BOOKS 2011: March
Some excellent fiction this month! I'm so tired I can't be bothered cleaning up or even spellchecking this post. Suck it up, lewsers!
1. Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in Space - Mary Roach
(312 pages)
Much as I've enjoyed Roach's previous books, I approached this one just a touch warily because I have never been interested in, well, being an astronaut. Being as it is about a subject only a very small handful of people will ever experience (unlike her previous), I thought my interest in this book might be lacking. Pleasingly enough I was wrong. Though I did not like this one as much as Stiff and Six Feet Over, I did in fact like it more than Bonk, and in fact rather enjoyed it a lot in itself, without comparing. I now appreciate that "small handful" I previously alluded to more than I ever did before, for the sheer amount of shit that they have to deal with/dealt with; from having their diets regulated by vets, to being toilet trained so they don't miss in space. This is not a book for the weak-stomached - there's an awful lot of poo - but for those not so easy to quease I'll happily recommend this. A book about doing what an ordinary human being does on an ordinary day in that most extraordinary of environments, any fears I had about this not being prosaic enough were unfounded. A cracking read in Roach's indomitable style, proper good stuff!
2. Life - Keith Richards
(608 pages)
And now for something completely different. I received this for Christmas. I'm not a Rolling Stones fan as such, but I expected this to be a good read. After all, it is the biography of Keith Richards and if there is any man on earth who can call his biography Life then he is it. I enjoyed this. No, it wasn't glimmering with insight on human nature or anything like that, but it was a fun and candid if rather hefty read (I read it on my week off work so I didn't have to lug it around so much.) It will make you appreciate the fact that Keith Richards is even alive at all, especially in sight of how many deaths there are in this book: an awful lot of his colleagues and friends died young, which puts it into perspective a bit. There were bits I found myself skimming this due to lack of interest, but I mostly enjoyed it. I particularly liked the last chapter, which sees Richards satisfied and domesticated: he talks about his pets, his library, cooking and even gives us a recipe for bangers & mash. Not to sit too firmly on his laurels, this chapter also deals with his accident in Fiji that nearly brought an end to his previously indestructable self, and the deaths of his parents. In spite of this it's a lovely end to a perfectly likable book, and I suspect a better book if you are a fan.
3. The Hunger Games: Catching Fire - Suzanne Collins
(480 pages)
I read The Hunger Games last autumn and - in apparent contradiction to what everyone else experienced with that book - had no particular urge to run out and buy the next two. I didn't not enjoy it, and while I read it it really grabbed me and I raced through, but when I finished had no violent need to know what happened next. As it is it's taken me this long to notice the second at the library and pluck it up. Once again, I raced through this. There never seems to be a good stopping point, it's always too exciting to put down. Yet, when I finally finished it I once again felt no urge to grab the next. I don't know what it is. They're fun books, and thrilling, but ultimately I'm not in love. I don't care for the characters and I feel Collins has picked a subject that she can't do justice. It would take a much better author to layer this world and do with it what it begs, and Collins is not that author. I find her worldbuilding too black-and-white, the divisions too clearly marked, to really ever believe in this world. Undoubtedly I'll pick up the final book one day, but I know that, exciting as it will be, I'll be left feeling like I've missed something everyone else has understood. And that's a shame.
