# Book review thread



## Pidgeon84

A place to give a small review for something you've recently read. I guess I'll start.

Perks of Being a Wallflower 9/10: Short but very well written and effective. Funny and heartbreaking. The movie was awful though. That only gets a 4 lol.


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## escorial

postoffice..by buk..10/10


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## Caragula

I've got a few from my blog, so I'll paste one in here:

_City of Saints and Madmen_, by Jeff Vandermeer, has been  labelled ‘avant-garde fantasy’.  It is.  The city is the star; Ambergris  is a violent and gothic-romantic ecosystem, the inhabitants of which  live in a fearful symbiosis with the deeply mysterious ‘Greycaps’.   These underground dwellers were initially displaced by the founders of  Ambergris from the much older city that it grew out of.


 The Greycaps give a Lovecraftian edge to the tales of the city,  silently malign landlords living in a world beneath the city’s people,  the balance of power shifted emphatically after their initial genocide  at the hands of Ambergris’s founders, with an event known as ‘The  Silence’, that shattered the collective psyche of the city’s denizens,  leaving behind a fragile society with a black hole where its heart and  soul should be.  This book feels like Lovecraft-meets-literary fiction,  and while not quite as dark as the master, its emotional canvas is  broader, a playful black humour mixing with the horror in its veins.


 Throughout this collection of stories the Greycaps and the fungi that  they have such a mysterious relationship with leave the whole book  tinged with mold, the city itself almost permanently rotted with rain  and mist.  The author has done for mushrooms what Spielberg did for  sharks, their almost sentient presence ominous, the citizens living in  fear of them and the Greycaps that cultivate them.


 I say ‘book’ because Vandermeer doesn’t give us a novel, even a  purely episodic one.  This is a literary encyclopedia of Ambergris;  stories, essays both historical and critical and even a story to be  decrypted by the reader from a number sequence.  He breaks a fourth wall  or two along the way, just for good measure.  From a charming and funny  essay by a self-proclaimed ‘authority’ on freshwater squids ending in a  conspiracy theory that could have come from Spike Milligan, to a pure  slice of gothic horror, ‘The Cage’, by way of psychiatric reports of the  author trapped in an asylum, the book disregards a single narrative in  order to provide a handful of perspectives from the various lives of  those who founded and then lived in Ambergris.  (I know that parts of  the book were previously published in journals, but I don’t know if the  format of this book was Vandermeer’s intention all along.)


 Anyone writing a ‘second world’/'crossover’/'plain old fantasy’ book,  because god knows what I’m meant to call fantasy fiction these days,  would be keenly aware and staggered by the behind-the-scenes work that  has gone into imagining this city.  Vandermeer’s choice of form, and the  quality of the work in particular, could only be executed to this  standard because of how meticulously imagined and deeply nuanced  Ambergris is to him.  I am reminded of Gormenghast (meets  Ankh-Morpork!), but moreso London or Rome.  The former fictional  cities were backdrops, the only others that go close to this, while the  latter I think can only be understood in the way that Vandermeer has  chosen to help us understand Ambergris,  through fragments that  illuminate how, like them, it was founded and then grew with sacrifice,  blood and money, each transfusing the city, maturing it.


 With barely an off-note (I thought the imprisoned writer and the  actor Belacqua were the least confident aspects of the book, if only  because they were about the author’s reflection on his art), Vandermeer  has written one of the genre’s masterpieces, pushing its form and  forcing all of us that like writing this stuff to think again about what  the genre is capable of.  His execution is exquisite, my favourite and  most exemplary piece being ‘In The Hours After Death’, a dream of a dead  man that has become fungus, becoming a man (again?), Vandermeer  deepening the mythos of the Greycaps and leaving us at the verge of  knowing, like Hoegbotton confronting ‘the Cage’, their divine and  splendorous truths.


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## Caragula

Another one from my blog:

*The Dying Earth trilogy – Jack Vance*
It’s rather late in the day for me to get to Jack Vance in terms of my enjoyment of the fantasy genre, given this is held up as part of its canon.

And lo, within twenty pages I could see where so many would-be fantasy writers I’ve come across on writing forums over the years were getting their inspiration from, when they weren’t getting it from Tolkien or Robert E. Howard!

Vance has a lot to answer for, but imitation etc. etc.  and heck, I’m not immune, I used to hand write passages of Paul Morel’s despair from _Sons and Lovers_ to put up alongside my Pink Floyd posters back when I was seventeen.

Vance has an old-fashioned writing style and I was reminded of Dickens; the characters themselves, both major and minor, that are scattered throughout these books are as vivid and as occasionally cartoonish and tragic as many of Dickens’s own, both in terms of their names and their static, overtly simple natures.  Unlike Dickens however, he does lack, out of choice or ability I don’t know, a truly deep protagonist.  At first I thought the writing was a little overblown and florid, but as I warmed to the stories, it was a perfect, gothic sort of fit.

Cugel, a reprehensible charlatan; deceitful, lazy, lustful, opportunistic and selfish, takes centre stage in this suite of stories that describe life on earth as earth itself winds down, the world no longer full of raging seas and the violence of its life, a calm twilight home to societies as fragmented as they were during the Dark Ages.

He is an anti-hero for the ages.  A cross between Basil Fawlty and Machiavelli, his hilarious travails on his journey across the dying Earth illustrate how his attempts to bend an impervious world to his own ends frequently blows up in his face.  Yet a wrong has been done to him, of a sort, and Vance’s mastery is such that this quite awful man elicits the kind of grudging sympathy a distinctly un-Christian spectator might give to the Christian thrown into a Roman arena with a few lions.

This is a world beyond magic and science, the intimation being that the powerful, such as Rhialto the Marvellous, the titular protagonist of the final part of the trilogy, wield an understanding of mathematics beyond our current perception of either.  What lifts the books up to a standing on a par with the very best of the genre is an incredibly fertile imagination, not just in terms of his vividly realised and nuanced ‘world-building’ but in terms of his acute understanding of people and motivation, when placed in the riot of sub-cultures that he’s devised.  There are numerous subtle messages in the text, probably more than I picked up on, that Vance has no doubt used to portray his own views on the world he lived in; again, a very Dickensian obsession, albeit a step removed in this genre.

I recommend this to anyone who hasn’t got around to it in their reading of fantasy (though it’s the equivalent of admitting you haven’t yet seen Star Wars), because it works brilliantly as a rather tragic vision of our future shot through with a bleakly comic and vivid cast.


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## Blade

I just posted this on the "What are you reading?" thread having not noticed this one.:chargrined:

I have happened across a rather odd item, _Duluth: A Novel_  by Gore Vidal. I do not read a lot of novels but this one seems to me to be a mockery or satire of the genre more than anything else. There does not seem to be any main character or plot with the description involving many rather eccentric characters described it what appear to be unrelated scenes. The location is nominally Duluth MN (as per the title) but pieces of LA, New Orleans, Lake Erie and a stretch of desert containing an alien spacecraft also figure in the terrain. The chapters are ridiculously short with a total of 89 contained in 214 pages.

I had heard of the author but was not familiar with any of his work, which was a reason to have a look at it, though I am at a loss as to why anyone would write this sort of stuff. The chapters are bite sized short though so once you begin reading you can always pick it up for a short chew.:mushroom:

The "About the author" blurb in the back of the book indicates that he has published a variety of different materials so this might be an attempt to integrate them. The piece ends in 1981 mentioning a 1981 work as his best novel though i am not sure what that has to do with this.:grumpy:


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## bookmasta

Every Day by David Levithan. I didn't know what to expect reading the first chapter, but needless to say its interesting so far. Will post a full review when I'm done with it in a few days.


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## Caragula

Just posted this to my blog, so thought I'd add it here as it is a kind of book review...
_

Wolf Hall, _by Hilary Mantel, is a masterpiece. It is one of the best books I will ever read.

I know this because I’ve lost count of the times I’ve paused over a page, muttered ‘**** off’ at the sheer and dazzling quality and control of the form and the narrative, and then carried on reading, a little bit sick at the work I still have to do, learning how to tell a story.

It charts the rise of its protagonist, Thomas Cromwell, in the court of Henry VIII; a rise that parallels that of Anne Boleyn’s. His role in her ascent is presented as instrumental in both their fortunes.

The book’s principle achievement for me is its intimacy with Cromwell, and this is made brilliant only partly by the fact that Mantel has effortlessly gotten inside a man’s head (OK, OK, so it’s not that difficult to understand men…). The achievement resides also in the subtle and consistent feat of the narrator’s eye being subjective and thus unreliable, while in the third person. The third person voice presents views on events and imaginative leaps beyond them in a warm, almost conversational way. Yet to read it, they could easily be Cromwell’s own thoughts, though they are never directly attributed to him. That his thoughts are also directly presented suggests a distinction, but that’s all it does. Thus we have a quite original mechanism by which wider musings on the characters and world are presented as (probably) coming from Cromwell or an intimately knowledgeable contemporaneous biographer/confidante.

The unreliability is apparent in the way that throughout the novel there is a clear dissonance between everyone’s fear of Cromwell, at one telling point even the King’s, and Cromwell’s own repeated acts of clemency, charity and loyalty. He comes across as a hard working and decent man who, with casual and rather glossed over asides, keeps a personal ledger of those that have wronged him, or are indebted to him and those who owe him favours. He takes on wards and sees them set up well for their lives, while feeding those waiting around at the gates to his house. He strives to be a mediator in the various conflicts around the court, particularly with the ousted Mary and Katherine, various heretics and the wider Catholic Church, but there is very little sense of a chip on the shoulder at their attitude to the ‘blacksmith’s boy’ from Putney. Even in his triumph, he alludes only to little more than a chuckle at how Henry’s displays of affection before Norfolk, Suffolk and others, renders them so angry. Yet his loyalty to Wolsey earned such opprobrium and the threat of ruin, that a stronger retribution would have seemed more honest. Clearly we have a faux-objective viewpoint coloured by his own perception, and, interestingly, how our narrator chooses to cultivate that with us, the readers.

Yet this third person narrator, perhaps because of the intimacy, gets into the heart of him on occasion. One such moment is beautifully rendered, as he contemplates a large gilded star and angel’s wings that would be brought out at Christmas when his children were around:

_“This year no one has the heart to hang up the star, but he visits it in its lightless store room. He slides off the canvas leaves that protect its rays, and checks that they are unchipped and unfaded…from a peg hangs angel’s wings. He touches them. His finger comes away dusty. He shifts his candle out of danger, then lifts them from the peg and gently shakes them. They make a soft sound of hissing, and a faint amber perfume washes into the air.”_

I loved the above particularly for the play on rays of light being sheathed or having the potential to be chipped. The narrator has found Cromwell at Christmas, in a dark room he keeps locked, mourning days gone by, the discarded nativity costumes and decorations. It reinforces him as a family man, and the opposite of his own father, who beat him mercilessly (the opening line, as he is being beaten, is as memorable as _Moby Dick’s_).

Mantel at times playfully exploits, as in the quote below, this indistinct narrator. Here she weaves in a dream of the future which reminded me of Alan Moore’s _From Hell_, where the Ripper imagines himself in a twentieth century office that he of course doesn’t recognise as such. Is Mantel here giving Cromwell to muse on a digital future?

_“Suppose within every book there is another book, and within every letter on every page another volume constantly unfolding; but these volumes take no space on the desk. Suppose knowledge could be reduced to a quintessence, held within a picture, a sign, held within a place which is no place.”_

These thoughts aren’t attributed to him, and there are many such asides that Mantel uses because they appear to unfold for us perspectives about Cromwell or perhaps by him.

There are far too many examples of how strong Mantel’s prose is to list here, barring a last one below. The prose of course is in service to the story and the intimate events between the main characters that shape the wider events. It’s something Mantel specifically points out at one point later in the book; how, among other things, the sigh of skin on skin in the bedchamber may rule the fortunes of kingdoms and whether or not they go to war. Cromwell’s ascent, the moment of his upward spiral, comes when the King calls him and Gardiner to his quarters after an appalling nightmare. Cromwell’s quick thinking interprets the dream inversely to the King’s frightened vision of his downfall, remaking it a vision of his authority to rule, a call to be bold. It is a pivotal moment, a single conversation out of the blue in a bedchamber, that changes everything for him.

I am sure that every other serious writer of historical fiction has to work incredibly hard on their research. This post may betray my lack of such reading before _Wolf Hall_, but Mantel’s command of the research, the nuanced ways in which it is referenced in these conversations and thoughts of Cromwell embeds the reader solidly in the houses and streets and crowds of this novel. The command she has of the place, the milieu of the story is expressed easily, again, as though she is a contemporary, an effect that reinforces my view of the narration. These are hard yards for any writer. The outcome can rarely be so exquisite.
I’ll leave this post with the most perfect description of England, then or now, I’ve ever read. It can **** off and all…

_“Who will swear the hobs and boggarts who live in the hedges and the hollow trees, and the wild men who hide in the woods? Who will swear the saints in their niches, and the spirits that cluster at holy wells rustling like fallen leaves, and the miscarried infants dug into unconsecrated ground: all those unseen dead who hover around forges and village hearths, trying to warm their bare bones? For they too are his countrymen: the generations of the uncounted dead, breathing through the living, stealing their light from them, the bloodless ghosts of lord and knave, nun and whore, the ghosts of priest and friar that feed on living England and suck the substance from the future.”_


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## Caragula

Just posted another review to my blog.  So unless anybody minds, I'll post it here too 

_Replay_, by Ken Grimwood, tackles the classic 'What if...' scenario: "What if I could live my life over again?"


It treads a path between the classic Star Trek episode _'The Inner Light'_ and _Groundhog Day_.   Jeff, the book's protagonist, is going to 'replay' his life more than  once, unlike Picard; but unlike Phil Connors, he's repeating decades  rather than a day.







Grimwood  has executed the premise spectacularly well.  The prose is economical,  and does a fair bit more 'tell' than 'show', but the scale of the story,  and the depth of his exploration of the premise in my view require  that.  This is a book that is really all about the plot and Jeff's  exploration of his situation.


It starts with Jeff in a weary  argument with his wife over the phone, in the middle of which he has a  heart attack and dies, aged forty three.  He wakes up as an eighteen  year old back in college, and gets to do it all again, this time knowing  who wins various Kentucky Derbys and World Series.  The book really  starts to motor when he dies again, aged forty three.


