Married to a Cave Man

Married to a Cave Man by Damien Owens
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

There you go, see? THIS is how you combine humour with real human drama and emotion. Here it is.


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The North Water

The North Water by Ian McGuire
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Thanks to Paul and Alice for getting me this book for Christmas, following the unerring logic of "well, it has a whale AND a ship on the cover". Once I picked up The North Water, I couldn't put it down, and raced through it as befits a book that's all told in a kind of breathless present tense, and is full of action and incident, not to mention Arctic shipwrecks and other things I'm very fond of.
I was also pleasantly surprised to discover that the book is not a murder mystery, despite what the Saturday Review people said about it.
I was unpleasantly unsurprised, though, to see that it is one of Those Modern Historical Novels, which have to tell you on every page how much everything reeks. Nobody can have a conversation without hacking into the dangling jawbone of some unfortunate animal, and everyone within a six-mile radius is vomiting, getting buggered, contracting a venereal disease, or witnessing the death of some terrified and hollow-eyed child. It's all a Bit Much, and very bleak.
Still, fairly clips along, and if you want to read a Cormac McCarthyesque story set on a Greenland whaler, well, this is the book for you.


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Nicole Cliffe's Favourite Horror Films of Recent Years

I'm just going to park this list here, and hope that Nicole does not think better of it and delete the whole thing.

It's Novel Fair Time Again

Last year, more or less on a whim, I entered the Irish Writers Centre Novel Fair. I was about halfway through writing a book I thought was properly good, and was certainly topical, and I wanted a deadline to give myself the push to finish it. So, I paid over my €50 as soon as the Novel Fair opened, then spent the period between April and October getting my first 10,000 words into as good a shape as I could get them.

I took a couple of very useful courses. I know some people doubt the value of courses. Another writer told me that his colleagues make fun of him for taking courses in writing. "Don't you know how to do it by now?" That kind of thing. But people go to yoga classes every week for years. And art classes. And dance. So why not writing? There's always something new to learn. And there are always other writers to meet. Plus, you know, you can steal people's ideas. (Just my little joke. Obviously I do not do this.)

I paid an editor to polish my entry (missus). This was extremely valuable for a whole lot of reasons. Obviously, the main one is that a good editor lifts your writing from readable to really pretty good. Another is this: did you know that you don't have to make every change the editor tells you? After twenty years in the tech writing business, hewing closely to the style guide at all times and bowing to the superior knowledge of my editor/SME, I found it very freeing to realise that if the editor wanted to swap "handsomeness" for "good looks", I could refuse to make the change.

I got a synopsis written. This is horrible, and everyone hates it, and somehow it's much harder than writing the whole actual book, but I got it done.

And, hey, I must have done something right, because I was shortlisted.

I got my novel finished, edited, beta-read, and re-edited. And people who read it liked it. I met the other writers. We flapped about how worried we were. We discussed bindings and bulldog clips and Strepsils. So much excitement and validation and fluttery nerves and camaraderie.

The day itself was a lot of fun, too. Obviously it did not go as well as I would have liked, but that's alright. It did go very well for other people.

But, you know, Jacob turns the wheel, or whatever.

A few years ago, I read an interview in the AV Club with a blogger who had been a contestant on The Biggest Loser. She talked about the close connection all the contestants end up having with the trainers, and how it all gets very intense, and the trainers promise they'll keep in touch when contestants leave and the season finishes. But, this person said, you rapidly discover that the connection, as deep as it might have been, is temporary. Eventually, even the neediest former contestants get the hint that they had their turn, and they have to get out of the way and let someone else have their turn.

The 2018 Irish Writers Centre Novel Fair opens for applications soon, and in another ten months or so, there'll be a new crop of writers getting the phone call. Maybe they'll actually be expecting it. I hope it makes them as happy as it made me.

The Arrival of Spring

The biannual changing of the clock has happened again, and, as usual, it seems to be too much for people to deal with. Not only is Twitter full of people making the same Stonehenge joke, but the 6 Music news this morning carried a report from a group that wants to keep BST all year round because "it would create 38,000 jobs in the leisure industry," because apparently it's the clocks changing that makes it get dark early in the wintertime, and not, I don't know, our latitude or something.

Anyway, ever since the time a friend accidentally turned up two hours early for a breakfast date on the first day of BST, I've developed a method of coping with the forwards/backwards motion of the year. In the autumn, when we get an extra hour, I watch a crappy film. The kind of film that makes you say, "that's two hours of my life I'm never getting back," because I can at least get one back on that magical night in October.

But in the spring you lose an hour, so it's important to spend that Saturday night watching a really good film so that the three hours you've spent on it will have been worth it.

