OUT OF SHADOWS

Lucy Ward, For the Dead Men.

2012-01-25T11:21:00.000+11:00

Here is a change from story telling in books. One of my favourite forms of music is traditional folk, another story telling medium. One of my most recent discoveries in that area of music is Lucy Ward from Derby - a few miles from where I spent my childhood. She has a gorgeous voice and uses it to express a variety of moods in song.

This is her first single.

Winter, Keven Newsome

2012-01-23T12:32:00.000+11:00

It was only a couple of weeks ago but I've already forgotten how I heard about this book, but something clearly appealed to me because I immediately ordered it.

I wasn't quite so enthusiastic when the book arrived. One of the things dampening my enthusiam was the opening statement in one of the mini-reviews on the first pages: "Christian Goth - way cool concept".

Personally I see very little that is "cool" about that concept. Conforming to the world's obessions, whether "Goth" or any other cultural fad ought to be the antithesis of the Christian life.

And the beginning of the first chapter did nothing to win my confidence, having the feel and imagery of horror fiction written by an enthusiastic but clumsy teenager.

Harsh things to say about a book? Certainly. I'm not sure I've ever written such strongly negative things on this blog...

But then - wait for it... things steadily improve.

Before long I'm caught up in the story, I identify with the main character Winter, the "Christian Goth" mentioned in the previously mentioned review. Early in the story the idea of "judging a book by its cover" receives a little attention, challenging the viewpoint I expressed above regarding the "Christian Goth" issue and I have to concede the right of Winter to her image.
We are told she has only been a Christian for a very short time. We are also introduced to the reasons why she adopted the Goth image in the first place. So, looking past the "way cool" comment I mentioned earlier I have no problem with the character as she has been written and my issue so far is more with the one who made the "way cool" comment rather than the book's author or his characters. Even the first chapter seemed less clumsy on reflection after I was able to place it in the wider context of the unfolding story.

One of the difficulties I find with Christian fiction is the underlying theology. With some books it is never an issue. They merely portray realistic people in familiar situations trying to deal with everyday life (with a few extreme situations thrown in) in the best way they can according to their level of faith in God. Moving from a place of doubt to a positon of greater trust is a common theme.
Winter is significantly different. It takes us beyond our familar world into territory more associated with the present day genre of "paranormal romance". Winter is struggling with dreams, visions and a recurrring feeling of deja vu. We find she is experiencing the beginnings of a gift of prophecy in which she is made aware of things that are either happening elsewhere or things that are about to happen.

And that is where my biggest concern with the book rises - with the way prophecy is portrayed in practice and purpose. To me the portrayal has more in common with clairvoyance and psychic practices than a biblically sound portayal of a prophetic gift. A clear example is Winter's need to have contact with an object belonging to another character to gain "prophetic" information about that character. That is an occult practice known as psychometry and not a practice of biblical prophets.

Considering the New Testament warns of an increase in false prophets and false prophecy , a non-biblical portrayal of prophecy in a potentially popular work of Christian fiction is worrying. As a work of fiction Winter is entertaining. It captures and keeps the reader’s interest. In my opinion it is a genuine page turner. But the nature of the theological foundation it is built upon makes that readability dangerous if readers accept the books portrayal of biblical prophecy and prophets as legitimate instead of being informed about these things through scripture itself.

Anne McCaffrey.

2012-01-17T16:11:00.000+11:00

I recently heard that Anne McAffrey died on 21st November 2011. She was 85 and suffered a stroke at her home in Dublin. That probably explains why an earlier post about her received so many page-views around that time.

I think I've only read one of her books, Dragonflight the first in her Dragon riders of Pern series. I read it in the 80s and loved it. I later read it as part of my university studies and, having forgotten the story, enjoyed it again. I do have two or three of her other books but never got around to reading them. They came later in the series and I didn't want to read them before I'd read the earlier books.

Several years ago my wife bought me a limited edition reprint of the book, autographed, numbered and enclosed in a slip case, it was a very unexpected find in a local bookshop. Although I read so little of her work there was something I found appealing about McCaffrey and I always intended to read more of her stories. I wonder if I'll get around to doing it or whether my tastes in books has changed too much to return to Pern.

Someone to Blame, C.S. Lakin

2012-01-03T16:16:00.001+11:00

I’m hoping to find more quality Christian fiction in 2012 and I’ve had a good start with C.S Lakin’s Someone to Blame being the first book completed for the year. But is that book a sign of things to come? Or has the bar been set too high for the coming months?

Unlike so many Christian books I’ve read recently, Someone to Blame has credible characters experiencing believable situations and facing very real faith challenges. It also avoids the clumsy preachiness that I’ve found in so many other novels of this type, but without compromising or holding back.

It might seem a strange comparison, but the structure of the novel reminded me of Stephen King's work, with a variety of characters in a small town facing a perceived threat from an outside source. However Lakin keeps her story firmly grounded in the familiar, with a positive recoginition of God's reality.

One of the most encouraging things about this book for me is the way it shows that quality Christian fiction is achievable, so maybe I'm not chasing a vain dream with my own writing ambitions.

2011: review of my completed reading

2011-12-16T12:04:00.000+11:00

I’ve fallen behind the number of books I read last year. With only a couple of weeks of 2011 I doubt I’ll match the 63 from 2010.
I intended to mention my favourite books of the year, but looking back at my reading list I find so few that REALLY excited me. So instead of a top 10 or a top three books of the year that I intended to write – all I can do is mention the books that kept my interest and made me reluctant to put them down.

• The year started with Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall. Despite its length I was caught up in the story and enjoyed it enough to be interested in the promised sequel.
• I always find Mike Gayle very easy to read. With all of his books I’ve been reluctant to put them aside when I’ve started them. I’ve now read them all.
• Jasper Ffforde, one of last year’s favourites had only one book on this year’s list. I really love his writing but I think I needed a break. I have several unread Fforde’s on my shelves waiting for next year.
• Richard Harland’s Liberator also needs a mention. A great sequel to Worldshaker from last year’s reading list. I really wanted to revisit the world he created in the first book and I would certainly be interested in a third instalment should he write one.
• Neverwhere was the first Neil Gaiman book I’ve read. Very inventive but at times verged on being overly grotesque for my liking. Fantasy with some very dark aspects.
• The Power of Six was another sequel, related to a book from last year’s list. This one is the follow up to I Am Number Four, while it kept me reading I found it less rounded than the first book. It was clearly part of a series rather than a stand-alone book, like pulling a collection of chapters out of a longer piece of fiction.
• Duma Key was the first Stephen King book I’ve read in over ten years. I enjoyed most of it. I’ve written about some of my concerns about the book in an earlier post. I recently came in for some questioning on a Christian forum – why would I want to read such things? I can understand the concern. King’s reputation perhaps gets in the way. People have preconceptions about the type of thing her writes, and I may write something about that issue at another time.
• Divergent by Veronica Roth, another first episode of a series. I am very interested in the next instalment due sometime next year.

All of the above are works of fiction. What about non-fiction?

• David Hick’s Guantanamo: My Journey will only reinforce whatever people already believe about his imprisonment at Guantanamo Bay and what led him there. While the book answers a lot of questions, at times he seems to avoid telling us what really happened. I feel he was not as innocent as he tries to make out – but neither was he as guilty as the political powers insisted. I think he was an idealist but foolish young man in the wrong place at the wrong time who continually fell into the hands of the wrong people.
• Unzipped, Suzi Quatro and Haunted Heart by Lisa Rogak. I’d like to write a separate article incorporating these two books. One clearly about Suzi Quatro, the other about Stephen King – famous people I’ve had some kind of attachment to in the past. Very interesting to find out what went on behind the scenes.
• Several food books – the stand out perhaps being In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan. His views of food are essential reading for anyone who has real concern about what they are eating.

After this listing and commentary of “readable” and “interesting” books – there is one book from 2011 that I have to single out as my book of the year. If I can only recommend one book out of all of those I’ve read this year it would be The Book Thief by Markus Zusak.
Why the recommendation? I suggest you read it for yourself and find out.

I loved it.

The Gratuitous Excess of Stephen King.

2011-11-14T15:48:00.010+11:00

I've probably read more about Stephen King and more about his books than I've read of his fiction. And I’ve probably read more biographies about Stephen King than I’ve read about any other individual.

He is one of the most successful authors ever, so it’s not surprising that I was interested in the man and his work. I saw I could learn something, or at least be inspired by his example.

My interest in King started around the same time I started a creative writing course at University in the early 1990s. One of my first stories written for the course had horror elements and immediately someone made a Stephen King comparison. I don’t know whether that comment influenced me in any way, but it seemed that most of my story writing from that point took on elements of “dark fantasy”.

For one Uni assignment I wrote a review of one of King’s books – Cycle of the Werewolf, a short novel illustrated by comic book artist Bernie Wrightson. The one thing I recall about my review is that I saw Wrighton’s artwork as a metaphor for King’s work in general. Wrightson had provided both coloured, graphically bloody illustrations and more subtle black and white sketches. I found the subtler drawings much more effective. Likewise with King’s writing, there was a mixture of “gross-out” and more nuanced incidents –again I found the subtler approach more interesting, more imaginative and overall much more effective in capturing my attention.

It had been over decade since I last read anything by King, but reading Lisa Rogak's Haunted Heart, a recent biography, made me curious enough to read another of King’s books. I chose Duma Key because its main character takes up art near the beginning of the book – as I have done this year.
I’m now approaching page 90 out of almost 700 pages. It is still a long way to go, but enough to give me an idea of what I like and don’t like about King’s writing. At this stage there is one major issue that in my opinion mars what he writes, and that is his occasional habit of resorting to extreme crudity. In the context of Duma Key it has seemed entirely gratuitous.

I admit that my opinion on this is strongly influenced by my Christian commitment, but that is not the whole of the matter. I understand that the use of expletives can effectively create realistic dialogue and give colour to character. Used in the appropriate context it doesn’t bother me so much.

In Duma Key so far, there have been two instances of excessive crudity. Both were unnecessary and neither added to the story, or the characters. Were they used to serve the story (in my opinion no) or to serve the reputation of King’s ability to shock?

I get the sense that it is the author himself rather than his characters that are the focus of the extreme use of language. As if King is trying to show that he’s still able to shock his reader rather than adding a realistic edge.

Reading Progress 2011.

2011-10-08T15:53:00.001+11:00

October and so far I’ve completed 33 books for the year. I look at last year’s final total and see I read 63 books in 2010. I seem to be a long way behind at this stage of 2011.

But then I look where I was up to in October last year and see I was at the same place as now, in the mid-thirties, so my progress is not as different as I thought.

Time will tell whether I’ll match the 30 books read in the last 2-3 months of last year.

Only 3 or 4 weeks before this blog's second anniversary. Like last year I'll create a list of my year's favourites.

Captain Thunderbolt and His Lady by Carol Baxter

2011-10-08T13:43:00.002+11:00

Frederick Ward is perhaps better known as Captain Thunderbolt, one time convicted and imprisoned horse thief, escapee and most famously bushranger. A contemporary of Ben Hall whose NSW territory stretched from the central west to the Riverina; Thunderbolt based himself around the Hunter Valley and northwards.

Carol Baxter’s book Captain Thunderbolt and His Lady is a detailed and enthralling biography of Thunderbolt and his “wife” Mary Ann Bugg. Baxter takes what is known of the two from historical sources and gives her account the pace and intimacy of a novel.

Baxter starts with family histories of both Ward and Bugg, exploring the cultural background of their path to crime. The story is one of both racial and class prejudice. Being native born (whether black or white, to aboriginal or convict parents) was a distinct disadvantage in a society ruled from the motherland by British born aristocracy and law enforcers.

Harsh and inflexible punishments, rather than deter crime could ironically entrench it, making capture and imprisonment a less desired outcome than death. Giving wanted men the incentive to resist arrest at all costs, even their own lives and the lives of others.

Ward experienced this harshness, but by accounts didn’t allow himself to turn to outright brutality and ruthlessness, despite resorting to crime. Instead he tried to foster an impression of himself as a gentleman; as far as that would be possible while threatening victims with guns.

Baxter describes her writing style as “allow[ing] the participants to live their own stories, wherever possible, by having the narrator step into their shoes and experience what they experienced as recounted in their own statements. This offers the immediacy of fiction without fictionalising the narrative”.

It is a very effective way of keeping the reader’s involvement but could have the disadvantage of being suspected of being fictional. To counteract this suspicion Baxter provides her research details on a website cited in the acknowledgements at the end of the book. The notes were considered too extensive to include as end notes in the book.

I love history but find many history texts fail to keep my interest. I had no trouble with this one. Baxter has written a lively and compelling combination of biography and social history.

Thanks to Allen and Unwin for providing a review copy of thebook.
http://www.allenandunwin.com/default.aspx?page=94&book=9781742372877

The Bushrangers: Australia's Greatest Self-made Heroes by Evan McHugh

2011-10-07T13:30:00.005+11:00

Probably the best overview of Australia's relationship with the Bushranger I've read.

While the more well-known and better documented Bushrangers are given a little more coverage than others in this book, they don't necessarily dominate. Instead they are placed within the greater historical context of the bushranger phenonomenon.

From escaped convicts through to the Kelly Gang, this book gives the topic far more than the "boys own adventure" depiction so common in other treatments of the topic.

Thyla by Kate Gordon

2011-10-06T13:15:00.001+11:00

Tessa, an injured amnesiac teenage girl, is found in the bush near Hobart and Thyla is the story of the difficulties she experiences as she slowly discovers the truth of her background and identity.

Overall the book is more an introduction to a larger story. As a stand alone book it disappointed me. Parts showed a lot of promise and kept me wanting to know what happened next - but in the end I was left with the anouncement that another book is coming soon. Thyla was clearly setting the reader up for what is coming next rather than giving us a self contained story. It finished with a lot of loose ends awaiting resolution in the promised sequel. Hopefully that sequel will fulfil what is only promised in this first book.

A & R, What on earth are you doing?

2011-07-06T16:15:00.004+10:00

I've already written about the problems of Angus and Robertson and pointed to their practice of overpricing books. This is a practice that I'm sure has had a significant part in their financial troubles.

Why would anyone order or buy a book from them when their price is far higher than other book sellers?

I've just come across a very clear example. I recently ordered a book about New Zealand artist Colin McCahon. My order was with the book depository who are selling the book for $43.00 (post free). I have since seen the same book being sold on fishpond.com for $37.69 (reduced from $66.99).

And what is Angus & Robertson's online price?

$95.95!!!

Need I say more?

LIBERATOR

2011-06-24T12:03:00.004+10:00

Many stories reach a satisfactory conclusion. The hero overcomes the odds and defeats the villain. Cinderella is found by her Prince Charming and rescued from a life of drudgery: and they all live happily ever after.

At least that is the impression given by a neat and satisfying conclusion.

Richard Harland’s Worldshaker would fit into that "satisfying conclusion" category, but the follow-up novel, Liberator shows us what happens AFTER the initial euphoria of a “happy” ending. It shows that such endings are only temporary and one problem solved will merely lead to another.

Liberator begins not long after the concluding events of the earlier novel and things have deteriorated very quickly. The Leviathan WorldShaker has been renamed Liberator to reflect the freedom gained by the lower class “Filthies” – but that freedom could now have severe consequences for the “swanks” who choose to stay on after the Liberation, even those who played a significant part in overturning the former oppressive, elitist regime.
It soon comes clear that elitism and oppression are not the exclusive traits of those born into privilege.

This book was just as enjoyable as the first in the series. Again I was compelled to read it at every opportunity I could make. Both are very near to the top of my favourites of recent years.

I liked Worldshaker enough to buy a second copy – the American Hardcover edition. I’ll be doing the same when Liberator is also (hopefully) released in Hardcover.*

Another installment please Richard?

______

*With both books, written by an Australian author and published by an Australian company, I bought the locally available product first. I prefer to support local writing and publishing when possible.

Liberator by Richard Harland

2011-06-09T11:37:00.006+10:00

Richard Harland, author of Worldshaker , has just notified me that its sequel, Liberator is now on the book shelves.

Worldshaker is definitely one of the best books I’ve read since I started this blog. I am very keen to read the next one.

I'll be ordering my copy as soon as I've posted this.

More information here at the publisher's website:

Liberator by Richard Harland

Bye Bye Borders

2011-06-02T14:53:00.003+10:00

I read today that Borders will closing their remaining Australian stores.

I remember feeling overwhelmed when I walked into Borders at the Macquarie Centre, North Ryde soon after it opened. So many books. So much variety.

They also had an extensive music collection with a large number of listening posts where I could sample new music. Gloria and I spent a lot of time there in its first months.

In recent years we've only been able to visit their store in the Canberra Centre, but we rarely bothered. As I mentioned in an earlier post, we found too many books were over-priced. Why should a huge company like Borders charge more than the publishers RRP for their books when smaller stores were even giving discounts on the very same books?

Sadly people will be losing their jobs and for a while shopping centres will have a lot of empty floor space to fill with new tenants. But on the whole Borders will not be missed by my household.

The Hand That Signed the Paper: and literary awards.

2011-06-01T11:33:00.007+10:00

Today is apparently the anniversary of The Hand that Signed the Paper winning the Miles Franklin award. Previously it had won the Australian/Vogel Literary Award. These are two of Australia’s most prestigious writing awards.

However, a few years later it was revealed that the author Helen Demidenko was not from the Ukrainian background she had claimed. Instead she came from a British family and her real name was Darville.

There was uproar in the literary world resulting in the once lauded book now being panned and labelled a hoax.

I found this turn around to be a symptom of snobbish hypocrisy. Does the author’s life and background have any bearing on the literary quality of a book? Even if the author lied about her identity – does it make the book itself and the quality of the writing any less award-worthy?

Surely the book should have been given the awards solely on the quality of the book itself and NOT be conditional upon the character and identity of its author. If the book wasn’t considered worthy afterwards, it should never have been considered worthy before Demidenko/Darville’s true identity was discovered.

Maybe this case gives a glimpse into the world of award giving – that awards given (supposedly) for the merit of a work, are very much influenced by “celebrity”, that the IMAGE and personality of the author has as much influence over awards as the quality of their work.

If they ARE being swayed by such influences we have reason to question the integrity of these kinds of awards.

Or maybe, just maybe the book DID have merit and the storm afterwards was an attempt to save face, being embarrassed over swallowing the author's OTHER fiction regarding her own identity. No one like to be exposed as one of those suckers born every minute.

A Man of Diverse Obsessions: the evidence in books.

2011-05-26T11:09:00.010+10:00

My reading has been very inconsistent this year. I’ve been picking up new books before I’ve finished others so it’s been taking me a long time to finish each one.

My interests have been changeable and few books have really grabbed my interest. Only two or three have made me reluctant to put them down until they've been read.

That’s not to say the other books aren’t worth reading. Some have been interesting even though they lacked what it takes to keep my constant attention They just took longer to read than I intended.

Even now I look at my book cases (or the cupboards in the garage where most of my library is stored) and see things I’d like to start reading NOW. But I resist the temptation because I don’t need the congestion of more semi-read books around the house.

Because of my current reading situation, I haven’t written on this blog for a long time. I’ve wanted to write, but without the inspiration of a specific book I haven’t known what to say.

Then the other day I was thinking about the TYPES of books I own and saw they come under several different categories which may highlight the truth of my blog profile: “A man of diverse obsessions”.

What are these types?

Well, in no particular order, as they come to mind:

1) Autographed books

I’m not sure how many I own, but I have a good collection of books signed by their authors. Some I’ve obtained in person through attending book signings, or through knowing the author. Others I’ve bought ready signed after a shop has held a book signing. I have also written to authors requesting their signature on a book plate which has later been stuck in the front of a book. The latter approach has also given me a small collection of letters from authors – often handwritten.
Sadly, not all authors have replied to my request, not even using the self addressed, stamped envelope to return the blank bookplates (which aren’t easy to get).

2) History books.

Most of my history books seem to be royal biographies, mostly concentrating on the Tudor era. For some reason I’m fascinated by the period between the Wars of the Roses and the English Civil War which takes history from the origins of the Tudors through to the downfall of the Stuarts.

3) Gardening Books.

There are several “How to” books, but my preference is for those detailing other gardener’s experiences in creating a garden. The downside of those books is the gulf between their resources and mine. I don’t have several acres and I don’t have a limitless bank account.

