. Using the internet the point of the model was that the 80% of goods beyond the core 20% will eventually be sold and have more value than the core goods.

The long tail has now become something to drop into conversations as a justification for backing what might have seemed like risky bets in the past. The problem is that in that 80% there are surely degrees of quality and right at the end of the tail it must be a fairly lonely old time.

A review will follow later this week...

Happy Easter

2011-04-24T13:27:00.001+01:00

Hope the bunny brings you some books as well as chocolate

The Decision Book: post VI

2011-04-21T22:35:00.000+01:00

In the final couple of posts from the Decision Book the focus moves onto using management models to understand other people better. In the next two posts I will pick out a couple I liked.

The first is The Maslow Pyramids model which in a nutshell looks at the basic human needs and then adds on top of those, pyramid style, the aspirations that are optional but nice to have.

So we all need to have food, a place to sleep, security and social relationships but let's face it we'd like to also add to that recognition, with its money and fame, and self-actualisation.

What it seems to make you think is that sometimes we can take for granted the essentials in our chase for the elusive wealth that is not perhaps that vital.

More next week..

The Decision Book: post V

2011-04-19T15:03:00.000+01:00

One of the things people say as a cliche is to live in the present and not in the past. But there has to be a careful balance struck between being stuck in the past, or as The Decision Book describes it being caught in a memory-driven model, and the future.

There are also real dangers becoming a dreamer hoping that the future turns out better than the present or the past will leave you failing to make the right decisions in the here and now.

Not easy to get that balance right but the book is good at highlighting the dangers of both a memory and a future dreamer model.

There will be more posts about this book throughout the month with a chance for a lucky insidebooks reader to win a copy of the book.

The Decision Book: post IV

2011-04-14T14:59:00.000+01:00

The second section of the Decision Book, which is where the next couple of posts draw their inspiration, looks at how you can understand yourself better.

Cognitive dissonance are not two words I use that often. But they are ones I will remember now because it describes an interesting idea. How can you carry on doing something that you know is wrong with self justification is what those two words describe.

"How can we overcome this dissonance? Either by changing our behaviour or our attitude."

Not an easy thing to do.

There will be more posts about this book throughout the month with a chance for a lucky insidebooks reader to win a copy of the book.

The Decision Book: post III

2011-04-12T14:56:00.000+01:00

Setting goals is one of the most oft couple of words that you expect anyone talking about personal development to say.

The Decision Book contains the advice that goals should be challenging but also achievable. if you set a goal too high then it can have a demoralizing effect.

The example given is of running a marathon. I like running and might well want to run a marathon one day but more achievable goals of running more regularly and further distances are needed first.

It's like setting out to read 100 books a year having been nothing more than a casual reader before. You won't know how to pace yourself or recognise the danger signs that you are falling behind. Not that I have ever reached 100 books but just getting to 80 plus last year was a challenge.

There will be more posts about this book throughout the month with a chance for a lucky insidebooks reader to win a copy of the book.

Thoughts at the halfway point of Lineman Thiel and Other Tales

2011-04-11T16:19:00.000+01:00

This short book contains three stories that the blurb on the back describes as being typical and influence by the German romantic movement.

That influence seems to be most clearly seen in the response of the characters towards nature with nature playing more than a backdrop role.

In the first story the iced over lake plays a crucial role in deciding the fate of the sailmaker and his wife. They are portrayed as earthy and greedy but sympathetically so compared to the grandmother who lives with them hoarding her coppers and silver in a box.

The idea of living for now and enjoying life is contrasted with the decision to wait. Ultimately both approaches are wrong.

Then the title story starts with poor lineman Thiel finding comfort from widowhood then a second marriage to a bullying wife in the woods in his hut next to the train track.

His life could carry on with his wife bullying him but you sense that as she turns her temper on the son the linesman had with his first wife the clock is ticking for their relationship.

A full review will follow on completion...

The Decision Book: post II

2011-04-08T14:52:00.000+01:00

Another post from this highly informative book. This model looks at the project portfolio matrix.

if you think of your life as a project, or a particular aspect of it in that way, it is useful to try and prioritize activities.

Cost and time are the two examples of potential sides of a scale that can be used to measure whether or not something is useful to a project.

For me it is often a question of time that dictates my decision, particularly around reading.

There will be more posts about this book throughout the month with a chance for a lucky insidebooks reader to win a copy of the book.

Thoughts at the half way point of the The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum

2011-04-07T16:09:00.000+01:00

A woman kills a reporter and then turns herself into the police. It's an interesting way to start a story and you want to know why she pulled the trigger.

Boll starts with the crime and then works backwards describing what led Katharina Blum to get to a stage where murder seemed to be an appropriate response.