Arrival is one such film.

Amy Adams tries to remember whether it's now 9am or 11am

If you haven't seen Arrival, I recommend you learn as little as possible about it before you do see it. (Don't worry, I'm not going to tell you anything about it). That's what I did, anyway. I saw the very first teaser, said "yes, I will see this film," and then made sure to avoid all discussion or reviews of it, so I had no idea what to expect. And I can tell you that it is very much the Deep Impact to Interstellar's Armageddon.

Saying that made me wonder what Michael Bay's Arrival would look like. If I were one of those YouTube people, I would now cleverly cut some clips together to make it look like Nicholas Cage was in Arrival, and he would maybe try and hand a bunny through the barrier to the... but Michael Bay didn't even direct that film, which is why it's the one that's good.

Certainly, it would have involved a lot more shouting. That is one thing I really, truly loved about Arrival. It has almost no shouting in it. Oh, and no hilarious paedophiles. Or Aerosmith. Or close-ups of Megan Fox's arse (I realise some people might see that as a negative). I won't say any more, in case I give anything away.

In case you're wondering, I've picked out my candidate for this October. It's this. Who's with me?

I don't have to outrun the lion...

Because I like to be about six years behind any trend, I have recently started running. As a very large woman, this was difficult for me for many reasons. First, it's physically hard to move when you're essentially carrying a particularly lazy full-grown adult around with you everywhere you go. Second, people can be very mean. Like others, I've been sneered at because of my weight for a very long time. You know, whatever. Alison Spittle covered this ground pretty well in a recent article for HeadStuff, so I won't go into much more detail than that.

So when I started running, I had to make sure that nobody, and I mean nobody, could see me making any kind of physical effort. I'm luckier than some in this regard. I live by the sea, next to a long, flat, hard-packed beach that's great for running on and is largely inaccessible to cars, which means you can run on it in the dark without worrying about people being able to see you. I also have dogs who need to be walked, so I have to go out every single day anyway, in all weathers. So I might as well be running as walking. I can also run without my glasses on, which, I understand, is a big deal. Best of all, though, it turns out I really enjoy running.

I accept that what I do can really only be called running in the strictly scientific sense: both my feet are off the ground at the same time at some point during my stride, and it's that, not speed, that marks the difference between running and walking. But look: I can do that for an hour. A whole hour.

And that's the real point of this post, and of the posts I will write about this in the future. I can run for an hour. And if I can get to that stage, almost anybody can.

It's a bit of a fudge to say that I started running "recently". I actually made my first attempt at a couch-to-5K programme in October 2011. Your first week is meant to go like this:
Run 1 minute.
Walk 1 minute.
Repeat x 8 (or something like that).

Mine was more like this:
Run 1 minute.
Walk 4 minutes.
Run 1 minute.
Walk 6 minutes.
Run 1 minute.
Realise that an ambulance can't reach you here, and just walk the rest of the way.
Lie down for three days.
Repeat x 8.

It took me two months to get to Week 5 of the programme, at which point I got a massive chest infection and had to stop.

The next winter, I tried again, and this time it only took me five weeks to get to Week 4 of the programme, but I still had to stop because of illness. I tried it a third time the following year with similar results. Then I just gave up, figuring I wasn't meant to run.

Then, in May last year, I met a man. I'd seen this man out running along the Golf Links Road quite a lot over the previous few years. In the beginning, he was a very big man, and he shuffle-ran like a big old man would. He just wore an ordinary jumper and trousers while running, but had a brand new pair of running shoes. I used to see him huffing up and down the road and I would think, there is a man who has been told by his doctor that he needs to lose weight and get fit. By May 2015, he had a proper tracksuit and was about half the size he had been previously. When I met him out with his dog for the first time, I told him that I'd seen his transformation over the years and I congratulated him on it. He told me that he'd been in a very bad car accident, which had put him in a coma for thirteen weeks. The doctors told his wife three times to turn off the life support, but she wouldn't agree to it, and eventually he woke up. When he woke up from the coma, he weighed 25 stone. He felt that after all his wife had done to make sure he didn't die after the accident, he needed to make sure he lived as long and as well as possible from then on, even though he had other illnesses. So he joined Slimming World, took up walking and running, and began walking or running 10K every day. He eventually lost 10 stone.

Sadly, he passed away a few months ago.

That man's story inspired me to give it another go, and now look what's happened. The other week I got my first ever race number for the Race for Life in Cambridge (perhaps you would like to sponsor me?) and now I sometimes even run in the daylight where people can see me (although I do still like running in the dark and the cold with just my head torch and the sight of my own breath for company).

