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Odd book, this one. It's a "classic", although whether this became true before or after it became famous for being in the pocket of American serial killers whilst they were on gun rampages I am not certain. Despite the fact that it was banned for much of its existence, I got the feeling that because it is an interesting portrayal of American youth, it should perhaps be distributed liberally among high school English classes as an example of disaffected youth (which we all know high school students just love to read about).

I read it while I was writing my own novel, and since they're both first-person narratives involving someone talking to someone else, I approved of the style and probably hijacked the thought patterns to make Dalent's own stream of conciousness ramblings. While I still appreciate regular-type God's-eye-view novels (they certainly can be more artfully constructed), the more I read the more I come to realize that first-person perspective is really the only perspective I can really buy into, and think my reading is tending more and more into that direction at the moment.

Plotwise, there's not a lot going on: 'Teenager wanders about New York city thinking about things' would pretty much sum it up. I mean he does stuff, but nothing particularly interesting- it's more interesting just to read the ebb and flow of his thoughts. Although not, I should say, absorbing- I didn't find it to be that great a novel.

There's this song that goes:

I'm afraid of people who like Catcher in the Rye
Yeah, I like it too, but someone tell me why
People he'd despise say: 'I feel like that guy'

Which is, oddly, kind of the opposite of the reason I think I didn't really get into the book. I just didn't really like Holden (the teenager) enough to care about his fate. I mean, you can't really blame me, even he didn't like himself enough to care about his fate. He had admirable traits, and had some good thoughts, but they were all so adrift in this sea of misanthropy that I found it difficult to warm to him, which made it difficult to warm to the book...which makes me wonder why it achieved such a lofty status.

"Hundreds of professional and amateur scientists actually believe the Bible pretends to teach science. This is a good deal like assuming that there must be authentic religious dogma in the binomial theorum."

"What's really remarkable about science," I interjected to my flatmate whilst reading the excellent Big Bang - The most important scientific discovery of all time and why you need to know about it "is that when it was taught to me, every teacher I had insisted on being very dry, logical, and factual about it. So I completely missed the fact that science is in fact incredibly interesting."

And nothing demonstrates this more than Big Bang, which is jam-packed with neat stories about how we eventually proved that everything in the universe came from a single massive explosion of matter. I can quite literally open the book on any random page and find some neat anecdote about some scientist's struggle to prove or disprove his theory. I'll do it right now!

"All of physics is either impossible or trivial. It is impossible until you understand it, and then it becomes trivial."

The book, much like the equally-great pop-science books E=MC2 and A Short History of Nearly Everything, traces its subject matter, namely how we came to grip with the nature of the universe, from beginning to end. I must say I enjoyed the beginning most of all, because of the very hands-on nature of people's discoveries, and the often amusing mistakes they'd made. I must say I got quite a shock when, after mentioning how people had calculated the size of the moon and the distance to the sun, they then invented the telescope! They'd figured all that out without telescopes! Incredible!

I guess the major theme of the book is about how elegant natural phsyics is. It's never complex, or ugly or confusing. It makes sense. And it's a lot of fun reading about how we uncovered its secret corners. I could recount a dozen great stories from this book, but I wouldn't want to spoil them for you. I recommend you find out for yourself.

Read this bad boy!

I've always been very wary of cross-gendered authorship. Not that I'm against it, I mean, I read cross-species books sometimes, and I don't have a problem with them. It's just that I'm very suspicious of the accuracy with which a male author can portray the female experience (and vice versa*), particularly when that experience relates to prostitution (as, curiously, it so often does when a man decides to write a story from a woman's perspective).

Is Memoirs of a Geisha about prostitution? That is to say: What is a geisha, and what is its relation to prostitution? Consider this passage:

Since moving to New York I've learned what the word "geisha" really means to most Westerners. From time to time at elegant parties, I've been introduced to some young woman or other in a splendid dress and jewelry. When she learns I was once a geisha in Kyoto, she forms her mouth into a sort of smile, although the corners don't turn up quite as they should. She has no idea what to say! And then the burden of conversation falls to the man or woman who has introduced us -because I've never really learned much English, even after all these years. Of course, by this time there's little point in even trying, because this woman is thinking, "My goodness...I'm talking with a prostitute..." A moment later she's rescued by her escort, a wealthy man a good thirty or forty years older than she is. Well, I often find myself wondering why she can't sense how much we really have in common. She is a kept woman, you see, and in my day, so was I.

