The Heart Goes Last

The Heart Goes Last (2015)
by Margaret Atwood

Clearly, Margaret Atwood is a little bit awesome. She's been short-listed for the Booker Prize FIVE TIMES, for The Handmaid's Tale in 1985, Cat's Eye in 1988, Alias Grace in 1996, The Blind Assassin in 2000 and Oryx & Crake in 2003 (all of which are well worth checking out, if you haven't already read them). Over a forty-six year career, Margaret Atwood has written poetry, fiction, non-fiction, short stories, children's books and screenplays. Obviously there's not much she can't do. She is fantastic and her new novel The Heart Goes Last is just a bit more fantastic to add to the collection.

Set in the near future, amid economic collapse, The Heart Goes Last is the story of married couple Stan and Charmaine. Barely scraping by on one very small wage and sleeping in their car, they constantly fear for their own physical safety and dream of financial security. Desperate, Stan and Charmaine sign up for a "social experiment" called the Positron Project. Resettled in the safe and pleasant town of Consilience, Stan and Charmaine have a lovely new home, steady employment, security, plenty to eat and drink... There's just one minor downside - they spend every second month in prison, switching places with another couple (their "alternates") who live in their lovely home while Stan and Charmaine are incarcerated.
Not perfect, perhaps, but still a notable improvement in circumstances - even in prison there is great food, rewarding jobs and busy social calendars. Styled to resemble 1950s America "because that was the decade in which most people had self-identified as being happy", Consilience offers Stan and Charmaine a fabulous new lifestyle and they couldn't be happier. At first. Over time, both Stan and Charmaine become increasingly fixated on their mysterious alternates, as their marriage begins to implode and Consilience's sunny veneer begins to crack.

Consilience. Presumably a little something like this.

Margaret Atwood's writing has been described as "speculative fiction" - it's kind of like Science Fiction, but not exactly, because the science parts are largely absent (no aliens or time travel or spaceships), the settings aren't too far removed from the present day, and the themes are universal. Originally written as a series of short e-books, The Heart Goes Last is exactly this kind of story. Initially dark and dystopian, the tone lightens over the course of the book as it becomes surrealistic, chaotic and genuinely funny. There are squads of gay Elvis impersonators, an ex-prostitute obsessively in love with a blue teddy bear, sexbots and chicken farms used for nefarious purposes (amongst a whole lot of other oddness). It's dark and sinister and cautionary in parts, but it's also delightfully weird, with a tone reminiscent of some of Chuck Palahniuk's best work (Lullaby and Invisible Monsters spring to mind).

I'm just going to leave this here...

It's unique and a little strange, but never lightweight - there are some pretty deep themes lurking in there, around free will and the sacrifices we're prepared to make for security, around sexism and relationships and the ways in which we misunderstand other people. As you'd expect from Margaret Atwood, it's also fantastically well-written - so compelling that I blasted through the whole thing in one day - and it leaves you with something to ponder. Fabulous.

9/10

Fortunately, the Milk

Fortunately, the Milk (2013)
by Neil Gaiman

There are plenty of times when being a parent is just a little bit shit. Having kids means that you have no money, no spare time, no nice things, no decent sleep and usually no real idea of where you are or what you're meant to be doing.
There are some times, though, when being a parent is kind of cool. Having a legitimate excuse to read a children's book while introducing your child to the joys of fantastically weird fiction - well, that's one of those times. If I didn't have kids, I probably never would have read Fortunately, the Milk, and following on from the soul-destroying masterpiece I'd recently finished reading (A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara), this book was exactly what I needed.

Written by the incomparable Neil Gaiman (Stardust, American Gods, Coraline, Anansi Boys, The Ocean at the End of the Lane - if you're not already familiar with Neil Gaiman, I suggest you pop into your local library immediately) and delightfully illustrated by Chris Riddell, Fortunately, the Milk is the story of a dad who pops out to buy milk. Returning home with the milk after an unexpectedly long delay, Dad is asked what took him so long. What follows is a fantastical tale of adventure, suspense and inter-dimensional time travel with Dad striving to protect the milk and bring it home to his children.

"Dad" and Neil Gaiman himself - not dissimilar in appearance...

Fortunately, the Milk includes everything a kid could possibly want in a book. And I really do mean everything. There are aliens, pirates, time-travelling dinosaurs, explosions, hot air balloons, a volcano god, vampires and sparkly ponies, to name just a few. There is not a single boring sentence to be found.
All of which makes this a great choice for reading to kids because it's charming and interesting and funny for adults, too. It also means that kids love it. My son is six, so still relatively new to this whole reading thing (and possibly a little younger than the target audience) and this book was an absolute revelation for him. I have never seen him quite so captivated by a book - any book that can make a six-year-old ignore video games has got to be a winner.