4. The Running Sky: A Birdwatching Life - Tim Dee
(272 pages)
It is always wonderful to find a book written by someone completely in love with his subject. This is what happened here. I'll admit I picked up The Running Sky because of what I found to be its evocative title, and the cover depicting a mass of starlings coming in to roost - not a good reason to choose a book -, but pleasingly in this case the old adage about books and covers (undoubtedly coined by someone using vanity press) did not prove itself. What a beautiful book! No doubt some people will be disappointed by the lack of exoticism and adventure - he pops to Africa at one point, but that's almost it -, but I found the focus on British birds very involving. Not just the unusual vagrant species either; some of Dee's best bits involve birds as ordinary as starlings and swifts and ravens and redstarts, and stooping peregrines, and those inbetweeny crooked birds, the woodcock and the nightjar. I found myself captivated and thrilled by this ordinary, extraordinary encounters, and felt myself falling in love with watching birds. Even the naval-gazing was quite charming and never self-indulgent to me. An undercurrent theme of this book is that of death, which pervades every chapter: a rufous-cheeked nightjar that dies in his hands after a clip by the car, blown-out eggs and an aviary of stuffed birds, sickly falcons and starved swallows, a broken-necked splinter-beaked gannet that misjudged a dive. Even non-avian creatures are taken along by this morbid tide, when he describes a companion killing fish he has drawn up by his net, and corvids lipping the dew from a dead rabbit's eye. Most movingly is his telling of a memory when, as a child looking for peregrines over the gorge, he saw a man fling himself from the Clifton suspension bridge. Unlike the falcons he was looking for, the man did not fly, and it makes for one of the most wrenching and powerful chapters of the book. A definite recommendation for those who, like me, love a poetic exploration of the seemingly mundane, who want to fall in love with birds again.
5. The Jewel in the Crown - Paul Scott
(528 pages)
I recently watched Faulks on Fiction, a four-part BBC programme presented by Sebastian Faulks discussing four archetypal characters present in British literature. I came out of the series with a short list and brandishing my debit card at Amazon Marketplace, as is typical of me when you wave lovely books in my face. The Raj Quartet appeared in the Villains episode of the series: it was Ronald Merrick that attracted me to this book, which otherwise I would never have picked up, thinking of it as a "not me" sort of a thing. As it was, Merrick does not appear all that much in this book, so it is a good job I enjoyed it for itself. The premise itself was offputting - a young English woman is raped by Indian men in the final days of British colonisation -, because it is too easy to get that story so very wrong, especially when the author is male, white and British. But my fears were swiftly allayed as I was engrossed. The characters are wonderfully drawn, each complex and faulty and so very real feeling. The context of the story - that of India shaking off and breaking free of its small island oppressors - is wonderfully portrayed, with real depth and compassion. Scott never resorts to the easy black-and-white views of racism and classism lesser authors fall back on, always keeping characters and their attitudes complex, explaining but never forgiving these prejudices. Some might find the sheer number of narrators and time-shifts confusing, and I myself found it a little confusing (I'm appallingly awful at remembering who characters are; the names of people in Russian literature is the bane of my book-reading existence), but I felt it helped the novel, in particular in regards to the rape storyline, because the majority of the narrators and viewpoints are women. The victim herself is given a large chunk of the book, and at no point does it feel (to me, at least) that her ordeal is glossed over, or that she is in any way weak. No man jumps to her rescue and saves the day and the little woman - the wrong men are arrested and put into prison for the crime. She is strong, but is also allowed to feel scared and lash out at the wrong people after the fact. This isn't a book I'm going to fall in love with, it's too outside my reading preferences for that and I think I'm failing to appreciate a lot of aspects because of my ignorance of the subject, but it's still excellent. It has taken a subject - several subjects - that is too easy to do badly, and absolutely nailed it. I'll certainly be reading the rest of the series.
6. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie - Muriel Spark
(144 pages)
The second book on my Faulks on Fiction list, I was pleased to read a nice short book for a change (thereby beefing up my Books of 2011 list with nary an effort!) This is one of those books I think I shall have to revisit later, I feel I've missed so much. My first impressions are that it is very wry, the writing sharp and clean, never engorged. Jean Brodie is a fascinating, outsized sort of character who leaps off the page, somehow both ridiculous and frightening in her efforts to become something of a divine influence on her group of girls. But I feel I've missed so much. Perhaps I'm not intelligent enough for books like this, books where most of the story is between the lines, written in special ink for people with analytical sort of brains, which mine is certainly not. I do know I enjoyed it though, and should like to read it again as it feels the sort of book that would reveal more of itself to you each time you do read it. Fortunately it is lightweight enough that this is doable.