The strength  of the novel is how good a handle Grimwood has on his main character.   As the events unfold, complete with some twists, one of which provides a  pivotal emotional thread, we're on a journey with Jeff that feels  right.  There are no false notes in his reaction to the lives he's given  and the relationships he has.  But it was only in a conversation he has  later on in the novel that I began to see a deeper metaphor unfold from  Grimwood, a parallel between Jeff's lives and our one life, which I  can't give away for spoilers.  Suffice to say: 'Youth is wasted on the  young'.  It's beautifully done.


Inevitably, _Replay_ is the  kind of novel that constantly holds a mirror up to us, wrestling with  the question of how we should live and what's important.  Through Jeff  and his story, Grimwood, remarkably, covers all the ground you could  think of with those questions.


The fact that 'the meaning of life'  is a problem or a goal undiminished regardless of the number of lives  you're given is one of the more interesting outcomes of Jeff's  situation.


If the book falls a little short anywhere it's in the  way Grimwood tackles the cause of Jeff's recurring life, something that  Jeff is obsessed with.  An attempt to save John F Kennedy's life in '63  gives a strand that could have been plucked to more effect, and later in  the novel there is a further and much larger opportunity given that  never really resolves, at least for me.


The climax of the novel is nevertheless interesting, and is given substance by the strength of what goes before.  Resolving _Replay's_ causality question might have been as big an ask as it was for Stephen King to give us a suitable climax with the monster in _It_, or Pizzolatto's challenge to provide a fitting climax to _True Detective_, but the journey all of these writers takes us on is both powerful and moving.


_Replay_ is much richer than _Groundhog Day_  of course, it has the space to be.  But given how brilliant the latter  is, this is more than sufficient recommendation from me to go read the  former.


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## Pidgeon84

^sounds interesting. Might have to check that one out.


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## Pidgeon84

Girl with the Dragon Tattoo 8/10- Pretty well written, suspenseful, well thought out. My only complaint is the writter had a tendency to ramble early in the book and you forget where you were before. Good book.


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## Caragula

One more from my blog: *Altered Carbon by Richard Morgan

*
_Altered Carbon_, by Richard Morgan, is a cyberpunk-noir  detective thriller of the ‘locked room’ variety.  If you want steam  rising out of your grates in grimy streets straight off the ‘Blade  Runner’ mood boards and a bosomy femme fatale in a plot full of twists  and turns then stop reading and go buy it, because as a debut novel,  it’s astonishingly assured plotting and writing.


 Needless to say it won’t do to discuss the plot, (hardened killer  brought out of jail to solve a mega-rich man’s “murder” but uncovering  far more), but what works so well here is how convincing Morgan is at  immersing you in his well-woven future Earth.  Much of the intricate  plot hangs off his detailed understanding of the minutiae of this  universe, how the Earth and the colonies have developed and changed,  though the fact it takes place in San Francisco and it’s a place where  the mega rich are beyond the law and influence it to their own ends are  sadly familiar anchors for the reader’s immersion in this future.


 As a writer I love it when another ‘worldbuilder’ does a good job of  choosing his or her idioms, making them feel natural and simple, two key  characteristics for slang.  Morgan works in a robust political and  social backdrop that hangs effectively off the technological  advancements that have fundamentally altered society and what it means  to be a human.  There are numerous well judged developments to humans of  the cyberpunk variety, the ‘empathin’ mood enhancers built into the  bodies, or ‘neurachem’, a triggerable state of full body enhancement  that turns you into a superfast and super perceptive killing machine.


 Due to my philosophical bent, the main thing that baked my noodle  about the central conceit of this future universe is the notion that a  person can be separated from their body.  It’s handled well, but I  couldn’t buy into it properly (which coincidentally goes for the odd  dodgy adverb littered throughout the book – a shawl puddles ‘silkenly’  on the floor?).


 This is a universe where a ‘person’ is encapsulated in a  neuro-cortical hardware device.  One’s body is inhabited, it’s referred  to as a ‘sleeve’.  If the body dies, the device is removed and is  ‘re-sleeved’, indeed this is mandatory.  Real death is a very big deal  in this universe.  As such, it is possible that a ‘person’ can be in two  bodies at the same time.  Derek Parfit, an eminent British philosopher,  presented this concept as a thought experiment in his _Reasons and Persons_, a treatise on ethics and identity.

 Imagine you are at a teleporter, ready to beam over to Mars.  The  process begins, then there’s an explosion.  You leave the teleporter  here on Earth and ask the scientist what’s gone wrong.

 He shakes his head, unsure as to what just happened.  He says the  machine this end is destroyed, but has done deep cellular damage to you,  which will shortly debilitate and kill you.

 “No need to worry though,” says the scientist, “you won’t actually  die, you teleported successfully.  There you are,” he says, pointing to  you on the monitor, waving back at Earth.

 But you do worry.  You aren’t him, you’re here, feeling your body  going, while that other person that is practically exactly like you  watches on concerned.  ‘You’ are moments from death.

 The break in continuity seems fatal to the notion of personhood.  One  sleeps of course, a gap of 6-8 hours where one is not a person, but the  physical continuity holds.  It could be countered that sleeving is just  that, a change to everything but the neural systems while you are  unconscious, for you still feel like you when you wake up, you feel it’s  the same you.  It isn’t a great stretch perhaps to imagine some way of  separating your brain and all its ‘tendrils’ and stitching them into a  similar body.  If you are your brain then continuity is assured.

 But the moment there is a split, a cloning, the self becomes other,  each second apart diverging the neural states that signify oneself.  One  cannot be divergently located, the sense of self is homogenous,  singular.

 But there’s a further problem.  What is going on within this neural  black box that transfers so easily between sleeves? The technological  capacity for it would indicate science so far advanced that the rest of  the milieu wouldn’t be in the state it is.  It would be easier to create  free infinite energy and eliminate poverty.

 This isn’t to say that Morgan doesn’t do a good job of presenting  some of the edges of this continuity dilemma in the book where it  affects the plot; he’s clearly thought about it, but for me the conceit  rings hollow.  People will never be blase about their clones.

 There are some standout moments in the book, the main one for me  being the mega-billionaire Bancroft’s explanation of how a marriage  feels after 300 years, a microcosm of the wider social picture that  cleverly illuminates how for the immortal rich, life is devalued.  It is  a conundrum of long life and how meaning and purpose might be  intrinsically linked to a more ordinary lifespan, that we would somehow,  despite the technology, feel like Bilbo, butter smeared over too much  bread.

 The one person I hadn’t expected to think about when reading this  book was my great-grandmother.  She was 98 when she asked me why she had  to go on, why she kept breathing when she’d outlived almost everyone  she loved and seen her great grandchildren grow up.  She had, she said,  “finished.”

 I couldn’t conceive of what it would be like to find myself having had enough of life.  _Altered Carbon’s _sweetest  moments for me arrive early, a conversation between the protagonist and  Bancroft an affecting echo of a Tuesday night drinking whisky with my  nan, a hundred years stretching back behind her eyes and a  self-deprecating smile breaking through an otherwise carefully hidden  ennui.


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## dvspec

Anything and everything written by Dick Francis.  

He isn't alive anymore, having died a couple years ago, but he is a master at suspense and has 40 books.  He started out as a steeple chase jockey (National Velvet.  Horses over jumps over miles.  Horrifying to watch.) and was the Queen of England's jockey until she asked him to retire after another injury.  He became a journalist and then a novelist.  

Most of the first books focus on the English horse racing community, but are easy for anyone to follow.  Only twice did he use the same MC for his books.  Sid Haley was one, if I remember right, and I think a guy named Kit.  

Check him out.  He is old school and one of the books as some old computer as a major plot piece.  He handles it well and the lack of tech is ageless.


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## Caragula

Gabriel García Márquez - One Hundred Years of Solitude

Hearing that I hadn’t read any of Gabriel García Márquez’s work, when his death was announced, a friend kindly bought me this, as he had _Wolf Hall_.  Clearly, he knows what’s good for me.

This twentieth century classic in the magical realist tradition was my first foray into the realm, unless Calvino’s _If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller_ counts.

I urge you not to wait as long as I have, but to throw yourself into the story of the Buendía family across six generations and their doomed trajectory intertwined with that of Macondo, their near utopian village soon despoiled by the industrial revolution. For all that it’s a translation, Gregory Rabassa has rendered the original prose into something surely as fizzing and gorgeous as the original:

_“…he left his accumulated grief behind and found Remedios changed into a swamp without horizons, smelling of raw animal and recently ironed clothes.”
_
_“He (Melquíades) went from house to house dragging two metal ingots and everybody was amazed to see pots, pans, tongs and braziers tumble down from their places…”Things have a life of their own,” the gypsy proclaimed with a harsh accent.  “It’s simply a matter of waking up their souls.”
_
Thus Melquíades first appears to José Arcadio Buendía and his wife (and for me the keel of the whole novel) Úrsula.  The family are the heart of Macondo, the principle family, and soon their wealth builds them a house that itself reflects and anchors the emotional and nihilistic journeys of their offspring.  With the railroad and then a banana plantation, ‘civilisation’ comes to Macondo, and it grows, whorehouses and schools and all manner of industry, and soon civil war.

As the generations progress, from their first children, Colonel Aureliano Buendía, Amaranta and José Arcadio (jnr), through all the Aurelianos and Josés and Amarantas, each seems somehow fated to varying extremes of self-loathing, lust, greed, insanity and above all, infusing all, passion.

Passions rule this novel, the magical realism amplifying the periods of bitter poverty and Gatsby-esque wealth and ennui, and make it a wild and compelling tale as the family’s generations spiral in their various ways out of control, with runaways, step-children, and an actual angel growing up in Úrsula’s house; Úrsula, at the heart of it, keeping the gyre from its widening for as long as she has strength, a superhuman stoic and the counterpoint that stops the novel from dissolving.  Through it also, Melquíades’s secrets in his books and his notes, left for decades in the room he had once occupied for a time.  These secrets puzzle generations of the Buendía men, drawn like their ancestor José to all things alchemical and occult.  Their unravelling is integral to the book’s visceral and shocking ending.

I can say little else for spoilers.  It is a masterpiece of course, as rich a tale of humanity’s excess as I’ve read, a defining statement on the savagery of love.


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## Caragula

*House of Leaves - Mark Z. Danielewski*

If the horror genre is a journey, then _House* __of Leaves, _by Mark Z. Danielewski, is its destination.

 I say this not only because it is an attempt to get at the fundament  of what is horrifying, but also because the nature of the attempt is an  audacious, remarkably intelligent and emotionally satisfying weaving of  multiple narratives and perspectives working on many levels; straight,  ironic, comic, academic and post-modern.  It is astonishing.

 At its heart, the novel is a pseudo-academic treatise on the events, and meaning, of ‘The Navidson Record.’

 This was a film, shot as a sequence of shorts, by award-winning  photo-journalist Will Navidson and his wife Karen, a former supermodel,  initially of their family trying to settle down and rediscover itself  after his years away shooting wars and famine.  Their new house,  however, seems larger on the inside than the outside.  Then a new  corridor appears behind a door that should lead outside, but leads  instead somewhere very dark.  The series of shorts were distributed  among ‘those in the know’ and achieved a cult following before they were  made into a release for cinemas.

 The treatise is an attempt, by a man called Zampanò, to both relay the events taking place in the Navidsons’ house  but also to draw on his wide and deep reading in and around the film by  academics, film makers, documentaries and testimonials alike, as a way  of finding an explanation or understanding of the supernatural phenomena  there.

 Layered over this, however, is the story of Johnny Truant, a dropout  working as an assistant in a tattoo parlour, whose friend Lude shows him  the apartment of the recently deceased Zampanò, and a trunk full of the  papers and research he’d done on The Navidson Record.

 Johnny becomes obsessed with the unfolding story and it soon starts  to fray his mind.  Danielewski, via a series of letters and, later on, a  fragmented set of Truant’s own recollections, paints a tragic backdrop  for Truant that will, alongside the trials of the Navidsons, provide us  with much to think about in respect of that which haunts them all.  For  this reason I will disagree with some other commentators on this novel  who see Truant as its weakest point.  I think he is essential to  Danielewski’s goal.

 Not content with a multi-layered narrative, Danielewski has Truant  open the novel claiming that for all its fame, no copies of the film can  be found, and much of the research is invented, while much more is  missing or perhaps unreliable.  Zampanò, in Truant’s view, is a complex  character, instantly fascinating: _“…his humour was that wry,  dessicated kind soldiers whisper, all their jokes subsurface, their  laughter amounting to little more than a tic at the corner of the  mouth…”_

 It becomes clear that Danielewski has academia as one target for his  barbs, but he is far cleverer and too restlessly creative for that,  referencing a story early on that Truant has read, but its entry in the  appendix says only that the story appears to be missing, calling into  question the veracity of what is presented as an academic paper, the  very form of which denotes authority.  Many of the quotes from  academics, right down to the highly plausible references in the  footnotes of almost every page, are digs at literary theory, art theory,  sociology and other fairly soft targets, the papers cited often have  highly pretentious titles, while real and fictional TV, film and  academic personalities are parodied either subtly or wildly.

 Beyond this, the story Zampanò tells is of a dysfunctional family  trying to find itself, it’s about a man and woman in love, and their  love in the face of the events of the novel is powerful, moving and,  sublimely for me, all these things _because_ of what are utterly  bizarre supernatural events.  I’ve not read a novel before that could  take as its conflict something with all the overtones of every haunted house  trope and use it as a lens through which we can see a couple at the  last chance saloon of their relationship looking to understand if they  are meant to make it or not.  The resolution is deeply satisfying,  indeed, the use of the various academic texts is highly effective at  offering various readings, all plausible and somehow mutually enhancing  of their struggles in the context of the house itself.

 The house itself.

 As I mentioned at the outset, Danielewski is interested in what lies  at the heart of horror, what is behind all those things that movies,  books, stories and myths down the ages have made us scared of.   Danielewski is self-aware enough to understand that his attempt at  facing this archetype of the horrific may still be quite American, a  notion he puts into the mouth of a fictional professor being interviewed  by Karen Navidson about the movie:
 “Quite a few Brits you know still prefer their ghosts decked in crepe  and cobweb, candelabra in one hand.  Your monster, however, is purely  American.  Edgeless for one thing, something a compendium of diverse  cultures definitely requires.”

 Without spoilers I cannot say too much more of what it is Danielewski aims at, but the nature of the house  and its past, even its fabric, but most of all what they find as they  begin exploring what lies beyond that mysterious corridor, is almost  Danielewski’s argument in support of what horror really is, what lies at  the heart of it.

 Still unsatisfied with the many layers on which his book is working,  Danielewski then plays vividly and overtly with the form of the novel,  the nature of words on the page, typography and narrative structure.   This is not an easy novel to read.  For any horror buffs reading this it  might actually also be a disappointment, ‘not at all horrifying or  scary’.

