I missed the last couple of waffles because I was absent with no internet, which just doesn’t work terribly well for blogging.

However, getting back to this in style, by actually posting on the correct day: welcome to the 4th weekly wednesday waffle! Today the lucky number is… 427!

Well, first of all, apologies for the poor quality of image, I actually took this one myself a few years ago. Onto the more important things, though, this is actually quite a special book for me. Partly because it always has been, and partly because I connect it with an experience I had with my father, who died nearly a year ago.

I picked it up in a tiny tiny art gallery in Cornwall. Dad and I had gone in and were looking around at all the paintings, which I recall being quite interesting. As always, though, my eyes fell on the table of books and among them there was this very slim plain black book. I opened it up and flicked through a couple of the poems. They were just really nicely done, quite abstract, quite subtle. I asked the gallery chap about it and it turned out that it was actually his own poetry, and he sold the book in his gallery. So Dad and I (mostly Dad) had a chat to him about his art and his poetry (mostly his poetry, as Dad was quite the poetry conoisseur), and I was still wistfully clutching the book. At which Dad, being the good father and poetry-lover that he was, bought it for me, and Padraig signed it. What a nice chap.

A lot of my time was spent reading through this poems on a beach in Cornwall for the rest of that holiday. So, yes; good memories, good times!

Norwegian Wood is a difficult book to describe, not because too much happens, but because, looking back, it seems like practically nothing happened at all, which is strange, because mainly, whenever I was reading the book, I felt completely absorbed by it. To give a brief synopsis, though; the story is told in the first-person by Toru Watanabe and begins as he sits on a plane, at the age of thirty-seven, listening to an Orchestral version of ‘Norwegian Wood’ by the Beatles. After that, the rest of the nearly four-hundred page book is taken up by Toru’s memories of his time as a student, and his relationship with Naiko, his best friend’s girlfriend, and his burgeoning friendship with another girl called Midori. And that’s about all I can say on the plot, without needlessly spoilering.

The thing is, despite the fact that I finished this book over a week ago, I really can’t seem to sort out what I think about it. The problem, I think, is that my reading of Norwegian Wood was fragmented by other reading that I had to do, and you can’t really get three more different books than Junk, Mortal Engines, and Norwegian Wood, and that worked against Norwegian Wood really badly. I also have to say that, because of all the interruptions, it took me a long time to finish this book, and I can’t help feeling that, if I had read the book straight through I would have enjoyed the book a lot more. That’s not me saying that I didn’t enjoy the book, by the way, as I really did, but it felt, sometimes, like I had started reading one book, and ended up reading another; that’s the only description I can give of how different I found reading the first and second halves of Norwegian Wood.

What really gets to me, though, is that I started out absolutely loving this book, as in ‘this could be one of my all-time favourites’, and closed it, several days later, with the thought ‘Yes, that was a really good book’ and a feeling of quiet disappointment. The first half of the book, where Watanabe talks about his friend’s suicide, moves away from home to go to university in Tokyo, and begins to see Naoko on a regular basis, really made me want to carry on reading, to the point that I would go to bed thinking ‘I wonder what happens next’, and wake up in the morning having to read a section of the book before I did anything else, and I’m not really sure when that feeling disappeared, and reading the last hundred or so pages began to feel like something of a chore. Possibly around the time Watanabe began having his billionth conversation about sex.

The thing is, I’m not a prude, and if these conversations had moved the plot along at all, I would have happily sat through every one of them, but they just didn’t seem to add to the narrative at all, and were so repetitive that I was seriously tempted to throw the book across the room any number of times. There were also a couple of things in the book that really pulled me up short, as a feminist, which I never like. What stopped me from actually throwing the book, however, were those times when, as a reader, I got to see into Watanabe’s private world, when there weren’t a load of two dimensional characters swarming around him. In fact, I would have to say Murakami has created a wonderful character here, and if the book was simply Watanabe remembering a summer, sat on his own in a bedsit somewhere, I still would have loved the book.

