I'm pretty new to MLT - this is my first post.

I love the idea of a 50 book challenge and have decided to start mine a little retrospectively from my 40th Birthday earlier this month.

I tend to flit around with my hobbies - I'll be fixated on cricket or poker or tea for a year or two then something else. But books have been a constant for me since I was 5. I've tried in the past to keep a record of the books I've read but never got past the first few. Hopefully it'll be different this time.

About 3/4 of the books I read are fiction, generally modern although I do have a soft spot for Victorian classics and novels from the inter-war period. The other quarter are history books of various types.

Message edited by its author, Sep 14, 2009, 12:41pm.

#1 The Last Witchfinder by James Morrow

An enjoyable historical yarn, with a good sense of humour and an underlying message or two. Jennet sees her beloved aunt a tutor burnt at the stake by her witchfinder father and vows to end the practice by persuading the public that their misfortunes are due to nature not magic.

While Morrow does not exactly wear his learning lightly, he never lets it interfere with the story which takes our heroine from England to North America with a somewhat pointless sojourn marooned in the Caribbean.

It is marred a little by padding and by the use of a frame, in this case the story is told by a book - Newton's Principa, no less. The latter device seems increasingly prevalent but rarely seems to be necessary and to me at least is annoying.

Morrow seems to have been influenced by Neal Stephenson's Baroque Trilogy. Feisty, clever heroine tick; adventures around the world tick; C17th scientists and politicians as characters tick. But his scope is much narrower and the novel really never hits Stephenson's admitedly giddy heights.

Fun, but the 3.5 stars I gave is perhaps a little generous.

6/10

Message edited by its author, Sep 24, 2009, 5:04pm.

#2 The Great Crash by J.K. Galbraith

Not really sure to make of this short, sharp book. I enjoyed Galbraith's dry with but finished it not that much the wiser about the causes of the Great Crash. Effectively, he says it was just a typical bubble exacerbated creatly by the overuse of leverage.

A quick read, not hugely educational but very well-written. I'm pretty sure this is the only economic history book which has ever made me laugh out load.

6/10

Message edited by its author, Sep 22, 2009, 5:36am.

#3 Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë

I bought this in preparation for reading The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde. I was bowled over by the lyrical but precise prose and the perfectly paced plotting. Jane is a splendid heroine. At its heart this novel is about Jane's struggle to secure a balance between her passionate. loving nature and her puritanical, moral core. How is she to reconcile her duty to her self with her happiness? Jane's struggle is complex and is explored by similar characters by other great women writers of the C19th - for example Dorothea in Middlemarch and Margaret in North and South. Jane Eyre is an easy read - I tore through it in a few days but it should probably be digested more slowly given its depth.

One minor irritation is the marketing of the book, at least my Penguin edition. The publishers seem to think that Bronte, like Austen, is suitable only for women, with several blurbs about Jane Eyre turning girls into women. This is too good a book to be pigeonholed in such a way. It is not proto-chicklit, it's a great classic which speaks to all of humanity not just half of it.

9/10

Message edited by its author, Sep 22, 2009, 5:36am.

#4 Netherland by Joseph O'Neill

This is a rather curious and disjointed novel. The story is straightforward enough, a Dutch oil analyst has moved to New York with his English wife and young son. His marriage slides away from him for reasons he can't grasp and his family move back to London. He tries to find some meaning in life by playing cricket with expatriate West Indians and sub-contintentals forming a strong if strange relationship with one of them who dreams of bringing cricket back to America.

As a cricket nut this book should have been right up my street but it never really engaged me. O'Neill's narrative swoops around all over the place so that, for example, one jumps from the present to the past and then to the future where he is talking to some one about the past.

The book is character, rather than plot-driven, and the confused narrative perhaps mirrors the difficulties the hero has in understanding himself and his relatioships. O'Neill is partially successful here - we do get a good insight into a fundamentally decent but emotionally stilted man. On the otehr hand this is at the expensive of the other characters, particularly the wife, whose actions appear incomprehensible.

5/10

Message edited by its author, Sep 22, 2009, 5:36am.

#5 The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde

I was really looking forward to this - the reviews everywhere are fantastic and it sounded right up my street. The trouble with great expectations is that they are hard to live up to. If I had just picked up this book at the airport, I'm sure I'd have liked it moe than starting it anticipating brilliance.

