France holiday reading

I was lucky enough to spend a week staying in the south of France with family. Here’s what I read while I was there:

The Search for the Dice Man by Luke Rhineheart – This has been on my list ever since I read The Dice Man. The Dice Man was really good: I liked the writing style, the plot was good and the characters were intriguing. The Search for the Dice Man, while retaining an enjoyable writing style, was otherwise not good: the plot didn’t seem to hang together and the characters (partly because of the terrible plot) didn’t seem meaningful or fixed in their attributes. This was an enjoyable book with a few good scenes in it (most notably at the very beginning and the very end) but if I were to choose again, I wouldn’t bother reading it.

Incompetence by Rob Grant – This is a ‘mystery’ but more of a comedy about a world where incompetence is no longer a barrier. Our hero, who is by turns Harry Salt, Harry Tequile and Cardrew Vascular, travels across Europe to follow the clues his friend has left him and struggles with pilots with vertigo, trains that don’t stop at stations and more. This book was hilarious – thoroughly recommended.

America Unchained by Dave Gorman – This is yet another travel book. In this one, Dave Gorman attempts to travel across America from coast to coast without giving any money to The Man (i.e. without shopping at any chain stores). For me, the key to this genre of book is the narrator, and Dave Gorman was brilliant. I’ll definitely be reading more by him.

God is Dead by Ron Currie – The premise of the book is in the title: having taken on the body of a young woman in the Sudan, God has died. This is a series of short stories about the world left behind, including an interview with one of the dogs who ate part of His body and the story of a man whose job is to stop people worshipping their own children because they have nothing to do on Sundays. The first few stories were good, but in general, I found the collection lacking and dull.

Book Review: Morvern Callar

Genre: Novel

Synopsis: Morvern Callar, a young girl stacking shelves in ‘The Port’, goes home one day to find ‘Him’ dead on her kitchen floor. The novel deals with her (somewhat unconventional) reaction anda subsequent period of her life.

Thoughts: Good and bad. The real genius in this book is the characterisation. Morvern is a very unconventional character, but Warner makes her seem entirely real. I did feel sometimes like the narrative was slightly detached (for example, most of the speech in the book is reported, and there’s no direct dialogue from Morvern herself), even though the book is written in first person, but looking back, that’s just part of how Morvern is. One of the best qualities of the writing is how things which most people would find truly horrific are presented alongside the mundane.

What I didn’t like about this book was how it didn’t really seem to hang together. In the beginning, the plot – such as it is – was strong, but after a while, the book began to lose the direction it had at a start. In one way, I can see that that’s kind of the whole point, but it made the end go a bit flat for me – due to the detached quality of the writing, it’s hard to tell what Morvern’s motivation is, and the large jumps in time and place made it quite unsettling to read.

All in all, this is a book about the characters, not the plot, and that’s fine, though it wasn’t altogether what I was expecting. Reading it is almost like people-watching: nothing is spelt out and it’s left to the reader to fill in most of the emotion and justification. I’m glad I read this, and maybe one day I’ll go back and read it in more detail – I have a feeling it’s one of those books you appreciate all the more once it’s had a while to digest.

Review: Predictably Irrational

Genre: Popular science

Synopsis: Why do we do the things we do? This book gives examples of times when we behave in a way that seems rational but upon closer inspection is influenced by all sorts of factors you never would have even considered.

Thoughts: I don’t read a huge number of popular science books, but from what I have read, this one was fairly typical. I enjoyed the conversational tone and personal feel (there’s quite a few personal anecdotes and stories). The examples of predictably irrational behaviour were interesting, but I disagree with the introduction: I don’t think being aware of these things will actually make any difference in how I do things. My only complaint is that things were spelled out a bit too much and too many examples of the same thing were given.

If you enjoy popular science books or you’d like to try one, then I would recommend this. It’s a quick read, so it’s not going to take up much of your time or require a good amount of effort. It’s fine to read out of idle curiosity as I did, but I wouldn’t overwhelmingly recommend it as it didn’t really stand out from the crowd for me.

Dan Ariely has a website which is probably worth checking out if you’re thinking of reading the book.

Review: You Shall Know Our Velocity

Genre: Difficult-to-place novel

Synopsis: After the death of their friend Jack, two friends Will and Hand decide to travel around the world in order to give away a large sum of money. The only problem is that they only have a week to do it. However, their plans are thwarted time and time again and their trip turns into something completely different.

