Reading Update #4 2007
I have actually been doing a bit more reading that usual, but some of it is stuff that I have read before, and so do not include in my count here. Otherwise I could break 50 books easily! :)
Fiction:
Misreadings by Umberto Eco
A collection of short works and essays - translated from the Italian. As Eco himself notes, things are lost in translation, but also that his humour is satirical and like all satire becomes dated quickly. Quite apart from the dated and largely insular Italian content, I simply discovered that I don't find Eco's style of humour that amusing. It's not terrible or anything, it's just not what amuses me.
One item in the book I did find amusing was the review of several famous texts as if they were passing across the desk of a prospective publisher. The Bible was noticed as being an excellent multi-chaptered work, although the first five only were recommended for publication; the rest were too confusing and clearly the work of several hands. I also found the review of the Odyssey quite funny. Overall, however, I found this dated and not to my fancy.
1 star
The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins.
A nineteenth century mystery detective novel, revolving around a terrible secret held by a member of the aristocracy - a secret that must be discovered before his wife suffers a terrible fate at his hands. What is this great conspiracy and who is the mysterious woman in white who seems to hold all the answers?
Written in 1860, it took a little to get into this book - the flowery tone, the excessive explanation and the odd grammar all hitched at first, but soon became a flowing narrative once I got my mind in the right place. The book is made up of several narratives (similar in style to Dracula, although, of course, predating it), told by several persons, through diary entries, written statements, lawyers accounts and in one instance, a tombstone.
It is in the switching of narratives that Collins' ability as a writer shines through. Each narrative is easily discernible through style, language and content as belonging to each character - from those you like to those you love, each character is described in such detail and characterised by particular thought patterns, making it a joy to read. From lively Italians to mean spirited Englishmen, dithering women to criminal masterminds, the accounts make a compelling narrative. The only downside was that at times the plot was unnecessarily complex and that the text does assume a certain amount of knowledge of the period in which it was written (particularly in the denouement).
A much more lively and interesting tale that much of the other literature of the period I have read (yes, Austen and Dickens, I am looking at you) and I enjoyed it so much that I think I may go and look up more of his works.
4 stars
The Ultimate Werewolf anthology.
A collection of short stories about werewolves ranging from the exceedingly metaphysical to the traditional, covering just about any and all sorts of werewolves you can think of (and a few you couldn't). The book also included a selected filmography of werewolf movies, which disappointingly didn't include Teen Wolf. ;)
My favourite stories in here were 'The Werewolf Gambit' by Robert Silverberg (a story about a man who claims to be a werewolf to pick up chicks), 'South of Oregon City' by Pat Murphy (somewhat like the Oliver Reed movie The Trap, but with werewolfy twists), 'Moonlight on the Gazebo' by Mel Gilden (a story about a society that uses werewolves as their method of public execution) and 'Day of the Wolf,' by Craig Shaw Gardner, a story in which the werewolf curse strikes in an unusual way (but remains very strongly a curse).
Like all short story works, it contains a mix of good and bad - I found the first, by celebrated sci-fic author Harlan Ellison, to be particularly painful - but mostly they hovered around the 'quite good' mark. There was the usual level of quirkiness and lack of resolution that tends to characterise short stories but for the most part they were creative and well written and I quite enjoyed them.
4 stars
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
A tale of decadence and indifference in 1920s America.
Okay, I admit, I read this because I a) knew it was one of those important literature works that everyone is supposed to read (at least in American literature) and b) it's Jared Padalecki's favourite book. Yes, I can be shallow and totally fan-girly. *pauses while most of you go 'huh? Who?'* c) dulthar had it, so it wasn't it like it was difficult to get.
I haven't read anything from this era for a while, so it took me some time to get into the flowery language (and to stop myself curiously looking at paragraphs to see how many lines down I could get before there was a punctuation mark other than a comma). Once I did so, I quite enjoyed the tone set, even if somewhat overly pompous at times, which I know is more a characteristic of the time than the author. Fitzgerald paints vivid images and makes excellent insights into human nature (often with sly asides), including my favourite, spoken by our narrator and main character Nick: 'I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth.'
