Choke

Title: Choke

Author: Chuck Palahniuk

Number of pages: 293

Started: 21 May 2011

Finished: 25 May 2011

Opening words:

If you're going to read this, don't bother.

After a couple of pages, you won’t want to be here. So forget it. Go away. Get out while you’re still in one piece.

Save yourself.

There has to be something better on television. Or since you have so much time on your hands, maybe you could take a night course. Become a doctor. You could make something out of yourself. Treat yourself to a dinner out. Color your hair.

You're not getting any younger.

Plot summary:

Victor Mancini has devised a complicated scam to pay for his mother's hospital care: pretend to be choking on a piece of food in a restaurant and the person who 'saves you' will feel responsible for you for the rest of their lives. Multiply that a couple of hundred times and you generate a healthy flow of cheques, week in, week out. Victor also works at a theme park with a motley group of losers, cruises sex addiction groups for action, and visits his mother, whose Alzheimer's disease now hides what may be the startling truth about his parentage.

What I thought:

This is my first Chuck Palahniuk book and, despite his rather discouraging start to the book (see above), I read on. I thought this book was funny and a good read. It brought it urban myths and weird scenarios and a whole load of things that if I explained what they were would seem kind of weird, but actually worked very well. A very readable book - although not necessarily suitable for those of a slightly prudish disposition or who have concerns about people reading their book over their shoulder on the tube.

The Impostor

Title: The Impostor

Author: Damon Galgut

Number of pages: 249

Started: 18 May 2011

Finished: 20 May 2011

Opening words:

The journey was almost over; they were nearly at their destination.
There was a turn-off and nothing else in sight except a tree, a field of sheep and lines of heat rippling from the tar. Adam was supposed to stop, but he didn’t stop, or not completely. Nothing was coming, it was safe, what he did posed no danger to anybody.
When the cop stepped out from behind the tree, it was as if he’d materialized out of nowhere. He was clean and vertical and pe- remptory in his uniform, like an exclamation mark. He stood in the road with his hand held up and Adam pulled over. They looked at each other through the open window.
Adam said, “Oh, come on, you can’t be serious.”
The cop was a young man, wearing dark glasses. He gave the impression, in all this dust and sun, of being impossibly cool and composed. “There is a stop sign,” he told Adam. “You didn’t stop. The fine is one thousand rand.”
“Wow. That’s a lot of money.”
He smiled and shrugged. “Your driver’s licence, please.”

Plot summary:

When Adam moves into an abandoned house on the dusty edge of town, he is hoping to recover from the loss of his job and his home in the city. But when he meets Canning - a shadowy figure from his childhood - and Canning's enigmatic and beautiful wife, a sinister new chapter in his life begins. Canning has inherited a vast fortune and built for himself a giant folly in the veld, a magical place of fantasy and dreams that seduces Adam and transforms him absolutely, violently - and perhaps forever.

What I thought:

Damon Galgut is a recent discovery of mine, and one that I am glad I made. This book was another sinister tale and looked at the dark side of humanity. It was a well written novel that looked at the tensions of South African society, although the underlying issues are perhaps ones about humanity as a whole, rather than one particular nation.

It was a dark reflection on the depths that people will stoop to in order to feel that they are in control of their own destiny.

One Day

Title: One Day

Author: David Nicholls

Number of pages: 448

Started: 11 May 2011

Finished: 18 May 2011

Opening words:

15th July 1988



‘I suppose the important thing is to make some sort of difference,’ she said. ‘You know, actually change something.’

‘What, like ‘change the world’ you mean?’

‘Not the whole entire world. Just the little bit around you.’

They lay in silence for a moment, bodies curled around each other in the single bed, then both began to laugh in low, pre-dawn voices. ‘Can’t believe I just said that,’ she groaned. ‘Sounds a bit corny, doesn’t it?’

‘A bit corny.’

‘I’m trying to be inspiring! I’m trying to lift your grubby soul for the great adventure that lies ahead of you.’ She turned to face him. ‘Not that you need it. I expect you’ve got your future nicely mapped out, ‘ta very much. Probably got a little flow-chart somewhere or something.’

‘Hardly.’

‘So what’re you going to do then? What’s the great plan?’

‘Well, my parents are going to pick up my stuff, dump it at theirs, then I’ll spend a couple of days in their flat in London, see some friends. Then France - ’

‘Very nice - ’

‘Then China maybe, see what that’s all about, then maybe on to India, travel around there for a bit - ’

‘Traveling,’ she sighed. ‘So predictable.’

Read a longer extract here (and also Emma Morley’s mix tape).

