Inglorious Indeed

Joanna Kavenna’s Inglorious is one of the most ludicrous examples I’ve seen yet of the recent propensity (described here) of publishers to slap a chick lit cover on any book written by a woman or about a woman.

I’ll tell you a little more about the book before I unveil the frightful cover. It was a last-gasp addition to my 2008 reading list, picked up in the library because I was vaguely aware that it had won an Orange award and been mentioned in a few best-of-year reading lists.

The basic story is that its protagonist has a bit of an existential crisis one day and quits her well-paid job in journalism, after which things start going a bit pear-shaped for her. Her relationship ends and she stays with a succession of friends while going deeper and deeper into debt as she remains preoccupied with a “search for meaning”. Bit of an eyerolly plot, I know, but it is well-written and often amusing. Fellow GTD wannabes will recoil at her unwieldy to-do-lists (tasks like “Read the complete works of Hegel, Nietzsche and Kant”!) before sheepishly whipping out their own lists to rephrase similar next-action-lacking mistakes. Fellow snarky types will like the self-sabotaging exactitude with which she writes application letters for menial jobs. You can read this extract, which I don’t really think does the book justice, but you will at least gather from it that the writing is not dumbed down for anyone whose favourite author is Sophie Kinsella. I finished the book on Christmas Eve, and would give it three stars.

Now that the stage is set, behold the cover! By the way, poodles don’t feature in the book at all.

2008 Reading Rundown

I was horrified at the tiny number of books I read in 2007 (wedding stress plus, okay, the addition of a large amount of X-rated X-Files fanfic to my PDA) so decided to keep a log of the books I read in 2008. I didn’t bother to record any of the cookbooks I read and probably missed out one or two photography books too but am happy enough with the 26 I did record, it seems a decent number for a working adult with a life and various other addictions.

Here’s an executive summary for anyone who might find it useful.

5 stars:

  • On Chesil Beach (Ian McEwan): Perfect distillation of McEwan’s best abilities unmarred by any of his failings. [My entry]
  • Epileptic (David B): Interesting plot, but it’s the complex, surreal drawings which elevate this to extraordinary. [My entry]
  • Stuart: A Life Backwards (Alexander Masters): Funny, illuminating and really sad. The choice of a “backwards” narrative (Stuart’s idea) is spot on. [My entry]
  • Never Let Me Go (Kazuo Ishiguro): Elegantly unfolded plot, wonderfully perceptive writing. [My entry]
  • The Road (Cormac McCarthy): Literary triumph, real life downer – it’s transporting, but be warned that it transports you to a meticulously imagined post-apocalyptic world of almost unremitting bleakness.
  • Nine Parts Of Desire: The Hidden World Of Islamic Women (Geraldine Brooks): Engaging, often surprising, and (came across as) mostly balanced. It made me want to read further into the topic.
  • Understanding Exposure (Bryan Peterson): A really accessible and useful introduction to the topic for this photography noob.

4 stars:

  • Memoirs Of My Melancholy Whores (Gabriel Garcia Marquez): Much of what is wonderful about Garcia Marquez’s writing, in a shorter and more accessible package. [My entry]
  • In The Bedroom (Andre Dubus): Even if you’re not much of a short story person (neither am I), these are some of the most masterfully written short stories I’ve ever read. I’d never heard of Dubus or this book until Karen pressed it into my hands, and am grateful for the recommendation.
  • What Is The What (Dave Eggers): The story of the Lost Boys of Sudan is worth reading in itself, but Eggers also does a great job of telling it.
  • An Artist Of The Floating World (Kazuo Ishiguro): Last read this as a teenager and still find its particular insights into Japanese society interesting.

3.5 stars:

  • Northern Lights (Philip Pullman): Rather too dull to unseat C.S. Lewis’s Narnian chronicles, but its ambition is impressive.
  • Black Swan Green (David Mitchell): Pleasant and well-written, but while I can’t think of any flaws I can’t remember much of the book at all.
  • What The Dead Know (Laura Lippman): I haven’t read many crime novels, but if they’re all this riveting I should read more of them.

