Uncommon Reader

by Alan Bennett

This book was touted as a celebration of reading and irresistible to avid readers but I was disappointed. While it was cute and amusing and I appreciated the depiction of the Queen discovering the joys of reading and then refining her tastes as all readers do, the ending really spoiled it for me. ***Spoiler Alert*** I was annoyed that the Queen eventually abandons reading and decides that she must write instead.

Had she been asked if reading had enriched her life she would have had to say yes, undoubtedly, though adding with equal certainty that it had at the same time drained her of life of all purpose. Once she had been a self- assured single-minded woman knowing where her duty lay and intent on doing if for as long as she was able. Now all too often she was in two minds. Reading was not doing, that had always been the trouble. p. 100

[S]he did not want simply to be a reader. A reader was next door to being a spectator, whereas when she was writing she was doing, and doing was her duty. p. 102

As an avid reader I believe that there is value in reading and that reading is an end to itself, not simply a means to become a writer. If this were truly a celebration of reading then the Queen would not have given up reading in favor of writing. I was also annoyed that reading had such a pronounced detrimental influence on her performance as Queen. While I generally enjoy antidotes about the crazy things that people do who get a little too carried away by books or reading, the antidotes in this story did not strike me as humorous. Instead of identifying with the strong impulse to read that I believe all avid readers share, it merely made me sad that reading had turned into such a negative that she was unable to perform her duties, especially when she actually abdicated the throne to become a writer. I did enjoy the beginning of the book, especially the way that reading opened her eyes to to the world at large and made her more aware of the people around her. While I had high hopes for this little story, I was disappointed.

July/August Bookmarks Magazine

Here's what looked interesting in the July/August Bookmarks Magazine.

Angel's Game, S. Carolos Ruiz Zafon
Devil's Company, David Liss
Girl Who Played with Fire, Stieg Larsson but read
Girl with the Dragon Tatoo first
Olive Kitteridge, Elizabeth Strout (S)
Lacuna, Barbara Kingsolver
Moscow Rules, Daniel Silva but start with first in series
Shadow of the Scorpion, Neal Asher but start with first in Polity series
Black Hole War, Leonard Susskind (NF)
The Company, Robert Littell
Stone's Fall, Ian Pears
The Family Man, Elinor Lipman (S)
Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, Wells tower (S)
The Little Stranger, Sarah Waters
The World to Come, Dara Horn
How it Ended, Jay McInerney (S)
The Scarecrow, Michael Connelly
Death at La Fenice, Donna Leon
Manual of Detection, Jedediah Berry
Pride Prejudice and Zombies, Seth Grahame-Smith
Omnivore's Dilemma, Michael Pollan
Brasyl, Ian McDonald (SF)

Once Upon A Time III Wrap Up

This marks the end of the Once Upon A Time III challenge. I had only committed to do the Journey (one book) but ended up doing a few short stories and three books.

Book of Lost Things
Death with Interruptions
City of Saints and Madmen


Short Stories:
The Library of Babel
The Lottery of Babylon

I never got a chance to post the links on the review site for Death with Interruptions or City of Saints and Madmen before Mr. Linky went away. By far my favorite read was the City of Saints and Madmen and I definitley plan on reading more by Jeff Vandermeer. Death with Interruptions was also good but I was very disappointed with Book of Lost Things. And of course the Borges short stories were fabulous as always. I enjoyed the challenge and look forward to next years.

City of Saints and Madmen

by Jeff Vandermeer

I first discovered this author last year when I participated in the Once Upon A Time II Challenge and came across a post on the author’s web site of the Exhaustive Essential Fantasy Reading List. I was intrigued by this list because it included many of my favorite authors such as Kafka, Saramago, Peake, Borges, Calvino, Marquez and made me rethink what fantasy was.The author also has an interesting blog and it made me curious to read this author.
The City of Saints and Madmen is a collection of short stories that all take place in the city of Ambergris. In its first edition it was just four stories, the deluxe second edition expanded to include an appendix which has more short pieces as well as letters from a director of an insane asylum and an Ambergris glossary. The second edition also included an encrypted story on the dust jacket. The paperback edition which I read includes an additional couple of stories and decrypts the story for you.