4) Food books

While Gloria has a large collection of cook books, my interest leans more towards food production, food quality and diet. However it is more the social side of these topics that interest me, not scientific detail. What kinds of things influence our diet and how are we influenced by our diet. Why do we eat what we eat? Why do we eat how we eat? What effect do these things have on society?

5) Christian Books

This is perhaps one of the more frustrating categories in my collection and covers the kind of books that mostly disappoint and frustrate me. So often the term “Christian” is totally inappropriate. Whether non-fiction or fiction, so many have little in common with biblical Christianity.

6) Books about Israel/Jewish history.

This category includes many holocaust diaries, histories of the Jewish return to Israel and books about Messianic Judaism. Despite two thousand years of denial by the church, Israel and the Jewish people retain an important place in God’s plan for mankind. It is mainly during the last couple of years that I’ve begun to see that importance.

7) Space Race

How could I not be interested in the space race? I grew up during its exciting early years when men travelled into earth orbit and then to the moon, basically “sitting in a tin can” (as I think David Bowie described it).
My collection includes autobiographies (one autographed by a genuine moonwalker), a book of art prints and several histories. Most of them concentrate on the Apollo moon missions and their predecessors. My interest in space travel was so strong that I would have jumped on a space shuttle the day after the Challenger disaster if given the opportunity.

8) Fiction

Such a varied category, but the most represented authors in my collection are Tim Winton, Nick Hornby, Jasper Fforde, Mike Gayle.
Jasper Fforde is a recent discovery and I write about him elsewhere on this blog.
Mike Gayle is a recent REdiscovery and he also appears in a few posts somewhere around here. All of these except for Gayle are represented in my autographed book section. I’ll have to do something about adding him to my autographed books too. I corresponded with him through email last year so hopefully getting a signature won’t be too hard.
Jasper Fforde sells autographed copies of his books through his website (see link in side bar).

9) Fortean Books

The title of this section may have some people asking “WHAT?”
These books deal with mysteries and the unknown, the unusual and strange. The name relates to Charles Fort, a writer and researcher who took an interest in the strange stories sometimes appearing in newspapers.
Along with the Christian section, this one provides some of the most frustrating titles in my collection. I have come across few reliable and readable books dealing with these “Fortean” topics. Most are highly questionable accounts based on dodgy evidence written in a manipulative style. Many of these books had me sucked in for years, until my gullibility was slowly eroded away by a few excellent books by Jim Schnabel, David Clarke and Andy Roberts, and most recently Steve Dewey and John Ries.

And at that point I’ll bring this entry to a close without saying too much about my books on birds and birdwatching, or those about wine, or the children’s titles, books about Derbyshire (where I spent my childhood), or well represented, individual categories of fiction such as Victorian classic, Science Fiction, Fantasy, Irish literature…

Angus and Robertson, Borders and online shopping

2011-03-07T15:41:00.004+11:00

Angus & Robertson and Borders bookshops are going through difficult times. I don’t understand the legal terminology describing their financial situation, but I do understand that their future may not be too bright. Many employees seem certain to lose their jobs and some stores are likely to close.

One of the reasons given for their precarious position is the increase of on-line book buying. People now prefer to shop on-line rather than in person in a shop.
I have to confess that I have become one of those people. But ironically it was Angus & Robertson that got me into the habit.

I’d been looking for details about a book and one of the references supplied by google was for A&R. After I found the details I wanted, it seemed much easier to click the “buy” icon than it would have been to take the details to my local bookshop and order it from them.

Then A&R started to offer free postage and almost monthly discounts to make on-line shopping even more appealing. Another attractive feature was the possibility of buying hardcovers instead of paperbacks. With the discount the cost wasn’t much more than the paperback price and I’ve always prefered the (apparent) permanency of the hard cover. I also found that I now had access to books I’d never see in a local bookshop.

My A&R deliveries all seemed to come from an overseas source, so available books were not limited to locally released editions. Books not released in Australia became accessible, in particular hardcover editions of books that were only released locally as paperbacks. My on-line book buying increased. I could even look for books I’d not known about. I could select a topic and see what books were available about that topic.

I was becoming a regular A&R online customer.

And then I discovered The Book Depository – an online book seller based in Britain. I’d seen the name mentioned a while ago in someone’s blog, but for many months I didn’t give them a thought – but when I decided to visit their website I was amazed by what they offered. They supply books at around half of the local price. Of course the highly favourable current exchange rates have been a big help. But considering A&R were sourcing their books overseas anyway, the exchange rate could not be the reason for the difference in price. Not only were the books so cheap, they have no-cost delivery to many countries including Australia. Since discovering The Book Depository most of my book purchases have been through them. I’ve even been able to pre-order unreleased books to ensure I receive a copy as soon after release as possible (one I ordered a couple of months ago arrived today).

But back to the situation with A&R and Borders – can they really blame online shopping? As I mentioned, my online shopping started with A&R and I only changed my supplier when I found a much cheaper alternative. Are there other reasons for their difficulties? I think there are, and I can suggest one.
I have seen both Borders and Angus & Robertson stores selling books at prices above the RRP. One book I had wanted to buy was being sold by both of them (in their Canberra stores) at $5.00 more than the RRP, and well above the price being charged by other shops who were offering discounts.
I really can’t see why large chains such as Borders/A&R should do that. In the mid 90s I worked for a publisher. Wholesale prices for their books were based on the RRP with booksellers being given a negotiated discount off the RRP. These discounts started at 35%. The book seller would therefore make up to 35% of the RRP profit on each sale.*
However, the larger chains like A&R, Borders, Dymocks, BigW, K Mart, Target etc. received more generous discounts. That is why places like Big W can sell their books with a 35% discount and still make money from the sales.

So here is the question. Why should A&R/Borders prices need to exceed the RRP? And why should they be surprised if their sales were affected and their profitability compromised?

_______

* My employer also sold books mainly on a Sale or Return basis – the book seller could stock books for a short period and if they didn’t sell they could be returned to the publisher for a refund. Therefore they did not need to gamble on stocking books that wouldn’t sell.

The UFO Diaries, Martin Plowman

2011-02-08T08:50:00.003+11:00

I should have reviewed this book weeks ago, but it’s been a difficult one to process. My interest in the book was directed towards the “UFO” part of the title, while the author wrote a book more focused on the “Diaries” side.

Martin Plowman set out to study those who study UFOs. This was the focus of a postgraduate degree. As part of course work he travelled to the Americas (North, South and Central) to meet with people with some kind of attachment to the UFO phenomenon. After some disappointment with Roswell and its claimed crashed flying saucer, he set his sights on Latin America and most of his book tells about his experiences there.

I did learn a few new things about the people with UFO claims. I hadn’t known that (in)famous contactee George Adamski was a theosophist and I was kept interested by his Roswell interview with Walter Haut . But those UFO related insights were rare. Most of the book was a kind of travelogue which sometimes touched on UFO-related regions such as those publicised decades ago in Erich Von Daniken's popular but mostly discredited Chariots of the Gods?.

Even though his travel experiences are interesting enough in themselves, it wasn’t really the kind of book I was looking forward to reading,

I feel part of the problem for me is that Plowman had no real interest in what lies behind UFO reports and he makes that clear all along. UFOs therefore become incidental to his personal quest – the goal of which was never really made clear. Maybe there was no aim in mind beyond completing his course, or maybe he didn’t figure out what his own motives were, why at times he seemed driven to continue the goalless journey he had started.
__________

I was kindly provided with a review copy by the publisher, Allen & Unwin.

Apathy

2011-02-04T16:09:00.002+11:00

What a month.

A severe case of apathy.
Very little motivation to read the several books I’ve started.

I enjoy them when I do get around to reading, but picking one up to make the effort…

I also have a review to write for the last book I have finished: UFO Diaries.
I was sent a review copy from the publishers Allen & Unwin and I feel more than a twinge of guilt for not writing my review as soon as I finished the book.

If my apathy increases anymore I probably won't even fini

Nightmare. Ghosts and Christians.

2011-01-12T13:25:00.008+11:00

Is it possible to present an intriguing, convincing and entertaining story about ghosts while staying within an acceptable Christian framework? Can a genre usually associated with fear and horror, dealing with unknowns about life after death, be compatible with a faith that is supposed to have strong, established certainties regarding the “afterlife”?

I had a strong interest in the “ghost story”. I read a lot of them in the past. I also tried adding to the genre by writing my own stories. My interest wasn’t restricted to fictional ghosts, I read a lot of “true life” accounts and I participated on an internet mailing list of a group called “Ghostwatch.
This wasn’t merely for entertainment or academic reasons; I had some personal ghostly experiences: seeing an apparition in my Sydney home (seen by my wife as well) and also seeing shadowy human figures in a motel room two nights in a row.

A successful Christian ghost story would need to maintain the recognised conventions of the genre without compromising biblical theology. One of the major obstacles would be finding a plausible reason for the existence of ghosts. Does biblical truth allow for the continuing presence of the dead on earth? If not, then what kind of apparent force or intelligence is behind a haunting?

Not only do we have to address the major problem mentioned above, there is also the matter of intent. What reason is there behind the story? Traditionally the ghost story has been associated with fear – giving the reader a scare. Is that kind of aim compatible with a Christian outlook? Should the Christian writer intentionally set out with the primary aim of creating fear in the reader?

Robin Parish’s Nightmare did nothing to change my suspicion that the two are incompatible. While most of the book deals adequately with the “ghostly” side of the equation, the “Christian” side fails: presenting a mixture of superstition, and vague pop-theology in place of a biblically supportable view of life after death and the spiritual conflict between good and evil.

College student Maia Peters is the daughter of famous paranormal investigators (ghost hunters). Despite her desire to be free from the effects of her parents’ celebrity status, she is offered significant financial rewards to help wealthy fellow student Jordin Cole to have a genuine paranormal experience. Maia takes Jordin on a tour of several haunted sites around America and they witness an extraordinarily high level of strange events.

Jordin later goes missing and her fiancée Derek suspects Jordin’s paranormal dabbling with Maia is to blame. When the two try to find out what happened to Jordin they stumble across an occult conspiracy which seems to have Maia herself in its sights.

Parish maintains interest in the parts of the book devoted to the investigations, but when it comes to bringing it all together the story flounders. The climax brings in elements of Science fiction that didn’t really work for me personally, and its depiction of the demonic owed more to fantasy fiction than anything gleaned from scripture.

As a ghost story I found Nightmare was adequately entertaining but as a “Christian” influenced ghost story I thought it failed to deliver biblical consistency, a feature which surely MUST be the foundation of anything published with a Christian world view in mind.

_________________

Since I mentioned my own ghost experiences some might want to know what I think I saw.

I believe that ghosts are a distraction – or a diversion. They are a deception, offering a false alternative to the truth of the “after life” as revealed through the bible.

Visiting Lady Jane Grey and the Tudor period

2011-01-07T08:50:00.009+11:00

While the calendar was moving another year ahead, I headed the other direction, visiting the past through a collection of historical fiction and non-fiction, in both book and film

I spent two or three weeks in Tudor England, with Lady Jane Grey and her family. Her most famous relatives were the Tudor Kings and Queens and her life ended violently like so many royal Tudor women.

Jane’s story is tragic. At only 15 she was manoeuvred onto the English throne to replace her recently deceased cousin Edward. She was quickly deposed by Mary, Edward’s older sister, and was eventually executed.

Viewing her story through various formats has shown me how difficult it must be to get an accurate understanding of history. There are many variables caused by gaps in evidence. If we want our history to be more than lists of facts and dates, we’ll have to recognise how much imagination and speculation play in its recording and reporting.

All of my books about Jane Grey presented more or less the same basic outline, but diverged slightly depending on the author’s own point of interest. For example Faith Cook’s book Lady Jane Grey: Nine Day Queen (non fiction) focused on Jane’s faith and how her protestant beliefs contributed to her death.

Alison Plowden in Lady Jane Grey and the House of Suffolk took a broader view and placed Jane within the context of her family, where they came from and the tragedies that continued after Jane’s death due to their proximity to the throne and the potential threat they could play to the reigning monarch. While Jane suffered at the hands of Mary, her surviving sisters suffered at the hands of Mary’s successor, Elizabeth, probably because they were next in line to the throne when Elizabeth had no children of her own.

Alison Weir’s book Innocent Traitor was fiction, but Weir is a respected historian and I found her story didn’t stray from what I learned from the other “factual” accounts. Her familiarity with Tudor times helped to flesh out Jane Grey’s world, giving depth to her cultural and physical environments. This is the only kind of historical fiction I’m interested in reading – where the known facts are not discarded, and nothing blatantly wrong is added merely for the sake of the story.

The 1980s film Lady Jane is a clear example of the latter. While half of the film does stay with the basic historical record, the other half is a sentimentalised romance where Jane becomes an impulsive, giggling girl far different from every other account of her story. The change comes after her forced marriage to Guilford Dudley, by all historical accounts not a happy relationship and one that rarely saw them together. Yet the film turns them into doting and inseparable partners who even manage to share a cell in the Tower of London after their arrest by Mary.

Another work of historical fictional that I read was Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, a winner of the Mann Booker Prize. While I enjoyed the book, which encouraged me to read further in the period depicted (I’m currently reading a biography of William Tyndale), it also made me wonder about the judging standards of one the most prestigious literary prizes. What made this book stand above others? Personally I found some of the writing was clumsy – often I didn’t know who was being written about. The main character Thomas Cromwell was mostly referred to as “he”, which was often confusing when the “he” in a sentence could also be one of the other characters. Mantel seemed to realise this herself in parts of the book and she made it clear by saying “he, Cromwell...” but that clarification was sporadic and inconsistent.

Also at times I felt that Mantel used inappropriately modern language – one example I recall was a reference to something being “stuffed up” when it was done wrong. Maybe that quibble is merely a sign of my own ignorance of Tudor idioms; perhaps the term does date back that far.

A graphic understanding of the period came through a miniseries Elizabeth I starring Helen Mirren as Queen Elizabeth. This film is not recommended for the squeamish, holding little back from its portrayal of beheadings and other executions, including drawing and quartering.

If nothing else, all of these accounts of the Tudor period show how tenuous the lives of those close to royalty could be. How easy it was to fall from favour and fall victim to the headsman’s axe (or worse).

I have a few more books about Lady Jane and Tudor times to read, so I'm sure I'll be returning to this subject beofre long.

Intentions and reality: a 2010 blog review

2010-12-23T14:27:00.006+11:00

I had intended to write about all of the books I’ve read over the last month or so to bring this blog up to date. I made a start on this when I wrote about Mike Gayle and 84 Charing Cross Road, but after that I lost my enthusiasm and didn’t see the point. Most of the books are by authors I already mentioned earlier in the year, such as Nick Hornby, Jasper Fforde, and Anne Tyler.

Nick Hornby’s A Long Way Down is about a small group of people who are brought together by the only thing they have in common. They intended to kill themselves on New Years Eve. They run into each other on the roof a high rise building from where they have all independently decided to jump.

Each character tells their part of the story in their own words. Their vastly different backgrounds require Hornby to give each character their own distinct style of expression.

Other books have been with me almost from the start of this blog. They are non-fiction books I have picked up from time to time to read a chapter or two before turning back to another novel.

Chocolate and Zucchini is mostly a book of recipes – not exactly something to be read from cover to cover in a matter of days, but it is one I enjoyed a lot through my infrequent visits. Clotilde Dusoulier entertains and informs in her introductions to each recipe, revealing some of the personal history behind each dish and offering advice about various food related matters, like how to plan for a dinner party and how to create a balanced menu.

A Year of Slow Food by David and Gerda Foster is a book I had for a few years before I read it and it wasn’t one I wanted to rush when I had started reading. It’s the kind of non-fiction I enjoy, a personal account of country life and semi self-sufficiency. It describes the kind of lifestyle I’d like to follow – in fact the life I’d hoped to follow when I moved to a country town myself. His book is part diary, part recipe book – each section ends with a recipe using seasonal home produced ingredients, like vegetables, milk and honey.

The new authors I read during this period were Marele Day and Frances Eagar.

I’ve had The Life and Crimes of Harry Lavender for almost 20 years. I bought it from the author when she was a guest tutor during my University course. I finally got around to reading it this month.
Several years after meeting the author I was employed briefly by her publisher and saw her in a nearby coffee shop having lunch with one of the Directors.

Harry Lavender is a crime novel involving a private detective, touching on the organised crime scene in Sydney where Harry is a major crime boss. Some of the locations were vaguely familiar and it is easy to project certain old time crime figures onto the character of Harry. The book uses a lot of computer metaphors and some of its computer references are now a little dated, but it was still an entertaining book providing a reasonably literary approach to the genre.

Frances Eagar’s book Time Tangle is another that I’ve had for more than a couple of decades. It is a children’s book that tangles a little history with the modern world as a girl of the present crosses into a different time, meeting a boy close to her own age. She finds herself caught up in the religious persecutions of the Tudor ages. It seems that time travel books of various types have been a regular part of this year’s reading.

When I started this blog my hope was to find inspiration and encouragement to return to writing my own stories. Partly I hoped to find some ideas about what made successful stories work. What was in the stories I liked that appealed to me?

That part of this blog has been a failure. I’ve written no stories and I’ve merely found how incapable I’ve been in analysing someone’s writing to assess why it appeals or not. I merely know what I like without knowing why I liked it.

In the end I have only concluded that a readable story needs an interesting plot and characters I with whom I can identify. There’s nothing profound or inspiring in that conclusion.

While maintaining this blog has helped me to persevere with my reading instead of continually putting books aside only partly read, I found towards the end that I was getting too caught up in the numbers game being more interested in reading 50 then 55 or 60 books before the end of the year. As a result I avoided books that would take longer to read. Why read one book of 500 pages when I could read two of 250 pages in the same amount of time?

Well that could be all for this year. It is Christmas Eve tomorrow. After that I’ll be away from the internet until the New Year when I can start a new reading list. Until then I have just over a week to reach 70 books for 2010 – can I do it?

Ruth Park, 1917-2010

2010-12-20T15:58:00.002+11:00

Ruth Park, author of Playing Beattie Bow (reviewed earlier on this blog ) has died aged 93.

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/nation/sydneys-dickens-ruth-park-dies-leaving-her-mark-on-nations-psyche/story-e6frg6nf-1225972951293

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/12/17/3095637.htm

http://www.smh.com.au/national/obituaries/novelist-shone-a-light-on-slums-20101216-18zid.html

.

84 Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff

2010-12-17T12:05:00.007+11:00

More from my “Completed 2010” list…

47b. The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street, Helene Hanff
47a. 84 Charing Cross Road, Helene Hanff

I found these two separate titles in my copy of 84 Charing Cross Road. They were originally published individually with Duchess being a sequel to the other, better known book.

My paperback is a film tie-in edition published at the time of the Anne Bancroft, Anthony Hopkins film. It was another of those books that I’ve had for years (probably over 20!) but never got around to reading. I bought it because I enjoyed the film so much and I’m not sure why I neglected it for so long.

The first section, on which the film was based, is a collection of letters written over many years between Hanff and the staff of Marks & Co., primarily their chief buyer Frank Doel.
Having seen the film again only a few weeks earlier, I could see how faithful the majority of the film was to this collection of letters. As such, the book became more of a written reminder of the film than a unique reading experience.
I wonder how different it would have been had I read the book first.

The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street was a surprise. Having neglected 84 Charing Cross Road for so long, I wasn’t aware that the sequel was there, and it was this part that I enjoyed most. It continued Hanff’s story as she finally realised her dream to visit London, thanks to the success of her earlier work.

I found Duchess a pleasure to read, mainly because of the genuine joy expressed by Hanff in her experience of London. How different it is to so many other travel books – where writers have a seemingly obligatory cynicism (at worst) or a (at best) a mildly mocking tone directed towards the places they see and the people they meet.

While the events in Duchess weren’t covered by the movie, the film continued to colour my reading of the book. I couldn’t help picturing Ann Bancroft as Helene Hannf, and when she finally met Frank Doel’s widow Nora, I kept seeing Judy Dench who played her.

Mike Gayle and Friends

2010-12-16T08:18:00.004+11:00

Mike Gayle has been one of my big rediscoveries this year. I found two of his books while I was sorting out my library.

It had been many years since I’d read either of them and when I re-read the first it was like reading it for the first time. I barely put it down.
I have since bought more including these on my “Completed 2010” list (see side bar).

