The Pearl - John Steinbeck

If you get what you want it may well ruin your life and inevitably lead to despair and misery.  This story is excellent but is pretty depressing.  It is about a poor Mexican fisherman who finds a huge pearl in an oyster and thinks he will be able to sell it and change his life for the better.  As you might expect things do not work out well and everybody and everything turns against him.  You get the feeling that Steinbeck feels that his life may not have got entirely better since his books started selling by the boat load.  Very good  little book.


7/10 

What I Talk About When I Talk About Running - Haruki Murakami

This book is about running and also about writing.  I used a long time ago to think I could write and more recently I thought that I could run.  This book is on the one hand very inspiring and makes me want to do both of those things but on the other hand makes me realise why I'll never really be able to do either.  Murakami suggests that the key is single minded focus.  I have more of a constantly moving on to new ideas and never really sticking with any of them sort of mind.

This is a really readable and enjoyable little book.

7/10

Coraline - Neil Gaiman

This is a very scary book about facing your fears.  The quote on the first page says something like " Fairy tales are more than true — not because they tell us dragons exist, but because they tell us dragons can be beaten." and Coraline herself says that " When you're scared but you still do it anyway that's brave."


Coraline, who is small for her age, quiet and used to people getting her name wrong, is lured into a nightmare alternate reality and has to fight her parents and the other children she meets along the way.


This is supposed to be a children's book but really is scary in places, although the author reckons adults see it as horror and children as adventure.  It is really well written and flies by in no time.  Then again I love everything Neil Gaiman writes.


8/10 

Catch Up List

Been a long time since posting so here is a list which I may add to as I remember or review if I feel like but present so I can know:

Paul Auster: Collected Prose  6/10
Zadie Smith:  White Teeth 7/10
Zadie Smith: The Autograph Man 7/10
Jonathan Franzen: Freedom 8/10
Mark Beaumont: The Man Who Cycle The World 9/10
Thor Gotaas: Running: A Global History 6/10
Stefan Block: A Storm At The Door 9/10

Bull Fighting - Roddy Doyle

A really good collection of short stories dealing with coming to terms with reaching later middle agedness.   All these men's children are growing up and there marriages are reaching second or third decades.  And they all read books too.  In the whole all these people feel real and sympathetic.

7/10

Imperial Bedrooms - Bret Easton Ellis

All the characters from Less Than Zero are back again but now its thirty years later.  In the intervening years no one has changed all that much, rather everybody has just got older.  This is written the dead-pan minimalist style that you would expect but the big difference is that there is much more story this time.  Less Than Zero was in effect a series of events to create an atmosphere where as this adds a real page turning story line.  Sometimes there were scenes that felt a little bit forced and reminded me of Inherent Vice  which isn't really a good thing and there are a couple of parts that seem to have no purpose other than to be shocking and maintain the authors american psycho reputation.  On the whole though I enjoyed this book.

7/10

Less Than Zero - Bret Easton Ellis

Loads of rich kids coked out of their minds drifting from party to party to a background of MTV and parents who don't care anymore.  The more shocking the events get and they get pretty bad the more the numbness and disconnect of the narrator becomes clear.  What makes this book work is the overwhelming emotional nothingness that it is built around.

8/10