CATEGORIES

The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, by Haruki Murakami

Turns out the guy who recommended Murakami for Book Club was right – Norwegian Wood is much better than Sputnik Sweetheart (thank goodness), and my review of it will be up soon. I’ve already been recommended another one by him, in fact – The Wind-up Bird Chronicle. A reasonably hefty book, I don’t think I can even try to explain it – and apparently that’s beside the point, anyway. Better not to question it and simply be carried away by Murakami’s brand of magical realism. Oh, how I love magical realism.

River of Smoke, by Amitav Ghosh

This author has the most beautiful covers on his books! Looking at this reminds me a little of The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet cover, which is not so surprising, considering both stories are set in Asia and involve sea voyages! An historical epic novel about the opium trade that is the second in the Ibis Trilogy (Sea of Poppies being the first). It all sounds incredibly glamorous, shipping and exchanging tea and silks from all sorts of exotic places. I don’t know much about the opium trade part of history, but I’m looking forward to learning.

American Tabloid, by James EllroyWhat on earth am I doing reading a crime novel, I hear you ask. I don’t quite know, exactly. I’ve just been told it’s a great way to nosedive into the crime genre, and I wouldn’t mind the chance to be more well-rounded in my reading. American Tabloid is a gritty, ruthless account of the glory days of America – the reign of John F. Kennedy leading up to his assassination in 1963, complete with a myriad of mob killings, extra-marital relations and underground conspiracies. Sounds delicious, don’t you think?

An Instance of the Fingerpost, by Iain Pears

An Instance of the Fingerpost has often been compared to Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose.. Since I haven’t read either, I am not sure the comparison makes much of a difference to me, except I know I’m meant to be impressed. Set in the 1600s, a man dies under suspicious circumstances and the story turns into something of a whodunit, involving four unusual characters who each identify their version of the events. Yet only one will reveal the strange truth. Ooooh, mysterious.

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Have you read, or are you planning to read, any of the above books?

I’m reading seven (yes, SEVEN) books at the moment. It’s no better than a tragedy. I am shameless – I’m putting down one book for a moment only to rip into another book the next. I’m carrying a different one in my handbag on the bus and leaving it in my drawer at work so I can buy another one before I get home. I’m hoarding, over-indulging and bulging with stories and characters and genres and plots.

I’ve taken some time out this morning to ponder why I’m binge-reading so badly. And I’ve thought of a few reasons as to why this might be.

Number one contributor to my book-binging on a normal day is other book reviewers. I read many, many wonderful book blogs, but the one I look forward to the most is Books on the Nightstand. I know I’ve discussed a bit about them before – but my love for them needs to be discussed again, in the hopes that you can learn to love them, too. An American book blog hosted by two people who work in the publishing industry (Ann Kingman and Michael Kindness), Books on the Nightstand posts weekly on the up-and-coming ‘two books we can’t wait for you to read’. The site has become so popular since its launch that it has mugs, t-shirts and bags, and even hosts an annual writers’/readers’ retreat. Their most recent rave is The Last Werewolf, by Glen Duncan, which is becoming very hard for me not to buy – particularly when the hardcover version’s pages are lined with a beautiful blood-red (or so Ann would have me believe).

Very True Blood, don’t you think?

But we’re getting off the main topic here. Maybe the real reason my binge-reading has gone beyond ‘cute and quirky’ into the realm of ‘this-girl-needs-serious-help-or-we’re-going-to-lose-her’ is the loss of Borders bookstore. Writing for an Australian online bookstore blog, it might seem strange and slightly controversial to Boomerang Books’ marketing strategy to be talking about a tanker of a competitor, but as Borders has been so central to my reading experience for many years I feel compelled to talk about how I’ve been affected by the fall of such a giant in the commercial bookworld.

Borders, in all its red glory, was a haven away from the world of Brisbane when I first moved there. I didn’t know many people, and work was giving me a bit of a hard time. So after a long, difficult day, rather than catch the bus home straight away for a few measly hours of mind-numbing television, I’d head down to Borders to enjoy a white hot chocolate and peruse the shelves: my personal brand of meditation. I don’t pretend to like the fact that eBooks are in existence, and I feel that their invention is to blame for what happened. I’m going to try not to be bitter about it all, but walking into our local Borders store the other day and seeing the shelves stripped of books and the backs of the rooms being packed up made it very difficult not to cry.

