The Artist, the Philosopher and the Warrior (#71b)

The Artist, the Philosopher and the Warrior by Paul Strathern


What I said when I got it:

I've been really interested by the concept of this one since it first arrived: basically, Leonardo da Vinci, Niccolo Machiavelli and Cesare Borgia all knew each other, and at a certain point they all travelled together. This non-fiction book examines that moment in time and what it meant to each man's career. Now it's out in a paperback, there's really no excuse to put off having a look.

What I say now:

I was reading this at basically exactly the same time as the enclave in the Vatican was choosing the new pope (yes, that's how far behind I am with my book reviews), and the timing was perfect. Reading about how Cesare's power-hungry father Rodrigo shamelessly bought the papacy and used its power in a grab for real estate made the rituals and solemnity of the modern Vatican seem absolutely ridiculous. I can't imagine anybody learning about the sordid history of middle ages Catholicism and remaining devout (sorry, Dad).

That aside, this was a fascinating peek into an era of history which is hugely important (in so many ways, Renaissance Italy shaped the history and culture of Europe, and thus had effects still being felt today), yet about which I knew very little. The book rotates chapters, focusing in turn on da Vinci, the brilliant artist and engineer who designed increasingly elaborate instruments of war; and Machiavelli, the young diplomat who would become the most radical political thinker of his age; and Borgia, tyrant and murderer, rampaging through Italy trying to claim a Kingdom with the sword.

Luckily for Strathern, Machiavelli kept meticulous journals, and his notebooks lay out exactly how the men met, and how they reacted to each other. Borgia loaned da Vinci from his Florentine masters to aid him militarily; Machiavelli was sent by the same men to divert Borgia's attentions away from defenceless Florence; the two Florentines (da Vinci nearing the end of his career, Machiavelli at the beginning of his) met in Borgia's train and struck up a brief friendship.

Strathern charts their time together during Borgia's campaign, and how their meeting affected each of their subsequent careers, in particular the effect that the charismatic (yet psychotic) Borgia had on the other two. Da Vinci, horrified by the realities of war, stopped designing weapons. Machiavelli, inspired by Borgia's ruthlessness, applied that ruthlessness to the world of politics, writing his famous tract The Prince using Borgia as an inspiration. Strathern's writing is clear and succinct, and doesn't have the grinding density of some non-fiction.

But despite Strathern's best efforts, it's da Vinci who makes problems for his book, remaining stubbornly a mystery: the man himself didn't keep any journals of his own, and the scraps of thought left in his notebooks are more likely to be shopping lists or reminders of chores than anything else. Whenever he and Machiavelli are apart, Strathern is left in the field of conjecture, prefacing a lot of his statements with phrases like 'da Vinci must have felt ...' or 'da Vinci surely saw ...' or 'da Vinci certainly would have been aware of ...' It lends those portions of the book an insubstantial air, which is unfortunate. That's a pretty small quibble, though, in a thoroughly researched and extremely readable history.

Cheers, JC.

2012: My Regrets of the Year

So last year I did a quick post on my 'Regrets of the Year' --- that is, the books that came out that I wanted to read, but couldn't because of this stupid quest. I actually think it'll be really handy in another couple of years when I'm finished with my list, because it'll stop me forgetting about things I was intrigued by, but never had a chance to investigate further. I might be late to the party on all these, but that's not gonna stop me, dammit!

So, here are my biggest regrets of 2012:

Your Face Tomorrow by Javier Marías.

Aaaaand already I'm sorta cheating. This wasn't a 2012 book, it just came to my attention this year. Anyway, it looks and sounds incredible. After splitting up with his wife, Jacques Deza begins to discover he has an incredible gift: he can interpret subtle cues in a person's face today to predict what they will do tomorrow. He can, on a very small, personal level, predict the future. Then he gets recruited to a spy organisation of dubious purpose, and the whole thing turns into a weird, philosophical thriller.

'Philosophical thriller' sounds right up my alley. I was close to buying this instead of Crime and Punishment, but it's friggin' huge, being sold in three separate volumes that total about 1300 pages. However, one of my colleagues at work flew through the lot in about two weeks, so it seems like it's still pretty page-turner-y.

Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk by Ben Fountain.