Sadly, though, some of the other characters didn’t have the same draw for me, and I found Naoke particularly irritating, which is why I didn’t like the middle section of the book. However, the ending made up for a lot of what I, personally, saw as deficiencies in the story, and, tellingly, I was left wanting to know more about what happened to the characters when the story ended, which is always a good sign. Overall, then, Norwegian Wood is a good, perhaps very good, book, but it wasn’t the book I was expecting, and it suffered for that, in my opinion. Having said that, I would like to have another go at a Murakami book, so if anyone wants to suggest a book of his they loved, I am all ears.

Firstly, it is with much happiness that I find myself back in my flat in London. I’ve been away for work with no access to the internet, and so no blogging. I cope very badly without the internet, I have found: there’s the anxiety (what emails am I getting?), the fear (what if a sudden and dramatic rainstorm is predicted and I don’t know about it so haven’t brought my umbrella?) and the sadness (poor me, for I cannot keep up with the blogging world).

It’s all pretty intense.

So luckily for me, I had a massive book with me to keep me happy and occupied either side of the 11 hour working days and I made the most of it.

The Balkan Trilogy by Olivia Manning is actually made up of three books: The Great Fortune, The Spoilt City, and Friends and Heroes. As it comes in one volume, though, and I glomped it up all at once, I’m going to review it as one book.

Books about WWII are spread thickly across the bookshelves in pretty much any bookshop of repute; and while obviously it’s a huge part of European modern history, it might sometimes seem implausible that anything new could be said about it. Of course, though, there are so many stories to tell and while there are a lot of elements that remain the same – and still significant – there are new perspectives to offer. Certainly I’d never read any literature relating to Athens in the Second World War.

The Balkan Trilogy is not just about the war, though, although that plays a major and compelling part of the narrative; but there’s also a strong character-driven element to it all. That touches where the characters end up, when, and who with.

At the beginning of the Second World War, Harriet marries Guy Pringle, an enthusiastic, giving and personable young lecturer, while he’s on leave. Having travelled back with him to Romania, where he lives and works at the University, she begins to discover that her new husband is enthusiastic, giving and personable, but nonetheless not the person she thought him. For all of his attention and generosity focused on the outside world and affection for all of the people in it (with particular reference to those who share his own brand of left-wing radical politics), there seems to be little energy expended on making Harriet herself happy, and an insensitivity to her needs.

As she learns more about Guy, Romania itself is changing: it begins as a place that feels secure and welcoming to the English couple, but with the threat of invasion from any and all sides, and internal politics that are becoming decidedly askew (not to mention the Jew hiding in their flat), the situation deteriorates, with Harriet feeling alone in a collapsing city. Restaurants and shops that were plentiful become empty, people start to leave, and there are numerous threats. Sticking it out until threats become explicitly focused on them, Guy and Harriet make for Athens.

And so the story repeats: Harriet becomes more distanced from Guy but nonetheless bound to him, and Athens which initially was a sanctuary becomes drawn into the war. The couple are forced to flee as the trilogy ends.

In theory, then, it’s all quite simple. It’s the quality of writing that really makes this worth your time. It’s wonderfully well-observed, both in terms of an account of people and places in wartime, the places that Guy and Harriet live in – and it’s worth noting that a lot of those elements are taken from Olivia Manning’s own experiences – as well as the highly-developed characterisations. There’s nothing flimsy about them or their interactions, and in particular the relationship between Guy and Harriet is complex and intriguing.

Actually, I got so absorbed in this book and the lives of Guy and Harriet that I sometimes felt so very indignant on her behalf that I became slightly inclined to irritability with the people actually around me, and had to remember that, in fact, they were nothing whatsoever like any of the characters. Which is probably good! Because neither Harriet nor Guy are wholly empathetic, but neither are ‘bad’ characters either.