As it is, I enjoyed it. I thought it was pretty clever. It made me smile here and there but I never laughed out loud. The ideas didn't blow me away as much as other reviewers. Where many hailed the book's originality, I saw a bit of a rehash of sci-fi tropes - for example I remember reading precisely the same account of who really wrote Shakespeare's plays in the 2000 AD comic about 25 years ago.

6/10

Message edited by its author, Sep 24, 2009, 5:06pm.

#6 Team of Rivals by Doris Goodwin

It must be hard to sell yet another biography of Lincoln to your publishers. Doris Goodwin tries to distinguish her works from her predecessors by looking at Lincoln through the eyes of his rivals for the Republican nomination - Seward, Chase and Bates.

This doesn't quite work. Once the nomination is secured, Bates is pretty much ignored and while there is plenty of focus on Abe's excellent relationship with Seward and his more fractious one with Chase, the book does not live up to its premise.

Fortunately, it doesn't need to. This is a first-rate biography. If there is a suspicion that Goodwin has rather fallen in love with her subject this can be forgiven becasue of the quality of the prose and sensitive and insightful exploration of key relationships.

What really comes across in this book is Lincoln's extraordinary magnamity. He seems to have an almost superhuman ability to forgive others their trespasses against him. To give just one example, Chase intrigues against him constantly but still gets appointed Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Rarely does a political biography prompt one to consder one's own relations with others as this does.

Obama is apparently a great fan of this book. Let's hope he is able to take its lessons to heart.

9/10

Message edited by its author, Sep 24, 2009, 5:07pm.

Welcome to LT and the 50-book challenge. Nice to meet another "flitterer" and love that word by the way. I'm going to appropriate it, if you don't mind, as it feels like it describes my way of being as well. I just joined the challenge this January and can feel myself running out of steam when it comes to posting (very much behind), but still love LT and reading other people's threads. I enjoy listening to Goodwin on Charlie Rose, so will probably read Team of Rivals eventually. In the past, it's been the kind of book that I buy, but don't read much beyond the first few chapters. I think I'm getting even lazier as I'm aging--didn't think that was possible. Agree with you totally on Fforde's book.

Thanks for dropping by Bonnie - nice to know I'm not just rambling on at myself.

Hope you can get your thread updated. I like the way it forces me to think properly about the book I've just read.

You have some great comments about each of the books you've read. It just takes a while for me to notice new members. I only look at them after I've gone through all my starred ones, and that doesn't happen every day. Happy reading.

#7 Me Cheeta by James Lever

This is the memoir of Cheeta the chimp who co-starred with Johnny Weissmuller in the MGM and RKO Tarzan films. The first chapter is one of the funniest openings of any book I've read - (Cheeta is the subject of a bet between Rex Harrison and his wife - if she wins she can sleep with Richard Burton "if he'll have you" if he wins she won't kill herself if he leaves her).

If the rest of the book doesn't quite maintain these standards, it's still a hugely enjoyable and wickedly bitchy (satire of a) memoir of the Hollywood golden age. In places Cheeta's love of Weissmuller is even rather touching.

Anyone with a good knowledge of Hollywood stars of the 30s and 40s will get even more laughs out of this then I did. But even if a number of jokes and digs sailed over my head, enough hit the mark to leave me grinning like the narrator through most of the book.

7/10

Message edited by its author, Sep 22, 2009, 5:38am.

#8 Riddle of the Sands by Erskine Childers

This novel, published in 1903, is of some literary and hitorical significance. It is generally regarded as the first spy novel establishing a template where the writer would produce verisimilitude by undertaking detailed research and setting out out the fruits of his labour in the book. More importantly, the novel was a significant propaganda tool for those in England who saw the rising Germany as a potential invader. The resulting naval arms race between the two countries was one of the causes of the First World War.

Unfortunately, I found the book a bit of a struggle after the first hundred pages. I've never got on very well with books set on the sea - naval jargon seems to just float over my head. The plot is very much dependent on the reader playing close attention to the navigation of the yacht sailed by the two heroes around the channels and sand banks of Friesland. To do so, one has the carefully check the maps provided at the beginning of the book regularly. Unfortunately my edition of the book had terrible reproductions of the maps which made them virtually impossible to follow.

When not at sea, I enjoyed the crisp narration and entertaining dialogue but being unable to properly understand the plot made reading the novel something of a chore.