Billy Lynn just has one of those set-ups that seems kind of perfect. After surviving a famous skirmish in the Iraq war, the remaining members of a heroic company are doing a whirlwind publicity tour back home. Scheduled to appear with Destiny's Child at halftime at a Dallas Cowboys game, they have to spend the day schmoozing with mega-rich corporate types, trying to score with the cheerleaders, humouring the hulking war-hungry players ... all while trying to protect the secret of what really happened over there.

I don't know about you, but I want to read that fucking book. It helps that it's been getting fantastic reviews, and is apparently hilarious. We run a book club at the store, and the fact that it divided our (generally pretty staid) book clubbers is another plus for me (don't tell them that).

HHhH by Laurent Binet.

Another war novel, this time set in WWII, it deals with the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, one of Hitler's coldest, cruelest lieutenants. The two men responsible, Jozef Gabćik and Jan Kubiš, were themselves discovered and killed almost straight away, and many details of their lives and their heroism have been lost to history.

Binet's novel, though exhaustively researched, isn't shy about admitting that there are elements of the story that will remain forever unknowable. Binet deals with this by inserting himself into the book, debating whether it is a greater tribute to imagine the interior lives of the two assassins, transforming them from real men into legends, or if it is a better, truer course to only write what is definitively known. So as well as a thriller, it becomes a meditation on how we remember our history, and how our selective remembrances can change the past.

The Bellwether Revivals by Benjamin Wood.

I was kind of 50/50 on this one: I liked the sound of the plot (a group of brilliant students at Cambridge get carried away by their leader's macabre experiments to do with music and death), and I loved the authors getting name-checked on the book's jacket (it was compared to Donna Tartt, Zadie Smith and Evelyn Waugh), but it could so easily have been one of those over-hyped debuts that has publishers hot under the collar, but never delivers. But then one of our regular customers, whose opinions are pretty close to my own, read it and loved it. I'll always be looking for another Secret History, hopefully this is a worthy successor.

The Flame Alphabet by Ben Marcus.

I've heard wildly disparate things about this one, and some people have flat out hated it, but the basic concept is enough to keep me intrigued: a new kind of virus sweeps the globe, making parents get gravely ill at the sound of their children's voices. I don't know much more about it than that (other than the fact it's got a really beautiful cover ... yes, I know that's how you shouldn't judge books), but that's enough to get its hooks into me. The possibility for exploring some really interesting stuff to do with families and the ties that bind us, and just what would happen when suddenly the world's children hold all the power. And god, so so pretty ...

So those are my 'want-to-reads' from 2012. Any of you guys read anything brilliant this year that I should add to the list?

Cheers, JC.


currently reading: Persuasion by Jane Austen
books to go: 76

Homer and Translation (and Cheating)

Before I start yakking away about The Iliad, I thought I'd take a moment to talk translation, and how important the translation is when reading an ancient work like this, and (not coincidentally) how I'm a total cheating arse.

The many different translations of Homer that abound in English mean that each new reader, if they bother to inform themselves, has a choice about what kind of Iliad they wish to read: the Richmond Lattimore translation is the most literal, taking as few liberties with the Greek as possible; the E.V. Rieu transforms poetry into prose; the Alexander Pope is apparently brilliant, but is more Pope's poem than Homer's; and so on, and on. How you respond to the work is obviously mostly to do with Homer, but in a situation where so many differing translations exist, your translator of choice will have an effect on your reading.

I own both The Iliad and The Odyssey, but both of them were books I picked up from the store for free (damaged Penguin books don't need to get sent back, so we get to take them if we want ... it's both a blessing and a curse, trust me), and I didn't pay any attention to whose translations I was shoving in my bag. I'd always intended, once the time came to read them, to do a bit of research, figure out which translations I wanted to read, and replace my copies if necessary. So, yes, I bought a book, which is technically cheating I suppose. But my copy of The Iliad turned out to be the first ever English translation, completed by George Chapman in around 1615. Reading a Shakespeare-era translation of a 3000 year old poem, which I'm already dreading reading anyway? Umm, no thanks.

I ended up going with Stephen Mitchell's recent translation, which seemed from the reviews to be doing its utmost to be accessible. A quick glance at page one confirmed my impressions.