Geisha existed to entertain wealthy, powerful men. Typically this entertainment would take the form of tea rituals, dances, witty conversation, elegant outfits. Ritualized flirtation, as one friend described it. However it cannot be doubted that the main character of Memoirs, Sayuri, is sold for both her mizuage (her virginity) and again sold as a danna (mistress). While a geisha was certainly not a prostitute as Westerners understand the word, I think what is distinct is Sayuri's utter powerlessness over her own circumstances- extremely common for women in prewar Japan (and, indeed, the West), unlikely to be any more imaginable for a white American male from Tennessee than it would be for you or I.

That grain of salt in mind, I have to say I found this to be an excellent novel. It reads like a dream, flowing effortlessly from one chapter to the next, always interesting, engaging and informative, and genuinely redolent of a time and place I've never considered before (the segments during WWII and the postwar years were of particular interest to me, even though they are largely glossed over).

Particularly well handled is Sayuri's mental maturity, which unfolds along with the reader in measured and realistic paces. At times Sayuri's situation seems impossibly desperate; at others it seems no harm can come to her- and of course, both are prone to changing on the whim of fate.

"Destiny isn't always a party at the end of the evening. Sometimes it's nothing more than struggling through life from day to day."

advises Sayuri's mentor, Mahema.

Too right.

The scene I had just witnessed brought back a lot of memories - not of things I had done but of things I had failed to do, wasted hours and frustrated moments and opportunities forever lost because time had eaten up so much of my life and I would never get it back. I envied Yeamon and felt sorry for myself at the same time, because I had seen him in a moment that made all my happiness seem dull.

Sometimes I go into a bookstore and start browsing and realize there are far, far more books that I want to read than I ever will actually read. There are far more books that I haven't even heard of yet that I want to read, but never will. And my mind goes into this little loop, and I just stand there, spoilt for choice, unable to make a purchase, frightened that it might mean that one other book that I won't ever get to read.

This is why I like it when people just give me a book I've never heard of and I don't have to choose it at the expense of another.

'Happy,' I muttered, trying to pin the word down. But it is one of those words, like Love, that I have never quite understood. Most people who deal in words don't have much faith in them and I am no exception - especially the big ones like Happy and Love and Honest and Strong. They are too elusive and far too relative when you compare them to sharp, mean little words like Punk and Cheap and Phony. I feel at home with these, because they're scrawny and easy to pin, but the big ones are tough and it takes either a Priest or a fool to use them with any confidence.

It occured to me, shortly into the second chapter of The Rum Diary, that it was the second book in a row I'd read by an author who had killed himself. John Kennedy Toole took his own life years before the publication of A Confederacy of Dunces. I don't know much about him. I know a fair bit about Hunter S. Thompson* who, of course, famously killed himself a short while ago, after complications due to a broken leg and a hip replacement. His last written words were: "No More Games. No More Bombs. No More Walking. No More Fun. No More Swimming. 67. That is 17 years past 50. 17 more than I needed or wanted. Boring. I am always bitchy. No Fun -- for anybody. 67. You are getting Greedy. Act your old age. Relax -- This won't hurt." I hope, fervently, that his last act was one made out of an attempt to avoid pain, not a lifetime of intelligent thinking leading to a conclusion that life was not worth living.

There was a time when I had been the same way. I wanted it all and I wanted it fast and no obstacle was big enough to put me off. Since then I had learned that some things were bigger than they looked from a distance, and now I was not so sure anymore just what I was going to get or even what I deserved. I was not proud of what I had learned but I never doubted it was worth knowing.

This is what I told myself on those hot afternoons in San Juan when I was thirty years old and my shirt stuck damply to my back and I felt myself on that big and lonely hump, with my hardnose years behind me and all the rest downhill. They were eerie days, and my fatalistic view of Yeamon was not so much conviction as necessity, because if I granted him even the slightest optimism I would have to admit a lot of unhappy things about myself.

