A long-overdue EIGHT mini-reviews

It's time for a mega mini-review catch-up!  I think that I'm now up to date with everything I've read up to the end of February, so... shall we get started?

The Pearl by John Steinbeck (4*) - It's been a while since I read this, and honestly I think it will be quite forgettable in the long run - but I obviously really enjoyed it at the time, hence the four-star rating!  A kind of fable about greed, materialism and envy built around the discovery of a great pearl by a poor Mexican freediver, it's short, folksy, lyrical and poignant, and I very much enjoyed the musicality and dreamlike feeling of the reading experience.  Not necessarily one I'd rush to read again, but quite beautiful!

 

Give a Boy a Gun by Todd Strasser (3.5*) - This is essentially a novel for young teens about bullying and gun violence, in particular the school shooting phenomenon. Its moral is perhaps a little simplistic and obvious to an adult, especially so long after it was first written, but the evolution of the two boys at the centre of the story has played itself out so many times in the intervening years that it still rings all too true. It's clear that the novel has used genuine incidents to formulate the story, with Strasser including footnotes to show where specific details echo real-life cases. If this makes even one kid stop and think differently about how they treat others around them, then that's got to be worth something.

 

The 8-Week Blood Sugar Diet by Dr Michael Mosley - I can't really rate this one yet, and it's very unusual for me to read anything like this - but diet book, yaaaaay! I've put on weight since my last mega-depression, and with my family history of diabetes, high cholesterol, heart problems and all kinds of other ticking time bombs, I thought this would be worth a try! Michael Mosley is known here in the UK for his well-researched, well-presented TV health documentaries, which time and time again have thrown things into new perspectives and flipped over decades-old received wisdom, so I have high hopes. The book itself is made up of a swathe of detail about Type 2 diabetes (which this diet has been proven to actually reverse), blood sugar, the Mediterranean diet and the science behind the resurgence of the VLCD (very low calorie diet).  All very interesting and persuasive.  The last section is all recipes, most of which I didn't like the look of - but I HAVE started the diet, using my own menu made up from the same foods and principles, and it's going well so far, cake cravings aside!

 

A Long Way Down by Nick Hornby (4*) - This was one of the longest-standing books on my TBR, and I'm SO GLAD I finally read it.  It's about four very different strangers who meet on top of a tall building on New Year's Eve, each planning to jump off - only they don't.  Instead, they grudgingly head back down the stairs together, and after a rocky night, end up making a pact to stay alive until Valentine's Day and see how things go.  I loved the four voices - disgraced TV presenter Martin, downtrodden Maureen, madcap young Jess and musician JJ (he was my favourite) - and the way this single shared experience unites them, separates them, brings them meaning but also trouble, creates opportunities but also slams doors.  It was real and blackly humorous and strangely uplifting and I can't wait to read my next Nick Hornby novel!

 

 

The Pirates! In an Adventure with Napoleon by Gideon Defoe (3*) - The fourth in the humorous Pirates! series, this one actually doesn't involved that much pirating.  After humiliation at the annual Pirate Awards, the Pirate Captain (with his luxuriant beard and pleasant, open face) has decided to retire - only his tropical island of choice actually turns out to be a bleak goat-riddled chunk of rock, and he'll be sharing the hearts of the local townspeople with none other than Napoleon Bonaparte.  Bring on the clash of the egos!  Funny, slightly surreal, and heralding the return of all my favourite pirates including Jennifer (former Victorian lady) and the long-suffering pirate with a scarf.  A fun way to while away an afternoon!

 

 

Plain and Simple: A Woman's Journey to the Amish by Sue Bender (4*) - Reading this slim little volume was like sitting down in your favourite armchair with a hot cup of tea at the end of a long day: soothing, comforting and deliciously peaceful.  Built around Bender's fascination with Amish quilts, this is the story of how her interest became a full-fledged quest for a better and calmer life.  Bender went to stay with two different Amish families over the course of a few years, and tried to use her experiences in their communities to pinpoint what was missing from her life and reframe it in a way that balanced Amish values with modern American living.  Unexpectedly relatable, interesting and quite lovely.

 

An Age of License: A Travelogue by Lucy Knisley (4*) - This was my third Lucy Knisley book (after Relish and French Milk) and despite the lack of all-out foodie emphasis this time, it was definitely my favourite of the three.  This time Knisley documents her trip around Europe promoting her books, meeting up with old friends and enjoying her three loves - comics, food and culture.  There's a dash of romance and a cheerful appearance from Knisley's lovely mother, and the overall tone is light and welcoming; she's mercifully lost that whining self-pity that made French Milk so much less appealing than it should have been.  Definitely a keeper!

