Finnikin of The Rock by Melina Marchetta (4 stars)

I wasn't sure how this was going to pan out; it seemed somehow unlikely that Melina Marchetta who wrote Looking for Alibrandi could write a decent fantasy novel. However, I was pleasantly surprised by the book and barely put it down.

I thought that Evanjalin was obviously important, but I hadn't picked her true identity until it was revealed. I was slightly surprised that Froi didn't turn out to be royalty or have some special powers, given how much he features in the story and the lengths to which Evanjalin goes to keep him.

I found Finnikin a little annoying, especially at the end of the novel when he acts more like a petulant child than someone who is ready to assume an important role. There is plenty of talk of Finnikin interacting with the other kingdoms, negotiating treaties etc. but it all seemed implausible given his level of immaturity. I guess it is young adult fiction, so the young adult has to do all the important stuff, even if they are under-qualified and have no real authority.

Enjoyed it!

4 stars.

The Girl Who Kicked The Hornets' Nest by Stieg Larsson (4.5 stars)

The final book in the Millennium trilogy, and it is a big one at 599 pages. I have really enjoyed the trilogy, and this book was a great end to the series. It begins where the previous book left off with Salander seriously injured, which means the pace is frantic from page one. I found it really difficult to put down.

Salander perspective isn't told nearly as much as in previous books - she spends a large part of the book in hospital. This is a shame, since she is by far the most interesting character. Most of the story focuses around Blomkvist, with a strange, seemingly out-of-place side-story involving Berger. I have spoken before about the lack of editing of the previous books, and I think a decent editor would have scratched that side story.

The trial itself seemed pretty silly at times. Maybe I have watched too many American legal movies, but it seemed ridiculous that Giannini could just interrupt her questioning of one person to fire questions at Salander, Palmgren, Ekstrom and others:

...We can interpret that as a manifestation of self-hate".
Giannini turned to Salander.
"Are your tattoos a manifestation of self-hate?" she said.
"No," Salander said.
Giannini turned back to Teleborian...

Blomkvist continues true-to-form by sleeping with pretty much every important female character in the entire trilogy. Surprisingly there was much less product placement in this book (or I was more immune to it).

If there had been more of Salander kicking arse I would have given this 5 stars.

4.5 stars

The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas (3 stars)

This book has sparked a lot of discussion in Australia - it won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, and was on the shortlist for a whole swag of other awards. It centres around an incident at a BBQ when 'a man slaps a child who is not his own'. This act divides friends and family (and Australia it seems) about whether he was right to slap the child, given that his own child was possibly about to be hurt by the other kid. It also creates discussion about how children should be disciplined, and what effect a lack of discipline from one set of parents has on other children and families.

I think there are plenty of interesting issues and themes in this book, but ultimately I didn't enjoy it much. Tsiolkas totally overdoes the sex (there is way more than The Bride Stripped Bare!) and swearing (I've never read so many c-bombs in one novel before). There was also not a single character I actually liked, which made it hard to care about the story.

Tsiolkas chooses an interesting set of eight points of view; I was expecting him to write about the same chronological time from each point of view (like the movie Go), but the chronology is linear, so each person's part of the story adds on where the last left off. I thought the end of the book dragged with Aish's experience at the conference and then the horrendous Bali 'holiday'. I totally didn't buy Hector as some sort of Greek Adonis. He was such a prick and so self-centred, I don't care how good looking he was, he would have been ugly.

Should Harry have slapped Hugo? No, he should have protected his own child without hurting anyone. Is Hugo a little shit? Yes. Every time I read about Hugo being breastfed, I thought of the Little Britain 'Bitty' skit...

3 stars.

The Bridges of Madison County by Robert James Waller (4 stars)

I read this book without any pre-conceptions after I had run out of library books. It turns out it is one of the best selling books of all time, which is an interesting and depressing list (How to Win Friends and Influence People beats Dune). It seems like every literature critic across the world has made a hobby of pouring vitriol on this novel, and that is balanced by an equally passionate group of people in love with the story.

The criticisms are mainly that it is a Mills and Boon dressed up as literature, the characters and dialogue are implausible, and the writing is something you would expect from a high school student. Some of that is true, but I didn't think it was groan-worthy, and I didn't want to throw it at a wall when Robert says 'I am the highway and a peregrine and all the sails that ever went to sea' as some reviewers have stated.

I think the story is very powerful and interesting. The characters and dialogue, while unusual, could be plausible for two highly educated people passionate about poetry and literature. Those qualities are so rare in modern society I don't think any of us are qualified to apply the 'implausible' stamp to the characters.

If I said I didn't enjoy it, I'd be lying. I do wonder if I read it again with those criticisms in my mind if it would be just as good. Literature intelligentsia, we're going to have to agree to disagree.

4 stars.

Under a Starless Sky, A Family's Escape From Iran by Banafsheh Serov (3 stars)

This is a first-hand account of a young girl's escape from Iran under Khomeini in the early 80s. The story focuses on Serov's and her family's experiences in Iran during the Islamic Revolution and later with people smugglers to get to Turkey. The book ends with the family's entry to Australia, and this great quote:

'Where do we go?' he asked. He pushed the passports at the immigration officer. Maybe the man had not noticed that they were Iranians. Maybe he had missed the exit stamp from Turkey declaring them as illegals and the refusal stamp from Hong Kong.

The officer took the passports, opened them again, checked the visa and handed them back with a smile.

'Anywhere you like, mate,' he said.

I'm going to give the Australian authorities in the 80s the benefit of the doubt and assume they actually did give them some support and help settling-in. More than a visa and a wave from Sydney airport customs anyway.

I think the saddest thing about this book is that this family could really only make their escape because they were very wealthy. Plenty of middle and lower class families in Iran would have suffered similar hardships during the revolution but lacked the contacts and the cash to turn the people-smuggling wheels.

The book is well-written. The focus is on Serov's experiences so don't expect a lot of historical information or background.

3 stars.

Sunshine by Robin McKinley (4 stars)

I started reading this book for a bizzare reason (thanks Lic), but I'm glad I did. It may well be the best use of c**t by a female character as claimed:

You want to talk cranky, coitus interruptus takes me well beyond cranky. My engorged labia felt like they were pressing on my brain - what there was of my brain - and if I didn't get to fuck someone, something now - a vampire would do - I was going to fucking explode. My cunt ached like a bruise.

