The Book of Strange New Things - Michel Faber

Peter Leigh is a man with a mission - literally! For this mild-mannered Christian minister to be selected to cross the galaxy to preach to and live among an alien race, this is the opportunity of a lifetime. But Peter leaves behind his beloved wife, Beatrice, and while he's out living the dream, Bea is trapped in a nightmare. How can a marriage survive such a distance?

In a literary culture saturated with dystopian futures, Oasis is aptly named as a seeming Utopia. It takes Peter a while to adjust to its days that are three times as long as an earth day, the peculiar regularity of the rains, and the crops and creatures that grow on the planet. The people themselves are difficult for him to connect with, at first; the way they look is hard to picture, the way they speak impossible to translate onto the page, and some of their words and consonants are pictured in symbols the reader has no frame of reference for. I was reminded of last year's film Arrival, where the linguist has to try to communicate with an alien race without any way of translating their language.

But that doesn't really matter. The Oasans are reserved, but kind-hearted, open and eager to hear Peter's message, and the work he puts in to translating the Bible into language they can understand and words they can pronounce is truly a labour of love. They open their hearts and homes to Peter; building a church together and working at the harvest. Probably this is the easiest missionary work ever. It all seems too good to be true. For the pages and chapters where Peter is alone among the Oasans, there seemed to be no conflict at all. And as someone who has studied the craft of writing, this made me uneasy. You just can't have a story without conflict. When, and how, was it going to go wrong?

That question is answered when Peter gets back to the base and reads his messages from Bea. All is not well on Earth. Every message from home brings news of some great catastrophe, whether a natural disaster, economical collapse or political chaos. And it is this dissonance that is the emotional heart of the novel. Like Peter, at first, you can compartmentalise what is happening on Earth, and on Oasis. The events are shocking, but you only hear about them from Bea, and the story you see first-hand is Peter's. And then Peter goes back to the Oasans, and you can relax a while and just enjoy the headway he is making with getting to know these people. That's what feels real.

But you just can't put your spouse to one side like packing a toy away in a cupboard until the next time you want them. They have their own lives, and a relationship must become strained if both parties are living in different realities. Tensions grow between them, as back at home Bea is overwhelmed by personal tragedy, professional struggles, social unrest and religious doubt, all things that Peter can't be whole-heartedly part of. It is devastating to read their messages (conveyed by a primitive email system called The Shoot) as they try to reach out for each other.

The Book of Strange New Things is powerful because of its authenticity. I don't know if Faber's writing was informed by any personal religious faith but Peter and Bea felt real, presented with compassion and with no impression of being seen from the outside. Both have overcome painful pasts to become a strong, supportive team at the heart of their community. Their love for each other quite literally spans the universe. And yet a love story does not end with the "happily ever after." The best relationships have their downs as well as their ups, and require a lot of work. Love is a choice, not just a feeling, and a choice that a couple has to make day after day after day. The Book of Strange New Things ends in one way just as you might hope, and yet there is a bittersweetness to the ending because it is not neat, it is not easy, and it is not over yet. But such is life. Faber has taken a gentle, quite simple tale and made of it an extraordinary examination of humanity, of what is worth living for, of faith, hope and love.

Rereadathon the Third: Part two - Saturday 26th - Wednesday 30th March

Saturday:

I finished American Gods yesterday, and although I've read it several times now, I'm feeling a hint of a book hangover; I can't get Shadow and Laura, Wednesday and Mr Nancy and all the rest out of my head. I spent the evening yesterday at a 50th birthday party, which was a really lovely evening, and read most of the stories in Through the Woods, a collection of gothic fairy tales in comic-book form. I left the last one until this morning, however. I remembered being really creeped out by one of the illustrations, and didn't really want that to be the image left in my mind after lights out. Yes, I'm a wimp.

And today I've got stuck back into Anne of Green Gables. If I must buy lots of different editions of my favourite book since childhood, it's only right that I read each one, and I've got a lovely collector's library, pocket-sized with gold edges and illustrations. I know that book inside out. If I found myself in the dystopian world of Fahrenheit 451, where books are banned and live on only because people memorise them word for word, Anne would be mine. I don't know it word for word,  and yet I can identify it from a half-glimpsed sentence on an e-reader screen. I can tell if the wording is slightly different from one edition to another. This copy I'm reading today has Marilla saying she didn't want a "Barnardo boy" instead of "'home' child," which was the wording I knew from my existing three copies. When was this changed?

It really struck me today how little legal protection orphans had back in the nineteenth century, when Anne of Green Gables was set. For one thing, Marilla and Matthew just decided the night before, that if Mrs Spencer was going over to the orphanage in Nova Scotia to adopt a child, she might as well pick one up for them too at the same time - like she's running grocery errands for them. There's no paperwork, they don't even need to go to the orphanage themselves to be assessed (hence the mix-up when they wanted a boy and got Anne instead.) Yes, Matthew and Marilla are good people, but they could be anyone. Mrs Spencer doesn't even take Anne all the way to Green Gables, but drops her off at the Bright River railway station in a strange place where she knows no one.  There's no follow-up; once Anne's off the hands of the orphanage trustees, we never hear from them again. If it weren't for Marilla's change of heart, she could have been fobbed off onto the awful Mrs Blewett and worked half to death, and no one would have any record of where she went or what happened to her. It's all rather sombre to think of what could have happened, if the story had gone differently.

Saturday Stats

Books read from: Through the Woods - Emily Carroll

Anne of Green Gables - L. M. Montgomery

Pages read: 202

Books finished this week: 2

Favourite reread so far: American Gods. 

On the menu: tuna couscous pot, apple, easter egg

Sunday and Monday

Although it's currently quite sunny, the last couple of days have been very temperamental weather-wise with Storm Katie hitting yesterday evening. (I had nothing to do with it, I swear!) So the usual Easter walk has been postponed, and I spent most of yesterday afternoon finishing Anne of Green Gables. What makes Anne stand out from the other children's books of the late 19th and early 20th century, is the way that L. M. Montgomery captures the spirit of childhood in a rural community. Anne is neither sickeningly good, nor do the scrapes she gets in read as though written as a moral lesson to the reader. Montgomery gently laughs at Anne's eccentricities, but does not diminish the soaring highs and crashing lows that might seem mundane but are important to the child. Anne is one of life's optimists, but you read enough sorrow between the lines to keep the sweetness from becoming cloying; the down-to-earth humour keeps Anne's precociousness from becoming twee. She's a bright, sparky child who has survived a tough life - having to care for her former foster mother's eight children (with twins three times in succession) while little more than an infant herself - through the escape of books and imagination. So it's heartwarming to see her delight as she discovers the simple pleasures: eating ice cream, sleeping in a spare-room bed, and to finally discover people who love her unconditionally. 

