The Homeward Bounders - Diana Wynne Jones

Diana Wynne Jones is an author that I've heard about from my best friend for most of my reading life, but only come to discover for myself in the last couple of years. Homeward Bounders is the best I've read so far, encompassing layers upon layers of jaw-dropping genius.

Enough of the gushing, Edwards! Tell us about the book.

When Jamie stumbles upon Them, the mysterious hooded figures who use his world as the setting for their games, he is exiled onto a circuit of worlds, doomed to wander until he can find his way home. On his travels, he meets Helen and Joris, fellow "Homeward Bounders" who, like him, have fallen foul of Them and sent from world to world.

Homeward Bounders crosses the boundaries between genres as Jamie and the others cross between worlds, encompassing myth, fantasy, science fiction and adventure as only children's fiction can. I have got lost in Diana Wynne Jones' books in the past, but this one came alive as I read, a complex, multiverse-spanning plot that nonetheless makes perfect sense. It appealed to my love of adventure, varied settings, limitless imagination and pathos. In the last section, I realised before Jamie did what was going on - but not in a "too-obvious" way. Wynne Jones' narrative style is simple but not simplistic, and her story is sophisticated indeed. In fact, I think that Homeward Bounders transcends mere children's fantasy fiction to take on a mythical status of its own.

Paper Towns - John Green

In the middle of the night, Quentin "Q" Jacobsen's next-door neighbour and long-term crush Margo Roth Spiegelman appears at his bedroom window and bids him come with her on an adventure - a campaign of revenge. The next day, Margo is missing. It's not the first time Margo has disappeared, but Q is worried. He makes it his mission to find Margo, uncovering some cunningly hidden clues about her whereabouts. But finding Margo's physical location turns out to be just the beginning of the challenge. In their hunt to find her, Q and his friends realise that not one of them can be sure they ever really knew Margo. Paper Towns is as much about uncovering Margo as a real person as it is about finding where she is hiding.

Is it terrible to say that I really like revenge stories? The escapades Q and Margo embark upon are an entertaining take on the usual "bring down the mean girl" high school drama. To give you a sense of the duo's unusual pranks I will duplicate Margo's shopping list. (N.B. random capitalisations are Margo's.)

"3 whole Catfish, Wrapped separately

Veet (It's for Shaving your legs Only you don't Need a razor It's with all the Girly cosmetic stuff)

Vaseline

six-pack Mountain Dew

One dozen Tulipsone

Bottle Of waterTissues

one Can of blue Spray paint."

I will not give the game away about what they do with these items - you can use your imagination or read the book yourself. Needless to say, it was hilarious, with a touch of the guilt you feel for enjoying watching people get what they deserve.

But Paper Towns is not really a revenge story, not after that beginning. It soon becomes a mystery, a sort of treasure-hunt to find Margo, who seems not to want to be found, but leaves obscure clues for Q to figure out nonetheless. And if there's anything I like better in a novel for teenagers than revenge plots, it's mysteries and treasure hunts. Not that I expect to be able to work it out before the protagonists, and nor do I really want to. I enjoy the thrill of being utterly clueless about the author's intentions, of being surprised and trusting them to make it all make sense in the end. Margo's treasure-hunt takes Q and his friends, Ben, Radar and Lacey through Walt Whitman's poetry (note to self: must read some more Whitman) to a seriously creepy office in an abandoned mini-mall, and ends up sending them on a race-against-time road trip from Florida to a non-existant town in New York state, the boys wearing nothing but their graduation gowns. It's a riot, a page-turner, and Q's ticking clock - will they reach New York in time? - adds to the sense of urgency. By this point I was racing through the book as though I too would run out of time.

I may have mentioned before that I really love John Green's books. They have a unique nerdy appeal, with smart, sarcastic and funny characters, and weird little details that just make the books stand out against the rest. In Paper Towns we have Urban Exploring, the world's largest black Santa collection, a teenage boy in a "World's Best Grandma" t-shirt, cross-hatched writing to make a notebook's contents illegible to anyone except the writer. I have since adopted this, as I could find myself in Harriet The Spy trouble if I were to accidentally leave my notebooks lying around.  And of course there are the titular Paper Towns, which are fictional locations invented by mapmakers in order to identify breaches of copyright. All fascinating stuff, and I loved it. But it's not all just quirks and chuckles; Paper Towns makes the reader think about how we view others - as real people or supporting characters in our own lives? Can we ever truly know another person - and if so, how?

Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

It is unusual, but not unheard-of for me to watch a film before having read the book it was based upon, but unfortunately I ran out of reading time before Les Miserables hit the UK cinemas, and I was impatient to see this epic musical. I hope my readers will excuse the inevitable comparisons with the later, and therefore obviously inferior, version of the tale. (I say this with some flippancy, assuming the unbreakable truth that "the book is always better." Certainly Victor Hugo's novel has the higher claim of being "the real thing," but does it follow that it is necessarily is the best?)