Ambergris is a fascinating dark and mysterious city with frightful grey caps or mushroom people, strange afflictions, giant squid in the River Moth, bizarre festivals and rituals and an interesting history. The first three stories in the book which introduced me to Ambergris reminded me of China Mieville’s New Corbuzon, although certainly not in a derivative way. The city is slightly evil, creepy, scary, richly imagined and enticing. I really enjoyed the fact that everything was not explained to you but you only caught glimpses and understanding gradually develops as you read more and more. The fourth story, The Strange Case of X, is my favorite and reminded me more of Kafka or Borges then Mieville. I don’t want to give anything away but it makes the reader, and author question what is reality, inserts the author into the story and makes you think about the writing process. The appendix then plays off of the Strange Case of X and includes materials that were in the possession of X such as other pieces about Ambergris in the form of stories, letters, pamphlets, scientific articles and a glossary. I enjoyed the fact that the appendix not only further developed Ambergris but explored different formats to do so. The appendix reminded me of Mark Z. Danielewski’s experimentation with format in House of Leaves and Revolutions. I thoroughly enjoyed this book and definitely will read more of this author.

Death with Interruptions

by Jose Saramago

Blurb from the Dust Jacket: On the first day of the new year, no one dies. This of course, causes consternation among politicians, religious leaders, morticians, and doctors. Among the general public, on the other hand, there is celebration - flags are hung out on balconies, people dance in the streets. They have achieved the great goal of humanity: eternal life.

Jose Saramago, a Nobel prize winning Portuguese author who is now 86 years old has a style uniquely his own. His sentences run on for paragraphs or even pages, there is not much punctuation used and any dialog is imbedded in the run on sentences so it is sometimes difficult to tell who is saying what. His focus is not a strong fast moving plot or extensive in depth character development. The author definitely makes his presence felt and I have heard my friends remark that he makes himself too evident in the writing and that he was just showing off but should just let the story speak for itself with out intruding. But if you enjoy a different style once in a while Saramago is wonderful and one of my favorite authors.

I love his beautiful use of language, his acerbic wit, and his social satire. The time and locations are rarely identified and characters are often unnamed making the stories seem more like a fable. He takes a big question such as what would happen if everyone went blind (Blindness) or the Iberian Peninsula became unattached from Europe and floats off (Stone Raft) and sees where it takes him. In Death with Interruptions, his latest work (2008) translated into English, the question is what if Death stopped? The first part of the book looks at this situation from the big picture view point and explores what this would mean for politicians, the Church, funeral directors, grave diggers, insurance companies, nursing homes and the mafia. In the second part of the book we meet death, with a small not capital d. I don’t want to give too much away but she, yes death is a she, is faced with a situation she has never had to face before. At the end of this fable humans have a much better appreciation of death and death has a better understanding of humans.

This is not one of my favorite Saramago books and probably not where I would recommend someone start but I thoroughly enjoyed it and will continue to read whatever Saramago publishes. My favorite is All the Names which I selected for my book club and was well received. Blindness seems to be very popular and would be a good place to begin but please don’t see the movie first!

BTT: Niche Books

What Niche Books do you read?

I have a lot of reference type books on my shelves pertaining to photography, Photoshop, dog training, gardening, travel and a huge collection of cookbooks (my husband loves to cook) but I don’t think of them as books that I “read”. They are simply references that I dip into to extract the information that I need and move on. There are three categories of niche books that I will curl up with and read cover to cover for pure enjoyment: 1) Books about Books 2) Books about Antarctica and 3) Books about the Carribean.

I absolutely adore books about books or reading or writing, either fiction or non-fiction. Some of my favorite fiction ones are The Muse Asylum by David Czuchlewski, Club Duma by Arturo Perez-Reverte, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler by Italo Calvino and the Cliff Janeway mysteries by John Dunning. Some of my favorite non-fiction are Gentle Madness by Nicholas Basbanes, Used and Rare by Lawrence Goldstone, and Library: An Unquiet History by Matthew Battles.

I find Antarctica fascinating and hope to get there someday. I have enjoyed fiction set there such as Ice Limit by Preston & Childe and Antarctica by Kim Stanley Robbinson as well as non-fiction such as Big Dead Place by Nicholas Johnson and In the Ghost Country by Peter Hillary. I will note that I have yet to find an extremely well written book about Antarctica but for some reason I am willing to tolerate poor or average writing that I normally wouldn’t read if it has interesting information about Antarctica.