The Rum Diary is the story of Paul Kemp, a journalist who travels to San Juan to work for a folding newspaper (much as Thompson did at the same age- I guess his novels follow the same autobiographical bent as his journalism did!). The actual plot points of the book, when stuff actually 'happens', are the weakest part of the book, as he just generally travels from place to place, getting drunk, getting in fights, chatting to characters, getting into trouble (there's an extremely misogynistic conclusion which I was really uncomfortable with). The strength of the book is the narrator's reflections on age, aging, achievement and living.

'I have a feeling that I'm following a course that somebody laid out a long time ago - and I have a hell of a lot of Company.'

I looked up at the plantain and let him go on.

'You're the same way,' he said. 'We're all going to the same damn places, doing the same damn things people have been doing for fifty years, we keep waiting for something to happen.' He looked up. 'You know - I'm a rebel, I took off - now where's my reward?'

'You fool,' I said. 'There is no reward and there never was.'

'Jesus,' he said. 'That's horrible.'

It's a sad, (cynical,) melancholy book, echoing a lot of the thoughts I have about aging and paths-not-taken in my own mind on certain grey, dull, bussy mornings. It's also a tight, cracking read, flowing smoothly and intelligently from scene to scene, evoking the lazy pace of life in San Juan without ever becoming boring or repetitive itself.

I recommend it highly.

Those were the good mornings, when the sun was hot and the air was quick and promising, when the Real Business seemed right on the verge of happening and I felt that if I went just a little faster I might overtake that bright and fleeting thing that was always just ahead.

Then came noon, and morning withered like a lost dream. The sweat was torture and the rest of the day was littered with the dead remains of all those things that might have happened, but couldn't stand the heat. When the sun got hot enough it burned away all the illusions and I saw the place as it was - cheap, sullen, and garish - nothing good was going to happen here.

Sometimes at dusk, when you were trying to relax and not think about the general stagnation, the Garbage God would gather a handful of those choked-off morning hopes and dangle them somewhere just out of reach; they would hang in the breeze and make a sound like delicate glass bells, reminding you of something you never quite got hold of, and never would. It was a maddening image, and the only way to whip it was to hang on until dusk and banish the ghosts with rum. Often it was easier not to wait, so the drinking would begin at noon. It didn't help much, as I recall, except that sometimes it made the day go a little faster.

A Confederacy of Dunces is an absolute joy. I had an enormous, goofy grin on my face the entire time. This is the funniest book I've read since The Book of the Film of the Story of My Life- it may, in fact, be the funniest book I've ever read. I kept turning to whoever was around me at the time (even strangers on the bus, like) and saying: "Oh, oh, this is a good bit, you've gotta hear this!" and then reading them a passage. God, what a gem.

It's the story of one Ignatius J. Reilly, an enormous, erudite thirty-year-old who lives with his mother in New Orleans, circa 1950. Ignatius is at once staggeringly smart and astoundingly stupid. He's got book-smarts, indeed everything he says is eminently quotable, but he applies his philosophies to life so rigorously that he is barely functional, and offends every person he meets with his bizarre outlook.

"I socialize with either my peers or no-one. Since I have no peers, I socialize with no-one."

Ignatius is a real creation. Awful, hilarious, repulsive, not actually malign, but somehow bringing destruction to all those around him. But he'd just be plain annoying if not for the fact that nearly everything he says is pure genius, particularly his frequent "Big Chief" rants which he writes in little notebooks scattered around his room, and his wonderful correspondence with "That Minx" Myrna Minkhoff, a friend he met in College, and perhaps his only friend outside his long-suffering and much-abused mother.

To give you an idea of Ignatius' personality, his favourite hobby is to go to movies (which, like all society, he loves to despise) and loudly point out all the flaws. "Oh, my God! What degenerate produced this abortion?" he cries.

I've got this habit that is by turns both helpful and annoying, in that my brain often 'picks up the pattern' of whatever book I happen to be reading at the time. So when I read Bill Hicks, I find I'm extremely funny, when I read Haruki Murakami I find myself slightly disconnected from the world, when I read a non-fiction book I'm very matter-of-fact, and so on. Unfortunately, whilst reading A Confederacy of Dunces I was very pompous and arrogant (aside: I'm now reading Hunter S. Thompson so am looking forward to being drunk and witty).

The book occasionally drifts to other subplots with other characters, the greatest of which is Burma Jones, a man who can't get through a sentence without exclaiming: "Whoa!" which I found highly amusing for reasons I really can't explain.

