Reads

Home of the Blizzard - Douglas Mawson ***1/2
Rather dry narrative of the Australasian Antarctic expedition of 1911-1914, in which the leader, Mawson, had a very narrow escape after his two sledging companions perished. Step outside the stiff-upper-lip with Cherry-Garrard´s ´The Worst Journey in The World´: Scott´s last expedition is simultaneously unfolding elsewhere on the continent, and the deaths, drama and soul-searching making for the best travel book ever.

Still Life With Volkswagens - Geoff Nicholson ***
How can you resist a title like that? Barmy pop-novel with no respect for anything really, except VWs.

Life of Pi - Yann Martel ***1/2
For 95% of this book you feel like you´re reading Gerald Durrell meets William Goulding. Then two things become clear: first, Hindus prefer colourful, imaginative stories to the truth simply because the truth is too boring, and second, you´ve been had.

Stupid White Men - Michael Moore *****
Moore is a regular yet supremely courageous guy who wakes us up to a thing we have become shamefully apathetic to: the behaviour of modern Western politicians. The US political class is running the country in its own interest while questions over 9/11 and Iraq remain to be answered. Very inspiring and funny, despite the odd inconsistency.

The Third Policeman *** and The Dalkey Archive ** - Flann O´Brien
I first read these yarns of surreal Irishry some time ago. They have not improved with age.

We Can Build You - Phillip K Dick ***
Starts off as a promising Sci-fi yarn in his ´Blade Runner´ mould, then turns into a dissection of hopeless, pointless love as a form of mental illness. You get the impression that (as was his wont, alcohol- and speed-fueled) Dick stayed up writing madly for days on end, and never bothered to check his output to see if it made any sense: there is no attempt to tie up all the threads (no Booker for this one, then), but there´s bags of imagination, truth and catharsis.

USA - John Dos Passos/Night Letters - Robert Dessaix
Didn´t finish either of these, the former through no fault of its own, as it manifested in a scruffy, smelly old American edition with no appealing features and illegible 6pt text. The latter, a handsome Picador volume, never seemed to perk up, which is hardly surprising when you consider that the ´Night´ of the title is a metaphor for imminent death by incurable disease.

Lonely Planet vs Rough Guides
LP guides look nice and have lots of pics. But you shouldn´t judge a book by its cover, right?

Saturday - Ian McEwan *****
McEwan's dark streak used to be wider than Lou Reed's, but now he's all grown up and there's a kaleidoscope of other colours too. He's possibly the only novelist whose output I've kept abreast with over his whole career, and this is his best book.

Wildlife - Richard Ford ****
An understated, rudderless, sidelong teenage shuffle through baffling parental behaviour. Fans of Raymond Carver look no further.

The Siege of Krishnapur - JG Farrel ****
I know nothing about the history surrounding this tale of beleaguered colonials cut off in the midst of an Indian revolt, but then it´s not really a historical novel, it´s more a comedy of manners in the face of hardship. Kind of unique.

This Accursed Land - Lennard Bickel ***
A narrative account of the Australian explorer Douglas Mawson's Antarctic survival epic in the early 1900's. A bit desperate to impress at first, Bickel eventually lets the story tell itself - a catalogue of mishaps, hardships and almost unbelievable lone misery.

Filth - Ervine Welsh ****
You get the impression here that Welsh has some seriously antisocial dispositions. A deeply unpleasant yet fascinating yarn with a brilliant ending.

An Equal Music – Vikram Seth ***
Pretty good romantic novel with much musical musing chucked in. Much shorter than ‘A Suitable Boy’, which would require excess baggage payments.

Brass – Helen Walsh ***
Racy but impressive chick-lit in the first-novel vein. Interestingly, if you substitute autism for sex and drugs, you have ‘The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time`, although I’m not sure how that fits in with Will Shako’s 17 possible plots.

Love etc - Julian Barnes ***
I like Julian Barnes, he's smart, full of ideas, and here he does it again with the 3-points of view love triangle developed in 'Talking it Over' . But I feel shortchanged: it's too brief, and it cries out for another sequel.

Yoga for People Who Can't Be Bothered to Do It - Geoff Dyer **
Kind of unfortunate title for a half-baked assemblage of semi-fiction. This could have been much better.

Heartsongs - Annie Proulx ****
Proulx hones her crafting of the Western short story. Impressive.

Bad Dirt - Annie Proulx *****
Proulx exceeds all expectations of the form. Brilliant.

The Limits of Vision - Robert Irwin ****
One of those picked for its cover. The evil ghoul of household dirt Mucor is held up to scrutiny by a housebound housewife, with the help of a clutch of geniuses of the Western world, very funny.

Ragtime - EL Doctorow *****
Very entertaining, fast paced, semi-historical New York yarn featuring uppety niggers, anarchism, and Harry Houdini. More ideas per page than most novelists even dream of, I suppose.

The Assistant - Berard Malamud ****
Poor-end Jewish New York, 1920's, seen through the eyes of a reformed but hapless character. Accomplished.

Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness - William Styron **
Embarrassed, autobiographical memoir of descent into severe depression in the pre-SSRI era. Depressing and anachronistic, especially as he names no names when it comes to the drugs that made his condition worse.

Buddhism: A Very Short Introduction - Damien Keown****
Does what it says on the tin. And for a subject worthy of the effort, unlike a sister volume ‘Postmodernism’, which someone gave me because they couldn´t adequately explain it, and succeeded in convincing me further of the increasing dissapearance, in a rectal direction, of the visual arts.

Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks *****
Hugely compelling novel about WWI trench warfare, falling in love, and shagging.
Brilliant, although goes on a bit towards the end.

Charlotte Gray – Sebastian Faulks ****
Sequel to Birdsong: WWII, falling in love and shagging, but somehow not fully convincing.

The Decline and Fall of the Freudian Empire – Hans Eysenck *** but getting on a bit
Eysenck puts the boot into psychoanalysis in general, and Freud in particular. Freud had a vivid imagination and a persuasive case, but made it all up, and psychoanalysts have conspicuously failed to come up with any scientific evidence at all for his theories.

Ballooning over Everest – Leo Dickinson ****
A completely barmy and self-effacing adventurer and film-maker, Dickinson's book is as impressive as his eponymous film, which is required viewing. These guys were really out there.

The Red Badge of Courage - Stephen Crane. No stars, one black spot
A fourth-form essay about war, by the tiresome attention-seeker at the front of the class. Given much credence for depicting the realities of the American Civil War, despite the fact that the author was never actually in a war (well at least when he wrote the book), and now totally eclipsed by the real stuff of Hemingway, Orwell and many others. To my misfortune I was caught out in Malaysia with nothing else to read.

© bullybones, natch