Well, it is certainly the most thorough! At 1200 pages, Les Miserables has the luxury of being able to spend plenty of focus time on each of the important characters and events, which, though important appear but briefly in the musical adaptation. Hugo also had a disconcerting habit of leaving the story to discourse freely and at length upon any subject that even slightly tied in with the novel's setting, giving chapters upon chapters of historical context for a single scene, and passing judgement upon it all. It verges upon the ridiculous, and I do not think I am alone from thinking that Les Miserables could benefit from a ruthless editor without having to lose its nickname of "The Brick." The most heinous examples are the forty-one pages of the Battle of Waterloo, twenty-five detailing life inside a convent (and an additional twelve pages have been cut from my translation to appear as an appendix) and fifteen all about the sewers of Paris. Don't get me wrong, all these make interesting reading - who, after all, can fail to be entranced by fifteen pages about poo? - but I'd rather read these digressions when Jean Valjean's fate is not in question.

Each member of Les Amis de l'ABC (ABC Society in this translation) the student revolutionary group, has a name, character and history: the fearless leader Enjolras, shy poet Jean Prouvaire, philosopher Combeferre, charismatic Courfeyrac, and cynical drunkard Grantaire. And then, not of them but with them, is young Gavroche, the kinder French cousin to the Artful Dodger. Maybe ten or eleven years old, this young urchin is a scoundrel with a heart of gold, the terror of the respectable folk, but generous to the unfortunate. He provides some delicious heartwarming and comic moments in this heavy tome - "I'm on my way to fetch the doctor for my wife, who's in labour!" But he will break your heart, too. If I can guarantee nothing else, I guarantee that.

Fantine, who appears so briefly if beautifully in the musical, has an entire history as Hugo chronicles her fall from innocence to despair: her friends and lover who deserted her as a sick idea of a joke, her sink from poverty to utter destitution and desperation. I wonder whether Les Miserables may have caused a stir when it was first published, for Hugo's insistance that a woman can be pure and virtuous of heart even when driven to prostitution. After all, didn't even Oliver Twist's Nancy cause outrage in Victorian Britain for being allowed to redeem herself? But Hugo's central message seems to be that good and evil are equally spread across the entire human race, and that desperate circumstances can lead to desperate acts. Justice is not merely the keeping of the law and punishment of crime, but compassion and forgiveness.

Of course the failure to grasp this truth is where Inspector Javert falls down. The policeman is an unambiguously unsympathetic character in his first introduction, a fact which may surprise fans of the film and show. "The Asturian peasants believe that in every wolf-litter there is a dog-whelp which the mother kills, because otherwise it will devour the rest of her young. Endow this dog with a human face and you have Javert." As far as Javert is concerned, the law must be upheld at all costs, as it is absolutely infallible, and law-breakers are utterly irredeemable. Once a criminal, always a criminal, and incapable of doing anything good. Hugo unequivocally condemns Javert's idea of righteousness untempered with mercy. My first impression was of a grotesque, a caricature, far from the tormented individual of the musical. But Javert is not without his strengths - he has a snarky sense of humour, for one, applies his rigid standards to himself as well as to others, and shows a great deal of courage. And we come to feel his anguish as Jean Valjean brings his worldview crashing down around him. Were it not for that first introduction, Javert could be seen as a tragic figure with a fatal flaw.

Hero Jean Valjean is portrayed as an almost messianic figure in the movie adaptation, but here in the novel, his goodness is at times swayed by flaws of character or judgement, particularly when concerning his adopted daughter Cosette. I was rather surprised by the lack of jealousy in the movie at his discovery of Cosette's having a suitor - or, rather, that he does not let his jealousy get the better of him. Somehow, I felt that it would be a critical part of the story, and so it is in the novel - a believable,  understandable, if not admirable trait. I could not help feeling that his withdrawal from Cosette's life after her marriage, doubtlessly intended by the author to be an act of selflessness, was actually rather a petulant and self-martyring act that helped no one and hurt a lot of people.

In Cosette we see her loving, sweet-natured mother Fantine once more, but with her fortunes reversed, rescued by Jean Valjean out of squalor, raised in humble but respectable circumstances by a foster-father who adores her, and ending up both happily married and wealthy. Her story is as happy as her mother's was wretched.

Ah, but the love story. I expressed confidence that Marius' and Cosette's romance had to be better depicted than the film's rushed version. Alas, I was mistaken. Yes, their courtship has more time devoted to it than the movie's two glances and one love song - but sadly more time and page space does not  necessarily mean more substance. Victor Hugo was doubtlessly a believer in love at first sight, but I found such a concept ridiculous. Instead of Marius dripping all over the stage singing, "Black! My world if she's not there!" immediately after seeing this pretty girl for a few seconds, he follows her regularly to the park - never speaking, mind you, only watching her like everyone's favourite romantic stalker - and then spends months putting his life on hold in favour of moping. And when they do finally start holding secret trysts, instead of, y'know, getting to know each other, they just seem to spend the whole time telling each other how in love they are with each other and how pretty the butterflies are when you're in love. (Of course, it is possible that there is nothing to tell, for neither of them seem to have any personality.)

So, in short, is Les Miserables worth reading? My answer is yes, absolutely - once. It gives so much depth and life to the story that is somewhat rushed in the musical, and making the characters much more rounded (even Marius, if not pretty little Cosette.) It is a huge book, not just in size, but in scope - Hugo included everything, and for the most part this is a great achievement. Between the book, the movie (which I have now seen twice) and the soundtrack (which I have been playing on repeat for the past three weeks) Les Miserables has proven to be one of those stories which takes over my head for a little while.