 

Breathing Room by Marsha Hayles (4.5*) - I picked this up on Amazon when it happened to pop up in my recommendations at the same time as one of those sudden 'last copy of the current stock' price drops.  I had never heard of it before and had no idea what to expect - but I'm glad I took a chance!  It's a YA novel set in a Minnesota TB sanatorium in 1940, and is told from the perspective of Evelyn, a 13 year-old new arrival on the girls' ward.  Although it's undoubtedly sanitised for younger readers, there are some genuinely shocking moments alongside the friendships, intrigues, medical interventions and the relentless strict monotony of the sanatorium routine.  Whenever I started to forget, something drew my attention back to the fact that these patients were literally fighting for their lives, every single day.  I cried several times, and learned a lot both from the novel itself and from the historical images, background information and research details that Hayles includes in the book.  A well-written little gem.

 

 

Aaaaand that's me all caught up, finally!

REVIEW: Books, Baguettes and Bedbugs - The Left Bank World of Shakespeare and Co, by Jeremy Mercer (5*)

Alternative title - Time was Soft There: A Paris Sojourn at Shakespeare and Co.
by Jeremy Mercer (Phoenix, 2006)

"Two months before I'd had a high-profile job with an enviable salary, a sleek black German sedan on lease, an apartment in a fashionable downtown neighbourhood, and a collection of not-so-inexpensive shirts and jackets hanging in the closet.  Now, there were a few hundred dollars in my pocket, no job or prospect thereof, some clothes jammed into an old handbag, and a bed in a tattered bookstore to call home.  All things considered, I couldn't have been happier."

As most of my regular readers will know (because I've mentioned it so many times!), this book and I have been good friends for many years now.  I bought it from the bookshop on my university campus and this month has marked my third reading.  The first time I read it, I fell in love.  The second time, I looked for inspiration.  The third time, I found both.  This is, I suppose, the story of our friendship!

My first reading...

I was still at university (I think) and fell utterly in love with Mercer's world of bohemians and books.  My review on LibraryThing went like this:

"On the run from an unfortunate mistake in his Canadian life as a crime journalist, Jeremy Mercer heads to Paris to escape for a while.  Caught in a rainstorm near Notre-Dame one afternoon, he spots a welcoming light across the river and thus stumbles inadvertently on the Shakespeare and Company bookshop.  Invited upstairs for tea by the beautiful woman behind the desk, wandering the labyrinth of books and beds, he soon realises that this is no ordinary bookshop and, as a poor writer, is invited to join the ranks of lost souls inhabiting the book-lined rooms.

So begins his whimsical and quintessentially bohemian stay, under the watchful eye of eccentric owner George Whitman (surely the star of the book, with his fascinating life and Communist ideals), who renamed his unique store after the original literary oasis, run by his good friend Sylvia Beach, which was forced to close down during the Second World War.  Here all are welcome to browse and lose themselves in their reading; tea is offered on a Sunday; eclectic readings take place in the library; literary and political opinions are argued out – and those in need of a bed will find one amongst the books in return for a few hours helping around the shop and in the kitchen.

Mercer deliciously evokes days trawling the scattered tomes, nights spent storytelling by the Seine, tourists attracted by the store’s reputation, wanderers attracted by Whitman’s generosity, showering in the public washhouses, scrounging leftover food to get by: in short, a poor life, without good facilities or scope for wastage of any kind, but a happy, lively life nonetheless.  The characters moving through Whitman’s utopia are many and varied, yet he remains, a kind of rock in the tides of time and tourism, as the chaos of youthful dreams and books and wine whirls around him. 

Of course, eventually reality bites for Mercer and it’s time to move on – but his journey is magical and the lessons of the bookstore honest.  Now I have Sylvia Beach’s own book 'Shakespeare and Company’ to read, and I recommend the documentary ‘Portrait of a Bookstore as an Old Man’, made towards the end of Mercer’s time in Paris and readily available online.  Still not sure whether to read it?  Try searching online for photos of the store in all its glory – if that doesn’t persuade you, nothing will!"


My second reading...