5/10

Message edited by its author, Sep 24, 2009, 5:03pm.

Fallen a bit behind in posting thanks to holidays etc but will try to catch up now.

#9 Millennium: The End of the World and the Forging of Christianity by Tom Holland

Tom Holland has risen very quickly to become one of the UK's foremost popular historians. The rpimary reason is his ability to tell a complex story reasonably simply through sharp and lucid prose.

With his third book, he has tried to add an element of analysis to the storytelling but he doesn't seem wholly comfortable with it. His argument is that it was this period that saw the formal seperation of church and the state which gave rise to the distinction between Christian western Europe and Islam. However, it's not a particularly strong argument and he pursues it rather half-heartedly.

The storytelling is compelling. The first crusade, castles and terrorising castellions springing up everywhere, the collapse of Muslim Spain, Viking pirates, the Norman invasion...there's plenty of action here. Such a canvas would be too broad for many writers but Holland just about manages to keep it together although there are so many charcaters to deal with it does become a bit difficult to follow sometimes.

7/10

Message edited by its author, Sep 22, 2009, 5:38am.

#10 Engleby by Sebastian Faulks

My second Faulks and just as impressive (in a different way) to Birdsong. Engleby is a near genius loner bordering on the sociopathic. His story is told in the first person allowing Faulks to use one of my favourite narrative techniques, the unreliable narrator. When done well, this way of telling a story demands an element of interaction from the reader, who is obliged to work out the true story behind the one he is being told rather than absorb it passively.

The book is split into three phases. Engleby has a miserable time at boarding school, where he is relentlessly bullied due to his impoverished background. At Cambridge, Jenny, the girl he falls in (unrequited) love with disappears and is assumed dead. Finally, he becomes a decent journalist.

The disappearance of Jenny is the book's centrepiece but its really not enough to sustain a plot in which not an awful lot happens. Nevertheless the quality of Faulks' prose shines through and we get what seems to be a realistic insight into the mind of a distinctly odd person.

The school part of the novel is expertly done, although it must be said that public scholl bullying is a bit of a literary cliche. The time in Cambridge is brilliantly evocative of the 1970s. Faulks loses his way a bit in the final phase, using Engleby as a mouthpiece to snap at the bits of modern Britain he doesn't like, especially education.

Overall, a very good novel.

8/10

Message edited by its author, Sep 22, 2009, 5:39am.

Engleby sounds really good! I am also a fan of the unreliable narrator, it makes for a great reading experience when it's done well.

Hi Spacepotatoes. If you haven't already, try Notes on a scandal by Zoe Heller, an exemplary unreliable narrator novel.

Still four books behind, will make a real effort to catch up this week.

#11 Guernica by David Boling

A historical novel centred on the carpet bombing of Guernica (the ancient capital of the Basques) by the Luftwaffe during the Spanish Civil War. The bombing was a truly significant historical event, the first time the dreadful tactics of attempting to platten an entire area were used in war - and by a supposed non-combatant.

Boling brings out the horror of the bombing very well and has made you care sufficiently for the characters that you share some of their distress and misery.

Unfortunately the rest of the book does not match the quality of this section. I had the feeling throughout that it was written very specifically for the book club market and there is a "writing by numbers" kind of a feel for it.

There's the quaint Basque traditions, robust peasants, short interludes about Picasso and the commander of the Luftwaffe (a very cliched and unconvincing Prussian officer), a love story or two and intertwining narratives. It's very much as if the publishers had told Boling to do a Captain Correlli set somewhere else - it certainly adheres to that formula like glue.

The narrative is reasonably enjoyable although Boling tries to do too much, with half a dozen stories and at least 8 major characters in a small-medium sized book. The real let down is the characters. Every main character is near perfect, albeit in different ways. Even if they are allowed a slight charcter flaw (one is a bit impetous) this is simply an amusing charcter flaw. Boling wants his readers to see the Basques as an idyllic rural people, unsullied by modern civilisation but robust in their traditions. I know the Basques well - as a group, they have many fine qualities (their food is the best in Europe) and many poor ones (their prinde in their heritage comes close to xenophobia if not downright racism) but they are certainly not as presented here.

The attempt to link the story to Picasso's painting doesn't really work either, although it might have had a better chance if the painting was reproduced somewhere. I assume that a deal couldn't be reached on the copyright, which is a shame.