3 stars:

  • When You Are Engulfed In Flames (David Sedaris): Fine if you’ve never read him, but disappointing compared to any of his previous books.
  • Wide Sargasso Sea (Jean Rhys): Impressive if you think of it as ambitious fanfic, otherwise it’s rather unsatisfying despite the good writing.
  • The Wasp Factory (Iain Banks): Passably diverting account of a disturbed teen and his freaky little universe. Might gross out the squeamish.
  • The Shadow Of The Wind (Carlos Ruiz Zafon): Enjoyable enough as an escapist romp through a fantasy Barcelona, but a tad overlong and predictable.
  • The Harmony Silk Factory (Tash Aw): Its ambition somewhat exceeds its execution, but am glad a Malaysian-born author got famous with a book steeped in Malaysia and I’ll keep an eye out for what Tash Aw comes up with next.
  • Water For Elephants (Sara Gruen): Unmemorable writing but the story’s great fun, especially if you counted Mr Galliano’s Circus among your favourite childhood books too.
  • Magic For Beginners (Kelly Link): Whimsical, dark short stories. Good while you’re reading them, but forgettable afterwards.
  • The Somnambulist (Jonathan Barnes): A “fantasy London” book. Promising first half, but second half lost steam and went a bit nuts.
  • Learning To See Creatively (Bryan Peterson): Good reminders and examples of things you probably already know.
  • Understanding Shutter Speed (Bryan Peterson): Not as immediately inspiring as Understanding Exposure, but perhaps I’ll think differently when I experiment more with shutter speed.

2 stars:

The Boretress Of Slowitude

Have any of you read this? I’m 67 pages in and still as bored as I was on page 1, which is to say: totally.

I even brought the book on our weekend trip to KL, hoping that an aggregate of 10 coach hours with nothing else to do would force me to keep going until a switch magically flipped and I finally realized why the novel is apparently a “great daredevil ride” (The Times, according to the back cover). Alas, no – every time I tried to make any progress, I’d get bored after a few pages and doze off, snooze for a few minutes and then wake up again due to coach discomfort or noisy kids. Rinse and repeat, 5 hours each way.

I don’t understand how the same author who delighted me with Motherless Brooklyn’s pace, plot and humour could have birthed this tedious turd. The writing is as competent and assured as you can expect from Jonathan Lethem, but he’s taken something that could be so engaging – the ’70s childhood of a white boy in a gradually gentrifying Brooklyn neighbourhood – and sucked all the life out of it, then spat out the flavourless remains into 67 pages (so far) of carefully penned but stupefyingly dull observations. It’s like seeing graffiti in greyscale.

In my younger more pretentious days I might have stuck with this because it is Worthy by many accounts, but I now feel no compunction in giving it up. More good books exist than I will ever be able to finish reading in my lifetime, and thousands of those will reward the intelligent, thoughtful and reasonably patient reader more than this one did. I’m moving on. What have you read and enjoyed recently?

Wtchmn

I’m not sure whether or not to bother rereading Watchmen before the movie, because I believe movies are always far more enjoyable if you haven’t read (or can hardly remember) the book. The book is substantially superior 90% of the time, so you might as well spare yourself some impotent huffing in the cinema, appreciate the movie on its own merits, and then savour the additional depth and luxury that lots and lots of words can offer.

I think it was fairly safe to read this Microsoft Paint condensed version though.

Cover Versions

How shallow does it make me that I kinda wish the particular editions I had of the last two books I was reading (my reading is primarily done on public transport) had different covers?

The one I was reading before those two had a suitably pretentious cover, but unfortunately I must confess that I enjoyed it the least. (I’m glad I read it, albeit 20 years after first reading Jane Eyre, and it successfully achieves everything I expected it to achieve, but it took a little more commitment to get through than the others.)

Oh well, as unimpressive as those first two covers are for public reading, at least they’re not THIS! (Found via random surfing, more horror here)

Reading Notes (Whores, Virgins, Epileptics, Psychotics)

I’ve had a run of great reading lately, and thought I’d share. As is usual for all my commute books, all of these are notable for their ability to keep a very sleepy Michelle awake on the way to work and all but the graphic novel come in handbag-friendly sizes.

Memories Of My Melancholy Whores (Gabriel Garcia Marquez): I’ve read 100 Years Of Solitude and Love In The Time Of Cholera twice each, and with each reread I was amused to find that I’d remembered so little of the plot that it was almost like reading a whole new book. This isn’t a diss, it’s more that his books are so dense with atmosphere and observation that I find myself just living from moment to moment, thoroughly immersed, until I reach the end and wake up from a beautiful, fragrant dream which then fades away as quickly as dreams always do. I think this is the reason some people find it difficult to get through his books, because sometimes you’re just not in the right mental mood for that sort of commitment. Anyway, Whores has a lot of what is wonderful about his writing within a much shorter and more accessible package (assuming you don’t find stories about a 90 year old man engaging a 14 year old prostitute to be inherently inaccessible, that is) so I recommend it to Garcia Marquez fans and newbies alike.

