The Golem’s Eye by Jonathan Stroud

This is the second book in the Bartimaeus Trilogy. The young magician John Mandrake, aka Nathaniel, has grown up a bit since his first adventure with the demon Bartimaeus. He has since moved in with a more competent magician and has risen in status and power. He’s well on his way to a successful career in the ministry. That is until the Resistance starts wreaking havoc in London and Nathaniel is forced to call up Bartimaeus to help him solve his latest problems.

Stroud does something a little unexpected with his characters in these books. You start reading them thinking that it will be the same as per usual, as in the kind of thing we all like. You’re expecting the underdog little magician to become your favourite character and you want to root for him the whole way. With Nate, you really just wind up feeling a bit like he’s an old friend who’s gone really wrong and you either want to save him, or, if that’s not possible, distance yourself from him as fast as possible. His new role in the ministry, his obvious talent and his fame have all gone to his head. He’s become pure ambition and all thoughts of altruism or morality have basically left him. Time and time again you hope he’ll do the Right thing, but he disappoints every time. You slowly start to feel like he’s a sticky bit of candy you’ve got stuck to your shoe and would dearly like to get rid of.

On the other hand, Stroud re-introduces the minor characters of Kitty, Stanley and Fred in this novel and delves into the Resistance. He shows the flip side to the wizards rule and you wind up rooting for the “enemy”. This reinforces the hope that Nate will finally get a grip on himself and realize how wrong the world has gone and do something about it.

Stuck between these two worlds is Bartimaeus. He, too, would like to like Nate and has hopes for him, but his sympathies, when he can scrape himself together enough to think about having sympathies for anyone but himself, are with Kitty and the Resistance. Still, Nathaniel manages to force him into another bargain and he must hold to his end of the deal.

I really liked this book. Again, yes, it’s a children’s book, but I think it looks at things from a fresher angle and I’m interested to see where Stroud goes with it. I’m still holding out hope for Nate, although less and less as time goes on. Still, nothing has been decided and there’s still time. Plus, Bartimaeus and his sarcasm are just really good, plus Kitty turns out to be a very likeable character.

This one gets a 5 out of 5 for me. What makes it a 5 and not a 4? I think what really kicks it up there for me is not only that it’s a good story with lots of action, excitement and interesting themes, but Stroud didn’t dumb down the vocabulary just because it’s aimed at children and young teens. I want to high five him for that alone. The best way for kids to learn is when they’re having fun and we could use more of that and not less. Go Stroud.

Dune by Frank Herbert

This is another one of those books I choose to read simply because you run into it, and/or references to it everywhere. I wanted to see for myself what the fuss is about.

Paul Atreides is a young nobleman in an interstellar empire belonging to the house of Atreides. His father is a duke, his mother belongs to the Bene Gesserits (a religious/mystical order of women who have certain powers over other) who facilitated the match between Duke Leto and Lady Jessica in order to further their goal towards the perfect DNA sequence. The world, or empire, they live in is a fairly gruesome, honourless society where everything goes, including crawling over the dead bodies of people you just killed, when climbing the social ladder. It’s all about power, who has it and if they can keep it.

Paul moves with his parents to the planet of Arrakis when he is 15 so that his father can rule and control the valuable spice mines of the planet. They go in the knowledge that the move is a trap, but are hoping to be able to avoid getting caught since they know to be on their guard. Unfortunately, they aren’t able to stop events which have already been set in motion and Paul finds himself thrust into a harsh world where existence is difficult on many different levels.

It’s a good story, but all in all, I’m not exactly sure why this book ever reached the cult status it seems to have. There are some interesting and controversial themes which you could spend quite a lot of time discussing, but not much more than most other books. I often found the events exaggerated and overblown and personally think it would have benefitted by more subtlety within the plot, although that might have made it a really epic sized book since events probably would have taken more time.

