nocto

It looks like I'm at a one all draw with Maggie O'Farrell. I enjoyed The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox after a slow start, but didn't get on at all well with My Lover's Lover. So it's taken me a while to pick up a third of her books.

This book is written in what I always think of as "jigsaw piece" style. Passages from the lives of the characters appear in what seems to be no particular order, time goes back and forth, places change, minor characters appear and it sometimes takes a while to figure out who they are. On the whole this is a storytelling device I enjoy and it's well used here. Underneath it's basically a love story but time and place are evoked so well that it doesn't get too cheesey. The contemporary story of two sisters is muddled up with bits of their childhood and with bits of the life story of male leading character too.

I liked the book despite finding the writing a bit over the top at times, and I liked that the story didn't explain everything in the end but didn't leave you feeling cheated by that either.

Purchased on 20th February 2010.

In the beginning I thought this book was fabulous, fast moving, intriguing and full of interesting characters. The first chapter follows a hot air ballooning accident as if in slow motion and I loved the set up here. But then the rest of the book kept going downhill. Nothing lived up to the first chapter. In many ways the book has the same trappings as a thriller - a mad character stalking a sane character while everyone thinks the sane character is going insane - and maybe this thrillerness led me astray from a decent piece of literary fiction.

I certainly didn't hate it but I expect to finish McEwan's books feeling impressed all round rather than with a vague sense that the story was interesting but just okay and feeling like I missed the point.

Borrowed.

I loved the book of The Time Traveller's Wife but found it such a unique quirky kind of a thing that I wasn't sure it's success could be repeated. It was completely unbelievable whilst being completely true to itself and exceedingly captivating at the same time.

I was really pleased to find that this book manages to pull off the same kind of trick without in any way emulating the first book. It is basically a ghost story - a genre that generally just annoys me by breaking what I consider to be the rules - but it's much more than your average haunting in Highgate cemetery. The ghostly elements don't seem out of place and the human characteristics are spot on.

Really pleased this turned out to be fabulous!

Borrowed.

I dropped into the library on Friday to return some overdue books and ended up paying off all Darren's library fines by mistake. I wasn't going to borrow any books because the fine was making buying books look cheap but I spotted this book with a Nick Drake quote for a title and couldn't resist.

On Sunday I had most of the day to myself and picked the book up to read and finished it a few hours later. I can't remember the last time I did that.

The book doesn't have a great deal to do with the Nick Drake song except for the obvious chiming of clocks as you go through the book. It's set in 1930s London with the financial crisis playing out in the background. Loads of details evoke the period nicely. The plot is a bit thin, which wouldn't be a problem if it wasn't subtitled as "a thriller" - it really doesn't deliver on that. There are criminals chased here but it's not big on action or suspense.

If I'd read the book at a slower pace I think I'd have liked it less - and reading books slowly seems to be what I do these days - but a few hours on a Sunday going round the London of the thirties with a door-to-door carpet cleaner salesman and the characters he encounters worked out to be very enjoyable.

Borrowed.

The second book in what seems to be a wildly popular trilogy. Like the first it took a while to get going, then raced off and tripped over itself finding ever stranger twists in the story. That it all more or less makes sense in the end and doesn't pull a huge deus ex machina is to it's credit. The central characters seemed consistent with the first book and the plot seems to be playing out as a well planned trilogy. Not great literature but I've read things a lot less well imagined and am hoping the third book of the trilogy doesn't end in disappointment.

Purchased on 25th December 2009.

One of Darren's graphic novels, picked up to read while I was ill - there's something about lying on the sofa barely able to move that makes comics appealing. Though describing modern graphic novels as comics will probably get me into trouble!

This as a slice of the life of a young Israeli man looking for his father who may have been the victim of a bus station bombing. Definitely not very amusing but it's a good story, a bit surreal in places but much of that could also be because the setting is so foreign to me.

Borrowed.

