Even though I have read some very mixed reviews for ‘The Marriage Plot’ by Jeffrey Eugenides, I have still been really looking forward to reading it for months. I thought it would be appropriate to read it now given that I had my graduation ceremony recently and this is the event where the novel starts. Set in 1982, the story follows Brown University student Madeline Hanna, an English major writing a thesis on ‘the marriage plot’ of 19th century novels and the love triangle between herself, Mitchell Grammaticus and Leonard Bankhead before and after graduation. (Unlike Madeline, my graduation day simply involved a lot of standing around in overheated rooms, posing for photographs I didn’t want taken and trying not to trip over my robes. But whatever.) Continue reading
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The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides
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Carrie by Stephen King
Continuing my current trend of reading freakishly disturbing books on a Kindle whilst commuting to work, this week I have also read ‘Carrie’ by Stephen King. The book tells the story of, yes you guessed it, Carrie White, a seventeen year old high school student. After being humiliated at her school prom, she exacts her revenge on her fellow classmates with spectacularly gruesome consequences through her telekinetic powers. This book definitely stopped me falling asleep on the train. Continue reading
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The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
I’m going to hog my sister’s Kindle for as long as I can get away with it – hopefully I will at least get to read the other two books in the Hunger Games trilogy by Suzanne Collins before she realises I still have it. Set in a dystopian post-apocalyptic future, the thirteen Districts of Panem must select one boy and one girl to fight in the televised Hunger Games until only one remains alive – sixteen year old Katniss Everdeen and Peeta Mellark are chosen to represent District 12. Like all the best YA fiction, ‘The Hunger Games’ is not just for teenagers.
Even though ‘The Hunger Games’ does have a relatively fast pace from the beginning, it did take me a while to get into the book. I’m not massively into science-fiction and I didn’t think there was anything particularly spectacular about Collins’s writing. Continue reading
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Nothing to Envy by Barbara Demick
I don’t own an e-reader so I borrowed my sister’s Kindle this week. She lent it to me specifically so that I could read ‘Nothing to Envy’ by Barbara Demick which is based on accounts of life in North Korea. Unsurprisingly, it is an extremely harrowing read. Demick cleverly interweaves the stories of six North Korean defectors with descriptions of everyday life in North Korea including working in a hospital, life in a labour camp, reactions to the death of Kim Il-Sung, how people survived during the extreme food shortages in the mid-1990s and life after defecting from North Korea.
Demick’s absorbing account of a real life dystopia is both shocking and captivating. The opening of the book is particularly striking. At the beginning of the first chapter, the reader is confronted with a satellite image of North and South Korea taken at night-time (similar to the one below). North Korea is almost entirely in darkness because electricity is so scarce. But it didn’t always used to be like this. Continue reading
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The Help by Kathryn Stockett
‘The Help’ by Kathryn Stockett tells the story of Skeeter Phelan, a young white woman from Jackson, Mississippi who decides to write a book documenting the experiences of Aibileen, Minny and other black maids who work for white families. Set in the early 1960s during the Civil Rights movement, the maids are expected to look after the children, cook and clean yet they are persecuted because they are ‘colored’. It is a story that needs to be told.
I saw the film quite recently and enjoyed it but my mum said she thought the original book was better and lent it to me this week. Unsurprisingly, the film version is more saccharine than the book but the adaptation was still well done and the plot wasn’t altered too much. Moreover, watching the film beforehand and knowing how the story ends did not hinder my enjoyment of this excellent book.
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Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson
‘Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit’ is Jeanette Winterson’s controversial debut novel first published in 1985. It is a semi-autobiographical novel: the main character is called Jeanette and her experiences of growing up in a Pentecostal household in Lancashire and exploring her sexuality are heavily drawn from the author’s own life. It is a coming-of-age story like no other.