45. Brand New Friend, Mike Gayle
55. The To-Do List, Mike Gayle
57. Life & Soul of the Party, Mike Gayle

Gayle’s dominant theme is friendship. This also comes across in his non-fiction book The To-Do List. In that book he describes a year of his life in which he compiled a list of 1277 things to do before his next birthday. These ranged from minor repairs around the house to an overseas expedition. Many things on the list related to expressions of love and friendship towards those close to him.

To aid motivation he shared the list with close friends who were given the task of assessing his achievement at the end of the year.

The thing I saw in this book was the similarity between Gayle and his friends and the characters within his fiction books. It seems clear that his fiction is about the kind of people and places he knows well.

Brand New Friend looks at the difficulties of a man trying to build new friendships in a new city.
When the strains of long distance romance make it necessary for Rob to relocate from London to Manchester, it means leaving life long friends behind. He tries a few different ways of meeting and making new friends.
Complications arise when the only suitable candidate he finds is a woman other than his girlfriend. Can men and women be and remain friends without romantic/sexual complications? And if so, how would their spouse/partner view the situation?

Life and Soul of the Party follows a group of friends during a year of tragedy and strained relationships. We see them through a series of parties which bring some of them together and tear others apart. (I assure you the melodrama of that last sentence is mine and does not reflect Mike Gayle’s story).
While Brand New Friend deals with the difficulty of starting new friendships, Life and Soul looks at the way failed relationships can linger and sometimes prevent us from moving on and how even the best and closest of relationships can be compromised by our associations with others, both in the past and in the present.

Gayle’s examination of love and friendship is done with a total absence of earnest navel-gazing or philosophical psychoanalysis. He just tells a story and entertains his readers, giving THIS reader the experience of what could have been – seeing how possible it would have been for me to be one of his characters with their experiences, if only a few things in my life had been different.

_______

Other Mike Gayle books read this year, which I forgot to mention in previous posts.

24. My Legendary Girlfriend, Mike Gayle
26. Mr Commitment, Mike Gayle

Wuthering Heights - CELEBRATION!!!

2010-12-15T11:31:00.002+11:00

I finally did it!

I reached the end of Wuthering Heights more than a year after I started. This reading experience was more about endurance than enjoyment. It was a battle from the first page.

I will admit that I was beginning to enjoy it towards the end, but I think that may have been the elation of realising I was getting close to that last page.

Apart from the satisfaction of not giving up, reading the book helped me appreciate and understand Jasper Fforde’s Wuthering Heights references in his Well of Lost Plots.

Now I think I should concentrate on getting this blog up to date.

So many books read – but nothing written about them!

Anniversary

2010-11-04T14:04:00.003+11:00

This blog has now been going for a year.
Here are a few statistics related to that period between 4th November 2009 and 3 November 2010

Books completed: 55
Non fiction 24
Fiction 31

Top 10 fiction in order of reading:
Worldshaker, Richard Harland
Blackout, Connie Willis
Slam, Nick Hornby
My Legendary Girlfriend, Mike Gayle
Anita and Me, Meera Syal
The Eyre Affair, Jasper Fforde,
For All Time, Meredith Resce
All Clear, Connie Willis
Lost in a Good Book, Jasper Fforde
Brand New Friend, Mike Gayle

Not quite making top 10 fiction list:
Mr Commitment, Mike Gayle
I Am Number Four, Pittacus Lore
Reckless, Cornelia Funke

Top 5 non-fiction:
Animal Vegetable Miracle, Barbara Kingsolver
Howards End is on the Landing, Susan Hill
A Man on the Moon, Andrew Chaikin
Foxeys Hangout, Cathie Gowdie
The Alternative Kitchen Garden, Emma Cooper.

Not quite making the top 5 non fiction list:
Like Me, Chely Wright
Our Hands Are Stained With Blood, Michael Brown.

Now the first year of the blog has been completed, I am turning to the calendar year.
So far I’ve read 45 books in 2010. I would like to at least equal the anniversary total of 55 books by the end of the year and hopefully exceed that by reaching 60.

Jasper Fforde

2010-11-03T08:12:00.005+11:00

Reading Jasper Ffforde’s Thursday Next series is like jumping into a blender with an armful of books selected from almost every genre. His stories defy narrow categorisation. They combine elements of Science Fiction, Fantasy, Horror, Crime and Humour, seasoned with a few pages from literary criticism and grammar text books. If I have overlooked a genre, it’s probably there anyway, like a familiar spice that you recognise in a meal but can’t quite isolate and identify.

My first attempted Jasper Fforde book was The Well of Lost Plots, the third in his Thursday next series. I struggled with it several years ago and eventually gave up. Recently I decided to try again, but this time starting with his first book, The Eyre Affair; and I now realise it is essential that the Thursday Next series be read in order as each volume builds upon what has happened in previous books.

Today Fforde would be my favourite writer (although tomorrow may bring about change). I love his continuing flood of strange ideas and distorted realities. I think his special talent is to bring so much weirdness together into one place and somehow give it a logical credibility.

In Forde’s “Nextian” universe, movement between the “real” world and literary worlds is possible. Some of the action of The Eyre Affair takes place within Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre as Thursday Next follows villain Acheron Hades into the pages of that classic text. Can she save that book from a man whose proven ruthlessness challenges the security and stability of well-loved literature?

Lost in a Good Book follows Thursday’s life after the events of the first book and adds to our knowledge of her world which has similarities to our own but has a significantly different history, technologies and priorities: the national sport seems to be croquet, literary societies are a powerful political force and the power of coincidence can be used as a lethal weapon.

After reading those first two books, I am definitely ready to return to The Well of Lost Plots. And despite my earlier experience I am looking forward to it.

Fforde’s website is worth a visit (there is a link in the side bar, see "links for writers"). I have now bought most of his books, the majority from the author himself. While this did work out a bit more expensive than buying them locally, all the books are autographed and come with a free, randomly selected postcard, some of which are limited editions.

I know this isn't the most enlightening book "review" written. I feel any detailed attempt to describe and critique these novels would be like a regression to my youth when friends and I would quote Monty Python, Goon Show and Fawlty Towers dialogue to each other. Second hand experience is just not the same. You need to go to the source for yourself and enjoy the vibrancy of the original.

From my personal viewpoint, Jasper Fforde's books have been one of the best discoveries I've made for years.

Dragonholder: The life and times (so far) of Anne McCaffrey

2010-10-27T14:43:00.005+11:00

Dragonholder was written by Anne McCaffrey’s son, Todd. It is an attractive illustrated book of mainly family anecdotes providing a basic though uncritical biography of a very successful science fiction writer. Any fan of McCaffrey’s work will enjoy the insight into her life and work, and this book is clearly intended for the fans. It also gives a few anecdotes involving other well known SF authors, particularly McCaffrey’s friendship with Isaac Asimov, (after whom the McCaffrey family named a cat).

I have a few Anne McCaffrey books. I’ve had them for many years, but the only one I’ve read is Dragonflight, the first of her Pern novels. My first reading of the book must have been some time in the 1980s, and then I read it again in the early 90s as part of a university course. Now, 20 years later I don’t recall much of the story, but I do remember I enjoyed it. About the only detail I recall is the unexpected twist upon which the whole book turns, so maybe any future reading wouldn’t have the same impact as previous readings.
Several years ago my wife gave me a special limited, autographed and numbered edition copy of Dragonflight, which is one of my most prized literary possessions

I wanted to read more of the Pern series, but I wanted to read them in order and I never found the second book. Clearly, these days it wouldn’t be so hard to track a copy via the internet, but to some extent, over time, my motivation has diminished. Maybe if I ever find it in a second hand book store my interest will be renewed.

Todd McCaffrey has since joined Anne as co-author of additional books in the Pern series, and more recently has taken over sole authorship of some titles.

An audio interview with Anne and Todd McCaffrey can be found here:

http://www.bookotron.com/agony/audio/mccaffrey_2006.mp3

.

All Clear by Connie Willis

2010-10-26T08:34:00.005+11:00

All Clear at last!

In writing this “review” I need to exercise great restraint. It would be easy to turn it into a bombardment of superlatives as I try to say how much I enjoyed Connie Willis’s All Clear. But I can’t help indulging myself with at least one word that keeps jumping into my mind. Maybe using that single word will give enough satisfaction to allow me to move on. It’s not a word that I recall using often but at the moment it seems the most appropriate to use.

All Clear is a MAGNIFICENT book.

It is complex without being complicated, weaving separate threads of time and multiple characters into a tight and cohesive story that I didn’t want to leave. It had twists, turns, surprises and puzzles as well as creating some vivid images of wartime London.

Willis’s characters are the core of the book. Time travelling historians, delinquent children, a venerable actor, shop girls, ambulance drivers, intelligence officers and clergymen give a human face to the horrors of a war where civilians were regularly the victims.

The central characters are historians from mid 21st century Oxford, part of a project utilising time travel to study the past. They were introduced in Blackout, the first volume of the story. Britain is at war and each of them is studying a different aspect of wartime England.

At the end of Blackout, they are trapped in London during the Blitz. They were afraid they had somehow interfered with events and changed the direction history had taken – maybe even altering the outcome of the war. This fear seemed to be confirmed when the casualties at the bombing of a department store exceeded the number recorded in historical accounts.

All Clear brings the story to its conclusion. Written as one long novel, the publishers decided to release the story in two volumes, thinking the modern reader could not cope with book of over 1100 pages.
In my review of Blackout I said it ended with a whimper. So hopefully the few months wait between volumes hasn’t discouraged any readers from completing the journey: but unfortunately that may be the case.

Those who don’t return will miss out on the experience that Willis intended to share, with the whole story presented as a united whole. The biggest obstacle to reading All Clear was trying to pick up a story that had been put aside months ago. It took a while to become reacquainted with the interwoven plots spread across different wartime periods. But it was worth the effort. After a chapter or two I was caught up again in the character’s lives. One day I hope to get the chance to read the whole story as it was intended by the author – from beginning to end without a disruptive break in the middle.

Why did I like the book so much? It has an all round richness and depth. There’s nothing shallow or simplistic about it. It gives the mind a workout without becoming convoluted and confusing, dealing with one of science fiction’s most iconic conundrums – the potential effects of changing the past and how it would affect the future. The characters are given time to develop and grow, drawing the reader in to experience their emotional journey through very difficult and unknown territory. It deals with the heroic as well as the horrific with occasional humour to balance the growing tension. Willis is able to do all of this without resorting to anything cheap, gratuitous or potentially offensive.

Yes, with its use of time travel the book is built upon a science fiction foundation, which will probably be a stumbling block for some potential readers. That is unfortunate because they will miss out on a very rewarding journey that has very little to do with scientific speculation. This book is about people, relationships and how the worst of experiences can bring out the best of human character.

I loved it.

_______

Thanks to Allen & Unwin,the publishers of this book in Australia for sending me a review copy.

See here for their All Clear webpage:
http://www.allenandunwin.com/default.aspx?page=94&book=9781741758429

NOTE: Allen & Unwin were not responsible for the decision to divide this story into two parts.

Something is Out There

2010-10-20T15:55:00.008+11:00

Something is Out There by Julie Miller and Grant Osborn is a very accessible introduction to some of the best known cases of Australian mysteries.

Miller and Osborn take the reader through a variety of haunted locations and UFO “hotspots”, introducing some of the people whose lives have been affected by strange personal encounters with the unexplained.

These phenomena can be annoyingly elusive, rarely (if ever) leaving convincing, tangible evidence. Mostly the only evidence available is the testimony of witnesses both past and present.

This book is divided into three main sections in which Miller and Osborn look at Ghosts (Supernatural), UFOs (Ufology) and Strange Creatures (Cryptozoology) with a mix of anecdotes, folklore and personal experience.

The book combines material gleaned from other sources with some of the authors’ own investigations. Their personal investigations include interviews with witnesses and researchers, and their experiences on some of the increasingly popular commercial ghost tours in various parts of the country, from Port Arthur in Tasmania to Picton NSW.

I’ve had my own experiences with strange phenomena. Those experiences don’t fit a rational, scientific worldview but I know they happened. But even from this “insiders” perspective I still maintain a distinct desire for accountability when it comes to extraordinary claims. Too often in these matters subjective experience and personal opinion are presented as fact, with little or no justification.

In parts I felt Miller and Osborn were a bit too accepting of some of the testimonies they presented. I am particularly sceptical of the testimony they give of “psychics” in researching haunted sites. Their subjective impressions help to pad out the lack of real experience or evidence, overshadowing and replacing genuine, though rare, ghostly activity at a particular location.

The only exceptions I can recall to this open acceptance are mild allusions of suspicion directed towards the number of Rex Gilroy’s* claimed sightings of anomalous creatures, and a couple of doubts expressed about the validity of “orbs” in photos. Although, regarding the latter, their doubts didn’t prevent them from illustrating the book with their own photos of “orbs”.

“…while we are sceptical about orbs as a manifestation of spiritual entities, we can’t help but ponder the size, brightness and intensity of these particular anomalies. Did we capture the little boy ghosts at play?”

A lot of what is covered in Something is Out There has been dealt with more extensively by others, but newcomers to these mysteries are given plenty to increase their appetite. Extensive bibliography and end notes provide more than enough leads to seek out more for themselves.

NOTE:
* Rex Gilroy is one of major characters in Australian cryptozoology. Credited with being the first to bring attention to the Yowie, the Australian cousin of Bigfoot, Yeti and Sasquatch. His early work inspired many of todays investigators.

______________

I thank the publishers Allen & Unwin for providing a review copy of this book.
For further details see:

Something is Out There

.

Playing Beatie Bow by Ruth Park

2010-10-19T10:05:00.005+11:00

While watching neighbourhood children playing a game they call “Beatie Bow”, Abigail Kirk sees another spectator, a young girl who remains unnoticed by the other children. Abigail’s curiosity leads her to follow the girl who runs to escape Abigail’s attention.

During their chase through the streets and alleys of The Rocks, there is a change in the surroundings and Abigail finds herself in 1870s Sydney. An accident results in Abigail being cared for by the young girl’s family who see Abigail as “the stranger” a mysterious visitor who always appears at significant times in their family history.

The stranger’s significance relates to the passing on of “the gift” of second sight from one generation of the family to the next. Granny, the current holder of the gift is growing weaker and the identity of its next custodian is uncertain. Abigail is not able to return to her own time until her role as the stranger has been fulfilled.

The consequences of its fulfilment affect not only the 1870s family, but also Abigail and her family in the present day. Through her journey Abigail learns to appreciate life and relationships in her own time and eventually finds hope for the future.

One of the appealing things about this story is its setting. I became quite familiar with The Rocks area when I lived in Sydney. It was perhaps my favourite part of the city. Right next to the harbour it maintains a lot of its historical character with many original buildings remaining intact. Gloria and I went there a lot, either to a favourite Irish pub for a Guinness or to the markets on the weekend, and sometimes to walk along the harbour, round circular quay to the Opera House. For a few years it was our favourite place to be on Australia Day, braving the media helicopter invasion to see the end of the annual ferry race.

I can’t remember where or when I bought Ruth Park’s Playing Beatie Bow, but it was many years ago and I bought it because I enjoyed the film adaptation.
While watching the film I could recognise some of the locations used. Now after many years of neglect I’ve read the book, and my familiarity with its setting helped me better imagine the places being described.

Time travel has been recurring thing in my reading and viewing this year. The next book on my list is Connie Willis’s All Clear, the continuation of the story started in Blackout and I recently finished For All Time by Meredith Resce.

Each of the books relies on a different means of moving through time. With Willis’s books a new technology makes it possible. Ruth Parks relies on “the gift”, a more paranormal approach: a step beyond clairvoyance in which a physical link to the past creates a kind of bridge between two times.

The idea of visiting the past brings up interesting questions about how much our knowledge of the present would prepare us for life in the past. Would it help us avoid potential dangers or could that knowledge even help us change the past to avert tragedy or prevent injustice? And if we change the past, what affect would that have on our own time? Would our own present even exist if the past was changed?

Reckless by Cornelia Funke

2010-10-14T09:13:00.004+11:00

As a boy, Jacob Reckless found a way into a world of magic through a mirror in his father’s study. It was a world he tried to keep to himself, but that desire was frustrated when his younger brother Will discovered the secret and followed him.

We enter Cornelia Funke’s Reckless when the boys have reached adulthood, with Will suffering from wounds inflicted in a recent encounter with a Goyle, a stone-like race at war with the mirrorworld’s human population.
From the injuries a spreading petrification is taking over Will’s flesh. Jacob knows he has very little time to find a way of saving his brother. His search for help takes them through a place where many familiar fairytales have a foundation in reality.

While I found the first few chapters a bit unclear, it didn’t take long to get caught up in the brother’s situation. Joined by Will’s girlfriend Cara, and a shapeshifting fox, Jacob’s attempt to save Will takes us through fantastic landscapes and into contact with a variety of “fairytale” characters.

A story with references to ginger bread houses, child-eating witches, fairies, unicorns, dwarves and elves may sound excessively clichéd, but the story of Reckless is told with convincing grit without the slightest hint of cutesy Disney, or the grand epic feel of Tolkien. Well known fairy tale and fantasy references (like Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Hansel and Gretel) give a surprisingly convincing familiarity to the world of Reckless, but are mainly used as background colour rather than primary plot features.

This was a book I didn’t look forward to finishing; a book I hope will lead to a sequel or even a series, revealing more of the characters and their world. It has definitely made me keen to look for more of Cornelia Funke’s work.

I Am Number Four

2010-10-11T09:08:00.006+11:00

Before I start on the content of this book, I need to address some things that affected my expectations prior to reading it.

I bought I Am Number Four without noticing the author’s name. When I got home and saw it was attributed to a fictional character I felt a bit concerned. It seemed like an overly contrived marketing ploy, or that the author had something to hide. Was he/she reluctant to be associated with the book?

A quick piece of research revealed the following about the author Pittacus Lore:

“Pittacus Lore is Lorien's ruling Elder. He has been on Earth for the last twelve years, preparing for the war that will decide Earth's fate. His whereabouts are unknown.”

Other searches reveal that Pittacus Lore is in fact TWO people, James Frey and Jobie Hughes. Frey was earlier the author of a memoir A Million Little Pieces, an Oprah book club best-seller that apparently caused some controversy when parts of the memoir were found to be not as true as many were led to believe.

So, was the pseudonym used to hide the involvement of an author with a controversial writing history? Or was it also the “marketing ploy” I mentioned above?

I suspect marketing played a significant part in the creation of this book. It seems like it is the first in a planned ongoing series, (perhaps hoping to follow the success of the Twilight Series). Also, a film is already in production. How long before the characters are sold as action figures?

But aside from the cynicism arising from the books background, how did I like the story?

Mostly I enjoyed it. I’ve had an interest in aliens, conspiracies and the unknown since childhood and the book covers that ground. I found the characters and situations were portrayed quite plausibly despite the fantastic elements. This perception may have been helped my longstanding interest in such things.

John Smith is “number four”, one of nine children rescued from Lorien, a planet being destroyed by a hostile alien race, the Mogadorians. The children and their guardians have made their way to earth where they each go their own way and try to hide their identity, in case the Mogadorians follow to destroy them.

The children have been partly protected by a “charm”. They can only be killed in a particular order. Attempts to harm or kill one of them out of that order will backfire on the assailant killing or harming him instead of the intended victim. The story starts when John (fourth in the order) receives confirmation that the first three have been killed and he is next in line.

The story has several elements. The most crucial is John’s evasion of the Mogadorians and his need to stay alive. Then he has to fit in with a normal school community life, dealing with teenage friendships, romances and bullying while trying to remain out of the spotlight which could draw unwanted attention. He also has to contend with developing special Loric talents (legacies) as he comes of age.

The book is paced quite well, continually developing new situations to keep the reader’s interest. This also helps to keep the reader from thinking too much about the implausibilities and weaknesses within the story. The “charm” intended to protect the nine is one of the weaker and least credible aspects of the story. The only reason for its existence seems to be to increase the stakes faced by John. He KNOWS he is the next one the Mogadorians will be coming for, making his situation more urgent and threatening.

The story moves on towards a showdown with the Mogadorians and we find out how John’s developing talents can help his struggle to survive. When the inevitable confrontation comes, the scale of it seems overwhelming and melodramatic in comparison to the tone of the rest of the book, and I found it difficult to see these events as part of the “real” world in which the story is supposed to be set.

