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Review: The Last Werewolf by Glen Duncan

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Category: Fiction/Fantasy/Horror – Paperback: 346 pages – Publisher: Canongate Press
First Published: 2011

Blurb:
‘You’re the last.
I’m sorry.
The end is coming.

For two centuries Jacob Marlowe has wandered the world, enslaved by his lunatic appetites and tormented by the memory of his first and most monstrous crime. Now, the last of his kind, he knows he can’t go on. But as Jake counts down to suicide, a violent murder and an extraordinary meeting plunge him straight back into the desperate pursuit of life.’

A Sample Quote: ‘If it were a novel I’d reject it along with all other genre output that by definition short-changes reality. Unfortunately for me it is reality.’
(page 88)

My Thoughts: For me it was nothing like realistic.

To be fair to the book, this is not my standard reading fare when it comes to fiction. However, it was on my radar because of The Readers picking it for their summer book club. Even then I read the blurb, considered it and said, ‘pass’. Not because I never read horror or think werewolves are silly but because I had enough reading commitments and wasn’t sold on it enough to add it on to my wishlist. Then a week later, I was in a charity shop, hiding from the rain and it was on the shelves marked as 75p (just over a $1). I read the blurb again, read the first chapter (it’s four pages) and thought, ‘yeah, why not.’ Home it came. I knew I wouldn’t get to it ahead of The Readers’ podcast but it might be good for insomnia some night. Posting all my autumn 2004 reviews has reminded me that insomnia drives me to books and a varied TBR pile is most necessary.

Anyway, fast forward a month and actually I am clearing through my book queue pretty well and I need something to feed my craving for good fiction. Bleakly Hall didn’t do it but maybe a werewolf can…

But not this werewolf.

‘And this was to say nothing of my one diarist’s duty still discharged: If I was snuffed-out here and now who would tell the untellable tale? The whole disease of your life written but for the last lesion of the heart, its malignancy and muse. God’s gone, Meaning too, and yet aesthetic fraudulence still has the power to shame.‘
(page 13, italics are the author’s not mine)

Jake is at first enjoyably verbose and erudite, then as more of his story is revealed he becomes frustratingly prolix and smug. He’s arrogant and falsely humble, smokes constantly, drinks, kills, uses women and thinks he’s funnier than he is. I found him entirely without charm. He insists that he dislikes the Horror Story aspects of his reality, tells you regularly that ‘if this was a movie’ things would happen differently and scatters his diaries and dialogue with references to books and libraries. He’s a sort of murderous, sex-crazed renaissance man. Utterly unbearable as a narrator.

After over 100 pages the plot had me hooked but was starting to become a little too dependent on twists and Jake was boring me. I wanted a human dealing with the monster within. Instead I got a monster who thought he was a work of art.

If you enjoy car chases in movies, plenty of plot twists and cliffhangers at the end of the chapter, this will appeal. Especially if you’re not afraid of colourful language, questionable sex and gore. For me the plot just wasn’t as strong a like as my dislike of Jake.

NEXT!

Rating: 0/10 – Did Not Finish
(My Book Review Scale)

Source: Bought from a neighbourhood charity shop.

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Books read in 2012

Review: Women’s Reading in Britain 1750-1835 by Jacqueline Pearson

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Full Title: Women’s Reading in Britain 1750-1835: A Dangerous Recreation
Category: Non-Fiction/History (Georgian)/Books About Books – Paperback: 312 pages – Publisher: Cambridge University Press
First Published: 1999

Blurb: The growth of female reading audiences from the mid-eighteenth century to the early Victorian era represents both a vital episode in women’s history and a highly significant factor in shaping the literary production of the period. This book offers for the first time a broad overview and detailed analysis of this growing readership, its representation in literature, and the extent of its influence. It examines both historical women readers, including Laetitia Pilkington, Elizabeth Carter, Frances Burney and Jane Austen, and a wide range of texts in which the figure of the woman reader is important, from Gothic (and other) novels to conduct books and educational works, letters, journals and memoirs, political and economic works, and texts on history and science. Jacqueline Pearson’s study offers illuminating insights which help to make sense of the ambivalent and contradictory attitudes of the age to the key figure of the woman reader.