The characters are shallow and wholly unlikeable, which is a deliberate move on the author's part. We have a disjointed mix of people discontent with their lives and their individual tales and tragedies all narrow down to a funnel point at which they converge with devastating results. I especially liked that one of the characters so central to the tale prior to the denouement vanishes almost entirely from the narrative at this point; viewed from then on to the end of the work only through the lens of windows and second hand gossip. A well written book that you get most of the way through before you realise that very little has actually happened and yet you are satisfied.
As a side point, I would like to read a book which has a character named Tom who isn't an utter prick in it.
4 stars.
While The Great Gatsby was at times lacking in punctuation, the next book more than made up for it, despite being a fairly short novella.
The Stepford Wives by Ira Levin
I decided to read this because I saw the recent remake with Nicole Kidman and Matthew Broderick and wondered how the original story differed. It was quite different, both in tone and ending.
I suspect I would have enjoyed this story a lot more if I hadn't seen the movie and thus had the ending somewhat spoiled. It reads like most suspense thrillers - hints here and there that things in the idyllic world of Stepford (which is ambiguously located somewhere near a large city) isn't really what it seems. Every woman is a domestic goddess, content to stay home scrubbing and cleaning endlessly while their husbands enjoy the unspecified comforts of the 'Men's Association.' Joanna, the book's heroine, finds life in Stepford claustrophobic after life in the big city and begins to suspect that something dark is happening in this happy little town.
The book was written in the 70s and to an extent it shows - the ideas and habits of the characters are outdated. The central plot concept, while very radical for its day, is a tired trope these days and so the book loses much of its impact. The characters are quite intriguing - we get little sense of how they look (apart from the Stepford Wives' ubiquitous big boobs and narrow hips) so much as their patterns of behaviour. Levin's sparse style lends itself well to such a topic, focusing less of the traditional topics of literary rhapsody and more on the mundane and how it can become sinister in the most unlikely of ways.
The grammar is interesting at points too - not just in that it is written in American English, which differs in small but significant ways from Australian or British English (beyond just spelling). While I can appreciate that some people feel that colons and semi-colons are under utilised in English (any form of it), I think Levin goes a bit overboard - in the first three pages I counted 8 semi-colons and three colons as well as the usual prevalence of commas, periods, etc. Hyphenation is something that was also very prevalent in the book, in both asides and truncated conversations. I would not necessarily go so far as to say they were grammatically incorrect, just that there abundance was very noticeable. In what is definitely a quibble, I found a case where a direct speech sentence lacked it's opening talking marks. As someone whose had to go through and edit a work to catch such errors, I find it annoying that a professional book got away with it, but that's just a pet peeve of mine (as are any typographical errors in any published work, as it detracts from the professionalism).
It was a book I enjoyed but will probably not bother to read again.
3 stars
Non Fiction:
The Pyramids by Joyce Tyldesley
This book proclaims to be 'the real story behind Egypt's most ancient monuments' (although reading it makes it clear that pyramids are not Egypt's most ancient monuments). Overall, it aims to show the history of the pyramids, particularly their construction.
Okay, I was really, really disappointed by this book. It was on ancient Egypt, a perennial favourite, it was on archaeology, another perennial favourite and yet somehow Tyldesley managed to make it boring. I don't mean boring in an academic way, it was simply a dull book. Rather than looking at the great achievement of the Egyptians, Tyldesley reduces it to a catalogue of monumental architecture, listing pyramid after pyramid with its builder, its specs (and she is highly repetitive in her language, too) and locale - which she often describes in ancient town names (without referring to their modern equivalent) and thus makes them useless to find on a modern map. Rather than clarifying how the pyramids came into existence, I instead fear this book will just be confusing and nonsensical to the non-specialist reader (and annoy the specialist no end).
