#8 The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out Of The Window And Disappeared - Jonas Jonasson

'100-Y-O-M' I really really enjoyed.  It reminded me of a sort of grown up version of the Moomins or any children's cartoon where everything is a bit strange, characters are easily identifiable and bizarre situations are accepted for what they are and everything moves on.  A bit Lemony Snicket, but Scandinavian.

The sheer fun of the novel stems from the ridiculousness of each increasing set up our geriatric and his rag tag bunch of allies encounter, intertwined with far fetched and seemingly implausible, yet fantastically believable tales of  his life and times across this most recent century.  The reader is asked and expected to keep swallowing the impossible simply because it is told in such a wholesome manner.  In general the book steers clear of unwanted clutter, there are no overriding stories of human love and forgiveness, or detailed exposes of the criminal world it touches on, just a mild touch of storytelling in a Tintin style.

It's fun, I enjoyed it and I wished it was longer.  My only mild sigh was the usual with books from this region in that I started to get confused with this 'sson' and that 'sson'.  I also wish I could have written this up sooner as it would've been better on a fresher mind - but we all know who's fault that was ;*ahem* Mr. Conrad'

Surreality - 9/10
Skandi-charm - 8/10
Originality of topic - 10/10
Overall a strong 9/10

Chin up bookamabees - the sun is out in London and it seems spring may finally be here!

#7 - Heart of Darkness- Joseph Conrad

I didn't like 'Heart of Darkness'.  Unfortunately I felt I should like it enough that it stopped me from even wanting to admit failure and write about how I didn't like it.  Mainly because I feel I just didn't 'get it'.  'Getting it' is of course notoriously tricky and subjective a notion.  I personally found it confusing, full of non sequiturs and just a bit dull.  I'm not going to waste any more time on it.

#6 The Big Sleep - Raymond Chandler

   I read 'The Big Sleep' in record time even for me, as a favour for my little sister.  I'd found her old copy at home for her and have to send it up to Manchester so she can read it for a university project, she asked that I read it quickly so I could give her some ideas about the themes etc. (she's a graphics student).  I was reading it over my lunch break and found one page fully covered in pencil annotations. I read through the page getting more and more annoyed at the willful misunderstanding and apparent lack of intellect or understanding of literature displayed by the annotator, feeling fully het up and scathing by the end of the page only to realize it was my little sisters handwriting...

   That blip aside I enjoyed 'The Big Sleep' mainly as an explanatory introduction to noir - not a genre I've ever really explored in written or filmic style.  As it is the hard bitten detective, femme fatales, suave and scary gangsters and knuckleheaded meat men are instantly recognisable as a style and as the source material for endless parodies and straight faced references.  Pulp Fiction and Tarantino films in general suddenly popped into focus as pure homage.  It was much like the feeling of having watched Spaced as a child and still now occasionally finding moments in classic sci-fi films that have been faithfully and lovingly reproduced.

   In itself I really enjoyed 'The Big Sleep', the characters were great fun, the storyline suitably complex and deathly.  Thematically its almost hard to believe it was first published back in 1939, the antics of the Sternwood sisters seem straight out of 90210 (or even Homeland).

  It almost seems a shame I couldn't have come to the novel 'fresher' and with less preconceptions.  Rather than having a clear idea about themes/characters/writing style what I really found I brought away from the novel was a sense of jigsaw puzzle completeness where lots of little bits of cultural knowledge found themselves new birthright.  Overall it was an idea absorbed rather than a story read.

Classic-ness: 9/10
Body count: 7/10
Cultural knowledge filling: 9/10
Overall: 8/10

#5 The Garden of Evening Mists - Tan Twan Eng

   For both my MA and BA I studied China and some South/East Asia so I naturally approach any book set in the region with a sort of proprietorial manner.  I expect to either like it very much as it has captured something I feel to be very true about 'The Orient, or to dislike it because they've got facts wrong and worked off lazy stereotypes.  It was in this frame of mind that I read Tan Twan Eng's 'The Gift of Rain' about a year ago, and I absolutely loved it.  Malaysia was new to me and his descriptions so evocative, of the rain forests and markets and temples which just hovered at the edge of my Chinese familiarity, just close enough to be recognizable.  Equally a new history of which I'd had very little knowledge of before was laid out and picked apart - fairly unflatteringly for most involved, another reminder that World War II was just that.