Boling obviously has talent and has written a first novel that could sell very well if latched on to by book groups. I wish it hadn't been written with that it mind, but perhaps I am being as idealistic as those Basques.

5/10

Message edited by its author, Sep 22, 2009, 5:45am.

Boling obviously has talent and has written a first novel that could sell very well if latched on to by book groups. I wish it hadn't been written with that it mind, but perhaps I am being as idealistic as those Basques.

Books that are so obviously written with that kind of intent, or where the author is clearly trying for a movie deal (*cough*NicholasSparks*cough*) always leave me feeling manipulated. Whatever happened to writing a good story for the sake of just writing a good story?

Thanks for the Notes on a Scandal rec, I've actually seen the movie already and liked it (for the most part). How does it compare to the book, if you've seen it?

The film follows the book pretty faithfully but of course the book is much more nuanced. I liked it a lot, razor sharp characterisation and nice, clear straightforward prose.

Just reade Heller's latest and it's clear that she's a very accomplished and improving writer.

Hi jintster! I decided to stop by and have a look at your thread. You've been reading some interesting books. I read Engleby last year and found it really gripping and deliciously disturbing. And Notes on a Scandal is one of my favourite books, so I must be a fan of the unreliable narrator...

Spacepotatoes - I suspect that Boling and his publisher were aiming at the book groups first, with the hope that if successful with them a film deal might be forthcoming. I think we're going to see this quite a lot in the future, now that book groups have become so popular. Well, I suppose writers have to eat as well.

Rebeki - thanks for dropping by. If you can think of any other good unrelaible narrator books, do let me know.

Thanks for info about Notes on a Scanadal. I will definitely have to pick it up sometime!

I like the Harper Perennial books that have the "P.S." section at the end with author interviews and discussion questions for book groups, and I've noticed some other publishers have started something similar. It would be nice if they could just leave it that, as far as appealing to the masses goes, but you're right. Writers have to eat too!

I haven't read it yet, but I think Dennis Lehane's Shutter Island might be an unreliable narrator book, from what I remember of the description. It's on my TBR, so I'll find out one of these days!

Thanks Space, sounds like a good one.

#12 Homicide by David Simon

I adore the Wire. In my view it is the best drama ever to have graced our TV screens. A lot of the events are based on what David Simon learnt from a year as a journalist embedded in the Baltimore police department.

The book is chronological and episodic. We follow the detectives in one of the two homicide squads throughout the calender year, flipping from one depressing case to another. Within the description of the cases, various processes are described - the judicial process and forensics for example.

The structure works well on the whole, although its sometimes hard to keep track of all the different cases in your mind - one may be described 200 pages in and then not again for another couple of hundred.

The style is very journalistic, generaly pure reportage and not much commentary. Simon lets the facts do the talking, and very eloquent they are too. Simon falls too much in love with the detectives - he admits as much and its pretty obvious from the text.

Generally, this is an enjoyable book but much of its content is pretty much known to followers of the Wire - the profligacies of the war on drugs, the overweening supremacy of statistics etc. It's also bloated. At least 200 pages could have been cut without losing much.

6/10

Message edited by its author, Sep 24, 2009, 5:01pm.

Hmm... Don't think I'll read Homicide, but you've reminded me I've got a dvd of The Wire episodes to watch and send back to Netflix. I don't normally like crime shows, but somebody (TaDad or msf59) convinced me to watch The Wire because I liked Lush Life and I have to admit that I'm enjoying it.

If you like unreliable narrators, Remains of the Day and A Gesture Life are the first two books that I think of--that is if I'm understanding the meaning of the term; I had never heard of it before. (Obviously, I'm not into literary criticism much.)

Jintster, I don't know of any more, although I did a tag search for 'unreliable narrator' on LT and got some results - Pale Fire and Lolita being the most popular. The Remains of the Day was definitely there too.

Message edited by its author, Sep 17, 2009, 4:09am.

I'd forgotten about Remains of the Day. I do like Ishiguro, must get round to the short stories he published recently.

This is a challenging book...great!

#13 Brazzaville Beach by William Boyd

From what I can tell from the three novels I've now read by Boyd, he is consistently solid. None of them would qualify for my book of the year but they are all very readable and interesting. As Boyd likes to work in different genres, this is more of an achievement than it sounds.