I'm don't remember that I thought the last couple of Warshawski books were that good but a quick look back through my website shows that I raved about them as much as ever. Much the same here. VI is possibly starting to age a bit more gracefully, not that that's what I want her to do particularly, I'd probably be disappointed if she managed to get through a book without hospitalisation. She didn't get there by thinking she was immortal this time - I think that counts as "aging" in her world.

This is a good plot, it took me a while to get my head in the right place to read it though. I didn't like the device used at the beginning of the book: a bit of exciting action followed by "some time earlier". This method of getting an interesting bit of action in the readers face before going back to the build up seems to be overused lately - maybe it's on television I've seen it more than in books though. Especially since the book didn't seem to gain anything from the device. If I know something before the characters do I want to be able to use my knowledge to see things in their situations that they don't. There didn't seem to be much of that here.

All in all I enjoyed the book though, I liked the story going back to the sixties and featuring Martin Luther King in it's periphery, I liked the involvement of more of VI's family history. I think Sara Paretsky would have to start writing complete rubbish for me to stop reading her books the minute I get hold of the hardback but I'm glad to say she's still writing the good stuff.

Purchased on 20th February 2010.

Finishing this it's difficult to see how I managed to leave it lying around the house for a year or so before picking it up to read. Though I did leave it lying around numerous times during the reading too - putting it down while other books took my fancy. And indeed I've set down far more books halfway through than I've finished in the last couple of years so maybe it's not so odd.

It is a really good read, and one that I think I'd enjoy as much on a second reading - if I didn't have far too many other demands on my reading time to even contemplate it.

The story is mostly narrated by Roseanne Clear, a hundred year old resident in an Irish mental hospital, as she writes down her history in secret. Retelling her childhood and young womanhood in the years between the first and second world wars. There are also passages from her doctor who is wondering how she will cope with the old hospital closing and moving to a new facility. Steadily you find out why Roseanne ended up in the mental hospital - it's pretty clear from the outset that she's not particularly mad but has been classified as such for convenience at some point.

To be honest I think the book was better for my reading it slowly, it feels right to have done so. To have zoomed through it quickly might have condensed the years of the story too far. It feels like there was much more story here than the number of pages would have you believe.

Purchased on 6th February 2009.

Picked this up to read on holiday and wasn't quite sure if it was going to be my cup of tea. It seemed to feature a lot of African chimpanzee watching and this is what I wasn't at all sure about.

Couldn't have been more wrong. Strong female lead - a chimpanzee watcher, yes, but also good scientist in a facility who are not quite straight with their research data. And her relationship with a slightly mad mathematician making up more of the storyline than I thought at the outset.

Good stuff and definitely an author to read more of.

Purchased on 6th February 2010.

I didn't remember that after reading If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things I'd written.... 'Jon McGregor's next book will very probably be on my "buy instantly in hardback the second it comes out" list.' ....but I did remember enjoying it and I bought this as soon as I saw it in the bookshop. It's not a hardback but some kind of bendy fabric covered not quite a paperback. This edition came out a week before I bought it, I'm not sure if there was a proper hardback released before it. Anyway, I think I more or less did as I said I would do.

While this book didn't engage me as ferociously as the previous book I still enjoyed it. The bitty narrative was great and just the kind of thing I was expecting although I did find it a bit impenetrable in places. I found myself flipping back from time to time to reread a previous passage now I'd deciphered the relationship of the characters to each other and to the story. The story centres on the death of a more or less housebound alcoholic and you piece together his life and that of his family and friends, most of whom are heroin users, as you hear different fragments of the story from different people.

It doesn't sound like it's going to be hugely interesting and I wonder if I'd have picked the book up if I hadn't previously liked the author's work. The multiple voices and jigsaw type storytelling works really well though. And I'll definitely stick with my view from the last book and will buy McGregor's next book more or less as soon as it's out in whatever passes for hardback these days too.

Purchased on 6th February 2010.