Jump to content

Freewheeling Andy

Advanced Member
  • Posts

    1,119
  • Joined

  • Last visited

Posts posted by Freewheeling Andy

  1. I've probably never been as angry or as sad as I was after finishing this book.

     

    For those that don't know it, Dallaire is the general who was running the UN Peacekeeping force (undermanned, understaffed, underequipped, underfunded) that was overseeing the peace accords in Rwanda. He describes the impotence of his force, and their failings and the failings of the international community as the build up and racial hatred got worse and worse before finally overflowing with the genocidal murder of 800000 people within 100 days, in 1994.

     

    He describes how the French and the US kept deliberately undermining his mission for domestic reasons, how UN beaurocracy hamstrung him, how humanity failed Central Africa.

     

    It's a depressing read - and even more so as, at the end, he hints at how the stupidity of the international community in not listening on the ground and instead offering high-profile aid to the regions that were media heavy led to increased instability and the 2 Congolese civil wars, the Burundian civil war, increased instability in Uganda, and even indirectly led to the current problems in Darfur - a failure which appears to have cost something close to another 4 million dead.

     

    But this end-game only comes after reading of the plight of the tiny team of peacekeepers who did all they could, but which was not enough.

     

    This really is a horror book.

  2. I've always had a problem with poetry. I just never really got it, most of the time, except in the comic-spoken form.

     

    I guess in terms of "real" poetry my favourite poet is the rambling drug-crazed nonsense of Coleridge.

     

    My favourite poem of all, though, the most moving of the lot, is Dulce Et Decorum Est

  3. I think the thing I was forced to read at school that I'm most pleased they made me read was To Kill A Mockingbird

     

    I still haven't forgiven them for making me put up with the first world war poetry, nor with the awful A Merchant of Venice, which is amongst the worst of Shakey's plays (and we didn't even get to see it as a play, only read the script).

  4. I'll put in a word for one of my favourite ever books. How many of these are there? I being to hear you cry. Too many, of course, is the answer.

     

    Anyway, this one is "Eastern Approaches" by Fitzroy MacLean.

     

    It's all a true story (although you do begin to wonder how much the author embellished and polished the story to make himself seem even more brilliant). He was a diplomat in the foreign office, and a bit bored posted in Paris. So he was the first person ever to ask to be posted to the fairly new Soviet Union in the mid 30s.

     

    Off he went, hoping to see a more exciting side to life. Which he did. Partly by travelling completely illegally through Stalin's Russia, through to the Caspian and Caucasus, which were out of bound to foreigners, whilst he was being tailed by the NKVD (precursos to the KGB). He jumped ships and ended in the middle of nowhere.

     

    Later on, he travelled into Central Asia, which was even more forbidden and closed. He kept deliberately losing his NKVD tail when going off to see the ancient cities of the silk road. Wonderful adventure stuff.

     

    But it got better, as he was also the only westerner to see the legendary Stalin show-trials.

     

    This is just the first of three sections of the book.

     

    In the second section, it's the beginning of the second world war, and he's in the government beaurocracy, but wants to get out and fight in the war. He's stopped because the authorities say that they need him in the diplomatic corps, and he can't be released from the government. He works out that the only way to do this is to become an elected MP. If he's an MP he can't be a civil servant. So he gets himself elected, gets kicked out of the civil service, and promptly joins up with the army leaving a friend to run his constituency.

     

    This lead him to Cairo and Alexandria, where he met up with a disorganised group who were starting a special squadron, which later became the SAS. Maclean writes about the beginnings of the SAS, their early assaults (and occasional mistakes), before the North Africa part of the war begins to come more under control.

     

    The third part of the book is in Yugoslavia, where he is posted to liaise with the Partizans. It turns out that he ends up as a confidante of Tito, and as the point man between the Allied generals and Tito's Partizans.

     

    A fantastic account of war, an amazing adventurer, and a man who did more in 10 years than most people would do in 100 lifetimes.

     

    Andy McNabb, eat your heart out. This man is the business, the proper dog's rubbish.

     

    This isn't the kind of book I'd normally read, but it's seriously good dope.

  5. Well, I'd certainly recommend it as a reading circle book. Not too big or heavy, but very good. Trouble is that I'd be at an unfair advantage of having already read it, and an unfair disadvantage that I last read it years ago...

  6. I bought this on the basis of the name alone, and the fact that it was half-price and looking prominent as I walked into Waterstones on Gower Street, a few months ago.

     

    It was a good thing that I hadn't spotted that it had crept on to the Richard & Judy Book Club thingy, because it would have driven me away, running and screaming.

     

    Which would have been the wrong thing to do.

     

    The book is an amazing layered onion of stories within stories within stories, moving forward in time, and then backwards again, bookending each other. I found it an ingenious and thoroughly worthwhile mechanism, not just the pretentious nonsense that you usually get with postmodern writing devices.

     

    I think it works because each of the stories is, itself, a proper, interesting, well written story, and easy to read.

     

    The book starts as the diary of a traveller in the south pacific in 19th century; moves through the letters of a feckless early 20th century dilletante; on to a 1970s eco-thrillier; and into a hilarious tale of a modern publishing executive; on to a semi-dystopian future world run by the Koreans; and finally into a basically post-apocalyptic world in the distant future. It covers a rise-and-fall-of civilisation, and each of the stories links in to the other stories, often with very similar themes.