The second time I read the book, two years later, I was on the cusp of opening my bookshop.  Since then I'd seen the documentary I mentioned at least twice - it became one of my go-to methods for getting out of a reading slump or inspiring me to read more each day - and seen lots of pictures and amateur YouTube footage of the shop, and I felt like I was going into the book with a more rounded feel for the world George Whitman had created for himself, his writers and the daily flood of visitors.

This time around, I wasn't just looking for a bookish good read - I was also looking for bookshop inspiration.  Thanks to George and to Mercer's book, I understood that books are, ironically, only a small part of running a bookshop.  While we wouldn't have the space and the right kind of customers to create anything like George's vision, I tried to adapt some of the elements of the atmosphere I'd fallen in love with through Mercer's account into workable parts of our own shop.  We tried to pour ourselves into our surroundings and make our shop a friendly and idiosyncratic place to be.

We didn't have a mirror covered in letters and cards - but we had a humble pinboard with pictures, interesting things we found tucked in books, recommendations and bestseller lists.  We didn't have a shop cat - but we did have a tiny mouse that liked to sit in our bird feeder, much to the bemusement of the tourists.  We didn't have beds amongst the bookshelves - but we had comfortable chairs where regulars would sit chatting about books and their lives (or sleeping, in one case).  Because it was OUR shop, and we had the flexibility of mostly selling second-hand books, I wasn't afraid to sometimes make personal decisions instead of business ones, waiving a few pennies for a kid whose pocket money wouldn't quite stretch to a book they wanted, slipping in a freebie for a teenager who was eagerly collecting Star Trek novels, or helping out a practically-homeless woman who would 'buy' a book for a fraction of the marked price on the understanding that she'd bring it back when she was finished with it.  In the back of my mind, there was always the question, "What would George do?"  I still hadn't visited Shakespeare and Company, thanks in part to the agoraphobia that crippled me right at the time when a Paris trip would have been ideal - after uni, before work - but it was always in my mind, thanks to Jeremy Mercer and his magical book.


My third reading...

And so we come to 2014.  After four and a half years of trading as a mother-daughter business, in a bookshop that had become our second home, we sold up and moved on around the New Year.  Neither of us have been back to see what it looks like now - it would be like going back to your old house to see what the new owners have done with it - and it already feels like a distant memory, thanks in part to the crippling depression that's driven such a huge wedge between me and the rest of the world of late.

As far as rereading this book goes, it means I've finally read it as a whole, in a lot of ways.  The first time, I was reading it as a magical vision of bookish possibility; the second time, I was reading it and feeling inspired in my own business; the third time, I've been able to just read it for itself, feeling greater familiarity with the world Mercer was immersed in and a greater appreciation for the negative aspects of life at the bookshop - the thieves, the poverty - as well as the amazing ones.  I can also now place the timeline of the book compared to the documentary, which was made after Mercer left the shop but while he was still in Paris, the summer that George's teenage daughter Sylvia returned from England to live with him for a few months; some of Mercer's friends at the bookstore appear in the film, and so does he, briefly!  I can now appreciate how close George and Jeremy became over the years, and the role he played in bringing Sylvia back to Paris.  At the time he stayed in the store, George could only dream that one day Sylvia might come home and carry on the family business in his place, so it warmed my heart to know that his dream came true.  Without her permanent return to the shop, where she quickly took over as manageress, the bookshop might have been lost when George died just before Christmas 2011.  I only wish that I'd made it to Paris while he was alive... 

If you'd like to watch the documentary that I've been going on about with such reverence, it's not available as a whole on Google video any more, but it keeps cropping up around the internet, sometimes in sections, sometimes in its entirety.  It's just under an hour long in total, and gives you such a flavour of life at Shakespeare and Company in the early Noughties, its history, its eccentric late owner, and the 'tumbleweeds', the ever-changing collection of young writers who continue to live and work there to this day.  I love it, and (when it's available!) I watch it every so often when I'm in a reading slump or feel generally uninspired.  I hope you enjoy it too!