It seems strange that this quiet and diligent house keeper should find herslef in trouble and the start details how her friends are motivated to rush to her side to support her. But as the days leading up to the killing are detailed it's clear that underneath calm outward appearances not all was going well.

Blum is involved with a criminal who spends a night with her before escaping police capture. It is for this initial crime, aiding and abetting a felon, that Blum is involved with the police.

But the press starts to create havoc and the seeds for the reasons for Blum to murder a reporter start to be laid down.

A review will follow on completion...

book review: Next World Novella by Matthias Politycki

2011-04-06T15:56:00.000+01:00

"There were not many, barely three pages. Doro's final set of comments began on the the third page. He could cope with her comments now too. He put all the pages in the correct order. And then? He would be done."

Big ideas don't have to be told in big books if the writing is as skillfully delivered as here in Next World Novella.

A professor wakes to find his wife has died of a stroke in the evening and he takes in the shock of the situation reading through the last notes that she was editing. As she usually edited his reports it is his material she was found slumped over.

But the work that Schepp finds his wife Doro was concentrating on is an old story that he wrote years before and never published. The story about a drunk who hangs out in a bar lusting after a waitress mirrors the professors own fixation with a waitress in a bar he stumbled into one afternoon after eye surgery.

What becomes clear is that the wife knew about the affair, at least the dream of an affair that was harboured by her husband, and it drove a wedge between them.

One of the promises they made was to enter the next world together and to hold each other's hands as they swam across the lake of the dead to try and reach the land in the distance on the other side. That promise is ruined by the secrets Hinrich kept from his wife.

That story contains enough food for thought but the way the novella ends leaves you with the distinct impression that even near the end all it would have taken is for Hinrich to have shown a bit of notice and the love would and could have been rekindled. Failing to listen and failing to notice are the real crimes of the lutsful professor.

The Decision Book: post I

2011-04-06T14:46:00.000+01:00

When to make a decision is a rather useful thing to think about. Everyday we face the need to make decisions but the challenge is perhaps to think about the right way to respond to them.

The Decision Book is a collection of different models for strategic thinking and one of the first you come across in the How to improve yourself section is about the way decisions should be timed.

Referring to the Eisenhower Method, coined by the former US president, he talked about the need to determine which things were critical and which could be delayed or deferred, which will help determine the priority of a decision and as a result help you work out how long you should take to make it.

There will be more posts about this book throughout the month with a chance for a lucky insidebooks reader to win a copy of the book.

Decisions, decisions...

2011-04-05T15:47:00.000+01:00

It's sometimes strange that you can be sent a book that seems to resonate because of a stage you are in your life or thought process.

So it was within a week or so of the Decision Book arriving for review that my working life was turned upside down and my company division found itself up for sale.

At a time like this the one thing that you can be sure of in a time of great confusion is that decisions are going to have to be made.

Decisions that will have a massive impact on the next stage of my life both work and home as I consider a new commute, working for a new company and numerous other changes to my life.

I will be using the Decision Book this month to help crystallise that thought process and thanks to Serpent's Tail am in a position to provide one lucky reader with a copy.

Keep reading for further details...

Plans are changing

2011-04-04T19:24:00.000+01:00

Having got stuck into Next World Novella the plans for the month have now changed and I'm going to be reading mainly German authors.

It makes more sense to try and keep the theme of the month something that relates to my TBR pile, which includes a few German authors, as well as giving me an excuse to get some more Gunter Grass under my belt.

Time to catch up on the TBR pile

2011-04-02T14:43:00.000+01:00

April is going to be a month of catching up with some of the books I have been sent or requested. So there is no overall theme for this month other than hopefully getting on top of the to-be-read pile a bit.

Starting with the beautifully produced Next World Novella by Matthias Politycki from Peirene it's the chance to dive headfirst into something that should be thought provoking.

From there it's going to be Laikonik Express by Nick Sweeney and then from there hopefully some other new writers.

Onwards...

The month in review - March

2011-04-01T14:43:00.000+01:00

Crime writers seem to enjoy delivering stories that come in at the 300 page mark and so the month's reading was slower going than I'd hoped. There were some good things consumed and some books were taken off the to-be-read pile but there still remain a fairly large number of crime stories and thrillers to be tackled later in the year.

March reading:

The Terrorists by Maj Sjowall & Per Wahloo
Parallel Lives by John Tagholm
The Long Good-Bye by Raymond Chandler
The Mournful Demeanour of Lieutenant Boruvka by Josef Skovorecky
Talking about Detective Fiction by P.D. James
The Suspicions of Mr Wicher by Kate Summerscale
Headed for a Hearse by Jonathan Latimer

A strange month

2011-03-31T09:48:00.001+01:00

Haven't managed to get the reading pace I wanted this month but it's been difficult because there has been a lot of uncertainty at work which culminated in an announcement that the magazine I work for has been sold.

