Andy's Blook bog (started 2006)

[Kenny_Shovel]

But sometimes Murukami feels like he's trying too hard to be Murukami

I know what you mean. I like Murukami, but he does tend to overshadow other writers from post-war Japan, which I'm not sure is all that healthy. I'd personally say that Mishima, Endo, Oe and Kawabata were all at least as good in thier time. I'm sure there are even more that could be added to that list.

[Freewheeling Andy]

I finished After Dark, which I enjoyed a lot. As I said earlier, I like Murukami; all the more so when, like this, he's not pushing it too far. It's quite engaging despite very little appearing to happen, and is remarkably warm for Murukami. All set in a single night with the interweaving parts of peoples' lives. Here, too, it feels like the surreal/fantasy elements actually play an important role rather than just being put there pointlessly.

[Freewheeling Andy]

Now reading The Inheritance of Loss

[SteffieB]

Finished Malcolm X. Well written, fascinating narrative, great social history. Best Autobiog I've read in a very long time, even if the politics are wrong.

 

Wondering what you meant about the politics? It's been a LONG time since I read anything about Malcolm X..but I know he was an inspiring voice for me.

[Freewheeling Andy]

Wondering what you meant about the politics? It's been a LONG time since I read anything about Malcolm X..but I know he was an inspiring voice for me.

 

Reading the autobiography is inspiring. But I also feel that Malcolm was very wrong in a lot of his separationist ideas. Early on he appears to be positively anti-white, and whilst this softens out dramatically by the end of the book, his view remains something closer to "Equal but different", rather than merely "equal", and that's the kind of attitude that led to, for example, the creation of the South African "homelands" like Bophuthatswana and so on. It still gives a lever to the racists, and is also wrong. And Malcolm's drive to have Black America exist as something close to a separate nation/state, is on very very dangerous ground.

[Freewheeling Andy]

Finished Inheritance of Loss. What an annoying book. Why do I keep finding such highly acclaimed books and discovering they're rubbish. For the first 80% nothing happens yet everyone behaves as pathetic Indian stereotypes with no substance at all. So no plot, and no plausible characters with any depth. Just bad Indian-ness. I know Booker judges love India, as it's a weird magical place but still has enough links to the UK that they can understand it. But please, just because there's a book about families and India, with a bit of independence/separatist violence thrown in, it does not make it Midnight's Children.

 

Bleck.

 

No reading a history of the Thames

[Freewheeling Andy]

Well, I'm still reading Jonathon Schneer's The Thames, which is an interesting history, but which seems a bit too London-centric, and perhaps just a little shallow in places and too deep in others. (Like a river?). I also started, over Christmas, JG Farrell's excellent The Singapore Grip, which is a very, very readable novel about the breakdown of Imperial rule in Malaya during the course of the end of 1941 and the advance of the Japanese. At least, that's what the first half is.

[Freewheeling Andy]

****** hell, The Singapore Grip is fantastic. It's quite a bit "War And Peace in Singapore" but one which finishes with the fall of Moscow. It's huge, it's got great plot, good characters, real characters, it's so symbolic of the failure and collapse at the end of empire, of the decadence and cluelessness and arrogance.

 

Oddly, I started off confusing JG's Ballard and Farrell, all the more because of Empire of the Sun and Ballard's view of the fall of Shanghai. Because if you pushed Singapore Grip to the future, it could be a Ballard story, of people carrying on half normally in a totally collapsed society some of the time going mad, and the rest of the time behaving as if nothing had changed. I might expand on this elsewhere. Fascinating stuff.

[Freewheeling Andy]

I've now finished Jonathon Schneer's The Thames (which I interrupted with Singapore Grip). It's, in a number of ways, a fascinating social history of the river. But in some respects a frustrating book. It's well written, and enlightening. But like lots of social history, it's picking too big a subject and has to make do with a load of snapshots. There were pretty much redundant chapters on art and poetry relating to the river, the focus was almost exclusively on London, and so on. And, at the end, the "getting up to date" section felt like the author just felt obliged to comment on recent redevelopment, but wasn't really interested, like those celeb autobiographies where the celeb has to talk about the stuff that's been on TV because that's all that the majority of readers know or care about.

 

That said, I've learned an awful lot about the river, and about some of the interesting stories surrounding it, like the Nore mutiny, like the machinations between GLC and Thatcher government over redevelopment, like how the ice-fairs came to be and won't ever happen again even with a long very cold spell.

 

-

 

Now I'm probably going to read Into The Wild by Jon Krakauer.

[Freewheeling Andy]

Into The Wild was OK. A fairly interesting read about a kid who decided to live independently and test himself against the elements in Alaska and eventually dying as a result. But it just wasn't that well written (I tried watching the film on the plane last night and was even more underwhelmed). OK, easy enough, interesting. But not great.

 

Now I'm reading Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond, and it's fascinating and wonderful and full of interesting stuff about how history progresses, and what drives societies to succeed. and become dominant. It is, though, a little repetetive. The basic thesis "Societies that develop agriculture first, tend to develop writing, domesticated animals and centralised government first because they tend to have higher population densities; and all of these add to the "advantage", which is why Eurasians, who first developed agriculture and where it disseminated fastest, became the effectively dominant societies".

