The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt (2013)

It seems a bit cheeky that my first book review of the year with a book that I read 98% of it in 2013 but, given the size of this book, I think I will not be the only one doing so! I speak, of course, of Donna Tartt’s very long highly anticipated The Goldfinch, her long-awaited follow-up to The Secret History and The Little Prince.

This book is told in the first person by Theodore Decker. His mother is killed in a terrorist attack at the Museum of Modern Art in New York at. Following the explosion, at the behest of a dying man a concussed Theodore steals the famous painting The Goldfinch. The rest of the novel follows Theo as he firstly lives with a wealthy foster family, then his father then his mentor, James Hobart.

There are many many reviews of this book out there – so many that I do feel a bit redundant sharing mine. But what is the point of having a book blog if I don’t get to share my Opinions? (Capital O, of course. My Opinions are many and strong) There were two fundamental things I took from reading this book. Firstly, Donna Tartt is a wonderful writer. Her language is beautiful and evocative and her descriptions of Theo’s grief after losing his mother are poignant and heartbreaking. But this first point is dramatically overshadowed by the second dominating aspect of the novel: this book is too bloody long!

I like a long book – Anna Karenina is one of my favourite books of all time and that is both lengthy and detailed. However, because so little happens in The Goldfinch and because we only ever hear the story from Theo’s perspective, rather than being lost in the story or entranced by the language I found myself becoming increasingly impatient. I wanted to tell Theo (and, by extension, Tartt) to hurry up and get to the point! By the end of the book Tartt had started to write in partial sentences (either Tart was as sick of the book as I was or was trying to use writing style to allow us to enter the mind of the protagonist – whatever the rationale, they were jarring and frustrating). I would estimate that a good third of the book is just about Theo getting wasted. You know how when you’re at a party and you’re sober and everyone else is getting wasted and telling you stupid repetitive stories that go on and on and on? That’s what reading about someone getting wasted all the time feels like. I reached the stage where if the first sentence of a paragraph made any mention of drugs or drug use I skipped it and moved to the next one. Life’s too short for reading the same paragraph rearranged slightly differently 3,000 times.

The most disappointing part of reading The Goldfinch for me was that it had the potential to be a really great book. The concept is great and at times Tartt’s writing is close to divine. It just really needed a good editor to tease out the story and cut back all of the excess verbiage. Instead of reading this book, I recommend re-reading The Secret History instead. 2.5 stars.

My copy is more than 4cm deep! Do not, I repeat, do not attempt to use this book as commuting material. This book is single-bookedly contributing to the death of the published book and rise of the e-reader. 

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year!

I read 78 books for the year, which falls a few short of my target of 104 but is still not a shabby number! I wrote 21 reviews, one more than my target of 20.

Cheers to a wonder 2014 that involves many books, much talking about books and many long, lazy afternoons reading books on the couch. 

Kinsey and Me by Sue Grafton (2013)

I am not a big short story fan. I find the format really limiting in that I prefer longer, more involved stories and the craft involved in writing short stories - and it is a format that requires a lot of skill and work to do effectively - is not necessarily the type that I admire the most. Given this disinclination, when I saw Sue Grafton had written a book of short stories featuring my favourite female detective Kinsey Millhone, it took me rather a long time get around to borrowing it from the library.

Well, after finishing this book I cannot believe how stupid I was to let my silly prejudices prevent me from reading this book for so long! Kinsey and Me is a collection of short stories, the stories are divided up into two separate sections. The first section are detective stories starring Ms Millhone, which are fun and entertaining and everything I've come to expect from Sue Grafton. However, it was the second section that really surprised me and that I enjoyed the most.

I think sometimes we don't think of authors in the same way we do celebrities in that we don't form an attachment to them but to the characters they write. We may associate authors with a particular genre, style of writing and set of characters but I know that I rarely think of their lives beyond the books they publish. Even though Sue Grafton is an actual living breathing person and Kinsey Millhone is not, it is Kinsey who feels more real to me. Or, should I say, did before reading this book. The second section is stories about Kit Blue, who Sue Grafton tells us is a fictionalised representation of her. Grafton says she wrote the stories to deal with her feelings following the death of her mother, who was an alcoholic, and the result is hauntingly beautiful exquisitely crafted moments in a life that say so much using so few words. They were poignant and sad but hopeful and loving - I enjoyed them very much and, as much as I love Kinsey, using these tales as a basis I hope that Grafton does write more non-Kinsey novels.

Five stars.

