Kategori: Authors

April, May and much of June

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I swear I meant to write proper posts on some of these. However:

Police at the Funeral – Margery Allingham
Showed up in my mailbox as a sort of birthday present – bookcrossing style. A quirky and charming read and definitely an author to look out for later. I still haven’t quite decided who next to «inflict» this on, I think it takes a certain kind of reader… Hm.

Portnoy’s Complaint – Philip Roth
A little dreary, but good in its way – I think its supposed to be a little dreary, to be honest. Recognisable and not so recognisable themes of guilt and shame, religion and upbringing.

The Chronicles of Prydain – Lloyd Alexander
A reread occasioned by finding the first three books in Norwegian second-hand by chance.

Sputnik Sweetheart – Haruki Murakami
Also a bookcrossing copy, my suspicions that I’d like Murakami in novel-form was confirmed. A perfectly beautiful – though quite sinister – book, and very hard to put down once you’ve started.

Under the Duvet, Angels and The Other Side of the Story – Marian Keyes 
A three for one sale on Marian Keyes paperbacks, and these are the ones I came away with. Under the Duvet was entertaining, but possibly a little too light-hearted for my taste (even the pieces dealing with serious issues such as alchoholism somehow felt light-hearted, something Rachel’s Holiday – the novel dealing with the same issue – doesn’t). I realised, shortly after having started it, that I’ve read Angels before. Nevermind, I didn’t remember how it would all end and it was worth a reread (even if I still don’t really like the ending. Bah). The Other Side of the Story was, uhm, not quite up to Keys’ usual standard, I don’t think. I think partly it was the narrative form I didn’t like, it was slightly too disjointed to suit the overall style of the novel (or me, possibly).

The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox – Maggie O’Farrell
Received from Tonbel, who grabbed the chance to get rid of some books while I was there. Most of them ended up bookcrossed, but this one she suggested I read, and I’m glad she did. The main problem with this book was that it was at least 400 pages too short. I wanted to know more, much more, and it left me (internally, I was on the bus) shouting «But what happened next?» Not that the story is unfinished as such, just that the characters were compelling enough to make me want to read more. I think I will have to put the books O’Farrell mentions as helpful when researching on my tbr list.

I’ve probably forgotten something here, oh well.

Since the middle of February

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The Tale of Desperaux – Di Collofello
Very sweet. Not exceptionally good, though, and with an underlying sort of morality which bothered me. Since I rather like rats I objected to the description of them being so nasty to look at and touch (especially in comparison with mice, which are, apparently, not nasty at all), but I can understand how it might be necessary for the story. However, I can’t quite excuse the idea that a rat is a rat and can never change his nature, it smacks – to me – a little of the I’m-trying-to-be-politically-correct-but-I’m-a-racist-really premise that all, say, negroes are lazy, but it’s in their nature and they can’t really help it. Balderdash.

Small Wars Permitting – Christina Lamb
Very interesting, highly readable. My father just finished this when I was trying to get through Sorting Out Billy (see below) and there was no competition, really, I jumped at the chance to read something else. Lamb manages to be both informative, profound and thought-provoking and at the same time laugh-out-loud funny in places. The book contains both newly written context material and quite a few of Lambs articles from various papers and both are equally readable and absorbing. Highly recommended.

Then, a bit of a Durrell reread going on – in between all the other stuff – if I find the time and energy I might write a more detailed post on Durrell, but for now, here’s a list:
The Bafut Beagles – Gerald Durrell
Fillets of Plaice – Gerald Durrell
The Stationary Ark – Gerald Durrell
A Zoo in my Luggage – Gerald Durrell
Catch me a Colobus – Gerald Durrell
The Dunken Forest – Gerald Durrell
Himself and Other Animals – David Hughes (biography)

Sorting Out Billy – Jo Brand
I read only the first half, or thereabouts and then gave it up in disgust. Abysmally bad, actually.

The Book of Lost Things – John Connolly
Entertaining, slightly scary in parts. Well worth the time.

Anybody Out There? – Marian Keyes
Excellent. I was a little worried, not being a great fan of spiritualism and trying to speak to the dead, however, Keyes managed the issue beautifully, I think, and I didn’t cringe even once.

Slam – Nick Hornby
Hornby’s first «young adult» novel, which probably should be compulsory reading for most British teenagers as a sort of literary contraception. Not Hornby’s best book – by far – from an adult point of view, but then that’s hardly the right point of view for judging it.

American Gods – Neil Gaiman
Superb.

A Ramble Round the Globe – Thomas Dewar
Disappointingly unoccupied with whisky or with advertising, the two main reasons I am interested in Tommy Dewar, but a rather interesting read nonetheless.