Hope Clearwater looks back from her beach hut on the two main espisodes of her adult life. The end of her marriage to a genius mathemetician who goes slowly mad and her work observing chimpanzees. The two stories are told in parallel and are clearly meant to be linked in some way (other than through the protaganist) but I couldn't spot it myself. However, this had no bearing on my enjoyment of the narratives.

The marriage strand is naturally the more introspective of the two. There are some interesting observations on the higher echelons of mathematics, on the dynamics of a marriage in which one party will always play second fiddle to the other's vocations and on madness brought on by the elusiveness of one's goals.

The chimpanzee strand was even more interesting. The band that Hope is asked with observing has split off from a larger group for the north. The northerners start a war against the southerners. But this is not standard chimp behaviour and it goes against all the academic theory of her boss, who becomes desperate to supress Hope's findings.

There's a lot of action, twists and turns stuffed into this book and towards the end it does strain credulity a little. But overall another fine story by Boyd.

8/10

I'm adding marks out of ten for the books I've read, just to make it easier to keep track of my favourites.

#14 The Believers by Zoe Heller

Joel Litvinoff, a famous left-wing New York Jewish lawyer, lies in a coma. This is the story of his highly dysfunctional family, focussing on his ogress wife Audrey and his two daughters bright, rebellious Rosa and dumpy doormat Karla.

The characters are all vivid and generally credible, although it is hard to believe that Audrey has any friends at all - she is just so appallingly rude to everyone, all of the time. Heller works best at the motives people have to change their lives. While Audrey is unable to break out of her image - once feisty, now overbearing, Karla tenatively moves away from the hard left towards orthodox Judaism. Karla, meanwhile, struggles to find a solution to an unhappy marriage.

Most of the decisions we make about the important things in our lives are instinctive. We may weigh up the pros and cons but we go with our guts. Heller is great and dissecting the thought processes of her protaganists as they wrestle with their problems.

There is some lampooning of the left here as well. It's not really as successful, because not very original. Many of the activists are engaged in the kind of holier than thou arguments that charcterise university students. These have been satirised so many times that Heller can't really do anything much new with the material. But this is a minor criticism in a book which has sharp writing and plenty of insights into the human character.

8/10

I was interested in your comments on Homicide, as I also love The Wire.

You've got some interesting reviews here. I'll drop in again.

#15 China A History by John Keays

Keays notes in his introduction that while most educated westerners would have little difficulty in naming half a dozen Roman emperors, very few could name a single Chinese emperor. This is partly due to the difficulty westerners have in remembering Chinese names but also reflects a more general ignorance of Chinese history. I've certainly felt that deficiency myself for quite some time, but was unable to fine a book to rectify it. I was delighted to see positive reviews of Keays' one volume (535 pages) history and grabbed it soon after it came out in paperback.

It does exactly what it says on the cover. It's naturally only an overview of China's long history from the mythical five emperors to workshop of the world. We see dynasties rise and fall and periods of terrible chaos and fragmentation in between. But there are patterns here and insights that hold true for nearly the whole of China's history (the Mao period being possibly the only exception). Legitimacy for Chinese rulers comes from history hence the confusing tendency for new dynasties to name themselves after old ones. Continuity is stressed over innovation and change, putting China at a terrible disadvantage when it comes to dealing with western powers and Japan in the C19th. Linked to this is the Confucian requirement that respect is always due to elders and ancestors and to an extent much greater than in other civilisations.

Keays prose is decent on the whole, although he does have a tendency to use rather long-winded sentences at times. On the whole the narrative is as readable as it could be given the rather bewildering succession of similarly named emperors. The book does its job in giving the reader a basic overview of 3,000+ of Chinese history which can be used as a springboard to explore periods or themes in more detail. My only real quibble is that rather too much of the story is devoted to changes in the ruling elites. Keays feels he has to at least mention every emperor whether noteworthy or not. When he digresses to economic or social history its much more engrossing. Overall though, very solid.

7.5/10

Message edited by its author, Sep 29, 2009, 12:56pm.

China does have a fascinating history. One of my favourite books is Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China, it's sort of a memoir/history that covers three generations of women in a Chinese family and takes you from the end of imperial rule through the rise of communism. I think it goes up to the late 1980s or maybe the early 90s. It goes into a lot of detail about the Mao period, because that was what the author experienced first hand. It is a very powerful read and was what first opened my eyes to China's history and how it got to where it is now. I'd highly recommend it if you are interested in reading more about China.