 What House of Leaves is goes  beyond that.  It is challenging and thought-provoking, holding the  reader’s gaze at the horror as the nature of the house  is revealed.  He is issuing a challenge:  “Can you imagine anything  more horrifying than this?”  I know what my answer is, and I doubt I  could have answered it before I read this incredible book.

 *_In the full-colour edition of this book, every instance of the word ‘house‘ is in blue _


----------



## Caragula

*The City & The City - China Miéville

*Hopefully all China Miéville’s novels are as original and engaging as this one.  _The City & The City_  is on one level a standard ‘detective investigating death of girl  uncovers big conspiracy’ story, but Miéville has decided to weave the  tale into a quite unique milieu.  And ‘weave’ is the operative word.

 Inspector Tyador Borlú lives and works in Beszél, a run-down city  somewhere in Europe.  It happens to be spatially (or as he calls it  ‘grosstopically’) co-located with another city, Ul Quoma.  The two  cities are meshed together, existing in the same space, and many areas  of them are ‘crosshatched’, places where citizens can see each other’s  cities co-located with their own.

 These cities have different cultures and different laws; effectively,  they are two different societies. Miéville’s mastery of the challenges  this causes is both fascinating but also functional, for the story that  emerges as Borlú starts digging goes to the core of the relationship  these two cities have with each other. It is disorientating initially as  we are given Borlú’s first person narrative.  Naturally he makes  assumptions about his world, so his vocabulary and his introduction to  the cities takes some time to settle to.

 This is mainly because everyone living in either of these cities has  learned to ‘unsee’ the others that live in the same space but are  citizens of the other city.  Cars driving along cross-hatched streets  must swerve to avoid the cars that are co-located but in the other city,  and they do so by accounting for them but otherwise ‘unseeing’ them, a  cognitive training learned from youth that feels, to read it, not  dissimilar to those ‘hollow face’ illusions.  This ‘unseeing’ is  profoundly important.  The different sets of citizens must ignore one  another. I found it quite interesting that I as a reader was immersing  myself into an initially confusing world where these two separate  societies co-exist spatially, then I got into it, a process in microcosm  not dissimilar to that Miéville describes a tourist as having to go  through, because you cannot visit either city without learning the rules  about ‘unseeing’.

 Now, the thing that stops these people, indeed compels them in either  city to ‘unsee’ and thus ignore the other city is Breach. Breach is a  terrifying and mysterious force that acts as judge and jury on anyone  that attempts to switch from one city to another without crossing the  official border, a neutral zone straddling which is a huge building  housing representatives of either city’s government.  Breach enforces  the boundary between cities and ensures their separation.
 If you start overtly noticing the other city’s citizens, if you  ‘see’, engage with or otherwise take or drop objects into the other city  you will ‘breach’ to the other city and Breach will find you and remove  you.  You will not be seen again.
 The great achievement with this book is partly a page-turning police  procedural with a likeable and sufficiently weary protagonist but mainly  how well it takes the questions you have as a reader about how these  co-existing cities could work.  Without undue exposition to clog down  the usual requirement for spare prose, Miéville paints a strong and  nuanced world where the facts of it, and its history, have that air of  being worn smooth; slang, culture, law, even the economy are effectively  referenced and thus ground the reader convincingly in this very strange  place as the plot thickens and unfolds, and it becomes obvious that  Borlú will have to visit Ul Quoma.

 There is of course a whole fascinating thematic structure here  regarding the nature of different societies and cultures sharing the  same space, both ignoring each other, and pretending to ignore each  other.  It is a lens on our own societies that can be cast through many  filters; race, wealth and class in particular.  As we come across  political pressure groups such as the ‘Unifs’ or Unificationists, who  want Beszél and Ul Quoma to simply join together and be as one, I for  one couldn’t help questioning the correctness of the need for discipline  in maintaining their segregation, which in turn provoked me to think  about the nature of of national identity and the notion of a joined up  society.

 I read somewhere that Miéville was looking to write a book in every  genre.  Apocrypha or not, this is a great page turner sandwiched into an  audacious and original conceit.  It’s not sci-fi per se, nor is it  dystopian.  But if you want a crime thriller bent into an  alternate-reality fantasy, a thriller with a satisfying intellectual  filling, look no further.  If all his genre tourism is this interesting  and original, I’ll be travelling through a few more.


----------



## Caragula

*Here - Richard McGuire (graphic novel)

*_Here_, by Richard McGuire, is no less than the zenith of the graphic novel as an art form.


 It is one of the most profound things I’ve read.


 Based on the six page comic that appeared in _Raw_ magazine in 1989, this was something I’d missed until Chris Ware reviewed it in the Guardian. (The link is to that review).  I can only express my pleasure alongside his, though less eloquently.


_Here _takes a point in space, which, for most of the  narrative is in the corner of a room in a house, but as you turn the  pages the clock winds backwards and forwards, billions of years  backwards on some pages, thousands forward on others, but most  concentrate on the time humans are around.


 On each page the elements of narrative, such as it is, are presented  as panels tagged with the year that each moment took place in.

All of human experience is here: Love, death, growing up, growing old, telling stories, play, sorrow, laughter, work, survival.


 The great achievement of _Here_ lies in the form, because it  achieves the above so effortlessly.  Perhaps this could have been done  with moving images.  I don’t believe it would have worked as well  principally because of the art, the flat almost idealised drawings are  devoid of detail, the humans standing out, for it should be as blank, as  ‘everyman’ a canvas as possible, this point of view in space.  It  should be anywhere.


 Inevitably, life is represented as a series of stills and there are  some beautiful miniatures, in particular the sequence of family photos  near the beginning, through the mid to late 20th century, where the  expression in one face diverges from the others, a worry or sorrow  there.  Later, a sequence in 1870 at a picnic portrays the emptiness of a  wasted love, perhaps the end of a relationship, all in a few drawings  and a couple of sentences.  Every word is carefully chosen, layering and  gluing the thematic structure together.


 Here, the fixed camera and the infinite reel of time allow McGuire  the space he needs to show that from anywhere we stand, moments full of  meaning to the protagonists can be found.  He exemplifies it most in a  sublime moment when a group of historians are invited into the house to  talk to the woman living there, in 1986, telling her that her house may  be on a culturally very important site for the American Indians.  Of  course, we’re in the middle of a graphic novel that asks us to consider  how, from an immortal perspective, no one place need be historically  more important than any other if what we’re looking for is meaning.


 And this comes to the heart of it.  Meaning.  Quite apart from the  strings of narrative that thread together clusters of pages either  contiguous or, in the case of the opening question, closing the entire  loop a book later, you must look at this as you would any fine art.   What is it saying?  How do I feel about it?


 These moments in time are overlaid, many beautiful resemblances and  contrasts that I won’t labour here, for that pleasure is all yours.   What arises is our fragility as a species, our ‘specks on a ball of  mud-ness’.  The form these moments take are most like memories in their  nature.  There is a tiny hand grasping two grown up (father’s?) fingers,  a joke (about death of course), images or sequences of a few seconds,  moments that would stick in the mind though they do not appear to be  important.  I doubt I’m the only one confused by why it is certain  moments of my life stick in my head as vividly as photographs and not  others.  McGuire understands this perfectly.


 But if I were a god and chose to stand ‘here’, for long enough, these  would be my memories.  The lives of many generations are spanned, and  while each moment itself seems ordinary, my nose is pressed to history  by this novel, a grander narrative appears that summarises the  irreducible beauty of a godless universe, from His perspective.  If  atheists were defined by something positive and not something negative  (to wit – ‘without theism’ or ‘without belief in God’) then _Here_ would be the manifesto.
 Take a step back, reflect on the ephemerality of your life in its  totality, face with a glad heart and bubbling curiosity the two axioms  from which you can build meaning.


 You are mortal.  Life’s what you make it.


----------



## Caragula

*The Blade Itself & Rivers of London
*
I recently read, back to back, Ben Aaranovitch’s _Rivers of London_ and Joe Abercrombie’s _The Blade Itself_, the latter a long overdue read for me as a fantasy author.


 It was because of their similarities that I’m writing about (and recommending them) together.


 Both books have an easy, warm prose, perfectly suited for the stories  they’re telling, full also of some very dry wit.  What makes them  special is that the worlds they’ve crafted are woven in equally subtly,  dribbled into the stories at just the right pace.  Aaranovitch clearly  has a passion for London and its history, it captures a London as much  Hugh Grant’s Notting Hill as it is Eastenders as it is an ancient and  storied locum of English history.  Within this he overlays a wonderfully  natural magic system, tying it into the folk/cultural history of the  capital exquisitely well.


 The book starts with DC Peter Grant, a bit of a useless policeman  with a crush on his career driven colleague Lesley May.  At the scene of  a murder, he soon realises that he’s interviewing a ghost rather than a  tramp, and from that point on he finds himself off down the rabbit  hole, shortly popping up as an apprentice wizard working for a secret  branch of the police, investigating the murders as they pile up and  piecing together the force behind them.


 It’s in bringing us from the one reality into the other that  Aaranovitch succeeds so well, and as an apprentice, Grant is the perfect  guide for the reader, discovering this secret London with us and for  us.  His initiation into magic, how he tries, initially, to will into  being a small magical light, is surprisingly plausible, it somehow feels  right, while Grant himself, having an unorthodox but solidly grounded  sense of the world, immediately tries to think about the physics of it.   The system Aaranovitch has worked out riffs off a more mundane  materialist backdrop well.  As it’s introduced to Grant, so it’s  introduced to us, but again, it’s done in a way that doesn’t weight the  plot down.  Given it’s a supernatural murder mystery, and a cleverly  conceived one with some twists and turns, it’s quite a page turner,  reminding me of how effortlessly China Mieville also managed to twist a  fairly conventional genre trope with his _City and the City.
_

_The Blade Itself_ is much more purely ‘sff’.  At first I  thought Abercrombie’s world was a bit shallow, but it was simply my  expectation that fantasy world-building generally comes on a bit thick.   As a reader I seem to have gotten used to being plunged into a  different world with a very small paddle and a strong current.  He  introduces his ensemble of misfits methodically, giving each their own  space, story and context to breathe and develop, before the novel  gradually pulls them together through the machinations of a mage called  Bayaz, whose mission is barely hinted at, the backbone of a trilogy no  doubt.  As the book carries through, the sense of place grows with  surety, and as with _Rivers of London_, I think the carefully  measured approach to planting the world along with the story works well  for a wider audience.  My recommendation for both novels is cemented  because of this, they remain perfectly accessible to any casual reader  looking for a fantastic yarn, not just the hardcore genre fans looking  for great characters.


_The Blade Itself_ is a bigger novel, and has more work to do  to establish the ensemble.  Each character is in some way obviously  flawed, some more likeable than others for it, but all with that nugget  of good in them, whether it’s the increasingly self aware noble Jezal  and his crush on a hard drinking and beautiful commoner, the stoic  crippled torturer Glokta unwillingly uncovering a conspiracy or the  uncouth but gentle Logen just trying to stay alive.  It’s refreshing to  see the main characters get into scrapes and feel like they’re not going  to get out of them without taking a beating, without having paid for  them in some way.  This gives them an important vulnerability that’s key  to their likeability.


 There are some dark moments in the book, (in particular a scene with  siblings later on), and for all that it has a wit about it, it isn’t  remotely Pratchett.  I enjoyed the book having these teeth and hope to  see more of them bared in the sequel.  The ‘grimdark’ was the more  effective for it being lodged in a world where the author hasn’t held  your face against the banal horror of existence for five hundred pages.   Equally, the ending of _Rivers of London_ contains something of a surprise, not quite playing out as I’d expected.


 There are more in either series, so while you can’t go wrong with these unshowy, well told stories, you can jump deeper in.


----------



## Caragula

*The Quantum Thief*

This book has no right to be a debut.  It’s exhilarating, a tour de force.


_The Quantum Thief_ is a heist thriller the threads of which  are woven into a sinuous and densely realised future.  It’s a  challenging read, I’ll admit hard to follow in places, as Hannu  Rajaniemi displaces the awesome intelligence and agency of his  protagonist, the ‘Thief’, into discontinuous layers – his past self, his  memories – locked away.  The threads deepen and widen, the narrative is  fragmented, but not frustratingly so; it’s as though it reflects the  discontinuity of self that resonates throughout this future.


 The heist, such as it is, is part of a much larger game being played  by a seemingly all-powerful race (?) the Sobornost and exile factions on  Mars, living on ‘The Oubliette’, a giant walking city that wanders the  Martian landscape.  While the thief, sprung from a ‘Dilemma Prison’ in  order to execute the heist, is ostensibly a pawn, it becomes obvious he  has a deeper plan of his own, and so his motives, like much else in this  novel, are nestled within other motives, each step he takes both for  himself and his employer.  A conspiracy is uncovered that threatens the  city, the very fabric of its culture, and the thief is somehow, at the  back of it all, aware of what’s going on.


 The thief’s execution of his plan is all the more difficult because  his ‘masters’ have direct access to his mind, after a fashion, but he  has rigged an elaborate mind palace, the keys to which he had hidden  many years before, to protect himself both against such things, and from  himself it would seem.


 Against him is Isidore, an homage to Sherlock Holmes (though the  demeanour comes across as more distinctly Colombo in my mind).  He is  wonderfully realised, his existence as the Holmes to our protagonist’s  Moriarty is all the more entertaining for the fact that the thief has a  heart, while being raffish and impulsive to boot.  Both characters are  extremely likeable geniuses.  There is a beautiful vignette by way of  introduction to Isidore, as he solves a miniature ‘locked room’ type of  crime, a clever and satisfying mini-plot that could have filled a much  longer story by itself.  Here it just sets up the character and his own  backdrop and conflicts, until both he and thief are brought together by  their relationship to a group of superhero-cum-civil rights activists  empowered to protect the Oubliette citizens’ privacy.


 With me so far?  As I said, it’s all rather densely plotted, and as  the thief and Isidore head towards the climax, the stakes rise  satisfyingly.  The twists and reveals are very clever and the dynamics  between these two, as well as between the thief and his ‘minder’, Mieli,  who is cognitively linked to him as part of ensuring he lives up to his  part of the bargain for being freed.  Needless to say, both she and his  ‘ex’, Raymonde, are as exasperated by him as they are enamoured of  him.  Given both these characters are themselves seriously kick-ass it  might be argued that their tolerance/indulgence of him rings a little  hollow, but whether I’m just used to this kind of trope or not, it feels  plausible without diminishing their agency in the novel.