I've no idea how many times I've read Anne. As a child I would read the same books over and over and over again, and a family friend's enduring image of me is reading that book, with my hair in pigtails and wearing a straw summer hat. But it still has the power to make me laugh and love and cry. I cried twice yesterday, once when the uptight, repressed Marilla half-grieves that Anne has to grow up, and the other time - well, you know which part!

Today, (Monday) I switched off my alarm and let myself sleep as late as I liked (which was pretty late) although the weather outside gave me some strange and frightening dreams. As I've already said, I've been getting into a routine even on days when I'm not working, but bank holidays are different. Today I ought to take a break from the rereadathon to catch up with The Stand for this week's readalong segment with Judith (which reminds me, I need to type up last week's notes.) But I also want to get started on my reread of The Charioteer. 

Sunday Stats:

Books read from: Anne of Green Gables - L. M. Montgomery

Pages read today: 267

Total books finished: 3

Favourite reread so far: American Gods and Anne of Green Gables tie

On the menu: hot cross buns, Easter egg (seeing a theme here?) apple, sour cream and garlic Graze crostini snack

Monday Stats:

Books read from: The Charioteer - Mary Renault
Pages read today: 220
Total books finished: 3
Favourite reread so far: American Gods and Anne of Green Gables tie, but The Charioteer is up there too. Look, they're all excellent! That's why I'm rereading them.
On the menu: Bit of Rocky Road Easter egg, caramel shortbread, apple, Graze snacks.

Tuesday and Wednesday:

It's the last evening of the rereadathon, but I could quite happily do another week, and maybe I will, unofficially; I've still got Monstrous Regiment and Miranda Hart's autobiography, as well as others which got added to my mental list after the books I did read - notably, Anne of Avonlea and Anansi Boys. Yesterday (Tuesday) I spent the evening away from the rereads, as I was a bit behind on my reading of The Stand, although I came back to The Charioteer for another chapter before bed, and over breakfast this morning. The problem with having two books on the go at once - especially when they are two good books - is that you can't choose which one to pick up. But for now, I think I'll aim to finish The Charioteer by the end of today. I'm feeling a little sleepy, however, and might fall asleep quite early.

(Later)

I finished The Charioteer at about 11PM, and I think I'm more satisfied with the ending on the second reading. Although I've concluded it is a happy ending, I find myself wondering about how the story will continue past the last page, and how much of a rollercoaster ride the characters are in for when the book is closed. I don't think that their problems will go away as easily as they, or we, would like. But they will endure the storms together, of that much I'm sure.

I am writing about these ink-and-paper people as if they are real, alive today, and that the next page is tomorrow, despite The Charioteer being written in the 1950s and set in the 1940s. That's the power of books, and why we like to return to books we've already read - to reacquaint ourselves with old friends, and try to know them better. When I was about 17, I read an author's afterward for a novel I studied at school, where they wrote something along the lines of, "People keep asking me what happened to the characters after the events of the book. Nothing happened! It's a story! They don't exist off the page!" I'm certainly misquoting this author's words, and probably misrepresenting what they were trying to say, but it was the message I took away, and I've never quite forgiven that author since. 

Tuesday Stats:

Rereadathon books read from: The Charioteer - Mary Renault

Rereadathon pages read today: 31

Other reading: The Stand - Stephen King

Total books finished: 3

Favourite reread: Anne, American Gods (see above)

On the menu: Apple, Bit of Easter egg, Graze cheesey corn snack

Wednesday Stats:

Rereadathon books read from: The Charioteer - Mary Renault

Rereadathon pages read today: 168

Other reading: The Stand - Stephen King

Total books finished: 4

Favourite reread: See above

On the menu: Special K cereal, chocolate brownie bites.

Final summary:

Books read: American Gods - Neil Gaiman
Through the Woods - Emily Carroll
Anne of Green Gables - L. M. Montgomery
The Charioteer - Mary Renault
Pages read: 1592
Best reading day: Sunday (267 pages)
Average: 159 pages per day

Thanks again to Bex for hosting the rereadathon. I've really enjoyed it. Another one in the autumn perhaps? 

Elizabeth is Missing - Emma Healey

Maud gets muddled about all sorts of things these days, but she is sure of one thing: Elizabeth is missing. In her obsession to find out what has happened to her friend, Maud's quest takes her back to a long-forgotten mystery from her past.

Elizabeth Is Missing hit close to home, making me think of my own grandmother, who is 92, and growing increasingly forgetful and confused. And like Maud, she has very fixed ideas that no one else can quite work out where they came from. But they make perfect sense to her. It did not help matters that Maud's daughter in Elizabeth is Missing was named Helen - my mother's name - and her granddaughter Katy (though they were very different people from my mum and me.)

It was a courageous choice on Emma Healey's behalf to write this book entirely from the point of view of an elderly lady with some form of dementia. Written in the first person, the prose is in a sort of stream-of-consciousness, a mixture of past and present as Maud gets her thoughts confused, with gaps between scenes, and the search for elusive words (which may turn up in the next paragraph as if they were never missing.) Each sentence is in the present, although we can observe where it contradicts the thought that Maud had just a couple of lines back. We get to experience Maud's frustration and fogginess while seeing what she forgets, as she forgets it. This fictional view inside a fading mind encourages empathy, patience and understanding. Maud's world is not the same as the one she physically inhabits, but is a world of the mind, of past and present perceived as fluid and changing. 