Let's compare them. Here's the opening of the Chapman translation:

Achilles' baneful wrath - resound, O goddess - that impos'd
Infinite sorrows on the Greeks, and many brave souls loos'd
From breasts heroic; sent them far, to that invisible cave
That no light comforts; and their limbs to dogs and vultures gave:
To all which Jove's will gave effect; from whom first strife begun
Betwixt Atrides, king of men, and Thetis' godlike son.

And here's the same passage from Mitchell:

The rage of Achilles - sing it now, goddess, sing through me
the deadly rage that caused the Achaeans such grief
and hurled down to Hades the souls of so many fighters,
leaving their naked flesh to be eaten by dogs
and carrion birds, as the will of Zeus was accomplished.
Begin at the time when bitter words first divided
that king of men, Agamemnon, and godlike Achilles.

It's pretty remarkable that Chapman managed to fashion the entire Iliad (more than fifteen thousand lines of poetry) into rhyming couplets. But, being that this is the first toe I'm dipping into the waters of Classical Greek literature (okay, second toe: I was in a production of Lysistrata at school), I figured 'accessible' should be the quality that should carry the day. Having just finished, and adored, Stephen Mitchell's translation, I'm pretty sure I made the right choice. Now that my toe is thoroughly dipped, when the time comes for The Odyssey, I'll probably go with a translation that's a bit 'tougher'. I'm willing to let myself get there one toe at a time, though, know what I mean?

I'll have my proper review of The Iliad up in (hopefully) another day or two. In the meantime, here's the short version: it was great!

Cheers, JC.


currently reading: Exquisite Corpse by Poppy Z. Brite
books to go: 84

A Dance with Dragons (#101b)

A Dance with Dragons by George R.R. Martin.

What I said a few days ago:

Uh-oh, this is the second time in a row that I've used my 'I get to get a book!' to buy the new entry in an epic fantasy series. My geek is showing. But it's nothing to be ashamed of: Martin is a master of narrative and, with the HBO show winning raves and garnering him new fans, the whole world's beginning to realise it.

What I say now:

Okay, this is the fifth book in a series, so I figure it'll be more useful to Martin newbies to kind of review the series as a whole.

Put bluntly, George R.R. Martin kicks arse, and I am completely addicted to his books. I'm not a downloader, so I haven't had a chance to check out the pretty well-reviewed (and popular)  HBO series that is being adapted from his works, but I'll be buying it on DVD at the first possible moment. I am somebody who's more fantasy-inclined than most, but this guy stands above his genre to a ridiculous degree. He's like the Don Bradman of fantasy writing.

What is it about his books that gets me all hot and bothered like this? He is, simply, one of the best pure story-tellers I've ever come across. He has a genius for narrative that is unmatched in the entirety of my reading.

The series is mostly set in the fictional continent of Westeros, where seven former kingdoms have, through centuries of warfare, been joined into one large, uneasy realm. The land is rife with bitter factionalism and Machiavellian politicking. Very, very, very unusually for fantasy novels, those fantasy elements that are present are much less important than the complicated interactions between the human characters. Even his tiny characters, insignificant though they might seem, have their own motivations, desires, and plans.

Martin writes from many different characters' viewpoints, alternating with every chapter, which allows him to view every event from both sides (I say 'both sides' as if there's only two, but it's normally more complicated than that!). In the third book, he suddenly takes us into the viewpoint of a character who, to that point, we've found utterly repugnant, and humanises him. It's a brilliant way of making his central point: nobody in Westeros is wholly good or wholly bad, everybody is some kind of shade of grey. Again, how unusual is that for a fantasy novel, the genre that simplifies character more than any other (except maybe romance): the naive protagonist destined to defeat evil, the dark lord who wants to crush the whole world beneath his yoke, the pristine princess whose love is pure. None of these characters appear in Martin's work, and if they did, they'd be eaten alive.

Buy A Game of Thrones, the first in the series, and read it ... and then thank me.

On A Dance with Dragons specifically, I'm a little less enthusiastic. Where the first three books in the series are pretty nearly perfect in my view, four and five have been slightly less satisfying. So many characters, subplots and viewpoints have been introduced that events have slowed down a bit, making us wait a long time for any gratification. In A Dance with Dragons there are two specific plot-threads where we spend a lot of time, but never reach any satisfactory resolution. Martin has proven himself so adept at balancing his story that I remain hopeful that the series, when completed, will work as a whole but I can't deny that right now I found the most recent entry a slight disappointment; we did a lot of travelling, but very little arriving. Still, when your main issue with a thousand page book is that it was too short, the author must be doing a hell of a lot right.

