the time to change is now

book: galapogos
author: kurt vonnegut
completion date:14/07/10
method: gift (jake)

i think that vonnegut and attwood have similar sympathies towards the human race: neither of them think that we are particularly well adjusted to live in this world. which i have to say i agree with. we are not very good natural hunters, our bodies don't fare well in the climates we live in (we have no fur and pretty thin skin). currently we cannot eat local plants (i mean grass, leaves). but maybe thats because we have evolved to live in the world we live in now...or the world we have created has stalled our evolution.
i feel that i've found my new chuck in vonnegut. he has a similar nihilistic style, but he has a much smoother, interesting method. his characters are different and interesting. then again, this is the first vonnegut book i've ever read so i don't know for sure if he just keeps rewriting the same characters but based on his history i would assume that he has a more varied cast.
the narrator confused me in this book. i was really throw off guard when i realized that the narration was in first person- told from the point of view of a ghost haunting this ship. i really was not expecting that but it made for an interesting perspective. the ghost remembers what civilization was and explains the change that humans went through when they had to start over. it is very similar to what happens in oryx and crake only a little less terrifying. this disaster was not a virus created to wipe out the dirty pleb people by some psychotic genius but world war three. however, we never really know what happened to everyone, because our narrator doesn't know. if anything it feels more like a side not that this disaster happened. although it is integral to the plot it doesn't feel that monumental.
i wonder how some authors don't become attatched to their characters tho. vonnegut just seems to let whatever may happen happen to them. maybe thats a silly critisism...
this really made me want to read more vonnegut though. he has such an easy way of writing and i feel like i could get lost in his books easily. it isn't the kind of world i would want to be trapped in though. everything just seems so chaotic.
xo-ellebee

see paul haggis- THIS IS HOW YOU DO IT!

book: let the great world spin

author: colum mccann

completion date: 12/07/10

method: borrowed (mum)

ok hands up if you remember that awful movie written by paul haggis. you know the one about how racism exists in all of us and how we're all really really racist s.o.b.'s? i do. remember how it won an oscar instead of being laughed out of theatres? I DO. paul haggis was trying to create a sequence of characters that worked together to create a story that happens over a period of a few days to these few people. it didn't work because they were all shallow stock characters that you felt nothing for at all. mccann does exactly what haggis tried to do, and he executes it brilliantly.

i think that the key difference is that everything in let the great world spin circles around one event- philippe petit's walk across the twin towers. this decision is fabulous because of two things: fist that this was a real event. petit strung a wire across the top of the world trade centre towers and walked, ran and lay down on it. watch man on a wire. its great. beautiful really. the event is so intense and surreal that it makes everything that happens to the characters monumental.

second- that this book was published after the fall of the towers. this event was just so devastating to us that to have a current (the book was published 2009) novel revolve around such an intense moment for these towers it really personalizes the novel even though it is set shortly after the vietnam war.

what this novel does so well is it fleshes out each of its narrators. each narrator has a distinct voice which speaks to mccann's skill as an author. he creates these voices with ease and distinction. i can see why this was mum's favourite book of the year, and why this american life has been suggesting it as an audio book. it was just such a perfectly constructed novel, i want to leave it on people's doorsteps so they can read and love it too.

xo-ellebee

love, still, is not enough

book: the disappeared

author: kim echlin

completion date: 09/08/10

method: borrowed (mum)

i don't know what it is about these love stories. i just don't feel them lately. mainly because i do believe that absence makes the heart grow fonder but the heart is a fickle and forgetful muscle. it does not remember after so many years that there is someone out there who might love it back, it is more interested in love as a whole. but maybe i am defeatist and a downer. maybe these stories are true but i have a hard time believing in this extreme dedication. maybe it can happen, but i feel like its an easy thing to fictionalize. funny to think about love being romanticized...

i felt like a dummy reading this book because i didn't know about this horrifying massacre that happened in cambodia. and it seems like the kind of thing that is so monumental you would hear about it. there were sides to this story that i wanted the author to pursue, but they focused too much on the dreamy love element. the narrator, anne, is more focused on finding her love than she is witnessing what is going on around her in this country. i wish that her lover had included her, but she is an outsider so he never really explains anything to her. he just lets her believe whatever she wants without making her see what is really happening.

i was glad i read this book however. i was glad that i learned about something that i didn't know about otherwise and it will be something that i research because i don't understand how i could be so oblivious to such a horrifying massacre, but i feel like the focus was too much on this unreal love story and not enough on what happens to the survivors of these situations.

however i have to add that i loved the way this book was narrated. it is written as almost a love letter to serey, anne's lover and this does help build her character, but i feel like she is built as an accessory to him. serey is a strong character, who faces incredible trials and suffering, and anne is very weak in comparison. but i don't know maybe it makes him seem stronger because she romanticized and idealizes him.

xo-ellebee

oh stephen

book: lisey's story

author: stephen king

completion date: 08/07/10

method: borrowed (mum)

the only other stephen king novel i've ever read was the shining and i have to say i loved the movie and i liked the book. i think stephen is a strong idea man but he creates the most bizarre twists and i never really can under stand where they come from. i feel like he wanted to be a fantasy writer once upon a time but settled for what he does now which isn't really fantasy or horror is just kind of 'bizarro'.

