Freewheeling Andy
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Posts posted by Freewheeling Andy
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Well, I don't think I've changed much in the last year, but I might be pushing slightly more non-fiction now:
Still, at number one, and still the book everyone should read:
If This Is A Man by Primo Levi. You should still read this. One of the most important books ever, a man describing his life inside Auschwitz, but with more humanity and more hope than you could imagine, a book that touches so deep I don't know where to being.
The Great Crash of 1929 by JK Galbraith. You should read this, this year or last year. Everyone in the financial world should have read it in 2006 or 2007. It tells you all you need to know about history repeating itself in our current financial mire, and how easy it would have been to avoid it, but that - in the end - we will never avoid it because we eventually forget the problems of the past and think we've reinvented leverage.
Bad Science by Ben Godacre. Not the best written book, by a long chalk, but it would do everyone a world of good to read it, so you can begin to understand how science and science-ism is used horribly cynically to take advantage of people who don't fully understand what's going on.
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller. Just because. There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one's own safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn't, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn't have to; but if he didn't want to he was sane and had to. Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle."
And, finally, you know it's coming: To Kill a Mockingbird.
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Like everyone else, I just can't imagine you take a book back just because you don't like it. Can I return a DVD I've bought because it was dross? No. Even when you taste a bottle of wine at a restaurant, you shouldn't send it back because you don't like it - it's actually just to check whether the wine is off.
I have taken books back - but only when they've been missing large numbers of pages due to a printing error, or when I already owned a copy.
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I kind of feel that picking a favourite English or British author is a bit like shooting fish in a barrel. There are a huge number of them, and most people are familiar with them.
Even if I was picking my favourite author who is strongly associated with my home town, I'm a bit too spoilt for choice - with the likes of CS Lewis, Matthew Arnold, Lewis Carroll, Philip Pullman, Brian Aldiss, JRR Tolkien, Graham Greene, TE Lawrence, Johnson, Shelley, Elliott and so on - to come down on the side of anyone in particular. Although probably my favourite Oxford-specific/Oxford-centric novel ends up being Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh.
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So, to answer ii's question
(1) The style - I found it very readable and easy, and at times I was quite fond of the lack of quotation marks, trying to determine whether it was internal reminescence or externally, talking to the children and getting them to understand what was going on.
(2) Hattie - seemed entirely plausible to me. Useless, dippy, hippyish, running off to Paris given the chance, totally incapable of dealing with children. That actually seems to me to be mostly normal. Perhaps there were a couple of times when she went pursuing the odd men along the way that were unlikely, given that they weren't on the road for very long she might have been a bit more focussed. But that's really about it.
(3) The beginning actually didn't grab me much at all. It was a bit like the beginning of Love Actually, the scene at the airport where the family comes together. It kind of just washed past, and I wanted to get onto the bit of the book where stuff happened.
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OK.
First thoughts, and this isn't really responding to ii's questions, just thoughts in general. I'll get to specific questions in a bit.
- What a very, very, very female book. This isn't a criticism, but I think I'll be one of very few men reading it this December. All the main characters, bar logan, are women/girls. The men are mostly freaks and losers and ciphers and shallow. Again, that's no criticism, but a contrast with all those books where there are few women and they're only shallow. But also the focus and interests of the book were very unmacho. It's a bit of a change for me to read a book like that.
- WHERE DID THE MONEY COME FROM? Now, this is just a silly point about plot, but unless I skimmed over it, they never said, and it was bugging me. Family on holiday in Mexico, this is us somewhere else, Min never worked, Hattie tootled off to Paris on a whim, also without a job just idealism, can fly back at a moments notice, has a wodge of cash for the drive, can fly home from San Diego. Min can start random artsy projects and just fall out of them. It just felt like a very false set up to make for nice "quirky", "alternative" sorts of characters. Perhaps there was a huge life insurance pay-out for their dad, or something, but the fact it's never explained or mentioned feels like it leaves a bit of a gap.