Cheers, JC.


about to read: Marie Antoinette by Antonia Fraser
books to go: 100

The Wise Man's Fear (#111b)

The Wise Man's Fear by Patrick Rothfuss

What I said a couple of weeks ago:

It's a big dumb epic fantasy sequel ... and I can't wait!

What I say now:

It's bigger than I ever expected (200 pages longer than Anna Karenina!). And, unfortunately, dumber than I expected.

Legendary magician/lutist/killer/wastrel Kvothe has faked his own death and is now the proprietor of a sleepy pub (with a murderous fairy for an apprentice). After being tracked down by a scribe, Kvothe is convinced to tell the story of his life, which he promises to do over the course of three days. Rothfuss' first book, The Name of the Wind, was day one, in which Kvothe covered his childhood, the murder of his parents by mysterious supernatural beings, his entrance to a University of magic, and his all-round precociousness. The Wise Man's Fear is day two of the story.

I don't ask a heck of a lot from a popular novel like this: all I really want is something with a strong plot that's easy to read, something that goes down smooth. I chose this after Anna Karenina to give my brain a break.

For a guy working in a popular genre like fantasy, Rothfuss can write a hell of a sentence. His prose is elegant, clear and far more imaginative than 99% of his fantasy-writing peers. He draws you in beautifully ... which makes his occasional lapses into first-year-creative-writing-student gauche-ness stand out a mile. I'm willing to forgive a bit of experimentation, but why oh why does that major new character speak with no capital letters in her dialogue? it's utterly pointless. and after a while, really annoying. maybe it's because she's a fairy ... but wait, kvothe's apprentice is a fairy, and his dialogue has capitals. so there's no reason, then? right-o.

And why does Kvothe suddenly get hazy on his details for about fifty pages? Okay, he clearly has the best memory in the world, but whatever, I'm willing to go with that ... then we hit a section that's so vague as to be painful to read, and given the perfect clarity of everything else, it's like I was suddenly reading a very different, and much lesser, book.

But hell, given that the book's 993 pages long, those are relatively minor quibbles. My major quibble is that the vast majority of those 993 pages didn't seem to need to be there! The first 300 pages or so simply re-do a whole bunch of stuff that was included in the first book, to the point that I was getting deja vu. It was all mildly different variations on the exact same themes. The last thing a page-turner should be is dull, and while I was flying through it, I did find myself getting irritated at the sameness of Kvothe's adventures.

Then, when he did leave the University to head off into the wide world, all the troubles he found had very little connection to each other, and didn't join together to create a story. Rothfuss is a talented enough writer that he could keep me interested in whatever given piece of plot was going on at the time, but at the end of the book all the pieces of the plot didn't add up to anything. The book essentially goes like this: "I did that, then I did that, then I did that, then I did that. The end." All of the 'thats' are perfectly fine in and of themselves, but they bear little to no relation to each other. I was left flat and emotionally un-engaged, because nothing ever really seemed to matter, or to affect anything else.

All in all, it was (for the most part) a pleasant enough time-killer, but absolutely nothing more. I'd forgotten most of it before I'd even finished. Oh well.

Cheers, JC.


about to read: One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn ... continuing my recent Russian obsession. And it's blessedly short!
books to go: 110

Cheating just a smidge ...

Okay, I totally cheated the other day. I bought a book. It wasn't a gift for somebody else or anything, it was for me.

I feel dirty.

But, like any lapsed addict (I'm keeping Brendan Fevola company in a Venn Diagram somewhere), I've got a reeeeeeeally good excuse, I swear I do.

There's this author named David Mitchell, who wrote a book called Cloud Atlas that I read and loved a couple of years ago. I've got another book of his called Ghostwritten sitting on my shelves, waiting to be read; it's one of the 111 books I've got left. Anyway, his most recent book, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, sounds really interesting to me: it's set in Japan during the late 17th and early 18th centuries, when Japan was closed off to all foreigners. A Dutch clerk at a little trading post (the only contact Japan has with the outside world) falls in love with a Japanese girl, and I'm guessing that complications ensue.

