Weekly Geeks #24
This week’s Weeky Geeks is to find out some facts about an author. I’m torn between authors I’ve read a lot and authors I haven’t, but I’ve decided to go with an old favourite of many people, Captain W. E. Johns, author of the Biggles books (and others).
Without further ado, here are the facts:
- In total, he wrote 169 books
- He is most famous for his Biggles books, which are about a daring pilot called James Biggles and his adventuring friends Algy and Ginger. However, he also wrote the Worrals books, the Gimlet books, science-fiction books, the Steeley books, other books for children and other books for adults.
- There were 104 Biggles books in total!
- His full name is William Earl Johns and he was born in 1893
- He enlisted in 1913 and served in WW1
- Almost at the end of the war, in April 1918, he was appointed as a flying instructor. He served 6 weeks as a bomber pilot before being captured and he was imprisoned until the end of the war.
- He stayed in the RAF until 1927 and retired with the rank of Flying Officer. His books are published as ‘Captain’, but ‘Flying Officer’ is roughly equivalent to a lieutenant in the army.
- The first Biggles book, The Camels are Coming, was published in 1932
- His books have been popular with younger people for many years and have recently been reprinted, including The Camels are Coming, which was previously very difficult to find. The camels of the title are Sopwith Camels, a kind of aircraft, and not the animals with humps!
You can see a complete list of Biggles books and covers here. I first came across Biggles when my father started buying some of the Biggles books he had enjoyed in his youth from sites like ebay. The first one he bought was Biggles CID, and he gave it to me to read. I’m not sure how many Biggles books I know own, but they take up half a shelf! All of mine are secondhand; I haven’t bought any of the reprints. I enjoy them because they offer a totally different perspective to war from what’s taught in schools, and the later books fulfil my love of mystery stories yet aren’t limited by being PC or ‘appropriate’ for children. There’s nothing ‘inappropriate’ in the books, but most children’s literature today is much more geared towards children, whereas I feel that the Biggles books just happen to be appealing to children, even though Captain W. E. Johns started writing war stories as a way of keeping up the morale of the men with whom he was fighting.
His works are now widely available, and I would strongly advise anyone who hasn’t read one of his books to give it a go and enjoy a little bit of history.
Book Review: Porno
Porno by Irvine Welsh is the sequel to smash hit Trainspotting. It also features some characters from Glue.
With sequels, it’s easy for the characters to fall apart. Take, for example, the film The Silence of the Lambs and its sequel Hannibal. The Silence of the Lambs was a good film because of the suspense, but Hannibal was a rubbish sequel. In Hannibal, all that happened was that Hannibal killed people, whereas in The Silence of the Lambs, the film was based around the question ‘is he going to kill people?’. It would have been very easy for Porno to fall into this trap, but fortunately, it didn’t.
The book is set ten years after the events of Trainspotting. The characters have moved on now and have all changed in some way, but they are still very much the same people. The book centres around them getting involved in making a porn film, but a large part of it is the fallout of the events at the end of Trainspotting. Renton has been out of touch with the others, and his return brings old feelings to the surface and sets in motion a whole chain of revenge.
This was a very satisfying read. The characters were still recogniseable and had retained their personalities, but they had all matured in a very realistic way and what had influenced each of them was clear. It’s difficult to say much without giving away the entire plot, but I do think I can say that despite being a new chapter in their lives, though, Porno follows the same pattern as Trainspotting in quite an ironic way.
The writing style of the book was different from Trainspotting: the narrative was more consistent, with less dialect, and it was slower and more considered, as opposed to the heady pace of Trainspotting, where you almost have to work out the action for yourself. There are also very few monologues in Porno, and those that do appear are closely related to the plot, whereas Trainspotting is full of the characters’ inner thoughts and ruminations about anything and everything.
If you enjoyed Trainspotting and want to see the characters develop, then this is the book for you: it isn’t a let-down in the slightest.
Book Review – 1984
I read almost to the end of this book more than a year ago, and then promptly forgot about it and left it sitting on my TBR pile. Then, in an effort to finally clear some of the long-standing volumes, I picked it up again, found that I’d entirely forgotten where I’d got to, restarted it and finished it in two days.
I don’t think that I could possibly say anything about this book that hasn’t already been said, but yes, it really is as good as it’s cracked up to be.
Book Review – Ludmila’s Broken English
I read this as part of the Seconds Challenge. In this case, my ‘first’ was Vernon God Little. This is also the author’s second novel.
The story flips between Russia and England. In Ublilsk, in Russia, Ludmila Derev lives a life of hardship, desperately trying to eke a living in depravity. In England, Blair and Bunny (Gordon) Heath, two ex-conjoined twins, have just been separated at the age of 33. The Heath twins, just released from an institution, attempt to find their way in a new world bristling with new experiences, including, most notably, sex. And as soon as I mention that Ludmila eventually finds her way onto a website for Russian brides, you can guess where the story is going.