As the first part of a continuing series, this book introduces some interesting characters and possibilities for the direction the story will take. What started as one teenager’s fight for survival will clearly expand into more widespread struggle for earth’s salvation, not only from the Mogadorians but from ourselves.

If earth survives the Mogadorians, will we take the right actions to ensure our planet’s survival? Will we follow the example of the Loriens, and reverse our exploitative and destructive practices before it’s too late? Or will we end up like the Mogadorians who, on depleting the resources of their own world seek out other worlds to despoil?

Hélène Berr's Journal

2010-10-07T11:50:00.004+11:00

Hélène Berr lived in Paris during the Nazi occupation and worked with an organisation devoted to saving Jewish children from “deportation” by the Nazis. About 500 children were sent to safety by this group.

As a Jew herself, Hélène was also in continual danger, but denied herself the opportunity to escape so her work with children could continue. She, along with her parents, was eventually arrested, “deported” and murdered in a concentration camp.

Journal is her diary, kept through the war years until her arrest. It was brought to publication by her niece who provides an afterward to conclude the story, informing the reader of Hélène’s fate after her last diary entry.

This book was not easy reading. As a diary it is a collection of experiences that are often unrelated and cryptic. There are gaps in the “narrative” when days and even weeks go by without an entry. But its structure and nature as a diary is not the hardest aspect for the reader. The recorded experiences and thoughts of real life horrors are the most difficult thing to take in and comprehend. Could these things have happened in “civilised” Europe so recently, within the lifetime of my parents?

The diary starts in April 1942, in a time of relative calm when there is a degree of freedom and it initially focuses upon Hélène’s relationships with family, friends and love interests with little attention given to the political situation.

As the diary progresses, hints of unrest begin to appear as political events start to have an impact on her life, such as being forced to wear a star to identify her as a Jew in public and the arrest and temporary imprisonment of her father.
More and more the realities of Hitler’s anti-Semitic agenda become evident, especially when fellow Jews start to be “deported” – a euphemism for being transported to concentration camps.
Hélène struggles to understand what is going on around her and this becomes the dominant topic of her writing.

“Is it not dire that I, reacting and rebelling against this, am an exception, whereas it ought to be the people who are capable of doing such things who are abnormal?”(Hélène Berr, 9 Nov 1943)

Journal was translated form French into English by David Bellos who provided an essay at the end of the book. The following paragraph from that essay is an astute summary of Hélène's diary and society portrayed within it.

The Journal is a precious unique record of denial - of Hélène's initial unwillingness to see what was staring her in the face - and of the blindness of her family, her immediate milieu among the elite of Paris students and then, more broadly of her neighbours, her colleagues, her whole community, its policemen and officials. For that reason, it is also an historic document showing just how the Final Solution was imposed: by incremental stealth, by secrecy, in an atmosphere of utter confusion. It explains and demonstrates how so many people really did not know what was going on before their eyes.

For more information about Hélène Berr:
Hélène Berr

Christian Fiction

2010-10-06T15:07:00.012+11:00

For a while I’ve wanted to read some Christian fiction to see what the quality was like. It had been a long time since I’d read any Christian novels. The last I recall were three by Ray Blackstone starting with Flabbergasted that followed the developing relationships of a group of young Americans, one of whom served as a missionary in South America. I quite enjoyed those books.
Apart from the lack of swearing and sexual content, they would almost fit in the (maligned but popular) genres of ladlit/chicklit.

It wasn’t easy to find books that I thought I could enjoy. The fiction shelves of my “local” Christian bookshop seemed filled with Little House on the Prairie clones, The Left Behind series, or other styles I didn’t find appealing. In the end I found a couple of books in the bargain bin that seemed promising, and to these I added two other titles I’d seen advertised. My brief impressions of the books are given below – without identifying the “bargains”.

1) Yellow Zone by Janelle G Dwyer
An end time story set in Australia. After devastating terrorist attacks around the world, The Government sets up strict controls over citizens. Essential utilities have been severely disrupted so most people are gathered into camps in an alleged attempt to restore order and security.

Good points. Overall the story idea had credibility and presented a world in which Christians face increasing restrictions, imprisonment and ultimately execution for their beliefs. I find this to be more or less consistent with bible prophecy.

Bad points. Dialogue was stilted and unconvincing making it a struggle to enjoy the telling of the story. Because of this I found the characters unrealistic. The story also presents a “pre-trib” rapture scenario, which isn’t overly emphasised but, added to the other shortcomings, spoiled my reading experience

2) Ulterior Motives by Mark Andrew Olsen.

A potentially catastrophic terrorist plot is discovered. Osama Bin Laden’s successor is captured and interrogation is started to try to find enough information to prevent it from being carried out. A disgraced serviceman and now Christian minister is brought in to conduct an unorthodox plan to obtain the required details

Good points. Easy reading and kept my interest.

Bad Points. One of the most ridiculously implausible stories I’ve ever come across. Very “preachy” in a heavy handed way.

3) Tomorrow We Die, Shawn Grady

A mystery novel about a paramedic who is becomes embroiled in a conspiracy after a dying patient passes him a strange note.

Good points. Maintained my interest throughout. Included references to Christian faith without turning the book into a clumsy tract.

Bad points. Used too many obscure medical references. My wife was a nurse so I was familiar with some of the jargon but a lot meant absolutely nothing to me. Plausibility seemed to suffer a little towards the climax and conclusion of the novel – but perhaps no more than in many other “thrillers”. A bit gruesome at times which may disturb some readers.

4) For All Time, Meredith Resce

A 21st century Australian doctor visiting England becomes trapped when part of a castle collapses. Her situation is shared with a male member of the cast of a medieval show being performed at the castle. After finding a way to freedom from the rubble, they emerge in the time of Henry VIII and have to survive in a world where an educated woman is viewed with suspicion, especially when the Witchfinder General Matthew Hopkins is in town.

Good points. A lot of naturally expressed Christian elements that don’t seem forced. A very proficient and plausible story created out of a very implausible (but intriguing) situation. Touches a little on the religious beliefs and superstitions of a time when knowing scripture in English was enough for someone to be considered a heretic.

Bad points. Nothing of significance. While no great literary masterpiece, and while some liberties may have been taken with history, I’ve found this book to be the most enjoyable of the four – but I haven’t finished it yet, so the whole thing COULD come crashing down in the last few chapters.

The Alternative Kitchen Garden and A-Z

2010-10-01T14:27:00.005+10:00

Earlier I said I would provide a link to my review of Emma Cooper's The Alternative Kitchen Garden an A-Z.
I have now written the review and have posted it here.

http://onefile2.blogspot.com/2010/10/alternative-kitchen-garden-a-z.html

.

So Many Books...

2010-09-24T12:57:00.005+10:00

I have been overwhelmed with potential reading material after going overboard buying books. I addition to my excess purchases I have received a copy of The Alternative Kitchen Garden an A-Z to review. As the title indicates this is a gardening book, and it was written by Emma Cooper, presenter of the internet podcast The Alternative Kitchen Garden. This is a wonderful book that I’ll write about in more detail on my gardening blog when I’ve read more of it (my article will be linked here after it has been written).
It’s not the kind of book I want to rush through. I prefer to read and enjoy an article at a time and there must be around 150 separate entries of around two pages each.

To get a good idea of what the book is like, I recommend listening to the podcast which can be found here: http://coopette.com/akg . There are currently 109 episodes.

A recent discovery I've made has been Jasper Fforde and I am now enjoying the first of his novels The Eyre Affair. I’ve had another of his books for a few years but never took the time to read it, but my interest in his work was stirred after hearing some interviews he’s done. I then had a look at his website (see side bar) and decided to buy the first of his books so I could read his work in order. While I could have bought it locally for a few dollars less, I decided to buy through the author’s website and get an autographed copy.

Not only do I have an abundance of new books, I was finally able to rescue my existing library from packing boxes where it has been stored for many years due to lack of space for book shelving. The boxes made access very difficult and I even forgot that I had some of the books in my collection. While the bookcase situation hasn’t improved, I now have a compromise solution. I bought two cupboards that are like bookcases with doors. All of my books have now been relocated to these cupboards in the garage and it is much easier to access them, so I have no excuse for not reading them – apart from lack of time.

Author Interviews on mp3

2010-09-03T11:28:00.004+10:00

Do you like hearing authors talking about their books and their work practices?

I have added links in the sidebar to sites having recorded interviews with a variety of authors, some recent and some going back 20 years. Most of those I've heard so far have been very good.

I'll be adding more links as I find them.

Perhaps those I haven't liked so much have been from the ABC - but that is a matter of personal taste regarding the authors featured and a tendency for them to over-analyse books.

Tell Me a Story...

2010-08-20T12:17:00.001+10:00

My “literary” tastes are extremely changeable – which is perhaps why I started so many books I didn’t finish. My attention was easily drawn to something I’d rather be reading than what I’d begun.

The one consistent thing about the books I enjoy is the telling of a “good story”. I have little patience with books that are primarily a vehicle to show off the writer’s skill with language. A writer may have the most beautiful way with words – but if I’m continually being drawn back to a beautiful sentence at the expense of the flow of the story, my interest won’t be maintained.

Those kinds of writers are also a discouragement to the ambition to write. They make that ambition seem unattainable. I much prefer those deceptive books that make writing SEEM easy and natural while telling an enjoyable story. At least they give me encouragement to try, and by the time I realise the extent of the deceit, I’ve had a productive and enjoyable time giving it a go.

My Top 3 Choices

2010-08-11T10:48:00.007+10:00

Best of the books so far (up to 11 August 2010)

Of the books I’ve read since starting this blog, the following are my top three fiction and top three non-fiction titles.

Fiction (in order of preference):
Worldshaker, Richard Harland
Slam, Nick Hornby
Blackout, Connie Willis.

Non Fiction (no particular order)
Foxeys Hangout, Cathie Gowdie
Animal Vegetable Miracle, Barbara Kingsolver
Our Hands Are Stained With Blood, Michael Brown

Honourable mentions.
A Man on the Moon, Andrew Chaikin
Howards End is on the Landing, Susan Hill

Rediscovering Nick

2010-08-10T15:45:00.006+10:00

I have rediscovered Nick Hornby.

On the weekend I bought An Education on DVD. Hornby wrote the screenplay for which he received an Oscar nomination. I haven’t had time to watch the film yet, but I did start reading his “first teenage novel” Slam last night and have now almost finished it.

My introduction to Hornby was Fever Pitch. I can’t remember now whether I read his book or saw the film first. I think it may have been the book. Fever Pitch was a memoir centred on Hornby’s relationship with English football team Arsenal. It helped revive some of my own childhood memories of going to the football with my Dad but I didn’t have the chance of attaining the same kind of obsession as Hornby. I left England when I was 13 and the last football game I attended was on my birthday in 1971. It was never the same again. My team, Stoke City didn’t have the profile of an Arsenal or a Man United, so it was hard to keep in touch from the other side of the world. However, they did beat Chelsea to win the League Cup, and not long after toured Australia. I was lucky enough to see them play in Sydney but remember nothing of the match.

And hidden in that last paragraph is a key to why I enjoy Hornby’s writing. He manages to add a degree of familiarity to his stories. As if I’ve ALMOST experienced what his characters are going through. It’s not in the details. Their stories are not like my own – but I can imagine that they COULD have been.

Reading Israel

2010-07-06T11:21:00.009+10:00

Although I’ve added a few more titles to the list of books I’ve read this year, I haven’t written about them on this blog.

My recent reading has all been related to Israel and the Jewish people and “reviewing” those books here would not be in line with my intentions for this blog. Instead I have addressed issues relating to these books on my “theological” blog ONESIMUS FILES .

I am currently reading Mission Survival, edited by Ruth Bondy, Chad Zmora & Raphael Bashan. It is a continuation of my interest in Israel, examining 1967’s Six Day War. Compiled from letters and articles written at the time, the book gives a very personal insight into the Israeli people facing a massive Arab attack on their land, with the Arabs threatening to annihilate the 20 year old nation. A very real threat that has not gone away more than 40 years later – but a threat that the majority of the media ignores with their clear anti-Israel bias.
I haven’t added this book to my reading list in the side bar because I’m not confident of finishing it. It is a library book and I’m content to read as much as I can during the loan period without feeling pressured to get to the end.

The common link with all of these recent books is the amazing story of people who were dispersed from their land almost 2000 years ago; were scattered through almost every nation on earth, were continually persecuted like no other race throughout history – and STILL managed to survive to return to their ancestral land.

Not only did they return, but they survived and thrived through several attempts by their neighbours to drive them out, and in surviving these attacks, they increased their land as their attackers fled from the much smaller Israeli forces.

All of this should be seen as “miraculous”, but most people ignore, or have forgotten, how unlikely the survival of Israel has been. Everything in history has been against them and yet they survived to become and remain the centre of world attention for over six decades. Has a day gone by without something about Israel being mentioned in the media?

Maybe a significant reason that people ignore the incredible odds that were against the survival of Israel – is the fact that their whole history of rejection, loss, persecution and restoration had been foretold thousands of years before. To recognise the miracle of Israel it would be necessary to recognise the God who revealed their history in so much such detail from their very earliest days.
These predictions are not hidden. They are found in one of the world’s most successful books, The Bible, which is found in most homes in Western nations but rarely read.

Messianic Quintet

2010-06-16T13:35:00.021+10:00

Christianity had its origins with a Jewish teacher (Jesus) who some considered to be the long prophesied Jewish Messiah. His first followers were all Jews and for many years their thousands of converts were all Jewish.

Even when the first non-Jews (or gentiles) began to believe in Jesus, they heard about Him from Jewish preachers and they were instructed by Jewish teachers.

Then after time, the balance shifted. Gentiles began to outnumber Jews and the church moved away from its Jewish roots. More detailed thoughts about all of this can be found on my other blog through the links at the end of this article

I’ve called this review/article “A Messianic Quintet” because I recently read five books addressing various aspects of the relationship between the church and Jews. Three of them are autobiographical, dealing with the experiences of Jews turning to faith in their Messiah Yeshua (Jesus). Another is written by a Jewish believer about how “Greek thinking” has replaced the original Hebraic understanding of the Bible and how it has affected what the church believes and how it behaves. The last is an overview, written by a non-Jew, of how Jews have been returning to faith in their Messiah since the late 1960s, and where this renewed interest is leading.

In its early years, before the term “Christianity” was coined, belief in Jesus was known as “the Way”. Steve Maltz plays with this phrase in the title of his book How the Church Lost the Way. Maltz shows how Greek Philosophy started to take over from Hebraic thinking as the number of gentile believers overtook the number of Jewish believers. This growing disparity eventually found the Jews being pushed out all together and a new, more Greek way of understanding changed “The Way” significantly. Maltz looks at how and when this all happened, and makes suggestions about reversing the situation.

Stan Telchin’s book Betrayed gives us an example of the effects of the church’s historical changes. Telchin, a Jew, is horrified when his daughter reveals she has turned to faith in Jesus after being convinced that He is the Jewish messiah. Fighting his strong disappointment, he decides to handle the situation calmly and logically. To help convince his daughter of her error, he and his wife undertake their own study of both Jewish and Christian scriptures to find enough evidence to change her mind. Their discoveries lead them in a direction they didn’t expect.

Yohanna Cheronoff writes about her family’s experience as pioneers in Messianic Judaism in Born a Jew...Die a Jew. Her husband Marty grew up in a Jewish family, came to faith in Jesus and set out to share the gospel with other Jews. Through a series of visions over many years, Marty saw that an increasing number of Jews would discover that Jesus is their Messiah. The Chernoffs were concerned that Jews coming to faith in Jesus were usually encouraged to turn away from their cultural heritage, basically losing their distinctive Jewishness. After some time trying to work with traditional Christian groups, it was seen necessary to start something new in which Jews could worship their messiah while still remaining true to their Jewish heritage. This new thing became known as Messianic Judaism, through which more Jews than at any other time in history have come to faith in Yeshua.

The success of this movement began in the late 1960s to early 1970s. Some people see this timing was not coincidental. It started around the same time that the nation of Israel won Jerusalem back during the Six Day war in 1967. This was a victory against impossible odds with most of the Arab world against them. This return of Jerusalem to Jewish control ended almost 2000 years of exile from the city and by some was seen to be the end of the time of the gentiles, a period mentioned in the Bible. In his letter to the church at Rome, the apostle Paul revealed that Israel’s hardening against the gospel of Jesus would last until the “full number of the gentiles has come in” and then “All Israel will be saved.”

The increase in Jews turning to Jesus coinciding with Israel regaining Jerusalem is therefore seen by some as the beginning of prophecy being fulfilled. Don Finto takes this view in God’s Promise and the Future of Israel. This book is a compelling overview of the history of conflict between Jews and the church. While Steve Maltz addresses the effects of changing philosophy upon the church, Finto looks from a more prophetic and political viewpoint.

The last book in my quintet is Ben Israel, Art Katz’s account of his search for meaning, which he finally found through Jesus. At one time a Marxist and an atheist, Katz starts his story at the Dachau death camp. He visited this site of incredible atrocity while serving in the US army after World War II. The book, based on his diaries, moves between different times and places as he tries to find direction and purpose. He comes to understand that his journey has been orchestrated and he is being pointed towards the God of his people and specifically towards Jesus, the Messiah most Jews still failed to recognise.

Katz is by far the most “literary” and intellectual of the quintet authors and his was the only book that didn’t keep me interested all the way through. I persevered with it because of my familiarity with Katz’s later Christian ministry which focused strongly on the continuing role of Israel in God’s purposes.

I could not hope to give each of the books adequate coverage in this one article, but it was not my intention to make any individual book the focus of what I have written. I am more interested in the overall interaction between Jewish experience and the biblical theology of Israel’s relationship to God and the Jewish Messiah. As mentioned at the beginning of this article, I have written more about this topic on one of my other blogs. (links below)

Hijacking Messiah.html

Reclaiming Messiah.html

For more on How the Church Lost the Way see here:
How the Church Lost the Way, Steve Maltz/

Like Me, Chely Wright

2010-05-26T13:32:00.008+10:00

Celebrity autobiographies are often a sanitised exercise in self-promotion. If that is what I was expecting from Chely Wright’s Like Me, it’s not surprising its first pages left me in shock.

I’ve been a Chely Wright fan for around ten years, since I discovered her album Single White Female. At the time my wife liked Faith Hill and pop influenced Country music and I was on the lookout for similar artists who might interest her. I found SWF at an HMV store in Sydney, listened to it, and bought it for myself. After that I tracked down all of her earlier albums, even the almost impossible to find first album Woman in the Moon.

It had been a few years since Chely’s last album but I remained in touch with her career through regular email newsletters. I pre-ordered both her new album and her book as soon as they were announced earlier this year and wondered what insights the book would give into her life and her career. I definitely was not prepared for what I read in the first sentence and later on the first page:

“Dear God, please don’t let me be gay.”

And

“I’m a proud Kansan, a loving daughter, sister, friend, a child of God and a lesbian.”

Those statements contain most of the elements of the book that have had me wrestling emotionally, intellectually and spiritually since I started reading her story.

The revelation that she is gay was completely unexpected. I was not exaggerating when I said earlier that I was left in shock. I can’t imagine how hard it must have been throughout her life, working in an industry she loved, knowing that she could lose everything she had worked for if the news of her homosexuality got out. And she went to great lengths to keep it secret, at times straining friendships and business relationships. The fear of being exposed could not be ignored. She particularly notes how the conservative nature of the members of her industry, and their idea of God’s view of homosexuality contributed to her fear.

On the other hand Chely developed an understanding of God that allowed her to accept who she is, even when she was not ready to share that fact with those around her. Adapting God to suit our own particular situation is perhaps a common survival move, allowing us to come to terms with who we are and what we are and at the same time maintain a sense of acceptance from the Divinity we choose to follow. Such a practice can be a strong comfort as we try to come to terms with those parts of our lives that may cause others offence.

The weakness with that strategy is that we ourselves can create and trust a Divinity based on our own subjective needs instead of trusting a real God with a firm and objective foundation. Needs-based faith is a growing reality within a society where each person determines what is truth for themselves, not requiring a standard outside of their own experience and desires to give their “truth” a secure foundation. The irony of this is that the initial idea of God has usually come from an outside source – whether it is from a church, from the bible, or from a cultural viewpoint; but that initial idea is merely used as a starting point for something that suits us personally: a God that can be shaped and moulded to suit our own requirements. The source of that initial awareness of God can be abandoned for something more suitable to our human need, taking us away from a God who has his own demands and expectations.