Despite finding it a bit too much larger than life like, I do admire Herbert for the complexity of the novel. It’s impossible to read the book without realizing how much research and work he must have put into it. The research on ecology alone must have taken years, then there’s the whole socio-economic aspect of the book, especially in regards to the native Fremen and their struggles to gain back their own planet while just trying to survive all that the planet itself throws at them.

Finally, I feel I have to mention the gender roles Herbert uses within the novel. I’m not overly sensitive about gender roles because I think everything is a give and take and every person should be shown respect for their work, regardless of their tasks. E.g. if someone is happy being a housewife in the 1950’s sense, then good for them. They’re happy, so why should I stand in their way. A good housewife and/or mother deserves as much praise as the CEO of a large company in my opinion and I admire both parties for being able to do something I can’t. However, even I had trouble with the more than obvious separation of women/men roles in the book. I’ll give Herbert the benefit of the doubt and assume he wasn’t actually trying to put women in their place, but at times it really felt quite sexist and began to irritate me. Still, it didn’t feel as if he was doing it to make a point. It was more as if he was a 1950’s kind of guy who still strongly believed in old-fashioned values when he wrote the book (it was still 1965 after all). I have to forgive him for that since they were the times he lived in.

4 out of 5. It’s a good story, interesting food for thought, it just lacks that certain something that makes me wild about it.

Award

Hey! Something seldom happened to me. I just received a Literary Blogging Award from Laura at Laura's Reviews. I'm flattered that someone thinks my blog worth reading, especially as I tend to be a bit dry and don't have much time for fun stuff.




Here is what the award signifies:

The Literary Blogger Award acknowledges bloggers who energize & inspire reading by going the extra mile. These amazing bloggers make reading fun & enhance the delight of reading!


I pass it on to:

Trish's Reading Nook Who sponsors the Classics Challenge and provides us with motivation to read old books
Lula at Strictly Letters who has a good balance of lit and good looking guys
Mari at Marireads Who I've known long and adore for her taste in books and knitting
Sequestered Nooks where I lurk

King Solomon's Mines by H. Rider Haggard

This is another one of those books I read a while ago and forgot to blog about. After having seen The League of Extraordinary Gentleman, I wanted to know who exactly Alan Quartermain was and why he was included in that particular cast, so I looked him up and voilà, King Solomon's Mines.

After having read it, I still can't quite understand why they included him in The League, because frankly the man was a coward (he even admits to being one in the book). Basically, Quartermain is a hunter in Africa and Sir Henry Curtis asks him to go along with him to look for his brother who disappeared looking for King Solomon's Mines. After making sure his son would be provided for in the event of his death, off they go into the heart of Africa looking for said mines.

It's an adventure story and I love a good adventure story, but this particular one was a bit too old fashioned for my taste. Boys of past ages would have loved it because it's full of hunting big game, dangerous situations and hearty men beating the odds in the desert, etc. etc. The reason I say past age and old fashioned is because of the manner these things were done in. I haven't got a problem with hunting, but this was the kind where they went out and were thrilled to kill a whole herd of elephants just for their tusks. In today's society that's unacceptable and frankly I felt a little sick just reading about it, especially knowing that that's really just what happened. I think if I had a boy, I would let him read the book, but not without listening to my opinions on the subject (my unborn children thank me daily for their unborn state). Anyway, it was all very, very old-fashioned as to views and manners and treatment of the natives etc. Not the thing for me, but my brother would have loved it as a kid.

I'm not going to rate this one because it's just too difficult. Judging it by this age, it should be condemned, but you really can't do that. It would be unfair. After all, most of the action would have been considered commendable at the end of the 19th century. Suffice it to say that it's an adventure story of the old English guard and must be read as such.

Behind the Scenes at the Museum by Kate Atkinson

This is the first book I’ve read from Kate Atkinson so I was uncertain what to expect. True to what I’d heard, it is a really good book, although I will add the caveat that you probably shouldn’t read it if you’re depressed. It might tip you over the edge.

