Month: February 2009

Categories
1980s Booker Prize Recommended books

The Bone People – Keri Hulme

The Bone People won the Booker Prize in 1985. It is set on the South Island of New Zealand, and centres around three characters. The first, Kerewin, is a painter, who having won the lottery builds herself a tower by the sea and lives as a virtual recluse. One day, Simon, a young, mute boy turns up at her tower and they begin a strange friendship. Simon’s foster father, Joe, is then drawn towards Kerewin and the three characters begin to discover secrets lurking in each of their pasts.

The book deals with many difficult issues, but domestic violence is the most dominant. Joe beats his foster son, and the delicate line between punishment and cruelty if seen to be very hazy at times. The characters are all really well developed, deeply flawed and incredibly interesting!

The book is very well written, and the writing is almost poetic at times, but at other times it was a ‘stream of conciousness’ and, particularly in the beginning, was very confusing. I fluctuated between loving it, and being irritated by it!

The book was filled with Maori myths and symbolism, some of which went over my head. I think that this book is one which needs to be read several times, in order to appreicate it’s many layers. In many ways it is very similar to Beloved – difficult to understand at first, complex, moving and full of symbolism.

I’m not sure I’d ever recommend this book to anyone, but I’m glad that I read it.

Categories
Other

Try Something New: A Mini Challenge

deweys_books1

As part of the Dewey’s Books Challenge, hosted by Chris and Robin in Dewey’s memory, I’m going to take part in the Try Something New Mini-Challenge.

Here’s how it works:

During the month of March, I’m going to step out of my comfort zone and try something new.

To make things more fun, the Mini-Challenge is going to work in pairs:  If you’re an even number, you’ll be paired with the person before you; if you’re an odd number, with the person after you , like we sometimes did for Weekly Geeks.

I’d like to try a graphic novel, or a western, as I’ve never read either before, but I won’t commit until I’ve found out who my partner is, and which sort of books they’d like to try, as it would be nice if we could try something new together!

Categories
Blog Improvement Project Other

Blog Improvement Project Week 4: Blog Basics

This is the fourth week of the Blog Improvement Project. Our task for this week is to focus on the basics of our blog. I’ve been very busy!

I spent ages trying to improve the layout and add a ‘recent comments’ section to the sidebar. It didn’t really look very professional, and I was worried all my messing around was actually making it worse!

Then I upgraded to WordPress 2.7 and everything became much easier! WordPress 2.7 is a big improvement. It is much easier to add things to the sidebar without a knowledge of html, and all the behind-the-scenes management of the blog is much more intuitive.

With WordPress 2.7 it was really easy to add the recent comments section to the sidebar. All I had to do was tick one box!

It also has an option to add a text box, so I added my ‘currently reading’ and ‘top of the TBR’ boxes, so that everyone can see which books I’m focusing on at the moment.

My next task was to try to add a tab to show all the books I have reviewed on my blog. This was a lot harder than I expected. Bloggers seem to want everything archived by date, so it took me a while to find this azindex widget to organise things alphabetically. It is a big improvement to have all my book reviews in one place, but I’d ideally like them ordered by author. I know this can be done using tags for the first letter of an author’s surname, but this would be a lot of work for me. I’ll try to do it one day when I have a bit more time.

I must have done something to improve my blog’s visibility, as I was previously getting between 5 and 10 spam comments a day. I the last 12 hours I’ve had 156!  I’m off to find a good way of getting rid of it!

I look forward to seeing what improvements everyone else has made, and hopefully I’ll get a few more good ideas!

Categories
Meme

The 5th Photo Meme

Fleur Fisher Reads has tagged me for a photo meme.
“Find your 5th photo file folder, then the 5th photo in that file folder. Then pass the meme to 5 people.”

Almost all my photos are of my boys, but I was pleased to find it was this one:

My youngest son and his little friends! Mine’s the one with all the hair in the middle!

 

16oct07a

I’m going to pass this one on to:

Deb on the run

Lou from Lous_Pages

Educating Pertunia

Teddy Rose from So Many Precious Books, So Little Time

U Krakovianki

Categories
2000 - 2007 Richard and Judy Book Club

The Cellist of Sarajevo – Steven Galloway

The Cellist of Sarajevo is set during the siege of Sarajevo, which took place from April 5th, 1992 to February 29th, 1996, and is the longest city siege in modern warfare. The inspiration for the book came from the true story of a cellist who decided to play on the site of a mortar attack every day for three weeks, to honor his neighbours killed in the blast. While the book is fiction, it is based upon many true accounts of what life was like during the siege.

The book follows three main characters trying to live out their lives under constant fear of attack. The sights, sounds, and sheer terror of everyday life for these people was brought across very vividly. It was very well written and easy to follow, but I felt that the use of three different characters fragmentated the book too much. It wasn’t long enough to develop each of their characters fully, and so no real story could develop.

If you’d like to get a sense of what life was like for these people during the siege, then this is a great book to read, but I wish that it had been longer, and included more of a plot.

Categories
Chunkster Classics Recommended books

The Moonstone – Wilkie Collins

2003 Paperback

2003 Paperback

The Moonstone was first published in 1868, and is considered to be the first detective novel ever written. Many people site The Moonstone as the longest piece of detective fiction in existence. I’m not an expert on this, but I do know that it took me a long time to read it! At 464 pages it only just classes as a chunkster, but I feel no guilt in counting it towards the Chunkster Challenge as the type was tiny!

The story takes place in an English country house, in which a rare diamond is stolen over night. The suspects are therefore limited, and a famous London detective is called in to investigate the crime.

The writing was easy to follow, but it was very dense, and so it was a slow read. For the majority of the book this wasn’t a bad thing, as I loved the descriptions, but there was a slow section in the middle, which I found hard to get through. It picked up towards the end though, and the it was very well plotted. I didn’t see any of the twists coming, and I liked the realism of it. There were also a lot of other issues raised during the book. SPOILER! Highlight text to read. I loved the beginning and ending in India, and the way Wilkie Collins challenged racial stereotypes by portraying the Indians as mysterious thieves, when they were the good ones all along.

I also found the opium factor interesting. I had no idea of it’s affects, and have since learnt that Wilkie Collins was writing from experience, as he had an opium habit.

I loved reading it so soon after The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher as I noticed all the similarities between the real murder at Road Hill and the theft of the moonstone. If you’ve read The Moonstone then it is worth having a look at this analysis – I found it very insightful. It contains lots of spoilers, so don’t click through if you’re interested in reading the book soon.

Overall, I enjoyed reading The Moonstone. It was hard work at times, but well worth the effort. As it’s the first ever detective novel I can’t not recommend it, everyone should read it at some point!