Eleven Hours

Mar6

Eleven Hours by Paullina Simons was my second pull from the book drop at the office. There was no non-fiction interlude between this and City of Beasts as I wasn’t organised enough. The book drop doesn’t contain vast amounts of books that I would jump at reading, so I just went for something lightweight and entertaining to tide me over until I got home to the collection of books that I desperately want to read. On the surface, Eleven Hours appeared to be a pretty standard thriller, heavy on plot, fast-paced, simple writing.

What a delightful surprise this book was. It is a fast paced, plot-heavy thriller and it is so much more. The characterisation was extremely skillfully done. The main character, Didi, endures an eleven hour abduction. I didn’t like her much, but she was very real to me and behaved in exactly the way I thought such a woman would. Even down to the extent that when she was being taken from the car park with threats of violence she never actually said no. Because many women can’t and don’t say no.

Another main character was presented to us with a single mention of his race. I mention this because often it seems that the defining characteristic of black characters in books written by white authors is that they are black and the adjective is used constantly. It is a measure of how impressed I was by the writing in this book that I was disappointed when this character was introduced as ‘a black man’ and so I subsequently was alert for how many times that was used as an adjective. I was pleased to note that it wasn’t.

I was also pleased with the ending. Although Didi’s husband and an FBI agent are chasing after her to rescue her, ultimately Didi rescues herself and then gives birth unaided. Her efforts are nothing short of heroic and even though she is so passive in nature, Simons’ writing is utterly convincing. I really enjoyed this.

This time I was prepared and my non-fiction interlude was The Work we are Born to Do by Nick Williams. This was lent to me by a friend years ago and I have often thought that I shouldn’t have kept it so long. Well, I’m glad I did because I gained a lot from reading it.

City of Beasts

Mar5

I haven’t read Harry Potter. Sometimes it seems like I’m the only adult in the world that hasn’t and the reason is that I’m not a child and therefore I don’t read children’s literature. Plus, I have an uncontrollable contrarian streak that prevents me from partaking in mass cultural crazes, which is why I don’t have an ipod either.

Any how, sometimes it is really hard to tell what is YA and what isn’t, especially if you’re not in a bookshop where they’ve conveniently categorised everything for you. At my office there’s a book drop where people can pick up and leave books. Handy when I unexpectedly finish a book on the way in and then have nothing left to read on my hour and a half commute home.

The first book I pulled out of the book drop was City of Beasts by Isabel Allende. On the whole, I enjoyed it very much but I found it took a while to get going. There’s a fair bit of exposition at the beginning and the language often feels a little stilted. Once into it, it’s a very engaging tale of a young boy travelling with his grandmother to the Amazon jungle and discovering a magical, strange city of beasts. It is quite fantastical and does raise the question about where the boundary between fantasy and magical realism lies. The structure is mythic and it has an old-fashioned feel about it – but in a way that is charming rather than patronising.

I googled the book because it’s been a few weeks between reading it and getting round to posting here, and I discovered that this is Allende’s first YA novel and that there are two sequels. I don’t think I’ll make an effort to read the sequels but I would certainly recommend it for teenagers.

Adventures in reading

Feb14

It’s been a while, but mainly because I’ve been writing a short story, so no apologies. Since I’ve been away I’ve cracked through lots of books and thus here comes a huge post.

Following on from the epic Martin Chuzzlewit I finished off Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth and Happiness by Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein, one of the many half-read books lying around my house. It had some interesting material but there are better examples of this type of book out there.

Moving on from there I felt that I wanted something light, so I chose A Wicked Liaison by Christine Merrill. It’s a Mills & Boon Historical Romance and quite far from my usual choice. I have it (and a few others) because my writing group did a workshop on writing for Mills & Boon and getting some examples was for follow up research. Anyway, I feel violated. On a content level, this offended me. On a writing level it does offer some interesting observations of what is missing from the book. What is there is well written, it’s just that there is so much that is left out. There is very little world building (as it is set in Regency London). We are offered little in the way of description, hardly any smells, sounds or kinesthetic input. The book takes place completely in the mind and we are entirely caught up in the thoughts of the two protagonists. This does make it very intense but the inner monologues are quite repetitious. Ugh. Did not like.

