Brooklyn - Colm Toibin

This was longlisted for last year's Booker and won the Costa Book Award, so it has form. And it was really good. Until the end, which I thought was really weak and didn't really resolve anything. But apart from that, it's a good read, quite short, but interesting. It follows Eilis Lacey, as she moves from Ireland to New York in the 1950s and begins a new life, full of possibilities. Eilis is a likeable, sympathetic character, you feel for her when she suffers from homesickness and loneliness, and as she learns how to be part of the new society she finds herself in. There are sad moments, but balanced out with the happiness Eilis finds in Brooklyn.

A few changes

I'm thinking of combining this blog with my other, more personal, less book-orientated blog, as running two and remembering to post things here isn't working out too well. So for now at least, there will be duplicate book posts here and also on the other blog.

Watch Your Mouth - Daniel Handler

I really liked Handler's first novel The Basic Eight, and I was hoping for more of the same. But this is a very weird book. The narrator starts off by explaining that everything you are about to read may or may not have happened and gives a selection of potential openings. It's supposedly set out like an opera, or so Joseph Last-name-changed-to-protect-the-innocent claims. But is anything as it seems. By the end I still wasn't entirely sure what was going on. Most unsatisfactory. And odd.

Trivia fact: Daniel Handler is also Lemony Snicket, author of A Series Of Unfortunate Events.

Slumdog Millionaire - A.S Swarup

Originally published as Q & A, this is the book that became the multiple award winning movie. However it's a little different from the film. It follows the same structure, but there were quite a few changes made when it was adapted for the screen. Nevertheless, this is an interesting, well written and entertaining read. The story of Ram Mohammed Thomas, who through a series of misadventures learns all he'll need to know in order to win the jackpot on Who Wants to be a Billionaire, and then gets arrested, accused of cheating, and reveals his story, and how he came to know all the answers. It's a story with a heart, without giving too much away as to how it differs from the film and how the ending works out, I'd recommend reading it if you have seen the film, and if you haven't. It was used more as inspiration than a direct book to film adaptation, so even if you think you know the story, they'll be a few surprises.

The Children's Book - A.S Byatt

I loved this book. I wasn't sure at first, I didn't enjoy Possession at all, and it took a while to warm to this one. But once I did, oh boy! I'm not sure about the title, it doesn't give anything away, which is good, but at the same time, it's not something that adds enticement.
The story is rather epic, covering the late Victorian period upto and including WW1. It centres on several families, the Wellwoods, the Cains, the Fludds, the Warrens and their friends. Following the growing up of the children in these families, Olive and Humprey Wellwood's seven, their cousins, and friends as they try to work out what they want to be and who they are in the early years of the 20th Century. It's beautifully well written, delicious old-fashioned storytelling, with some poignant and tragic moments. Not to be read in one go, but slowly and savoured. It was nominated for last year's Booker prize, and it's a shame it lost. On my 'to read' list is the eventual winner Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall, but I wonder if I'll enjoy that as much as I did this.

Reading List

I'm in the middle of reading A.S Byatt's The Children's Book right now, but I thought I'd share a quick list of what's loitering in my "To Read" pile at the moment.

Brooklyn - Colm Toibin

Wolf Hall - Hilary Mantel

Battle Royale - Koushun Takami

Goodbye to Berlin - Christopher Isherwood

Shakespeare; Our Contemporary - Jan Kott

The Hippopotamus - Stephen Fry

Can I Bring My Own Gun? - Seth Freedman

A bit of a mixed bunch, I'm sure you'll agree!!

Read this week*

Love Walked In - Marisa de los Santos

Notes From An Exhibition - Patrick Gale

The Whole Truth - David Baldacci

The Abortionist's Daughter - Elisabeth Hyde

The Owl Killers - Karen Maitland

Pretty Things - Sarra Manning

The Suspicions of Mr Whicher - Kate Summerscale

* Because I'm too lazy to write reviews for all this lot

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest - Steig Larsson

The final book in the Millennium trilogy. A doorstop of a novel, read in almost a single sitting (well, eventually I had to sleep!). Larsson draws together the plots left loose in the previous novel, The Girl Who Played With Fire, and rounds up the stories of his main characters, Lizbeth Salander and Mikael Blomkqvist, despite not knowing that this would be the last. As I wrote before, Larsson sadly died before any of his books were published, rumour has it he was planning to write 10 in total in this series. However, Hornet's Nest does a very good job of wrapping it all up. When Fire ends, Salander is unconcious, with a bullet in her brain, and wanted for triple homicide, Hornet's Nest picks up right where it leaves off, and steams ahead, with the usual dense plotting, convoluted twists and moments of brilliant storytelling that you just don't see coming. Intelligently written, edge of your seat thriller, impossible to put down. I would mention that you really need to have read the previous two books for it all to make sense though, otherwise you're coming in in the middle of it all, and not a lot will mean anything. I highly recommend blocking out some time in your life for these novels, it's a terrible, tragic shame to have lost such a talented writer when he had so much more to offer, but thank goodness he left these brilliant books to stand as his memorial. Read them now!!

One Pill Makes You Smaller - Lisa Dierback

The title refers to Alice in Wonderland, and this book too features an Alice. Eleven year old Alice Duncan to be precise. But she's definitely not in Wonderland. Instead she's an unsupervised innocent, unless you count her 16-year-old Aunt Esme, who pays her no attention and is indirectly responsible for the terrible things that Alice gets involved with. Sent away to a rather derelict alternative art camp for the summer, Alice meets twins, Hope and Faith, and the dangerous J.D. Soon she's drawn into J.D's world, a world no 11-year-old should be exposed to. Dierback chronicles the dark side of reckless abandon, and it's definitely not a nice place to be. Creepy and perverse at times, you feel terribly for poor Alice, unable to pull herself out of this rabbit hole.

Born Confused - Tanuja Desai Hidier

This is an old favourite of mine. I must have read it at least a dozen times since it was first published and I reviewed it for the school library I volunteered in at lunchtimes. Oh yes, I'm that much of a lit geek.
Anyway, Born Confused is the story of Dimple Lala, living in New Jersey, family from India, not sure how American she is or how Indian. The book chronicles the summer that marks a turning point in Dimple's life, when she decides who she is, and how little it matters if she is a mixture of all her influences, as long as she's true to herself. The story is funny, sad, clever and well written. I wouldn't come back to it so often if it wasn't worth reading. Every time I do, I discover something I missed the last time round. It's a great read for young adults and those who are resisting growing up!