A bout of rereading again. In a few short weeks I got through Strong Poison, Have His Carcase, Gaudy Night, Busman’s Honeymoon and Thrones, Denominations. As delightful as ever and still touching me deeply, though in a somewhat different way than before (and yes, Martin is to blame for that).
Kategori: Authors
Under en hårdere himmel
Chilling reading in these warmongering times, though the main point Bjørneboe attempts to make deals with the aftermath of war (WW2), rather than war itself. Still, it’s hard not to hear echoes of current argumentation when he states that facts, and even opinions, lost all significance, the only argument anyone was interested in was which party you belonged to. «You say two and two makes four? Where do you pledge your allegiance? I knew it! Keep away from me with your propaganda!»
And both (all) parties are equally guilty.
I am, as usual, reminded that there are piles of books in Norwegian I have neglected in my anglophilia. And as usual I promise to make amends. Let’s see if I stick to it for once…
The Dark Room
I once had an Indian pen-pal who sent me two of R. K. Narayan’s novels, The Guide and Waiting for the Mahatma, both of which rather impressed me. I picked up The Dark Room second-hand somewhere, and finally got around to it when picking a book to read this weekend. It was a bit of a disappointment, frankly, nowehere as good as I remember the two others to be (which makes me think I probably ought to reread those). I think it will probably not survive the next move.
The Finer Points of Sausage Dogs
I was planning to wait and read The Finer Points of Sausage Dogs only after I’d got my hands on Portugese Irregular Verbs and so read them in the proper order, but it was lying so handily nearby when I was looking for a new book to start that I decided to be improper, just this once.
This, incidentally, is a book of the Laugh Out Loud variety. There is the unfortunate incident of the sausage dogs and the lecture and then there is the even more unfortunate incident of the sausage dog and the veterinary institute and towards the end there is the rather catastrophical incident with the sausage dog and… Oh, but that would be telling, so I’d better not.
The Sword in the Stone
I tried reading The Sword in the Stone once, ages ago, and never got anywhere with it. I only had to read a few pages in this time before I A. realised why I found it uninteresting back in the late eighties and B. burst out laughing. This may be common knowledge to the rest of you, but The Sword in the Stone is a seriously funny book. I always though it was a rather solemn tale of King Arthur’s childhood and ascension to the throne. However, I quite see that I would not have found it anywhere near as funny when I was twelve or so – a lot of it would simply have made a whooshing noise while passing over my head. But I know better now, and I intend to let the world know, starting with YOU. Go. Read. Now.
Eleanor Rigby
Coupland has done it again, though I would be hard put to tell you exactly what «it» is. I only know I find Coupland’s novels strangely compelling, Eleanor Rigby being no exception.
The Risk Pool
Another re-read, another of Richard Russo’s masterpieces. Oddly enough, The Risk Pool seems not to have been reissued in the new paperback editions of Russo’s works, you can still get hold of it second-hand, though.
The Sunday Philosophy Club
I was apprehensive to see what I’d make of McCall Smith outside of Botswana, but The Sunday Philosophy Club, luckily, did not disappoint. It doesn’t hurt, of course, that the setting is Edinburgh, a place I – unlike Botswana – already know and love. And then you’ve got to love a man who can write paragraphs like this one:
‘Perhaps,’ Cat had said, but she had been looking away then, at a jar of pickled onions – this conversation had taken place in the delicatessen – and her attention had clearly wandered. Pickled onions had nothing to do with moral imagination, but were important in their own quiet, vinegary way, Isabel supposed.
Isabel Dalhousie is a charming main character, on the whole, and to make it even better she might eventually make me understand cryptic crosswords. I am certainly looking forward to the next installation, if there is one, which I hope…
Olivia Joules and the Overactive Imagination
In which we are thrilled, but perhaps not in the way intended.
Olivia Joules and the Overactive Imagination by Helen Fielding is a strange book in that it is somehow both a romantic comedy of sorts and a thriller. I think it suffers slightly from the association with Bridget Jones, because the combination should not really be impossible, but because Bridget is so very… well… fluffy, Olivia somehow becomes fluffy by association, which really isn’t fair (not that I don’t love Bridget, you’ve gotta love Bridget, but she’s hardly a heavyweight, is she?). So the thriller never really becomes a thriller because you never really manage to take poor Olivia seriously (well, I didn’t, anyway). It’s still a cracking good read, though unlikely to become the cultural phenomenon Bridget did.
Blast from the Past
In which we are entertained, but not much more.
I brought Ben Elton’s Blast from the Past to Scotland this time, because I figured I probably wouldn’t want to read it again so once I finished it I could dump it. This proved to be an accurate assessment. I find Ben Eltons books entertaining but insignificant somehow. It’s not as if the points he tries to make are insignificant, it’s more that he doesn’t quite get through to me. Blast from the Past is about obsession and about corporate (though in this case the corporation is the army) politics, there is a stalker involved and it all gets very tense towards the end. Very entertaining, as I said, but nothing more than that.