Category: Publication Date

Categories
1990s Historical Fiction

Stonehenge – Bernard Cornwell

In preparation for hearing Bernard Cornwell talk I wanted to read one of his books. The reviews on Amazon seem to indicate that his King Arthur books are the best, but unfortunately my library didn’t have a copy of The Winter King in stock and so I ended up with Stonehenge. I was equally intrigued by the historical setting, but the Amazon reviews were a lot less enthusiastic and so I wonder if I picked the wrong book to try.

Stonehenge gives a plausible account of events leading up to the construction of the iconic neolithic monument. The story focuses on two brothers who are battling to become the tribal King. We witness the tribal feuds and rituals and learn about the way people lived in 2000 BC.

The historical detail was fascinating and there were several scenes, especially those containing ritual sacrifice, that affected me deeply. The problem was that the sections between these gripping scenes were too long – the plot meandered and I frequently found myself loosing interest. It was a real chore to read much of this book and I almost gave up a few times. I had no emotional connection to the characters and although I learnt about their belief systems, I didn’t feel as though I really understood their fears or motivations.

I have been lucky enough to read several very well written books recently and Stonehenge stood out for the averageness of its writing. I can’t pinpoint what was wrong, but I felt that the scenes failed to come alive. The writing was serviceable, rather than special.

Saban hardly slept, but instead lay and listened to the noises of the night. Once he heard the crackling of twigs, the sound of a great body moving through the brush, then silence again in which he imagined a monstrous head, fangs bared, questing up to the elm. A scream sounded on the ridge, and Saban curled into a ball and whimpered. An owl screeched. The boy’s only comforts were the stars of his ancestors, the cold light of Lahanna silvering the leaves and his thoughts of Derrewyn. He thought of her a lot. He tried to conjure up a picture of her face. Once, thinking about her, he looked up and saw a streak of light slither across the stars and he knew that a god was descending to the earth which he took to be a sign that he and Derrewyn were destined for each other.

Overall I feel that the negatives far out-weigh the positives for this book and so I’m afraid I can’t recommend it.

Did I just pick the wrong Cornwell book?

Are the problems I describe present in the King Arthur books?

Categories
2009 Commonwealth Writer's Prize

Solo by Rana Dasgupta

  Winner of 2010 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize

The Commonwealth Writers’ Prize is my favourite book award and so I’m very pleased that it lived up to my expectations and provided me with another wonderful book that I wouldn’t have discovered without it.

Solo is set in Bulgaria and as I love science I was very excited to see that the central character is a chemist. Now a blind, old man, he reflects upon how much has changed over the course of his life and explains the difficult situations he faced over the years.

I knew very little about the history of Bulgaria before reading this book and it was nice to find out so much about this country’s difficult past. The combination of both European and Asian ancestry, and the struggle against communism makes me wonder why I haven’t read more fiction set in this fascinating country before.

The book was very well written and successfully managed to combine science with literature – a feat few authors can manage without patronising readers with a scientific background or going over the heads of those that don’t.

I loved the first half of this book which followed the chemist’s life in a fairly linear fashion. He was such an endearing, slightly grumpy character, but packed with the wisdom of a long and complicated life.

He switches on his television for a bit of sound to eat his beans by. He is irritated by the weather programmes that come on the international channels. Ignorant people judging the world’s weather. In that place it will be a nice day because there is pure sunshine. They estimate a nice day as when you can sit outside in sunglasses and drink coffee that no normal person can afford. Their minds cannot consider that a place is full of people cursing because there is no rain.

I found the second half much less enjoyable. It consisted of “daydreams” which could otherwise be described as a collection of short stories. The writing quality remained high, but I lost that emotional attachment to the chemist, so it felt a bit disconnected.

Overall this is a wonderful book. I recommend it to all lovers of literary fiction, if only so you learn a bit about Bulgarian history.

Categories
2009 Audio Book

The School of Essential Ingredients – Erica Bauermeister (Audio Book)

Note: This book is called The Monday Night Cooking School in the UK, but is only available as an audio book under the title The School of Essential Ingredients.

I bought a copy of this book after Sandy raved about it and then included it in her top ten of the year. Good audio books are very hard to find, but Sandy listens to a lot of them and so if she raves about one then I know I’m in safe hands.

The School of Essential Ingredients is a weekly cookery class run by Lillian, a restaurant owner who taught herself to cook as a child in order to connect with her mother, a woman who had become depressed after her husband left her.

Each week the book focuses on a different one of the eight cookery students; we learn a bit about their lives and Lillian uses food to help them through their various problems.

Warning: This book will make you hungry!

The book is packed with amazing descriptions of food preparation – I could almost taste each dish as it was described and in many cases I wanted to rush out and make it. I think this is mainly down to the wonderful narration provided by Cassandra Campbell – she made the book come alive! I can’t imagine enjoying the print version of this book – I think I’d have found the recipes tedious and the lack of momentum would have led me to give up.

I’m not a fan of short stories and I’m afraid this book suffered from being more like a selection of short stories than a novel. The stories of each cookery student were very different and I had hoped everything would be brought together in the end, but I’m afraid they failed to link up and the book seemed to end quite abruptly.

I also found the book to be a bit overly sentimental and there were a few too many metaphors for my liking:

What did she do that made her happy? The question implied action, a conscious purpose. She did many things in a day, and many things made her happy, but that, Claire could tell, wasn’t the issue. Nor the only one, Claire realized. Because in order to consciously do something that made you happy, you’d have to know who you were. Trying to figure that out these days was like fishing on a lake on a moonless night–you had no idea what you would get.

Note: Trying to get a quote from an audio book is very hard, so I copied this quote from this wonderful quotes and passages blog.

