A is also for...er...A

Somewhat belatedly, book number one in my alphabetical literary journey is A Gathering Light by Jennifer Donnelly.

I’d like to tell you that it was a recommendation from a close friend that moved me to buy this book. That, or maybe a knowledge of the author and her work. Possibly a desperate love of semi-fictionalised historical fiction for teenagers? I’d like to be able to say that any of those things were true, but unfortunately I can’t. No, the first thing I saw on picking up a copy of A Gathering Light in Waterstones was this quote from the Sunday Telegraph:

If George Clooney had walked into the room I would have told him to come back later when I had finished.

This book is better than George Clooney. That’s what the reviewer at the Telegraph told me, and though in my opinion, there are several other things I would count as better than George Clooney (mulled wine, snow, dark chocolate digestives), I was curious. So I bought it, read it, and found that I absolutely agreed with this bold, dare I say controversial statement.

Mattie Gokey is a girl desperately trying to keep everyone happy; her father, who needs her help to run the family farm after her mother’s death and her brother’s disappearance; her best friend Weaver, who intends to study law on day but can’t seem to stop getting into fights with people who call him a nigger; her school teacher, who has read some of her stories and has persuaded her to apply to college in New York; and Royal Loomis, the handsome boy from the farm one over, who has taken her out driving and suddenly seems to be imagining a future for the two of them.

As I stand here on the porch of the Glenmore, the finest hotel on all of Big Moose Lake, I tell myself that today – Thursday, July 12, 1906 – is such a day…
…I believe these things. With all my heart. For I am good at telling myself lies.

The story opens as Mattie is working as a waitress at the Glenmore Hotel, where a woman has been found drowned in the lake. Everyone assumes that it was simply a terrible accident, but Mattie is beginning to suspect differently. The man who went out on the lake with her is nowhere to be found, and in Mattie’s apron pocket is a bundle of letters, thrust into her hands earlier that day by the drowned woman with the desperate plea to burn them.

The novel alternates between this thread of the story, based around a real murder that took place at the turn of the century in New York state, and a thread set months earlier, which follows Mattie as she attempts to be everything to everyone, looking after her father and sisters, worrying about her impoverished neighbours and trying to figure out exactly what Royal sees in her, while also secretly harbouring dreams of her own to write and to get a proper education. It’s only really when the two threads of the story meet that Mattie finally figures out what to do and takes action.

Based in part around real events and places, A Gathering Light recreates in amazing detail what life was like for people like Mattie in turn-of-the-century rural America. The extent of Jennifer Donnelly’s research really shows, not least in the three page bibliography at the end, and yet it manages not to fall into the old “I spent all this time researching; let me tell you EVERYTHING I’VE LEARNT” trap. Never having written a historical novel, I may be talking out of turn, but I imagine that this must be really hard to do. You want to research enough so that you don’t get your editor, or worse, your readers pointing out the fact that your heroine couldn’t have flown to New York because planes hadn’t been invented yet, but neither do you want to give the impression that your story has taken place in the middle of a Simon Schama documentary. The little details, however authentic, shouldn’t overshadow the story, but in this case, Mattie’s story is just so interesting, and the writing is so light and beautiful that it’s only once you get to the end that you realise how much you’ve learnt.

One of the things I love most about this novel is the fact that the letters, which Mattie reads in a desperate attempt to find out who the drowned woman was and why she died, are the actual ones written by Grace Brown, who died in Big Moose Lake in 1906. Discovered, in reality, in her hotel room after her death, the letters paint a terribly bleak picture, but in giving them to Mattie, and allowing her life to be changed by them, Jennifer Donnelly has given Grace’s story something of a happy ending.

I suppose that honestly, I chose this novel to begin with because I had read it before and knew I loved it. I hope that I shall read many books for the first time this year, but wanted to start, like Miss R, with an old friend. As I read it though, it occurred to me that it was a good book to start with for more reasons than that. It’s about someone who loves words, and writing and reading. It’s about someone who dreams of being something more than they are. Most of all, it is, after all the sadness and intrigue, an incredibly hopeful book, which seemed like a fitting way to begin the year.