We bought the electronic version of Fortunately, the Milk for 99c on Amazon. Bargain! It looks like it's gone back up to $4 now, but this is still a pretty small price to pay for absolute brilliance. The version we bought also includes embedded video of Neil Gaiman introducing the book and discussing parts of the story - unfortunately my Kindle is not fancy enough to do this, so instead we just got a sad-looking "Your device does not support video playback" message. If you have a slightly fancier device, however, I'm sure that this would add to the whole experience.

I don't know why this photo insists on turning itself sideways, but you get the idea...

There are plenty of people despairing about kids spending too much time staring at screens and not enough time reading. The best way to get kids reading? Give them something fantastic to read (and stop trying to ban books, of course)!
Reading should be fun. If books were more fun than TV and Minecraft, kids would probably choose to read a lot more often and books like Fortunately, the Milk are doing a great job of making reading WAY more fun than anything on TV.

If you happen to know any children, buy this book and read it to them. If you don't know any kids, just buy it for yourself - who wouldn't enjoy a story about a time-travelling Stegosaurus?

The time-travelling dinosaur in question, accompanied by Dad and a carton of milk.

9/10 (if the video playback had worked, it totally would've been a 10)

A Little Life

A Little Life
by Hanya Yanagihara (2015)

I finished this book a couple of weeks ago and it's taken me quite a while to get around to writing anything about it. This is not because there's nothing to say about it, but rather that there's so much I could say, that I'm struggling to know where to start... Let's start with this: A Little Life is an absolute masterpiece. It will suck you in so that you stay up late at night reading. It will make you feel like you know the characters, like they are your friends, like you understand them - then it will tear out your heart, throw it on the floor and jump up and down on it so that you're sobbing in a corner. This will not be subtle crying; this is not eyes-welling-up-a-bit territory. This is soul-destroying, snot-nosed, making awful noises, rocking in a corner crying. Consider this fair warning.
A Little Life is beautiful, surprising, insightful , powerful and absolutely devastating.

This kind of crying. Do not read this book on public transport.

In the first few chapters, we meet four friends - charismatic aspiring actor Willem, earnest junior architect Malcolm, outgoing experimental artist J.B. and enigmatic lawyer Jude. Initially, A Little Life is a book about four friends in New York, but over time the narrative starts to focus more on one character in particular and we realise that actually, this is all about Jude. Jokingly called Jude the Postman by JB ("post-sexual, post-racial, post-identity, post-past") when the friends first meet at university, Jude is an orphan with leg braces and a mysterious past. As the four men get older, Jude's emotional problems become more obvious - he self-harms, he bluntly refuses to discuss anything prior to university, his love life is so discreet that nobody's even sure whether he prefers men or women. Through a series of flashbacks, we learn more about Jude's past and his problems become more understandable as the horror of his childhood becomes clear. At best, it's Dickensian childhood initially - abandoned amongst trash in an alleyway, baby Jude is taken in by a group of no-nonsense monks who raise him in a monastery with plenty of corporal punishment and an absence of affection. Not exactly an ideal environment for a child, but it gets much, much worse from here.

Seemingly at random, the narrative moves back and forward in time, slowly adding layer upon layer to each of the characters, especially Jude. The tense changes as well - sometime past, sometimes present - so that it's never quite clear when the story is being told from. Not only that, but the narration switches between different characters' points of view and even between first-person, third-person and even second-person narrative ("Ah, you tell yourself, it's arrived. Here it is. And after that, you have nothing to fear again"). This sounds like a messy, confusing tangle of crazy but it's not - it's so masterfully done that you don't even notice what's happening with the narrative because you're so caught up in the story and the characters.

Hanya Yanagihari - so very good at what she does.

In some ways it's so easy to read - Hanya Yanagihara's simple, heartfelt writing keeps the pages turning until you suddenly realise it's 3am and you need to get up in two hours (there aren't many 700+ page books that I'd describe as page-turners, but this is one of them). On the other hand, this is a really, really difficult read. A Little Life pulls no punches. Jude's early life is absolutely horrifying and his traumas are recounted in awful detail, in passages that are so very painful to read. Even the title of the book hurts - it's referenced in a few different places earlier in the book to refer to Jude's concept of his small, broken, limited existence; sometimes in a negative way (that is, that he'll never be able to live a proper, full life like those around him) and sometimes a positive way (that maybe a nice, little life is not so much to ask for and maybe it might be achievable). Later in the book, in a flashback to Jude's childhood, the phrase "a little life" is used in a whole different way and it quite literally takes your breath away. Not in a good way. In a someone-just-punched-you-in-the-gut-and-you-might-vomit kind of way. I won't say any more about this, but when you get there, you'll know it. I have never been so emotionally affected by a book in my life.

