Sunday Salon: Week Three

Featuring:

• The Golden Compass
• Book Lover
  
• Twilight
• Like, Mad
• Novelist's Boot Camp
• The Opposite House
  

I started this week by finishing off Book Lover on Monday. It turned out to be an oddly compelling sort of book. Even though indications weren’t good last week, the book was very easy to read and clearly I found something interesting in it, even if I’m not exactly sure what. The title of book refers to the main character’s habit of retreating to her bathtub and her books for days on end on a “book binge” when times get tough. I think the book is supposed to be about her evolution as a person and how she learns to deal with life instead of retreating into books, but I think the storyline is lost somewhere and the end judgment seems to be that reading too many books is bad, and dating a man who works in a bookshop and is writing a crappy play is also bad, because he isn’t the “real deal” and your cheating, workaholic, sometimes shallow ex-husband is. I certainly wouldn’t rush out to read other books by both or either of the authors of Book Lover and I’ll be selling my copy ASAP.

As promised last Sunday I finished off His Dark Materials aka Northern Nights aka The Golden Compass. I can’t remember why I stopped reading about 20 pages from the end in January, but I did. Obviously the ending had little impact as the rest of book had blurred a bit in my mind. In any case, I really did enjoy the book. I bought it after seeing the movie and after hearing from a number of people how good the books are. Unlike some people out there I enjoyed the portrayal of the church as a manipulative controlling monster. Philip Pullman has written a book about a child, but I don’t think it was written for children. His writing has a glorious timelessness about it, and I feel that this book could have been written 70 years ago instead of just 12. The concepts and relationships in the book (especially those of Lord Asriel and Mrs Coulter and Iorek and his bears) are complicated and very adult. I think children could certainly enjoy the book, but the complexity of storytelling is subtle and the nuances compelling, seeming to exist for understanding by the adult mind. Very interesting and highly recommended. I also love one of the titles – His Dark Materials. It give me goosebumps! As I have the three book omnibus, I plan to move onto The Subtle Knife in the next few weeks.

Most of this week has seen me reading Twilight by Stephanie Meyer. I bought this book in February of 07 when I was working at Borders in San Antonio. I read about three quarters of it and for some reason stopped (this is clearly a theme with me…I wonder why?). So I’ve picked it up again and I’m starting from the beginning. It is extremely readable and the character of Bella is easy to relate to, even to a 31 year old woman like me. As I type this I am remembering that I found the angst of Bella and Edward’s relationship a bit annoying, so perhaps that is why I stopped reading. However I will persevere this time. At the writing retreat I attended in Scotland last month a 14 year old listed Stephanie Meyer as the author whose work had changed the way she sees the world, so there can be no doubting of Meyer's place in the heart of teenagers as a powerful and memorable author. Unless you've been under a rock you'll also know that Twilight the movie is due to be released in December 08.


I also picked up a funny book this week – Like, Mad – which was one of my Dad’s books. My dad died 4 years ago, so I smile to think of him as a 15 year old paying the cover price (35 cents) in 1960 at the local shop. I’ve taken a photo of the book below.


It hasn’t coped well with age (how would you feel if you were a 48 year old paperback?) and the pages are very yellowed and literally falling out of the book. There are also about 50 pages missing from the middle of the book, no idea where they went. I’m about half way through and it is a lot like reading today’s Mad Magazine, except sometimes I miss the pop culture jokes because they're 50 years old. One segment was on the invention of the “video phone” and how spouses could lie to one another about where they were and what they were doing. It’s a fun read.

I borrowed Novelist’s Boot Camp by Todd A Stone from the library this week. I’ve read a bit, but so far I’m not too impressed. Stone is a former military dude who believes that I need to “take command of my novel” and “plan and execute a writing strategy that’s in sync with my ultimate mission objective: getting published”. I’m not a huge fan of the military or military discipline, but I picked up this book at Borders a few weeks back and thought it might have a few good ideas so I put through a request for it at the library. I’ll keep reading for now, but I’m not sure I can be bullied into writing a novel. Seems like the wrong approach entirely to me. Then again, Todd Stone is published and I’m not, so we’ll see I guess.


Another book I want to mention is one I’m half way through and that is The Opposite House by Helen Oyememi. I found out about this book after listening to the author being interviewed on the Writers on Writing podcast. According to the book jacket, The Opposite House “is about the disquiet that follows us across places and languages, a feeling passed down from mother and father to son and daughter.” This doesn’t really do the book justice though. It is literally prose in the form of poetry. Oyememi is a poet and the way she constructs her sentences makes me want to weep at their beauty. She tells her story in images which are then written as words which are then conveyed with a mysterious sort of disconnectedness. I can imagine people gushing about this book because it seems to be smarter than we are – it exists on a higher plane of consciousness and the reader only gets glimpses as to what it really is. On the down side, it is difficult to read, requires total concentration and is best served in small portions. Sometimes we think something must be genius if we don’t understand it, but sometimes it is just not good writing. I am not sure which description fits Oyememi and this book just yet, but I will keep reading to find out.

And that’s me for this Sunday. Yay!