Maud's memories are bound up in repeated behaviour and in objects, which take her back to a time in her past, in the 1940s, when her sister Sukey disappeared. Her recollection of seventy years ago is far more lucid than her short-term memory, which just will not retain information. She will latch onto small details, ask strange, apparently meaningless questions, such as where would be the best place to plant marrows? As well as the memories of her family, their lodger and her missing sister's lodger, a "mad" woman recurs in her flashbacks, making scenes, but for the most part seemingly unrelated to everything else Maud remembers. As well as perhaps being a parallel to her elderly self, one wonders if the "mad" woman's strange behaviour will be the key to unlocking the mystery. And ultimately the clues were in plain sight all along, if only Maud (and the reader) could figure out what they meant. 

Elizabeth is Missing was an excellent book to start 2015 with, a compassionate psychological study, and a compelling and satisfying mystery. A remarkable, perfectly-crafted debut. 

Perfect - Rachel Joyce

In 1972, two seconds were added to time. Could this be to blame for what happened next? Eleven-year-old Byron Hemming thinks so. Byron is a bright, imaginative child, and he worries about the effects that could come of humans meddling with something so constant as time. When his mother, running late on the school run, takes them on a detour, something terrible happens, and with his friend's help, Byron hatches Operation Perfect, a plan to put everything right. But can perfection be achieved - and if so, at what cost?

Viewed from the outside, Byron's family life might appear perfect. He lives in a big house, is sent to an exclusive public school, and his father has just bought his mother a swanky new Jaguar. But money cannot buy happiness. Rachel Joyce presents the Hemming family as viewed through the eyes of a child on the edge of adolescence, narrating what he sees and leaving the reader to understand what is shown and not told. Byron's father, Seymour, lives away from home during the week, working hard to earn piles of money, shower his wife Diana with gifts which he then uses as power over her. Diana acts the part of the dutiful wife, but this fancy lifestyle is not suited to her nature. We see Diana only from her son's perspective, but her character is brought to life as much by what is concealed as what is shown: the hints and secrets of the past of which she can never quite let go.

Perfect is a very British novel, examining attitudes towards class and social mobility, and making the reader think very carefully about their own preconceptions. We see this in the aftermath of the accident, when Diana befriends Beverley from the dreaded Digby Road, who seems to be exploiting Diana's feelings of guilt for her own gain. But I didn't feel quite comfortable to accept this interpretation of Beverley's behaviour, expecting the author to throw in a plot twist that declared: "Aha! You're just as prejudiced as Seymour and Diana and the other mothers!" On the other hand, is it completely patronising to refuse to accept that a lower-class person can be a scheming, conniving piece of work just as much as a wealthy person? Either way, the relationship between Beverley and Diana is completely toxic, and as the book progressed, I felt the absolute certainty that the plot was building up to something dreadful. Rachel Joyce teases us with the idea that a conflict was resolved, more or less, before opening up another can of worms.

Between the chapters about Byron's summer of 1972 are those of another story. Set in the present day, this other story follows a man called Jim, who has spent his entire adult life in hospital being treated for obsessive-compulsive disorder and possibly other mental disorders. Jim is now in his fifties, living in a van and working in a supermarket cafe cleaning tables. His days are dictated by rituals, and he still lives in the shadow of a terrible event of his youth, which could be connected to the something dreadful of Byron's summer. It seems clear where Jim's story fits beside Byron's, if not the details of how, but somewhere near the end started to question my assumption. The story as I understood it did not quite gel, and there came a powerful dawning realisation before the big revelation came. The novel is made all the more poignant by the joining of the two halves. I cried.

Deceptively simple in style, Rachel Joyce's prose is powerful and hard-hitting, yet it is not without hope or beauty. Perfect leaves the reader with a lot to think about and to feel, concerning family, class and mental illness, the power of friendship, the nature of time and the struggle for an impossible perfection.

Perfume: The Story of a Murderer - Patrick Süskind

Just these last few weeks, it has seemed as though the whole world wanted me to read Patrick Süskind's Perfume: The Story of a Murderer. After joining in with a customer about the merits of real books over e-readers, his parting words to me were to recommend this book. My friend had been talking about the movie adaptation, and then Ellie mentioned it as a really challenging book in reply to my comment on one of her posts. Lastly, it emerged that my latest acting "discovery" Ben Whishaw had starred in the movie adaptation. And I couldn't see the film without having read the book. Only Shakespeare is exempt from that.

Perfume starts slowly. Really slowly. We are treated to pages and pages of descriptions of smells, every scent in Paris that you might be able to think of. Scent is, of course, a hugely evocative sense, and this forms the basis of the novel, however, I'm not quite sold on how convincingly it can be described with pen and ink. But though slow, these descriptive pages are compelling. It is easy to describe the appearance of things, but there are all the other senses, and Süskind has chosen to focus on one not widely used in literature.

Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, Perfume's protagonist villain, is a very unusual sort of character, even from birth. Those who ought to look after the infant Grenouille are repelled by him in ways they cannot describe, other than that he smells of nothing. Yet his own nose is remarkable, able to identify the subtlest scents, and this one sense occupies his entire mind. He is utterly alien, lacking in human qualities, a psychopathic nose. There is nothing relatable about Grenouille, and yet he is pitiable. Süskind seems to use scent as a metaphor for the soul, and Perfume leads one to ponder on the nature-versus-nurture debate, presenting the uncomfortable idea of a person innately evil. Grenouille moves from place to place, and bad things happen to those he leaves behind. No explicit connection is made, but Grenouille leaves a trail of misfortune behind him, leading back even to his mother, which adds to the sense of menace.

Perfume does not end where you might think it should, and I found the expected denouement to be anticlimactic. When compared with the pages of description earlier in the book, the "finale" is prosaically described, lacking all tension. There is a sense of inevitability of events, with Süskind making no attempts to keep the reader guessing. I came to realise (thanks to my friend's comments) that this is actually incredibly clever, because, after all, this is how Grenouille sees the world. The smells are everything - human actions, life and death, mean nothing to him.

But just when I thought the ending was all wrapped up, the plot takes a horrifying turn by showing not just the evil in Grenouille's character, but the depravity he inspires in his fellow man by the seeming of purity. Perfume is a slow-burning novel, which took its time to grab my attention, but one that lingers, turning out very dark and unsettling indeed.

1Q84, Haruki Murakami

The year is 1Q84. This is the real world, there is no doubt about that. But in this world, there are two moons in the sky. In this world, the fates of two people, Tengo and Aomame, are closely entwined. They are each, in their own way, doing something very dangerous. And in this world, there seems no way to save them both. Something extraordinary is starting.

