Week 3- When Will There Will Be Plot Points That Don't Annoy Me?

Week 3 of what will now be the 12 week novel challenge and things have taken a turn for the worse. Not in the sense that I've fallen further behind on my reading as I'm keeping steady pace there but in the sense that book choice has become an issue. As I mentioned in my last post, I have a love/hate relationship with the novels of Kate Atkinson and so randomly adding one of her books to the list probably wasn't wise but more on that in a minute.

My book for the week was Kate Atkinson's When Will There be Good News? which is the third book of hers to feature former soldier, former policeman, former private detective Jackson Brodie. As you can guess by that description of the character they are crime novels. When Will There be Good News? focuses on three stories which as they tend to in novels ultimately intersect. The opening chapter of the novel tells of Joanna Mason who as a six year old escapes when her mother, elder sister, baby brother and pet dog are slain by a mysterious man in a remote English village. Skip forward 30 years and Joanna Hunter nee Mason is now married, living in Edinburgh with her husband, young baby and large dog and working as a GP. Joanna Hunter isn't the one of the novel's principle characters but she becomes the central spoke around which they turn. Joanna Hunter's nanny, Reggie Chase, is a precocious 16 year old who looks about 12 and left school around a year earlier when her mother drowned. She is mildly obsessed with Dr H as she calls Joanna Hunter and when her employer disappears Reggie focused on tracking her down even when no-one else will listen to her. On top of this, Reggie also has to contend with bad seed elder brother and with the death of her former school teacher who after retiring on medical grounds is assisting Reggie to complete her A levels. Visiting Joanna Hunter prior to her disappearance is DCI Louise Monroe who is the one to let Joanna know that her family's murderer is to be released from prison. DCI Monroe is a tough as nail police officer who believes she isn't good at relationships as evidenced by the distance growing between her and her teenage son but despite this she has recently married a surgeon and has also taken a younger police officer under her wing. DCI Monroe is focused on helping a women who had members of her  family gunned by her husband at her child's birthday party especially as the husband is still at large and when she meets Dr Hunter she focuses on the contrast between these two women who have both been victims who narrowly escaped death at the hands of a madman. Finally there is DCI Monroe's old friend/colleague/almost lover Jackson Brodie who unwittingly boards a train heading for Edinburgh instead of London when trying to return home to his new wife after retrieving DNA from his former girlfriend's son in order to test if the boy is his child. Brodie's luck gets worse when his train is derailed on the outskirts of Edinburgh leaving him seriously injured and momentarily dead until he is saved by Reggie Chase who happens to be nearby and thanks to Dr Hunter knows CPR.

Rambling plot summary done and now onto the love/hate relationship with Atkinson. I have read three of her books in past- Behind the Scenes at the Museum, Emotionally Weird and Human Croquet. For the most part I enjoyed all three (in particular Emotionally Weird) and found Atkinson's prose style quite smooth, entertaining and skilled and I can see why a lot of people I know like her works. At the same time, I found all three had minor plot points that bugged me- not that I could reel them off now- and Atkinson's obsession with saccharine epilogues drove me half mad as I despise epilogues especially soppy ones (Atkinson's aren't the worst of recent years- the epilogue in the final Harry Potter scores that crown- but they are still a waste of paper). When Will There be Good News? doesn't have an epilogue but my love/hate relationship remains and sadly for this novel there is less positive than her earlier non-crime works. Thankfully as my mother had informed me it can be read having not read the two earlier Jackson Brodie novels and not feel that you are missing anything. Atkinson's prose is still of a high standard and it is at times quite funny (I loved in particular DCI Monroe's comment on her young colleague's taste in music). That said it is novel that suffers from too many characters syndrome. I could deal with the focus on women who are lost, women who are victims and women who fight to raise above this but this could have been executed without the need to introduce Reggie's elder brother, DCI Monroe's in-laws and, I hate to say as his name emblazoned the cover of the copy I read, Jackson Brodie. Reggie's brother, Billy, served no tangible point and all Monroe's in-laws did was highlight the cracks in a marriage that were already glaringly obvious to the reader. Both Billy and the in-laws felt like padding on the novel. Brodie was a different beast. He was an interesting character and I could see potential for him but not in this novel as he felt like he had been pasted into a novel that was mostly written in order to push along the plot and as a catalyst to unite Reggie and DCI Monroe. I felt that the Monroe character could have been expanded to cover Brodie's function in the novel or that Atkinson should have worked harder to make him fit more smoothly. There are several plot points that are odd and not strictly neccessary which will bug the eagle eyed reader- one near the end is so impossible and ridiculous that I was left wondering why it was there at all and if it was needed all I could do was puzzle over how to make it make sense or even land in the realm of possibility. Also Atkinson may have abandoned the epilogue but there is still plenty of sugar at the end- too much for my liking. Ultimately I only really like three categories of conventionial crime fiction- Agatha Christie, detective fiction ala Hammett or Chandler, or gritty stuff  in the vein of Larsson's Millennium trilogy and the like- and sadly this doesn't fall into any of them. It is well written but poorly executed and a little too twee for my liking at the end.

