Stieg Larsson - The Girl Who Played With Fire

This week's book was a real feat, it is the first time in this challenge that I've attempted to read a book that's 600 pages long. As you can see, I have failed. It's Monday and I'm too late writing the short report, but I have finished the book and I can't wait to get home from Liverpool and find the third novel in this trilogy on the door mat. 

After reading the first book The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo I wasn't too keen to continue reading the other ones. That's why I kept Stieg Larsson's - The Girl Who Played With Fire untouched on my book shelf for over a year. I was not impressed by Larsson story-telling skills in the first book and the way he describes the characters and the ever changing narrative really put me off. In this next novel, however, we already know most of the characters and the narrative is less awkward and jumpy. Larsson does not have to explain in tiring detail what is going through Salander's head, because we remember from the first book. I don't know how he did it, but unknowingly I remembered a lot of details from the first book and the characters stuck with me even after reading countless books and watching numerous films in between these novels. 

At most times I really could not put the book down, because the story is told from so many point-of-views, that every time you finish a passage you want to continue on to see what happened to the other characters. I will write a more extensive blog when I have finished the last book. Since this novel has an open ending, I feel that I would not do it justice by going in too much detail about the story. And who knows... Maybe Larsson will fail to impress me in the last one of his magnus opus.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón - The Prince of Mist

The book for this week is Carlos Ruiz Zafón's first book that has recently been translated into English; The Prince of Mist. It is a young adult book, but Zafón was really clever by making it interesting for adults as well. This novel has a lot in common with old horror stories, where the suspense is bigger than the actual scary passages.

The book is about Max and his family who move to a small seaside town in Spain to flee the war. There they uncover a story about the old residents of the house and about the boy and his grandfather who live in the lighthouse. It's a very suspenseful novel about keeping your promises and what happens when you don't.

Andrea Levy - The Long Song

I'm not proud of this, but I must say it. This week I struggled to finish a book that is only 398 pages long. I can't give you the reason for this. I don't think it was because I wasn't interested in the book because it was quite entertaining. I think my desire to participate in this little challenge is faltering. Nevertheless, I rejoice in the fact that I did finish it and I'm ready to get started on next week's book.

But let's have a little peek at Andrea Levy - The Long Song first. It's a book written by a British author whose roots are in Jamaica. The novel is set in Jamaica in the last years of slavery as told by the narrator July. We skip back and forth to July writing the story while being supervised by her son Thomas to the actual tale where we read all about July's struggles in Jamaica before and after the abolishment of slavery. 

The narration of the actual tale is interesting, but the pieces in between where Thomas talks to his mother are tedious. Luckily these aren't long passages, which makes the book perfectly bearable. This is the most striking part of the book where older July does not want to admit the story is actually about here:

 "This tale is of my making. This story is told for my amusement. What befalls July is for me to devise. Better that my son save his wrath for those parts of his household which deserve to see the anger he can raise, was my reply. 

'Mama,' he say to me, 'do not take me for a fool. This is the story of your own life, not of your creating, I can see this.'

'No it is not,' I tell him.

'It is,' him say.

'It is of my making,' I tell him.'" (Levy, 185)

And in that same passage she stubbornly persists in referring to July in the third person, never really relating to her and thus keeping a safe distance from her past. It's a good book. But this distance ruins it in a way that we can't really feel for this character, which to me is one of the most important elements in books about slavery. It's an emotional subject and not something you can describe dryly. 

It's time for bed now though. Let's see if I can meet next week's challenge. I have yet to pick a book though, which is the most exciting thing of doing this challenge. Buying and picking books on a weekly basis.

Hide & Seek - Ian Rankin

I am so happy I don't give up on authors after one book. Knots & Crosses wan't very good. It was generic and even a bit boring. Ian Rankin's Hide & Seek however is much more confident and interesting. You can see that Rankin feels more comfortable with Inspector Rebus. He even feels confident enough to add other characters. In Knots & Crosses Rebus was the complete centre of attention. In the sequel this centre switches from him to Constable Holmes.

The book moves completely away from Rebus’ personal issues, because they were mostly covered in the first book to other crimes. In this case the crime involves a boy who overdosed on drugs with rat poison. At the same time Rebus has to set up an anti-drugs campaign with the richest of the city because he acquired fame after his brother was jailed for drug trafficking. There isn’t much more to say about this book. I will definitely read more of Rankin’s book, but for now it’s enough Rebus and it’s time to move on to another genre altogether. 