   So coming to 'The Garden of Evening Mists' I had high hopes it would be like 'The Gift of Rain, and it was! Very alike, very very alike, almost too alike, almost like the same book...

  In terms of basic structure both have as their protagonist an outcast, one mixed race, one straits (English speaking) Chinese.  Both are post-war coming to terms with their actions and experiences during and since the war.  Both are by this point fairly old and are retelling their stories to a previously unknown (Japanese) visitor - although in 'Mists' Teoh is writing her story down her decision to is prompted by and coincides with the scholars arrival.  Both are remembering a older Japanese sensei figure who taught them the ancient and honorable Japanese arts - before being revealed to have (probably) played sinister role in the war.  All is set against a backdrop of beautiful blooming but damaged Malay.

   There are a lot of similarities and had I not enjoyed 'Gift of Rain' I would have been a bit pissed off to find myself reading the same book again.  As it is I loved The Garden of Evening Mists' for how skillfully it drags you into the world of Teoh Yun Ling and how fully immersed you become in the mists and the humidity and the cool air of the mountains of the far east.  Also how unsparingly it lays bare the history of the region and the atrocities enacted upon the local population by the Japanese - and then the native Communists.  Overall its rich and absorbing and just a bit too much like 'Gift of Rain' to be considered even a wholly separate
book.

Immersiveness: 9/10
History teaching: 8/10
Self-plagiarism: 8/10
Bonus points for plenty of Japanese words to practice saying: 5
Overall: 8/10

#4 The Quickening Maze - Adam Foulds

   I supposed it had to come to this - although I'd hoped I could put it off a bit longer, I've finished a book I have all but no interest in reviewing or writing about or even particularly remembering.  I could just pretend it never happened and skip straight to the next (which is already far more enjoyable), but that wouldn't really be the point would it?

  I'm sure there's nothing wrong with 'The Quickening Maze' I just didn't really feel that we gelled, I wasn't ever gagging to read it, I never had to stop reading it because I really didn't want what was about to happen to happen (when Joey has to freeze books in 'Friends' I can only nod sagely) and I was mildly surprised when it finished as nothing really had happened.

   It's bit like if Pride and Prejudice got as far as the ball at Meryton, so that dances were had and not had, prejudices were made and pride was offended and the beginnings of characters and stories were being teased out and then Jane decided that was enough and lay down her pen to go for a jolly picnic instead.  The whole novel felt like a long introduction which was just getting interested when it was curtailed.  I'm sure if I mention this to my mum she'll sagely say 'Ah but you know what happens to her, and you know what happens to him..' as if 'knowing' where the story will go - because we can know these things from having read Austen, is equal to having someone else write and craft it for you.  I *know* all sorts of stories, I still read books.

  All in all an inconsequential 5/10 for hinting but never extrapolating to the point where you don't care - if Mr Foulds couldn't be bothered to expand on his tale, why should I?

Over and out my little bookamabees

#3 Gone Girl - Gillian Flynn

   I wasn't expecting to like 'Gone Girl', as read from the description the basic premise didn't really appeal:

 'What are you thinking, Amy?' The question I've asked most often during our marriage, if not out loud, if not to the person who could answer. I suppose these questions stormcloud over every marriage: 'What are you thinking? How are you feeling? Who are you? What have we done to each other? What will we do?' Just how well can you ever know the person you love? This is the question that Nick Dunne must ask himself on the morning of his fifth wedding anniversary when his wife Amy suddenly disappears..