This cover looks exactly like the one I read except the one I read said "The New Jackson Brodie Novel" under the title. Looking for this image on google, I discovered that there is an edition with a small red haired girl and what looks like an Irish setter on the front which makes no sense as there are no small red haired girls or Irish setters in the novel- the only small girls are Joanna Hunter and her sister who have dark hair and the only dogs are a terrier and a lab- WEIRD

So after the step down from McCarthy to Atkinson there is nowhere to go but up as I delve into The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles by Haruki Murakami. I've loved every Murakami books I've ever read so here's hoping for another win.

Once again a reminder, please donate http://register.thenovelchallenge.org.au/The-Novel-Challenge/clarewoodley

Week 2- Apocalyptic Landscapes and Facial Injuries

Two and a half weeks in and it's confirmed....I'm not going to get through my books in a month so I'm switching to the three month option. Instead of blaming the book, this week the blame lies securely with my being a clumsy fool and landing myself with facial injuries. Let's just say falling head first into a concrete footpath isn't wise and leads to a massive black eye which leads to:

• Having to wear sunglasses in public and therefore being unable to read on the bus
• Having dry eyes and therefore being too tired to read at night

When I got to it, Cormac McCarthy's The Road only took about two days to finish.

I've never read anything by McCarthy before and had heard so much positive that I was prepared for The Road not to live up to the hype. For those living under a literary rock (and I guess a cinematic one too- not that I've seen the film), The Road is harrowing tale of an unnamed man and his son travelling through a burnt post-apocalyptic United States. It details their quest to escape the rapidly approaching bitter winter; to find the bare essentials of life such as food and clothes; and to avoid what the boy terms "the bad guys" who represent the majority of the living humanity that has descended cannibalism in order to survive. Largely it is a story of survival with very little action and when the horror of the hell in which they are living creeps in there is a feeling of inevitability about it.

OK Cormac I take it back- hype schmype! This is without question and all hyperbole aside one of finest works of fiction ever written. From the third sentence I was hooked and were it not for the facial injuries I wouldn't have put it down. The language is sparse but beautiful, and is masterfully presented. You can see the bleak landscape and almost taste the ash. There may not be much in the way of action and as mentioned above it does have an aura of inevitability but the relationship between the man and the boy is so honest, so real and so raw that you feel immensely for them both. When it comes down to it, there actually aren't words to tell you just how profoundly wonderful this book is except to say READ IT!

Brilliant book- I like this cover much better than the movie-tie of my copy

Next was to be The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles by Haruki Murakami but I finished The Road at my parents' place and don't have it on me. That means borrowing a book from them and therefore adding a new book to the list as my parents own none of the rest of the list. The new entry is When Will There Be Good News? by Kate Atkinson. This one really could go either way as it is the third in a series and I haven't read the first two (my mother assures me it stands on its own), and I have a seriously love/hate relationship with Kate Atkinson (I think her writing funny and of a good calibre but I hate her obsession with doing an epilogue "and then 10 years later" chapter- it killed Emotionally Weird for me which otherwise I'd completely loved).

Also please donate http://register.thenovelchallenge.org.au/The-Novel-Challenge/clarewoodley

One week and one book in....I think I may be falling behind

One week into the MS Novel Challenge and I already feel behind. I think this is partly because of the book I choose to read first, Jonathan Franzen's The Twenty-Seventh City.

As regular readers will know I read The Corrections early this year when I was overseas and found it brilliant. I also found that it was quite a fast read for its length. Unfortunately for me, The Twenty-Seventh City isn't so much of a quick read. Written in 1988, it was Franzen's first novel and while I loath the term as many of my favourite novels are first novels, it does have a clear case of first novel syndrome. Set in the late 1980s in St Louis, Missouri, it is the tale of the community response to the appointment of an Indian woman with no American police experience to the role of police commander in the city. It focuses largely on Martin Probst (a prominent industrialist in the city), his wife Barbara and their daughter Luisa. However unlike The Corrections with its focus on just one family, The Twenty-Seventh City is more expansive in its focus and there are large sections devoted to the police commander, S Jammu, and her associates, Singh, Asha and Devi, to around five other prominent members of the St Louis community and to a junior member of the St Louis police force. It is a tale of politics, corruption and a community at a loss to cope with change.

