Read Merrily

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

Monday, January 16, 2006

Keeping your Distance from the Milling Multitude

Or Far from the Madding Crowd :)

I've dumped another hate from school; i got to the end of this and thought, "must read more Hardy." After The Mayor of Casterbridge, which we did at GCSE, in the driest fashion possible, i thought i'd hate him forever. Tess improved my feelings, but this really put me into the realms of "like". It is my sisters favourite book, no doubt helped by the fact that she had a young and enthusiastic teacher for whom it was also a favourite, while my English teacher was dry and dull at that level.

I would go so far as to say it could be a favourite, it was a little too slow, ambling and predictable for that, but very evocative of a time and place. Something i'm enjoying is learning to read so i see a place in my minds eye, i have got better at savouring a book and this was a good one to practise the skill.

It is a love story, a tragedy and a story of patient endeavour. It is a story of betrayal and despair and of community spirit. It is very understated, it has an air of the slow change of seasons that rules their farming life and moves the stroy on. I felt "at ease" in the story and warmed to its two imperfect lead characters.

I don't know if i would read it again, but if i ever had the opportunity to study it, i would do.

That is a big change in me!

4:46 AM 0 comments

Sunday, January 01, 2006

Mort

Aside from The Colour of Magic, which didn't do it for me at all, i'm surprising myself by liking these. I don't know why i'm surprised, they ought to be just my thing, but i never thought they would be.

This was fun though, a slightly mental romp through the life of Death and some associated nonsense. Fun enough that i've ordered its sequel, even though it isn't a top 100 book. So, if i can get into TP books, i ought to be able to keep myself entertained for quite a while!

10:14 AM 0 comments

Saturday, December 31, 2005

A Christmas Carol

Reading Dickens, i've decided, is not really my thing. I find it too wordy and laboured and it bores me a little. That said, listening to Dickens is a whole different ball game. I downloaded this one from a free Podcast, in 5 easy stages, and listened to it as i was getting ready to sleep over several nights. It was the full version but i much preferred having it read to me. Dickens lends itself very well to performance i think and possibly to being delivered in chunks in the way it was often done, serialised in the papers of the era.

I have to say, then, that i very much enjoyed this one in the format i partook of it. It's a funny book, an emotional book, a gentle and sometimes not so gentle poke at human nature. At times it is brutal and judging and with a message in it that is just as relevant, perhaps even more so, today as it was then. It is touching to see Scrooge want to change, to be easily changed, to be mortified and humbled by the person he has become. I don't think that tv versions do that side of it justice; they show, for dramatic effect perhaps, a man who has to be tuned, but the book shows a Scrooge who is humiliated and brought low by his lowness from almost the beginning. It is a story of someone getting their comeuppance early, for their own good. it is a story of faith, perhaps, a story of friendship, of change, of doing right.

I came unstuck trying to decide if Scrooge would have changed had he only seen his affect on other people and not seen that he was hated and despised. The Scrooge at the beginning of the book wouldn't have cared, the Scrooge after one spirit has already begun to care. Does he care that his chains are waiting or that he has brought sadness? I'm not sure it is that cut and dried, i think there are elements of both in there - change for good for others, change to change his own future, beyond that which is bound by living time. Clever Dickens, more than meets the eye there, i felt.

I think, in the end, i am most fascinated by something that i blogged; why, when this story is the story of a man changing, of a man rebeginning, of a man making amends do we use the term Scrooge to refer to a person who is mean? It should refer to someone who is the opposite, someone who befits the moral of the story. Do we, the reader, decern his true motivation? Is that why Scrooge lives on, because he reminds us of our own natural selfishness?

12:32 PM 0 comments

Friday, December 23, 2005

Back to the point.

Picked up Vicky Angel today in Oxfam and read it instead of talking to the children. Its the first of her books i've read. I can see the appeal, i'd have liked books like that when i was growing up. it's about 14 year olds but i can't see kids older than about 9-10 thinking it was something they wanted to read. I think Fran would quite like it in a couple of years; maybe a bit too in your face before that. A good description of those feelings of teenage grief after a death though, liked that side of it a lot.

Also read Case Histories by Kate Atkinson - excellent story, well worth a read. Also The Virgin's Lover by Philippa Gregory, another take on the Elizabeth/Dudley thing.

EDIT: And The Wish List by Eoin Colfer. Not quite up to the early Artemis books, but a good read, i liked it. Lots of inventive ideas and a good twist on the "buy a second chance to get into heaven" idea.

3:19 PM 0 comments

Thursday, December 15, 2005

Yet more spiritual porridge.

But now Josie goes to bed of an evening, i'm going to get back to reading some of those big books on my shelf.

I've had a bit of a Dan Brown fest recently, aided and abetted by MyBookYourBook which is just such a great thing - please sign up, it deserves to be well supported. I've yet to send a book of my own out, though spookily received one from someone who knew me!

So, first it was The Da Vinci Code - started brilliantly, kept me enthralled the whole way through . Enjoyed it, and the genre, enormously. Then i read Angels and Demons, not as good and a bit silly but still a gripper, The Deception Point which i really rated and finally Digital Fortress which i thought was weak by comparison to the others. But i'd like to read more similar stuff; Max has been recommending Michael Crighton.

Since then i've read Chick Lit, to see me through novelling and a busy period. Restoring Grace by Katie Fforde, her best in a long while, though ended a bit weakly. After that it was Love Rules by Freya North, again her best in a while, much better than Pip and Fen and excellent for not having a perfect wrap up of an ending. Well done Freya. Loved it. Now i'm reading Case Histories by Kate Atkinson, another writer i rate highly.

After that i'm going to go for Far From the Madding Crowd and i've just ordered 5 more from MBYB that are all on my list of Top 100. Going to crack that this year, i'm on the home straight. Gave up on Midnight's Children. What a load of tosh.

5:18 PM 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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