Running Away to Love
Oct. 31st, 2015 08:52 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
todayiamadaisyToday I saw the most pointless amazing kitchen gadget I have ever seen. Why has nobody told me about the carrot spiretti before? Is it because when I searched for it online, all the pages were from Australia and New Zealand?
Are we really the only countries in the world to know about this?
It's a carrot-coloured carrot sharpener! For sharpening your carrots. I cannot tell you how tempted I am to buy one of these for every single gift I have to give this Christmas.
October books read
It was a big reading month by my normal standards. Partly because of the Booker read, partly because the post-Booker books have been short and partly because I have finished all my subjects for this year, huzzah!
* The Year of the Runaways - Sunjeev Sahota (2015)
This is Booker Prize nominee number four. This one is by an English writer, and it is the story of four young Sikhs living, either illegally or in hiding, in the north of England. The three men, Randeep, Avtar and Tochi, are immigrants from the Punjab, and the woman, Narinder, is a Londoner who marries Randeep so he can enter the UK on a marriage visa (Randeep's family can afford that; Avtar has to sell a kidney to buy a student visa, while Tochi has no papers at all). The book covers a year of their hand-to-mouth life, plus flashbacks to explain what all four of them are running away from, so it does exactly what it says on the tin.
The book has a ten-years-later epilogue, in which we find out that everyone has a happy ending (or at least, a things-are-starting-to-look-up ending in the case of poor Narinder). It read like Year of the Runaways fan fiction, which threw me a bit; but on the other hand, after the relentlessly grim main part of the book, it was nice to see a little sunshine.
Anyway, the book is really good, if extremely depressing with an abrupt ending.
* A Spool of Blue Thread - Anne Tyler (2015)
Spool is right. This unwinds and unwinds and unwinds. Over half the book is the story of Red and Abbie Whitshank, and their four grown children and their spouses, and however many grandchildren. The book says the family thought it was special, but it really wasn't. And that's about right. They're an ordinary sort of family. Not rich, but doing okay. Nice people. A bit smug, but I've read smugger. This is all about the stories the family tells itself about its history. The rest of the book is scenes from the past, showing the truth of those stories and raising more questions about them. Which sounds very dramatic, but it isn't. It's all very mild and pleasant. This is Booker nominee number five, and the first of the two US authors nominated, and I would have been amazed if it won. (Having said that, of all the nominees, this is the one I would be most interested in a sequel to, because I was quite interested in the fate of the Whitshank's two sons: the black sheep who had a much more interesting life off the page, and the good son who got some fairly devastating news late in the piece.)
* A Little Life - Hanya Yanagihara (2015) (abandoned)
Jesus. This book. This is the cover:
That's how I felt reading it. I made it a third of the way through, and I resented every word of it.
Oh, all right. This was the sixth and final Booker nominee, and the second US author. It's about a man called Jude. Jude suffers. And suffers and suffers and suffers. And then, for a change, he suffers some more. In the third of the book I read, we find out that he: was abandoned as a baby in a garbage skip, found by a monk, raised in a monastery where he was beaten and molested and taught to sing opera, taken from the monastery by a rogue monk and turned into a travelling child prostitute, put in an orphanage, rejected by potential adopters, permanently injured in a car accident (after which his social worker died of cancer), won a scholarship to college, studied law and mathematics, became a brilliant lawyer, was adopted as an adult, and, at some point in all that, he started to cut himself. Again, that is just one-third of the book; or the first two paragraphs of this plot summary. (Now that I've read the rest of the plot summary, I'm glad I bailed when I did, what with the stalking and the raping and the self-immolation and the amputations and the fatal car accident and the suicide and the being run over by his kidnapper.) I know it sounds like a melodrama, but it isn't. It is Serious Literature, with hand-crafted artisinal sentences full of ponderous self-importance. It's awful.
(In fairness, reviews of this book on Amazon seem to be sharply divided between a large five-star majority who think it is a heartbreaking masterpiece, and a tiny one-star minority who think it's misery porn. I'm with the latter group, clearly.)
As mentioned above, The Year of the Runaways was also flamboyantly grim (Tochi, for example, was set on fire by a gang, after seeing his parents, brother and pregnant sister murdered), and yet my reaction to that was totally different: concern for the character, as opposed to eye-rolling. Sorry, Jude.
