80 Books No. 10: Beautiful Creatures by Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl

Unhappy boy who doesn’t feel like he fits in meets a girl who is ostracised by the community. He becomes infatuated. It turns out the girl is magical and has some awful curse and her family are quite weird and she shouldn’t be mingling with a mortal. Their love is almost all conquering.

It sounds sort of familiar, doesn’t it? It could be Twilight by almost any other name. Piggy-backing on the heels of Stephanie Meyer’s series, is this series, but this time it’s Casters (sort of witches and wizards) who are the topic rather than the rather ubiquitous vampires of late.

I really wanted to see the film of this, but having subjected my friends to the Twilight saga (and wanting to store up some Brownie points for The Host at the end of March) I gave into peer pressure and gave up. When I saw the book going cheap in ASDA, however, I decided to buy it as I like magical stuff and the first page seemed reasonably engaging.

And engaging it was as a whole. It seems unfair to judge the book by the sparkly vampire standards, but it is almost certainly aimed at the same audience and has so many similarities that it would be silly to overlook them. So here’s my opinion of it compared to Twilight.

The narrator is infinitely less irritating. Bella Swan pouted and sulked and generally mardied her way through four novels, whilst Ethan at least comes across as a likeable enough bloke. He behaves in a generally decent, if slightly over-the-top way, falling for Lena almost before he’s had time to even quite catch her name. And you have to admire a boy who is willing to stand up for his girlfriend against the whole town.

The relationship is also less weird than Bella and Edward’s. Yes, Ethan and Lena spend almost every waking minute together (either physically or communicating psychically) but it doesn’t become the demanding moaning miserable mess that the Swan-Cullen alliance is. Even as the climax of the novel approaches, their relationship still maintains some charm and innocence.

The setting is more believable than Forks. I mean, how likely is it that an average high school would just be fine with the Cullens and not react to Bella’s downright odd-ballness? At least here we get the real bitchiness girls are capable of which would absolutely be directed towards Lena, not least because she steals one of the popular boys from right under the cheerleaders’ noses. The reaction of the community makes this a far more believable tale within the world it is set. No, Casters are no more real than vampires, but the situations in this book ring truer than Meyer’s world does.

The writing is generally better too. It’s not Pulitzer Prize worthy, and there are perhaps too many descriptions of how Lena’s hair curled, but there is not the endless description over how wonderful she is, and how amazing she is, and how incredible she is, which frankly drove me insane in Twilight. And after all, this is generally a teen-read: they’re not really looking for War and Peace.

Which brings me to some of the negatives. I would have said this was too long, at over five hundred pages, and with some dodgy pacing at times, but in all fairness, the novel does make good use of almost every chapter, introducing key characters and events which tie together. Perhaps the flashback sections could have been cut down as they weren’t entirely necessary, although perhaps they will be picked up on in the following three books in the series. The shift of narrator towards the end, whilst necessary due to events, was jarring and slightly lazy on the part of the authors in my opinion; had they decided they wanted to switch narrator, perhaps they needed to do this earlier in the novel to set it up to be more natural for the reader. This smacked of convenience. After this shift, the ending was a little wet and I would have liked a little more punch, but I suppose five hundred pages of engaging material is quite a feat.

So now the question is, am I going to read the next three? Part of me says yes, it would be nice to see what happens next, but a (perhaps larger) part of me says no. It was enjoyable enough and kept me reading late into the night, but I’m just not sure I care what happens to Ethan and Lena. I would guess that some great event will mean that they can be together, potentially forever, and probably some characters will die along the way, and good will triumph over evil… and I just don’t care.

So maybe Stephanie Meyer wins out in the end after all.

80 Books No.9: The Crow Road by Iain Banks

I best knew Iain Banks from a teenage flirtation with The Wasp Factory when I was doing my A Levels. It’s a pretty standard rite of passage for a Literature student to read the tale of child murder and then finish it with a ‘what on earth is wrong with this man?’ kind of reaction.

Since then I haven’t read another novel, assuming they’d all be quite depraved and depressing. Then, last week, I bit the bullet and borrowed The Crow Road from the school library. I expected a hard slog and for it to possibly be the first book I abandoned in 2013.

Instead, I got my read of the year so far.