 The thing that sets this novel apart for me, however, is how  interestingly and coherently imagined this future is.  As you are  plunged in, a strange vocabulary  peppers you like the spray of a  machine gun.  Here’s how he sets a combat sequence up:


_“Far above, the ship sends down a burst of exotic weakly  interacting particles through the room. The skeletons of the vasilevs  ghost in her vision. Her metacortex matches patterns, classifies hidden  weapons. Ghostguns. Sobornost weapons, with bullets that take over your  mind. Damn it. With a thought, she brings her own systems online.
_

_Her right hand contains a q-dot gun, a linear accelerator firing  semi-autonomous coherent payloads. Her left has a ghostgun with an array  of nanomissiles: each has a war gogol ready to invade enemy systems, to  flood them with copies of itself. The programmable matter layer under  her epidermis becomes armour, her fingernails harder than diamond. The  fusion reactor in her right thighbone spins up. The metacortex Nash  engine chooses a set of optimal targets and a cover position for the  thief.”
_

 The hard science forms that kind of shell of believability where  anyone without a doctorate in quantum mechanics can get the gist enough  to feel like it’s all super-advanced, and yet the concepts are  wonderful; artificial brains the size of planets, ships with “_q-dot sails -_ _concentric  soap-bubble-thin rings made from artificial atoms…(that) catch  sunlight, Highway meso-particles and light mill beams”.  _The  thief’s given a body with ‘proteomic computers in every cell, and he can  view this body externally, as well as the ship he’s inside, through a  ‘spimescape’.  Nope, I got nuthin’.


 I can’t do justice to the many-faceted references to the nature of  things in the far future.  It’s fascinating and thought-provoking, but  one passage does suggest a problem that Rajaniemi presumably chooses not  to tackle, in a scene where Mieli is interrogating someone (a  ‘vasilev’) for information:


_“Then she pulls the surgeon gogol from her metacortex and tells  it to begin.  It traps the vasilev into a sandbox and starts cutting;  separating higher conscious functions, rewarding and punishing…The  surgeon gogol’s outputs are cold readouts of associative learning in  simulated neural populations.”
_

 Here it seems the ‘surgeon’ has reconstructed the mind/brain of the  vasilev from defiant to perfectly pliable, in order for her to  interrogate it and get the truth out of it.


 In this ‘post-human’ future where persons can be discrete from  bodies; sliced, diced, able to reconstruct their physiques (with the  right kind of body) at will, they don’t seem able to reconstruct their  personalities.  The characteristics I perceive the characters to have in  what I’ve described above seem to be immutable.  Yet this must be the  writer’s conceit, a willing blind spot, the only aspect of this future  that seems unchanged.  And it has to for the narrative to be compelling  enough to read, as a novel.  I couldn’t care about characters that could  reconstruct their predilections at will, though this technology is  clearly available.


 For all that, communication between persons in this future is  fascinatingly conceived, whether it be brain to brain messaging, called  ‘qupts’, between Isidore and his girlfriend, to the concept of  ‘gevulots’, a kind of privacy matrix between citizens of the Oubliette  existing neurally and capable of transmitting via thought the opening  and closing of privacy protocols defining what two people are capable of  interacting about, indeed, how much they can even see of each other.   People can pass each other ‘memories’ through it, and it’s a brilliant  concept woven into a plausible etiquette of social interaction between  Martians.  At the same time, the Martians have an ‘exomemory’, a sort of  Jungian collective consciousness and record of public fact, that weaves  all of this together and forms (I think) a glue or basis for ‘gevulot’,  but is itself political and at the heart of the larger plot.


 Another major aspect to this novel is the notion of currency being  ‘Time’, every citizen of the Oubliette owning a watch through which they  can sell their time as a human to buy things, and when their time is  up, they become robotic workers, servants to the humans, keeping the  city going, until they have served enough time to be ‘reborn’ as  humans.  As a society of immortals goes, it’s remarkably well balanced.   To Rajaniemi’s credit, this concept plays into the development of the  plot intimately as well.


 If you’ve got this far you probably have some idea how I’ve struggled  to articulate how fertile this novel is for both great writing,  storytelling and far future world-building.


 It’s a difficult read, and having started the sequel, which opens up  more of the thief’s backstory and the bigger picture generally,  obliquely referenced in this debut, it is only getting more difficult,  more layered.  If you found _Cloud Atlas_ easy to follow, this  might be a heartier meal.  I’m hanging on by the coat-tails as Rajaniemi  drags me through this amazingly conceived universe.  I can’t offer  greater praise to another writer than that they send me back to my own  work feeling like ‘I’ve got a long way to go, must try harder!’


----------



## InnerFlame00

My review of Twilight. I had fun with this one:

                                                                                 I knew I had to read this  series at one point in order to adequately make light of it, as well as  to avoid the eternal cry of die hard fans "But you didn't even READ it!  You don't understand Bella's eternal love for Edwards tawny eyes and  gleaming creamy pale chest!"

But how to make myself sledge through what I knew would be some pretty terrible writing?

The  answer and setting: I have come down with Strep throat, I have 104  degree fever and my attention span is now about the same as a three year  old cracked up on sugar. Perfect!

In my fevered state the  glaringly obvious grammar issues didn't bother me, but the main  characters did. If you could call them 'main' or 'characters'. Because  the two things that stood out to me the most was:

A] All the  supporting characters were infinitely more interesting than Edward,  Bella, and Jacob. They had histories and personalities (excepting  Bella's mother, whom Bella clearly inherited her flatness from). I could  see a good book being written about Carlyle and Esme, or Alice and  Jasper. Or the Volturi. Hell, even Bella's dad. I'd sooner read a book  starring her dad's mustache than re-read this series. Maybe not if it  was written by Meyer, but I digress.

B} Edward is amazingly  immature for someone who is supposed to be 108 years old. He acts like  an angsty teenager and makes decisions like one. He breaks up with his  emotionally unstable girlfriend (who has basically said she did not want  to live without him) in order to supposedly protect her.  Great job  protecting her by abandoning her in the middle of a forest!

There  are dozens of more instances of poor character development, bad  plotting, gross plot twists, and more, but those have all been covered  in other reviews so I will leave them be.

I read the entire  series in three days, although as I was getting better at the end of  that third day I skimmed through most of Breaking Dawn (I think I got  enough of the general idea though, don't worry).

The only good  thing that came out of these books are the movies and the subsequent  rifftrax of them.  If you have not watched the twilight series rifftrax I  highly recommend them - It's basically the guys from MST3K plundering  the ripe field of bad writing and acting that is the movie franchise.

I thought The Host was much better, so it seems Meyer may be learning from her mistakes.  Here's hoping.


----------



## BurntMason84

One of the last books I had read was *The Historian*.  Not sure how to set it in a genre... maybe a historical fiction, suspense and horror elements?  Not horror in the sense of Friday the 13th or Final Destination, but more along the line of Bram Stoker's Dracula.  Great writing appeal, the world around the character is painted immaculately.  And maybe I'm a bit naive, but the book does take a dramatic turn of an historical fiction/biography unto horror pretty quickly and without warning; truly took me for a loop.

If I had to say a downside, was that at some parts, it was drawn out quite a bit with needless information or back story, or that the ending was kind of anticlimactic.  Not bad, just not what I had expected the way it was going.



InnerFlame00 said:


> The only good  thing that came out of these books are the movies and the  subsequent  rifftrax of them.  If you have not watched the twilight  series rifftrax I  highly recommend them - It's basically the guys from  MST3K plundering  the ripe field of bad writing and acting that is the  movie franchise.


----------



## Caragula

*The Deluge

*I’d been putting off trying to articulate my thoughts on Adam Tooze’s masterful analysis of global history from 1916-1931, _The Deluge_,  because, being so ignorant about that era, I wasn’t sure what I could  say other than ‘read it, it’ll educate ya’, for fear of drawing  incorrect or misleading conclusions from this densely detailed and  nuanced appraisal of the post-WW1 political order.  I’ll confess it was a struggle, but a fascinating one.


 Anyway, I read an article  this morning about academics giving that lunatic George Osborne a  shoeing about his desire to enshrine budget surpluses in law.  It  brought home one of my big take-aways from Tooze’s thesis, in particular  this comment from the article: _“77 of the best-known academic  economists, including French economist Thomas Piketty and Cambridge  professor Ha-Joon Chang, said the chancellor was turning a blind eye to  the complexities of a 21st-century economy that demanded governments  remain flexible and responsive to changing global events.”
_

 The thing is, it isn’t a 21st-century problem.  It was a problem back  in 1916, and it’s been a problem ever since and it arguably caused  World War II.  What was so eye-opening about Adam Tooze’s book was the  extent to which the world’s economies were and thus are interconnected,  how decisions made by banks and governments in the US and the UK, then,  tragically, Germany in 1929, rippled across the world and back again,  fuelling nationalism, revolutionary and counter-revolutionary fervour,  the Depression etc.  Decisions politicians make about their own  economies in isolation never truly affect those economies in isolation.


 Because no economy, a hundred years ago or now, is in isolation, George.


 Tooze, in his introduction, outlines a key plank of what he believes  went wrong after the war that was meant to end all wars, and it begins  during it: (President Woodrow Wilson’s)_“mission was to ensure not  that the ‘right side’ won in World War I, but that no side did.  He  refused any overt association with the Entente.  Only a peace without  victory, the goal that he announced…to the Senate in 1917, could ensure  that the United States emerged as the truly undisputed arbiter of world  affairs.  This book will argue that despite the fiasco of that policy  already in the spring of 1917…this would remain the basic objective of  Wilson and his successors right down to the 1930s.”  _They did not  see supporting Britain and France as supporting ‘good’ but supporting  rampant imperialists, in that respect no better than Germany, and  actually more of a threat.


What was interesting to read, later on, was Tooze’s belief that  Wilson and the US in general was so scarred by its own civil war that it  had a kind of genetic antipathy to the ‘imperialists’ of Great Britain,  France and other powers on the ‘dark continent’.  Arguably, the  failures of the victorious powers to secure, with the US at their head, a  lasting peace, lay in this antipathy residing in the world’s first  superpower.  For the first time in history, as Hitler, Churchill and  Trotsky all realised fully, the US was bigger and stronger than any  nation had ever been.  They could no longer consider their place in the  world without also considering their relationship to it.  What rankled  for at least Trotsky and anyone else that did not share its liberalism  was that the US chose to exert its power through its economy and  ideology, that it was using its power to establish a blueprint for the  world’s social order and couldn’t be stopped from doing so.  Yet insofar  as it proposed to the world a desire to see it at peace such that free  trade and liberalism could spread, and it had ample resources to achieve  this, why did it fail?


 In the early part of the book it was interesting to see how this  played out as World War I reached 1916 and 1917, when formally the US  government was preaching non-intervention while Wall Street was  independently lending massive amounts to the Entente to fund their war  effort.  In 1916 JP Morgan, principle lender in all this, apparently  lent almost all the money the Entente spent on its war effort that  year.  This lending, and its impact on the US economy via its exports  began to have such a powerful effect that the US was being drawn into  the conflict regardless, and it was becoming clear which side, but it  had nothing to do with US foreign policy.  However, the US was, at the  time, equally concerned about the strength of the British Navy and its  empire as it was the Germans.  The counterfactuals over these two years  come thick and fast, particularly how close the US might have been to  supporting Germany if not for a disastrous decision on their part to  increase U-Boat attacks on US shipping.  Even with a number of its ships  being sunk, it took time before they fell into line with the Entente  and started sending troops and supplies over the Atlantic.


 There are some fascinating minor facts that came out of this, such as  some of the people involved in organising the allied supply  infrastructures would later go on to inform what became the EU, for this  was the first truly international logistics effort between European  nations, alongside the US.


 One of the early counterfactuals relates to how closely the call for  ‘peace without victory’ might have gained the credence it needed to  overcome an Entente opposition so determined to win at all costs, to get  a decisive victory despite the impact of this crippling the home  economies.  If Wilson had kept the US out of joining sides for just a  few months, it would have been bolstered in its position by the  Russians, whose revolution in 1917, almost at the same time, led to  their own desire for a ‘peace without victory’, all the more stunning in  its force because they had already lost hundreds of thousands in the  war.  For a country to effectively ‘write off’ its war dead for the sake  of peace without victory, for a new world order, was a bold and  progressive step, one unlikely to have been ignored in concert with the  US position.  The Russians were advocating abolition of the death  penalty and removing restrictions on assembly and free speech.  _“It was making itself the most democratic country on earth.”_   It’s unbearably sad when, as someone so ignorant of history, I came  across this, how pregnant with so much better possibility was the  world’s future at certain critical points.  The ennui with knowing how  it would ultimately transpire was unexpectedly heartbreaking as I went  along.


The Russians could not surrender to Germany, despite such heavy  defeats on that front, given successes in Turkey and the new nationalist  fervour stoked by the revolution.  Yet to engage in a truce with  Germany would cut off the flow of credit and support from Britain, while  allowing Germany to move its men fighting its eastern front to the west  and likely deliver a victory as part of their massive  counter-offensive, with the risk they would then turn back east anyway.    The Entente would have struggled to endorse it because it might at  least force the Russians into the German army, along with the  considerable ‘food basket’ and coal that the Ukraine and Russia could  supply.  Yet the Russians had no desire to win the war for imperialist  objectives.  A peace without victory was needed.


 So, because the Russians offered a peace formula, a large part of the  German SPD party that supported the war to defend Germany against  Tsarist aggression was now suing for peace itself, in April 1917.   Indeed, at this point, an Entente victory was looking unlikely, after a  joint British/French offensive failed to break through German lines.   Some French divisions then mutinied, while at home some Liberal and  Labour MPs clamoured for the acceptance of the ‘Petrograd’ peace  formula.  The U-boat blockade was bleeding the allied forces dry on the  continent, and food supplies to Italy had almost run out, the country  beginning to starve, leading to rioting.  Yet it was the German  government’s belief that despite all this, the Entente, presumably in  part due to Britain’s widespread empire, were still able to get enough  boats through that the blockade would ultimately be futile.  This  boosted their own calls for peace even more strongly internally.  The  German Chancellor was dismissed and the Reichstag voted for peace.  It  was all just a few months too late.


 When the Petrograd peace formula came through, echoing Wilson’s own,  it was too late for him to throw himself and the US behind it, though  where his own peace without victory had failed, it would not just have  become embarrassing to follow Russia’s lead and do a u-turn, but also  because it would go counter to his own view that the US should lead the  new world order.  He saw Germany as dangerously imperialist and  aggressive enough that a peace by force would be required, and had thus  acted first.