Thoughts: I very much enjoyed this book. I loved Dave Eggers’ writing style in A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and I wasn’t disappointed here. The action was sometimes hard to follow and it took me a while to get the hang of reading the way it’s written, but it’s definitely very effective. Anyone who’d like to be an armchair traveller will love this book.  The first section, especially, where Will and Hand are in Senegal, is incredibly evocative of the atmosphere of Senegal (or at least what I imagine the atmosphere in Senegal is – I’ve never been, but after reading this, I’ve definitely acquired the desire to go).

However, I felt that near the end of the book, the narrative started to fall apart a bit and make less sense. It didn’t really measure up to the standard of the beginning.

While googling to find an image for the review, I found that this book was republished under the title of Sacrament with a middle section by Hand that casts doubt on Will’s retelling of the story. That section is available on the internet here (warning: that’s a link to a 49-page pdf) and I’m looking forward to reading it.

As an example of Dave Eggers’ fabulous writing style, I’m going to share a quote from very near the end of the book:

Hand took a breath and opened his palms, as if accepting the gift of rain. “YOU SHALL KNOW OUR VELOCITY!” he bellowed into the cold exhausted city.

It’s not much, I know, but believe me – it’s worth reading this book so that you can understand.

Having seen some other reviews, I’d also recommend a little googling to any potential readers – there’s definitely some differing opinions out there on this one, and some of them are definitely worth considering.

Review format

I’ve just updated – for the first time in a while – the list of books I’ve read, and you can now see the true horror of my backlog of reviews to do. There was a weekly geeks question last week about review formats, and while I didn’t participate, I read the responses with great interest and thought a good deal about the reviews I find most helpful. I came to the conclusion that the reviews I like best:

• Give the genre of the book
• Include a brief synopsis
• If it’s a book I haven’t read, include some good general thoughts that let me know whether or not it’s worth reading
• If it’s a book I have read, includes some more specific thoughts that give me an insight into the reviewer’s opinion

The other thing that’s important to me is the length of the review. I’m really not one for long reivews, but just a couple of words isn’t really good enough for me – I want to know more than that. However, I always feel pressured to write long, detailed reviews – which is probably the reason I don’t write very many of them. So from now on, in an effort to stop the pile mounting up, I will (a) attempt to keep to just the list of things I’ve written above, thereby making sure I’m actually writing reviews I’d want to read and (b) make a renewed effort to actually write some reviews in the first place. We’ll see how it goes, eh?

On another note, I’m also going to signal my temporary absence from the blogosphere. I’m going to be busy this week with a French exchange partner arriving, and directly after she leaves, I’m swanning off to Iceland (lucky me!). It’d all be wonderful if it weren’t for the fact that bloglines is going to be backed up to high heaven when I come back…

Book review: The Prize

Once upon a time in Hay-on-Wye, a girl bought a book called ‘The Writing of One Novel’. This book is about how Irving Wallace wrote his novel The Prize. This girl decided that she should read the novel first so that she’d have a better idea of what was going on in the process of writing it.

She tried very hard to get hold of it through bookmooch, and eventually someone sent it to her from America. The girl was astounded to find that it is actually an 800 page hardback and not the rather slimmer volume she had been expecting! Still, she put it on her TBR pile, where it began to gather dust, until one day she decided to open the covers…

This book is about a fictitious set of winners of the Nobel prize. It is skilfully interwoven with snippets of information about real winners and the genuine events of Nobel Week, which makes it a very convincing read.

In the first part of the book, we get to learn about the characters and their work. Each of the characters has a well-developed personality and we learn quite a bit about their lives and motivations, which really helps to flesh out the story. I really enjoyed this part: the narrative dealt largely with everyone finding out that they’d won the prize and getting them to Stockholm, which wasn’t amazingly interesting in itself, but the characters themselves held my attention.

The second part of the book, to me, seemed like a rather awkward vehicle for building relationships between the characters, who of course had not met each other previously. It deals with the activities that they undertake during Nobel Week.The characters were still what held the book together, but this section was more hard-going and I didn’t find it as enjoyable as the others.