B is for Bill

hello dear readers,
This week's book is "Mother Tongue" by Bill Bryson.

I think that choosing a non-fiction book for my second week was a mistake on my part. Firstly, I do want to make it clear that I love Bill Bryson, in a fatherly/grandfatherly way. In fact, in an uncle-like way. He’s the cool one who lives hundreds of miles away but would give you presents/alegandawing/money when he saw you twice a year.
Mother Tongue deals with the origins of the English language, the reasons it’s become so powerful internationally, and the places it’s going in the future. According to Bill, the answer to all of these is “America”. Okay, I’m being a bit flippant. After all, even I couldn’t read a couple of hundred pages where the word “America” was repeated over and over, and I read Marian Keyes. It comes pretty darn close though.
Bill liberally sprinkles the tome with amazing factoids such as explaining that the reason we call the live animal (cow,sheep,pig) and the meat (beef,mutton,pork) different things is to do with the peasant language of Anglo-Saxon versus the court language of French, i.e. boeuf, mouton and, erm. Porque? *Checks google* Apparently, it’s porc. So there. Anyway, I thought that was pretty cool and solved a niggle that I’d had for a while.

There are others, such as the Japanese renderings of some words which were originally English but now sound Japanese. These weren’t particularly amazing, but it did give me the opportunity to say things in an hilarious accent. Of course, the fact that the book was written in the late eighties doesn’t help the vaguely uncomfortable finger pointing that Bryson does throughout, including the entire chapter he devotes to what can be called, for ease, as ‘engrish’. He does make a good point in this, which is that there are a lot of people who would class themselves as English speakers, but actually cannot string a sentence together and lack the skills to articulate their basic needs, desires and wants. It struck me as I read that this description (or, at least, Bryson’s hinting at this) could very well apply to so-called “English patriots”. A quick perusal of facebook sites with names such as “I’m English forever and if you don’t like it/aren’t white/don’t have the St George tattooed on your arse go home even if you were born here and your parents were and your grandparents and in fact you are more English than I am” or something to that effect, will reveal a staggering low literacy level among the members.

That was definitely something that I expected from Mother Tongue, and never got. I wanted a study of the so-callled decline of literacy – is it real? If it is, should we be bothered or is it simply the evolution of language, as it’s been evolving for the last 2000000000 years (give or take)? There was a chapter on Shakespeare-isms. Bill said about four times that Shakespeare himself didn’t even know how to spell his own name. He also says that the OED spells it Shakspear, but no-one listens to it. There was also a chapter on silent letters and various Americans who tried to change the spellings of some words (dwel was one, I think) and succeeded in changing some others: catalog, program and so on. He spends an awful lot of time on this, which iI thought was strange as he is now not only a self-confessed Anglophile, he also lives somewhere around Wymondham (not exactly bustling and cosmopolitan, it has to be said) and is the Green Sherriff of East Anglia, or something. In Mother Tongue, he comes across as positively Anglophobic. There’s a lot of that classic defence tactic: “they started it”, which obviously means that he’s allowed to be downright mean about some parts of the world that aren’t American.

Another thing is that I felt like he bends the rules. At one point he writes down a long list of American words that a Briton wouldn’t know what to do with. He even invites the reader to cover up one side and try to identify the other. Shamefully, I did it. Some of the words are now easily recognisable, such as diaper and sidewalk. Some have fallen out of use altogether – I watch a lot of American TV and don’t remember a seesaw ever being referred to as a ‘teeter totter’.
There are other instances where Bill asserts that ‘no language apart from English has swear words’, or something along those lines. They’re just wrong, and that makes me doubt the fun “isn’t that amazing? I never knew that before!” moments elsewhere in the book. Just like that time that you found out your favourite uncle has a gambling habit, not a petting zoo. You just can’t trust anything else he says, and it makes you uncomfortable.

Next week it's Charles Dickens' "A Christmas Carol"

A is for Audrey

Book Number One is….