The storyline of A Little Life would be easy to scoff at. Jude's childhood is so awful, the abuse he's subjected to so completely abhorrent that it would be easy to brush off as over-dramatic. In adulthood, things take a turn for the overwhelmingly positive with Jude and his friends becoming, rich, successful, famous... Is it realistic? Probably not. Does it matter? Not in the slightest. The novel works beautifully and the relationships at the heart of it all are wonderfully written.
In parts, A Little Life is a touching celebration of the importance of friendship: "Wasn't friendship its own miracle, the finding of another person who made the entire lonely world seem somehow less lonely?".  The relationships between Jude, Willem, Malcolm and JB are heartfelt, nuanced, unique and so very believable. Each of the characters is so complex and well-detailed that you really do feel like they're real people with real thoughts and ambitions and experiences, none more so than Jude himself.
Jude is intelligent and sweet and earnest and so very broken. As a reader, seeing Jude through his friends' eyes it's so clear and easy to see why they all love him; from Jude's point of view though, it's also easy to see why he finds this impossible to understand. This is a man struggling to make a life for himself after being almost destroyed by events he should never have had to live through. All you want for Jude is for things to go well, and for him to believe that he deserves it.

Jude, Willem, Malcolm & JB. Like this, but more multi-cultural and fifty years younger.

There was a news story a few weeks ago about the child welfare organisation meant to help kids like Jude here in New Zealand. According to the latest report, 117 children were abused in 2013/2014 while in CYF custody. I'm sure I would've thought this appalling anyway, but in the immediate aftermath of reading A Little Life, I've found this absolutely horrifying. 117 abused children, feeling as lost and worthless as Jude did. 117 children growing up into broken adults like Jude. 117 people who may never get over the things that have happened to them. Obviously, it's 117 too many but I feel like A Little Life gives these kids something of a voice - these are 117 little lives, not just numbers in a report.

I guess that's my main takeaway from this book - it stays with you. It affects the way you look at people and the way you look at life. It's sweet and beautifully-written and heart-warming and heart-breaking all at the same time. Nominated for the Man Booker prize this year, A Little Life absolutely deserves to win.

10/10

A God in Ruins

A God in Ruins (2015)
by Kate Atkinson

I should probably start by saying that I didn't actually like this book much to start with. A God in Ruins follows on from Kate Atkinson's 2014 novel Life After Life, the fantastic, quirkily-told story of Ursula Todd, who gets to start her life over and over again, dying in a number of different ways but then getting another chance to do things differently (resulting in all sorts of differing consequences). A "companion piece" rather than a sequel, A God in Ruins follows the life of Ursula's much-loved little brother Teddy from childhood through his years as a World War 2 bomber pilot and into old age. The unique oops-I-died-let's-try-that-again structure of the earlier book is notably absent; instead A God in Ruins is a more straightforward retelling of a man's life. I loved Life After Life, so spent the first few chapters of this book getting increasingly frustrated that Teddy only seemed to be getting one go at life, while the plotline jumped all over the place (one chapter we're in the 1920s, the next it's fifty years later, then we're back in the middle of WW2 again...). I almost gave up on this book completely but I'm so glad I stuck with it. About a third of the way through the book, it stopped being hard work. By halfway, I was kind of enjoying it. By the time I finished it, A God in Ruins had become one of my absolute favourite books. Do not give up on this book.

The scale of A God in Ruins is enormous. Over the life of one man, it covers almost 100 years of history and four generations (Teddy's parents, Teddy himself, his daughter Viola and his grandchildren Sunny and Bertie) with a huge cast of well-developed characters. A God in Ruins doesn't follow any kind of standard chronological order - instead we skip back and forward throughout Teddy's life, as the narrative jumps randomly from one point in time to another and then back again. It's disorienting and a little frustrating to start with (just as you start to get a handle on what's happening, the story shifts to a completely different character in a different time and place) but it's masterfully done. Each fragment of the story adds another layer to each of the characters and sheds a bit more light on the relationships between them, the interactions rich in convincing and sometimes heartbreaking little details - ""Daddy!" Bertie shouted, barrelling past... "Hey", their father said, taking a step backward as if his daughter might be attacking him".
This creates an absolute masterpiece of a novel where the characters feel like real people who you know and love.

Not only does A God in Ruins introduce a fabulous set of characters and tell a fascinating story, it's also beautifully written. Teddy nurses ambitions to be a poet and sees the world in his own unique way - this lends a certain charm to his thoughts and colours everything in the book, even those passages that you wouldn't normally expect to be described so poetically. For example, in the middle of a high-adrenaline scene during a bombing raid: "At one thousand feet they could see the white horses on the crests of the waves. Fifteen, perhaps twenty foot high. Tempest-tossed, Teddy thought" or "They had been awestruck not only by the sight of the Alps by moonlight but by the depthless inky-black skies, pricked with thousands upon thousands of stars - bright seed broadcast by some dangerous god, Teddy thought, drifting dangerously close to the forsaken realm of poetry" Teddy's self-deprecating attitude towards his own literary ambitions helps these passages to ring true without seeming pretentious or out of place. It's very clever.

A Halifax bomber (less famous cousin of the Lancaster) like those flown by Teddy. Around 50% of bomber crews died. 

