Category: Book Reviews

Yes Please by Amy Poehler

Posted December 6, 2014 by Michael @ Knowledge Lost in Humour, Non-Fiction / 4 Comments

Title: Yes Please (Goodreads)
, 2014
Pages: 400
Buy: Amazon, Book Depository, Kindle (or visit your local Indie bookstore)

For those who don’t know Amy Poehler, then let me clear this part up first. Poehler is a comedian/actor who studied improv before working for Saturday Night Live from 2001 to 2008. In 2009 a spin-off from the American version of The Office was created and Poehler took the lead role in this show called Parks and Recreation. The character Leslie Knope is a perky, mid-level bureaucrat with big hopes and dreams in the small fictional town of Pawnee, Indiana. Parks and Rec follows this government department in a single-camera, mockumentary style as they try to jump through all the hoops to do something as simple as fill in the construction pit in an abandoned lot and create a park. The seventh and final season of Parks and Recreation is set to begin during the mid-season of the 2014–15 season.

Amy Poehler is not the first Parks and Rec star to release a memoir; Nick Offerman’s (who plays Ron Swanson) book Paddle Your Own Canoe finds him musing about life, manliness, wood work and how to best grill meat. However Poehler’s book was marketed as companion to Saturday Night Live co-star and friend Tina Fey’s Bossypants, rather than Offerman’s memoir. This is possibly due to the huge success of Fey’s memoir and the fact the two often work as a comedy duo.

I picked up Paddle Your Own Canoe as an audiobook because I liked the idea of Ron Swanson narrating and I decided to do the same with Yes Please. Amy Poehler made the audiobook a unique event, with guest stars and banter that I don’t expect appeared in the book. This allowed the listeners to enjoy a different experience to that of reading the book which I know has some pictures to look through instead. I have stopped listening to fiction in audio form because of personal preferences, which has allowed for more podcasts and non-fiction audiobooks. I feel like non-fiction and memoirs seem to work really well as audiobooks; I am not sure why but it just works really well.

What I found interesting about Yes Please was the memoir style; this wasn’t told in a linear format, rather a collection of essays that went back and forward depending on the topic. I really liked this style it allowed more focus on particular topics and allowed Amy Poehler to explore things in her own way. I was also impressed with how strong and confident she comes across in the book; when it came to talking about her divorce with Will Arnett she just simply stated it wasn’t a topic she wanted to go into and then moved on. I think people expect all the juicy and dark details on someone’s life in a memoir and I liked how she just brushed it off, proclaiming “This isn’t a topic I wish to share”. She does share some darker moments but for the most part she wants to come across as a positive and happy person.

Amy Poehler has a strong and passionate attitude towards life and in the end Yes Please really wants people to know that it is okay to be yourself. There were tender moments throughout the book and if you are a fan of Parks and Recreation, you might tear up when she shares her love towards every star within the show. She also spends a lot of time talking about her improv days and trying to make it into show business, reminding people persistence and passion is needed; if you love what you do, then why do anything else.

I really enjoyed reading Yes Please, maybe not as much as Paddle Your Own Canoe but it was still interesting to learn about someone’s life. While some may think that Amy Poehler has let the reader down by refusing to share some parts of her life, I think it really showed integrity. Just because she is an actor doesn’t mean her life is an open book. Parks and Rec fans should pick up this book, but also anyone interested in reading a memoir about someone passionate about life and their job will find Yes Please a great book.

Ariel by Sylvia Plath

Posted December 5, 2014 by Michael @ Knowledge Lost in Poetry / 0 Comments

Title: Ariel (Goodreads)
Author: Sylvia Plath
Published: Faber & Faber, 1965
Pages: 81
Genres: Poetry
My Copy: Library Book

Buy: Amazon, Book Depository (or visit your local Indie bookstore)

It feels like Sylvia Plath’s life overshadowed her literary value; her autobiographical novel The Bell Jar was like a confessional and people tend to read it for all the juicy bits. Ariel is a collection of poems published posthumously, just a few years after her suicide. It is true that we have Plath to think for advancing the confessional poetry form and exploring topics previously taboo like suicide, mental illness and domestic abuse.