That has obviously led to a lot of conversations in corners and a dip in concentration as we all try to work out what it means for us all.

One fact is already clear, that it will change a daily routine I have been in for years and will change relationships with colleagues that stretch back in one case over a decade.

As a result the reading has been hard because the mind has been elsewhere but hopefully April might improve reading-wise.

book review: Headed for a Hearse by Jonathan Latimer

2011-03-30T22:07:00.002+01:00

"'I remember Sullivan, that's the house detective, gave a sort of snort when he went into the living-room from the hall. We all ran in behind him, and there she was on the living-room rug. She looked just like she was asleep, except for her pretty brown hair.'
'her hair?'
'It was all soaked with blood.'"

It's always going to be hard to play with the hard-boiled detective format but one option, used here by Latimer, is to wait a fair bit before you introduce the private eye into proceedings.

Not only wait a bit but then even when he has been introduced play the character in a minor key until they suddenly emerge towards the last third as the principal driver of the action.

Does it work? Only to a degree. While you wait for the detective to take centre stage you naturally search for alternatives and even when the action is in full flight you find yourself as a reader holding back from giving the hero your fulsome support.

The reason for the mechanics of the book stem from the clever premise that a man who has just a couple of days before facing the electric chair suddenly decides to fight to clear his name.

Robert Westland is rich but starts the book almost happy to take the rap for the murder of his wife. But after a conversation with one of the real murderers in the cell next door to his own he decides he will fight.

Money being no object he hires a crack lawyer and a tram including colleagues, his girlfriend and a couple of recommended private detectives.

As one of the private detectives Bill Crane seems to take an age coming to the foreground of the action but once there he moves swiftly, aided by heavy doses of alcohol, to start to piece together what really did happen to Mrs Westland.

Part classic locked room part Chandler in feel the book does finally spring into life and deliver. But for me it took slightly too long and the plot twists that are unwound so quickly at the end happen before the reader is introduced to the story and as a result lose their ability to interest slightly.

Perhaps the book just hasn't aged as well as some of its contemporaries. In 1935 it might have had the reader gripped but in 2011 it struggles in places and that's not good for any 'hard-boiled' crime novel.

Thoughts at the half way point of Headed for a Hearse

2011-03-29T23:15:00.000+01:00

A man finds himself on death row for killing his wife. But with just a few days left until his visit to the electric chair he snaps out of his shock and grief and decides to fight for his innocence.

Hiring a tough Chicago lawyer and a detective to help find out who framed him the chapters start to count down the days until hope runs out.

In-between great description of the prison and the feelings of those awaiting death there are passages that have not aged as well but overall so far it's not too bad a reading experience.

A review follows on completion...

Thoughts at the half way point of Talking about Detective Fiction

2011-03-23T23:14:00.000Z

If you like reading crime and detective fiction then most of the big names will be instantly familiar but this guide fills in some of the blanks.

Starting at the most logical starting point, with the literary reaction to the creation of the police force and detectives, this charts through the ages of crime fiction.

By halfway you have been introduced to Sherlock Holmes and the imagination of Edgar Allen Poe and James fills in very concisely the features and writers that constituted the 'golden age' between the wars.

this book has the feel of being a guide that will throw up inspiration for a while to come and will be re-read.

A review will follow on completion...

Thoughts at the half way point of the Mournful Demeanour of Liutenant Boruvka

2011-03-20T23:12:00.000Z

The idea of a detective who finds the idea of solving a murder and discovering someone has lied and killed one that is depressing is more entertaining than it sounds.

The key moment when Lieutenant Boruvka has solved the case comes with a sigh as the murderer usually pushes their luck too far and makes one lie too many.

Although presented in the style of a collection of short stories, there is a continuos narrative and you start to discover about the life and the problems of the detective and some of those that work around him.

You can't help but admire the way he not only fails to lose his temper when surrounded by incompetence but also the way he allows a murderer to feel they have almost got away with it before he sighs and pulls the rug out from underneath them.

A review will follow soon on completion...

A Brilliant St Patrick's Day

2011-03-17T23:05:00.000Z

Enjoyed reading the short story Brilliant by Roddy Doyle today. It came about because of Dublin’s UNESCO City of Literature designation and the decision by the St. Patrick’s Festival Parade to specially commission a short story by Roddy.