How I reacted to Harriet is in some ways very similar to my reaction to Martha Quest, the central character in Doris Lessing’s Children of Violence series (which I really need to finish some day). I sometimes felt so angry at their treatment by others within an unfair society – as both are constrained and limited by their gender and their role in their relationships – that I became genuinely agitated. One of those moments in The Balkan Trilogy comes when Harriet expresses dismay at being not shown any consideration by Guy, who would rather leave her to her own devices and talk with his own friends; his immediate reaction is shock: why should she get special treatment from him when she is but ‘part of himself’? Equally, any opposition of Harriet’s to him or his political views is seen by him as a sign of her ‘immaturity’. At other times when drawn into their complex inner worlds I felt slightly uncomfortable and claustrophobic about it.

They are very different characters, though. Harriet is far more decisive and forthright and a great deal easier to anger, even if it’s not always channelled in an effective way. Guy is appealing and you want so much to like him, but he’s deeply flawed and frustrating. As a reader, you might well come to the judgement that they are both immature, which evidences itself in different ways.

I’ve focused on Guy and Harriet but I can’t leave this review without pointing out that there are lots of other characters who are just as clear and fascinating.

It’s a wonderful book, and kept me happily engrossed for the entire 1036 pages to which it stretches. Phew. I highly recommend it. Before I’d even finished the last page, I rushed out to buy the sequel – yeah, I couldn’t believe it had a sequel either – The Levant Trilogy. It’s half the size of the first trilogy, but it looks fascinating and I can’t wait to read it. In fact, I’m so very enthused that I also want to see Fortunes of War, the TV serialisation of the books starring Emma Thompson – because I love her! – and Kenneth Branagh.

Anyway, at 1036 pages all in one volume, you betcha bottom dollar that I’m going to be including this in my books for the Chunkster Challenge.

I’d also be interested to hear people’s thoughts on their own experiences with WWII fiction?

Mortal Engines, the first part of a quartet by Philip Reeve, is a children’s book set in a dystopian future, after “the sixty minute war” has destroyed the surface of the Earth, where Municipal Darwinism is seen as the only way of life, and traction towns, cities built to move across the wasteland of what was once Europe, hunt each other down and devour each other for resources.

The narrative is split into two, with Tom Natsworthy, an Apprentice Historian, and Hester Shaw, a terribly scarred girl who attempts to kill Tom’s hero, head Historian Thaddeus Valentine, featuring in one strand, and Katherine Valentine, Thaddeus Valentine’s daughter, featuring in the other. What is so wonderful about the narrative, though, is how these two narratives weave around each other, before finally coming together into one explosive denoument. What is even more wonderful is how the characters are so beautifully drawn and developed as both Katherine and Tom, especially, discover that Valentine, and London itself, are nowhere near as perfect as they imagine.

It is, of course, very easy to dismiss Mortal Engines as “only” a children’s book (a phrase that, given my choice of course, really grates on me), but there is no sense of Philip Reeve talking down to his readers, and there is no intrepid, flawless hero character to save the day; at one point Tom, realistically, actually wets his pants when first faced with a Stalker (a cyborg created from the corpse of a soldier), which is something I’ve never come across in a book for children before, as far as I can remember. In fact, I have to say, there is no flawless character in the book; what marks the “good” from the “bad” is merely the damage that each flaw leads to, in the world at large. There is no simplistic moral code in this book.

Further, the book has a lot to say, though not in a particularly didactic manner, about the inability of people to learn from the mistakes of the past, no matter how bad those mistakes were; a subject that is particularly potent, considering the books environmental and post-war themes. Even considering the terrible effects that war and pollution have caused, there are still many characters in the book who are willing to start the whole thing off once more.

If I have made the book sound terribly depressing, however, that is far from the truth; there are many instances of genuine humour in Mortal Engines, and it is a testament to Reeve’s skill as a writer that he often juxtaposes these moments with some of the darkest moments in the story. He also highlights the ability of just a few people to genuinely make a difference in the world.