A Sample Quote: ‘Women readers are paradoxically both the most visible in the literature and the most invisible in the historical record.’
(page 12)

My Thoughts: Firstly, I have to say I love the cover of this book. It made me smile when I picked it up in the library and every time I picked up the book in the evenings to read it. I read this expecting it to be drier than it was and pitched solely at an academic audience, it is however an enjoyable read even for a curious general reader. Pearson uses a variety of sources to show what it might have been like for a female reader in the late eighteenth century and the early nineteenth and nearly all the sources agree: it was hard work.

For a woman of the period there were so many rules and expectations around her reading tastes and habits and these constantly shifted as the nation became a reading nation with a thirst for novels as well as academic texts. Pearson summarises the difficulties in a couple of places in the text but my favourite of these summaries is:

‘Being an effective woman reader required the agility of a tightrope-walker. Literate women had to avoid the stigma of the learned lady, whose reputation was bad throughout the period: when accused of being a ‘great reader’, a heroine generally protests, and only foolish or malicious characters make such observations. But a virtuous woman or girl must not fail to read, either, or this might endanger her, as it does the ‘illiterate’ Hannah Primrose in Inchbald’s Nature and Art (1796). For a woman to write or read badly was at least by the nineteenth century ‘disgraceful’. Contemporary comment, however, is less concerned about women or girls who do not read than with those who read the wrong books, in the wrong ways and the wrong places.’
(page 15)

She goes onto say later:

‘Reading must not only be confined to good books but must be concealed, compliant, and devoted to an ideology of service. Women must be sensitive to literature, but not too sensitive: they may gain knowledge and pleasure but not too much. So hard is the balancing act involved that, to paraphrase Rasselas, it is hard to imagine that any female can ever be a good reader.’
(page 92) (italics are mine)

It’s this idea of being scrutinised that I find so abhorrent as a modern female reader. In amongst all those gorgeous paintings of women in fine gowns curled up with a novel you never see the reality – the scene afterwards where she had to explain to her husband or father what she was reading and accept his ruling on whether it was suitable for her.

There’s lots of examples of conduct books written by men saying a book should or shouldn’t be read by ladies but I want to include a lovely (and somewhat lighter) quote about a botanist, Richard Polwhele, being horrified that women and girls should have the temerity to look at the rude bits of flowers:

‘Polwhele was especially outraged that he has ‘several times’ actually seen ‘boys and girls botanizing together’. He equates botany not only with immodesty but with free-thinking, republicanism, the French Revolution, the wearing of hairpieces, and anything else he considers dangerously unnatural and un-feminine.’
(page 68, talking about Richard Polwhele and his book The Unsex’d Female)

While it’s funny to now imagine Polwhele having a hissy fit over how botany will lead to you wearing a hairpiece and becoming a republican, it probably felt very bleak and stifling at the time.

Early women readers were haunted by this constant assessment of, and commentary on, their reading activities, Pearson even gives cases of women going back and altering their diaries to say they never read a particular book when tastes shifted and it became unsuitable for ladies.

There are however, rays of sunshine into this very controlled environment. The subscription libraries gradually spread across the country and women could access books beyond their father or husband’s collection. Women could lend books amongst themselves as they became more readily available and discuss them together – the first book groups. Books began to trickle down from high income ladies to the middle class and even in some cases the working class, though evidence of what the working class girls thought of the novels they borrowed is hard to come by.

Pearson’s book is a great introduction to the period, the specific books that were being printed, sold and read and the experience of being one of these revolutionary women readers. The bibliography at the back of the book has led to several books being added to my wishlist and I now have a greater appreciation for how some books dominated the burgeoning literary scene in a way they wouldn’t today in our competitive modern market. To a modern reader used to the choice on offer today it can be hard to assess the impact of an early novelist like Frances Burney or Samuel Richardson but this book sets them firmly in context.

