This book by Paul Torday was the choice of reading group for May.  As I mentioned in my last post it was also one of the three books I took with me on holiday last week and in fact the only of the three which I finished.  There was a definite reason for this, which is that I not only took my library paperback, but also a five CD audio book of the same volume (unabridged).

I would definitely now say that having the book read to me did not detract from the reading, in fact in places it added something. On occasion I switched between reading the book on paper and listening to it and this felt quite seamless.  I had wondered if it would bother me to hear the lines of dialogue spoken rather than imagining the voices of the characters, but I had no problem with this.  There is a point where a radio interview is held, and having the voice of Andrew Marr as a radio four presenter definitely felt like a bonus.  I know audio books are expensive, but I was lucky because a friend already had this so I did not have to buy a copy.  It made the drive pass a lot more pleasantly and I would highly recommend it to anyone.

As for the actual book, well I would recommend it as a decent holiday read, but it is not great literature.  That does not mean the story is without it’s merits though, I loved the observations on Arab culture although perhaps they were a little stereotypical.  More interesting was the exploration of politics and civil service.  This was very believable to me and quite entertaining.  The other entertainment was slightly unsavoury, in the form of an exemplary failing marriage which was exploited a little for comic effect I feel.

Lastly, and perhaps unsurprisingly, there is a little for the keen fisherman here, although how authentic it is I cannot say.  It certainly made me imagine I could enjoy donning waders and fishing a stream in Scotland some day, but I think I shall save that for a future holiday!

I think there really should be a post on my blog that discusses Holiday reading and books.  In fact there ought to be one whenever I take a holiday.  The last was probably for going to Wales, but this was only a weekend and Dylan Thomas remained untouched!

This time it is a week and it is in Northumbria.  Reading seems a more likely proposition.  My Ereader is loaded with “White Tiger” which is this months choice for the Brixton urban bookgroup.  And I have “Salmon Fishing in the Yemen”  on load from my library which is the choice of the reading group there this month.  I also have the unabridged audio book of the same work for the car journey, which I am almost certain we shall manage to fit in since the drive is over six hours long, from London to Northumbria.

That gives the context, and I shall be especially interested to compare my experience of the three media forms, audio, Ereader, and paper.  I shall either make additional posts or edit and expand this one to give an update, assuming I am online whilst on holiday.  Should I be offline the posts will appear on my return, in June!

One could be forgiven for thinking that this book might fall into the Dan Brown/Da Vinci code “genre” to go by the title, but you’d be wrong.  There is a narrative device of two journals which alternate and one of these is necessarily hidden away and secret.  Perhaps secret is the wrong word, but there is a big “secret” which is only revealed towards the end of the book.  It is hard for me to talk about plot specifics without revealing this secret without “spoiling” the plot.

I was really quite taken with the way this book covers the sweep of an entire century, yet does so in a very engaging way by literally covering the life story of a woman from the last century to this.  All this in the context of Ireland.  There always seem to be questions I am left asking myself after reading a book, and I think the more of them I have usually is a pretty reliable indicator as to how good the book is or at least how much it engaged me.

For this book one question was if Sebastian Barry were Irish and another was whether he started the book with the ending in mind and some sort of plot outline.  For the former a quick google has revealed that he was Dublin born and is indeed Irish, as I expected since the book is immersed in Irish culture and history which was one of the reasons I so enjoyed it.  This also enabled me to learn a lot of history and background both of the troubles and of the recent revelations of abuse cases endemic in Ireland and a few other island nations (such as the island of Jersey where a residential childrens’ facility apparently had many many historic abuse cases).

As to where he started his planning of the book - well Google is less revealing of course and we can likely only speculate.

But this does lead me to the last thing I am curious about, which is how many readers are surprised by the final “twist” to the plot.  As the interleaving narratives progress we are left wondering if they will overlap in any other way than their perspectives on Roseanne’s life (it is told in the first person from the beginning and in third person from the end).  The third person is not the narrator per se, but another character in the book.  I found this plot device immensely satisfying and it gave Mr Barry a lot of opportunity to show what a fine writer he is.

To conclude - thoroughly recommended!  And please please do leave a comment to let me know if you were totally surprised as you finished the book or if you, like me, had intimations as to what was to be revealed before it was!

Over my holidays I took quite a few books with me, the majority on my ereader and two in paperback format.  I finished one of the paperbacks and found, as usual, that I was not going to get much further with Proust on my ereader!  Since the other paperback was not so appealing it was really nice that my uncle lent me a copy of “The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner” by James Hogg.  I’m still reading this, but it is the main subject of the posting.

Before I start though let me just say a little about the book I finished reading.  There would have been an earlier post for this, but i was on holiday from being online as well as from London!  I had been under the impression that I was reading a first novel when i started “The Savage Garden” by Mark Mills but at book group I learned this was his second novel.  It did not really show as such to me.  I found it gauche and the inclusion of gratuitous and vaguely salacious sex scenes did not improve matters.  A contrived plot sees a young graduate in Tuscany, where he shows us how attractive and modest he is when the local women seem to flock around him and swoon.  Methinks the author is playing with his own identification with the main chracter.  The writing is equallty inept in the florid use of analogies and similies - as one member of the reading group pointed out, describing the touch of a woman’s thigh as “dough like” is not really a fabulous idea from the female point of view!  It did however work as a piece of holiday reading, one can flip through and get it read fast enough without troubling oneself that life is too short to read such things.  Think of it as reading pap to relax from more enjoyable and worthwhile reading.