But I think in this case there is no shame in cheating, if you feel the need: skip the discourse chapters, or even read an abridgement. I don't know whether I will read Les Miserables from cover-to-cover again, at least for a good long time, but I will hold on to the book. I can't part with it after the times we've had, and I feel quite sure it will be one I'll want to refer to again and again.

Note: I read the 1976 translation by Norman Denny.

Top Ten Tuesdays: Bookish memories.

Another top ten that I simply could not resist writing about. There is more to books than merely the story inside the books. So many of my fondest memories are associated with books. So, without any further ado:

Top Ten Tuesday is hosted at The Broke and the Bookish.

1. 1988. Honestly, I don't remember a time when I couldn't read. The first memory on my list is not actually my own, but my mother's. At the age of three, my parents were woken up in the middle of the night, by the sound of me in the next room, reading Goldilocks and the Three Bears aloud. Before I started primary school, I had got myself known as "Katie who can read" (which, incidentally is my twitter nickname if you want to follow!)

2. 1990-ish. My first school's reading scheme books were the Biff, Chip and Kipper series published by Oxford. These are very much of the "This is Biff. Biff has a football. This is Chip. Biff and Chip play football." sort of standard, progressing to more complex sentences and even stories. One day I came into school very apologetic that I couldn't read all of the words. When I pointed to the page, the teachers realised that I had been trying to read the "additional notes for parents" section at the back of the book, and decided that perhaps I ought to move onto more challenging reading. I was devastated. I didn't want to read books that weren't about Biff, Chip and Kipper. Clearly I was very attached to these, erm, characters.

3. 1990-1998-ish. Who else remembers the travelling bookshops that used to visit primary schools? For a week, the school hall or library would be filled with huge metal boxes that would open up to display their ink-and-paper treasures for sale. I discovered so many beloved stories here: my first Famous Five omnibuses came from here, as did Fiona Kelly's Mystery Kids and Ann Bryant's Cafe Club. This was the highlight of my school year.

4. 1993-1996ish. Anne of Green Gables was a birthday present from my parents, and probably I haven't received a more suitable gift until last year's Lego Mines of Moria. One of my family friends has fond memories of me sitting cross-legged rereading Anne while wearing a straw sunhat and my hair in pigtails. For Book Week, we used to dress up as book characters, and I remember exactly what I wore as Anne - a long blue checked dress, the aforementioned straw hat with a navy blue ribbon, pigtails with matching ribbons and felt-tipped freckles. My mother wouldn't let me dye my hair, though.

5. 1992-ish. One evening, when I was about seven, my dad sat me and my sister down in the living room a little before bedtime, took out a book, and started to read aloud: "There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it." An excellent opening to an excellent book. I was hooked from the beginning, and even more so when I realised that the Edmund and Lucy were the same as the characters of the same names in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. I hadn't realised that there was any more to that story. Over the next couple of months, or years, Dad or Mum would read us a chapter from all of the Chronicles of Narnia and the Swallows and Amazons series every night as a bedtime story.

6. 1998-ish. Discos were the popular form of birthday party when I was in years 7 and 8 (aged 11-13) but the most memorable one (except for my one-and-only slow dance with Sam Irving, who I semi-stalked for the rest of the school year - sorry Sam!) was nothing to do with the disco at all. It was held in a room above a pub (The Bargeman's Rest, which I highly recommend if you are looking for somewhere to eat on the Isle of Wight.)  There was a shelf of second-hand books for sale, which included a few out-of-print Chalet School paperbacks from the 1970s, which I was quick to notice and charmed my parents into buying for me. I still have these, except for one which has since fallen to bits and been replaced.

7. 1999. Harry Potter had been in the world for a few years, but only recently become big. Suddenly it was the name on everyone's lips. Over-protective parents had been concerned by even more over-protective parents who denounced the series as witchcraft, and my sister's school required a permission slip from parents for the children to check the books out of the library. I was at high school by that point, and my friend Lara was reading Prisoner of Azkaban. My father bought a copy of the first three books to see for himself if he thought they were suitable for children, but   he left them lying around in the living room, where anyone could pick them up. And by "anyone," I mean me. From the very first sentence, I was hooked. "Mr and Mrs Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say they were perfectly normal, thank you very much." Thus began an adventure that would continue for many years, many rereads, and an awful lot of speculation.

8. 2001-2003. My sixth form years will forever be associated with one thing: The Lord of the Rings. Until the first film trailer, Lord of the Rings was one of those weighty tomes that lived on every bookshelf but people didn't actually read - did they? I associated it with War and Peace. Then I saw the trailer before the first Harry Potter film, and decided that actually, it looked quite interesting. The first movie was released on the last day of the Christmas term, and the year 11 teachers booked a screening at Cineworld for the entire year group. I left the cinema and took down the weighty tome; I simply had to know what happened next. For the next two or three years I lived and breathed Lord of the Rings. My abiding memory of sixth form is of my circle of friends hogging the squashy chairs in the library, reading and rereading Lord of the Rings, talking about Lord of the Rings, writing Lord of the Rings fanfiction... you get the picture. And for the first time, I felt like I fitted in. I've always been a person with obsessions, and for once other people, even some of the cool people, shared my obsession.  I found my niche and could for the first time revel in being a nerd, instead of being ashamed of who I was and conspicuously failing to fit in.

