Everybody lies

This book left me decidedly underwhelmed. In fact, so much so that I didn’t even bother to finish it. It is not really a novel as such, but consists of several separate stories (my guess would be 11, but I didn’t really check) that are only very tenuously connected by the mention of woodworm and/or Noah’s Ark - don’t ask me why, I didn’t get it either.

The first story, which tells about what went “really” on on board Noah’s Ark, told from the standpoint of one little passenger, was quite funny. If you’re an atheist that is. It doesn’t leave a good hair on any aspect of the nonsensical story as told by the Bible, and as such I obviously enjoyed it a lot.

I really wanted to like the book based on that first story, but sadly it all went downhill from there. The following chapters ranged from the downright silly (as in “stupid” and not funny at all) to the plain boring. I couldn’t muster any interest in any of them, except maybe “The Survivor”, but even that one got too confusing and pointless in the end.

In fact, most of the stories seemed kind of pointless to me. Probably I just didn’t get the point, but they all left me wondering why the hell I should be interested in those people. Very, very dissatisfying.

The most puzzling aspect of the whole book, though, was the to my eyes absolutely exaggerated praise for it on the back cover. All those reviewers praising it as a masterpiece, as funny and moving and whatnot - they all must have read a totally different book and I want to know which one.

I am normally not a big fan of audiobooks. I often find that my mind tends to drift off and I lose the thread of the story, if I don’t concentrate very hard. The only audiobook I have enjoyed so far has been “Three Men in a Boat”, read by Hugh Laurie. And that was easy, because not only is it a hilariously funny story, but Hugh Laurie is the perfect narrator for it. How could I ever drift off while listening to Hugh? Exactly.

Now, my new found enthusiasm for audiobooks incidentally was sparked by Hugh Laurie as well, if only indirectly. You see, it was on his recommendation, so to speak, that I started to read my first P.G. Wodehouse novels recently. And, not surprisingly for anybody familiar with said novels, I enjoyed them just as much as Hugh’s foreword had led me to believe I would. (I will in time write a review about them, too.)

So, since I am a newly converted Wodehouse addict, obviously I started to look for more of his books. And that was how I happened to stumble upon LibriVox.

LibriVox provides free audiobooks from the public domain, read mostly by volunteers. They have oodles of books there, as far as I can tell.

For myself, of course, I was only interested in the Wodehouse stories, of which there are 19 finished ones recorded and a couple others in the works. As of today, I have downloaded most of them, but only listened to “Psmith in the city” (only partway through). And even though the fact that the single chapters are read by different people takes some getting used to, I quite enjoyed it so far. I might have enjoyed it still more if I had read it myself, but at least I got to hear the story at all, whereas I just don’t have the money to buy all the books right now. Plus, audiobooks do really have their merits on long distance drives - can’t read very well while driving the car, after all.

So if you’re a fan of audiobooks, it might be worth to check out LibriVox. Oh, did I mention that you can also volunteer to read for them? That sounds like fun. Of course, with my dreadful german accent I will abstain from doing so.

I can’t remember anymore what prompted me long ago to put that book on my Amazon wishlist (it probably had something to do with the beautiful cover again), but when I recently found it on Bookmooch I decided to give it a go.

This is what Publishers Weekly had to say about the story:

The author of the bestselling Bee Season returns with an accomplished but peculiarly tensionless historical novel that follows the shifting fortunes of a young Irish-American woman. Raised in tough turn-of-the-century South Boston, Lydia Kilkenny works as a shopgirl at a fancy downtown department store, where she meets shy, hypochondriacal medical student Henry Wickett. After a brief courtship, the two marry (Henry down, Lydia decidedly up) in 1914. Henry quits school to promote his eponymous remedy, whose putative healing powers have less to do with the tasty brew that Lydia concocts than with the personal letters that Henry pens to each buyer. After failing to pass the army physical as the U.S. enters WWI, Henry quickly, dramatically dies of influenza, and Lydia returns to Southie, where she watches friends, neighbors and her beloved brother die in the 1918 epidemic. A flu study that employs human subjects is being conducted on Boston Harbor’s Gallups Island; lonely Lydia signs on as a nurse’s assistant, and there finds a smidgen of hope and a chance at a happier future. A pastiche of other voices deepens her story: chapters close with snippets from contemporary newspapers, conversations among soldiers and documents revealing the surprising fate of Wickett’s Remedy. And the dead offer margin commentary—by turns wistful, tender and corrective (and occasionally annoying).

This turned out to be a very quick read and I enjoyed especially the comments of the dead people in the margins (they literally are in the margins beside the main text and were a bit of a pain in the ass to read, because switching over to them meant a break in the flow of the story). It seems strange that they sounded so very much like the living, but on the other hand that was what made them so funny to me.