Tyldesley also made odd choices with the information she chose to leave in or take out - I became aware of the depth of my knowledge in this area as I noticed these odd exclusions. She makes no mention of where she gets most of her information (or indeed, where the Egyptians got their materials for the most part) and she treats the information in a perfunctory, almost bored manner. This is all the more striking because her previous book I read, Nefertiti, while having points I would dispute academically, was written in a much more engaged and lively manner. In a most annoying academic error, she leaves dates out of the work entirely - while I understand many of the dates are debated, to leave them out entirely is an unscholarly way to progress and leaves the reader adrift with no sense of where these events fit in to the history of the world. Further, she doesn't even make clear which pyramid is which (of the largest three), or explains properly the theology of their structures and shape.
1 star.
Australian Early Settlers Household Lore, compiled Mrs N. Pescott, illustrated by R. Paul Learmouth
This book caught my eye as I was walking past a stack in my university library (darn my wandering eyes! I left with six extra books that day due to my wandering eye!). I borrowed it out of a sense of curiosity as to what was considered to be 'good housewifery' in the 1800s. As I suspected, a large portion was given over to recipes (cooking being one of a woman's most important jobs!) but there was one absolutely fabulous section on home remedies and cures.
Some of these ranged from fascinating things I didn't know - that vinegar can be used in a pinch to loosen rusty bolts or that cloves in oranges provides an excellent moth repellant (and, it was thought, though erroneously, a ward against illness) , through to the awesome concept of using a leech kept in a jar as a barometer (is your leech limp? If it's summer, this means it will be hot! If winter, it will snow! A lively leech means a thunderstorm is on the way!) - on to those that were clearly old wives tales - for instance the notion that tying pieces of smoked bacon around your throat warded off an incipient cold.
The recipes were fairly boring, but the hints on home handymanship and etiquette were very amusing and interesting - and apparently chemicals were much easier to come by back in the early days of Australia's colonial settlement.
3 stars
Books so far:
Fiction: 13
Non-fiction: 8.
21 / 50
(42.0%)
Fiction:
Misreadings by Umberto Eco
A collection of short works and essays - translated from the Italian. As Eco himself notes, things are lost in translation, but also that his humour is satirical and like all satire becomes dated quickly. Quite apart from the dated and largely insular Italian content, I simply discovered that I don't find Eco's style of humour that amusing. It's not terrible or anything, it's just not what amuses me.
One item in the book I did find amusing was the review of several famous texts as if they were passing across the desk of a prospective publisher. The Bible was noticed as being an excellent multi-chaptered work, although the first five only were recommended for publication; the rest were too confusing and clearly the work of several hands. I also found the review of the Odyssey quite funny. Overall, however, I found this dated and not to my fancy.
1 star
The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins.
A nineteenth century mystery detective novel, revolving around a terrible secret held by a member of the aristocracy - a secret that must be discovered before his wife suffers a terrible fate at his hands. What is this great conspiracy and who is the mysterious woman in white who seems to hold all the answers?
Written in 1860, it took a little to get into this book - the flowery tone, the excessive explanation and the odd grammar all hitched at first, but soon became a flowing narrative once I got my mind in the right place. The book is made up of several narratives (similar in style to Dracula, although, of course, predating it), told by several persons, through diary entries, written statements, lawyers accounts and in one instance, a tombstone.
It is in the switching of narratives that Collins' ability as a writer shines through. Each narrative is easily discernible through style, language and content as belonging to each character - from those you like to those you love, each character is described in such detail and characterised by particular thought patterns, making it a joy to read. From lively Italians to mean spirited Englishmen, dithering women to criminal masterminds, the accounts make a compelling narrative. The only downside was that at times the plot was unnecessarily complex and that the text does assume a certain amount of knowledge of the period in which it was written (particularly in the denouement).
A much more lively and interesting tale that much of the other literature of the period I have read (yes, Austen and Dickens, I am looking at you) and I enjoyed it so much that I think I may go and look up more of his works.