9. 2007. When I arrived home from university, by some chance I discovered that me, my best friend Judith and two other friends (Cat and James, then a couple) had all been reading the same book series: Robin Hobb's Assassin series. So we decided to hold an informal book club - which consisted of going to the pub, beginning discussing where we had got to in the series, predictions and opinions, and generally wandering off-topic more often than not. I recall one summer evening taking wine and cheese to a picnic area near the beach and very much not discussing the books, but nonetheless, book club it remained. Alas, now Cat and James are no longer on speaking terms or living near us, but Judith and I from time to time revive the old book club, recently reading American Gods and last year working our way through A Song of Ice and Fire. And a healthy amount of wine.

10. Present. I confess I find it very enjoyable to watch other people's reactions to big moments in books I've already read. Last year in our aforementioned Song of Ice and Fire readathon, there were a couple of times I got ahead of Judith, and it was with a certain amount of smugness that I listened to her speculations about what was going to happen next. She began reading a certain chapter (those who have read it will know which chapter I am referring to, while those who are going to are none the wiser) one afternoon when we were at the beach. She put the book down halfway through that chapter, and did not resume until three days later! The suspense was almost as unbearable as the incident in question. I was waiting for her anguished "MARTIN!!!!" text message for three days. And when it finally arrived, it was very satisfying indeed. Mark Oshiro's blog Mark Reads is great for that, as he goes into popular books with no prior knowledge, reviewing them one chapter at a time. The comments, too, make for excellent in-depth discussion of the books in question, but read them at your own risk. 

Top Ten Tuesday: Frustrating Characters

This is the first Top Ten Tuesday post I've written for a while, but I couldn't resist the opportunity to rant about those characters who make me want to dive into a book for the sole reason of giving them a good shaking.

Top Ten Tuesday is hosted by The Broke and The Bookish.

I had planned to include pictures in this post, but could not find a way of doing so without wanting to punch the computer screen.

In no particular order:

1. Dolores Umbridge, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. There are villains you love to hate, and then there are villains so unpleasant that they make the book in which they feature less enjoyable to read. The Umbridge Woman, as she is often called, is the latter. I always feel a sense of relief as I come towards the end of the fifth volume in an otherwise fantastically enjoyable series.

2. Angel Clare, Tess of the D'Urbervilles. Don't let his name fool you; Angel Clare is a nasty piece of work indeed, causing more hatred in my heart than the actual villain of the piece. Minutes after confessing and being forgiven for his pre-marital indiscretions, Angel abandons his bride for not being the pure maiden he believed her to be - never mind that this was probably not through her choice! Such audacious hypocrisy makes me wish Tess had dealt him the same fate she did Alec D'urberville.

3. Mary Lou Trelawney, The Chalet School series. Mary Lou starts out all right, a spirited, gobby little girl, but by the age of fifteen or so, from the way others talked about her, you'd think that she excreted rainbows! In book after book, a new girl with Issues comes to the school, and the task falls to Mary Lou to solve everything. She talks to the staff the same way she speaks to her classmates, but "it's not cheek, it's just Mary Lou." And yet with every honour or award, she is always surprised. "What? Me? No, surely not!" In one notable book, this happens twice in as many chapters. Sickening.

4. Cersei Lannister, A Song of Ice and Fire - particularly in A Feast For Crows. About as unlike Mary Lou as you can get, Cersei schemes and manipulates her way into power over the seven kingdoms of Westeros - but when she gets onto the throne in all but name, she is utterly clueless. This is understandable: being a woman in a highly sexist society, she was never expected to get into power, and therefore never trained for the role. Instead she spends all her time in her obsession to bring about the destruction of somebody she has got into her head is a danger to her. It is clear that she will bring about her own downfall in her desperation to prevent it.

5. Mr Brocklehurst, Jane Eyre. There are a lot of characters in this book that I would like to punch, but the cruel schoolmaster at Lowood heads the list, singling out children for punishment for imagined sins, such as having red, curly hair.

6. Thorin Oakenshield, The Hobbit. For the most part of the book, Thorin is a surly but respectable exiled Dwarven King. But when the gold-fever strikes him, he turns into a callous, avaricious jerk. He redeems himself, in the end, but while he is under the dragonish influence of the gold, he needs a stern talking-to with violence. It'll be interesting to see how the film copes with the most un-heroic traits of this majestic figure.

7. Aunt Elizabeth, Emily of New Moon. Always stern and with no understanding of raising children, Aunt Elizabeth raises Emily out of duty rather than love, and it is a rather austere childhood. But what pushes Aunt Elizabeth onto this list is her utter disapproval of Emily's writing, actually forbidding her to write stories for a number of years. Can any writer imagine something worse?

8. Aunt Norris, Mansfield Park. (What is it about maiden or widowed aunts in classic fiction?) Aunt Norris gives Fanny Price no illusions about her role in the Bertram family: she is a charity case, and the lowest of the low. As if shy, rather insipid Fanny needed any more lessons in humility!

9. On a similar note, Miss Minchin in A Little Princess. A pre-teen schoolgirl in her care becomes an orphan on her birthday, and her only thought is, "Who's going to pay the bills?" The way she treats young Sara Crewe is an absolute disgrace, using a girl who had been trusted into her care as the lowest servant, without the pay, food or decent lodgings that the regular staff would have been entitled to, forcing her to work on an empty stomach and sleep in a drafty attic. At least this one got her comeuppance in the end!