But can such a God give any genuine security beyond providing a temporary sense of self-justification? What lasting value is a God who can be changed according to our own whim? More than once Chely states that God made her the way she is. Is God so contrary? Or is it more likely to be our human nature that is fickle, wanting to cling to both God and those things He (according to the Bible) is said to abhor.

Chely refers to several occasions where discussions in her presence were focused on God’s condemnation of homosexuality. Homosexuality seems to be a favoured target when the sins of society are being addressed by professed, bible believing Christians, and while the bible does condemn it, surprisingly it gets far fewer mentions than more common, accepted and even popular behaviours. Maybe there is more than a little hypocrisy at play when a person’s sexuality is condemned by someone who has a serious problem with greed. There are for more condemnatory references to covetousness and the love of money than there are to homosexuality. It is all too easy for the “straight” but greedy Christian to point at a gay individual and “thank God that I am not like that person”. (seeLuke 18:11).

I accept that Chely has every right to reveal whatever she chooses of her own life, opening herself up to scrutiny, but I felt she overstepped the mark in making revelations about others. While expressing contrition over the way she treated fellow country singer Brad Paisley with whom she had a relationship for a time; exposing the fact that the relationship included a sexual element perhaps showed a continued lack of respect for Paisley’s feelings and privacy. Kiss and tell confessions where participants are named may give some gratification to the reader and writer, but they demonstrate little concern for the other party involved. Wasn’t it bad enough to involve Paisley in such a relationship when it was known that his strong feelings could never be reciprocated, without later publicly spilling those intimate details?

While a lot of the book deals with the struggle she faced over her sexuality, to me some of the more interesting parts of the book were those that describe her trips to entertain troops in places like Iraq. She experienced situations that brought the reality and tragedy of war to life. From meeting and finding common ground with a soldier merely days before he is killed, to being transported on an HR (human remains) flight with the coffin of another casualty at her feet, her trips were far from the glamour usually associated with show business.

I had seen some of the events she describes in a DVD of "home movies" that came with one of her CDs. The book helped to give a clearer perspective of some of the footage of a performance for thousands of troops in Baghdad where she and Kid Rock shared vocal duties.

This book is a very personal opening of the heart from a person who through fear hid the truth for most of her life. Most of us could never understand what it is like to live such a life where secrecy and half truths seem mandatory. How can a person have dreams and the ability to achieve them when such a central aspect of their life is condemned or made the subject of jokes by the majority of those around them?

I was saddened by the struggle she experienced. I think I’ve been made a little more aware of the difficulties faced by people like Chely who not only have to cope with the way society perceives them, but also with the desire for normality. To be accepted for who they are. Not wanting to stand out and be perceived as different in a negative way.
This story is one of an individual person struggling to be accepted, and to accept herself, as she is. But to me the real sadness relates to the way ideas about God are manipulated to support a human agenda. How He is used to justify both bigotry and human desire. In all of this HIS desires and HIS demands get pushed aside and He is made a tool to suit OUR needs.

Whatever happened to the Almighty God, creator of heaven and earth who was once feared and respected as well as loved?
We didn’t like that kind of God so we replaced Him with another who is cuddlier and more likely to bend His ways to suit us.

The Road, Cormac McCarthy.

2010-05-24T09:44:00.003+10:00

This is an aptly named book concentrating on journey rather than destination, a kind of aimless travelling with no logical place to go. It portrays the confusion and pointlessness resulting from an "apocalyptic" catastrophe. Few have survived, and those who have, desperately resort to whatever it takes to cling to what life is left.
McCarthy’s world in The Road is a world with no hope and no future. It is a world of violence and cannibalism, a world where memory and dreams of the past merely add to the torment experienced by the survivors: Reminders of a world and security that cannot be reclaimed.

It is the story of a father taking his son towards the coast. The only reason for this seems to be to escape the approaching winter and to take care of their immediate survival from the elements. Beyond that there seems to be no purpose. The father motivates his son through combination of fear and hope. Fear of the bad guys and the hope of meeting up with the good guys – however when driven by fear and suspicion how can someone take the chance to distinguish between the two?

The most telling observation comes at the end of the book where the son is advised to stay away from the road – as if the whole journey along “the road” has been misguided. And for me that pointlessness of the journey seemed to apply to my reading experience. It wasn’t the kind of book that kept me wanting to read. When I put it down I wasn’t desperate to pick it up again. Its main saving grace, and the reason I was able to persevere, was the fact that it is divided into short segments which made it easier to tackle. When I picked it up I felt I didn’t need to commit to a lengthy spell of reading at each sitting. This made it seem there was less of a chore ahead of me than would have been the case had I needed to tackle long chapters.

Once again I found myself at odds with the literary critics who seem to be unified in their praise of the book. While I felt parts of it expressed keen insights, on the whole I wondered why I bothered to continue reading.
The term “post-apocalyptic” was used to describe the book’s setting. In using that term critics wrongly applied a term that has biblical origins. They fell for the common usage of “apocalypse”, describing the ultimate destruction of the world and human society. That usage is a misapplication of the biblical reference to the last book of the bible, The Apocalypse of Jesus Christ, more commonly known today as The Book of Revelation.

The word apocalypse does not refer to destruction; it refers to revealing or unveiling, and in its biblical context it specifically refers to the ultimate revealing of Jesus Christ as humanity’s Saviour and Judge at the climax of current human history.
This climax does include massive widespread destruction throughout the earth as God finally deals with evil in the world, but that destruction is not the focal point. The emphasis is on Jesus Christ taking His rightful place in His creation as King of kings and Lord of lords and then ruling over all of it with perfect Justice.

I guess it’s not surprising that the term “apocalypse” has been redefined in such a negative way. To the majority, those who continue to wilfully resist their creator, the genuine apocalypse would not be a thing to eagerly desire. To them it will be a time of destruction and despair instead of the intended joyful, face to face meeting between man and God. To them the apocalypse (or revelation) holds no ultimate hope.

McCarthy’s metaphorical use of the “road” is possibly more appropriate than he realised. We all follow a road and most do so aimlessly, not knowing where their road is heading. The choice of road is ours, but is our choice made solely with the journey itself in mind or should we also take into account the destination?

“… wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life and only a few find it.”
(Matthew 7:13-14)

Blackout by Connie Willis

2010-04-01T11:48:00.007+11:00

What more desirable tool could historians dream of than the ability to travel through time to observe people and events for themselves instead of relying on texts and artefacts? Connie Willis has created a world in which this tool is a reality and is being used by Oxford based historians.
She introduced this concept in her Hugo and Nebula award winning novel Doomsday Book, a merging of science fiction with the historical novel. She has now returned to the ideas of that earlier book with a two volume story that starts with the recently released Blackout and will conclude with All Clear, due later in the year.

In Blackout historians are studying various aspects of life in the Second World War. One is studying evacuees, children sent away from areas of danger in the cities to the relative safety of the country. Another is focusing on the life of the “shop girl” in London during the Blitz and a third has been sent to cover the heroes of Dunkirk who set out in small boats to rescue British troops trapped on the beaches of France.
All of these projects should run reasonably smoothly. It is assumed that the laws of Time Travel prevent them from having significant impact on the events they observe, but it’s not long before that assumption is challenged.

One of the difficult things in writing about a book like this, is avoiding giving away any key plot details that will spoil the experience for anyone who has not read the book so I'll avoid specific references to events in the story. It was the desire to find out what happens next that made this book such an addictive read as I got more involved with the characters and the challenges they face.

At first I struggled with the story but as I gained more familiarity with the characters and their situations, the book became one that I was desperate to return to whenever my reading was interrupted by the unwelcome intrusion of real life. Willis uses a common technique of cutting from one set of characters to another at each chapter break, often leaving each section with a “cliff-hanger” making the reader more eager to read on to find out how it is resolved.

As mentioned Blackout is only the first part of the story, I knew this before I started the book, but I was still disappointed when I came to the end without the satisfaction of a conclusion. Against expectation the book didn’t end dramatically, it ended with a whimper. I feel it would have been much stronger had it ended a chapter or two earlier.

Early in the book I found myself being pulled out of the story a few times by little irregularities. I’m sure a lot of this comes down to personal idiosyncrasies and probably other readers wouldn’t think twice about them and this may be why I struggled with it a little at first.
One thing that irritated was the occasional lapse into inappropriate Americanisms – for example, cars were often referred to as “automobiles”, a term that I’m sure was not used by the British in war time. Having lived in England until the age of 13, and having parents who lived through the period detailed in the book, little things like this became minor irritations.
Admittedly Willis is an American author and her main readership would be American – but to a non-American, former English reader, such lapses broke the illusion of the reality being portrayed.

Another grievance I had with the early part of the book relates to something I’ve seen described as “build up and pay off”. This is a technique in which significant plot points are built upon foundations that have been set up in advance. For example, if a character saves himself by shooting an enemy, it is necessary to establish the fact that a gun is available for him to use before it comes into play.
In the case of Blackout, a significant part of the plot involves “time lag”, tiredness similar to jetlag which can cause intense sleepiness. The first time I recall this happening in the book was when the experience completely changed a character’s situation. It was mentioned again a little later in relation to a second character where the experience had very little impact.
Structurally I think the story would have been significantly strengthened if these two experiences had been reversed, allowing the minor situation to prepare the reader for the case when time lag played an important part in the first character’s experience.

By making these critical observations I don’t want to diminish the fact that Blackout is a very enjoyable book. The characters are well portrayed and their wartime experiences are believably vivid. I am very keenly waiting for the release of All Clear so that I can re-enter their world and share their experiences again.
In the mean time I’ve been inspired to find out more about war time Britain and I am realising how little my generation (and those following) can conceive of the horrific realities of a war only 15 years before I was born.
Today I checked the casualty figures of American troops in Iraq. In seven years almost four and a half thousand of them have been killed. While these figures are certainly tragic, such casualty figures AND HIGHER were common on a DAILY basis during WWII – many of them being civilians.

---

I acknowledge and thank Allen & Unwin, the Australian publishers of this book, for providing me with a review copy.

Rich Mixture by Stuart Haywood

2010-04-01T11:44:00.003+11:00

Stuart Haywood’s book has a nostalgic appeal. I spent my childhood in the area he describes and I lived less than a kilometre from his childhood home a couple of decades later.
I was familiar with most of the places he describes, either though my own experience or through stories my parents have shared over the years.

I left South Derbyshire when my family moved to Australia and have never lost my interest in that area, although I am the only one of my family not to return for a holiday. From what I have heard, the place I remember has changed significantly and I probably wouldn’t recognise much of it.

Rich Mixture describes parts of the region as I remember it, helping me to recall details I had forgotten. Those moments of familiarity and being able to picture the places being described were the source of most of the pleasure I found in this book. And it made me think about the possibility of recording my own memories of childhood.

Stuart Haywood has an article about his wartime childhood here:
http://www.bygonederbyshire.co.uk/stories/Stuart-s-wartime-childhood-Newhall/article-1796888-detail/article.html

Chocolate and Zucchini

2010-03-24T08:33:00.003+11:00

I’ve been reading Chocolate and Zucchini by Clotilde Dusoulier, a Parisian food blogger. The success of her blog led to the publishing of her book with the same name.

While the book is mostly a collection of recipes, I have been enjoying the introductions she has written in which she gives the story behind each dish, they have a wonderful personal quality that makes one feel like a friend instead of a distanced reader.
For an idea of her writing style, rather give a selection of quotes, I recommend a visit to the Chocolate and Zucchini blog. http://chocolateandzucchini.com/

While there are many recipes in the book that don’t appeal to me – anything containing fish for example – there are a few that I would love to try. Maybe they will be the stimulus I need to take charge of the kitchen myself, giving Gloria a break from food preparation.

One of my favourites has been waiting for suitably cold weather before I even think of attempting it. Clotilde’s Beef Bourguignon lists chocolate as one of its ingredients, and any recipe with chocolate sounds all right to me (as long as it doesn’t include fish).

For some reason when I ordered the book from my local book shop they obtained the American edition instead of the one intended for Australian readers (the British edition). Therefore the names of some ingredients and the quantities used are the American terms instead of those that are more familiar to me. I also understand that there are a few differences in the recipes included in the different editions. Fortunately, being a part of the greater American Empire ruled from Hollywood, I have enough familiarity with the American terminology for this not to be a great problem.

(And did I mention I don’t like fish?)

Foxeys Hangout

2010-03-17T16:27:00.005+11:00

It’s hard to believe but I’ve now read two books in a row that have maintained my interest and have kept me wanting to read. Two books in a row that had me returning to them at every available opportunity, and the difference in content could hardly have been greater.
One was an SF/Fantasy title written for “young adults” (see previous post), the other almost defies genre, being part memoir, part history, part cook book.

Foxeys Hangout is Cathy Gowdie’s account of her family moving from Melbourne to establish a winery on the Mornington Peninsula. Wine making wasn’t a completely new venture. They had already established a small vineyard in the region and wine from their grapes had been produced for them by other winemakers. It was marketed under the label “Foxeys Hangout” named after a landmark near their vineyard.

The whole idea of this book appealed to me from the time I read a review in a food and wine magazine. Gowdie’s family brought to reality a lifestyle I can only dream about. Growing grapes and making wine has a very romantic appeal to those who want to overlook the realities of hard work and the uncertainties of growing any kind of crop. It’s easy to envy a lifestyle of sitting on the veranda, sipping wine made from your own grapes as you watch the sun setting beyond rows and rows of healthy vines.
But I’ve now done enough vineyard work to understand that reality is far different from the idyllic scenario I described above.

Foxeys Hangout shows both sides of the picture: the joys of rural life, and also the realities of a WORKING rural life.
The family faced several problems after buying their property, intending to develop part of it into a winery and restaurant. Their plans were delayed when objections made to the local council effectively put an end to their idea of building and running the restaurant. Ironically, many of the objections didn’t come from fulltime local residents who made a living from the land; they came from the part-timers, those who had purchased properties as weekend escapes from the busyness of city life. Those who saw the farming countryside as a quiet retreat instead of work places providing their food and drink.

As well as detailing the family’s experiences, Gowdie also investigates the background of her new home. From the history of the landmark after which the wine label was named, to a local, historical murder mystery, she weaves diverse strands together into an original cohesive collection of stories. The uniting factor is Foxeys Hangout, a tree from which fox hunters hung the corpses of their victims, a practice which continued until the 1980s, creating a gruesome memorial for the introduced pest that was the bane of local farmers.

Gowie divided her book into monthly sections and ends each section with a seasonal recipe. These dishes are among those that the family serve to customers who visit their cellar door. While plans for the restaurant may have fallen through, this setback didn’t prevent the desire to serve quality food to complement the wines being produced. Gowie’s husband is a qualified chef as well as grape grower and wine maker. Such focused drive and commitment is clearly the decisive factor that divides dreamers like me from achievers like them.

The wine lable's website is here:
http://www.foxeys-hangout.com.au/

Richard Harland’s Worldshaker.

2010-03-17T09:27:00.005+11:00

Before I write anything else I have to confess to two areas of apparent “vested interest”. Firstly Richard Harland was one of my lecturers/tutors at University in the early 1990s and he wrote me a very generous reference when I was looking for work afterwards. Secondly, in the mid 90s I worked for Allen & Unwin, the publisher of Worldshaker, for about a year and a half.
(Richard’s website also had a part in inspiring me to create this blog which is why I have a link to it in the sidebar.)

While this may appear to give me reasons for bias, I will also add that for one essay, Richard gave me the lowest mark I ever received for any assignment during my whole time at University (and I still remember after 19 years!!!), and A & U relocated my job to another city so I had to leave them and find work elsewhere in a less stimulating environment. So we can pretend that the positives have been cancelled out and a balance of neutrality has been restored.

Worldshaker was a book I didn’t want to leave. I read it at every opportunity and was disappointed when I reached the end. It’s the kind of book that demonstrates why continuing series of novels can be so successful. It is a book that creates a world and characters so interesting that you want to explore and experience them some more.

Harland has created an alternative history, a world where the industrial innovation and creativity of the Victorian era has taken a huge leap beyond the bridge and shipbuilding wonders of I K Brunel. In this world political necessity has driven steam age technology to achieve far grand goals than was the case in the “real” Victorian age.

Worldshaker is a massive “juggernaut”, part ship, part tank, part earthmoving excavator, which houses and employs citizens of various fixed classes. Perhaps a comparison could be made to futuristic stories of massive star-ships transporting nation sized communities through space – except juggernaut communities are earthbound and restricted to Victorian age technology.

Colbert Porpentine, heir in waiting to Worldshaker’s Supreme Commander, is thrown into contact with a girl who has entered his room to hide from the authorities. She is a member of the lowest of the low, a “filthy. A reflex decision not to expose the girl’s forbidden presence puts Col’s privileged position at risk and leads him to discover the price that others continually pay to maintain the lifestyle of the Juggernaut’s elite classes.

Worldshaker has what I consider to be a novel’s most essential qualities: strongly believable characters that I care about; an exciting storyline with interesting and original ideas and on a more practical level - short chapters.
I have found long chapters can be a stumbling block to successful reading. It is a major reason I’ve always struggled with Lord of the Rings. By the time I finish one long chapter, the task of reading another of similar length can seem too daunting, especially when other things are competing for my time. With shorter chapters it is easy to read “just one more chapter” several times in succession until a significant portion of the book has been read.

Worldshaker would be classed as a Young Adult title and it was a pleasure to read a book untarnished by the presence of graphic sex and foul language. From recent experience, books that don’t resort to such devices are becoming increasingly hard to find.

Reviewing My Reason for Reviewing

2010-03-16T15:33:00.002+11:00

The review I wrote of Mary Poppins left me wondering whether I’d forgotten my reason for starting this blog.

I’m not sure I wrote anything of interest or value in that review. I could at least have written about my reason for reading that particular book at that particular time: which was for convenience. The book had been sitting unread on my bookshelf for ages and I wanted something reasonably quick and easy to read after taking over a month to get through the second of two books about the space race of the 1960s.

So why did I think I had to attempt a review? Do I really need to review every book I read or should I reserve that task for those books that I WANT to write about? Those books that move me in some way and give me an experience that I feel is worth documenting…

Alistair Hulett, Roaring No More

2010-03-10T16:02:00.011+11:00

This week I read of the death of Alistair Hulett, a Scottish folk singer and musician who I interviewed in the early 1990s. When I met him he sang with a Sydney based band “Roaring Jack” who played weekly at a pub in Newton (NSW). The band released two albums “Cat among the Pigeons” and “Through the Smoke of Innocence” which I played daily without fail.

I wouldn’t have a clue how many times I drove to Newton from Wollongong to hear them play live. I was at their last Newtown performance when accordion player Steph Miller left the band. I was also at one of their first return gigs, on New Years Eve at the Harold Park hotel, with Steph’s replacement alternating between accordion and saxophone. I don’t remember hearing anything about them after that night.

When I interviewed Alistair he made the mistake of playing some of his then unreleased solo album (Dance of the Underclass). Not wanting to miss the opportunity of hearing as many of his new songs as possible I definitely overstayed my welcome. The situation also wasn’t helped by the fact that he had served me what seemed to be a half pint glass of scotch during the interview.

I’ve possibly still got the tape of the interview somewhere, but as far as I’m aware the article based on it no longer exists.

Alistair was born in Scotland and moved with his family to New Zealand in the late 1960s. At eighteen he moved to Australia and started performing around the country. After his Roaring Jack days he started collaborating with former Fairport Convention fiddle player Dave Swarbrick who was then also an Australian resident.

In the mid 90s Hulett moved back to Britain where he lived, performed and recorded until his death, from cancer, in January 2010.

Several of his songs are available for download on his official website, where there are also a detailed biography and discography.

http://www.alistairhulett.com/albums.htm

Mary Poppins

2010-03-05T08:11:00.003+11:00

Perhaps most people would know of Mary Poppins through the Disney film starring Julie Andrews. I saw the film as a child during its original cinema release. It was notable for some memorable songs and for the worst cockney accent in cinematic history courtesy of Dick Van Dyke.

Those familiar with the film would recognise some of the stories in PL Travers’ book including Mary entering a chalk drawing to spend an afternoon in the countryside scene it depicted; an afternoon tea floating near the ceiling with an uncle afflicted with “laughing gas”, and the bird lady selling bread crumbs to “feed the birds, tuppence a bag”.