If I can do this, there's a really good chance you can do this too.

Crafty hen

Since I became a fully fledged layabout... I mean, self-employed writer and proofreader (reasonable rates! Quality work! Hardly any crying!), I have developed some terrible habits, including playing Bejeweled Blitz till I have a cramp in my arm and watching Eggheads.
In order to rid myself of at least one of these habits, I started knitting. Well, technically I restarted knitting, because obviously, like all Irish women my age, I actually learned to knit when I was a child. I just didn't keep it up because it was girly and a thing nuns liked you to do, and because my mother was so very good at it, there seemed little point.

I've been really enjoying it since I took it up again, even though I'm not very good at it. Reading patterns is a struggle, and Fair Isle with two hands still eludes me, largely because my left hand is rubbish, and since I stopped wearing a watch regularly, it's become nothing more than a glorified cupholder and wedding-ring display unit.
What amazes me, though, having been drawn into this world of selvage stitches and thumb casting, is how other people (so far only women, but you never know. After all, there was a boy in my ballet class for a while) are able to tell you exactly what you need. I want to knit a hat for a man, I say. You will need this much wool, they say. Start with this much for the rib, then switch to this and knit this stitch. Start to decrease it after this many rows. What do you mean, you need a row counting app to help you count your rows? Can't you just eyeball it?
Well no, I can't. I was complaining about just this thing to my mother the other day, over my knitting. Other people have special skills, where they can use their years of experience to eyeball things and know what's right and wrong. When we were kids, my older brother could do this with the BASIC computer programs in magazines. If there was a line wrong, he could find it and correct it. My mam can do it with knitting and sewing (and linear accelerators as well, for what that's worth). I watched Mary Berry do it time after time on the Great British Bake Off: "I knew that cake would be huge when you said you were putting six eggs in," or "yes, this is too dense because you overworked the pastry."
"I don't have any of these skills," I said to Mam. "I am nearly 43 and I have no useful skills."
"Yes you do," my aunt said, "you have skills with words. You can look at things and see if they're written well or spelled correctly."
"Oh great," I said. "So everyone else gets things like 'you need to put more flour in if you want that to turn out right' or 'here's how you fix a dropped stitch'. I get 'it's fewer not less' and everyone tells me to fuck off."
Well, I can knit a bobble hat now, so it is you who can fuck off.

History! (6: Sian Rees - The Floating Brothel & 7: Barbara W. Tuchman - A Distant Mirror)

In the last week I finished reading not one, but two history books. One of these was a long, broad book taking in the whole sweep of 14th-century Europe and concentrating quite hard on the Hundred Years War, the Avignon papacy, and a lot of minor French nobles. The other was a short book about the first group of female convicts to be sent to Australia, which featured the sea, transportation, ships, and world travel.

One of these books had such a boring first thirty pages that I struggled to get through them and ended up taking weeks and weeks to finish the book. Can you guess which one?
Yes, it was The Floating Brothel, by Sian Rees. I spent weeks trying to get through the painfully dull descriptions of court proceedings and petty crimes, only to find that many of the women mentioned in these early pages don't even end up on the transportation ship the Lady Julian, leaving me wondering quite what the point of it all was. (I suppose the point of it was to explain something of how the justice system worked, but god, couldn't someone have told her?)
Once the Lady Julian leaves London, the story gets more interesting and you learn all sorts of things about 18th century sanitary arrangements (not good), attitudes towards women's sexuality (not good), the state of the early colonists in Sydney Cove (not good), and the sanctity of shipboard marriages (not good). Despite the surprisingly affecting narrative of ship's cooper Jon Nicol to help her, though, Rees never really manages to maintain a good balance between the context and the detail, the backdrop and the specific story. Disappointing.
The same could certainly not be said about A Distant Mirror, by Barbara W. Tuchman. After reading this book I felt a little dizzy from the sheer amount of information in it, but also genuinely educated, as though I understood something fundamental about the way the world (or, at least, western Europe) is organised that I had hadn't understood before. I normally have tremendous difficulty with broad-stroke histories, especially ones that feature a lot of campaigning and land battles (I mean, really, land battles? How tedious!) and similarly-named kings and popes following on from one another and more or less doing the same thing over and over again, but Tuchman's ability to leaven this relentless march of the gowned and bearded with exciting incidental stories about bizarre religious sects, people being set on fire, the horrors of the Black Death, and knights, knights, and more knights gave my brain a break whenever I needed it.
Unlike Rees, Tuchman makes her focus clear from the very start: she uses the noble French noble de Coucy family as the backbone of her narrative, and her choice is a wise one. Enguerrand de Coucy was a prominent landowner in both France and England, was an important military leader who was centre-stage for key military and political developments, and was married to Edward III's daughter Isabella (a woman who, let's say, knew her own mind). He might not seem a particularly heroic figure by today's standards, Tuchman admits, but he exhibited genuinely noble attributes and did his duty as best he could despite his divided allegiance. He also stayed alive for quite a long time, which important for the central figure of a book about a whole century, and more than many of his contemporaries managed.
Everything from clothes to tax systems to religious observances is covered here. The Peasants' Revolt, flagellantism, the oppression of the Jews, art, literature, the beginnings of the age of exploration, the end of the Crusading spirit, the hypocrisy of the chivalric ideal, and proof that just about everything that happens in A Knight's Tale is historically accurate, yes, even the Queen songs. What more do you want?
Alright, maybe not the Queen songs.