My only criticism, and it is a small one, is that Pearson seems to have relied solely on diaries, collections of letters and autobiographical writings for evidence of what women thought about their reading – I really felt there should have been some commonplace books consulted to round out the picture, the sources she used were all written with an audience in mind (even if that audience was just the letter’s recipient) whereas commonplaces were mostly intended for private use.

I highly recommend this if you are interested in the politics of being a female reader or even in England’s development into a reading nation, it’s far more accessible than some other texts on the subject.

Rating: 8/10
(My Book Review Scale)

Source: The Public Library.

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Books read in 2012

Reviews Posted This Week

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Here’s a round up of all the 2012 and 2004 reviews posted over the last couple of weeks for your perusal.

Reviews from 2012 reads:

Leeds: Old & New by Percy Robinson

This week I only posted one 2012 review, this week has been all about The Classics Club instead. I decided to join, discussed my selection process for my 50 books and then in a separate post shared the list. I also explained why I am now splitting my DNF (Did Not Finish) category into true DNFs and Deferred books which I intend to come back to and I shared a cute animation about the great library in the sky.

Full list of 2012 reads

Reviews from 2004 moved across to Alex in Leeds this week:

Scenes From A Smallholding by Chas Griffin

We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families by Philip Gourevitch

Thyme Out by Katie Fforde

Lady of Hay by Barbara Erskine

Dark Angels: Lesbian Vampire Stories edited by Pam Keesey

Virtual Light by William Gibson

Full list of 2004 reads

The Sunday Salon: The Difference Between Deferred and Discarded

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This last week I have created a new category for my book reviews. From now on, every book I read is being assigned one of three statuses:

- Finished and Rated (using my own scale of 1-10)
- DNF (Did Not Finish)
- Deferred

By saying that something is Deferred I am acknowledging that I got to page 50, enjoyed or was curious about the book, but it wasn’t the right time for me. Marking something as deferred is acknowledging that some day I might come back to it, when I feel I might understand it better or after reading some of its source material or simply when it fits better with my reading commitments.

It’s going to be a different category from those books marked DNF. A DNF is for those books I have tried, am willing to fail with and won’t be going back to. I have got to page 50 and I feel no need to finish it, now or later. In some cases by marking something as DNF I am signalling that me and that author are a mismatched pair and I am crossing them off my list of authors to try or consider.

I guess I feel the need to distinguish between these two reasons for setting aside a book because of the recent reading slump I have been going through and how I feel about some of the books I am not finishing.

I borrowed three fairly academic books on aspects of the same subject and only finished one – I started to feel overwhelmed when I began the second and still had the third peeping out at me from the TBR shelf. I returned the second and third books to the library but I very much intend to read them at a later date. Just not one after the other. They’re deferred books not DNFs.

And then there’s a book like The Pale King by David Foster Wallace which was another library borrowing. I had other reading commitments when I borrowed it and after three or four evenings of reading 20 or 30 pages at a time I felt I wasn’t giving it enough of my attention. What I read I enjoyed vastly but it required a lot of concentration to appreciate the language used by Wallace, understand the chunks of accountancy material used in one of the plot lines and deciphering some of the Americanisms. It’s a book I need to buy my own copy of, clear the reading decks for a week and give my full attention to. Deferred.

When it comes to DNFs, there’s a couple of books recently that have been definitely earned that status.

There was Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino. I read the blurb, liked the sound of it, wondered what Calvino had done before he wrote If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller… and took it home. I really should have read a chunk of the text before taking it – it’s exactly the same style as If…. Every passage is a description of arriving in a different city. Just as you are interested in the city you turn the page and he is describing another arrival, another city. Argh! I hatehatehate this style. If you have a story to tell, tell it. Don’t think you’re clever for starting a new story every page and never doing anything with any of them. Did Not Finish. Will Never Finish. Calvino is an author I am done with.