My non-fiction interlude was Earth Path by Starhawk, which I loved.

Then, due to an unscheduled trip to Doncaster, I read February’s book club book, The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid. It was an interesting style. The author chose a monologue for the whole book and the writing was wonderfully tight. What was there was very well done but, for me, the style made it distancing. It felt like an intellectual novel not an emotional one. Disappointing, because it could have been much more powerful.

After my unpleasant toe-dip in to romance, I felt a strong need to return to speculative fiction, in the form of The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch by Philip K. Dick. I find that Dick’s novels are very much the fiction of ideas. I did notice lots of new words for not-so-new concepts and at one point it did feel a bit overwhelming. I loved the idea of stress being measured in units of Freuds. Having said that, the world-building was great. The book plays with the idea of reality, the nature of god and altered states of consciousness. I really liked it.

Following that I read The Introverted Leader: Building on your Quiet Strength by Jennifer B. Kahnweiler, which I found really inspiring and helpful.

Then I picked Poison Study by Maria V. Snyder (I’m noticing a lot of people using middle initials today). I think I’m going right off the use of the first person in the long form. The story had potential but the writing was unsophisticated. I couldn’t make up my mind up whether it was YA fiction or not; in the end I decided that even if it was, it could still be held to the same standards as anything else. There was too much tell and too much ‘Yelena had worried about/planned for/thought’ where we hadn’t been given that previously. The world-building and characterisation lacked depth. It also committed the cardinal sin (in my eyes, at any rate) of not being internally consistent with levels of technology, clothing, dialogue, etc. I couldn’t fix an historical period in my mind. Characters fought with swords, lived in castles and used magic but then had factories and used incredibly modern dialogue. For me, it was distracting and annoying. The dialogue as a whole was not well done; often I felt that the dialogue didn’t reflect the characters as they were described. The relationship between the protagonist and her love interest was pure Mills & Boon and was so creepy. Not good. And there are two more in the series.

Most recently, I’ve read Belching out the Devil by Mark Thomas, which is an exploration of Coca Cola’s activities in the world. I may not be able to drink pop again.

Martin Chuzzlewit

Jan23

I feel so virtuous. Like my mind has been on a marathon session at the brain gym!

Martin Chuzzlewit by Charles Dickens. I’m a bit ambiguous about Dickens. I had to read Great Expectations at school and I hated it. On the other hand, A Tale of Two Cities is one of my favourite books. But I have a sort of list of ‘books I should read’ which is traditional classics, fantasy & sf masterworks, key feminist and minority texts, and anything else that I come across that seems important.

It took about sixty pages to get into the rhythm of Martin Chuzzlewit and that was hard going. It’s been a while since I read anything where the average sentence has more than three clauses. Anyway, once I got into the swing of it, I loved it. It was funny and I found myself laughing and smiling a lot. I loved the snarky portrayal of the characters and the swipes at broader societal hypocrisy. It’s a huge read – even by comparison with today’s epic fantasy novels – and covers the doings of a family of nefarious characters, anyone of which could have had a book all to themselves. It’s not an easy read, but well worth it.

A Gun for Sale

Jan17

I joined a book club at work. This month we’re reading Graham Greene’s Travels with my Aunt and A Gun for Sale. I read Travels with my Aunt ages ago and loved it. Graham Greene is one of my favourite authors.

A Gun for Sale was new to me and the first thing that struck me was how contemporary the writing felt. It is full of short, sharp sentences with a gritty, terse feel to it. The interior monologue occasionally sounds like telling, but otherwise it was amazing. There is a point in the middle when one of the main characters is killed and I found it incredibly shocking. It turns out later that she wasn’t actually killed and that is also a stunning reveal. I loved it.