5: Virginia Woolf - Orlando

I'm not sure I can add an awful lot to the millions of words that have been written about Virginia Woolf and about Orlando--about its playful, affectionate look at 300 years in the life of a colorful character who is first a man and then a woman but always someone aware of his/her place in history. It's full of lovely observations about the differences between the sexes and how many of these differences are imposed from without in such subtle ways that they appear to be coming from within. For instance, Orlando observes that women can't carry swords because in order to use a sword, you need to have a hand free, and how can you have a hand free if you need your spare hand to fix your wrap when it slips from your shoulders? And now, because you don't have a hand free because of your wrap, you need a man to help and protect you with his free hand.
It's also a book chock-full of beautiful prose, from the gorgeous winter skating party to my very favourite passage, the couple of pages where Woolf describes the passing of the 18th into the 19th century, and how everything just becomes damp, and as a result of the damp all the men grow huge beards and everything gets covered in ivy and the clothes become sombre, and books become massive and self-important and unncessarily long, and all, apparently, to keep out the damp. I read this four times because it was just that lovely.
Because Orlando's long life is never explained, I suggested during book club that maybe the whole thing had been part of a fugue state or a dream, of someone wandering in a museum and imagining him or herself to be the people in the paintings. Eoghan pointed out that that couldn't be the case in a book of this period (1928), but would almost certainly be the answer if the book was written today. Mark, though, came up with the most plausible explanation, which is that Vita Sackville-West (and probably many other people in Woolf's circle), would have lived in places that were basically private museums, so they would have been constantly aware of their own places in history and the idea of themselves as just another iteration of the same familial material.
Much has been made of the fact that this is a love letter from Woolf to Sackville-West (the nature of whose relationship seems to have been as hard to pin down as Orlando's sex), but to me it read like a whimsical children's book a lot of the time. It would look great with Pauline Baynes illustrations.

4: Gillian Flynn - Gone Girl

It's ages since I read one of the books everyone is talking about. In fact, I don't think I've done it since I stopped working in Oxfambooks, when I read several Dan Brown books, one after the other, standing behind the counter during slack periods in the shop.

This is far, far better than any Dan Brown book, but it did have a couple of similarities. I ate it up over the course of a weekend, not wanting to put it down, just wanting to keep those pages turning. But when I'd finished it, I felt... not cheated, but slightly grubby. The people in this book are either amazingly unpleasant or else they feel like they've been deliberately toned down to ensure there are one or two genuine humans in the mix. Not that there's anything wrong with unpleasantness, per se. God knows I've read enough horror books where people are unpleasant and find themselves in rotten situtations, but there's usually someone to root for. Usually at least one of the protagonists is good, sympathetic, semi-normal. Not here. These people are all awful.
Not only that, but I felt uncomfortable with the characters' gender roles and the whole issue of men versus women that I felt was a thread throughout. You will just have to take my word for this, though, because I no longer have the book to hand. I mostly read it on a plane, and now I've loaned it on to someone else to read on a plane, because it's that kind of book.
Much of this criticism stems from the fact that Gone Girl, despite being good, is not perfect, and I feel like it could have been. Certainly there's a whole heap of excellent writing in here. The story--in which two married writers of useless fripperies are crushed by the recession and the death of print and must return to his home town to help take care of his dying mother and try to make some kind of normal life and instead end up playing the most monstrous mind games with each other to the bewilderment of all around them--is very clever. The way it ties in the recession, the extreme poverty of much of middle America, and even the selfishness of people in propagating the species even when there's no apparent future for the offspring, is deftly done and makes some serious social points pretty lightly. The way the story of their relationship is woven into the book's main action is skilful and adds to the book's page-turning power. I even liked the ending, which has apparently divided readers and made the book quite the talking point. And what author doesn't want that?
But I couldn't love it. Because I didn't like the characters, I couldn't care about their fates that much, and even though I know it was meant to be funny in a way, I just found it overwhelmingly bleak.