Overall, then, I loved, this book, but I don’t think I’ll be reading the rest of the quartet, not because I don’t think that they will be wonderfully written (because I do) but because, having sneakily looked at the blurbs for the other three books, I don’t think that they can match up to Mortal Engines for me, and, besides, I’ve got my own ideas about what I would like to happen to my favourite characters, and I’m sticking to them, but Mortal Engines still works as a stand-alone book.

Reeve has also written another series, so far a trilogy, set in an alternative Victorian Era that involves space travel, and begins with Larklight, and, if it is written in the same wonderful style as Mortal Engines, looks to be fantastic.

Junk, by Melvin Burgess, is the story of Gemma and Tar; Tar runs away to Bristol to escape his physically abusive father and his emotionally abusive mother. Before long, however, Gemma has decided that she wants to run away too, as her parents have started keeping her in against her will (which I can’t help thinking is reasonable, considering she’s fourteen at the time), and she joins Tar in Bristol. It’s from this point on that their story really becomes harrowing.

Before long they have become involved in stealing, heroin, drug-dealing. The girls become prostitutes, there are teen pregnancies, overdoses, deaths. If you think I am needlessly spoilering, you’re wrong; the whole story becomes heart-breakingly inevitable from the moment Gemma and Tar get their first hit. I will say, though; at least one of the two seems to escape their addiction, by the end of the book.

I found the book, sometimes, almost too harrowing to bear. What was most difficult, for me personally, was the willingness with which the two central characters seemed to embrace their downfalls, and their blindness to their own addiction. However, the whole book is written in the first person, and so what Gemma and Tar don’t tell you about their lives is revealed in the portions of the text where other, minor, characters take over the narrative.

I won’t deny, either, that Burgess is a gifted writer; his ability to create a distinct, recognisable voice for even the smallest character is exemplary, and, even while I was completely appalled by some of the characters and their actions, I was still compelled to read on until I reached the end. Nevertheless, it’s not a book that was really written to be enjoyable, and I certainly didn’t enjoy the experience of reading Junk; I don’t even know if I would have made it to the end of the book if I hadn’t had to read the book for a course. All I do know is that I am relieved to have reached the end of it, and, now that it is finished, I am glad that I read it.

On my own, the subject would not have appealed to me, I probably wouldn’t have even picked the book up, and I think I would have been missing out. Junk is compelling, masterfully written, and well worth a read. It’s just not for the faint-hearted.

Well, I am shortly to be banished to Another Place for work purposes for two weeks. I should have internet access, but I will be rather more elusive than usual. So I have been making the most of the weekend while it lasts!

It was an absolutely glorious day up here in North London yesterday. So warm that I ventured out without a coat for the first time this year! I didn’t really have any pressing commitments, so I wandered off to partake of one of my favourite weekend pastimes: scouring the local charity shops for new books.

I found two things that I really wanted: Snow by Orhan Pamuk, and another A.S. Byatt (as I’ve been loving her work for the last couple of years), The Virgin in the Garden.

I already knew I wanted them when I saw them, and they seemed in pretty good condition, better than most of the books I get in charity shops, so I just bought them without really doing much more than going “Oooh!” and reading the back covers to remind myself why I wanted them.

It was, therefore, when I got home that the mayhem began. I sat down in the evening to have a bit of a flick through to familiarise myself with my lovely new books, but as I got up close and personal with Snow I discovered that all was not right…

Dun dun DUUUNNNN! Somebody has dog-eared a page. I have now remedied this poor, sad, state of affairs and have talked soothingly to the book to promise that it will never be so misused again.

Phew, that was a close one.

I hesitantly picked up the next, and I was rather taken aback by what I found. I looked again. I grabbed my boyfriend and shoved the book in his face, too.

It’s not often you find a book signed by the author in a charity shop! Look! Signed!