The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid – Bill Bryson
Just what you’d expect from Bill Bryson: Very good.

Hoggerne – Roy Jacobsen

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En ganske så stillferdig, men svært så tankevekkende historie om «landsbyidioten» som nekter å evakuere fra hjembyen sin i Finnland under krigen og hans møte med russerne og deretter de tilbakevendende finnene. Nok en bookcrossing-bok, dette, og jeg er glad for at den falt meg i hende.

Harlequin Valentine – Neil Gaiman & John Bolton

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A rather beautiful book, another one that came my way thanks to bookcrossing. Bolton’s illustrations are magnificent and the story is concurrently charming and haunting, just as Commedia dell’arte should be. I will have to keep this copy for a while and enjoy it again before sending it on its way (and also, probably, put it on the wishlist).

November to January, so far

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The Tea Rose – Jennifer Donnelly
The plot must consist of pretty much every cliché in the book except the classic evil twin. At the last two «twists in the tale» I actually laughed out loud – that’s how madly «buy one plot-device, get three free» infested it all was. However, despite this, Donnelly had me caught well and good and I had serious problems in putting the book away and not sneak a few pages in under the desk at work. Not a Nobel candidate, then, but very well worth reading.

Shaman’s Crossing, Forest Mage and Renegade’s Magic – Robin Hobb
Ok, so this deals partly with those lost months… I had to labour a bit through the first two volumes (I never thought I’d say this about a Robin Hobb book), and got completely stuck at the beginning of the third. I don’t know if I could put my finger on it, but this trilogy just didn’t do it for me. I kept reading because I was just interested enough to want to know what would happen in the end, but not interested enough to want to spend 2000-odd pages getting there. It doesn’t help, of course, that the volumes are really too big to read comfortably (I might need to consider weightlifting if I’m to keep reading this size of book in hardback), and certainly too big to be tempting for bringing on the bus etc. I suppose I felt that Hobb might have been better off writing this as one book rather than a trilogy. It seemed somewhat unnaturally extended to me. It may be that she was caught in the probable contract with her publisher to produce trilogies, or it may be that she really felt this story needed three times 700 pages. I didn’t. I will still look foreward to Hobb’s next, but not with such bated breath as before.

Special Topics in Calamity Physics – Marisha Pessl
Very gripping and full of intriguing twists. Found it hard to put it down towards the end, and wanted it to go on once it finished. Still, not the sort of book one rereads – the twist is not quite surprising enough to make me want to go back and reread to see what I’ve missed and knowing how it ends will ruin the rest of the story too much at a second perusal. Bookcrossing candidate if ever I saw one.

The Book Thief – Markus Zusak
A very engaging book, though I became mightily annoyed with the narrator. Partly the fact that «he» is death (which just didn’t work for me, don’t ask me why), partly the endless foreshadowing (or, rather, foretelling – «more of that later» hints – a bit of vague foreshadowing I can deal with) and partly the bulletin-style interruptions which, yeah, ok, I could make a convincing interpretation of if I had to write an essay on this book for an exam, but, hey, I finished school and I prefer to do my reading at my own pace, and, frankly, until I learned to «ignore» them I wanted to hurl the book across the room every time. Still, engaging. (Sent as a rabck.)

After the Quake – Haruki Murakami
A bookring on bookcrossing and one of those 1001 books. This reminded me why I don’t like short stories (just when I start getting interested, they end), but I like Mr. Murakami’s way with words, so I will try him in novel-form when I get the chance.

Frost on My Moustache – Tim Moore
Funny.

The Careful Use of Compliments – Alexander McCall Smith
Isn’t it a lovely title? And isn’t it a lovely book?

Boksamlere forteller
An interesting anthology I found at an «antiques» fair. And by interesting I mean that the existence of such a collection intrigued me, especially printed in 1945. The book itself was unfortunately mostly dull. I normally love reading people’s descriptions of their collections, so I’m not sure why it should be so, but there it is.

June to October

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Dreadful. And now I can hardly remember what I’ve read all summer (and autumn…). I’m bound to leave something out.

Anyway:

The Imperfectly Natural Baby and Toddler – Janey Lee Grace
Interesting and contains lots of tips for things I hadn’t heard about before, but reads a blit like a list of weblinks at times (this is good for usefulness but for readability? Not so good.)

First Among Sequels – Jasper Fforde
Brilliant, but missing something that I can’t put my finger on. Still, definitely brilliant. Just not quite perfect.