Wow, brilliant, amazing, wow!

This morning, Mary Anne Hobbs played "Windowlicker" on her 6 Music show and I decided that it was time to not listen to Mary Anne Hobbs anymore. Not because she played "Windowlicker", but because she introduced it by saying that the great thing about 6 Music is that it's so brilliant because you can play "Windowlicker" at ten to nine on a Saturday morning, and where else could you do that (I don't know, Mary Anne. Power FM, maybe? Or 2XM? Or any one of a number of Internet radio stations, I'm guessing)? And that's what's so brilliant about 6 Music. Then she actually played "Windowlicker". Then she came back on, laughing about how transgressive and brilliant it was to play such a thing at ten to nine on a Saturday morning, and said, again, how amazing it was to have played it, and how brilliant it was to work for 6 Music. I swear, I am only very slightly paraphrasing.
"Shut up, you tedious bloody woman," I said, and turned off the radio.

Later in the day, I found myself turning off Gilles Peterson for much the same reason. I'm getting tired of people on the BBC telling me how great the BBC is. I know how great the BBC is, I don't need you to keep telling me. I'm listening, aren't I (well, except that I've turned you off)? Why don't you take out some advertising space on ITV to tell people over there how brilliant the BBC is? Isn't that how advertising works?
Then later, after my nap, when you would think I would be feeling less grumpy about people talking, I saw this article in the Independent about how David Attenborough has, to everyone's massive and lasting shock, endorsed Brian Cox as his successor. I'm not convinced.
Don't get me wrong, I love Coxy. I want to lie beside him on a hill and have him tell me about the heat death of the universe, over and over again, until I get dizzy and stop caring about the fact that I will never amount to anything because, you know, fucking entropy, man. But I don't want him to be the new presenter of natural history programmes. For one thing, doesn't he really just see animals as arrangements of particles, really? And for another, he's not Mister Telly.
You can see it in his presenting style. Either he's given too many lectures where eyes have glazed over and students have slumped onto the desk to truly believe that what he's saying is interesting to you, or the criticisms about the cost of his shows ("I'm here in Malaysia to show you how water behaves when it falls out of the sky") have got to his producers, and he has to keep telling you how brilliant it all is. Isn't it brilliant? Look at this thing, isn't it amazing?
It is amazing, is the thing. And we get that it's amazing. We don't need you to keep telling us. It's annoying.

3: Harriet Steel - Becoming Lola

Lola Montez was a 19th-century dancer, courtesan, free spirit, and, if Harriet Steel's novelised version of her early life is to be believed, not remotely afraid to fight her corner. Her real name wasn't Lola Montez. She wasn't Spanish. She wasn't even much of a dancer, it seems. But she had a determination to live a certain kind of life and the beauty, charisma, and slapdash attitude to monogamy to make sure that was what happened. During her lifetime, she was one of the most famous women in the world, and a truly modern celebrity, in that she was famous mostly for her relationships and her fame, rather than for anything more concrete.
I'm surprised Madonna hasn't made a film of her life at any stage, but I suppose Madge wouldn't like to be reminded of the fact that, unlike her, when Montez turned to acting, she turned out to be good at it.
The problem with novels about real people is that real people sometimes do things without the kind of rock-solid motivation you would give a fictional person, which can sometimes make for a frustrating read. This is especially true if, like me, you're a pretty contented person by nature. The idea of being so restless, so jealous, so frustrated with the way the world works (especially as a Victorian woman), that you assault your lovers when they fail to provide for you, push people into impossible positions, compromise them and yourself in the eyes of society, and eventually end up being almost killed by a mob of disgruntled citizens because you're having a highly unpopular affair with their king, is somewhat alien to me. Maybe that's the fault of the story, but maybe it's a fault of the writing. The upshot is that I'm not sure I ever understood or got to like Montez, even though the story is told well enough that I always wanted her to succeed.