7. The Lord God Made Them All - James Herriot
(347 pages)
A return to Herriot after a short break, and just one more to go now. I like this one and found the couple of stories about his travels outside of England (Russia and Turkey) really fun, especially as it lent him further excuse to dish out the foodporn. There was a brief moment (or two) or discomfort, when the book saw fit to show its age in a fit of jovial racism. It was brief, but cast an unfortunate shadow on the rest of what is supposed to be a comfort book for me. Hum :(
8. Discarded Science: Ideas That Seemed Good at the Time - John Grant
(320 pages)
Though not my least-liked book, this is the closest I have come to not reading a book of the year so far. In fact I'm almost ashamed to add it to the list because "skimming" doesn't even begin to describe the way I approached the first chapter, which took up a good fifth of the book. Apparently I'm just really not into geology. After the tedious and boring first chapter it did improve and I found my interest piqued at several points, but my initial impression forever tainted the rest and I finished it with some relief. It was just so dry. I approach pop science books wanting to be thrilled and imbued with that sense of wonder nothing but that subject can produce. This book just didn't do that. I don't know whether that was due to the lack of detail such a book has naturally to bear, the listing of dates and brief facts, or because it's ultimately about crap and disproved science that only occasionally leads to something useful, and often leads to untold misery. It's a strange thought that a turn to pop science for something uplifting, but it's absolutely the case, and that I didn't feel happy or filled with wonder by this book is a big black mark against it. The flimsy, sudden ending did not improve matters. There are better books on the subjects this one approaches, with finer detail and more interest, so I can't recommend it.
9. Never Let Me Go - Kazuo Ishiguro
(304 pages)
I got spoiled for the "twist" of this book by some mouthy arse on a message board, much to my annoyance. I suspect I'd have worked it out anyway: it's fairly transparent and you're outright told about a third of the way in what it is the school and its students are designed for, but I'm still cross. In spite of this, I'm glad to say it did not detract from my enjoyment of this wonderful book. A gorgeous gem, this book gazes into what it means to be human, and humanity's primitive instinct for companionship and loyalty and love, even when missing something as basic as what these children are missing. This book is by turns sad and sinister, but never heavyhanded with its message. It could easily have been bogged down in politics but never does, instead choosing to focus on those things that define our humaness. The science of the plot never comes into it, and I for one am glad because without it the book seems more real and likely, and I doubt any introduction of the actual biology of the thing would have convinced me. It is wiser that it is left out entirely. The best fiction I've read this year so far, I heartily recommend this.
10. Notes From Walnut Tree Farm - Roger Deakin
(224 pages)
I fancied a quick foray into nature writing and this was a good book for it, its diary format making a brief and pleasant read, nothing I found truly special but easy and something to plump up the list. I noticed the odd fragment that wound up eventually in Wildwood, but never so much it was annoying, just a faint sense of deja vu. Deakin frequently bemoans people's loss of connection to nature, and this could easily become irritating - we're not all writers; some of us have full time jobs necessarily based in cities and no money -, but always manages to shirk it, just. He does have a certain amount of pomposity but never overbearingly, never drawing attention from the thrust of his point which is a wonder in the British environment that surrounds us, but goes so largely overlooked by this island's inhabitants. A nice, light, whimsical read.
11. Notes on a Scandal - Zoë Heller
(256 pages)
More wonderful fiction! A real page-turner, I really struggled to put this down and spent a few sullen work hours sulking until my break wherein I could settle down with it again. I'm not sure why it is so good. It could be so easy for this novel, written by a journalist, to descend into tawdry tabloid rubbish, but it never does, becoming in fact a really clever, funny, sinister little story that in its final page will reduce your skin to gooseflesh. Sheba is never allowed to get away with what she's done; she's wrong, she knows she's wrong, she even pulls the classic "you'll get in trouble too" line, but she is by no means the only villain in this piece. Everyone gets it, in their scheming, their pomposity, their mealy-mouthed petty-minded managerialism, their hypocrisy and snobbery. Most memorable of course is the narrator, Barbara, whose manipulation of Sheba left me fascinated and gasping. I particularly liked the theme of loneliness in this novel. We've all read novels about the sorrow of poor lost souls who do not fit into society, but this book's depiction of loneliness is the crux of its creepiness. The loneliness in this novel is a damaging, warping thing, and Barbara is twisted by it. When Barbara, in her role as narrator, writes "People like Sheba think that they know what it's like to be lonely... They don't know what it is to construct an entire weekend around a visit to the laundrette... They don't know what it is to be so chronically untouched that the accidental brush of a bus conductor's hand on your shoulder sends a jolt of longing straight to your groin. I have sat on park benches and trains and schoolroom chairs, feeling the great store of unused, objectless love sitting in my belly like a stone until I was sure I would cry out and fall, flailing, to the ground. About all of this, Sheba and her like have no clue" you actually gasp, it is so glorious and true and awful. You pity these characters, but they are terrible people, and wonderfully real for it. Fantastic stuff.