Cooked by Michael Pollan (2013)

Michael Pollan’s contention in Cooked is that it is through the act of cooking food that we can address the health and environmental issues concerning food and food practices that permeate our culture. Not only is cooking at home healthier than eating processed food, it both encourages and allows consumers to be closer to the food chain process and, in the process through the act of sharing meals, foster a better family environment.

This is the first Pollan book I have read. I was familiar with his food philosophy – “Eat food. Mainly plants. Not too much”, which I think is an excellent way to approach eating (although, based on the amount of meat he says he eats in this book, he doesn’t practice what he preaches). I also like his idea that you can eat whatever you want – as long as you make it yourself. He argues that it is the easy access to high calorie foods that were previously labour intensive that has led to widespread health problems. Previously, making French fries or potato chips was a labour-intensive time-consuming process that, because it was difficult to do, was done less often. Now, not only is access to potato chips and French fries easy, it is cheap – cheaper than other nutrient-dense lower-calorie foods. In this book, Pollan extends his food philosophy to the practice of cooking by developing his basic cooking skills in four different cooking practices: grilling with fire (bbq), cooking with liquid (braising), baking bread and fermenting (brewing beer). He was “surprised and pleased” to find these elements just happen to coincide with the classical elements of earth: Fire, Water, Air and Earth. What a happy coincidence! Warning: do not read this book if eye-rolling is an issue for you because situations such as this abound throughout the pages of Cooked.

I had two thoughts when reading this book. Firstly, Pollan does go on a bit. He talked about onions for many more pages than I felt was justified – we get it, onions are a big deal. I imagine in person he’s a man who very much likes the sound of his own voice. I found this very wearying and I admit that I did skip the last chapter on brewing completely because I felt that if he can be so unbearable on the subject of onions, then what would he be like on the infinitely more wanky subject of homebrewing? I did find his tone quite offputting and, in places, a bit patronising.

Secondly, there seems to be a huge disconnect between Pollan’s understanding and interaction with the cooking process and actual real life. I am not implying that Pollan is some sort of cyborg and not a real person; rather, that he has no concept of how the average person interacts with food and cooking in their everyday life. For example, he makes a convincing point that cooking is important and that everyone should cook at home. But to develop his cooking skills, he hires a chef to come into his house once a week and teach him to cook. No one I know would consider that a reasonable option. In another section, he waxes lyrical about how well the bread-making process fits in to his personal writing schedule. If you work in an office to which you have to commute, fitting regular bread baking into your schedule is very difficult.  At one stage he realises that if you set aside time on the weekend to make meals in advance, it is cheaper and healthier than buying takeaway or microwaving meals. No shit, Sherlock – do you reckon? Not only is that information included in most cookbooks (which I have noticed now tend to contain a helpful key that indicates whether meals are freezer friendly, vegetarian, gluten-free, etc), the kind of person who would read a book called Cooked by a food philosopher and activist already knows that.

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This leads me to the central paradox of Cooked. It says some really important stuff! The links between poor health and processed food are persuasively outlined and the case for cooking more (by both genders, he is clear to state) is convincingly made. But while he identifies the problem (current food consumption practices are bad for us and the planet) and the solution (cook more, especially more local food) there’s no bridge between those two positions. It’s like asking ‘How do I produce more knitted objects?’ and then answering ‘Knit more’. Well sure, but unless I stop paying rent or seeing my friends or exercising, that’s not actually a useful solution at all. I’m not sure there’s a point of identifying a solution, even a really really good solution, if there’s no way of implementing it. (Although, I do admit that after reading Cooked I put a book on making sourdough bread on reserve at the library and I’m going to have another go at creating a starter of my own…I’m very suggestible when it comes to bread baking!)

Cooked raises an important topic but is lacking in its delivery and execution. I give it a tentative three stars.

Hyperbole and a Half by Allie Brosh (2013)

I've been a huge fan of the blog Hyperbole and a Half for a years so when I saw Allie Brosh's book Hyperbole and a Half: Unfortunate Situations, Flawed Coping Mechanisms, Mayhem and Other Things That Happened on Netgalley, I requested it immediately. Out of all the books I've ever requested, it was the first one that had me compulsively checking my email waiting for notification of my approval so I could start reading it straightaway. Once the approval came through, I devoured the book immediately.

And I enjoyed every page. 

