Forfatter: Mirthful

Starting Over

Mirthful

In which a new beginning is completely the wrong end.

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Having read and enjoyed all of Rosamund Pilcher’s books, I have been meaning to pick up her son’s novel An Ocean Apart, but never got round to it. In Waterstone’s in Brighton I found his latest volume, Starting over, and thought: «Why not?» So it made its way into my shopping bags (along with, it must be said, rather a lot of other books). I thought this might do well for holiday reading, and I was right. I expected the novel to last me until Scotland (Sunday) at least, as it didn’t seem like I’d read that much earlier on in the week, but I started it on the Thursday in Clonmel and finished it on the bus to Dublin the next day. Once I had been caught up in the story it was well nigh impossible to put it down. Apart from obviously having mastered the design of plots that draw the reader on, Pilcher also creates characters that are believable and sympathetic. Having said that, I was NOT happy with the ending of this book – I still recommend it, but be forewarned that it does not «do what it says on the box» (it being a «they lived happily ever after» sort of box, and to my mind this was not how the story ended – which left me feeling somewhat cheated). I will leave it along the way somewhere…

No News at Throat Lake – Lawrence Donegan

Mirthful

In which we feel pointlessness.

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Still not sated with all things Irish (probably because the trip was looming large in my mind) I decided to pop down to Tanum and see if I could find a suitable book to bring to read while on the road, preferably one I could easily dump once I’d done with it. I picked up No News at Throat Lake by Lawrence Donegan, and it pretty much fulfilled the purpose.

Donegan escapes city life and goes to live in rural north of Ireland, and relates his trials with humour. However, as the whole thing ends with him chucking it and moving back to the big city, I was left with a feeling that the whole thing was somewhat pointless, and though I’m sure he’d learnt a thing or two about himself, he didn’t really relate it effectively enough for me to feel that the whole experience wasn’t just a complete waste of time.

Luckily, that meant I was not tempted to carry the book home with me – finished it while in Ennis, and left it there, with a bookcrossing label inside.

McCarthy’s Bar

Mirthful

In which we learn about the rules of engagement.

Or was it travel? Having finished Tony Hawks I thought some more travel-in-Ireland was in order and therefore reread Pete McCarthy’s McCarthy’s Bar, where, amongst other things, he lays out a few of the rules of travel. The one that gives the book its name is ‘8. Never pass a bar which has your name on it.’ An admirable sentiment, though somewhat more useful if your name is Pete McCarthy than if it’s Ragnhild Sandlund. Never mind.

Round Ireland with a Fridge

Mirthful

I seem to have concluded that I will not be able to reread both A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses before I go to Ireland. Considering the fact that it’s now only 75 hours before I leave for the airport, this is probably a sensible conclusion to come to (especially as I’ll have to subtract at least 12 hours for work and hopefully 22 for sleep).

So I’ve been rereading Tony Hawks’ Round Ireland with a Fridge instead, which is less intellectually snobbish, but at least as much fun.

Hawks somehow gets himself into a bet that he can’t hitch-hike the circumference of Ireland with a fridge, and as absurdities go, this one’s quite good in itself and should make for an interesting read at least. Add then Hawks’ exemplary ability to get into contact with people and to relate conversations (something certain other travel writers should learn a bit from), and you’re basically in for a craic. Or something.

 

Anyway, I enjoyed it last time round, I enjoyed it this time round, and I’m really looking forward to getting to Ireland.

Fast Food Nation – Eric Schlosser

Mirthful

In which we swear off fast food forever.

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Fast Food Nation is a book calculated to make you lose your appetite. On the other hand there is such a lot of talk of hamburgers and fries (and tacos and pizzas) that it’s very difficult not to obsess about food while reading it. A somewhat mixed experience, in that respect.

A somewhat mixed experience in many respects, actually. The book’s adequately well written, not in itself a very compelling read, but once I got into it I found it hard to put it down because I wanted to be done with it and go on to something more pleasant. It seems thoroughly researched, and I can’t really see any reason to doubt the main gist of Schlosser’s argument – that the fast food industry is bad for just about everything: The food’s unhealthy (whenever it isn’t lethal), the workers are unhappy and the effect on the economy as a whole is negative too.

Successful in it’s bid to make you averse to entering a fast food «restaurant» ever again, I still found the book patchy in its arguments. In fact, the whole «feel» was spoiled by just one jarring episode; Schlosser visits a slaughterhouse and gets a guided tour, starting at the «wrong end» in the packaging room and getting progressively closer to where «meat» is still «cattle». This description could have been very effective if he’d left the focus on the knocker, for example – stunning hundreds of cattle a day (up to 400 an hour), every day, must be a pretty terrible sort of job to do, even for the most determined carnivore. But this is where Schlosser slips into sentimentality, he exits the «plant» the way the cattle come in, and spends some time expounding the way the big brown eyes look at him, the way the ramp is designed so that the cattle do not see what’s coming. Now, I eat meat. I would prefer not to have to slaughter the animal myself prior to eating it, but I would if I had to. I have no illusions about the steak or bacon I buy at the supermarket, I know perfectly well that a short while ago this bit of meat was part of a (hopefully) healthy, (hopefully) happy, (definitely) living, breathing animal. Such is life. If it bothered me I would become a vegetarian.