I don’t know how long it will take before I feel ready to forgive the world for eBooks and the impact they’ve had on paperbacks. But I’m going to try and move on, by reading one (paper) book at a time and trying to rid myself of binge-reading once and for all. Heck, maybe one of these days I’ll even bring myself to buy an eReader. But for now, I need time to grieve.

Goodbye, Borders. You fed my habit of book-bingeing for a large part of my life, and I’ll always remember our time together fondly.

Rest in peace.

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Do you ever binge-read? What are your reasons for doing so?

Isn’t it absolutely despicable when someone promises something and then doesn’t deliver on that promise? Like how I said that Sundays would be reserved for fairytale-themed posts, and then haven’t posted on fairytales on Sundays since.

So I thought I’d start making it up to you, today, by letting you into the secret room of what is possibly my all-time favourite fairytale: Bluebeard.

What is it that attracts me to such a bloody, gory story? Truth is, I like blood and gore in fairytales, just as I like it in Shakespeare (Titus Andronicus) and Greek plays (The Bacchae). There’s just something about a tasteful bucket of blood over a white dress, or a head hanging artfully by its hinges, or the comic tragedy of a child cooked in a pie and served to you for eating. I’m sick, I know. But I’m not the only one.

Bluebeard, the original edition attributed to French fairytale master, Charles Perrault, is the story of a wealthy aristocrat with an ugly blue beard, whose previous marriages are shrouded in mystery. His wives have all disappeared and as a result, the local girls avoid him, lest they themselves be entrapped as Bluebeard’s next wife and suffer the same mysterious fate. Eventually, he is able to convince a young woman to take the plunge, and soon after the wedding Bluebeard presents his new wife with a number of keys for her to explore their extensive home, and one single key for a room which she is never to open. Curiosity, of course, gets the better of the wife and she finds herself inside the room staring into the dead faces of Bluebeard’s previous wives, hanging by hooks on the walls…

So what does the story of Bluebeard signify, if anything? Bluebeard, like most traditional fairytales, has its origins rumoured to be reality. A number of possibilities present themselves – kings, noblemen, serial killers from a century or two earlier. One can’t help but see the connection to all those other famous ‘curiosity-killed-the-cat’ stories, where females are told not to do a certain act and can’t help themselves, gaining knowledge and understanding but paying the price. Unlike Pandora or Eve, however, Perrault’s outcome symbolises an entirely positive female revenge – Bluebeard’s wife and her sister foil his murderous plan, and receive wealth and romantic love as an extra bonus.

In fact, Bluebeard, held to the light, paints a dark picture for males rather than females; any man who might have had a past before marriage and wishes not to speak of it. Traditionally it is the female who often must be seen as the virgin with an unstained past, but the story of Bluebeard heralds a cultural flip-side: the man is at judgment here, and once the reader has confirmed their suspicions that he is a horrible beast, one feels satisfied when he receives his just deserts. This is not the only time gender expectations in marriage are turned on their head – Mr Rochester from Jane Eyre is arguably a Bluebeard himself (though Rochester fans will vehemently deny this interpretation of his actions, I am sure).

For a child born in 1980s, not the 1600s – 1700s where Perrault first contributed to the new literary genre known as the fairytale, nothing was more terrifying (and more exciting) than the story about the bearded dude who liked to polish off his wives. The fact that this particular story continues to horrify and mystify makes Bluebeard the perfect example of our timeless human curiosity, and people’s often unspoken fetish for the macabre.

I promised myself that after reading the desolate, desolate Oryx and Crake, I would turn my thoughts to dystopian novels that are more reasonable. Whatever that means. Super Sad True Love Story seemed like one such ‘reasonable’ dystopian, but in retrospect it has affected me just as much as Atwood’s, though not in entirely the same manner.