I would like to thank Meg Wolitzer’s book Belzhar for pushing me into reading more of Sylvia Plath. The book explores a struggling student that was sent to a private school that put her in a special English class. This class spent the semester journaling and reading Plath, most importantly The Bell Jar but also Ariel. That book made me want to re-read The Bell Jar which I loved but instead decided it was time to give her poetry a go.

However I am very aware that I don’t know how to review poetry let alone a whole collection, so this is more about my experience with this book. I feel like I am becoming a better reader but if you ask me to read out loud I am going to struggle. So I decided this is an issue I needed to work on and I read Ariel to my wife (she read some of it to me as well). This may seem like a romantic and intimate thing to do with your partner but Plath has a way of killing any sexy moods.

I loved the experience but I am struck with a sense that Sylvia Plath might have been a poor choice to begin with. She has a very strong sense of imagery and plays a lot with metaphors; some of which I picked up on but there was some stuff that went over my head. Poetry is meant to be read out aloud and I thought this would help with my understanding as well as develop my skills. However I found it extremely difficult to work out punctuation in these poems. Some sentences span over a few stanzas but my natural impulse was to pause after ever line.

Having said that, this was a wonderful experience and while the poems are often dark and depressing I am glad I shared this moment with my wife. Ariel kind of reminds me of those people on the internet that overshare about their lives and you can’t help but be glued to what they write even if it annoys you. Sometimes I think, that is too much information but Sylvia Plath seems to get to the heart of that raw emotion.

Sylvia Plath was an incredibly intelligent and complex woman; I can’t help being fascinated by her. I want to learn more about her life, and understand the emotion behind her writing. Take for example her poem “Daddy”; there is this anger toward her father as well as some holocaust imagery that I just want to understand. I am going to have to find a biography on Plath’s life because I think this places a big part in her writing. Can anyone recommend me a good biography?

Tragedy of Macbeth by William Shakespeare

Posted December 4, 2014 by Michael @ Knowledge Lost in Classic / 2 Comments

Title: Tragedy of Macbeth (Goodreads)
, 1606
Pages: 249
Buy: Amazon, Book Depository, Kindle (or visit your local Indie bookstore)

I probably don’t need to go into too much detail about the plot of Macbeth as most people are aware of what it is about. The Tragedy of Macbeth is obviously a tragedy the legendary playwright William Shakespeare, and is often considered his darkest play. Set in Scotland, the play explores the destructive psychological and political effects that form when evil is used as a method of gaining power. It is generally believed that this was written between the Elizabethan Era and the Jacobean Era, around about 1599 to 1606.

The Elizabethan Era was generally regarded as a ‘golden age’ for England. Colonialism was strong, England has dominating the seas (defeating the Spanish Armada) and there was great commercial wealth to be found in the ‘New World’. However the Jacobean Era was different; James VI of Scotland inherited the throne in 1603 and things seemed to change drastically. The ‘Gunpowder Plot’ of 1605 failed to assassinate the king and the plotters were executed. This possibly led to the King commissioning a new translation of the bible; the ‘King James Version’ was first published in 1611.

The reason I talk about these two eras is that there seems to be a connection to Macbeth. Set in Scotland, Macbeth seems to reflect the atmosphere of the Jacobean Era and there has been speculation to the play alluding to the Gunpowder Plot. However to try to draw direct correlations between Macbeth and the political situations of the time would require a lot of speculation. I just added this information into this review because there are connections that I feel would be relevant or interesting to readers of this play.

I was lucky enough to have experienced Macbeth as a play being performed before ever reading it for my university course. There is something about the performance that was essential to critically reading the text; I already understood the plot, the tone and the overall emotions behind the words and this allowed me to grasp a lot more out of the play. One thing that I picked up in reading Macbeth that I seemed to have missed was the importance of gender roles within the play.

Let’s look at one example which appears in Act 1 scene 7. Within the scene Macbeth is having second thoughts about killing the king and taking the crown. Lady Macbeth scolds Macbeth and manipulates him to go through with his original plan. How does she do this? Simply by calling him a coward and telling him he is not a man. She even suggested that she is more of a man and stated she would kill her own child; taking that child from her breast and smash its head against a wall.

