Mystery Book by Unnamed Author

DISCLOSURE: This book was a 'gift' from the boss of the company that owns the company that I work for. It came with a syrupy letter saying something about how amazing it is that after working in publishing for so long a book can still move you and aren't words great and aren't we all really priviledged to work here and make books like this bullshit bullshit etc.

I read the book - it was free, afterall - and I know the adage about peering into the gobs of gift horses, but this one, it must be said, came at me with it's mouth wide open and it's rotten teeth and halitosis plain for all to witness. It doesn't take a veterinary denitst to tell you that this 'gift' was as a completely transparent attempt to save money on marketing by having me do it for them for free.

'Fraid not, Mr. Hyphenated-Surname, not this little reader, no Sir. I mean, perhaps if there were a more direct link between sales of this book and my salary, I'd be reading it on the train, offering to loan it to my mum, dropping its name into random conversations with friends etc, but there ain't. So I'm not. There was no offer of commission in the letter you sent accompanying the book so I can only infer that it really makes diddly-squat difference to me what happens to it. Bury it under a pile of compost for all I care.

Also, it was crap. The cover is pretty and very eye-catching, and characters were kind of engaging, but the narrative was, oh, how shall I put this? Shit. Maybe if you hadn't spent so much on the foil on the cover, or let the extent get so out of hand that by half way though I was wishing someone would tear out some of the pages, or if you'd maybe considered being slightly more economical with the chapter heads, you wouldn't need to sell so many copies of it that you'd blatantly attempt to use your workforce, gratis, to start some kind of whisper campaign about it like we're a bunch of teenage girls and this is Twilight. Just a thought.

So, you know, thanks for the book and all that, but far from telling anyone to read it, I'm not even going to tell anyone what it is. I'm shoving it under my compost heap and hoping that, like shit in a garden bed, something useful actually comes out of it. Unless, of course, you'd like to reflect this in my salary somehow? No, didn't think so.

Maybe I'm wrong, and you just really value your workers and really thought this was brilliant and wanted to share it with us? Well then I have another suggestion: next time you want to enourage my love of reading and remind me why I work in this slavishly underpaid industry you could just add the wholesale value of a book (reflective of the staff discount, if you like) to my bank account (you've got the details) and I'll read whatever I like. Thanks.

Girl Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen

“A successful suicide demands good organisation and a cool head, both of which are usually incompatible with the suicidal state of mind.”

HA! I loved Kaysen’s dry and detached observations about being viewed as crazy, even more commendable since this is her story about being locked up in a mental institution for 2 years in the 60’s. She was in the rock-star McLean Hospital, home to fellow nutty alumni such as Sylvia Plath, Ray Charles and James Taylor, and was admitted after a 20 minute consultation with her doctor. Having been diagnosed with ‘Borderline Personality Disorder’, Kaysen seemed to me like a slightly moody, anxious teenager, barely grown and displaying some vaguely subversive tendencies that wouldn’t get a second look at now – she was vegetarian, slept with her English teacher and didn’t want to go to college. She must be nuts, let’s throw her in with society’s rejects.

Becoming a writer, Kaysen tracked down her medical records, which must have been strangely illuminating, since it never really was made clear to her why she was there. She obviously needed some time chilling away from the world, as she didn’t really protest or try to bust her way out, but her story does beg the question – what were her family doing? Why was she there for two years? Answers aren’t all that forthcoming, and Kaysen focuses more on the day to day of being in a loony bin, which she does in an engaging and direct style. There’s an awesome chapter called ‘Velocity vs. Viscosity’ which describes the fastness and thickness of insanity in a way that gave me great insight into mental illness, and the fragility of the mind.