I feel it’s important to note that this was my first pick for our newly-fledged book club. To date, we’ve read fiction: I Am Legend, The Elegance of the Hedgehog, and now Super Sad True Love Story. Next time, we’ll be subjected to some non-fiction with Novella Carpenter’s Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer (what an awesome name for an author, huh? Novella). We’ve all chosen books so far that we haven’t read ourselves – though since our regular members are limited to about five or six, it shouldn’t be too long before my turn comes around again and I’ll choose a book that I’ve read and loved. I’m pleased, however, that I went outside my comfort zone with this unusual piece of fiction.

Even though Super Sad True Love Story is a dystopian in that it’s set in a distinctly unfavourable future, it’s also a lot more than that. Lenny Abramov is a cringeworthy nerd, son of Russian immigrants, who falls impossibly in love with one beautiful, young Eunice Park. Reading Lenny through his dairy entries and Eunice through her chatroom-style messages to friends and loved ones, I can’t help but think of that old saying by Charlie Chaplin: “life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long-shot.”

There are some absolute gems scattered throughout the novel – Shteyngart has this incredible ‘speed-style’ way with words, like he’s knocked back a few too many Red Bulls, and yet it feeds so well into the whole fast-paced future thing that the prose will be loved by literature lovers and sci fi fans alike. Shteyngart’s imagination makes the radical seem possible, and even comfortable: I found myself borrowing phrases for my facebook messages to friends, and attempting to visualise what on earth the all-the-rage ‘onionskin’ jeans would look like (if anything at all).

As for the love story part, it’s there, but it’s certainly not traditional. Lenny’s love for Eunice is a little lopsided – Eunice takes a while to warm to his embarrassingly low ‘hotness rating’, his ridiculous contentedness with growing old, and his penchant for reading those smelly old things called ‘books’ – but the love story is beautiful, indeed both supersad and supertrue, and also kind of hilarious. I’m not one to laugh in books, but one morning reading this on the bus to work – the only seat left being that horrid two-seater that faces the back of the bus so everyone can watch your nose run in winter once the bus heater cranks up – I laughed out loud, and didn’t care for once who was watching.

Super Sad True Love Story is not an entirely easy read – mainly due to its length and its strange habit of going off on seemingly-unrelated tangents, but it is a worthy one. Tell me if you don’t laugh at least three times while reading it. Especially during the sad parts.

The Elegance of the Hedgehog is one of those literary phenomenons. You know the ones – plucked from relative obscurity, a story that doesn’t seem like it would appeal to the masses somehow does, and before you know it millions of copies are sold and book clubs everywhere are discussing it and your friend tells you it’s a must-read.

Well, The Elegance of the Hedgehog finally made it onto my book club’s agenda.

Translated into English from its native French, The Elegance of the Hedgehog involves the thoughts and movements of two characters, the first being Renee – a Paris apartments concierge, and the second being Paloma, an adolescent who contemplates the correct frame of mind in which to commit suicide. Her family resides in the apartments at which Renee works.

Our book club had a fairly heated discussion about the novel once we had all finished it, fuelled by wine and tapas at our local haunt. People were of similar opinion – they liked it – up to a point (well, one person hated it and didn’t mind saying so), but overall found it to be a – dare I say it -pretentious read.

The idea of the novel appears to be that the two are largely ignored by the world, but that they are clearly very intelligent and can do such things as ‘appreciate art’, while the rest of the guests and staff at the apartment appear to see them as below the station befitting their intelligence. Paloma’s perspective is distinguished from Renee’s because it takes the form of diary entries with ‘Profound Thoughts’ as titles…but otherwise I couldn’t tell the voices apart. And I wasn’t the only one at book club to have this problem. There are some humorous depictions of fellow guests, but largely the book seems to hinge on addressing the importance of these two characters and their recognition of supreme intelligence in each other. Renee, the book tells us, is the hedgehog, with a refinement belying her external prickles. But i tired early on of being told who was refined and who was not, and found the characters strangely typed, rather than multi-dimensional beings with which I could experience a connection.

While I am glad I read it (it’s so annoying when you’re the last person in the world to read something and so your opinion about unread book means diddley squat), I also didn’t find it a particularly enjoyable read. I would much rather a book that is simple and says what it means to say, than a book that appears intelligent, but allows the message to degenerate into froth and puffery. You can decide for yourself which category The Elegance of the Hedgehog falls into.