This review could be considering spoilery, if the above book blurb is all you have to go on.

1Q84 follows the lives of two characters, Aomame and Tengo, who are living very different lives in Tokyo. Aomame is a fitness trainer who doubles as an assassin, and who finds her world ever so slightly but significantly wrong after taking a shortcut off the expressway when running late for an "appointment. Tengo is an aspiring writer with a part-time job as a mathematics teacher at a girls' school. When offered the morally dubious task of rewriting a fantasy novel by an enigmatic child prodigy for a literary competition, Tengo finds himself embroiled deeper and deeper in trouble that has little to do with the legal ramifications of fraud. To his dismay, he starts to realise that this extraordinary tale of "Little People," who spin air chrysalises to hatch - essentially - changelings, a secretive cult, and a world with two moons, is not fantasy at all, but autobiography. And the Little People did not want to be written about.

Murakami keeps you guessing about how Tengo and Aomame's stories fit together, as they spend much of the book going about their lives without any kind of interaction or indication that they have ever met. Their worlds don't fit together neatly at first, and in fact I wondered at least once whether they even inhabited the same reality. There are parallels between the two characters' lives, and I would be just on the verge of thinking I knew how they worked when a small detail would seem to throw me off the scent again. The world, or worlds, of 1Q84 shifted and were just a little off-kilter for a while, before Murakami began to answer the questions raised.

The influence of Murakami's "Little People" can be felt throughout the novel, though they are rarely seen and never explained. Are they malevolent fairies or demons? When we do actually meet them, it is in a haunting, surreal scene that unsettles the mind for a long time afterwards. Despite the vagueness of the "Little People," they seemed more vivid and real than any other part of the story - it felt impossible to me that the human mind could make this up. In a New York Times interview, Murakami explained that "The Little People came suddenly. I don’t know who they are. I don’t know what it means. I was a prisoner of the story. I had no choice. They came, and I described it. That is my work." An unsettling thing to read, considering the catastrophic consequences of writing about the Little People in 1Q84. Within the book, Murakami blurred the lines between fiction and reality so well that it even spills into the mind of the reader.

The world of 1Q84 really held my imagination for a long time after I finished reading it, but the story itself was far from flawless. In three volumes, it is too long, with a lot of unnecessary exposition - book 3 introduces a character whose main role is to discover all the things the reader already knows. The characters often don't act or think like real people at all, but are quite clearly doing what they have to in order to fit the plot, rather than the plot evolving naturally from the characters' actions, and the leaps of logic with which characters solve mysteries are ridiculous. Tengo has a memory of Aomame, as a child, looking at the moon, and takes this thought as a message that he needs to look at the moon - and wait! There are two moons! Which automatically means a lot of other things are instantly to be taken as fact, not fiction. Characters somehow arrive at unlikely but true conclusions with very little reason to lead them there, and Aomame "just knows" an impossible thing can only be caused by another, specific, impossible thing.

And, though I can believe in Little People, parallel universes and two moons, I cannot suspend my disbelief enough to be convinced that two people, who interacted precisely once, twenty years ago, in fifth grade, can have a "connection" that means that they are each other's lost love, destined to be together.

All in all, I had a love-hate relationship with 1Q84. It began and ended well, and was full of   extraordinary moments. I felt a thrill every time Aomame noticed something not-quite-right about her new world, and the Little People were among the weirdest things I've read in recent times. But ultimately, the questions were more satisfying to see asked than answered, and the fantasy world was more interesting than the characters or the story itself.

Before I Go To Sleep, S. J. Watson

Memories define us. So what if you lost yours every time you went to sleep? Your name, your identity, your past, even the people you love - all forgotten overnight. And the one person you trust may be telling you half the story. Welcome to Christine's life.

(Cover blurb for Before I Go To Sleep.)

I'd had my eye on this book since it was published, and when I boxed up nearly all my books in order to decorate my bedroom this week, I borrowed this from the staff library at work. Although I'd read books about characters with amnesia before - and even made a half-decent attempt at writing one - Before I Go to Sleep was something altogether new. Christine Lucas wakes every single morning having to learn everything about her life and the world from the last twenty years - sometimes more. Before reading this I wondered just how Watson was going to manage to tell this story; how the reader would learn with Christine and not have to endure endless repetition as she rediscovered everything anew. Watson manages this with a simple solution: Christine's journal, which she reads before adding to each day, meaning that we are on the same page, as it were.

Before I Go To Sleep is a deep insight into what it must be like to live with amnesia: the fear and horror of not knowing anything, the world being a strange place, and discovering each day that you're twenty-odd years older than you thought. There were almost time-travel elements, as of course the world has changed a lot in the past decades. Where the world has changed gradually, to Christine it happens all at once, and she has to come to terms with the existence of mobile phones, photoshop, the Gherkin and London Eye - and living in a post 9/11 world without any understanding of the significance of that date - or knowledge that it is a significant date at all. "I must have missed so much," Christine writes. "Disasters, tragedies, wars. Whole countries might have fallen to pieces as I wandered, oblivious, from one day to the next."


Being a book all about memory, there are inevitably plenty of flashbacks, which are rather disorientating to read. Christine's mind is a very intense, confusing place to be, and the flashbacks can read like actual, physical shifts in time. Her perception of the world is a mishmash of past and present, real and imagined, and filling in the gaps where memories ought to be - but aren't.

The storytelling is very well-paced, with questions answered at satisfactory intervals - and with every question answered, another two are raised. The most straight-forward resolutions to mysteries add to the suspicion by posing another question: if this is the truth, why lie about it or conceal it up until now? Before I Go To Sleep is an intelligent, well-written thriller and psychological study that keeps you turning the pages wanting to know just what's going on. Although I had guessed at a major twist early on, it was revealed to give me a sense of satisfaction for figuring it out, rather than disappointment with the author for not being cleverer than me - a rare achievement.

Wonder, R. J. Palacio

I won't describe what I look like. Whatever you're thinking, it's probably worse.

Ten-year-old August Pullman is off to school for the first time, after being taught at home all his life. It would be a scary time for anyone, but Auggie draws attention. He has severe facial disfigurements that no one can help noticing. And for the first time, he will be constantly surrounded by people noticing, or trying very hard not to notice how he doesn't look like the other kids. Wonder is a simple, heartwarming story that follows Auggie and his friends and family through his first year at Beecher Prep School.

