The month in review - October

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

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

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

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

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

"'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

"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

"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

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

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

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

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

"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

"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

"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.