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Year of Publication: 2008.
Number of Pages: 336.
Book Challenges: None.

Pressure
Pressing down on me
Pressing down on you

Wherever you have the opportunity to quote something by the immortal David Bowie, do. Freddie Mercury? Ditto.
The reason I’ve started this post with song lyrics (accompanying a tune which is now stuck in your head, most probably), is that I’m feeling – you guessed it – under pressure. Through no one’s fault but my own. And a particular book’s.

My first introduction to Haruki Murakami happened in high school. A friend recommended me Sputnik Sweetheart to read, saying I would love it – I don’t think I was wise enough to truly appreciate the talent that went hand-in-hand with the weirdness of Murukami’s magic realism bent. It was nothing less than a test of our friendship. A friendship which would surely crumble if I did nothing less than love every inch of the Sputnik Sweetheart‘s strange skin. Although I now count magic realism as my favourite literary style to soak in, all I can remember about that first taste of Murakami is the awkwardness of expectation. Expectation not only from my friend, but an expectation from myself that if he liked the book, then I should, no, I must love the book just as much. The characters of Sputnik Sweetheart to my current mind are hazy at best, the storyline non-existent. I’m sure that somewhere in the universe is my parallel self, enjoying the language and the atmosphere of Sputnik Sweetheart without any of the agonies of expectation I have in this world – but unfortunately it’s this world my current self lives in – I had to tell my friend that I didn’t think the book was anything special. Not in those words, of course. I must have sugarcoated it to save feelings. But friends know when you’re not telling the full truth, anyhow.

Since then, I’ve managed to avoid another Murakami book for close to ten years. Up until a few weeks ago, that is.

Murakami must have it in for me.

A friend has chosen Norwegian Wood as his pick for book club. Thus far, each book choice has been unread by the party who chose it. But Norwegian Wood is one of his favourite.books.ever. I respect the guy – and think we’re similar in tastes. Let’s face it, I admire him. His type of intelligence has a certain air of sophistication that I struggle to emulate. And so I’m afraid to read Norwegian Wood, lest I’m found to be a fraud – someone unable to appreciate the beauty of real literature.

The weight of the world is on my shoulders, my friends. I really hope I like this book!

***

Do you ever feel under pressure to like a book?

Is there anything that screams danger and adventure in books more than a journey by ocean?

For my birthday recently, my best bud contributed to my growing Penguin collection, by presenting me with The Odyssey, by Homer. As you can see by the picture to our left, the cover is gorgeously patterned waves of aqua against a forbidding sea-green cloth background, as only Coralie Bickford-Smith knows how to do. It’s been one of my favourites of the Penguin collection so far, and has only recently been trumped by the new version of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (have you seen it?).

I confess, however, that this isn’t the first time that I’ve been dreaming of the salt-spray hitting my face, sails flapping above me, albatrosses circling ever closer. Despite its best efforts, my very pretty new gift of one of the most classic sea journeys ever did not completely satisfy my cravings for the sea air. So I’ve turned to other reads, in the hope that I will be cured of ocean-lust for at least a few months…until it’s warm enough to brave the beach on the coast again.

Beauty Queens, by Libba Bray
I’ve raved enough in the past about Libba Bray’s wonderfully-realised Gemma Doyle trilogy, but this is a true departure from the Victorian boarding school witchcraft I’ve come to love and expect from the author. Beauty Queens, released this month, is the story of pageant contestants who are stranded on a desert island after their plane takes a dive. A satirical take on the whole Lost / Lord of the Flies tale of psychological survival, Beauty Queens doesn’t appear to sugarcoat the beauty queen stereotype – I’m expecting a book where we laugh at the characters’ expense, often. From early blog reports, Beauty Queens is a book you’ll either love, or you just won’t get. I’m interested to see which group I’ll be part of once I sit down to have a read of it. And at the very least, I am a huge fan of the cover (are lipstick bullets not the best invention ever?).