 As Tooze says, had the Americans not joined the war when they did,  had the Germans not stepped up their U-boat campaign (against internal  opposition), had the Entente been more ready to sue for peace though it  would mean declaring the world’s worst war futile, there may have been  peace with Germany and democracy in Russia from 1917 onwards.  The  Bolsheviks, and later, Stalin, might never have got started.  The steps  to their power, and Lenin’s subsequent naked aggression and usurpation  of the fragile democracy that Russia was birthing, are followed in much  the same fascinating and tragic vein through the ramifications of the  ‘Brest Litovsk’ treaty.  I’d be typing the book out if I carried on, but  now I revisit it to refresh these points, I’m once again carried away  by it.  The Entente, concerned about a pact that forced Germany and  Russia together, as well as the US, who foresaw a pan Eurasian counter  to their own global power, supported the Czech army that was fighting  both Russians and Germans.  This forced Russia into Germany’s arms, yet  led to deep civil unrest in Russia due to the former Tsarist  connections, and Lenin, to maintain control, effectively declaring  himself a dictator, after being shot by leftists disappointed at the  treaty.  What comes across in this book is his and Trotsky’s ideological  arrogance and the damage it ultimately did.  In my notes I bolded  ‘Lenin is a total dick’, which I’m sure sufficiently excoriates him in  the eyes of the world…


 Here, in a microcosm, is an illustration of how the decision making  and economic ramifications of them played in and out of how these  nations engaged with each other.  They are bound no less by such  relations in peace time, as the rest of the book goes on to amply  demonstrate.  It explores the failures of the Treaty of Versailles and  the League of Nations, the rise of fascism and of Chinese nationalism  and how the Russians saw a great opportunity to shape it into a  communist regime.


 Wilson was arguably right about the imperialist bent of Britain and  France, from the Anglo-Iraq treaty of 1926 to the French bombing Syria  and their Rhineland invasion in the late twenties, or the British  occupying Istanbul and letting the Greeks assault Turkey’s interior.  It  was a view that even Hoover shared in his own way, with the US  government time and again refusing to consider economic plans and  security guarantees that could have altered the impact of the serious  deflation of the early 20s and later the global economic collapse borne  of the Great Depression.


 Off the back of this depression, Heinrich Brüning, the German  Chancellor in 1930, began a train of events that, with another miserably  missed alternate universe, led to Hitler’s Nationalist Socialists  gaining power.  Aristide Briand and Gustave Stresemann, a Frenchman and a  German (both of whom would win the Nobel Peace Prize) advocated, in  response to America’s intransigence on inter-allied war debts and  reparations that were seen as damaging to European sovereignty, the idea  of a European Union, but it collapsed.  Brüning was looking to overturn  the Versailles Treaty and, perhaps fuelled by the challenges of the  negotiations around the Young Plan, which was an attempt to review and  decide reparations for the war, his foreign minister, replacing the  recently deceased peacemaker Stresemann, with a strengthening economy  exporting to Russia and developing ties with Italy, decided to embark on  negotiations with Austria for a customs union.  So what, eh?


 It broke at least three post-war peace treaties while simultaneously  being rather suicidal in the face of Briand’s proposals for a stronger  Europe overall which would have given Germany a bigger export market.   Instead the move, on the back of deflationary economic adjustments, led  to an increase in domestic and international pressure, and Tooze views  it as a sop to the far right.  In Tooze’s view the French had opened  their money markets to Berlin as a reward for its compliance/adherence  to the Gold Standard for its currency.  The US and Britain appeared not  to care a great deal about the union, with the US view being this would  surely only help consolidation of European states and reduce their  fragility.  But this antagonisation of the money markets and Brüning’s  scathing view of the reparations payments was made because he was aware  that with the US as a key debtor, and Wall Street wanting to see its  creditors ensure they got theirs before the allied nations, Germany  could reduce its reparations obligations.  When Germany’s economy went  into freefall, it soon became clear to Hoover and the allies that  something had to be done to shore it up, and the US put forward a plan  to suspend Germany’s war debt commitments, a plan ratified by everyone  but France.  I infer from the text, because of their 25% holding of the  entire world’s gold reserve at that time, that they just didn’t want to,  having been particularly sore about German reparations enough to invade  Rhineland, at great cost to their own international credibility.  This  decision to ignore Hoover’s rescue plan incensed the international  community, yet France could argue that it had made round after round of  reparations concessions that weren’t matched by the US.  In addition to  the financial reparations _“Again and again France had called for an  international security system to replace the provisions agreed at  Versailles.  But this had been vetoed by Washington…With the  stabilisation of the franc in 1926, the agreement to the Young Plan and  the Mellon-Berenger war-debt deal in 1929 it had paid the price.  Now,  as a result of a crisis the Germans had brought upon themselves, America  was unilaterally asserting its right to declare an emergency and  overturn the rules of its own game.”
_

 By the time France agreed to the Hoover moratorium Germany’s  financial system had collapsed and its banks were closed.  Brüning’s  reduction in reparations was achieved, but everything else was a  catastrophe.  With the disaster in Germany this apparently put pressure  on the British financial system that ultimately led to its dropping out  of the gold standard as it deflated its own currency to protect the  British economy from huge cuts in government spending and support for a  nation still recovering from the war.  Once this happened, sterling and  London in general being a key global currency and financial hub, the  impact was felt all over the world, bad enough it caused banks to fail  in the US (as a measure of its former influence this is quite  shocking).  The plunge in sterling and subsequent adoption of  protectionist trade measures to protect the domestic economy was  disastrous for its trading partners.  With the pressure now gone  internationally to conform to the gold standard and the strictures it  imposed on its economy, Japan’s government came under increasing  pressure to start spending on its military to counter the growing  spending of China and Russia.  Back in Germany, without currency  reserves to stop runs on the mark, it could not sensibly, with the  British deflating, expect to keep competitive in its export market and  came under increasing pressure to leave the gold standard as well, but  it could not do so because of the foreign debts, in particular the  dollar debts to Wall Street creditors.  As unemployment rose and its  industry was hit hard, the German government lost an election on the  back of Hitler’s pro-jobs rhetoric, sweeping him into power.


 As you can no doubt see, Germany’s financial decisions, ties to Italy  and Japan’s massively increased military spending are all jigsaw pieces  required for 1939.

*
​ Why have I regurgitated all this from Tooze’s book?  I could have  been playing Bioshock instead.  I want to impart, to anyone bothering to  get this far, through the examples at the beginning and the end of the  period examined in _The Deluge_, what a profound effect it’s had  on my view of Europe and the US and that it is worth reading if you want  to understand the importance of staying in the EU, and of extending the  United Nations, of trying to make these institutions work rather than  denigrating and ignoring them.


 I hadn’t expected it to be this gripping, to watch with horror as  time and again peace was snatched away at the brink of treaties, how  those who won the war ended up no better off than those who lost it, how  they were all, anyway, bound up together.  Tooze sees the peacemakers,  these internationalists like Briand and Stresemann, J.M. Keynes and even  Lloyd George at one point, not as idealists, but, given how  interconnected the world is, the ‘_higher realists’.    _It’s a lovely phrase, reclaiming away from cynics the ongoing and very real value of speaking nation unto nation.


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## Caragula

*The Girl With All The Gifts

*I’ve not personally overdosed on zombie movies/games/books/TV  shows/tee shirts etc. but because the rest of the world has, I’ve got a  second-hand kind of weariness of it, so much so I have tried to avoid  it. I’ve done the odd George Romero, loved _Shaun of the Dead_ and _28 Days Later_, but then I’d had enough.


 I was thus in the glorious state of not actually knowing that _The Girl With All The Gifts_,  by M.R.Carey, is a book set in a world overrun with zombies. I didn’t  know what Melanie, the young protagonist, was, as the blurb was  thankfully vague, but don’t worry, it’s not a big spoiler.


 So anyway, imagine my delight when I couldn’t put the damn book down.


 This is a zombie novel with a great big heart and a conundrum.  Why  are so many people zombies in the classic moronic sense, and why are  some, like Melanie, full of empathy and good at quadratic equations?


 Soon enough the story becomes about Melanie, her beloved teacher Miss  Justineau, a scientist and a couple of soldiers forced on the run.  The  big heart comes from Carey’s great characters, who, despite being  somewhat stereotypical (the kind teacher, the cold scientist, the  hardened sergeant, the nervous rookie) nevertheless have their flaws and  ‘soft sides’ exposed through their travails.  It’s effortlessly done,  and you’re rooting for the whole not-so-merry band all the way along.   Melanie’s presence, exemplifying this unique take on the zombie mythos,  adds a delicious tension between them, as well as her own unique  struggle as she learns and then has to deal with what she is.  Indeed,  they are all challenged by her, and it should be obvious to most readers  that there’s a clear message here about prejudice, ignorance and  humanity more generally.


 Though I do have limited reading in the genre, I thought Carey’s  ’cause’ of the zombie plague was engaging and fairly plausible and it is  critical to their challenges and the highly satisfying and surprising  conclusion.


 The other interesting thing about the novel was the narration  itself.  I didn’t sense a consistent voice but the character of that  voice came across as though it was a mate telling you it all down the  pub; the narrator doesn’t come across as typically dispassionate.  It  reminded me of _Wolf Hall_, the sense of the narrator being one  of the characters telling their story in the third person.  It certainly  lent a warmth to the storytelling here, and as with Mantel’s book, you  feel a bit closer to the characters where this technique is adopted and  it led to some lovely phrases: _“(strings) wrapped loosely around and  around the little corpse as though the rat had decided to try to be an  octopus then hadn’t known how to stop” _and _“Melanie thinks:  when your dreams come true, your true has moved.  You’ve already stopped  being the person who had the dreams, so it feels more like a weird echo  of something that already happened to you a long time ago.”
_

 There are plenty of beautiful phrases like these throughout the novel  that elevate it without clogging it up.  I felt there was one off note  later on in the book, a scene with one of the soldiers, of which I’ll  say no more but it did so stick out like a sore thumb I’m still  wondering what Carey was thinking, but that aside, I don’t hesitate to  recommend it to you for a gripping summer read.


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## Caragula

*The Goldfinch.  The Liars' Gospel

*_“if our secrets define us, as opposed to the face we show the world: then the painting was the secret that raised me above the surface of life and enabled me to know who I am.  And it’s there: in my notebooks, every page, even though it’s not.  Dream and magic, magic and delirium.  The Unified Field Theory.  A secret about a secret.”
_
Theo Decker, the protagonist of Donna Tartt’s brilliant novel _The Goldfinch_ contemplates the way Carel Fabritius’s painting of the same name has dominated his life, a complicated connection beginning with the shocking opening as his mother is killed in a terrorist bomb blast in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in their hometown of New York.  He escapes with a ring given to him by a dying man – to take to an old furniture restorer – and his mother’s favourite painting: _The Goldfinch_.

His life takes its turns from there, Theo trying to keep the painting hidden, a paranoia about it, and a passion for it that almost drives him mad.  We come to know the people who, in his mother’s absence, will dominate his life:  his gambler of a father; his friend Boris, a kindred spirit that he spirals out of control with in the bleached out and desolate sands of a Vegas suburb; a girl who is the love of his life from start to finish; the furniture restorer whose great kindness is not so well repaid, and a wealthy Manhattan family.

He slides through his adolescence and into an adulthood addicted to pills, wrestling with depression, until he receives some shocking news which precipitates his being drawn into a criminal underworld half a world away.

The book succeeds so resoundingly because of Tartt’s detail; storytelling that immerses you utterly in Decker’s life because it is so vividly nuanced, rich.  It is mahogany-hard in its realness, autobiographical almost.  But Tartt goes much further than tell a story.  Decker’s journey, his surfeit of feeling and rich reflection on his regrets, his pain and of course, most vividly his love, progresses into an almost dream-like finale where he comes to contemplate the nature of self and the notion of a continuum with art.  To what extent did the painting represent him, its subject matter a rich metaphor for his life?  What is our relationship with immortal works of art?  I’m sure Tartt intended this introspection on our behalf as the finale ploughs its deep philosophical ground.  This is an unforgettable book.

 *
​_“Losing one’s faith is so very like gaining it.  There is the same joy, the same terror, the same annihilation of self in the ecstasy of understanding…One has to lose one’s faith many times before one begins to lose faith in faith itself.”

_​I include here my thoughts and my recommendation for _The Liars’ Gospel_ by Naomi Alderman because it shares with _The Goldfinch_ a fabulous immersion and a narrative that raises, indirectly here, its own deeper questions.  Alderman has delivered a pungent, flinty Jerusalem you can taste and smell and it empowers her stories of Jesus and those around him; stories about his mother, Judas, Caiaphas and Barrabas.  These bit players in his life are here given their own rich lives, each capable of leading a novel in themselves, each to varying degrees touched by who Jesus was.  By immersing them so vividly in a land and time of which so little is really known – Galilee and Jerusalem being backwaters in the Roman Empire as far as its own historians are concerned – Alderman’s research and fine prose gives an almost ‘photo-realistic’ quality to their lives and their passions.  The book is ambiguous in respect of the theology, neutral as a camera or a historian would be in depicting Jesus debating, or the riots against the Romans.  These are powerful vignettes against a violent backdrop simmering with the threat of rebellion.

Having read the eminent historian E.P.Sanders’ life of Jesus which stripped away the fervour of the Gospels’ message for the reality of the time, there is the same maddening question for us reading this fictional treatment of the world around Jesus as there are for the historians attempting to piece together the origin of Christianity.  Why, of all those who proclaimed to be the Messiah, did this man, little known and little mourned in his own lifetime before a relatively modest number of disciples, catch fire in the minds of those who heard his word so that, only a few hundred years later, he had conquered Rome?  It is, incidentally, a kind of great revenge, this subsequent deification, that creates the book’s most satisfying twist, as it sets itself against the more literal and darker advocate of Jews under the Romans’ heel, Barrabas, Jerusalem’s principle gangster.

Alderman creates a beautiful and quite, well, christian moral out of the aftermath of the book’s critical scene, where Barrabas and Jesus face Pilate in order to determine their fates.  What we know well enough is that the course of history was decided with the outcome of that conversation.  Alderman finds a unique angle from which to create an account of that fateful event; a beautiful, masterful dialogue that seals the fate of the world.


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## Caragula

*H is for Hawk

*Helen Macdonald has opened her soul, and unlike most of us, is able  to articulate its pain and its healing with a beautiful and haunting  power.


_H is for Hawk_ is a memoir that weaves her grief over the  loss of her father with her training of a goshawk, but it also follows  the life of the author T.H.White, including his attempts to train a  goshawk, his account of which became a book in its own right.


