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Pigeons in the garden
Yesterday morning a neighbourhood cat caught a pigeon in the garden. Interrupted, he fled.
The bird remained. Bleeding, wing broken, huddling beneath a patio table. Blinking in pain.
By afternoon the pigeon was gone. The cat returned. Prowling, proud. Only blood and feathers to tell of what had happened.
This morning the bird was back. I watched through the kitchen window as it limped up the garden path, escorted by another pigeon. The other would hop a few steps, then wait, watching. Take your time, it seemed to say. I'm here.
Halfway up the path they paused, interlocked beaks. I watched their heads bob. Were they fighting? Kissing? They part.
The healthy bird hopped into the tall grass, pecked at the ground. Returned to the path with a broken acorn in its beak. They locked beaks again. Pieces of acorn rained to the ground. The healthy bird bent down, plucked them from the ground, fed them to the other, a piece at a time.
They continued their slow progress up the path. More birds gathered on the fences, either audience or guard or both.
My tea grew cold on the countertop.
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Wheel Of Time #4 - The Shadow Rising
It's been a few months since I read The Dragon Reborn and I was a little worried that I would have forgotten a lot of the context of this book, but once I picked it up I found that I slipped back into the story very easily.
I said that book 3 was my favourite of the first trilogy, and that's true, but The Shadow Rising is definitely my favourite of the series as a whole so far - although it's a really close call, because I think all four books at the start of Wheel Of Time are excellent. Here you can really feel the scope of the series starting to open up. Jordan does a great job of building and expanding on the material in the first three novels while hinting at more to come. The expansions into both Tel'aran'rhiod and the worlds of the Finn do a lot to show us the scale of what we're working with here, and we start to get a taste of the silly levels of power that we're going to be dealing with in later books.
I'm always struck by the way in which Jordan manages to make really huge, important moments take up next to no space on the page at all. The prime example of this is Egwene's capture by the Seanchan and subsequent escape in The Great Hunt, and there's more of it here as well. Matt's meeting with the Eelfinn doesn't last very long at all, and the fall of the White Tower and the stilling of Siuan and Leanne take place entirely off-page. I think many authors would lean into these moments and drag them out in order to convey their importance, but Jordan takes a completely opposite approach and it works very well.
It's been so long since I read this whole series that my memory of it is formed of several big moments (like Matt with the Eelfin), and the rest is effectively lost to me. That means that reading these is like coming to them for the first time again, which is very fun. For some reason I'd convinced myself while reading that the cleansing of Saidin takes place in this book, but of course it doesn't. I'm not sure when that occurs, exactly, but the tools that Rand needs to make it happen are attained in The Shadow Rising and now that I'm thinking about it I remember some of the other events that need to take place before he makes the decision to attempt it, so I suspect it might be a few books before we get to that point. But that, I think, is what I like about The Shadow Rising in particular. The groundwork for so much of the later series is laid in this book. It feels like books 1 to 3 were simply a prologue, and this is is chapter one. And I love that.
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Strange Pictures - Uketsu
Translated from the Japanese by Jim Rion
I've heard so much about both Strange Pictures and Strange Houses, all of it incredibly positive, and so I really feel like I must be missing something given how much I hated this.
"Hated" is perhaps a strong word, but I can't think of a single moment where I actually enjoyed reading Strange Pictures. For most of the book I spent my time trying to figure out what the point of it all was. The 'mysteries' here feel like they're only mysteries because somebody decided to say they were - especially the first one, about the missing blog posts. I can't imagine a world in which somebody becomes obsessed with a random blog enough to dig into it in the way the characters in the opening section do.
Everything feels forced here, from the curiosity of the people investigating these pictures, to the nature of the clues in said pictures, and the links between the different mysteries. When we reached the resolution and it all links together my response was something along the lines of "Oh. Okay then."
Needless to say, I won't be reading Strange Houses.
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Atmosphere - Taylor Jenkins Reid
It turns out I like romance as a genre. Who knew?
Reading this immediately after reading Carrie Soto Is Back perhaps put this at a disadvantage given how much I loved the other book, but after enjoying that so much I wanted to see what else Reid had to offer.
This isn't as strong as Carrie Soto Is Back. I didn't feel like I knew or cared for the characters as much, and despite the stakes objectively being higher they didn't feel higher, lacking the personal element that really made the drama of Carrie Soto sing.