10. Romeo Montague, Romeo and Juliet. I can't be havin' with any of these drippy love-at-first-sight so-called love interests and it's hard work picking out just one, but we might as well go to the original. I love Shakespeare's plays, especially the tragedies, but Romeo and Juliet is the exception. When we first meet Romeo, he's moping about the love of his life, Rosaline, as if his life will never be complete without her. Then he meets Juliet, and BOOM, he's found another new love of his life. We all know how well that goes. I'd be curious to see how things might have turned out for them had they, y'know, not killed themselves. The greatest romance of all time - or two empty-headed teenagers whose brains have been replaced with hormones?

Mini-reviews: Miranda, The Land of Decoration, The Fault In Our Stars

I always find it exciting to start a new year in Storyland, venturing out into the uncharted lands of new books, TV and film, without any idea about which stories will become home to one's heart and mind. I've read three books so far in 2013: two for the first time and one reread, and so far all three have satisfied.

1. Is It Just Me? - Miranda Hart

One of the biggest selling hardbacks of the Christmas season was comedian Miranda's book - not so much an autobiography, but a "Miran-ual" of ponderings on life generally. Written as a dialogue between adult Miranda and her eighteen-year-old self, Is it Just Me? is packed full of reflections on being big and clumsy, of the joys of stationery and spontaneity, and whether carrying one's personal effects in a battered old rucksack rather than a tiny handbag really means that one is not "taking oneself seriously as a woman." (Spoiler: no.)

Is it Just Me? is an absolute joy to read, especially as someone who cannot leave a room without crashing into the doorpost. I mentally read the book in Miranda's own plummy tones - helped by her addressing the reader as "My Dear Reader Chum" (MDRC for short.) I howled with laughter at some of her escapades - although I did wonder how many had been embellished just the teensiest bit. Her recollections of an embarrassing picnic brought to my mind the memory of a disastrous incident with a barbecue burger bagel I battled in Cardiff with plastic cutlery. I won't go into details. Just imagine anything that could go wrong with these things and you probably wouldn't be far off. It was mortifying. But back to Miranda: I left this book feeling admiration for this woman who could be so confident in her goofiness and unwillingness to be a decorous grown up that she can not only laugh at herself and not care, but star in a sitcom about her life. Is It Just Me? is a funny and feel-good read that was just what I needed to get me through my annual Christmas Lurgy (although it is not good when you have a cough.) I originally bought it as a gift for my best friend, who lent it straight back to me. Now it's my mother's turn to read it.

2. The Land of Decoration - Grace McCleen

Ten-year-old Judith is an unusual child. Brought up by her strict widowed father and bullied at school, she finds refuge in the creation of a miniature world in her room which she calls "The Land of Decoration." Desperate not to have to go back to school, Judith makes snow for the Land of Decoration, and sure enough, it snows in the night, closing the school. Judith becomes convinced that she has miraculous powers, and tries to use these to make life better. But then things start to go wrong. Very wrong indeed.

Grace McCleen leaves it up to the reader to interpret what is going on here. Is Judith really having mystical experiences - and if so, are they benign or malevolent? Alternatively, is she simply over-imaginative, or even mentally troubled? Judith's narration is only reliable to a certain extent, revealing more to an adult reader than the child would understand, and it is unclear how literal we are to take her "visions." I am as yet undecided where I stand, but inclined towards her having a vivid imagination, shaped by her skewed religious upbringing.

At the heart of The Land of Decoration is the relationship between Judith and her strict father. Judith matter-of-factly says that she knows her father doesn't love her, because of her mother's death from complications giving birth to her, and because he always seems so angry. The discerning reader will understand that the truth is far more complicated than this. McCleen's portrayal of the grieving father trying to find his way as a single dad in a difficult world is all the more poignant for being described by someone too young to really understand.

The Land of Decoration is an extraordinary book, strange, challenging and often dark. It took a few pages to hook me, but once it got my attention, I could not put it down. A masterpiece from a new author.

3. The Fault in Our Stars - John Green

It hasn't been long since I read The Fault in Our Stars the first time around and my every intention was to pick up one of the many other books in the staff room library, but somehow this little blue paperback fell into my hands instead. The Fault In Our Stars is an incredible book, marketed at teenagers but one which should be read by people of all ages. I didn't have much to say about it the first time around and can't really add to it today, either. Just go out and read it. Buy, borrow, steal a copy. (Don't steal, kids, it's bad.) I always love John Green's characters: they are so funny and sarcastic and smart and angry, and reading about Hazel and Augustus actually hurt. The Fault in Our Stars hit home even harder the second time around, knowing what was coming. I recommend it whole-heartedly; it is a fiction full of truth and heart - but beware. You will need tissues.

2012: A Year in Books (and a bit of film and TV too.)

Looking back over the hundred-plus books I've read this year, I was surprised to see which books had stuck in my mind and how many I had forgotten ever reading - or at least, was surprised to discover I had read them only this year. I've paid flying visits through some story-worlds, and immersed myself in others, which were often but not necessarily the ones I enjoyed the most at the time.

It can be a wonderful but slightly frightening thing to be so engrossed in a story that it is more real than day-to-day life. The notable books and series for this in 2012 were:

The Sandman graphic novel series by Neil Gaiman. Can that really have been this year? It seems a lifetime ago.

Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, prompted by the BBC's second series of Sherlock at New Year. (Towards the end of the year I once more immersed myself in the world of 221B Baker Street by watching the second Holmes movie from last year, and having another Sherlock marathon.

My reread of Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, around the middle of the year, reignited a second time by receiving a lot of the Lego sets for my birthday, and a third by the release the first Hobbit film. Middle-Earth has had a strong pull on me since I was 16, and it doesn't like to let me go.

A Song of Ice and Fire. I took a long time to even be tempted to read this series of doorstopper novels, but eventually I was won around - although I have second thoughts about whether or not to watch the TV adaptation.

Shakespeare as a whole, although I've only actually read the one play in its entirety this year - Julius Caesar. The BBC's marvelous Hollow Crown was a magnificent introduction to Shakespeare's history plays - I love the tragedies, and some of the comedies, but apart from studying the famous bits of Henry V, the histories were entirely new to me. But the staging of Richard II, Henry  IV and Henry V utterly captured my mind and admiration in the way only the Bard can do.

Other books that have stuck in my brain:

The Fault in our Stars - John Green.
The Etymologicon - Mark Forsyth (look! A non-fiction!)
The Snow Child - Eowyn Ivey
Tipping the Velvet - Sarah Waters
Little Brother - Cory Doctorow
The Perks of Being A Wallflower - Stephen Chbosky
1Q84 - Haruki Murakami
Perfume: The Story of a Murderer - Patrick Suskind

But looking back over my reading, I realise how much I've already forgotten; how many books that I enjoyed while I read them but which didn't stick in my mind, and the books that I was fairly indifferent to, and how relatively few really engaged me as a reader. And there is a place for light reading, for enjoyable fluff, but I found myself wondering how many books were ones which I read because they were short or easy, and because I hadn't posted a review on my blog for ages. Surprise, surprise, the easy reads often didn't get reviewed either, because I hadn't much to say about them.

Ellie at Musings of a Bookshop Girl wrote an excellent series of posts about rediscovering the joy of reading which I recommend reading if you feel you've fallen into a bit of a reading or blogging slump. Quality, rather than quantity, is my aim for reading and reviewing in 2013. Of late I have not done much of either. And by "Quality" I don't mean reading only Serious Literature and shunning light reading - far from it! At heart I am a fantasy freak. A thriller-seeker. A comfort-reader. A girl with a literature degree and the intent to use it. A nostalgic inner child. All these things at once and more. My aim is to merely to read the books I love, not the page-numbers of those I don't.

I set myself two reading challenges in 2012 - to read 120 books in a year (at the time of writing I have just over 5 books left to read in under 29 hours - not going to happen!) and Ellie's Mixing It Up Challenge, which encouraged me to read outside my comfort zone. In the end I read books in 13 of 16 genres - you can see which ones here - so I missed target but hardly disgraced myself, and seem to have more non-fiction in my list than in most years. But for 2013 I have resolved to set myself no blogging/reading challenges at all - not even enabling a target on Goodreads for how many books to read. That in itself feels like a bit of a scary commitment as I've been setting myself challenges for several years now (and failing to meet any of my targets.) I'm going to be selfish, and I'm going to fall back in love with my books once more.

At the same time, one of Gandalf's lines in the new Hobbit film really struck a chord with me: The world is out there, not in your books and maps. Or as Dumbledore would put it, It does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to live. So in 2013, I want to go on my own adventures. What form these may take is as yet a mystery, but I feel the need to redress the balance between book and life.

Happy new year everyone, and I wish you all lots of joy for 2013.

Book to Film: The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

This is going to be a looooong one. Spoilers for the film, but not later on in the book.

It's always risky adapting a beloved film for the big screen. They say that no two people read the same book; everybody has their own ideas about how it should look, sound and feel. Even Peter Jackson, whose adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings was widely acclaimed, was not guaranteed to repeat his success upon his return to Middle-Earth. One could be forgiven for thinking that after the sprawling three-volume epic, The Hobbit should be a piece of cake, but the smaller novel provides its own challenges. In effect, it has to be two different stories simultaneously: the simple fairy-tale that Tolkien started writing while marking exam papers, and a part of an entire world of mythology that culminated in the Lord of the Rings. The Hobbit's reviews have been very mixed, and those negative reviews that are not primarily concerned with Jackson's experiments with frame-rates, seem to fall in one of two camps. Some complain that The Hobbit is too much like Lord of the Rings, too epic and complex, when it ought to be a Narnia-esque kids' adventure. Others think that it is too simple and childish - not enough like LotR. 

Me? I couldn't be happier. As far as I'm concerned, Jackson got the balance just right, keeping the world of The Hobbit consistent with the existing cinematic Middle-Earth, but retaining the story's unique flavour. At first I had my doubts about the wisdom and necessity of turning The Hobbit into two films, let alone three, but after reading the book I realised just how much happens, how many people Bilbo, Thorin and co meet, and how many places they visit, rushed through at a chapter per location, character or incident. It would be a very long film to do each one justice. Jackson and co have also turned to the back end of LotR's appendices and other writings to give an added depth to The Hobbit.

The film opens with a prologue, slotting it nicely into the beginning of Fellowship of the Ring, by showing Bilbo Baggins as an old Hobbit, and a cameo from Frodo. Perhaps this is a little forced, but it rekindles that homey feeling of Bag End, and was probably put in as an excuse to show Bilbo writing and narrating those immortal words:

In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.

