“Fiddle-de-dee’s not English.”

The Book of Lost Things by John Connolly
Atria (2006)
352 pages

Twisted fairy tales: sure, just what I was looking for. World War II background: I seem to be stumbling across a lot of books about WWII lately. A book about books: of course I want to read it. So I did.

The writing is terribly bland. It’s . . . flat. The plot was interesting, the way the myth/fairy tales were twisted were awesome, but the writing! Oh man, the writing. I’m trying to come up with another adjective, and the only one I can up with is still “flat”. I felt no connection at all with any of the characters. David did this. David did that. David is angry with his father. I don’t know. I read on because I wanted to get to the end, and also because the book came so highly recommended by so many sources. Also, it was the book not chosen by the bookclub that doesn’t exist for the month of May. (Oh man, I still need to go along and apologise for the lateness of the not-June book discussion. Which will probably be the not-June and not-July book as well. Drat.)

Anyway. The Book of Lost Things. The book is about David, a twelve-year-old boy living in England during WWII. His mother falls ill and dies, and when his father remarries and his stepmother is having a baby, David’s anger and frustration over the whole thing kinda transports him to another world, where fairy tales are twisted and he needs to find the king and the book of lost things the king has to return home. (Or something like that. Go find some other more objective summary elsewhere.)

I liked how dark the fairytale land was, and how the fairy tales were turned on their heads. My copy of the book didn’t have the appendices with the original fairy tales and explanations by Connolly and whatnot, so I am probably missing a lot of things. I don’t particularly care — I’m just glad to escape Connolly’s prose. The ending made me wince. The author seems to be intent on making sure that we know that yes, David’s changed, and yes, he will find happiness but it will be taken away from him sooner or later. Yes, we do understand that. Please be more subtle next time.

This book gave me really odd dreams. It could simply be because I was back at my parents’ house when I was reading it and sleeping in a different bed in a different room, but still, they were really weird dreams about the book. (I was reading Ellen Raskin’s The Westing Game almost concurrently with this book and I didn’t dream about that book.) It wasn’t even scary — it just had the characters of the book traipsing through my dream (no David, though), all of them almost earnestly explaining why they were as they were. Unfortunately, I couldn’t recall the details of their explanations — you know how dreams are. Each dream I woke up from left me even more annoyed than I was before, and as you can see, it didn’t bode well for this commentary.

Considering that this is John Connolly’s most recommended book to date, I think I’ll have to skip the rest of his works. I traded my copy with my sister’s copy of An Abundance of Katherines when I was back at my hometown. I should ask her if she enjoyed it better than I did.

Uh. It looks like this weekly recap isn’t a consistent thing after all.

Books!

I finished three books since the last recap: number9dream by David Mitchell — man, I’m keeping an eye on David Mitchell; all of his books are in my to read list now — The Changeover by Margaret Mahy and The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch. I liked number9dream most, and now I definitely have to read Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas as well. Reviews later! Probably very much later, the way I write those things.

New books checked out from the library this week are Possession by AS Byatt and East by Edith Pattou. I picked up Possession thanks to recommendations and also because it’s a Booker winner, and East because there’s a giant polar bear on the cover. Giant polar bear on the cover! After reading the inside flap, I realised that it was a retelling of the Norwegian folk tale East of the Sun, West of the Moon. The story is included in the anthology of Scandinavian folk tales I am reading which shares the same title with the folk tale. (Come to think of it, there’s a polar bear on the cover of that book too, and a girl is sitting on it.) I haven’t gotten to that particular story yet; the stories puzzle me a lot and I am taking an astonishingly long time getting through the book.

Other books in my “currently reading” pile: Tales of the Thousand and One Nights and Empire of the Sun. The progress on the latter is rather dismal — I’m still at chapter four. It’s not that I don’t want to read the book; it’s just that when I come across other books, I just drop it in favour of those new books. I can read Empire of the Sun quite contentedly when there are no other books around, like while I am eating lunch at work. Hmph. It’ll take forever to finish the book if this goes on.

I am also contemplating re-reading all of Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time books. I must be mad. I am trying to convince myself that if I re-read them, I’ll feel like throttling Nyneave and Elayne ever so often as well as give Rand a clonk on the head, but somehow I am not discouraged yet. We’ll see where this will go. :P

Site updates

Some things have been tweaked and changed in this blog — mostly fonts and alignments (but only for Firefox 3.0) and I’ll have to look at the CSS again and fix a few things for IE one of these days. I keep thinking of redesigning the blog, but I can’t think of a nice enough layout and theme. Sad. I can code stuff, I’m just bad at the actual design stage. All tech skills and no sense for aesthetics. XD

I’ve also added a new page listing all the books I’ve read since 2007. I’m absurdly obsessive when it comes to lists. The current list sorts the books by authors’ last/family names, and I was contemplating a “by title” list but gave it up. The thes and as and ans confused the spreadsheet sort, and I’ll have to figure out whether having a separate field for the articles in front of the title is something I’d want to do before I try another sort. (And I wonder where the time goes. Hah.)