     

    I can imagine that the plot devices would really wind some people up, and be found to be very annoying, but to me, the book works brilliantly, and explored some very big themes about truth and civilisation without being particularly pompous about it.

     

    I heartily recommend it.

  7. I'll drag this back to the top, because I think that all of you people who want to read a bit outside of your normal field might like to try Broken April. It's both mad and alien enough, I think, to appeal to the horror and the fantasy people. Even though it's set in the real world, with real people and real things.

     

    And it's also pretty high profile at the moment with Kadare having won the international booker.

     

    Before you mention it, yes, I am nagging. :D

  8. Is this the great big huge monster pile of books by my bedside?

     

    If it is, it's (largely) as follows:

     

    Shake Hands With The Devil by Gen. Romeo Dallaire

    The Final Solution by Michael Chabin

    Snow by Orhan Pamul

    A Short History of Tractors In Ukrainian by Marina Lewycka

    Travels with Myself And Another by Martha Gellhorn

    Oracle Night by Paul Auster

    The Time Travellers Wife by Audrey Niffenegger

    In The Shape Of A Boar by Lawrence Norfolk

    Dance Dance Dance by Haruki Murukami

    Vineland by Thomas Pynchon

    and the unfinished half of London - a Biography, by Peter Ayckroyd.

     

    Apart from that my bedside is empty...

  9. The top number one favourite childrens book of all (with the possible exception of Winnie-the-Pooh) is Russel Hoban and Quentin Blake's How Tom Beat Captain Najork And His Hired Sportsmen.

     

    I think it's aimed for sort of 5 to 8 yearish range, but have no idea. I first read it when I was 27 and still loved it. (And I read it to myself, as I don't have any kids to read it to).

  10. I have a few. I've retained a card one from Dillons, back when it was Dillons, for nostalgia purposes. I've a card Stanfords one, for when I'm being a map geek. And then there's the random stuff. Which mainly seem to be the tear-off tags from aeroplane tickets. Plane tickets make great (if slightly clunky) bookmarks.

  11. I really enjoyed The Postman. As a late-teen I was always really into that post-apolcalyptic stuff. My obsession with it started with JG Ballard's Hello, America. I remember The Postman being excellent first time around, but a bit less impressive when I went back to it. I seem to think I read some other David Brin, but it was much more space-opera-ish, which wasn't my thing at the time.

  12. Oh. I forgot the main bit, didn't I?

     

    I choose books on all kinds of basises (bases?). Primarily on recommendations, and on whether I know the author. Sometimes, Daunts' style, topographically - if I know a book is about a region, or by an author from a region, that I'm fascinated by at that period, I may tend towards it, and then read the first page, look at the blurb, and decide.

     

    Sometimes I decide on genre, but I mainly read "proper" novels, along with some history and travel stuff, so the genre isn't a very good way of defining things.

     

    But the recommendations of friends I trust (and particularly my mum) seem to be the best way.

     

    Except when I go for things almost at random. See them in a shop, or mentioned in the paper, and think "That sounds good". That happened with Haruki Murukami, Ismael Kadare, and most recently David Mitchell.

  13. My favourite of the Richard and Judy ones so far (although, to be fair, it's the only Richard and Judy one I've read - I do have the Time Traveller's Wife sitting in my pile-of-books-waiting-to-be-read) is David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, which I think is extremely wonderful and lovely, and that everyone should read it.

  14. I read one or two things in the late 80s when I was getting through loads of SF stuff and did enjoy them. My memory of the stuff is pretty shot, though. Did he write The Postman, or was that someone else?

  15. Possibly a new name to some here, but Ismael Kadare won the International Booker Prize a month or so ago. The international Booker is for the body of work, rather than the individual's books.

     

    Anyway, I'm utterly delighted that he won because I've been enjoying his books for a few years now because he deserves a wider audience (even if it does gazump my "I'm into a very obscure great Albanian novelist" chat-up line - what do you mean, you're not surprised I'm single?).

     

    They are all about Albania, and usually about the mad tribal stuff that still goes on in the highlands. In particular a number of books focus the blood feud, and its codified, formalised, legalistic description in the "Kanun".

     

    Because of the codified blood feud there's some very, very cold killing in the books, which makes them at times incredibly black.

     

    The blackest of the lot, and my favourite, is Broken April. About a boy who is obliged to kill under the blood feud, but who then knows that in the middle of April his life will be fair game. A marvellous, marvellous dark book.

     

    My other favourite is much more comedy (although very wry comedy) and is The File On H, about some Irish-American scholars wandering the Albanian highlands desperately trying to find the origins of the Homeric epic, whilst loads of petty politicians and drunk inn-keepers suspect them of spying and are desperately trying to shop them to higher powers.

     

    Anyway, it's all marvellous. And a thoroughly deserved award for a desperately underrated writer (you can tell he's underrated because nobody in Waterstones was expecting him to win, and therefore there were none of those stupid over-sized displays with his books on).

×
×
  • Create New...