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List Price: £7.99
Our Price: £1.91
Author:
Bret Easton Ellis
By Picador
 I love this book, 2007-10-23
I only read this book after I seen the film, which is portrayed wonderfully by Christian Bale. The book itself is the blackest of comedies with a hint of sarcasm about it. The violence in American Psycho, which is described down to the closest of details, is only a small part of the book as a whole. The rest of it is about the day-to-day life of an American businessman who is rich, good-looking but rarely happy and those are the most entertaining parts for me.
You may find it heavy going having to read the over-described details on everything from fashion to electrical products, but trust me, it gets easier. As I write this I struggle to pinpoint exactly why this book is entertaining, it just is. It's funny, quirky, sarcastic and plain sick all at once and it can play tricks with your mind. The interaction between characters is comical, as everyone is so self absorbed that half the time they don't know who one another are. But that doesn't really matter: having the right suit, business card and restaurant reservations are important. It's the 80's and image is everything to yuppies living in New York city.
List Price: £7.99
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Author:
Cormac McCarthy
By Picador
Sensational, 2008-09-29
I started reading this book about a month ago, but put it down after fifty pages. I could tell that I needed to read this in long sittings, and not twenty minutes here and there. So then I read it again on holiday.
It is not an easy read - you have to work at it. McCarthy's prose is stripped back to the very bones, much punctuation is missing and there are no chapters. And the book is repetitive - the man and the boy get hungry, look for food and somewhere safe to stay, find them and do the same again.
But the overall effect is shattering. The world he conjures up in the aftermath of the apocalypse is stunningly realised, and the bleakness of life, the descent of humanity back into savagery and the man and the boy carrying the flame is almost too much at times. There is a lot of bleakness, a lot of misery and despair (and no, not many laughs). But always there is an indefatigability and a flicker of hope.
I've not been affected as much by a book for a long long time. The starkness of the writing and the bleakness of much of the book will be offputting for some, but this is worth the effort and I cannot recommend it too highly.
List Price: £7.99
Our Price: £3.50
Author:
Don DeLillo
By Picador
Love this book..., 2007-06-20
This is one of my all time favourite books. Contrary to other reviews, I found this the most accessible of Delillo's fiction. It's a humerous look at the state of modern American culture.
Exposure to an 'airborne toxic event' causes Jack to confront his own mortality and seek out a black market drug called Dylar to allay his fear of death. This book is brimming with witty observations and ridiculous dialogue. The character of Murray is laugh out loud funny. Definitely worth reading!
List Price: £9.99
Our Price: £4.82
Author:
Graham Robb
By Picador
Unification and what was lost along the way, 2008-10-07
Visiting relatives in France, I often drive down the A26 autoroute over the plain of Champagne: mile after mile of chalk plateau, with never a village or house in sight. I've often wondered how this landscape looked before motor transport, when getting from your house to work the fields involved horse-power or your own feet: was the settlement pattern denser, with hamlets and villages now swept away by the depopulation following agribusiness, or has it always been this empty? Graham Robb answered this for me in this splendid study of the making of modern France: it always was this empty, to the extent that in early cartographic surveys of the country the attempt to find landmarks on this featureless plain led even to particularly conspicuous trees finding their way onto national maps.
Robb is both a historian and expert on France, and someone who has cycled extensively in the country, and he brings to his historical work a grounding in the sheer physicality of the land that I don't remember encountering in a comparable historical work before: he is intensely aware of the distances, the physical effort involved in traversing them, and the network of minor roads and tracks that form a network below the sightline of the motorway driver. He is equally good on the sights, sounds and smells of the French landscape. This appreciation of the physical landscape informs his discussion of how, at the start of the early modern period, much of France was a foreign country to its rulers and the citizens of its capital: remote, difficult to reach, self-sufficient, perhaps only recently added to the kingdom, living according to customs and rituals remote from Parisian practices, and speaking at best a patois of French that the cultivated metropolitan found incomprehensible (and in many cases a completely different language: Occitan, Flemish, German, Basque).