I defy anyone to read this book and not love Auggie. He is a bright spark, a good-natured and generally optimistic kid, although of course his situation gets him down at times. But with the support of a loving family, kind teacher and good friends, he gets through fifth grade and comes out the other side. Wonder is told from multiple viewpoints, a character-driven rather than action-filled novel that portrays the ups and downs of being ten - a ten-year-old with a particular and unusual set of difficulties, certainly, but one that can resonate with anyone who's been ten. I remember vividly the woes of still being a child when my classmates fancied themselves all-grown-up, just like Auggie and his friend Summer:

One of the things I'm not loving about this year is how a lot of the kids are acting like they're too grown-up to play things anymore. All they want to do is 'hang out' and 'talk' at recess.

After a lifetime of putting Auggie first, saying to herself, "hey, at least I don't have things as bad as him," his sister Via has her own worries. She, too is struggling with life at a new school, with friends who have drifted apart, a new boyfriend, and trying to find her own identity away from being "Auggie's sister."


Wonder is a superb book, and I would recommend it to anyone from about ten years old upwards. Although it shows that kids can be thoughtless, and adults can be ignorant - which is worse - it also reveals the best in human nature: kindness, family, friendship and loyalty. We can all learn a lot about acceptance and tolerance - not just from the characters around Auggie, but also in his attitudes to them. He is wise and forgiving, aware that people will double-take when they see him, no matter how kind they might be.

Like, it's okay, I know I'm weird looking, take a look, I don't bite. Hey, the truth is, if a Wookiee started going to school, I'd probably stare a bit! 

It was easy to love Auggie by reading about him on the page - but I was challenged to think about how I would treat him or think about him if I were to meet him in the street, or interact with him on a daily basis. Because, after all, Auggie is just a kid like anyone else. He may face challenges that others don't have to deal with, and that's not fair, but behind his face, he's just a ten-year-old boy with a Star Wars obsession.

To me, though, I'm just me. An ordinary kid.But hey, if they want to give me a medal for being me, that's okay. I'll take it. I didn't destroy a Death Star or anything like that, but I did just get through the fifth grade. And that's not easy, even if you're not me.

I was sent this book by Ellie from Musings of a Bookshop Girl. Thanks Ellie! :)

February mini-reviews.

Hi everyone. Despite my lack of blog posts recently, I've actually been reading a lot, I just haven't had an awful lot to say about any of the books. However, I felt it was about time to share some thoughts on a few of the things that I've been reading.

Sandman - Neil Gaiman

Since discovering that one of the Island libraries has nearly all of the Sandman graphic novels, I have been making regular trips and marching through the series, before passing them on to my friend. There is a wide variety in the style and format of stories, like an elaborate patchwork quilt: one volume will be a long narrative, and the next made up of short stories. Some star the titular Sandman, Dream, and his Endless siblings: Destiny, Death, Delirium, Desire, Despair and Destruction, whereas in other volumes they only appear occasionally, around the edges of the stories, so to speak.

I'm currently up to vol. 8: Worlds' End, in which travellers from all through time, space and contradictory but co-existing realities find themselves stranded by a storm in an Inn, in which they occupy their time by telling stories of all flavours and styles. But the storm is not an ordinary storm, but a "reality storm" caused by something strange and rare and unexplained. When the tales have all been told, the travellers go to the window and see a strange thing in the sky, a thing that none could explain or understand, but somehow we all, reader and character alike, could sense that things were never going to be the same again. Behind the pages of the stories told in Worlds' End, another story has been taking place, a story of enormous significance, hidden from the eyes of the ordinary - extraordinary - folk who dwell in the Sandman universe(s) and yet to be revealed to the readers, no doubt in volume 9.

I felt almost afraid to turn the page,
fascinated but scared of what I might see in the sky.

By this point, Sandman has become more than "just a comic book" to be a masterpiece of storytelling, in any format.

Submarine -  Joe Dunthorne

Submarine is a coming-of-age tale of Oliver Tate, a precocious teenage boy, an account of his relationships with family, friends and girls, and his observations of the world around him. It is an intelligent, somewhat poetic read, and one which led me back to my Superior Person's Book of Words to indulge the word-nerd tendencies that I share with the narrator. However, I didn't altogether like Oliver - he was a rather obnoxious kid - and the scenes in which he participated in the bullying of a classmate were an insurmountable barrier between me and the book, and Dunthorne seemed to rely too much on cringe-comedy and explicit content for my tastes - possibly appropriate for a tale about a teenage boy. I'm not saying that I entirely disliked Submarine, but I don't feel that I have gained anything from having read it, and shan't be rereading or watching the film.

The Hunger Games - Suzanne Collins (reread)

When I first read the series a couple of years ago, I wrote, "I'm not sure that The Hunger Games is as amazing as the hype had led me to believe, but it is a very good book, and it was a lot better than the book blurb and my reading taste came together to expect." Catching Fire won me over, and evidently the story lingered in my brain, because over the last months I've had dream after dream about being in that arena, about being Katniss Everdeen. With the hype mounting for the new film which comes into cinemas next month, I am still undecided whether or not I actually want to see it. 

The trailer is amazing. Watching it, I felt tears stab at my eyes a couple of times, when Katniss shouts in desperation and love for her sister: "I volunteer!" and the salute to her from the citizens of District 12. And yet - there is a movie already in my mind that I feel a fierce attachment and loyalty to. Flicking through The Tribute Guide which came into bookstores recently, I nearly shouted aloud, "You are NOT President Snow!" (Donald Sutherland is an excellent actor and I am sure he will play the part admirably, but he is not my President Snow.) Some pictures looked perfect, while others I judged as "too sci-fi." Jennifer Lawrence is almost Katniss, Josh Hutcherson a passable Peeta, Gale I never had a very strong image of, so he'll do. Rue. Cinna. Effie Trinket. Prim. All fine. Great, even. It looks a like a great movie. 