Whoah.

That quote is actually a bit misleading - one of the things I liked the most about this book was that it wasn't a tragic teen love story between an impossibly beautiful vampire and a human (I'm looking at you, Meyer), and wasn't chock-full of sexual tension. The vampire Constantine is seen by Sunshine as a menacing, terrifying figure, an embodyment of evil and darkness. Sunshine has created a bond with him, but she isn't sure it was a good idea, and he isn't wild about it either.

I have two main complaints. The first is style. A large amount of the story is told in an internal monologue, with very little actual conversation and interaction between sunshine and other characters. Character development suffers, and I could have lived with that, but it also destroys the flow of the most exciting parts of the book. Here is a section from the climax, where Sunshine is in the middle of a battle, covered in blood, and decides it is a good time to embark on a long monologue about vampire fiction she read as a kid:

Blood stings when it gets in your eyes. And it's viscous, so it's hard to blink out again. It may not only be because the blood stings that you're weeping.

I have always been afraid of more things than I can remember at one time. Mom, when I was younger, and still admitted to some of them, said that it was the price of having a good imagination, and suggested I stop reading the Blood Lore series...

McKinley has a parentheses problem. Take a look at page 13 and 14 - there isn't a paragraph without a lengthy bit of text, or even a few full sentences inside parentheses.

My second main complaint is that McKinley barely explains anything properly and didn't write a sequel when there were so many interesting things I wanted to find out (beware tharr be spoilers ahead):

• Who/what is Mel? Some kind of sorcerer? A vigilante? What do all his tatoos do? Why doesn't he care about what Sunshine is doing? She likes that he doesn't ask questions, I think it is weird.
  
• Is her grandmother alive?
  
• What the hell is a bad spot? How do you sense one? What does the special SOF car do that allows you to drive through one?
  
• What happened in the Voodoo wars? Who was fighting? Just humans vs. vamps or all the 'Others'? What happened to all the other cities?
  
• Is the goddess of pain evil? What is her deal? Why is she called that?
  
• How are Bo and Con actually different? Why are they fighting? Sure Sunshine is fighting out of some self interest, but why doesn't she ask him about it?
  

Arrrrgggggh!

So many times Sunshine asks a question in her head, but is too gutless to voice it:

I wanted to know why: what would scar a vampire? Another vampire's try for your heart?...But I didn't ask

I wanted to know too! Ask for me goddammit!

McKinley has a massive whinge on her blog about people hounding her for a sequel. Well sorry for liking your book Ms. McKinley, and maybe you should explain things next time! McKinley has created an incredibly rich world of magic, part-bloods, vampires, wardskeepers, secret police, and so much more, yet she claims not to have any ideas for a sequel. Come on! I think the real story is that she got sick of talking and thinking about the book on the tour, and now can't face writing a sequel.

I loved the world McKinley created, if only there was more.

4 stars

The Bride Stripped Bare by Anonymous (3.5 stars)

When I started reading this book, Em made some comments like "Are you going to read that on the bus?" and others that I can't remember that made me think I was picking up a Mills and Boon. Thankfully it wasn't nearly as trashy, and although there is a fair bit of sex, not as much as I was expecting given the hysterical things that have been written about this book.

The first thing that struck me, was the second person narrative. Nikki Gemmell (not so anonymous) says:

I was fascinated by that particular tense and wanted to give it a go. It's extremely difficult to sustain...Some people have said, of my unnamed bride, that it was like "reading her brain, being in her head-space," which was exactly the effect I was aiming for-hopefully without too much indulgence.

I actually found it very impersonal, and annoying. This is what it sounds like (stop saying 'you'!):

You'd almost invited her on the spot when she said she was so low. You wanted her to join you just for a couple of days, as a treat: it's her birthday in three days, June the first. But you knew...

Some have speculated that Gemmell's outing as Anonymous was all part of a sneaky marketing ploy. I'm sure the scandal didn't hurt book sales, but I believe her when she says:

I loved the idea of writing a book that dived under the surface of a woman's life, a seemingly contentedly married woman, and explored her secret world-with ruthless honesty...I'd fully intended putting my name to the book when I began it. But six months into the project the text just wasn't singing-I was censoring myself...I'm a wife and a mother of two young boys, not to mention the daughter of two gently bewildered people in their sixties. I didn't want people judging them...But when the idea of anonymity came to me, everything clicked. I was suddenly like a woman on a foreign beach who's confident she doesn't know a soul and parades her body loudly and joyously without worrying what anyone thinks of her.

Much has been made of the sex in this book, but it is way less racy than any edition of Cosmopolitan magazine in the last 15 years. It actually gets quite cosmo-like with a section that lists 'what you want' and 'what you do not want' that could be transplanted straight into cosmo under 'turn ons' and 'turn offs'.

Overall I thought it was a good read.

3.5 stars.

Sacred Games by Vikram Chandra (1 star)

I'm giving up! Sorry Mr. Chandra, I've given you 227 pages, and that's all the time I have to waste. This book has been on my list ever since I read Shantaram, but I thought I'd better have a break from epic Indian novels before I started this one. It is definitely epic, at 900 fairly dense pages.

My main objection is that the plot is just not interesting enough. The main story that follows Sartaj and Ganesh Gaitonde has some good moments, but even these are overpowered by the vast array of boring side stories. These are often lengthy chapters, and while I was reading them I had to fight the urge to flip pages to get back to the main plot.

There is a lot of untranslated Hindi mixed in with the text, but I didn't mind that at all. I thought the writing was reasonably good, but not enough to appreciate it on its own in the absence of a decent story.

If Chandra had a competent editor and re-told the same story in 500 pages would it be good? I doubt it. Shantaram is a far better book about the Mumbai underworld. I've also heard some good things about Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found by Suketu Mehta, so I might give that a go in the future.

1 star.

Neuromancer by William Gibson (4 stars)

Neuromancer was a re-read for me, it is a book that almost defines the science fiction genre. It coined the term cyberspace, and was the first book to win the science-fiction grand slam - the Nebula Award, the Philip K. Dick Award, and the Hugo Award.

