FFS!

It's amazing how some things can really push your buttons. I was so close to giving the staff in Waterstone's a piece of my mind, and then, just like that, I couldn't be arsed.

Still though. For fuck's sake.

Standard Time

Just to prove I don't hate Irish authors (just the bad ones), here comes Keith Ridgway's collection of short stories about Dublin people, past, present and future. I read his novel The Parts a couple of years ago and found it excellent in places but a little stretched in the telling and maybe not as brilliant as some found it. His short stories, however, are spot on. Funny, weird, magical, mundane, violent, personal and cryptic. He picks up on great details and paints a Dublin I recognise: just another city that has nasty histories as well as great ones, and has nasty presents as well as sophisticated European ones. Top stuff.

My birthday (Part two)

Presents from The Carpenter and The Lady arrived today, hooray. Another Magnus Mills book (which reminds me that I must read that other Magnus Mills book and give it back to William) with a picture of a ship on the cover, and this four-CD set.
The first thing I did with the Irving Berlin box set was import it to iTunes so that I could listen to it on the iBook. So, once again I am in the amusing position of using thousands of monies' worth of equipment to reproduce crackly mono recordings. I'll be on the wax cylinders before long, I predict.

Why, Lord, Why? (Part two)

One for Ed.

It's grim out east

I find myself struggling to like DBC Pierre. I did like Vernon God Little when I read it, but I would be hard pressed to remember a single thing about it now and I know a lot of people hated it. Recently I heard DBC being interviewed on Rattlebag and he made his new book sound really interesting. He made the situation in the Caucasus sound grim and overwhelming and as though it would make a great subject for a novel. And it would. But this is not that novel.

The story concerns Ludmila and her family who live on the constantly shifting border between two warring zones in... I want to say Armenia(?). At the beginning of the book Ludmila's grandfather, whose pension is the only income the family has, dies. So someone has to become the new breadwinner for this unpleasant, backbiting family. But Ludmila has plans to escape to the West with her boyfriend and make a new life for herself there.
During the meanwhile, over in an England made paranoid by terrorist threats, conjoined twins (one conservative, one liberal, one weak, one strong, oh the symbolism!) are separated and set loose on an unsuspecting public, having lived in a sheltered home all their lives. One of them is looking to crawl back into the home, the other wants to get out and have some sex. And if he has to order a young woman off the Internet from the Caucasus, so be it.

Pierre's dialogue is superb, and his story - what there is of it - is reasonable, but his actual narrative is awful and his descriptions are so offputting that they leave you more confused than you would have been if he'd described nothing at all. Eileen Battersby's comment that you should only write a book if you've something to say is unfair, because he does have something to say about what a luxury it is to be able to worry about terrorism and to fear bombs, when there are so many people for whom getting shot is a very real daily possibility that they can do nothing to avoid because poverty has left them without any choices. But I had to look hard to find that point, and I only found it because I was well disposed towards the book to begin with.

Compare and contrast with A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian, which also deals with former USSR states and how people got out of them. Billed as a comedy, this book is in fact more like one of those chirpy, hummable Beatles songs that actually turns out to be lyrically dark and quite depressing.

The story concerns a family of Ukrainian immigrants to Cambridgeshire. When the mother dies, the father (who is eighty-six) decides to marry a thirty-four year-old Ukrainian woman in order to help her stay in England after her visa runs out. The novel follows the efforts of his two middle-aged daughters to extricate their hapless father from the clutches of this scheming woman and her supposedly genius son. It's a very quick read and does actually have some stuff about tractors in it, but for the characters in this book, much of the awfulness of Eastern Europe is consigned to the past and has a discreet veil drawn over it. Until, of course, it rears its loud, garish head again in the shape of Valentina, who terrorises everyone and everything around her in an effort not to be sent back to Ukraine.

The book raises some serious issues about older people and their rights and abilities, but ultimately relies on a whimsical and Anne Tyler-ish wrapup that allows everyone to feel better about themselves. Maybe I'd have liked it better if it was grimmer all over, but then, I'm maybe a little young to be the target market for this book, and maybe the target market has had enough of that unpleasantness to be going on with, thank you very much.

The Shadow of the Sun

Columbo gave me this book last year around the time I got married, which just shows you how big my to-read pile is that I only got around to this recently. It's a great book, lovely American-style paperback that flops open and feels smooth to the touch and is easy to read on the train.
Oh, and what's in it is great as well. Ryszard Kapuscinski is a Polish journalist who wrote articles about his life in Africa from 1955 onwards, taking in the broad sweep of post-World War Two independence movements, dictatorships, famine, reconstruction and everyday African life. He acknowledges the difficulties inherent in attempting, as a white Northern European person, to get to the root of the nature of Africa, but he does a great job of sketching the basics. I like that he looks at geographical as well as political and historical factors, and that he never lets you forget some very basic facts, namely that Africa is very, very hot, and that it is very difficult to live there. I enjoyed this book immensely and will seek out more of the same.