Breakfast of Champions or Goodbye Blue Monday by Kurt Vonnegut

It was just over a year ago that I read Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death. This book, it would be fair to say, broke my mind a little bit. It broke the way I thought about time, and lead to such incidents as me visiting Greenwich and stomping on the line of GMT shouting 'Take that, time!', to the amusement of my friends and the horror of the attendant. This resulted in an afternoon in Greenwhich park with me saying things like 'If time is a place, there are only 2 dimensions, and we're all flat. Everything is flat'. It's not really picnic conversation. Still, now, I am perplexed as to how one is to reconcile this made up ridiculous idea of the 'passage of time'. Daylight savings is minor crisis I endure twice a year when I think 'Why bother keeping time if we're only going to change it to suit ourselves?'. My dear friend Guy, whose couch I was calling home when I read this book, seems to be able to tell, before I've even opened my mouth, when I'm about to being a rumination on the topic of time. He'll invariably try to distract me with something shiny, or alcoholic, or just take his head in his hands and say, 'No, Amber. No talking about time'. Poor Guy.

Don't get me wrong, I LOVED Slaughterhouse-five: I dream of having the perspicacity of the beings on Tralfamadore to be able to see through time, but it has had some pretty deep reverberations. For example, I no longer believe in the concept of being late. So, on the basis of what that book has done to my life, and my ability to meet people in bars without coming off like a completely steam-punk worshiping freak, I hesitated to embark on Breakfast of Champions.

Ok, that's a lie: I didn't hesitate. I couldn't get into it fast enough. A friend gave it to me at her leaving party while she was packing to go overseas, in the kind of way you haphazardly discard your belongings in this process - you're ecstatic at the thought of off-loading something to someone else, no matter how precious, simply because it means you don't have to pack it. So, I made my excuses, left the party, and went home to start the book. I was not disappointed. I should have known I wouldn't be, and if I wasn't such a rudimentary creature who experienced time as linear, I could've told you how much I would enjoy this book before I even started it. Alas.

Breakfast of Champions or Goodbye Blue Monday is also illustrated by the narrator (who is also the author - Philboyd Studge). This paragraph in the preface sets the tone perfectly:

This book is my fiftieth birthday present to myself. I feel as though I am crossing the spine of a roof--having ascended one slope.
I am programmed at fifty to perform childishly--to insult "The Star-Spangled Banner", to scrawl pictures of a Nazi flag and an asshole and a lot of other things with a felt-tipped pen. To give an idea of the maturity of my illustrations for this book, here is my picture of an asshole:

And so on.

This books is the biggest piss-take ever. Nothing is sacred and, in a sense, since as it plainly says in the preface, this book is an attempt "to clear my head of all the junk in there--the assholes, the flags, the underpants... I'm throwing out characters from my other books too. I'm not going to put on any more puppet shows..." this book is even a piss-take of writing. Vonnegut recycles characters from his and other people's writing. It would be lazy, if it weren't so incredibly well crafted and superbly executed.

It's an anti-novel of a sort. A good sort. An hilarious, laugh-out-loud, read-pages-to-your-mates sort.

If that's not enough to get you to the library, allow me to refer you to p.22 of the 2000 Vintage edition:

Intimacy by Hanif Kureshi

All men are bastards, apparently. They'll marry you out of some misplaced sense of obligation (and because they don't fancy being alone), have kids with you, shag other women with no guilt whatsoever and fantasise about leaving you. And then they will leave you with a note on the kitchen table with no real explanation other than 'I can't do this anymore'. Greash. Get my a white dress and a priest stat.

I know that not all men are bastards, but this novella doesn't fill me with confidence (much like the distubring portrait of suburban dreams gone sour in Richard Yates excellent Revolutionary Road). This is a fairly bleak and depressing insight into the workings of a male mind, and the protaganist of this piece Jay, is apathetic, selfish and unlikeable.

The theme can be broadly described as 'when is enough not enough?' - that weird feeling when we know we should be happy with our lot (health, family, a job) but still something is missing.....that first world depression of not feeling like we've achieved enough despite a wealth of love and happiness. Now that's something that men and women can relate to.

People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks

The cover of this book proudly states ‘the Pulitizer Prize winning author of March’, so I had fairly high expectations of Geraldine Brooks’ writing skillz. I mean, they don’t just hand out Pulitizers these days do they? Perhaps, like Sandra Bullock winning a Best Actress Oscar, ol Geraldine just snuck in with the best of an average bunch that year. Or maybe I read too much, and have gotten to the point where a book needs to be REALLY amazing for me to even be vaguely impressed.