 But the weaving of this memoir goes deeper than that, as her  reflections expand out to contemplation of the nature of belonging and  identity.  These thoughts are coextensive with her interpretation of _The Goshawk_  and White’s struggles with the titular hawk as symbolic of his inner  turmoil; a psychoanalysis of White and the forces of his parents and his  homosexuality on the man he became, and the actions in which those  formative experiences and predilections would later, destructively,  manifest.


 It is a moving book, a wrestling with grief and depression, a desire  for annihilation of the self in the ‘everpresent’ of nature, the  goshawk’s pure and timeless purpose.  Macdonald flees people and all the  trappings of her life, sheds them, and gives us a mesmerising account  of the journey there and back.


 The book is a vigorous argument for the importance of good prose.  Great prose has always thrilled me, and _H is for Hawk_ is overstuffed with it:


_‘The light that filled my house was deep and livid, half  magnolia, half rainwater.  Things sat in it, dark and very still…There  were imperceptible pressures…Something else was there, something  standing next to me that I couldn’t touch or see, a thing a fraction of a  millimetre from my skin, something vastly wrong.’ 
_

 This is early on, the depression taking hold.  There are beautiful  juxtapositions here – a light that is wet, a light within which sit dark  things, something barely a millimetre away that is also vast.  These  juxtapositions make us giddy, they define a wrongness in the house  around her that is a symptom of the depression she is slipping into,  when, as I can attest, the world in its entirety seems wrong, not just  distant.  It is the choice of description here, the avoidance of cliché,  that works to draw the parallel out of my own feelings.  A more generic  description would fail to engage.  This description, my mind’s  consumption and decoding of it, is precisely the activity required to  create the resonance between her feelings and feelings I remember  having.  But this applies to the whole book.  My engagement and  emotional involvement stem in significant part from her ability to  describe some quite esoteric memories of childhood such that they  triggered memories I’d forgotten about but also shared.


 More than once in the last week or so I’ve walked into the office and  for fully fifteen minutes tried to disentangle myself from her story in  order to start my day.


 Here’s a snip regarding the man she’s buying the goshawk from retrieving the box with it inside from his car:


_‘A sudden thump of feathered shoulders and the box shook…Another  hinge untied.  Concentration.  Infinite caution.  Daylight irrigating  the box.  Scratching talons, another thump.  And another.  Thump.  The  air turned syrupy, slow, flecked with dust.  The last few seconds before  a battle…and it’s all happening at once, the man pulls an enormous, *enormous *hawk  out of the box and in a strange coincidence of world and deed a great  flood of sunlight drenches us and everything is brilliance and fury…My  heart jumps sideways.  She is a conjuring trick.  A reptile.  A fallen  angel.’
_

 Then there are gorgeous turns of phrase, almost beyond count, such as:
_‘She breathes hot hawk-breath in my face.  It smells of pepper and musk and burned stone.’
_

 Much of the book then, revolves around her growing relationship with  the goshawk.  While her memoir fills out around the day to day of her  life as she vanishes from society to encompass her thoughts on White and  her own mental stability, she writes captivatingly about the hawk, its  predilection for play, its states of mind and its savage power.  On top  of everything else, there’s an education about training hawks in here,  not to mention sociocultural musings on the history of falconers and  austringers (the name for goshawk trainers particularly).  There are  many threads to this weave of memoir yet the result is vivid and  readable.


 Later on Macdonald wonders about the nature of ‘Old England’, and how  it is really only a construct, a sop, something simple we can put upon  the objective past to make us content about it and thus pine for it:


_‘Old England is an imaginary place, a landscape built from words,  woodcuts, films, paintings, picturesque engravings.  It is a place  imagined by people, and people do not live very long or look very  hard…We cannot remember what lived here before we did; we cannot love  what is not.  Nor can we imagine what will be different when we are  dead.  We live out our three score and ten, and tie our knots and lines  only to ourselves.  We take solace in pictures, and wipe the hills of  history.’
_

 Her musings on England are both her own and her wondering to what  extent White’s view on such things was.  Much of what she writes of from  her own life she explores with regard to his.  They are  musings informed by her wandering in the countryside and her coming to  know one part of it intimately, that part she hunts with Mabel, her  hawk.  It is the classic ‘landscape as collective memory’ that is being  explored in this book along with so much else of her heart.  The journey  of Mabel’s training, the triumphs and failures, she paints as stemming  from but also revealing to her what it is that’s wrong with her, what  her own state of mind is.  Training Mabel seems to be a tackling and  overcoming of her perceived flaws – neediness, being overprotecting,  nihilism.  These are all reflected somehow purely and transparently in  the hiccups she has with training the hawk.  Ultimately, Mabel delivers  the means of a resolution.


 Macdonald’s honesty, her passions and her brutally scrutinised flaws  are clearly exposed in this book.  It’s a self-awareness and a depth of  feeling that’s so much more profound than so much else I’ve read.  It  doesn’t surprise me she can suffer so much.  Knowing this book is ‘true’  is what made it so moving, that and her exquisite ability to express  this truth.   I followed her story and its helical mirror in T.H.  White’s story with gratitude and admiration.


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## Caragula

*The Children Act

*I’ve written here  about my miserable realisation I wouldn’t read more than a couple of  thousand books in my lifetime, if I really went for it.  I thus struggle  to read more than one or two books by any author because there are so  many more authors to read.  How could I read another Philip K Dick while  I’ve not yet read _The Odyssey_?


 Nevertheless, I keep returning with relish to Ian McEwan.  With _The Children Act_ I delight once again in his sublime prose, but also the gossamer feel of the stories.  From _The Child In Time_, through _Atonement_, to _On Chesil Beach_  he balances whole lives on the point of a pin, a moment in time, fates  curling away like skin through a peeler from their previous  trajectories.  Whether it’s *that* moment in _On Chesil Beach_ or the ‘next moment he’s vanished’ horror of _The Child In Time_, the glance between Joe and Jed in _Enduring Love_ or, now, _The Children Act_,  where a boy’s life is determined by a song and a kiss, McEwan revels in  the delicate nudge of circumstance, a butterfly effect culminating in  dragging great anchors through the deeps of his characters.


 I’m always in awe of his mastery of the form, an ability to surf entire lives in a page, and yet also find the simplest, most _right_  words to depict particular events.  Early on, High Court judge Fiona  Kaye is facing her husband’s accusation that she is frigid:


 “‘It’s been seven weeks and a day.  Are you honestly content with  that?’…Seven weeks and a day also had a medieval ring, like a sentence  handed down from an old Court of Assize.”


 With characteristic efficiency McEwan tells us a lot about Kaye’s  husband from his noting their lack of sex to the day, as opposed to a  more vague ‘It’s been weeks’.  But, though it’s the third person  narrator, the thought that is triggered by this is perfectly right for  Fiona herself, being a judge, McEwan limiting himself to the allusions  that would keep with the character herself.


 His sentences are pared down to their essence, there is no fat.  The  power comes from what he chooses to describe with those sentences.  Near  the end, as Kaye plays a duet with a colleague at a party, McEwan  applies a very gentle pressure to the moments, the most delicate of  hints that there is a wrong coming, barely more than a change in the  air, a taste in the mouth.  It’s all that’s needed to hold you to the  pages as the end nears, your immersion in the moment of the events  playing out is subconsciously preparing, anticipating a payoff.


 The novel is short, deceptively deep: Kaye, the High Court judge, is  ruling on a Jehovah’s Witness, a minor, refusing a blood transfusion  without which he would die, the challenge for Kaye resting on an  assessment of his ‘Gillick’ competence, his only being three months from  eighteen complicating the judgement.  It sits in parallel with Kaye’s  confrontation of her husband’s marital frustration and infidelity.   His journey is practically off camera, and thus two dimensional,  pathetic even.  She is the lens for the breakdown, for the ebb and flow  of hate and annoyance, despair and longing that the threat of the end of  their marriage triggers.  Everything about her feelings and the gaps  and interconnects between her and her husband, the inching through a  stalemate back to something more, feels right, feels solid.  It’s only  because I try to write books myself that I know how this seemingly  effortless ‘rightness’ is far, far from effortless.  The true quality of  his work lies in how brilliantly and fully realised his characters are.


----------



## kekmaw

Total Recall 5/5 easy!


----------



## Caragula

*The Bone Clocks - David Mitchell*

The title of David Mitchell’s marvellous book almost fully  encapsulates it, as all its characters, deathless or otherwise, serve  its dominant theme: the misery of ageing.


 The book is split into decades, charting the life of Holly Sykes from  the teenage heartbreak that makes her flee her home in Gravesend in  1984 to her cancer-ridden old age on the Irish coast in the very  convincing near future dystopia of 2043.


 Her life is bound up in a sort of supernatural war, which, you know,  spoilers, the first hints of which is seeded very early on by her  younger brother Jacko giving her a picture of a maze which he begs her  to memorise in case one day she needs it…


 Very soon afterwards, the supernatural events impose themselves as  she becomes formally, albeit superficially, embroiled in this war.  This  world of the magical hidden behind the ordinary is of course familiar  territory ploughed by many other novels.  Two my favourites in this  oeuvre, and therefore strong recommendations, are _Weaveworld_ by Clive Barker and _The Talisman_ by Stephen King and Peter Straub.


 As with _Cloud Atlas_, this is many peoples’ story, and with  each decade comes a different narrator, among them a cocky and amoral  Oxbridge type called Hugo Lamb, Holly’s war journalist husband and a  once adored and now faded literary novelist Crispin Hershey.


 The war is explained and progressed from the perspective of these and  other characters, but, this being David Mitchell, it’s the detail of  their lives, almost short stories akin to his revered ‘Russian Doll’  novel, that absorbs.  The ‘main thread’ of the war finds its way into  their lives at various points, but is never there consistently through  each of them.  We’re effortlessly jetted around the world through their  lives and more importantly through their eyes.  Despite their differing  life experiences they nevertheless share almost identical reflections on  the awfulness of ageing, whether it’s Lamb’s reflections on a decrepit  and senile but once upon a time ‘bon vivant’ that he visits, to  Hershey’s withering self-disgust as he assists the world in its heaping  of indignities on his once proud reputation – a cliché  of a loveless upper middle class marriage and spoiled kids followed by  years of heavy drinking and professional spite and envy on the literary  circuit.  Each of them finds a kind of redemption, and I like that  Mitchell has varied both the outcome and the impact of it for each of  them.


 Of course, in saying that the novel is structured so as to be like a  series of short stories with beginnings through to ends, that contribute  fully and seamlessly to the story arc of a novel while each separately  explores the same theme across successive decades, illustrates amply  Mitchell’s formidable and layered storytelling.  That he’s able also to  convincingly immerse us in past, present and future, in locations as  diverse as Syria, Japan, New York, Kent or the Alps only adds to the  wonder of a book that needs to feel big, dealing as it does with the  ramifications of his invented metaphysics.  This is a war spanning  millennia that is imminently coming to an end, the combatants of which,  again, to avoid spoilers, clash directly over the proverbial (not  literal) fountain of youth.


 As with his other novels, including my still favourite _The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet_,  I could not put this book down.  It’s gripping, full of heart and just  pure storytelling, so get lost in it this February, when all else is rain  and runny noses.


----------



## LeeC

*"Thirst" by JD Shaw*

"Thirst" by JD Shaw is an all too human story that engenders both disturbing and hopeful feelings, all the more so in the plausible reality of this speculative fiction. Oh, and you might want to have a glass of water at hand while reading.

The story is set in the vast Australian outback, nearly a century beyond climate tipping points in a time called The Failing. The protagonist Harry Sinclair travels the fringes of an ever-expanding Australian desert, haunted by the consequences of his past and beset by the resulting human behavior. In his travels, among others Harry meets a naïve young man Finn that both aggravates and countervails his blunted disposition. Given the circumstances of their meeting, will any good come of it? 

Beyond being caught up in the story, as a writer I was intrigued by the author's wordsmith skills in moving the story along smoothly, and the construction of overlapping twists and turns that keep one turning pages. 

But one example of the writing skill is the snippet:

"His mind baulked like a frightened beast, knowing, at last, it had been cornered, that flight was now futile. Finally, he thought, finally after all this time, it has caught me. He fought a shuddering sob. His mind reeled and he felt tears build. Desperate not to be overwhelmed, he breathed out slowly, and the flood of anxiety settled a little ..." 

This is especially a book for the emerging adults of this world, but old dogs will appreciate it as well.


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## LeeC

*Review of Back to the Garden by Clara Hume*

Life is like water moving from sky to land to sea in an eternal cycle, picking up and discarding all in its path in creating anew. Alas in our time spans we tend to focus more on the immediate, getting on day to day as we must, not the overall cycle of cause and effect necessitating adaptation, that is until the die is cast. 

This life affirming, speculative fiction book is a journey, harkening back to paths chosen, and forward to possibly better choices. Along the journey there is foreboding and tragedy mixed with perseverance and hope, all entwined in an engrossing storyline. The author is clearly no johnny-come-lately to writing. 

I could write on and on about what I saw in this book, but we each see things somewhat differently. To highlight any particular aspect of the story I might well do you and the story a disservice. Thus I'll leave you to your own page turning journey, confident you'll find in the adventure much to captivate your interest. Bon voyage.


​


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## Caragula

Lavie Tidhar - The Violent Century

This is a story about superheroes in the second world war and beyond, a counterfactual fantasy.


 At first you will rightly think of _Watchmen _and _X-Men _but Lavie Tidhar has created something here that is more bleak and more noir, as though the _X-Men _had been re-told by John le Carré.


 It centres on two British superheroes, Fogg and Oblivion, who, after  gaining their very particular super powers, are recruited into the  secret service in 1936. Perhaps sparing us, in the broad canvas of such  characters, ordinary names, Tidhar gives all these men and women names  that resemble their powers, Fogg can manipulate fog, Oblivion causes  just that to whatever he touches.  Spit, she spits bullets. I never  quite got my head around why Mrs.Tinkle was so named, but maybe you can  enlighten me 


 We learn that a ‘Vomacht wave’ spread out across the world, in 1932,  the result of german scientific research, and was responsible for  converting a small percentage of all humans to each having a particular  super power.  The nazis called theirs the ‘Ubermensch’ of course.  This  was a single event, the only superheroes in this world were effectively  ‘born’ in the thirties, diminishing in number as they are hunted down  and used or killed by the various superpowers in the decades afterwards.