I'm not really a fan of that sort of thriller-esque beautiful woman goes missing why did she do it thing.  The orange on black cover sort of confirmed the impression of a  'dramatic' novel for the mass market.  Not to mention the title - 'Gone Girl', why 'girl' why not woman except that girl a) alliterates - making it easier to remember and rhetorically more appealing, and b) what, it sounds more mysterious/flighty? A 'girl' applied to a grown woman already makes her sound more dramatic, someone whose eyes probably 'sparkle mischievously' every now and then, it implies lack of responsibility.  All in all a total turn off.  But for a project I had to read 'Gone Girl' and I'm thoroughly glad I did.

   Flynn has managed to create a relationship between Nick and Amy that is unmistakably grim, human and true.  I'll hope other people read it quietly nodding along to the way two people who love each other can still just not understand one another, and how things unsaid build up and become huge silent elephants.  The grim but inevitable realization that the other person isn't perfect and will never understand you as much as you'd want, not even close.  Whilst these things are easy to lay out clinically the treatment Flynn gives them brings the issues to shocking life in front of your eyes.  Genuine human relationships are rarely found anywhere in literature - or much art, but this is brutally insightful.  The twisted conclusion it comes to is more worrying - and the point when (luckily) I felt the head nodding come to a stop.

   Whilst this is a thriller in the truest sense there are no jumps, no killers in the back seat, yet it isn't totally a psychological kicker either.  The thrill lies in the pitch perfect depiction of what could just happen when someone crosses a line.  It touches on one of my favorite motifs of literature - the unreliable narrator, the blunt realization that we, the reader, are being lied to.

   All in all a brilliant bit of fiction, perhaps the ending maybe felt a little too stretched, the conclusions a little too contrived but never to the point of anything less than total fascination.

Characters: 9/10 full and complete and mental
Police procedure: 8/10 we get to watch them swing back and forth with genuine interest
Narrator Reliability: 2/10 Brilliant!
Totally: 8/10
  

#2 The House of Silk - Anthony Horowitz

  In great contrast to review #1 I absolutely loved 'The House of Silk' - to the point where I was totally gutted when I finished and immediately set about cataloging which of the original Sherlock Holmes I have read (sadly most of them) and excitingly those I missed first time - the read/not read list corresponds almost identically to what's free/not free for kindles...

   The time was certainly ripe last year for a revival of the great Holmes and increasingly important Watson  after the huge success of the BBC adaptation with Benedict 'Otterface' Cumberbatch and the surprisingly attractive and not-hobbit like Martin Freeman. Getting Anthony Horowitz on board was too a stroke of genius - as the author notes at the end attest he may be the most prolific literary murderer of our times.  Plus he himself has reckoned 'The House of Silk' is suitable for anyone 13+ and it just so happens he's vastly well known to the younger demographic - who might have liked the modern BBC adaptation but would worry about not liking a 'period' Holmes, except for the author already being known to them.

  In tone and language and setting the novel feels like vintage Conan Doyle.  Brief, sharp, almost sparse writing interspersed with detailed yet still highly functional descriptions of people and places.  The strange and wide ranging locations visited in their quest are as bizarre and barren as would be expected.  Watson is a reliable narrator as usual - and gets quite a few compliments on his chronicles.

   The actual storyline of the book is initially brilliant, one seemingly minor criminal case swiftly blurs into something more potent and deadly.  As far as the central 'crime' goes the build up is magnificent as the extent of the elusive House of Silk becomes known, and yet the final denouement feels lacking somewhat.  The central crime seems both too attuned to modern sensibilities and somewhat lacking in scale and scope after the billing it was given.  This is not to say the final resolution isn't satisfying - the eventual return to the original 'minor' crime and it's solving is brilliant, simply that the major crime feels a tad inauthentic.

  It's easy to pick holes however and for the vast majority of the book I was completely hooked, in the way where a ride up an escalator becomes a brief 45 seconds of reading time.  It's also quite fair to say if I re-read much of the Holmes so far it's fairly likely I would be able to pick out criticisms too.

  All in all I hope Horowitz attempts another Sherlock Holmes and perhaps follows his own 'rules' more closely so delivering a more authentic story line.

Minor plot: 8/10
Major plot: 6/10
Period sensibilities: 4/10
Effort: 8/10
Overall: 8/10