Ah, ’twas a day of ups and downs, but I do rather feel that the pleasures were greater than the perils on this occasion. I do love a good bit of charity shopping, you really never know what you’ll turn up.

This was the first book I’ve managed to snag from LibraryThing’s Early Reviewers project, which was all terribly exciting. So I wanted to love it. Like so many things, though, it didn’t quite work out that way; but it wasn’t disappointing either.

The Widow’s Tale is a book written entirely in the first person, by a nameless widow who has fled to Norfolk three months after the death of her husband. Not much is given away to start with, we don’t really know who she is and just why she’s abandoned her comfortable London home for the Norfolk saltmarshes. The reader follows her inner monologue as she trudges about in Norfolk, going for long walks, seeking out and then hiding away from hordes of the religious, and drinking rather a lot.

Given the nature of the book, it’s the character of the protagonist that is the major driving force, and I suppose where the novel gets both its strengths and its weaknesses. She’s an odd character, a complete mixture, who combines acerbic wit with defiance, but also a sprinkling of traditionalism, cliche, and rigidity. I suppose in one way that made her work as a character currently working through grief, which is a disorientating experience if anything is. Sometimes the narrative followed this, by being a confusing jumble of thoughts and activities, which actually worked quite well. At other moments it was simply jarring and didn’t fit well. She was, at any rate, an interesting choice, and often quite funny.

I do think that the book got into its stride more as the narrative wore on. The actual story is quite simple. There was a husband, and for a short period of time there was a lover, and the existence of the latter made it much harder to deal with the loss of the former. The observation of grief as an emotion, though, could be stunningly acute. To the extent that I wouldn’t recommend it for somebody currently dealing with their own. I think it would be too much to take. This is definitely one of the aspects of the book that is a success, though. Those passages are really very well observed, and the current of grief-induced confusion sustained (mostly) throughout feels very real. Without wanting to over-personalise, I did find myself very able to relate to the experience of loss as depicted in The Widow’s Tale.

I’m not sure I’d seek out something else by Mick Jackson, but I wouldn’t turn my nose up at it, either.

Yeah okay, so I got kind of thrown off my the long weekend. It is the third day of the working week, though, so I stand by doing the waffle today!

Courtesy of the randomiser, I have number… 340!

O… oh dear.

I have a bit of a problem with this. The thing is, I like Ted Hughes. Really, I do! I do I do! But you may never believe me after I say that I have actually never even looked inside this book. Which is partly because I got it not long before I moved off to university, but it’s no excuse really.

The real reason is that with certain things – poetry and music albums, primarily – I’m a bit monomaniacal about it all. Once I’ve found a book of poetry by a particular poet, or an album by a new band/singer, and decide I really like it, I get a bit obsessive. I’ll read or listen to the relevant item over and over, but will I branch out to other things that the creative type in question is responsible for? Will I heck.

It’s not really deliberate, which is why, for instance, I buy things like these really rather attractive volume, only to never touch it. When I realise what I’m doing, there’s the guilt and the discomfort; all of which is eased so readily by turning to a nice familiar book of poetry. Like… Birthday Letters, or Crow. Ah, it is indeed a vicious cycle.

This Waffling feature is really not highlighting the best aspects of my reading.

So okay, I’m going to make this pact, right here, right now. I will read volumes of poetry by poets I like that I haven’t yet read. I may even start with Carol Ann Duffy, because I have three handy volumes of her poetry right here. It’s on!

I have been meaning to read Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijie for an absolute age, but looking as unassuming as it does, it constantly got pushed to the bottom of my TBR pile, and so it has been hanging about my collection for years without getting a look in. However, looking for something short to read in the little time that is not taken up with studying at the moment, I saw it on my shelves and was suddenly reminded of why I had been so intrigued in the first place.