A God in Ruins is the story of one man's life, all of the people he meets along the way and all of the ripples he creates in the world. It's also a story about World War 2 and it's a really, really good one complete with a number of absolute edge-of-your-seat moments as Teddy's crew joins bombing raids over Europe, with planes falling from the sky all around them. Hit a few times but never down for long, Teddy is one of the very few to survive the war and the following decades of his life somehow underscore the terrible waste of so many other lives: "Fifty-five thousand, five hundred and seventy-three dead from Bomber Command. Seven million German dead, including the five hundred thousand killed by the Allied bombing campaign. The sixty million dead overall of the Second World War, including eleven million murdered in the Holocaust. The sixteen million of the First World War, over four million in Vietnam, forty million to the Mongol conquests, three and a half million to the Hundred Years War, the fall of Rome took seven million, twenty million to the Taiping Rebellion. And so on and so on, all the way back to the Garden where Cain killed Abel. All the birds who were never born, all the songs that were never sung and so can only exist in the imagination" All those young men dead (Teddy describes them rather brutally as birds thrown at a brick wall), who might've gone on to live long and complex lives like Teddy's - all those futures wasted. It's not a new message when it comes to war novels, but Kate Atkinson puts an original and affecting spin on it.

The title of the novel comes from Ralph Waldo Emerson, who wrote "A man is a god in ruins. When men are innocent, life shall be longer, and shall pass into the immortal, as gently as we awake from dreams" Teddy is complex and at times misunderstood, but he's ultimately a good man in the final stages of a very long life. It may be true that a gentle "passing into the immortal" is the most that any of us can hope for but I would challenge anyone to reach the end of A God in Ruins and contemplate Teddy's impending death without a tear in your eye. I'll say no more about the ending itself, except that it will surprise you and it might just break your heart.

I could not recommend this book more highly - it is absolutely brilliant (and if you haven't already done so, read Life After Life; it's fantastic too).

10/10

Shades of Grey

Shades of Grey (2010)

by Jasper Fforde


Jasper Fforde is nothing if not original. He writes in a way that makes the most ridiculous things seem perfectly normal. The Big Over Easy, for example, is a detective story written in a noir style, featuring hard-nosed officer Jack Spratt as he investigates the murder of Humpty Dumpty. This is not a children's book; it's a fast-moving, absorbing murder mystery that just happens to include (for no apparent reason) a cast of nursery rhyme characters. Beginning with The Eyre Affair, Jasper Fforde's Tuesday Next series follows the misadventures of Agent Tuesday Next, who investigates literary crimes. You know, crimes that happen in books. She goes into literature, interacts with the characters in said books and solves crimes for them. She also has a pet dodo, as you do.
Shades of Grey is another brilliantly written, inventive and original novel, worlds apart from that other book with the similar name.



Shades of Grey is set several hundred years in the future in a post-apocalyptic England, where humans have lost most of their ability to perceive colour and your place in the social hierarchy is determined by which colours you're able to see. Most people can only see one colour (maybe two if you're lucky, none at all if you're a miserably unlucky Grey) with different colours carrying different levels of esteem. Narrator Eddie Russet is a middle-class Red, who aims to move up the social ladder a bit by marrying higher-class Constance Oxblood. Sent to the Outer Fringes to conduct a "chair census", Eddie meets temperamental, hot-headed and occasionally violent Jane, one of the lowest-of-the-low Greys. As Eddie becomes somewhat infatuated with Jane, he runs afoul of the local authorities and begins to question the rules and laws at the very heart of his society.

Parts of Shades of Grey are deeply creepy. It's a very Orwellian perspective on the future, with a totalitarian government ruling the people with an iron fist, pedantic rules and strict laws enforced with threats of violence and some lives (those of the Greys, in particular) worth very little. Those who don't follow the rules tend to disappear and while their fates aren't exactly known, it's pretty clear that things haven't ended well for them. It's not all dark though - Jasper Fforde's distinctive humour keeps things from getting too dark and adds a quirky, decidedly British flavour to things. There are tea shops on every corner, there's a severe jam shortage and cutlery is no longer being produced, so teaspoons are prized possessions. As Eddie says, despite the evils of the world around him, "there is no problem on Earth that can't be ameliorated by a hot bath and a cup of tea".
Every know and then random remnants are found from the present world and wildly misinterpreted - for example, the only remaining "map" is a copy of the boardgame Risk, leading to a slightly warped idea of what the world might have been like in the time before "The Something That Happened". There are government-ordered "Leapbacks" every few years, in which various previously-approved technologies are banned (like telephones, or cutlery, or indoor lighting) much to the confusion and frustration of the general population.

Well, it's not wrong, exactly...

Jasper Fforde walks a fine line between comedy and dark futuristic fantasy with plenty of political satire thrown in for good measure. He is incredibly good at what he does and Shades of Grey is a fantastic read - compelling, dramatic and exciting, but also genuinely funny. There's some serious subject matter in there that will really make you think, but Fforde's light-hearted tone prevents it from all becoming too much. Right from the first paragraph, the wry humour sets the tone: "It began with my father not wanting to see the Last Rabbit and ended up with my being eaten by a carnivorous plant. It wasn't really what I'd planned for myself - I'd hoped to marry into the Oxbloods and join their dynastic string empire. But that was four days ago, before I met Jane, retrieved the Caravaggio and explored High Saffron. So instead of enjoying aspirations of Chromatic advancement, I was wholly immersed within the digestive soup of a yateveo tree. It was all frightfully inconvenient."

