"The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time" - Mark Haddon

BLURB:

"The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time is a murder mystery novel like no other. The detective, and narrator, is Christopher Boone. Christopher is fifteen and has Asperger's Syndrome. He knows a very great deal about maths and very little about human beings. He loves lists, patterns and the truth. He hates the colours yellow and brown and being touched. He has never gone further than the end of the road on his own, but when he finds a neighbour's dog murdered he sets out on a terrifying journey which will turn his whole world upside down."

REVIEW:

It's difficult to know how to review this one. On the surface, I didn't really like the book...but the purpose of this particular novel isn't really to entertain.

For me, the majority of fiction I read has to serve one purpose, above all others: to entertain. I want to get absorbed in the story, lost in the words, hooked into the narrative, and basically use books as another form of escapism. Of course if the book also has an important message, that's icing on the cake. But I mainly read fiction for entertainment.

The Curious Incident didn't quite make it, and it was a bit of a chore to finally - finally - finish this book, which has been sitting forlornly on my 'to be read' shelf for possibly over a year now. The predominant emotion I felt throughout the story was frustration. And come on, when I'm on the train at 7:45am on a cold wet day being squashed against the window by a really big person sitting next to me - I'm already kind of in a sour mood. The last thing I need to be thinking is "This is the most frustrating, dysfunctional bunch of main characters I have ever spent time with".

Of course, the protagonist (and narrator) has every reason to come across as frustrating, and I guess that's where this book really shines through: realism. Every single other person that Christopher came into contact with struck me as incredibly real. The dialogue, their thoughts, their actions, and most of all how Christopher perceived them, seemed to leap off the page. Plus, I definitely have a bit more of a sense now for what it must be like to live with someone who has a mental illness. If I felt frustrated just by reading a (comparatively) short novel about someone with Asperger's, I can't imagine how difficult it would be to feel that way every single day.

I have a terrible feeling if I go on for too much longer, I'll fall into some horrible quagmire of Insensitivity and/or Political Incorrectness. Normally, I fully support this on the Internet - there's too much careful sidestepping and political correctness everywhere else in the world, it's often refreshing to find someone who doesn't give a damn and just says what they think. But for now, I'll leave this review with just one final comment...

RATING: ...I'm giving it points for sheer realism, and also for (as I call it) Dealing with a Significant Issue, but for me personally, I wasn't a fan of the book. 2 STARS

"The Book Thief" - Markus Zusak

BLURB:

"It is 1939. Nazi Germany. The country is holding its breath. Death has never been busier, and will become busier still.

By her brother's graveside, Liesel's life is changed when she picks up a single object, partially hidden in the snow. It is The Gravedigger's Handbook, left there by accident, and it is her first act of book thievery.

So beings a love affair with books and words, as Liesel, with the help of her accordion-playing foster father, learns to read. Soon she is stealing books from Nazi book-burnings, the mayor's wife's library, wherever there are books to be found.

But these are dangerous times. When Liesel's foster family hides a Jewish fist-fighter in their basement, Liesel's world is both opened up, and closed down.

In superbly crafted writing that burns with intensity, award-winning author Markus Zusak has given us one of the most enduring stories of our time."

REVIEW:

I read this one in bits and pieces over a very long period (...well, a long period for me to be stuck on the same book, anyway). It wasn't because the book wasn't engaging enough, but because stupid trivial things such as university and tests and assessments and minor family mishaps kept getting in the way of progress.

But I finally finished it today, and subsequently felt rather depressed. In fact, very depressed.

Of course I know about what happened during the second world war in Nazi Germany, on a sort of 'factual' level. I've seen a movie adaptation of The Diary of Anne Frank, I've heard about people like Corrie ten Boom, I've read about it on Wikipedia (which of course naturally makes me an expert now), etc etc. But nothing brought home the true horror of actually living there, actually experiencing the full force of human tragedy, as The Book Thief.

At first I thought it was the weirdest book I've ever read. I mean, for starters, it's narrated by Death. Secondly, the prose is bizarre. I felt like I was swinging wildly between hating the pretentiousness and loving the richness with which Zusak describes the most ordinary things. Everything is personified and metaphoralised (..."metaphoralised"?...oh well) beyond belief. Houses "crouch nervously", for example, or pimples "gather in peer groups". Only, imagine this continuing throughout the entire book, on every page. Also, there were a couple of things that weren't explicitly spelled out, which mystified me a bit, and I wish they'd been made more obvious.