There are other themes that are prominent within Macbeth, but the idea of masculinity verses femininity seems to stick with me the most. This idea that claiming you are more of a man than someone else is a common occurrence but the way Shakespeare presented this graphic manipulation really stuck with me. Obviously feminist literary studies would have a field day with this play. I have been picking more and more issues to do with feminism within literature, but I would rather be looking at Marxism or psychoanalyst; why does this keep happening?

Macbeth is this wonderfully dark play that has a lot to offer; I can see why Shakespeare remains a legend. I am not really sure how to review a play like this; there is so much to talk about with plot and theme, however I would rather people discover that for themselves. I do feel like this review turned into something that would resemble a Jackson Pollock with random thoughts flicked onto a page but I wanted to get some of my thoughts down.

Wonder Boys by Michael Chabon

Posted December 3, 2014 by Michael @ Knowledge Lost in Contemporary / 6 Comments

Title: Wonder Boys (Goodreads)
Author: Michael Chabon
Published: Harper Perennial, 1995
Pages: 384
Genres: Contemporary
My Copy: Library Book

Buy: Amazon, Book Depository, Kindle (or visit your local Indie bookstore)

Grady Tripp is a writer of a few novels; following the success of his award winning novel The Land Downstairs he has set out to write his follow up. Seven years later his manuscript for Wonder Boys was over 2600 pages long and nowhere closer to being finished. In his personal life things were messed up, his wife has walked out on him, and his mistress Sara has revealed she was pregnant. Wonder Boys (1995) is Michael Chabon’s second novel following the success of his debut book The Mysteries of Pittsburgh (1988).

Michael Chabon spent five years writing a book called Fountain City following The Mysteries of Pittsburgh. Fountain City ballooned into a 1500 page novel about an architect building the perfect baseball stadium in Florida. Chabon stated that he “never felt like [he] was conceptually on steady ground.” Without telling his agent or publisher he abandoned the book and started Wonder Boys which steamed from the melodrama involved around Fountain City. The main character, Grady Tripp is apparently based on one of Chabon’s professors from University of Pittsburgh who had a 3000 pages manuscript which eventually was published in 2001.

This being my third novel by Michael Chabon, I was struck by how different this book was to the other two. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay and The Yiddish Policemen’s Union play with intertextuality and genre blending but Wonder Boys didn’t have this at all. Sure there were some similarities, the frequent use of metaphors and recurring themes (particularly with Jewish identity) were still present but it felt very different. Wonder Boys felt raw and emotional, and now understanding the fate of Fountain City I can see the birth of this book.

Chabon plays on the ideas of how we view the stereotypical struggling writer; a person surrounded in melodrama. Wonder Boys is set over the course of one weekend in which Grady’s third wife has left him and his mistress has told him he will be a father. To make things worse, his mistress is the chancellor of the university he works at and her husband in the head of the English department, which makes him his boss. The drama continues to unfold as his agent has arrived in town in the hopes to get a peek at his new novel, which is far from finished. However that is not the half of Grady’s problems and this novel is overly dramatic to give the reader a chance to re-examine the ideas they have of a struggling writer; not all of them are Grady Tripp or Hank Moody (Californication).

Michael Chabon wanted to play with the idea of drama as a reflection of the internal struggle that is experienced with a novel that just isn’t working. Everything is over the top, much like the 1600 page novel that needs to be trimmed down and turned into a more accessible novel. However everything that Grady tries to do to make his life a little less complicated just makes everything worse. This metaphor plays out throughout the entire novel and I had to wonder if it is better to abandon the novel and start again or continue trying to fix it (this plays out near the end of this book but I won’t give spoilers). The fact this book is full of anxiety and raw emotions only serves to enhance the experience and the metaphor.

Wonder Boys was also turned into a movie starring Michael Douglas, Tobey Maguire, Katie Holmes and Robert Downey, Jr. I haven’t seen the movie yet but I can see what it working on a very fundamental level but I am not sure how it would translate. The movie does seem to have a cult classic status so maybe it translated onto the screen perfectly.