Incidentally, misuse of the word 'cyber' annoys me pretty much every day. As far as I'm concerned, unless you're jacking in with electrodes attached to your head and are in constant danger of flat-lining (brain death), it isn't cyberspace, it's just the Internet.

Neuromancer is amazingly forward-looking considering it was published in 1984. I really enjoyed the book, but it is definitely not an easy read. Characters are not introduced, concepts are not explained, and for most of the book I felt I was only just understanding what was going on. I think an amazon reviewer put it best:

Gibson's narrator gives you a vague patchwork of the plot - it feels like a drunk's telling you about the movie he just watched.

Everyone should read it, if only to see what all the fuss is about.

4 stars.

The Girl Who Played with Fire by Stieg Larsson (4.5 stars)

Great book, heaps better than the first in the series. Salander grows ever more intelligent and amazing the more we find out about her. Not only is she a hacker wunderkind, a master chess player, a boxer (come on, really?), she also happens to be a genius mathematician despite the lack of any mathematical training. Of course she can solve Fermat's last theorem just by reading a pop-culture mathematical history textbook. Sigh. Incidentally there is a great book about Fermat's last theorem if you are interested. And why did Larsson make her a boxer? So ridiculous, I was perfectly happy with her as a hacker with a taser.

Speaking of ridiculous, the ending was one of the most overdone, totally implausible, stupid things I have ever read. I don't want to give away any plot here. You'll know what I mean when you read it.

Larsson has an annoying habit of inserting massive amounts of unnecessary detail. Consider this boringly complicated description of a dinner at Blomkvist's sisters' family:

Annika had two children: Monica, thirteen, and Jennie, ten. Her husband Enrico, who was the head of the Scandinavian arm of an international biotech. firm, had custody of Antonio, his sixteen-year-old son from his first marriage. Also at dinner were Enrico's mother Antonia, his brother Pietro his sister-in-law....

Of the eleven people he introduces in this passage, none of them play even the most minor role in the story. We never hear from them again. Where were you editor?

Speaking of editing, I found the use of the word 'dyke' fairly offensive in some places, even when it wasn't supposed to be (ie. Faste didn't say it). In Australia (and most of the English-speaking world I believe) it is typically derogative. I suspect the same is not true in Swedish and it was just a bad translation choice.

Oh, and every single character in this book is going to have serious health problems from the amount of coffee they drink - it's like Phillip Marlowe, but with caffeine instead of alcohol.

One more thing. Berger is a complete bitch for even considering deserting Millenium at the time of crisis.

Now that I have all that off my chest, I need to say again this is a great book. I didn't pick the major revelation about Zala, and thought it was quite clever. I couldn't put it down and stayed up to 1:30am to finish it.

4.5 stars.

Update: I forgot something else that really annoyed me! What is with the product placement in this book? It's everywhere!

She went shopping at H&M and Kappahl department sores and bought herself a new wardrobe...

Her most extravagant purchases were from Twilfit...

...sat down at her PowerBook...

...a jumbo pack of Billy's Pan Pizza...

Ikea should have payed thousands of dollars for the advertisement below - I'm expecting a "Buy Lisbeth's Salander's Furniture" link on the Ikea website any day now. I suspect the Larsson estate didn't make any money off the gratuitous advertising since the contracts would have to be in place before publishing - so why is it still there? I think Anna is right about them being reluctant to edit, see her comment.

She drove to Ikea at Kungens Kurva...She bought two Karlanda sofas with sand-coloured upholstery, five Poang armchairs, ... a Svansbo coffee table and several Lack occasional tables. From the stoage department she ordered two Ivar combination storage units and ...

Checked the Ikea website, and most of those models don't even exist anymore.

The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro (3.5 stars)

This book won the Booker in 89, and has been made into a movie starring Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson. It has a lot of critical acclaim and is beautifully written. I enjoyed reading it, although I always felt that the real story was just around the corner, and then it ended. Stevens' revelations about his life are quite depressing, as are his absurd allegiance to his employer such that he waits at table while his father dies upstairs. A deserving winner of the prize but I'm not going to pretend I loved it.

3.5 stars.

Peeps by Scott Westerfeld (4.5 stars)

Can Scott Westerfeld do wrong? Seems not so far. This was a fun read, I couldn't put it down. Lets start with the bad bits.

I hate Lace purely because she says dude all the frickin time. It is ridiculous. Was this some misguided attempt to appeal to teens? Did Westerfeld's editor tell him all the cool kids are saying it? Even people who do say dude a lot wouldn't say it how Lace does.

When I read this I wondered if the story was going to dissolve into some sort of stupid sci-fi Mills and Boon:

The parasite makes sure that I'm like the always-hungry snail, except hungry for sex. I'm constantly aroused, aware of every female in the room, every cell screaming for me to go out and shag someone!

Thankfully it didn't.

I found the alternating chapters of parasitology information slightly annoying because they broke the story up. It kind of felt like Westerfeld was showing off his research - look how much gross stuff I know - but it was pretty interesting so I didn't mind.

I liked the idea of vampirism being caused by a parasite, and the linking of all the major historical disease outbreaks was also pretty creative. This approach sets this book apart from the vast majority of vampire fiction.

I think I would have preferred to have left the evil in the sewers as a vague bad smell because the fight scene in the subway seemed a bit stupid. I think he would have been better stopping the story early and leaving the fight for the next book.

4.5 stars

The Afgan by Frederick Forsyth (2.5 stars)

Well, it's been a little while since I read a book like this - something you'd pick up in an airport to keep entertained on a flight.

It was the usual annoyingly perfect picture of the US intelligence and military machine - brilliantly efficient, elite trained forces, amazing weaponry etc. Where are the bored unmotivated workers, the hopelessly inefficient bureaucracy of the real world? It was certainly no Caine Mutiny.

One of the amazon reviewers had a funny list of inaccuracies that I'll reproduce here:

• Malaysian Airlines _does_ serve alcohol.
  
• The 9/11 attacks did not occur at breakfast time in London but in the mid afternoon.
  
• There is no U.S. Army rank of "Senior Captain"
  
• In the U.S. government a GS-15 is not a "junior staffer," but rather the highest ranked of the non-executive service, making more than$100,000/year.
  
• The British SBS is the "Special Boat Service" not the "Special Boat Squadron."
  