The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger

I thought I’d ease myself in gently to the Book Challenge ’09, by starting with one of my favourite books. I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve read it, but it must be closing in on a dozen times. Every time I read it, something new pops out at me.
It reninds me of an argument I once had with a thankfully now ex-colleague. When I said I was in the process of re-reading Watership Down, he snorted derisively and said “Why bother reading a book more than once? Bloody English students”. His reaction really surprised me – coming from a family of self-confessed (or should that be self-obsessed? Arf) readers, it never crossed my mind that other people only enjoyed a book once. My answer was “Why not? Would you listen to a CD once?”, which I thought was pretty quick, even if I do say so myself. I find myself gravitating towards certain books time and time again – the aforementioned rabbit saga, A Proper Little Nooryef, Phillip Pullman’s saga, Black Beauty and a couple more that I’ve forgotten.
Each time I read them, there’s something new. Re-reading a book for me is like welcoming old friends in and enjoying a classic song. It’s like coming home, in the cheesiest way I can think of.
Is it just me that reads good books countless times? Don’t get me wrong, I also read lots of new books. If you do re-read them, what books do you go back to?

Anyway, on with the review.
The Time Traveler’s Wife tells the story of Henry and Clare. Theirs is an epic love story spanning nearly a hundred years. It involves difficulties experienced by countless people all over the world, and difficulties that only Henry and Clare encounter. Henry is a time traveller. He finds himself inconveniently naked in different places at different times. Sometimes he ends up with Clare at various points in her childhood, whereas sometimes he’s running for his life after being accused of theft/burglary/bestiality.
As the blurb on the back of the book says: Clare and Henry first meet when Henry is 42 and Clare is 6. So far, so paedophilia. I’ve been thinking about this lately, especially in the last time round, as a couple of people have mentioned this aspect. Is it grooming to spend your wife’s childhood with her? Bear in mind, they meet in the present through chance – Henry never tells Clare his last name, birth date or anything that can identify him. Is that Niffenegger telling us it’s okay? The arguments and the friction felt between Clare and Henry when they first get together in ‘their’ time (as opposed to hers) is telling – Henry is not the Henry Clare knows, but a younger, rougher model. In reality Henry is eight years older than Clare.
Personally, I think that the way they are together is recognisable in every couple you meet. Sometimes you wonder why they keep going, why they torture each other on a seemingly daily basis. But love is something which cannot be explained in a novel, a film, a pop song. That’s why humans have been trying to capture the intangible for the last dozen centuries – the fascination draws them in.
There are other players in this story – their best friends Gomez and Charisse, where Gomez loves Clare and is apparently biding his time until ‘something happens to Henry’. Lesbian wannabe Celia Attley adores Henry’s ex-girlfriend Ingrid, who colours his view on life and himself. In a pleasing twist, Celia and Clare become friends – something that pops up on a couple of occasions.

It’s hard to describe the story without it sounding twee and trite. Essentially it’s boy meets girl/girl and boy fall in love/boy time travels to girl’s childhood. But it’s so much more. Niffenegger deftly explores the themes of loss, union, families and the struggle of life alongside different ideas of fate, religion, art and poetry. One of my favourite sections is when Clare and her sister Alicia are watching It’s a Wonderful Life. Somehow Niffenegger manages to interweave the most ridiculous points of It’s a Wonderful Life into the narrative of The Time Traveler’s Wife without missing a beat. In fact, the first time I read it I had never seen It’s a Wonderful Life, and was adamant that it was Niffenegger’s fanciful re-drawing of it – how does she expect me to believe that Donna ends up naked in a bush while George Bailey threatens to sell tickets?
Beneath the love story runs a dark vein of chaos, anarchy and a feeling that life sucks, then you die. This is helpfully illustrated by the punk devotees, including Clare and Henry. Henry is not always a great guy, as Clare is not always a great girl. Henry beats people to a pulp and Clare orders the kidnapping of a classmate without regret. This again comes up for criticism – how are we supposed to like Henry when he’s a womanising drunk who likes beating the shit out of people? In my own opinion, this reaction comes from someone who either didn’t have time to read the whole book, or has forgotten that real people aren’t 100% nice or nasty. This is another of my favourite things about the book – Clare and Henry are the loved-up couple, torn apart through no fault of their own but destined to be together. But their romance is harsh, physical and, at times, brutal. Romance here doesn’t come from Jane Austen or Mills & Boon (although there is a place for each of them, elsewhere) but instead from the world we know, where people fight and play and shout and cry and experience life from beginning to end and sometimes something inbetween.