Corny set-up or not, those words would have been missed if they had not been there. The entire Bag End scenes which follow are practically flawless. Martin Freeman truly is the young Bilbo Baggins. I fear Mr Freeman may be in danger of being typecast as an ordinary Englishman (or hobbit of the Shire) who finds himself caught up in extraordinary adventures against his will - see Sherlock's Dr Watson, or Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy's Arthur Dent. But he plays these roles so beautifully! Bilbo and Gandalf's first interaction walked straight off the page and onto the screen, a lighter comedy than in even the beginning of Fellowship of the Ring, and laying to rest my anxieties that this would be more Lord of the Rings: The Prequel than The Hobbit. After this very strange encounter with a wizard who seem to know more about Mr Baggins than he ought, poor Bilbo finds his house swarming with Dwarves, with muddy boots, sharp swords and huge appetites, completely clearing out his pantry and threatening to trash his kitchen. (Spoiler alert: Yes, the washing-up song is in there - one of my favourite moments in the entire film.)

J.R.R. Tolkien didn't give the Dwarves a lot of personality, with the exception of the king, Thorin Oakenshield. Balin is kind, Dori is "a decent fellow," Fili and Kili are young, cheerful and a bit reckless, and Bombur is overweight - that's about all we know. For the film, each of the thirteen has his own look and personality trait. Fili and Kili are shaping up to be fan favourites - especially among the female fans, perhaps for obvious reasons.

May I here point out that they were always my favourites, years before they were cast? Fili, Kili and Balin, who is depicted in the film as a gentle soul but a seasoned warrior, a loyal follower of Thorin, but one filled with doubts about the wisdom of their quest to reclaim the Lonely Mountain of Erebor.

An unexpected favourite from the movie adaptation turned out to be Bofur (played by James Nesbitt) who has been expanded from one of the Interchangeable Backup Dwarves to quite a character. He starts off as quite a lovable rascal with a Northern Irish accent and a twinkle in his eye, tormenting Bilbo in his home and sparing no details about exactly how it would feel to run into the business end of Smaug* the dragon. Yet, a moving scene later on in the film proves that he is made up entirely of charm and loveliness.

Reading the book, I never found Dwarven king Thorin Oakenshield to be a very likeable character, surly at best and a complete jerk at worst, but, again, the movie rounds him out a little by showing flashbacks to his past. After showing the devastation of Erebor and the awful aftermath of battles, his quest comes across as more than filling his pockets with gold. I still wanted to shout "Oh, shut up Thorin!" a couple of times, but not as often as when reading the book.

Like Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit uses long, panning shots of breathtaking New Zealand countryside that made me want to pack up my bags and hop on a plane to go on long treks across the mountains. Howard Shore returned to compose the score, keeping in the heartachingly familiar Concerning Hobbits theme, and giving it a jaunty and adventurous twist in keeping with Bilbo's character. As well as other familiar leitmotifs, Shore has introduced some new tunes, most notably the solemn, proud, Dwarf theme (the same tune used in the "Misty Mountains" song which reduced many a Tolkien fan to tears in the first Hobbit trailer last year.) The soundtrack and scenery help to ground this story in the same Middle-Earth as Rings, leaving me feeling as though I'd never left.

It is interesting to compare the perspectives of the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings quests. LotR focused upon the human civilisations and the Elves, whose glory days were coming to an end, and the beauty of their kingdoms in Rivendell and Lothlorien, but the only Dwarf, Gimli, was mainly used for comic relief. We return once more to Rivendell, but somehow it doesn't feel like the same idyllic haven that it was before. In the company of Dwarves, we see through their eyes, and I felt that Jackson excelled in subtly giving the same place a sense that something was slightly off-kilter in this golden leafy paradise. The Elves do not sing "tra-la-la-lally," (thank goodness!) but there is a tra-la-la-lally feel to their music, that is at odds with the solid, earthy Dwarves. That being said, I enjoyed seeing another side to Elrond: riding home exhilarated from battling goblins, not the care-worn, frowning leader bearing responsibility for the whole world as well as his wayward daughter.

But it was in Rivendell that I had the closest thing to a criticism of the film: the role of Galadriel. My quibble was not with anything explicitly said or done, so much as the veneration with which Galadriel was treated. Yes, she is one of the wisest beings on Middle-Earth, and, though she is not mentioned in the book of The Hobbit, the Lord of the Rings and Unfinished Tales establish her as being a key member of the White Council. But she is still an Elf. The film adaptation implied in its treatment that she ranked higher even than Gandalf, but the wizards of Middle-Earth are in fact closer to angels than humans or Elves. Still, if these suggestions and insinuations are my only cause for complaint - and "complaint" is far too strong a word, really - then The Hobbit fares better than both The Two Towers and Return of the King, which in turn are nearly flawless despite each containing a moment that makes me shout at the TV every time. + 

Galadriel is not the only character to be moved to The Hobbit from Tolkien's works. For the first time, we are introduced to Radagast the Brown, a third member of the order of Istari (commonly known as wizards.) Sylvester McCoy (familiar to many as the Seventh Doctor) portrays Radagast as a rather dotty character, with a darling little pet hedgehog named Sebastian - not a name that you could derive from any of Tolkien's languages, but one which suits the hedgehog perfectly. But I digress. Hidden beneath Radagast's silly exterior which earns ridicule from the haughty Saruman and certain critics, are strength, wisdom and courage equal to that of his peers. "Is he a great wizard?" Bilbo asks Gandalf, "Or is he more like you?" "I think he is a very great wizard," is Gandalf's answer, and I think I would prefer to take Gandalf's side on this matter than Saruman's. Power corrupts absolutely, as is proven by Saruman later on in Lord of the Rings, but there is an innate innocence to Radagast that prevents this in his case.