• The M21 sniper rifle was replaced by the M24 Sniper Weapon System in 1988.
  
• It's somewhat unclear, but the story seems to imply that the hero learned passable Pashto from hanging out with Tajiks for six months. That's roughly like learning learning German by hanging out in France.
  
• The hero is impersonating an Afghan ex-mujahedeen turned Taliban fighter. His teeth are inspected by very thorough Al-Qaeda security men, who somehow fail to notice his Western dental work.
  

2.5 stars.

Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks (4 stars)

This was a really interesting read, based on the true story of the village of Eyam in England that quarantined a plague outbreak within the village in 1666. I had high expectations for this book after enjoying March, and it lived up to my expectations. My main criticism is the hurried ending. I thought Mompellion's story about why he married Elinor was ridiculous, which was then compounded by the bizarre flight to...Morocco? What the? If the ending had been more thoughtful I would have given it 4.5.

4 stars.

Specials by Scott Westerfeld (4.5 stars)

This was a great end to the Uglies trilogy. I'm a sucker for some superpowers, and the Specials have got them by the bucketload. Self-healing, indestructible skeletons, 'skintenna' network interfaces, infra-red vision, super fast reflexes and enhanced hearing makes for some seriously surgically weaponised individuals.

Tally is playing for a new team, which is quite unsettling, and because of her 'icy' outlook the love story is quite subdued in this book. I liked the ending and thought it demonstrated the benefits and challenges posed by democracy and immigration (trying not to give too much away here). I didn't pick any of the twists in the book, which was great.

4.5 stars.

Pretties by Scott Westerfeld (4 stars)

The second in the Uglies trilogy. Although not as good as uglies or specials, I still enjoyed this book. It explores some interesting ideas, and demonstrates the motivation for the system of mind control with the violence of the pointlessly warring hunters camp. The ethical waters are muddied so that the reader can see some positives to the actions of the wardens and 'Special Circumstances'.

I was surprised by the alcohol abuse - in the opening pages Tally sucks down Bloody Marys at breakfast to cover a hangover, and the self-mutilation - the cutters making themselves 'bubbly' with knives. Fairly dangerous territory for a young adult book.

Still a good read, but it was mainly about getting the plot ready for the next book.

4 stars.

The Caine Mutiny by Herman Wouk (4 stars)

The Caine Mutiny was published in 1951, and was a massive success, feeding a public hungry for stories of the recent war. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 52, was made into a broadway stage production, and a movie with Bogie playing Queeg. It is referenced all over the place, including Red Dwarf, Star Trek, and Michael Caine's name?!

Of course, I didn't know any of that (except the prize-winning) when I started reading. I really enjoyed the book, and was amazed Wouk could take me through Navy officer school, and so much ordinary Navy life on board the Caine without being boring. Wouk paints what feels like a very true picture of the Navy at the time, through his own experience. The war-time Navy life described would have been similar to that experienced by many sailors, Willie sums it up best:

It's a broken-down obsolete ship. It steamed through four years of war. It has no unit citation and it achieved nothing spectacular. It was supposed to be a minesweeper, but in the whole war it swept six mines. It did every kind of menial fleet duty, mostly several hundred thousand miles of dull escorting...But we will remember the Caine, the old ship in which we helped to win the war. Caine duty is the kind of duty that counts. The high-powered stuff just sets the date and place of the victory won by the Caine.

There are some interesting characters in the book. Captain Queeg is brilliant in his spectacular stupidity, arrogance, cowardice and paranoia. Keefer is supposed to represent the intellectuals forced into military service, his attitude is summed up with his speech:

The Navy is a master plan designed by geniuses for execution by idiots. If you're not an idiot, but find yourself in the Navy, you can only operate well by pretending to be one...

Life on the Caine is probably representative of the average experience in the Navy during WWII: it is mostly a daily drudgery of shifts, tedious drills, and manufactured melodrama over the smallest of incidents, interspersed with with just a few moments of complete terror in battle. Willie exposes a "glad it's not me" attitude to battle that seems to be shared universally amongst those on the Caine:

Willie had a vague shameful sense that he was storing up anecdotes for future parlor chats while other men were perishing, and that such behavior showed a want of feeling...It occurred to him that there was an unsettling contrast between himself, eating ice cream, and marines on Namur a few thousand yards away, being blown up. he was not sufficiently unsettled to stop eating the ice cream, but the thought worked around like grit in his mind.

It is an interesting, well-written story, of which the mutiny actually plays a surprisingly small part. The court martial is Queeg at his best, and is the high point of the book. I'm not sure I would recommend this book, but I enjoyed it enough to give it:

4 stars.

Breaking Dawn by Stephenie Meyer (3.5 stars)

Last in the twilight series. I approached this one with trepidation because I had heard it was the worst in the series, and I'd already dealt out some nasty reviews. There are plenty of annoying things about this book (big spoilers ahead):

• Bella is supposedly in love with Edward but plays a ungrateful spoilt little kid at the wedding, which she doesn't want, and acts like it is just another party Alice wants to organise for her.
  
• Bella and Edward finally get jiggy, after marriage of course, and Meyer manages to write a suitably Mormon sex scene. Of course the very first time Bella has sex she gets pregnant.
  
• Bella names her freak baby 'Renesmee Carlie' (a combination of the Grandparents' names), which is the most pathetic, ridiculous name I have ever heard of.
  
• Jacob is reduced to being a glorified guard dog for most of the book.
  
• Bella finally gets her vamp on, and is completely disappointing as a newborn - where's the ferocious thirst and ensuing bloodbath?
  
• The baby is perfect, doesn't cry, has super powers, and practically looks after itself. C'mon, we could of at least had a bit of uncontrollable baby vamp!
  
• The Cullens amass an army that starts to be more X-men than anything else (now we're talking), with all sorts of different super-powers in the mix. There is an awesome setup for a huge battle with the Volturi which comes to.....nothing. No one important dies and they live happily ever after thanks to Bella's care-bear force field. Yay.
  

Having said all that I was entertained. Despite the book being 754 pages long, there was so much less stuffing around than in the other books. The wedding and honeymoon happen fairly quickly and were much less agonisingly drawn out and overblown than I was expecting. The book read like a fairly mindless action novel, and was fun to read, even if it threw away all the most interesting plot opportunities in favour of happy endings.

