Sunday 30 January 2011

Booklog #12

I've one word for you: HALLELUJAH!!! 

This week I've finished:

* The Children's Book ~ A.S. Byatt
At last!  After goodness knows how many months of slogging away (and two more chapters than I realised - a most unwelcome discovery) I've finally beaten it!  And do you know what?  I cared as little for the characters by the end as I did at the beginning.  They seem to float around, vaguely interacting with one another, but never becoming fully '3D' as it were and when the First World War comes into play towards the end (I think you can guess what this means for at least some of them) I found myself really disassociated from them - I didn't care what happened to them.  The best word to describe them would be 'flat'. I know characters can't all be likeable - it would be boring if everyone were lovely - but this bunch just seem like a group of half-sketched out ghosts. 

I've pondered for some time why it makes me feel this way and I think it comes down to the style of the writing.  There is a huge amount of background information shoe-horned into the story, to the point where it feels as though Byatt is writing in a 'look how much I know about everything' kind of way.  The story seems a convenient vehicle for her to show off all the research she's done, whether it's relevant or not.  The parts involving the main families are written in what seems like an odd way to me.  It's as if she has done a really quick draft to get down the ideas of what will happen, but then not gone back and edited into something that flows.  For example: 

Philip had no idea where the pony's stall was.  He stood mute.  Fludd cursed him in mediaeval English and strode in through the door through which Dobbin had gone.  The carriage rolled into the yard.  Geraint climbed down and started to see to the horses.  There seemed to be no servants to help him.  (p.104)

There are almost certainly better examples than this but I can't face trawling through the book to find one!  Hopefully you can see what I mean though - it's one isolated sentence after another: bam-bam-bam, and I think this is partly what makes it feel like the characters are all very separate, like they're not existing in the same place.  Dialogue sections are the same - literally "'Blah blah blah' said Philip.  'Blah blah blah' said Olive."  These sections do have the benefit of breaking up the long and winding demonstrations of Byatt's understanding of politics, current affairs of the time and such, but they feel cold and passionless and make the characters unlikeable (to me at least). 

I don't think I've ever had such a strong reaction to a book...I think you can probably gather that I wouldn't recommend it!  Perhaps it's just me (though I know two other people who feel exactly the same way about it) and I've missed the point somehow, but I really think that if Byatt wanted to demonstrate her knowledge then she should have written a non-fiction book, instead of stringing together a plot to loosely drape over the mass of information she wanted to show off.  Can't believe I would ever say this about a book, but: 0/5

* Moab Is My Washpot ~ Stephen Fry
Ahhhhh - Stephen Fry, how I love him!  I could listen to him talk all day, I just adore his way with language.  If the writing in The Children's Book was like wading through mud, this is like flying with the birds!  It chronicles his life up to the age of about twenty - through schools, prison, first love and everything in between.  It's amazingly honest, he really reveals all sorts of personal things you would expect a person would want to keep to themselves and as a result I feel that I know him that bit better now.  I could blather on, but it's easier to just say: if you don't know who he is you probably won't get much from this, but if you like him on TV, you will enjoy this book - read it!  5/5

* The Rome Express ~ Arthur Griffiths
A 'Murder on the Orient Express' type of whodunit (though written much earlier - about 1907), this is quite a short book (I felt I deserved it after The Children's Book!) and very simply written.  It doesn't have the wonderful characterisation and clever plotting of Agatha Christie but is still an enjoyable read.  And I didn't work out whodunit, so that's a mark in its favour!  Find it cheap on Kindle: 3/5

* Inhuman ~ Danielle Q Lee
Another Kindle cheapie, this is a paranormal romance/thriller, refreshingly not another vampire/werewolf but something else altogether (something indefinable in fact!).  The main character, Cassia, is well-defined and - I felt - quite believable.  Her love interest, Keanu (you can't help but visualise Mr Reeves throughout, which is somewhat distracting - perhaps another name would have been better) is a bit of a mystery, though one which is soon explained.  Their adventure is compelling, you want to keep reading to find out what happens to them, though I felt the end was perhaps a little bit rushed and not explained as fully as it could have been (or is it setting up for a sequel?).  Anyhoo: 3/5

This week I've started:

* Picture Perfect ~ Jodi Picoult

* The Golden Acorn ~ Catherine Cooper

* The Library of Gold ~ Gayle Lynds

I'm still reading:

* The Parthenon ~ Mary Beard
* Pillars of the Earth ~ Ken Follett
* Murder on the Flying Scotsman ~ Carola Dunn

This puts me at 8/100 for the 100 Books In A Year challenge. 

Have a great week!  
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Wednesday 26 January 2011

Back to normal

After the panic that was That Essay in previous weeks, today I have finally been able to spend a Wednesday doing just what these days away from the boring regular job are supposed to be for.  Writing.  Specifically, not writing essays! 