Other things

I kept thinking of participating in Weekly Geeks but I keep running out of time. I’m rather appalled at my progress with the previous “catching up on reviews” challenge issued some time back — I barely made any progress at all. It’s partly due to my insistence of posting reviews in the order of the books read — I told myself once that it was ok to skip books and come back later, but I found out that I couldn’t quite do that. Uh. Obsessive. That’s the word for today, I guess. You’d think someone who has such an obsession to have things posted in order would be able to keep her life in order, but somehow it doesn’t spill over to life outside of book blogs, this order-obsessed thing.

This week’s theme is about challenges, and I think I’ll use that to update my challenge posts. I don’t participate in many — don’t like a fixed reading list much would be the main reason, so the ones I participate in are often the ones that give a good amount of leeway in choosing what books to read. So hopefully there’ll be a post about challenges soon!

I was hoping that I’d be able to participate in the 24-hour Read-a-thon Dewey’s hosting, but I have a weekend trip to Pangkor Island with some friends from university . . . and their families. It’s a bit strange that there are only four of us singles joining in this time. I shall stay clear from babysitting duties; two-year-olds aren’t really my favourite sort of people, however cute they might be.

Anyway. Read-a-thon. Thanks to timezones, had I been able to participate, it would’ve started at midnight on Sunday for me — or possibly one in the morning on Sunday — I’m not quite sure what PST equals to: I thought it would be -8 UTC during daylight savings, but Dewey says it’s -7, so it’s very likely I am wrong. I’m at +8. Hmm. Never mind. I hope I’ll be able to participate next time when something like this comes up.

The Giver by Lois Lowry
Houghton Mifflin (1993)
192 pages

This is one of those books that I don’t really have anything much to say about. It seems like everyone has read the book, and most of those who have read it loved it. I liked it a lot, though it won’t make it into any sort of favourite books lists of mine. I especially liked the main character, Jonas.

This book won the Newbery Medal in 1994.

It’s the future, and everything is perfect. No issues, no problems. Family members get together and talk about their feelings, everyone is polite, there’s no hunger or poverty or war, and everything is carefully planned and executed. Everything and everyone is equal, the same, normal. Welcome to the future: utopia has never been this flawed.

Everything starts out very smoothly. Jonas’s community seemed like a very nice place to live in, and I began to wonder what was wrong with this world Lowry has created. After a while, though, the sameness of everything gets a bit disquieting, and when I realised what was missing — colours, memory, music, truth, human emotions — I was rather freaked out by the whole thing. Jonas’s father and the baby that was released was bad enough, but when Jonas’s parents just laugh when he asks whether they love him, it gave me a shudder. Use another word, they say. “Love” is not a precise word, they say: “[it's] a very generalised word, so meaningless it’s become almost obsolete”.

Lovely little place, this utopia. Looks like I’m not moving there after all. Any list about books concerning dystopian fiction should have The Giver in it, that’s what I think.

I like the ending, uncertain as it is. Not only Jonas gets to make his choice and struggle with what comes with it, we get to decide ourselves what happens. It left me thinking long after I closed the book.

I have the other two books by Lois Lowry which are loosely related to The Giver in my reading list: Gathering Blue and Messenger. I think I’ll also pick up Lowry’s Number the Stars one of these days.

I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith
Virago Press (2003) (First published 1948)
360 pages

“I write this sitting in the kitchen sink”, writes Cassandra Mortmain in her journal, and that’s how this heady mixture of romance and coming-of-age story set in the 1930s Britain begins. Cassandra is an aspiring writer, living in a run-down castle with her sister Rose, along with their brother, stepmother and father. Here’s the catch: they’re so poor that they can’t afford decent meals at times. Cassandra observes: “I have just remarked to Rose that our situation is really rather romantic, two girls in this strange and lonely house. She replied that she saw nothing romantic about being shut up in a crumbling ruin surrounded by a sea of mud.” Cassandra’s father wrote a very successful novel years before and has written nothing since. Cassandra dreams of becoming a writer herself, so she goes around “capturing” her family and her home in her journal. When two American brothers — one of them the heir to the estate which includes the castle where Cassandra’s family is living in — return to England, Rose tries to court one of them as a way out from poverty, with rather hilarious results at times.