A yateveo tree. Doesn't look like a particularly pleasant way to go.

Like any good Jasper Fforde book, Shades of Grey is strange, compelling and delightful. It's packed full of clever little details, making this completely oddball idea of a chromatically-based apartheid seem perfectly believable on not just a little bit horrifying. The only part that's a little frustrating is just how long it seems to take Eddie to realise that things aren't quite right - hey, maybe chromatically-based slavery isn't such a great thing after all! Maybe people should be able to marry outside of their own colour! Maybe all those mysteriously disappearing people aren't going to some nice farm somewhere! As a reader, you figure out what's going on quite some time before poor old Eddie does. But that's a minor criticism of a book that's otherwise quite spectacular.

The wonderfully weird Jasper Fforde

Apparently there's a sequel to be released in 2016, which can't come soon enough, as far as I'm concerned. Give Jasper Fforde a go - I guarantee you've never read anything quite like his books ever before.

9/10

In the Unlikely Event

In the Unlikely Event (2015)
by Judy Blume

When I was eleven years old, Judy Blume was my absolute favourite author. I adored her. I read every single one of her books (or at least, every one published prior to 1992) - I know this, because I ticked them off on a list I'd made. Arguably a little bit tragic, but I was completely devoted to all things Blume. So, when I heard she'd released a new novel this year (and adult novel, even), I was all sorts of excited. And much like the books I loved in childhood, In the Unlikely Event is a fantastically absorbing story, although in this case it's a story focused around the frightening events of Judy Blume's own adolescence.

In the early 1950's, three commercial airliners crashed in Judy Blume's hometown of Elizabeth, New Jersey within a period of just eight weeks, killing 118 people. In the Unlikely Event tells a fictionalised version of the real-life events, seen mostly through the eyes of fourteen-year-old Miri Ammerman. The short chapters switch narrators, including viewpoints from Miri and her friends, as well as their parents, grandparents and other adults in town, even down to chapters narrated by passengers on the doomed airliners. Most of the action, though, revolves around Miri - she's a spirited, independent teenager (reminiscent of a number of the characters from Judy Blume's earlier YA novels) from a single-parent family. Surrounded by great friends and devoted to mysterious new boyfriend Mason, Miri's life is pretty well derailed by the series of crashes.
As planes continue to fall on their town, the people of Elizabeth are panicked and confused - conspiracy theories abound and petitions are drawn up. In the aftermath of the crashes, people's attitudes begin to change too, with some relationships crumbling and others blooming (get it?) as priorities and beliefs are turned upside down.

In the Unlikely Event is chock-full of detail, bringing 1950s America to life in full colour. Clearly I don't have personal experience of 1950s America, but this all seemed completely convincing to me (and educational. Who knew there were fax machines in the 1950s?). There are so many rich little details in every chapter - things like jukeboxes, angora sweaters, Elizabeth Taylor haircuts, Oldsmobile cars, rumours of Commies and A-Bombs...
None of this comes across as cheesy or contrived; it's just a completely convincing portrait of a very particular time and place.

 

Priorities in the airline industry were arguably a little different in the 1950s...

The short chapters and regular switches between characters work well to keep the story short, punchy and interesting, despite it being a relatively long book at 397 pages. This unique style gives the reader a glimpse into the lives and stories of a number of different people, but also means that there's not a particularly clear over-arching storyline. Each of the characters has their own story happening and the structure of In the Unlikely Event gives the reader a real slice-of-life view of a whole community during an incredibly challenging time; like the coming-of-age story of an entire town.

Reporting on the real-life events in Elizabeth, New Jersey.

This can't have been an easy book for Judy Blume to write, but I'm so glad that she did. Like so many other Judy Blume books, it's an absorbing and entertaining coming-of-age story but it's also a sweet and heart-felt tribute to her hometown and a series of terrible events that happened there. Clearly it's a topic close to the author's heart. In the book, she writes:
"After enough time it fades and you're grateful.
Not that it's ever completely gone.
It's still there, buried deep, a part of you.
The stench is gone from your nostrils now
Unless someone leaves the kettle on to boil and forgets about it.
The nightmares have tapered out.
There are more pressing things to dream about, to worry over, to keep you awake at night.
Aging parents, adolescent children, work, money, the state of the world.
Life goes on, as our parents promised that winter.
Life goes on if you're one of the lucky ones.
But we're still part of a secret club,
One we'd never willingly join,
With members who have nothing in common except a time and a place.
We'll always be connected by that winter.
Anyone who tells you different is lying."

