Week Five: My Name is N

Well that was disappointing TBH.

Not sure why all the fuss, just because the protagonist (who's not really because everyone is not who they say they are... sigh) is Gay or Bi or Metro or just a Sociopath who can't make up his mind?

Too convoluted. Too coincidental. Too planned. Too clever by half.

Or it tries to be all these things, but isn't good enough to be any of those that well.

I mean it was ok, but it was mostly just blandly trying to be the Usual Suspects.

All the furuore when it came out was probably just to hide that averageness of it all.

Not a waste of time, but not necessarily a good use of it.

Week Four: Night School

I have now read all of Richard Wiseman's books and as ever they are elucidating and entertaining non fiction without the dry and hard to follow sections.

Loads of fascinating stuff and if you want to know more about sleep, dreams and performance I would highly recommend it.

Also extremely good to remind yourself why it's not good to just accept your sleep patterns and to do something about them

Lots of very interesting tips for dealing with issues for adults and children and how little hacks can improve almost every part of your life.

The most fascinating is 'If you have a stressful day - deprive yourself of sleep, if you have a great day - go to bed early.'

If you have a bad experience a good sleep embeds it in your memory, whereas lack of sleep helps you forget. Yes it's more complicated than that, but still interesting none the less.

Week Three: How Not to Be A Boy

How to be amused, very amused and enlightened and then miserable - all in one book.

Helps when you like the writer certainly, and the other half will get a look in at some point I'm sure, but for now this book was so beautifully heartfelt without being cloying or posing too much.

Webb has a style and a voice that comes through in every sentence, so even the most cringe-worthy  embarrassments read like sketches and you can't help but smile and be amused. Contradictory to this is the facts, the heartbreaking facts of life, love and death that often sneak up and belt you from nowhere.

Laugh then cry, then laugh again and feel the pain healing for him and you as the reader.

Honestly I can't recommend this book enough for my female friends, maybe not how every guy's mind works, probably the minority.

But any one who does think like this and ends up in the same point by the end is worth getting to know as a person (not a Boy or a Man, or a not-Woman - a Person).

Read the book.

 

Week Two: Orphan X

Finished a book on Day One of this year, (even though Google thinks I'm in America I guess) so had loads of time to start/complete another one and I fiddled about with Springsteen and Atwood but then picked this up which a good friend had suggested (though I never take suggestions) and started it 3 days ago.

And it is everything I hate about thrillers and thriller writers yet I liked it and it gripped me more than enough to race through it by the weekend.

So it does the usual thing of having a mystery loner who is super-humanly trained by special forces for wet-work and can recognise the make model and the shop that a gun was sold in by the way a person is walking when it's holstered. The usual OMG he's so cool bullshit that peppers these books.

But I couldn't put it down. It was cliched,  obvious and yet compelling. The fingerprints of a brand obsessed author with a less than funny acerbic 'wit' that comes spewing sarcastically out of people who even barely speak English dot the landscape with machine gun carelessness.

But I still invested and read it all.

In 3 days.

So I'll stop bitching...

In a minute. WTF is with mystery and thriller writers who are so fucking obsessed with showing off their intimate knowledge of 'high end' (expensive and ridiculous) brands? Guns, beds, cars and alcohol? It irritates me.

Now I'll stop.

Way better than I Am Pilgrim - a book in the same fantasy vein.

Recommended in spite of my rant.

Week One: The Girl With All The Gifts

So I'm back, after a few years (6 years apparently) of amassing more books and finishing fewer than I'd like it's time to start up again.

The Girl With All The Gifts is a Zombie/Post Apocalypse novel/YA/Genre thing by M R Carey and the only reason I ever bought it was the fact that it came with a jacket recommendation by Joss Whedon. A good a reason as any.

Bought it in an airport and read a bit of it on the way home, put it down and struggled to make my way through it. Mostly because it starts well, then the middle 50% of the book is aimless and slow, the point of what they're doing and why is never really clear. So it drags on and I'm not very vested in it, but it had been good and I feel like there is an answer or a way out towards the end so I persevere.

And in the middle section that's a fair estimate of what I'm doing, killing time and turning pages.

Then it gets interesting again and the action and tension of the quoted promises comes to fruition and the story picks up again.

It ends as it should, no happy resolution, but the correct and most logical way that it should.

Where I felt annoyed with the writer in the middle section, it's fully redeemed in the end. It serves the story but not the characters, it serves logic, reason and nature vs right, moral and fitting.

Could have been a lot shorter in the mid section.

Week Fifty Two: The Power of Six

The Power of Six by Pittacus Lore is the sequel to (or continuation of) I Am Number Four - which I read some weeks ago. It all feels very interstitial and disjointed, yet entertaining enough - without being as good as the first, and probably there are many more in the series.

And so the blog project: 52 weeks of reading comes to a close with the 56th book read and blogged, but If I counted the books I have read my son - the Zac Power books each about 60/70 pages long or so you could add another dozen to the total.

What's next?

Next book and last entry in this blog will be Ulysses by James Joyce, I'll start tomorrow and then see how long it takes, I suspect more than a week.

Next project a new blog where I embark on a year of self improvement.

Week Fifty One: Beyond Good and Evil

Beyond Good and Evil by Frederich Nietzsche is the pinnacle of his philosophic works, or so I am told (having not read the complete Nietzsche library). It's been touted as complete self knowledge, a basis for modern humanity, the death of God, the start of the Nazi party and a whole bunch of things good and bad.

There's a reason for this of course, mostly because the man would not shut up. It's aphorism after aphorism, analysis and opinion on many things often contradicting itself and himself because there's just so much stuff in here - like he can't keep up with himself.

At once you can know nothing, yet speak in absolutes. Is it any of the things above? No. It's just words on a page, the power always lies in the reader. No magic potions, no silver bullets and no answers. Just a German who thought brilliantly, but not always correctly - by his own admission and in this readers mind.

Two points of interest: 1 - He's teribly sexist - embarrassingly so, and 2 - He's a snarky bitch. It's like watching a celebrity roast of the famous in philosophy, none are spared the passive aggressive certainty and clarity of the author - but it comes out snarky.

One week to go, one book to go - what will it be?