 What follows however is a narrative in the present tense that flips  back and forth between the various events in the past and the present,  as Fogg is summoned to the ‘Bureau for Superannuated Affairs’ (the  British division that employs and monitors these superheroes) and is  questioned about a sequence of events at the end of the war. At its  heart, beating throughout the novel, is a love story.  ‘The Old Man’,  who heads the bureau, teases out of Fogg a secret that he’s kept for  decades, and the flash backs and forwards layer up the events and the  relationships between the characters, from their first meeting to their  present day ennui.  What Fogg is hiding fuels a very satisfying finale.


 Through the eyes of Fogg we see these super-people moulded into what  their nations or their ethnoreligious group (in the case of the Jews)  needed them to be, in both the War and the wars that followed, from  Vietnam to Afghanistan.


 Fogg serves an interesting double purpose given his power permeates  the very feel of Paris, Transylvania or Belarus. This is no cartoon,  it’s like _The Third Man_ in prose, all shadows, mist and snow.  The British ‘watch’, working out of sight. The Americans are all spandex  and six shooters, the Russians similar. These are stereotypes knowingly  manipulated, and these are people who, as you would expect, deal with  the huge changes to their lives caused by the Vomacht wave with varying  degrees of success.


 I thoroughly enjoyed it and recommend it for the treatment of  superheroes in a counterfactual world that, like the best superhero  stories, such as Alan Moore’s treatment of _Miracleman_, show us that pure power is a shallow thing, much more a curse than a blessing.


----------



## LeeC

*The Marshlanders by Annis Pratt*

*The Marshlanders by Annis Pratt *
[Volume One of The Marshlanders Trilogy]
Publication Date: May 25, 2010
Print pages: 280
Language: English
ISBN: 9781450228909
also available as an ebook


*Review by: L. G. Cullens on April 24, 2016*

Welcome to a very realistic world of long ago, or could it be a possible future? Either way, realistic people with recognizable behaviors populate this world, playing out a full range of interactions that draw the reader in. In surprising twists and turns the reader encounters vivid interactions spanning the range from affection and alliances to manipulation, intrigue and hostilities. The skillful writing easily elicits reader emotions. 

The central protagonist is Clare, a young girl of eight initially, not always making the best choices in a harsh and biased world. But this isn't only a child's eye or coming-of-age view, as the narrator insightfully paints accompanying characters with an encompassing brush. The writing is also lush in setting, sans distracting verbosity, and where applicable replete with wildlife, all in all giving the reader a sense of relevant intimacy with the storyline. 

No fanciful make-believe here, there is an undercurrent of allegories in the storyline adding to its depth and enhancing its entertainment value. With accomplished wordsmithing and good pacing the author creates a familiar yet far away world in the reader's mind's eye, one easily revisited.

All in all, the author's finger is on the pulse of life, leaving this reader looking only for more pages to turn. Will I read the next volume in this trilogy? Definitely.


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## LeeC

*Living In The Event Horizon Of A Big Mud Hole by Robert Zwilling*

Living In The Event Horizon Of A Big Mud Hole by Robert Zwilling
Publication Date: Feb. 16, 2012
Print Pages: 139
Language: English
ASIN: B007AAK9DQ

Weird title you think? Actually it's very apt as one discovers in digesting this book, and I do mean digesting as this is a collection that is best consumed one bite at a time to experience all it offers to the mind's palate. Beyond the universe spanning subject matter, the odd turns of phrase the author uses add depth and colorful imagery to the writing. There is even an annotated Table of Contents so the reader may better select from the menu. 

At times the reader may be highly amused, and at the other pole maybe angered by either what the author says or portrays. To me both feelings sometimes occurred hand in hand. To the collection's credit I didn't find the writing provocatively black and white, being that ambiguity of life is an aspect of the authors words. Something else I didn't find was bland filler text, but there is overlap as all things are connected. 

With the breadth of subject matter, the readability of the quirky poetic style, the sprinkled humor, and the insightful takes, I found this collection a treasure chest. There's more than enough material for most any reader to discover the gems that tickle their fancy.

I believe strongly in Edwin Schlossberg's words, that "The skill of writing is to create a context in which other people can think.” This collection fully honors that ideal in a world awash in ho-hum content, and it does so in an entertaining manner. Pull up a chair and live a little.


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## Caragula

*Jonathan Strange & Mr.Norrell*

If the awards and critical acclaim have not steered you towards the  fractious company of the two foremost English magicians of the  nineteenth century, then it is unlikely my meagre addition to the chorus  will tip the balance. Nevertheless, I exhort you to go get this  enchanting novel.

 And I was enchanted.

 Susanna Clarke’s prose is styled as that of a nineteenth century  author, perfectly suited to this tale of the titular magicians and the  fairy that, with a perfect whimsical savagery, wrecks their lives. The  conceit is brilliantly sustained. The book describes an England that was  once two kingdoms, north and south, with the south as ‘real historical’  but the north ruled by John Uskglass, England’s greatest magician,  until he disappeared, centuries before Norrell surfaces. The opening of  the novel focuses on Norrell’s desire to bring magic back to England,  though strictly on his insufferably dull terms. Norrell is wonderfully  realised, heading a cast of characters that are ‘Dickensian’ in the best  possible sense.

 This alternate history is referenced in fabulously entertaining  asides, lengthy footnotes to the references the characters make to  magicians, folklore and manuscripts pertaining to magic. There’s a depth  and wit to these beautifully judged vignettes of fairy tales (literally  in most cases) and historical notes and they are a fitting and elegant  way of illuminating the world in which Norrell and then Jonathan Strange  come to prominence.

 Their relationship falls apart in the main because of the actions of  the ‘gentleman with the thistle-down hair’, a fairy king that Norrell  summons to bring the wife of a politician back to life, in the hope of  showing he can be useful to the English government’s efforts to combat  Napolean in France and Spain. The gentleman’s actions against Strange  and Norrell create both the central crisis of the novel but also the  resolution, which is as unexpected as it is perfect.

 I shan’t go into more of the plot details, it’s a thousand pages and  those pages fly by, particularly with lines as good as these:
_“It was an old-fashioned house – the sort of house in fact, as  Strange expressed it, which a lady in a novel might like to be  persecuted in.”_

_“”Can a magician kill a man by magic?” Lord Wellington asked Strange._
_Strange frowned. He seemed to dislike the question. “I suppose a magician might,” he admitted, “but a gentleman never could.”_

 Finally, I can strongly recommend the BBC adaptation of the novel, but of course, implore you to read the book first.


----------



## LeeC

*Hope or High Water by Duncan Morrison*

*Hope or High Water by Duncan Morrison*
Publication date: March 28, 2016
Print Pages: 312
Language: English
ASIN: B01DJWPQK4

*Book review by: L. G. Cullens on June 21, 2016*

_Live as if your Life had consequences far beyond your understanding. It does._

This is a non-fiction adventure story of the highest caliber. It's a riveting account of an epic, perilous ocean voyage, recounted in somewhat a captain's log format with an adventure writer's flair — the narration catching one up in experiences very few dare to contemplate. Their vessel one of seven double hulled voyaging canoes, and their voyage a roundabout from Aotearoa-New Zealand to San Francisco and back in 2011/2012. Beyond the expansive adventure, there are insightful portrayals of life's interactions on varying scales, and the playing out of the purpose in undertaking the voyage. 

I can't begin to give the reader an idea of all they'll discover in the book's pages, so have touched on what lingers in my mind. That, given the broad range of readers, may not be what appeals to others. So be aware there's a wealth of good reading within, that I've left the reader to delight in discovering. William Wallace said, "Every man dies. Not every man really lives."  To me really living is realizing one's place in the natural world, and reveling in the experience. In the pages of this book the author conveys his journey through a portal of consciousness in an evocative manner, propelling the reader from their human bubble. 

The book also has intriguing learning potential for those that haven't experienced taxing natural forces at length, such as those found in the expanses of the Pacific when afloat in only a canoe. Subjects range from tacking to traditional navigation, that is navigating without modern instruments, to understanding more about reading waves than one might imagine, and even includes varying cultural immersion. 

As an example, imagine yourself as one of a crew on a canoe, alone in the vastness of the Pacific.

_Wati was now on the long watch of the navigator. Traditionally they don’t sleep from the start to the end of voyage, or if they do it’s only a few hours a day with catnaps and meditation, depending on their habit. The lives of the crew and canoe depend on their vigilance, simple as that. During the day the sun rolled across the sky, and at night the stars spun on their own courses. As he guided us north, we watched the Southern Cross sink lower in the sky. When it stands on end and the distance between the top and bottom stars is the same as the distance from the bottom star to the horizon you’re at the latitude of Hawai’i, twenty degrees north._

There are also vivid observations of the effects of human activity on our little blue planet, such as the following:

_We were skirting the Eastern Pacific Gyre, “the Great Garbage Patch.” Twice the size of Texas, or as big as France, it’s an enormous pool of trash created by currents and weather patterns in the middle of the sea. We’re told that only twenty percent of the plastic is visible on the surface. The bulk of it lives as a plastic soup down through the water column. It breaks down and disappears from sight, but it only breaks down to micro-waste, molecular level particles of plastic that attract the heavy toxins in the water, and are then absorbed into the food web, ingested by plankton, the plankton by larger organisms, then on to bigger and bigger fish and eventually to us. We all have plastic in our bodies today._

That is, images of the extent of what we don't pay heed to in our day to day lives. It doesn't help that in our materialistic pyramid culture, big business interests actively counter understanding. 

An augmenting thread throughout the book is contrasting cultural immersion. That from the breadth of far flung ports of call, down to the up close interactions of crew members with differing origins and experiences. On the broader scale, I even found strong parallels with my own early nurturing, which was gratifying. One example is:

_It seemed that, no matter where we went or who we talked to, the message was the same. The way forward is in the past, in the old recognition that all things are one. That to live fulfilled, we must live with conscious respect for all things. _

The above doesn't mean reverting to primitive life styles. It means that going forward we need to think and act outside our human bubbles. There's hope for humanity if we begin to use the advanced consciousness we believe we're endowed with. 

Saving the best (to me) for last, there are many evocative passages that give one pause to think, with more being said than the words at first glance might convey. A mark of good writing in my eye.

_Listen._
_Listen to the breathing of the tides, and know that all the world beats with one heart, breathes with one breath._
. . .
_The dolphins had been frolicking, and the whales, sperms and humpbacks had been pec-fin slapping and lob-tailing and breaching and synchronised breaching in pairs and … And if we hadn’t been halted by the wind, we would’ve missed it all. We would’ve zoomed on through as we do for most of our lives, distracted by the music and the white noise of the modern world, and really just missing the point._
_“Listen, listen, listen!”_
_You can’t hold a conversation unless you listen, and our lives are always talking, they never shut up. This world has some beautiful conversations if we give and take the time._

And some important thoughts to listen to if we really value the world (Our Blue Canoe as the author calls it) our children will have to get by in:

_Often we’re put to the test, and it takes strength and tolerance to allow people their differences. It takes wisdom and compassion to share resources and make sure everyone is looked after. It’s a question of simple logic that, if people are unhappy and you don’t address the issues in some shape or form, then things will deteriorate. We have successfully ignored so many basic issues for so long, regarding the people of our planet and our environment, that finally our chickens are coming home to roost._
_Kahlil Gibran, 12th century Persian poet, said, “Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encases your understanding._
_. . ._
_Stewardship extends to not only our physical environment and the creatures and plants in it, but to the rich diversity of culture that has thrived on our planet. That, beneath the weight of consumerism and the Western mindset, has been diminished and mocked as redundant, old fashioned, and of less value than the science/commerce/dollar based worldview we now operate on._

It took me a good while to complete this review because the book is longish, befitting the scope of the adventure, and not one can skim or skip through, keeping the reader involved in the story as it does. All in all it's one heck of a ride, with an appropriately questioning yet uplifting ending. It's also a book you'll recall in becoming more aware of the interdependencies of life. There's a beam of ancient wisdom reemerging.


----------



## LeeC

My review of:
*Windfalls
*By Jennifer Christie Temple​

Still turning from time to time to the author's first collection, I've been looking forward to this second. My patience has been well rewarded.

From inner self to vista on high, and from first crush to death's dance, with a dash of rascal spice in the pie, it's all there with the insight of life well contemplated.

A magical bit of humanity, I'll enjoy over and over. 

------

Available at:
https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/656506


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## LeeC

*Winds of Change: Short Stories about Our Climate*
by Robert Sassor, John Atcheson, et al.
edited by Mary Woodbury
Publication Date: October 16, 2015
Publisher: Moon Willow Press
Print Length: 253 pages
Language: English
ASIN: B013TQ6KJQ

Review by: L. G. Cullens on Aug. 20, 2016

This being a diverse collection of eighteen short stories and some poetry about climate change, you may be thinking, geez, not another damper-on-my-day book. Fact is there's some great storytelling in this collection that you might well appreciate — a tantalizing mix for most any palate. The best, to me, in this collection follow the theme in a disarming, subtle way, allowing the reader to bask in immersing stories. 

To give you an idea of the range of stories:

There's an odd story with a metaphysical twist, about interviewing a body painting artist, that I thought exceptionally well written. I can't remember last time I came across wit like, "Our Alesha is not only a fully fledged member of the loon family, she also sits on the executive council of The Coalition Against Pipelines, the very epicenter of looniness."

A story said to be inspired by a Twilight Zone episode, much more to me. The insightful writing, prodding the mind to participate without handholding, was simplicity in its expansiveness that I don't see often.

A Sci Fi story with time travel, fans of such can get into. I'm not much of a Sci Fi fan, but this one had an nice sardonic note I enjoyed. 

A speculative future story about a grandfather and grandson, that struck me as quality writing in keeping me engaged. 

A futuristic-cyber-biker-publishing combo story with an ironic ending. Here again not my usual preference, but engrossing. 

An imaginative and entertaining doubles-from-the-future type story, with a zany twist and a  scintillating ending.

A speculative fiction piece of man's loss of cultural trappings, regressing to our primitive beings.

And eleven others. There's also a bit of poetry to round out the offering.

The above, of course, what struck me as standing out. Other readers may find something different of interest in the collection, but I doubt will be sorry they picked up the book.


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## Caragula

*Against The Day - Thomas Pynchon

*Where do I begin? While this is not my favourite book, it is the best  novel I’ve read. Pynchon, for me, is the most accomplished writer in  English alive. Here is my impossible benchmark.


 I will now struggle to articulate why.


