Andy's Blook bog (started 2006)

[Freewheeling Andy]

I've started on John Kennedy Toole's Confederacy of Dunces which seems to have acquired serious cult status in a lot of places. It's quite odd to start with, but I'm beginning to get it now.

[wiccibat]

The title sounds intriguing

[Guest Anonymous]

Andy,

 

While browsing eBay this evening I spotted something that may interest you. You can view it here.

 

It's a copy of The Sea-Crossed Fisherman by Yaşar Kemal. It's an even better copy than the one I've got - condition and cover.

[Freewheeling Andy]

Thanks for the pointer, Stewart. Unfortunately, at the moment I've forbidden myself from buying new books because I'm getting through current ones too slowly.

[Freewheeling Andy]

I was a bit underwhelmed by Confederacy of Dunces. I'll do a review later, but suffice to say that although it's fun, I struggle to see quite how it became such a legendary cult book.

 

I'm now reading Black Swan Green which is wonderful, although completely different to Cloud Atlas, and far, far less showy.

[Freewheeling Andy]

Just finished Black Swan Green.

 

Magnificent. Beautiful. Wonderfull. I now concur with the general mood that David Mitchell is probably the greatest British author writing at the moment (or is the British author producing the greatest writing, perhaps).

 

So deep, so much big theme being covered, yet with such a light touch.

 

Gobsmacked, I'd say.

[Freewheeling Andy]

Just started on Perfume by Patrick Suskind. So far it reads incredibly easily, but I suspect it will be thoroughly nasty.

[Freewheeling Andy]

Well, I was right. How beautifully dark and vicious. Nice writing, tight, concise, full of ideas, and completely soulless and violent. It leaves me feeling I've read a truly good book.

[Kell]

This sounds a bit interesting - perhaps one for me to try...

[Freewheeling Andy]

I'll do a review later

[Kell]

Excellent - I'll look forward to it.

[Freewheeling Andy]

Hmm. I have a feeling I must have read something in the two weeks before I went on holiday, but can't remember what it was...

 

Ah.

 

Yes.

 

Got it.

 

Holiday's in Hell by PJ O'Rourke, a slightly sneering, excellent fun bit of travelog from the time he was Rolling Stone's foreign correspondent. It's all a bit out of date, having been written in the 80s, but it's amazing how many of his spots are still unsafe (or perhaps it's amazing how many places have recovered). Entertaining and light.

 

Then, on the holiday: Andrey Kurkov's two Penguin novels, which are spectacularly easy, and utterly bizarre. I did really enjoy them, though. They aren't the most serious books I've ever read. They belong in the tradition of the more bizarre Russian/soviet novels, but also in the tradition of the thriller.

 

Then it was Ghostwritten by David Mitchell, which was excellent, a great book, although it's also fairly obviously a first novel in comparison to the other books of his I've read. It's a bit more obviously showy and flash, and borrows more obviously from other sources, and feels a bit like someone desperate to make themselves heard. But, for all that, it remains a wonderful book and closer to Cloud Atlas than Black Swan Green is. It's all very big themed stuff, starting small scale, but with terrorists and art thieves and ghosts, and heading towards a dystopian very-near-future.

 

Now I'm reading Snow, by Orhan Pamuk. Much easier to read than My Name Is Red was, but with probably the same bad translation. It feels clunkier than it should for such a spectacularly highly rated author. Set in modern eastern Turkey, it seems to cover the battles between secularism and traditional Islam in a border city cut off by snow. I'm enjoying it, but it's taking a bit of an effort to read.

[Freewheeling Andy]

I'm struggling badly with Snow, despite it getting good reviews from reliable people. It's not bad, but it's just not what I can focus on at the moment.

 

I've just read, over the last 24 hours, a book called Busting Vegas by Ben Mezrich, which is a really to easy read true life story of a bunch of geeks who found a cool way of winning at blackjack, made loads of cash, and ended up in a lot of trouble as a result.

[Freewheeling Andy]

Well, the battle with Snow continues. I'm slowly becoming convinced that it is, actually, utter rubbish despite all the plaudits.And it has the other massive flaw of being about a poet, and I just can't deal with books about writers.

 

I did, though, also just read Vikas Swarup's Q&A, which is fun and simple and rather wonderful, and interesting structure, but one with some meaning, that allows that book to slowly fill up the life of the main character, Ram Mohammed Thomas.

 

He's a contestant on what is effectively Millionaire, wins, and is arrested; and how he knows the answers to the questions brings individual tales that fill out his life story. Sometimes the writing was simplistic, maybe too much so, but after Snow that was actually rather delightful.

[Kell]

Ah, i should have read this thread before your Olympian one! The general consensus at the Posh Club, when we read it, was mostly positive - the majority rather liked it, some more than others, a couple weren't so chuffed with it, but you can't please all the people all the time.