Jamrach’s Managerie, by Carol Birch
Ah, Jamrach’s Managerie. I’m expecting beautiful prose, and a fantastical story of Jaffy the Zookeeper’s assistant, saved from the jaws of a Bengal tiger and sailing the high seas, a story infused with a bit of real-life history too. Not recommended for those with a weak sea-sick-prone stomach, I’ve heard Birch talk of how she was not particularly happy to hear so many readers felt nauseous from the realistic descriptions contained within the novel, but she did like that it moved her readers. I hope it moves me, too – even to cradling the toilet bowl.

Leviathan, by Philip Hoare
Finally, we have Leviathan. Alternately titled The Whale, Philip Hoare explores the wonderful and wacky world of this majestic sea creature. Fascinated by the story of Moby Dick , the author sees the parallels between that classic fictional adventure and the journey of the modern whale, and its strange and often arduous relationship with man.

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Have you read, or are planning to read any of these books? What books have you got to read next on your nightstand?

I reserve Sundays for fairytale reading. Whether it’s a traditional Grimms’, or a new adaptation of a known tale, there’s nothing better than curling up with a hot chocolate and a cupcake in your favourite chair, and following that breadcrumbed path through the woods, and out into another world. And I figure – since I always end up relaxing with them on the weekends – why not share my Fairytale-filled Sundays with the rest of you? Who knows, we might start a phenomenon.

So from now on, every Sunday, expect a fairytale-related post on Poisoned Apples and Smoking Caterpillars. And if you have any suggestions for future posts, or fairytale-related things you’d like me to read, please let me know in the comments.

To kick us off on this fairytale frenzy, I’d like to discuss Beastly, by Alex Flinn. I haven’t actually had the expected pleasure of reading the book, but before any Beastly fans out there protest too loudly, I have recently seen the film version. I’m the first one to say that films and books do not compare – much of the time (in my opinion) film adaptations do not do the book justice. More rarely, sometimes the film adaptation actually does the book more justice than it deserves. For today, I’m just going to pick up on the themes that were interesting, and if I refer to anything that is changed – or not even present – in the book, well – you can politely ignore it.

The story of Beastly borrows the story of Beauty and the Beast and places it in a modern context. Kyle is the most-sought after boy at school, but he knows it. After humiliating a fellow student (who happens to be a witch), the girl seeks her revenge on Kyle by making him ugly in appearance, to reflect his ugliness inside. He has one year, so the spell goes, to make someone love him for who he really is, or else he stays ugly forever. Taking the opportunity to save a maiden in distress from a dangerous situation, beautiful fellow teen Lindy is put under house arrest and forced to interact with the shame-faced Kyle. And you can guess what happens from there…

Despite its many adaptations, I found Beastly to be a surprisingly refreshing spin on the traditional tale. But it is perhaps even more surprising how apt the story is to current-day teen relationships. The need to be accepted is at no age more prominent than during the teen years, and it evokes the right amount of sympathy for Kyle (who truly is a horror at the beginning of the story). We’ve all seen how popularity can turn people’s heads, and most of us have at some stage experienced what it’s like to be an outsider craving to be an insider, as well. I was impressed that the story appeared to be from the male point of view as well – because Lindy (Belle) by herself would have been a little weak, and we would have missed out on all that teen anguish and transformation that works so well through Kyle.

All in all, I’m looking forward to seeing how true the film stayed to the book, because the film wasn’t too bad at all.

Have you read or seen Beastly?

I’m reading Oryx and Crake at the moment. Margaret Atwood is quite possibly in my top 5 favourite authors of all time (I count The Blind Assassin as my most cherished of her works so far, though I have the highest admiration for The Handmaid’s Tale and will be reading The Robber Bride next), but I am feeling thoroughly depressed by this latest grim dystopian.

That’s not to say that the book isn’t excellent and wonderful and thought-provoking and possibly brilliant (I haven’t finished it so I can’t say for sure just yet).

But.

Riding on the bus to work last week, I was overcome with a melancholy sadness. Nothing out of the ordinary was happening in my life, so by my powerful and incredibly accurate method of deduction I realised it could only have been one of two things: Lady Gaga’s Judas warbling in my ear (dang it, that’s one catchy tune), or the book open before me, distorting my day with a future that seems to have already happened. It swiftly became clear: it was the book that was turning my mood sour.