The story itself is wound around Ruby Lennox, a girl born to a middle class family in the early 1950s. However, it’s not restricted to Ruby, but bounces around between the generations of her family, from her great grandmother’s time, to her. Each episode is followed, not by its sequel, but sometimes its prequel or another event entirely. The style reminds me of Virginia Woolf or Daphne du Maurier, only more modern. Most of the book is simple narration and all of it is written from the perspective of a third person omniscient narrator. It’s as though you’re sitting on the porch listening to an ageless person who watched all the happenings of each generation as they happened tell you about them as they occur to them instead of in a linear fashion. The descriptions are vivid and very realistic. You feel as though you’re there as you listen to the stories.

I found the story a very sad one from beginning to end, perhaps because it is so very close to the truth for most people. You see generation after generation enter the world with high hopes and wind up something completely different than they expected. Only rarely do they come anywhere close to meeting the hopes and dreams they had for themselves. Life gets in the way of their dreams at every twist and turn, partially due to uncontrollable outside influences, but even more sadly, partially because the characters make so many decisions without really knowing what they want and cannot see the consequences of the decisions they make, even though they’ve watched their parents suffer from the same mistakes all their lives. The novel really drives home the feeling we all have that “that just can’t happen to me”. We all think we’ll be so different from our parents, but are we really? Is it because we’re human and human’s are just like that, or is it because our parents teach us to become like them? Or, do we make the same mistakes because we’re afraid of making new ones which might be worse?

The other thing the book drives home is the sadness and the real cost of war. Ruby’s family has lived through both WW I and WW II and has watched many of their family and friends die fighting. Again, you see the young men with all of their potential and hopes lose them to war. The longer they survive, the more they are aware that their luck must be running out and they reconcile themselves to death instead of hoping for the future. Again the descriptions are vivid and make the reader feel as though they are there watching the fate of these young men. It’s all terribly, terribly sad.

Despite all of the sadness and depressing thematics, the novel is very human in the sense that hope reigns throughout. There’s always the hope that things will get better as they change. There is always the hope that things will turn around. I don’t want to give the impression that the book is terribly heavy and depressing, because it is, but it isn’t. Atkinson breaks the novel up by flitting about from childhood memories to scenes later in life and the sometimes quite sarky comments her characters make give the book an element of humour that lightens it up. She keeps some of the family secrets back and only lets them out one by one as the novel goes by, lending an air of secrecy and things left unsaid to the whole of the family. You always know there’s more to come, you just have to be patient and wait for it to show itself when the time is right.

All in all, I give this one a 5 out of 5 for being a poignant, well written, very human story.

Martin Chuzzelwit by Charles Dickens

Having heard that Dickens considered this book one of his best works, I was quite looking forward to reading it. It’s always interesting to see what an author likes best out of his own works as it gives a bit of insight into his own personality, only in this instance, I can’t quite put my finger on what he must have liked about it, or not for certain anyway.

The book is actually not just about Martin Chuzzelwit, but about the extended Chuzzelwit family. Martin Chuzzelwit the Senior is simply the head of the family who sets events in motion. Much of the book is about the how the characters deal with what Martin Sr. has put into motion. The whole story becomes very complicated with all of the characters who are involved. It can be a bit difficult to remember who is related to whom and how and if not related, how are they involved in the story. As much as I’d love to go into all of the characters and who is who and related to whom how, it would take an age to do so, so I’ll just refer anyone who’s interested to the Wiki page (Spoiler warning! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Life_and_Adventures_of_Martin_Chuzzlewit) where there’s already a good list.

The short version is that Martin and Anthony Chuzzelwit are two wealthy brothers who both lose their trust in humankind as they assume that everyone is out after their money. Such is Martin’s fear that he hires a young girl, Mary, as a servant and pays her well with the understanding that as soon as he dies, she will get no more out of him. This is supposed to ensure that she puts all her efforts into making sure that he lives as long as possible. He trusts none of his relatives because he “knows” that they want him dead so they can inherit his money. Unfortunately, Martin Sr.’s grandson, Martin the younger, falls in love with Mary and intends to marry her. That would, of course, destroy Mary’s disinterestedness in Martin Sr.’s will, so he disinherits Martin the younger who must then go off and seek his fortune alone, ultimately leading him to abandon England for the United States to try his fortune there.

