Reviews and Comments

This is one of the most extraordinary and inventive books I have ever read. The author just lays on layer after layer of strange, and manages to make it work by the sheer audacity of keeping going.

I'm deliberately saying nothing about content because much of the pleasure of this book comes from discovering the world it creates, so I don't think I can say anything descriptive without taking something away from that. Just read it!

I fell gradually more and more in love with this book until the very final chapter, which almost completely broke the spell. Until that point, it's an enchanting weaving of various bizarre characters' stories, and the whole edifice makes sense in the world that had been set up, yet Şafak felt the need to add an ending directly equivalent to the "then I woke up and it was all a dream" that we were all sternly told not to use in primary school. It tarnished the book so much for me that I'm tempted to just tear that chapter out of my edition.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, for a retrospective collection, I found this very patchy. My favourite parts of the collection were actually some of the shortest stories, in which Chekhov did a wonderful job of painting a vivid scene and one or two very real characters in just a couple of pages each time. Some of the longer stories convey a deep sense of pathos, but there were also a few that just didn't engage me emotionally at all.

The thing you have to be prepared for when reading Conrad's political novels, is that he was writing 100 years ago and a disturbing amount of what he portrays fits the present day, and probably always will. I suppose I should see this as the mark of a talented author--he's really just describing people, and we really don't change--but I can't read one of these without becoming somewhat disillusioned by just how little has changed in 100 years of "progress".

Anyway, to the story. This is the least action-packed of Conrad's works that I've read, and it's kind of refreshing. All the real "action" happens before the book starts, and to a character who barely appears in the book himself. The story, instead, is about the consequences for everyone else around him. It's a brilliant ruse to focus on what Conrad does best anyway: writing about emotions and interpersonal conflict, honesty, suspicion, honour and malice. And in the end, the small story of turbulence in a few peoples' lives illustrates much better than any broad narrative could the astonishing power of abstract ideas like patriotism and political systems to crush the individuals caught up in their way.

My one frustration with this book, in common with several of Conrad's others, is that at times he gives the narrator character himself too much attention, and manages to come across rather pompous as a result. I think an editor could have improved this book by cutting a few soliloquies out....

This is a very powerful book. It's a first-hand account of how Orwell found himself volunteering for an anti-Fascist brigade, and how utterly disillusioning the whole experience was, as the fractious anti-Fascists wasted enormous amounts of energy fighting each other instead of the real enemy. There are relevant lessons for any political campaign today (certainly I see the same tendencies in the environmental movement), and it also does a lot to illuminate where he was coming from with Animal Farm and 1984. Having studied these at school I was left under the impression that Orwell was a rather pro-establishment writer, but reading his non-fiction makes it clear that he was a strong ideological Socialist, and his critiques of Stalinism have all the bitterness of someone seeing his own ideals betrayed.

I loved this book, but must warn you to be careful with it. It messes with reality so effectively that it gave me nightmares twice, and made me miss my bus stop when I was nearing the end of the story.

Three stars doesn't do this book justice. It should get 5 for the second half, and -1 for the worst parts.

When it's good, this is a beautiful, moving and informative description of the Pacific Northwest. Egan can be wonderful at describing the beauty of the region and the emotions it induces in people, and at the stupidity and sheer unbridled greed that has led to some of the worst problems we have today. But he can also over-reach, both in terms of just over-egging his writing and exaggerating claims (he makes Rainier Valley sound like Compton) to the point of undermining his own credibility. And in places he falls for the sort of ridiculous stereotypes and cliches that make it sound like he's writing this all from New York.

The chapter about Victoria, in particular, was such an irritating pastiche of stereotypes about Canada, the US and Britain that it almost made me stop reading and I would advise anyone to skip it altogether. I'm glad I continued though, and most of the badness is concentrated towards the beginning.

The chapters on native tribes and on salmon are particularly beautifully written, and the parts that I know the factual background to check out with the other things I've read or learned about. They will make you angry, but appropriately so.

