Kategori: Aardwolf – one hit wonders

In which we become clairvoyant.

Claudine Cullimore’s Small-Town Girl is a pleasant read. There is really not much more to be said about it.

Oh, go on then. It’s got the right mix of romance, friendship, character growth and serves-you-right-ness. The language is flawless, and never intrudes upon the flow of the story with odd springs (whether on purpose or mistakenly). The only negative thing about it is the predictability (I guessed all the major twists of plot way in advance of the «reveal»), but what can you expect?

Perhaps I should have left it at «a pleasant read» after all.

In which we ramble through Africa.

I picked up Peter Moore’s Swahili for the Broken-Hearted in the aforementioned 3 for 2 sale at Waterstone’s in Brighton, and started it shortly after finishing Fforde back in July. So why haven’t I reviewed before now? Well, things have been happening and book reviews haven’t exactly been my top priority.

Anyway. It’s pretty good. Nothing spectacular, but a decent, mildly entertaining read. I won’t ruch out to buy any more of Moore’s books, but if I come across one of them in another three-for-two sale, I might just buy it.

In which we find that you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover.

The clothes do make a man. I picked The Memory of All That up in a charity shop in Prestwick because I found the cover attractive. That was probably related to me and Linda having spent a lot of time talking about Audrey Hepburn lately.

Well, they do say not to judge a book by it’s cover, and maybe they’re right. This was a very readable novel, no doubt about that, and the main character (who is also the narrator) definitely holds the reader’s attention while the novel lasts. However, once I’d turned the last page yesterday and shut the book, it seemed to fade very quickly from my mind. I can remember the plot all right, it just doesn’t seem to have any significance whatsoever beyond entertainment value for a few hours. I don’t know.

In which we wonder: What’s with the realism?

The good ladies at Pemberley have talked so much about I Capture the Castle that when I found it at Waterstone’s 3 for 2 sale, I obviously jumped at the chance to finally read it. I’d like to say I was not disappointed, unfortunately that would not be entirely true.

All they have said about the story is correct. The narrator is captivating. The characters deliciously eccentric and real. The story flows along and drags you ever onwards – it’s not a book you want to put down.

And then it ends. Realistically ambigiously, no doubt about that, but not on the ‘they lived happily ever after’ note that I was hoping for. Hang realism, I like ‘they lived happily ever after’.

If this continues I am going to have to start reading Mills&Boons.

In which we are delighted and annoyed, but mostly annoyed.

I found Mrs P’s Journey: The Remarkable Story of the Woman Who Created the A-Z Map by Sarah Hartley in a charity shop somewhere along the way. I must admit I had never heard of Phyllis Pearsall before, and neither had it really occurred to me that the A-Z is something that must have been «created» at some point – it seems like such a fixture – though on reflection it’s pretty obvious that it hasn’t always been around… This, of course, was motivation enough to make the book an interesting purchase.

«Remarkable story» is right, Phyllis Pearsall was some lady, and her life seems to have contained enough events to fill more than the one little volume this book is. However, I found Hartley’s style increasingly annoying, which did detract a lot from the pleasure of reading about Mrs. P. «Disorganised and haphazard» are words that come to mind. An example: Phyllis is living in Paris, having a hard time making ends meet, she hears of an English-language magazine and thinks «I could write for that», she sits at a table writing an article when she first lays eyes on Vladimir Nabokov, she goes to visit the magazine in question to ask if she may write for them and is told to submit an article which she sits down to do a few days later… The article she is writing when she first sees Nabokov. That is the exact order in which the events are related, and Nabokov is only mentioned in passing to surface again three pages later once the whole visiting-the-magazine-and-settling-down-to-write episode is over.

Maybe I’m easily annoyed. Whatever. I still decided to bring the book home with me once I’d finished rather than leave it, so I guess that means I’m planning on reading it again one day.

In which we feel pointlessness.

Still not sated with all things Irish (probably because the trip was looming large in my mind) I decided to pop down to Tanum and see if I could find a suitable book to bring to read while on the road, preferably one I could easily dump once I’d done with it. I picked up No News at Throat Lake by Lawrence Donegan, and it pretty much fulfilled the purpose.