My birthday

An Fear Moncai's birthday present to me finally arrived. On a gloomy day when I am feeling ill, he arrives home from work with a new Canon Digital SLR for me. Because he got a bonus in work.

He is nice.

We decided we like this photo because it shows our living room in a good light. Groovy accessories, clever telly, highly groomed cat. The filth with which we are generally surrounded does not show up much. Just what I've always wanted - a camera that makes my whole life look better.

Oh, the embarrassment

I have a horrible feeling I'm going to want to see The Da Vinci Code when it comes out. I always enjoy Ron Howard's films, I like Tom Hanks, I adore Paul Bettany, and I thought the book was fun.

The shame.

Even more shameful is the fact that this blog entry is merely an excuse to post a picture of Paul Bettany on my blog. Again. Although I am not using any of the publicity stills from the film, because they make him look like a young Emperor Palpatine.

White heron

Truth be told, it can get a little lonely out here by the sea. Far away from all the friends in more ways than one, there's some connection lost there.

But then some mornings I get out for the walk and it's rainy and blowy but I've worn the right hat and coat for once and I'm bundled up and the dogs are leaping around trying to decide if they're hunting or playing and a white heron flies overhead and lands on the river to fish. I've never seen a white heron before, and it's good to be able to stand and watch it for a while without fear that someone is going to come along and disturb us. After a bit it saw me, though, and started to do its "I'm not a bird, I'm a stick!" routine, so there was no point in watching it anymore.

More baby announcements today on the list. Feels very springtime.

A night at the theatre

When you only ever go to the theatre to see things written by people you know, or actors you went to college with, or something experimental in a small room above a pub, there's a whole level of polish and style and years of craft that you never get to see. A whole world of actors who can make their voices carry across a full house without ever seeming to raise them above the conversational, without covering the front row in spittle.
Mister Monkey and I went to see Brian Friel's The Faith Healer at The Gate, starring Ralph Fiennes, Ingrid Craigie, and Ian McDiarmid. Quite the cast of heavy hitters, and quite the night they delivered. The play is great and interesting and says much about the nature of playacting and storytelling and desire for glamour and a belief in unattainable happiness and a need to be noticed and loved and to be in the spotlight. The simple staging, in which monologues are delivered to the audience as if the audience were a journalist interviewing each of these people about their memories, is very effective and successfully brought us into the action so that, even from the very back of the theatre we wanted to answer the actors whenever they appeared to fumble for their places in the story.
It was just great. I would be interested to see it again with a different cast, just to compare, because I thought that Ralph Fiennes in particular was absolutely mesmerising, and not just, you know, because of the charm and everything.

The Known World

I waited so long for this book to come into the shop, and was looking forward to reading it so much, that I suppose it couldn't help but be disappointing. It could be the frame of mind I was in when I read it. It could be a whole lot of things, but I just wasn't engaged by it, despite its credentials. I usually like a Pulitzer winner. I usually like an epic tale of hardship in the American South. The fact that this was an epic tale of hardship in the American South that also included a black slave-owning family only made the book more attractive.
But I couldn't follow it. I kept having to go back and reread sections because I found the names confusing and the characters blank. Nothing much happened that I haven't read in other books. The timeline was constantly disrupted, which I know is a deliberate style to make the book seem more like an oral history, and the actual story moved very, very slowly. I'm sorry I didn't like it, but I just didn't. It was, well, it was boring.

A Pound of Paper

John Baxter's memoir of his book collecting is all the things I like in such a book. It's a quick read, full of interesting little asides and anecdotes about books and people and places. It's also got some top tips for making yourself popular with Parisian shopkeepers.
Book collectors are funny people. They appear to attach no value to the words in a book, only to the object itself. They see minor details that most of us miss - a tiny line of numbers close to the spine, an extra zero here or there, a missing errata slip where one should be, and so on. Like record collectors, they pore endlessly over boxes of apparent junk in the vague hope that they just might come across a first edition of something amazing, or something that will fill that last hole in their collection.
They hate the internet, by and large. It has removed much of the mystique from what they do and has made it easy for anyone to pass him or herself off as an expert.
I suspect that they wish they were private detectives. This is a fun book.

Proof, if proof be need be...

... that wasps are just the creepiest things on earth

I'm so glad I didn't watch that David Attenborough programme.

The Ultimate Question

Why, lord, why?

Pack Up the Moon

Bleucch, eucch.