Plot summary:

15th July 1988. Emma Morley and Dexter Mayhew meet for the first time on the night of their graduation. Tomorrow they must go their separate ways.
So where will they be on this one day next year? And the year after that? And every year which follows?

What I thought:

This book was a pleasant return to normality following on from the previous book I had read. I am not normally someone who reads the latest popular read. It’s not a snobbish thing, it is that I think that books don’t normally live up to the hype – I have never read a Harry Potter book (although I wouldn’t rule it out one day, and if I am drawn in I can read them all without having to await the next one being published).

“One Day” is certainly a very popular book. I borrowed my copy from the library and as I walked into the shopping centre have just been issued a copy, I walked past someone carrying a copy. I also know several people at work who have just read or are reading it. I even saw Deirdre Barlow reading it on Coronation Street. Need I provide any more evidence of its popularity?

I thought the concept was interesting. The plot develops based purely on what happens on the same day – 15 July - each year. In a lot of ways this worked, there was no dwelling on incidents or life’s occurrences, instead you got an insight into one day and then you started a new chapter and you were a year in the future, what ever that might bring.

The book moved at a decent pace, and was light relief, which I most certainly needed, but it also lacked something. I suppose because of the way the book is put together, there was no reflection as such. A day started, a day ended and the world moved on by a year. That is a somewhat simplistic description of the book, but not entirely inaccurate. Don’t expect anything life changing or profound, but it is a decent enough read and a pleasant distraction.

The Diaries of Jane Somers

Title: The Diaries of Jane Somers

Author: Doris Lessing

Number of pages: 528

Started: 28 April 2011

Finished: 11 May 2011

Opening words:

The first part is a summing up of about four years. I was not keeping a diary. I wish I had. All I know is that I see everything differently now from how I did while I was living through it.

My life until Freddie started to was one thing, afterwards another. Until then I thought of myself as a nice person. Like everyone, just about, that I know. The people I work with, mainly. I know now that I did not ask myself what I was really like, but thought only about how other people judged me.


Plot summary:

The diaries introduce us to Jane, an intelligent and beautiful magazine editor concerned with success, clothes and comfort. But her real inadequacy is highlighted when first her husband, then her mother, die from cancer and Jane feels strangely removed. In an attempt to fill this void, she befriends ninety-something Maudie, whose poverty and squalor contrast so radically with the glamour and luxury of the magazine world. The two gradually come to depend on each other -- Maudie delighting Jane with tales of London in the 1920s and Jane trying to care for the rapidly deteriorating old woman. 'The Diary of Jane Somers' contrasts the helplessness of the elderly with that of the young as Jane is forced to care for her nineteen-year-old drop-out niece Kate who is struggling with an emotional breakdown. Jane realises that she understands young people as little as she so recently did the old.

What I thought:

Well, what to say about this book? This is the first Doris Lessing book that I have read. In fact this is actually two books that she originally wrote under a pseudonym that have now been brought together under one title and, since the cat was let out of the bag, are now attributed to Lessing. She wrote the books under a pseudonym because she wanted to try a different style and to see how the books would be received if they were submitted by an unknown author. The first book was turned down by many publishers, at least one of which said this was because it was too depressing. I can see why.

This book gives me dilemmas. It was well written and I persevered with it to the end because there was something very engaging about it. But it was so depressing and my general mood plummeted because of reading this book.

It is a book that looks at British society and how we treat each other and the social care system, loneliness, relationships and much more. It is an insightful novel and one that is worth reading, but beware of the psychological impact that this book can have.

Sunset Park

Title: Sunset Park

Author: Paul Auster

Number of pages: 308

Started: 20 April 2011

Finished: 27 April 2011

Opening words:

For almost a year now, he has been taking photographs of abandoned things. There are at least two jobs every day, sometimes as many as six or seven, and each time he and his cohorts enter another house, they are confronted by the things, the innumerable cast- off things left behind by the departed families. The absent people have all fled in haste, in shame, in confusion, and it is certain that wherever they are living now (if they have found a place to live and are not camped out in the streets) their new dwellings are smaller than the houses they have lost. Each house is a story of failure — of bankruptcy and default, of debt and foreclosure — and he has taken it upon himself to document the last, lingering traces of those scattered lives in order to prove that the vanished families were once here, that the ghosts of people he will never see and never know are still present in the discarded things strewn about their empty houses.