On Chesil Beach (Ian McEwan): I routinely read any new Ian McEwan book, but due to various dissatisfactions I’ve felt with his other books, he’s always been an admired-but-not-favourite writer for me. He’s amazing at taking an incident (usually narrated in vivid, heart-in-mouth detail) and building on it, fleshing out causes and consequences and the inner lives of the people involved with incredible depth and perspicacity, but in my view something else often lets him down – pacing for Black Dogs and Saturday, plot for Enduring Love and Atonement, and just too much obviousness for Amsterdam. I’m undecided on how believable I find the “incident” here – a disastrous wedding night for the virginal protagonists – but its awkward, cringeworthy moments, and how McEwan uses them to elaborate on the lives of Edward and Florence, their love and its sad aftermath, are masterfully done, like a perfect distillation of his best abilities unmarred by any of his previous failings. My favourite McEwan book yet.

Epileptic (David B.): I don’t always get graphic novels, in that I often find the writing decent but don’t feel the drawings have added much to my appreciation of the whole. (Blankets, Jimmy Corrigan, I’m looking at you.) Epileptic is different. The plot is interesting on its own – the author’s brother develops epilepsy in childhood, and his family life becomes dominated by his parents’ efforts to find a cure and the increasingly disruptive manifestations of his brother’s illness – but it’s the complex, surreal drawings which make this extraordinary, and elevate it to my personal graphic novel pantheon formerly inhabited only by Sandman and Watchmen. I can’t describe the richness of artistry that unfolds in these small black-and-white pictures in a way that you can appreciate without experiencing the book for yourself, it would be like trying to describe Guernica to someone who’s never seen a Picasso painting. Just read it.

Stuart: A Life Backwards (Alexander Masters): Masters was working for a homeless charity (not for altruistic reasons, because it paid well) when its directors got convicted for permitting the trafficking of drugs on the premises, even though they had made concerted efforts to prevent this and the same problem afflicted almost any other homeless charity facility. In the course of the campaign against their convictions, Masters met alcoholic, polydrug-addicted, violently psychotic, frequently suicidal Stuart, who was also actually quite a success story of rehabilitation, relatively speaking. The book is the story of Stuart’s life and of the friendship between the two very different men. It’s funny, illuminating, and really sad, and I think it will interest anyone who has ever given a moment’s thought to the problem of homelessness.

Never Let Me Go (Kazuo Ishiguro)

I picked up Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go in the library simply because it was a nice handbag-friendly size for my commute, but if (like me) you’ve lost track of Ishiguro’s work since An Artist Of The Floating World or The Remains Of The Day, this one’s worth a read.

NLMG reminded me how wonderful Ishiguro is at illuminating the silences between people, the myriad things that may come to your mind during a conversation but which, for all sorts of reasons, you decide to leave unsaid. I don’t think I noticed this in his other books that I’ve read, but in NLMG he’s particularly adept at bringing this to life in the interactions between women, or at least it’s very true to my interactions with women anyway. I think he really skewers the things that can render even conversations between fairly close, caring and not particularly immature girl friends a mire of unvoiced resentments. Kathy is able to be annoyed with Ruth’s various facades and disingenuities, while understanding (and sometimes appreciating) why Ruth puts on the acts she does. Ruth is able to engage in genuine and close friendship with Kathy while she continues, through knowing inaction, to deny Kathy a precious and irreplaceable happiness. Tommy, the third major character in the book, is also quite accurately characterised (as far as my interactions with guys go, anyway) as being more straightforward, less calculative, not completely oblivious to all that’s going on between his two close girl friends but simply not wired to view things through the convoluted web of surface-vs-imputed-meanings that girl interactions have to be filtered through.