Notable Quotables:

• "I woke up straight.  The instant my eyes opened, everything felt sharp and clear, as if I'd finished a wind sprint or stepped from a frothing sea.  I'd always been one to play with snooze buttons, lolling in bed and rationalising being ten, twenty, thirty minutes late for work or school.  But that first morning at the bookstore, there were no slow degrees of consciousness or seductive fingers of sleep.  I was alive."
• "In a place like Paris, the air is so thick with dreams they clog the streets and take all the good tables at the cafés.  Poets and writers, models and designers, painters and sculptors, actors and directors, lovers and escapists, they flock to the City of Lights.  That night at Polly's, the table spilled over with the rapture of pilgrims who have found their temple.  That night, among new friends and safe at Shakespeare and Company, I felt it too.  Hope is a beautiful drug."
• "He washed his clothes by hand, ate the most basic of meals, and shunned the cinemas or restaurants.  With this regime, not only was he able to survive on the bookstore's paltry receipts but he also managed to provide communal meals and tuck away enough money to keep expanding the bookstore... George had discovered money to be the greatest slave master, and by reducing your dependence on it, he believed, you could loosen the grip of a suffocating world."
• "I had been at the bookstore more than a month, but it felt like time had barely passed.  Without the normal barometer of a workday or a fixed schedule, life had become fluid.  It was hard to keep track of the hours and days in the bookstore, everything came and went in pleasurable waves of evenings and mornings and afternoons.  In the criminal world there is a term, hard time, which refers to difficult prison sentences in maximum-security facilities... Time at Shakespeare and Company was as soft as anything I'd ever felt."
• ""You know, that's what I've always wanted this place to be," he said.  "I look across at Notre Dame and I sometimes think the bookstore is an annexe of the church.  A place for the people who don't quite fit in over there."  I understood.  We sipped our beer until the sun set and then sat awhile longer."
• "Living with George at Shakespeare and Company has changed me, made me wonder about the life I left and the life I want to live.  For now, I sit, I type, I try to be a better man.  Life is a work in progress."

Source: I bought this book from the little branch of Blackwell's, above Market Square, at the University of York.

REVIEW: Beach Babylon, by Imogen Edwards-Jones and Anonymous (4*)

(Bantam Press, 2007)

This book was such great fun! I read Hotel Babylon on holiday years ago, but I think this one was even better. In this exposé the anonymous whistle-blower is once again a manager in the hotel industry, but this time of a luxury island resort rather than a London establishment - and it takes things to a whole new level! As in the other Babylon books, all the people, places and madcap events that appear in the book are real, but names and locations have been changed (obviously!) and the bizarre situations the manager finds himself having to cope with have been condensed into one crazy 'week in the life'.

The reader is swept into a world of incredible luxury and privilege. This is a resort where the villas can cost up to $6000 a night, and the guests are so wealthy that they can afford to blow $20,000 on a afternoon's entertainment or $1,500 on a bottle of champagne without batting an eyelid. Not only does our intrepid manager have to cosy up to each and every one of his guests and bend over backwards to keep them happy, but he must also deal with their more outrageous requests, make sure the isolated island has everything it needs on a daily basis, and try to keep his staff functioning and content in the face of daily difficulties.

This is a wonderful piece of escapism, managing to capture both the little bubble of island life, with its daily champagne parties and beach barbeques and celebrity guests, and the all-consuming nightmare of trying to keep such a large resort in the impossibly perfect condition expected by the demanding clientele. Despite the 'world apart' nature of the island, the characters will be painfully familiar to anyone who's ever been on holiday! It's funny, it's dry, it's cringeworthy - and it's brilliant!

Source: I borrowed this book from our shop shelves.

REVIEW: To Touch a Wild Dolphin, by Rachel Smolker (4.5*)

(Souvenir Press, 2002)

Sometimes a book comes along that manages to balance a range of genres with such perfection that you close it having smiled and cried, experienced new places and lifestyles, and learned more than you realise, all without ever having left the comfort of your sofa. To Touch a Wild Dolphin definitely fulfills that description.

Monkey Mia, in Shark Bay, on the West Australia coast, is known for its friendly wild dolphins, who come right into the shallow waters and interact readily with humans. These days they are a huge tourist draw, but when Rachel Smolker first discovered them in the early eighties, hardly anyone knew about them. For Smolker, a marine biologist, they provided the perfect opportunity to study dolphins in the wild, learning to identify individuals, recording dolphin communication, and observing all the different elements of dolphin life, from courtship to hunting. For fifteen years she and her fluid team of colleagues and assistants spent huge swathes of time at Monkey Mia getting to know the dolphins, sharing their joys and sorrows, and reaching ground-breaking conclusions about their previously mysterious existence.