Set in the lead up to the Gulf War, this is the story of a Scottish student called Prentice and the seemingly never-ending deaths in his family. Across the novel, no less than five members of his family meet a grisly end, beginning with his grandma who explodes at her funeral: I kid you not. This statistic becomes less shocking when you realise that the novel covers some forty years of life in a small Scottish village, ranging from Prentice now, to Prentice as a child, to his father as a child.

Finally, I’ve found a character I like in 2013. Prentice is far from perfect and not even that extraordinary: a history student who rows with his dad and drinks far too much. Yet he is endearing and a perfect narrator for this novel which is part coming-of-age, part murder mystery. The ending is a little messy and the whole premise does really hinge on an unlikely coincidence, but I didn’t care. I thoroughly enjoyed this from start to finish, even when it got briefly bogged down in the standard anti-Thatcherite politics that seem to typify books set in this era.

This was an accessible and easy read, and I think most people would enjoy it (whereas my next book might not appeal to most people over the age of sixteen…). It’s sort of a more intelligible Irvine Welsh novel with less drugs and more likeable characters.

I reckon this will make my top five of the year.

Farmyard Fridays #3: Why did the T-Rex cross the road?

So many T-Rex jokes, so little time. Poor fella. Funny how his tiny arms are cause for so much hilarity, but if he was human it would be completely un-PC and the sort of thing only Ricky Gervais and Frankie Boyle would tweet about. What’s more, I’d bet my Findus beef lasagne on the fact that nobody would be pointing and laughing if they actually came face to face with one.

Which leads me onto that other much maligned creature in jokes: the humble chicken. There are any number of embarrassingly terrible ‘why did the chicken…?’ jokes which would be simply too tedious to reproduce here. That’s all without mentioning the frankly hideous things both McDonalds and the Colonel do to chickens before covering them in batter and serving them up to drunken people who should know better. Somehow, chickens have become an animal it’s okay to laugh about, whilst horses are achieving some kind of saint-like status in our society.

But no more. Because I have some news. Admittedly not fresh off the press news, as this news was detailed in The Telegraph in April 2008: I’ve never claimed to be quick off the mark. This news however is something which may just blow your mind.

T-Rex. And chicken. Not a disaster waiting to happen, but in fact two ends of a rather large family tree.

Yes, chickens are one of the closest living relatives to Tyrannosaurus Rex, alongside ostriches. Now that you’ve thought about it, it does kind of make sense. Both of them walk in that slightly strange, I-may-be-about-fall-over kind of way; both of them have frankly cold, calculating, murderous eyes. And both of them have some pretty terrible jokes told about them. Which is where you came in.

Farmyard Fact #3: Chickens are the closest farmyard relative to Tyrannosaurus Rex.

Which makes this image a little more disturbing.

 

 

80 Books No.8: Thirteen Reasons Why by Jay Asher

I’m going to out myself as a Daily Mail website reader here by linking to this article in which they worry about the trend for ‘sick-lit’ aimed at young people. Thirteen Reasons Why, according to the DM, breaks the taboo about teen suicide. I do find it fascinating that it took until 2013 for the writer of this article to actually become aware of this book that was published in 2007, but let’s set that heel-dragging aside and focus upon the book itself, and whether it deserves to be labelled ‘sick-lit’.

I read a lot of teen fiction, mainly fantasy driven novels, partially because they are about all I concentrate on during term time: witness how long The Stand took me to read. I also actually enjoy them for what they are, maybe because in my head I’m still fifteen and quite melodramatic. I’ve read all The Hunger Games, the Chaos Walking trilogy and any Sarah Dessen I can get my hands on. Thirteen Reasons Why has been on my list of ‘want-to-reads’ for a while and just so happened to be written by somebody whose surname began with an ‘A’ and so came to hand when I started my newest trawl of the library shelves. It took me about four hours to read so from a progress point of view, it was clearly something which kept me hooked.

So, to the story: Hannah Baker kills herself. Weeks later, Clay receives a package of audio tapes on which she has recorded a message for thirteen people: the thirteen people she perceives to have been instrumental in her decision to take her own life. Clay is one of them and must listen to them before passing them on to the next person, or the whole school will hear all of the tapes. As a premise, it’s pretty adventurous; Asher sets up a dual narrative which interweaves in a way I’ve never seen before. The very fact that you already know Hannah is dead and therefore nothing Clay does will stop that should make the book less compelling, but somehow it didn’t. I still really wanted to know what Clay had done to force her down that path.

