What I Did On My Holidays

The Moonlit Mind - Dean Koontz 6*
The New Rules - Bill Maher 9*
Mockingjay - Suzanne Collins 7*
Catching Fire - Suzanne Collins 7*
The Hunger Games - Suzanne Collins 8*
Snuff - Terry Pratchett 8*
The Four Horsemen Of The Apocalypse - Vicente Blasco Ibanez 8*
Soldiers Of Salamis - Javier Cercas 4*
127 Hours - Aron Ralston 9*
VSI Sikhism - Eleanor Nesbit 7*
Tiger, Tiger : A Memoir - Margaux Fragoso 8*
On The Third Day - Rhys Thomas 7*
The Good Women Of China : Hidden Voices - Xinran 9*
Songs Of The Mexican Seas - Joaquin Miller 4*
Blackout - Connie Willis 3*
Antique Works Of Art From Benin - Augustus Henry Lane-Fox 8*
The Man Who Would Be King - Rudyard Kipling 7*
Miss Peregrine's Home For Peculiar Children - Ransom Riggs 7*
The Insatiable Spider Man - Pedro Jaun Gutierraz 6*
Band Of Brothers - Alexander Kent 4*

"Philip was a good listener; though he often thought of clever things to say, it was seldom till after the opportunity to say them had passed;" - W Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage.

Book Review : Ulysses - James Joyce 2*



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I realise that Joyce's stream of consciousness work is endlessly inventive and clever, displaying a dazzling use of language and a lack of repetition which is quite incredible for a a book of its size and length.  However, call me an old traditionalist if you will, but I would have sacrificed several hundred pages of bizarre literary ramblings for anything bearing a resemblance to a coherent narrative.  Ulysses took me almost six weeks to read, in stages as I could not stand the though of grinding through more than a handful of pages each day.

David Punter, English Professor at Bristol University describes Ulysses as "one of the most extraordinary works of literature in English."  Punter goes on to praise the manner in which Joyce performs "an exploration of the inner workings of the mind" and Joyce's replication of random thought processes.  I can see all this, and I do admire it in a way as being original, groundbreaking and inflammatory.  For myself though, none of these things made Ulysses into an interesting or compelling read.

Cover of Of Human Bondage

"Philip had an unfortunate trait: from shyness or from some atavistic inheritance of the cave-dweller, he always disliked people on first acquaintance; and it was not till he became used to them that he got over his first impression. It made him difficult of access. He received Hayward's advances very shyly, and when Hayward asked him one day to go for a walk he accepted only because he could not think of a civil excuse." - Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham.

Wagner - The Greatest Hoax



W Somerset Maugham



"But Siegfried! When he mentioned it Professor Erlin leaned his head on his hand and bellowed with laughter. Not a melody in it from beginning to end! He could imagine Richard Wagner sitting in his box and laughing till his sides ached at the sight of all the people who were taking it seriously. It was the greatest hoax of the nineteenth century." - Of Human Bondage, W. Somerset Maugham.

Wagner, Dead As Mutton

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"I tell you young people that before the nineteenth century is out Wagner will be as dead as mutton. Wagner! I would give all his works for one opera by Donizetti."

"But Siegfried! When he mentioned it Professor Erlin leaned his head on his hand and bellowed with laughter. Not a melody in it from beginning to end! He could imagine Richard Wagner sitting in his box and laughing till his sides ached at the sight of all the people who were taking it seriously. It was the greatest hoax of the nineteenth century." - Of Human Bondage, W. Somerset Maugham.

Book Review - The Underdogs : Mariano Azuela 6*

Image via Wikipedia Written about events during the Mexican Revolution, this tale follows the exploits of a group of villagers who band together under their local leader Demetrio Macias.  The men seemed to have joined the Revolution not out of ideals, but because a side has to be picked, and a poor working man has to be anti-Federal.

Demetrio leads through force of action, but when a Federal deserter, Luis Cervantes, arrives with his city education and, initially at least, his strong sense of ideals for the Revolution, the group find they have a spokesman who can express why they are fighting.

As the war grinds on, Demetrio's band experience some success, but along the way they become corrupted by greed and revenge.  Petty killings occur on the flimsiest of pretexts, and robbery and looting become the order of the day.  Eventually they come to be feared and hated by the peasentry in turn as the federal soldiers who burn Demetrio's home were hated by them. Cervantes uses the power of his speech to set Demetrio up as a great general, with Cervantes rising in power at his side.  The city man though can see which way the wind blows, and as the Revolution begins to turn on those people it was meant to serve, he flees the fighting with his war loot and sets himself up in business.

When the gang eventually return home they can find no peace.  Demetrio is asked why he keeps on fighting, but after two years the fighting has come to define his life and he can see no other purpose for it.

The Underdogs chronicles the failures of the Mexican Revolution as it turns on the very people it was meant to serve.  In its unflinching treatment of the main characters and Azuela's depiction of men changed by war and greed, it paints a picture which has become more familiar to us in more recent war books and films, particularly those concerning the American involvement in Vietnam.