A Widow for One Year – John Irving
Yay! I finally got around to finishing a John Irving novel! I brought A Widow for One Year to Austria planning to release it once I’d finished, but somehow didn’t get as much reading done as I’d intended. For a long time I thought I might just leave it even if I didn’t finish, as I didn’t feel compelled to keep reading, even half-way through the book, but that would have entailed having to buy something else to read, and I never found anything I wanted to buy. By the time we were packing our bags to go home I only had a couple of hundred pages left, and found that the story had grown on me and that suddenly I could hardly put it down. Strange stuff. I might just have to buy some more Irving (especially if I find more cheap second-hand copies like this one).

Death at La Fenice – Donna Leon
A bookcrossing copy I picked up in Vienna. Pretty entertaining, I’ll probably read more Leon.

The Sound and the Fury – William Faulkner
On the 1001 books list. I can see why.

Intimacy – Hanif Kureshi
Also on the 1001 books list, which is why I read it. That is, I read the story actually entitled Intimacy, and struggled to get through that, despite its relative briefness and it’s status as a «classic». I’m sure it’s a brilliant portrayal of a middle-aged guy planning to leave his wife, but I just thought it was dreary. I then read the following story in the book, something Night-ish, and found that it was basically about a middle-aged guy who’d left his wife. And then I gave up. I’m sure I’m at fault rather than Kureshi, we all have our hang-ups and one of mine is that my empathy fuse blows when you mix infidelity into the story and so I fail to connect with the characters at all, which takes the fun out of it.

So Many Books, so Little Time – Sarah Nelson
Unfortunately not as good as I’d hoped. As many of the other readers of the bookcrossing-copy I read I would have liked more books and less life, I guess, but my main gripes were with Nelson’s way of presenting herself and her reading. Firstly, she talks about her «discovery» that you really don’t have to finish books you don’t like as if it’s something profound – a rite of passage, «growing up» – which rather irritated me, but then she goes on to say that she doesn’t want to discuss or give her opinion on books she’s given up on. What? You read 200 pages of a 400 page novel and then decide you really can’t be bothered to finish it, but you maintain that you don’t have the «right» to say that the book sucked (or wasn’t quite to your taste) since you didn’t stick with it to the bitter end? Seriously, if a novel doesn’t manage to capture your attention sufficiently to make you finish it has fundamentally failed in its object and you’re entitled to say whatever you like (well, ok, I’d stay away from such statements as «the ending sucked» if you haven’t actually read the ending, but you know what I mean…). It made me suspect that Nelson really hasn’t «grown up» and that she’s still uncomfortable about leaving books unfinished, for all her protestations that this is something she has learned to do. The other is with the project itself: She reads books for a living, for goodness sakes, and still 50 books a year seems to have been a daunting task? Even last year, when I really didn’t read a lot, I read that much, and I’m up to 43 (and two halves) this year, despite giving birth in January (which everyone told me would be the death of reading novels, as I’d never be allowed to, or indeed able to, concentrate for long enough). I’m not impressed.

The World According to Bertie – Alexander McCall Smith
Perfect, as usual.

The Complete Polysyllabic Spree – Nick Hornby

Oops. It’s been a while…

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Ah well.

After American Pastorale, I reread the Aubrey/Maturin series for the umpteenth time, so that accounts for about two months…

Since then I have no excuse, except it’s hard to keep both a baby and a laptop on your knee at the same time. Anyhoo, I’ve been reading:

Citizen Girl by Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus – not a high point. It’s engaging, but seems rather pointless and left me feeling that it lacked any sort of conclusion.

Nattelangs av Gro Jørstad Nilsen var noe meningsløs. Ingen god reklame for norsk litteratur denne heller. Er det bare jeg som er uheldig eller står det så dårlig til?

Matilda, litt av en robot av Philip Newth. Ny Matilda-bok! Litt skuffende, riktignok. Historien hang litt dårlig sammen, synes jeg, særlig har jeg vanskelig for å godta at robotene skulle kunne ønske seg følelser dersom de ikke har en slags følelser allerede (kan man ønske seg noe hvis man ikke kan føle?). Vanskelig å si om Newth er blitt dårligere eller jeg eldre… Det finner jeg vel ut om noen år når det er på tide å begynne å lese Matilda-bøkene for ungen.

The Beet Queen by Louise Erdrich – a reread, as it was one of the few books I could find on my shelves with a botanical word in the title and therefore useful for Alvhyttan’s May Flowers / Botanical Challenge 2007. Hence this is going to be bookcrossed shortly, but I wanted to reread it first. As usual with Louise Erdrich this story was magical and down to earth at the same time. Definitely an author to note on your TBR-list if she’s not already there.

Uncle Dynamite by P.G. Wodehouse – Wodehouse being Wodehouse, this was funny and clever.