But I'm still not certain. The concept of the book - children killing each other for entertainment purposes - repelled me, and watching it as a film takes you closer to the real experience, the discomfort of knowing you'll be watching the Hunger Games recreated, rather than reading about them. (Maybe that's just me.) And the other thing: I have a phobia of wasps - can't even say or type the word without flinching, and there is a horrific scene with mutant wasps, or "tracker-jackers." Is this spheksophobia strong enough to deter me from watching the film?

Reading The Hunger Games the second time around, I realise that Katniss' affections could go either way, being manipulated and fabricated before she's really aware that she has any romantic feelings, being formed by her circumstances. Interestingly, on my first time reading the books, if I had any strong opinions on the matter, I suppose I was slightly in favour of Team Peeta, whereas this time I'm veering more towards Team Gale. I wonder what has changed.

Wish Me Luck - Margaret Dickinson

I picked up this cosy wartime romance in a charity shop years ago, and forgot that I'd even got it until yesterday, when I wanted a break from the doom and gloom of Panem. I have little time for romance, whether that be Mills and Boon, or chick lit, but occasionally I'll make an exception for a sweet story from the "granny" section of the bookstore, wartime romances, family sagas, usually seeming to take place in World War 2 Liverpool. Wish Me Luck is the story of Fleur, a WAAF (women's branch of the Royal Air Force) girl who falls in love with an RAF officer. Their relationship is marred, not only by the dangers of being in love during wartime, but by their parents, whose own pasts are intertwined by secrets long gone but never forgotten.

Wish Me Luck is a light, easy read. Dickinson's style is simple but warm. She hooked me with the mysteries and kept the plot twisting so that it wasn't predictable. She recreates 1940s Lincolnshire and Nottingham well, peopled with a likeable, well-rounded cast. With one exception. Fleur's mother was too unpleasant, a bitter, shrieking harridan who is never given much development or redemption, and towards the end, I felt that the story tailed off a little. Of course it is inevitable that any book set on the home front of World War 2 is going to feature some sort of tragedy, but it all seemed to come at once, like an avalanche of heartbreak, all at once. Still, Wish Me Luck is a very sweet, "nice" sort of story over all, and despite the deluge of disaster before the happy ending, just the sort of book to cheer me up when I was feeling low.

The Gum Thief, Douglas Coupland

I wanted to fall in love again, I realised. Not with a man. I’m far too lazy and selfish right now to arrange my life around another person’s. I’m too fond of going where I want, doing what I want, when I want, acting on the spur of the moment without having to be accountable to someone else. No, what I wanted was to fall in love with a story. To discover something brand-new that grabs me by the brain and imagination and takes me entirely by surprise. Something that would mean my life would not be quite the same after having read it.

Seeing Douglas Coupland’s The Gum Thief in the library, I wondered if, perhaps, this might be The One. I had vague memories of my friend Anna recommending Mr Coupland - possibly JPod - and Girlfriend In A Coma has been on my to-read-maybe-one-day list for so long I can’t even remember why any more. My friend Anna is very clever and a bit nerdy but in such a way to make it cool, and she likes Neil Gaiman and has purple hair. If she recommended Coupland, maybe I would like him too. Anyway, I’d give him a try. The blurb on the back hooked me: “Bethany discovers Roger’s notebook and finds that he’s writing diary entries pretending to be her - and weirdly, he’s getting it right.”

Of course, when you go looking to spontaneously fall in love and be taken by surprise, you’re doomed to failure. The Gum Thief is entertaining and voices many truths about Life, The Universe and Everything™ - especially if you’re stuck in a dead-end job in retail - but ultimately, I did not connect emotionally with the book. When reading, the pages passed quickly, with multiple narrators and short chapters to keep interest, but I didn’t feel a great urge to return to it when I’d put it down. The book’s tone was subdued. Roger is in his forties divorced and disillusioned, while Bethany is a twenty four year old goth living at home with her mother, with vague plans of visiting Europe with her new boyfriend, but no real plans for the future. I could identify with Roger’s and Bethany’s observations in their working life in a Staples superstore, and I liked the characters well enough, but somehow I felt distanced from their world.

As well as Roger’s and Bethany’s diaries and letters to each other - interspersed with the occasional letter from Bethany’s mother and other Staples employees, many chapters of The Gum Thief are chapters from Roger’s attempt at a novel: Glove Pond. Unfortunately, this novel is bad. Deliberately bad writing - at least deliberate on Coupland’s part - full of dry dialogue, telling-not-showing, faux-intellectual ponderings on life and creative but not quite successful imagery. And when so much of a book is full of bad writing and pretentiousness, even as a literary device, the lingering impression I take away from reading the book is - bad writing and pretentiousness. Glove Pond colours The Gum Thief - or perhaps I should say it sucks out all the colour, leaving a white and grey, cold and somewhat empty-feeling novel.

Or, conversely, maybe the fictional-within-fiction Glove Pond helps to draw attention to what colour does exist in Roger’s and Bethany’s apparently bleak, dull lives. It makes the chapters written by them interesting by comparison. Time will tell which of these contradictory impressions of The Gum Thief is stronger in my mind.

A Little Stranger - Candia McWilliam

When Daisy needs a nanny for her toddler son, she thinks 22-year-old Margaret Pride is perfect: sensible if a little old-fashioned and reserved, firm but immediately beloved by the child. Yet as the new nanny becomes established in the household, her behaviour doesn't always quite add up, and it becomes apparent that Margaret is not all she seems.

Perhaps I was influenced by having read the back blurb of the book, but from the very first pages I did not trust Margaret. Although narrator Daisy describes her in positive terms: "pretty," "warm," "eager to please," Margaret's own actions and words come across as stiff, stuffy and unnatural. Her first words are a firm triple negative: "No. Never. Not at all." She says "I am," and "I do not" instead of the more natural-sounding "I'm" and "I don't," and her emphasis on neatness - wanting to wear a uniform to work, shunning jeans - makes her seem much older than her young age. These small details, though subtle, put a distance between Margaret and the reader. She never quite seems comfortable, and as such, I never felt comfortable around her. As the book progresses, Margaret's behaviour seems strange, sometimes suspicious, but Daisy seems completely oblivious. I found myself wanting to shout at the narrator for not seeing through her nanny's facade.

