Book Haul!

It’s been a very long time since I bought books, and it’ll be a very long time until I can do it again, but lately I did buy a few books to last me through most of the summer. I thought I’d just quickly show you them, as I made sure I bought only books I was very keen to read. Also, The Last Girlfriend On Earth which I reviewed here was among these books but I figured I didn’t need to show it again. Now, to the books which I shall also briefly comment on because, you know, it’s me and that’s what I do!

The Girl Who Saved The King Of Sweden by Jonas Jonasson. This is the second novel by the Swedish novelist, who is famous for writing the amazingly funny The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out Of The Window And Disappeared, a novel which was Sweden’s bestselling book the year it was released, which has achieved international fame and has even recently been made into a movie. Very excited about this one.

The Ocean At The End Of The Lane by Neil Gaiman. I bought almost all of Gaiman’s novels last year, then never got around to reading them and had to leave them boxed up in Australia for the time being. This, his latest novel, will help make up for that a little I hope.

If you haven’t seen the brilliant television show QI, get off my blog and go and look up QI on Youtube right now (I’ll talk to you in a few days upon your return). For those more familiar with it, this book basically deals with the same sorts of information the show does, and even includes snippets from the show. A good way to find out a lot of what you know is wrong, and very funny too.

The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, by Rachel Joyce. Don’t know much about this one, but the title made me curious. Every now and then I make a reckless purchase based on something like the cover or the title. Fingers crossed.

Imagining Alexandria by Louis de Bernières. One of my favourite ever authors, famous for Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, Birds Without Wings and Red Dog, this is his first collection of poetry. What I’ve read so far is beautiful.

The Pleasure Of My Company by Steve Martin. I was swept away by a newer novel by Steve Martin recently, An Object of Beauty, and have decided to backtrack to his first two works of fiction. This one is about a modern-day neurotic, and as I expected it is incredibly intelligent, witty and insightful. Steve Martin, I have to admit, is a very impressive writer.

Shopgirl, by Steve Martin. His first work of fiction, this short novella looks at a young woman working in a shop who embarks on a relationship with a man nearly twice her age. I am yet to read it, but the praise I have heard about it, plus the fact it was made into a film, make me suspect it’s as good as everything else I’ve read by Martin.

Well, that’s it for now. I aim to have proper reviews up of all seven of these books over the next couple of months, so keep an eye out for them!

What books have you bought or borrowed recently? I’d love to hear from you in the comments.

30 Day Book Challenge #2: Day 01 – Best book you read this last year

I have to admit that sadly I haven’t read anywhere near as much as I would have liked this year. Though I started maybe thirty books, I’ve only actually finished about half of that, although I may zoom through a few more when I’ve finished work for the year. The major downside of this is that there are less books to choose from, although I have definitely read a number of memorable books as the year has gone on.

The two books that come to mind are remarkably different – Haruki Murakami’s Norwegian Wood and Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere. I loved Murakami’s work because it was so brutal, confronting and honest. His novel was so upsetting but incredibly beautiful at the same time, with a startling relevance lurking beneath its surface. His writing really took my breath away and by the time I had finished the novel I was lying there stunned and unable to do anything else for a while. The first novel I finished this year, it has haunted my thoughts this whole time and will probably continue to do so for many years.

But there was something about Gaiman’s Neverwhere that not only drew me in more at the time, but which has had a lasting influence on me throughout all of 2013. Maybe it was because I read this only a few months after I had visited London, and the setting of the London Underground intrigued me beyond belief. I have since spent time looking into the world below that amazing city, even blogging on it once or twice, and the whole concept of worlds below worlds has come to interest me even more than it already had (and as a historian and history teacher that kind of thing is pretty fascinating to me).

It was more than just setting that made Gaiman’s novel so memorable for me, of course. His writing was brilliant, quirky and intelligent, and the story and characters were so imaginative, so magical and yet quite dark and deceptive – I really was just swept away in it all. The creativity behind such a story is just immense, and makes many similar novels pale in comparison. There’s a reason why Neil Gaiman has become such a respected and beloved force in the writing world today, and this novel, though one of his older works, is a good reminder of why he is so successful.