2: Scott Lynch - The Lies of Locke Lamora

In one of those worlds where everything is made of obsidian* and everything is slightly magical, a conman, thief, and gang member in good standing called Locke Lamora* hatches a plan to relieve some wealthy people of their money, while at the same time, unbeknownst to him, he has become a key component of someone else's plan to do Very Bad Things to a great many people within the city state of Camorr. Sounds very exciting, doesn't it? And it probably would be if was a 300-page caper full of cut and dash.
But it isn't. Instead it's a 500-page slog where every single clever idea that pops into the author's head gets spun out into a lengthy description, and every detail of clothing, furnishing, and location is laid out in forensic detail (stop telling me that the buildings were made by a giant race who were there before people. You've told me five times now, and believe it or not, I can remember it from the first time you told me). Some of these ideas are pretty clever, but others just don't work, and the ones that don't work grew to annoy me pretty quickly.
(For example, the world Lynch has built has 12 gods, or 13 if you're one of the Right People. So instead of saying "oh my god," people swear by saying, "gods!" Which is fine. But they also say "gods-damned" a lot, where Earth people would say "goddamn." Now, I don't know if you've tried saying "gods-damned" out loud, but it doesn't work as an exclamation. It's too hard to say. But there it is, scattered throughout the book, annoying me.)
Locke Lamora's plan is also pretty dull, as is a lot of the talk about guilds and pacts between various lawless or religious factions within the city state. The annoying thing about this is that you can't really skim it because some of it turns out to be important later on.
However, if you're prepared to wade through the setup stuff in order to get to the far more exciting second half, you're richly rewarded with dastardly baddies, a confused and imperilled protagonist (the best kind), some serious revenge motivation, a couple of exciting fight sequences, and a sickeningly vertiginous escape before everything gets wrapped up in a highly satisfactory manner. Oh, if only the whole thing could have been like this. I get the awful feeling it was written backwards, with things happening in the exciting second half that then needed to be tediously set up in the first, like Bill and Ted's escape from jail.

* "Why do people in these books make everything out of obsidian? What's wrong with steel? Steel's much stronger." - Husband's response to my observation about the language in the book.

* Whenever I say The Lies of Locke Lamora out loud, I always have to do it in an Oirish accent.

1: Patrick O'Brian - Treason's Harbour (or, the one with the diving bell)

Sometimes people ask me what would be a good starter Aubrey/Maturin novel, so that a person could just see if they liked them without having to commit to anything very serious. (I think people really only do this to shut me up, to be honest, but sometimes it's just nice to chat.)
If you don't mind jumping in almost exactly at the middle of a series, thereby spoiling some earlier storylines for yourself, you could do worse than starting with Treason's Harbour, I think. It's got a lot of the elements that make the series great, it's pretty easy to follow the action without a lot of prior knowledge, and it's not overburdened with nautical talk.
Just for the record, some of the elements that make the series great are:

• Intrigue!
• Spying!
• Daring escapes from the French (boo, the French)!
• Illicit liaisons with ladies!
• Stephen looking and smelling like some kind of mythical hermit (an honest-to-god plot point)!
• Prizes!
• Sea battles (although there aren't the lengthy and detailed descriptions of nail-biting close actions in this one, but there's enough to let you know if it's your thing or not)!
• That scrub Harte showing away!
• Jack being an excellent commander, a discreet and loyal friend, and freakishly strong!
• Killick complaining!
• The Surprise!

I could go on. And no doubt I will, the next time I see you.

New Year's Resolutions: quitting a thing, reading some things

For 2013, I decided to quit the third worst habit I've ever had.
To celebrate this decision, I gorged myself on my third worst habit for hours last night. In fact, I stayed up doing it till two in the morning, and then woke up with a sore arm because of it. I'd like to tell you this had never happened to me before, that it was a goodbye binge, but that would be a lie. I've often given myself a cramp in my right hand in the service of my third-worst habit.
Well, never again. I have played you for the last time, Bejeweled Blitz.*
Oh, also I have decided to read fifty books, because this worked out great for me the last time I tried it. So, watch this space for amazing insights about books everyone else was reading and talking about five to ten years ago, and for books with pictures of ships on the covers. I think that's a good mix.
(*I am by no means certain I can keep this resolution. This is about the fifth time I have deleted everything to do with this awful game from my Facebook account only to come crawling back when I get bored. But I suppose the first step is admitting I have a problem.)

Modern Book Club: Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller

Here's what I wrote about this on Goodreads (where you can be my friend and look at whole lists of things I will never read and nor will you):


Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is the least sexy famous-for-being-sexy book I've ever read. The sense of place and time it conveys is beautiful, and Miller almost manages to make being a semi-destitute layabout in 1920s Paris seem like, not exactly a viable career choice, but certainly an understandable sidebar. However, I couldn't warm to any of the characters and I didn't like the attitude towards women (even if Eoghan did make some good arguments for this not really being indicative of actual misogyny).




We did have a very good discussion about this last night, though, before we got really drunk on Pernod and went out and got ourselves a dose of the clap.

(We didn't do that.)