Melding this vast and remote landscape into a unified nation-state involved, Robb indicates, vast acts of state-enforced forgetting, with regional differences ironed out by a centralising state (having seen my nieces go through the rigid centralised French school curriculum, I won't argue with that). Vast riches of local peculiarities, many vanished, are brought together by Robb in this volume: be prepared to bore anyone you live with by reading out a snippet every other page. (Cafés in Paris, for example, were - and still are - disproportionately run by immigrants from the Auvergne. Want to know why? - read the book.) It's a lively read, a chance to wallow in the particularities of the French landscape, a study that raises all sorts of questions about the nation-state, its relationship to "minorities" and the extent to which it has to enforce homogeneity; my only complaint was that it was over too soon.
List Price: £8.99
Our Price: £3.58
Author:
Oliver Sacks
By Picador
A Fascinating Read, 2008-02-15
A neurologist, Oliver Sacks, discussed and brought to light the neurological disorders in case by case in this book with an interesting choice of the title: "Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat." This is the first book by Sacks that I have read, and I found his writing style to be quite enjoyable.
Not only that, this book contains an extraordinary collection of cases of individuals with neurological disorders that brings one to understand a bit on how human brain works. While this book was first published in the early 1970s and the understanding of the human brain mechanism has changed and increased since then, I found this book to be very insightful.
Out of all the cases I have read from this book, I found the following cases (or stories) to be of great interest to me: "Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat," "The Man Who Fell Out of Bed," "Witty Ticcy Ray," "Cupid's disease," and "The Autist Artist."
This book is a fascinating read and deeply recommended.
List Price: £7.99
Our Price: £1.87
Author:
Cormac McCarthy
By Picador
A journey to the dark side, 2008-09-28
A long time ago a very astute reviewer said of Herman Melvilles great novel Moby Dick,"A polar wind blows through it and and birds of prey hover over it". A very fitting description of Cormac McCarthys "Blood Meridian" which it resembles.Both the Judge and Ahab are the Devil personified. Both lead their men to destruction over time and vast forbidding terrains. Ahab over the savage seas and The Judge over the stark lunar landscapes of the West. The characters in both books head towards inexorable destruction.
The book is a Western set in that time and place. But it does not slot easily into that genre. I can think of no Western that I can compare it with. Alan LeMays character Amos Edwards in "The Searchers" is a similarly dark character but he is not the devil himself. Aside from Moby Dick I can only compare it with certain Old Testament passages or perhaps an eighteenth century Gothic horror story. The setting I feel is irrelevant. I note one reviewer has read this novel five times such was its power. It has a terrifying beauty that has the strange ability to transfix you like the Gorgons head. You know you are looking at dark forces but are unable to avert your eyes. You are appalled yet compelled. I can understand the compulsion to go back to this book again and again. Could I ? I dont believe so. The novel is just too deep a look into mans heart of darkness. But read it once you must. The power of McCarthys writing takes the breath away. It possesses a strange biblical cadence. Yes it is also visceral, have no illusions, but for all that it is some of the most potent stuff I have read. He has his own unique style which the truly great painters and film makers possessed and he is stamped with the same hallmarks of greatness. Dare I say I believe his writing is as visionary as any of the last centuries writers. A bold claim I know. I can think of no author who can describe landscape better. Contemporary or otherwise. Only time will testify to the truth of this statement. McCarthy can make an unpromising plot mesmerising. Read "The Crossing" to evidence this.
Blood Meridian is set in the 1840s American/Mexican West. It covers the activities of a gang of scalphunters who leave rivers of blood in their wake. It was a period when this area was being laid waste in a scorched earth policy carried out by the Apache Indians. Mexico just South of the border was particularly hard hit. The Apache had warred with the Mexicans for centuries. The hatred ran deep between the two and atrocities were an everyday occurrence. The perfect setting for the nightmare vision that is Blood Meridian.
