Two books I have not finished

I am so far behind on my book reviews that I have no idea how I will ever catch up again, if I don’t get a few days off anytime soon. anyway, here are 2 books I definitely DIDN’T enjoy:

So far I was quite lucky with the books I have read this year. Out of almost 30 there were only two I didn’t finish:

Will Self’s “The Book of Dave” and Susanna Clarke’s “Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell”.

Both of them promised so much and delivered so little. If I had a 50-pages-rule, neither one would have passed it, but since I am an eternal optimist when it comes to books I plodded on, in the case of Jonathan Strange for another 200 pages. But it just wasn’t any good.

To compare Jonathan Strange to Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings - as some reviewer did (and of course they had to put that line on the cover) - is just plain preposterous. The only thing the two books have in common is the occurence of wizards in the story, although to call either Strange or Norrell a real wizard is quite a stretch. Apart from that I can see no reason to even put them in the same broad category in terms of storyline or subject, much less so in terms of quality. Susanna Clarke’s writing is miles, no leagues away from Tolkien’s. This book was abysmally boring and pointless.

My opinion of Will Self’s writing is marginally better. Quite a while ago I have read his book “How The Dead Live”, which I enjoyed, even though it was slow going and took me ages to finish. So I came to “The Book of Dave” with some amount of expectation, which is almost never a good thing. Mainly I expected to like it, because the blurb made it sound like a dystopian fiction, which is my favorite genre at the moment, and also like a dig at religion - and how could I pass it up in that case? Sadly, in my eyes it delivered on none of those promises. The story took a long while to get into gear and then just dragged on and on interminably - until I gave up around halfway through. So now I will never learn how Dave’s demented ramblings went on to spark an equally demented religion in a dark and distant future. But you know what? I think I can live with that.

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After reading and enjoying “Basket Case” by Carl Hiaasen recently, I received 3 more of his books through Bookmooch a while back:

• “Skinny Dip”
• “Sick Puppy” and
• “Lucky You” (which I am reading just now)

A few days ago I realized I had quite a few points collected on Bookmooch again, so I requested 6 more:

• “Stormy Weather”
• “Skin Tight”
• “Nature Girl”
• “Hoot”
• “Strip Tease” and
• “Native Tongue”.

And, with the exception of Hoot, the mooches have all been accepted already and the books will be on the way to me shortly. Yay!
I don’t know how many others he has written, but I guess nine books by the same author should be enough to occupy me for a while. I’ll get the other ones later - if I shouldn’t have enough of him by then.

Since Janet from FondofSnape has posted pictures of her bookshelves a couple of days ago, which I always find very interesting, I decided to follow suit with some photos of my own shelves.
(In case you want to actually check out the titles of the books I have linked to bigger versions of all the pictures. You can also find all of them on my flickr page.)

There are more shelves and a couple of boxes of books elsewhere in the house, but these are my main collection. I tend not to hold on to many books nowadays. Most I won’t bother to re-read anyway, so I rather exchange them for new ones either on Bookmooch or Bookcrossing. And as you can see here, I have been a very good girl lately (or, rather, a very broke one) and have aquired very few new books, so my Mt. TBR has shrunk considerably.

If you wanna play along, go ahead and post some pictures of your own book collection. Leave a link in the comments so I can come over and have a look.

Talk about life being unfair and cruel.

Apparently Terry Pratchett, one of my favorite authors and a man with one of the most amazingly creative imaginations out there, is suffering from Alzheimer’s Disease. I could hardly believe it when I just read that on the BTT blog.

I hate the thought that the man who invented a whole new world for millions of people to enjoy, might someday soon not be able to remember his own name anymore. That’s just wrong.

Pratchett himself donated £ 500,000 to the Alzheimer’s Research Trust last week, which has triggered a fan campaign to follow suit with donations of their own, aptly named Match It For Pratchett.

It is nice to see at least some good come from such bad news.
The way fans immediately rallied for this cause reminds me of the Can’t Stop The Serenity screenings that the Whedonverse does to support Joss Whedon’s favorite charity.
Only in Pratchett’s case the cause for this campaign is so much sadder.

I hope they will reach their goal, and of course I have contributed right away. Maybe I’ll wish for one of the t-shirts for my birthday next month.

