More Pride

While I can’t quite believe that I’m writing another post about “Pride and Prejudice” and that I can write so often about something I still haven’t read, I feel that it’s important to share with you that there’s a new edition of the classic book coming out  which could change all that!

This new edition will be on our bookshelves from April 13th and is probably the book that Jane Austen meant to write…

Keep your eyes peeled for the real story of the Bennets and the Darcys:

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: The Classic Regency Romance – now with Ultraviolent Zombie Mayhem!

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies features the original text of Jane Austen’s beloved novel with all-new scenes of bone-crunching zombie action.

As our story opens, a mysterious plague has fallen upon the quiet English village of Meryton-and the dead are returning to life! Feisty heroine Elizabeth Bennet is determined to wipe out the zombie menace, but she’s soon distracted by the arrival of the haughty and arrogant Mr. Darcy.

What ensues is a delightful comedy of manners with plenty of civilized sparring between the two young lovers-and even more violent sparring on the blood-soaked battlefield as Elizabeth wages war against hordes of flesh-eating undead.

I’m thinking that this may be the way for me to break into 19th Century Literature, perhaps next we could have Wuthering Heights with Werewolves or perhaps Jane Eyre with Vampires (the real reason the first wife was locked in attic was because she was a vampire, it explains a lot, doesn’t it?)….

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Empty Words, Empty Pages

It’s bookgroup tonight and for the second month running I have not completed the book, I’ve barely even started it!

I do have excuses though….

It’s not like the last book (Richard Powers – the Time of Our Singing, I just couldn’t get into it, I couldn’t be bothered with the characters.), this one (Moses Isegawa – Abyssinian Chronicles) seems like it’s worth reading but I’m not in much of a reading mood at the moment and so it remains barely read.

Also the book wasn’t available in any English shop in Amsterdam (all three or four of them) so that means hardly anyone else will have read it either so the book discussion part of the meeting might be pretty short this evening…

All the more time to spend choosing a nice short book for next month (I have to try and increase the odds of finishing the book…), I’m going to try and push Thor Heyerdahl’s Kon-Tiki Expedition (I had a brief browse yesterday and I’m already 50 pages into it), I think that might be the type of book to rekindle my love of reading…

It’s weird not reading so much, the last time it happened was when I was travelling solo around Asia a couple of years ago, and then there was so many more interesting distractions….

Perhaps I need some distractions or else more interesting books….

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Pride

I’ve discovered an even quicker way of getting to grips with Pride and Prejudice, I can read in pure Facebook format:

http://www.much-ado.net/austenbook/

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Apparently people lie about the books that they read and it seems that I’ve read four of  the top five (honest!), the top five being:

1. 1984 – George Orwell (42%)

2. War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy (31%)

3. Ulysses – James Joyce (25%)

4. The Bible (24%)

5. Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert (16%)

For the full article:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/arts_and_culture/7925720.stm

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Booklist Revisited

At the prompting of my shy Belgian reader, I shall continue this book discussion with a few remarks on some but not all of the 100 – books I’ve read, books I should probably read and of course, books I’m never going to read.

1) Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
Oh Mr Darcy! A large percentage of my female friends have the DVD box set of the BBC adaptation of this book, they regularly take it down off the shelf so that they can drool over Colin Firth and it’s that not a good reason for staying well away from the book then I don’t know what is!

Another problem with a lot of the 19th century fiction is that there are so many films and tv adaptations that is no need to read the book, we can just get it in a manageable condensed form without all the heavy prose.

5) To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
This is a good book and probably deserves to be read, a simple courtroom drama and a story of race relations in the Deep South

13) Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
There’s lots of reasons why people would find this hard to get into, it’s a war book, it’s an anti-war book, it’s cynical anti-war book and it’s filled with dark humour. I loved it.

18) Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
I never got to grips with it, I read literature from all over the world, but I always have problems connecting with the characters in a lot of American novels, there’s something about the American style where I really don’t care all that much about what happens, it doesn’t invite me in and make me demand more.

