Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen

One of my favourite sayings is ‘Too many freaks, not enough circuses’, and both are abundant in this tale of the travelling American circuses of the 30s. This book seems like it would have written itself – lions, tigers, carnies, dwarves and bearded ladies travelling through post-war America on a rickety old train lorded over by a schizophrenic ringmaster and a villanous boss, with obligatory love story and not so commonplace murderous elephant – and I feel like the author herself shouldn’t get too much of the credit, as the writing is plain and the story is the star.

It’s no surprise that the movie version of this book is about to hit screens, as reading it you actually got the sense of almost watching the action (ok so perhaps I do need to give Gruen some credit). A perfectly pleasing mid-week read.

Life by Keith Richards

An interesting one this – on the surface of things, you’d think Keith Richards sitting down to write his memoirs would be the most titillating read on the shelf (and indeed, the publishers have been rubbing themselves in gold since its release) but there’s something a bit….well, slightly boring about the whole caper.

Firstly; how does a man who took more drugs than a war torn hospital remember enough to fill 500 pages? The answer I reckon, must have been to make some shit up along the way. There’s a lot of ‘here’s how I remember it’ – no doubt to negate any potential lawsuits – and there’s a lot of ‘I was a functioning addict’, tales where everyone around him goes down in a drug induced stupor, EXCEPT for him. Which is maybe how it actually happened, and I’m just such a lightweight that I don’t understand how someone can drink three bottles of bourbon, five tabs of acid and a tab of heroin and not sleep for five days and live to tell the tale.

So the excess is there, and people around him turning into monsters on drugs (his long-time missus Anita Pallenberg is depicted as an unreasonable, sex crazed violent psycho), characters dropping dead left right and centre, but there’s not a lot of true introspection. Even his philandering is wrapped up in this warm, fuzzy ‘there were women I cuddled along the way’ dialogue, when really he was cheating on his partner.

What IS fascinating is the rock and roll cultural history along the way, and how some honky English lads managed to take a blues R&B sound and scare the living beejusus out of a God fearin America. And the depiction of a music scene that truly was organic and for rabid music fans – people hunting down rare records, one ‘black’ station and hearing new music at underground parties – no internet, no publicists, no regurgitated hit makers and a population so surrounded by crap music that when something awesome and original comes along, you’ll just as likely hear it on Nova as you will on Triple J.

And if you want to examine a complex and deeply dysfunctional band relationship, look no further than the brotherly hate displayed by Richards and the Stones frontman, Mick Jagger. I think Keith spends a whole lot of this book trying to sound aloof and disconnected, when you get the feeling underneath he's just simmering at a life spent to the left of the man in the spotlight. Also, I can't finish this review without mentioning Richards' fierce mullet and unfortunate above the neck situation - really one of the most unattractive musicians going round.

If anything, it made me a little bit sad that our generation will never have a Beatles or a Rolling Stones to hold up as the marker of better days gone by. And on that old lady having a rant note….

Empire of the Sun J G Ballard

And somehow, yet again, I was reading a war book. This one, at least, had a semi-autobiographical element and was set in the second world war in Shanghai. It's not an angle of the war I've thought about much, but it was a seriously messed up situation, by all accounts!

This book did a couple of things I really love - it had that colonial view of the oriental that is completely unapologetic and describes, without meaning to, the prevailing attitudes of the time in a completely understated way. I find that kind of unintentional insight really interesting. Possibly for obvious reasons, but I'm fascinated by stories of being 'other' and transient and expatriate. The power dynamics of colonialism in no way reflect my own expatriate experiences, but I'm fascinated to read about them - from the Orient to the Raj, it's amazing how people can imbue themselves with such a sense of self-righteousness.

It also does that other fascinating thing of looking at how people bond and bicker in adversity. It's a fine line between safety in numbers and competition for resources, and the way this story commentates on the ebb and flow of these relationships is gripping.

I did, at some point, take the sequel out of the library, but I returned it without reading, but with a late fine... Story of my life.

Timequake Kurt Vonnegut

"I have to go home. I have had one heck of a good time. Listen: We are here on Earth to fart around. Don't let anybody tell you any different!"

Yes my friend, the time has come for my annual Vonnegut. What a joy. I'm a bit ahead of schedule, I know, as I was reminded of having been reading some of last year's installment during a weekend away in mid-April. I was reminded of this because, it turns out, I was reading aloud out the window from my bath on the second floor of our lovely old Norfolk farmhouse to some friends down in the garden below. Not a bad idea, in theory, except that you might remember a central feature of the book I read last year, Breakfast of Champions, was its illustrations. It was here, I suspect, that the plan fell apart, and not for the simple oddity of having a naked friend read to you from two floors above. I concede that I may have been slightly drunk. Alas.

Timequake. Whoa. I'll let Timequake explain the timequake, as it happened to Kilgore Trout:

"The timequake of 2001 was a cosmic charley horse in the sinews of Destiny. At what was in New York City 2:27 p.m. on February 13th of that year, the Universe suffered a crisis in self-confidence. Should it go on expanding indefinitely? What was the point? It fibrillated with indecision. Maybe it should have a family reunion back where it all began, and then make a great big BANG again. It suddenly shrunk ten years. It zapped me and everybody else back to February 17th, 1991, what was for me 7:51 a.m., and a line outside a blood bank in San Diego, California."

In 2001, the timequake 'zaps' everyone back to 1991, and continues for 4 days short of a 10 years. During the rerun, everyone's free will is suspended, meaning that if in 1996 take 1, you stacked your car, or failed your maths test, or forgot to call your mum's birthday, or won the lotto, in 1996 take 2, exactly the same thing will happen again. Vehicles are also subject to this, so you get in your car and it goes where it went the first time, for example, without any direction or input from you. This serves to allow Vonnegut to explore free will and determinism, and as you might imagine in the hands of this master craftsman, it's a joy.

The rerun goes off without a hitch, really, and it's only when the rerun ends, and free will is reinstated that thing get messy. When the timequake ends, people are struck dumb by their own free will. In essence, we're told, "If your brains were dynamite, there wouldn’t be enough to blow your hat off."

Lucky, Kilgore Trout, science fiction writer turned hobo and Vonnegut's fictional alter ego, is schlepping around and saves the day. "You were sick, but now you're well again, and there's work to be done," he tells us. People need rousing from their determinist existence, they almost need to be tricked into living again, because '[t]he truth about the human condition is just too awful".

Timequake is one of Vonnegut's last published works, and it is just as much a reflection/memoir/nostalgic conversation as a novel. The book is so aware of itself, to the extent that Vonnegut explains that what we're actually reading is the salvaged parts of an earlier manuscript, Timequake One, which he worked on for a decade but found to be untenable, and the most recent musings of his 78 year old self. Often, poignantly, and as with Breakfast of Champions, many of these musings are on the usefulness or otherwise of writing, art, living and you know, some other big things. Just let me share two thoughts with you, and then I'll leave you, to begin your own Vonnegut discovery journey of wonderment:

"Let me note that Kilgore Trout and I have never used semicolons. They don't do anything, don't suggest anything. They are transvestite hermaphrodites."

and,

"Many people need desperately to receive this message: 'I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people don't care about them. You are not alone.' "

Get amongst it. You won't be sorry.