Travers’ book is a collection of short stories about the strange situations experienced by the Banks children after the arrival of a mysterious nanny literally blown in by the wind. The Mary Poppins of the book seems far more abrupt and lacking patience than the Julie Andrews character in the film, but she is still able to obtain the affection of the children in her care.

The most memorable part of the book for me was a chapter about the babies of the Banks family when they are still young enough to understand the languages of nature; holding conversations with the sunlight and with a visiting starling. Twins John and Barbara want to know why their parents and older brother and sister can not also understand what the birds and the weather are saying, and when told that the ability is lost with age they are adamant that THEY will never forget.

Most stories in the book cast the older Banks children, Jane and Michael, into unusual situations which afterwards they are never sure were real. Their nanny offers them no assurance of the reality of their experiences. If anything she insists the children’s claims are absurd –and yet there is sometimes a clue that makes them doubt her denials.

Mary Poppins is the first in a series of books that Travers wrote about the Banks family nanny. I have two of the others but have not yet read them. The second title, Mary Poppins Comes Back gives a clear indication about the ending of the first book where, as in the film, a change of wind direction leads to Mary’s sudden departure from the family. The departure reveals the affection the children have developed for their nanny despite her abrupt lack of patience. After their initial sadness the children’s spirits are lifted when they learn the meaning of the “au revoir” in Mary’s farewell note.

“Au revore dearie?” shrieked Mrs Brill from the next room. “Why, doesn’t it mean – let me see, I’m not up in these foreign tongues – doesn’t it mean ‘God bless you’? No. No., I’m wrong. I think, Miss Jane dear, it means ‘To Meet Again’.”

Jane and Michael looked at each other. Joy and understanding shone in their eyes. They knew what Mary Poppins meant.

Michael gave a long sigh of relief. “That’s all right,” he said shakily. “She always does what she says she will.”

Binary Moon: two views of the Apollo Missions

2010-03-01T15:53:00.007+11:00

Alan Shepard & Deke Slayton were two of the original intake of astronauts for the American space program. Shepard was the first American into space but soon after was removed from active flight duty due to an ear problem that affected his balance. Slayton was also removed from flight duty because of a minor heart problem. These two men remained with NASA as managers of the astronaut department

The writing of Moon Shot is credited to Shepard and Slayton but its writing had a significant contribution from Jay Barbree and Howard Benedict, journalists with a background in aerospace reporting.

Moon Shot gives a good general (and brief) coverage of the space race of the 1960s – early 70s, with a more detailed concentration on the roles of Shepard and Slayton and how they overcame their health issues to be reinstated to active flight service. Shepard was reinstated in time to command Apollo 14 and become the 5th man to walk on the moon. Slayton missed out on a moon mission and barely scraped into the last pre-shuttle mission, a joint USA- USSR flight in which the rendezvous and docking of the two nations' craft was achieved.

I read the book immediately after Andrew Chaikin’s A Man on the Moon and my reading experience suffered because of it. Chaikin’s book is much more detailed and to my mind much better written. He interviewed almost every surviving astronaut from the Apollo era as well as their wives and many of those behind the scenes. His descriptions of events and memories were written using information gained from these interviews but without the obvious flights of imagination used in Moon Shot.

In my previous post I mentioned the Moon Shot account of the first moon landing which gives an imaginative description of Neil Armstrong’s eyes as “tired but warm with anticipation”.
This was only one example of what marred the book. How about this description of the separation of the stages of a rocket?

“Explosive charges blew apart the two stages with all the velvety touch of a locomotive thundering off a high trestle to roll down a rocky slope”.

I also found that parts of the book were over-sentimentalised and soap-opera like. Yes, I’m sure that astronauts and their families did experience some strong emotions – but those feelings could have been explored with greater skill than was utilised.

In my previous post I described the book’s style as “new journalism gone mad”. So much was written that was not based on obtainable fact or observation – so much imaginative speculation was presented as fact (as in the Armstrong eyes example). “New Journalism” at its best gives literary style to description without resorting to unverifiable detail. At times it might get into the head of a “character” and explore his/her thoughts and emotions, but the exploration needs to be based on substantial evidence from interview with (and observation of) the person being portrayed.

In contrast, I don’t know whether there could be a better book of its type than Chaikin’s. It addresses the major developments in the space programme from the beginning through to the climax of the moon missions, examining every moon landing (and the aborted Apollo 13 flight) with enough detail to highlight the individual achievements of each Apollo crew.
The book provided the basis for Tom Hank’s mini series From the Earth to the Moon.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_the_Earth_to_the_Moon_(TV_miniseries)

SPACED OUT!!!

2010-02-26T15:07:00.005+11:00

It has been a while since my previous post. I was waiting until I finished the second of two books about the Apollo space programme (see left).
Both books were borrowed from the library and I needed to extend the loan of the second so I could finish it. I’m still about 60 pages from the end and I have just over a week left of a total six week loan period.

It’s taking much longer to read than the first even though it’s a fraction of the length. Maybe it’s been more of a struggle because it covered the same kind of ground as the other, and while it is very readable, I found it was not written any near as well as the other book.

When I am told that during the approach to the first moon landing, Neil Armstrong’s eyes:
“…were tired but warm with anticipation”, I have to wonder who made this observation. For some reason I can’t imagine Buzz Aldrin, his only companion, had time to stare into Armstrong’s eyes and make poetic observations while they were approaching the moon’s surface.

This is only one example of the book demonstrating “New Journalism”* gone mad or, in other words, poorly thought out writing spoiling a very good story.

Hopefully I’ll finish the book over the weekend and will be able to write more about my impressions of both books about the moon landings before too long.

Before I move on to other books I have about the space programme (and I have several to read) I’ll try something different so I can come back to the topic with a fresher mind. But where to start?

I have many books I want to read but I’d like to tackle something short and not too demanding before trying to tackle anything that’s going to take a lot of commitment. Maybe I’ll turn to one a children’s book again.

---------

* a journalism technique started in the 1960s - 70s in which literary story telling techniques were combined with news stories making journalism more accessible to the reader.

Not on OUR moon they haven't!!!

2010-02-03T13:11:00.009+11:00

My first introduction to the space race came at a very early age during a journey to Sunday school.
Each Sunday morning my Aunt would pick me up from home and we would walk to the Methodist church about 15 minutes away. We would be accompanied by a boy two or three years older than myself who informed me that a Russian rocket had crashed on the moon*.
My initial response must have been one of shock, but common sense soon took over as I reassured myself that it wasn’t OUR moon that they’d crashed into but the Russian moon.
Despite his attempts, my older companion could say nothing to convince me that the “Russian moon” was the very same one that we could see in England.

A few years later my school class started to follow the progress of the Apollo moon program, though after more than forty years I can’t recall whether the interest started with Apollo 7 or 8. Certainly there would have been more interest in the latter mission considering it was the first time man had broken away from the earth to travel to the moon. It was a genuinely historic achievement perhaps best signified by a photograph taken on the flight, of the blue earth rising above the grey wasteland of the moon.

From that time onwards I was fascinated by anything space related and was caught up in the excitement leading up to the moon landing and shared concern over the fate of Apollo 13.
There were other missions to the moon and while possible I followed the diminishing amount of news devoted to those missions. The media and the general public seemed to lose interest when the novelty started to fade. Familiarity was starting to get close to breeding contempt and the last few moon missions were scrapped as the lessened public interest led to politically expedient funding cuts.

For decades NASA’ s manned space programme plodded along almost unnoticed by the general public – except when tragedy added enough spice to attract attention again.
The Challenger disaster was the first time American astronauts were lost during a mission. Exactly 19 years and one day earlier three astronauts had died in a fire during training on Apollo 1 but that had occurred out of the public eye. Challenger exploded on our TV screens ending a highly publicised mission in which a civilian, a teacher, was intended to add a more positive note to American space flight history than actually eventuated.
That tragedy briefly undermined any misconceptions the public may have developed about the potential dangers associated with manned space exploration. But the necessity of a lengthy investigation into the tragedy meant that the public’s attention had again drifted by the time the space shuttle program resumed.

I recall my feelings at the time of the Challenger incident. Along with the obvious horror regarding the loss of life I realised that had I been given the chance, I would have immediately joined a shuttle crew myself, despite the obvious risk. I’m not sure I’d be so willing now, not through concern of the dangers but because I now have other priorities.

What is the relevance to all of this on a blog about books?
I suppose this background is merely an introduction. I am currently reading Andrew Chaikin’s book A Man on the Moon, a history of the Apollo astronauts and their mission to reach the moon. I also have several others on the same topic waiting to be read when I’ve finished Chaikin’s 600+ page book.

The others include an authorised biography of Neil Armstrong, Charlie Duke’s autobiography (an autographed copy I’ll be receiving for my birthday. Shhh! I’m not supposed to know) and two volumes by Colin Burgess and Frances French, Into That Silent Sea and In the Shadow of the Moon.
I also have an Alan Bean book on order about his artworks in which he has painted aspects of the moon landings.
His paintings are unique due to his personal involvement in the program (he was the fourth man to walk on the moon); his use of his space suit boots and tools from Apollo 12 to create interesting texture; and the incorporation of materials from his spacecraft and also moon dust within his paintings. Examples of his artwork can be seen here: Alan Bean

--------
* This was probably Luna-5 which crashed during an attempted landing on 9 May 1965.

A Taste For Death

2010-01-22T11:06:00.007+11:00

Peter O'Donnell's Modesty Blaise novels were my favourite teenage reading and I last revisited them in my early 20s. It would therefore be around 30 years since I read this book.

For several years I have been looking for Modesty Blaise novels in every second-hand bookshop I've come across. My own copies disappeared long ago. A shop in my home town has had a hardcover first edition of one of the series for a couple of years - but $70.00 is much more than I am willing to pay.

This was the very first affordable Modesty Blaise book I've seen for years* and, allowing myself to be overcome by nostalgic urges, I bought it.

In reading this book I quickly recognised why O’Donnell’s stories had so much appeal especially to a teenage boy. It is the same kind of appeal that can be found in the Indiana Jones films, the appeal of the rollercoaster ride that lifts you to a peak of suspense and then lets you accelerate to a brief resolution before building up to the next peak. O’Donnell continually drops his heroes into impossibly desperate situations and then lets them work their own way out.

This kind of story could easily leave readers shaking their heads at the improbability of the plot but with skill a writer can suspend the reader’s sense of unbelief to hide the improbability from the readers mind. I can see two aspects of this skill in the Blaise books. Firstly O’Donnell creates very likeable heroes with backgrounds that equip them for the dangers they will face. Secondly he adds humour showing his tongue is very much at home in his cheek. And then there is no pretence that his villains are anything other than villainous – no attempt to justify their behaviour through questionable psychology. They are the baddies because they are evil, not because they are misunderstood or misguided.

Modesty Blaise is a former organized crime boss who made her fortune through illegal but not entirely immoral means, her crimes allegedly having no really innocent victims. Living in retirement, she retains an extraordinarily close bond with a former associate, Willie Garvin. It is a retirement that is regularly interrupted by their ability to attract – or be attracted to – trouble. In A Taste For Death, a holidaying Willie Garvin witnesses the murder of a young woman, after which he is able to rescue the victim’s companion from the murderers. In doing so he disrupts the plans of an old adversary and further confrontation becomes inevitable.

The books exotic settings, from the Caribbean to the deserts of North Africa are matched by the exotic and inventive challenges faced by Blaise and Garvin. In this book they are rejoined by Stephen Collier, a survivor from former adventures. Collier’s self-deprecating humour not only provides some of the books lighter moments, it becomes an important part of the plot with Collier being adopted as “court jester” by the book’s major villain Delicata, extending his life and also giving him access to vital intelligence.
Another recurring character is also introduced in this book. The girl rescued by Garvin at the beginning of the book, Dinah Pilgrim. She is the focal point of the villains’ plans, possessing a talent essential for their success. Garvin’s intervention ensures that he and Blaise will complicate those plans and be drawn into a deadly confrontation with a collection of adversaries from their past.

Some would call stories like this “comic book” and that criticism would not be entirely unjustified. Modesty Blaise started out as a comic strip character in the 1960s. The strip’s success led to a film adaptation with the original screenplay being written by O’Donnell. Unfortunately, the film business being as it can be, there were several rewrites and the result was far from satisfactory. At the time O’Donnell vowed never to allow his characters to be portrayed on film again unless he had personal control, a sentimnet he made known to me in a reply to a fan letter I wrote in the early 1980s.

After the disastrous film, O’Donnell salvaged the reputation of his characters by converting his screenplay into a novel, the first of a series which continued for 20 years. The Modesty Blaise books ended with a collection of short stories The Cobra Trap, published in 1996, 10 years after the last of the novels. However the comic strip continued until 2001.

Despite O’Donnell’s intentions regarding film adaptations of his characters, he relented to a degree and two other films were made. The first in 1982 was a telemovie, the pilot of a proposed TV series that never eventuated and the most recent being a prequel to the published Modesty Blaise stories. The latter made little impact and went straight to DVD. Maybe the most significant aspect of the DVD release was the bonus features, which include a lengthy interview with Peter O’Donnell who talks about his career and his relationship with the Modesty Blaise stories.

---

* Some of the series are available as new books but to me the old Pan paperback editions are an important part of the nostalgic experience.

The New Atheist Crusaders, by Becky Garrison

2010-01-15T08:28:00.003+11:00

This was cheap book I picked up on sale at a Christian bookshop. The subtitle “The Misguided Quest to Destroy Your Faith” appealed to me. I have always found it very ironic that so many atheists are more vocal about a God in whom they don’t believe, than most professing Christians are about the God to whom they are supposed to be devoted.
The letters pages of most newspapers have their regular atheist contributors who seem to have little better to do than attack a “non-existent” God.

Becky Garrison is a self-described satirist whose specialty is writing religious exposés for “The Wittenburg Door, the oldest, largest and only religious satire magazine in the United States”. In this book she turns to her keyboard to deal with the “New Atheists” a currently prominent collection of men (the most well known perhaps being Richard Dawkins) who have recently become famous for attacking religious faith. Their view is that religion has been the cause of all human evils and the sooner it is abolished, the sooner mankind can settle down and be nice to each other.

The problem with this book is that Garrison doesn’t succeed with her attempt at “satire”. There was nothing really satirical within this book, even though Garrison keeps reminding the reader that she is a satirist, trying to convince us that she is using satire to make her point. Allying herself with “fellow satirist Jonathon Swift” hardly does her a favour; it merely highlights the chasm between a classic master of the form and a modern day wannabe.

I found this book works best when Garrison uses quotes from the targeted “New Atheists” who very readily shoot themselves in the foot with comments such as this one attributed to Sam Harris:
“If I could wave a magic wand and get rid of either rape or religion. I would not hesitate to get rid of religion”.

Other quotes highlight how theologically ignorant these men are, with many of their arguments based on their own imagined theological framework. The religious views they so eagerly demolish are mainly straw men of their own creation. There is more than a hint of “if I were God I’d do things this way and since the Christian God doesn’t do it like that, it’s clear that He doesn’t exist”.
For example, Richard Dawkins thinks “If he existed and chose to reveal it. God Himself could clinch the argument, noisily and unequivocally, in his favour”. The obvious implication is that God hasn’t done this so therefore He doesn’t exist. But why should the Creator of the universe stoop to fulfilling Dawkins’ expectations? If Dawkins took a little time to learn what God is like and how He relates to His creation it would be clear how pathetic Dawkins’ expectations are.
Likewise, while not exactly a “New” atheist the late Bertram Russell is quoted as saying “If I were a God, I think it very unlikely that He would have such an uneasy vanity as to be offended by those who doubt His existence”. Again it is an argument based on personal assumptions with no regard for the God of the Bible that is being refuted. These men create their own “God” and then tear Him apart.

However, perhaps it is expecting too much to wish that these men had a little more integrity with their treatment of religious belief and the nature of God. The promotion of religious ignorance is an effective tool in their hands. If they had done their Sunday school homework they would be guilty of wilful dishonesty instead of mere ignorance. But I have to admit that many Christians are no less careless in their approach to the sciences and therefore do their own beliefs no favours when they involve themselves with scientific arguments they don’t understand.

I found Garrison’s own approach to the Christian faith was also problematic at times, but I would have been better prepared for that if I’d taken better note of those who endorsed the book in the back cover promotion. While it currently has one of the most popular faces of the church today, the borderline syncretism of the “emergent church” is hardly representative of biblical Christianity. One of its major figures, Brian McLaren, is regularly referenced in the book and is one who gave his endorsement on the cover. To the emergent church “relevance” and tolerance have become the dominant characteristics, even if they lead to a compromising of the essential gospel message.

Certainly there are parts of Jesus’ gospel there, – the parts about loving your neighbour, feeding the hungry and caring for the poor, but they are placed within the context of improving the world and human existence as if they were the purpose of Jesus’ time on earth. But these very temporal matters were NOT the main focus of Jesus’ ministry, death and resurrection which was all about reconciling fallen man with a perfect God.
However, those things have such a strong feel-good aspect to them that it’s much easier to promote work towards a better world and a better life than it is to promote dying to ones’ self and living for God. Improving mankind’s temporal state is much easier to sell than it is to promote God’s eternal plans; especially to a generation who needs to have everything now.

While Garrison’s book does expose the hypocrisy of fundamentalist atheists calling for an end to religion, I felt that Garrison was more interested in getting everyone to play nicely together than in exploring the truth. Considering that Jesus said that He is THE TRUTH this book clearly fell short. Maybe we should consider which is most likely to destroy true faith, the loud mouthed clearly hostile atheist; or the purveyor of a watered down, compromised view of Jesus and His gospel.

Defeat? Or Coming to my Senses?

2010-01-08T13:44:00.001+11:00

Could this be an admission of defeat? A confession of failure?

I suppose so it could be viewed that way – but I’m not proud or stubborn enough to battle on for the sake of making a point.
Now what on earth am I referring to?

It had been my intention to overcome the difficulties I’ve faced with finishing books by resolving to finish every book I start. That I will no longer back away and give up on a book once I’ve started it.
I have now realised the futility of such a plan. Why should a book I am not enjoying be given that kind of respect? Life is too short to waste it on bad books.

Now by “bad” I am not intending to make an overall value judgement of a book’s merits. I am merely recognising that a book is “bad” for me if the reading of it becomes a chore rather than a pleasure. After all I’m not following a compulsory required reading list. I went through that in the early 1990s when I studied for my BA.

I want to read for pleasure and for knowledge and not as a sport. It should not be an issue of endurance, or of ticking a book off a list to reach a desired target. So I have therefore decided to officially put aside Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, and I will remove it from my “currently reading” list so that I don’t feel compelled to stick with a book that I have no desire to pick up and continue.

But I WILL continue with Wuthering Heights. While I’ve struggled with this book it IS one I want to read and eventually it will make its way onto my “read” list.

Last & First

2010-01-04T09:32:00.006+11:00

The Time Traveller’s Wife is the kind of book responsible for the dilemma I experience with reading. As previously anticipated I received a copy for Christmas and spent most of the Christmas holidays reading it.

Firstly the positive…
It inspires the desire to read, with its interesting and original story of Henry, a man who is uncontrollably snatched from one time period to another. These shifts in time occasionally bring him into contact with important people from other periods in his life, enabling him to visit his childhood self and other people of personal importance. He is able to spend time with his wife throughout her childhood, preparing her for their eventual meeting and the novel alternates between his and her points of view.

Time travel stories have always appealed to me. There have been TV series like Dr Who and Time Tunnel; films like The Terminator and Back to the Future series, adaptations of HG Well’s The Time Machine (and of course the original book); Connie Willis’s award winning novel The Doomsday Book and so many other examples of time travel being explored.
Unlike all of those, Niffenegger’s book is not likely to be described as “Science Fiction” even though a scientific reason for Henry’s condition is lightly touched (some kind of genetic anomaly). This book’s major focus is on the effects of the time traveller’s condition upon his relationship with his wife Clare; effects that (to me) did not always ring true and left me wondering whether real people would react in the same way as this books characters when faced with the particular realities of their relationship and experiences. For example, would a woman be so accepting of her husband having an extramarital, sexual encounter with a younger woman – even if that woman was herself, many years before, during one of his time travelling episodes?