Oh and David Starkey. I tried another of his books at the start of the month. Couldn’t get beyond page 30 without gnashing my teeth. Had a lovely conversation with the history professor sat opposite me on the train who was amused with my reaction all the way back to Leeds instead. Got home, put the Starkey book in the pile for donating to the local charity shop. No more Starkey for me. Suddenly I feel relieved, like a weight is off my shoulders.

I still plan to blog about the deferred books and the DNFs but by flagging them as these two separate categories it’ll hopefully put them in a proper context with less of a negative tone for those books which are not being criticised, merely postponed.

Review: Leeds – Old & New by Percy Robinson

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Category: Non-Fiction/Leeds – Hardback: 151 pages – Publisher: S R Publishers Limited
First Published: 1926

Blurb: This book was originally published on the tercentenary of the Charter of Incorporation of the Borough of Leeds in 1626 and written with the specific intention of serving as a record of some of the landmarks of old Leeds which were even then gradually disappearing before the ever advancing tide of modern improvements and requirements.

A Sample Quote: ‘In April, 1750, a fashionable dancing academy was opened by “Mr Joseph Baker, of London, in a large room in the Nag’s Head Yard commonly called the Slippin, where ladies and gentle-men may depend upon being instructed in the best manner.”‘

My Thoughts: This was republished in 1971 but it was originally published for Leeds’ tercentenary in 1926 (Leeds is older than 1626 but they lost the original charter so had to get a replacement). What was really lovely about this was that Robinson had access to a lot of materials that are much harder to get hold of today, he had also written and read about Leeds history widely for many years so he’s a great guide to the city. He’s good on most periods and in between the drier assessment of the city’s growth he brings in an enjoyably gossipy note and tales from the early newspapers.

It’s by no means encyclopedic but I did learn a couple of really interesting little snippets which I’ll share via Exploring Leeds. I’m so glad this was reprinted and the library keeps a copy – I have a copy of the 1926 edition but it’s on paper of terrible quality and is hard to read as it’s falling apart. I love books like this, that have little nuggets of local history ‘did you know?’ in amongst the more widely known facts about the Town Hall and main streets.

Rating: 7/10
(My Book Review Scale)

Source: The public library.

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Books read in 2012

The Classics Club: My List

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So, yesterday I announced that I am belatedly joining The Classics Club, a challenge to read 50 or more ‘classic’ books over the next five years.

I also explained that I wanted my list to be a balance of men and women authors and that although I am no classics expert I’ve read a lot of the books by women authors that usually turn up on big 1001 books style lists. Making my list of new-to-me titles meant digging a little deeper to find a few more Victorian and Edwardian women authors since (much as I love them) I didn’t just want to read the many female authors from the 1920s-1940s who are coming back into vogue.

Below are my 52 books, 26 by men and 26 by women. My start date will be 01JUN2012 and I aim to have read all of these by 01JUN2017. I’ve included some notes with the selections.

First up, the men:

1. A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe (1722)
2. Roderick Random by Tobias Smollett (1748)
3. The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1774)
4. Waverley by Sir Walter Scott (1814)
5. The Betrothed by Alessandro Manzoni (1827)
6. The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1850)
7. The Warden by Anthony Trollope (1855)
8. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens (1859)
9. The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins (1860)
10. Can You Forgive Her? by Anthony Trollope (1865)
11. Innocents Abroad by Mark Twain (1869)
12. I Am A Cat by Soseki Natsume (1906)
13. Howard’s End by E M Forster (1910)
14. Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust (1913)
15. Sinister Street by Compton Mackenzie (1914)
16. Crome Yellow by Aldous Huxley (1921)
17. The Trial by Franz Kafka (1925)
18. All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque (1929)
19. The Road To Wigan Pier by George Orwell (1937)
20. The Outsider by Albert Camus (1942)
21. A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway (1964)
22. As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning by Laurie Lee (1969)
23. Slaughterhouse-five by Kurt Vonnegut (1969)
24. Ragtime by E.L. Doctorow (1975)
25. Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie (1981)
26. Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami (2002)