The story’s villain is Mr. Pecksniff, a cousin of the Chuzzelwits who uses their mistrust of others and the absence of Martin to insinuate himself into a place of importance in old Martin’s life. He sucks up and brown noses Martin Sr. to the point of becoming an emetic. Both Pecksniff and his two daughters are a cause of outrage to the reader as he goes about promoting himself, especially by defaming honest people, whenever he feels it will be to his advantage. His is literally prepared to do anything to secure his own comfort, and is introduced into the story as a “teacher” of architecture who actually passes off his pupil’s work as his own and gleans both credit and money for the work. His character becomes more and more devious and audacious as time passes and he feels himself more secure in receiving an inheritance from Martin Sr.

There are many, many side and sub plots in the novel and it eventually begins to bounce back and forth between the US and England. The US does not come out smelling of roses, however, Dickens was very careful about printing his own comments about the American episodes with the novels. He begs his audience to take the book as fiction and to forgive him for his rather exaggerated portrayal of the more negative traits of the Americans. He was actually quite fond of the country and it’s people, but it did serve his purpose in making certain points about Martin the Younger’s personality and character development. My only qualm with this was that he should have put it at the beginning of the novel and not at the end, at least in all printings of the book which took place after completion of the series (This was another of Dickens’ serial works. He didn’t intend to send Martin to America from the outset, but changed his mind after the first parts had been published.).

Did I like the book? Yes and no. I found that some parts dragged and some were really suspenseful. Many of his larger than life characters really got on my nerves, specifically I would have liked to smack the Americans for being so annoying and Martin the Younger for being so stupid and gullible. Pecksniff really gets up your nose on occasion too. Still, it’s a good work and I’m not sorry to have read it. I’m giving it a 3 out of 5 rating, 2 points lost of annoying characters and occasionally dragging bits.

In my bid to finish all of Dickens’ works I still have the following to read:

The Old Curiosity Shop
Dombey & Son
Hard Times
Our Mutual Friend
The Mystery of Edwin Drood

I’m curious how I’ll like these in comparison. I’ll be sure to let you know when I’m done with them :0)

The Amulet of Samarkand by Jonathan Stroud

The Amulet of Samarkand is the first book in the Bartimaeous Trilogy. It's a children's/early teens book, but was really imaginative and a lot of fun. I just finished it and loved it. It's one of those books I would classify as the candy of reading. OK, maybe the fruit of reading. Candy isn't good for you, but reading always is, no matter how fun and quick a read.

The main character is Nathaniel, a young boy who was given up to the magicians at the age of 6 to become a magician's apprentice. Unfortunately for Nathaniel, his new master is at best a mediocre wizard and isn't really very keen on taking him on. Arthur Underwood would much prefer to live a quiet life and concentrate on climbing the ministry ladder than to bring up someone else's child and to teach him magic. Nathaniel, feeling cheated, neglected and alone, finally decides to take his education into his own hands, which ultimately leads him on a hectic and dangerous chase around London when his plans backfire on him.

The London Nathaniel lives in is not like the London we all know, or a Muggle London, if you will. It's something like a parallel world, like the England Lara of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials. Some things are the same, but not all. The first major difference is that magic is an integral part of life in Nathaniel's London, where the Magicians are the aristocracy of society. They hold most powerful positions in the ministry and the look down on commoners as, well, common. The reasoning is that magicians are powerful, they protect the people from foreign magicians and they are better educated than the commoners, therefore they are better. Nathaniel is learning to be just like them as he grows up in this world, only there are still notable differences in his attitude. He still has a sense of honour and decency that the older magicians seem to have lost completely. However, he has still lived in that world all his life and knows he must play by it's rules to save his own skin.