The final section is less character-orientated and is where the plot (which took its time in appearing) finally comes into its own, with lots of deceit and double-crossing. I would have liked to see even more on the characters (not that there wasn’t plenty already!) but this part was very enjoyable as well and the book came to a satisfactory resolution: all the loose ends from the events of Nobel Week were tied off, but we were still left withthe sense that the characters were going to continue their lives after the book. I for one would have loved to know how events panned out for them as lots of things happened in the book that could potentially have changed their whole lives. What a pity he didn’t write a sequel!

One of the brilliant things about this book is how seamlessly fact is woven into fiction. It’s almost impossible to tell which characters and events are real and which are not (though there is an afterword which explains most of this), so get ready for some heavy googling to satisfy your curiosity!

This book has also been made into a film, which I’d like to watch.

This is a big book but it’s well worth reading. Definitely recommended.

(Have you reviewed this book? If so, post a comment and I’ll link to your review!)

Book review: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

I first read this book a couple of years ago. A friend mentioned it in conversation and I decided to reread it.

The story is told from the point of view of Christopher, a 15-year-old autistic boy. The plot is fairly irrelevant to the book (I’ll expand a bit more on that), but the story kicks off with Christopher finding a dog that has been stabbed with a pitchfork. He decides to find out who killed the dog. Sounds simple? You’ll be surprised.

The reason this book is so brilliant is how realistic Christopher’s voice is. I confess that, like many people out there, I don’t know all that much about autism. I do know some people who are autistic, and I could probably quote some facts at you if you pressed me, but that’s the limit of my knowledge. Reading this book, though, made me feel like I understand. Quoting facts is all very well, but this book made me think about how it would be to live in a world like that day in, day out – or to live with someone who is autistic. The story is written almost entirely without emotion, but it’s easy to read between the lines and imagine the feelings of the other characters, even though only the barest facts are spelled out on the page.

To give you an idea of the writing style, here’s the first paragraph:

It was 7 minutes after midnight. The dog was lying on the grass in the middle of the lawn in front of Mrs Shears’ house. Its eyes were closed. It looked as if it was running on its side, the way dogs run when they think they are chasing a cat in a dream. But the dog was not running or asleep. The dog was dead. There was a garden fork sticking out of the dog. The points of the fork must have gone all the way through the dog and into the ground because the fork had not fallen over. I decided that the dog was probably killed with the fork because I could not see any other wounds in the dog and I do not think you would stick a garden fork into a dog after it had died for some other reason, like cancer for example, or a road accident. But I could not be certain about this.

I remember reading in one of those women’s magazines some feature where someone answered questions about their life (favourite food, favourite book, marital status, best tip for saving money, etc.). They said that after reading this book, they quit their job in finance and retrained so that they could work with autistic children. That’s the kind of effect this book has on you (though perhaps not that much in most cases!). I just finished reading a post over at Scobberlotch about narrative voices that get into your head. This book is a prime example: Christopher’s voice found its way into my brain and wouldn’t let itself be forced out.

There aren’t many books I’d recommend as unequivocally as this one, but I think that this is a book everyone should read. It sold a lot of copies so you can probably find it at your local library – get down there!

(I know that a lot of people out there have probably reviewed this book as well: if you’re one of them, do let me know and I’ll post a link to your review.)

Book review: Madame de Treymes

Gosh, it’s been a while since I read this. Maybe I should make an effort to actually get through some of the books I’ve been meaning to review so that I can review ones I can remember!

This book was given to me as a ‘free gift’ with another book I got from bookmooch. The first thing that struck me about it was that it was small. This book is about the side of a pad of post-its, only thinner! Still, it was quite nice to have such a small book when I was reading it because it’s very easy to carry around.

I’ll be brief because I can’t particularly remember a lot of it, but the plot is that a man wants to marry a woman who can’t get a divorce because her husband will object. Madame de Treymes is part of the husband’s family and is the instrument through which the divorce is obtained – with a twist.

The writing style was nice; plain, but still nice. If I were going to make notepaper to match Edith Wharton’s writing style, it would be the posh kind with scalloped edges: plain in the middle and pretty at the edges but good quality all over.

The plot held my interest, but only because I had nothing else to read (I read this book on a train journey). I think my main problem with it was that the plot wasn’t big enough: all that drama and intrigue was crammed into a short book, and something was lost because of it.

Still, this wasn’t a bad book, and I did enjoy reading it. If it sounds interesting to you, you can download it for free here.

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.

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!