- In contrast to Kell, I find Hattie completely plausible as a bit of an airheaded, idealistic, but completely unsettled and immature young aunt. Her uselessness at parenting and her struggle to work out what to do, to work out how much she can boss around and how much she has to let slide and how much she can shout, seems very likely to how I'd be - particularly if she'd not been home for ages from Paris and was slightly out of touch with the kids. That just seems, well, normal. I know I'd be far more useless. Funnily, I found Thebes the least plausible character, and she felt like a bit of a fake invention - almost too obvious as the super-independent, intelligent, slightly gothy, slightly quirky, remarkably level-headed 12 year old. It just felt like Toews had thought "What kind of character would people like most in the world?", and came up with someone halfway between the girls in Juno and Little Miss Sunshine. Ooh, perfect, modern alternative young characters.
- The book itself? I enjoyed it, but it was pretty light. Perhaps if I wasn't working so hard, and was thinking more, I'd have focussed more on the parallels between the self-discovery voyage and the real voyage. But I think it's meant to be light, the stuff about depression and loss and coping in impossible situations is background that you sort of absorb, rather than having spelled out to you by someone with a sledgehammer approach.
- Road-trips? They've very North American, aren't they? It seems almost entirely normal to get up and drive for a few thousand miles when you're in North America. It takes a lot more thought and planning in Europe.
That's it for the time being.
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Actually, I've been reading this weekend. About 60 pages to go, I think, and I've mostly sitting at work waiting for things to happen, so the end will come quickly and I'll give you my words of genius then.
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It's a long time since I read The Trial, probably 20 years now. I remember finding it very dark, but very fascinating. I think I was too much of a teenager to understand it properly, and really need to go back to it in the light of someone (I think Murakami, but can't be sure)'s comments that it was like reading Jeeves and Wooster, except that Joseph K had no Jeeves to rescue him repeatedly.
One of the things that'll stop me going back is the memory of crazily long sentences and paragraphs (in some ways reading the book was Kafkaesque - you wondered if you'd ever escape from a paragraph that just kept going and going)...
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Blimey! I sound intelligent and knowledgeable in that thread. I think someone else must have nicked my keyboard to write that...
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I agree with Rob here. I love Alsace wines, generally, and they're pretty cheap by French standards (and very cheap in France). And Austrian wines - even their reds, which nobody really knows about.
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Angels and Demons was a terrible film, but almost infinitely better than the book...
And on a slightly different level, I actually much preferred the film of No Country For Old Men. But I think that might be because I saw the film first and it was in many ways such a literal translation from the book, the book just read like a screenplay, but without some of the humour.
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Finally got my copy. Should read it over the weekend. And then read all these comments afterwards...
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I was just looking back my my reading lists for this year, and had thought it was a bad year where I'd read little, but it turns out I've read a bunch of fantastic stuff.
The big surprises of the year, though? One fiction, one non-fiction...
The Great Crash of 1929 by JK Galbraith
and
Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
The Galbraith you'd think was just going to be the most turgid, tedious thing. A book by an economist on an old recession, written in the 50s, re-written in the 70s. Couldn't be more wrong, it's funny, witty, pacy, fascinating, insightful, and you just wish that everyone who'd been trading CDOs and CDSs in the mid-2000s had read his warnings on leverage and debt and bubbles. History is doomed to repeat itself. It's astonishing how prescient he was, too, telling us that as we forget past crashes we get rid of the regulation thinking it useless, only at some point to find ourselves skewered by the same thing.
Brideshead was one of those books I hated the idea of because of a residual memory of Jeremy Irons prancing around Oxford holding a teddy bear, and my hatred of period-ness. I'd never guessed it would be funny, satirical, dark, and not really that in love with the whole English-aristo thing. So much better than I could have guessed.
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With apologies, I've not read the book yet. Bought tomorrow. Crazy busy with work the last two weeks is my excuse. Crazy busy the next two weeks, too, but should read it in that span.