Since it came out I've just kind of assumed that I'd buy it in a couple of years, after my read-everything-I-own challenge is done. 

There's also the added benefit that it's a really beautiful book. Okay, I'm even sounding effete to my own ears here, but let's take it as a given that I'm the kind of person who gives a rat's arse about stuff like that. Because I do.

This picture doesn't really do it justice, but the three-tone palette of cream, black and a vivid cyan kinda thing ... it just works.

But recently, Thousand Autumns has come out in a new, smaller format. And they've changed the cover. And the new cover fucking blows.

  

It's like someone in the art department at the publisher had the bright idea that because, hey, there's a guy and a girl in it, they were going to go after the elusive middle-aged-woman demographic (I'm probably being unfair to middle-aged women) by giving it a totally nondescript, 'romance-y' cover.

Now it looks like a Memoirs of a Geisha knockoff, or something. Or like a fucking Paullina Simons book.

(Again, I feel like this photo isn't doing justice to the new version's ugliness. That grey is darker in real life and so much more ... grey. And UGLY!)

Anyway, that's my excuse. Once we got the new version in, we were going to send back all of our copies of the original, and I nabbed one before they got returned.

So now The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet is sitting under my bed, where it will gather dust for another couple of years and make me feel extremely guilty every time I remember it's there.

Meanwhile, Anna Karenina is coming along. I'm roughly three-quarters of the way through it, and not hating it anywhere near as much as I feared I would. In fact, it's kind of great in a way. But more of that soon.

Also, once I finish the Tolstoy, I get to buy a book, but I already know what I'm gonna get, so I won't mess with you by asking for recommendations (hint: it's a big, dumb, epic fantasy sequel ... and I can't wait!).

Cheers, JC.


currently reading: Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
books to go: 111

Burmese Days (#121)

Burmese Days by George Orwell


What I said then:

[Part of] another inherited boxset. If I don't like the first one I read there could be trouble.

What I say now:

Jeeeeeeesus, George Orwell was one pessimistic motherfucker. Okay, having read 1984 and Animal Farm (which are the two that I figure nearly everybody's read), I guess I already knew that. But man, the ending of Burmese Days is such a downer that it's almost ridiculous. It's the kind of ending that a mopey sixteen year-old boy would come up with ... on a bad day. Everybody either dies, is forced to live out their lives in misery, or is revealed to be completely shallow and unthinking. Or some combination of those three. It's not a surprise to find out that this was his first novel: it's denouement is too naive, too un-nuanced for it to be anything else.

Anyway, until the last twenty pages, Burmese Days was fascinating. It's set in Burma (duh!), then part of England's Indian colony, in the late twenties, and it's a brilliantly realised portrayal of the moment in time when Britain's Empire had reached its zenith and was finally fraying at the edges, about to collapse. In a remote jungle station, eight whites comfortably dominate a village of a thousand local Burmese and a handful of itinerant Indians - a distinction which is completely lost on most of the English, who dismissively reject anybody outside their circle as a 'damned nigger.' They all drink way too much, do way too little, and are generally idling their days away in a miasma of sweat and gin and sharp-eyed local mistresses and boring evenings at 'the club' (the Englishman's Club, complete with tennis court and butler, becomes the focal point of the book's obsession with race and privilege). 

Orwell can write beautifully, and his evocation of time and place is brilliant. I love books that educate me about moments in history of which I wasn't aware, and on this score Burmese Days is a triumph. As a kid I was a massive Roald Dahl fan (okay, okay, as an adult I'm still a massive Roald Dahl fan) and parts of his memoir Going Solo occur in a similar 'outpost of Empire' in East Africa. Orwell's much more frank depiction of a tiny society of Englishmen and women existing in a place of (as they believe) utter savagery, makes me re-evaluate Dahl's light-hearted romp of a book, and wonder at all the things he left unsaid. 