I think most these should be recognisable but: The Sorrows of Young Werther was a huge bestseller in its day and led to emo-style suicides, I’m curious to know what all the fuss was about. Roderick Random is an adventure novel told by a sailor, I loved Humphry Clinker by the same author. Waverley is the first book in the series by Scott that includes the more famous Ivanhoe. The Betrothed is a historical novel set in Italy in the 1620s when it was occupied by the Spanish. I’m including the first book in the Palliser and Barsetshire series by Anthony Trollope because I’ve only ever read Phineas Finn and quite liked it, I figure if I get a taste for one of the series, bingo, instant increase in my TBR stacks! Innocents Abroad is a collection of Twain’s travel reports from his trip to Europe. I Am A Cat is a classic Japanese novel narrated by a sarcastic cat mocking its humans.

Sinister Street was published in two parts in 1913 and 1914 and it influenced George Orwell as well as being loved by Henry James and John Betjeman, it’s about coming of age and going to Oxford. Crome Yellow is a book I have been meaning to read for years, I studied Brave New World at college and always wondered what Huxley’s other books were like, this was his first book and is a satire on house parties. A Moveable Feast is the only Hemingway that appeals, a posthumously published account of life in Paris. As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning is an account of Lee waking up one morning and walking from England to Spain, given how much I love ‘long walk’ travel books I am slightly ashamed to have never read this. Slaughterhouse-five passed me by and I should really make time to go back and take a look. The three more modern classic books are included in the hope that they’ll round out my literary education a bit more.

Now for the ladies:

1. Evelina by Frances Burney (1778)
2. Agnes Grey by Anne Brontë (1847)
3. The Heir of Redclyffe by Charlotte M Yonge (1853)
4. The Daisy Chain by Charlotte M Yonge (1856)
5. Romola by George Eliot (1863)
6. Aurora Floyd by Mary Elizabeth Braddon (1863)
7. The Doctor’s Wife by Mary Elizabeth Braddon (1864)
8. Miss Marjoribanks by Margaret Oliphant (1866)
9. Hester by Margaret Oliphant (1883)
10. The Wages of Sin by Lucas Malet (1890)
11. The Literary Sense by E. Nesbit (1903)
12. Man and Maid by E Nesbit (1906)
13. The Convert by Elizabeth Robins (1907)
14. The Return of the Soldier by Rebecca West (1918)
15. Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner (1926)
16. The Way Things Are by E M Delafield (1927)
17. The Lacquer Lady by F.Tennyson Jesse (1929)
18. Bricks and Mortar by Helen Ashton (1932)
19. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein (1933)
20. Miss Buncle’s Book by D E Stevenson (1934)
21. Illyrian Spring by Ann Bridge (1935)
22. Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell (1936)
23. The Pursuit of Love by Nancy Mitford (1945)
24. Miss Ranskill Comes Home by Barbara Euphan Todd (1946)
25. The Franchise Affair by Josephine Tey (1948)
26. The Towers of Trebizond by Rose Macauley (1956)

Okay, so: Evelina was Burney’s first novel and she was incredibly popular in her day, she had a great influence on Austen; this is the story of a young woman trying to find her way in society. Agnes Grey is the only Bronte novel I haven’t read and tells the story of a governess. Charlotte M Yonge was another very popular and successful novelist in her day who was seen as working at the same level as Trollope, Zola and Flaubert but today she is largely unknown. The Heir of Redclyffe is the tale of a man wrongfully treated by his evil cousin and striving to clear his name to claim Redclyffe, the estate he should rightfully be heir to. The Daisy Chain is about a family dealing with calamity. Romola is set in fifteenth century Florence. I love E M Braddon’s madcap style and want to explore more of it: Aurora Floyd is the follow up to the scandalous Lady Audley’s Secret, The Doctor’s Wife is her attempt at a more literary style and a rewrite of Madame Bovary. I love Madame Bovary so I look forward to comparing the two books. Mrs Oliphant wrote over 120 works in her life and was again, massively popular and respected in her day. Miss Marjoribanks is about a young woman trying to organise her village and Hester is a story of love, betrayal and family ties set within a family bank. Lucas Malet (whose real name was Mary St Leger Kingsley) was the daughter of Charles Kingsley and she was forbidden to read novels until she was twenty. She responded by writing controversial novels like The Wages of Sin which broke rather a lot of taboos. Good girl. ;)

