On The Best Books To Give For People Who Are Unwell

Hello there. Hope you're feeling well today.

Twitter can sometimes cause surprises even with regard to this blog. I hadn't thought of anything to post when I was chatting to people in it about books.

The other people involved in this converstion were @AnnaCaig ,@Efrogwraig and @MacdocLeonard (all rights reserved etc,etc).

The chat moved from being able to praise an author directly online after having read their work, to my doubts Miguel De Cervantes that, even by ouja twitter, he could use just 140 characters, to the relative merits of  Don Quixote, Miss Read and Jane Austen.

But what intrigued me the most was when @Efrogwraig advised that not only was @AnnaCaig a journalist writing a book column in the Sheffield Telegraph (and incidentally has a book blog https://murderundergroundbrokethecamel.wordpress.com) but also gave her books when unwell. Which got me thinking? What is the perfect book to give for someone who's ill?

In some respects I'm not the perfect person to have asked this. In my life I've been fortunate that only twice have I been in hospital as a patient. The first time aged four to take my tonsils out, the second to have my wisdom teeth extracted in my late twenties/early forties. I can't remember my four year old reading habit but books second time around took a back seat from recovering from the anaesthetic and listening on hospital radio to West Ham losing in the quarter final of the F A cup against Luton Town.

I do however remember having the flu in junior school and picking up Black Beauty by Anna Sewell to read sitting in an armchair and going through it pausing when everything seemed to be swirling around me. Praised this book in the past and won't repeat myself here except to say that on reflection perhaps the episodic nature of the story as different issues befall the eponymous horse made it easy for an ill boy to digest it all.

The worst place to answer this question is probably at a hospital shop. The last time I went inside one (daughter's physiotherapy for her knee) around January did have a look at the books on offer. Certainly it was a different selection than when the shop was owned by W H Smith. Then it seemed to be current bestsellers,what were bestsellers and what they seemed to hope would be bestsellers. Lots of thrillers by James Patterson (and one other) and Clive Cussler (and one other) adorned the shelves. To think I'm so old I can remember when Clive Cussler wrote rubbish thrillers by himself.

Now the books seem to be bestsellers of decades earlier. SS GB by Len Deighton (before the TV series - Am not a fan which I'll explain if I ever get to read another book by him again. Let's just say this cemented my dislike) and The Dead Of Jericho by the late Colin Dexter (I've read this and a few other Morse novels and, and I'm sorry to say this, the TV series was much, much better) were the titles that sprang to mind. But though the selection was interesting it didn't really seem to hit the right note.

So perhaps the answer lay in the one and only time I gave books to a person whilst they were in hospital. Over a decade ago a friend of ours was struck by an infection which though she is much better now has changed her life forever. At that time she was staying in a hospital in Llandough (near Cardiff  and funnily enough one of the places we're looking to move to now) for a number of weeks as I recall, and possibly even a few months.

Before going to visit her for the first time I was in the Waterstones bookshop in Cardiff having decided that grapes/flowers didn't really cut it as gifts given  the circumstance so decided to get her a couple of books instead. But for reasons that seem inexplicable to me then, let alone now, I bought a couple of gritty dark crime novels by Patricia Cornwell.

What made this decision odd was not only that these books were dark crime thrillers, not just that they were from her medical examiner Kay Scarpetta series to be read by a woman stuck in hospital for (then) an unknown period of time but also that I'd never read a Patricia Cornwell novel before....and indeed since.

(A quick aside here. The reason I've not read Patricia Cornwell is simply because there are so many books but so little time and they've simply not come up on the pile of the great unread. As to how do I know therefore that her novels are dark and gritty? Simple. I've judged a book by it's cover)

And the reaction of our friend? She has moaned about it to me ever since. Complaining that she so loved the thrillers she's had to buy every other Patricia Cornwell book including getting a hardback copy before the paperback came out. Unwittingly I had created a superfan. Ms Cornwell you don't have to thank me.

And the point to be made? Unless the person's condition is terminal perhaps the best book to buy an unwell person is one where people have worst problems than the recipient of the gift is facing. Like say danger on the streets....or death.

Until the next time.

Call Of The Wild by Jack London aka Black Beauty Part 2

Hello there. Hope you're feeling well today.

There is always for the reader too many books too little time. And so you try and avoid as much film/TV series/any illustrations of a book as possible. But of course you're never going to completely successful. Snippets will come to your view.

If you take the Lord Of The Rings / Hobbits books for example. I know there is a search for rings, the hero has funny ears and there are old men with authority and white beards. Nothing though that would be any degree of spoiler to when I actually read the series.