I’ve also been reading Your Next Move by Micheal Watkins and Heart of Darfur by Lisa Blaker. The latter was very moving but I was disappointed that there was no attempt to explain what was going on.

I may be a while in posting my next ‘what I’ve been reading’ update as I’ve embarked on Martin Chuzzlewit and it’s 700 pages of tiny type. I may be some time.

Triumff: Her Majesty’s Hero

Jan7

Ah, comic fantasy. There’s plenty of it out there, even if some people insist that Terry Pratchett is the only author in the genre. Humour is a very personal thing and my sense of humour is quite idiosyncratic, so I generally don’t read too much of it.

I picked up Triumff: Her Majesty’s Hero by Dan Abnett in a post-christmas impulse shop in Waterstones. On this occasion I was swayed by an hot boy on the cover and an admirable commitment to voice in the blurb. I wasn’t expecting much, just a bit of fun.

And it was indeed fun. I laughed out loud quite a lot, which was occasionally embarrassing on the train. Abnett is a good writer and his elizabethan twenty-first century is an engaging world, although it did strain my suspension of disbelief somewhat that fashion and architecture wouldn’t have changed in all that time. However, the book is so entertaining that it really doesn’t matter.

There’s quite a bit of head hopping which I normally don’t like but as the narrator is kept well away from the action for the majority of the time, it works on this occasion. I think it is an indication of Abnett’s skill that he is able to do this.

The character’s are well-drawn, the dialogue is good, the world-building is good and all the loose ends get wrapped up tidily. Highly recommended – for those with a well-developed sense of the ridiculous.

Slammerkin

Dec26

Should historical fiction be considered speculative fiction?

OK, no, I know. I’m only asking because I want to talk about a novel that isn’t SF, fantasy or horror. The book in question is Slammerkin by Emma Donaghue. It was inspired by a true story about a teenaged servant who murdered her mistress.

First of all, I loved the title. A slammerkin was a type of loose gown popular in the mid to late seventeenth century and also a euphemism for a whore. It’s a fabulous word.

The first part of the book, written in third person and entirely based in the main character’s pov, was gorgeous. It was visceral and colourful and drew me right into a very physical world. The use of language and metaphor was striking. For this alone, this book is worth reading.

Part two felt slightly different. It was less colourful, less passionate. Partly this reflects the changed life circumstances of the protagonist and was well done, if disappointing. I enjoyed the earthiness of part one very much and was sad to return to a greyer world. We are introduced to other povs in part two and while this is necessary for the reader’s understanding of the story, inevitably there’s not enough time to really get inside the character’s heads.

The ending was telegraphed but not obvious. I know this is something I complain about a lot and it was nice to be surprised. Slammerkin starts with a prologue of the protagonist in gaol and then shows the reader how she got there. Somehow I got it into my head that this was a rags to riches tale and the prologue represented a middle low point rather than the end and it was well into the book that I realised this was not to be. Despite that misunderstanding, however, the ending managed to be engaging and shocking without coming as a complete surprise.

Of course, it’s not perfect. Sometimes the pov gets a little confused, swapping between characters mid-scene or even flipping back and forth in the same scene. When the narrator is a character other than the protagonist, the characterisation is a little flimsy. This is compensated for by the characterisation that’s done while we’re in the head of the protagonist, so that in total the characters are quite solid. It’s just that the reader knows them more through the protagonist than through themselves.

This book came to me serendipitously. My neighbour gave it to me and I’m really glad she did. I’ll be reading some more of Emma Donaghue’s novels.

Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang

Dec11

It’s been a week and a half into the new job and I’ve read two books! Probably could have done better if I’d chosen easier books, but that’s cheating.

This morning, I finished Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang, by Kate Wilhelm. This was an interesting read from a style perspective. It was published in 1974 and feels even more dated than that. Partly it’s because the book looks at cloning technology and its physical and psychological effects and much of the thinking has moved on a lot since. That aside, I think the main thing creating the archaic feel was the use of omniscient point of view.