Yet again I find myself being impressed with the works of Michael Chabon and a little sad that is takes me so long to read another novel of his. I have Telegraph Avenue on my TBR bookcase waiting for me but it is a bit of a tome. I have so many big books I would love to read but they still scare me, I really need to work on this problem. Wonder Boys is a wonderful and emotional journey and a great place to start if you have never read Michael Chabon before.

The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery

Posted December 2, 2014 by Michael @ Knowledge Lost in Contemporary / 3 Comments

Title: The Elegance of the Hedgehog (Goodreads)
, 2006
Pages: 325
Buy: Amazon, Book Depository (or visit your local Indie bookstore)

Renée Michel is a concierge for an upscale apartment building that is inhabited by bourgeois families. Renée is an intelligent autodidact that hides herself from the residents of this elegant apartment, trying to confirm every stereotype they might have towards a concierge. However a precocious girl named Paloma suspects there is something more about Renée. When a wealthy Japanese business man moves into the building, he sees right through the concierge’s façade and tries to befriend her for some intellectual conversations.

The Elegance of the Hedgehog is a highly successful novel by Muriel Barbery who obtained her agrégation in philosophy before becoming a professor for the Université de Bourgogne. The publication I read was a Europia edition that was translated by novelist and Literary translator Alison Anderson. L’Élégance du hérisson was translated into more than forty languages and has also been adapted into the 2009 movie The Hedgehog (Le hérisson) staring Josiane Balasko, Garance Le Guillermic and Togo Igawa.

This novel is full of allusions towards works of literature, music, films, and paintings, which is one of the reasons I loved this book. While it might come across as pretentious and somewhat cynical The Elegance of the Hedgehog plays a lot with the ideas of stereotypes, class-consciousness and acceptance. A philosophical novel that explores ideas of how we present ourselves to the world and if we should pretend to be someone different, if that is what others expect from you.

There are plenty of philosophical ideas running through this novel that presents different ideologies, Muriel Barbery has stated that literature is an effective way to explore philosophy. Having sat through plenty of long and boring philosophy classes she wanted a way to explore the ideas in a more effective and interesting way. I suspect people can get lost in the pretentious nature of this book but also the ending; however I think it was a fitting ending for the novel.

I found The Elegance of the Hedgehog to be a beautiful, if not recherché little novel and I enjoyed every moment of it. I wanted to turn back to page one and start again; I think there is plenty within this book to offer its readers. If you pay close attention to the book you might also notice that most of the book was told in a first person, present day nature that makes for a fresh look at the story that I didn’t notice till near the end. I know I should have paid more attention but this is one of the main reasons I wanted to re-read the book.

Lovers of philosophy and literature would love this book but also anyone interested in Marxism. I know I didn’t talk much about the class struggle within the book but that is because I have much to learn in this area. The Elegance of the Hedgehog is an intelligent novel, full of references to literature, witty and smart humour with a satirical nature. The way this French novel translates into an elegant English novel is a testimony to Alison Anderson’s ability but she had a great piece of literature to work with. I would highly recommend this novel to everyone but maybe that isn’t a good idea, I think you have to be in the right frame of mind or mood to truly enjoy this book.

Tales of Terror and Mystery by Arthur Conan Doyle

Posted November 29, 2014 by Michael @ Knowledge Lost in Crime, Short Stories / 0 Comments

Title: Tales of Terror and Mystery (Goodreads)
Author: Arthur Conan Doyle
Published: Knopf Doubleday, 1913
Pages: 224
Genres: Crime, Short Stories
My Copy: Library Book

Buy: Amazon, Book Depository, Kindle (or visit your local Indie bookstore)

When we talk about Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes always seems to be one of the first things that spring to mind. Sadly for this Scottish writer, this turned into both a blessing and a curse. Firstly, Sherlock Holmes remains a seminal part of crime writing and English literature, but limited the writer’s chances in exploring something different. In 1893 Doyle famously tried to kill off Sherlock Holmes in the story “The Final Problem” but due to public outcry and high demands the eccentric detective returned in the 1901 novel The Hound of the Baskervilles.