I'be had Wild Swans on my bookcase for years now. Been tempted to pick it up lots of times but unfortunately its a whopping great hardback and it's lost out to ther lighter books in the do I really want to lug this around on my commute stakes. It being one of your favourites does inspire me to have a pop at it though. I'm usually a one book at a time man but I may make an exception and read Wild Swans at home and read something else on the commute.

I don't have much luck with Chang it seems. A couple of hundred pages into her biography of Mao, and I left it on the train!

Well, I will confess that the writing style is not one of my favourite aspects of Wild Swans. There are some passages that are quite dry, particulary when Chang recounts her grandmother's story and the early part of her mother's life. But I think it helps that this is a personal account, and when she writes about her own life and experiences, it's not dry at all. If you do get around to it sometime (yes, it is pretty long!), I'd love to hear your thoughts on it!

#16 The Heather Blazing by Colm Tóibín

I read The Master when it was shortlisted for the 2004 Booker. I loved the cool, elegant prose and the delicate exploration of Henry James' feelings and manners.

I'm not sure why its taken me 5 years to pick up another Toibin novel but I'm very gald I did.

The Heather Blazing won't be for everyone. There are no fireworks here, no vampires or wizards, no sudden plot twists or amazing coincidences - nothing out of the ordinary really happens at all. Instead we get a subtle exploration of the differences between a person's public and private personas.

Eamonn Redmond is a High Court judge in Ireland. Each of the three parts of the book starts with his ending a case just before summer recess and heading down to his holiday home on the east coast of Ireland. Interspersed are chapters from his early life - first as a boy, then a teenager and finally an aspiring and promising barrister. Redmond's mother died during childbirth and his father had interests in many matters other than his son. He grows up self-reliant and reserved - qualities that work well in a judge but are less attractive in a husband and father.

As well as exploring the development of Redmond's character, there is some beautiful writing on the Irish landscape and sea in particular. Also interesting are the passages about the post-independence Irish civil war which is not well known about in England but was very nasty indeed (c.f. Sebastian Barry's excellent The Secret Scripture). But what really shines out is Tobin's wonderful prose. Every sentence is crafted so that there is not a word out of place. There is precision and honesty in his style reminiscent of Hemingway in The Old Man and the Sea and in Orwell's later works. Not a book that you want to gobble up in one go, but worth savouring slowly.

8/10

Message edited by its author, Oct 6, 2009, 11:11am.

Hi Jinster,

Nice thread. I read my first Toibin (Brooklyn) this year, really loved it, and so recently bought The Master from Book Closeouts. Sorry to read about Guernica. I love that time period and had high hopes for that book. Good luck with the rest of your reading year.

Teresa

Thanks for dropping by. I'm looking forward to more Toibin and will most likely go for Brooklyn next.

Hi jintster, just dropped by to say I agree with you about The heather blazing. It was the first Toibin I read and I was very impressed by its quiet sublety. I also enjoyed The master, and have a couple more lined up to read (The south and The Blackwater lightship) which I'll have to get round to soon.

Look forward to reading your reviews Parmaviolet. Was talking on Friday about Toibin with a neighbour who is Irish and works in the book trade (and has very good taste). Was surprised that he described Tobin as too cold for his taste.

#17 The Book Thief by Markus Zusak

Not too sure what to say about this one. It's a huge bestseller which is greatly loved if the reviews are anything to go by but it didn't really grab me.

That's not to say there weren't plenty of good things in it. Several of the male characters are very nicely drawn but I dodn't find the female charcters very convincing - Rosa in particular rings false. It's also interesting to read about the war from a German perspective.

My problem with the book is that it felt too contrived. The book is narrated by Death who tells the story if Liesl, the family she is adopted by, her neighbours and a Jewish man her family hide in the basement. Adding this touch of irreality is very plainly a narrative device - it allows Zusak to refer to events occurring elsewhere in the world, highlights the theme of the book (death - what else) while hinting that death is not the end and most importantly provides some distance between the upsetting events the book describes and the reader.

This latter point is important to Zusak for some reason. I'm not sure if The Book Thief is aimed at a teenage or adult audience (the publishers seemed to be equally confused, marketing it to different groups in different countries). The story is ultimately very sad and Zusak is determined to soften to blow by, for example, telling the reader what is going to happen well in advance of it actually occurring - I've never read a book with so many self-spoilers in it! It may be that he did have a teenage audience in mind and didn't want his novel to be too depressing for them.