4 stars
The Ultimate Werewolf anthology.
A collection of short stories about werewolves ranging from the exceedingly metaphysical to the traditional, covering just about any and all sorts of werewolves you can think of (and a few you couldn't). The book also included a selected filmography of werewolf movies, which disappointingly didn't include Teen Wolf. ;)
My favourite stories in here were 'The Werewolf Gambit' by Robert Silverberg (a story about a man who claims to be a werewolf to pick up chicks), 'South of Oregon City' by Pat Murphy (somewhat like the Oliver Reed movie The Trap, but with werewolfy twists), 'Moonlight on the Gazebo' by Mel Gilden (a story about a society that uses werewolves as their method of public execution) and 'Day of the Wolf,' by Craig Shaw Gardner, a story in which the werewolf curse strikes in an unusual way (but remains very strongly a curse).
Like all short story works, it contains a mix of good and bad - I found the first, by celebrated sci-fic author Harlan Ellison, to be particularly painful - but mostly they hovered around the 'quite good' mark. There was the usual level of quirkiness and lack of resolution that tends to characterise short stories but for the most part they were creative and well written and I quite enjoyed them.
4 stars
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
A tale of decadence and indifference in 1920s America.
Okay, I admit, I read this because I a) knew it was one of those important literature works that everyone is supposed to read (at least in American literature) and b) it's Jared Padalecki's favourite book. Yes, I can be shallow and totally fan-girly. *pauses while most of you go 'huh? Who?'* c) dulthar had it, so it wasn't it like it was difficult to get.
I haven't read anything from this era for a while, so it took me some time to get into the flowery language (and to stop myself curiously looking at paragraphs to see how many lines down I could get before there was a punctuation mark other than a comma). Once I did so, I quite enjoyed the tone set, even if somewhat overly pompous at times, which I know is more a characteristic of the time than the author. Fitzgerald paints vivid images and makes excellent insights into human nature (often with sly asides), including my favourite, spoken by our narrator and main character Nick: 'I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth.'
The characters are shallow and wholly unlikeable, which is a deliberate move on the author's part. We have a disjointed mix of people discontent with their lives and their individual tales and tragedies all narrow down to a funnel point at which they converge with devastating results. I especially liked that one of the characters so central to the tale prior to the denouement vanishes almost entirely from the narrative at this point; viewed from then on to the end of the work only through the lens of windows and second hand gossip. A well written book that you get most of the way through before you realise that very little has actually happened and yet you are satisfied.
As a side point, I would like to read a book which has a character named Tom who isn't an utter prick in it.
4 stars.
While The Great Gatsby was at times lacking in punctuation, the next book more than made up for it, despite being a fairly short novella.
The Stepford Wives by Ira Levin
I decided to read this because I saw the recent remake with Nicole Kidman and Matthew Broderick and wondered how the original story differed. It was quite different, both in tone and ending.
I suspect I would have enjoyed this story a lot more if I hadn't seen the movie and thus had the ending somewhat spoiled. It reads like most suspense thrillers - hints here and there that things in the idyllic world of Stepford (which is ambiguously located somewhere near a large city) isn't really what it seems. Every woman is a domestic goddess, content to stay home scrubbing and cleaning endlessly while their husbands enjoy the unspecified comforts of the 'Men's Association.' Joanna, the book's heroine, finds life in Stepford claustrophobic after life in the big city and begins to suspect that something dark is happening in this happy little town.
The book was written in the 70s and to an extent it shows - the ideas and habits of the characters are outdated. The central plot concept, while very radical for its day, is a tired trope these days and so the book loses much of its impact. The characters are quite intriguing - we get little sense of how they look (apart from the Stepford Wives' ubiquitous big boobs and narrow hips) so much as their patterns of behaviour. Levin's sparse style lends itself well to such a topic, focusing less of the traditional topics of literary rhapsody and more on the mundane and how it can become sinister in the most unlikely of ways.