While Arthur Conan Doyle is known for his prolific writing, he didn’t gain much recognition for his works outside of Sherlock Holmes. Even though some critics believe his historical novels are some of his best works and The Lost World being the inspiration behind Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park. I picked up Doyle’s 1923 short story collection Tales of Terror and Mystery as part of our book club, but this afforded me the opportunity to explore his writing outside of Sherlock.

Tales of Terror and Mystery is a collection of thirteen short stories broken up into two topics; six stories on terror and seven on mystery. The book kicked off on a positive gear, the tales of terror are almost like a homage to Edgar Allen Poe. Even the short story “The New Catacomb” has a remarkable similarity to Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado”. What I enjoyed about these tales of terror was the way Doyle went a little darker and macabre to what I expected from this author.

Having such a great experience with the tales of terror it was a shame to move onto the tales of mystery. Here is a fun experiment; replace the protagonist name with Sherlock Holmes in these stories and see if they feel any different. It doesn’t work in all the stories; I wanted Conan Doyle to explore different styles of writing but I felt like the tales of mystery was almost like Holmes stories at times and the rest just didn’t work too well at all.

Some of the stories with Tales of Terror and Mystery worked really well but then the rest just feel short. I loved that Arthur Conan Doyle seemed to be influenced by great short story writers like Edgar Allen Poe or H.P. Lovecraft in some of the stories. However for the most part I was left wanting something a little more. Also, like what I have found with Doyle’s writing, there are some incredibly racist moments within this collection, with stories like “The Japanned Box” and “The Jews Breastplate”. After reading The Sign of Four earlier this year I have come to expect this colonialism nature from his writing. I like that some of these stories were macabre but overall I think this lacked the stylistic approach I am used to from this author.

We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler

Posted November 28, 2014 by Michael @ Knowledge Lost in Contemporary / 0 Comments

Title: We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves (Goodreads)
Author: Karen Joy Fowler
Published: Serpent's Tail, 2013
Pages: 308
Genres: Contemporary
My Copy: Paperback

Buy: Amazon, Book Depository (or visit your local Indie bookstore)

First and foremost, I must advise this review will contain a slight spoiler about Rosemary’s sister Fern. I did try to write this review spoiler free but it proved impossible to talk about what made this book interesting without mentioning Fern. I am not sure if this is a real spoiler, as some covers and synopsis I have read give away that Fern is in fact a chimpanzee.

We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves begins in the middle of the story; Rosemary is in college, her brother Lowell is a fugitive, wanted by the FBI for domestic terrorism and her sister Fern has disappeared. As the novel progresses in a non-linear format, the puzzle starts to make a lot more sense. Karen Joy Fowler’s novel takes the tragic story of a dysfunctional family and makes it a little more complicated.

I wasn’t sure what to expect from Karen Joy Fowler, all I knew about this author was the fact she wrote The Jane Austen Book Club, which I got the impression was a chick-lit but it is a book about books so I plan to read it. After a little research I found that Fowler likes to blend genres; historical fiction with fantasy (Sarah Canary) and chick-lit with mystery (Wit’s End). Having now read We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves I know I need to experience her writing again. She appears to be an author that is willing to try something different and give the reader a different experience every time.

While the novel doesn’t begin at the start, the story really begins in the 1970’s when an ordinary Midwestern family take on a baby chimpanzee and raise it as Rosemary’s sister. The two toddlers grow up together, but this makes life a little complicated for Rosemary. While Fern did develop some human social skills; there were some negative effects for Rosemary. No, Rosemary didn’t start flinging poop at people, but her social skills cause plenty of problems when she went to school. They were close sisters despite some problems, but then Fern was taken away; the term ‘went to the farm’ was mentioned which is messed up.

This novel takes on a very complex subject and the mental and psychological effects on a primate in a human behavioural study but also the family involved. The book moves erratically over forty years of Rosemary’s life and the reader is subjected to the scars and damage this whole situation had on her. We are confronted with the difficult subject of advancing science and where we should draw the ethical line in the sand. However, you have Rosemary’s father who has a doctorate in physiological behaviours on one end of the spectrum and then her brother who is part of the Animal Liberation Front on the other side.