3.5 stars

The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger (5 stars)

I think this will be in my top ten books of all time.

The idea of involuntary time travel by the main character Henry in this novel is simple, and brilliantly executed. Not much time is spent dwelling on the mechanics or fake science of why/how this is possible, the real focus is the love story between Henry and Clare, and their struggle to have a semi-normal life together.

The plot follows Clare's (normal) chronology, which succeeds brilliantly at binding together all of Henry's jumping around in time. The voices of Henry and Clare are very similar - I often found myself checking back to the start of the paragraph to see whose thoughts I was reading. Some reviewers have criticised this as a character development flaw, but I don't agree, I think the characters are well developed and individual even if their voices sound similar. One sentence jarred for me, I simply could not believe that Clare would think this:

My breasts hurt. My c**t hurts. Everything hurts.

I'm not denying childbirth hurts, but I just can't believe that Clare would use the 'c-word' in her own thoughts.

I didn't really buy Henry's supposed 'bad-ass' persona before he met Clare, and I wasn't 100% convinced by the 'intelligentsia' Rilke-quoting name-dropping acts from Henry and Gomez either.

Having said all that, they are literally the only criticisms I can think of. The story is beautiful and incredibly emotional, don't read the ending on the bus!

5 stars!

Eclipse by Stephenie Meyer (3.5 stars)

Book number 3 in the Twilight series, I give this one some credit, and I certainly enjoyed it more than the previous two. However, there are still lots of spew-worthy moments:

It was a face any male model in the world would trade his soul for. Of course, that might be exactly the asking price: one soul.

The plot direction is super obvious - someone is creating new vampires, oh really, who could that be? And Edward's ridiculous over-confidence makes it obvious the real battle is going to be wherever they think Bella is 'safe'.

The literary comparisons are overdone again (this time it is Wuthering Heights), but not as terribly as in New Moon. I'm also pretty sick of the whole love triangle thing - can't we have some more battles with the Volturi or something?

Meyer introduced the creepy 'imprinting' thing for the Werewolves. I wonder if this is going to be a convenient plot escape for Jacob in the next book? Is he also going to fall in love with a two-year old (like his pack-mate), and give up on Bella?

I just read some of the Twilight forums (wow, people, really), and checked out the merch store (Bella's bracelet anyone?). I'm surprised they have mens T-shirts, is there anything more emasculating than a Twilight T-shirt?

Those who haven't seen it should check out the XKCD comic (NSFW language).

3.5 stars.

In Defence of Food by Michael Pollan (4.5 stars)

I think this is the best food-related book I have ever read. The advice is distilled by the author into:

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

Pollan writes very well, and the book is the perfect length to be informative but not boring. He explains the rise of nutritionism - treating food as the sum of its currently known parts, the dangers of this approach, and how it has changed the western diet:

Milk through this lens is reduced to a suspension of protein, lactose, fats, and calcium in water, when it is entirely possible that the benefits, or for that matter the hazards, of drinking milk owe to entirely other factors (growth hormones?) or relationships between factors (fat-soluble vitamins and saturated fat?) that have been overlooked...The entire history of baby formula has been the history of one overlooked nutrient after another: Liebig missed the vitamins and amino acids, and his successors missed the omega-3s...

The 'Lipid Hypothesis' is one of the great failings of nutritional science, and has fundamentally changed the food landscape. Is there anything in the supermarket these days that isn't low fat? How bout this bombshell:

The amount of saturated fat in the diet may have little if any bearing on the risk of heart disease, and evidence that increasing polyunsaturated fats in the diet will reduce the risk is slim to nil.

I was fascinated by this book, and the advice rings true. To summarise:

• Avoid foods that: include ingredients with unfamiliar/unpronounceable names, have more than five ingredients, or contain high fructose corn syrup. From our experience in the US it is extremely difficult to avoid the evil corn syrup in American supermarkets, it is in pretty much everything. Pollan uses the example of Sara Lee 'bread' as something to avoid - we called it 'cake bread'.
  
• If your great-grandmother wouldn't recognise it as food, don't eat it.
  
• Avoid food products that make health claims. The FDA in the US allows 'qualified' health claims on packaging, read 'lies'.
  
• Eat mostly plants, especially leaves. Leaves are better than seeds because seeds are high energy storage mechanisms.
  
• You are what you eat eats too. Chicken, pigs and cows all grow quicker when fed grains, but are healthier when eating grass. Roo is good for you because it is wild, and hence eats a diverse diet of plants. Wild plants have to defend themselves without pesticides, so have higher quantities of antioxidants and other goodies than farmed plants.
  
• Eat like an omnivore. The more diverse your diet is, the better chance you have of covering all the nutritional bases.
  

There is plenty more advice, this is just some of it. I don't have the knowledge to critique it for scientific accuracy, but I don't think anyone will be harmed by following this advice.

I'm also going to read the "The Omnivore's Dilemma".

4.5 stars.

The Known World by Edward P. Jones (3 stars)

The subject of this book is intriguing - it largely focuses on the story of slave-owning free blacks in Virginia in the 1850s. The idea of free blacks owning slaves had never even occurred to me before picking up this book. Jones explores the complicated relationships between whites, free blacks, slaves, politics and the law in a way that eroded the simplistic view I had of slavery in America at that time, and won him the Pulitzer.

The issues are complex, and I still find myself ill-equipped to answer the question 'Why would free blacks own slaves?'. Part of the answer is they were buying freedom for their families. A talented slave who was permitted to make money might eventually buy his/her freedom with money earned from making furniture, boots etc. and go on saving to buy freedom for his/her family. Once their family was secure, free blacks were looking to expand their wealth and secure their future by buying land and farming. Slavery dominated the labour market, and I imagine it was difficult to find labourers that could be paid a wage, so free blacks would buy slaves to work the land.

Jones painfully demonstrates that a free slave's hold on freedom is very tenuous - there was much money to be made in kidnapping free slaves and selling them back into slavery. With the only proof of freedom being 'free-papers' carried by the slave, these could easily be destroyed and there were plenty of unscrupulous buyers available.