12. Every Living Thing - James Herriot
(370 pages)
The final book. I feel bad admitting I'm a little relieved at reaching the end of them, and for March too, but they seemed such an indomitable part of my bookshelf that it was almost a little threatening. I did enjoy this one, as it had my favourite story I remember as a child (Olly and Ginny, the feral cats), and the most satisfying ending. It feels like a true ending to what was not really a "series" as such, more a sleection of books of the same theme. It was a pleasure re-visiting Herriot, but next time I shall do it in a greater span of time.
13. Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder - Richard Dawkins
(352 pages)
This is not one of my favourite books of his. It's a shame, because the premise is exactly what I love: that scientific knowledge does not detract from its wonder, but only enhances it. It is by no means a bad book, but it did not grab me in the way others of Dawkins' books have done. Some parts were extremely interesting: I particularly loved the idea of brains creating a "virtual reality" in which we exist, which is what hallucinations and illusions owe their existence to. Dawkins feels that science needs more poets; specifically, good poets, people who can illuminate their subject. He also warns against "bad" poetry in science, the way that it can turn heads of even experts in the subject in spite of it being misleading or inaccurate, just from its mesmerising properties. I appreciated these themes and agreed with them, but in spite of this the book never really excited me. Whether that is due to some of the subjects focused on which I am just not interested in, or because I've been feeling somewhat fatigued and should probably have put such an invested book off until more alert, I don't know. I feel I should read it again before I can offer a real opinion, but that won't be any time soon. A weak conclusion? Fine. Ever wondered why pigeons bob their heads as they walk? Then read this book.
Total books so far: 35
Total pages so far: 10,552
1. Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in Space - Mary Roach
(312 pages)
Much as I've enjoyed Roach's previous books, I approached this one just a touch warily because I have never been interested in, well, being an astronaut. Being as it is about a subject only a very small handful of people will ever experience (unlike her previous), I thought my interest in this book might be lacking. Pleasingly enough I was wrong. Though I did not like this one as much as Stiff and Six Feet Over, I did in fact like it more than Bonk, and in fact rather enjoyed it a lot in itself, without comparing. I now appreciate that "small handful" I previously alluded to more than I ever did before, for the sheer amount of shit that they have to deal with/dealt with; from having their diets regulated by vets, to being toilet trained so they don't miss in space. This is not a book for the weak-stomached - there's an awful lot of poo - but for those not so easy to quease I'll happily recommend this. A book about doing what an ordinary human being does on an ordinary day in that most extraordinary of environments, any fears I had about this not being prosaic enough were unfounded. A cracking read in Roach's indomitable style, proper good stuff!
2. Life - Keith Richards
(608 pages)
And now for something completely different. I received this for Christmas. I'm not a Rolling Stones fan as such, but I expected this to be a good read. After all, it is the biography of Keith Richards and if there is any man on earth who can call his biography Life then he is it. I enjoyed this. No, it wasn't glimmering with insight on human nature or anything like that, but it was a fun and candid if rather hefty read (I read it on my week off work so I didn't have to lug it around so much.) It will make you appreciate the fact that Keith Richards is even alive at all, especially in sight of how many deaths there are in this book: an awful lot of his colleagues and friends died young, which puts it into perspective a bit. There were bits I found myself skimming this due to lack of interest, but I mostly enjoyed it. I particularly liked the last chapter, which sees Richards satisfied and domesticated: he talks about his pets, his library, cooking and even gives us a recipe for bangers & mash. Not to sit too firmly on his laurels, this chapter also deals with his accident in Fiji that nearly brought an end to his previously indestructable self, and the deaths of his parents. In spite of this it's a lovely end to a perfectly likable book, and I suspect a better book if you are a fan.