Like all great comedy, Dunces is laced with tragedy, at one point quite depressing me (even while remaining depressingly funny) because everyone's case seems so hopeless. But like five episodes of Seinfeld mashed together, all the various threads come together to solve everyone else's problems, and ends on a great high note that to be honest I wasn't expecting.

It's a great work. Read it- It'll be one of the best things you've read. Read it. I demand it! My copy is yours, should you wish it.

So I was heading off to Croatia and I realized that I knew next to nothing about the war there. I knew it had something to do with Serbia and Bosnia or Bosno-Serbi-Cromagnon or something, but really didn't have the foggiest idea what it was all about, how it started, how it ended, who was doing what to whom, and that I should really get my head `round it while I was there (so forgive me if you already have encyclopaedic knowledge of the event. You're in a minority.)

The Fall of Yugoslavia was my attempt to do just that (although, reading a book with that title on a Croatian beach was probably in the same order of stupid as going into an Irish Pub and reading a book called The Troubles: Who's Right and Who's Retarded?). It's the story of Misha Glenny, a 'confessed coward' who nonetheless ended up, in his role as a journalist for the Guardian, in all the hotspots of the various wars that sprung up all over Yugoslavia throughout the former half of the 1990's. Yep, it really wasn't that long ago- the war was still raging less than ten years ago.

I say 'various wars', because the Croatian war was just one of many different wars which sprung up during Yugoslavia's dissolution. The Croatian war was the first of these, and seemed to begin when Serbians in Croatian became alarmed by measures taken by the Croatian government to reduce the role of Serbians in Croatia's cultural and political life. Several of these alarmists formed small militias and overtook the town of Knin (not far from where I was staying in Split), which happened to be the gateway between the economically powerful Dalmatian Coast and the rest of Croatia. They got a stranglehold on Croatia's economy and war swiftly broke out from there, spreading into Bosnia-Hercegovina and then transforming into a three-way conflict, as Serbians and Croatians in Bosnia went on a collosal land-grab, leaving none for the resident Bosnia Moslems, who formed a third faction in the conflict. Other factions included the UN, who largely had their hands tied while the conflict got more and more bloody, and the JNA, Yugoslavia's Federal Army, which began by trying to keep the peace, but as more and more nations seceded from Yugoslavia, became more and more a tool for the Serbian factions.

Confused? I was. It's a confusing conflict. One of the more bizarre sequences in the book is when a Serbian General calls a Croatian General and says: "Mladic! We've left an open grave with all your boys in it near the front, you might want to go and pick up the bodies, they're stinking up the place. How's your family?" There was a lot going on, and annoyingly, the book kind of cuts off in 1993, when the conflict was still going strong.

All the time I was reading the book, I kept looking around myself, at Croatia, asking: "Where the heck are all the Serbs? Surely the conflict didn't just STOP and everyone became friends again after all the horrible atrocities they committed on one another?" The epilogue, which was written in 1996, covers the massive exile of Serbs from Croatia- the largest exile of a people from one country since World War II- and answered my question.

This is disturbing, fascinating, very well balanced, and exhaustively well researched material. I say exhaustive as both a compliment and a warning- it's not a 'light read'. I had to go over some pages over more than once just to figure out exactly what was happening.

It's also a very sad book, just because the entire conflict seemed so bizarre, so needless. The author repeatedly refers to war as some kind of virus (he probably would have said 'meme' if he was a blogger), something that infects people and makes them do horrible things they would never normally do. It's tough to argue with his theory when presented with such awful testimony.

As I sat on golden sands in Croatia, surrounded by tranquility, knowing that most everyone around me had lived through, could remember, had participated in, those insane times, not too long ago, it was a frightening reminder to me of how close any society is to suddenly being infected with the virus.

"So far, so average." says the narrator about two-thirds into The Player of Games, my first foray into the highly recommended world of Iain M. Banks.

"Yup." I internally nodded to myself. Maybe it was my own fault for reading outlandish sci-fi right on the heels of the immacuately-constructed worlds of Infinite Jest and Post Captain. Maybe nothing could live up to those two giants of awesomeness.