The great enemy of The Hobbit is, of course, Smaug the dragon, but he barely makes an appearance in the first part of the film - just flashes of stamping feet, swooshing tail and a single golden eye. But there are other foes that Bilbo and the Dwarves must face in the form of the trolls and goblins. These seem to jar a little in comparison to the evil creatures we have previously encountered in Middle-Earth, and it was very strange to watch the trolls sitting around the campfire grumbling and talking. The Great Goblin is quite jolly in a nasty sort of way, even singing a happy little song about how he intends to send the Dwarves to a gruesome fate. Such moments remind us that The Hobbit is a children's story, and yet at the same time, the villains are more complex than the Lord of the Rings orcs, with distinct personalities (albeit not particularly pleasant ones) which may cause a bit of a twinge of disconcerting pity when they get killed. There is a poignant moment when the blue glow of Bilbo's sword, an alert to the presence of goblins, fades away, the goblin having been killed by Gollum. It is strange and unsettling to feel pity for the orcs - battles against them were simple and straightforwardly good-versus-evil in the more "grown-up" Lord of the Rings. Yet that moment of pity foreshadows the critical turning-point in the entire Ring saga: when Bilbo Baggins did not kill Gollum.

It is not only the Hobbit's monsters' characters that seem a little out of place with how we've seen them so far in the cinematic Middle-Earth, but also their appearance. It is apparent that a lot more CGI has been used in the creation of the goblins, and perhaps also the trolls, than in Lord of the Rings. LotR was, of course, a big turning point in computer graphics in the movies, with Gollum a pioneer in motion capture technology. But whereas Gollum fits right at home among the other cast, thanks to the character's design and Andy Serkis' extraordinary acting skills, some of the Hobbit's CGI antagonists don't look as real as the old-style orcs which were actors in prosthetics. I thought that there was something slightly off about the Pale Orc, Azog, but it wasn't until my second viewing that I realised why. It was not merely that computer graphics look less solid than the real thing, but Azog, as well as one or two of the other creatures, looked like they had wandered off the set of Guillermo Del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth - probably no coincidence, as Del Toro also worked on The Hobbit.

Gollum, of course, stole the show, and I was saddened at the end of the film to remember that he only featured in the single chapter of the book and would not be seen again until Lord of the Rings. He is, as ever, alternately hilarious, cute and pathetic, but my friend and I agreed that we also got more of a sense of menace from him than in his previous appearances. Frodo, of course, knew of Gollum before their first meeting, but Bilbo was unprepared, alone and terrified, and he first sees Gollum violently killing a goblin twice his size. Freeman's and Serkis' acting in their game of riddles is marvellous, bringing the book to life in a bit of light relief but with an undercurrent of tension beneath.

"If Baggins loses, then we eat it whole?" 

"...Fair enough."

When Gollum discovers the loss of his "precious," the light relief is gone. The Ring is Gollum's sole reason for being, and its loss seems unendurable. But Gollum will go on hunting it for the next sixty years - or seventy-seven if you go by the book's chronology. Gollum's agony is heartbreaking, and the expressions changing from terror to compassion on Bilbo's face will stay with me for a long, long time. The entire saga depends on that single moment, and it could not have been done better. It was perfection itself.

I still don't care for 3D, though. I'm unsure whether the edition I watched on Friday 14th was the infamous double-frame-rate version of the film or not (I'm no expert in that sort of thing, being more concerned about the story, scripting and acting) but I did find it difficult to focus during the busy action scenes. The 3D is certainly well done, but I found it to be more of a distraction than an enhancement. There was one notable moment when I thought that a member of the audience had stood up in the aisle and blocked the screen, until I realised that it was a 3D character on the edge of the shot.

After Lord of the Rings, I hadn't been too excited about the possibility of a Hobbit film, and doubted the necessity of making more than one - after all, it is shorter than any one LotR volume. Yet despite its simplicity, it is a very full book, as I realised on my recent reread. Are three films really necessary? Well, I've no doubt that there are parts of An Unexpected Journey that could be trimmed with little detriment to the finished result, and I would have estimated that Jackson could probably have made two decent movies without sacrificing any plot. Yet if parts two and three are up to this standard, then as far as I'm concerned, the more Hobbit film there is, the better. (Bring on the Extended DVD!) An Unexpected Journey was an absolute joy to watch - though I strongly advise you to avoid drinking anything before or while watching it. I have already seen the movie twice, and expect to see it at least one more time. Probably more.

*I've been pronouncing it "Smorg" all these years, but apparently the "au" makes an "ow" sound. Similarly, the film rhymes "Thorin" with "Florin" but I've always called him "Thor-in."


+the Faramir-fail and the Sam-go-home-fail, if you're interested.

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.