It's been surprisingly relaxing as well.  I think that after the stress of a) having a deadline and b) having an incredibly precise question to answer, just sitting and letting words form freely has been a pleasant treat for my brain!  I've been working on Project Crunch - one that I haven't touched since before NaNoWriMo way back in November (it seems like a dim and distant memory now), and, as ever, when I look back at what I'd already done I was pretty pleased with it.  Once again, time has been my most loyal supporter - no matter how rubbish I might feel something is when I'm in the middle of writing it, looking at it a day/week/month later I will almost always discover that it's actually quite good.  I wonder whether that's a normal thing, or whether some people feel that way about their work while they're actually still in the process of writing it? 

In my slightly-obsessed-with-statistics way I have started a 2011 Word Counts graph...yes, I know, I'm a total Excel fangirl (!).  Crunch has gone from 2444 (where I left it last year) to 3196.  That's 752 words today - not the 1000 I was roughly aiming for but still quite good.  They're words that I like, for one thing, and that feel right.  Things have taken a pivotal turn for my heroine and I've been writing about her immediate reaction to this event.  Though it's not something I've ever been through, I think (hope?!) that the way I've written it is believable. 

Ah, one last thing before I go.  The result for the stressy essay, which I did my mind map for, came back today - 86%.  86%!  So far in my OU journey I've only topped that with my final 'Arts Past & Present' assignment (also Classics-based, it's clearly My Thing) and my first 'Start Writing Fiction' assignment.  It just goes to show that putting the time into research and planning definitely pays off when it comes to writing a coherent essay.  Let's hope I remember that for the next one! 
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Sunday 23 January 2011

Booklog #11

Eyes down, look in...here's this week's book report. 

This week I've finished:

* Wish ~ Alexandra Bullen
This is a light and sweet chick (or perhaps teen?) lit story about a shy 15 year old girl grieving for her recently dead twin sister, while also coping with being moved all the way across the USA and all the problems that brings (new school, making friends, boys etc).  An encounter with a seamstress who is more than she seems sets Olivia's life on a new path in a magical way. 

It's a nice book - somewhat predictable (you'll see the ending coming from quite a long way off), but there's nothing wrong with that sometimes.  After finishing the darkness that was In Search of Adam it was a lovely shiny twinkly piece of light!  I read it in a couple of days as it's written in a breezy flowing style that keeps you hanging on for 'just one more chapter'.  4/5

This week I've started:

* Moab is my Washpot ~ Stephen Fry
Fry's first autobiography, chronicling his early childhood up to his early twenties. 

I'm still reading:

* The Parthenon ~ Mary Beard
* Pillars of the Earth ~ Ken Follett
* The Children's Book ~ A.S. Byatt (I've bullied myself into perservering with it each night and have got all the way up to a mighty /53 chapters)
* Murder on the Flying Scotsman ~ Carola Dunn (book club)

This puts me at 5/100 for the 100 Books in a Year challenge.  

Adios for now! 
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Wednesday 19 January 2011

FINISHED!

It's finished!  The stressy essay that caused me the 'shame' of admitting defeat last week is done!  It took a good deal of planning and a return to a technique that I used in school but it's finally done and I'm happy with it.  Just going to go over it one final time tomorrow with fresh eyes and then it'll be off on its way down the wires to my tutor. 

The technique I referred to as having used in school was mind mapping - I did it for all my GCSE and 'A' Level revision, carefully drawing connecting lines in different colours, little diagrams of things and so on...anything at all to make the information more visual.  I find things so much easier to recall in an exam if I can do this.  I've never really used it to plan, it was always as a memory aide, so I wasn't sure how well it would work here, but being at a loss for an alternative I thought I'd give it a try.  Here is the (tidied up) final product:

Copyright: me!  :o)

The question is about why 5th century BCE Athenians placed such emphasis on performance and display (yeah, I know...even I wonder why I'm studying this sometimes).  I went through all the source material and made a ton of notes, just bullet points and page references, then started drawing my map, starting with the cloud in the middle, then the Parthenon bubble at the top and working my way round.  The original was a lot messier as I had to join together things that were not next to each other, but the effect it had on me was amazing.  I started writing the essay and found that all I had to do was pick a place to start (I picked the Parthenon again, for ease) and work my way round, incorporating as many bubbles and sub-bubbles as I could.  And it worked!  The essay almost seemed to write itself!  The hardest part was making sure all my references and bibliography were in An Acceptable Format (it seems to change from course to course, which doesn't help). 