Of course, the very nature of these thirteen reasons raise issues over whether it is fair to blame anybody for someone’s suicide. My opinion is, no, never, but then Hannah is a teenager. Teenagers habitually blame others for their mistakes, and whilst no-one on Hannah’s tapes seems to have done anything too awful (apart from her 12^th reason), it’s a lesson for everybody in how what we do affects everybody else: the Butterfly Effect in some ways; It’s a Wonderful Life in others. Certainly, her thirteenth reason made me think about what I’d do in that situation, and it was a little uncomfortable.

The Daily Mail article suggests that books like these might lead teenagers to be depressed or even to attempt similar acts of violence themselves. I sincerely doubt that. Romeo and Juliet has never been proven to have a direct impact upon people’s actions after all. What’s more, Thirteen Reasons Why does not glorify suicide – Clay himself as narrator repeatedly asserts his anger with Hannah for what she’s done and how she’s trying to implicate others in it. But this book just might make people think twice about what they do, which can only ever be a good thing for young people.

Perhaps the most disappointing thing about this book is that the film is supposedly in production to be released this year - with Selena Gomez in the role. Sheesh.

80 Books No.7: The Daylight Gate by Jeanette Winterson

This book was lent to me when I was in the middle of The Stand, and when I’d finished that I wanted something far more easy going, so this book got relegated to the bottom of the pile. Having now caught myself up, this was the next one to read.

If you can’t tell from the above paragraph, I wasn’t really dying to read this. I’ve never got on with Jeanette Winterson. People rave about her and I just don’t get her, her writing largely leaves me cold. Now to be fair, in this book, I was impressed with some of her descriptions of people and places. I felt there was worth to them. To the actual plot – I’m not so sure.

It’s based on the true events of the Pendle Witches in Lancashire in 1612. Last year was the 400^th anniversary of these events, and so Winterson wrote this novella. Her descriptions of the environment and the events are good, creating a real sense of 17^th century rural Lancashire. It was interesting to have the two-fold fears of witchcraft and Catholicism brought together so succinctly, and to learn about an event which is apparently so famous but which I’ve never heard of before now. It was also a quick read, which is always nice when you’ve set yourself a target of 80 within the year!

Ultimately, though, it lacked soul for me. I didn’t care for or about any of the characters, perhaps because it was clear they were going to die pretty quickly. Roger Nowell was about the most interesting character in my opinion. Alice Nutter was admirable in her actions, but not drawn in enough detail for me to be that interested.

The historical event is worth reading into, not least because it shows how easily fear can be whipped up into something more (something the Daily Mail still plays on today), but unless you really like witches, Jeanette Winterson or both, I’d probably skip this.

80 Books No.6: Changeling by Philippa Gregory

Philippa Gregory is an odd one. Her Tudor Court novels are largely quite exciting and salacious and keep you reading, and yet if you try re-reading them her overlong sentences seem to hide some quite limited vocabulary at times. I didn’t really get into ‘The Cousins’ War’ series, after reading both The Red Queen and The White Queen, maybe because I didn’t know anything about that historical period and so lost interest.

My main problem with her is that I tend to believe her implicitly and so have a quite twisted view of British history.

This book was largely an okay choice, even if it was made by my mum on a whim to bulk out an order she was making. It’s Philippa Gregory; it’s young adult fiction; it’s about the Catholic church. It should be a win-win all round for me. It was enjoyable enough in places and I particularly liked the character of Freize.

Yet this book just seemed to expose Gregory’s apparently quite limited vocabulary: characters were constantly ‘demanding’ something. The plot sort of ambled around without much direction to it. There is an absolutely ridiculous scene involving nuns attacking people, and the word ‘wimple’ (always entertaining anyway) appeared so many times it was untrue; I couldn’t take killer nuns seriously when their wimples kept falling off.

