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

Everything I Never Told You

Everything I Never Told You (2014)
By Celeste Ng

There's a missing teenager, a nearby lake, a dodgy-looking boyfriend and a dysfunctional family with secrets - sounds like a fairly simple murder mystery, right? But Everything I Never Told You was Amazon's Best Book of 2014 for good reason and it's much more than you might initially
expect.

For starters, the mystery of the missing girl (lost? kidnapped? imprisoned? murdered?) is resolved pretty quickly - in fact, it's never really a mystery at all. The very first paragraph of the book reads "Lydia is dead. But they don't know this yet. 1977, May 3, six thirty in the morning, no one knows anything but this innocuous fact: Lydia is late for breakfast".

Missing girl Lydia Lee is her parents' favourite child - intelligent, ambitious and popular, she seems the least likely of teenagers to disappear. As we learn more about Lydia and her family though, the events of that May morning begin to make a bit more sense. The Lees are a bit of a novelty in 1970's small-town Ohio - mother Marilyn is blonde and beautiful, with crushed dreams of a career in medicine; father James is American-born Chinese, a history professor who specialises in the particularly American institution of Cowboys. Lydia's older brother and younger sister have both been relegated to minor roles in the family as their parents pour all of their hopes and dreams into blue-eyed Lydia. For her mother, she is a hard-working, focused scientist with an assured future at medical school. For her father, she is young, vivacious and popular, surrounded by giggling blonde American friends. In reality though, Lydia may not be any of these things at all. After her daughter's disappearance, Marilyn snoops through Lydia's diary to find clues, only to find that every single page is blank.

Everything I Never Told You is a book full of secrets, mysteries and misunderstandings. First and foremost is the mystery of Lydia's disappearance, but there are also secrets between Marilyn and James, the unexplained disappearance (and then re-appearance) of Marilyn from the family a few years earlier, the reason for the complete absence of grandparents from the children's lives, older brother Nathan's secretive ambitions and younger sister Hannah's secret stash of stolen objects. The narrative moves back and forward in time through the 1960s and 1970s, following various members of the family and adding layer upon layer of complexity to the characters and the relationships between them. Running beneath it all is an undercurrent of racism and misunderstanding - there are no other mixed-race families around and it's a time and place where it's still perfectly acceptable to refer to the Lee family as "Orientals". Following Lydia's disappearance, the local newspaper runs a story headed "Children of Mixed Backgrounds Often Struggle to Find Their Place" and it seems to be widespread opinion that her disappearance is due to her unfortunate ethnic background.

America - not always particularly accepting of the "Orientals"

It's a beautifully-constructed portrait of a unique family, with characters so well-written and complex that they feel completely real. There are elements of suspense in Everything I Never Told You, as the story builds to the final revelation of exactly what happened to Lydia - but there's so much more to the book than that. Ultimately, all of the character development along the way means that you feel very strongly about and for the Lee family, so that ultimately the final twist has much more impact than it might otherwise have done. It is fantastically well done, and Amazon may well be right in choosing this as the Best Book of 2014; it would be hard to pick a better one.

10/10

Room

Room (2010)
By Emma Donoghue

Apparently inspired by the real-life case of Josef Fritzl, Room is the story of a woman, kidnapped at age 19 and then kept captive in a tiny shed for seven years. Imprisoned, emotionally abused and repeatedly raped, the woman gives birth to her kidnapper's child alone in her prison and is left to raise him on her own, in one small room. Her jailer punishes insubordination by turning cutting off the electricity or by leaving her without food for days at a time. He tells her "I don't think you appreciate how good you've got it here... Plenty girls would thank their lucky stars for a setup like this"
So, not exactly a feel-good book, right? It sounds like a horribly dark, depressing novel that nobody would voluntarily read. Except that Room is narrated by the woman's five-year-old son and through Jack's eyes, things don't seem quite so dark.

To Jack, the "Room" they're imprisoned in is his entire world and Ma is his family. They have comfortable, predictable routines - Phys Ed, Orchestra, Labyrinth, Bath, Hum - they watch TV (but only occasionally because "it rots our brains") and read books and play games. Jack has no idea that Ma is being held against her will; to Jack, imprisonment in Room is just unremarkable, everyday life.