The fact that the system is condusive to mistreatment of the animals, poor conditions for the workers, all sorts of odds and ends ending up in the food (bone, gristle, excrement, glass, what-have-you) and one small sample infected with e-coli 0157:H7 making millions of hamburgers lethal bothers me in the extreme, and the uncovering of all this makes the book interesting reading. The fact that the hamburger I eat was once part of a cow (or more likely hundreds of cows), bothers me not one iota, and the descent into sentimentalism mars what was otherwise a persuasive read.

But it will be a while before I eat at McDonald’s again.

About a Boy

Mirthful

In which we have growing pains.

Finally got around to rereading About a Boy this weekend. I’ve been planning to ever since the film came out, I didn’t want to see the film before I’d reread the book. So now I can see it, though it’s no longer on at the cinema, obviously, which is a pity, but I guess it’s probably not the sort of film that needs the big screen, so I guess renting the dvd will be ok.

Anyway. It’s a lovely book. No surprises, there, really – well, I already knew I liked it, obviously, having read it before – since I have yet to come across any book of Nick Hornby’s that I don’t like. I suppose I could give you a rundown of the plot, but I don’t think I can be bothered. And I don’t really have anything intelligent to say about it other than that it is lovely and you really should read it if you haven’t. Not doing a very good job of this book review thingamagig, am I? Pathetic, really.

Junk Food Monkeys

Mirthful

In which there is plenty of monkey business.

Having had a bit of a strange assortment of books in my tbr pile lately, I started Robert Sapolskys Junk Food Monkeys after finishing with Moore. Not a continuous narrative like A Primate’s Memoir, Junk Food Monkeys is a collection of essays all dealing with the bordeline between biology and personality. Bravely, Sapolsky even considers what possible connections there are between our bodies chemical reactions and our belief in God (or other religious beliefs). Personally, I found some of the earlier essays more interesting, especially those dealing with the biology of psychological anormalities – are there really purely chemical reasons why some people are schitzophrenics? And are a lot of people walking around with a milder version of the same chemical configuration, resulting in just mildly odd or eccentic behaviour rather than actual illness? He also relates some interesting stories of how the availability of corpses for scientific research though the centuries has resulted in some very wrong conclusions and some serious errors in the treatment of patients. And can testosterone really be blamed for all the fact that all men are agressive idiots?

Sapolsky writes intelligently and readably (is that a word? probably not), and manages to balance the «populistic» aspect (this is a book anyone could read) with enough «meat» to make it interesting even if you know a lot on the subject already (or so I’ve been told by someone who does), and certainly makes it challenging enough for us mere mortals not to make me feel like I’m being talked down to, which is nice.

Stupid White Men

Mirthful

In which Robin fails to laugh.

moore_swm.jpg I found Stupid White Men in a Stockholm bookshop at a reasonable price (the shops here seem to have marked it up, for some reason), and it was pretty quickly devoured. It’s hard to know what to say about books like these, I think. It’s very good, of course, and Moore definitely has a point or two (or a hundred). I am puzzled, though, at how it can be described as «funny». The quote on the back from the San Francisco Chronicle is pretty typical of the sort of thing you hear about Moore: «Hysterically funny. The angrier Moore gets, the funnier he gets. Sensational.» Well, I mean, no, not really. I think I might have laughed once during the whole book. That’s not what I’d describe as hysterically funny. The Observer seem to have got the point, though: «Caustic, breakneck, tell-it-like-it-is… He’s a genuine populist; a twenty-first-century pamphleteer.»

I am not being very helpful about this, am I? Well, here’s some advice for you: Read this book. It’ll make you think even if it doesn’t make you laugh.

The Secret World of the Irish Male – Joseph O’Connor

Mirthful

I’m sorry to say that O’Connor went downhill pretty quickly and never quite recovered. There is one hysterically funny episode towards the very end of the book, when he visits Disney World with a group of fellow Irishmen. The guide says «There’s some really good rides here at the Magic Kingdom» and you can probably imagine how it goes from there. Other than that – two pages or so – the rest of the book made me snort occasionally, but didn’t live up to the promise of the first few pages, and so was rather disappointing. I didn’t really learn anything new about Ireland, either, which, in 248 pages is pretty good going. Learning something new about Ireland was obviously not my motivation for reading the book in the first place, but would have been some compensation for the lack of laughs. Oh well.

Northern Lights

Mirthful

I’ve just reread Philip Pullman’s Northern Lights for a bookring at bookcrossing. I remembered the first book as being the most enjoyable the last time I read the «his dark materials» trilogy, and I guess I would probably still feel the same way. I’m not sure that I’ll reread the other two – at the very least I will try to read Paradise Lost first, as I remember too much of Pullman’s plot to make a reread fruitful without having some new aspect to investigate. Those of you who know my reading habits will know that this is not necessarily a compliment (I reread practically every book I enjoy at least once).