It is a story for our times causing you to smile at the response Doyle comes up with to banish the recession blues that grip Dublin and Ireland.

it doesn't take long to read and is available here as a PDF

Chandler on the BBC

2011-03-15T15:34:00.000Z

Although sadly I think it's gone from iPlayer the BBC Saturday plays of Chandler's Marlowe stories that aired last month were brilliant. Toby Stephens played the private detective and managed to drag you into a world of mystery and intrigue within just a few minutes on a Saturday afternoon.

The series resumes in the autumn and if you get a chance to make a mental note and listen in then it is well worth it.

Thoughts at the half-way point of The Long Good-bye

2011-03-14T15:32:00.001Z

There is a real difference between the Philip Marlowe books written before the second world war and the one I'm reading this week which came afterwards.

The Big Sleep and Farewell, My Lovely introduce you to a wise but clevcer Philip Marlowe who has the wise cracks and is prepared to take the punches to solve the case. The people he mixes with tend sto be at both ends of the social spectrum with the blondes living off daddy's money down to the thugs trying to intimidate him out of solving the case.

In The Long Good-Bye Marlowe seems to be tired, vulnerable and although the wise cracks keep coming they just don't have the zip of earlier attempts. The brutality of the war seems to have made his run-ins with hoodlums and casino owners lose that bit of tension.

There are also references to technology that didn't seem to be there pre-war. Then it was all about guns, cars and cocktail mixers but now it's television, coffee makers and electric shavers.

It can't have helped that Chandler's wife was dying as he wrote the book. It is still enjoyable but so far in it's sad to come across this Marlowe compared to the one from the 1930s.

A review will follow on completion...

book review: Parallel Lives by John Tagholm

2011-03-12T21:21:00.002Z

"In a sense, Majorie had saved his life and he realised this was her role, to give back to others what had been denied herself. he shook his head, as much for himself as for the dead therapist."

This is a thriller in the sense that it starts with a body being discovered and somewhat towards the end the reason for the death is revealed.

But aside from those points of crime novel construction this book moves away from the medium and is much more of a study of human beings and the way that therapy offers some people hope of finding an answer to their problems.

But once the therpaiset Majorie Nielson has been removed, abruptly in this case because it is her body being discovered that opens the book, those that depended on her for answers have to look into themselves for answers.

Not only do they have to look into themselves but for three of them, the main characters of the book, they look to each other and find that sharing their problems, fears and anxieties with others can bring some sort of resolution.

Tagholm writes character well and in this small cast you start to connect and care about the love story between Toby and Perdita. You want them to come through their darkness into the light.

Worrying about how and who might have killed Marjorie is part of answering the problems for the other remaining patient in the trio Peter Harrington. He works out what secrets he shares with the therapist and why she had to face the end she did.

But by then the focus is on happy endings and unlike most crime novels the sense of solving the crime comes almost as an after thought to the reader who has been focused elsewhere.

It's only after reading and thinking about it you realise how the death of the therapist is the crux of the whole book and even the reaction to the truth of her demise at the end is part of showing how her patients have moved on a developed in her absence.

Thoughts at the halfway point of Parallel Lives

2011-03-10T21:05:00.002Z

It's hard at the start with a book where one of the main characters is a therapist after you have read All in The Mind by Alistair Campbell.

But once you shake of a certain sense of de ja vu you get into a story that is fundamentally different. For a start the therapist here dies at the very start of the book leaving her patients bereft as they were working their way through their problems rather than having got to a stage where the therapy had ended.

Tagholm uses three characters to start to build a story around what happened to the therapist. As a 78 year old woman with diabetes the initial view of the legal establishment is that this is a case of suicide. But her patients and secretary dismiss that idea and start the process of trying to piece together what happened.

It is made harder of course because firstly they don't know anything about each other and they know not a great deal more about the therapist.

It's going to be interesting to see how the plot unravels as the three patients meet at the funeral and start to look to each other to provide some of the answers about the therapist's death.

A review will follow on completion...

Reflections on the Beck series

2011-03-09T13:42:00.000Z

When you come across an author you really like there is always that dilemma that as you plough through their catalogue and get closer to the end of their output you know that the moment when you finish is getting nearer.

So it was perhaps for that reason that completing the tenth and final Martin Beck crime story from husband and wife team Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo took a bit longer to get to than I planned.

Having completed it and as a result finished the Beck books I'd like to just make a few comments about the experience.

Firstly, this was my first introduction to Swedish crime writing, which is so much in vogue now but was virgin territory when these books were written back in the 1970s. As a result through the pages of these books I was introduced to a country that was cold most of the time, windswept and had the same problems you find anywhere else with drugs and murder occupying the police.

But these books also provided a political and social context as a backdrop to their stories so the changing nature of the police, becoming armed and more authoritarian, is also a feature along with references to anti-Vietnam war protests and some of the demands for the legalisation of drugs.