The last niche that I sometimes read is books about the Carribean, either fiction or non-fiction, especially if it about or set in the Virgin Islands. This is a small niche and most of the books that I have are out of print or only available in the Virgin Islands. I must admit that I used to read and collect a lot more in this niche when I didn’t live in the Virgin Islands then I do now. When its cold and snowy in New England it is more fun to read about the Carribean but now it is more fun to read about the ice and cold of Antarctica.

Does anyone have any suggestions for Books about Books or Books about Antarctica?

Edit:

Having perused the other responses I have found some great books about books to check out. From the comments to the post by Savidge Reads:
Reading Like a Writer - Francine Prose
Books, Baguettes and Bedbugs - Jeremy Mercer
Ex Libris - Anne Fadiman
Classics for Pleasure - Michael Dirda
The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop - Lewis Buzbee
The Polysyllabic Spree or Housekeeping vs the Dirt - Nick Hornby
The Care and Feeding of Books Old and New - Rosenberg
Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel -Jane Smiley
How to Read Literature Like a Professor -Thomas C. Foster
Why We Read What We Read - Lisa Adams and John Heath
Beowulf on the Beach - Jack Murnighan

And from Molly from My Cozy Book Nook:
Reading Like a Writer - Francine Prose
The 7 Basic Plots - Christopher Booker
How to Read a Book - Mortimer Adler
The Well-Educated Mind - Susan Wise Bauer
Mini Lessons for Literature Circles - Harvey Daniels and Nancy Steineke

May/June Bookmarks

Here's what sounded interesting in the May/June Bookmarks Magazine.

The City & The City, China Mieville
Prayer's for the Assassin, Robert Ferrigno
Lambs of London, Peter Ackroyd
Book of Air and Shadows, Michael Gruber
In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, Daniyal Mueenuddin
Housekeeper and the Professor, Yoko Ogawa
Emperor's Children, Claire Messud
Vagrants, Yiyun Li
Way Through Doors, Jesse Ball
What the Dead Know, Laura Lippman
The Caryatids, Bruce Sterling (SF)
Drood, Dan Simmons
The Terror, Dan Simmons
Incandescence, Greg Egan (SF)
Lost City of Z, David Grann (NF)

Hyperion

by Dan Simmons

Wow! I don’t think I have said that about a book in many a year. Here is what the blurb from the book says:

On the world called Hyperion, beyond the law of the Hegemony of Man, there waits the creature called the Shrike. There are those who worship it. There are those who fear it. And there are those who have vowed to destroy it. In the Valley of the Time Tombs, where huge, brooding structures move backward through time, the Shrike waits for them all. On the eve of Armageddon, with the entire galaxy at war, seven pilgrims set forth on a final voyage to Hyperion seeking the answers to the unsolved riddles of their lives. Each carries a desperate hope--and a terrible secret. And one may hold the fate of humanity in his hands.

While that is the set up, the book is the stories of six of the pilgrims. When the pilgrims first meet up to begin their journey to the planet Hyperion to see the Shrike they decide to each honestly tell their stories and their connection with Hyperion which may aid them in their endeavor. The worlds that are depicted in the six stories are amazingly well realized and could easily serve as settings for entire novels or even a series in their own right. The characters themselves are also very well developed.

I don’t want to give too much away but .... The pilgrims are 1) a Catholic priest 2) a Colonel in the military of Palestinian descent 3) a female private detective with an AI client 4) a Jewish scholar who brings his infant daughter on the trip 5) an incredibly old poet who lived on old earth before it was destroyed and 6) the Consul, a former governor of Hyperion. There are so many worlds and concepts that could serve as entire books in them selves. I loved the idea of “the World Web” which were worlds linked together not only by communications but by “farcaster” portals that literally allowed you to step from one world to another. There are even houses described where each room would be on a different planet. I found the TechnoCore fascinating - AI’s that are linked together in the “datasphere” and that provided humanity with the “farcaster” technology and basically run the World Web. But I don’t want to give the impression that this is just a hard scifi book because it certainly is not.