let me get something straight- i liked lisey's story. i felt that the character of lisey was strong and interesting. stephen captured the sibling relationship to a tee. he seemed to know exactly how they play off eachother without making it tacky or contrived. they are all strong characters. what i wanted was for there to be no fantasy. the idea is there is this world (boo'ya moon) that people can access and things and people can be left there). we are introduced to this story perifially in the beginning but it soon becomes a major element of the plot. what i wanted is for this world to not exist. i wanted lisey's husband, scott, to actually be totally insane and to have invented this world which he used to escape his horrifyingly abusive childhood. basically i wanted there to be a twist, but there wasn't one. no twist. everything was real and thats what i didn't want.

one thing i loved in this novel though was 'the bad-gunky'. i'm not sure what to classify it as (depression, self mutilation, escapism) but it seems to be all the bad feelings we have that get so bottled up we go insane with them. and i loved this because this made sense. totally. and i believe i have felt something at least similar to scott's 'bad gunky' but i might just be projecting.

i am really at a loss as to why stephen king is such a popular writer, because i don't really thing he's very good at what he does, but then again 'twilight' has sold almost as many copies as the bible.

xo-ellebee

mercilessly good.

book: mister pip

author: lloyd jones

completion date: 05/07/10

method: borrowed (mum)

normally when someone lends you an upsetting book they warn you. they hand it to you (just like my father did with engleby) and say, "now it gets upsetting at the end- just so you know". so you know. you know that everything win't always be coming up roses. this book came with no such disclaimer, but it needed one. more than any of the other books i have read, this book needs to come with a major warning label. i was also on the bus so i couldn't have the breakdown i thought needed. this one deserved an ugly cry.

the worst part about it is that it comes so unexpectedly. the story up until this point is so beautiful and heartfelt. i couldn't really figure out a time period, but i have a feeling its around the 70's or 80's. it is the story of a small village torn apart by the wealth of the soil (paraphrasing seriously) and how the children of this village are entranced by a man (the only white man in the village) reading them the story of great expectations. i'm actually having trouble writing about this one, because what happened at the end was just not something i was able to handle. i am not going to be able to read this book again, however i really recommend it. it was beautiful, but it just grabbed your heart, ripped it out and fed it to you.

i don't know how many of these stories of trials and tribulations suffered by young children i can keep reading. they have really been getting to me in my dreams and i just need to read something a little more light hearted so i can get out of bed in the morning.

xo-ellebee

love is not enough

book: love invents us

author: amy bloom

completion date: 04/07/10

method: borrowed (mum)

i think that this book was meant to be an incredible love story. a story of love through time or maybe even the true missed connection. it seems to embrace the idea that although we may have many partners, there is only one person for us and no love will be the same as the love we feel for this person. this is something that i just can't believe. i believe that absence makes the heart grow fonder to a point. after a while, the heart can be forgetful and stop filling in the blanks.

i just didn't feel the love between these two kids. i feel like i missed the chemistry. or maybe they just didn't have it. i felt like they were just two teenage lovers who never completed their relationship so they always thought 'what if'. they never had any resolution or closure so they blamed every failed relationship on their unrequited love for each other.

and i have to say i was very confused by elizabeth's commitment to her old teacher who sexually abused her. at one point he compares himself to humbert humbert and it couldn't be more accurate. as she matures sexually and moves to other relationships, he seems to cling to the little girl she was. i don't understand why she would have any loyalty to him in his death, because he was her abuser. he uses every excuse in the book to make it 'ok' - he never refers to her as a child, she is a 'young woman'. he convinces himself he would love her as much as a grown woman, but you know it isn't true. she seems to have this guilty attachment to him, like its her fault he's dying.

i just never felt the connection here. lets just say i didn't feel the love

xo-ellebee

nature vs nurture

book: engleby
author: sebastian faulks

completion date: 02/07/10

method: borrowed (dad)

i had a really hard time getting into this book. it didn't seem to grab me in the beginning, but i persevered. i know with a lot of mystery type novels it takes a little longer for the story to get established. my problem was that mike engleby wasn't very likeable (something that is frequently mentioned in the second half of the novel). but i felt so sorry for him. he seemed like someone who was just simply ostracized by his piers early on and this detaches him for the rest of his life.

a monster is a scary thing because you never know who created it. was it always there just lurking below the surface? or was it created through a detached upbringing? and is 'monster' the best word if it was created by society and the 'monster's piers? i could spend all day thinking about this and still not have an answer.

what i found about this book is that it has one of the most upsetting twists and i never saw it coming. i was afraid of the character (this is the infuriating thing about books with twists, is i don't want to ruin it for any future readers). mainly because he lacked remorse or sadness. he was rational and that is what made him terrifying. i felt like i was just humming along great in this novel and then all of a sudden- BOOM everything goes to shit.

part of this is because of the narration. the narrator (the title character) skips around through time, so you get bits and pieces of the stories. once i learned what happened i wanted to go back to the beginning and read the whole thing again. it was so unexpected that i feel like i must have missed some clue.

the problem with this book is i can't tell you for sure whether or not i liked it. i read it and was affected by it... but i don't know if i would describe what i went through as enjoyment

xo-ellebee