Classic Book Club: The Way We Live Now, by Anthony Trollope

A quick look at the bibliography on Anthony Trollope's Wikipedia page is enough to give anyone an instant case of sympathetic writer's cramp. The man was prolific. And yet I don't know anyone who reads him anymore (although obviously someone does), and his books, when they turned up in the bookshop where I used to work, always went unsold. This made him a perfect choice for me for CBC, because I'm always curious about the writers everyone has heard of but nobody reads (I'm coming for you too, Lawrence Durrell).
Although a lot of people (myself included) think of Trollope as a kind of gentler, more pastoral writer, themes of heartbreak, greed, deception, and avarice were central to a lot of his writing. Even by these standards, The Way We Live Now is apparently one of Trollope's least sentimental and most scabrous works, written on his return to England after a long absence, and in response to what he saw as the country's massive decline.
It is his longest book.
It is too long.
In true triple-decker Victorian-serialized-novel style, The Way We Live Now features a lot of amusingly named characters dicking each other over with protracted legal proceedings, marriage shenanigans, and vague threats about revealing one another's secrets if signatures are not produced or certain favours are not done. Unfortunately, Trollope has a number of limitations as a writer that make the whole enterprise more of a slog than its outline suggests.
I have to agree with Henry James's criticism of his authorly interjections ("what will happen now, readers? Who can tell?" etc.) which are jarring and kind of smug when you just want him to get on with it. In addition, he's so keen to make sure that the reader is never lost and never in any doubt about what is in every single character's mind at every single point in the story that he spends wholly unnecessary pages recapping, clarifying, and explaining and the reader ends up bored instead. It is the literary equivalent of the constant recaps you get on reality television programmes, and it's just as annoying.
Nevertheless, there's a lot of really good material in here and a great many fantastic characters. I particularly enjoyed 

• Marie Melmotte - her dad beats her but she stands up to him anyway, and her character develops really well from an airheaded romantic idiot in the beginning to a pragmatic and strong young woman by the end
• Mrs. Hurtle - shot a man in Reno just to watch him die, kind of, and will sort your life out for you in seconds if you let her
• Felix Carbury - just an absolute dick, and hilariously whiney and rubbish. Think Flashman without any of the brains or charm, but with all the cowardice, good looks, and venality
• Mr. Melmotte - sneaky and dreadful and driven by a desire to have people think well of him, which of course leads to everyone thinking badly of him
• Squercum (a lawyer) - another one of those proto-Columbo characters who is constantly saying "just one more question," or "I can't help but notice that..." and gums things up good style for some of the more dastardly characters.

It does seem, though, as if Trollope felt that if he just included the main story the novel would be deemed too cruel or too cold, so he dropped in four or five other storylines and associated characters, none of which are particularly interesting and all of which just dilute the main thrust of his point, which is that modern society can be kind of crap if you don't have money and you know that you don't know how to play the system, but even crapper if you are obsessed with getting money and think you know how to play the system.
If he'd kept the story leaner and ditched a lot of the more unnecessary side plots and characters, he probably wouldn't have needed to keep reminding people of what was happening, and could have kept up the forward momentum a bit better. Then you'd be looking at an absolute satirical classic rather than a bit of a niche interest. I'm sure of it.

Goodbye to a good dog

So, while we were away in Berlin and Paris (aka the holiday I now wish I'd never gone on), Trixie got very sick. Her minder, Catherine, a retired nurse, was able to keep her alive till we got home, mainly through round-the-clock injections and some incredibly expensive magic cream. Catherine fully expected that we would arrive home and see how appallingly sick Trixie was, and that we would immediately take her to the vet and decide to let her go. Trixie being Trixie, though, she rallied when we arrived back. She got up out of her bed and came to the door to see us, then she ate some chicken and went back to sleep.
The next morning she seemed better again, managing to give me a little wag when I came downstairs, and eating her breakfast. We were hopeful.
But then we went to the vet and she let us know that this was absolutely as good as it was going to get and she was probably mostly coasting on the excitement of us being home. She was exhausted. Every bit of her was worn out, and the magic cream was, we were assured, only going to keep her alive for another couple of weeks at most, and that was only if we added in steroids and some other medications too. Plus, we would have to keep her separate from the other dogs because if the magic cream touches your skin at all, it drops your blood pressure and gives you a massive headache.
And suddenly I just couldn't do it anymore, either for her or to her. I didn't want her to have to fight to breathe anymore, I didn't want her to pee everywhere, or to absolutely stink because really at this point she was only eating chicken and nothing else, and all her meds were now making her stomach upset.
So I held her and the vet gave her the injection and her heart stopped and it was over.
When I called Catherine and told her, she said, "I'm glad you never had to see her like she was on Saturday."
She is being cremated, and I will be taking her ashes to the firing range to scatter them over the rabbit warrens, which were her favourite places in all the world anyway. And I will take the card out of my car, the one that says, "if you see a small dog beside this car, she is okay," which I used to put in the window when I couldn't get her to come back so that people wouldn't think she'd been abandoned, and I will put it in a box with her collar to keep.
And then I will get another dog. But it won't be as good.

