The Fourth Bear

I'm a bit over the Nursery Crime series. Don't get me wrong, Jasper Fforde is awesome, but I'm just a much bigger fan of Thursday Next.

These are kind of fun, there are lots of literary allusions (my favourite was Dorian Gray in this one), but that's really where the quality stops. Don't be fooled by the recommendations on the back cover, plot is not high on Fforde's list in these novels. This one is based on Goldilocks and the Three Bears, with some other random nursery characters. And I mean random! Try the Quangle Wangle, for example. Ever heard of him?

In the end I skimmed through the last few chapters. It got old and I stopped caring about what happened. Skip in favour of a Thursday Next novel.

Time's Arrow

Martin Amis did something really different with Time’s Arrow. The narrator lives his life backwards… no, that’s not right. He watches his life backwards. His consciousness is born as an old man, and is irrevocably attached to a man who is called (at this point anyway) Dr. Tod Friendly.

At first, the book is simply an entertaining, vivid and clever look at life backwards. We hear about the pain of going to the toilet in the morning (oh, just think about it), emptying food onto empty plates, letters than appear in the fireplace and fling themselves into your hand, starting relationships with a slap on the face and most disturbingly, the eventual descriptions of Friendly’s job. Imagine patients who walk in happily looking healthy and rested. Then Friendly and his colleagues go to work on them, unplucking stitches, implanting bits of broken glass, sewing back on ruined limbs. The narrator (well, you cannot really call him Friendly) is sickened by his work. He is also plagued by nightmares that he assumes comes from his sickening job.

Life goes on, and the novel could simply be an interesting study of life lived backwards, but Amis eventually takes us to Nazi Germany and the death camps of Auschwitz and Treblinka. Perversely, our narrator thinks he has come to the most wonderful place; they make human beings in ovens! Oh what great work, bringing to life so many pale corpses! Sewing together his beloved Jews from nothing but a bucket of body parts! They look so skinny and sick at the beginning, and grow fatter and more rosy cheeked until they are sent off on trains into the world. Later (earlier?) he also re-lives going and fixing the broken houses of his beloved Jews, and giving them money from his own pocket. We meet his wife and then they get married. Then he goes right back into his childhood, until he cannot even remember who and what he is.

This is a fascinating read, and certainly makes you think about the world around you going backwards. But what was missing for me was a sense of purpose. Why did he have to experience his life this way? A punishment for his sins? But Amis doesn’t go here. It’s just the story of an extraordinary life told backwards.

Everything's Eventual

Stephen King is a genius – although he and I have a somewhat tempestuous relationship. I want to read him, but sometimes he just wont let me. For example, I loved the film The Green Mile, but do you think I can get into the book? And the new book, Lisey’s Story. Do you think I can get into that? That’s not to say that I haven’t read and enjoyed many of his books (does it get any better than the Dark Tower series?), but sometimes, we are not a great fit.

Fortunately for me, Everything’s Eventual – a series of short stories - was a great fit. We have King at his scary best in the title story, as well as the truly frightening 1408 (soon to be out on film with John Cusack and Samuel L. Jackson, so it will have to be good) and a few good moments in Autopsy Room Four. For Dark Tower fans, Kings returns to tell us the story of The Little Sisters of Illyria. Very cool.

But don’t forget that King also wrote the story that The Shawshank Redemption is based on. So Lucky Quarter and The Death Room deserve a mention too.

This collection is out again at the moment because of the film release of 1408 – so grab a copy if you can.

Crowded House

I don’t usually deviate from books here, but seeing as I did once for a film, I could hardly not express my praise for the Crowded House concert I saw last night.

Some bands you see live, and you can really hear the effect the studio has had on their sound – but Crowded House is even better live than their studio albums are. Like a fine wine, Neil Finn’s voice has only improved with age, it is rich and clear. From classics in the rock style like Locked Out, to the new single almost entirely in falsetto A Sigh, Finn was breathtakingly flawless.

He is also one of the world’s most amazing songwriters, so I thought I would leave you with a few of his words…



There is freedom within,

there is freedom without

Try to catch the deluge in a paper cup

Theres a battle ahead, many battles are lost

But you'll never see the end of the road

While you're travelling with me

Hey now, hey now

Dont dream its over

Hey now, hey now

When the world comes in

They come, they come

To build a wall between us

We know they wont win
Don’t Dream It’s Over

I've been locked out

I've been locked in

but I always seem to come back again

when you're in that room

what do you do?

I know that I will have you in the end

And the clouds

they're crying on you

and the birds are offering up their tunes

in a shack as remote as a mansion

you escape into a place where nothing moves

Locked Out

I have all I want, is that simple enough?

a whole lot more I'm thinking of

every night about six o'clock

birds come back to the pond to talk

they talk to me -- birds to talk to me

if I go down on my knees

it feels like nothing matters

in our private universe

And it's a pleasure that I have known

and it's a treasure that I have gained

and it's a pleasure that I have known

Private Universe

She came out of the water

Into my horizon

Like a cumulo nimbus

Coming in from a distance
Burning and exploding

Burning and exploding

Like a slow volcano

When you come

Cover the ground with ashes

When you come

When You Come

A sigh

from the deepest well

you can tell a lot

by not saying a thing

It's true

between us, my friend

this longing...A sigh

for loneliness to end

no changing the story now

A Sigh

These walls, have eyes,

Rows of photographs of faces like mine,

Who do we become,

without knowing where we started from,

It's true,

I'm missing you,

And I stand alone,

inside your room.

