Booklog #1

Happy Halloween!  Okay, so now that's out of the way let's move on.  I'm not a fan of this festival, or at least of what it has become (I have no problem with the original Pagan Samhain, which is actually very interesting).  I don't see why I should be obliged to use my own money to buy sweets or whatever and then hand them over to children/teenagers I don't even know, just because of the date.  I get that it's fun to dress up, have a party and all that, but walking the streets going to strangers' houses and asking for sweets...isn't that the exact opposite of what we're taught as children?!

Anyway, onto this week's books! 

I haven't finished anything this week (too much studying getting in the way!) but these are my 'in progress' reads:

Image by Pickersgill Reef via Flickr

The Children's Book ~ A.S. Byatt

Be prepared to see this one listed every week for a loooong time - it's really heavy-going because there is so much detail stuffed in there, not a single thing can be mentioned without a long ramble about a bunch of other topics and history related to it, diverting your attention from the plot.  I know A.S. Byatt is a well-established and highly-respected author, but I can't help but feel that there could have been a lot of pruning done to this book before publishing it!  I can only manage a chapter per sitting, so it's going to take me a long time to get through it, which is not like me at all.  But I hate not finishing something I've started! 

The Book of Secrets ~ Tom Harper

Much more my cup of tea - I'm a bit of an addict when it comes to Dan Brown-esque 'race to find historical artefact/secret before bad guys do' stories!  This one concerns the very earliest printed books and alternates between the present day chase and the historical story of what they are searching for came into being.  A book about the invention of books - what could be better?  I may well have finished by next week as it's very fast paced and every time I pick it up I find it hard to put down...

Angels ~ Marian Keyes

I've read a fair bit of 'chick lit' - Cecilia Ahern, Sophie Kinsella and Lindsay Kelk being my favourites - but never any Marian Keyes.  Given that she is considered to be one of the best I thought I'd try one - after all, if I want to write one myself, I need to see some good examples of how it's done!  Amazon is recommending all sorts of different authors of this type to me at the moment, so I plan to go on and download more samples onto the Kindle to get a feel of whose work I might like. 

The Redbreast ~ Jo Nesbo

As I mentioned last week, I’m reading this because it’s the current selection of the mini ‘crime’ book club that I’m in at work (don’t worry – we meet at lunchtimes, not while we should be working!).  It’s of the ‘dysfunctional alcoholic police detective’ vein of crime novels, but I have to say that it’s not doing much for me.  It was written in Norwegian originally, so obviously takes place in Norway, but this means it uses acronyms that I’m not familiar with, and there are so many  characters with similar sounding names and jobs within government/the police that I can’t remember who’s who.  Not that I’m really that bothered though, as I don’t feel any connection with or sympathy for any of the characters, even the main detective.  There’s a lot of reference to WWII, Nazis, neo-Nazis and political stuff that – not to sound like a total airhead – just doesn’t interest me.  Overall it feels very grey and two-dimensional...perhaps you need to have read Nesbo’s earlier books to ‘get’ the detective more, but to me he just seems really sulky and overly critical of himself.  I want to tell him to pull himself together!  Needless to say, I’ll look forward to when this one is done and hopefully our next selection will be something more like Agatha Christie/Sherlock Holmes where there are a list of suspects and a bunch of clues and we can try to guess whodunit before the sleuth reveals the answer. 

Question!  If something exists in both book form and TV form, which would you consume first?  I have Ken Follett’s Pillars of the Earth on the Kindle, but it’s also being shown in a brand new six-part series on TV at the moment, which my satellite recorder is storing up for me.  If I read the book first, the series will be taking up valuable space on my recorder’s hard disc while I read (and it’s quite a long book).  But if I watch the series first to get it off the recorder, then when I read the book I’ll have preconceived ideas of what the characters, places etc look like, which would have been quite different had I read the book first. 

It’s a bit like when the Lord of the Rings films (which I adore, I’m not criticising them) came out – they overwrote the mental pictures that I’d created of everything from reading the books many years previously as a young teenager (and then again several times over!).  I can’t remember now how I used to ‘see’ Rivendell, because all I see now is how Peter Jackson believes it should look.  It’ll be the same when The Hobbit is released I suppose, which makes me quite sad because that book is a real childhood friend.  I can still see the exact mental images that I had as a child of Bilbo in Smaug’s lair, riding the barrel, riddling with Gollum and so on.  Once the film comes out it will wipe these out and replace them, because seeing that with my eyes will undoubtedly create much stronger memories than the ones I made up in my mind.  Having said that though, I’ll almost certainly not be able to resist seeing it anyway!  

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