Basically, I agree with everything this young reviewer said in The Guardian. I’ll probably keep reading the series if I can get hold of them, if only to find out who the ‘real-life historical figure’ they’ll meet is. I’ll admit it was interesting to find out so much about Islam at this time and how Islamic nations were at the forefront of educating women. However, I doubt I’ll be parting with cash in order to read them; I’ll pay more when Gregory buys a thesaurus.

80 Books No.5: The Night Circus

Last year, through some sheer hard graft and forcing myself to concentrate, I managed to read seventy-six entire books, starting the seventy-seventh on 29^th December. Loving reading doesn’t mean that I don’t sometimes need to persevere with a book more than I’d necessarily want to, and it’s almost always easier to flick idly around the internet than sit down with a book, but I can honestly say that I got more from those seventy-six books than I did from many a TV programme I watched last year.

So this year, I’ve sent myself the challenge of reading eighty books. This is one of my six challenges for this year (perhaps more of which in another post) and it may be the one which kills me as I’m already falling way behind schedule. Still, with some crafty selections of books (e.g. Where’s Wally?) I may be able to catch myself up.

So far, I’ve read:

1.    Spell it Out by David Crystal (29^th December 2012-2^nd January 2013) – the first non-fiction in over a year and a hard read at times. Interesting on some levels.

2.    Grimm Tales by Philip Pullman (2^nd-5^th January) – really enjoyable if you like fairytales and Pullman – I do, so it was good!

3.    Looking for Alaska by John Green (8^th-9^th January) – only because a student insisted and it was okay – pretty average teen stuff.

4.    The Stand by Stephen King (9^th January-3^rd February) – see previous post for my thoughts on this!

Book 5 of 2013 was The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern. The blurb on this gave almost nothing away, beyond the fact that it sounded magical and Audrey Niffenegger really liked it. This I met with some mixed feelings: I loved The Time Traveler’s Wife but Her Fearful Symmetry was one of the most disappointing novels I have ever read. Still, the cover of The Night Circus is pretty so I gave it a chance.

I’m really glad I did. This was magical and mysterious and romantic and charming all in one. There are certain books which have that certain something about them which whisks you away on a journey and when you finish them, everything seems slightly different. The Night Circus is almost one of those books for me, perhaps only missing out because there was no character I fully loved in the way I loved Inigo, Penelope, Charlotte and Harry in The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets. In spite of this, I enjoyed the story and the style in which it was written, not least the way so many mysteries were kept from both the characters and the reader. Even at the end, I still wasn’t 100% certain exactly what had happened but far from frustrating me, this somehow gave the circus itself more life, which was really what the novel was all about in the end

 

And if I haven’t convinced you to read it, it might be worth knowing Wikipedia uses the word ‘phantasmagorical’ in order to describe its genre. That alone surely makes it worth a read.

Farmyard Fridays #2: Findus 'Beef' Lasagne

Beef. Horse. Easy mistake to make, isn't it? Both have four hooves, both can jump over fences, both have a tendency to occasionally fall (or be tipped) over and struggle to get back onto all fours. To all intents and purposes, they are very similar animals, right?

Wrong, Mr Findus! You couldn't be more wrong. Horses and cows are very very different. You couldn't begin to imagine how different they are. It should have been glaringly obvious to Findus that what they were sticking into their vat of bolognaise sauce was not bovine but indeed equine.

And how should they have known the difference?

Simple. They should have looked at how the animals got up.

Witness. Here is a cow getting up from having a lie down in a field.

And here is a horse doing the same.

Perhaps this is why we don't like eating Shergar but we're happy enough to eat Ermintrude. After all, the pony above looks almost human-esque as he has a little sit down before continuing his arduous day of grazing, whinnying and generally prancing around. In contrast, the cow looks a bit ridiculous.

Either way, this is Farmyard Fridays Fact #2: Cows get up back legs first; horses get up front legs first.

For shame, Mr Findus.

In which size definitely matters

“If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.”
Oscar Wilde

I adore reading. Ironically, it’s been a part of my life since before I could read, via audio books and my parents reading to me, and I can barely remember a time since when I haven’t had a book on the go. Sometimes, my favourite thing about going to London by myself or to meet someone is that I get to read on the train and I feel completely vindicated in doing so as there is nothing more productive I could feasibly do (my relationship with technology being shaky at best).