I found the sections about the Probst family and its troubles brilliant and a sign of things to come for Franzen but there were too many characters and they tend to pull focus. The number of characters made me feel at times like I was reading a Russian novel and I was just happy that, unlike a Russian novel, they didn't all have the same names or have three names that they went by. The number of characters felt like Franzen was testing the water in terms of what kind of fiction to write and where to place his focus. This slightly jilted focus also means that I found it less funny than The Corrections. However it is still worth the read and it shows the early stages of Franzen's brilliance. If you haven't read The Corrections (or, if what I hear is true, Freedom), it'd read this first as it is the comparison that makes it seem the lesser novel. Compared to the large percentage of fiction on the market, it is of a much higher quality.

 

Having finished with The Twenty-Seventh City, I'm embarking on a much shorter novel....albeit a less cheerful one....Cormac McCarthy's The Road....

If you still wish to chuck some sponsorship money my way, go to http://register.thenovelchallenge.org.au/The-Novel-Challenge/clarewoodley  

A week in the dark and a month full of books

Long time no blog...well only a month really but I currently find myself a little lost having come to the library to work on my thesis only to find I left the USB drive on which it dwells at home and it is only saved to my other laptop. Sure my house is only a couple of blocks from the library but I'm a slacker and would rather blog instead. And today my blog turns to what I have been up to over the last few weeks and what I will be up to over the next month.

It will come as little shock to anyone who knows me that if there was such a thing as Cinema Goers Anonymous that I would have to sign up and declare "Hi, my name is Clare and I watch too many movies". On average I go to the cinema at least twice at month and in some months you would push that closer to four or five times. I'm very selective in what I watch. Steering clear of the big budget blockbusters of the most part (the names James Cameron and Steven Spielberg will likely send me running in the opposite direction), I tend towards the oddball films, the indie films, the films by cult directors and the films in foreign languages. Where am I going with this? Well to the Sydney Film Festival. Growing up in Wollongong, I had this image that film festivals were somewhat beyond the reach of the common people. Sure we got the free guide to the festival with the Sydney Morning Herald once a year but still it didn't sink in. When I made the move to Sydney, I finally figured it out that just about anyone could fork over the money and rock up to a film festival (well possibly not in Cannes or Sundance, though I could be wrong about that too). Every year since then I have spent two weeks or more recently a little over one week (the film was shortened a few years ago) sitting in the dark watching films of varying quality in numerous languages. The first two years I attended I saw over 20 films (the first year close to 30 and also spent a day watching short films as part of the short film awards for the festival), then I cut it back to around 15, then last year only 3. This year I was back up at 12 films but I doubt I'll climb over 15 again until I retire- 30 films in two weeks takes a lot out of you especially if you are working full time in a job that has nothing to do with movies. Going to a film at a film festival holds a certain allure that seeing the same film at a regular screening does not and this even holds true of the films for the Sydney festival that are screened not at the gorgeous State Theatre but instead at Greater Union George St or the Dendy in Circular Quay. If you are a film nerd, you are surrounded by fellow film nerds and you get to hear snippets of conversation about the decline in quality of modern cinema from one country, the emergence of another country as a cinematic powerhouse, etc., etc. You get the feeling of power of voting for a film and knowing that your vote (be it good or bad) will come into play as part of the audience awards for the festival- this year two films I voted for quite strongly (Tucker and Dale Vs Evil and Even the Rain) finished in the top 5 for the audience award though neither took top spot. You get to see films that may not wind up getting a cinematic release on the big screen in Australia (a few years ago I saw one of the only big screen showing of Grace is Gone a very touching film which thanks to poor US box office went straight to DVD in Australia, and three years ago I feel in love with the UK film Unmade Beds, which never got a box office release here and which I only located on DVD three months ago) and you'll get to see others long before the general public (I saw the Australian film, Wasted on the Young, almost a full year before it got to the cinema here, and the brilliant US film and bigtime Oscar contender, The Kids Are Alright over three months before it was released here). Finally you might get to see someone famous- I've seen Cate Blanchett, Hugo Weaving, Bryan Brown (OK not as famous as the first two but he's just the most Aussie actor ever so I have to include him), Mia Wasikowska and (insert excited scream) Ewan McGregor, and back in 2007 I almost literally ran into Russell Crowe. As I said the films aren't all good (terrible ones included the Portuguese film Eccentricities of a Blond Haired Girl, the German made-for-TV series of films Dreileben (I left before the third of the three films, I was so bored) and several overblown period pieces from all over the place), some are down right strange (David Lynch's Inland Empire was mighty perplexing and even four years on I couldn't tell you if I liked it) and some are disturbing (Redacted is a brilliant film on the Iraq war but you couldn't watch it twice and it kicks you hard in the guts the first time- lots of people walked out at every festival it screened at and its box office was pretty poor when it got general release too). At the same time, it also has introduced me to some of my favourite films in recent years and while some like Once, Sukiyaki Western Django, Death at a Funeral, The Trip500 Days of Summer and The Kids are Alright I probably would have watched at the cinema anyway, I will be eternally thankfully to the Sydney Film Festival for showing me films like Shut Up and Sing (the wonderful doco about the Dixie Chicks), Even the Rain, Beautiful Kate (I may be Australian but Australian cinema especially set in rural climes isn't usually my cup of tea) and You, the Living which I wouldn't necessarily have looked into otherwise (especially the first one), and films like Unmade Beds and the French film, I Always Wanted to be a Gangster which I never would got the chance to see.  So I say to you, film goers of the blog world, if you get the chance get to a film festival....if audience make up during the day time seasons is anything to go by, we'll all end up going to them when we retire in any case.