The books starts off with Nathaniel, age 12, summoning up a djinn, Bartimaeous, to help him with his plans of revenge against a magician who humiliated him. Bartimaeous provides a lot of comic relief in the book. He's sarcastic, scornful, haughty, and although he portrays himself as being rather on the evil side, he's soft-hearted all the same. He's not pleased at being summoned up to serve a magician, and least of all a magician of such tender years. However, Nathaniel proves himself to be more knowledgeable than anyone would have thought and the two become bound together for better or for worse, literally. The only thing they can do in the end is help each other, or perish trying. This leads them running across London and Southern England trying to halt an evil plot which Nathaniel's original plan unwittingly uncovered.

Like I said, I was tempted to call this book reading candy because it was so fun and exciting, however, on reflection, there really is a lot of food for thought in it. First of all there's the whole subject of social superiority, which is blatant and rampant in Nathaniel's world. Usually in books of this type, there would be one person of exceptional moral standing guiding the young hero down the right path, but here, there just is no such person. All magicians are for themselves. There is no greater good or right path except the Machiavellian one. So basically Nathaniel's development into a hopefully morally upstanding person is left up to himself and his innate sense of right and wrong. Also, as magicians look upon djinns, imps and all creatures from "the other world" as their own personal slaves to be summoned up and bound at will, there is point of slavery. Will Nathaniel grow up thinking this is fine as it is or will he ultimately try and change it? The first book leaves these questions open and it will be interesting to see how he turns out. Finally, Stroud didn't dumb down the vocabulary for children, which impressed me. All in all, I think kids could learn a lot from this book while having fun at the same time. I know I'd recommend it to anyone with kids between the ages of 11 up.

For it's outstanding merits all around, this one gets a clear 5 out of 5 rating.

100 Books + a Meme

Well, I reached 100 books for the year. I was kind of hoping to finish 150, but I'm not sure I'll make it, inasmuch as I'm not likely to read much in December when I go home an visit my family. Somehow they take it ill when you've got your ear buds in or your nose in a book when you only see them once a year. Funny that...



Trish put up the Honest Scrap meme on her blog and “tagged” everyone. According to Trish and Lisa, who originally tagged Trish, "The "Honest Scrap" award requires me to tell my readers 10 true things about me and then pass it on to 10 more blogs."

10 Things:

1. I make a pot of tea in the morning at work and it usually lasts me most of the day in summer. It goes cold and I still drink it. In winter I usually manage the first pot hot and then go on to make a second pot which eventually goes cold.

2. I would love to have a really clean house all the time. I used to clean every day so that it would stay clean and I wouldn’t be embarrassed if someone dropped by. I can’t be bothered anymore. I clean at the weekends and maybe do the floors a second time in the middle of the week if the weather has been nasty and the animals brought in more than the usual amount of dirt/hair.

3. I used to iron my bed sheets. It’s a lovely feeling, but somewhere along the line I became too tired to deal with it and haven’t ironed anything in 6 months. I find I can live with this.

5. I can be really quite, but also really obnoxious. I’m surprised my friends put up with either.

6. I don’t actually own a sofa like normal people. I have a single bed with pillows on it. It’s one of my most favourite pleasures at the weekend to lie down and read until I fall asleep, then nap for a couple of hours. This does not help motivate me to actually purchase a real couch.

7. I have the world’s worst body temperature regulation. Actually, I don’t think I have one at all. I’m either too cold, or too hot, but rarely just fine.

8. I keep swearing I will not get more dogs once the current ones are no longer. No one believes me, but I really hope I can stick to it this time. I love my dogs, but between work and walking the dogs, I no longer have a life.

9. Even though I know they are seriously ugly, I wear Crocs 95% of the time because they are comfortable and don’t make my feet hurt. I have tendon problems in my feet so it’s difficult to find shoes I can wear long term.

10. I’ve been on a classics book binge for the last couple of years. I got tired of not understanding casual references to books and decided to remedy it. I have to admit that I would not have made it through many of them had they not been in audio format. Having said that, I’ve also found some great books that I will love forever.

The Girl Who Played with Fire by Steig Larsson

Fabulous book. Fabulous. Loved it. The only negative thing I have to say about it is that it's very intense and intense and probably not a good book to read if you're otherwise stressed. That's not actually a negative though, just an observation.