I’m sure there’s more… In which case I’ll add them later.

American Pastoral – Philip Roth

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When I was admitted to hospital for observation rather unexpectedly because of high blood pressure in the last week before my due date, Martin had to be sent in to the town centre to provide reading material, as we had both, inadvertently, left home without a book. Philip Roth’s American Pastoral was not a bad choice for an emergency read. The novel is engaging and touches on some profound issues around identity and image. However, I found it ended somewhat prematurely, I would have liked another few chapters to «round off» the narrative. I assume Roth has his reasons for ending the way he does, and I suppose, in retrospect, I can see that it makes sense on some levels. And it should not put you off reading the book.

I finished American Pastoral while waiting for the inducing of the kid’s birth to take effect, and the next book I picked up was Master & Commander. Jupp, I’ve started my – uhm- is it fourth or fifth? – reread of O’Brian’s Aubrey/Maturin series, so if I do not update the bookblog for a month or two (what with a newborn baby in the house, there is limited time available for reading) you’ll know why.

Yikes!

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It’s been so long (12 November?!) that I’m not even sure I can remember everything, never mind which order…

Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation by Lynne Truss – while I agree with the zero tolerance approach, this book didn’t quite do it for me. Not quite funny enough, and not quite extreme enough. Or something.

Faster, They’re Gaining by Peter Biddlecombe – entertaining enough, but that’s about it (will be bookcrossed).

A Good Man in Africa by William Boyd – received as a RABCK. I loved the film when I saw it years back, I struggled somewhat with the book, though. I think it’s probably just my old problem of needing to empathise with the main protagonist and, frankly, Morgan Leafy is not the most appealing of characters… However, as Morgan «grows» as a character, I get more caught up in the story, so that by the end I’m beginning to forget about the struggle with the first half (or so). Still, not, I think, Boyd’s best (and I’ve only read two).

The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne – Uhm. Yeah. Classic, you say? Why? Not my cup of tea. For one thing I find it hard to believe that ANYONE (let alone a seven-year-old child) ever spoke like that.

Ikoner i et vindu av John Erik Riley – Tja. Ikke dårlig, bare ikke særlig bra. Hovedproblemet, kanskje, er at de forskjellige fortellerstemmene lignet alt for mye på hverandre til å være særlig overbevisende som forskjellige fortellere. (Blir bookcrosset.)

The Arm of the Starfish by Madeleine L’Engle – another RABCK. Pretty enjoyable, this, but I agree with rednumbertwo who sent it to me that the religious/spiritual overtones were a little hard to swallow. Not giving up on L’Engle, though.

No Logo by Naomi Klein – a reread prompted by the Husband reading it for the first time. Somehow it’s stayed with me for longer and been more fundamentally upsetting this time round, probably because of the pregnancy. It seems worse, somehow, to contemplate the baby wearing clothes sewn by children or even adults in sweatshops than wearing such clothes myself (though I hardly like the latter thought). I suppose it’s a good thing to become more «hung up» on such issues, but it’s certainly made shopping a lot more difficult…

Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman – clever and entertaining, and a quick read as it was quite difficult to put down for any amount of time.

Pappa for første gang av Finn Bjelke – kjøpt til mannen i julepresang (kjempeoppfinnsomt, sant?). Lettlest (vi hadde begge lest den innen utgangen av 2. juledag) og underholdende, men med noen gode poenger (tror jeg da – vi får se hvordan realiteten blir…).

ABC for spedbarnsforeldre av Nina Misvær – sikkert nyttig…

The Baboons Who Went This Way and That by Alexander McCall Smith – another collection of folk tales from Africa.

The Outlaws of Sherwood and Spindle’s End by Robin McKinley – McKinley was a pleasant discovery. The Robin Hood version caught my eye, as I collect Robin Hood versions, and since they were both on sale and Spindle’s End looked intriguing, I bought both. In The Outlaws of Sherwood we meet a Robin Hood like no other Robin Hood I’ve ever come across. It’s a more realistic novel than any other Robin Hood novel I’ve ever read, and the characters are all more human and fallible. Much as I love the legend of the (almost) invincible outlaw, I hugely enjoyed this fresh take. Spindle’s End is Sleeping Beauty retold, with surprising twists to the tale, and rather a lot of «embroidery», seeing as filling a novel with just the basic tale would be rather difficult. It’s pretty and competent embroidery, however, and is to be recommended. I’ll be looking for more McKinleys – and not just on sale, either.

Vita Brevis av Jostein Gaarder – jeg nærmest skummet gjennom denne. Kanskje fortjener den mer oppmerksomhet, men jeg er ikke så sikker (nok en bookcrossing-bok).