Book review: The Gone Away World.

Just to give you a heads-up: this is not really a review. It's more a paean of delight. Because I love this book. It is fab.

That's not a review, is it? That's rubbish as a review. That's an indiscriminate value judgement and doesn't really tell you anything useful.

What can I say? Some books just take you that way. They find you feeling all sort of bored and blase and indifferent, and they leave you with a grin on your face. Because you just read a fab book that made you giggle helplessly with joy for pages at a time.
It has ninjas. And mutants. And mimes. And pirates. And a heartrending love story, and battles and wars that are stupid fought by people that are very good at fighting, and fantastic bits of monologue and dialogue that I wander around my house quoting at people at random, and a bar powered by a pig generator and a villain with An Iron Hand, and all sorts of awesome things.

And mimes. Did I mention the mimes? In make-up and everything.

The ninjas and the mimes have this whole battle at one point. I'm just saying, is all.

It's fab. Go read it. Come up with your own review.

Book review: the Monsters of Templeton

The Monsters of Templeton is a many layered beast. It is at once many kinds of story. It is a kind of love story directed at Americana and a certain sort of small town, where everyone is related to everyone else and your family history trails behind you in the sand leaving your secrets in the tracks for all to see. It is a history of an American town, based very much upon the author’s hometown, and it is also the history of that town’s founding family. It is the story of the last scion of that family, Willie Cooper who has come home in disgrace, kicked out of Stanford, possible pregnant, armed only with a terrible haircut and an unfinished PhD. It is also a story about a monster.

Book review: Never Let Me Go

I've had mixed feelings about Ishiguro ever since I read When We Were Orphans, a book I cannot well remember but which set my teeth decidedly on edge, mostly becuase I seem to remember spending much of the novel gripped with the fervent desire to hit the hero and heroine around the back of the head. I cannot remember why.

Recently however, I read The Remains of the Day, and found it utterly absorbing, a quiet, devastating character study of a dissolving world and an account of a profoundly human tragedy. It breaks your heart, but so gently, in this calm and steady, drop-by-drop way, scene by scene, loss by loss, thread by broken thread.

So I was utterly won over to Ishiguro, felt very silly for having ignored him before, and set out to find some more.

As a rule I quite enjoy science fiction that doesn't really care if it's science fiction or not. Examples include Margaret Atwood(The Handmaids Tale, Oryx and Crake, etc.) Cormac McCarthy (The Road), books of literary heritage but nonetheless not about The World As We Know It Jim. Speculative fiction then, that lovely, uselessly broad, catch-all category. Categorizing books, I increasingly feel, is a foolish and futile endeavour, so we won't tear our hair over this one. Never Let Me Go is speculative, it seems to be near future or parallel world, set in a UK recognisable and familiar, but different to our own. Because this one has an awful lot of clones.

What is it that I like about books so damn much? Part 2

To continue, if reading is an intensely personal process, it is also a intensely social one. There is, I think, a tension when reading, between the isolated and the reaching-out aspects of the act.

In isolation then we are left alone with the book and ourselves. We read through the prism of our own consciounesses, that is to say, through the maze of our own absorbed social conventions and ideas. Our understanding of new concepts brought to light in our reading is necessarily bounded by those concepts we already contain, and are constituted of.

What isolates reading, then, from other social acts? For example, how is reading a book not only a different experience but a different kind of experience from having a conversation? Is that, in fact, the case?

Well, OK, first the most obvious differences: I read in my own time. There is no pressure for an instantaneous response. I can go back and forth, revisit and reconsider passages, extract multiple meanings from one paragraph whilst ignoring another completely, put a book down and pick another up as the whim takes me - all of this is under my control.

Moreover I don't have to defend my responses. If I think an argument is complete nonsense, unless I take the trouble to find some public arena to say so, then I needn't say why. A conversation is a public event to the extent that it involves at least two people directly. Reading is a private one, though the option of going public is there, now more then ever (as is evidenced by the existence of this blog).

Book review: My Mistress's Sparrow is Dead

It's now an established part of my holiday preparation ritual that the day before I leave, I will have a great flurry and panic and visit about six shops in quick succession because I realise that I have no mini shampoo bottles, no sunscreen, and I can only find one of last year's pair of sandals and need urgent replacement. It is also a part of that ritual, that I stare at all my bookshelves, decide that nothing on there will keep me sufficently occupied whilst sunbathing, and swoop around Oxfam book sections, scooping up everything I can see that costs less than £2.00, has at least 300 pages and seems to have a reasonably pleasant cover.*

It is in this way, before anyone shrugs dismissively, that I came across Jeffrey Eugenides's collection of love stories, My Mistress's Sparrow is Dead. I had vaguely heard of it before somewhere in a newspaper review archived somewhere in the depths of my memory, where it had been tagged with the thought hmmm. maybe?...But it fufilled all the relevant criteria (£2.29, about 540 pages, very pretty swirly cover in purple and blue.) And so I bought it. And it was a veritable cornucopia of absorbing stories that could stab you through the heart with a single sentence or make you laugh and wince together.

What is it about books that I like so damn much?

It’s partly the tactility of them. No other experience, to me, ever quite matches that clean angular sense of an unopened new book, or the reassuring softness of old, much-turned pages. The smell of paper can take people back to their childhoods. Libraries and book shops, with their piled up sense of books laid up in store, reading experiences in potentia galore, can be nigh-on hypnotic. There’s a corner of the big academic Waterstones on Gower Street with a most distinctive smell where I used to go and hide post exams until my heart rate returned to something like normal. Books, for me have always had an intensely physical, comforting presence.*

But as well, it’s what they represent. Ask people why they read and you’ll get myriad responses, from escapism to enlightenment. It is, to my mind, as broad and meaningless a question as asking someone why they talk, for heaven’s sake. People don’t read with just one purpose in mind, any more than they have conversations the same way with everyone. There are books which are like old friends that we can read with disrespect, skipping the parts we’ve read too many times and know off by heart, going straight to favourite passages like talking in the shorthand of shared jokes. We are somewhat more formal with books we’ve only just met, reading them politely from beginning to end, with due attention to detail, perhaps skipping passages if the book we’ve just met is something of a bore. If we do go straight to the last page and read the end first, it is with a slight feeling of transgressing social norms.

This, as metaphors go, is whimsical but surprisingly stretchy. Reading a book is a conversation of sorts, one that you contribute to as much as the book, and yet all your contributions are done without you noticing. It's a most peculiar and unique process, unlike almost any other experience.

*If one of your big worries about e-books is their deficiency in this respect, worry no more! Someone has both thought of and solved this problem for you. http://smellofbooks.com/