Hello there. Hope you're feeling well today.
It's been a while since I've done a post solely about books but then again it's unusual when I finish three in one day. The literary equivalent of waiting for buses.
So let's start with the good. Sue Townsend's The Public Confessions Of A Middle Aged Woman, a collection of her columns in the Sainsburys Magazine was a joy to read. With her trademark engaging humour she writes about subjects as varied as Vodka and car boot sales though tinged with sadness towards the end with the decline in her eyesight. It's the best book I've read this year.
It occurred to me as I was reading that she is the last writer that was liked by so many readers. When I say liked I mean that you can be an academic or a gardener, male or female,work in a petrol station or a rail station, work in London or her home city of Leicester and still feel that you can relate to what she's writing. Her recent death robbed us of a person who I think we now realise was a quiet British literary institution.
Just as Sue Townsend's book is the best I've read this year then Ali Smith's The Accidental is the worst. This book won the Whitbread book of the year in 2005. Whitbread own the coffee chain Costa which is why this prize has changed to the Costa book of the year. But either way it struck me that the judges must have been high on caffeine to have awarded this first prize.
As a parent in the beginning there's an incident that upset me and I almost put the book down. I wish now I had.
If I was to say to you that some important characters are called Magnus and Astrid but it's not set in Sweden then you'll have an idea of how pretentious this piece of work is. But this is not so much a novel of pretensions but a pretend novel. For the author does not hesitate in using a hundred words where ten would do. Somewhere there might be a short story that I wouldn't bother to read screaming to be set free.
The writing style is best described as a "stream of consciousness" but is more a stream of urine. It rambles around like an intellectual tramp and in the middle there is even pages of poetry for no good reason whatsoever.
As a reader the only pleasure I had from this book was the feeling of relief when it was finished.
The trouble with The Dirty Game by Andrew Jennings is that for all the goings on in FIFA that it goes into intricate detail to explain (and it's a book that you truly need to be paying attention to or else you'll be lost in all the dealings it goes into) the investigations are still ongoing. When I finished this book I felt the phrase "TO BE CONTINUED" should have been placed at the ending.
As interesting a book as it is it really is unfinished and can only be completed once the legal and police processes are completed. Perhaps this can be best described as a first draft.
So new books now need to be picked from the great unread. The next Penguin to be picked is:
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| Not A Hazardous Sport - Nigel Barley |
Apparently this is a book about a visit to a particular tribe in Indonesia. Hope this isn't going to be patronising. We shall see.
Unless anything unexpected happens I won't be able to visit the library until Monday week. So the non Penguin book I've picked is this one.
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| The American - Martin Booth |
As you may remember I bought this book for a pound in Poundland but what pushed me into getting it was that it was set in Tuscany, the Rhondda of Italy.
Until the next time.
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