19) The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
For the boys: It’s science fiction, it’s got time travel and it’s got all the usual paradoxes – changing events, what if I meet my future/past self? Well written and fun.
For the girls: It’s science fiction. I know, but before you have an allergic reaction, there’s hardly any science involved, it’s just a minor plot device to have the two main characters interact, it’s really a love story, a really lovely touching love story (but don’t tell the boys).

21) Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
Four Words – Never Going To Happen!

24) War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
I surprised myself with this one. I started reading it as a challenge to myself, I never expected to actually enjoy it but it is quite interesting and paints a good picture of how Russia was at the time but with the length it might not be everyone’s cup of tea.

29) Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
Something everyone should read and the reason why there is currently a 1.2m long playing card lying on my sitting room floor.

38) Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
To anyone who’s had this sitting on their shelf for years and never read it (you know who you are) then stop what you’re doing right now and go home or wherever you’ve been keeping the book and read it. After reading it my father described it as the best book he’d ever read. I wouldn’t go that far but it’s pretty good.

39) Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
See “Gone with the Wind”

42) The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
Why oh why oh why oh why?

43) One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
I think this was the first of Marquez’s books I read. In the summer before I went to college I worked in fiction department of a bookshop and it was there that I read so much and found so many writers that have kept me entertained every since. It was this job that introduced me to Marquez. It’s a wonderful book but because of the use of magical realism not accessible to people who prefer realism to the fantastical.

44) A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
I liked the first couple of books I read by John Irving (Hotel New Hampshire, World According to Garp) but I could never really get the same satisfaction from Owen Meaney, I think I stopped reading Irving’s books after that.

45) The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
Wilkie Collins is important to literature because it was he wrote the first detective story and set the scene for many of the great detective stories that have been written since. I can’t remember if it was this or “The Moonstone” which was the first, but I enjoyed “The Moonstone” more.

55) A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
I loved this book and would recommend it to anyone, of course it’s when I mention that it has 1600 pages that people’s eyes glaze over. It’s worth the investment. It’s a vast sweeping story that deserves to be read.

56) The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
A very well written book, the plot wraps you up and pulls you along through a world of books and mystery but in a good way, not like all the DaVanci Code clones that are out there. For anyone who knows and loves Barcelona, it creates a beautiful texture to the city.

57) A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
Probably the only of Dickens novels that I actually enjoyed and I think it helped that it wasn’t all set in dreary Dickensian England.

60) Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
One of the best books I’ve ever read.
(though not something that everyone will be able to get into, the beautiful love story wrapped up in his characteristic magic realism, I know a lot of people who gave up on this book)

62) Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
Nabakov always seems to feature weak or troubled male characters and none more so than the poor man who is targeted by the scheming Lolita and thoroughly manipulated by her. An interesting read.

64) The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
It’s got such good reviews and critical praise that maybe it’s worth me giving it a try.

66) On The Road – Jack Kerouac
I think this is the type of book that needs to be read at a certain time in your life, when you’re young, when you’re wondering what to do with your life. It should be read sometime before you start thinking that taking endless drug-fueled roadtrips across the US is immature and pointless.

76) The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
A classic, a favourite of angsty American women but should I read it? Would I really enjoy it?

80) Possession – AS Byatt
This was an ordeal.

84) The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
I’m not sure why I haven’t read Ishiguro, he’s supposed to have beautiful prose, maybe it should be on the maybe list.

85) Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
Read this primarily because of a book by Julian Barnes called “Flaubert’s Parrot”, wasn’t too excited by it though recently a friend was reading it and exclaimed that “the scene in the carraige – hot!”, I think I may have been reading a different book.

86) A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
I really enjoyed 97% of the book, I enjoyed the characters and the way their story unfolded but the ending was a big letdown. It wasn’t because it was a shock ending but more because it didn’t fit in with the way the rest of story flowed.

91) Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
The basis for Apocalypse Now and don’t they always say that the book is better than the film? I’m not convinced, I’ve read “Typhoon” and tried to read “Lord Jim”, it was hard going, I’m not sure if “Heart of Darkness” will be any better.

96) A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
Before I had a job or money I had my father’s library and he was a big fan of Nevil Shute and so I became a big fan of Nevil Shute, it’s a good book.