The book is a continuation of the Mikael Blomkvist's and Lisbeth Salander's relationship/adventures/lives after the Wennerström Affair and their historic investigation into the Vanger family and the disappearance of Herriet Vanger in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Lisbeth, a slightly odd person with possible Asperger's Syndrome and/or other psychological and social difficulties, distances herself from her friend Blomkvist and vanishes into thin air. Blomkvist doesn't give up trying to contact her despite her obvious desire never to see him again. Suddenly, two of Blomkvist's friends and business parters are murder and Salander is implicated and it become more important than ever for Blomkquist to find his anti-social hacker friend.

Larsson does such a good job at making Salander so very likeable despite her obvious dislike of people in general, that you really become quite afraid for her. I found myself quite emotionally involved in this book, rooting for Salander and Blomkvist all the way. There are so many twists and turns in the story that it's impossible to see how things will develop, which keeps you constantly on the edge of your seat. It only took me two or three days to read this, despite being quite a long book. It's one of those where you've just got to know what happens next, so you can't put it down. This one gets 5 out of 5 for plot, likeable characters and readability.

Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

This book scared me witless and I sort of formed a love-hate relationship with it. I loved it because of the points it made, but hated it because it forced me to contemplate things which are, to me, unthinkable.

Montag is a fireman, but not like the firemen we know. His job is not to stop fires, but to start them. He burns books for a living. The setting is Earth in the future and books have been banned. All books. There are hints that there are technicalities governing the ownership of books, but practically speaking, all books are considered illegal and must be burned. The premise is that books and being well read inspire people to think they are better than others, in turn making those with lesser education feel bad about themselves. Negative feelings of self-worth are no longer tolerated in a society who wants to feel happy, happy, happy all the time. Therefore, anything that contributes to someone else feeling bad, must be done away with.

The scary part about this is that the way Bradbury set it up, and the way that society has developed since he wrote the book, it is actually a conceivable situation. As I was reading, I was constantly trying to reassure myself that neither I, nor my fellow book lovers, would allow such a sacrilege: we would fight to the death to retain our books and the right to read them. The question is, would there be enough of us to stop them from doing it? Are there really enough readers? I know that many, many people love to read, but what about all of those who don’t? There are probably more people out there than we know who haven’t picked up a book since they got out of school.

Comforting is the thought that so many people’s livelihoods are dependant on the publishing industry. To forbid the written word would decimate the economy, even in this day and age. Publishers, book shops, librarians, universities, shipping agents, printing houses, editors, certain web-cites would all be out of business if we were to ban books. That’s a lot of people if you think about it. Financially I think it would be impossible. Despite this being a comfort to those who love books, I can’t help but think there’s still something fundamentally wrong about a society who uses financial viability to validate the importance of the written word. It’s a fact of life, but it still seems quite oxymoronic to me.

Even better than the book was Bradbury’s afterward where he tells of many people’s (publisher’s) attempts to edit his books so that they would be acceptable to everyone, i.e. removing all references of God or minorities so that no one would be upset by the content. I hope he asked them if they had actually READ his book, although even if they did, they obviously didn’t get the point. Bradbury points out that the constant editing and re-editing of books is exactly the sort of thing that would facilitate a society as Bradbury describes in Fahrenheit 451. He points out that “blacks don’t like Twain and whites don’t like Uncle Tom’s Cabin” (paraphrasing there). What’s the answer? Do we get rid of both so everyone is happy, or do we keep both and teach from them so that everyone can learn why someone else would have a different point of view? Would we even be happy if we were always “happy”, i.e. if nothing ever upset us, or would our happiness disappear through lack of contrast?

There’s a lot of material in this book for discussion and I came away feeling like I’d like to make it compulsory reading for all schools. There’s much that can be learned from looking at the consequences, albeit fictional, of well-meaning but ill informed intentions based on short term results.
Loved the books and thus, 5 out of 5.