E Nesbit is today known for children’s novels but also wrote adult novels and short stories, The Literary Sense is a collection of stories while Man and Maid appears to be a novel about relationships. I read the first page of one of her short stories and knew I needed to include her in this challenge. Elizabeth Robins was an actress and a suffragist and The Convert tells the story of Vida Levering, an upper-class British woman “converted” to the working-class suffrage movement. The Return of the Soldier tells the story of a shell-shocked soldier returning home from the trenches of WWI with amnesia. Lolly Willowes has been recommended by a friend and the plot of village life, witchcraft and the need for a life of one’s own sounds like a great contrast to some of my other selections. E M Delafield is famous for the Provincial Lady books which I love so I’d like to try something else of hers, The Way Things Are is a tale of gambling on love and marriage in the country. The Lacquer Lady is based on the true story of a European woman called Fanny who brought about the fall of the Burmese Royal Family at the end of the nineteenth century. Bricks and Mortar by Helen Ashton is a novel told from the perspective of an architect reflecting back on his life, the architecture and London history aspects appeal greatly.

Gertrude Stein is on my list because I really do feel I should have read some of her work and, with the Paris connection, it is a nice companion piece to Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast on the men’s list. Miss Buncle’s Book centres around the lead character writing a book about the village she lives in and having to flee as the villagers recognise themselves in the not very flattering story. Illyrian Spring by Ann Bridge has been reviewed on a couple of blogs I follow recently and the Croatian setting sounds intriguing. I’ve never read Gone With The Wind despite loving the film and I’ve never read any Mitford books because I always suspect the snobbery will irritate me but I plan to give both a go. Miss Ranskill Comes Home is about a woman being stranded on a desert island, being rescued three years later and coming home in the middle of WWII. She thinks the natives have gone crazy, they think she has. The Franchise Affair is a mystery, I don’t read very many of them and I’ve fancied reading more Tey for a while. Finally, The Towers of Trebizond sounds hilarious and I couldn’t resist – it is the story of a highly eccentric bunch of English people travelling across Turkey, encountering magicians, travel writers and other travellers as they go.

Wow, this has now become a rather long post but hopefully it explains the choices a bit better especially the titles that are less read nowadays.

Let me know if you fancy a read-along on any of these!

Belatedly Joining The Classics Club

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I’ve been watching from the sidelines ever since Jillian at A Room of One’s Own announced The Classics Club back in March. The idea of compiling a list of 50 or more ‘classic’ books (a term that is carefully left open to interpretation) to finish over the next five years really appealed. After all, when I do read fiction, I tend to dive straight into those books that have stood the test of time.

I’ll be posting my full list tomorrow but I just wanted to explain the main reason why it has taken me so long to get around to joining: I wanted my list to be equally balanced for gender. And that hasn’t been as easy as it should be to put together.

Simply put, there’s a smaller canon of older books by women authors which are agreed upon as classics by big lists like 1001 Books To Read Before You Die etc. It’s much harder to pick next reads once you’ve read the big hitters, especially if you want to discover pre-WWI books – they’re there but they take work to find. They’re also less likely to be in print.

Trying to create a list that is a balance of Victorian, Edwardian and modern titles (that are new-to-me) has meant digging through literary encyclopedias, trawling the Persephone Books and Virago catalogues and exploring the further reaches of what’s available on Project Gutenberg when physical copies of some of the books have been shown to be hard to track down.

In the end I came up with a list of 52 books, 26 by men and 26 by women and all will be first time reads for me. I’m taking a gamble with some of the female authored works, a few were bestsellers in their own day but I’m not sure if they’re out of print for a reason. Time of course will tell. I’ll be honest, I’m rather looking forward to going a little off-road on this particular classics adventure, maybe I’ll find buried treasure. ;)

Reviews Posted This Week

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Here’s a round up of all the 2012 and 2004 reviews posted over the last couple of weeks for your perusal (last Monday I was in A&E with my very poorly boyfriend and my Reviews This Week post wasn’t finished in time).