Once again I picked up a YA book and once again I didn’t get disappointed.

Imagine a world where your fourteenth birthday is your last. In a futuristic urban wasteland, evil Overlords have decreed that no child shall live past the age of fourteen. On that Sad Birthday, every child is the object of an obscene harvest - his brains and muscles are used to construct machine-like creatures whose sole purpose is to kill.

Although the book is at times quite brutal, the story is nevertheless a real page-turner from start to finish. I know I would have loved this book if I would have read it as a teenager. Being over 30 now, I still enjoyed it. Not only was it a nice, quick read in between more demanding books. It only fits well into my obsession with dystopian fiction. I’ll definitely look up Garth Nix’ other books as well.

I don’t even remember why I picked this book up in the first place. I think I must have heard some good things about the author somewhere. Also, I kind of liked the blurb and this pretzel-like dead lizard on the cover must have been the last thing needed to hook me. (Yes, the dead lizard does play an important, though short, role in the story!)

Whatever it was, I am very glad I did give the book a try, because it was an absolutely delightful read. Normally I am not much of a fan of crime fiction. Following clues and trying to find out who is the killer just doesn’t interest me at all. Normally.

But, just reading the title should give you an inclination that this is not exactly a ‘normal’ crime story. Yes, there is a murder, there are clues, there is a journalist trying to solve the case (to redeem himself with a big story that will alow him to get out of writing obituaries for the rest of his life) and all that.

But besides that stuff this is just a damn funny story. Jack Tagger is not exactly your usual hero-type of guy and to follow him on his bumbling way to the solution of the case is great fun.
It doesn’t take long to become clear who actually committed the murder, but just as Jack himself, the reader takes a while to puzzle out the why - which is much more interesting, at least for me. And Jack’s obsession with dead people - or rather with the age at which famous people dropped dead - is just hilarious.

In the end, our unlikely hero solves the case, gets the girl (oh, I didn’t mention her, but she’s quite funny as well), could get his job back, but doesn’t want it anymore and overall everything is fine. And I had a couple of very entertaining days reading this. What more can you ask from a book?

So, whoever it was that said something nice about Carl Hiaasen’s books and made me pick this one up in the first place: I thank you very much. It seems I have found a new author to look out for. And I just love to find someone new to read when they have already written several books, because that means I have a lot of catching up to do.

I have never actually read one of Elizabeth George’s novels, because as I mentioned before, I am not much of a crime story fan. But this book is subtitled “One Novelist’s Approach to Fiction and the Writing Life”, and there are two things I just can not resist: books about books and books about writing. And even though I am not a fan of her books myself, I gather that she is a very successful writer who sells millions of books, so I figured she might have actually something worthwhile to say about the writing process.

After reading the book I am still not a fan of her writing (I know that because she uses excerpts from her books extensively as examples), but I have the feeling I might get along with her personally. She certainly has a very sensible attitude towards writing and has a few interesting, if not actually new to me, things to say concerning the craft.

It was very interesting to compare her approach to writing a novel to, for instance, Stephen King’s. While King seems to be a very intuitive writer, who always says that the story basically writes itself and he is just there to take it down, Mrs. George seems to be quite the opposite, taking planning and plotting to extremes and needing a very detailed outline and kind of flowchart for the whole thing before she even begins the actual writing.

I am neither the one nor the other extreme, but there are certainly things to be learned from both methods.

Elizabeth George’s process in a nutshell, as given by her in the final chapter, consists of roughly 13 steps:

1. the idea, the expanded idea, the primary event
2. people the world of the expanded idea and the primary event, list characters generically, list characters specifically
3. research
4. create characters
5. create settings
6. step outline till there’s nothing more to say
7. plot outline
8. write the rough draft
9. the fast reading
10. the editorial letter
11. the second draft
12. the cold reader
13. the third draft, if necessary

She goes into much detail about each step in the different chapters. I especially liked the way she really takes her time to get to know her characters intimately before she begins the writing. Also, what she had to say about dialogue and how to turn an idea into an actual plot.

All in all it was a very nice book, which I am glad to have read, but probably won’t pick up again. While I agree with her on many points, I think her writing style is so different from mine that I won’t feel compelled to return to this book again and again as I do with other books.