I can’t remember the last time I read something where the narrative was so far removed from an individual character’s POV. The advantage to this is that it keeps a story that unfolds over several generations to a manageable length. The book is relatively short at approx. 75,000 words. It also keeps the focus on the intellectual ideas behind the book – what happens when people only reproduce by cloning – and allows the author to present several sides of the debates.

The downside is that characterisation suffers. The reader never really gets in the head of the characters. On the one hand, the clones are presented to the reader as not quite human and distant POV gets in the way of identifying with them. There are two cloned characters, Molly and Mark, that we do get a bit closer to in the second half of the book and they are presented as being more human. I wonder if this was deliberate in order to emphasise that the clones are not like us. Which might have worked if the fully human characters in the first part of the book were more fully drawn. In the end I think that Molly and Mark are the most developed because they get the most POV time.

In this book I really noticed that the dialogue was used to explore the intellectual concepts of the book rather than as a characterisation tool.

It’s been a long time since I read a sci-fi novel in which the story was so clearly subordinate to the idea. I enjoyed it, but this one’s for the purists.

The second book was Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine and it was awesome.

The Steel Remains

Dec1

Well, it’s been a busy time lately, what with finishing up one job and preparing for the next. One last work-related out of town trip didn’t help either.

Tomorrow I start my new job with all that entails and I’m looking forward to getting back into a routine. As I’ll be commuting, I plan to read lots, which means lots of posts on what I’ve been reading. I hesitate to call them reviews because they are more like musings. Anyway, to get in to the mood, lately I’ve finished:

The Steel Remains, by Richard Morgan. I picked this up because I’d heard it compared to Joe Abercrombie’s work (I’m such a fangirl; it’s embarrassing). This I found to be both true and not true. And I found that there were things I liked and things I didn’t.

It was a stand-alone novel in a sea of trilogies and series.

I liked that the protagonist was a marginalised minority in his world and that his experiences reflected the shocking, traumatic reality of someone in that position. I liked that the three main characters were all, in some way, outsiders and that it was done without romanticising their positions. These aren’t glorious, loner heroes nobly serving the community. They are damaged people making limited choices. Just like us.

The book is quite bleak and driven by bitterness and anger. I thought that the characters’ awareness of the consequences of their experiences was realistic. Sometimes they faced what had happened to them in the past and was happening to them now and acknowledged how it shaped them, and sometimes they didn’t. Sometimes they saw themselves clearly and at others they were self-deluding.

I also liked the sex scenes. A couple of days ago, I was sent a news story about the Bad Sex in Fiction Awards and it reminded me that it is apparently difficult to write sex well. Richard Morgan writes sex very well. He whips up an emotional response without losing touch with the earthiness of the act. Brilliant.

As an aside, I wonder if the reason so many great literary names find themselves on the Bad Sex in Fiction Award shortlist is because they’re not that good at writing and sex scenes show up the weaknesses in convoluted, pseudo-intellectual prose. Or perhaps I’m just being snarky. What do you think?

What I didn’t enjoy so much was the rushed ending. At the start of the book we follow three characters who have a shared history and whose lives are being disrupted by similar events. The convention of fantasy fiction is that at some point these three paths will merge. Morgan draws this point out right until the very end. Then, when the three characters come together, the final scenes happen in what seems like a small number of pages. As I was nearing the end of the book and the three hadn’t met I found myself wondering if this was a trilogy after all. While I appreciate that life is often a slow build up to a brief climax leaving you vaguely disappointed, this was perhaps a touch too much realism for the novel.

I felt the exposition was handled in a slightly clumsy way and there were several points where the reader was taken out of the action into interior monologue. This was particularly true at the beginning of the book.

And all the swearing! Don’t get me wrong, I don’t actually mind swearing. I enjoy the full use of a wide vocabulary. It felt a little heavy handed though. Too much spice for the stew.

All in all, I enjoyed it and I’d recommend it. Unless you don’t like brutal, gritty, realistic depictions of life.

Boudica Marginalia

Reading, writing, and other things

Archives