McWilliam sets many parallels between the two women. Daisy, after all, used to be used as a nickname for Margaret, and as Margaret weasels her way into the heart of the household, Daisy retreats from the family. Margaret takes on a role as substitute mother for John, and mistress of the house. And it's not only Margaret who isn't all she seems. Daisy, in her seeming oblivion, is an unreliable narrator, and we learn more from what she shows, rather than what she tells us.

A Little Stranger is an intriguing book with a menacing atmosphere. At 145 pages, it is more of a novella than a novel, yet it still took me a while to read. It is long enough for Daisy to spend chapters navel-gazing, reflecting upon her past, and much of the prose is heavily tinted in purple. I felt at times that McWilliam tried too hard to be "literary." Daisy's world seems very old-fashioned, set in an upper middle-class home with nannies and other servants. Except for a few references to (for example) cassette tapes, I would have place this story in the early 20th century, between the wars.

Hothouse Flower, Lucinda Riley

Hothouse Flower is another Richard and Judy Book Club choice, and the seemingly obligatory "green one" with a cover design of hedges and a door, gate or archway, which tells two stories from two eras which turn out to be linked, probably by an old family in a huge English country house. A few years ago we had Kate Morton's The House at Riverton and in the autumn was Rachel Hore's A Place of Secrets. I found myself wondering why Richard and Judy seemed to choose someone else's version of the same story - at least, the same framing story. Like in A Place of Secrets, Hothouse Flower starts in the modern day, when a newly widowed woman - this time a concert pianist called Julia - retreats to Norfolk, where she grew up descended from staff at an old house, Wharton Park. There, she meets a kind and handsome young man and discovers an old diary.

I took a while to get into Hothouse Flower, as it all felt very familar. I clearly found it quite slow at the beginning as I was ruthlessly picky about the style, noticing run-on sentences and finding the dialogue quite unnatural. It wasn't until we were sent back in time, through the discovery of the diary of Lord Harry Crawford of Wharton Park, that I got immersed in the story itself. We're taken back in time to upper-class society in 1939, young debutantes preparing for "the Season" and looking for husbands, against the clashing backdrop of oncoming war. We follow the courtship and marriage of Harry Crawford and Olivia Drew-Norris, but the couple can barely get to know each other before Harry is whisked off to fight in the Second World War.

We don't get to see much of the War itself, instead, after an interlude concentrating on Julia's twenty first century romance with the current Lord of Wharton Park, the book skips forward to 1945, when Harry is released from being a prisoner of war in Thailand. Riley doesn't dwell on Harry and the other men's suffering, but instead shows their effects on Harry afterwards, as he recovers from serious illness. There are gorgeous descriptions of ife in Bangkok in the aftermath of the war, and through Harry's affair with a hotel employee, Lidia, Riley explores the conflicts that can occur between love and duty. With Rachel Hore's novel, my one complaint was that everything was resolved too easily, with too many tidy coincidences tying up the loose ends. Lucinda Riley does avoids this trap, with her plots getting messy, seemingly with no good ending. I found it somewhat uncomfortable reading at times, with the troubling suspicion that the author wanted to take the side of the adulterous couple, that sexual love should rule at the cost of everything else. Then, back in the 21st century, Julia finds herself in a situation that seems to have no happy ending. The plot gradually draws together the strands of past and present, with plenty of twists in the tale, echoes of past in present, before the two stories become parts of a whole.

Compare:
The House At Riverton - Kate Morton
A Place of Secrets - Rachel Hore
Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
Atonement - Ian McEwan

Mini-reviews 2: Grace Williams Says It Loud & Feet of Clay

Another post with a few thoughts on two more books I've been reading at the same time. Like the last two, these couldn't be more different!

Grace Williams Says It Loud, Emma Henderson

I bought Grace Williams at Waterstone's bookshop on a special offer for customers who use the Orange mobile phone network. It is an account of a life inside the Briar Mental Institute, from the point of Grace, a mentally and physically disabled girl. We follow Grace through her life from before her arrival at the institute aged eleven in 1957, through to the 1980s when she is living with carers in a smaller house. Although Grace has difficulties communicating with others, leading to dismissive attitudes from outsiders and even staff, she is observant and thoughtful, and the novel focuses particularly upon her friendship and romance with Daniel. Narrated in a sometimes stream-of-consciousness style by a girl limited by her lack of speech, Grace Williams can be a little claustrophobic and jarring in the contrast between how we see Grace - from within her own head - and how others see her, as a hopeless simpleton. Grace Williams Says It Loud is a challenging and sometimes disturbing but compassionate novel from a new author.

Feet of Clay, Terry Pratchett

My favourite Discworld books are by far the "Watch" sub-series. We first meet Ankh Morpork's City Watch in Guards! Guards! which takes place at a turning point in the Watch's history. At the beginning of the novel there are only three people foolish enough to police Ankh Morpork: drunken Captain Samuel Vimes, solid and thick - in every definition of the word - Sergeant Fred Colon and Corporal "Nobby" Nobbs - who was "disqualified from the human race for shoving" and needs a certificate to prove that he is (probably) human. The three remaining watchman have a settled lifestyle of plodding the streets, ringing a bell and saying "All's Well!" and looking away when, in fact, all isn't well. Enter new recruit Carrot Ironfoundersson, two metres tall, who when he was sixteen had to be informed by his father, a dwarf, that he was in fact adopted. Carrot knows the rulebooks inside out and, to Vimes' dismay, thinks that the watchmen should actually be fighting crime. Carrot's arrival is the catalyst for a complete overhaul of the City Watch into a force to be reckoned with. The second book in the sub-series, Men At Arms, introduces new recruits of nearly every species (but no vampires) into the force, and by Feet of Clay it has become a vital cog in Patrician and Tyrant Lord Vetinari's well-oiled machine that is Ankh Morpork.

In brief, Feet of Clay is - to use Friends terminology - the one with the golems, the one in which Lord Vetinari is poisoned and the one that introduces Cheery Littlebottom, the first dwarf to "come out" as female. (Of course there are female dwarves, a necessary evil for the continuation of the species, but it wasn't something dwarves really talked about, except for a few delicate conversations when courting.) Feet of Clay raises questions of personhood and slavery: are golems - clay-baked workers - machines or people? If machines, they have no moral responsibilities and cannot be arrested for committing crimes, any more than a sword can be arrested. If people - then their owners/employers have some serious thinking to do! The book is full of scathing comments on social hierarchies and comparisons of human "breeding" with farming. Full of Pratchett's trademark biting satire and groan-worthy "punes, or plays on words," there is also a brilliant whodunnit, howdunnit mystery with some wicked red herrings. In my opinion, Feet of Clay is one of Pratchett's finest stories.