Most people who have spent even a minimal amount of time on the internet will be familiar with Brosh's distinctive humour and visual style. Her images and word have sparked a number of memes, the most famous being Clean All The Things, which she is excellently happy for people to use as they will. Her work recounts experiences from her life with humour and pathos and the style of the book is very faithful to her blog. I was actually amazed at how well this internet comic lends itself to a print format - if anything, it's funnier having the (very slightly) delayed gratification of turning the page before seeing the next comic.

This leads me to my first concern with the book, in that many of the chapters are lifted directly from the blog with little or no modification. This is not a huge issue for me - I think Adventures in depression and Depression Part Two are wonderful, meaningful and poignant and I would have been disappointed if they hadn't been included in the print version. However, I know that reprinting blog content is an issue that many people have with print versions of blogs - why should they pay for something they got for free before (I tend to think why shouldn't a blogger profit from their own hard work? But that's just my view.)

The second concern that I have is the book's structure. It is basically a collection of illustrated short stories without any link other than they feature Brosh's pink cartoon alter ego, leading to the odd editorial situation where we have an entire (hilarious) chapter devoted The Simple Dog but then have a section in another chapter where the dog is introduced and its simpleness explained, which I found a bit jarring. Also, it isn't clear to me why the chapters are structured the way that they are - there's adult Allie stories interpersed with child Allie stories without a clear thematic link. The last chapter is really really sad, so after reading that one I had to go back and re-read a happier funnier chapter. My Hollywood training has taught me that things should end on an up note! But again, this is probably only a thing for me and no-one else.

The unexpected sadness and poignancy of this book is one of the reasons I will wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone who will listen. I literally laughed out loud in several parts and in one place giggled so hard I needed to stop reading for a bit, yet other chapters of it made me feel sad and want to reach into the pages and hug the author who was writing with pain that felt so real. So everyone - buy this book, read this book, buy more copies of this book and give them away to others so they can read this book. It is a very good book.

The Marx Sisters by Barry Maitland (1994) and some thoughts on the BorrowBox app

My library, which I love, adore and think is completely fabulous, recently started using the BorrowBox system. With this system, library members download the BorrowBox app and use it to borrow eBooks and audiobooks. I'm always happy to give anything that increases my access to books a go (especially if I can access the books for free without leaving the house!) so I was pretty keen to try it out. There aren't many ebooks available so my choice was pretty limited. The first book I downloaded was Jennifer Love Hewitt's The Day I Shot Cupid but it was so terrible that even with my deep and abiding love of celebrity memoirs and/or lifestyle guides I could not get past the first chapter. I cannot emphasise how really really terrible that book is (Wikipedia tells me it inspired the popularisaiton of the term "vajazzling": decorating woman's pubic area with crystals. Shoot me now). Urgh.

However, I had more luck with my second title, The Marx Sisters. Mystery novels are one of my favourite genres. I love a world-weary detective, impelled to investigate a world of crime and corruption that confirms his or her dark view of humanity. I love the ability of good mystery writers to use murder as a way to capture entire characters in a few pages while setting these characters, who only briefly feature in the story as part of a murder investigation, against the backdrop of the personal life of the detective, which develops across a series. Some of my favourite series are the Kinsey Milhone Alphabet stories (I have W for Wasted sitting on my bedside table waiting for a day where I have nothing planned so I can spend the whole day lying in bed, drinking hot chocolate and devour it all in one go!) and the first 12 Inspector Lynley novels (seriously, stop at A Place of Hiding. I have read all of them and Elizabeth George spends all of her time in the later novels doing horrible things to the characters we have grown to love. I briefly reviewed the most recent one, Believing the Lie, on Goodreads [review here] and if my review can prevent one person from reading it, then I have done good). I also adore Philip Kerr's Bernie Gunther books and very much enjoyed the first twelve or so Stephanie Plum novels. Because I have strong series loyalty, I'm always on the lookout for new authors and detectives so, when I saw this book was the first in a series that has been rated consistently highly on Goodreads, I was sold.

The book features two detectives, homicide detective Kathy Kolla and Scotland Yard Chief Inspector David Brock. They are set the task of investigating the death of Meredith Winters, an old woman who lives in an odd enclave in London called Jerusalem Lane. In Jerusalem Lane, tensions left over from World War II still simmer within a diverse group of people including British nationals and German immigrants. It's an unusual part of London that seems to these detectives like a remnant from another time; a forgotten moment of London's history caught in a particular space. However, the property is in the middle of London and desired by developers with an eye for profit. Meredith held papers that may or may not have belonged to the great Karl Marx that were desperately wanted by an American academic whose career had stalled and Meredith's son was pressuring her to sell so he could liquidate her assets for his hair salon chain. It soon becomes clear that solving this murder is not going to be an simple matter.