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Booklist

I’m not usually one for lists and memes, it’s feels like lazy blogging, of course so is posting a photo when I’m too lazy to write….

This list caught my eye, as lists of books would, the idea is that apparently on average people have read 6 out of the 100 books listed below and it’s surprising given that there’s books like Harry Potter and Dan Brown on this list that the number would be so small.

I’ve highlighted my reads in red.

1) Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2) The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
3) Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4) Harry Potter series – JK Rowling
5) To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6) The Bible
7) Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
8)Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
9) His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10) Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11) Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12) Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13) Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14) Complete Works of Shakespeare
15) Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16) The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
17) Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18) Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
19) The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20) Middlemarch – George Eliot
21) Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22) The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
23) Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24) War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25) The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
26) Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27) Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28) Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29) Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
30) The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31) Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32) David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33) Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
34) Emma – Jane Austen
35) Persuasion – Jane Austen
36) The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis
37) The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38) Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
39) Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40) Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne
41) Animal Farm – George Orwell
42) The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
43) One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44) A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
45) The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46) Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
47) Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48) The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
49) Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50) Atonement – Ian McEwan
51) Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52) Dune – Frank Herbert
53) Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54) Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55) A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56) The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57) A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
58) Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
59) The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
60) Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61) Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62) Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63) The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64) The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65) Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66) On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67) Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68) Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
69) Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70) Moby Dick – Herman Melville
71) Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72) Dracula – Bram Stoker
73) The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
74) Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75) Ulysses – James Joyce
76) The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
77) Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78) Germinal – Emile Zola
79) Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80) Possession – AS Byatt
81) A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
82) Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83) The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84) The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85) Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86) A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87) Charlotte’s Web – EB White
88) The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89) Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90) The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91) Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92) The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93) The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94) Watership Down – Richard Adams
95) A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96) A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97) The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98) Hamlet – William Shakespeare
99) Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100) Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

61 – that’s the number I’ve read, I’m a bit disappointed, it should have been more but since I really don’t read all that much 19th century literature, it’s not bad!

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December Books

What with two speeches and a busy Christmas, reading took a bit of back seat and there was nothing at all that excited me but January holds great promise….

John Banville is a powerful writer and now he’s turned his talents to crime, writing as Benjamin Black he’s already pumped out three books and there’s probably more on the way, it might be interesting to have a cime novel with a literary flourish…

“The People of Paper” could be wonderful or it could be dreadful. On the back cover it has those key unlive-up-able words “original”, “innovative” and “intense” and then the writer is compared to Borges, Calvino and Marquez, so yeah, could be dreadful, but what if it was wonderful….

Books Bought
The Lemur – Benjamin Black
The People of Paper – Salvador Plascencia
Books vs Cigarettes – George Orwell

Books Read
The White Tiger – Aravind Adiga
Norwegian Wood – Haruki Murakami
The Secret Life of Bees – Sue Monk Kidd

Currently Reading
Great Irish Speeches

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Bristling Spines

There was controversy raging at the book group last night, someone had the cheek to suggest that Midori was a slut! And she was quite vocal and strident about her opinion too!

My Midori, my charming, loveable Midori! I was shocked! It was surprising how much discussion Norwegian Wood generated, I thought it might be the usual 20 minutes talking about the book and the rest socialising but Norwegian Wood kept us going for at least an hour, a very good choice.

And the raised voices didn’t end there, while choosing next month’s book, there was a quite a heated political argument over some right-wing Dutch politicians, at some stages it looked like it was not going to end at raised voices!

And you thought book groups were quiet….

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Not the one with the ears

Although Kikare is busy working through re-reading Murakami’s books, I’ve never been one for re-reading books no matter how good the author or book was, I tend to just classify those books as memories and moments in time.

In bookshops while browsing I will occasionally touch the spine of special book, the mere touch evoking memories of the whole reading experience and a part of me wishes that I hadn’t read it so that I could have the pleasure of discovering such a treasure all over again.

But the treasure’s already been discovered and here I am reading it again. And reading it brings back different memories, it reminds me that Norwegian Wood was really not my favourite of Murakami’s books, not by a long shot. It’s a very unhappy book, filled with seemingly unredeemable characters coasting through life unable to break through the impotence coating their every breath.