 Someone asked me what it was about the other week, just before I  finished it. I mumbled on about it being speculative fiction that was a  revenge western, HG Wellsian sci-fi, a spy thriller, a class war story, a  mirror world story, a search for Shambhala the mythical hidden kingdom.  There are also time travellers, sort of. As for where it takes place,  Pynchon tells us it “_moves from the labor troubles in Colorado to  turn-of-the-century New York City, to London and Göttingen, Venice and  Vienna, the Balkans, Central Asia, Siberia at the time of the mysterious  Tunguska Event, Mexico during the Revolution, postwar Paris, silent-era  Hollywood, and one or two places not strictly speaking on the map at  all._”


 It’s a very difficult novel to read, and one I recommend with all my  heart knowing it’s not what many people I know would look for in a book.


 It follows a group of characters who move in and out of the shallows  and deeps of each others lives from the late nineteenth century to just  after the first world war – The anarchist Webb Traverse and his children  Frank, Kit, Reef and Lake, the exotic Yashmeen Halfcourt, Dally  Rideout, Cyprian Latewood, the ‘Chums of Chance’ and about eighty  others, though these are the principle actors.


 While Frank and Reef Traverse have the most obvious ‘plot’, having to  avenge their father killed by Kit’s employer, the arch capitalist and  all round scumbag Scarsdale Vibe, both they and the rest of the  principle cast find themselves getting more and more caught up in events  relating to Pynchon’s science fiction of technological progress,  riffing on maths and physics to concoct a strange alternative to an  energy and weapon arms race that leads everyone into the ominous (and  foreshadowed) inevitability of the first world war.


 What is most staggering is the research that must have been done to  create such a compelling alternate reality. The references to everything  from higher maths to the beautifully painted panorama of the US and  Europe, with a seemingly intimate knowledge of all of the involved  cultures and history, fills out the odyssey they all undergo with an  unmatched grandeur. This is achieved with page after page of the finest  prose, a sublime mastery of the form delivering the messy complexity and  fragility of these people’s lives while simultaneously providing  comedy, love and tragedy and exploring various higher and interwoven  themes of time and light. Critics have also found Pynchon to be doing  some postmodern mimicking of genre styles as they relate to the various  aspects of the novel I outlined at the top of this post. I wasn’t  perceptive enough to see these higher workings, but on reflection  they’re right too.


 I can’t sensibly describe the ins and outs of a 1200 page novel that  has no clear direction, so I’ll end this page of hyperbolic infatuation  with some examples of the prose that floored me page after page. I  couldn’t find again the passage about how, in photographs, silver would  record light, but this lot should do…


_“Scarsdale and Foley had agreed to delude themselves that in this  sun-spattered atrium they had found temporary refuge from the murderous  fields of capitalist endeavor, no artifact within miles of here younger  than a thousand years, marble hands in flowing gestures conversing  among themselves as if having only just emerged from their realm of  calcium gravity into this trellised repose.”
_

_“When required she could pose with the noblest here against the  luminous iceblink…eyes asking not for help but understanding, cords of  her neck edged in titanium white, a three quarter view from behind,  showing the face only just crescent, the umbra of brushed hair and  skull-heft…So had her grandson Hunter painted her, standing in a loose,  simple dress in a thousand-flower print in green and yellow, viewed as  through dust, dust of another remembered country viewed late in the day,  risen by way of wind or horses from a lane beyond a walled garden”
_

_“It was said that the great tunnels, like the Simplon or  St.-Gotthard were haunted, that when the train entered and the light of  the world, day or night, had to be abandoned for the time of passage  however brief, and the mineral roar made conversation impossible, then  certain spirits who once had chosen to surrender into the fierce  intestinal darkness of the mountain would reappear among the paying  passengers, take empty seats, drink negligibly from the engraved  glassware in the dining cars, assume themselves into the rising shapes  of tobacco smoke, whisper a propaganda of memory and redemption to  salesmen, tourists, the resolutely idle, the uncleansably rich, and  other practitioners of forgetfulness, who could not sense the visitors  with anything like the clarity of fugitives, exiles, mourners and  spies-all those, that is, who had reached agreement, even occasions of  intimacy, with Time.”_


----------



## LeeC

*WILD ROOTS: Coming Alive in the French Amazon*
by Donna Mulvenna
Publisher: Naturebased Publishing 
Publication date: July 10, 2016
Print Pages: 160
Language: English
ASIN: B01IAC3C9U

*Book Review by: L. G. Cullens on Aug. 25, 2016*

Are you comfortable in your niche, seeming to have a degree of control, yet sometimes fantasize about acting with abandonment and seeing new places? Maybe it's an unconscious feeling you suppress out of fear of where it will lead. Come on now, you can tell me. No? Well then may I suggest reading about how exciting real life can be, and maybe expanding your horizons at the same time. No one else need know you're escaping to another level of being. It's what the doctor prescribes for a gloomy day. 

As we join the author, she has made tentative steps in our artificial culture, maybe even making a few false starts as we all have, and is settling into a guarded lifestyle when she meets a new man. No, this isn't a romance novel, unless you think of such as a romance with what life can be. The immersing experiences are related in an at first seemingly naïve voice evoking awe, with a magical blend of  subtle humor, touches of irony, sense of place, and insight, delivered at a quick pace. Quick to me at least, as I lost track of time reading this book. Getting further into the book, one realizes how much enlightening experience, and breadth of knowledge is being served up. Only those overly full of themselves could resist being pulled along. 

As a small example, even a simple act of taking a dip in the ocean is evocative, "I find swimming in their warm waters to be quite pleasant, or at least it was after I stopped freaking out every time something I couldn’t see brushed against me."

There are questioning natural world and biodiversity threads, subtle with a ring of hopefulness. And for the inquiring mind there's also a fair amount of interesting fact asides cleverly interspersed. For example, do you know why French Guiana's geographical location is ideal for launching satellite rockets?

As another example of immersive writing, in this snippet the author is transitioning from a "civilized" world mindset to appreciating Amazonian Nature. 

"It wasn’t long before illusions of following in the footsteps of eighteenth-century botanist Jean-Baptiste Aublet took root, and I tentatively slipped from the hammock to sit on the grass. However, rather than appreciate the nature around me, I anxiously looked about for armies of man-eating ants or hordes of tail-waving scorpions, cringing the moment so much as a breeze brushed against me."

When it comes to Nature observations, the author doesn't bore you with a mouse in the cupboard. Here she's talking about a Harpy Eagle.

"As well as being an astonishingly powerful bird – imagine legs almost as thick as your arm – they are possibly the most scary-looking of the carnivorous birds. It is the harpies that are depicted in Greek mythology as horrid winged women with their breasts hanging out who swooped down to take humans to the underworld. However, despite this formidable appearance, they really are quite nice to each other. They form monogamous couples that mate for life, chirp to each other as they build a nest, live together for their twenty-five to thirty-five-year lifespan, and devote two years to care for a single chick."

Oh, and you think you have problems with wildlife in your yard? Try catching an enormous iguana making its way to the chicken pen, or helplessly watching as a colony of cassava ants make off with a good part of your garden.

So you don't get the idea that only wildlife falls under the microscope, here's an example of the author's wry humor.

"French Guiana is also a bureaucratic and bungling nightmare, and that is being optimistic. It took six months to open a bank account and longer for a debit card to arrive. On one occasion the wait was so long I asked, “Do you have a toilet?” “Yes, I will show you were it is,” said the clerk. Finding the door locked I asked, “May I have the key please?” “Oh no,” she said. “We can’t give out the key because one of our colleagues got murdered in there!” And at that moment I could understand why something like that may have happened."

I don't know what a pooh-bah writing "expert" might think of this book, but I'd laugh if they missed the point that the dogma we find harborage in is a reflection of our problems. To me everything in these pages melds together in an exciting journey and enjoyable balanced learning experience, and I applaud how the author both entertains the surface reader, and speaks to those that realize there is much more to life on our exciting little blue canoe than we're conscious of.

I truly hope that for all our sakes some of the authors insight and passion finds its way into the minds and hearts of readers.

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## LeeC

*A review of Terry Durbin's "Chase" by L. G. Cullens*

The biggest problem I had with this book is that the writing was so well done it drew me into the story, a story that in the beginning I would have rather not experienced. There's one fragment of a sentence therein that still haunts me. The author does an exceptional job of bringing out characters, getting to the dark heart of depravity in humankind, and manipulating the reader's feelings with such. It had me close to telling the author where to put the book.

I soldiered on tentatively reading though, because what I know of the author is opposite what this book slams the reader with up front. Many such books attempt to grab the reader in fanciful grotesque ways that we've become numb to, but this writer has a gruesomely realistic manner that brings the story home.  That front end story, instilling prominent characters in the reader's mind's eye with activities I find repugnant, was difficult for me to get through. As I got further along in the book though, I could see how effective the opening was in introducing prominent characters as very realistic beings. I spent the rest of the book wanting to stake some of those characters out naked on a red ant hill in the desert, and watch them die in agony, which speaks to the author's wordsmith faculty. 

From there on the book is a heart throbbing and maddening course of twists and turns, where you're hoping but never knowing how the book will end. A suspense thriller in every sense, with a wide cast of characters, and multiple threads of activity where major players (both man and beast) play "Chase."

Working your way through all the twists and turns, it seems like the ending is always just over the horizon, but caught up in the story you'll lose track of time getting there. The ending is ... well ... it's best to let you twist in the wind getting there as I did. 

The eternal struggle of elemental good and evil, played out in very realistic costume that's closer to home than you might think. 

[review posted on Amazon and Goodreads]


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## LeeC

Book review by L. G. Cullens

*Heart of a Lion: A Lone Cat's Walk Across America* 
by William Stolzenburg
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA (April 12, 2016)
Print publication date: October 2013
Language: English
Print Pages: 256
Language: English
ISBN: 978-1620405529


This is superbly written, journalistic style non-fiction, rendering a mountain lion's journey from the Black Hills of South Dakota to the Connecticut coast, but that's only the glue that holds this exceptional work together. Avoiding sensationalistic and preachy  writing, this book is an engrossing, fully researched, well-balanced presentation of facts, complemented with juxtaposition of  perspectives relative to predators. In other words, beyond immersive reading, this book has the potential to broaden understanding. 

Oh, he details the ill-fated adventures of big cats and other predators, and addresses the reasons why they undertake such journeys, but additionally he shows rare insight into the minds of their adversaries such as:
"     From the first teetering steps to the inimitable cocky stride in humanity’s six-million-year journey— from tree-dwelling, knuckle-walking offshoot of an African ape, to bipedal globe-trotting pedestrian of the world— had come uncounted sidetracks and detours through the bellies of big cats. Being hunted was a fact of early life that forever shaped the growing brains and bodies of the people who would come to be."​
And their supporters such as:
"   Whether eastward from the Rockies or northward from the Florida swamps, the exiled eastern cougar would need help coming home. The rewilders’ pleas for civility and compassion obviously weren’t cutting it. But their cause had lately embraced yet a more ecological rationale for why the East so needed its big cat back. 

    The murmur had been gathering from field sites and conference halls, formally surfacing in academic journals and publicized in mainstream media. Researchers from around the world were returning with disquieting reports of forests dying, coral reefs collapsing, pests and plagues irrupting. Beyond the bulldozers and the polluters and the usual cast of suspects, a more insidious factor had entered the equation. It was becoming ever more apparent that the extermination of the earth’s apex predators— the lions and wolves of the land, the great sharks and big fish of the sea, all so vehemently swept aside in humanity’s global swarming— had triggered a cascade of ecological consequences. Where the predators no longer hunted, their prey had run amok, amassing at freakish densities, crowding out competing species, denuding landscapes and seascapes as they went."​
This together with chronicled transitions in thinking by involved individuals, exemplifies the potential of critical thinking.  One example being Aldo Leopold's journey from advocating well managed stark forestlands, to recognizing the vibrancy and greater productivity of forestlands with a naturally occurring full complement of biodiversity. 

This isn't a book a thoughtful person will soon forget. With the breadth of reasoning it encompasses, the reader will find themselves wondering how human potential will play out in a setting of self-destructive proclivities. 

In our haste to overcome Nature have we gone too far, or is this simply evolving ecology? The author makes a fair case for both, leaving the reader to exercise critical thinking. 

“_The skill of writing is to create a context in which other people can think._” ~ Edwin Schlossberg​

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## escorial

enjoyed reading those two rev's man..will read the others soon..cool stuff


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## LeeC

*Memories of a Distant Future by M.D. Robinson*
Published: July 31, 2015
Words: 93,720
Language: English
ISBN: 9781310818431


*Review by: L. G. Cullens (author of Calan's Eden) on Oct. 4, 2016*

As the author notes in his book description, a current day young man finds himself several hundred years in the past, in a North America before Europeans began to arrive. He recognizes the terrain of northern Wyoming, but is understandably confused by the absence of modern man's hand. So begin his adventures in a time closer to Nature.

The story is both awe inspiring and endearing, especially to me in being familiar with both the locale and people depicted. To those that look for depth in a story, the author's use of a simpler setting brings out humankind's good and bad proclivities. 

My only issue with this book was the author's stumbling, drawn out start, where he might have better captured the reader's mind's eye and attention. I got over such though, as the author quickly hit his stride in presenting an engrossing story. 

This isn't the kind of book where one can note snippets to interest potential readers, so I'll say only that many should find this book an immersing and enjoyable read.


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## LeeC

*Ice Canyon Monster by Keith Rommel*
Publisher: Sunbury Press, Inc.
Published: July 23, 2016
Print Length: 136 pages
ISBN: 978-1620067222
ebook available (592 KB)
ASIN: B01IZXV44Y
Language: English

*Review by: L. G. Cullens (author of Calan's Eden) on Oct. 17, 2016*

This is much more than a monster book, addressing very real problems we face with a tantalizing story. Beyond the reality based setting, this many talented and award wining author drags the reader into the story as few I've read do. 

What lengths would you go to if your cherished way of life, and those you cared for, were being destroyed by a corrupt and uncaring materialistic culture? Now imagine you're an Eskimo Shaman, and ask yourself the same question.

I toss aside many books, especially the fanciful kind written by the naïve, so based on the cover alone I passed over picking this up several times. When I did eventually give it a shot though, I had trouble putting it down. Warning, this book moves like a freight train. Strangely for this storytelling ilk, I even found myself rooting for the monster. 

It's hard for me to imagine anyone not enjoying this book. As another reviewer said, "Here comes Keith and he is taking no prisoners with his new book!"

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## LeeC

*Snugs The Snow Bear*

What a delightful children book.

I picked up the book “Snugs The Snow Bear” as a birthday gift for my grandson, and read it to be sure I’d made a good choice. I was richly rewarded with an exceptional storytelling effort. It’s a story most any parent or grandparent would throughly enjoy reading to a child. 

Please give us more of your delightful stories Suzy Davies.


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