In Burmese Days, three things happen to change the cosy lassitude of the white inhabitants: the niece of the only married couple on the station comes to stay, sparking every single Englishman to compete for her affections; the government decrees that every 'Englishman's Club' in the country should, in an effort to appease the restless populace, admit one native member; and a bitter feud erupts between a good-hearted Indian doctor and a conniving Burman magistrate. While it's a bit convenient that all these things come up at the same time, there's probably never been a novel where nothing 'convenient' happens, so I'm happy to forgive this. The English characters are all weak, or vain, or mean, but they're also the people who had to run to the other side of the world to make a life, so that makes perfect sense.

There is a moral conscience in the shape of Flory, the protagonist, who is just as uncomfortable in the company of his racist clubmates as he ever was back at home in England - he has a hideous birthmark across half his face, which marks him as an outsider in whatever company he keeps. Flory thinks differently about the natives, and about England's place in Burma, than anybody else, and one can't help but assume that his (infinitely more compasionate) opinions are those of Orwell himself. But the book goes out of its way to show the horrible price Flory pays for deliberately standing out from the crowd, lending it a curious air. Flory is heroic but constantly depressed, while the other English characters end the novel believing themselves content but living lives that are completely vapid and meaningless. The unbearably depressing ending almost suggests that: "Life sucks. You can either acknowledge it sucks, and be miserable, or ignore that it sucks and be a buffoon. Your call." I really enjoyed most of Burmese Days, but the ending spoilt it a bit for me, which was a shame.

Cheers, JC.


currently reading: Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
books to go: still 121

--- So I got to buy a book! I went with Never Let Me Go because I've had it recommended to me by a bunch of people over the years, because Ishiguro is supposedly one of the best writers around at the moment and it fills a hole in my reading, because of all his books this one has a bit of a sci-fi bent to it which is attractive to me, and because the movie's coming out soon and I want to read the book first. Fair enough?

A Hasty Confession

So, after all the hoopla of introducing myself and writing down the rules, I should probably confess to the wee little itty-bitty infractions that I've already been guilty of.

Just after I began this whole wacky project, Douglas Coupland released his latest novel, Generation A. Now, there are a few authors who are absolute heroes of mine, and before I die I'm going to read everything that they've ever written (Hmm ... idea for future blog post: discuss who these authors are, and why). And Douglas Coupland is absolutely one of them. So the instant the store had his new book, then I had to have it to. Even then, I might have stood strong, except one of my managers at The Avenue Bookstore, knowing I'm a Coupland fan, organised with our Random House rep to get me a free copy. She'd either forgotten about my pact, or else she's got a nasty streak I wasn't aware of.

It wasn't too much of a cheat, though: I was nearly at the end of a batch of ten books, so I just jumped the gun a bit on my new acquisition.

A far more egregious breach of the rules came more recently. Like, last week-type recently.

When I was a teenager I devoured the entire Tomorrow, When the War Began series. I was the right age, they hit me at the right time, and - for teen fiction - I thought they were pretty bloody good. I read a fair bit of bad teen fiction back in the day (though I suspect it's a section of the market that has matured a lot since then), so the good stuff was like a desert island to a drowning man.

With the movie coming out, and the trailer making it seem like it would be a steaming pile of shit (seriously, watch it online. It's ridiculous, right down to the whole 'guy diving away from an explosion in slow motion' cliche), I thought I should revisit the books before I saw it.

Not seeing it at all was, of course, never an option I remotely considered.

I'd intended only to read the first three books, which were always my favourites, but they blew me away all over again and I ended up scything through the whole series of seven in about five days. Whether it's that they really are great books or that I was reading through rose-tinted glasses, I couldn't say. What I can say is that it got me crying a couple of times, and I'm not much of a weeper. Books and movies can often get me blinking back tears, to the point that it's my fallback line when I want to suggest 'emotionality' in my writing ... and my writing partners mercilessly mock me for it. But to actually get those salty bastards out of my eyes and rolling down my cheeks? Not easy.

And the movie? Actually, it wasn't as bad as I'd feared. Most of the action was well-staged (a personal beef of mine is the utterly inept way that most contemporary action movies are filmed) and the actors did what they could to breathe life into the characters.

My main issue was that, when in doubt, it always reached for the easy answer, the cliche, the 'done' thing. A character who, in the books, smokes pot, writes poetry and is quiet and introspective gets turned by the movie into a comic-relief 'stoner', lighting up joints at inappropriate times and saying 'dude' a lot.