The book is a collection of Cassandra journal entries, so all are written in the first person. (Dodie Smith is also the author of The 101 Dalmatians, which I haven’t read.) She probably has the most charming voice I’ve ever come across — she’s witty and wry, precocious and naive at the same time. I love the first two parts — or was it the first one-and-a-half? — and the last part not so much. Cassandra grows up, of course, over the course of the year, and the later parts reflect this. I rather liked Cassandra more when she was happier and more pragmatic.

Her father reminds me of mine, actually. I wanted to march up to him at one point and ask him whether he has bipolar disorder as well — he certainly acts like he does! He’s the eccentric writer all the way — solitary and secretive and takes note of the strangest things, leaving his family wondering whether he really is mad. I liked the characters: Stephen, the servant turned family but mostly still servant who’s desperately in love with Cassandra; Topaz, the stepmother who sometimes wander around nude to commune with nature; the wealthy American brothers; even Rose at her most selfish and, of course, Cassandra herself.

The book came across to me as dreamy and funny and strange. The ending is bittersweet and fitting. If there’s a novel that I’ll remember the first and last sentences, it will be this one — I could still almost see Cassandra scribbling “I love you, I love you, I love you” in the margins of the journal as she runs out of space.

Apparently there’s a film made in 2003 based on the book, hence the cover of the paperback I read. (It was the library’s only copy.) I generally dislike covers for book tie-ins of films; I’d pick up another version if I have a choice. No real reason for this; just me being a snob, I guess. :P

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Also, this book was recced by Nikki for the Herding Cats challenge. This actually means I’ve covered the “read three books” requirement for the challenge, but hey, there’s nothing against going above and beyond requirements, right? Especially when you have a rec list with more than six hundred items on it. XD

Julie tagged me for this!

1. Who’s your all-time favourite author, and why?

I. Uh. I don’t have one. Strange, I know, but I’m one of those people who fall in love with books, or perhaps a series of books, instead of authors. Sure, every now and then comes an author that impresses me so much that I’ll greedily read all his/her works, but I don’t really have an all-time favourite. I’d expect an “all-time favourite” to be an author I had loved all the books he or she had written, and would read the books over and over. Maybe I’m setting my standards too high. Who knows, maybe I’ll find one, one of these days.

2. Who was your first favourite author, and why? Do you still consider him or her among your favourites?

Enid Blyton, perhaps? Simply because her books for younger children are easy to read and we had a lot of them when I was growing up. (Books I read at the age of earlier than six probably didn’t have authors — they’d be one of those set books about the Wise Owl or Sesame Street, I think.) I haven’t read any of her books in ages; I have no idea how well they would’ve stood the test of time. I won’t say she’s a favourite right now, but I’ll always have fond memories of her books. Well, at least until I reread them. Hopefully I won’t have one of those “wow, I can’t believe I used to like these!” moments everyone gets every now and then.

3. Who’s the most recent addition to your list of favourite authors, and why?

Dorothy Dunnett. The woman made me read six books about a historical period I never even bothered about before (her first book I read, The Game of Kings, starts in 1547 Scotland), made me struggle through snippets of poetry and quotes in French and historical characters I am not familiar with and a complicated plot and I ended up loving every moment of it. I ended up sleep-deprived by the time I finished all six books. I am generally a fantasy/science fiction sort of girl, so pegging a series of historical fiction novels as my favourite books so far for the year came as a surprise to many people, myself included. Now I’m tentatively poking through the historical fiction shelves, trying to find something comparable to her Lymond Chronicles.

Why? The characters and the plot, of course, and I like the fact she doesn’t coddle her readers. Didn’t grasp something? Too bad: go look it up (my new best friend: Wikipedia!), double back a hundred pages, reread that passage again. Curiously enough, I enjoyed doing so. And her attention to detail is fascinating. I have no background whatsoever about the period she writes about, yet I got sucked into her world.

She’s also the first author in ages who’s sent me desperately searching for a forum discussing her works, partly because of the complexity of the books, and partly because the end of book four almost killed me and I wanted to vent. I can’t remember the last author who provoked such a reaction from me.

4. If someone asked you who your favourite authors were right now, which authors would first pop out of your mouth? Are there any you’d add on a moment of further reflection?

Dorothy Dunnett is the first name that comes to mind. I’d add Diana Wynne Jones if you let me think long enough. Probably Neil Gaiman if you let me think even longer.

5. Tagged:

I’ll have skip this — I have no idea who to tag. If you answer this meme let me know? I’ll hop over and read it; it should be interesting!