That said, I still liked it. Reid writes well and tells and engaging story, and her characters have emotional depth and complexity that makes them a pleasure to spend time with. I think had I read this in isolation, rather than coming in with very high expectations, I may have been more enthusiastic about it. It's still good, though.
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Carrie Soto Is Back - Taylor Jenkins Reid
I went into this book expecting very little. Mentally I'd associated Taylor Jenkins Reid with authors like Coleen Hoover - complete fluff that I would have no interest in. But I was on a beach, and needed a beach read, and I enjoy sports novels, so I decided to give this a go.
I'm very glad I did. This was much better than I could have expected it to be. It's definitely "fluffy", and it's very much a feel good story, but it's also very well written and incredibly moving. I really cared for the characters and wanted them all to succeed, and I felt like I could have spent a lot more time with them. Although sports stories tend towards the formulaic - which is a strength of the genre, in my opinion - this still managed to surprise me.
This may be my biggest shock of the year.
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The Secret Of Secrets - Dan Brown
As I approached the end of Dan Brown's The Secret Of Secrets, I began to think about how I was going to review it and what I thought was worth talking about. I unapologetically love his first two non-Langdon novels, and I apologetically enjoy the first two Langdon books despite hating the self-insert protagonist and being able to recognise that Brown is, objectively, not a good prosaist.
I had planned to talk about how The Secret Of Secrets puts all of Browns worst habits as a writer on full display, how he tries to make a joke of his egregious overuse of ellipsis, how obnoxious it is that he quotes the opening line of Digital Fortress as "one of [Langdon's] favorite novels". I was going to talk about how characters get introduced only to be completely forgotten about by the denouement. But then, towards the end of the book, a chapter appeared that is very obviously an advertisement for Starbucks, and now that's the only thing I can think about.
Say what you want about Brown's writing, one thing he's always excelled at in the thriller form is making sure that every chapter reveals something new or propels the plot forward in some way. This is the formula that makes his often poorly-written books work. This is what makes them "page turners".
The chapter in question is perhaps a page and a half long (I read on Kindle, so it's hard to know exactly). In it, a minor character goes to Starbucks to buy coffee, taking "[a] heavenly sip of the creamiest flat white in the city". While he's there he remembers something Langdon told him about the Starbucks logo, which is printed on the page so we can look at it. And then the chapter ends.
That's it. That's the whole chapter.
I'm not naive. I know that product placement has appeared in film and TV practically since the dawn of the mediums. I hate it, but I accept it as a facet of the financial realities of producing film. And I guess I just thought that novels were safe from it. But no. Even in a novel, we now have to deal with stealth marketing.
Maybe this has been happening for a long time and I just haven't read the books that are doing it. Maybe even Brown has been doing it for years - the last Langdon novel I read was The Lost Symbol, which I thought was bad enough that I didn't pick up Inferno or Origin. But even if this isn't a particularly new horror, I absolutely hate it. What the fuck are we doing here?
The upshot is that The Secret Of Secrets will forever live in my mind as the book that tried to slip a Starbucks advert past me. And that pisses me off.
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Horror In Translation
When I set my reading goals in January, the main one was that 50% of all the fiction that I read this year should be in translation. I've been lagging behind on that a little. Of the close to 80 books that I've started this year, a little under 20 have been in translation.
As we're about to come into October, my mind has obviously turned in the direction of horror. I've realised that I haven't really read much translated horror at all. I've read most of John Ajvide Lindqvist's books (minus Harbour, which has been on my list for year), a few Japanese horror novels, and some of Mariana Enriquez's short fiction. I'm aware of Jenny Hval but haven't yet read anything by her.
So I'm looking for recommendations. If you've read any really great horror that wasn't written in English originally and you think I'd like it, please let me know about it. As always there are no comments on this blog, but you can email me at chris@loottheroom.uk
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The Rest Of Our Lives - Ben Markovits (DNF)
DNF at 30%
My sixth read for the Booker Longlist, and my first DNF. Early reviews of this indicated that it's something of a sports novel, and I've enjoyed the sports books on the Booker lists in recent years (Western Lane and Headshot), so that plus the fact that this made it onto the shortlist meant that I went into it with high hopes.