Knots & Crosses - Ian Rankin

I'm not a big fan of crime novels. Up until now the only two detectives that truly interested me are Sherlock Holmes (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle) and Jack Caffery (Mo Hayder). Both characters spike my interest for different reasons; Sherlock because he's an expert in deductive reasoning but also a drug addict. What's even more fascinating about him is that his creator hated him because readers didn’t want anything from him but Sherlock Holmes. That's why he attempted to  kill his character off, but the public didn't let him and he had to resurrect him. The interaction between the character and the creator is fascinating in that sense. Caffery is interesting because he has experienced a horrible trauma when he was a child and he has never recovered from it. He’s a Byronic hero and I like my men to be as Byronic as possible.

Detective Rebus can now be added to my favourite detectives list. Not because he is such an enthralling character, not in the first book at least. It’s because I have something in common with him and that’s our love for books:

"His eyes beheld beauty not in reality but in the printed word. Standing in the waiting-room, he realized that in his life he had accepted secondary experience -- the experience of reading someone else's thoughts -- over real life." (Rankin, Knots & Crosses)

Also, it's because I love reading references of the city I live in. Ian Rankin's novels are famously set in Edinburgh. The city I've called my home for the past six months.

There’s not much to say about the story itself. It’s very simple and not very refreshing or different. For next week I’m reading Rankin’s second Rebus novel to see if he can hold my interest for more than one book, but I especially hope he manages to come up with a really good story. 

Room - Emma Donoghue

The first thing that came to mind after I finished reading this book was a short story I had studied in my English Literature Ode to Fear MA course. It's by Richard Matheson:

X — This day when it had light mother called me retch. You retch she said. I saw in her eyes the anger. I wonder what it is a retch.
This day it had water falling from upstairs. It fell all around. I saw that. The ground of the back I watched from the little window. The ground it sucked up the water like thirsty lips. It drank too much and it got sick and runny brown. I didnt like it.
Mother is a pretty I know. In my bed place with cold walls around I have a paper things that was behind the furnace. It says on it 5CREENSTARS. I see in the pictures faces like of mother and father. Father says they are pretty. Once he said it. And also mother he said. Mother so pretty and me decent enough. Look at you he said and didnt have the nice face. I touched his arm and said it is alright father. He shook and pulled away where I couldnt reach. Today mother let me off the chain a little so I could look out the little window. Thats how l saw the water falling from upstairs. (Matheson, Born of Man and Woman)

It's a short story about a boy who is locked away in a cellar by his mother and father. Similarly, Jack the protagonist in Room is locked away with his mother by a kidnapper who has kept Ma locked away in a tiny room for seven years. The difference between the boy in Matheson's story and Jack, is that Jack is growing up with no sense of the real world, he does however develop perfect speech and his mother teaches him everything about what she calls the "television world". Jack is the narrator in the novel, it shows that he is a very smart 5-year old, but that he is struggling with grammar, for example: "I know who brung it" (Donoghue, 54) However this young boy is quite clever for his age. The only concept he is struggling with is the vast amount of things living and going on in Outside.

It's a very intelligent book about a boy and his Ma who have lived most of their lives in solitary confinement and who had to live with each other in one single room for most of their lives. The only other person Jack knows is the evil Old Nick who comes by every now and then to "make the bed creak" with Jack's Ma. It's definitely a book I would recommend, because it's a very touching story about a small boy who is learning about life within the confines of a single room.

The Beginning of a Wonderful Journey into the World of Books

Well, here I am. An entire array of failed attempts at finishing something left far behind me and ready to take on a new challenge. In the past I tried writing books, screenplays and even silly cartoons (before I found out I wasn't particularly adept at drawing). I did, however, finish something in the 24 years I've been around and that is my MA in English Literature. I wrote full length essays and I read all the necessary novels. Needless to say, after a regime of at least two books a week, my life spiralled into a black hole after I had graduated.

My job is dominating my life now and at the moment a call centre is the thing that is sucking my passion for books and films out of me. This is why I thought of this challenge. I will force myself over the next few months, maybe even years to finish at least one book per week. This is will range from incredibly short stories to extremely lengthy novels (J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings is still staring at me from my bookshelf, waiting to be read). Every time I finish reading a novel, I will write a short but slightly academic blog about it.

I'm doing this mostly for myself, to make sure I will stay motivated in the things I love, but I'll do it for the one or two people out there as well who may have the same idea but don't feel like they can pull it off. I hope I can prove to myself that I can keep this up. First, I have to start reading the novel for Week 1 of this challenge: Emma Donoghue's Room.