So we come to Call Of The Wild. by Jack London, the latest ebook I've been reading. The snippets I knew beforehand were as follows. It involved a dog,it was set in somewhere icy and there was a sympathetic male character. I knew the final fact because though I've not seen it "the film of the book" starred Charlton Heston and if he's in a film you know he's not playing the bad guy be it in ice or the Planet of the apes.

What was unexpected, and I'm sure I'm not the first person to mention this, was that this turned out to be Black Beauty Part two. A different animal, I know. Tougher, I know. But still Black Beauty Part Two.

Essentially this is about an animal taken from a more comfortable environment and what it has to experience with different owners. It is tougher. It has literally, more bite,  but in concept it's no different from Anna Sewell's novel.

Is it better than Black Beauty? Given I read the latter as a child not sure whether my view would be swayed by the passage of time. What I will say is that the whilst Call of the Wild is readable I'm not sure whether it deserves classic status especially as now I've realised it's basic concept is not new.

Perhaps indeed there should be a greater appreciation, as I've also explained in earlier posts, of what Anna Sewell actually did.

The next one on the great ebook unread is Twilight in Italy by D H Lawrence. Regular readers of this blog will know that I'm not a fan, but let's see if this changes anything.

Until the next time.

The Trouble With George Clooney's 2010 Film The American Is......I've Read The Book

Hello there. Hope you're feeling well today.

As you know from my blog I read a lot of books. What you will rarely get here is a chat about films. I'm not a film buff. Of course I have favourites won't deny that but when I've control of the TV I'd rather as a rule watch the football (rugby,basketball etc).

And there is the subsection to that of films that are based on a book. Again normally I'd avoid them as it would spoil my enjoyment of the work it was based on. Reading a book after seeing a film would be like watching a recording of a football game whilst already knowing the result (in most cases,but I'll come back to that later). And If I've already read the book then to me what's the point of watching the film for exactly the same reason.

Of course occasionally the film is better than the sourced book. But in my experience only if the original was dull. The Guns Of Navarone as an entertainment is a perfectly good war film but the only near death experience I had when reading the Alistair Maclean thriller was to my brain as it was coma inducing (and for the record that's not an exception - I don't particularly like him).

All of this is leading to of course the recent exception to the above. Wife/daughter have been nagging me to do more in watching my recorded programmes on the DVR. It's about 14%  clear at time of writing. This is to be fair mainly due to recordings of football (rugby,basketball etc) as well as the Welsh language programmes such as the soap opera Pobol Y Cwm. So I've been making an extra effort to watch them. Which brings us to The American. A 2010 film starring George Clooney.

Now you may remember a while back after reading the original Martin Booth novel I said that when this film was next on TV I'd see it. This was partly out of curiosity and partly that I like watching films set in Tuscany as this is where my Italian relatives live. It came up on the DVR list and so started viewing .....I wish I hadn't.

The film starts with a gunfight in a frozen snow ridden part of Sweden. In the book a similar scene is the main character's bad memory somewhere around the middle and that was it. In the film it's the beginning and turns out to be part of the plot. In other words they were changing the storyline.

Personally it really angers me when they do that because if you hadn't read the book you'd have a wrong idea of Martin Booth's thriller. I first realised that film/TV could cheat like this when I was nine years old. There was a TV series in the early seventies of Black Beauty. Set in a Victorian country doctor's house the point was that for me as a nine year old it seemed to be a series for girls (the lead character other than the horse being the eldest child, a daughter) so I didn't watch it after the first few episodes.

About a year later I had the flu and as this was not even the age of the video recorder let alone the internet reluctantly picked a book from my great unread at that time which turned out to be somebody's unwanted copy of Anna Sewell's original novel. Well I was bowled over. Not only was it good it also had nothing to do other than have a black horse in it with the TV series that bore it's name. And incidentally it was also far tougher than I'd expected.

If you've read the book first you'll realise as a consequence that the main villain is not the same as the film. When you realise that it's not difficult working out who that is.

I mentioned  before in this blog falling asleep when trying to view the film for the first time. Well I understand why now. The novel slowly ratchets up the suspense with powerful intensity . The film is just slow and the occasional gunfight and naked female breasts cannot hide it's overall high boredom level.The most lively bit is at the end but I was just too numbed/annoyed to care.

George Clooney is the best thing in the film. In conveys the icy isolated main character impressively. However although he is the best thing in the movie he doesn't carry it.

I really should have known better.

Until the next time.