And next the negative…

This book is also an example of what annoys me about modern writing that makes me think twice about starting a book.
Like so many modern writers, Niffenegger follows the compulsion to soil her craft with the use of explicit sexual encounters and graphic language. What is it about today’s writers that make them think it’s necessary to include at least one obligatory oral sex scene in their novels? It’s a practice so common that it has become a cliché.

Many years ago an English work mate was telling me about his favourite author, a writer of pulp thrillers who, as part of his popular formula, always included “one fook per book”. It seems to me that otherwise talented “literary” writers today see it necessary to fall into the same formulaic trap, spicing up their stories with gratuitously explicit sexual encounters and obscene language. Is it REALLY necessary for a writer to use the crudest terms in the English language to describe genitalia?

Prior to reading this book I had been seriously considering Niffenegger’s next novel, but after reading this one – despite its many good points, I’m not likely to follow it up with any more of her writing.

The Time Traveller’s Wife was the last book I completed in 2009. The first to be finished in 2010 was Susan Hill’s Howards End is on the Landing, a book that I purchased through a series of mistakes and misunderstandings.
I saw it praised on a book blog and immediately assumed it was the same book I had recently left on the shelves of a charity shop’s book section. I was disappointed at missing out on such a highly recommended book that I could have bought for a few dollars, but my disappointment was eased when I found that I could buy an autographed copy direct from the author. Several days after placing my order it arrived and I realised that it had NOT been the book I had previously seen for a bargain price, which will now remain unidentified as the shop is a four hour drive from home.

Hill’s Howards End is a collection of writings that every book-lover should enjoy. Each chapter addresses a different aspect of Hill’s relationship with books, literature and the varied personalities involved with their creation. It is a personal insight into Hill herself, as well as to the many writers she has been privileged to meet. Along with anecdotes about people like Roald Dahl, Ian Fleming and Edith Sitwell, Hill writes about the memories stirred up by the different types of books (diaries, pop-up books, literary classics and more) that she rediscovers on her own bookshelves. In particular we are given a glimpse into her love of both Virginia Woolf and Thomas Hardy.
After my conflicting feelings about The Time Traveller’s Wife I was quite pleased to read Hill saying that love is “the most difficult thing to write about successfully. It is the litmus test of greatness in a novelist if a love story moves and convinces and never once makes the reader grimace, smirk or feel embarrassed. Modern novelists are bad at writing about love because they feel that it has to mean writing explicitly about sex.”
I certainly see that comment being applicable to parts of The Time Traveller’s Wife.

Susan Hill concludes her book with a list of her “Final Forty” which could be described as those books she would find as most essential if she had to cull her extensive library. Reading such a list makes it clear how subjective book choice is. Out of the forty I have only six of them in my own library – one of which is Wuthering Heights, a book that would clearly be absent from my own “Final Forty” (Read about my struggle with this book elsewhere on my blog).

Last Post for 2009.

2009-12-23T13:33:00.005+11:00

After today I’ll be away from my computer until after the New Year holiday.

My attempt to become more disciplined in my reading has been reasonably successful, but Wuthering Heights remains on my “currently reading” list because I haven’t picked it up for a few weeks. Eventually I’ll finish it off but I think it will be more of a chore than a pleasure.

I also added Zadie Smith’s White Teeth to my current reading list, even though it’s a book I started many months ago and put aside. I have read a few more chapters but it hasn’t really maintained my interest.

Since I started this blog I’ve tried to write short “reviews” of books as I complete them, but maybe “review” isn’t an accurate description. I’ve merely tried to record some personal impressions of each book including (when possible) my reasons for reading it and how the book came to my attention: (i.e. why THIS book and not one of the countless others that I could have purchased and read?).

There seems to be so little time to read and far too many books that I would like to read. Prioritising my time is never easy with so many other things demanding attention. With a week or so off from work over Christmas I might be able to find a little more reading time and hopefully another book or two will be ready to be transferred from my reading list to the completed list before the end of year.

One title that will soon be added to those I’m currently reading will be The Time Traveller’s Wife – a Christmas present (but shhh I’m not supposed to know that yet!)

Talking to Animals, Creating Myth & Returning to Reality

2009-12-21T12:04:00.009+11:00

As a child I loved Hugh Lofting’s Doctor Dolittle books and read all of those held by my local library. When I recently found the first book in a nearby second hand bookshop I couldn’t resist it.

Reading it again more than 40 years later I can understand the appeal the books had, but I wondered whether such a book could remain in print today considering some of its very politically incorrect portrayals of black Africans. However, a quick look at the website of a major seller has shown me that The Story of Doctor Dolittle is still being sold.
Now I wonder whether it has been modified in anyway to remove references to “Darkies” “Niggers” and “Coons”. I also wonder about an incident in the book where a black African prince dislikes his colour and turns to John Dolittle to change his face white.

Otherwise, the story is a simple adventure of animals (both domestic and exotic) and encounters with pirates.

Another favourite revisited was Mythago Wood by Robert Holdstock. I found a hardcover copy in the same second hand shop mentioned above a few weeks ago and looked forward to rediscovering why I enjoyed it so much when I first read it. Not long after I bought the book I found out that the author had very recently died .

This book is the first of a series. None of the subsequent books is a true sequel, they merely explored different aspects of the world introduced in the first. However only a month or two before Holdstock’s death Avilion was released and that book apparently returns to the characters of the first novel to continue their story.

The main “character” throughout the series of books is Ryhope Forest, one of the last remaining wild woodlands in Britain in which man’s deepest mythological memories are brought to life. The Mythago’s of the title are the people and places originating in the wood that have been formed out of the racial memories of the humans venturing near or into the forest.
As someone who has always had a love of British legend and mythology this book offered a mature exploration of a doorway between our “real” world and the world of myth. Instead of children finding a way to Narnia through a wardrobe (as in The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe), Mythago Wood presents darker more brutal reality behind the stories that became legend and its world is entered along hidden trackways into and through the forest. Take the wrong path and you merely find yourself back at your starting point. Take a correct path and you enter deeper into the forest and its mysteries.
If the book has a weakness it is its lack of sustained emotional engagement. The characters are stoic ex-servicemen who don’t let their guard down.
The exception to this comes through the early relationship between Stephen Huxley and a female Mythago, Guiwenneth. Only during their deepening relationship is there a genuine sense of emotion involvement between reader and characters. It is this relationship that provides the motivation for Stephen to enter the forest and seek the paths to its heart.

A Patchwork Planet was something new that I hadn’t previously read. I had seen that its author Anne Tyler is a favourite of both Nick Hornby and Roddy Doyle, two of my own favourite writers.
I don’t know how this particular book fits within her overall work, whether it is one of her best or one of her lesser novels, but I enjoyed it enough to something else she has written.
Unlike the fantasy and adventure of the two books mentioned above, A Patchwork Planet deals with very realistic characters facing very real situations and at times gives a very moving account of relationship issues that most (if not all) of us face at some times in our lives. The emotional complexities of maintaining relationships in a broken family where a child has little contact with one parent. The effects of old age, in which physical and mental decline can strike suddenly to significantly change a person’s relationship with those around them. The way emotional blackmail can be utilised to create and maintain dependency of one person upon another.
It is a simple book exploring complex matters of relationship without any sense of exploiting or manipulating the reader emotionally.

Who Killed Dave?

2009-12-14T16:04:00.007+11:00

I received Linda Cockburn’s book Who Killed Dave as a review copy under the condition that I would read it and write a review for my blog within 8 weeks. The book arrived in the mail on a Friday and by the next evening I’d finished reading it. I didn’t even get the chance to enter it on my blog as “currently reading”; it went straight to my completed books list.

In an earlier book, Living the Good Life, Cockburn recorded her family’s attempt at genuine self sufficiency, trying to live for six months without spending money.
Coburn regularly contributes to the ABC’s Organic Gardening magazine in which she writes about the environmentally friendly property her family are developing in Tasmania. This is also the main topic of her blog. http://lintrezza.blogspot.com/

It is clear she and her family are people who act on their convictions, not taking shortcuts for the sake of convenience.

The method of publishing of Who Killed Dave is an example of living out those convictions. The author writes a little about the publishing process here: http://lintrezza.blogspot.com/2009/05/who-killed-dave.html

I make a point of highlighting this because I have to address this book in a way that would maintain the integrity of MY convictions.

Firstly, as a recipient of the book I am obliged to keep to the terms of the book being given, and that is to write a review for this blog.
Secondly I want to be fair to the book, its author and any potential readers.
But taking into account those two factors I can not compromise myself or my Christian beliefs.

There is no denying that Who Killed Dave is entertaining and very readable. As I’ve said previously on this blog it’s often the case that I don’t even finish the books I start, so it’s very rare that I start and finish a book in less than a day.

The Dave of the title is a very unpopular resident in the aptly named Kaos Court, and when he is found dead there is no shortage of suspects. Everyone in the street had a motive and community interest into the investigation of his death turns the crime scene into a media circus with almost constant TV coverage being broadcast.
Robyn Miller finds herself at the centre of everything. Accident prone and voted as the prime suspect by the viewing public, her relationships are in turmoil, finding herself involved with men with surnames inappropriate for long term commitment

“Our love life, well, it’s an oxymoron really. Besides, with my first name Robyn and his last name, Banks, we were doomed from the start”.

Her luck doesn’t improve when she starts to lust after Detective Mark Hood one of the policemen investigating Dave’s death.

And lust is a major factor through much of the book with all kinds of sexual experiences being thrown into the mix (real, imagined, fantasised and “psychic”) from a ménage a trois, and phone sex to an incubus-like experience.

Coarse language is also a big factor. The main character herself confessing she has: “never sworn so much in my life. For some reason I equate swearing with assertiveness. Perhaps I could start my own workshops and have circles of people sitting in yoga positions loudly mouthing as many satisfying expletives as possible”.

Those two aspects of the book, being used so frequently, would normally have stopped me from finishing it. But having agreed to reading and reviewing the book I didn’t have that option. Clearly those who have no problem with the language and that type of sexual content won’t have the same concerns.

A third issue I have with Who Killed Dave is the positive view it presents of psychic experience, while giving a more negative view of the Christian characters in the book. The Christian as raving loony has become an accepted and much overused cliché in the world of popular fiction, however in this case the Christian has not been singled out – EVERYONE in the street has their particular problems with normality.

The positive portrayal of psychic experience includes a scene in which a psychic sexually engages Robyn during a phone conversation. Although the man is not physically present, Robyn’s experience is described graphically enough to leave no doubt that she encounters physical, sexual contact. Later it is revealed that someone observed the event and saw her and a partner performing oral sex.
When she finds out who her “sexual” partner had been Robyn expresses her disgust, indicating to me a lack of informed consent. However, towards the end of the book an event that in other circumstances would be considered sexual assault is given a positive spin.

While humour is a central part of the book, I found the most effective sections were those in which Robyn found herself empathising with characters that previously had been the focus of hostility. Revelations of Dave’s life make her realise why he had been so obnoxious to everyone and she feels a little remorse for the way she had felt about him before his death. These brief scenes late in the book give a little breathing space after Robyn’s constant stream of unfortunate experiences.
Other breaks from the humour that definitely don’t give breathing space are a couple of scenes of effective horror. The first occurs when members of the neighbourhood discover the crime scene. The sight, not surprisingly, results in Robyn relieving her stomach of its contents.

Ultimately the reader wants to find out who did kill Dave. My suspicions continually changed – from the obvious to the highly unlikely, trying to outguess the author. While the resolution didn’t disappoint (all of my guesses had been wrong) I had difficulties wrapping my head around the practical aspects of his killing. When all was revealed it seemed very impractical, if not impossible that it could have been carried out in the way depicted.

Overall I was entertained by the book, but for reasons mentioned earlier, if a sequel were written it wouldn’t be something I’d add to my reading pile.

Three Faces of Politics: Peak Oil, Local Food and the Fall of the Iron Curtain

2009-12-08T13:20:00.014+11:00

Last weekend I finished three books that I’ve been reading for a while. Two of them turned out to be very long reading projects, being read over several months. The third took only a matter of weeks.

Choosing Eden tells the story of a middle aged couple whose concern about “peak oil” led them to a radical life-style change. Realising that the world’s oil reserves were less than secure and that the days of “cheap” oil are well and truly over, the couple bought a farm near Coffs Harbour, intending to prepare for the time when oil can no longer be relied upon. Considering that our western lifestyles are totally reliant upon oil, not only for fuel but as an ingredient for medicines, fertilisers, man made materials, toiletry products and countless other essentials, the oil crisis that can not be avoided will have a devastating impact.

The couple in question featured a while ago on an Australian TV series “The Real Seachange” in which their move from city to country was observed.

My copy of the book came as a freebie with the purchase of an issue of Gardening Australia magazine; a free offer that seems to have been restricted to purchases of the magazine from Woolworths. As a subscriber to GA I missed out on the book and had to purchase another copy of an issue I already owned so I could get my hands on the “free” book.

I have a particular interest in this kind of book because I started a similar journey myself three years ago when I moved from Sydney to a country town 4 hours to the west. My ambitions are on a much smaller scale, choosing to wrestle with an average sized garden instead of a farm of many acres.

In the end I was disappointed with the book. I felt there was too much emphasis on “peak oil” and not enough on the actual experience of two city folk becoming farmers. It got to the stage where the term “peak oil” was becoming extremely irritating. However it was THEIR story told as THEY felt it needed to be told and I cannot expect a book to be written to satisfy what I would like to read about. Instead of having that attitude I should have read a different book that DID look more at practical solutions rather than continually point out problems.

Fortunately I found the book taking the approach I prefered: Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal Vegetable Miracle.

Kingsolver’s book was one of the most enjoyable reads I’ve had in a very long time. It is a witty and informative look at a year in her family’s life during which they chose to rely on food grown in their local area instead of following the extravagant but common practice of eating unseasonal produce shipped from around the world to our supermarkets.

The book follows the family’s year as “locavores” and includes many recipes utilising seasonal food. While Barbara Kingsolver takes care of most of the book’s content, her daughter provides the recipes and her husband interjects occasionally to address some of the technical and political issues affecting food production and marketing. As a new inductee to the world of gardening and backyard food production, I could identify with a lot of the experiences shared in the book. In particular I can understand why a community that is still secure enough to leave doors of cars and houses unlocked for most of the year needs to change that practice during zucchini season (read the book to find the answer).

The third is the only fictional book. Snowleg by Nicholas Shakespeare has its setting in East and West Germany, both before and after the fall of the iron curtain. It follows a young man’s life after he finds out that the man he grew up knowing as his dad was not in fact his father. Instead he was the son of an East German man with whom his mother had a brief affair prior to meeting her husband. From that point onwards, Peter tries to identify more with his German roots.
After finishing school he starts medical studies at a German University. When the opportunity arises for him to visit East Germany, he hopes to make tentative investigations into the fate of his father. In the process Peter himself becomes involved with an East German who he only knows by his anglicising of her family nickname: “Snowleg”.

The rest of the book is about Peter trying to deal with the memory and consequences of his brief relationship with “Snowleg” until the reunification of the two Germanys makes it possible for him to (eventually) try to find her again.

Overall I found the book disappointing. The potential for an intriguing story was definitely there, but to me it didn’t fulfil that potential. The author did a good job of setting up his story, and he knew where he wanted it to lead – but he didn’t seem to know what to do with the middle bit. To me it seemed like a lot of padding with some low credible sex scenes thrown in to try to maintain the reader’s attention. Maybe I live in different circles, but Peter seemed to find far too many women who were willing to get intimate with him as soon as they met him. Was it a case of an author vicariously satisfying his own fantasies?

Another problem I had was the books predictability. I saw some of what was ahead long before it was purposely revealed by the author. And Steven, despite being a medical student (and later a doctor) which I would assume demands an above average intelligence, didn’t seem able to take the simplest logical action when required. For example, immediately after his return to the west he tried to re-establish contact with Snowleg by writing to her. But he addressed the letters to a place that offered very little hope of reaching her; a University to which she had hoped to be admitted but she had told him, due to political issues, had been denied entry. Why didn’t he address them to the place where he first saw her, a place he knew she regularly frequented?

The final disappointment was the book’s conclusion. After slowly building up a little tension, the potential is hurriedly snuffed out within a couple of concluding sentences, failing to give the payoff required from such a build up.

Clearly I felt the book could have been much better, but I DID get to the end, and at the moment that is a very important factor.

Reflection on the present

2009-12-04T12:28:00.004+11:00

This blog was started to give me a springboard which will hopefully reinvigorate my interest in literature as both a reader and a writer. I started my "Fictional Autobiography" to see if recalling the past might help me rediscover the joyful aspect of reading that has been lost. In following this process I am wondering what most specifically led to the loss of enjoyment I used to get from a book.

At one time I enjoyed popular fiction and I’ve tended to blame my University studies for spoiling my enjoyment of some of those books. Exposure to more literary works has made me more critical and discerning about the kind of books that I want to spend time with. But then, so many of the literary works don’t spark that desire to keep reading page after page, chapter after chapter. If a book is going to maintain my interest for a few hundred pages, it needs much more than clever sentence structure and poetic imagery. While I can relish a well constructed paragraph with exquisite and vivid language, that paragraph has to lead me on to the next paragraph and the one after that. Unfortunately, the craftsmanship of the author can get in the way and I find myself stuck in place, admiring the beauty of that individual part forgetting that there is supposed to be a greater story to which that individual part is leading.

Initial evidence seems to indicate that I’ve lost my love for books, that I have changed and no longer have that strong desire to spend time in someone else’s stories. My inability to persevere with a book is therefore due to something different within me. Throughout life we all find that our tastes and interests change – and maybe that is what has happened, and it’s not a matter of trying to rediscover or renew a past love, but perhaps its time to move on; recognise the truth and start to pursue other interests that do maintain my attention.

But if that is the case, why am I continually drawn to books? Why do I spend so much time in bookshops? Why am I so interested in what others are reading? When I visit the home of a new friend, why do I head for their bookshelves to see what kind of books they put on display (I should not assume they read them)? Why do I keep buying books that through experience I know will probably remain unread? Why do I still hope to find that book which will take me by surprise and be one that I don’t want to put down?
I don’t want my reading experience to be an act of endurance, with the main pleasure being a sense of achievement attained by the fact that I actually finished the book. I want one of those books that I don’t want to finish, where reaching the last page leaves me wanting more.

Robert Holdstock: 1948-2009

2009-12-03T13:24:00.005+11:00

I’ve just found out that Robert Holdstock, author of one of my favourite novels, Mythago Wood, died in hospital on 29th November after contracting an E.coli infection.

I’m not sure what to say beyond that. Only two weeks ago I bought a hard cover copy of Mythago Wood from a local second-hand book shop (I already had it in paperback) and it was a high priority on my reading list. It has been many years since I last read it. I was hoping to write about the book in the near future.
He was only 10 years older than me.

RIP Rob Holdstock

My Fictional Autobiography (part 3): The Alien Years.

2009-12-02T13:33:00.006+11:00

I recall writing to Arthur Shuttlewood in the 1980s. He was a one time journalist who became a kind of UFO guru. He had written several books about his home town’s relationship with UFOs, starting with The Warminster Mystery. Over many years Shuttlewood claimed that Warminster in southern England was an important hot spot for UFO activity.
I had been fascinated by UFO stories since the mid 1960s when England became the focus of a UFO “flap”. As an 8 or 9 year old during the time of the space race, the idea of alien visitation inspired a lot of excitement. I read many books from that time onwards including a few of Shuttlewood’s. Since I came across this topic at such an early age I can’t blame myself for maintaining a degree of gullibility for many years after. I lapped up the wildest claims with barely a degree of scepticism and a lot of my reading leaned towards things unexplained.

There was a strange tension in my life from trying to live with contradictory beliefs. In the late 70s I became a Christian, and yet I still tried to hold onto the interest in visiting aliens. To some extent I was able to do this by redefining the UFO phenomenon, moving from aliens visiting earth to an understanding that the whole thing was a demonic delusion. This view was not merely an idea permeating fundamentalist circles; some of the most popular and respected UFO writers were saying the same thing. The most well known that come to mind were John Keel (Operation Trojan Horse) and Jacques Vallee (Passport to Magonia). While these writers did not necessarily hold to the Christian interpretation of “demonic”, they raised the possibility that entities that had once been viewed as “demons” in some cultures were now being interpreted in terms applicable to the space age. Vallee saw the possibility that they were “Inter-dimensional” rather than Extra-terrestrial.