* L'Astrologue de Bruges - Roger Leloup (1994)
After the above, I needed a palate cleanser. As with previous French entries in this list, this was a present from![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
emma2403. It's a comic, volume 20 in a series about a young Japanese-Belgian engineer called Yoko Tsuno. It begins with Yoko visiting Bruges, where she is surprised to meet a painter who has allegedly been alive since 1545, and who claims he painted her portrait way back then. Fortunately, Yoko has a friend with a time machine (of course!), so they go back in time and solve a mystery about an alchemist/astrologer. So that was fun.
What I learnt from this: The good people of 16th century Bruges were surprisingly relaxed about meeting time travellers. Also, all the men had the same beard, but in different colours:
* Laura - Vera Caspary (1943)
Classic noir with a hardboiled detective, but written by a woman, which was interesting. No femmes fatales here, but there is a paper to be written (and probably has been) on the role of masculinity in the novel, comparing her fiancé who is performing the role of the ideal man, the detective who actually is, and her friend Walter who has an entirely different concept of it.
It is fairly obvious who the culprit is right from the start, but it's an enjoyable ride nonetheless. It also features the detective musing on Bad Guys He Has Known, including "the king of the artichoke racket". That's a story I want to read.
(After reading this, I watched the film version, which is fun, but not as good as the book. More conventional, placing the male characters front and centre, compared to the book's emphasis on Laura and her career.)
* A City of Bells - Elizabeth Goudge (1936)
The Little White Horse by Elizabeth Goudge would be one of my top five books ever; it's just delightful. I've also enjoyed other books of hers, and now here we are with the first of a trilogy. This is about a young man called Jocelyn who was wounded in the Boer War and is now at a bit of a loose end. He goes to stay with his elderly grandparents, who live in sleepy cathedral city with Jocelyn's young cousin and an orphan they adopted. If Anne of Green Gables went to visit the Vicar of Dibley, this book is what would happen. There are rooms painted periwinkle blue and gardens full of wisteria and everything is delightful and just this side of twee. And I've got two more to go.
* The New One-Page Project Manager - Clark A. Campbell & Mick Campbell (2012)
This was a work thing. I was looking for a way to help my boss report the progress of our new company to the board, and the one-page template that this book is based on was just the ticket. You can buy the template, apparently, or you can read the book and construct your own, which is what I did. So if you're looking for a simple way to report a complex project, this may be the book for you. I wouldn't recommend reading it for fun, though (unless the choice is between this and A Little Life).
Are we really the only countries in the world to know about this?
It's a carrot-coloured carrot sharpener! For sharpening your carrots. I cannot tell you how tempted I am to buy one of these for every single gift I have to give this Christmas.
October books read
It was a big reading month by my normal standards. Partly because of the Booker read, partly because the post-Booker books have been short and partly because I have finished all my subjects for this year, huzzah!
* The Year of the Runaways - Sunjeev Sahota (2015)
This is Booker Prize nominee number four. This one is by an English writer, and it is the story of four young Sikhs living, either illegally or in hiding, in the north of England. The three men, Randeep, Avtar and Tochi, are immigrants from the Punjab, and the woman, Narinder, is a Londoner who marries Randeep so he can enter the UK on a marriage visa (Randeep's family can afford that; Avtar has to sell a kidney to buy a student visa, while Tochi has no papers at all). The book covers a year of their hand-to-mouth life, plus flashbacks to explain what all four of them are running away from, so it does exactly what it says on the tin.
The book has a ten-years-later epilogue, in which we find out that everyone has a happy ending (or at least, a things-are-starting-to-look-up ending in the case of poor Narinder). It read like Year of the Runaways fan fiction, which threw me a bit; but on the other hand, after the relentlessly grim main part of the book, it was nice to see a little sunshine.
Anyway, the book is really good, if extremely depressing with an abrupt ending.
* A Spool of Blue Thread - Anne Tyler (2015)
Spool is right. This unwinds and unwinds and unwinds. Over half the book is the story of Red and Abbie Whitshank, and their four grown children and their spouses, and however many grandchildren. The book says the family thought it was special, but it really wasn't. And that's about right. They're an ordinary sort of family. Not rich, but doing okay. Nice people. A bit smug, but I've read smugger. This is all about the stories the family tells itself about its history. The rest of the book is scenes from the past, showing the truth of those stories and raising more questions about them. Which sounds very dramatic, but it isn't. It's all very mild and pleasant. This is Booker nominee number five, and the first of the two US authors nominated, and I would have been amazed if it won. (Having said that, of all the nominees, this is the one I would be most interested in a sequel to, because I was quite interested in the fate of the Whitshank's two sons: the black sheep who had a much more interesting life off the page, and the good son who got some fairly devastating news late in the piece.)