It’s like watching the OC, it’s always the miserable, boring characters that get the most attention when all you really want is to find out more about the nice decent characters, here the same, I couldn’t stand Naoko and Watanabe, it was Reiki that intrigued me and Midori that I fell in love with.

What was interesting was to read the book after I’ve learnt so much about Murakami himself both from the Running book and the excellent “Haruki Murakami and the Music of Words”, you could see the parts of Murakami’s life that he knitted into the life of Watanabe, the books he read and the music he listens to.

As I read the book, I found myself making notes of quotes that I liked, not something I’d normally do.

I really liked this one and it makes a lot of sense though when you think that I’m reading the book for a book group….

“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking”

Sometimes his words create this perfect image that I was left gasping, wondering if this was one of those perfect phrases that writers spend this lives searching for:

“I love the way you talk. Like spreading plaster, nice and smooth”

There was one page that I marked but couldn’t find any quote that seemed memorable, there was a reference to pretty ears and I think it might have been that. When the book was suggested I asked if it was the book with the girl with beautiful ears but was reminded that it wasn’t so finding the reference to pretty ears was interesting all the same, maybe he has a thing for Japanese ears…

The book ends with another phrase that speak volumes:

“Midori responded with a long, long silence – the silence of all the misty rain in the world falling on the all the new-mown lawns of the world”

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November Books

It’s been a bit of a struggle book-wise this month,filled with the effort of trying to finish books, bad books. These books were presents or recommended to me and I kept reading them in the vain hope that somewhere, somehow I’d begin to enjoy them but alas, that was never the case!

Benjamin Kunkel’s Indecision was indeed about a man’s problems with indecision but I couldn’t really work up any interest in this guy who flip-flops his way through life. I’d never heard of Karl Pilkington before I got his book as a present and I think I was happier in my ignorance. You’ve already read about my feelings towards Lost on Planet China…..

And then there’s “White Tiger”. Apart from a few notable exceptions, Booker Prize winners never really work for me, they generally seem to be an effort to trudge through the text. I spend a lot of time wondering what it was that won the prize and did they remove that “something” from the book after it one? This was not one of those exceptions!

All in all, not the most illustrious of reading months!

Books Bought
Oscar and the Lady in Pink – Eric Emmanuel Schmitt

Books Read
Indecision – Benjamin Kunkel
Oscar and the Lady in Pink – Eric Emmanuel Schmitt
Happy-Slapped by a Jellyfish – Karl Pilkington
Maps For Lost Lovers – Nadeem Aslam
Lost on Planet China: The Strange and True Story of One Man’s Attempt to Understand the World’s Most Mystifying Nation, or How He Became Comfortable Eating Live Squid – J. Maarten Troost

Currently Reading
Warsaw Station – Agata Passant
The White Tiger – Aravind Adiga
Norwegian Wood – Haruki Murakami

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Long Titles

I was realy excited when I bought “Lost on Planet China: The Strange and True Story of One Man’s Attempt to Understand the World’s Most Mystifying Nation, or How He Became Comfortable Eating Live Squid” by J. Maarten Troost and not just because it would mean I could really up the word count of this post simply by pasting in the title of the books a few times!

The excitement was more to do with reading a book by an author I’ve enjoyed writing about a country that I loved.

How could I have been so wrong?

It’s like he went to a completely different country…

Maybe if I’d been to Kiribati, Vanuatu or Fiji, I wouldn’t have enjoyed his books as much or maybe because he wasn’t living in China but merely travelling through as an observer that he spent his time on the outside looking in.

He seems so critical of the country, he never seems to relax, it’s always him against the land and its people, everywhere people were only after his money, everything seemed negative, from the old ways of Mao to the attempts of the people to cast off the problems of Mao, nothing the Chinese did seemed to satisfy him.

Even in the most beautiful parts where even the most jaundiced eye will admit to beauty he always seemed to be looking for a “but”, perhaps that’s how he enjoyed himself?

Or maybe I live a charmed life but I loved my time in China yet along the way I would meet these people like Maarten who had problems in their travels and didn’t like China as much as I did,  I kept wondering if I was missing something….

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