 

Personally, I rather liked how it told you a section of the story, then told youwhat the question was, making you party to the answer before kowing the question yourself. It was very nicely done. I've heard tell it's being made into a film - I look forward to seeing how it's handled.

[Freewheeling Andy]

I'll write a review-let in a bit, although I guess I've already covered most of it. I like the fragmentary story telling style. The only things I was slightly unhappy with were the sometimes simplistic prose - although as a conceit for an 18 year old narrator that's no problem; it'll be a problem if the style continues in Swarup's next book; and the fact that most of the chapters have a basically happy, lucky ending, although again as the point of the story is of coincidence and good luck, it's a bit of a nonsensical complaint - it's just that when it all comes out in the wash that it makes sense. Before that it's a little irritating. Oh, and a final thing, the last chapter round up happy-ever-after ending kind of annoys me; I think I'd have liked it left more vague.

[Kell]

Yes, the ending caused a lot of debate with the Posh Club too - sounds like we had some similar thoughts on it.

[Freewheeling Andy]

Was there a general concensus that the last chapter was just a bit too glib, or was it just you against a tide of other people happy with the happinness?

[Kell]

It was pretty much split 50/50 if memory serves. I felt it was a bit "nice" myself, but at the same time, there were aspects of it that felt almost "right" too. Mostly, though, there were one or two things I maybe would have tweaked about the ending if I were given free reign over the narrative... & a couple of things I might have changed completely too.

[Freewheeling Andy]

Well, I've finally finished Snow. Good grief. It's a book that should have fascinated me. The subject matter itself is great. But they style of the book is horrible, the way the author imposes himself more and more into the book, but does it in such a clunky way. The long, tedious, moping descriptions of emotions, of the tender, oh so tender and delicate and fragile emotions. Please. ****ing please. Gah! And, instead of being a fun tale of a revolution or coup, it's all about a bloody poet. And the bloody poet has poems "come to him" yet we never get to see them. It's all created by deus ex machina, but with no explanation, and no point. It's meaningless. Bleh! And the bloody hyperemotional poet/main protagonist annoys me so much, with a page of "oh, how miserable he felt when he saw in her eyes that she didn't truly love him but wanted instead to show him compassion" followed by him doing something on impulse with no explanation. Book moved on by "He suddenly saw a man and felt he had to follow him".

 

Aaaaaaargh!

 

Thank god its over.

 

I'm reading Yes Man by Danny Wallace now. Thank god for fluffy books.

[Freewheeling Andy]

Yes Man was a fun little book. Not exactly deep, or serious, and maybe neither as profound, nor as adventurous and insane, as it might have been. But fun to read and a little enlightening none-the-less.

 

Man has dull life, meets man on bus telling him to say yes more, which he does. Fairly interesting things happen.

 

I've now started on Ismael Kadare's The Successor. I love Kadare's books, but the most recent I read - Spring Flowers, Spring Frost, didn't really strike home. Be interesting to see whether this is a continuation of the downturn.

[Freewheeling Andy]

Thinking back on Yes Man, I think it actually perhaps gains by being less dramatic. In my mind I was expected wild, exciting things to happen to Danny, and it to turn out more like a novel; but perhaps the fact that most of the things are fairly low key (buy a car, get a girlfriend, reply to some e-mails, go to bars) actually make the book better, more enlightening.

 

I've just finished The Successor. It's definitely a step up from Spring Flowers... but is still not great. I found it frustrating because it was written in a similar allegorical style to The Pyramid, and didn't seem to be a full novel, with full plot, and seemed more constructed as little fragments, more like an idea for a book. The idea is fascinating, as a psychological whodunnit set in communist Albania, trying to work out who is responsible for the murder of the designated succesor to a character who is clearly Enver Hoxha. I guess it was a worthwhile read, but I just thought it should have been better.

 

I'm now properly starting on Due Preparations For The Plague by Janette Turner Hospital.

[Freewheeling Andy]

I finished Due Preparations For The Plague, which I really enjoyed. A genuinely interesting thriller, playing with the voices used. Incredibly dark, very big themes, very nicely written, like Hospital's other book I've read, Oyster.

 

The big qualms with it for me were the predicting of the known future, having a book set pre-9/11 written post 9/11, when the book covers the subjects of terror and of Iraq.

[Freewheeling Andy]

Now starting on Mitchell's Number9Dream

[Freewheeling Andy]

Ah. It was marvellous. What is real, what is dream, what is written, what is in Eiji Miyake's head? Is it SF? No. Is it cyberpunk? No, not really. I guess, like Murukami, it's cyberpunk set in normal urban Japan. But it's not Murukami, it's most definitely Mitchell, with it's multiple voices, it's playing with stories, it's fragmentation leading to a whole. I guess a more linear story than Ghostwritten or Cloud Atlas, but certainly not conventional like Black Swan Green. Ace, anyway.

 

Now to Dance, Dance, Dance.