* A Little Life - Hanya Yanagihara (2015) (abandoned)
Jesus. This book. This is the cover:
That's how I felt reading it. I made it a third of the way through, and I resented every word of it.
Oh, all right. This was the sixth and final Booker nominee, and the second US author. It's about a man called Jude. Jude suffers. And suffers and suffers and suffers. And then, for a change, he suffers some more. In the third of the book I read, we find out that he: was abandoned as a baby in a garbage skip, found by a monk, raised in a monastery where he was beaten and molested and taught to sing opera, taken from the monastery by a rogue monk and turned into a travelling child prostitute, put in an orphanage, rejected by potential adopters, permanently injured in a car accident (after which his social worker died of cancer), won a scholarship to college, studied law and mathematics, became a brilliant lawyer, was adopted as an adult, and, at some point in all that, he started to cut himself. Again, that is just one-third of the book; or the first two paragraphs of this plot summary. (Now that I've read the rest of the plot summary, I'm glad I bailed when I did, what with the stalking and the raping and the self-immolation and the amputations and the fatal car accident and the suicide and the being run over by his kidnapper.) I know it sounds like a melodrama, but it isn't. It is Serious Literature, with hand-crafted artisinal sentences full of ponderous self-importance. It's awful.
(In fairness, reviews of this book on Amazon seem to be sharply divided between a large five-star majority who think it is a heartbreaking masterpiece, and a tiny one-star minority who think it's misery porn. I'm with the latter group, clearly.)
As mentioned above, The Year of the Runaways was also flamboyantly grim (Tochi, for example, was set on fire by a gang, after seeing his parents, brother and pregnant sister murdered), and yet my reaction to that was totally different: concern for the character, as opposed to eye-rolling. Sorry, Jude.
* L'Astrologue de Bruges - Roger Leloup (1994)
After the above, I needed a palate cleanser. As with previous French entries in this list, this was a present from
emma2403. It's a comic, volume 20 in a series about a young Japanese-Belgian engineer called Yoko Tsuno. It begins with Yoko visiting Bruges, where she is surprised to meet a painter who has allegedly been alive since 1545, and who claims he painted her portrait way back then. Fortunately, Yoko has a friend with a time machine (of course!), so they go back in time and solve a mystery about an alchemist/astrologer. So that was fun.What I learnt from this: The good people of 16th century Bruges were surprisingly relaxed about meeting time travellers. Also, all the men had the same beard, but in different colours:
* Laura - Vera Caspary (1943)
Classic noir with a hardboiled detective, but written by a woman, which was interesting. No femmes fatales here, but there is a paper to be written (and probably has been) on the role of masculinity in the novel, comparing her fiancé who is performing the role of the ideal man, the detective who actually is, and her friend Walter who has an entirely different concept of it.
It is fairly obvious who the culprit is right from the start, but it's an enjoyable ride nonetheless. It also features the detective musing on Bad Guys He Has Known, including "the king of the artichoke racket". That's a story I want to read.
(After reading this, I watched the film version, which is fun, but not as good as the book. More conventional, placing the male characters front and centre, compared to the book's emphasis on Laura and her career.)
* A City of Bells - Elizabeth Goudge (1936)
The Little White Horse by Elizabeth Goudge would be one of my top five books ever; it's just delightful. I've also enjoyed other books of hers, and now here we are with the first of a trilogy. This is about a young man called Jocelyn who was wounded in the Boer War and is now at a bit of a loose end. He goes to stay with his elderly grandparents, who live in sleepy cathedral city with Jocelyn's young cousin and an orphan they adopted. If Anne of Green Gables went to visit the Vicar of Dibley, this book is what would happen. There are rooms painted periwinkle blue and gardens full of wisteria and everything is delightful and just this side of twee. And I've got two more to go.
* The New One-Page Project Manager - Clark A. Campbell & Mick Campbell (2012)
This was a work thing. I was looking for a way to help my boss report the progress of our new company to the board, and the one-page template that this book is based on was just the ticket. You can buy the template, apparently, or you can read the book and construct your own, which is what I did. So if you're looking for a simple way to report a complex project, this may be the book for you. I wouldn't recommend reading it for fun, though (unless the choice is between this and A Little Life).