Although the subject matter was interesting, the writing good, and Jones deals with the subject matter thoughtfully, I didn't enjoy this book very much. The writing constantly jumps around in time, from weeks to decades, often in the same paragraph and there are a huge number of characters, which are difficult to keep track of. The book finally seemed to be building to a climax in the final pages, but the narrative style kept me strangely disconnected from the events so I didn't have a burning desire to read on.

3 stars.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz (3.5 stars)

I can see why this won a pulitzer. I loved the language, and the writing style (yes, there is lots of swearing):

I guess I should have fucking known. Dude used to say he was cursed, used to say this a lot, and if I'd really been old-school Dominican I would have (a) listened to the idiot, and then (b) run the other way. My family are surenos from Azua, and if we surenos from Azua know anything it's about fucking curses.

The passionate style at times reminded me a little of stand-up comedy in terms of delivery. I think this would make a fantastic audio book. The untranslated Spanish was occasionally annoying, but mostly I found those sentences interesting. The other languages in the book belong to sci-fi/fantasy geeks, and although I got most of the references, I missed plenty too (been too long since I read Dune):

Even a woman as potent as La Inca, who with the elvish ring of her will had forged within Bani her own personal Lothlorien, knew that she could not protect the girl against a direct assault from the Eye.

Oscar is a great character, similar in many ways to Ignatius J. Reilly, but I would have liked to know him better. I felt limited by the narrator's view of him.

The insight into the brutality of Trujillo in the Dominican Republic was fascinating, and although lots of information was delivered in footnotes, they weren't boring footnotes.

I felt a little off-balance by the perspective changes and plot jumps, and that wasn't helped by reading the book in smaller chunks than usual.

3.5 stars.

Uglies by Scott Westerfeld (4.5 stars)

Some more Young Adult fiction, this one on recommendation from a friend. Brilliant book, and I totally want a hoverboard (to be honest I've wanted one since Back to the Future came out, but now more so).

The themes of healthy self/body-image, free society, and environmentalism are not exactly subtle, but given the target audience is young adult I'm prepared to cut it some slack. The escape from mainstream society and life in The Smoke had strong overtones of Tomorrow, When the War Began. I think the premise of making everyone 'pretty' to remove Darwinian evolutionary advantages of people with highly symmetrical faces and particular body shapes is brilliant (for a story that is, not government policy). As Tally explains it, before the operation existed:

People who were taller got better jobs, and people even voted for some politicians just because the weren't quite as ugly as everybody else...Yeah, and people killed one another over stuff like having different skin color.

Of course, the operation is not all as it seems. I will definitely be reading the sequels Pretties, and Specials.

4.5 stars

The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas (4 stars)

Swashbuckling! This book's characters serve as a definition for the word!

I enjoyed reading about the adventures of M. d'Artagnan and his three friends. At the start of the book d'Artagnan can barely travel down the road without engaging strangers in duels over some perceived slight, and indeed this is how he first meets the musketeers. Together they perform all sorts of ridiculous feats: foiling the cardinal's machinations, defeating large numbers of enemy soldiers while breakfasting at the siege of La Rochelle, and avoiding assassination attempts by the evil Lady de Winter.

Highly entertaining, although I did wonder what readers would have thought of it when it was published in 1844? Would it have been the equivalent of an modern action novel, something like a Tom Clancy book?

I was also incredibly confused by the currency in the book: pistoles, livres, crowns, francs etc. This is common enough that it deserves its own Wikipedia page :)

4 stars.

Gilead by Marilynne Robinson (1 star)

Gilead won the Pulitzer prize in 2005, and although it didn't sound particularly appealing I thought I'd give it a shot. I initially liked the measured, reflective narrative style, but it quickly sent me to sleep. I struggled to concentrate on the largely boring, rambling, grandpa-simpson "there's an interesting story behind this silver dollar" kind of prose that trundles in random directions without any cohesion. I'm giving up 90 pages in, sorry Ms. Robinson.

1 star

New Moon by Stephenie Meyer (2 stars)

Twilight series book number two, another dud, and yet I feel compelled to keep reading. Unfortunately Bella continued to be one of the most annoying characters of all time, I skimmed a massive section of the book filled with boring, verbose, pining after Eddikins:

I wondered how long this could last. Maybe years from now - if the pain would just decrease to the point where I could bear it - I would be able to look back on those few short months that would always be the best of my life. And, if it were possible that the pain would ever soften enough to allow me to do that, I was sure that I would feel grateful for as much time as he'd given me.

In addition to being uncoordinated, and so emotionally disabled she can't function without constant contact with Edward or Jacob, Bella is also dense: she couldn't figure out Jacob was a werewolf even though he told her in the first book and she saw him:

...the deep eyes seeming too intelligent for a wild animal. As it stared at me, I suddenly thought of Jacob...

Meyer makes it very obvious she is re-creating Romeo and Juliet, with constant references to Romeo (Eddikins) and Paris (Jacob). I don't mind her ripping off Shakespeare, it's a long-standing tradition, but did she have to beat me over the head with it to make sure I couldn't possibly miss the plot cues?

I like the personalisation of the mythical characters, Meyer has developed a whole set of strengths and weaknesses, history, and family interactions for the vampire covens and werewolf pack. This is enough to keep me reading, and I'll keep skimming the shite....

2 stars

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon (3.5 stars)

Another Pulitzer prize winner, but I was fairly underwhelmed by this one. It is beautifully written, the characters are interesting, and I don't remember ever being bored, but my desire to finish it outweighed my desire to explore the storyline.

At 636 pages it is much longer than it should be, and I think it is marred by some strange sub-plots. Joe's time in Antarctica is a complete break in the storyline, and everything after he returns to New York - the Empire State bungee jump and the awkward family reunion in suburbia - don't sit well with the rest of the story.

3.5 stars

The Six Sacred Stones by Matthew Reilly (2.5 stars)

Matthew Reilly is always good for a laugh, I've read all his books and generally love the completely shallow, one-dimensional characters, and non-stop ridiculous action. Of course Jack Wests' house is full of booby traps and hidden explosives, and of course a mag-hook is used to get him out of more than one tight spot.

I found it much harder to suspend disbelief for this book, perhaps it was the stupid callsigns for every single character. Vulture? Scimitar? Astro? Really? Or maybe it was the exponentially increasing size of each underground cavern - by the time we get to the final stone the cave will need to be the size of a continent. Or maybe it was the needless product placement - Sony Aibo, Asus laptop, Google Earth etc.