 There are many books I can indeed read over and over again: Wuthering Heights, the Chronicles of Narnia, The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets, Little Women, and so many others. They’re like old friends I can fall back on whenever I need some comfort food.

On one level, I agree with Oscar Wilde’s statement above. Without knowing the context, I would fully concur that nobody should be discouraged from re-reading a book they’ve enjoyed. Yes, there are hundreds of thousands of other books in the world which you could be reading instead. Yes, life is potentially too short to read about Christian Grey’s sex-life in Technicolor detail once again. But it’s surely your right to be able to read something you liked as often as you liked: at least you’re reading.
 
Yet, taken another way, I’m not entirely convinced by Wilde’s thoughts. I’ve read many books once only and probably been more affected by them than some of the ones listed above. The Book Thief, for instance, by Markus Zusak, is a brilliantly wonderful novel which took me a while to get around to reading and which I thoroughly enjoyed when I did. The narrative style was so original and involving, the prose so beautiful. Yet I’ve never even tried to read it a second time. Similarly, I’ve never read the Regeneration trilogy by Pat Barker more than once, unless you count random extracts as part of exam papers. It’s almost as though I’m afraid that they won’t live up to the hype I’ve created around them if I were to meet them all over again. This doesn’t mean that these books hold any lesser place in my life than the Chronicles of Narnia – it doesn’t make them any less enjoyable.
 
And then we come to the other section of books which I enjoyed but would never even contemplate re-reading. The section I like to refer to as ‘the bricks’. For some unknown reason, the last two years have seen me reading increasingly large books. As just a quick sample of the kind of beasts I have read since January last year:
 
Freedom by Jonathan Franzen: 570 pages

The Passage by Justin Cronin: 1008 pages

11.22.63 by Stephen King: 752 pages

Under the Dome by Stephen King: 896 pages

The Stand by Stephen King: 1344 pages

 They’ve been varying in quality. Freedom I remember as being interesting in some places and yet utterly pointless in others; The Passage was engaging and had one of the most startling endings in a novel I can remember reading for a very long (made even more startling when I realised it was one of a trilogy, with 688 pages in the second part which hasn’t even been published yet in paperback). 11.22.63 was, frankly, amazing, bested only by Under the Dome which I read in about three days last summer.

And then we come to The Stand, the longest novel I have ever read. It took me nearly a month and in the end, it was almost a sense of not wanting to lose a battle which got me through. I enjoyed it. The characters were engaging, the storyline reasonably interesting, and King’s writing is almost always accessible. Yet I can’t help thinking I’ve missed something. By the time I finished it, I’d almost forgotten what had happened at the beginning. There were some chunks of it which just felt like filler – and indeed, to some extent, were filler as they were initially edited out of the first edition and were put back in about ten years later when the novel was success. In the foreword, King comments upon how pleased he was to share some unseen characters with the reader now and to bulk out those characters which already ‘existed’.

But I wonder why. I can’t help thinking it could all have been easier and quicker, and that in some way I’ve been cheated out of over thirty hours of my life by a self-indulgent need to cash in on an old novel. I’ve set myself a target of reading eighty books this year, and The Stand was only book number four; I fear to even attempt the maths to work out how many I now need to read per week in order to catch myself up!

What I’m trying to say is, I enjoyed The Stand. But there is almost nothing which could induce me to even attempt to read it again.

Life is definitely too short for that.

Farmyard Friday #1: Dogs can't look up...

'It's true. Big Al says so.'
'Yeah, Big Al also says dogs can't look up.'
(Shaun of the Dead, 2004)

Big Al is not strictly telling the truth. Dogs can indeed look up as Shaun affirms repeatedly throughout the film (although to a much lesser degree than humans can).

Pigs, however. Pigs are a different thing altogether. Pigs indeed cannot look up, as their neck and spine are designed in a way which only allows them to move their neck from side to side and reach ever so slightly upwards. They certainly can't look up at the sky - and, after all, what need does a pig have to look upwards anyway? As far as I'm aware, no bird of prey is ever going to be able to carry off an adult pig in the way they would a rabbit or mouse, and pigs are predominantly foragers, so their downwards facing head is perfectly designed for their rooting around for roots.

So, Farmyard Fridays Fact #1: pigs cannot look up.

Next week: cows.