Books update pt1
Right: Again, I haven't written up any books in ages, but I have been reading loads.
32: Arcadia, Tom Stoppard. A play, this. It's been very highly recommended, and I had high hopes, as a Stoppard fan, but... well, it was amusing enough, and quite clever, but it felt hopelessly contrived, and unlike plays like Albert's Bridge or Dirty Linen, I didn't find the characters sympathetic or even particularly interesting. The staging (always a strong suit of Stoppard's) was ingenious, but felt like it was his only really original idea. I might enjoy a live performance a lot more than reading a script, but I couldn't be sure.
33: The Winter Queen, Boris Akunin. This is the first of four historical novels about a naive young Russian policeman in St Petersburg in the 1870s, and it's absolutely cracking! the main character, Erast Fandorin, has been compared to James Bond and Flashman, but he's more charming, more enthusiastic, and less sadistic than either of those two. The plot is somewhere between a Robert Louis Stevenson thriller and a Sherlock Holmes story, which lurches somewhere along the way into a world-domination-sinister-Svengali-figure romp, and I finished it in a day. Apparently Akunin is regarded as something akin to a Russian John Grisham - if so, I can't wait to find the Russian Joseph Heller, because this writer is excellent. Another favourite of the year, and I'm saving the sequel for a bad day, because I know it'll cheer me up.
34: Going Postal, Mark Ames. First book of the holiday, it's an analysis of workplace massacres in the post-Reagan era, and includes a look at school massacres too. It starts well, Ames' argument that the brutal workplace environments in which the attacks took place were partly to blame for spawning them is hard to dispute, and his use of slave rebellions as allegory for modern workplace massacres is interesting and enlightening; however, his writing style is atrocious, he uses film quotations to illustrate his points, he repeats himself ad nauseam, he literally puts words into dead people's mouths, and he answers his own rhetorical questions with poor witticisms. Poor style in a social study, and highly inappropriate for such a macabre subject matter - academics who read this will feel queasy.
35: Mr American, George MacDonald Fraser. Absolutely delightful story of an American in England in 1909-1914. The attention to detail is absorbing, the atmosphere of wonder and joy that pervades the first half of the novel is infectious, and the disillusionment and hurt of the second half is heart-breaking. I rattled through it, and started to pace myself in the second half so it would last longer. Highly recommended.
36: Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe. Nigerian novel about a man who is banished from his village after he accidentally kills another tribe member, and returns home seven years later to discover that a Christian mission has turned up and is destroying the entire region's way of life. I wasn't quite sure what to make of this; the main character is deeply unpleasant, a man driven to coldness and brutality out of fear that he'll be tarred with his soft, lazy father's brush, yet the occasional glimpses into his internal pain and anguish are still moving. Similarly, the tribal culture seems not only primitive and ignorant, but it works for them, and seeing it undermined at the end is equally moving. A curious book, I'm still not sure how I feel about it.
37: Scoop, Evelyn Waugh. Entertaining satire of the newswire industry, in which a singularly unsuitable correspondent is sent by mistake to cover a civil war in the minor African nation of Ishmaelia. Similar writing style to Graham Greene, but is more concerned with setting up splendidly silly situations than in the inner turmoils of his characters. V. enjoyable, and great preparation for going to cover the Lib Dem conference in Brighton last week!
38: Animal Farm, George Orwell. Re-read this for the first time since school. Embarrassed that I completely missed the Stalinist angle the first time around. Okay, so I was only eleven at the time. I mean, I followed the story and everything, and I got the nuances like Snowball being killed by Napoleon's dogs, and the irony of the pigs becoming essentially human at the end, but Stalin and Trotsky! Who knew? Not me at age 11, certainly. Still, very clever. Very good to read in the current climate, too.
Right: I've read more, but I've been writing this for bloody ages. News update follows soon.
32: Arcadia, Tom Stoppard. A play, this. It's been very highly recommended, and I had high hopes, as a Stoppard fan, but... well, it was amusing enough, and quite clever, but it felt hopelessly contrived, and unlike plays like Albert's Bridge or Dirty Linen, I didn't find the characters sympathetic or even particularly interesting. The staging (always a strong suit of Stoppard's) was ingenious, but felt like it was his only really original idea. I might enjoy a live performance a lot more than reading a script, but I couldn't be sure.
33: The Winter Queen, Boris Akunin. This is the first of four historical novels about a naive young Russian policeman in St Petersburg in the 1870s, and it's absolutely cracking! the main character, Erast Fandorin, has been compared to James Bond and Flashman, but he's more charming, more enthusiastic, and less sadistic than either of those two. The plot is somewhere between a Robert Louis Stevenson thriller and a Sherlock Holmes story, which lurches somewhere along the way into a world-domination-sinister-Svengali-figure romp, and I finished it in a day. Apparently Akunin is regarded as something akin to a Russian John Grisham - if so, I can't wait to find the Russian Joseph Heller, because this writer is excellent. Another favourite of the year, and I'm saving the sequel for a bad day, because I know it'll cheer me up.
34: Going Postal, Mark Ames. First book of the holiday, it's an analysis of workplace massacres in the post-Reagan era, and includes a look at school massacres too. It starts well, Ames' argument that the brutal workplace environments in which the attacks took place were partly to blame for spawning them is hard to dispute, and his use of slave rebellions as allegory for modern workplace massacres is interesting and enlightening; however, his writing style is atrocious, he uses film quotations to illustrate his points, he repeats himself ad nauseam, he literally puts words into dead people's mouths, and he answers his own rhetorical questions with poor witticisms. Poor style in a social study, and highly inappropriate for such a macabre subject matter - academics who read this will feel queasy.
35: Mr American, George MacDonald Fraser. Absolutely delightful story of an American in England in 1909-1914. The attention to detail is absorbing, the atmosphere of wonder and joy that pervades the first half of the novel is infectious, and the disillusionment and hurt of the second half is heart-breaking. I rattled through it, and started to pace myself in the second half so it would last longer. Highly recommended.
36: Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe. Nigerian novel about a man who is banished from his village after he accidentally kills another tribe member, and returns home seven years later to discover that a Christian mission has turned up and is destroying the entire region's way of life. I wasn't quite sure what to make of this; the main character is deeply unpleasant, a man driven to coldness and brutality out of fear that he'll be tarred with his soft, lazy father's brush, yet the occasional glimpses into his internal pain and anguish are still moving. Similarly, the tribal culture seems not only primitive and ignorant, but it works for them, and seeing it undermined at the end is equally moving. A curious book, I'm still not sure how I feel about it.
37: Scoop, Evelyn Waugh. Entertaining satire of the newswire industry, in which a singularly unsuitable correspondent is sent by mistake to cover a civil war in the minor African nation of Ishmaelia. Similar writing style to Graham Greene, but is more concerned with setting up splendidly silly situations than in the inner turmoils of his characters. V. enjoyable, and great preparation for going to cover the Lib Dem conference in Brighton last week!
38: Animal Farm, George Orwell. Re-read this for the first time since school. Embarrassed that I completely missed the Stalinist angle the first time around. Okay, so I was only eleven at the time. I mean, I followed the story and everything, and I got the nuances like Snowball being killed by Napoleon's dogs, and the irony of the pigs becoming essentially human at the end, but Stalin and Trotsky! Who knew? Not me at age 11, certainly. Still, very clever. Very good to read in the current climate, too.
Right: I've read more, but I've been writing this for bloody ages. News update follows soon.