 

And, really, there you are. The book could be written in a paragraph. Admittedly, you wouldn't get so many fantastic facts and stuff, and it's well worth reading for that, but it feels just a bit repetetive. Four or five chapters to go.

[Freewheeling Andy]

I finally finished Guns, Germs and Steel. There's nothing much more to add about it than I wrote above. Fascinating and enlightening, but maybe just a little too narrow. The later stuff on how China and Africa, in particular, ended up as they have is truly excellent, though, and allows a very different perspective on racial divisions and so on.

 

Now on to (the hopefully less chewy) Mister Pip.

[Kylie]

Thanks for your views, Andy. I have this one on my wish list, along with Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed.

[Freewheeling Andy]

I really enjoyed Collapse. It's a fantastic and sometimes very scary book. Again, sometimes I think Diamond repeats the key points too often but you learn so much that it's well worth the occasional rehash to keep you focussed.

[angerball]

I've yet to read Guns, Germs and Steel, or Collapse, though I own both. I did enjoy The Rise and Fall of the Third Chimpanzee; have you read that one?

[Freewheeling Andy]

I never read The Third Chimpanzee.

 

I've just finished Mister Pip which I really enjoyed. I don't think at any time he specifically says Bougainville is the location, which is odd. But it obviously is Bougainville, both from the civil war and mining and papuan references, and (on checking an atlas) the town names.

 

It's much darker than I expected. I did like the multiple-levels-of-pip theme; there's Pip, and Mr Watts as Pip, and Mathilda as Pip. I like the slightly fictionalised self that Mr Watts presented and the way you're left wondering if the same was true of Matilda (although it probably wasn't).

 

I've never really been partial to the "I must write my story" style of writing, and this is another book which references books and writing lots, but somehow it wasn't as frustrating as that usually is.

 

I've now started reading a history of St Pancras Station by Simon Bradley.

[Janet]

I've just finished Mister Pip which I really enjoyed. I don't think at any time he specifically says Bougainville is the location, which is odd. But it obviously is Bougainville, both from the civil war and mining and papuan references, and (on checking an atlas) the town names.

It's mentioned on page 12.

 

Bouganville is one of the most fertile places on earth.

[Freewheeling Andy]

oops

[Freewheeling Andy]

I had read in review that it was Bougainville, and I guess early on it wasn't registering that the name wasn't prominent. My bad.

[Janet]

Not bad! It's only a fleeting reference to it, and I only remembered it because it made me think of my parents Bougainvillea plant!

[Freewheeling Andy]

Bum. It just ate my post!

 

Anyway, as I was saying, to myself mostly, I finished St Pancras. Fascinating and well written and I enjoyed it much more than I was expecting. Architectural history isn't really my thing, but there was enough of the social history tied to both the railways and the gothic revival to make it an excellent little book.

[Freewheeling Andy]

And then I read Richard Powers' The Echo Maker, which I don't really know what to make of. The blathering about the Cranes and the eco-******** were a bit tiresome. The long-winded pieces showing off how much the author knew of neuroscience and psychology were a bit pointless. But on the other hand, the descriptions and feeling of psychological disconnect are fabulous, and the plotline about the note, the whodunnit element, is interesting with lots of possible people who may have been bringing someone back; and lots of possible people they may have been bringing back; all good right up to the pay-off which was frustrating because it just wasn't flagged up.

 

Still, I think a worthwhile, if not brilliant, book.

 

It may be one of those I change my mind on as time goes by, though. I may love it in a month or hate it in 2.

[Freewheeling Andy]

I've finished reading my very dry history of Persia and the Persians. All Achaemenids and Sassanians, Ctesiphon and Xerxes. Interesting stuff, but a badly written book.

 

Now, finally, I'm reading The Kite Runner. It's pretty good, so far.

[Freewheeling Andy]

Finished The Kite Runner. Good book, but perhaps not as great as is sometimes suggested. Just started, god help me, Vineland by Thomas Pynchon. I'll see you in six months.

[Freewheeling Andy]

Well, it was only 2 months to read Vineland. A fantastic book, I think, but hard work. So much going on in it, in some twilight between real and fantastical, with madness abounding in a post-hippy-60s insane California populated by ghosts and the mad employees of Nixon. Wonderful but madly complex.

 

Then I read The Business by Iain Banks, which took all of about 2 days and is a great fun tale of a modern global version of the East India Company, running large chunks of the world. Hugely fun.

 

And I've started on The Human Stain by Philip Roth, which seems like a more sordidly fun version of Coetzee's Disgrace so far.

[Kylie]

Well, it was only 2 months to read Vineland. A fantastic book, I think, but hard work. So much going on in it, in some twilight between real and fantastical, with madness abounding in a post-hippy-60s insane California populated by ghosts and the mad employees of Nixon. Wonderful but madly complex.

 

Sounds very interesting. If I've never read Pynchon before, would you recommend this as a good starting point, or should I try something else first? It sounds a bit daunting.