Room starts with Jack's fifth birthday, when Ma tries to explain to him that there's a world outside of their Room. This is a fairly crazy idea to Jack, who struggles to wrap his mind around the idea of something more than his tiny prison home - "When I was a little kid, I thought like a little kid," he says, "but now I'm five I know everything".  So begins a whole new chain of events as Jack and Ma begin plotting their escape. 

The deeply creepy house of Josef Fritzl, inspiration for the room in Room

Jack's narration provides a unique perspective on events - he doesn't quite understand most of what's happening around him and he sometimes embroiders his stories so that things don't make a lot of sense and as a reader, you find yourself not quite understanding what's happening either. Throughout the story of Jack and Ma's imprisonment, Room builds a claustrophobic sense of paranoia and suspense right up to the heart-in-your-throat panic of the pair's escape attempts. Jack is insulated from the nastier aspects of his environment because he doesn't understand them and this helps the reader as well, insulating you from what could be a horrible, depressing novel and instead making it suspenseful, fascinating and very readable.

At times, Jack's narration verges on jarringly infantile - he seems to be pretty smart for five (he can read and write) but his language is that of a much younger child. For example, "We have thousands of things to do every morning, like give Plant a cup of water in Sink for no spilling, then put her back on her saucer on Dresser... I count one hundred cereal and waterfall the milk that's nearly the same white as the bowls, no splashing, we thank Baby Jesus". This isn't how most five-year-olds speak and it grated on me to start with, but when you stop and think about it, this makes a lot of sense. Jack has spent all of his five years in one small room, with one other person and a warped view of the world. It seems right that he should be a unique mixture of intellectually-advanced and developmentally-delayed at the same time. It should be annoying as all hell, but it actually works.

Room is a memorable, powerful novel that manages to transform an awful story into something exceptional. Highly recommended.

9/10

The Bees

The Bees (2014)
by Laline Paull

This book is completely different to anything I've ever read before. And I do read quite a lot.
Basically, The Bees is a story about, well, bees. It follows a year in the life of a bee hive and OH MY GOD I had no idea of the kind of crazy, brutal, terrifying Orwellian society that exists inside a beehive.

The protagonist, Flora 717 is born into the lowest class of worker bees (the sanitation caste) and narrowly avoids immediate execution due to her differences - she is "excessively large" and "obscenely ugly" and as the bee police say, "Deformity is evil. Deformity is not permitted". Flora is instead taken away by a priestess from the high-ranking Sage caste and put to work in the hive nursery, among other workers from higher castes, as part of a "private experiment". This is great news for Flora, as her lowly caste are normally not permitted in such important roles and instead spend their days cleaning up corpses and disinfecting areas where the (completely disgusting) male bees have been. Still, the future's not exactly bright for Flora, as the Sage sisters are constantly snooping over her shoulder and they are scary - cold, totalitarian and merciless.

All looks pretty innocent, right? IT'S NOT!

There are references throughout The Bees to concepts we all vaguely remember from school - worker bees, drones and the Queen; beeswax and honey and Royal Jelly; worker bees gathering food for the hive; bees "dancing" as a form of navigation - but I don't remember it all seeming quite so creepy before. The Bees reads like post-apocalyptic sci-fi about a crazed, classist, uber-religious society (very similar to Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale), but it's also clearly based on solid research, reflecting the true-life behaviours that really happen in beehives every day. My next-door neighbours have a beehive. I will never look at it in quite the same way again.

There are vicious beatings and beheadings on a regular basis. The "Fertility Police" roam the hive at will, spreading terror and tearing workers limb from limb whenever they choose. The hive is under constant threat from those they call "the Myriad" - predators including wasps, spiders, rodents and humans, all of whom will destroy the meticulously constructed hive to steal the bees' carefully guarded honey. There is thinly veiled tension between competing clan groups in the hive and there is constant irritation caused by the slobbish, uncouth male drones (who also provide a little comic relief in a novel that's otherwise fairly dark). Changes in the landscape around the hive mean that food is becoming scarce and to make matters worse, winter is just around the corner.
I honestly do not know how much of the detail in The Bees is scientifically correct and how much is author creation, but every detail that I googled (what? the workers eat the drones' penises?! surely not!) turned out to be disturbingly correct, so I'm assuming that the bulk of the detail in The Bees is true to life. It is quite literally keeping me awake at night to think that the little beehive next door is housing this kind of terrifying society.