Throughout the series of books a small team of police officers that operate around the central character of Martin Beck are introduced and one of these Kollberg, a good policeman, goes as far as to leave the force because he cannot live with the changes that are happening to the police.

Secondly, the style of the books introduces a reader into a world where crimes can take months and years to solve and often it is a bit of luck that helps solve them rather than the great ability of a master detective. The first book Roseanna had just one such case that took the police months to solve.

Given that the action can be slow to come to a head you could be forgiven for wondering why you stick with it. The answer is a mixture of great characteisation, you want to know more about Beck and his colleagues, and an ability to pull out some of the detail from the background into the foreground.

Although these days it's all about girls and dragon tatoos and snowmen the Beck books are some of the orignials and for those who enjoy a good crime read and police procedural it's hard to beat these books. I'm sad to have finished them but very grateful that I came across them.

book review: The Terrorists by Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo

2011-03-08T13:08:00.002Z

"'The motorcade is now passing Haga southern gates,' said the radio announcer. 'The streets are absolutely seething with demonstrators. They're shouting slogans in chorus. It's even worse at Haga Courthouse.'
Heydt looked at the television screens to see for himself. The slogans could be heard less well on television and the reporter did not bother to mention them. Instead, he said, 'The Senator's bullet-proof, custom-built car is now passing Stallmastaregarden, where the government is giving a gala banquet tonight.'
The moment was very close.
'At this moment the car with the Senator and the Prime Minister is leaving Solna and crossing the Stockholm city boundary.'
Very, very close."

The idea of knowing the face and final movements of terrorists is something that has become all too common in the last few years as the video taped final statements are broadcast after the suicide bombers wreak their terrible havoc.

But back in the 1970s terrorism was a faceless secret activity where people planted bombs with out the intention of either taking their own lives or getting caught. It is this type of terrorist, ruthlessly efficient but a career bomber and political assassin, that the Swedish police find themselves trying to defend a visiting US senator against.

Weaving through this story is not just a couple of sub plots, plenty of detail on character and the personal lives of the main protagonists but also plenty of social context. Sjowall and Wahloo don't just write books that contain policemen solving crimes they put those crime fighting efforts in a context that is not always a good one. The Vietnam war is in its final stages and the police have become an armed force of repression against not those that protest against the war but against too many normal citizens.

In this environment Martin Beck has to coordinate attempts to stop the assassination of the deeply unpopular US senator. There are moments in the cat and mouse game with the terrorists where the book is so visual you turn the pages as if watching a film.

The police know the identity of one of the terrorists Richard Heydt and in the end it becomes a personal battle between him and Gunvald Larsson who sets his sights on bringing him to justice.

The sense of failure is always in the air and there are numerous points where your faith in Beck, well established over nine previous books, is seriously tested.

But if there is one thing the couple know how to do it is to deliver a story that kicks into a higher gear as it reaches the final third and the pace is evident again here.

Putting this alongside all the other Beck novels it has to be considered one of the better ones. But you could never come to this without knowing about the past laid down in the previous books. Neither is it possible to get top the end of this 10 book series without a deep appreciation and respect for the husband and wife team that wrote them. Reading them has been one of my best reading discoveries of recent years.

Thoughts at the half way point of The Terrorists

2011-03-07T14:19:00.000Z

There is something rather odd reading a book penned in the 1970s that covers terrorism in a way that seems almost fresh. We are so familiar with the idea of bombings, political assassinations and explosions designed to disrupt society that it is almost taken for granted.

But here the idea of a terrorist cell turning up on Swedish soil to target the visit of a US senator is one that throws the police into confusion. As usual Mart Beck emerges as the calm in the storm and is given responsibility for protecting the senator.

But before the senator arrives there is the case of a bank robbery to be dealt with and the lessons from the latest political assassination which is witnessed by a Swedish policeman sent to watch and learn how an anti-terrorist campaign is run.

The failure of those efforts to prevent the bombing and the poor state of the anti-terrorist forces in the Swedish police indicate that any attempts to stop the bombing in Sweden are going to be a close run thing.

A review follows on completion...

The experience of giving

2011-03-05T15:05:00.000Z

Months ago I send my details and waited to see if I would be chosen as a book giver for World Book Night. Rather than choose one of the more contemporary and probably sought after titles I chose a classic, All Quiet on the Western Front. It also helped that I'd read the book so if challenged I could recommend it with a degree of confidence.

But I just wanted to share some observations here about the experience of giving.

* Suspicion - the first reaction of most people I tried to give a book to was one of suspicion. Did it cost anything? What was it in aid of and why were they being given a copy?

