Author: Jackie

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2011 Recommended books

How I Became A Famous Novelist – Steve Hely

Five words from the blurb: write, bestseller, succeeds, fame, gleeful

How I Became A Famous Novelist is a satire of the publishing industry. The central character, Pete Tarslaw, decides to become an author in order to impress his ex-girlfriend. He doesn’t have any idea what to write about and so researches the bestseller lists with the aim of creating a book that will appeal to as many people as possible. He comes up with a series of rules for his book and shapes the plot around them – leading to a novel that contains a ridiculous number of themes and plot threads.

Rule 4: Must include a murder
Sixty percent of that week’s bestselling novels involved killings. Glancing around the bookstore, I estimated that fifty thousand fictional characters are murdered each year. Not including a murder in your book is like insisting on playing tennis with a wooden racket. Noble perhaps in some stubborn way, but why handicap yourself?

I normally struggle with satirical novels, but this book had me laughing out loud on several occasions. It is an insightful parody of the current publishing industry and no-one is safe from mockery – I particularly enjoyed reading the sections about bloggers.

The only downside to this book is that everything he writes is true – the title could easily be changed to How to Become a Famous Novelist, and the text taken literally by an aspiring author to create a publishable book.

I flew through this entertaining story, finding several sections so amusing that I made my friends and family read them too.

Writing a novel – actually picking the words and filling in paragraphs – is a tremendous pain in the ass. Now that TV’s so good and the Internet is an endless forest of distraction, it’s damn near impossible. That should be taken into account when ranking the all-time greats. Somebody like Charles Dickens, for example, who had nothing better to do except eat mutton and attend public hangings, should get very little credit.

I highly recommend this book to anyone with an interest in the publishing industry.

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The thoughts of other bloggers:

I can’t see why anyone who likes to read wouldn’t want to check out this hilariously funny, spot-on satire of popular fiction. Life With Books

However, it can feel a bit light and fluffy due to its readability and how neatly everything is squared away at the end. The Literary Omnivore

Part of the fun in reading this story is seeing if you can guess who the real life models might be for those authors that he critiques. At Home With Books

Categories
Other

Read or Reject #4

My New Year’s Resolution is to give up on books that aren’t outstanding. I don’t want to miss out on a gem that happens to have a poor beginning, so I hope that you can help me sort the wheat from the chaff.

Should I continue reading any of these books?

The World According to Garp by John Irving

This is a modern day classic and so I had high hopes for it. I loved the first few chapters describing Garp’s birth and childhood, but as he aged his life became less interesting. I didn’t enjoy the stories-within-the-story and the plot began to drag. I gave up after 245 pages (out of 570) but keep wondering if something exciting happens in the final section. Do you think it is worth persevering with this book? Does it return to the greatness of the opening chapters?

 

The Child Garden by Geoff Ryman

This book won the Arthur C Clarke Award in 1990. It is set in London in the near future and has a fascinating beginning. I loved the inventive predictions for the future, especially the way in which people are educated and controlled via viruses. Unfortunately the plot quickly became too complicated for me and I had no idea what was happening. The central character performs an opera based on Dante’s Divine Comedy, but I’m afraid the symbolism was lost on me. After reading 50 pages in a row in which I understood hardly anything I gave up. I’m passing this one on to my husband and hope he might be able to explain it to me. Does this book suddenly make sense after a certain number of pages?

The Diary of a Nobody by George Grossmith

I hadn’t heard heard of this book before watching Faulks on Fiction, but it was mentioned several times during the series and so I was intrigued enough to give it a try. Unfortunately I found it a tedious read. He lives a very dull life and I didn’t see the funny side of reading the diary of someone who does nothing noteworthy. I gave up after 70 pages. I assume that the rest of the book continues in the same vein?

Salvage by Robert Edric

I normally love predictions of what life will be like in the future, but although Salvage had a promising opening I quickly realised that this book provides a vision of what government bureaucracy might be like in 50 years time. Bureaucracy annoys me at the best of times and so it isn’t something I enjoy reading about. Does this book move away from the red tape?

Was I wrong to give up on any of these books?

Is there magic lurking in the final pages?

Categories
2010 Book Prizes Commonwealth Writer's Prize Other Prizes

Serious Men – Manu Joseph

 

Shortlisted for 2011 Commonwealth Prize South Asia & Europe Best First Book
Shortlisted for 2010 the Man Asian Literary Prize
Winner of 2010 Hindu Best Fiction Award

Five words from the blurb: Mumbai, slums, son, genius, comic

Serious Men had a controversial reception in India because it depicts a Dalit (someone of a lower caste) as being a victim of circumstance instead of having an inferior intelligence to the Brahmin (upper-caste people). This attitude offends many people in India who like to see that these social barriers remain unquestioned.

The book centres on Ayyan, a man so fed up of life in the slums that he decides to hatch a plan to elevate his position. He claims that his 10-year-old son is a mathematical genius, but whilst this gains the attention he was looking for, the lie quickly gets out of hand.

The book is quick and easy to read, but unfortunately the humour wasn’t to my taste and although I could spot the jokes they barely raised a smile in me.

Ayyan Mani’s thick black hair was combed sideways and parted by a careless broken line, like the borders the British used to draw between two hostile neighbours.

The book did a fantastic job of showing the differences between the Indian castes and the unjust way in which a person’s position at birth determines their outcome in life, but as a novel I found it unsatisfying. The story had little forward momentum and I was frequently bored by their trivial discussions.

Ayyan Mani surveyed the room with his back to the wall, as he had done many times, and tried to understand how it came to be that truth was now in the hands of these unreal men. They were in the middle of debating the perfect way to cut a cake and were concluding that carving triangular pieces, as everyone does, was inefficient. 