So many things wrong with Anna McPartlin's book, I barely know where to start. I was asked to read it and review it on Newstalk106's lunchtime show. The other guest reviewer, I was surprised to see, was Dermot Lacey, a strange, showbizzy kind of politician who appears to be so completely consumed with being popular and being elected that he has lost all of his critical faculties along the way. Along with his powers of hearing and listening. During the review I said that I thought it was good that young women were writing books that were relevant to other young women in the same social category as them, I just didn't think this was a good example of that type of book. He said that he didn't care if the book wasn't socially relevant, he thought it was a good book anyway.
He reminded me of my least favourite kind of man, the ones who don't listen to women, who don't listen to anyone, in fact, except for other men who are exactly like them. You know the kind of guys who sell you a crappy car or fuck up a simple plumbing job or arrive three hours late to move your furniture and then, when you complain to them about the level of service you've received in return for your hard-earned money, they roll their eyes at your husband or father as if to say "women, eh? They just don't get that this is how the world works". I do not like men like this. I did not like this man. I did not like this book either, but I've ranted about it so much that I've lost the will to rant about it any more. Suffice to say that I think it's a disgrace that women are expected to pay a tenner to buy this sort of shoddily written, shabbily edited rubbish. Of course, what would I know? I just think that people should do their jobs well. Including writers.

The Ballad of Peckham Rye

I could easily write the same review for this as I wrote for The Girls of Slender Means. Short, punchy, single event causes mayhem, ripples of strange behaviour upset the status quo, etc. Really, more people should write like Muriel Spark. Fewer people should write like Anna McPartlin. The world would be a better place. Okay, maybe not the world, but bookshops certainly would be better for it.

All the clocks in the house are wrong

As soon as I get better and can get the hell off this sofa, I will buy batteries for the clocks. I will buy a new lightbulb for the little lamp in the sitting room so that the corner of the room that the telly's in isn't only lit by the glow of the telly. I will post the Pinefox the book I promised him. I will pick out the books I haven't read yet and arrange them in some way so as to make it easier to find them when I want to read them.
There are so many things I will do when this crappy winter is over.
That is soon, right?

The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon

Another break from Aussie convicts. This is a subtle horror story from Stephen King about a nine year-old girl who gets separated from her mother and brother while out hiking and has to try to find her way back to civilisation, dodge nameless horrors in the woods, and has only her personal stereo and its tinny reception of baseball games far away to keep her company. I read this at one sitting, which is the only way to read Stephen King really. He builds up a great atmosphere here, doesn't lay it on too thick, and has his usual fun with homey details in the middle of great fear. I liked it a lot, partly because I love stories about people walking and covering loads of ground. My favourite parts of Lord of the Rings are the walking parts. However, I do think he has a nerve calling it a novel when it barely skims a hundred pages.
PS, Tom Gordon is a baseball player. No, I didn't know that either.

The Necropolis Railway

Just one of the books I read while reading The Fatal Shore just to give myself a little break from the relentless size of the thing. This is a thriller, supposedly, that I kept thinking was going to turn out more thrilling than it really did. The title promises all kinds of spooky steam-age goings-on, but really it's a fairly straightforward story about a young man who comes down to London to work on the railways and gets mixed up in some bad blood about unions and land sales leading to moider; it's Steamtown. Interesting historical research though. There really was a necropolis railway, the spirit of Edwardian London is evoked quite faithfully, and so on. But the story, I thought, was weak. Ah well. It passed the time and at least it was short.

The Fatal Shore

It is a constant source of disappointment to me that Mister Monkey can read history books galore and actually retain facts from these books, while I learn only vague concepts. For example, he has just finished reading a big fat book about Persia and has learned many exciting things about Persia which he will happily share with you (if he ever updates his bloody blog, that is). I read a whole exciting novel about Persia last year, and the only thing I can remember is that there was once a Persian king called Arses.
I'm a bit like that about Australia now. Even after reading six hundred fairly dense pages about transportation and the colonial beginnings of Australia, all I can really tell you is an amusing story about a bloke called Pearce who was a cannibal. Or that you really, really didn't want to end up getting transported to Norfolk Island. Or that you didn't want to be a woman who got transported. Otherwise, there were worse things that could happen you than being sent to Botany Bay. In general, you worked hard, you got your ticket-of-leave, and you had a chance to be set up with some land and you could get some convicts of your own and start your own farm or business or whatever it was you had been doing in Ireland or England before you got greedy or stupid and did whatever it was that got you transported in the first place. In fact, one of the British government's biggest problems, once the colony was up and running, was to retain some sort of threatening air about it, which was very difficult seeing as how things were pretty crap for the English poor at that time.
It's a very good book, even if it does repeat itself a little and sometimes there's a little too much talk about architecture for my liking (namely, any at all. I don't care about architecture), but there's no way it should have taken me two months to read.