So today's lesson learnt is that it's all about the prep.  Do the legwork and the rest becomes a lot easier!  It took me less time to write the essay than it did to do all the background work, and this makes me wonder whether this might apply to fiction writing too.  If I were to plan out every single detail of a story, perhaps even draw a mind map and/or timeline, would the story be more inclined to write itself?  It's got to be worth a try...  ;o)
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Sunday 16 January 2011

Booklog #10

Wow - the tenth booklog post already, where does the time go?! 

This week I've finished:

* The Remains of the Day ~ Kazuo Ishiguro
I just realised that I forgot to mention that I'd started this...I'm going to blame Christmas and say that I was all out of sync with what was started/finished/in progress (how long after the event is it acceptable to continue blaming the Christmas break for things?!).  Anyway, this is one of those contemporary classics that I've always meant to read but never quite got round to.  In 1956, the butler of a large stately home takes a driving holiday to visit an old colleague and reminisces along the way about various things that occurred during his long career.  It seems quite philosophical - 'what is dignity?' being a question he mulls over often. 

I find that with classics you're generally expected to a) fully understand all their levels and nuances and b) enjoy them without question.  It seems sacrilege to say that you don't enjoy Dickens or Shakespeare or whoever.  But I'm going to be honest and say that I probably didn't fully appreciate all the levels of this story.  Don't get me wrong, it was an enjoyable read - I loved the use of language, the setting and the characters - but the philosophy kind of passed me by.  I probably should have been reflecting seriously on the Nazi sympathiser aspect but instead was merrily enjoying the descriptions of the house and the countryside.  Maybe I need to read it again with a serious head on...  4/5

* In Search of Adam ~ Caroline Smailes
A (fictional) account of how, following her mother's suicide, seven year old Jude is raped by a neighbour and the subsequent spiral of self-harm and abuse that her life goes down, as well as her quest to find out the truth about a terrible secret within her family.  It's desperately sad and very uncomfortable to read, but it's also very well-written with complex characters and a great depiction of the setting.  Smailes writes phonetically to convey Jude's father's Sunderland accent and while this is effective if you read it out loud, I did find that it really slows you down, which I didn't appreciate as I like my reading to flow (these parts felt like wading through treacle).  It's difficult to know how to score this, but I feel that my score should be based on how much I enjoyed the book, rather than its quality, and so I can only really give it 2/5

This puts me at 4/100 so far for the 2011 Reading Challenge

This week I've started:

* Wish ~ Alexandra Bullen
* The Parthenon ~ Mary Beard (non-fiction, I used some of it for my OU essay but it's an interesting read so I'll finish the whole thing)

I'm still reading:
* Pillars of the Earth ~ Ken Follett
* The Children's Book ~ A.S. Byatt (chapter 33/53 - there are about 200 pages left, I want to be finished with it before the end of February as it seems to have been going on forever!)
* Murder on the Flying Scotsman ~ Carola Dunn (book club)

Till next time, happy reading! 
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Wednesday 12 January 2011

Admitting defeat...

I wonder what you thought this post would be about when you saw the title?  What am I giving up on?  Writing?  Of course not.  Reading?  Definitely not!  Studying?  No...though it is related to that. 

My next Classical World assignment is due this Friday, however because I wasn't able to keep up with the study schedule over Christmas, I've only just finished studying the relevant chapters.  This essay is longer and more complex than any previous ones, so it's going to take some serious planning and research - it's not one I can just pick out some relevant quotes from the material and blag my way through it (which I'll admit, I have done before).  So I had to ask for a week's extension in order to be able to give it the time I need to do the question justice. 

You might not agree that asking for an extension equates to anything remotely as dramatic-sounding as 'admitting defeat', but I can honestly say that I have never failed to meet a deadline when it comes to studying.  Right through school and university (the physical one I went to after finishing school, not a distance learning one like this), I always prided myself on my time management and how I never had to give excuses for failing to hand something in on time, like other students often did.  I would have been so ashamed to admit that I wasn't up to speed with where I should be.  I still take pride on delivering things on time, so to have to admit that I can't do that on this occasion is really difficult for me, even though my tutor was very understanding about it. 

Of course, the essential difference is that I'm now studying alongside a full-time job.  I think that I often forget that it won't be as easy as when I was a teenager/20-something and all I had to do was turn up to a few lectures a week, with the rest of my time free to do all the background reading, research and essay writing at my leisure.  So perhaps it's not so much a case of admitting defeat, as accepting reality.  And learning not to beat myself up about it so much.  I've started on the research for this essay today, and by this time next week I hope that it will be almost finished, with just the final touches to complete.  Wish me luck! 
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Sunday 9 January 2011

Booklog #9

Happy New Year!