The 'to be continued...' is annoying, but I know I'll be reading the next one anyway.

2.5 stars

The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins (4.5 stars)

Yet another from the young adult section of the bookstore :) This book was awesome, with kids fighting for their lives in a compulsory competition designed by the state to simultaneously oppress and entertain the population of a somewhat 1984-esque world.

Katniss reminded me a bit of Ender (from Ender's Game), in that she was totally underrated by her opponents, but ends up kicking some arse. Although she is an excellent fighter, survialist, and strategist, she wasn't particularly heroic. She always complied with whatever was expected of her by the establishment, including playing up the love show with Peeta. I suspect she will grow some backbone in the next book.

Interestingly some people on amazon are whinging about this being a ripoff of Battle Royale by Koushun Takami. Battle Royale has been made into a movie and a manga series, and sounds awesome, I'll read it once I can get my hands on a copy.

4.5 stars.

Twilight by Stephenie Meyer (2.5 stars)

Bella may be the most annoying heroine I have ever encountered. The first few hundred pages are her obsessing about whether Edward will be in the cafeteria, will he look at her, will he smile at her? When it isn't about Edward we're hearing about how uncoordinated Bella is, Gym is completely beyond her, and normal activities like walking and getting out of the car require intense concentration, often resulting in falls and scrapes.

Granted, I'm not an adolescent girl (ie. the target audience), who can probably empathise strongly with the "gorgeous guy in school doesn't notice me" situation, but being inside Bella's boring, insipid head is tedious.

So what does Edward see in her? Bella herself wonders this on many occasions. Would a 100+ year-old vampire with a fairly ridiculous array of superpowers really be interested in a whiny, uncoordinated 17 year-old? Sure, maybe her blood smells good, but a few minutes of talking to her should have cured him of any attraction (conveniently he can't read her thoughts, or he would have been turned off instantly).

The characters quickly declare their undying love, so the story can move on, and things actually get interesting 300+ pages in when other vampires arrive on the scene. Edward's control of his vampire urges seems to be a thinly veiled metaphor for a very conservative Christian 'no sex before marriage' vibe running through the book.

One final thing I found funny, at one point Bella uses cold medicine to drug herself to sleep. Meyer was obviously worried about giving teenagers this idea so she qualified it as below, but I think she could have left it out and avoided this weird 'say no to drugs' passage:

...so I did something I'd never done before. I deliberately took unnecessary cold medicine - the kind that knocked me out for a good eight hours. I normally wouldn't condone that kind of behavior in myself, but...

Maybe the next books in the series are better?

2.5 stars

Update: Saw the movie, and thought it was better than the book, which pretty much never happens. Slightly clumsy cameo for Stephenie Meyer was funny.

Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan (3.5 stars)

I'm not even sure where I heard about this book, but I had it on request at the library and it was something fun I knocked over in a couple of days. It followed in a vein somewhat familiar, see if you can pick it:

• Boy discovers he has 'powers'.
  
• He travels to a school where he meets others like him and begins indoctrination into a secret society and learns how to make use of his powers.
  
• He faces great dangers, and fights battles with loyal friends against against an ancient evil that is growing in strength.
  
• etc...
  

Basically take Harry Potter and replace wizards with greek gods and their demigod offspring. Despite the fairly obvious formula-stealing (published in 2005, well after HP kicked off) the book is entertaining and a fun read. It is probably aimed at slightly younger kids, the story moves quicker and is shorter overall. Left wide open for a long series of books - there are five so far. At least kids learn a bit about Greek mythology along the way!

3.5 stars.

Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts (4.5 stars)

This seems to be my year for reading epic novels. I have to admit that the 933 small-font pages of Shantaram were fairly intimidating, and I was reluctant to begin reading. The feeling dissolved almost immediately when I picked it up, this book is amazing.

Roberts has led a phenomenal life: heroin addict, escaped convict and Australia's most wanted man, mumbai (bombay) slum doctor, mumbai mafia 'goonda' counterfeiter/smuggler/dealer, and Mujahideen fighter in Afganistan.

I don't think I will look at any slum anywhere in the world in quite the same way after reading this novel. Roberts' slum is an amazing community where everyone works together, taking turns at the dirty cleaning jobs, and pulling together to fight fire, cholera, and the monsoon rains. All slums might not be as loving and carefully cared for as the community presented by Roberts, but it is a very different perspective to the horror with which most Westerners view slums.

I loved the description of the Indian head wiggle, and how Roberts gained instant smiles when he adopted it on the train to Prabaker's village. In conversation the side-to-side wiggle means 'yes' or 'I agree with you' or 'yes, I would like that', but it can also be used as a greeting to show you are friendly.

Roberts is a deeply philosophical man, and much of the book is devoted to philosophical discussions he has. I found some of these passages a bit boring, like the one on the nature of suffering:

...is it not true that some of our strength comes from suffering? That suffering hardship makes us stronger? That those of us who have never known a real hardship, and true suffering cannot have the same strength as others, who have suffered...

I also got a bit sick of the fawning descriptions of pretty much every woman he was ever friends with - I get it, your friends are good looking:

Her eyes were large and spectacularly green. it was the green that trees are, in vivid dreams. It was the green that the sea would be, if the sea were perfect.

A final thing I will never forget is the descriptions of the Colaba lockup where Lin (Roberts) spends three weeks and the infamous Arthur Road prison where he spends four months. In Colaba there were three overcrowded rooms and a corridor - Lin ends up breaking a man's nose and bites a chunk out of his attacker's cheek just to secure a place to stand:

...even at the foul end of the corridor, where shit and piss flowed onto the floor in a repulsive, reeking sludge, men fought each other for an inch of space that was slightly shallower in the muck.

In Arthur road Lin weathers systematic brutal beatings, starvation, and the constant attack of thousands of body lice.

Amazing book. The movie is supposedly coming out in 2011, although it has been delayed a number of times already. Looking forward to it.

4.5 stars.