The story is set in China in the early 1970s, a period I have to confess to knowing little about, and recounts the exploits of two young men, the narrator and his friend Luo, who have been sent, along with many other adolescent children of bourgeouis parents, to be “re-educated” by the workers in the mountains, after all the universities in china were closed. While they are in the mountains two significant events shape the pattern of their days, and indeed the whole plot. Firstly, they meet the eponymous ‘Little Chinese Seamstress’, the daughter of the only tailor on the mountain, and the most beautiful girl in the area, and Luo begins an affair with her, and, secondly, they discover that a fellow exhile is hiding a suitcase full of forbidden European novels.

The plot is pretty simple, and I can’t say much without spoilering, but the real strength of the novella is, in any case, the descriptions of the books the two boys read, and the effect this has on them after years of being limited to engineering textbooks and Mao’s ‘Little Red Book’. The forbidden novels are the first fictional books the two boys have ever read, as well as the first European books. It certainly made me realise to what extent I take the almost unlimited access to books that we have in our society.

I would also be quite interested to know how autobiographical the story is, as the author bio at the front says that Dai Sijie ‘was himself ‘re-educated’ between 1971 and 1974…[and]…left China in 1984 for France, where he still lives and works’, and this certainly fits in with the narrator’s obsession with French literature. Nevertheless, Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress is not by any means a flawless book, at least to my mind. The narrative voice, while it can be beautifully expressive and descriptive, sometimes comes across as quite crude, which can be quite jarring. Similarly, the narrator sometimes goes off on a completely unrelated, and seemingly unnecessary, tangent, which would be fine in a longer book, but in a novel of under 180 pages seems needlessly distracting, and irritated me after a while. Still, overall, I did enjoy the story, and I wouldn’t rule out reading any of Dai Sijie’s other books, but I won’t be raving about this book any time soon.

After the comments on my last post about just how stunning the cover of The Children’s Book is – which is undeniably so – I’ve been looking at the rest of the book covers in my collection. While I agree that it’s no guide to content, a well-groomed book cover can be a delight to behold.

So without further ado, here are what I judge to be the nicest of book covers in my collection. I excluded art books and cookery books because, quite frankly, that’s cheating. We all know that cake and Chagall are dashed sexy.

1. The Children’s Book by A.S. Byatt: Well, obviously. I think that there are many beautiful book covers in this world, and this just is one of them.












2. The Siege by Helen Dunmore: Given the subject matter – the siege of Leningrad – I think this cover works beautifully. It’s sparse and cold and a little unreal; and I find it a nicely balanced cover.












3. On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan: Love it or hate it (and I love it), McEwan’s cover before he went all Solar on us is a nicely understated piece, which again is something that I think works well with the novel itself. I love that big big sky with its subtle variations, and the contrast between that and the beach below. The teeny tiny figure gives a good sense of perspective, too, without being boringly wistful and pensive (because, hey, she’s too far away).




4. Titus Andronicus by William Shakespeare (The Arden Shakespeare edition): The play is pretty yucky and bloodthirsty, if I’m permitted to call a Shakespeare play ‘yucky’, but the cover is stunning. A wise choice also to not necessarily show the visuals of all the brutality right there on the front. A little imagination goes a long way! Although incidentally, there have been some really interesting stagings of this play over the years, and the violence in it, which I’d quite like to see. Anyway, the cover. I like the blank, chiselled face which draws your gaze right in, and the lovely rich red and orange-tones.




5. The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists by Robert Tressell: I love this book, and have seen lots of covers of it. This one, which I own, is definitely my favourite of the bunch. Nothing amazingly fancy, and perhaps it seems a bit anomalous alongside my other choices, but there’s just something I really like about this cover. The bold colours, the lines of the figure, and the splodgy splodgy paint, just all combines quite nicely, I think.




While we’re on the subject of covers, has anybody else seen any of the new Harry Potter covers? They’ve all been repackaged. Personally, I’m still a fan of the tried and tested, colourful, ‘children’s’ covers, but I guess I’m just kicking it old school.

Anybody else got thoughts on good book covers past, present and future?