Now 77 years old, Judy Blume has implied that In the Unlikely Event could be her final novel. I sincerely hope that's not the case - the world is a better place with Judy Blume books in it.

10/10

The Interestings

The Interestings (2013)
by Meg Wolitzer



A lot of the books I love are kind of unusual - they tend to include things like interplanetary soul-sucking weirdos (like The Bone Clocks), or terrifying insects (like The Bees), or even re-imagined fairy tale characters (like the fabulous The Big Over Easy by Jasper Fforde). The Interestings isn't one of these books. It's about a group of fairly normal (if a little upper-class and pretentious) American friends, their lives and their relationships. And yet, it's nothing if not - well - interesting.

When we meet the main characters of The Interestings, they're self-involved teenagers at an exclusive summer art camp, smoking pot and airily discussing literature. Ethan, Cathy, Ash, Goodman and Jonah are the cool kids at camp - beautiful, privileged and hugely talented. And then there's Jules Jacobson, our protagonist. Blotchy-skinned, poodle-haired and not particularly talented, Jules comes from a decidedly non-posh family in New Jersey, attending the camp on a scholarship and unexpectedly taken under Ash's wing, she becomes a member of this clique, who (with some irony) name themselves "The Interestings" : "From this day forward, because we are clearly the most interesting people who ever fucking lived...because we are just so fucking compelling, our brains swollen with intellectual thoughts, let us be known as the Interestings. And let everyone who meets us fall down dead in our path from just how fucking interesting we are."    

The Interestings follows the teenagers' lives from this point on, as they struggle (and occasionally succeed) in their careers and relationships, from high school, through university and young adulthood, through marriages and children and career changes and divorces and illnesses and deaths, to well into middle age.

Summer Camp in the 1970s - presumably something like this...

Throughout the book, the narrative switches back and forth between most of the six characters, which works seamlessly to flesh out each of the characters and to better explain the complex relationships between them. The main character though, is Jules and somehow she manages to be the most interesting of them all, despite leading what arguably turns out to be the least interesting life. As a teenager at camp, she worshipped the other five from afar, before unexpectedly becoming one of them. Despite their continuing friendship over the following decades, Jules always feels different and this gives her a unique viewpoint on her friends. The relationship between Jules and her lifelong friend Ash is particularly well-written, with genuine love and affection coupled with a niggling undercurrent of envy and resentment.

Like, so very happy for your friend and her awesome lunch but also a little bit tempted to punch her in the face and steal it.

In her first summer with The Interestings, Jules develops a new outlook on life, deciding that nothing is more important than the whole-hearted pursuit of artistic and creative ambition - that the meaning of life is to be successful and to stand out. To be extraordinary. As she devotes herself to a failing acting career while her friends achieve financial and artistic success, Jules becomes a seething mass of jealousy/happiness; she is genuinely pleased for her friends, but she's also incredibly disappointed that it's not happening for her. But then, as her perfectly-happy-just-being-average husband says, "Specialness - everyone wants it. But Jesus, is it the most essential thing there is? Most people aren't talented. So what are they supposed to do - kill themselves?".

It's a great question and one of the themes at the heart of The Interestings - that is, what about those of us who aren't particularly interesting? Can we still be happy if we're not extraordinary?

As Jules herself says, "You didn't always need to be the dazzler, the firecracker, the one who cracked everyone up, or made everyone want to sleep with you, or be the one who wrote and starred in the play that got the standing ovation. You could cease to be obsessed with the idea of being interesting."

The Interestings is a fabulously well-written novel, that details some very believable relationships between very believable characters across a really quite interesting period of time - America over the past forty years. At 560 pages, forty years and six main characters, The Interestings is a long and complicated book but it's never boring or confusing. It's packed full of thought-provoking themes around ambition and aging and feminism, to name just a few. It's a clever, witty and well-written novel, which I would highly recommend and (it really does have to be said) it's just interesting.

9/10   

The Sad Demise of my Kindle

I have terrible news.

I dropped my beloved Kindle into a toilet. Never mind how this came about (it's less gross than what you're thinking), just know that said Kindle was fully submerged for several terrifying seconds before it was rescued. Funnily enough, a dunking in toilet water has not really agreed with the Kindle.

Here is my Kindle now:

It's Basmati rice. Not sure whether this is important.

 

Covered in rice, in a possibly misguided attempt to dry it out. Stuck forever more, 4% of the way through A God in Ruins by Kate Atkinson. The book was going pretty well up to this point...

Please keep my Kindle in your thoughts. He's still so young, with so much life yet to live. In the meantime (while waiting patiently for the rice to effect a miracle cure), I will go back to paperbacks. Sob.

IMPORTANT UPDATE
It's working again! Kind of! After four days of intensive rice treatment, my Kindle has been resurrected and now works for a good five minutes at a time (after which time, the font suddenly changes to ENORMOUS and the whole thing freezes). The Kindle is currently back in the rice for further recuperation.