In the books they decide not to carry guns with them, in the hope that, if caught, they'll be incarcerated rather than executed. It makes perfect sense. In the movie, one guy's wandering around with a rocket launcher slung over his back. A fucking rocket launcher! A) Where'd he get it? B) Who taught him to use it? C) A fucking rocket launcher?

It's that kind of movie. I think Stuart Beattie, the writer-director, either didn't trust his actors enough to play any sort of complexity in their characters, or he didn't trust his audience to understand it. I know a film needs to be adapted from a book, and that of course some things will get lost along the way, but interesting characters should never have to be one of them.

Cheers, JC.


currently reading: City of Saints and Madmen by Jeff Vandermeer
books to go: 125

The Quest

Uh, hi, I guess.

My name's John and I work in a bookstore and, probably unsurprisingly, I covet books. A lot. And when you work in a bookstore and have very little willpower, you're able to acquire books at a phenomenal rate. Here's how it normally goes: 'Hmm, that looks interesting. And so does that. And so do those eight other hefty novels. And hey, I've carried them all up to the registers. And now my wallet's in my hand, how did that happen? And, wait, oh God, I've done it again. Looks like it's Doritos for dinner for the rest of the week.'

But the thing that really killed me was the free books. Because publishers want us to read their wares so we can talk them up to our customers, we can ask them for free copies of stuff we want to read. And get them. It's like magic or something.

And then as if that isn't enough, Penguin, the biggest book distributor in the country, has a policy that if anything arrives at our store damaged, we don't have to send it back. We can't sell it. We don't have to send it back. You do the maths on that one. And it's not just any publisher, it's bloody Penguin. Penguin with all their wonderful, terrible classics. Those ones with the black jackets, they're flimsy as hell so they can sell them so damn cheap and it sure doesn't take much to knock them out of shape. 'Samuel Richardson's Clarissa? I guess I might read it someday ...' And home it goes.

Until one fateful day I decided to count the number of unread books that I owned, and was flabbergasted by the total. I actually had to have a bit of a sit down. And so I made a pledge, a foolhardy, quixotic, anal-retentive pledge: I WOULD READ EVERY BOOK THAT I OWN! (My description of the pledge could equally be a description of me, now that I think about it. Throw in 'shy' and 'goofy-looking' and 'immature' and that's pretty much me.)

Now, the idea of going cold turkey on new books was terrifying, and as single-minded as I can be about some things, I thought there'd be no way I could stick to that. So I came up with a plan that would still allow me to buy books, just at a drastically reduced rate: I'm allowed to get a new book for every ten old books that I read. Or, to put it more simply: Read Ten, Buy One. 

And in case you're wondering about the title of the blog ... my Mum, who's lovely, but also kind of a sadist, gave me the entire six-volume, 5000-page sequence of Marcel Proust's 'In Search of Lost Time' - an epic novel of one guy's kinda boring life. I know there's no way I'll ever read it if there's anything (and I do mean anything) else in the house. When I have one thing left to read, it'll be Proust. 

So, here are the basic rules: 

I can only read books that I already own.

I can only acquire (be it bought, given, stolen, found on the street, or written myself) one new book for every ten old books that I've read.

When I acquire a new book, I must read it straight away. 

(I should add that I reserve the right to break these rules as I see fit. If an author I really love has a new book out, or the film's just about to come out and I want to read it first, or if it turns out I'm as spineless as a Portuguese Man-of-War. And I've already committed the biggest cheat of all: I'm not including my copy of Shakespeare's Complete Works. I'm crazy, but I'm not that crazy.) 

So that's my quest. I've been going for about six months or so and making steady progress. The soccer World Cup was a boon. I took time off for it and managed to use the boring games (I'm looking at you, Switzerland) to get through a couple of hefty buggers that I'd been worrying might take me a couple of months each (I'm looking at you The Crimson Petal and the White).

I'll be blogging about the books I'm reading, about what's still to come on my shelves (I've got them all mapped out on an Excel spreadsheet), and I'll be soliciting opinions on what I should buy when I'm up to my tenth old book and starting to get excited. Me being me, I'll also be blogging about writing and films, and anything else that takes my fancy really. 

Cheers, JC.


currently reading: City of Saints and Madmen by Jeff Vandermeer
books to go: 125