Once the book really got going, though, I quite enjoyed the reading experience as a whole. A lot of careful thought and imagination has been poured into this story, which I like. The characters were interesting, if occasionally a little unbelievable. And it definitely highlighted the despair of living in Nazi Germany.

What a horrible time in human history.

RATING: Incredibly haunting, and well worth a read - but probably only once. 4 STARS

"Nineteen Minutes" - Jodi Picoult

BLURB:

"Sterling is a small, ordinary New Hampshire town where nothing ever happens - until a student enters the local high school with an arsenal of guns and starts shooting, changing the lives of everyone, inside and out.

The daughter of the judge sitting on the case should be the state's best witness - but with her boyfriend dead and her childhood friend charged with murder, she's struggling to remember what happened in front of her own eyes....

Number one bestselling author Jodi Picoult brings us her hardest-hitting and most involving novel yet. NINETEEN MINUTES asks what it means to be different in our society, who has the right to judge someone else - and whether a person is ever whom they seem to be..."

REVIEW:

If you want a truly uplifting, joyous, warm, inspiring read - do not read Nineteen Minutes.

I borrowed it from the library on a whim, mainly to see why everyone was raving about Jodi Picoult. And once I started reading it, I found out why. To me, it was utterly engrossing, and as 'un-put-downable' as any thriller. It was also very, very moving and emotionally powerful. However I don't think I'll be reading any more books by Picoult after this.

Why? Because it was so profoundly sad.

Nineteen Minutes is incredibly depressing, but I think that's because it seems so real. You can imagine, with great clarity, every single one of the scenes in this book. You can imagine how each of the characters feel, how they act, how they think, what they look like. In fact Picoult paints characters so real, so vivid, that I found myself thinking about them long after I'd actually put down the book on any given day.

Occasionally, it did veer a little too widely into slightly sappy sentimental territory, and at times it felt as though the author was putting in all these clever metaphors just for the sake of writing something that had a 'deep' hidden meaning to it, just because she could. "The rain came down so they couldn't see each other clearly". Oh, and it's like a reflection of their relationship too! Wow. That's profound.

On the whole, it was one of those books that just stays with you for ages, making you think, and it does call you to question who the real victims are in various situations.

RATING: Riveting. Depressing. And haunting. 4 STARS

"The Kite Runner" - Khaled Hosseini

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Amazon.com product description: "In his debut novel, The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini accomplishes what very few contemporary novelists are able to do. He manages to provide an educational and eye-opening account of a country's political turmoil--in this case, Afghanistan--while also developing characters whose heartbreaking struggles and emotional triumphs resonate with readers long after the last page has been turned over. And he does this on his first try.
The Kite Runner follows the story of Amir, the privileged son of a wealthy businessman in Kabul, and Hassan, the son of Amir's father's servant. As children in the relatively stable Afghanistan of the early 1970s, the boys are inseparable. They spend idyllic days running kites and telling stories of mystical places and powerful warriors until an unspeakable event changes the nature of their relationship forever, and eventually cements their bond in ways neither boy could have ever predicted. Even after Amir and his father flee to America, Amir remains haunted by his cowardly actions and disloyalty. In part, it is these demons and the sometimes impossible quest for forgiveness that bring him back to his war-torn native land after it comes under Taliban rule. ("...I wondered if that was how forgiveness budded, not with the fanfare of epiphany, but with pain gathering its things, packing up, and slipping away unannounced in the middle of the night.")
Some of the plot's turns and twists may be somewhat implausible, but Hosseini has created characters that seem so real that one almost forgets that The Kite Runner is a novel and not a memoir. At a time when Afghanistan has been thrust into the forefront of America's collective consciousness ("people sipping lattes at Starbucks were talking about the battle for Kunduz"), Hosseini offers an honest, sometimes tragic, sometimes funny, but always heartfelt view of a fascinating land. Perhaps the only true flaw in this extraordinary novel is that it ends all too soon. --Gisele Toueg "

REVIEW:

I have always been someone who wants both sides to a story. When two of my friends fought, I didn't just listen to one and bitch with them about the other - I sought out both of their opinions before making any judgement. When I began getting involved in debates about science and religion, I was mainly reading creationist literature, so I took biology as one of my subject in my senior years of high school to get the 'hard science' I was missing. And these days, most of the time when the media talks about Afghanistan and the Middle East, it's in a decidedly negative tone. After all, who was it who flew those planes into the Twin Towers on September 11?