If you haven’t read Neverwhere before, I urge you to do so regardless of what genre you normally read. It defies both genre and expectations and you simply won’t be able to put it down.

What are your thoughts on Neverwhere, or Neil Gaiman in general?

What’s your favourite book from this last year?

Ghost Stations of the London Underground

About a year ago, I did two things in quick succession – I went to London (after not visiting England since I left at the age of 4, some 23 years ago), and then pretty quickly afterwards I read Neverwhere, a Neil Gaiman novel set in a fictionalised London Underground, using some of the shut down stations for its inspiration (among other things).

Ever since then, I’ve been really fascinated by the whole concept of all these shut down stations, and am slowly learning just how many have been shut down, for what reasons, and what has become of them. Earlier today I discovered some articles on the extremely interesting londonist.com that looked into this very topic, and found this amazing picture:

Click to see the full size. Created by Dylan Maryk, this tube station map is labelled only with tube stations which no longer exist – time capsules of the era in which they were used. For more information on it, visit http://londonist.com/2013/06/alternative-tube-maps-ghost-stations-on-the-london-underground.php which is also where I found this image.

Pretty impressive, huh?

Many of these old tube stations are now bricked off and difficult to access, looking perhaps a little like this inside:

Looks vaguely familiar, doesn’t it? Taken from http://londonist.com/2011/08/inside-a-ghost-tube-station-brompton-road.php?showpage=13#gallery-1

I also found this page – http://londonist.com/2011/02/what-shall-we-do-with-the-old-tube-station.php – to be quite interesting, as it looks at a few different stations and what they have become since they closed down. I’d love to go to some of these places and visit them, see if it is easy to recognise the station architecture still.

My interest in what lies beneath London will only grow though, and one book that has caught my interest is Peter Ackroyd’s London Under. This book looks at not just the tube stations but all the history lying underneath the great city, from Roman amphitheatres to Victorian sewers, Bronze Age trackways, the monastery of Whitefriars and so much more. I haven’t yet got my hands on this one, but when I do I suspect I’ll gobble it up in a single sitting.

It’s really no wonder that so many stories can and do come from the London Underground, with so much history there. When I think of how many other cities around the world must have their own stories to tell…it makes me yearn to put on both my historian and writer caps, and start seeing these things with my own eyes!

What stories do you know of the London Underground? What about any cities where you live – do they have their own hidden pasts?

So I finally read Good Omens…

…and I’m not entirely sure how I feel about it, actually.

The 1990 comedy novel about the end of the world, written by both Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman, both now giants in the fantasy genre (although both quite different writers, in my opinion), has been hugely successful in the nearly quarter of a century since its release, often being cited as a favourite book by many fans of either or both authors, and indeed by quite a large number of my friends. It often also makes various lists of the most popular books, and books you must read, and so on and so forth.

Considering all of this, it’s fair to say I came to this book with certain expectations. I was pretty sure it wasn’t going to blow me away, and it wasn’t going to become one of my favourite ever novels, but I expected to enjoy it a lot, and I thought I’d knock it over in a week at the most.

It ended up taking months to read. About three, I think. Now, this doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a bad novel, and in fact the second half I gulped down in a couple of days, when I finally made the effort to do so. But the first half of the book just completely failed to hook me in a way that frankly should have put me off the book entirely. If it wasn’t so well talked about by so many people, I would have given up on this novel before reaching the half way point.

I’ve been trying to pinpoint in my mind what I did and didn’t like about Good Omens for a few days now. The idea in itself is quite clever, although it also leaves the ending somewhat predictable – either the world ends in a really chaotic but humorous manner, or it doesn’t end and somehow it makes some vague statement about good and evil and human nature and blah blah blah. There’s certainly lots of potential in exploring the apocalypse in a comedic way but I much preferred the way Douglas Adams addressed the end of existence in The Restaurant At The End Of The Universe.

The characters were really a mixed bag. I loved the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, and I am fairly sure these characters were largely Neil Gaiman’s work (they just seemed more like him). I really like the angel Aziraphale and the demon Crowley, who if anything were the book’s main characters as they desperately tried to avert the apocalypse because both are quite happy on the Earth the way it is. Adam, the young boy on whom the fate of everything rests even though he has no idea, and his friends who follow his every word, get rather tiresome quite quickly, as do the witch-finders with their storylines. The prophecies of Agnes Nutter are quite funny in their own way, and help bring other parts of the story to life, but overall the characters were very hit and miss.