Dear Editor...The collected letters of Oscar Brittle by Glenn Fowler, Christoper Smyth, and Gareth Malone (2.5 stars)

Three guys invent the character of Oscar Brittle, a prolific letter writer. This is his collection of letters to the editor, many of which were published. One of my favourites was a letter published in The Canberra Times describing a drive in Canberra at sunset:

I was unprepared. The crimson sunset, the azure mountains and the verdant green hills combined, forming a rich tapestry of colour that was, quite simply, overwhelming. I wept. I wept like I used to in the '80s. Thank you.

Awesome. It's quite interesting which letters get published, and what words the editors cut out. Some of the responses to his letters are great too. In one letter Oscar makes the bold claim:

I believe that I have eaten more types of animal than anybody else on the planet.

and proceeds to list them all including gnu, elephant, mole, iguana etc. A Sydney Morning Herald reader replies with 'I too have had a Chiko roll, but not for some time'.

2.5 stars.

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson (3.5 stars)

I came pretty close to giving up on this book. It starts well, with Blomkvist's trial and conviction for libel, and introduction to Salander. I quickly became bored once Blomkvist started his investigation into Harriet due to the huge number of pages devoted to boring narrative history of a seemingly endless parade of Vanger family members:

In 1926, when he was nineteen, he was going out with a woman called Margareta, the daughter of a teacher in Falun. The met in some political context and had a relationship which resulted in a son, Gottfried, who was born in 1927. The couple married when the boy was born. During the first half of the 30s...

If this information is really important (it isn't), then why not do it in the first person as a series of flashbacks? I also found it quite disconcerting to have this mind numbing verbal family tree cut with the brutal violence of Salander's experience with Bjurman. The violence with Bjurman was extremely graphic, and seemed to be the typical setup for harsh vigilante justice - think Batman's parent's murder.

After this point the story gets much better, Blomkvist makes progress in the investigation, and Salander joins Blomkvist (albeit in a fairly contrived way). I read the second half of the novel in one sitting and thought it was great.

It was interesting to read a 'very Swedish' novel with great placenames I don't know how to type on this keyboard. I did feel the unwelcome presence of product placement - many references to 'iBook', 'Ikea', and others I can't remember. I also usually cringe at any descriptions of 'hacking' in the media, but those in this book were at least better than average.

3.5 stars.

Update: Just saw the movie, it is brilliant. I was really dreading the rape scene, and I thought they took the violence too far in the movie, it is really, really uncomfortable to watch (and should probably be R). However, the rest of the movie is great: it is entirely in Swedish, Salander is perfectly characterised, it isn't a commercial for Sweden (although there is plenty of Apple product placement), and the 'hacking' is believable, which is more than I can say for most movies. As an aside - Salander's screen shows '/var/lib/dpkg' directory listings, which indicate a linux system (probably Debian) - on a Mac 'fink' is based on dpkg but shows up in '/sw/var/lib/dpkg'. Lookie ma, I'm hacking:

$ find /var/lib/dpkg
/var/lib/dpkg
/var/lib/dpkg/alternatives
/var/lib/dpkg/alternatives/xinput-zh_SG
/var/lib/dpkg/alternatives/tclsh
/var/lib/dpkg/alternatives/wx2.5.pth
/var/lib/dpkg/alternatives/cpp
/var/lib/dpkg/alternatives/vi
/var/lib/dpkg/alternatives/xinput-zh_HK
/var/lib/dpkg/alternatives/libgksu-gconf-defaults
/var/lib/dpkg/alternatives/odt2txt
/var/lib/dpkg/alternatives/kdesu
/var/lib/dpkg/alternatives/rcp
/var/lib/dpkg/alternatives/postmaster.1.gz
/var/lib/dpkg/alternatives/locate
/var/lib/dpkg/alternatives/wish

The Host by Stephenie Meyer (4.5 stars)

This book is brilliant. Sort of a soft sci-fi, with the focus on what it is to be human. It reminded me a lot of the Tomorrow when the war began series, with a secret community hiding out from a hostile society. The writing style was simple and easy to read, similar to the Harry Potter series, and I imagine it probably would come under the same sort of literary criticism :)

The premise is great - a super-intelligent race of parasitic beings colonizing planets through secret implantation of their hosts. The 'souls' want to experience life as their host, not take over or massively change the planet, something their human hosts don't realise or appreciate.

This book was Amazon best of the month for May 2008. It is going to make an awesome movie one day.

4.5 stars.

Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry (5 stars)

Loved this book. It is an epic (858 dense-font pages), but worth every minute I spent reading it. Lonesome Dove won the Pulitzer for fiction, and has inspired a ridiculous number of movies and miniseries. My favourite part of the book is when Gus gets ambushed by 12 indians on his quest to rescue Lorie. He immediately knifes his horse to use its body as cover on the open plain, and singlehandedly kills six indian warriors. Gus is a hardass, he breaks a bartender's nose because he isn't quick enough about serving him.

The characters in the book are brilliant, and by the end of the book I felt like I had known them for many years. Because of the books length there is quite of cast of characters you get to know who die before the end of the book. I really liked Janey, who could keep up with a trotting horse and throw deadly rocks like a ninja, and Po Campo who was the American version of the bush tucker man. The journey from the Texas-Mexico border to Montana is full of adventure, and death lurks everywhere.

5 stars!

A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole (4 stars)

Another pulitzer prize winner, this one awarded in 1981 posthumously after the author's suicide in 1969. It is a very difficult book to describe, and has characters unlike any I can remember from other books. Ignatius is fat, extremely lazy, overly educated, and in an almost constant state of moral outrage. He rails against everything, popular movies are one of his favourite targets, prompting screaming in theatres:

What degenerate produced this abortion?

Although Ignatius was an amazing character, my favourite was Burma Jones. Jones gives Lana Lee a tough time about suspicious packages she claims are for orphans, and the dismal state of Lee's bar the Night of Joy:

The only thing you ever be givin the orphan is siphlus.

I feel sorry for them po peoples comin in here thinkin they gonna have theirself some fun, probly gettin knockout drop in they drink, catchin the clap off the ice cube.

This book made me laugh out loud quite a few times, and produced plenty of smiles. It really is an amazing piece of work.

Quite a number of attempts have been made to convert the book into a movie, but with no results. Ignatius is such a formidable character I could see how representing him in a movie would be difficult, although I think Will Ferrell would have had a pretty good crack at it.

4 stars.