All has been quiet on the blog lately, due to excessive levels of busy-ness. I have been reading, however, and what’s more I even tried to blog a couple of days ago, only to be met by Epic Computer Fail (ECF) in the middle of it, and losing everything I’d written. Highly irritating! By that point, I was sleepy and went to bed rather than re-typing. Hence the frustration.

Castle in the Air

The Lives of Christopher Chant (The Chrestomanci Series)

The Museum of Innocence

* Tess of the D’Urbevilles made me ridiculously sad. Way to pull at the heart strings, Thomas Hardy!

And now a word from the resident gnome…

Alphonse

Finally getting to grips with the big stuff, eh? Well well. Seems like a good choice. Lots of other big books with long words out there, though, so don’t you stop now.

And speaking of Diana Wynne Jones books, I was reminded this week about Alan Garner, and his brilliant fiction. Why not have another bash through those books, eh?

Anybody else other than a humble gnome remember Alan Garner, and his Weirdstone of Brisingamen, or the Owl Service?

Anyway, that’s one book notched up for the Chunkster Challenge, at 532 pages. Now for the next!

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The Whole Wide Beauty

Emily Woof

I really wanted to like this book, another LibraryThing early reviewers book, and there were certainly elements of the book that I enjoyed, but, for me,the whole wide beauty was slightly disappointing. Despite this, I certainly wouldn't rule out reading another book by Emily Woof, as most of the problems I had with the novel were with the characters, rather than the plot or the writing.

Woof's writing is clear, concise, and highly descriptive, and in some passages of the book she shows that she possesses a highly inventive turn of phrase, and a beautiful lyrical style. There are some parts of the book that are also very moving, especially the ending.

The plot, too, is interesting and multi-layered, with the story of Katherine, a retired dancer having an affair with her father's protegee, running parallel with the story of her father's attempts to save the poetry foundation he has spent his life trying to build up. There are also several more sub-plots interweaving with the main story, all with varying degrees of interest.

What really let the book down for me, then, were the character's themselves. It wasn't exactly that there was a lack of characterisation within the whole wide beauty, or that the characters were unbelievable, but more that the characters themselves were highly unlikeable, at least to me. I found the level of self-absorption of the characters highly irritating, and at points almost sickening; at one point Katherine, who works in a school for mentally disturbed children, watches a boy repeatedly bang his head against a piano, to the point of making himself bloody, and yet all she can really think about is her own reaction to the incident, and whether she can cope with it, and there are several similar, though less violent, incidents throughout the book.However, this was a very personal reaction to the characters, and other people might not see the same thing in the characters that I did.

Overall, I am glad that I had the opportunity to read the book, which is probably not a book I would have picked up in a bookshop on my own, and the whole wide beauty is certainly a promising and highly accomplished debut novel. I would certainly be interested to read another book by Woof, and can't help wishing that I had been able to empathise with the characters to a greater degree.

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Ingo

Helen Dunmore

Ingo is the first book in a tetralogy for teenage readers, and, to my shame, the first book by Helen Dunmore that I have ever read, although I have several of her novels for adults in my library. However, I can easily imagine the traits that make Ingo such an exceptional book carrying over into her adult fiction.

The story is narrated in the first person by Sapphire, an adolescent girl living in Cornwall, whose father disappears from his boat one night and is presumed dead by everybody except Sapphire and her brother Connor. It is only when Connor disappears briefly as well that the key to their father's mysterious disappearance is revealed to the siblings as they discover they have Mer blood, and the ability to survive in the underwater domain of Ingo.

There is a strange, eerie quality to much of the writing in Ingo that lingers in the mind long after you have finished reading, but the book is undoubtedly beautifully written, with wonderful pacing, and Dunmore is clearly incredibly gifted when it comes to description, both of the local Cornish landscape and the underwater world of Ingo. Furthermore, she has created unique, sensitive and highly likeable characters in Sapphire and Connor.

Helen Dunmore also has an amazing gift for mixing the bigger issues into her narrative, and passages describing over-fishing, oil-spills, and other ecologically disastrous events are all mixed into Sapphires discovery of Ingo. I am so glad this book is part of a series, though, as I really didn't want the book to end, and I will definitely be reading the rest of these books at the first possible opportunity.

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Toilet-aquarium

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First up, on this lovely relaxing Sunday morning let's start with the Sunday happies! I've been looking forward to Not the TV Book Group since Kirsty at Other Stories blogged about it a little while ago. It's a fun project, and I find that on this, The Guardian and I are of the same mind.

The book is marred by unidiomatic or unintelligible phrases and clueless syntax; by expressions such as ‘the forger being’, ‘man’s work equal’, ‘the adulteress wife’, and ‘leisure in château life’; and formulations such as ‘because since woman is certainly to a large extent man’s invention’, ‘a condition unique to France is that of the unmarried woman’, ‘alone she does not succeed in separating herself in reality’, ‘this uncoupling can occur in a maternal form.’ The translation is blighted by the constant use of ‘false friends’, words that sound the same but don’t mean the same in the two languages

Seemingly, that isn't even as bad as it gets. Alas, I think I'd find reading the new translation just too much of a chore. I like my feminist philosophy like I like my food menus: legible. Mmmm. Cake.