The writing, like the characters, is also hit and miss. There were times where I was totally engrossed in the story, and points where I was howling with laughter. There were also quite a lot of times where I was simply quite bored. One thing I have to admit is that while I am becoming quite a big fan of Neil Gaiman, I struggle to enjoy Terry Pratchett, and as Pratchett supposedly wrote the greater portion of this novel, I think that does pose a bit of an issue for me. I could almost tell which part was written by who because I enjoyed the parts that felt more like Gaiman, and was bored by the rest (and yes, I am aware there will have been some bits that were edited so many times they were probably written by both authors). I also thing the writing at times was too slow; as I have already mentioned, I nearly gave up on the book during the first half because it just felt like nothing was happening, both with the plot and the character development.

I guess what I’m trying to say is, I quite liked the book. I just didn’t love it. I can see why people do obsess over it, as there is something awfully cult classic about it, and I know a lot of people do really appreciate both authors equally which I suspect would help in one’s enjoyment of it overall. Maybe my expectations were too high, which is always a dangerous approach to any book, film, music album or any form of artistic expression really, but Good Omens just didn’t blow me away by any stretch of the imagination. Good Omens is bang on – they certainly weren’t great omens. Just good.

Neverwhere: the lure of Neil Gaiman’s mesmerising ‘London Below’

For quite a while I’ve been saying I want to read more novels by Neil Gaiman. I read Stardust at some point last year and was swept away by it, but then I became distracted, as you do, by various other also amazing authors and books. Then, a couple of months ago maybe, I noticed a lot of Gaiman’s books were cheap where I usually buy my books, and I immediately ordered the rest of his novels, as well as his short story collections.

Faced then with the decision of where to begin, I was drawn to Neverwhere, his quirky fantasy set in “London Below”, a city beneath a city. Perhaps it was my recent visit to London (which is a big thing when your closest city normally is Sydney), perhaps it was simply the idea of a whole secret dwelling place underground that most people could never even dream of, but something grabbed me about the idea.

The whole concept is that London Below is where the people who have “fallen between the cracks” in society go. These people, when they do walk London Above, are not even seen by most Londoners (who are too busy in their lives to notice such insignificance). But London Below has more than this, teeming with huge dangerous monsters, angels, knights, jesters, talking rats, murderers, assassins and personalities galore. And when Richard Mayhew, a young businessman plodding away through his seemingly average life, stops to help out someone in need, he finds himself inexorably pulled into this world below his own, where he is drawn into an increasingly intricate story involving murder, revenge, mystery and deceit.

There is so much to love about the way Gaiman has written this book. The descriptions of the various parts of London Below is brilliant, and has been informed by research – indeed Gaiman wandered down into the sewers to gain some understanding of how they looked, smelt, and were connected to one another (he was so impressed by them that he changed the perceptions one of his characters had of them). Many of the places are based on old unused Underground stations from the tube system, and many more are based on stations that are used, as he twists the meaning of the place names – in many cases interpreting them literally. There are places like the Floating Market, a market which moves around from place to place, only opening at night and only for the people of London Below, and the story returns to the bizarre stalls of this place more than once throughout the novel.

Then there are the brilliant characters. You do spend the majority of the story feeling sorry for Richard, but without him becoming too whiny (which is always a risk with such protagonists). Door is clever and cunning, and often is the most impressive at the most pivotal moments of the story, indicating an intelligence and forethought that is quite charming. Then there are characters like Hunter, and the Marquis de Carabas, both of whom are well developed yet are surrounded with a certain amount of mystery until the end of the story. And of course there are the bad guys, in particular the gruesome Mr Croup and Mr Vandemar, both of whom, with their nightmarish tendencies, put your average bad guys to shame.

A book that is full of imagination and yet feels somewhat familiar, I could recommend this to anybody and everybody – Gaiman appeals to my adult imagination in the same way Roald Dahl appealed to my childhood imagination (and that is a pretty big call coming from me). Gaiman is a genius and a master storyteller, and I simply cannot wait to go and dive into one of his other novels.