Sign at the State duing the 2010 Sydney Film Festival

So that was my last few weeks, what of my next month? Back when I was a kid, I LOVED the MS Readathon- for those not in the know, the MS Readathon is an annual fundraiser for the MS Society in Australia (I'm not sure if overseas branches of the society do similar) in which primary school aged children are challenged to read as many book as they can in a month and adults sponsor them an amount per book and the funds raised go towards research into multiple sclerosis and helping individuals who suffer from it. I'm not sure if it was being asked to read for a good cause or that I was committed to raising money to help people suffering from a debilitating illness or, even, that raising particular amounts of money got you some kind of prize. I think it was a combo though shamefully the last one definitely factored in because, as my parents still remind me whenever the MS Readathon is mentioned in their presence and I'm there, I used to "cheat" including not only novels appropriate to my age but also things like Grug and Mr Men books when I was in the upper years of primary school. This week I discovered that the MS Readathon now has an adult section called the Novel Challenge and though the allure of prizes for reading has faded (in fact there aren't any) I've jumped on the band wagon. The Novel Challenge asks adults to read as many novels as possible over a 30 day period in July, August or September and to get people to sponsor them for the same- though not per books as you would a child. They even have a few recommended lists of ten books for people to aim at (I say books not novels as almost all the list they suggest contain works of autobiography or comedy or other forms of non-fiction, and therefore aren't technically novels). If people don't want to read one of their list, they can make their own. I'm doing the latter as the lists which do not contain books I've already read are heavy on the click lit or include Clive Clussler and therefore aren't my cup of tea. I encourage everyone else to join the fun and maybe one of their lists will appeal to you- though I would say steer clear of their classics list which contains both Anna Karenina and Don Quixiote either of which you'd be hard pressed to finish on its own in a month, let alone both of them and several others. My list will be as follows and I do think that there is a strong chance I won't get through all of them in a month and may have to read them over three as the MS Society website suggests is a possibility (I'm still aiming for the month though):

• The Twenty-Seventh City by Jonathan Franzen
• The Road by Cormac McCarthy
• The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles by Haruki Murakami
• The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
• Maya by Jostein Gaarder
• The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
• The Beautiful and the Damned by F. Scott Fitzgerald
• The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Bronte
• Talking About Jane Austen in Baghdad: The True Story of an Unlikely Friendship
  by Bee Rowlatt and May Witwit (I'm worried this one might get a bit chick lit like but it sounds interesting nonetheless)
• The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle

I've read none of them (I know some will be shocked that I haven't read the last one) and I think it is wide spread of genres by a diverse group of authors. If you decide after reading this post to participate in the Novel Challenge you are welcome to steal some or all of my list if you want- though I will say it is a very Clare list. If you don't want to join but would like to back me as I attempt the task of getting through these in a month, you can donate at http://register.thenovelchallenge.org.au/The-Novel-Challenge/clarewoodley . I started yesterday and currently I'm around a third of the way through The Twenty-Seventh City which I'm loving even though it is quite different from what I was expecting after having read The Corrections. I will update on here as I go so blog may become increasingly book focused in the next month.

The pile of books for the MS Novel Challenge- all but the last two books which I only decided on today and one of which I don't have as yet.