Reviews from 2012 reads:

L’Assommoir by Émile Zola

Of Curiosities and Rare Things by Peter Brears

Bring Up The Bodies by Hilary Mantel

Bright Day by J B Priestley

A Kirkstall Forge Romance ed. by Hugh Myddleton Butler

There was also a day spent at a library conference, a literary map of Great Britain and I shared some thoughts about being confronted by my former reading self.

Full list of 2012 reads

Reviews from 2004 moved across to Alex in Leeds this week:

Not On The Label by Felicity Lawrence

The Secret Hunters by Ranulph Fiennes

The Time Traveller’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger

The Lost Gardens of Heligan by Tim Smit

Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain

Automated Alice by Jeff Noon

Digital Fortress by Dan Brown

Full list of 2004 reads

The Sunday Salon: Ms 2012 Meets Miss 2004

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As those who follow the RSS feed and anyone who’s seen one of my posts of ‘book reviews posted this week’ will already know, I am slowly but surely posting all my old book reviews from 2004-2011 from two old websites onto Alex in Leeds.

I thought about it quite hard before I started doing it since it means copying and re-formatting the old posts and slowly publishing them at a rate of about one a day until I’ve caught up. It also means that 30 year old Alex is being confronted on a daily basis by 22 year old Alex.

22 year old Alex read the wrong things.

She read books suggested by friends and bookcrossers, random library borrowings and secondhand bookshop purchases. Much like 30 year old Alex does.

But she did it badly.

She tried things she expected to hate. She didn’t read about authors before she tried their books or try to understand the push that got that particular author into the chair every morning, wrestling with a broken-down old typewriter because this was what they needed to say. She wanted to be dazzled but she didn’t understand that fireworks involve science as well as magic.

I’m not sure if it was a result of being educated out of book-loving. Just a year or two earlier I read Tristram Shandy and Humphry Clinker, back to back, for fun. But suddenly, in 2004 I wasn’t doing that any more. I was avoiding classics despite half of my Personal Collection (books read, loved and moved carefully from house to house) being things like The Iliad, The Odyssey and all the Austens. What I can see now is that I wasn’t analysing my reading, jumped from subject to subject and author to author based on other people’s suggestions, threw around big words like love and hate when discussing books with abandon and gave far more 9s and 3s out of 10 than 5s.

At the time I probably thought I was going through a bad reading patch but dear reader, it was all of my own making.

I’m up to September 2004 in the re-posts and I must confess I am a little infuriated with 2004 Alex. She just picked up Oryx and Crake*. She’s stubbornly reading it despite expecting to hate it. Guess what, she hated it.

I have thought over the last couple of weeks about not moving these reviews over, of letting silly Miss 2004 die off in some unvisited corner of the internet. But, silly and opinionated as she is, she’s part of this site’s history. When I read Patrick Leigh Fermor’s books in 2012 I want to be able to see how my approach has changed, how my thoughts have developed. Where once I saw interesting and unique travel books of walking across pre-WWII Europe (complete with overnight stays in castles and lovemaking in haystacks), now I question the narrator’s motives and honesty of writing up his adventures decades later from almost no notes. Should I ever pick up a later Pratchett book or the most recent book in Laurie R King’s Holmes and Russell series, I want to add its review to a thread of how that particular series has woven its way through my reading life through the years. While it might be easier to pretend I never read Dan Brown or read nothing but Camus for the whole of my twenties, this site for me will be an honest glimpse of my reading life over eight years. For better or worse.

But if you ever want to laugh at 2004 Alex’s determination to read books knowing she’ll hate them or want to shake your head over her accepting recommendations from just about anyone without comparing their reading taste to hers… Go right ahead. Reader, I am right there with you on that one. :)

* Review going up tomorrow.