Book review: Quite Ugly One Morning

The problem with leaving books lying around without reviewing them is that you forget what you thought about them. I chose Quite Ugly One Morning by Christopher Brookmyre because I’ve enjoyed his other books, but it’s been a few weeks now since I finished it.

This book is regular Brookmyre fare: a mystery story with an element of humour thrown in. This book centres around a particularly bizarre murder and the corruption that the investigation uncovers in the NHS system. It doesn’t sound like it, but there is quite a bit of humour thrown in there as well.

Quite frankly, I was disappointed. I’ve heard brilliant things about this book (one friend told me that the opening scene reduced them to tears with laughter), but itjust didn’t do it for me. I didn’t really care about the plot, possibly because there were no ‘case studies’. Without giving away too much, I can say that the plot centres around large numbers of people not being treated quite the way they should by the NHS system, but they just felt like statistics. As they say, a thousand deaths is a statistic but one death is a tragedy…I think I probably would have cared more about the plot if there had been characters involved on the inside. As for the comedy element, it seemed to rely too much on just being absurd. Absurdity is normally one of the best parts of Brookmyre’s comedy, but in this case, it was just absurd, and not comic.

Another weakness of this book is that it seemed so incredibly British. I have nothing against the Brits (hell, I am a Brit!) but any book with a certain nationality pouring out of it tends to annoy me. I can’t help feeling that there can’t be a huge number of people out there who want to read about a fictional scandal in the NHS. It’s interesting when it happens for real, but somehow it doesn’t make for a terribly scintillating novel.

If you don’t like Christopher Brookmyre’s zaniness but enjoy the rest of him, then this might be a good book to choose. Really, though, while it’s not the worst book I’ve ever read, you would do far better to pass over it for some of his better books.

To Be (ever?) Read

The tyrrany of the to-read pile

I just came across this article, and it intrigued me.

I’ll admit that I do have a very large TBR pile: two shelves of books, plus another half-shelf of Daphne du Maurier books that won’t fit on the main pile (plus a list of books I haven’t yet obtained but which I do intend to read). In the past, I have been somewhat neglectful of reading these books, with some books staying on that shelf far longer than they really should, but I don’t think there’s been any specific period when I’ve stopped reading my own books from my TBR pile, even if I’ve been keeping up with library stuff at the time.

Since about August, though, I have had no access to a public library. I live in a rural area and cannot get to a library by myself (public transport is virtually non-existant here, and I’m too young to drive). Therefore, I rely on getting a lift from someone or on having other people pick up my books for me, which means I have to reserve them. You can reserve books in the library, but obviously, you need to be there to do that, so instead, I reserve them using the online catalogue. This allows me to search every library in the county and request any book (and because I still have a child’s ticket, it’s free! Adults have to pay 50p), which will then be moved to a library of my choice and then anyone with my library card can collect it.

However, the computer system is currently being updated. The online catalogue has been down since August and for a few weeks, you haven’t even been able to reserve books at all. This means that I haven’t been able to get books from the library, because short of getting to a library in person and sitting at a computer with a list of books, then finding each one individually on the shelves (and repeating this every time I wanted to look for a new book ), there’s been no way for me to get books from the library.

I’ve been looking for a lot of books on bookmooch, but mostly, I’ve just had to read what I have. Books still manage to find their way into the pile at an alarming rate, but I’ve definitely been getting through quite a lot of what’s already there. I haven’t read any book I don’t or didn’t own for a good few months, and I think the experience has taught me that I really need to be on top of my TBR pile. I’ve chucked out quite a few books because I know I’ll never read them, no matter how long they stay there. A TBR pile should be a pile of books that will actually be read: if it’s not gonna get read someday, it no longer belongs in my pile. Those two shelves have become my library and I’m picky about using shelf space for something I’ll never read when I could have another good book in there.

What about you? How rutheless are you with your TBRs? Does that article apply to you?

The Sunday Salon (for the first time ever!)

So, for the first time ever, I’m participating in The Sunday Salon. Here goes!

What I’ve been reading this week:

• Silks by Dick Francis. I’m a huge Francis fan and was very pleased when he announced he was going to start writing again. Under Orders, his last offering, was mediocre, but Silks was a true return to form. Look out for my review of it soon!
• Notes on a Scandal by Zoe Heller. This has been on my TBR stack for a while, despite my mother having told me that it wasn’t much good. Unfortunately, my mother was right: I didn’t really see what all the fuss was about. Look out for a review of this one too. I’m not sure if I’ll bother watching the film – I’ll give it a go if it comes round on TV, but I doubt I’ll go to the bother of renting it.
• Waiting for the Galactic Bus by Parke Godwin. I can’t remember how long ago it was that my father gave me this and told me I’d enjoy it, but it’s certainly been a long time. I read the first couple of pages once, but no more. Recently, I’ve been sorting out my TBR pile, and so I thought I’d give it one more shot and then either finish it or dump it. I read roughly the first 100 pages this afternoon, and while it’s a little hard-to-follow in places, it’s quite enjoyable. Keep an eye out for my review of it when I finish it.

Time spent reading this week: more than usual, I suppose. I started Silks last Sunday and finished it on Thursday afternoon, and I read the whole of Notes on a Scandal between Friday night and Saturday morning.