Reading this book and sharing the dolphins' lives felt like a real privilege, and it was utterly absorbing from start to finish. Smolker is a wonderful writer, moving effortlessly from lyrical descriptions of the beautiful Shark Bay area, through profound thoughts on the links between humans and dolphins, to accessible and concise information on all areas of dolphin society, without ever losing the thread of her narrative. She superbly captures the nuances of each of the key dolphins' personalities so that the reader grows as close to them as they would to any character in a novel, and experiences their happiness and their losses all the more deeply. She describes life in the rough camp by the beach, and offers anecdotes about interaction with the dolphins that range from the sublime to the horrific. And alongside all of this, Smolker distils everything she and her team learned from their time with the dolphins of Monkey Mia, from foraging techniques and courtship rituals to communication and male bonding, offering a complete and reverential picture of the wonder and complexity of the dolphins' lives.

This is a tour de force of nature writing, bringing together elements of science, natural history, ecology, autobiography and travel writing. It will make you laugh and cringe and cry, and leave you with a new respect both for dolphins and for the people who have dedicated their lives to studying them and working to develop our understanding of these amazing creatures. Read it!

NOTABLE QUOTABLES:

• "My mind still in that floating, receptive state of the recently asleep, I settle down on the deck to admire the spectacle: the phosphorescent comets below and the Milky Way above.  The magnificence of the scenery pulls me far above and beyond myself.  Shark Bay is a tremendous, wide-open expanse, jutting out into the Indian Ocean.  Distant from any city lights, it is a place where the night skies offer up a slowly rotating banquet of constellations, pulsating multicolor planets, bright clouds of star clusters, and dark, eerie nebulae."
• "I reached out slowly and tentatively and touched her side.  She watched me intently but did not flinch or move away.  I was stroking the side of a wild dolphin.  Her skin was silky smooth, slightly rubbery, and surprisingly warm for a creature living in the ocean and resembling a fish.  I felt suddenly aware of how odd my long, gangly arms, with all those independently moving digits, must seem to her.  She was sleek, a torpedo."

Source: I borrowed this book from my local library.

BTT: Books and travelling

BOOKING THROUGH THURSDAY #10
A bookworm went a-travelling...

When you travel, how many books do you bring with you?
Has this changed since the arrival of ebooks?

Ah, that age-old question.  How many books do I take?  Well, let's take a week's holiday as an example.  Now, I am extremely lazy when I'm on holiday.  My ideal vacation means seven days of lying in the sun or curling up on a sofa, a stack of books by my side and a large amount of delicious food and plentiful beverages of my choice on hand.  As a general rule, for a seven day holiday I'd probably take eight books.  That way I've got the best-case 'book a day' scenario covered, as well as having a spare or two should one of the titles fail to take my fancy when the time comes.  

Which leads me to the real problem when it comes to books and travelling: Which books do I take?  I don't have this problem with clothes, because I have a limited number of favourite T-shirt/jeans/jumpers/shoes combinations to choose from - mainly because I spend all my money on books instead.  In go the clothes, in go chargers and pens and toiletries and sweets to nibble on the way there.  When it comes to books, however, I enter into a military-precision process we shall call Operation Holiday Reading.

A couple of weeks before The Day, I'll sit down and methodically comb through my LibraryThing catalogue, listing any likely candidates.  Things I've been wanting to read for ages, things that will be suitably light and fluffy, books I've been warned to read when I have time to get stuck right in because I won't be able to put them down...  This usually leaves me with a ridiculous number of possibilities - perhaps 200 or more.  Over the next week or so, I will return to this list a few times, each time crossing off a few more books.  When this stage is complete, it's time to roll out the big guns.  I hunt down every book left on the list and start the business of sorting through them in earnest, weeding out more books in the process.  Eventually, a couple of days before I go away, I should be left with perhaps 30 to choose from, and will usually have picked out perhaps five 'definite' titles by the night before.  The last few will be picked depending on my mood on the morning we leave.  Usually causing more stress and consternation than the rest of the holiday preparations put together...  WHAT IF I CHOSE THE WRONG BOOKS?

Happily, this has never been a problem, and since books so often take longer than you think to read them, especially when you factor in that burning-eye thing that makes you fall asleep when you've been reading for too long in one go, I never get through every book anyway!  Oh, and to answer the second question (bit of an afterthought, this) - I don't have a Kindle or anything like that, so it's not an issue for me!  Besides, it would completely ruin my oddly satisfying, geeky, obsessive list-making pre-travel book frenzy if I could just load the whole lot onto a gadget - and I'd still have the problem of deciding which books I actually wanted to read while I was away!

Do you have a similar dilemma?  Does anyone else have any slightly insane methods or habits when it comes to choosing their bookish travel companions?