The book was released in 1994 and it was really odd reading a police procedural without the technology that is so ubiquitous in crime stories today. There were fingerprint checks and a bit of mention of DNA testing but the characters communicated via fax rather than email and establishing the provenance of an academic at an American university involved writing letters rather than just visiting the university's website. In 1994 I was at high school and I remember having to find books in the library using a card catalogue so it's not like this past is completely foreign to me, but it is amazing reflecting on how far we have come in technologically in just under 20 years. However, despite this slightly jarring historical issue, I enjoyed reading this book. It is the first in the series so it does serve the function of establishing characters, meaning there's a bit more exposition than there usually is in later books but, importantly, it is interesting enough to make me want to read the later books. I give this novel three stars and, as soon as I can figure out how to return it electronically via the BorrowBox app, I will download the next one.

Concerning the BorrowBox app - it does seem to be really focused at audiobook listeners rather than ebook readers, because the range of audiobooks is much larger and has more recent and popular titles than the ebook range. I couldn't find any functionally to change the size of the text like you can with the Kindle app - it looked like the pages were fully typeset and fixed. This meant that the type was a little bit small on my iPhone but would be perfect for an iPad or other tablet. I will keep borrowing books from it because it is so convenient; but, based on its current catalogue, I might run out of books that I want to read sooner rather than later.

Mr Penumbra's 24-hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan (2012)

A victim of the economic slowdown due to the global financial crisis, Clay Jannon is an unemployed marketing graduate. His one career job was design and marketing for New Bagel, a company run by former Googlers who developed a machine that would make perfect bagels that were completely identical every time. When it turned out that the market didn’t want perfect identical bagels, the machine was refigured to produce burnt irregular ones. New Bagel went under, the Googlers moved on and Clay started looking for another job.

With his job search hampered by the myriad distractions offered by the internet, Clay starts printing out job applications and walking to the park to read them. One day while walking home, Clay sees an ad for help wanted in the window of a 24-hour bookstore. He enters, applies, gets the job and immediately begins work as a clerk at Mr Penumbra’s 24-hour bookstore. Mr Penumbra’s is a bookstore made in two parts – the used bookstore in the front of the shop and the Waybacklist, a collection of old books that have never been registered on any official book database, that go up the walls of the odd, tall space. In his quest to digitise the store, Clay uncovers a secret society that has been searching for answers for 400 years and, with his friends who each have their own quirky technological specialities, goes on a quest to find the answers.

These two instances, where the new (perfectly identical bagels, the internet, technology) is compared and contrasted with the old (imperfect bagels, the printed page, a bookstore) and then integrated is the key theme of this book and I think whether or not you like Mr Penumbra's will depend on how well you think this theme was executed.  I am honestly not sure if I liked this book or not. I think questions about the integration of technology with publishing and the book industry are interesting. I think the digitisation of books is good because it makes book more widely available, often much cheaper and has much less stress on the planet because we’re not chopping down trees to print them and then shipping the printed book all over the world. However, I worry that the models used by Amazon and Google mean that authors aren’t getting enough of the royalties for the book industry to remain sustainable (not a lot of use having models to sell books if no good books are being written!). I also recognise that a shift to a largely electronic book marketplace will result in changes in the labour market in that some jobs will be lost (printers, probably some designers and typesetters) and some will be created (digital distribution). I think this book acknowledges this tension and explores it to some extent but, by reducing it to a question followed by an unrealistic and cheesy conclusion, it dismisses the complexities of the argument in favour of a Hollywood ‘let’s all just be friends’ happy ending.

This book is very computer driven. I am certain that I missed a whole bunch of references to computer stuff that probably affected how much I enjoyed the book. I didn’t know which of the computer language/design things were real and which were invented for diegetic purposes and I didn’t care enough to look them up. Also interesting with this book were the references to Google. Clay dates a girl, Kat, who is a Google employee and devotee and the book is quite critical of the role Google play in the digital world. I was surprised that Google allowed their name to be used, especially in such a negative portrayal. In the digital/analogue binary that this book divides the world into, Google is just a digital modern-day cult; a more public version of the secret society that funds Mr Penumbra’s 24-hour bookstore.

I’m going to reluctantly give this book three stars. I would be hesitant to recommend it to anyone I know (bad) but it has given me food for thought (good), so I’m placing it right in the middle of the star scale. If you’ve read it and have thoughts, I’d love to hear them but don’t let this review in any way influence your decision to pick it up.