This is a photo of worker bees throwing a particularly useless drone to his death. This really does happen. I checked.

It is certainly unusual to find a novel based around a cast of non-human characters and I don't think I've ever read a book where the characters are all insects (outside of kids' picture books). Author Laline Paull handles this masterfully - somehow it never seems weird that Flora is a bee. She is relatable and likable as a character, and even her unusual motivations (Accept, obey, serve is the bees' mantra and Flora is utterly dedicated to serving her hive) are understandable in context of the very complex, rule-based society of the hive. The bees communicate largely through scent, vibrations and their antennae, with the Hive Mind playing a large role - these are all concepts that should be very odd and alien to human readers, but somehow this is all perfectly understandable. To be able to show your reader their world from the point of view of a completely different creature is a very impressive achievement.

Never gimmicky or cutesy, The Bees is a fantastic insight into the world of bees and a compulsive read. Absolutely outstanding.

9/10

All The Light We Cannot See

All The Light We Cannot See (2014)
By Anthony Doerr

While I'm not normally big on historical fiction (I've been trying to read The Luminaries for six months and am still on page 6...), I do have a bit of a soft spot for books set in World War 2. There's just something about that period that's fascinating and terrifying and so scarily recent - let's just say I have read an awful lot of these books. Some of them are fantastic (like The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas) but you'd think it would be getting a bit tricky by this point in time to find a unique spin on an era that's been written about so many times already. All The Light We Cannot See is a complex, absorbing novel set in World War 2, which manages to bring something different to the telling of a very well-known story.

The story follows two quite different characters. Marie-Laure is a young blind girl in Paris, who lives with her doting father: a locksmith who works at the Museum of Natural History and makes tiny models of the world so that Marie-Laure can learn to navigate by touch. The same age as Marie-Laure but far away in rural Germany, Werner is an impoverished orphan with a talent for repairing and building shortwave radios. As the story goes on, the war impacts both of their lives in quite different ways. Marie-Laure is relocated to the new, unfamiliar town of St-Malo where she can no longer confidently find her way around with the help of her father's models. Werner is snapped up by the Nazis for his engineering talents and sent to an elite military training academy. The two storylines follow quite different directions, but the two characters are linked through a series of coincidences (for example, a young Werner listens obsessively to a children's radio programme about science; the scientist who made this programme is Marie-Laure's grandfather) and eventually they are brought together in St-Malo in the final days on the German occupation.

Anthony Doerr's writing style in All The Light We Cannot See is unusually poetic - it's rich and descriptive and a little heavy at times. For example: "His voice is low and soft, a piece of silk you might keep in a drawer and pull out only on rare occasions, just to feel it between your fingers" or "She walks like a ballerina in dance slippers, her feet as articulate as hands, a little vessel of grace moving out into the fog." Some of it is quite beautifully worded, but there is a lot of it and it could get pretty overwhelming pretty quickly. However, the book is quite cleverly structured with some very short chapters (often as short as one or two pages) interspersed among the longer ones. Breaking the narrative up in this way provides a bit of breathing space and means that the book is still very readable, despite its complexity and wordiness.

Anthony Doerr - he's pretty good with words. Probably why he won a Pulitzer Prize that time.

The narrative moves back and forward in time, with a number of different themes and additional storylines woven through the novel. The idea of light comes up again and again - the radio broadcasts that Werner is so fond of, speak at length about the way that waves of light move through space as well as human perception of those light waves and the way that the human brain can create light within darkness: ""The brain is locked in total darkness, of course, children", says the voice. "It floats in a clear liquid inside the skull, never in the light. And yet the world it constructs in the mind is full of light. It brims with colour and movement. So how, children, does the brain, which lives without a spark of light, build for us a world full of light?""
This idea is applied obviously to Marie-Laure's world but also to the metaphorically dark times the characters are living in and the moments of hope and light that somehow survive... And this is just the start; there are a number of complicated themes brought to light (excuse the pun) in this novel, which should make it unreadably complex and overly literary but somehow it's still absorbing and interesting and very readable.

All The Light We Cannot See is beautifully written but it's also a stirring war story about two unique and likeable characters. It's really a great read and much more than just another WW2 historical novel.

9/10