Everything that you made by hand,

Everything that you know by heart,

I will try to connect all the pieces you've left,

I will carry it on, let you forget,

I remember the years, when your mind was still clear,

All the flickering lights,

That filled up this silent house.

Silent House

The List - Most Recent Version

1
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
J.K. Rowling

2
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Thomas Hardy

3
Of Mice and Men
John Steinbeck

4
1984
George Orwell

5
A Prayer for Owen Meany
John Irving

6
The Woman in White
Wilkie Collins

7
Atlas Shrugged
Ayn Rand

8
A Room With A View
EM Forster

9
The Yellow Wallpaper
Charlotte Perkins Gilman

10
The Old Man and the Sea
Ernest Hemingway

11
A Child Called It
Dave Pelzer

12
The Penelopiad
Margaret Atwood

13
Double Vision
Pat Barker

14
Northanger Abbey
Jane Austen

15
The Turn of the Screw
Henry James

16
The Mermaid Chair
Sue Monk Kidd

17
Ethan Frome
Edith Wharton

18
David Copperfield
Charles Dickens

19
A Tale of Two Cities
Charles Dickens

20
Never Let Me Go
Kazuo Ishiguro

21
Zorro
Isabel Allende

22
Amsterdam
Ian McEwan

23
Memories of my Melancholy Whores
Gabriel Garcia Marquez

24
The Road
Cormac McCarthy

25
The Surgeon of Crowthorne
Simon Winchester

26
Island of the Day Before
Umberto Eco

27
A Clockwork Orange
Anthony Burgess

28
Slaughterhouse Five
Kurt Vonnegut

29
Lolita
Vladimir Nabokov

30
The Ground Beneath Her Feet
Salman Rushdie

31
Enduring Love
Ian McEwan

32
On The Road
Jack Kerouac

33
Possession
A. S. Byatt

34
Briefing for a Descent into Hell
Doris Lessing

35
Time’s Arrow
Martin Amis

36
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Phillip K Dick

37
Girl with a Pearl Earring
Tracey Chevalier

38
The Same Sea
Amos Oz

39
In Cold Blood
Truman Capote

40
If On Winter’s Night, A Traveller
Italo Calvino

41
The Infinite Plan
Isabelle Allende

42
Boy in the Striped Pajamas
John Boyne

43
Sleep, Pale Sister
Joanne Harris

44
The Count of Monte Christo
Alexandre Dumas

45
The Complete Polysyllabic Spree
Nick Hornby

46
The Stories of John Cheever
John Cheever

47
Nineteen Minutes
Jodie Picoult

48
The Ringmaster’s Daughter
Jostein Gaardner

49
The Dice Man
Luke Rhinehart

50
The Sea
John Banville

51
Kafka on the Shore
Haruki Murakami

52
How the Dead Live
Will Self

53
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Milan Kundera

54
The Outsider
Albert Camus

55
The Woods
Harlan Coben

56
Shakespeare’s Wife
Germaine Greer

57
Mister Pip
Lloyd Jones

58
The Thirteenth Tale
Diane Setterfield

59
The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith
Thomas Kenneally

60
Life of Pi
Yann Martel

61
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch
Alexander Solzhenitsyn

62
The Outsider
Albert Camus

63
The Trial
Franz Kafka

64
The Red Queen
Margaret Drabble

65
The Poisonwood Bible
Barbara Kingsolver

66
A Long Way Down
Nick Hornby

67
On Beauty
Zadie Smith

68
The Green Man
Kingsley Amis

69
This Boy’s Life
Tobias Wolff

70
Hangover Square
Patrick Hamilton

71
Housekeeping
Marilynne Robinson

***Books in pink have already been read***

The Complete Polysyllabic Spree

Note: This is a list text.

I am not usually a non-fiction reader, but when the book is about books, I had to give it a go!

The Complete Polysyllabic Spree is a column author Nick Hornby wrote for the enigmatic magazine, The Believer. The monthly entries detail his relationship with books – what he bought, what he read and what he abandoned. Hornby says he is a reader’s reader – he is not interested in wanky novels by authors that are trying to be as clever and obscure as possible. This kind of sends up warning signals – I wonder what Hornby would make of Italo Calvino, for example.

Naturally the only test of this is to look at books we have both read. Hornby gives Dickens the big thumbs up (score one), and The Da Vinci Code and The Poet the big thumbs down (scores two and three). He was disappointed in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (score four) and describes Finnegan’s Wake as “inpossible to get through” (score five – and an extra point for going against general literary belief!). McEwan’s Saturday does well (score seven), but then so does Catcher in the Rye (yes I know, I am supposed to love it, but I don’t!). So overall, I guess we tend to agree on books. That said, I have added six books recommended by Hornby to my list (check out the updated version). I could flick through the pages of the book again in a couple of months and no doubt get more recommendations. You would every time you looked through it.

As a read, The Complete Polysyllabic Spree was enjoyable, although it is not the sort of book you would read in one sitting. I would spread it over, a bit at a time and absorb it. Too much in one hit and it starts to get monotonous. But I think that could be more of the nature of my relationship with non-fiction than anything else. Hornby himself approaches the subject matter well. He talks about the web that is created by our reading – one books leads us to another, and then another. We follow authors and subjects and styles and so on. He is very readable, often discussing the strange group of people who edit The Believer and their even stranger rules for his column (he is banned no less than three times during the publication dates of the entries) and ruminates on what makes a good book. It’s worth a look for any keen reader – especially one who writes her own book blog!

If interested, apparently this volume is followed by Housekeeping vs The Dirt.