Booklog #4

Firstly, apologies for being a day late - November is Birthday Month in our family and it seems like barely a weekend can go by without meals out to celebrate various relations turning a year older.  It was too late to engage my brain last night when we got home (and is almost too late now, but luckily I drafted this on paper during my lunch break). 

This week I've sampled two 'Quick Reads' - novellas by well-known authors, intended (I presume) to tempt you to read their full-length novels.  I've never been a massive fan of short stories as I prefer to get really immersed in a long book, but these were less than a pound to download to the Kindle so I couldn't resist...  Oddly, they both have similar names - The Perfect Holiday (Cathy Kelly) and The Perfect Murder (Peter James).  But that's where the similarity ends! 

I haven't read any Cathy Kelly before but I have to say that I quite enjoyed The Perfect Holiday.  I don't usually go for what I would call 'normal life' stories, i.e. stories that aren't predominantly comedy, fantasy, history, thriller or whatever.  I don't know why but they've just never appealed - perhaps because part of me thinks that they wouldn't be different enough to normal life to be interesting.  However, I liked the way that the stories of the various characters staying at the same hotel are interwoven and also how the events that unfold lead to their lives changing in different ways.  Although it touches on serious subjects (alcoholism, bereavement) it's not overly gritty and serious and still feels quite warm and touching.  Without wishing to sound condescending, it just has a nice feel to it and I think I'll most likely go on to try some of Cathy Kelly's novels.  4/5

The Perfect Murder, on the other hand, has no such warmth and humanity - quite the opposite!  The main characters are a middle-aged married couple who are so fed up of one other that they each plot to murder the other.  I won't throw you any spoilers of course, but will just say that it's a clever plot with a good ending.  I've read Peter James' Looking Good Dead which is also very good - if you're looking for a new thriller writer to try, you could do worse than him.  4/5

And so to wrap up...

This week I finished:

The Redbreast ~ Jo Nesbo
I think you've probably gathered from my previous posts that I didn't enjoy this much.  Everything does get resolved and explained in the end, but to be honest I was so annoyed with it that I read it as quickly as possible and someone else from my book club had to explain it to me!  2/5

Angels ~ Marian Keyes
Now that I've finished it, I think this has just about the right balance of comedy and seriousness.  Things are revealed well into the second half of the story that explain a lot of issues lightly touched on in the first half and I found myself less and less able to put it down the further in I got. It starts out seemingly quite frothy and light but becomes a very compelling read.  4/5

This week I started:
Fallen ~ Lauren Kate (seems quite Twilight-esque so far, but with fallen angels instead of vampires)

I'm still reading:
Pillars of the Earth ~ Ken Follett
The Children's Book ~ A.S. Byatt (up to chapter 21)

That's all for now - happy reading!  :o)
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Booklog #3

I hope you've had a good week...the weather here has really gone downhill, with gale force winds, driving rain and all the fun that is winter in Wales.  What better excuse could there be to stay in of an evening and curl up with a book?  Not that I need an excuse of course..! 

This week I have a sneaky surprise 'started it and finished it' entry for you in the form of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon.  It's a former Whitbread Book of the Year and is well-known for its autistic teenage narrator.  I'd always thought that I wouldn't mind reading it but never got round to buying it, or knew anyone who had it that I could borrow it from, but on Friday a chance discovery brought the two of us together! 

For my day job I work for our local police force - as a civilian, not as an officer - and my department is within one of our main divisional HQs.  While lunching with a friend on Friday she asked if I'd seen the library yet.  Library?  What library?  It turns out we have a sort of 'trust library', where people donate books and they're stored in the atrium (where some of the lunch seating is) for anybody to take, read and return (that's the trust part!).  And fair dos - there are three units with five shelves each and they're not only full but also neatly arranged into genres...someone has been busy!  We browsed the shelves and my friend recommended Curious Incident to me and I recommended The Ice Cream Girls (Dorothy Koomson) to her.  I started it on Friday evening and was hooked - had I not had to go out to a university tutorial on Saturday I probably would have finished it that morning!  As it was, I finished on Saturday night - possibly a new record, as although I do read fast I'm not usually that fast.

I won't drop any spoilers here as I really do recommend it to everyone, but I will say that it is funny and sad and moving and educational (both about autism and about maths!) all at the same time.  It's very cleverly written, in such a way that you recognise various things happening slightly before Christopher, the narrator, does.  I felt that this was a good thing as it meant they were still a surprise to you, but that you also then got to witness his realisation and reaction separately to your own, so that becomes part of the story too.  He's a very interesting character and you really do want everything to work out for him.  Though of course I won't say here whether it does or not...  ;o)

I give Curious Incident... 5/5.  Everyone should read it! 

And now for this week's 'I'm still reading' list:

The Redbreast ~ Jo Nesbo
The Children's Book ~ A.S. Byatt (up to chapter 20 now, following a massive push!)
Angels ~ Marian Keyes
Pillars of the Earth ~ Ken Follett (I decided to start reading it rather than watch it on TV first)

That's all for now - thanks for reading, have a great week! 
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Booklog #2

Greetings!  So another Sunday evening is upon us and as usual I have that 'pre-Monday morning meh' feeling.  I often daydream about how liberating it would be just to jack in the day job and write full-time, but then I remember that I have bills to pay!  Still, at least I'm taking baby steps towards that day...

NaNoWriMo (see my previous post) has somewhat taken over my free time this week so there hasn't been much reading going on.  However I couldn't resist pushing on and finishing The Book of Secrets by Tom Harper.  I give it 4/5 and would definitely recommend it if you enjoy the 'race for the historical artefact' type of story.  I wouldn't say it brought anything particularly new to the genre - you could pretty much guess how things were going to end - but it was very well-paced and the interweaving of the historical story of Johann Gutenberg and his invention of the printed book with the present day story of Nick and Emily was done well.  They alternate chapters for most of the book and each one ends leaving you wanting more from that side of the story, but then as you start the next you remember the cliff-hanger that the other characters were left in and become absorbed in their story again.  All in all a very enjoyable read. 

Today I started reading Mythology for Dummies, as a supplement for my Open University course.  I'm a big fan of the Dummies series and I'll admit that I have quite a collection, from Scrapbooking to High Blood Pressure...whether that makes me a Dummy I don't know?!  I really like the format they follow, breaking a big subject down into sections and then into smaller sections, using lists and bullet points and so on.  They appeal to my obsessive sense of order and I really feel that you could learn about anything from them. 

Other than that, I'm still reading:

Angels ~ Marian Keyes
The Redbreast ~ Jo Nesbo
The Children's Book ~ A. S. Byatt (halfway through chapter 15 - I feel that the only way to bully myself into making progress with it is to hold myself accountable to you!)

Till next time - happy reading!  
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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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