Affinity, Sarah Waters

Upper-class Margaret Prior, after recovering from a long illness, takes on a position as “Lady Visitor” to the women’s wards at Millbank Prison. There, she meets Selina Dawes, a professing medium, imprisoned for fraud and assault. Margaret becomes fascinated by Selina and as the two women grow closer, she finds herself drawn under Selina’s spell. But is Selina a clever fraud, or does she really possess unearthly powers?

I’ve read two of Sarah Waters’ novels before this one: The Little Stranger which I loved, and The Night Watch which left me cold. Although ser in the Victorian era, Affinity has a lot in common with The Little Stranger, with its eerie atmosphere and possibly – possibly not – supernatural elements. Waters’ prose is beautiful, immediately drawing me into the story, creating an atmosphere of suspense and perfectly recreating the language of the era, so that I could quite believe I was reading a contemporary of Charles Dickens or Wilkie Collins. The novel is written in two plot threads: the main story being presented as Margaret’s private journal of 1974, interspersed with entries from Selina’s medium’ log book from a year or two previously, which showed how she came to find herself in prison.

Much of the story takes place in Millbank prison, which is where the two women meet and interact. Waters describes the harsh, dehumanising conditions of the Prison, again, in a Dickensian manner. Margaret’s role as “Lady Visitor” is to befriend the prisoners and exert a good influence over them, to encourage them to repent of their crimes and reform their lives, yet the contrast between her and them seems too big for this to be more than wishful thinking on the part of the prison authorities. Margaret’s first encounter with Selina highlights the seemingly insurmountable differences between Visitor and prisoner – yet, in many ways, she is not so different from them after all. Margaret is outwardly a dutiful daughter, sedate, proper and genteel, but beneath that veneer she is frustrated, imaginative and highly-strung. Ultimately, Selina is the character with the influence.

Waters’ exploration of Victorian Spiritualism made a fascinating novel. The common conception of the Victorian age is rather a puritanical one, everyone being prim and proper and with the urban myth of people covering their piano legs for modesty! But it was also an era of discovery, and people found the world as they knew it quite turned upside-down. Anything might be possible! Affinity, like the two aforementioned classic, is a proper gothic novel, creepy and eerie, with seemingly clear lines blurring, between life and death, madness and sanity, real and imagination. I did not quite trust Selina through this novel and racked my brains trying to work out how she managed her “tricks,” or whether she was a genuine medium. There seemed to be no natural explanation for her accomplishments.

But were my suspicions of Selina right? In The Little Stranger, Waters leaves the ending ambiguous, and I wondered whether she might do the same here, to leave the reader to work out for themselves what had happened. Does Waters answer all the questions? Well, Affinity is such a wonderful read, I couldn’t possibly spoil it for you – you’ll just have to read it for yourself. All I will say is that there was a wonderful twist at the end, one that Waters has set the plot up for, and yet you shouldn’t see it coming. Affinity is a gorgeous and very satisfying tale, and I’m keen to get my hands on the rest of Ms Waters’ work. An excellent novel.

 

If you liked this you may enjoy:
The Little Stranger, Sarah Waters
Little Dorrit, Charles Dickens
The Woman in White, Wilkie Collins,
Film: The Illusionist

Norwegian Wood, Haruki Murakami

Whenever Toru Watanabe hears his favourite Beatles song, “Norwegian Wood,” his mind is taken back to the late 1960s, when he was a student in Tokyo. In particular he relives his relationships with two girls: vulnerable, damaged Naoko, the girlfriend left behind by his best friend Kizuki, who took his own life aged 17, and lively, curious Midori who is Naoko’s opposite in every way.

Norwegian Wood is first and foremost a story about memory. It’s quite difficult to comment on the prose, as being a book in translation, I’m not sure whether to credit the author Murakami, or translator Jay Rubin. Still, the narration is beautiful and poetic. In the descriptions, I felt the effect of a lazy, sultry summer afternoon, as if lying in a meadow and watching the world go by. There is a haunting sense of the sadness of time gone by, lost loves and missed opportunities.

In Watanabe we have a protagonist who is drifting, unsure of what he wants to do with his life. He is an ordinary youth at a time of revolution: he watches his fellow students protest about the “established order,” then slink back to class so as not to fail their course. Watanabe is a student of drama, more out of a vague curiosity than because he has any passion for the subject, a rather world-weary, bored character who describes university as “a period of training in techniques for dealing with boredom.” He is somewhat of a loner, going through to high school making up a third with Kizuki and Naoko. After Kizuki’s death, he and Naoko clung together as if for safety, but when they have spent only one year at university, Naoko takes “leave of absence” and is taken to a sanatorium for mental health.

When compared with Naoko, Watanabe himself, or anyone else, Midori stands out as someone fully alert and alive amongst a cast of sleepy drifters. She is rather a breath of fresh air, a childlike character in her curiosity and frankness. Despite being rather sex-obsessed and starting horribly inappropriate conversations at the worst times, there is a sort of innocence about Midori that is very endearing in a world of “phonies.”

Immediately after I jotted down that thought, a throwaway line from Midori jogged my suspicions as it echoed from another character’s history, and I expected a plot twist that never came to pass – much to my relief, for it would have completely changed my feelings towards one of the most central characters, and not for the better.

Read for the Support Your Local
Library 2011 challenge



Usually, love triangles bore me, and I have little patience with a character torn between two people. If it’s not obvious who you should be with, I reason, then should you be with either? In Norwegian Wood, however, I felt sympathy with Toru Watanabe’s dilemma. Naoko and Midori were so different, yet both were such important parts of his life. His choice seemed so impossible.

Norwegian Wood is the first book I have read by Haruki Murakami, and it is described as being very different from his usual style – a coming-of-age novel and a romance – or several romances. I understand that most of his books have more surreal or supernatural elements to them – but this is something I would be perfectly happy to find out for myself.

Norwegian Wood has been made into a film which is released in the UK on Friday.