Most puzzling for me is what Zusak is trying to say about his theme. I'm sure there is something profound in here but if so, I've missed it entirely.

This all sounds a bit more critical about the book then it deserves. Possibly my expectations were raised too high by all the fantastic reviews. Ultimately I did enjoy it as a story but think it overrated.

6.5/10

Message edited by its author, Oct 12, 2009, 4:49am.

Jintster, I feel strangely pleased to hear that there's someone who didn't love The Book Thief. I haven't read it but have a copy at home that I've been afraid to start because of all the hype surrounding it. Quite often I don't feel about modern bestsellers the way others seem to and I don't like the disappointment of feeling indifferent to books others have rated so highly. Now that you've lowered my expectations sufficiently, I can get round to reading it, so thank you!

Message edited by its author, Oct 16, 2009, 7:53am.

I hope you enjoy it more than I did. I feel the same way about many bestsellers - I occasionally wonder if I'm looking for flaws just because its so popular, but I hope not.

#18 Traffic: Why we Drive the Way we do by Tom Vanderbilt

This follows the template of Freakonomics blending economics. sociology and phychology with counter-intuitive results. Unfortunately, it very much has the feel of a book comissioned to jump on the Freakanomics bandwagon. Here's an interesting subject - I'll write about 10 issues, roughly 25 pages each - please can I have an advance?

The results are patchy. Some of the chapters are very interesting - notably those on cultural differences in driving, the economics of congestion and the Dutch experiments on integrating vehicles and pedestrians. Others feel like filler, with a whole chapters devoted to subjects that could have been dealt with in a shortish magazine feature. As a consequence, more than half the book is repetitive and some times tedious.

Vanderbilt is preofessional and objective throughout but its hard to detect any passion for the subject. The prose is very competent in a journalistic style but rarely inspiring. It's a shame because, this is a good subject and if the book were cut down a bit and other aspects of traffic dealt with (some more history would have been appropriate, for example) it would have been much more successful.

6/10

#19 the Quickening Maze by Adam Foulds

For the last four or five years, I've bought the Booker shortlist. I usally only manage to read 4-5 of them, although I did get through the lot last year and was impressed with the crop. This is the first of the 2009 cohort and it's not a bad start at all.

This is a fictionalised version of various events that occurred at an asylum on the outskirts of London in the 1840s run by Dr Matthew Allen. There's no real plot, rather a series of stories told from the point of view of the patients (including the poet John Clare), the Doctor and his family and others such as Alfred Tennyson, whose brother was a patient. These stories interact a little but are generally quite contained. The effects is a rather disjointed narrative skipping from one person to another, often rapidly. Probably it was intended to reflect Clare's schizophrenia (which is very well described).

The narrative technique is unusual and didn't quite do it for me, perhaps because the book is so short that it is difficult to really get into any of the individual characters. However, this deficiency is made up for by the quality of the writing.

Foulds is, I would guess, a poet at heart. Unlike some poets who try their hand at novels, he avoids purple prose while retaining a degree of lyricism where appropriate. Some passages are really outstanding and his ability to pick exactly the right word in any given sentence provides a rare degree of precision.

This is Foulds' second novel and I look forward to the next one. As he matures as a novelist and becomes able to focus on getting the narrative right he will be a very good writer, maybe even a great one.

7.5/10

Message edited by its author, Nov 25, 2009, 9:08am.

Hi Jinster, I've occasionally go on a Booker binge, too. This year I've read all but the Coetzee and The Quickening Maze. You review encourages me to pick it up soon.

What's your favourite so far?

Must say I'm really looking forward to the Mantel.

Oh, Wolf Hall by a mile. Enjoyed the rest and am anxious to hear from someone else on Byatt's The Children's Book. Let me know if you get to it.

Re: Your review of Jane Eyre, "It is not proto-chicklit, it's a great classic which speaks to all of humanity not just half of it." Hear, hear.

#20 Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen

I've not read any Austen since I was a teenager and thought it was about time I got reacquinted with her.

I gather that Northanger Abbey is the least popular of her books amongst her admirers and I'm not too surprised.

There's a lot of wit here and quite a bit of wisdom as well. The first part of the book, set in Bath, is good fun. I really liked the way Isabella's true character is gradually revealed to the reader. Other characters are less well though out though -John Thorpe is a bit of a cliche and not very credible while Austen barely takes any trouble to give any real personality to others such as Mrs Allen and Eleanor Tilney.