What I’ve been blogging this week:

• A post about voluntary proofreading and what you can do to help. Today, I heard about reCAPTCHA, a captcha system (you know, those irritating things you have to type in to prove you’re human) that follows the same idea, only one word at a time. Cool!
• A review of Panic by Jeff Abott, a thriller/chase novel I read a little while ago.
• I’ve also written about winter again, over at notinparis.

I’ve been neglecting my blogging lately, so this week, I’m aiming to get back on the ball. As for reading, I’d like to finish Waiting for the Galactic Bus and hopefully start The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe, which I’ve been looking forward to for a long while. My local library’s catalogue should be back up sometime this month, so if they finally do, I’ll be able to run through the huge list of books I’ve been wanting to get. Still, I’m not holding out much hope for it!

Book Review: Panic

This is a fairly typical thriller/chase book. The main character is Evan Casher, a young filmmaker. He has a pretty good life; his films are doing well, his family is fine and he’s just got involved with the beautiful Carrie and he thinks he’s finally in love. All that changes when he receives a mysterious phone call, which throws everything he’s ever known about himself into doubt – and him and Carrie into danger. Throughout the course of the book, coming across the FBI, the CIA, a sinister underground organisation and more double-crossers than you could shake a stick at, they endeavour to find out the truth about who they really are and what has been happening, hidden from everyone, for so long.

I chose this book because I saw it at an airport once and thought it looked vaguely interesting, and then when I came across it in a charity shop, I decided to give it a spin. It’s not normally my cup of tea, but I do like to experiment with different genres (though I do have my limits!).

Overall, I didn’t really like this book. I felt that it was dragged out too much, with too many complications for its simple plot. The bad guys were stereotypical bad guys and didn’t ring true. Our hero did the one thing you really hope authors who write these books don’t have their characters do, which is to totally change his personality as soon as the going gets tough. The Evan of the first few pages and of the brief slower-paced sections throughout the book was not the same Evan as in the many, many chase scenes. As a result, it was very difficult to care about him. I also felt that the whole book in general had been done before: cops gone bad, secret organisations, spies, double-crossing families, ‘I’m not who I thought I was’…it can work, but it’s been done so many times that it now needs something new to bring back interest, and this book didn’t have that.

The writing style wasn’t bad, but wasn’t good either. I think the author was trying to tell a story with this book, rather than anything else, and it’s very true that the prose doesn’t get in the way of the story at all. There are no fanciful descriptions, no flights of fancy that aren’t directly related to the plot and barely a sentence that isn’t just factually describing what’s going on. The reader is left to add most of the tension and suspense for themselves. Unfortunately, though, while this could have been one of the book’s high points, it seemed to me that in this book, there was just too little. The whole focus was on the story, but the story wasn’t good.

I wouldn’t recommend this book. It was hard to find the motivation to follow the characters on another chase when we know they’ll get everything right in the end (that said, the end was very unconvincing and spectacularly out-of-character). Once the plot had dealt with one thing, it moved on; there was no reference to what had happened before, and as a result, I didn’t feel like I was getting anywhere or that the story was moving forward. Overall, this book was rather limp.

However, if you would like to read it, my copy is currently available on bookmooch (username: newcaribou).

Have you reviewed this book? Let me know and I’ll link to your review!

Proofreading

Most likely, you are already aware of Project Gutenberg or something similar. The idea is thus: books that are out of copyright are posted on the internet for everyone to download for free.

However, what you might not know is how the books get to be on Project Gutenberg and other similar sites. Certainly, I used to think that they paid people to sit around with volumes and volumes of books, typing them in by hand!

However, I’ve recently got involved with Distributed Proofreaders. This is one place that provides content for sites like Project Gutenberg. In a nutshell, books are scanned in and then OCR is used to create text versions of them. Volunteers – anyone with an internet connection and some time on their hands – then proofread and format them so that they can be posted in the public domain.

I envisaged a dour, boring place where proofreading was a forced commitment, but I couldn’t have been more wrong. Firstly, you can do as much or as little as you like: some days, I’ve completed almost 30 pages, and others, I haven’t done anything at all! Secondly, you can choose from a huge array of books to proof, which means you can choose something you’ll enjoy. And thirdly, the system is much more complex than I imagined. Books go through a series of stages: three rounds of proofreading the text, two rounds of formatting it and then more processing to produce the final e-book. However, you’re not let loose on the whole system at once: until you’ve proofread 300 pages, you can’t work on anything other than the first round. This provides a lot of motivation for sticking with it!

Also, there is great support for beginners. When you first join, you’re directed to some books for beginners to proof, which are easy to do and which are looked at by more experienced proofers when you’re finished. About a week after I’d joined the site, I received detailed written feedback from an experienced proofreader about my proofing in the beginners’ books. There’s also another feedback mechanism, as well as extensive guidelines including lots of examples and forums, so you’re never left in the dark. I’ve been really impressed at how easy the learning curve has been.

If you have a couple of minutes to spare each day (one page of a fairly easy book will probably only take you two minutes to proof!), then this is something I’d really recommend for all you book-lovers out there. I’m really enjoying it – maybe you will too!