* Confusion - the more I tried to explain about World Book Night the more it became obvious very few people knew about it.

* Satisfaction - get over those hurdles and the reward was a smile, thanks and that wonderful feeling of having passed on a good read.

Really hoping that the books I have given out will circulate and bring pleasure to a large number of people. They say that giving is better than recieving and when it comes to books it certianly can be.

Well done World Book Night and I hope those that got copies from me really enjoy them.

World Book Night

2011-03-04T13:59:00.003Z

If you love books then the idea that they are to be celebrated in Central London is something rather special. World Book Night in Trafalgar Square was an occasion that was worth braving the cold for.

The women next to me had come down from Shrewsbury because "this is part of history" and it was hard not to get caught up in the excitement and agree with them. As Graham Norton took to the stage and introduced a host of literary household names the feeling that all these people had come together to celebrate books was a palpable one.

The highlight of the evening was not just watching the likes of Alan Bennet and Margaret Atwood take to the stage but to meet other 'givers' of books and to share an evening with so many book lovers.

Hope that when the feedback comes and the million books are tracked those behind it deem it to have been a success and can then extend the concept beyond the UK and Ireland.

World Book Day

2011-03-03T15:51:00.002Z

This year more than ever with libraries closing left, right and centre and charities like Book Start getting its fuinding cut the need to celebrate books and reading is more important than ever.

Getting the young to develop a passion for reading is so important and yet again the selection of books for children is great this year. The flip books, with two stories, provide two experiences that children really enjoy. Over the last couple of years my household have been strong supporters of World Book Day and already the sights are set on the Spy Dog book that is in this year's offering.

Happy World Book Day to you all and may a love for reading long continue to be something that hits headlines and grabs attention across the globe.

A month of crime

2011-03-02T10:52:00.001Z

Carrying on the idea of themed monthly reading the theme for March is crime. I have a stack of thrillers on the shelf and so this month is going to be a chance to get through some of them.

A good thriller can be a great reading experience as you go through the ups and downs trying to work out who is responsible for the growing body count in parallel with the detectives also trying to crack the case.

Some of the greatest literary characters have been involved in cracking crime from Sherlock Holmes to Inspector Morse and I'm starting the month wrapping up the last of the Martin Beck books, The Terrorist, by Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo. The ten books the husband and wife team wrote together have been a real joy to read. Some are better than others but in terms of style and plot the bar is always high with a Beck story.

So it should be a bloody but fun month ahead.

Month in review - February

2011-03-01T15:10:00.001Z

It felt like a very short month and so getting the usual seven books under the belt was a challenge and the rteading went to the wire.

Didn't get a chance to read some of the Balzac I had put to one side but happy with what I did manage to get through. As a result of some good charity shop buys managed to discover some fresh voices, particularly Desplechin and Ferranti. Both are authors that given a bit more time and a chance would read more of.

Ended with De Maupassant who really is starting to stand head and shoulders above the rest with his writing ability. Books read in February:

Count D'Orgels Ball by Raymond Radiguet
Taking it to Heart by Marie Desplechin
The Counterfeiters by Andre Gide
Holiday in a Coma by Frederic Beigbeder
Jezebel by Irene Nemirovsky
The Princess of Mantua by Marie Ferranti
A Day in the Country and Other Stories by Guy De Maupassant

book review: A Day in the Country and Other Stories by Guy De Maupassant

2011-02-28T14:55:00.000Z

This collection of short stories might have plenty of variety but it is all written with great mastery of a form that eludes some writers.

Here the reader's attention is grabbed through a number of different ways including thriller, ghost story as well as insights into the social world of 19th century French life.

To pick out a selection from the first third of the book to give a flavour is not too difficult.

Simon's Dad is a heart warming tale of a boy seeking a father to end the bullying at school and as a result ending years of shame and pain for his mother by landing his mother a husband. You find your heart swelling at the end of the story as Simon informs his bullies that their days of targeting him are over.

Then you get a change in mood with the story that gives the title to the collection, A Day in the Country, providing a girl from a shopkeeping family with a moment of love that she can never forget. Her bawdy mother and ineffectual father are used brilliantly to illustrate the difference between those working in the suburbs and country folk.

That difference between the country and the city is also picked up in the story Riding Out which sees a man keen to show his family he can ride knocking down an old woman as he loses control of his steed in central Paris.

If there was a theme to the first third of the collection it might have been countryside and the second has stories that make various references to money. The Necklace describes the costs that borrowing and losing a necklace have on one couple only for them to discover at the end of a decade spent clearing their debts that it wasn't worth a great deal of money.