The grammar is interesting at points too - not just in that it is written in American English, which differs in small but significant ways from Australian or British English (beyond just spelling). While I can appreciate that some people feel that colons and semi-colons are under utilised in English (any form of it), I think Levin goes a bit overboard - in the first three pages I counted 8 semi-colons and three colons as well as the usual prevalence of commas, periods, etc. Hyphenation is something that was also very prevalent in the book, in both asides and truncated conversations. I would not necessarily go so far as to say they were grammatically incorrect, just that there abundance was very noticeable. In what is definitely a quibble, I found a case where a direct speech sentence lacked it's opening talking marks. As someone whose had to go through and edit a work to catch such errors, I find it annoying that a professional book got away with it, but that's just a pet peeve of mine (as are any typographical errors in any published work, as it detracts from the professionalism).
It was a book I enjoyed but will probably not bother to read again.
3 stars
Non Fiction:
The Pyramids by Joyce Tyldesley
This book proclaims to be 'the real story behind Egypt's most ancient monuments' (although reading it makes it clear that pyramids are not Egypt's most ancient monuments). Overall, it aims to show the history of the pyramids, particularly their construction.
Okay, I was really, really disappointed by this book. It was on ancient Egypt, a perennial favourite, it was on archaeology, another perennial favourite and yet somehow Tyldesley managed to make it boring. I don't mean boring in an academic way, it was simply a dull book. Rather than looking at the great achievement of the Egyptians, Tyldesley reduces it to a catalogue of monumental architecture, listing pyramid after pyramid with its builder, its specs (and she is highly repetitive in her language, too) and locale - which she often describes in ancient town names (without referring to their modern equivalent) and thus makes them useless to find on a modern map. Rather than clarifying how the pyramids came into existence, I instead fear this book will just be confusing and nonsensical to the non-specialist reader (and annoy the specialist no end).
Tyldesley also made odd choices with the information she chose to leave in or take out - I became aware of the depth of my knowledge in this area as I noticed these odd exclusions. She makes no mention of where she gets most of her information (or indeed, where the Egyptians got their materials for the most part) and she treats the information in a perfunctory, almost bored manner. This is all the more striking because her previous book I read, Nefertiti, while having points I would dispute academically, was written in a much more engaged and lively manner. In a most annoying academic error, she leaves dates out of the work entirely - while I understand many of the dates are debated, to leave them out entirely is an unscholarly way to progress and leaves the reader adrift with no sense of where these events fit in to the history of the world. Further, she doesn't even make clear which pyramid is which (of the largest three), or explains properly the theology of their structures and shape.
1 star.
Australian Early Settlers Household Lore, compiled Mrs N. Pescott, illustrated by R. Paul Learmouth
This book caught my eye as I was walking past a stack in my university library (darn my wandering eyes! I left with six extra books that day due to my wandering eye!). I borrowed it out of a sense of curiosity as to what was considered to be 'good housewifery' in the 1800s. As I suspected, a large portion was given over to recipes (cooking being one of a woman's most important jobs!) but there was one absolutely fabulous section on home remedies and cures.
Some of these ranged from fascinating things I didn't know - that vinegar can be used in a pinch to loosen rusty bolts or that cloves in oranges provides an excellent moth repellant (and, it was thought, though erroneously, a ward against illness) , through to the awesome concept of using a leech kept in a jar as a barometer (is your leech limp? If it's summer, this means it will be hot! If winter, it will snow! A lively leech means a thunderstorm is on the way!) - on to those that were clearly old wives tales - for instance the notion that tying pieces of smoked bacon around your throat warded off an incipient cold.
The recipes were fairly boring, but the hints on home handymanship and etiquette were very amusing and interesting - and apparently chemicals were much easier to come by back in the early days of Australia's colonial settlement.
3 stars
Books so far:
Fiction: 13
Non-fiction: 8.
21 / 50
(42.0%)