3. The Hunger Games: Catching Fire - Suzanne Collins
(480 pages)
I read The Hunger Games last autumn and - in apparent contradiction to what everyone else experienced with that book - had no particular urge to run out and buy the next two. I didn't not enjoy it, and while I read it it really grabbed me and I raced through, but when I finished had no violent need to know what happened next. As it is it's taken me this long to notice the second at the library and pluck it up. Once again, I raced through this. There never seems to be a good stopping point, it's always too exciting to put down. Yet, when I finally finished it I once again felt no urge to grab the next. I don't know what it is. They're fun books, and thrilling, but ultimately I'm not in love. I don't care for the characters and I feel Collins has picked a subject that she can't do justice. It would take a much better author to layer this world and do with it what it begs, and Collins is not that author. I find her worldbuilding too black-and-white, the divisions too clearly marked, to really ever believe in this world. Undoubtedly I'll pick up the final book one day, but I know that, exciting as it will be, I'll be left feeling like I've missed something everyone else has understood. And that's a shame.
4. The Running Sky: A Birdwatching Life - Tim Dee
(272 pages)
It is always wonderful to find a book written by someone completely in love with his subject. This is what happened here. I'll admit I picked up The Running Sky because of what I found to be its evocative title, and the cover depicting a mass of starlings coming in to roost - not a good reason to choose a book -, but pleasingly in this case the old adage about books and covers (undoubtedly coined by someone using vanity press) did not prove itself. What a beautiful book! No doubt some people will be disappointed by the lack of exoticism and adventure - he pops to Africa at one point, but that's almost it -, but I found the focus on British birds very involving. Not just the unusual vagrant species either; some of Dee's best bits involve birds as ordinary as starlings and swifts and ravens and redstarts, and stooping peregrines, and those inbetweeny crooked birds, the woodcock and the nightjar. I found myself captivated and thrilled by this ordinary, extraordinary encounters, and felt myself falling in love with watching birds. Even the naval-gazing was quite charming and never self-indulgent to me. An undercurrent theme of this book is that of death, which pervades every chapter: a rufous-cheeked nightjar that dies in his hands after a clip by the car, blown-out eggs and an aviary of stuffed birds, sickly falcons and starved swallows, a broken-necked splinter-beaked gannet that misjudged a dive. Even non-avian creatures are taken along by this morbid tide, when he describes a companion killing fish he has drawn up by his net, and corvids lipping the dew from a dead rabbit's eye. Most movingly is his telling of a memory when, as a child looking for peregrines over the gorge, he saw a man fling himself from the Clifton suspension bridge. Unlike the falcons he was looking for, the man did not fly, and it makes for one of the most wrenching and powerful chapters of the book. A definite recommendation for those who, like me, love a poetic exploration of the seemingly mundane, who want to fall in love with birds again.
5. The Jewel in the Crown - Paul Scott
(528 pages)
I recently watched Faulks on Fiction, a four-part BBC programme presented by Sebastian Faulks discussing four archetypal characters present in British literature. I came out of the series with a short list and brandishing my debit card at Amazon Marketplace, as is typical of me when you wave lovely books in my face. The Raj Quartet appeared in the Villains episode of the series: it was Ronald Merrick that attracted me to this book, which otherwise I would never have picked up, thinking of it as a "not me" sort of a thing. As it was, Merrick does not appear all that much in this book, so it is a good job I enjoyed it for itself. The premise itself was offputting - a young English woman is raped by Indian men in the final days of British colonisation -, because it is too easy to get that story so very wrong, especially when the author is male, white and British. But my fears were swiftly allayed as I was engrossed. The characters are wonderfully drawn, each complex and faulty and so very real feeling. The context of the story - that of India shaking off and breaking free of its small island oppressors - is wonderfully portrayed, with real depth and compassion. Scott never resorts to the easy black-and-white views of racism and classism lesser authors fall back on, always keeping characters and their attitudes complex, explaining but never forgiving these prejudices. Some might find the sheer number of narrators and time-shifts confusing, and I myself found it a little confusing (I'm appallingly awful at remembering who characters are; the names of people in Russian literature is the bane of my book-reading existence), but I felt it helped the novel, in particular in regards to the rape storyline, because the majority of the narrators and viewpoints are women. The victim herself is given a large chunk of the book, and at no point does it feel (to me, at least) that her ordeal is glossed over, or that she is in any way weak. No man jumps to her rescue and saves the day and the little woman - the wrong men are arrested and put into prison for the crime. She is strong, but is also allowed to feel scared and lash out at the wrong people after the fact. This isn't a book I'm going to fall in love with, it's too outside my reading preferences for that and I think I'm failing to appreciate a lot of aspects because of my ignorance of the subject, but it's still excellent. It has taken a subject - several subjects - that is too easy to do badly, and absolutely nailed it. I'll certainly be reading the rest of the series.
6. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie - Muriel Spark
(144 pages)
The second book on my Faulks on Fiction list, I was pleased to read a nice short book for a change (thereby beefing up my Books of 2011 list with nary an effort!) This is one of those books I think I shall have to revisit later, I feel I've missed so much. My first impressions are that it is very wry, the writing sharp and clean, never engorged. Jean Brodie is a fascinating, outsized sort of character who leaps off the page, somehow both ridiculous and frightening in her efforts to become something of a divine influence on her group of girls. But I feel I've missed so much. Perhaps I'm not intelligent enough for books like this, books where most of the story is between the lines, written in special ink for people with analytical sort of brains, which mine is certainly not. I do know I enjoyed it though, and should like to read it again as it feels the sort of book that would reveal more of itself to you each time you do read it. Fortunately it is lightweight enough that this is doable.
7. The Lord God Made Them All - James Herriot
(347 pages)
A return to Herriot after a short break, and just one more to go now. I like this one and found the couple of stories about his travels outside of England (Russia and Turkey) really fun, especially as it lent him further excuse to dish out the foodporn. There was a brief moment (or two) or discomfort, when the book saw fit to show its age in a fit of jovial racism. It was brief, but cast an unfortunate shadow on the rest of what is supposed to be a comfort book for me. Hum :(
8. Discarded Science: Ideas That Seemed Good at the Time - John Grant
(320 pages)
Though not my least-liked book, this is the closest I have come to not reading a book of the year so far. In fact I'm almost ashamed to add it to the list because "skimming" doesn't even begin to describe the way I approached the first chapter, which took up a good fifth of the book. Apparently I'm just really not into geology. After the tedious and boring first chapter it did improve and I found my interest piqued at several points, but my initial impression forever tainted the rest and I finished it with some relief. It was just so dry. I approach pop science books wanting to be thrilled and imbued with that sense of wonder nothing but that subject can produce. This book just didn't do that. I don't know whether that was due to the lack of detail such a book has naturally to bear, the listing of dates and brief facts, or because it's ultimately about crap and disproved science that only occasionally leads to something useful, and often leads to untold misery. It's a strange thought that a turn to pop science for something uplifting, but it's absolutely the case, and that I didn't feel happy or filled with wonder by this book is a big black mark against it. The flimsy, sudden ending did not improve matters. There are better books on the subjects this one approaches, with finer detail and more interest, so I can't recommend it.
9. Never Let Me Go - Kazuo Ishiguro
(304 pages)
I got spoiled for the "twist" of this book by some mouthy arse on a message board, much to my annoyance. I suspect I'd have worked it out anyway: it's fairly transparent and you're outright told about a third of the way in what it is the school and its students are designed for, but I'm still cross. In spite of this, I'm glad to say it did not detract from my enjoyment of this wonderful book. A gorgeous gem, this book gazes into what it means to be human, and humanity's primitive instinct for companionship and loyalty and love, even when missing something as basic as what these children are missing. This book is by turns sad and sinister, but never heavyhanded with its message. It could easily have been bogged down in politics but never does, instead choosing to focus on those things that define our humaness. The science of the plot never comes into it, and I for one am glad because without it the book seems more real and likely, and I doubt any introduction of the actual biology of the thing would have convinced me. It is wiser that it is left out entirely. The best fiction I've read this year so far, I heartily recommend this.