Following the journey of Aussie book restorer Hannah to retrace the history of a sacred Jewish Haggadah, salvaged by a Muslim librarian during the Bosnian war, it covers a huge amount of narrative ground; and in doing so, spreads itself a little too thin. There’s the rabbi during the Spanish Inquisition, a slave girl from the 1400’s, an Austrian physician and then the modern story of Hannah, all interwoven and revealing how the book came to be. One of the book’s strengths is that the historical detail seems well researched, and paints a rich backdrop for this manuscript mystery.

The bit that made me cringe the most was the characterisation of Hannah; Brooks seemed to be trying waaaay too hard to make her into this no-nonsense ocker chick and it totally grated on me. The relationship between book nerd Hannah and her over-achieving, cold neurosurgeon mother came across as clichéd, and the Father-She-Never-Knew-Big-Reveal fairly unbelievable. Oh and the attempt at sex scenes – so very Mills and Boon.

I imagine that this would have been the perfect candidate for an Oprah’s Book Club recommendation…..and if you know me, that’s not considered very high praise.

The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen

Remember earlier in the year when I read A Spot of Bother? Right, well, The Corrections succeeded where that failed. I would like to send a copy of The Corrections to Mark Haddon with a 'spot the difference' style questionnaire.

The Corrections includes a whole load of things that I enjoy in books: tales of middle America, mental illness, ponderances on the nature of humanity, wrong and broken sex scenes of more than one kind, hysterical characters, analysis of success and failure, etc. All this, I tell you, as well as words sewn together in ways that make me want to sing, like:

Here was a torture that Greek inventors of the Feast and the Stone had omitted from their Hades: the Blanket of Self-Deception. A lovely warm blanket as far as it covered the soul in torment, but it never quite covered everything.

and

The madness of an autumn prairie cold front coming through. You could feel it: something terrible was going to happen. The sun low in the sky, a minor light, a cooling star. Gust after gust of disorder. Trees restless, temperatures falling, the whole northern religion of things coming to an end.

In The Corrections, Franzen catalogues the offences of life against the mind and body without ever once belittling his characters; using humour among a vast chache of techniques, but not resorting to humour while employing few other tools. (Mark, are you reading this? That's the answer to Question 1.)

Given how I've just raved about it, this will seem strange: I spent every second page of this book thinking, 'I've read this,' and then, 'but I have no idea what happens next...' Which, in essence, is half the reason I wanted to start this blog: I'm really good at writing down the titles of books I read, but I write them down in whatever notebook I happen to be using at the time, 95% of which are somewhere in my mother's garage and, therefore, useless since I am not in my mother's garage. Introducing... the portable book log! - blog! It's what Internet intended.

Thanks to my darling Badger for sending this along.

Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell

Broke is boring, is the conclusion and point of this book. No shit George. Good on you though for putting yourself through grinding poverty to undergo a social experiment and then write an insightful book about it. I have neglected Orwell throughout my reading years, only to finally pick up my dusty copy of 1984 last year. It was like everyone told me it was – pretty good (and now I keep hearing references to ‘thought crime’ in songs; it’s always nice when you get the literary pop culture reference). I wish I had read this when I first arrived in London, because there are so many parallels between mine and Orwell’s (and I’m guessing pretty much all antipodeans that turn up to Old Blighty poor as possums) experience, just to varying degrees. Working as dishpig? Check. Walking to work because you can’t afford public transport? Check. Washing yourself at work because there was no hot water at home? Check (the place I was housesitting, the thermostat broke while the homeowner was away – it was March and freezing). So I felt I could relate to the Paris chapter, and especially the chaos of working in restaurants, with the hierarchy of chefs and waiters. Oh the heady days.

So it seems that being broke in Paris is a whole lot more exciting than being a tramp in London, because that is where the action ground to a halt, and I trudged through the pages to get to the end. I even picked it up one Saturday morning around 9am, read about 3 pages and then fell back asleep, book crushed under me, which never happens unless I’m completely bored, which I was by that stage. I kept waiting for his luck to change, but as he explains towards the end, poverty is an ongoing, relentless cycle, and once you’re there, it’s very hard to get a foot hold back amongst the middle classes, which sadly rings as true now as it did back then.