And I’m left wondering: Is Oryx and Crake a little too close for comfort? Is there such a thing as too much dystopia in one’s daily life?

Maybe there is, when every day seems to bring a new natural disaster occurring somewhere in the world. Maybe there is, in places like Canberra, where mornings in Civic are icy and people turn the collars up on their coats to shut the wind – and you – out. Maybe there is, when a figurehead of ‘holy war’ is killed, and the Western public can’t trust their own government…the world is sad right now. Maybe sadder than ever.

I think I’ve missed a glaringly obvious reason as to why I enjoy dystopias so much in the first place. Not only do dystopians serve as a red alert about what ‘might happen’ if we keep doing things a certain way, they also are a comfort in that they haven’t happened yet. Not so comforting when you feel like it’s only a matter of time before your country is the next natural disaster zone (apologies for being so depressing – but this book was clearly poor timing)!

I think it’s safe to say that Oryx and Crake was – like milk – ‘a bad choice’. I’ll still read it through to the end, because quite frankly a depressing dystopian by Margaret Atwood is worth 100 frothy books by lesser writers. But if I’m expecting to ever be able to read a dystopian again, I need to be a little more cautious about what I read and when. The First Tuesday Book Club has suggested two books on my current to-be-read list, one which I will be reading for my own personal book club: Super Sad True Love Story, by Gary Shteyngart. The other is that terrible beauty Blood Meridian, by Cormac McCarthy.

They seem to be completely different books from each other, but I’ve heard they’re dystopian-depressing, in their own way. Super Sad True Love Story is a future where books are pretty much non-existent (depressing), while Blood Meridian is considered Western dystopian, set 100 years ago, and somehow involves the Devil (depressing, and freaky).

So yeah. I will read them both soon, but maybe Blood Meridian can wait until I’ve had at least an hour of cuddling my two pugs. It’s hard to stay mad at the world after hugging a puppy, don’t you agree?

I tried.

I really did.

Remember how I said in this post that I was 99% sure Michelle Moran would handle writing a book on the French Revolution with ease? Well, I must have had a premonition to leave out that remaining 1%, because unfortunately, this read did not live up to expectation.

I have been following Moran’s blog since she first began researching Madame Tussaud as a novel, but back then it was just sketchy details, and I doubt she had thought of writing the book from Madame Tussaud’s perspective at that point. But whichever point it was that Michelle Moran decided to be revolutionary herself, and write the book from a new, fresh perspective – I wish she’d thought it through a bit further. What became clear to me reading a third of this book (I drifted off finally at page 157 after several attempts to read through to the end) is that there is a reason authors haven’t naturally caught on to Madame Tussaud’s point of view – she’s just not interesting or likeable enough to carry a story.

I don’t think that was the only problem. To enhance my point – there was not enough character development from any angle – the number of notable and colourful characters during the French Revolution would be overwhelming at the best of times, but I felt particularly removed from them because they weren’t fleshed out enough. I hesitate to make judgment on Moran’s artistic ability – she may well have some – but I felt her descriptions of Madame Tussaud measuring and drawing her waxwork models to be tiresome, almost passionless. Present tense language was also distracting and somehow unsophisticated, regurgitating historical facts rather than heralding any true insight into the era.

Let’s face it – Moran wasn’t employing her usual flair that I had so admired with Nefertiti, The Heretic Queen, and, to a lesser extent but still impressive enough, Cleopatra’s Daughter. This book felt like a particularly onerous history lesson where the teacher is not even sure what they think of the subject matter. I couldn’t muster an interest for the book, knowing that there are a ton more immersive books out there on the shadows of Marie Antoinette’s reign and the French Revolution. At page 157 I was forced to relinquish my love of everything Moran. I can only hope the author learns from the mistakes she made with this novel, so I can learn to love her again.

***
Disclosure: Bought.
Number of Pages: 440.
Year of Publication: 2011.
Book Challenges: Historical Fiction Reading Challenge 2011.