swordfishtrombones

Well that was longer than expected. But since this domain is costing  me a handful of dollars a year I might as well try to post something under it an odd time and I need some kind of impetus to do that, that much is clear. Ladies and gentlemen, we are floating in space and I give you:

Steve’s Book-Challenge-Thing-Fest! 2011!

52 books in a year with no order or reason to the choices other than I fancy them and can acquire them legally or otherwise in the .mobi ebook format. I can and likely will cheat at some point by reading very short books if it looks like I may fail but I begin this literary adventure with the best of intentions and a copy of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea just loaded onto my Kindle. In a blaze of sitting down quietly and reading I have finished three so far already this year:

Stephen King – Wizard & Glass (The Dark Tower IV) *****

Note I have used Roman numerals in the title – this denotes epicness if you didn’t know it already. This is a series I started a few months ago (my first Kings!) with pretty much just the knowledge that it was like Lord of the Rings minus the traditional Nordic fantasy trappings of elves and goblins but with cowboys instead, and they told me the first book was patchy and not indicative of the quality of the books as a whole. Yet it still appealed and I read the first one, thought it was a bit scrappy if I’m honest and somehow still persevered. And it turns out they’re exceptional.

To my shame I had assumed Stephen King to be quite a dull writer, churning out multiple novels a year in a bland James Patterson-esque style with little more than name changes each time, “How else could he be so prolific?” I thought. I’ve rarely been more happy to be wrong. The pacing, imagination, characterisation of these books is incredible, the way he forgoes swathes of exposition to feed you backstory and the history of this world and lets it be revealed naturally is the mark of a master storyteller. I see why people like him. I just can’t understand why they also like Dan Brown.

Part four of a series with each one longer than the last, my Kindle tells me that Wizard & Glass is just over half the length of War & Peace, which means it’s pretty fucking big. And I have three still to go. Awesome.

Junot Diaz – The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao ****

It’s a book about a fat Dominican kid in New York and his family. I like the way our narrator jumps around timelines, introducing characters then expanding upon how they came to be these people, shaped by key events in their pasts, but even better is the use of language. It’s like absolutely nothing else I can think of. The narrator sounds like a human being, drops the F and N bombs when appropriate, delivers entire lines in the Spanish he grew up around – you know exactly who this guy is before you meet him in the book and, uh, find out who he is. It’s interesting and compulsive and it’s the kind of book that sticks with you.

Kin-Nosuke Natsume – Botchan ***

I try not to like Japanese things because white people who do are weird and boring, but this caught my attention because even though he is from olden times this guy wrote a book called I Am a Cat! That’s a wee bit mad. So I went looking for it and couldn’t find it in ebook format and settled on this as they had it on Project Gutenberg. In it, our hero takes his first job, a teaching position at a rural school, and travels out on his own for the first time. Once there he gets incessantly bullied and teased for being the big-city kid, the principle themes of the novel are interpersonal politics and morality. It’s pretty short (two, three hours tops), surprisingly relatable for a book written in 1906 about life in rural Japan and fairly funny to boot. Would read more of, definitely.

Recommend me things!