We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves becomes a novel not only full of psychological drama but also about how we treat animals and the environment. There are plenty of complex issues that the reader has to work through but I found that Karen Joy Fowler presented her argument perfectly. Not just jamming her ideals down our throats, she told a story and let us she just how damaging the situation can be. Each part begins with a quote from Franz Kafka’s short story “A Report to an Academy” (“Ein Bericht für eine Akademie”) which is about an ape called Red Peter who learns how to behave as a human and presents his report to an academy of his transformation. This tiny little addition to the book really help seal the deal for me, as this is a satire on the Jews’ assimilation into Western culture as well as a look at evolutionary theory.

I have to admit from the beginning of this novel I wasn’t sure what to expect, beginning the book in the middle was interesting but I was sceptical on how it would work. Karen Joy Fowler handled every delicate issue with such confidence and ease; I was on board with what she was doing really quickly. Yet again I am left with the feeling that I need to learn the literary theories in the psychoanalytical field, I think there is so much worth exploring. Even if you are not interested into a deep dive into psychology, this contemporary novel is fantastic and I would recommend it to anyone with an interest in some good fiction.

The Complete Polysyllabic Spree by Nick Hornby

Posted November 27, 2014 by Michael @ Knowledge Lost in Non-Fiction / 0 Comments

Title: The Complete Polysyllabic Spree (Goodreads)
Author: Nick Hornby
Published: Viking, 2005
Pages: 278
Genres: Non-Fiction
My Copy: Library Book

Buy: Amazon, Book Depository (or visit your local Indie bookstore)

While Nick Hornby is best known for his fiction that includes books like High Fidelity and About a Boy, some maybe familiar with his column in The Believer called Stuff I’ve Been Reading. The Complete Polysyllabic Spree is the combination of two U.S. titles from his column, The Polysyllabic Spree and Housekeeping vs. the Dirt. The title is a reference to the Dallas choral rock band The Polyphonic Spree, a group with over twenty members in it. Hornby often describes the works of The Believer in this way; “all dressed in white robes and smiling maniacally, sort of like a literary equivalent of The Polyphonic Spree.”

In fact, The Believer is a literary magazine created by Dave Eggers and part of the McSweeney’s company; it also focuses on other forms of the arts and general culture. It started in 2003 and releases nine issues a year; this book takes Hornsby’s column from September 2003 to mid-2006. Each article follows the same basic format, first listing books he bought that month, and then the books he read. However due to The Believers guidelines all books he hated must be listed as untitled. This is followed by an essay talking about these books and future reading plans, often between 500 to 2000 words.

What I thought was interesting is the fact that Nick Hornby took a very simple formula and worked within the confines of it successfully. As stated in a previous What I Think about When I’m Not Blogging post, this has inspired me to write more personal essays. However I have to say, I was a little disappointed by this book, simply because he kept to the same formula and never grew or evolved as a reader or writer. I like the idea but I would have liked to see some growth or experimentation; I also think if you don’t mention the books you don’t like can’t really give a true representation of your reading life, but I do understand their policy.

I have to also mention that Nick Hornby has a strong aversion to literary fiction and will actively poke at it. The idea that people only read literary fiction to become literary snobs felt a little off colour; I embrace my pretentious nature but I read literary fiction because I love the proses. His reading tastes are very narrow and focus mainly on popular fiction; this type of article would be far more interesting if the writer was interested in exploring all types of literature. I am fascinated by books about books and learning about someone’s reading journey but this was like watching someone run in the same spot. There was no risk-taking and no changes from article to article; to make matters worse I did not add a single book to my TBR as a result of reading this.

We Were Liars by E. Lockhart

Posted November 26, 2014 by Michael @ Knowledge Lost in Young Adult / 0 Comments

Title: We Were Liars (Goodreads)
Author: E. Lockhart
Published: Allen & Unwin, 2014
Pages: 225
Genres: Young Adult
My Copy: Library Book

Buy: Amazon, Book Depository, Kindle (or visit your local Indie bookstore)

Meet Cadence (Cady) Sinclair Eastman; she is seventeen years old from a family that is so wealthy they spend their summers on their own private island. The summers are spent with her cousins Mirren and Johnny, plus her crush Gat. The four of them are so close they are collectively known as the Liars. However, there is a big secret within the family, a secret that has been kept from Cady. An accident when she was fifteen left Cady damaged and with some memory loss. What are they hiding?