The story itself is strangely undramatic. Considering that there was a war going on and then additionally a worldwide flu epidemic with people dropping dead left, right and center, I think one could be excused to expect a bit more drama or at least action. But Lydia seems to go through life mostly as a spectator, having things happen to her, but not actually making them happen herself. That makes her a quite realistic character in my eyes, but sadly not a very engaging one.

Still, it was an quite enjoyable light read, nothing to write home about, but a good way to spend a lazy afternoon or two. But I don’t think I will go out of my way to read Myla Goldberg’s other book(s).

Another book I have had on my shelves for more than a year. At 750 pages it seemed a bit daunting. Add to that the fact that it is a historical novel, based on facts, which can turn out pretty boring if not handled right. So it’s no wonder I passed it over again and again, I’m more surprised that I did finally get around to tackle it. And it “only” took me almost 2 weeks to read it…

Then again, the fact that I didn’t give up on it, but kept picking it up again and again, tells you that it can not be all that boring in the end.

The first thing about this book that caught my eye in the bookstore was the beautiful cover (as usual), the second one was the back blurb:

1828

Brilliant young naval officer Robert FitzRoy is given the captaincy of the HMS Beagle, surveying the wilds of Tierra del Fuego, aged just twenty-three. He takes a passenger: a young trainee cleric and amateur geologist named Charles Darwin. This is the story of a deep friendship between two men, and the twin obsessions that tore it apart, leading one to triumph and the other to disaster…

To be honest, they had me at the mention of Charles Darwin. Having studied biology, it is probably not a big surprise that Darwin is something of a hero to me. His books and his theories about natural selection and the origin of species have done more to enlighten the world than any other person’s achievements ever. So, to read a gripping novel about the man can only be interesting, right?

Well, yes and no. Firstly, I was a bit dismayed to realize that this book is not so much about Darwin (he is mentioned for the first time around page 220 or so) as about Captain FitzRoy. Secondly, the Darwin in the book turned out to be a very much different person from the one I thought to know from reading his own books. Frankly, the Charles Darwin in this book is not very likeable and, especially in the beginning, comes across as a bit of a tosser, who just got lucky.

But the story in this book revolves mainly around the person of Captain Robert FitzRoy, who, I have to admit, seems to have been quite a remarkable man himself. It is unfair that he is totally forgotten today, whereas every child knows Darwin’s name. But such are the vagaries of history. Personally, I would have gotten along better with Darwin, since FitzRoy’s staunch belief in God and the Bible would have driven me up the wall - as they did Darwin, which is the reason for the end of their friendship and their later hostility towards each other. But nevertheless I can’t help but being impressed with FitzRoy’s contributions to science either: Besides inventing the weather forecast, his navigational charts of Patagonia, Chile, the Falklands and Tierra del Fuego were so exhaustingly precise that they continued to be in use until recently. His inventions saved hundreds, if not thousands of sailors’ lives. Sadly, he died utterly bankrupt and ridiculed and his writings were soon all but forgotten.

One thing I love very much about historical novels is the author’s notes at the end of the book, because I am always curious as to how much of the narrative is actually supported by recorded facts. In the case of this book these notes were quite detailed and just as interesting as the novel itself.

I still think the book could have been a good 200 pages shorter. There were many scenes that didn’t really add to the narrative and could have just mentioned briefly in passing (the whole New Zealand episode being one of them). But on the whole this turned out to be an entertaining read. I loved the fact that it gave me a new perspective on a man I thought I knew and that it taught me about another one, who is unfairly forgotten. What more can you expect from a book?

I just found this list at Puss Reboots, who got it from Bibliobibuli, who in turn found it at the site of The Telegraph.

The allegedly 50 best cult books. What exactly a cult book is defies an easy definition. I thought the Telegraph’s attempts at explaining it were quite funny:

Some things crop up often: drugs, travel, philosophy, an implied two fingers to conventional wisdom, titanic self-absorption, a tendency to date fast and a paperback jacket everyone recognises with a faint wince. But these don’t begin to cover it.
Cult books include some of the most cringemaking collections of bilge ever collected between hard covers. But they also include many of the key texts of modern feminism; some of the best journalism and memoirs; some of the most entrancing and original novels in the canon.

Well, whatever the definition, what we have here is a list. And I just love lists.
Sharon Bakar at Bibliobibuli had the idea to see which ones she’s read and because I’m curious I will do the same.

The books I have read are bold, the ones I am interested in reading are in italics.

* Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut (1969)
* The Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell (1957-60)
* A Rebours by JK Huysmans (1884)
* Baby and Child Care by Dr Benjamin Spock (1946)
* The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf (1991)
* The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath (1963)
* Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (1961)
* The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger (1951)
* The Celestine Prophecy by James Redfield (1993)
* The Dice Man by Luke Rhinehart (1971)
* Chariots of the Gods: Was God An Astronaut? by Erich Von Däniken (1968)
* A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole (1980) - easily the most awful book I have read in years!
* Confessions by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1782)
* The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner by James Hogg (1824)
* Dianetics: the Modern Science of Mental Health by L Ron Hubbard (1950)
* The Doors of Perception by Aldous Huxley (1954)
* Dune by Frank Herbert (1965)
* The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams (1979)
* The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe (1968)
* Fear of Flying by Erica Jong (1973) - and god was that boring
* The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer (1970)
* The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand (1943)
* Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas R Hofstadter (1979)
* Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon (1973)
* The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln (1982) - this one was so boring that I couldn’t even finish it
* I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith (1948) - loved it!
* If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino (1979)
* Iron John: a Book About Men by Robert Bly (1990)
* Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach and Russell Munson (1970) - no, I was wrong, THIS ONE is the most awful book I ever read (along with The Little Prince *blech*)
* The Magus by John Fowles (1966)
* Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges (1962)
* The Leopard by Giuseppe di Lampedusa (1958)
* The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov (1967)
* No Logo by Naomi Klein (2000)
* On The Road by Jack Kerouac (1957)
* Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S Thompson (1971)
* The Outsider by Colin Wilson (1956)
* The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran (1923)
* The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists by Robert Tressell (1914)
* The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám translated by Edward FitzGerald (1859)
* The Road to Oxiana by Robert Byron (1937)
* Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse (1922)
* The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1774)
* Story of O by Pauline Réage (1954)
* The Stranger by Albert Camus (1942)
* The Teachings of Don Juan: a Yaqui Way of Knowledge by Carlos Castaneda (1968)
* Testament of Youth by Vera Brittain (1933)
* Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1883-85)
* To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (1960)
* Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: an Inquiry into Values by Robert M Pirsig (1974) - another one that bored me to tears, I think I tossed it aside after a hundred pages or so and even that was too late

That makes 13 out of 50. Not too bad, but sadly I only really enjoyed 2 of the ones I read. That doesn’t bode too well for the other ones I still plan to read one day.

I can’t believe what I just found in one of my books:

It’s an adorably little bookmark - still in its original packing and with the price tag.
I bought the book last summer in a secondhand bookstore in London for 1 or 2 Pounds and had it sitting on my shelf for almost a year now without ever noticing this little thing hidden between its pages. Until I just took the book down to register it on Bookcrossing, and the bookmark slid out.
Since the price tag is in Dollar, I guess the bookmark - probably together with the book - was purchased in the US and left behind in London after a holiday (it’s quite a heavy book, so I wouldn’t wanna lug it across the pond with me twice). Or maybe it was a gift that was not appreciated and unceremoniously dumped in the next secondhand store? Hm, I wish I knew.
Anyway, now I feel compelled to read this book next.
Which book is it, you ask?
“Ahab’s Wife: Or, The Star-gazer” by Sena Jeter Naslund
Judging by the fact that it has over 230 customer reviews on Amazon.com it seems to have been quite the bestseller in its day.

This is one of those books I desperately wanted to like, just for the fact that the story is narrated by Death. Ever since meeting Terry Pratchett’s version of Death in the Discworld books, not to mention Neil Gaiman’s version in the Sandman comics, I have an ongoing crush on Death as a person.

Also, this book is about somebody who steals books. And honestly, if you have to steal at all, books are about the only thing worth doing it.

Plus, who could resist this beautiful cover art? I know I should stop judging a book by its cover, but I do it all the time anyway.

So this one should have been an easy sell on me. If, that is, there hadn’t been such a hype around it when it came out. Overhyped books generally, more often than not, turn out to be nothing special and hardly worth the time for me. *coughHarryPottercough*

And finding out that the story was set in World War II Germany didn’t help either. If there is one thing that really bores me to death it is stories about WWII, about persecuted Jews and the bad german Nazis, blah, blah, blah… I have read Anne Frank’s Diary, thank you very much. They tortured us with stories about that war all the bloody time in school, so I really am not interested anymore.

So I ended up getting a copy of the book, but whenever I looked for something to read on my shelves, my hand passed right over it and chose something else instead. But recently I finally decided I had avoided the book long enough and ought to give it a chance. And I’m glad I did, because the story really is beautiful.

Liesel, a nine-year-old girl, is living with a foster family on Himmel Street. Her parents have been taken away to a concentration camp. Her brother died. Liesel steals books. This is her story and the story of the inhabitants of her street when the bombs begin to fall. Death is busy during those years, but he manages nevertheless to keep an eye on the little book thief.

That sounds bleak, and it kinda is. But it is also a wonderfully hopeful story about love and friendship in unlikely places, about caring and trusting and dreaming in hard times. The fact that the story is narrated by Death himself makes the celebration of life ever so much more touching and memorable.

And then, there is Zusak’s beautiful prose. The guy really has a way with words. His language flows along and draws you into the story right from page one. Although it is a longish story I was sad to reach the end so very soon, because I just couldn’t put it down.

I ended up enjoying this book much more than I expected to. And that is always a nice gift, because it happens so rarely.