One can read many things into this film. Many of which may be correct. You must read it yourself and interpret it in your own way. Reading can be a very personal journey. For myself I just saw a rapid and spiralling descent into the dark recesses of the human soul. Aside from the Judge the other characters are not worth mentioning other than to say that they have not a single redeeming feature amongst them. They are a glimpse into those dark places where mans worst vices lurk. No depravity is beneath them. But there is a price to be paid come the final reckoning. They will be judged. The Devil himself lies in wait. He does not age and he laughs at the folly of men. He sees that man never learns from past mistakes. They keep him in business. This keeps him happy so that he can play his fiddle and dance to the end of time.
List Price: £7.99
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Author:
Alice Sebold
By Picador
A great read, 2008-10-13
I picked this up in the airport on the way to visit my 88 year old mother, when you read the book you will know why that seemed to fit my needs :) I was hoping for an interesting read and was captivated from the first page. The story covers a 24 hour period and that is exactly how long it took me to read it-great stuff from a writer that can tap into the dark night of the soul.
List Price: £7.99
Our Price: £0.72
Author:
Cormac McCarthy
By Picador
Awesome, 2008-10-07
It has been years since I read a Cormac McCarthy and I had forgotten just what a fantastic writer he is, one of the best living American writers for sure and deserved of all the praise heaped on him.
A slimmer book than many of his others, and difficult to read without having the film in mind (which is quite faithful to this), but there are one or two scenes that are crucial to the themes of the novel that you wonder why they never made it into the movie.
The narrative voices are superb. And the economy of the language that you just wish that British writers could master, but you realise this is something that seems to run through good American writers' veins and cannot be acquired.
He is the nearest writer I have seen to a modern-day Faulkner.
A true master and I think it is time I re-read some of his earlier novels.
List Price: £8.99
Our Price: £0.65
Author:
Peter Godwin
By Picador
Heart-breaking and deeply moving, 2008-08-07
Peter Godwin was born in Rhodesia, and in 1996 he published 'Makiwa', a gripping account of how he grew up in that country. He was conscripted into the Rhodesian army to fight against the independence movement, by which time he felt that he was fighting in an unjust cause. He eventually got to England, became a journalist, and in 1981, now based in the United States, he returned to what in 1980 had become independent Zimbabwe, partly because his parents were still living there and partly because he loved the country and its people. But he now had to record that the new government of Robert Mugabe was more savage than the white government had been and was carrying out bloody suppression in Matabeleland - a sign of things to come. Godwin's reporting at that time made him persona non grata and he had to leave Zimbabwe again, though he was able to return after Mugabe had `stabilized' the country with the so-called Unity Accord in 1987.
This second volume, first published in 2006, is an account of several later visits, beginning with one in 1996. In the chapters relating to 1996, 1997 and 1998, Mugabe's dictatorship is not central to his account, though of course he is aware of it; but he is more concerned with the quite non-political aspects of his family's life. At this time Mugabe had not yet whipped up anti-white agitation. Indeed he had for years encouraged white people to stay and help the Zimbabwean economy. In fact, in the year 2000, "78% of white farmers were on property they had purchased after independence, only when that land had first been offered to -and turned down by - the government, as was required by law" (p.56).
Godwin's next visit was in 2000. That year Mugabe wanted to change the constitution to allow him another 12 years in power; and this change had to be ratified by a referendum. To get the new constitution accepted, he inserted in it a law allowing the seizure of white-owned farm land for redistribution to black peasants (though in fact most of it went to his cronies). His instrument for this were the so-called war veterans, and violence against whites now took off, under such thugs as those calling themselves `Hitler' Hunzvi and `Stalin Mau Mau'. When Mugabe lost the referendum, he unleashed violence also against Tsvangirai's newly created Movement for Democratic Change (MDC).