I also failed to connect with the characters on an emotional level.

I know that a lot of people will love this book and I did find a lot to like, but I’m afraid it just didn’t contain my kind of humour.

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The thoughts of other bloggers:

It’s the kind of book that you yearn to discuss, debate, analyze and always remember. At Pemberley

Joseph, a former editor of The Times of India, tries to weave a funny and clever novel about the ridiculousness of academia, and for the most part, he succeeds. Mumbai Boss

….this is an amazing book and follows in the league of White Tiger in terms of satire by Indian authors on society. Sandeepinlife’s Weblog

Categories
1960s 1970s Non Fiction Recommended books

The Mountain People – Colin Turnbull

  

…..our much-vaunted human values are not inherent in humanity at all, but a luxury of ordered society.

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Five words from the blurb: tribe, starvation, cruelty, individual, society 

In 1964 anthropologist Colin Turnbull spent two years living with the Ik, a tribe living in the mountainous borders of Uganda and Kenya. Crops had failed for two years in a row and people were dying from starvation. This book details the shocking events he witnessed as the people struggled to survive.

Turnbull saw that the basic structure of society seemed to have been lost as everyone cared only about themselves.

Children are useless appendages, like old parents. Anyone who cannot take care of himself is a burden and a hazard to the survival of others.

The old and young were left to die – food sometimes even being stolen from their mouths. The people failed to display any of the characteristics we think of as being common to all humans, failing to show the slightest degree of compassion for those who were suffering.

…she was totally blind and had tripped and rolled to the bottom of the oror a pirre’i, and there she lay on her back, her legs and arms thrashing feebly, while a little crowd standing on the edge above looked down at her and laughed at the spectacle.

The tribe were also unusual in that the structure of the family unit had completely broken down. Children were thrown out of the home at the age of three, elderly relatives were ignored, and even the husband-wife relationship was minimal.

This entire book had me gripped and questioning how strong our own society is. In many ways this book was similar to Blindness, but the scary thing is that Mountain People is true. Human beings actually did these things to one another and there is little to stop it from happening again somewhere else.

This book isn’t perfect – there are some points when the writing is a bit dry or when too many geographical or anthropological details are added to a section, but these are very minor issues.

This book is a fascinating insight into what could happen to a society when there simply isn’t enough food for all to survive. It is my favourite read of the year so far.

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So how did I discover this fantastic book?
After my disapproval of Anne Robinson as a host on the recent My Life in Books TV series (because she doesn’t like fiction) I am almost embarrassed to admit that I first heard about this book in an article she wrote for the Radio Times. All I can say is that Anne Robinson has a fantastic taste in non-fiction books and I will be keeping an eye out for more of her recommendations in future.

Categories
2011

The Final Testament of the Holy Bible – James Frey

 

Five words from the blurb: Messiah, New York, healing, enraged, controversial

James Frey is clearly courting controversy with this book. The title and Bible-like lay-out of the text will cause offense to some people before they’ve read a single word. Frey ensures that this outrage is continued by filling the first chapter with an unusually high density swear words – the concentration of which isn’t repeated anywhere else in the book.

I had no plans to read this book, but a copy popped through my letter box from the publishers and once I started reading it I couldn’t put it down. The basic premise is that the Messiah is alive and living in New York. I found the concept interesting as anyone in our society who claims that they can perform miracles or speak to God is generally not taken very seriously.

Each chapter is written from the perspective of a person who comes into contact with Ben Zion (the supposed son of God). Initially the narrators know little about the man, but as the book progresses we hear from those who are closer to him and so more information is revealed.

I loved the first half of this book – it was fast paced and entertaining. In many ways it reminded me of a Dan Brown book, but with better structure and less historical research.

The text was initially a lot less controversial than I had expected from the cover. Whenever a potentially controversial statement was made it was balanced by another character expressing the opposing view, or by one so charming that few could disagree with it:

Biblical stories were written decades, and sometimes centuries, after the events they supposedly depict, events for which there is absolutely no historical evidence. There is no such thing as God’s word on earth. Or if there is, it is not to be found in books.
Then where is it to be found?
In love. In the laughter of children. In a gift given. In a life saved. In the quiet of morning. In the dead of night. In the sound of the ocean, or the sound of a car. It can be found in anything, anywhere. It is the fabric of our lives, our feelings, the people we live with, things we know to be real.

Unfortunately the book went downhill towards the end. We started to see the ways in which Ben Zion ‘loved’ everyone and I felt that James Frey was just trying to throw as many controversial scenes into the text as possible. It wasn’t necessary for him to sleep with everyone (male and female) and I was inwardly groaning as he made a girl pregnant and then took her for an abortion. It wasn’t necessary and just undermined what could have been a good book.

I also struggled with the writing style in the last 100 pages – it became overly sentimental and more like something written by Mitch Albom than the faster pace of the first section.

I found much of the book entertaining, but ultimately I was disappointed by the way in which controversial scenes were added to the text for no good reason. This book is guaranteed to start a conversation, but unfortunately it isn’t going to be a very intelligent one.

Categories
Orange Prize Other

The 2011 Orange Prize Shortlist

The Orange Prize shortlist has just been announced as:

I predicted four out of the six correctly, but I was surprised that A Visit from the Goon Squad didn’t make the list – especially since it has been winning every prize it has been eligible for recently.

Who will win the Orange Prize?

I have no idea! I would guess that Great House or The Memory of Love has the greatest chance of winning, but as Room has been shortlisted I think it will still be in with a chance. I also wouldn’t be surprised if The Tiger’s Wife took the title – in fact I don’t think the field has been this wide open for a while.

What do you think of the shortlist?

Who do you think will win?