Wrapped Up In Books

My musings on what I've read since January 2006.

Sunday, May 31, 2009

Shakespeare Wrote For Money - Nick Hornby

I mean, really. Who could possibly want to read the bletherings of some pommie Arsenal obsessive about the rubbish he's been reading that month?

No, er, hang on. Hope you're enjoying the blog. (Pauses, rethinks, starts again)

Hornby is always engaging and readable, and a bunch of the reviews here made me want to rush out and read the subjects but I'll probably forget by the end of my self-imposed new book ban.

I read this out to M, and she looked at me with great forbearance:

"Thierry Henry, my role model and hero and the man that both my wife and I wish had fathered our children".

Bloody Margaret: three political fantasies - Mark Lawson

The middle-class milieu, the characters set up to embody opposing points of view in debate, the unexceptional prose counterpoised by formal experimentation, the sadsack protagonist mixing the sexual with the ideological. Has David Lodge been copied enough to spawn the term Lodgian? That's what this is, albeit set in the world of 1980s UK politics rather than academia, specifically around the rise and fall of the SDP.

The first, longest story here is by far the best. Funny and thoughtful, and anything about Thatcher will have me interested.

Monday, May 25, 2009

The Europeans - Henry James

Another miniature from James in the same mode as Washington Square, but this never quite achieves the same exquisite brilliance. Some of the characters seem a little underdeveloped but the writing is lovely and there are some interesting ideas in the culture clash between a Bostonian family and their European-raised cousins.

Contains the word eleemosynary.

Bone: Rock Jaw, master of the eastern border

Another lazy weekend, another chapter of the Bone saga. I bit of a side trek this one, focussing solely on Fone Bone and Smiley's adventures in the mountains, and with a worryingly high cute quotient. I hope the next one has a little more meat, but I'm too far in to stop now.

Into The Wild - Jon Krakauer

Your reaction to this peculiar account of the life and death of Chris McCandless, a young man who wandered naively into the Alaskan wilderness to live off the land and starved to death, depends on your view of the subject. Was he a visionary, poetic adventurer or a selfish, arrogant fool who left behind a grief-stricken family. The author is very much in the first camp whereas I'm afraid that I tend towards the latter.

I suppose the tone is American Romantic, invoking Thoreau, Jack London and Kerouac in the whole "rejecting society by heading off to nowhere" thing. I've never got around to Thoreau but I've hated the London and Kerouac that I've read. My favourite art is about how people behave in society rather than about people rejecting society. Basically, I'm an Enlightenment kind of guy, I'm more interested in the majesty of the mountain rather than how the majesty of the mountain makes the individual feel. The sublime my arse.

The book is based on a magazine article which explains the journalistic tone, and the padding is all to obvious.

Tuesday, May 19, 2009

The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald

It's always interesting to reread a book. Certain things were still remembered specifically from my first reading in my faraway student days - the eyes of T.J. Eckelberg, the butler's thumb, poor Myrtle's ripped open chest. On the other hand, I'd virtually forgotten the actual plot, including it's violent denouement.

Anyway, if you haven't read it then do so. Fabulous writing and one of the indisputable American classics.

Monday, May 18, 2009

Seats In All Areas - Leslie Halliwell

Halliwell is to film reference books as Roget is to thesauri, so I was expecting his memoirs to be a series of movie anecdotes. In fact, it concentrates on his childhood in 1930s Bolton (which at the time boasted forty seven cinemas) and later adventures running a picture house in partnership with a dodgy bloke with a background in haulage. It's both evocative and informative about the British film industry either side of WWII.

Friday, May 15, 2009

The Biographer's Tale - A.S. Byatt

It is impossible to read The Biographer's Tale without being reminded of Byatt's masterpiece Possession, which similarly weaves together a romance with a discussion on the impossibility of biography (and, implicitly, the necessity of fiction). This book does not benefit from the comparison.

Byatt throws so many elements into the mix - taxonomy, bees, eugenics, Ibsen - that they fail to cohere into a central argument. That this seems to be the point is no compensation to the frustrated reader.

Monday, May 11, 2009

The Eye - Vladimir Nabokov

Does anybody still read Nabokov? He seems to have fallen off the agenda rather since I was reading a lot of his stuff back in the early nineties.

The novella has somewhat reawakened my interest. The prose is wonderful in its precision and ability to control tone, and the tricksy plot is intriguing.

2 Samuel

Rape, incest, massacre and loopily murderous divine justice. A typical OT book, then.

One entertaining facet of the Bible is the profusion of odd names but one in here will take some beating - Obededom the Gittite. Magnificent.

Leviathan; the unauthorised biography of Sydney - John Birmingham

Very much a study of Sydney's more sinister character, this is a fast-paced, funny and sometimes disturbing read. The structure is odd, defiantly non-chronological but thematically opaque, although this does allow for the odd impressive flourish. If the thesis is that Sydney's corruption is inherent in its convict camp DNA, then the segue from a punitive attack on an indigenous encampment in 1790 to a lethal police raid on an innocent aboriginal man's home in Marrickville in 1989 is a spectacular way to make your case.

Having read a fair bit about the city's earlier colonial days I was most educated by more recent events such as the jaw-dropping police corruption of the 1970s and a brief section on the hapless and hopeless anti-immigration parties of the 1980s, from which this typically in-your-face sentence comes:

"When Whitehouse blew him away, Bovver was wearing a singlet bearing the message: Say No To the New Gun Control Laws."

Arf!

Tuesday, May 05, 2009

Samuel 1

Haven't bibbled for a while, partly because I was anticipating that this would be something of a trudge. It's splendid though, featuring David and Goliath, a witch raising somebody from the dead, and a preoccupation with bodily discomfort - foreskins used to buy a wife, enemies inflicted with haemorrhoids and men who "pisseth against the wall". Pisseth!

Genocidal mania gets its usual look in too:

15:3 Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass.

Too right, God! No mercy to those suckling infants!

Monday, May 04, 2009

Sabbath's Theater - Philip Roth

In which we follow the life of Mickey Sabbath, puppeteer and thoroughly shameless dirty old man. The style is familiar to Roth readers - the basic facts are laid out early on in the narrative and the blanks are then filled in throughout the rest of the book in a dizzying series of flashbacks and timeshifts.

The prose is as spectacular as ever, but the emphasis on lust in the first half of the book is wearying. The second half is stronger, with the focus shifting to aging and mortality, and ultimately the riotous tone is modulated into something rather more affecting.