When it comes to the subject of my posting though, I need to turn to the first book I mentioned above.  As you can clearly see from Wikipedia the author is a truly remarkable man!  I cannot quite believe that he started out in life as a shepherd and only in adult life became a more or less self educated author.  More than that, he managed to write a work that has come to feature as a classic work with a particular appeal as being of great historical interest.  It is entirely possible that this may attract a contemporary audience, if it is true that Ian Rankin is collaborating on a screenplay as my uncle tells me.

I cannot complete my opinions of the work yet, given that I am still reading it, but already I know that it appeals to me on two levels, both as a novel in it’s own right and as a work of great historical interest.  Perhaps it could be compared with something like “The Woman in White” by Wilkie Collins as an exciting read.  Of course the Wilkie Collins work has been adapted for stage and it appears Hoggs may make it to screen, one of the reasons the comparison sprang to mind.  If I have the time and given that I was on holiday in Edinburgh the work also appeals to me as a historical sourse informing me about Scottish History and the reformation.

There is yet one more level on which I enjoy the work though!  It deals with the idea that a person can act in the name of Religion and perpetrate acts which are anything but religious.  In this case Fratricide, marital rap, and more all feature!  But the character believes he is acting in accord with “God’s will” and this absolves him of personal moral responsibility.  Could this arguement not equally be applied in modern times as one we need to consider in facing the challenge of terrorism and so forth?

But to come back to the title subject - please consider this edition of the work, from Edinburgh University Press if you have any plans to buy it.  Although the original text is standard (and readily available online and in numerous paper editions) a good deal of the pleasure in this work is the considerable body of historical notes and research around the book and it’s author.  Incidentally there is a preview of the work at Google Books and the link above takes you there..

This is not the only reason to get a particular edition, there remain one or two more.  Perhaps the cover picture can be extremely annoying or misleading.  If you are bothered by such trivia then it can be a reason!  On the other hand I have another work (James Joyce’s Ullyses) where I expressly chose the edition I bought because it actually has a different text, one agreed as authentic after considerable study.

So these are the reasons I think the choice of an edition of a work really matters!  I wonder what YOU think?  Feel free to add comments!

When this book was selected by the Urban 75 bookgroup I recently started attending I thought it was going to be a cute rom com or chick lit sort of read about a couple meeting through the intra webz and getting cozey… How WRONG could I be!  But that did not stop me using my new  Sony E-reader and getting a free download of the book in question.  I was quite thrilled about that, thinking it was apposite for the name of the book and calculating that if I could download all my bookgroup choices this way then the device would pay for itself in a matter of months.

As it turns out the use of the word geek pre-dates modern useage and has nothing to do with computers.  Rather the word derives from the freak show person at fairs and carnivals whose role was to bite the heads off live chickens!  The heroine of the novel is an albino midget who has a daughter with a far more minor deformity.  One of the first things you have to confront in this story is the idea of a loving mother and father who intentionally inflict birth defects on their offspring, the reason being to populate their travelling roadshow for the carnival.

This may sound immediately offensive, and objectively it is by all standards of human decency.  This is where I find the book remarkable.  It is normal to be asked to suspend our disbelief for the purposes of fiction.  Here we are challenged to also suspend our moral values and jusdgements.  This I could manage to do, largely because my own upbringing was ourside the “norm” for society.  The use of the term norm is actually to be found throughout this book in a pejorative sense for those who conform.

There are a lot more requirements to suspend disbelief - from the character of “Magneto” who has kinetic powers to the charisma of “Arturo” and the movement he founds that disfigures “norms” by their own choice.  One character I found quite repelent is the normal woman who elects to try to “save” certain women by subjecting them to surgical procedures, and indeed she meets a sticky end in the story.

Although it may sound as if I have given away a good deal of the plot I hope these are tasters rather than spoilers and that anyone who reads this will be sufficiently intrigued by them to read this challenging and engaging book.  Although I downloaded it for free I would gladly pay the cover price for what I found to be a great read and a fine first novel.

On a side note - the urban bookgroup was one I started attending when I had no paid employment - as a result taking a bottle of wine along seemed a pricey option and so I developed the habit of baking a cake to take.  I may well keep this up now that I have work, because I enjoy it and they seemed to go down well.  There was the notable time I baked my finest chocolate cake to date and turned up a day late (I had to share with friends and eat it all myself!) and the last time the hostess had baked a fine fruitcake making my efforts irrelevant, but by and large I like the idea and would recommend it to others.

I’m thinking of the Kevin Costner movie “Field of Dreams” at the moment, maybe every blogger has that feeling, it is like “build it and they will come” but I know I shall not always make a post that especially entertains with a particular attitude.  At least not so far as I can tell, but then I probably get easily bored by myself.

I’ve wondered idly from time to time if a blog could be any aid to my finding employment.  But when I tried googling to find any evidence for that it seems far more likely that a blog will result in you being fired than it will in you being hired!  One of the top hits seems to be the M$ employee who took pictures of Apple G5’s being shipped into M$ buildings and posted them to his blog (he was fired).

The other thing I’ve already mentioned toying with is adding to the blog something indicating the book I am reading.  Once I looked a little further into that it seems it is a heavily mined area of blogging already.  It is one instance of a “social cataloging application” apparently, and as Wikipedia will show you, there are several widespread already in this area, like Shelfari, Goodreads, Books iRead, and Anobii.  I’m tempted to look into that last one a little further, I certainly have no intention of paying anything for the service!  I think really I ought to try coding something to make the books I am reading site throw up a page - it should not be that hard really…. certainly not if I make it a link from this page, but I guess most people would prefer to see it right away on the home page and are less likely to click away to a sub page.  Comments from any passing bloggers on this are of course most welcome!