Unfortunately it wasn't to be. The narrator's jaded, disaffected, disinterested tone put me off from the first few pages, and the book never managed to recover from that. I think I'm approaching a point where I've read enough books from the point of view of asshole men who think everyone else is the problem. I'm also, perhaps, a little too tired of living in a media culture of endless transphobia to see any merit in using jokes about pronouns in email signatures as a way of developing character. It just feels lazy and obvious at this point.
So I didn't care for the narrator - which is perhaps the point - but I also didn't care for the style of storytelling here. It's rambling and aimless, something of an internal monologue that just doesn't feel like it's going anywhere in particular. I gave it until the end of the first of the three long chapters that make up this book, read a few pages of the second section, and decided I had better things to do with my time than continue.
I still haven't written a review of Seascraper, which is a stunning piece of fiction, but I'm astonished that it lost out on a place on the Booker shortlist to this.
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Flesh - David Szalay
This is the first of the Booker Prize longlist books that I've really loved (aside from Misinterpretation, which I read when it was on the Centre For Fiction First Novel Prize shortlist, so long ago that it doesn't really feel connected to the Booker longlist in my mind).
The main character here is often hard to like. He's taciturn, refuses to open himself up to anybody (including the reader), is wholly passive aside from a couple of moments of unexpected and uncontained violence, and yet there's something really compelling and sympathetic about him. I think it would be easy to look at him and say that he's a person who uses people, but I actually think it's the opposite - he allows himself to be used, constantly, by other people in his life who want to fill a void in their lives, who need a distraction from perfectly good lives that they're somehow dissatisfied with. He goes through life as a piece of clay, allowing himself to be moulded and shaped by people (usually, but not always, women) and then discarded when they eventually tire of him.
This is really a book about a form of masculinity that we don't often see in media. It's one that comes very close to the world of MRA activists and incels, and I'm impressed that Szalay manages to pull this off without it feeling like apologia for some really heinous viewpoints. I think the fact that Istvan never thinks of himself as a victim or blames anybody for his lot in life helps - though this is largely because he never actually reflects on his lot in life in any meaningful way. He is, really, a very pitiful character, and he spends a lot of the book trying and failing to access his own inner world, which he's completely cut himself off from. He has no vocabulary or toolbox with which to express himself, and so he just floats along with a vague sense of numb apathy.
The more I write about this the more I think it sounds like a book I should have hated, but actually I loved it.
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One Boat - Jonathan Buckley
I'm still coming out of a reading slump and finding it a little difficult to really sink into books, so it was nice to find a novel that I could get through in a single day after months of slogging through things even when I was otherwise enjoying them.
This year I seem to have read a lot of books that investigate the ways in which we narrativise our lives, how we construct stories after the fact about the things that we do and experience, and how we attempt to ascribe meaning to events that are largely out of our control in order to try and feel like we're in charge of our lives. This is another of those books, and it's one that I liked a lot.
Thematically this shares some space with Katie Kitamura's Auditon, also on the Booker Prize longlist, and Neel Mukherjee's Choice. I liked this more than Audition but less than Choice.
Now that it's been a couple of days since I read it, I find that I'm thinking about One Boat quite a lot. The main character, Teresa, tells us that she always wanted to be a writer but that her life pulled her in a different direction. She spends her days filling a journal with observations about the people and landscape around her, observations that she writes in very heightened, "literary" language. It's clear from these journal entries and the philosophical conversations that she keeps foisting upon the people she spends time with that she considers herself an intellectual and something of a philosopher, and yet when you get beneath the layer of language that she clothes everything in, she really has nothing much to say. This is contrasted with the poetry written by the mechanic she once had an affair with, which is stark and simple and often the source of scorn and mockery from Teresa and the people she speaks to. There's an attitude among the characters that the mechanic should not consider himself a poet, that he has ideas above his station, that he isn't as intellectually or artistically developed as everyone else because he works with his hands. And yet his work affects Teresa deeply, and it's on a juxtaposition of his poems and her attempts at writing autofiction that the novel ends.
I suspect that this theme - who gets to make art? Who deserves to have a point of view that we listen to? - is present in the novel throughout, but I didn't pick up on it until late in my reading. The result is that I find myself wanting to revisit this immediately to see what I missed, and I look forward to going back to it.