As this is my first proper post (excluding the extra Book Challenge one that I did last week) of 2011 I'd like to take a moment to wish you health, happiness and prosperity for the coming year.  I hope you had an enjoyable festive season - apart from being struck down with a bit of a cold, I enjoyed my twelve days off work very much.  Received some nice new books as Christmas presents, including the phenomenally heavy Nigella Kitchen...seriously, it weighs a ton...I hope hubby isn't expecting me to have a go at every single recipe in it!  I also got Agatha Christie's Secret Notebooks, which I'm very much looking forward to getting stuck into - it includes two previously unpublished Poirot stories! *hysterical squeee*

Excitingly (for me, at least) I have at last joined the smartphone community that I have envied for so long and am the proud owner of a shiny new HTC Desire.  Of course the first app I downloaded was 'Kindle for Android'!  I didn't think reading on such a comparatively small screen would be enjoyable, but it actually isn't as bad as I expected - very smooth page turns and good clear text.  In a pinch, if I don't happen to have the Kindle with me (though this is rare) it makes a very good alternative. 

Of course it wouldn't be a Booklog post without me confessing that the Kindle 'To Be Read' category has increased (again).  It's not my fault though - they had a 12 Days of Kindle sale where loads of books were either free or £1!  How was I supposed to resist?!  The TBR count now stands at 91, which is a good thing really as it means I'll have a lot of choice when it comes to getting through those 100 books for the challenge...

Speaking of that very challenge I should have a lot more to post in these Booklogs from now on, as I hope to get through at least one or two shorter books within each week, as well as plodding on with the longer things that I'm reading.  Luckily for me, I've always been a fast reader, so it's not like I'll be skim-reading or anything (that would be cheating anyway!) - I assure you that I savour everything I read, be it 10, 100 or 1000 pages long!

Since the last Booklog I've started:
* Murder on the Flying Scotsman ~ Carola Dunn (this is for book club, it's an Agatha Christie style 'cosy' whodunit - hurrah!)

* In Search of Adam ~ Caroline Smailes

Since the last Booklog I've finished:
* Shatter (The Children of Man) ~ Elizabeth C. Mock
If you recall, I was unsure about this when I started it.  It was a free Kindle download and as such, I couldn't help but wonder whether that might be a sign of the level of quality of the writing.  It's a fantasy story and there were a lot of peculiar names and places, and references to the particular theology/magic-use to get to grips with very quickly.  I'm glad I stuck with it though because once the story really got going it was very good.  I'll be honest - I can't remember most of the places or different 'religious' orders that were involved, but the main characters are well-written and very memorable, which is probably more important really.  If you have a Kindle - and it's still free - I would recommend you give it a go, though be prepared...the ending is quite abrupt and clearly a set up for another story.  Not a huge fault, but I was hoping for a bit more resolution than I feel I got.  3.5/5

* Wish List ~ John Locke
One of my Kindle sale downloads (only 49p!), this is a short thriller with an dark edge of comedy to it.  It's difficult to describe how I feel about it as the idea of the story - that the main character types his wildest wishes into a mysterious website and later finds them coming true, but at an unexpected price - is good, but I didn't really enjoy the execution of it.  Some unpleasant stuff happens, which is not usually a problem for me, but for some reason it made me feel quite uncomfortable, as did the ending.  If you like edgy reads and this is free or very cheap then do try it (there are also others in the same series), but otherwise I couldn't say I recommend it.  1/5

* Clover ~ Susan Coolidge
The fourth (and previously unknown to me) book in the 'What Katy Did' series.  I loved the Katy books when I was little and read them over and over.  Something about the way everything was described was just magical, so heart-warming and homely - I very much wanted to live in olde America!  I was a bit worried that the story of Clover (who is the second sister of the family, after Katy herself) wouldn't live up to my nostalgic memories of the other books, but was pleased to find that it is just as lovely.  It's so nice - and very relaxing - to get absorbed in something simple, something that isn't out to shock, thrill or otherwise provoke an extreme reaction in you, just a nice tale of the lives of ordinary people from a different time.  5/5

I'm still reading:
* Pillars of the Earth ~ Ken Follett (Kindle says I'm 45% through it)
* The Children's Book ~ A.S. Byatt (I'm up to chapter 31 of 53...was hoping to get it finished over Christmas but there were too many other more interesting things to be doing!)

Till Wednesday then, when optimistically I'll be back to doing some writing...but realistically I'll be working on the OU assignment that's due next Friday!  ;o)
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Monday 3 January 2011

100 Books In A Year - 2011


I came across this challenge by chance, having seen it mentioned on a blog that I get via the Kindle (I seem to subscribe to so many blogs that they're coming out of my ears!).  What better and more enjoyable challenge could there be than to read 100 books in a year?!

This post is going to be where I upload my progress (via Comments I guess, haven't quite decided yet).  Feel free to follow along, or ignore as you please...it's more for my own records really.  :o)
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