Have you read Neverwhere, or any other novel by Neil Gaiman? What are your thoughts?

12 days down, 354 to go! So far, still sane (I think).

So, just under two weeks ago I posted a blog about my New Year’s resolutions, in which I listed 12 goals which, when combined, show me to be an overly optimistic and stupidly ambitious silly person. So, 12 days into the year (okay, I didn’t mean the last 12, that was just a coincidence I swear), how am I going? Because let’s face it, if I’m not on track already, I could be in trouble…

Actually, overall I’m going okay. Some goals, like the writing groups and paying off my debt, are hard to measure or won’t really be important until later in the year. But the measureable goals I have, for the most part, made a start on. Here are some tidbits on some of those goals:

Reading Goals: To read 50 books this year

So far, I am on track for this goal. I have finished two books so far this year, Spike Milligan’s interpretation of Frankenstein (it was quite short, to be fair), and For One More Day by Mitch Albom. Milligan’s book was as ridiculous as you would expect, but roaringly funny the whole way through, and perhaps one of the more entertaining retold stories he wrote (he rewrote many classics for a laugh). Mitch Albom’s book was much like his other books, with the same melancholy vibe as Tuesdays With Morrie and The Five People You Meet In Heaven, but also with that uplifting view of life that shines through the many cracks of the characters and story.

I am very close to finishing a book about the art world by Steve Martin (no, really – he knows a lot about the art world, actually), called An Object of Beauty, and am also nearing the end of Stardust by Neil Gaiman and Hemingway’s Chair by Michael Palin. All of these I will likely finish in the next week, which would push me a couple of books ahead of schedule, which would be nice.

Viewing Goals: To watch 100 films this year

On track with this goal, too, as I am currently sitting on 4 films so far this year. I started the year with watching an older Simon Pegg film, How To Lose Friends and Alienate People, which was fairly classic Pegg, though perhaps not my favourite film of his. This was followed a couple of days later by seeing the film The Iron Lady, about Margaret Thatcher, which was a brilliant film, in particular Meryl Streep’s fantastic portrayal of Thatcher, not to mention being interesting for me as that was the period of England I was born into (and which I left as it ended, at the young age of 4). Earlier this week I watched the football hooligan film Awaydays, which was a lot better than I expected it to be, and has only just been released in Australia now, 2 years after it’s initial release. Finally, over the last two days I watched Scorsese’s epic documentary film, George Harrison: Living In The Material World, an amazing 2 part, over 3 hour long film using unrivalled and in some cases never before seen footage and interviews to cover his entire life, both musical and personal, and I must confess this just blew me away (to be fair, The Beatles are one of my favourite bands).

I have many more films I plan on watching in the next couple of weeks, so hopefully I can push ahead on this goal too.

Health Goals: To become healthier, fitter, and eat better foods

Okay, this goal is a bit hit and miss so far. I haven’t been running and going to the gym as much as I should be, but I have been going a little, so the ball is rolling I suppose. I have been trying to eat better, however, keeping a lot of junk food out of the house, keeping a lot more healthy food in the house, trying to cook with fresher foods. I have also been experimenting with different recipes, with varying levels of success. Tonight I created an awesome spinach based pasta meal which was actually a lot tastier than it sounds and looked (and someone else tasted the meal to verify this)! So I have a way to go on this goal, but I am slowly making the changes.

Writing Goals: To write (among other things) 12 novellas

Okay, this goal has hit a brick wall. It’s not writer’s block (personally I don’t like that phrase – I don’t believe it really exists). The problem is that I don’t like the story of my first novella, and I especially hate my protagonist. I was attempting to write a comedy, but it is easily the least funniest thing I have ever written. So I have decided, nearly halfway through the month, to scrap this first novella and start over – and still try and finish before the end of January. Am I completely insane? What in the world am I going to write about now? Any ideas for something I could write a comedy novella about in about 18 days would be greatly appreciated!

 

And that’s it so far. I am mostly on track with my goals, though more with some than others. But this is the easy part of the year – the true tests will come later in the year when I become busier with work and other areas of my life. But for now, I’m on track, and I’m loving 2012 so far! Bring on the remaining 354 days!