It's for this reason that The Kite Runner becomes a much-needed antidote to the biased attitudes of many (reinforced by the media, of course). At a time when many Afghanis are probably crying out for their side of the story to be heard, this book has launched itself onto the bestseller list, and at least one of their stories can be told to everyone who reads it (and judging by the statistics on BookMooch, that's a lot of people - it is currently in second place on the 'Most Frequently Mooched' list.)

The tale of Amir, the protagonist, is beautifully told - after reading action-packed thrillers for a while, the different style of prose was at first startling, however I soon got used to it. Hosseini paints characters so incredibly real, so real that even the most hard-hearted of readers couldn't help but feel for them. The bleakness of their situations only heightens the sense of heartache one feels while reading - this is not a novel to read when you need cheering up, it's one to read when you need waking up to what goes on in the world we live in.

Nowhere is the utter depravity of human nature more starkly highlighted than in The Kite Runner. You may not enjoy it, but it will certainly make you think.

RATING:

Not what I'd usually read at all, but I'm glad I did. 4 STARS

"Next" - Michael Crichton

BLURB:

"Is a loved one missing some body parts? Are blondes becoming extinct? Is everyone at your dinner table of the same species? Humans and chimpanzees differ in only 400 genes; is that why a chimp fetus resembles a human being? And should that worry us? There's a new genetic cure for drug addiction--is it worse than the disease?

We live in a time of momentous scientific leaps, a time when it's possible to sell our eggs and sperm online for thousands of dollars and to test our spouses for genetic maladies.
We live in a time when one fifth of all our genes are owned by someone else, and an unsuspecting person and his family can be pursued cross-country because they happen to have certain valuable genes within their chromosomes...
Devilishly clever, Next blends fact and fiction into a breathless tale of a new world where nothing is what it seems and a set of new possibilities can open at every turn.
Next challenges our sense of reality and notions of morality. Balancing the comic and the bizarre with the genuinely frightening and disturbing, Next shatters our assumptions and reveals shocking new choices where we least expect.
The future is closer than you think. "

REVIEW:

This is such an ambitious sort of book I doubt it would have succeeded if it weren't for Michael Crichton's best-selling status and reputation. In fact, my mum (also a fan of Crichton) tried reading it but put it down quite quickly as it "was just too complicated". I have to admit, it was.

This is not the kind of book you read as you're getting ready to fall asleep - it requires concentration. It was even getting to the point where I felt like writing down a list of the main characters and a short description for each, just for reference. Crichton juggles many lead characters at once, with many complex scientific scenarios as well, not to mention the fully fleshed-out personal lives of each character - their career paths, their wealth, their upbringing, their various sex partners, the lot. Their stories are all told 'at once' so to speak - a chapter about Rick, followed by a chapter about Josh, followed by a chapter about Lynn, and it's five chapters before we get back to Rick's story, which has since moved on slightly, and then we're back to Josh again and then a new character with a new situation is introduced and - you see what I mean. (There are even two different primary-school-aged boys called Jamie. Confusion city.)

These characters and their stories all interweave and connect as you move through the book, so the experience is sort of like watching a tapestry being constructed, but only seeing one distinct section being worked on at a time. The issues tackled in this one are also pretty hefty - it's all about genetic researchers and their crazy experiments and the big pharmaceutical companies who just want to make money. Occasionally, some elements of the story became slightly ludicrous - a genetically modified parrot with incredibly high intelligence levels who can perfectly mimic voices and sounds, do arithmetic, and hold coherent conversations sometimes provided comic relief, but other times was simply too ridiculous and the situations seemed contrived.

Because of all the different plotlines being juggled and told at the same time, I felt that there were too many loose ends not tied up at the end of the book. Following all these different storylines proved difficult, but possible - as long as you were concentrating very carefully.

RATING:

Thought-provoking stuff that raises many questions about issues that arise in today's genetic industries, but the sheer amount of different plotlines and characters muddled the message. 3 STARS