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Sombrero Fallout is an utterly fantastic book! Sadly out of print, now.
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Riaan Manser's the man's name. Around Africa On My Bicycle.
Incidentally, something else I keep going on about, but it might very well be your sort of thing - Eastern Approaches by Fitzroy Maclean. He started out in the foreign service in Moscow during Stalin's times and travelled whilst being pursued by the NKVD throughout then-forbidden central Asia, came back during the war and was one of the founders of the SAS, and then ended up as Churchill's point-man to Tito in the Yugoslav mountains. Great writing, and genuinely exciting- and he was apparently one of the role-models for James Bond.
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I've read a couple of "end to end of Africa" books - Paul Theroux's Dark Star Safari, which is modern and travelling in an easy manner; and a South African bloke cycling all the way round (you might actually be interested in this, although it's not very well written - I'll see if I can find the name) the outside, going through every country that has a coastline in Africa. Both, though, modern - I've recently been reading more African stuff - Kapuscinski, who I keep talking about, and also some of Martha Gellhorn's stuff - and although the idea of spending much time in the interior does nothing at all for me, I'm finding it increasingly fascinating.
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That Giuseppe Maniscalco book sounds awesome, and right up my proverbial alley.
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I've read some parts of the Mark Twain travel writing, and it's very, very entertaining. Well worth the effort. Although it's really not much effort at all.
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I've not read Gravity's Rainbow. All I've read are Mason&Dixon and Vineland. Both are completely and utterly barking mad; also supremely intelligent; also incredibly dense and take a lot of reading. Vineland I wasn't fully convinced by, but I thought Mason&Dixon was magically brilliant, even if it did take something like 3 or 4 months to read. Both took an awful lot of getting in to. So, from what you're saying, I'm not sure they'd be much easier, style-wise, than Gravity's Rainbow.
I guess Vineland is easier, but it's a substantially less good book.
The only other Pynchon book that may have a reputation as being readable is V. At least, it's often the most recommended.
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OK.
One fiction: Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
One non-fiction: The Shadow Of The Sun - Ryszard Kapuscinski
And Cloud Atlas wins, of these two, although of course it's silly to compare fic with non-fic which is why I want to have one of each.
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I've surely missed obvious ones, but
Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
The Road - Cormac McCarthy
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay - Michael Chabon
and I suspect, although I'm only reading it now, so perhaps I need distance to confirm... but I wanted to include some non-fiction
Shadow of the Sun - Ryszard Kapuscinski
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at swim-two-birds is woeful.
what???!!???
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Oh, no. I mean, I love re-reading my Winnie-the-Pooh books, and still love reading Stevenson.
But I accept that I am enjoying reading a childrens book. What Rowling invites with the increasing length of her books (and what many people, including myself, do when I see lots of adults reading her books), is comparison with, and treatment as, "serious" literature.
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But if you start to judge Rowling (or even Stevenson, who is, of course, a far, far better writer) on their literary merits, comparing them against "serious" fiction, they will fall short.
If you take them on their own merit, aimed at their regular audience, they stand up perfectly well. The trouble with Rowling is that she begins to invite (and her adult audience certainly invites) the comparison with literature written for adults. And yet there are objections when she is (justifiably) criticised on that basis, even though as books for adults, her books are actually not that great. They aren't quite Dan Brown, but they sure as hell aren't Nabokov.
Andy's Blook bog (started 2006)
in Past Book Logs
Posted
Well, read The Troutmans, which was OK but not magnificent.
Then have spent ages ploughing through Jonathan Raban's Hunting Mr Heartbreak, which was a genuinely fascinating travelogue as he spends over a year heading around the USA trying to find himself and the country and a place to locate himself. But, in the end, it just ended up being a bit turgid and fragmented for my taste, and didn't have a great deal of narrative drive.
Now, I'm reading Breath by Tim Winton and really enjoying it. It's quite dark in places, as Winton is wont to do, hidden amongst a very light and easy prose.