Norwegian Wood

Norwegian Wood (1987)
by Haruki Murakami

This is an absolutely beautiful book. A coming-of-age story set in late-1960s Tokyo, Norwegian Wood is sad, sweet and really well written - in parts, it reads almost like poetry.

Norwegian Wood starts on a plane, where 37-year-old Toru Watanabe hears part of a song (the Beatles' Norwegian Wood, of course) and is reminded of his time as a student decades earlier - a time that he fears he may not be remembering correctly: "What if I've forgotten the most important thing?What if somewhere inside me there is a dark limbo where all the truly important memories are heaped and slowly turning to mud?". In the late 60s, Toru was a new student in Tokyo, doing all of the things students do - drinking, partying, living in a filthy all-male dorm, arguing about politics, even attending a few classes - but he remains apart from his fellow students, always deep in thought and a little aloof. Toru is a wee bit traumatised, as it turns out, by the recent suicide of his best friend Kizuki. Equally affected by the death is Kizuki's girlfriend Naoko; she bumps into Toru one day and the two begin an unusual relationship, walking the streets of Tokyo together in silence every Sunday. Naoko is beautiful but damaged, with psychological issues that eventually lead her to leave the city for a sanitarium in the mountains. Back in Tokyo, Toru is charmed by a vivacious, quick-witted and mini-skirted classmate called Midori while Naoko's mental health continues to deteriorate.



Toru and Naoko in the 2010 movie adaptation

Norwegian Wood is about love and loss, but it's not your usual love story - Toru loves both girls in different ways, but it's not like the love triangles you often find in novels or movies. There's no real competition between Naoko and Midori for Toru's affections and the story isn't about Toru choosing one over the other; it's more complex and than that and so the relationships come across as more believable.
The characters in Norwegian Wood are quirky and unique, with complicated and often painful back stories. At the heart of it all is Toru, a thoughtful and unemotional observer who only ever wants to do the right thing but often finds himself out of his depth. With his cool, disengaged manner, Toru shouldn't be particularly likeable but he really his - he always means well, and you just want things to turn out better for him.

Norwegian Wood was first released in Japan in 1987, where it quickly became an enormous hit, selling millions of copies and making Haruki Murakami a household name. Full disclosure: I can't read Japanese, so the version I read was translated into English by Jay Rubin. I'm guessing that Jay Rubin is a pretty good translator, as the writing in Norwegian Wood (even after it's been translated into another language) is dazzling. Murakami (and Rubin too, I assume) can put words together in a way that's unique and breath-taking: he describes Naoko crying "with the force of a person vomiting on all fours". He recalls the stunning countryside outside the sanatorium: "Washed clean of a summer's dust by days of gentle rain, the mountains wore a deep, brilliant green. The October breeze set white fronds of head-high grasses swaying. One long streak of cloud hung pasted across a dome of frozen blue." He writes honestly about grief and loss "No truth can cure the sadness we feel from losing a loved one. No truth, no sincerity, no strength, no kindness, can cure that sorrow. All we can do is see that sadness through to the end and learn something from it, but what we learn will be no help in facing the next sadness that comes to us without warning". It's like chapter after chapter of fantastic poetry.
Adding to the poetic feel of the book is its structure - there's no clear beginning/middle/end and no particular resolution to the story; we just follow Toru through his memories of a particularly eventful time in his life and feel the same sad nostalgia that Toru himself feels when he hears that song on a plane and remembers how things used to be. It's unique and it's really quite lovely.

I had been intending to read Norwegian Wood for years - I just wish I'd gotten around to it sooner. It is a modern classic and should absolutely be on your must-read list.

9/10

Touch

Touch (2015)
By Claire North

I may have mentioned before that I'm not particularly keen on sci-fi. With the number of absolutely fantastic sci-fi novels I've read in the past few months though, I'm starting to rethink this opinion. Utterly unique, Touch is another absolute gem.

A very unusual spin on a ghost story, Touch follows Kepler, an entity who can move from one body to the next, taking control of another person just by touching them. Sometimes the bodies are willing participants; sometimes they taken unaware, only to find themselves in an unexpected place with no explanation for missed time (sometimes minutes, sometimes hours, sometimes years).  

Kepler is happily, consensually, inhabiting the body of a young woman called Josephine Cebula when she is tracked down by an assassin who murders Josephine in an attempt to kill Kepler. Grief-stricken and angry, Kepler begins a one-woman (or one-man, depending on current "skin") crusade to bring down Aquarius, the organisation that wants Kepler and all the other ghosts like Kepler, dead.

Touch crosses continents and centuries, with Kepler reminiscing about previous lifetimes - an Egyptian merchant, a Russian socialite, a medical student, a prostitute, a politician - Kepler has worn a lot of different faces and lived a whole lot of different lives.

Some "skins" may have been more familiar than others...