Penny pinching is on display again in The Umbrella where a woman wants her husband to have a good umbrella but is not prepared to pay for that. As his work colleagues ruin the cheap ones that he turns up to work with she would rather claim on the insurance than pay out for a proper umbrella.

That ability to pierce a side of someone's character is on display again with Bed 29 where a proud and vain solider is unable to show compassion for an old lover struck down with syphillis. Happy to be seen with her when she was beautiful he has no words of comfort for her when she is ill.

The last third of the book contains some of the longer and darker stories. The Little Roque Girl is an account of the discovery of a murdered girl and then the unravelling of the Major's mind. Responsible for her rape and death he finally loses his mind after being haunted by her ghost.

Our Spot is also fairly dark showing off the agression of a couple that lose their fishing spot on the river bank. Their anger at losing out results in the death of the rival fisherman but as the court case recounts the anger and death is more by accident and the fisherman is aquitted.

A great collection of stories that provoke various reactions but come from a writer clearly able to turn his pen at will to deliver stories of very quality.

Ill but not the type that's good for reading

2011-02-27T20:31:00.001Z

Apologies for the absence recently. I was struck down with flu. There are those moments when you get ill and it can result in some time off work and some decent reading but other times when there is a constant headache and it's hard to find energy to keep the eyes open the books sadly remain closed.

This was one of those times. It has left me scrambling to try and get some books finished tonight and tomorrow to keep my reading on track this year.

Fingers crossed that happens.

book review: The Princess of Mantua by Marie Ferranti

2011-02-25T13:14:00.000Z

It is not until the novella is complete and the full scale of the author's literary invention hits you that you really start to appreciate what you have just read.

In a nutshell this story charts the life of Barbara von Brandenburg who levaes her home at the age of ten and heads off to marry an Italian Prince of Mantua, Ludovico Gonzaga. No sooner has she arrived and got married than her husband runs away and spends years fighting and making a name for himself leaving his bride alone to grow from a girl into a woman.

Once he returns they start to get cracking on producing ten children and in having a major influence on 15th century Italian life. In the principality run by her husband Barbara manages to tempt some of the great artists to produce works of wonder that are designed to cement their standing in society and immortalise the family.

Her picture shows an ugly dour looking woman who by the time it was painted was perhaps racked by loss and grief of her husband, the health of her children and the detoriation in relationships with her best friend and cousin Maria.

Told using the information contained in the letters between the cousins this story sketches out a behind the scenes tale of life at the top end of the scale in the 15th century.

The story itself is interesting enough and the relationships between Barbara and her daughter, who she seems to hate to the point of cruelty, and with her sons is intriguing enough. But it is on finding out that the letters never existed. The cousin Maria a work of fiction and the author's knowledge of the real Barbara of Brandenburg is not that great that you realise just how much imagination has been at play here.

It's perhaps a comment on the way that some of these historical biographies are put together that even one completely made up can be as engaging, if not more enjoyable a read, than its non-fiction contemporaries.

Thoughts after the second third of A Day in the Country

2011-02-24T15:52:00.000Z

If there was a theme to the first third of the collection it might have been countryside and the second has stories that make various references to money. The Necklace describes the costs that borrowing and losing a necklace have on one couple only for them to discover at the end of a decade spent clearing their debts that it wasn't worth a great deal of money.

Penny pinching is on display again in The Umbrella where a woman wants her husband to have a good umbrella but is not prepared to pay for that. As his work colleagues ruin the cheap ones that he turns up to work with she would rather claim on the insurance than pay out for a proper umbrella.

That ability to pierce a side of someone's character is on display again with Bed 29 where a proud and vain solider is unable to show compassion for an old lover struck down with syphillis. Happy to be seen with her when she was beautiful he has no words of comfort for her when she is ill.

A review follows soon...

book review: Jezebel by Irene Nemirovsky

2011-02-23T14:11:00.000Z

When you are first introduced to Gladys Eysenach she is a small old lady sitting in the dock in court charged with the murder of her young lover. The case seems to be open and shut and it's a question of getting the judge to be merciful in the sentence.

But as the focus of the story turns back in time to tell of how Gladys came to find herself going up to the top of society then down into the darkness of murder and a court case you wonder just whether or not you will feel sympathy for this woman.

Certinaly in the courtroom you feel the stirrings of pity although Gladys seems to have a pride that barbs but as you start to encounter her in the prime of her life that split between dislike and pity becomes harder to straddle.

Ultimately this is a story of vanity, fear of growing old and a damming inditement of a society that only values appearances. Once the wrinkles come and the true age is clear you are washed up. Or at least that's what Gladys thinks shoes she does everything she can to exploit her youthful beauty. She goes to extraordinary lengths to shave ten years off her birth certificate and her treatment of her daughter is bordering on the insane.