I picked up this book because of the marketing campaign; see good marketing does sell books. Basically the concept behind the campaign was to read the book then lie about it; a great way to stop anyone from spoiling the fact that Cady’s grandfather is really a Russian sleeper spy. We Were Liars is this wonderfully secretive novel with a psychological element that slowly gets revealed. The way I view this book is if Daphne du Maurier (Rebecca) wrote a YA novel set in the world of the TV show Revenge.

There are a lot of people that loved this book and to be honest I wasn’t sure if I would be among them. I started off reading this book thinking there wasn’t anything special and it felt like privileged white kids with first world problems. However, like most people, I got to a point where everything clicked and I was floored. Everything started making so much more sense. As you can tell, this is a difficult novel to write about because I don’t want to give away the plot about the zombie apocalypse.

I am of two minds about the writing, on one hand it was pretty basic and I found it incredibly easy to rush through the novel and not miss anything important. However as things start to reveal themselves, you can think back to previous chapters and see all the subtle clues that were missed. In the end, I think E. Lockhart did a brilliant job of making the book so easy to read while packing in subtle evidence that The Sinclair family are just a big crime family. The subtlety worked really well throughout the novel and I feel like I was so blind, I would never have guessed that they were aliens, but the evidence was there.

I may joke about the ending and the fact that it was all a dream but I am just following their marketing campaign. I had a lot of fun reading this book; much like Gone Girl, the twist was done so well and We Were Liars kept me up at night as I desperately tried to finish the book. I am very surprised by this book and I wonder if re-reading this book would be any good. I can’t imagine going into the novel knowing what happens would be any fun, but I am not the kind of person that likes spoilers.

Tolstoy and the Purple Chair by Nina Sankovitch

Posted November 25, 2014 by Michael @ Knowledge Lost in Non-Fiction / 0 Comments

Title: Tolstoy and the Purple Chair (Goodreads)
Author: Nina Sankovitch
Published: Harper Collins, 2011
Pages: 241
Genres: Non-Fiction
My Copy: Audiobook

Buy: Amazon, Book Depository, Kindle (or visit your local Indie bookstore)

When Nina Sankovitch lost her eldest sister to cancer, she grieved for a long time. However when she turned forty six, she decided to stop her grief by reading. Tolstoy and the Purple Chair is the memoir of a year of reading, dealing with loss and loving books. Reading a book a day Nina learned about the magical healing powers of books.

I started reading this book as soon as a finished Ex Libris; I wanted to continue in the joys of personal essays about reading and thought this one would be a good choice. While there is a lot of beauty in the writing, especially in the tender moments about her sister and dealing with her death, something just was not quite right. I spent a lot of time thinking about why this book did not work for me; I just could not put my finger on what was causing the problem. Then I realised this book is just a repetitive conversion narrative.

What I mean by conversion narrative (there probably is a better name for this) is something like Confessions by St. Augustine; where the author writes about all their problems and how they miraculously were saved. This isn’t normally a religious journey like Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert but it is often a memoir of a struggling person that found a way to heal and have a better life. Tolstoy and the Purple Chair has that same formula over and over again; “I was grieving and then I found books”, “I had another problem so I picked up a book”.

Then there is the overly ambitious task of reading a book a day; from the start of the book I saw it to be problematic when she wanted to only read books about 200 pages. Then there was a moment where she didn’t want to read her son’s favourite book Watership Down by Richard Adams because it was almost 500 pages. The whole idea of ‘quality over quantity’ came to mind; what happens when you want to take your time with a book?

In theory the idea of reading so much might sound good but there is so much practicality that gets in the way. Nina Sankovitch does explore these day to day problems but more so in a way where cooking dinner or having a sick kid is getting in the way of her reading project. I like reading about someone taking up a reading project and documenting the results but I think this didn’t work. If you want something similar try The Year of Reading Dangerously by Andy Miller.