Fascinating and fast-paced, Touch is a wild ride as Kepler runs across Europe, switching from one body to the next so quickly it's hard to keep track. It's a short, punchy book that you won't want to put down. But it's also more than that, an absorbing read based around a completely unique character. The whole idea of Kepler is inherently creepy; it's very unpleasant to think that someone could just climb into your skin, shucking it off when they tire of it and leaving you with no memory of the time you were absent. The potential repercussions of this are horrifying - imagine waking up one day to find yourself thirty years older than you were when you went to sleep, your body (your self) having done all sorts of things, with all sorts of people, without you. Just staying alive requires Kepler to violate other people, living parasitically inside someone else's body and stealing time from their lives. The line "Are you losing time?" is often repeated in the book, and it's a disturbing question.  

Really, Kepler is a monster and we should be on Aquarius's side in this, but Claire North has created such a fabulous character that you just want everything to turn out well for him (her?). Kepler's view on the bodies he (she) inhabits is uniquely respectful, compared to others of her (his) kind:

"You must travel light when you wear another's skin. Everything you own belongs to someone else. Everything you value you must leave behind. It is not I who made a family. It is not I who made a home. It is someone else, whose face I borrowed for a little while, whose life I lived and who may now live the life I lived as I move on". Yes, Kepler steals other people's lives for personal gain, but he (she) also tries to improve the bodies' lives for them, leaving each in a better position than she (he) found them - with a handbag full of cash, or a wardrobe full of designer clothes, or a university degree. Kepler may be a monster, but it's a monster with a soft heart.

It's a fantastic read, but it's also thought-provoking, poignant and often beautifully written. In Touch, author Claire North has taken a fairly far-fetched idea (wasn't there a really average Denzel Washington movie about body-hopping ghosts once?) and made it not only credible but also clever, compelling and touching. I loved it.

There was a really average Denzel Washington movie like this! Google tells me it was called "Fallen".

9/10

Blood on Snow

Blood on Snow (2014)
by Jo Nesbo

Jo Nesbo is fabulous. He writes dark, edgy crime novels set in Norway. His books are always fast-paced, adrenaline-fuelled adventures (like every good crime novel should be) but he also elevates the crime novel to another level - he writes very clever crime novels. Most of Jo Nesbo's books feature alcoholic detective Harry Hole, the ultimate flawed hero and my absolute favourite protagonist of any crime series. There are ten Harry Hole novels in total (although the first two were only translated into English recently), the most recent being 2013's Police, a best-selling and critically-acclaimed triumph of a novel. Whether there will be more novels in the series is yet to be confirmed, but in the meantime Jo Nesbo has been happily churning out a number of short and sharp stand-alone novels like the absolutely brilliant Headhunters (from 2011), The Son (from 2014) and most recently, Blood on Snow.

The Harry Hole series - if you have not already read these books, you should probably do so immediately.

Set in Oslo shortly before Christmas of 1977, Blood on Snow is a very short, pacey novel about Olav, a hitman with a heart. When we first meet Olav, he's just shot someone and is calmly considering the visual effect of the blood dripping onto the snow and pondering the science of snow crystal formation. As Olav tells his victim, his death was nothing personal. Olav works for gang boss Daniel Hoffman. Upon reporting back to Hoffman, Olav is given his next assignment - to kill Hoffman's wife for a hugely exorbitant fee. Concerned that this may mean he's about to be terminated, Olav begins to freak out a bit. A series of misadventures follows as Olav's life begins to unravel rather quickly.

Not entirely relevant, but the Sex Pistols were also in Oslo in 1977.

Much like Harry Hole, Olav is not the kind of character you'd expect to find in this type of book. Self-deprecating with a sharp sense of humour, Olav explains that he's a fairly useless criminal (unsuitable for jobs as a getaway driver, robber, pimp or drug dealer), with "fixing" the only thing he's manage to develop a knack for. Despite his dyslexia, Olav is a voracious reader with wide-ranging tastes, including Viking sagas, nature books, poetry and Les Miserables. He's also a bit of a poet himself and is extremely dedicated to stalking the love of his life, an ex-prostitute. Olav has a unique perspective on the world and the people around him, describing a crime boss as "a jovial, fat man with a walrus moustache who made you think of Santa Claus, until it suited him to slash you with a Stanley knife" and waxing lyrical about the more observation aspects of his job: "You can't see a person more nakedly than that, when they don't know they're being watched".
Even in a book this short, Jo Nesbo doesn't really do one-dimensional protagonists.

Not only is Olav complex and unique, he's also a little unreliable - he has a tendency to gloss over details that later turn out to have been extremely important and it's never quite certain that he's being completely honest with the reader. This is particularly true in the case of his beloved - is she an ex-girlfriend? A current girlfriend? A stranger who Olav is creepily stalking? It's a little hard to tell, which keeps the narration particularly interesting.

At 200-ish pages, with a plot that hurtles along at breakneck speed, Blood on Snow is easily a read-in-one-sitting book. It's quirky and interesting and so much fun to read; Blood on Snow is a beautifully constructed, absolutely engrossing little roller-coaster-ride of a book. Read it - I promise that you won't be disappointed.

9/10