Even the main character, Catherine, is rather hard to get to grips with. When she arrives at the Abbey she develops a plainly ridiculous theory that General Tilney murdered his wife. This part of the book made little sense to me. It seemed out of character for Catherine, who fault is really to believe the best of people. Nor did it move the plot forward in any meaningful way.

Northanger Abbey is, of course, a parody of the gothic novel genre. If, like me, you haven't read the novels being parodied your missing much of the point and its hard to form a reasoned judgement of the qualities. However, the test of a true classic is whether it speaks to all the ages by telling us something about the human condition. I doubt Austen would be remembered much if her reputation depended on this novel. Nevertheless, I liked it enough to want to read a few more.

7/10

Good analysis, Jinster. You're much nicer to Austen than I was. I love, love Pride and Prejudice, but really disliked Northanger Abbey.

I agree with your assessment of Northanger Abbey. It is my least favourite of Austen's novels too. My interpretation of Catherine's jumping to conclusions about General Tilney is that she's read one too many gothic novels and fancies herself to be in one when she gets to stay in an abbey. She lets her imagination run wild a little bit.

Thanks both. It's hard to be too critical off a great author - I always think that I must be missing something about it. Nice to know it wasn't just me!

#21 Remainder by Tom McCarthy

This is a very difficult book to review - it's very quirky and original. Following an undescribed accident our unnamed hero get a huge pay off from those responsible. He becomes obsessed with authenticity and staging reenactments.

Quite a few reviewers thought this book a work of genius. About half way through, I thought they might be right but ultimately this felt somehow hollow, inauthentic even. As our hero ramps thinks up, it becomes difficult to suspend disbelief.

Good prose style though and full marks for trying something different.

6.5/10

#22 The Hundred Years War: Trial by Battle by Jonathan Sumption

Sumption is one of England's top 2 or 3 commercial lawyers. Goodness knows how he finds the time to research and write history books as well.

As Sumption points out, this is narrative history without much in the way of analysis. Although it is 600 pages and only covers teh first 10 years of the war, events move at a rapid pace and the number of personablities involved can make things a bit confusing.

There's a degree of unreality in that we don't ever get to understand the characters of the two main protaganists - Edward III and Philip VI - except through their actions. Sumption is right to point out that contempary chroniclers just didn't write about royalty in that way.

There's a solid section on the causes of the war - fundamentally the centiuries old problem of kings in England having to do homage for their possessions in France. Sumption is strong on the problems of paying for war and the devastation that maurading armies caused.

Good, solid history (and I'll certainly read volume 2 at some point) but Sumption the historian is not in the same rank as Sumption the lawyer.

7/10

#23 Anathem by Neal Stephenson

For some reason the hardback was a little cheaper than the paperback at Amazon and so I grabbed that. A mistake: at more than 900 pages the hardback was too big to lug around on my commute so I only read this at home, usually in bed.

For most novels, this wouldn't have been a problem, but Anathem asks a lot from its readers. Like the excellent Baroque Cycle, Anathem is a mix of adventure story and text book but with a much more challenging subject matter covering maths, geometry, epistemology, consciousness, metaphysics and parallel universes amongst other things.

If Stephenson wasn't a great writer he could have been a superb teacher. The above list is less daunting than it sounds because Stephenson uses dialogue to great effect in simplifying some pretty difficult concepts. Nevertheless, there are parts of the book which I couldn't get even after re-reading.

Anathem is set on a earth-like world. Intellectuals have been separated from seculars into closed institutions, similar to monasteries but generally without a religious element. A threat emerges to the entire planet and our hero and his fellow avout are called into the outside world to work on ways of dealing with it.

The book uses unusual terminology which means the first 70 pages or so are slow going as you flick to the glossary at the back. It adds atmosphere but is otherwise rather unnecessary. Stephenson's prose style may be too workmanlike for some but I like its straightforwardness and the touches of humour.

The plot is not as exciting as his other books and I think that Stephenson had got the balance between text-book and adventure yarn wrong. You have to expect information dumps in a Stephenson book but these were sometimes just too long.

Not my favourite Stephenson, but still enjoyable, educational and thought-provoking. I hope I find time to re-read it one day.

7.5/10