Do you know what I mean, or does none of this strike a chord with you? I mean the insecurities and disingenuities of your girl friends which chronically and acutely infuriate you, yet because you figure that they wouldn’t be like this if they weren’t fragile, you decide to be the bigger person and not crush them by letting on that you see right through them. But because you’re not perfect yourself, you can’t totally let go of your annoyance either, and it ends up colouring your interactions with them anyway, anything from throwaway comments which indirectly target an insecurity, to deliberate obtuseness when they’re fishing for affirmation, to finally just limiting the quantity/method of your interactions. (I have girl friends who I like in person, but I don’t like how they come across on their blogs, or vice versa, and other girl friends who are lovely alone but put on facades in certain social settings, so I sometimes try to pick how and where I interact with them accordingly.) Perhaps the dispassionate observer might wonder why you don’t just cut off these dysfunctional relationships, but there’s the rub – underneath all this bullshit you still like these people, you know they have good hearts, and you want to believe others will ultimately give you, too, the dignity of the holistic analysis, rather than write you off for your own annoying faults. And so we hold on to these relationships, and everything left unsaid represents the good and bad we can’t let go of.

That was a bit of a tangent, wasn’t it? Anyway, the point is that the major strength of Never Let Me Go, for me, is how consummately Ishiguro gets all of the above. Another of its strengths is how elegantly he unfolds the story, but it’s a little tough to discuss this without introducing spoilers. If you pick this book up cold as I did without knowing much about it, I daresay you will be a little surprised initially at the opening chapter’s hints about the central premise of its plot, and you might even be dubious about whether it’s your sort of story – I was. But I soon found that this didn’t matter, and (with apologies for being so cryptic, really) the third major strength of the book is how he uses the first strength to illustrate how little it matters.

King Rat: Needs A Remix

Oh dear, my naffness premonition about King Rat turned out to be right. Check out these lines:

  • “Saul’s heart was beating like a Jungle bassline.” [This is after Saul had been running for ages. Fuck saving the metropolis, dude has some serious irregular heartbeat issues to worry about! You want to exaggerate like this, say his heart was beating like Moby’s Thousand, but a jungle bassline is just…medically wrong.]
  • “The rats and Saul left the relative safety of London’s nightlands and entered the warehouse, the frenzied jaws of Drum and Bass, the domain of smoke and strobe lights and Hardcore, the Piper’s lair, the heart of Darkness, deep in the Jungle.” [Again with the unnecessary capitalisations. Are we in Brixton or the Hundred Acre Wood?]
  • “The Drum and Bass felt as if it would lift the hatch out of the floor, off into the sky. It was unforgiving, a punishing assault of original Hardcore beats.” [It feels a bit off to use that usual MC patois of “original hardcore” in a description like this. Is it just me?]
  • “She pulled the record back, let it forward again a little, pulled it back, scratching playfully like an old school rapper, finally releasing her hand and switching off the first tune in a smooth movement, unleashing the new bassline.” [Scratching like a rapper? Also, reading about how someone DJs is like watching paint dry.]

Apart from the drum’n’bass cringeworthiness, some other things about the book’s plot seem a bit misconceived, sort of like what you might come up with if you went out to a massive jungle night with your mates back in the day, took a lot of E, brought everyone back to yours to come down on some spliffs, and while lounging wrecked on your plonk-stained student flat carpet, started brainstorming ideas for a book. For example (some spoilers to follow, but I think they’re so damn obvious long before they happen that there’s no harm giving them away now):
Read More “King Rat: Needs A Remix”

King Rat (China Mieville)

I decided it was about time I read some China Mieville (although he’s a notable writer in his own right, I must admit the main draw for me was that he’s said the Borribles trilogy is one of his biggest influences) so I went looking in the library shelves. I know Perdido Street Station is his most celebrated work, but when I read the blurb on the back of King Rat it was clear I had to start with that instead:

Something is stirring in London’s dark, stamping out its territory in brickdust and blood. Something has murdered Saul’s father, and left Saul to pay for the crime.

But a shadow from the urban waste breaks into his prison cell and leads him to freedom. A shadow called King Rat.

In the night-land behind London’s facade, in sewers and slums and rotting dead spaces, Saul must learn his true nature.

Grotesque murders rock the city like a curse. Mysterious forces prepare for a showdown. With Drum and Bass pounding the backstreets, Saul confronts his bizarre inheritance – in the badlands of South London, in the heart of darkness, at the gathering of the Junglist Massive.

Like the DJ says: ‘Time for the Badman.

Potentially a bit naff, I know (who capitalizes dance music genre names like that? It’s like a Winnie the Pooh book), but how can I resist? I’m hoping it’ll be like Neverwhere…with riddim.

O RLY?

I have to return House of Meetings to the library today without having finished it, unfortunately (The Somnambulist got in the way), but before I do I just have to capture this rather intriguing line: “…even in their most intimate dealings the women, too, were worked on by socio-economic reality. In the post-war years, there were no non-swallowers in the Soviet Union. None.”