A slightly amusing problem was caused by the fact this is an American book. Many foods have different names and although I knew most of them, there was a point when I wondered why she was decorating a cake with okra. It took me a few minutes to realise that Lady’s Fingers are something very different in America!!

Despite these criticisms it did inspire me to cook and on the whole I enjoyed listening to it.

Recommended to those interested in cookery.

I couldn’t find a negative review for this book:

I absolutely adored this book, and I’m going to be recommending it to everyone. Booking Mama

…if you’ve never read a food-related novel, this is where to start. A Reader’s Respite

Don’t read this book when you are hungry; it will probably be unbearable. S. Krishna’s Books

Categories
2010 Richard and Judy Book Club

The Crying Tree – Naseem Rakha

 Richard and Judy Winter Reads 2010

The Crying Tree is all about forgiveness. The book follows an American family as they come to terms with the murder of their teenage son. The murderer, Daniel Robbins, is on death row and the family exhibit a range of different reactions to his imminent execution. Set over several decades, we see the family before and after their son’s murder and the difficult spectrum of emotions they go through in trying to continue life without him.

I loved the first half of the book – it was fast paced and totally gripping. There were several touching sections and I did find myself genuinely sad about Shep’s death.

Shep was rolling a ball back and forth between his legs. He was crying because up beyond the trees the moon was all broken. He was tucked beside her as she read and laughing as she sang. He was riding his bike, and going to his first day of school, and playing the piano and the horn. Shep was smiling and laughing. Shep was her boy, he was just her little boy….

Unfortunately the book became increasingly sentimental and the theme of forgiveness became overbearing. By the half way point I was bored.

The characters were stereotypical and as I learned more about them I became increasingly annoyed by them. The twist in the end was the final straw. I won’t give anything away, but it ruined the entire book for me. The twist was unnecessary and took away from the message that the book was trying to deliver.

Recommended to those who like light, sentimental reads. 

Literary fiction lovers seem to have the biggest problem with this book:

Rakha is a bit heavyhanded with the message at times…. The Book Lady’s Blog

Naseem Rakha writes beautifully and with such depth of emotion at times I felt the suffocation that such pain and grief brings. The Eclectic Reader

The writing was so vivid that I felt as though this family was going through a real trauma, that this novel was in fact a true story. Book Addiction

I couldn’t quite bring myself to care about the people in this book because they felt less like people and more like representatives of various points of view. Shelf Love

Categories
2010 Recommended books

The Cuckoo Boy – Grant Gillespie

The Cuckoo Boy was recently short listed for the Not the Booker Prize, but it appealed to me from the moment I first heard about it.

The book is about a boy who was adopted at birth. His twin brother is said to have died, but we know next to nothing about his birth family or the reasons for his adoption.

James’ new mother is Sandra. She struggles to cope with him and as he grows he becomes increasingly difficult. As soon as James can talk he tells everyone about his friend, David; the only problem is that no-one else can see this imaginary friend. The two boys collude to commit increasingly evil acts, but there is always a reason for their actions and so the reader is left wondering whether the children are evil or just unlucky.

This book reminded me of The Fifth Child, but it also had elements of We Need to Talk About Kevin, and classic Gothic ghost stories. I loved the way in which we never knew whether David was the ghost of James’ twin brother or just a figment of James’ imagination. Many episodes of the book were quite chilling and so this is the perfect book for Halloween.

I’m always fascinated by books which explore motherhood. The Cuckoo Boy is especially good for discussions about whether children are born evil or whether it is the fault of the parents. The fact that Sandra isn’t James’ biological mother leads to some interesting insights into maternal bonding and I was impressed by the way in which the emotions of motherhood were accurately described.

This book was gripping and thought provoking, but it also contained many of the amusing observations that only young children can get away with. There were so many talking points that I’m sure I could spend hours discussing it – making it a perfect book club choice.

Highly recommended to anyone interested in books about motherhood.

Categories
1990s Booker Prize

How Late It Was, How Late – James Kelman

 Winner of the 1994 Booker Prize   

How Late It Was, How Late is set in Glasgow and follows Sammy, who wakes up in the gutter after a night of heavy drinking to discover that his shoes have been stolen. He gets into a fight with some plainclothes policemen (“sodjers”) and ends up in a police cell. Badly beaten, he wakes to discover that he is blind and so begins the difficult task of learning to live without his sight whilst also trying to avoid being blamed for a crime he knows nothing about.  

I started off hating this book. The stream of consciousness writing style combined with frequent swearing and the Glaswegian dialect meant that I had trouble connecting with it, but I persevered and slowly became used to the writing style. I found that if I read it in large chunks then I could immerse myself in the Glaswegian dialect and the bad language became a natural part of the conversation.   

Plus ye couldnay quite predict what they were up to, the sodjers. So he was gony have to go careful. So fuck the drink there was nay time, nay time, he had to be compos mentis. Whatever brains he had man he had to use them. Nay fuck-ups. The things in yer control and the things out yer control. Ye watch the detail. Nay bolts-from-the-blue. Nayn of these flukey things ye never think about. Total concentration. 

After about 50 pages I was amazed to find that I started to like Sammy – I began to feel sorry for him and even found some of the book funny.   

It wasn’t an easy read – the book flipped forwards and backwards in time and sentences were often left without an end. It took me a long time to read this book and there were several points at which I nearly gave up. Very little happens and the middle dragged. I think that if the book had been 200 pages shorter then I’d have appreciated it a lot more.

This book is packed with symbolism and I’m sure it could benefit from multiple re-reads. I’m glad I glimpsed Sammy’s life, but I’m not sure I’d want to read about him again.

Recommended to fans of literary fiction who enjoy reading about the darker areas of society.

Did you enjoy How Late It Was, How Late?

Do you recommend any of Kelman’s other books?