First she refuses to allow her daughter to marry for fear people will see hoer as an older woman capable of having a daughter of marriagable age. But when her daughter's fiance dies in the trenches Gladys is faced with the new challenge of becoming a grandmother.

Again she rejects the child not so much on the grounds of social disaster but because she is determined never to be called a grandmother.

As she wanders through life, getting ever more desperate to be loved and adored by men, it brings her closer to the moment when her real age could catch up with her. The way she seems to postpone that moment means that on reflection the court case goes in her favour more than you might have initially expected.

Nemirovsky is brilliant at characters and even when there is a select cast, as there is here, she delivers real depth. Add to that her ability to spring a few surprises on the reader and this packs more of a punch than you might expect.

Thoughts after the first third of A Day in the Country

2011-02-22T15:50:00.001Z

What makes a master short story writer? The ability to make you laugh, come to the brink of tears and have your heart warmed all in just a few pages has to be the best way to qualify the talent.

Guy De Maupassant is seen as one of the best in the short story genre and it's not long before you can see why with this collection showing his ability to paint a detailed picture of a situation in just a few paragraphs.

To pick out a selection from the first third of the book to give a flavour is not too difficult.

Simon's Dad is a heart warming tale of a boy seeking a father to end the bullying at school and as a result ending years of shame and pain for his mother by landing his mother a husband. You find your heart swelling at the end of the story as Simon informs his bullies that their days of targeting him are over.

Then you get a change in mood with the story that gives the title to the collection, A Day in the Country, providing a girl from a shopkeeping family with a moment of love that she can never forget. Her bawdy mother and ineffectual father are used brilliantly to illustrate the difference between those working in the suburbs and country folk.

That difference between the country and the city is also picked up in the story Riding Out which sees a man keen to show his family he can ride knocking down an old woman as he loses control of his steed in central Paris.

More soon...

Thoughts at the half way point of Jezebel

2011-02-21T13:55:00.000Z

You would think that with a story starting with a court case and the judgment handed out to the murderer that the tension in the book might be lost.

Sure you expect the focus on events to shift back into the past after the opening description of the court case but you start to settle back into your chair expecting little in the way of surprises.

But if there is one thing that Nemirovsky is an expert at it is character and as she starts to peel back the history of Gladys Eysenach you start to be introduced to a rather extreme woman. Someone who starts out in the court accused of shooting dead her young lover this is not quite as open as shut case, from a reading perspective, you might have expected it to be after the first chapter.

A review will follow soon...

Le Tour

2011-02-19T16:18:00.000Z

Aside from literature there are a couple of things about France that are well worth investigating. One is of course the food and the other is the passion the country has for cycling.

The Tour de France is a three week cycle race that spans the country and is not just a great advert for cycling but the country as the elite riders glide through some of the most wonderful scenery as they clock up the thousands of kilometres.

There are plenty of books about cycling that you can read and one I managed to get through was Geoffrey Wheatcroft's history of the Tour, Le Tour, but as with most things one of the best ways to enjoy it is to watch and get drawn into the action.

This year's race starts on 2 July and coverage should be on ITV 4 as well as online. Do dip in and take a look as it's something great to watch.

Proust looms large

2011-02-18T13:50:00.001Z

If you think of the two words French Literature then it's almost impossible not to have the name Proust turn up fairly quickly into those thoughts.

Credited with writing that summons up every atom of the memory and imagination he is also responsible for intimidating a fair few readers with the length of time it takes to commit to reading Remembrance of Things Past. The first volume is a great introduction to Proust.

My thoughts about Rememberance of Things Past, from a while back, can be found here:

Part One
Part Two.

It's also putting in the famous madeline quote just to remind you of what people get so excited about.

"Many years had elapsed during which nothing of Combray, save what was comprised in the theatre and the drama of my going to bed there, had any existence for me, when one day in winter, as I came home, my mother, seeing that I was cold, offered me some tea, a thing I did not ordinarily take. I declined at first, and then, for no particular reason, changed my mind. She sent out for one of those short, plump little cakes called ’petites madeleines,’ which look as though they had been moulded in the fluted scallop of a pilgrim’s shell. And soon, mechanically, weary after a dull day with the prospect of a depressing morrow, I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid, and the crumbs with it, touched my palate than a shudder ran through my whole body, and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary changes that were taking place. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, but individual, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory–this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me, it was myself. I had ceased now to feel mediocre, accidental, mortal.

Whence could it have come to me, this all-powerful joy? I was conscious that it was connected with the taste of tea and cake, but that it infinitely transcended those savours, could not, indeed, be of the same nature as theirs. Whence did it come? What did it signify? How could I seize upon and define it?"