For me, this was a bit of a hit-and-miss book. Unfortunately, what let it down for me was the plot: the two stories, especially Ludmila’s, were superb by themselves, but the connections only became apparent very late on in the book and they didn’t merge very well. The plot detracted from what was, for me, the most enjoyable thing about the book: the writing style. I don’t speak Russian, but I have of course heard the traditional stereotypes of the languages (including some of the supposed insults in the language), and this is brilliantly invoked in the dialogue. The characters of the Heath twins are very well developed; they are somewhat one-dimensional, but they do have fleeting shades of other traits, and they come alive very well in the mind. Ludmila was also a very interesting character, but most of the personalities of the Russian characters is shown in their dialogue, and towards the end of the book, she speaks only in badly broken English, which took away my interest from her. Trying to follow the somewhat fantastical plot was an unwelcome distraction from the characters and the writing; I can’t help feeling that this would have worked far better as two separate stories somehow.
Compared to Vernon God Little? This wasn’t as good. The writing was excellent, but it lacked the edge and bite of its predecessor and while VGL’s plot meandered along and could quite happily be mostly ignored in order to enjoy the writing, in Ludmila’s Broken English it felt as it it had been shoehorned in a little too tightly.
It’s difficult to think who would enjoy this book; ardent fans of Vernon God Little may find it a disappointment, but the writing style is similar and I think that’s a reason that many people didn’t enjoy VGL in the first place. I’m not sad I read this book, but I don’t think I’d read it again.
Book Review – I Didn’t Get Where I Am Today
The first book I ever read by David Nobbs was The Legacy of Reginald Perrin. I found it on the bookshelf and thought it looked like it might be interesting, and so I decided to give it a go.
Our household being what it is, I didn’t realise that The Legacy of… is in fact the last book in the series as all the others were tucked away in a box somewhere. When my father saw me reading it, though, he promptly became amazingly enthusiastic and ran off to fetch me the rest. Since then, I’ve seen the television adaptation of The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin and also enjoyed A Bit of a Do. When I came to find David Nobbs’ autobiography in a charity shop, I thought it would make a fitting addition to my bookshelf.
I would definitely recommend this to anyone who has enjoyed his other works, on stage, on screen or on paper. The writing style is very similar to that of his comic novels, but he still manages to convey serious situations in a serious manner without being overly emotional or downhearted. In addition to the constant comedy and behind-the-scenes knowledge of his works, this book also provides the tale of his life before he became a writer, which was far more interesting than I expected, given that I knew nothing about him other than his books. Anyone who hasn’t read his works would probably find the latter part of the book quite dull, as much of it is made up of details of his works and their adaptations, but you don’t have to be a Nobbs anorak to enjoy this book; I’ve only seen one of his television series and read a few of his books but I still found it a great read.
This was a very good book in all ways and really gave a sense of the author’s character. Thoroughly recommended to anyone who’s ever heard of David Nobbs!
Book Review: The Yellow Wallpaper
I’ve wanted to read The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman for a long time, but never quite got round to actually, y’know…getting hold of a copy?
Then, I found an old list of TBR books and decided to check the whole lot out on bookmooch. The Yellow Wallpaper had one copy available…how could I resist?
Synopsis: a young woman is kept in a house by her husband after giving birth to her child and slowly but surely loses her sanity.
This isn’t a book as such; it’s not even long enough to be a novella. I’d probably refer to it as a long story; 36 pages (or, according to the wikipedia article, 6000 words). Still, those 36 pages are very, very good pages. The writing style is very blank and sparse, with precious little extra detail, but it still manages to convey a sense of personality and vitality in the doomed young woman. The descriptions of the yellow wallpaper (with which the young woman becomes obsessed) are detailed, but it’s still impossible to conjure up any visual image of the wallpaper. That’s one of the great charms of this book: it’s so easy to read and so quick to get through, but thinking about it takes it to a whole new level and even when you think you’ve understood it, there’s still something you can’t quite put your finger on.
I’m sufficiently uneducated never to be able to understand the finer points of books until they’re pointed out in the afterword. And believe me, I’m glad that afterword was there, because it made this book a whole lot more interesting. Still, this book still works as a ‘light’ read with no more than a literal meaning (if you can call a book about a young woman going insane a ‘light’ read) if you’re not interested in picking it apart.
Very much recommended; I’m glad I read this one.
Weekly Geeks #23
This week’s WG is to repeat one of the previous ones.
I forgot to do last week’s, so I’m going to do this week’s twice over and do last week’s and another one!
In a rather boring manouevre, I’ve chosen WG#6, which is to catch up on reviews. I have a pile of books to be reviewed that’s growing larger all the time…may as well get some of it done!
In other news, nanowrimo starts today! I’m not participating as such this year: I’m aiming to write, yes, but I’m writing short stories, not a novel, and I have no word count goal. Since I started nano-ing, I’ve basically stopped writing outside of November, so this month I’m going to get back into the swing of it and re-start my writing habit.
The wonderful folks at nanowrimo have made ’sitting this year out’ badges for people like me, so I’ll take this opportunity to post one:
Happy NaNoWriMo everyone!
ETA: Take a look at my catchup reviews:
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