An interesting read that introduced to me a period of history I knew nothing about, but which makes clear the eternal pointlessness and brutalising nature of war.

Image via Wikipedia"I would have given the world to take back what I had said; but a word once spoken, who can recapture it?" - Kidnapped, Robert Louis Stevenson

"I would have given the world to take back what I had said; but a word once spoken, who can recapture it?" - Kidnapped, Robert Louis Stevenson.

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"Hoots! Small blame to ye! To be feared of a thing and yet to do it, is what makes the prettiest kind of a man." - Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson.

Image via Wikipedia"But equality is always the same. Liberty and fraternity are words while equality is a fact. Equality should be the great human formula—social equality, for while individuals have varying values, each must have an equal share in the social life; and that is only just, because the life of one human being is equal to the life of another. That formula is of prodigious importance. The principle of the equal rights of every living being and the sacred will of the majority is infallible and must be invincible; all progress will be brought about by it, all, with a force truly divine. It will bring first the smooth bed-rock of all progress—the settling of quarrels by that justice which is exactly the same thing as the general advantage." - The 120 Days of Sodom by Marquis de Sade.

Pic - a line engraving of the Marquid de Sade in prison.

Spirit of War

"If the spirit of war isn't killed, you'll have struggle all through the ages." Under Fire: The Story Of A Squad Henri Barbusse.

Tell It How It Is

With his mouth full, and wafting me the odor of a sweetshop, he stammers—"Tell me, you writing chap, you'll be writing later about soldiers, you'll be speaking of us, eh?"

"Why yes, sonny, I shall talk about you, and about the boys, and about our life."

"Tell me, then"—he indicates with a nod the papers on which I have been making notes. With hovering pencil I watch and listen to him. He has a question to put to me—"Tell me, then, though you needn't if you don't want—there's something I want to ask you. This is it; if you make the common soldiers talk in your book, are you going to make them talk like they do talk, or shall you put it all straight—into pretty talk? It's about the big words that we use. For after all, now, besides falling out sometimes and blackguarding each other, you'll never hear two poilus open their heads for a minute without saying and repeating things that the printers wouldn't much like to print. Then what? If you don't say 'em, your portrait won't be a lifelike one it's as if you were going to paint them and then left out one of the gaudiest colors wherever you found it. All the same, it isn't usually done."

"I shall put the big words in their place, dadda, for they're the truth."

"But tell me, if you put 'em in, won't the people of your sort say you're swine, without worrying about the truth?"

"Very likely, but I shall do it all the same, without worrying about those people." from Under Fire: the story of a squad by Henri Barbusse.

10%

Cover of Under Fire: the story of a squadOr as near as damn it 10% anyway. Yesterday I finished Cormac McCarthy's All The Pretty Horses to finish one of my reading goals for the year, to read at least 100 of the 1001 Books list.

Reading the classics of literature, or at least the classics as nominated by editor Peter Boxall and his team of well read contributors, is an interesting experience, although the 1001 book itself puts these novels forward as the best novels ever written my experience so far has been that in my own opinion, some of these books are wonderful and fantastic, and some of these books are dull, turgid or just plain horrible.

In the wonderful category I would include H G Wells The Time Machine, W Somerset Maugham's Of Human Bondage even though at points I wanted to reach into the book and give Philip Carey a hard slap, and Under Fire : The Story Of A Squad by Henri Barbusse, a harrowing and all too realistic description of a French unit fighting and suffering in WW1.

The middle ground of books that are just alright takes in Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier in which I just could not warm to any of the characters and The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje which had some absolutely beautiful writing but a slightly directionless plot.

At the lower end of the enjoyment scale I did not enjoy a protracted trek around the Scottish uplands with Sir Walter Scott's Rob Roy, and 120 Days Of Sodom by the Marquis De Sade is just horrible, both of these books took me a long time to finish.

My next reading goal then is 100 books for the year, and as I am on 90 books already I should manage this with ease unless my eyeballs drop out.  How have I managed all this reading on top of a degree course and a job ? Well, it's amazing how much time you can find when you leave your Eve Online battleship in its hangar for a few months.

A Fantastic Road

"It is a fantastic road enough, in truth. On both sides of it are crouching armies, and their missiles have mingled on it for a year and a half. It is a great dishevelled highway, travelled only by bullets and by ranks and files of shells, that have furrowed and upheaved it, covered it with the earth of the fields, scooped it and laid bare its bones. It might be under a curse; it is a way of no colour, burned and old, sinister and awful to see." - Henri Barbusse, Under Fire : The Story Of A Squad.

The painting is The Mule Track by Paul Nash.

"Where I come from," interposes the poor Southerner, "holiday feasts last so long that the bread that's new at the beginning is stale at the end!" - Henri Barbusse, Under Fire : The Story Of A Squad.