Read Merrily: February 2006

Sunday, February 19, 2006

Noughts and Crosses

Hmmmm. I had higher hopes for this if i'm honest, but my over-riding impression was that it has done well because a black woman chose to write about racial inequality, for children.

So - two races, noughts (with no capital, very clever, we get the device but did you really have to actually spell out in so many words that its 'nought like nil, nothing') and Crosses - with a capital, closer to God (so Cross, look, another clever device) and with words changed into things like Crossmas. Crosses are black people and supreme, noughts are white underdogs and resorting to terrorism to make things right. Yawn.

The book dots back and forth between a nought boy and his family and a Cross girl and hers. The dad goes to jail for taking the blame for his older son who does a bombing and dies trying to escape. The girl is the daughter of the nearly Prime Minister. They fight, young laddie goes off to be a terrorist having just missed seeing said girlie and gone off to be happy with her because he didn't read the letter in time. His cell has to kidnap her, he sleeps with her, he gets caught, she gets pregnant - and well, you can probably guess the end.

I dunno - does writing politically thought provoking books for children really HAVE to include pregnancy, death, teenage drinking, lots of teenage angst, bullying and a seriously spelled out and contrived plot?

I do think we could perhaps do better. But of course, i'd be devastated if someone was so rubbishing of anything i'd written. Sorry, Malorie :(

4:50 PM 0 comments

Good Omens

This started promisingly, ambled about a bit and totally lost its way at the end. I don't think it benefitted from having two authors. I don't think it was well enough thought out. If that is Armageddon, they need to get someone who CAN organise a piss up in a brewery.

I did like it at times, it was quite funny. I thoguht Crowley and Aziraphale were a good giggle.

But overall, go back to Discworld Terry :)

4:48 PM 0 comments

A Town Like Alice

Unusually for us, Max read this book before i did. I'm so glad he did, because if he hadn't, he wouldn't have read it based on how i would have described it. But the look on his face as he finished it told me i would enjoy it; it is fairly unusual to see Max moved by a book but he certainly was.

In short, the book is about the life of a girl caught up in the Far East'd WW2 experience; the stroy is told after it has occurred, as her experiences affect the life she has aftewrward. She was part of a group of women and children prisoners who march across country, having been effectively abandoned by the Japanese. The account is set fictionally, but apparently based on real life and it made fascinating reading. The second part of the book goes to London and to Australia and is a love story, which is why Max would have not read it, but it really is rather a wonderful love story; i think i loved it because it felt familiar. Love growing from a chance and inopportune meeting, againt the odds of it being successful and with much to overcome is somewhere i've been and i felt warmed and encouraged by the gentleness of it.

I know i can get the Chalet School into anything, but oddly enough, this book made me think of CS books a lot. In those stories, brothers and fathers are often on plantations in Kuala Lumpur or India. They are places that feature heavily - and if you read the unabridged versions that cover the war years, there are illusions to more than one father or brother who die in those places. EBD, their author, was not afraid to allude to real and brutal life, thoguh she did it in a subtle way, suitable to the audience and sensibilities of the time. In many ways her careful but respectful recognition of atrocities bore the hallmarks of how she believed children should be brought up - with knowledge but with care. What i like about her writing is that she was largely fair and unbiased and i think i recognise a flavour of a writer with a similar ethos in Neville Shute.

He spoke with gravity and fairness about the Japanese; both about their brutality and about the way they helped and cared for the captured children who were dying because of their invasion. He wrote respectfully about the culture of the people in the country and to illustrate that, he used a phrase from the Koran as a main theme for his belief in the real humanity of people. he painted the white colonials as people who had stood high and demanded homage and who were brought low and made to pay when there culture no longer brought them respect. He painted his heroine as a true Chalet School girl - a Joey Bettany, a Jo March. All those honourable and upright young white girls that were so much a part of the jolly hockey sticks culture of 20's, 30's and 40's England.

It made me wonder, reading her story as she went off to do the right thing, pay her dues and follow love borne out of the acknowledgment of a man's sacrifice doing what he knew to be right, who the heroines of young girls are going to be now? Who will Fran and Maddy and Amelie and Josie aspire to be? Will Joey Bettany be too far in the past? Will Hermione Granger be a suitable role model? Can you aspire to be a Rainbow Fairy? Now we've put aside neat hair, a willing, godfearing mind and a desire to be a stay at home mummy, where will the literary heroines lie? I'm not saying those CS values were right, or suitable for the 21st century but i do wonder who my girls will aspire to. I had a good opportunity to choose; i had high powered career mum and i had Joey. i chose, Joey. I wonder who my girls will want to aim for, rather than aim for being me.

4:22 PM 0 comments

Friday, February 03, 2006

Oh no! I've turned into a Prachett head!

Oh dear, out of pure unfounded snobbery i resisted this for so long - and now finally it has got me. lol.

I've just read three of these on the trot, Guards! Guards! followed by its sequel Men at Arms and then Reaper Man, follow on from Mort. I don't know what to tell you; i really enjoyed them. I laughed outloud frequently, giggled about them after light outs, read the first two in ever spare moment at Centerparcs.

They were great - the combination of ourworldness and otherworldness always entertains me, i like people who can be clever like that; i loved the characters and fear i hold a secret candle now for Sam Vimes and Death, as a character, made me snort with glee on several occasions.

Guards! Guards! revolves around a plot to bring a dragon to town, men at Arms was just so much daft tomfoolery morphing all of a sudden into rather a good plot and Reaper Man - well caustic schmultz, if you can have such a thing. But a great giggle - and about as opposite to HDM as you can get, despite sharing a smidgen of the same plot. Very funny.

Try Prachett. I hate saying it, but try it.

7:22 AM 0 comments

An attempt to get through everything i haven't already read in the BBC Big Read Top 100 during this year (hmmmm... maybe a little longer than 2004 actually... didn't bargain on the pregnancy and baby!!!!!)

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