To prepare for this review I perused Amazon’s entry. I found no less than eight hundred and thirty nine reviews. All of them are written honestly and baldly – six hundred and two are five stars, forty five are one stars and the rest are spread out between the rest. What does that say? That there are over six hundred right people and forty five wrong ones? That lots of readers want to jump on Richard & Judy’s bandwagon?
To my dismay, I found myself reading the one star reviews. Many of them make good points – the first person narrative makes it difficult sometimes to tell who is speaking i.e. Henry or Clare. It’s true – on occasion it is hard to tell who has taken over the literary reins, but perhaps that’s because Clare and Henry are connected on a molecular, intimate level. Clare as a six year old is certainly easy to pick out, along with Clare at sixteen. Other comments are just strange – along the lines of Henry conveniently never travelling to somewhere he doesn’t know, or that he is the only time traveller. Firstly, Henry explains that he thinks his time travel is contained within his sub-conscious, which means that as he has never gone abroad, he doesn’t time travel abroad. Secondly, why criticise a book because he is the only time traveller? That sounds like the reviewer expected a literary adaptation of Jumper or Tru Calling, and is marking accordingly. Again, the prose explains that Henry has always felt lonely because he expected to meet someone else like him and never has. If it’s constrained by your own consciousness, why would you travel to someone else’s memories? Given that Henry faces daily problems around hiding his ‘disease’ from those around him for fear of being carted off to a mental hospital, why would another time traveller advertise it?

I love this book. It touches me on levels I cannot explain, and do not wish to. If you enjoy an easy to read, multi layered novel about life and death and union and separation with a million other things mixed in, read this. Don’t think it should be more than it is and please, don’t expect Dostoyevsky. That’s not fair on Dostoyevsky…

On a side note, for those of you averse to reading (I appreciate your time but really, you may be on the wrong blog) the Hollywood re-make's looming at some point, possibly this decade : imdb entry.
Book Number two is: Bill Bryson’s Mother Tongue.

It's a new dawn, it's a new day...

Hello dear readers!

I hope you all had a Merry New Year and a wonderful Christmas.  In some ways, for me, it's been a long holiday but in others, as always, I need another week to recover and do all of the things I needed to do! Oh well, there'll be time to sort out my filing cabinet and get new bookcases soon.

I must have been a pretty good girl for 2008 as Santa brought me lots of nice presents, including Mamma Mia! and 

Wall-e. Mr Charming and I got a couple of joint presents too - a breadmaker and Trivial Pursuit. Yay. 

So, anyway. On to business. Today is the first day of the Book Challenge. I will begin with The Time Traveler's Wife, carry on with a BIll Bryson, Charles Dickens and a David Mitchell. That's January taken care of. I've decided to do it a month at a time, rather than the whole six months, year or whatever as I don't want to rule out a book I might get along the way. My good friend Liz has decided to join me on the journey, which'll be lovely. Hopefully she'll be able to read some books and write a few blog entries too. I'll tell you which book I'm reading about a week in advance, then maybe we could do a virtual book group thing. That would be cool. 

I pledge to read each book between Monday and Sunday of each week. This gives me a little bit more time this week, admittedly, but  will have less time on some weeks so basically it'll all work out in the end. 

After reading each book I will write a review within a week of reading it. Hopefully it'll be within a day or so but it depends what else I'm doing!

Any comments, feedback etc will be more than welcome. This is just a bit of fun so I can maintain my reading and carry on writing, but book suggestions will be especially useful.

Have a fantastic 2009, everyone. It's going to be ace.