Smashy smashy

When I eventually get around to rewriting my zombie apocalypse novel and somebody eventually makes a film or four-part telly series out of it, there's one bit I'm particularly looking forward to. It's the bit where our heroes (that's the people who are still alive, btw, I don't hold with any of this new-fangled pro-zombie nonsense) go out foraging for food, find a store selling these items:

and, just for fun, smash the fucking shit out of them.
I am really hoping I get to be on set that day, and that the crew will let me set up the display of these hideously gendered, winsome, sickly gewgaws. Perhaps I could build a lovely pyramid of them, gingerly placing them one atop the other, wincing occasionally at that little squeak of china on china that sets my teeth on edge, and grinning away at the thought that soon the whole lot is going to come crashing down. Hopefully we will have to do several takes and then, fingers crossed, play the whole thing back in slow motion (even though I normally hate slow motion).
For these mugs to generate the full berzerker rage, it's best to happen on them in a bookshop, where they have no fucking place being, and, even better, to view them alongside their male counterpart:

Yes, that's right. Men read books, you see. Women eat cupcakes. 

I have to go back to this bookshop during the week to collect a book for mrmonkey (because he's allowed to read). Maybe I will bring my smashing stick. 

Boats, trains, and riding horses in the living room. Or, books I read recently

Classic Book Club continues apace. Recently we read weighty Russian funfest Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy, about which enough has probably already been said in the world. All I'll add is that it had the feel of a biography rather than a novel, in that Tolstoy played everything out to its inevitable, unromantic, and bitter conclusion as if he had no means of stopping it (as if it was some kind of oncoming train, do you see?); also, modern life is killing Russia, peasants are good, trains are bad.
When you write it down like that, it does make it seem a lot more forbidding than it really is, so if you're thinking of embarking on Anna Karenina and the size and reputation of the book are putting you off, don't let them. I let them for years, but when I finally read it I found it warm, easy to read (I read the Maude translation, which has a reputation for quality (although as Eoghan pointed out, this could just be because Tolstoy was friends with them)), romantic, and very funny.
The more modest 20th Century Book Club recently read The Siege of Krishnapur, by JG Farrell, winner of the 1973 Booker Prize. The story concerns the British residents of the fictional Indian town of Krishnapur and their experiences under siege during the Indian Mutiny of 1857. It's told in a perfectly-pitched tone of more-tea-vicar jollity which serves to highlight the eccentricities of the British colonial machine, and to gloss over and magnify the horror of the actual siege. It reminded me of this Monty Python sketch from The Meaning of Life.

Although obviously there's more to it than that. Recommended. I may also give the other books in Farrell's Empire Trilogy a go at some stage.
In more British Empire fun, I finally got around to reading Kydd, the first of Julian Stockwin's series of seafaring adventures about a young wig-maker from Guildford who is pressed into the navy in 1793, a time of war with France (in the books I read, it's always a time of war with France, or at the very least, in France).
This is a real page-turner/button-pusher/screen-tapper of a story that moves as briskly as chain through canvas and features lots of clear and exciting descriptions of life at sea for pressed men. Okay, there's a lot of jargon here, plenty of clewgarnets and boatswains and taffrails and any amount of belaying, but it's all pretty clear from the context and sure, you can always look it up in one of your many reference books about the age of sail, which of course you all have.

What stops Kydd making the ascent from the gundeck of decent adventure yarn onto the quarterdeck of great nautical fiction is its lack of characterisation. Kydd himself is difficult to read and hardly speaks, and his new best friend Renzi is slightly unbelievable so far, but maybe he gets better in the later books. There were also a few jarring details that lifted me out of the story on occasion (I don't care if "lanthorn" is the word they used at the time, every time I read it I think "lanthorn, oh, you mean lantern" and it snags on my brain, and when Kydd looks down on his shipmates on his first trip aloft and describes them as looking like penguins, I wondered how he would know what penguins looked like when they moved? Especially from above?) but these were, I assure you, minor considerations. In fact I've already bought the second one of these and will get to it as soon as I've finished the next Classic Book Club tome, The Way We Live Now, by Anthony Trollope (May 20th, Trollope fans).