Maybe I was just in the mood to be nit-picky. The book begins in a society called 'The Culture', in which all human needs are provided, humans can 'gland' any emotion or high they desire, and they coexist with sentient droids that have the full rights of people. The main character is Jernau Gurgeh, who is the Culture's most renowned game-player. Whatever game you care to mention, Jernau is the master of it (he's also something of a pompous ass, which makes it tough to sympathize with him, or indeed give a shit about the outcome of his fate- death for many a novel).

Jernau is driven into action after cheating in a game with the assistance of a droid, which then blackmails him (along with physical threats) into a course of action that ends up with Jernau on the other side of the universe, playing a very complex, dangerous game (the rules of which are frustratingly never explained in even the slightest depth) that dominates a primitive society.

Now, I have no problem with imagining societies that don't realistically make sense. Take Star Trek for instance- obviously if transporters really did exist, the society that would erupt from such discoveries would be one vastly different to what is portrayed in the Trekiverse (indeed, it'd be difficult to imagine). However I'm willing to put such fickle transgressions aside in the name of a good story.

However, the Culture's, ah, internal inconsistencies aside, I had two big problems with the opening premise of the book. The first is that if any human society would ever develop droids that were so overwhelmingly powerful that they could threaten humans to do their will, they would also develop safeguards against that happening- however Jernau seems completely and utterly suprised that such an event is occuring- surely it'd be commonplace? Fortunately, this complaint is actually addressed (quite satisfyingly) in the very last line of the novel, which made me very happy, but then opened up a much bigger can of worms, namely that while the Culture appears to offer its citizens complete freedom, it does in fact manipulate its citizens to do its bidding, via byzantine and overly-complex conspiracies- which begs the question: why does it bother?

The second problem is that Jernau is the greatest game player in the known galaxy and yet can't think a way out of a simple game of double-bluff! He seems flustered beyond all understanding by the droid's threats. He's obviously never played a decent hand of poker -or clam, for that matter. After that simple slip-up, any of his claims to brilliance just seemed to further irritate me.

[super nit-pick! Jernau, the greatest authority in gaming in the galaxy, states in one of his essays on gaming that chess 'has no element of chance'. Well, it's got one element. Muh.]

It's certainly well written, which I always enjoy, and there is some thought-provoking (although, by the standards of recent sci-fi, somewhat antiquated) material on what kind of society would be ruled by games, but I think the best review could be summarized by what I said immediately after I finished the book- I put it down, and said: "Done!"

"Any good?" my friend asked.

"Meh."

How much do I love the Aubrey-Maturin novels by Patrick O'Brien?

If you're not familiar with them, the film Master & Commander was based on book ten (The Far Side of the World) of a twenty-book cycle that follows the adventures of Captain Jack Aubrey, a brutish by good hearted sailor in the royal navy, and his friend Stephen Maturin, who is variously a surgeon for Jack's vessels and a spy for British Intelligence.

It's not just that they are the most meticulously researched historical novels I've ever come across. It's not the ease with which the author switches between the two utterly different but intricately well realised lead characters. It's not even the hilarious little post-modern winks that shows up every now and then to remind you that it's just a book. It's the raw sense of fun that permeates every page. There's a great line in one of the Sandman comics that reads: "Think on it, and you'll be there." which I think neatly sums up the Aubrey-Maturin novels. They create a time so vividly in your mind that it's just fun to see what happens next.

Post-Captain is the second in the series, and is something of a departure from the first (which revolved mainly around naval warfare) in that it begins with a Jane Austenesque aside in the country, as Jack and Stephen go to Balls and coming-out parties and fall in love with Sophie Williams and Diana Villiers, respectively. Sophie is a simple girl who could never marry Jack, as he is bankrupt and her mother would not allow it (!) Diana Villiers is her cousin, whom Stephen falls in love with (and it's great fun to read his analytical take on what love is), but there is more to Diana than meets the eye, and she plays Jack and Stephen against each other in a way that almost tears the friendship apart.

However with Jack on the run from the debtors and the invasion of Napoleon, Jack and Stephen are soon thrust into action, which is the meat and potatoes of the book, but I have to say the moments I love the most are the conversations with Jack and Stephen as they play together in the cabin, discussing all manner of thought and theory. I almost never stopped reading this book from the moment I started it, it's that entertaining. Yet I suppose that is true of a great many terrible books. What elevates Post Captain, what makes it better than the impression the cover might give you, is the humanity on show, those moments that are true now, then, and a thousand years before. Friendship and logic and passion.