Plot summary:

In the sprawling flatlands of Florida, 28-year-old Miles is photographing the last lingering traces of families who have abandoned their houses due to debt or foreclosure. Miles is haunted by guilt for having inadvertently caused the death of his step-brother, a situation that caused him to flee his father and step-mother in New York 7 years ago. What keeps him in Florida is his relationship with a teenage high-school girl, Pilar, but when her family threatens to expose their relationship, Miles decides to protect Pilar by going back to Brooklyn, where he settles in a squat to prepare himself to face the inevitable confrontation with his father that he has been avoiding for years.

What I thought:

I was not entirely convinced by Paul Auster’s previous book, Invisible, but I think he was on much better form with his latest book, Sunset Park.

I thought this was a good read and had clear indications of earlier novels - misfit characters, strange circumstances, no nice neat endings – and hung together well. It was a satisfying read and reminded me why I like Paul Auster.

Hideous Kinky

Title: Hideous Kinky

Author: Esther Freud

Number of pages: 186

Started: 16 April 2011

Finished: 20 April 2011

Opening words:

It wasn't until we were halfway through France that we noticed Maretta wasn't talking.
She sat very still in the back of the van and watched us all with bright eyes.
I crawled across the mattress to her. 'Maretta will you tell us a story?'
Maretta sighed and turned her head away.
John was doing the driving. He was driving fast with one hand on the wheel. John was Maretta's husband. He had brought her along at the last minute only because, I heard him tell my mother, she wasn't well.
Bea glared at me.
'Maretta ...' I began again dutifully, but Maretta placed her light white hand on the top of my head and held it there until my skull began to creep and I scrambled out from under it.
'You didn't ask her properly,' Bea hissed. 'You didn't say please.'
'Well, you ask her.'
'It's not me who wants the story, is it?'
'But you said to ask. I was asking for you.'
'Shhh.' Our mother leaned over from the front seat. 'You'll wake Danny. Come and sit with me and I'll read you both a story.'
I looked hopefully at Bea. 'Oh all right,' she relented, and we jumped over Danny's sleeping body and clambered up between the two front seats.

Plot summary:

While Mum immerses herself in the Sufi religion, and contemplates wearing a veil, the children begin to rebel: Bea insists on going to school while the five-year old narrator dreams of mashed potato and fantasises that Bilal is her father.


Read an analysis of the book in The Guardian.

What I thought:

This was a tale of two children being dragged to foreign climes in order for their mum to live the carefree life she aspired to. It was an interesting read and was a well written book. It was an engaging and, in some ways, a fairly light story. But you felt for the children at times who were looking for things from their mum and those around them and sought “normality”, which was rather at odds to their mum’s aspirations. A good read.

Point of Departure

Title: Point of Departure

Author: James Cameron

Number of pages: 312

Started: 8 April 2011

Finished: 15 April 2011

Opening words:

I cannot remember when these curious moments of suspense first began, when I would find myself unanchored and adrift in the dark groping for clues as to where I was. Sometimes, indeed, even who I was. These moments came, and still come, at the exact transition between sleep and awakening, lying on the edge of uncertainty: what is this bed, where is this room, what lies beyond it – Egypt, Engalnd, Berlin, Jerusalem, Moscow, Minneapolis, Peking; there have been so many places, and any of them could be the background of this vacuum.

Plot summary:

Reportage resists easy definition and comes in many forms - travel essay, narrative history, autobiography - but at its finest it reveals hidden truths about people and events that have shaped the world we know. This new series, hailed as 'a wonderful idea' by Don DeLillo, both restores to print and introduces for the first time some of the greatest works of the genre. The classic memoir by one of the great British journalists of the twentieth century, a man who earned universal respect not only for his courage in reporting from dangerous places, but for his candour and independence. "Point of Departure" features Cameron's eyewitness accounts of the atom bomb tests at Bikini atoll, the Chinese invasion of Tibet and the war in Korea; and vivid evocations of his encounters with Mao Tse-tung and Winston Churchill.

What I thought:

This is the first non-fiction book I have read for ages. It was the account of a journalist, James Cameron, who was mainly active post WWII to the 1970s. This meant that they were not periods of history that I have lived though, although some of them were familiar. I think because the book was not giving a perspective on things that I was particularly familiar with, it made the book less accessible/ relevant to me. I did not necessarily understand the politics that was beneath some of the things that happened or that Cameron reflected upon. But that said, it was a book that gave a unique perspective in some major points of history. He was there when atom bombs were dropped 9and became one of the founders of CND as a result). He was there to see Churchill when he was frail and expected to due imminently. For others with a more indepth view of history, I suspect they would have got more out of this than I did, but nonetheless it gave some fascinating insights into 20^th Century world history.