I was pretty disappointed by this book. I found the story it tells to be overly simplistic and focussed on guns and blood at the expense of developing characters, places or motives. The action is taut enough that I could see the film being rather good, but the book feels too much like it was actually meant as a screenplay to stand up on its own.

Having grown up outside the US, I never read these books as a kid, and they're actually very interesting as an adult still learning about the country. In fact, I'm not convinced this should be a childrens' book, because being written from a small child's perspective means it only vaguely hints at the evil backdrop of the story. But the first-person perspective brings the experience of being a Pioneer much more alive than any historical text I've read, and as someone who very much buys into the "the Pioneers perpetrated gross acts of ethnic cleansing" view espoused by that linked article it was actually kind of refreshing to read an account that humanises them.

This book romanticises the Pioneer life considerably, but not to the point of airbrushing out all the difficulties and discomforts, and it was actually a lot less of a propaganda tract than I had expected it to be. Definitely worth reading as an adult, with knowledge of the background.

Months after finishing this book, I still don't know how to describe it, so I'll just describe my reaction. I absolutely adored every word of Laxness's writing, and couldn't tear myself away even though the events he describes are such a succession of awfulness that I often wanted to put it down. The book wormed its way into my head in a way that I've rarely experienced since I stopped studying literature formally, and several of the scenes are still vivid in my mind now.

I think this is one of the finest books I've ever read, but don't read it if you're feeling down, because it's also one of the bleakest.

Given how popular this book seems to be, I was surprised at how long it took me to warm to it. At times the deliberate simplicity of the writing was engaging and light, but at times it also seemed annoyingly patronising to the characters and their culture. Most of the chapters stand alone as fairly self-contained stories, and the highlights were clever little tales in which someone with a little common sense (usually the lady detective of the title, but not always) proves smarter than some people who society would hold to be their 'better'. But really almost all of the little stories do the same thing, so it gets rather repetitive and the chaff ends up detracting from the wheat.

I think this book could be cut up and 3 or 4 chapters made into lovely short stories for an anthology, but the rest left me rather disappointed.

It's not often that I read books about cooking. It's even rarer that I read "manly" books about going out into the wilds and hunting elk and bear. Yet this somehow managed to be both of these things and quite wonderful.

The premise is simple: man who likes to hunt and forage (but disdains showily macho hunter culture and is just a tad hippy) discovers a vintage French cookbook that is Wagnerian in its ambition and Biblical in its influence, and decides to put on a 3-day feast with a total of 21 recipes from the book. Much of the story hinges on gathering the ingredients, which range from game he hunts himself and mushrooms he forages for through absurd misadventures in fowl-rearing to simply tracking down suppliers of things that have gone out of fashion as food. Many of the interesting characters are the food suppliers, and the book is filled with stories of where things came from and how delightfully obsessive the people involved are.

This book's a perfect companion to the Michael Pollan narratives that have become so very popular over the past few years, but it takes a much less lecturing tone. Simply by the example it sets out, it reminded me of all the reasons food is simply more appealing when it hasn't been mass-produced.

This translation is wonderful. I had tried reading a different translation in school, before this was published, and couldn't get through it. Heaney was very open about not being too slavishly literal in his translation and the result is something that's very readable, tautly paced and full of evocative turns of phrase.

The actual story recounted is much less interesting than its telling. It's about the most macho character in a very macho world, who takes on other peoples' battles to prove himself, and where everything is valued in strength and/or gold. I found myself sympathising more with the second "monster" (a bereaved mother out to avenge her son) than the "hero". And the narrator seems very confused about whether the characters being described were Christians or not - they're explicitly described as pagans but then they keep referencing a distinctly monotheist God as if that was the only way the narrator knew to render humility. But it's still an interesting window into a period of history we don't exactly have copious written records from.

Unusually for an Important Work Of Literature, the introduction is really worth reading, I suppose because Heaney wrote it himself. I read it after the poem, which I think was the right way round.

The titular poem is one of the greatest perspective-setting works I have ever read, and I often return to it in hard times. The rest of the collection is a wonderful series of meditations on life, death, history and the author's other career as a microbiologist.