Read it, read it, read it. Read the whole series. Do.

Infinite Jest is huge.

That's the first thing you need to know. If you are the sort of person who goes to sleep with a book balanced on their chest and wakes up when it falls on their nose, Infinite Jest will fall over and give you a black eye. That's how big she is. We're talking War & Peace, here.

To give you an idea of how big this book is, there's upwards of 300 footnotes, most of which are just a sentence or two. Several of them, however, are complete short stories in and of themselves, just to describe a single word.

It's also glorious. You could pick any chapter, at random, and it would be one of the greatest short stories you've ever read. Each sentence is immaculately, effortlessly, brain-meltingly smart. And it's always followed and proceeded by a similarly painfully smart sentence. If you're a fan of the well-crafted sentence, they are legion.

In terms of actual plot, well, the book isn't so much plot based. It's more about creating a completely self-sustaining world, not too dissimilar to our own, in which you get to wander about for a while. It is set at an unknown time in the future (years have become 'subsidized', which means instead of saying 2005, you'd say: "The Year of the Whopper" or "The Year of the Depends Adult Underwear"), in which America has joined with Canada, and turned all the northernmost states into 'the concavity'- a huge zone of garbage into which all of America's refuse is projected. Some of the book's most delicious scenes are set on an outcropping in the concavity, where Remy Marathe (a French-Canadian separatist) speaks with Hugh Steeply (a CIA agent) about America, Canada, and 'the entertainment'.

The Entertainment is a disseminated film that leaves anyone who watches it with no other desire than to keep watching that one film- removing the entertainment from their sight reduces them to a senseless coma. The content of it is alluded to but never revealed, and the CIA suspects that the separatists are using the entertainment as a weapon against America.

I may be inadvertantly implying that the entertainment is, in fact, what the book is about. Actually, this is simply one facet of many. Most of the novel switches between the dysfunctional Incandenza family, who live and work at an academy for tennis-playing prodigies; and the residents of Ennet House, a home for recovering drug addicts. To even begin to cover either of these subplots would take far more space than I have here.

Infinite Jest is funny, intelligent, and rewarding. It's also quite a mission to read and occasionally feels overwhelming. In fact, it's so big, it becomes such a complete place in your mind, it's actually really difficult to review with any justice. However it is one of the best books I have ever read, and I can give it my highest recommendation.

It's ace.

The arrival of a new Chuck Palahniuk novel, while an event that usually happens without any huge PR budget or fanfare, is, to me, an occurance to dwarfs the largest film premiere. Ever since writing the book that more or less defined my generation, Chuck's batting average has been more or less perfect. Yes, he has a tendancy to wander off into the implausible at the end of all his stories, but the journey is so well written and just so much fun to read that you tend to forgive. Feeling the pages crack as you turn them, devouring the juicy prose- that's better than going to the movies. I more or less put my social life on hold just to devote my life to reading when there's unread Palahniuk for the taking.

Haunted is an anthology of short stories. Each story is preceded by a poem. Each story is connected to the others via a larger framing story, which is this: Twenty-four wannabe authors attend a "Writer's Retreat"- a place they can go to get away from the world for three months and write the novel that will take them to the big time. Unfortunately, the retreat is run by a madman who locks them all in a theatre and refuses to let anyone leave. The situation rapidly unravels as each prisoner attempts to turn themselves into the hero of the story they are in. Along the way, we learn that each author is running from something, and each individual 'sub-story' details what those are.

The stories run the gamut from horrific to humorous, surreal to sci-fi. All of them are very, very bleak, the way I like `em. All of them function as stand-alone stories, the sort you could easily read to some friends while sitting around the fire on a beach. To frighten and amuse. Ghost stories without ghosts in them. "All stories are Ghosts." I could have sworn this was written on the first page, but, looking now, I can't find it.

If you like your fiction a little dark, a little disturbing, very funny and very well written, then I must recommend (nay, demand!) that you read this book. If you need further persuasion, go and check out the excellent excerpt on audible.com or this written excerpt at the Haunted website.

As always, if anyone wants my copy: it's up for grabs.

d

ps- also of interest, I just saw on Chuck's website that the 'Invisble Monsters' comic is free for download in PDF form. Looks pretty good, check it out.