In words and pictures, a roundup of what you thought of the books you read last week:
November, and I have to rejig my ‘best books I read in 2013’ list again. Annoying. A Girl Is A Half-formed Thing needs to go near the top. It’s an intense slow read. The style is unusual and original, yet feels natural and unselfconscious.
Extracts do the book much justice, but its rather magical coherence is properly revealed when it’s read as a whole. It interrupts itself constantly in mid-sentence, even mid-word. As I read on, I realised how conversational this was. That surprised me, as did the gripping storyline that, unbeknownst to me, emerged as I read.
I do have a slight quibble. In the very final pages, the storyline got a tiny bit over-excited and the style, perhaps as a consequence, seemed a tiny bit self-aware. But that’s just a minor quibble about a major book. It was a hard, harrowing, battering and beautiful read. I can still feel phrases, sentences and moments from it, the way you can still feel the tightness of a badly bruised muscle even after the surface bruise
Just read A Dog In Water by Kazuhiro Kiuchi, a really good detective novel that pushes the Marlowe-type to his logical extreme. Quite pulpy in places, but well-written and observed. It reads as quite like a Tarantino-y film, in the sense that he borrowed a lot from Honk Kong action films - it has the street action, but with greater heart and awareness of wider social repercussions.
Well worth a read if you enjoy Chandleresque detective novels.
Anyone else reading Dylan Thomas in anticipation of his anniversary?
The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa. It took a little while to get into - it's more about the interior landscape of thoughts and feelings, and mine are not at all the same as the narrator so I was out of sympathy with him at first - but now I've got over that. I'm so absorbed that I actually forget where I am when I'm reading it, which is rare these days.
One to avoid:
I've just had the distressing experience of reading Mo Yan's The Garlic Ballads.
A brilliant book, well written, but the unrelenting violence is difficult to take - we have the oppressive state, corrupt, vindictive and violent local authorities and a subsistent peasant village life mired in mud, rats, lice and the ever-pervasive stink of the garlic which the Chinese government have forced the people to grow at the expense of other crops and then callously made uneconomic. It is of little surprise that this novel, written by the Nobel prize winner, was banned in China during the 1980's.
If you would like to share a photo of the book you are reading, rather than talking about it in the thread below, please do. Click the blue button on this page to share your image. I'll include some of your snaps in next week's blog.
Our review list - some of the books we'll be writing about this week
Non-fiction
• Fire and Ashes by Michael Ignatieff
• The Leonard Bernstein Letters edited by Nigel Simeone
• Religion without God by Ronald Dworkin
• High Minds by Simon Heffer
• Treasure Neverland by Neil Rennie
• Mitterrand by Philip Short
• Shooting Stars by Stefan Zweig
Fiction
• Equilateral by Ken Kalfus• Raising Steam by Terry Pratchett
• Butterflies in November by Audur Ava Olafsdottir
• When The Time Comes by Josef Winkler
• Half the Kingdom by Lore Segal
Children's
• Ways to See a Ghost by Emily Diamand
Poetry
• Sleeping Keys by Jean Sprackland