I loved the depictions of old earth before it was destroyed - the water levels rising, the extreme rich partying in their little enclaves while the rest of the world went to hell. I loved the planet Maui Covenant (think Hawaii) with its living “motile” islands that migrate in groups with the seasons and the dolphins transplanted from Earth that humanity can now speak with. I also loved all the references to the poet John Keats from which the author takes the novel’s name. Keats not only provides the book’s title named after one of his poems but at one point is the name of the main city on Hyperion set up by Mad King Billy to be an artists colony. And then there is a memorable “cybrid” which is an artificial recreation of the poet John Keats. It seems that all the different segments or aspects of earth have been transplanted to the stars. Catholicism, Islam, Judaism all play a part in the story. There are also Templars who have mysterious tree ships that travel between the stars. And then of course there are some other non- earth aspects such as the Ousters - the enemy that Man is about to go to war with. It is interesting that it is not entirely clear that the Ousters are really the bad guys at all.

This book ends after hearing the six pilgrims tales but before they reach their destination to see the Shrike. I understand that there are three more books in the Hyperion Cantos - the Fall of Hyperion, Endymion and the Rise of Endymion. I immediately bought the Fall of Hyperion when I finished this book to see what happens to the pilgrims but the six stories are so completely rendered that even with out reading any more I would have been satisfied.

Book of Lost Things

by John Connolly

This is my first novel for the Once Upon A Time III challenge. I have read such glowing reviews of this book that I not only read it for the challenge but was thinking that it might be one of my selections for my book club. I am afraid that I didn’t like it. I didn’t hate it either but it certainly didn’t live up to my expectations.

The story is about a 12-year-old English boy, David, who, after the death of his mother, moves with his father and new step mother to the new wife’s family’s country estate. David is given an attic room lined with old books from a previous occupant and the books begin to literally whisper to him. One day after seeing an intruder in his room, David hears his dead mother’s voice in the sunken garden calling to him for help. He follows the voice and finds himself in a very different place where he searches for his mother and a way back to his world.

There is nothing I like better than a book about books. I loved the beginning - who could resist books actually whispering - but as soon as he goes through the crack in the garden wall and finds himself in a different world, the book totally lost me. I appreciated that this new realm is not the realm of Disney fairy tales but harkens back to the brutality of the original Grimm fairy tales that do not necessarily have happy endings. The book is definitely not written for kids, or adults who are the faint of heart. But for me, his retelling of extremely familiar fairy tales was not unique enough to keep my interest. As soon as Roland entered the story I wanted to lay this aside and pick up the Dark Tower series by Stephen King which really does a fabulous job using Browning’s poem Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came. And it’s not that I don’t like fairy tales (I love the Russian ones like Baba Yaga) or re-telling familiar fairy tales (I loved Wicked by Gregory Maguire).

Not only did the plot not hold my interest but the writing itself just wasn’t enough to captivate me. Some authors could write about watching paint dry such as David Foster Wallace, Tom Robbins or Haruki Murakami and I still would be totally entertained and awed by their writing. The writing in this book does not fit into that category. I kept feeling that I was reading a children’s book, even though it is clearly too gruesome in some parts for children. I think that this came from the very simplistic writing style which I found annoying.

Finally, every review I have read has mentioned something that lead me to believe that reading and books would play a major role in the story. (Like the Shadow of the Wind or the Uncommon Reader). I loved the whispering books at the very beginning of the story but that idea was never developed. I was hopeful that since the boy was ultimately seeking “The Book of Lost Things” that a book would play a pivotal role. It is indeed a book about stories and fairy tales but I had hoped that books themselves or reading would play a role.

It was a quick and easy read. All in all I was disappointed as it didn’t live up to my expectations. I do believe however that even if I had not read the rave reviews and had simply read the cover blurb I still would have been unsatisfied with the book.

March/April Bookmarks Magazine

Here are the books that look good from Bookmarks Magazine.

Book of Chameleons - Jose Eduardo Agualusa
Deathe with Interruptions - Jose Saramago
Elegance of the Hedgehoge - Muriel Barbery
Metropole - Ferenc Karinthy
Little Giant of Aberdeen County - Tiffany Baker
Gridlinked- Neal Ahser
Suicide Collectors- David Oppengaard
Daemon - Daniel Suarez
Lush Life - Richard Price (Clockers)