Donegan escapes city life and goes to live in rural north of Ireland, and relates his trials with humour. However, as the whole thing ends with him chucking it and moving back to the big city, I was left with a feeling that the whole thing was somewhat pointless, and though I’m sure he’d learnt a thing or two about himself, he didn’t really relate it effectively enough for me to feel that the whole experience wasn’t just a complete waste of time.

Luckily, that meant I was not tempted to carry the book home with me – finished it while in Ennis, and left it there, with a bookcrossing label inside.

In which we swear off fast food forever.

Fast Food Nation is a book calculated to make you lose your appetite. On the other hand there is such a lot of talk of hamburgers and fries (and tacos and pizzas) that it’s very difficult not to obsess about food while reading it. A somewhat mixed experience, in that respect.

A somewhat mixed experience in many respects, actually. The book’s adequately well written, not in itself a very compelling read, but once I got into it I found it hard to put it down because I wanted to be done with it and go on to something more pleasant. It seems thoroughly researched, and I can’t really see any reason to doubt the main gist of Schlosser’s argument – that the fast food industry is bad for just about everything: The food’s unhealthy (whenever it isn’t lethal), the workers are unhappy and the effect on the economy as a whole is negative too.

Successful in it’s bid to make you averse to entering a fast food «restaurant» ever again, I still found the book patchy in its arguments. In fact, the whole «feel» was spoiled by just one jarring episode; Schlosser visits a slaughterhouse and gets a guided tour, starting at the «wrong end» in the packaging room and getting progressively closer to where «meat» is still «cattle». This description could have been very effective if he’d left the focus on the knocker, for example – stunning hundreds of cattle a day (up to 400 an hour), every day, must be a pretty terrible sort of job to do, even for the most determined carnivore. But this is where Schlosser slips into sentimentality, he exits the «plant» the way the cattle come in, and spends some time expounding the way the big brown eyes look at him, the way the ramp is designed so that the cattle do not see what’s coming. Now, I eat meat. I would prefer not to have to slaughter the animal myself prior to eating it, but I would if I had to. I have no illusions about the steak or bacon I buy at the supermarket, I know perfectly well that a short while ago this bit of meat was part of a (hopefully) healthy, (hopefully) happy, (definitely) living, breathing animal. Such is life. If it bothered me I would become a vegetarian.

The fact that the system is condusive to mistreatment of the animals, poor conditions for the workers, all sorts of odds and ends ending up in the food (bone, gristle, excrement, glass, what-have-you) and one small sample infected with e-coli 0157:H7 making millions of hamburgers lethal bothers me in the extreme, and the uncovering of all this makes the book interesting reading. The fact that the hamburger I eat was once part of a cow (or more likely hundreds of cows), bothers me not one iota, and the descent into sentimentalism mars what was otherwise a persuasive read.

But it will be a while before I eat at McDonald’s again.

I’m sorry to say that O’Connor went downhill pretty quickly and never quite recovered. There is one hysterically funny episode towards the very end of the book, when he visits Disney World with a group of fellow Irishmen. The guide says «There’s some really good rides here at the Magic Kingdom» and you can probably imagine how it goes from there. Other than that – two pages or so – the rest of the book made me snort occasionally, but didn’t live up to the promise of the first few pages, and so was rather disappointing. I didn’t really learn anything new about Ireland, either, which, in 248 pages is pretty good going. Learning something new about Ireland was obviously not my motivation for reading the book in the first place, but would have been some compensation for the lack of laughs. Oh well.

In which it is necessary to remind the reader of the importance of tissues.

I’ve just swallowed Tony Parsons’ Man and Boy whole. Not literally, obviously, or I’d be in the hospital right now, but in as few hours as is compatible with thorough reading. I read the first few pages (20? 30?) a week or maybe more back and got distracted, but this afternoon I picked it up again, and I couldn’t put it down. This was absolutely not what I was meant to do this afternoon. I was meant to do some work and maybe fix that bunad (17th of May looming larger on the horizon every day), but alas, alack.

So. Man and Boy is a compelling read. I suppose that’s established. It’s not the best book I’ve ever read, the ending, for example, has left me a bit deflated. This is not to say it’s bad, just that it could have been better. Still, I am near enough convinced that I will be reading every other Parsons book I can lay my hands on, so I suppose the publishers will be happy.