10. Notes From Walnut Tree Farm - Roger Deakin
(224 pages)
I fancied a quick foray into nature writing and this was a good book for it, its diary format making a brief and pleasant read, nothing I found truly special but easy and something to plump up the list. I noticed the odd fragment that wound up eventually in Wildwood, but never so much it was annoying, just a faint sense of deja vu. Deakin frequently bemoans people's loss of connection to nature, and this could easily become irritating - we're not all writers; some of us have full time jobs necessarily based in cities and no money -, but always manages to shirk it, just. He does have a certain amount of pomposity but never overbearingly, never drawing attention from the thrust of his point which is a wonder in the British environment that surrounds us, but goes so largely overlooked by this island's inhabitants. A nice, light, whimsical read.
11. Notes on a Scandal - Zoë Heller
(256 pages)
More wonderful fiction! A real page-turner, I really struggled to put this down and spent a few sullen work hours sulking until my break wherein I could settle down with it again. I'm not sure why it is so good. It could be so easy for this novel, written by a journalist, to descend into tawdry tabloid rubbish, but it never does, becoming in fact a really clever, funny, sinister little story that in its final page will reduce your skin to gooseflesh. Sheba is never allowed to get away with what she's done; she's wrong, she knows she's wrong, she even pulls the classic "you'll get in trouble too" line, but she is by no means the only villain in this piece. Everyone gets it, in their scheming, their pomposity, their mealy-mouthed petty-minded managerialism, their hypocrisy and snobbery. Most memorable of course is the narrator, Barbara, whose manipulation of Sheba left me fascinated and gasping. I particularly liked the theme of loneliness in this novel. We've all read novels about the sorrow of poor lost souls who do not fit into society, but this book's depiction of loneliness is the crux of its creepiness. The loneliness in this novel is a damaging, warping thing, and Barbara is twisted by it. When Barbara, in her role as narrator, writes "People like Sheba think that they know what it's like to be lonely... They don't know what it is to construct an entire weekend around a visit to the laundrette... They don't know what it is to be so chronically untouched that the accidental brush of a bus conductor's hand on your shoulder sends a jolt of longing straight to your groin. I have sat on park benches and trains and schoolroom chairs, feeling the great store of unused, objectless love sitting in my belly like a stone until I was sure I would cry out and fall, flailing, to the ground. About all of this, Sheba and her like have no clue" you actually gasp, it is so glorious and true and awful. You pity these characters, but they are terrible people, and wonderfully real for it. Fantastic stuff.
12. Every Living Thing - James Herriot
(370 pages)
The final book. I feel bad admitting I'm a little relieved at reaching the end of them, and for March too, but they seemed such an indomitable part of my bookshelf that it was almost a little threatening. I did enjoy this one, as it had my favourite story I remember as a child (Olly and Ginny, the feral cats), and the most satisfying ending. It feels like a true ending to what was not really a "series" as such, more a sleection of books of the same theme. It was a pleasure re-visiting Herriot, but next time I shall do it in a greater span of time.
13. Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder - Richard Dawkins
(352 pages)
This is not one of my favourite books of his. It's a shame, because the premise is exactly what I love: that scientific knowledge does not detract from its wonder, but only enhances it. It is by no means a bad book, but it did not grab me in the way others of Dawkins' books have done. Some parts were extremely interesting: I particularly loved the idea of brains creating a "virtual reality" in which we exist, which is what hallucinations and illusions owe their existence to. Dawkins feels that science needs more poets; specifically, good poets, people who can illuminate their subject. He also warns against "bad" poetry in science, the way that it can turn heads of even experts in the subject in spite of it being misleading or inaccurate, just from its mesmerising properties. I appreciated these themes and agreed with them, but in spite of this the book never really excited me. Whether that is due to some of the subjects focused on which I am just not interested in, or because I've been feeling somewhat fatigued and should probably have put such an invested book off until more alert, I don't know. I feel I should read it again before I can offer a real opinion, but that won't be any time soon. A weak conclusion? Fine. Ever wondered why pigeons bob their heads as they walk? Then read this book.
Total books so far: 35
Total pages so far: 10,552