Having read Winterson’s memoirs ‘Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?’ last month, ‘Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit’ seems perhaps less shocking to me than if I had read these books the other way round even though the events are virtually the same. The novel is sensitively written but I found ‘Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?’ to be the more poignant of the two books probably because the distance of time after writing ‘Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit’ made her own memoirs more personal and reflective. Continue reading
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Last Man In Tower by Aravind Adiga
I loved Aravind Adiga’s Man Booker Prize-winning novel ‘The White Tiger’ and short story collection ‘Between the Assassinations’ and his latest novel ‘Last Man in Tower’ is equally enthralling. The story is about a real estate developer Dharmen Shah who offers the residents of a dilapidated tower block in Mumbai vast amounts of money to leave so that he can build luxury apartments on the land. Of course, one by one they all accept his offer apart from Masterji, a retired widower. Soon, his neighbours become prepared to take matters into their own hands.
I love Adiga’s evocative and colourful descriptions of life in India. His writing in ‘Last Man In Tower’ truly brings twenty-first century Mumbai to life – everything from the smell of the traffic to the taste of the food leaps off the page. The book is as much about the city as it is about the large and complex cast of characters who inhabit it with the reader being confronted with the messy realities of life in modern India. Continue reading
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White Teeth by Zadie Smith
I thought I would hate ‘White Teeth’ given the tidal wave of hype which still seems to be continuing over a decade after the book was first published. But Zadie Smith’s writing is warmer and less pretentious than I thought it would be and her sprawling take on multicultural London focusing on three families in the second half of the twentieth century is ambitious but not exhausting to read. Although I had my doubts at the beginning, I found myself being carried along by the story to the point where I realised about 200 pages in that I was actually quite enjoying it. Character observation is her main strength, and the dialogue is often very witty albeit in a wordy sort of way. Continue reading
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Room by Emma Donoghue
‘Room’ tells the harrowing story of Ma, kidnapped seven years ago by captor Old Nick and her five year old son Jack who are imprisoned in a single room. Partially inspired by Josef Fritzl’s incarceration of his daughter, there are no real surprises to the plot of this novel if you are familiar with the background of this case. But whereas the hysterical media coverage of such crimes often focuses as much if not more on the abusers than the abused, Donoghue has wisely chosen to focus on the story of Ma and Jack rather than Old Nick who only makes brief appearances throughout.
For Ma, Room is a prison where she has been abused and raped. But for Jack, Room is home and he knows nothing else. It is his struggle to deal with the alien concept of Outside that is the most affecting aspect of the book. As well as writing very convincingly on this subject, Donoghue is also excellent at building suspense and evoking the claustrophobia of solitary confinement. Continue reading
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The Field: Yesterday and Today
I was pleasantly surprised to find a copy of ‘Yesterday and Today’ by The Field in an Oxfam shop of all places today. Given that the selection of CDs in charity shops usually consists of records by boybands like Another Level and other examples of the very worst of 90’s pop music that everybody wants to forget about, minimal techno music is an extremely rare find.
‘Yesterday and Today’ may only comprise six tracks but it still stretches to just over an hour of aesthetically rich layering and looping with barely a moment wasted. As is true of all the best electronic music (and all its sub-genres), listening to ‘Yesterday and Today’ is pure escapism. Album opener, ‘I Have the Moon, You Have the Internet’, builds slowly but ends satisfyingly. John Stanier’s guest appearance on the title track is a highlight with his math rock drumming in perfect collaboration with Axel Willner’s complex sound textures. Only the cover of the Korgis’ ‘Everybody’s Got To Learn Sometime’ seems out of place. It’s not badbut it sounds like The Field couldn’t decide whether to do a straight-up cover or a proper remix of the song which is a little frustrating.
Futuristic, hypnotic, eclectic and melodic, ‘Yesterday and Today’ is a stunning record which is both absorbing and more accessible than the words ‘minimal techno’ might have you think. It’s repetitive, yes, but in a good way. And given that I find a good CD in a charity shop about once every three years, I think I’ll have to investigate The Field’s other albums a little sooner than that.
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