The 1980s was a boom-time for UFO books, aided by some highly questionable TV specials claiming Government collusion with extra terrestrials. I recall one that featured interviews with alleged CIA agents who described interaction with a captive alien (or “gray” as they came to be known). One of the major revelations provided was the flavour of ice-cream the entity preferred.

Books that were part of this trend included Above Top Secret by Tim Good and Communion by horror writer Whitley Strieber. The latter describing Strieber’s claimed abduction by “the visitors” was followed by several sequels such as Transformation and Breakthrough: the next Step. Strieber was another UFO writer who noted the similarities between his “visitors” and the demons of various religious traditions but his later books became more and more esoteric in content, making him seem more like a mystical guru than a serious contributor to UFO literature.

It was in the 90s that I woke up to my gullibility thanks to books by Jim Schnabel. Round in Circles examined the crop circle craze and Dark White looked at alien abductions. Rather than follow the tried and (not so) true path of examining countless witness reports, Schnabel turned the spotlight on the investigators who were presenting their own interpretation of the reports to the public. In my view he well and truly blew these phenomena apart, showing how much the investigators projected THEIR desires and expectations onto the evidence they claimed to have.

While the books and authors mentioned above would be classified as non-fiction, the borders between fact and fiction were clearly blurred by a lot of wishful thinking (both on the writer’s part and more significantly mine).

Hollywood returned to the UFO/Alien visitor arena starting with Spielberg’s Close Encounter’s of the Third Kind (in the 1970s) and later with his more popular ET.
Joe Dante’s Explorers starred very young River Phoenix and Ethan Hawke, while Cocoon directed by Ron Howard made an Oscar winner out of one of its aging stars (Don Ameche).

Starman one of John Carpenter’s less gruesome films was (like ET) part of the “alien as benign but threatened visitor” genre that contrasted significantly with the hostile aliens portrayed in many 50s SF films, when Hollywood had previously exploited an interest in things alien.

Some of the most popular films were converted into “novelisations”, of which I only recall reading Close Encounters of the Third Kind. I also owned the book version of Explorers but I don’t remember reading it.

Away from Hollywood’s exploitative inspiration, John Wyndham’s novels were favourites for a while, some of which had tenuous links to UFOs and/or alien visitors. The most significant being The Midwich Cuckoos, a story about a village that was temporarily cut off from the world by a mysterious force field (an idea that Stephen King has also used in his recent novel Under the Dome). In Wyndham’s book the temporary isolation is lifted and the entire female population of childbearing age are found to be pregnant. The story has been twice filmed under the name Village of the Damned. (Did I say I had moved away from Hollywood’s exploitation of the genre? Clearly that is not possible!)

One of the earlier and most well-known novels about alien visitors cannot be ignored. War of the Worlds has inspired films, radio plays and a musical extravaganza, and it was the latter that most closely followed H G Wells book. I read Wells’ novel many years ago and it’s one that I intend to read again when time and discipline permit. It is one of those science fiction stories that has taken on iconic status. A popular SF writer also wrote a sequel. Christopher Priest’s The Space Machine takes elements of War of the Worlds and another Wells novel The Time Machine and creates a story from a mix of the two ideas.

Perhaps the most cerebral book dealing with UFOs that I’ve read was Ian Watson’s Miracle Visitors, which dealt with the psychological nature of UFO encounters and gave a very ambiguous view of them. The cerebral approach to alien intelligence was also taken in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 A Space Odyssey created with Arthur C Clarke. I later read Clarke’s novel to see whether it would help me make sense of the film (which it did). In this story an alien presence has been alongside mankind from the very beginning of man’s development, following his progress and leaving clues of their existence that mankind will find at various stages of his technological journey.

Clarke was one of the most well known and admired science fiction writers and created various differing scenarios in which mankind came into contact with alien civilisations. Apart from 2001, the most memorable to me were Childhood’s End – which from memory gave an interesting spin to the alien as demon concept; and Rendezvous With Rama, a story dealing with the exploration and examination of a massive alien craft passing through our solar system. Rama was followed by a series of sequels.

I have only touched the surface of the ways in which human-alien contact has been explored in both fiction and “non fiction”, and all of it refers to aliens visiting US. There is probably far more about man visiting alien worlds stretching from early stories of men visiting the moon, through to Star Trek TV shows and movies and their various spin offs and imitations. The possibilities for stories about alien contact of various types are potentially limitless.

And here, on that cliched note, ends the latest part of my "fictional autobiography".

My Fictional Autobiography (part 2): Mostly Fantasy

2009-11-25T11:45:00.010+11:00

My later teens are nothing to be proud about. I refused to read the required novels for my English classes in High School (but passed my final exams anyway). And I read many books of questionable taste such as Stanley Morgan’s “Russ Tobin” series, commencing with The Sewing Machine Man (gratuitous sex), and Richard Allen’s “Skinhead” series (gratuitous violence).
Those books are best forgotten.

I also had my first real taste of horror fiction with William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist. It was the first time that a book genuinely scared me – something that the film failed to do, even though the book’s literary qualities are questionable and the film is considered a classic of the genre.

Some of the brighter spots in my reading diet came through my interest in fantasy and I rediscovered books by CS Lewis and Alan Garner. I had some memories of reading The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe years before, but I’d never moved on to the sequels. I’m not sure when I first came across Garner but his fiction seemed more grounded in “reality”. Lewis and Garner both portrayed a crossing over between real and magical worlds. Lewis took his child protagonists from their familiar circumstances and placed them in a world very different from their own, but Garner turned this around and showed the world of magic and myth crossing over to our world, bringing conflict here instead of isolating it in the relative safety of somewhere else. Garner also had less “jolly good show” about him than Lewis, portraying characters more familiar to me than those created by Lewis.

Obviously any serious follower of fantasy fiction can not avoid Tolkien and Lord of the Rings, but I have clearly not followed seriously enough because I've been unable to complete this revered trilogy. I’ve made multiple attempts, but have never made it to the end. It may seem irrelevant to others, but one hindrance to my progress has been chapter length. In my earlier attempts I found the chapters far too long to be tempted to read “just one more chapter” before I put the book down for the night. It’s amazing how much reading progress can be made through the “one more chapter” approach. When I read The Wizard of Oz as a child, I read the whole book in one sitting because I wanted to keep reading “one more chapter” before I was ready to put it down.

I recall very little fantasy fiction available for adults in the 1970s. That may be difficult to believe for anyone used to today’s abundance of fantasy titles. Almost everything I remember was written for children or ‘Young Adults”. The exceptions were Lord of the Rings and a couple of books inspired by it, like Terry Brooks’ The Sword of Shannara. Some see Brooks as being the one who inspired the rise of Fantasy fiction as a viable adult genre, being the first to break through the fear of competing with Tolkien. (see http://www.terrybrooks.net/novels/sword.html)

For some reason those first attempts to aim fantasy at the adult reader didn’t appeal to me and my own reading of fantasy remained with the books written for children and teens. To Lewis and Garner I would add Susan Cooper (The Dark is Rising) and Lloyd Alexander (The Prydain Chronicles) as my favoured authors of that time. I even named my Collie, Bran, after a dog in one of Cooper’s books.
I know there were other books and other authors, but they haven’t stuck in my mind to the extent of those already named; and I’m sure that those I DO recall (Penelope Lively, George MacDonald, E Nesbit,) belong to a later part of my life in books.

The Other Half Lives: Sophie Hannah

2009-11-24T16:37:00.002+11:00

Sophie Hannah’s The Other Half Lives was so intriguing that not only did I read it at every opportunity I had, but I wanted to share the story with my wife who rarely spends time reading books. After each section I would put the book aside and bring her up to date with the story.

I first heard about the book from a very complimentary review in a Sunday newspaper. Very rarely am I tempted to buy a novel on the strength of a stranger’s recommendation, but this was one of the rare exceptions and without that review I probably would not have given the book any consideration, and if I’d known it would turn out to be a “crime novel” I would have been less likely to have taken an interest in it.

Considering my dislike of “crime fiction”, how did a book like this overcome my prejudice? Firstly its beginning didn’t fit with my idea of that genre and it was quite a way into the book before police investigators started to take a primary role.

It begins with Ruth Bussey being confronted with her new partner’s dark secret: that he, Aiden Seed, had killed a woman. Ruth’s initial shock resulting from this confession is compounded when she hears the name of the victim, Mary Trelease – a woman that Ruth knows is very much alive.

Ruth’s new relationship suffers from the turmoil created by the confession, and her attempts to discover the truth, and to convince Aiden that he did not kill Mary. Through this process we learn about Ruth’s own traumatic past which will re-emerge and affect her current situation.

The police become involved when Ruth tries to get them to investigate the murder she knows could not have taken place, hoping that where she had failed, the police may be able to convince Aiden of the truth.

This book has been described as a “psychological thriller” rather than crime fiction, and perhaps that label is more appropriate. Many of the characters have been damaged in some way by previous experiences, and those experiences are the catalyst that draws them all together within the unfolding conflict.

Towards the end of the book I lost a bit of momentum when I had to put it aside for a while. When I finally picked it up again I found it hard to get back into it. This was possibly because I was unable to devote a serious slab of reading time to one of the most crucial parts of the book; I could only read small portions at a time and I had trouble picking up the flow of the resolution.

I’m quite sure that Hannah managed to resolve all of the questions and quandaries she created, but my disjointed reading pattern at an important part of the story made it hard for me to appreciate the closure she brought to it.
If only I could go back and read it for the first time again, without the unfortunate break that disrupted my concentration at such a crucial time!

[I recently listened to an interview with Hannah, which can be found by clicking on the book title in the “Books Read” section the side bar. She reveals that a TV series based on her books is being planned.]

Black Swan Green: David Mitchell

2009-11-24T13:33:00.009+11:00

I found a hardcover edition of David Mitchell’s Black Swan Green in Wagga Wagga K-Mart selling for $7.00. I had never heard of the author or the book, but the blurb and the bargain price gave enough incentive for me to buy it.

It was after I’d finished the book that I found out that Mitchell had been twice shortlisted for the Mann Booker prize, and that this particular book had made the long list. That discovery made me wonder whether I should have liked the book more than I did.

The book wasn’t a disappointment. I DID enjoy reading it and it WAS the first book for a long time to keep my interest from beginning to end. Unlike many other books it didn’t get put aside for a lengthy period prior to finishing. But I’m not sure it was worthy of consideration for what is supposed to be one of the world’s most prestigious literary prizes.

Apart from the bargain price, what attracted me to THIS book instead of one of the others in the bargain bin? Mainly because it was about a young teenage boy growing up in the English Midlands and until I turned thirteen, I had also been a Midlands boy. Mitchell’s story about 13 year old Jason Taylor to a degree continued where my experience of English village life ended with my family’s move to Australia. Despite the 10 year gap between Jason’s time and my own there remained enough familiarity to recognise a lot of his story and environment.

The book looks at 13 months of Jason’s life at the beginning of puberty. We are not given a continuous narrative, but each chapter is like a short story of Jason's month by month experiences. Not all of these experiences are given full and immediate closure, but their outcome is revealed in hints throughout subsequent chapters. This approach is something I find appealing and has a slight similarity to Tim Winton’s technique in The Turning, where Winton used distinctly separate short stories to bring together an overall narrative linked by common characters. Mitchell’s book however maintains a more significant focus on the one person’s experience.

Jason faces all of the usual teenage anxieties of relating with family and being accepted by peers. The book shows how fluid and changeable concerns about those relationships can be and how successful manoeuvring through those changes is often dependant upon the image someone is able to create and maintain. Jason, having a persistent stammer has an obvious disadvantage regarding his perceived place among his peers.

Reviews of Mitchell’s books mention his uses of unconventional writing styles. Black Swan Green seems like it must be more conventional than his previous works, but it still has the interesting handling of narrative continuity mentioned above. While I wasn’t completely won over by this book I’m grateful for the introduction it gave me to David Mitchell and I look forward to trying his other novels.

For more information see: blackswangreen

My Fictional Autobiography (part 1): Childhood

2009-11-13T09:23:00.013+11:00

In my early blogging days I wrote about the progression of my musical tastes through the different stages of my life. I have been thinking of doing the same with my literary tastes, but for some reason it doesn’t seem so easy.

One of the surprising things about considering the music in my life was how complete I was able to make the list. Of course I didn’t refer to every group, artist or recording that I liked over the years, but I was able to recall all of those who had an important influence on my tastes.

(See: Changing Tastes)

Applying the same approach to my relationship with books is much a more complicated process, but I’ll do what I can.

My mum taught me to read long before I started school. I have vague memories of two “Ladybird’ books, one about the alphabet and the other about farm animals, which must have played a part in my introduction to reading.

At school I remember “Janet and John” books that were used as a basic introduction to reading in class. Among the books available later were the “Thomas the Tank Engine” series and “Topsy & Tim” books.

A significant part of my reading journey began with a nose bleed that started on the way to school one day. I spent some time out of class with huge wads of cotton wool to soak up the blood. Eventually the school staff decided it would be better if I bled to death at home rather than on school premises and they contacted my mum who took me home.
I was very upset about missing class that day because I would miss the story broadcast via radio each week. As compensation my mum arranged my membership at the local library and selected a few books for me to read.

Apart from those few details I have no memory of specific books in those early years, but as my time in Primary school progressed I was a keen reader of the Bobbsey Twins, Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew series. I also enjoyed Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books prior to the TV adaptations and Doctor Dolittle was a friend long before Rex Harrison played him in the original film.

Part of the problem in recalling the books of my early life is the fact that there were so many of them and their significance to this project is merely due to the fact that I can remember their titles or parts of their plot.
Dodie Smith’s “One Hundred and One Dalmatians” is memorable partly because of the animated Disney film and also because my family had a Dalmatian for a pet. And there are similar Disney links for “Emil and the Detectives” and “The Incredible Journey”.

In my final Primary years the class library had a series of novels about wildlife. Each book focused on a different animal, creating a storyline out of its natural day to day experiences. I don’t remember any details of author or title but I loved them at the time. Those stories inspired me to write my own contribution to the genre and I spent hours filling an exercise book with the improbable exploits of a wolf cub and his family. I must have included drawings to illustrate my story because I remember one of the wolf pack in a deadly fight with a herd of buffalo (though the image I recall looks more like a cow).

My early high school years brought on an obsession with James Bond and Modesty Blaise; books with content intended for readers much older than myself. Years later I wrote fan letters to Peter O’Donnell, the author of the Blaise books and was excited to receive a reply to each typed on special “Modesty Blaise” letter head. I regret not keeping them. They could have been a valuable part of my current autograph collection.

The most memorable short story I wrote in my teenage years was a James Bond tribute. After an accident my protagonist woke to find he was the “guest” of various Bond villains, and had been mistaken as Bond himself. While I regret not keeping the story, I recognise that my memory has perhaps given it qualities that I would find lacking if I had the chance to read it again. Sometimes memory might be a kinder literary critic than reality.

Withering Heights: wrestling with a classic

2009-11-11T14:48:00.006+11:00

In escaping my “reader’s block” I’ve run into the first obstacle. It could have been avoided with adequate preparation and the application of more thought.

Instead of finding an irresistible, can’t put it down, what happens next, guaranteed good read to start me on the way, I picked up “Wuthering Heights”.
And in place of the thrill of anticipation and the desire to turn back to the book at every opportunity, I am begrudging the thought of spending my reading time plodding through its pages.

Its one of those books that has been sitting on my shelves for over twenty years along with many other “classic” Victorian era novels; then after seeing the recent dramatisation of the book on TV I thought I should see how the story REALLY played out. The series seemed to be rushed, trying to cram a lifetime of experience into two episodes and therefore missing so much of the character development that might explain the actions and attitudes of its characters.

I am barely 90 pages into the book and it seems I have more interest in how many pages are left to read than I am in the fate of its protagonists. However, having started, I am hesitant to add another failure to the growing list of books I’ve been unable to finish.

What is it that makes one of these books into a “classic” of literature? Why has this book survived and maintained a following when others of the same era have been forgotten? Is its style merely a trait of its era, common to most books of that time? (I don’t recall the older Jane Austin novels being so hard to read). Or is the style a peculiarity of the Brontes?

I have found myself continually re-reading sentences that on my first attempt have seem badly structured. But again that might be a matter of the linguistic differences between 19th Century Yorkshire and 21st Century Australia.

It’s been a long time since I read anything of its particular era, but I still recall the difficulty I had when I first read Thomas Hardy. I battled through Tess of the D’Urbervilles as if it was a test of endurance yet eventually, on reaching the end, I appreciated why it was considered a classic. I’m still not sure whether that was because I had finally grasped and enjoyed the point of the book, or whether it was merely relief that the ordeal was over

Why “Out of Shadows”?

2009-11-05T12:33:00.001+11:00

I gave some thought to the name of this blog. My first choice was “Reader’s Block” – an idea I came up with after reading something by one of my former University lecturers (Richard Harland). He mentioned suffering more than 20 years of “Writer’s Block” that gave him a large collection of unfinished novels. No matter how many times he started, he would always stall and get no further with a project. (A situation that has changed and he is now a many times published author).

It’s a situation I can identify with. My own writing attempts never got to the stage where I could call a project an “unfinished novel” because nothing I attempted came close to resembling a novel in scope or length. The similarity was not with writing but in the reading. I realised I had an acute case of READER’S BLOCK.

Where Richard had a sizeable collection of uncompleted writing projects, I had a massive library of partially read books. Going to my book cases now I can see countless bookmarked volumes displaying evidence of how long they were able to maintain my interest before other distractions led to their neglect.

Post-it notes, shop dockets, business cards and assorted scraps of paper join “proper” bookmarks of various types: publisher’s and bookseller’s promotional material, tourist souvenirs, home made gifts…everything except the sacrilege of the dog-eared corner.

Occasionally I’ll come back to a long neglected book and will find that I can pick up where I left off. But usually I’ve forgotten too much of what I’d already read for the remaining pages to make enough sense. Then if I try to start again at the beginning I feel like I’m wasting time by digging over old ground, finding enough familiarity to rob me the novelty of reading something for the first time. Usually I find it hard to tolerate repetition and I find affinity with the robot in the film “Short Circuit” (“more input, more input!!!”)

So, the name “Reader’s Block” seemed appropriate for a literary blog written by someone who had difficulty committing to a book for long enough to finish it. The name could be offered to forewarn readers and to excuse myself for sharing thoughts on PARTS of books instead of giving intelligent comments on completed books.

If the name was so appropriate, then why didn’t I use it?

Someone else beat me to it and used that name for a blog, posting two contributions before leaving it neglected in 2001.
Before moving on from that first strike against originality I will note that the owner of the “Reader’s Block” blog provided a reading list of his childhood reading matter; and it was scarily close to my own, naming the Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew and the Bobbsey Twins at the top of the list.

My Second choice was “Out of Shadows” and I decided to stick with that name despite finding another blog with the same title. The difference in this case was the other blog was created almost five years ago but was never used. Nothing at all has ever been posted on it. I therefore decided to give the name a go and to liberate it from neglect.

So why was the title considered in the first place?

After my university days when I still had enough confidence to think a writing career was possible, I had a title ready for my first book: “Out of Shadows into Darkness”. Eventually when I realised the possibility of a writing career was fading away, I created an extremely limited edition (2 copies) self published collection of my stories and gave it that title as a form of closure on my writing ambitions.

The title has remained fixed in my mind since then, and due to the continuing absence of a proper book to which it can be applied, I will use an abbreviated form of the title for this attempt to relaunch myself into the world of books, literature and related arts.
“Out of Shadows” could possibly describe this tentative journey, with the hope that it will be a journey into light and not further into darkness and greater obscurity.

INTRODUCTION

2009-11-04T15:17:00.000+11:00

Why am I starting yet another blog?
I have two others that have been active for a few years – aren’t they enough?

Links to those blogs can be found in the side bar, and each serves a specific purpose.

The first “ONESIMUS FILES” provides an outlet for ideas and discussion relating to theological issues. The other “WHERE THE BLOGS HAVE NO NAME” started as a site for more “arts” related matters, but it soon changed when other things started to take priority in my life. It became dominated by my move to the country and attempts to convert my new garden into something more attractive and productive.

I have now decided that I’d like to regain a focus on “arts” (literature in particular) and so I’ve created this new blog to give that focus its own designated outlet.

Some background reasons for the making of this choice can be found here:

Autobiographical Musings