In 2001 there was a total eclipse of the sun over Zimbabwe, and, unusually, there was another one in 2002. The folklore expression for this is that `a crocodile eats the sun', and it is considered the worst of omens. Godwin now chronicles in the most graphic manner the increasing horror of Mugabe's appalling regime and the descent of Zimbabwe into chaos and lawlessness: the ruin of agriculture; the displacement of millions of black farm workers; famine; the government's deliberate withholding of food supplies from areas where the opposition is strong; hyper-inflation; casual murders and robberies, with the police either unwilling to intervene or actually participating in them. Among the many grotesque vignettes: cemeteries plundered, patches of maize planted between the graves, and befouled with excrement; the RSPCA being given permission to evacuate tortured animals from farms - when their white owners are not allowed to leave their besieged homes. Godwin is there during the General Strike of 2003 and its brutal suppression.
But this is not only a journalist's book about Zimbabwe. It is also a touching story of a loving family. The scenes with his gallant and now impoverished, sick and aged parents - who, beleaguered as they are, refuse to leave Zimbabwe - are deeply moving. And there is an unexpected dimension. On a visit in 2001, when he is in his forties, Peter Godwin learns that his father, George, now 77, was not in fact the reserved Anglo-African he had always taken him to be, but was born a Polish Jew. Only now can George bring himself to talk and write about it. The revelation has an immense impact on his son, who inserts a couple of chapters to tell the story of George's Warsaw childhood, how, just before the war, he came to leave Poland as a teenager, without his family. George's mother and sister later perished in Treblinka. Peter Godwin had heard of Auschwitz and Belsen, but (somewhat surprisingly for a journalist) he had never heard of the other extermination camps, which he now researched and whose horrors he then describes.
This beautifully written book is a lament for Zimbabwe, but it is also a tribute to his parents, and it is dedicated to his father's memory.
List Price: £7.99
Our Price: £2.15
Author:
Alice Sebold
By Picador
On her way home from school on a snowy December day, 14-year-old Susie Salmon is lured into a cornfield and brutally raped and murdered, the latest victim of a serial killer. The Lovely Bones, Alice Sebold's haunting and heartbreaking debut novel, unfolds from heaven, where "life is a perpetual yesterday" and where Susie narrates and keeps watch over her grieving family and friends, as well as her brazen killer and the sad detective working on her case. As Sebold fashions it, everyone has his or her own version of heaven. Susie's resembles the athletic fields and landscape of a suburban high school: a heaven of her "simplest dreams", where "there were no teachers... We never had to go inside except for art class... The boys did not pinch our backsides or tell us we smelled; our textbooks were Seventeen and Glamour and Vogue". The Lovely Bones works as an odd yet affecting coming-of-age story. Susie struggles to accept her death while still clinging to the lost world of the living, following her family's dramas over the years. Her family disintegrates in their grief: her father becomes determined to find her killer, her mother withdraws, her...
Gentle accounts of heavy subjects, 2008-09-09
I was captivated as soon as I realised that the narrator of the tale is doing so from the spirit world, a refreshing perspective, and spoken through the mind of a child the descriptions of the mechanics of mortal and astral metaphysics are explained accurately and simply. There is great insight in this book, not only in respect of the above, but in the understanding of the mind of the serial killer and the tortured childhood that made him what he became. The stigma communities pour onto to those who are different in some way,(e.g. the Ellis boy), and the prejudices they hold is also touched upon, along with the gross misconception that those who appear polite, normal and act in a regular fashion must be inherently good people.
The tale is great but the greater depth is in what is written between the lines, the slights and references to things deeper and unsaid, and how the novel weaves fragments of information back to earlier references in a most elegant style.
Well worth reading, although I thought that the ending was incongruous as though the book had been hastily finished, or the final chapters replaced with a new "happy ending" so as to please the American mass market. This then, after a gripping and touching realistic account, made it seem less real, as life does not usually turn out to be that kind or tidy.
Overall it has become one of the books I will namecheck and recommend, and look forward to reading again: the true litmus of value!
Readers who enjoyed this may also be interested in the non-fiction classic "Testimony of Light" by Helen Greaves, as it narrates form a similar perspective, although is without any nasty bits!
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