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Griffin and Sabine: An Extraordinary Correspondence

Nick Bantock

I only received the Griffin and Sabine box set this week, for my birthday, although I have been hankering after this trilogy for a long, long time.

Nick Bantock, the author, is a fully trained artist, and it clearly comes across in the books, which are half graphic novel, and half epistolary novel. The letters in the novel are written between two artists, Griffin Moss and Sabine Strohem, who have never met, and are separated by thousands of miles.

The story begins when Griffin receives his first letter from Sabine, who claims to be able to see what he is painting while he works by some form of remote viewing, and moves on from there to become a beautiful, enganging, and highly original love story.

Sabine’s Notebook

Nick Bantock

Each of the letters can be taken out of their envelopes, and read as if they were a genuine letter that had been accidently stumbled across, creating a wonderfully intimate atmosphere for the books, and meaning that the novels were a tactile, as well as a literary, pleasure to read.

However, it is not just the novel concept behind the books that make them such a joy to read; the artwork is genuinely superb, and, somehow, Bantock has managed to create two individual, and yet complementary, styles for his protagonists, both in their artwork and their writing styles, that makes the idea of their being somehow, inexplicably, connected entirely believable in this strange and compelling literary universe. I don't want to say any more about the story, in case I spoiler.

Golden Mean: In Which the Extraordinary Correspondence of Griffin & Sabine Concludes

Nick Bantock

Nevertheless, the story genuinely made the hairs stand up on the back of my neck in some places, and, while I didn't want the story to end, I couldn't put the books down, and just had to keep on reading and reading until I was finished.

I was really worried that the books wouldn't live up to my expectations, once I had finally gotten my hands on them, but, if anything, the Griffin and Sabine trilogy exceeded my high expectations by a mile. 

Yes, the concept is original, and this was a large part of the initial appeal of the books for me, but the plot could easily have been let down by a writer or artist less accomplished than Nick Bantock. Thankfully, Bantock has enough skill in both fields to make the book not just quirky, but incredibly beautiful, moving, and disturbing in equal measure, and I am incredibly glad that I got the chance to read them.

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Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow

Castle in the Air

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Swallows and Amazons

Arthur Ransome

The wonderful thing about studying children's literature as part of a literature degree is that it gives you a perfect excuse to read children's fiction without anyone thinking you're weird. You can revisit the favourite books of your childhood, but you are also introduced to authors you have never read before, which is the case with Arthur Ransome.

So, onto the review; Swallows and Amazons rocks. Yes, I am aware that's not really a good description of the book, but it does. The children in the book have the kind of childhood that I can't help wishing I had had, one spent sailing and adventuring in a perfect summer setting, living on an island in the middle of a lake, free from parental influence for the most part.

It's a lovely, gentle book, and Ransome really seems to have a great affinity for his readers. I wish I'd read the book fifteen years ago, it would have been the kind of book my nine-year-old self would have read over and over again, but better late than never, as they say. Now I just have to come up with an excuse to read the other eleven books in the series.

Tom’s Midnight Garden

Philippa Pearce

Philippa Pearce's time-slip fantasy, Tom's Midnight Garden, was the second children's book I read this month and, while I did really enjoy it, I didn't love it as much as Swallows and Amazons; it just isn't as whimsical as Ransome's book, and I am a big fan of the whimsy.

Still, the characters are well formed, and the story is very original, and beautifully written, with a twist at the end of the book that was delightful. It's a less action-packed novel than Ransome's, and more psychologically based, but it has its own charm. It just didn't appeal to the child in me as much as Swallows and Amazons, although I'm glad to have read both books, and they are certainly staying in my permanant library after my course has finished.

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Orlando: A Biography (Oxford World’s Classics)

Virginia Woolf

Orlando was the last book I read this January. More than one person had told me that I would enjoy the book, which I had to read for a course in twentieth century literature, and they were right. The book itself is concerned with the eponymous Orlando and his/her travels, from Tudor England to Constantinople, where, for no clear reason, Orlando's gender switches from male to female, and then back to England, where she is still living at the book's time of writing, 1928, as a highly successful female writer.

There was a wonderful synthesis of realism and fantasy in the book which was genuinely enjoyable, and the lighthearted, straightforward style of the work, including the voice of the squeamish, supercilious faux-biographer who narrates the novel, is a far cry from Woolf's other, perhaps more difficult, novels, although all have their wonderful qualities.

Having also read Portrait of a Marriage, about Vita Sackville-West and her husband, last month, I could easily see the parallels between the life of Orlando and that of Vita Sackville-West, on whom the character of Orlando was based, but I still can't work out whether this made the book more or less enjoyable for me. Overall, though, I thought the book was beautifully written, and I'm glad that I took the opportuntity to read it.

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